#I cannot wait to get the chance to draw that

[mustainegf]

This is a crazy sad idea I had the other night

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐆𝐇𝐎𝐒𝐓 𝐎𝐅 𝐘𝐎𝐔 ¹⁹⁸⁷

I wake up to the pitter of rain against the windows. The air was dead, with the smell of old wood and the remains of cigarette smoke from the night before. The house held its breath. Lying there, in sheets that smell of memories, the leather and aftershave smell with the damp air and cleaving to everything in this room. His room.

James has left his space this way ever since, the mess of records that he insists have some sort of order, utter chaos to anyone else. Guitars leaned against the wall, scattered papers on the desk. Hard to tell, really. A few half empty beer bottles remained on the nightstand, one of them with the label peeling off where his fingers had unconsciously picked at it.

I sit up and blink away fogginess in my head. My body is heavy, I'm trying to move underwater. Really, I don't want to get up. I want to be wrapped in the warmth of this room, in the memories that lean against me from every corner. But I know I cannot stay here forever. The guys will be up soon, and we'll all gather in the kitchen, making laugh, eat whatever we can find, making plans for the day. It's 1987, and life moves fast. Even if I don't feel like keeping up.

Lately, James has been different. Quieter. Or maybe I'm just noticing things that were always there. The way he sometimes stares off into space, his fingers tapping out rhythms for his own ears. The way he lingers a little too long in doorways, expecting something or someone to appear. He doesn't talk about it, though. None of us do. We just keep going, acting like everything is okay.

Maybe he's downstairs already, fiddling with his guitar, a low hum of his voice humming along to whatever song's in his head. I smile at the thought. James Hetfield. My roommate, my best friend, and sometimes... I don't know what. Something more, maybe. Or something less. It's hard to define what we are.

I drag myself out of his bed and into my jeans,the necklace around my neck is getting heavier with the days. The little locket inside, the one I never take off, a picture of him. I rarely open it. I don't have to. I can pull up his face on the screen in my head anytime. Those diamond cut blue eyes, that wonky smile capable of illuminating the whole damn room.

I trudge softly down the stairs, trying not to make any noise. I used to joke this place was haunted, maybe the ghosts of musicians still waited here, looking for their chance at popularity. James would laugh at me for it, calling me ridiculous, but sometimes. Sometimes, I truly wish it were. And maybe it is.

But it's still an empty kitchen. No James, no one else. Just the light patter of rain, the ticking of the clock on the wall. My face droops immediately. He's probably out in the garage, messing with his guitar, or he went for a drive. That's what he sometimes does when his head needs clearing. I'm fine. I'll see him later.

I sit at the table, running my fingers over the grain of the wood in an absent circle. The house is too quiet. Too still. I shut my eyes and try to recall the last conversation we had, but it's all hazy, reaching for smoke. My mind drifts and for one moment, I might have sworn I heard him, his voice calling my name up the hallway. I snap my eyes open and my heart's racing. But there's nobody.

Just the house. Just me.

I shake my head, feeling pathetic. Need to stop doing this, stop waiting for things that aren't there. I'm not some little girl anymore.

But still… I was hoping the house was haunted.

I lie later on his bed, gazing up at the ceiling, the Scorpions poster on his ceiling boring an image into my skull. The rain has calmed. I have no idea why I am in here. I should do anything else, do something else. Instead, I draw his pillow closer to me, inhaling into the now-faint scent of him that still clings to the fabric. I know if i keep breathing it in, it'll only smell like me. And that's no good.

I simply wish that he would just come back now.

I heard the opening of the door behind me, and my heart leaps half a second, hoping it is him, but it isn't. It's Cliff.

He steps inside, his eyes soft as they land on me, knowing exactly what's going on. That's always been him, kind and patient. He doesn't say anything, not for a minute or so, just walks over and sits on the edge of the bed, his weight sinking into the mattress.

And then I don't know why, but I just start crying. It's out of nowhere, tears spilling down my cheeks before I can even attempt to stop them. They soak into James' pillow like a hello. It's kind of really embarrassing, actually. I'm not a crier. But here I am, sobbing into James's pillow like some sort of broken thing, and I have no idea why.

Cliff says nothing more, but reaches out and gently brushes my hair from off my face, and I imagine his touch is James'.

"He loved you, you know," Cliff says in a voice soft enough that it caresses my slow heart.

My body freezes up. "What?

"James," he says, his fingers still moving through my hair, soothing me like I was a little girl. "He was crazy about you."   I shake my head, a bitter laugh escaping my lips. "You don't have to say that, Cliff. I know you're just trying to make me feel better."

But he doesn't laugh. He doesn't even smile. He just looks at me with those sad eyes of his, chestnut hair falling slightly in his eyes.

"He was gonna tell you," Cliff whispers. "After the tour. He had this big, stupid plan. He wanted to take you out to dinner, make it all special, you know? He was nervous as hell about it, too."

Why is Cliff saying this? Why now?

Again, Cliff says, "He never had the chance." Cliff's voice is no louder than a murmur. "But he loved you. Really did."

I wrap myself into a tight, clinging ball with his pillow. "But he's still here," I choke. "James is… he's still here, Cliff. He's just… he's just out somewhere, right?"

There's such a long pause, when Cliff speaks again, his voice is full with a sadness that I don't want to recognize. But I do.

"He's gone, sweetheart."

I shake my head wildly, eyes refusing to believe what I already know is true. "No. No, he's not. He's coming back. He's just—"

"He passed, remember? Last year. The bus."

I stop breathing as the room tilts, heavy with fog, pushing against my skin, promising to smother me. I remember, yet I don't want to. I don't want to think about that night, the phone call, a feeling of my love slipping away.

"I saw him," I whisper, my voice shaking. "I swear, Cliff, I saw him. He was right here."

Cliff doesn't argue, won't try to reason with me. He just pulls me into his arms, holding me as I break apart. He strokes my hair, whispering soft words that I can't quite make out, but it doesn't matter. All that matters is that James is gone. He's been gone for a year, and I've been living in this house, waiting for a ghost that will never come home.

Cliff lays me back down, tucks James’ blankets around me as if I am some sort of child. He doesn't leave, though. He stays beside me, his hand resting on my shoulder.

"He really did love you," Cliff says again, much softer this time. "More than you know."

The house isn't haunted. At least, it isn't haunted the way I wish it was.

I still wear you in my locket, James. I always will.

And maybe someday I'll find you again.

[syoddeye]

i don't know what this is. lightly edited. price x reader. ~600 words.

cw: dubcon, violence, blood, a little gore, stalking, abrupt non-ending

freshly promoted lieutenant john price is fairly drunk when he spots a woman backed into a wall, staring wide-eyed up at some nitwit. she's clearly frightened, chest heaving, shoulders pulled up toward her ears.

swaying in the mouth of the alley, he thinks he's caught a lover's quarrel. thinks otherwise when the man pinches her chin, and she rips it out of his grasp to meet john's gaze in the dark.

it's instinct. it's duty.

he rolls his bad shoulder as he barrels down the alleyway, face fixing into a glower that's cowed even his rowdiest subordinates. the scrap's short, most are, but he cuts his knuckles on the man's teeth. he sends him stumbling, tail tucked into the night. his hand stings, but a quiet gasp draws his bleary-eyed stare back to the woman on the wall. yet instead of a thank you, she takes three of his fingers into her mouth.

he nearly keels over. he's never sobered up quicker in his life. goes light-headed.

she licks the thin ribbons of blood streaming from the wound, and her eyes roll to the back of her skull. her tongue darts to the webbing of his hand, then laves over the torn flesh. her grip on the front of his jacket tightens, arms slightly trembling as she licks and licks and licks.

it's obscene. disgusting. he ought to push her away. she's a stranger. it's blood. yet he finds himself, a trained killing machine, helpless. stuck watching, rapt, until his skin's clean and soaked in pink-colored spit.

she wipes her mouth with her thumb, then sucks that into her mouth, too. her eyes find him with an almost shy smile, lips curving around the digit.

thanks, handsome, she purrs. what's your name?

he doesn't stick around to share it, and never tells a soul.

he was drunk. it must've been a dream. a nightmare.

-

it's puerile fascination. a fleeting crush. you deny it until you find yourself stalking him in the streets. loitering outside his residence. staring hard at the walls that separate you. oh, how easy it would be to dig through the rock and burrow inside him.

you learn his name.

john price.

he occupies your waking. slips into the quiet spaces between thoughts. settles in your mind and kicks up his feet. he makes a little home for himself there, whether he knows it or not. after your first and only tête-à-tête, it's clear he's not ready to make it into reality. he needs more time and to see more of the world.

you follow him in town, and when he goes to the city. you're tempted to follow even when he leaves, but your considerable territory needs minding, and your attention is already stretched thin. so you spend his absences fretting like any other wartime wife would.

mrs. price.

years pass in a blink. you wait. both of you take lovers, but your loyalty never strays.

he climbs the ranks. matures. hardens into his own formidable creature. your mouth still waters when he returns home bandaged and bloodied. of the innumerable people you've sampled, his is the only taste you remember.

on that noisy night in piccadilly, you finally get the chance to look after him like he did you. you haven't felt so alive since you, well, were, gorging on the men who pursue and try to kill him. you drag them kicking and screaming into the wreckage, tunneling into chests and snapping necks. you pull the pins on their grenades to cover your tracks.

drenched in blood, drunk with it, you watch him disappear into a ruined building with a younger man. you tag along, sticking to the shadows, ready to pounce at a moment's notice.

husband. mate.

the young man cannot break the lock. the bomb will detonate. over the beeping, the sobs, and the unfortunate's desperate screams—you listen for his heartbeat. it's all you care about. you prepare to launch across the destroyed shop, to crush him to your chest and flee, but then he moves.

he heaves the poor bastard over a railing, and you fall further in love.

[envy-of-the-apple]

older reader?? SAY NO MORE

you're a confident, popular, charismatic lady in your 30s. you catch a pretty, barely-not-teenage gojo at a bar about to get roofied and rescue him.

you're neither a paragon of moral virtues but apparently you do still have some maternal instincts because you take him aside, help him sober up, and give him a stern but well-meaning lecture about watching drinks, staying safe, etc. maybe he gets a headpat and a caring look while you do this.

that's where you thought this would end but to gojo had absent parents and is starved of all forms of affection, including maternal, so he absolutely cannot let this end here and he will exploit his prettiness, his pitifulness, AND your maternal instincts to the max.

if wires get crossed and he manages to get you to bang him (and hopefully feel so guilty about taking advantage that he can get you to stay with him) then even better!!

omgggggyou know me so well-

(Warnings: manipulation, guilt-tripping, large age gap but both characters are 21+, implied non/dubcon, implied drugging)

Dark!Gojo Satoru x reader

Bad Night

When you open your eyes, your head is pounding.

Last night is a blur, but you get the big picture. You drank too much, and you brought someone home.

He's a cuddler, pressing you against his bare chest, a long arm wrapped around your naked body. It'd be a cute way to wake up if you weren't so sweaty and already in a bad mood.

You're debating on how to kick him out when he shifts behind you. He yawns, one hand reaching up to draw circles on your waist.

"You wake up pretty early."

It's not a stranger's voice. You know him.

You turn your head, almost afraid to look. He gives a sleepy smile.

"...Satoru?"

"Mornin'." Taking advantage of your shock, he gives a quick peck on your lips.

It's a jumpstart for the memories of last night to kick in. Satoru had invited you out, you had a bad day at work and you took the offer, you took shot after shot, one thing lead after another and then-

Shit.

"What's wrong?" He asks, and you doubt you're managing to hide the horror off your face all that well. His usually carefree attitude melted into concern.

"Feeling' alright? I wasn't too rough last night, was I?"

When you open your mouth, the only thing that comes out is a strangled 'I'm fine'.

"That's good." He nuzzles his face into the crook of your neck. "I was worried I hurt you or somethin'. Last night was perfect, by the way. Everythin' I dreamed of, baby."

Baby. You want to throw up.

"Oh, you must be hungry." Satoru frowns, clicking his tongue. "Uh, wait here, I'll go whip somethin' up."

Another kiss, this time on your cheek, before he's sliding off your bed. He's naked. You squeeze your eyes closed when he starts to put on his pants. You keep them closed until the door shuts behind him.

What the fuck did you just do?

You know what you did. You just had sex with someone more than a decade younger than you. You can't even remember it, but the evidence was all around you. Your panties laying crumbled on the floor. The ache between your legs. The bitemarks on your chest, your legs.

You fucked up.

Satoru was by chance You weren't supposed to talk to him, let alone meet him. You were at the right place, at the right time. You happened to catch smug asshole putting something in the oblivious kid's drink. You happened to grab it right before Satoru could, before dumping it on the asshole's face.

Looking back, it wasn't your finest moment. You nearly got the police called on you, but ever since that day, Satoru clung onto you like Velcro. He didn't leave you alone for the rest of the night. You thought your lecture would have embarrassed him enough to leave, which kid wants to be scolded by a thirty-year old? If anything, that might have sparked his admiration for you.

He was determined. Before you knew it, Satoru was everywhere. He spammed you with texts everyday, when he couldn't call. He'd constantly invite you to places adults way past their college years should not be going. Despite your absolute refusal to visit his dorm, you found yourself reluctantly letting him into your house, picking him up from parties when he was too drunk to drive. He'd told you things he'd never told anyone before.

You knew what was happening, you weren't stupid. And unhealthy infatuation. Young, starved for attention, eager to please. You saw the signs, you tried to set boundaries, but you thought you could help him somehow. Your savior's complex grew too big...you thought you could help him.

And then, you ended up sleeping with him.

It wasn't illegal. You knew he was over 18, at the very least. You still feel nothing but nauseating disgust. When you looked down at your hands, they felt dirty.

You needed to fix this, somehow. You needed to tell Satoru that this was a mistake. Rip the band-aide off, nice and clean.

You ignore the crumbled clothes on the floor: your flimsy dress, Satoru's shirt. Instead, you go to the closet and pull out baggy pajama pants and an oversized sweatshirt. You needed to hide as much skin as possible. To preserve the remnants of dignity you had left.

You stayed in the bathroom for ten minutes, practicing what you were gonna say over and over again. I'm sorry, it was a mistake, I was drunk, I took advantage of you, it's not your fault. I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

When you step outside your sanctuary, you smell something that makes your stomach growl.

Satoru's standing over a sizzling pan with a smile on his face. He knows his way around your kitchen because he's been here before, doing homework on your countertops. You feel sick all over again.

"Hey." He pouts when you inch closer. "I told you to stay in bed, didn't I? Silly." He reaches over, pinching your cheek in affection.

You swallow and you finally manage to steel yourself.

"Satoru, we need to talk-"

"And done!" Satoru cheers, setting down a plate. "Hungry? You gotta' be, right? We did a whole workout last night." You cringe at his choice of words, wishing he'd stop mentioning your biggest blunder.

When you don't move, he picks up some food with his fork, hovering it close to your lips.

"C'mon. At least try it." He urges. "I promise it's good. Please?"

You look into his baby blue doe eyes. Wide and earnest and eager. When you accept the offering, he glows.

He feeds you like this, one forkful at a time. When you ask why he isn't eating, he just shakes his head.

"I don't think it'll stay down." He admits. "I'm so happy, it almost feels like I'm dreaming."

You clear your throat. Hopefully, you can steer this conversation into something more productive. "Satoru, about last night-"

"Did you like it?" He suddenly asks.

"What?"

"Last night." He says with a sheepish smile. "Did-did you like it? Was I any good?"

You stare at him, utterly bewildered. "I-"

"It was my first time!" He blurts out with clear impulsiveness, and your heart stops. "I-I was pretty nervous. 'Had no fuckin' idea what I was doing, but it looked like you liked it. Right?"

He looks at you with those wide eyes, filled with genuine sincerity and you want to throw yourself off a ledge because not only did you not remember having sex with him, you don't remember taking his virginity.

You were a horrible person.

"It...was a nice night." You mutter quietly.

He beams again, it does nothing to assuage your guilt.

Fuck this all. You needed to put a stop to this. You needed to stop stringing this poor kid along. You needed to be the bad guy.

But, like always, Satoru makes the first move.

He rounds the countertop, coming to a stop by your chair. Satoru kneels to the floor, taking your hands within his owns. If it were anyone else, you would have melted.

Not him. Anyone but him.

"I meant what I said yesterday." He quietly says. "I know you still think I'm young, but I'm 22. I'm more than old enough to treat you the way you deserve to be treated." Oh God. When you turn away, he's reaching out, placing a hand on your cheek. You're forced to stare at him.

"Thank you for giving me a chance." He smiles. "I-I always thought you'd never see me that way, but then you said you liked me too and-"

"Wait wait, hold on." You interrupt. "What?"

He suddenly looks unsure, his gaze darting around. "At the bar last night. I confessed, and you said it back."

That doesn't sound like you. If anything, when you're drunk, you're annoyingly honest. You've never seen Satoru as more than a kid how could you have said that to him?

But he can't be lying. Not with those eyes. Eyes that were suddenly starting to fall like dying stars.

"Oh..." He trails off. "Did you not mean it?"

He handed you your chance on a silver platter. It was a mistake. I was drunk. I've never seen you like that. I took advantage of you.

You can break his heart, here and now. You take in a breath.

"No." You smile. "Of course I meant it. I...really really like you, Satoru."

His smiles returns and he's leaping up. You can't stop him from kissing you, but he's quick, flitting away just as quickly to give you a hug.

"I'm so glad." He whispers. "I'll make you happy, I promise. I'll do anything for you."

You pat his back, still in a daze.

Satoru is smart. He's a physics major, he's got to be smart. You just need to pretend to date him for a while before he realizes that you're too old for him. Then, he'll leave you for someone his age.

He'll snap out of it eventually, right?

[chronically-ghosted]

iron and charcoal

rating: explicit 18+ pairing: pero tovar x f!reader word count: 6.9K summary: Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. But there would be no tomorrow. No future, no light of dawn – not without –  Her. He’d never heal because tomorrow would never come.  OR Pero falls hard for a princess and doesn’t know what to do with himself on your wedding night. warnings: angst, brief classism/xenophobia two very stubborn people, pero experiences one Human Emotion and cannot fully process it, arranged marriage, yearning, smut LIKE WOW, soft!pero that i broke my own heart with a/n: Thank you so much to @perotovar for this request: "congrats on your milestone, my love! so happy for you <33 i'm sending a little astrology 💫 + pero & #6 on the fluffy list OR #1 on the smutty list (whichever is speaking to you), because i wanna see your take on him 👀” – of course I chose the slutty one, just for you 😉 I’m actually pretty proud of this one - please consider reblogging if you like it too!

*the image in the header is for aesthetic purposes only and does not reflect the appearance of the reader*

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💜come see what else we've done to celebrate 1K followers

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 

Sometimes before battle, the clatter inside Pero’s head goes silent. It listens. It waits. 

Other times, it roars. Memories of family, of dead amigos, of mujeres he fucked – they all buck and scratch for a chance to blaze across his mind like a dust storm kicked up by an unbroken mustang. 

