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#I don’t usually post WIPs on here
pagandaddybutart · 6 months
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How we feelin chat??? (Can’t decide. Like em both)
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kkolg · 6 months
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oh we’re so back
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vitrificvitriol · 8 months
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(WIP) Wrecker Bonding Sessions
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kuzuhina1brainrot · 8 months
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OKAY FINE I’m tired of not serving y’all any food
have kuzuhina sneak peeks
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rainswept · 3 months
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amaranth
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sapphicmonsoon · 2 years
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So I may be working on a little something something… 👀
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eyenaku · 1 year
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web-pets · 7 months
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oooouuuuaaaafhghghgghh ( don’t rb pls )
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Wip :)c
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deus-ex-mona · 2 years
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when you try to write a parody of what is practically a parody, ig…
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bunibelles · 2 months
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Was going for like a flower fairy ballet theme 💐✨
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keflibunni · 4 months
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guess who 🤭
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remxedmoon · 2 months
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(what if they died because you tried to get a better ending?)
ok i’ve been in this fandom drawing silly little blorbos for long enough. time to put them through the wood chipper. this is the first proper painted scene i’ve done for isat surprisingly. and of course i had to draw my silly little critter 😊😊😊 my little thang 😊😊😊 please enjoy my very normal bonnie art i’m very proud of it 😊😊😊😊
(also!! gradient map + my sketches!!! i don’t usually post my wips here but i spent an hour on them smh)
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nereidprinc3ss · 28 days
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in which spencer disappears from fem!reader's life entirely for three months, right as it seems they were finally about to make things official. when he comes back they reunite, all the while knowing things can't be the same as they were.
18+ (smut, angst) warnings/tags: oh god so many. NOT canon compliant in the slightest, i make shit up, softdom!spence, nipple stuff prob, fingering, oral f receiving, piv sex, unprotected sex, pet names, tara mentioned, depression, mentions of trauma cause its the prison arc duh, passing mentions of alcohol, mentions of spencer losing weight, reader mistakenly thinks spencer tried to kill himself BUT ONLY FOR A SECOND, where is diana reid, nobody knows or cares, probably filming glee, optimistic ending a/n: haven't posted smut in forever but this wip required it and the angst was so angsty i just had to finish it. it was started in jan or feb and subsequently added to and changed months apart and then edited so the writing quality varies from section to section which i apologize for. originally based on good guy by julia jacklin... also the odyssey by homer? can't really explain that one you'll just have to see for yourself anyway byeeee ilysm!!! PLS tell me if you liked it! or if you hated it! but preferably if you liked it! MWAH! wc <12k
It’s been about three months since you last saw Spencer Reid.
About three months since you had an early Valentine’s Day celebration (even though you weren’t a couple) complete with champagne (even though he doesn’t usually drink) and slow dancing (even though you swore you’d be terrible and he spent the first ten minutes laughing at you as you stepped on his toes.)
About three months since you finally settled your head on his shoulder and let the warbling vinyl carry you somewhere distant as the two of you danced slow circles on the parquet floor for what felt like hours.
You’d have liked him to stay later that night. You’d have liked him to stay all night if you were being honest with yourself, but at 11:45 he gently pulled away and told you he had to go.
“Curfew?” you joked, the corner of your mouth lifting a little and you hoped you were hiding your disappointment well.
“Actually, I’m going down to Texas for a few days to speak with one of the leading doctors in experimental Alzheimer's and dementia treatment. I’m going to see if he can get my mom into a clinical trial. I leave early tomorrow morning.”
“Oh my god, that’s amazing, Spencer! What are you doing still here? You should be at home getting ready to go!”
A rosy blush stains his cheeks and he looks down at the ground, laughing that little self-deprecating laugh of his. It makes your heart dance to see him so happy, makes you want to wrap your arms around him and never let him go so that he knows how much you absolutely adore him—but you settle for an affectionate squeeze where your hands have come to rest on his biceps.
“I wanted to see you tonight because I won’t be here for Valentine’s Day... but I still really wanted to spend it with you,” he admits meekly.
If before your heart was dancing, it is now melting.
The dreaded ‘what are we’ talk has been lurking in the dark corners of every conversation you have with each other lately—at least, in your mind it has. What you have with Spencer is not easily defined, and near impossible to explain to your friends—you act like a couple, you go out on dates, he introduces you to his team like you’re his girlfriend without ever putting it into so many words—but this validation that your pseudo-relationship might be evolving is better than any flowers he could have gotten you (although the peonies he brought will look very nice on your bedside table.)
“Four whole days... what will I do without you?” you whisper, brushing a hand along his face, and your chest aches with the heavy truth of it—despite the fact that he often is gone for stretches about that length. They don’t ever start to feel shorter.
“Well, you can start by reading that copy of The Odyssey I annotated for you.”
“Depressing,” you admit. “And a little ominous, considering you’re about to embark on a hero’s journey.”
“I think you’ll like this one,” he smiles.
You chew on your bottom lip, looking up at him as you think.
“Give me something to look forward to,” you say, earnestly.
“I—well, honestly, I just really want to kiss you and I’ve wanted to for a long time now and, you know, if that’s something you’re maybe also interested in then we could, uh, figure out a time to—”
“You want to kiss me?”
“Wh—you couldn’t tell?” Spencer says, like he can’t believe it.
As if on reflex, you lunge up and capture his lips with your own. It obviously catches him by surprise, but when you lower from your tiptoes he follows you, pulling you in closer and holding your face in his hands.
It’s too natural, too right, to be exhilarating. There’s no rush of adrenaline—it's more like stepping into a hot bath or warming your freezing hands at a fire. Like pieces clicking into place. It’s a relief.
You breathe into it, letting more and more of yourself melt against him. He keeps coming back to you deeper and deeper like a rising tide, and you want more than anything to keep getting closer to him—but then he stops. He stays close enough for you to breathe his air, but dodges your kiss gently before supplanting it with a gentle one to the corner of your mouth.
“I really have to go,” he breathes, before moving away from your mouth to kiss your forehead and speak softly against your skin. “If I don’t leave now I’ll be here all night.”
Which is exactly what you want, and the implication does little to make you want him less. But you care about him too much to be so selfish.
At some point, his hands found their way into your hair, and you gently grab his wrists.
“Incentive for you to come home.”
Nearly three months since that night.
At first when he stopped answering texts, you’d assumed he just had too much going on down in Texas. Which you could understand—you knew how stressful this situation with his mother was.
Even when four days came and went without even an alert from him that he was back in town, you thought, okay, maybe he’s been called away on a case. It wouldn’t be the first time he’s disappeared because of his work. But even then, he’d at least text you enough information so that you would know he was alive. Now, radio silence.
So you tried not to be clingy. You tried to act like an adult, to focus on school and your life outside of Spencer, but when Tara Lewis cancelled your weekly meeting due to an “unforeseen work-related emergency”you called her immediately. Tara was something of a mentor, and it was she who had connected you and Spencer to begin with. You had met the other members of his team by that point, yes, but none who you knew as well as Tara.
When she had informed you that Spencer had been arrested in Mexico and was now facing prison time for murder, you laughed.
Laughed until you realized her end of the line was silent.
Realized it was not at all a joke.
In a catatonic state of tranquility, you asked her for more details. Beyond assuring you of his innocence, she couldn’t (or more likely, wouldn’t) provide them. Asked where he was now. Asked all the right things that made sense to ask.
Then you hung up and had a panic attack because Tara said something about 25 years and you saw Spencer evaporate from your future like an apparition.
Slowly, you felt him evaporating from your past, too. Those memories from the night he left, became visions of you swaying with a ghost. Holding nothing but light between your hands as you kissed the peony air of your apartment.
He doesn’t want to see you, she had said into the phone one night, her tinny voice cutting in and out. You’re not on his list of approved visitors.
“You asked him about me?” you had whispered, curled up on top of your made bed in the dark.
I tried. I’m sorry. I’ll call you when I know more.
All your days melded together like a muddied smear of paint. Suddenly you felt you had nothing to look forward to. No anchor, no goal. Yes, a PhD... and then what?
The only thing that punctuated one 24 hour period from the next was the time you spent crying because Spencer was in prison and he didn’t want to see you and by the looks of things you may never see him again. When you weren’t crying, you were thinking about how your life was a big cosmic joke. An unfortunate statistical anomaly that didn’t mean anything to anyone else, and that you couldn’t do anything about.
That copy of The Odyssey, which wasn’t even bound and instead was a thick stack of printer paper organized by a single black clip, became something of a manifesto for you—a tome that your poured over, reading and re-reading each note in the margins, each word beautiful and imbued with meaning because you knew Spencer had selected every single one specifically for you. You traced the letters reverently, because in a way this was the last thing he had said to you—about Lattimore’s faith to the original text, Merrill’s strict use of dactylic hexameter, the stylings of Wilson and Lombardo, and how he thought you would enjoy Hammond’s prose just as much as he did.
Day by day it was becoming more prophetic than fictional, and you allowed yourself to sink into madness. You would rather be a deluded zealot than be nothing at all.
He didn’t want to see you.
He might as well have been dead, for all that you were grieving him. And you started to hate him, because he wasn’t dead, but wouldn’t do you the kindness of proving it. Like a festering wound, scratched open day after day so as not to ever heal, you had to live knowing he was less than an hour away. So no, you weren’t exactly over it. You lived day by day, waiting for the occasional call from Tara to keep you updated on Spencer, but either she didn’t want to share much about how he was doing, or he had specifically barred her from doing so, because she was always sparse on the personal side of things. That thought actually lifted your spirits, because it meant he was at least acknowledging your existence in some tiny way.
But your routine was becoming more regular, and so you staid on top of your classes and your non-Reid related meetings with Tara once a week, and you learned to dip your toes into existential dread and the oily black pool of depression every night without ever fully submerging yourself. You learned hope, because it was pretty much all you had, and the BAU had confidence that they would get Spencer out one way or another so you did too.
So you didn’t really think about it when you missed a couple of calls from Tara some evening in May. You were preparing for finals and had way too much on your plate academically to think about anything else which was a welcome relief so you fully embraced it. I’ll call her back tomorrow, you think, as you clean up from dinner before going back to the living room where your textbooks and papers are completely covering every available surface. Maybe I have no idea what I’m going to do with my life after school, but I’ll be damned if I don’t even make it that far.
Hours later, well into the night, you’d all but forgotten about the calls. A knock at the door takes you a bit by surprise, and you frown as you stand again, tugging your Georgetown sweatshirt down over your shorts as you shuffle to the entrance of your apartment. You’re not expecting anyone, so you crack the door, peering around the edge of it.
