#I’ve been in a caprice frenzy | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

taeilm · 4 years

Text

mutual jeopardy

crawl inside this body, find me where i am most ruined

johnny. [mafia au]. ref

rated m | 2270w

summary: whim, caprice, violent desire

“Let me get this straight: you’re a criminal, a part-time gambler, and a professional pianist?”

You raise an eyebrow, lingering in the doorway. The sight before you is so incongruous with your intuition that at first you’re convinced the man by the piano is just some musician they hired for entertainment. But Johnny fits into the elegant scene perfectly, so perfectly that you can almost pretend the dark ink of depravity isn’t there, lining every crease of the picture.

He spares you a glance upon your pointed question, eyes sweeping over your bloodstained shirt and the cuts beneath your throat before looking back down at the monochrome keys and his fingers rested between.

“Come here.”

It isn’t so much an order as a light beckon. He’s exceedingly good at this way of talking, as you’ve discovered in the past twenty-four hours. The soft allure of words, the artless pull of his voice; a trap. Yet even when you know the danger is there, you can’t help but hurl yourself right into it.

You leave the doorway, step into his room.

“Sit.” Johnny gestures at the empty space beside him, and shifts over on the leather bench. You inch forward until you’re standing right behind him, heart pounding against your chest in a mix of apprehension and neurotic curiosity.

You can wring his neck right here. choke him a blink to death. You can wrap your arms around his shoulders and kiss the edge of his jawline.

Fuck you.

Johnny turns around at your hesitation, tilts his head back and looks at you with that blank, unmoving gaze. He parts his lips, perhaps to say something, and then… you can’t recall how your fingertips found themselves tracing the contours of his face, weaving into his hair.

He sighs, and the small exhale of breath grazes your wrist for the briefest second before the world tilts beneath you. And then you’re lying flat on your back against the lid of the grand piano, Johnny bending over you with a lethal, prepossessing calm. He takes you in for a moment, eyes roaming over your body like he’s carving into flesh.

“They didn’t give you a new shirt?”

Your breath is caught in your throat. From this angle, he looks as untamed as he is composed, and it’s that same incongruity again—the shifting guise between a gentleman and a killer—that strikes you with a new vigor.

He doesn’t wait for your answer.

“Take it off,” he says, his voice mild as ever. But you hear the shadow of something else this time. A finespun impatience. A carnal desire.

“I’m going to kill you,” you spit, twisting in his hold to bite into his wrist but he’s faster, much faster, and has both your hands pinned above your head in a flash, one hand going to your throat. A smile ghosts over his lips. The effect is so animalistic that you shiver despite yourself, deciding he looks more human with a blank expression after all.

“I’ll let you,” he replies, tilting his head to regard you as a hunter would his prey. “Eventually. But not today.”

He meets your puzzled gaze for a slow, deliberate, and agonizing second. Then without warning, he dives down and kisses you; bites your lower lip, hard.

You gasp at the sudden pain, and Johnny takes the chance to conveniently muffle your cry with his mouth, dissolving the echoes with his tongue. His fingers glide from your throat to the collars of your ruined blouse and begin to unbutton it, before ripping it free of its seams altogether and tossing the fabric onto the floor. Gone is the physical proof of his earlier heist. The dried blood no longer chafes your skin with every movement.

His hand trails over the curve of your waist, claws up your ribcage. Your breasts spring free from the hold of your bra to be kissed by his cold fingers instead. His mouth moves from your lips to your neck, collarbone, shoulder. The cuts on your skin sting momentarily from his tongue before melting against it, losing all sensation.

He’s freeing you, freeing you from the memories of his crimes and the crimson flashes of gunpowder, screams, gurgling pleas. Yet at the same time, he doesn’t forget to remind you of your captivity. that you are his prisoner for as long as it takes to blight your own morality.

“If you think this will change anything—” your words end in a hitch of breath, a swirl of inebriated frenzy when his cold fingers dip into the heat of your folds, a toe-curling clash of temperature. “—y-you’re wrong.”

“This isn’t about you.” Slowly, he loosens his grip on your wrists. “Or me, for that matter.”

You test his hold, then let one hand slither free from his grasp. You allow your fingers to splay across the back of his neck, gingerly drawing him closer as he kisses your jawbone and the soft flesh underneath. Your thumb finds his throat, digs in with imperceptible pressure. He does not react.

And then you realize this is all deliberate on his part; the freedom he accords you is but another jab at your impotence. He exposes his vulnerability to you knowing fully well that you cannot—will not—attack him. You suspect that’s how he always lures in his targets.

So your thumb trails down the ridges of his windpipe to the opening of his white dress shirt, unbuttoning the first, second, third... until the fabric slides off the frame of his shoulders to reveal the tan skin underneath, wintry and marble-smooth in the moonlight. You’re almost surprised by the feverish heat when you push your palm into his chest.

The heartbeat, too; you’re surprised by the heartbeat. To discover he’s human after all and not an android, though he well may have reached that level of mechanic apathy.

“Then what is this about?” Your question ends in an involuntary noise of complaint when his fingers withdraw from the heat between your legs and your arousal is left exposed, pining after his touch.

His fingertips land on your sternum, gliding with ease down the valley between your breasts and you tremble, hand gripping his shoulder as you fight to push him off and pull him in all at once. His hand trails from your ribcage to the small of your back, arching it off of the piano lid and pressing you against his bare front. His other hand finally retracts from your wrist, drags down the length of your arm to curl around your shoulders, holding you in place. His lips never leave your skin.

“A quest,” he exhales the answer into the hollow of your neck, teeth grazing over your throat. You swallow in anticipation, your pulse beating at his mercy.