He doesn’t know which one he prefers or which one will win out. They both have their uses, necessary states of mind to survive whatever is barreling towards him – an ax, a monster out of legend, some other drunken mercenary he intentionally pissed off. It’s an unconscious decision, yet one that has served him well so far. He wouldn’t be alive today if some deep, primal part of him knew what he needed to live through another battle. 

And yet, his own trunk knocking against his hips as he climbed the sickly ostentatious stone steps to the top of the parapet, the handles starting to pinch his fingers, the barest – nearly invisible – tremor in his knees, he cannot fathom, for the life of him, why that singular phrase from his abuela played in his head like water swirling around and around a cenote. 

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 

His inner voice, taking on a myriad of forms, of sounds and voices, never quite standing still, the one companion he could always rely on. 

Maybe it was warning him. Dust yourself off, boy, you know exactly how this was going to end. 

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. 

But there would be no tomorrow. No future, no light of dawn – not without –

Her.

He’d never heal because tomorrow would never come.

He feels sweat escape from the nape of curls at his neck, his cheeks warm and chest hot. Two more flights, he can manage two more flights. 

His abuela also liked to tell him something else: if hell doesn’t get him, his pride certainly will. 

It’s certainly what got him into this ridiculous farce in the first place. Because he can’t alchemize whatever is in his gut into vocalized syllables, he instead has to climb a truly incalculable amount of stairs, while carrying a ragged, torn trunk that weighs as much as his armor. 

Because he can’t form the right words, any words, about what he carries lodged beneath his breastbone for her. What draws him up and up and up and up because it’s lighter than hope, makes him lighter than air, and yet it clogs him up, chokes him out all the same. His pride, his vanity, cuts through it, through her – enough to keep him tongueless and dry but not enough to offer this lightness in his chest to her, for her. He can’t take the light out of him or else he fears what he will truly become.

So, he walks, he goes around and around on unforgiving stone steps until finally there is a door. He thinks about waiting, to catch his breath, but he knows he will just as easily turn around and go back the way he came, trunk still heavy and knocking against his hips, and that pride will be the death of him. So he keeps going, opens the handle, and makes abrupt eye contact with the two guards outside her door. They seem uninterested and unamused in his sweaty, stilted breathing, but by his less-than-royal attire, they easily clock him as one of their own; a man who fights to make his way in the world. The one on the left nods jerkily at him. 

What they see him as, what he will always be, is nearly the reason he kicks that fucking trunk all the way back down. Instead, he nods back, shoulders rounded, eyes down. 

“The princesa - the princess - is requesting the last of her things, to be b-brought up from the stables –,” he clears his throat, “drop this off for her and –,”

“Can’t let you in. King’s orders.” The one on the right sees him as something else – a foreigner first and foremost, their similar stations in life irrelevant. His bright blue eyes rove over Pero’s dark skin, dark hair, jagged scar, distaste and disgust smearing his already ugly features. But he had been dealing with men like these all his life.

“Bueno, you can explain to the King himself why his daughter’s belongings were lost and disregarded. I hear she’s very fond of the Italian prints at the bottom of this . . .”

The guards glance at each other, calculating way above their paygrade. Pero jostles the trunk as if to show he is not above throwing it out the window. 

“Fine.” The second one snaps. “Drop it inside and come back immediately.”

He drops his head, a good little foreign boy. “Gracias, señor.” 

The heavy wooden door opens beneath the iron lock and the instant he is through, he bolts it behind him. Waits to see if the guards notice. They don’t. Perfectamente – all the time in the world. 

All in the time in the world – for what? 

To fail? Again?

He stows the trunk in front of the door, extra time, a few seconds maybe – as if she wouldn’t just tell him to get out the instant she laid eyes on him. Only time will tell. 

Out of the atrium, another door, this one set deep into the wall. A last line of defense. He knocks, once, then twice, then waits. El orgullo chokes him again but fuck it, he’s come this far. He knocks again, knocks something in his chest free and, with it, spill the words:

“Princesa? It’s me. I –,” it throttles him, “princesa, can you open the door?” 

Silence. His heart sits, buried in that trunk. Then –

“It’s unlocked, Pero.” 

His heart in his throat, he opens the door to presumably what will be your marriage bed. And yet, by the state of things, you could have been moving out of it. Trunks and bags stack high against the far wall – those fucking trunks he made such a scene over because the unnecessary weight would slow them all down remain untouched, arranged as they had been when they had been first brought in. He didn’t quite know what to make of that, his thumb absently pressing into the callus of his other hand as he glanced around. It is a beautiful room – tall windows, etched in scarlet drapes, to match the scarlet curtains around the bed. With gold thread and impossibly detailed paintings of the countryside, it is fit for a princess, a some-day queen. This is where someone with royal blood deserved to be, not in the back of a hot carriage for weeks on end, surrounded by dirty, loud, rough men. 

And yet, with your hair down, expansive gown from the ball tonight replaced with a simple cotton dress, you could not have been more out of place. Pero’s heart lurches briefly, moisture seeping from his mouth, as he realizes this is the same dress he bought you when the two of you had been accidentally separated by the caravan and your previous dress had been ruined in the mud. He had no idea you still kept it, much less wore it ever again. 

But if anyone asked him, you look more beautiful in this than any silk or velvet. 

Instead of unpacking, settling into your new home and eventual role as wife, you sit hunched over at the intricately carved mahogany desk, eagle feather quill scratching against parchment. You finish with a flourish and look over your shoulder at him, your eyes annoyingly unreadable. 

“Yes?”

A stupid brute some may call him, but he wasn’t entirely without awareness. Observation of your customs and what you considered inappropriate only encouraged him: if you really didn’t want him here, you would never have let him see you in this state.

But it’s hard to remember that under your icy stare. 

“Y-your things, Princesa. The last from the caravan.”

Your eyes slide over him, to the trunk in the shadows of the atrium. He can tell from a single glance that you know as well as he that trunk is not yours, that no one told him to come here with it, and yet he did it all the same. Something flashes over your eyes but it’s gone by the time you meet his gaze again. 

“Thank you. I am, as always, indebted to you.” 

He hates your words, but warmth spreads in his gut at the way you say it. That’s how it’s always been between you and him – saying one thing but meaning another. He’d never appreciated a sharp mind like yours until he realized you wield it as he wields a sharp sword. 

There are many things he’d never even dreamed of before he met you.

“Then, this means you’re leaving, I suppose.” You draw your sword against him. The metal flashes in your eyes as you stand, one hand against the curved tip of your chair. A bronze halo rims your outline, the fire behind you burning bright and hot. He knows if he touched your shoulder, your neck, your skin would be wonderfully warm. 

He wets his lips. “Si. Our contract with your father is done.” 

You drop his gaze, your lips tightening for a minute, your fingers running through the carvings of wood on the chair. “Even with William in his state? Would it not be better for him to stay and recover? The journey home is –,” you pause, as though someone had thrown a hand over your mouth, “– the journey back east is long.” 

All the longer without you.

“William, he is not an idle man. Two days of bedrest is often all he can take.” 

You grin, in spite of this thing circling you both. “Unless he finds the nun attending to him beautiful.

“He finds them all beautiful.” 

Your smile expands wide across your bright face when you find him smiling at you too. 

This – if this is to be his last memory of you (his heart wrenches at the thought) – this is the you he wants imprinted on his soul: smiling and glowing by firelight. 

But as quickly as it came, that grin that warms him down to his bones, fades. In an instant, your eyes grow soft, your mouth twisted, jaw tight.

“Where will you go?” you ask, in the quietest voice you’d ever addressed him with. 

It pains him, physically aches within him, to hear the distress in your voice. He hasn’t even thought about the next contract, the next royal cabrón who intends to yank him all across God’s green earth to perform a task he can’t be fucked to take on himself. How can he possibly answer you? Nowhere, without you. To rot in a dark hole in the ground? Off a cliff? What answer would provide you or him any sort of satisfaction?

“Wherever the coin goes,” he says and the words scrape his tongue like bile. That ache in his chest spiraling rapidly, deep into his gut – like a poisoned limb he cannot amputate – he does the same thing he always does when he’s hurt: he makes others hurt until they leave him alone. “You do not have to worry, princesa, your new husband will keep you in such comfort you will never wonder where the coin comes from.”

He must be a truly sick man, for the knife-sharp glare you throw at him only knots arousal around the base of his spine. It tugs on something attached directly to his groin which, in turn, yanks the next words out of his mouth.

“He looked especially happy with you in his arms on the dance floor tonight.”

The icy shards in your eyes go brittle and crack. His heart races; he’s overplayed his hand. 

“You watched me dance?”

“All guardsmen were required to –,”

You shake your head, eyes bright and searing through him. “No. It was only the King’s Knights there in attendance.” 

Your hand trailing off the edge of the chair, you take a step forward and he feels his weight shift back onto his heels. But he remains firm. 

Sana, sana.

“Pero, why did you come here tonight?”

“To return the last of your things, princesa. What else is there?”

You flinch, as if he had raised his voice to you. What else is there indeed?

“Not even to . . .  say goodbye? Sixteen weeks on the road is an awfully long time to be around someone, only for them to . . . leave so soon.”

He locks his knees to keep them from shaking. “Do you wish for me to tell you goodbye, princesa?” 

There’s something painfully sad about the way you smile at him. “I wish for whatever would make you happiest.” 

Anger roars within him, hungry and hot, like a burn from a white flame. Why can’t you just admit it? Why do you avoid it time and time again? He knows he hasn’t misread anything you’ve sent his way, so why? Why are you so vested in torturing him this way? 

“Coin makes me happy and, now that I have it, there’s nothing to keep me here.”

There, that hurts you too, just as he meant it.

“Then leave.” They could make ice fortresses out of the strength of your bone-cold stare. “If you have nothing else to say, then take your goddamn trunk and get out of my sight.” 

The flame scorches him, ripping him apart and in his anger, making him cruel.

He bows to you.

“I imagine you will be very happy with your new husband, ranita.”

The term slips from his lips before he can stop it, but his throat and cheeks blister so badly, he physically can’t open his mouth to correct his mistake. Instead, he turns and strides towards the door.

He thinks he hears a gasp from behind him, a sharp sound like breaking glass – small, tinkling, tragic. It spears him through his chest, pierces his heart. 

He gets to the door and pauses.

If you have nothing else to say . . .

Of course he has something to say – words in English and Spanish and broken dialects gathered like poisonous lichen all churning in the boiling cauldron of his mind, but nothing will suffice – nothing reflects or compares to the grief he is already feeling, the despair, the anguish that has settled into all the fleshy joints in his body. Not his pride, but this, saying goodbye to you, this is what actually will kill him.

Every word imaginable crawls up his throat and rages in his mouth, presses up against his teeth, begging for something, anything to be let out, to be free, to tell you that he cannot fucking live without you–

Nothing comes through, but one single word.

“Don’t.” 

The fire crackles in the silence, a wicked god pleased at the display of carnage.

“What did you say?”

A dull thud echoes from where he drops his forehead against the wood of the door, all anger flooding out of his system. Do you have any idea the power you hold over him? One request, one tremor in your voice and his knees all but buckle at your altar. 

Fuck it. 

He always thought he’d go out in a blaze of bloody glory, but he’d never expected to be so exposed, so flayed like this.

“Don’t,” he repeats, his throat as dry as sand. “Do not . . . marry him. Please.” 

The vision of your great warrior slumped against the door frame, his neck bent, shoulders curled up to his ears has your already pounding heart leaping forward into a gallop. He is defeated, laid low. You watch his guts all but pool out on your hearth. 

He looks about as hopeless and anguished as you feel. 

Your soldier, your man of iron and charcoal, goes blurry in your eyes.

“And what would you have me do, Pero?” Your plea is damp, malleable at the edges. You press your hand flat against your chest, near your throat, as if you could pull the grief lodged there with your fingers. “I have been engaged to this man before I was even born. How can I stop this?” 

“Fight.” The word snarls against his bare teeth. He turns, his eyes liquid ink, and suddenly he has you by the shoulders. His thumbs nervously skitter around the curve of your shoulder, gaze just as unsteady and unfocused as it wavers between your hands, your earlobe, your neck. "Where is my brave girl who fights for what she wants, hm? Fight – for me, please.”

Fight, he asks – but in spite of him or because of him?

You lay your hands on the silver shine of his breastplate, watch as they rise and fall with his steady flow of breath. How many nights had you woken up against that shine, in the crook of his arm for warmth, or protection? You didn’t cherish it at the time because you never knew when it would be your last. 

“Why won’t you fight, princesa?” His voice is low, strained, the groan of a wagon wheel before it breaks. You meet his gaze and the exposed look on his face, softening every line on his mouth and around his eyes, nearly sends you into hysterics. You swallow the tears, swallow the hook in your throat as your fingers curl around the clasps of his cape. 

"Because if I don't fight then I can't lose.” His fingers slip from your shoulders, to your elbows, to your waist. You inhale and the scents of warm leather, oil, and ash flood your mouth. The tip of your nose is inches from the scruff of beard against his cheek, the ruddy brown of his sun-drenched skin. He has curled you into him and this, you do not fight either. His massive palms map your back, against your skin, but without any urgency or control. “If I can’t lose, that means I don’t lose you. You'll just be . . . gone."

That last word is a lie. It hangs in the air like a sweltering humid rain and you both know you’re lying. He has you wrapped up in his arms, you didn’t stop him even for a second, and you are all too aware that it would take some great, insidious alchemy to ever truly tear him out of you. 

You stare at his silver collar, defiant against the waves you had managed to shackle down until this very moment: a wave of hopeless crashes into you, a wave of heartbreak, a wave of helpless that fills your eyes to the point of spilling with that very same salt water.

He touches your cheek delicately, fingers rough with callouses, and the floodgates break open with a sob. 

“Preciosa,” he rumbles softly against your hairline, “hush. You break my heart with your tears.” 

“Do not mock me, Tovar. Not now.” you sniff, trying to turn your face but his wide hands catch you around the cheeks.

“You are beyond mocking. I’d show you my heavy heart but I do not wish that weight on anyone.” The snag of his rough thumbs against your cheek draws your watery gaze to him. His mouth is a flat line, barred against whatever climbs his throat, but his eyes move like mercury across your nose, your eyelashes, the arch of your cheek. Your fingers wrap themselves around his wrists, a grounding agent against the waves that threaten to pull you under. 

“Pero, I –,”

“I have fought you, tooth and nail, for days without end. Every favor, every breath, you have forced them from me. I fight my own mind when I sleep at night. Sueños, always of the same woman.” He smears away the tears with his thumbs, gently, sweetly, before pressing his lips to your wet flesh by his knuckle. He inhales deeply, eyes closed, mouth hovering stationary above the skin of your cheek. “You fight me every step of the way . . . and I am so tired of fighting.” 

For all your struggling, for all your tearing and clawing and snarling against the blooming in your chest, nothing is as easy as it is to turn your head and press your lips to his. 

The brush of his bristled mustache against your upper lip. His warm, rough palms holding you steady. His lips soft and hot. You are overwhelmed by the scent of him.

There is nothing like, and nothing will ever be like, finally kissing Pero Tovar. 

All it takes is the movement of his hands from your cheeks to your lower back, the light trace of his tongue against your lips, and the yearning you’d been smothering for weeks now roars to life. His hands squeeze your hips and you can suddenly barely breathe. 

“Pero–,” the noise in the shape of his name that escapes you is near a whine, begging. He nips at your lips, hand firmly at the cup of your jaw, mouth now rough and insistent, and your fingers claw up his neck, wrapping themselves in his dark curls. You tug, nails scratching his scalp, and he groans into your mouth as if you’d just kneed him in the gut.

A thread-bare gasp of your name from his lips splits you from him, then his hand on your hip and the back of your neck pushing you backwards gives you enough air to breathe – to think.

"Your husband will know you're not a virgin,” Pero warns, breathing hard and fast, his eyes like black flints, “if we go on." 

You curl your fingers around his neck, dragging your mouth near his jaw, the soft skin at the edge of his ear.

"Then he will also know my heart is not his either.” You ask everything of him with this. His armor blocks his warm body from you – you want to sink inside his hard shell. “If you’ll have it.”

He is not himself, half-human with an inhuman want, with the snarl that leaves him. 

“Don’t make such promises, dulzura –,” A threat, a dog forced to expose its underbelly, fear radiating like the pain from a broken bone. Your fingers dig into the buckles of his cape, steadying you against a sudden terrible awareness that bloomed, purple-bruised. 

“Unless you don’t want –,” 

The desk rattles when your hips break against it, the force of his kiss enough to topple over your inkwell, spill rolls of parchment to the floor. The wood groans under your weight when he gathers the thick swell of your thighs in his hands, heaves you onto the flat surface, and spreads your knees around his waist. He is as hard as the iron on his chest. 

“Can you feel how much I want you?”

A frantic sigh of relief, a groan shared between two pairs of lips, seeking skin and warmth and other hungry places. 

He drags you onto his chest, your skirt bunched up around your hips, the rings of his armor digging into the soft flesh of your thighs, his mouth covering yours in wet pulls, and he stands up right, as though you weighed less than his sword. 

A stumble, and he spreads you out on the velvet covers of your marriage bed, his hands imprinting on your hips, your knees, the supple meat of your calves. The touch of him on your bare skin feels like the licks of flames, the smoke of arousal blurring your awareness and dragging your eyelids half-closed. On his heels at the edge of the bed, the flint shards of his eyes drift over the bones of your ankles, the bend of your knee, your heaving chest, hair in snarls around your neck and caught behind your back, and finally to your cunt, hidden by the folds of your dress. 

Velvet hums as you slide your ankles to the curve of your ass, widening your legs, parting your knees. His lips part open, dark want etching every line of his face. You feel the wet linen of your dress cling to your achy cunt. He swallows, unbuckling his cape one latch at a time, his eyes nowhere else. The metal clatters as it falls to the floor.

Piece by piece, the chinks in his armor fall away. Piece by piece, he is revealed to you. Your hands rise up, up your thighs to your knees, your thumbs rubbing soft circles. He watches, never tears his gaze away from your sticky hole, his nimble fingers working away the buckles and knots with practiced precision. You can see it in his eyes – memories of bedrolls by firelight, of such a deep painful, yearning ache, separated only by thin tarp, they are a physical weight beside you in this marriage bed. 

You see them because they’re there for you too. You see them because you've been here a dozen times, on your back, legs spread wide, your hands circling but never dipping, waiting. Wanting. For him. 

His bare chest is warm, the wings of his ribs expanding around short, half-drawn breaths, as he crawls up into your pliant mouth. The kisses are slow, like before, with a crackle of heat just beyond them, his hips slipping into the cradle of your thighs, the wet warmth of you separated by the thin linen of your dress. He sucks the tendon below your ear, a whine slipping out of your mouth, fingers spreading over the harsh planes of his back, and his cock bobs against your thigh. 

Pero is bare and warm and entirely yours. All man beneath the sweltering armor. 

