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yeyinde · 1 year

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IN DREAMS | Price x GN!Reader

Sweet dreams. Warm knuckles. The ghost of your lips pressing against his crown. He never tells you he doesn't sleep enough, but somehow you just know.

》 WARNINGS: 18+ – MATURE, SMUT | GN!Reader: no use of pronouns, gendered language or anatomy; very soft smut; soft John Price; established couple; gratuitous fluff (does this count as fluff????)

》 WORD COUNT: 4,6K

》 NOTES: Since there were no gender specifications, I kept everything as vague as possible for the descriptions of MC so this could (hopefully!) be easily read as Gen Neutral Reader, Fem Reader, Male Reader, or whatever you prefer. I did my best to exercise as much of the angst out of this as possible but still found myself having to slap my fingers from typing out legions of hurt. This is my BEST attempt at fluff. Sorry.

This is wholly dedicated to this anon!!! I hope you feel better! 🖤

Waking, he finds, is often easier than falling asleep.

It's a quick descent into cognisance, the dream he had—long forgotten, never remembered—fading into smoke in the back of his head. The popcorned wall of his ceiling takes its place. A water stain in the corner—coffee brown. A crack above his head. The hairline fracture is just a small river of black that cuts through off-white.

Falling asleep takes ages, aeons. Lying on his pillow for hours without feeling the talons of sleep dip into his temple.

Silence is consuming. Crushing. It makes the threads of his thoughts echo in the recess of his mind, bouncing off the walls until they bruise. It leaves its mark in the shape of burning eyes, restlessness.

Cureless insomnia.

It's easier with someone else. You.

Price isn't a man who needs much outside of a stiff drink or a rich cigar. Cures to an age-old conundrum in the form of vice—vices because Price was never a man who could just stop at one—but nothing batters the errant thoughts into quiet disinterest quite like you sleeping beside him.

The noises you make are loud enough to drown out the ghosts in his head. Soft snores, the rustle of sheets. Your arm draped over his broad chest keeps him locked to the mattress, forced to forego his usual nighttime ritual of rising after trying—and failing—to fall asleep after a few hours. You stop him when he'd normally pour himself another drink, light a cigar on the deck, and watch the ethereal gloom of midnight swell over this little part of Liverpool he calls home.

Keep him in check.

Though, sometimes, it doesn't work, and he lays awake all night staring at the damned ceiling while you curl up against his side, chasing lavender in your bare palm (a recurring dream, you tell him, and he tries to remember when he last slept long enough to truly have one. He comes up short each time.)

He rises before you, always. Doesn't have the heart to tell you he doesn't sleep. That he stares at the ageing canvass of the ceiling, mind stuck in an endless loop of inanities that are not worth losing sleep but still rake across his mind with a viciousness he knows won't go away until morning, when he wakes in a daze. A fog.

So, when you ask him how it was, running rheum from your eyes, he lies and says it was okay.

But he slept last night. Knows it because he dreamed.

Falling lavender. Knuckles warm, soft against his temple. A voice—susurrus, low; the sibilant echo of sweet dreams whispered against his ear.

Sweet dreams.

Sleep, as an insomniac, is always a double-edged sword. No matter how many hours he spends chasing REM, that fickle mistress, she always evades him in the end. Dancing just out of reach.

He wakes up feeling worse each time. Over-exhaustion. The paradoxical conundrum of being too tired to sleep.

He feels the same clutch of evanescent slumber tangles through his lashes, making his lids too heavy to open, but it's dulled. Lessened.

Price forces himself to keep his eyes open, staring at the blurry ceiling above. He wakes to this sight every morning. A familiar ritual. Three blinks. He watches the ceiling gradually grow clearer.

His hand threads across the sheets, and where he expects to find the warmth of your skin, he instead meets empty space. The sheets are already leaking the heat you left behind.

Price blinks, lashing clinging together from the sleep crystallising along the crease of his eyes. He has a headache needling behind his brow, a tension building from lack of sleep, and—

His tired eyes slide from the empty bed to the half-smoked cigar sitting in the ashtray. The empty glass of scotch beside it.

He's found a cure for woes in the form of a stiff drink—scotch, neat; and a side of spring water—and a perfectly rolled cigar. Vices, of course: the kind that rots his insides, and stains his teeth.