And you couldn’t even consider trying to hide that shaky inhalation of dead air when you see Spencer standing on the other side.
Surely you’re hallucinating.
Surely this man in front of you who looks like he just got back from a day of work didn’t spend three months in prison pretending you didn’t exist.
He looks the same. Hair a bit longer, maybe—and gaunter even more than is normal for him. 
But it's him.
You can’t think about the apprehensive look on his face—you can’t think about the impossibility of him being here. You can’t think at all. Without your explicit permission, your body surges forward into his, and he’s real, and alive, and warm, and he is an anachronism in the hallway as he accepts everything you pour into the embrace, doesn’t flinch when you move your arms from around his waist to loop around his neck and back to his waist again with crushing force because you just can’t get him close enough.
“I’m sorry,” Spencer mutters into your hair, I’msorryI’msorryI’msorryI’msorry, he keeps saying, rubbing your back as you try to find a solid grip on the sleek material of his suit—try to gather all the pieces of him, already afraid he might fall apart and float away again.
“You—dis—disappeared,” you hiccup after an eternity, pulling away enough to look up at his pretty face. Tears blur your vision and darken the front of his jacket, bending the florescent lights so they form a kind of halo above his head.
Through the surreal haze you can see his throat bob.
“I know.”
He knows?
He knows?
You scoff.
“You have no fucking idea, Spencer. What the fuck is wrong with you? I—I'm—”
The hot anger is such a relief for a second, boiling the oceans of your despair into a wrathful, scorching fog, but as soon as you try to tell him how you feel, the barbed wire cuts into your throat again. You shove him away, skin burning where his hands had been.
“I’m sorry,” he croaks, hands hanging uselessly at his side. There’s that kicked puppy look about him—and it’s familiar, but now there’s more damage. You don’t know anything about his time in prison, you haven’t heard a damn thing, but beneath the glassy desperation in his eyes there is an unfathomable void that seems to be preventing him from being fully present—and you realize for the first time that he is different.
It chills you.
Before, you and Spencer shared everything. There wasn’t one part of his internal machinations that you didn’t understand, nothing you kept from each other. But as you study him now from a few feet away, you realize there might as well be a yawning chasm between the two of you.
He is so different.
Those eyes look deeper. No gears turning just behind the slashes of gold and brown anymore—only an endless dark corridor that goes places you will never go.
Gone is the perpetual boyish up-turn at the corner of his lips that always made him look slightly vacant in a way that you found incredibly amusing. Something you had been so fond of, even if you teased him.
He seems to have aged ten years—if not physically, then in demeanor. And now you feel like a little kid throwing a tantrum.
You cross your arms, suddenly unable to meet his eyes.
You’re embarrassed. And pissed. And relieved. Everything is worse and better. You want to fall back into his arms, but you have been jarred by the revelation that this might not be the same Spencer. It might not be the same relationship. You have no idea where you stand.
He says your name gently, with so much familiarity you’re briefly jerked into the past. It makes you wish you could look up to find him as he was three months ago. Wish this was just a bad dream. But that’s not fair to him.
“Sorry,” you mutter, studying the grey carpet fibers instead of looking at him.
“Don’t apologize,” Spencer says immediately, “you’re right. I don’t—” he clears his throat— “I’m being incredibly selfish. I shouldn’t have just shown up, I’ll just—I'll leave. I’m sorry.”
A silent moment passes.
You don’t look up as he turns and swiftly begins to move down the hall toward the stairway, leaving as quickly and silently as he had come, like a few bars of a song sighed in and away on a fleeting breeze.
Your bare feet are concretely planted, imagining him jogging down the steps and speed-walking away from your building—
And suddenly you’re sprinting after him, feeling like you might puke because Spencer was just here and you let him go again—and even though you’re still so mad and confused and hurt, the realization that he is leaving again makes the entire building spin and lurch.
“Wait!” You yell, almost wiping out as you run down the stairs and whip around corners in your slippery fucking socks. “Please, wait!”
The lobby is already empty as you spill out into it, and cold dread tightens around your neck like a fist as you shoulder your way through the double doors and right into Spencer.
“Please don’t leave again, you just—I'm sorry, I really need you to not go—” you blabber, lachrymose once more, gripping onto his forearms for dear life.
“I’m not going,” he breathes shakily. “I tried to leave because I think you were right and maybe I should and maybe it would be better for you but I can’t.”
“You can’t,” you agree, more sob than spoken word. He cups your jaw, then your cheeks, wiping tears and brushing away hair like he can’t figure out how to hold enough of you between his hands. The wild kaleidoscope of his eyes, bright and alive and real as he scans you desperately captures your attention enough to slow the tears to a trickle. He notices this and stares back, entranced.
A silent agreement is made, or maybe an inevitable fate is accepted—either way, something was set in motion three months ago and it matters to see it through. Spencer kisses you and you’re ready for it. You don’t need slow or tender. You need to feel how he feels. You need to know what he knows.
You sling your arms around his neck and he pulls you closer until you almost tip backward, chasing the bruising kiss even as you regain your footing. You want to drink him in and you do your best, breathing deeply as he kisses you deeper, backing you inside and toward the elevator.
“Is this okay?” he manages, only after blindly reaching for and mashing the up button on the wall panel.
Ideally it wouldn’t happen like this, but the world you live in obviously isn’t ideal and your personal situations as they coincide are far from ideal, so this is how it has to happen. But it’s hard to explain, and you’d rather not admit that this is so far from what you wanted for both of you and follow up with the fact that despite that you need him like you need water. So you don’t say a word as the metal doors slide open promptly. Instead you pull him in and let him press you to the chrome wall as he hits your floor button, and that very hand comes back to grab your ass like you didn’t think Spencer Reid capable of. It almost aches as his fingers dig into the flesh, but it’s a good ache because it means he’s real and he’s there.
You gasp as he hitches your leg up, arching into him. The shorts that you’re wearing leave very little to the imagination to begin with, but they become downright indecent like this.
Quickly the elevator stops and the doors hiss open. You don’t hesitate to pull Spencer by the hand down the hall. When you notice you left your door wide open, you don’t even care. Neither does he, apparently—once you’re inside he slams it shut, flipping the deadbolt while his eyes are glued to you like you’re already naked. Now Spencer is shameless in the way he drags his eyes over every curve, every place your clothes and hair are disheveled from his touch and eye-fucks you so obviously it makes your face warm. Three months ago Spencer would have at least been bashful about it when he met your eyes again, but this Spencer is far from apologetic as he pins you with his burning gaze once more. His hand stays stuck to the door like he’s holding himself back.
“Is this what you want?”
There’s an undercurrent of sorrow below the gravely arousal, like this isn’t what he wanted for the two of you either. But you’re both at the mercy of fate. This is all you have, and it might be all you can do for each other anymore. So you don’t need to say that, because he understands.
“Yeah. Yes, this is what I want.”
For just a second more he watches you from his place by the door, and there’s an unexpected softness to it. He looks at you the way he would have looked at you before. Like as long as he stays there he can entertain the idea of being that person again.
Need wins out quickly, though, and he surges forward. Immediately you’re caught in the riptide of him, helpless as he kisses you all the way to your bedroom.
He’s never been in here before. You find yourself glad it’s relatively clean—one of the pastimes you’d picked up in his absence was keeping everything tidy. It was something you could control.
A lamp glows at your bedside. You lean against the footboard of your bed, hands timidly behind your back and suddenly shy to have in him in your intimate space. Both of you set aside the heaving desperation long enough to catch your breaths, and for him to scan the room like he too is being forced to reconcile with the innate and unexpected intimacy of the moment. He cuts a harsh, dark gash in your sweetly decorated bedroom, radiating something wild and powerful and unsure of himself like a chained bull as he takes in the soft, pale bedding, the paintings and photos taped to the walls, the woven rug and the sheer drapery. His breathing slows as he studies it all—eyes eventually catching on something behind you. Looking is unnecessary. You’re sure he’s spotted the dried peonies in their ceramic vase. Or maybe the now worn stack of papers that is his Odyssey, marked up and soft around the edges from constant flipping-through.
Then Spencer looks at you, and that softness seeps in again. Along with something like... fear? Grief?
In some other universe your first time with Spencer is sweet and giggly and kind and he smiles at the decor in your room and looks around with wonder because it’s another way he gets to know you. It’s a different way to learn you from the inside.
You sense that he’s caught in between universes right now as well, painfully aware of what he would have given you that he can’t anymore.
He breathes your name like an apology, and foolishly you let a second go by in which you think he might offer you one. But he doesn’t. Not with his words, anyway. His eyes tell a different story.
“It’s fine,” you say unprompted on a whispered exhale, then a little louder as you push off the footboard, crossing the space until your hands are on his chest. You focus on his tie, not making eye contact as you rush to undo it. “It’s fine.”
He lets you do this for a few seconds before finally covering your trembling hands with his own. You still can’t meet his eyes.
“We don’t have to do—”
“No! No, please. I want to. I need—I need us to be okay.”
“Hey,” he murmurs, catching your chin and forcing you to look at him. “We are okay. Me and you are fine.”
It’s a pretty thought, but it’s not true. In fact, it’s a hideous and abject affront to the truth. Sure, maybe you’re fine in comparison to last week. Maybe anything feels fine compared to an eight by six cell. But it would be impossible for you and Spencer, for your relationship, whatever that relationship may be, to be fine. It’s especially impossible for him to make that claim, after all he did or rather didn’t do while he was gone. What you need is for him to stay anyway. What you need is to find a way to be with him, to exist with him, even when you are so clearly not fine.
“I just need you to stay,” you whisper, and he’s already nodding, wide-eyed like he’d do anything for you. You ignore all the bitter venom rising in your throat. You pretend this isn’t all happening after he cut you out of his life with a dirty switchblade. Instead you focus on his hands on yours, the familiar smell of him, which invites you to let go of each and every thought and worry. He must’ve showered before coming here, you realize. How long has he been out? What happened? 
“Okay. Okay, I can stay. What else can I do? How do I make it better?”
You sniffle and look back down.
“You can untie that for me.”
He hesitates, then nods some more, fingers working under yours to undo the tie around his neck.
“Okay.”
A moment goes by and after that final whispered word, the tension begins to build again. Spencer senses it in the way your fingertips linger on his chest and you step even closer, dragging them down to his belt. The metallic sound of it unbuckling, despite being your own doing, still manages to flip your stomach. How many times have you pictured this? When was the first time you realized you wanted it? You’re sure you haven’t stopped wanting it even once since then.
Spencer tosses the tie away and is shrugging off his jacket now, then before you see it coming he’s kissing you again, ducking down to do it. He feels taller this close up, and especially in your bedroom, where he just seems rather out of place. But you want him here. God, you want him here.
