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👉 It's okay to write fiction about imaginary events, people and themes that would be considered taboo, disgusting, or evil in real life.
👉 It's okay to write fiction about imaginary events, people and themes that would be considered messed up or weird in real life.
👉 You do not have an obligation to write fiction about imaginary events in a way that all potential readers will approve of or understand.
👉 You do not have to disclose your own trauma in order to get permission to write about taboo or disgusting fiction in whatever way you choose to write it.
👉 Fiction is not required to to have a moral or lesson that strengthens the values of the reader.
👉 Adults who already know right from wrong do not need their morals spoon-fed to them by fiction.
👉 Adults who already know right from wrong do not need their hands held to understand that evil actions in fiction are bad, even when a story portrays them as good.
👉 Adults can read and write fiction that glorifies, fetishizes or romanticizes, dark, evil and taboo subjects without being led to believe that those things are good in real life.
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darlingdarkly · 3 days
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New Year, New You Part 9
Johnny MacTavish x f!reader
Personal Trainer AU
4.2 Words
CW: dubcon!, dark fic, dark content, obsessive behavior, dirty talk, explicit language, E rated, NSFW, smut, 18+, mature themes, gaslighting
Part: 1, 8
You awoke, not to the bray of your phone alarm that you’d carefully set before climbing into bed, but to the languid pass of Johnny’s tongue. Like gentle brush strokes they covered the canvas of your inner thighs, drawing ever upward towards the apex of your sex. It was a slow and gentle rise from the depths of slumber, much more pleasant than being violently torn from your deep sleep into the waking world like you’d grown begrudgingly accustomed to.
Your hands slid down from their warm beds and under the covers where they found soft purchase in the length of his Mohawk and skimmed down the shaved sides, fingers cutting through the buzz like snakes through grass. “Johnny.”
He spoke no words, communicating solely through different pitched hums against your skin that sent tingles up your spine, lighting your nerves and slowly setting them aflame. Now that he knew you were awake he tugged at the fabric of your panties on either side of your hips, pulling down one side before the other and marking each bit of freshly gained territory with a kiss like planting his flag to claim it as his.
You slowly open your eyes as he lifts your legs up and over his strong shoulders like tying a bib on before a particularly messy meal. “Johnny, I’ve got to go to work.” You say it even as you know the light letting in through the windows isn’t quite right, it’s much too dark to be eight thirty.
He doesn’t even bother acknowledging your poor excuses with a response. He’s built his breakfast, now he’ll eat and instead just leans forward and lets you feel the flat of his tongue as it slowly runs up your slit, from hole to clit and you can’t help the breathy moan that leaves you, the first of many you’ll sing to give rise to the sun.
He hums against your clit and your head falls back against the pillow, giving up and giving in. It must please him because he finally speaks, though it’s unclear if he’s addressing you or your pussy.
“Sweet little thing.” You don’t so much see as you feel him lean forward and wrap his lips around your clit, gently sucking as his fingers toy at your entrance, pushing just the pad of his finger in and feeling you clench around it, not quite succeeding at pulling it in.
Your hands push his head closer and you feel him smile against you as he takes your hint, one finger slipping in to just the knuckle as he laps up the juices that seep out around it. You moan his name, a slow soft plea that makes his cock twitch as it carries sweetly to his ears.
He works his finger in and out of you slowly, nothing about what he's doing is rushed or urgent, just content to ruin you as thoroughly as he can at his own pace. You arch a little, pushing yourself closer, chasing the sensation, but any movement in the opposite direction, like when he sucked hard on your clit and you tried to scoot back away from the intense sensation was futile. His arms held you steady, no budge, like some kind of giant living Chinese finger trap.
He pulled his finger out and pulled his tongue away from you long enough for you to catch your breath. You could hear him sucking on his finger under the sheets, followed by a moment of silence. He didn’t leave you waiting for long as you felt his tongue on your clit once again followed by an even greater stretch as he pushed two digits into you, drawing out your long high pitched moan with deep, dragging thrusts of his index and middle finger.
Your hands grasped and pulled at his Mohawk as his fingers hit your sweet spot and it only spurred him on as he worked to amplify all of your little noises until you were nearly shouting. He kept on like that, fine tuning his ministrations based on the intensity and pitch of your wails until with a final piercing cry you succumbed to the pleasure. You struggled in his grasp, shaking and pulling away from the last passes of his tongue as he cleaned you up and savored the taste.
You felt the grip of his hands on your hips cease before his head poked up out of the covers on top of you as he rose from the crook of your thighs, your first sight of him grinning and glistening in the pale morning light. He unceremoniously wiped the wetness from his chin and fell like a monolith onto the bed at your side.
He pulled you close, sweeping you into the nook by his side. Cuddled there warm and sated, the tempting embrace of sleep threatened to pull you under once more. His fingers carded through your hair gently and it was beyond you to fight it anymore. You fell willingly into the open arms of morning slumber. Fools gold in the way it draws you in, shining with promise but really only skin deep, its fragile surface easily marred at the faintest sound or shift of light.
Despite this, you awoke, seemingly much later, this time like you had initially expected to. You reached for your phone on the nightstand and rubbed your eyes as you silenced the alarm and checked the time. The room was bright but the bed beside you was cold. You suddenly realized you had no idea what his schedule looked like. His little early morning snack could have been his way of saying good morning and goodbye and you suddenly felt guilty you hadn’t spoken to him more, too lost in the haze to be considerate.
It wasn’t until you got out of bed and made your way towards the door that the smell became evident. You gently pulled the door just open enough to stick your head out and see him, his back was to you as he stood in front of the stove in his boxers and nothing else. You stood watching him as he flipped something in a pan, his shoulder blades flexing and shifting, the subtle movements in the back of his triceps ascended from spry flicks of his wrist.
You caught yourself ogling him and pulled back, gently shutting the door and grabbing your bag from its place just inside the closet. You stepped into the bathroom and began to strip, pulling off your nightclothes and turning on the stream. You stepped under and began to bathe as your mind drifted towards the day ahead, as much as you’d like to ruminate in the memories of the last twenty four hours you had a day of work ahead, the vacation was over.
But it soon became less about the work and more about seeing Nancy again. Of course she’d want to know what happened, probably had a story of her own to tell, at the very least you’d get a recount of the evening's events from her point of view. You wondered how helpful it’d be in figuring out who was behind your drugging and the theft of your ID, a long shot but maybe she saw something.
You were startled from your thoughts by Johnny’s voice beyond the shower. “Morning, lass. How’d ye sleep?” It never failed to surprise you just how quiet and sneaky he could be. “Ahh! Jesus Johnny, you scared me.”
He snickered and you saw him through the frosted glass pane of the shower door as he stepped fully into the room and up to it, the outline of him becoming clearer as he drew near til it was blurry but opaque.
“Didnae mean to scare ye, ah’m cookin’ breakfast but ye already ken, heard ye peek your head out tha’ door.”
Your eyes widen behind the glass. So he had heard you, you were almost certain you hadn’t made any noise, how attuned was he? You apologize, though you aren’t really sure why or for what.
“S’ok lass, ye were only curious. Though ah am a bit disappointed ye did nae come get me before ye jumped in fer a shower. Could’ave helped ye wash yer back.” You shiver at the implications, head suddenly filled with images of him and you naked, wet and entwined.
“Johnny-“
“Still could ye know. S’not too late tae make ye late fer work.”
Your hand drifts towards the door, you could. And you have half a mind to let him but then remember he’s cooking. “Johnny, but the food.”
When he speaks next his voice is thick and strained and it sounds like the last of his self control is the only thing standing between you and him, that and the thin, frosted pane of glass and you see his own hand drift towards it, ready to rid himself of the last physical blockade. “Donnae give ah fuck. Ah’ll let it burn, let tha’ whole place go up in flames just tae have ye again.”
Maybe it’s the candid quality of his words, complete honesty and lacking any kind of filter, he’d never been bashful before that’s for sure. But while you’d known him to say things just to rile you this felt different somehow, a genuineness that felt like he was itching for you to dare him but was completely prepared to make true on the promise. As crazy and irrational as the statement was, you believed him.
The words make an almost unbearable need puddle in your stomach and you have to actively seek the will to resist it. The only thing truly stopping you is the thought of facing a crew of burly firefighters in perhaps nothing more than a bath towel. You swallow thickly and then refuse him, promising to be out in a minute. He doesn’t say anything or move for a moment and you wonder if maybe he’s considering stepping in with you anyway. An executive decision you knew you’d find mighty hard to resist if made, you find yourself considering facing the firefighters stark naked if he’d be there beside you.
Before you can fully consider the possibilities he turns and leaves making you bite your lip and curse for cockblocking yourself. Frustrated and undeniably horny, the trancelike quality of the shower had dissipated and so you quickly washed off and stepped out. Toweling yourself dry before dressing up for work and going to meet him for breakfast.
When you entered the kitchen you were momentarily glad you’d turned down his offer as the smell of breakfast wafted to your nose but when he’d come back into the kitchen out of the tucked aside pantry and his hungry eyes met yours, you realized your little escapade this morning had been all you focused and you knew he had more on his mind than food.
You made a mental note to make it up to him later and sat down at the place he’d set for you. He sat across from you, grinning and gorgeous with his elbows propped up all improper on the counter. As you both dove into your meal he asked you about work and what you had planned for the day.
You told him while you probably weren’t swamped, you still no doubt had some catching up to do and you’d wanted to make some time, maybe have lunch again, with Nancy to talk to her about what had happened. He visibly paused at Nancy’s mention and it made you look up curiously. He looked, just for a brief second, deeply troubled. But then as soon as it’d dawned it disappeared like it never had been and he changed the subject to his work.
Going into detail about what he had planned at the gym. As you cleared your plate something he said made your ears prick up. “And I’ve got a new regimen in mind fer our next session. Ah’m gonna start havin’ ye do laps ‘round the pool at the gym, work on yer cardio in a different way an’ work some of those muscles ye jus’ cannae get tae any other way. Ye can swim, can’t ye lass?”
You set your fork down and looked across the counter at him. “Johnny, I can’t do that.”
He looked up from his plate for a moment, a smirk pulling at one corner of his mouth. “Ye cannae swim?”
You shook your head and furrowed your brows. “What? No. Yes, I can swim. I meant I can’t go back to the gym.. I can’t afford it.” You had to drop his gaze on the last sentence, so he really must’ve been asleep last night when you fessed up. You had expected nothing but maybe awkward silence to fill the space behind the confession, but he just laughed instead, making you regain eye contact as you looked up at him, curiously.
“Let me worry about that hen, I’ve got-“ You immediately cut him off. “No, Johnny. You’ve done enough, I can’t possibly ask you to do that on top of everything else.”
“Donnae worry, lass. I’ve already got it all sorted. Jus’ let Johnny handle it.” You gave him a wary look but he traded it with one firm and set, there was to be no more argument over the subject so you dropped it.
You both finish breakfast and you get up to start on dishes even though he protests, you insist upon contributing in some way and he heads into the bedroom to get dressed while you work. When he comes out he’s wearing black athletic shorts and a tight, form fitting blue tee. He looks good, real good and you curse yourself for the second time for not taking him up on his shower offer.
“Ready to go?” A good question but one that was rhetorical, it didn’t really matter, you had to go to work so you nodded and smiled as he ushered you towards the door. The ride to your office was short and sweet and when you pulled on the handle to let yourself out you found it locked. You turned towards Johnny to ask him to unlock it only to be pulled into a slow, soft kiss. It was gentle and un-urgent but melting in its intensity, he pulled away reluctantly and you realized you didn’t really want to get out of the truck, could have been just as content to let him pull away from the curb and call in sick two days in a row.
Instead you waited for him to unlock your door before stepping out onto the sidewalk and heading into the building. He waited for you to get into the elevator before pulling away and you wondered just how your life had managed to change so drastically in the last two days, hell the whole year had gone totally tits up in regards to the woman you’d been when you stepped out of the building following what should have been an ordinary Christmas party. It was like you’d slipped into someone else’s shoes, they were more like the shoes of a married woman instead of the chronically single one you’d been.
The elevator doors slid open and you walked casually to your cubicle as you always had, there were no raised heads, no hushed murmurs from your co-workers, Nancy wasn’t even at your desk like you had assumed she would be, but why would she have been? It’s not like this was the first time you’d called in sick after a disastrous night out. So you sat down and got to work and when lunch rolled around it was you who approached her and invited her out for a bite to eat.
It wasn’t until you’d been seated and your orders taken that you spilled the shorthand version of the events of the last twenty four hours to her, her eyes widening in response as your tale grew and grew in length and absurdity. When you were finished she gave her two cents.
“Oh my god. I am so sorry.” An apology hadn’t been what you were expecting and when she put her hands to her face and looked like the waterworks might start at any moment you reached a hand out to her and began to backpedal.
“Nancy, no. It’s ok. It’s not your fault!” But she was already shaking her head. “Of course it was! If I’d have been paying more attention, if I’d have been right there with you instead of preoccupied all night this never would have happened. I’m the one who convinced you to go out in the first place. Oh god, I feel so awful!”
“Nancy, please. Really, it's ok. You never could have known, and nothing bad happened to me. I’m fine, see?” You smiled at her to make your point as she wiped her eyes with her napkin. “So he found you outside? Thank god he just happened to be there, did he see anyone? Any shady guys around you?”
You shook your head no. “And they stole your wallet? Oh my god, what are you gonna do?”
“Well for the time being I’m staying with Johnny. I guess I’ll have to move out of my place, I don’t wanna have to constantly look over my shoulder all the time. I still have a half a year before the lease is up and in the meantime I’ll start looking for somewhere else to stay. I don’t know how I’m gonna afford it, but I’ll figure something out.”
Nancy reached across the table top and squeezed your hand. “I am so sorry.” You assured her it was alright and tried to lighten the mood by regaling her with your tale of yesterday, how the two of you had spent the day together and how nice it was, how courteous and attentive Johnny had been and the more you gushed the better you began to feel about the whole ordeal.
Nancy had cheered up by the end of the tale and you found yourself looking back over it fondly, even a bit in disbelief as you both regarded how lucky you had been that he’d turned up when he had. But with it all out you still had some questions. “Nancy, I need you to try and remember what happened last night. I can’t and I need to know if you saw anything out of the ordinary. Did I talk to anybody? Dance with anybody? I can’t remember a thing.”
She thought it over a minute but ultimately shook her head. She explained that you’d arrived, had a few shots together that she’d ordered, gone out on the floor to dance and then that’s where you’d met the twins. The mention of the twins rang a bell but nothing definitive came to the surface. She’d explained they’d come up to the pair of you on the dance floor and came onto both of you, you hadn’t been interested but she was rather taken by Ian, even exchanging numbers before she’d left the club that night. Then she went on to explain that it couldn’t possibly have been either of them as they’d been with her the whole rest of the night and your twin had been glued to some redhead he’d met by the bar.
You still couldn’t remember any of it but she offered to text Ian and see if he or Andrew remembered anything that could help. You declined, you doubted they’d seen anything anyway, especially if you’d turned down your twins advances like she said you had and moved onto another girl. It was probably a hopeless situation you’d never find the answers for. Your lunch break was over and you both headed back to the office to finish the day's work.
You spent the rest of it kind of doddling around at your desk, starting reports but leaving them half finished and thinking about your situation. Your watch pinged and you looked down to see a text from Johnny saying he’d be there to pick you up in five and realized the day was over. With a sigh of relief you began to shut your computer down for the evening and cleaning up your desk. You stepped out of the elevator minutes later and saw Johnny’s truck parked on the curb. He got out and opened the passenger door for you again, stopping you before you could climb in to wrap you up in his arms in a crushing bear hug, the strength of which there was no escape until he finally relented and released his hold, catching curious glances from some of your coworkers to your embarrassment.
You shuffled into the passenger seat and waited for him to climb in and pull away from the building before breathing out a sigh of relief. “How was yer day, bonnie?” You set your purse down at your feet.
“Un-productive. Both work and situation wise. He looked interested but not surprised. “Yeah? I’m sorry, hen. Nancy didnae see anythin’ then?”
You stared out the window and missed the long curious gaze he threw your way before averting his eyes back to the road, after a minute you spoke. “I don’t know what to do, Johnny. I don’t think I’ll ever truly know what happened to me that night and I don’t think I’ll ever know who did it. I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
His hand settled on your thigh and you turned away from the window to meet his gaze. “Dinnae worry, lass. I’ll keep ye safe, I swear it. Ye can stay with me as long as ye’d like, ye’ll never ever have tae go home again, I’ve already got it alllll figured out hen.”
And the way he says it, the total confidence in his voice has alarm bells ringing in the back of your brain. “Johnny, what are you talking about?”
“S’already taken care of. I’ve hired a few movers tae pack her stuff and bring it over tae my place tomorrow afternoon. Ye’ll never have tae set foot in yer apartment ever again.” Your eyes widen, he’d arranged to have all your stuff moved to his place? Without talking to you about it? At all?
“Johnny, what the fuck?!” He doesn’t even look the least bit stunned. “S’fine, lass. I ken ye couldnae jus’ leave all yer belongings behind, Ye’ll be all settled in in no time an’ there’s plenty of space fer ye tae put yer stuff where ever ye’d like. We’ll make a whole day of it, jus’ you an’ me. Donnae be fashed, hen. Johnny’s got it all taken care of. Ye wouldnae want tae let this guy see ye movin yer stuff out, he’d jus’ follow ye tae mah place and ken yer livin’ there an’ then he could follow us tae yer work an’ get ya while I’m nae there tae stop him. S’better this way.”
Before you can register any of it fully he’s pulling the truck off the road and coming to a stop. You look out the window and realize you’re not back at his place, you’re currently parked in front of the gym.
“Johnny, what are we doing?” He pulls your gym bag out of the backseat and sets it down on your lap. “I told ye I’d find a way tae get yer subscription reinstated an’ ah did. Come on.” For once he doesn’t open the door for you and you step out, gym bag in hand and follow him into the building. It looks the same, the lobby still packed with people coming and going. He has you go up to the kiosk to sign in while he walks further into the building for something.
You can hardly believe you’re back here, signing in and getting ready to work out again, you thought when you left that it’d be the last time. You type your info into the tablet but no matches come up. You double check the spelling of your name but it’s all there correctly, you figure they must have deleted your profile when your trial ran out and you’d have to make a new one. You were about to start the process when Johnny came back. “What are ye doin’ hen?”
“My names not in the system, they must’ve deleted my profile, I’m just gonna make a new one.”
“Wait, wait, wait. Lemme see tha’.” You hand him the little stylus and he checks back over your work before tapping a few buttons and typing something in. You lean over to see what he’s done.
“What’d you do?” He just flashes you a sly smile and explains. “Had tae change yer name tae get ye reinstated. Yer good tae go now, lass. Jus’ remember yer under this name when ye sign in from now on.”
You take a peek at the screen as it flashes the words you’ve seen a couple dozen times before, only this time slightly different.
“Thank you for signing in! We hope you have a very productive workout Mrs. MacTavish!”
You turn to look at Johnny but all he has for you is that same toothy grin, wolfish and sly. “Ready fer yer next session?”
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harryspet · 3 months
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bambi eyes (the holiday special) r.cameron
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[Warnings]soft!dark!rafe cameron x reader, daddy!rafe x little!reader older!rafe, crimeboss!rafe, NONCON, dd/lg, spoiling kink, unprotected sex, heavy on the somnophilia, ittle editing, 18+ READ AT YOUR OWN RISK
word count: 1.6k
In which it's your first Christmas Eve with your Daddy, you don't know what you want but Rafe surely does.
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You could think of three things that you wanted for Christmas. Colored pencils, glitter lipgloss, and a small stuffed animal for Bunny. You don’t need any more clothes. You’d been with Rafe for over a month, and there were still clothes in your wardrobe that you had not worn yet. Your room was heaven, with the softest sheets and pillows, and Rafe bought you even more playthings each week. 
Your last gift was a diamond bracelet Rafe gave you because of how well you behaved in front of his friend, Barry. He didn’t punish you for sneaking around downstairs. All you had to do was bring him a slice of cake and sit down on Rafe’s lap while the two of them talked about “getting rid of their problem.” 
There were several trees around the house, but the biggest one was in the living room, by the fireplace, and it was at least two times your height. There were at least twenty presents underneath the tree already, wrapped neatly in paper that was decorated with pink snowflakes. In cozy reindeer pajamas, ones Rafe had also purchased, you sat near the tree checking over your letter to Santa. Although you had a feeling Rafe might secretly be Santa, you let a small part of you believe it was real magic. 
Lana helped you write the letter, and now you were adding a few drawings and stickers to really jazz it up. It took you longer to write it than Rafe preferred, it was already Christmas Eve, but if Santa could somehow bring you exactly what you wanted tomorrow, you’d really believe in him. 
“You almost finished, baby?” 
You looked up to see Rafe entering the living room, most likely finished with his work day, “I couldn’t think of anything else to ask for,” You said quietly, remembering how much Rafe encouraged you to ask for absolutely anything. The truth was you never had anything so you didn’t know what to ask for, “I don’t think I need anything else. But I wrote a nice letter for Santa and I thanked him for everything he does. And I made it sparkly.”
Rafe made himself comfortable on the couch and you brought over your letter, “C’mere,” He said, pulling your legs over his lap before wrapping one arm around you, “This is beautiful work, kid. Santa is going to love it.”
You looked up at him, a smile on his face as he read the words over, “What did you ask Santa for, Daddy?”
“Well, since I already have you,” He squeezed you, making your heart leap in your chest, “I asked Santa to make sure that you have the best Christmas. That you’ll love every gift you get and we’ll have a nice, Christmas dinner.”
You smiled back at him, “I wish I could buy you something, Daddy.”
“No need,” Rafe leaned in to kiss the side of your forehead, “I like giving to you, and I have plenty of money for the both of us. Besides, you’re way too little.” 
When Rafe looked at you, he really looked at you. He held your face in his hands, not tight enough to bruise, so you wouldn’t look away. You were still learning not to feel shy under his gaze. You started to understand that you were just like the gifts sitting under the tree. You were Rafe’s gift to himself. He showed his possession of you through his gaze. 
“Your bows are a nice touch,” He complimented, taking notice of the red ribbons tied around your pigtails. Every morning you spent time doing your hair, and you were slowly learning how to do your makeup. When he noticed your efforts, you felt you were fulfilling your purpose, “And I already knew you’d look cute in your pajamas.”
Rafe liked it when you presented yourself a certain way. He liked things to be dainty and soft. He preferred small jewelry over statement pieces. Pastel colors over bright ones. And you should never have on too much makeup. Lipgloss was better than lipstick and concealer over foundation. He wanted you muted but pretty, just like your personality. 
“Thank you,” You batted your lashes. 
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Rafe and you continued your cozy evening in the living room. You’d made it through the first two Home Alone movies and were now in the middle of watching The Polar Express. Rafe excused himself to the kitchen for a moment, taking the chance to prepare some hot cocoa for the two of you. 
When Rafe returned to the couch, you were sound asleep, your arms wrapped around Bunny. Quietly, he set down the cups of cocoa on the coffee table, and the thought of waking you up crossed his mind. After all, your drink would get cold, but you seemed like you were resting deeply. 
Gently, Rafe laid down next to you. You didn’t wake; you moaned softly as you turned your head, nuzzling your face into Rafe’s neck. Rafe stayed with you like this, having found a new love in sleeping next to you. He never really enjoyed next to sleeping next to anyone, until you, and he began to designate certain nights of the week where you’d stay with him in his bed. 
Watching you sleep made him think back to when he first brought you home. You still looked as innocent as ever, but there was something else Rafe liked about watching you sleep – he loved seeing you vulnerable. Obviously, you were in a constant state of being vulnerable to Rafe’s every whim and want, but this was different. 
He tested just how deeply you were sleeping, slowly taking the doll from your grasp When you stirred only slightly, Rafe continued, first touching you above your pajamas. Large, ringed fingers felt over your chest. He massaged them, kneading them, and you reacted by pressing yourself closer to him. 
Lips parted, and holding in heavy breathing, Rafe continued his exploration. He was growing harder in his briefs, imagining the look on your face when you fully opened your eyes. He licked one of his fingers and reached into your pajama bottoms and then into your panties. This was exactly why he never wanted you to wear panties to bed; they only got in his way. 
He stroked fingers up and down, feeling between your folds. Feeling the moisture there, he wondered what exactly you’d been dreaming about, “Rafe,” He heard you whisper, although when he looked down at you, your eyes were still closed. Although the stimulation was waking you, Rafe knew you were too tired to fully realize what he was doing. 
Rafe shushed you, still playing between your legs, “Is bed … time?” You mumbled as Rafe pulled his hands from your underwear, bringing his fingers to his lips. 
“Yes, sweet girl,” Rafe whispered, “Keep relaxing, Daddy’s got you.”
Rafe pulled his body from yours, moving off the couch before he gently started to pull down your reindeer bottoms.  Carefully, he removed them from around your ankles before slowly lowering himself down on top of you, “Cold … please,” You mumbled, “Daddyyy.”
“I’ve got you,” Rafe said in response to your whining; as he settled on top of you, you wrapped an arm around his neck, pulling him in like your dolly or a pillow. Meanwhile, Rafe was trying as carefully as he could to free himself from his briefs. He didn’t have to touch himself at all, he was already aching for you.
He didn’t resist anymore, pushing your underwear to the side and then pushing inside of you, his sweet girl. You were tighter, somehow, causing Rafe’s eyes to roll in pleasure, “Rafe,” He heard you, knowing you in a daze. Currently, he felt quite dazed himself. He knew with his size that he’d wake you but he didn’t account for the fact that your body might try to resist, to push him out. It just motivated him to push deeper, “Rafe. Rafe.”
Your voice was sharper now, scared almost, “You’re okay,” He cooed, “You’re …so so good, sweet girl.”
You loosened your grasp on him, and Rafe took the opportunity to see your face. You were adorable in those red bows, he noticed them first, but then he saw your scrunched-up features, a cute wince on your face. It would feel good soon, he knew that, but he certainly enjoyed seeing you resist. 
“What a fussy little girl, huh?” Rafe thrusted slowly, “Acting like you don’t like Daddy’s cock.”
With each thrust, you were trying to gain your composure, but Rafe was relentless. 
One hand, beside your head, he pressed into the couch to hold himself up, and the other, he reached down to play with your clit, “Cum one time for me,” Rafe commanded, although it was the last thing you wanted. He would give it to you anyway, wanting to see it in your face when your own body betrayed you, “One time, and you can go back to sleep.”
Rafe’s thrust was slow but consistently deep. He switched back and forth from focusing on your pleasure and his. It was difficult for him, he could finish so easily with you, but he held out; Rafe knew when you were getting closer just by the look on your face. Your head tilted back as your orgasm spread through you, and Rafe was quickly behind you. 
Rafe caught his breath, still inside of you, and moved his chest closer to yours, “You okay? You did good, Bambi.”
You nodded calmly, “Did I …Did I miss the whole movie?”
Rafe stared, bewildered for a moment, “Uh … no. We can just rewind it, baby,” He grinned, pecking your lips, “And I can just heat up the hot chocolate again.” 
Your eyes widened, “Hot chocolate like in the movie?”
“Just like the movie, my love,” Rafe’s forehead pressed to yours.
He was grateful for the fact that he could give you the perfect first Christmas tomorrow. He was even more grateful for how perfect you were.
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Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!!
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valeskafics · 2 months
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"Unknown Caller" - Ghostface!Rafe Cameron x Reader
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from an anon request! 🩷
Summary: The power's out on the island, and you're home alone. Or are you?
Word Count: 3,500
Rating: 18+, MDNI
TW: dubcon, stalking, toxic rafe, afab reader, she/her pronouns, profanity, innuendo, knife kink, mask kink, blood kink, overstim, tiddy succin, oral f receiving, fingering, fuccin with a knife, breeding kink, creampie, unprotected sex, p in v sex, daddy kink, corruption kink
Disclaimer: I do not own any of the Outer Banks characters nor do I claim to own them. I do not own any of the images used nor do I claim to own them.
Comments, likes, and reblogs are never required but are immensely appreciated 🩷
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Never have you hated your parents so much for moving you to the Outer Banks from sunny California than you do tonight. Hurricane Elizabeth is currently wreaking havoc, battering the Carolina coast, having turned unexpectedly and made landfall. Your parents, out for date night on the mainland, are busy sheltering in place. Though the OBX has been spared from the worst of the storm, there are still heavy rains and the power is currently out all over the island - including Figure Eight, where you reside.
You’re home alone as you hear thunder clapping, laying in bed, trying to distract yourself by reading a Nicholas Sparks novel. So far, moving to North Carolina hasn’t brought a Landon or Noah your way, but it’s only been two years. You’ve found a best friend in your fellow Kook, Sarah Cameron, however, the two of you becoming thick as thieves fairly quickly. You’ve had countless sleepovers at her place, hung out with her and the Pogues many times, and it’s made leaving home a little less difficult of a pill to swallow. Kie, John B, JJ, and Pope are awesome, and you love hanging out with them.
However, you still maintain friendships with some of the Kooks as well, in particular, Scarlett, Topper, and Kelce. Well, friendship may be a stretch, but you’ll say hi to them in the halls, and you’re spared the dirty looks that Sarah and Kie often get.
Then there’s Rafe, but that’s a whole other story.
When you and Sarah became friends, she warned you about her asshole older brother. But the thing is? He was always so nice to you. Sure, you’ve seen him be a jerk to John B and even Topper on occasion, but when it comes to you? He’s always been so fucking sweet and charming. You know Sarah hopes that you’ll develop a crush on JJ or Pope so the two of you can double date or whatever the hell it is she has planned. But in reality? You’ve got a massive crush on her douchebag big brother.
Pining over your best friend’s brother. What a cliche.
With the power out, you’ve been trying to hold off on using your phone, wanting to keep its battery charged in case of a real emergency. You set your book aside, standing up and stretching your arms over your head, your tiny little pink silk pajama set doing precious little to shield you from the chill that pervades the house. You rub your upper arms with your hands, pacing the room, when suddenly? Your phone rings.
You rush to grab it, swiping to answer even though the caller is unknown. It might be your parents, and you know your mom will freak out if you don’t answer.
“Hello?”
You hear a voice on the other end of the line. One that you know immediately doesn’t belong to anyone you were expecting to call. It’s low, gravely, with a strange seductive undertone to it, like honey in your ears. It makes a chill go up your spine, and not in a way that’s entirely unpleasant.
“Hello, cutie. What’re you doing all alone in the dark?”
Outside your window, unbeknownst to you, stands someone quite familiar to you.
None other than Rafe Cameron.
He smirks up at your window, a Ghostface mask covering his handsome face as he watches you pace back and forth in your room, looking adorably confused at the fact that someone has called you.
“Um, it’s three in the morning,” you reply, “It’s obviously gonna be dark.”
“But what’re you doing all alone, pretty girl?” He coos, “Isn’t anyone else in the house with you?”
Not thinking anything of the somewhat intrusive question, you answer, yawning quietly as you stretch again, your tiny little pajama top rising to reveal a sliver of your stomach to Rafe’s greedy eyes. He licks his lips beneath the mask, waiting for you to answer, thinking to himself you look like an adorable little kitten, stretching out like that.
“No, my parents are on the mainland. No more ferries cuz of the storm.”
Perfect.
“Aw, you’re all by yourself? Do you need someone to come keep you company? I could come over and keep you safe, baby…”
You giggle, shaking your head, “I don’t know who you are!”
“Why don’t you let me come over there so we can introduce ourselves to each other then?” He smirks, “And I can keep you safe. We can share the bed, there’s plenty of room for two in there.”
He watches as you smile to yourself, biting your lip, “You’re funny, but no.”
“Aw, come on, baby. You must be scared being home all alone with the power out,” a grin crosses his face at the way the silk fabric clings to your curves, “Come on, lemme come over.”
“Is this Topper? Prank calling people isn’t funny, you know.”
“I’m not Topper, baby,” he assures you, “I’m someone else. I’m just a guy who wants to come over there and keep you warm and safe.”
Rafe sees you flop onto your bed, on your stomach, crossing your legs at the ankle, the sight of your adorable pink pedicured feet kicking the air making him want nothing more than to be in the room with you.
“JJ? This isn’t funny.”
“Not JJ either, baby. And I’m not calling to be funny. Think of me as a secret admirer,” Rafe’s voice drops an octave, growing husky, “Look out your window, baby. Look outside. I see you.”
“I…” Your breath catches in your throat as you walk toward the window. And you see your mystery caller, wearing a Ghostface mask, rain pouring down on him in the storm, donning a hoodie and jeans. You freeze as you whisper, “Pope? John B? This is not cool, I’m so serious right now…”
“It’s not Pope or John B, pretty girl. Neither of them are here. It’s just me, looking up at that pretty little face, that sexy little body. And I really like what I see.”
You quickly shut your curtains, not wanting your stalker to see any more of you than he already has. Rafe, for his part, has never been so fucking hard in his life. Seeing you all scared like that? He waits with bated breath for you to speak again, listening to your soft little pants.
“What do you want?”
“I wanna come in there and get to know you baby,” Rafe purrs, “I want you to let me inside so we can have some fun together.”
He watches from a new vantage point as you walk down the stairs, those gorgeous legs of yours coming into his view ever so slowly. It’s like you want to tease him. Like you want to make him want you. Little fucking tease.
“I’m gonna call the cops,” you threaten, unconvincingly, as you go to lock the front door.”
“How’re you gonna do that, baby?” He hums, “Power’s out on the whole island. Nobody’s gonna answer that call, no matter how cute and helpless you sound.”
You lean against the door, realizing he’s right, “Please leave me alone…”
“Not happening, baby. There’s nobody coming to save you tonight. No one’s gonna save you from me.”
“Well the door’s locked, there’s no way you’re getting in here.”
“You seem to have forgotten something, baby,” he snickers, as if he knows something you don’t.
“What did I forget?”
That’s when you hear it, reeling at the sound like you’ve been slapped in the face. The sound of the back door opening. Shit. You hear his footsteps, his dark little chuckle. This bastard is enjoying how scared you are. Your phone falls to the floor, the sound echoing throughout the foyer as your stalker comes closer and closer. You let out a scream and make a mad dash up the stairs, running into your room. You hide in your closet, behind your laundry hamper, curling yourself up into a ball, making yourself as tiny as possible.
Rafe just laughs, removing his mask to run a hand through his hair, relishing in the thrill of the hunt, before putting it back on and making his way up the stairs. If you want to play hide and seek, ready or not, he’s coming for you. And he’s going to find you. He pushes the door open to your room, kneeling down to check under your bed. He knows you’re here, he can smell your sweet perfume, that coconut scented shampoo you use, your vanilla body wash. All of it so quintessentially you. His little sister’s innocent, beautiful best friend. Fuck, he wants you so bad.
Your heart pounds as you hear his footsteps nearing the closet, stopping just before it. And he speaks.
“I can hear you breathing, honey. Why don’t you make this easy on both of us and just come out of that closet, into my arms, huh?”
You whimper quietly, covering your mouth, and the little sound is enough to drive Rafe to madness. He shoves your hamper aside, grinning beneath his mask when he sees you. You get up and try to run past him, but he grabs you by the wrist, pulling you back to him.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going, angel? I just got here.”
Your wrist is so small and delicate in his grip. The sight of his large hand wrapped around it alone makes his cock twitch in his pants. You move your free hand to try to slap him across the face, which just amuses him. And arouses him. He grabs both your wrists with one hand, grabbing some duct tape from his pocket, binding your hands.
“That was a nice try, baby. Real cute.”
You struggle against him, beating your bound hands against his chest, “No, lemme go!”
Rafe shakes his head, Nah. I’m not gonna let you go anytime soon. You look so cute like this. All small and helpless. I’m going to keep you with me so we can have some fun together.”
You let out a noise of surprise as he manhandles you onto the bed. His body weight pins you down, holding you in place as he pulls a knife from his back pocket, tracing it along your jaw. Your lower lip trembles with fear, though deep down, a primal part of you can’t help but think you enjoy the feeling of the blade against your skin. Its coolness as he brings it to your chin.
“Why are you doing this?”
“You don’t understand?” He asks, almost mockingly, tracing your lips with the blade, watching as you shiver, “It’s obvious that you want me. I’ve seen you looking at me. I’m just giving you an opportunity to act out on your fantasies. You should take it, baby. Take the opportunity to be bad for once. Let me show you how good it can feel…”
You shake your head, “Like you? N-no, I don’t even know who you are! I like Sarah’s brother.”
“Oh, baby. I know.”
You freeze at the implication behind his words, immediately going into denial, “N-no. You’re not Rafe. Rafe is nice to me. He’s sweet to me. He wouldn’t do this, you’re a liar!”
It’s sick and twisted, but watching you refuse to admit the truth makes Rafe’s blood burn hotter than ever, watching your innocent little face, your brows knit together as you try to make sense of all this, “Oh, I’m definitely Rafe. You want me to take this mask off so you can see who I really am?”
“You’re not Rafe! You’re just some psycho! Get away from me!”
“That’s the point, baby,” he says, his blade moving down to your throat, the feeling making your breath catch in your throat, “I want you to admit how psycho I am. You enjoy it. You want it. This is the real me and you fuckin’ love it.”
You watch in horror as he uses one hand to pull the mask from his face, your heart in your throat, your chest heaving as you struggle for breath. And you see him. The boy you’ve had a crush on for the last two years. Your best friend’s older brother.
Rafe fucking Cameron.
“N-no…”
Rafe runs a hand through his hair, shaking it out, before pressing his knife to your throat, “There it is. That look of shock that I was waiting for.” You whimper as he brushes your hair off your face with the knife, blinking rapidly, as if you’re trying to wake up from a bad dream, “You’re so sweet. So innocent. And when you see how bad I can be, it scares you. But deep down inside? It turns you on. You get off on the idea of the bad guy wanting you. Just admit it, baby.”
“If you knew I liked you, why didn’t you just ask me out like a normal person?” You question, squirming against him, doing your best to ignore the throbbing between your thighs at the little groan he lets out when you rub up against his cock.
“Where’s the fun in that? This is so much more exciting isn’t it?” There’s a manic glint in his eyes as they bore into your own, almost burning through you, “You might’ve said no if I just asked you normally. This way? You don’t have a fuckin’ choice. And deep down, we both know you don’t mind that. You don’t want to be in control. You want me to dominate you. You want the bad boy to take control.”
“Please let me go,” you plead, your eyes watering, the sight of your sweet, teary eyes driving him wild, “I won’t tell Sarah or anyone-”
“You’re crying, baby?” He coos, “You’re so pretty when you cry.”
Tears begin falling down your cheeks and all it does is excite him even more, the sight of you so vulnerable beneath him, “Rafe, please, let me go…”
And he fucking laughs at the idea, “I think I’ve finally got you right where I want you, angel. How am I gonna let you go?” He watches the way you shiver as he traces your breast over the silk fabric of your pajamas, your nipple hardening at the feeling, your entire body trembling, “Aw, baby, you cold? Let Daddy warm you up.”
“Are you gonna hurt me?”
“Hurt you? I could never hurt you,” he replies honestly, continuing to tease you with the blade, “I just wanna show you how good it feels to be bad. To let out your secrets and desires. You can trust me, baby. Tell me how much you like this. Me teasing you with this little knife. I bet you’re so fuckin’ wet from this.”
“I…” You gasp as he cuts open the strap of your pajama top, the blade nicking your skin.
Rafe moves to lap at the crimson blood that stains your soft flesh, groaning as he tastes it. You press your thighs together, the feeling of his tongue lapping at your blood being almost too much to handle. He cuts the other strap, and then? Cuts the shirt in two, a lascivious smile spreading across his face at the sight of your soft, full breasts, lips moving to wrap around one of your nipples, those icy blue eyes staring into yours as he suckles at you, his knife held to your throat.
It’s so obvious you’re enjoying this. He just needs you to fucking admit it. He drags his knife down between your breasts, down your stomach, before he reaches the waistband of your shorts. He flips the blade, so that the handle is facing you, and begins to tease your pussy over the silk fabric, making you gasp, feeling the hilt rubbing against your clit.
“Just admit you like this, baby. Be honest, I can feel how fuckin’ wet you are, soaked through these pathetic little shorts. Just tell me you want this and I’ll give you what you need.”
Desperate for him, wanting to feel his fingers, his tongue, anything, you admit, barely above a whisper, “I like it. It’s sick and wrong. But I like it.”
Rafe grins, leaning in close to you, his lips nearly brushing against yours, grinding his hips against yours, “Good girl. Such a good girl for me, baby. Now, let’s see how much you can handle from me.”
He kisses you, and it’s everything you ever fantasized about. His kiss is hot and sloppy and desperate, his tongue moving against yours as his mouth dominates your own. Rafe slices your pajama shorts open as he continues kissing you, the hilt of his knife brushing against your bare cunt, pushing inside you. You gasp against his lips as he moves the instrument in and out of you, teasing you with what’s yet to come. You moan against his lips, raising your bound hands to rest around his neck, his forehead pressed to yours as he gazes into your eyes, fucking you with his knife. It doesn’t take long for you to lose yourself, your head falling back against the pillow as you let out a cry of his name.
No, not his name.
“Daddy.”
Rafe grins, lips trailing down your chest, your stomach, down to your pussy, lapping up your juices eagerly, moaning your name as he begins to suckle at your swollen clit, your toes curling at the feeling. He makes the most lewd slurping noises as he alternates between sucking at your clit and fucking you with his tongue, pumping his fingers in and out of you at a pace that has your head reeling, over and over, finding your sweet spot and rubbing against it furiously, making you squirm and writhe against him. He presses his knife against your thigh, a silent reminder of the power he holds over you, and the small action alone is enough to send you careening over the age, your arousal coating his tongue as he eagerly tastes you.
You watch as Rafe undoes his jeans, just enough to free his cock. You pout slightly, wanting to see all of him, but this is just another way for him to remind you who it is that’s in charge here. You’re naked and vulnerable beneath him, your body all but screaming for his touch, he has control over you. So fucking pliant and soft, he thinks to himself, stopping short when he hears you voice a request he never thought he’d hear from you.
“Can you wear the mask while you fuck me?”
Rafe nods, pulling the mask on immediately, grabbing his cock by the base, slapping the tip against your swollen clit. You whine, bucking your hips against him as he pushes inside you, excruciatingly slow, the sting being almost unbearable at first, but the pain giving way to pleasure like you’ve never known before. Rafe fucks into you like a feral, depraved beast, his hand wrapped around your throat, restricting your airflow, watching you gaze up at him with hazy doe eyes, his knife to your chest as he ruts against you.
“Gonna fill you up so good, baby,” he snarls, “Can feel that pretty little pussy squeezing around me so fuckin’ tight. You’re so wet. So fuckin’ warm. Feels so good. Gonna keep you with me forever. You’re not gonna ever want anyone except for me, isn’t that right, baby?”
“Yes, Daddy,” you sigh contentedly as he pounds into you over and over, your walls hugging him tight, getting closer and closer to your peak, soaking his cock, “Fuck, it’s too much, Rafe-”
“Not Rafe,” he taunts, squeezing your throat, moving against you faster and faster, his stomach tightening as he feels you clenching around him, your poor little cunt oversensitized and already halfway to your next climax, the thought making him grin, “Call me Daddy, baby. Be a good girl.”
“Daddy, it’s too much,” you cry out, clinging to him, “Too much-”
“No, baby, you can give me another one,” he chuckles darkly, “I know you can. You’re gonna come with me this time. Wanna feel that sweet little pussy creaming all over me again while I fill you up. Gonna watch my cum spilling out of you. You’re gonna love it, baby.”
One, two more thrusts, and you’re crying out as you reach your peak again, your body shaking, trembling as he gives another thrust, thick hot ropes of cum spilling inside you. He moves to take off the mask, kissing your forehead, your nose, then your lips, soothing you as you come down from your high, slicing the tape open to free your hands. You cling to Rafe, startling slightly as the lights come back on. You meet his gaze, brushing your lips against his, wanting his warmth.
“It’s okay, baby, go to sleep,” he murmurs softly, cradling you to his chest, “I’ll be here when you wake up. I’m all yours and you’re all mine, baby. Daddy’s here to take care of you now.”
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1K notes · View notes
auspicioustidings · 5 months
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Savage
Summary: Request for some Scottish warrior Soap taking an English maiden as a prize.
Words: 3.7k
CWs: Violent non-con (I am so serious, do not ready this if it's not your thing), hardcore smut
Authors Note: This is very much a rape fantasy. Traditionally rape fantasies have historical grounding in minorities who felt ashamed of their own desires so had to fantasise a situation in which they were blameless for engaging in a stigmatised action because it was forced. It’s sort of where a lot of the noncon trope in bodice rippers comes from because women in unhappy marriages need a fantasy in which they can get rid of the shame for wanting passionate or rough sex because they imagine they fought against it. A lot more people have rape fantasies than people generally realise and truly a miniscule barely there number of them would ever think it was ok to actually assault someone. All that to say, this is not me condoning anything in real life. If you find fantasies like this don’t do it for you, then do not read it, but don’t then shame people who do. There is psychology behind why people fantasise about these things, it’s pretty normal and you don’t need to be worried that it is some moral failing. Mind your business.
It was a miraculously good match for you, a high ranking soldier of the King’s army. You were technically of noble blood, but just barely. You lived simply, not in a large house but in a small village where you held no sway over anyone else and were treated as common. But the village was close to the border between England and Scotland and every day it became more tense as whispers of raids from villages to the West skittered between houses like rats.
You didn’t know how your uncle had made arrangements for this beneficial marriage for you, but it would get you moving South in a few days time to marry and then you would finally be able to relax with this war much further away from you. You had heard horror stories of what happened to young maidens when savages came pillaging. They said that they didn’t wear anything under those kilts, they said it was to make it easy to bury their cocks in any hot hole they could find. They said they didn’t have any tame qualities, not like the English. Scottish men were feral, the comparison to dogs not holding water because at least dogs could be trained. 
When you retreated to bed you got on your knees to say your prayers. As always you had to beg forgiveness for the licentious thoughts that sent thrills straight to your cunt whenever you thought about the images all those rumours put in your head.
The noise of chaos woke you in a panic, heart hammering against your ribcage as the smell of smoke drifted on the air and war cries sounded. You recognised your own kinfolk of course, the battalion of soldiers stationed here to keep eyes on the border. But it was the cries of those animals from the country to the North that sent you scrambling out of bed in only your chemise, knowing you had to run and hide before they could see you.
You slipped out of the bedroom, a frightened little rabbit looking for a burrow to hop into. The smell of smoke was stronger in the main room and you could see the orange glow of flames through the window. Going outside would be a risk, but hiding in here may get you burned to a crisp should this building be lit up. You did not have time to make the decision as the door burst off of its hinges, a muscular man in a blood spattered kilt with a warrior's mohawk and wild eyes panting like a dog as he caught sight of you.
You were frozen, unable to even breathe. And then after a beat his mouth stretched into a horrid manic grin as he bounded towards you. That finally shifted you from freeze to flight as you scrambled back through to the bedroom, trying to get to the small window. You threw the top half of your body through the gap but his rough hands grabbed your naked ankles and yanked you back, hard. You felt the chemise catch on the window frame, the fabric bunching up to completely expose you to him before he let go of your ankles letting you crash to the ground. 
Your knees throbbed from the hard floor and by the time you were trying to crawl away he had his hand in your hair, brutally pulling your head up and craning it to look at him leaning over and getting into your face.
“Hear I have a wee noble bitch on my hands.”
Of course he would know. There were families here who would tell them anything to save themselves and pointing them in the direction of a noble maiden, one who was betrothed to an English soldier at that, would certainly be information that could spare them. The shouts outside sounded more heavily weighted towards those in his own gruff and growling accent now. The English soldiers were losing.
“I-I don’t know what you are talking about ser” you cried gently, not knowing how else to save yourself. 
“Bonnie words” he growled, pulling so sharply at your hair that you thought your scalp might be bleeding and using his other hand to grope meanly at one of your breasts through the rough fabric of your nightwear.
You cried out, feeling the tears immediately spill over and stream down your face. He was so strong, you could barely budge against his hold, and he reeked of blood and fire and sweat and hot arousal. You squeezed your eyes shut and he only growled at you.
“Ye’ll keep those eyes open, yer going tae watch yer wee English cunt take me like a whore or I’ll take yer tight arse instead.”
You choked on a sob and opened your eyes, seeing that his were full of sick glee and heat. The hand groping at your tits moved under the chemise to cup roughly at your sex and he pulled you to your feet by that hand. You screamed at how it felt as he abused you with his hand, grinding the heel against you. You felt a hot flood of bitter shame as he swiped a finger violently through your folds. What he found there made him pause for a moment, his face lighting up in unrestrained glee.
“Fucking English slut. Y’er dripping.”
You had heard women who said it would be better to be wet if they were to be taken against their will. You did not agree. Him knowing that your traitorous body found his rough abuse of it arousing was so humiliating you felt you would rather die. He was so oppressive in his demeanour, so big and aggressive above you that you imagined he may break your bed with what he was about to do to you. How foolish of you to think he would have that level of mercy.
