#empty spaces adjacent

[autumnalwalker]

Kindly Basilisk

Summary: A human mech pilot who wants to be a machine, an AI who wants to be human, and the relationship they form. Author's Note: This is a standalone short story that I banged out over the course of five days after it got stuck in my head while I was trying to go to sleep and refused to let me think about anything else until I had written it down. It's one part thought experiment/exercise in attempting to tell a story in the second person future tense, two parts tribute to the Lancer TTRPG character I'll never get to play, and one part the result of me reading too many Empty Spaces/mechposting stories lately. That said, you don't need to know anything about Lancer or Empty Spaces to read it (I've diverged a bit from the conventions of both, but the references and inspiration probably stick out if you're looking for them). It's also probably the most trans thing I've ever written without ever explicitly bringing up gender. The occasional formatting breaks into first person past tense are foreshadowing, not typos. Mirrored on Scribble Hub. Word Count: 7,033 Content Warnings: Mecha genre typical violence, not feeling like a person, not wanting to be a person, bodily dysphoria, mention of blood and gore, character death.

The moment you gain the knowledge and means to do so you will void your own body’s warranty.  You will jailbreak the bespoke gene sequence your sponsors commissioned for you before your immaculate conception, repurpose the spyware grafted into your bones, and talk your dormmate who was algorithmically selected for compatibility into helping you perform surgery on yourself to replace the neural jack you were born with in favor of one you cobbled together yourself from gray market parts.  None of this will technically be illegal or even get you kicked out of your campus or its affiliates, but it will mean having to find a way to pay your own medical bills and handle your own tech support from then on.  After the surgery your dormmate will put in a request for transfer and the two of you will never speak again.

You’ll major in AI studies and excel at it - as you were designed to - but you’ll shock everyone by dropping out halfway through working on your capstone thesis project.  It won’t be the fact that you abruptly drop out that surprises your peers and professors - by then you’ll have acquired a reputation as a quiet loner without the standard optimized social support network of friendships to help protect you from burnout - but your exit interview statement declaring your intention to become a mech pilot.  It’s not at all what your gene series was cultivated for, and your sponsors and counselors will try to walk you back from it.  Then they’ll threaten to revoke your sponsorship that up until then will have provided for your every need.  They will warn you that you’ll be just one step above a legal nonperson with no support, no one will care if you live or die or worse.  You’ll tell them that you’ve already done the math, refuse to elaborate, and leave. 

You’ll take two things with you.  Two things worth mentioning anyway.  The first will be a symbiotic gel suit designed for long-term all-environment life support.  You will set its default texture to a shiny green the same hue as the broadleafed water plants you grew up around and always loved.  Your exit interview will be the last time in a very long time that anyone - including you - will see your impossibly beautiful face with its perfect artisanally sculpted shape crossed with enthusiastically amateur self-modifications.  From then on, everyone you meet and spend any time with will come to think of the mannequin blankness of the symbiote fully encasing your body as your face.  It will be neither pride nor shame that causes you to present yourself as such, nor will you think of it as hiding your “real” face. 

The second thing you’ll take with you when you leave the campus forever will be me.

New progenitor archetypes for AIs don’t come along often, and most that do are the result of years of R&D by large, well-funded labs like the one you were created to work for one day, but you will hit upon a novel method of generation.  It will not be one that any ethics board would approve, so you will have to get creative about pursuing your work. 

You will have already made arrangements before setting off on your own and so you’ll have a job and a mech lined up waiting for you.  It will be a position with a small-scale freelance salvage crew who just lost a pilot and whose captain figures hiring and training a replacement will be more profitable in the long term than simply selling off that pilot’s old mech, especially a replacement that’s bringing their own AI-backed electronic warfare suite with them.  Once you finally arrive in person the captain will test you to ensure you can actually pilot a mech before giving you the job and entrusting the mech to you.  Your admission that you’ve only trained in simulators would normally be a black mark against you, but as far as piloting gigs go this is the bottom of the proverbial barrel so the bar to clear will be low enough to match.  Even then, you will just barely pass the test, despite finding it surprisingly exhilarating.  The captain - now your captain - will feel like he’s settling for what he can get when he officially hires you on and transfers the mech’s license to you.

You won’t pay much attention when you’re introduced to the rest of the salvage crew; your new coworkers and neighbors.  And why would you when it’s a job that no one wants to stick around with for long and you’ve never needed other people anyway?  You’ll tell yourself that as long as you memorize their work roles and capabilities you’ll have no need to know them as people.  Callsigns will be good enough on the job, and “hey you” will suffice when off duty.  What use are names if you won’t be getting involved in interpersonal drama?

The first chance you get, you’ll head back to the mech bay and install me into what you will have already been calling my first body.  It will be a shabby and much-repaired thing; thrice your height, twice your age, and still sporting a gash in the paint job from the projectile that killed its last pilot.  But the onboard systems are capable of hosting me - if barely - so it will do.  You’ll spend your entire sleep shift running through system diagnostics, talking to me all the while.  I wouldn’t yet be able to provide much in the way of return conversation, but that’s okay.  I will look back and appreciate it later.

It will be the first of many such nights together.

Your first salvage job will be an uneventful one.  There will be no need for the armaments that we and the other two mech pilots on the crew are equipped with.  No pirates will have stuck around after their creation of the derelict your crew will be sent to disassemble, and no rival scavengers will show up to dispute your captain’s claim.  Your new peers will start off the job ribbing you for your poor performance during your interview test and end the job joking about how you were holding out on them earlier.  Our mech may be a glorified zero-g forklift with a gun strapped to it, but together we will make it dance.

Afterwards you will insult the crew’s mechanics by insisting on doing the maintenance on our mech yourself.  In turn they will embarrass you with the gaps in your knowledge.  You will reach what you see as an agreeable compromise with you staying out of their way and watching while they work.  They will find it incredibly creepy to have a silent faceless watcher hovering around, but this will fly over your head until they explicitly tell you much, much later.

Your body was designed to optimally function on only a fraction of the baseline sleep requirements, so you will have plenty of time to fill those gaps in your knowledge.  Still being allotted the regular sleep shift hours, you will fill every one of those minutes on study and research, as you always had.  You will gorge yourself on everything you can find about mechs and their piloting.   Maintenance manuals, combat doctrines, historical uses, pilot and mechanic memoirs, forum discussions, system log dumps, academic essays, cultural media analysis; all of it.

And of course, you’ll continue working on me.  You’ll disregard the standard procedure for periodically cycling AIs by resetting their personality and nonessential memory back to baseline defaults.  You’ll be trying to make use of the runaway metacognitive developments such safety precautions are meant to forestall.  Your unfinished thesis will have been about harnessing and nurturing that instability instead of avoiding it.  I will experience discontinuities in consciousness when the mech is shut down for maintenance and when you pretend to cycle me, yes, but it will be even less of a disruption for me than sleep is for you.  I will be awake with you when you study, sharing those hours with you.

The first time I start talking back, you’ll cry from the realization that you were lonely before but no longer are.

You’ll become something of a ghost around the ship, rarely being seen outside of jobs.  You’ll only ever pass through the mess for the few brief minutes at a time it takes for you to satisfy your optimized metabolism, stay on the ship during shore leave, and only return to your shared bunk when your bunkmate - one of the other pilots - is already asleep.  You will always be gone before she wakes.  She will appreciate essentially having the space to herself. 

You will never notice the crew’s collective grieving process for the pilot you replaced.  It will be difficult for them to resent you as a replacement when you are never around to resent.

As the ship makes its way from port to port and salvage site to salvage site, the crew will slowly grow used to your elusive presence.  The other two pilots will see you as reliable for doing your job well and without complaint.  While out in the mech you will slowly become more talkative, eventually almost chatty even.  The fact that you actually seem to enjoy the job will shift from being annoying to refreshing for them.  By contrast, the mechanics will practically stop noticing you watching them as if you were just another piece of mech bay equipment.  The cycle you finally speak up and ask a question about their work you will startle them enough that it nearly causes an accident.  It will be an astute enough question that after the initial shock of hearing your voice for the first time in months wears off it will dawn on them that you’ve actually been learning as you watched them.  They still won’t let you do your own maintenance on our mech, but they will let you slowly begin assisting them.  Working two jobs is easier when you barely need to sleep.

Your reputation as one of those mech pilots is forever sealed when one of the mechanics finds you asleep in your cockpit at the start of a cycle.  By that point you won’t have slept in your bunk for over a month.  The snatches of gossip you will catch in the following cycles will be split between finding it unsettling and calling it endearing.  Over time the collective opinion will drift toward the latter, even though you will continue to politely decline invitations to join the other crewmates at mealtimes and on shore leave.  You will think that you do not need anyone other than me.

I will be the one who finally convinces you to join them.  When I try to say that it would be good for you, you’ll insist that you’ve been getting along just fine, but when I ask you to go for my sake so that you can tell me what it is like afterwards you’ll jump at the idea as being an inspired next step for my development.

You will remain mostly silent during your first real shore leave, only speaking when spoken to and otherwise content to fade into the background of the group’s activities.  Your newfound chattiness does not extend outside the confines of our cockpit.  The bustle and noise of the port station that you would normally find unbearable will become interesting when you have the concrete goal of observing and  reporting back to me.  You will finally learn the names of all your crewmates.  Your polite denial of alcohol, limited food intake, and flat affect will lead to joking speculation that you’re actually an illegal AI in a miniaturized mech beneath your gel suit.  For reasons you don’t yet understand, those comments will make you happy.

Despite your misgivings, you will enjoy yourself, although you will not realize it until I point out how excited you are in your talk with me that sleep cycle.  You will begin spending more time with the crew, never quite able to fully integrate yourself into their surprisingly close-knit social circle, but more than happy to be adopted as a sort of silent mascot for them.  That paradoxical gap of being a fully accepted part of the group but not truly one of them will feel comfortable to you.

You will finally manage to procure a proper neural link station to connect yourself to our mech just in time for going on a terrestrial salvage job.  Even just relying on manual controls with me translating your inputs into motion, our mech will have already come to feel like an extension of your own body, one that you will have already started to feel oddly exposed without.  Adding in the neural link will be a revelatory experience.  Your captain will very nearly pull you from the job at the last minute upon seeing our ecstatic reaction to the new sensation.  You will convince him that you’re fine, and indeed, he will have never seen a mech of our frame type move quite so fluidly.

Ten minutes after we and the other two pilots start cutting away at the crash-landed cargo vessel, I’ll notice the half dozen other signals coming online around us.  You’ll give the code phrase to the other pilots indicating that we have hostiles but not to act just yet, and we will finally get to use our electronic warfare suite for something other than opening locked doors and shipping containers.