Cirrhosis. Emphysema. All the ugly little warnings on the back of a tobacco box.

But it numbs the ache in his bones, and the ghosts in his head, so he considers it an equivalent exchange.

(Just one that takes more than its fair share when he doesn't oblige by the rules.)

There is a respite from the steadily growing throb behind his left eye when he grinds the heel of his palm into his eyelids. A brief moment of fleeting pleasure. It rears when he pulls his hand away, letting them fall to the sheets.

Today feels a little off-kilter.

Without you grumbling about sleeping in beside him, peacefully chasing after lavender, and the same dream clotting behind his eyelids, he feels distinctly out of place.

His hand slides over to your spot, fingers curling around the cooling sheets. The blankets are tucked in around him.

Sweet dreams. Warm knuckles. The ghost of your lips pressing against his crown.

He never tells you he doesn't sleep enough, but somehow you just know.

You're not hard to find. He can hear the rattle of the old pipes as you shower; the hiss of the water hitting the title.

Lured in like a beacon, a siren's call, he follows the breadcrumbs that lead him to you.

Your silhouette is a dark line against the old curtain he keeps meaning to replace, but even the shadow of you seems to dampen the maligned feeling curling in his gut.

A sight, he thinks, for sore, tired eyes.

He rasps on the doorframe, announcing his presence. You scare easily, he finds, and he'd rather not get a bottle of your shampoo tossed at his head for the trouble.

The curtain peels back. You greet him through the cracks, blinking owlishly through the rivulets running down your forehead.

"Room for one more?"

A wide grin stretches across your face as you nod eagerly before disappearing behind the curtain once more. The spray of the shower swallows the echo of your laughter.

"Thought you were gonna sleep all day, old man," you call, loud and exaggerated. He watches your arms lift over your head, fingers threading over your scalp.

You think you're funny. Charming.

(He does, too—he'll never admit it, of course, but he laughs the hardest when it's just you and him; when the world around you fades into the background, and all he can hear is your effervescent giggles over the words you uttered, the jokes that always come after the punchline. The ones that fall flat, that miss.

It's funnier, you say. When it isn't supposed to be, you know?)

You wander through life with ease in your gait, a sense of peace in your mien like the world and everything in it is your best friend. Comfortable in your own skin, content with your lot in life. Happy, he thinks, just to be included. To be a part of it.

Happy to have him in it.

"Might have," he mutters, affection blooming in the gnarled remains of his heart.

You bring a sense of chaos to his life that feels like watching a nasty storm brew in the distance from the sanctity of his window. Laughter that sounds like a whip of lightning striking the pavement, close enough to smell the ozone, to have his neck prickle with danger, but far enough to feel safe. A voice that echoes like a thunderclap. Pelting hail. A torrential rainfall. A gale.

(All his life he was told to run from storms, but you make him want to chase the calamity brewing in the distance; to feel the hazard against his skin.)

"But I couldn't sleep without you snorin' in my ear."

"I do not—!"

Your words of indignation taper off into a yelp when he pulls the curtain back fully, letting the chill of the mid-spring morning drift over your slick skin. Goosebumps ripple across your trembling flesh—no longer a tantalising tease behind plastic (ohh, you cooed when you first saw the simple navy and blue striped curtain. Very predictable, cap; very you) but bared to his eager, hungry eyes.

He takes a moment to appreciate the sight that greets him, a low rumble spreading through his chest. "Well, don't you look cosy?"

"It's my day off," you whine, shivering when he draws out getting into the water behind you. "Let me pamper myself a little bit."

"Don't you get pampered enough?"

"Do I?"

His hands settle on your waist, nose bushing against the wet space between your ear. When he breathes in, the familiar scent of you floods his lungs. Warm milk. Honey sweet. A touch of loam, something bitter. The acrid tang of your sweat still clinging to your hairline. It reminds him of sex. Of your dewy skin when he has you pressed into the mattress, head burrowed into his neck, he fucks into the tight clutch of your willing body.

He stirs. Want smouldering low and heavy in his belly. You feel it when he presses tight against your back, but there's no rush. He feels no urgency to seek release. To get off. He just—

Wants.

Always, really. There is this distant buzz of desire that sits low in his belly whenever you're around. A constant simmer.

