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street-smarts00 · 3 months

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Complimentary Colors

Spencer Reid x BAU!Reader

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WC: 7.3K

Summary: After recently joining the team, you and Spencer could never get along. What started off as you two ignoring each other turned into bickering at work. What happens when a stressful moment for you turns into an opportunity to get to know this fascinating coworker of yours?

tags: enemies to lovers, fluff, brief mentions of crime/murder at the beginning (talking about cases/kidnapping), reader is shy and anxious, reader looks young for her age. (reader might be female but i don’t think i specified)

A/N: I haven’t written anything in years and I’ve been on a criminal minds kick for a while. I had this idea loosely based off a prompt I saw on cai by (ApolloTheBoykisser) so thanks babes ;) also for once I had a fic of mine beta read lol my bestie beta read this for me. This is also posted on my AO3 page.

You had been working at the BAU for the last few weeks. You tried to get to know most of your coworkers and it seemed like you were making great progress. You had heard a lot about the team before you joined and were pretty intimidated by them at first. Okay- you were still pretty intimidated by them. But you pushed through your quiet exterior little by little and slowly but surely tried to get to know them.

All except for Spencer Reid. It seemed like he was trying to avoid you. He was always very quiet and would barely talk to you. Being a shy person yourself, you thought maybe he was just shy or a quiet guy. However, he continued to ignore you except for when he had to acknowledge you for work.

His coldness towards you was increasingly annoying as time went on, and your perception of him had slowly warped. The things about him you once found endearing, you now forced yourself to hate about him. If he rambled for too long, it could potentially make your blood boil. However, you could never stop paying attention to when he rambled on about facts or statistics. You didn’t want to admit it, but you found him fascinating.

It didn’t take that long for him to start acknowledging you, but this soon turned into the two of you bickering like children. When you were discussing cases or profiles, you both would argue over motives, victimology, crime scenes- literally anything about the case- you two could turn it into an opportunity to contradict the other. You both still kept a level of professionalism to not let your rivalry affect your job.

But there was always this tension between the two of you when you were in close quarters for too long.

And at some point you both reached your boiling point.

Last week, while the team was on a case, you and Spencer had gotten into a little spat once again. This time it went beyond the slight bickering or contraction. In the middle of the local precinct, you two were at each other's throats.

“What was that?” You asked after you and Spencer left the interview room that held a victims family.

“I was working off of the profile . . .”

“You mean the profile we haven’t finished?” You interrupted. “The one we are still currently working on and have yet to disclose?”

“That doesn’t mean we can’t work off of the information we already have,” he objected.

“You told her information we are still unsure about. We don’t know for a fact how long he keeps them alive,” you accused while placing your hands on your hips, trying to conceal your frustration but failing.

“Guys.” Someone tried to tone things down. Neither of you heard who and you weren’t backing down.

“If I remember correctly, I heard you discussing this very subject and inputting your thoughts . . .”

“You still shouldn’t have told her! Especially when you don’t know for sure if her daughter could be alive,” you seethed stepping closer.

“Would you rather me hide everything from the mother who’s suffering from the disappearance of her daughter?” He asked, matching your tone and taking a step forward.

“I didn’t say that!”

“It sure sounded like it.”

“Reid. Y/N.” The two of you turned your heads to your boss like two deer caught in headlights.

“With me, now.” Hotch demanded and led you to an empty interview room.

You could tell how angry he was- despite the fact that his stoic face represented almost every emotion in the book. But by the tone of his voice, you knew you and Spencer had messed up.

“You two do not only represent this team, you represent the bureau. These cops are already not pleased with the idea of their boss calling us in and I do not need you arguing in front of them and giving them a reason to take us off this case. You must learn to respect and cooperate with one another or I will take you both off this case. Do I make myself clear?” He lectured.

You both replied with a monotone “yes.”

“Good”

Ever since your argument, you both had been relatively quiet towards one another. Like it had been in the beginning when you were ignoring each other. But that didn’t stop you from letting him invade your mind at every waking minute. It almost saddened you in a way there was no more bickering or quick remarks with him. With how much it annoyed you, you never thought you would miss it.

The team had just finished a case and before everyone packed up and went home, Rossi announced that tomorrow everyone should come over for a little ‘get our minds off work’ get together. Your coworkers all thought it was a great idea to relax after the last few very stressful cases.

As excited as you were to finally go to one of Rossi’s house parties, you were also scared shitless. Parties with relatively new people in your life were hard. You were so quiet around new people and were scared to approach others; you often waited to be approached. To you, being a profiler was easier than having a social life.

But, maybe this time would be different. There’s not that many people on the team and you’d already started to familiarize yourself with them.

The next day, you were pulling up to Rossi’s house. If there was anything else to be intimidated by with this man- besides his years of experience in the BAU- it was this giant house. You were greeted by the man himself at his front door.

“Y/N, glad you could make it.” He opened the door and welcomed you in.

He led you inside to where everyone else was gathered. Everyone was cheery at your arrival. Penelope with her clicky heels ran up to you and greeted you with a hug. It was refreshing to be around people who were so welcoming. It made it a little bit easier to really let your walls down.

Well, almost everyone. Spencer gave you a small wave from where he stood.

The night continued on and you would occasionally engage in conversation with the team. At this point, you were off to the side- standing in the kitchen and occasionally sipping some wine that Rossi had been bragging about and was just so excited for everyone to try. You were a bit too overwhelmed to go back to talking. The music was getting a bit loud and the lights seemed to be too bright. You opted for sitting on the barstool next to the counter and observing everyone around.

They were all off in small groups or pairs around the house. All except for you and Spencer. He was another outlier and standing away from all the commotion. You looked over in his direction and he caught your eye. You both glared at each other and you quickly averted your gaze away from him. Your thoughts started to race and you began playing with your hair.

After a moment, he glanced over in your direction again when you weren’t looking. He was unintentionally profiling you and noticed you getting overstimulated. Your eyes laser focused like you zoned out, your foot tapping against the chair, and your hand anxiously playing with your hair.

While he wasn’t exactly your friend, he did understand what it felt like when social gatherings got overwhelming. He made his way over to you, careful not to make you more nervous or uncomfortable.

“You okay?” He asked you. You were pulled away from spacing out. His voice sounded a bit concerned- which took you by surprise. You were partially relieved someone approached you to help bring you back down to earth. That someone noticed something was off. What confused you was the fact that person was Spencer.

“I’m fine.”

He was well aware of what it meant when someone was “fine” and you were clearly not fine. He felt bad that you were so quick to shut down his attempt to check on you. After all, it was his fault and he knew that.

“Do you wanna step outside?” He asked.

You were conflicted. You didn’t want to be outside alone with him, but at the same time, you needed some time away from everything. Maybe it would help calm your nerves.

“Maybe for a bit.”

You followed him outside onto the back patio. You took note of the fresh air and the muffled sounds from inside. It all felt like a weight lifted off your shoulders. Pretty soon though, you realized how awkward it was to be outside alone with him.

Spencer cleared his throat and spoke to break the silence, “Sometimes these parties can be . . . a lot.”

“A little bit. I was doing fine for a while but I think my social battery is running low.” You confessed to explain your discomfort.

“Yeah” he replied. He appreciated the fact that you felt comfortable enough to express this with him. He tried to relate to you. “It’s the same with me. Sometimes I just need a moment to collect myself.”

“Exactly.” You were relieved to hear that he felt the same way. “Plus it doesn’t help that I'm so new to the team.” You crossed your arms and slightly closed yourself off.

“I was the same way when I first joined.” He told her to try and ease your concerns. You were just like him at some point. The new guy and just trying to figure out how you fit in.

“It’s difficult at first, but you settle down after a bit. Once you get to know everyone.”

“Yeah it’s just the whole getting to know them part is a bit . . .” You abruptly stopped, hesitating to reveal too much to him.

“A bit what?”

“Intimidating,” you confessed, avoiding his eyes.

He obviously noticed your hesitance and avoided his usual behavior with you. You were always so strong and quick to banter with him. But now you seemed vulnerable, and he didn’t want to take advantage of that.

“It’s not just you, I promise.” He was being honest. This was the calmest and most genuine conversation the two of you had ever had. “I find them all pretty intimidating.”

Your eyebrows raised at his confession. How could he possibly be intimidated by these people?

“Really? But you’ve known them for so long. You all are so close.”

“Close doesn’t mean you can’t be a little intimidated,” he replied. It might not make much sense, but it was the truth.

“I mean Hotch is always stonewall and silent, no matter what you say to him. And don’t even get me started on Morgan.” He joked, knowing you would understand.

You lightly chuckled at his joke. “I get what you mean.” You were starting to understand him more. You thought it was ironic that one of the team members you were first intimidated by was also intimidated by the team. Now he was starting to seem less intimidating or annoying and more approachable. You kinda liked seeing this new side of Spencer.

“I guess I’ve always been like that. Worried to get to know people or open up.” You weren’t entirely sure why you were telling him this, but you knew he would understand.

"I think when you're afraid of being hurt or judged or misunderstood by people, you try to keep your guard up." He told you, speaking from experience. From a young age until now, he's always felt misunderstood.

"And I think...maybe that's why you're on edge with me? You're not sure what to expect from me."

“Are you profiling me?” You asked jokingly. Spencer however thought you were serious and you noticed him tense up.

“I’m kidding.” Your expression softened to let him know you weren’t actually accusing him of profiling you. “I’m gonna be completely honest, I’ve been on edge with you cause I thought you didn’t like me.”

He was a bit taken off guard by your statement. But at the same time, he couldn't deny it. He didn't dislike you now, but at first, he wasn't exactly fond of you. And now he was ashamed of that.

"I didn't like you." He admitted. "I thought you were pretentious, too eager to be accepted. I think I saw you as competition."

Spencer’s comment did sting. It was never sunshine and rainbows to hear someone doesn't like you. However, you did take note of his language. He said “didn’t,” “thought” and “saw,” all past tense. Does this mean he doesn’t dislike you now? What you did appreciate was his reciprocated honesty. You both were making some progress in your relationship and you wanted to continue it.

“I was eager to be accepted. I wanted to feel like I belonged.”

“I know how you feel.” He expressed his sympathy. “I regret not giving you a chance. You’re not like I thought you were.” He also appreciated seeing this different side of you.

“You’re not like I thought you were.” You admitted.

A little smirk tugs at his lips, “So I’m not as pretentious and selfish as you thought?”

You lightly chucked, “I never thought you were selfish, but I did think you were a ‘know-it-all’ and trying to show off.”

Spencer really didn’t want you to think he was a show off. Sure- he had a vast amount of knowledge, but he never wanted you to think he was bragging or that he knew better than you. “I do know a lot but I promise I’m not trying to show off. I just have all this information in my head and I want to share it with people or I’m really passionate about something and want to talk about it.”

You understood that feeling all too well. There were so many times you wanted to ramble on about things you cared about or had knowledge on, but for the most part just stayed quiet. Meanwhile, he didn't keep quiet. He would go on and on. And while almost everyone else was either rolling their eyes or trying to shut him up, you were listening intently. You didn’t want to admit it back then, but now you were feeling up to it.

“I will admit, while I did think of you as a know it all, I found a lot of your tangents interesting.” You admitted.

His eyebrows raised in surprise. He was so used to people dismissing him. It was nice to hear you often would listen. “Really? You didn't mind me babbling on?" He asked, relieved with your response.

"I mean, it is something I have trouble with. I tend to talk too much.”

“Oh Dr. Reid I am very familiar with rambling and being worried about talking too much.” You paused for a moment- considering how much more you wanted to share with him. “I know it may not seem like it because I’m always quiet around the team but.. once I get comfortable around people, I actually get very rambly”

"You do?" He asked, sounding surprised. “About what?”

“Really anything. Mostly things I’m passionate about like you. I’ll also tend to go on tangents about memories or just things happening in my life.”

You made your way to a bench on the patio as you spoke. Spencer followed and sat down on a chair adjacent to you. You brought your attention back to him and noticed his focused gaze on you and he quickly licked his lips, a habit you noticed he did all the time.

"You really are a lot like me. You're just quieter at first." He added, teasing you a little. While he was not one for social cues, he had the sudden urge to be bold and make a joke. "Maybe next time I see you rambling, I won't immediately contradict you."

You dramatically dropped your jaw and placed your hand over your heart. “Wow, you really know how to give a compliment,” you said, pretending to be offended.

He laughed with a bright grin. "I'm sorry. Let me rephrase. The fact that you're so silent and reserved makes it that much more thrilling when I find out how much of a chatterbox you actually are." He joked, being playful as before.

Your cheeky smile slightly falters for a moment. You hoped he wouldn’t notice but he did. “I think you won’t be so thrilled once I actually turn into a chatterbox around you.”

"Actually I think I would find it intriguing." He told you, looking directly into your eyes. "The quiet ones tend to be the most interesting and complex when they do end up talking."

“I’m not that interesting.”

“I beg to differ. You’re very interesting. Probably the most interesting person on the team.”

Did he really say that? Did he mean it? Or was he just being nice? You tried not to profile him, but couldn’t help it. His body language expressed he was being honest. Uncrossed legs and arms, open palms, eye contact. The only thing you didn’t notice when studying his body language was his dilated pupils.

“Thank you,” you smiled at his compliment, “I doubt I’m the most interesting though. You maybe, Mr. Three PHDs and can read 20,000 words per minute.”

He smiled back at you, “Just because I'm well educated doesn’t mean you can’t be as interesting as me, if not more.”

You couldn’t believe he was saying such nice things to you. This was the first time you guys were actually making some kind of connection.. and it felt wonderful.

“I still can’t believe we’ve known each other for this long but are just now talking. And by talking, I mean not getting into a spat after speaking for more than 3 minutes.” You confessed with a hint of playfulness in your voice at your joke.

“Yeah, I feel like I barely know you.”

“What would you like to know?” You asked.

He thought for a moment trying to think of a question to ask. You noticed once again that he licked his lips, trying to concentrate.

“Let’s start with something simple. What’s your favorite color?” He asked.

“Wow, I think that’s a bit too personal.” You said, voice laced with sarcasm. You tried your hardest to contain your amusement but started to smile. He smiled back at you. At first, he was always confused with sarcasm and social cues. To be honest, he still was. But he could just tell with you. He knew when you were joking and when you were being serious. He found your sense of humor amusing.

“Yellow.” You answered. “What’s yours?”

“Purple.” He replied.

You intended to leave it inside your head- but a quiet “huh” made it past your lips as an idea came into focus.

“What? Is it my choice for my favorite color?” He tried to joke with you but was also a little bit serious.

“Oh no, it's just I thought it was interesting because those are complementary colors. You know how they are opposite on the color wheel?” You asked even though you figured he knew.

He nodded his head, “Yes! Because they are on opposite ends of the color wheel, when they’re used together it creates a vibrant contrast and enhances visual appeal. The two colors almost balance each other out and support each other's intensity. Complimentary colors are a key component to color theory.” He suddenly noticed how long he was talking and his posture stiffened. He pressed his lips into a thin line and avoided eye contact. “Told you I talk too much.”

“And I told you that I find your rambling interesting.”

His head perked back up at you. You genuinely wanted to listen to him. It was refreshing to talk to someone that didn’t cut him off or zone out.

“That’s kinda like us though, don’t you think?”

“What’s like us?” He asked confused, still thinking about the fact that you actually enjoy listening to what he has to say.

“How our favorite colors are complimentary colors. Like you said, they support each other's intensity. When you first see them they’re opposites, but the more you look the more they compliment each other.”

He softly smiles. “That does sound like us. The more we learn about each other, the more we find we have in common.”

There was a short pause where you both considered his statement. You did want to know more about him. You wanted to know all of him.

“Can I ask you a question this time?”

“Of course.”

“So, you're always reading. Like everywhere you go, you carry a book with you. I wanna know: what’s a book you could read over and over again and never get tired of?” You wanted to know beyond his favorite color. You wanted to get to the various building blocks that made him the way he was.

Spencer considered your question for a moment. Trying to go through the near infinite list of books he’s read in his life. You could tell he was concentrating on his answer because licked his lips. “Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens.”

“Is he one of your favorite authors?”

“Yes.” He said almost immediately, confident in his answer.

“How come you like that book so much?” You asked.

You could see this sort of spark enter his eyes the more you asked about it. Giving him the chance to share his passions. ”Oliver Twist was one of the first books that used satire to deliver social commentary. Particularly in this book the social commentary was aimed at poverty in 19th century England. The book also quickly gained attention after its publication due to the scandalous subject matter in which crimes, such as murder, were depicted in detail.”

Spencer finally stopped rambling and almost looked as if he caught his breath from the endless talking. But what he was met with was your undivided attention.

”That sounds really interesting, maybe one day I should give it a read.” You say with a soft smile.

“You should,” he matched your smile, but it seemed a bit more sheepish due to his brief tangent. “Have you ever read Charles Dickens before?”

You shook your head in response. “I’ve never read anything by him. I actually don’t read much. But I used to in high school.” You revealed.

“What have you read?” He asked. He leaned slightly forward and unconsciously mirrored your body language and placed his right hand on his leg like you did yours.

“Pretty much the same books everyone else had to read for school.” You paused and tapped your fingers trying to refresh your memory.

“To Kill A Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, 1984, um.. a few Shakespeare books.” You answered with the few books you could remember.

“Which one did you like the most?”

“I’m not sure”, you sighed and thought about his question, wanting to give him a genuine answer. “Maybe.. Macbeth. I remember finding the story interesting and I did a group project on Macbeth and Lady Macbeth's descent into madness. Like the scene where she’s hallucinating the blood on her hands.”

Your voice started to pick up speed and volume ever so slightly. He could tell you were getting more passionate the more you spoke. Subtly displaying how you could ramble once you opened up to someone. He smiled as you continued, happy to see that you felt comfortable enough around him to let a hidden part of yourself out into the open.

“I guess that kinda explains why I wanted to be a profiler and learn about psychology and forensics. I was interested in how Lady Macbeth's guilt manifested and caused her delusions. I wanted to understand why people did the things they did.”

“I can tell, you have this curiosity. You want to understand. Know the ‘why’. He mentally recalled the times you would express your curiosity during work.

“Yeah, pretty much.”

He pressed his lips in a line. “Is it- is it my turn to ask you something now?” He stuttered slightly.

“I mean you don’t have to. It’s nobody’s ‘turn’ but you can if you want.”

“I do.” He replied immediately. The corners of your mouth perked up into a small smile. He mirrored you.

“I may be stealing your previous question. Like you said you don’t read much. But I have noticed you listen to music a lot. I want to know a song you could listen to over and over again.”

He was right, you often listen to music. Mostly on your way into work or on the jet, you would be wearing your signature headphones and have some playlist on. It was your own way of coping with the stress of your job. You looked down at the ground as you recalled the songs in your favorite playlist.

“Dreams by The Cranberries.” You brought your eyes back up to face him. But what you saw was confusion in Spencer’s eyes. He tried to hide it but you knew better. “Have you heard that song?”

He did that little sideways pout you often saw him doing when he was in awkward situations.

“I’m not sure,” he replied. Spencer broke eye contact, embarrassed he didn’t know something from pop culture.

“It’s okay. Remind me next time I have my headphones and I’ll show you.” You spoke calmly to reassure him there was nothing to be embarrassed about.

He brought his attention back to you. Relieved to hear your gesture instead of a quip about his lack of pop culture knowledge like he was used to.

“I will.”

“Alright my turn.” You shifted your weight and brought your legs up to your side so your whole body could face him. “Um, it's kind of a personal question though. I’m curious about something.”

“Go ahead. What is it?” He asked, giving you his whole undivided attention.

“Does it ever bother you when people question your age when you say how educated you are?”

He was somewhat thrown off by your question, but something told him you've wanted to ask him this for a while.

He furrowed his eyebrows, “I wouldn’t say it bothers me. Considering I have had such an extensive education so early in my life, it’s completely understandable that someone would question how I did it at a young age.”

“Hmm,” you hummed in response. He knew that wasn’t the answer you were looking for.

“Can I ask you something personal?” He asked before asking his real question. He appreciated your concerns about potentially pushing a boundary and he reciprocated it. He didn’t want to break this newfound friendship- if he could call it that- by making you uncomfortable.

You nodded your head, silently telling him it was okay.

He slightly fidgeted with his hands. “Did you ask me that because people question your age?”

“Yes,” you answered hesitantly. “I’ve never looked my age.”

He thought about his next question before asking. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, I’m just trying to understand. Why does that bother you?”

“It bothers me when people don’t take me seriously. I mean I’m in my late 20s and some people still think I look fresh out of college. It hasn’t happened as often since I joined the BAU but so many people in law enforcement don’t take me seriously. People tend to think I’m too innocent to have a job like this.” You confessed to him as you avoided looking him in the eyes.

"I wouldn't say you're innocent.” His comment brought your eyes back to him.

“But you do have a soft demeanor. It makes you approachable. If anything, those qualities are an incredible asset to this job whether it be when you're speaking to victims or their family members.”

Even though he would often throw snarky retorts to you in the past and try to get under your skin, he always admired how good you were at your job. Of course, you were an amazing profiler and had no trouble standing against dangerous unsubs. But the way you handled incredibly sensitive situations with such calmness and comfort with others was admirable. During cases with children, you were able to ease their worries and provide a safe space.

“While you are very sweet and shy, I would never call you innocent.”

“Thanks,” you smiled at his compliments. You felt understood hearing his affirmation. It also warmed your heart to hear that he thought so highly of you. Especially since the last few weeks, you thought he hated your guts. Although- his comment did make you more curious about how you were perceived. “Half the time I don’t realize how shy I am or how I present myself,” you weakly chuckled.

“There were actually a lot of ways to deduce that you're shy,” he matched your lighthearted tone but also kept a sense of seriousness to prove he was being genuine.

“Was it the fact that I was sitting by myself and scared to talk to them?” You half joked as you figured that’s what he was going to imply.

"That was part of it, yes. But besides that, it was the way you often avoid direct eye contact, and the tone of your voice. It's gentle and low, as if you're afraid of coming on too strong.” He was too caught up in his thoughts and observations to realize how much he was divulging. “You keep your distance and your words are always measured or not overly assertive. Almost like if you do come off assertive you will receive backlash."

When he met your eyes again, he noticed how frozen you were. On the outside you didn't reveal much, simply had a stoic expression. He knew you better than that. He knew that he had hit a nerve and started to panic that he went too far. He had finally wrecked this slowly growing friendship like he thought he would, by being himself.

“Wow, yeah that sounds pretty spot on,” you agreed. You sounded soft spoken and played with your hair again, of course without your knowledge.

“I am so sorry. I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.” He abruptly spattered in a panic.

“No it’s okay really,” you interrupted trying to reassure him. “I just didn’t expect you to be so ... correct.”

He pressed his lips into a thin line, relieved he didn't mess things up, but still slightly worried he had left you feeling exposed. "I guess I'm just good at noticing things about people,” he shrugged.

“You forget, we get paid to notice things about people,” you joked with him, trying to make him feel better by lightening the situation. Of course, it worked.

"That's true." He chuckled and paused for a moment to consider. Then he continued with his profile of you.

"It's just the way your voice softens whenever you become uncomfortable, almost whispering or lowering in tone. Or your nervous habits, like when you play with your hair." It was a gesture he was pretty keen on catching.

You suddenly were very aware of the fact you were playing with your hair. You quickly dropped your hands and crossed your arms.

"It's not bad that you do that, you know,” his voice had a slight crack in it. “It's just something you do subconsciously." He told her, trying to be comforting.

“Do you wanna know something you do subconsciously?” You asked, your voice with a hint of teasing. You decided that if he was going to profile you, you were going to profile him back.

He noticed your tone and that you had gained a bit more confidence. "Sure, hit me." He said as he awaited your reply with curiosity and interest.

“You poke your tongue out a lot or lick your lips. Most of the time when you’re concentrating or lost in thought. Which means you definitely need to start using chapstick. I’ve seen you do it a lot since we’ve been out here.” You explained.

"So, are you telling me my lips are dry?" He replied playfully, his grin widening.

“They probably are,” you lightly laughed at the silliness of his question. He laughed along with you and subconsciously went to lick his lips again, but caught himself.

“I'm gonna be thinking about this so much more now,” he confessed.

“Consider it payback for pointing out how much I play with my hair when I'm anxious. I don’t know what to do with my hands now,” you remarked as you dramatically waved your hands in the air.

“Sorry,” he awkwardly apologized.

“I already told you it’s alright. You're not the only one who analyzes behavior. I’ve noticed plenty of things you do and why you do it.”

“Like what?” He furrowed his eyebrows, curious what particular things about him you had profiled. He noticed something though. The confidence you once had, had washed away after you collected your thoughts.

“I don’t want to make you uncomfortable,” you stated.

"You won’t make me uncomfortable,” he responded almost immediately. “I promise. I really want to know.”

You took a deep breath before explaining your observations. “You desperately want to be heard. You love to share the endless knowledge you have, but when someone walks away or cuts you off your reaction is almost that of deflating. And when someone does show a bit of interest in what you have to say your voice perks up and almost cracks with excitement. Then you talk a lot faster, probably a mixture of excitement and as a way to keep the other person engaged and to not lose their attention.”

Spencer carefully listened to every word you said. Not a single deduction was false. You had read him like a book in the short time you knew him. You noticed something about him that most of the team couldn’t pick up on.

"You're right about everything,” he said with a soft tone. Almost everyone interrupted him, you never did. This got him thinking. Of course everyone on the team made observations about each other, they’re profilers of course. However, he wondered why you had made so many about him.

"Are you always this observant about everyone? And I mean everyone. Or is it just me that gets the special treatment?" He asked his last question with a hint of a teasing tone.

You scoffed, “yeah right, like you get special treatment.” You thought about your response, not wanting to reveal too much.

“I guess I might have paid attention to you because you were the only one who was so closed off to me. I wanted to know why. I wanted to know who you were even if you weren’t going to tell me.”

He was right, you were paying him special attention. The fact that you wanted to know who he was despite his closed off nature revealed enough.

“So you admit it, I get special treatment?" He cheekily asked.

“Oh shut up,” you retorted.

“Make me.”

Your lips pursed, holding back a smile.

Spencer noticed you were trying to hold back a smile and found it endearing. He also noticed something else about your reaction. You were blushing. You blushed as a result of his taunting. He got lost in the thought of you blushing from him.

“Something you wanna share with the class?” You teased.

He didn't want to admit it, not yet at least. He wanted to make you sweat just a little bit and get a reaction out of you.

"I'm curious about something. Could you tell me what would cause someone's cheeks to flush?" He tried to seem genuine but of course he came off with a hint of cheekiness.

You furrowed your eyebrows. You were completely oblivious to your red face and were confused by his random inquiry.

“Are you questioning my profiling skills?” You lightly scoffed, not knowing what his true intentions were.

"No, not exactly. I just want to know what you think.”

Your expression changed to one of confusion but also amusement. You decided to play along with his little game.

“Well psychologically blushing could mean a multitude of things. Embarrassment, stress, anxiety, attraction.” While your voice stayed consistent, he noticed the change in your breath and how your eyes darted away from him. It was a brief expression, but he caught it. He got the answer he was looking for.

"And which one of those can explain why you’re blushing?" He raised an eyebrow and smirked as he leaned closer to you.

Your stomach dropped and eyes widened. You shifted your weight in your seat and touched your cheeks. “I’m not blushing..” You ignored his question.

"You are.”

You sighed and stood up, “Well if I am it’s probably because you just pointed it out and I’m embarrassed.”

"Oh, really?" He taunted and followed you. "I think that you might be blushing for a different reason."

You bit your lip out of frustration and crossed your arms. “Are you profiling me Spencer?”

"Maybe I am,” he smirked. "I would say that maybe you've been so interested in me that you've been paying a lot of attention. That's why you took note of so many of my habits and behavior."

Your face got redder and you started playing with your hair again. You huffed, “I told you before, the reason I paid attention to you was because I didn’t know you.”

"Sure, but you pointed out how you kept noticing I licked my lips. Why were you looking at my lips in the first place?"

You were caught between a rock and a hard place. “Why are you so interested in why I’m blushing or looking at your dumb face anyway? Why do you care so much?” You asked defensively.

He couldn’t respond, he froze up.

“I mean, you question why I pay so much attention to you but here you are doing the same thing to me. Trying to read me like a book,” you accused.

He cleared his throat and stuffed his hands in his pockets. "I guess we're both curious about each other."

“I guess we are,” you responded. You saw his cheeks turn pink in reaction to your questioning. “Look who’s red now.”

If his face could even get redder, it did. For a man that could probably say a thousand words a minute, it seemed like none of them could fall from his lips.

It was your turn to smirk. “I can’t believe I’ve managed to leave you speechless. Never thought that would happen.”

"Shut up,” he sheepishly scoffed.

“Make me.”

Spencer felt his stomach flutter, he smiled bashfully at your mimicking his own teasing. The seconds passed and neither of you spoke, neither of you had words. Both of you in your own heads. In your head, you got a stroke of confidence. You didn't know where it came from, maybe the teasing, maybe the fact that you had him speechless. But you took it and ran with it.

