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satocidal · 8 months

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𓂂 ˚ ☆ ꙳ * ࣭ 𓂂 ˚ ☆ ꙳ * ࣭ “Jealousy Jealousy” — Geto Suguru

Synopsis:- He dislikes you and you dislike him, rather simple an ordeal—except it’s not. Not when you’ve got one bed to share and your rival is Jealous for your attention—not when he can’t get enough of hearing your moans.

— word count:- 7.7k words ||Masterlist||

— A/n:- I wouldn’t consider myself a writer if I didn’t write a “rivals to lovers x one bed” trope so here it is. Poor jelly Suguru who’s also a little nasty but we like em like that. Au! Where Suguru doesn’t leave btw. Also smut starts after a long while💀

— Tw:- !Porn with Plot!MDNI!AFAB! Reader x Geto Suguru; perverted suguru!+perverted ex(?) hints at masturbation (both male and female); cursing (a lot of it); use of sex toys; geto is a thief (lmao); geto calls reader “doll”; spanking; dom! Geto to sub! Geto and then back to dom! Geto; oral (m and f receiving); pussy spanking; implied blackmailing

Kyoto and Tokyo.

Housing the two sister schools, they also housed three of the strongest sorcerers. Satoru Gojo, Suguru Geto and you—and irony lay bare that two of you did not like each other.

At all.

Insufferable he’d call you and exasperating you’d bounce back. And that was all their was to it—for the longest time and that’s what you two showed as well.

An eye roll here and a prodding middle finger there, you couldn’t even remember a time when you’d actually said “hi,” to him—considering your first meet was at the Goodwill event during a round.

So your annoyance was all too understandable when you walked into Principal Yaga’s room to find him lounging on the couch—ears stuffed with his earphones listening to shit you never liked.

“Yes sir?” You prompted, taking a seat across the man while Suguru didn’t even do so much as look at you.

Idiot.

“There’s a mission,” his eyes closed in on yours, “before you begin, don’t,” he was quick to add—“He’s already agreed to it and it has been decided that you two are the best suited for it. I will take no further questions.”

You find yourself raising a brow—no further questions? And he obliged?

“Why?” You asked regardless—“there are perhaps a hundred better pairs than us—why?”

“Your grade, your promotion and his to special grades depends on it,” the old man answered quietly, all too aware that his piercing gaze worked much better to shut you down than his words—“Now, any and every arrangement has been made. I just need you two to leave by tomorrow morning,”

Tomorrow morning? You could feel the gears in your brain turning fast—you would’ve asked more questions too, had the silly little Ijichi not dropped by, nervous and clammy, “Sir?” He’d called out—“You’re needed in the grounds…” voice timid, thoughts perhaps more so but nothing compared to your form left alone with Suguru Geto.

A silence.

Long silence.

“Why did you say yes?” You let out finally, frustrated to have that question knaw at your mind so long— only to be answered by another silence. Of course, he would play you just about now of all times.

You found yourself gritting your teeth— feet moved up close, his eyes staring at you all the same— “well?” You questioned again.

An eye roll passed, a sigh escaped, “Don’t go about getting ideas princess- I’m not keen of doing it with you but a promotion is promotion nonetheless. You should be glad you’ve got me helping you around,”

“Excuse you?” Your words very quick—sharp, “you’ll help me around?” You barked out a chuckle, “Don’t you go around being the princess with ideas Geto—much rather be helped by pigs than you,”

“Because pigs are the ones saving your ass every mission?” He quirked a brow—“Implication being you’re equable to pigs?” You smirked.

Your smirk only widened as he exhaled sharply, “Listen,” he began, “I want that promotion and so do you. The least we can do, for this one time is help each other. It’s a mutual goal, don’t fuck this up,”

You stared at him.

A brow raised, thoughts ran quick as you scanned his face—annoyance settling deep inside for his too stood sharp—“Fine,” you muttered, “For the mutual goal it is.” You heard him sigh—in relief? Mayhaps.

It was his turn to smirk now, “My my, she’s actually thinking this time—miraculous—”

“—Shut up,” you interrupted his words, “What exactly is the mission?”

He gazed at you quietly, “Hm, well, simple really. Someone like you—”

“—what is it?”

“Information extraction, and a side thing for this local deity who’s apparently a special grade. That’s theoretically all,” he paused, frowning, “it’ll take efforts,”

Your eyes narrowed up at him— “Don’t worry—I’ll figure it out.” He mumbled to nobody in particular.

You found yourself scrunching your face up at him, “Does it turn you on or something? To act like you’re the best?”

“I am,” he grinned,

“At being an idiot,” you added—“and it turns you on at least,” a wink he passed with that—your gag followed next.

What Suguru wanted, Suguru got.

Never a question about, never an objection either—you should’ve known.

“Let’s just call it a night Geto,” your voice bleak, tired—“So what if it’s shady? I know the owner,”

His eyes trained themselves upon you carefully, “It’s a fucking brothel y/n,” he paused, “and I know it’s well past 12 and you’re tired but pull yourself up a bit—”

“—I can even land us a discount,” whiny, your brows furrowed you pouted.

A grumble and a sharp exhale- Suguru didn’t do so much as grunt as he tossed you over he shoulder- silencing your yelp as he shushed you, “I’ll carry you- lead the way,” evident with his voice, he was tired and so were you.

You grinned and squealed internally, softly whispering directions in his ears as he lead the way through the foreign state.

You watched, and watched—eyes wandering onto his bun- the one he’d hurriedly made to help the heat, onto his fingers which held you close—grip tight to make sure you wouldn’t fall—it was embarrassing sincerely to be paraded around such but maybe, just maybe, with him, you liked it.

“Where the fuck is it?” A grunt- you smiled bashfully- “Think we walked past it some 5 blocks ago—” a giggle fell off your lips, his fingers pinched your sides- never playfully.

“The fuck are you-” an eye roll, an inhale, “you know what? Amazing,” and just with that he jogged back- the path retraced wher you came from, the shy pointing from the kids once again.

Five extra minutes you cause him, searching for the hotel- or brothel as Suguru deemed it—“Is this it?” Both your eyes watching the multi-story building in front of you.

It wasn’t half as bad as you’d thought it’d be—pretty decent, Suguru realised.

“You’ve called the owner?”

Before a ‘yeah’ could fall off your lips—clammy fingers gripped your waist��“Y/n!” A voice boomed, the owner- an old ex of yours.

Face flushed you faced him, “Oh hey,” you mumbled hesitantly, “Long time Hm?”

The man in front of you only smiled wide—a creep, Suguru muttered under his breath—sliding a firm handshake for the sake of formality.

Your ex chuckled- unsettling, “And this is your new man huh?” Your face flushed- Suguru’s did too— but he held his own—eyes narrowing at his words.

You however, chuckled nervously—and when you’d told Suguru you knew the owner, he thought, he never should’ve listened to you.

“Not uh…” you looked down, “not boy-friend—just uh, just—” you move to face him, a silent plea for help—“Colleagues,” he nodded.

“Just colleagues, yeah,” a nod you passed- relieved just a little.

The second guy only ever raised his brows, “Sure,” he smirked—“Come inside,” he ushered- hand, suguru noticed, too close on your back.

“Don’t tell me,” His face hidden behind his palm he spoke, “You said you knew him,”

“I do!” You prompted, helplessness evident in your voice—“He’s forcing you to fuck him,” Suguru’s expression a deadpan.

Your shoulders dropped-“He’s not…forcing me,” you bit your lip—“The only other option is us sleeping together geto,”

His eyes widened incredulously, “And that’s what you should choose—far more safe,”

You stared—of course you couldn’t sleep next to Suguru—not when—just no.

He sighed—“Really are an idiot,” you groaned internally- for the first time, agreeing with him, “Be glad I’m literally next door—call me at any moment that pervert-”

“-Geto!”

He shrugged—a fact was a fact nevertheless.

And now you lay awake, still, motionless in the cramped bed—so close.

So close the man’s body lay, the one you used to know all so well—the one which disgusted you now.

“Y/n,” he called for the nth time—your mind getting all too hazy to answer—fuck was that his hand on your thigh?

Mind a mess, eyes barely open and jaw slack- you got up, not a word—none at all as you pushed your way through the room.

A knock—and then two more.

He was fast to open the door, a glass of wine in hand, brows raised in amusement—“And I was correct?”

Rage all over you, a hand pushed him away—“Shut up,” his brows only ever raised higher.

“Bother me with a drink?” It didn’t sit as much of a question — a glass poured for you all too soon as you settled on his couch.

“Thanks,” you mumbled, grabbing it with both hands, fingers you found to be shivering a little too much.

Eyes narrowed, he watched you, taking a seat beside you, “Pray tell,” he began, “Did he say something? A fight between the lovers?”

A hint of jealousy did you catch? No- of course not.

You played with your silence, and his mind—just guilty eyes meeting his, as you sipped.

“Don’t tell me,” he whispered and you pin point a sudden anger inside—“Geto,” you mumbled, “it’s fine,” you but your lip.

Suguru’s brows furrowed, it most definitely wasn’t, surely you knew that—right?

A sigh left your lips—“Sit down please,” your fingers tapped the place beside you. He nodded simply- taking a seat beside you quietly, closer to how he usually would.

Another sip—“will you just sit here or…” his words were quiet, an initiative to not make you uncomfortable, more than you already were.

“This was the reason we uh,” you paused, eyes boring into the ply wood, “back when we broke up you know,”

Another nod- nothing to offer and when you didn’t say anything else, he tilted his head, “That’s it?” You snorted.

“I’m sorry it wasn’t a 3 hour documentary,”

“Thank everyone it isn’t, I was afraid I’d have to hug and comfort you and all,”

“Disgusting,” and you both chuckled—settling into your seats. Maybe someday you’d open up more onto your ex to Suguru, something in his eyes told you that you could. But as of now, just sipping on the off-brand wine seemed alright.

In a momentary silence you two sat in, nothing too comfortable but nothing otherwise either—until a moan was heard.

Your eyes snapped to him and his to you—a bewildered “What?” Spilling from both.

You’d have asked ‘did you just moan’ had the series of moans and grunts not continued and instantly, all too clear it was.

You see, the brothel had walls paper thin—pitiable were the customers of course—and this specific night, the both of you.

“Isn’t it your room?” Suguru questioned—a chuckle included, “What the hell,” you responded back- disgust prominent on your expressions.

Another chuckle, and another until the both of you sat there giggling all together- “If that’s how he fucked you, i am very sorry,” he grinned, “no wonder you used to be so frustrated all the damn time,”

Your jaw fell first, “Shut up?” You laughed, “Was not frustrated at all,”

“Nu uh doll, pent up sexual frustration is very real—I’ve seen it in Yaga and Gakuganji-”

“-Don’t you dare compare me to him,” your voice was shrill- now above the grunts in the room beside yours—shriller than the pathetic moans your ex was paying the girl to make.

And just so, two hours the two of you spent together- shy glances and touches shyer still- but enjoyable nonetheless.

It wasn’t the first night you’d drunk together, no, and such nights were always different—the grimaces that Suguru and you wore around each other during the day were always thrown away—smiles and grins, hidden glances and soft touches—nothing more, nothing less.

It was true that you guys barely ever talked when drunk—but it was all too obvious. But tragedy lay in the way you would simply forget, you would too and he would just the same. The nights were spent flamboyant, silly flirts and sillier jokes—all means to just adore each other As to what Satoru would call it.

Shoko on the other hand called it your idiocy, the sheer annoyance masked her expressions everytime she’d watch Suguru and you tumble around each other the next morning—as if the night before never happened.

Two hours spent laughing— every once a while Suguru would gaze at you, you’d do the same. It wasn’t ever weird, no.

If respectful could be the word to define any sort of staring, that would be how you did it.

Were curses and insults only thing to befall both your conscious mind and lips for each other? Yes. Would you two actually bare your life for each other? Satoru and Shoko had always guessed a definite yes.

And just so, flitting eyes captured between his, soon jumped to his clock—“It’s 12 already,” you mused, his eyes never leaving your face—“I should head back,”

“To that pervert?” He shot instantly, “Had he been good at sex I’d understand but he’s toxic, perverted and finished in 5 minutes—bet he didn’t even get the whore to cum,”

A drunk gasp escaped you as you smacked his thigh laughing—“You’re so drunk,” you mumbled, head lolling to the side, only to end up on his shoulder—it fit perfectly.

His eyes gazed down at you, “You’re drunk too- don’t go to him. Sleep here tonight,” and had you been conscious you’d certainly have fought the idea- ‘I can defend myself’ you’d have retaliated, which you of course could’ve but not like this. Not in your drunk state.

For the saying goes all too true, drunken words are sober thoughts.

So you nodded pliantly, head resting on his shoulder still, you nodded while he watched.

So close- just a mere inches and you could—just a little more booze and perhaps.

He noticed a lot in this position, your tinted lips—the warmness of your breath and body—your messy hair and insignificant attempts to not stare at his lips—he found you adorable.

“C’mere,” he called as he slowly got up- careful to not cause you discomfort, “you can sleep on the bed,”

“And you?”

A side-shrug he passed, “I’d be no better a pervert if I crept in beside you, you know,”

“It’s your bed,” subtle desperation- his drunk mind couldn’t catch —“I’ll be fine,” and just sometimes you had to curse the gentlemen to be all so gentle.

“Night,” you muttered as a yawn went past you- eyes following his form, tidying up his room to sleep on the couch you two just sat on—“G’night idiot,” he muttered back.

And in your sleep you wouldn’t realise of the little hurt he lay down with—choosing that scum over Suguru? Thoughts such replayed in his mind over and over; he was simply aching, for your touch and feel—drunk words were a sober man’s thoughts but what of the drunk thoughts never spoken aloud?

The morning came by fast- rays bright enough to break off your slumber, you let a yawn pass by.

Usually, a surprise would’ve caught you, to find yourself in his bed but somehow- just for once, last night didn’t lay forgotten — last night’s memory embedded in the corners of the room with empty bottles lying around—suguru’s short tossed on the couch as you heard the hum of a shower.

Unsure of the prospects, you lay just there- enveloped in the certain warmth of the duvet- until the water stopped.

The door opened swift, and to mock the gravity of situation, you close your eyes in the pretence of sleep—and you were partially glad you did for soon enough the soft thud of a towel falling entered your ears—naked Suguru stood, the view shielded only by your eyelids—embarrassment yours grew.

And in that moment, you fought hard to not open your eyes- the scent of his body wash all too inviting—citrus? You made a not to tease him on that later.

“You can stop pretending, I’m decent now,” your face grew warmer—you maintained your silence.

An annoyed exhale he let out—“When I call you dumb, instances like these are exactly what I’m referring to doll,”

You scoffed- “For someone who has the audacity to walk in like that, butt-naked, you shouldn’t talk at all,” your act let go just a second after his words.

You got up from the bed—yawning and stretching, Suguru’s eyes trailed up your form as your loose shirt lifted slightly along your hands—“The water’s warm right now- might as well go shower,”

You scrunched your face, “In your shower?” Before you could add further argument, “Your other option is simply that fucker,” and you knew he’d won the argument again.

“My clothes aren’t here,” a last resort you had and you grabbed on it desperately- he tossed you a clean towel, and one of his shirts—“You can wear these inside, I’ll just go grab your luggage right now,”

You rolled your eyes- he was relentless, stubborn entirely too much and you shook your head, having no option but to comply.

Suguru was quick—all too quiet as he slipped into the room beside, a musky scent heavy in the room.

In bleak darkness he reached out his hand, to pick up what he assumed to be your luggage—lips turning to gag instantly when his fingers felt something slimy on it. Each and every plan to annoy your ex left his mind quick as a disgusted suguru quickly picked up the bag beside the mess he’d touched already- rushing outside, back into his room.

A sigh left his lips—disgust painted over his face as he wiped his fingers with a napkin—the other hand settling down your bag—oddly heavy, and prodded out at certain angles, his interest was piqued.

Curiosity, he blamed it upon- focused fingers reaching out to zip open your bag- he knew it was wrong but then…something told him, deep down, you wouldn’t mind.

He heard the water falling come to a stop- he’d be quick anyways, hefty fingers reaching inside your bag—suguru felt so bad but a smile guilty adorned him all the same, especially when his fingers came in contact with the silky fabric of your panties—red? he grinned.

Fingers prodded deeper still, products of your daily use coming in his hand until finally he found it—aha! His grin widened, fingers slowly pulling out the little toy in hand.

And shame would befall you all too deep for in his hands was your pink little vibrator—he chuckled—how pathetic, and on a mission? All the more. Suguru’s thoughts raced, faster than ever—dirty, he felt in the best way possible until a sudden voice managed to creep to his ears.

A moan- again, different from last night—the source being all too different too.

From the bathroom he realised, face contorting to one of amusement as he thanked this time, the brother for having walls paper thin.

And as his fingers stuffed your items back in—pocketing the vibrator and leaving a single note in your bag, to be found hours later. Just so he was done—material worth stealing in his pocket and ears pressed against the door as he listened intently, finally the a moan of his name falling from your lips.

Thus he found, it truly was nothing more than that sweet little cry of his name from you that made him all so hard every argument, with your face so close to his- flushed red with annoyance—it was amusing really, of how you threatened to kick his ass while all he could think about in moments such was to pin you hard against the wall and pound yours.

Your fingers moved onto close the shower- assuming the thud of the door to be a sign of suguru leaving—a sigh escaped you as you propped yourself down into the bathtub.

Your fingers worked quick—you had to be, for Suguru could be back whenever and the last thing you wanted was for him to hear you such—and you let your head fall back- fingers quick to gather the slick around your slit.

It was simply desperate, you supposed, the way the thought of seeing him naked got you all so worked up—his scent and the prospect of wearing his shirt.

But a mind so restless could only be helped so much—the inkling of him leaving the room had your legs spreading instantly, lips bitten down to control the moans.

Pathetic, you called yourself—getting off of your rival—off him, of the way he carried you the day before, hiked over his shoulder—pathetic.

More pathetic were the moans and slight groans you found yourself unable to suppress, fingers pumping in and out at a steady pace—your clit glistening with no attention as you imagined him teasing you.

A gasp escaped your lips—eyes widening at the moment as you imagined him between your thighs—he’d mark your inner thighs with kisses you knew, leave you begging for him too.

“Fu-uck,” you muttered, the pressure rising up—“m’close,” you mumbled to nobody in particular and amusing was the fact that you’d left your clit untouched as you knew Suguru would too.

Desperate sighs and moans you let go—trust in the assumption that he wasn’t back yet- he couldn’t be.

“Please,” you begged—perhaps to yourself for more stimulation—“pleasepleaseplease,” your voice a whisper as a finger you thrusted and pulled out sharp—finally a finger rolling slowly around your clit.

“Fuck,” you drew out, as your moans fought to become louder—“fuck m’lose su’” your eyes widened again, mouth turned o-shaped as the pleasure you chased finally arrived.

“Mm!!” You moaned and finally—“Fuck please Suguru!” Let out as you came on your fingers-not loud, just enough to tip him over as well as he sat listening outside your door.

Your fingers looked for it in a frenzy—you were sure you packed it—“Ready?” You head Suguru call out.

“Wait!” You shouted back—“I can’t find something,” Suguru grinned, “A brain is it?” Your door opened just as that, a shit-eating grin on his face.

“Look for it later,” he mused—eyes watching your hands buried in your bag, total concentration tossed into it—sweet.

“The mission ain’t waiting for your pleasure-satisfaction, I mean,” he chuckled- your eyes narrowed.

“Whatever,” you grumbled under your breath—walking outside, basking in the warm afternoon warmth and your ex’s gaze.

“He’ll join us,” you whispered—“wouldn’t let me leave without well, threatening to kick us out,”

Suguru scratched his neck—nerves racking and a thought constant to as why he hadn’t punched your ex yet.

“Sure,” Suguru sighed—to your surprise, “we’ve to be in a club anyways, gonna maintain our distance from trash,” you chuckled beside him—a slight twinkle in the way you looked at him.

You walked ahead of the two boys—aware of the unmoving gaze on your form—a small black skirt—a smirk you held, hungry eyes—theirs.

“How far is it?” You made sure to question your Ex, not once did your body tilt towards Suguru on the slightest—cruel.

“Just about here,” he replied, providing no help, but you smiled nevertheless—“Thanks babe,” you giggled.

Suguru merely watched.

And he watched the entire evening—potently, as you did the exact opposite of his entire plan. He watched as you swayed your hips—with the target himself.

He watched as you grinned and giggled, letting your ex roam his hands onto your ass—he wanted to punch him right there, but he watched.

He watched as you watched him, ass grinding back into your ex, a grin on your face—and he watched as you downed three shots right after your bit of the mission was done and he watched as you draped yourself around your ex.

And as the fact lay, You weren’t really sure to what you were doing, or why.

Suguru Geto had never meant anything exactly, more than a rival of course- and a drinking buddy- and the person you admired- and a classmate you wouldn’t want to lose- and yes. Nothing more than all that, ever. So the sudden need to spite him? It was new- exhilarating, some may say.

So you wove the game- an open invitation shoved into his face; Never the watcher however, he finally moved, jaw tightened and annoyance all so present on his face.

And this time, you watched- you watched as he made sure to drug the target all too well, maintaining eye contact as he let the girls sway around him too—you watched as he slid his hands into the girl’s skirt, the one he danced with—planting a soft kiss on her neck. And you watched simply, wondering how that could’ve felt.

But a game only remained one so long until you stepped it up a notch- turning around to kiss your ex, placing deliberately, his hand on your ass- a tease.

“Get away,” he spoke through gritted teeth, a shove to your drunk boyfriend’s shoulder.

“Hey!” You yelped—“The hell?” Your eyes wide—as if innocent.

“Don’t ‘hey’ me right now,” he muttered dangerously—eyes boring into yours—“Let’s leave,” his hand reached up quick, grabbing onto yours to pull you away.

“Woah there pretty,” you called out, brows raised, “who the fuck are you to tell me what to do?”

Silence—exactly.

“You can leave if you want Geto,” such condescension laced your voice, he was almost hurt.

“You’re drunk,”

“So are you,” you snapped back—he wasn’t—you knew he wasn’t.

He blinked once, then twice, gaze persistent—begging you to come; your hardened into denial.

He sighed one last time—“Get fucked bitch,” and before you could reply, he was gone.

Gone as that—leaving you in a mess of your own emotions and an idiot of an ex-boyfriend.

A three day mission, two days gone by, the larger partial of the mission dealt with—you crashed onto your ex’s bed the second night, no courage found to even meet Geto’s gaze after the scene at the club.

The smell of booze was intense, your mind slightly tipsy on its own accords. With a confused heart you scrolled through your Instagram, bored.

The snores of your ex—and the girl beside him provided little entertainment—the thought of Suguru Geto in the room beside did nothing to help, you wanted relief. But all to no avail for your vibrator was ‘lost’ too and the energy to chase your high was not your preferred option.

Your eyes found its way to the clock- 12:02 a.m. it was late—‘would he be asleep?’ You wondered, fingers adamantly rubbing slow circles around your nipples—again, desperate.

Eyes closed, you fought urges to call him—just to tease of course, you could pretend to be drunk after all.

And so your thoughts fought quick—to lay bare without him or with him, eyes staring at the screen if your phone—ring!

Your eyes widened- the caller id read ‘Bangs’, you mentally convulsed. You stared at the second for a decent ten seconds—11, 12, 13–you knew he cut it any second—14, 15–“Hello?” You mumbled quick, raspy.

“Awake?” He inquired- “No,” you replied.

You welcomed his silence on the line—“Come here,”

“No,” you echoed—“don’t wanna talk to you,” you mumbled- mind hazy to how you couldn’t help the fingers swirling around your hardened nipples.

“I’m not calling here to talk,” his voice was sharp—annoyed—a silence you offered him this time.

“You think I don’t notice doll?” You could hear the smirk, “You’re probably wet just by the sound of me,”—you were—“so needy,”

“You’re the one who’s calling me Geto,” you snapped, “Really needy of you,”

“Maybe I do need you—keep rubbing, slowly, touch yourself doll, just slightly,” your mouth ran dry—you obliged without a second thought, “and maybe I have something that you need too—tell me though, can your silly little ex even touch you as good as you imagine me to, even in his dreams?,” a grin—a shit-eating grin, on his face you imagined. Such a fucking thief.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” you muttered through your side of the line, an airy breath leaving you as your fingers dipped beneath your shorts—as you did exactly what he told you to—“Sure thing,” his voice polite with just the best undertones of condescension, “Just a request then, doll, check if you’re wet please,”

You could practically moan at his voice and words—you were wet, nimble fingers prodding cautiously, “I’m not,” you lied- a moan bitten back, “Seems like your needy cunt really does need the pretty pink vibrator to get ya turned on Hm?” Husky, he sounded.

“Give it back Geto,” a whine, “Come take it,” a challenge.

And however could you deny a challenge from him?

A knock, and then two more—just like last time.

The door opened just as quick—brows raised, “Yes?” He questioned as if he hadn’t just teased you through the phone 5 minutes ago—you eyed him, “I believe you stole something,”

He grinned, your frown widened—“Come inside,” his hand gently found its way onto the small of your back—the gravity of the situation slowly befell you, you regretted nothing.

You walked slow, as you’d last night, “Where is it?” You questioned, brows furrowed, “Where’s what, pretty?”

Fingers clenched you stared at him, “Enough with your games Geto—hand it the fuck back,”

You watched as he slowly walked around you, a slow pace as he ended right behind you, bending slightly to grab the soda can—something easily possible without managing to glue his dick to the round of your ass—your face burnt.

“My my, such a dirty mouth you got there doll,” you needn’t turn back to imagine his expressions, “Maybe I should punish you- you’ve been bad all night anyways,” your blood boiled at the whisper of his words- “I wouldn’t have to, had you not been the idiot you are,”

His fingers were quick on your waist, spinning you to face him��even without a surface to be pinned against, you felt trapped under his gaze.

“So mean to me,” he mumbled—eyes bearing into yours, a subtle smirk, “There are other ways of getting into a guys’ pants you know,”

Eyes narrowed you scrunched your face, “Rather fuck a-”

“-a pig before me,” he rolled his eyes, “Yeah yeah, I know doll,” a sip of his soda he took, “But that’s not what you were doing this evening Hm?” His fingers were quick to grab your chin too, urging you to look no where but his eyes.

“Tell me doll,” he pressed, “What were you trying to do Hm? Grinding against those guys’ cocks? You’re that cock-hungry? A slut?”

Red- you saw red as his words registered in your head—a shake of the head was all to be offered, “Such a pity I had to deal with this way because you can’t control yourself,” your eyes widened, shushed by a shake of his head—perhaps, reassuring.

“So tell me, what were you trying?”

You stared, like a kid caught stealing- you could only stand there guiltily, answer on the tip of the tongue, but too ashamed to mumble it out.

Suguru simply hummed, “Too embarrassed to accept it doll? That’s fine—maybe me sending pictures of your little toy or the recording of you moaning today in the morning—”

Your ears rang- no way he heard that- your mouth hung open, “You sound like a pretty bitch in heat you know,” it was simply insulting, to have him say all this- but it was in the way it felt good—in the way it made you wetter.

“Don’t,” you managed, he grinned further, “Don’t what doll?”

You rolled your eyes, seemingly unable to get out of your predicament, “Geto please,” finally—you could see he’d mentally relented already, “Please give me back my…” you paused, swallowing, “please uh- my, my vibrator, give it back please,” your face flushed.

His gaze remained fixated, “Don’t think that’s what it is, c’mon dummy, you’re smarter than this right?”