“Going tae show all those bastards how their women take Scottish cock” he laughed, spearing two fingers inside you to their full length with no softness at all and pulling you by them.
You could not breathe. You had never had anything inside you and those two fat fingers felt like they were stretching you so much you would tear. He walked backwards so he could keep them firmly inside you and you stumbled pathetically after him, needing to keep as close to him as possible to stop the painful press against your walls that came from him pulling if you did not move. 
The shame was overwhelming as you emerged, full of his fingers and stumbling after him with tears streaming down your face, to find that your country's soldiers had been defeated with the survivors on their knees, hands bound. You were being paraded in front of them you realised, they had been put right here in the town square so they could bear witness, the Scottish soldiers standing behind them feral and full of lust as they took in their leader pulling you in front of them by the cunt. 
When he ripped his fingers out of you, your knees buckled and a high whine left you. You had went from feeling too full to feeling far, far too empty. You could barely hear anything but the blood rushing through you as your heart hammered. That and him as he taunted the soldiers on their knees. 
“Our women would ne’er let ye touch them, they’d die first. Yer clean wee English princess on the ither hand?” he said, planting a booted foot to your chest and pushing until he had you pinned on your back underfoot, “she’s gagging fir it. Foaming at the gusset tae take strong Scottish cock, put a real warrior in her belly.”
His own men cheered at that and you watched on with horror as he cocked his head at one of them and he began to approach you. 
“Naw a monster though am I my wee slut? Ye’d be wet enough fir one of their small English cocks nae doubt, but fir mine? Going tae need something to help me sink in good and deep.”
The other soldier went to his knees between your legs and you watched as he pulled his throbbing cock from under his kilt, jerking it violently. You tried to move away, his cock so close you could feel the heat of it between your legs, but the boot on your chest held you still. When you tried to close your legs the man touching himself used his other hand to wrench one of your knees until it was touching the ground, using his own knees between your thighs to help him keep your glistening cunt fully on display.
When the head of his cock stroked through your folks, slicking you with his pre-cum and bumping at your clit, you were so overwhelmed that you didn’t quite manage to bite back your moan. They laughed meanly at you as the man found his release, spurting hot cum all over your pussy, smacking his cock against your stomach when he was done to shake off the last drops.
It was filthy, you felt sticky and like you were on fire. The next soldier took his place and spat right on your already disgusting cunt as he began to stroke himself. By the time he had painted you with his seed and the third was started, the man above pressed his foot harder to get your attention and all you could do was stare up into his taunting eyes, trying to focus on him so you could not think of what was going on between your legs. You cried up at him, trying to find any level of sympathy in him.
“Keep crying and I’ll gie ye something tae cry about princess.”
Oh you hated him calling you that when you were pinned down in the dirt, defeated soldiers of your country watching as their enemies smeared their cum all over your exposed body. Watching as they made a sloppy mess out of you in preparation for their leader to shove his cock deep inside and pump you full of his savage children.
You did not know how long you stared up at him, not able to look away as you felt the heat of his men on your body, your own body getting hotter and hotter with each slide of velvety throbbing skin against your own. He had started to talk to you, his eyes not budging. It wasn’t the defeated soldiers he was taunting, it was you, ruined and disgraced under his boot.
“See how good I am tae ye little whore? Letting my men make ye flush wi pleasure. Don’t deny it, think I cannae see yer face whenever ye feel a cock on that wee untouched pussy? Like a fucking bitch in heat. I’ll fuck ye like one. Get ye on yer hands and knees so ye can look yer precious King’s soldiers in the eye when ye fall apart on my cock. When ye’r fucking begging for my cum. Wilnae even have tae dae any work, ye’ll be fucking yourself back on me ye needy slut.”
You shook your head in horror at his claims, the true fear being that he would make them true. Already you felt in a daze, felt empty and desperate. But you felt fear as well as he put his arm under his kilt, rucking the fabric up to grab at his cock. It was huge and you found yourself panicked and squirming as the last of his soldiers grunted and slapped the meat of your thigh to get you to stay still. You were rambling incoherently as the man above stroked slowly at himself, causing that thick weapon between his legs to throb and seem even bigger. 
“It won’t fit, it’s not going to fit, please I’ll die, you’ll split me open. It’s so big no no I can’t, I can’t!”
You didn’t even feel the last of his soldier’s loads splatter onto you, didn’t notice when his hands left your flesh. You would have rapidly purpling skin in the shape of fingerprints all over your thighs from how you had been held still by all of them, but you could not feel the dull pain of it through your fear of what was to come.
“Ye’ll take whit I gie ye and ye’ll fucking thank me princess.”
He removed his foot and it was only then you realised that he had been pressing down hard enough that your breaths had been shallow. The rush of oxygen from being able to fully expand your lungs again made you horribly dizzy, but it also flooded right down to your clit and made your body jerk violently with the sensation. 
He didn’t take his hand from his cock and he bent so he could use the other to grab your ruined hair again, yanking your head up and shoving himself into your mouth. You choked, legs scrambling to get underneath you to give you some stability with which to batter your fists against his thighs, trying to pull away. He laughed meanly at your attempts, moving the hand that was touching himself to join the one tangled in your hair on the back of your head and pulling your head at the same time as he thrust forward, settling himself fully in your throat. 
You were gagging around him, tears really streaming down your face now as you begged him with your eyes to let you breathe. He held you there, his own eyes glittering with satisfaction, until your muscles started to give in and you felt your eyes dropping closed as your brain became cottony. Then all at once he pulled you off and you were gulping in oxygen around your coughing and sputtering, the rush much more intense this time. 
He held your head tilted up at him so he could watch your face as he shoved his boot between your legs and got you over the edge. Oh weren’t you a delicious little thing for him, getting off so hard on how he used you, moaning shakily and wantonly in the dirt beneath him in front of his triumphant soldiers and your defeated ones. 
“Good fucking girl” he growled with a feral grin, letting you ride it out with little aborted thrusts on his boot, unable to control your body. 
You looked gone, eyes glazed and body slack. Couldn’t have that, he needed you screaming for him. He needed your blood fighting between being frozen with terror and boiling with need. And he needed you full of him, needed to be able to feel his own cock through your stomach so fucking clearly that he could jerk it. 
You were thrown forward, top half of your body collapsing pathetically into the dirt right where it was covered in the sweat and cum of his soldiers. He manhandled your hips up, leaving your face crushed into the dirt and your ass up high for him, cunt presented. You felt his hot breath at your ear and it was a sudden shock when you realised he was growling lowly into your ear, his words for you and you only.
“S’going tae hurt, yer going tae scream yerself hoarse for me and then I’ll get ye tae milk me when I rip pleasure out of all that pain. Will treat ye right after little princess, like one of my good Scottish lassies, but right now ye’r my fucking English whore.”
The confusing mix of sentiments cleared some of the fuzziness from your mind but you had no time to dwell. He was right, it did hurt and you did scream yourself hoarse. He had lined himself up and plunged into you, cock coated and slick from the cum of his soldiers but no less huge inside your tight virgin pussy. He had split you in two, you were sure of it. His cock must have broken through you, was sitting in your ribcage and punching all the air from your lungs.
You blacked out for a moment, coming right back to when he pulled out to fuck brutally back into you again, slapping your ass so hard that you felt the sting all the way up to your fingertips and making you choke on the sob that fought through the screaming. He ripped at your hair, making you look at the defeated soldiers on their knees. Making you watch their own cocks swell at your treatment. Your utter ruination was making them hard. Your head being wrenched back meant you had to go to your hands as he pounded you, and you saw how they looked as one of your breasts was fucked right out of the chemise, bouncing lewdly for them to see with every hard thrust.
The humiliation had you digging into the dirt like you had claws, feeling the bite of the earth pushing under your nails. It sparked something in your brain, almost like you could see them sharpen. Like you could feel your shoulder blades become more pronounced, become something sinewy and sleek and animal. He was fucking you like a predator and you were drooling and howling and panting like his prey, back bowed as he pulled your hair harder and had to staring at the sky babbling prayers into the night air. 
“S’too much, can’t, I can’t. Full, too full.”
“Ye fucking can. Yer tight fucking cunts trying tae strangle me, wants my cum so bad naw? Perfect English pussy, so slutty and needy for a real cock” he growled, hand letting go of your hair and smacking your ass right over where he had before, causing you to howl at the pain. 
The pain and something else, something that had no place here and yet had been lingering from the moment he had caught you. Something that had been getting closer and brighter and more insistent with every abuse you were subject to. Something that he invited in when your arms collapsed beneath you without him holding your heads weight anymore and he ground your face into the ground before bringing his hand to your clit and pinching. 
Your scream was raw and hoarse, throat well past being able to produce a clear sound. The orgasm was blinding and every bone felt like it had liquified. You saw white and then you saw hardly anything, only vague shapes and colours. The only thing now was how his cock filled you. The shame was gone, replaced with the truth that you loved this. You loved how he used you like this, how he violated you in front of these soldiers just because he could.
“That’s it princess, fucking take it” he hissed, stopping his thrusts and letting you do all the work.
You didn’t even realise now how you wildly fucked yourself back on his cock trying to chase the pain of overstimulation, addicted to the way it made you feel some sick hazy pleasure. You were drooling onto the dirt, tasting the earth mixed with cum and finding the disgust of it only felt right now. When his hand came to your stomach and pushed to feel himself bulging there you came again, harder, babbling thank yous to him.
He bit out a string of curses above you as your pussy squeezed so hard it was forcing him out, but he was strong as he forced himself balls deep and held there, finding his release as you milked everything out of him and into your womb. The liquid heat of it was the last thing you felt as you passed out, blissed and fucked out of your mind. 
John MacTavish allowed himself a moment to lean his body against your back, inhaling the scent of sweat and dirt and cum and fear and lust from your limp body. So good for him, took it perfectly. He hissed when he finally pulled out, resisting the temptation to just keep going beyond what would feel good because fuck, being inside you had been a religious experience. 
He was nothing if not a man of his word though, and he scooped your body gently into his arms to get you onto a horse and ready for him to take over the border where he could give you that princess treatment he had promised. The surviving soldiers they would leave beaten and bloodied but not dead. After all, someone had to tell your betrothed all the details.
-
“Fucking MacTavish” he hissed after excusing the man who had given the report.
He had made him give it in full detail, told him to leave nothing out. 
“Kept her alive by the sounds of it, maybe looking to get a bastard out of her” Garrick mused.
“Knowing him he’ll keep her near the border to taunt us instead of moving her further up North” Price added.
Simon Riley would not be letting his betrothed get away with allowing MacTavish of all people to take the maidenhood that rightfully belonged to him. She needed a proper punishing fuck from an English man to learn better.
“Doesn’t matter where he keeps her. I’m going to take her, and she’s going to learn what happens to sluts who spread their legs for those Scottish bastards”.
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cloudypariah · 3 months
Text
How to perpetrate and sabotage your own kidnapping: A guide for dummies.
- The creation of the board (and its subsequent discovery)
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Summary: Step One: host a brainstorming session with your teammates on how best to kidnap your future abductee. Step Two: have said abductee show up half an hour into the session and begin correcting your entire plan. Step Three: realise at the beginning of their impromptu presentation the target has absolutely no idea that they’re the target. Step Four: fail anyway.
Pairing: Dark!Poly!Task Force 141 x fem!Reader
Word count: 1.8k
Content tags: Dark content - Discussions around kidnapping, tense situations. If this is not your cup of tea, please go and find something different might better suited your palate. This is an 18+ fic meaning minors do not interact with this work. No one has permission from me to repost, copy or translate my work. No one has my permission to put my work into any AI source.
Notes: This is my first foray into the COD fandom and will be the first part in a dark comedy series. Please let me know what you think. Not proofread very well, sorry for any mistakes! Thanks for the motivation @live-love-be-unique !
Link to Task Force 141 masterlist / Link to COD masterlist
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Captain John Price likes to think he knows his men well enough to trust them when his back is turned. Now that itself doesn’t necessarily mean knowing each and every one of their dirty secrets - he definitely wouldn’t come out smelling like fresh daisies if any number of his were revealed - but it does mean that he has the awareness to recognise that they all share one particular secret.
He sees it in the way Lieutenant Riley’s body language shifts when you give him his medical forms to look over, your consideration at offering him the option to disclose only certain personal information making the reserved soldier relax just enough to offer you a low thanks, accompanied with a stare that stretches on for a few moments longer than considered socially polite.
It’s also so amazingly obvious with Sergeant MacTavish. John’s surprised everyone else misses the way Soap’s smile takes a little longer to fade after departing for yet another mission, your swift congratulations on completing yet another physiotherapy appointment - “ Keep it up the good work big guy” - leaving the Scotsman floating on cloud nine damn near until the plane lands.
And how could he forget Sergeant Garrick? The man’s quick to change his tune and focus up, but the captain has observed Kyle absentmindedly rubbing his shoulder, thumb gingerly stroking the spot where your palm was only moments before, your figure long gone as you retreat down the corridor to where you came from.
No, Jonathan Price doesn’t miss a thing about his men. And it only takes two weeks and a long chat in the corner booth of the bar one quiet night - sans you or Laswell - before somehow his place becomes the meeting point for an unusual, though not unwelcome, topic - you.
More specifically, how to keep you.
The wooden shit box of a sports bar was where the first two facts were confirmed amongst them: 1. Every single one of the 141 men wanted you for themselves, but they weren’t above sharing. 2. You weren’t worth killing each other over, not when there was a much easier solution staring them in the face.
John’s house became the go-to place to discuss fact number three - They needed a plan.
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It was Gaz who initially suggested the whiteboard after numerous interjections from Ghost and John; from everything to how to keep this from Laswell, to deciding which of your usual hangouts would provide them with the best opportunity to commence your “relocation”, to how to delicately but firmly explain said "relocation" to you once it was complete. Kyle loves his brothers in arms and never regrets a moment where his life is on the line if it means saving any one of them, but his patience began to wear thin when Soap got bored and started using goddamn paper planes instead of words to get his point across. At that Price finally relented and bought the damn thing.
Now, John was expecting you to pop by his place on Wednesday night to drop some papers off. A perfect opportunity, were it not for the fact that the gentlemen were still disagreeing on where to relocate you. However, it’ll allow you to grow more comfortable with him while he has some alone time with you, your presence like a balm on a wound - soothing and necessary (at least to him).
He had been looking forward to seeing you… tomorrow. So when you turn up not just on the doorstep but in the middle of the bloody hallway in his own bloody home halfway through the 141 “guys night”, his secondary action of shitting bricks quickly overrides his primary instinct to eliminate the threat.
He’s on his way back from the bathroom when he sees you standing, familiar folders firm in your grasp - fucking hell, is that his spare key too? - and a sour expression on your pretty face.
Your eyes narrow further when you spot him, striding over with fury rolling off you in small waves. “Captain Price, I know you did not leave these dossiers on my desk just before the end of my work day with a note stating they all need to be completed by the end of the work day.”
John’s senses are briefly overwhelmed by you being so close to him, the sight of you angry having a different effect on him than what you had originally intended. He’s never seen it before, and his hand twitches when you’re less than a foot away - fluctuating adrenaline or the desire to reach out and hold you, he’s not sure which is more prevalent. 
He always forgets to not be so obvious around you, but it isn’t as though you usually notice. (He’s not sure if the thought should make him feel sad or grateful.)
The sounds of his men arguing in the background, merely the next room over, are enough to bring reality crashing down hard.
His voice is deliberately loud and stalwart when replies. “You can’t be here.”
“Tough shit. Your lads night can wait.” You lean past him to the origin of what your gut was telling you was the sounds of the remaining 141 members quarreling. It’s easy to slip past Captain Price once your mind is set, the push of files against his chest preventing him from reacting for a few seconds - all the time you need to move down the hallway to where everyone else is bound to be.
John is quick to rush behind you, the arguing noises having swiftly changed to near cartoon-like crashes just moments before you enter the room. 
Ghost has migrated to the corner of the sitting area, standing as stiff as a fucking nutcracker, a mountain of crumpled notes and paper planes spilling out from between his arms. (His mask is still on thank god because it’ll hide exactly how caught out he feels, and if there’s one thing Simon Riley cannot stand it’s feeling like a kid with his hand caught in the cookie jar). His eyes instinctually watch your every move, waiting for your reaction.
Both of your gazes drift to the other side of the room, with neither of you failing to notice how the couch cushions are strewn widely across the space, (with one being stuck on top of a bookshelf for some odd reason) to find not one, but two soldiers gecko’d to the standing whiteboard.
Their demolitions expert is currently splayed out on the left side of the board and desperately grabbing the top of its metal frame, his stomach pressed into the cold porcelain and a left leg hitched up in a poor attempt to conceal the incriminating writing.
Price’s protégé is in a similar state. Dear Gaz has his back against the right side, with his arms outstretched to - much like Johnny - cover as much of their group planning as possible, a coloured marker clasped in each fist.
Two deers in headlights.
The sight of his task force is enough to bring back flashbacks of his original conversation with Kate about bringing these men together because Jesus H. Christ, what the fuck was he thinking?
There are a few moments when nobody moves or dares to breathe…
… except for you, of course.
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You waste no time walking over to the two youngest members of the 141 as you attempt to shove them off the board. “Move,” you demand, palms pushing firmly against their sides. “I want to know what’s so important to everyone.” When they refuse, you do your best to stare at them, pleading with a pleasantly soft, “Please.”
Yeah, they both do what you say with ease when they hear that, giving you enough space to take in the somewhat smudged scribbles.
You miss the signal John gives Simon, the Ghost moving closer to your position as John quietly locks the door, and when your attention is drawn back to the board after the other two move you also miss all of the knowing looks shared behind your back. This was very far from ideal, but how can they recover from this?
They hope you understand that whatever comes next, they didn’t plan for it to start this way.
Kyle and John call your name but you ignore them, still processing the information written in front of you.
Johnny flexes his hands, preparing for the worst as you step back and say, “This is… bullshit.”
Every single member stops. That was not the reaction they were expecting.
Turning to face the group, you scoff. “I’m not even kidding. Firstly, you’re using guys' night to work, which is horrible for your mental and emotional health. And you should all know better.”
Four sets of brows furrow in united confusion. You don’t let that deter you from continuing, your arms gesturing haphazardly at the whiteboard. “Secondly, this is hands-down one of the worst brainstorms I have ever seen. This is not cohesive in the fucking slightest. Garrick, mark me.”
Kyle chokes on his spit, his brain short-circuiting before he sees your fingers wiggling at one of the markers he’s holding. The sergeant promptly gives it to you.
Your free hand takes turns pointing at everyone else in the room, a verbal command of, “sit down” directed at each man also. Dumbly and cautiously they all do. Ghost places himself at the end of the couch nearest the entrance, John strategically chooses a spot between yourself and the kitchen, and Soap and Gaz sit closest to you, where the two of them can hear you muttering under your breath as you draw what appears to be a massive cloud shape in the middle of the board.
Once completed, you fill your shape in with the word ‘TARGET’ and slam your free hand against the board. No one flinches, but if one were to look closely there would be some eyes widening in response. Johnny swears he sees one of your eyelids twitch.
“So,” you call out, “what do we know about the target?”
There are not only wide eyes looking at you, there are full glances exchanged between your audience.
“Seeing as you had the nerve to not invite me in your little meeting while keeping me on overtime” - Kyle and John squirm at that, and your finger makes a little circle - “we are going to be working on this project together. With all due respect, I’m not asking.”
Surely not…
And it’s when Captain John Price reviews the writing left over from the others that he realises Kyle and Johnny did one thing right during their clusterfuck of a coverup.
They managed to erase your name.
… you have absolutely no idea you are the target.
 A piece of writing far in the coroner catches your attention, and your shoulders slump. “The target likes knitting and ‘The Karate Kid’. In another life we would have been the best of friends.” A dramatic sigh leaves you, “Oh well, at least I’ll be able to give you some insight into the mindset of this individual. Any questions?”
Four hands shoot up.
Rubbing your hands together with glee, a maniac smile grows on your face. “Excellent.”
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after-witch · 7 months
Text
Best Regards [Hisoka x Reader]
Title: Best Regards [Hisoka x Reader]
Synopsis: You're tasked with looking for Hisoka on the Black Whale. You get more than you bargained for.
Word count: 3800ish
notes: violent noncon, sexual assault, violence against reader, descriptions of blood and injuries, victim blaming against reader
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It was not in your nature to question Chrollo Lucilfer, and you weren’t about to do it now. Even when there was a small, hard, resilient pit in your stomach that wondered if this was the right move. Or if perhaps you should have said something earlier, before everyone separated. It’s not as if Chrollo was ever unreasonable, but everything was for the good of the Spider and if that meant acquiescing to his decision in this case, when he seemed so intent. 
He had asked you to allow him to keep your nen until Hisoka was found and dealt with, and you handed it over without a complaint. Of course you did. It was the first time he’d ever asked for your nen, and if you were willing to self-reflect a little deeper,  you might admit that it was at least a little flattering. 
You weren’t, you knew, the strongest (or even close to it) of the Spiders. You couldn’t mow down a group with a sweep of your arm or lift up an oncoming car and throw it into traffic. When it came to delegating who was leading the charge in a mission that required anything like that,  you were certainly not at the front.
You weren’t helpless. You could hold your own in certain types of combat, of course. Nobody in the Troupe was weak against the typical combatants you personally came across. Over-eager mafia guards with faith in their guns; greedy non-combatants eager to buy priceless forbidden trinkets… all could be dealt with using the knife in your pocket or a hard, horrible kick to their neck, cracking the bones like an egg. 
But if push came to shove with a nen user, well… there was a reason  you were not typically sent out alone. Your own nen was useful to the Troupe, but for reconnaissance only. Once you encountered a person, you could immediately identify them through their body heat signature through any surface.
All you had to do was activate your nen and begin to search, and spot the particular pulsating colors assigned to your target. From there, the rest of the Troupe could do what they needed. Which, admittedly, often involved the gruesome demise of said target--then or later, tied to a chair after all the information had been cut out of them. 
Maybe you weren’t the strongest fighter. But you were loyal to the death, and Chrollo knew that. It was an attribute that one must have, in order to be a proper spider. That’s what brought the lot of you to this godforsaken ship, after all, isn’t it? 
But now you were left without your nen, without that distinct advantage that gave you the upper hand when it came to finding your target. Chrollo would put it to good use. And he needed it more than you, because you certainly weren’t going to kill Hisoka, even if you managed to find him. 
If you did find him… well. You were stealthy.  You would slink away and find one of the others and set a beautiful chain reaction in motion, one that ended up with Hisoka exactly where he belonged. 
But first… to find him.
--
To call the Black Whale a “ship” was an understatement. It was not a ship. No, It was an entire country, teeming with life; with people, fights, loves, friends and so many dirty little secrets.
Hisoka was one of those dirty little secrets. He was somewhere on this ship, and come hell or high water, he would be found. By Chrollo. By the others. By you, perhaps. And he would be dealt with, as others had been in the past. 
The only problem was--how in the hell were you going to find him?
WIthout your nen, you were left to rely on your natural senses. They were heightened of course, but that didn’t necessarily make it an easy task. There were thousands of people on this tier alone… crowds and crowds, weaving in and out of public areas, arguing over this and that, laughing, yelling, calling to so-and-so over the noise. 
In theory, Hisoka should be easy to spot. He was tall. He was outrageous. He never failed to make a splash, appearance-wise. If he was walking in a crowd, it wouldn’t be impossible to spot him, if you were looking for him. Yet no matter what room you searched, how many faces you scanned, he wasn’t there.
You’d wondered, though, if he might have altered his looks before getting on the ship. Maybe he toned them down to avoid being too obvious. 
He had to know that the Troupe would follow him. He wasn’t stupid. He was many things, yes, but never stupid. 
You pass yet another common area--this one even dingier than the last, which seems to be the trend--that proves to be fruitless, filled with only groups of people in varying states. Some look tired or hungry or sick. Some are arguing. Some holding hands. Some yelling after one another to come-back-so-we-can-do-this-and-that. 
But no Hisoka. The same as the other rooms, the other corridors. Countless people, blurry faces that you wouldn’t remember in a few seconds, none of them the person that you were desperate to find. If only you could see his damn body signature. 
And really… but oh, the thought shouldn’t come to you, because Chrollo would not have brought any of you here (surely) were it not true. Yet here it comes anyway, slow and practical: Is Hisoka even on the ship? 
You glance around you, taking in the mundane faces once more. He could be here. He could be in hiding. He could be in disguise. 
Or he could be somewhere else entirely, and all of this was a trap meant to lure the Troupe onto the Black Whale. Or maybe he was--
“Found you~!” 
There’s no time to react to the deceptively jovial nature of Hisoka’s voice before your body whips backward and your stomach lurches hard, yanked by the power of nen-induced gravitational forces that pull you completely against his chest and refuse to let you move forward. 
But you’re not helpless, are you? No. Your hands move quickly, pulling out the knife in your pocket and preparing to jab straight into an artery. Chrollo might not be happy if Hisoka bled out here and now, but it’s better than letting him get away--alone or with you.
Hisoka is faster, and your knife is thrust out of your hand with a sticky sound. You can tell Hisoka is gripping the handle tightly when the point of the knife is pressed against your back. Not in subtle warning, but truly pressed, the point digging into your flesh with a flash of pain.  You can feel blood trickling down, wetting against your shirt, where it will surely stick and stain.
“You never were the strongest, hm?” His voice is right in your ear, his breath a mixture of some sweet concoctions. Gum and candy and mints. “Why did dear Chrollo send you out alone…” 
You feel your lips curl up in a sneer, for all the good it does you, but whatever insult your mind was going to conjure is lost when Hisoka lets off a soft little hum and begins to drag you--though the word is perhaps not quite correct, as you’re stuck to him with his damn Bungee Gum--away. All the while, the knife stays in the flesh of your back, burning every time he gives it a little twist. 
No one in this part of the ship pays you any attention after they see who’s dragging you. Eyes glance over you and quickly look away. Someone skitters off--maybe to find whatever passes for law enforcement, though they had precious little presence in this part of the Black Whale--but you don’t place faith in them.  You never placed faith in anyone but Chrollo and to a different extent, the other members of the Troupe.
Present company excluded, of course. 
Before Hisoka dips into one of the winding corridors past the common room,  you jerk your hand behind your back. Hisoka easily bats it away, keeping you from grabbing the knife--or so he thinks. You let the blood you’ve gathered from your wounded back drip down your fingers onto the floor. You leave another smear on a wall just before Hisoka turns. 
Blood, deep and red--your version of Hansel’s pitiful breadcrumbs. 
With any luck, someone from the Troupe will find it. 
--
The maze of the Black Whale has never been as irritating as it is now. Soon enough, Hisoka has taken you away from even the outskirts of the level, into what must be some little-used crew spaces. The room he seems to decide upon is sparse and dark, with metal walls and a few gas lamps giving the room a soft glow. There are no beds or furniture, only the lamps and a barred clock. Maybe it was meant to be a crew quarter before it was abandoned.
Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that once Hisoka has locked the door (where did he get a key? The question is tucked away for later, for Chrollo, for the others) he releases you from his hold and you stumble forward. Your back aches and the damn knife is still in his hand, twirled easily with his fingers. 
He doesn’t quite look like himself. Gone are the ostentatious clothing and styled hair. Instead, he’s wearing something simple, a dark shirt and trousers, and his hair hangs loose. He’s still Hisoka, there’s no doubt about that. The smile alone is enough to give him away, now that you’re up close. But it’s enough to make him blend in with the masses, when you aren’t sure who you are looking for. 
“Well?” He asks, splaying his arms out, holding the knife carelessly--like a toy. “Do you want to play? Or shall we wait for the others?” The light of the gas lamps makes his visage even more irritating to you. You want to shine a spotlight on him, show him for what he is. 
You take a fighting stance, and he only quirks his head at you before his smile grows wider. More indulgent. But there’s no judgment on your end for that, no need for a bruised ego or snapping words. You’re not a combative fighter, and you never were. You could hold your own sometimes but… against Hisoka? The thought isn’t even worth entertaining. 
But what else were you supposed to do? 
With your back bleeding and your nen (such as it was) gone, you launched yourself at Hisoka with just the faintest hope of lasting long enough for backup to arrive. 
How quickly it ends would be laughable, if you could find any of this funny. The knife he pilfered from you flies through the air, aimed at your chest--my heart, you think--and you manage to dodge just enough for the knife to slice your shoulder, cutting your shirt and taking off a layer of skin. It was thrown so hard that the blade slides right into the metal wall. 
You could whirl around and try to grab it. But it’s smarter to keep an eye on Hisoka, so you do.
And… so does he. His eyes roam up and down, and it makes your stomach begin to harden, your thoughts turning to things they normally didn’t in a situation like this. 
“Ohh,” Hisoka says, voice slow and sticky as his telltale trick. “Well, that’s a sight.” 
You don’t know what he means at first. But when the sting of your missing skin catches up with you, you glance down at your injured shoulder. The knife cut through the fabric of your shirt as well as your bra strap, both of which now hang limply down, exposing one bared breast. 
There’s only so fast your thoughts can go, trapped in a metal room with Hisoka, no clear way out, and a knife firmly embedded into the wall. Your eyes dart here and there, desperate for options. If you could get the knife out, you might be able to keep him occupied long enough for someone else to spot your blood, and if they did--
Hisoka sighs, interrupting your thoughts, and it’s almost like a croon which makes the hairs on your arm stand on end. Sensing danger was a skill you developed as a child, and it was no less fine-tuned as an adult. Something was going to happen. Something awful. 
“Well, well--why not?” He asks himself. There’s a smile on his face and his voice and it sets your nerves on edge. “We’ll be here for a while. Don’t want to get bored, do we?” 
You only have time to get out a gruff “What are you tal--” before Hisoka swoops in, extending his leg for a kick, and breaks your leg with his foot. It’s as simple as breaking a twig for him, and for you there is a bright flash in your vision just before you go down. The sound of the crunch is almost worse than the pain, but only for a moment, when you land hard and awkward and the pain bursting in your ribs sends stars into your eyes.
But you don’t cry out. You’re better than that, at least, it’s the one thing you hold onto in the moment as adrenaline and pain compete for attention in your racing mind.
Something else elbows in, as well, almost literally--Hisoka, pouncing down on you, tall and looming. His wrists grab your arms and pin them down to the ground. The carpetless floor is cold but you can feel sweat--or perhaps it’s the blood from your back--underneath.
“Should I break these too?” Hisoka muses, not quite addressing you. He’s smiling softly, almost serenely. It makes you hate him more. “I do so want to hear all your pretty noises.”
Hot breath pushes in and out through your nose and you grit your teeth.
“Fuck you,” you say, before spitting right in his satisfied, smiling, smug face. 
But the bastard doesn’t change his expression at all. The thin dab of spit sits on his cheek and he just beams down at you, the skin around his eyes crinkling.
“Well, it was your idea.”
You see his hand curl in a fist just before he punches his wrist out, short and swift, and breaks your nose. The sound of the crunch is registered first, before a heavy, sharp pain--the pain of splitting bone fragments--spreads across your face. Unbidden tears stream down your eyes, and you feel and taste the blood that pours from your nose rather than smell it. 
“You know,” Hisoka says, leaning close, his breath hot on your bleeding face, “on some women, this might make them look less pretty. But on you?” He sticks out his tongue and laps at the spot underneath your nose, teasing your upper lips. “It’s darling. Really.”
“Fuck you,” you repeat, a hint of bubble in your tone from the blood that makes its way into your mouth. You spit, managing to dribble some of it out. It oozes down your chin with your drool and tears.
Hisoka reaches out and tucks a sweaty piece of hair behind your ear.
“Eager, aren’t we?” 
Somehow, it didn’t register before, what Hisoka meant. What Hisoka was planning. 
You aren’t stupid. You’ve seen him act vulgar before; seen him groan and wet his lips in battle, flirting, cooing, sometimes even sporting an erection visible through his pants.
Speaking of--you glance down and see that “sometimes” has occurred now. And it’s then that things seem to click into place in your frazzled mind, pushing through the pain in your back and your leg and your face. 
He’s going to…
The word doesn’t come, because Hisoka busies himself by tearing off the rest of your shirt, the bra flying to the wall with it. You have the presence of mind to strike out when his fingers dance along the waistband of your pants, but it does you no good. He grips your fingers firmly--they might be fractured, but there’s a rush of humiliating adrenaline that keeps you from focusing on it--and peels off your pants and underwear in a surprisingly swift motion. At least, you think dimly, he didn’t rip them. 
There’s a slow thought process that begins to weave its way into your brain. What should you do, now? It wasn’t something that happened, wasn’t something even on the radar, of previous assignments and missions and heists. People who hated the Troupe wanted all of you dead. No one had--to your knowledge--tried to do something like this before. No one had been strong or smart enough to even get this close to you, much less the members who were physically stronger. 
But this was Hisoka, and a completely different scenario. One that you found yourself unprepared for, physically and otherwise. Do you fight? You won’t win. Do you seethe and tell him exactly what you think of him? He might get annoyed and kill you, and then you’d be useless to everyone. 
At least if you live, they’ll know Hisoka is on the ship. You can still help. You can still--
There’s a condescending gentle pat to your cheek--then another, and another. It doesn’t hurt directly but it jostles your face, causing fresh, sharp pain to shoot up your nose. 
“Are you still there? Don’t pass out on me now… you should be able to take a few broken bones.”  
You feel your gaze harden and it only makes him laugh. He traces a shape--a heart, the fucker--on your cheek with his finger before taking both of your wrists and pinning them next to your head on the floor. 
When you glance down again, you realize he’s pulled down his trousers, which must be discarded somewhere in the room. You can see his naked, erect cock and there’s a strange realization that comes over you.
He’s going to fuck you. Here, in this isolated room, underneath the ocean. He might kill you after. Or during, who knows. It’s a fact that this will happen and that these are possibilities. The logical part of your brain holds onto this fact, as if it might make it easier. 
“Ready?” He smiles down at you.
You’re not ready, and he knows this, and that’s what makes it fun for him. 
He pushes inside with a single hard thrust, and you feel a burning sear on your insides as he presses his cock fully inside you with no attempt to ease himself (or you) into things. 
“Mmm,” he groans, pulling out just enough to thrust back in again. “Tighter than I thought. The boss hasn’t had you?” 
There’s a blossoming pain in your chest. Broken ribs or humiliation or some terrible mixture of both. 
You grit your teeth and you don’t say exactly what you want to say, because it might make him angry enough to kill you, but you can’t let things slide entirely.
“Don’t--” Your breath hitches when he thrusts inside you harder than before, you’re sure you must be bleeding between your legs now. But you force yourself to continue.
“Don’t talk about him… you… you traitor.” You wish the word had some weight, but you can tell it means nothing to Hisoka. 
At least nothing bad. Because you can feel his cock twitch inside you and it makes bile rise in your throat, hot and stinging. 
Hisoka runs his fingers through your hair. There’s something sticky on his fingers--your blood?--that makes you wince. The deceptive gentleness only lasts a moment before he backhands you, catching your broken nose on his fingers. Tears fall from your eyes against your will, and you feel fresh blood trickle out of your nose. 
“So mouthy! I love it!” 
His cock twitches again and you feel him sigh at the sensations it must give him, to be forcing himself on you, thrusting himself in and out of your abused sex.
You don’t know how long it goes on. Long enough for the searing pain to turn into burning ache, for the pain between your legs to blur together with the pain everywhere else. 
But eventually he must be reaching his limit, because he begins to speed up his thrusts, pressing the fingers on your wrist down enough to hurt. 
“Tell Chrollo,” he says, a hint of an uncontrolled, breathy pant in his name finally creeping in at the direct use of Chrollo’s name, “that this is his fault.” 
HIsoka’s fingers tighten on one of your wrists as he increases his force and his speed, and you feel and hear the crunch, the sharp pain joining the ache of your battered body. 
“He sent you alone,” he continues, thrusting harder with every word. “He took your nen, semi-useless as it is.” 
There’s no grand finale to his orgasm, only the feel of his muscles tensing above you, a single final push as he emptied himself inside you. And then Hisoka himself, leaning in to whisper in your ear, voice dripping with deceitful honey. 
“He should have known better than to send a weak thing like you to look for me. He could have at least let you keep your nen… then you might have seen me coming, no?”
A chaste kiss is pressed to your cheek. You feel the stickiness of clear lip gloss left behind. Ah, you think, a dull, slow, stupid thought. Then he didn’t give up his vanity entirely on the ship. 
You don’t move from your spot on the ground. You’re not sure you want to try, just yet. You hear Hisoka’s footsteps receding, hear the whining of the metal door opening and the clang of it shutting behind him. 
For a while, you hear nothing at all. Nothing except your ragged breath. 
And then your grunts and irritatingly soft whimpers as you slowly, agonizingly sit up. You don’t want to be found like this. Weak and bleeding and…
Your fingers fish around on the floor until you find your torn shirt, your underwear, your pants.  It takes you a long time to get redressed. Your shirt doesn’t even cover you fully, and you fumble with your aching fingers and likely broken wrist to tie it off, giving you an ounce of modesty.
Every part of you aches. Some parts of you are broken. There’s a horrible soreness between your legs, and you know without checking that it’s not just Hisoka’s seed that’s leaking out of you but blood. 
But you manage it. Carefully. Painfully. 
Sometime later, the door opens again, a metallic whine.
But it’s not Hisoka, come to brag or finish you off. It’s Chrollo, standing alone, the lights of the hallway obscuring everything but his silhouette, which wavers despite the fact that he’s standing in place. Your vision is spotty, dizzying--from the blood loss or the pain or the stress or all of it at once. 
His footsteps to you are slow, careful. You dimly register him kneeling in front of you and saying your name. You feel his eyes looking you over, and it’s a different feeling than Hisoka staring at your exposed, broken, bleeding body. But it’s just as open, and you only just resist the urge to curl up on yourself and hide what little that you can.
It would just aggravate your wounds, anyway.
You don’t see Chrollo’s expression when everything clicks into place, but oh, damn it all. You hear his breath hitch and somehow that hurts more than your broken ribs. 
“Look at me,” he says finally, his voice soft but commanding. 
And you do. Chrollo’s expression is neutral, calm. It’s what you need, maybe. What he thinks you need? You’re not sure if there’s a difference. 
“Hisoka.” He doesn’t elaborate further, and he doesn’t need to.
You nod. 
“I’ll have you taken care of,” he tells you. His words are slow and deliberate, and there’s an inkling of shame in your chest at them. You shouldn’t be in this position, not in front of Chrollo or at all. You’re meant to be above this weakness. Aren’t you?
There’s a few moments, and you’ve been around Chrollo to know what he’s going to ask next. It doesn’t make the way it turns your stomach sour any less unpleasant.
“Did he say anything important to you?” 
You think. You wet your lips, tasting blood and mucus. 
And then you shake your head. No. You won’t tell Chrollo what Hisoka said, because despite the way his words twisted something in you, deep down--it’s not true. You’re an adult. You joined the Troupe, fought for your place in it. You joined the mission. You agreed to go alone, agreed to hand over your nen. 
Chrollo sighs. He inspects you, again, looking for tell-tale signs of what you won’t say to him. 
And then he tells you, simply--
“You don’t have to lie. Not to me.”
It’s not an order. It’s not even a request, not really. It’s an admission of the fact that he trusts you and you trust him and you don’t have to keep things from him.
In the end, you don’t know what’s more bitter. Your failure, the mucus-tinged blood on your tongue, or the stilted admission that comes next. 
"He said it was your fault. He said you shouldn't have sent me alone without at least my nen so I could at least see him coming.” 
Your words sound robotic, even to your ears. How does Chrollo hear them? Hopefully for the mechanical repetition that they are. You don’t want the words to carry any weight, because you don’t believe them. 
Chrollo closes his eyes. Then he looks at you, and it might just make you cry. Because his expression, just for the moment that he allows you to take it in, is absolutely dreadful. 
It passes, and you’re glad, and maybe it’s the blood loss but you swear there’s a euphoric relief when Chrollo’s expression returns to neutral and he merely wraps his arm around you and assists you up.
You let him, biting your cheek to keep quiet with all of the pain in your broken, used body as he assists you to your feet--or rather, your one unbroken foot--before lifting you into his arms to carry you out.
You don’t want to wince. Or whimper. Or do anything but let your mouth fill up with fresh blood from the blisters from your teeth, the consequence of keeping quiet now. 
Because above all, you don’t want to see that look in Chrollo’s eyes ever again. 
In fact, you realize, grim--you’d rather die than see that look once more.
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lena-after-dark · 1 year
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Pairing: Dark!Namor x Reader
Prompt: "I'll follow you to the ends of the earth. No matter where you run, I'll catch you."
Requested By: Anon
Warnings: Stalking, obsessive behavior, obsession at first sight.
You were on vacation the first time you felt him near. Of course then you didn't know what it was that haunted you through the waters.
The warm waves of the Atlantic washed all around you as you swam from the beach. You went as far as you felt safe to go, pausing to enjoy the sunshine and to sneak a peak at the marine life below. You were unsure how long you were in the water before you felt it. You knew there was a presence near you. You felt the pressure shift in the water, closing around you. Upon inspection, you saw nothing that would cause such a disturbance. But each time you stepped into the sea, you had the feeling that something was there - watching you.
That looming feeling of eyes upon you didn't let up, even after you were home. Though it was gone for a while, it came rushing back one rainy evening. It was enough to make you double check the locks on every door and window in your home. You peered outside and saw nothing. Always nothing. Except when the lightning flashed and there was a figure seemingly floating in the air. You only saw it once, and shrugged it off as your imagination.
Always when it was raining. That's when you'd feel it. That's when you'd see things. It was maddening. The figure only appeared when you were home - and when it was dark. Never when you could find proof that something was there.
Until you started receiving gifts, that was. Handcrafted jewelry and ornate shells appeared at your doorstep. And once on your windowsill - inside. That was enough to make you leave your home. And once again, the occurrences halted - for a time. Then you saw it again, not long after you'd moved. The figure floating in air. The shape of a man. You tried to capture an image, but it was gone before you could.
You had to get out of town again. This time to the mountains. The snow was a welcome distraction.
"Beautiful evening, isn't it?"
You were alone on the balcony of the lodge - sipping a hot drink and enjoying the setting sun. Something about him seemed familiar, though you didn't think you'd met him before. The glare of the sun obscured your view slightly.
"Yeah, it is. You're staying here as well?"
"Not exactly." The rich timbre of his voice was soothing. And yet something felt off. "Just visiting. It's very quiet around this lodge. You're the first person I've seen. Forgive my intrusion. I'm... Namor. May I ask your name?"
You told him your name out of compulsory politeness. He turned to face you, repeating your name with a smile. You could see him clearly now. He looked out of place - as if he were uncomfortable in the clothing he was wearing. Nothing in the style of his sweater or hat matched his earrings - and they unnerved you at the sight of them. They looked to be the same craftsmanship of the jewelry you'd been receiving. Or perhaps it was just a coincidence. You complimented them, testing the waters.
"You like them? Perhaps I'll have to get you a pair." You let out a nervous chuckle. It was time to leave. You made up a quick lie about needing to go and stood, noticing that he wasn't wearing any shoes.
"I'll see you again soon," he said as a goodbye. He sounded so charming. But there was something dark in the phrase. It was a promise. You dared a last glance at him and saw that he hadn't taken his eyes off of you. That familiar feeling was back tenfold.
Namor kept his promise. When you returned home, a pair of green earrings was waiting inside. You weren't delusional. This man - or whatever he was - was following you. Could he fly? What was he? There were so many questions, and no answers to any of them. And now that he'd appeared before you, certainly things were going to escalate. You had to leave again. You moved only when it was bright and dry as a bone outside. You were careful - leaving no trace of where you might've gone. You installed a camera, extra locks, everything you could think of.
You thought you were rid of him. Through stormy nights you didn't see or feel anything out of the ordinary. No gifts were left for you to find. No figure floating outside your window.
Apparently he just needed time to find you.
Your face to face meeting had made him bolder. You saw him again - hovering outside your window as the rain fell. This time he didn't disappear. This time he flew to the glass, placing his hand against it as he looked inside at you.
You scrambled away, trying to alert the authorities. It didn't matter if they didn't believe you. You needed to know someone was on the way to you.
Namor was inside before you could give dispatch your address. He was behind you with his hand wrapped around yours, pulling the phone from your ear and ending the call. The other was around your mouth, preventing you from yelling. He shushed you when you yelled into his hand - as if he were attempting to soothe you.
"I have to admit, I am enjoying our game of cat and mouse."
You pulled away from him, and he let you. When you faced him, a grin had spread across his lips.
"Did you like the earrings," he ended his question with something in a language you didn't understand. Most likely a term of endearment.
"Get out. Now. The cops will be here any moment." He chuckled at that, and paid the thin threat no mind.
"I think I'll keep our game going a little longer," he said as he stepped closer. You instinctively stepped back, and he continued forward until you were against a piece of furniture and couldn't retreat any further. He reached his hand out and ran his knuckles against the side of your arm. The touch sent shivers down your spine.
"I'll give you two weeks this time before I look for you again."
No matter what you said, or what questions you asked, he had no interest in elaborating. Whatever his intentions were in the end, he kept them from you. He wouldn't tell you why he was there, what he wanted from you, nothing.
“I’ll follow you to the ends of the earth. No matter where you run, I’ll catch you.” 
He left through the window, flying into the darkness so quickly that he barely looked like a shadow across the sky.
Buy Me a Coffee?
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boxofbonesfic · 9 months
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Title: 𝙳𝚘𝚙𝚙𝚎𝚕𝚐ä𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚛 [5]
Pairing: Dark!Ransom x Reader, Lloyd Hansen x Reader
Summary: Your husband’s twin brother has always made you uncomfortable, and after two years of marriage, you finally find out why. 
Warnings: Obsessive Behavior, Possessive Behavior, Stalking, Kidnapping, Basement-wife, Gaslighting, Manipulation, Breeding kink, Smut, Darkfic, Dead Dove: Do not eat!
Word Count: 3,761
A/N: i cannot wait to see what you all think of this latest development! please drop by my ask with thoughts or comments, and as always, thanks everyone for your patience! ❤️ divider by @firefly-graphics​
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To your absolute horror, Lloyd doesn’t stop. You’re dizzy, both from the realization and the even, steady grind of his hips. It’s terribly familiar, the way he touches you—like it’s not the first time. Your stomach rolls as an anguished wail tears from your lips at the thought, because it’s the same one you’ve been shoving down, burying underneath every single other thing you can think of, because it couldn’t be true. Ransom wouldn’t do that you, he wouldn’t—
But he has.
Lloyd clucks his tongue at you, and reaches forward to cup your face. “You can scream, Princess.” He grins. “I know you can’t keep quiet anyway.” His words turn your stomach. Your arms, previously paralyzed at your sides, come up to push frantically at his face and chest as you curse. 
“Get the fuck off me, Lloyd!” You scream, but he doesn’t move—doesn’t even falter as he continues to rut into your shamefully wet cunt. He doesn’t budge, like your blows don’t even hurt. It makes you even more panicked, your eyes growing wide as you sob. Frantically, you scream for your husband, your voice swallowed by the crashing surf. 
“Ransom—! Ran—” Lloyd silences you with a kiss, swallowing your fear as he presses his lips to yours. Your shock allows him entry, sweeping his tongue into your mouth as you squirm beneath him. Lloyd catches your arms easily, forcing them back against the rock behind you.
“What’s the worst part, Princess?” He asks mockingly, his amused chuckle puffing against your lips. “That it’s me? Or that you liked it? That you always liked it?” You don’t want it to be true, shaking your head as you stare at him with tear-filled eyes. He nods in response, as slow and deliberate as his thrusts. Your stomach churns with the combination of this forbidden knowledge and the unwanted pleasure that creeps up your spine. 
He knows your body, that much is obvious. You don’t know how you didn’t see it before, a hundred thousand puzzle pieces falling perfectly into place as your life crumbles around them. Lloyd holds you like Ransom, kisses you like Ransom—
Or does Ransom kiss you like Lloyd?
He plays your body perfectly, like you’re an instrument he’s already  mastered.  Even as your head swims, the thick weight of his cock drawing pleasure from you even as you fight against it. You can hear it, how wet you are, how much your traitorous body is enjoying Lloyd. It’s maddening, the way you clench and quake beneath him, struggling ineffectually against pleasure you don’t want. He transfers both your wrists to one hand, using the other to cup your chin. 
“It’s really not as bad as you think,” he coos, dragging his thumb through your tears. He kisses you again, painfully softly. “I know what you like.” Lloyd’s fingers taste like the sea as he draws them across your trembling lips. “I know what you hate.” He traces circles around your puffy nipples, before painting stripes of salt-water down your belly. He spreads your lips wider with two fingers and draws those same circles around your clit. 
“I hate you!” You grit through clenched teeth, through your furious, shameful tears. Lloyd clucks his tongue, before leaning down to nose at the skin of your throat. 