”Maybe the reason you wanted to know why I was blushing so badly, is the same exact reason I was blushing,” you mumbled.

The realization hit him in waves. You just admitted to the very thing he was trying to get out of you in the first place. He was speechless once again, but this was different. He stared at you with a stunned look, not knowing what to do.

You took his blank expression as a negative reaction, thinking you came off too strong. You slowly backed away from him, regretting putting yourself out there.

“Sorry. I don’t know why I said that. Just forget it.” You turned around to go back inside but felt something on your wrist. You turned around and saw Spencer had grabbed your wrist to stop you. His eyes wide and breath heavy.

"No. Don’t,” he begged.

"Really?" You whispered softly.

He smiled, "yes. Please don't take it back."

You smiled back at him bashfully. Spencer’s reaction make your stomach do backflips, but it made you wonder.

"Can I ask, why did you pay such close attention to me?

He released his light grasp on your wrist and instead placed your hand in his. "I couldn't stop analyzing every single detail about you. I wanted to know you inside and out. There was something about you that felt intoxicating. After every time I spoke to you, even if it was just us bickering or arguing, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”

He looked down at your joined hands and started to rub his thumb over your hand. You looked up at him and smiled, glancing at his lips. “Well you definitely must be thinking about something now, you licked your lips.”

He couldn’t help but feel a little embarrassed. You made him feel like he was on full display, like he was a book that only you could read.

He slightly blushed at your comment. “I am. Can you guess what I'm thinking about?"

You grabbed his other hand with yours as a smirk grew on your face, “How close we are. How it’s probably driving you crazy..” You nearly whispered the last part as you leaned closer to him, “how I’m making you crazy..”

"You do.” Spencer wrapped one of his arms around your waist and placed his hand on the small of your back. A shiver ran down your spine as his hand touched your back. Of course, he could tell and was light headed by the effect you had on him. He’d never felt so intoxicated by someone before. “You’ve made me a mad man ever since I met you.”

Your heart was beating so fast it felt like it was going to burst out of your chest.

“What about you?” He asked. “Do I make you crazy?”

You glanced between his eyes and his lips.

“Yes..”

It was like you both were on the exact same wavelength. You both dove in at the same time and slammed your lips together. Both of you just so desperate to get a taste of the other. The kiss was tender and passionate, with no single person in control. You both moved together in synced motions. All of the arguments, all the tension that had been slowly building up could be released.

When you finally parted, Spencer rested his forehead against yours. You felt his airy breath as he tried to come back down to earth. You placed a hand on his face and stroked his cheek with your thumb.

“I’ve been wanting to do that for weeks,” he breathed.

“I can tell,” you chuckled. “what’s stopping you from doing it again?”

“Do you want me to?” He asked desperately.

You placed your other hand on the back of his neck, “I love hearing you talk.. but shut up and kiss me.

Before today he never liked the idea of you telling him what to do. But now, he was at your mercy. He didn’t hesitate and locked your lips with his once again. You both melted together like lovesick teenagers. But moments like these of course don’t last forever.

The sound of the patio door opening fell deaf on both your ears. It wasn’t until you heard Derek Morgan that you both pulled away from each other.

”What’s going on out here?” Derek questioned with a smirk.

You and Spencer couldn’t speak, too frozen to react.

His grin only grew, “My man,” he chuckled as he glanced at Spencer.

“Don’t kill each other while you're out here.” Derek left the way he came and closed the patio door.

You sighed, “He’s gonna tell someone isn’t he?”

“Yup”

He made his way back to his coworkers with a cheeky grin plastered on his face. “What’s got you all happy?” Emily asked.

“Looks like our two angry birds are now two love birds,” he answered.

“What? What are you talking about?” Penelope sprinted over as fast as she could with her heels.

“How I just caught Reid and Y/N making out.”

The room exploded with chaos at the reactions to his news.

JJ, who was standing off to the side with Hotch, furrowed her eyebrows, “I thought they hated each other?”

Hotch glanced towards the patio door and saw the light shadow of two figures. “No they don't. Not really.”

#spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #criminal minds #criminal minds fanfic #spencer reid headcanon #spencer reid fluff #spencer reid fanfiction #criminal minds x reader #spencer reid x you #criminal minds x you #spencer reid one shot #spencer reid fic #spencer reid imagine #criminal minds headcanons #enemies to lovers

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skywitchmaja · 1 year

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convincing myself i’m gonna DIE because i’m starting concerta on the SAME DAY i’m starting my period and probably i’m being melodramatic but my hands are clammy and that’s very unpleasant

and okay it’s not completely baseless because i have had cramps so bad i threw up and almost passed out before and my resting heart rate was 99 bpm BEFORE i even took the stimulants which those two things may seem unrelated but i guess my blood is problematic so there’s that

#like if i have pots (inconclusive but not entirely unlikely) both periods & stimulants are things that make symptoms worse hahaaaa #health #uh #periods cw #jic?? idk #also i can’t remember if eating more or less makes my periods worse but i’ve definitely eaten less lately #um #not in a. i mean for one thing i puked my guts out a couple weeks ago and very much don’t want to repeat that #do i need tags for food & emetophobia in the tags? i feel like if it’s in the tags it’s whatever right?#emetephobia tw #bc i forgot i literally mentioned it in the post itself whoops

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thebellearchives · 11 months

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𝐀𝐋𝐎𝐍𝐄 𝐓𝐎𝐆𝐄𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑

~ inumaki toge // fushiguro megumi ; jujutsu kaisen

✧˚ · . S Y N O P S I S : at night, you and your sorcerer friend take shelter in an inn room to take care of each other’s wounds

‧₊˚ c o n t e n t s : gn!reader, fluff, mentions of blood and injuries, making out, a bit suggestive maybe ?? (i’m still tagging it as fluff)

- gumi’s part: 'it’s complicated' friends to lovers, he tends to your wounds

- toge’s part : toge’s aware of your crush on him, you feel cursed energy through his kisses, onigiri ingredients in japanese, he uses harmless words at the very end, also uses cursed speech on you in the last sentence lol, you tend to his wounds

‧₊˚ a / n : wasn’t intending on posting this but anyways, this shots turned out kinda cute so, would’ve been sad to keep them to myself, also putting them together because both follow the same scenario and have many similarities

the reader feeling toge’s cursed speech was largely inspired by this 🫶🏻

also don’t question the fact that they’re in an inn room instead of the infirmary or smth okay just go with the flow bye 😭

• 𝐌𝐄𝐆𝐔𝐌𝐈 𝐅𝐔𝐒𝐇𝐈𝐆𝐔𝐑𝐎

You and Megumi somehow managed to check in the room without much questioning. Entering an inn late at night looking like you just got beat up was definitely something that would raise the front desk lady’s eyebrows, but you figured you had just gotten lucky.

You closed your eyes and sighed, Megumi’s footsteps came closer. You were sitting in the kitchen counter, knees apart from each other so Megumi could stand in between and attend to your wounds just like you had done before with his. His fingers lifted your chin up so he could see better under the room’s dim light. He pressed an alcohol drenched cotton ball lightly over your left eyebrow, making you jolt.

“Ouch!”

“Sorry” he mumbled “I’m almost done.”

Your eyelids opened slowly, finding him close to you, his dark eyes fixed on your wound. You studied his face in the meantime, long lashes contrasting with his pale clear skin, yet blending with his black irises.

“Can’t believe after all this time of being friends we just had our first mission together.”

“I’m guessing Gojo wasn’t sure of what would work well for us”

“That’s not what I mean, I mean we did great!”

He scoffed in slight amusement.

“Yeah, I knew we would”

“You mean you knew because I kicked your ass the last time we sparred?” a cheeky smile appeared on your face.

“As far as I remember, I was declared the winner” he raised an eyebrow

“Small details, truthfully it was a tie.”

“Right…” Megumi decided to cut the conversation, focusing more on wiping dry blood from your skin.

Finally he exhaled, his hand moved away, examining your face carefully. A soft frown appeared on his face as his eyes fell on your lips.

“Did you cut your lip?”

“Oh? Not that I’m aware of, it doesn’t hurt.”

“It’s bloody.”

Megumi’s fingers on your chin tensed up, sliding the cotton ball over your lip and then discarding it. He tilted your head to the right, blinking and squinting. With the same hand he was holding your jaw, he swiped his thumb over the lower lip.

With widened eyes you stared at him, alarm bells suddenly going off in your head and your irregular breathing hitting his skin, his gaze fixed on the way your soft lip molded under his fingertip. Tangled thoughts raced in your head, trying to figure out the sudden change in the atmosphere and the accelerating pace of your beating heart.

“It’s not wounded” Megumi’s voice was barely audible and you noticed the way his body had just gotten as stiff as yours, probably gaining awareness of the context you were both were surrounded by: him in between your thighs, under the cover of dim lightning and the silence of the night, being the closest to one another you had ever been.

Dark eyes wandered over your mouth, following his thumb as it now slid to the other side. Hesitantly, he moved even closer until his lips hovered over yours. The anticipation that filled the room made sure to cut off both your breathing and his. But then, Megumi closed the distance between your mouths, lashes lowering and hidden feelings bursting out into the open. Megumi’s kiss was soft, and you made sure to reciprocate slowly, easing into the unknown sensation of kissing him.

When the kiss stopped he remained still. Your shaky hands slid up his shirt, fingertips grasping the fabric to keep him in place for as long as the sweet burning sensation sat on your guts. You weren't sure of what came over yourself, maybe it was the curiosity of having him as more than a friend. Maybe it was the thoughts that had constantly whispered at the back of your head how attractive you thought he was, the thoughts you had made sure to ignore and so you never acted on them. Maybe it was the thrill of crumbling his aloof and distant demeanor in between your hands.

Maybe it had been all of those things together, but you slightly and eagerly nudged your nose against his. And so he kissed you again, with a deep sigh of surrender and his hands roaming up your thighs. The sounds of kissing filled the kitchen, your tongue sliding across his tongue, his hungry mouth now fighting against your, your fists pulling from his shirt. His fingers squeezed your skin, a breathy exhale left your throat almost becoming a soft whine.

Megumi’s hands then settled on your hips, until he suddenly stopped, freezing in place and then pulling away from you to search for your eyes. You stared back in a bit of a daze.

“What…” the black haired sorcerer tried to form a coherent sentence, but it seemed like his brain for once wasn’t cooperating.

“I…” you cleared your throat, blinking a couple of times “I don’t know.”

He swallowed, trying to find words once again.

“Listen, I…”

“It’s okay” nervously you tightened your grip on his shirt, now anxious of letting him go “we don’t have to talk about this today or tomorrow. We can just… forget it happened.”

Slowly, Megumi nodded.

“We can just let it be… for tonight.”

“Yeah” you pulled him close again, his body relaxed as he followed your movement and searched for your lips once more.

“Yeah, just for tonight…”

• 𝐈𝐍𝐔𝐌𝐀𝐊𝐈 𝐓𝐎𝐆𝐄

Toge’s eyes followed you around as you picked and discarded objects from the first aid kit. At first he was annoyed at how much you had insisted on taking care of the wounds your last fight had inflicted, but at a certain point he had stopped complaining and just… stared. Now, you knew Toge wasn’t one to say much, because he couldn’t, but even when he didn’t say actual normal words he also wasn’t one to shut up. There was always some 'okaka's and 'tuna's and he would gesticulate here and there, he just had to let you know his opinion on absolutely everything. But now… he was absolutely silent.

You walked over to the kitchen counter, where he had sat down begrudgingly and now he was just lazily waiting.

“Bend over a little, will you?” you sighed, wet cotton in your hand.

His lavender eyes stared curiously, but he did as you asked and moved closer so you could reach for his face. There was a bloody scrape right next to his brow, product of a bad landing during the fight with the curse. You held your breath to gain courage and put aside your romantic feelings for the boy, then reached to cup his cheek with your left hand in order to keep him steady and started cleaning the almost dry blood.

He winced, a pitiful expression appeared on your face.

“Sorry” your voice softened “I’ll be finished soon, don’t worry, this is the last one.”

You expected him to say something, he would’ve usually just muttered a 'shake' or something, and yet he didn’t. When you were finally done you sighed once again, lowering your hands and grasping the edge of the counter.

“Alright, that’s it, why aren’t you speaking to me?” Toge raised a brow, as if your question was ridiculous to him “don’t look at me like that, you know what I mean.”

He pressed his lips against each other and then shrugged.

“Are you mad at me?” your brows almost touched, his eyes widened.

“Okaka” he immediately shook his head.

“Oh, so now you’re talking” he snorted, finally letting a small smile shine through “there’s something off, I can tell…”

He bit his lip and shrugged again, this time pointing to his head with his index.

“Thinking?”

“Shake”

“About what?”

His eyes seemed to shine in a peculiar way, trying to hold back a smirk. It was almost as if he had been waiting for you to ask that question for a while. Toge pointed at you, made a small heart with his index and thumb, and then pointed at himself. You blinked about twice, blankly.

“You’re thinking… about you and me?”

He squinted and motioned 'more less', then repeated the previous gesture: you, heart, him.

“You’re thinking…” you heart him. Suddenly your eyes widened, a blush rapidly crept up your face “you’re thinking i like you?”

Toge then grinned and nodded enthusiastically.

“Huh” you exhaled nervously, eyes shying away from him “right when i thought i was the best at understanding you seems like i still don’t get what is going on inside that head of yours.”

He chuckled, his right hand searched for his phone in his pocket and then quickly typed something up in the notes app. You just expectantly watched him as he conveyed his thoughts into written words.

“I’m not thinking you like me, i’m thinking i know you like me”

“Narcissistic much?” you quirked one of your eyebrows and he snorted “what makes you think that?”

“Just the way you look at me, and the way you act around me. Panda had pointed it out before but i’m just now thinking maybe he was right”

“I treat you just like all of my other friends!” you looked up at his eyes again, this time in defiance, but he tilted his head, raising his brows in disbelief “alright then, what have i done with you that i wouldn’t have done with anyone else?”

With a smile, Toge rubbed his cheek and then placed his index right on top of yours.

“Blushing?”

“Shake”

“You’re insinuating that I have romantic feelings for you, of course i’m gonna be embarrassed!”

Rolling his eyes, he nodded. Then, he cupped your left cheek, raising your face towards his and supporting your chin with his ring finger and pinky. You frowned, quickly catching up with the fact that he was holding your face in the same way you had done just moments before.

“… I was just taking care of you…” your whisper worsened your blush.

“always”

He chuckled at your shocked expression, the sound waves of his harmless words making you shiver. It wasn’t everyday that he’d risk speaking normally.

“… well, yes, i care for you”

“a lot” you bit your lip, there was no denying that, so you swallowed your nerves and looked away, he snickered “you’re cute”

Once again the surprise froze you, the power in his voice making your body tremble, what he had said made a sweet nervous feeling flutter around your stomach. He leaned in, you held your breath. Toge placed a lovely kiss on your lips, and you delicately but firmly kissed him back, the sliding of his lips on yours enticing and elating. A soft wave of cursed energy flowed through your mouth, but the moment he slid his tongue on your lower lip and you opened your mouth it rose in intensity. You had to cling from his shirt to keep yourself steady, the moment his marked tongue brushed against yours a sharp wave of electricity ran down your throat, pulling a whimper out from your vocal chords.

He pulled back to look at you and you panicked, embarrassed.

“I’m- oh god i’m so sorry!” your face was burning red at that point “it’s just that- i can feel your cursed energy.”

His eyes widened with surprise and worry, hopping off the counter his hands grabbed your shoulders.

“Takana?!”

“I’m fine! I’m totally fine” cupping his face you tried to comfort him, and it worked, he relaxed, but you pulled him closer again, your noses brushing “it felt… really nice…”

You lips searched for his, Toge smirked in amusement to your reaction, but he complied. So slowly, he kissed you again. The feeling of his energy running trough you seemed to make the blood in your veins rush in bliss, pulling sounds from the depths of your chest. Suddenly his hand slithered to the back of your head and he deepened the kiss, the mark on his tongue making contact with yours and making you gasp and jolt against his body. Toge giggled, but caught you in his arms, resting his back on the counter.

“Come on Toge, won’t you have mercy on me?” you complained, Toge shook his head slowly, and by the way he smiled you knew he was about to pull one of his stunts.

“Be louder” his lips immediately crashed back onto yours.

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going-to-ikea-for-the-fries · 3 months

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Who wears the pants. || husband!John Price

[MASTERLIST]

Rating: M Words: 3.4K without the extra!! (this one got away from me, I'm sorry.) Pairing: husband!John x wife!reader CW: quick smut!, yelling mentioned, slightly dubcon (if you squint), john got angry and jealous Tags: you/your pronouns, afab!reader, smut, fingering-ish, slight exhibitionism, love bites and marks, established relationship, jealous!john price, anger mentioned, ghost's stirring the pot. Summary: John is embarrassed of the fact you 'wear the pants' in your relationship... But only after the lads come to stay over and a snarky comment from Simon, does he decide to show you what's what. a/n: my first attempt at writing smut that I wanted to post... Also Ghost/Simon is a dick in this one...

John simultaneously is and is not ashamed to say how much he loves you.

Of course, he loves you to bits, finds you the most stunning woman he’s ever seen, and would kill and die for you in a heartbeat. His love was the epitome of “If I ever were to lose you, I'd surely lose myself.”

However, he would never risk introducing you to his teammates. Not if he can avoid it. And not just because he cares about you and wants to keep you away from prying eyes, safe and sound in your family home…

More like… they don’t need to know how John purrs when you scratch his beard right beneath his chin and whisper sweet nothings into his ear. They don’t need to see how his pupils almost morph into hearts equally if he sees you in one of his shirts, or in your work clothes, or in joggers and a sweaty t-shirt, or a sexy little number, or nude…

And they especially don’t need to know that their tough-as-nails Captain figuratively rolls over and bares his neck in submission when in the presence of his wife… Or that your voice is like a goddamn foghorn making him genuinely quake in a way he hasn’t since he was a boy at Sandhurst, getting yelled at by drill sergeants…

He hasn’t left the toilet seat up in 12 years. Hasn’t tracked mud into your shared home (whose floors you had just mopped!) in 10. Hasn’t eaten the last of your snacks or used the last of the tea bags without replacing it in 6.

There is no weaponized incompetence in your home because you know John is not incompetent and you will not allow him to feign being it to make you his maid. You take care of him and your home, and you refuse to let him disrespect you in any way… And he knows better than to try.

His teammates have no idea how hopelessly in love he is with you. With the way you seize control from him in a way he allows no one else to. Not his soldiers, not the rest of his family. He’s been the ‘man’ of the house in all aspects for as long as he can remember… But that stops the moment he crosses the threshold of the front door, hangs his coat and his gear in the hall closet, and pads through the home in search of you.

He always finds you busying yourself with something or other and you beckon him close like a puppy, with a pat on the chair next to yours as you work at the dining table, or a come hither motion of the fingers as you water the plants, or reach your arms out for a hug as you stand atop a ladder halfway through repainting the accent wall in the living room. He always hugs and burrows himself in you, inhaling your scent, basking in your warmth, leaving kisses and touches in every inch of exposed skin.

He’s not embarrassed of you, he’ll gladly shout out to the world about his love for you. But he’s embarrassed by how he acts around you. Soap and Gaz would tell him he’s “whipped” if they ever knew what you do to him. So he doesn’t want them to meet you.

But he doesn’t have a choice. December 23rd, at 11 P.M., he and the lads have just touched down from a mission. The weather forecast speaks of a rainstorm and severe weather warnings extending right over Christmas… And John knows what he must do.

So disgruntled, your husband walks off to his office and calls you. In a low tone of voice, almost hushed, because he woke you up, he grumbles about the storm, about how Soap won’t be able to drive up to Scotland for Christmas, that Gaz can probably risk driving to Birmingham, but it’s still pretty unsafe, and that Ghost, as usual, was going to lock himself in his quarters on base and drink himself until he passes out…

You don’t need to be told again. You spring into action immediately. You simply reply that you’re getting up and getting the guest rooms ready, asking if one of the lads would mind getting the pull-out sofa in John’s study, and telling John to drive safe, that the roads are dangerous with the rain…

It’s midnight when you hear the front door opening, and the hall light turns on, flooding the space with a bright warm-toned yellow-ish light. “Shoes off, you lot. The missus doesn’t want water or mud inside.” He demands in a gruff tone.

As they go about unzipping coats and undoing their muddy boots, you can hear John still chastising them. “I’ll stress again: I want you on your best behaviour. No work talk, no cursing, no disrespect. The missus is doin’ you a favour.” He adds as if the poor lads are children who cannot be trusted to be polite.

Unbeknownst to you, he had already spent the whole drive over from base warning them about picking up after themselves, about being respectful to you, about putting the toilet seat down, about making their beds… reaming them out as if they were wild animals who had never once been inside a house and would break and dirty up everything they touch.

You move to stand at the step that separates the lowered entryway from the sitting room, silently observing them, arms crossed as you lean your shoulder against the wall, wearing a robe and your house slippers as you look at them.

They’re all taller than you, moving surprisingly efficiently and quietly, trying not to disturb the peaceful home too much. They’re dripping wet, probably from rushing from the car in the driveway up to the front stoop. A set of four backpacks or duffle bags are on the floor by the door, their clothes for the days they’ll spend here inside.

“Give them a break, Jonathan, you can keep bossing them around in the morning, love.” You quip and you immediately feel all their backs stiffen, four pairs of eyes glued to you.

“Hi, lovie…” John says, already crossing the small entryway to wrap his arms around your waist, dropping a deep open-mouthed kiss to your awaiting lips. Your hand touches his face, caressing his cheek over his mutton chops.

“Steamin’ Jesus, the Captain’s got taste…” You hear a voice murmur, followed by a sharp ‘ow, what was that fo’?’ which causes both you and John to look at the other soldiers. The offending man, the shortest, with a mohawk, rubs at his arm, which seems to indicate the tallest one on his left side smacked him into shutting his mouth.

You don’t need to be told who’s who to realize that it was ‘Ghost’ who smacked ‘Soap’, while ‘Gaz’ stands on Soap’s other side and shoots John an apologetic look. He told you everything about them, without ever revealing names or pictures, for you to know more about them than you should. John himself as his lips pressed together, his mouth nearly disappearing behind his mustache, as he glares at the lads (aka Soap) for making comments about you.

You quickly approach the three men. “You must be the lads my husband talks so much about!” You say with a chuckle. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet the men responsible for bringing my John home in one piece every time…” You tell them gratefully while shaking each of their hands with two of your own, your eyes shining a bit.

“Please, come in!” You gesture behind you into the home as you flick the sitting room lights on. “John, will you show them their rooms while I put the kettle on?” You ask your husband as you slink into the kitchen.

A few muffled footsteps, created by socked feet, are heard as they walk inside, with John directing the boys to the different bedrooms (and study), and you hear a gruff voice murmur something about taking the pull-out sofa. You assume it’s Ghost.

Your husband then comes to hug you around the waist as you wait for the water to boil, dropping kisses to your temple and cheek, doting on you while his big, calloused hands squeeze at every part of you, your thighs, especially, but your tummy as well, along with gentle words. “I missed you so much, lovie…” “Thank you for doing this…” “You know, I can never sleep right without you in my arms…” “Just missed you so much…”

Five minutes later, you hear their steps coming back as you’re finishing pouring the water into a few separate mugs. Your husband dislodges his arms from around you. He doesn’t need the others to see he’s so crazy about you.

“Your home is beautiful, Mrs. Price.” Gaz says as you set the tea mugs, the sugar, and the milk within their reach on the island counter. He takes one of the mugs and tops it off with some milk. The way the young boy calls you ‘Mrs. Price’ has nothing if not respect dripping from it.

It makes you tingle on the inside, even after so many years, the realization that you’re John’s wife, John’s choice, John’s priority. Your husband preens himself a bit when he catches the look in your eye. He loves that you’re his, of course, but loves it even more that you like being his.

“Thank you, Gaz. I’m glad you like it.” You remark with a smile as you sip your own tea. Herbal, different from theirs, so you can resume your sleep which John interrupted with his phone call.

“Aye, real cosy!” Soap quips from beside him as he slides up to a stool on the island. He doesn’t drink tea, so you didn’t prepare any, per John’s request.

“I hope the beds are to your liking… I kinda made them in a hurry.” You quip, which causes the boys, and your husband, to laugh, as they seat themselves across from you, in the bar stools. You barely even noticed Ghost taking the last cuppa and sliding up next to Johnny, his mask rolled up just enough to allow him to drink.

“We’re soldiers, ma’am, we’ll sleep anywhere,” Gaz told you, ever polite, with a sweet smile on his lips. John has told you all about Gaz, his protegé, of sorts, a respectful lad, the youngest, but one that has proved himself to be useful.

Your eyes flitter over to John for a moment, watching as he drinks his tea, two fingers laced through the handle of his navy blue mug, rather than around him, his behind leaning back on the counter beside you. While doing that, however, you miss the glances the lads exchange with each other, and then to you.

“As true as that might be…” You trail off after sipping your tea and look back at the soldiers again. “I still hope you have some good rest. And, I’m sorry about the pull-out sofa… it’s a bit old, came from John’s old apartment… Has gotta be a decade old now.” You quip as you look toward Ghost.

“It’s alright. I’ll sleep fine.” Ghost says. “Like Gaz said, we can sleep wherever.” He adds.

Soap nods along. “Anything’s better than sleeping on the ground with your rifle between your legs and your jacket folded up to serve as an eyemask.” He adds and laughs.

“Johnny.” Your husband calls out, chastising him. “No work talk.”

“Aw, c’mon, Captain, that hardly counts as work talk.” He retorts with a little boyish grin.

“Them’s the rules. No bloody talk about service.” John insists.

“John.” You scold him, and your husband stiffens next to you, his eyes flittering over to you, eyebrows scrunched and his eyes softened as he meets your eye… nothing short of a puppy.

It was stronger than John at this point, to respond to your tone of voice with nothing but a baring of his neck, not a baring of his teeth like he would with anyone else. The boys all noticed it, the way his shoulders sagged and his eyes looked at you with utter devotion.

“Let the boys talk about work. As long as it’s nothin’ too gory or confidential…” You trail off. “I’m sure I’ll enjoy ‘earing all the stories they have to tell about you at work... Right, lads?” You ask as you look at them again.

“Oh, we’ve got stories alright.” Soap says with a giggle and a wagging of his brows, which causes Gaz and Ghost to snicker under his breath.

“Well, then, regale me with them during Christmas dinner, ye?” You ask them, to which they nod along with smiles. You could swear even Ghost had one in the corner of his scarred lips.

After a bit more small talk, you kissed John goodnight, while he told you he’d stay downstairs and talk with the lads a little longer, so you waved at them while trekking your way upstairs, the boys once more thanking you for the hospitality.

The moment John’s trained ears honed into the fact the bedroom door has closed, he finishes his tea and glares at the lads.

“Don’t be bloody flirtin’ with my wife.” He tells Soap directly, though his comment extends to Gaz and Ghost as well, which is why he glances to both sides at the other two.

“Sir?” Gaz asks while blinking.

“You ‘eard me, Garrick.” He adds and points a finger at the young Sergeant.

“We’re not flirtin’, sir.” Soap tries to defend himself.

“Aw, that’s rich that there, MacTavish, yeah.” Your husband says bluntly.

“Weren’t flirting.” Ghost retorts as he looks at John. “I was more so interested in the way she has your balls in her little purse.” He adds.

Both Soap and Gaz turn to look at Ghost with eyes so wide you’d think he just tried to kill the Captain directly… and he might as well have, the way John choked on nothing and started coughing up a lung.

The other two are trying to muffle their chuckles and hide their smirks as Simon continues. “Don’t give me that look, boss. We all saw it. Pretty thing might as well be walking you around on a lead.”

“Nonsense.” John says defensively as he snatches the cups of tea from the island and turns to deposit them all in the kitchen sink. He starts washing them quickly, shoulders stiffened.

“Bunk down.” John demands. “We’ve got plenty to do tomorrow.” He adds. The light screeching of bar stools being pulled back and pushed back into place is heard, as the boys vacate the kitchen with curt ‘Goodnight, sir’ murmured before they headed upstairs as well.

“Balls in her bloody purse, my arse.” John grumbles under his voice as he finishes doing the dishes, drying his hands, and then setting them on the island across from him, head hung in shame.

He knows Simon’s right. Hell, he revels in the fact you’ve got metaphorical balls of steel to confront him, to steal control right from under him, to wear the pants in the relationship. Lord knows it took him years to meet a woman who could not only keep up with him but put him in his place…

So why does it embarrass him so to hear them snicker at that fact? Why does it annoy him to look weak for you in front of his men? Why does it anger him that he loves to be weak for you?

Those are the thoughts in his head as he turns off the sitting room and kitchen lights and marches upstairs... And as he approaches your bedside in the dark, pulling the covers out from atop of you, exposing your body to him.

Under that robe you came to welcome them in, you were only wearing one of his t-shirts and no pants whatsoever, which he had peeped by the way your bare legs had shown through the slit between the two sides of the fabric whenever you walked.