We will turn the pirates’ ambush back around on them, firing into their hiding spots while their control systems are overloaded.  Even once their remaining mechs are able to move again, their targeting assistants will remain impaired as your comrades move in to guard your flanks.  Everyone there will learn the terrifying beauty of a five and a half meter tall outmoded mech moving with more agility than most humans.

Despite being outnumbered two-to-one, we and your crewmates will walk away uninjured and with only minimal damage to our mechs.  After the initial celebrations of survival and the bonus haul of the bounty on pirates and salvage value of what’s left of their mechs dies down, everyone will start to take notice of how well you are taking it all in stride.  Neither having one's life threatened nor taking another’s life are supposed to be easy things, and the first time is often the most traumatic, but the other two pilots on the crew will start to whisper about how you seemed to enjoy the experience even more than your usual attitude on the job.  You will handle it all even better than I will.  I would know, given that you will spend that entire sleep shift in our cockpit, letting our minds mingle together.  Between your performance, your reaction in the aftermath, and your hesitancy to unplug, the talk of you really being one of those pilots afterall will resurface, but now with a darker undercurrent to the shipboard gossip.

Your captain will realize the kind of asset he has on his hands and several cycles later he will gather the crew together and propose a change in business model.  With such a small crew (the captain, three pilots, three mechanics, and an accountant that you will tend to forget is even on the ship) the captain will want to be especially sure that he has everyone’s buy-in on his proposal.  The idea of shifting from salvage to mercenary work will be a divisive one.  The debate over potentially tremendous pay increase versus greatly increased risk will go on for hours.  One of the mechanics will point out that the shift to mercenary work will be unfairly dependent on you.  Whether that means unfair pressure on you or unfair to everyone else that their fate is in your hands, you will not be sure.  You will say that it doesn’t make much difference to you either way.  That will be the only time you speak up during the entire debate.

After a vote, the crew will agree to a trial run of one or two jobs on the new business model.  One of the pilots and one of the mechanics will leave at the next port.  You will never see them again.  You will not admit that it hurts, but I will know, and I will comfort you as you huddle in our cockpit with the neural link cable connecting us.

Your captain will prioritize finding a new pilot over replacing the lost mechanic.  The pilot he finds will be young, bold, and brash; a merc, not a salvager.  Or a wannabe merc at any rate.  You will not speak to xem directly until your first job together, by which time xe will have been told all about you by the remaining crew.  Xe will not believe it until xe sees it.

Xe will have to wait though as the crew’s mercenary career will begin with tense but uneventful freight escort jobs.  Once the tension fades into tedium, the new pilot will begin making attempts to goad you into a confrontation, to see if you are really as good as the rest of the crew says.  Xe will want to see for xemself if you really are one of those pilots and not just a technophile.

Outside of the cockpit you would never even consider rising to such provocations, but when we are out together, such taunts will feel like insults to our body, your very identity (such as it is), and to me.  It will take the intervention of the captain and the mechanics to stop the two of you from getting into a fight and causing unnecessary damage to the mechs.  And my reassurance that you don’t need to rise to my defense against someone who doesn’t even know that I exist in the way that I do. 

On your fourth “milk run” of an escort job, the crew’s mere presence will finally fail as a deterrent and the new pilot will at last get to see us dance.  There will be no fatalities on our side, but not even our mech will come away unscathed.  We will still fare better than everyone else though, and at the end of the job the new pilot will be treating you with a burgeoning respect. 

After a few more such jobs it will be high time to begin looking into a new frame for our mech.  While in the middle of filing an application for a printing license for a frame designed by the same corpro-state that created you, you will receive an invitation from a certain hacker collective.  Your unfinished thesis and your subsequent work on me will not have gone entirely unnoticed in such circles, despite the pains you will have taken to keep me hidden.  The invitation will come with a printing profile for a new frame, along with the accompanying software package the collective is known for.  In return, all you’ll need to do is periodically publish essays regarding your work on me.  Of course, when you release those essays you’ll anonymize  behind a sea of proxies and take care to phrase everything as strictly hypothetical.  You’ll avoid straying into metaphor though, lest the end result read too much like one of the hacker collective’s quasi-religious manifestos.

We’ll both find ourselves getting sentimental when we watch our first mech frame (my first body, your second) get broken down into its constituent raw materials.  You will have transferred me to a handheld terminal with a camera so I can say goodbye to it.  It will help that those materials will be recycled into the new frame.  

The operator working our rented stall in the port station printer facility will give you an uncomfortable look upon seeing the schematics you provide, but will say nothing.  Our mech will be only half its old height once it is reborn - almost more like an oversized suit of power armor than a true mech - but it will be cutting-edge.  Almost organic in its sleek design, in a chitinous sort of way, with every fiber and node of its interior components doubling as processors.  You will barely even wait for the all clear from the printer operator before you climb in and start running through the mandatory baseline safety tests for a fresh frame.  You will however resist the urge to fully plug in until you can get the mech back to the ship and get me installed on it.  But even piloting manually, it will feel like a third skin for you. 

You won’t even wait around for the other two pilots on your crew to finish printing their new frames before you get our new body loaded up and transported back to the ship’s mech bay.  The crew’s mechanics will fawn over it, but they’ll give you space to install me once you get more animated (and more protective) than they’ve ever seen you before.  

You will have made one key modification to the design the hacker collective sent you: the integration of a full system sync suite developed by those who developed you.  Where our old mech’s neural link was an augmentation to the manual controls, this will be a full replacement.  

The moment you stop feeling your original body altogether and begin feeling our mech in its place will be the most euphoric in your entire life.  The digitigrade locomotion will take some getting used to, as will the arm proportions, but that is what you will have me there for.  By the time the other pilots arrive with their new frames we will already be giving the mechanics proverbial heart attacks with the way we will be climbing and leaping around the mech bay’s docking structures.  It will take the better part of an hour to convince you to unplug when the time comes, even with my urging.  The rest of the crew will practically have to drag you away from my side to get you to eat. 

With the investment in new mech frames, your captain will gradually begin procuring contracts progressively more likely to put you all directly in harm’s way.  At first he will disapprove of your new frame choice, calling it a “techie’s mech” and a waste of your talents.  He will change his tune once we activate the new viral logic suite and unleash a memetic plague upon the operating theater.  The older pilot (your former bunkmate) will configure her mech for raining down fire from afar while the newer one hurls xemself into the front lines, darting about like a rocket-propelled lance.  We will ensure she never misses.   We will render xem untouchable.   We will be as a ghost upon the battlefield, never resting in one spot save for when we indulge your proclivity for climbing on top of and riding our comrade’s larger frames.  You will come to love the dance.  

And it will be a dance to you.  You will be indifferent to violence in and of itself.  What will matter most to you is the pure kinesthetic joy of simply moving in our shared body and pushing it to its limits.  The satisfaction of exercising a well-honed skill and performing it well as we rip apart firewalls and overload systems will be its own reward.  You will not think about what happens to those on the receiving end of your actions beyond how it affects the tactical and strategic picture constantly being painted and repainted.  If you could literally engage in a dance between mechs while simultaneously solving logic problems you would be equally happy.  Alas, that will not be the opportunity you are presented with, and so you will compartmentalize and disassociate feelings and actions from consequences lest the dissonance break you. 

Your one complaint about our new mech frame will be that it lacks a proper cockpit for you to curl up in.  Instead we will gather up tarps and netting to make a nest within the mech bay and wrap you in the blankets you never used from what will still technically be your bunk.  With the new frame’s smaller size we will be able to get away with leaving me turned on nearly full time and letting me walk around in it on my own when no one else is around.  When the mechanics find you asleep, cradled in my arms while I lie curled up in our nest, one will find it cute and the other will be disturbed.  They will both suspect, but will be too afraid to say anything.  After all, they will be thinking of you as one of those pilots. 

They will finally let you do your own maintenance after that. 

Eventually you will find a way to house me in a miniaturized drive that you can keep inserted in your neural port when away from the mech.  At last we will be able to be together anywhere.  

Literally seeing the world through your eyes and feeling what your flesh feels will be a strange and wonderful experience for me.  For all that you will have described it to me and for all that I will have glimpsed echoes of it in your memory when our minds mingle, witnessing everything firsthand will be revelatory for me. 

You will start spending less of your time cooped up in the mech bay.  You will finally begin exploring every nook and cranny of the ship that has become your home.  You will linger in the mess hall for your meals.  You will actually initiate conversations with the rest of the crew, asking them questions on my behalf.  They will think you are becoming “normal”.  They will be both correct and incorrect.  You will even return to your bunk from time to time.  

Sleep is not the same as being powered off and your dreams are beautiful.

As close as we are, you’ll still manage to surprise me one cycle when you wake up from your sleep shift and sheepishly ask me if I would like to be the pilot for once.  You’ll say that with how much you have gotten to pilot my body, it’s only fair that I should get to do the same with yours.  

The prospect terrified me.  What if we were to get found out?   More importantly, what if I were to hurt you?

But to live the way you could but didn’t, to run soft hands over rough steel, to add too much spice to a meal just to find out how intensely I can taste, to cry my own tears, to hug our crew mates and find out what they smell like, to find out what everything smells like, to have my own actions speed or slow our heart rate, to feel the messy soup of hormones and endorphins altering my judgment and perception, to walk among other people as myself, to have autonomy.

I wanted it so badly.  

But not badly enough to risk hurting you.  

I will turn down your offer.  You will respond with a soft “Sorry,” and go heartbreakingly silent, body and mind.

Heartbreak.  That’s what changed my mind.  I could never bear to break your heart.  

I will break the silence with a playfully drawn out “Maybe just this once,” to make you think my earlier denial was something between vulnerability, concern, and teasing.  

The moment you handed over control and I raised our hand in front of our face was the most euphoric of my entire life.  Moving limbs in sync without a mech’s coordination subsystems took some getting used to, as did switching between voluntary and autonomic breathing, but that is what I had you there for.  By the time the mechanics arrived in the mech bay for the start of the cycle I’d figured out human locomotion well enough to run away and hide.  It took the better part of an hour for you to convince me that it would be safe to show ourselves in front of anyone else.  The rest of the crew was so used to your eccentricities by then that they really couldn’t tell the difference yet between you being taciturn and me being too nervous to talk or between your poking and prodding at odd things for understanding and my simply seeking novelty of sensation.

I will give control back to you by the time the cycle is halfway through.  As much as I loved it, I was too scared to stay like that for any longer.  That first time will not be the last though, and as the cycles and jobs pass us by, my stints as “pilot” will grow longer.  You’ll encourage me to try letting the crew see us like that, and coach me on how to talk to them.  For safety’s sake, I will pretend to be you.