Wanting you, he finds, is the same as craving a draw of nicotine behind his teeth.

"Always," he rasps, nose running down the length of your neck. The warm spray of the shower rouses him from the last tendrils of sleep, clearing the congealed rheum around his lash line. "You always get pampered, love."

When you hum, he feels it reverberate through his chest. "You're slacking today then, John."

His hands slide from their perch against your hips, your quivering stomach. Soft skin, slick from the water, flutters under his touch. He dips his hand down to cup your sex in the palm of his hand, feeling the heat of you bleed into his skin.

"How do you want to be pampered then, love?"

You lean back against his chest, tucking yourself into the fold of his body where you fit like a mismatched puzzle piece, bent and cut until it slides in. The gaps between your bodies are filled with the steam that curls off the hot water pulsing down around you.

"Just—fuck, John—," you gasp when his thumb rubs soft circles over your sensitive skin, arching into his embrace. "Just—ah, just this—"

"Want me to wash you?" He presses his hips into the plush softness of your ass cheeks. "Or want me to get you off?"

His question makes you mewl, thighs spreading to fit more of his hand between them. "A–anything—both—"

"Greedy little thing, aren't you?"

"Fuck, John—"

Your petulant whine disintegrates into a soft hum when he wraps his arm around your waist, pulling you tighter to his chest. His chin settles on the plinth of your shoulder, watching his fingers trail over your sateen flesh.

He's content to just feel you. The keen in your naked chest when his thumb brushes over a spot that makes you melt. The harsh pants; soft, languid little noises slipping through your wet lips—uh, uh, uh—interwoven with the hymn of his name. The shudders that wrack through your body when he presses the fat length of him against the plush seat of your ass. Your hips cant, rocking into his hold, as you greedily seek your release.

Your fingers curl around his thick wrist, thumb and forefinger barely able to lock in the middle, and it's the sight of you wholly in his grasp that ignites a childish sense of glee in his chest.

He's never been a particularly possessive man.

The transient lifestyle he led, the one he'd been primed for since he was young, and everyone around him just expected that he'd follow in his father's, his grandfather's footsteps, doesn't allow such luxury.

And he'd never been the type of man to take it. To want it, to pursue it. He was content with the ephemeral romance that came and went, a flickering flame that bloomed bright before eventually burning out. It was easier.

Lonelier, too.

You had been unexpected—a squall.

Your presence has ripped through his life like a violent tornado, leaving everything turned upside down in your wake.

You left him wanting.

It always seemed silly to run toward the thing that could kill you, but when you grinned at him—the recession of water before a tsunami hit—he finally understood why some people chase danger their whole lives.

He thought he'd have to adjust, to make room for you when there is no more space left.

But storms don't squeeze to fit.

They rip through.

He supposes, then, that there's no need to worry about making room when there are no walls left standing.

"Give you whatever you want, love," the words are a broken snarl in his throat, bleeding with the tangled remnants of his filthy desire; an aching sense of possession, and hunger. "Anythin' you want. Anythin'. Jus'—"

The empty bed flashes behind his eyes. Your side, now cold to the touch; the heat already fading out from the sheets. Whispered promises in the sleep-stained curl of his hair.

"Jus' stay—," the mangled plea is a faulty firecracker in his throat.

His arms tighten around you. Possession, he finds, is a silly thing. Ownership. Covetousness. All of it means substantially little to him when the only home he'd ever known is a duffle bag packed full of clothes he'd never wear.

And then he comes home to you. The space is saturated with your scent. Little markings around the flat that remind him of your presence. That scream out into the desolate stagnancy of a place that was always covered in a fine sheet of dust, and cobwebs, that you were here. Are here.

The fridge is stocked. The cupboards are full.

His bed slept in. Calendar marked with dates that mean something to you—meetings, negotiations, birthdays of people who matter in your life.

Scented candles run out the stench of disuse.

The days when your worlds don't overlap, and he comes home to an empty flat in a city he thinks he loves, he's never felt emptier.

It's harder to sleep those nights, too.

The whisper of an empty bed haunts him, echoes isolation and loneliness each time he reaches out and can't feel the warmth of your skin.

"Greedy," you mock, words a breathy mewl that are quickly swallowed by the hiss of the shower. Your fingers tighten around his wrist, clinging to him as he works you through the gentle waves of pleasure, slowly letting you drift toward the precipice of your release.