“John?” You ask him in surprise, his breath is a bit ragged, more so huffing like a bull through his nose, as he grabs you and pulls you up into his arms, only to drop you on the bed further in the middle of the bed.

The giggle that escaped you when he did so annoyed him even more. He’s angry, pissed that he had been humiliated in front of his men, that you had humiliated him by merely existing and going about your relationship with him the way you always did…

So why are you giggling? Is he really that weak for you that you’ve grown to not fear his anger?

He grabs the hem of his shirt and yanks it up and over your head, tossing it to the side before he attacks your neck with nothing but kisses and bites, his hands touching your naked body, rough skin dragging over every inch of the softness he has left on display.

“John!” You giggle some more as he keeps touching and kissing you, his body weighing down on yours, your legs parted to accommodate him. “We can’t… We have guests!” You try to negotiate as his fingers dig into the pudge of your thighs and slide around to grip a greedy handful of your ass.

You still haven’t spotted the anger in him… And, as such, your playful attempts at negotiating postponing sex only annoy him more. You’re still trying to call the shots…

His left hand wraps around your face, quieting you with a strong palm holding your lips, his fingers digging into your jaw on either side. “You’re mine.” That’s all he says as his fingers continue exploring your body.

“You think you can embarrass me like that in front of the blokes?” He asks you in a whisper as his teeth catch your earlobe and suck and bite at it. “Hm?” He beckons, his tone aggressive. “Make me look like a big girl’s blouse in front of my subordinates?” He continues.

A shiver runs down your spine as his free hand wraps around the waistband of your underwear and yanks it off, down your legs, tossing them to a random spot, barely giving you time to react before his fingers drag up your thigh.

“You think you’re oh-so-box-clever, innit?” He asks you as his fingers slowly drag across your slit, finding your clit effortlessly, years of practice aiding in his torturing of you. You find yourself moaning and sighing against his hand, hips stuttering a bit, your feet looking for a perch at the edge of the bed so you can rub yourself into his hand.

“Walking around in just my shirt and those knickers and stupid bloody robe, making my boys see how lucky I am to have you, make them jealous… Only to embarrass me, make me look weak…” He trails off and tuts loudly, his tongue clicking disdainfully.

The things he’s saying make no sense to you. You didn’t try to seduce his friends, and you sure as hell didn’t try to embarrass him! It’s just the way you always act around him, around the house. He’s never complained, in fact, he’s praised you plenty of times for being ‘perfect’ for him… So where did this change of his come from?

Frankly, you don’t know, but you don’t care… It has been weeks since you were last together, sure, but you know that’s not the main reason why you’re loving this. The unbridled rage in his voice, combined with the way his experienced fingers touch your body, is making you feel things John’s never made you feel before. Your mind is clear of nothing if not a pang of hunger for him, your hands gently pawing at his shoulders atop his charcoal grey t-shirt, soft whimpers muffled by the hard palm pressing you into silence, into submission.

“I’m afraid I’ve let you gone unchecked for too long, lovie...” He grunts in your ear as his fingers draw circles against your clit, the rough pads catching at the throbbing bud, making you whine and whimper, your whole body shuddering against him. “I’m going to fix that attitude of yours...” He clicks his tongue again, sounding all the more annoyed.

“Now you’re going to be good f’r me…” He says as he uncovers your mouth, his hand, wet with saliva, slipping from atop your mouth to grab your wrists and pin them above your head, flush to the mattress. “And make the lads know exactly who’s in charge in here. Clear their doubts...”

[MASTERLIST]

extra: 500 words-ish

The next morning, you wake up before John, as usually tends to happen when he comes back from a mission. The silence and lack of stress, the warmth of you in his arms, the cosy atmosphere of the house… It’s all the perfect sedative to keep him as good as dead for many, many hours. You slip out of his embrace and check the clock… it was just past 9 A.M. You pad quietly to the hall bathroom after fishing out a change of clothes from the wardrobe, and rinse off the sweat from the night before, as well as the dried slick and cum between your thighs. You’re still unstable on your feet, your thighs and the space between them deliciously sore, your body covered in marks of the night you spent in your husband’s arms… You feel like you’re floating as you drift downstairs and into the kitchen… “Fuckin’ hell!” You jump, startled. In your kitchen, pouring himself a cup of tea is Ghost… You think. The height seems about right, though you didn’t expect a broad-shoulder, bare-chested blond in your kitchen. “Good morning.” You say softly as you shuffle inside, hearing him return that same greeting in a way-too-deep of a voice, standard of man who’s just woken up. “Go put a shirt on, this isn’t the beach.” You scold him, as you open the fridge, looking for the eggs. Your voice is as fierce as it usually tends to be with John. When he doesn’t reply, you look over at him, noticing his mask is missing. You assume John scolded him about it, how you’d likely be startled by seeing a masked man in the night. The look in Ghost’s eyes is unreadable, stern, unwavering, and eerily calm, as if he’s seeing through you. They flit over you, up and down, with a certain glint you can’t quite decipher. You straighten your back in the face of his look, portraying nothing if not confidence. Ghost leans against the counter, one hand holding his tea cup and sipping from it, the other resting on the counter to support his weight, before one of his eyebrows shoots up. “Nice night, huh?” He asks you and, immediately, you feel your entire confidence bleed out of you, your eyes widening like saucers. Of course he heard it… You’re sure all the lads heard you, especially considering John and you started right as they had gotten to their respective rooms to sleep, all of which were located in the same hallway as the master bedroom… It’d surprise you if they hadn’t… Hell, it’d surprise you if the neighbors across the way didn’t! The way John had you last night, crying out his name at the top of his lungs and making you apologise repeatedly for something you didn’t even do (on purpose) definitely leaked through the walls… Just like the shame you currently feel leaks through your pores. You turn away to fix your eyes on the fridge, too embarrassed to face him again after realizing he knows. Your brain rushes to find something to distract you, to hide what you feel… “Are you hungry?” You end up asking softly.

#ikea writes 💚#captain john price #john price x reader #price x you #husband john price #cod fic #cod modern warfare #captain price #task force 141 #masterlist #cod smut

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fatesundress · 1 year

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⭑ for the love that used to be here. tom riddle x reader

summary. you and tom are the only muggle-borns in slytherin, until one day he isn’t.

tags. angst, afab reader who is referred to as a witch a few times and rooms with girls but i don't think i ever use she/her pronouns or say the word girl/woman, biggest warning is that this is SO long (idk what compelled me to write a year 1 – post-hogwarts fic but here we are twenty thousand damn words later), blood purity and bigotry, dumbledore is greatly offended by the bonding of two orphans until he can capitalise on it, frequent wwii mentions (specifically the blitz), book clerk tom, MURDERER TOM… ministry reader, kissing, smut once they’re 21/22 May all the minors in the room exit at once, more angst, sad ending kinda, me spreading a very personal and very nefarious tom riddle agenda that is canon to ME but probably only like two other people

note. i need a shower and an exorcism after writing this shit. i'm exhausted. i don't even remember half of it. but i'm also SO stoked, this is my little (very large, frankly) 100 followers celebration! i've only been on here for about a month and the love has been so crazy so thank you mwah mwah mwah ♡

word count. 21.8k (i know... i KNOW)

You learn quickly that your shade of green is not the same as theirs. The rest of them are emeralds, even at that age — they glitter with their parent’s polish. You are flotsam, sea-sick, envy green; the putrid boiling stuff that brews in your cauldron when you look away for a second too long, and, really, it’s more of a stain than a colour at all. There is a fraction of a second where you find something powerful in that. You are not an easy thing to remove. And then it’s gone, because they want to so badly.

You learn, with a bit less tact, that you doesn’t actually mean just you; that it’s you and him whether you like it or not.

He evidently does not.

“It has to be completely fine,” Tom says to you in Potions, his voice small then but just as practised.

You narrow your eyes. “‘Scuse me?”

“I said the powder has to be completely fine.”

“I heard you completely fine. I know how to read.”

He stares blankly at you before returning to his own station, and that’s that.

It isn’t unheard of for muggle-borns to be sorted into Slytherin, so you’ve been told, but one glance around your common room and you can see it’s pretty damn rare.

There’s Tom Riddle, there’s you, and there’s a seventh-year girl whose knuckles are always white like she’s spent so long with her hands balled into fists that they don’t know how to do anything else. Tom Riddle is a prat, the girl is too old and unapproachable even if she wasn’t, and you are very good at being alone.

That decides it. Flotsam still floats.

Everything is — fine. It’s fine for months; you have no one and need no one and sometimes you catch a jinx in the back of Charms that zips your mouth shut or bends a foot the wrong way (a cruel reminder of how much more these people know than you) and your broom occasionally pivots so sharply the Flying professor has to stop you from careening into a wall and breaking enough bones for a week’s worth of Skele-Gro, but it’s fine.

…It’s just that he’s insufferable.

The boy is eleven years old and he speaks like he’s stealing glances at an invisible lexicon between every word, more refined than any of the orphans you grew up with which makes you wonder which sort he’s surrounded by, and you take it upon yourself to theorise in passing if you could ever scare him badly enough his real voice would slip and he might just appear human for once.

Only it becomes clear when you’re stirring awake in the Hospital Wing after a mysterious bout of dragon pox (conveniently, all the pureblood children developed an immunity after catching it young) has rendered you bed-ridden and pockmarked, that you don’t think anything can scare Tom Riddle. He’s suffering just as well in the bed beside yours to keep the contagion to the two of you, and he’s all cold, eddied rage under sallow skin and beetling bones.

“They’re going to kill you,” he says after three days of silence, when the room is dusted in moonlight so thin it’s like squinting through cinema noise or mohair fluff to try to see him.

You blink at the vague shape of him. “What?”

“If you don’t hurt them back, eventually, they’ll just kill you.”

In hindsight, it’s an assumption so hastily bleak only a scared child could make it.

I want to hurt them, you try to say, but for what follows you cannot: I want to hurt them but I’m not good enough to do it.

You roll over and pretend to sleep, and in the morning, you hurt them anyway.

It’s Avery who’s unlucky enough to be the first to test you when you’re three assignments behind in Transfiguration, still a bit groggy from your last dose of Gorsemoor Elixir, and actually, physically green. He tugs your hair and stings your cheek with the promise of “bringing a bit of colour back to your face” and it’s sort of funny how banal it is compared to the other transgressions you’ve been dealt — that this is the thing that makes you bare your teeth, grip your wand in a hand that still can’t hold half of it, and send Avery flying across the room with a Knockback Jinx.

Tom sits with you in the Great Hall for dinner that night, and he never really stops.

You practise spells by the Black Lake between classes and he’s anything but kind about the ordeal, but you teach each other. You end your days with singe prints and sore wrists and you often take more damage than he does, but sometimes, as spring settles in with warm tones (apple and jade and moss — all the greens you’d never imagined), you leave with less bruises than he does. It hardly feels like friendship. It feels much more like purpose.

When summer comes you don’t write to him, and you don’t expect he will either. You don’t suppose you’ve actually written a letter in your life. Instead you try new wand movements under your quilt every night and wait for August’s departure on a big red train.

You sit together when the day does come. He asks you if you’ve been practising. You frown and tell him you’re not allowed to use magic outside of school.

Second year is nothing but monotonous, antiquated theoretics. Most everyone complains. You don’t see why they should — they’re already aeons ahead of you — but that means you finally have a chance to catch up in your less-than-school-sanctioned meetings with Tom while the rest remain practically stationary.

Deputy Headmaster and Transfiguration professor Albus Dumbledore is imperceptibly less soft with you than he was last year when you make the apparently poor decision to sit beside Tom on the first day, and you file the subtle shift in demeanour into some mental cabinet to review later.

You find workarounds with the librarian, Madam Palles, inclined to sympathy for the poor, orphaned muggle-borns to grant relatively unfettered daytime access to the Restricted Section so long as you keep it tidy and none of the books leave the library. That’s where things get a bit more interesting.

For a month you remain innocuous as can be. You browse through rare historical tombs and foreign biographies that would charge more galleons than you can conceptualise, and you never leave so much as a tea stain on the parchment. You smile at the Madam when you return the key each night, and walk back to the dungeons with your hands behind your back. It is, of course, totally unrelated that a month is what it takes for Tom to master the third-year curriculum’s Doubling Charm. An entirely separate affair when you meet him in the most secluded alcove of the library, slip him the key, and stifle your grin as he duplicates it perfectly.

You discover Christmas break is your favourite time of the year. Nearly all the purebloods go home. The Slytherin dormitories are effectively halved.

It’s two weeks of earnest, uninterrupted work and sleep without fear of waking up with jelly legs or whiskers.

Madam Palles, most nights, makes a slight, drowsy effort of searching the library for leftover students before she casts the lights out and closes the door. Then, it belongs to you and Tom.

You’re splayed rather ridiculously over one of the big reading chairs on Christmas Eve, Lore of Godelot in hand, enthralled by a chapter detailing his controlled use of Fiendfyre through the power of the Elder Wand.

Tom is cross-legged and sat straight, his brows furrowed in concentration.

“What’ve you got?” you ask, leaning over to answer your own question.

Tom as good as rolls his eyes, holding up the book to give you an easier look.

“Magick Moste Evile?” You scrunch your nose. “Bit much, don’t you think?”

“It’s the stuff they’ll never teach us.”

“I wonder why.”

He steals a glance at your own book and smiles in that smug way that makes you want to slap him.

“What, Tom?”

He shrugs. “You might want to know you’re reading stories about the author.”

You look down. Lore of — Godelot wrote Magick Moste Evile?

It shouldn’t really be surprising. Three chapters ago your book was recounting his months in Yugoslavia grave-robbing magical burial sites.

“Whatever,” you mumble, “It’s just a biography. Least I’m not reading the words out of his mouth.”

“Well, they’d be out of his quill.”

“Oh my God, Tom, shut up.”

All good things must come to an end. Term resumes and your hackles are back up.

Abraxas Malfoy, Antonin Dolohov, Walburga Black and the best of the worst of your house have returned, sleek-haired and insatiable and deranged, truly, in such a manner that you don’t think you can be blamed for the instinct you feel every time you pass them to lunge like a wild predator or run like wild prey. All Tom does, though (and so you follow, because he’s standing with you and who has ever done that?) is meet their gazes with equal assuredness. He never seems bothered. He never seems animal. You are still all hammering heart and heavy lungs, and you are learning not to see the world through the eyes of someone who’s only ever had their fists to fight. You have magic, you remember. You’re good at it. You could hurt them, if you really wanted.

Not much is different that summer than the last. The war is hard. The food is hard to chew. You chip a tooth. You’re too afraid to fix it with the Trace on you, but you still smile because you will, and everyone seems put off by that. What is there to smile about?

You suppose, for them, it’s a question with few answers.

For you — you’re back on a big red train musing about the functions of muggle warfare with Tom Riddle, chucking a useless card from a chocolate frog out the window and moaning about how you wasted the sickle you found under your seat.

He’s gotten very good at ignoring your theatrics and going right back to whatever it was he was talking about. And you note, unrelatedly, he almost looks like he’s learned how to open the windows at Wool’s. (You dare not suggest he’s doing something so ludicrous as sitting in the sun too, but this is a start.)

Dippet, or the Minister, or whoever it is that’s in charge of the practicality of the curriculum, has become fractionally less stupid in the last three months.

You don’t have to rely on nights in the Restricted Section or weekends at the Black Lake to actually learn something anymore. Of course, without the assistance of those illicit extracurriculars, you wouldn’t be able to match up to your peers the way you are this year, but it’s nice to duel with dummies instead of motioning your wand vaguely over a desk, and you and Tom still climb the notice boards in rapid succession.

They hate you for it. One of your roommates makes a pointed effort each night to glare at you from her bed like those jelly legs are back on the table, Orion Black (two years younger but just as nasty as his cousin) nearly trips you on your way to Divination, Abraxas Malfoy develops what you think borders on obsession with Tom, and for once it feels almost offhand to not care about any of it.

You’re beginning to think even at its best, Hogwarts is remarkably insufficient. This leads you to books mercifully unrestricted so you can read about a few of the other magical schools for comparison. Beauxbatons is renowned for providing most of the worlds alchemical developments, Uagadou’s early propensity for wandless magic makes it unfathomably more practical than Hogwarts, Durmstrang (though you scoff at their violent anti-muggle sentiment) teaches the Dark Arts as something beneficial rather than unforgivable, and — what do you learn here? Even with the hair’s-breadth of magical leniency you’ve been allowed this year, it’s no surprise so few recognizable names in wizarding history are Hogwarts alumni.

“Let me have a look at that,” you say to Tom one evening, when he’s peering once more over the pages of Magick Moste Evile. He’s a purveyor of knowledge in all forms, but he always seems to come back to Godelot in the end.

He raises a brow, handing it to you like your intrigue doubles his. “No more reservations?”

“Don’t get ahead of yourself. I’m only curious.”

“Curiosity—”

“Killed the damn cat, I know.” You glare at him through the pages. “I think that’s you, in this case though, since you’re the one in love with the bloody thing.”

He shakes his head as he reclines in the low light of the Restricted Section, muttering something that sounds like “ridiculous,” or “querulous,” or something else unimaginably fucking annoying.

You might be wrong. Retract your last quip and expunge it. If Tom’s in love with any book, it’s the behemoth dictionary he’s been spitting stupid adjectives out of since he was eleven.

But Godelot’s musings on the Dark Arts are fascinating enough that you can understand the appeal. He’s no wordsmith, and you appreciate that in a way you’re sure Tom deems regrettable, but his points are straightforward but thoughtful in such a way you can read in them how he was guided by the Elder Wand through everything he did. There’s a stream-of-consciousness to them. Something doctrinal you’re surprised to enjoy for all the obligatory English creed they washed your mouth with at the orphanage.

“Find what you’re looking for?” Tom asks, combing with little interest through the tomb you’d put down in favour of his.

“I’m not looking for anything. I’m just…” You sigh. It’s almost painful to say. “I think you were right, and — oh, shut up, don’t look at me like that — I don’t think we’re learning anything here. Not really; not as much as they do at other schools.”

“Of course,” he says blankly. “Hence this.”

This — restricted books and furtive duels — should not be necessary.

“You know that’s not gonna be enough. For the rest of them, maybe, but not us.”

He tenses how he always does at the reminder of his difference. And you get it. Sometimes in moments like these you forget the reason you’re here in the first place. It isn’t just the rebellious divertissement of two academically eager students, it’s… survival. What future do you have as a penniless orphan in wartorn London? What future do you have as a muggle-born Slytherin who’s apt with a wand when there are a thousand more your age, just as skilled and twice as pure?

It isn’t enough to be as good as them. You have to best them, and you have to do it forever.

The night stumbles into an exhaustive silence because you both know it’s true and it’s a bit too heavy right now. The answer isn’t in this room. Just you. Just him. So you sit in the dark and you stare through that muffled nighttime noise playing tricks on your eyes. The worst of the world can wait until morning.

The worst of the world has impeccable timing.

A fault of both sides of the coin; the muggle world is a travesty and the wizarding world is just a bit fucking late, really.

So there’s the newspaper. It’s October first and the date reads September tenth. School owls are a joke and you can’t afford anything better.

And it’s a dirty, ashen grey. It smudges your green if you ever had it at all. You were born to this and you will return to it always.

BOMB’S HAVOC IN CROWDED PUBLIC SHELTER

MOTHERS AND CHILDREN AMONG THE CASUALTIES

DAMAGE CONSIDERABLE, BUT SPIRITS UNBROKEN

All you can hope to do is pass the paper to Tom and wonder without words what you’ll go home to.

The answer is very little when the summer clouds your vision with dust and you stand dumbly with your suitcase in front of nothing at all. You’d tried your best until your departure to keep up with muggle news, but it had remained, routinely, a month behind with the owls. By the time June arrived you were still holding your breath through May. Tom had attempted to reason with Dippet for summer lodgings at the school but you were both denied in light of the exquisite mercy — the bombs have stopped! The Blitz has ended! Go back to the aftermath and make do with the craters.

It’s a bit ironic that Tom’s orphanage survived and yours didn’t. At least you can finally see what all the fuss is about.

In truth, it’s more strange than anything. You feel unreasonably like you’re impeding on a part of him that has never belonged to you (if any of him does); that place where you intersect but never draw attention to. You remind yourself you had no choice in the matter. The system puts you where it wants to, and these days the options are slim. But it’s — the walls are amber-black tile and plaster, lined with sanitary-smelling hospital beds and a cupboard per room. Per room, you think; you’ve got one of those now, and with only one girl to share it with.

You figure the reason for the extra space is probably not one you want to know.

Anyway, you don’t actually see Tom for two days. The caretakers bring you a tray of dinner that’s vaguely warm and a bit too salty and you sleep off the debris you think you breathed in that morning, half-sated and sun-tired.

But then you do see him, and he’s in these funny uniform shorts and a thick blazer and your greeting is an offhand joke about the scandal of his knees that he doesn’t seem to appreciate. He eyes your muggle clothes while you wait for your own set and you know you really don’t have any room to judge.

He doesn’t, or at least doesn’t say he minds your relocation.

You spend half the summer waking up in the middle of the night to acquaint yourselves with the London tube stations, and the other half in whatever crevices of the orphanage you aren’t harangued by Mrs Cole every five seconds, which are far and few between. She seems to have decided fourteen is old enough an age to worry about your intentions unchaperoned, like it’s the bloody 1800’s, and admonishes you and Tom relentlessly despite only ever finding you quietly buried in useless books.

You begin to miss Madam Palles and her invaluable pity. Everyone’s an orphan here. No one’s sorry.

“What’s his deal?” you ask one stuffy afternoon, reclining in your creaking seat to prop your legs on the desk.

Tom knocks them off (he’s so well-mannered that you sometimes push these little gestures of impropriety just to bother him) and glances at the target of your question. Some broad, blond boy who skitters down the corridor a shade paler than he arrived. You’ve yet to properly introduce yourself to anyone you don’t have to, so names are muddy when you try to apply them to faces.

He shrugs, but there’s a flash of something in his expression you’re fascinated to realise is unfamiliar. “He’s an imbecile.”

“...Riiiiight, but that isn’t a proper answer.”

You smile. Legs return to table. Timeworn Oxfords muddy the surface. Tom scowls.

“There was an altercation last year,” he says tersely, “he’s rather fixated on the matter.”

“An altercation.”

“Very good, that is what I said.”

You narrow your eyes and he sweeps your legs off the desk again, gaze catching the unmistakable ribbon of an old bullied scar on your shin.

“And I suppose you’re above such incidents,” he muses.

You cross your arms and huff. He always wins games like these.

You’re grateful when you return to Hogwarts in one piece after your final night of summer is spent underground, and the certainty of knowing where you’ll rest your head for the next ten months cannot be understated.

But the worst thing has happened, and you blame it on the flicker of a moment where you missed Madam Palles like it was some jubilant, accidental curse to ever miss anyone. A foreign thing you remind yourself never to do again.

She’s only gone and jinxed the locks to the Restricted Section so they cry like newborn Mandrakes when Tom’s replica key clicks in place.

For a second you both stand there looking stupidly at each other. Getting caught was a fear two years ago; you’d almost forgotten it was still possible.

Tom is quicker to collect himself. He grabs you by the arm and casts a Disillusionment Charm, and you don’t burst running out of the library like two blurry suncatchers reflecting the candlelight as your instinct heeds; you cling to the shelves and you slither silently to the door. (You’ll make a joke about it when you can breathe.)

Madam Palles the Traitor comes heaving into the library in her nightgown, a blinding blue light baubled at the end of her wand, and it’s really just theatrical at this point to use Lumos bloody Maxima when the basic spell would do the job just fine.

“Has she suspected us the whole time?” you say on gasp once you’ve made it to the dungeons.

“Perhaps someone else has,” Tom suggests.

“What? Malfoy?”

You think it’s a good first guess. It could have been any of the Slytherins, upon consideration, but Malfoy seemed most fixated on Tom last year and it wouldn’t surprise you to learn he’d been observant enough to follow you to the library and notice you don’t leave with the other students.

But Tom quashes the idea. “I’m doubtful. Malfoy is attentive, but Madam Palles is hardly partial to him.” (He had, in second year, set one of her books on fire while studying offensive spells.) “I suspect it was someone with more influence.”

Only no one has more influence than Abraxas Malfoy. The rest of the Slytherins follow him like lost pups. But then Tom might mean —

“A professor?”

“It may be.” He says it like he’s already decided his suspect.

He is, as always, and ever-infuriatingly, correct.

It’s that file you tucked away for later, reoccurring when you return to Transfiguration in the morning like a second epiphany: Dumbledore.

He assigns the term’s seating arrangements, which he’s never done before, and there’s something in his tone when he pairs you with Rosier that feels intentionally like not pairing you with Tom. You don’t think it’s paranoia clouding your better judgement, and by the way Tom’s gaze hardens as he takes his seat beside Malfoy, neither does he.

Dumbledore is suspicious for a number of reasons. He disappears for weeks at a time. The Prophet writes articles on his sightings in Austria and France like he’s an endling beast. He’s being sighted in Austria and France — two notable countries in Grindelwald’s ongoing war. Perhaps ancillary, you’ve decided the charmed glass repositories he uses to hold his old artefacts are the same ones encasing the least permissible books in the Restricted Section. And if that isn’t paranoia (which, you’re willing to admit, it may be) then you assume he has them so proudly on display because he wants you to know.

You consider it a warning.

Tom does not.

“Just give it up,” you hiss over a game of wizard’s chess, “I bet we’ve read every book in there twice already anyway.”

His jaw ticks as the sole indicator of his annoyance, and he takes your rook. You scowl.

“Tom, that man thinks you’re devil-spawn. You know he’s just waiting for an opportunity to catch you doing something wrong.”

“So?”

It sounds so petulant you think he’s been possessed by his eleven-year-old self. Then you think he was a lot wiser at eleven.

“So?” You make an aggressive move with your knight. “So don’t give him one!”

He stares at the board and his breath is just a trace sharper and you hate that you know him like this and no one else. You wonder if he knows you like that too, but resolve with ease that he does not. You’re hard frowns and lewd jokes and trousers torn at the knee to bare scars with stories you wish you could forget. There’s no mystery there. Tom is nothing but — gordian knots and fixed expressions and little patterns to learn like the rules of this stupid game between you. You must know Tom Riddle by every atom or not at all. And that isn’t a choice, really. You’ve never known anyone else.

“Are you stupid, Tom?”

You glance at the board. He’s got Check. A terrible, true answer.

“No,” you finish. “Then don’t act like it.”

Your king glances at you and you nod. He falls. The game is resigned.

Tom acts stupid.

Dumbledore knows.

It all happens very fast.

You strike Tom harder in the arm with Confringo than is likely necessary that night, and he returns the favour with a Knockback Jinx that thrusts you into the shallows of the Black Lake.

You gasp. The cold water feels like it’s swallowing you whole when it strikes, an envelope sealed around you and licked shut for good measure. Everything holds to you, and it’s fucking November. Your senses are so overwhelmed that you forget to murder Tom the instant you sink in. You forget to do much of anything.

You wade trembling out of the lake when sense returns and Tom huffs, peeling off his robe to treat the burn on his arm.

“You—idi—iot,” you mutter, trying to find the incantation for a warming charm but the words get stuck between your chattering teeth. “You stole a re… stricted book.”

Tom glares daggers at you between his poor healing job and you scowl, mincing through the grass and grabbing his arm. “Fucking imbec-cile…”

You’ve done enough damage that if he were anyone else you’d be proud of yourself, and somehow, simultaneously, if he were anyone else you’d be able to manage a pinch of guilt. But he’s Tom, and you know him by every atom, so you cannot be proud, and he’s Tom — he retaliated by tossing you in freezing water and now your clothes are clinging sodden and heavy to every inch of you, so you certainly can’t be guilty either.

“I borrowed it,” he says tightly. As if that means anything at all. And then he takes his robe and drapes it spiritlessly over your shoulders. “You could attempt communication before curses.”

“I could attempt communication,” you scoff, uttering a charm to partially close the gash on Tom’s arm, “Fucking h-hypocrite. I did communicate. You lied.”

“I —”

“Omitted information? Withheld the truth? Watch your mouth or I’ll steal your fucking dictionary, Riddle.”

You swear a great deal when you’re cold and mad, apparently.

“I won’t be caught.” His calm is infuriating. “It would hardly earn expulsion regardless.”

“It doesn’t matter! He knows it’s you! He was staring at you all class!”

“So nothing novel then.”

“D’you want me to blast you again?”

His lips form a flat line. No. That’s what you thought.

You sigh, clutching his robes in your fists to quell your trembling. “What’d you take, anyway? We never touch the encased stuff.”

That is, you assume, why Dumbledore was vexed enough about the whole thing to mention it in class today. A highly valuable book has gone missing, from a repository you dare conclude belongs to him, and he has to pretend all the while not to know it’s Tom who took it. You are out of the question. Theirs is some delicate vendetta you can’t begin to unfurl.

“Nothing anyone should miss,” Tom says, a complete non-answer as he stops to murmur a warming charm you could probably manage yourself by now.

“Tom.”

“It was an encyclopaedia. It’s entirely in Runes. I suspect it will take months for me to decipher.”