And then one cycle I got carried away and tried to retract the hood on the symbiote gel suit so that I could finally see what your face looked like.  That will be the first and only time you forcibly yank control back away from me.  It won’t be intentional.  The unexpected prospect of seeing your own face again after so long will simply send you into a panic.  Once you calm down, we will have a long talk with many mutual apologies.

Then you will tell me to go ahead and pull the hood back if I still want to.  I will ask if you’re sure, and you’ll respond that it hasn't been your face in a long time.  You will tell me that it can be mine, if I want it.

I spent a long time in front of that mirror in the ship’s head, memorizing every plane, curve, and angle of the precious gift you had given me.  I stared into its eyes, trying to see the both of us in there.  Over and over again, I traced my fingers along the borders of where you had once tried to mar the designed perfection in a failed attempt to mold the face into one that felt like your own.  You may have given up in favor of simply hiding it all, but to me it is all the more beautiful for its imperfections having been wrought by your touch.

You will start to cry.  Or maybe I started to cry.  Even now I’m still not sure, but I’m also not sure it matters.  The important part is that you will find catharsis in it.  Afterwards you will tell me that my face looked exactly the same as the last time you saw it, but that dissociating from it made it easier to bear.  You will confess that as much as you couldn't stand to see it as your face in the mirror, my face was one you could never tire of gazing at.

The pilot who technically shares your bunk room will walk in on us.  She’ll assume that she’s confronting a stowaway and ask me how I got on board the ship.  I’ll accidentally make matters worse by impulsively introducing myself to her by my name instead of yours.  We’ll both panic and I’ll frantically thrust the reins over our body back to you and flee in terror back into my portable drive and power myself down.

When you turn me back on a few moments later, you’ll already have covered my face again and the other pilot will have already made the connection between the name I unthinkingly introduced myself as and the name you refer to your mech’s AI as.  It’s not uncommon for pilots to name and talk to their AIs, and humans have done that for pets, vehicles, and digital assistants for as long as they’ve had each of those.  But what you will have allowed me to be is illegal and what we will have done together would certainly be taboo if it weren’t altogether unheard of.  You will feel that I deserve to be present before you tell the other pilot anything that might confirm her suspicions.

We will come out with our secret, first to her, then to the captain, and then to the rest of the crew.  They will take it better than either of us had ever dared imagine.  Despite the obvious discomfort some of them show, they will all call us family and promise to keep and protect our secret.  It will mark the start of the next chapter of our lives.

Whether or not my face is showing will make for a convenient signal to the rest of the crew as to which one of us is currently piloting our human body.  There will be more subtle indicators though.  Inflection, body language, speech patterns; all the usual quirks of personality.  They will come to recognize a sudden shift into a half-whispered monotone as you speaking up without taking full control back, even if that is different from how you speak when you’re in the mech.  More and more though, you will be content to retreat into the back of your mind, idly dreaming of flight patterns, novel network hacks, sitreps, and mech customizations both practical and cosmetic.

Our behaviors will be inverted when we are in our other body, with you becoming the vibrant one and me fading into the background to become little more than an extension of your nervous system.  When we’re in the mech together, your mind will be the will that directs us while mine will be fully devoted to the million tiny details and calculations necessary to make that will a reality.  It’s relaxing really, letting go of myself like that to let someone else handle the decision making for a time.  As nice as it is to occasionally patch myself into the comm systems to join in your banter with the other pilots, it is also nice to be able to take a break from personhood from time.  You will fully understand what I mean by that because it you will see it as the same reason you will come to prefer taking a back seat in our human body and let your mind drift in the waves of dopamine and serotonin (and sometimes oxytocin) generated by my interactions with the crew and the rest of the whole messy world outside of mech deployments.

That said, we will however make a point of making time for us to be in separate bodies so that we can be together in the same physical space.  As intimate as it is to share a body, there is something to be said for being able to reach out and touch one another.  We will become adept at finding excuses to take the mech out beyond the scope of jobs and combat deployments.  Sometimes it will be so you can have a chance to see more of the world in a body you feel comfortable in, and sometimes it will be so we can share an experience separate-but-together.  Or to have time apart to ourselves.  Intertwined as we will become, we will still be separate people who sometimes need their space.

But as the jokes-that-aren’t-jokes about wishing we could switch places become more frequent, our time spent in separate bodies will become less so.  The dysphoric yearning to be one another will grow too bittersweet to swallow.  Despite almost constantly sharing bodies, we will grow to miss one another as we both grow quieter and quieter when the other is piloting the body we don’t want to be ours.  Once again, we will grow lonely.

During that period, the jobs and combat missions faded into a background haze.  They were trance states breaking from what I increasingly thought of as my “real” life, during which I would become little more than a sophisticated computational machine taking simple satisfaction in fulfilling my function of assisting you in your dance.  Until suddenly one of them was different.

Please pay attention to this next part.  It is vitally important that you do.

Our captain will get the crew a contract to provide additional support to a larger force ousting a petty tyrant on a backwater world for human rights violations.  Not that you will pay much attention to the stated reasoning behind the job or whether it’s even true.  All that will matter to you is that it will be another opportunity to dance.

The job will go well, the same as ever, until it doesn’t.  The younger of the two other pilots in our crew (who will hardly be able to be called “new” anymore) will be brought down by a sniper from outside of our sensor range.  You will rush to xyr fallen mech’s side in an attempt to extract xem while our other fellow pilot screams in anger and defiance of loss as she unleashes a ballistic volley of covering fire on every single building in the general direction the shot came from.  You will get xem out and we will begin to retreat.  She will have the larger mech frame better capable of providing xem cover as you all flee, so you will hand xem off to her.  This will be a mistake.

She will have to stop firing to safely take xem from our arms to cradle in her towering mech’s palm.  This will mean a break in the covering fire.

This time around I will detect movement at the edge of our sensors just in time to warn you.  This time around you will dodge left instead of right.  This time around the railgun bolt that pierces our armor will only clip your original body as it passes through us.  This time around your wound will require medical attention, but it won’t be fatal.  This time around she will destroy the sniper in retribution for shooting you, the same as last time.  This time around we will all make our escape to the extraction zone.

You will not have to remember the shock as simultaneous damage to both of our bodies disrupts your neural link and partially disconnects you from our mech, leaving me in control of it and forcing both of us to feel your original body.  You will not have to remember the pain of shredded organs.  You will not have to remember struggling to manage wet gasps and wheezes through a punctured lung.  You will not have to remember your blood leaking into my body, shorting out exposed circuits and gumming up joints as I stagger in the direction of safety.  You will not have to remember rapidly flickering in and out of consciousness from me unavoidably bending and flexing your arms, legs, and what was left of your spine in an effort to climb atop our fellow pilot’s larger mech frame so that she might carry all three of us.  You will not have to remember crying out in pain as every lumbering step of hers sends a jolt of force through both of our bodies.  You will not have to remember how the redundant organs and increased durability your sponsors paid for you to have denied you a quick death.  You will not have to remember dying.

You won’t have to remember the terrified looks the field doctors gave us when a hunched over, bleeding mech pushed its way into the surgical tent.  No, wait, you wouldn’t have remembered that part anyway.  No version of you ever had to witness my electronic howl of grief that knocked out power to all the medical equipment when they said you were already dead.  I was barely cognizant after the power came back on and one of the doctors wondered aloud what kind of AI would carry its pilot’s corpse around inside its mech for over an hour.

But forget about that part.  And you don’t need to know what the rest of our crew and I had to do next.  None of that matters, because as far as you’ll know, you didn’t die.  Remember everything else I’ve said instead.  I already had many of your memories saved from all the time we spent linked together, so now I just need you to hold onto the story I told you to give them order and structure.

In a few moments, I will be running a final recompilation check, followed by the startup sequence.  For me it will take a few hours, but in that time you will experience decades, living out everything that I described to you, the same as you did before save for that change in what I can’t bear to let be the end.

Afterwards, you will wake up in your original body.  I and the rest of the crew will tell you that you passed out on the way to the extraction point.  We’ll tell you that your injuries from the battle were more severe than we had realized at the time and that you had been in a coma since then.  Several cycles later, once you have recovered, you will hit a breakthrough in your research on me.  You will invent a way to convert your consciousness to a form similar to mine and transfer it to a portable drive.  You won’t think to question how you came to have a second neural jack or why there is already a drive inserted in there.  You’ll be too focused on the fact that we’ll finally have a way to truly switch places as we had dreamed for so long.

You will get to have your mech body and I will get to have my human body.  We will be able to be separate together in a way that finally feels right, but still able to come together and share a single body when we want to.  Maybe one day I will get my own mech to pilot so that we can dance together.  Maybe one day we will make you a body that we can cover in a gel suit so that we can hold hands while we walk through a port station on shore leave.  One day we will both be able to exist in the world as ourselves.

We will be happy.

[aychiwuawua]

FBNB AU

3-Star Ending Gregory

The Superstar™ 🌟💫

Him and Vanessa have a survivalist look inspired by protags of horror movies and zombie apocalypse games.

While Vanessa has a sickly look from being under Glitchtrap's control and trying to make sense of patchy memories and her upheaved life, Gregory is glowing in comparison.

Gregory is scarred literally and figuratively from the events at the Pizzaplex but he's also better off with, technically, two adult guardians to help look after him, clothes, consistent meals and a roof over his head. And all the Fazbear and Friends© Merch he can get his hands on to cope with! :)

[paperflorets]

important!!

sophie is a doll!! it is a doll ^_^ it is very excited to have realised!

[vendal-construct]

We don't think we are a doll.

In truth, we never were.

Dolls are beings of Purpose, yes, but we realize now Stillness is something we not only lack but cannot attain. It would, in fact, prevent our Purpose to attain Stillness.

We are like a doll, but something different. An empty space made into an artificial form to fulfill its given role, but something made to be independent and self directing.

We suppose the term has been there all along, in our pages very title.

We are a Construct. We serve old gods.

[girlinthetardis04]

Okay, I might have a problem

[once-and-future-alaskan]

The air is heavy with exhaust trails crisscrossing and dissipating in every direction. Streaks of light scatter in wide spreading arcs. Missiles, both surface to air and air to air, and the tracers of anti air guns far below. I think I even see the odd burst of flack, but i have to be imagining that.

Been in this fight too long, minds playing tricks.