You break the kiss, forced to look down as you fumble with his belt.
“Sorry,” you gasp, embarrassed by your lack of dexterity. The light is barely sufficient to see what you’re doing, especially when he’s wearing black on black and your eyes are still bleary.
“You’re okay,” he assures you, and it’s so Spencer a fresh round of nerves electrifies the tips of your fingers. That thing is happening—the thing you’d hoped to avoid if you hadn’t lost momentum partway through, where you’re allowing your actual feelings for him to get in the way rather than getting swept up in the pathos of the moment and letting everything be easy and mindless. “Here, can I help you?”
But he doesn’t actually wait for an answer before he’s finishing off the belt for you, tugging it loose from his hips till it’s a leather coil in his hands. Your fingers brush the material and he lets you take it as if it were your prize. It’s heavier than you thought it’d be, and you just feel the weight of it in your hands for a moment, your dropped head brushing his chest.
You have a terrible feeling that if you do this now, it doesn’t mean everything will be alright. Because it can’t just go back to normal. Spencer has told you nothing of what must be an enormous trauma, and you haven’t spoken about it at all, but you sincerely doubt that after this he’s going to be ready to just jump into that committed relationship the two of you had been toying with for months before his absence. You’re almost... scared of him, now. Scared of where he’s been and what he’s endured—things you’re sure you couldn’t have taken. What that does to a person, you can’t imagine. He seems so solid and real in front of you now—but you know that’s not always enough. Maybe you’re just scared that somehow whatever he’s been through will have made him care for you less. That you were too far removed from the whole ordeal, and now you’ll never understand. If you could understand, maybe you could fix it for him. Maybe he’d stick around.
Still—even if you do end up pushing him further away in the long run—won't it have been worth it to have had him so completely, even just once?
You toss the belt to the ground, compressing all of these very complicated thoughts and feelings into a few seconds so short he can’t ask you any questions about them. Instead you find his top button, and just as you manage to undo it with relative ease he’s gently grabbing your wrists. You look up at him, immediately surrendering.
“If we’re going to do this I need you to relax a little bit.”
Gears grind in your chest. You feel need and anxiety comingling in every square inch of your body. It’s a sick buzz—a high on an empty stomach.
“I can’t,” you admit.
“Yeah, you can,” Spencer gently disagrees, slowly lowering your hands. When he’s sure you’re not going to try ripping his clothes off again, he releases, and his eyes lower to the zipper of your hoodie. His fingers follow, warm against the soft triangle of revealed skin at your chest as he grips the small piece of metal between barely shaking fingers. “You can.”
You match his eyeline, breathing shallowly and watching as he slowly drags the zipper down. You wonder if that sound has haunted his fantasies the way the sound of his belt has haunted yours. If he’s seen this hoodie on you and wondered what’s underneath, staring at you and daydreaming during movie night with you none the wiser.
Both of you have your eyes glued to the span of skin as the zipper parts. Spencer stalls with the zipper at your sternum, just below the band of your bra.
Right. No shirt.
You look up and find his eyes already on you, tinged with a curious kind of humor.
“I wasn’t expecting guests.”
The words come out shy. Spencer’s chuckle has its own nervous airy quality as he resumes tugging on your zipper, leaning down until your noses bump.
“You don’t have to explain yourself to me.”
Then he kisses you again, a little sweeter now. Sweet enough to give you butterflies and for them to flutter right out of your stomach and spill from your lips in a little whimper against his.
It comes as a surprise when he pushes the fabric from your shoulders without looking or asking. Not that you’d have said no—you're just underprepared for how assertive he is in this foreign context.
Left just in your flimsy shorts and your thin bra, you feel quite exposed—but Spencer’s hands are as demanding and hungry as his mouth. They skim up your sensitive sides and sweep lower, suggesting less proper placement over your ass and pulling at your bottoms until you gently put a stop to their wandering.
“Wait. We’re... we’re uneven.”
It’s a struggle to get any words out at all when he keeps chasing your lips, nipping at you like he physically can’t stand not kissing you, but they catch his attention and he laughs airily, pulling back to let his gaze pour over your less clothed form. It lingers and catches and lights you up everywhere it touches, drops of heat soaking into your skin and making you feel all fuzzy and needy.
“We are,” he acknowledges, tone low and colored with the faintest smile. “You’re a lot prettier without your clothes on than I am.”
“I don’t believe you.”
The challenge comes immediately and thoughtlessly. Spencer’s golden eyes flash up to yours. He’s breathing a little harder than usual.
“You want me to show you what I mean?”
If that means getting him naked, then yes, absolutely.
You nod, but rather than immediately stripping, he takes your hand and holds his own open next to it. A thick pink scar bisects some pretty significant palmistry lines, but you don’t mention that. Instead you swallow—your thoughts, your words, your nausea.
“That’s new.”
You wonder how you hadn’t noticed it earlier.
He nods.
“A lot is new.”
It sounds almost like he’s challenging you—there's a kind of tremulous force in his voice, despite the perpetual softness there, like he’s inviting you to say it’s ugly. And you realize he’s referring to more than just the glowing scar cutting an asteroid trail against the flesh of him palm. The scars he obtained in prison must form a constellation over his body.
“I don’t care. I wanna see you.”
Spencer swallows, cupping your face with the scarred hand once more. You can’t feel it against your cheek but you know it hasn’t gone away.
“I’m sure you think you do,” he permits, and that’s where the conversation ends for the moment—with his hand on your face and his lips back on yours. “For now why don’t you let me worry about you?”
Obediently, you breathe, “okay.”
This is, for whatever reason, amusing to him. The brief levity dies as quick as it comes like a snuffed-out brush fire as soon as he lets his hands fall back down to your hips.
“I want... I want to give you slow. But...��
But slow is for people who didn’t lose three months of their life. Slow is for people who don’t know what it’s like to be starving. Slow is not for the desperate.
You understand the feeling.
“I don’t need slow.”
You’ll let him use you up like quick-burning fuel if that’s what he needs. You’ll go as fast and as bright and as hot as he tells you.
“But you want slow,” he murmurs, a secret acknowledged into your own waiting mouth. You’d keep it there forever. You could be the object he hides his soul in. “I know you do. You deserve to get what you want.”
“I can go fast. I want whatever you can give me.”
Spencer’s shuddering exhale is like a drug, dizzying as you inhale it and your eyes flutter at the high, pressed head-to-head with him. For so long you’ve needed him so badly. It’s overwhelming to have him now, all over you. If only your walls could breathe him in the way you are, if this room could remember what it feels like to hold him the way you will, if any inanimate object could bear witness to how you’ll give yourself, any part of yourself, over to him, so willingly.
“I’m going to try.” Spencer’s voice is hoarse as he walks backward to the bed, taking you by the hips as he goes. “I want to do it right. I want to do this the way I... the way I imagined it, before...”
Now he’s sitting, and you’re standing between his legs as he finds the clasp of your bra and undoes it, his fingers a comforting pressure where they ghost down the slope of your back. Your heart is pounding at the confession, at the way his tongue darts over his bottom lip and his fingertips journey back up to your straps, looking up at you with haloed irises as if he’d find anything other than the most dangerous kind of smoldering devotion in your eyes—the kind cult-leaders seek and spend years nurturing, and he’d earned with a mere brush over your bare skin.
The fabric slides down your arms, and as it falls to the floor, you watch something like despair flash-flood his eyes. It is a deep, distinctly human grief. The ineffable kind where something is almost too beautiful; so perfect it offends the mortal senses because it should be permanent, but nothing is, and the clash of divine beauty with unstoppable time which oxidizes copper and covers marble with vine is almost as grotesque as metal rending delicate flesh. It is the grief that drove the first poet to write and the first parents to press their baby’s painted hands to the walls of a cave. It is the desire to do the impossible—to capture ephemeral perfection and make it eternal, and the knowledge that it is hopeless. You recognize it because you’ve felt it for him.
“I thought about you all the time,” he whispers, doesn’t bother calling you beautiful but you don’t mind because he’s telling you with his hands and his eyes and the waver of his voice. “When I was gone, I thought about you—”
You’re just as quiet, just as soft.
“Don’t, Spencer.”
He doesn’t get to tell you about when he was gone. Not now. Not after he acted like you didn’t exist.
“Okay.” He swallows the things he’d wanted to tell you like you choked on the things you needed to tell him for three months. “I’m sorry.”
But his hands—his hands are perfect over your waist and his lips are perfect where they kiss your ribs like they’re his homeland. You could forgive a thousand wrongs for each kiss he puts to your skin. Light from the full moon stretches over the room like a blessing from the cosmos, and you have every intention of making the most of that gift, how the silver gilds the planes of his face and highlights curls like they were carved, and invites you to search for something in each shadow.
Some of his kisses land over the sensitive skin of your breasts though you doubt he has much intention or that there is any sort of end-goal with the trail he blazes—in fact, you have to root your hand in his hair and pull gently back when he doesn’t seem to realize that he’s making you wait again. His eyes are glassy and cheeks slightly pinkened—you weren’t expecting this wave of fondness to knock you on your ass but here you are, falling all over again.
“You don’t have to go that slow.”
A slow smile splits the heart of his mouth at your bashful tone and he’s emboldened to bring his hands higher for a moment, thumbs brushing particularly delicate though not downright indecent spots. Nonetheless, your breath catches.
“Impatient girl,” he scolds, and though it’s lighthearted it still inspires heat to dance across your face. Oh, I think I’ve been plenty patient, you itch to say, but you bite it back because it’s only sad and true and unkind.
Still, he gives you the beginning of what you want, really only the tip of the enormous iceberg that is your desire for him, by slipping his thumbs into the waistband of your shorts and tugging them down. His hands slide up the fronts of your thighs, tracing the trim of your underwear, and you’d swear he’s not even breathing. The moment one of his hand loops behind your knee and pulls forward until it’s pressed to the mattress and you’re half-kneeling, half standing, desire begins to truly cloud your mind. Manhandling never seemed like Spencer’s style, but when paired with how softly he reveals your hip, pulling gently down on the fabric of your underwear just to admire you up close, you don’t mind it.
More kisses are littered over your stomach, and he takes you by surprise a second time with a quick maneuver landing you on your back and him on top of you.
“I wasn’t doing you justice with my imagination,” he murmurs against your mouth. “I couldn’t have known.”
“Couldn’t have known what?” you pant as he shamelessly digs his fingers into the plush of your ass. You almost hope it bruises.
“How pretty you would be,” he coos like he means it, and you dissolve, slipping through his fingers like sand in an hourglass. “You were holding out on me.”