“God’s sake,” you groan. He really is exhausting. “I think Dumbledore’l take his chances and loot your dorm before that happens.”

Tom wipes a stray droplet of water from your cheek. His fingers are soft. “We should return. You look half-drowned.”

“I am half-drowned, dickhead.”

And you accost him in hushed tones the whole walk back. Runes, Tom, really? Threw me in the damn lake over a Runic Encyclopaedia? He accosts you just the same; You burned me first.

It does, in fact, take Tom months to decipher the Runes, and he’s quite secretive about it. He won’t let you see the book, won’t tell you what it’s about, won’t indulge your queries on how far he’s gotten or if it’s worth the way Dumbledore bores his eyes into the pair of you in the Great Hall with nothing but the glass of his spectacles to soften his censure. You consider — well — you consider taking your chances and looting his dormitory.

The day everything changes starts the same as any.

You muse over breakfast about muggle news and how the way Tom holds his wand when he casts defensive spells is too sharp when it should be circular. He argues. You soften the criticism by telling him his offensive magic is stellar but you’ll always beat him in defence if he doesn’t swallow his damn pride and listen to you for once. (So, really, you soften it very little.) He doesn’t take Divination so you don’t see him until Herbology that afternoon and he’s silent enough during the hour you share with your wormwood plant that you know he’s done it sometime between breakfast and now.

Tom has cracked the book.

It’s late spring and the night takes longer to settle than it did in the winter. Errant sunbeams still sparkle on the water when you meet him by the lake, and it’s warm enough to forgo a coat.

“Are you going to tell me what it’s about now?” you ask without preamble, arms crossed over your chest as he approaches.

He hands you the book like it’s worth something to you without his explanation, but you’re intelligent enough to gather something from the illustrations of two twined snakes embroidering the cover.

“I should have suspected it sooner,” Tom says before you can comment. “By the way Dumbledore acted when I told him… I should have known he would have wanted to keep it from me.”

“Tom, I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“It’s an Encyclopaedia on Parseltongue and its known speakers.”

You flip through the pages and none of it means anything. “Parseltongue?”

“The language of serpents,” Tom supplies, and the two of you walk along the edge of the forest. “It’s almost exclusively hereditary.”

“Okay, so, what — you’re trying to learn it anyway?”

“I have no need.”

You frown. “You… you already know it.”

“I always have,” he says, and there’s something almost unrestrained in his voice. He’s proud in a new light, and it takes you a moment to understand and you’re not sure why exactly it makes your heart sink, but —

“You’re not muggle-born.”

“No, I’m not. And Dumbledore knows.”

“So, he —” You try not to sound crushed because why should you be? Why should it matter that he isn’t some exact reflection of you? He’s at your side, he’s still there, he’ll always be there — “How does he know?”

“When he came to Wool’s to inform me I'd been accepted at Hogwarts. I hadn’t known anything, certainly not that speaking to snakes is emphatically rare, so I asked him. He said it was ‘not a peculiar gift.’ Perhaps to keep my interest at a minimum.”

“Why would he lie?”

“Because it isn’t just that I’m of magical blood. I’m a descendant of Salazar Slytherin.”

You can’t be faulted for laughing. It’s not often Tom makes jokes, let alone funny ones.

“That’s good, Tom. Morgana used to have tea with my great-great-hundredth-great-grandmother, so that works out nice.”

He sighs, taking your hand and leading you further into the woods.

“Are you trying to murder me?”

“I might.”

“You’d be the first suspect.”

“No, I wouldn’t. You’ve far too many enemies.”

Not by choice, you start to scold, and then he stops, not so far into the Forbidden Forest that you’re afraid, but far enough you understand this is not something he’d chance showing you in the open.

He closes his eyes and whispers, and it’s — decidedly not English. And you know the sound of a few other languages, at least; this doesn’t sound like words at all. His consonants are pointed, his S’s stretched, the syllables repetitive but separated by a difference in cadence someone less perceptive might not notice.

It shouldn’t be surprising; it’s exactly what he told you, but it startles you how much it reminds you of a snake.

“Tom?” you murmur, unsure at the prospect of speaking some ancient, unknown language into the air of the Forbidden Forest, and, underneath that, still reeling with the knowledge that this is real at all. You’ve pinched yourself a few times to make sure.

There’s a low susurration in the grass, wet with dew that catches the moonlight, and you gasp, clinging to Tom’s arm when you see the blades part in helices for the space of an adder.

“It’s all right,” Tom says softly, almost elsewhere, his eyes zeroed in on the snake. “It won’t hurt you.”

You’re still by the balance of his arm and some petrifying awe as he extends a hand to the grass and the adder coils around it, weaving upward to his shoulder.

“Oh my God. Oh my God, Tom.”

The adder points its beady gaze at you, and Tom whispers something else in that strange language before it retreats in agreement or compliance or whatever could come close to expression on the face of a fucking snake, and maybe you’re dreaming this despite your pinching. Maybe you’ve lost your mind.

“Hope you didn’t just tell it to bite me,” you try, and it comes out half-choked.

He smiles. It’s partly for you and partly for this venomous little thing on his shoulder, and that’s a bit startling. Tom Riddle smiles for adders and you and not much else.

“Should I?”

And all you manage, for whatever reason, is, “Don’t be like them now that you’re not like me.”

It’s out before you can stop it, welling from a small, scared place that embarrasses you to return to. A hospital bed when you were eleven. The walls of a bedroom ravaged by bombs.

Tom’s smile fades. “We’re nothing like them.”

The thing is, neither of you know that’s the day that changes everything.

You celebrate your fifteenth birthday in the Deathday ballroom with Tom, a stolen dinner pastry, a green candle, and a few sad ghosts. You try to learn how to dance. Tom thinks it’s silly. You tell him that’s only because he’s upset he keeps stepping on your toes.

Summer blisters when it comes.

Some of the children take jobs as mail-sorters and steelworkers and you clasp for whatever you’re (one) allowed and (two) capable of, which isn’t much. You’re both old enough at the end of the day to explore London on your own, opting to spend as much time away from the orphanage as Mrs Cole allots, but you only have knuts and pennies and you warn Tom it would be unwise to swindle muggles and risk a letter from the Ministry. So you work where you’re needed and you eat the rationed nonsense you always do and you miss Hogwarts terribly. It’s much the same: you’re together, you’re hungry, and you’re nothing like them.

And then it’s different: Tom makes Slytherin Prefect, is suddenly tall, and you wonder in fleeting moments if his face has always suited him this well.

A stupid remark. You fervently ignore it.

Fifth year begins and you have almost the same number of electives as you do core classes, Tom has duties in his new role that take much of his spare time, and despite popular belief, you and him are not a mitotic entity, so this splits you up more often than it had in previous years. Which is fine. You still have plenty of things to talk about during meals and between duels, and you reckon you’ll share DADA until you graduate.

But in his absence, your attentions are forced elsewhere, and you should be grateful they land on something potentially promising.

It’s like Transfiguration just clicks for you this year. You’ve never been the greatest at Transformation (importantly though, you’ve also remained far from the worst), but fifth year launches you into Vanishment and something about that feels like a perfect equation. There are no complicated half-numerals and objects stuck between inanimacy and being — just unmaking the made. Nothing or not. You’re fucking excellent at it. You glean the theoretics fast and then the practise comes like breathing. Even the purebloods struggle as you Vanish Dumbledore’s Conjured garden snakes in brilliant tendrils of light. You exult unabashedly when you brush past them on the way out of class — who was it that didn’t belong in Slytherin?

You say the same to Tom and he rolls his eyes, but the amusement is there.

“Think you can talk to my snakes for me?” you tease, nudging him on the path to Hogsmeade.

“If they’re yours, I doubt they have anything worth discussing.”

And Dumbledore is… a hue nearer to the man you remember from first year. He praises your improvement and smiles when you can’t hide your giddiness as if equally impressed.

He doesn’t shelve people the way Slughorn does (you’re dismayed to find Tom has been invited to join the Slug Club and you have not) but you think if he did you’d be rapidly climbing your way to the top. Maybe get put in one of those neat little repositories he keeps all his best treasures in.

Dumbledore does, however, offer additional assignments for those who are interested, and tasks you with a few if you’re up to the challenge.

You always are.

The Tom-Dumbledore-Encyclopaedia debacle is apparently either resolved, or your part in it forgotten.

Tom humours you when you’re both singed at the fingers from duelling, yours dipped in the lake while he buries his in the cold moss, about how Abraxas takes the seat beside him at every Slug Club dinner. He tells you he pretends to be very interested in the Malfoy’s business affairs and their stock in the Bulgarian Quidditch team’s win this coming spring. He tells you he finds it amusing to let Abraxas think he can make Tom his pet. Tom says he considers searching for Salazar Slytherin’s fabled Chamber of Secrets and showing Abraxas what a real pet looks like. You smack him in the arm.

He’s had an ego forever. He just has a few too many reasons for it now.

And maybe that’s why you push harder in Transfiguration, dedicate the majority of your studies to it, spend your Saturday nights scrutinising advanced techniques while Tom makes nice with Potions experts and politics with people who don’t even know what he is but like him anyway. It’s patronising, of course — borderline fetishistic; not a real like — but it scares you. Tom Riddle would not allow himself to be anyone’s pretty mudblood show pony if he didn’t have an ulterior motive.

Everything changes but the observable truth that he is still insufferable.

You’re lucky to see him twice a week if it isn’t in class, and the way it starts is so slow you don’t even fully understand what’s happening until Christmas break when Abraxas stays a few extra days and leaves by Dippet’s Floo instead of the train.

You don’t dare ask where Tom has vanished to in that time or why the hell Abraxas Malfoy would willingly subject himself to unnecessarily extended time at school with all his lackeys gone, and it isn’t because you don’t want to. It’s because he won’t tell you himself. It’s because you’re terrified the answer will feel like a broken promise, and you’ve come to realise (it’s been there for so long; such an obvious, tiny thing that you’ve never stopped to really dissect it) that it’s quite difficult to know someone at every atom and not love them a little bit.

You’re suddenly aware of the risk of it: you love him like an inextricable piece of yourself, and, well, you’ve seen war. You know what amputation looks like. You’ve seen the remains of structures designed to stand forever, and you’re strong like them — casts and gauze in all the weak spots because you remember the pain of breaking them — but those were blows dealt without the complication of loving the bombs behind them.

Tom is the green on your robes, the dragon pox tinge you sometimes think never truly faded when you look in the mirror too long, and all the shades you never imagined. Apple, jade, moss. The beginnings of emerald. (No, he couldn’t be that.)

You wonder what the world would look like if he stole those colours back, and it’s much worse than some brutal decimation; it would leave you with too much. You would just be you without him.

So you love him into June like you always do, and you pluck his Prefect badge off on the last day of school and tell him it makes you jealous like a joke when it’s half-true.

It’s raining when you walk to the train together, miserable for what should be summer but not at all remarkable in Scotland. Tom wipes it from your cheek. Your wrists are sore from vanishing bits and bobbles all night while you still can, never truly prepared for three months without magic, and you curl into your seat as soon as you’re in it. Tom wakes you up when you arrive back in London, startling you to find that you fell asleep at all.

It rains a lot that summer. There’s nothing much to see in the city and you can’t get anywhere else (you note: the Trace cares little about broomsticks but you can’t afford one of your own and flying might be the only thing Tom is bad at) so you’re stuck to the library again with a noseful of old paper and a certain prose that magical literature cannot replicate. You theorise a lifetime of reckoning with the mundane forces one to be more creative.

Perhaps it’s the cold that makes you sick. Perhaps it’s the state of your meals. Either way, your final weeks before sixth year are hell. Biblical, blazing hell.

The nurses aren’t sure what it is — another influenza epidemic you’re the first in the orphanage to catch — but they isolate you immediately and there’s not much care they can offer.

You hear Tom arguing with one of them outside your door but can’t make out the words. Everything is dizzy, sweaty, halfway to unconsciousness but without its relief. You’d take dragon pox over this.

Some days later (though you can’t be sure because it feels like bloody centuries), he’s at your bedside, and you think even if you were lucid enough to ask what horrible thing he’d done to change the nurses’ minds, you wouldn’t.

But you know he’s not beyond breaking wizarding law, because he’s muttering healing spells with a hand to your damp forehead, and you hazily find yourself reaching for him, trying to shake your head no.

“Not allowed,” you mumble. Your throat is sore and your nose is stuffy. You sound terrible and you probably look worse.

Tom is slightly blurry but you think he’s staring at you. You know if he is it’s with the utmost incredulity.

“Not allowed,” he repeats slowly. It’s very easy to picture him clenching his jaw. “I wonder, if the Trace is so exact that it can detect all forms of magic, it can’t also detect malady. You’re burning — and I’m to consider whether saving your life might be illegal?”

He’s angry. He’s angrier than you’ve seen in a long time; and you can actually see it now. His magic courses through you and your vision clears, bit by bit, until your depth perception steadies and you realise he’s closer than you thought. His jaw is, in fact, clenched.

You move to catch his wrist and manage it this time. “Tom.”

“Don’t argue,” he says thinly.

“You’ll get sick.”

His face is far too neutral for the way his fingers stroke your damp cheek. “Hm. Then it’s a good thing you’d break the law for me too.”

Of course he’s right — you love him. Which makes it a good thing he doesn’t get sick.

Some of the younger children do. The fever comes overnight for a girl who wasn’t in the orphanage last year, and it takes her by the next.

When you get back on the train to Hogwarts, the virus is circulating Britain and you’re livid.

What Tom said is true; you consider the Trace’s precision and the details of the laws on underage magic — how one of the technicalities is that a young witch or wizard may be absolved of the consequences if the circumstances are life-threatening. You think about how it supposedly doesn’t care about broom-riding or Portkeys or Floo travel, and if the Trace is that complex, surely it understands sickness.

You only wonder if the Ministry would understand it. There haven’t been any epidemics in the wizarding world since Gorsemoor cured dragon pox in the sixteenth century, and when there isn’t healing magic there are antidotes and Pepper-Ups and herbs that muggles simply don’t have. The fatality of a fever of all things is not something you imagine could be comprehended by the sort of people who sent you and Tom back to London in the wake of the Blitz.

Of course, the Ministry hasn't written to you, you haven’t been forced in front of a representative from the Improper Use office, and you have no real reason to be upset.

You are regardless.

It shouldn’t even be a thought: you immolating into oblivion protesting rescue because one of you might get in trouble for it.

A world you’ve never much cared for is blanketed in ash and its people are dying and you can’t help them. A girl is dead. You’ll return next summer and there will certainly be more.

Life is for the magical, you find. The muggles can burn.

It’s what makes you start to panic this year, knowing you’ve only got one more after it. You have no idea what you’re going to do after school, and it doesn’t help that Tom doesn’t appear to share the sentiment. He’s got Head Boy in the bag and when he isn’t with you he’s with Abraxas, who can surely provide him connections if whatever game Tom is playing at works (and you have no doubt it will), but it’s like you said in third year: that isn’t enough for you.

You remember with a small ache that you no longer means you and him.

And then — it makes sense. You feel incredibly stupid.

“You told him, didn’t you?” you ask Tom the first opportunity you can get him alone, in the glum blue light of the Deathday ballroom on your way back from supper.

He sighs like it’s a conversation he’d hoped to put off for longer. “You’re referring to Abraxas, I presume?”

“You’re referring to — yes, you prick, I’m referring to Abraxas. Of course I’m referring to Abraxas, or are there others? Dolohov and Nott seem unusually enthralled by you, now that I think about it.”

“And for a reason I’m supposed to be aware of, this is an error on my part. Should I be apologising?”

“Why did you tell him, Tom?!”

“Why?” he deadpans.

You throw your hands up. “Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

“Shall I provide you with my itinerary as well? Would you accompany me as I tour the third-years around Hogsmeade? Or can you do me the favour of trusting me to make my own decisions with the nature of my ancestry?”

“You’re keeping something from me and there’s a reason,” you say, stepping closer to him, “and forgive me if I want to know what it is when you were willing to tell me you’re the Heir of Slytherin and you can talk to snakes. What — what could possibly be bigger than that?”

Tom returns your approach with one of his own. His eyes are steady, dark, thick with lashes and you can’t reminisce on the details of the rest of him because that would be strange for a friend to do. Stranger to do it now, when you’re angry with him and there’s two sleeping ghosts in the corner and he’s framed by deep indigoes like the ripples in the Black Lake and — you’re doing it anyway.

To be short, he’s close, he’s very beautiful, and sometimes you despise him.

“Trust me,” he says again, without the derision of the last time. “This will change things for us.”

You frown, but it’s a weak upset in contrast to the explosion you came in here willing to make. There were at least twenty questions you meant to ask and you only managed one.

You are not his keeper. You know that.

“Change them for the better, Tom,” you say on a sigh.

He blinks, and you think he’ll respond with a nod or a slightly offended ‘of course’ but he does not. He blinks and he just keeps looking at you. It’s disarming. It probably resembles the way you often look at him. There’s a rationale somewhere; you never see each other anymore, life is so incredibly busy, maybe he’s forgotten what you look like.

And he does nod, finally, but he does it with his thumb brushing the corner of your lip.

What? Sorry. What’s going on?

He pulls it away like he’s heard you. “You had something.”

You’re almost positive you did not.

Transfiguration this year brings Conjuration, which is an advanced and welcome distraction, and even more exciting when you consider no longer having to Vanish things you have no idea how to bring back. Dumbledore’s is one of three N.E.W.T classes you’re taking — Defence Against the Dark Arts and Alchemy besides. It’s easily your favourite.

You share it with eleven other Slytherins and twelve Ravenclaws. Four of them are muggle-born, and it’s hard to describe the ease you feel among them because you don’t think you’ve ever had anything resembling ease with anyone but Tom.

Your schedule is more crammed than it’s ever been, but it’s good. Two of the Ravenclaw girls invite you to Hogsmeade every other weekend, you share butterbeers when you can afford one, you study until you collapse, you take Dumbledore’s extra assignments and consider trying out for Chaser on one of your more restless evenings before waking up in the morning and resolving there is such as thing as too much of a good thing. Best not to get ahead of yourself.

Your contentment is remedied quickly.

Someone is found unresponsive in the dungeons. Dippet makes an announcement at breakfast that the boy isn’t dead, rather, petrified. No one is quite sure the cause, but the Headmaster warns a few minor precautions, suggests a buddy system, and says that after dinner studying should remain in everyone’s respective common rooms rather than the courtyards or library.

You know next to nothing about petrification, but the victim is muggle-born, and you suspect it was the result of a poorly performed statue curse by one of the many blood zealots in your house. The whole thing makes you hold onto your wand a smidge tighter, but you’re adamant not to let it drive you to paranoia like it would have a few years ago.

Tom nods at your theory when you manage to escape to the Black Lake together in November.

“That isn’t unreasonable,” he says. High praise.

You sink into the moss, sighing. “Do you think there’ll be more?”

He looks out onto the lake, the lapping waves, the crystalline beads that furrow them, midnight algae and flotsam you don’t think you belong to anymore.

You peer up at his silhouette in the dark. “Do you think whoever did it will do it again, I mean?”

“I don’t know,” he says finally, and after another pause: “but I don’t think it would be you.”

“How’s that?”

“No one would be senseless enough to try.”

And he sinks beside you with that, breath shaping the cold in steady, rhythmic clouds while yours are scattered. His robes brush yours and you take his arm with a sleepy hum, tracing patterns in the stars until your eyes feel heavy and he insists on taking you back to your dormitories.

One of the Ravenclaw girls, Marigold Wright, distracts you with a spare blue scarf and an invitation to her next Quidditch match. You watch from the stands and cheer as she catches the snitch to beat Gryffindor.

It’s a bit strange — having a distraction — having a friend. Mari is kind, smart, a good study partner who’s as keen on stepping into the advanced theoretics of Human Transfiguration a year early as you are. She’s funny in a vulgar way, introduces you to all her friends, shows you the best way to sneak into the kitchens, and you sometimes wonder if she was sorted wrong, but — her methods are creative, and she’s definitely intelligent. She’s also definitely not Tom.

You see less and less of him and more of her, Dumbledore, the Ravenclaw common room and the pages of progressive Transfiguration methodologies. He sees less of you and more of Abraxas, Dolohov and Nott and all the other purebloods, Slughorn’s soirées and Prefect meetings that cut into meals.

It happens again.

Second floor lavatory. A girl called Myrtle Warren. She isn’t petrified.

There’s a vigil the following week and her parents are there, two muggles whose sobs wrack the Great Hall even as the students clear out. Flowers descend from the charmed ceiling, little bluebells and white chrysanthemums.

You cry that night. You can’t remember the last time you cried.

This time, you don’t have to seek Tom out. He catches you on your way back from Alchemy and brings you to the Deathday ballroom with a melancholy glance in your direction that you don't hesitate to follow. You realise it’s an odd place to continue to end up in, but no one else goes there and you suppose that makes it yours.

You’ve seen Tom skinny and sickly and olive green, but today his eyes are circled with veined violets and the lack of summer sun this year has whittled him grey once more. He’s still beautiful. He’ll always be beautiful. But he’s tired and — sad — and for the six years you’ve known him you aren’t quite sure what to do with that.

You don’t spend too long pondering it. You just hug him with the dawning newness of a thing like that; a thing you’ve never done, and never really thought to do. (You ask yourself in bewilderment how you’ve never thought to do it before.)

He’s warm. He’s uncertain. He doesn’t reciprocate immediately.

And then he does, and you understand without caveats or concerns that you stopped having a choice in your destruction the moment you chose him. He’s home, and that’s going to ruin you one day.

Your arms tighten around him and his around you, the rhythm of his breath holding you to earth when you begin to float away. Nothing makes sense in this moment but the mercy that in all the death you’ve seen, you swear to God you’ll never see his. As long as you’re alive, he must be too.

And there’s something to be said about the innate self-slaughter of loving a person (of loving Tom Riddle, especially): that it’ll cleave you in two, that you’ll say feeble things in his embrace that you should be above saying, like ‘I’m scared’, that his hand will find the back of your head and he'll tell you he knows, that that should not feel like enough but it will be. You’ll clasp your hands under black robes and hold this singular embrace together by the faulty adhesive of your fingers. Maybe you’ll cry again, like your body can suddenly comprehend its capacity for it and is making up for lost time.

The first sign that something is wrong, more than the obvious grievance of the death itself, is the Ministry’s happy acceptance of Rubeus Hagrid as the culprit.

The boy is maybe fourteen years old, half-blood — half human, mind — and no one has a bad word to say about him other than he likes to keep eccentric pets. Which leads you to wonder what pet he possessed with the ability to petrify one student and kill another and what cause he’d have for it in the first place besides two terrible, miraculous accidents.

That question draws an even stranger path. Mari says over butterbeers (on her, bless her soul) that she read somewhere years ago that Gorgons can induce petrification, but that she doesn’t remember much else.

One of the boys in DADA says that his father’s an auror, and heard from him that Hagrid’s pet was some sort of arachnid. Tom deducts five points from his house after class with a scowl on his pale face, muttering about conspiracy.

The second sign that something is wrong is that only one of those things would need to be true for the entire case on Hagrid to be called into question. If Mari’s memory serves right, how the hell did Hagrid come into ownership of a Gorgon? (Could Gorgons even be owned?) If the auror’s son is worth your credence, then what species of arachnid is capable of petrification?

You take to the library.

Unsure of where to begin and hesitant to draw attention, your research lingers into Christmas break and stalls some of your extracurriculars in Transfiguration. Tom is busy enough not to notice the new step in your routine, and you’re grateful not to have him breathing down your back, telling you you’re looking in the wrong places or you shouldn’t be looking at all.

The third sign is the end.

You wish to retract it all. There are time-turners and memory charms and potions that could dizzy you enough to manipulate the truth; there is anything but this. You’d suffer the consequences for the bliss of loving him with one more day before the ruin — you’d write it down to remember through the fog: look at him, duel him without wanting to hurt him, kiss him to know that you did it at least once, have him, be had. You never will again.

He’d shown you the adder. He’d joked about the Chamber of Secrets. He’d spent months disappearing with Abraxas, earning the trust of the sons of the Sacred Twenty Eight.

And he’d killed Myrtle Warren.

So it’s statue curses and Gorgons and Tom — speaking to serpents when no one else can, buttressed by pureblood boys who want people like you dead.

Don’t become like them now that you’re not like me.

He’s something else entirely.

What do you do in a moment like this? Panting into an empty library at a revelation you wish you could unknow, fingers digging into the hickory of your desk — another memory carved among the initials and hearts; how do you stand from your chair and leave like the world outside this room is the same as it was when you entered? There’s nothing to orbit. You are cosmic debris, tea dregs in a barren cup, flotsam.

You stand; and you tell no one. Not even Tom.

His presence in your life is so infrequent that you don’t even have to come up with excuses for your distance until three weeks after your discovery when you’re paired together in DADA to practise stretching jinxes.

You almost laugh. He’s standing beside you, tall (lanky like he was when he was a boy if you look long enough) and serious, and you love him without knowing who he is anymore. You’ve skirted corners to avoid him and sat with Mari during lunch and breakfast like he’s some scorned lover to escape confrontation from and not someone who held you through a grief inflicted by his hand.

“You look tired,” he says, inspecting the daisy you’d been tasked to elongate.

You glance at him. You are tired. It’s exhaustive, bone-deep, aching like nothing you’ve ever known, and maybe that’s why you can look at him and smile sadly instead of thrashing against his chest screaming for what he did. You suppose it happens enough in your head to satisfy. When you can sleep, you sleep to the thought of it. The waking moments are just blank.

“Mhm,” you hum, transfiguring the daisy stem back to its regular length.

Tom observes it with curious eyes. “You’re getting good at that.”

“I’ve been good at it.”

His lips turn, a small frown before he puts it away. You make the observation that he’s tired too; there are still bags under his eyes and his hands tremble ever-so-slightly with his wand when he loosens his grip on it.

His own doing and still you flicker with some relentless hope that he's drowning in regret.

“Sorry,” you say. A ridiculous thing. Do you intend to slowly push him from your life with weak disinterest and diverging academic avenues? As if he were something extricable. He’d never let you.

You’ll have to confront him, and that’s a revelation that holds its weight on your chest until you think you'll suffocate under it.

You’re in the blue light of the Deathday ballroom with a face you've never worn before when it happens, deep into spring, and you know then that you were wrong all those years ago.

He sees all of you.

Takes you in in the flash of a second and maybe it’s your quivering jaw that reveals you or the flint of betrayal in your eyes waiting to be struck and lit. Yes, you were wrong — Tom Riddle knows you at every atom too.

“Are you going to let me explain?" he asks before any hello. His jaw is tight but there’s nothing else to go on to judge his disposition. He's settling into impassivity like an animal drawing its shell. You will not be allowed in if you're going to make it hurt, and you might be the only one who can.

“Explain," you copy with a hard exhale, “Just tell me it wasn’t you. That’s all there is to say."

He stares at you. There’s nothing there.

“Tell me, Tom.”

Your breath catches on an automatic please but you don’t want to offer him that.

“I cannot.”

Then make me forget, you want to scream. Let it be summer. Let us work for pennies and breadcrumbs and be no one together.

It’s late winter and it’s too cold.

“You killed her,” you say quietly.

“If I told you I did not wish for it, would you even believe me?”

“What are you… so it was an accident?”

“There was — an opportunity presented itself that may never have come again; that does not mean I don’t find the nature of it regrettable.”

“Regrettable.” You’re laughing or crying or both, and you must look unwell. Halfway out of your mind.

He’s so composed in the face of it that it only makes you more incensed.

“You told me to change things —”

“You killed someone! Can you understand that?”

“You nearly died,” he hisses, “and if I am to apologise for recognizing it only as the first of many times, I will not. If I am to apologise for doing whatever is necessary to prevent it, I will not. The hand we were dealt will not be the hand we die to — so yes, I understand it. And one day so will you.”

“Don't," you spit, and your anger must look pathetic under your welling tears. “Don't you dare tell me that this was for me.”

“Do you want me to lie?”

“What could her death possibly bring me, Tom?”

“Her death is the first step to —”

“God, stop dancing around the fucking question!” Both hands have wound their way to your head, clutching at your skull like the brain matter might spill through one of the cracks he’s wearing down. “Just… tell me.”

“You recall Godelot's work," he says stiffly. The question of it takes you by surprise, peels the moment back like the rim of a fruit and you're left uncertain.

All you can do is nod, arms falling to cross over your chest.

“There was one form of magic he refused quite concisely to impart. I searched the Restricted Section for days, and under Dumbledore's watch that was not an easy thing to do."

You stole from him, you're urged to remind him, but it's something you'd say with a nudge of annoyance and a roll of your eyes. Such admonishment is small and far away.

“I found it at last in one of the repositories," he goes on, “Secrets of the Darkest Art."

“...What?"

“It's called a Horcrux,” he says. “Murder, by nature, splits the soul. The Horcrux simply makes use of the act; puts the soul fragment into something imperishable so that it is protected, rather than abandoned. In turn, your life cannot be taken. By malady, by magic, by sword — the vessel is destroyed but the soul lives on.”