Jaw tightened, you stared at him, “Geto please, can I have my- my uh, my pretty little pink vibrator back?” The way you bit your lip so hard, Suguru was sure it would bleed any second—adorable.

He clapped right then, like a proud teacher—walking closer to you, “such an obedient doll,” so close hope stood, his breath lingering upon your face, eyes observant to every breath and sigh—smiling when he noticed your relaxed fingers.

He knew you liked this.

“Nope,” he chuckled—“don’t wanna hand it back yet,” you wanted to scream at him—you couldn’t of course.

“And you haven’t told me yet,” he continued, “why were you acting like a brat Hm?”

And somehow accepting this was worse than accepting the fact above- “I wanted..” he stared hungrily, “I wanted your attention,” everything in that moment felt more interesting than his expressions—he found you all too cute such.

“Aha,” he smiled wide, “You wanted to suck my dick so bad pretty?”

“Not everything is about your dick,” you flared—“But this is, isn’t it?” He sneered—and you quietened down again for it was.

It escalated quickly here on, his hand moving to grope your breasts—“Can i kiss you?” He murmured against your skin and as much as you wanted to humble him- to not feed into his ego, you nodded.

With his lips latched onto the supple skin of your shoulder he pulled you closer still—so very close, a you let out a soft moan, having accepted it was a lost battle to fight him anymore.

“Eager,” he gripped your jaw- making you face him again, “Aren’t we?” A chuckle rumbled deep in his chest—fingers betraying his composure too, in the hasty way they unbuttoned your shirt.

“Eager, aren’t we?” You mirrored his expression- smirking all the same as you unbuttoned his.

“Shut up,” he muttered, a simple command—but you’d be fucked truly if you listened to him of course.

“Do it yourself,” you grin- already pushed underneath him—“Aren’t even gonna tell me to stop? Thought you came here to get something? Or maybe the slut really did just want attention,” smile, condescending—and he did shut you up.

And so there you were, pinned underneath him- hungry lips searching every inch of you, mapping your body in just a certain way.

“Had I known,” he grunted in midst the frenzied kisses, “that you tasted so sweet—I’d keep you like this all the damn time rather than fighting,” you groaned against him, feeling his hard dick propped against your thigh—separated by all but a think layer of clothing—“You talk a lot, shut up,”

He let your words fall blatantly, mouth never parting from your face as it smeared around wet kisses all over it, letting a deep moan as your hands found their way into the tangled mess of his black hair, pulling slightly with every grind of his hips. A breathy moan escaped you too—His teeth nipping at the soft flesh of your ears—“this is what you want right? What you want all the damn time?”

You couldn’t care less about his taunting—until a sudden slap ended upon your face, jaw gripped by fingers—“Tell me, could those men have given it to you like I do?” Heat surged through you—pooling all the way into your abdomen.

A grin you passed and and nod—another sharp slap, it felt euphoric.

Slowly, Suguru pulled away, enticing a low groan from you—“get up,” he murmured and you obliged, black eyes staring into yours, “get up and on all fours,”

“Really gonna fuck in a brothel?” A cheeky grin you adorned, body working nevertheless, as per his words—with hands and knees planted on the bed, you gave a soft arch to your back.

The clink of his belt entered your ears, the low shudder of his clothes thrown away—“Since you love acting like a prostitute, it would only make sense, right?” A hand reached to pull away your shorts too, save for the little black thong you wore—a smirk on his face as he admired the view. His fingers were soft in the way they explored—touching and prodding every inch of your back, resting just a little too long at the curve of your ass.

Suguru geto was simply cruel in the way he administered the pleasure on you- handing you a little and taking away a whole lot for the moment his fingers came close to your clothed cunt, the moment your sensitive core could feel the slightest touch, he was gone. All too aware of the wet patch on your panties, you dared not question a thing.

Body shifted to face you, he kneeled on the bed too—your eyes widened slightly, scrolling down to the length of his cock, it was pretty you had to admit. A decent length with a girth that you knew you would have you crying later—an angry pink-ish tip welcomed you, pre-cum leaking over it.

“Go on,” he commanded, “not gonna put your whorish mouth to use doll?” And normally you’d have reciprocated his words- but just the way his hands gripped your hair, bunching it up into a ponytail of sorts- you knew he was playing. You inched closer, hesitant eyes staring up at him as you shyly licked the tip, it was salty, nothing that you truly minded.

You gulp- uncertain lips as they wrap around the top, an experimental flick to his tip you passed- a hiss escaping his pretty lips, grip tightening on your hair.

“Come now doll,” he sneered, “don’t go all shy over me now—run your mouth the way you used to suck up for that ex of yours,” you pass him a glare- mouth pulling away from his upturned cock entirely—he chuckled.

“No lie right? After all, you were begging to sleep with him doll, cozied up beside him yeah?” All the while he kept pressuring your hair, a soft cry you let out.

“You act very smart yaknow,” he rubbed his chin—“Try that again,” and with no choice but to comply — you open your mouth and insert the tip of his cock, your jaw loosening to accommodate the familiar girth of his length protruding from your oral cavity to the walls of your throat. Geto hissed at the swirl of your tongue on the underside of his dick, his free hand now on the top of your head with tufts of your hair in his fingers. "...mmhmm, this is how you should use that mouth doll, not in all that chit-chat you do,"

And if you could, in the moment you only wanted to bite his dick off- it would’ve been hilarious, had he not been holding onto the pictures and recordings—and you suck as you could, the precum’s taste all over your tongue while his grasp on your hair tightened— fingers roughly pushing your head to bob up and down.

It simply felt disgusting to be treated this way, like his slut- like his toy and only worse was the wetness between your legs that couldn’t seem to stop growing.

“Shit,” he breathed out, “Ah— shit shit, jus’ like that doll,” it felt Dirty—but so good, to have him falling apart at your touch, even if he held the control, “s’good for me yeah?” Raspy, he sounded-hips bucking into your mouth and before you could register what was happening, his fingers pushed your face to his base, his cock prodding deep down your throat, tears were quick to pool around your eyes.

And just then, he pulled out, leaving your mouth feeling hollow—finger quick to pump his shaft, lubricated by all but your spit—a string of saliva joining it still to your mouth. And right before you, Suguru came with a sharp hiss, “A-ah, fuck,” he groaned, cumming all over your face and chest—paining you in his mess.

You watched him like that for a second, unspent, eyes huge as you instantly get to suck on his thumb he shoved right into your face.

“Good girl,” he murmured— “So good f’me,” he grinned, he wasn’t done yet- not until you’d be too exhausted to even move.

He eyed your form, on all fours for him like a true slut, his eyes only held adoration as he watched his cum stain your face—his eyes, however, we’re quick to take note of your drooling mess soon.

He stood behind you now, face level with your clothed pussy—“How pathetic,” he grinned, “You got so fucking wet by me using your mouth doll?” It was the way he said it—making the statement sound so innocent and yet, “Or was it the call? You got all so wet by just my voice? But then again, should’ve known—”

—smack!!

Your body lurched forward with the sudden force—a cry escaping your lips. You heard him chuckle, “such a tease, you have to be punished right?” A shake of your head he offered, nothing against his predefined course of actions.

Another spank he lay down—lips biting down onto suppress your moans—“I’m talking to you doll—fucking answer me,” another spank, you couldn’t help the pleasure the pain from his palm provided.

Quick enough, his belt was grabbed- grabbing your arms, he shoved your form into the ass-up-face-down position, classic.

“Sorry,” you mumbled helplessly—aware of your bare ass being exposed to him as he slowly pulled down your panties.

“Fuck doll,” he bore, “you’re fuckin glistenin’,” you knew it and the fact that you knew made it all the worse—just so another spank came crashing down, a rough squeeze he offered this time too, “think I should gag you with these eh?” The cockiness all too prevalent in his voice as he pocketed your soiled panties.

A whimper you let out at his words—needy.

His eyes stared at your core, “Spread your legs for me pretty,” and even that small murmur seemed sweet to you as you obliged quickly—he chuckled.

“So obedient for me, you’re far better when you’re like this you know,”

“Savour it while it lastssss- oh” your words interrupted by a dega of his fingers down your slit—filthy.

Quick to inhale the scent of you— he spanked you again, “only use your mouth to moan and scream for me or to tell me to stop ok?” You nodded, head pressed into the mattress, heart racy.

And in that moment—the power handle shifted just a bit as Suguru moaned wantonly, nuzzling up his nose between your folds—for just in that moment, he let you guide him. A tentative tongue swivelled through your folds—lapping onto it like he was hungry, and perhaps he was top, for your attention and praise.

“Fuck- right there yes,” you moaned hazily, the grip of his fingers tightening around your thighs—sure to leave bruises, he sucked reverently, as if worshipping you in this state and form.

He didn’t tease you anymore—he couldn’t, for as much as he wanted to see you cry for him, for his touch—he was starved. And he wanted to show you too, that even in your palm he treated you better than any guy ever could.

“Mmm su!” You cried softly, mouth hanging open to just let out out moans and cries-“jus’ like that—s’ perfect,” you arched your back more for him—letting him better access to your hole as he whimpered against your clit—“So so good for me Su,” you mumbled mindlessly as His moans against your slick cunt vibrate you to your core, as he greedily laps you up, tongue-fucking the precise spot that you praised him for finding until the coil in your stomach tightens, and you brace yourself against his shoulder.

“Like that?” He groaned against your cunt, pulling away slightly only to insert a finger suddenly, “feels good baby?” He questioned, spitting onto your pussy and rubbing it all over your core messily—another finger inserted, he stretched you out slowly.

“Could your boyfriend have done this Hm?” You took note of the green in his voice—“of course he couldn’t—nothing could right doll?” You nodded hastily, too focused on chasing your high until—smack! Another spank to pull you out of it—you whined.

“S’tight doll—not even your fucking vibrator yeah,” slowly—the slight buzz of it entered your ears—eyes widening.

The hum only ever got louder as he brought your toy closer to your core—chuckling as you clenched around still air—“so desperate—who do you belong to Hm?”

Silence you offered, not even a moan as he rubbed the vibrator around your core—he grinned devilishly, “Now is not the moment to play games doll—” you groaned at the touch of the vibrator.

“Oh?” He smiled, “don’t want it? Isn’t this what you came for in the first place?”

Another swift smack—this time on your pussy, you clenched and cried all together—“Ah!” His fingers curled up inside you—“I’m talking to you—Mm! Yeah- talking to you doll,” he grunted, watching you fall apart—another sharp spank on the same spot had tears building up in your eyes again.

“Who does this slutty pussy belong to? Who do you think about when you cum doll?” You never wanted to feed his ego but in the way, he cruelly pulsated his fingers inside you—teasing your clit slowly with the vibrator you couldn’t help it.

“You,” you breathed out- “Fuck s’you—all you,”

“Scream my name doll, let your ex know it too,” and just then he pulls his fingers away too, and the vibrator—latching onto your clit, his tongue again, swirling and swiping—until, it was there.

And all in a moment, it hits you like a wave—pleasure washing all over you as you cum all over his tongue—shuddering and shaking through it, riding his tongue out as you did so.

If you could look behind and spot him, you’d be all too pleased I assure you, with cheeks flushed he kneeled behind you, lips swollen and covered in your cum.

“Shit,” he groaned after a moment of silence, his and yours, “Pretty sure you woke the whole hotel up with your moans ya know,” and just like that, he was back at his usual self—“Shut up,” you mumbled, moving your arms to remind him to untie you.

He was quick to settle you back into a sitting position—propped against his chest you lay, head resting on his shoulder—“You want something? Water?” He inquired, concerned eyes boring into yours, you shook your head, he nodded.

You sat there a moment, “It’s 1:30 already,” you mumbled, just like last night—“I should go,” he grinned again, “I would, had your ex been a better fuck than me,” you giggled at his words—“Certainly more entertaining,” you gingerly spoke—“Liar,” he chuckled.

“And please,” his fingers teasing your nipples now—slow, steady circles, “I’m not letting you go until I’ve made you cum at least thrice more,”

“Suguru!”

“And now you say my name?” A deep laughed rumbled as he held you close—“uh- suguru,” you looked at him closely, “Can you delete those…the pictures and all?”

He chuckled again—already aware of your angry gaze the moment he replied, “my doll really is dumb yeah? You think I would care enough to film you when I could cum at the sound of you moaning?”

“What the fuck Geto?”

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beybaldes · 10 months

Text

And somehow I know that you and I would've found each other

roy kent x gn!reader

word count : 8.7k

masterlist

summary : you and roy always end up finding your way back to each-other

content warning : taylor popped the fuck off with the speak now vault tracks especially timeless (another timeless fic coming out soon!!!!), slow burn that takes place over 36 years - dermatologists hate me! Roy’s sister is dubbed Molly yet again, I steal britanny brett for plot because I’m obsessed with @onceuponaoneshotfanfic and superstar (check it out now if you still haven’t, and if you have already, then reread it!!!!!!)

It's 1991 and youre not old enough to understand why your neighbour, and best friends older brother Roy, has to move away. You're only 4 years old, and so is Molly, and Roy's only 9 - so you're not sure why he's going away, where he's going, or if he's ever going to come back.

All you do know is that you and Molly's little arms are wrapped tightly around each other and you feel like it's never going to be enough to fill the hole of Roy's absence.

It's a cool September morning and Roy knows that December 19th - the day he gets to come back home for Christmas - is exactly 107 days away, but not even the last dregs of summers warmth can make this moment something he's going to look back fondly on.

He's got blankie folded perfectly at the bottom of his backpack and your favourite teddy bear wrapped up in it. Even though he wouldn't discover it until he'd arrived at Sunderland, you knew it was there and that Roy would look after it, and it made everything feel just a little bit better.

When Roy's Grandad announces that it's time to go, he gives you and Molly one last hug, pressing a kiss to both of your heads and promising to write and call whenever he can. You and Molly chase the car until the end of the street, where it turns a corner and Molly's mum calls you back to the house; you linger long enough to watch Roy turn from one of your best friends into a blurry figure in the back of a car.

Ms Kent gives you and Molly ice lolly's from the freezer and puts on 'Cinderella' while you eat them. She then sits through 'Sleeping Beauty,’ ‘The Little Mermaid', and 'Beauty and the Beast' with the two of you until your tears have long since stopped and you've fallen asleep in each others arms.

The following morning, Ms Kent nearly has a heart attack when she doesn't find you in Molly's bed, but her worry is soon ended when she realises the door to Roy's room is half opened and you're quietly curled up in tear stained sheets. Slowly, she wakes you up, and when fresh tears spring to your eyes she's quick to pull you into her arms. As she rocks you gently in her hold, she promises you that the prince always returns to the princess; even if it takes breaking a curse or waiting for 100 years.

They always find each-other in the end and live happily ever after.

And 107 days is nothing when you're 4 years old, it's the blink of an eye and sticky melted ice lolly on your hands, it's your first ever school uniform and glitter from Christmas crafts that you cant get off you no matter how many showers you take, and it goes by even quicker when Roy comes home 10 days sooner then expected.

You don't see him for the first 5 days. Roy locked himself away in his room and refused to come out or speak to anyone. But when the sixth day, and the weekend, finally rolls around, you decide to do something about it.

For a 9 year old, Roy sure had a lot to think about. He never got to say goodbye to his grandad, and he wasn't going to teach him how to ride a bike, or see him score his first professional goal, or get married, and he didn't know how to explain that when he went back to Sunderland come new year, he wasn't going away in the same capacity granddad had.

No 9 year old should've been thinking of all that.

Roy hadn't been expecting any visitors, not that he wanted any, but when you barged your way into his bedroom, he couldn't bring himself to send you away.

"Go away." Roy had growled, hidden beneath blankie and curled tightly into himself. "I want to be alone." Roy hadn't meant a lick of it and you hadn't believed any of it either.

"No, you don't." Though you had to wriggle your little self into his arms, you did it, and beamed proudly against his pyjama clad chest when he let you cuddle up to him. Roy had hugged you tightly, pulling you closer to him and wrapping blankie tightly around you both. "I missed you, Royo."

"You packed Dave in my bag." Roy stated, not asking why, or whether you wanted the teddy bear back, or telling you that he'd actually left it in Sunderland for when he went back in a few weeks time.

"You need him more then I do." Roy just nodded his head at your words, willing himself not to cry at the guilt he felt over leaving you and Molly behind and thinking about something other then his grandad. "And, if you have Dave, and Dave is mine, then you have to come and give him back to me. You have to come back from sundayland."

"Sunderland."

"What's that?" You tilted your head up to look at Roy, and found him already looking at you, half a smile on his lips.

"It's nothing."

Both you and Roy fell asleep in his room, under the safety of blankie, talking about 'sundayland' and everything good about his time there. It wasn't until tea time that his mum found the two of you and dragged you down stairs for dinner, teasing Roy once you'd gone home that you definitely had a little crush on him.

~*~

Roy's transfer to Chelsea once the season is over is announced just before your 16th birthday and you swear it's the best birthday present you've ever gotten. He's newly 21 and he's got this shaggy mullet thing going on that really shouldn't be working for him, but it is. You can't keep your eyes off of him, and Roy pretends not to notice for what he tells himself is your sake. He knows it isn't.

When his car pulls up in the drive for the first time since the weekend he came down for Mollys birthday, you and Molly run out of the house hand in hand to greet him, crying his name. He lets the two of you crash into him and wrap your arms tightly around him, almost squeezing him to death when he finds himself sandwiched between the two of you.

Roy's barely been on home soil for 10 seconds when Molly pulls away from the hug to look up at her big brother with the best puppy dog eyes she can muster up at 16. "Will you buy us drinks to take to leavers?”

"Fuck off, buy your own." You don't unwrap your arms from around Roy while they bicker, quite enjoying the familiarity of the scene before you. It was almost too long ago to fathom the last time Roy had been home long enough to start a fight with Molly, and though you never thought you'd say it, it was really nice to see.

"Incase you lost some brain cells this season, you have to be 18 to buy alcohol, fuckhead." Roy just stared blankly at Molly, and ran his fingers up and down the length of your arm as you stayed curled in his side, thinking about how similar Roy and Molly really are when it comes down to it. "So, I need you to buy it for us."

"Ask mum to buy it for you."

Molly immediately scoffs, throwing her hands in the air and muttering under her breath that she was genuinely concerned that Roy had lost some brain cells from all the headers he'd done this season. "Don't you think I tried that, dumbass? Mum said no to both of us."

Roy's gaze turned to meet yours, surprised to find you already looking at him. "Please Royo, everyone else will be drinking at leavers." Roy could never say no to you, and he was convinced both you and Molly knew that and had concocted this scheme to get him to buy it for you. He didn't mind saying yes, at least not this time, at least not when it was you asking.

Molly ran back into the house with an excited cry, promising to return with all the money she'd owe Roy for the drinks plus some as a charitable donation for his kindness.

For the first time in almost a year, you and Roy where completely alone together. He spared a moment to look at you, really look at you; notice how your hair had gotten longer and that your sense of style had completely changed, that the early summer sun was already tanning your skin and that you still had your arms around him. Roy only tightened his grip on you, dragging you into and around the house with him until you made it to the living room.

His mum had repainted since he'd last been down to visit from Sunderland and there were new photos on the wall behind the settee; mainly of you and Molly on your last day of school and one of Roy at his last match playing for Sunderland.

"You look like a proper footballer now, Royo." Despite every other seat in the living room being free, you took purchase on the arm of the chair right beside Roy and pray no one thinks it's a sign of the bubbling feelings you have for him. You may only be 16 but you're sure you've been in love with Roy for the better part of your life. It's one thing for everyone to tease you about you and Roy having little crushes on each other as kids, it's a whole other thing for people to tease you for having a crush on him when you actually did.

Roy scoffed, taking a long swig from the beer he'd grabbed from the kitchen when he first got to the house, swallowing down his smile. "But not enough for you to stop calling me 'Royo,' apparently."

"You could be the most famous footballer on the planet and I'd still call you Royo." You reached up for his hair and ruffled it, laughing at the way he pulled away from your touch and went to flatten his hair back out almost immediately. "But I mean it, you look like the kind of footballer kids have posters of up on their walls, that they want to be when they grow up."

And you're entirely right. Somewhere up in Manchester, a 6 year old Jamie Tartt is pinning a poster of your Roy up on his wall and promising himself, and his dad, that all of his time and money spent on football practice will one day pay off - that he's going to be one of the greats, just like Roy Kent.

"You'll always be my Royo, Roy. Even when you're super famous and don't remember me anymore." Your hand had somehow found it's way back into Roy's hair and he couldn't bring himself to move away from your touch. Since his sudden rise to fame, in which it seemed like he'd become an overnight sensation, he couldn't remember when he was last touched so gently. Touching only to touch, not because they wanted something from him or his name.

Roy couldn't keep in the smile that pulled at his lips. It faltered slightly at the fact he couldn't remember the last time he'd smiled, let alone genuinely, but it quickly returned and warmed his face when he meet your eyes. "And how could I ever forget the likes of you, yeah?"

Somewhere between shared words and glances, his hand had found yours and the two of you couldn't tear your eyes away from the other. "Dinners ready, guys." Molly was well known for her perfect timing, and despite some initial upset at the moment being taken from you, you knew it was for the better. Roy was Molly's brother, your best friends brother, who had 5 years on you yet. Though you knew it was unlikely anything would ever happen between the two of you, moments like this made you think there was a small possibility something one day would. The thought wasn't one worth seriously entertaining. "Did I... interrupt something?"

"What? No way." You and Molly ran from the room hand in hand, giggles bubbling past your lips and exchanged, in hushed whispers, the conversation that Molly had just walked in on.

It was like Roy had never left as he followed the two of you into the dining room. He took his seat across the table from you like he always did and knocked his foot against yours every time he wanted your attention. Dinner was good and before he knew it you were half on top of him on the sofa, sneaking bites from his plate of dessert as everyone else partook in the worlds most heated game of Pictionary.

He gave a sharp nudge to your ribs when you stole the last bite but quickly soothed it over with the gentle drumming of his fingers against your skin. The pair of you talked in hushed tones for the rest of the evening about his transfer to Chelsea and everything he was looking forward to now that he was back in London, as well as all your plans for your super long summer before you started college in September.

It was only when Roy's mum turned to ask if you were going home or staying over that anyone had noticed the two of you cuddled up in the armchair in the corner of the room, both fast asleep. She didn't dare wake you, thankful to see her son at peace for the first time in what felt like years, instead placing a blanket over the two of you and ushering Molly up to bed despite her insistence that you come with her.

One day, she thought, the two of you would finally see yourselves in other people, realise that if love looks like that then the two of you must be in it, and with any luck she'd still be alive to see it. She knew Roy was stubborn enough to keep that from happening. Maybe he would't be this time; at least, not when it came to you.

~*~

When the rumours of Roy's relationship with Britanny Brett are confirmed by a quote she gives in an interview, he finds himself typing out an apology to you. He stares at his phone for 3 hours and the most he can type out is 'I didn't want you to find out like this, I'm sorry,' but he still doesn't send it. Roy's not entirely sure what he's apologising for.

It's the night before his 27th birthday and he's debating whether or not he should show up to the birthday dinner his mum has planned for him tomorrow. You'll be there. He knows it. But only because he knows that Molly dragged you back from uni with her just for the occasion. And for some reason that he can't quite place, or just doesn't want to yet, he feels bad about having to see your face and hear you talk about his girlfriend.

Although Brittany Brett is smoking hot, and they have really great sex, he's not sure he wants to take her home to meet his family. To meet you. Sure, she's a great footballers girlfriend, but he's a little worried about what the people who know him as just Roy will think of her.

When she appears on the other side of his door the morning of his 27th birthday, the first thing he says to her is 'you can't come to my birthday party' and he feels like he's 8 years old again and making mortal enemies in the playground at school. She doesn't acknowledge his comment, instead inviting herself in and making herself at home in Roy's living room, and he's never been more thankful for her 'too good for everyone' demeanour.

He drops her off at her house on the way over to his mums house later that evening. Roy decides he hates the way her perfume lingers in his car and has buried itself under his skin. He wants nothing more then for it to get away from him but there's still 20 minutes left of the drive and he knows the second you hear the car pull up you'll come running out the door and he won't have anytime to get the smell off of him.

When he pulls up on the doorstep of his childhood home 20 minutes later, only Molly comes running from the house to greet him. For a minute he thinks you haven't shown up to celebrate his birthday with him and he feels his heart break in two. He tells himself he doesn't know why. However, when he walks into the house and heads straight to the kitchen in search of a beer to calm his nerves, and help him forget about you, he finds you there, helping his mum with making his favourite dinner and a wide smile on your face.

You notice him lingering, shocked, in the doorway and pull him into your arms. There's less strength to your hold then he's used to but he feels grateful that you even want him in your arms after everything he's done. Now Roy really isn't sure why he's talking like that; like you've been hard done by from his relationship with Brittany Brett. To a degree he feels like he's cheated on you, but he can't have done because the two of you were never together. However, he doesn't let the thought linger, instead pulling you tighter against him and pressing a kiss to the crown of your head. Of course you'd be here, of course you would, but he finds himself holding onto you for a little longer then he probably should just to make sure you're really here and really staying.

Dinner is nice. It's a piece of simplicity he's missed every night since he was 9 years old and heading away to Sunderland for the first time. It's not often nowadays that he gets to eat dinner at a dining table surrounded by people he loves and who love him, so he relishes in every moment of it. He lets his hand brush against yours when he asks for the salt and he nudges your foot with his every-time he wants your attention. Being in this room, in this seat, with you, is like being 8 years old again and everything bad is yet to happen to him. Roy realises he likes the feeling of it more then he ever remembers.

No one brings up Brittany Brett, the way Roy smelt like her when you hugged him, the apology he never sent, or the way you cried in Molly and Ms Kent's arms when you found out he had a girlfriend. Dinner is peaceful and you and Roy share a slice of birthday cake on his Grandad's armchair, then fall asleep together there like he doesn't have a girlfriend and you don't have a broken heart.

His mum feels like she's got two children in her house and she wishes it would stay like this forever, as long as that meant Roy couldn't hurt your heart more then he already had. But Roy is stubborn, and she knows that. When she comes downstairs in the morning it's just you on the armchair with Roy's jacket over your shoulders like a blanket. You're hugging the material tightly against you as if it could ever replace Roy's presence, and even though you're still asleep, both of you know it won't.

When Roy sneaks out at 4am, the first thing he does is drive to Brittany Brett's house and breaks up with her. After all, there's no point being with someone when you know for a fact that you're in love with someone else.

~*~

Molly's dating this guy who doesn't let her speak to you, or Roy, or her own mum and you're scared for her life. In the two times you've managed to get a hold of her, you begged and pleaded with her to leave him. She's only 25 and so are you, you could run away together and start it all over and no one would know any different. Both times she said she wanted to be with him, that she loved him. All you want is your best friend back and for her to be safe, and rather selfishly, because you need her more then you've ever needed anyone.

Despite trying all day, you can't reach her, or her boyfriend, and you don't know who else to call. Ms Kent was the only real parental figure you'd had growing up, but it was pushing midnight and you didn't want to wake her up for the sake of your own comfort. Roy's number is below hers on your favourite contacts and you don't hesitate to ring it. You know he's got a match this weekend and practice tomorrow but you need someone and you have no one else to keep you from your own mind.

Roy's in some club in north London when his phone rings and his screen illuminates with your name and a picture of the two of you from last Christmas. It's one of the newcomers 21st birthday and he remembers being 21 and moving to Chelsea, moving back home, like it was yesterday. He's got 10 years on the kid who's just starting his career while he's going on aging out of it. It's almost enough to make him feel old.