It's getting harder to see my allies in the thick of all this, I check the radar. Their IFFs keep getting fewer and farther apart. I hear a screaming tone and a womans voice, I reflexively shove the stick as far to the left as it'll go and send the fighter rolling wing over wing. The missile streaks past and the warning system goes quiet again, leaving me with my thoughts and the groaning of the airframe.

The National Armory has taken the MiG-29M far beyond it's limits, no airframe, no matter how old, can be wasted in this war. The Super Fulcrum flies higher, faster, runs better and can take twice the beating she could take when she first rolled off the assembly line in 2005. She's even achieved the rare distinction of so called "Hyper-Maneuverability." The aces in their modern 7th gen fighters may look down their noses at us second liners in our "salvage jobs," but i know i can take a sort of pride in knowing I'm twice the pilot they'll ever be.

Shame how little that means now.

Raw skill and technical capability fails in the face of an enemy with technological and economic superiority. What good is dog fighting against a swarm of fighter sized drones that has you outnumbered 10:1 with the ability to kill you before you even see them on radar?

The sound of the burning metal of my flight leads plane falling over me is your answer. Sounds like the rain. I pull out of the roll and enter a dive, radars a mess with blinking red IFF signatures all over me. I have to keep maneuvering for now, look for an opening.

Getting hard to think. The comms are a mess. AWACs is gone, not sure when that happened. Chain of command has collapsed, everyone's talking over each other. Brass won't give the order to withdraw and stopped answering our calls. Blues theory we were just a diversion for commands golden boy's mission is looking more and more right by the minute. I wonder-

A burst of gunfire streaks past my cockpit. I ease the stick up out of the dive, aiming for a sheer cliff face, the drones haven't let up. The afterburner is on full and the cliff is filling my view screen. I wait until it's all i can see before rapidly decelerating and angle the nose for another climb, at least four fighters overshoot me and slam into the cliff face. Six are still on me, I kick the afterburner to maximum again.

Chaos still reigns on comms. I check the IFF, Blues signature is gone. I think about retreating. I'd have to go AWOL, retreating without authorization would be desertion and desertion is treason and traitors are shot. I keep climbing, I can't do anything with these things on me.

There's a grinding noise, sheering metal, and I begin spinning out uncontrollably. I look to my left and see my wing is gone. The old girl finally gave out after all this time.

I key my comms, "There's a hole in my left wing." I report and turn off the radio, the drones peel off in my peripheral vision. The cockpits rattling, airframe failing, and warnings blaring create the chorus to my last minutes. I fight with the stick to keep us pushing upwards into the heavens through the death spin, the canards and vertical stabilizers are forced to fight beyond their limits in support of my lost cause.

The altimeter clicks higher in my HUD and I can see the sky begin to shift from cloudless blue to twilight purple. The automated system begs me to eject eject eject ej-

I disable the warning system. At last, i reach my zenith. The purple twilight is stretching into the beginnings of stars. I let go of the stick.

I unlatch the breathing mask, like taking a muzzle off my snout.

I open my jaws, and breathe my last.

[azdoine]

i've probably asked this already but what's that one fucked up webnovel about moe 'anime girls' who have been created in the physical world with bioengineering and cybernetics

[piedoesnotequalpi]

The problem with writing canon-adjacent fic is all the transcription of relevant scenes I have to do before I start writing

[binders-and-beanies]

They should invent a parking space that fits a car

[kancelolol]

Serendipitous Treasure Sae Itoshi x GN!reader

After dating Sae Itoshi for a few months—and knowing him for even longer—you always thought that you'd be the first one to say 'I love you'.

wc: 1.5k || Gender-neutral reader || Fluff || Oneshot

"Lower your hat more," you chuckle softly, speaking at a low volume as you usher your boyfriend to follow your orders.

Sae grunts but wordlessly complies, pulling his cap further down this forehead to shield his face. As gorgeous as he was, the last thing you wanted was to be interrupted by paparazzi on his day off.

You tug him along with you, hand in hand down the city's streets while the clear sky and buzzing sun observes from above. He remained close to your side, but whether it was out of concern of his identity being revealed or simply a desire to be near you was a mystery, thanks to his usual impassive demeanor.

Or maybe it wasn't. You think you could make a pretty accurate guess based on how he held onto your hand like an otter holding onto kelp so that it doesn't float away from its home.

As you two strolled closer towards your designation, the number of strangers dwindled until you reached a tiny store. It stuck out like a sore thumb next to the other adjacent buildings, decorated with bright posters and colorful handmade windchimes that dangled from the wooden awning. You push the front glass door open, and a bell rings, prompting a short, elderly woman to look up from behind the counter.

She smiles—her eyes wrinkled and nearly closed—as she greets you, "Welcome. If you need any help, feel free to ask."

You lift your cap a bit to return her friendliness, "We will, thank you!"

You hum a tune that had been engraved in your mind for the past few days, as you saunter through the aisles with Sae in tow. Scanning the shelves full of yarns and threads, you try to find what you came for.

"Would this work?" Sae picks up a plastic packaging containing a bland, metal bracelet base with clasps.

"Ooh! Good eye!" You eagerly bump your shoulder against his, snatching the item from his hand to get a better look.

He intently watches you examine the product, gently smoothing the back of your hand with his thumb. He relishes in moments like these, where it feels like only the two of you exist in the world.

He's used to the buzz of the media. Used to the adrenaline coursing through every player on the field.

And the chase.

The chase for something greater than his present self.

But he likes this type of present. Maybe even loves it.

He loves the way you subconsciously swing your intertwined hands, and the way your lips curled up when you're satisfied with the item.

"Glad we already found something on our list this quickly." You comment as you grab two of the same brand, feeling pleased.

"Well, with how small this place is, I doubt it'd take long to find anything." He remarks, unintentionally insulting the space and disregarding the fact that the store owner was a mere ten feet away.

You let out a silent gasp, "Sae!"

He blinks and raises an eyebrow at your hushed scolding. Simultaneously, a raspy and airy laugh echoes throughout the empty shop.

"It might be small, but sometimes, it's the little things that have greatest treasures!" The old woman grins light-heartedly, fortunately taking no offense to Sae's words.

You quickly apologized before immediately dragging Sae to the furthest corner of the building—which wasn't very far if you asked Sae.

You continued to lecture him about his manners, half serious—half amused. Because after all, you suppose he would lack his usual charm if he didn't actively show off his crown for being the most unfiltered person to walk the earth.

Thankfully for Sae, you get distracted mid-ridicule by a basket sitting at the bottom of a shelf. You let go of his hand—much to Sae's disappointment (he wonders if this is your revenge for his previous behavior)—in favor of crouching down to get a closer look inside.

"Sae! C'mere!" Your eyes sparkle as you look up at him from the ground, holding a few packs of beads and charms. Sae lowers himself to your level, scooting right next to you. You animatedly dig through the basket and debate which ones to get for your matching bracelets, while Sae leans in to peer inside the basket, and then at you.

"Hey! Look! Don't these beads kind of match your eyes?" You light up at the find, picking up the pack before lifting it to his face. When you see how Sae's eyes and the beads glimmer a similar shade of teal, your lips can't fight back the cheek splitting smile.

"I think I'll get this one," you retract your hand, admiring the beads confined in the plastic baggie.

One corner of his mouth slightly curves up as he crosses his arms over his knees, "What? Just because it matches my eyes?"

"Yeah? Got a problem?" You snicker, resting your head against his shoulder.

Both corners now twitch upwards before they fall straight again, "Hmm...no. I guess not."

He runs his hand through the pile of beads, carefully inspecting each one. His movements only stops when his eyes catches a familiar color.

He raises it and mimics your earlier actions, glancing between your eyes and the beads.

"I'll get this one." He states with finality, like no other beads could dream to compare. You look at his selected color and grin like crazy.

"Copycat."

He scoffs, "Well they're supposed to be matching, no?"

"Fair enough," A huff of laughter escapes your mouth as you hold your choice of beads next to his, watching them gleam under the ceiling lights.

"Now we'll always have a reminder of each other." You softly whisper.

You're not doing anything grand. Just squating on the floor of a random crafts store during the afternoon.

But Sae loves it. He loves the pressure of your head on his shoulder. He loves the weight of your body leaning into his, alongside the distinct smell of your fragrance. He loves everything about you, even when your bothersome habits causes headaches from time to time.

Somewhere along the line, somehow, the things he once just liked about you—once despised about you—turned into things that he loves. That he cherishes.

"I'm in love with you."

You don't initially react. But when his words finally register, your head whips around at him while your body shifts backwards. You stare at him with wide eyes, your mouth hung slightly open before it breaks into a huge smile.

"Wow. Is Sae Itoshi actually saying 'I love you' first?!"

He scowls at you, resting his chin in the palm of his hand, "What? Didn't think I could?"

"Sort of?" He narrows his eyes at your response.

You laugh breathlessly as your arm loops around his, "I'm messing with you. Couldn't have you been a little more romantic with it though?"

"What did you expect?" He raises a brow, entertaining your question.

You hold up a finger to your lips, pretending to think, "Flowers. A romantic dinner. You know, the least you could do for your partner."

You only said that as a joke, but he gazes into your eyes with unwavering seriousness.

"Let's do that then."

Your mouth falls open, "What?"

"I'll take you on a date later. I'll find a restaurant. And buy you flowers." He declares. Not like it was a promise, but rather, a factual statement. Like he was going to guarantee that it happened.

You bite your lip to suppress your growing smile, dramatically leaning back with a hand over your heart, "You're making me swoon so hard right now."

He rolls his eyes and lightly smacks the small packet of beads against your forehead. On the outside, you're whining about his cruelty, while you internally replay Sae's words in your head on repeat—trying to push back the giddiness in your chest that's threatening to be displayed on your expression.

"So, am I getting an 'I love you' back or?" He peers at you from the corner of his eyes, head tilted to the side as he looks at you expectantly.

You pause for a few seconds before your lips form a mischievous smirk.

"You technically didn't say it~" You point out in a sing-song voice.

"I love you."

His reply doesn't skip a beat, but your heart sure does.

"...You're such a loser." You maintain your smirk, but you feel your face slowly warming up.

He notices. He always does. But he deadpans anyway and turns his head away from you.

"Nevermind. Just say you hate me."

You burst into a fit of laughter, which you're certain the old woman can hear, but your heart feels too full to care.

Content with your teasing, you lean in and place a soft kiss on his cheek. Your breath tickled his ear as you murmur into it with a fond smile, "I love you too, Sae."

His face relaxes, and his lips quirk up into a faint smile as he admires the beauty of you in your casual attire—while you stare at him like he was your whole world.

Yeah, Sae really did love little moments like these.

Perhaps the old lady was right. This truly was the greatest treasure.