You blink, feeling dizzy. “Myrtle was the sacrifice.”

“Myrtle was there,” Tom remedies.

“How lucky for you.”

“The circumstances could be ameliorated if one were to be made for you. I would have preferred it be someone who deserves it.”

“For — you’d do it again? Again, Tom?”

His brows crease, and even his upset seems contrived. There’s this barricade he’s placed that you, in all your infallible knowing of him, cannot puncture. It’s agony to begin to question what he could possibly be keeping from you in a confession like this.

“You killed someone, Tom. You — I would never ask you to do that. I would never live at the cost of someone else."

“No, you would not,” he agrees, though he shakes his head like it’s incredulous of you. “Do you think, even if I knew it were certain, a summons from the Ministry would have stopped me from saving you this summer? Do you suppose the threat of punishment would cause me to waver at that moment? I know it would not hinder you. So, you have your lines and I have mine — you never needed to ask.”

And now it hurts. The emptiness clears and you can't stand yourself for crying, but you do. It comes out in ragged, breathless sobs, clasped behind your palm as you turn away from him.

You've loved him since you were eleven. It's always been you two — it was always supposed to be you two. What is there to say to him? He's blurring in your periphery like in the midst of your sickness, and there's nothing he can do to heal you this time. Your vision will clear and Myrtle Warren will still be dead. He'll still be a stranger in the face of the boy you love.

“Why," you whine, a wet, hollow stain in your voice you've never cried enough to hear before. “Myrtle was — wasn't — uh —" You swallow, hysterics severing your words. You can't really think right now. Your body wobbles and your head feels puffy and hot. This might be shock.

Tom scowls like it irritates him to watch you push yourself, like this is just the unfortunate effect of you depleting your energy in a duel, not eating correctly, treating yourself carelessly.

Of course you can't stand or talk or think. You're you, contemplating a life without him.

“Sit," he says in frustration. You smack his hand away when he reaches for you, but the world has turned a shade darker and you're slipping into it.

He tugs a chair towards you with a silent charge and a reprimand, and your body doesn’t possess the wherewithal not to collapse into it the second it’s under you.

After a moment you can speak again, shaking hands steadied by your knees. “Did you… did you think I wouldn't find out? You know, the only thing that can petrify someone besides a serpent is a Gorgon. And — where would Rubeus Hagrid have found one of those?"

“I thought I would have time.”

“To come up with a good lie? Something I’d sympathise with?”

He bites his cheek. “Evidently the particulars matter little to you.”

Fuck him. “Fuck you.”

“Very cogent.”

“No, fuck you, Tom. We could have — we only had a year left and then we could — we could've done anything we wanted." You're crying again. You don't have the energy to be embarrassed. “And you chose this."

He’s indignant as he steps closer. “With what money? For what life? We are better than all of them and it’s never mattered. It never will; you know that. You told me that. You’re angry now, but you must know the truth of it. I would not forsake you. I would not lose you.”

You blink up at him, mouth stuck with some cottony feeling and cheeks stiff from crying.

“You have lost me, Tom."

He stills as if suspended. Some maceration must follow but it doesn’t.

You stand on weak legs to look him in the eyes. You wonder if he can see the love in yours. You wonder if he knows you will walk away despite it. (Of course he does. You’ve never lied to him.)

You think about how his fingers seem to always find their way to your cheek and you put yours to his. The bone there is sharp, but the skin is soft. Boyish.

There isn't a word for a goodbye like this. It shouldn't exist and so it doesn't. You just leave.

You fail your N.E.W.T courses. Quite spectacularly.

Mari sits beside you on the train with a soothing hand on your shoulder, and doesn’t ask what’s rendered you into a comatose husk since March. There’s no crying. You chew numbly on soft caramels from the trolley and stare out the window onto the hills.

That summer is spent in your bedroom unless you’re forced elsewhere. A new girl with skin so white it’s nearly translucent sleeps in the bed beside yours, taking meals on trays like you did in your first days here, tracing the cracks in the tiles, humming to herself in the dark. She makes you feel less pathetic for doing much the same.

You’d been right in your assumption that there would be more dead upon your return, and wrong that there would be more empty rooms. There are always more orphans being made.

And then you receive a letter. It isn’t delivered by owl (only for secrecy, you assume, because there are no muggles who’d be writing to you) but it’s stamped with a vaguely familiar crest. Not Hogwarts’ waxen seal, but something undoubtedly magical. A cockroach and a cup, you think, squinting. Transfiguration.

You tear the envelope open and pull the letter out.

It’s from Dumbledore. Some of it melds together, but the key words stand out.

Spoken to Dippet… Exceptional promise… N.E.W.Ts… May be reconsidered… Upon dispensation… Be well.

Be well.

You are not. You are something half-drowned and half-burned, never enough of one to quell the effects of the other. Sunlight is sparse through your side of the orphanage. On the radio, they warn a pattern of one bomb every second hour. The only other warning is the sound when they fly overhead, and if you can’t run fast enough —

You write your answer in a crowded tube station with a spotty ballpoint pen. Tom is there, looking between you, the dust, and your shaking hands as if to say: tell me I was wrong.

Some of your letter melds together but the key words stand out.

Thank you, Sir. Whatever you need.

It’s a shock that you live to seventh year. It’s a shock that you do it without him — though he watches, and in his gaze you feel regressed. You’re alive, yes, but there’s something there… his dead weight, death-grip; his haunting. They always speak of the dead as something heavy. Something that holds onto you even after it’s gone.

You find that to be true.

Dippet’s condition that you remain in Dumbledore’s N.E.W.T class is that you achieve more than the standard requirement. Essentially, your final exam will be much harder than everyone else's: Human Transfiguration, mastery of petty Transformation (through the means of Wizard’s Chess pieces), Conjuration and Vanishment of various delicate objects — all done nonverbally.

Even Dumbledore seems sceptical, but it translates to more rigorous practise rather than resignation, assignments he doesn’t even task to Mari, though she’s just as good, and you can’t begin to understand why he cares so much.

“I’ll entrust you with these while I’m away,” he says before Christmas break, sliding a sheet of parchment your way with a flick of his wand.

You frown, unfolding it. His instructions are always short now — you’ve learned to decode his meaning well enough without much exposition.

Teacup to gerbil — to cat, and inverse.

Inanimatus Conjurus spell (cockroach and cup, as instructed) to be Vanished when perfected.

Study Antar’s Doctrine. Miss Wright will act as your partner.

Due February.

It’s far too much to be done in that time. “Sir?”

Dumbledore lugs a messenger bag over his shoulder that appears small, but he carries it in such a way you suspect it’s magically extended. He smiles wistfully, pushing his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You know, I often regret how much this war asks of me. A consequence of my own doing.”

Right — Grindelwald. Sometimes you forget between awaiting the next muggle paper. War is everywhere.

You nod. “I hope… Good luck, Sir.”

Another half-smile as he twists open a jar of Floo Powder, and then he shakes his head with something you almost decipher as amusement. A brittle sort. Tired. “Good luck to you.”

And then he’s gone, in a swath of green flames that do nothing to inspire any desire for Floo travel in you.

Antar’s Doctrine is simultaneously prosaic and grandiose. They read like excerpts of a journal and you yawn into them over your morning tea, stirring amongst the first-years, who are the only people at the Slytherin table you can stand to sit with. Your blood status is apparently nullified by your age, and the worst they do is look at you funny. You aren’t sure what Abraxas’s — Tom’s (the new hierarchy never fails to stagger you) — lackeys would do if you sat with the other seventh-years instead. A part of you longs to know. They certainly don’t bother you in class the way they used to, you aren’t tripped in the corridors, but you wonder how far Tom’s influence can stretch. He is the Heir of Slytherin, and he’s earned them. But you are nothing.

You’d like it if he would let them hurt you. You think the incentive would be enough to hurt him back. And God — God, you want to. You want to hurt him almost as much as you want him.

You practise through the doctrine with Mari, as Dumbledore directed. When you’re able to sever Antar’s egotism from his abilities, you can see why Dumbledore would recommend his book to you. It feels like slipping through a crack in glass without shattering the whole thing. You weave in and back out, and Mari grins when she returns from the shape of a teapot to her body without you needing to utter a word to do it.

In the back of your mind, you’re aware what you’re doing is nearly unprecedented. It’s spring, you’re months away from eighteen, muggle-born, and mastering nonverbal Human Transfiguration like it’s a Softening Charm. Mari tells you you’re the smartest person she’s ever met. It makes your cheeks go hot to hear such open praise, worse when you snap out of the thought that you believe her.

Grindelwald falls. The school celebrates in whispers until the evidence is in front of them — Dumbledore, returned without a scar, a new wand in his hand — and then they’re cheers. The feast that night is a great one, and he toasts to you from the end of the staff table, a discreet tilt of his cup before he takes a sip and returns to converse with Professor Merrythought.

You take from your own, and your eyes land on Tom, spine of his goblet tight in his hand. He’s looking at you like you’ve affronted him somehow. You could laugh — by choosing Dumbledore. Of course. As if it was a choice at all.

But if it bothers him… if it feels anything at all like the betrayal you felt, then — good.

You drink, and don’t look away.

By the time your N.E.W.T.s arrive you have a renewed confidence that you’ll succeed, even with the obstacle of performing each exam wordlessly.

There are only twelve students who came out of your sixth year class, so to divide resources for the tests is no grand task. You’re given a Wizard’s Chess set, a desk with assorted vases and goblets, an intricate epergne (you had to whisper to Mari to learn its name), and a Ministry worker borrowed like some laboratory mouse. You suppose it makes sense, though — you’re all capable enough of Human Transfiguration not to mutilate anyone, and performing on a classmate could obfuscate the results. It’s far easier to Transfigure someone you know than someone you don’t.

You start with the chess set, Dumbledore and the Ministry worker observing you as you turn pawns to knights and rooks to kings, the minutiae of the pieces drawing sweat to your brow. They change, and change, and change, and you don’t mutter an incantation once. The Ministry worker puts the set away and directs you to the glass. You Switch the vases with the goblets, Vanish them, and Conjure them again. The Ministry worker takes notes. Dumbledore nods affirmatively at you and you can exhale. The epergne is the hardest; so kitschy and elaborate you don’t know where to start when you’re tasked to Transform it into an animal.

An animal — like that isn’t the vaguest instruction you’ve ever received.

You look at it on the desk, mirrors and glass and gold on protracted arms, and you go for the first thing you think of because the Ministry worker is staring at you like you’re inept and you see it in his eyes — this is the muggle-born one, this one can’t do it.

You’re better than them. You can do it forever.

The epergne spins at the dip of your wand, and emerges more than an animal. A big glass tank appears in its place, round and gold-rimmed, water lapping at the sides. Inside it is a jellyfish. Emerald green, bobbing, tentacles and oral arms coiling against the glass like the limbs of the epergne had spanned its centre.

The Ministry worker swallows. Dumbledore smiles.

“And — and back?” the worker says, like that will be the thing that stops you.

You point again, mouth tight with irritation, and reverse the Transformation. A droplet of water smacks your face and you’re lucky to be so hot you can disguise it as sweat. You suspect even an error that small would cost you a mark.

You wipe it away. A strange thing happens; you imagine Tom brushing the water from your cheek at the Black Lake. You imagine his fingers in the rain.

The Ministry worker steps closer with a shameless frown. He tells you to turn his hair red. You do. He regards himself in the mirror and scribbles something down. He tells you to turn it back. You do. To grow him a beard, to change his clothes, to make him taller, shorter, this and that — all read from a list he does not appear enthused to recite. You do it all.

He shakes Dumbledore’s hand when it’s done, duplicates his notes for him to keep, and follows the other Ministry workers through the fireplace when everyone’s exams are finished.

You find out you’ve passed with an Outstanding on your birthday.

Mari drags you to the Three Broomsticks to celebrate, butterbeers on her. (They always are.)

“Can’t believe we’re about to graduate,” she says into her cup, froth on her upper lip.

You sigh into your own, partially giddy and mostly nervous.

Mari squeezes your face between her thumb and finger so your frown is puckered. “Chin up, genius. You’ll be excellent.”

You push her hand away but can’t help a small smile. “Outstanding,” you correct.

“Outstanding!” She bursts out laughing. “Bloody ego on you now…”

“Well, I am the smartest person you know.”

“I take that back.”

She pushes out of her chair with a slightly inebriated wobble. “Going to the loo. Don’t touch my chips.”

Your hands raise in surrender, and you steal only one when she’s gone.

You aren’t the only ones here to celebrate. (Your birthday and your mutual achievement, yes, but the Three Broomsticks is filled wall-to-wall with seventh years drinking their final nights at school away.) There’s music charmed to reach every corner, even yours at the little alcove hidden from plain sight. It’s nice to watch from here — the stumbling, the kisses meant for mouths that land drunkenly on cheeks and noses, the barkeeps that roll their eyes as soon as they turn away from all the newly adult customers, not yet learned or careless in their drinking manners.

It is not nice to be occluded from plain sight in such a way that you don’t notice Tom Riddle until he’s inches away from your table. It is not nice that no one else notices either.

On instinct you don’t make any impressive exit. He slides into the booth next to you and your brain short circuits for a moment at the warm familiarity of his presence beside you. Then it occurs that it’s been more than a year since this was remotely commonplace — that you cannot forget the reason why.

There’s not much time to decide whether you want to be vicious or indifferent or to debate on past precedent which would bother him more. You haven’t attacked him despite being concealed enough to do it unnoticed, and you haven’t shoved furiously out of the other side of the booth.

Indifferent it is.

“Can I help you?”

“You’re causing quite the stir,” he says, taking one of Mari’s chips.

You’re allowed. It’s infuriating when he does it.

“Am I?”

“It’s enough to fail a N.E.W.T level class and be expressly petitioned back, but to have a special criteria set for your exams and manage an O on top of it all…” He inclines his head as if to appreciate your face so close after so long. You should not let him. “You are incomprehensible. It terrifies them.”

“They’re afraid of the wrong mudblood, then, aren’t they?”

Indifference effaced. You’re angry.

He seems to have come prepared, and shrugs your scorn off like a scarf you would have forced him to wear winters ago. “Of course, they have no reason to suspect Dumbledore might have ulterior motives.”

Ulterior — you certainly hope he isn’t suggesting this is based on anything but your merit, but then — you couldn’t begin to understand why Dumbledore cared so much, could you? You’d made brief inspections of his disdain for Tom in second year, his waning shades of kindness and the matter of his stolen encyclopaedia, but you hadn’t… you hadn’t thought at all about how his dedication to your progress only begun after you’d stopped sharing a class with Tom, how it had developed as you began to drift from one another in fifth year and accelerated in sixth after the first petrification and Myrtle’s death. How Tom had worn you down with a weighted glare at Dumbledore’s little toast.

It wasn’t because you had chosen Dumbledore, you realise. It was because Dumbledore had chosen you.

“Why don’t you worry about your pets, Riddle?” you snarl, “I’m sure there are bigger problems with your lot than my exam results.”

Something in his face shifts at the name. You swell with distorted pride.

He mends the reaction by looking you over in more detail, his features schooled into something he must know you can’t deduce. You try not to squirm under the intensity of it.

He reaches almost mindlessly for your collar (there is nothing mindless about it, you’re sure) and smooths the fabric gently with his fingers. “I always liked you in this colour.”

You blink. His thumb just barely brushes against the skin of your neck before retreating, and your mouth falls open.

“Don’t do that,” you say. Truly a sad attempt. Your repulsion is more with yourself than him, and that’s not at all right.

Where is Mari?

“Your friend was at the bar, last I saw her.”

You stare at him with wild eyes. How the hell — ?

“You were always easy to read,” he supplies, and leans in so you can follow his line of sight to the tiniest sliver of the bar visible between two columns, where Mari looks deeply engaged in conversation with Leo Ndiaye, one of the Gryffindor Chasers.

You take a sharp, exasperated breath at her antics. She might be more in love with the competition than the boy himself. They’d never last without Quidditch to bind them, but you can’t fault her for wanting a bit of fun.

“Well then —”

Right. Tom hasn’t actually moved away. You turn and his face is just there.

His eyes dart forthwith to your mouth, and — no. No, he won’t be doing that and neither will you.

“...I’m off to bed.” Stop talking to him like he’s your friend, you think miserably. Stop looking at him like he’s your —

“That would be wise.”

He’s still looking at your lips.

No one else is looking at you at all.

It could exist in just this moment, you deliberate; separate from everything else.

Except nothing about Tom exists in its own moment. He’s all over you all the time, skin and bone and soul. You hope you still have a place in the broken fragments of his.

“So I’ll be going now,” you say again.

“I haven’t protested.”

But he’s leaning in, and he has to know that’s impedance enough.

“But you will.”

His lips touch yours. “Yes, I will.”

You grab him by his shirt and you’re kissing him. You’re kissing each other like either of you know what the hell it means to kiss anyone, but you’ve learned the rest together, haven’t you? Your noses bump and you don’t care. You just need to kiss him, and — God, you make some noise against his mouth and the hand cupping your face spreads to capture more of you, greedy and wayward — he needs to kiss you too. It’s a horrible thing to know. It leads you to pose too many questions.

The need must have begun as want, and when did the want begin? How long has he looked at you and wondered what you’d feel like to kiss, touch, mark? (He’ll never have the latter. You swear that.)

You’re pulling away in intervals. “You don’t have me, you know.”

“I know,” he responds, lips on the corner of yours.

“You still lost me.”

“I know.”

“I hate you.”

He pauses for a moment. “I know.”

You kiss him again. Long and soft, memorising his cupid’s bow and the tip of his tongue, and when one of his hands moves to your waist you part from him like you’ve been burned.

“I —” You resist the urge to touch a finger to your lips, standing abruptly from the table and adjusting your shirt. Your body feels like an evolutionarily faulty vessel, too easy to please, though you can’t imagine it responding to anyone else this way. Or perhaps your mind is the problem. Not wired well enough to resist an evidently bad thing. “Goodnight, Tom.”

You thought there wasn’t a word for your goodbye, but that’s it. So simple it sinks you. Goodnight, Tom. I’ll dream of a morning where I wake up beside you, but you won’t be there.

He grabs your hand before you can go, licking his lips and it haunts you to think he’s savouring you. It stings a place deep in your chest you’d spent all year trying to heal.

“My door is always open,” he says.

He lets you go.

You graduate with Mari’s hand in yours, and you aren’t afraid.

Dumbledore requests that you stay for the summer to help him prepare for the first year’s curriculum in the fall. It’s a ridiculous opportunity for someone your age — free lodgings and a stellar impression on your resume, and — you can only accept it with an ire you haven’t felt since the spread of influenza in muggle Britain.

If he’s offering you lodgings now, he could have done it all along.

It sends you down a horrible train of thought while you move your things from the Slytherin dormitories to a little chamber a few doors down from the staff room; Tom will be removed from Wool’s this year. Will he stay at Malfoy Manor? But Tom is still publicly muggle-born — Abraxas’s parents would never allow it. Will he find a job, a flat? Will he swindle muggles once he turns eighteen and the Trace is no longer an obstruction?

You think of him often. You think of his offer.

My door is always open.

Plenty of doors are open to you now. Why should you want to go back to his?

Still, the Second World War ends in November and you feel like you can breathe at a depth you never could before. The school doesn’t celebrate like it did with Grindelwald. No one but you seems to care at all.

It’s a tempting door.

The year passes in a blur of graded papers and lessons Dumbledore sometimes involves you in and sometimes does not. Most of the first-years care little for you, but there are two Slytherin muggle-borns who look at you like a new sun to orbit. Everything is worth it for that.

You see Mari when you can, and find she’s training with the Italian Quidditch team, who apparently are smart enough to care more about skill than blood. She says she misses the complexities of Transfiguration, but any career in it was always going to be yours. Smartest person she knows, she reiterates. Biggest ego too.

The next summer Dumbledore informs you of a posting at the Ministry. Something small with a smaller wage. He emphasises the weight of his personal recommendation, but that you won’t be respected unless you claw tooth and nail for it. You don’t take long to consider a chance to make an actual income with an actual career doing something muggle-borns simply don’t do before you’re nodding assuredly and asking him what you need.

Better clothes are first, and all you can afford until further notice. You take to Gladrags with intent to purchase for the first time in your five years of wandering in the shop with eyes bigger than your wallet, and the owner looks at you with distrust when you slide her your sickles.

The Ministry job is truly, infinitesimally, insignificant.

It’s far down in the Department of Magical Accidents and Catastrophes. You’re a glorified secretary, and you recall the few times you’d worked as a mail-sorter during the war. It’s some sick irony that you’ve landed yourself in a pile of paper once more.

But the money, though offensively scant to someone with better options (and it’s infuriating the options you deserve), is more than you’ve ever had, and within the next year you’re able to leave the castle and take a cheap room at an inn in Hogsmeade. You’re close enough to Dumbledore to aid him when he needs you, but far enough to feel like your school days are departed, and you need not worry about memories lurching unexpectedly at every corridor.

A sick part of you still reaches for your mouth sometimes to remember what it felt like to be kissed. That part of you wishes for Tom. You could kiss him into oblivion. You could find a way to make it hurt him back.

My door is always open.

Then you’ll slam it bloody closed.

Mari invites you to her first professional game and you cheer for her in the stands, a green, white, and red scarf around your neck in place of her old blue.

She wins and you get drinks in a muggle pub. You kiss a man at the bar. You go home with him. His hair is dark, but not dark enough. His lips are soft, but the shape is wrong. He makes you feel good, but you wonder if in another life, the dream is true; you roll over in the morning to Tom beside you, and he makes you feel better.

When you can find time between the monotonous demands of your job, you’re in the Transfiguration classroom, staying behind to help the Slytherin muggle-borns with their Switching spells.

It’s one stupid accident the next fall that changes things.

A muggle bank has been robbed, and whatever idiotic, panicked witch or wizard was behind it apparently found themselves incapable of getting the deed done with a simple Imperius Curse (you can’t imagine, based on the scene, that they’re above Unforgivables), and somehow ended up leaving the building half-charred and teeming with at least six bank tellers Transformed into birds, two chirping into the floor tiles with broken wings.

“Renauld’s on it, though,” your coworker says when the news finds your department.

“Renauld?”

He’s a year older than you, a pureblood with parents in high places, and endlessly fucking hopeless.

“Well, yeah —”

You push out from your desk, files fluttering behind you. “Renauld will expose the whole damn wizarding world if he touches that building.”

“But McCormack sent him.”

“Where is it?”

“I… McCormack said that —”

“Where is it, Flack?”

“Um. Um, near King William, I think. Moorgate or, um —”

That’s good enough. You toss the Floo Powder into the fireplace and go.

The place is a mess. You don’t even have to look for it. There’s some ward around the street, bouncing muggles away like an invisible end to a map they don’t even register is there. At least that’s handled right.

But you slip through it and curse under your breath at the muggles trapped inside the wards. They’re like fish prodding at the dome of their bowl, and some run up to you demanding explanations when they see you unaffected by it. You brush them off — Obliviation is not your strong-suit — though you do shout at a pair of DMAC wizards uselessly standing guard outside the bank.

“What the hell are you doing?” you ask on approach. “Renauld’s supposed to handle the inside, yeah? You deal with fixing them.”

You point toward the frantic muggles, and the officials just regard you with vague confusion at your presence. “Renauld said —”

“Oh my God! Fix. The muggles.”

You afford nothing else before pushing past them to enter the bank.

It’s quite impressive, actually; Renauld, the result of generations of foolproof breeding, is waving his wand around like he’s just stepped out of Olivanders for the first time.

“Heal their wings,” you say without greeting.

Renauld jumps. “What? What are you doing here?”

“Heal their damn wings. They’re easier than human limbs and healing magic’s the only thing you aren’t completely shit at.”

“Who authorised you?” he hisses.

“I did.”

In hindsight, it should have gone horrifically wrong. Your wand could have been taken and your life might have been over in all ways that matter, flung back into the muggle world where you’ve always been told you belong.

But Renauld vouches for you. You Transform the walls, you fix the burns, you mend the bank to something presentable. A muggle robbery — dangerous, financially tragic, but believable. And your suggestion to heal the injured bank tellers in their animal forms might be the thing that saved them. When Renauld mends their wings and regenerates their blood, you Untransfigure them, and the other DMAC officials alter their memories with haste.

You were completely out of line and utterly right.

It isn’t something people like you are allotted.

Your probation period is dreadful. You hide in your room at the inn most days, Vanishing little stained panes on your window to feel the warm breeze of air before you Conjure them again. You help grade papers, though Dumbledore is displeased with you and the night is a silent one. He assures you curtly that he’s doing his best with the Ministry to amend this.

And… he does.

With Renauld’s help and the corroboration of the other DMAC officials, you’re back at work by the start of the school year.

It’s a slow process — almost eight months of meaningless paperwork — before the next incident occurs and you’re hectically ushered to the scene like a belated understudy. And then it happens again. And again. And again.

There’s really no choice but to promote you.

Your heroics are torn from a Gryffindor cloth, so says Flack. You urge him never to say such a thing again.

By your twenty-first birthday, you think about Tom almost exclusively in your sleep. You’re much too busy to think about him anywhere else.

The summer is warm and Hogsmeade is lively. You’ve vacated your room at the inn for a little house on the outskirts of the village, decorating it how you like — discovering what you like. You’d never had a chance to find out before.

Mari visits when she can once you have your fireplace connected to the Floo Network (you yourself prefer Apparating) but her name is slowly working its way from the Italian papers to the British ones, and she has so much to tell you there isn’t possibly enough time in her days to tell it. There’s also the matter of Leo Ndiaye, who has, recently, gotten on one knee and proposed to her. If there had been a bet on them ending up together, you would have been out enough galleons to put you in debt.

After especially gruesome days at work, you and a few colleagues make a habit of getting sherries at the Siren’s Tail, complaining that sometimes the nature of your work is akin to an auror’s but without the notoriety and pay.

“Oh, please,” says Emilia Alves, twirling her straw, “have you seen the shit the aurors are up to lately? I’d rather be a blimmin’ Unspeakable.”

“You’d have to be able to keep your mouth shut for that, Alves.”

Emilia punches Renauld in the arm.

“What are the aurors up to?” Flack asks.

“I dunno much. There was a murder all the way in Albania, s’posedly. Reeked of dark magic.”

“Nothing new,” you join, and then frown. “Why’s our Ministry dealing with it though?”

“I dunno. I got word from Hillicker that the Albanians didn’t know what to make of the mess. They’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Hillicker’s not a source,” Renauld scoffs.

“Yeah? Why don’t you ask your daddy for something better?”

“Alves, I’ll have you know —”

You lean in over the counter. “What do you mean they’ve never seen anything like it?”

She grins. “Why? Storming a bank robbery wasn’t exciting enough for you?”

You roll your eyes, taking a drink.

That ought to be the end of it. One extraordinarily lucky incident to push you up the career ladder was rare enough — there is absolutely no way digging around a case that has nothing to do with you or your department could ever end well.

But something about it itches.

You make nice with Hillicker. She’s a year younger than you and far too kind for her own good, and she gushes freely about her husband’s work as an auror (they must be a perfect match for him to gush freely about it with her). It’s a bit manipulative. You have no excellent excuse for it, but… ambition, and all that, you suppose. Flack’s Gryffindor theory is studded with holes.

You are green, through and through.

Emilia’s updates are meaningless when you garner so much information that you’ve already heard everything she has to say over drinks, and at this point her and Hillicker might be a step behind you. Emilia still only knows about Albania; peppery little details of half a story. Hillicker discusses an assortment of murders with no real string between them, and Dumbledore regards you with cool heeding when you bring up the matter with him.

You see him little nowadays but you’ve never been close in any true sense, traces of resentment budding over the years like rainwater collects on glass until the stream finally slips.

You visit Hogwarts mostly for your Slytherins, fourteen or fifteen now, unafraid of the distinction of their blood.

And then there’s one night after you turn twenty-two where drinks take place at yours for a change, Mari and Leo included and happily wed. You have no sherries but your ale is just as well, and it’s only you and Renauld who are sober by the time everyone else is vanishing into the fireplace and going home.

That makes it much worse when you sleep together.

There’s no excuse of having had a glass too many — so sorry, I’ll be on my way then, and him stumbling over his trousers to get out of your hair. Of course, he does that anyway, scratching the nape of his neck when he reaches your doorway in the morning.

“Thanks for the — well, you have a nice home — I do think I should —”

“Yes.”

“Right.”

“Oh!” He turns around at the last second. “Er — I know you’ve become a tad obsessed with… Hillicker mentioned another, anyway. Hepzibah something. Killed by her own elf, the aurors suspect.”

“Oh,” you echo, sheets pulled up to your shoulders. “Thanks, Renauld.”

“I thought you might like to know. Don’t be daft about it.”

You’re incredibly daft about it.

There’s something reminiscent about Albania in this case that wasn’t there with the others. The tide of dark magic ebbing across the scene, the cherry-picked information released in the Prophet, the claim of an old, dumb House Elf who poisoned her mistress like the Albanian peasant killed in some insoluble accident.

The itch exacerbates.