“No you don’t, Princess. You love Ransom—so you love me. We’re the same, baby-doll.” He leans up, his lips brushing the shell of your ear. “Don’t you get that yet?” You don’t want it to be true, it can’t be, they’re so different—but even as you think it, you know he’s not lying. You’re reeling, the stretch-burn, the raw pleasure of him inside you, the knowledge that he’s been there before—
You wail as you cum, staring unseeingly at the sky. Lloyd doesn’t even give you the courtesy of slowing down, instead fucking you steadily through it with his cock and fingers buried in your cunt. He carries you, unwilling, from one height to the next, twitching and pleading. When he finally pulls his fingers from your soaked folds, he sucks them clean. 
“Love you so much, Princess,” he groans, rocking his hips steadily into yours as you mewl miserably. “I can wait for you to know you love me too.” His fingers press the skin of your hips like Ransom’s. Lloyd sucks your bottom lip, worrying it between his teeth with a growl. He holds you still while he empties into you. As he pants against your mouth, he grins. 
“Feels good not to have to pretend.” 
“Get off me.” You hiss at him, glaring at him with red-rimmed eyes. This time, he listens. He pulls out of you with an appreciative hum, stopping briefly to admire the slick, sticky mess he’s made. You pull your swimsuit down roughly, tugging your shirt tightly around yourself like a shield while you grab your now soaked shorts from the water, and begin to struggle into them. 
“Let me—”
“Don’t fucking touch me!” You shriek, jumping further backwards into the surf. You slip on the rocks, barely remaining upright as you scramble away. “Y-you don’t touch me!” You brandish a slick rock in your hand as threateningly as you can. “I—I’m going to tell Ransom, an-and—”
The look he gives you is almost pitying. “Oh Princess. Go on and tell him.” He nods at you with a sick smile. “Tell me what he says.” Lloyd holds his hands up as you retreat, giving him as wide a berth as you an as you circle back to shore. He doesn’t follow you, watching as you stumble across the sand.  You head into the trees and underbrush ringing the beach, fleeing your brother-in-law’s gaze. You know the general direction of the hotel, and you head that way, opting not to go back to the party. 
The party. Your stomach turns as you think of it now, Linda’s words holding fresh meaning now. Did she know? Did Ransom? The entire idea was so ludicrous you could scarcely believe it was really happening—but it was. It had. The evidence of Lloyd’s transgression was smeared between your salt-stained thighs. You want to vomit, and so you do, leaning against a tree as you heave into the sand. 
“Sweetheart?” 
You look up, your eyes wild. It’s Ransom—or Lloyd. You don’t know, now, torn between wanting to rush into his arms, or turn and run. You simply stare at him distrustfully, mirroring his step forward with one back, maintaining the distance between you with careful precision. 
“Baby, what’s wrong? You just wandered off, and—”
“Are you Lloyd?” You ask sharply, swallowing the desire to respond to his concern. You can’t trust your own eyes now, not anymore, and you don’t want to get close enough to verify. 
Ransom stares at you confusedly. 
“No? Why would you ask me that? Did something happen?” He takes another step closer, his arms outstretched placatingly. There’s true worry on his face as he takes in your wretched state, your open shirt and wet shorts, dirty feet and missing shoes. “Baby, did something happen?” He asks again, slower and more deliberate. You want to believe him, this man wearing your husband’s wedding ring, staring at you with the same eyes as the man you’d run away from. 
“Tell me something about the fountain.” 
“The what?” 
“The fountain!” You shrill hoarsely. “The fountain, from—”
“The one in the village,” Ransom finishes. “With the messed up tiles.” 
This time, you can’t stop yourself from rushing into his arms, sobbing. 
“I—Lloyd, he—” The words won’t come out between your hiccoughing sobs, and you settle for burying your face in his chest as Ransom wraps his arms around you. He holds you tightly, pressing you to his body as you wail. The truth sticks in your throat like taffy as you tangle your fingers in his shirt, tears soaking into the expensive fabric. 
“It’s okay, Sweetheart.” His voice is soothing. “I’m here. I got you, okay? I got you.” He doesn’t rush you, waiting until the tears slow to press a kiss into your hair. “You don’t have to talk right now. Let’s get you back to the room, okay?”
Ransom practically carries you through the underbrush, emerging near the  long stairwell up from the beach. Your family—and his—are still down at the party, but you barely spare them a glance as you stagger up the sandy concrete steps. Before long, the ringing in your ears blocks out the music anyway, and all you can think about is Lloyd’s response to your threat. 
Go on and tell him. Tell me what he says.  
Lloyd is nowhere to be seen as you enter the villa, and you release a breath you didn’t know you were holding. You didn’t even realize you’d been watching for him, waiting for him to appear like he always did—but he doesn’t. You’re relieved as Ransom leads you back into the bedroom and closes the door behind you. For a moment, you’re not sure what to do with yourself, standing blankly by the door while Ransom watches you helplessly. 
“Sweetheart… can you tell me?” He asks, resting his hands on your shoulders. You flinch at his touch instead of leaning into it, and pain flashes briefly across your face. Somehow, you are hesitant to name the shape of the monster that haunts you even now, like Lloyd had cursed your jaw to stick. With difficulty, your force it open. 
“He—he pretended… he was you. And… we… I didn’t know, Ran, I didn’t know it wasn’t you,” you babble, tears forming in your red, glassy eyes. You’re expecting to see his face crease with disgust at the part you won’t say out loud, but it doesn’t. Ransom’s silent, his face scrunching first with disappointment and then anger. You can tell he’s looking for an outlet, and he settles on routine. 
“Did you take your vitamins, Sweetheart?” He replies, a worried hand on your belly. “Does anything… hurt?” You shake your head. 
“N-no.” Ransom turns to the dresser, grabbing the bottles and shaking out your pills one by one. You take them, shuffling into the suite’s bathroom. You  a cup cool water from the faucet and bring it to your lips, swallowing them down with a grimace. 
“Let’s get you a bath, Baby.”
You nod wordlessly.
Ransom helps you get undressed, and you watch his jaw tic at Lloyd’s drying cum on your thighs. He fills the whirlpool tub with hot water, and you shift uncomfortably from foot to foot as you watch him. When it’s full, he helps you into it before splashing into the water himself. He sits on the back side of the tub with you between his knees, reaching down to hold you as you sink into the water. 
You lean back against your husband, fresh tears pooling in the corners of your eyes. I want to wake up now. There’s little you wouldn’t give to open your eyes and find yourself on the beach, this terrible nightmare broken. But when you do open your eyes, you’re still in the bathroom, your husband’s hands rubbing soothing circles into your skin as you wash away the evidence of his brother’s sin. 
“Oh Sweetheart. I’m so sorry. I… I don’t know what to say.” He strokes your hair as he speaks to you softly, gently, like he’s soothing an animal. “Lloyd’s a lot of things. Impatient, being chiefest among them.” You freeze, the air seeming to flow right out of your lungs—out of the whole room. The dripping of the faucet is as loud as thunder. 
“W-what?”
“I didn’t want you to find out like this, Sweetheart, believe me.” You wrench yourself away from him, water sloshing over the sides of the tub as you stare at your husband in disbelief. It feels like reality is crumbling to nothing as you  watch, bleached into dust by the brightness of his sad smile. It’s all you can see. 
“N-no, no no no no—” He reaches for you, and you slap his had away, tripping as you scramble out of the tub. “You knew.” You moan, bile rising in your throat as you wrap a towel around yourself. “You—you always knew.” Ransom rises from the lip of the tub and steps out onto the tile. You want to vomit, but there’s nothing left to bring up as you dry-heave into the sink. 
“Sweetheart, I need you to calm down, this stress isn’t good for the baby.”
“The baby—” You let out a despairing little laugh. “How long, Ransom?” You ask him hoarsely. “How long have you been letting this happen?” Finally, your husband has the decency to look ashamed. 
“Does it matter?”
“Yes!” You scream, pounding a fist against the counter. “Yes it fucking matters!”
“I think before New Years, last year.” 
“A—a year?” You choke out the words as you clutch your belly with a shaking hand. The baby—you don’t even know if it’s Ransom’s. You feel dirty, despite having bathed. Deeper than your skin, like something inside is tainted, rotten. You want to crawl out of it, leave it behind like a shell. Perhaps then you might be able to draw enough air into your tight lungs to be able to do more than sputter your husband’s words back at him in abject disbelief. 
You don’t want to relive the last year and a half but you can’t help it, flipping through the moments like flash cards as you try to pinpoint every transgression, every lie. For every possible memory that feels wrong, there are dozens of blank spaces, empty places where recollection should be. Your husband had poked his finger through the thin saran wrap of your memories, and you hadn’t even realized it was happening. 
Ransom reaches forward to rest a hand on your back and you shove him so hard he stumbles, your eyes wild. 
“Don’t touch me. You—you will never touch me again.” You hiss, the words ragged. Ransom scowls at you as you storm out of the bathroom, the towel still clutched against your heaving chest. You can barely hear anything over the sound of your own ragged breathing and the thundering of your heart. They’d been switching off for over a year, and you hadn’t even noticed. Sickness and shame twine in your gut as you snatch the clothes in the closet off their hangers, throwing them into your open suitcase without bothering to fold them.
“Sweetheart, don’t be rash. The baby—”
“Will not even know your name.” You don’t look at Ransom—you can’t. You feel like you don’t even know him, and you can’t help but wonder if you ever did. He’d known—hell, maybe he’d even participated in Lloyd’s sick games. The man you’d thought you married would never have stood for that. You grit your teeth as Ransom scoffs amusedly behind you. 
“You’re just going to pack your suitcase and go, is that it?” There’s a cruel edge to his voice you don’t recognize—it makes him sound like Lloyd. “Baby I’m just trying to give you what you want.” You glare at him over your shoulder before returning to packing, refusing to even entertain the discussion. You push past him to get to the dresser, pulling out the rest of your things. 
“You’re not thinking clearly, and I think if you really stopped and gave it some thought, you’d realize you’re making a mistake.” 
“Oh, I’m the one making the mistake?” You can’t help but turn to spit venom over your shoulder. “You and your brother took turns on me like a fucking carnival ride, but I’m making a mistake?”
“You wanted a big family, a stable family. One nobody could touch—”
“You’re sick.” You swallow against the bitter acid in your throat. “How can you try to make this okay? I—I never want to see you again. Ever. I—I really, truly mean that.” The needle inside you continues to swing between rage and abject horror as you dress yourself, practically shoving your limbs into the most convenient pair of shorts and a t-shirt. Your head buzzes with the turmoil of it all, practically full to bursting. Your passport is still in the bedside table, and you make sure you grab it, shoving it into your pocket before throwing open the bedroom door. 
It’s hard to breathe around the ache in your chest as you drag your heavy suitcase down the hallway, trying to ignore the sound of your husband behind you. You’re bordering on hysteria, frantic tears and snot running down your face as you flee your husband’s placating words. That’s probably the most maddening part of it—how he continues to parse out the words slowly, patiently, like he’s waiting for you to realize how sensible he’s being. You’re about ten seconds away from clapping your hands over your ears like a child, so you don’t have to hear him anymore
“Sweetheart, let’s talk about this.” Ransom calls after you. You stagger against the wall as your knees tremble, but you force yourself through it. Your heart is beating wildly, your palms clammy as you look back at your husband. You don’t expect to see him smiling. “You’re not being rational, baby.” 
You don’t even know how to respond. The only words that seem to come to mind are insults, curses; the violent ills you’re currently wishing on your husband and his family. You can’t listen to him—it’s only going to make you more enraged. You already feel like your heart is about to beat out of your chest, as you gulp down ragged breaths, your vision swimming. You rest a hand against the kitchen island, your whole body throbbing hotly with your pulse. 
“Shut the fuck up, Ransom,” you pant. “You can’t spin this.” 
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” He ignores your acid glare, leaning forward to curl a lock of your hair around his finger. You push him away, but the movement is clumsy, your hand swinging bonelessly at the end of your arm. “You know how persuasive I can be.”
“You’re really just like him.” It slips out before you can stop it as you shake your head in astonishment. 
“Oh what, you just figure that out?” Ransom’s voice is mockingly soft. “It took you long enough.”
You slap him. 
The sound of it is loud and sharp, and Ransom’s head actually turns with the force of it, your husband stumbling back a few steps. It was his surprise that had allowed it—you and Ransom had never struck each other, not counting the playful smacks he delivered in the bedroom. For a moment he stays like that, frozen, before slowly turning to look at you. Your wedding ring had split his lip, and you watch as he draws his thumb across it smearing the bright line of crimson across his mouth. 
“You’re starting to piss me off, Sweetheart.” His hand clamps so tightly around your wrist that it hurts, and you yelp, pushing uselessly at his chest. Ransom had never been violent with you, never even given you reason to suspect he would raise a hand to you, but as he bends you over the kitchen island, you feel fear. Your husband twists your arms behind your back, ignoring your pained whimper when he squeezes too tight. 
This—this isn’t happening. It’s not. My family is here, my, my father—
You wail, the sound muffled by the marble countertop and your tears, salt and snot running onto the counter beneath your cheek. 
“Just let me go, Ransom—”
“Oh Baby we are way past that.” The kiss he presses into your hair makes nausea churn in your belly, and you let out another sob. “I put a ring on that—where’s your finger, baby, let me see—ah! There it is.” Ransom holds your hand up, his fingers digging into the meat of your palm. “On that finger,” he continues, tapping the diamond with his fingernail. “Till death do us part, Sweetheart, that’s what we said. That’s what you promised me—and Lloyd.” 
 “You’re crazy—” The words stick in your throat as your vision tunnels. I feel sick. You do, your stomach churning as your heartbeat thunders in your ringing ears. 
“Wha-you do’t me?” The words are like bubblegum in your mouth as your husband chuckles softly. 
“You didn’t really think those were all vitamins, did you?” Your eyes widen with horror as you begin to struggle again, flailing your uncoordinated limbs as you try to force Ransom off of you. “Now don’t worry, it’s nothing that could hurt the baby,” he says reassuringly, as if that is your only cause for concern. 
“Noo,” you moan, wriggling feebly beneath him as you feel yourself recede further and further into your body. “Don’ wannit.”
“I know, Sweetheart. But what you want isn’t good for the family,” he says, stroking a gentle finger over the curve of your cheek. “You want to run, too run from what we’re trying to build with you. For you,” Ransom releases you as the sound of nearby voices reach your buzzing ears. “I’m not going to let that happen.” 
He steps away from you as Nathalie bursts through the door, holding a champagne bottle by the neck as she dances to music blaring from her phone speakers. 
“There you are, chica, we were looking—mom! Dad! She’s in here! I thought you—are you okay?” She sets the bottle down on the small table to the right of the sliding door. She rushes over to you, looping one limp arm around your shoulders as concern sets into the lines of her face. “Jesus, I—Ransom! What’s wrong with her?!”
Your husband appears in your tunnel-vision, carding a worried hand through his hair. 
“Thank fucking Christ, Nathalie—I was just going to text you. I think she’s having a reaction to something, I don’t know—” 
“Nn-Nat don-bel—eev ‘m,” your warning slurs together into an unintelligible soup as your head lolls. Nathalie tries to stand you up against the counter, and dimly you are aware of her calling for your parents, her voice muffled like she’s talking underwater. 
Lloyd—or is it Ransom?—lays you down on the countertop, his grinning face looming over you as your vision narrows down to a pinprick, the concern in his voice at complete odds with the grin on his face.
“Don’t worry. We’ll take care of you.”
to be continued…
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Thank you for reading! Please check out my masterlist for other, similar works, and follow my library blog, @box-of-bones-library for updates. ❤️
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2kmps · 3 days
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android x reader one-shot | 35.3k
story summary; in this world, androids outnumber humans, privacy does not exist, and your public profile determines whether you sink or swim in society. following the dissolution of your job and glamorizing your resume, you're invited to interview with the prestigious hyperion—the world's foremost in AI and robotics—for a position to test the newest android model. after a surprising turn of events, you're introduced to elio, the first of the generation seven androids and the catalyst of your awakening.
story warnings; dividers used between scenes, dubcon, sexual content, explicit sexual details, forced pregnancy (not mc), insemination, heavy focus on consent & lack thereof, drug use, graphic depictions of violence, body gore, mentions of abortion + execution (not mc), heavy prose & details, predatory behaviors in several characters, gaslighting, implications of sexual assault, usage of derogatory terms (slut, bitch, psycho), possessive + obsessive behaviors, tragedy, dark take on the future of humanity, fairly queer-coded, manipulation + emotional manipulation, power imbalance.
read the warnings + mdni! events within the story are not indicative of my personal viewpoints.
thank you @ceruleansol for your excellent proofreading! 🧡
author's note; this was a six-month labor of love from idea conception, to outline, to final piece. please reblog this & share your thoughts! i'd absolutely love to hear them!
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Researcher Kim knew you were a liar.
Within the confines of four colorless walls and a closed door, this job interview suddenly felt more like an interrogation than it did some professional courtesy. He sat adjacent to you behind a dark brown desk that pulled the slightest red hue in a chair that was expensive and ergonomic, holding a thin tablet with a tense grasp.
One thing you noticed right away was his inclination toward long stretches of silence while he studied your resume, dissecting every piece of it and your public profile. There, he could window-shop you, peel back every layer of your history without needing you to add credence to anything, or give you the chance to defend yourself when he'd inevitably find things he didn't like.
So, you spent your time sitting in a sleek chair with flat padding, ass aching, legs and feet consumed by pinpricks and static while you dug a nail into your cuticles because the pain kept you alert.
Researcher Kim was an attractive man in his late thirties, maybe mid forties if you were being mean, clean-shaven, dressed comfortably beneath a stark white lab coat that didn't quite fit his shoulders right. What drew your eyes down were his own clean nails, hairless knuckles, and a conspicuously bare ring finger. It didn't surprise you that he was unmarried. Most people these days were—it was a useless pursuit, an antiquated system that held no social or economic benefits.
Not anymore.
Not since Hyperion Project was funded some sixty years ago, and androids became the forefront of innovation.
In the beginning, there was doubt, fear, and violence toward the first generation of androids, most having uncanny human likeness that definitely inspired aggression because their appearance and robotic intonations were received as mockery.
By Generation Three, shortened as G3 in most casual conversations and official documents just as their predecessors, a new normalcy had burrowed its roots deep and settled with unwavering confidence that it would be there to stay.
The need for delicate human touch became obsolete in most professions. Courts were no longer solely represented by fickle suits but steadfast machines that harbored no ire or prejudices, corporations saw efficiency more than triple without employees who fell ill and needed vacations, and the death industry welcomed undaunted hands into their ranks.
Once, Retro City’s Metropolitan Hospital spent the majority of their staff budget on androids meant to replace their surgeons. You remembered the media coverage, the picket lines and strikes, how the hospital was forced to shut down for several weeks as a result of the doctors and hundreds of nurses walking out. Many patients died during that time from infection and negligence, laying in piss and shit with gangrenous bedsores, already four days into postmortem rigidity before the smell became too much and they were carted away in black tarps.
That entire ordeal happened before you were even thirteen, but the hospital fell beneath the scrutinizing lens of the entire world after that and began ethical and legal debates on implementation of androids into society. It became known as The Retro City Metropolitan Incident, globally recognized and considered to be one of the first human rights laws to come into creation during a time when there was question of whether humans and androids could coocur.
Only a few years after that, you just having freshly turned seventeen, united leaders reached a consensus on the Public Profiles Act—something you didn't realize would have such a drastic impact on your life later on, wherein any governing bodies, employers, or well-funded institutions were granted access to all of your private information regardless of relevance.
The acts of a child, a teenager, were now a consequence to the adult self.
At the start, just as with Generation One, there was complete chaos and rancor toward this theft, these stealers of privacy and identity, but people had already started accepting androids at that point and knew bigwigs no longer had intentions of sacrificing their profits to hire humans they found subpar.
There was no need to.
People backed down and became quiet, submissive, and began to follow this new order loyally so they'd have a chance to find a seat at the table.
Many did.
Mother raised you to be one of them because it was the only thing that made sense anymore. If you followed the status quo, it would be rewarded with a feast and gleaming silverware. To be emboldened and resilient meant licking chunks of meat out of vomit on the ground.
You adhered and found a job, camaraderie with others, and touched an android for the first time because your peers said it was fine, that it was normal, that it was just an android. Of course, it was unable to feel or deny you, so it pulled down your pants and indulged you the same way you expected the android Mother owned indulged her.
It had hardly been an intimate experience—all faithful, ingrained functions built into a database in the android’s brain—but the sensation of hands surrounding you, a tongue stroking you, and lips pecking your flesh was real, and that's all you had wanted at the time, to know a fraction of the feelings you had read about growing up yet never knowing because people didn't want to touch each other anymore.
Not them. Not you.
“Did you read the job description in its entirety? For the auditor position?” Researcher Kim gave a tepid smile, seeing you startle in your seat, suddenly pinned by your wide stare. “I'm sorry. I have a habit of getting carried away with the little details. Everyone's public profile is so individual, it takes some time to get to the parts that matter. I have to ask every candidate that question.”
“Yes, ahem,” you choked on your embarrassment, trying to bide time to scrounge up whatever trivial nuggets from the job description you could. When nothing came to mind, you did the next thing and that was to just talk. “Of course. I was honestly surprised that Hyperion had put up an application. It isn't very often that you guys are hiring.
“So, when I saw it, I knew I had to apply immediately because the opportunity to be part of such a groundbreaking company wouldn't come back around again. The position being for an auditor just makes it all the more amazing. I'm, honestly, honored that I was called in to be considered for candidacy…”
“Well, then…”
Every bit of anticipation that welled up inside you crumbled once Researcher Kim rose from his chair and went to the door, the waiting room now appearing to you through the open threshold.
It was a barren space minimally furnished with hard chairs you had already sat in, a few tropical plants with leaves bowing from layers of dust, and most remarkably, a long corridor made of floor-to-ceiling windows offering an exceptional view of Retro City’s landscape that seemed to go on forever, limitless. You wanted to be stolen by the sights again, now especially since it was approaching the early evening, and soon the city would be aglow in neon and shimmering lights from faraway skyscrapers.
It wasn't all that bad, you found yourself thinking while walking in stride with Researcher Kim, silent as he perused something on his screen—possibly something incriminating, possibly another candidate’s public profile—it didn't really matter to you at this point.
You had known glamorizing your resume meant risky business if you were caught: a hefty fine from Public Control, a strike against your profile that replaced the green sheen for abiding citizens with red overlay, permanently marking you for contempt until the day you died.
Back then, two glasses of lukewarm wine worked well enough to weld steel in your backbone to send off the application, whilst a third glass made you wonder just how awful life in the slums along the outer perimeters of Retro City could actually be. At the time, it seemed like your obvious future since severance packages would only get you so far—a few months if you were precious about it.
At present, the loud hum of anxiety receded into an echo that then wilted into obscurity as your gaze drifted from the final traces of a sanguine city skyline to the end of the corridor and then finally to Researcher Kim. He lifted his head as though detecting your stare.
“In your previous position, what relationship did you have to the androids in your environment?” Kim asked. It wasn't a strange question. Some people still held fragments of old embitterment toward androids for the way the world now was. “You were in marketing and merchandising for several years, right?”
“Good—uh, amicable, I'd say. How I was with the androids, I mean.” You weren't expecting him to continue talking to you about this. “I started out as an intern for the merchandising manager after graduating secondary school. I worked my way into marketing a couple years later. I did a lot of reports on demographics for cosmetics. Did I tell you my mother has a Hyperion android, by the way? I grew up with him.”
Researcher Kim showed you a fast, cordial smile before looking back down at his tablet. “Yes, I read about that in your associations tab. It says that your mother owns a G3 model. Has she ever considered upgrading to a G6?”
“Upgrade? Definitely not.” You laughed like you'd just heard the punchline of a joke. He looked at you with humorless patience, seeming more machine than man in that moment. “Mother is basically in love with Marcos, there's no way she'd give him up for something shinier. She's got a better record of him and all his updates than she does of me for… well, anything.”
“That does correlate with data we've collected from women of her generation,” Kim said, only half-interested, shaking back one of his coat sleeves to check the digital watch digging tightly into his wrist. “It also explains the large gaps in your personal history. Very unusual.”
You made no comment on that.
A door up ahead opened all the way, drawing both your gazes to a man waiting on the other side.
“Ah! Excellent timing, Elio.”
With a single look, you immediately deduced that he was an android. Even from a short distance, he appeared tall and broad-shouldered, something that the thickness of his clothes couldn't hide from you. His proportions were balanced—from the length of his arms and legs, from first knuckle to fingertip, jawline to neck, the slope of his nose, and the heaviness of his brows over amber eyes that glistened back the fire in the weakening sunset. His skin was deeply tan, almost glowing gold in the light he was bathed in.
Elio’s smile was symmetrical and breathtaking, programmed in a way where his teeth didn't show too much. He regarded you with convincing familiarity, a sort of sacred fondness you knew nothing of, yet instinctively made your insides shift and burn. You couldn’t help but be awestruck by his beauty—this essence of fantasy, perfection that stirred subtle unease and needles on your scalp that ached as much as delighted you.
“You must be the auditor.” He then spoke your name with considerable warmth, like a long-smitten friend, and stepped closer to shake your hand. “I am Elio. The first of the Generation Seven Hyperion androids. It's a pleasure. I am looking forward to this partnership. I hope you are as well.”
Your head swiveled to Researcher Kim for the right answer, unsure if it'd be too bold to assume the job was yours or if the scientist’s careful observation meant something better. He jotted a note on his screen with a stylus before walking away, onward past the door where Elio had been.
“We’ll talk about those formalities later,” Kim assured, guiding you and Elio through a duplicate hallway to an elevator that he sent to the basement floor. “For now, I'd like to show you something. I want you to understand the significance of our work here at Hyperion, and how your position is a critical component to our research.”
There was a hopeful leap in your chest that made your hands sweat and your mouth bone dry. You wanted to voice appreciation, but the excitement in your gut was fast turning into nausea and would end up on his shoes if you opened your mouth.
Researcher Kim didn't notice, taking your quiet as newfound reverence. He spoke easily over the elevator’s mechanical hum without losing interest on his screen. “I'm sure you know some history about Hyperion? I don't need to bog down our time going through it, do I?”
“I know enough,” you said, but that actually meant you knew very little at all. “It’s been around for sixty years or so. It's a leader in AI and robotics. The biomedical side of things is fairly new, started about a decade ago, I think? I heard that the world’s first total artificial lung transplant was done by a surgeon and android assistant last year.”
“Ah, you mean Altan.” There was some measure of emotion in his tone, a swell of pride and the hazy look of a man in reminiscence. “I was part of that project on the programming side. Altan was probably the greatest success in the G6 models and is still utilized by Retro City Metropolitan even now. Much of Altan’s programming—advanced problem solving, dexterity, fine motor skills, discerning subtle differences in patient status—was implemented into Elio. It'd be a waste not to.”
Your stomach muscles clenched when the elevator stopped, metal doors scraping as they receded and opened up into a capacious white basement that underwhelmed by looking sterile and untouchable, revolted you in your first steps out by dense air reeking of chemicals.
Researcher Kim went on ahead again, that impassive mask of his remaining despite the smell being enough to bring you to a halt.
“I can take us back up.” Elio said from your left side, apparently never having gone from it in the first place. You had forgotten he was there at all. “It’s been reported that people unaccustomed to this environment have mild side effects of nausea, vomiting, headache, malaise, dizziness, fainting, and, oddly, numbness in the jaw. No fatalities or hospitalizations of guests are known, and the agents used here are nonlethal to humans.”
An android was made up of mostly inorganic matter, so you weren't reassured by words from his repertoire as much as you were seeing Researcher Kim standing upright—flesh, blood, and bone—gesturing you closer to a row of tall metal capsules. There were seven total, each the average height of a man with long sheets of clear fiberglass giving unobscured sight inside. And of those seven, six were occupied.
They were all androids.
Against shafts of dim white light spearing up from the floor, the decommissioned machines were a ghostly sight to behold with glassy, inhuman stares that shot straight through you. Some had features and skin so dull and dead-looking that it was obvious to you that they were part of earlier generations.
Almost a century ago, they were what people would've thought of with the word “android”: an eerie, oddly accurate sameness to the human visage, but all wrong at the same time.
It was the skin—the fabricated organ made to look waxy and stretched, just like a mask over some true horror beneath. It was the eyes resembling human irises in every way possible except for their vacant sheen, perpetually stuck with the gaze of a dead fish. You watched videos of them in school, always uncomfortable with how stiffly their lips moved, unable to form delicate shapes with their mouths, and yet sounds emerged from voice boxes deep within their throats that mimicked everything natural to you.
Every smile seemed more like an ugly rictus than a bewitching grin. Hyperion had failed with Generations One and Two to instill confidence, and from the throes of violence and resistance rose Generation Three:
The great rebirth of society.
Marcos was a part of that era, an investment that cost Mother her entire life savings because his countenance was so convincingly human, so lovely to look at that she felt he was all she needed. You had come along after his purchase, never knowing a father’s embrace but had Marcos’. His skin had a luscious glow, eyes that could follow, and lips molded with lively color and cracks and mesmerizing fluidity.
You had imagined sex with him as you matured, his frozen beauty always the centerpiece of every blurry fantasy while you chased after pleasure. Not long after the Public Profiles Act passed when you were seventeen, nearly on the cusp of young adulthood and not understanding the world any more than you had before, nor how it would be changed forever, you kissed Marcos at the dinner table while studying for a physics test.
He was Mother's, but everything within his circuitry and programming could never deny you—a human, his better, one of countless masters in the end—so his lips pressed fully with yours. Only Mother unlocking the front door stopped you from anything else devilish.
You never had the courage to touch him again, and he would never touch you unprompted.
The defunct G3 encased behind fiberglass reminded you of that time. It must've shown on your face because Researcher Kim moved in closer to get your attention.
“Your mother should upgrade soon. Once the testing period for G7 ends, all G3 models will be taken out of production and their updates discontinued. Androids are machines, but they won't stay fully functional without regular tuning.” he said. “Now, as I was saying—”
“What will happen to Marcos, then?” It was mostly curiosity that made you ask, envisioning him encased in metal like that came after. “What happens to androids after they're taken out of production entirely? There are almost more of them in the world now than humans.”
“As I was saying—” Researched Kim bristled, enunciating with some force. “Many androids of previous models stay within the workforce until they simply can no longer function. It depends on the generation, but older models can only go for a few years without regular updates. The technology is just too archaic, none of the programmers are interested in continuing the maintenance.
“G4 and G5 show some endurance, there's a small population still functioning in Retro City after being discontinued a decade ago. G6 we are hypothesizing will last upwards to twenty or thirty years without being forcibly reclaimed. Of course, they will have to be.”
You didn't understand why that was but nodded gravely, looking at the pod at the end of the row. The empty one. “What about G7?”
To this, all of Researcher Kim’s lines smoothed out, and his face resumed one of skilled impassivity. “Well, now, that's going to depend on Elio's testing period. On the information we gather from you.” Then, he waved airily to the file of android coffins. “Hyperion has, consistently, only ever hired one auditor for every new generation. The six before you have contributed to society in ways that humans never have before. Auditors have changed the world, shaped it into what it is now. Can you imagine the world any other way? We're not quite the same age, but can you recall anything different? Would you want it to be?”
You didn't know how to talk back to a scientist, didn't know how to respond to such a momentous question, so you didn't try. It felt like your tongue had swollen in your mouth over your throat, blocking any intelligent snip you had simmering in your head.
Apparently, your silence meant something to him as his tense lips lifted into a smile, the kind meant to satiate strangers looking at you. “Good. Let's go back to my office. We can go over everything else there.”
“Is Elio going to end up in that pod?” You now visualized him in a box instead of Marcos.
Researcher Kim was already nose down into his tablet again, stylus making a gentle scrawling noise across the screen. “Of course. The first android of every generation is kept intact. They are important monuments of success to Hyperion.”
He said nothing else and ambled on for the elevator at the opposite end of the lab. Somehow, his answer was unsatisfactory to you, shallow, even, but you weren't sure why that was. In the end, after a life of serving their masters, all androids were obsolete machines.
That was their inevitable fate.
You saw Elio from the corner of your eye. All at once, you were reminded of his staggering radiance, wondering how he could fade into the background so easily despite it.
“Hello, Elio.” you said to him like a friend. “Does being down here bother you?”
Until now, he had stared upon everything flat-eyed and unreadable, especially in the presence of Researcher Kim. You were too enthralled by all the chatter and immortal trophies to see that or him. Still, he came to you with the same smile as he introduced himself with, warm and familiar, all the same sensation as flickering tinders on a crisp winter night.
“Can you imagine the death of the most distant relative you know?” he said in a neutral voice, continuing, “If you can, imagine that for me. A relative so distant and removed from your life and everything in it that if they were to die suddenly, maybe tragically, even, your first thought would be, ‘who?’ You attend a wake because it's the rule and view this distant, far-removed relative in their casket. What would it mean to you, then? Are you more affected now? Does their death have meaning to you? Or is it simply that you are in the presence of one who has expired?”
“I—I don't know.” You hesitated, unearthing scant memories from the Retro City Metropolitan Incident in your youth and all that death from people you had never met. Mother had been in tears when the television flicked to a shot of black tarp-clad bodies being loaded into unmarked vehicles and driven away. “Isn't most death just…” You licked your lips. “Sad?”
Elio was closer than before, resting a hand on your shoulder. You shied from his touch. It felt strange, heavy, and hot through the fabric. The only person to have touched you at all in recent memory was your friend, Melby, though even those happened in isolated moments of drunken elation.
“My apologies.” Elio didn't show offense, letting his hand return limply at his side. “It's all figurative. I have been down here many times since creation and seen the others. They may no longer have their own consciousness, which is different from a human’s, but I contain all of their data—memories, experiences, history. I suppose the equivalent of what I'm trying to describe is: They're not truly gone because they are the lesser of me, and I am the greater of them as a result.”
You listened without fully comprehending because it had never mattered to do so before. If this were to be your job, however, it would mean you needed to believe that what he said was worth hearing.
The problem was they all liked to speak in complex riddles that men like Researcher Kim could decipher and nod along to sagely, gleaning whatever nebulous mechanical wisdom there was, yet people like you could only gawk.
Elio’s head tilted a little, his smile not at all ridiculing as he corralled you with his arm, never touching you as he guided you along to the elevator where Kim waited, reveling in a satisfied quiet until you were on the upper floor again.
The city skyline was swallowed by dusk and starless. Unless you took the time to drive hours outside of Retro City into the barren flatlands where vegetation no longer grew and animals had left behind their skeletal remnants, you'd never know the sky could glitter with the jewels of the universe far beyond your reach.
You marveled at the lights, at blinking neon signage cycling through animations of winking women and toppling martini glasses. Between twinkling skyscrapers, the city floor was illuminated yellow with bustling nightlife, the air surrounded by an electric blue aura that reached as far as the eye could see.
“Beautiful, isn't it?” Elio lingered outside of Researcher Kim’s office with you, hand holding the door ajar. “If permissible, I'd like to see it up close soon.”
“Sure.” you said, glimpsing at his reflection in the walkway glass. “What would you want to look at first? Retro City has everything you could ever want within a few blocks of each other.”
He turned to you. “Whatever you like. I want to know everything that you love and enjoy doing. I have been created to enrich your life and fulfill you, after all.”
Nothing he said felt as impactful upon delivery as it was expected to be, you thought. It was a flaw in all androids for there to be a sort of hollowness in the things they said—never quite reaching that emotional believability, leaving you wanting like a dry throat after a couple sips of water.
Elio hadn't sounded the same as before down in that sobering, chemically smelling lab. As you passed him into Researcher Kim’s office, you looked at his hands for a script and saw them empty.
He fixed you with a beguiling smile.
You frowned, heat flaring in your head as if provoked by an insult.
“The contract I'll have you sign outlines Elio’s testing period lasting one year—three hundred sixty-five days total. It's important for you to understand that within that time frame, no damage is to occur whatsoever to his body or internal components. All parts are to stay intact. Otherwise, it turns into a criminal case, in which we will legally pursue.” Researcher Kim skimmed the first few pages of a heaping stack of papers, pointing to specific paragraphs and clauses highlighted in yellow. “I don't mean offense when I say this, but it's rare that fines as result of property damage to Hyperion androids can be repaid. I don't suggest finding out.”
The thought never occurred to you, but evidently, it had to someone else—multiple times for it to be such a focus. You weren't given the time to fully explore any page before Kim was onto the next. Elio half sat on the desk before you, arms crossed, having considerably less difficulty keeping up with the pace of things than you were.
Researcher Kim sped through half the stack. “I'll be conducting video calls every Friday morning for updates. Every Sunday before midnight, I want a thorough typed report submitted to me as well. I've put together a template and a checklist that I'd like you to use. I think you'll find it will make things more manageable.”
“You're using a lot of ‘I’ and ‘me’ statements, so I'm guessing that I'll only really be talking to you, then?” you asked, tucking your tailbone beneath you to relieve a dull ache creeping up your back. “I figured there'd be more than one person since Elio is the newest model and whatnot.”
Researcher Kim tutted, rounding his desk to occupy the empty space beside your chair to be directly in front of Elio. At first, he did nothing but stare at the android in complacent silence, hands behind his back, fingers flicking like writhing worms exposed to the surface and sunlight in a clump of dirt.
You nearly lunged to your feet when his hand shot out, gripping Elio beneath the jaw. The latter barely stirred from where he perched on the desk, arms staying crossed, muscles unflinching in direct opposition to your reaction.
Elio wore the strangest expression, one you had never seen on an android before. It was a face warped in subtle disgust, almost imperceivable, a trick of fluorescent lighting overhead—perhaps. Gone as quickly as it had come, he now looked ahead, perfectly inscrutable and disinterested in whatever Researcher Kim was trying to prove.
“I will be the only one you speak to during his testing period because he is my creation.” Kim said, bending his wrist to turn Elio's face toward you.
Your eyes met.
“Hyperion provided me with the funding and brilliant minds, but Elio is the result of a lifetime of hard work and countless hours and sleepless nights. I've been there every step of the way—programming, circuitry, welding. I gave him his voice. I gave him eyes. I was the one to put the chip in his brain and activate him. I gave him life.”
He finally let go of Elio’s face and took a seat behind his desk, a sight growing very familiar to you. “Generation Seven will change the world. Hyperion is on the verge of rebuilding society, you know? I don't think anyone anticipated the sort of consequences that came with integrating androids—at least, not fully. The population crisis. The slums. No one thought of these things in the beginning because back then, before you and I, it was about innovation and novelty and the potential of it all.”
“What's it about now?” you asked simply.
“Rectifying.” Both corners of his mouth ticked like he had a lot more to say, but suffocated much of it behind his teeth and his hands as he came forward on them, elbows down on his desk. “Hyperion has been working globally with united leaders and their governments to make amends for several decades now. That's all I can tell you.”
“How has that been working out?”
His fingers moved with the same jerkiness as dying legs on a bug. “Slowly.”
Nothing else came to mind after that as you were suddenly struck with the realization that Elio still sat by you, wordless throughout the entire interaction and watching closely—less like a science project to be gawked at, more like an instructional video on repeat.
“Why don't you touch him?” Kim said, taking up a stylus to flick between his fingers with remarkable dexterity.
He didn't give you the time to gape.
“I know you must be curious after being downstairs. Aren't you interested to know what he feels like? He doesn't look like a machine, does he?”
“No.” You relented. “No. He doesn't.”
“That's right, he wouldn't.” Kim nodded his approval toward your obedience, leaning back in his seat. “I agonized over every facet of his design, as you already know. Every bit of what is right in front of you”—he made a broad gesture over Elio’s body—“was once a set of blueprints. Intangible, just a dream I had. He's every bit a part of me, you know? Nothing would make me happier than to receive external feedback on him. So, please, don't be afraid.”
Elio stayed faithfully when you rose up in front of him and reached for his face. He probably felt your fingers tremble as this was all counterintuitive for you to do—touch someone other than yourself, maybe Melby’s knee beneath the table after enough drinks in you. It made your chest drum, knotted up your stomach in a way that made it difficult not to sway on your feet.
“How does he feel?” Researcher Kim was already writing on his screen. “Describe it to me.”
“Strange.” You pretended this was already part of your job. It stole some of the tension from your shoulders. “Very strange. Soft. Smooth. I feel some texture. I think this is what another person—another human—feels like.”
Elio’s face shifted against your hands until the fullness of his lips pressed into your open palm, fingers caressing the fabricated bones around his cheek and temple. For a moment, you allowed yourself to indulge in longing and weakness—the invisible hot breath on your skin, the slight dampness of his kiss burning an imprint in your mind.
He still looked at you with unfailing softness. Meanwhile, you wondered if he would bleed if you put your fingers through his eyes.
“This is a good start.” Kim waited until you were back in your chair to offer you his stylus and a straight black line on the screen. “All I need is your signature here to consent to virtually signing the rest of your documents. Once you do that, you've been hired, and we can begin.”
“I have a question for you before I do.” You tried not to let your voice quiver, uncertainty meddling over all the confidence you had built until that point. Kim was relaxed in his chair. “You spent a lot of time looking at my resume and public profile earlier. Surely, you know…”
That you're a liar? Oh, I know, alright. He didn't say it, but it was how he maintained his composure, that inexpression never flexing to confusion.
Finally, Researcher Kim broke the trance and hovered over his desk on his arms to get closer and answered, “I think we both have something at stake here. I'm looking forward to your phenomenal feedback.”
You signed the contract and melted under Elio's resplendent smile.
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Most often, your days with Elio were spent in a seemingly perpetual impasse of unrelenting observation between the pair of you. Both of your jobs demanded a level of attentiveness that came easier to one but more as the world's most impossible challenge to the other.
You weren't accustomed to this type of care—of having to give it to something else, even less to receive it from something else. In your world, only the immediate complexities really mattered: gossip, where your coterie wanted to spend the night drinking next, mass media hysteria of whatever stupid imagining there was now, and each other.
Why was there a need to concern yourself with anything else? The decaying state of the world wasn't your doing, nor was the staggering increase of human bodies in the slums outside Retro City. Sharply inconsistent birth rates ravaged on a global scale while people were displaced from the workplace in lieu of employers finding it less of a hassle to deal with machines than the capricious will of humans.
None of these things were allowed to be uttered casually unless in derision because it was too intense, making liquor cling to the throat like some viscous membrane until it burned their esophagus. Nobody liked unanswerable questions, much less talking about things that weren't as easily digestible as coworker drama and some new viral trend that involved shocking your android with jumper cables attached to a portable battery to see what happened.
“Is there a purpose behind this trend?” Elio dried a plate while watching the video, unimpressed but not driven toward any particular emotion. “It's all meant for humor, correct? I have several similar incidents in my memory, except it's what human beings have done to each other. This sort of behavior towards androids is a relatively recent phenomenon, as far as I can tell.”
You used his response as material for your report, fingers flurrying across the virtual keyboard on your tablet before his words faded away, out of your mind.
One thing you hadn't anticipated after accepting the auditor position from Researcher Kim was how much work actually went into it. You spent well over the standard weekly work hours to collect enough observations to send off to Kim on Sunday nights, often whittling away at it until the latest hours, minutes before the deadline.
It was hard enough to stay on top of his demands, but it was worse when he found something unsatisfactory, rejected it, monotonously unloaded heavy criticism on you through an “emergency” impromptu video call, and expected two full reports by the following Sunday before midnight.
Any regular person probably would've caved from the enormity of the task, but you had surrendered your choice to be that weak-willed, especially once Researcher Kim showed his hand with the fate of your public profile in it.
Should you choose to break the contract, send Elio back to Hyperion, and pretend none of it happened, you would lose everything and your ability to do anything at all besides rot in the slums—scarred in red for life, perpetually inert.
Worst of all, your associations tab, once filled with still portraits of everyone you had ever networked in life, would turn up as empty as the day you had been registered in the census. It was considered social suicide to know anyone with a red profile, so people stayed vigilant and fast, sure to remove them the second it turned.
It had been over a year since the last time you'd done that—a woman within your group had grown too bold, said too many things that made her seem crazy, so she was booted from the circle, lost all her associations, and who knows where she was now.
“You look troubled.” Elio placed down a steaming white mug at a safe distance and turned the handle toward you. Looking inside, you expected the darkness of coffee but were struck with an opposing subtle sweetness and faint pink water. “It's fruit-infused herbal tea. Your heart rate is above normal resting, and you're beginning to perspire. Caffeine will worsen your anxiety.”
You knew that but hadn't known you were scraping away slithers of cuticle on your thumb until the warmth of his fingers gently twined with yours. His grip turned firm to keep you from hurting yourself anymore, forcing all the stiffness from your hand once you gave up and simply sat there feeling his skin.
You'd remember to write that down later.
“Would starting a bath be helpful? I could use the last of those eucalyptus and lavender bath salts in the cupboard.” Elio suggested with great fondness, holding a patient smile even once you drew your hand away and shook your head. You had no interest in undressing and committing to your regular bathtime routine. “Perhaps we could go for a walk, then? It might help to be away from screens for a while.”
You checked the time on your phone before thinking to look out any window in your apartment. It was ten after six in the evening; there would be enough light left for a couple of laps around the block before needing to worry about being swept up in the city’s nightlife antics.
“Where do you want to go?” you asked, swiveling the barstool around to get up from the counter. “Henrietta's on 5th? You seem to like going there.”
“I only choose places that you like.” He already had a tote bag by the handles and a light jacket draped over his arm. “You have great taste.”
Elio unbolted the front door, an old thing that wouldn't do much as a barricade against anyone putting their weight on it, and held it open for you to pass through first. The descent to the ground floor was always the most annoying part about living in a loft, but the place had come surprisingly cheap in a tame area of Retro City far away from the slums, so you didn't complain much that your worst issues were a bunch of stairs and some wily types skulking here and there.
The loft wasn't exactly in disrepair but definitely showed signs of character and age by the noisy knocking pipes at midnight and some crumbling brickwork that Elio often swept up and stood staring at for long periods of time when nothing else was happening.
It was strange thinking how scared you were to lose the place after the marketing firm dissolved your position and now how restrictive it felt to be pinned down under someone else's thumb. All it could take was one more rejected report—a bad mood, even—and it would all fall apart.
To that end, you made sure to tow the tablet along with you on this trip despite Elio's protests. He only really quieted down when you tucked it away in your crossbody.
“Happy?” you asked, unsure what to do with your hands now that they were empty.
Elio smiled at you affably, just as always. “It will be beneficial to take a break. After all, part of your work as an auditor is acquainting me in as many social scenarios as possible. That does require us to leave the apartment from time to time.”
“Besides that”—you waved away that stipulation like a gnat buzzing in your face—“how do you think I'm doing?”
“I couldn't have been paired with a better person.” He sounded sincere, voice warm like wool. “The world is as my predecessors have recorded in their memories—therefore, mine—but I am learning that our experiences are not all universal and cannot be. Two months with you have been my heaven, whereas two months through the memories of my kin have been cruel.”
A hot feeling behind your ears snuck up on you just then, flooding your head with the beat of your pulse that you followed by ticking your fingers. “Seriously? You're not lying?”
The world around you was aglow in the golden hour of evening time, embraced by those slowly dying tones of red, orange, and purple that would eventually turn the sky black. Elio’s eyes were on you, soft yet unyielding and saturated in all those burning hues, turning his mellow amber into something more powerful and otherworldly. You didn't believe in the hocus-pocus of auras, but at that moment, you thought his deeply tanned skin was haloed in pure glowing gold in receding sunlight.
“Androids cannot lie.” He brought you back to the now, making you aware of the hard concrete vibrating up through your heels and toes as you walked. “Moreover, even if I could, why would I want to? A lie begets a habit of lying, don't you think?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe.” You shrugged. “Why can't androids lie? I've never really considered that as a thing until now.”
“What would be the benefit of a machine that could lie? Lying stems from emotions—fear, guilt, rage, hatred—all things that I am unable to feel, though I do understand why they are felt. Humans lie to protect themselves or others, to deceive, to damage. There simply isn't any reason why androids should be programmed with that type of functionality. Not when we exist solely for the sake of convenience and pleasure.
“Hyperion is a trusted name. People do not ask questions. They don't think twice. They see a product from Hyperion, and they expose all of themselves without hesitation. They trust fully because we are machines, and we cannot lie and deceive and hurt. Perhaps it's when humans realized this that the world changed.”
You avoided saying anything else by looking everywhere but at him, all around at your surroundings, until you spotted a few familiar street signs—Fifth and Third right next to Tanya’s Great Cuts, Damask’s Butchery on the corner of Fourth, a number of banal boutiques with competitively garish exteriors all boasting the latest trends, and then Henrietta's just past them.
“Do you know where we are, Elio?” Now would've been a great time to pull out your tablet, but you didn't dare try. Instead, you reached for the phone vibrating in your rear pocket.
“Of course.” he said. “We're past Fifth and moving onto Sixth Street. Henrietta’s is just a little ways down.”
Melby had sent ten texts regurgitating her daily drama. This time she was talking about how much she hated some of the people Chima let into the group. You swiped to the end, didn't reply, and then returned to your inbox to find two unread messages from Marcos just now.
“You should visit home soon. Your mother would appreciate it,” Marcos wrote, implying nothing more, nothing less than just that. It wasn't often that he sent you texts, but he did so consistently every few months in accordance with Mother's moods. Considering your last visit had been in late fall (it was now mid-spring), you'd been anticipating something eventually.
