#and you know what I'm proud of it

[ionomycin]

Forest Guardians

[mintjeru]

"but there is nothing more beautiful and terrifying than innocence."

open for better quality | no reposts

[son1c]

shadow and maria from my original shatterspace :)

far from the illustrious view of the stars, the ARK-tic research station where they both live is cold and bleak. going outside is strictly prohibited, since the project's existence is top secret. (plus, jupiter, who retains maria's illness from canon, would not fare well out there in the snow and ice for long.)

the environment has had an impact on jupiter's attitude. it's tough to stay positive when you're stuck in a freezer! callisto tries his hardest to cheer her up, though.

[accirax]

🌟🍬🤖🎈Congrats to Wonderlands x Showtime for finishing their 4x4!🌟🍬🤖🎈

[historicity-was-already-taken]

wisdom i've accumulated in my almost-35 years on this planet: success = hard work + privilege + luck

never let this late capitalist hustle culture bullshit convince you that your lack of "success" is your fault.

[otiksimr]

Just gonna really quickly challenge all the artists that follow my blog (or just see this in general) to pick out an animal and draw it as a wof dragon. Like draw the dragon as funky as you can- make a real complex hybrid- whatever just make it as similar to that animal as possible.

Anyways, I was not expecting to get so many recommendations. Thank you though if you did send me one!

[derpychocho]

"And with a flick of his wrist, he exposes his SOUL to you."

True Love // Happy 2nd anniversary, Dating Start!

The visual novel where you can fall in love with Sans the skeleton!

[trensu]

Some more of stasis in darkness. you have no idea how many times i've written this scene. i discarded three or four different versions of it before i came up with this one. i feel like this version worked best for the characters. or at least i hope they feel in character.

It was the ninth night.

Steve took his usual spot before the shrine. He greeted his god as he had before but decided tonight was going to be a quiet night. He didn’t have much to say so he’d simply let his faith burn bright in his silent vigil.

Hours passed, and again the strange man didn’t show up as he had been the nights prior. This time, Steve didn’t bother putting it off. He decided to do a perimeter check. As he stood, however, a cacophony of squeaks and beating wings filled the air.

A massive colony of bats burst into the clearing. They moved shockingly fast as they neared Steve and the shrine. Steve ducked his head under his arms but let the bats come. He ignored the little Robin in his head yelling about rabies. He couldn’t risk hurting one of his god’s favored creatures. 

There were so many of them, more than Steve had ever seen in his life. They flew round and round dropping altitude until they coalesced at the foot of the shrine. The din stopped as abruptly as it had started. When Steve could no longer hear a single squeak or feel wings zipping overhead, he lowered his arms. Cautiously, he lifted his head, eyes drawn immediately to the shrine to check for any damage. 

Not a single bat remained. Instead, the strange man sat, cross legged, at the statue’s feet. He wore a dark cloak comprised of deep navies, bruising purples, and an inky black. Each color slowly, gracefully shifted and melted one into another, again and again before Steve’s eyes. Flecks of light littered it in familiar formations. The clasp that secured it around the man was a bright silvery white. It was shaped exactly the same as the waning moon above. 

“Ta-da!” the man said, fluttering his hands in a showman’s gesture.

Steve took in the man's appearance. The ratty travel clothes, the cloak of constellations and its clasp…Steve leapt back in shock. Everything suddenly clicked into place very quickly to paint a very unflattering picture of himself. He whirled around. He couldn't face the shrine. 

"Shit," Steve's voice was loud with a stunned sort of panic as he remembered the events of the past week. He paced anxiously. "Shit, shit. It was y–the whole time, you were–FUCK. How did I miss–and even if you weren't you, you were still a traveler in the night and I treated you like–I'm a fucking idiot. I'm the stupidest man alive, how–"

"Probably from getting dropped on the head so much, huh?" the man asked with that same annoyingly self-satisfied voice he'd been using every night. The annoying stranger with his annoying questions and his stupid smug tone.

Mindlessly, Steve turned on his heel to glare at the man. He jabbed an accusatory finger in his direction, frustration flaring.

"Oh, you can fuck right off, man," Steve replied reflexively. "I am having a crisis!"

A split second later, he felt his stomach drop to his feet. This wasn't just a stranger talking. He backpedaled hard.

"Oh, ohhhh no, I didn't mean that, Lord, I-I wasn't thinking."

The man exploded into raucous laughter. It shook his whole body until he doubled over from the strength of it. He continued to laugh when he toppled off the side of his perch and landed with a thunk on the ground. The man sat up, wheezing and wiping at his face, mirth clearly keeping him in a choke-hold. 

"Oh, far be it for me to interrupt your crisis," the Lord of Night forced out amidst the laughter. He flapped a hand at him. "Please, continue."

The god attempted to regain composure but all that did was turn his full bellied guffaws into snorting giggles. Steve waited, his anxiety fading in the face of the god’s genuine good humor. It took another couple of minutes before the god calmed enough to pop back to his feet and climb back onto the plinth. The man made himself comfortable at the foot of his own statue as he had before.

"So how goes the crisis?" he asked mischievously.

"On hold," Steve said evenly, fighting back the start of a smile. The man said nothing but still radiated amusement. Steve crossed his arms over his chest. "Are you really the Lord of Night?"

"The one and only!"

“And you’ve been here the whole time?”

“Yep!”

“So why didn’t you say anything? I mean, I talked to you every night! I don’t get it.” Steve paused as a thought occurred to him. “Was this a test?”

“Uh…yes? Yes.”

Steve narrowed his eyes. The god shifted in his seated position. It reminded Steve of the time Dustin shattered a jar of his most expensive hair product and tried to hide it. Dustin had squirmed guiltily under Steve’s expectant gaze until he confessed to his dastardly crime. Apparently, the method worked on gods as well.

“Okay, it started more as an attempt to get you to leave me alone,” the Lord of Night admitted. 

“Oh.” It came out blankly, which Steve was grateful for, because he felt like he’d been kicked in the chest by a mule. “You don’t want me.”

Steve wasn't sure why he was surprised. This was a classic Steve problem. He tamped down the old familiar sting of rejection. Steve knew going in that this had been a possibility. It was a god’s right to reject an offering.

“I never wanted any holy warriors,” the Lord of Night corrected. “Hence the attempt to make you leave.” 

Steve supposed that lessened the blow a little. It was an impersonal rejection. That was better, right? 

"If you didn't want me as your holy warrior you could've just said," Steve said ruefully.

“You seemed pretty determined to come back, though.”

“Only because I thought you’d want to, like, use me for something. If you’d asked me to, I would’ve stopped bothering you. I could’ve gotten someone else who could worship you better,” Steve said, trying to keep his voice light and unaffected.

"Yeah, I really don’t think you could have,” the Lord of Night said in a strained tone. 

“No, I mean it,” Steve insisted. “I told you, Robin and Dustin wanted to come along. They would make sure you’re not alone again. You would like them. They pick up on stuff faster than me. They’d be good worshipers.”

“That’s not what I meant. Your worship was, uh, it was…no, nevermind, forget that. The thing is, the more you came back the more I…” 

The Lord of Night trailed off. He tugged his dark starry cloak around him tighter. When he spoke again, he seemed to have switched tracks entirely. 

"Look, I don't know exactly how the holy warrior thing works, but you guys do quests for your gods, right?"

"Well, yeah, that's the whole point. We're your boots on the ground. We do acts in your service to spread your faith. Like priests but less boring." 

The god snorted which made Steve grin.

"Priests are so boring," the Lord of Night agreed. 

Things went quiet again. The cloak of constellations made it hard to see his god, but Steve got the impression that the Lord of Night was fidgeting. Steve remembered the conversation from a few nights before, about nervousness and not knowing what to do. Steve fell back on his social graces, his good old Harrington charm, and carefully picked something that would encourage the god to speak.

"I can't believe I didn’t see it,” Steve said, with a self-deprecating shake of his head. “Like, I know I'm not the smartest guy around but I didn't think I was that slow."

"Don't worry about it,” the god replied instantly, breaking out of his internal reverie. “That's not on you. I didn't want you to notice, so you didn't."

"Oh."

"Yep. And, it's not like I have a face to remember, so, y'know. You're good."

"I guess that does make me feel bet–wait. What do you mean you don’t have a face?” Steve squinted at the Lord of Night.

“Well, I don’t know if you’ve heard, but I lost my name,” the Lord of Night said with a hint of irony. “No name, no face.”

“But I saw it,” Steve insisted.

“Did you?” the Lord of Night asked, amused. He slid off the plinth and walked up to Steve until he was only three feet away. The god lowered his hood without any flourish. “What do I look like?”

Steve squinted at him studiously. The god was pale as moonlight and had hair as dark as the night itself; as for the rest of him…it was the strangest thing. Steve knew there was a pair of eyes under a brow. There was a nose above a mouth. He knew the right features were in the right places. However, he couldn’t tell if the eyes were dark or pale. He couldn’t say whether the nose was large or small. The mouth could be thin or it could be full. 

“I don’t know,” Steve relented. The Lord of Night nodded.

“Yeah, me neither.”

“Is…is that the quest? To find your name?” Steve asked, dread pooling in his belly. That quest would involve a lot of reading and…he didn’t even know. Language things? General research, for sure. None of which Steve was particularly good at.

“That’s a bit presumptuous of you,” the Lord of Night smirked. He didn't give Steve a chance to apologize. “But yeah, there’s something important that needs to be done. I’m not strong enough to do it myself and I’m running out of time to do it.”

“I can do it,” Steve responded. “I’ll do it for you, my Lord.”

“You don’t even know what the quest is,” the god said wistfully.

“But I know you wouldn’t ask me to do anything cruel or unfair.”

“You’re unbelievable,” the Lord of Night muttered under his breath. Steve didn’t think he was supposed to hear that so he kept quiet. In a louder voice, the god resumed. “Okay, are you sure you wanna do this? Be a holy warrior? Because you could be literally anything else. You told me you liked cooking during one of your prayer sessions. You could open up a restaurant! Restaurant owners don’t usually die in the line of duty or whatever.”

Steve resisted the urge to roll his eyes. This is what Steve trained for, what he was good at, and he wanted to put those skills to use.

“You said you needed help to do something important. I want to be the one that helps you. I want to be your warrior. I can do it, I know I can. I won’t let you down.” Steve bit his lip uncertainly as a thought struck him. "If you don't think I'm worthy–"

“It’s not about worthiness!" The god cut in. "Do you know what it would mean to be my holy warrior? The weight of the night sky, with all the stars and the moon, will be on your shoulders for as long as you walk the land. I don’t know much about holy warriors but I remember this: there’s no take-backs. You can’t just quit and go off to become something else later.”

“Yes, I know. We covered this in lectures at school. It wasn’t all swordplay," Steve said impatiently. "I did think about it once I finished training and I decided if I could find a god to pledge myself to, I didn't want to be anything else. Then I found you."

“...Okay. If you're sure, then okay,” the Lord of Night said decisively. “So what do I have to do? How do I make you mine?”

“Um, I think it’s different from god to god?” Steve stuttered, heart thumping at the god’s words. “But I guess we can do our own thing? I’m pretty sure it’s the intent that matters most.”