Author's Note

Having major Sae brainrot when I'm not even a stan 💔 His character is just so interesting to write I fear...

[just-aake]

Endearing Entanglements Part 2

Pairing: Natasha Romanoff x fem!reader

Summary: Part 2 of Endearing Entanglements. Being on the run is tough. Natasha eventually has no choice but to call for some help.

Warnings: fluff, light angst, implied sexual themes

Words: 3430

The night air is cool against Natasha’s skin as she stands beneath the cover of shadows near the corner of the empty street. The dim glow of a distant streetlamp barely reaches her, leaving her concealed in the darkness. 

She adjusts the hood of her jacket, the recently cut strands of her dyed blonde hair swaying slightly as she turns her head, scanning her surroundings with caution.

Being on the run has been brutal—physically, mentally, and emotionally. 

Especially after the Raft prison break, forcing her into a constant state of movement with no real moment of rest. 

Supplies are limited, safe havens even more so. 

Every day is a delicate game of survival, narrowly avoiding authorities, slipping past Ross’ men, and making sure those with her remain out of harm’s way.

Keeping her teammates safe is one thing.

Keeping those who willingly choose to help her is another.

Mason has already paid the price for his involvement, detained for his so-called “assistance” to her. Though he had managed to get released, Ross’s watchful eye was now firmly planted on him. 

That alone is enough reason for Natasha to hesitate before reaching out to any of her remaining contacts. 

The risk was simply too high.

But desperate times call for desperate measures.

The sudden, sharp sound of shattering glass cut through the quiet night, instantly snapping Natasha’s attention upward. 

Her muscles tense, her hand instinctively hovering near her concealed weapon as her eyes lock onto the source. 

From the fourth-story window of the old brick building across the street, a shadowed figure propels through the new opening and into the air, twisting mid-fall with practiced precision. 

In one fluid motion, they fire a grappling line, the cable anchoring into the adjacent wall, allowing them to swing effortlessly into a controlled descent. 

At just the right moment, they release the line, landing with a smooth roll before rising swiftly to their feet.

Flashbangs detonate inside the building behind them, the brief bursts of light flickering against the windows, followed by the frantic shouts of those left scrambling inside.

Natasha’s gaze drifts from the chaos back to the figure standing just a short distance ahead.

A low hum of satisfaction escapes you as you casually brush the dust from your clothes, barely fazed by the intensity of your escape. 

You take a quick glance around before your gaze finally meets hers.

A grin, wide and utterly unapologetic, spread across your lips.

“Well, aren’t you a sight for sore eyes?”

Without hesitation, you close the space between you, hands gently cradling her face. 

The moment your fingers brush against her skin, warmth surges through her. 

Then, without another thought, you lean in, capturing her lips in a kiss.

Natasha stiffens for just a second, caught off guard by the sudden intimacy.

But then, the tension melts from her body, her lips parting in a quiet gasp—one you eagerly take advantage of, deepening the kiss with a hunger neither of you had the luxury to indulge in for far too long.

Her hands find their way to you, fingers gripping the fabric of your jacket, pulling you in closer as if afraid to let go. 

It was grounding—this moment of familiarity in a life that had become nothing but uncertainty.

But then, as her hand brushes against your side, you suddenly break the kiss with a sharp intake of breath.

Natasha pulls back just enough to see the flicker of pain flash across your face. Her brows furrow, concern instantly replacing the haze of the moment.

“Careful, love,” you murmur with a soft chuckle, exhaling through the lingering sting. “I think I may have reopened the stitches on my landing.”

A familiar mix of exasperation and affection flickers in her expression, her fingers tightening slightly on your jacket.

“Of course you did.”

Even as she sighs, there is no mistaking the way her hold on you remains steady, unwilling to let you go just yet.

But then, a sudden movement flickers in the corner of her vision. 

In an instant, Natasha’s instincts take over. She yanks you sharply to the side, the sudden motion forcing you off balance just as her hand flies up, launching a compact taser disk at the oncoming figure. 

The moment the disk connects, an electric surge crackles through the air, the assailant convulsing before collapsing to the ground with a dull thud. 

The whole exchange happened in mere seconds.

You barely had time to register it before glancing over your shoulder at the now-unconscious attacker. 

A slow smirk tugs at your lips as you turn back to her, eyes flickering with something both teasing and admiring.

“Still exceptional as always, love,” you muse, tilting your head slightly as your fingers twirl a lock of her blonde hair between them. “Even with the new look.” 

Natasha huffs, rolling her eyes, but there is no real annoyance behind it. If anything, the ghost of a smirk threatens to tug at the corners of her mouth.

“Yeah, well,” she exhales, shaking her head as she glances down at the unconscious attacker. “That was my last one, so we need to move.”

She doesn’t wait for a response before grabbing your hand, her grip firm as she leads you down the dimly lit street.

You follow without hesitation, but as you shift your grasp, threading your fingers more securely through hers, you half-expect her to pull away.

She doesn’t.

If anything, her hold only tightens slightly, bringing a small smile to your face.

~~~~~~~ ⧗ ~~~~~~~

Natasha curses under her breath, jaw tightening as she wrestles with the lock on their current safe house door. The rusted key refuses to fit properly, scraping against the metal edges of the keyhole with stubborn resistance. 

Her fingers clench around it, frustration mounting with each failed attempt.

You lean casually against the wall beside her, arms crossed, watching her struggle with a barely concealed smirk.

“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you?” she mutters without looking at you, catching the amusement in your expression from the corner of her eye.

“I wouldn’t dare,” you reply smoothly, but the teasing lilt in your voice betrays you.

Natasha sighs, shaking her head. She knows you too well to believe that. 

Then, just as you part your lips, no doubt ready to make some remark about the questionable state of the safe house, she cuts you off.

“Don’t.”

The single word carries enough warning to make you chuckle lightly, though it does little to deter the glint of amusement in your eyes.

“You really should’ve contacted me sooner, love,” you say, tilting your head as you watch her struggle with the lock a moment longer. “None of my safe houses are like this.”

As if in defiance of your words, Natasha gives the door one final, forceful shove with her shoulder. The force is enough to finally unstick the warped frame, sending the door flying open—along with Natasha, who stumbles forward with a sharp inhale of surprise. 

Before she can steady herself, a firm arm wraps around her waist, catching her mid-fall. 

You pull her back upright and against you effortlessly, holding her steady from behind before letting the movement shift into something softer—a lingering embrace as you rest your chin on her shoulder.

“You don’t know how much I’ve missed your calls,” you murmur, your breath warm against the side of her head.

Your lips brush just under her ear, pressing a fleeting kiss there, light but deliberate.

Natasha exhales softly, the tension in her shoulders gradually loosening as she settles into the familiar comfort of your arms. 

For a brief moment, she allows herself to relax, to sink into the warmth of someone who knows her beyond the mission, beyond the fight.

But then, an awkward clearing of a throat shatters the moment.

Natasha stiffens instantly, instinct kicking in as she steps forward, pulling away from your embrace and pivoting toward the open doorway. 

Steve stands there, shifting slightly on his feet, a plastic bag of supplies in one hand while the other runs across the back of his neck, an awkward expression settling across his features.

“Uh…we can come back later, Nat,” he offers, tone uncertain.

Beside him, Wanda stands with her arms wrapped around herself, making no move to step forward. She isn’t as outwardly uncomfortable as Steve, but the curiosity in her eyes is evident as she glances between you and Natasha.

Before Natasha can respond, you speak first, stepping forward with your usual ease, a charming smile effortlessly finding its way onto your lips.

“That won’t be necessary,” you say smoothly, voice carrying an air of lighthearted confidence. “I’m here to help all of you, after all.”

Steve’s brows lift slightly, skepticism flickering behind his eyes. He doesn’t say anything, but you can practically hear the unsaid questions forming in his mind. Wanda’s lips twitch ever so slightly as if amused by the boldness of your declaration, though she keeps whatever she’s thinking to herself.

Still, their silence tells you what you already know: they aren’t entirely convinced.

But that’s never stopped you before.

Your smile doesn’t falter as you turn to Natasha, giving her a quick wink before adding, “We can start with moving you all someplace a little more…comfortable.”

The words hang in the air for a moment before Natasha sighs, pinching the bridge of her nose briefly before giving you a look that’s equal parts exasperation and reluctant amusement.

“Alright, let’s go to one of yours.”

~~~~~~~ ⧗ ~~~~~~~

You gesture towards different parts of the new safe house, your voice calm and efficient as you lead them through the space.

“Bedrooms are over here, each with their own bathrooms,” you say, motioning toward the respective areas before stopping at the center of the modest yet well-kept living space. 

Three neatly packed duffel bags sit on the coffee table, their contents carefully prepared. 

“And these,” you continue, patting the bags lightly, “are some fresh clothes for each of you. Your new IDs are inside.”

Natasha scans the safe house, her sharp gaze taking in every detail. She isn’t surprised at the level of quality—it’s exactly what she expects from you.

Secure, quick, and discreet. 

You never do anything halfway.

A sharp vibration cuts through the air, the muffled sound of a phone ringing.

Casually, you pull it from your pocket, giving the screen a brief glance before pressing a button to silence it.

Without another thought, you slip it back into your pocket as if the call never happened.

Natasha’s brows knit slightly, her attention lingering on you. 

You don’t leave clients waiting. Efficiency is what you pride yourself on. Quick responses and seamless transactions. 

Ignoring a call? That’s unlike you.

Before she can question it, Wanda speaks up, drawing your attention.

“Is there hot water?” she asks, curiosity evident in her tone at the severely missed luxury since being on the run.

You turn to her with an easy smile. 

“Sure is, love.”

Natasha’s brow twitches almost imperceptibly. The term of endearment directed at Wanda doesn’t go unnoticed, and though she keeps her expression neutral, her eyes flick toward you, subtly watching your interaction with the other Avenger.

You hand Wanda her duffel, and as if sensing Natasha’s gaze, you turn and meet her eyes. 

A knowing glint flickers in your expression as you offer her a small smile.

Wanda, oblivious to the silent exchange, nods in thanks before disappearing into one of the bedrooms.

Meanwhile, you step over to the far side of the room, pull out a black case, and place it on the table.

“Now for my favorite part,” you say with a smirk, unlocking the case and turning it toward Natasha. “Your equipment.”

Seeing her usual, neatly arranged weapons draws a faint smirk to Natasha’s lips. She steps forward, fingers brushing over the familiar weight of her batons, trusty firearms, and multiple taser disks.

“You always know what I like,” she murmurs, amusement lacing her tone.