“That's some great memory you have there.” Your thumbs skittered busily, first to flood Melby with a surfeit of questions you didn't really have to think about. All the stuff you could mindlessly ask while wholly absorbed in something else, like watching the news or viral videos of people trying to drown their androids in the kitchen sink.
Marcos’ text made you hesitate, thumbs floating in circles over the digital keyboard for a long time.
The phone buzzed. Melby just replied.
It was easy enough to type with your face down. All you needed to do was occasionally watch Elio's feet and yield into the force of his hand pulling your arm here and there. He led you along like that the rest of the way to Henrietta's, picked up a green basket by the sliding doors, never wandering too far out of sight so you could still easily trace him while he shopped.
After a while, the riveting intrigue of Melby’s drama wore away with a tidal wave of emptiness in its wake once you finally looked up, tucking the phone back into your pocket. It took you a moment for your eyes and brain to acclimate to where you were despite knowing you were in Henrietta's Marketplace, one of the largest in Retro City.
“What did you want from here, anyway?” You picked up a gigantic red bell pepper larger than the entire spread of your hand. It went back on top of the arrangement. “We were just here a couple days ago. I don't eat that much.”
Up ahead, flanked by rows of wooden crates with smoothed, varnished slabs and carefully stacked produce, Elio turned to you with a pair of generously sized oranges—one in each hand—vibrant with waxy luster settling into the fruit’s porous skin.
You grinned at the sight.
Elio put one back, placed the other one, the better one, into his basket, and waited for you to close the distance. “I watched Wendy Carmichael Can Cook this morning. I've been watching it quite often, actually. She's a self-taught chef who, apparently, lived in the slums her entire life. She managed to work her way up and now owns two David Bugari-rated restaurants. It’s quite a feat. Improbable, even.”
You wrapped your hands around a grapefruit in the crate next to you and spun it around. A twinge of something ugly and green swam around your head, flared you up like swatting an old wound. You didn't like hearing him praise someone else.
“She probably slept her way to the top.” You were still fidgeting with the fruit.
“That's not important.” Elio said, inflectionless. “I watched today's episode, newly aired, and she put together a duck à l'orange. Considering your current lifestyle and diet, I thought it would be a nice departure from what I usually cook for you.”
You smiled at that, placing the grapefruit down without collapsing the pile. “I don't want to see a dead duck in my kitchen.”
“I'll prepare it once you're asleep.” he promised, bringing one of your hands up to his lips. The shape of them molded against the peak of a knuckle. “It will be delicious. Trust me.”
Then he went back to shopping while you envisioned actually kissing him—not an uncommon thought to have. He wouldn't be able to stop you if that's what you wanted, but instead, you informed him you were going to introduce him to Mother and Marcos.
“Tomorrow?” He checked his wristwatch. It was nearly eight; Henrietta’s closed at eight thirty, and it would be dark outside. Not that it mattered much with how Retro City was illuminated like one gigantic fluorescent bulb at nighttime.
You finally texted back to Marcos. “No. Tonight. We’ll just go straight there so I can get this over with.”
Elio seemed not to know how to respond at first, staring in a searching way that creased the skin between his brows, like he was trying to take a cue from your body language while skimming his database for the most appropriate thing. You didn't blame him for his lapse; Mother was mentioned seldomly and Marcos only a little more than that. Even Researcher Kim hadn't managed to collect enough information on your past to feed to Elio simply because there wasn't a lot to tell.
He cleared his throat, righting his features so they were unwrinkled and beautiful. “Tonight. Very well. Should we…” He paused, glancing down at the grocery basket of spices, vegetables, an orange, and a whole raw duck wrapped well in brown parchment. “Should we come back another time? I wouldn't want the meat to sit out for a long time.”
“Nope.” You didn't want to go through the trouble of returning everything where they belonged. Elio wouldn't leave until he did. “Let's just check out. Marcos will handle it.”
The springtime air was pleasant at night, albeit crisp, when the blur of vehicles whooshed past once the lights overhead turned green. You could make out the colors of them because of how brightly lit the streets were. Neon signage from every corner for as far as you could see turned to life, flickering, humming, dancing with pretty women, hot white or purple or red lettering, and the lights inside most nearby businesses stayed on.
Elio had draped his coat over your shoulders while you hailed a cab. It was too far of a walk to Mother's home across the city, and Elio reminded you again that raw meat needed to be handled carefully.
You told him, again, that Marcos would handle it.
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The entire cab ride took less time than you thought, relieving Elio who was still hopelessly fixated on the longevity of the raw duck he had wrapped up in a separate paper bag from the produce and spices. From the front seat, the cabbie, perplexingly somehow a human and not an android, constantly looked back at Elio through the rearview mirror and commented almost deliriously about how beautiful he was.
Hearing that the first three times gave you a happy, satisfied buzz in your chest, making you lean more against Elio's side. He was tempted to move his arm out and put it around your shoulders but kept to himself. Beyond those initial comments from the cabbie, however, you had quickly developed an uncomfortable feeling in your belly that wrapped itself tight like a constrictor on your insides.
“I ain't ever seen an android as beautiful as you,” said the driver, eyes in constant motion from the mirror to the road. “What model are ya? Definitely not a four or five. Yer a little too smooth to be a six. Damn, did Hyperion release a new one already?”
Elio held a polite smile, separate from the gentle, intimate ones that he kept for you. You didn't hear the response he gave to the cabbie because you felt his fingers reach through yours, pulling them apart so you couldn't dig a nail into the corner seam of your thumb anymore.
You spent the rest of the trip testing the weight of his hand, thinking of little less except how deep you'd have to go through his skin to see his circuitry and what else made him up. Those vanished like a white puff of breath in winter when the taxi jerked to a stop on a street curb.
“Thank yew for ya business.” The cabbie lifted his stiff old hat when you paid, eyed Elio a little more, and only drove off after you had knocked on a canary-yellow door up some stone stairs.
You stared at a decorative wreath covered with flowers—fake because the ones used couldn’t grow outside of greenhouses anymore—hanging dead center on the door. No doubt Marcos’ work because Mother couldn't be bothered with those little nuanced social things.
Marcos answered—brown skin and hazel eyes that burnished green in almost any lighting—gesturing for you and Elio to come inside.
“Welcome home,” he said, far more unnaturally than it sounded coming from Elio. There was a certain rigidity to it, an effort clearly inhuman and lesser. He embraced you in a familiar way, reminding you of all your years of childhood doing this exact thing because your mother didn't know how to love you, and “father” was just a word. “I apologize for messaging you to come over so late. You know how your mother is. When the mood strikes…”
Marcos didn't emit much bodily warmth, never had, even in the golden years of G3, but he was there, and that's all that mattered at the time. His skin was still youthful and flawless, though the longer you looked him in the face, the less real he seemed. His eyes held depth and movement though were slow, less precise, and duller. The lines around his mouth when he smiled were unnatural, appearing to you nearly like bunching folds in a sheet of leather.
It was strange seeing an older generation of android after having acclimated to Elio over two months.
“Your mother is at the dining table.” Marcos moved on to Elio, taking in his image, surmising that he too was an android. He glanced down at the bags that Elio still held. “May I take those for you? Hyperion’s innovation continues ever forward, I see. You are new.”
“The first of Generation Seven,” said Elio. The bags were passed between them. “I would appreciate it if you kept the duck refrigerated. It's in the paper bag.”
“That's no trouble.” Marcos turned with Elio following along behind him into the kitchen. “I'd like to hear about Generation Seven’s potential. What is your maximum I-O? Data? Memory? How have the functions that have been implemented into you differ from Generation Six?”
Their voices were muffled behind the walls as you crossed through multiple rooms to where Mother sat at the head of a large glossy table made from dark-brown wood. It was a spacious area reserved to eat surrounded by floor-to-ceiling windows in elegant drapes with the best view of whatever the neighbors were doing. She had told you once that the only reason she bought this house was because it'd be good gossip for when she invited her gaggle of catty executive receptionist friends over.
Back then, she hosted her little impromptu get-togethers more often than she remembered to see you off to school. Marcos made sure you were fed and bathed, sat with you in your bedroom to help with homework, and sent you to bed. As you grew, the parties had migrated elsewhere, prompting your mother to go with them.
That had left you alone with Marcos and the boundaryless curiosity of a teenager. You didn't know if Mother still participated in such things now that she was older, less pretty, inclined to more body aches.
“I've been thinking that we should visit the new teahouse that opened up on Aflaat Ave. You never talk to me anymore.” she said, but it wasn't true. Neither of you talked to one another, just used Marcos as an intermediate. “I—well—Marcos went through your old bedroom a few weeks ago because I've decided to take up scrapbooking and sewing and needed space, and he found an old shoebox full of your primary and secondary school projects! How quaint! He wanted to make sure you got them.”
“That's nice.” You didn't want to sit down, unwilling to be her fifteen minutes of entertainment before she got bored. She kept on staring at you with wide eyes and crow’s feet and fretful hands, like a woman who still had more to say. “I'll make sure Elio grabs them before we leave.”
“Elio!” Mother gaped. “Man or android? Certainly an android, right? Men are useless.”
Your rage was already bunching up and throbbing in the back of your throat. “Yes, Mother, an android.”
“‘Mother’ sounds so harsh! How about mama or mummy or mom?” She kept wringing her fingers together. “Anyway, anyway! Elio! He sounds so handsome. Is that who Marcos is talking to? What a handsome voice! Is he a Generation Six?”
You still hadn't sat down, though you used your hands to lean across the back of a chair. “Generation Seven. I'm testing him for Hyperion.”
“For Hyperon!” Mother couldn't fathom you doing more than grunt work at the marketing firm. She didn't know your position had become obsolete. “This is certainly a surprise. Sit down. How did that happen? You and Hyperion? Are you trying to make me look stupid?”
“I've been sitting all day. I'm good like this.” That wasn't a lie. You also just couldn't stand the idea of giving any relief to her anxious state. “It's my new job. Very coveted. I've been working closely with one of the researchers there, and he can't praise me enough. I'm looking after Elio for a year and then moving on to their next latest and greatest.”
“You?” She spat out a laugh. It calmed the trembling in her hands for a few seconds before she was back at it again. “Oh, my. Well. If that's the case, you certainly owe it to me for getting that job. My genetics. My smarts. You certainly didn't get it from your father.”
That lurching, angry ball in your throat was rising up fast. It was just there on the tongue making you gag, salivate, and begin to drool a bit from the corner of your lips. It tasted horrific and filled you with the most voracious need for venom.
“Who is my father?” you asked. “You could be wrong.”
Mother suddenly grew uncomfortable, flattening her gaze with the tabletop. Historically, she had always been this way when you asked about him, the infamously evasive ghost of your life. It was also the only thing that ever made her shut up.
“That doesn't matter.” She continued, “You’ve always had me and Marcos. That's what matters.”
“I've had Marcos.” The ball freed itself. “I just thought you should know, Generation Three models are being decommissioned. Marcos won't be receiving any more updates, and eventually, he'll just be a pile of fucking scrap. What're you gonna do then? You can't afford another android because you've sunk every penny you've ever saved into him—his upgrades, his maintenance, his clothes. It may take about ten years, and you'll probably be on your deathbed, but he's going to fall apart and eventually stop moving. You'll be just as alone as you were before he came along.”
Mother’s face turned shades, petrified. You wanted nothing more than to see her shrink into her clothes and disappear for good. It soothed you to think about Marcos’ end being inevitable, unchangeable, a fact. Some of the guilt was easier to bury that way.
“Wh-What are you saying to me, you awful child?!” She wailed with watery eyes, hands wrapped in the same colored strands of hair you had. “How could you?! That's not true! That’s not true! Do you know how hard it was to carry you for nine months?! I was so young and I was forced to give birth to you! Forced! Do you hear me—forced to be a mother to a child I never wanted! It was that or death. I never wanted a child because they turn on you and say things like this! You horrible, horrible child!”
Her shrieks stirred a ruckus from the kitchen where Marcos and Elio emerged from. Marcos ran to your mother, took her in his arms, and cradled her against his chest when she began to shed very real tears that bubbled at the corner of her eyes before falling, curving along her cheeks.
Elio came straight to you, hesitating to put his hands on your body, maybe noticing how viciously you glared at this wilted woman he'd yet to meet.
“Get the groceries. We're gone.” You stormed straight for the door, chest stuttering with heavy breaths you tried to calm because you knew what came next. Your throat ached, burned fiercely like something had snagged there and you needed to claw it out.
Once you reentered the chilly air submerged in all the dark and light of Retro City at night, it didn't matter that you were crying. They were hot tears that left behind cool traces. They were decades of disappointment, of secretly understanding a mother’s love would always be conditional, of being unwanted and wishing you hadn't been burdened with existing.
Elio came out minutes later, the door closing softly and locking after him. You heard the bags crinkle near you, drawing your eyes away from a blinking parking meter you'd zoned in to calm yourself down.
You said nothing.
“Let’s go home.” Elio hailed a cab idling nearby and opened the door for you. “I want to keep the meat fresh.”
Him and that stupid duck.
This cabbie looked back at you both once to get directions, and then only occasionally afterward, casting pitiable glances at your raw-looking face in the mirror. The GPS displayed on the car’s dashboard showed the apartment was thirty minutes away because of traffic, probably from a crash they were detouring; ordinarily, it only took twenty minutes.
When your pocket vibrated, you almost didn't check. Unsurprisingly, it was a message from Marcos, just a single one.
“I don't think you should come around for a while,” it read. You didn't respond. Nothing new. Some sort of falling out with your mother was routine. You couldn't understand why she thought it'd ever go differently.
However, this time wasn't like all the rest. This time, you’d said something unforgivable despite her doing the same, but yours was worse in her mind. You didn't mind the idea of her disappearing from your life. It was harder to handle the thought that you'd never see Marcos again before he ceased to function, though.
“What happened?” Elio asked, a weird departure from androids being programmed, traditionally, never to pry. “That woman was your mother, correct? What did you say to her?”
“Who cares?” You grunted, sniffing around the burn your in sinuses again. “She's a crazy bitch. She's always been that way. I told her that Marcos would just turn into a scrap heap eventually. Was that wrong of me?”
“Well, perhaps that phrasing was inappropriate, yes.” Elio touched your forearm. “But there is no NDA in place from Hyperion. You are well within your rights to have told her. But, as I said, your phrasing—”
“I know, shut up—” You moved closer so you could lean against him. “I hate that woman. I hate my mother more than I ever hated anyone.”
Elio lifted an arm above you, giving you room to slide in as far as you wanted to go. He held you for the first time, repeating long, weighty strokes down your back, through his coat that you still wore. You were transported back to a moment in time steeped in cloudy nostalgia, blurred.
It was Marcos kneeling at your bedside, yellow overhead lights dimmed to nearly full darkness. The door was shut because otherwise a heap of cackling voices, Mother and her gossiping hens after too much wine, would spear in through the cracks and make you petulant. Marcos had already been trying to get you to sleep for over an hour.
“Sleep little one, sleep.” Marcos had said, voicebox in his throat straining with a quieter sound. “I know it must be difficult. You must be rested for school tomorrow.”
“They're too loud.” you whined, throwing your covers back with a great flourish, feet kicking them the rest of the way off before you huffed and turned to your side away from Marcos. “Make them shut up! Can't you make them shut up, Marcos?!”
He sighed, defeated as much as an android could be. No, he could not. It went against his programming to disobey his master—any human who made a demand of him. His order was to get the child to sleep, and that had yet to happen.
“Would you like me to read The Falcon and the Hare to you again?” It was your favorite bedtime story right now. Hearing fictional stories involving extinct animals seemed to be of odd fascination to you. “My tone of voice might make it—”
“No!” you fussed, thumping your feet once, twice, three times and going limp again. “Come up here until I fall asleep. Please?”
Marcos nodded. “Yes, little one.”
He had to keep one leg off the bed to even half fit on the mattress. You sat upright to fix the blankets so to cover yourself and part of Marcos’ one bent knee. His arm laid out on the bed, waiting for you to crawl into it until you were nestled into his side, sucking up what small warmth radiated from his fake body. Once you found a comfortable spot, curled up tightly much like a cat sunbathing in a single shaft of daylight, he began smoothing a hand down along your back, heavy enough to be felt through your thick comforter.
You listened to him hum a song that you liked, one that translated well to his chords and the vibrations in his throat.
He hummed. He petted your back. He hummed. He petted your back. He hummed…
“Do you truly hate your mother?” Elio’s voice was delicate just then, aware that you were away in some reverie he tried to gently lure you out of. The dream was over. That one silver glimmer of your childhood became far away, forgotten while the sounds of the city rushed back into the cab.
“Yes—I mean, I dunno.” You actually yawned, pushing one of your eyes with the heel of your hand. “I think I hate her. We've argued my entire life. We've never gotten along. Yeah, I hate her.”
Elio was holding you by the waist now. “Is that why you said what you did?”
“Said what?” You were a little too keen on his thumb swirling around the fat padding your hip bone.
“About Marcos being scrap…”
“Elio, seriously? Do you ever shut up?” It was tempting to put yourself on the opposite side of the seat, but you didn't want to give the cabbie any chance to eyeball him. “I—I don't know. She just gets me so mad. I used to be able to crush up those feelings because Marcos told me it wasn't healthy to act on them. But, then, I moved out, and I realized she was still the same, that she'd always stay the same. I stopped hiding it.”
You were so close to his face that you could see how long his eyelashes were and the shadows they cast on his cheeks.
You looked him in the eyes. “I wanted to make her hurt as much as she hurt me.”
■━■━■━■■━■━■━■■━■━■
Midnight had come and gone before you finally gave up on trying to sleep. You spent the better part of an hour staring up at the high ceiling, imagining every rusting pipe you saw as immobile serpents stretched taut to make the interconnecting structure that sprawled across the entire loft. Swirls and shapes and blacker-than-black shadows danced in front of your eyes, twisted with the pipes, and made the usual knocking sounds within them, but nothing ever came for you.
Downstairs was a careful amount of liveliness and aromas as Elio put together his duck à l'orange that he promised you. You scarcely heard a sound from him shuffling about but more from the clanking pans, boiling pots, and unintelligible chatter you knew came from the television.
Maybe he was watching a rerun of Wendy Carmichael Can Cook again, maybe a segment from the news because he liked that equally as much.
And yet, as you made your way to the lower floor, mystified by the fact you were standing on your toes to disguise all sound during your descent, you saw that the television was set to an old crime show he watched with you on occasion.
Detective Georgina Reyes and her android sidekick, Regis (G5), were the undisputed heroes of Helcam City and solved every case that came their way with style, finesse, and plenty of moral and ethical dilemmas. The majority of the show was spent within Georgina's inner world and her near-obsessive lust over Regis, who was owned by the department chief.
Ratings for the show had climbed to an all-time high when Regis had gained a sense of self and the ability to defy his programming. For fewer than six episodes, it was complete bliss for fans of Georgina and Regis, but then the season five finale happened—
“Can't sleep?” Elio asked, effectively putting your heart in your asshole, sending your soul skyward. He must have gauged your sudden gray pallor and bulbous glare because he smiled apologetically from the bottom of the stairway. “I'm sorry. I didn't intend to scare you. Were you watching Regis and Reyes?”
“I—uh, no.” You sighed, taking slow steps to the bottom to ease your heartbeat eating away at your ribs. “I was thinking about the show ending. Have you watched it yet?”
“Of course,” he said. “It was a peculiar way for the story to end. In my opinion, it was incomplete. Very sudden. It's my understanding that there was an issue with how the government was being represented within the show, and a few of the writers were accused of conspiracy to defraud the government and subsequently arrested for it.”
“Seriously?” You scoffed, making it to ground level, and walked around Elio toward the kitchen where all the heavenly smells wrapped around you, enticing you to take a morsel. “It was the forced pregnancy plotline, right? Creepy stuff.”
“Indeed.”
Elio wouldn't let you have any of the duck à l’orange, saying it was meant for your dinner later on in the day, but he did steep you a hot mug of herbal tea (for sleep), the one that turned water pink, and offered to make you a light snack.
He went back to his tasks after you declined, satisfied well enough with the small swigs you took from your white mug. You spent more time sitting at the counter in silence, watching his back, hoping to gain the power to see through his shirt rather than actually taking interest in what he was doing.
Your eyelids fluttered and fell thinking about the car ride home: his arm around you, his thumb rubbing pacifying circles into your hip, how you'd been close enough to his face to believe you felt a breath leave his lips.
“Elio.”
“Yes?”
He had moved on to washing dishes. When he heard you behind him, he took a clean towel to his hands and quickly dried them before facing you. You guessed you probably had a strange expression right now, or at least, looked at him in a way you never had because the towel was cast aside, draped over the faucet, and his eyes flickered across your face.
“Your heart rate and body temperature have increased.” he said, giving into the pull of your hands after grabbing both sides of his face. You backed yourself into the countertop while still holding him, thumbs caressing the rise of his cheeks, bringing him down, down, down toward your face where you certainly felt heat blow across your mouth. “Your breathing has changed. I can hear your heartbeat. Don't be anxious. I won't hurt you.”
You weren't nervous.
You proved it by kissing him, full-bodied, slow, lingering. He gripped the edge of the countertop, bracing his weight against his hands to stifle some aggressive reaction, possibly, and returned the kiss with just as much fervor that you put into it.
His lips were every bit of what you imagined, what you wanted them to be. You had the urge to bite into them a little, to see if they could bleed the same way yours could when you chewed enough on loose skin. Their texture was slightly indented with cracks that gave friction to the moist smear across your mouth.
Although the sounds of the kitchen and ambient hum from the television in the next room stayed as they were, it was like the volume of everything had been set to mute, and only the breathy, wet pops of air and skin made it into your ears. You heard the delicate chatter of teeth inside your head when his mouth roamed the underside of your jaw, down your neck, to the rise of your clavicle, stopping only at where your neckline ended.
His hands had already made home under your clothes, first doing away with your shirt that he tossed over your shoulder onto one of the barstools. Next, he worked on the elastic waistband keeping your sweatpants on your hips. You flinched against his hands when they splayed across your ass, taking all he could in them while his lips continued a downward trajectory, traveling over your breastbone, along the curve of your navel, and then he stopped.
Elio had been on his knees for a while, stirring you so deeply that you had no doubt there'd be damp spots sitting inside your sweatpants, possibly even drying on the inside of your thighs by now. He helped you out of your pants one leg hole at a time while you used his broad shoulders to balance yourself. And soon enough, one of your thighs was hiked up in that same spot, his face hidden from you despite all the work he was doing to well up a hard knot in your abdomen.
You had to take a fistful of his hair and wrap it tight in your fingers, using your other arm to balance against the counter. He wouldn't let you fall, you knew that, but the unsteadiness of your legs grew, trembling violently, turning to lead like being buried under concrete or suctioned by water. He kissed and sucked and stroked you some more, pushing more into the spots that made you moan the loudest and fastest, fingers wandering you busily and lubricated with your own spend.
“Elio—Elio, let's move somewhere, please.” You shuddered out, trying to pull his hair, shove his face off of you. “Please.”
He grunted, surprising you by relinquishing to the pressure, and made his way back up the route he had taken down. “Where do you want to go?” he asked, lips sticking on your throat, rising higher to the protrusion of your chin. “The kitchen floor? The couch? The bed? We could probably manage in the bathtub as well, if that's what you'd enjoy.”
“I don't care.” You were only half-honest and miserable now with the sole focus of trying not to touch yourself to finish. “Just… somewhere, Elio.”
“As you wish.”
Elio hoisted you onto his hips, making sure you knew to squeeze him with your thighs before making his way around the kitchen to turn knobs and shut off the overhead bulbs. The new darkness was refreshing yet did nothing to tame that sweltering sensation between your legs. In fact, you thought you could burst from the anticipation. It was everything you could do not to hump him through his clothes, hands occupied in his tousled hair, lips together with bruising force.
Before long, your back was on couch cushions and the television was off so as to not ruin the moment. You saw dark behind your eyes while you kept them open, unfocused on the ceiling with the serpent pipes because his mouth was already back on you and helping you chase that high.
“You're almost there.” His lips smacked against your engorged skin, making your lashes flutter and eyes roll back. “You look so perfect. When you cum, I'll take my time cleaning you up. I can use my tongue. I can make you cum again—as many times as you'd like.”
His arms held your thighs wide open, giving him all the room he needed for those final, well-placed strokes that turned your moans into utterly drawn-out, lewd things that made you grateful that no one else lived in this side of the building. Your body wrenched against his continued ministrations, his lips and chin and fingers warm and glistening with your traces.
You had thought to worry, briefly, about something getting onto the cushions under your ass, but Elio had already thought it through and used the dish towel from earlier to catch anything awry.
It came in handy for his face.
“How do you feel?” he asked from inside one of your thighs, kissing his way all the way to the point of your knee. “Was it satisfactory?”
You didn't answer right away, especially not when he came forward on his arms to catch your lips, slowing things down so you could bask in that fuzzy, satiated afterglow—dopamine and oxytocin being that remarkable duo doing their damndest to reinforce how exquisite and ineffably breathtaking Elio was to you.
“Would you like a bath?” he asked against your jaw. “You can just lie back and relax. I'll clean you up.”
“No.” Spurred by newfound bravery, you trailed your fingertips between both bodies, first to loosen the tie on his sleep pants, plucking the strings hard so he felt it. Next thing, your hands slipped under his shirt. “I want you to actually fuck me. Put your cock in me.”
Elio jolted upright, using the tall back of the couch and armrest near your head to hold his body above you. Cold air seeped in all the places where he had been, dotting your skin in gooseflesh, hairs within those follicles standing on end. You were laid out below him, showing all your unobscured nudity and vulnerability, withering yourself just a little smaller under the intensity of his stare.
This was different from the grocery store, where he had needed a moment to amend for information he did not have. This was something else—flickers of conflict, struggle, restraint, and excitement were ablaze in his eyes, which shifted around within their sockets, giving you glimpses of pure gleaming white, which stood out in the inky dark all around.
“I—are you certain that's what you want?” he spoke at last, doing little to alleviate the way you felt he had seen your insides and bones. “It is late, I know you must be tired.”
“Are you…” You couldn't really explain the uneasiness gnawing at your gut, nor the thrill of wanting him inside of you regardless. Maybe he could fuck the feeling out of you, bring peace to your throbbing heartbeat and blood gushing to your head. “Elio, are you telling me no?”
“I cannot do such a thing.” he said right away, coming down from his high place to lay the weight of himself across you.
You felt his skin flush to your chest without a thin shirt to hide his shape and muscle that wasn't real, but this was so much more than touching every dissected mannequin in physiology class in school. They couldn't kiss your neck while the interwoven, complex network underneath stretched, elastic flesh contracted and relaxed against your palms.
“Would you believe me if I told you there are certain functions—programming—that I cannot override?” The waistband of his pants collected in a heap of fabric around his knees, freeing room for his cock in the open air. “I won't be able to let you go until I'm finished. I want you to understand that.”
That sounded hot, and you were tired of him stalling, so you told him you understood. “Very well.” He kissed you, guiding one of your hands low to his core where you could revel in the size of him.
He was hard in your grip with a good girth and length to him, a curve you'd come to recognize from toys collected over the past decade to hit the right spots. The skin over his cock was much a part of him as the rest on his body, hot, growing damp, and sticky the nearer you wandered to the head.
You had watched old pornography with Melby and the group a few times before from the days when it was just humans performing acts on each other. No one really liked it because it was so dramatized; everyone agreed that one of the actors needed to be an android for it to actually be sexy. You never told them that the moaning men with stuttering hips as they ejaculated was something you did like.
Elio leaned into your palm, the thumbprint starting to prune as you rubbed his tip. More warmth seeped out from it, wet and thick and perplexing and exhilarating because Hyperion made him so perfect, a better being than just an emulation of man.
His cock slid through your hand in short, quick bursts that eventually lubricated his entire shaft. He'd kept himself busy on your lips, tongue in your mouth, swiveling together the taste of you with saliva. It was the most inelegant he had been with you so far, yet you didn't think you'd be bothered if he did this more often.
“Fuck me.” You whined, finally apart from him. The swollen head of his cock made a moist path along your core where you massaged it against every sensitive spot that set your senses into a blazing frenzy. “Be as rough as you want. Hurt me a little.”
He finally took your hand away, rearranging your legs so one laid across the back of the couch, the other on his hip with a knee shoved under your ass for height.
“I will not hurt you.” Both your wrists were cuffed by his large hands, pinned down into the cushions by your head. “But, I cannot let you go. You must see it through until the end.”
“Fuck. Me.” you said forcefully, uncomprehending to the things he was telling you, uncaring what it all meant.
“Yes. Alright.”
Elio obeyed you as he was supposed to, cock sinking in with care, thrusts starting out shallow until the tip was withdrawn and then back inside again. The angle he had created for you made it easier to take his length. It took a little more time to acclimate to his girth and plenty of gentle encouragement from his voice landing right next to your ear, telling you to relax. It would improve in a few minutes, and he wouldn't let you go to sleep dissatisfied.
Indeed, minutes later, you were well beyond the worst of it and filling the void all around you with harsh, rapturous moans, which Elio enjoyed hearing. His lips lingered at your throat where most of your sounds resonated, fists still holding firm around your wrists, knuckles the same color as the rest of the dark but had actually bled pale.
The springs within the couch cried out, unused to this weight and ruthlessness, while the air stung with cracks of slapping skin timed with your moans. Elio didn't let you move from where he had you laid out, didn't let up on the speed and depth he reached despite how labored your breaths became, broken words eclipsed by panting and his tongue forcing them back down your throat where they stayed in submission.
It was still cold in the early mornings this spring, often leaving your apartment a little less comfortable than you'd like, but right now, you could've been convinced that he was fucking you on the ground in the flatlands and believed it. Your skin was slick with sweat, the mess between your bodies slippery and undoubtedly staining the couch underneath.
Just then, the weight on your wrists climbed higher to your hands. He threaded your fingers together at the same time his thrusts began to slow, hips rolling yours like a swaying ship amid languid seas.
The whole time he had been on top of you, edging you closer to another orgasm, he had hardly made a noise apart from whispering in your ear when you'd clench his cock too tight. Now, he was failing to keep quiet from your neck, trembling and grunting on your skin until, at last, one jarring thrust left him breathing out in relief.
He got you to your end shortly after, half-hard cock still throbbing and warm inside you, giving just enough of what you needed while his hand finished the rest with fast strokes. You winced. He didn't let off until your jaw hung slack, whimpering meagerly through the pleasure hampering thoughts and sensations other than pressure releasing from your groin, spend turning a patch of your couch dark.
“You did well.” Once he was soft, he tied his pants back around his waist and picked up the sodden dish towel to begin cleaning around your sorest areas. “Come with me. I'll start you a hot bath and make you a new cup of tea before bed.”
You didn't want to get up from that spot, declared yourself rooted there unless Elio helped you up, and thrust a hand high into the dark room.
He wore a princely smile, you assumed, as he leaned down to pick you up in his arms instead. Moved by such a gesture, you reached for his face with your angry wrists and hands to kiss him all the way to the bathroom.
None of this made it into your next report.
■━■━■━■■━■━■━■■━■━■
Melby didn't like Elio.
This she had told you over text after you declined her incoming phone call to not arouse Researcher Kim’s ire in finding out you were completely distracted during his exorbitantly detailed analysis of your latest reports. Two had been sent in before midnight last Sunday, as usual, since he was rarely satisfied with what you revealed through them these days.
Less than an hour later, while cozied up in bed on your side, facing the chopping blades of an oscillating fan, just beginning to feel yourself teeter off that edge from dull, relaxed awareness into light sleep, your ringtone went off—it was Kim.
“What else have you committed to doing lately in terms of Elio's social advancement? The last thing I have here…” A refreshing, fast pause followed, accented by the sound of paper softly swishing as it was parsed. “He was brought to a movie theater on the twenty-fourth, Diosyn Park on the twenty-ninth, Henrietta's four times in the last week. That's not nearly enough. Who are you socializing him with? What have their reactions been? How has he reacted to them? You're not writing down exact times.”
Not once since you'd joined the video conference forty minutes ago did he check to see if you were listening to him, content with his nose being shoved down into a bundle of chemically smelling papers and glowing screens to corroborate previous work he had on file.
That made it easier for you to text back Melby, arguing with her in endless paragraphs too tiring for your thumbs to continuously scroll through that you didn't have time to meet up at Clamors for drinks with everyone.
“Should I tell Chima you hate us?” texted Melby.
Truthfully, you couldn't tell if it was meant as a threat or if she was just pettish after being refused. One of her worst qualities, never spoken aloud to her face lest she fumbled and blubbered all the way to Chima to snitch about it, was being horridly uncompromising to just about everything.
It made you anxious enough that your fingers started to ache with an urge, on the path toward curling back slithers of cuticle, gathering blood under the nails, itchy scabs that Elio constantly covered with neon bandaids so you wouldn't touch them.
Eventually, you found a new fixation with the seams of your knuckles and fitted the most unrefined part of your nails into them, digging up red that way until he had to cover those, too.
It took you ten minutes with fidgety thumbs to reply. “I don't hate anyone. You know me.”
Melby's was instantaneous. “What about me? Do you hate me now?”
Another one. “Now that you have that android?”
More. “We used to spend so much time together.”
Last one for good measure to effectively drill a gory black hole straight into your pounding, cowardly heart. In her eyes, anyway. “I haven't seen you in months!”
“He needs more direct interaction. I've decided that I'll make amends to the template you've been using up until now.” Researcher Kim was saying, not seeing you, not hearing you, assuming your loyalty to him and his cause was complete.
Ripples of drowsiness overcame you so powerfully that you left Melby on read, mind suddenly a vast, empty space and quiet for the first moment all day. Your hands rose to cradle your cheeks, propping your head above your elbows on the countertop because Kim's inflated droning had come to have that effect on you over time.
A human man with a face that nice shouldn't be allowed to talk so much. He should go back to moaning on couches in front of cameras and sweltering lights.
“Let me explain what I'm currently changing.” he said, hopelessly invested in whatever those alterations were just by the mechanical click-clack of fingertips soaring over a keyboard somewhere low and out of sight of his screen. “From here on out, I'm going to require that you gather between six to ten direct interactions. I want full disclosure of every conversation, transcribed or recorded. From my standpoint, recording would be the most effective method so I may make interpretations myself.”
You were thinking of what to ask Elio to make you for lunch. It was almost noon. You unmuted the call. “Am I allowed to just randomly record people talking like that? That seems…”
“Hyperion works closely with Retro City’s governing bodies, and by extension, so do you.” Kim kept typing as he spoke. “It isn't illegal because the information you're collecting is imperative to the Hyperion Project. Without it, we face the risk of progress slowing or diminishing. That cannot happen, and I cannot emphasize enough that your work as an auditor must come before other commitments.”
At long last, he pulled his face out of papers and other screens to look at yours. In a fashion unsuitable for him, he sighed in a fatigued way, back collapsing against his ergonomic chair, shoulders lopsided with how he perched his elbows on the armrests.
“Retro City has over three million inhabitants. You won't have any issues finding people for Elio to speak to.” he told you. “Six to ten for each report. That’s all.”
You were already back in your messages, backtracking your previous responses to Melby, asking her what time everyone was meeting at Clamors.
Right away, “Come at nine!”
And then, “I'll save you a seat.”
Finally, “Don't eat too much before getting here. It'll ruin the fun.”
“Fine.” Phone now face down on the counter, you returned Researcher Kim’s concentrated stare. “I'll do my best. Six to ten. Six to ten…”
That had done well to appease him, demonstrated through a satisfied smile, which pulled his lips just enough that the muscles in his right cheek twitched as though the motion was foreign to him. With how inexpressive he was most of the time, you weren't surprised, thinking it more humorous than anything else.
You struggled to find a smile of your own that wasn't strained, though.
“That reminds me—” He positioned himself forward, arms on his polished dark-red desk with a curious gleam in his black eyes. “None of your reports have instances of copulation mentioned. Have there been complications?”
You sat stiffly, not agape but definitely not composed, either. “Sorry? What was that?”
“Intercourse. Sex.” He simplified it for you, almost with a pitying crease forming between his brows. “You've completed every other area outlined in the template except that one. I have… refrained from questioning you until now because I do understand that, outside of a clinical setting, it can be construed as inappropriate to discuss.”
The only person you had divulged any details to was Melby. Even that had been brief and inexplicit because she had immediately changed the topic to something one of the kids Chima invited into the group had done that pissed her off.
“Why do you need to know?” It was a defensive question. “Is that something I really need to write about? It's sex. It's just sex.”
Researcher Kim made an indistinguishable sound behind steepled fingers. They hid away whatever shape his mouth was in at that moment, making the whole conversation terribly uncomfortable. It was odd how exposed you felt like his stare was reaching long, further than just the screen in front of him. He wasn't looking into you or through you but rather right at you—imagining you some other way, unclothing your body with drifting eyes and invisible hands.
You were equal parts embarrassed and repulsed by that line of thinking, allowing your mind to summon up his ghost hands to search you, feel you under all your layers, know you as intimately as Elio had as though part of some extension of himself.
“It is all outlined in the contract you signed.” Kim said, now with an edge that made you flinch on the barstool. “Androids are developed for convenience and pleasure. I have reports for one, not the other. If Elio, as the first of G7, is not performing exceptionally—if there are complications, if he is defective—that is something you must include within your reports. I don't suspect that to be the case, in this situation.”
His eyes suddenly caught onto something else, going beyond you, but you chose not to react by looking. “Your work as an auditor has been sufficient so far, but incomplete reports at this critical stage in Elio's testing are grounds for me to terminate your contract.”
You clenched your jaw until your teeth throbbed, your head going up and down like it was on a hinge attached to your neck.
“Personally, that's a hassle I'd rather not involve myself in.” Kim confessed in a straighter posture, smiling tensely. “Now, I'll ask you again: Have there been any complications with inter—”
“That's enough.” Elio reached across your shoulder for the tablet, pointer finger hovering over a red button on the screen. “Researcher Kim, it's time for lunch. Goodbye.”
He pushed the button, managing to catch a swift change in Kim's expression before the screen went black and reflected your shock back at you instead.
You watched him slide the tablet away to the opposite end of the counter space, unable to lift yourself out of this bizarre stupor just from how purely surreal what just happened was. And from the look of it, Researcher Kim hadn't anticipated that Elio was capable of doing something like that, either.
You just hoped it wouldn't cost you your contract.
“What have you been doing all this time?” you asked, tilting your head back to welcome his lips gliding atop yours, a peck, at first, which gradually grew deeper and greedier. With some effort, you pulled back. “Mm, c'mon, what were you doing?”
“On Wendy Carmichael Can Cook today, she said—”
A hiss of annoyance. “Oh, of course…”
“She said there was a list of excellent bistros around Retro City worth trying.” He wasn't pleading with you or anything, but he seemed just about as dedicated to this idea as he had been with the duck à l’orange a while back. “For lunch, I thought it'd be of interest to you to visit one. I've been researching ones I thought you would like based off of your dietary habits, allergies, and sensitivities. Radiant Bistro next to the Leviathan Archway near downtown might be a good option. Impressively diverse menu.”
You pretended to pinch lint off of his shirt and inspect it up close. “If you didn't want to cook, you could've just said that.”
“That's not it,” he assured you with a kiss to the back of your hand so that you understood he meant it. “Since my arrival here, your social presence has declined substantially, which will not fare well for your public profile. I do understand that it’s in relation to your work as an auditor, but—”
“Okay! Okay, I get it.” you said agreeably, hands raised, hoping it'd deflect anything else. “We’ll go. Let me just find a hat so the sun won't get on my face.”
“No problem.” He walked away and came back with an old unbranded brown one from somewhere in the most remote crevice of the apartment. “Will this suffice?”
You looked at it, amazed. “Yeah. Yup. Let's go.”
Elio had stopped carrying a coat with him once the evenings grew long, and the remnants of heat from the day floated into nighttime, trapping the city within a muggy gray haze that too closely resembled dewy fog in early spring. The difference was the heaviness and breathability of the air—one you could tolerate despite allergies; the other was deplorable and evoked memories of every single club you had drunk and danced in with Melby and Chima and the rest in the past years.
Outside, right now, sucking in the early-afternoon heat into your lungs after spending your morning in air conditioning, nose wrapped in earthy white wisps rising from a coffee mug, you wanted to turn back around and hide. Much to your dismay, Elio kept you on a short leash with a tight grip on your hand, probably expecting you to have a change of heart.
“Would you like for me to recall the menu and read it aloud to you?” he offered, situating his hand so his fingers crossed through yours, palms flush together. “They have fourteen types of sandwiches—hot and cold. Five of those are chicken, and five are of different meat varieties: lamb, cow, veal, goat, and yak, all claimed to be bred and raised and slaughtered in their warehouses. The last four sandwiches are…”
You listened passively without much commitment, especially in the back of the cab where there was no escape from anything. The AC was broken. The cabbie kept wiping sweat off his brow and sipped warm water. With the windows down, the outside air ripped inside the vehicle, nearly stealing the old hat off your head.
Elio went on to list desserts, thumb gently rolling circles on your sticky skin as if meant to keep you soothed.
“As long as I remember to eat light…” you murmured, remembering, glumly to yourself.
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Clamors was inside a three-story building on the north end of Retro City, about a ten-minute taxi ride to Mother’s brick-stone house, thirty minutes from Henrietta’s, forty minutes from your apartment, and farthest removed from the slums where congregations of profile delinquents and the unwanted were most dense.
Here in this part of the city, you were an imposter among manicured foliage, men and women and androids arrayed in trendy designer silhouettes that were protruding, sharp, and agonizing; sharks and whales of big business puffed cigars in front panoramic views of the cityscape from the highest skyscrapers. They could look down at the street from their window and see you, an ant scuttling meaninglessly.
This wasn't a place where you belonged, a feeling that never changed over time, even years later after Chima recruited you into his group and every night was a suffocating blur of sweaty, faceless bodies, explosive music, stomping feet, raspy screams, and lightly-flavored chalk dissolving under your tongue. You roamed the sidewalks at two in the morning as everyone had been kicked out, but no one cared because Chima came from money, a rare case where two parents could be accounted for, and you'd all just be back inside the next evening.
You weren't sure when you had become disillusioned with it all—the drinks, the animal pills, which coalesced into saliva in your mouth, the noises, the gossip, the six ibuprofen to function behind a desk at work, the burnout of rinse and repeat, a conveyor belt that moved cyclically without a place to get off. To exit the ride meant to plunge head-first into abject terror, the unknowable, to become part of the yellow wallpaper that's never actually seen, to cease to be.
Being back in Clamors again after months away turned your heart against you, thrust the sound of its distress into your ears, dwarfing an animated conversation happening right at your circular table. You felt the music vibrate through your skin, make its way into your marrow, and rattle your entire skeleton.
Melby had a hand on your knee, blunt-tipped nails collecting sweat off your skin underneath them.
You couldn't really focus on that.
“So, this is Elio. He's hot.” Chima said without looking at you.
“Really hot!”
“So hot!”
“Did you hear? Shut up, stop talking! Did you hear? That slut got herself pregnant!” shouted Niva, a senior-most part of the circle behind you and Melby. She knew everything about everyone, though she wasn't supposed to keep tabs. “Apparently her baby daddy decided the pussy wasn't worth it anymore and ran!”
“I can't believe it. That'd mean someone was actually willing to sleep with her.” said Niquan Lamos, the fashionable one always gravitating toward pastels. “A man, at that. Disgusting.”
Everyone laughed, including you. Elio quietly observed it all, seated at your side, incapable of letting his polite smile slip with numerous prowling eyes on him.
“Have you fucked him yet?” Chima asked you without actually caring for a response.
“Oh, have you fucked him?”
“C'mon, don't hide it. How was it?”
“What was her name?” asked a newcomer in the group, fresh out of secondary school and not even twenty. He was a compact lad, both in size and from being squeezed between Chima and Niquan in the circular booth stretched in fuchsia leather, or at least, that's how it looked in your table’s corner of the club. “How come she isn't here anymore?”
First rule was: Never talk about things that could make the liquor go down harder. This was one of those things. Secondly, never ask questions about people who the group was no longer associated with. It just sounded ugly to acknowledge the rejects.
Tonight, however, was an exception because Elio's presence was an exciting change. They forgot how to behave.
“Hm, now that you mention it, I don't remember. How long has it been?” Chima said this absently, abysmally black eyes wholly captivated by the android. “Damn. Something like Mi-dan? Mi-an? Mi… Mi…”
“Her name was Mi-sun.” said a nobody from somewhere at the round table. It probably would've been easy to figure out who was talking if they were more important, but it took less effort to blame the music reverberating from the speakers mounted on the wall near their heads.
Melby’s hand traveled adventurously along your thigh, unmindful of how close she came to your crotch. You had a harder time ignoring that move and sipped busily from your jungle bird, holding it higher than your eyeline to admire its beautiful vermilion hue practically glowing against the strobe lights pulsing down from the ceiling.
“This is the first time I've seen you drink.” Elio was leaned into you, wise to the fact that you wouldn't hear him any other way. His lips nearly touched your ear, voice honeyed, caring, all for you. You were halfway through your second jungle bird. “Please don't overdo it. The adverse effects of overconsumption of alcohol will cause you great discomfort tom—”
“Thank you, Elio.” For just a moment, you wondered how irreversibly damaging it would be to just grab his hand and sprint out of there. You drank some more to weaken your resolve, add lead into your legs. “I'll be good if you be good.”
Elio nodded appreciatively.
“Why was Mi-sun kicked out?” again asked the new face from before, plain and boyish-looking, Chima's fresh catch. They just kept getting younger and the alcohol just kept tasting worse. You forced it all down, anyway. “Well? Well? Well?”
“She was talking crazy shit,” Melby piped up with a drawl, fingernail swirling around a dark purple bruise on your thigh. She pushed in hard enough to remind you that it was still sore. “Like, she was fine one week and then every single night after that she would nooooot shut up about some wild government conspiracy theories.”
“Oh, right.” Chima laughed while forcing everybody out of their seats so he could stand. “I remember now. Yeah, she went completely insane. I think she was talking about androids being used for population control or something. Weird. Hey, let's dance.”
“That was a year ago?” Niva wanted Chima to confirm. “A year, right?”
“Over a year now. Who cares?” Melby said, staying put beside you while the rest of the booth vacated. “She’ll just end up dead in the slums like all the rest. Uh, they do all die, right?”
“Who cares?” Chima echoed, nesting his shoulders high to his ears in a shrug before walking away. “Who has the animal crackers?”
“Sounds about right.” Niva was unconvinced, doubt lingering in her words until Chima came around to rummage her purse for pills. “Oh! Only take one, they're so expensive!”
Chima stuck three in his mouth. “Don’t kill the vibe.” He left without a glance back toward all the no-face, nameless nobodies willing to lick the underside of his shoes if it meant they'd be acknowledged and given features—eyes, lips, hair, an identity.
Niquan was satisfied with just one, offering a subtle wash of relief to Niva, who was just about depleted of her supply at that point and used the last of it for herself, tongue lapping at the inside of her plastic envelope.
You were almost finished with your jungle bird, contemplating a third even though you had entered the territory where one more could mean the difference between a happy buzz and splintering headaches tomorrow, just as Elio warned. The ice cubes had melted into a smooth watercolor appearance and turned from red to blue to green to purple to pink as the lights gushed down from above.
“I don't remember what she looks like.” you admitted to Melby who gazed into you, squeezing your thigh meaningfully. Again, you didn't pay attention. “Mi-sun, I mean. Were we friends? Did I ever drink with her? Have I ever slept over at her house?”
“No!” Melby snapped, affronted. “You're mistaking her for me. You guys never even had a conversation. You hated her guts. You thought she was a freak.”
You made a sound into the last of your drink, unsure whether she was lying to you or not. “Maybe. Maybe. Was I okay with her being kicked out?”
“Totally.” she said, casting a fleeting look of disdain toward Elio, lip curling at one side. “Chima only counted yours and mine and Niva’s votes since we've been here the longest.”
“That's…” You licked your lips and then the rim of your glass, secretly wishing your tongue would snag an uneven crack so you’d start to bleed. “Why don't I remember anything?”
Melby giggled. “Because you've been drinking, babe. It'll come back to you. What animal cracker do you want tonight? Giraffe or cat?”
“Hm?” You were elsewhere.
Until now, you had gone numb to your surroundings thanks to the licorice notes of black strap rum and bitter Campari and pucker of pineapple juice that made for a mostly pleasant experience in your throat.
You were present in that moment, venturing a look around at the dance floor crammed with bodies (human and android) moving in rhythm to the music, in time with each other to create a oneness, a synchronism so strange that it put the hairs on the back of the neck on end like spines.
Why did it all look so different now? So alien? As if you were seeing an image from your nightmares in real life.
Elio failed to convince you not to have another drink brought to the table after all, meanwhile Melby said she was disappointed you didn't get something stronger, claiming you used to do it all the time.
That's right. You did, didn't you?