"I can work with that." The Lord of Night gestured downward. "Kneel, kneel. I have an idea of what to say.

"Should I close my eyes or something?" Steve asked once he’d gotten to his knees.

"Nah, this is good," Lord Night said. 

The god squared his shoulders and straightened his spine. Then, something miraculous happened. The Lord of Night spoke his name aloud.

“Steve Harrington.”

It was the first time his god ever said his name; it was stunning in a way Steve couldn’t begin to comprehend. A bolt of lightning down his spine. A roaring forge in his chest. A whirlwind in his lungs. It felt like all of that simultaneously, yet nothing like that at all. How could pitiful human speech hope to encompass the intensity of a god’s undivided attention; his god’s specific acknowledgement of a primitive life such as his? 

Tears sprang unbidden in Steve’s eyes. He became aware how lowly and frail his own body was, and how utterly insignificant his existence was in the vastness of the stars in the sky. He curled forward, hiding his face and making himself as small as he could. He could not bear his god seeing his mortal failings and imperfections. It would invite an exquisite, holy agony Steve surely wouldn’t survive. 

“Oh,” the Lord of Night breathed. “I forgot how that could feel to a human. I’ll try not to do it again.”

“No,” the word tore out of Steve’s throat without any conscious thought. “No, please. Please, my Lord.”

Steve didn’t even know what he was begging for because the singular attention of a god was agony but the thought of his god leaving him filled him with terror. He shattered, left with no purchase save his god’s words. Then there were arms around him, pulling him close, and enveloping him in constellations. Steve’s vision blurred. Great, heaving sobs overcame him as though ripped from his very soul. The Lord of Night murmured comfortingly.

“Alright, there we go,” he said softly. “I’m here, Steve. I see you in the night, every night. The stars shine for you, Steve. The moon turns its face for you. I’m with you, Steve.”

The words crashed into him with the unrelenting force of ocean waves. They swept his footing from underneath him and sent him spinning endlessly, endlessly. They lifted him upwards and sent him plummeting down until he was deep below the surface where the currents finally slowed. Surrounded by eternally burning stars, he was left weightless and suspended in an unearthly calm. The words rang in his skull with the surety and strength only a celestial being could claim.

Somewhere between an eternity and no time at all, Steve came back to himself feeling overexerted, though he hadn’t moved from where he knelt. Steve’s heart and soul had been scraped out of his chest, put between a pestle and mortar before getting unceremoniously dumped back in his weak flesh, but in a weirdly good way. His sobs subsided. His breathing came in and out slowly.

Eventually the cloak of constellations released him as well. He blinked his eyes open gradually to see his god kneeling before him at arm's length, palms resting on Steve's shoulders. Steve felt a stab of shame at having brought his god down low to a mortal's level. 

“Sorry. I’m sorry,” Steve croaked. “Do you still–? Can I still be–?”

“No, yeah,” the Lord of Night said straight away. “That was on me. Not your fault at all. I’m out of practice interacting with mortals."

The god’s words lost the gravitas from before in a way that would've been jarring if it weren't such a relief. He finally broke his hold on Steve. He got to his feet, somewhat gracelessly. 

"Let’s try that again?” the Lord of Night asked.

Steve cleared his throat. He straightened up where he knelt and kept himself still. He nodded to show he was ready.

“Steve Harrington,” the god said. This time hearing his name on his god’s lips was exhilarating but at a level a human could bear. “Do you swear to spread my values in the minds and hearts of mortals, through action and word?”

“I swear.”

“Then will you, Steve Harrington, do me the honor of being my sword and shield? Will you carry my crest through all your agonies and all your joys?”

“Yes.”

For a breathless moment, their words hung in the air, resonating through the night with finality. The Lord of Night reached out and gently traced something on Steve's forehead. Steve assumed it was his god's sigil, though neither Robin or Dustin could find any images of it so he couldn't be sure. It felt like an incomplete circle with a squiggle running through it. The god stepped back to observe him when he was done.

The stillness that followed, ironically, rattled Steve’s bones with relief and joy that it was done. His god had accepted him. Then the Lord of Night shuffled his feet in an awkward, shy manner.

“Cool,” said the Lord of Night.

The heaviness and tension brought down by the gravity of their oath ruptured with that single world, and Steve could do nothing but dissolve in helpless, giddy giggles.

[inkskinned]

maybe i'm a bitch but if i hear you go out of your way to judge someone's weight, i immediately lose trust in you & will probably forever find you a little unbearable . yes also the little floating bar over my head will start reading [hostile]. this is natural and u caused it.

[miinsang]

ateez friendships | woosan for @sanchelinz

[superfallingstars]

Snapetober Day 15: Serpent

[ghostlykeyes]

I'm feeling so totally normal about Denji so like denji with reader who both are hella virgins trying to have sex for the first time

virgin Denji so sweet LOVE him

Warnings: 18+ Denji, explicit sex, AFAB pronouns/anatomy, Denji's POV.

dare et accipere.

Denji knows there’s not much he can give you. 

He’s supposed to be listening to you, and he really, really wants to. Your voice is coming out in a low, gentle hum. It’s buzzing around his head like a late-night summer moth tempted by a flickering streetlight, but never quite landing. But your hand, your hand has landed. It’s resting on his knee and he thinks the warmth that’s seeping into his skin through his pants might set him on fire. Blistering, intense, somehow not unpleasant. But it’s enough to scramble his brain, to cross the wires a little. 

So he’s supposed to be looking at you, listening to you, but he can’t stop thinking about how his room looks. His room, of all things. There was a time when he would have been so glad to have a girl in his room, he wouldn’t have thought about anything except girl and room and ohmygod ohmygod ohmygod and no amount of dirty laundry would poke through her feminine smokescreen. But you, you’re different. 

His eyes flicker around the room: underneath you both, a mattress, the sheets just washed but freckled with permanent stains. On his nightstand a candle Nayuta made at school, allegedly smelling like warm vanilla (really, it just stinks like somebody forgot cookies in the oven). There’s a curtain, bought second-hand, fixed over his bedroom window with thumbtacks. Over everything a dusting of dog hair. And it’s enough for him, really, it is. 

But he can’t stop thinking that you, you deserve new clean sheets, romantic music filling the air instead of the hum of an air conditioner, a whole damn department-store-section of candles. The weight of everything he doesn’t have presses into his bones. It digs its thumbs into his chest. He starts to think, what the hell, you deserve more than him—

And then your soft hand rubs against his cheek. His thoughts evaporate. Poof. 

“Denji? What are you thinking about, honey?”

“Um,” he says, very eloquently. Denji goes completely pink. His hands won’t stop moving in his lap. He rips off a sharp corner of fingernail, lets it tumble out of his fingers and onto the floor. If he keeps picking at his fingernails, he’s going to start bleeding. That thought doesn’t save his cuticles. Denji squishes a loose tag on his index finger. He pulls.

You giggle. Your soft hands close over his, prying his fingers apart. Denji’s lips quirk. You squeeze him in your grip, and sigh. 

“It’s okay to be nervous,” you tell him. You squeeze his chin between your soft, soft fingers and lift his chin until your cool breath fans his burning cheeks. The smile you give him is gentle, delicate, like a flower blooming. And god, his chest tightens. His heart hums in his chest, growling chainsaw-loud. The buzzing in his ears threatens to swallow him whole. “I’m nervous too,” you admit. “But I want it to be you.”

“I want it to be you, too,” he blurts out. Thank god his brain can go on autopilot sometimes because he feels so pleasantly tangled up, he has no idea how to form words right now. But, well, who needs words, anyway. Your eyes flutter shut, and you keep his chin trapped between your fingers. You blow a sigh out of your mouth, like somehow maybe your nerves will go out with it. 

He knows he’s supposed to close his eyes to kiss—he knows that’s a rule that someone somewhere made up, and everyone is supposed to follow. But he can’t help it. He wants to watch you as long as he can. You’re starting to lean in. He catches the softest hint of your shampoo. Again, on autopilot, his hand finds your cheek. Denji’s rough thumb skims over your cheekbone. You smile then, so bright, and you timidly catch your bottom lip between your teeth, and holy, holy, holy shit, Denji thinks. A shiver shakes down his spine. 

“You’re so pretty,” he murmurs. And you deserve everything, absolutely everything, but you’re here with him. Denji. With his chainsaw heart and his bare-walled room and his hands that don’t know how to touch a woman (yet). His hand trembles a little against your warm cheek. His throat’s dry, and so is his mouth, dry like cotton. He’s nervous, yes, because it’s you, and because it’s sex. He’s nervous but dear god he’s ready, the way his pants are too tight, almost choking him and the pounding in his chest all shout ready, ready, never been so ready. So it kills him to stop but ugh, you’re such a nice pretty girl. You really do deserve at least one candle.

“Wait wait wait,” he chokes. Your eyes fly open. Your spine straightens as you pull back, so fast and half-frantic you could almost call it ‘recoiling’.

“Did I do something wrong…?” There’s nervousness sticking to your voice. 

“No,” Denji assures quickly, squeezing your hand. “Just hold on a second, okay? And close yer eyes again.” Your shoulders relax. The gentle, timid smile blooms back across your face. 

Denji scrambles up from the bed. There’s a fluorescent pink lighter lounging next to Nayuta’s candle and he snatches it up. Flicking it quickly, he holds the flame to the wick and smiles lopsided as the flame catches. He lets the lighter clatter out of his hand back onto the desk. Denji plops back onto the bed beside you, catching one of your hands in his. 

“Ta-da,” he announces. You open your eyes and he presents the lit candle with an enthusiastic wiggle of his fingers. You make a showy gasp and cover your open mouth.

“Wow! All for me?” You tease, and bump his shoulder with yours. He grins. Tease all you like, but you can’t hide how hard you’re blushing or the way that just one candle makes your eyes light up like a whole damn Christmas tree. Denji feels a warmth start in the center of his chest and spread out, all gentle-like. It pools in his stomach, his fingers, his cheeks.

“Well, yeah,” he says. “Anything for my girl.”

‘My girl’ makes you melt into him. You rest your head on his shoulder and sigh, looking up at him with those pretty-pretty eyes. He brushes a kiss right between your eyebrows, and lingers there a moment. Because yes he wants to sleep with you, and yes maybe he imagined losing his virginity as something sloppy, sweaty, pulled away from him quick and unceremoniously like a band-aid. But Nayuta is at a sleepover and you have nothing but time tonight, so why rush? Why not savor it?

(No. He’s not stalling because he’s nervous. No way.)

“This feels kinda sappy,” you laugh, rippling through the silence. Denji squishes your hand.

“Yeah,” he agrees, smiling lopsided. “It kinda does, doesn’t it? Who woulda thought I could be so romantic?”

“I like it, though,” you assure.

“Good,” he says.

“But I wanna have sex with you now. If that’s okay.”

“Oh,” he says. A beat passes. His brain is in total-meltdown mode. Not a single coherent thought to speak of. Autopilot takes control again and makes him inch closer to you on the mattress. You both ignore the squeaking. “Yeah, that would be awesome.”