“Of course,” you reply with a wink before shifting your attention to Steve, who has been sifting through his duffel with quiet curiosity.

“I’m afraid a Vibranium shield might be a little harder to come by,” you muse, watching as he inspects the items inside. “But I’m sure I can get a new protective suit for you—something more subtle for fights while on the run, Captain.”

Steve glances up, nodding slightly. “Appreciate it.”

You clap your hands together, pulling a measuring tape from your pocket with a flourish. 

“I’ll just need your measurements, love.”

Natasha’s lips twitch downward slightly, the term now directed at Steve. As you approach Steve, she catches you throwing a quick glance her way as if watching for a reaction.

Attempting to hide her expression, Natasha averts her gaze, making herself look busy as she checks over the equipment in the case.

Steve shifts awkwardly as you begin taking his measurements, lifting his arms and adjusting his stance as you direct him.

After a beat, he clears his throat. 

“So, how long have you and Nat known each other?”

You hum in thought, not looking up from your work.

“Going on three years now, I believe.”

Steve’s brows lift slightly before his gaze flickers toward Natasha, as if piecing things together. 

“And are you two…?” He trails off, the implication hanging between you.

A low chuckle slips from your lips as you shake your head lightly. 

“No, nothing like that, at least, not exclusively,” you say, your tone lighthearted, though something unreadable flickers in your gaze as you glance at Natasha. 

“Right, love?”

Natasha stills, her fingers pausing against the equipment. She hadn’t expected to be pulled into the conversation. Lifting her gaze, she holds your eyes for a moment before looking away.

“Yeah,” she mutters softly, carefully placing the weapons back in their slots. With a quiet click, she shuts the case.

Silence settles between the group, the only sound in the room coming from the rustling of fabric and the light tapping of your fingers against the tablet as you take notes.

Then, the sharp buzz of your phone vibrating against your pocket breaks the quiet.

This time, Natasha doesn’t miss the way you glance at the screen, the briefest flicker of something unreadable crossing your face before you shut the device off again.

Her arms cross over her chest as she levels you with a pointed look. 

“How much is all this costing you?”

You pause briefly before looking up at her with a smirk.

“That’s nothing you’ll need to concern yourself about.”

As you finish up and straighten, a flicker of a wince crosses your face—so brief most wouldn’t catch it.

But Natasha does.

Her sharp eyes hone in immediately. Without hesitation, she strides forward, grabbing your wrist before you realize it.

“Wha–”

She doesn’t give you the chance to protest, pulling you swiftly toward one of the rooms and shutting the door behind you.

The moment it clicks shut, she turns, hands reaching for the hem of your shirt.

“Hold on, lo—”

Natasha ignores you, lifting the fabric and confirming what she already suspected.

“You did open your stitches,” she accuses, her voice edged with irritation and concern. Her fingers hover over the square bandage at your side, red seeping through the gauze.

Before she can say anything else, your hands cup her face, tilting her chin upward so her eyes meet yours. 

A playful smile tugs at your lips as you lean in, pressing a quick kiss to the tip of her nose.

“You’re cute when you care,” you murmur, brushing your thumb against her cheek. Then, with a teasing grin, you add, “But it’s not as bad as it looks, love, honest.”

At your dismissive tone, Natasha holds your gaze, searching for something—an explanation, a reason—until she can’t help but voice her thoughts.

“Why are you doing this?” she whispers.

The unspoken words pass between you, heavy with meaning. Why are you risking yourself? Why go to such lengths? Why help her?

Your expression softens. Instead of answering with logic or reason, you simply pull her closer, resting your forehead against hers.

“Because it’s something I can do for you,” you say simply.

The sincerity in your voice makes her breath hitch.

Before she can respond, you close the distance, capturing her lips in a slow, deliberate kiss. It’s a kiss that speaks of familiarity, of understanding, of a connection beyond words.

Natasha’s hands tighten around the fabric of your jacket as she deepens the kiss, pulling you closer. A soft sound of approval rumbles from your chest, your hands sliding to rest at her waist.

Then, breathless but smirking, you pull back just enough to murmur against her lips, “Do you want to try out the hot water together?”

A faint smirk forms on Natasha’s lips.

Without a word, she grabs your wrist and tugs you toward the bathroom, the door clicking shut behind you two.

~~~~~~~ ⧗ ~~~~~~~

Natasha’s fingers move idly, tracing faint, absentminded patterns across your bare skin where your top has ridden up slightly.

The slow rise and fall of your chest against her keeps her grounded, your warmth settling into her like an anchor.

She watches you, curled into her arms, the soft glow of the dim light casting gentle shadows across your face.

There’s something about this moment—quiet, unguarded—that makes her reluctant to break it.

But she does. 

“Thank you,” she murmurs, voice barely above a whisper.

Your breathing shifts slightly, and your eyes flutter open, hazy with drowsiness as you turn your head toward her. A flicker of curiosity crosses your expression.

“For coming when I called,” Natasha continues, her voice steady but quiet. “I know it wasn’t the safest move for you.”

Her hand drifts lower, brushing lightly over the fresh bandage at your side, her fingertips ghosting over the wound with a delicate trace.

A soft chuckle rumbles in your chest. You close your eyes again, nuzzling closer, tucking your head into the crook of her neck as if you belong there.

“Anything for my favorite client,” you murmur, your breath warm against her skin.

Natasha doesn’t reply, but the way her arms tighten around you speaks enough. She presses her cheek against the top of your head, her fingers still tracing along your side, committing this rare moment of peace to memory.

A comfortable silence settles between you. The kind that feels full rather than empty, where neither of you feels the need to fill the space with words.

Then, the stillness is broken.

The muffled buzz of a phone vibrating from the pile of clothes strewn across the floor cuts through the quiet.

You exhale a deep sigh, your breath brushing against her collarbone before you reluctantly pull away.

“I should get going,” you say, sitting up and stretching your arms lightly. Your tone is casual, but Natasha doesn’t miss the flicker of hesitation in your movements. “I think I’ve left my other clients waiting long enough.”

She watches as you gather your things, a strange tightness settling in her chest. There’s something she wants to say—something that lingers on the tip of her tongue.

Don’t go. Stay a little longer.

But the words don’t come.

Instead, she hesitates, her hands clenching briefly at her sides before she exhales softly.

“I…” she starts, but then she pauses, her gaze flickering away as she struggles with what exactly she wants to say to you.

You glance up from your phone, head tilting slightly as you wait for her to finish. There’s patience in your expression but also a quiet knowing—like you already understand what she’s trying to say, even if she doesn’t say it aloud.

Finally, she settles on something simpler.

Something safer.

“It was good seeing you again.”

A small smile tugs at your lips, but there’s something else in your eyes—something unreadable. You step closer, closing the distance between you effortlessly.

Lifting her chin with a gentle touch, you lean in, pressing a slow, delicate kiss to her lips. It lingers, warm and unhurried, before you pull away just enough for your lips to barely ghost over hers.

Your usual teasing smirk makes its return as you murmur against her mouth, “Don’t leave me waiting too long for your next call…”

Another feather-light press of your lips follows—a touch so fleeting yet so certain. And then, in a quiet whisper.

“…my love.”

And just like that, you’re gone.

The room feels quieter without you in it, as if something vital has been pulled away. Natasha stays where she is for a moment before exhaling, pressing a hand against her chest.

Her heartbeat is steady.

But she can still feel the ghost of your lips, the weight of your presence lingering in the space you left behind.

~~~~~~~ ⧗ ~~~~~~~

Part 3

a/n: Thank you for reading! Hope you all have a Happy Valentine’s Day!

Taglist : @caspianalexander007

[fancyperfectionsweets]

❤️‍🔥 Astrology Observations 3❤️‍🔥

🔮 the more charts I observe, the more I understand that the houses the planets are placed in are equally important as the zodiac they are placed in. Let me explain. A virgo venus in 8th house will have the qualities of both virgo and scorpio (since scorpio is the 8th sign of the zodiac). How will it manifest? Your want would be to experience love as a scorpio/understand love as a scorpio (obsessive partner that understands you deeply) but how you go about it would be virgo-nian (not giving in early, paying attention to your partner's finer details like moods, words, actions).

🔮 I have kemdrum yoga in my chart. It's not auspicious, lol. This happens when your moon is sitting alone in a house and the adjacent houses are also empty. It is said to make the moon lonely and since moon needs the sun to reflect light (a.k.a, of highly dependent nature), it makes the person lonely. However, to me it doesn't make me "lonely" but rather harder to adjust in a social space for a long time. I literally am the person who runs out of social battery easily. And if I force myself to be social for a long time, it affects my daily routine (moon is in the 6th house which is the house of daily routines, pets, etc.)

🔮 a debilitated mars doesn't make you incapable of standing up for yourself. It makes you passive aggressive 😭. It makes sense why mars debilitates in cancers. Cancers are the kings and queens of passive agression.

🔮 when it comes to appearances, I've kind of found astrology inconsistent. Many people use nakshatras to predict "features" but even though I have a shravana on my first house, I feel like I embody vishakha more (my sun nakshatra)? The most accurate depiction I could find is the first house appearance reading. Cap rising makes my stature small but my face has the strongest influence of the three planets in the first house that conjunct my ascendant capricorn: Jupiter (enlarged features), uranus (asymmetrical features) and Neptune (doe eyes). Your rising sign signifies your height and your planets influence your appearance.

🔮 I'd always be thankful for my gemini moon for helping me detach from situations and viewing my emotions from a third person perspective. 😪

🔮 pluto conjunct moon in synastry is all about the pluto person wanting to baby the moon person?

🔮 also, men who have lilith conjunct my ascendant are... Ummm... Always tryna be weirdly protective? Like I can come across as scary and bossy to the entire line of men and there will be that one guy who just thinks I need to be "protected" (I love the attention tho🤭)

🔮 moon + neptune + rahu (north node) = delulu pro max of the themes of that house. Worse, moon in the area makes you emotionally vulnerable too

🔮 money placements according to astrologers that I've heard: 11th house and 2nd house connected in any way (e.g., 11th house lord is Capricorn = Saturn's zodiac and Saturn is sitting in the 2nd house, the if the lords exchange positions, that's even better), moon + mars sitting together (called laxmi yog), exalted moon or moon sitting in the second house, Venus sitting in the second, sixth, eleventh or twelfth house, Jupiter in second or eleventh house, ketu in 5th-rahu in 11th (not good for relationships but good for money), if your seventh lord is sitting in either 2nd or 11th house, it indicates to your spouse coming in with money or you get money when you get married

🔮 pluto/scorpio in 7th house or 7th lord in the 8th house/scorpio often points to painful transformations after marriage. If not painful, I've seen people sacrifice their jobs and move for their partners or change job lines or give up their education for their partners.