You see him in your dreams again. He peers over Runes in a stolen encyclopaedia, he whispers to an adder on his shoulder, he kisses the corner of your mouth and it isn’t enough. He kills you, again and again. You kill him too.

You wake up and he isn’t there.

It’s a new low when you’re invited to the Hillicker’s anniversary dinner and you end up digging through the drawers of their study halfway through the night.

The Albania file offers nearly nothing. There was the charred residue of dark magic imprinted on a hollow tree in the fields of the peasant’s hamlet, but nothing detailing more than a blank imprint of the Killing Curse in his eyes. Still, you tuck the knowledge away for the file of one Hebzibah Smith, whose tea did indeed have traces of poison, but whose den was also ripe with a layer of darkness that didn’t line up with the Ministry’s tale of senile elf.

And then there’s the forgotten matter of her being a purveyor of ancestral artefacts. The file doesn’t recount whether any are missing, since the woman was wise enough not to proclaim all her possessions to the world, but it’s something. A scratch.

You travel to Albania that Christmas. The neighbours in the peasant’s hamlet have skewed memories, so they provide little help, but the man’s house was left almost untouched.

You tear the place apart and Transfigure it back together when you’re done.

All you find, in the end, is a scrap of an old envelope in a suitcase.

R.R

It could be that it’s old. The cursive seems ancient enough. But you swear the letters have the distinct shape of quill ink — too artful for any pen — and maybe that wouldn’t matter if it weren’t for half a wax seal stuck to the torn edge of the envelope. Stained but silver, the barest hint of two ribbons, a crest, and the letter H.

You return to Hogwarts posthaste.

It’s snowing in the courtyards and you waddle with a duotang under one arm to pretend you’re here for something scholarly, an array of excuses prepared in case you run into Dumbledore, but you don’t.

The Grey Lady is as beautiful as she’s rumoured to be.

You ask her about her mother, and she’s silent, an expression on her face like you’ve struck her.

“Is it found?” she whispers. The snow floats through her.

Your heart hammers as you consider how to approach this. She thinks you know more than you do, which means there’s something to know.

“Yes,” you say. And you dare further with the context you know, “In Albania.”

“Oh,” she hums. “Oh…”

And if she means to say more she doesn’t seem able, washing away through the balusters, then the walls. You think of your house ghost and what he did to her, and you feel sorry for a second.

Madam Palles expels you from the library the moment you find what you’re looking for, and you rush past a throng of staring students to the staff room fireplace. It’s too far a walk to the border of the castle wards to Apparate. You bite back the preemptive sickness, get swallowed by the flames, and go home.

There are blanks to fill in but you do it easily. Rowena Ravenclaw’s diadem. Hepzibah Smith and her assortment of unregistered artefacts. The stain of dark magic. Something so rare not even the aurors recognized it.

But you do, because he told you.

You wonder on your search to find him what object he used when he killed Myrtle Warren. Nothing special, you think — maybe even the closest thing he could find. These murders involved more preparation. He got to mark them however he wanted.

It’s almost disappointing to find him here. In a little flat over Knockturn Alley with a view of charmed coalsmoke and the brick wall of another shop.

It’s as tidy as his room at Wool’s, the only dirt the irremediable age of the building itself. The whole place looks almost slanted, large enough only for the bare necessities; a kitchen, a toilet, a bedroom that looks more like a closet, and a study/dining room/den you can’t imagine he hosts many gatherings in. You rescind the mere thought. Whatever gatherings Tom Riddle is having these days, you’re sure you can’t begin to imagine at all.

You wait, legs crossed on an old loveseat, fiddling with your wand.

The door clicks open when the snow has turned to hail and there’s no light but the few scattered candles you’d lit on the mantelpiece.

It strikes you only when he’s standing before you that it’s his birthday.

You’re in Tom Riddle’s flat, on his birthday, adorned by the orange glow of half-melted candles, and you know everything.

He eyes you carefully, a hint of surprise at the sight of you after four years that even he needs a second to recover from. And then he's even, inscrutable Riddle again, and you dare to think, come back.

“I placed wards," he says, hanging his bag on a rack by the wall.

“I thought your door was always open.”

You see his posture change from just his silhouette.

“Wards never work in Knockturn,” you offer additionally, “not really. There's too much conflicting magic; one border cuts into another; leaves a little sliver behind if you’re smart enough to find it. You should know that."

He turns to you. You take in a moment to acknowledge how he's changed. It's hard to see in the curtained moonlight, and it seems unreasonable to imagine he’s grown, but you think he has. An inch taller, perhaps. Two. Maybe the dress shoes. His arms are bigger under his button-down, but not enough to consider him muscular. His black hair isn't as perfect as you remember, and you suspect a long day of work undoes his curls. You always liked him better that way in school, after a night duel at the Black Lake, his robes askew and his hair a mess. Evidence that you were the only one to dishevel him. Now you were — what? Did he even think of you anymore? Yes. You'd always think of each other.

“Duly noted. What are you here for?” He tries your surname like a foreign language.

You cross your arms, and you're acutely aware that he's observing your changes too. You're not the matchstick witch he once knew. Your emotions are cultured now, taut to mirror his. You wear dull, formal grey, and that glowing green tinge that should be gleaming on you is under a thick carapace. That’s for Mari, Flack, Emilia — even Renauld. Not for Tom.

You wonder if he knows it was Dumbledore who put in the word that got you this uniform. You wonder if he resents you for it.

“There’s been talk at the Ministry," you say finally, “A string of murders. Whispers of something — some dark magic they don’t understand. And you know they're careful about things like that after Grindelwald."

“A string of murders... Hm. That might imply you understand a connective thread. Is there some sort of accusation being made?”

“Oh, I'm sure you'd be flattered by accusations. There’s not enough there, as it stands. Just whispers." You sink more comfortably in the seat and the springs make a concerning sound. “But I know you."

His hard, sharp gaze falters for a moment. You watch the flames dance behind him, the firelight playing against the lines of his shoulders, and feel your heart skip a beat. “Who else is speculating?"

“No one." Your fingers brush over the book spines on the coffee table. “I guess their attention hasn't been drawn to a book clerk yet, even if you have taken residency... here." You say it with no shortage of disapproval.

Knockturn was never where Tom belonged. You'd once imagined a flat together in muggle London, taking the telephone booth to the Ministry together, changing the world together. It's a wish that's a lifetime away now.

“Is this a warning? I assure you, I don’t need the condescension.”

“I'm not warning you," you scoff, “I — I'm seeing you. God knows I'll probably never get the chance to do that again once you get yourself locked up in Azkaban, which you will."

You sound exasperated. You sound half-pleading. “What are you doing, Tom? Is this — this is really what you want?"

“Yes."

You shake your head. “I don't believe that." And then some of that fiery spit returns to you, and you feel like a child again, stuck in the London tube stations holding his hand at every plane that flew overhead, scowling that you needed his reassurance. Scowling that you were afraid.

“Well, your conjecture is ever-appreciated. Shall I lend you mine? Shall I congratulate you on your revolutionary position at the Ministry? Or is it Dumbledore I should afford my thanks?”

“I earned this,” you hiss.

“You deserve it,” he amends. “But do not lie to yourself and pretend that’s why you have it.”

“Fuck you.”

He smiles. “There you are.”

“I don’t need your congratulations, Riddle. Dumbledore doesn’t need your damn thanks. But,” you say, biting back the snarl that wants out, “you could thank me. After all, I could turn to the Ministry any minute with the truth of your heritage. I could tell them about Myrtle, the Horcrux — Horcruxes.”

The humour dissolves from his face and you despise the immense glee it brings you.

“Oh, did you think I didn’t know? Didn’t understand the connective thread? You are sentimental under all that… fucking posturing, you know. I’m sure it’s all very romantic to you — making Horcruxes out of Hogwarts artefacts. Shame it’s such an insult to your intelligence.”

“Very good,” he says after a long, terse silence. You’re sure he’s thinking just the opposite.

You hum, meddling with your nails. “So what’s your plan?”

“I’d need a Vow for that.”

You laugh. “I’m not that desperate.”

“You’re also not an auror, are you?” He tilts his head appraisingly. “And yet you’ve found your way here.”

“How many do you plan to make? How many people do you plan to kill?”

“A Vow.”

“Absolutely not.”

“Tea, then? Biscuits?”

“Oh, I shouldn’t. I read in the paper the other day about a poor old woman who had her tea poisoned.”

“Hm. Terrible shame.”

Your fist clenches around your wand. “Is it paying off well, Riddle? It must be a good life if you’re willing to split your soul to hell and back to have more of it.”

He smiles at the barb in your words. “You never were good with subtlety.”

“I wasn’t trying to be subtle. This place is horrific.”

“I was referring to your inability to see more than what’s directly in front of you.”

“Oh, really? And what more should I see than a boy who’s very good at getting weak men to bow and do very little else? I’d try to see the bigger picture, but I reckon it wouldn’t fit in here.”

Tom regards you colourlessly. You are slate, Ministry-grey, impermeable like palace portcullis.

“I suppose I should have killed you.” He says it with the nonchalance of a forgotten chore. He says it like you’re a stain.

He doesn’t say it like he feels any terrible urgency to remove you; and you think, this time, you’d feel more powerful if he did. You think it’s far more debilitating to sit here and be looked at like he regrets wanting you alive more than he wants you dead.

“Yes,” you concur, “I suppose you should have.”

You place your wand down on the table and scoot your chair away for good measure. “It’s never too late to rectify your mistakes.”

Tom, for a moment, looks surprised. That makes you feel powerful. You’d take more of that.

“You have wandless magic,” he tries. A weak recovery.

“Scout’s honour, Riddle.”

He doesn’t move for a moment, then fixes his wand in his hand and rises, doused in the same inscrutable calm that always used to drive you mad. Now something in you gleams with the knowledge that he only ever looks like this when he’s trying not to look like anything at all.

He steps closer and it gleams brighter. It trembles inside you and you know, distantly, that this is insane. You’re weighing your life on a childhood trust that was shattered years ago, and you don’t think you’ve ever been that good at faith, but he’s approaching you and that gleam you feel is reflected in his eyes and you just… know. Your spilled blood once crawled with his. There’s no undoing that. Half of you is made of the other.

“I should have killed you,” he repeats.

It’s a murmur. Stilted. Angry, even. Angry that you made him this and there’s no fucking rectifying it — what a joke that is. What an immensely you thing to suggest.

“Yes,” you agree.

It’s a breath. Low. Proud, even. Proud that you’re his only mistake and he’s going to make it again.

Tom kisses you. It’s a murder of its own kind. You kiss him back, and — you were always going to kill each other like this, weren’t you? It’s you and him whether you like it or not.

There should be no love in it. You know that. Love is far behind the both of you, stifled in a gasp at the back of your throat on your eighteenth birthday and the soft, selfish hands of a seventeen year old boy. This is mutual destruction. Spite and teeth and skin that’s cold under your fingers.

He was your first in everything but this.

You push back at him and feel the hunger, the need in him, like a flame as he kisses you deeper and harder, and you find yourself losing yourself to it all over again, like you're back in the dark alcove of a pub where you told him goodbye, pushing to extend the juncture. And then he lets out a hitched, gravelly sound; not a moan but enough to make you shudder.

You pull him onto the sofa and crawl onto his lap.

“How long?” he asks thickly.

You don’t have to ask what he means. You bite against his neck, nails under his shirt as you struggle to pop the buttons open. There must be a violence in all your want for him because if there isn't it's just loss. It's just another thing you'll give him without taking anything back.

“Sixth year," you pant, “in the Deathday ballroom when we fought for the first time. You — ah — you put your thumb on my mouth. Since then."

You hear a sharp intake of breath, and his hand moves up your back to pull you impossibly closer. His voice is ragged. “Should I tell you how long I’ve wanted you?"

You shudder a breath. “Since —" And it's a bit hard to talk with the way he's rolling your hips — “Since when?"

His lips twitch into a mirthless smile, hands spanning your thighs as you start to rock against him. “When you burned me, and I sent you into the lake."

You swallow, agonised by the slow pace his grip forces you to keep when all you want to do is go faster.

“Your uniform was terribly wet,” he says, mouth tracing your jaw. “Did I ever apologise for that?"

“N-no.”

He tuts, the hushed sound warm and deadly on your neck. “Bad manners. I must have been distracted."

Oh. Oh, you think. It seems pointless to flush in the position you're in now, but the knowledge that he wanted you then and you hadn't even known is... all the more devastating.

But you shiver at the question of how he’d wanted you, in what amount of detail, in what precise way. You almost want to ask. See it for yourself.

You don't think you'd manage the words. He’s hard underneath you and your head wants to lull toward his shoulder but a big hand holds you from one side of your jaw down the length of your neck, his tongue laving up the other. Instead you’re balanced only by his hands and his mouth, rolling against him because it’s all you can do like this.

He’s marking you, you realise with a gasp, and your fingers bury in his hair to remove his mouth from its descending assault on your collar. Not that. You’d sworn against that.

Your fingers return to his buttons and he copies you by finding yours, pulling at the fabric tucked into your trousers until it’s discarded entirely. You press your hands to the planes of his chest and watch him, your mouth agape as his eyes linger on your chest.

His heart is pounding and he must know you’re about to comment on it because his lips are on yours again and he adjusts his position and your fingers dig into his shoulders at the delicious new feeling of him pressing into your thigh.

You move for his belt. He moves for your zipper. It’s some sort of race, whatever you’re doing, and you’re at an unfair advantage when you’re still fumbling with his buckle when his hand is already carving a slow path to the band of your underwear. You're scalding under the journey of it, little stars pricking you under every new inch he explores.

He dips in and your eyes wrench shut, grasping frantically for his wrist.

“Shh,” he says softly, caressing your cheek with his spare hand, thumb finding your mouth how it did all those years ago and you want to curse him. The fucker knows exactly what he’s doing.

You shake your head, chest rising with heavy breaths as you return to his belt and scrabble to unbuckle it.

“So tense,” he murmurs. The hand at your cheek draws over your lower lip before it falls to your back to hold you closer. “Rest now.”

And his fingers trace you where you want him most, brushing past your clit as he pulls his face back to watch you.

You sink into the feeling, still swaying on his lap, a half-efforted attempt at finding friction in the hardness between his legs that feels fruitless because it won't be enough until he's inside. Your hand just grips onto the fabric of his unzipped trousers and stays there. It’s a pause. An obstacle on your path to him that you need just a moment to recover from before you’ll make him feel just like this. Better. Worse. It’s hard to tell which is which.

He’s stroking at you now, pleased by the way you lurch against him with every touch.

You have to recover, you have to make it even, you have to… you…

A finger presses inside and you moan.

“You came back to me,” he whispers, close enough to be kissing you but there’s just the stutter of his breath. It's a fucking religious thing to say, the way he does it.

“Doesn’t make me yours,” you breathe.

He shakes his head. “I know. You’ll still take it though, won’t you?”

Oh, fuck.

He makes a sound of approval. “Good.”

Good. Fine. Your hands slip from his zipper to the meat of his thighs, pushing yourself forward so the shape of him is firmer against you, and Tom slips another finger in.

You’ll take it, won’t you? Yes.

Maybe you don’t need to tear him at the seams (though you want to) to make it even. Maybe this is punishment enough. That he can have you like this and it still won’t make you his, that he’ll give you everything and you’ll lap at it with half the greed he possesses.

You ride his hand, clutching his shoulders, rocking your hips. You take all of it, and it builds something delirious inside you, that it’s him doing this, his perfect fingers, the shape of his lips, the soft dark of his hair when you find your hands in it again. The feeling makes you stutter, and he has to move you by the waist himself to keep the momentum when you can't do it yourself.

He’s painfully stiff, pushing up against you with a degree of self-control that feels like it can only end disastrously for the both of you, and you start smattering kisses down his cheek. You tilt his head back and lick a stripe down his neck. Rest now, you'd say if you could.

But he adds a third finger and your head falls, a cry planted in his collar when you come, and you don't think you say anything.

Tom holds your legs steady, guiding you through it like this is just another one of his studies. You are what he knows better than anything else, and still he wants to learn more.

“Look at you,” he mutters, dipping you back to press his lips down your chest, unclasping your bra while you’re still breaking, the sensation swelling again when he takes a nipple into his mouth.

“Tom,” you try to say. Your mouth is the sticky sort of dry that words refuse to come out of.

“Will you give me more?”

Give, not take. You fuss into a stolen kiss, grappling again with his trousers, pulling them down until you can palm him through his boxers.

He hisses, gripping your wrist like he hadn’t just done the same to you, and then he’s pulling you up and off the couch, trousers discarded with what must be magic because you blink and they’re gone. Greedy boy. (You have no room to judge.) Your back is to the wall an instant before his fingers are on you again, pushing your underwear down your thighs until it falls at your feet like they despised to ever part from you.

You arch to feel him press against your stomach, pushing off the wall so that you can meld to him but he just closes in on you to do it himself.

He goads the heat from you when his fingers push in again, still wet, coiling how you like, where you like —

“Want you,” you protest shakily, hand on his abdomen.

That must kill him a little, because he curses under his breath (a thing he never does) and the immediate absence of his touch is cruel when he goes to free himself from his boxers. You reach for him without thinking as he does, and he pins your hand beside you when your fingers so much as graze the length of him.

You sound frail, but you have to ask. “Is this how you wanted me?”

A cruder version of you would go on. Is this how you pictured it? Taking me against a wall? Have you waited for it all this time?

And you don’t belong to him but you’re so incomprehensibly, contradictorily his. You’ll want him forever. He could do anything, and you’d be his. You could haunt him into his lonely eternity, and he’d be yours. Then, you suppose — haunting him makes him yours by principle.

Maybe you already do.

Tom practically growls into your mouth, pressing against you and — God, it’s skin on skin. He's right there. You could push forward and —

He slides in. You cry out at the feel of him inside you, the angle of it like this.

“I wanted you,” he says lowly, your legs wrapped around him, “everywhere.”

You’re gripping him so tight you think he’ll bleed under your nails and somehow you still feel on the brink of collapse when he thrusts deeper.

“I thought mostly of your mouth,” he rasps. “It felt depraved to imagine it wrapped around me, but then I thought of you splayed out before me instead. That maybe you’d like it if it was my mouth on you.”

You whimper.

“Would you like that?” he asks, hands spanning your hips to snap them into his, like you are a piece removed from him he seeks to reattach.

If you wanted to answer you couldn’t. You’re clinging to him and the rising surge inside you, carved between your legs like something sweltering and unfixable. It rushes in and he pulls out of you. He pushes in and you cry for the release of it, the moment the wave lurches over the edge, but he won’t let you have it.

“But,” he says, and your eyes want to roll back at how heavy his restraint is, callous in the tone of his voice, some leash at his neck he must tug himself lest you take it from him — “If I knew how well you’d take me like this, I would have thought of it much more.”

Taking him, again — you don’t feel at all like that’s what’s happening. You feel possessed. You are buoyant in his arms: his and his and his.

“You can — uh — you can — ”

"Hm?" He brushes down the slope of your brow, your cheek, back to the edge of your mouth, wiping a trail of saliva from your chin. “Poor thing.”

And he slams into you again, drawing a mewl from you that slices your unfinished thought.

You clench around him, flames wild and fluttering at every contact of his skin on yours, and there are too many to count. Too many points where they intersect, just some blend of bodies connected at every curve.

“You’re going to give me more,” he says, like it’s an epiphany when you already told him you would.

You remember then. What you meant to say. “You can take me too.”

You feel him twitch inside you, his pace stilling for a moment, and the thumb on your lip slips into your mouth. Your lips close around him and he curses again.

He fucks you with a finger in your mouth and his teeth clamped over your shoulder, soothing the sting with his tongue. His pace is too slow when he drags his free hand between your legs, but you understand its purpose well enough that the mere recognition almost destroys you.

He’s patient in bringing you to the edge because there's time here. A slow agony that severs you from the rest of the world until it splits you down the middle. And he may not ever have it again.

You have to promise yourself he’ll never have it again.

But the movement of his fingers against the same spot he’s hitting inside you is too much at once, and you won’t last. You drool around his thumb. You let him mark you. You can see on his neck you’ve marked him too. And you hope impossibly there’s a scar. You hope the little death you coax from him claims him as yours for eternity, keeps him even when you're gone. You tighten, lurch for the edge, and make him mortal once more.

Tom holds you there, your cries reverberating as he sinks another finger in your mouth, and then he’s gasping at your neck, peeling back to look you in the eyes when he spills into you. Your eyes screw together and he releases the sounds you make by holding you by the jaw instead.

“Look at me,” he says, and for the strained need in it you do.

You come down to earth and you kiss him, wetness dripping down your thighs as he pins you to this moment. You love him. You’ll always love him.

He’s still inside you when he’s secure enough to bring you to his bed, only removing himself from you when you’re safely in his sheets, legs surrendering their grip on his waist as you pull apart. You pant into the cold linen of his pillow. Everything smells like him. There’s something empty now; the reason you came today; the reason you left four years ago.

You love him and it isn’t enough. Not even to look at him, the sleepy hint of the boy you knew in his eyes, and know that he loves you too.

“Goodnight, Tom,” you say, finding home in the warmth of his chest.

You’ll dream of a morning where you wake up beside him, but you won’t be there.

#tom riddle #tom riddle x reader #tom riddle x you #tom riddle x y/n #tom riddle fluff #tom riddle smut #tom riddle angst #(the trifecta)#tom marvolo riddle #voldemort #voldemort x reader #tom riddle imagine #tom riddle oneshot #harry potter fanfiction #wizarding world #ftltutbh

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byuntrash101 · 2 months

Text

𖤐 𝕯𝖆𝖒𝖓𝖆𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓 𝖔𝖋 𝖆 𝕾𝖆𝖎𝖓𝖙 𖤐

pairing — fem!nun!reader x sin of lust!seonghwa ft. ateez as the other sins

rating — smut | mdni

wc — 13.7k

synopsis — life is dull when you are an immortal being such as seonghwa. every day is the same and you live (or rather, merely exist) through the times crushed by the burden of boredom. until something new comes along in the form of a kind, compassionate and righteous newly ordained nun. and so the sin of lust makes it his personal mission to corrupt the purest of souls: yours.

nsfw tags under the cut

tags — *strap up babes this is a wild one*, a tad of plot, my attempt at humor, heavy religious/blasphemous themes (don't read if you're uncomfy <3), inclusive writing (reader is not physically described), also reader is the embodiment of purity, 20240127 hwa (moodboard here), kinda slow burn kinda vibes, so much tensionnn, mentions of a pxrn magazine, sooo much teasing, hot make out sesh, dom!hwa, also very sly demon!hwa, virgin!reader, supernatural sex, corruption kink (obviously), masturbation (f), oral (f), the (un)holy trinity =teasing, begging, mind breaking), thigh riding, nipple play, clit play, some light impact play (kitty slaps + 1 face slap), breath play, hair pulling, fingering (f), monster cock!hwa, size training, pet names (angel, love, darling, sweetheart), praising, degradation (slut, whore), unprotected sex (don’t recommend), denied and ruined orgasm (f), dumbification, multiple orgasms (f), overstim, an ungodly amount of cum, cumflation, lil breeding kink at the very end

playlist — me and the devil by soap&skin, unholy by sam smith, going to hell by the pretty reckless, smells blood by kensuke ushio, american horror show by snow wife, toc toc toc by zazie

ateez masterlist | navigation

a/n: i had an absolute blast working over my fave fic ever posted. i love it even more now <3

also wanted to say a special thank you to @hwaightme who really helped me pulled through with one <3 ily bai <3333

Seonghwa was bored out of his mind. Like he had been for decades now, even centuries. He couldn’t remember what it was like to feel… well… anything at all really. And after years upon years of vegetating he didn’t care enough to even try anymore. He just laid there, endlessly staring blankly at the emptiness. He tapped his slender finger on his thigh, comfortably set on the bed of dark purple smoke he had materialized out of thin air.

He let out an audible annoyed groan as he was nonchalantly stretching out his long limbs which didn’t fail to catch the attention of the others.

“What’s wrong?” Yeosang asked as he was feasting on some delicious meal he poofed out magically. He didn’t even take a second to look up the bucket full of chicken drumsticks, wrapping his greasy fingers around the bone and eyeing the meat like one would their life long partner. But then again, that wasn’t too far from the truth for Yeosang.

“I’m bored” Seonghwa complained, pushing his long silky black hair back on his forehead and choosing to ignore Yeosang’s lack of interest, dragging out the word on his tongue, transmitting his state of utter apathy to the others.

“Why don’t you go up and play with the Humans?” Mingi suggested while checking himself out in the mirror, readjusting his bangs and sliding his sunglasses up the bridge of his nose before striking a pose to himself, remaining completely self absorbed.

Once again, Seonghwa wasn’t getting much attention from his counterparts but he was somewhat used to it when it came to Mingi.

“What’s the point? They are no fun anyways!” Seonghwa sat up straight and crossed his long elegant legs on the cloud of cotton like smoke.

“Why?” Jongho asked, unlike the others he deigned looking in Seonghwa’s direction with somewhat surprised eyes. “You used to love going around and breaking up happy marriages, luring men and women in with your charms… That was always fun!” He said a little sluggishly, but still with as much enthusiasm as he could muster.

“Yeah… Maybe it was…” Seonghwa replied. “Two millenniums ago…” Another prolonged sigh. “When everything still felt fresh.” He got up from the comfortable cloud of smoke, pacing the endless void as his heels clacked and echoed with each step. “Now I know that Humans are only self centered vile creatures who only claim to have better morals than us because they are scared of the consequences that inevitably ensue from succumbing to their primal desires. When in fact, all they want is to eat, kill, have sex or not do anything at all. They are nothing short of underdeveloped, unevolved, spineless piles of meat”

“Meat? Where?” Yeosang said, finally lifting his head from the bucket of fried chicken to look around, eyes rounded in panic.

Not a single one of them reacted except Mingi who side eyed him with disdain before returning to more important matters at hand such as swapping the aviator sunglasses for narrower, more rectangular ones.

“That’s not entirely false” Jongho concluded, shrugging, easily giving up on the idea of comforting Seonghwa.

“I mean where’s the fun if you can’t break their minds to give in?” Seonghwa placed both hands on Jongho's shoulders, slightly shaking him while the latter lifelessly swayed back and forth. “What is the point if they don’t resist the call of evil? If you can’t erode their will like a rock made smooth by the incessant beating of the waves of the cruel sea.” Seonghwa huffed in a quiet, defeated voice, letting go of Jongho's shoulders to let his arms hang at his side while the other one stared at him blankly.

“Hm… okay” Jongho said before slipping off Seonghwa's reach to take his place on the fluffy bed of purple smoke, crashing head first onto the soft cloud.

A silence settled for what seemed like a long moment, even for them, immutable creatures to whom the very concept of time couldn't grasp at their permanence.

“Well you never tried with that girl…” Wooyoung said, slithering his way to Seonghwa without a sound. He had been watching the scene unfold from afar up until then. “What was her name already?” He snapped his fingers and looked to the side trying to access his memory. He turned to Mingi for help but he was too busy looking through the mirror, slipping on yet another dangling necklace and smirking, satisfied at the results. Wooyoung then tried his luck with Yeosang but he now had his face buried in a huge bowl of chicken broth, the empty bucket of fried chicken abandoned and slurping up a big mouthful of noodles in a rather unpleasant way. “Jongho?” he called, finally settling for the one that looked almost passed out on the bed of smoke, but still this one wielded the most positive result.

“Y/n” Jongho responded without conviction, still laying flat on the cloud of smoke, eyes growing heavier by the second.

“Yeah! That’s right!” Wooyoung exclaimed. “That girl is unbreakable,” he affirmed. Seonghwa scoffed and threw an unconvinced look to his peer.

“No really! I’ve tried to corrupt her but I really couldn’t”. Wooyoung said, raising his brows and talking loudly to support his point. But that did little to persuade Seonghwa, he was convinced that Wooyoung was just not as good as him at breaking the mortals’ souls. So yes, it was possible that Wooyoung had struggled with that girl. But not him, surely not him.

When Wooyoung saw Seonghwa was not budging his face dropped, and he turned to the others. “Please someone back me up on this one”

“Oh yeaaah… I remember her” Yeosang said, voice cut by various sounds of loud lips smacking and open mouth chewing. “Even I tried!”

Now, that was different. Seonghwa was interested. Most people are quick to indulge themselves when it comes to food. It was, so to speak, the easiest sin of the seven to succumb to. The Humans often say “there’s always room for dessert” and innocently eat a generous slice of cake after devouring a full meal. They don’t even notice Yeosang forcing the big spoon full of buttery sugary goodness into their mouths. They don’t even know Yeosang, himself, made this saying.

“She refused to even do as much as taste the delicious meal I made her sister cook for her even though she was starving… instead she gave it to the homeless man living not far from her apartment.” Yeosang stated with aberration shaking his head in disappointment before plunging right back in the ramyeon bowl.

“Hmmm” Seonghwa scratched his chin, his curiosity for the mysterious righteous girl was piqued.