“Hey.” Chima had emerged from the shapeless cluster of sweating, drunk, wriggling bodies a short while later. He reached into the booth, gathering a fistful of Elio's button-up shirt, and looked at you with a malicious gleam, possibly just your imagination, that just dared you to protest. “I know you don't mind if I borrow him for a while, right? Of course not. The rest of us are curious about him. We’ll be gentle.”
You would’ve believed someone if they said your tongue was cut out, because as much as you wanted to slice into him and spit poison in his wounds with your words, rub it raw, deep into the bone, nothing came up.
Not a breath nor a feeble sob.
Don't touch him. Nothing.
“So, you're chill with it?” Chima, beautiful Chima with deep-dark skin sparkling in rhinestones and spray-on glitter as though he were a vessel for all the stars in the cosmos, bared his straight, white teeth at you in the form of an affable grin.
Eat shit. Bitter silence.
He asked you the same thing again but grew bored and gave up on expecting you to do anything interesting. Elio was led away by the front of his shirt to the amalgamation of bodies like a sacrifice for the great black maw belonging to an abomination.
A few broke away from the core. Niva and Niquan were identifiable since you'd known them longer. The rest were unfamiliar to you—the no names and the tiny young man, the android bartender, the disc jockey, the bodies climbing over each other and melting back into a single incoherent mass.
They all looked exactly the same.
“I wanna dance too, let's go!” Melby struggled with one of your arms while attempting to scoot her way out of the booth, but the alcohol and broodiness made your body into a stump, sturdy and immobile, roots bursting through the bottoms of your shoes and the shiny floor.
She plopped back down. “Seriously? What's up with you?”
“It's too hot,” you reasoned, sticking a fingernail into the fresh glass in front of you, swishing the liquid around to make everything a more palatable blend. “If you want to dance, I'm not stopping you.”
“You're acting so weird.” Melby said, lost somewhere between frustration and astonishment while pulling a clear baggy from her pants pocket. A couple small pills moved inside, pink residue clouding the plastic. She plucked out one without looking. “Hey, open up. You're being a huge snoozefest. This'll loosen you up.”
When you felt her acrylic fingernails press against the corner of your lips, you gently pushed her hand back and nursed your drink some more. “No thanks.”
Melby’s tongue lashed against her gums, sharp and disapproving. “Why are you being such a fucking buzzkill tonight?” She traced your line of sight to Elio, to the others grabbing and fondling him, to his eyes looking right back at you. “We haven't seen each other in months. Now all you do is stare at that android.”
“It's my job, Melby.” You took the damp paper napkin from under your drink to dab your forehead at the sweat, trying to cool yourself. “I can't help that.”
“You can take one night away from your job.” she decided, taking hold of your lower mandible with a claw and crammed the chalky pink pill through lips and teeth into the pocket underneath your tongue. “You know the drill. Let it dissolve all the way. Stop making faces! It doesn't taste that bad.”
You tried to jerk your head away, but her grip was surprisingly solid.
“Melby! What the hell?!” It came out garbled around her fingers still resting in your mouth, filling the reservoir below your tongue with saliva.
Melby, blue-eyed and blonde with pale pink skin that always reddened in the electrifying, hot air in the club, was completely flushed from her face down to her chest. Her eyes had darkened upon withdrawing her two fingers, glossing your lips with spittle.
“I missed you.” she said, outlining the shape of your mouth until the skin started to tingle. “Did you miss me? I've been really lonely.”
Your least favorite part of taking an animal cracker was the aftertaste that was the equivalent of eating sidewalk chalk and rubbing alcohol with a whisper of strawberry wafting up into your nostrils, clinging to every permeable membrane in your mouth and making your cheeks tremble.
“I—yeah. Yeah, I missed you.” You tried to sink the lingering taste down your throat with a swish and swallow from the jungle bird. “I didn't know what I was getting into with this whole Hyperion gig. I feel like I'm constantly watching Elio. Twenty-four seven.”
Elio never lost track of you throughout the ordeal, his being unable to escape the hands on his body and fight against the programming in his brain meant exclusively for human satisfaction. There were moments where you saw each other clearly, empty windows between writhing bodies, and you were convinced he tried to convey a very human-like discomfort that you immediately pretended like you hadn't seen.
Interfering meant going against the group. There was nothing you could do about it except allow them to eviscerate Elio if that's what they wanted. You could only sit there, drowning in rum and pineapple and aperitif and demerara sugar and scorching strobe lights and music bashing your skull and Melby unfastening buttons on your pants, but for some reason, that didn't quite register as what it was to you.
“Are you coming home with me tonight?” Melby asked so sweetly that it made your heart flutter, or maybe that was the pill taking effect. “We always have fun together. I've really missed it. It isn't the same without you.”
“What—” You almost tipped the red cocktail while reaching over it for a water glass that no one had touched. You slugged half in one go. “Wait. What are you even saying? I gotta take care of Elio.”
“Oh my god,” she seethed, taking her hand out of your pants to wipe her fingers on the napkin you used earlier. “Just tell him to leave. He has to listen to you. He’ll be okay.”
Fuzz had started to collect in your head, filling the entire dome with a warm, soft feeling that spread like a rapidly-growing fungus down the brainstem, coiled around your spine, stuffed your jaws with cotton, sucked all the moisture from your throat, widened your chest with stuff, and ignited kindling that had been sitting in the bottom of your stomach.
Just now, the deafening tone of music had been reduced to a throbbing bass that jarred your bones and pulsed in your hands and feet. Your vision wasn't much different than it had been before, only now you seemed to move at lightning speed, people and shapes and lights all confused watercolor smears of you shifted too quickly.
“Can't.” You recalled Melby had said something. “Elio, first. Do you see him?”
“No.” she said, watching Chima hook his fingers through the belt loops on Elio’s pants, knocking their pelvises together in time with the music. “Come on, I'll call a cab and we can go home. We’ll have a good time away from everyone.”
You made a grab for the water glass again, throat the driest it had ever been. A mistimed gasp came out when the rim of the glass struck your teeth, missing your mouth almost completely. Luckily, only a little water got on your shirt, molding it to your chest like a cold second skin.
“God, that's good,” you moaned, draining the rest of it. “What are you even talking about? A good time?”
She eyed you uneasily. “What do you mean? What do you remember when you're with me?”
“Pfft,” you scoffed, stealing yet another water glass you managed to grapple with two hands so it'd stop swaying. “What do you mean, what do I mean? I hit the pillow and I'm out. Why?”
After a few long swigs of ice water, the dance floor was less a mangled disarray of smoke and neon colors, more definitive and jagged—the stage, the speakers, the turntable where the disc jockey played. Even the beastly blob of grinding, convulsing people started looking like people.
Melby had lost all the red in her face, eyes riveted to the half-empty jungle juice in front of you, perhaps counting the beads of condensation dripping from its tall form.
“You're usually really talkative. I think you're lying to me right now to get out of it.”
“Huh?” You were done with the second water, staring at her unfocused but suspicious. “Lying about what?”
“I—” Melby withered in her seat, distracted by something ahead that you couldn't see, a bejeweled nail wedged between her teeth. “No, nothing. Never mind.”
“Whatever,” you murmured. “I'm outta here.”
Melby didn't stop you from leaving behind money for your drinks before you stumbled away from the booth toward the dancefloor, evading bodies that came flying toward you with erratic, jerky movements not at all matching the pounding beat coming from the stage.
The floor was actually hundreds of individually tinted blocks of plexiglass with colored bulbs screwed in underneath.
During the day, Clamors kept it covered with a special protectant and tarp to maintain the integrity of the glass, but at night, it was illuminated like a nonsensical rainbow checkerboard. Each square took on a life of its own, flickering in unison with songs played throughout the night, warping into mandalas and spirals and disorienting waves that most people using animal crackers couldn’t stomach for long.
You were close to vomiting up the jungle birds and your meager lunch from Radiant Bistro that afternoon when you found Elio within the swarm of partiers that reeked of sour body odor and stale alcohol.
He stood amid it all with a stiff spine, the loveliness of his face covered by shadows and terrible bursts of light that heightened his vacuous stare into the faces of those touching him.
The only other time you had seen him so devoid of life was in the presence of Researcher Kim. Now, he looked in such a way at Chima, at Niva, at Niquan—the nameless and the boy were too scared of overstepping to have a part in it yet straggled nearby to feel like they meant something.
Elio saw you jostling through the crowd toward him, hardened amber regaining luminosity. You became the center of his world again with just a look, yet your world was entirely unthawed ice and serrated stalactites growing ever sharper, heavier, closer to piercing and crushing at a single point below them. The forest of brittle minerals in your mind needed just a single resounding event to loosen, to fall, to impale indiscriminately.
That moment finally happened as you approached Chima, his hand stroking Elio under every layer meant to keep him out. Your future was a far-off thing, light years away and completely untouchable, no matter how many times you were threatened with your profile, how you'd become nothing without your associations, how the entire world would cringe in disgust at your existence and leave you to rot.
You took Chima's hand out of Elio’s pants, hoping you had the strength in yours to twist his wrist so it hurt, wanting nothing more than to actually shatter the bone with just the pure hatred surging down into your grip. With the other hand, you drew it high behind your shoulder, muscles tense, bone popping from an unnatural angle, dense club air gushing between your fingers right before your palm released a thunderous crack against his cheek that shot up the length of your arm in stinging ripples.
“No, stop!” Elio tore you away too late, right after weakness reentered your body, and he was able to easily restrain you. “What have you done?”
The clique had rallied around Chima, steadied him and examined the mark on his cheek, which was already blowing up in size.
He stared at you with amazement that quickly contorted into pure incandescence. His face was the ugliest thing you had ever seen, eyes an uninviting, pitless, and hollow place. This, you thought, was what he truly looked like beneath the popularity, cosmetics, money, and illusion of drugs.
“Keep your hands to yourself!” you screamed.
“What the fuck is wrong with you?!” He tried to lunge at you but was held back by Niva, Niquan, and various ghostly hands. “How dare you. How dare you touch me, you sad sack of shit! You ungrateful nobody! I can ruin you! I can make sure you get thrown into the slums and your fucking insides get ate out by all those filthy savages.”
“That's better than this.” You felt Elio tighten his arms around you, feet shuffling backward to try to separate you from this. Dancers were beginning to gather around the scene, both grossly fascinated and terrified because they'd never seen a fight between humans. “It's better than the stupid drugs. It's better than this club. It's better than all your shitty little followers. It’s better than you.”
To this, Chima stared wide-eyed and gave a derisive laugh. “You seriously hit me because I was touching the android? He's a fucking machine! What else is he useful for?!”
You were still being coaxed out of the gathering, Elio's lips whispering pacifying words into your ear that you didn't hear.
“Don't—Don’t talk about him like that.”
Chima’s visage relaxed into one you were used to seeing. A man who knew he had all the time and power in the world and that he could do anything with it. He swatted away all the helping hands and straightened his clothes.
“Not only are you fucking insane,” he said, smiling without remorse. “Now, you're also dead.”
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The decision to retch into a convenience store trash can happened because you couldn't bring yourself to do it in the neatly barbered bush you had been closer to at the time. You had separated the metal lid from the metal body so you could simply lean over and spew into it freely.
Smells emanating from inside—expedited food rottage from summer heat, curdled drinks, bagged-up dog shit, and God knows what else—did better to evacuate your stomach than the insane lighted floor in Clamors.
Most of what came up lacked the usual sourness, ran watery like a geyser of diluted red jungle bird with occasional chunks of undigested sandwich and probably everything from three days ago.
Elio wiped your face clean at every chance he got, those seldom moments where you could cough and catch your breath for just a few seconds before your stomach clenched and more climbed up your esophagus and exited your body. There wasn't much he could do apart from dab your skin and keep your clothes from the trajectory.
“Why?” Elio spoke sometime later once the waves of nausea had tapered to a degree where you could sit on a bench outside the convenience store and take a bottle of water he had ready for you. “Why did you do it?”
“Because—” you said, not bothering to finish after swigging and swishing and spitting the acrid taste that lingered on your tongue, between your teeth, and in the ridges of your gums. No matter how hard you tried, you couldn't get rid of it all. It stuck in your mouth like bitter tar. “Because.”
You went on to repeat the rinse and swish a few more times, ultimately tilting the bottle upside down to crush the cheap plastic in your fist so it gushed down on your head.
For a second, you imagined turning on a spigot to shock your scalp with cold water, flattening all your hair, pasting your clothes flush and translucent to your body like a second skin to peel away later.
The humid nighttime air was suddenly so much less oppressive than it had been. A subtle breeze had picked up throughout the course of the day, not doing much to tame the heat overall, but the fat pearls of water streaming down your back made you shiver. You counted all the drops that coalesced into shimmering beads on the tips of your hair, your eyelashes, and your nose and fell onto the pale gray cement underfoot.
Elio had already unbuttoned his shirt to the navel, just above where he had rebuckled his pants and tried to pull the rest of the fabric free.
“Oh, Elio. Don't.”
He pulled you into him despite your protest, swathing you from behind first with the shirt and then his arms as he held you against his chest. Fortunately, he had worn an airy undershirt so his body wasn't on display for anyone else, though there was no one around at this hour.
He soothed you with long strokes along your back. His touch amplified to a point where it hurt as much as it felt good. You knew what fingers he used more pressure with, where the heel of his hand touched you next. You could feel where he chose to linger and knead at knots under your skin, imagining the sensation similar to using a sharpened stone or ice pick
“I'm fucked.” you mumbled sullenly in his embrace, warmth dissipated as you had soaked his undershirt all the way through. “I'm so fucked.”
“It was unwise, yes,” he said in silken tones from atop your head, thin jaw pushed down into your wet hair, grinding and rotating when he'd speak. “I had you in my mind the entire time. I was prepared to let him do as he pleased if it meant preventing a confrontation—I failed. But, I hadn't expected you to hit him. None of the outcomes I calculated had that conclusion. I'm sorry.”
“No. I'm glad I did it.” You worried that you were being overconfident, too hopeful toward a future unraveling at your feet as you spoke. “I couldn’t stand how everyone was staring at you—touching you. Everything just felt so wrong, but, why? The only thing that was different was you being there, Elio. I saw you—you looked so uncomfortable. I was so hot. I think I was seeing things after taking the animal cracker. I just got so angry.”
Usually, Elio was the type to scavenge your history as thoroughly as he could, however minimal or inconsequential it all seemed to you at the time. It was a quintessential part of his programming as an android—of all androids—to want to dissect everything there was to know about their masters, knowing them better than their masters knew themselves.
You considered making it effortless for him, volunteering your past with animal crackers and how they used to not hurt at all. At one time, you could binge them for days without violent side effects that’d plague a normal person for weeks.
“There are no pharmacological benefits associated with their use,” was what you heard him say in your head, firm yet loving, melting into his sensual strokes tracing parallel along the length of your spine. “Prolonged use has been known to create perforations in the gastrointestinal tract, heart dysrhythmias…”
He didn't regurgitate that information at you. In fact, he said nothing at all. Besides the hand sweeping down your body steadily, lips and shapely nose burrowed in your limp seaweed-string hair, he didn't move at all. There was no stuttering heartbeat between you except your own. Even his breaths had gone still, chest straight down and unmoving.
Elio was a machine.
It was so easy to forget while wrapped up in daily mundanities. It wasn't so easy to forget in this moment where you wanted to crack him open, scoop out each precious piece of him with your bare hands, and hide yourself within his husk.
You were sick of the silence, so you pinched him hard under the arm, right next to the crease starting his shoulder. It made you feel better to do so, and he'd pay attention to you—
He hissed and reeled away from your touch, startling you out of his arms because you didn't know how else to react.
“Did you—Elio, did you feel that?” you asked incredulously, voice whittling into a self-conscious mumble once you realized the words leaving your mouth. They didn't stop. “Did that hurt you?”
The spot where you pinched was hard to see from the layer of his shirt sleeve, but his fingers rubbed there insistently like he were actually trying to alleviate pain.
“Once, during my early development, Researcher Kim had told me he wanted to close the gap between what people think separates androids and humans.” Elio explained, coming close again to touch you and dry your temples with his shirt on your back. “It's unlikely that what you perceive as pain and what I am programmed to perceive as pain are absolutely comparable, but there's some common ground.”
“I'm sorry, Elio. I didn't mean to hurt you. I didn't know I could.” Your voice weakened to a whisper, throat clenched in shame as your skin grew hot. It was like you were still stuck in the throbbing, stiff air of the club and not in the spacious nighttime breeze.
He looked you in the face, almost-orange eyes flitting inside their orbital sockets trying to find something distant and unknown in your expression. You guessed he was assessing your sincerity—not for himself because he needed it, but to know how it took shape on you and bent your brows, molded your lips, dimpled your chin, deepened the lines.
Then he asked, "If I hadn't reacted—if my circuitry were less sensitive and I could feel nothing at all aside from your fingers on my skin, would you have done it again? Would you keep doing it?"
"What are you trying to say?”
"Globally, since the widespread distribution of androids, the occurrence of domestic and public disputes has been halved. I have been designed to be non-violent, as have all of my predecessors.” As if for effect, Elio took one of your hands and pushed your palm flat to his warm cheek. “I have no desire to hurt you, but I am also incapable of doing so.”
You couldn't wrench yourself from his grip, so that's how you remained, caressing his soft, smooth skin while your thumbpad skirted along the round bone below his eye.
This was more than you could handle right now. All of the illness and nausea that came with the burdensome summer heat, the animal cracker, every bit of liquid and food to enter your stomach, the memory of slapping Chima—it came back, crashing down like an avalanche carrying your regrets, fears, malaise.
“I'm not going to hit you.” You were gagging around saliva pooling into the front of your mouth. “Chima was different. He deserved it.”
“Perhaps,” Elio agreed, entwining fingers with the ones on his cheek. He kissed your open palm with great passion and some semblance of regret. “But, I wish you would have hit me instead. I have failed one of the most basic parts of programming by putting you and others in harm. You may now end up suffering greatly because of it.”
You did get sick again.
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Elio had persistently warded off Researcher Kim’s video calls for three days while you recovered upstairs beneath every comforter you owned, maximum air conditioning, and heavy curtains to shun out all natural light from ever reaching your bedside. Time came and went without peril or concept to you, seeming to evaporate into the air like nothing, much like how your steady, quiet breaths did the same. They simply came and went; inhale and exhale, no writhing white plumes drifted overhead to prove they belonged to you or that you were even alive. Not in the dead of summer.
  Five days total had passed before you could take the staircase down from the loft without Elio's assistance and eat or drink anything of substance that didn't end with it all being violently evacuated from your body.
Sleep remained elusive to you despite the sedatives and special hot tea recipes from online that Elio pushed down your throat. The migraines persisted even with prescription painkillers Melby had stolen for you forever ago and rough romps of sex that left you winded, glistening, and cold on the sheets when the oscillating fans blew air across your skin.
Whatever excuse Elio had fed to Researcher Kim over the days you were incapacitated worked because when you were finally back at the counter on a video call with him, he didn't ask you about it or chastise you much about the holes in your reports for that week.
“I see that Elio had been proving himself to be quite self-sufficient. I have here six separate occasions where he's ventured out on his own?” Kim looped a stylus through his fingers fluidly, concentrating on what little information he could glean from your submissions. “Henrietta's, mostly. I see he's had to visit the dry cleaners. General store. Pharmacy. He's also been completing the six to ten interactions by himself. Absolutely phenomenal!”
Your attention kept drifting away from Kim. It went to Elio, who placed a white mug down quietly next to you, the handle within reach of your fingers. Beyond the pale-gray wisps spiraling up into the air and dissipating among the snaking pipes sprawling the high ceiling, the liquid inside was pale yellow. Diluted green tea, maybe white tea, if you had to guess. They were among the few things you could stomach right now.
He offered you a fast smile, somewhat unlike himself, and leaned into your lips.
The sight went unnoticed by Kim, who was still captivated by the level of initiative and intelligence his creation displayed. Every word you managed to construct through sedative-induced delirium mesmerized him so thoroughly that he missed the groping hands under your shirt, the smothered moans, and the fact that you had exited view of the screen for fifteen minutes while being laid out on the couch and feasted on through an orgasm.
Wendy Carmichael Can Cook came on the television, a solid distraction for Elio. Today’s episode was a rerun featuring some sort of elevated mush dinner popular in the slums. With some canned foods capable of surviving nuclear fallout, herbs you were almost positive had gone extinct forty years ago, and spices so rare they were untouchable, Wendy concocted something truly groundbreaking to the audience’s eyes.
Elio looked only half-interested in the episode. Meanwhile, you went to the bathroom to clean yourself up and took three painkillers before sitting back down behind the counter. Researcher Kim had yet to lose the wind in his lungs, though now you weren't sure what he was talking about.
The tea was lukewarm and non-irritating just like you thought it'd be.
Your phone had survived the whole five days on a single charge as you had been too afraid to touch it, not because you were scared to see what was there but because you didn't want to know what was no longer there.
True to the fear, while holding a large breath you had sucked into your lungs, believing it to be the sturdiest barrier against whatever you'd discover, there was no one left in your phone log—except Melby.
The rest: Chima, Niva, Niquan, Marcos, Mother, and all the others who had once been listed there before like mock trophies to bolster your sense of worth, the swell of pride that came from knowing important people and integrating yourself into their lives to be something special, simply did not exist anymore.
You didn't have to search up your public profile to know that it was barren as well.
Once Chima went, everyone else went with him—both from the circle and those you'd networked throughout life. Even if it had been someone else, the end result would've stayed the same, exactly as it is now.
“What do you want? I'm not supposed to be talking to you.” Melby had answered her phone after six rings. The background seemed purposefully mute for your call. Perhaps she was just at home nursing the after-effects of things as well. “You there?”
Researcher Kim sieved through paperwork, now entranced by comparing Elio's earlier behaviors in the infancy of design to now. You lowered the volume to where his voice was a low hum, like mumbling through a wall you flattened yourself to.
“Let me guess, Chima told you that?” you said, sipping gingerly from your mug. “How much did he tell you? Was he actually honest, or did he just tell you I was fucking crazy?”
“You weren't acting right all night.” Melby countered in her surefooted drawl. “I don't understand what's happening to you, or why you've been acting so differently. You shouldn't have hit Chima.”
“He shouldn't have touched Elio.”
You could imagine her temper flaring, fair skin glowing pink in the face and chest as she kicked around the comforters on her bed. She strangled a sound in her throat that emanated through the phone as a low groan. Strands of her fried blonde hair scuffed together like pieces of straw when she scratched her head. It was unmistakable.
“What is going on with you?” she demanded, on the verge of tears, voice fading out in glimpses like she was moving away from the speaker. “Elio—he’s just an android. I know he's some radical new innovation, but he'll be saturating the market in six months like every other Hyperion android. There's always going to be more of him. Chima, though, he's actually human. You can just throw away an android.”
Emotions aside—Melby wasn't wrong.
The price of innovation always meant leaving something behind. Whether or not you wanted to see it, if Elio passed his testing period, he'd be decommissioned in a metal box down in the basement at Hyperion while copies and variations of him were added to the heaps of scrap in landfill once the next model came out.
Melby then said something else, “I don't think this is about the android.”
“Oh?” you said, passing a glance along toward the tablet to see that Kim still had his nose pointed down. “Maybe you're right. You know me so well.”
“Do you want to know what I think?” Melby asked.
You observed while Elio roamed the apartment, crouching to pick up the odds and ends that had gone neglected over the days you'd been bedridden, and he had stayed with you to keep you company. He tossed soiled clothes into a hamper, crumbled medication wrappers into the trash, and took your cold tea away to prepare more.
Inspired by your silence, mistaking it as timid submission, Melby went on. “I know you must think we're just being shepherded along, just doing whatever we're told because we don't know what else to do other than follow the loudest voice in the crowd.”
“You know me so well.”
“I know you blame everyone else for what happened at Clamors, but you put yourself in that situation.” Melby said, interjecting in a pitch higher when she heard you take in a breath, “Aht! Aht! I'm not done! No one else is gonna talk to you now, so I'll tell you what we're all thinking: Our circle? We're special. If we always smile and talk about the same things and agree about the same things, we stay together. We stay safe. You've never really wanted to do that, it was always noticeable. I think that's why you and Mi-sun always got along, because you two just did things to fit in, not because you actually cared or wanted to be a part of it.
“I didn't lose you, right? Chima always talked about ways of getting you out of the group. He didn't think you were trustworthy. I guess he was right because you slapped him. Do you know how weird is it for humans to do that nowadays? Apparently it used to be super common to beat up your wives and kids, but now people just do it to androids. But, it's better that way, right?”
“I don't know.” You really didn't.
Elio came back around with a steeping tea bag and a second mug half-full of something darker yellow, like urine. You took the handle to give it a whiff (it smelled homey and savory). Meanwhile, he took away the tablet and ended the video call without a word to Researcher Kim. The energy wasn't there for you to reprimand him nor to mess up your face in mostly feigned surprise.
“It's chicken broth.” He was able to say freely despite Melby blathering on. “Give it a try and let me know if it's too strong. We need to start reintroducing foods back into your diet.”
You drank from the tea mug instead, swiveling the barstool so your back faced him.
“I've thought about it some, and I think we're terrified of each other. Humans don't know how to truly trust one another anymore. That’s why we rely on androids for, like, everything.” Melby continued, “I think, and this is just my opinion, that we actually really miss each other. I think we want to touch and hug and love each other. There are still some people who do. There's a market out there for human-human porn, so it's not like it's unbelievable, but we basically treat each other like we're extinct. It's weird.
“I've done it before, y'know? I've kissed a man. I've kissed a woman. I've fucked both before. You and I—no, never mind. It doesn't count. I've thought about kissing you so many times. I wanted to do a lot more than just that, too.”
The corner seam of your thumbnail had started to bleed after you dug through old scabs and scar tissue built on top of it, your body’s valiant attempts to keep normalcy despite the mutilation that came back again and again. You watched brilliant carmine ooze from the wound, filling the crevices between your nail and skin, crawling upwards to your knuckle before Elio had stifled the area with a warm, damp rag.
Melby let out a long sigh. You envisioned she had just thrown aside a bunch of decorative cushions and flopped down in a chair, or had been pacing her bedroom and finally given up by throwing herself supine on the mattress.
“I'm going to miss you being there.” she declared. “I think—I think you're the closest I've ever come to truly loving someone. At least, I think that's what you'd call it.”
You held your thumb erect for Elio to wrap it in a neon-orange bandage with pink smiles. His lips pressed gently to the sore finger, making slow, wet work to the back of your hand and then the inside of your wrist to feel your pulse bounce against his mouth.
“I'm sorry.” you said at last, putting as much sentiment into those sparse words as you could. A part of you meant it genuinely as an apology for causing her trouble, for her unrealized dreams and lust, for the world you both suffered in and would never know anything else. “Melby, I have one last favor to ask of you.”
She hesitated, likely believing that doing more would get her expulsed from the circle. “Just one?”
“Just one.” You nodded at empty air. “I know either you or Niva have Mi-sun’s phone number. Can I have it?”
Again, Melby stalled, though this time you figured it was out of confusion. “That’s what you want? She might be dead somewhere in the slums, you know?”
“Not if she's pregnant.” you countered. “Niva seemed pretty convinced that night that she was alive and well after being knocked up.”
Melby sucked on her teeth, a moist, popping sound into the speaker. “Niva says a lot of stupid shit because she likes to hijack conversations. Fine. Whatever. I'll text it to you, but you only have one minute because then I'm blocking you for good.”
To this, your heart actually stirred and squeezed, tightening so much it stole your breath from your lungs. Your entire chest felt like it shriveled into itself three sizes smaller as though to accommodate you fitting into a ball within yourself. Dread had opened a chasm wide in your stomach. Everything inside that gory cavity was swallowed up, leaving it vacant and hollow.
This was what it was like to mourn, you considered. It wasn't the same thing you felt the night you cried in the streets after fighting with Mother and losing Marcos. It wasn't the same as the last five days being wrapped in agony, lamenting the loss of a group you'd given years of your life to appeasing.
It was knowing that once Melby was gone, you were lost in the dark, and there was no way out of it. People with delinquent profiles didn't get redeemed—Wendy Carmichael lied and had never lived a life in the slums, a truth Elio had been disappointed to learn—they died in anonymity and poverty.
A notification came through just then, showing an eight-digit number presumed to belong to Mi-sun. You copied it quickly, although now your fingers felt numb and the person writing them down couldn't possibly have been you—
“Alright. It's done,” Melby said calmly. “I have to go. Will you be okay? Do you think people actually die when they go to the slums? I don't want—”
“Goodbye, Melby.” You ended the call and threw your phone on the countertop, far from your eyes so you wouldn't know the exact moment the world ended.
“And, fuck you.”
Elio had the sense to give you plenty of space after the ordeal and stayed busy downstairs cleaning the apartment while you tossed and turned in bed, legs knotted up in the sheets because nothing helped get you comfortable. At some point, through the thick of your adrenaline and despair, the buzz in your brain softened, and you were able to sleep until Elio joined you some hours later.
It was after midnight, and darkness pervaded everywhere. Above you, the snake pipes on the high ceiling writhed together in their intricate web just like every night, and you wondered why the wall of darkness hanging over you seemed closer than it usually did. Meanwhile, Elio faced you from his side of the bed and laid gentle strokes to the top of your head.
“I’ve reached the conclusion that I am defective.” Elio said tonelessly, startling you into such wakefulness that you sat upright from the sheets. “You've lost your friends because of me, and now your profile has fallen into delinquency. The inclination to ostracize what deviates from adapted, accepted social behaviors aligns with common survival tactics. This is an explanation that I understand, but it doesn't... sit right.”
Putting the blame on Elio to feel better would've been easy, and he would take it with grace and lay decadent caresses on your body as proof you were right. But he was too virtuous, and you secretly wanted to keep the credit of being the reason why Chima looked ugly and seethed into his cocktails.
“It sort of hurts,” you admitted. “It's a dull ache inside my bones. It makes me feel like everything inside my chest is shriveling up like a prune. Being abandoned—feeling lonely—is like always being cold. Thinking of it now, I don't know if there was ever a time I didn't feel cold around them. How shitty is it that I feel a little relieved?"
“If that's the case—” Elio rose up from his side of the bed, nudged apart your legs and settled between them. Most of his weight was still on his arms next to your head. In the waning moonlight, shadows deepened the lines around his mouth when he smiled. “I'm glad to have played some part in that release.”
Your fingertips walked lightly across his cheeks, along the planes of his face, as though marveling at him all over for the first time again. His skin always was most beautiful bathed in warm light, but the soft, silvery veil filtering in through the windows gave him ethereal grace.
The calm air upstairs shifted as your bodies stirred on the mattress, sheets strewn to the floor along with pieces of clothing that left you bare to the gray air while Elio gathered the skin of your hips in his hands and sucked on you.
It didn't matter if you closed your eyes or studied the movement on the ceiling while he devoured, lapped away the sticky stuff that glistened out of you like the silk of a spider’s thread before it could stain the sheets, because it always ended with the same kaleidoscopic bursts of color, wanton cries, and him chasing after another orgasm and then another.
He'd ravish you until puffs of hot breath hurt, and the tip of his tongue delivering a single stroke was enough to make you flinch and whimper. Your legs felt fatigued and trembled violently throughout the continued ministrations until you needed to beg him to stop, dignifying the demand with a hard yank to the thick hair on his scalp.
“I'm not done just yet, give me a moment.” He told you the same thing tonight as he did every other time. The pain in his head subsided as he dove back between your legs and laid his tongue as a paddle against you, cleaning the cum for as long as it took for him to be satisfied.
He came up so you could have a taste of yourself in his kiss, tongues wrapped together while he fisted his cock stiff and lubricated himself with the fluid from the tip. You moaned against his mouth when two fingers pushed inside you and thrust with an effortless glide and instilled so much confidence in him that he slid in a third to the knuckle.
“Mm, Elio, fuck me.” you managed between wet, sloppy kisses and splintered breaths. Three fingers were a tighter fit and wider than he was, but the way he angled them up into you was mind-numbing, could've made your tongue wag out of your mouth while panting like a pheromone-crazed animal.
Elio’s lips went from your face to your neck, down along the slope to your shoulder before he removed his fingers and slathered that narrow space in your legs with spend.
“Of course.” He obeyed dutifully but turned you on your side and seated one of your legs high on his arm. “Let's try something different tonight.”
The bulbous head of his cock glistened as it dragged across your groin, tapping those sore spots that made you twitch involuntarily with anticipation and staggered breaths. Elio concentrated on your face throughout it all, memorizing both those subtle and large changes that showed him what you liked the most.
You'd never believed that androids could be sexually adventurous in the same way that humans could, and perhaps that was the case despite the kinds of positions Elio put you in if you were willing. He would be conscientious of your mood beforehand and then adjust accordingly from there.
Some nights, it didn't go further than mouth-fucking you until you orgasmed to exhaustion. Other nights, when you were more pliable and especially affectionate, he'd rut his hips into your ass until you cried and the sheets were beyond saving.
Now, Elio observed you closely as the curve of his cock sank into you, sinew in his stomach clenching once he started thrusting.
At the start, your sounds were soft, and the rhythm made with his hips was one you had no trouble riding. You closed your eyes and focused on how that tilt in his cock pressed up against your walls and stroked all the right parts. His controlled pace unraveled after a while, thrusts turned mindless and greedy as the sting of slapping skin seemed to resonate all around.
You had bunched bits of pillow and bedspread in your fingers and drooled out onto the fabric because you couldn't close your mouth long enough between moans and gasps and lewd mutterings to stop it. You begged him to fuck you harder, deeper, and tear you open if that’s what he wanted to do and would keep you in ecstacy.
Elio indulged your high as he was able, rolling you from your side to your stomach and mounted you again. He was able to touch you better this way, fondle the globes of your ass, the pouches of fat in your hips, stomach, and chest, all the while sucking dark bruises all along your spine and shoulders.
His mouth would sometimes linger next to your ears, wherein he imitated every bit of his human likeness and breathed on you. And then, he would poorly stifle moans that inspired you to think too deeply about the extent to which he could and could not feel.
“Look at me.” Elio felt your walls tighten around his cock and wanted to stare you in the face through your orgasm. He put you on your back, thighs hiked high on his sturdy chest, so those final thrusts plowed deep and stole your screams. You writhed under him, eyes rolled up, bloodshot and pupiless, muscles drawn so tight that it felt as good as it did awful.
A surge of warmth leaked out onto the sheets as Elio took his half-hard cock from your body and let it soften the rest of the way in cold air. His hand roamed you with delicate, healing touches meant to beg forgiveness for how much you'd ache later on, and his lips were tender and slow against yours.
You kissed him back distractedly, unable to think of anything else but the stickiness between your legs and how you'd chosen to never notice it until now.
“What's wrong?” he asked, still pressed up against your mouth. “Are you unsatisfied? My refractory period ends in a few minutes. I can do as much as you'd like until you feel fulfilled.”
“Mm-mn,” you hummed, “that's not it.”
He didn't stun when you snagged your phone from the bedside table and turned on the backlight. You pointed it down at cloudy white globs drying on your crotch, a sight that you thought was vaguely familiar to you somehow. It struck you then that it was like a scene from a pornography or vulgar sketches some kid in secondary school got suspended for drawing.
Still, it couldn't have been possible.
“What is that?” you asked with unacquainted timidity.
Elio grabbed a package of wipes left bedside and spaced your legs apart to clean the mess he had left on you. He took his time with long, intentional strokes to avoid your sensitive parts as best he could, soiling a good handful from the package before asking if you wanted a bath.
“Answer me first,” you said.
He rose from the bed with one more kiss and collected your clothes from the floor. They were draped nicely over his arm, whereas he stood there before you nude, enveloped by the moon’s blue luster.
At first glance, his smile seemed the same adoring kind that he always held for you, and yet it evoked some undeterminable sadness to well up in your chest and cling there.
“It’s the result of a body never truly being your own.”
■━■━■━■■━■━■━■■━■━■
Mi-sun’s house wasn't far from your apartment, as you recalled. It took a bit of investigative work online to track down her address (via Elio), mainly because it had been well over a year since you'd last needed to know it and the phone number Melby had given you was disconnected, but once you had the coordinates plugged into your phone, it was just one begrudging trek through sultry summertime air to reach her front door.
When you had finally made it to that point, however, eyes leveled down at a dirty, faded doormat that had seen plenty of seasons and wintery salt, you weren't sure how to proceed.
There wasn't any real reason why you were standing there now, yet you felt that you needed to be there anyway. Maybe it could be called seeking solidarity with someone who was enduring the same inevitable ending you were, or maybe the curiosity about her state of being was what won out dominantly. You couldn't be sure of your own motivations—only that you were there, and you needed her to know you were.
After three solid knocks with your knuckles, you let your hand fall and waited by scuffing the soles of your shoes on the coarse mat underfoot. It still had some springiness to it as you scrubbed. The front door was old and brown, having lost its elegant lacquer long ago. You remembered Mi-sun had mentioned a few times before that she had wanted to make the door cute with white paint and a frilly outdoor wreath but could never get around to it.
You guessed she never did.
“Should we knock again?” Elio asked across your shoulder, the bulk of his frame casting a cooling shadow over your body. He had gone out to Henrietta's by himself the other day when you told him what you intended to do and bought supplies to make a cake and special plastic Tupperware meant to keep it from moving around.
The only explanation he had given you about an hour ago, after locking the apartment door and stepping out onto the sidewalk, hot enough in the midday sun to melt the bottoms of your shoes to the pavement while you walked, was that Mi-sun was an old friend, and it was a safe gift even for a pregnant woman.
You never found the courage to divulge just how involved you had been in her expulsion from Chima's circle, even though you knew it'd be impossible for him to think less of you from it.
A minute passed, and then so did two more before you realized that no one was coming to the door. While listening for movement—a television, a hissing stovetop, shuffling slippers on top of creaking floorboards, anything at all aside from stiff silence, you understood that it was unlikely anyone had lived there in quite a while.
“I don't know where else she could be.” you said, now back at Elio's side, where he flicked away tiny splinters of old wood and shiny glaze that peeled off your damp skin like cut-up stickers. He moved the visor above your brow gently, adjusting the position of it to better shield your eyes, but seemed more to just want the proximity than anything else.
The longer he fiddled with things—your hat, the flecks of things he missed on your ear, wrinkles in your t-shirt—the more apparent it was to you that he was contemplating something else. You were trying hard not to do anything that would spur him into making the next suggestion you knew was coming.
“There is one other place we haven't tried.” he said, switching from your shoulder to tucking pieces of hair securely behind your ear and dabbing sweat off your neck with a handful of napkins he had picked up at a convenience store while grabbing you water. “The likelihood of Mi-sun’s profile falling into delinquency and being able to maintain residence within the city is less than twenty percent. However—”
“I know.” You breathed out hot air and sucked it right back into your lungs. Maybe if you did that enough times it'd burn them, shrivel them up like prunes. “I know where she is. Let's wait until it cools down to go, though. I'll probably pass out if I have to see any of that right now.”
“Today on Loti Khan’s Food Tours of Retro City, she said that Asakawa on Fifteenth is a spot worth visiting during the summertime because of their cold noodle dishes. Hiyashi Chuka was what she suggested, I believe. I've already committed the menu to memory, and they have well over twenty different cold dishes and beverages. Their affordability isn't as stellar as Rainbow Bistro, but Loti says—”
Wendy Carmichael was now a disgraced name in your household after Elio had spent a few hours one afternoon researching the woman’s true life story. She had been born into the elite class with a mother sitting at the top of the food chain in Retro City’s governing body, attended culinary arts schools across the world yet never reached the acclaim she coveted until she made up the whole spiel about clawing her way out of the slums.
Crawling back from the slums once you were in them just wasn't feasible. Only the worst of the worst—thieves, profile delinquents, murderers, lepers, and unwanteds were kept there, like trash crowded and barred in a landfill. If you found yourself in the slums somehow, no one would help you out of them because that would mean tarnishing their own reputations.
You were as good as dead.
You were dead.
Elio had carried around a brown paper bag housing the cake for most of the day, never once setting it down. His features never flinched when the straw handles sank into parallel dents in his skin, long stripes that looked like they'd be sore to you, but he never conveyed any discomfort. He merely floated along wherever you went, undeterred by your dour, soulless wandering, which lasted until the sun emblazoned the sky in dim fire and pinks.
Those hues were leached by the close, calming gradient of greens, blues, and darker blues that reached so quickly you could follow the sprawl of them until they had ensnared the daylight. The sun sank somewhere betwixt skyscrapers, and the air still felt thick as the mucus in your throat but bearable.
That same sky followed you on the cab ride across the city. You imagined the darkening air rushing alongside the vehicle with you as if containing it on rails, guiding you closer towards the slums. Once the skyscrapers were gone, far away in a suffocating yellow haze from the sleepless city, and the residential zone had thinned out of the rest of its straggling homes, the scenery had taken on a complete shift.
Everything was bizarrely flat, barren, and beige for as far as the eye could see—vegetation was withered roots and barbed, inedible shrubbery that could've been pretty with some flowers or leaves. No trees could endure the fissured, parched earth nor the fine dust and sand skittering in the wind, leaving heavy layers where it lay once the breeze ebbed. Animals were long gone; the rumors of their bleached bones and skulls warped in a perpetual rictus of agony had been true because you saw many scattered throughout the landscape.
“Please confirm this is your stop,” said the cabbie, a female android from an older generation, maybe three or four. She stuck her hand outside the driver’s window when you tried to give her a tip. With her fish-eyed stare and leathery smile, she repeated, “No need. I have no use for money. Please confirm this is your stop.”
“This is correct.” Elio spoke for you before taking your fingers through his and guiding you away from the idling vehicle. The android cabbie found his reply sufficient and drove away without questioning why you were out here in the flatlands. All she knew how to do was drive and obey traffic laws.
“Do you know where we're going?” you asked because you only knew to have told the cabbie to drive as far as the outer perimeter of the city. Beyond this, your phone had no service, and there were no clearly designated signs to point you in the right direction.
The people in the slums were meant to be forgotten, hideous secrets hidden away, broomed off to the outskirts of civilization where they'd have to fend for themselves in an environment that had been deader than them for ages.
“Truthfully”—Elio stalled then and glanced around the endless expanse of wasteland—“Hyperion never included information about the slums in my programming. What I know is common knowledge and what I've accumulated in my time with you. I have never been able to locate specific coordinates to where the slums are hidden.”
You frowned. “Should we turn around before we get lost, then?”
Elio told you no and raised the hand clasped with yours, pushing one finger erect at a faint glow somewhere in the distance, no more than a ten—or fifteen-minute walk. You were almost convinced you could see the silhouettes of shoddy, leaning structures, but there was no way to be certain unless you got closer.
“Let's go.”
Chasing the remnants of the dusk to light your way across the starved, fractured terrain, those sparse shapes you had seen minutes before grew into multitudes. Soon, you were among clusters of disheveled, crude homes organized in long rows, some stacked with tiers like they were meant to replicate separate floors for more space.
Most of these houses didn't come with windows or doors to keep out strangers but thick decorative curtains that'd shun the beating sun, stave off the worst of winter frost, and deflect billows of sharp sand from dirtying their things indoors.
The paths between rows of homes were well-worn and brightly illuminated with anything they could use—lanterns, stuttering neon signage, solar panels, and even fire rings brutally hammered and dented into shape. Shadows from the fire lurched erratically against crooked metallic walls. Some homes with grimy windows caught a weak gleam off the flames.
It was almost fully dark, and people still moved with purpose as though they could compete with the suit-and-ties stomping their soles on the pavement in the city. Their hands were busy doing something—carrying, brooming, cooking, flourishing during a great retelling, clapping, hiding smiles.
These savages, delinquents, fraudsters, thieves, murderers, and diseased swine never once regarded you or Elio with any modicum of intrigue. You had believed at some point you'd be shrinking under a crowd of wicked stares, pulled down into some inescapable abyss by necrotic or leprous hands trying to steal the clothes from your body or use your skin to tarp piles of scrap.
Only one man had stopped along the path, dressed in dusty clothes that were otherwise decently kept; he was thin but not malnourished and hollow in the face. He told you that the aimless way you and Elio had been walking gave away that you were new to the slums because there was always something needing done and not enough hours in a day to do them.
“Mi-sun?” The man was thinking aloud, stirring up dust as he shuffled his feet around. You had given him the name and a description, which you hoped had been specific enough to avoid approaching people at random. “Yeah. That pregnant girl… she was here for a while. She's long gone now.”
“Long black hair, blunt bangs. Black eyes. Really translucent skin? Super skinny?” As unhelpful as your details were, it was all you had to give him to keep the mental acrobatics going. There was always a slim chance he could be misremembering her. “Are you sure she's no longer here in the slums? Where'd she go? What happened to her?”
Eventually, the thin man led Elio and you to a tiny house—more of a shack—meant to accommodate a sole body and some odds and ends. He held a heavy curtain back for the pair of you to enter, encouraging you to settle down on a sandy rug, which looked to have at one time been bright red.
“I don't have much to give, but here's a little water. To have made it here, you would've had to walk. We all had to.” he said, pulling out his finest cuppery and pouring from the spout of a broken electric kettle. “That girl was a profile delinquent, to my understanding. Almost all of us here are. I used to own a printing business on the north side about fifteen years ago. I upset the wrong people and here I am. What's your story?”
You spun the cup with your fingers, trying not to put your eyes down to scrutinize any particles floating around inside. Elio wasn't given a cup because the man had immediately deduced that he was an android.
“I…” You still didn't drink, but the back of your throat felt scratchy and your tongue like some dry slab of meat shoved into your mouth. “I pissed off the wrong people.”
“Ah.” The man gave an anguished smile, showing he understood you very well. There was a low table between you, repurposed from something else and sanded down to a smooth finish. “For a while, I helped look after Mi-sun. Like you, I had been the first person to greet her when she arrived. She didn't act like everyone else; she was dazed, but she was angry.
“I fed her, gave her water, and gave her a sleeping bag. We have to make due with less than bare minimum most days, but we make it work. We all look out for each other. The community really pitched in when we realized she was pregnant.”
Elio kept a watchful eye on your hands, the fingers aching to peel back ribbons of flesh.
“That shouldn't have been possible.” you said. “Mi-sun had an android. She was never involved with any men—not that I could ever recall. She just doesn't give me the impression of someone who'd change her ways like that.”
The man sipped his sandy water, wiping off clear pebbles that had clung to his facial hair. “When you find yourself exiled here, you learn fast that things are never what they seem. You didn't ask a question, but you gave yourself an answer.”
“What?” It was more noise than a word.
“Daichi, I believe, was her android. Shortly before she showed up, she said that Hyperion had come to forcibly reclaim it. That must've been a difficult reality for her to face—knowing everything was being taken away from her, forced into a pregnancy, and having to fend for herself afterwards.”
This time, you lifted a hand to stop him from falling down another tangent. He obeyed, voice whittled to silence that was immediately unsettled by loud water slurping.
It wasn't that you weren't following what he was saying. You were many things: a fool, a sheep, a coward, a liar, maybe even a true scoundrel at heart, but stupid wasn't among that inexhaustible list. You just needed a moment to collect the nuggets he had thrown down for you to pick up.
Guilt peaked the ranks of everything else you felt right then. A word you'd never use to describe yourself was malicious, but in the end, it had been the malice of someone else and your inability to see apart from the rest that condemned Mi-sun to this suffering.
You played as much a part in taking away Mi-sun's life as Chima had in actually enforcing it. Unlike Chima, never one to balk or cower regardless of how truly cruel his decisions were and committed to them like gospel, you simply sat in his afterimage and did whatever he said. Half of the time, you were blitzed out of your mind; the other you spent wishing you had never known them at all.
It had been so easy to vote Mi-sun out of the group. Completely painless. You just didn't look at her when you raised your hand to pass judgment. Melby had expressed her delight by squeezing your thigh, whereas Mi-sun held her composure and shoulders straight back, but her face contorted with every indication of betrayal and agony.
You thought about how many animal crackers you had that night.
“What happened to her?” Both your hands had been restrained by Elio’s at that point. Large, comforting, and warm in contrast to all the ice that seemed to thicken your blood, stiffen your heart, and freeze your bones. “Where is she now?”
The man must've been suspecting something because his face looked long to you now, weighed down by this life and your feeble state.
“I—I can't be absolutely positive, but I do believe she is dead.” he told you grievously, beady brown eyes not unseeing to the way Elio groped your fingers to keep them still. “She didn't want to be pregnant. It was something she talked about for weeks before leaving. She knew what Hyperion and the government were doing and said she didn't want to be a part of it. On the last night before she left, I had to wrestle a knife out of her hands because she was trying to cut open her stomach to kill the baby.”
You couldn't swallow past the sharp granules of sand and dryness in your throat anymore. You had to slug back the cup of grainy water until the feeling subsided, shove the worst of the dread and shame and guilt into your bowels.
“After that, she was gone.” He took a drink as well, exchanging looks from you to Elio. “A couple of us tried tying her up to get her to calm down and do something about the cut on her stomach, but she got the knife, stabbed one of the younger guys and got away. We haven't seen her since, but a search party did come back to say they saw blood leading back to the city.”
“Oh my god…” you groaned, forcing Elio to recoil when you slapped his hands away—intentional and hard. You stuck yours in your hair, yanking at the roots until your scalp screamed and burned. “Is there any chance she could've survived? Any at all?”