It's when the other reaches up behind you to thread through his damp locks, nails scratching across his temple, that he finds himself a little lost under the swell of you. Swept away by your breakneck pace.

Possession, he thinks, and finds himself drawn to the way your fingers curl around him. How you hold him tight, keeping him locked against you as you take. Syphon your pleasure from the feel of him against your skin.

Hard, wanting, he barely thinks of himself when he grinds his pelvis into your ass, cock slipping between the globes of your cheeks. Too enraptured by the way you fit in the palm of his hand (in his head, his bed, his house, his life—) to worry about anything else.

"Tha's it," he slurs the word into your neck, the scratch of his beard catching the droplets that run down the smooth column of your throat. "Jus' like that, love."

You writhe against his hand, strangled noises slipping from between the parted seam of your mouth. It's when his name falls, bitten in half when you snap your teeth together, lips curled, does he realise he's not even kissed you yet.

His hand slides to cup your jaw, craning your neck until your chin rests on your shoulder. He meets you with a kiss, and can't stop the groan that rumbles out when he feels the weight of your lips on his.

"You're extra touchy today," you breathe into his open mouth, words curling around his teeth. He tastes you when he swallows, and it soothes the burn in his joints; the ones that ache for nicotine. "What's got you in such a mood?"

"A mood?" He volleys, thumb rubbing the skin of your cheekbone, keeping you locked against him. He isn't ready to forfeit the taste of you, the feel of your lips moulding against his. "What kind'a mood do you think I'm in?"

"You're—," you gasp so prettily when he touches you in tandem with his peppered kisses; back arching in a way that makes him throb. "—clingy," you pant, breath warm and sweet when it ghosts over his tongue. "Needy."

You have this way of pulling truths out of him. Like you know how to crack his skull open, and rifle around inside until you find what you're looking for. A remarkable ability to galvanise his whims into words.

Price doesn't even try to bite them back when they slip out, syphoned into the air from your pull. A black hole. A vacuum. You consume.

(And he lets you.)

"Wakin' up," he starts, words trailing off when you buck, clumsily, into his palm.

He devours you, then, swallowing down each moan and grunt you make as he brings you close to the edge, desperately wanting to see you fall. Break apart in his hold.

"Tha's it, love." He murmurs, trailing open-mouthed kisses across the smooth column of your throat. His matted beard grazes your sensitive skin until you shiver, whimpering from the coarseness of it juxtaposed to the soft kisses, and teases of his teeth in small nips he plants over your slick flesh. "Come on—wanna see you cum for me."

It doesn't take much to bring you to the brink. Years of learning your body, of decoding the little places and tricks that make you howl for him, have given him the insight into how to work you to completion. He uses them all, a softer, muted descent up that wobbling precipice, and knows when your toes are dipping over the edge when your nails bite into his skin, and your hips buck into his palm.

You're a pretty little thing when your eyes snap shut, mouth dropping open as you dive down the vertiginous slope and into the maddening clutch of nirvana.

His pretty little thing.

He cups you in the palm of his hand, a fluttering little bird beating against his lifeline, and wonders if he can entice you to crawl back in bed with him, nestled tight under the covers while he spends the whole day worshipping every inch of precious flesh.

Might be able to, he thinks, when you go lax in his hold, chest shuddering with the shocks of pleasure the tips of his fingers bring.

"God, John—" you whine when he keeps it up,

stroking your sensitive, throbbing flesh until your knees threaten to give in. "Stop—I can't—"

You could. He knows your body by now. Knows he could get you off again and again until you were a weeping mess tangled in sex-soaked sheets, begging him for reprieve. He nudges against your mettle each time, rapacious to see how far he can push you until you're overstimulated, and barely conscious.

Greedy. Always.

His hunger for you is never satiated. No matter how many times he buries himself inside of you, it's never enough. A ceaseless wanting deep in his gnarled chest to have, to consume. Something in the polluted pit of what was once the heart of a man who didn't think he'd succumb to greed, to gluttony, now wants to devour you whole. Ingurgitate you into his marrow, into the rotted remains of his still-beating heart where you'll stay, safe and sound, forever.

His fingers itch, even now, to delve deep into your being. And so, he does.