It’s a tease, not at all serious, but you manage to hit him with a, “Was not, asshole,” and he chuckles, placating your little hurt with another sticky kiss, and you get another disorienting glimpse of some other timeline where you’re both a little less damaged. Where it’s a little easier.
But in this timeline, his touch becomes starving and ragged and urgent, and you accept the drag of his thumb up your thigh and between your legs, gasping when he runs his knuckles up the center of you. This touch is metal on screeching metal. It does not pretend to be anything more than what it is—brute, powerful, executed to elicit sensation. You get the sense that Spencer’s never touched anyone this honestly, and while you do envy the girls who got to have him gentler, you’ll take this as the compliment that it is. A kind of vulnerability that is nearing primal.
His lips, though—always his lips—are kind when they brush and land on your skin guided by some invisible map. A dip down your neck and chest and then a plunge, his tongue dragging over your hips, chasing the fabric of your underwear as he almost pulls it off and then reroutes, making room for himself between your legs and pushing lace aside to mark the hinge of your inner and upper-most thigh. Your chest heaves and you don’t dare move for fear he’ll stop leaving signs of himself on your body and you won’t be able to reassure yourself that it was real and he was here and it was not another dream.
Because something in you knows, if only consciously recognizing it for the first time now, that he will disappear again. That this may be your only chance.
The desire to make the ephemeral eternal. An impossibility.
He’s clearly losing himself to something, eyes shutting blissfully. You wonder when the last time he let his guard down even a  little was. You’re okay with being the thing he gets lost in, even if you’re not exactly okay with him—something you are becoming more acutely aware of as each touch makes a part of you want to cry. Maybe you still have some things in common. A strange pain that doesn’t quite feel like it belongs to you, for one thing.
You slam back into your body as his nose nudges against you through fabric, and his lips catch on cotton as he drags himself up, eventually settling a kiss against the little bow at the waist of your underwear. There he stays, eyes closed, mouth pressed to you.
“Is this okay?”
You swallow, buzzing. Is this really what he wants? After everything?
“You don’t have to...”
“But is it okay with you?”
Nothing more than an airy whisper, you reply, “Yes, if that’s what you want.”
Being emotional at this point seems wrong, but it’s difficult to ignore the fact that you have thought about this before and it’s finally happening but it’s not exactly as you’d imagined it. There is an indelible sadness to it, to the way he’s so hungry for you because he’s been deprived, to the desperation with which he touches you because he’s had everything taken from him.
For a moment, before he tugs your underwear down, he pauses, and you wonder if he’s freezing one moment in time, this moment, and grieving all the other ways it could’ve been, and accepting that this is the way it is going to be. You are.
These higher realms of thought abandon you as he finally pulls the last barrier down your legs and encourages you to spread them further. You don’t have time or energy to be embarrassed, not even by his staring, or the way his eyes dart up to yours and back down again, wide and shining, as if to say, have you seen yourself? Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?
All you feel is the lack of him on you, the pull to have him closer so strong it’s almost sickening because he could be gone at any second. Maybe he understands that because he doesn’t waste anymore time before he’s kissing the most sensitive part of you. The drag of his tongue has you loosing a shuddering cry.
His mouth wanders, making connections you wouldn’t have realized the value of until you feel them on your skin. Your hips buck as he traces you and you’re unable to stop yourself from tangling your hands in his hair. Speech fails you—hell, you can hardly breathe as you watch his with a furrowed brow and parted lips, only expelling air from your lungs in the form of little cries and gasps and failing to hold your hips down to the bed.
The tip of his tongue teases around your entrance and he catches your leg as your foot rises off the bed, slinging it over his shoulder and consuming you more fervently until you have no choice but to moan though you’ve never been one for theatrics. Nobody has done this for you like he’s doing it for you. Locks of hair fall in front of his face and you hold them back for him, shuddering as he shifts his weight and presses the tip of his finger to your cunt.
“Ah—please,” you manage, your first words since he started. Spencer groans against you and the sound is so wonderfully unexpected, so much better than in your dreams. You cant your hips up in further invitation, chirping as he takes it, pushing two fingers into you at once. Your eyes screw shut and you bite back a whine at the slight stretch, unconsciously writhing your hips either to get further away or take him deeper, you’re not sure.
Spencer pulls back, kissing your hips and thighs and pumping his fingers very slowly as you adjust.
“’M sorry,” you pant, “it’s been awhile, I...”
“Don’t apologize,” Spencer says like it’s simple, his own breath coming quicker. “How’re you feeling? Need me to stop?”
“No! No, it feels really good, I feel good.”
He holds your burning gaze, matching it with his own, and his hair is tousled and his cheeks are flushed as he continues to move his hand.
“Yeah?”
“...Yeah.”
This little show of obedience, of call and response, has him smiling before he occupies his mouth with something else once more. It’s a different smile than you’re used to from him, but you decide you don’t at all mind it.
Like that, with his tongue and fingers working tirelessly, your orgasm comes on quickly. The feeling is rare but not entirely foreign, and in that brief moment of utter disconnect between your brain and reality, of sheer white-hot pleasure, you don’t feel you’re missing out on anything at all. How could you be, when you are here and Spencer is here and for a moment all your neurons are lighting up and flashing neon? How could there be anything more to life than the searing feeling of him slowly withdrawing his fingers from you, than your hips between his hands like he’s cradling the world, and his lips, indiscriminate with where they kiss because every part of you is worthy of attention?
You’re reeling, and your legs are gelatinous as he so affectionately sucks the darkest mark yet onto your inner thigh like a parting gift, like he’s signing his trembling work. If you could clamp your legs shut around the almost painful aftershocks you would, but he’s climbing back up your body, so all you can do is wriggle against him and release delayed, stunted little moans. He stops to kiss your neck before he makes it to your mouth and drinks down all your sounds until you’re gentle and pliant for him like you haven’t been yet.
His voice is soft and sympathetic when he speaks. “Better?”
Wordlessly you nod, both comforted and unsettled by how well he knows you. What, exactly, has been made better, you’re not sure. Not trust. You don’t trust him anymore. Something cheaper, but temporarily effective. A sense of permanence, maybe, however fleeting it may be. You’ve completed something with him now, and he’s still here, still sweet.
He looks into your eyes, then, for a moment—and there is just enough light in the room for you to tell yourself that the shadows dancing there as he looks at you are love.
They morph as you watch into haunting, wild hunger. Pained even now.
He sits up abruptly and so do you, scooting back against your headboard and pulling your knees to your chest to protect your pounding heart as Spencer takes you in with darting eyes and quick breaths. His fingers find the collar of his shirt and he begins to unbutton.
“I need you to remember it’s all going to heal.”
He swallows, and you hardly have the wherewithal to study the way he unbuttons his shirt, a way he exists in the world that you had previously not been privy to. The words are too distracting.
“What?”
Sometimes he reminds you of a deer, with those big brown eyes that can’t help betraying anxiety. Moreso in those old pictures he’d shown you from his early days at the BAU—but it shines through occasionally even now. It’s reassuring to know that something inside of his has remained soft.
“Just...” his fingers don’t stop at their task, and you come to the disturbing realization that his knuckles are bruised. “Please don’t freak out, alright?”
Your mouth goes dry, eyes glued to the lengthening span of revealed skin.
And before he even has his shirt fully undone, something isn’t right.
He’s like a Pollack of bruises—starbursts and watercolor blots of discoloration blooming over his side and stomach.
You’re glad the light is off for two reasons: one, being that you don’t think you could handle the bruising in all its glory, and two, you hope the look of horror painted on your face is at least partially obscured from Spencer.
But you can’t. You simply don’t have the gas in the tank to freak out, as he’d said—at least not externally. Those bruises shouldn’t be there, but 96 days is a long time to be gone.
You drag your eyes back to his—nervous, deeply insecure and mistrustful. A deer. Just like those pictures of a 24 year old Spencer in an FBI jacket that was too big for him.
It’s enough to have you scooting on your knees across the mattress to him. Those big eyes stay glued to you as you draw near, falling as you carefully push open his shirt, cautious not to bump any tender spots as it falls to the bed. A flash of white gauze wrapped around his forearm that makes your stomach flip. How? You want to ask. Why?
He doesn’t seem to know what you’re going to do, and neither do you, until you’re grabbing his hands, bruised knuckles and all, and just... holding them for a minute.
“I lost weight,” he says quietly, as if that’s the most shocking thing about his current appearance, though it is noticeable.
“You’re still pretty.”
He smiles at this—a true Spencer Reid smile. Flattened lips, eyes tinged silver with sadness, voice quiet and anxious and wavering.
“I didn’t have a lot to spare.”
A moment goes by.
“I’m not going to ask you about them,” you promise, though you care so much and you want to know but you already understand that he won’t want to tell you.
Another moment. It doesn't surprise you to watch the shiny vulnerability in his eyes to freeze over completely. But he squeezes your hands once in thanks, and you know it’s still the same Spencer.
“Lie down.”
Oh. Right.
This.
You do as he says, taking a deep breath to try and exhale the concern twisting your stomach like a poison. Somehow your room feels so unfamiliar, so new with him in it. Even the whorls on your ceiling look different as you study them, trying to time the pattern of your breathing with the pattern of the paint and plaster and not let the sound of Spencer further undressing quicken your heartrate too much.
Soon he’s coaxing your legs apart again, reverently, and kneeling between them, studying every part of you—lingering not on the parts you’d expect. He traces the scar on your knee with his thumb, follows a line down your thigh to the freckle on your hip. The scrutiny is unnerving and warms you everywhere. Perhaps he senses the microscopic clench of your thighs as you imagine pushing them together, if he weren’t in the way.
“You alright?” He asks, still stroking your hip. Tender again. It’s so hard to keep up.
“I...”
Suddenly your heart beat is a deafening echo in your own ears. The tide of your breathing is too powerful, too in and out and whooshing, leaving you always too empty or too full but never comfortable.
Maybe he’s changed, and he’s harder to know now, but he is the same Spencer. He is the Spencer you’d fallen in love with. The hard part is knowing that now you may never get a chance to tell him that. You don’t know if he’d be able to hear it.
There are things you can’t have with him anymore. Not now, at least. Maybe not ever. But you can have this. It will be different, but you’d rather him be different and here than the same and only in your memory.
You swallow.
“I’m good.”
Tangling your hand in his hair once more, you pull him down into a kiss. It’s hesitant, at first—maybe he can taste your thoughts, where they’d been balancing just on the tip of your tongue. But the uncertainty fades and he kisses you deeper, harder, in a way that is hard to keep up with. You like the messy overwhelm of his lips, teeth, tongue. That’s the only way he knows how to want you.