“Amorcita,” he drips into your ear, kisses smeared against your collarbone, your mouth, your earlobe, “amorcita, amorcita . . . ranita, let me take you.” 

He starts to use teeth, a harder nip behind his kisses, when he dips down to your chest. A wide palm with stocky fingers grasps at your breast and it’s a startling sensation for you both. 

“Soft,” he moans before licking up under the supple curve of your breast, mouthing at what his tongue missed. He slips your erect nipple into his mouth and twists it between his teeth. “Sweet,” he murmurs with your nipple firmly between his lips. 

This is unlike anything you’ve felt before. You deliriously thank the gods that he hadn’t touched you like this on the road; you would have kept him, your own wild animal, in bed without rest for days on end.

Pero plucks just as aggressively at your other breast, the spit-wet nipple that preoccupied his mouth verging on purple and aching. He cups you from the outside this time, squeezing and massaging, ringing your nipple with his tongue until your back bows and you let out a whine that has his eyes flickering up to you, the scent of wounded prey filling his nostrils. 

That whine of pleasure elongates into a whimper: “please.”

“Tranquila, ranita.” His touch is softer around your bruised tits, but he keeps one hand bagging the weight of your breast while the other slips beneath your skirt.

The pads of his fingers brush your creamy cunt and with a yelp, you grab him by the wrist, your eyes open with a familiar emotion he draws out of you: rage.

“Pero Tovar, if you value your life you will take me under the covers and put your —,”

He chuckles, his cheek against yours, nose rimming the velvet hairs on the ridges of your ear. The vibrations liquify the tension in your bones, loosening your grip. Your eyes flutter, slick obviously running down his fingers. “Ranita, I don’t think you know how you want to end that sentence..”

His words roll like honey over the heat of your skin. It makes your skin tremble. Your grip tightens on his wrist and you roll your hips, your swollen clit finally relieved by the pressure of his palm. 

“Oh, oh, Pero—,” 

With a grunt, he shuffled closer, elbow by your shoulder and he cups your entire wet cunt in his hand, pushing the heel of his palm flatter against you. You cry out, a sparkling kind of pleasure radiating out from where his hand rests. You buck your hips faster, complete release flickering through your outstretched hand. 

“Can you come like this?” You nod, eyes squeezed shut as you barrel towards escape, and you feel him shudder next to you. You are intimately aware that he’s rubbing his cock on the crease of your hip bone but that only drags you faster towards the light. “Then come, ranita, come and I’ll fuck you.” 

The wet, curling heat growing between your legs descends, then in a bright snap, explodes across your body. 

“Fuck!” You tear open your eyes to find them damp, Pero’s massive hand cupping your cheek towards him, his stallion eyes dark as his fingers drag on the soaked material of your dress, your hips slowing. 

“Amorcita, breathe.” The words are torn from his chest, all cock-suredness gone from his frantic gaze. You gulp in air, the weight of his body over yours grounding and smothering you all at once. He pulls his hand away from you, rides it up your thigh to your waist, looking for something to hold onto. He strokes his thumb once against your overheated skin and you’re wriggling up out of your dress. 

“Help,” you hiss and his fingers nearly tear the fabric off you.

With a few undone buttons, you shiver out of your dress, the slick-drenched spots catching on your warm skin. He flings it behind him, near the fireplace. 

He takes you barely beneath the thick covers before you welcome him back to the heat of your open legs. 

But instead of reeling back and plunging his aching cock into you, he takes the time to kiss you. To praise you in all the ways he fears his mouth will end up short. He kisses you, grateful, reverent – wonderful to be swallowed by but also a distraction.

When he lifts your knees by his waist, your hips automatically tilt towards him and for the first time, you feel his red, sore cock between your tacky lips. The dual sensation nearly drags you over the rack of delectably delicious pleasure, as does his worn, broken groan in your ear. 

“More, please, don’t stop.” You cry against the bristles of his beard, his hand dropping between your sweat-slick bodies, finding yours already there to guide him. The press of him spreads you open, filling you one sinking notch at a time. The sensation of your pink, dripping walls moving to take more of him in has you arching up into his chest, nails dragging into his back. His dry lips stifle the moans escaping from your mouth. 

Pero takes both of your hands in his, dragging them above your head, his fingers locking your palms together as his hips roll forward. “Cálmate, amorcita, cálmate,” he murmurs between distracted presses of his mouth against your chin, your cheek, his breathing heavy and stunted. You writhe, pinned open by his hips and his hands, his cock filling you all too slowly and not fast enough. 

With the last few inches, you take him completely, your cunt throbbing, heart pounding, intoxicated by the sensation of being so maddeningly full. Pero drapes over you, his head tucked into your neck, forearms straining with the tension of gripping your hands tightly. 

“Santa madre . . .” He is not a warrior right now. He is but a man, cunt-drunk and heaving. 

His name is pushed out of the bottom of your lungs with the first swing of his hips. You cling to him, knees at his ribs, unwilling to let even an inch of space between your bodies. But this becomes increasingly difficult as his thrusts gain speed. His flushed lips stain a sticky line against your jaw, down to your throat, and he releases your hands, the oak of the bed creaking beneath the force of him drilling down into you, he props himself up on his palms, his shoulders bent and curled over you, biceps straining, hairline damp, eyelids fluttering. The scar on his cheek is flushed pink.

“Look, amorcita, look how well you take me.”

His words tear you from your nebulous high, the grit of them forcing your head down to the obscene squelch beneath the sheets. The thatch of rough curls over his groin is drenched in slick, his thick cock soaked to the point of shine as it drives into you again and again. The heavy draft of breath the sight steals from him, the tap of his cock against a place so deep you didn’t know your body possessed, draws the spooling bliss as tight as a wire. 

Your trembling thighs squeeze him tighter, that hot pressure rendering you speechless, except for the most pathetic whine. Please, Pero, please, you think, you mutter, you whisper, your body rocking damp against the sheets. 

With a sudden snarl, he takes the chunk of your hair at the base of your head flat in his fists and tugs. A shoot of bright pain sparks bliss down to your tight and bruised nipples, and you cry out again. 

“Stop fighting, puedo sentir cuanto la quieres. Let me have it.” It is the following word that splits you open like lighting carving apart a tree. “Please.”

The wail that you release is the rush of gooseflesh over your skin alchemized into audible sound. Heat radiates through you, sucking the air from your lungs, your vision going blurry, then black as you clamp your eyes shut against the rush, the final release, that curls you into his arms. His warm, flushed arms, shaking with strain. A final wobbly thrust or two and his elbows are buckling, sweat-drenched chest pressing into your own.

Distantly, you are aware of the warm, slick drip down your thighs, his cock pulsing the last drops into your cum-flecked cunt, and the dangers this sort of intimacy poses. You can’t gather enough breath, enough sense to settle the spinning room, to worry or even care. 

Your his, and he is yours. That is all that will ever matter. 

The crackle of wood burning is the only other sound than your ragged breaths, the silent roll of sweat from sticky hot skins into the bedsheets. The stone walls of the castle’s room entomb you together for a brief stretch of infinity.

Pero moves and you think he’s going to back out of you, but instead, he merely adjusts, his head fully on your chest, thick fingers clutching your bruised waist, the shift of his cock pushing more of his release out of your oversensitive cunt. But you’ll take overstimulation over his absence every time. You run your fingers through his damp curls and he hums. 

“I’m sorry,” he huffs into your humid skin. “I’m sorry I let my pride keep us apart for so long.” 

You grin lazily to the ceiling, your breath settling as affection takes its place in your chest. 

“You were not the only one blinded by vanity.” 

“But I’m not blind. Not anymore.” He lifts his head, eyes as dark as your spilled inkwell. “I am never letting you go.” 

You smile at him, fingers soft against the back of his neck. “I don’t plan on wandering away.” 

His oil-black gaze drops to your lips and he leans forward to take your mouth against his. Gentle, but with the promise of more. 

“Mi ranita,” he purrs to break the kiss. 

“You call me that all the time, Pero. What does it mean?”

At that, a nearly shy expression crosses his face. He shakes his head, shifting onto his elbows to lift off you. “I can’t tell you. It will ruin your good mood.” 

You gasp, offended, and you grab him by the ear and twist. He chuckles through a grimace. “You will tell me what that means, Pero Tovar, if you value your appendages.” 

“Órale, princesa, retract your claws and I will tell you.” 

You release your grip and settle against your pillow. Grinning bashfully, he kisses your neck briefly.

“Remember that I love you after I tell you this.” 

Your heart nearly stops, the absence of a steady beat nearly drawing tears to your eyes but you hold firm. You breathe deeply against the fluttering in your stomach and pin him with your glare. Of course, this is how he would profess his love to you – when he’s trying to get out of trouble. 

“Tell me, Tovar!”

He chuckles again and preemptively picks up your hands. He kisses the inside of your palms, settling himself between your thighs. 

“It means little frog.” Your mouth falls open in a gasp and you struggle to yank your hands back from him, hissing like a tea kettle, but he uses his weight to press down on you. He nips at your nose. “I call you that because when you’re upset with me, much like you are now, you puff up like a bullfrog, your cheeks like this–,”

He rounds his cheeks full of air, crossing his eyes, and you simply cannot take the slight anymore. You push roughly against his gut, the breath trapped in his mouth escaping in a hot puff, and you twist him onto his back. He lets you, of course, his bold, full laughter rendering him defenseless. His body shakes beneath you, his beautiful eyes squeezed shut, his mouth open wide as he laughs and laughs and laughs. You take him by the wrists and push his limp hands over his head, pinning him as he had you. You pinch his chin with your teeth, your messy cunt over his stomach, as his laughter subsides. 

“Have you had your fun yet?” 

“Barely,” he chuckles, turning his big nose against your cheek and inhaling. He hums.

“Is that all I am to you? A joke?”

Pero opens his eyes, sober as death rattle. He takes you in, not in a hungry, all-consuming way, but in a look that speaks of awe and rapture.

“You are everything to me.”

You sigh, releasing his hands and curling into his chest. He kisses the top of your head, your eyes on the roaring fire. His thumbs rub your shoulder blades, trace the lines of your spine.

“You’re so very lucky I love you too.” 

His wandering against the expanse of your back stills, just for a moment, before his fingers slide into your hair, around the nape of your neck, holding you to him with the intention of keeping you there forever.

“I know, ranita, I know.” 

He watches you sleep as the sky lightens beyond the tall windows on the opposite side of the bedroom. The dying fire traces your edges in gold, settling heat in the curve of your lips. 

His heart lurches with the wanting of you.

There’s more terrible things to come, he knows that. The plan the two of you concocted in the early morning hours will be dangerous, deadly even. But dying together instead of living apart would be much more tolerable, you told him earlier that night, your hand on his chest. 

He would kill if you asked. He would kill, even if you didn’t, to keep you safe and by his side. You’ve proven yourself capable of living a life away from this spectacular opulence, but it pains him to know he will never be able to give you anything nearly as lovely as the velvet dresses in the closet, the gold jewelry in your trunks. 

Instead, all he has to offer is himself. His strength, his hands, his heart. It’s his own fear that tells him that’s not enough, because you remind him again and again that’s more than you ever wanted. 

He traces the curve of your cheek with the hovering pad of his finger, brushing your hair away from your face. How he ended up so lucky with your love, he’ll never know, but he will spend the rest of his days proving that he’s earned it. 

You stir in your sleep, sensing him above you, and he hates to steal even a few minutes of blissful sleep from you, knowing the endless nights that are coming. When he steals you away from all that you’ve ever known. 

The sleepy grumble in your throat resembles his name as he curls around you, but your eyes remain gently closed. He pulls you against him, the air that leaves your mouth and sits between your chest and his something he covets with his whole heart. 

I love you and I’m disgustingly lucky and I love you. 

He is a man made of dust, serving men made of silver. He is a man of dust, loving a woman made of gold.

El orgullo? No, Abuela, his ranita will get him first, last, and every time.

+

Translations:

Sana sana culito de rana. Si no sana hoy, sanará mañana. - This rhyme is typically said to children when they have just hurt themselves. The parent (or grandparent) usually rubs the part that is sore and sings this little tune. Literally translates to: "heal, heal, little frog’s tail. If you don’t heal today, you will heal tomorrow."

el orgullo - pride

dulzura - sweetness, romantic connotation

amorcita - little love, romantic connotation

Tranquila - quiet, as in "be quiet" or "relax"

Cálmate - take it easy, or take it slow

puedo sentir cuanto la quieres - I can feel how much you want it/love it

Órale - okay, or an exclamation expressing approval or encouragement.

ranita - little frog, but you knew that already ;)

the rest are cognates (or familiar words) which you can probably guess the meaning of, but feel free to message me if you don't know!

[retroaria]

｡･:*˚:✧boyfriend bachira･:*˚:✧｡

summary: general dating headcanons for the best boy of all the boys

warnings: umm if you don’t read this and like it I’ll cry, mentions of biting (cuteness aggression), use of pet names

BLUE LOCK M.LIST | enjoy 🤍 - aria

pre!boyfriend bachira who literally tells you straight up that he likes you but does it in such an unserious way that you don’t recognize his true feelings. he’s always touchy and affectionate and often acts that way with his other friends as well so you have a hard time differentiating if he’s being platonic or not.

pre!boyfriend bachira who notices that you DONT notice and gets really upset about it. feels like there’s nothing he can do to get you to see all the love he has literally oozing out of his veins for you.

pre!boyfriend bachira who has already made a great impression on your family and friends. he’s just such a little bundle of joy that everyone loves having around. you’ve also met his mom and she’s so happy meguru has someone who genuinely loves and cares for him.

pre!boyfriend bachira who takes pictures and notes of every thing he sees that reminds him of you. sometimes he shares them with you but often times he’s afraid you’ll think the sheer amount of time he spends thinking about you is weird :(

pre!boyfriend bachira who CANNOT help but engulf you in the most lung suppressing, air tight, vacuum sealed hug of all time every time he sees you. feels this is the closest he can get to you as just friends. (really he wants to plant a thousand kisses on your face and swing you around like a teddy bear in his arms)

pre!boyfriend bachira who doesn’t stop talking about you to all his friends (EVERYONE but you knows that he has feelings for you). He’s spent so much time observing everything about you that he feels like there’s endless things he could mention and if he says one thing but leaves out another they won’t fully understand just how amazing you are.

pre!boyfriend bachira who writes you a love letter with a full declaration of his feelings and a cute little drawing of the two of you playing football together. you go find him immediately after reading it and he’s like “well FINALLY I’ve been trying to tell you for forever silly :D” (you better love this boy or I will hunt you down)

boyfriend bachira who is literally the kisses bandit. will kiss you any chance he gets. passing by you in the hall for literally two seconds? boom! kiss on the cheek. you are never safe (not that you’d ever NOT want this boys sweet little pecks at every chance you can get them). His favorite place to kiss you is everywhere and anywhere he can get to.

boyfriend bachira who finally gets to share all the things that make him think of you. expect to receive texts and voicemails from this boy all day. “I walked past this bakery that smelled just like you!” “This flower I saw is the same color as your eyes!” “I saw the cutest bunny at the park today and it even sat with me for a while, I named it after you! call me back! love you!”

boyfriend bachira who has already curated a list of places he wants to take you. Ranging from his favorite stores and arcades to his favorite parks, under bridges, picnic spots, hidden gems. He’s always out and about finding fun places and his first thought is always how he can’t wait to take you there.

boyfriend bachira who calls you the silliest pet names. pumpkin, bunny, squish, baby face, cutie pie, literally anything that sounds adorable might as well be your middle name in his book.

boyfriend bachira who loves to share everything with you. He’s always giving you one of his earbuds when you walk/sit together, gesturing the straw of his drink over to you, splitting half his food order with you (as long as he gets half of yours :)) I imagine you guys sharing manga, dvds, vinyls, books, anything that’s his that he also wants to be yours. LOVES seeing you in his clothes. His jersey???? Omg he would die.

boyfriend bachira who wants to tell you everything about himself and his life and know everything about you. he’d never push you to speak about something that might be hard to talk about but he wants you to know that you can always be comfortable sharing anything with him. He truly considers you an extension of himself, his other half if you will.

boyfriend bachira who suffers from a terrible case of cuteness aggression!!! he definitely strikes me as a biter/nibbler. he never wants to hurt you and would only do it if you were ok with it but just little love bites on your hands, neck, cheeks, ears, lips anywhere. when you aren’t around and he thinks about how cute you are he has to scream in a pillow or kick his soccer ball really hard lol. Really wants to just squish you so hard you evaporate and become a part of him forever.

boyfriend bachira who if asked what he wants the most in this world would simply say he wants to live a happy vibrant life with you <3

Bachira is probably the loml. I think I would give him the world. I’m finally caught up with the blue lock manga as of last night and I’m literally itching so bad for more I need that new chapter ASAP gotta see goatsagi score that goal 😭

[strawheart-pirate]

One Bed, Two Sinners

Zoro x afab!Reader

This is my Secret Santa for @eelnoise ! Merry belated christmas, Zi! I hope you enjoy! Love you 💚

Words: 3518 CW: N!SFW / pre relationship / nightmares / comfort / kissing / smut / oral (f receiving) / piv sex / no pronouns or nicknames used

You were aboard the Polar Tang, on your way to Wano, when you anchored at a small island. Robin, Usopp, Franky, Zoro and you decide to stay in a hotel for at least one night instead of sleeping in the already cramped Polar Tang. Nothing goes as expected, and as nightmares plague your sleep, Zoro can't find it in himself to see you suffer. Will he succeed and turn your nightmares into the sweetest of dreams?

Half of the Straw Hat crew, including you, were aboard the Polar Tang on its way to Wano. When Trafalgar Law commanded to anchor for the night at a small island to get some air and supplies, you finally see your chance to sleep in a comfortable bed. No offense, the makeshift beds in one of the Polar Tang’s storage rooms are better than nothing. But escaping the cramped conditions and having a real bed for just one night was far too tempting for all of you, so the five of you decided to check into a nearby hotel. You waited outside while Robin talked to the receptionist, and once she returned, she handed each of you your key cards.

"They only had three rooms left, which means we have to pair up. I'll share a room with Franky and you could draw straws? Winner gets a room to themselves?" Robin suggested.

"Yeah, sounds fair." You said and Usopp and Zoro nodded. Franky prepared the straws and offered them to you. "Ladies first."

You hesitated for a moment before grabbing your straw. After you'd chosen yours, Zoro and Usopp chose theirs and on the count of three you all pulled your straws up.

"Yes! Finally a peaceful night!" Usopp chimed. He had drawn the shortest straw and won the game.

Zoro accepted the news with a neutral face without showing any emotion and you smiled, seeing Usopp so happy was just precious and you were happy for him. Well, until you remembered that you'd be sharing a room with Zoro. Pirate hunter Zoro, your crush for at least a year. It was only after you were all separated by Kuma that you realized your feelings. You missed everyone, but you missed him more. In a different way. And those first little feelings only intensified when you saw what a man he had become after the two years of separation. He was so much more. More handsome, more strong, more muscular. More of everything.