You take his face in your hands, holding him still, and lean forward to gently push your lips together. It’s a quiet, sweet peck before you pull away. Once. Twice. On kiss three Denji flicks his tongue out to push against your lips and relishes in your quiet gasp. He’s kissed a handful of girls and he’s definitely read his fair share of dirty manga, enough to have good instincts. He lifts a palm to caress your babysoft face before dragging it back to tangle in your hair. His other hand finds your left breast and camps out there. 

“Denji,” you sigh into his open mouth, in an airy kind of voice that goes straight to his dick. His fist tightens in your hair and he’s desperate, he’s got to taste you. He slips his tongue inside your mouth and curls it along the roof of your mouth. Denji licks a shuddering stripe across you. Your back arches, mashing your tit into his hand. He whines. 

You chew on his bottom lip, timid enough that he barely feels your teeth. But it’s enough to make his hands tremble against you. 

“Mmmmm,” he hums, deep and dark and low. The prick is enough to remind him he’s got hands and, oh shit, he should probably be doing something with them. He unwinds his fist from your hair, trails it slowly down your neck until you shudder into his touch. Denji’s hand cups your other breast. Experimental, he squishes them, savors how they mold to his hands. 

“That’s…” you’re stammering, breathing your unsteady words into the inch of space between your mouth and his. 

“Good, baby?” Denji double checks. 

You nod before slamming your mouth back against his, almost splitting his lip on his needlepoint teeth. The sting makes him palm your chest again, probably harder than he should. But you make a sweet little desperate sound that he swallows whole, a keening note that he takes as encouragement. Timid, he runs his fingers along the firm shell of your bra, feeling where the material starts and ends under the thin fabric of your shirt.

“You can take it off,” you pull away from his mouth to whisper in the shell of his ear. And then, more firmly, “I want you to take it off”

Denji doesn’t need to be told twice. He snatches the loose hem of your shirt and pulls, yanking it off you so quickly it almost gets stuck on your arms. You splutter, teasingly.

“Can you take it off faster?” You giggle, helping him unsnare the fabric from your armpit.

“Can always try!” He says brightly, offering you a wide, cheesy grin. You roll your eyes. He finally gets the damn shirt loose and slides it quickly off your arm, tossing it over his shoulder.

“No thanks, I don’t need you to rip all my shirts to shreds.”

“Mmmmm,” he bumps his nose against yours, rubs against you affectionately. Denji’s calloused palms skim down your arms. His fingers tingle like electricity, like TV static. “I dunno, it seems like a good idea to me.”

You don’t answer. Instead, you grip his shoulders, steadying yourself before swinging a leg over his waist. Your knee brushes against his dick and he whines, full on whines, and he doesn’t even have it in him to be embarrassed. Denji sinks one hand into your soft thigh. His other spreads out over your spine, helping you balance until you’re comfortably straddling him. Your thighs, god, your soft, squishy, wonderful thighs, how did he get so lucky, squeeze against his legs, and the heat explodes across him like a wildfire. Tender, you press a light kiss to the top of his head and sigh. The inhale pushes your tits right into his face. He almost cums right then and there.

“Fuck,” he breathes. The word fans hot air across your collarbone and your skin explodes into goosebumps. Denji’s hands scramble across your back, looking for your bra clasp. You arch into his touch.

“Up,” you murmur into his ear, earning a shudder. “And to the left.”

He follows your instructions well and hones in on the snaps. Denji’s fingers tremble but it doesn’t stop him from unclasping your bra. His fingernails scrap lightly against your skin and right there, he’s got it. The bra snaps open, and you slip the straps off.

Denji’s seen your boobs twice. The first time, when you’d broken into an apartment-complex swimming pool and lost your bikini top trying to dunk his head underwater. The second time, you’d been sharing the bathroom, changing clothes. He’d made to (reluctantly) slip out as soon as you’d started unzipping your shorts but you’d given him a wink, squeezed past him, and locked the bathroom door. “I don’t mind if you stay,” you’d whispered against the shell of his ear. 

He’s jerked off to both events multiple times but holy shit, this? With you breathing heavy, topless, and straddling him? Your hard nipples just inches from his face, your cheeks warm and blushing, you biting your lip as if to say I hope you like them? This takes the absolute fucking cake. He’s gonna be touching himself to this for months.

Denji’s hands shoot to your breasts. For a moment, he just holds them gently, still, his eyes wide and cheeks cherry-red. 

“Um,” he chokes out. “Baby, I dunno if I’m gonna last long enough to…”

You giggle all sweet, taking his face in your hands. 

“It’s okay if you don’t,” you reassure. “We have time, right? I just want to make you feel good.” 

Okay, you’re a certified fucking angel. It’s not the first time he’s thought that. But it is the first time he’s thought that while you’re half-naked on top of him, letting him feel up your chest. And despite the fact that oh, the way you said that just made him so painfully rock hard he thinks he could cum right then and there if his boxers shift the right way, he plans on showing you. That you’re an angel. That he needs you. That he loves you.

With a jerky motion, Denji maneuvers his hands back to your thighs and pivots you. You fall back onto the mattress with a squeal. Denji quickly scrambles over top of you, until his knees settle next to your thighs and his hands press into the mattress, just above your shoulders. Your doe eyes blink up at him. For a second he looms over you, committing the sight of you all laid out—all for him—to memory. 

He leans in until his nose brushes against yours, offers you a butterfly-light kiss. 

“C’mon, baby,” he breathes. “Wouldn’t be fair if I just laid back n’ let you make me feel good…” 

He attacks your neck like he’s starving. The wet suck of his lips trailing down along your jugular tugs a moan out of your mouth and fuck, you’ve gotta stop making noises like that or he really is going to cum in his pants. Denji nips your skin, gently, of course. The sharp edge of his shark-teeth is enough to make you bleed. He doesn’t want that—a hickey or two, though? That could be nice, he thinks as he sucks the dip between your collarbones. Something dark purple, something in the shape of his lips that reminds you of him.

“Lemme make you feel good, too,” he rumbles against your skin. You squirm up against him, your thigh brushing his cock. He sucks in a breath and drops his forehead to the dip between your tits. His fucking nerves are on fire. Denji lingers there for a moment, waits for the heartbeat-throbbing in his dick to calm down. 

He tries to think of the unsexiest thing he can, just to hold on. Paying taxes, bringing the dogs to the vet, pulling hair out of the shower drain. It only half-works because no matter how much he tries to think about something else, the smell of your body wash, the music of your heavy breathing, and the heat radiating from your naked tits coalesces into a mind-bending smokescreen. Fuck, you’re so sexy.

Denji fills his hands with your chest and licks a lazy stripe down the center of your torso. Your back arches into him. As he gets lower you tremble, quaking and moaning and oh, Denji thinks, I could do this all freakin’ day. His tongue stills against the barrier of your shorts (still on, unfortunately). He looks up at you. Denji raises an eyebrow, questioning, but your head is thrown back and you’re moaning his name—won’t stop moaning it between heavy breaths—so he takes that as an okay to pop the button. 

Your shorts slide off you easily, and you lift your legs to help him tug the fabric off. Denji’s hit with the sudden scent of ‘girl’. He can’t describe it, but it’s a little musky, a little sweet. A little wet spot seeps through the thin fabric of your underwear. The sight of you in your panties generates a shiver that reverberates from the top of his spine, down through every nerve in his crotch.

He breathes out, shaky. Denji gulps. He’s not afraid, really, or even nervous anymore. His raging hormones vaporized every single feeling except the need to be inside you. It’s just that he’s dreamed of having you like this so long, ever since the first time he saw you, and he’s half afraid that any second he’s going to wake up in a tangle of sticky sheets. Still single, still a hopeless virgin, still no ‘you’ to give himself to. He could weep at the thought.

Denji shakes the thoughts out of his head. He leans towards your core, until he can feel and smell and holy shit, almost taste you. Carefully, he hooks his index finger in the bridge of your panties. You whimper as his finger brushes the hot skin beneath, skimming over your lips. He swallows a moan at the sound.

“Can I—”

“Yes, Den, please, just touch me,” you whine, lifting your hips toward him. He bites his lip at your desperate attempt for more friction. Just for a second he reflects on how lucky he is, on how badly you want him. But he’s not going to keep you waiting.

Denji tugs your panties down. He doesn’t bother to slip them off your legs. They hang crooked off your left ankle and you open your mouth, probably to tease him. You don’t get the chance—his warm mouth is on you before you can speak. Your quip melts into a deep moan. 

Denji shudders between your legs. Your thighs bracket his head, squeezing tightly. He doesn’t mind the pressure. It keeps him grounded, a little, because holyfuck his head is spinning. Nothing in the world could glue back all the little pieces your pussy’s taste has broken him into. Perfectperfectperfect. His rough hands keep your legs lifted, trapping you at an angle that lets him lick you unrestricted. Experimentally, he slides his tongue from the top to the bottom. He tries to note which places make you squirm hardest. He tries, but fuck, he can’t make anything stick in his brain. So he lets his tongue take over. 

It’s sloppy at first. Not that it matters much. Everywhere he licks and sucks turns you into a trembling mess, whining and fisting the sheets. He dips his tongue inside. Denji’s eyes roll back. Holy. Shit. You’re so warm he could just fucking live down here, pushing his tongue into you all day.

A few weeks ago you’d mentioned sex and Denji, determined not to fuck it up with his inexperience, clumsy hands, had called Kishibe. (Yes, Kishibe, and yes, ew. Asking for sex tips from that man was the weirdest conversation he’d ever had.) Despite the fact Denji doesn’t remember much of what the old man said (how is he supposed to think with his tongue in your cunt), he distinctly remembers this; pay attention to your clitoris. 

Denji’s tongue maps the wet skin. In the back of his mind, he’s half-concerned he won’t find it. Gentle, hungry, he licks towards the top of your pussy, higher, higher, until—fucking ow. If the way you just pulled his hair says anything, he found it. 

“Relaaaaaax,” he breathes against your hot pussy. You whine from above him. “I’m gonna go slow, okay? Lemme know if it’s too much.” 

Closing his eyes, Denji says a silent prayer you won’t ever tell him to stop, because this may be his new favorite place on earth. Then he timidly closes his mouth around your sensitive knot. Encouraging, you gasp his name.

Denji takes his time, sucking softly. (It’s not a doorbell, kid, Kishibe’s voice rattles through his brain. When you’re eating a lady out you need to be gentle.) He savors the little whines his tongue shakes out of you. You’re writhing around his mouth like a live wire.

Timid, Denji removes a hand from your thigh and spreads your lips. If you’re going to take his dick (supposing he even makes it that long) he needs to stretch you out. Slowly, he presses his index finger into your pussy. He sucks in a breath as your muscles clench around him. The wetness, the pressure. Denji imagines the heat and the softness closing around his cock. He groans from somewhere deep, deep in his lungs. His nerves are spitting electricity.

“This okay?” He asks, mouth still flush to your cunt. You take a second to breathe and adjust around his finger before blowing out a breath.

“Yeah, it’s good. It feels tight but…it’s not bad.”

“M gonna put another finger in, ‘kay?” 

You nod. His middle finger prods your entrance, stilling against the hot flesh for a second. Denji works it in, and yeah, he thought it was tight before, but now? The pressure against his fingers is almost unreal. A shiver tumbles down his spine. His skin explodes in goosebumps. 