“For what?”

“Something I’ve lost.”

He brings you down from your perch the tiniest bit, and you swallow back an imminent moan when you feel his hardness dig into the thin fabric of your underwear.

Your sentience hangs by a thread, unraveling by the second as Johnny does the same with your clothes, your body. You want to push him away, claw a labyrinth of nail marks across the expanse of his back, bite his lips till you draw blood, shake him out of that infuriating poise and nonchalance.

And yet, when he pulls back to look down at you, his neat hair escaping its styled hold and his eyes dark with lust and something else you can’t make sense of, your body burns with white-hot desire despite yourself.

This stranger whom you’ve known for less than a day, yet seems so ineffably familiar to you—the thought of him ruining your body is oddly turning you on, alighting all your nerves.

When Johnny pushes into you, you all but stop the moan from fleeing your mouth but he pries your lips open with his own, forcing his way past your teeth-clenching resistance until your strength gives out beneath his and you finally, finally surrender yourself to him.

Like cannonballing into a maelstrom, a sudden release of high-strung energy. Did you lose against him, or yourself? A self-deprecating grin twists its way across your countenance. You close your eyes, willing yourself not to give in even as you already are. He builds up a steady rhythm, searing a path in you, through you, until you feel nothing but him, him, him.

“Look at me.”

This time, it’s a command. His movements do not slow. He is not gentle with you.

You open your eyes, and find his staring right into yours. The dissonance between his austere voice and his softening gaze almost registers to you, but you’re wholly distracted. The pressure point beneath your abdomen blossoms a bit more with Johnny’s every maneuver, and you find yourself clinging onto his shoulders. His muscles are taut beneath your touch, as taut as your own nerves, quivering at the warmth of his breath fanning across you, percolating through you.

You savor the way he fucks you against that pristine glossy surface, the way your body so willingly lets down its guard down for him. It isn’t until much later, retrospectively, that you realize he had let his guard down that time, too, for you. Perhaps involuntarily, perhaps out of necessity.

Your throat unclasps itself. The sounds escaping your body echo in the grand room, filling the cold space. Against your better judgment, you moan out his name.

Johnny fucks you harder, and you feel yourself reeling, capsizing in his bellicose motions.

Then, as suddenly as he had pinned and stripped you down, he leaves you without finishing. The towering presence is gone; the warmth that had been cocooning you fades. The remnants of that mind-numbing pleasure dissipates, and your hazy vision refocuses on the man in front of you, hair messy and eyes downcast, deftly adjusting his belt, re-buttoning his shirt. Long, pale scars marking his torso and chest peer from the interstices of his fingers, disappearing quickly as the shirt covers over them once again. You wonder why you hadn’t felt them when you’d touched him. Is it possible for scars to grow so seamlessly into old skin?

You inch yourself up and gingerly dangle your legs over the edge of the piano, and watch as Johnny slowly lifts his hands towards the piano keys again. He resumes the piece he had been playing when you’d first entered the room. The confidence, the seasoned killer is gone, and you watch the way he throws his body into the melody, the poignant stir of his shoulders with every notes he strikes. You can hardly make out his expression from behind his fringes and bowed head, but he looks like he’s on the verge of crying.

The nocturne slowly settles from its final climax, but Johnny leaves the measure hanging, retreating his hands. He doesn’t lift his head, even long after the incomplete song has faded into oblivion.

Finally, you decide to break the silence, though your voice comes out a whisper.

“You didn’t finish.”

“No,” he admits. “How can I?”

As if suddenly remembering your presence, he looks up at you, your nude body poised like a nymph statue atop the piano, delicate neck cocked in his direction, your hair aglow in the moonlight.

Something like anger flashes across his eyes, and you brace yourself for an attack that never comes. The momentary intensity gives way to weariness, and he reaches for his gun that had been resting on the highest piano keys. He hands it to you by the grip, the barrel pointed at himself. The air freezes over. The palliative melody disappears like a forgotten dream.

“I change my mind,” Johnny says, almost nonchalantly. “Today’s as good as any. So do it, why don’t you? Just like you said you would.”

You don’t take the gun. As if expecting this, he takes your hand instead, his touch uncharacteristically gentle, and lays the gun in your hand, closing your fingers around the grip and the trigger even as you’re shaking your head, backing away. The impulse to struggle is quelled by the heavier fear of accidentally hurting him, so you let him direct you at will, orchestrating his own demise.

“No, I can’t—even though, even though—”

“Even though you saw everything I’ve done? Please,” his voice softens, as if he’s begging, “you know what I am.”

His hands envelop yours against the gun, held together like a prayer.

“You remind me of someone I met a long time ago.” Johnny looks at you and past you at the same time, his hands trembling imperceptibly. “She told me to find what I was willing to die for, and live for it.”

Something stirs in your dusty memory capsule, too faint for you to grasp. You don’t tell him that you find an oddly familiarity to him, too, because whatever he had once been, no longer resembles the man sitting before you. The metamorphosis had taken everything out of him—the humanity, the wonder, the fondness for life. Admittedly, his line of work necessitates it.

“And did you?”

“That’s a ridiculous question for someone like me. My salvation lies in the opposite. It has to.”

You want to purposely misinterpret his words, if only to save him. But deep in your heart, you already know he’s right—that is his only salvation.

“Then did you find what you were willing to live for?”

He smiles, hesitantly, like a newborn practicing a latent behavior. His hands are no longer shaking.

Perhaps it’s better this way, for his sake, and for yours. He closes his eyes.

“Yes.”

#johnny scenarios #johnny fanfic #johnny imagines #johnny au #this was an exercise in conquering the personally impossible

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