He's quick to answer the phone, practically running out of the club to make sure he can hear you and he's already walking back to his car when he hears the suppressed sniffle to your voice. Roy can't see 100% past 9pm anymore so he doesn't drink when he goes out with the team, he knows it'll only make it worse, and for the first time ever, it's actually come in use.

It takes him 37 minutes exactly to drive from the club to your childhood home that's pressed brick by brick against his, and that's only because he made a pit stop to his own house on the way over. Every time he comes back here lately, it feels like some cruel trick of fate, that he can't have you but can have his entire life shaped by you.

He's banging his fist loudly against the door before he can take into consideration that your neighbours, one of which is his own mother, are likely asleep and wouldn't take too kindly to being woken up at this hour. When you open the door to a friendly face, you all but collapse into Roy's arms, already sobbing and heaving and trying to get the words out but not being able to do so. He scoops you up into his arms, years of intense football training allowing him to do it without second though, and carries you to your bedroom.

He placed you against the pillows and then kicks off his shoes, he definitely scuffed them up in the process but Roy couldn't seem to find the time to mind. Before you've managed to get a single word out Roy's stripped off the bulk of his suit, leaving him in just a shirt, boxers and socks. The image is kind of funny and if you weren't so devastated, you were sure you'd be laughing.

"What's wrong?" When Roy's hands gently wrap around your wrists to try and pull them away from your face and get a glance at you, you just start crying harder. "C'mon sweetheart, talk to me."

When he's met with more silence he pulls out his surprise weapon, a raggedy, old teddy bear, with matted fur that smells surprisingly like Roy. "Would it be easier to talk to Dave?" Finally your hands move away from your face to get a look at the teddy bear, not believing it's right in front of you when you know you haven't seen it since you were five yours old. It took a couple of minutes, lots of sniffling, and really willing yourself to say it, but eventually you did. Roy's arms around your and the soft touch of Dave's fur against your skin settling your nerves.

"My dad died this morning." Roy didn't hesitate to pull you into his lap, settling himself against your pillows as he brought you closer to him. "And I have no one to tell. Molly's boyfriend won't let her speak to me anymore, and I didn't want to burden your mum with it, and I just... I didn't know who to call or talk to and I know you were probably busy-"

"Hey, hey, don't. You did the right thing calling me. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, yeah?" Both of Roy's hands are cradling your face, forcing you to look at him and really listen to what he wants to say. "I'm here, okay? I'm here. And I'm not going anywhere."

You shuffle in his lap, turning enough that you can bury your head in the crook of his neck and wrap your arms around his shoulders. Roy's warm and surprisingly comfy, but you reckon that's more so because the skin of his thighs are pressing into the skin of yours and you're sure it's the closest you've ever been to him. You try not to think about how you wouldn't mind being this close to him more often.

The rest of the night is spent with you in Roy's arms, his hand running up and down your back, his other hand cradling your face and wiping away each tear that spills over. He lets you ramble and ramble about everything on your mind with no regard for the fact he's got practice at 8am tomorrow. Even when you fall asleep in his arms, tears staining his brand new shirt, practice is the furthest thing from his mind, so much so that he doesn't even remember sending Di Matteo the text saying he wasn't well and wouldn't be able to make practice in the morning.

Roy wakes up a long time before you, and he finds he has to practically drag himself away from you and the bed. When his eyes blink open he sees the sight he's spent the better part of his life waiting to see: you're in his arms, fast asleep, looking entirely peaceful and for a minute he can pretend that this is his life. While the haze of sleep has yet to fade, he can act like he wakes up to you every morning, that you love him like he loves you, and that, if he wanted to, he could press kisses all over your face until you woke up and flashed him that bright beautiful smile of yours.

If he wanted to, he could press kisses all over your face until you woke up and you would greet him with a soft smile, pressing a kiss to his face in return and not caring if it landed against his lips, cheek, or jaw, because you know you'll be able to kiss the other places whenever you like.

Roy pulls himself out of bed and drags his feet all the way to your kitchen where he cooks the two of you breakfast. Nothing about it is rushed - he knows that he has nowhere to be but here, with you. He knows you've woken up when he can hear the gentle padding of your feet against your bedroom floor. Roy hears you walk down the hall, down the stairs, and into the kitchen, where you then cross the room to him, and wrap your arms around his waist. Dave is clutched in on of your hands and your head is pressed against the dimples of his shoulder blades, your other hand fiddling with the hem of the front of his T-shirt, so casually that any passer by would think this was routine. And even though it isn't, Roy takes the risk of placing his hand atop your own and lacing his fingers through yours. When he can feel you smile into his back, he thinks maybe he should've kissed you in the bedroom, that maybe you'd have liked it just as much as he would've.

~*~

It's another year after your dad died before Molly finds out. She doesn't show up to Christmas, or Easter, but she comes by one late spring afternoon when Ms Kent had invited you and Roy over for picky bits in the garden, with a bin bag full of her belongings and a black eye. If your hand wasn't holding Roy's so tightly you were sure he would've been right out of the door, driving off to find the prick and give him an even worse beating then he'd given his sister.

You pull Roy with you when you cross the garden to engulf Molly in a hug, both of you breaking down at the contact and apologies tumbling from both of your lips. Molly apologises for not being there when your dad died, and not attending the funeral, you force her to take back her apology while also shoving your own down her throat, apologising for not finding her, for not being there. The two of you only cry harder when Roy pulls the two of you, still hugging, into his embrace. It's warm and his hands are big and it makes you feel like you're a child again, and you suppose that in some ways you still are.

It takes almost half an hour for the two of you to calm down enough for any coherent words to get out, and the first ones that do is that Molly's pregnant and she needs somewhere to stay. Immediately you ask her to move in with you. It's perfect really, you're next door to her mum and you've got a room for her and for the baby (when it comes) now that your dads passed. Roy likes the idea even more; something about his three, soon to be four, favourite people being in one place taking his fancy.

The eight months between Molly showing back up and beautiful baby Phoebe being born seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. The soft, warm, yellow paint of phoebes nursery smears your memories of those months; everything about it is caked in the glow of the summer you have when you're 5 years old and have no care in the world.

You and Molly are best friends again and it's like you never missed two years of each others lives; everything just falls right back into place. The two of you do everything together and you wouldn't have it any other way, even when everything includes being in the room with her and Ms Kent when she's giving birth.

Roy, unluckily, is the only one not invited into the room, and he spends almost 6 hours pacing back and forth and back and forth and back and forth in the waiting room, waiting for some kind of an update on his sister and his niece. It's you that comes to give it to him. You're in blue scrubs that you pull off further with every step you take into the waiting room, running right into Roy's arms with the widest smile he's ever seen cross your face.

"She's beautiful, Roy. She's so beautiful." He just nods his head and allows you to take his hand and pull him in the direction of the room Molly and his mum are in. "I love her so much already and she's only been here for 5 minutes."

Roy understood what you meant as soon as he walked into the room. Molly was absolutely glowing, and cradling this tiny, tiny baby in her arms like she was terrified any movement at all might hurt her - she didn't even look like she was breathing less it hurt the baby.

"Do you want to hold her?" You whispered, nudging his foot with yours to gain his attention. "You won't break her, promise." You didn't give Roy the opportunity to answer, instead eagerly taking the baby off of Molly and walking over to Roy. His mum all but pushed him into one of the chairs they had in the room and lectured him on how to hold the baby correctly. Slowly, you lowered her into his arms, making sure he had a comfortable and safe grip on her before you removed your arms from the little Phoebe completely. "Isn't she amazing?"

Roy can already picture it and it's breaking his heart. You, and him, and a little baby wrapped in a blanket with eyes that don't yet know how to open. But, in the daydream he doesn't tell anyone about, you're holding the baby and his arms are around you, whispering how much he loves you into your ear and promising to do everything for that baby. Your baby. He doesn't yet know if a day like that is ever going to come; he'd have to get over himself first, and he doesn't see that happening anytime soon. For you, however, he just might try.

"Yeah, yeah she is."

Molly and little baby Phoebe have to stay in the hospital overnight, but can be discharged in the morning, and Molly doesn't let any of you stay with her. In fact, she demands the three of you head home and come back tomorrow, well rested to drive her and newborn Phoebe home.

The three of you pick up some chinese takeout on your way home and eat it around Ms Kent's dinner table. Molly's absence is so heavily felt that part of you feels thrust back in time to a year ago, when you didn't have any contact with her and didn't know if she was even alive, let alone okay. It shakes you to your core and you leave your dinner half eaten as you excuse yourself to the bathroom just to breathe. When you return to the table, you find that dinner has been cleared away, but Ms Kent is holding out a spoon for you, pointing you in the direction of the living room.

Roy's sat in his grandads armchair with the biggest bowl of ice cream you've ever seen and he opens up his arms to you when he feels you staring at him from the doorway. You didn't hesitate to sit with him, squished up in the seat that fit the both of you slightly better when you were kids, with Roy's arm around your shoulders. When you didn't take a large helping of ice cream for yourself, he nudged the bowl in your direction.

"When Molly came home, I'd get in bed with her each night." You whispered, only loud enough that Roy would be able to hear you. It felt embarrassing, to try and explain why you felt Molly's absence for one night so vastly, but you knew that if anyone would get it, it would be Roy. "For the first month or so, she'd ask me to stay with her, so she knew she wasn't alone and she was safe. So I did. And then one night she was like 'I don't need you in bed with me anymore, I think I'm okay now,' and I didn't know what to do." You stuck your spoon inside the ice-cream, stirring it around the bowl but never bringing the build up of vanilla on the spoon to your lips. "I got in bed that night and I couldn't sleep at all, so I went and knocked on her door and she was still awake. Told me she couldn't sleep either, and I got right back into bed with her." Tears pricked at your eyes and your spoon fell against the bowl. "I don't know what to do without Molly, Royo, I don't want to have to do without her again."

Roy quickly moved the half eaten bowl of ice cream to the coffee table, pulling you into him and cradling your head against his shoulder. "Molly's not going anywhere, babe, she'll be home in the morning. Everything's going to be okay."

Neither of you brought up how he called you babe, and his mum didn't bring up how you fell asleep cuddled up in the armchair like you did when you were kids. But when Roy brought Phoebe and Molly home the following morning, and Molly and Ms Kent had taken Phoebe upstairs to get her settled into her new home, he pulled you in for a hug.

"Told you so." He whispered in your ear, pressing a featherlight kiss to your temple. Then Roy grabbed your hand, interlocking your fingers with his and pulling you up the stairs to join Phoebe in her new room. Dave was in his other hand and he continued to stand by you as you placed it in the crib with her, knowing that she needed Dave more then you or Roy did now.

All of you couldn't wait to watch this little girl grow up surrounded by people who loved her so, so much.

~*~

Roy gets transferred to Richmond just before Phoebe's 4th birthday and you tease him that he has a penchant for getting the best kinds of birthday present. He asks why you remember so clearly that his transfer to Chelsea 15 years ago was just before your 16th birthday, and you answer honestly that it was the only thing you'd wanted for your birthday that year - for Roy to be closer to home. You immediately get to tease him again as a blush coats his cheeks.

On his first day at Richmond, he gets you, Molly and Phoebe seats in the family box, says that they'll always be there if you ever want to come and watch him play, and you reply that you always watch him play.

"I've been playing professionally for half my life. Sunderland, Chelsea, and now Richmond. I've never seen you even glimpse at a football match."

You scoff immediately and Roy's slightly taken aback, you almost look angry at what he's saying and he doesn't know why because he's right. Not that it matters to him, but you just don't like football that much; he doesn't blame you or anything, each to their own, but he wishes you'd like it for him. "I've seen every game you've ever played."

"Yeah, right."

"Yeah, right." You turned to Roy, putting down the bag filled with Phoebe's first ever school uniform inside now that you'd made it back home. "I'm serious. I've watched every match you've ever played in. All of your games with Sunderland and Chelsea, and I'll watch all your games now that you're at Richmond." You turn to Roy with a tense crease in your brow and he's wishing he never brought it up. "You're important to me Roy, of course I'd watch every time you play."

"What's sundayland, babe?" Phoebe had ran into the living room when she'd heard the door go, excited that you and Roy returned home. Molly and you had called each other babe since you were teenagers, and Phoebe had taken to calling you babe over your actual name. It didn't help that Roy had let it slip a few time too, only reassuring her that she was calling you by the correct thing.

"It's nothing, pheeb's." You scooped the little blonde into your arms, resting her against your jutted out hip and beginning to wander through the house. "Where your mum? You need to try on your uniform."

"Can I give you a fashion show?" She asked, leaning her head against your shoulder in a way that had Roy thinking about the two of you with a kid again. He'd have to ask you out first, and with each year that passed, the possibility of him actually doing that seemed to get slimmer and slimmer.

"Of course you can, Pheeb's. Go get dressed. Me and your uncle Roy will wait in the living room."

You stuck to your word, watching every single match that Roy played in. Sometimes at Nelson road, sometimes with Molly and Phoebe, sometimes in Ms Kent's living room - but you always watched him play.

The first time Molly let you take Phoebe to Nelson road was as your birthday present the same year Phoebe turned 6. You'd been pleading all year for Molly to let you bring Phoebe along to a home game, and she finally caved - on the condition you kept her ear defenders on all night and left if it got too much for her. Phoebe loved every minute of the match, screamed her little heart out just for the sake of joining in, even if she didn't know what people were saying; You were certain her cry of 'uncle Roy' every time she saw him with the ball was the loudest in the stadium.

When the match was over, a man with glasses found you in the stands, introduced himself as 'Higgins,' handed you two family lanyards with Kent plastered all over them, and asked you to follow him. You're barely in the changing rooms when Phoebe lets go of your hand, crying Roy's name and interrupting a speak from that new, American coach that Roy had complained about.

"Phoebe!" The blonde didn't wait up for you, running right at Roy and knowing he'd catch her when she flung herself the remaining foot into his arms. "What did I tell you?"

"I didn't know grandad fancied himself a cradle robber." You'd heard enough complaints to know the dig at Roy was from Jamie Tartt, the season loan from Manchester City. "Surely, someone like you isn't married to someone like Roy."

The twinge of disgust that slipped from the mans mouth when he said Roy's name had your blood boiling. "Why? Would you rather me with the likes of you instead?"

Jamie stood in dumbfounded silence as you turned back to Roy, your face entirely brightening, and his presence being totally ignored for the rest of your stay in the lock room. He wasn't used to that. He was trying to compliment you, say you were way out of Roy's league - maybe even ask for your number - but you didn't even spare him a second glance. In fact, now that your eyes were back on him, he wasn't entirely sure you were ever going to look away from Roy again. It made sense when he thought about it in bed later that night, even though he teased the fuck out of Roy and sometimes plainly treated him like shit, Roy Kent was one of the greats. Even Jamie Tartt knew that, and had known it since he was 6 years old - of course he'd managed to score someone like you.

Murmurs of Roy Kent having a secret spouse and daughter had filled Nelson Road before you'd even left the building.

It wasn't that Roy didn't want to talk about you. If he had the opportunity, he'd scream about you from rooftops, but being a footballer was a very public affair and he loved his privacy. Almost as much as he loved you.

The dog track didn't think they'd ever see your face again, not when Roy had growled at them after he'd guided you and Phoebe out of the changing room. Unfortunately for them, they would, under the worst possible circumstances.

You'd been on the edge of your seat the whole match. Roy's been benched for the first time in what you're sure is his entire career and doesn't come on until the 60th minute and when he does, you swear he's on fire. He's playing better then he'd ever played before, running faster then he's ever ran in the past few years, and he's slide tackling Jamie Tartt and getting the ball away from the goal. People are screaming his name and so are you.

And then he's not getting up.

And then he's still not getting up.

And then he's still not getting up, the cheers have died down, and everyone's waiting with baited breath while it's determined if they've just seen the end of Roy Kent's 30 year long career with their own eyes.

And then Roy gets up, and for a fleeting moment you think that maybe everything's okay, that Roy's okay, and he's going to carry on playing.

And then he's walking from the pitch, limping, and your sprinting from your seat in the family box and running up to the owners box. You don't have to say a word because Rebecca calls a member of security over to you, and asks with a kind smile for him to guide you down to the changing rooms.

You linger outside the door for about 5 seconds before you push it open. If you were anyone else, you'd were certain he would've yelled at you to get out, even though he didn't mean it, just for the sake of his image. But you weren't anyone else, you were you.

"I'm fine." You hadn't even made it fully into the room and Roy was already trying to make his pain seem less bad then it was. "I'm fine. Go watch the rest of the match. You might have to drive us back to yours though."

"Roy." He doesn't say anything as you cross the room and sit beside him on the bench. You slowly wrap your arm around his shoulders and tangle your fingers into his hair, pulling his head down to rest against your shoulder. "Don't. I wouldn't want to be anywhere else, yeah? You're important to me, let me be here for you."

Roy kisses you and you instantly realise you'd have waited 33 more years for it, if that meant it would happen.

His lips are chapped, and his beard is slightly scratchy, and he's already breathless before he even leans into it but you don't mind. You find that his lips slant against yours perfectly and he slides you closer against him on the bench, using the hand he'd placed on your hip to give it a squeeze, eliciting an gasp from you. He takes the opportunity to slide his tongue into your mouth but he pulls away before it can escalate.

You hope to anything listening that he wants to kiss you again, because you're sure he's ruined the touch of everyone else's lips against your skin for you.

"I've been in love with you since I was 5 years old." Roy pressed his lips back to yours in a quick succession of kisses and you're sure that thats a good sign.

"Since you were 5 years old?" He asks, nudging his nose against yours, pressing his lips firmly to yours when they brush slightly as he speaks. "Fuck, did we waste a lot of time."

~*~

Roy's been the manager of Richmond for the last 4 months and you're thankful that there's no football on over Christmas. You get Roy practically all to yourself for three weeks and it's the best feeling ever.

Phoebes still in school until the 22nd, and you live together at Roy's house, so there's no chance Molly will walk in on the two of you or his mum will hear you through the walls - meaning 90% of his first week off work is spent having sex on every surface in the house, in every position imaginable.

The second week off is the main bulk of Christmas. You pick Phoebe up from school on the 22nd and she has a sleep over at your house. The 23rd is spent curled up on your couch, with Phoebe sandwiched between the two of you, watching Christmas movies all day and stuffing your faces with popcorn and hot chocolate. Phoebe spends the night again, and then the three of you drive down to Ms Kent's house at lunchtime on the 24th. Molly comes home from work around 6pm and the 5 of spend the rest of the evening in the living room, watching 'love actually' and 'the polar express,' until it's time for bed. Even though you and Roy have been together for nearly 3 years now, you sleep in Molly's bed with her and Phoebe, reminiscing on the christmas's of your childhood and giggling over them until you fall asleep.

When christmas morning finally comes, you and Molly are the last awake, Phoebe jumping all over the two of you and demanding you get downstairs as soon as possible to see what Father Christmas has left for her. You let Phoebe drag you down stairs even though you're barely awake and you crawl into Roy's lap, in his grandads armchair, at the first opportunity. He's already got a coffee made for you, just the way you like it, and a warm hand that he slips up the back of your tshirt to scratch gently against your skin as you watch Phoebe begin to open her mountain of presents.

"How many of these are from you?" You whisper, feeling Roy smile against your temple as you sip on your coffee, slowly waking up in his arms.

"Enough. They're not all for Pheeb's anyway." Roy picks you up enough to adjust your position in his lap, making it more comfortable for the both of you to sit and talk and watch presents getting opened. "Some for my mum, some for Molly, some for you."

"You're too kind to me, baby." You lean up enough to press a kiss to Roy's lips, ignoring the loud screech Phoebe lets out at the display of affection. "I got some stuff for you under there too, handsome."

"I don't see you under that tree, Father Christmas clearly mustn't have got my list." Even though you're not looking directly at Roy you can feel the smirk that is pulling at his lips.

Before you could comment on what that could possibly mean Phoebe was calling your name, sticking her hand out with a tiny, paper-wrapped box in her palm. "This one's for you, it says it's from uncle Roy!"

"For me, huh? Lets have a look then, shall we Pheeb's?" Phoebe abandoned her half opened pile of gifts to stand beside you, leaning over the arm of the arm chair and over your shoulder to get a prime look at the gift as you opened it. "Thank you, baby."

Roy pinched your hip teasingly, pressing a kiss to your cheek as he intently watched you carefully unfold the wrapping paper. "Open it first, you might not like it. I kept the receipt so... just say the word and we'll get it changed."

"It's from you, Royo, I'm sure I'll love it." You punctuated your words with a kiss to his lips, not realising just how much your words would ring true until you'd fully unwrapped the box; finding a navy blue, velvet ring box and tears in Ms Kent's eyes. "Roy..."

"I spent 36 years of my life not knowing you felt the same way about me as I felt about you." Roy took the box gently from your hold and opened it, taking the dainty and elegant ring from it and holding it between the two of you. "And I don't plan to waste another moment of my life without you by my side."

"Yes."

"Oi, you're supposed to let me fucking ask you first." A laugh bubbled past your lips despite the tears building in your eyes. "Will you make me the happiest man alive, and marry me?"

"Yes." Your hands found Roy's face before his could place the ring on your finger, pulling him into a hot and forceful kiss, tilting his head back with how much you leaned into it, into him. "Yes. Yes. Yes, please."

"You owe me £1, Uncle Roy."

Tears are shed and the rest of the gifts are opened. Christmas dinner goes by without a hitch, and before you know it the days nearly over and you find yourself in Roy's lap, in his grandads armchair, with one bowl of dessert between the two of you, like so many times before. Ms Kent is sat across from the two of you with her own bowl of dessert and she looks like she wants to say something about it. She doesn't, but only because she knows, and she knows that you and Roy know. This day was a long time coming and she's over the moon that it's come in her lifetime.

Roy's love for you was stronger then any will he had to remain stubborn, and after a life time of waiting, he'd finally found his way to you, and she was sure he would find his way to you in every lifetime; even if it took 100 years or breaking a curse. Like she'd told you on that cool September morning, the prince always comes back, and they always live happily ever after. And she was sure the two of you were going to as well.

an : if you made this this far I love you!!! I hope you enjoyed another super long Roy fic, feel free to leave some feedback or what your favourite part of the story was, or even a request from my summer sleepover prompts!! Mwah <333

#beybaldes writes !!#ted lasso x reader #roy kent one shot #roy kent x reader #roy kent imagine

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jennifer-jeong · 1 month

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Okay so first, I really love your LnD fics (patiently waiting for more of your amazing works) 🥹🫶 and hear me out...

Reader who is reincarnated as a Fae being and has been alive since. But the thing is, her wings had been clipped off (with the use of silver chains, meaning she's vulnerable against silver) for a century and is in Linkon city since she feels that part of her (her wings) are somewhere hidden in the city (Think of Maleficent live action ig where her wings were taken from her) and meets the guys and so on :)

HI ANON THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR YOUR ASK AND YOUR KIND WORDS FJDSKLAFJSDL;A I APPRECIATE IT SM!! TY FOR INTERACTING!! I’m so glad to hear you like my fics and I promise more are on the way hehehe please do request me again if you have more ideas!!

I hope I did your prompt justice! I definitely did think a lot about maleficent when writing this hehehehe

[Fluff + Angst] [Love and Deepspace Boys x Fae!Reader] Angel

CONTENT Angst to fluff, gender neutral reader, mentions of violence, blood, trauma, torture, healing alongside them, mutual pining between you and the boys, happy and open ended endings! ALL CHARACTERS ARE 18+

Your wings were a pretty and pearly milky white. Your wings resembled those of high flying birds. They were thick enough to allow gliding and also strong enough to give you lots of control in the air. They were iridescent in the sun and carried you high in the bright sky. The air was thin but more refreshing up there. You played with clouds and soared through the endless blue. It was freedom. It made you feel alive, warm.

It was your gift, but unfortunately, it was on someone else’s wishlist.

You’d never been a spiteful being, nor had you ever hurt a fly. But when silver chains ripped your flesh and tore your muscle to take your wings, severing your very soul from your body. When they destroyed your forest, your home, your family, your heart. You swore to make them suffer.

You were powerful and hunting these fools down was nothing difficult for you. The problem was hunting without your wings, your best weapon.

The lack of mobility and being forced to fight on the ground made it so that you could maim the weak ones, but you could never reach the ones who profited off the suffering of you and your people.

Linkon city is where they were. You knew this. You could feel your wings there. You also knew that you’d need to hide, figure out who did what and how to get your damn wings back. It would take time, but time was all you had as a fae. You’d do whatever it took to make them pay.

It’d take years, but it was worth it.

2 years later and you’ve already made moves to apprehend (and torture) a few key figures, always leaving them in front of the police station when you were done. You still had so much good in you and it always prevented you from killing. But it made you seethe that they were filthy fucking rich from what they stole from your homeland. They sold your resources and displayed your bodies, your wings, like they were trophies. Life was still cold and depressing for you but you did manage to make some friends in Linkon. They’d even help you with your mission. You only trusted them with the information because they had similar goals.

XAVIER

Xavier was a local policeman you had met a few decades into your plot when you were hired to help with the case. He was coincidentally also investigating illegal hunters and black markets selling goods stolen from other civilizations such as yours. It was a big ring of crime and he was determined to end the atrocities that were being committed in it. Meeting you was just extra motivation on top of his already relentless drive for justice. You became investigative partners since you were both capable in combat and often investigated the same people anyways.

Xavier was kind, gentle, quiet, and stronger than he let on. He always worked without expectation of reward and you appreciated that. You just wanted justice and he wanted the same. It helped that he didn’t seek publicity because it would’ve made your life harder since you were probably wanted as a vigilante from before. Xavier taught you his philosophies and you realized you’d been consumed by your desire for revenge, unable to enjoy life outside of it. You admired him for his morals, so you learned from him, and it made you two grow closer. He was more than happy to help, it was so rewarding to see you slowly become your bubbly self that he guesses you lost a long time ago.

He had his suspicions that you might be fae. The man was smart but he played his cards carefully, he always held them close. He acted aloof with you and pretended to not constantly stare at the back of your shirt, trying to see if you had imprints of missing wings on your shoulder blades. He also figured that your motivation for wanting to crack these cases came from somewhere. If he also managed to figure out that you’d been behind some of the previous mysterious arrests, he’d turn a blind eye. He knew your actions weren’t crimes. He felt glad that you got them back for what they did to you and your people.

After a few years of planned raids and dozens of arrests, one of the recovered items from the warehouse was a beautiful pair of wings. Still buzzing with magic, craving to feel the wind again. You felt them when they were being transported to the police HQ. The surge of energy that continued to approach you made you hold your breath and bounce your leg out of pure anxiety. Xavier put a hand on your shoulder to try to calm you down. He’d already figured out what was going on just by looking at you. You didn’t need to say a word. It was something that slowly came naturally since you two spent so much time together. You smiled and he smiled warmly back. You were in the middle of panicking because Xavier was still touching you when you were presented with your missing soul, your wings. You requested to view the “evidence” privately with Xavier and wasted no time in feeling your delicate wings with your fingertips again.

Xavier stood behind you, his right hand found its way to your upper back. He finally traced the outlines of your cut wings. It made you gasp at first, but you trusted him. As he continued to feel them, you shivered. They were scars, they were more sensitive. He stepped to your side and you turned to partially face him, his hand sliding off of you. You looked into his eyes and your longstanding feelings for Xavier were making their presence known by heating up your face, flushing your cheeks. You swore you saw a slight tinge of red on the tips of his ears too. He spoke to you in his familiar voice that you loved so much. He decided to tease you slightly.

“I think I always knew that you’d have wings, you were too perfect to not be an angel.”