Unfortunately, he was not the least bit aware of you. So you kept to yourself, dreaming from afar and just being happy to be part of the same crew. You took a few deep breaths and calmed your mind as the five of you went to your rooms. It was just one night, and it's not like you need to cuddle up. The bed is big enough with two blankets and two pillows and you wouldn't even notice him. With a fluid motion, you used your card to open the door and stepped into your room.

Your smile immediately disappeared and all your worries returned. One bed. There was only one bed in the huge ass room. A single-sized bed with just one pillow and one blanket. Your eyelids twitched. Zoro pushed past you as he entered the room, his shoulder brushing yours lightly.

"Don't worry, I'll just sleep on the floor." Zoro said in his usual careless voice and sat down on the floor, right next to the door.

"No... This must be a mistake, they must have mixed up something... I guess Usopp has our room?" You felt nervous. This must be a mistake, this cannot be... You were about to go out the door again and ask Usopp, when Zoro stopped you.

"Don't. He's probably asleep by now. And like I said, I don't mind." He said with a calm voice.

"But I feel really bad being the only one who has the comfort of a bed..." I tried one last time without giving myself away. Was he for real? Even the makeshift beds in the Polar Tang were more comfortable than the floor.

"It's okay, I'm used to it. Just sleep." He said, his eyes already closed as he sat next to the door with his back to the wall and his arms crossed.

You sighed defeated. You knew he was stubborn and had his pride and there was nothing you could do to change his mind. So you went to the bathroom, changed into some more comfortable clothes and went to bed.

"Okay. Night, Zoro." You turned your back to him, getting only a light snore as an answer, and turned off the light, ready to fall asleep. You still felt bad leaving him on the floor, but there was no solution to your problem. There was no bigger bed, no second blanket, no extra pillow. You pushed those thoughts aside. It took a while, but you managed to fall asleep to Zoro's soft, rhythmic breathing.

---

It was in the middle of the night when Zoro sensed that something was wrong. He kept his eyes closed and concentrated on his surroundings, letting his haki search the entire hotel when he heard the soft whimper. When he was sure that there was nothing that could be a threat to the crew, he opened his eyes and looked at you. You were shivering and whimpering. Probably a nightmare... He guessed and thought for a moment what to do. He couldn't just walk over and wake you up. His options were limited. A silent 'please....' escaped your curled up form and he sighed. He just couldn't leave you like this.

"Hey..." He spoke at a low volume. "Hey, Y/N."

He waited a moment to see if he was successful, but then you whimpered again.

"Wake up." This time he tried a bit louder, but still softly, because he didn't want to frighten you in any way.

Again he wasn't successful. He groaned and finally stood up. Silently, he placed a chair under the doorknob for extra security. He walked over to you and sat down on the edge of the bed.

"Hey, wake up. It's just a nightmare." He tried a third time, hesitantly placing a hand on your shoulder.

The touch seemed to startle you, because you turned to face him, your hands clawing into his arm.

He took in your pained expression. There was sweat on your forehead and your knuckles were white from how hard you clawed into his skin. In another setting, your grip on him would have brought him to his knees, but right now he wanted nothing more than to comfort you. Cursing under his breath, he turned on the soft light of the lamp on the bedside table and lay down beside you. He scooped your trembling form into his arms. Whispering sweet nothings into your ear, he watched as you finally began to calm down. With a gentle movement, he wiped the sweat from your face and laid his head on top of yours, cradling you in his arms, hopefully bringing you the most comfort.

His plan finally seemed to work as your grip on his arm loosened and you stopped shaking. He looked down at you and found a delicate little smile on your lips. All right, it was time for him to get up, but he just couldn't. The way your body felt in his arms, the way your hips pressed against his and how warm you were had him under a spell he couldn't break. He knew he should go, but he was being selfish. Your whole being had fascinated him since you joined the Straw Hats, but he never had the courage to tell you how he felt. He would look like a creep if you woke up now. But the way you felt in his hands when he finally got to hold you like he had dreamed of so many times... His body reacted to yours and his breathing was slightly labored as he looked down at you, just as you opened your eyes. He froze. Shit…

---

When you opened your eyes, you found the reason for the warmth you felt right above you. He was breathing heavily and his eyes were fixed on you with an intense gaze.

"Zoro?" You whispered. When did he join you in bed?

"You had a nightmare. Are you feeling better now?" He asked, his voice an octave lower than usual and his arms not moving. He seemed frozen.

"Yes... thank you..." You replied softly, noticing the way he was holding you, the impressive size of his arms and chest, and even the reaction of his body in his pants. A slight blush made its way to your face and you shifted in his arms. Your attempt to free your body from his hard-on failed miserably and you pressed even harder against him. Zoro hissed through clenched teeth and unfroze.

"...Yeah, I'll take my leave..." Zoro dropped you as if you burned him and sat up, freeing himself from the temptation to make you his in an instant. Your hand on his shoulder stopped him, and he knew that whatever you said next would decide your future.

"Stay..." You asked him softly and heard a slight moan from the greenette. "Please..."

"Do you even know what you are asking of me?" Zoro asked as he turned to you.

The way you looked at him told him all he needed to know. He got back into bed and crawled on top of you. Slowly, gracefully, like a predator. And you were his prey, looking at him wide-eyed and frozen in the heavy anticipation of what was to come. His piercing eyes felt like they were holding you in place and you bit your lip as he looked down at you, his hands beside your head.

It was only a second, but it felt like an eternity. You looked into each other's eyes with burning desire and in the blink of an eye, Zoro quickly pressed his lips to yours, stealing a needy kiss. He wrapped an arm around you and grabbed your side hard as he slipped his tongue past your lips for a much more passionate kiss. And you responded with a passion that nearly knocked him off his feet. All those repressed feelings surfaced and you couldn't get enough of him. It was not enough... not fast enough, not deep enough, too many clothes, too little skin on skin, you wanted more and so did he. Sharing wet kisses as your tongues entwined and tasted each other, you quickly pulled off his shirt and he pulled you into a sitting position to make short work of your clothes.

As soon as he had freed your torso of all clothing, he laid you back down and kissed your neck and collarbone like a desperate man. He was not rough, but eager as he made sure to taste every inch of your skin and memorize your sweet spots. You could only moan from the intensity and your hands made sure to explore every inch of his impressive frame you could reach. You traced every muscle on his large chest and shoulders, making him tremble at your touch. He kissed his way down your body, taking his time at your breasts, swirling his tongue around your hardened nipples before sucking on them. His hands remained on your soft chest, kneading it ever so gently as he kissed his way south, leaving a wet trail of his saliva glistening in the dim light of the room.

He pulled on your panties and looked up at you, giving you the choice of continuing or not. You nodded slightly, not trusting your voice, and looked at him with slightly parted lips. He smiled, proud that he had such an effect on you, and quickly removed your panties, leaving you naked in front of him. He took a moment to admire your body as he ran his finger along the trail of saliva before reaching your folds and slowly trailing his fingers down each side of your clit. You let out a small gasp and your eyes widened as you saw Zoro stand up. He wrapped his arms around your thighs and pulled you to the edge of the bed before sitting down in front of it. This took you by surprise and your eyes flickered with curiosity as he smiled mischievously just before burying his face between your thighs.

He licked slowly from your cunt to your clit and a deep growl rumbled in his chest. "So sweet..." He whispered and his hot breath fanned your folds as your taste exploded on his tongue, setting his taste buds on fire. You were already dripping wet and tasted like heaven to him and he wasted no time in devouring you like his last meal. His tongue swirled around your clit before he sucked on it, making you twitch as you let out a soft moan. His eyes were glued to you, noticing every little movement or the way you bit your lips, and your sweet moans were music to his ears. He flicked your knob repeatedly, mercilessly, making you squirm on the mattress. His arms wrapped around your legs, holding your hips in place as his fingers dug into your soft flesh. The spot was sensitive and you gasped. Zoro's mouth worked wonders on you, the constant licking and flicking of his tongue, the frequent sucking with his soft lips, the gentle scratching of his teeth over your sensitive knob. Everything he did brought you closer and closer to the edge and your moans became louder and louder. He loved every single sound you made, every wriggle and when your hands grabbed the sheets in sheer bliss. He wanted to savor this moment as long as possible, but his restrained cock throbbed in his pants and he needed you.

He released your hips with one hand and licked two of his fingers before sliding them through your folds and slowly pushing them inside you. He made sure to stimulate your clit as his fingers explored your insides, caressing your velvety walls until he found the spongy sweet spot inside of you. He drew gentle circles with his fingers and watched as you responded to his movements with a shiver down your spine. You were so close, he could see it in the way you shivered and squirmed. He put his other hand flat on your belly to hold you down as he applied more pressure to the spot inside you. The licking and sucking on your knob increased and you couldn't last much longer. "Zoro!" You moaned as you let go and your orgasm washed over you like a wave. He watched as you trembled and shook, your thighs pressing against his head, holding him in place as he kept going to make sure you rode out your high completely. Ecstasy coursed through your veins, and as his tongue became a painful torment on your clit from the overstimulation, you grabbed his hair and yanked his head away. He let go and immediately pulled his fingers back. As he looked at you, he grinned like a madman who had just tasted heaven, his lower face glistening with your juices. You were panting heavily from the pleasure you had just felt and your cunt still clenched around nothing, feeling the afterglow intensely.

"That was an impressive performance." He smirked and crawled on top of you. His lips captured yours, giving you a taste of your own juices as he kissed you. You hummed, his lips desirous yet gentle, giving you time to cool down after your high before you dive into another round of pleasure. You ran your hands down his sides, feeling every curve of his ribs and muscles until your hands reached his waistband. You palmed the bulge in his pants as Zoro pushed his tongue into your mouth, making the kiss more passionate as he sensed you were ready to go again. Your fingers were quick, opening his pants in no time and freeing his cock. You couldn't see it yet, but you felt it. It was thick and girthy. A prominent vein ran from top to bottom. Its head was massive and the slit at the top leaked pre-cum. You dipped your finger in the sticky fluid and swirled it around his tip, making him growl into your open-mouthed kiss.

He pulled away and stripped off all his clothes, giving you the opportunity to admire his body. You knew his impressive chest from all the times he displayed it openly, but what took your breath away was his waist. The slender, defined part of his torso that only made his chest look even wider. His cock twitched as he noticed your ravenous eyes on him and with steady movements he made his way back on top of you, his muscles beautifully illuminated as they shifted with his movements.

He ran his hand over your curves and you spread your legs to welcome him between your thighs. He grinned, but his eyes looked at you with a gentle expression. "Are you ready?"

"Yes." You whispered softly, ready for him and for this.

He propped himself up with one arm while his other hand aligned his member with your entrance. He rubbed the head over your slick folds a few times before pushing the head inside. Although you had seen and felt it in your hands before, you were still surprised and gasped at the thickness. Zoro kissed your lips tenderly, distracting and relaxing you as he pushed deeper and deeper until he bottomed out. "Shit..." He hissed through gritted teeth as he threw his head back. You were so tight around his length, testing his patience as he wanted nothing more than to rut relentlessly into you. You whimpered as you felt like you were being split in half. Taking deep breaths, you slowly adjusted to his size and finally gave him a sign that it was safe to move.

He started slowly, enjoying the feeling of your tight walls and your warmth around him. "Zoro... mhh..." You moaned as he placed both hands beside you again, picking up the pace and stopping the teasing. His length was so deep inside you, kissing your insides, and you gripped his biceps tightly as the knot in your stomach tightened with each thrust. Your mouth hung open and your breathing was labored, but you had the most mesmerizing view. Your gaze was fixed on the muscles in his chest as they twitched with each thrust, giving you quite a show of that 110cm chest. Zoro went down on his elbows, breaking your view of his chest, and looked deep into your eyes. His angle changed and he was now deeper inside you, hitting your sweet spot every time. Sweat formed on his forehead and his earrings jingled as his thrusts became stronger and more intense. You moaned louder, not able to keep it together anymore which earned you a satisfied growl from Zoro, who loved your sounds. Your legs trembled slightly which was a clear sign that you were close to your climax. "Zoro, I'm close..." You whispered between moans and Zoro responded with an open-mouthed kiss before he pushed himself up onto his knees.

He folded your legs against your chest and pulled you back onto his dick as he changed position. You grabbed the sheets for support as you began to tremble underneath him from the way his tip kissed your cervix deep inside you. "Come for me..." He pressed through his clenched teeth, his voice dripping with desire, and you gladly complied. His next thrust pushed you over the edge and the knot in your stomach exploded, making you see stars. You moaned his name as he pounded mercilessly into you, making sure to fuck you through your high. Your walls squeezed him tight and he growled deep as you pushed him over the edge with you. His thrust became sloppier as he shot his seed deep into you, making sure to fill you to the brim. Ecstasy ran through both of you, igniting a feeling of utter satisfaction deep inside you as your climax slowly faded. You were both panting heavily and he collapsed on top of you, making sure not to suffocate you with his weight as your insides and his dick still twitched from the pleasure, but the exhaustion mixed into your systems.

After a moment, he rolled off of you and gently pulled you into his arms, stroking your hair from your sweaty forehead. You snuggled against him and rested your head on his chest, enjoying how his sculptured chest felt like it was made for you. You both enjoyed the afterglow as you shared gentle touches and light kisses. There was no need to speak as your actions spoke louder than any words could have.

But there was one last thing burning in your mind, a fear that he would leave your side when you fell asleep and that this was all just a dream. So before you could fall asleep in his arms, you had to know, and you chose your words carefully.

"Will you stay with me?"

There was no hesitation from Zoro and you could hear a light chuckle rumbling in his chest.

He pressed another affectionate kiss to your temple and wrapped you a little tighter into his arms.

“For as long as you’ll have me.”

All content unless otherwise stated belongs to: ©Strawheart-pirate. Please do not copy / modify / translate / repost my writing, banners or art on other platforms. Comments, reblogs or likes are highly appreciated!

[see-arcane]

The trains go only so quick

The weather’s only so calm

For the people are all out

For celebration’s a balm

Our good friend sighs in shelter

Barred from revelry and fear

A storied local greets him

As a thunderhead draws near

Preface: For maximum effect, give, “Dracula’s Guest,” a read before proceeding.

The PDF version of the preview is here.

2

Walpurgisnacht

Munich held onto him longer than he would have liked. Had he been marooned in the place as a mere visitor he would never have opted to haunt the station rather than milling around through the celebrating streets. There was as much reveling as reverence at work due to the holiday. The far end of it, anyway. Jonathan had tucked a note on it in his schedule. Celebration meant delays even in the most sedate locales and there was every chance that this one’s might postpone his conveyance. He smiled tiredly at the shorthand, if only so he did not torture himself with looking at his watch for the third time in as many minutes.

‘Walpurgisnacht. Walpurgis Night. A holy day held in respect to Saint Walpurga, the 8th century abbess who warred with illness, pestilence, witchcraft and grim spirits. A time of grave superstition by dark and relieved gaiety by sunup with the witches and the dead all banished. The date has a predecessor in the form of the May Day festivals of old, making the time one of bonfires and fear, beauty and feasting.’ And apparently keeping the trains held up so that any wandering spirits cannot flee too far from the cemeteries.

Jonathan tucked the note away with the rest and battled with himself over whether he dared to stray from the platform or not. His train was meant to arrive at seven o’ clock, which meant that for safety’s sake he ought to be ready and waiting by six, even if the train was more likely to appear closer to eight. But the hour was now half-past five and he had taken his lunch early that day. He was down to rationing mints from their tin lest he give in to hunger and try to elbow his way through the crowded streets to find a restaurant. One that he would not even have time to truly enjoy, needing to eat speedily and flee back to the tracks. His stomach pinched him in protest. He held a fist against it to muffle a growl.

“You can wait.” He could. If there was no dining on the train, he would still make time for breakfast in Vienna. Or if not breakfast, lunch in Klausenburgh. Or… “Or I could just break and get a room for the night.” The words were a sigh. He had spied a hotel sitting in a picturesque spot near a spread of wild greenery that bled into woodlands. What was the name? “Quatre Saisons, I think,” he said under his breath. This, like the rest of his murmured commentary, was meant for no ears but his own. The festivities had left the station remarkably barren. Everyone who had traveled to or from the area wouldn’t be packing up until at least the next morning. So it came as a surprise when he heard a voice behind his head:

“You are an Englishman?”

Jonathan turned to see a man almost as young as himself peering down at him. A cluster of wild roses at his breast was the only flourish to his apparel. His expression was unreadable apart from an angle of suspicion to the brows.

“I am,” Jonathan allowed, grateful that he didn’t need to strain his tongue or the man’s ears with his fragmented German.

“You have come from the Quatre Saisons?” The suspecting angle deepened.

“No, but I was thinking I may have to book a room if the train comes too late.”

The man’s face softened at this, his posture relaxing an increment as he insisted, “The train will come late. Not too late, but still late. You must not bother with the Quatre Saisons either way.”

“Is it full?”

“Most rooms always fill in advance of these days. Inns and hotels shall all be swarmed from now until the seventh of May. But Herr Delbrück’s Quatre Saisons must not be tried. The place is not well this time of year.”

“I do not quite follow,” Jonathan said, his nose just catching the whiff of past toasts to the date on his companion’s breath. “How is it not well?”

“The land it sits with. It is bad to be near it, even after Walpurgisnacht has been and gone. There are…” the man seemed to catch himself on a word before pressing on, “…wild dogs that roam the forest and its valley. Strange souls who would take after the devils of last night, even as we light the fires against them. No, you must not stay there until at least the thick of summer. Better to try in the city’s heart if you must have a room.”

The rooms that were full of visitors already, according to the young man himself. Either way it still relied on Jonathan potentially spoiling the entirety of the client’s route as laid out and paid for from his own account. The idea of taking a room and gambling on a morning train was only a daydream. Jonathan almost said as much.

Instead, “I do not need a room, really. I can hardly risk missing the evening’s train by a minute. But I thank you for the advice, sir.” The young man frowned at Jonathan then, his eyes roaming the length of him in a searching way. “Are you waiting on the train as well?”

“I just purchased my ticket for the morning. It is better to travel by day. And to eat by it too.” He nodded at Jonathan. “You have not been in the city itself? You have partaken of nothing?”

“Sadly no. If I were here on my own account I should have liked to see more, but—,”

“The train will not come any earlier if you sit and starve.”

“Likely not. But I cannot risk wandering too far.” He regarded his luggage drearily. No, he dared not even risk a restaurant. Even the next stop would allow him only a glimpse of the city as he rushed from one point to the next. Perhaps he could find some time to wander when he reached the hotel, but not before. He clenched his belly against another snarl and popped another mint in his mouth. Only three left, but, “Would you care for one?”

The young man whispered something in his homeland’s tongue—it sounded to Jonathan like, “Better to have the leaves,”—but in English said, “I would. Thank you.” He laid it on his tongue as if it were a medicine pill. “But it is still not a supper. Take yourself away for a meal at least, Herr Englishman.”