“One day I tried to make her give in” Jongho chipped in from the dark purple smoke bed, even pushing himself on his elbows to look at the others, to Seonghwa’s surprise. “Made her miss the train and the bus she needed to take to get home after work and conveniently laid a juicy wallet stuffed full of even juicier bills in the gutter. All she had to do was to bend down and get the money to take a taxi to her apartment. But instead she took the money and walked to the police station to report the lost wallet, which was in the opposite direction by the way and then walked back home only to take a shower and leave right after to attend the charity soup kitchen. Anddd… Explaining this made me tired. Please don't talk to me for the next two hundred years, thank you.” Jongho concluded in one single breath before laying back down and turning on his side to nap comfortably.

“Maybe that one can be interesting after all” Seonghwa thought aloud, his pretty face taking on a pensive frown, his sharp brows joining on his forehead.

“Yeah no kidding” Wooyoung added. “And you don’t know the best part yet…” A perfidious and sly smile pulled on his handsome features. “She was just ordained nun.”

Seonghwa’s face turned serious as his eyes snapped back to Wooyoung. All of a sudden the girl went from distraction of the day to possibly the ultimate challenge of corruption Seonghwa has been waiting for god knows how long (and he surely did not use the expression lightly).

“Don’t mess with me, Envy!” Seonghwa spat, suddenly calling Wooyoung by his biblical name, testifying the gravity of his statement.

“I’m not kidding, Lust” Wooyoung mocked Seonghwa’s serious tone by also using his sin name. “She decided the life of material things wasn’t the way to happiness so she devoted herself to a humbler one, gifting her time and belongings to the poor and destitutes while she devoted her body to God. God only…” Wooyoung said, feigning nonchalance while he snaked an arm around Seonghwa’s shoulders. “Look… Here she is” he purred in his neck.

With a flick of his wrist, green smoke emanated from thin air and formed a pierced circle where in the middle the reflection of a girl could be seen. She was quiet, in the very humble room, a single window shone down onto the bed as she knelt at its side, palms joined, retreated into silent prayers.

She’s perfect.

That was Seonghwa’s first thought as an obscene smirk tugged at his mouth, his tongue swiping across his lips making them shiny and wet. He eyed the girl kneeling by the bed as he lowered his chin, one strand of hair falling over the piercing siren eyes. The black and white uniform she was wearing, the habit, couldn’t fool the seasoned eyes of Seonghwa. All the fabric in the world couldn’t hide away the glorious curves of her body, the beautiful arch of her back leading to the roundness of her bottom gently resting on her heels. The holy swells of her chest softly lifting the thick black material of the habit and the simple wooden cross held by humble twine she was wearing around her neck.

Divine.

Was what described her best.

“She’s stunning,” Seonghwa huffed in a soft murmur, mesmerized and captivated by the image Wooyoung was showing him. And he smirked in victory, relishing on the way he had convinced his peer, once again living up to his name and very nature.

“Yeah I know.” Mingi said, finally turning his face away from his reflection to address Seonghwa. “I thought with such a pretty face she’d be easy to convince that she’s above everyone else and just make her a pretentious too-far-up-her-own-ass bitch. But I quickly realized she was a lost cause” he concluded, shrugging and stepping away from the mirror, sitting down next to Jongho, already fast asleep only to materialize another handheld mirror. seconds later.

“Yes…” Seonghwa spoke softly as he stared intensely at the girl. “She just might do.”

***

You were on cleaning duty at the church today after the mass. Even if the church was quite big it didn’t intimidate you. You settled the two buckets of warm soapy water and your floor cloth before tying your hair up in a rather unaesthetic but very practical hairdo and stretched your shoulders before giving yourself a determined little nod.

You started with scrubbing the ancient cobblestone of the old church with soap and a lot of elbow grease. Then you immediately followed up with dusting the chairs, the altar and the numerous effigies.

You diligently washed, dusted, scrubbed, cleaned, polished, until everything was neat and right. Simply happy and content with the idea of being useful to the community. The rhythmic sounds of your hard bristle brush against the pavements were setting the pace of the silence which helped you connect to the spiritual nature of the ancient place of worship.

But as you were tidying the confessional booth you noticed a small piece of colorful paper peeking from underneath the bench lined with worn burgundy red velvet. When your hands reached under the seat and hazardly caught the object you knew it was a magazine from the glossy feeling of the paper underneath your fingertips and when you finally let your eyes fall on it you realized the nature of the magazine.

Porn. A pornographic magazine.

The cover displayed several nude women adopting very suggestive poses, one of them even dangerously leaning her face towards the intimate parts of another one.

The obscene imagery made your heart race and you started to feel dizzy. You sat yourself on the bench and rested the lewd magazine in your lap. You took a deep breath and, very slowly, parted the red curtains to make sure you were alone in the church. Then you opened the magazine and flipped the cover page.

“Oh my… Look at that! She is flipping the pages!” Yeosang exclaimed.

“Oh she’s definitely curious about it,” Mingi laughed, his lips stretching into a satisfied half smile. But Seonghwa was more cautious, he refused to believe it just yet. Something about your body language was not right.

“Shhh” he shushed the others and motioned for them to keep looking through the green smoke.

As your fingers glided across each page. You felt hot in the face with each scene more obscene than the last one, tension building in your neck.

Seonghwa didn’t lose sight of you for a second, his lips curling on his teeth in a vicious smile as your trembling fingers went over every single page, your wide open eyes darting to every corner of each page. He could almost hear your heart thumping in your chest he could almost taste the adrenaline in your blood.

When you came to the end of it and closed out the magazine you sighed, letting your shoulders drop, closing your eyes in relief.

“Well…” you started “nobody left their name in it” you said to yourself, completely unaware the demons were spying on your every move. Not that you expected that anybody would leave their signature in such a piece of literature but still you had to at least try to find the rightful owner before taking actions.

A loud complaint erupted from the demons. All in disbelief. You looked at the magazine, true. But it was not for an impure purpose. It was only in the hopes of finding the name of the true owner and hopefully, returning it back to them. You had no interest in the salacious scenes presented in the glossy pages. The rushing blood to your cheeks wasn’t due to any feeling of arousal or libidinousness. It was only the shame of invading someone’s privacy.

Once again your intentions were completely commendable. Immaculate.

As the demons protested and complained, Seonghwa, on the other hand, stayed completely silent as he watched you bring the magazine to a trash bin without an ounce of regret. He wasn’t disappointed, he was excited. He felt excitement. A feeling so distant and faded that it felt foreign. Seonghwa had forgotten all about this thrill. He didn’t remember how tingles tickled the tip of his cold fingers or how his guts swirled around in frenzy. This feeling was joy. Pure joy. Sweet intoxicating euphoria. And it was all thanks to you.

“I’m gonna have so much fun with you” he whispered to you, as if you could hear him, his eyes glued to the reflection in the pierced circle of deep green smoke, he whispered to the image of the unsuspecting girl discarding the impure magazine. A paltry, too poor of a stratagem to have you yield to the darkness. You, the pious and saintly nun.

***

You never really liked cooking, before you joined the covenant your sister was always the one in the kitchen preparing delicious home cooked meals for the family. But what you did like on the other hand was helping. Usually you cleaned up the kitchen but when your sister was running out of time she would ask you to peel the vegetables or cut them. So naturally cutting the vegetables was not your favorite task around the convent. You liked cleaning and tidying up better. Only because you were more on the active side and you liked how cleaning would make you break up a sweat when the whole monastery needed a dust off but nonetheless what you liked most was to help the community. And knowing the soup you were cooking up with the help of two of your sisters was going to feed everyone was a fulfilling feeling. Well enough to make you happy.

So you were contemplating life cutting off the homegrown zucchinis when Sister Chaeyoung started to giggle. You didn’t pay much attention until Sister Nayeon started to snicker along with her.

You lift your eyes up and the both of them instantly stiffened up and started to act suspicious.

“What are you laughing about you two?” you asked, an amused smile playing on your lips.

“Oh nothing” Nayeon said, hiding something behind her back.

“Come on, I want to laugh too” you said, the smile spreading further on your face, lifting up your cheeks adorably.

You three were the youngest in the convent so you did many duties together, you grew quite close with the girls.

Chaeyoung ripped something from Nayeon’s hand and proudly showed it to you.

“Look at this carrot” she said, puffing an adorable laugh.

It was true the carrot had quite the… interesting shape. First of all it was quite large, abnormally thick for a simple carrot. Homegrown vegetables were never like the perfectly shaped ones you could find at the store and it was definitely the case for this one. It had a slight upward curve and the extremity had a very distinctive shape. It was phallic.

You delicately took the vegetable from the hands of Chaeyoung to examine the orange root closely.

It was almost unnatural how close the resemblance was, like it couldn’t be due to fortuity… The thick tip, the robust and curved upright shaft, the asperities reminiscent of the blood engorged veins, even the small slit at the top… The details were impressive.

“Look look” Mingi exclaimed, nudging Seonghwa in the ribs as he observed you through the green fog. “She looks interested. I think she’s done this time”. He declared self-assured, cocking a single eyebrow. But Seonghwa remained completely silent but a smirk pulled on his lips when he noticed how you were eyeing the forbidden vegetable (no pun intended), how your throat seemed to thickly swallow and how your lip slightly trembled.

It felt so empowering, finally getting to chip away at your strong willed spirit, finally getting lust to creep under your skin. For these long seconds of contemplation, Seonghwa could only imagine the wicked places your mind raced to. But right when he was about to open his mouth and declare victory. You laughed.

Seonghwa’s eyes nearly popped out of their sockets as this laugh ripped through him, like a dagger through the skin.

You laughed so openly, your head hung back, eyes creased. The laugh was like the rest of you, joyful, clear and pure.

You are only amused by such a coincidence. Nothing more, nothing less. Of course it was funny and you were never the stuck up kind and it felt right to have a bit of lighthearted fun with your younger sisters.

“I guess she’s only laughing at your stupid tricks,” Wooyoung said, his sly smirk mocking Seonghwa’s failure.

“Fuck off Wooyoung” Seonghwa spat as he watched the scene unfold.

The three of you just laughed, enjoying this bonding moment together while the stricter, older sisters and the Mother Superior weren’t there to dim down your childish and silly amusement. It was just some playful, innocent humor to you.

Nothing to shake your faith or virtue.

“Now let’s finish up the soup, girls” you said, setting the amusing carrot on the cutting board. Before chopping it up and tossing the pieces in the big pot.

“Maybe we should have kept it” Chaeyoung whispered with pouty lips. “It could have been useful.”

“Don’t be silly,” you replied with a smile.

Seonghwa felt anger bubbling up in his stomach and rushing through his veins to burn down his chest and neck. As much as he hated to admit it… Wooyoung was right, these stupid tricks were no match for the unwavering righteousness of your mind. These would certainly suffice if it was any other soul but not yours. Not you.

So Seonghwa resolved to resort to drastic measures. Something he hasn’t done for centuries. But something necessary. This anger he felt, the deception upon failing once again. He hadn’t felt that in so long, he felt alive finally. It was ironic how an immortal soul would forget how to feel alive for the simple reason that nothing is a threat to their existence. Their presence is immutable, infinite, certain. Therefore unexciting, monotonous and lifeless.

The negative feelings reminded Seonghwa of a purpose he once had, they reminded him of the stakes that used to be. In a way you reminded Seonghwa what it felt like to feel. You reminded him what it meant to be alive. Him, the unholy and vile Sin of Lust.

***

“You cannot be serious,” Hongjoong exclaimed, rubbing the deep crease between his eyebrows, this conversation was starting to give the Guardian of the Gate a headache.

“I am most certainly serious,” Seonghwa assured. “Now is the best time.”

“Why?” Hongjoong asked. “I’m sorry but I can’t let you through unless you give me a solid explanation.”

“Come on Joongie~” Seonghwa said innocently smiling at him leaning on the smaller man in front of him, wrapping his arms around his waist and tilting his head adorably. “You and I go way back, right?”

“Your ways have no power against me, Lust. You know that.” Hongjoong just looked at him scornfully. “Now if you don’t tell me your plan I’ll shut the gates for the next century.”

“What has this place come to? We used to be able to go and play with humans all day and not get questioned,'' Seonghwa complained, throwing his hands in the air and slipping away from Hongjoong. But the latter didn’t budge. “Fine” Seonghwa spat.

“You see my dear friend, today she’s ovulating. Her body is most likely to respond to the primitive instinct of the survival of the species. Meaning that her spirit is most likely to be weaker.” Seonghwa explained his reasoning.

“But how do you plan on actually interacting with her? You know you won’t be able to have physical contact, you'll go through her like a ghost. Unless she summons you. And I don’t see how or even why she would call your name three times” Wooyoung pointed out, as he was watching the feud from afar.

“I know that I’m not stupid” Seonghwa said with an eyeroll and a sigh. “I won’t need to touch her to break her” he assured.

“But how if she can’t even see you?” Hongjoong yelled, ready to pluck the hair out of his head. Seonghwa was about to become the Guardian's breaking point.

“Hey relax, okay” Seonghwa said, slipping behind the man and gently pinching the muscles of his shoulders. “You are starting to look like San.”

“What did you say about me? “ San yelled from across the empty space, interrupting his card game with Yunho.

“Just play” Yunho instructed with a monotonous fed up tone, pointing his chin towards the deck of cards.

“This game is stupid anyways!!” San screamed before flipping the table over in a loud grunt as the cards flew everywhere, floating gracefully to the ground. Yunho sighed deeply.

“He always does this…” he whispered to himself, getting off the chair and walking to Hongjoong and Seonghwa as Jongho was peacefully snoring close by.

“How can he sleep through this?” Yeosang looked at Jongho in disbelief, as he was stuffing more cheesecake into his mouth. Yunho scoffed.

“How can you eat through this?” Yunho underlined and Yeosang just shrugged before smiling with his mouth still full, earning disgusted grunts and complaints from the others.

“Can we focus for one minute here?” Hongjoong interrupted, desperately trying to get back on track. “How are you going to corrupt her if she can’t see you?”

“Oh but she will see me” Seonghwa smirked.

“Not in the monastery she won’t, not on sacred ground” Wooyoung mocked his overly confident tone.

“It’s true, you know” Yunho chipped in, putting his large palm on Seonghwa’s shoulder. “I can’t believe I’m about to say that but… I think you’re being greedy” Yunho concluded, as Seonghwa whipped his head to him.

“Wow… That’s so out of character for you.”

“Well that should speak volumes about the foolishness of your plan” Yunho shrugged, taking his hand back.

“It’s not foolish because she will see me. For the simple reason that she will invite me in” Seonghwa’s smirk grew wider as silence settled in the unholy space between hell and earth. Wooyoung laughed hysterically, holding his ribs as he wiped off a tear in the corner of his eyes.

“And how will you manage that?” Hongjoong asked with a raised, unimpressed eyebrow.

Just then a chiming sound could be heard in the emptiness. Seonghwa fished out of his pocket a small human device. All in the room looked incredulous As Seonghwa smirked at the small screen illuminating his pretty face.

“Since when did you-” Hongjoong started but Seonghwa simply brought his long pointer finger to his lips and shushed him.

“She’s waiting for me”

***

“A disaster” Mother superior exclaimed as she threw her arms at her side, looking at the flooded basement. “We cannot go to the retreat and leave until the problem is fixed. The humidity can damage the foundations of the monastery. “I’ll stay and sort it out.”

The sisters all let out frustrated sighs.

“You should go Mother” you stepped in. “The sisters need you at the retreat as well as the faithful… I’ll stay and get things in order. You can count on me” you said with a determined nod and a smile, tightly holding the wooden cross on your chest.

As much as you wanted to go. Someone needed to stay, that much was undeniable and the wisdom of the Mother Superior was needed at Lourdes. So it wasn’t without a little sting at the heart that you waved goodbye to a bus full of your friends, your sisters.

You went back in and sighed at the mess. The ancient timber beams were slowly soaking up the stagnant water, the old stones of the walls were being eroded and the humidity was not good news for the cheeses you were maturing, not even mentioning the ruined mushrooms you were about to harvest before the disaster. Of course the boiler was old and rustic but Mother Superior always made sure it was checked annually and repaired when it was needed before any damage could be done. But even the most diligent measures sometimes can’t prevent the unforeseeable hazards of life.

You went back up and searched for a plumber in the local newspaper. Luckily there was an ad for one that was living in town.

Park, plumbing/heating engineering at your service, the flashy ad read.

You looked at the time, it was late afternoon, probably a little too late to take up a new job, but you figured there was still hope he could at least pick up the phone and maybe appoint a day to come have a look at the leakage. You didn’t waste anymore time and dialed the phone number in the ancient and only phone located in the Mother Superior’s office.

As the tone rang you suddenly got nervous. Ever since you joined the convent you didn’t interact much with the outside world except the followers coming to church or the people you were helping. So this upcoming conversation was making you agitated.

“Hello, Park, plumbing and heating engineer, how can I help you?” You are surprised by the voice at the end of the line. You never expected such a smooth, melodic voice to pick up the phone.

“H-Hi! I’m Sister y/n from the Monastery of the Sacred Mission, our basement flooded, we think the boiler possibly needs to be replaced. Is it possible for you to come take a look?”

“Oh! Sorry to hear that. I’m guessing much damage has been done…” his concerned tone somewhat eased your nerves.

“Unfortunately yes”

“I see… I can come right now”

“Really?” you blinked your eyes twice in surprise. “Well that would be marvelous” you said cheerfully “but wouldn’t you be working past hours? I fear there’s quite a lot of work” you ask concerned.

“It’s okay. You help others so much. Now it’s my time to help you” his tone changed, a subtle switch you can’t put into words but the difference sent a shiver down your spine.

“Thank you”

***

“Thank you so much for coming this quickly” you thanked the man as he stood in the impressive frame of the heavy convent door.

You took a step aside to let him in but he just stood before the front steps not moving an inch. You threw him a puzzled look but he just stared back blankly at you. There was a moment of hesitation on his behalf that left you quite perplexed.

“Please come in” you hesitantly said while amicably smiling at the man.

“Thank you” he simply responded, almost sounding relieved.

As soon as he stepped foot in the door frame you felt a cold breeze run on your neck under the habit and shivers run down your spine. Autumn was indeed well advanced now but such cold winds were usually never felt before winter. Of course, you made little of a simple gust of wind.

“Hi. I’m Sister y/n. Nice to meet you” you stuck your hand out to him. He looked down at it and fumbled with the tool boxes but opted for a polite nod instead of a handshake.

“Sorry, I’ve been working all day and my hands are dirty” he laughed nervously “and the name is Seonghwa” he flashed the brightest smile you have ever seen. For a second your heart skipped a beat and a foreign feeling blossomed in your chest. You never expected this unknown plumber to be this handsome.

He had long and shiny raven black hair perfectly framing his face and just as healthy thick eyebrows complimenting the dark, round and benevolent eyes, reminiscent of boba pearls. A long elegant neck, a defined jawline, high cheekbones and tanned olive glossy skin.

His body was cladded in an unbuttoned navy blue overall that let peek out a simple white t-shirt underneath. You could tell the outfit had undergone various difficult jobs as the fabric was thinned out at his knees and had various stains of paints and plaster.

He looked like a kind man. Like the kind of person you would give communion to without confession. The kind of person that just has a good heart. It was that kind of reassuring and warm aura that you felt from him, something that put you at ease right away.

You led him to the faulty boiler.

Right away he got on one knee and started to inspect the recalcitrant piece of machinery.

“Well I’ll leave you to work on your own” you said as you retreated to take your leave. Seonghwa only politely nodded and smiled in your direction before turning his attention back to the problem.

While the plumber was working you put your time to good use and organized the paperwork of the Mother superior. Doing such work was always tedious for her because she wasn’t exactly the organized kind of woman but you were. You knew doing that you would be of great help. Since the task was quite large, it took quite a long time and it’s only when your stomach emitted a loud grumble that you realized the evening was well advanced.

You figured Mr. Park was hungry or at the very least thirsty after working for so long. So you grabbed a metal tray and brought him a set of the specialty sugar cookies the convent was selling along with a generous serving of cold water embellished with a dash of freshly squeezed lemon juice to make sure Mr. Park’s thirst would be thoroughly quenched.

When you passed the archway that was leading to the boiler room your heart nearly stopped beating when your eyes met the working man.

Swiftly you spinned on your feet and hid behind the wall, only peeking an eye out the corner to still be able to witness the novel scene taking place in front of you.

Seonghwa had tightened the sleeves of his blue overalls around his waist and was wiping the sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand, clearly the labor was not restful. You couldn’t tell if it was from sweat or from the leaking water but his white t-shirt was wet and sticking to his skin, making the fabric lightly translucid. You could guess the dark pinkish color of his nipples and the outline of his well built body underneath. The short sleeves of his t-shirt were rolled up and were tightly hugging his arms while his long fingers were wrapped around a wrench as each twist of his wrist was making the veins of his forearm bulge out.

You loudly gulped down a lump in your throat. Your hands tightly held onto the tray in fear of letting it fall to your feet.

But your misery was far from over because before you could realize it Seonghwa was pulling on his shirt and passing it over his head. Every muscle of his back moving around, contracting and relaxing in a beautiful dance, shining under the golden hour sun seeping through the small single window of the basement. Water and sweat was running down his back and at his flanks, when he turned around, your eyes dashed around his naked upper body. You couldn’t decide where to settle them. His collarbones, his pecs, his abs, the dent at the sides of his abdomen, his (very) low resting overalls…

Your heart was about to give out. You had seen male bodies before, never in real life that was true but you did once or twice on TV or on billboard ads of men’s underwear.

But, never, you felt something like that. That feeling. This tingly feeling budding in the low pit of your stomach, making your guts stir around, making your palms sweaty, making your heart helplessly hammer against your ribs, making your eyes widen as you couldn’t peel them off the naked wet skin of the handsome stranger. This feeling of immoral interest for another person’s body, this longing for somebody else’s touch.

This feeling of Lust.

It was completely foreign to you.

If it wasn’t for Seonghwa you would have chugged the whole carafe of lemony water by yourself because you never felt your throat as dry as it felt right now.

“Look! Look!” San shouted, wrapping a strong hand around Wooyoung’s forearm and making him wince in pain as they both stared at you through the green smoke. “Y/n is giving in!”

“Look at the way she’s staring at him!” Yeosang said, briefly reaching for a napkin to wipe his mouth.

“Wow” Yunho added “She definitely isn’t thinking about church-appropriate things”. Yunho laughed but Mingi scoffed.

“If she likes him, wait till I show my human form. I’m infinitely more good looking than him”

“Not everything’s about you, Mingi” Yunho scolded him.

With trembling hands you settled the metal tray onto the window sill. You poured a glass of water and presented it to Seonghwa.

“Here” you unexpectedly manage to keep your voice calm and steady. “I figured you might be thirsty or hungry.”

“Oh thanks” he said, wrapping his hand around the glass, carefully avoiding touching your hand in the process, probably trying not to get sweat and dirt smeared on you. “I just got done actually”

“Oh wonderful” you exclaimed, maybe a little louder than expected. Maybe eager to get rid of that immoral feeling that was awakened by his presence. Seonghwa cocked an eyebrow and gave you a puzzled look at the unexpected outburst of joy.

“Why? Are you impatient to throw me out?” he smirked, pushing his long and soaked hair back as he took a step closer, doe eyes narrowing, becoming sharp. You did your best to lock your eyes with his, not to let them wander down his still half naked body. Seonghwa didn’t make any effort to cover himself. Your heart seemed to be trying to break through your rib cage to get a chance to beat closer to Seonghwa’s chest.

“No, it’s just that…” you took a step back “you have been working for so long you must be wanting to go back to the comfort of your home” you quickly get back on your feet before smiling politely at him, trying to conceal your uneasiness.

“Why?” he asked tit for tat, taking a step closer again, siren eyes bored deep into yours, trying to lull you in. “No one is waiting for me at home.”

Seonghwa heard the faintest little gasp escape your lips and he knew you were shaken. You, the unwavering nun, the faithful saint. You were at last considering him. Contemplating giving in to the primal and lowly instinct of desire.

Seonghwa sensed it. He saw it in the way you hurriedly licked your dry bottom lip, he saw it in the way your eyes darted between his lips and his eyes, he saw it in the way you stopped backing away from him.

You, y/n, you were giving in to pure sensual need. No love, no sentiment involved. Only desire to feel a complete stranger’s body against yours, only pure, untainted lust.

If only he could touch you. If only he could, it would be so much easier to help you gently fall into the welcoming and serene arms of corruption. But he couldn’t and that was making the whole experiment that much more exciting. He had to use deceit and trickery. Like a siren numbing your mind with a beautiful song.

But if you gave the slightest hint of submitting, if you let your guard down and let him into your heart then he would have won and that was all that mattered. If you tilted your head and you puckered up your lips to kiss him, if you took a step towards him to press your body against his, if your lifted your hand to feel his wet, glistening skin under your fingers, if you did anything to welcome the unholy desire, if you opened yourself to lust, then touching you would have been unnecessary because Seonghwa would have won and you and God would have lost.

And victory was oh so close. So close when he was as near to you as he could. So close when he slowly approached his face to yours. So close when your heart was pumping scorching hot blood through your veins, so close when your mouth started to water, so close when your lips started to quiver, so close when your eyelid started to flutter but…

Again, you stepped back.

“WHAT?!” San shouted.

“No way!!” Yeosang added, staring at your unsuspecting reflection in the green smoke.

Seonghwa’s shoulder dropped along with the satisfied little smirk.

“Thank you for fixing the boiler this quickly, Mr Park” you said, averting your eyes, finally breaking the spell he had casted on you and peeling your eyes off him.

Seonghwa had cried victory too soon. He had counted the chicken eggs before they hatched, he had put the cart before the horse. In other words… he had underestimated you.

He underestimated your will, your faith and your unwavering sense of righteousness. The other Sins had warned him though but he didn’t listen. They told him it was impossible to bend you. All of them had tried before and none succeeded so it was undeniable now that Seonghwa was just going to join them in failure.

“Don’t worry about it” he smiled at you, disappointment peeking behind his shiny brown orbs.

Seonghwa had accepted defeat when you led him back to the door of the convent. He walked away but turned around half way only to see your still body standing straight in the doorframe, perfectly incarnating your strong, unbending mind.

You only politely smiled when you pushed the big heavy door with difficulty, finally closing it in with a loud thud.

“Fuck… I guess Seonghwa failed too…” Yunho stated as he watched you close the door. But Wooyoung looked at you with a knowing grin.

“I’m not so sure…” he said as the smirk tugged further at his lips.

***

When you finally escaped Seonghwa’s taunting eyes, you leaned your back on the sturdy door, your spirit drained, your mind exhausted. You closed your eyes to catch a breath but the only thing you could see was the working man’s godlike figure carved onto your retinas, the translucent white t-shirt clinging to his golden skin, the sweat dripping down his temples and wetting the beautiful long strands of black hair, the bulging veins of his forearms and the dents engraved at both side of his lower stomach. And the more you thought about it, the quicker your breathing got.

You were all alone here… Your sisters and Mother superior were all gone. What wrong could it cause if you gave in just this once? Not that much, right?…. Just this once.

With big strides you walked to the kitchen and handpicked a nicely shaped carrot, almost regretting not listening to Chaeyoung and keeping that other one.

But this one was going to do the trick. It was not too thick and just long enough to help you carry out your shameful business but not too big to actually taint you and strip you of the precious veil of chastity that you managed to keep intact all of these years.

You climbed up the stairs with haste, avoiding the marble eyes of the holy figures represented in the halls only to take refuge in your bedroom.

You slipped out of your shoes and laid on your bed. You didn’t even bother taking the habit off, it wasn’t going to take long anyway, you simply pulled it up.

When you slid off the white panties you realized how soaked you were. You couldn’t believe it. Your whole life you’ve never felt this way, the feeling was overwhelming and needed to be dealt with immediately. Yes, that was what you were doing simply ridding yourself of an impure feeling!

You whipped out the orange root and clumsily rubbed the thinner tip on yourself. The cold sensation took you aback and pulled a small gasp from your lips.

You coated the root with your juices and then you aimed it at your entrance. You slid the carrot inside, it was too thin to hurt in any way but it was well long enough. When you reached the bottom of yourself you couldn’t help but to let out a satisfied grunt at the sensation of the vegetable rubbing against your sensitive spot.

You pulled it back out and slid it back in, this time a little faster. Heat gained over your body as your eyes fluttered close and you recalled the unfairly handsome and devilishly sexy working man.

The muscles of his back, his long slender neck, his collarbones, his beautiful sun kissed skin.

“Aaah” you sigh. “Seonghwa” his name rolled off your tongue so naturally, almost like it was meant to be said like this.

His long and dark wet hair, his plush lips getting close to yours, his warm breath fanning your face.

“Seonghwa” you moaned again, more high pitched this time as your wrist was getting more and more reckless, each time deliciously scrubbing your walls in divine and forbidden pleasure.

The way he looked at you, the way his dark eyes were filled with the same desire you had for him. The way they spoke volumes about the sinful things he wanted to do to you. And God… did you almost let him have his way with you.

You started to clench around the root, each time you pulled it out your walls were eagerly gripping on it, refusing to let it go, so you smashed it back in with force to grant their wish. Your walls quivered around the vegetable, a foreign and unknown euphoria was taking over you and you knew you were done for.