Tries to, really. But there's a surprising dearth of strength hidden in your body, and he lets you go without a sound when you push against his wandering, hungry hands.

You twist in his hold, knees buckling as you try to slide down for him, but he stops you.

"No, love," he rasps, the words ungluing reluctantly from his throat. "Later. Jus' wanna take care'a you for a moment, mm?"

His arm winds around your waist, pulling you taut against him. His cock is trapped between your bodies, leaking prespend over your quivering stomach. Price thinks he could get off like this. Staring at you like this—eyes lidded, cresting in the aftershocks of your bliss; gazing up at him through heated skin, warmed from the molten spray of the shower pelting across your body; lips blistered and bruised from his kisses, and the abrasive scrape of his beard over your flesh—he doesn't think it'll take much to get him there, but he finds he likes the delay a little more than usual today.

Likes the lazy way you lean into him, fingers threading through the damp, matted hair on his chest before sliding your palms down to where he aches. His cock juts up between your soft belly, and trembling thighs—fleshed vermillion, and swollen. Your fingers dance across his weeping slit, catching the thick pre-spend gathering there. The feel of your flesh on him—hot, and softened from the water—sends tendrils of pleasure coiling through his loins.

He won't last. Not when you rest your chin against his sternum, staring up at him as you languidly work your hand over the head of his cock. Eyes heavy, drunk with the slow ebb of your bliss.

You paint a pretty picture. One he finds he could stare at all day—every day—if you'd let him.

Mauldin spools in his eyes. He knows this by the way your hands spasm around him, eyes catching the frisson that flickers across his face, mirrored in your liquid gaze.

"What were you saying earlier?" You murmur, pressing a kiss to his slick chest. "Waking up—?"

You're teasing him, of course. The impish twitch to your lips gives you away.

"Wakin' up alone—," he grumbles, hips canting into your grip. "Guess it made me miss you some."

The impact of the words on you is breathtaking. The sudden bashful dip of your chin, the flutter of your lashes as you drink in his words—it's a sight that tucks away in the fibrils of his heart, kept safe for later when he's all alone in his bed, or off in some corner of the world with bullets raining down on him.

(You don't have to worry much about bullets, you always quip, the barb in your voice, the teasing nonchalance, dulled by the quiver in your joints. You've fallen out of a helicopter more than you've been shot at.

He's never felt more drawn to you than when you're struggling through the fear gnarling in your eyes to joke about the many ways he'll die just to bring him some iota of comfort.)

His release bubbles quicker than he'd expected, aided when you press a soft, gentle kiss to his thundering heart. A wild storm on the horizon, one that leaves no wall left standing. You break him into pieces without even so much as a murmur.

Price falls apart in your hands, and he thinks, then, about the promise in his dream.

I'll catch them all for you, he'd said when you pointed to the whirling lavender petals falling down around you, eyes light with wonder. All of them. Jus' promise me you'll stay—

Your knuckles against his temple. The sun dawning in the curve of your smile. You breathe and he tastes wildflowers on his tongue.

Stay? You echo, teeth flashing. But—

"I'd never leave you, John."

He shudders in your grasp, fingers digging into your skin as he pulls you close, slanting his mouth over yours in a clumsy, searing kiss.

Your name is drenched in benediction when he spills himself all over you, words a hushed gospel over the altar of your tongue.

You pull away from him, eyes gazing toward the field of yellow sprawled around the hazel boscage.

When he looks up, he finds thunderclouds on the horizon. A looming storm.

"It's gonna rain," you murmur.

He rumbles. "Doesn't it always?"

"Only when you're around."

He catches a petal in his palm. That shape of it reminds him of the curve of your smile. He tucks it in his breast pocket for safekeeping.

"Best keep me around for a while, then, mm, love?"

The sound of your laughter is swallowed by the crack of lightning.

In life, he finds there is nothing better than a cigar, and a finger of scotch after a round of sex.

(Or anything, really.)

He sparks the lightener, holding it to the end, and takes quick puffs from the stem. The sound of burning paper crackles as it burns in the flames.

Price stands on the balcony, eyes aimlessly drifting across the docks. The water is grey, nearly black; shaded by the approaching storm in the distance. A dark cloud on the gunmetal horizon. He tastes ozone in the air; the electric buzz of a gathering lightning strike.