So saying, the young man departed, perhaps for his own plate or hotel. Jonathan swallowed a sigh and put the tin away. Looking around he saw he really was the last one on the platform apart from one dozing woman playing chaperone to her family’s luggage. Her husband had taken the two sulking children back out into the streets to burn off some energy. With the surly toddlers and the brief conversationalist departed, the space felt oddly like an island. Even the clamor that leaked in from the mouth of the tracks was muted. Jonathan tried to bury himself in a book, but gave up as the text swam before his eyes.

What rest he had gotten was as thin as his last meal was distant. If he could only lay down and sleep through the hunger he might be satisfied, but that risked drowsing through the train whistle itself. He tucked the book away and took himself to the closest opening which showed the beginnings of twilight oozing over the tracks. His hand went again to the neglected journal at his heart and thought another apology at its pages. So far he’d only managed to jot his name within the cover.

“I am sorry,” he told the air. “My head is in no state for you yet.”

A sudden cold gust blew his words back. There was a rise of distraught voices from outside as the breeze whipped through. In the next moment there was a shift in the palette of the sky as a weighty cloud rolled over the last of the sun, plunging the outdoors into early dusk. After that came the pattering of hail. The last festive sounds turned to a disgruntled din before their noise was drowned entirely by the hammering on the station’s roof. Jonathan pulled his coat tight around him and wished luck out to the revelers.

Between one blink and the next, one of the latter manifested at the threshold below. She wore what would have been an immaculate costume of a bygone age if not for the burns that had assailed the fine old dress. Though perhaps that was merely a desired effect. She was likely going around as some witch or spirit who had escaped the bonfires’ efforts during the night. Between the platform’s glow and the outdoors’ new gloom she certainly possessed the half-lit look of a ghost.

The sort of ghost meant for a stage, he added to himself. She has an actress’ face.

Yes, an actress powdered and dressed to be a dead beauty. Her mouth was a full and somber curl of red against a carcass’ pallor. She carved it into a smile as she stared up at him, seemingly oblivious to the cold and hail at her back.

“Are you alright?” he asked in his stilted German. The woman only kept her faded eyes upon him. They had a pull to them that Jonathan couldn’t place. He found himself approaching the tracks’ edge before he realized his feet were moving. “Do you need help?” he added, wondering if the trouble was just a matter of shelter. The tracks were set deep and it would be a hassle to hoist oneself up to the platform’s edge.

“He tries again,” said the woman on the tracks. Possibly. Her German was almost as fractured as his own, albeit with a different inflection. “Another sent for. Another to travel with. Fast, fast, fast.” The sky growled at her words. A stage’s effects could do no better. With the thought in mind, he wondered:

Is this a performance?

Before he could ask, his stomach spoke for him. It was mortifyingly loud and the thunder’s next peal did not do enough to cover it. The woman’s expression cracked on a wider smile. She recited:

“Help, Heaven, help! who knows the Father

Knows surely that he loves his child:

The bread and wine from the hand divine

Shall make thy tempered grief less wild.”

Jonathan smiled back, glad to recall the verse. He and Mina had gone over it in the original text and the English for practice and preference’s sake. Lenore’s lines fell from him:

“Oh! mother dear mother! the wine and the bread

Will not soften the anguish that bows down my head;

For bread and for wine it will yet be as late

That his cold corpse creeps from the grim grave’s gate.”  

The woman’s grin now bared teeth. They were brilliantly white against the crimson of her lips.

“Are you meant to be Lenore?” Jonathan asked.

“Lenore sought her lover. I sought only death.” Her hand rose toward him. “Will you help me find it?”

Thunder boomed as a new wind rolled through the station like a howl. The woman’s ruined dress and hanging hair danced wildly on her, though she seemed not to notice. Jonathan went toward her, deciding whatever act she adhered to would be better performed out of the elements’ reach. His hand reached down to hers. There was a moment when their fingers brushed and Jonathan felt sick at how frozen she felt even through his glove.

In the same instant he saw the dancing of lightning without. The bolts seemed almost like a great weaving animal, snapping in closer and closer bolts along the blackened sky. Intuition tightened in his chest. Suspicion leapt to certainty. There was no time to speak—

Get off get off the tracks it’s going to—

—only to grab for her hand.

But not fast enough. Another gale of wind rushed through, this time angled in such a way that it seized and flung him back against the floor. Lightning struck in the same instant. Noise blasted his ears. It was a nigh deafening din made from the crackle of electricity dancing on the tracks and the rattling roar of a thunderclap. Under it, he swore he heard the woman scream.

God oh God oh God hospital what is the word for hospital I need the dictionary I need—

He scrambled to his feet and back to the platform’s edge. His breath stayed trapped in his chest until he looked down.

And saw nothing.

There was no woman, alive or dead. He gawped for almost a minute at the bare tracks. The hail thinned away as he stared and the thunder softened to a grumble.

How..?

“You are hurt?”

Jonathan looked up and found the dozing mother had left her heap of baggage to check on him.

“No, no, not hurt. But there was someone…” He gestured at the tracks and limped through a few lines of German before she shooed his words away with her hand, switching briskly to English. He explained the scene in full and the mother nodded with something between grave intensity and a sprightly eagerness.

“Yes, there would still be some who wander late. Walpurgisnacht is night and day. Probably she is drifting back to her tomb, sulking that she did not get company for her bier. If you had your gloves off and showed your ring she may have not bothered. Lovers who die before the wedding day, they are the greediest souls on these nights.”

This she said with great authority and Jonathan had no desire to mention that he wore no ring as yet. No more than he had any urge to voice his suspicion that the woman had been very much alive and somehow made it away from the station’s threshold before the lightning could do any damage.

The other explanation is that the woman was, in fact, a roaming ghost come to collect a new member for the graveyard. It is the time of year for such things.  

A call from the other end of the station turned the mother’s head. Father and children had come in from the storm, as had a smattering of other travelers. The train whistle bayed not long after. Jonathan looked to the tracks again as if the woman might suddenly rematerialize in the locomotive’s path. The only body that he could see was the outline of some animal at the edge of the platform’s glow. It looked like a large dog posed beside the tracks, tail still and eyes lambent. Jonathan held its stare for a moment. Then it was gone, loping off into the night.  

This. This is worth writing about.

And it was. At least once his seat had him in it and a wonderfully dense meal sat in him. He brought out his stationery pages for the cause, jotting the entirety of his time in the station up to the arrival of the train. These loose sheets were reserved specifically for storytelling and recipe preservation, the better to possibly be scrapbooked away at home. The journal still drowsed in his pocket.

Hold out for the hotel room. Almost there.

Jonathan cupped a hand to his eyes to keep out the glare as he watched the world go by in the window. The storm was left behind now and the sky was all stars above rooftops and treetops alike. A brilliant wedge of a moon shined out at him. He was still admiring the view when the steward came along to tap his shoulder. There was a smile on his face but a glimmer of anxiety in his eye.

“Herr Harker, yes?”

“Yes,” Jonathan managed before the steward produced a telegram.

“For you. Will you have another drink?”

“No, thank you.” But the glass was already stolen away and refilled before he could finish the sentence. The steward vanished in nearly the same instant, looking as if he meant to finish the bottle himself. Jonathan puzzled over this a moment before turning his attention to the telegram.

BISTRITZ.

My friend, I send all apologies to you on account of the trains and the time. We arranged our meeting during the heart of much fervor, and such will always meddle with travel. I send this in anticipation of your own frustrations with the hindered hours and my gratitude for your steadfastness. I hope it shall please you to know that the Hotel Royale has its finest suite reserved and waiting for you, and so too for the Golden Krone of Bistritz after them. May their hospitality be a balm against the troubles of a passenger at the mercy of fickle clocks. —Dracula

Jonathan marveled at the message. It was a rarity in itself to have a client who made no fuss when it came to snags that the firm had no control over. To have one who foresaw said snags and went out of his way to apologize to the solicitor himself was unheard of. And from a noble?

He added the telegram to his memoranda with a smile. 

[sorensolsikke]

here's some punk diy tips and ideas

[other than crusty pants and battle jacket, although we still love those greatly.]

why should you diy, when you can just find decorated items everywhere, you can ask. what if you are clumsy at painting or anything?

firstly, good questions. we diy so we don't give credit to the big companies who rule the world. we diy to get more independent from the system we dislike. we diy so to save money. to express uniqueness, recognize eachother and be recognized. and especially to have fun and feel cool. diy is not only about clothing, but anything you can set your mind on. of course, one cannot make EVERYTHING for themselves, there isn't enough time and energy. but making at least small steps are already a statement and more than nothing. also, helping small artists by buying their products is also pretty punk.

that being said, i provide you with some tips of mine, all gained from experience:

anything you drew/painted on, you will WANT TO protect. acrylic paint/markers + acrylic paint varnish/transparent nail polish/textile medium are your best friends. read after anything that's new to you.

i highly recommend working with old clothing or thrift shop finds when it comes to textiles, as it is environmentally friendly and you will stay in budget. Anyways, always make sure that the material you use isn't gonna be problematic. for example, if you want to do some patchwork, the material shouldn't decay easily (if it does, it will come off so quickly.). if you want to paint on it, it shouldn't be rugged.

you can not only draw/paint on your canvas shoes, but can also sew, embroidery (just make sure to use a thimble, plus floss instead of thread could make your work more durable), and add beads and trinkets to your shoelaces. in the case of shoes, never use glue (neither hot nor instant glue) – it will come off quickly. for some inspiration, i'll show you my shoes!

(the fake moss is literally unstoppable from falling off or getting dirty. risky idea.)

it's good to carry around water and food!! you don't even have to pay for decorative water bottles and food boxes, as you can draw on glass and plastic just fine with acrylic markers. just don't forget to paint transparent nail polish all over your drawing. in at least two layers. don't be lazy or laid-back. even posca comes off while washing the dishes. and you WANT TO save your reference pictures/final designs, as the case of emergency is likely. but after all, my water bottle is exactly fine after six months, with no accuring problem.

if your current best option to get stickers from is aliexpress or overpriced decor stores, search for local artists and shops on instagram and tiktok, as it may be their most efficent way of getting you to know them. if it seems like you have no chance, you may can still find a print shop with the option of printing on self-adhesive sheets (at least in hungary, those are pretty cheap). and if you want drawings to print out as stickers, you may use your own or –ONLY IF YOU GET PERMISSION– other artist's work. not only good for decorations for like, headphones, but for vandalism too. WAIT WAIT who said that. who said it. not me. no never

(in case that's also impossible, you can create stickers by printing out/drawing a picture, cover it up in transparent adhesive tape, and then put some two-sided adhesive tape on the white side of the pic. it won't be that durable, but it functions.)

if you want to bleach-paint clothing, get some plastic brushes!! any other brush dissolves. draw your design first with chalk!! never forget to put cardboard inside the clothing, and to wash the finished work in a washing machine before you'd put it on. prepare to be patient with the process. and it's not dangerous to touch 5%-9% household bleach, just wash your hands soon after.

if you want your crusty pants to last veryyy long, wax them. look up on youtube jeans waxing.

some more things i made for myself so to give you some inspiration: totebag with pockets, a small crystal holder cabinet, badges, and i decorated some t-shirts, button-ups, an id card case, phonecase, laptop.

theoretically speaking, there is nothing that an individual would be unable to learn how to make, when it comes to diy. you can't imagine how easy it is to bake bread at home. consuming-focused media makes people believe that it's hard to make anything. of course, everyone has to decide about their own priorities, i don't want to convince or change anyone in here. and if you have any questions, send an ask!! i hope i had been helpful.

[a-dauntless-daffodil]

well @flagonking I'll blame you for this one

Emily: "Sir Pentious! Is that a laser canon!?"

Sir Pentious: "What? What, no. Of courssssse n- OH THISSSS canon! Ah, I, ah- I wass jussst dissssmantling it, oh mighty sssseraphim!"

Emily: "Dismantling- does it still work?"

Sir Pentious: "P-perhapssss, but ah...." (falls face down) "Pleassse! Do not ssssssend me back or rip the wingsss FROM my back!!!! I prosssstrate mysssself before you! I am a worm at the hem of your sssscelesstial sssskirtsss! I beg of you have merssscy! I-"

Emily: "I need you to do a terrorism for me."

Sir Pentious: "...I... beg your pardon?"

Emily: "Vaggie collapsed at last week's meeting and hasn't been fully conscious since-"

Sir Pentious: "WHAT! Vagatha!?"

Emily: "-Charlie's tried everything in hell she can think of but nothing's helped and she's finally broke her promise not to tell anyone in heaven and I really really wish she would have done that SOONER because Lute stormed out of the meeting just a few minutes before Vaggie went down and since then I haven't seen Lute anywhere and Sir Pentious, I NEED you to draw her out in a HURRY, Lute I mean, so I have a chance of finding what I think she's been hiding when I slip into her place while she's off confronting you-"

Sir Pentious: "What."

Emily: "I'm sorry, but we can't go to Sera for help. I don't trust her not to give Lute a heads up and enough time to get rid of any evidence before she's searched and Vaggie won't be safe again until we catch Lute red handed and make sure to get it BACK from her- That's the main point, everything else comes later-"

Sir Pentious: "Theesse are too many wordsss! I don't underssstand! Me dissstract her?! Vagatha very expressly told me NOT to draw the pathetic bi-, the ah, lieutenant'sss ire! It wassss a direct order!"

Emily: "I know and it's dangerous and she'll be furious with us both afterwards but Lute can't get away with this!"

Sir Pentious: "Thisss what? What issss she-"

Emily: "I think she has Vaggie's halo, from when Adam took it."

Sir Pentious: "Her halo..?"

Emily: "I think Lute's been hurting her with it."

Sir Pentious: "Oh..."

Sir Pentious: "...Undersssstood! Where in heaven ssshould the terrorisssm take plassce?"

Emily: "As far from the Exorcist barracks as you can manage- maybe, also as far from Adam's suits as you can make it too? I don't know where else she'd feel safe enough to do something like this from, so we'll start there."

Sir Pentious: "Ah... The gatessss ssssshould be a good disstance from both, yesss? And an attack on them would be MOSST alarming."

Emily: "Perfect, Pentious! That's perfect."

Sir Pentious: "Ma'am! When ssshall we commenssce the opperashhion?"

Emily: "Now. Right now- I have no idea what this is actually doing to Vaggie, if it IS what I think it is, but it can't be good and it needs to stop."

Sir Pentious: "Then I sssshall attack at onsssce!"

Emily: "Wait! Sir Pentious, I won't let Lute hurt you either- Take this with you."

Sir Pentious: "Y- YOUR halo-? NO! I cannot!"

Emily: "I'm authorizing you to. It's MY blessing to give. You'll be under my protection with this- As long as you hold it, anyone who tries attacking you will be attacking me too."

Sir Pentious: "But what if, sssshe attacks anyway?? I, I don't know if I could ssssurvive, never mind sssafeguard your-"

Emily: "If she comes for you, use my halo to shield yourself."

Sir Pentious: "Ah! Ah, but-"

Emily: "No buts. Promise me?"

Sir Pentious: "But you are ssssso much powerfuller and more important than I am! You are helping with the hotel! We ssshouldn't risssk-"

Emily: "Your friends lost you once, Pentious. You died for them."

Sir Pentious: "W-well. I would have preferred not to..."

Emily: "But you did and we're not putting them through that again. If Vaggie can survive Lute's sword cutting her eye out of her skull, I'm sure I'll manage a dent in my halo or two."

Sir Pentious: "... very well, ma'am."

Emily: "Please, it's just Emily."

Sir Pentious: "Ah, err, missss Emily? If you are sssscertain..."

Emily: "Good, then take it and good luck!"

Sir Pentious: "AH! You asss well!!!"

Emily: "Try to keep Lute arguing if she doesn't go straight to trying to kill you!"

Sir Pentious: "I will! I sssswear I will give you asss much time for your sssssearch ass I can!"

Sir Pentious: "...."

Sir Pentous: "Oh dear."

Sir Pentious: (hastily gather up laser canon) "Oh dear oh dear- oh thisss would be ssso much fasssster with my eggssss!" (juggling emily's halo) "Ah!"

Sir Pentious: (slithering quickly) "All thisss time. The crusty exorcist leader.. doing things to Vaggatha's halo..?"

Sir Pentious: (HISSES)

Sir Pentious: "I DO hope Charlotte MURDERSSS that bitch...."

Random Angel: "What?"

Sir Pentious: "AHHH!!!! I- I sssaid- OH DEAR! I SSSSSEEM TO HAVE AN ITCH! I ssshall jusst go and ssscrape myssself very inossscently againsst the gatesss of heaven, la la la, do not be alarmed! ....YET!"

-

Vaggie: "...?"

Charlie: "Oh-!"

Vaggie: "...charlie...?"

Charlie: "Vaggie."

Vaggie: "Why'm I... lying down."

Charlie: "Shhh it's okay, you're just resting a bit-"

Vaggie: "Weren't we, doing something... You're... crying..?"

Charlie: "No I'm-" (wipes face) "D-do you know where you are right now?"

Vaggie: "Our room..."

Charlie: "Right, that's right. That's good. You know me and our room and it's, okay. You're safe here and it's okay. Just rest."

Vaggie: "But the... meeting..?"

Charlie: "That was days ag- never mind. It's not important. Can I prop your head up for a second? Can you try a sip of water? You, you should drink a little while you're still awake-"

Vaggie: "I was... sleeping? Am I going to. Fall back asleep... again?"

Charlie: "I don't-" (voice breaks) "-I, I don't know. Maybe. You weren't really talking when you woke up before. Here. Drink?"

Vaggie: "Not thirsty. Not tired. What. Happened?"

Charlie: "You've been resting-"

Vaggie: "Charlie you've been crying. You still are. What's wrong?"

Charlie: "Oh m-maybe nothing, now you're sounding like yourself again... How's the headache?"

Vaggie: "It's..."

Vaggie: "...Gone?"

Charlie: "Gone? You're sure? Please don't hide it this time-"

Vaggie: "I'm not, sweetie. I feel okay."

Charlie: "And not even tired, mm?"

Vaggie: "Alright fine. A little tired. Probably not as tired as you though."

Charlie: "I'M not the one who's been-"

Vaggie: "When did you last get any sleep?"

Charlie: "... Husk and Angel offered to sit in while I tried napping, yesterday. But it felt wrong. You were just, laying there next to me so still, you only moved when another fit started."

Vaggie: "I've been having fits?"

Charlie: "A few. Four, I think? But only since yesterday." (shaky sigh) "Everyone's been trying to help, so don't get mad at them about me losing some sleep. I kept jolting awake scared I would miss- something. Not be there when you... the next time you woke up."

Vaggie: "...well I'm awake now."

Charlie: "You shouldn't strain yourself, okay? Just. Try to rest. Do not try getting up."

Vaggie: "I won't. But I could use a hug."

Charlie: "Me too..." (snuggles gf)

Vaggie: "..."

Charlie: "...Vaggie?"

Vaggie: "Hm? Yeah?"

Charlie: "J-just checking."