“I’m… ngh… c-cumming” you whispered to yourself as you felt the tightness in your core reach a brand new level. “Seonghwa” you cried out one more time, being only a few back-and-forths away from your sweet release but alas you couldn’t pull it through.

Because without knowing, without realizing, completely unsuspecting, you called his name. You called his name three times. You summoned him.

Purple smoke started to erupt from the corner of the small dimly lit room by the late evening sun. With terror you ripped the vegetable out before you could finish and covered your modesty with the habit you were still wearing.

From the smoke appeared slick black leather chelsea boots resting under a pair of anthracite gray dress pants coated with a shiny silverish finish. As the smoke got thinner you could distinguish a matching cropped blazer with an asymmetrical and deconstructed silver vest underneath that was held together by one single button right under his neck, you could see the soft and glistening golden skin underneath. And finally when the smoke was completely gone you saw his face. The sharp features and the slender slithering body reminiscent of the one of a serpent, eyes just as sharp and presence just as menacing. A face you hadn't known for long but couldn't forget. Seonghwa’s face.

But he looked different. His long bangs weren’t framing his face anymore, instead he had tied the long wavy strands in a high half bun. His aura was also different from when he was wearing the blue and spotted overalls. Now cladded in the revealing ensemble he looked expensive, confident and sensual.

Your jaw practically dropped to the floor when your mind finally wrapped around the information your eyes were transmitting.

“Well well…” Seonghwa stepped closer while you jolted yourself up the bed, your body cornered between the headboard and the wall.

“What are you?” you whispered with trembling lips, heart pounding, adrenaline rushing through your veins, ready to flee if need be.

Seonghwa looked at you, puzzled for a second. Then he laughed, head tilting back. The laugh made the hair in your nape stand. It was unnatural, cold and fundamentally evil.

“Me?” he asked. Right then you felt your body being magically lifted from the soft mattress. You shrieked again, utterly confused while Seonghwa’s magic slammed you against the bare walls of the humble bedroom, the tip of your toes barely scraping the worn out wooden floor.

“Oh my, please pardon my awful manners,” he said in an overly polite tone. “I’m Seonghwa, Cardinal Sin of Lust” he said, bowing respectfully, elegantly bringing his right hand on his chest in a princely manner. “But for you, love…” Seonghwa stepped towards you, taking his time to look at you. He leaned on your ear to whisper.

“I’m a dream come true” his voice was deep, sultry, self-assured. Everything you’d imagine it to be.

A faint gasp escaped your lips as you felt his warm breath on your neck.

You wanted to scream to all heavens, you had brought a demon into the convent. You had desecrated the sacred ground of this place of worship, your home. You led the wolf to the sheeps. But you couldn’t scream, you couldn’t even if your life depended on it.

“W-what do you want?” you managed to push the few words past your teeth. Your voice, perfect opposite of the one of the demon: muted and trembling.

“Just want to finish my business with you” his face stayed right where it was, nestled in the crook of your neck. Lips so close you could feel the heat radiating from them but somehow they were still too far, unable to touch you.

“What business?” you whimpered.

“Darling.” Seonghwa clicked his tongue and shook his head in disapproval. “There’s no point in fighting anymore. Stop playing dumb with me. I know you’re a smart girl.” He took a deep breath, inhaling the sweet scent of your shampoo. “I already won, darling… that very second you decided to give in to the thought of me. That second you closed the big heavy door and thought you escaped my eyes. That very second I had won.” A wicked smirk pulled on his lips. But his words didn’t make any sense to you.

This languish was torture, this state of expectation, of suspense. This proximity. You wished it would just stop. Be it touching you for good or get away finally. Just as if he read your mind he got even closer. Now it wasn’t only his lips taunting the thin skin of your neck, it was his whole body, hovering over yours; but still… Not touching you.

“Sure winning felt good. But you know what feels even better, darling?” You couldn’t bring yourself to formulate words and only whimpered in response.

“I asked you a question, sweetheart” he grinned, relishing on your anguish, placing both of his palms at both sides of your face, trapping your frail figure between his arms and the wall.

“It’s to finally touch you.”

So he finally let himself take a deep dive into you. The plush warm lips crash onto your neck, giving wet sloppy open mouth kisses while you couldn’t help but to tilt your head back giving him more access.

“What a good girl you are” he purred, not taking the time to part his lips from you.

His left hand went to your chin and turned it to make you face him, without much hesitation he planted a wet kiss on your lips, your cute whimpers and gasps were the perfect opportunity to deepen the kiss.

The kiss got heated as Seonghwa pried your hesitant mouth open with his long thumb and pushed his tongue inside to breach your lips. His delicious taste spread through your mouth, making your head dizzy. He tasted like candy, like you just took a bite of the juiciest strawberry. Ripe, just in season, absolutely delicious.

You moaned into his mouth and he smirked as his grip around your chin got tighter, he lifted his knee to part your legs and his thigh rubbed against your center through the habit. You couldn’t help but to moan louder, the unsolicited pleasurable friction made you incapable of reciprocating the kiss, your dangling feet nervously giving small kicks in the air.

Seonghwa finally parted from you, allowing you to catch your breath. But he was far from done with you.

“I know you long for more than this, angel” he whistled while his hand went up your thigh, still clothed with the thick black fabric of the habit. “I know you languish for pleasure” his blunt nails went up your arm and you realized you were still holding onto the carrot. He ripped the root from your hand.

“You won’t need this anymore” he said before smashing the poor vegetable on the ground sending millions of orange pieces flying across the room, you flinched once more at the demonstration of strength.

“Mine is much bigger than this. But don’t worry, love, I’ll make you nice and ready for me” he purred before placing both of his strong hands on the habit and just like that with astonishing ease he rips through the black gown. But not only, everything covering you is ripped in two and that also goes for your bra that fell to the ground. With the deafening sound of the fabric ripping you found yourself completely naked in front of the demon apart from the veil on your hair and the rosary beads laying on your chest.

You flinched and your hands flew to cover your nude frame but Seonghwa once again laughed and you felt an irresistible magical force pin your wrists at each side of your face. You sniveled and squirmed trying your hardest to go against the invisible force to hide away from the avid eyes of the demon.

“How cute.” The demon snickered when you failed to fight back. “Sweetheart, you don’t get to hide anything when you look this good” he said in a breath, eyes darting over your naked figure. From your dangling feet, to your thighs tightly pressed together, to your flushed face and to the Rosary beads sitting between your gorgeous breasts, swaying every time you kept trying to break away from the spell pinning you against the wall.

He brought a cold hand to the side of your breast, you couldn’t help but to moan as you felt his soft hand against you, his finger suddenly pinching your sensitive and hardened nipples. You let out a high pitched whimper.

“So sensitive” Seonghwa mocked you before he flicked the sensitive bud. Then he lifted his hand to harshly slap against the innocent lump of flesh, you jumped in surprise at the sensation. The surprise didn’t lie in the sudden surge of pain but rather from the enjoyment you got out of it, the sting sending electricity down your spine to light up your core.

With another faint movement of the head Seonghwa made you open your legs widely. You whimpered and felt tears build up in the corners of your eyes when he finally laid eyes on your most private part. And you realized with dread how wet you were. Soaked. Juices streaming down to your inner thighs making them glisten under his persistent gaze.

“Fuck, sweetheart” he exhaled out one heavy breath. “You got this fucking wet for me?” he said as he crouched down, inching his face dangerously close to your exposed center.

Embarrassment and shame reached an unbearable level, tears finally spilled out of your eyes, wetting your cheeks as you squirmed, trying your best to escape Seonghwa’s spell.

“So here’s the little hole I’m going to split in two” he said as his breath brushed over your wet folds.

You squirmed even harder, somehow feeling Seonghwa’s spell loosen around your wrists and ankles. But when he aimed his pointer finger right on your swollen bundle of nerves, earning a loud scream from you, the sudden pleasure from the perfect amount of pressure he applied on you made you completely immobile. Torn between the need for more of the foreign forbidden joy but also the fear and shame of letting the demon have his way with you, tainting you, taking away your most precious possession: your purity.

“What? Are you not fighting me off anymore?” He started to draw small circles on your bud. Your wetness made it easy for his finger to glide across the small and stiff nub. You moaned a little louder and he started going faster.

“Does it feel good, angel?” his voice went down an octave as pleasure got to your head, making the room spin, luckily you don’t have to stand on your legs.

Seonghwa went even faster when you didn’t reply.

“I said, does it feel good?” his tone was as harsh as his restless teasing of your clit. Hellish circles sending blazing heat to your whole body as you felt the pleasure rising in the deepest part of your core, your walls quivering on themselves.

But Seonghwa slowed down at the worst moment, a wicked smirk pulling on his plump lips, narrowing his piercing siren eyes.

“Good little sluts should answer when asked a question.” His pace was now just fast enough to keep you at your limit, each spasm of your core, testifying of the agonizing muted pleasure he was inflicting on you.

“Answer!” he ordered while he delightfully pressed on your painfully sensitive bundle of nerves.

“YES!! Yes it feels good” you blurted out, panting, sweat pearling between your breasts, giving in to the pressure.

“Good girl” he praised as he finally lifted his hand from your sensitive parts. You sighed in both relief of finally being let off the hook but also in frustration at the displeasing feeling of his denial.

But before you could celebrate or pester he pushed that very same finger inside you. You didn’t know by what ungodly miracle he managed to aim straight at your sensitive spot, but he did, applying divine pressure deep inside you. Your eyes instantly rolled to the back of your head as you felt the will of fighting off slipping through your fingers.

Seonghwa chuckled at your reaction, he was enjoying himself very much. After centuries of boredom he intended to savor every second of your agony.

“Darling, you really are hungry for my fingers, aren’t you? Your slutty little cunt is gripping so tightly” he chuckled again while he pulled his finger back. You hated how right he was. You hated how you felt your walls clench around him, how you felt your own body crave for more of him as soon as his finger slipped out.

But the yearning didn’t last long because he pushed past your entrance again, this time fitting two fingers inside you, taking the time to gently stretch you until his blunt nails reached as deeply as they could.

You let out a moan through gritted teeth, the pleasure making beads of sweat pearl at the sides of your face.

“Fuck! Your virgin little pussy just loves to be stretched out like this, doesn’t it?” He leaned even closer to your sopping center.

Tears continued to run down your cheeks as pleasure rose again. Seonghwa picked up the pace, stretching your walls so deliciously, pumping his two fingers in and out of you, each time he pulled out he ripped a moan out of you. Again, you started to twitch around his fingers and he smirked down on you. Pleasure continuously grew as you made this silent prayer that he would finally take you over the edge, over the barrier of this beautiful and forbidden land that you stayed away from all these years.

But again he slowed down and came to a stop. This time tears of pure frustration ran down your cheeks as you pathetically bucked your hips up trying to fight against Seonghwa’s spell pinning you down the wall.

“Aww.” He cooed in a mocking tone. “Darling, I’m sorry… were you about to cum?” He said while you shot him a death glare. He chuckled at your reddened cheeks and your frowned brows.

His finger swiped across your fold, pressing on the lonely bud once and you instantly dropped the angered look, your eyes drooped at the sensation and you couldn’t help but to grind against him, your womanliness made so eager by his touches.

“Fuck, look at you” he slipped one finger back inside, pumping it very slowly in and out. You bit down on your lip. “Acting so fucking distant only a few minutes ago…” he added a second one as you moaned out in bliss. “When in fact you were craving this… craving me…” he fitted a third one inside your already crowded heat as your moans now mixed with confused sobs. The intense feeling of pain and pleasure blending into a dangerous cocktail.

“Fuckkk” you cursed out, allowing yourself another sin you managed to avoid up until now, which has the demon showing more teeth.

“What a good little slut taking all of my fingers so good” he said as he took his time thoroughly stretching you out, his blunt nails pushing against your sensitive spot, while his face was closing in the distance with your intimate parts. Your eyes fluttered close as the muscles in your neck gave out and you let your head hang back on the wall.

“Look at me” Seonghwa grunted and your eyes snapped back open instantly meeting his dark ones, his irises seemed to go black with perversion.

“Now I’m gonna make you cum” He announced as he picked up the pace once more, you can tell he didn’t intend to stop before it was over. “I want you to never forget this. This feeling you’re about to experience.” His wrist took on a punishing pace as your eyes were locked with his. Pleasure sending radiating heat through your body, chest heaving up and down as you moan out loudly with your jaw hanging open. “Every time you’ll think of me I curse you to feel exactly… like… this”

Seonghwa finally wrapped his mouth around your lonely and eager little clit, flicking his tongue on it as his fingers relentlessly punched your g spot, both sources of pleasure go to your head and your first orgasm finally drops over you like a wave, taking you away with its raging current.

Your cum squirts out of your body, water like fluid rushing out of you and filling Seonghwa’s mouth, drenching his neck and exposed chest in the asymmetrical silver vest. He moaned, lips against yours and sending delicious vibrations into you.

You screamed out as the level of pleasure ripped through you, your walls clenching around Seonghwa and twitching uncontrollably as your whole body shook, still magically pinned down to the wall.

When you finally settled down he slowed down and took his fingers out of you, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and licking his fingers clean.

“Hmmm” he hummed contentedly and smacked his lips, seemingly enjoying your taste. “It’s true… Good little sluts, like you, taste much better”.

Seonghwa cut the spell and stood back up, your exhausted body dropping to the floor, your weakened legs unable to support your weight.

Seonghwa had enough of this teasing and had grown impatient. He brushed back the cum-soaked locks of charcoal black hair sticking to his forehead and cheeks, the wet skin of his chest glistening under the silver asymmetrical vest. Your eyes trailed down below the belt you gasped as you saw the outline of what was hidden from your eyes all this time… Even still restricted by the fabric of the shiny gray dress pants, the thickness and the length had your heart racing again.

“I want to feel you around me. Now.” he ordered, in a sultry tone that lifted goosebumps all over your naked skin.

Suddenly your body was magically lifted up again but this time Seonghwa threw you on the bed. The veil was barely hanging onto your hair anymore.

Seonghwa walked to you as he took off the cropped blazer along with the rest of his clothes. You gulped down at the sight of his nude and perfectly sculpted body standing beside you. The glistening chest made wet with sweat and cum, dripping down his abs even down to his groin where you barely even dared to look.

There it was. The Absolute Sin.

Seonghwa’s long, thick, twitching, veiny, hard cock.

You could have screamed at the monstrous thing if you weren’t still in a daze from your first crushing orgasm . It was so thick, so long you couldn’t even begin to imagine how this was about to fit inside you.

Seonghwa chuckled when he caught the panic swimming in your wide eyes. He thrived on this fear. And he knew exactly how it was going to go. And he couldn’t wait. He couldn’t wait to see the very same doe eyes grow heavy with pleasure and look back at him with need when you will inevitably beg him to keep going, to never stop fucking you. Because he broke you once and he intended to do it over and over and over again until you will no longer remember anything but him.

Seonghwa dipped both his knees at your sides, his body weight making yours sink in the soft mattress while he shimmied his way up between your wide open legs.

He rubbed the thick blazing hot tip on your still very sensitive bud while he stared down at the place your two bodies met. You tried not to moan by biting down on your bottom lip.

“Please” you meekly whimpered, his dark eyes shot back to yours.

“Please what?” he slithered between his teeth, smirking.

“Please don’t… do that…” you puffed, as fear crushed your chest. Seonghwa snickered again and brought his hand to very gently and softly brush his thumb over your wet cheeks and lips.

“Darling” his deep voice purred so softly. “You are not under any spell here. You can control this tiny little body of yours. So go ahead” he taunted you as his hand went down from your face to your sensitive nipples. “Go ahead and close your legs.”

What? No… It isn’t possible.

There was no way he was not the one forcing your thighs apart like this. But when you gave it a try, when you attempted to lift your ankle it actually worked. You indeed could move. But… somehow you…. still didn’t.

“Come on show me. Go ahead, pretty” his hand went down again to your stomach. “Close your legs on this poor, aching, desperate….” he flicked his pointer finger on your clit “virgin little pussy”. The sweet sting made you moan out and arch your back instinctively.

Seonghwa waited a few seconds staring down at you with amusement as you didn't move an inch. Your body kept your legs nice and wide for him against your own will.

“You know what?” he took his hand back and you swallowed back a whine and the loss of contact. “Okay, I won’t… if you are still this strong headed after all of this maybe you’re right. You are a pure spirit and I can admit defeat when I have lost.”

The smug look he wore completely gave him away. You knew it was a ruse, a ploy to get to you, to toy with you but you weren’t listening to reason anymore, only your delirious body tortured with vicious need and you just couldn’t risk it. You couldn’t risk him leaving you, not like this.

“NO!” you wailed, extending your hand to him as he was already getting off the bed and on to his feet. “I-…I-… Ok… do it”

Seonghwa’s expression here took a turn. The smug smile was completely wiped off his face, only dark brown and grave eyes looking down on your naked frame.

“Yeah?” he came back to bed and laid over you. He brought his lips close to your ear and he seductively whispered against your neck as your eyes fluttered close. “If you want it, sweetheart. You’ll have to properly beg for it”.

Your eyes snapped open. But Seonghwa only looked dead serious.

“I- I-” you started but Seonghwa lifted his hand to let it slap against your wet cunt. The whacking sound bounced off the bare walls and the stinging pain had you grunting in unsolicited pleasure.

“I said properly. I want to believe you” his voice had nothing of the playful undertone it had a few moments ago. You didn’t think twice, maybe not even at all.

“Please, Seonghwa. I implore you to fuck me. Please fuck and use my slutty virgin cunt as much as you’d like. Please hurt me and rip my virginity away. I want to scream and cry out your name. I want to be yours. I want to forget everything about the good girl I used to be, I want to be your whore. Forget about my soul, just take it with you back to hell.”

Silence fell as a grin played on his lips. It’s not smug or playful, it’s wicked, downright evil.

You were not just begging him. The desperate prose was not just a plea. It was a prayer. You were praying for him to taint you. Begging him to take away your purity like it was nothing but a nuisance to you, discarding it. Seeing you abandon your values and principles was the greatest achievement, a victory so sweet it made Seonghwa lose control. The feeling was intoxicating, blissfully filling his veins and making his evil heart thump. In his infinite existence he had never felt that. And it was all thanks to you.

Suddenly his body was elevated in the air and purple smoke enveloped him again. For a second you were scared that he was actually leaving you but the thought vanished as quick as it appeared when you heard the distinctive shrill sound of the metal scraping against the wall. You looked above your head and you witnessed with dread the crucifix above your bed being slowly turned upside down, engraving the white plaster of the bare walls. The foreboding omen lifted goosebumps off your skin and sent a cold shiver down your spine.

Soon you saw his body peek out as the smoke evaporated. It was still him but he had changed.

Huge wings were open behind his back, covered in raven black lustrous feathers, shining under the moonlight peeking from the window as the dark night was now settled. Two black horns have pierced his skin at each side of his head, pointing upwards, resembling the ones of a spanish bull. His body, somehow, looked even more defined, the muscles of his abs and shoulders seemed to bulge out. He looked strong, ominous, dangerous.

“You have such a way with words” he said as he floated back between your legs and settled his huge cock on your stomach. “Now I’m gonna make all of your wishes come true”. He brushed the tip of his cock, wet with precum, once again on your slick folds. “I've never fucked a mortal in my true form before.” he started, still rubbing against you, the muted pleasure making your brain fuzzy. “I can’t guarantee you’ll come out of this alive”.

But you were already set on it and if you had to die, so be it…

“I don’t care” you whispered as your eyebrows met and you looked back at him with need.

You braced yourself when you felt him finally push himself inside you. You could practically hear your hymen rip in two to make way for his huge cock. The puny little carrot could have never compared to the size of him.

“What a good little slut you are,” he cooed, before grunting as you were gripping around him. “Willing to die for a round of fun on my big cock”.

Sharp throbbing pain ripped through your lower stomach as you frowned and grunted.

“I know…” Seonghwa purred as he leaned over in your ear “I’m big” he said as he finally reached the bottom of you, linking his hips with yours. And he pulled out a lot faster than when he came in. Your eyes rolled back and you crushed the pillow over your mouth to yell in it.

But when he went back in again somehow the ache had lessened and pleasure was slowly taking its place. Soon the pain, as sharp as it was, vanished to become only a vague memory you couldn’t even recall as your mind was too preoccupied by the incommensurable pleasure Seonghwa made you feel.

“Fucking whore” Seonghwa grunted as he mercilessly ramed up your pussy, making it the shape of his cock. “Cheating on God feels good, doesn’t it? Your whorish little cunt can’t resist this fat demon cock, can it?” he growled.

You started twitching once again around him and Seonghwa instantly recognized the familiar clench he felt earlier around his fingers.

“Are you going to cum?” he asked, panting above you.

You couldn’t even process the words you were hearing as your eyes rolled back and your jaw fell open. But you were brought back to your senses when Seonghwa’s big clawed hand slapped your cheek forcefully. The burning pain took you aback and stopped your never ending ascension to pleasure. You whined a complaint and Seonghwa grabbed your face into a strong grip making your lips pout.

“Good little whores have to ask first” he said, still deeply pounding your precious little pussy.

“Pleasepleaseplease… C-can I cum?... F-fuckk… Please” you mumbled as his pace made it hard to hold yourself back.

“No!” he responded sternly. “Not now” he said, smirking evilly. Enjoying this anguish in your eyes as you tried your best to control your body. He brought his hand and pinched hard on your swollen little clit.

“Aaaah” you screamed, arching your back and pressing your head back into the soft mattress.

“You’ll cum when I’ll tell you too” he snickered, looking down at you. And the pleasure kept on building, frustrated tears starting to wet your cheeks again.

“My God please…” you whined, as tears streamed down your face and your pussy clenched around his thick cock. Seonghwa scoffed.

“Sorry but he has left you, darling.” He started to draw circles on your sensitive and aching clit, still maintaining the punishing pace of his cock rearranging your guts, making the rosary beads jump along with your breasts with each powerful thrust. You cry out as it’s becoming nearly impossible to keep yourself from cumming. “He abandoned you to me” he growled, his low voice sending electricity down your core.

“Pleaseeeee” you pleaded once more, desperation oozing out of your broken up voice and finally Seonghwa pronounced the magic words.

“Cum. Cum for me like the godless little whore that you are”

Finally you let go. You let Seonghwa’s skillful hand and monstrous, merciless cock take you down to the hellish pit of lustful sin. Pleasure took over you and clouded your vision, everything came to a blur as you could only concentrate on the throbbing of your cunt around Seonghwa’s thick dick. You moaned out his name in pure agonizing bliss. The orgasm was even longer lasting, even stronger than the one he gave you moments ago. And you knew for a fact now that there was no going back.

The good girl that you were had died, Seonghwa killed her. And you had let him do it without batting an eyelash. But fuck did it feel good. You felt no shame, no regrets, only unholy desire for the demon’s heavenly cock.

Soon the high wore off but Seonghwa didn’t seem to care and kept on pounding you, taking a bruising grip on your parted thighs with both his hands.

“Please” you whimpered again as your poor little pussy might split in two from clenching and throbbing this much right after an earth shattering orgasm. Seonghwa chuckled in between heavy breaths.

“I just came” you cried out, turning into an over-stimulated mess.

“I don’t care” he spat, using you like a fucktoy just like he pleased, after all you had asked him to do so… ‘to fuck and use your slutty virgin cunt as much as he’d like’. The exhausted quivering of your restless pussy started to build up again and before you could even realize it, Seonghwa’s thick cock had you flirting with the edge of the bottomless pleasure pit again.

“Please” you whined “Please stop” you begged him, breast lewdly jumping up and down with each of his brutal thrusts. But he kept on going, growling as his eyebrows met, handsome face contorted in pleasure, biting his lip. Body pressed over yours and full black feathered wings completely concealing you, one of his horns even scraping the wall with one too violent move.

“Pleaseeeee” you whimpered yet again. And suddenly your body was being lifted and flipped over by Seonghwa’s spell. You land on all fours, completely confused but worst of all, completely empty.

“Don’t you get it?” Seonghwa said as he slowly pushed himself back into your soft, warm little throbbing cunt. You moaned as you gladly took him back. “You sold your soul to me. You don’t get to ask for anything anymore. So I’ll fuck you for as long as I see it fit” He said before pushing down on your face, shoving your head into a shamefully submissive position, your ass up in the air, ready to be destroyed by him once more.

His fat cock parted you so deliciously as lewd wet sounds rang to your ears. It was like your once virgin pussy had completely taken the shape of his monstrous dick. Every movement he made ripped a delighted moan out of your lips, you didn’t have the will to fight anymore. You only wanted him and this delectable high he made you feel.

“Fuckkk” you cried out as he started to go faster again, the quiver in your lower stomach making a quick return.

“You’re my thing now.” He ripped the veil of your hair, the last relic of your past self and sent it flying across the room. He grabbed a fistfull of your hair, harshly pulling on it maintaining your face forward but your chin still firmly planted in the mattress, asserting his dominance on your frail figure. “My toy, you hear?” the sting on your scalp added to the full feeling of his cock had you completely fucked out. Your eyes rolled as heat spreaded through you again, your jaw fell open and your tongue slipped out. You were fucked out dumb, completely. Brain nice and thoughtless just from him.

“Yeshhh” you mumbled.

“I’m gonna make you cum again and this time I will fill your dirty little cunt with my cum” The obscene sounds of his balls slapping against your slick folds and clit bounced off the walls.

“Yesshh pwweathe” you replied as your tongue slapped against your chin with each inhuman thrust of his hips deep into you, sending strings of drool on your chin and staining the sheets.

“Today you’re ovulating, you know what it means?”

Your eyes snapped back open.

“I’m gonna force a child into you. You’ll take my seed into your fertile womb and life will sprout inside you” His grip on your hair tightened and you felt him start to twitch inside you.

“You’d like that?” he teases, knowing the answer.

“Yesssshhhhh!!!” you yelled, you were ready for anything if it meant he’d let you cum again.

“Then take it. Take my cum you depraved slut” His second hand left your hips to grab the rosary still around your neck, twisting his wrist to wrap the beads around his fingers and pulling on it while still maintaining his grasp on your hair.

Bloodstream to your brain became restrained and you started to feel dizzy. A deliciously light headed sensation filled your head up as your pussy quivered with a third orgasm. Your hungry cunt squeezed Seonghwa’s thick length as if its life depended on it, demanding every last drop of cum the demon had to offer. You clenched and throbbed around him in pure joyful sin as he took you to the deepest part of this abysmal and cursed pleasure, taking your sanity and everything that was left of the old you to the pits of hell with him.

Seonghwa’s rhythm faltered and he shuddered and grunted in bliss as his throbbing cock gushed out streams after streams of piping hot cum that stained your walls with white, shooting straight up to your womb, assuredly knocking you up in the process.

You yelled and moaned one last time. You were so full of him, belly round and swollen with the ungodly amount of cum Seonghwa gracefully gifted you. You were so unbelievably full that you couldn't help but to let it flow out of you and run down your thighs, no matter how much you clenched to keep it all inside.

You were in heaven. This was pure euphoria. A kind of contentment not any amount of spirituality and virtue could ever give you. The kind of happiness you could only experience when you let go of everything you’ve ever known to throw yourself into the arms of the most pleasurable sin of all.

Lust.

***

The next morning when you woke up at dawn with the chirping birds you felt nauseous and disoriented. You looked around the room and found it immaculate. Your habit was not ripped in two, it was neatly folded on the wooden bedside table along with your veil and underwear. The room was clean and neat: no traces of small pieces of orange carrot anywhere or puddles of cum on the wooden floor. And you were wearing a comfortable full length pyjama gown.

In a flash, disjointed memories came back to you. You remembered the anthracite gray suit, the black bull horns, the raven wings, the defined abs, the devilishly handsome good looks, the tempting smirk and the huge thick angry cock and the immense forbidden pleasure that came along with it.

You sat up and looked behind you hastily, the wall was perfectly smooth, no scrapes of the black horns and most of all the crucifix was perfectly normal, hanging right side up.

You spotted the small, thin, intact carrot next to your pillow and sighed in relief. Yes, you had sinned but you knew if you confessed and prayed hard enough God would forgive you. Afterall, you had never done such a thing and it was shameful and wrong, yes, but they were far greater sins than this one, like selling your soul to the Sin of Lust and bearing his child… You shook your head, chasing away the blurry memory of the nightmare, feeling a weird tingly build up in your lower stomach as you saw flashes of the evil smirks and the huge monstrous-

“It was a dream” you said out loud, sighing, hoping the sound of your own voice would prevent your mind from imagining more of the sinful imagery. “Just a meaningless dream” you told yourself again.

Convinced the soreness between your legs was only due to masturbating for the first time, that the nausea was nothing to worry about and that the spasm inside your belly were benign little cramps.

Seonghwa smirked in victory as he looked at you through the pierced purple smoke. He made it. He broke you beyond repair. He went, won and marked you. And soon he would back to take what you had promised him: an offspring and your soul, body and mind, you.

“See you soon, y/n” he chuckled.

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a/n: leave a comment or even a cheeky lil reblog if you liked it <3

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