When you go to wrap your leg around his waist he catches it, running his hands over the soft plush of your thigh. The hard line of him presses against you like memory foam and you gasp and he breathes it in deeply as your brain short-circuits, as you realize this is really going to happen, that you’re going to have him like you’ve never had him before and in ways you’ve only imagined and immediately felt ashamed for.
“Spencer,” you whisper. He ducks to leave open-mouthed kisses along your neck and your eyes flutter shut, craning your neck but not losing sight of your objective as you reach down blindly. When you find what you’re looking for he freezes, groans against your neck at the same time as you breathe the tiniest whimper. Just in your hand he feels impossible, hot and imposing and hard. Your heart palpitates.
Without thinking, you angle your hips up and encourage him closer, until the tip of him is smearing through your folds, and you both go utterly silent like the breath had been stolen right from your lungs. The moment crystallizes, time around you hardening like preserved amber to keep you frozen there forever.
And then he rolls his hips, catching the underside of his cock on the crux of you, and then he does it again, and you choke out a moan and so does he, and it’s beyond perfect—it's nirvana, more than you could ever have conceived of, with his weight pressing you into the mattress, arms caging you in, his heavy breaths hot against your neck and vice versa as you twine together like serpents on a rod, your foot floating in the air as you widen your legs to make more room for him.
And you’re not even fucking yet.
“Oh my god,” you whine, just for him, barely audible under the heavy cloak of night, the thickened air in your bedroom and the sound of panting and fabric shifting. It’s like your heart is trying to reach through your chest to his own where they’re pressed together—that is how hard it’s beating.
Spencer only breathes a long, low curse and shifts so he can grasp himself. Your fingers drift down the shaft of him as he slots himself at your entrance, notching half an inch in and you hold your breath, and you brace yourself—and then he’s kissing you again, but gentler this time. Reassuring. You soften, you can’t not, releasing all your air in a soft gust through your nose, and then he’s pushing in.
Your lips part at the stretch as it fuzzes your mind, but he stays right there, nose pressed to your nose, lips ghosting over your own. He’s not going anywhere, you think, and you’re glad for it, when it burns ever so slightly, and the tiniest whine escapes your open mouth.
“Shh,” he soothes immediately, low and soft, only fractionally louder than you had been. “You’re okay.”
Spencer. Your Spencer.
For a moment, you’re living in that alternate universe. The kinder one. The flash of pain you feel then has nothing to do with the way he’s opening you up.
This is the closest you have ever been, and in some strange way, the furthest apart.
Together, fingers brushing, you guide him until he settles at not quite your deepest point. You can feel that he’s not giving you everything yet, but you’re okay with that, as you adjust to the full feeling. Spencer again senses your desire to close your legs against the deep intrusion, and gives you the best he can by encouraging you to wrap your legs around him.
“Good girl,” he whispers tenderly, nudging at your jaw with his nose and dragging kisses along the ridge of it. Your stomach flips at the moniker and your brain turns to warm sludge as your eyes flutter shut. It makes you feel all light-headed and you flutter around him. Spencer chuckles into the junction of your neck and shoulder and the vibrations send a chill down your arching spine. “I thought you might like that one.”
“Mhm.”
“Mhm. How are you? You okay?”
“’M ready.”
“You’re ready?” His tone is dripping sarcasm and faux-disbelief as he pulls back the slightest bit only to push right back in deeper, this time. Your toes curl, one thigh sliding higher up his waist as you cling to him.
“Fuck,” you manage, a pitiful, high pitched curse tossed to the wind. He echoes the sentiment.
“Oh, my god,” he groans, continuing with that slow pace, “you feel so good, angel.”
You grapple at his back, searching for purchase as your brow knits. “Faster.”
This inspires another breathy chuckle, but he obliges, and you cry out softly. It’s almost unreal, your head buried against his neck, drunk on his scent and the drag of him like a shock felt in the far reaches of your body, again and again.
There’s nothing you can say that will accurately demonstrate what you’re feeling, so you elect not to speak, to remain silent and try to get a grip on this cacophony of sensation and emotion. But it’s too much to be alone with. You feel you have to get it out, to seek understanding. You can’t do it alone.
“Spencer.”
“Hm?”
“I don’t know...” the sentence trails off into a gentle keen. He moves to kiss you, speaking against your lips.
“You don’t know?”
Shyly you shake your head. Spencer sighs wistfully.
“Do you know how much I missed you?”
It’s like he can sense your need for comfort. For something grounding.
And while this topic was off-limits earlier—you're softer now. The stone walls that form your boundaries have been chipped away and lowered.
Spencer continues unprompted.
“I thought about you every day. Every night while I was falling asleep. You were always on my mind, angel girl.”
You whine. Whether it’s pleasure or distress is anyone’s guess—including your own.
“You were gone so long,” you whisper, eyes shut.
At this, Spencer slows again, and the tension that was building settles back to a simmer.
“I know. I wish I could—I wish I could change that. But I’m here, okay? I’m right here with you.”
Then he makes sure you feel every last inch, and it takes your breath away. If your thoughts were any more coherent, they’d be something along the lines of: but for how long? How long until you leave again?
“You’re here.”
You say it like a mantra, once out loud, and then again and again in your head, timed with every clash of your hips. With each repetition he becomes more real. Every little ache, every tingling, head-emptying brush against that most sensitive spot inside proves to you that he could not be any closer. This can’t be faked. It can’t be another dream to wake up in tears from.
“You’re here,” you gasp as it hits you, as it truly sinks in.
“I’m here,” he breathes.
There’s so much you want to say—three months of words you need him to hear, of things you need to talk to him about, things you need to yell at him for and things you can only say crying in his arms and things you can only say laughing or whispering or drunk or half-asleep—and in this moment you can’t manage any of it. Every word condenses into one drop of salt water, drifting away from your eye and down your cheek. Spencer doesn’t tell you to stop crying. He only kisses the tear away, and murmurs I’m here I’m here I’m here over and over again against your skin until he’s not even speaking it out loud anymore. But you feel it. With every brush of his lips, every breath, every movement, you feel it.
Soon he’s adjusting his angle, gradually picking up the pace but retaining that unforgiving depth, and your nails bite into the skin of his back as your jaw drops. Spencer hisses, pressing impossibly closer.
“I’m sorry!” you squeak.
“Do it again.”
“Wh—what?”
“Please,” he begs, low and hot against your jaw, just beneath your ear. “Do it again, honey.”
Honey.
You’d do anything for him if it meant he calls you that again.
When he shifts his weight to one arm and reaches down between your bodies to play with your aching clit in exactly the right way, you don’t really have a choice. You arch and moan wantonly enough to feel embarrassed as your nails scratch down his back. At the same time he’s making noises of his own, and you almost feel guilty for marking him up like this only you think he likes it. The most perfect and troubling tension is building in your core, so taut you almost fear the inevitable rebound when it snaps. But you’re driven to be exactly what Spencer needs right now, and to let him try and be what you need. Even if it scares you. Even if you’re not sure how.
Spencer groans, head tucked to the bend of your shoulder. “I’m not gonna last.”
Any response you might’ve been about to muster is annihilated by a sudden, deep bolt of pleasure.
“’M gonna cum,” you mewl like it’s a secret.
“Are you?” he asks, coming up breathless. If your eyes were open, you’re sure you’d see him above you.
“Mhm.”
“Look at me. Look at me.”
It is unmistakably a command—one you fight to follow.
You cry out as you meet the intensity of his gaze, those shadowy corridors suddenly ablaze and alive. They are not unending, like you’d thought. They are a door thrown open to let the light in, or maybe to let the fire out. They’re open in this moment for you.
No more words are spoken after that—you cum hard, gasping as you fall and spin. Spencer follows very shortly after, like he was holding it together just for you, and your eyes are still locked though everything is a bit bleary.
“Fuck,” you whine as he continues to fuck you for as long as he can, despite your writhing hips, but you’re entranced by him, unable to look away now that you’re hooked. Until he slows to a halt, glances down at your mouth, and you just have time to pray that he’ll kiss you before he does. You whimper against his lips—a plea for understanding. A plea for him to stay, even though this is over. He kisses back so soft and sweet it’s like he can read your mind. Echoes of I’m here I’m here I’m here still buzz across your skin. His eyelashes tickle your cheek. Your heart stops beating quite so quickly, melting and warm like the rest of your body.
Soon the kissing ceases and you’re just breathing together, trapped and faced with the knowledge that it must end just the same as you had waited for it to start.
Eventually the air between you becomes mostly carbon dioxide and you let your head fall to the side, dizzy and giggling breathlessly as you nearly avoid asphyxiation. Spencer laughs too, letting his head fall to your shoulder once more, and you finally let your eyes flutter closed. To do something as simple as laugh with him again is its own small euphoria. It’s unexpected, and a soft landing once all that tension breaks underneath your combined weight.
It can’t last forever, you know that well. But the slow fade of it makes the next parts a little easier.
Spencer presses a kiss to your neck. “Is your bathroom through that door?”
You hum a confirmation and are only slightly disheartened when he pulls out and rolls off of you. You’re further disturbed when you see there’s gauze around his thigh, matching what’s around his arm, and you wonder how you missed that. Spencer scoops up his clothing and disappears into the adjoining restroom, assuring you he’ll be right back and leaving you alone with your thoughts and the whorls on the ceiling which have seemingly shifted into entirely new constellations.
He leaves the door cracked which is oddly reassuring—the sliver of warm light and the sound of the sink running. Only a few moments pass before he’s returning clad in boxers once more to sit on the edge of the bed, pushing away the sheet you’d just pulled over your chest and pulling one of your legs over his lap. Your face warms as he brings a washcloth between your thighs. As soon as he glances up at you and catches your eye you’re looking back to the ceiling.
“I should’ve asked first,” he says quietly as he cleans up the mess he’d made of you.
You speak just as softly, like you’re both afraid of disturbing some peace, of waking some sleeping giant. “It’s okay. I would’ve told you if I didn’t want it.”
His reticence, his unreadable face, make you nervous.
When he’s done, he rises to toss the dirtied cloth in the laundry bin, and with his back to you (as scratched up as it might be) you feel braver.
“Are you gonna, like... hate me now?”
It was a mistake. That’s clear by the way he turns around, brow knit deeply and grimacing slightly like even the suggestion offends him.
“Am I going to hate you?”
Again you pull the sheet up, and again you look away, studying the pattern of moonlight stretching out over the floor and scooting to make room for him when he steps in it.
“Not hate, I just...” the bed dips beside you and you are indescribably glad he’s not immediately running out the door. “I’m not dumb. I know what this was.”
He pulls you into him and you settle against his chest. It feels good. “I never thought you were dumb.”