ZAYNE

Zayne was a surgeon you’d met one day when he treated your wounds since you collapsed outside the hospital. He discovered the scars where your wings used to sit on your back. You were high off the morphine when he checked your back for more injuries so you barely even realized.

He questioned you but not in the way you expected. You thought he wouldn’t know what they were or try to take advantage of you. But instead he asked what you knew about the hunters that took your wings. He already knew exactly what happened to you just by looking. He was involved in cracking down on research related to Fae and Lemurians since there were people trying to fuse their genetics with these races to gain their beneficial traits such as immortality.

He knew some things you didn’t know and vice versa. You both began working on this together, investigating research facilities, interrogating suspects, and fighting only when needed. You were unstoppable and the law didn’t plan to ask you to let up. You both hand delivered them collectors and shadowy figures that had hid from the police for so long. When you fought, Zayne could both heal and attack from afar while you rushed them head on. You were unafraid because you believed in your partner, your trust in Zayne only grew as the years went on.

Early on, Zayne encouraged you to let go of the spite, the revenge. You knew he was right when he said that they did not benefit you in this. He saw the rage in you and could see that it was hurting you, mentally and physically. You listened, you knew better. You stopped the relentless tortures and instead, let the collectors rot in jail, but not before you got in a few good punches. Zayne watched you slowly come out of your shell again, actually taking the time to enjoy the little things in life instead of being hyper focused on revenge. He’d be lying if he said you weren’t one of the most rewarding patients he’d ever had.

Working with your partner was definitely quite the rollercoaster. He was always so professional and mature but would also randomly tease you as if you were kids, albeit with a fully deadpan expression. Zayne was reserved and often came off as cold but he made you so warm. You knew he was an extremely compassionate and kind person under his exterior and you admired him for it. Zayne also adored you in the same way. You had gone through so much pain and suffering but you still smiled and shined like the sun.

Over time you adapted to live without your wings but after one specific raid on a collector’s mansion, you knew exactly what the collector’s prized possession was because it belonged to you. You could feel your wings. They still surged with energy and upon seeing them when you went to do follow up investigation, you immediately called to them. They flew towards you and you inspected them, almost not believing the scene in front of you. Zayne stayed close ready to support you, especially if you were to fuse with your wings again, he knew it’d be hard to keep them hidden and it’d just bring up so much previous trauma.

You turned to face him slowly, leaving your wings behind you. You hesitated. Not letting your wings fuse with you yet. Zayne looked into your eyes, trying to comfort you with his presence. After a few seconds, Zayne held out his hand, you took it. His skin was cold but somehow it made yours burn, the heat spreading through your body as your face warmed up. He spoke quietly to you, telling you to take your time. You closed your eyes and took deep breaths, your thumb slowly caressing the back of Zayne's hand as he did the same back.

Zayne had always been good at comforting you with his words, maybe it just came naturally since he was a doctor. Regardless, you knew it was exactly what you needed right now. You didn’t know what you’d do after you got your wings back. Would you go home? Would you continue this mission with Zayne? Would having your wings make it harder? Would it make it easier? You confided in Zayne as you spoke your thoughts out loud. Once you were done, you were overwhelmed and he could tell. He started his reply with a sentence that filled you with warmth, hope, and a little bit of giddiness. He speaks, teasing you a bit at the end, his face flushing.

“It doesn’t matter what you are or if you have the wings or not, you’re beautiful and you should follow your heart… especially if it’s here.”

RAFAYEL

Rafayel was a painter “looking for art or inspiration” that you met at an underground event where illegal goods were being sold, but you quickly figured out it was a front. Rafayel was a Lemurian, you sensed it immediately since you weren’t human. As a fae you had the ability to sense certain things, and so did Rafayel. Upon meeting each other at an art exhibition, you quickly exchanged information and agreed to meet up again the next day. You almost simultaneously revealed that you were both after the hunters that destroyed your homes when you finally got to chat alone.

The two of you start to frequent more underground events, both of you being well connected and hiding your true intentions very well. You use the events to gather information and then put your plans into action when your targets are alone. It worked amazingly well, you were both extremely skilled and efficient at what you did. It slowly chipped away at this network that shamelessly destroyed your beautiful homes.

Rafayel was a bit of a loose cannon. The man was so sweet and bashful one second and deadly serious the next. He was so gentle with you but didn’t hesitate when there was business that needed to be done. He could easily switch it on and off too. You were just glad you were on his side of this war.

Both you and Rafayel were out for revenge but something about your partnership changed you two. You both slowly helped each other heal, confiding your worries and traumas in each other. You were still both ruthless when it came to apprehending the people who did you wrong but the tortures stopped and the warmth returned outside of the violence. You two actually started to make good memories and live life instead of just trying to survive. You’d often watch the sunset over the ocean together, it was peaceful and you’d chat about anything and everything.

Eventually, after dozens of raids and missions, Rafayel finds weapons that used to belong to his family at the same time you find your wings again. You kept quiet until the mission was done, knowing you could feel your wings but not wanting to startle Rafayel. You looked at the weapons with him, you put your hand on his back to show your support for him. His eyes stayed glued on the knives and his face was a painful melancholic expression. You rubbed circles into his upper back with your thumb, hoping it could ease some of the pain caused by resurfacing memories.

After ensuring that the weapons would be sent to his personal studio, he continues to explore the mansion with you, following you while you find your wings. You communicated to him about your wings and he knew this would be tough for you too but you were both glad you had each other in this moment.

When you saw your wings in a display case at the end of one of the hallways, you bit back tears. It was a lot to take in. You passed millions of dollars worth of paintings to reach the most priceless thing in this whole building. Rafayel lags slightly behind you, wanting to give you a moment. You turn to face him, telling him that you don’t know if you want the wings back or not. Would they make you complete again? They can’t bring anyone back, can’t take away the pain. You couldn’t hide them like Rafayel could hide his true form, would it be a nuisance?

Rafayel makes his way towards you as you ramble, clearly distressed. He quickly envelopes you in a hug, letting you cry lightly into his chest, a painting of Lucifer on the wall next to you. You stay like that for a while. When he finally pulls back, he cups your face with his hands. You were his fallen angel, he wasn’t always great with his words but he truly spoke from the heart when comforting you like this.

“You never needed these wings to be complete, you’re ethereal with or without them. You’ll always be my angel, no matter what.”

Thank you for reading!

|| MASTERLIST<3 ||

#love and deepspace x reader #lads x reader #l&ds x reader #xavier x reader #xavier fluff #xavier angst #zayne x reader #zayne fluff #zayne angst #rafayel x reader #rafayel fluff #rafayel angst #love and deepspace fluff #love and deepspace angst #lads fluff #l&ds fluff #j's silly ramblings #j's asks

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hellfirenacht · 7 months

Text

Wing Man Part 3

A/N: This fic is all vibes, no plot so it's hard to write lol. I have a few ideas now thanks to the wonderful @crocwork-clockodile and @hellfiredarling 💜

As usual, typos are fixed live and in post lol

Fic Summary: Steve ‘the Hair’ Harrington is your best friend, and is constantly striking out. Sick of this, you two make a deal; you’ll wing man for each other. Hooking Steve up with dates is easy, but he finds himself struggling to find you a date. At least, until Dustin starts talking about his new cool friend Eddie.

Chapter Summary: You really should be trying to flirt, but somehow you and Eddie can only ever talk about Chris Morrison.

5k words

Part 1 Part 2

Steve did not show back up for at least a half hour after he ‘went to the bathroom’. Had you not been in your current situation, you would have made fun of him for being ‘backed up’ or something along those lines.

But in all honesty, you hardly even noticed that he was gone. When Eddie dropped the puck the world had faded into a whirlwind of clacking, yelling, and pitting children against each other. With the sudden death match, Dustin had won. You had taken Mike's place, giving him a condescending pat on the head. He hadn’t been pleased about the situation, but at least it kept him from saying whatever rule-grudge that he held against Eddie.

To your surprise, Eddie had stuck around to watch the match between you and Dustin. You tried not to be too nervous as the match went on, but your freshman friend was your saving grace even as he kicked your ass.

“Eddie’s been the leader of Hellfire for years now.” Dustin said, dropping the puck down and hitting it. “He’s always been the DM.”

“Except for Chris Morrison.” you said.

“Yeah except that guy.” Dustin nodded.

“He started the club, but I made it the merry band of bandits and misfits that it is today.” Eddie said, his hands resting against the side of the table, leaning forward. You’d only been chatting with him and Dustin for a few minutes, but you had quickly learned that Eddie was not the type to stay still for very long.

“You’re gonna get your finger smashed if you keep your hand there.” you said, glancing at how close his fingers were to the smooth surface of the rink. “You’re putting a lot of trust in geometry that this puck isn’t going to crush your hand. It’s already tried to kill me once.” You doubted that the heavy silver rings on his fingers would help at all.

Eddie looked down at his hands and pulled back, just in time for the puck to nearly hit where his fingers had been. “Shit, I didn’t even notice.”

“I notice everything.” You said, not noticing as Dustin smacked the puck at an angle that went directly into your goal. “I notice some things.”

Dustin laughed, and Eddie even grinned at the joke. With that point it was game set and match, or something like that.

“Alright, I’m going to go win some tickets now.” Dustin said, putting the clacker? Paddle? Not-Hockey Stick? Down. You still didn’t know what it was called, but luckily air hockey probably wouldn’t come up again later.

You expected Eddie to leave again, but instead he leaned back against the table, now free to let his fingers dangle without fear of being crushed.

“So you really were interested in Hellfire when you were still in school?” he asked, tilting his head over at you. That same distant and unreadable expression on his face. You really wished that you knew what he was thinking right now.

“Yeah, I saw you guys always having fun so I thought I wanted to try.” you said. “But, you know. Chris Morrison.”

“Forget about Chris Morrison.” Eddie turned towards you, standing upright and looking down at you. How did he feel so tall all of the sudden? How did he keep doing that? What magic switch was he able to turn on and off in his brain to make him go from ‘just a guy’ to ‘hey, I’m in charge here.’? “What made you have an interest in Dungeons and Dragons?”

“The dragons first, and then the dungeons.” It was the first thing that popped into your head, and you immediately realized it was maybe a little stupid and sarcastic. To be fair, you also were a little stupid and sarcastic, but with the way he was looking at you, Eddie wanted a real answer. The look on his face was actually a little funny, the way his whole face fell in annoyance.

Right, he didn’t know you. You didn’t know him. He was still trying to decide if you were some sort of friend or foe. You suspected that if Dustin hadn’t chatted with you so easily through your match with him Eddie wouldn’t have bothered talking to you more.

Maybe you should fire Steve and make Dustin your wing man instead.

He didn’t immediately leave though, which made you assume that you were being given a second chance to give him a real answer.

“Alright, I played a lot of make-believe as a kid.” you said. “Then as I got older, people stopped playing, but I wasn’t ready to be done. Then when I heard about this club where you could play make-believe again, I thought it would let me have that feeling again. I thought it’d be cool to, I don’t know, have people to play with again.”

It was a childish answer, but it was a real one. Everything in your life after middle school had been a steady monotonous stream of ‘work, home, work, school, home, school function, work, home’.

“Hellfire Club isn’t Make-Believe Club.” Eddie said, still staring you down. “Yeah, it’s a fantasy game but we take it seriously. It’s not all princesses and fairy tales.”

Actually, this guy might be getting on your nerves now.

“You’re taking my answer awful personally.” you said, straightening up under his gaze. You didn’t care how intimidating he was trying to be right now, he had pissed you off. “You asked why I wanted to play, I gave you my answer. You don’t have to like it, but there it is.”

He seemed taken aback by your bluntness. He blinked, his round eyes shifting to something else. “You’re right.” he said finally with a subtle laugh. “That was a dick thing to say. I really sounded like Chris Morrison for a second.”

“Yeah, you did.” you agreed. “You always this cynical about people?”

“Well, when you’re the town freak it comes with the title.” he shrugged.

“Does it come with a sash too? Or perhaps a crown?”

“No, unfortunately Hawkins High didn’t have that in the budget this year.”

“You should take that up with the student council.”

“Or City Hall.”

He was smiling at you now, and you hated how that smile was brighter than any of the flashing lights of the arcade. The longer you looked at him, the more attractive he got. God, you were going to kill Steve for delivering something you couldn’t have.

Eddie’s demeanor changed as you two bantered, no longer on edge now. Now that he seemed sure that you weren’t here to cause problems or were just looking to laugh at the freaks, his stance was much more relaxed. You looked him over again, taking advantage of his gaze drifting to where two other members were hunched over an arcade cabinet.

He had long wavy brown hair, and you tried to place how you could have missed that in school. Surely you would have remembered someone like him, right? It felt so much like you were missing something, but you couldn’t place where you knew him. It was going to drive you insane.

“So it looks like I’m done here.” You jumped as Steve appeared behind you. You looked over at him, your face reading with panic at the idea of him ditching out on you now. Yeah, things were going a lot better without him here, and he had not been very helpful-

Okay, maybe he didn’t need to be here to help with your attempt to flirt but you still weren’t exactly eager to be left alone.

Eddie looked between the two of you and you turned to Eddie. “I’ll be right back, I’m gonna see him off.” You said.

“Right, yeah.” Eddie nodded. He was on his guard again and you felt bad that Steve’s presence caused that.

Eddie and Steve looked at each other, a tension between the two of them. For five full seconds they just stared at each other with you in the middle, wondering what the actual fuck was going on.

That’s when Eddie threw up his hands over his hand in an imitation of horns and sputtered at Steve who was immediately taken aback. It was so out of left field, and you let out a laugh before covering your mouth and grabbing Steve and dragging him away towards the entrance.

“What was that about?” you asked as you two stepped outside. “And where the hell were you for the past half hour?”

“I was giving you space because you weren’t going to get anywhere with me around.” Steve said, looking back over his shoulder. Eddie had disappeared into the arcade with his club. “He really does live up to his nickname.”

“Nickname? You’re trying to set me up with a high schooler with a nickname?” You sighed.

“Yeah, and you were basically drooling over him the whole time you were talking so, you know, you’re welcome about that.” Steve said. “Everyone called him a freak in school so, Eddie ‘the Freak’ Munson.”

“Yeah, he mentioned something about being the town freak.” you said. “Why’s he a freak exactly?”

Steve tilted his head, as if he couldn’t tell if you were joking or serious. “He runs a club called Hellfire, plays that weird game you and Dustin keep talking about, and just- look at him! With the long hair and the chains and metal patches.”

“According to you, I was looking at him.” you snorted. “So he plays games and dresses differently and has taste in music. Doesn’t make him a freak.”

“Right, I forgot you’re a total weirdo who’d be into that.”

“He was your idea!”

Steve couldn’t argue with that. All the things that he would have found off putting to him in high school now seemed to parallel and fit with someone who he now considered a close friend. He’d been wrong about a lot in the past year, maybe he’d been wrong about Eddie too.

“So are you gonna actually flirt with him when I leave or are you just gonna stand there and make small talk?” Steve asked, crossing his arms. “I introduced you two, at least tell me you’re going to put in the effort.”

You winced and glanced back to the arcade, you couldn’t see Eddie but you knew he was still in there.

“You’ve got to be kidding me.” Steve gawked at you. “This whole thing was your idea and you’re not even going to try?”

“Listen, Steve, I like him. I do. That’s the problem. You actually hit the nail on the head, and he is absolutely my type.”

“So what’s the problem?”

“I’m not his type.” you admitted. “See, I know guys like Eddie. I’ve fallen for guys like Eddie. Funny thing about a lot of male weirdos, freaks, and outcasts, is that they still loooove themselves some popular girls. Girls like that love them because they’re trying to either fix them or piss off their parents. Freak guys don’t like weirdo girls.”

“You’re being the biggest dingus in the world and I think you’re full of shit.” Steve said bluntly. “Nice try, but you’re gonna go in there and flirt with him. Did he actually say that he was into that type?”

“Well, no but-”

“But nothing!” Steve sighed. “Listen, you’re cute, okay? I’ve seen what you look like when you’re not at work.” He gestured to your outfit. “If I took you to a party or a bar I’d be able to help you get at least six numbers by the end of the night.”

You furrowed your eyebrows. “So why are you so bent out of shape about Eddie?”

“Because you’re picky, and you’re my friend.” It was a surprisingly nice sentiment. “I’m fine dating around while I figure out what I want, but you’re not the same. You need someone who is going to understand what you’re talking about, and he is the only person in Hawkins who would also bite a head off a bat.”

“You know, everyone wants to talk about how Ozzy bit the head off a bat but no one wants to talk about how that whole thing actually happened-” you started.

“Nope. Not me. Don’t tell me, tell him.” Steve cut you off. “I should be telling you that talking about biting animal heads is not the best way to flirt but he might be into it. Just promise me you’ll at least try okay?”

Steve gave you a pleading look, and you couldn’t say no. You didn’t have the heart to. He was right, you’d given up before you’d even tried. Steve went out of his way to hand pick a potential date for you, someone he never would have even bothered talking to before. You had to try.

You breathed in the cool night air deeply, holding it before exhaling slowly. “Alright, I’ll try.” you promised.

“I expect you to tell me everything tomorrow!” Steve said as he started walking towards the parking lot you found yourself following him, your body reacting to all the times you two had parked next to each other at work.

“Yeah, yeah, you get first dibs on any kiss and tell!” you shot back. “After the details you gave me from your dates, I promise I’ll be worse.”

Steve pulled you in and gave you a hug, and you squeezed him tightly in return. You never would have thought that Steve Harrington of all people would end up such a good friend, but you were glad he was there. You two said your goodbyes before he got into his car. You waited until he’d pulled safely out of the parking lot before turning back into the arcade.

Just go in there, crash the Hellfire Club meeting again, and shamelessly flirt with Eddie Munson. Three things, that’s all you needed to do.

You pushed the doors of the arcade open and walked back inside.

You wander around the arcade.

You’re alone.

Shit.

There was no sign of Eddie or any of the Hellfire Club. You were completely alone in the arcade now and there was a pang in your stomach. You had told Eddie you’d be right back, but he was gone. Maybe your comment about still wanting to play had totally fucked over your chance to talk to him more after all.

You made your way back outside, just in time to see a van peel out of the parking lot. Your eyes widened when you saw Dusting looking out the window with an apologetic look and mouthing what you assumed to be the word “Sorry”.

Eddie must have gathered up the club to go somewhere else. You wanted to be fine, you wanted to shrug it off as you had every other time you’d failed to impress a guy, but you felt disappointed. Really disappointed. Sure you’d only talked to the guy for a half hour, most of which was spent talking trash as you all played air hockey, but you’d had fun. More fun than you’d had in a while with a guy, Steve notwithstanding.

It felt like Chris Morrison all over again.

You sighed to yourself and made your way to the car. Of course the second you wanted to try you ended up alone again.

Well, that killed it for tonight. You pushed the rejection out of your mind and made your way back to your own car, thinking about how you were going to tell Steve that you’d blown your chance.

Eddie Munson didn’t know what to make of the fact that Steve Harrington of all people was at the arcade. Popular? Played sports? Someone like him didn’t hang around at the arcade, not under any normal circumstances. The only thing that made sense about him being there was that he was with a girl, one that didn’t match up with the normal type that someone like Steve should be dating.

He had planned on avoiding Steve, choosing to focus on his club rather than antagonize the former king of Hawkins high. Really, he did. But then that shrimp Henderson had made his way over to Steve and his date. The kid already talked about Steve too much as it was, always going on about how cool he was while also dodging questions about how the two had met and become friends. Eddie had long since given up on asking about it, not that he cared. Not that he was jealous that the kid he was growing to see like a little brother already had another older male friend in his life.

That wasn’t Eddie’s style.

But this was Hellfire Club, and Eddie wasn’t about to lose another member to the dark side. Dustin had been looking forward to this rare gathering of the club outside of school, more than usual actually. He’d been wearing that same shit eating grin he always did when he was about to pull some bullshit at the table. Now Eddie knew why.

This little shit was trying to introduce him to Steve. Dustin talked Steve up so much, and now he just happened to be here on a date the same time as Sidequest Day? That was too convenient. Eddie shouldn’t have been surprised that Dustin was trying to bridge his friends together, but he was.

So, when Eddie saw Dustin watching Steve and his date chatting and playing Q*bert, he could have ignored the bait. He should have ignored the bait. But then Chris Morrison’s name was mentioned, and curiosity got the best of him.

Plus how could he ever resist talking shit about Chris Morrison.

So he walked up to the group, fully prepared to make agonzing small talk with Steve for thirty seconds before dragging Henderson away to focus on the real reason he was there. It wasn’t often that everyone had the time or money to come to the arcade like this, and Eddie had been lucky enough to make a special sale that day to some senior from the art department. He didn’t often have spending money for something like the arcade. He’d prefer to go to the movies or get his supply from Rick or buy anything to maintain his guitars, or upkeep of his van. Arcade time with Hellfire was something that happened once a semester at best, with the promise of him giving out advantages during the campaign he was running.

“Henderson is right. Morrison was the biggest asshole that Hellfire has ever seen. Worst DM too.” Eddie said, glancing between Dustin with a warning glare and Steve with a weary look.

He didn’t expect you, the girl playing the cabinet, to be the one to speak up. You knew Chris? This night kept getting weirder. When Eddie turned to Steve, to ask about what he was doing at the arcade, just to appease Dustin, Steve directed his attention back to you.

That made more sense, Steve Harrington wouldn’t be at an arcade on a Saturday night unless there was a girl involved.

When you turned around to face him, he noticed the way your eyes looked him down and up quickly. That was something he was used to with most people in Hawkins. They’d size him up just so that they could try and tear down the freak. There was a look in your eyes that he couldn’t quite catch before it turned into one of... disappointment? Discomfort? Shit, it was all the same to him.

Dustin made quick introductions of everyone, and Eddie was surprised when you offered your hand so easily despite the look in your eyes. Well, at least you were polite. It hadn’t even been two minutes and Eddie was already itching to get back to spending time with his club rather than crashing whatever meeting Dustin had clearly planned here.

But he’d be polite, humor the kid for just a second. If Dustin wanted him to meet Steve, then Eddie would be the contrarian and make small talk with his date instead.

You two would have graduated the same year, had Eddie not been held back. Yeah, it was starting to come back to him. He remembered you.

And that was enough of socializing with the upper class for the night. Eddie started directing Dustin back to club activities before Steve spoke up again.

“So, my friend here actually had an interest in Hellfire Club back in the day.”

It could have been left at that, but Eddie was getting more and more irritated over this situation. He looked at you, who looked like a deer in the headlights. Of course, Dustin might have seen something in Steve but he was no different now than he was back then.

“Really?” Eddie said. “And what about our little club was so interesting to you?”

He shot a glare to Steve, but looked down at you with a frown. You’d always seemed nice at school, but he’d made that mistake before. Eddie always liked the groups that kept to themselves and didn’t whisper behind his back or cause trouble for his friends. It was a shame he had been wrong about you.

But when you answered awkwardly about asking Chris to join, there was something in the way you spoke that was genuine. Either you were a really good actress, or you were being serious about it. Eddie might have been the biggest cynic in Hawkins, but he always did have a weakness to cute girls.

The conversation fizzled out quickly, and as much as Eddie didn’t mind talking to you he still wasn’t interested in crashing your date or getting to know Steve at this time. Not when his club started going wild across the room as Lucas was scoring big at a game.

So he turned around and left the two of you alone, running off to see what the jackpot prize was that Lucas had claimed.

For about ten minutes everything went back to normal. He was in the middle of an intense racing game against Jeff, when suddenly he heard Dustin screaming for him, causing his car to spin out and lose spectacularly.

Tonight was not going well at all for Eddie Munson.

Pushing down his irritation, he could hear it in Henderson’s voice that he was about to start trouble again. Of course as he made his way over to the hockey table, there you and Steve were again. Great. Eddie was so excited to be the third wheel during his club’s meet up.

But then Steve disappeared to take a shit. Well, he didn’t say that exactly but it made Eddie feel better to think of Steve having a miserable time in the bathroom. Jealous? No. Not at all.

Maybe a little.

You didn’t seem to like that Steve had left you, and Eddie figured you were uncomfortable without your date around. Dustin only ever talked Steve up, but had never mentioned you to his knowledge.

When the puck went flying towards your face a moment later, Eddie’s eyes widened with shock as you caught it with a laugh. The way you spoke to Wheeler and Henderson was familiar, as if you’d met them before. How did they know you? You were cuter when you were laughing with his friends.

As Eddie watched the chaos of you bantering with his freshmen, his mind wandered to what you would have looked like in the darkness of the prop department wearing the Hellfire shirt. With how easily you got along with Henderson and Wheeler he was sure you would have fit in.

Damn Chris Morrison and damn Steve Harrington.

He snapped out of his thoughts when you spoke up, a glint in your eyes as you handed over the puck.

“What say you, Eddie of Hellfire?” The way you spoke to him, a hint of a laugh in your voice but not in the normal mocking way he’d hear from others at school, made him break out into an unabashed grin as he took the puck.

“Sudden death it is.”

Making small talk with you was easy, and it wasn’t long until Eddie had forgotten about Steve completely as Dustin decided to bridge the gap between the two of you. You were the assistant manager at Family Video, had helped Dustin and Mike with homework on occasion, and were a regular at the Rocky Horror Picture Show that played at the seedy theater on the outskirts of town.

Eddie was starting to like you more the more the three of you chatted. When the topic od D&D came back up, your answer had struck a chord with him.

“I wasn’t done playing.”

Those words would tumble around in the back of his mind for the rest of the evening. They had been honest, raw words. There was a weight to them that he’d carried himself for a long time. Growing up with Al Munson didn’t exactly give him the idyllic childhood that one would see in movies or tv. Play time wasn’t exactly a priority when you were just trying to fucking survive.

He’d challenged your answer, when he knew in his cynical heart that he was the same. Between Hellfire and his band, there wasn’t much else he had going for personal enjoyment. Of course there was time to hang out with his friends and the occasional odd night where he crashed at Rick’s place when his home with Wayne felt too small or cramped.

Eddie wanted to ask you what you’d play, if you ever did have a chance to join a campaign. He wondered if you enjoyed fantasy the same way he did, if you were a fighter, a spell caster, or a healer.

Then Steve showed back up.

Right, you were here with Steve on a date. A date that had way too much fiber and had probably exploded the toilet while he left you hanging for going on forty minutes now. And now Harrington decided that the date was over? Jesus, this guy didn’t know what he was missing out on. Eddie felt for you, he’d been on his share of bad dates in the past too, and bad nights that he wished were dates.

He shook the image of Paige out of his head.

You gave him a smile as you said goodbye. Well, you said you’d be back in a moment but Eddie knew that the night was over. You walked out of the Arcade with Steve, and that would be that.

Sidequest day was always short, with limited spending money between members and the machines eating quarters like candy. Soon his little sheepies were gathered around him again, talking about their winnings and who deserved to get some sort of perk for the game. It was almost unanimously decided that it would go to Lucas, after he’d nearly broken the basketball machine from how fast he had been throwing balls.

Eddie still had a bill burning a hole in his pocket, having spent more time talking to you than playing games. He had to get this weird night out of his mind, and turned towards the group, knowing that he was going to regret this.

“Whoever has any money left, pool it in I’ll take us to get pizza.” He said. This was followed by cheers and a scrambling of pulling out loose quarters, dimes, and even a five that Gareth forgot he had in his wallet. Eddie lead them all towards the parking lot, his eyes scanning the parking lot for you.

You and Steve were chatting by his car and laughing the same way that you had laughed with him before Steve pulled you into a tight hug. Maybe your date wasn’t a bust after all. Eddie didn’t know why he cared, this was only the third time you’d met. You didn’t know him.