Vaggie: "I swear I feel okay now. Whatever all, that, was, I think it's over."

Charlie: "Okay. Heh."

Vaggie: "What?"

Charlie: "Maybe I worried Emily over nothing after all."

Vaggie: "You didn't tell her-"

Charlie: "It's been a week, Vaggie. I'm sorry, I know I promised- but I didn't know what to do."

Vaggie: "A week? Oh hun... then that's my fault for freaking you out." (hugs) "Don't be sorry. The only angel you told was Emily, right?"

Charlie: "Yes. Just her..."

Vaggie: "That's fine. She's not. The worst."

Charlie: "Someday you'll admit that you like her~ You think she's niiiice and want to hold haaands~"

Vaggie: (snorts) "Definitely fucking not. You're loopy from lack of sleep, babe, and that's the only reason you're saying that. But I trust her."

Charlie: "You do?"

Vaggie: "She stood up to heaven with you. That's good enough for me."

Charlie: "I want you to be the one standing with me, Vaggie."

Vaggie: "Does laying down with you count too?"

Charlie: "For now I'll take it."

Vaggie: "Very generous of you sweetie. Can you take a nap for me too?"

Charlie: "Maybe. You'll... get better soon now, right?"

Vaggie: "I will. "

Charlie: "... and if I drift off, just for a moment, you'll be awake when I wake up?"

Vaggie: "I promise."

-

Lute: "I plead innocence."

Emily: "Innocence? Lute, you admitted to it! You basically bragged about doing it!"

Lute: "There's no shame in doling out righteous punishment."

Emily: "How can you call this righteous!? She couldn't even defend herself! She didn't even know what was happening to her! And you- describing every scratch and dent on this halo, talking about how you dragged you sword's edge across it at first until it drew sparks, and then how you just started hacking at it- You had better PRAY when Charlie hears about this-"

Sera: "Hell will not be informed of the matter."

Emily: "Sera- they are the wronged party here! Of course we have to tell th-"

Sera: "No. We will not."

Lute: "Thank you ma'am."

Sera: "You will hold your tongue, exorcist. Did you strike a Seraphim?"

Lute: "... that, filth, the snake hid behind her halo-"

Emily: "As I told him to."

Sera: "So you saw the halo before you struck. And still did so."

Lute: "He was destroying the gates of heaven!"

Emily: "Also on my orders."

Lute: "See!? She's as bad as those SCUM down there are- just as much of a traitor as-"

Emily: "Thank you. I would rather be like her than-"

Sera: "Stop. Lute, you are banished from the inner spheres for the time being. I will summon you once a tribunal is convened to consider your actions."

Lute: "Ma'am."

Sera: "Emily... Go lie down for the rest of the day. I'll check in with you later."

Emily: "..."

Emily: "I knew you would do this."

Sera: (sigh) "Do what?"

Emily: "Part of me hoped you wouldn't, but I knew I couldn't risk the chance you wouldn't care... even when it was one of ours being hurt."

Lute: "THAT FLITH IS NOT ONE OF US!"

Emily: "Good. Maybe she's safer down there."

Lute: "Not if I having anything to say about it!"

Emily: "I can see that. I'm starting to think even angels aren't safe up in heaven."

Sera: "Go lie down, Emily, please."

Emily: "Fine. I have a headache anyway. Dented halo and all that."

Lute: "Why are you taking the-"

Emily: "Vaggie's halo?"

Lute: "It belongs to- it belonged to Adam! And as the new leader of the exorcists, I-"

Emily: "You'll touch it again over my dead body."

Sera: "Enough with the dramatics. Now I am getting a headache."

Emily: "Let's talk politics then. As the sole volunteer delegate to hell, I am the only one here who can return Vaggie's stolen halo to her, aren't I? Aren't I, Sera."

Sera: "... you may as well."

Lute: "Seraphim please- you can't show mercy to Adma's killers-"

Sera: "I am left cleaning up the mess Adam and you have caused yet again, Lute, and I am becoming tired of doing so. Go."

Lute: (glares) (leaves)

Sera: "...and Emily... I won't be able shield you from your own actions forever. I am only one of heaven's seraphim- Please, do not do anything to condemn yourself in the eyes of our fellows. I cannot out rule them all. And some of them have been listening to Lute..."

Emily: "Including you."

Sera: "That is my duty."

Emily: "Well, maybe protecting people from angels like you is mine."

Sera: "Emily-"

Emily: (flies off) (still carefully cradling vaggie's halo)

[luveline]

your spencer writing is so beautiful jadey! i was wondering if we could get some hurt comfort where reader really struggles after a case and he comforts her? <3

thank you ♡

Grief for other people can vary in strength. Ever present, occasionally numbing, tonight's case has left you neck deep in it, and the feeling needs to come out. Tears slink down your face in lazy rivers. You keep thinking you'll stop crying. Then you remember her hand, soft with newness and curled in death, and it starts again. 

It hurts to cry. You don't attempt to stop; you don't think about it, or the team, or the heat at your side, you just think about the girl's hand. It's not fair. It's too much. 

"It's okay," Spencer says. You know it's him without looking, his voice a familiar gentleness that reaches your ears despite the roaring-quiet nothing and your sniffles. 

You turn your face away from him to hide. 

He puts his hand on your thigh amicably, his tone encouraging as he continues, "If you don't calm down you'll throw up. What can I do?" 

You suck in a shaky breath, an attempt to regulate feelings too big for one body, "Sorry, it's– I'm fine. I'll be fine," you wobble. You can't finish the second fine, a cry crushing it down. 

Another hand touches you, fingers on your wrist and weaving down. He covers the back of your hand with his palm. It's not like Spencer, but it's not like you to cry like this. 

Spencer doesn't tell you to stop crying or try to shush you. He'd told you once that he tries not to stop people when they're talking, because he knows what it feels like to be shut up. I wish people… I wish people would have more patience, I think. Sometimes I can't get things out the way others want me to, and I get that things are time sensitive, but. I don't know. If I have time to listen, I'll listen. 

Listen to you cry, listen to your staggering breaths as you catch them. Patient, Spencer pulls your hand to his lap and draws letters into your wrist. You can't make out what he's writing, but you can feel the bumps and curves of Os and Ks. Maybe he's telling you it's okay, maybe he's writing out a recipe. Whatever it is, it calms you down. 

"Do you want some water?" he asks as you still. He sounds pitying, sure, but he understands. His thumb rubs down to the middle of your hand. 

"Yeah. Please." 

He passes you a plastic bottle of water with the seal already broken. You have the wherewithal, then, to see where you are. The conference room is dark, and your teammates have given you the chance to cry alone, though they'd sent Spencer in to keep you company, it seems. You can see Morgan waiting out by the door like your bodyguard, and you're sure you can hear Hotch shouting. Or, not shouting, he doesn't yell much, but his voice is loud and terse. He cannot be argued with. 

"I'm sorry you got the short straw." 

Spencer puts an arm behind your back. "Actually, I had to fight Emily to be the one who gets to sit with you. And I can't fight, so it was more like begging." 

He rubs your back. You forget that he's a man, sometimes, but you can feel the ridges of his arm, smell the woody scent of his deodorant as it stretches around you in a half hug. His awkwardness with women doesn't extend to his friends at any rate, and he hugs you with surety. 

"You're one of my favourite people. I'm sorry you didn't know that. Holding your hand when you cry isn't a short straw," he says. 

You lean into his shoulder. He murmurs a quiet, "Come here," as you do, his jaw pressed tight to your forehead. 

"I'm so sorry," you say. To him and to someone else. 

"It's okay. It's not your fault. You can't save everyone." He sounds near choking up with his last sentence. It's a grim and undeniable truth. No matter how hard any of you try, there will be impossible cases with twisting riddles for motivation and terror that fills every corner. There will be young girls who die, because there will always be someone waiting to hurt them. 

"I tried–" You bite your cheek until it screams at you to stop. 

"I know. There was nothing else we could do." 

You turn into him completely, wrapping your arms around his waist in a vice. Spencer doesn't baulk, circling your shoulders, his breath tickling your ear where you squish your face against the collar of his sweater. The fabric bites your skin, a wicked heat returning to line your lashes. 

Your back shakes under Spencer's hand.

"I know," he repeats, rubbing your back. "It's okay, Y/N, I promise. He can't hurt anyone else, ever again." 

It doesn't make the crime any better. It won't bring back the girl you lost. And it can't erase the agony of knowing you failed her. 

Spencer starts to talk. Simple facts, explaining grief. When we cry, it releases oxytocin. You feel better afterwards because of the chemical effects. 

When you eventually do calm down, head pounding and chest aching, Spencer helps you clean the tear stains from your cheeks with a pocket pack of tissues, and you know it isn't the oxytocin that made you feel better, just a really caring man. 

"Thank you for dealing with me. I know this wasn't even the worst thing we've seen, but I–" You clear your throat, determined not to cry anymore tears until you're back home. "I couldn't stop seeing her hand. I can't remember my hand being that small anymore." 

Spencer gives you a smile. It's far from happy, a flat line with the slightest curve at the corners. "Some things are hard to forget. And we shouldn't forget them. But we have to keep going so we can balance it out. Or at least that's what I think." 

You hug him quickly. "Thanks, Spence." 

His hand twitches against the small of your back. 

[owliellder]

Two's A Crowd

College Bully! Leon Kennedy x fem! Reader

MDNI 18+

(Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5)

Description: College is proving to be a lot harder than you imagined. You cannot fail this math class. So when you've tried everything else, a well-known student is recommended to you by your professor for tutoring lessons, not really leaving you with much of a choice but to work with him.

Warnings: Not proofread, No Use of Y/N, Dub-Con, Unprotected Sex, Bullying, Yelling, Cursing

Tags: College AU, Bully! Leon, Shy! Reader, both are in their early 20's, Leon is Rude AF in the beginning, Loss of Virginity, Oral Sex, Fingering, Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Mention of a Fight, Additional Tags to be Added

Author's Note: Ahh thank you for 1,000 followers!! I don't even know how that happened!! Anyways, I think it's a little anticlimactic? I just feel like since I am definitely not the kind to raise my voice, a shy reader wouldn't either. Besides, disappointment hurts more than anger, right?

Cross-posted onto AO3

Chapter 4:

Leon really did like you, honest. You were such a sweet girl, so innocent and clueless. Maybe it’s because he never gave his one night stands the time of day, or maybe it was just the sheer amount of time he had to spend with you to get this close, but now he knew he was a pretty terrible person for taking that bet

In the beginning he didn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt due to the words the frat spewed at him. He knew all the right questions to ask, all the right things to say, the sweetness of it all had you under a spell.  It was also such a menial thing to get, a single pair of panties… You probably wouldn’t even know it was missing!

But as time went on, it got harder and harder for Leon to stomach just what he was doing. You’d opened up so much to him about your home life, how stressed you were, how much pressure you were under. Doing this would absolutely ruin you so he did his best to convince himself that he was being the nice one by waiting to complete the bet until you had finished all your finals. All that time spent together had him second guessing, triple guessing, even quadruple guessing his decision to go through with this. The good grades were important to you, he didn’t want to draw your focus away from that.

It was a shame his friends couldn’t keep the damn thing to themselves even if their life depended on it. He’d explicitly told them that it’s done and there was nothing more to it, yet of course they just had to snicker and make snide little comments to each other the next day when they saw you in passing.

Leon wouldn’t admit out loud that you’d really grown on him over the months, so he could only brush his friends off whenever they’d tease him about getting angry whenever the topic arose. Chris was the worst out of all of them, being his best friend, it seemed like his mission was to dance on Leon’s nerves any chance he got.

“Delete that.” A scowl graced Leon’s features as he glared at Chris, who’d stepped back from the agitated man. Almost the entire frat had posed with the panties Leon stole from you, all of them making some form of exaggerated pose and face. What was only meant to be goofy on their part was making the man responsible furious.

“Relax, it’s just a picture. I thought you’d find it funny.” Chris chuckled, bringing his phone back in to look at it again himself. “You’re acting real sour for nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. You’re all acting like a bunch of fucking idiots and I’m sick of it. Now delete that damn picture before I smash your phone with a hammer.” The nonchalant attitude from Chris was driving Leon up the wall. He already knew he’d fucked up big time, and with the way everyone was acting would only get him into bigger trouble.

“Shut up, man.” Chris laughed, like this was all some big joke. Everything was a joke to him. “Acting like you’re gonna explode or something.” This man was an actual dumbass, never taking a moment to actually think about what consequences having photo evidence with the entirety of the frat’s members posing with something stolen would have.

Leon scoffed, holding his hands up before letting them fall dramatically to slap against the tops of his thighs. “No fucking way..” One hand came back up to cover his mouth, breathing out sharply through his nose. It was a sad attempt to keep himself from pouncing on the other man, seeing as not barely five seconds later he tackled Chris, hands scrambling to rip the phone from his hand.

Chris was a few inches taller than Leon, a bit stronger too, so the scuffle didn’t last long. Some punches thrown here, a few kicks there, and Leon had the wind knocked out of him at some point, thrown to the side and left to struggle to get up off the floor while Chris decided to make his way to a different part of the house, muttering under his breath all the while.

“God dammit-” Leon wheezed, on his hands and knees, one hand against his chest as he tried to catch his breath. Sure he reacted purely on instinct, but Chris could stand to be knocked down a few pegs in his opinion. The guy is an ass.

After finally collecting himself, Leon slowly spun around to rest his back against the foot of the couch, elbows resting on his knees. He coughed a couple times and let his eyes fall closed, eyebrows furrowed as he silently seethed. Chris was most definitely going to send that picture around since he obviously thinks it’s the funniest thing to ever grace this planet. You were going to see the picture. That thought alone had his head falling forward in defeat, breathing out a weak sigh and a few more coughs. 

If he had just followed his own shitty advice, he would’ve taken a second to think about it. Why didn’t he just tell you in the first place? Why didn’t he just go to the store and buy a random pair of panties? Why did he follow through on such a meaningless bet?

Now that Leon thinks about it, he was the dumbass in this scenario. A royal one.

He probably sat there for an hour with his eyes closed, mind racing a million miles a minute. Trying not to make another stupid decision, he decided the best course of action would be to tell you before you saw that picture. You should hear it from him and not a total stranger. It was the right thing to do. Right?

He let out a few more strangled coughs and wheezes as he stood up off the floor and threw his coat on, beginning the walk of shame to your building. It wouldn’t have taken that long, but the snow and sludge on the ground made it a bit more dangerous, he needed to tread carefully. In more ways than one.

The extended walk left him alone with his thoughts, seeing as he didn’t grab his own phone to bring with him. With every step his mind grew heavier, an involuntary grimace scrunching his face up as he mulled over what exactly he’d done. He was mentally beating himself up over how easy it would’ve been to avoid this situation if he’d just thought outside of himself for one singular minute.

What had he done? 

Leon stomped the excess snow off his boots once inside of the dorm building, hands hidden in the pockets of his jackets as he meandered over to the stairs to get up to the second floor where your dorm was. He took his sweet time, practicing what he wanted to say under his breath as he stared down at his feet while walking up the steps.

Your dorm was down the hall around the corner, allowing him the few extra seconds it would take to get there to get his heart under control. You would be mad, rightfully so, but would you forgive him? Is it selfish to hope that you would?

He stood in front of your door for a minute longer, hand hovering just in front of it, trying to bring  himself to knock. Licking his dry lips, he quickly hit the knuckle on his index finger against the door three times, his eyes downturned. As much as he wanted to be the bigger person, it scared him to no end. He’s never cared this much before, so why was he so worried about it now?

Leon’s eyes shot up at the sound of the door opening, immediately showing his confusion when it was Sky on the other side. They didn’t say a word, but they looked mad, or at least very irritated. “Hey, I really need to talk to-,” they cut him off by simply holding up the palm of their hand to him, taking in a deep breath. “We saw it.”

Those three words made his heart drop to his stomach, his eyes quickly darting to look through the opening in the door to see if he could see you. “Please, if you would just let me explain I can-”

“Don’t embarrass yourself. Just go.” Sky was just about to close the door before they quickly looked over their shoulder, shutting the door almost all the way. Leon could hear them whispering to you, and though he desperately wanted to listen in, he decided to take a step back from the door and wait patiently. It was the least he could do.

He looked side to side to make sure no one was walking through the hallways, not wanting anyone to eavesdrop on such a sensitive situation. The door reopened, only this time it was you standing in the doorway. You looked so sad, so disappointed.

Leon hesitated before opening his mouth, yet you cut him off before he could even get a word in. “I trusted you,” you rasped quietly, a shaky sigh passing your lips, “I-.. I trusted you… and this is how you treat me..?” His shoulders slumped as he listened to you. He didn’t think he could feel any worse about this, but here you were, reminding him just how much of an ass he’s been.

“All that time we spent together.. all those kind, encouraging words you told me.. were all a lie?” You sniffled, arms slinking around yourself tightly. Sky was standing out of his view rubbing your back, knowing you wanted, no, needed to confront him yourself.

“No- I-..” Leon stuttered, trying to find the best way to explain everything. And no matter how many times he formulated it in his head, the explanation would never justify his actions. Instead he settled on something that would probably mean and do nothing for you. It was worth saying, though. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so sorry,” his voice fell to a whisper as he repeated himself, eyes remaining on yours. What else could he say?

Silence fell between you as you only stared back at him with glassy eyes, your every breath shaky as you held back sobs. Crying in front of him would only give him more fuel, was your thought process. In your mind, he couldn’t even be trusted with your trash. 

By now, Sky had walked over and grabbed your suitcase, rolling it over next to you. You were leaving a day earlier than you said you would, Sky having offered to drive you back home since your hometown was only a couple hours away from where theirs was.

You didn’t give him the satisfaction of a response, instead taking the handle of your suitcase from your friend before silently walking out of the room, past Leon, and down around the corner. He only stood and watched you walk off with a deep frown, head turning back to look at Sky when he heard them lock the door behind themself. 

“You’re only sorry that you got caught.” They grumbled as they walked past him, giving him a quick yet harsh glare. They soon disappeared around the same corner you had, leaving him all alone in the now quiet hallway. 

You were the nicest, most considerate person he’s ever had the pleasure to know and he blew it. The worst part about it all was you didn’t even seem mad, just heartbroken. Disappointed in him.

You had put so much of your trust into him, even after he’d been so nasty towards you in the beginning, and what did he do with it? He basically spit on it, lit it on fire, and then flushed the remnants. He was only annoyed with you the first few times he had to help you study, the bickering the two of you shared easily becoming one of the things he liked about you.

Leon honestly liked you from the start, so determined to pass a class that you’d put up with what was basically harassment from him. When he told his frat buddies about you, they were quick to draw up that bet. Unfortunately, he’d known most of these guys since middle school, and you were just a girl he met on chance. His friends’ words blanketed his own morals, and because they saw you as a target, so did he, that subconscious need for peer approval leading him to make one of the worst decisions he’s ever made thus far.

If he was in your shoes, he’d raise hell, so your decision to leave was completely understandable. For some reason you’d let him off easy and he knew he didn’t deserve such light treatment. 