The last tidbit of information Kishibe gave him burns through his brain—make her cum before you get in, alright? Once you’re really fucking you’re not going to last long enough to make her feel anything. Denji needs to be in you soon or he’s going to be sitting there, sheepish , cum staining the front of his pants. 

So he picks up his pace. He works his fingers in and out, gentle, but still fast enough that it makes you whine and clench around him. He moves around you clockwise and counter-clockwise, then his tongue starts spelling out the alphabet. And then once he’s through that and you’re yelling his name at the ceiling, but you’re not quite there, he starts his grocery list. He’s halfway through ‘seaweed nori’ before you unleash this noise, this deep, dark call that’s almost scary (but definitely sexy) and squeeze your thighs around his head so tight it makes his neck hurt. 

“Denjidenjidenden, holyshit, that’s so good, Denji,” you scramble strings of curse words and his name. It’s an angel’s choir to his ears. Your body shakes like you’re about to fly apart. He can’t see much of you from where he’s trapped against your pussy but he doesn’t care, this is the best view he could ask for anyway. You’re perfect no matter what angle he’s viewing you from. He lets you ride the orgasm out, lets your breath start to steady and your thighs gradually un-vice from his head.

“Babyyyyy,” you whine. Your voice is so cute and sweet. It drags him from between your legs. He just has to look at those big, worshiping doe eyes you’re giving him. He presses a kiss to your lips and tingles at the way you lap up your own wetness off his mouth. For a virgin, you’re not shy. 

“I…I wanna go down on you, now,” You whisper to him. Denji’s jaw tightens, and his eyes roll back in his head. His hips jerk, completely involuntarily, dragging his throbbing cock against your leg. Electricity surges through his limbs. It’s almost over, right then and there. You move to undo his pants and he lets you, but he grinds a warning through his still-clenched teeth.

“Baby, if you do that, I’m not gonna be able to uh, last long enough to…” You giggle and shimmy both his pants and boxers off in one smooth pull. The air hits his sensitive dick and he whines your name. Half-a-prayer, half-a-plea. Your name sounds so good in his mouth, he thinks through the haze. 

“Okay,” you say lightly. “Next time?”

“Next time,” he says. Or at least he wants to say that, but then your hand closes around his cock and he can’t speak. He groans instead, shoving his head into the crook of your neck. 

You breathe, deep, but your words quiver.

“I think I’m ready, Denji.”

And in his fantasies that’s the moment he sinks into you—the moment he fills you up, the moment that you become his and he becomes yours. 

But he knows that tremble in your voice. It’s the one that haunted you when you asked him out for smoothies, (as a date, you’d squeaked after a second of silence). The one that colored your tone when you called him once, panicked, whispering that a guy might be following you home. You’re scared. 

So he slows down, and he presses all his love into a kiss on the tip of your nose.

“Hey,” he says, taking your face in his hands. “It’s me, okay? Your Denji. Everything’s gonna be okay. If it’s too much we can stop right then ‘n there. Okay, peachy?”

And you giggle, because he only calls you ‘peachy’ when he’s trying to make you laugh. And suddenly, he makes everything okay again. 

“Okay, love,” you nod your head. You reach down between his legs. When your hand finds his dick you give him a loose stroke before lining him up at your wet, soft entrance. The head of his dick brushes against your heat. Denji bites his lip so hard he almost draws blood. He makes a fist in your hair, careful not to pull, and you drop a feather-light kiss to the inside of his wrist. “I’m ready,” you say. This time your voice is steady. He knows you mean it. You’re ready.

Slowly, so slowly, Denji eases his hips forward. You suck in a breath as he just barely pushes in. He knows he needs to be gentle but holy shit. The head of his cock works into your core. It’s so warm and so, so tight. Denji’s head falls forward, his messy hair dragging over your face. The sensation is overwhelming, unbearable almost. Every single one of his nerves is in overdrive. It feels like they’re all poking into each other with a million needles but somehow it’s hot and it’s electric and it’s absolute bliss. 

You’re vice-tight around him and Denji doesn’t even think he’s going to fit. Carefully, he inches it in, panting. Your pussy’s squeezing him tighter than he’s ever squeezed himself jerking off. Is this what it’s going to feel like every time? The thought sends a pins-and-needles shock through his entire groin and he moans, half a grunt, half your name. 

“I—fuck—I don’ wanna hurt you,” he breathes, his fists white-knuckling the sheets. “Is this okay?”

“Yeah,” you keen back, almost breathless, boneless. “It’s okay, Den. I can take you.”

He gulps at that, and pushes his cock in. It takes every fucking ounce of restraint in his body not to start humping you like an animal because god. above. This is the best he’s felt, ever, in his life. And it’s better than he could ever have imagined, it’s better than any dirty magazine could make it look and sound. If this is sex then he’s never putting his life in danger again. He’s got to keep living on no matter what just so that he can come home at the end of the day and fuck you.

You’re mind-numbingly tight. Denji grits his teeth around your name and eases his hips back. It’s hard for girls, sometimes, he remembers, and there’s no way he’s going to let himself fuck you, hard, unrestrained, squash his virginity into nothingness. Not if it hurts you. 

“This is good,” you breathe airily, and press your fingernails into his back. 

“Mmmmmmm,” Denji moans, pushing back into you. Words are impossible. He rocks his hips back-and-forth, back-and-forth. The way it’s tugging pretty little noises out of you is divine and shit, he can’t help thrusting into you a little faster, a little more greedy. You feed his passion by screaming his name. Your pussy squeezes around him. Denji gulps. The tightness is bunching up in his abdomen, deep and low inside him. It’s coming—what, it's been like a minute, tops?—but he can’t stop it, the pleasure’s fucking smashing through him. It’s tidal-waving through his limbs, rippling everywhere but collecting in his groin. Denji moans your name, tries to warn you, “baby, baby I’m gonna—” and then he’s jerking out of you, sudden and almost severe. His fist closes around his dick, pumping, and he’s cumming. Hard and fast and thick and all over your pretty tummy.

He can’t even be embarrassed because what the fuck this feels sosososo good, it’s fucking unimaginable and he is never, ever, ever going to jerk off again. It’s sex, with you, only sex all sex forever and ever sex. Denji whimpers your name, clinging on to you like you’re the only thing that might stop him from exploding right out of his body. Everything’s all tingly and his nerves are static and his vision’s white and, just, fuuuuuuuck. There’s no words to describe this. But he hopes the way he’s whining into your neck and his whole body’s writing tells you plain and clear how good you make him feel.

After the lightbulb-flash of that orgasm, he’s completely jellybones. Denji collapses, thankfully, far enough to your left that he only flops on your arm and doesn’t crush all of you. You giggle, giddy with sex and love. You snag his boxers from the corner of the bed and wipe the cum off your tummy with them, and shit, he really should’ve gotten you a towel but he literally cannot fucking move. You snuggle up underneath his arm and he accepts you, pulling you into his chest. Despite the dusting of sweat, despite the smell of sex, despite your wetness slicking both your thighs, he can’t get close enough to you. He squeezes you, plants a kiss to the top of your head. You both settle in, tangled in his bedsheet, and let your breathing even out.

“Thank you,” you hum after a while, nuzzling him. You’re so sincere it makes his heart melt in his chest a little. Because, what could you ever thank him for? You, sweet you, beautiful you, angelic you? He should bow at your feet just for letting him breathe the same air as you, let alone touch you. He’s about to say that, but you sigh and he knows you’re not done speaking yet so he waits. You walk your fingers along his naked collarbone, just basking in the warmth. “For making that so good for me.” He squeezes you tighter to him, nuzzles into your neck affectionately. “And for, um. For giving me your first time. I know it’s not a big deal for a lot of people, but it felt really special. This, I mean,” and you sigh, and he presses a kiss to the warm, inviting skin of your neck. “...us.” You finish. Denji couldn’t agree more. He’s glad you’re good with words, because him…not so much. But it feels good to hear the way you feel, spoken plainly, put out on display. He feels the same.

“Aw, baby,” he murmurs, and pulls you into him. He wriggles up, maneuvering until his nose presses into the skin of your temple, and his words breeze gently over your ear. “I’m glad I got to do it with you,” he says, and seals his words with a kiss. “Forget my first time, y’know? I’ll give you every single thing I have.”Denji knows he can’t give you much—not everything you deserve, at least. But giving you all of himself seems like a good place to start.

[russquez]

ʜᴀᴘᴘʏ 31ST ʙɪʀᴛʜᴅᴀʏ ᴍᴀʀᴄ ♡

“look at where you are, look at where you started„

[yeyinde]

SEA, SWALLOW ME | Simon Riley x GN!Reader

No one wrenches you open, leaving you raw and exposed, like Simon. A wound that never heals. A sickness that never dissipates. You carry the weight of him between your ribs and thundering heart. A place of safekeeping, protecting this precious knot that gnarls inside of you from everything else out there that might want to hurt it. It thrums now, dizzy with the feeling of him so close to you.

》 WARNINGS: 18+ – MATURE, SMUT | GN!Reader: no use of pronouns, gendered language or anatomy; very soft smut; light breath play/choking but. It serves a narrative purpose.

》 WORD COUNT: 9,4k (of pure, unadulterated nonsense)

》 NOTES: UM. This was meant to subvert standard D/s | Predator/Prey dynamics for Ghost but became a mess of nonsensical metaphors instead.

As far as missions went, this was slated to be amongst the easiest assigned out to your group—a standard hostage rescue of a foreign diplomat. 

It's a sequence you've played out many times over in basic training. The steps, drills, are already ingrained in your memory with minor changes to suit the situation unfolding in a place you'd never been before, and probably will never see again. Rudimentary. Boring, almost. 

The chance of injury was minimal. The probability of death is even infinitesimal. 

And yet—

He pulls you into an alcove in the safe house you've been holed up in for the last twelve hours, alternating between bouts of sleep, and pouring over each minute detail of your roles. 

Price's voice cracked an hour ago. 

It was Gaz who called it with a soft chuff. "Guess that means we're good to go, eh, cap?"

"Off with you, then," he groused, reaching for a bottle of water. "We'll head out in an hour. Be ready." 

You meant to sneak away to the gym and exercise some of the anticipation pooling inside your veins—a physical outlet to exert the antsy feeling that made your fingers tap a soundless beat against your shaking thigh; a post-mission ritual to saturate your brain in those feel-good chemicals caused by the rush of adrenaline. 

But you were stopped by a hand on your wrist. One that snaked through the tenebrous of the storage closet that housed the guns, weapons, and ammunition, all spread out on the walls with a bench in the middle. 

Simon leans back against it, guns spread out on the surface behind him. The hand not curled around your wrist is pressed flat, bare, to the granite top, only inches away from the collection of knives he meticulously tends to before each assignment. 

His sleeves are rolled up to his forearm, ink coloured in a hazy smear of yellow from the lamp spilling across the table in the corner. Your eyes are drawn there first—the shadows cast over the thick veins running along his forearms, hidden beneath the charcoal. 

The other flexes around your wrist, rough skin scorching when it presses against yours. Seeing the bulk of his palm swallowing the entirety of your wrist and half of your hand has your mouth running dry.