This is your first real conversation since he’s gotten back, you realize. And how quickly you’re falling into familiar patterns, familiar syntactical beats. You know when to speak. You know when to bite your tongue and keep him talking.
The silence goes on longer than you’re used to. Maybe he got good at not speaking while he was away.
Eventually your eyes wander, falling to the white strip over his thigh where it is parallel to yours on the bed, only over the sheets.
“What happened?”
You said you wouldn’t ask, but that was then, and you’re upset again. You almost want to hurt him. To piss him off. You don’t know.
But it doesn’t work.
“Do you really want to know?” There’s a note of something heavy in his voice, and you look up at him. It’s a privilege to have him this close—his beauty is a constant surprise that you’d become unaccustomed to over the months. You say nothing, and he takes that as the yes that it is. “I... I did it to myself.”
He may as well have reached down your throat and grabbed for fucking heart for all its clenching. Tears well almost immediately, though they’ve been waiting in the wings all night.
“What? Did you—were you trying to—”
His eyes widen.
“No! No, honey, no.” You wilt as he gathers you closer, a deeply confused frown still contorting your features, too heartbroken even to cling to him, or to appreciate the ease with which honey slips past his lips again. “No. I was—it's complicated. I didn’t—I wasn’t trying to hurt myself, but I had to—I had to do it before someone else did something worse.”
The bruises covering his abdomen.
You sniffle and pull back enough to look up at him tearfully. “Why would they want to hurt you?”
Mist fills his eyes even as he’s looking down at you, a layer of separation, as if he’s two places at once. Even as he goes to brush your hair behind your ear, to stroke your cheek.
“I’m... not... the same, as I was.” It’s not an answer to your question—but it’s the beginning of the answer to a question you’d been too afraid to put into words.
“Don’t say that,” you beg, because you know where this is going. He keeps smoothing your hair like it’ll make this easier.
“But it’s true,” Spencer says gently, the slightest waver betraying his own emotion.
“You’re just going to leave again.”
And you’re losing to the tears.
“I’m right here. I’m not going anywhere.”
“But you will,” you insist, like a child crying to a parent come to comfort them after a bad dream.
“Not right now. Right now I’m here.”
I’ll stay until you fall asleep again.
For now, maybe that has to be enough. 
You cry on his shoulder. He kisses your head and doesn’t tell you to stop. 
Eventually, you sniff and wipe your eyes. 
“We were so close. Before you… we were almost there.”
You’re sure of it. You’re sure that if he hadn’t gone when he did you would’ve been a real couple. You would’ve told him you loved him. 
“We’ll get there again,” he promises, rubbing your arm. “I just… I need a little bit of time. I think you do too. But we’re going to get there again.”
Maybe it will never be like it was. 
But as so often is the case—Spencer is right. Difference doesn’t mean it won’t ever be good again. 
You have to believe that, just as you had to believe you’d see him again. 
You look to The Odyssey on your bedside table. 
The sun has been obliterated from the sky, and an unlucky darkness invades the world. 
But the sun has a habit of rising, time and time again, after the longest nights, after the darkest storms. 
You feel the beginnings of its rise, see the golden tips of it lighting the room as he holds you. Even now. 
2K notes · View notes
staff · 4 months
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We Asked an Expert...in Herpetology!
People on Tumblr come from all walks of life and all areas of expertise to grace our dashboards with paragraphs and photographs of the things they want to share with the world. Whether it's an artist uploading their speed art, a fanfic writer posting their WIPs, a language expert expounding on the origin of a specific word, or a historian ready to lay down the secrets of Ea-nasir, the hallways of Tumblr are filled with specialists sharing their knowledge with the world. We Asked an Expert is a deep dive into those expert brains on tumblr dot com. Today, we’re talking to Dr. Mark D. Scherz (@markscherz), an expert in Herpetology. Read on for some ribbeting frog facts, including what kind of frog the viral frog bread may be based on.
Reptiles v Amphibians. You have to choose one.
In a battle for my heart, I think amphibians beat out the reptiles. There is just something incredibly good about beholding a nice plump frog.
In a battle to the death, I have to give it to the reptiles—the number of reptiles that eat amphibians far, far outstrips the number of amphibians that eat reptiles.
In terms of ecological importance, I would give it to the amphibians again, though. Okay, reptiles may keep some insects and rodents in check, but many amphibians live a dual life, starting as herbivores and graduating to carnivory after metamorphosis, and as adults they are critical for keeping mosquitos and other pest insects in check.
What is the most recent exciting fact you discovered about herps?
This doesn’t really answer your question, but did you know that tadpole arms usually develop inside the body and later burst through the body wall fully formed? I learned about this as a Master’s student many years ago, but it still blows my mind. What’s curious is that this apparently does not happen in some of the species of frogs that don’t have tadpoles—oh yeah, like a third of all frogs or something don’t have free-living tadpoles; crazy, right? They just develop forelimbs on the outside of the body like all other four-legged beasties. But this has only really been examined in a couple species, so there is just so much we don’t know about development, especially in direct-developing frogs. Like, how the hell does it just… swap from chest-burster to ‘normal’ limb development? Is that the recovery of the ancestral programming, or is it newly generated? When in frog evolution did the chest-burster mode even evolve?
How can people contribute to conservation efforts for their local herps?
You can get involved with your local herpetological societies if they exist—and they probably do, as herpetologists are everywhere. You can upload observations of animals to iNaturalist, where you can get them identified while also contributing to datasets on species distribution and annual activity used by research scientists.
You can see if there are local conservation organizations that are doing any work locally, and if you find they are not, then you can get involved to try to get them started. For example, if you notice areas of particularly frequent roadkill, talking to your local council or national or local conservation organizations can get things like rescue programs or road protectors set up. You should also make sure you travel carefully and responsibly. Carefully wash and disinfect your hiking boots, especially between locations, as you do not want to be carrying chytrid or other nasty infectious diseases across the world, where they can cause population collapses and extinctions.
Here are some recent headlines. Quick question, what the frog is going on in the frog world? 
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Click through for Mark’s response to these absolutely wild headlines, more about his day-to-day job, his opinion on frog bread, and his favorite Tumblr.
✨D I S C O V E R Y✨
There are more people on Earth than ever before, with the most incredible technology that advances daily at their disposal, and they disperse that knowledge instantly. That means more eyes and ears observing, recording, and sharing than ever before. And so we are making big new discoveries all the time, and are able to document them and reach huge audiences with them.
That being said, these headlines also showcase how bad some media reporting has gotten. The frogs that scream actually scream mostly in the audible range—they just have harmonics that stretch up into ultrasound. So, we can hear them scream, we just can’t hear all of it. Because the harmonics are just multiples of the fundamental, they would anyway only add to the overall ‘quality’ of the sound, not anything different. The mushroom was sprouting from the flank of the frog, and scientists are not really worried about it because this is not how parasitic fungi work, and this is probably a very weird fluke. And finally, the Cuban tree frogs (Osteocephalus septentrionalis) are not really cannibals per se; they are just generalist predators who will just as happily eat a frog as they will a grasshopper, but the frogs they are eating are usually other species. People seem to forget that cannibalism is, by definition, within a species. The fact that they are generalist predators makes them a much bigger problem than if they were cannibals—a cannibal would actually kind of keep itself in check, which would be useful. The press just uses this to get people’s hackles up because Westerners are often equal parts disgusted and fascinated by cannibalism. 
What does an average day look like for the curator of herpetology at the Natural History Museum of Denmark?
No two days are the same, and that is one of the joys of the job. I could spend a whole day in meetings, where we might be discussing anything from which budget is going to pay for 1000 magnets to how we could attract big research funding, to what a label is going to say in our new museum exhibits (we are in the process of building a new museum). Equally, I might spend a day accompanying or facilitating a visitor dissecting a crocodile or photographing a hundred snakes. Or it might be divided into one-hour segments that cover a full spectrum: working with one of my students on a project, training volunteers in the collection, hunting down a lizard that someone wants to borrow from the museum, working on one of a dozen research projects of my own, writing funding proposals, or teaching classes. It is a job with a great deal of freedom, which really suits my work style and brain.
Oh yeah, and then every now and then, I get to go to the field and spend anywhere from a couple of weeks to several months tracking down reptiles and amphibians, usually in the rainforest. These are also work days—with work conditions you couldn’t sell to anyone: 18-hour work days, no weekends, no real rest, uncomfortable living conditions, sometimes dangerous locations or working conditions, field kitchen with limited options, and more leeches and other biting beasties than most health and welfare officers would tolerate—but the reward is the opportunity to make new discoveries and observations, collect critical data, and the privilege of getting to be in some of the most beautiful and biodiverse places left on the planet. So, I am humbled by the fact that I have the privilege and opportunity to undertake such expeditions, and grateful for the incredible teams I collaborate with that make all of this work—from the museum to the field—possible.
The Tibetan Blackbird is also known as Turdus maximus. What’s your favorite chortle-inducing scientific name in the world of herpetology?
Among reptiles and amphibians, there aren’t actually that many to choose from, but I must give great credit to my friend Oliver Hawlitschek and his team, who named the snake Lycodryas cococola, which actually means ‘Coco dweller’ in Latin, referring to its occurrence in coconut trees. When we were naming Mini mum, Mini scule, and Mini ature, I was inspired by the incredible list that Mark Isaac has compiled of punning species names, particularly by the extinct parrot Vini vidivici, and the beetles Gelae baen, Gelae belae, Gelae donut, Gelae fish, and Gelae rol. I have known about these since high school, and it has always been my ambition to get a species on this list.
If you were a frog, what frog would you be and why?
I think I would be a Phasmahyla because they’re weird and awkward, long-limbed, and look like they’re wearing glasses. As a 186 cm (6’3) glasses-wearing human with no coordination, they quite resonate with me.
Please rate this frog bread from 1/10. Can you tell us what frog it represents?
With the arms inside the body cavity like that, it can basically only be a brevicipitid rain frog. The roundness of the body fits, too. I’d say probably Breviceps macrops (or should I say Breadviceps?) based on those big eyes. 7/10, a little on the bumpy side and missing a finger and at least one toe.
Please follow Dr. Mark Scherz at @markscherz for even more incredibly educational, entertaining, and meaningful resources in the world of reptiles and amphibians.
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elizzsush · 3 months
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Future Child | Twisted Wonderland
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Malleus Draconia X Reader
----It wasn’t everyday you’d find a three year old running around campus causing a ruckus. Usually students wouldn’t have to deal with this, but with Crowley you had to deal with everything. Now… why is it when you catch this small trouble maker it calls you “momma”?
AUs: None Rating: SFW
Note: Hi, hi! So, basically, I wasn't going to finish this and posted it as a WIP and people really liked it. So, then I had no other choice but to finish it! And I hope you like it.