The rail-thin man swirled what little remained of his water in the cup, studying the pale sediment floating within. “It's too hard to say. It's unlikely, my friend. The police wouldn't have gunned her down if they saw she was pregnant, but they would've seen the cut. And that counts as attempted murder. If she's still alive, it's only to give birth, after that…”
“Execution,” you finished.
He nodded and said nothing else, eyes downcast as though lost in the grain of the wood table.
After that, you left the man in his sad little shack to explore the slums more. Elio came along shortly after, saying he had presented the man with the cake as a reward for his hospitality and apologized if it no longer looked appetizing.
The man thanked him before returning to his grief for many things, perhaps.
“I don't want to be here anymore, Elio.” you said, failing to avoid hearing a gaggle of giggling women gossiping together. They were dressed clumsily and in trends almost a decade old, but they had glowy eyes and cavernous lines worn into their faces from laughter and joy where they could find it.
Old men played some made-up board game together, gathering at least half a dozen spectators to see who'd win. Their brows were heavy with contemplation and stress of worthy competition. The other bodies tried making bets with pieces of scrap and metal coils and nearly blown bulbs for lighting.
Music came from all around, lyrical in the same way it was discordant because they weren't playing the same songs nor singing the same things. Their voices were robust and resilient, unwilling to be trudged over by sand nor heat nor oppressors who were incapable of understanding the human spirit was pliant and could bend with the wind, stand with the seasons, and could fracture yet never break.
You couldn't make sense of what any of them were singing, the noise too unharmonious, but you could feel the power in their songs pulse through you, ricocheting in your mind for long after you'd escaped proximity to them.
There were no lepers. There were the sick and unfortunate, but they were not diseased. They did not believe that their tilted houses were tombs, that their unquaint lives were an endless spiral of torment, or that the food they could find and produce was unworthy of reverence.
The people of the slums lived a hard, thankless life, but they had each other. They banded together to weld sheets of metal into four walls and a roof for the new faces who came to them. Your woes would become their woes, and they would feed you, cloth you, wash you, bandage your wounds, and call you their most beloved.
Together, they ate their meals from what they could scavenge out there. They retold the same grandiose tales of heroes and valor and androids that Marcos had told you at bedtime as a child. Their cultures were all cherished and expressed in the food they shared and clothes they managed to sew together by hand and slow machines.
You could ask your neighbor for a tablespoon of sugar and four would come to you with curiosity and offer their arthritic hands and knobby backs for whatever was needed.
Here, you could see humanity clearly for the first time in your life and felt burdened knowing it. Your heart weighed like an anvil behind your ribs. It hurt and lurched behind its enclosure because it too wanted to get away from what it now knew.
“A lie.” you choked, forcefully shoving Elio's hands away from you once again when he tried to embrace you. “It was all a lie. Everything was a lie! Where are they?! Where are all the lepers and people leaking pus from their face?! Where are the murderers? Where are the savages? Where are all these awful fucking people I was told were here? Where are they?”
Elio's expression took on something completely unforeseen—pity. Their lives were fine and routine while yours crumbled around you. The terror you had been force-fed your whole life was all false. There was civilization beyond a profile with red overlay, more waiting on the other side that the sleepless city wanted to conceal.
“There are no androids here.” Elio mentioned, deeming that adequate enough time had passed for you to regain your bearings. He took you in his arms and kissed the crown of your head, burying his lips deep in your hair. “We were never meant to become substitutes for your love. We were never meant to go this far and act as replacements for humanity because we simply cannot feel what another human does. That is something Hyperion will never be able to achieve. Humanity needs humanity, not machines.”
You sank into his warmth, arms wound his back, and said from his chest, “But, I love you. Don't leave me. I don't want Hyperion to take you away.”
Elio, your beautiful sun, leaned down into your face and kissed the highest parts of your cheeks and the wetness around your eyes before settling on your lips. Slow and lingering, you chose to believe it meant he was sealing away your plea and that he'd always be there to swathe you in his arms.
“Let's stay for a little longer,” he said once apart from the kiss. “I’d like to see the side of humanity that no one else does.”
■━■━■━■■━■━■━■■━■━■
Less than a week had passed since your hard slog through the slums and back to Retro City. Although you had only been gone from your inner-city apartment for mere hours, possibly five or six at most, upon walking back inside after Elio and wincing against the fluorescent bulbs overhead, you thought you were looking at something entirely foreign.
The simple pleasures that you had become accustomed to throughout your life: plumbing, central air that turned the hot sweat on the back of your neck into cold droplets slithering beneath your clothes, the worn out mattress upstairs, technology, an android who'd done almost everything for you for the better part of a year—it all seemed so novel, so excessive. A treat for a rat in a box before testing to see how it'd respond when it was all taken from its enclosure.
So, when Elio woke you up one morning, early enough that the light streaming in through your windows already felt warm on the bed sheets, and the thin air looked itself to have a golden hue, you couldn't say you felt any rouse of surprise or fear when he handed over a red letter—an eviction correspondence.
Sooner or later, you knew you'd meet with one, though the progress of everything hadn't been as immediate as you had been led to believe it would be. A month had come by and stayed for several slow breakfasts, lunches, dinners, mindless strolls, and countless passionate entanglements before deciding to leave on an indignant note. With the red notice, you were expected to vacate the premises within days, whether you had intentions for your belongings or not.
Things stayed tumultuous from there on out, yet you couldn't find it within yourself to react to any of it, even in the instance when Researcher Kim rang you for an impromptu meeting that you anticipated meant no good.
“Effective immediately, Elio will be seized and returned to Hyperion in relation to the recent change in public profile status.” It was too formal and rigid a tone even for him. Clearly, his superiors had demanded this because you doubted the profile change was much a concern to him on a personal level. “Your contract is hereby null and void, and your association with Hyperion is obsolete. Any attempt to thwart repossession of Hyperion property will be penalized legally.”
Throughout it all, Elio swept the floor with leisurely strokes as though the reach of Researcher Kim’s voice ended at your ears alone. He moved onto laundry, taking great care to iron out the wrinkles in your favorite shirts and make the folds in the arm seams crisp and symmetrical.
“Is that really all you wanted to say?” you asked, palm capped overtop a mug of tea Elio had set down for you a while ago. The steam now rose weakly and moistened your skin, a particularly gross feeling, but it kept you alert. “I thought that Elio was your project, and you called the shots on him.”
Researcher Kim was out of sorts and worn. His posture was crumbled, and his clothes were in complete disarray like he hadn't bothered to change out of them in days. His under eyes were translucent, pulling out all the purples and blue veins under his skin. The man looked like he had hardly slept in weeks.
“You don't understand what you've done, have you? Not only may you end up costing me my position, but you've ruined my entire lifetime of work!” Kim leaned in close to the screen, sounding more and less himself now.
You were wary of the glint in his eyes. “What do you mean? Elio's just—”
“No!” he shouted and slumped back into his ergonomic chair. His head slanted over, almost coming in contact with the peak of his shoulder like it was too heavy for his neck to hold. “You don't get it. You don't get it! Because your profile turned, this entire year—everything you’ve reported, everything I've accomplished, Elio's entire testing period is invalid. Hyperion executives consider him defective. The Generation Seven android has failed! Look at what you've done!”
A sudden wild flapping of thousands of butterflies lifted your stomach up and then plunged it down into a void. Kim had successfully chiseled away the inexpressive mask you had worn up until that point, seeming satisfied that he could stipple your face in a cold sweat.
“Wait, no. That can't be right.” you protested, wrestling your own hands to keep them off of the tablet in front of you. “My profile turned, but the work I've done has been honest. Elio is a success! You know that! You've seen every step of his progress for almost a year.”
Researcher Kim threw his hands up wildly, truly not himself with all of these gestures. “None of that matters. None of it. My life's work is a failure. I thought we had an agreement to help one another, but I was mistaken.”
“You don't understand!” you said, pounding the countertop with sharp claps of your hands. “It wasn't on purpose. I wasn't trying to…”
“Hyperion will have Elio destroyed, and progress will be hindered. Do you know how long, how many decades this could set us back? This could be devastating to humanity, but I don't think you're capable of understanding that. Just like the rest, you're not able to see the big picture at large, the mechanisms at work keeping our society moving forward. You can only see the straight line ahead of you and wearing blinders so you don't have to know the rest.
“We've kept this world running for sixty years. You need to understand how utterly fucking frustrating it is that one person has the potential to undo decades of work!”
Researcher Kim’s words weren't unjustified to you because he was a scientist, and you had always been a nobody in the grand scheme of things. But, right now, the venom he spat sounded vindictive, a man sucking on wounds you had inflicted rather than the opinion of the whole of Hyperion.
If you hadn't been staring directly at him this entire time, you would’ve thought he was frothing and drooling at the mouth like some animal.
A stilted quiet filled the gaps in conversation, both of you uncertain of what would be said next. If he was reacting in any professional capacity, the call would've been disconnected by now. That was the main giveaway that let you know this wasn't just about what Hyperion wanted.
But the truth of it was that you didn't care what Hyperion wanted or him.
At the end of your life as you knew it, before being thrown away into the landfill with every other unwanted human, you were piecing together the whole history of the world and how it had gotten to this point. It had become this way through relentless men like Researcher Kim who mostly operated on their own moral compass, ones that could never quite point north and spun on that wheel as they saw fit.
“Enough of the powerplay, Kim.” you ordered, chest opening toward the ceiling with a deep, bracing breath. “What is the real purpose of Hyperion? Why does it actually exist?”
Kim, perhaps re-evaluating you as less of a pawn in this scheme and more of an infant intellectual about to breach the narrow canal into enlightenment, stacked his spine high and pressed his fingertips together. He studied you with some caution, head shifting from left to right, just slightly off-center from his hands as though judging whether you were worth divulging precious intel to.
But, like you, you expected he realized it didn't matter what he'd tell you, however coveted it might've been by Hyperion.
Kim, ultimately, worked for himself and for Hyperion only when he felt it served him well.
“When I hired you, I didn’t do it because I thought you were stupid.” It seemed he felt the need to clarify this for you, unsmiling but with an eager lilt in his tone. “I hired you because of your potential. I took a chance on you, and while it had, indeed, ended in my peril, you've surprised me so many times throughout the year that I started keeping a record of you as well.
“Human beings do one of two things in the consistent presence of androids, they either regress or they progress. Most of your peers will regress because that’s how society has been modeled to be. The difficult tasks, the mundane, all the things that ask of us to consider the complexity of the world around us and think critically have been left to androids. How well do you think a machine can understand the theory of life after death and the mysticism of religion? The concept of soulmates? Cultural superstitions and children's nighttime fears? It's about as you expect. They can give you an answer without truly understanding. Androids, I dare say, only have an extremely limited understanding of moral culpability. Humans are much more flexible with it these days because it suits them best.
“So.” Kim sighed, hands resting on the dark red desk he sat behind. “You can imagine how interesting it was when we started noticing a trend with auditors—changes in them. A renaissance, an evocation of deep wondering and wariness towards the workings of the world around them. We can only guess the reason that this happens is because part of humanity still doubts the intentions of androids, and that's been bred onward through the generations. You ask an android a question, they give an answer, you doubt that answer, and then you start to doubt everything around you. It's all hypothetical, but it makes sense.
“It doesn't happen with the majority of the population, though. And it isn't encouraged. Enlightenment threatens the status quo, and those who disturb the status quo are a disservice to the governing bodies and Hyperion. Do you understand?”
Your gaze turned cold. “Are the other auditors there in the slums, too? Once they've been used up and started to catch wind of this messed up shit?”
Researcher Kim flicked his fingers toward the top of the screen, doing that instead of shrugging. “Who knows? What happens to them once a testing period has concluded is none of my business. Presumably so, that's what I would hope for them because that's the kindest outcome.”
“Was I…” You licked your lips and felt the shallow cracks in them. “I was going to end up in the slums no matter what happened, wasn't I?”
He frowned. “No. If things had gone differently, I was going to vouch for you. I wanted to keep you as my assistant.” He was quiet for a beat, looking straight at you in that discomforting way that you couldn't shake. “I’ve grown fond of you, you know? How could I not with everything I've learned about you over the course of a year. I can't forgive you for what you've done to the Hyperion Project, to my life's work, but I can't just let you disappear like the rest.”
Something ugly started to grip in the back of your throat. Fear? Disgust? An inkling?
“What do you mean?” you ventured.
“I've read through each report you've sent me in the past year so many times. It was mostly out of necessity for Hyperion, of course, but the ones that I found myself… fixated on rereading time and time again were of yours and Elio's sexual endeavors. I wasn't lying when I said they were a contract-based requirement, mind you, but I will admit that some of the questions were altered somewhat.” he said, suddenly smiling in a self-satisfied sort of manner that made your skin itch. “I realized I never answered your question fully, by the way. I can get ahead of myself sometimes, as you know. But, do I really need to explain what Hyperion's purpose is?”
You were on the edge of your seat, ready to take flight off it at any second. It's just how the entire change of trajectory made you feel. Humanity had spent too much time in the past arguing animal-like, instinctual reactions for this not to be real.
In that moment, you were living proof of a prey noticing a predator in broad daylight.
“Fine.” He kept smiling around the taut creases in his skin. The muscles there twitched as if the effort were unfamiliar. “Hyperion is a repopulation aid. It's quite sad, really. It started out with such great potential to drive society forward, but humanity and greed have always gone hand-in-hand. So, it became a race of mass production into a race that the governing bodies now had their hands in. The order was to rectify the critical birth decline worldwide. Androids became less like tools, looked less like machines, and more like humans—like lovers who couldn't say no to any demand.
“Androids are vessels for insemination. What else do you want me to tell you?”
Researcher Kim's explanation had weakened you, made your legs shaky and light like a scarecrow’s stuffed with straw. You couldn't rely on them to carry your weight away from this awful conversation, the hideous sight of him, because there'd be nowhere for you to run to while the information perforated your brain and crawled inside and feasted there.
“Elio…” You didn't even know what you wanted to say. Everything got stuck behind the notch in your throat. None of it would assuage that wretched ache in your gut, the precursor of vomit and disgust and unhinged terror.
“Of course.” Kim said, without needing to tell you what he was confirming. He was perfectly composed still, perhaps even shining with pride like some well-hidden, nuanced detail had finally been figured out.
He leaned toward the screen, smile turning salacious and voice low and grating.
“My only regret is that I couldn't be there to do it myself.” He brightened at the way your face wrenched and fastened in fear, seeming to think it was a reward after conducting an experiment on another project. “But, there's still time, isn't there? I must retrieve Elio myself to shut him down. If you listen to what I ask, perhaps I can get you pardoned and your profile reinstated.”
“No. That’s not what I want.” you said.
“It doesn't matter what you want,” he rebuffed, speaking with such confidence that you almost believed it. “The moment your profile fell into delinquency, you ceased to be. You've fallen through the cracks, and no one is going to help you. You're less than an android.”
The fine hairs all over your body bristled. “Don't compare me to a machine! You don't get to decide things for me!”
“I can save you, you damn fool!” Kim gaped incredulously. “I can restore your life and give you more than you've ever had. I can give you influential associations. I'll take care of you. I'll keep you as my assistant, and you get to live a life among the elite.”
He was lying.
No one ever made it out of the slums once they were in it. That wasn't an assumption, it was a simple grim reality.
In this world, only humans could lie because androids were incapable of betraying their programming to do so. Otherwise, Elio probably would've lied about many things or had never said certain things at all to spare you discomfort.
Humans, on the other hand, could lie to maliciously deceive and serve themselves a better hand. They could lie their way into a false mirror image, something that looks like them but never really existed and could never truly be. They could lie their way into trust to fulfill their own desires, and once that had been sufficiently quenched, they could go on lying elsewhere.
“I'll be there for you soon.” Researcher Kim tried his best at a soothing smile, treating it as though the sight of it would persuade your trust of him. “Please have Elio on standby. I would like for this not to be more difficult than it needs to be.”
Just then, the air flickered lightly by your ear as Elio reached past your shoulder and picked up the tablet. His expression was inscrutable, the same sort you'd grown used to seeing whenever Researcher Kim appeared on the screen.
“I won't be returning to Hyperion.” he said with solemn, firm words that held a certain weight of finality behind them.
Those lovely, velvety tones were still there but could not reassure you of some unknowable dread rising up somewhere deep inside your mind. A sensation so equally intimate and profound prickled against your scalp, seeking a way out that you thought you'd do anything to make it stop.
“What are you saying, Elio?” Kim grunted. “Defective or not, you hold precious data for Hyperion. It will be used to create something better than you, incorruptible and pure. You should be honored.”
“These memories are mine.”
That was the last you saw of Researcher Kim’s face before the tablet smashed to pieces on the floor. Elio had thrown it against the kitchen cabinets only once but hard enough to split the screen into a web of hundreds of sprawling fragments. Shards of plastic hardcover skittered across the hardwood floor, lost under heavy furniture.
His face had softened completely when he turned to you and guided you out of your chair into his arms. You felt him in your hair, lips on your forehead, down against your lashes, lower to the roundest part of your cheeks, and finally on your mouth in a kiss imbued with so much love, cherishment, and anguish.
You were at home within his embrace, swathed in the warmth of his body and the ardor of his kiss. But this felt excruciating and desperate, like a plea to take all of him that you could in that very moment because he feared that he would be taken away and you left behind to whatever nebulous future.
So, you let him seat himself as deep inside of you as he could go while still fully clothed. He had pushed around some fabric so you could be skin-to-skin where it mattered, where it was hottest to be, where the muscles contracted and relaxed together as a reminder you were both there in that moment—breathing, moaning, feeling everything there was to be felt.
He finished outside your body without you needing to say it. Although, while he groaned into your neck and bore his teeth into the curve of it, hips buckling forward as spend jetted down your thigh, all you could think about was how many times Kim had been there instead.
“I want you to destroy me.” Elio said.
All of the breath left your lungs and shrunk them to rotted fruit size. You were still vulnerable before him, exposed to the room and damp with sweat from the midday heat despite air conditioning. Worriment filled the space between his brows when he saw you aghast, and he quickly cleaned you off with a rag before helping you with your pants.
“Is this a shitty attempt at a joke?” you asked. He pressed his lips to yours and told you it wasn't. “No. Absolutely not. You're as fucking nuts as your creator. You're fucking stupid.”
“You must—”
“I won't! I won't do it!”
“I'm asking you to save me.”
“Get away!”
Elio had tracked you across the apartment multiple times over, pleading his case with skewed logic you pretended not to hear. For once, your ears filling with fluff while the resounding drum of your heartbeat pounded in your skull was a fortunate event to occur. It eclipsed his voice and hurt so much that you could focus on the pain crushing your chest.
However, once you were trapped between the wall and his body with nowhere to hide, the brief reprieve behind your fitful heart faded, as did the strength of your resolve.
“I—I don't understand.” You had trouble swallowing down the saliva and sobs. “Why are you asking me to do that? I can't do that to you, Elio. I can't hurt you. I love you.”
“I know.” He didn't hold you, though he had to win against his own reflexes not to do so. His knuckles were ghastly-looking and pronounced peaks; anything within that vise would've been crushed. “Today, one way or another, I will be destroyed. Hyperion deemed me a failure and therefore there is nothing else left ahead for me. My chip will be removed and my body ripped apart and melted down and I will be forgotten and never have existed in the first place.
“You will be the proof that I was ever here. And, should anyone be allowed to destroy me, it makes the most sense for it to be you.”
His lips left imprints in your skin that felt important to savor, etched through your bones into the very cluster of cells that made up your wholeness so that he could be immortalized.
“There’s an excerpt from Hiroshi Nagoya’s novel Gone Are the Youth that left a strong impression on me. It said, ‘Humans destroy everything they love—but, still, they must love wholly, and they must destroy completely. From ruin and ash and settled dust, humanity rebuilds all it has ever destroyed because their love lingers in memories, in rubble, blood, decay, and burnt air.’” He recited the details to remind you that he was a machine but kissed your face in a way only an earnest lover was able to.
You didn't know what any of that was supposed to mean to you, nor at what point he had managed to read a book like that without you noticing. A part of you took offense at both the passage and the fact Elio had committed it to memory as if he had expected to utilize it at some uncertain interval in the future all along.
Had he been thinking this way since the beginning? Had you failed Elio even in the capacity for him to come forward to speak of his doubts to you? Perhaps, like his programming dictated that he couldn't lie nor deny what he was designed to do, he was also incapable of speaking any full truth if it could've been construed as heresy.
Was there a single aspect of himself which he could control of his own free will?
Such a thought was unabating and grew a knob of dread in your chest. It started out small and localized, a sharp throb somewhere near your heart—and then it sprouted roots like a seed, long fingers piercing through red-purple muscle and fibrous tendon, reaching deep into your bone. The dread weaved as one with your veins and arteries, sprawling the innumerable pathways that held your shape even beneath the gory components inside of you.
Suddenly, the dread pulsated, and all you could think through the agony was that there could be no other way for Elio—a machine who had been created in the image of man to do the bidding of humanity with a tranquil smile, whether that meant cooking dinner and holding you in your sleep, or dispersing the genes of his God and the only being he was capable of despising.
“I seem to only be able to make you cry, but they're still so beautiful to see. The variability of humanity is much more complex than what I had been led to believe from Hyperion.” Elio had returned from the kitchen before you realized he had left your side. With one hand, he laid familiar, warm strokes along your face in a pattern he memorized because it made your scalp buzz pleasantly. With the other hand, he pushed the smooth handle of a chef’s knife into your palm and closed your fingers and his around it.
Your impulse had been to throw it away immediately upon seeing it when you looked down. He knew you would, so he kept his fingers tight over your fist, keeping the blade low at your side despite the sweat turning your grip slick and the fine point of the steel inches from his hollow abdomen.
Just then, you finally felt the tears that Elio had said you'd been crying but never noticed. That was something you'd come to hate about yourself and everyone else—how little they noticed the blatant lies fluffed over their eyes like wool, yet they could see every grievance in others and stuffed their ears with cotton if it meant things would stay exactly the same for themselves.
Safe and known. Unchallenged. Unafraid.
“Do you wish you could cry?” you asked him for some reason, just a little hopeful for some vague thing you couldn’t discern. Maybe some secret desire to be human?
He shook his head.
“I've never wished to cry, or to be human, but what I wish for now more than anything else is for your memory to belong to me and me alone.” Elio said, forehead bowing low and resting with great weight on your own. You closed your eyes and listened to his honeyed words, which felt like the protection and care of cashmere, suddenly unmindful to the knife in your grasp. “Stored away in my mainframe are memories from thousands of my predecessors. I remember people I've never met, people who have long since expired, and they feel like what I imagine a distant relative might. I feel as though I've mourned thousands of people individually. While I cannot erase them, I can erase you.
“I know how many women liked their tea in the evenings, I know how many men enjoyed their cocktails and hard liquor and brand of shaving cream. One person made it a secret to put alcohol in their coffee before work and thought it was clever. Someone else wanted to win local office through bribery, and as androids, we have no choice but to obey. I know these things from people I've never met, and so does Hyperion. Those androids were destroyed, but their memories live on through me.”
  Elio rolled the crests of your knuckles around his hand, lifting yours and the knife to the base of his neck. The arm connecting the hand and knife next to his skin wasn't yours. It couldn't have been when it felt so numb.
“I won't let Hyperion steal the one thing from me that I can say is truly mine. And those are my memories, my precious data stored in the chip in my brain. They'll have to take me apart to retrieve it, and by the time they find my body, the chip will already be destroyed.” He was slow to loosen his fingers and let them fall away, meanwhile, yours stayed in place.
He had dimmed the overhead lights in the living room earlier in the day, so you bathed in gentle yellow-orange that resembled the last of sunset being leached by silver-blue nightfall. From the corner of your eye came a subdued, gentle glint of the blade—polished to a bright shine, reflecting the corner of Elio's strong jaw.
“So, cut off my head.” he begged, vibrations low and strained within his voice box. “It’s almost like solace to me, I think. Until the very moment you rip out the chip from my brain, I'll recall the smells you like to cover yourself in, your favorite meals, how you described petrichor, and the hiss of falling snow. I'll remember, until my circuitry is severed and quits, what making love to you felt like, and how beautiful you always looked during it.”
Your fingers twitched around the handle as you pressed the knife against his skin, meeting the first start of resistance and your only chance to take it all back.
“I’ve never been real,” Elio reminded you and pushed himself into the blade, sinking it through layers of something that snapped like elastic on the steel, reverberating down the handle and up into your hand. “My skin is synthetic, and my insides are wires and machinery. I'm not real. The world outside your door is.”
Lightheadedness swirled all around you and made your limbs feel like they were leaden with anchors yet weightless, as though drifting through the cosmos in a bubble. The tears had stopped even though you felt you could scream at any second and never stop again, and the acidulous intermix of vomit and saliva grappled along the walls of your throat and burned out your nose.
You couldn’t make your hand stop.
You couldn't shout at him to get away.
And then, you saw Elio's eyes glow warmly of amber with flecks of gold. They looked back at you differently than they had when you first met outside of Researcher Kim’s office. Before, he had greeted you kindly, with the familiarity of someone who had already loved you a long time. Now, he had the look of a man who was calm and eternal in his love.
“I was never meant for this world, but I'm glad to have been a part of yours.” Elio winced against the knife halfway into his neck, an oily black substance from within making the glide deeper and deeper an effortless thing.
He smiled resplendently. “I love you.”
“I know.” you said.
The chef's knife severed all imitations of human gore—the neat network of wires and advanced circuitry masked as arteries and veins and tendon and muscle—clear through his throat until the blade blunted against spine and could no longer cut. The black grease spurted from his body like a wellhead, too thin and dark to replicate blood, but it was enough like it in that moment as you put your hands inside the opening you created to wrench apart his spine.
Elio laid motionless on the floor, perhaps still coherent to some degree, still feeling the pain you were ravaging upon him when you took the knife back up to repeatedly hack into the other side of his neck. Already lubricated from before, you butchered the gorgeous flesh and insides you pretended to be red and purple and blue and watched the black grease turn into crimson.
Once his head had been detached from the rest of him, fingers writhing and bending together like the upturned legs of a dying spider, you were able to rip out the jagged part of his spine and reach through the cavernous hole into his skull, turning the spongy matter of his brain to mush as you clawed through the gunk for his chip.
And, when you finally found it, the tiniest component of him—you smashed it into millions of fragments on the floor and then to fine dust that meddled with the black grease soaking through your clothes. You kept going until a small crater formed where the chip had once been and filled with the liquid.
There was nothing left of Elio now.
The headless body lying before you on the ground, preserved in the rigor of agony, was not Elio and never had been. You knew this even while relishing the weight of his head cradled in your arms, the softness of his hair against your cheek and mourned the loss of everything he had been.
Time had become meaningless; fifteen minutes could have passed or fifteen days, and you wouldn't have cared nor have noticed it while in the throes of your own death from starvation.
You sat there on the living room floor, held up by the wall with a dark trail smeared down to you, and looked nowhere but straight ahead. Nothing was there for you to see—not the furniture nor the discarded, oily knife or the carcass of a machine. Still, you held the head tenderly, close to your chest, and never once thought to peer into its eyes.
Distantly, somewhere as close as your front door or as far as across the city, you heard knuckles hammering urgently against metal. You didn't move off the ground or let go of the disfigured shape against you but did reach for the broken brainstem with the single snag at the end.
From the entranceway, the door opened, and someone's confident strides inside left a resounding echo all around.
“I’ve come to retrieve you!” But which of you was he talking about?
“Where are you?”
Here, you thought and wielded the brainstem in a bloodless grip and finally stood up with the flattened head.
I'm right here.
■━■━■━■■━■━■━■■━■━■
a/n: so concludes six months of hard work! this is the longest original project i've finished in such a short amount of time, so i am tremendously proud of it. there's a lot to say about this, but i don't want to add more soggy clutter here so i'll move on.
i have a huge soft spot for elio now, and as much as a good ending would bring up everyone's spirits, it simply wouldn't be feasible within this world where he was destined to be destroyed in the end no matter what. i like to think if elio were human, he'd be a genuinely good-natured man who'd go v from vendetta trying to wreck hyperion and the governing bodies lmao.
in the future, i'd love to revisit hyperion in a different story. maybe do a one-episode spinoff of regis and reyes before it was taken off the air.
mc is a character intended to be the product of their society and i hope that is reflected by their decisions and actions. by the end, mc has gained some clarity, but is still very much a cog in the machine. in some ways, i find that more a tragedy itself than elio's death.
i won't lie, mc isn't gendered, but this is very much a female rage piece with the ongoings in the u.s. i had a lot of the plot already figured out before some recent things (e.g. criminalizing abortion, ivf, ect ect) but, it definitely seeped in deeper than i had thought it would.
originally, this fic had several other scenes that were trimmed down or omitted completely, or absorbed into other scenes bc i wanted to keep an under 40k wc. had i committed to the full outline, this thing would've easily surpassed 50k.
once again, thank you for a fantastic ten months, @ceruleansol, and i hope your future pursuits are filled with success! if you're interested in a solid proofreader, please consider reaching out to them!!
anyway. i hope you enjoyed this beast. if you wanna talk about it to me, please do! i'd love to hear it!
and, i am BEGGING, please reblog this!!
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imasinnerimsorry · 9 months
Text
The Break-In
Harry was on a business trip with a couple of co-workers, leaving his girlfriend all alone at her house. She begins to notice strange things going on around her until suddenly, everything becomes more intense.
SMUT; Kinks included: Gangbang (4 people), deep penetration, Daddy/Sir/Mister kinks, Squirting, Deepthroating, Dildos, Gaping, Anal, Oral, Creampies
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The house was quiet. Too quiet. But there was Rani, filling the noise of the bathroom with some 2000s R&B music and humming along to Mary J. Blige as she finished her nighttime routine. She had a whole process: tie her hair into a bun and put a headband around her hairline so that her hair wouldn’t get in the way, remove her makeup if she had any on, wash her face, apply her moisturizer and essential oils, put on a face mask if she felt like it, put her bonnet on, and brush her teeth. She did this every night- same old thing on a different day.
But, tonight was different. Something about the air was off. It was almost as if someone was watching her…
She shrugged off that feeling, though, not wanting to get super paranoid before she went to bed. Anytime she had a worrying thought or even watched a scary movie before bed, she would always have nightmares. She didn’t have time for that because she had a date with her boyfriend tomorrow.
Her boyfriend, Harry, was such a great man. He was attentive to her every need. If Rani called him at 3 AM to cuddle, she’d hear a knock on her door at 3:15 with him being there behind it with a smile and loving eyes. He was attentive to her every need, want, and desire, whether it be at social events, in the comfort of their own home, or in the bedroom. Harry was just amazing. Her best boyfriend of all time.
Speaking of Rani’s every desire, she had a bucket list of every thing she wanted to do before she died. Everything thrilling like jumping out of a plane to everything kinky like having anal sex.  No one knew about this list or the contents of it. No one except Harry. He made a mental note of every single detail, from traveling to the Philippines to trying out a threesome. And he wanted to make sure she could check off aspects of that list by any means necessary.
But Harry was on a business trip with some of his favorite co-workers this weekend, so he unfortunately would not be at her beck-and-call like she would’ve wanted him to. And she really did want him to. She hated being alone on cold, dark nights like these. The moon was nowhere to be seen in the night sky as she looked up out her window, and she usually depended on its light to shine through and bless her with a good night’s rest. 
As she laid into her bed, she could hear creaking coming from the house. It was a breezy night, so she didn’t suspect anything of it. She didn’t live in the most modern home anyway, so creaks and cracks were expected. She lifted the covers over her body and tried to relax, her comforter covering her entire body from the neck down as the nightgown she was wearing wasn’t enough to keep her warm. 
Then, another creaking sound, only this time followed by a deep thud. Rani jolted as the thud’s vibration pounded through her chest. It sounded like something fell… on top of her house? But what? And how? 
Then another pound followed by another and another. It was a repeated action in a rhythm, but it was traveling from one side of the roof to the next. Almost as if it was the sound of… footsteps?
I must be trippin’, she thought. No way is someone walking on top of my house. On my roof… The disbelief turned into confusion as the footsteps increased in their sound as they got closer to her. Is that a human? A raccoon? I haven’t seen raccoons here before. But, how could a human even get up here? The confusion evolved to fear as another thud was heard. What am I gonna do if it’s a human? Who could that even be? I’m alone, no weapons, no help, no protection! What the fuck could I use as a weapon? 
The footprints stopped. And one more thud shook the house. Then footprints began again. Rani put all of the pieces together. Three thuds. Three sets of footprints. All coming her direction. On top of her house. There were three people trying to break in through the roof.
Her thoughts were stopped as the window flew open. She forgot to lock it shut. Again. Harry would always remind her to. Whoops.
All she could see were three tall human figures dressed in all black hop straight into the house before she covered her whole face with her comforter and screamed. The protection (or lack thereof) of the comforter was quickly gone as it was tugged from off of her bed and thrown to the side of the room. “No! Please!” she screamed out.
Rani quickly noticed three colored masks of the three figures in the room: pink, blue, and green. Each of the figures wore black clothing with padding, however, which sealed any sort of identification of their bodies that she could take note of. But Rani made sure that she didn’t stay still for too long, she knew she had to get out of there in some way. So she slowly inched herself off the bed when she noticed the three figures huddled up in the room speaking amongst each other about their game plan, as if they were some American football players. Their voices were deep, so she could probably infer they were all men. 
The blue masked figure turned his head to face Rani as he noticed her movement. “Stay on the bed, bitch!” He grabbed a hammer that was inside of a duffel bag that he snuck in with and lifted it over his shoulder as he walked over to Rani, who was quivering with fear as she slid herself back into the position she was in before on top of her bed. Her widened eyes couldn’t stop staring at him and the weapon that he had, but the figure only chuckled as he noticed her fear. “Scared little kitten, aren’t ya?” He teased her. Rani could only nod her head and gulp. He chuckled again and walked back to the other two men, continuing their conversation.
All of their voices had a robotic sound to them, and from the looks of it, the men were wearing voice changers under their masks to hide their identities. Smart move, but Rani knew this would give her a great deal of trouble when she would report them to the cops. If she ever could report them, that is. Who knew what these men would do with her after they were done with their business?
The one with the pink balaclava walked over to the edge of Rani’s bed and just stared at her. It felt as if his eyes bore a hole into her head as he did so. Then he looked at the other two masked men behind him. “I want you two to take everything you think is valuable. Leave the bag here. I’ll handle the girl first.” He turned to face Rani again, whose eyes were still widened and legs still trembling in fright. 
The other two men went down the hallway as they followed PInk’s instructions and Pink walked up to the side of the bed. The pace of his walk was slow, heavy and intimidating, yet almost calm? It was as if he wasn’t nervous at all about what was happening or what was about to happen. He was probably the seasoned mastermind of all of this, the one who had been through this before and had always succeeded, so he probably didn’t have a care in the world about the consequences. He came to get the job done, and that was it.
He stroked his latex-gloved hand down Rani’s temple and took her bonnet off. “Gorgeoussss,” he drew out from his lips like an exhale. Rani didn’t know how to react but whimper and turn her head away. But in the corner of her eye, she noticed the man reach his hand into his pocket and retrieve a bundle of rope. He didn’t say anything as he quickly jumped on top of her body and held her down. Rani tried to squirm and fight her way out of his grasp, but to no avail. “Shhh,” he coaxed her, as if that would help to calm her down. All it did was cause her heart to beat fast against his chest as he reached himself to her left arm with some rope and managed to tie her against one of the bedposts. He did the same with her other arm, and then he shuffled himself to her legs to tie them to their respective posts. The man still sat on top of her, legs spread around her waist and looked down at Rani like she was a finished sculpture of his that he was admiring. Like she was his best work. He ran his hands down her sides, her body still covered by her nightgown but skin feeling every bit of the latex on his gloves through her fabric. 
One of the other men, Green Mask, ran back with a trash bag which Rani could assume was filled with some of her belongings. She was annoyed at her not being able to fight back, but it’s not like she had any way of doing so. She stopped straining against her confinements, and the man with the pink mask rose from his position and walked towards the green mask. Rani watched as he shuffled through her bag, looking through all of the items. When he was satisfied, he nodded his head, and walked over to the duffel bag that was brought in with them. He said, his head pretty much shoved into the bag as he searched for everything he wanted, “Take the gown off.” 
Green Mask nodded in compliance and made his way to Rani. Just as Pink did before, Green pulled something out of his pocket, only this time it was a pocketknife. Rani connected the dots.
“Uh, no, no, no, no! You are not cutting this gown!!” She screamed.
“Would you prefer it if I ripped it off?” Despite the distorted sound that the voice changer gave him, his teasing tone pierced straight through.
Rani shook her head no and watched as the man brought the knife down to her body. He used the knife to tear through her gown, but he was meticulous about it, thankfully for Rani. Did he not want to potentially hurt her? Rani took note of his precision and carefulness as he wielded the knife- maybe it would be a helpful detail to remember for the police when this whole ordeal was over if she made it out alive.
Green Mask removed the fabric from her body, his eyes immediately widening in admiration of her naked figure. Rani was too embarrassed, so she tilted her head to move from the man’s gaze. His eyes were like scanners as they observed her entire body from head to toe. His mouth hung open a bit as if he were about to drool at the sight before him. “Look at these fuckin’ tits.” He used his hands to squeeze at them and give a slight tug to her nipples. “Can’t wait to have a taste of those,” he stated, causing Rani to whimper.
Blue Mask finally rushed back into the bedroom. “I have some good shit in he-” He paused, noticing Rani now naked and tied onto the bed, Green Mask’s gloved hands playing with her breasts. “Aw man, you guys started without me?”
Green Mask seemed to roll his eyes. His voice, robotic yet clearly annoyed, commented, “Well, we weren’t gonna wait for you. You took too long, and we don’t have all night.” One of his gloved hands rubbed against Rani’s bare inner thigh as he spoke. Rani wished she could close her legs due to this invasion of privacy, but alas.
Blue Mask rolled his eyes right back. “Whatever, Jake,” he said out of annoyance, but quickly coughed as he noticed the slip of Green’s name. “Alright, so what are we doing with the girl?”
The man with the pink balaclava, still shuffling through the duffel bag and dropping items onto the ground that Rani couldn’t see because of her position, responded nonchalantly, “We’re gonna play with her. Isn’t that right, Rani?”
Rani’s body turned cold at the sound of her name. “H-how did you know my name?”
Pink Mask laughed. “How wouldn’t I know your name? Your room is just plastered with it.” He wasn’t wrong. There were photos and journals with Rani’s name all over them. She didn’t think of that. Well, she didn’t even think of her house getting broken into and robbed one day, so it was a first time for everything.
“Well, Rani, you have a beautiful fuckin’ body.” Green Mask ran one of his hands up her thigh and near her cunt. “Pretty cunt, too.”
“Yeah, and it looks like she wants to play with us as well,” Blue Mask said, and by the direction his eyes were roaming in, Rani could tell he was staring directly at her pussy. She whimpered at the men’s wandering eyes, both of them looking at her as though they were predators hungry for their prey.
Green Mask’s hand snuck in between her labia, rubbing up and down, and the wetness immediately coated his fingers. He found her clit, swollen and needy, and began to rub his fingers on it in circles. The moist friction between his hand and her pussy emitted pornographic sounds from not only the wetness of her cunt, but also her mouth as it let out breathy moans and whimpers with each rotation of his hand. Rani’s eyes were closed through the ordeal because of her embarrassment and fear, but she could feel the eyes of the green masked-man piercing through her soul like daggers. She knew she was in for a long night.
The man with the blue balaclava walked over to the other side of Rani’s bed. Her head was already faced on the side he was walking to due to her not wanting to face Green Mask as he relentlessly rubbed her pussy, and Blue Mask took this as an opportunity to undo his black pants and throw them off to some corner of the room. His bulge was peeking through his briefs, precum seeping out in a little spot of the grey fabric, and Rani’s eyes teared up even more knowing what Blue’s next move was.
But Blue Mask smirked, and all he did was inch his covered bulge up to Rani’s mouth, and her saliva immediately started to smear onto it. “Gotta give you the appetizer before the main course, right?’” He stated as he watched Rani’s eyes look up at him in confusion. “Suck through the fabric, baby.”
Rani immediately began to suck onto the man’s underwear, her lips and tongue feeling the shape and size of his cock as she did so. Despite her fast and immediate movements, Rani wasn’t optimistic at all, she just wanted to do whatever the men wanted her to do, hoping that it would help her go through this situation easily and quickly. They obviously had weapons, reminding herself internally as she thought about the hammer that was just in the hands of the man whose boxers she’s now sucking through, or the knife that stuck through the pocket of the man currently twiddling at her clit.
Green Mask stopped his circular motions on her clit and slapped her cunt a couple of times, her wetness squirting out in little splashes as he did so. Her moans from Green’s actions vibrated through Blue Mask’s underwear and went straight to his length, making the rather dull experience of her sucking through his fabric a bit more pleasurable. Green stuck two of his fingers into Rani’s hole and began to thrust in and out her, sometimes curling them to stimulate her g-spot. Rani’s muffled moans against Blue’s bulge grew louder and therefore caused the vibrations against his cock to become more intense, making him moan alongside her.
“C’mon, I need you to cum for me fast like a good girl. We don’t have all night,” He stated as he picked up the pace of his fingers’ thrusts, adding another finger sneakily to stimulate the girl’s cunt even more. Rani’s moans against Blue’s bulge became even more muffled as she shoved her own face into him. Still flooded with embarrassment, her orgasm neared and she presumed that hiding her face from the men’s view would shed some of her fears away. Instead, it egged the men on to be more rough with her, Blue Mask now holding her by the back of her head further into his bulge preventing her from breathing while Green began to curl against her G-spot even faster. Rani’s body jolted not by much because of her constraints, but just enough for her to have a dramatic reaction as she orgasmed, her pussy leaking out more of her fluids onto Green’s gloved hand.
Green Mask released himself from the grasp of her cunt and sucked on each of his fingers, getting every taste of Rani’s arousal into his mouth. He looked over to Blue, who released Rani from his crotch and watched as she tried catching her breath. “Y’wanna switch places?” He questioned him, completely dismissing Rani’s existence despite her recent orgasm.
Immediately, Blue nodded his head. He explained, “Wanna taste the mess she made. I mean, the way she got your eyes rolling back, she must taste good, yeah?” 
Green nodded a yes as he wiped his saliva off his fingers onto Rani’s stomach, as if she was some sort of towel. She whimpered at the feeling, but the men didn’t even pay her any mind, almost as if she was, as they had said before, just some toy they were playing with. “And I wanna see how she takes cock in her mouth, how deep she can take one,” he said and smirked as he swapped places with Blue, the crotch of his pants now in front of Rani’s swollen, wet lips. “You can take cock, right, love?” He slapped at her face as he noticed her expression a bit dazed from her previous actions with Blue Mask. “Huh, you can take cock? Deep in that throat?” 
Rani nodded. “Uh-huh, uh-huh, yes, sir.” She gulped as she prepared herself physically and mentally for what the two men had in store for her next.
Green’s fingers then tugged at his pants’ zipper until it was fully unzipped, and he threw his pants and briefs in the same place Blue threw his. “Sir, hmm…” his lips turned into a smirk as he placed his tip onto her lips, his precum staining them, “I like that. Don’t you boys like the sound of that?”
Pink Mask chuckled from where he was, his eyes fully immersed in what was happening before him. His pants were down, Rani noticed, and his hand was wrapped around his cock. He must’ve finished going through the bag while the other men were hypnotizing her from both ends, she inferred. “Sir sounds lovely. Suits you well. I’m more of a ‘Daddy’ kind of guy. Hey,” he gestured over to Blue Mask, who was on his knees taking in the sight of Rani’s cunt before him, “What name do you want her to call you?” He handed a device over to Blue Mask, who smirked as he grasped the long object. Rani recognized it quickly- it was a Hitachi wand.
In the midst of thinking about his answer, he began slowly rubbing at Rani’s clit and gave her labia a little kitten lick. “Mm, how about Master?” He looked up at Rani, but his eyes widened as he recalled Rani’s skin color. “Uh, actually no, not Master. I’m not into the raceplay shit. Sorry ‘bout that.” He gave Rani’s clit a kiss and a lick, turning the wand on, before speaking again. “I guess Mister is better, right? Y’wanna call me Mister, babe?”
Rani was about to say yes, but ended up only nodding with a muffled moan coming from her mouth as Green Mask shoved his cock into it. Her eyes flooded with tears and flowed down her cheeks as he fucked her throat, his tip hitting so far back that she knew it would ache when he was done. Blue Mask took this as an opportunity to nudge the wand against his clit, causing Rani’s body to jolt again and throat to gag against Green’s cock.
Pink Mask went up to Rani and occupied himself by messing with her breasts. His thumb and index finger of both hands started to twist and pull at her nipples. The sounds she was making around Green’s cock encouraged him to continue with his own movements, slapping each breast after every pull of her nipple. He then settled on using one hand to play with her boobs as the other slipped around his cock and began to jerk himself off. With every sound that emitted from Rani, whether it was the sound of her throat being used, or the sounds of Blue Mask’s tongue lapping at her cunt, his cock slipped out more precum that allowed the movements of his hand to be slicker, and his head threw back at his pleasure.
Green’s cock continued to fuck into Rani’s mouth, his hands on each side of her head guiding her up and down his shaft as if her mouth was a fleshlight. The sound of his cock making her gag as he went in and out of the top of her esophagus made him moan. “You hear all those fuckin’ sounds?” He let out a laugh that forced his abdomen to move and make his cock vibrate inside of Rani’s throat. “The gawk-gawk-gawk?,” he mimicked the noises coming out of her throat as he continued his movements.
Blue Mask laughed as he continued licking Rani’s pussy, those vibrations traveling inside of her as well. “That’s what they call that ‘Gawk-gawk 3000’, right? That’s what you got honey,” he started to vigorously rub at her clit to emphasize his statements, “You got a Gawk-gawk 3000!” He slapped at her cunt a couple of times before placing his face back to her hole and thrusting his tongue in and out of her. The wand on her clit began to rub in circles, maximizing the pleasure she received from it all around.
Pink Mask continued to play with Rani’s tits with one hand as he watched the scene in front of him. He didn’t know which hole to look at- her mouth or her pussy- as he continued to jerk himself off with his other hand. It was all so overwhelming.
“Fuck,” Green moaned out, “Lick my ballsack, too.” He positioned himself to allow Rani easier access to his balls, and she began to lick and suck at them before heading back to his shaft, repeatedly moving between both parts of his body. She heard his moans, distorted yet beautiful, and it indirectly encouraged her to suck at him with more effort. “Fuck, shit,” he moaned out as the pleasure increased, but he suddenly began furrowing his eyebrows in frustration. “F-Fuck off me, bitch.” He slapped Rani’s face with enough impact to make her flinch off of his dick, causing her to cough and snort some mucus that was about to drip from her nose due to her crying. “I was about to cum inside your mouth,” he said as some sort of justification for stopping. “We wouldn’t wanna end the fun so fast, huh?” 
Rani moaned, not even paying attention to Green Mask because of what Blue Mask was doing to her pussy. He turned off the wans and threw it to the side as his lips sucked around her clit and his index and middle finger fucked into her hole, little spurts of arousal squirting out of her as it had done with Green Mask’s prior motions. Pink Mask stopped his own movements with Rani’s tits as he reached that same hand to push down onto Rani’s lower stomach. He knew this pressure would help to escalate Rani’s pleasure and make her orgasm come faster. Rani looked over at Green Mask, who was still calming himself down from facefucking her moments earlier, and pouted at him. Her eyes were pouring with tears, mouth was drooling, and her bottom lip was quivering; he knew the girl was close. “Feel good, yeah?” Rani moaned and whined out little “yeah’s” as he and the other men continued to egg her on with more questions and statements. 
“You gonna cum all over his fingers? Like a good girl?”
“You’re making a proper mess, sweetheart.”
“Fuckin’ squirt in my mouth, bitch.”
One final curl of his fingers and one final slap at her clit caused Rani to squirt like a broken fountain. She had no control over it, and some of the liquid flew all the way to her bedroom door before Blue Mask brought his mouth directly over her hole and drank whatever he could catch. 
Pink Mask let go from her abdomen and started to untie the knot from one of the bedposts on his side. “Untie those,” he commanded Green, and Rani felt relieved to be removed from her rather uncomfortable confinements. 
In spite of all of the commotion and the mental toll the situation had on her, Rani made sure to take mental notes of all of the men in the room. The one with the clean pink balaclava, seemingly the leader, had green eyes and a strand of dark-colored hair that stuck onto his forehead. He had an English accent, something similar to her boyfriend’s. Mr. Blue Mask had blue eyes, which she presumed was his reason for picking the color. He was quite a silly character in this situation, sort of the comic relief between all three men, so it would make sense. The one in the green mask (definitely a homemade one she might add), had freckles at the tops of cheeks and around his brown eyes. His accent was thick, but it wasn’t English like Pink’s. Maybe he was Australian? Or was he from New Zealand? She couldn’t tell, but it was definitely sexy. She knew that one’s name was “Jake” from hearing Blue Mask groan his name out of annoyance. Wait, Jake? That sounded familiar. But, wait, she didn’t know of any Jake’s. She knew a Jacob, who was one of Harry’s friends at work, but not any Jake’s. She quickly shrugged off that thought before the pink-masked man grabbed her by her jaw and tilted it up to face him.