There's something about him, about the fold of his massive frame condensing itself into a nook much too small for him to fit, that feeds into a part of your head that aches to fly. To scale mountains, to reach the summit. To be the first person to stand on top of the highest peak, and gaze down at the world shaded in blues, greens, and greys below. 

Staring at Simon fills you with summit fever. 

"Did I scare you?" 

It's hard to rip your gaze away from him with so much of his flesh bared to you. He's usually dressed by now in his jacket and vest. Always prepared for the next slaughter. This—

This is new. Unusual. 

You huff, rolling your eyes toward the domed ceiling, and struggle to stave off the influx of anxiety that gnarls inside of you. A break in the routine. It unsettles you. "Hardly." 

He makes a low, starchy noise in his throat, muffled partially by the balaclava covering his mouth. "That so?"

He runs his thumb over your pulse, drawing your attention to the rapid thud of your heartbeat under his finger. It's a slow, meticulous circle, and his eyes dance with derision when you scoff, a touch embarrassed, and curl your fingers into a fist as if that would somehow stop the thundering in your chest. 

"Whatever," you murmur, defensive. "I drank an espresso. It's just a natural, bodily reaction—"

His hand twitches again, fingers lifting from your skin as he slowly peels away from you. The chill against your flesh makes you shiver, already missing the intensity of his heat. 

"If you say so," he volleys, settling his hand back on the table, palm cupping the thick ledge, fingers tucked under the surface. The motion makes his muscles quiver. 

Goosebumps prickle along your flesh. Your throat runs dry. 

"Got somethin' for you."

It's standard, benign—the words are flat considering the weight behind them, the potency. They're all he'll allow in this brief window of privacy when everyone else is busying themselves with their pre-mission rituals. 

Price leans against the wall in the corner of the room, fingers curled into the straps of his tac-vest. His chin is dipped low, eyes fixed on the table a metre away where the files lay open, floorplans exposed. Despite the evenness of his brow, and the squared set of his shoulders, you can see the weight of everything circling in stormy blue. 

The success of this will be shared amongst everyone, but the loss will be solely his own. 

On the opposite side of the room, Soap picks over every centimetre of your weapons and tactical gear. Scouring every iota in an effort to make sure nothing will fail anyone. 

Gaz, as the youngest, shoulders it all, and pours over the blueprints, committing each exit and entrance point to memory. He won't be caught unawares if a route is compromised. He'll get everyone out to safety. 

By stark contrast, Ghost does nothing. 

He doesn't look over the documents, but he doesn't need to. The blood vessels streaking through jaundiced white speak of a sleepless night staring at the photos of the men you're supposed to hunt down. The people you're supposed to rescue. 

Before he slips on his gloves, you catch ink stains on his thumb and inside his forefinger. The thick scent of gunpowder and oil clings to him. His weapon is sleek: gunmetal grey and cleaned. Meticulous. His attention to detail is unyielding. 

He did everything he was supposed to do last night when he didn't come and sneak into your room.

But he never does. Not before a mission. 

You sometimes wonder if he likes to torture himself with the if only or the what if that lingers whenever you split apart, left to your devices and wholly dependent on yourself for survival. He keeps his distance. Doesn't want, nor need, the distraction.

Some might think it cruel that he avoids you like you're already caught in the clutch of the Reaper; skin shading a sickly grey as your blood rots from within. But you know him. You know Simon. 

And when he hands you your gun, you can feel that it's already been loaded, and tended to. There's a fine sheen of oil glued to the tight folds of metal from where his meticulous cleaning couldn't reach. 

Your tac-vest is packed with everything he deems necessary for your own survival (and even a few things he doesn't but you do). 

He hands you a knife, too—one you know is from his personal collection. It fits into the palm of your hand like it was made for you, and you wonder—with a small smile blooming across your cheeks—how long he took looking over them before picking this one. A perfect fit. 

"Thank you," you murmur, low and soft. No one is paying attention to you at all—there is no time to do so when you can feel the seconds ticking down. "I'll do my best not to get your pretty knife dirty." 

He snorts. "Defeats the purpose, doesn't it? And it ain't mine." 

"My knife, then." 

You glance down at the smooth curve of the blade, sharpened to a deadly point, and twist it in your hand to stare at the handle. It's black. Two stems jut out from the hilt, extended a bit longer than the blade. It's triangular and pitched in the centre before tapering off to a sharp point. It's the length of your forearm. Longer than the tactical knives issued by the weapons branch in the SAS. Bound in leather. The stitches look much too similar to the ones he threaded through your gaping skin in Jakarta. 

"Fairbairn-Sykes," you say, glancing up at him. "Thought they stopped using these?"

He rolls one massive shoulder. A man with his girth shrugging insouciantly is a strange sight. You almost expect to hear the distant roar of an avalanche. 

"Much better'in the cheap ones they give you."

"Oh, yeah? Kinda hard to hide, though—"

"If you don't want it—" 

Simon reaches for it, but you pull it close to your chest, grinning. 

"You can't take my knife away." 

He huffs, lowering his hand back to the table. His eyes are piercing. Heavy. "Then stop complainin' about it."

A fly buzzes by your ear. A bead of sweat drips down the nape of your neck. Something about the look in his dark, shadowed eyes sets your teeth on edge. 

It wells on your tongue, then—soft words not meant to be uttered in a room saturated in contracted death—and the astringent flood strips your enamel until your teeth ache with the urge to let them out, or swallow them down. You wonder what he would say if you let them free. If they slipped from your tongue and filled the room with the stench of your poisonous wants, ones left to rot inside your chest, your throat. 

The burn of them blisters your esophagus, leaving behind open wounds leaking infection into your bloodstream, into the vessels that run to your lungs, your heart. 

The tremendous weight of them makes your knees quiver, struggling to stay afloat in the thick atmosphere that sits, oppressive and unignorable, between you. 

It's all one-sided, of course—a hunger felt only by you. He doesn't acknowledge the gossamer of tension that bleeds into the room, wrapping tight around your neck like a phantom noose. To Simon, nothing is amiss; nothing is wrong—

And it isn't, you think. This spooling knot inside of you, wound tight into a ball, isn't wrong. It isn't bad to feel this way, but it's terrifying. 

Being with Simon is a bit like climbing a mountain. 

But there is scaling one in a harness, secured safe and sound with ropes and pitons, and then there is this: 

A free solo up the side of a chossy. 

The chalk on the tips of your fingers clumps together under the stickiness of your damp palm. One slip, and you'll be a wreck at the bottom before you can even try to hold on. 

Jagged rock at the bottom gnashes its teeth together in anticipation, eagerly waiting its chance to grind your flesh into pulp, and offer your spilled blood to Thanatos. 

Melodramatic, maybe, but something about Ghost brings out a sense of morbid sentimentality from within you. The feeling is a harsh juxtaposition to who the man really is. 

A mythological being who lingers in the foreground like a psychopomp, but gives you whittled knives from his personal collection, carefully whet to a fine point, and cracks stupid jokes in a deadpan manner as if the world around you wasn't raining bullets and reeking of gun cotton. 

Your gaze wavers, falls. There are a lot of things you are meant to say now, and many more that are forbidden. None of them brim through the humus that sticks to your throat. Disturbed dirt in a lonely graveyard. 

A flurry of motion snags your attention. In the corner of the room, you catch sight of the fly sitting on top of an intricate web. It runs its hands together, waiting. Mischievous. A morsel of food is still tangled in white lace. It feasts without worry, unaware of its impending demise as its feet glue to the threads woven below, shaped like the cracked skulls in a catacomb. 

As the fly feeds, the spider cocks its head up from a darkened crevasse, a multitude of eyes gleaming in the flushed light hanging overhead. 

It waits. 

Poor thing. 

"Thanks," you say again, wrenching your eyes away from the opening maw of the ossuarium in the corner. The sight unnerves you. 

It's not meant to be any more sincere than the first utterance of your gratitude, but you say it—if only to fill the stifling silence, and wonder if that carefully curated mask would shatter into pieces, revealing the bare-faced man (human: flesh, bone; vulnerable) beneath, if you uttered the words pulsing against your vocal cords like a pizzicato. 

He levels you with a flat look as if he, too, hears the whine of c minor screaming in your chest. 

"Hilt is new. Try not to get it dirty." 

You fight a shiver. Force yourself to give some facsimile of a smile in response.

"Wouldn't dream of it, Lt."

(A liar.)

You tuck the pretty knife in a tawny leather sheath into your pocket. 

"I'll take good care of it." 

(A thief.)

Behind smeared grey, charcoal black, his eyes narrow. Pensive. Considering. Something rears, lurks. Hidden in shadows. Cut into brimstone. It's the same shade of death that only surfaces when he's on the battlefield—no longer Simon, but—

"See that you don't." 

A ghost. 

(Just warmer than most.)

Your eyes stray back to the corner of the room where the black spider prowls closer to the hapless fly struggling to be free. 

Yeah, you think, a touch dazed. Your fingers tighten around the leather-bound hilt of the blade. Me, too. 

You dirty his knife. 

The chance for an injury is minor, but never zero. You find this out when someone grabs you from behind, knife pressed to your jugular. There is no fear, no terror. 

Just—

Embarrassment. Stupid. You know better than to leave your six unchecked. 

It ends with a paper-thin cut to your skin, and your knife buried in flesh. 

The hilt is bloodied. Authentic leather stained red. Grotesque. Garish. You can't tear your eyes away from the droplets that stain the handle. 

Plastic, usually. You know this because you looked it up. Polymer-covered wood. 

The leather was handmade. Sewn with thick, black thread. Glued to the stripped wood. 

Wrapped up pretty just for you. 

(Just for you.)

And you ruined it like you promised you wouldn't. 

(A liar. A thief.)

It makes you wince, and the burn in your chest hurts more than the sting in your neck. You thought you heard death and his fiddle this morning, but who knew his boney, rotted fingers would wrap around your wrists like it was the hilt of a conductor's baton. 

Simon doesn't say anything, but there's a weight in his silence. A soundless ticking in the background as he watches, placid, as you make your way to him. 

Nails bite into your palm until they're sticky with the blood that pools between your fingers. It's meant to be grounding. Replacing one hurt with another, but the biggest injury is the one to your pride, your ego. It's burned, blistered, and not even the swell of something you feel roiling through you at the sight of Simon, steady and sturdy—faultless despite the roaring that seems to echo around, the scream of the tide trying to pull you under—is able to quell the sting of humiliation. 

Your hands are stained just like them. Scars mattered across soft tissue, and despite the way they spill over your flesh like Orion, you still feel the pull of torn flesh beneath your armour. 

This—

This was an accident. Unfortunate. Unforgiving. It lingers between aching teeth, and tastes of raw wire. 

You won't let the shame dip its talons into your pride despite the bruise forming on the side of your veneer. 

Your chin lifts: defiant, almost. As if waiting for him to say something. 

Anger, you think, is easier to wield than culpability. 

There are a number of derisive, droll words he can pin you with, and your mind runs through the possibilities, the ones you heard barked out over the comms. Things like: rookie mistakes. Shoulda checked your six. How'd this happen? Thought you were better than this. Another scar to add to your collection, then? Better stop before you end up lookin' like me.