Dustin nudged Eddie, that same smug grin on his face.

“Pretty fun night, huh, Eddie?” he said.

“Your plan didn’t work, shrimp.” Eddie said. “I know you were trying to set something up and I’m not interested.”

Dustin looked surprised, and looked like he was going to argue but a sharp glare from Eddie shut him up. Eddie never had an interest in meeting Steve, and it was clear Steve felt the same way, going so far as to ditch his date to hide in the bathroom the whole time. Eddie didn’t know what the kid saw in Harrington but Eddie was less than impressed.

“Geeze, sorry.” Dustin sighed. “I thought you two would get along.”

“You know, a little humility wouldn’t hurt you.” Eddie said before grabbing his shoulder. “Next time you decide I have to meet someone, don’t make it during Hellfire, mk?”

Dustin looked disappointed but nodded as everyone piled illegally in the back of Eddie’s van. As long as Eddie didn’t drive like a madman (a difficult feat) it would be safe enough. He’d put the seats down to haul equipment years ago, and never could get them to come back up. He could fix it if he wanted, but there was never a real reason to.

As everyone got settled, Dustin looked over at Mike with a shrug. The two of them had thought that things were going well between the two of you, but the look in Eddie’s eyes had said otherwise now.

“Maybe she just wasn’t his type?” Mike said, as the rest of the club chatted. “Eddie doesn’t really talk about those things anyway. Maybe he doesn’t even want a girlfriend.”

“Yeah, but you didn’t see the way they were talking. Even if he wasn’t into her like that, they were still getting along.” Dustin sighed and shifted to look out the window as Eddie started up the van. Everyone in the back held on for dear life as Eddie started out of the parking lot.

As they passed your car, Dustin caught your eye just as you stepped out looking dejected.

“Sorry” Dustin mouthed to you.

It had been a bust tonight, but something felt off. Why would Eddie have such a clearly good time talking to you, just to turn around and say he wasn’t interested?

Dustin made a mental note to drop into Family Video tomorrow to talk to you and Steve.

Part 4

Dividers by @strangergraphics

Tag list: @k8loo @terrormonster55 @sp1dyb0y1008 @crocwork-clockodile @ali-r3n @mxcheese @josephquinnschesthair @gagasbee @peaches-roses-sins @witchwolflea @vintagehellfire @royale1803 @cumslutforaemond @prestinalove @browneyedgirly93 @perpetualmess @thebook-hobbit @mistonk @cultish-corner @grishaversecaptivated

Comments and reblogs help me know that y'all read and enjoy it, which feeds my excitement to write!

#wing man #eddie munson x reader #nacht fic

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ladykailitha · 2 months

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Not All That Glitters is Gold Part 15

The second part being released today. And it's looking like people really want more of this AU. Which, I really should have seen coming.

So once I get my backlog up for Moonlight and Indiana (I just need to write one more chapter each to get the stories up to three chapters) I will start working on it for you.

And because I've been zooming past my daily goal of 400 words a day (I'll often get 1500-2000 words a day) I've decided as a way to pump the breaks so that I don't get too far ahead again is to spend my evenings editing stories for my beta to edit for AO3. I already have one in the works, I'm just waiting for her final edits to put it up on AO3.

In this we have Steve being awesome at what he does, he dodges one hell of a bullet because Robin is awesome, and Eddie falls just a little more in love with Steve.

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14

****

Steve was busy leading up to Eddie’s rut, Chrissy being right about him getting more clients just from being on Eddie’s arm.

Everyone clamoring to see what it was that made Eddie fall head over heels in love with the omega escort.

Steve ate up the attention. He had talked to Eddie about the actress and how it made him feel.

Suddenly Eddie was all apologies. The actress was a good friend of his and he had just been so excited to see her that he forgot what it would look like to Steve. Especially since Eddie hadn’t introduced them. Plus it had left Steve open to Tommy’s sneering.

Steve had backpedaled then. He hadn’t meant for Eddie to make a big deal out of it. He had thought that Eddie would apologize, they’d fuck about it and Steve would learn that with Eddie being as famous as he was, Steve would just have to learn to share him.

But Eddie wouldn’t let him. He had hurt Steve’s feelings over something that he could have and should have avoided. Now he knew why Tommy’s words had stung as badly as they had.

So he showered Steve with all the affection in the world. Taking him on picnics to the beach one day and bowling and miniature golf the next. Fancy dinners and shopping sprees. Intimate to formal, fun to stately. Concerts and plays.

Every spare moment Steve had was spent being wined and dined by Eddie.

The courting was intense, but then again so was Steve. He liked intense, he was intense.

Steve was getting ready for a final rut, before Eddie’s next week when Robin called him up.

“Hey, what’s up?” Steve asked in confusion. “What’s up?”

“Management just flagged the client.”

Steve’s blood ran cold. It took a lot for management to flag a client. They always did checks on their clients before letting them hire their escorts. But sometimes they’ll do a deeper check if they feel something is off.

“What caused the flag?”

“Something in the wording,” Robin said. “I had been trying to pin down where I had heard it before. It was only yesterday I realized it sounded like some of the stuff the alpha from the Grammy’s was spouting as we hauled his ass out of the venue.”

If Steve was cold before, now his spine was ice. “Holy shit.”

Robin hummed her agreement. “So I had Hopper dig deeper. It’s–it’s not good, Steve.”

“Just tell me.”

“The idiot had used his real accounts to plot your kidnapping after going through all the work to hide who he was to the company,” Robin said grimly.

Steve sat down on the sofa with a thump. “Was he–did he know where I–Robin I’m scared.”

“I’m already in the elevator, babe,” she said softly. “He doesn’t know where you live or even where Eddie lives, okay? Starcourt alerted his security detail as soon as the plot was uncovered.”

Steve breathed out a sigh of relief. “That’s good. Will I still be able to service his rut?”

“Yes,” she said, “I’m at your door, I’ll tell you all about it, face to face, okay?”

“Okay.”

Robin let herself in and hurried over to the sofa to throw her arms around him.

“Everything is okay,” she promised. “There hasn’t been a successful kidnapping of a Starcourt omega since the 1940s. Trust us, we’ve got this on lock.”

Steve nodded. “Tell me about Eddie’s rut.”

Robin grinned mischievously. “You’re going to love it.”

“Oh?” Steve’s interest was piqued. That interest drew him from his fear and anxiety, just like she knew it would.

“It’s going to happen here.”

Steve’s jaw dropped. “Holy shit!”

“It gets even better,” Robin said sing-song.

“How could it get any better than that?” Steve asked once he had picked his jaw up off the floor.

“Management is letting him know where you live,” she squealed.

Steve’s hands went to cover his mouth. “Shut up! Tell me everything!”

So she did.

She broke down what would happen if Eddie’s rut broke through the scent.

She went over the different things that would happen due to it being in Steve’s room with his nest, but it was amazing news.

“What made them decide to let Eddie in on the secret?” Steve asked when she was done.

Robin set down her tablet she had used to go over all the information and turned her full attention to him.

“Because he tried to cancel his rut servicing with you but with you still getting paid because he was worried that you might be followed to his place,” Robin explained.

Steve blushed a deep red.

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

He looked up at her with glistening eyes. “He really loves me, doesn’t he?”

“Yes, yes he does.”

****

Steve didn’t have any other clients that week, so he spent the week getting his penthouse suite ready for his alpha. He already knew Eddie’s favorite snacks and how he could just eat handfuls and handfuls of trail mix as long as there weren’t raisins. So Steve subtly tried out other dried fruits and found he loved dried apricots. So those replaced the raisins.

Protein shakes were okay as long as they had some chocolate in them. But he could tell if there was any herbs to them. Thyme, basil, you name it, if it was there, Eddie wouldn’t drink them.

It was actually kind of fun tailoring the rut servicing to what Eddie enjoyed. Cotton sheets over satin. Certain brand of bottled water. How often he was lucid during the five days.

His nest was carefully packed away into another room, so that Eddie’s scent didn’t get embedded into the materials. There would be plenty of time for that when they bonded, doing it too soon could result in a faux bond and Steve would get sick.

Which was the last thing either of them wanted.

Steve was fluffing the pillows for the millionth time when Robin radioed that Eddie was about to pull up. He made his way to the front of the hotel and watched as Xander pulled up to the curb.

Eddie stepped out onto the pavement and looked up at the hotel in shock.

“La Rose?” he asked Steve in confusion. “Isn’t this where we met up for drinks after my interview?”

Steve grinned, taking Eddie’s bag from Xander. They walked past the hotel bar and Eddie turned to him.

“Holy shit!” he gasped. “It is! I thought we met up here.”

Steve giggled. “We did. I just came down the elevator instead of arriving by car.”

“How the hell did you manage that?” he asked, bumping Steve’s shoulder with his own.

“Robin,” Steve said proudly. “She can work any magic she wants to with management. I swear she has blackmail information on key members.”

Eddie threw back his head and laughed. “That sounds like Buckley.”

They finally got to Steve’s floor and he pointed to a room to the far right. “That is where you’ll be taken if I go into a mini heat.”

“Wouldn’t they want me to be far away from you as possible?” Eddie asked.

Steve shook his head. “They want to whisk you away to a nearby room on the same floor so your scent could calm me down and help me through my heat. If they took you off the premises I could get rejection sickness.”

Eddie blinked at him a moment.

“Oh.”

Steve smiled and led the way to the door that would lead to his apartment. He opened the door and moved out of the way so Eddie could enter first.

“Wow, Stevie,” Eddie murmured. “This is amazing. You live here all by yourself?”

“On this floor,” Steve answered. “Have a seat, we’ll talk about the coming rut and then get you settled. I’ll just put your bag in my bedroom.”

Eddie did as he was told, sitting on the nice fluffy sofa.

“All right,” Steve said, sliding onto the sofa next to Eddie. “So walk me through your ruts, what happens?”

Eddie squirmed a little. This was Steve Harrington, professional escort, and not Stevie, his hot omega boyfriend speaking.

“My pre-ruts start hard and fast,” he said, rubbing his chin in thought. “Then they last five days and I’m barely lucid through them. It’s how I got caught by that omega who told me they were infertile. I wasn’t conscious for much of it.”

Steve nodded. “When do you lower the light in wherever it is that you spend your rut?”

Eddie blinked at him. “Lower the lights, what do you mean? You don’t have sex with the lights on?”

“You’ve always had light on during your ruts, even at night?” Steve asked, tilting his head to the side.

“Not lucid enough to turn them off,” he said with a shrug.

Steve picked up a remote from the coffee table and closed the drapes and dimmed the lights.

He could see the physical change that came over Eddie. His shoulders relaxed and his eyelids drooped. His skin color which had been pale and clammy when he arrived was starting to get color back in his cheeks.

He tilted his head up as he examined the lights. “What is this feeling? I feel warm and drowsy.”

Steve sighed. “It’s how ruts are supposed to start. But it’s not mentioned in health class or anything. The bright lights signify to our poor little lizard brains that we’re still out in the open where we can be attacked, instead of safe in our caves. It wasn’t until the advent of modern light that it was ever a problem for alphas, but the science of it has come a long way in recent years.”

“Huh.”

Eddie rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “You think that’s why I’ve had trouble staying lucid because I’ve been forcing myself to be on high alert all the time?”

“Could be,” Steve agreed. “But even if it isn’t, you can trust me to keep you safe. I will not trick you and I will not harm you. You want condoms on all the time, I will be sure to change them as often as required. I’ve been on birth control for twelve weeks as you requested.”

Eddie blushed. “Thanks for sending me the video of you taking the pill every day, that must have been so humiliating for you.”

Steve shrugged. “I’m an escort, the amount of humiliating things I’ve had to do, that doesn’t even make the top twenty.”

“What, now?”

Steve laughed. “Alphas will sometimes hire us for humiliation roleplays. Did a fair number of those before I was big enough to reject them. But I know a couple of omegas that live for that shit, so if a new omega is really uncomfortable with it, the roleplay will be passed to one of them.”

Eddie blinked again. “Darlin’, the more I learn about your profession the more intrigued I am.”

“At least you’re intrigued,” Steve chuckled. “Most aren’t. They tend to be pearl clutchers about it.”

“Not even the highest paid actresses have to do the kind of work you do,” Eddie breathed. “Why aren’t there award shows for you escorts?”

Steve smiled sweetly. “Because it’s all confidential. But maybe I can convince a couple of my friends to do our own version of that for booze and prizes. I think it’d be a hit.”

Eddie grinned. “Oh to be a fly on that wall.”

Steve reached out and rubbed his arm. “How are you feeling? Is the pre-rut still progressing or have you hit full rut yet?”

Eddie frowned as he took stock of his body.

“Still in pre-heat,” he said thoughtfully. “Huh. My uncle was a beta, so he wasn’t able to teach me this sort of shit, but you would have thought that someone along the line would have said something.”

“The education in this country is still woefully behind for anything regarding sex,” Steve said ruefully.

Eddie snorted. That was like calling a hurricane a little summer storm.

“But at least they teach you this shit,” he said.

Steve grinned. “Indeed they do teach me this shit.”

He got to his feet and gently led Eddie to the bedroom. He got undressed and sat down on the bed. He took Eddie’s hand and directed it to his thighs.

“Is it time, baby?” Eddie murmured, looking down at this beautiful, smart, talented omega in utter awe.

“Almost, alpha,” Steve purred. “But being in bed when it hits is easier on the knees.”

Eddie cackled and Steve’s omega chirped happily.

“Oh, sweetheart,” he cooed back, “the things that cute little noise does to me.”

Steve laid down on the bed, as pretty as a picture and oh how Eddie wanted.

He got undressed and slid the first condom on. He straddled Steve’s hips and kissed him deeply.

“Oh, Stevie,” he murmured. “I feel so good.”

Steve stroked Eddie’s cheek. “And I promise it will continue to feel good for the next five days.”

Eddie looked into his eyes and believed him.

****

Part 16 Part 17

Tag List CLOSED: @mira-jadeamethyst @rozzieroos @redfreckledwolf @emly03 @itsall-taken

@spectrum-spectre @estrellami-1 @zerokrox-blog @swimmingbirdrunningrock @gregre369

@a-little-unsteddie @chaosgremlinmunson @chaoticlovingdreamer @messrs-weasley @goodolefashionedloverboi

@maya-custodios-dionach @val-from-lawrence @i-must-potato @danili666 @carlyv

@wonderland-girl143-blog @justforthedead89 @bookworm0690 @bookbinderbitch @yikes-a-bee

@littlewildflowerkitten @vecnuthy @scheodingers-muppet @y4r3luv @cinnamon-mushroomabomination

@genderless-spoon @anne-bennett-cosplayer @awkwardgravity1 @irregular-child @nburkhardt

@apomaro-mellow @yellowdevilkitten @eyehartart @mangoinacan13 @demolvr

@ellietheasexylibrarian @rememberthatiloveyou @slowandsteddie @r0binscript @alyelf

@melodymeddler @mogami13 @annabanannabeth @disrespectedgoatman @manda-panda-monium

#my writing #stranger things #steddie #ladykailtiha writes #omegaverse #alpha eddie munson #rockstar eddie munson #omega steve harrington

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mikami · 4 months

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"Did Light love his family?" Anon - Catch-All Answer

Since these are six asks that are all about in the same vein, I am gonna just put the responses into one post for organization's sake.

Light begs his father to kill Mello because he wants his father's death to have been good for something. Nothing pains him more than the idea of having let this happen without it even accomplishing his goal.

Light is the physical manifestation of the lost cost fallacy: he needs to keep going because he sacrificed too much to stop and allow those sacrifices to be rendered meaningless.

And Light rationalizes. It's one of his most prominent character traits: instead of acknowledging his own emotions, he tries to filter his thoughts into nothing but emotionless pragmatism.

This is consistently portrayed through the 'hidden eyes' visual key - Light is excellent at lying to himself, in his own thoughts, which is why Obata gave us this clever way of seeing when this is happening even as Light's own internal monologue doesn't reflect it.

I have an incomplete list of these instances here, especially as pertaining to his family.

Ultimately, if we disagree that Light rationalizes his feelings rather than allowing himself to fully feel them, then none of my arguments are ever going to make sense to you and vice versa.

As a short addendum, here's Ohba's own words on this chapter (HTR13 p.80): "Even if there was acting involved in Light's tearful performance, I don't believe the tears are 100% an act." (もし月の涙に演技入っていたとしても、100%演技の涙では到底ないと思います。)

Soichiro already made the eye deal, which is an absolutely horrifying sacrifice to have made. Light wanted it to be as useful as it could possibly be, in order to justify the magnitude of the price.

I hate to say it, but you're really gonna have to take this one up with Ohba himself. On Page 65 of HTR13, he literally says that he picked Sayu as a kidnapping victim because Light loves his family and wouldn't kill her. (Unlike Misa, whom he would have just killed in this scenario rather than letting the plot progress.)

The panel you are thinking of is this one, where he is panicking, but you're not putting it into perspective.

In a previous chapter (62) Ide was about to inform the whole police force that Sayu Yagami was kidnapped. Soichiro was about to agree to this.

If Light had let this happen, he could have killed Sayu without narrowing down the suspect pool at all. They already know that Kira has ties to the police. He would have removed the leverage the mafia had held against them and gotten off entirely scott-free.

He does decidedly NOT do that. It's LIGHT personally who stops Ide from giving him the perfect alibi. EVEN RYUK CALLS OUT HOW ODD THAT WAS AS A MOVE.

And sure, Light says 'oh yeah, now nobody will suspect us!!' but nobody was really suspecting them to begin with.

This is what I mean - Light never allows himself to just feel things, he always rationalizes himself to justify his actions to himself.

His father dying. Dude.

.... literally why would he? Like, even if they don't accept Kira they also pose absolutely no threat to Kira.

I've covered all of this above, but I am including the ask to say that yes, I've seen it. The core issue here is that we disagree on Light's relationship to himself - you take his internal monologue at face value, while I think there is ample evidence that Light manipulates himself most of all. (As made completely manifest in the Yotsuba-Arc where he literally mindwipes himself into an incredibly emotionally and physically painful experience just to use himself as a pawn.)

#answers

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heartfullofleeches · 1 year

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There once was a witch.

Yandere Candy Folk + G.N Sweets Witch Reader Teaser

An: A taste of what was meant to be a blurb, but became more. Hope it peaks your interest and I'd love to hear theories on where you might think the plot will go

There once was a witch.

The first of her kind.

"A candy witch? What a ridiculous idea!" She was quick to disagree.

"It is my magic. If I can't do for me first, I haven't the heart nor time to do a thing for others."

Her mother had been the town doctor with her healing magic, and her mother's mother nurtured the barren lands they founded their village upon. Her mentors encouraged her spirit - cautioning to keep her roots close to heart. The young witch had not a care for their warnings nor the people around her. Her goals and ambitions were met much closer to home right - in the pit of her stomach. The girl found even great tragedy could become the sweetest delight with the right confectionery. A spoonful of sugar a day kept most of her troubles away. Outside of home, she was mocked and ridiculed for her dreams. How selfish and cruel was she to use her birthrights for her own agenda. Without her, the town would be left unprotected. As the day of her ascension to power drew near, the kind eyes and faces around her turned scornful. The witch wore a brave face, but she did not have the same guise to protect her behind closed doors. She cried through every spoonful.

Had it not been for that one person, she would've given up on everything.

"My birthday is the day after your coronation. If you do become a sweets witch like you say, would you make the cake?"

That person gave her a tooth ache no amount of her mother's magic could cure. Everything she ate hours after their meeting tasted bland and bitter. Nothing in her entire pantry could be sweeter than that smile. They were the child of the town baker who saved a loaf of sweet bread for her every week, and her first and only friend. Against her own word, she acted from the kindest of her heart and did as they pleaded. The cake was an extravagant piece; nearly twice the size of banquet table it stood upon and tiered with every flavor she could think of. The light in their eyes was brighter than the flames all six dozen chocolate candies held. The witch's fingers were in her mouth more than her fork as she had to make sure her teeth had rotted and fallen out. Her family had always given her praise, but that silent display of gratitude and wonder opened her heart. She wanted to see that expression more - on their face and beyond. She would come a witch for the mass, like every witch in her family before her.

The newly appointed candy witch became an apprentice not at her mother's clinic, but the baker's kitchen. The two youths were inseparable with the time they spent as one. They swore to run the shop together when the mantle was passed down. Balancing magic and her culinary skills, the witch uncovered numerous feats in her time. In doing so, she learned she had the influence from any element of craft - so long as they were baked into her treats. She infused healing magic into her scones, created truffles that turned hair the same color as their filling. She built a house for her and her friend to live made out of gingerbread and sugar glass. Everyone was happy.

Too happy.

The town's people demanded more than she had already gave. They wanted sweets that could increase their wealth or assure their hand in marriage. The witch began to double back on her old beliefs. Being wed was a necessity as food and shelter were. She hadn't confessed to her true love yet either - so why should others get what she hadn't the guts to? They grew angry, she locked herself away in her home - unaware that her sweet friend was the new outlet for their fury. They ran the store and stocked it's shelves with her treats all by themselves; returning home with a smile and hidden wrists. The witch knew something was off, but she never bothered to ask as their smile was still as sweet as it was the day they met. She never questioned a thing - until it was too late.

Left all alone in a place that reminds her of what she lost at every turn, and people so uncaring of her grief and pain - the witch went mad. These savages acted as if they cared, reassuring her her love would return while holding out a hand for their reward. Selfish. Greedy. Demanding... Murders. If they hadn't asked for so much, her friend never would have tried to become a witch on their own to help their community. A task proved too taxing on their untrained body. The witch could not help those deep in the hell of their own making. She still longed to make others happy, but her talents were wasted on these dreaded husks known as humans. She would create her own town - with people made of the treats of her youth. They would never take her for granted and they would never die - the only securities she needed. The witch would clear out the entire town and make room for her and her candy companions were they would love the rest of their days in eternal peace. What the witch didn't know...

Was that they'd betray her worst of all.

The bell chimes above a confection shop's door. Wiping sweat from their brow with their forearm, a figure curses beneath their breath; hunched over a lit stove.

"Shoot..... Just a minute!"

#yandere #yandere x reader #yandere imagines #yandere oc #yandere x you #yandere scenarios #yandere insert #yandere headcanons #yandere blurb

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johnslittlespoon · 1 month

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okay a bit (a lot, tldr in tags) of rambling to gather my thoughts, but for the dog coded bucky fic <3 enjoyers i have tentatively decided:

i will finish chapter two so ik it's # serious lol, plan out the rest of the chapters so i make sure i don't need to change anything in the first two (bc i'm still not even sure how many chapters it'll be), and then, i think i will force myself to stop being a Coward and post ch1 🫠

but i DO want to warn you that i am a slow writer, i've said this before ik, but i haven't written a chaptered fic in about five years so i'm really not sure how my pacing will be, so i feel like it's fair to lyk in advance!

my ideal aim would be to get a chapter out once a week, but i'm gonna be so real, a more realistic goal is once every two–ish weeks because me + freshly–medicated adhd + writing is not conducive to productivity lmaoo :')) tbh i'd be happy if i even got one done a month but i'm hoping to be faster than that, i just also don't want to rush bc this fic is so close to my heart already, i don't want to put smth out where i feel like i let myself/readers down. <3

anyway. that's my yapping for the afternoon, very excited bc i made a lovely fellow fruit loop friend recently while in queue for a concert and we both accidentally found out the other wrote fanfic LOL u get close real quick when ur holding out for barricade all day 😭

but we have a writing day planned tmrw!! bc body doubling is a lifesaver. so i'm rly hopeful i'll get ch2/all my plotting done tmrw and if all goes well, ch1 can be posted this week <33 half of the reason for posting this is to hold myself accountable too bc i'll feel more pressure to work away at it so i don't have to eat my words lmfaoo

to the angels who have been following the (very slow) formation of this fic, genuinely thank u sm for being so patient with me and also for always keeping my spirits and motivation up chatting to me ab it, i don't think i would've ever actually ended up writing it otherwise so!! i am v thankful <33 it's 'just fic' but it's also a return to something i adore but haven't had the inspo or energy for in years so i'm very :'))

#tldr: if all goes well ch1 of dog coded bucky fic will be up this week #dog coded bucky fic #<- updates will always be under that tag! :-)#soon i can start using the actual title but idk if i will i'm kinda attached to our silly tag #i'm gonna make some cute moodboards for it probs too #art eventually but that's v time consuming so later <3 #johnslittlespoon yaps

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explodingsilver · 6 months

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Book review: Nightbane by Alex Aster

Lightlark…2!

I’ve already made my thoughts on the first book quite clear (read that review first if you haven’t already; I don’t feel like rehashing all the context), and were I a bit more sensible, I would have stayed away from its sequel. I am, however, somewhat of a literary masochist, so of course I borrowed this from Hoopla the day it was released (November 7th, not too long ago). Very pleased that I was able to write this review much faster than the first one, though this review is shorter, at only 2,100 words long. Was the experience worth it? I don’t know, you tell me.

(There are spoilers ahead, on the off chance that you care)

The plot and style

After the events of the first book, Isla is trying to learn her several powers as well as get a hold of this “leading two different realms” thing while trying to move on from getting betrayed by four different people she used to love. At a celebration for a Wildling holiday (in which no Wildlings other than herself are in attendance), Grim magically crashes the party from afar and announces that the Nightshade army will destroy Lightlark in thirty days. The other realms start preparing for the invasion, and Isla tries to recover all her lost memories of being with Grim in hope that they will reveal what his goal is and how to stop him, especially after receiving a prophetic vision of him standing in the ruins of a village he destroyed with his powers.

Put simply, if the plot of the first book is split between “Isla and Celeste search for a MacGuffin” and “Isla and Oro search for a different MacGuffin”, this book is split between “Isla and Oro do basic defense building stuff” and “Isla remembers the time she and Grim searched for a third MacGuffin”. There’s also a subplot about a rebel group trying to capture Isla, but this is inconsequential and could’ve been dropped entirely.

It feels like there was an attempt to address some of the criticism of the first book, but not nearly enough of an attempt. On the one hand, metaphor usage has improved to the point where it actually feels like it was written by a human being and not a neural network (no throbbing and raw glaciers this time around), the book acknowledges that no longer having a power no one else had in the first place is less bad than having a maximum lifespan of 25, and Isla realizes that Grim let her win the duel in the first book and that she did not win against a 500+ year old army general on the strength of her own skill. On the other hand, it does not address questions like “how does Starling society even function if none of them ever live to 26?” or “if Oro always knows when someone is lying, why didn’t he call bullshit the moment Celeste said ‘Hi, my name is Celeste’?”

Speaking of that last thing: I didn’t mention it in my review of the first book because it didn’t really feel relevant to anything, but each ruler has a ‘flair’, a special power that is unique to them. Oro’s is that he can always tell when someone is lying. Grim’s is that he can teleport. This book reveals that Isla’s is that she is immune to curses. Glad to finally have an answer to one of my biggest questions of the first book (checks notes) 75% of the way through the second one, when this explanation should’ve been given the moment we learned the original stated reason does not apply.

Wildling elixir and its (lack of) consequences

Much of this book centers around the presence of the Wildling elixir from the first book, a potion that is super effective at healing wounds. As you might imagine, this kills a lot of the tension. Used in conjunction with Isla’s magical teleportation device, “teleport away, use Wildling elixir, teleport back” becomes an easy way to recover when the characters get their flesh ripped apart. And indeed, they do this all the time! The book tries to nerf this strategy by stating that the elixir is rare due to the flower used to make it being rare, but 1) this is at odds with Isla’s very liberal use of it, and 2) aren’t the Wildlings the “make flowers grow instantly” people? Why can’t they just use those powers on it like they do for every other plant?