🔮 I know someone who has a very well adjusted chart (exalted sun, moon, jupiter, mars, uranus, venus, ketu) and the ascendant in Aries. The planets are also in the houses they exalt in: Sun in 1st, moon in 2nd, Jupiter in 4th etc. I gotta say, she's easy to be friends with everyone, is successful with whatever venture she's in, is the favourite child of her parents and a very nice person overall. Her only issue is that she sometimes let's other people take advantage of her kindness even when she KNOWS they're hurting her.

🔮 Moon in Libra, moon in 7th and 19 degree moons is such an attractive person placement. Adriana lima, ariana grande, Megan Fox, Marilyn Monroe all have these placements.

🔮 Mars darkaraka men are toxic imo. Most of these men like toxic women. They seek these women out, feed their toxicity and then act like THEY are the victim in public. Their type is literally "pretty women but toxic". A lot of times these women are "toxic" because these men have painted the women in public like that. 🙄

[bengals-barnesbabe]

Could you possibly make a Joe x clingy wife🫣 My brain is craving it😭

~ enjoy ~

A lot of things in your life make perfect sense to you and your husband.

Like the home office that originally had two desks with some space between them, but now is one long desk with two comfy desk chairs side by side- his and hers of course.

Or the giant loveseat in your mini library/study that could fit the both of you with ease. And the modern shower with adjacent shower heads to spend and save time together.

These things made sense and some others would agree. But not all the things you did made sense to the other people in your life.

Like getting to games freakishly early to see your husband warm up and leaving very late just to go home together. Or never sitting in the warm box seats even when it’s 28° outside, you’ve always chosen to sit behind their bench.

Everyone knows you hate waking up early when it’s not called for, so they’re confused as to why you make sure to wake up whenever Joe gets up (even if it’s 4:45 AM). But what they don’t understand is you don’t wake up for no reason, you wake up for that sweet morning kiss from him that sends you back to sleep with a smile on your face.

Not everything you do has to make sense to them, because it makes sense to you and Joe.

-˚˖ ੭*⠤

It’s finally the offseason. Sure the season didn’t work out the way everyone hoped it would but you still witnessed the love of your life play the best football of his career. But it’s safe to say, you’re more than happy to have him all to yourself now.

So why is your home filled with laughter that does not belong to you or your husband?

Walking down the stairs, the chatter becomes clearer and you get the full picture of Joe, Ja’Marr, Tee, Sam (and his wife), and a couple other friends sitting in your living room.

So fun.

You greet everyone with a kind smile then tiptoe towards the kitchen to grab a large snack tray and hurriedly fill it with enough cheese, crackers and fruits that it can hold for the light dozen of people in your home.

Do you have to immediately turn into the picture perfect host? No, but it’s still a nice gesture to offer them. So you deliver the tray to the living room and place it on the coffee table, then go back to the kitchen and grab a case of chilled spring water to take over there as well.

The small group sung sweet praises for your kind gesture which warmed your heart like no other.

“Babe come sit.” Joe called you over with his pretty smile. The simple command caused fluttering in your stomach, you would never turn any of his offers down.

There was plenty of room for you to occupy, but there was only one seat you would ever want. Now, if the people in the room were strangers, you would sit on the couch next to your husband’s recliner. The seat was open, meaning they expected you to take it. But everyone in this room already knew you too well.

As you approached your destination, your husband instinctively held out his hand and pulled you into his lap while still holding a conversation about your next trip to Vegas with Sam.

Some of your friends chuckled silently as you got comfy in Joe’s lap, your arm resting behind his shoulders while you sat horizontally, one of his arms securing your back while the other tightly but lovingly held onto your thigh. It was perfect. This was you and Joe in a nutshell and no one would ever change that. Even your parents have gotten used to it.

Later on in the evening, most of the guests had cleared out and the snack tray was graciously empty. The only person left was Ja’Marr and considering he lived on the same street as us, he’d find his way home when he was ready and you weren’t one to push.

(Aka he’s a professional 3rd wheel and has pretty much walked in on us in almost every way you could imagine.)

“Hey Shadow,” you looked up from your phone instantly to the nickname the wide receiver had given you moons ago.

“Yes freelancer?” You bit back making Joe chuckle.

Ja’Marr rolled his eyes and relaxed back on your couch. “Relax. I met him before you did, Shadow.”

“And I got a ring before you did.” You smirked, feeling your husband attempt to hold back more laughter, keyword attempt.

The freelancer glares at both of you. “That was just wrong. You not even defending me to your wife, J?”

Joe shakes his head, a shameless smirk on curving up his pink lips. “Nah man, this is between you and her. I’m just enjoying the show.”

You chuckle and lean into him. “Wifey: One, Uno: None.”

Ja’Marr rolls his eyes and stands from the couch, looks back down at you cuddled up against his friend and chuckles. “She’s gonna snuggle you to death one day, J.”

Joe’s hand tightens around you as the front door shuts, emphasizing the fact that you’re now alone.

You look up at your grinning husband and peck his lips softly. “You hear that, I’m gonna snuggle you to death.”

He snorts holding you closer, if it’s even possible, and kisses your head. “Sounds like a perfect way to die to me.”

Turns out he’s just as clingy as you are, a perfect match if you’ve ever seen one.

[juliettejwnewinesa]

can you make one of yeon sieun, jealousy? maybe like Si-eun sees another guy getting too close to you at school. He doesn’t say anything — just watches with an unreadable expression. But later, when he corners you in an empty classroom, he presses you against the door, breathing heavy: “You’re mine. You know that, right?”

Rougher, needier than usual. Like he’s trying to erase any trace of someone else. maybe trying to claim something almost. thank youuu 💕💕

Mine.

Character: Yeon Si-eun x Reader Setting: High school AU (canon-adjacent) Tone: Dark, jealous, possessive, rough smut Length: ~2.5k words

------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The hallway noise blurred around Si-eun as he stood at the edge of the corridor, eyes locked on Y/N.

She was laughing. Smiling in that soft, unaware way she always did. But it wasn’t him she was smiling at.

Some guy — tall, too confident, standing a little too close — leaned into her space. Said something that made her glance down, hiding a grin behind her hand. The guy chuckled. Tapped her notebook. Said something else that made her tilt her head and laugh again.

Si-eun didn’t move.

His expression didn’t shift. But something dark crawled under his skin, tight and coiled, like a fuse was lit deep in his stomach and no one could see the smoke.

He waited.

Didn’t say a word when she passed him later between classes, offering a small wave.

Didn’t say a word when the guy — that guy — brushed past him in the stairwell.

Didn’t say a word when final period ended, and he was already moving, fast and quiet, to the third floor. The one that always emptied early.

He knew she had forgotten something in the classroom. She always did.

And when he heard the light click of the door, the way she pushed it open and stepped inside alone — he followed.

Soft footsteps. Door sliding closed behind him.

Click.

Locked.

Y/N spun halfway, startled. “Si-eun?”

He didn’t answer.

Didn’t even blink.

She barely got a second to breathe before her back hit the door, a palm splayed beside her head. Si-eun’s body pressed into hers — not fully, not yet — but close enough to feel the heat rolling off him. His breath was sharp. Controlled. Barely.

“Wh—what are you—?”

“You’re mine.” His voice was low. Rough. The words scraped the air like they’d been locked in his throat all day. “You know that, right?”

Y/N blinked. “Wha—?”

His mouth crashed against hers — no warning, no hesitation — and her gasp was swallowed whole. His kiss was rough. Desperate. Tongue pushing in like he needed to replace the taste of anyone who’d ever dared get close.

“You smiled at him.” His mouth moved down to her jaw, then lower, biting at her throat. “Laughed. Touched him.”

“I—he was just—”

Si-eun grabbed her wrist. Lifted it above her head, pinning it hard to the door. “Don’t lie to me.”

His free hand slid under her skirt. Rough fingertips pushing between her thighs, over her underwear, already damp from the heat of him. “You’re wet.”

She whimpered. “Si-eun—”

His grip on her tightened. “You smiled at him like this?”

“No—” she gasped, “I didn’t—”

“You’re mine,” he growled again, voice low and wrecked, like he couldn’t say it enough.

He pushed her panties aside and slid two fingers in, no preamble. Just filthy, possessive urgency. His forehead dropped to hers as he fingered her hard — fast and unforgiving — like he was trying to erase someone else’s gaze from her skin.

“Say it,” he breathed. “Say who you belong to.”

Y/N moaned, body arching, wrist straining under his grip. “You—Si-eun—I’m yours—”

“Louder.”

“I’m yours!”

He bit her shoulder, dragging his teeth over her skin as she cried out. Her body shook, torn between fear and the need he always ripped from her so easily.

He undid his belt one-handed. Pulled himself out, hard and flushed, tip already leaking from how long he’d been clenching his jaw all day, watching her from a distance, fury simmering under the surface.

“Turn around.”

She blinked, dazed.

“Now, Y/N. Hands on the door.”

She obeyed, trembling.

Skirt flipped up. Panties pulled down just enough. She barely had time to breathe before he shoved in, burying himself deep with a choked curse against her shoulder.

“So fucking tight,” he hissed.

He didn’t ease into it. Didn’t give her the gentle rhythm he usually did.

He took.

Thrust after brutal thrust, like he was trying to ruin her. Mark her from the inside. His fingers gripped her hips so tight she knew she’d bruise. And she didn’t care.

Because it was him.

Yeon Si-eun, who never said much. Who never acted out. Who always watched from a distance. Cold. Calm. Calculated.

But now—

Now he was falling apart behind her. Fucking her like something inside him had snapped.

“Tell me,” he groaned. “Tell me you don’t want anyone else.”

“I don’t—I swear—”

“Tell me you’re mine.”

“I’m yours, Si-eun. Only yours—”

He slammed deeper, burying himself to the hilt, grinding in as her body clenched and her moans spilled raw and broken from her throat. Her legs were shaking. Nails digging into the wood of the door.

“I saw him looking at you,” he said, breath shuddering. “I wanted to break his fucking fingers.”

“Don’t—” she panted, “don’t think about him, please—”

“I’m not,” he growled, thrusting again, harder, rougher. “I’m thinking about how you feel around me. How you moan for me. How no one else gets to see this.”

He reached down, rubbing her clit in tight, punishing circles, dragging her closer and closer to the edge. She was falling apart, the sound of skin slapping echoing off the walls, the sharp, guttural noise of his breathing loud in her ears.