____________________________________
Crowley in-listed you to help with the child problem around school. No, wait that sounded bad. A young fae no older than five got into night raven campus and has been running amok. Some students say he appeared out of thin air. So, obviously, you: the defenseless, Magic-less human with no knowledge of fae or even how some of these basics of this world work, you were the schools best bet against this ‘threat.’ And so, your oh so kind instructor pushed this task onto you and left.
Not without you demanding an extra allowance, but still.
Thankfully, you were well equipped with a grumpy cat-weasel thing who is so glad to help and definitely did not try and run away. “Ehh? Why do I have to help ya??” Grim whined as he hung limply, your hand firmly grasping his scruff as you held him up. He was so generous and did not need to be bribed at all.
You sighed, “I’ll put some money aside from this to get you tuna.” Technically, that was a lie. No, you were going to fix the window Grim broke from practicing his magic in the house, again.
“I want two cans!” The motivated cat purred and jumped onto your shoulders. Now, you can finally begin your mission and take on this… threat...?
This threat was a real threat!
The sight of the frozen cafeteria did scare you. You had learnt that after you had stumbled upon the frozen dinning hall; all of this was from the baby fae! What on Earth were you suppose to even do once you caught the child?
How would you catch this kid without being frozen exactly? Why were you put on this task?
There was a mountain of ice and a many frozen students who were actively being saved by other students most of whom were made to help. They had gotten lucky in your option. They didn’t have to find the kid. “So much magic…" An awestruck student said, "it’s hard to believe a kid did this.” The nameless person mumbled as they helped thaw the room out. You couldn’t help but hum in agreement to yourself.
What kid could do this when Deuce struggled with making anything but cauldrons while he was somewhere new! It was… overwhelming magic for sure. Even for you to stand in the middle of it, magicless. And this was just the dining hall!
Apparently, you had three more places to check out.
“Not much to see here.” Grim grumbled from your shoulder, just then a ball of fire came hurtling towards the two of you! “Eek!!” Grim squealed jumping of your shoulder while you ducked.
“Sorry!” A no name student called out… He had been using the fire to dethaw some students.
“We should leave… and fast.” You said as you turned to leave in a hurry. You tripped on the ice almost tripped on the ice while you left.
.
.
.
The very next place you checked was the courtyard, where Mr. Vargas liked to make you run in the blistering heat. PE was horrible. Everyone else got to be on their dumb magic brooms while you were stuck doing laps.
Mr. Vargas did like to make the boys sweat afterwards though. You got to sit on the grass and laugh at them cheer them on! Especially Ace, who always lagged behind.
Anyway, in the place of the field of green grass that your peers used to practice flying on a broom, was a field of fire. Green fire no less. At least it was still green? You stayed a distance away while you watched a group of five students try and summon water magic to help fight these flames. “If you don’t do this right, it’ll be off with your heads!” Next to them, a familiar short, red-haired boy was shouting at them and telling them what they were doing wrong.
You liked to think it wouldn't actually be off with their heads, Riddle was above that... Now. You liked to think it was just motivation to make them work harder!
Because it was mostly Heartslabyul students, it worked. "Hey! Riddle?" You called out to the boy. The Housewarden looked at you and jogged up to meet you a way away from the green flames. Was Sebek here as well? You swore you heard his voice shouting...
"You shouldn't be here. This area is off-limits to anyone outside of the Equestrian club because of the danger." Riddle crossed his arms; his tone was pretty gentle though. You nodded along to what he was saying, because it made sense.
"Crowley wants us to find the Fae doing this, do you know anything about it?" You decided to get right to the point. Riddle was busy enough as it was. He seemed to appreciate it too.
The boy glanced back at the students trying to figure out how to calm the fire and shook his head. "I think I heard a few third years mention a blur of H/C going into the school." He mentioned, you mostly knew the kid was in the school. It was one of the places Crowley wanted you to check out, Mr. Trein's class, after that you didn't really know where the kid could be.
You smiled and thanked Riddle before turning to leave, the boy glanced back at the fire before stepping a bit closer to you, a slightly embarrassed look on his face. "Uh- Y/N, I was wondering if you wanted to have tea with me later I-"
"Dorm leader! it's spreading!" A student shouted out, a panicked look on their face as they rushed up to the two of you. Riddle muttered something under his breath, before jogging back to the fire. To step up to calm the flames even more than what the regular student could do so you left.
“This seemed handled enough…” You muttered, a bit disappointed that you didn't get to finish your conversation with Riddle, Grim simply rolled his eyes and you two turned to leave.
.
.
.
You went to Mr. Trein’s classroom next. Your most boring class of twisted wonderland, history, uh... you think. Truthfully you hadn’t stayed awake long enough to know what class he taught.
It was not for lack of trying either!
He just drew out his words and spoke in just a boring robotic tone, it could put anyone to sleep! I digress. The cat: Lucius liked you too, he tended to let you sleep more while waking up other students.
Anyway, in place of the classroom was… an overgrown forest? In the center of it, you noticed a tall, well groomed, teal haired male, squatting down to examine what appeared to be a mushroom….
Obviously. it was Jade. He was part of the Mountain Lovers Club. The sole member actually if you remember right. Crowley mentioned something about the clubs handling the situations. So...
This seemed… handled-ish….
You would be taking your leave now. You closed the door silently and Grim groaned. "This is so boring." He whined, "Why do we have to do this?!" You shrugged slightly.
"Crowley said he'll give an extra allowance this week if we do this." You mumbled, "We could really use it to fix that window you broke." You reminded the cat. He huffed and glared at you a bit childishly, crossing his furry arms silently on your shoulder.
"I thought you said I could have extra tuna?" He realized, jumping off your shoulder he pointed at you in an accusatory manner; you sighed a bit.
You didn’t have time to find him right now. "We can talk about this later." You walked past him but when he didn't follow you, you turned around.
Where did Grim go...? You looked around the halls for him, "Grim?!" Didn’t he know not to wonder off while there was a threat on campus!
Where did Grim go...? You looked around the halls for him, "Grim?!" Didn’t he know not to wonder off while there was a threat on campus!
This fae would eat him alive!
Feeling even more motivated and slightly panicked, you ran off to find the cat and disregard the threat that was getting killed by meeting this Fae kid unarmed. Uncated? Either way.
.
.
.
.
“Someone help me!” You finally heard Grims's voice after looking for him for... quite a while actually. Pushing the door to the classroom open, you found...
Nothing.
Every potion was on its self, the stirring sticks where the usually go, nothing burned, frozen, or overgrown nothing was… well anywhere. At least anywhere out of place. “Someone, help me!” A cried out a very familiar voice squeaked out. Hesitantly, you walked closer to where you heard Grim’s voice.
This felt like something out of a horror movie.
A cauldron, inside of it was the soft glow of blue flames. No doubt caused by Grins fire ears. “Grim…?” You spoke softly. Peeking inside the steel pot, you saw a young boy, a long tail curled up beside him and one horn on the side of his head. In his arms was Grim, held tightly like he was a stuffed animal. He sniffled and then looked up at you with the most striking green eyes you’ve ever seen…
“Y/n!” Grim cried out, relief flooding his voice and breaking you from the little boy's curse of cuteness.
You plucked Grim from the kid's arms and He crawled onto your shoulders.
“Momma!” The boy, still in the cauldron yelled out, stumbling to get up and jump into your arms, get hindered by the caldron he found himself stuck in. His face was red from tears, and he looked scared… his small hands shaking with fear. He sniffled more, his chubby hands rubbing away his tears as they fell. Your heart ached slightly seeing those tears.
This can't be the same boy running amok in the school's campus. He was just so... non-threatening?
So, without a second thought. You picked the small boy up and cooed at him. Grim stared at you bewildered, His experience far more intimidating them yours.
Didn't you know how tight that boy was holding him?! Poor Grim almost didn't make it. He whined and frowned at the attention you were giving the boy.
Now, you just had to take this sweetheart to Crowley.
Either way, the small boy was absolutely adorable! Sure, he may or may not have caused this week's class cancelations but really, Ace was thanking the boy for it, so all was fine! Back at ramshackle, you realized, he was just a kid.
He was using some crayons to draw. He screamed like a bit of a brat when you tried to make him eat some broccoli you got... You thought it would be good for you and grim and neither of you ate it.
His big electric green eyes that reminded you of… someone? But who was it again? Well, it didn’t matter. The boy had green eyes, H/ced hair and these two small slightly curled horns on top of his head.
His ears were pointed just like a fae’s but just slightly? They weren’t as long nor as sharp as a regular fae’s like Lilia. It was hard to explain. It was the oddest thing- he had a tail as well! A long blackish purple one at that. And he was excellent at magic, if the destroyed campus told you anything. “Are you mad at me?” He looked up at you with teary eyes after you informed Crowley you caught him.
“Why would I be mad at you?” You asked the small boy curiously, blinking at him a bit confused at the question. His large electric green puppy eyes weren’t exactly helping you stand strong and not coddle him either.
“Because I made the rooms a mess…” he rubbed his large cheeks free from stray tears. Not that he was any good at it either, you just shook your head and kneeled to the floor, wiping them away for him.
Something about this boy made you wanted to care for him and protect him- he was just do cute. “Nonsense, you were scared. A little mess is fine as long as you weren’t hurt.” When you looked at him you felt something akin to cuteness aggression. This little fae was adorable! If Crowley didn’t find his parents, you’d take him in!
Ignore how poorly you yourself lived in ramshackle! And how much of your food was canned tuna because Grim insisted on it over actual food.
And the window that you still needed to fix and were most likely going to spend this week's allowance on...
The boy nodded, cuddling into your side like a small cuddly cat.
__________________________
He was adorable but children were a handful.
Crowley, after assigning you to catch the kid, gave you the poor child to take care of. So, you had been living with the child for three whole days.
Not to say the kid- who’s name you learned was Casper- was a handful. In fact, he was a sweetheart. He tended to shy away from things a bit, and he was a bundle of nerves sometimes.
He definitely got overwhelmed when left by himself, often resorting to crying and when he cried his magic tended to...
Anyway, Despite the amount of magic he held at his fingertip, he’d rush to you at the slightest creak of the floorboards, held onto you tightly, and hide his face in your shirt.
When it was finally time to go to school you didn’t really know what to do with the kid…? We’re you suppose to just… bring a kid to class with you? I mean, you already bring a cat, and the kid would probably be more well behaved then Grim.
So you brought Casper with you. And it was fine He was very sweet, maybe a little to shy, the teachers did love him. He introduced himself to them from behind your leg.