It surprises you, then, when he says none of them. 

"Alright?"

His hand lifts, and a weight settles against your jaw, lifting your chin. It's barely a cat scratch, and doesn't even need stitches, but it stings something fierce when he stretches the skin around it. Pulling, tugging. You clench your teeth, swallowing back a wince. 

He catches it, anyway. 

Stupid. 

You wait for the rest. For the or what? that traditionally follows a simple alright, but nothing comes. 

His hand drifts, palm cups the side of your neck, and—

It's indescribable. A rush, maybe. A raw, pulsing wound throbbing inside your throat where his heavy, rough hand sits. A plinth. You can't lower your chin with it in the way. Stuck, you think, and then—

You shiver. It's instinctual. The curve of your neck is vulnerable; a sacred place. Animals protect their jugular, their soft bellies, from attack, and something primal in you tenses up. Waiting for the strike. For the snapping of jowls into your soft skin. 

None come. Stupid. Of course—

"Jus'a little scratch."

His hand leaves almost quickly as it appeared, and you drift aimlessly, unconsciously, after it. 

Snapped out of your strange reverie when Price calls out your name. Paperwork, probably. You've been hurt, and as a response—or a sneaky punishment—you have a mountain of forms to fill out, t's to cross, i's to dot. 

The weight of Ghost's gaze on you is almost as heavy as the heft of his hand, and you linger for a moment in that strange, phantom noose, wondering what it would feel like if he held on just a little bit—

"Go on, then," his chin jerks toward Price. "Get cleaned up." 

Something shifts inside of you. The open of a proverbial floodgate. 

It's instant:

The weight of his palm, the press of his fingers—you feel them against your skin, a phantom whisper. A breath. 

There's something almost comforting about the danger of exposure, you think. About bearing your neck to the biggest predator around. 

It's not an act of submission. You'd never submit to Ghost, much less anyone else, but—

There's a sense of vulnerability there. Trust. 

(It's that unseen edge of danger: a spark of life in a world that's always shades of muted grey, and draped in the folds of calamity. Death sits only a hair's breadth away no matter where you go. So close, you can feel the ghastly chill on your skin; always cold. Always freezing. You can set fire to your flesh, but your teeth still chatter.

For the first time in years, the skin on your neck burns with feverish heat.)

(The warmth fades. You chase it, pressing your fingers flat to your pulse, but still feel the icy drift of the waiting Sheol against your skin.

Cold to the touch once more.)

His fingers ghost along the skin of your wrist, skimming over your pulse. It’s soft. Gentle. A light brush that has no other meaning or purpose except to gain your attention— 

—and oh, doesn’t it just. 

Simon doesn’t let it linger. He pulls his hand away when your chin jerks toward him, and slides them into the pockets of his trousers. Hidden away. Out of reach. 

Your wrist burns. 

"Could've just said hello." 

His eyes are heavy under the hood of his sweatshirt and lined with the grease paint he couldn't scour off. Maybe he never even tried to. Glacier blue framed in ashen blonde. His eyes remind you of the sandstone cliffs that line the Corfu shore. Stark white. Deep blue. 

They're weighed down with something—exhaustion, maybe. The last you'd heard of him, he was chasing after leads that might link you to Shepherd with Gaz (who sent a dry text in the early morning, between the keds and the dad jokes, I don't know how anyone could be scared of this Manc; and: does the man ever sleep, or is he fuelled on Tenzing and spite alone?). And now—

“C’mere.” He murmurs, eyes heavy and lidded, sparking with something sharp, acrid. Humour, you think, heart stuttering in your chest. 

The word is uttered just as softly as the touch against your flesh, and the sound—the phantom memory of the featherlight brush—burns with the heat in his gaze, the warmth that seeps through the gloves, and into your skin. Bone deep. You can feel the burn of him congealing in your cartilage. 

"Finally gonna do me in?" 

It earns you a dry scoff, the barest hint of an eye roll. "If I wanted to, you wouldn't see me coming." 

"You could have just said no, never," you mock, stifling down a grin. "Or—I wouldn't even think about hurting you—"

The rest of the words are cut off when he steps closer. Liquid agility: he moves quickly for a man cut from Everest, sifting through the shadows with no more than a soft thud of his heel clipping the linoleum. Ghost looms before you in a blink, head tilted down to gaze at you. 

His hand lifts, knuckle grazing the swell of your cheek. It's softer than he has any right to be. A warm brush across cold skin. The Agulhas current colliding into the Somali. It ripples across your surface and rattles the rotting bones below. The empty husk of you trembles. 

"No," he murmurs, words distant and warbled under the roaring in your ear. You watch a flicker of something tremble across his face. A frisson shuddering too fast for your sluggish, mortal eyes to discern. 

You can't find the remnants of that ugly, gnarled thing that sometimes stares back at you when he's unaware. A beast hiding in a forgotten bivouac, creeping through the desolate ruins of a travesty that reek of upturned humus. A ghost disinterred from its slumber. 

But when you stare at him, bare-faced and uncertain, you see a darkening edge in the cuts of blue: deep canyons and crevasse that warm when your reflection swims in the glossy curve, wide eyes and parted lips filling the tenebrous, the shadows. 

The things, disentombed, are at rest. Clouded over by the shocked face that swims in endless pools of blue. 

"Never." 

"Oh," you murmur, honeyed sweet and viciously coy. "How sweet of you."

(It takes you a moment to realise he's mocking you.

Your heart still thunders like the words were true.)

Simon cleans the hilt of the knife for you, bare fingers scouring away the blood that stains the leather. He lets you watch as he works, content to lean against the wall in silence as he dabs a cloth in a petri dish filled with cleaning solution, and gently scours the stain from the hide. 

The motions are gentle, and familiarity bleeds into each swipe. This isn't the first time he scrubbed away the rotting blood of a dead man, and some part of you aches, stupid, knowing that it won't be the last. 

A testament to the age-old woes of an occupational hazard. 

Watching him work, silent and unbothered by your intrusion ("of all the bloody gits, you're somehow the least annoying. For now;"), fills you with a strange sense of comfort. Of longing. 

(Domesticity makes your teeth ache and your cheeks burn.)

His knuckles are bruised. He won't tell you how it happened. Doesn't say much outside of, it's done, already, so no sense in worryin' about it. 

You suppose he's right. No sense in dwelling over what you can't change. But the sight of his hands—bruised, cracked and bloodied—makes your mouth dry, and your heart race. 

There's something about his hands that captivate you.  

You can't stop staring at them. The memory of what his molten flesh felt like against your icy skin sears into you. The weight of his palm on your neck. Steady, solid. 

Something predatory had risen from within you, and cocked its head to the side, allowing him an ounce more of your flesh for him to take. To touch. 

A bear will seek the warmest cave to slumber after gorging itself on flesh and bone. A moth will kill itself just to touch an open flame. 

There's something alluring about heat. Flames. Fire. 

(Ghost smells of cedar embers: pyrolysis.

You're cold enough to want to burn the tips of your fingers in the open flame. To immerse yourself in the fire that'll char your flesh, and blacken your bones. Hollowed marrow, now filled with charcoal and brimstone.)

Your knuckles twitch. You curl your fingers into fists by your side. 

"Done," he says, sitting back in the chair, and shaking you from your reverie. 

He turns to you, the knife perched in his upturned palm. The leather is dark, wet, but the blood is gone. 

On the table, the water in the Petri dish is diluted pink. 

You let yourself linger when you reach for the proffered knife, knuckles grazing the rough flesh of warm, bare palm. Greedily catching tendrils of heat on the tips of your fingers. 

"Thanks."

His eyes brim with something you can't name. "Try to keep it clean, or you'll ruin the leather."

You want to say, no one told you to make it pretty for me in the first place, but you don't. You think, instead, of summit fever, of scaling walls. The view from the top of a mountain must be worth the risk, the danger. To see the curve of the earth, and pure blue of the horizon yawning for you. As close to god as a mortal can climb with their bare hands.

It hits you like a punch to the gut. The rock crumbling. The chossy wobbling. Your feet giving away, fingers scraping against the granite as you fall to the rocks below. 

He waits, eyes narrowing in that same shade of pensive contemplation as before. 

You're lingering too much. Touching him too openly. Greedily. You wonder why he lets you when you pull away, shamefaced and meek. 

(How much of it, you wonder, is an act and how much of it is real. Subconscious submission. Meek and unassuming. It rears inside of you, a skittish animal. But you're not scared. Not of him. Never.

A sick joke. Mortal folly. Something inside of you wants to know you're alive, and so—

Roll over and he'll think you're prey.)

You manage a shaky smile, mind racing to the same tremulous crescendo as the arrhythmic drum of your heart.

You don't meet his gaze. Can't when there's a deluge of something—ugly and awful—roaring through you at the sight of his hands, and the scars that cover them. Some, you note, deep enough to knick bone. False starts. Your teeth ache at the sight. Stomach knotting. Churning. 

Something vicious gnarls through the rotten entombment of your living heart. 

Gaze lowered. Neck bared. 

Hook, line—

"Got it, Lt." 

He fractures his fingers in Medellín after chasing a man through the barrios. They're cracked on the concrete when he jumps from the roof and catches it on a metal rod sticking out from the ashlar. 

Those same ones that tilted your jaw back, bones creaking under the strain of his grip.

Ghost doesn't flinch, of course—you don't even know they're broken until he asks for gauze and a splint at the safe house you're holed up in. You just see him swing that same hand out, catching the man by the throat when he tries to slip past. Steady. Solid. An expert killing machine, numbed to the pain, the carnage. 

Simon holds him tight to the wall by his jugular, barking out coarse questions, demanding answers. His voice carries (who are you working for? Where are the others? Gimme a reason not to snap your neck right now—), and you watch it all unfold from your perch on the rafters beside the alcove. 

Watching his six—supposed to be, anyway—but you can't stop staring at the way he dwarfs the other man. The curve of his fingers, long and thick, around his throat. It fits like a scarf. A neck brace. 

Simon's so—

Massive. Undeniably so. And seeing it like this is mesmerising. Hypnotic, almost. 

Whatever the man says is swallowed by the roaring in your ears; the rush of the wind whistling through the houses below. 

He gasps something out, eyes wide, and whatever it is, it makes Simon nod. 

Right, then. Target acquired. 

The moment his jaw snaps shut, information unveiled, he barely has a chance to beg before Simon's hand twitches. 

You hear the sharp snap from your perch above him, and barely have a moment to collect yourself before the man goes limp. Simon pulls away from him, a half step back, and without his support, he falls to the ground with a soft thud. 

His hand falls to his side when the man falls, and it's then, in the fading ochre streaking through the concrete, you notice the drops of red staining his gloves. They catch in the light—a Rorschach of brutality and death—and you can't stop staring at them. At his hands. 

A small thing, really. It's hardly anything noteworthy considering the litres of blood that saturate any of you on a particularly gruesome day, and yet something about the red smears on the back of his hands, staining the worn, faded white metacarpals catches your attention. Eyes glued to the way he shakes his big hand, as if throwing off the sting of split bones. 