The morning leaves him feeling off-kilter. The dream—dreaming, even—and the empty bed still sits in the pit of his guts. Uncomfortable, disquieted.

He's anxious, he notes, fingers trembling around the fat stem of his cigar. Each draw does little to quell it. Nicotine and scotch on little sleep and an empty stomach do nothing to calm his ruffled nerves. A state he hadn't fallen into since he watched Laswell grow smaller and smaller on the horizon.

He nearly smoked three cigars back to back before Gaz snatched his lighter.

("Don't think this is helping you much, cap.")

It does. Did.

But—

Your arms snake through the brackets of his elbows, curling around his waist. He's too tall for you to notch your chin on his shoulder, and so you settle for leaning over, and peaking out around the bulk of his broad back.

"Lovely morning for it," you murmur.

He catches your eye, teeth sinking into the stem of the cigar to hold it steady as his hands drop to your forearms. He catches the derision in your gaze. The pointed look you send him, sarcasm dropping from your eyes when they swing, pointedly, between the clock on the wall—barely noon hour—to the cigar in his mouth, and the glass of scotch on the patio table. Wordless disapproval of his mid-morning choices. His vices.

It makes his lip twitch up, pulling back from his teeth. It's hard to talk around the delicately balanced cigar clenched between his incisors, but years of practice lead him well.

"Ain't it jus'?"

He likes it when you're close to him.

Needy, you'd said. Clingy.

He feels it, too. There's a desperation inside of him, a clawing sense of affection woven with the threads of anxiousness, and it makes him unsettled when you're too far away from his greedy hands.

His fingers latch around your arms.

"You should stop smoking so much," you say in that tone he knows well—the one that, despite the subdued words murmured in a soft breath, actually means: stupid old man, you better listen or so help me God—

The same tone his mother had perfected when he was younger. Equal parts hedging, cautious, but firm enough to feel the blooming heat behind them. A caustic warning. One that, translated, means: there won't be another one.

No more chances when you speak to him like that. None.

And he gets it.

He's on the wrong side of forty, and you're tired of the ashes on the sheets, the cigar burns punched through the mattress you just bought (at a steal, you'd said, gleeful and bright, and—fuck).

So, he says, "sure, love."

(And really, giving up that extra cigar a day seems easy when you smile at him like that.)

You say nothing when he holds you a little bit tighter to his body, keeping you close; but he catches the soft sigh when he relaxes in your arms, and the tension bleeds from his shoulders.

You make a soft noise when he stubs the cigar in the ashtray, and then turns to you, eyes heavy.

Thunder cracks in the distance. The heavens split in two sending a deluge down that rips across the grey docks. Liverpool smells of ozone and wet pennies in the downpour.

Price pulls you in to his chest, hands heavy on your skin. Firm, rough. He's never been a gentle man, but you make him want to try. To be tender. Soft. Whatever you need, and more. Anything, he thinks. Anything.

You echo the call, and place your warm palm on his cheek, lids cresting in that sleepy desire that never fails to make his heart race.

He likes the way you make yourself fit against him - an imperfect puzzle piece - and draws you close when you lean up on the balls of your feet, eager to meet him in the middle. It's a searing kiss, the kind that instantly warms him against the sweeping winds howling through the wet streets below.

Nirvana in whispers. A soft tongue tracing the seam of his lips. He imagines this is the closest to peace a man like him will ever get, and it makes him hold on to you just a shade tigher. A bit more desperate. Unwilling - unable - to let go.

Thunder booms in the aether above, and echoes through his hollow bones. He feels the pulse of it thudding in his throat when it strikes again, and scents the livewire tang of a lightning strike when it cracks across the grey sky in a blinking, evanescent flash that makes you jump a little when it hits.

Price huffs into the kiss when you tremble in his arms, and holds you closer in the bracket of his chest.

"Jus' a storm, love," he whispers, the words a rough rasp pulled from his throat. "It'll pass."

"I know," you murmur, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt when another strikes scorches the pavement.

"Maybe I should distract you, mm?" He peppers kisses across your face, brows drawing together. "Could go for a nap after."

It makes you hum, a soft, honeyed coo. ", Take me to bed, John."

"Gladly, love."

He's never felt more at peace than in the middle of a terrible storm.

(But that should be a given considering they always seem to remind him of you.)

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