That was two days ago, now you were in the cafeteria. You hadn't been here in two days because, well you weren't sure if Casper would be okay around the crowd of students. Some of whom were still bitter about the Ice things... and the green fire thing.
“Fufufu, what do we have here?” Lilia popped up out of absolutely nowhere. "I heard a rumor about a trouble make~" He smirked.
“Grandpa Lilia!” The kid for once didn’t shy away. You had expected him to start crying. (He had before after all, when Jade introduced himself to the boy.) Lilia simply smiled and accepted the boy's affections, nodding along as he babbled about his day. Meanwhile, you were staring bewildered at the boy.
And... That was your lunch.
With of course, Ace and Deuce coming to keep you company while Lilia entertained Casper.
Most of your lunch you'd glance at the two. 'Grandpa Lilia?' You wondered why he was unusually not shy? He was a talkative boy to you, but with a stranger, no way... “Where Papa?” He asked looking up at the older fae with his large sparkling eyes. Oh, maybe Lilia knew the boy's parents! He was an older fae himself, right?
“Yes, good question indeed where is your papa?” Lilia asked, before he looked at you, a small smirk on his face, he looked at you like you’d know! You didn’t. You had tried to correct the kid on you being his mom before two- he cried and sulked over it for a while after that. “Well, I best be Off now!” Lilia cheered and gave you the kid back before disappearing off somewhere.
That was weird right?
You day went on- Ace and Deuce were good around the kid. Casper was pretty decent around Ace and Deuce, not too shy but he wasn't rambling like he was around Lilia. "Is something on your mind?" Deuce asked curiously, a mild layer of unwarranted concern.
"It's fine..." You shrugged, "I just hope Crowley find Caspers parents soon." You sighed, and the boy in question looked at you confused. He called you Mom and you basically took care of him, so you figured he thought you were his mom.
Not that you really minded, it wasn't like he thought you were old, fae tended to not age and stay good looking forever basically. Case in point, Lilia.
You really didn't mind, you already took care of Grim, so what's another, milder tempered Grim who didn't run away? "Speaking of the kid- Where is he?" Ace asked, looking around.
Scratch that, the kid wondered off.
"Oh no." You sighed and looked at the Adeuce duo with an exhausted look they couldn't say no too. They'd help you find the kid.
__________________________
How on earth did Sebek of all people get Casper?
Sebek, a first year in your class. Some loud guy who you got partnered up with once.
Why didn't Casper run away! You most certainly would and have. Instead, you found Casper on Sebek Zigvolt of all people's shoulders. Now you and Ace were whispering about how to get the kid back. No way you were going to go up to Sebek of all people and have to listen to his "fae are superior" speech... again.
"We should... Lure Casper away with candy." You whispered, Ace gave you a look and shot down your idea.
"Do you want to give him the impression that you should follow random people with candy?" He said looking at you like you just had the worst idea ever. "I say we just grab him and run."
"No, Sebek is faster than us." You noted, "Especially you, he runs laps past you in PE." Ace bumped your shoulder with an eyeroll.
"Where's Deuce?" Ace frowned, you watched with wide eyes as you saw Deuce confidently walk up to Sebek... "oh no." Ace groaned and run up behind Deuce.
You cursed to yourself. "We don't have to follow right...?" you asked the cat who agreed with you, but you knew you kind of had to follow them.
"Hey- Sebek." You smiled awkwardly.
"Mama!" The kid called out to you and reached out towards you. he almost fell off Sebek's shoulders- thankfully you caught him. Sebek looked at you in confusion and maybe a bit judgmentally...?
"No- he isn't..." You sighed and gave up.
"A human couldn't mother a Fae of Caspers caliber!" And so... Sebek began his rant. He started with how Lilia informed him of the situation, and he was here to lift the burden of Casper from your human shoulders.
Really, it saved you the time of informing Sebek you were in fact, not a teen mom. Also, it was weirdly insulting? Like hey, come on, you’ve taken care of him for three days! Almost four, “Casper is pretty happy with me, right sweetie?” You asked the boy who nodded hesitatingly. Wait- hesitantly? “Huh?”
Sebek looked a bit disheartened the Fae kid rejected him, but he was also kind of confused as well. “It’s just… I miss Papa, Mama…” the boys lips quivered a bit.
“No, no! You're not in trouble.” You fell to your knees to comfort the boy.
Apparently Sebek was hanging out with the child because he thought he was Malleus but something went wrong. Perhaps someone used their unique magic in the future ruler of briar valley.
Um… who’s Malleus?
________________
Day four of having a child.
Today you were going to find this kid someone who looked close enough to his dad. I mean, you apparently looked like his mom enough, so… yeah!
Also, perhaps his brother went to this school and that was how he ended up here. Finding him a dad sounded fun though.
It was a solid plan… “Casper?” You woke the boy up. You put Casper in the guest bedroom ace usually occupied when he was collared. Which was often. Even with Riddle being looser on the rules Ace always pushed sadly. “Today we’re finding your father.” You informed the boy.
“Really!” His eyes lit up. Why didn’t you do this sooner?
“Mhm, just tell me what he looks like-“ and so began Caspers rant on how amazing his father was. How he always makes time for you two even though he’s so busy, how good he was at playing superhero’s- and so on.
You didn’t even realize superhero’s existed here. Crazy. “He has black horns like me!” He grinned up at you, “oh- and black hair and we have the same eyes!” He giggled before again going on about how awesome his dad was.
“Horns, black hair, green eyes…” you mumbled, “and you're a fae, so we should probably go to Diasomnia, they have the most fae of the dorms” you smiled brightly. “This Malleus guy seems promising- and if he doesn’t want to, I’ll just make him!” You cheered and with Casper on your shoulders you were out the door!
.
.
.
Was it just you or was Diasomnia slightly terrifying?
 Either way, with Casper on your shoulders like you were going to the zoo, you walked on the winding path with thorns around it and into the dorm. The halls were… very long and castle-like. 
Eventually you found the dorm's common room. Witch had three students, only one of which was a fae. With as much confidence you could muster, you approached them. “Hello! Good evening gentlemen… Um, do you happen to know someone whom this child looks like?” You smiled and proceeded to the kid. 
They very politely actually said that they think he looks like Malleus. You asked them to point you to this Malleus, and they again very politely refused. Apparently he was a busy man which was fair. But he was a father now! If casper deems him fit enough (By that you mean mistake him for his father like the boy did you.)
Still, throughout this process, you couldn't help but wonder if you were forgetting someone. 
You kept glancing at Caspers horns… who else did you know with horns? “Tsunotarou! That's who you look like!” You finally realized after an embarrassingly long time. In your defense you had only met the guy once or twice while you were dealing with Leona’s stupid plan, and didn’t Leona mention Malleus during his overblot?
“That's what you call Papa!” Casper cheered, his eyes widening in awe. Okay so, either that was a common name… which you doubt or Casper had a weird background. 
“Khee Khee what do we have here?” Lilia appeared out of nowhere! …again, still you jumped! 
“Mama is going to find Papa today!” Casper cheered in all his three year old glory. Picking the boy up and lifting him to sit on your hit you nodded. 
“Mhm! I’m going to meet this… Malleus demands he becomes Caspers father or pay child support!” You claim confidently because in reality, you were beginning to doubt the plan you came up with at 3am and woke up early for. “Tsunotarou would be a better bet but I really don’t know where that guy is… or his real name.” you muttered to yourself. 
Either way, Lilia clapped and with a large smile said this: “You're in luck! Malleus just finished his breakfast and should be heading over for his morning coffee.” So, without verbally questioning why he knew that you smiled and plopped down on the common room’s chairs watching a bit nervously as Lilia wandered off again. 
So… You were really dumb. Realistically this was a horrible plan bound to fail, but you already came this far. 
Didn’t all your friends always comment about how scary Malleus was? Wasn’t he like one of the top mages of this world? 
Okay, maybe if you didn’t come up with this plan at 3am last night you wouldn’t be so royally screwed! Hah, get it because Malleus is supposed to be some royal of… a whole nation right? Yeah, this was a bad idea. 
Getting up to leave, you heard Casper cheer for his father.
“Child Of Man?” 
“Tsunotarou?” You turned around, “Actually- no this is better than getting smited by some scary mage! Okay so I have been looking for… you, for a while!” You smiled, “This is our son: casper.” You introduced them. 
“Papa!” 
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“Mm, He does look like me.” Tsunotarou hummed; he knelt beside the child, titling his head curiously as he observed the child. “Your horns are coming in nicely aren't they?” He commented with a small smile, the boy nodded enthusiastically. 
“Mhm! They should be as big as yours soon!” Casper giggled. 
“Your speech is also advanced for a child of your age.” The older boy smiled, It was a very touching sight actually. 
“It is. Ace and Deuce have been helping me teach him some bigger stuff too.” you stated proudly as the younger boy nodded along. You sat beside where the boy stood in front of his new father. Your back against the armrest, you sat planted on the floor. “The headmage said he would be dealing with getting him back home but I have to take care of him till then.” You sighed. 
“I see, so you thought to find me as I am the child's father?” Malleus asked curiously, an eyebrow raised almost teasingly.
“If you’ll believe it, yup.” You nodded along, I mean if he believes that the kid is his, why not get him to take responsibility for that sweet child support money?
“I see, so Crowley is making the proper arrangement to get you back to us in the future.” 
“Wait, so he's actually my kid?” you couldn’t help but blurt out. Tsunotarou merely chuckles. “Am I dumb or are we actually like his parents?” You whispered a bit to Tsunotarou and stood up, he followed after you standing up as well. 
“Mm? Crowely didn’t inform you?” he said with an amused and sly smile. “I suppose it's time anyway we get properly introduced seeing as you are my future spouse” He smirked, his hand on his hips.
“I am Malleus draconia”
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Fun Fact:
The events of this takes place after Heartslabyul’s and Savanaclaw overblot. So y/n doesn’t know Tsunotarou is Malleus.
Also, Lilia knew all along.
Also, also, I'm sorry this sucked lol
NOTE: Sorry this slightly sucked I didn't really plan to actually finish the WIP I posted it as "Forever unfinished" and people liked it so I thought I'd do this anyway!
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Some of Ya'll wanted to be Tagged: @yu-night-raven @kelsyntam @reivelmin @thisisafish123 @cheshire-kitsune @dmiqueles @ranbutler-epicsans-moon @dontmindmelove @swivi @halseyhatter @barbatoss-bitch @itslucieen @bell7duck @whatever-fanfics @ziankenvirus @blcknebula @leilakaro @sarraisme
(I'm not quite sure if I did it right but thank you for liking the WIP enough to comment and want to see another! I hope it was good, I kind of think It wasn't that good but Thats why I made it somewhat long... To compensate!)
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