(Even with splintered fingers, he was still able to snap a grown man's neck. The thought shouldn't be as enticing as it is.)

Later that night, you sit on your knees between his broad thighs, and gingerly take his bruised hand into yours. The contrast is laughable—his palm alone swallows the entirety of yours up. A cantaloupe to a satsuma. The mental image makes a smile crack on the corner of your mouth, a little twitch. 

He catches it. Always, always—

The hand that isn't several shades of indigo and burgundy lifts, settling on the curve of your jaw. Long, thick fingers splay out, stretching from the slope of your bone just below your ear, down to your chin. The entire expanse of your face cupped in his palm. 

Simon is a big man. Massive. 

(You sometimes forget that he's a direct descendant of Everest.)

Something inside of you gnarls, and tightens. There's always that thread of unease whenever he's juxtaposed to mortal men, to yourself; a lingering remnant, an atavistic fear for the beings that are bigger, broader than yourself. The primal instinct to run from the things that look like they could snap your bones into pieces with just their bare hands. 

It's a small thing, considering, and always washed away by the surge of desire that pools in the space it once occupied. 

He's big. 

(You've always had a fondness for heights.)

"Does it hurt?" 

If it does, he'll never admit to it; but you murmur the words, anyway—if only to feel the power in his hands when you move your jaw under his palm; the gentle resistance that meets you when you lower your chin, and hit the warmth of his skin.

"No," he says, and you fight back a smirk. "Are you finished yet?" 

His question pulls your attention back to his swelling hand, skin already turning glossy from the tumescence of inflammation. Irritated. Pulpy. The knuckles are split in the valleys; a deep divot of plum red. 

He has pretty hands, you think. 

Peached-tinged ivory dusted in a fine layer of coarse, flaxen hair, and broken into streams of scars and welts in a mosaic on his rough skin. Thick veins in ballpoint blue run from his knuckles to his forearms; all intersecting rivers that cross and meld into a confluence near the bend of his elbow. 

It's layered with fading charcoal ink pushed beneath his dermis. 

The slide of his palm is rough with a patchwork of scars that cut through his life line. Jagged little marks from the sharp end of a knife. Pockmarks from cigarettes. 

You like the way they feel on your skin. The weight behind them, the heat. The way they bend, and contort. Curling around the butt of a cigarette as he snipes game plans back and forth with Soap. Then the hilt of a rifle when he steadies it on concrete; playing God with gunmetal. 

The way they curl into loose fists by his sides when he's displeased, tense and ready for the impending alternation. 

How soft they are, then, when he slides the back of his hand against yours. Touches the small of your back, fingers curving around your waist when he pulls you close. 

The way he sometimes holds your face between his palms. 

You cover them up with the starchy gauze before lifting your chin to catch his gaze once again. 

His eyes are stagnant seas. 

You might think it's tranquillity that keeps the midnight blue surface from succumbing to the pull of the moon, and the tides; but that would be a fallacy. A death sentence. 

There's nothing calm in those depths. Below the thin film sits an endless abyss torn up by currents that carry the same inescapable grasp as the churning hydrology of a waterfall. It'll snatch you the moment you plunge into the blue, ripped through the water until it suctions you into a crevasse. 

But—

You hold his gaze as you lift your chin up, notching it higher until his hand slides down your jaw, palm now resting on the side of your neck. 

—You've never been afraid of drowning. 

"That's good," you murmur, tilting your head to the side until your neck is cupped in the palm of his hand. Algae blooms in those unfathomable depths when your pulse thuds against his thumb. "'Cause I was kinda thinking it would be nice to get your hands around my neck one of these days."

His hand twitches against your pulse. 

The usual caustic, derisive barbs and brackish quips are bereft from his hidden lips. You might mistake him as unbothered. Uninterested. But you've always been good at scraping off the veneer people tend to wrap themselves in, burrowing under their dermis, and the flash in those murky eyes—widened slightly at your words until it's a pretty polynya: icy white around a puddle of midnight blue—gives him away. 

His thumb slides down the column of your neck until it's pressed tight to the little jut of your jugular poking through thin, delicate skin. Ashen lashes flutter when you swallow against the soft press of his fingers; eyes flickering down, liquifying, as he takes in the way your muscles tense in his hand. 

He could close the entirety of his palm around the convex curve of your throat, and—if he really wanted to—his thumb and middle finger might meet in the back, nestled just above your spine. 

There's a heat simmering in your veins, stroked by the flex of his fingers as he mulls over what you're asking him for. The smooth, almost pensive way he brushes his thumb over your neck; an unconscious action, you think, with the way his lids dip, cresting over liquid black. 

His silence doesn't last long. Whatever conclusions he draws in that brief lull are tucked away, hidden from view, when he shifts in the old wicker chair.  

He leans forward a little—enough, you note, to hide the growing bulge in his slacks—and lifts his heavy gaze back to yours. 

"That so, pet?" 

It's rare you ever find Simon speechless, but you've known him long enough to know how to catch him off-guard. 

You swallow when his fingers thread through the loose hair along the curve of your ear, scratching his short nails along the skin of your skull. His thumb presses against the spot below your eye, lower lashes spilling over the tip of his finger when you blink up at him, eyes lidded with the weight of your want. Despite the languid, almost kittenish, way you tilt your chin until it's plinthed into his warm palm, your eyes are razors. Sharpened on the whetstone of your conviction. 

"Yes," you breathe. Your tongue runs across your bottom lip, as if chasing the words from lingering in the seam of your teeth. "That's so, Lt."

His fingers twitch at your words, eyes narrowing into those same contemplative slits as before. Then slowly, deliberately, he drags his hand down to rest once more over your jugular.

—sinker. 

Your nails dig into the hard flesh of his bicep until the skin breaks: crescent moons pool beneath the tips of your fingers. Red, raw. 

It makes him suck in a slow breath, the sound heavy in your ear. 

"Keep that up," he rasps, a livewire pressing into your naked chest. "And I'll have to do somethin' about it, pet." 

It's not an empty threat. You know Simon enough by now to know he never says anything he doesn't mean. But you still toss your head back, laughter slipping from your blood-red lips. High, you think, on the thrill of him. 

"Yeah? Promises, promises, Lt—"

A flash in liquid black. Napalm embers. 

One hand lifts, leaving the back of your knee. You know what's coming. Asked him for it, even, but it still takes you by surprise when his massive hand slips between your chin and neck, fingers curling until he has a perfect grip of your throat in his palm. Your head is forced back, pulse beats against his thumb; a frightened bird struggling in the grip of a predator. 

He isn't squeezing—not yet—but the hold he has on you is firm. 

You meet his stare, quivering in his arms. 

"Lay back." 

A slight pressure. You gasp. He feels the inhale under his hand, the thick swallow you take when he begins to push you down slowly. It makes him groan again when you lock up around his cock, tight and throbbing like the pulse under his fingers. 

"That's it." He holds you against the pillow. You don't test his grip, but you know it's ironclad. You're shackled to the bed. At his mercy.  

Tears burn your eyes. It's not fear, panic. The moisture leaking into the crease of your eyelids is involuntary. You want to tell him this, to let him know you want this, want his hand on your vulnerable neck.

You gasp quietly, the air barely slipping past the curl of his fingers—naked, warm, rough—on your skin. 

"Simon—"

"Relax," his voice is liquid sin; velvet draped over a kindling fire. The crackle floods you until you're panting, breathless. "C'mon…you can take it." 

Your fingers unfurl from his biceps, tips soothing along the irritated flesh, ghosting over scars—bullets, fire, knives, cigarettes: his flesh is a mosaic of history you're barred to ever uncover—but the way his muscles coil under the softness of your hands makes your chest lurch. 

You trail them down until you reach the thick forearm bent over your sweat-slicked chest, nails catching on the throbbing veins until you hear the rasp of his breath under the mask. 

Your palm is tiny, almost fragile, in comparison to his wrist. Wrapping your fingers around the thick of him is like holding onto the end of a bat. Your hands can only cup the width; a perfect crescent. 

It's that—the immense power, the strength of him, buzzing under his storied skin that makes your belly burn with the fever of your want. He's so—

Massive. 

Strong.

You can feel it, now. Fingers brush over the veins on the back of his hand, a seal around your throat, and you know that he's holding back. Has to. He could snap your neck with an ease that should terrify you. You've watched these same hands throw knives into men's throats. Watched them wrap around their necks, crushing the bones until the struggling ceased with a gut-wrenching snap, and they fell, limp, to the floor. 

His eyes flutter when you swallow, when your small, delicate throat works under his clutch. 

He has the capacity to ruin: 

Simon—Ghost—can break your neck without a flinch. 

And yet—

You meet his eyes, lips trembling, and then you slowly tip your head back. 

Submission. You give yourself to him wholly. 

(A toil—

come closer, pretty thing.)

Simon's breath stutters in his chest, his hand tenses. Eyes widened. The whites are stained with tendrils of red. 

His next breath is a snarl that bludgeons into your core. He leans down, cock jarring something inside of you that has the cosmos burning into your retinas. 

When he speaks, his words are raw. Scoured with sandpaper. It's almost animalistic when he growls your name, adds:

"So good for me, pet."

He matches the praise with a sharp jerk of his hips, sinking in deep until you can feel him throbbing in your sternum. 

When you clench, spasming around him, his fingers flex. 

It starts slow. 

He readjusts his grip until you're a perfect fit in the palm of his hand. A little bird begging for respite in the claw of a hungry lion. 

Ghost has never been a man of mercy. 

(And you'd long learned to stop trying to barter with a hurricane.)

There is no rhythm to the way he fucks you. An interrogation expert, skilled in torture, he keeps you on the edge the whole time. Left to do nothing but cling to him, and take it. All of it. Whatever he wants to give you. 

You suck in a breath, but it is stopped when his hand squeezes. Tighter, now. The air in your lungs is compressed, forced out until they're empty. 

His pulse beats against your throat. His heat is an inferno, a fever; he presses into you until you're panting, head soporific and gummy under the intense blaze of his body. Hard, firm: there is no give when you notch your knees to his ribs, pressing your caps into his flesh. He's unmovable. Unshakeable. 

Liquid pleasure spumes from that unfathomably deep place he batters into with his cock, and the tips of his fingers as he burrows both into your flesh. 

It's too much—

His hand drops from your knee, resting on the pillow beside your head. It brings him closer—now, almost chest to chest—and smothers the air from your lungs completely. His eyes, however, steal the last wisp of your breath away. 

Standing on the edge of a singularity, gazing into the event horizon. Black holes ready to swallow you whole. 

Bereft of oxygen, you begin to crumble in his hold. 

"That's it," he rasps, fingers tightening. "Fuck—you're so tight—gonna strangle me, pet—"

Your breath is clinched by the palm of his hand. Futile gasps, hiccups, spill from your lips as he shifts inside of you, bracing his knees on the bed, and driving forward until you see stars. Until you claw at his wrist, back arching like a bow. 

The cosmos tastes of gunfire. Smoke. The heavy scent clogs your throat until you're choking on the embers that seep from his skin.

"I'm not done with you, pet." His timbre pitches, low and sultry; a rough graze. A scraped knee. "I could do this for days."