All he could do now was hope you’d come back next semester. He’d be fine just getting to see you in passing since you most likely wouldn’t want to be anywhere near him anymore, your friends would certainly keep him at a distance away from you. 

Would writing a message be okay? You need time before he approaches the topic with you. Should he leave you be? No, you deserve an apology, even if you don’t want it, nor accept it. 

Someone brushed by Leon, breaking his train of thought. He was still standing in the hallway in front of your dorm room. He needed to go and try to make this right, or at the very least rip everyone at the frat a new one. He wasn’t sure, maybe it was because he was angry at them and himself, but leaving the frat sounded like a pretty good way to start righting his wrongs. Not before he made sure that the picture was wiped from everyone’s phone and the panties he stole were kept far away from everyone there. 

Chris sent the picture to you, which means it was sent to a bunch of other people too. He’ll spend all winter break tracking down every last person it was sent to, tell professors what he’d done just so it didn’t spread any further. And if it meant he’d lose his scholarship, then so be it.

tags:

@kayotee4 @k-fallingstar @bobastayhigh @mi-zer-y @chasingkennedy @l30nva @espressonerd @jjouki @5tarx @bunnybreadloaves @whoisgami @cyanscribe @c4b3r1a @darichvep @mmmangel @kingtacocat @klee-iii @baby--vera @dakiniii @kenma-izhu @aliidarling @leonsmamacita @deadghxsty @nekoheist @dumbassmortal @cassiecasluciluce @iovewilliams @maeplayscello @deddiemunsonsblog @paranoid-but-android @mariesmain @tteokhwaa @bonnibuckets @eilonwykennedy @1dk-anym0r3 @papatyacikcik @animesnowstorm @lexi-zsy09 @mylifedoesntexist @ifeellikedying @yourmommylol04 @ravioli19 @dakiniii @papichulo120627

(few of your blogs won't work, i tried though 😭)

[lina-lovebug]

Nikolai Lantsov spicy headcannons

- Nikolai knows that he was born the second son, the bastard, and he had no chances of ever being King

- So he made his ventures elsewhere and proved himself in other ways, especially in the bedroom

- He knows how to get you riled up before bed, whispering in your ear, his hand on your thigh during a meeting and slowly trailing upwards

- and when you mumble to him that you're in public, he says "I can't help it, love, you're fun to mess with"

- this man eats pussy like it's a fucking competition

- and he's the only one competing. Against who? Himself

- his hands gripping your thighs as they shake, your head thrown back, your back ARCHING-

- even after you've orgasmed, his tongue is relentless to get you screaming his name all over again

- "your thighs are shaking so much, love," He says with a grin, keeling your legs apart as he presses soft kisses against your skin

- he doesn't enjoy quickies because he relishes being inside of you

- he wants to take his time with you, draw his hands over ever inch and memorize every little thing that makes you say his name and his name only

- "shit, just like that" "fuck, you're so wet" "you feel so fucking good"

- he loves whispering in your ear as he pounds into you and your nails along his back only encourage him

- afterwards, he always keeps a cloth and water bowl by the bed to clean you both up and kiss your forehead, lips, stomach, thighs

- especially the thighs cuz there's usually always bruises the next day

- and he cannot wait until the day is over so he can toss away his crown, pick you up, and lay you down so he can do it all over again

[senualothbrok]

Revelation

Gif by @dolceaspidenera

Summary: Gale shows Aurora she has nothing to hide. Sequel to Progress and Promise.

"Wreathed in morning light, sitting astride you, her every blemish and bulge is on display. She is exposed. Doubt disturbs her gaze.

You must banish it.

“I want to see you, Aurora.”

You take hold of her hand, swirling your tongue across the pads of her fingers. “All of you. Just like this.”"

AO3 link

Word count: 3.8k

Disclaimers: NSFW. 18+. Smut. Gale x female OC (Aurora). Aurora is in recovery from an eating disorder/body dysmorphia.

More disclaimers: Body worship. Hand and finger kink. Woman on top/cowgirl. Vaginal fingering.

-----

When she rustles beside you, your hand darts out by instinct. Buried in your bedsheets, you hear faint shouts from the docks outside, the morning call of seagulls circling overhead. Aurora has always been one to rise early, much to your chagrin. You prefer to cling to the comforts and luxuries of the night. You reach for her, groaning into your pillow.

“Early,” you manage, as your fingers dance across her hip. “Stay.”

She laughs, a huff of affection. As she retreats, you open a sleep-blurred eye. She is shuffling speedily into her slip, her auburn hair spilling over her shoulders. Strokes of golden light linger on the contours of her face. Even after all this time, your breath still catches at the sight of her, here and yours. The space she has left beside you is an ache, whirling with her scent of lavender and rain. The fragrance of home.

“Come back to bed, Aurora,” you rasp.

She smiles, amused, forbearing. You mourn the cascade of white silk over her curves. Never before have you hated a piece of flimsy, spiteful fabric as much as you do now. You could disintegrate it with a thought, were it not for Aurora’s wishes. You yearn for the constellations of freckles below her breasts and navel, trembling beneath your touch.

“I need to get to the market, Gale. I want to get you those pastries you like. And I need to get some paints and ink.”

You grizzle, shifting onto your back. After the discoveries of last night - a secret mole on the innermost curve of her thigh, a snug spot that made her body sing - you cannot think of anything less appealing than leaving this bedroom. Not for a thousand ancient tomes would you trade such reveries. Not even for signed first editions.

“All that can wait.” 

She is reaching for her robe, draped lazily on a chair beside your bed. Outside the paradise of your bedsheets, Aurora cannot bear to be naked. It saddens you, how difficult it still is for her, though your love burns in every caress of skin and tongue and soul. This goddess in all but name, the north star blazing in your blue-green sky. In your haze, it seems the greatest injustice to watch the covering of her perfect form, so recently bare and flushed against yours.

It will not do. No, you cannot bear it. You spring awake, your mind and body united in their purpose.  With a crackle and flicker of your fingers, her robe whizzes into your grip. You draw yourself up against the headboard.

Aurora can be playful. You discovered it soon after she moved into your home. It was a delight, to step behind the veil of solemn reservation, to see the twinkle in those appraising eyes. There was the joy of novelty in her, too. She had never had the chance for mischief, under the yoke of illness and her mother’s cruelty. Now, she relishes the opportunity to tease and tickle, to nip at an earlobe or ghost over a nipple. To rise to the challenge of desire. You are almost certain she will play your game.

Her lips part in surprise for an instant. Then she frowns, an impression of disapproval. “Gale.”

There is something about the intensity of her furrowed brow that makes you want to grin. It is almost theatrical. Supremely endearing. You resist the urge, mirroring her frown instead.

“Oh.” You smooth out her robe in your lap, deliberate and measured. “Did you want this?”

“Gale.” Her tone is stern, but her gaze is tender. She bites her lip, a telltale sign that sparks through your thoughts and steels your resolve. Heat simmers beneath your skin, the thrumming arousal of half-sleep that swells. “Come now.”

You arch an eyebrow. “You come now.” You tap your thigh briskly. “Come here.”

She narrows her eyes, silver flashing in a grey sea. For a while she waits as you tilt your head, your lips curled in appraisal and expectation. She pulls at her slip, her arms hovering over her belly, a habit of concealing beauty she believes to be ugliness. A habit you are bent on helping her to break, even if it takes a lifetime.

The standoff does not last long. You knew it would not. With a sigh, she climbs onto the bed, grasping for the robe which you snatch away from her once, twice, three times. You are deft and quick, and she is small, and it is easy. She glares at you, shadow daggers without an edge.

“Come closer,” you drawl. 

Her cheeks are dusted coral now. You laugh as she clambers onto your lap, her slip riding higher and higher up her thighs as she clutches for the prize that you suspend frustratingly beyond her reach. A shoulder strap falls, her lowered neckline dancing over the dark skin around her nipple. The trail of freckles between her collarbone and her cleavage is a torment, stirring your ever-present compulsion to follow where it leads. You linger on the peaks pressing through the silk that clings to her breasts, almost translucent as she jostles. There is a gathering within you, a tingling in your groin that is spreading into your core. Your growing hardness twitches against her as you wet your lips.

You feel her sharp breath, warm and sour-sweet, the tightening of her lean calves bracketing you. The gentle, subconscious roll of her hips as her eyelids flutter. You sense, once again, that she cannot resist you. Rare are the occasions when she tries. You only have to ask, and she will open to you, like the blooming bud of an unseen flower, kept in a vault to which only you have the key. She is yours, and always will be.

A jolt of desire, red and raw, pulses through you.

You fling her robe onto the floor. She does not move towards it. You seize your victory.  A gasp escapes her as you press down on the velvet soft cheeks of her ass, her arms falling around your neck like an anchor. As she buckles forward, her thick waves form a curtain around your faces, streaked with faded light. She is everything, and there is nothing else but her. 

Aurora is quiet. In the early days, your only guide to her arousal was the catching and quivering of her breath, the tensing of her flesh, the rippling of her features. Through pants and pauses, you learned the peaks and troughs of her pleasure, and in the discovery, found that she, too, was embarking on uncharted territory. Until you, Aurora’s only experience of intimacy was to mask herself with a Glamour, lying still and silent to perform a role she never asked to play. Before you, she had never known the topography of love and desire, the twining of mind, flesh and soul with another.

She had confessed, later, that you were the only one to have brought her to climax. She had never before felt that explosion of ecstasy - singular and earth-shattering, entirely alien. You remember the long, lilting moan that dripped from her, echoing the first taste of her release. And though you felt sorrow at her story, you swelled with pride. Yours is the only flesh to have joined the marvel of hers, naked and unglamoured, and brought her to bliss. If you could wear this as a badge of honour for the world to see, you would.

Yet at times there is still a hesitation in her. Not just a shyness, cemented by years of isolation, when her body was always a punishment and never a privilege. But a hint of shame. A deep-seated suspicion that you will turn away.

To have beheld Aurora in all her glory has transformed you. You could never turn away.

Your hungry mouth finds hers, open, wet and willing. You clutch and pull at the offensive fabric that stubbornly separates her skin from yours. Heinous, wretched thing. You could tear it off, rip it with your teeth. As her tongue glides against yours, she does not seem to notice your frenzy. Her delicate fingers weave into your hair, setting every fibre alight. She whimpers ever so softly as you lap and suck at the corner of her lip, her chin gleaming and moist with your spit, and all at once you are rock hard, possessed by the feel and smell and taste of her. You wrench and tug her slip upwards, drawing back slightly to whip it over her head.

Aurora pauses. Flushed and breathless, she looks down, and you know she is registering her position. She is not cloaked by your writhing limbs, or obscured beneath the bedsheets. Wreathed in morning light, sitting astride you, her every blemish and bulge is on display. She is exposed. Doubt disturbs her gaze.

You must banish it. 

“I want to see you, Aurora.” You take hold of her hand, swirling your tongue across the pads of her fingers. “All of you. Just like this.” 

She shivers. For emphasis, you press her hand firmly against your cock. It throbs, free from the constraints of clothing, seeking her like a beacon. Her touch is a surge of electricity, and you cannot stop the groan that spurts out of you. Her grey eyes are almost black, dilated with unmistakable longing.

“Please,” you whisper.

You would not ask if you thought she was unwilling. If you saw displeasure in her hesitation, and not a residual fear of rejection, an anticipation of disgust. And you must show her, again and again, that you could never respond to the miracle of her beauty with anything but the most all-consuming love. You will never stop showing her.

In the steepling of her brow, you sense a shift. The shell of trust and love peeking open. She arches backwards with the easy grace of a swan, and you are the lake beneath and around and within her. You peel her slip off with a slow and gentle reverence, your breathing stilted by awe. She closes her eyes, and you are entranced by the arc of her lifted arms, the web of her lashes, the starry patterns of her dappled skin. The sheen of desire adorning her mound. 

She is, as always, a revelation. 

“I love you.” Your voice is a prayer. “Every part of you.”

You do not let her hands fall to conceal the softness of her stomach, the stretchmarks around her hips and breasts. All the parts you cherish which she yearns to hide, dazzling stitches in the glorious tapestry of Aurora. Her eyes glimmer as you clasp her hands against the bristles of your beard, holding her fast. An eternal affirmation. A promise you will keep making until the end of your days.

You are safe. You are seen. You are loved.

Her eyes widen as you push your tangled bodies away from the headboard. Raised halfway on her knees, she steadies herself on your shoulders, as though balanced on a tightrope, with only you to keep her from falling. Every muscle within you clenches with a building ache as you bend upwards to clasp her close. You run your tongue from the nook behind her earlobe to the heave of her breast, swirling a circle around her nipple.

“I love this part,” you murmur, sucking at the hardened bud.

Her breath seizes, arousal thrusting against uncertainty. As she tilts forward, you lean back on an elbow to savour the gift of this moment - the fullness of Aurora bare and naked before you, the undeniable quiver of faith, hope and love that vibrates through her flawless form. You circle one arm around the small of her back, and the warmth of her hands gliding up your neck and into your hair sends a spasm through your gut. When your tongue catches the salt around her navel, sweeping over each mole and freckle on her midriff, she stiffens. But you trust.

“I love this part,” you repeat.

You plant wet, starving kisses on the dimples of her belly, dark corners which Aurora so fears to tread. She tenses with apprehension, hanging back slightly. You look up at her, open mouthed, your tongue still flickering from its feast before. You hold her gaze as your fingers snake over her hip bone, through her damp wiry down, to her molten core. Her folds are hot and slick, her clit smooth as a nectar-coated petal. She shudders, toppling back into you as you find it, sending a pulse from the tips of your toes through the deepest recesses of your balls. 

“And this part,” you groan into her skin.

You can smell the salt tang of her desire now, and it is intoxicating. You hum, half-drunk, as you lap at the curves of her waist, tracing swift whirls around her fire with your lithe and expert fingers. With them, you can summon the mightiest storm, reduce enemies to dust. You can raise up and tear down. But no spell could ever come close to this most masterful of skills, reserved for her alone.

She lets out a whine, short and needy - that precious signal, the spark which stokes the raging fires within you. You cannot hold it any longer. You grab her hand in your slick-soaked fingers and wrap it around your cock. You are fully erect, veins throbbing, a desperate bead leaking from your tip. In her slender fingers, you are a giant, growing stiffer by the second. You are invincible.

If she had any reservations about her effect on you, there can be surely no doubt now. In this moment, there is nothing you want more. You are nothing more than an all-consuming ache for her. She looks at you half-lidded, a gossamer string of saliva trickling from her parted, plump lips. 

“Yes,” she pleads.

You are panting as you guide her hand, aligning your length against the dew of her entrance. She lowers herself onto you so delicately that you feel like clay in a sculptor’s hands. Her walls are so smooth, so tight, against the head of your cock, and the pleasure is so piercing that your elbow buckles under you as you writhe. She falls forward, her arms trembling on either side of your head, her tongue a helpless flurry inside, outside, around your eager mouth. The mattress shivers beneath you. You see how her mind narrows to a pinpoint, drifting from the flaws she imagines and longs to hide. You feel the grinding of her hips, inviting you deeper inside her. Every sign of her unravelling snaps a frayed nerve inside you.

“Yes, my love,” you manage. “Take your pleasure.”

She withdraws a little, confusion flitting across her features. A fleeting awkwardness. You remember that this is not a position Aurora is accustomed to, nor is the control and rapture that comes from it. All at once, you are gripped by a singular determination. You will show her, or help her learn herself. You will help her reclaim what has been lost to her, all these long and lonely years, before her comet blazed into your world.

You lean upwards, your hands resuming their placement on her ass. She stares, wide-eyed, unsure. You send your thoughts out to her - trust me - and her lips ease into a faint, halting smile. You finally understand the purpose of all those meaningless dalliances of your youth, when you fumbled over and finessed the techniques of love. They were all for her. All for this.

You draw your knees up and shift your pelvis. You feel for the swollen pearl of her clit against the top of your shaft. You have memorised its contours well, so well you could seek it out blind. Aurora is your favourite topic of study, a masterpiece you will never stop unveiling. And between the sheets, this gem is her centre. When you find it, you angle yourself so every surge of your cock will grind against it. She sucks in a breath, and you smile at the confirmation.

“Does this feel good?” 

As you thrust up into her, you push her hips down to swallow your length. A blush flares on Aurora’s cheeks, deep as the pink of her folds. You grit your teeth through the compulsion that engorges you, the tremors of need through your muscles. On the third stroke, she bites her lip and rolls her eyes back as she takes your fullness inside her.

Gods, you think to yourself. You cannot hold on much longer. One moan, one whimper, one gasp as she arches back, and you could let go and fall off the edge. 

You remind yourself that you must not. You must hold on for her.

“Take your pleasure, Aurora,” you rasp.

She moves slowly, tentatively, chasing after the movement you have set. You cup her breasts as they sway, pinching gently at her nipples, thumbing at the freckles nestled within their smooth, silky undersides. Rapt and voracious, you watch for signs of growing tension seeking release. A wrinkle appears between her eyebrows, the mark of laboured concentration. The drag of your cock inside her is an ache that rubs you raw. But there is a faltering in her rhythm as she rises and falls, a frown that betrays her mounting anxiety.

You realise, with horror, that she has slipped into a performance, and she feels she is failing.

She stops. “I'm sorry.” She looks away. “I'm not very good at this. I'm not sure-”

You lurch upwards to catch her words with your mouth. You speak your reassurance through the tender dance of tongues, the shield of your arms around her. You are furious with yourself, incandescent, to have put herself in this position. To have made her feel that she could do anything to let you down. It is unconscionable.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, moving back. “I didn’t mean-”

She cuts you off with an embrace. The force of it winds you. Aurora is small, but she is not weak. Her resolution has a firmness that has always stilled you. She nuzzles into your hair and neck, sealing tiny kisses along your Adam's apple. She soaks you in, and you are buoyed by the strength of her love, pure and unwavering. 

“You have nothing to be sorry for.”

You cannot ignore the sincerity in her voice. Her love is larger than your anger, greater than any foolish mistake you could make. Before her altar, you lay down the burdens of blame. You press your lips to her forehead, her eyelids, her cheeks. You had wondered if it was all too much for her, if you should stop. But her fingers are ghosting over the base of your cock, and her mouth is almost greedy when she tilts your chin down to taste your moan.

“What feels good?” you ask, when you pull apart to breathe.

She struggles to answer. The question is a continual discovery, its waypoints not formed from words. But you know some of them already. You can remind her. 

“Does this feel good?”

You brush your lips across her fingers, widening your mouth as you take two, then three, into your wet warmth. You swirl your practised tongue into the space between them, sucking one in softly, the other more firmly. Her gaze darkens, the edge of her thumbnail bearing against your beard as it glistens with your spit.

You are wizards. It was not a surprise to discover your mutual love of fingers, those graceful channels of power and wonder. She had been surprised, at first, to find out all the secret spells they could cast. Her clear delight filled you with a fervent satisfaction. You know, as you press your fingers into her open mouth, that this will drive her wild. 