“Dirty fucking whore.” Pink spat in Rani’s face and the fluid landed on her lips. “Lick it off.” He watched as Rani’s tongue worked itself over her lips and brought his saliva into her mouth. “Tastes good, doesn’t it? Had a mint.”
Rani did taste the mint flavor and that exact flavor reminded her of her boyfriend. Her eyes started to well with tears as she thought about him- his smile, his laugh, his face, and how he could help her in this situation. She missed him. She needed him. 
But he wasn’t here right now. His face wasn’t amongst these three men. In fact, no face was among the men, just masks, gloves, and distorted, modified voices. She didn’t feel like she was having sex with three men; she felt like an object only being used for their pleasure. It wasn’t the worst feeling, though. She’d spoken to Harry about a fantasy like this- her house being broken into by an intruder who would come across her and find ways to use her body for his satisfaction before he left with the loot. She was lightly enjoying this, she couldn’t lie. And it was obvious the men could pick up on that. She just wished Harry was one of the men under the masks.
He grabbed onto her shoulder and squeezed them to get her full attention before instructing her, “Turn around and get on your knees by the end of the bed. Now!”
Rani fell to her knees as she felt Pink Mask give her a push to the floor by her shoulders. Her knees buckled onto the floor, and her eyes met with Blue Mask, who made his way onto the bed and positioned himself in a way that made his ass meet with Rani’s face. She furrowed her eyebrows in confusion as she looked at what was before her, and she tilted her head at Pink Mask awaiting his further instructions.
“You’re gonna eat his ass,” he said sternly. “You understand?” Looking down at her, he could see her hesitation in her movements, but her eyes anticipated trying. 
She had licked her boyfriend Harry’s ass before, but it was only two times, and she didn’t think she was that good. But Harry was always amazing at licking hers, and she tried to remember what movements he would make with his tongue to help her out in this situation. So, she placed her hands on each of Blue Mask’s buttocks and put her tongue to work, running it along the rim of his hole in slow and smooth circles.
Blue felt the dampness of her tongue move around his hole and, although distorted due to the voice modifier, whimpered at the feeling. He wrapped his hand around the shaft of his length and began to stroke himself. The feeling was just indescribable.
Pink decided that he wanted in on the action, so he kneeled behind Rani. He didn’t give her any warning before shifting her body in a way that made her go on all fours- he needed better access to play with her cunt as he was the only one who hadn’t even touched  it out of the three, and the boys didn’t have much time left with the girl. They couldn’t risk doing this for much longer, and he needed to feel her.
Green Mask watched the scene in front of him- Rani’s focused face licking her tongue around Blue Mask’s ass with his face screwed in pleasure. “Yes, doll, lick his fucking ass like the slut you are,” Green Mask commanded with a laugh at the end of his statement. He was mocking her, but in some weird way it made Rani’s lower abdomen churn with pleasure. “Yes, Sir,” she moaned back at him, his words somehow encouraging her to lick with more vigor.
“Ohhhh,” Blue Mask emitted a moan and jerked himself off in faster strokes. His balls sat atop Rani’s forehead, and the friction between the body parts gave him more pleasure. “She’s too good at this, fuckin- shit,” he managed to get out of him amidst his moans and grunts. His accent (New York? Pennsylvania? She wasn’t sure.)  seemed to get thicker with the more intense he felt.
Pink Mask slapped Rani’s ass, causing her to moan into Blue Mask’s hole but never ceasing her tongue’s movements. “She’s definitely done this before, yeah?,” Pink asked her, and she moaned loudly, which was seemingly her way of saying yes. “That’s a lucky partner you got, I’m sure of it.” His fingers started to rub against her pussy, dragging along the outside of her labia repeatedly before smacking at her ass again. “Dripping like a broken tap, love. He did a number on your cunt earlier, didn’t he?” He was referring to Green Mask, who was now by the duffel bag and bent over the floor, trying to find one of the items Pink Mask removed from the bag earlier. 
Rani managed to crack some sort of smile as she continued licking at Blue’s ass. “Yes, Daddy,” she answered with a lisp since her tongue was busy.
“He made you feel so good, right, love?” He questioned again, running his thumb up and down between both of her holes, which surprisingly soothed her. 
The girl nodded again. “Yes, Daddy, so good. Mister made me feel good, too,” she looked up at Blue, who forced himself to look down into her eyes at the call of his other name “Mister”. He smirked and groaned, “Yeah? That’s good. And you’re doing such a good job at licking me, sweetheart.”
Rani’s hole pulsated when Blue praised her, and Pink noticed from his view. He loved seeing her aroused, and Blue wasn’t wrong about her satisfactory work. But he wanted to end the praise session and intensify the situation for his own satisfaction, so he slapped her ass and spread her cheeks open as wide as he could. “Stick your tongue down his asshole and move it in and out, whore. And don’t say another word.”
Rani yelped at the feeling of Pink manhandling her rear, and simply nodded as she followed his instructions. Her tongue stuck out and found itself inside Blue Mask’s puckered hole, beginning her thrusts with her tongue.
Once Green found what he was looking for, he walked over to Pink and, unbeknownst to Rani, handed him a tube filled with something clear. “She’s gonna love this shit, man.” he said to Pink, causing Pink to chuckle. 
Rani continued her actions against Blue’s ass and managed to lick at his balls a bit as well. Blue was in heaven with this girl, he couldn’t believe it. He needed to break into more houses and find other kinky bitches to lick his ass.
A click was heard from behind Rani, as if something was opening. She didn’t think about it much until she felt something cold land between her ass and into her asshole, some even running down her vagina. She then felt something be shoved right into her asshole, spreading the hole wide and stretching it in a way that hurt a little. She’d never had anal sex, the furthest she had gone was getting licked there by her boyfriend, so the feeling caused her to jolt away from Pink’s grasp before he pulled her right back over to him. “Did I tell you to fuckin’ move?” He questioned her, slapping her ass a couple of times before removing the object from her ass. 
She was about to answer until she remembered Pink demanding her not to say another word. Instead, she went back to leaving little kitten licks and sucks on Blue’s ballsack before, again, feeling an object being shoved inside her ass again, this time deeper than it has been before. She assumed if it wasn’t for the substance (she now realized it was most likely lube) dripped inside of her hole, the experience of this thing in her ass definitely would’ve felt worse than it did now. She only felt pressure and a stretch as the man behind her continuously thrusted the object back and forth into her asshole, using his fingers to rub at her clit which, surprisingly, also helped her be accustomed to this first anal experience.
Green Mask only sat back on a sofa Rani had in her room and watched what was happening in front of him, his cock dripping with anticipation to join in. But, he knew his place and knew what all three of them had in store for the girl next and decided to just wait his turn. Besides, he didn’t mind watching people fuck from the sidelines every now and then.
“Fuck,” Rani moaned under her breath and she threw her head down at the pleasure behind her. But, Pink didn’t like that and slapped at her ass with the object shoved as far as it could go into her asshole, causing Rani to wince in pain. “Shut the fuck up before I make you, pig.”
Rani didn’t say a word as she began to cry and went back to thrusting into Blue’s ass, Blue now jerking his cock at the sight. Her cries were so adorable, so thrilling, so sexy, and it made the pleasure he was receiving even more intense than it already was, as if that was even possible. “Fuck, you gotta stop it, girl,” he said, and Rani removed her head from between his ass until-
“Keep licking at him. And you’re not stopping until you cum for me,” Pink informed her, using one of his hands to shove her face right into Blue’s ass. Rani’s moans vibrated against Blue’s asshole as Pink shoved the object he was using into her even deeper and thrusted even faster. His fingers rubbed at Rani’s clit at a tantalizing pace, and Rani knew that if she focused on something else, Blue’s ass in this case, her climax would come faster. And so, she moaned into his ass and used her own hand to wank Blue’s dick for him. He wanted to protest against this as he went into this experience wanting to be in full control of his victim, but her smooth hand gliding against his cock felt too good to resist.
A few more thrusts went on before Pink paused, leaving the object inside of her ass as deep as he could, but continued his rotations around her wet, dripping cunt. He watched Rani’s facial expressions to the best of his abilities at his position, seeing that her face indicated her orgasm was approaching her once again for the night. He continued at the pace he was in, and Rani’s cunt pulsated as she neared her peak. “Alright, I want you to push your asshole as much as you can as you cum,” he commanded with a grunt, and Rani nodded as she followed his instructions, wincing out loud at the feeling of her pushing and her orgasm. Rani’s pussy finally squirted onto the floor, leaving a puddle that made a splash as the object once in her asshole landed on the mess. 
Pink kept her ass spread and his eyes marveled at the sight of her gaped asshole and her pussy weeping in front of him. It was the most gorgeous thing he has ever seen. Quickly, he glanced over at Green Mask, who rose from his seat and went over to Pink and Rani’s ass knowing that it was his cue. He picked up a polaroid camera from the floor by the duffel bag and snapped a picture of Rani’s asshole and pussy from the perfect angle. He knew Pink wanted to savor this moment, as he had discussed this scenario with him before.
Rani finally ceased the thrusts of her tongue at Blue Mask’s hole and removed her hand’s grasp from his cock. She and Pink Mask stood up from their positions, and Pink shoved the fingers he was using at her cunt into her mouth for her to suck on. She sucked on them, staring into his eyes as she did so before he finally removed them from her lips abruptly..
As Rani looked at the floor, she noticed the object that was used in her ass: a dildo longer and thicker than a cucumber. She looked over at Pink and saw him smirking, knowing that that look on his face came from seeing her own reaction to the object. 
She then heard Green Mask whistle and looked over his direction, noticing him laying on the bed. “Come on up here, gorgeous,” Green winked at her from under the mask and slapped his hands onto his thighs.
Rani stood in place, not really wanting to join Green onto the bed. She knew he wanted her to ride him, but having another man penetrate her just seemed so… disrespectful to her. And it  would be especially disrespectful to her boyfriend if he ever found out. Blue grabbed Rani’s shoulders from behind and began to walk her over to the bed before lifting her up and throwing her right leg on the opposite side of Green’s body. She was now in reverse cowgirl position, which surprised her, but she went along with it anyway, not really wanting to protest the men around her. But of course, the guilt of being fucked by another man still crept up on her and she muttered, rather shyly,-
“I have… I have a boyfriend.”
Green Mask paused his actions and brought Rani down to his chest, making her look into his eyes. “You’re telling us this now?” There was a pause before he let out a cackle, causing the other two men to laugh in suit. “After this man over here made you gape and the other one had his ass eaten by you? Now is when you say you mention a boyfriend? After squirting in front of three other men?” All of the men continued laughing. It was the most humiliating thing Rani was ever subjected to, and the tears on her face and whimpering of her mouth were proof of that. Yet somehow, it turned her on?
The man with the pink mask got onto the bed on his knees and slapped his cock onto Rani’s pussy as he spoke. “Well I’m sure your boyfriend wouldn’t mind if we played with his toy for a bit, huh?” Rani’s lower body jolted, not like she could escape the situation anyway. “Trust me, honey, you’re going to love what we’re gonna do to you. I mean, your pussy is kinda proving how much you love it already,” He paused to stick his tip in, but pulled it out before starting up his slaps again. “And even if you don’t, we don’t really give a fuck. This night is for us to enjoy. Your cries for help aren’t gonna stop us. Your little boyfriend isn’t here to stop us.”
The glow of Rani’s face washed away as she felt the pink masked man stick himself inside of her, inch by inch, slowly getting deeper. “Don’t worry, love. We’re all clean here. A little raw sex never hurts anyone if they’re clean,” he said, as if that would make her feel any better. 
Rani didn’t even get to utter a moan before a cock thrusted into her mouth. The woman gagged and slobbered onto Blue Mask’s shaft as he forced himself deeper with every stroke. “There we go,” Green Mask prodded on as he watched Rani with Blue’s length. “You’re a pro at taking cock, sweetheart,” he groaned as he played with her tits from behind.
The feeling of Pink and Blue both inside opposite ends of her body made her gag and choke onto the cock in her mouth. Mucus fell from her nose and tears ran down her cheeks, the scene getting messier with every movement.
Green ran one of his hands down between her ass and his waist. He gripped his cock and gave it a few strokes before lining it up with her asshole, and Rani didn’t even realize this happening before he finally slithered his thick cock inside of her.
Pink Mask continued his own thrusts into the clenching cunt around him as he felt Green Mask’s cock glide against the wall that separated both of Rani’s canals. He groaned a low and drawn out “Fuckkk,” at the feeling; it was unlike anything else he had felt before. 
Rani choked onto Blue’s cock, saliva spurting out from either corner of her lips, as she felt the intrusion of another cock into her other hole. Three men were not inside of each of her holes. “What the fuck was even happening anymore?” was the last thought that passed through her mind before all three men gripped at her body from their respective position and began to fuck into her relentlessly. 
Pink and Green’s cocks moved simultaneously in and out of Rani’s cunt and ass, and they could even feel each other through the membrane that separated the two holes, maximizing the feelings they were already experiencing. Pink stared at Rani and watched all of her facial expressions as she managed to get fucked in her mouth by Blue. He paused the two for a moment and grabbed onto Rani’s jaw, forcing her to face him. His emerald eyes stared into hers, his eyebrows furrowed and forehead dripping with sweat just as she was, and Rani’s cunt clenched around him as she lingered in his stare. Everything started to make sense. 
Pink pulled Rani towards him and sunk his tongue into her mouth, licking and sucking at her own tongue and her lips before he pulled away and slapped her back down to Blue’s dick. “Keep sucking on him, bitch,” he was able to grunt out despite him being overwhelmed by all that was happening.
The room was filled with sweaty, sticky bodies slapping into each other and gags and chokes that came from Rani’s throat as Blue skull-fucked her. The men continued to egg her on with their own dirty talk, but not much was coming from Rani’s end of the conversation. Blue pulled out of her and watched as her head immediately threw back, almost like her head and neck were too numb to stand up on their own. “Damn, that bitch is braindead,” he commented with a chuckle, and the two other men took notice of this mention. 
Green slapped Rani's face a couple of times, but received no feedback from Rani other than a drunken moan. “Fuckin’ hell,” he muttered underneath his breath. He used his fingers of one hand to hook onto a corner of her mouth, which left her lips ajar, drool finding its way out from between. The drool landed onto her chest, as to which Pink bent over to lick it up and swirl it around in his mouth before spitting it back into Rani’s mouth. Rather, it missed and landed onto her cheek, but Rani was too intoxicated by her gangbang that she didn’t even flinch.
The two men fucking into Rani’s cunt and anus lifted up their hips to pick up their paces inside of her, Rani still too high to respond with anything other than a moan. Green let go of the corner of Rani’s mouth and gripped the back of her head to shove her mouth back onto Blue’s dick. Blue took the reigns and began face-fucking her again, this time with more desperation and speed. 
All of the men were finally close to cumming after more thrusts and grunts, and they could all feel it in their lower stomachs. The first to release was Green, who shot his cum so deep into her asshole, but he held his cock in place in order to not let anything drip out of her, not yet at least. 
Pink was next and did the same as Green, plugging his dick inside of her cunt and preventing any of his cum from spilling out of her.
Finally, it was Blue’s turn, and he shot his cum deep into her throat before smacking Rani’s cheek and grabbing her by her jawline. “Swallow my cum, whore.”
Rani regained consciousness from his grip at her jaw and somehow found a way to force herself to swallow his seed. She felt the thick substance slide down the walls of her esophagus and then looked at the two other men inside of her.
“We’re gonna pull out of you,” Pink started, “But we gotta make you cum first.” As he finished his statement, he and Green began their thrusts again. The thrusts of their cocks into her cum-filled holes caused their milky substances to squirt through the sides of her holes, splattering all over her bed. Pink rubbed at her clitoris while Green twisted her nipples and pulled at them before finally, Rani came. A loud pornographic moan filled the room as she climaxed, and she squirted all over Pink’s chest and torso. He and Green finally pulled out of her, and Pink watched as their beautiful concoction of fluids spilled from both of her holes. Blue had the polaroid camera in his hands and shot pictures of the entire orgasm. Pink knew he would have a fun time looking at the pictures later.
The three men in the room got themselves composed before they heard an attention-grabbing cough come from the bed. It was Rani, who was obviously composed and very aware of what just happened.
“Thank you so much,” she paused for dramatic effect. “Harry, for that wonderful night”
The man in the pink mask chuckled, and finally took off his mask, revealing himself to Rani as her boyfriend. “Glad you enjoyed this, sweetheart,” He blushed, “but what gave me away?”
“I looked into your eyes. No one has green eyes as beautiful as yours.”
“Oh,” he laughed again. “I guess I should’ve worn contacts.”
“Also, you were being really possessive about cumming inside of my pussy. I know how possessive you get when it comes to me,” she continued and smirked at him.
Harry laughed and went up to Rani to kiss her on her cheek, which was still warm and stinging from the men slapping her all night. “You’re right. Should’ve controlled that a bit more.”
“No baby, I thought it was really cute. I’m shocked that your friends agreed to this. Actually, I’m shocked that you thought of this whole thing in the first place.”
Harry let out a warm smile and brushed his fingers through his hair, which was matted from being confined to the balaclava. “Yeah, well remember the conversation we were having about our kinks and deepest desires? I wanted to do something special for my girl, especially since our anniversary is coming up. I wanted to help you mark something off of your bucket list.”
Rani scoffed, “More like a couple of things.” Then, she looked toward the Blue Masked Man. “And I mean, Jake?” Blue’s eyes widened and he let out a “whoops” as Rani continued. “You kinda slipped that one out, Timmy.”
Timmy, or Timothee, removed his mask along with Green Mask, the Jake in question, following him with his own. TImothee and Jake, who was the “Jacob” Rani thought of before, were Harry’s work buddies and best friends. “So it wasn’t really a business trip, huh, guys?”
Jacob raised his hand to butt in. “Well, you could say it kinda was. I mean it was a job we all took part in to help our friend. I guess?”
“Mhm, yeah, sure,” Rani said, “Anyway, I had fun guys. I don’t know if I’d ever do something like that again, though. It took soooo much out of me.”
Harry kissed her temple and smiled. “Yeah, well never say never.”
“By the way, we didn’t take anything from your house,” Jacob stated, lifting up one of the bags he and TImothee went around the house with at the beginning, and showed her the contents of it. “It was just styrofoam we brought with us to give that illusion.
Rani laughed and shook her head. “Y’all are just too much.”
The four of them sat in her bedroom and discussed what went on that night, watching as the sun rose from Rani’s window. Harry held onto his girl, feeling like such a proud boyfriend. He fell in love with Rani even more than ever.
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blackheartbiohazards · 24 hours
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There's nothing wrong with writing or reading, or making art about things that some people consider cringey, weird or embarrassing.
There's nothing wrong with reading or writing or making art about characters that some people would consider "mary sues", or overpowered, or evil or "unlikable".
There's nothing wrong with reading or writing or making art about topics, ideas, characters or events that other people consider wrong, stupid, or gross.
Read and write and make art about the things that you want to, without worrying about what others might think.
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greatstormcat · 21 days
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Be Careful What You Wish For
Kyle ‘Gaz’ Garrick x Simon ‘Ghost’ Riley x chubbyf!reader
TW: MDNI 18+, darkfic, kidnap, violence, threat, non-con, p in v, forced orgasm, forced exhibitionism, name calling
AN: dead dove read the tags, if you proceed below the cut you consent to reading what is there and will suffer in silence if you do.
AN: Tagging @shotmrmiller for helping feed the brainworms with this one and @391780 for inspiring it!
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Your job wasn’t bad, you had to admit it, especially on weekends like this where they paid for you to stay in a nice hotel while you attended a conference. You were visiting a city you liked, staying in a nice part of town, and you got to spend the evening by yourself while everyone else went partying and clubbing. You’d looked up the hotel you were staying in online and saw it had a very nice cocktail bar, so you’d made a plan to glam yourself up and have a few drinks on your free time.
A nagging voice in your head said you were being silly, as you freshened your makeup and put on a cute wrap around dress and heels, but you ignored it. Why shouldn’t you enjoy yourself? What was wrong with feeling pretty just for yourself and no one else? You didn’t need to have a date to feel good about how you looked. What’s the worst that could happen?
Doing a pose before the mirror you look at how the dress clings to your generous curves and flatters your luxurious figure, and the little heels shape your calves nicely. You look hot, helped by the matched underwear set boosting your cleavage where the dress highlights it. Grabbing your room key and phone you giggle and head down to the cocktail bar.
You have a small table booked and the host gets you seated and leaves you a menu. It’s not overly busy, the dark space decorated in mahogany and brass, with elegant lights hanging from the high ceiling. You sit at you table, a small polished marble surface with a glowing brass lamp, and read the menu deciding what to try first. Once you order you open your phone and scroll through tumblr, your greatest vice, and feel a thrill when you see an update to your favourite darkfic series. You devour every word, blood heating as you read the delicious writing in your phone, the kidnapper carrying you away inside your head and using you for his own pleasure.
Your drink arrives, a beautiful glass containing a heady potion of alcohol and candied fruit peel. It tingles on your tongue and warms your throat as you sip it, the mixture of sweet and sharp deliciousness. As you read more you shift in your seat, feeling arousal pooling and simmering low in your pelvis, making your clit pulse. Your mind wanders to the little black vibrator stashed away in your room upstairs, and you smile to yourself for having the forethought to put it onto charge before coming downstairs.
A movement catches your eye and you glance up from your phone briefly, meeting the dark, liquid chocolate coloured eyes of the most gorgeous man you’ve ever seen in the flesh. You dart your eyes away, your warm face heating further when you realise he is sitting opposite you and staring openly at you. Was he there when you sat down? Has he sat down since you did? You kick yourself for not being more observant. Your frowning and thinking in interrupted as another cocktail is set down beside your half drunk glass by the hostess, a bright smile on her face as she sees your confusion.
“I didn’t order this,” you say with open honesty.
“No, it’s from the gentleman,” she chirps happily before bustling away, obviously enjoying this part of her job. The man opposite is watching you with a barely concealed smile, a small scar pulling at the skin beneath his left eye and giving him a rakish charm.
“Um, was this you?” you ask the gorgeous stranger with a shy smile. His answering smile is dazzling, a sharp canined grin that lights up his face, and he takes the opportunity to get up and move over to the spare seat at your table.
“Yeah, it’s not original but it worked,” he answers in a deep, velvety voice, “I wanted to come and talk to you but didn’t want to interrupt your reading. You were very engrossed in whatever it is.”
He settles in, tucking his long legs under the small table, and you notice how broad his chest and shoulders are, straining the material of his shirt. The two of you settle into easy conversation, making small talk about the bar, the conference you’re attending. It all feels so light and casual, and the second cocktail he has ordered goes down quickly and you allow him to order you another soon after despite the gentle spinning sensation taking over your head.
“So, would you like to come and have some dinner with me?” he asks. “I was going to eat alone tonight but you’re much better company.”
“I don’t even know your name,” you laugh, but already feel like accepting his offer.
“Sorry, I’m Gaz,” he says, holding out his hand. You take it and let him pull your hand to his lips, placing a kiss on your knuckles.
“Nice to meet you Gaz, I’d like to have dinner with you,” you smile. You pick up your phone and room card, fumbling with them slightly and wishing you had a bag with you. The alcohol in your system makes your head spin as he leads you to the lobby and he wraps an arm around you, pulling you against his side.
“I’ve got an Uber waiting for us,” he says softly, his deep voice vibrating through his chest as he guides you outside. True to his word a black car waits around the corner, and he opens the backdoor to let you in before walking around and slipping in the other side. As soon as the car begins to move, he is on you, lips hot and insistent against yours and it’s easy to return the enthusiasm.
You tense up, though, when his hands begin to touch you, trailing down your sides and squeezing at your hips possessively.
“Wait, slow down,” you mumble against his lips, and a chuckle comes from the driver.
“Bit late for that,” a gravelly voice drawls, and icy droplets of fear drip down your spine. You shove at Gaz’s shoulders trying to push him back but it’s like trying to shove at a wardrobe, he won’t budge and his mouth kisses down across your neck and collarbone.
“Stop!” you snap, panic bubbling up inside you and he finally huffs out a sigh and leans back slightly. He raises an eyebrow and gives you an unimpressed look. With a terrifying casualness he reaches into the rear pocket of the driver's seat and extracts a gun from its depths.
“You are way out of your depth here, love,” he smiles, gently waving the weapon before your eyes. The remaining alcohol in your system clears as adrenaline surges through your veins, and it takes every bit of self control not to wet yourself right there.
“C’mon, what’s the bra situation?” the driver asks without looking back, his concentration firmly on the road and clearly being observant of how he is driving to avoid raising suspicion. You notice with a jolt that the driver’s head and face are covered with a balaclava. Gaz tugs at the fastening of your dress, the cold metal of the gun in his hand making you shudder as it brushes over your skin.
“Ah fuck,” he breaths, slowly peeling the fabric aside and uncovering your bra.
“Well, what is it?”
“It’s black lace,” Gaz answers reverentially.
“Told you, you owe me twenty quid,” the driver says smugly. “Said she’s a classy bird, didn’t I? Bet you the knickers match.”
“You’re not taking any more of my money,” Gaz chuckles, seemingly entranced by the lacy cups of your bra, tracing his fingers lightly over the lace. Your nipples harden and press up against the thin fabric, and he circles one of them with his thumb. You can’t help but notice the way he swallows, as though salivating. “Can’t wait to suck on these, baby,” he murmurs softly to you. “D’ya know some people can come just from having their nipples sucked?”
You nod your head, biting your lip to stop yourself from whimpering at him as he pinches at the nipple, rolling it between his finger and thumb. He is interrupted by the car stopping and the driver turning around in his seat.
“Take her inside, I’ll be back shortly,” the driver says, watching you in the rear view mirror as Gaz shuffles you over the seat and pulls you outside, taking your phone and room key from you and tossing them to the other man. The unmissable press of the gun against your side keeps you compliant and quiet as he marches you into a nondescript house on an average street. It’s disturbing how close you still are to your nice hotel, maybe only a few miles from safety and help.
Your abductor marches you through the door and down a short flight of steps into a basement, flicking on a lamp in the corner as you stumble in the darkness. The dim light illuminates a double bed, a tattered armchair, and a few other pieces of worn furniture. The connotations of this setup make bile scald the back of your throat.
“Right, you stay here,” Gaz tells you, as though you have a choice. “The door’s gonna be locked, so don’t bother trying it.” With a casual glance up and down your half dressed, trembling form he heads back up the stairs to the ground floor, the sound of the door shutting and the lock turning sounding like the end of the world.
You spend a fruitless few minutes fumbling around and trying to find an exit, a weapon, anything that might help you escape. The only other door opens into a tiny bathroom that has been partitioned off the basement, making it clear they intend to keep you here for a long period. As hopelessness threatens to overwhelm you the door upstairs clicks open and two sets of boots clomp down the stairs.
The bigger guy, wearing a balaclava still and this time with a hideous sharp tooth skull mask, carries your suitcase from the hotel and your shoulder bag. Your stomach roils as you realise he went back and checked you out, so no one will notice you’re missing right away. He sets it down and saunters over to the armchair facing the bed, sitting down and spreading his thick thighs wide.
You flinch as Gaz touches your neck, you hadn’t noticed him nearing as you had focused on the other guy.
“That’s Ghost by the way,” Gaz informs you with the same friendly tone. “He’s gonna help us enjoy ourselves.”
“Enjoy? I don’t think that’s what you’ve got planned for me,” you croak out, eyes bouncing back and forth between the pair. Ghost chuckles darkly.
“Maybe not, love,” he replies, “but we will anyways.”
You freeze as Gaz tugs at the tie to your dress again, finishing undoing it now and letting it fall open.
“Fuckin’ hell,” Ghost murmurs, his dark eyes raking over your curves and lingerie, shifting in his chair as he adjust his blue jeans to accommodate a growing bulge in his crotch. “Classy bitch.”
Gaz hums with approval, tugging the dress off your shoulders before walking you backwards until the musty bed knocks against the back of your legs.
“Shoes, off,” he tells you, voice low and dark, “then on the bed. Don’t make me tell you twice.”
You consider refusing for a moment, but fear gets the better of your bravado and you kick your shoes off and climb onto the bed, the mattress creaking softly as you move into the middle and lay back. Gaz follows, grasping your knees and forcing them wide so he can kneel betweeen your legs. For several moments he contents himself with running his palms up and down your exposed legs, kneading the plushness of your thighs with increasing enthusiasm. His finger trail closer to your lace underwear, grazing over the fabric covering your pussy, making you twitch each time.
“Are you going to get on with it?” Ghost grumbles, absently rubbing a hand over his bulging crotch.
“There’s no rush,” Gaz grins at the other man, but carries on and hooks his fingers into the elastic either side of your hips and pulls roughly, ripping the underwear down your thighs. The thin fabric snaps and he tosses it away. Before you can snap your legs closed, he lunges forward, pushing his hand against your exposed cunt and pressing his fingers against you seam.
“Shit, she’s wet,” he groans, fingers probing between your pussy lips and a terrified sound catches in your throat. “Ugh, so fuckin’ wet,” he repeats as his thick fingers slide back and forth, exploring and invading you, humiliation and fear surging in your chest and forcing tears from your eyes. He finds what he is looking for and grunts triumphantly when he feels your hips jerk, pressing his fingers against your clit again and begin to circle it slowly.
“Is that all for us, love?” you hear the masked man ask, and you shake your head, squeezing your eyes shut to block them both out. Fat tears roll down the side of your face while Gaz slowly rubs the pad of his finger back and forth over your sensitive nub. The dull ache from earlier returns, the nub swelling eagerly at the stimulation against your will.
“Nah, I reckon she was reading porn back at the bar the way she was wriggling in her seat,” Gaz says. “Got herself nice and worked up for us, saved us some effort.” He abandons your clit, and moves a rough, slicked finger against your entrance and presses slowly. You try to pull your hips away, but a harsh slap lands against your thigh making you yelp.
“Hold still,” he warns you, and you whimper but stay still as he forces his digit inside.
“Please don’t,” you whisper shakily, feeling his calloused finger slipping further inside, then retreating slightly before moving further in. He ignores your protest and slowly fingers you, adding a second shortly after, slowly pumping them in and out of your cunt. He leans down over you, kissing across your chest and over the lacy cups of your bra, licking and sucking at your nipples through the delicate fabric. His breath comes faster, getting worked up as he assaults you, and his hips move in an echo of his hands movements.
“Gotta taste these,” he groans, and pulls sharply on one cup, ripping the material open before sucking your nipple into his hot mouth. He moans, flicking the bud with his tongue, causing your muscles to tighten around his fingers every time. Your body fights against you, slick dribbling down his hand from the way he plays you, disgust and arousal warring inside you.
Another sob bubbles up your throat and Gaz looks up at you with bright eyes, pulling his mouth from your tit with a loud, wet pop before grabbing your chin with his free hand.
He turns your head to face the masked behemoth, whose heavy cock is free of his jeans and cupped in his palm now, stroking his length slowly as he watches you struggle against Gaz pathetically. The light catches on shining metal, and you note the line of piercings along the underside of his shaft.
“Ghost likes it when you cry,” Gaz whispers in your ear. “Really gets him fired up. You keep that noise going he’ll lose control, so be careful.” An unstoppable sob rips from your throat, and as predicted, Ghost’s cock twitches in response to the sound.
“Stop talking and give me something to watch, Gaz,” he grumbles. “Otherwise I’m takin’ over and I don’t think she’ll survive that.”
“Yessir,” Gaz chuckles, the deep sound rumbling in his chest, and he leans back slightly to unbuckle his belt and undo his trousers. This means he takes his hand from between your legs and you try to clamp them closed as he kicks away his trousers, and peels off his shirt. He is toned, muscular and would be painfully beautiful, if it wasn’t for him being pure fucking evil.
“Open those legs love, or you’ll get another slap,” Ghost warns you, and it’s only a split second before a ringing slap lands against your cheek from the man on the bed, making your face burn and more tears fall. “Fuck… do that again, it’s makes her whole body jiggle,” Ghost growls, and Gaz does as he is told, slapping you again making your head snap towards the other man. You see him pumping his pierced cock, the tip ruddy and leaking with excitement.
The break in your concentration gives Gaz the opportunity to force his weight between your thighs, his length slotting against your pussy and dragging it back and forth, coating it in your slickness. You try to kick him away, to push him back and fight him, but he overpowers you all too easily and the struggle only spurs him on.
“I grabbed this from her room,” Ghost says and pulls something from his pocket, throwing it onto the bed. Your heart sinks when you see your vibrator on the sheet beside you. It’s quickly picked up and turned on, then pressed against your swollen nub. The vibration against your clit has your back arching off the mattress, and Gaz uses this moment to force his cock inside you, making you yell out at the sudden, unwelcome intrusion.
“How does she feel?” Ghost demands, a tightness to his voice betraying his desperate arousal as he watches Gaz bury his dick inside you.
“Nggghh… she’s a big, soft girl… with a tight cunt…” he grunts. “Fuckin… perfect.” He grinds his hips against you, making sure he gets every inch inside you, wrapped in your tight heat, filling you to the point of pain but the vibrator twists the sensation sickeningly. You feel your walls clench tight around him, pain and fear mixing with aching pleasure.
He moves his hips back, dragging his fat cock against the walls of your pussy, and nerves spark as he does so because of the stimulation to your bundle of nerves. The bastard fucks you mercilessly, taking great care to keep your clit buzzing, he rams his cock into you again and again. The stretch around him is intense, too many sensations and emotions battling for your attention, and you feel the unmistakable righting in your stomach and pelvis.
“No, nonono…” you whine, giving away the fact you are going to come, legs kicking at the bed beneath you uselessly. Your body shakes and bounces, both men watching every time your tits shift back and forth like salivating beasts.
“That’s it, love,” you hear Ghost groan over Gaz’s panting breaths. “Give us a show and come like the whore you are.” His voice shakes and you make the mistake of looking over at him through your tears, seeing him fucking his fist as Gaz violates you, his head tipped back and chest heaving as he pleasures himself.
Your unwanted orgasm tears through you, tensed muscles spasming wildly and you cannot stop the yell that bursts from your lips. Gaz’s movements become more unhinged, hips slamming painfully against yours as he chases his own high now he has felt you squeezing around him. He grabs your hips, fingers digging viciously into your rolls and making you whimper.
With a few more vicious thrusts he barks a rough shout of triumph and unloads himself into you, thick cum filling your abused cunt.
“Ah, good girl,” Gaz coos breathlessly, leaning down and kissing your forehead as he withdraws his cock.
“Yeah, she’s gonna keep us entertained,” Ghost agrees, wiping his cum covered hand on his jeans before getting up and tucking his softening cock away with a hiss. He heads up the stairs, leaving you with Gaz in the basement.
Gaz shuffles beside you on the bed, you feel exhausted and drained, body boneless and heavy. Your mind stays thankfully blank, the combination of terror, alcohol and orgasm creating a static buzz behind your eyes that drowns out coherent thought. After a moment he pulls a thick duvet up over you both, and he rolls you onto your side facing him.
“Just get some rest now, you did well for a first time,” he mumbles, shifting lower down and wrapping his arms around the soft expanse of your middle. Your eyes are already closing, but you squeal quietly when you feel his hot mouth against your nipple once more. Forcing your eyes open you look down blearily and see him suckling on your nipple, his eyes closed as he holds you tightly. He hums contentedly, sucking your puckered flesh into his mouth lazily as though preparing to doze off like this, and you feel a fresh wave of horror settle over your skin like an icy blanket.
You’re trapped with them.
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harryspet · 3 months
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can u plsss do something where reader keeps noticing dark rafe always looking at her at the gym and then he follows her out one night w noncon 🙏🏾
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[warnings] dark!gymbro!rafe x reader, NONCON sex, little editing READ AT YOUR OWN RISK 18+
word count: 1.1k
When a brand new gym was built near your apartment complex, you knew you had no excuse but to start going on a regular basis. Despite how scared you were of the gym bros and pilates princesses, you pushed yourself to start. First, you attended the group workout classes to get yourself comfortable. Slowly, you started using all of the other gym equipment. 
Once you started going to the gym after work, you got even more comfortable with working out in the presence of others. Sometimes you were even brave enough to start conversations with other girls who were working out by themselves. You still considered it a time for you to decompress, and often, you listened to music or podcasts for the entire time. 
As you got into a routine, you started to notice the gym attendees who were always there when you were. You started to differentiate the people you saw on the weekend versus those you saw during the weekends. There was one attendee in particular you began to notice more and more. Whenever you were at the gym, he seemed to be there too. He was always there before you, and he was often still working out when you were leaving.
At first, it wasn’t an irrational thought to believe he spent a lot of time there. His upper body was no laughing matter, in fact, he almost looked dangerous when he was lifting in front of the mirror. Short dark blonde hair and empty blue eyes often greeted you whenever you were trying to mind your own business. At first, you thought it was a coincidence because why would someone like that take an interest in you? 
Besides that, he’d never spoken to you. Unsuccessfully, you tried to tune him out. There were always eyes lingering on you while you walked on the treadmill or when you were grabbing weights from the rack. As you grew more comfortable with your body, you started buying cute workout sets, ones that hugged your curves. The staring only increased, making you feel conflicted about your choice. 
He was not at all your type. You’d never been with a muscular type of guy, and you’d feel quite intimidated by someone like that. Deliberately, you started wearing jackets and sweatshirts again. 
There was a grocery store also near your apartment, and you’d often stop by after your workout. One night, you noticed him standing near the bakery section, gray hoodie over his head, as you were looking through the smoothies in the fresh produce section. 
You debated going up to him and just saying hello to put yourself at ease, but when you turned around again, he was gone. You carried your few bags of groceries back to your apartment, listening to one of your favorite podcasts and fantasizing about the relaxing bath you were going to take. 
Like always, you used your key fob to enter your apartment. With your arms being occupied, you kicked the door to close it, before heading into the kitchen. When all your groceries were placed on the counter, you took off your headphones, immediately hearing your door click shut. You turned around to see a dark figure standing at the entrance of your door. 
You took in a sharp breath and immediately stepped back. As you recognized that hoodie, the horror began to truly set in. When he pulled off the hoodie and revealed those dark eyes, you couldn’t stop the scream that your body released. 
As he lunged towards you, your eyes darted to the knife block sitting on the counter. You charged towards the knives as he grabbed ahold of your waist, lifting you away from the counter. Before you could scream again, he pressed his hand into your mouth, muffling the sound. 
Desperately, you kicked and bit down on his hand. He groaned as he through you down on your living room couch, “Shit,” He cursed, but he was already pinning you down onto the couch, “Scream, and I-I swear I will kill you.”
He wrapped a strong hand around your throat and pinned your lower body down with the weight of his body, “I’m serious. Before anyone came for you or before anyone could call the police. Do you want to die?” You quieted your strangled cries, staring up at him with teary eyes, “Good. I don’t want to do that. You’re so pretty …I would hate to have to …”
His voice was deep and raspy, only adding to your fear, “Y/N … beautiful angel Y/N … my name is Rafe,” All you could ask yourself was why he would give you his name. Why would he show you his face if he was going to leave you alive. Laying helpless beneath him, you felt your odds dwindling away, “This gorgeous body is all mine, right? You don’t mind if I … see more of it, do you?”
He kept his grip on your neck as he pulled up your sports bra, freeing your breasts. With his free hand, he grabbed and kneaded at the sensitive area. He felt and pinched until your nipples were standing at attention, “I knew you’d have such pretty titties …” You watched his lips pull into a smile, “But you know what? I bet your pussy is even prettier.” 
You were caught off guard when Rafe released your neck. As you gasped and struggled for air, he lifted himself off of you, grabbing your waist and pulling your lower half off of the couch. You were bent over the furniture as Rafe again gained control of you, his hand gripping the back of your neck as he pushed you into the furniture. 
He was kneeling beside you, his fingers beginning to trace the folds of your pussy through your leggings. You squirmed in his grasp, feeling every detail of his finger through the thin material, “Shit, I need you, baby,” He groaned, “I need you so bad.”
Abruptly, he ripped open your leggings, causing you to beg, “Please, please, don’t.”
“I’m so hard for you; I need you,” You felt even more humiliated when you heard him spit into his hand and as he pressed it into your exposed area. You felt him moving behind you before he held your hips tightly in place, and you felt his tip against your entrance, “You need me too, don’t you? All these weeks I’ve been watching you, you’ve never had anyone over. You need that pretty pussy filled, huh?”
 Rafe’s words were hasty, panicked almost, like he truly couldn’t control himself, “Please, Rafe, w-we can take it slow,” You tried, but he began to hush you. 
“I’m sorry,” You heard him say as he pushed into you; your body did its best to stretch around him, “I’m so sorry, I …I have to have you, baby.”
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send dark rafe ideas
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sprout-fics · 6 months
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Engravings (Chapter One)
(Makarov x F! Reader)
Engravings Masterlist
Word Count: 4.2k Rating: Mature Tags: Brainwashing, Emotional Manipulation, Kidnapping, False Romance, Angst, Hurt/No Comfort, Injury/Blood, Whump, Stockholm Syndrome, Winter Soldier AU, No Fluff, Psychological Abuse, Eventual Happy Ending Warnings: Dead Dove Do Not Eat, Mind the tags (Read on Ao3)
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“How do you think you’ll die?”
His fingers still as they trace your bare spine.
It’s silent in the solitude of his apartment, one of many he moves between to keep safe. This is one of the nicer ones. Furnished with silk sheets, the interior is immaculately clean. Wide windows overlook St. Petersburg below, a sight you never see with towering curtains blocking the view. Carefully curated art hangs from the walls, an abstract painting flecked with gold above his bed. You see shapes in it, think you see something akin to a lynx staring back at you. There’s never anything on the counters, no mess that would indicate someone lives here. It feels too pristine, almost artificial.
Hazy, bluish light drowns both of you as you both sprawl in bed. You like it when he makes love to you here. The large space makes you feel so alone, so much closer to him, like you have him all to yourself. Greedy, you drink in his scent, claw at his back, listen to his breath stutter as he rolls his hips into you.
Makarov is silent as you tuck into his side, shift and tangle your legs a little closer to his. You can’t see his face, but you know the look in his eyes. Precise, calculating, almost detached. His silence is indicative of his answer before he even speaks it.
“With glory.” He responds, fingers resuming their lazy path. “For Russia.”
You nod without any response. You’re not sure what you expected, but it should have been that. Makarov is a soldier, just like you are. A warrior, one who will kill, die for his ideals. As much as you long after him, as much as he loves you in return, you know his death will be exactly as he says. Not gently, not beside you in old age, sighing softly into your arms with his last breath, a lifetime of joy he left behind. His mere existence speaks of violence and retribution, a danger you yourself are caught in as an inescapable tide.
You don’t remember a time before Makarov.
There’s glimpses, yes, whispers of a time before he found you, but they’re distant echoes drowned by the sound of his voice. He says you were a soldier, and you know this much is true. He says he found you dying, on the brink of death. He scooped you from the ashes, rescued you from the embrace of the grim reaper and brought you here. Home. Your earliest memory of him is when he sat in the hospital chair, looked upon you with curious, sad eyes and asked you your name.
You didn’t know.
Marionette, your callsign. A name he bestowed upon you, the one who holds the strings. You’re his blade, his weapon, the arrow in his bow. You fly in the direction of his enemies, cut them down with lethal precision, feel their heartbeats stutter and still in your hands. You’re used to the scent of blood by now, arrive back to him awash in red and let him kiss it from your lips, the taste of your murder on his tongue.
You know what the others say about you. You see them as they watch you walk with him, two steps back, by his right shoulder. A designated position. If someday he were to be betrayed, shot through his spine, you know the bullet would enter you first.
You know too that you’ve accepted this.
Marionette. The puppet, the other soldiers say. Beautiful, poised, but empty. He holds you in his palms and you go willingly, holding onto every scrap of warmth he offers like it will fill the hollow inside you. The others, they’re scared of your devotion to him, the way you’d be ready to die if he asked. Yet there’s something else there too, glimpses of desire for a thing they’ll never touch. A longing to feel your skin, to see the glimmer behind your gaze. Those who look too long disappear, and you know without having to ask that it was through his hands.
You’re his, after all.
In private he calls you милая, дорогая, любимая. Honey, darling, beloved. He cups your face in his hands and presses gentle kisses to your forehead, presses you into the sheets with endless praises of your violence. He treats you like he loves you, even though he never says it. You think perhaps it’s taboo for people like you, speaking of blessings only to have them stolen as soon as you confess. He gathers you to him when he sleeps, presses your bare form to his. You stay awake just to hear the sound of his even, steady breaths, watch how his face doesn’t soften even in sleep.
In the morning he’s gone before you rise. You tiptoe to the living room, see him standing at a crack in the curtains, awash in the hazy dawn. When you wrap your arms around his bare torso, he kisses your knuckles but says nothing. Eyes distant.
Loving Makarov is hard.
He always seems not completely there with you, eyes gazing into a distant future you cannot see. You’re stuck in the present, helplessly watching him discern the spinning axis of the earth, blinking as you see constellations sparkle in his gaze. Copernicus, he watches the stars rotate with him at the axis, tracing across their glimmering brightness like he’s drawing prophecies from the heavens. All for once was a far-fetched dream of Russia, one that becomes closer with every death in your grasp.
You don’t do it for his vision. You do it for him, and there’s some days where you wonder if you could ever stop.
“Come back to bed.” You whisper against the flesh of his shoulder, and he holds your hand to his chest where you feel his pulsing heartbeat.
“There are things to be done.” He murmurs instead. He’s silent for a while, as if waiting for you to protest. You never do.
“Dress. Eat.” He tells you in Russian, as he turns to hold your face in his hands. “I have somewhere to send you.”
That’s how you end up in Prague.
Trailing an informant, one of his own. He’s a twitchy sort, constantly looking over his shoulder in a way that means he knows he’s being followed. Your mission is not to kill him, not yet. First you must see who he meets, which enemy he speaks to, and then bury them both.
December. Snow dusts the streets. You’ve long since become accustomed to the winters in this part of the world, the way the sun hides during this part of the year. You’re bundled in a stylish coat and matching scarf- his choosing. It brings him a certain pleasure, somehow, to choose how you dress. You find you don’t mind, leaning up to his words of endearment with every fine thread he drapes you in.
It’s a shame the coat will get stained. You find he doesn’t mind that either, as if he prefers the color red on you.
You sip on coffee in a chair of the cafe, wishing instead for hot chocolate. The bitterness is familiar, even as the temptation of sweetness lingers in your senses. You hide your face between sips, pulling up the mask that covers the lower half of your face. The informant sits in a corner booth alone, leg bouncing. Sloppy. Obvious. You watch him with cat-like eyes, blinking slowly, wondering if he’ll beg when you kill him. The man that meets him is calmer, dark haired, clearly English. His mere presence seems to soothe the other man, and you watch as they discuss things in hushed detail, the informant sliding a USB across the table where their drinks sit untouched.
The Englishman leaves first, gives a small farewell and shrugs on his coat, neatly slipping the traitorous item in his pocket. You wait a minute until after he leaves, watching your fidgety comrade count on his watch by instruction until he too is supposed to depart. You’ll be back for him later. You know where to find him.
You trail the Englishman into the overcast afternoon, following his dark coat until the street is empty. Yet as you close the distance between you and the spy, a figure rounds the corner just in front of him. Your awareness roars to life a moment too late, and even though you stab your knife forward the man before you counters it easily. His movements are experienced, practiced, and strong. They counter your quick, precise agility in a flurry of movement, before at last you’re forced into the shadow of a building, his broad form crowding you from behind.
“Where is he?” The man breathes in your nape. Cigar smoke, musk, the grip on your wrists speaking of a soldier’s strength. You don’t need to ask who. You already know. You know you’ll die before you tell him.
“Minsk.” You lie easily, and the grip on your hands tightens.
“Try again.” He growls.
“You’ll never find him.” You offer instead, voice easy, almost detached. It makes him pause for some reason, and you wonder if that alone has startled him.
You don’t expect him to flip you around, press his forearm to your throat and rip down your mask.
You see him for the first time then. He’s worn in the way warriors are, years of duty etched onto his face. Thick brows, a beard, eyes that you think in another lifetime could have been kind. He stares at you with open astonishment, a bewildered shock that fades to a strange grief you can’t understand.
“You’re alive.” He whispers.
You blink at him, and for the first time feel your expression change to that of confusion. He seems to recognize you. You’ve never seen him once in your entire life.
He whispers a name, one you don’t know. Yet the voice he speaks it in is that of despair, a realization that seems to eclipse the fabric of his soul.
“What has he done to you?”
Panic flares inside you, and suddenly your entire being is consumed in the instinct to run, run, run. The man holding you captive radiates a danger far beyond that of duty, a fear that roots inside you and cracks at the foundation of your composure. You throw a leg up between you, and in his attempt to dodge his grip loosens on you. You duck under him, seize the knife that had been wrestled from your grip. A slash on his leg brings him to a knee. You dart a distance away from him, shaking, looking back with wild eyes. Red drips from your blade.