It makes you whimper. Makes you thrash. He means it, too. Always. Always. He'll hold you down until you're drowning in it. 

Your head swims. Hypoxia bleeds into your eyes. 

"Simon…" you whimper when his hips slot into yours. "Simon. I'm—"

The words are swallowed down when he ruts into you again, driven mad by the clutch of your body, and the vulnerable way you look at him. His head drops, moussed hair tickling your nose. 

"Fuck, pet—," it's chiselled out of him. A warning, perhaps. Don't. Don't say any more. Don't—

His voice is polar when it drifts over you. The chill alone freezes the words in your throat. 

"You like this, don't you?" Detached. Distant. He can't let himself feel the quiver in your voice, the ache in your throat. If he lets himself have this, even a meagre amount of it—

You don't think he'll be able to let go. 

The words are tucked back into the pocket carved out in your ribs just for them. They'll sit until he's ready, until the storm in his Rorschach eyes dissipates—if, of course, it ever does. You'll wait for however long that might be, even if it lasts a lifetime. 

(closer, now—)

Your fingers spray wide over his skin, soothing and gentle—calm pets over a ruffled plumage—until you feel the tension bleed from his coiled muscles; softening back into the pliancy you've come to expect from him. 

He'll run if you're not careful. Flee. Disentangle himself from the weaved knots spooling between the fibrils of your bodies, atoms merging and moulding together in a joined entity. Severe himself even if it means losing limbs. 

You think of old dogs, strays. The ones that weave through the villages with matted fur, and battle scars; the wizened, grizzled muzzles from a short lifetime on the run. Wild, feral. Touches that don't cause hurt are bewilderingly foreign—the idea of a hand that doesn't maim, doesn't break is as unfamiliar to them as living inside of a home. 

The only way to gain their trust is patience. Perseverance. 

And so, you pull back. Let him breathe. 

"I love it, Simon."

The breathy utterance falling from your lips makes him twitch deep inside of you, a groan spilling out of the cage of his chest when he feels the vibrations of his given name against his naked palm. 

"Fuckin' hell, pet—," you might call it a snarl, a growl; a mangled curse in your likeness dipped in the palpable ache of his pleasure. 

He says nothing more. A man of little words and heavy actions, he shows you what he won't say, what he can't. 

His cock hits something deep inside that makes you see white; a nebula of bliss pooling deep inside of you until you're spasming over the absurd thickness of him. 

Ghost holds it for a moment, and it's that—the midnight hour pooling in black, covered in grease paint, and clothed under a thick balaclava—that, the subtle way he takes, takes, that makes you all too aware of who is fucking you right now. 

You're not fucking Simon. It's Ghost. Deadly. Dangerous. His eyes gleam in the light; dark and empty. Black holes pulling you in. 

He drags you to the edge until your eyes cross—hazy and unfocused, slipping into that blurred realm of semi-consciousness—and it's when you begin to slip down that precipice, head numbed and full of him, he pulls back. 

His cock bludgeons into you, seated deep, and when the head kisses the deepest part of you, grinding sharp, and intense, his grip on your neck eases. 

Air floods your lungs so quickly it hurts.

His name rushes out of you on the deep exhale, a wrecked, aching plea. It sounds like a hymn when you breathe it out, and the reverence of it makes him shudder. Makes his hand clench, and his cock throb. 

You feel it all. The deep twitch inside of you. The spasm of his knuckles. The way the air clicks in his throat, catching in his larynx. A thick swallow. Another spasm. You take it all. Everything. 

No one wrenches you open, leaving you raw and exposed, like Simon. A wound that never heals. A sickness that never dissipates. You carry the weight of him between your ribs and thundering heart. A place of safekeeping, protecting this precious knot that gnarls inside of you from everything else out there that might want to hurt it. It thrums now, dizzy with the feeling of him so close to you. 

His hand lifts from your thigh, reaching down to snag both of your wrists in the wide expanse of his palm. He drags them up, arched high above your head on the pillow stained with your sweat. The brassbound grip of his hold, locking you tight in the cup of his hand when he presses them into the pillow steals the last vestiges of air from your lungs. 

The hold on your neck eases. His long, thick fingers brush over the smooth column of your throat. You suck in a deep breath, letting it fill the vacancy of your lungs, and take the rich, dewy scent of him in until it clots to the fibrils inside. 

Filled, you think, to the brim with him.

He smells of chemise, tonyon, and dried hawthorn. Wet chaparral after a wildfire scorched the thicket to cinder and ash. 

With him perched above you, now drenched in the fullness of him—his smell, his touch, the way he sounds when he fits deep inside of you—you find the once unutterable words again. 

They've been buoying up and down for months now, maybe even years. Always left to rot in their esophageal prison, but as your airways open up, as this moment of utter vulnerability and underlying trust brims inside of you, hotter than the bliss burning through your core, they slip out, tangled up in the way you breathe his name. 

The orison rings with the palpable weight of your wants, oiled in the gossamer of your pleasure. It lingers in the scant space between you. 

Simon shudders as it tickles against his skin. A featherlight whisper over naked flesh stained with the brine of sex. 

You gaze up at him, burning the sight of him arched above you like the fruition of your yearning carved in flesh and bone, and a part of you selfishly hopes the barbed hooks of those words you're barred from saying sink into his pale flesh. Piercing deep enough to sink into his bloodstream. 

Infectious. Incurable. 

It's dark, and awful, and full of that ugly longing that makes your teeth ache to mark him up for the world to see, to know, that he's been conquered, claimed. Stupid. Silly. Infantile. You can't own a person, can't chain them to you through ichor and offerings, and yet—

Ghost groans when your teeth find purchase in the meat of his shoulder, a rough noise that rattles through your empty bones, and fills the barren space where humanity once beat. 

—You spill his blood on the altar. A sacrificial offering. Yours to keep. 

"Fuck," he rasps, the word sticking to the side of his raw throat. "Tryin'a give me a new scar, pet? Don't got enough already?"

Despite the weight of the words, they're uttered with a caveat that's almost indiscernible had you not the wherewithal to know him as intimately as you do. Equivalency bleeds in the vowels. 

It comes as no great surprise, then, when he huffs in your ear, dips his chin, and then sinks his teeth into your pulse point, just above the place where his thumb rests. 

(Matching offerings. A tangled web.)

The sharp sting condenses into a blistering pleasure: a damnable bliss. It's the victory of your acquisition, the satisfaction of your merger. Your release bludgeons into you—a mix of euphoria and pain—and the world around you wobbles, narrows. There's a pinpoint where only the hazy shadow of ashen hair fills your periphery. The dark silhouette of a man you itch to pry open and burrow inside. 

A muted noise spills from the back of your throat. His name, maybe (Simon, Simon, Simon), but it's swallowed by his wet groan—blood-drenched and bitter. 

Maybe it's the bitter tang of you on his tongue, or the dribble of red on the corners of your mouth, caught when he flickers his gaze up to your own, catching the smear of his blood staining your lips, but he shudders above you. Rumbling like an earthquake. The clash of plates grinding together. It splits you down the middle, and shakes the chill from your bones until you're a molten mess of liquified limbs: polymer bones, bubbling blood. 

You melt into the mattress below with a hymn of his name—a blasphemous orison that has no place amongst the debauchery of sex-soaked sheets, and blood-stained teeth, but fits like a second skin when it brushes past your lips. 

Simon follows. He says your name—a rough and gritty howl in the back of his throat—and then he's burying himself so deep inside of you that something breaks apart, gives, and the consuming hole, the vacuum he wrought, is filled with him. Him, him. A void. A cenote. 

A gaping chasm of rot, need. Unquenchable.

"Fuck—" he snarls like a beast, the words crushing your ribcage, and leaking brimstone in your empty marrow. "Feels so fuckin' good, pet—"

There's something alluringly victorious about catching the biggest predator in the pen. A man made of death now bowing at the knees with just a flash of vulnerability; the slightest tilt of your delicate neck. 

A string coils around your finger, pulling taut when you tug. 

Bones ache when you move. Muscles scream when you swallow. Still, you lean forward, and syphon the heat from his skin, the blood from his veins. 

Your spoils to keep, wrapped up prettily inside a diaphanous web. 

Your nails rake across his flesh when you pull him close, curling around him in a spooled knot. When you grin, you feel the thick film of blood on your teeth. Vicious, victorious. "We match now, Simon." 

He might run.

But you've always been good at running: a long-distance sprinter in perpetual motion.

(You'll catch up, no matter where he goes.)

And when he breathes your name through the wet fabric of his mask, trembling with his release, you know that some things are worth chasing after. 

"You, uh… got anything to tell me?"

Gaz can't keep his eyes from straying to the moulted bruise on your neck—a startling smear of charcoal, flaxen, and indigo, broken in a perfect crescent of teeth—and each glance feels like a physical touch to your sensitive, inflamed skin.

It's childish. Immature. 

(You wear it proudly, flaunting your win to the world.)

"Not really," you shrug, body buzzing with heat. It simmers in your veins now. Syphoned warmth that spools in your bloodstream, leaks from your marrow. "Just tamed a stray over the weekend. You know how it is."

There's a strange cut in melted brown. A look you're much too familiar with. One might mistake it as condemnation, scorn, but you know Gaz. The quirk of his lips gives him away. 

"A stray, huh?" He intones contemplatively, timbre breezy, light, as he was mentioning the weather in Birmingham. Light drizzle, should clear up in the aft'. "Don't come aggin' to me when this backfires on you, yeah? Some never learn to stop biting." 

Gaz pointedly looks out toward the table where Ghost and Price pour over another set of documents—shoulders drawn tight as they toss ideas and plans back and forth—before turning back to you. 

"But I guess you know all about that already."

The barb in his tone—equal parts admonishing, and scathingly facetious—prickles against your skin. You offer a small smile, a languid shrug, and let your gaze drift, dragged back to Ghost. 

His hands are wrapped in white, his mask pulled over his neck, hiding your mark from the world. Another scar on top of a storied history of others, but far kinder than anything else he'd ever received. 

It prickles in your gums when you see him, and makes heat fill your chest when his eyes list to you, to Gaz, as if he can feel your stare, even when you're tucked away in a hidden crevasse, watching, waiting.

He won't come closer. Not when everyone else is around, but you catch the hunger in his gaze when you tilt your chin, exposing the soft, vulnerable curve of your neck, baring the bruise for him to see. It's rough, abrading. His eyes scrape over the varicoloured smear with a rapacious greediness that burrows under your skin. 

"I'm learning," you murmur, words muted, heavy with something that tastes like triumph when it slips out. "Baby steps, right?"

Ghost turns away first, tearing his gaze from the bruise on your neck, muscles tensing as he ducks his head, and forces his attention back to Price. 

In the corner of the room, a spider reaps the spoils of its fruit: a webbed sarcophagus around an exhausted fly that has long since given up on the struggle to get free. 

It opens its maw, fangs glinting in the jaundiced light.

Vicious, victorious: it feasts. 

(You drag your tongue over your warm lips, and feel the stirrings of hunger gnarl inside you once more.)

[lyxchen]

@karin-in-action requested Pia and Esther dressed up for Halloween and it gave me ideas so here you go <33

[emeraldotter]

ice pop