There was a bit of potential for an interesting theme with these flowers: Isla eventually learns that while the Wildlings use them to make the healing elixir, the Nightshades use those exact same flowers to make the titular nightbane, which is basically fantasy heroin. I was intrigued by this motif (I like it when things have a dual nature like that), but unfortunately this doesn’t really go anywhere, other than some vague gesturing at “wow, just like Isla”. Speaking of Isla…

Isla

This time around, Isla is clearly traumatized by the events of the last book, trusts very few people, and is aware that she is in over her head with leading two realms full of subjects she barely knows while also being the king’s unofficial consort. Not a bad start for a character arc, but in effect, she has gone from naive and impulsive to naive, impulsive, and guilty about those things while making little effort to amend them. It feels like her attitude towards leadership is basically “I’m allowed to call myself a bad leader but nobody is allowed to agree with me on that.”

Much of Isla’s internal conflict in this book is based around her Nightshade heritage on her father's side. She is convinced that there is an inherently evil part of her because her father was from the Inherently Evil Realm. This may not come as a surprise, but I do not like when stories have such a thing as an Inherently Evil Realm. Not only does Nightshade fill this role, but the book never even gestures at pushing back against Isla’s conviction that her heritage taints her, and in fact ends up affirming it.

This book really told me to my face that Isla is the first person in millennia to have both Wildling and Nightshade powers. I do not buy that even for a moment. Maybe my disbelief is because the series discarded the “only one realm’s power set per person, even if their parents are from different realms” thing in the same book it was introduced, and I would expect there to be Wildling/Nightshade couples way more often than once per few millennia. But no, that highly plausible thing can’t happen because then Isla won’t be the most special person currently alive!

The other characters

Sadly, the rest of the cast did not improve, and in some instances, got worse.

Oro going from "world weary, distant king" to "official love interest" has unfortunately sanded down all his interesting aspects, and everything I liked about his character in the first book now takes a backseat to being overly protective of Isla and making stock Love Interests threats to kill anyone who hurts her. I swear, he turned so generic that some of his lines were indistinguishable from something Grim would say. But hey, if nothing else, he at least didn’t get character assassinated like I was sure he would!

While Grim actually does stuff in this book, he still has no personality traits other than what's included in the Sexy Villain Starter Pack. Like, it actually upsets me that he's such an absolute nothing of a character. Everything about him begins and ends with “what if the villain…was sexy?”, and there are about a morbillion stories out there that provide more interesting answers to this question. You’d think focusing on him this much would be the perfect opportunity to give him any unique traits at all, but Aster certainly did not take that opportunity, nor did she ever answer the question of why he likes Isla, despite the sheer number of pages dedicated to their relationship.

As for everyone else? Azul, our beloved token gay black man who runs his realm like a democracy, still receives woefully little page time. Cleo, the bitchy ruler who hates Isla for no reason, receives even less, but at least we get to hear about her dead son, I guess. Ella, Isla's Starling assistant, is mentioned so rarely I wonder if Aster forgot she exists. There are also several new average citizen characters introduced, but none of them are remotely interesting. They're all defined solely by whether or not they're on Isla's side. It says something when the best new character is Isla's new animal companion (a panther named Lynx, who rules because he does not give a shit about Isla).

The chili pepper emoji, as the TikTokers call it

Because I must do as the book did and address the topic of sex before I get to the final important bits.

This book is much hornier than the first one, but in a way that makes large parts of it feel like one of those dreams where you're trying to have sex with someone but your attempts keep getting interrupted. I regret that I did not count the number of times Isla was about to fuck someone and then got denied for some reason or another.

There are three times she actually succeeds, and luckily these scenes do not read like they were written by Sarah J. Maas, despite her obvious influence on everything else. This doesn't seem like much of a compliment, but this series needs all the W’s it can get. That's not to say everything is fine, though. There's one scene that's obviously using all the "first time" stuff for characterization, and I can't help but feel this would be more effective had they not already slept together a few short chapters beforehand? Like c’mon, all you had to do was switch the order of those two scenes.

The ending

Shortly before the Nightshade army is set to storm the island and destroy it, Isla learns Grim’s (and Cleo’s) real motivation for doing so: there’s a portal on the island leading to another world, one in which the original founders of Lightlark came from before making Lightlark in the image of the world they left. Grim and Cleo want to open that portal and reach the other world, which will just so happen to destroy the island. They’re not actually trying to kill everyone for the evulz. Isla, in her naivety, accidentally opens it for them before they even arrive.

During the final battle, while trying to steal Grim's powers so she can kill him and save Lightlark, Isla finally remembers the last two important memories: 1) she and Grim actually got married right before he memory-wiped her, and 2) what she thought was a prophetic vision of him killing an entire village was actually a memory of her doing so. Convinced that she'll accidentally kill Oro if she stays with him, she agrees to go with Grim, whom she just realized she is still in love with, in exchange for a promise that he'll withdraw the attack.

I cannot remember the last time I had this strong of an "are you fucking kidding me" reaction to the end of a book. But after some thinking, I decided that it actually makes for some great tragedy material. “Traumatized woman with a supportive partner becomes convinced that she’s too horrible to be with him and goes back to her terrible husband” would make for a good story if this was a more grounded book written by anyone else. Alas, this concept just had to be tackled here.

I also naively thought that because the deal was for two books, that means this would be a duology. But it feels like there will be a third book, and I'm hoping there is, not out of any desire for more (unsure how much more I can take), but because it would be straight-up authorial malpractice to end the series on that note.

Conclusion

This honestly wasn’t quite as bad as the first book, but the problems that persisted outweighed the ones that got fixed, and the severe case of Middle Book Syndrome certainly did not help its case. It’s a very small improvement stylistically, but when the nicest things I can say about it are “there were some concepts that could’ve made for an interesting story in the hands of a better author” and “the sex scenes aren’t atrocious” and “the cat is kinda cool”, then I feel justified in calling it terrible overall. It’s a good thing that Lightlark…3! is presumably a long ways away, because I will need all that time to recover from having read this.

#nightbane #lightlark #alex aster #ya fantasy #book review #book discussion #original content do not steal

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thewebcomicsreview · 6 months

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Crafting A Comic: Frog Alarmclock And The Fabric Of Time

For a long time, I’ve wanted to make a webcomic.

I’ve written two webcomics, Legend of the Hare and Saffron and Sage, but I didn’t draw either of them. And I’ve always been a little self-conscious about that, and harbored a desire to make a comic all by myself, art and all. This desire has been inflamed lately by the success of ForEach, a comic made by one of my discord mods. It’s getting kind of popular, and already has more interest and engagement that Saffron and Sage, something I’m very normal and well-adjusted about, and I’ve been thinking this is something that’s in my power to make. My art, while still limited, is finally at the point where I can do this, and I’ve been writing forever. All I need is a plan.

I have never been a good planner, and it shows a lot in my comics, so I want to have a lot more of the comic written out and planned before pencil comes to paper than I traditionally have done, and I‘d like to turn this brainstorming into Content for you all. It’s a critical part of the writing process, and one that gets glossed over a lot, in part because it leads to slightly rambling essays. But I do have one thing to start with: a protagonist.

(Art by HolyHandGrenade)

Frog Alarmclock is a young woman being trained to join a coven of powerful witches who stitch the fabric of time. She has very little interest in this grand destiny, and is a bit of a stereotypical NEET loser despite her great magic power. Her name, Frog, comes from a knitting term referring to a way of correcting mistakes, but obviously frog-the-animal theming is cute and marketable. I’ve posted a bit about this character on my discord, and the reaction has been overwhelmingly positive, so I think there’s some potential here worth mining. So far, though, the only plot element I’ve been able to come up are

Frog lives with her Grandma, who trains her. Grandma’s power level has fluctuated wildly in my rough drafts, from “generic witch” to “personally gets into fights with Satan in hell”, and I’ve been leaning towards the higher end. Frog and Grandma don’t get along. I’m giving her the placeholder name “Batra”. It sounds witchy, sounds batty, and it comes from batrachia, which means Frog, so it fits the theming subtly.

Frog lives in a Florida suburb. I don’t remember why I settled on Florida specifically, and that may change, but I do like the idea that this cosmic entity lives in kind of a slummy neighborhood. I may move them to Lowell, MA, which is closer to home and an aesthetic I know better.

Frog has a crush on a pink biker chick with pig theming, the Miss Piggy to her Kermit. For the time being, lets call this character Susie Pepper. Susie from “Sus” the latin word for pig, and Pepper because Peppa Pig. It’s a placeholder name.

That’s all I got so far. Even the name, “Frog Alarmclock and the Fabric of Time” is placeholder I made up just now while writing this. I’ve written a few random short stories of this character, trying to get a feel for her, and I even made her my character in a weekly Pathfinder game. But it’s time to try and get a proper story going. With Legend of the Hare, I had a huge over-arcing five-year plan for each layer in the tower, but little sense of where the comic was going to be in three pages, which led to a lot of problems. With Saffron and Sage, I set out with a vague over-arching storyline of “Saffron must rescue her prince”, and kept the comic to short episodic self-contained stories, taking heavy inspiration from Gunnerkrigg Court. Saffron would go on wacky adventures, and rescuing Faunus would be some vague future goal she was theoretically working towards in the same way Ash Ketchum wanted to be a Pokemon Master but took 20 years to get around to that. This worked better, but led to the comic feeling very aimless and meandering, which is part of why it’s turned increasingly farcical. In some ways, my two comics would be better served by switching protagonists. Saffron is very driven in a way suited for a somewhat goofy battle shounen, and if Jill set out on an adventure to rescue Riley she’d be distracted more easily and it’d lend itself better to an adventure-of-the-week format.

Frog, being a NEET loser, is closer to Jill than to Saffron. And suddenly, just from that sentence, I know what I want to do with this comic now. Writing this essay has given me one of those Eureka moment that happens sometimes, when you go from no ideas to the entire plot of the comic all at once. Frog is Jill if she was the Rabbit Champion for a few years before the story started. They’ve got different personalities, of course, Frog isn’t just Jill with a big hat, but this is the throughline I needed. I can work with this, get a first draft done, get an editor to look at it, and report back to you with more detail.

#Frog Alarmclock

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acourtofthought · 3 months

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I've seen it going around that the lands of Illyria are Koschei's ultimate goal but if that were true, how would Elain and Lucien close out the series?

In SF, we learn Briallyn fixed the Rite so that she could force Nesta to wear down her powers:

Briallyn had willed him that way. Had moved people around like chess pieces to ensure that Nesta arrived here. "Why?" Nesta said.

Briallyn's thick fur cloak ruffled in the mountain wind. "Your power is too strong - throwing you into this primitive spectacle wore you down."

Briallyn said her original plot was only to grab Emerie to lure Nesta out after receiving information from Bellius on how they were friends but because Nesta was at her house it made it easy for Briallyn to grab them all and that Gwyn was an amusing bonus.

The Rite wasn't Briallyn's goal for reasons related to the stone at the top of Ramiel, it was to wear Nesta's power down to get the Trove from her. And she had to wait until the end of the Rite because she needed Cassian to show up, something she specifically tells us. She didn't care about Nesta or her friends reaching the top of Ramiel:

Nesta cut in, demanding, "I was worn down days ago. Why hold off until now?"

Briallyn glowered at the interruption. "I was waiting for him." She nodded toward Cassian who was bristling with rage - something like loathing and fear now pushing through the cloudiness in his eyes. "Days and days, I waited for him to get close enough for me to use the crown to ensnare him."

Bellius and Briallyn are now dead, the two people most involved in carrying out this plot.

Koschei was as well but his only interest seemed to be helping Briallyn in order to gain access to the trove.

"What Vassa suspected is true. The death-lord Koschei has been whispering in Briallyn's ear. He remains trapped at his lake but his words carry on the wind to her. / He pointed Briallyn toward the Dread Trove - not for her sake, but for his own ends. He wishes to use it to free himself from his lake."

Then later:

"You can take him now, Briallyn. You have plenty of time before dawn."

Koschei said, "Tell my Vassa I'm waiting."

Briallyn planned on taking Nesta as soon as her powers were weakened and once she had Cassian in her hands to obtain the Trove regardless of when during the Rite those things lined up. Anything else to do with the Rite or the Illyrians was irrelevant.

We know for a fact that Elain could technically wield the Trove. I don't think she will but as Nesta is made, Elain is too.

We know that Lucien may have a connection to the Trove considering the reaction Helion had to the mask.

Trying to tie Koschei into Illyria just so it fits a Gwynriel book being next doesn't make sense to me considering we already know his motive. Why are we now adding a brand new reason for his wanting to free himself? He wants the Trove to become the master of their world and to free himself from the lake.

Also, trying to turn Illyria into Koschei's ultimate end-goal doesn't make any sense while then claiming Elain and Lucien will end the series because Elain and Lucien have nothing to do with Illyria.

Koschei took Vassa for a reason and plans on calling her back soon. The plot lends itself to us learning exactly what that reason is and what is about to happen now that she's going to be called back.

Elain had a vision of the box Koschei keeps hidden and we need Elain to discover where the box is.

Koschei wants to gain access to the trove and we know made creatures are the ones can use these items. While it is keyed to Nesta's blood, it's clear that others who are made can use it once it's in their hands as both Bryce and Hunt did.

It's more likely that Koschei would plot for someone to take Nesta's blood in order to call the Trove items to him so he could free himself from the lake but at that point, the only people who could truly stop him would be those who are Made (so Elain or maybe Lucien depending on what connection he has, at least those are the two from the main lineup).

And the pairing who has the strongest backstory giving reasons to visit the lake is Elucien. To save Vassa, to understand why SJM wrote it so Elain's father had been there with Lucien. To stop Beron who is trying to ally with him.

#elucien #pro elucien #elain archeron #lucien vanserra #acotar 5 #koschei acotar #vassa acotar #pro lucien vanserra #pro elain archeron

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circa98s · 1 month

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‧ ₊ ˚ ✧ › MUN: good afternoon, my dears! i'm k ( she/her, est, 21+ ), the writer behind han mila & shin eunbi. milas blog serves as my main, while eunbis is a side, so you'll most likely see me interact from this one more frequently ooc! if you'd like to plot over on discord, i'm happy to give that out upon request! ♡

‧ ₊ ˚ ✧ › MUSE: and now, meet han mila— 25 years old, a city girl who planted her roots in yuseong bay only 4 months ago, so she's a new resident. utilizing her marketing degree ( wow, fancy ), she currently works as a visual merchandiser at eclectique 33. you can find her wip stats page here!

when did your muse first arrive in yuseong bay? mila has only begun planting roots for herself in yuseong about four months ago ( so, essentially, at the very beginning of this year ).

what does an average day look like for your muse & where can they usually be found? the busiest of bees, mila can be seen fluttering around eclectique, as well as it's general vicinity, the majority of time— at least, during the day / general work hours. as mornings wind down into evenings and the sun begins to set, the blonde often takes refugee at the 88&bar, nursing cocktails of her choice as a way of keeping her frazzled thoughts at bay ( when i tell you this city girl is still trying to adjust to rural living amidst having her hallmark movie moment . . . pls help her ).

how does your muse feel about hanhwa resort? having no real frame of reference for what mild negativities a resort like hanhwa could be bringing to the local space and its primary inhabitants whose daily lives are now continuously altered, mila herself doesn't see the harm with how much attention it seems to be garnering. honestly, the urban crowds that filter in and out are a welcome familiarity.

is there an aspiration for your muse to stay in or leave yuseong bay? for the time being, mila has no real idea what she's looking for just yet— coming to yuseong had been a random, but conscious, choice, one made with the intention of being somewhere different. for now, four months in and still aspiring to find some sense of rthym for herself ( as hard as that'd currently been ), the thought of wanting to leave has yet to cross her mind.

list your muse’s three favorite songs. healing — fletcher. walking home — mac ayres. naked girl — iyla.

describe your muse’s wardrobe. flirty, girly, pastels. a soft romantic at heart, that aspect of her personality translates one for one in terms of her fashion.

what is a color, word, and emoji that you feel describes your muse? baby pink, ambitious, 🎀.

three strong likes and dislikes for your muse. likes — floral perfumes, early mornings, staying busy. dislikes — creative ruts, the stench of fish, root regrowth.

three positive and negative traits for your muse. positives — sweet, upbeat, extroverted. negatives — impulsive, workaholic, judgy.

three talents and shortcomings for your muse. having a knack for connecting with others, a skill she'd already had since childhood that only got stronger with time, mila can make an acquaintance out of anyone. open, ready to talk about anything and everything, there's not a single person she'd ever found herself intimidated by enough to keep her distance. often times, it's this very facete of herself that leads to a decline in energy by the days end, her social batteries quick to recharge after quiet evenings, and even then, she'll often find herself engaging in conversations past her moods expiration simply because that's what she's always done. mild eye bags and all that'll be gone come time to wake up the next morning, mila engages with a smile.

what is a book/tv series/movie/video game character that you feel your character relates to? without question, elle woods has always been a role model, a character mila strives make proud.

a relevant goal or arc for your character to overcome. finding balance, not just within herself, but in this new daily life she's found for herself.

#˚ ♡ ‧₊˚✧ › THE MUN.#yshqs:intro #( late to the party as always :'3 eunbis will be posted soon!

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w0lfinsheepscl0thing · 3 months

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1898: Forgetting Their Shadows - Update

Since last May, I’ve been developing an 1899 fic, and I’m as excited about it as I was when I thought of it. However, I’ve been in a writing slump for almost a month and it’s been taking away all my confidence and motivation. But I’m not going to give up on the project till it’s done! I’m mainly active on Instagram, so after I posted some teasers I made for it back in October, mainly because I thought I would somehow finish it soon, I completely abandoned the idea of posting on here till it was done. But, of course, things didn’t go as planned. I really want to keep working on this fic, so, in hopes that it’ll help with motivation, I’ve decided to try and post updates for it here, even if they are small.

But first, I haven't really introduced this project properly! Settle in, because this is going to be a long one…

How I Started the Story

(Feel free to skip this or any of the points to get to the info you want; a lot is rambling!)

In April, 2023, I checked out 1899 and was immediately invested in Ángel (and Ramiro, of course. He just came later). I had no idea what I was getting into when I started the show, so I’ll have to admit, I didn’t think I’d like it at first, and it took till episode three to really get into it. If it wasn’t for Ángel, I might’ve not seen the whole thing through, which sounds crazy looking back on it now! I started to visualize Ángel and Ramiro’s backstory and where they came from while constantly hoping they’d get their own episode, so when I finished season one and found out it was canceled, I was very disappointed. Not only because they didn’t get an ending, but because now I wanted to know everyones’ endings. It was by this point I realized how stupid I was to think it wasn’t worth watching.

Also, at this time, I didn’t use Tumbler and assumed (from an Instagram only perspective) that the community for the show was dead. I also thought the people I loved and wanted to see more of weren’t appreciated among the few people still active in it. I really wanted to see the backstory behind Ramiro and Ángel, so I tried to write it myself. It was… terrible in the beginning. It was written in a script format, the chapters were only 300 words max, and a lot of it wasn’t realistic, but at least it was a start? Over time, though, I figured out I definitely wasn’t the only person who wanted to see more of them, and it evolved into not just those two people, but the entire story of 1899. I’m really glad it changed to that.

What Exactly Is This Story? What is it trying to accomplish?

I’m writing every backstory, then hopefully seasons 2 and 3, but also trying to make them as precise and accurate as possible. They include some of my own twists, as long as they aren’t contradicted by anything already confirmed, but the point is to make it everything the show was to be and more. I want it to have all of the detail and thought that Bo and Jantie put into it, even if it is painstaking to map out. I don’t want to give too much away yet, but just to clear something up (mainly for my own sake), this is my own take on the story and it’s different from other backstory/finishing the plot fics; I’m really trying to make it as different as I can!

So, Where Are You Now With It?

That’s complicated. I thought I had almost everything done for Volume One (Spain), but after getting through a rough draft of Chapter Six, I was gravely mistaken. I decided to take a step back and plan as much as I could, so once Volume one is out, I can almost immediately start on Volume Two, and so on and so forth. However, with so many puzzle pieces, it’s been tortuous to plan. Right now, I think the best option is for me to pick apart everything pre-simulation so I can understand everything that comes next. The main goal is for me to map out anything and everything, so I don’t change things later that ruin everything I already did, then (finally) finish Volume One.

This is going to be a while, but I want this to be as perfect as I can get it. At least it’ll be done this year, and I hope you're able to stick around for the journey :).

#1899 #1899 netflix #🚢#rant post #I know that nobody really needs this information but here it is anyway #perfectionism sucks #I didn't proofread this

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farfromstrange · 1 year

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Total Eclipse Of The Heart | Matt Murdock

Matt Murdock x Vampire!reader (f!reader)

Part 1 // Part 2 (currently here) // Part 3 (coming soon)

PART TWO - Humans are dying at the hands of her species and she has to do something about it, but how can she when the object of her attraction just so happens to stumble into her path over and over again, as if he's just as addicted to her as she is to him?

Warnings: 18+ MINORS DNI! Very explicit sexual language, dubious consent (inappropriate touching, dirty talk), blood, vampires, death, bad humor, plot, religious imagery (?), submissive Matt Murdock, Dom!Reader, DARK FANTASY (dead dove do not eat), really, this is absolutely filthy dark, AND not proof-read

A/n: This is so dark, holy shit… Here’s the second part! I hope you’re not mad at me that I left you waiting. 2023 already feels so weird I don’t know why, but I’ve finally finished this chapter and I’m getting to work on the third one as we speak. The smut is coming soon, I promise. Until then, I’m just going to get you all worked up :)

DARK CONTENT UNDER HERE, 18+ ONLY!

Ever since the beginning of time, humans have felt threatened by their fellow species. The goal is self-preservation rather than preserving the world around them. At the same time though, there has never been another species so hell-bent on destroying their habitat than the human race.

She watched the seasons come and go. Where one life ended, another started. Humans were fast to reproduce, she realized, but they were also just as fast to die. Sickness and injury are the biggest threats to the human body. You could be okay one second, then on your deathbed the next. While the female body could withstand the terrible strain of childbirth, it stands no chance against cancer. You could bleed out in seconds if the right vein is nicked, and if you fall the wrong way, a broken neck will either kill you instantly or leave you dependent on machines for the rest of your life.

While humans are considered the most sophisticated species since the beginning of time, they are all collectively fragile.

The last time she was actively human, she didn’t even have a quarter of the knowledge at hand that she gained later in life. Times have changed since then. The world grew into something new, something modern, and the human race evolved with it.

They’ve never had many nice words to say about her kind, so it came naturally to be terrified of a species that was more than willing to eradicate her own.

Sure, killing and blood-sucking isn’t something that goes over well with a crowd, but she often emphasized that they weren’t all cold-blooded murderers. Not all vampires were the same, and the lore often got it wrong.

Cold, they were, but only temperature-wise. Her half of the litter, anyway. And they were murderers too, else they wouldn’t have survived this long. Drinking blood to survive was a curse she wished upon no one. It naturally made her species reborn killers; they had to take a life to sustain their own, and since death and starvation weren’t in the cards without a stake through the heart, they had to follow their most primal instincts.

She tried to refrain from murder like a good citizen, and it worked, most of the time. There are other ways to get blood that doesn’t involve murdering an innocent. In Hell’s Kitchen, she could easily roll open a map and point to a random place, and she surely would have found criminals deserving of punishment.

But there were also humans who didn’t fear her species, those who were willing to give to the cause voluntarily. They liked to call themselves blood-submissive as if it were a sexual practice on its own – the sex was a nice byproduct, and some of those people were born to be whores, but making it a new trend was something she wished would never happen.

Though she was well aware of the subculture around humans fetishizing vampires, who were all more than ready to give their blood. Humans are so susceptible to overstimulation, especially through strange forces, even the smallest taste of a vampire’s blood could get them high enough up the precipice to push them into an orgasm.

That was the one thing that enticed her the most; the human anatomy, and how responsive they were to stimuli. She knew all about it, and yet she found herself surprised again and again whenever she lay with someone new.

That evening though, she woke up with a heavy feeling in her stomach. One that wouldn’t go away.

She entered the kitchen of her shared home to find a stranger sitting on one of the stools at the kitchen counter. Two very obvious holes adorned the young man’s neck. He didn’t look terrified when he saw her, only overly tired and perhaps a little drained.

She sighed heavily, moving to get herself a drink from the fridge. Not that she had one already sitting there, but he wasn’t hers to take. He had already been labeled with two very sharp fangs that could only belong to one person.

“Eli, you left your dinner in the kitchen!” her voice bounced off the high walls, doing black flips until it finally made the human twitch. “No offense,” she said. “I’m just not a fan of waking up to blood banks sitting at my kitchen counter.”

He opened his mouth, but no words would come out.

She grinned. With her mug in hand, she returned to ask the boy, “Coffee?”

He declined.

“Well, you can’t say I haven’t tried to be hospitable with you.”

Just in time, Eli came around the corner wearing nothing but a pair of boxer briefs. She rolled her eyes. It was one of those guests.

She met Eli somewhere around 1800 when she spent some time in the deserts of Egypt. He was only a couple of days old then, bitten by a passing vampire with no regard for human life. Eli was lucky to have survived, but with no one to teach him, he went rogue and slaughtered his entire village in a hungry haze. When he came to, the life he once knew had been destroyed beyond repair.

She saved him. Initially, she planned to just pass through, but the word about a vampire on the loose traveled fast, even back then, and so she found herself in Eli’s village soon after, convincing him to join her. She saved his life and therefore, he felt as if he owed her. They never left each other's side again.

Though sometimes, Eli was particularly hard to live with. He was almost like an unruly child, and he left his food lying out most of the time – he tended to forget that wasn’t the only hungry one in the household.

“Would you stop calling every human I bring home a blood bank?” he said.

“If you stop letting them stay for breakfast,” she retorted.

He met her bitter smile with a sour one of his own. “Not everyone feels the need to submit to you as Talon does.”

“Maybe I should make that a rule then. I mean, I am the head of this coven, after all. The least you can do is give me some respect.” She eyed the young man still sitting at the counter, completely hypnotized by the shirtless man prancing around the kitchen. “And your blood whores, too, before you start giving them a sexually transmitted human disease. Or turn them into one of us.”

He scoffed. She patted his shoulder as she passed by him, taking the chance to whisper into his ear, “Would be a shame if I had to drive a stake through one of them when all they signed up for was just a little fun.”

She couldn’t help herself. On her way out, she passed by the helpless human, pulling his head back by the hair to reveal his deliciously long neck, and she dipped her nose to take him in. The blood running through his veins smelled beyond divine. Sweet temptation. She wanted to bury her teeth in his soft skin and suck until he was empty. “Ah, delicious,” she said. “Youngblood, untainted, pure. Excellent pick. I wonder if he tastes as good as he smells.”

The tips of her sharp fangs scratched at his neck, and she had to force herself to pull away before she could make the mistake of taking Eli’s food off his plate.

“Get him out of here,” she told him. “Before I make you bathe in holy water for the rest of the week.”

He rolled his eyes. “Yes, ma’am.”

The respect issue was a problem she had to deal with. She wasn’t someone to play around, with except for the bedroom. She was nothing if not playful there, with someone writhing underneath her and begging for the mercy of pleasure, and they would always get what they wanted and deserved. She was considerate like that. But her lovers also never struggled to pay her respect. That seemed to be a family problem only.

Perhaps she had to assert more dominance over them too, even if it was just for kicks. They would learn soon enough. It wasn’t exactly easy to be a leader, after all. That was common knowledge even amongst the undead.