Her eyes wrench closed as her tongue glides down the length of your index finger, weaving and winding across, desperate for more. The shine of saliva on her chin mirrors the moisture that streams over your spasming cock as she licks and sucks with increasing hunger, whining as you plunge her digits deeper into your mouth. As you savour every inch and groove of her, your thoughts slow to a trickle. You are coming undone. 

She begins to rock, echoing the rhythm of your fingers. The flame of her desire burns over in tiny oscillations of her hips that shudder through your girth. Wider and stronger they grow, following the fierce current that takes hold of her, banishing all thought and doubt. You keen, her walls tightening and clenching as she flinches, the top of your shaft aching from the bulge of her clit and the friction that mounts as she rolls faster and faster into you. Her whimper rumbles through the pads of your fingers, and you hear the slick, heavy sounds of her arousal everywhere at once.

“Gale.” Her voice is torn with need and pleasure. “That feels so good.’

Her words are a spell. A door swings open inside you, breaking from its hinges. She senses it. Your hips snap of their own accord, thrusting to her quickening pace. All the love and lust within you gathers into the power between your legs, a roiling river ready to burst its banks. You gulp and suck, your teeth catching on her knuckles, your fingers pressing down on her flurrying tongue. She shakes as her wetness convulses around your surging cock, the twitching urgency of climax pulling her off the precipice. You gasp out a muffled cry, clinging to the last vestiges of the dam inside you as they splinter, one by one. She throws her head back and cries out your name.

You explode inside her. It is a shattering of every sensation that you have ever felt, an unleashing of yourself in bursts of blinding ecstasy. You spasm against her, a chaos of incoherent murmurs through the aftershocks of bliss. Your chest heaves, your vision fogs, your skin tingles against hers. And when your eyes meet again, a haze of awe and wonder cocoons you.

There are many things you want to say as you lie beside her. Her gaze is bright and gentle as sunlight on snow, her tousled hair a waterfall winding through your heart. You want to tell her that you love her with the fire of a thousand suns. That no night sky or grand illusion could ever hold a candle to her beauty. That she is your beginning and your end, and every instant with her is the most magical of revelations. But you do not. 

It is her moment. Her milestone. You sense the memories that ebb and flow within her, the tide of your love washing over her wounds. You listen to the lilt of her breathing, the swell of the sea, the drum of your heartbeat. Her robe and slip lie discarded on the floor as the morning wears on. You trace the footsteps of her freckles, while she maps out the drifting down on your skin. 

“I think I could do that again,” she says finally. Her smile is light with mischief. 

You grin as she melts into your arms.

-----

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[sitp-recs]

Drarry fics where Draco is absolutely whipped for Harry? Especially love when everyone seems to know it except for Harry. Thanks! :)

Hi there! It’s hard to see Draco let Harry do whatever he pleases even when he’s pining ahaha but I do have a few suggestions. Would highly recommend eidheann and lettered as authors who usually write fics with a hopelessly in love Draco:

The Courting by the Pureblood Who Only Has Five Milligrams of Romantic Intelligence and Thinks He’s Real Smooth by hiimcibee (T, 19k)

Draco could grab Potter and shove him into a stall before proceeding to suck his soul out of his dick, but secretly, deep down, in the part of Draco that he will never admit to anyone, he is (everyone pauses to shudder) a romantic. Potter is not someone Draco wants a one-off with. Potter is — Draco’s beloved!

And Back Again (Where You Belong) by eidheann (E, 16k)

He thought back on their previous handshakes, and smiled faintly at the fact they always seemed to mean so much more to him than they did to Potter.

Whoo Knew? by oceaxe (E, 18k)

Despite having had a crush on his Auror partner for years, Draco's been biding his time and waiting for the perfect opportunity to make his case. But when Harry subscribes to a new wizarding personals service, Draco gets a wake-up call.

Five Weddings and a Potions Accident by lauren3210 (E, 19k)

In which Harry thinks he’s a playboy, everyone else knows better, and Hermione will kill Seamus if Ron tries to collect on that bet.

Nothing But You On My Mind by Moonflower_Rose (M, 21k)

Potter has been in Australia on an internship for almost a year, and Draco cannot wait for him to get back home. They'll finally have a chance to talk about their feelings for each other. What could possibly go wrong? Loads, as it turns out.

The Green Vial by eidheann (E, 31k)

After months of seeing Harry Potter walk into his Apothecary disappointed and hopeless, Draco offers to carry the baby that Harry can't. Now he's just got to hide the fact that he's been half in love with Harry for years.

dirtynumbangelboy by magpie_fngrl (E, 39k)

After Harry’s unfortunate encounter with his ex, Draco Malfoy makes him a proposition. Draco wants his parents to stop matchmaking him and Harry wants to make his ex jealous. All they need to do is simply pretend they’re in love. Problem is… Draco already is.

Another Heart Whispers Back by slytherco (E, 53k)

At twenty-five, Harry Potter is still a virgin and sorely lacking in options to change that state anytime soon. To help him find a plus one for Ron and Hermione’s wedding, and maybe kill two birds with one stone, Harry’s friends set him up on a series of blind dates. The only problem is, there’s something not quite right with each of their candidates.

Harry Potter Gives a Shit by talithan (E, 58k)

“Where are you headed?” “No place special,” Draco fumbled, and flushed further. But then: “I can change that,” said Harry Potter.

Finely Drawn Lines by The_Sinking_Ship (E, 61k)

Draco doesn’t consider himself an artist (though the dozens of sketchbooks lining his shelves might suggest differently). Yet ever since Potter returned to Hogwarts, accepting a teaching position alongside Draco, his drawings have taken on a rather singular focus.

Soup-pocalypse and The Great Curry Cataclysm by SquadOfCats (E, 104k)

Eleven years after the war, Draco Malfoy leads a quiet, boring, and perfectly respectable life, thanks very much. Or, at least he does, until a sudden and very unexpected veela awakening causes him to throw soup all over Harry Potter in the middle of the Ministry cafeteria.

By the Grace by lettered (T, 140k)

Harry is an Auror instructor. Malfoy wants to be an Auror.

[vilhelios]

— SWIM WITH ME / I THINK I CAN SEE THE BEACH;

( i need you here with me / but we're out in the open. ) ; romantic headcanons for abysswalker!rafayel ♡ more under the cut!

CW: spoilers for rafayel's "sea of golden sand" myth + general abysswalker rafayel lore ; fluff ; angst ; hurt/comfort ; mentions of blood, injury, and self-harm (rafayel plucks off his scales) : might feel a little ooc because it is abysswalker and not main story rafayel ; quite the word dump (bc i rattle my cage for him)

— as the morning light of the desert creeps into the dim of a tent, two bodies lay tangled in the warmth of each other. RAFAYEL sleeps light and wakes early—hours before the sun peeks over the golden dunes—and although the habit irks him, it does offer him a wonderful sight as compensation: the sight of you, bathed in the soft, rose-gold light of morning, hair a mess, marks littering your skin from where the sheets pressed up against you.

overcome with a love that warms him like molten gold, the young god cannot help but litter your face in butterfly kisses. two to the apples of your cheeks, one on the tip of your nose, the corners of your lips, the middle of your temple. when you shift in your sleep, groan at his ministrations, rafayel can only chuckle, nuzzling his face into the crook of your neck. he thinks he can hear amund yell for his presence. he couldn't care less.

— RAFAYEL sees himself as the sword at the hilt of your belt, the dagger in your hands that you should use as you see fit, the steady hand guiding your own, drawing your bowstring. he is your ever faithful shadow, always at your side, a watchful gaze always on you. it is only natural for one to protect the keeper of their heart... which is why you and the medical kit from the nurse's tent have gotten well acquainted with each other.

"one of these days, you're going to listen to me." you sigh, gently peeling aside the torn leather of his garb. rafayel does not wince; you don't think you've ever seen him do so, not when he ripped that arrow from his shoulder, or when he stumbles back to your tent with a bloody gash on his chest, or when he's brandishing new bruises on his knuckles. the royal guards seem intent on tracking you down, crossing all of philos's 30,000 zetameters of sand to lock you up in your gilded cage again.

rafayel seems equally intent to ensure that doesn't happen, even if it means throwing himself into their line of fire.

"if i listen to you," the lemurian starts, violet gaze trained on the gentle workings of your fingers, "they'll take you from me again, back to the palace." his breath hitches the slightest—at the thought of you leaving him again, or at the too-harsh tug of the bandage, you're not sure.

— some nights, RAFAYEL is awoken by dreams—horrible, lifelike nightmares. it's sudden, a jolt that has him taking in rapid breaths, a tremor in his hands. "a nightmare", he tells you, when you stir awake and ask him what's wrong in a groggy voice that makes his heart ache, "just a nightmare, sweetheart. nothing to worry about." he waits until he hears your breathing slow once more, pressing kisses to your temple all the while, before slinking out of the tent and into the cold desert air. he'll return to your side before the sun rises, but for now, with still-stuttering breaths, he just needs some time to clear his head.

in his nightmares, a butterfly flaps its wings just the wrong way and rafayel is landed in a world where he is as cold-blooded as amund wished he was. he is back in the ruins of the isle of songs, your hand guiding his own (white-knuckled, dagger brandished) to the place where your heart thrums beneath. and unlike himself, rafayel takes the chance: takes back what is his, what was never yours to keep. the god of the sea was a foolish, lovesick man. he would not make the same mistake.

the dagger sinks into your flesh, the ease of it wrong. your blood flows onto his palms, gets into all the creases of his gloves, spills onto the barren earth and dyes the returning sea red. it is so, so warm against his skin, warms the fire in him that threatened to fizzle out. (he has always been a selfish man, he knows. it is only right that he is no better than bloodthristy philos.) the look dream-you gives him, before he awakes from this cruel world, sears itself into the back of his eyelids. he can see it still, when he looks at the dark of the night sky: reverent, loving. (how could you not, when he has freed you yet again?)

— often, you ask RAFAYEL to tell you tales of the ocean; more specifically, its creatures! what were those rays he spoke of, or the sharks, or those star-shaped things? do the lemurians actually eat them? your lover finds your boundless curiousity incredibly endearing, chuckling whenever your eyes seem to light up at the mention of some new deep-sea fish.

"this is a whale shark." rafayel says, and you watch as the scale in his hands transforms into a small purple apparition. it's as long as his pointer finger, heteroceral tail flicking as it swims in the flame currents, light purple spots patterning its black back. "they are gentle things, despite their size. they only ever eat plankton. i used to have one as a pet, long ago."

"how cute!" you laugh, waggling your finger in front of the shark and watching it follow. "did you have other pets?" and at that, he procures another silver scale, places it into your palms and covers it with his own. a barreleye manifests, and you grin when it's luminous purple eyes stare up at you.

(rafayel ignores the sting in his arm, pinpricks of blood soaking his garb from where he'd plucked some scales off. the wonder in your eyes is more than worth it.)

— helping the LEMURIANS with their daily chores within the camp comes like second nature to you. there is always so much to do: collect jars upon jars of water from the nearby oasis, prepare food, feed the camels, record the state of the camp's supplies... all the while, you feel RAFAYEL'S eyes on your form, your ever cautious vassal. with a little smile, you pretend you don't notice his lavender gaze, if only to spare him from the flushed ears.

it's surprisingly simple, making that lemurian cake: tapioca flour, camel's milk, a healthy dash of sugar, and citrus rind... when the sweet old woman you've spent the afternoon baking with feeds you a slice, you think you've simply ascended. back then, rafayel had fed you one that was cold and a little stale—probably as it was a part of his rations for long journeys. perhaps he'd like one that was far fresher, and baked with love?

... which is how rafayel found himself with a wicker basket full of cake shoved into his hands, and an awaiting you in front of him. "you've been training a while, haven't you?" you smile, taking one of the soft slices and bringing it up to his lips; "try it for me, please!"

and as obedient as ever, rafayel takes a bite, sweetness and citrus on his tongue. "it's good," he hums, kisses your fingertips, "tell me when you're making it next time, love. i'd love to help."

— the LEMURIANS, you remember, were masters of the arts: singing, painting, poetry... so it's no surprise, then, that they celebrate their craft almost every night: children crowd around a charming poet, hooked on every word of their newest bedtime story—his newest fable, that is (something about a fish and a bird, who wished to visit a bakery); the musicians have already begun their newest improvised song, a lively version of an old elegy, it seems; the bonfire in the centre burns high into the night sky like it was trying to reach the stars itself, and when the lemurians dance around it their shadows are long against the sands. you don't know how, but you're eventually dragged into the dance yourself. the glee is infectious, and you find yourself instinctively looking for your beloved.

RAFAYEL doesn't indulge in dancing often, as fun as it may be. he knows the steps, his feet still tapping to the rhythm of the tambourines even as he nonchalantly leans against the tent pole in the distance. it is second nature, now, but his eyes always find you, even in the crowd of people—you, laughing and twirling around without a care in the world. it makes his heart race, a smile creeping onto his own features. he watches you dance with his people, linking arms and being spun around; for a moment he wonders if he should join just to be your one and only dance partner.

... he doesn't notice when you've escaped his gaze, but before he knows it, you've snuck up on him and wrapped a shawl around his neck, dragging him towards the crowd; "dance with me, rafa!"

and how can he refuse a shared moment that transcends lifetimes—across shimmering oceans, and marble floor ballrooms, and golden sands? rafayel's stumbling forward into you until his arms take their rightful place around your form. his hands find the small of your back and yours hold onto his shoulders, shawl long abandoned on his neck. this is second nature, galaxies colliding, two souls becoming one.

— after all of the night's festivities are said and done—the musicians pack up their flutes, lyres, and tambourines; the children cover up their yawns with still-red palms from clapping to tonight's tunes; the remaining food is safely packed away for tomorrow—it's just you, RAFAYEL, and the dwindling embers of the fire he'd just stomped out. "i do believe even your highness is not exempt from curfew," he hums, takes your hand in his, and presses his lips to the knuckles.

and in the silence of your tent, coveted in the silver hues of moonlight, rafayel sits you down before him, your back leaning against his chest. his arms wrap around your frame, his chin resting on the crook of your neck. this is your ritual, on too-cold nights: rafayel lights a flickering flame in his palms, the black and violet embers cold as ever. you both stare into this dying fire—you both know what is to come.

sometimes, when the ugly concoction of guilt and sorrow prick at your very soul, your hand reaches up to entwine with his own, just as they did to guide his dagger to your heart. "i won't." rafayel says, and you know what he means. "i will never hurt you." he doesn't complete the sentence, the words dying on his tongue, but you know the rest (there is no other end to this story): i would rather die.

a/n : i need abysswalker carnally it's not even funny anymore 🤩 these were. not supposed to be this long (they are like little fics in themselves omg). but i love this rafa so much i think he deserves it. thank you for the love on the previous rafa content <3 it makes me so happy seeing people who also love this lil guy. the dancing with rafa hc is very much so inspired by "through heaven's eyes" from the prince of egypt! <3333

[anantaru]

MAYBE I SHOULD OR MAYBE I SHOULDN'T

— ꒰ synopsis ꒱ — after your first date with kaveh, there was something particular yet scary that the both of you simply couldn't ignore.

— ꒰ word count ꒱ — 800ish words

— ꒰ warnings ꒱ — fluff, very sweet, kissing, early relationship (first date), a lil awkward but he's got the spirit, gn! reader

there was a lump in kaveh's strained throat, of the size of a cherry pit and he hasn't been able to get rid of it all passing day— you cannot discern it on your own and he hoped that you wouldn't notice that he had been nervous this entire time.

at the end of the day, it was your first date together and the blonde had tried his ultimate hardest to show off all his exciting and confident traits.

nobody could save him from the established chain reactions moving inwardly, set in stone in his colorful mind. kaveh was a creative individual and he had a way with words, he bleeds on paper when he draws, pouring his soul onto the a blank canvas until it turns alive, he shows his feelings but can get desperately tongue tied when in front of someone he desired to impress.

agitated receptions where the fundamental causes he had suffered from, from nothing more than having you close beside him.

a date, again, what had seemed so pure and virtuous, was slowly shining to its very ends with the night emerging, the occasional barking of faraway dogs around sumeru city breaking the silence which was savaging the air between.

and even after he had decided to walk you home, you stay still in front of your door, as if, something essential was missing, more and more.

"there we are." the man truly was patient, and scared.

yet how was he so quiet about it? for the desire to kiss your lips.

how could he, keep his heart closed off in his chest? when all it wanted was to flee.

or his eyes, those scarlet eyes, surely kaveh wouldn't say it out loud, but his expression was telling. horrible discreet, that's a sufficient way of calling it.

but it's persistent in its silence, and kaveh didn't see that you had ached for the same, he thought about it but wouldn't want to cross any boundaries with you.

and then, under the boundless, glowing stars stretched in infinity, he sees you and imagines to have you embraced in his arms, a pure fantasy as such was like he held all the celestial bodies close to his heart.

you, on the other hand, have decided now, to maybe, not go in for that kiss you sought after, rather go inside and call it a night. but as you turn around to open the door, kaveh gently, yet swift, grabs your wrist into his palm, stalling your way home.

"wait." he gulps, knowing he had just witnessed his body move on its own, "wait." kaveh says it again, this time slower, more controlled and he holds your wrist and pulls you towards him.

like it was nothing, like it has to be that way, he did it as easily as holding down a butterfly.

you find comfort in his subtle trace and step forward, watching how his deep red eyes now held a perception of delight, "yes?"

some days, you felt everything at once while others, you feel nothing at all, but right this second, you catch yourself becoming addicted to the man who had made up his mind.

he coughs, "do you think—" maybe he has misjudged the situation, perhaps he can still walk away but how accomplish that without making an utter fool of himself.

"yes."

fighting for another mouthful of air, you repeat yourself, "yes." feeling almost lightheaded as the hand around your wrist loosened to slide and cup your warm cheek.

the dream flickered, becoming reality when kaveh moves closer to slowly place his lips on top of your own yet not before making sure of it again, remained eye contact and a subtle nod giving him permission to proceed; shivering, increased with a rapid heart rate but you take the chance to draw him near as well, trembling hands weaving into his soft hair.

his tongue clumsily pokes at your bottom lip before you part your mouth, feeling how he's readjusting his posture, just right so he could welcome you in his arms.

kaveh's face was burning at the thought of what was happening right now and the way you'd skillfully circle your tongue over his own while whining silently into a breathless moan.

was he insane? no, this is insane.

he should be figuring out on what to say next, when will the kiss end and how will he survive the somewhat plausible possibility of things becoming awkward right afterwards? right after you pull away.

still, despite the chaos in his mind, he accepts and tries to remember this for his entire life. you're pressed up against a muscular body that only got warmer as time passed by— while you, well, you never wanted it to end, and it's making your knees weak as your ears detect a slight pitch of a whine slither right past them ..

.. finding it hard to stay restraint, when this situation was exactly how it's meant to be.

©2023 anantaru do not share, copy, translate any of my work