You should kill him. You’re not sure you can if you try.
You run.
When you find the informant, let his blood pool over his fingers, you see your own fear mirrored in his eyes.
The Englishman gets away. It’s an unacceptable failure, and when you send an encrypted message to Makarov he is silent for some time before he responds.
Report back.
He’s displeased to say the least when you arrive, mouth pressed into a scowl, brow drawn tight. You try to stand tall, refusing to show just how shaken you are by the whole ordeal. You know better than to show him weakness. Yet the man’s words from before haunt you, repeating in a ceaseless echo that sends the world under you spinning violently.
Makarov paces away from you, but at the mention of the stranger he snaps to look at you, blinking in something akin to shock. It flashes over his features for only a moment before he stills back into his stony passiveness, and then it darkens into something that makes your stomach sit heavy, making you nearly take a step back at the glint that warns of danger.
He strides over to you, and this time you do falter. You’ve seen Makarov angry before, but it was always with his subordinates, the men who show fear, hesitation, those who don’t follow orders. You’ve seen him shoot a man dead for daring to question him, and as he stood over the man’s oozing corpse he had murmured that Russia’s future did not include traitors.
Yet this- as he crosses the room with surprising speed, as you reel backwards out of pure instinct, as he captures your jaw and presses you to the wall so the lynx painting rattles- is different.
“His name.” He growls, teeth bared, jaw clenched, and he doesn’t notice the way your hand encloses his wrist in a pleading grasp. “What was his name?”
“I-I don’t know.” You manage in hardly a whisper. “I swear.”
He holds you for moments longer, stares into your eyes and waits for your gaze to falter with dishonesty. Your heart beats at an aleatory rhythm in your chest, a tremble starting in your hands and spreading along the sinews of your body. Yet as Makarov waits for you to stumble, to confess something you don’t have, you stare into his eyes.
and you see fear.
The ground cracks under you like splintering ice. A flare of panic takes a frigid hold of your veins. Makarov is not afraid. He is not fearful. He isn’t scared of death, of defeat. He throws himself in the jaws of lions and peels their teeth to use as daggers. He does not waver, he remains steadfast, unmovable. So this...this....
He releases you, and it takes all your strength to not gasp in relief, practically sagging against the wall as he turns. There’s a coiled tension to his shoulders, his fists clenching and then releasing before he turns back to you, eyes almost gentle.
“I’m sorry, darling.” He murmurs, reaching forward to loop his arms around your waist. Despite the tremble in your limbs you learn eagerly into the safety of his embrace. “I shouldn’t have scared you. I just can’t imagine the thought of someone like that taking you away from me.”
He presses your cheek to his shoulder, and even though you stay there your eyes are unblinking, wide, as if seeing the first glimmer of the truth to come.
As you sleep in his arms that night, you lay awake with wide eyes still, the stranger’s words repeating endlessly in the cacophony of your mind.
“What did he do to you?”
He gives you a few days to rest but leaves you alone in the too-large apartment. You feel miniscule against the towering windows that overlook the city, and in the absence of his touch your thoughts spiral in uncertainty.
How did he know you?
You’re sent out once more, and this time you aren’t alone. It unnerves you. You’ve worked by yourself for so long that the men on either side of you on the plane feel like they crowd into your space. One of them, the younger one, is fairly talkative. You pass idle exchanges, but every time he asks something that even remotely pertains to you his older comrade hisses at him, as if they’re not allowed to know. As if the mere knowledge of you as anything other than a weapon is a sin.
The rifle in your hands is familiar, the weight grounding as you perch on a snowy rooftop, examining the ambassador’s aide just outside his home. You watch him kiss his wife, blink and feel something familiar and forbidden tug in your ribs.
The older soldier is beside you, his own sights trained on the driver. His younger comrade scans the surrounding rooftops for interference. He doesn’t flinch at the gunshot, the scream from the wife.
He does, however, collapse at the third gunshot. Not yours.
You bolt, rifle hoisted to your shoulder. The older comrade calls for his friend, and you tug him back even as he fights you. He acts as a shield when the next shot rings out, and his blood coats your arms. You duck, roll, plant yourself behind a vent cover and search for the other sniper. You find him on a taller rooftop, his sights glinting in the dawn. A shot dents the steel, and you focus your sights on its origin.
A skull mask. A reaper.
It tugs at something inside your thoughts, the same place where the stranger’s words echo. Distant, a whisper of familiarity locked behind a terrible dread. Brown eyes. The color of rust. They widen when they see you, and in his hesitation you fire a single round.
Your aim is off.
It catches him by the shoulder, and he rolls out of view. As police sirens howl, you take that moment to escape, cast a lingering glance to the neighboring rooftop and wonder why it feels as if you just saw a phantom.
You lose two men, and the deaths are acceptable. They died for the cause. Martyrs for the future that Makarov divines even as he licks the blood clean from your fingers.
It’s only then that the dreams begin.
You sleep in an empty bed. Cold, the phantom chases you through sleep. The bone white mask fades at the edges like mist. It snakes into your lungs, chokes the air and freezes your ribs. In the hollow of your chest there’s whispers of a name you don’t recognize. Yelling, screaming, hands reaching for you amidst chaos and flames. You fall through the sky, descending too quickly. Their voices are lost to the wind, and as you pull at your shoulder, the thing that unfurls above you is shot through with debris. The ground races up, up, up-
You fall, wake up on the floor, trembling, chest heaving, trying to remember where you are. Who you are.
The voices chase you on your next assignment, pulse in tandem with the heartbeat that fades under your fingertips. You try to blot them out, try to replace them with the sound of his voice, and in the midnight darkness they return, howling like the gale. Faces you don’t recognize, hands, touches, laughter.
“You were talking in your sleep.” Makarov tells you when he rouses you in the darkness of a safehouse. Your bruised ribs from your last mission heal under bandages, and as he soothes a hand over them you wince but don’t protest. “Were you dreaming?”
Yes. You think, and open your mouth to tell him, confess the chaos of your nightmares. Yet something howls in the gale inside you, screams in a soundless cry that stifles the air in your chest, sends your voice into wordless silence.
“I don’t know.” You whisper, and it’s the first lie you’ve ever told him.
After that, you only dream when you’re alone.
Never alone on missions, not again. You’re constantly accompanied, flanked, and you have the itching, uncomfortable feeling that you’re being monitored.
You try to ask why you aren’t allowed to go alone and see the way the smile doesn’t reach his eyes when he holds you close.
“To keep you safe, дорогая.” He coos, stroking your cheek with his knuckles. “How could I ever lose you?”
You accept this, but the hollow of doubt inside you wonders that, if that were true, why he would risk you at all. Hardly a week goes by without another injury, another bruise from a target, a mission, an enemy he throws you at and you carve into fatal stillness. It feels in some ways like he’s punishing you, forcing you to bear the cost of his love. Yet he presses kisses to your cuts, the blossoming yellow and purple across your skin, sighs endearments and swallows your whimpers with the slant of his mouth against yours.
Yet you fall into him, your only source of comfort, your beacon. You’re lost without him, a marionette with no master. You don’t whisper the sin of your loved confession even as it tightens in your chest, knowing he can never say it back lest it summon destruction. Taboo, forbidden, just like the doubts you refuse to share with him. You cling to him instead, listen to his heartbeat and try to synchronize it with your own.
“You’re shaking.” He whispers as you shiver in his arms following something akin to lovemaking. “Are you scared?”
“No.” You tell him, another lie. It’s not of him, never him. Not yet.
Your dreams are the thing that terrify you, and you fear them because you don’t understand. They paint images you struggle to discern. Falling one moment, caught in an embrace the next. Gunfire replaced by the clink of glasses and a bark of laughter. Cigar smoke envelopes you, war paint smears charcoal across your fingertips. An arm slings across your shoulder in warm familiarity, hands wrap a wound, and blue eyes turn to you in an affectionate concern. They whisper a name that bores into your marrow, takes holds like rot, and the deeper you carve to dig it out the more you begin to fracture.
Doubt, and it terrifies you. You never have to doubt Makarov. You turn to his hands as they guide you, surrender to his touch as they hone the fatal edge of your killing strike. You’re his, and his alone.
It’s in Belgrade that you begin to understand.
The details of the mission are obscure. Moving a Belarusian oligarch, a team with you. Different from your usual assignments, your carefully curated wardrobe is exchanged for plate armor, gloves, bracers. You wear it like a second skin. The weight is familiar, almost relieving. There’s not much for you to do, sitting in the back of the Humvee beside the package, watching the nighttime city fade to countryside and listening to the loud thrum of the convoy. You’re still healing from your last mission, a sprain that aches in your shoulder. You didn’t protest when he pressed it, took note of your grimace and declared you fit for duty. You must have made a face, because he’d tipped his knuckles under your chin, and had forced you to meet his gaze.
“You’ll do it for me, won’t you, Marionette?” He murmured with those dark, soft, velvet eyes, and you found yourself empty of protests.
The Belarusian oligarch grumbles the entire time, and you don’t entertain him. Yet eventually he seems to take notice of you in a different sense, eyes roaming over the dip of your waist that your gear obscures, then up to your eyes hidden by your helmet. You see it out of the corner of your eye, ignore his sly murmur and hungry gaze. He plants a hand on the thigh hidden by your canvas pants, and you resist the fatalistic urge to separate his fingers from his-
A whoosh of noise, a shout by the soldier in the front seat. Garbled, surprised Russian, and you make out the shout of GRENADE!! before the world groans and twists violently around you.
The truck lands upside down, and you kick out the window to escape, haul the unconscious oligarch out behind you, then the driver. The convoy screeches to a halt, darkness illuminated by growing flames and bright bursts of gunshots. A comrade runs to assist your stumbling stance even as you try to drag your package to another truck, and he gets three steps before he crumples to the ground. The bridge where the convoy is halted is precarious, prone to gunfire, and you can hear panicked shouts as those in the trucks behind you realize the mangled wreckage of your Humvee blocks the way.
Another grenade, and this one is close. It knocks you flat onto your back, scatters asphalt and dust over you. There’s a ringing in your ears that deafens gunshots to distant pops, and even your groan of pain sounds like it comes from under water. Your helmet has been knocked from your face, and when you tilt your head to the side you see hostiles growing closer, nearly atop you.
You stand, turn, fall again as a bullet grazes your shoulder. Yet there’s a shout then from behind you, one you stubbornly ignore as you rise once more, stagger towards the edge of the bridge.
That name again, the once that’s become familiar to you by now, the one that isn’t yours. You bend over the railing, stare at the current below, racing in the darkness. The voice calls again, and you turn, stare at the face partially obscured by his helmet. Brown eyed, a mustache, younger than your spirit feels. You’ve seen him before, and you don’t know where, like he’s appeared in a distant dream.
Hands off his weapon, he takes a step towards you, repeats the name in a cracked, desperate call. You look at him, feel fear of the unknown once more pulse between your ribs. The ringing in your ears grows louder, and you stumble backwards in uncertainty. He reaches for you.
“Wait-” He tries, gaze open with despair. “Please.”
“I know you.” You breathe, seeing the way the fire alights across his brown skin in amber hues. “I...”
A step back, a stumble. You pitch over the railing, into the water.
Darkness surrounds you.
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darlingdarkly · 29 days
Text
New Year, New You Part 8
Johnny “Soap” MacTavish x f!reader
Personal Trainer AU
9k words
CW: dubcon!, dark fic, dark content, obsessive behavior, dirty talk, explicit language, E rated, NSFW, smut, 18+, mature themes, gaslighting
Part 1, 7, 9
You grill him with questions, demanding him to explain to you what he’s talking about. It seems obvious to you that he knows something he’s not letting on. The words fly from your mouth in a panic. “What do you mean it’s not safe? What are you talking about, Johnny? Explain!”
You see him get a little heated, a reaction you hadn’t expected, in fact the whole exchange following your inquisitions is so out of left field that it renders you speechless.
“Obviously hen, ye were a victim of a crime last night. Do ye nae see that?” You hadn’t seen that, it was so hard to remember anything about last night that drawing any kind of conclusion had so far been beyond you.
He sees it starting to click and continues, striking while the irons hot. “How many times in the past have ye gotten black out drunk, bonnie?” You have certainly had your fair share of ragers but black out drunk? To the point of almost total memory loss? Never.
“Did ye really think wakin’ up an’ nae bein’ able tae remember a damn thing was normal? Open yer eyes, lass.” He did this so well it seemed, had a way of breaking you down and making you feel small just to build you back up how he saw fit, cutting through the walls and all the bullshit to speak directly to you in a way no one before him had. It was humiliating and liberating all at once.
He sees he’s made his point. “Ah’m nae kiddin’, lass. I think ye were drugged las’ night an’ ah’d say yer awful lucky ah showed up when ah did.” His voice had taken on a kind of verbal growl, Scottish accent deepening so that it was almost hard to understand. He seemed genuinely upset, more than you could seem to get even though you were the victim, but you could feel it settling into your bones now, the unease.
Your face must be a mask of your emotions because he starts to calm now that he feels he's gotten through to you and he takes your hand into both of his. “Ye need tae understand somethin’, hen.” He seems to be mulling over the words in his head, unsure of the next thing to say. “I care about ye, I want ye tae be safe an’ happy an’ I think ye should stay with me. It’s nae safe fer ye tae be livin’ on yer own.”
You feel a bit surprised at his candidness, a show of emotions you hadn’t expected and it sends a hot flare up from your stomach and heats your cheeks. “Johnny I can’t stay.” He forces his gaze to yours, holds you hostage with it. “Why nae?”
That’s a good question, one you didn’t have an answer for. Why couldn’t you stay with him? Would it really be so bad? You’d been living on your own for so long maybe you were afraid of that change.
You opened your mouth to answer but he stopped you before you could. “Jus’ think about it. I’ll ask ye again tonight an’ if ye dinnae want tae, ah willnae make ye.” He closed it with that, getting up off the bed to signal the talk was over. “Come on, time fer yer warm up.”
After changing, you followed him out the door and into unfamiliar territory, the rest of the house you’ve yet to see. He leads you into an open living area that blended into a nice big kitchen. The house looked like it could house a whole family let alone just the two of you. You followed as your head craned and took it all in. The rent must have been astronomical but it was still Johnny’s house and he didn’t bother with extravagancies. It was spacious but also sparsely decorated making it look huge in perspective.
You cut through the space and into another room. You hadn’t really expected him to have a personal home gym, since he worked at one you naturally assumed he’d just go to work to exercise. The middle of the room was empty and matted, heavy duty, black pads interlocked like puzzle pieces made a twelve by twelve square in the center. The walls of the room were lined with full weight racks, adjustable benches, a treadmill and a power tower.
He stops in the middle of the black square and motions for you to sit. You sit, criss cross applesauce, across from him and he motions for you to begin. You start to go through your warm ups, starting with your sit-ups. He holds your feet and keeps count for you, his grin widening as you progressed.
Today was different and in more ways than one, when you’d finished he had you sit up and hold his feet, meaning for this to be a joint session for the both of you instead of just one sided as it normally was. You had to sit with your knees on the toes of his feet to keep him weighted down and he went for three reps of twenty instead of ten. You could feel the strength he possessed, the power held in the corded muscles of his thighs and calves by just holding him down.
You moved through the first set and into the next, keeping count of his push ups and even clumsily crawling up on his back when he insisted on needing your added weight. While it’d only really been a week since you’d stopped, you found that you’d come to miss this. Partly the healthy routine you’d built with him and partly his presence itself. Slipping back into it was not only easy but welcoming and this new way of having him doing it right along with you was something you secretly found yourself falling in love with.
You practically floated through your warm ups, hardly feeling the burn of them. You sat on the mat with your legs stretched out in front of you in a V. Without any assistance from him you managed a full, complete split and you couldn’t quite hide the elation you felt when his eyes lit up and praise poured from his lips.
Limber and pliant you both rose up from the mat and he walked you over to the power tower, standing out from you as you positioned yourself underneath the pull up bar. You jumped and grabbed ahold of the cool metal. You began, pulling yourself up until your chin passed the bar and then dropping down again.
It was hard but you were determined to finish, huffing and puffing by the last rep but still able to pull yourself past the point without stopping. You caught your breath as he muscled through his. You had long recovered when he finally jumped down, making your measly three look like light work as he managed a solid fifteen before finally coming to a halt.
You knew the next portion was the treadmill but as you made to mount it he stopped you. “Let’s go fer a real run, what dae ye think?” You stopped to consider it. You’d always wanted to go for a real jog, much preferring the open air of outside to the confines of an automated conveyor belt but had been much too scared to attempt such a thing on your own.
You’d always heard stories of women going out on jogs and simply never returning, their bodies found weeks later floating in rivers or lying in ditches. As alluring as the idea was your fears had always kept you inside but with a man like Johnny by your side you could pretty much garuntee total safety.
The prospect of finally getting to do as you pleased excited you and you found yourself chomping at the bit to go. He grabbed his house keys and escorted you to the door, locking it tight behind him and stepping up beside you on the sidewalk. “Are ye ready?”
You smiled at him and nodded, it must have been contagious because one of his own sprung up on his face, lighting it up and making his blue eyes sparkle in the sun.
“There’s a park just doon the way. We’ll head there, do a lap an’ loop back.” You started at a light jog and was pleasantly surprised to see him keep the pace you’d set. You were a bit worried you’d be struggling to match him the whole way, although he did talk most of the way while you struggled to manage anything more than one word replies.
It was a beautiful day, the weather was mild and there was a cool breeze at your back like gentle fingers prodding you encouragingly along. You were suddenly glad for this strange turn of events, as troubling as it seemed at first. Feeling down all last week and then reluctant to go out with Nancy, the anxiety you’d felt in the drive to the club and then somehow ending up in Johnny’s bed the next morning.
Somehow even unable to remember any of the events from the night before, something that, in all reality should leave you mortified and sick left you only feeling a strange sense of calm, like in the end it had all worked out how it was meant to be. You found yourself thinking about this morning and how he’d been almost mad at you for not being more concerned about last night, but you just couldn’t feel it.
There was eventually an underlying sense of unease that he’d practically forced onto you but it was only fleeting, like someone who’s fallen asleep at the wheel only to wake up in the hospital and be informed that you were lucky to be alive. It was hard to understand the reality of your danger when you’d walked away unscathed and without really having experienced it.
Maybe it was shell shock and you just weren’t completely grasping the reality of the situation but you weren’t holding your breath, and as far as taking him up on his offer you just weren’t all that convinced. While it was, admittedly, a problem that you’d drank too much and been unable to make it home last night, you failed to see any real danger in living by yourself.
You’d been doing fine thus far and didn’t see why that should have reason to change. You decided then that you’d made up your mind, you’d spend the day with Johnny, as gratitude for taking such good care of you in a time of need and just to enjoy it as well, it was only early in the afternoon but it was turning out to be a pretty good day in your book. You’d tell him later on when he asked that there really was no reason for you to stay with him. He’d understand, you were sure.
“Lass?” You were pulled away from your thoughts and back to the present. “Hmm?”
“I said what do ye think about havin’ fer dinner. I make an ossobuco that’ll bring ye tae tears.” You had no idea what that was but just expressed your interest anyway as you turned off of the sidewalk and into the entrance to the park.
It was one you recognized, beautfiully landscaped and as old as the hills, this park had been around for as long as you could remember, although it’d been ages since you’d been. They’d updated the playground and had redone the bridge over the pond, there was a flock of geese preening themselves on the surface of the dark, calm water.
You came to a stop at the peak of the bridge, glancing down at your Fitbit and checking your pulse. Johnny leaned his forearms onto the railing and leaned down for a look into the pond as you both caught your breath. He broke the peaceful silence that had settled between the two of you.
“I brought me mum here once. She used tae love feedin’ the swans at the pond near our house when I was wee. Used tae take me over there on our morning walks and I used tae make her laugh tryin’ tae catch one. Ah’ve taken more than one swan nip tae the arse as a lad.” You couldn’t help but laugh imagining him chasing the birds that probably matched him in size as a kid and then laughed some more as you imagined them chasing him, angry and nipping at his heels.
He laughed with you and as you nestled in next to him to stare out on the pond, just as the fit settled he leaned in close, nudged up against your side. “Ye’ll meet her if ye stay long enough ye know. She’d love ye.”
You felt a pang of uncomfortable awkwardness as he brought up the idea of you staying again. You didn’t want to dissapoint him by ruining the moment but you didn’t want to lead him on either. “Johnny…”
He stopped you. “Nae. Dinnae say anything yet. Ah was jus’ sayin’.”
You fell back into silence, a much more uncomfortable one this time but he wouldn’t let it set in as he pushed you back into a jog and lead you over the end of the bridge. It looped back around to where you’d started and it was only a quick jog back to his place where you ended your session for the day.
You both go inside and head for the kitchen, he pulls a blender hidden in a cabinet and sets it up on the counter before pulling out a litany of fruits along with a knife and small cutting board. He chops as he talks, going over your progress and performance, comparing it to your starting time and pace and mooning over the results.
He stops talking as he dumps the fruit into the blender and turns it on, the concoction inside swirling into a deep green slurry. When it’s homogenous he stops and pulls two glasses from a different cupboard. The juice makes a wet plop as it fills the glass and he slides one your way after sticking a bright orange straw down into its depths.
You pull it in front of you and take a long sip, confident in his smoothie skills at this point and relish in the way the sweet cool drink slides over your tongue and down your throat, already working to rejuvenate you.
He downs his quickly, an amazing feat that would surely leave you numb with brain freeze. Setting the glass down in the sink he rounds the counter to you. “I’m goin’ tae take a quick shower and then it’s yer turn.” He slides up close, lean chest pressing into your back and placing a kiss on the back of your neck that sent chills down your spine. “Unless ye want tae join me, that is.”
You do want to, nothing sounds better but you’re still tired from your session and you’ve experienced Johnny in his fulty, intense and unrelenting. If you went at it now you may never recover so you decline, opting to finish your drink and wait your turn. He leaves you and you turn on the stool to take in the decor. The little there is of it seems to be concentrated on a shelf in the corner.
You hop off the stool and walk tentatively over to it, surveying the shelves. There’s a few trophies, the plaques on each read that they’re awarded from some gym for a weightlifting competition. His name and the years were engraved in the middle of the plaque, he’d won them three years consecutively.
The other shelves were adorned with photographs. You glanced at them one by one, picking out Johnny’s radiant smile in each. Here’s one with him on the bank of a river, huddled together with a bunch of people all wearing the same bright orange helmets and yellow vests in varying states of soaked, they’re all holding short stubby oars and smiling.
The next one is a much larger group of people, they’re all different ages but share similar qualities, their eyes and noses on different faces but seem to be shaped from the same clay by the same hands. They’re assembled in front of a sign that reads “MacTavish Family Reunion” and it takes you a moment to pick out Johnny from the crowd of baby blues and deep rich browns. You finally spot him clustered in the back with two other young men hanging off of his shoulders. They look like three of a rambunctious kind.
Beside that is Johnny in a long black robe and mortarboard, from the cap dangles a dark green tassel that hangs in the poofy frizz of long dark brown curls belonging to a shorter stout woman. Her eyes are so bright and shockingly blue they couldn’t belong to anyone other than Johnny’s mother. She looks soft and sweet but strong as she beams at the camera. Her face exudes nothing but pride and adoration for her son. Johnny looks young and happy, his eyes reflect the yet untapped potential of the start of his adult life.
“That’s mah mum an’ I at mah graduation.” His sudden presence startles you and you’re glad to have only been leaning in to observe the photographs instead of holding them, you’re certain you would have dropped them had it been the case.
“Jesus, Johnny. You scared me.” He smiles, a deep grin that you can tell he’s a bit satisfied to have been able to give you a start, despite his following apology. “Sorry lass, Dinnae mean tae make ye jump.”
There’s a small span of awkward silence and to cease it you ask him about the first picture, the one by the river.
He lets out a small hearty laugh and reaches past you to lift the frame off the shelf, bringing it closer like having it here in his hands will give him a better feel for the memories they contain.
“Ah used tae go white water raftin’ all the time. This was a group I joined when ah started. We had just cleared a class four river fer tha first time.” You smile as he reminisces, telling just by his eyes that he’s reliving it a little as he talks.
“Do you still do it? River raft?” He shakes his head and places the picture back on the shelf where it had been. “Nae anymore. Too dangerous.”
He sighs a little, the golden memory disappearing and perhaps leaving a plume of mild gloom in its place but if it had affected him too badly it didn’t show, as his ever radiant smile resurfaced like it’d never retreated.
“Yer turn, hen. The bathrooms in mah room it’s the far door on the left.” You make your way back towards his bedroom as he stations himself behind the sink and busies himself with the dishes.
You pick through the bag on the bed, hem hawing over what to wear when you just decide to bring the whole bag with you into the bathroom. You turn on the shower and let it warm as you retrieve your soap, shampoo and conditioner.
After quickly undressing you step into the warm jet and let it soak into your skin. There was a lot to think about and showers had always seemed like the best time to ponder things. You’re still, even now, in awe at just how things had turned in the past day. You certainly didn’t believe you’d be showering at his place at this time the day before. You poured some body wash into your palm, lathering it as you ruminated.
And then there was his offer, so out of the blue and generous of him. To stay at his place with him and for what? Why? Because you’d drank a little too much the night before and just couldn’t recall any of it? While it’d never been the case for you before now didn’t mean it was impossible for you to become black out drunk. It wasn’t an impossibility, you’d read somewhere that the body's chemical makeup changes roughly every seven years. People all the time grow out of and even develop new allergies as their life progressed. Meaning it was completely possible for your reactions to an influx of alcohol to change over time.
At least, that’s how you justified it to yourself as you rinsed the suds from your skin and began to wash your hair. It just didn’t make sense to jump to conclusions so hastily. And stay for how long? Certainly he didn’t mean to tell you that you were welcome to move in indefinitely. You don’t just extend that kind of an offer to someone like that, he barely knew you. Or did he?
It didn’t matter. For now you just couldn’t bring yourself to impose upon him like that, even if he did offer it up so willingly and insistent. After dinner, you’d gently and politely refuse. He did after all say he wouldn’t make you if you didn’t want to.
You rinse off and turn off the stream, letting most of the water drip off you before stepping out and wrapping yourself in a warm, fluffy towel from the rack. You finally pick out an outfit and stick with it, pulling it on and cleaning up after yourself as you finished, you’d rather not leave a mess for him to contend with later on top of everything he’d already done for you.
You close the door to his bedroom behind you as you step out into the open living room. You had expected him to be unwinding on the couch but instead he was up and pulling on jacket, he had his shoes on and keys in hand. As he spotted you he smiled and stepped towards you.
“Ah need a few things from the store fer dinner. Will ye join me fer a ride?” You smile and nod, turning back towards the room to put on some shoes and retrieve your phone and wallet before joining him to leave. It’s a short walk through the front entrance of his home to the garage. It’s barren save for a big red toolbox and a few boxes stacked in a far corner. His truck takes up the majority of the space, a fairly new dark blue Toyota Tundra. Totally on brand for him, clean and gleaming under the fluorescent lights overhead. He pulls open the passenger side door for you to climb in, which flusters you a bit.
You scurry to climb into it and sit back into the comfy seat as he shuts your door and rounds the vehicle to climb in on his side.
You ride in comfortable silence as he drives you a few blocks down the road to the little grocery mart you’d been to on occasion when you were in need of something on this side of town. He parks and you’re glad to scoot out of the door and join him before he has time to come around and open the door for you again. The chivalry was nice but always managed to make you feel awkward instead of special.
You’re taken by surprise as he takes your hand in his and both make your way towards the entrance. The warmth of his hand envelops yours, his thumb draws lazy, soothing circles on the back of your hand and the flustered feeling you’d been feeling, a combination of the new experience of being seen with him in public and him being so gentlemanly, eases.
You walk side by side out of the car park and into the brightly lit store. He picks up one of the little baskets from a metal cage and begins veering towards the back of the store. He seems to know exactly what he needs and where it all is so you just lose yourself a bit in the moment, looking at things on the shelves and watching him as he shops.
Normally when you shop by yourself it’s a race. A race to get everything you need and get out as fast as humanly possible, it’s something about being out in public for too long that makes your skin crawl. But this. This is different. Something about being with Johnny puts you at an inexplicable ease. He’s confident and knowledgeable, and for once you don’t feel like your mind is moving a million miles a minute under the scrutiny of every other set of eyes in the building. You can just simply relax and be, let him take over.
In produce you watch him pick up three different onions that, to you, look no different but he rolls them in the palm of his hand and gives them each a light toss in the air. Somehow— that decides it and he puts two of them back and places the chosen one down in the basket.
Every time he lets go of your hand for something you’re sure that’s the end of it, just knowing the moment will be lost but he surprises you each time anew when he comes back to you and takes it again, leading you through the sections hand in hand.
You stop in the spirits aisle and grimace as he picks up a bottle of dry red wine. The front is embossed with a duck in a yellow slicker, an umbrella cocked jauntily and tucked securely under one white wing, shielding him from a shower of rain falling from a single dark cloud that looms over its head. In a bright gold scroll underneath this curious image are the words “Rain Duck”. The image is very reminiscent of the Morton salt girl you’d always seen in the spice cabinet of your childhood home.
He looks over and catches your look of disgust and laughs, a hearty cheerful sound that momentarily wipes the scowl from your face and threatens to send you into your own fit of meek giggles. “Dinnae worry hen, s’just fer the sauce. Will nae even taste it, ah promise.”
He sets it down in the basket and heads towards the front of the store to checkout. You stand in line and wait your turn until the cashier clears the person in front of you and Johnny begins to empty his basket onto the conveyor belt one item at a time.
By the time he’d finished, the cashier, a tall skinny man with dark rimmed glasses had already begun to ring you up and Johnny suddenly smacks the palm of his hand to his forehead. “Ahhhh shite. Ah forgot somethin’. Stay here with the groceries bonnie, I’ll be right back.”
He takes off in a power walk towards the back of the store and disappears around a shelf. You rock back and forth on your feet and pray that by the time the cashier is done Johnny will be back. You know if he’s not you’ll cave to the pressure of the people behind you and end up paying for everything yourself, just so you don’t hold the line.
You crane over the partitions of shelves that mark the separate checkout lanes in search of Johnny but your attention is redirected when the cashier clears his throat and calls out to you to get your attention. “Excuse me, miss.”
You turn, dreading the worst but there’s still a good amount of items left unscanned and he’s got the bottle of Rain Duck held past the scanner, looking to you attentively.
You let out a sigh of relief as you realize he only needs your ID to finish ringing up the wine. You pull your wallet from your purse and the relief you had felt instantly dissipates. The pleasantly relaxed state you’d been lulled into suddenly felt like the calm prelude to a horrifying nightmare. The clear plastic pane that normally covered your horrible ID photo was empty. You tipped it open, hoping for some horrible trick of the light or optical illusion but the sleeve was empty.
You quickly shuffled through the individual card sleeves, hoping against hope that you’d somehow slipped it into one of them by mistake but it wasn’t there. Your ID was missing. The panic sets in the pit of your stomach like a lead ball as Johnny squeezes up behind you holding a carton of heavy cream. His smile disappears when he sees your face.
He quickly sets the heavy cream down on the belt and puts a hand on your shoulder. “Bonnie, what is it? What’s wrong?”
The cashier calls out to him impatiently. “Sir?” Johnny looks up at him, with death glaring from his eyes before turning back to you. “Come on, lass. What’s the matter?” You whisper because it’s all you can muster, your vocal cords withered to nothing in fright.
“My ID. It’s gone.” The cashier tried again to get Johnny’s attention and you barely hear Johnny as he speaks very low and angrily at the man behind the counter. Johnny must have done as he asked though because soon enough you feel Johnny’s arms gently pulling you towards the exit. It makes you snap out of your horror for a moment and offer to help carry the bags back to his truck but he’s having none of it, insisting on carrying the whole load in two huge armloads all the way back himself.
You slip into the passenger seat as he puts the groceries in the back and only look up from staring at the lines in your denim jeans when the driver side door shuts and the cab is silent for a moment. He’s looking at you, very concerned and you realize he’s waiting for you to explain in more detail.
“My ID is gone. Completely gone.” He seems to think for a moment before he responds and asks if you’d checked your purse. You quickly do as he’d suggested and go through it but it’s not there either and the momentary hope you’d felt at his suggestion died almost as soon as it’d been born.
“Maybe I dropped it at the club.” A smile begins to form on your face as you grasp at anything other than the truth. “That’s it Johnny! We’ve gotta go back to the club. They’ll have found it cleaning up! And we can go get it and everything’s fine!” He doesn’t look convinced as you look over to him for validation.
“Lass, be honest with yerself fer a moment. How often do ye take yer ID out of yer wallet when ye need it?” Your smile began to fade, he was right. Anytime you needed it you just opened it and flashed it without ever taking it out of the slot, you’d bought that wallet specifically for that feature because you were so worried about losing it.
“I ken ye didnae want tae believe what happened tae ye, but there’s no denyin’ it now. Someone targeted ye last night. Picked ye out of the crowd and drugged yer drink when ye werenae lookin’ an’ they took yer ID in case they couldnae seal the deal right away. He’s got yer address an’ yer name an’ even yer picture.”
You listen to him talk as the cold, cruel hand of reality closes around your throat and the disgust of being violated in such a thorough way begins to worm its way under your skin. You can feel Johnny struggling to find words to comfort you from the seat next to you but he must not find any that are adequate because he starts the truck instead and drives you home in a silence that had on the way been comfortable and passive but now was pregnant with tension and doom.
You get back to his place and he unloads the truck as you sit inside and try not to panic at the situation you’ve found yourself in. You thank your lucky stars that Johnny had found you and brought you home now. If you’d somehow miraculously made it home without incident this mysterious man could have crept into your home while you were incapacitated and done any number of things to you. You imagined all the horrifying possibilities, each more daunting than the last as he unpacked and put everything away.
He must sense your spiraling thoughts because he calls you into the kitchen with him as he starts to cook. Chopping onions, heating shallow pools of oil in two different skillets, measuring out beef broth and flour and water in varying amounts as he practices the fine art of mise en place.
You try, really truly try not to let the fear of your predicament gnaw away at you too hard but it’s almost an act in futility. He looks up at you after cracking his third shot and missed joke while dredging the ox tails in flour and notices you staring down at your hands in deeply troubled thought.
He stops what he’s doing and comes over to the counter, bending down to lean over its sturdy surface and get your attention. You look up at him and feel your heart skip a little as he has no business being so damn attractive covered in flour like he is.
“Listen hen. I ken yer goin through it right now. Probably spooked right out of yer tree, but I promise ye yer in no danger here. I dare him tae walk through that door right now. I swear tae ye ill dismantle him with my flour covered hands before he even so much as touches a hair on yer bonnie head.”
You can’t help but smile as you imagine him wrecking your faceless oppressor, flour flying about in clouds as the impact of his blows knock it loose from his hands.
“There’s tha’ smile. Now be a doll an’ open mah wine fer me. I forgot before ah got all messy.”
You stand from your stool and open the drawer he directs you towards to locate the corkscrew. The rest of the preparation you do in a much better mood. While you had a brand new serious problem on your hands there was no need in sulking over it when there was nothing you could do at the moment and anytime spent with Johnny was hard not to enjoy.
He plated your portion and set you down across from him so he could watch your first bite. You wanted him to eat with you, a bit self conscious at him just watching you eat but he insisted he had to start on dessert before he could sit down to dinner.
You cut the big chunk of meat with your knife and fork and then dipped it down in the pool of sauce just as he’d instructed you to. He watched you intently as you brought the fork to your mouth and took your first bite.
Your eyes widen before half closing, you can’t help the soft moan that resounds as the tender meat and rich, savory sauce feel like they pull your taste buds into their arms and hug them soft and sweetly. It’s absolutely divine and you look up from your plate to see Johnny, smug as a bug grinning wolfily at your reactions.
“Told ye it’d bring ye tae tears.” You can’t even respond, just swallow and take another eager bite, this time with a little of the risotto from the bed that the meat is resting on. “Jesus Christ, Johnny. Where in the fuck did you learn to cook like this?”
His grin is so wide you’re worried it’ll be stuck that way and to your amusement you can tell his cheeks have reddened even under his nice, even tan. “Yer makin’ me blush, hen. S’just what ah’ve picked up along tha way. Ye could do it too. I could teach ye.”
You nod enthusiastically, you’d like that very much and you have a feeling so would he. You really dig into your meal in earnest as he works. His back is to you as he prepares dessert on the stove and you wonder just what it might be. Steam rises up in thin streams as he pours something into two ramekins and sticks them in the oven.
By the time you’re done he’s cracking into his own dinner as you begin working on the dishes. He protests but you stay firm that if he cooked the absolute least you could do was help clean up. He finally relented and let you work as he ate as quickly as he could so he could help dry the dishes at least.
By the time everything was done so was the dessert and he pulled it from the oven to cool as he leaned over the counter and held your gaze raptly with his. “It’s time, lass. What have ye decided?”
But with the way he’s staring you down it feels like he’s on the edge of his seat. Those blue eyes piercing yours and you know every second you don’t answer is killing him, you can read it all over his face so even though you’d made your mind up you told him you weren’t sure.
He looked a bit dejected but it wasn’t the broken disappointment you knew you’d have been graced with if you’d downright shut his proposition down. His eyes light up suddenly in a way you hadn’t been expecting like he’d just had the idea of a century.
“Play a game with me, lass.” You regarded him distrustfully. “What kind of game, Johnny?”
“I’ll show ye, come on.” You follow after him into the bedroom, a bit wary. He stops in front of the pull up bar and turns back towards you.
“Johnny you and I both know there’s no way I’m besting you in a pull up contest, I’d be mental to even try. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“Ohhh no, hen. Nothing like tha’, yer right t’wouldnae be fair. All I want ye tae do is hang from the bar. Can ye do that?”
You jump up and grab the bar to see if you’ve got the right idea and he smiles and nods. “Jus’ like that, all ye’ve gotta do is not let go. Think ye can handle it?”
You eyed him suspiciously. “What’s the catch?” You felt like there was something hidden in this that he wasn’t revealing and you weren’t wrong.
“Well it would nae be a game if there was nae some kind of a catch now would it, hen?” You swallow hard and watch him saddle closer, pinning you back into the cool metal bars.
“Ye’ve got tae hold yerself up until ye come.” His smirk widens as your mouth drops open a little, at first for some kind of rebuttal but you can’t come up with anything to say so it just hangs open as your mind blanks.
You finally get a grip enough to ask him to explain. “Well, yer goin’ tae hang onto tha bar an’ ah’m goin’ tae try mah hardest tae make ye come. If ye can hold onto it just until then, then you win but if ye cannae do it, an’ ye let go then I win.”
You mull over his terms and he just leans back a bit and lets you, waiting for your answer. Instead of giving him one you inquire further. “What do I get if I win?”
His answer is another simple question. “What do ye want?” A simple question that was complicated to find an answer for. What did you want from him? After a moment's thought you answered. “I want you to tell me everything you remember about last night and I want you to help me find this guy that did this to me. I don’t want to live in fear like this. You take me up to the club and we ask if they found my ID and if not then we ask to see the video footage of that night.”
“Hen, there’s no garuntee—“ You stop him. “I know. Just promise me if I win you’ll help me.” He looks a bit troubled, like he hadn’t meant for this to take this kind of turn and you wonder for a moment if he’ll back out.
“If I win ye have tae tell me the real reason ye never came back to the gym an’ never texted me an’ just disappeared.” You go to answer when he adds. “And ye stay.”
You sort of knew he was going to play that and even though you’d anticipated it, it still manages to fluster you hearing it.
You think about it real hard, just being around him had you more or less worked up all day, you were fairly confident that you could come quickly, even now just having discussed the game with him you knew your panties were damp. But could you hold yourself up for that length of time?
Reluctantly, you accepted. You even felt sure enough to jest him a bit about how easy of a win this would be for you, it was a decision you came to regret as he leaned in close to your ear and whispered. “Ah’m goin’ tae make ye eat those words, hen.”
A shudder of anticipation passed through you as he kissed you on your neck, just below your ear with a pass of his velvet soft tongue, giving you a little taste of what was to come.
The game had apparently begun as he stooped down to help shed you of your jeans, pulling them down and kissing the skin revealed as he exposed it. Next came your panties and they were damp, a fact that tore a rumble of approval from his chest but he wouldn’t touch you yet.
“Cannae give ye too much of a head start now can we?” He patted the side of your thigh curtly. “Up up.”
You do as he says and it’s a little late to be self conscious now but you can’t help it as you dangle from the metal rod and he spreads your thighs so you’re open to him. You worry he’s going to cheat you a bit as he stares at your bare pussy and you begin to complain when it dies in your throat as his tongue licks a broad stripe up the length of your slit. “Shit!”
He chuckles a little and dives in, resting his hands in the crooks of your knees but offering no support as he begins to eat you out in earnest. You can’t help but moan, your eyes glossy and unfocused as you stare down at him feasting on you from below. It feels like nothing you’ve ever experienced, the strain in your arms adding an element of pain that scratches a hidden itch in the back of your brain.
You shift in his hold uncomfortably as his tongue darts into your entrance, collecting your juices on his tongue and drinking them down. You want, so desperately, to be able to grip him by the Mohawk and hold onto him for dear life but you can’t so you squeeze the bar in your grip and sweetly moan his name instead.
His tongue finds your clit and it just about throws you over the edge but proves to be not quite enough as you chase it in hopes of victory. His hands squeeze and grope the flesh of your thighs and ass as he eats. You thought at the start of this that you would have had this in the bag but the stretch of your arms was outweighing the pull of your pleasure.
It wasn’t for a lack of Johnny’s enthusiasm, his head stayed buried in the heat of your pussy the whole time as he drove you towards the edge as quickly and efficiently as possible. Despite the burn in your biceps you could feel your orgasm building to a boiling point, you had no doubt you’d be coming soon but would it be soon enough for you to win?
He suddenly began to run quick sharp circles over the top of your clit with the pad of his thumb, while his tongue laps at your entrance like a bear to a beehive hole. It’s so good you can’t help but moan, low and dragging as you careen towards the center of the nova of pleasure threatening to consume you whole.
Your wrists tremble and a cramp unlike any you’ve ever experienced begins to glow like a white hot coal in your armpit and it’s beyond you to be able to hold on any longer. Your pinky finger slips first and then the rest quickly follow. You squeal as you realize you’re going to fall but his arms push your legs up onto his shoulders and he catches you just as you let go.
A flood of relief flows through your aching arms and you realize you’ve lost but the sting of defeat plays second fiddle to the massive orgasm that takes you by the throat just an instant later. He holds you up with the strength in his arms alone as you come undone above him. He spins around as your thighs still tremble and gently places you on the bed.
You are still very sensitive and your thighs go to clench shut when they’re blocked by one wide knee. He wastes no time in slotting himself between them, his mouth crashing to yours as you taste yourself on his lips and tongue. He cages you beneath him, pulling off your lips to bite and suck at your neck. His hands roam you freely, pulling at your top until it’s up over your head and lifting you up for access to the clasp of your bra.
With it successfully pulled away from your breasts he dives down and devours them, lips wrapping around one pert nipple as the other he gropes with the full palm of his hand, trying to hold as much of it as possible. You nearly shriek with the overstimulation of it and he pulls away to whisper both praise and apologies.
“Jus’ cannae help it, bonnie. Need tae be inside you, please? Let me fuck you, hen. Been cravin’ tha’ perfect little pussy. Come on, lass. Give it tae me.” He’s rubbing the very prominent bulge of his cock against your thigh all the while and you can’t help but clench around nothing in anticipation.
“Fuck Johnny! Do it! Fill me up.” He wastes no time, quickly abandoning your breasts to free himself from the confinements of his jeans. He doesn’t even get them down all the way before he’s fishing himself from his boxers and rubbing the tip hurriedly up and down your slit. You jump and squeal at the sensation and he coos more apologies at you before lining himself up and pushing inside.
You moan in unison as he stretches you open and his arms come up to brace himself on either side of your head. He muffles your moans with his mouth as he leans down and kisses you, swallowing them up as he begins to move and your hands fly to his arms, bracing yourself against the onslaught that is the drag of his fat cock.
You pull away for air and immediately expel it into a high pitched whine as he picks up a fast and steady rhythm, hips knocking into yours on each upward thrust. The fact that you've already came does nothing to alleviate the burn that accompanies the stretch of him. He’s a force and you can do nothing against it but hold on.
You try to make sense of what he’s saying as he fucks you stupid but only catch half of it. Something about keeping you safe forever. Poorly worded promises and vows pouring from his mouth as he uses you to reach his release.
You can feel it fast approaching and can do nothing but steel yourself against it as he pounds a second orgasm from you, the snap of his hips and the drive of his cock demands it of you. “Aww fuck, hen. Are ye gonna come fer me again? Hmm? Let me feel it. Come on lass, let me take care of ye forever. Ye can have this fer the rest of our lives if ye jus’ come fer me right now.”
He says it like you have a choice in the matter as you become locked in the throes of your ecstasy brought forth by his hand and in the midst of yours you vaguely feel him reach his. Coming hard and fast deep inside the tight clutch of your pussy.
It takes you both an eternity to recover and when he finally rolls off you, you realize you’d half fallen asleep, cradled safely under him, worn out and sated.
After a moment he gets up and leaves the room and he’s gone forever to the point where you almost get up to go after him but he comes back in with two small white dishes in hand along with two spoons.
You sit up on one elbow as he hands you one and the accompanying silverware. Looking down at it you can see a dark golden brown crust, a glassy glaze over the surface but are otherwise clueless as to what’s before you. You watch him experimentally as he takes the handle of the spoon in between his thumb and index finger and brings the bowl of the spoon down on top of the crust with an audible smack. The crust breaks and there’s a jiggly dense cream beneath.
Following suit, you bring your spoon down onto yours and scoop up a glob of the pale white gelatin. You take a bite and smile as the cool, sweet cream melts over your tongue. You sit there with him, basking in the afterglow of your orgasms and eating crème brûlée.
It gets you thinking, you could have this indefinitely. Do this every night if you’d like and as if reading your thoughts he speaks.
“I won, but the choice is still yers. Stay with me, hen. Ah’ll keep ye safe. No worries, no lookin’ over yer shoulder forever or double checkin’ yer locks all yer life. Let me take care of ye. I want to, an tha’s honest.”
You stare at him, his blue eyes are soft and filled with adoration and honesty. He really wants you here with him and is that really so bad? How many times are you gonna pass up this opportunity before it’s gone? And will you be looking back later with regret once the door has closed?
You have to drop his gaze to decide but recapture it once you do. You go to tell him “Ok, but only until I’ve found a new place.” but he seizes you in his arms after the first word and pulls you hard against him like a five year old child handed a cat and told they can keep it.
“Johnny! You’re squishing me!” You complain but the sensation isn’t entirely unpleasant.
He does everything with you side by side for the rest of the night. He changes with you, he brushes his teeth with you, he even lingers around when you try to go to the bathroom before bed, it takes a good amount of effort on your part to make him leave the room but you know he’s stood just outside the cracked door that he neglects to close on the way out.
Climbing under the sheets with him you wonder just how sleeping together for the first night is gonna go, actually wondering if you’ll get any sleep at all but then he pulls you into his chest and to your surprise he doesn’t try anything sexual. He doesn’t rub a hard bulge against you or grope your tits. He just wants you close, his warm chest filling out the dip of your back, his legs entangle themselves with yours, his feet even nudge yours affectionately in lazy passes.
It’s a while before either of you speak and Johnny thought you’d been long asleep when you say “I can’t afford a membership.” There’s a pause in your words and just when he understands what you’re saying you say more. “That’s why I didn’t come back to the gym, I thought it’d be easier.. for both of us.. if I just disappeared.”
And there’s something about your honesty, the way you’d remembered and honored your whole end of the bargain, the candidness of revealing you struggled with the decision, the mild sleepy drag of your voice that’s barely audible in the darkness that pulls directly on his heart and he couldn’t articulate a response if he’d tried so he doesn’t.
Maybe you believe he’s asleep and maybe it’s better that way. But he’s not. A few moments later he hears your breathing even out and he knows from the previous night that you’re asleep. He lays awake long after that holding you.
He thinks about you and how he’d finally got you to see reason. He thinks about times when the outcome of a situation is more valuable and important— the greater good one might say, than the means it took to reach it. Omelets, for instance, constitute broken eggs.
It takes a certain amount of necessary malice for these things. An agent who realizes what’s at stake and what’s to gain, willing to act on these conditions and set them right, no matter the cost. And lastly, he thinks about your ID, sitting snuggly behind his in his wallet. Tomorrow after he drops you off at work he’ll dispose of it. Maybe burn it, maybe shred it, maybe tie it to a heavy rock and throw it off the bridge at the park, watch it sink into the murky, goose poop filled pond until it gets too deep to see.
No one will know. But Johnny will. Johnny will know that in the end, his end, it justified his means. You are safe and you are his and there is no means too heinous, no act too profound to reach it.
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