The vibrations of the phone in her pocket caused her to look up. She checked the text – a piece of technology she was quite fond of, the cell phone – and if she hadn’t been pale enough already, she surely would have turned white as a sheet right about now.

“What happened?” she asked as she entered the main room.

Talon nodded his head. “I just got word from my source at the police station,” he told her.

“And?”

“There’s been several suspicious murders in Hell’s Kitchen in the past week.”

“If I wanted a broken record player, I would have gone into the attic. Spit your words out now, Talon, or I will cut out your tongue.”

He flinched, remaining in his position with his head bowed downward. He couldn’t look into her almost blacked-out eyes and be met with disappointment.

“The victims have been drained of most of their blood, but the injection sites are sloppy, so a lot of the blood got wasted and spilled around the corpses,” he said.

“That’s… graphic.” She rolled her eyes. Chaos only compelled distraction. “But not at all the details I need,” she said.

“Yes, I was just getting to the important part. There’s security footage that shows a foreign party escaping from the site of the murder, and the same person is shown a couple of days later attacking the third victim in a blood-thirsty rage.”

The scenery sounded all too familiar. She tilted her head, intrigued by his report, and moved forward. “What exactly are they saying?”

“The police are blaming it on a new drug epidemic that has the users acting out to the point they would cause a blood bath. The drug supposedly triggers hallucinations that make them unaware of their surroundings and crave violence.”

“You mean blood. The drug is making them crave blood.”

“That’s what they’re thinking, but it’s not in the official report.”

“Yeah because that drug is called vampirism and that’s not exactly an epidemic that should be happening,” she said.

Talon nodded. “Police are issuing a warning,” he told her, “without knowing what they’re warning from. It’s just a couple of kids overdosing and bleeding out in the most ghastly of ways. They’re saying it’s drugs because they don’t understand.”

She grew more and more agitated with every word that slipped past his lips. The pedestal that kept her above the man made her seem much taller than she actually was. She paced the floor. It gave her a sense of superiority that she fought very hard to receive. Her status surpassed those of the people around her. She was older and wiser and perhaps slightly more sophisticated. Her moves were calculated yet often brutal because she learned that you get nothing in life if you’re not willing to spill a little blood, literally and figuratively. To have something or someone threaten her precious freedom like that was an obvious call for action

She halted her movements when he went quiet. “Do they have proof?” she questioned as if she expected him to tell her himself.

“No,” Talon said.

“Good. Call a meeting. I need to know who did this. And make sure no one knows beforehand. The last thing I need right now is a fucking vampire uproar.”

“What, you suspect it was one of us?” He had a doubting frown resting on his pale face.

“While I have faith that you can keep your fangs in your jaw, I need to make sure I’m not misplacing that faith,” she stated. “If I’m wrong in my suspicions, that is good for you. If I’m right and one of you idiots is behind this, I will drive you to hell myself.”

“If you want to have my opinion…”

She smirked, “I really don’t.”

“But if I may?”

“You may not.” Stepping down from the pedestal, she eyed him. “Call the meeting,” she ordered. “In the meantime, I’m going to get myself a bottle of Scotch to drown my sorrows, and then I’m going to steal from the police.”

Talon yelled after her, “Do you need any help, boss?”

“Yes. You can help yourself to stop crawling up my ass! That would help me a lot, actually. Don’t get me wrong,” she said, “I like my men submissive, but your behavior is just getting pathetic now. I’m your boss, not your mother. She’s dead. Deal with it.”

It wasn’t the first time she broke into the police station in Hell’s Kitchen. Crime rates exploded at night, which meant a higher police presence in the building, but at the same time, the cells overflowed with the many criminals they caught. They were always drowning in paperwork, and the crime never seemed to take an end.

She waited until the commotion in the bullpen caused the officer at the front desk to jump from his seat and escalate the situation. She sped toward the file cabinet, retrieved what she needed, and disappeared just as fast as she had come.

The officer looked up to find nothing but a strong breeze knocking the documents off his desk. He frowned, choosing to ignore it as the man underneath him writhed against the handcuffs.

Talon said a lot yet nothing at all. She eyed the pictures in the moonlight, the dead eyes staring straight into the security cameras, the man’s body covered in blood as he left a trail of bodies along the Hudson’s riverbed. He downplayed it. This was bad, a monster out of control, someone who shouldn’t even have existed in the first place and yet somehow came to life. There were clear rules. Those rules had been broken in more than one place, shattered on the ground, and then walked over with utmost disrespect.

And he wasn’t the only one. Every murder was accompanied by one of the herds escaping, later appearing on the scene of another crime. To the untrained eye, it appeared as if these kids were high and just playing around. The blood around the bodies was significant, so the ordinary human might sort it as an overdose after all. An accident. Though none of the things she saw were accidental.

They killed without a care, without remorse, and at the rate they were going, she was sure they wouldn’t stop anytime soon.

It wasn’t the first time she had to run against the clock, but it had been a while since she was tossed into such a situation where she had to choose between peace and her most primal nature. She had to appeal to her common sense. She knew better than to let them continue this.

Humans aren’t stupid but often underestimated. At this rate, if they kept going, war seemed inevitable.

These strangers were hunting on her turf and they turned everything upside down. She wasn’t having it. She had to do something.

The wind came from the far east and blew through the streets. Many different smells lay in the air that night, but the most prominent hit her nose at the front step of the precinct.

She tilted her head. She could sense him clearly now. He still smelled the same, his blood a bittersweet taste on her tongue, and she craved more. His heartbeat filled her ears, an elevated sound. She searched for him in the night until the sound of his scruffy, careful voice caught in her ears.

He stood on the fire escape of the precinct’s second floor. The metal creaked. A door fell shut. He wasn’t alone.

“Look, man, I’d be happy to help you, especially because we are way in over our heads with this case, but I told you,” the second voice said, “The file is gone.”

She stared down at the brown folder in her hands.

“What do you mean gone?” he asked, finally, and her eyes rolled back at the mere sound of him.

He was everywhere, so goddamn overwhelming, all she wanted was to pull him off that fire escape, into the alley, and turn him into a helpless mess until he was begging her for mercy with tears in his eyes – she could only imagine the soft color behind the red glasses. Were they brown, green, or perhaps even blue? They surely would turn black with lust and then gloss over with exhaustion from the sheer overstimulation when she was done with him. Though she would only stop when the color of his eyes would disappear behind his eyelids as he slipped into a state of unconsciousness, the pleasure causing his mortal body to shut down and submit even more to the power she wielded.

“Apparently, someone took it.”

“Since when do people steal files from a police station, Sergeant?”

The man shrugged. “It’s not the first time,” he said. “Happens more often than you might think.”

“What now?” her nameless stranger asked.

She could only imagine his mouth moving in sync with his gravelly voice, the movement of his Adam’s Apple in his throat as he swallowed, and the way his hands balled to fists at his sides, the beautiful veins protruding and his knuckles turning white. She wondered how those hands would feel somewhere other than a cane or a metal rod. How they would look tracing not the brim of glass but rather a different opening. Playing with wetness until his hands were coated in it the same way he played with the condensation on the glass of his drink.

“Sergeant, if you want me to help you, I need more than a whim to go on. Do you have anything you could give me?”

“Look, I can’t help you,” the Sergeant said, “but if I did know something, I would suggest scouting out the docks. Ground zero seems to be close to the docks, but I’ve also got word that the rest of Manhattan might be involved too, so I’d be careful if I were you.”

“Thank you.”

“Yeah, whatever. We have heightened police presence there since the first suspected overdose, consider that before you make any wrong moves.”

That stopped him. “Suspected?” he questioned.

He was a smart one. Her lip curled into a distant smirk.

“I’m not saying it’s not an overdose, I’m just saying they’re too suspicious to be instantly ruled as such. It’s my opinion, not the official statement, and everyone else here at the station and even the DA’s office agree with the drug epidemic explanation. But I’m not sure it’s right to assume that, not yet, not without evidence,” he said. “We judge people way too quickly these days.”

The stranger chuckled again, his voice darker than when she met him, but the darkness he displayed was something she thoroughly enjoyed. It was enticing, eliciting an excitement she hadn’t felt in quite a while.

“Are you talking about me?” he asked sheepishly, and she imagined him smirking. He seemed more confident in that alley, fully in his element, not at all as submissive as he had been around her.

She wondered if there were two sides to that man whose name she still hadn’t figured out.

The Sargeant scoffed, opening the door back into the precinct. Hot air met the cold one outside, causing the air to condensate. She could feel it even from a distance, the changes in temperature, the warmth that felt more wrong than it felt right.

“Just be careful,” he told him.

The fire escape squeaked and the sound of his boots disappearing into the distance had her frowning. Blind men don’t jump rooftops and they don’t do parkour. There was more to him than she first suspected. He wasn’t the innocent man he made himself out to be. He had dark secrets that went way below the surface. Her curiosity was spiked. She needed to see him again and she needed to have him now.

She held the file in the air, watching as the edges started to crinkle and the fire spread from her fingertips, infecting the paper. The folder lit up, filling the night with yellow flames and the ashes of the several documents gone with the wind.

When the paper fully dissolved, she closed her fist and the last remaining flame vanished.

As the mysterious stranger made his way over the rooftops of the city, she turned in the opposite direction. Her first instinct was to follow, but there was no fun in chasing him just yet. She wanted to play some before she did that and wanted him to know more about her before she completely destroyed and corrupted him. His beautiful soul would only remain a faint memory.

The doors into the old, abandoned church swung open. The benches were occupied with exactly five people, two of them Eli and Talon, and the rest of what she liked to call her family, but historians would have called them a coven. An assembled group of vampires qualified as such, as did more than one witch sharing the same ideologies and sharing the same living space. That’s what the two species have in common - they are both widely hated by all kinds of religions except for Satanity.

Six vampires living in a church sounds like the beginning of a bad joke, but the place had been abandoned years ago and there was no official owner, so it was run-down and, most importantly, they didn’t require an invitation to enter. So they made their home there, choosing Hell’s Kitchen as their turf and claiming it as their territory. That had been years ago and the small chapel grew significantly to feel like home since then.

“Cold-blooded murder,” she recited as she walked down the aisle, “Blood baths, two injection sites on the neck, suspicious behavior making humans thirsty for blood, and the police declared it a fucking drug epidemic!” she said. “What century are we living in, people? Is this the seventeenth or the eighteenth? Have we traveled back in time so that these words can be used in the same sentence again, right here in New York? What bad dream am I having right now, because it surely can’t be real?”

She reached the pedestal, stepping up in front of the altar.

“Seriously, what is happening?” she asked.

They all stared at her with wide, confused eyes. Those weren’t the faces of people who were about to cause a supernatural war of the undead. They were pretty much caught off guard by her accusations and that gave her hope, considering she knew them pretty well by now to know their tells when they were lying.

“Please tell me that it’s not one of you currently going on a rampage in Hell’s Kitchen, turning innocent teenagers into ruthless, blood-thirsty vampires, and breaking every rule that was set for us when it comes to hunting humans. Tell me none of you is going on a fucking murder spree!”

Her voice boomed off the high stone walls, almost cracking the colorful windows that adorned the church, pictures displaying passages of the bible and glowing bright red under the moonlight while others shone in blue and green. Though that night, red was truly prominent, and it fell right on her pale face, making everything appear dangerously dark about her.

One of the younger men raised his hand.

“William,” she called.

He stood up, clearing his throat, his hands tangled together in front of his body. He was the shy one, the one she had to pick up because he was starving himself due to his fear of what he had become after he was brutally turned by a woman he thought he could trust. It had been a very dark time back then, early twentieth century, and vampires in the States were still on the loose without a care in the world. There were no rules, only bloodshed, and the covens had body counts higher than the entire population.

“None of us is going on a murder spree,” he said.

“Are you saying that just because I want to hear you say it or do you actually mean what you just said?”

“I, um… you know what, I’m just gonna sit back down.”

“Wise choice.” She nodded. “So, William’s not a killer. What about the rest of you? Anyone trying to start a rebellion?”

Eli shrugged. His answer was obvious, “It’s not me.”

“I figured. You let your dinner stay for breakfast, and you know, you prefer blood whores. Gives you a sense of superiority, which of course, is not how this works. But anyway…”

The group burst out in laughter and Eli glared at her from across the room. “Very mature,” he said.

“I’m just giving you a taste of your own medicine,” she said. “Now, anyone else wanna share?”

Another hand rose in the air. “I’m honestly just knitting,” the woman said. As a demonstration, she lifted the half-finished scarf - they didn’t even wear scarves - and threw the ball of wool in the air. “I tried my hand at a very complicated cardigan, but that project failed, so I’m just going back to my roots.”

“Thank you, Helen, but I never doubted you, not even for a second. You’re a total sweetheart.”

“It also wasn’t me,” Talon spoke up. “But you already knew that.”

“Yes, because you are too stupid to cause such mayhem,” she stated plainly. “That leaves only one…” she let her eyes roam over the pews until she found who she was looking for.

His head hung low. Was he… sleeping?

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for fuck’s sake! Can someone please punch Adam in the face?”

Eli stabbed him with his finger. The man shot up, causing the bench to creak. “I’m awake!” he declared.

“Thank you for gracing us with your presence,” she answered sourly. “Did you hear anything I just said?”

Adam looked around. All eyes were on him. He rubbed his very heavy eyes. “I zoned out after you said bloodbath.” At least his confession was honest.

She sighed. She was living with a bunch of idiots. She shouldn’t have suspected them. They weren’t capable of the monstrosities that she saw in the police file.

“Never mind,” she said in exasperation. “You’re all dismissed. Now please, fuck off. I need to be alone so I can fucking shoot myself.”

She wondered how they even managed to make it this far without getting caught.

“Talon.”

“Yes?” he replied.

“I need to get back out there. You’re in charge while I’m gone. Make sure that these idiots don’t kill themselves or each other.”

“Are you sure that is such a good idea? Going out there, I mean? We don’t know what we’re dealing with,” he said.

“No,” she stated after a slight moment of hesitation, “but I’m the only competent one in this house, so I have to step up.”

Her version of stepping up was simple. Scout the docks, stake out if necessary, and confront anything she deemed suspicious enough to risk getting caught. She hoped to run into one of the young vampires, at least, so she could make them answer her – the young ones were never bright, always controlled by hunger and the new intensity of their emotions. The anger was the most brutal one.

It’s like that even for humans – anger blinds, anger poisons, and anger can tear worlds apart and start new generations built on the same ideals. She witnessed anger and greed topple empires that had once been strong and flourished. There is no limit to what anger can make a person do. And vampires, like any other enhanced species, experience most emotions ten times deeper and worse than the ordinary human being.

She felt that effect even after years of being trapped in the same body, in the same state she was left in back then, and especially as she stood on the roof of the warehouse by the docks, overseeing the Hudson and the city that laid on the other side of the shore. She learned how to control and live with her anger. She learned how to survive. Though there were moments when even the highest form of self-control failed and she was stranded with the blade of a hot knife stuck in her sternum, digging further to tear apart her cold, dead heart.

The hunger was the worst part. It had the ability to cloud her mind completely and dictate her every behavior with the purpose to stave that hunger, which was a near-impossibility. There was no satisfying a hunger that had been there for centuries, that not even pints of blood could satisfy. In the years she lived, she learned how to live with it, but always going hungry was also no real way to live. It was awful, constant torture, and with every passing century, she grew more tired of the life she was forced to live.

In the distance, the wood creaked. One of the boats on the harbor displayed movements in its belly. The light only faintly fell on the source of the noise. A figure emerged behind the barrels stocked on the pier, heading straight for the oblivious fisherman who seemed to have stayed around to have a celebratory beer after bringing home quite a large catch of fish. She could smell them across the docks, already tied in bags to take home, but the victor was still inhabiting his boat. Humans have always been particularly obsessed with the art of fishing; it had once been their largest source of food income and fish is still pretty high up on the list of shippable goods. Though there was nothing worse to her nose than the smell of several fish perched together in one place. The stench was astronomical.

A young vampire was far more sensitive, though once hungry, there was nothing but blood on their minds and so none of them would run at the smallest hint of fish in the air, let alone the fear of getting caught. They didn’t have that kind of perception, not yet at least, because this particular behavior was taught. Primal nature dictated them to be monsters and without the proper training, the hunger would control them instead of them gaining control over the real monster – the insatiable thirst. Self-control is one of the hardest traits to gain, but it goes a long way, especially for creatures of the night who were born to be the opposite of compliant and self-aware.

If you want to live amongst an emancipated species, you have to learn how to conform to their rules and compromise, if necessary. You have to be willing to change your true nature to fit in and become something more than what history made of you. All of it comes back down to self-control. Without self-control, there can be no rules and without rules, society is doomed to collapse. Rules are what make a society habitable.

If there was one thing all young vampires had in common it was their lack of stealth. The young boy she had heard lurking behind the barrels across from the fisherman’s boat only checked the corner to his right, his eyes bright red as the moonlight fell on his blacked-out irises.

She cocked her head to the side. Someone trying to preserve themselves would have gone about this much differently. He stopped tip-toeing when he caught her scent in the air, slowly turning in her direction, and the way he looked straight at her reminded her of a frightened deer or a child caught in the act of stealing something. He was stealing, it just wasn’t something so easily explained. What he was stealing and risking went beyond what the human mind was capable of comprehending, let alone the brain of a young vampire that had absolutely no rational thoughts left behind.

He froze dead in his tracks and she sighed, almost like a condescending mother trying to teach her disobedient son a valuable lesson.

“I see what you’re doing,” she stated.

The boy licked his lips, revealing parts of his very sharp fangs. Another thing about the young ones – they didn’t know how to mask. One look at them and your first thought would be a vampire. Red eyes, protruding veins around the sockets, pale, clammy skin, and strength and speed they couldn’t control yet. Stealth was little to non existent, as was their sense of self-preservation and control. They were like unruly babies turning into toddlers overnight, the Devil on their shoulders whispering sweet sins into their ears and causing them to make the worst decisions. Right or wrong didn’t exist in their world. They knew what they wanted and they would try everything to get it, rules be damned.

Even though they all started out like this, not many chose to stay that way anymore. Once you learn how to live by the rules, it’s not that hard, and she grew to love the routine.

Without someone to teach them, young vampires could turn into everyone’s worst nightmare, and then everything she had worked so hard toward for centuries would have been for nothing.

“Fair warning,” she said, “Don’t.”

He bared his teeth.

“Oh, I’m shaking in my boots. Not. What’s your name, kid?”

He looked no day over seventeen, at best. His mother was probably worried sick. Little did she know that her worst fear, her son dying, had come true but in a far worse sense than she could ever imagine. Who he was now had nothing to do with the boy he used to be. The young vampire staring back into her eyes dark and empty had nothing left inside of him but insatiable hunger. His soul was clouded by the demon inside of him and chances were that it would never fully recover from the monstrosities he committed and would still commit.

She couldn’t stop him, she knew that. If she took him with her, whoever was responsible for the sudden spike in bloodless corpses would only create more of him, and take more teenagers from their parents until they got what they wanted. She needed to know what that was so she could stop the war that was looming on the horizon. She couldn’t have an apocalypse, not when her life was going semi-normal for a change. She quite liked New York, she wasn’t done yet.

“Who did this to you?” she asked again.

“Leave,” he growled.

“You see, I can’t do that. I want to, believe me, but I can’t. You’re too young, too inexperienced, so I’m trying to tell you this as easy as possible. What you’re doing right now is breaking all sorts of rules. You’re hunting on our turf,” she said. “My turf. My coven and I live here now. If you continue causing mayhem and destruction and turning innocent people into vampires, you’re breaking a truce that is far older than you, your parents, and great-great grandparents together. There is a set of rules for a reason…”

“You need to leave,” the boy repeated.

She ignored him. “This truce,” she continued, “was put in place over a century ago to assure that vampires and humans can live together in peace. Covens are not supposed to turn innocent people into vampires, let alone leave them without someone to teach them the ropes. A vampire out of control poses a danger to all species and if you continue what you’re doing, your actions will lead to war.” Her eyes narrowed. “Or perhaps that’s what you want. Is that it? Do you want us to be at war again?”

He smirked.

“You weren’t there the last time. It was ugly. That’s why there are rules, right?” She motioned as if explaining the way the world worked to a toddler. “To prevent such unnecessary bloodshed from happening again. To prevent us from killing each other,” she explained. “That’s what those rules are for, okay? Prevention, not causation. You’re supposed to stick to the rules to prevent a war that would destroy more than it would fix, and world domination doesn’t happen just because you say ‘fuck it!’ And shine a dangerous light on all vampires in the process. We’re not all alike. Every coven knows that,” she said. “Whoever made you is only using you to get ahead. In other words, you’re fucked and doomed to get slaughtered in the end. Either by your own kind, a war, or maybe even one of the very ancient vampire hunters that are only waiting for a chance to get back at us.”

Talking to him was futile. He didn’t follow a word she said and even if he had, he wouldn’t have understood. Young vampires were so stupid, naïve, useless and a nuisance. To think they all started out this way grossed her out, even though she made saving the lost causes of the world her life’s work.

Her logic was twisted and more often than not illogical, but she was wise and considered herself above average in intelligence, simply because she had been around for quite a while. She saw empires rise and fall. She stared into the darkest pits of existence and still managed to come back from the abyss. Her life had been a series of doors in her face, which led to several life lessons being taught over the course of centuries. She was no angel, but she wasn’t stupid and she had one job: make sure the truce would remain intact. And she would do just that, even if she had to eliminate that young boy in order to do so.

He didn’t say anything for quite a while. “Get out of my way,” he growled. Of course, he would settle on something as dramatically pathetic as this catchphrase. “I’m starving and I won’t hesitate to hurt you if you keep me from my meal.”

“Ouch,” she cocked an eyebrow, “You really bruise my ego, thinking you can get through me without getting hurt yourself. I’d suggest you think about your actions,” she said, “but I know that I’m practically talking to a wall right now, so thinking isn’t an option. You’re incapable of rational thought.”

Fear was the last thing that came to her mind when he showed off his teeth again.

“Listen, I just want to know who’s behind this. Who’s leading your coven, kid?”

“Fuck you!” he spat.

“Hey now, no need to get vulgar. I asked you a normal question. Who’s behind this and is there a chance I might get to have a conversation with the one in charge? Tell me and I will gladly point you in the direction of a different hunting ground,” she said.

The boy nodded toward the boat. “I want that one. He’s mine. Don’t even try to stop me.”

“Yeah, but you can’t have him.”

“I’m going to have him.”

“No, you won’t.”

“Stop disagreeing with everything I’m saying!”

She shrugged. “Can’t help that you’re wrong all the time. I’ve never learned how to shut up. It’s genetic; centuries of untreated trauma are at fault here, and of course, your general wrongness plays a big part in my need to disagree with your embarrassing hypotheticals.”

“Go to hell!”

“Already did. You know, of course, pride always goes before the fall. Such a human trait to have; multiply it by a thousand, where does that leave you? Certainly not more sophisticated than me, someone with hundreds of years of experience. You need to be careful, young vampires like you are at an even higher risk to be discovered and murdered before you even get the chance to learn what you were given with this transition.”

Finally, he launched at her. She sped away, gone in a matter of a second, and appeared a few feet behind him, heaving a heavy sigh. “You kids are all the same,” she declared, looking into his very distraught eyes. He couldn’t believe she had switched that fast. “Fast but reckless and extremely easy to trick.”

A moment later, he stood in her spot and she was gone again, crossing her arms behind her back.

“You done?” she asked. His attempts to attack her only made her laugh, “Oh, so terrifying.”

She had him right where she wanted him, so agitated that he spiraled out of control, no longer aware of where he was going or what he was doing. She watched him dance for a bit. By now, he surely must have realized he wasn’t going to win. But the pride was stronger and he kept going, trying to get to her in all kinds of ways, though never succeeding.

“I feel bad for you. What would your mother say if she saw you like this?”

He stopped. His left eye twitched. She saw the wheels on his head turning and she thought, finally, I got him.

What did she say? Pride goes before the fall.

She caught the billy club that soared through the air in their direction only a few inches from the boy’s face. Her lips pursed and she stared at the red object, feeling the heavy metal between her fingers and the small ripples in the material.

When she turned her attention back to the target, the boy was gone. He had sped away, using the moment of distraction to run. She couldn’t sense him anywhere; he must have escaped the docks completely, not even staying close to the Hudson. He was on his way home. The fisherman was safe and she had diverted quite the disaster, but she still deemed the interruption rude, including the attempt to impale that poor boy with the billy club. She had thought about it, but she would have never gone through with it. Whoever the weapon belonged to had to have been close by.

Her night just kept getting better and better. That was her assessment, at least, until she heard his heartbeat again. The scent of him brushed the hairs in her nose and she took a whiff, feeling his presence so close in the air, she stopped to let the sensation wash over her. The fire inside of her belly ignited once again, the excitement tickling her cold skin and leaving nothing but lust and hunger to rummage through her veins.

Footsteps thudded against the asphalt, stones crunching under his weight. They were slightly wet from the previous rain, causing a slight slip.

She lowered her hand with the billy club, turning to look over her shoulder at the supposed blind man in a suit. She had seen that get-up before in the papers when he first showed his masked face in Hell’s Kitchen. She never thought much of it since he had never posed a problem before.

The tables had officially turned.

Her lips parted to chuckle. “This is awkward,” she said. In the distance, the waves of the Hudson crashed into the riverbanks. It was colder than usual with a breeze in her hair that caused the water to go wild.

She fiddled with the red billy club, smirking, “Does this belong to you?”

“Who are you?” his voice sounded significantly lower than the night she first met him at that godforsaken gala.

To think she didn’t want to go in the first place; she would have never met him if she hadn’t let Talon convince her that she was supposed to show her face. A political move, he called it, to assert her dominance, which she did, but not in the areas that mattered.

“What are you doing in my city?”

She pouted. “So many questions.”

“Who was that boy you were just talking to? Where did he go?”

“What happened to hello, how are you? What’s your name?” She retorted. “Take a girl out for a drink first, would you? Back then men used to still be gentlemen.”

His chuckle was rather dark, a sound that made her shiver and imagine what it would sound like to reduce him to whimpers instead. The man was a brat, no doubt, not easy to force into submission, but she had cracked worse nuts. Surrendering wasn’t her forte, but she could make it everyone else’s.

“I’m not here to play games,” he told her.

“But I am,” she said.

“What do you want?”

“As far as I can recall, I made that pretty clear when we first met.”

“When we- I don’t know you,” he lied and she realized how bad he was at it for a lawyer.

She licked her lips, the fangs threatening to come out. She was starving. “I quite like an oblivious man. Makes things so much more exciting.”

“Listen, I don’t have time for small talk. There have been several suspicious murders around this part of New York and you’re currently my only connection, so you better talk before I make you.”

“Just out of curiosity,” she said, “what does making me entail?”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!”

He headed straight ahead, determined to grab her, and she watched with an amused crinkle in her eyes. The downward tilt of his lips was truly something to laugh over.

She allowed him to push her against the wall behind them. His force was surprising – those arms didn’t just look scrumptious, they actually carried a lot of strength for a human.

The stranger bared his teeth and she smirked, eyeing his focused expression. He tried to look intimidating but failed miserably. One of his hands braced against the cement beside her head and the other landed around her neck, a threatening motion to assert dominance. They were all so predictable and foolish enough to think that a woman like her couldn’t fight back.

Everywhere she went, she was underestimated. If only everyone knew her true nature, they wouldn’t be so reckless as to push her into corners over and over again. Or in this case, against cement walls on the docks in the middle of the night, right in the middle of her hunting ground with not another human soul close enough to hear him scream. And water is knowingly a great way to dispose of a dead body.

He squeezed tighter and she unclenched her jaw, wriggling out of his grasp in the process. “You’re a kinky bastard, aren’t you?” she asked.

“Answer my question,” he bit back.

“If you answer mine first.”

“This isn’t a game. Lives are at stake here! Listen, I don’t know who you are or what you are,” he said, “but if I find out that you had anything to do with these innocent kids getting slaughtered or know something about this new drug everyone is talking about, I will find you and I will destroy you.”

“You know, if it weren’t for the way you smell, I wouldn’t have recognized you, all confident in your little devil’s costume,” she purred.

Her finger slid up the leather of his suit, brushing over his tensing abs hiding behind the protective gear and she sucked in a sharp breath at the illusion she received.

“All of this tension and I still don’t know your name.”

He caught her hand and pinned it over her head. She squealed. He was full of surprises, and it only turned her on more. She wanted to bite him, really bite him, and suck on his pulse until he was crying her name and praying for God to save him, but the pleasure would only drive him further to hell and God wouldn’t be coming. She wanted him to writhe under her touch, taste him and make him come undone over and over again and once he believed she was done with him, she would start her torture anew, right from the beginning, pushing him from the precipice just far enough so she could catch him, bring him back to the top and then do the same thing in repetition all over again.

He roamed her face aimlessly, as it seemed, but barely visible behind the mask. “How?” he growled.

“Wouldn’t you want to know?” She chuckled. “It’s unfortunate that we had to meet again like this, but…” In an instant, she had them flipped around, her arms pinning him to the wall instead of herself and her strength remained unmatched. He could struggle, it was of no use. She had the upper hand.

Her breath tickled his ear as she spoke, far too close for comfort, “You smell absolutely divine. It’d be a shame to waste all that sweet, sweet blood for a second time,” she said.

He couldn’t move. Sharp nails raked through his hair and over his scalp, tugging his head to the side until his throat was completely bare to her, naked, exposed. His aorta pulsated wildly under his skin. She could see it bulge with every beat of his heart. That strong, masculine heart, stronger than anything she had heard or felt before.

She tasted the sweat on his skin and the salt of threatening tears in the air. If he was turned on or scared, she wasn’t sure. The lines between fear, pain, and pleasure blurred. It was all the same to her, anyway. Getting close to her would most certainly draw everyone under her spell at some point, no matter the sex or gender, and all the heads would continue turning to her whenever her presence entered a room full of lively human beings. Only then her pheromones could work their wonders.

The Devil of Hell’s Kitchen struggled against her grasp but to no avail. He was powerless, just how she liked him, how she wanted and craved him.

She licked a long stripe over his pulse point. “I want to taste you so badly,” she whispered. “I want nothing more than to dig my teeth into your pretty little throat and suck you dry, and then I want to get on my knees and eat your cum so I can feel it mix with the essence of what your heart has to give, and then you’d be mine. I’d own you. You’d be completely at my mercy, you’d be bound to me and it would feel so fucking good. It would feel so fucking good for the both of us.”

Her fangs began to scratch the surface, enough to make him feel it but not nearly enough to break the skin. She tasted the salt of his sweat even clearer now, wondering how much deeper she had to go to finally reach the source of the sweetness that surrounded him.

“Don’t you want that?” Her hand joined the words slipping from her silver tongue and wrapping around him like a poisonous snake. “Don’t you want to let me corrupt you, to bite you, to eat you until all you can feel is the pure pleasure of having me all over you? My lips, my tongue, my teeth, my body on yours everywhere, all the fucking time… oh, that would be such an orgasmic sight, and the pleasure you’d be feeling, I can’t even describe it. You won’t know until you at least try and believe me, you should. Isn’t that something you want, darling? Doesn’t your body crave to be caressed and receive undivided attention from someone who knows how to make you feel good?”

He sounded small, fragile, and utterly broken when he next spoke, and she hadn’t even started yet. “What are you doing to me?” he asked. The heat of his breath mixed with the cold night air. “What are you?”

She chuckled. “The better question is, what am I not?” The tip of her tongue moved from his neck to his cheek until she reached the corner of his luscious lips. Her nose dug into his cheekbone. “Fuck,” she said. “The things I want to do to you are far from innocent.”

But so fucking good.

Even with fear holding the reins to his body, he melted into her touch. He turned into a puddle of melted chocolate right at her feet. She could have asked anything of him, he would have done so just for the sake of pleasing her. But she wanted him to do it voluntarily not because the smell of her pheromones managed to drive any man into a state of co-dependency.

She wanted him to want her for the sake of wanting her. Like this, she would only compel him to do things he would never choose to do out of his own free will, and while the thought of having him right there on the docks was exciting and had her cunt squeezing around thin air, already wet and wanting, the only treacherous thing about her that was entirely defenseless and could be forced into submission with just a simple flick of the tongue over plump, rosy lips. He had her on the cloud of dangerous euphoria in seconds, already stumbling on the edge and about ready to slip, lose herself, and lose control only to have him, finally, in all the ways she pleased and all the ways that would make him feel good.

She could give him anything he had ever wanted, give him a time that not a single human could give him, and make him come undone inside and outside so many times, he would pass out from the pure pleasure. But he wouldn’t regret it. He would go out this as the winner, fucked out and blissful and perhaps a little addicted to the taste of her as well – she was sure she would be addicted to him as well. She almost already was, just from the scent of his blood and the way his body shivered at the slightest touch. He was so responsive, so human, yet stronger and more unique than anyone else could ever be. He was the one thing she wanted and she was ready to take it as soon as he wanted it, too.

She was used to taking what she wanted however she wanted and screwing the consequences, quite literally, but not with him. With him, the need bubbling up deep inside of her belly was different. It wasn’t just a hunger for blood or a hunger for sex and pleasurable violence, he caused much more than that within her already conflicted soul, and as enticing as that was, the connection confused her. There was a reason she didn’t let anyone close, using sex as a mere pastime activity to get the edge off – she couldn’t toy with him because chances were she would reduce his survival chances to zero.

Allowing a human like him close would only cause pain in the long run, and she’d been through enough of that for several lifetimes. And that wasn’t even an overstatement.

Her lips brushed over his momentarily before she forced herself to pull away, widening the distance between them.

The poor man slumped against the wall, his world rotating. He took it much better than most people, but the sweet taste of his fear in the air reminded her that he was just human, after all. A curious, enticing, and mysterious human, but a human being nonetheless.

Humans serve only one purpose for vampires like animals serve a purpose to humans – predators hunt their victims to feast, sustain themselves and survive. Humans are essentially animals and vampires used to be humans turned into hunters, predators, and dangerous perverts who craved blood to survive while at the same time using it for twisted, sexual purposes that had God locking the gates of heaven to anyone who even dared to fantasize about it. There is no ancestor ready to turn around in their grave because vampires were born from lust and hunger, and the first vampires had been carnal creatures as well, ready to go at it like animals without a single brain cell at their disposal.

Vampires weren’t like that anymore. Sex still played a huge role in their existence, but their main purpose was to fit in. They wanted a peaceful life. Taking everything they wanted was no longer possible, their chances were limited, but at least they didn’t have to fear imminent death anymore. Not ever since the truce was first established, anyway.

If those young vampires continued killing and turning innocent children without mercy, and their coven even supported their decisions, the peace would have been short-lived. She could already see it swindling with every passing second, though fear was not something she wanted to concern herself with, not yet. Her life had more important things to offer before she rang the warning bells on all the vampires she knew, therefore causing a certain commotion that would send the gravestones rolling. Not yet, she decided, but if they kept going at this rate, certainly very soon.

“Go,” she growled into the night. “Do yourself a favor and stay away from the Hudson until further notice. You can never know what blood-thirsty and murderous monsters might lurk in the dark around here,” she said.

He didn’t move.

“Did you hear what I said?”

“You don’t get to tell me what to do,” he said, his voice remaining steady.

She frowned. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, you don’t scare me. Manipulate me all you want, this isn’t the first time an otherwise scary woman fails to put me under her spell. But,” he smirked, “don’t take it personally. I’m sure you look pretty scary.”

“Oh, sweetheart,” she cooed, her eyes switching from their natural color to a glossy black. “You have no idea who you’re talking to, do you?”

The red nails adorning her fingers grew sharper and in size. If only he could have regained his eyesight, he surely would have changed his mind. Her skin turned even whiter, the bags under her eyes sinking deep into her skull, replaced instead by thick, purple veins that transported the venom from the core of her existence into them. She was chaos, an abomination, humanity’s biggest threat – not scary was a description she wouldn’t accept.

No matter how blind he was, he had to follow the natural order of things like everyone else. He was supposed to be afraid of her. If he couldn’t find it in himself to show her, all of her games would inevitably lose their fun factor. And her ego would suffer the most.

Open an ancient book about demons and a picture like that might stare back at you.

“It takes a lot more than dark magic to scare the Devil of Hell’s Kitchen,” he told her.

It was cute. Remarkable, really. She laughed at his attempt to make himself feel better, and partly because she was starting to grow upset with him.

“Somehow, being infuriated with you only makes you so much more attractive to me,” she said.

“You still don’t scare me.”

“Enjoy it while it lasts.”

Five seconds. The heartbeat of the fisherman rang loudly in her ear. She was starving, her last meal far too long in the past. He wriggled in her grasp, crying, begging for her to let him go, to have mercy on him and, “Oh, God, your face- what happened to your face? Are those- are those fangs? Please, I have a family!”

Her laugh reverberated in her chest. The man stiffened when she tore at his hair to position his head sideways, his neck in perfect reach for her mouth. She looked at the man in the suit before her, his jaw clenched, and he had his billy clubs at the ready. They weren't going to hurt her, he knew that. She would catch them with ease. He could only stand by and pretend he wasn’t scared even though he had never been more in sync with the feeling. They were a package deal when it came to her.

“Don’t worry,” she told the poor fisherman, “You’ll see your family again, and you won’t even have to remember a thing.”

Her mouth opened.

“Don’t,” Daredevil threatened – yes, it was a threat, not even a warning – from the other side of her, and she saw the conflict dance clearly over the revealed lower part of his face. “You don’t have to hurt him,” he said. “The man’s innocent.”

She shrugged. “I know.”

“He has a family.”

“I know. My ears are quite impeccable, can you believe that?”

“How about you think this through before you act? There’s a lot of ways you can go about spiting me, but pulling an innocent bystander into this is not fair. Come on, you said you wanted me, so take me.”

As lucrative as that sounded, she had a different plan.

She hummed, “No.”

“Why? Are you scared? Perhaps you’re not such a bad person after all. Is that it? You want me to be afraid of you, so you’re trying to hurt that man until I cave? Well, I won’t, but I’m offering myself to you instead of him, so don’t try so hard. Just take me. Take your shot.”

Oh, he sounded so amused – time to wipe that smirk off his beautiful face.

“Ancient advice,” she ignored everything else he had said, “Don’t be a martyr,” she said and her lips rained down on the fisherman’s throat in a fiery passion. “History hates martyrs.”

“No, history only consists of martyrs.”

“The official version. The truth lies much deeper than your little human brain could ever explore.”

Daredevil was right about one thing; the man was innocent. No matter how she turned it, there was nothing wrong with him, so death would have been unnecessary punishment.

She wasn’t going to kill him just to spite the man she craved to actually have a taste of. She was just going to take a sip, still a quarter of her hunger and then move on, heal the man’s wounds and make him forget this ever happened. He would be disoriented, but he would be fine.

Humans are the most susceptible to manipulation.

“Don’t be afraid,” she told the fisherman, “I’m just going to have a little taste of the forbidden fruit.”

Her teeth dug into his aorta and she sucked, tasting the blood that squirted into her mouth and all over her face in thick stripes. He tasted nothing like the feast standing right across from her, but it didn’t matter. Her mind shut off. The hunger moved to the forefront and at that moment, everything else stopped existing. It was just her and the life of this particular human in her hands, the taste of his blood exploding on her tongue and her stomach churning with the endless hunger that only got fueled with the small taste. She wanted more, needed it, but she knew better than to let the desperation overpower her.

Passed out and short of a few pints of blood, the fisherman fell to the ground. She licked her lips. He was everywhere, even stuck on her clothes and traces of him had gotten tangled in her hair. He was a bleeder, that much was sure, and if she hadn’t licked over his neck to seal the wound, he surely would have bled out.

Poor thing, but sentiment was useless in a case like this. He would make it. No use crying over a blood bag, she was taught. Humans lived to feed them. It was their purpose and she had no reason to feel bad for wanting to be full for a change, not go to bed hungry because she wouldn’t dare touch someone that wasn’t already in a plastic bag. She deserved this.

And Daredevil cowered in fear at the sounds he was met with. Her night had turned from a total shit show into the sight of victory.

She stepped forward and he flinched away, finally. “You wanted to know what I am. This is it!” she declared. “I’m the monster parents warn their children about and I’m the one thing every church fears because I happen to stand against everything religion stands for.”

“Dear God,” he breathed out.

“God can’t help me now,” she said. Her eyes moved to the sky, watching the stars disappear behind a thick cloud of smog and thousands of lights from the city center. “He stopped doing that the second I died. He’s dead to me now. He cannot be found. There is no God, there is only hunger and I’m probably the most merciful of them all, so I’d run if I were you. I’d run before another one of those demons God gave up on saving, jumps out of the dark and decides to suck the life from your pretty little body. I’d run,” she said, “because there is not a millisecond that goes by in which I do not want to tear your neck open and drink your blood while I also desperately want to suck your dick between my lips and do the same to those veins too, and the longer you stay the more my self-control starts to fade into the thin smoke that comes out of your mouth whenever you speak.”

He shivered and the color faded from his skin, blood pooling in his veins at twice the amount and the smell almost knocked her off her already hazy feet from the first course.

More, her body screamed, but she held back. She learned how to hold back. No one had to die tonight.

“Run now or I’m cutting this short, and then Hell’s Kitchen will no longer have a Daredevil to protect them from the likes of me. They won’t even get the chance to mourn because it’d be impossible for me to drop your body in the Hudson after getting a taste of your blood.”

He turned around, finally getting the hint to run. He jumped the wall up to the rooftop too gracefully for a blind man. She watched, her bloody lips moving into a smile.

“Fear is healthy,” he heard her loud and clear. “Don’t let your pride cloud that healthy feeling from manifesting. And find me,” she said, “when you’re ready to talk without underestimating me.”

By the time she looked back up, Daredevil was gone with the wind, but his scent still lingered long after he had left and she would take it to bed with her where the most unholy of things would happen to the sound of a name she didn’t even know.

She should have fucked him when she had the chance.

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februairy · 5 months

Text

grief that disguised as love

chapter two of an english version of acesabo fanfic based on an indonesian movie; jatuh cinta seperti di film-film (literally translated into falling in love like in the movies)

warning: spoilers for jatuh cinta seperti di film-film, past sabolaw, minor character death, grammar mistake as english isn’t my first language (but i did try my best!), grieving theme.

note: koala and deuce were married only for plot convenience and because they suited as acsb sidekicks

ep. 1 english version [here]

you can find the indonesian version ep. 1 [here] and ep. 2 [here]

enjoy!

hastily arriving at the apartment, accompanied by a cup of instant coffee and the sun which began to dim through the window, ace's fingers typed slowly on his laptop.

s e q u e n c e t w o

sequence two, hm. this was the part where the character found their goal. after a few hours been spent thinking about it, producer shanks’ feedbacks were spinning in ace’s head. this and that and all manner of things that made the story even more complicated.

ace sighed, enough for today. he picked up his phone and started chatting with his closest friend while he was studying film in university.

ace: u home tmrrw with deuce?

koala: what

a few minutes later;

koala: deuce’s shooting had been canceled anw

koala: yea well be at homw

koala: home

"how was it? my idea?"

ace leaned his head hard on the sofa of koala and deuce's house, he sat on the floor with his feet stretched out and there was already a gaming console controller in his hands (a sign that he had used to come arbitrarily and relaxing around the house of the video editor and actor couple).

next to him, koala sat in her home attire and a shoulder massager in her hand. her face looked as if it was swallowing bitter food after hearing ace's script idea, "honest opinion? tacky."

"why is it tacky, huh? won’t it be cute if sabo watches it, and then at the end he will realize that it turns out to be my confession?" ace scowled, turning his body slightly to face koala. "anyway, why aren't you shooting, deuce?"

deuce, who had just entered the living room with his laundry basket, simply replied with a flat face before continuing. "my director is annoying," he put the basket on the sofa, then began to fold the clothes one by one. "well, yeah, this happened a lot with a newbie director. suddenly, he went away in the middle of shooting. i don’t know when we will resume the shooting again."

"this happened often with newbie directors, huh?" ace showed interest and suddenly remembered producer shanks' words. "hey, deuce. do you want to be in my movie if you are being offered by shanks?"

the blue-haired man paused for a moment before stacking up his already folded t-shirt. "soap opera adaptation again?" his voice was a little doubtful.

this time, it was the koala who answered (while still beating her shoulders with a massage stick). "no, this one is ace's first original script. based on his personal experience, he said. the film is intended for confessing to his high school crush. i’m so grossed out."

ace looked at deuce, looking for an ally, but deuce just turned his face away.

"hey, ace. have you asked sabo’s permission? that's his life, no? i will be furious if i'm in his shoes." said koala, as if she was trying to force a common sense to get into ace’s head.

"won’t he be moved?" deuce replied while still meddling with his laundry, he had this questioning expression, ace sticked out his tongue towards koala, 'hah!’. koala stopped her movement, she lifted her shoulder massager stick, motioning to throw it at ace.

"now sabo is still grieving, koala. how can i tell him? he will see me as heartless." ace chimed in, his shoulders shrugged.

"what if he hasn't moved on?" koala asked, sharply.

ace was silent. "then it will be a sad ending, huh?" his hand began to touch his chin, doubting. "but, listen. the production of the film is about a year or so? i can approach him for the time being, and when the film’s aired, i will invite him and confess my feelings. that sounds great, doesn’t it?"

koala made a vomiting expression.

"it's been a year, koala. surely, he will have moved on, right?"

annoyed, koala's voice sounded harsh by the next she spoke up; "you can't tell when people are done grieving."

deuce, who had been lost in the conversation between his friend and his wife, stared back and forth between ace and koala. confused. "aren’t we talking about ace’s film?"

the light brown-haired woman raised her hand, defeated, and stood up to walk to her desk behind the sofa. giving up talking with ace for further discussion. surprisingly, their debates often ended in nothing, but koala and ace were still friends from their university days until now.

"whatever. i will continue my work. get out of the way, ace. i want to use the TV for editing." koala grabbed the controller in ace's hand while ace was lost in his own thought, thinking about the koala's words which, according to ace, did not make sense.

is it true that sabo won’t have moved on for over a year?

the whole pile of deuce's laundry was neatly folded, but the confusion still didn't disappear from his face.

"so… is this a true story or…?"

sabo was busy discussing orders with his employees when he caught ace's figure from the corner of his eye, he saw ace hesitated to enter sabo's flower arrangement studio before being allowed to.

"just come in, ace," sabo coaxed with a chuckle. it was actually casual, but sabo himself didn't know how big the effect of his smile was to ace, because ace wanted to melt in front of the door right away. "you're not lost, are you? how did you get here?"

ace pointed at his car which was parked in front of the gate of sabo's house, to which sabo replied with a thumbs up before walking towards the rows of flower arrangements in his studio. "sit down, i'll take care of the orders first. you can have a look and take photos."

after getting permission and approval from his friend, ace walked around sabo's studio while occasionally nodding a little to the employees of the flower shop. sabo’s flower arrangement studio occupied one of the room in the old house of sabo's parents, a modest house with colonial architecture in the old housing area of the capital city. during the day, the studio was only illuminated by sunlight that seeped in from the gap of windows.

the floral fragrance mixed with the weathered wood of an old shelf, that ace could guess was an old shelf handed down from the sabo’s parents too. there are many crumbs of dry leaves and spots of blackish stains on the floor, a sign testifying to the high intensity of activity and mobility in the room. the flowers were lined up in a plastic bucket (which arranged alphabetically by the type of flower, ace noticed).

ace smiled. after so many years of not meeting sabo, this small space was able to provide a small part of sabo that ace had not had time to know. about sabo, who turned out to had participated in flower arrangement certification several times (there are four certificates displayed on the wall), about sabo, who once received an order from the mayor of a neighboring city (his photo was at the top corner of the shelf).

about sabo–

ace's steps stopped at a framed photograph hanging on the innermost side of the studio with fresh white flowers embedded between the frame carvings.

–who started this business supported by law.

there was sabo's sweetest smile in the photo, sabo's smile that had always taken ace's breath away since they were in highschool. a photo of sabo in front of a flower shop in his old town, embraced by a taller man with a sheepish smile and looking at sabo lovingly.

and suddenly, all the information ace had just learned about sabo seemed meaningless.

ace's fingers, which were holding the camera, were frozen.

from the gap of the shelf, ace turned his head weakly towards sabo who was still busy directing his employees to move the flower arrangements into the delivery box, making sure the destination address was correct. really, the grief was not visible in ace’s eyes, covered by sabo's usual attitude in carrying out his daily activities.

but the fresh flowers in the frame said otherwise.

one year. would ace be able to make sabo drew his grief to a close?

"ace?"

sabo's voice from behind the other rack pulled ace out of his thoughts. ace hurriedly approached sabo while trying to cover the confusion on his face, "have you finished your business?" ace asked nervously which, hopefully, was subtle.

"yes," sabo's eyes glanced at the shelf aisle that ace had just passed through and deduced that ace had seen the photo hanging there. for some reason, there was pressure in sabo's heart that passed by, but sabo ignored it. "by the way, how is it? how can i help you with the survey?"

"i– " ace cleared his throat, his fingers fiddling with the camera he was holding. "i want to see your daily life as a florist, sab."

"are you free tomorrow?"

ace blinked confusedly. "yeah?"

"tomorrow morning, would you like to come with me to the flower market? usually, i buy flowers early in the morning at the flower market," sabo's hand moved, sweeping to one of the flower arrangements on the shelf. "because i restock fresh flowers everyday. but it will be suuuper early in the morning–"

before sabo could continue his words again, ace had already shown an affirmative nods. the opportunity to be alone with sabo? certainly ace wouldn’t miss it. their plan was further confirmed after ace promised to pick up sabo tomorrow at five in the morning.

sabo and ace just got to the flower market at nine in the morning.

"so... you go the flower market this early every day, huh, sab?"

sabo's footsteps slowed down, adjusting to ace who was busy taking photos with his camera to all corners of the flower market, as documentation for spots that would be good for shooting later.

sabo looked back, flashing a small smile. "well… i think… this is unusually late for me." which was followed by a small chuckle. ace's face flushed, saying sorry at sabo because he overslept and was late to pick sabo up from the promised time. sabo laughed back, patting ace on the shoulder, reassuring that it was fine.

some time later, colorful flowers had diverted ace's mind from his steps with sabo getting at the same tempo.

"why do you want to make the main character as a florist?"

ace turned his head, somewhat flustered by sabo's sudden question. he scratched his neck, looking for answers. "you see... in my mind, florist… is lovable, isn’t it?" it was sabo's turn to turn his head before ace continued “and later, the setting will also be pretty, there will be lots of flowers and very colorful. well, even if the film mostly is going to be black-and-white, anyway."

only a small hmm came out of sabo as he continued to walk across the sea of flowers while looking right and left, trying to find fresh flowers that he could buy today. the minimal reaction from sabo made ace a little uneasy, and his brain started looking for a way to break the silence.

"can i ask something? if you don’t mind?" ace asked, while sabo was busy bidding for flowers with the seller. sabo turned his head slightly, nodded, allowing ace to continue his question. "why did you open a flower-arranging shop?"

sabo's face looked like he was looking for an answer in a few seconds of pause.

"after graduating from uni, i came to take a liking to flowers. i think…flowers can say things that can't be conveyed with words." the tip of sabo's lips lifted slightly, but his eyebrows said otherwise, showing a bitter smile. ace caught on, there was something deeper from the colour of his voice and all of that was instantly answered in sabo's next words;

“actually, i was already going to stop this business,” and in between his words, sabo chose another bouquet of flowers. "but this was one of my dream that was realized by law’s support. for me, this is all that left of law. so… i can't stop doing this."

ace and sabo were silent.

sabo blinked quickly as if he was processing something in his brain. it was like he had just got an epiphany. he turned and looked at ace.

"i realize something because of your question, ace... not all my dreams were buried with law–"

at that instant, something felt like hitting ace's chest, pressing like it was taking his breath away; who would have thought ace's own words would strengthen law's presence in sabo's memories.

“–my flower shop is one of them."

sabo lifted the flowers he had just bought, then tilted his head at ace. for some reason, his movements were like slow motion and, oh god, that smile... the smile that was painted on sabo's face, which ace knew, only appeared when law crossed sabo's mind.

“pretty, right?”

this time it was ace's turn to smile bitterly. not sure how to answer; yes, pretty. but, which one is pretty? the flowers or sabo in his eyes?

sabo, who still bore the pain of losing, was still as pretty as sabo that made ace fell in love; was it mean if ace thought so?

the flowers that sabo bought were neatly stored in the middle of sabo's car and trunk. ace was seated behind the steering wheel, while sabo was already leaning his head on his hand draped over the window.

sabo's eyelids felt heavy, the faint sound of ace's voice and the radio gradually sounded quieter in his ears.

"sabo?"

his eyes suddenly opened. "i'm sorry, i was a little bit sleepy," he smiled, scratching the back of his neck. "i only got a few hours of sleep last night because i was occasionally awoken."

ace's gaze remained fixed on the road, but sabo could see his fingers tightening on the steering wheel after hearing sabo's answer. without heeding what ace had in mind, sabo continued his own words. somehow the company of his old friend brought back the old habit of sabo with ace; pouring his feelings out without notice.

"since law passed away, i haven't been able to sleep in our room anymore," sabo's eyeballs glanced at the road, not thinking deeply about the words that came out of his mouth. maybe sabo really just needed a friend to tell stories, sharing his grief. "law's bedside was empty, ace. i can't. that's why i sleep on the living room’s sofa."

all those words were honest and sabo did not try to cover it up. in the past four months, sabo had never expressed his feelings like this. but this was ace. this time, like water in a cracked dam, sabo’s feeling seeping out, raw and bleak in the face of ace's presence.

there was no reply from ace and sabo appreciated that. sabo just needed a person to listen to his mechanism in overcoming his grief. the silence in the car and the song that sabo did not know the lyrics couldn’t win over his sleepiness.

slowly, sabo finally fell asleep with the increasingly dense traffic, driving him slowly back to his house, until he didn’t realize ace had parked in front of his gate.

ace turned his body towards sabo, resting his face on his hands and staring at the sleeping face of the blonde man beside him. sabo's face was so calm and peaceful with no signs of fatigue on his face if ace didn’t catch the bags under his eyes that were so obvious.

ace wanted to sweep sabo's hair that fell over his face, but ace canceled his intention as means of keeping the boundary line between them or just to not wake sabo up.

ace sighed for the umpteenth time today, then he took his notepad from his bag, started typing the continuation of the script that had been running in his head this whole day long.

N A R R A T O R

In his tiredness, Sabo fell asleep like an exhausted child running all day, playing with grief that disguised as love.

there was a weak groan coming from sabo in his sleep, making ace immediately closed his notepad.

sabo woke up and ace put the manuscript back in the bag, together with all his feelings.

#jatuh cinta seperti di film film!au #acesabo #saboace #revolutionary sabo #portgas d ace #portgas d. ace #ace x sabo #one piece #me trying to write #snowcurtain writing archive

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