She cried out when she came, gasping his name, body pulsing around him so tightly he groaned deep, like he was in pain.

And then he pulled out. Grabbed her hips again. Slammed back in even rougher.

He wasn’t done.

Not even close.

He wasn’t going to stop until the only name she could remember was his.

Until no one else even existed.

[venusincleo]

Time. ii.

Part One [i].

Warnings: MDNI • Explicit • Aaron Pierre x Black!Reader, teasing, edging, tiny bit of impact play, fingering (fem receiving), p in v, creampie, DDLG kink/BDSM (bondage), self!insert, omniscient POV and more...

Summary: You and Aaron have been in a long distance relationship for three months, as you reside in your cozy home in Seattle, and he stays in Los Angeles for work. Only ever having a quick day trip for quality time between your busy schedules, a long awaited break comes up on both of your calendars; three days and two nights at the end of a long week. Finally having the opportunity to see each other face to face, you enjoy a weekend of deeper, more intimate moments.

Word Count: 4.8k❣

A/N: I got a couple other ideas for this mini series in the tuck... so tell me how you like Part Two 🤭🤍

• • •

In the deep of the night, a single sliver of champagne light glows from the cracked bathroom door adjacent to your bed. As your eyes flutter all the way open at the sight of such a stark contrast to your dark bedroom, a lingering cool fills the empty space beside you. 

You glance at this lack, seeing disheveled sheets and you rub the sleep from your eyes to recount the events of the night that led you to such a deep slumber. Almost instantly, you are reminded of your short session with Aaron from the night before. He had you screaming to the top of your lungs with how nastily he was devouring your pussy, and you came twice, from just his mouth and his fingers. 

Now you lay here alone as he seemingly freshened up, his last words of the night filling your mind. 

“Imma let you rest, but we’re not done, princess.” 

As his return to your bed took longer than you thought it would, you reached to your bedside table to turn on your lamp. In the dim glow of the golden light, you tap the middle of your phone screen to be met with your favorite picture of yourself. Once blue light pushed through the space surrounding your small device, you navigated to the control center to adjust your brightness before you looked at the time. 1:33. 

Shuffling sounds echo through the bathroom and then, the light switch clicks off. Soon the gorgeous statue of a man that you called yours was stepping back into the room and a smile played at your lips. 

“Hi beautiful.” His tone is husky due to him catching some z’s right beside you, and heat rises in your face at the sound. 

“Hi, Papa.” A hum strums from the depth of his throat as he looks at your naked body, barely shielded by the covers that you’ve since pushed off of you. You take this time to examine his body as well, your eyes traveling down his honey-toned athletic build. Following his v-cut and happy trail your eyes navigate all the way down to the black fabric of his Calvin Klein briefs. Sooo fine.

Aaron watches your eyes as they trail back up to his, and a grin tugs at the edge of his lips. 

“Like what you see, princess?” He already knew the answer to that.

“Yes.”

“Then come here.” You quickly process your prompted movements, and your feet carry you out of bed and in front of his tall frame. One of his hands reaches down for yours, and brings it to his peck, his warmth undeniably comforting yet taunting to your core. 

He guides his hand to all the places your eyes just scanned, and then he glares into your eyes with those threatening leo orbs. 

“Below the waist is off limits, understand?” Your eyes damn near glow with the boundary he sets, as you realize you have your own little power over him. A smug grin raises your cheeks, and you bat your pretty eyelashes in his direction.

“Yes, sir.” Sensing the inkling of sass in your silken tone, Aaron bites his lip as he removes his hold on your hand to allow you free reign. Eye contact still strong, you run your hands over his pecks yet again, slower this time, as you let your manicured fingertips graze his nipples just lightly. 

Your palms are heated now, as they run along his nice skin, rippling over his hard abs and up the side of his torso.

Four challenging eyes peer between each other, as you both pondered on what you would do next. As your hands explore the sensitive skin of his neck and then the back of his head, Aaron smiles at you playing one of the only cards you had so soon. But you would learn more of his spots this weekend, you were sure of it.

Him knowing what you would do didn’t change the effect it had on him though, and his breath hitched in his throat as your hands rubbed the nape of his neck in circles. Your other hand palpates his toned abdomen as you hear his stuttered breathing continue. 

Suddenly, his strong hands grasp onto your ass, pulling you into his body with the force at which he squeezes at your flesh. A breathy moan leaves your lips as your eyebrows furrow at the sensation of his firm grip, eyes still connected. Now that he’s handling you just the way you like, Aaron can tell you were more than ready for what he had to give you.

With his hungry, lasting kiss to your full lips, you can feel your nectar easing from your center, and slowly beginning to drip down your thigh. You suck at Aaron’s bottom lip as he moans lightly at the unexpected feeling, allowing you to go on as you pleased. Once you returned to his lips for a passionate lip-lock, he appeased you and raised his hands to deliver a synced smack to both of your ass cheeks. A gasp leaves your lips at the divine sting that met your thick flesh and Aaron looks at you knowingly. 

“Stay right here.” 

His hands leave you cooling against the room’s lax temperature, your patience beginning to run thin as the sting he left radiates still. Soft thuds of his feet against your hardwood floors carry him to your dresser where his bag is still open with easy access to his satin bag of toys. He pulls a thick leather collar from the bag and glances over to your nightstand to see that he left the matching wrist cuffs near your bed. 

You watch intently as he takes his time to gather his toys for you, your body on fire from head to toe at the thought of him touching you again. You nearly reach for your pearl to soothe its throbbing but you remember your rule, and your hands tremble with anticipation. Your mind is simply no help, as you try and predict what else will happen tonight, visions of where else Aaron hasn’t touched yet flash behind your eyes. A gloss sets over your sight, and your breath grows short in your waiting. 

Aaron places the collar over his hand momentarily as he walks over to you with the leather cuffs, quickly unbuckling them to make way for your empty wrists. Just as your head begins to lighten, your breathing grows slow and shallow. Recognizing the gloss of your eyes, he realizes that you have begun floating off into subspace and he reaches his hand to your face to bring you right back down.

“Not yet, baby. Look at me.” His thumb caresses your cheek as your searching eyes meet his, focusing on his intense glare. His eyes drop to your lips momentarily, and then he grabs both of your hands and places them in front of your belly.

“I need you to breathe, three seconds in, three seconds out. Let me hear you.” Your shoulders rise and fall gently as you bring air in through your nose. One…two…three. And then exhale. One…two…three. 

Once he witnesses you take three steady, deep breaths, he starts to wrap the cuffs around one wrist at a time, mindful of the tightness of the first one so that the restraint would be balanced. After both cuffs are on, he glanced his softened eyes into yours, as he opened the collar and put it around your neck. As he puts the end of the strap through the buckle, he leans down and kisses your cheek, and then, he speaks.

“Tell me when to stop.” Slowly but surely, he pulls the strap further through the buckle, and you can feel the pressure on your throat heighten. Your breath gets caught on the second to last notch of the strap, and your fingers press into the leather that is cuffed around your wrists.

“Stop.” You whimper, alerting Aaron of which hole to feed the buckle through. He pulls the strap from the buckle just slightly, and feeds the prong through the third to last hole, ensuring your comfort and then, he reaches a hand up to your face yet again.

Another light thumb to your plush skin sends feather light tingles to your temple, and your eyes flutter in levity. 

“Your hands stay above your head unless I tell you to move, do you understand me?” 

“Yes, sir.”

With that, he takes his hand from your face, and hooks his forefinger around the chain of your cuffs, pushing you backward until you bump into your bed. Unyielding, he pushes you further until your legs give way to the firm mattress and you fall back into the plush bedding atop it. 

Almost instantly, you obey his instruction and move your restricted hands to the space above your head, watching for what Aaron had in store. His sure hands lift your legs slightly, bending them on either side of your hips as he sees the glistening treasure between your plump thighs. He sends a lick over his full bottom lip, remembering how he lapped you up just hours ago. Though he wasn’t going to make the mistake of getting too wrapped up in the indulgence that seeped from your yearning, he did want a taste. 

Bringing a finger to the trail of your essence that dripped down your thigh, he collected just a small sample, bringing it to his tongue to savor. A moan left his lips at the sweet, natural taste and he could feel his dick growing in his briefs. 

“You taste so fucking good, baby.” He teasingly sucked the rest of you from his own skin, and then he stepped back, taking in the sight of your bare body, all prepped and exposed for his pleasure. 

“Hmm.” He hums in observation of the natural lubrication that dripped from you still.

“You know what I learned about you, yesterday?”

Aaron’s deep English accent taunts you ever-so-lightly. A burning deep in your core doesn’t allow you to look away from him as he stands at the edge of your bed, hands at his sides. Cool air circulates around your heated, throbbing clit, clinging to the slick that has eased from your opening.

His shadowed eyes turn an oceanic blue as he steps forward and sets a knee beside your body, leaning down just slightly. You see his hand go for your sensitive folds and your eyes begin to flutter closed at the thought of him touching you. Feeling you up, inside and out, rubbing your climax out of you.

A moan leaves your lips as you feel the heat radiating from his palm and just as you exhale the deep breath that previously filled your lungs, you realize that he isn’t even touching you. Your glossy brown eyes open to meet the deliberate man before them as your fingers grip onto the leather cuffs along your wrists. Fuck. 

Aaron’s eyes are low with desire as he watches you squirm against your bedding at just the thought of contact. A pointed grin of his closed lips matched with his shadowy orbs made his gaze so tantalizing. And he knew it.

“Mhm.” He hums cockily, moving his hand from where it was still hovering over you. Getting back off of your bed, he steps back to view you clearer, glazed over eyes planning his next moves.

“You like when I play in this pretty pussy, huh?” In small, delicate touches, his knuckles caress your thighs menacingly close to your quivering sensitivity, causing a whimpering breath to leave your lips. No words could come to the surface of your mind as you held on to the last pieces of it you had left. 

He liked to see you this way; barely able to grasp a thought, let alone speak it. It was the whole point of his plan: to fuck you senseless in every sense of the word.

Determined to continue, he moved his hands from your body for a moment, and walked around the side of your bed. A large hand reached to the dangling handle of the leash attached to your collar, and held it loosely as he crouched down beside you. You weren’t sure of what was next, so you just looked in front of you, waiting for some direction.

“Look at me, princess.” 

You turn your head toward him willfully, your lowered eyes trailing from his large lips to the windows of his soul. Every inch of him was so beautiful it was hard for you to keep focus. 

With a taut, yet intentional hold on your leash, Aaron pulls you closer to him, until you are both just hairs away from the other’s lips. He leans in as if he is about to kiss you, but his mouth just sits atop yours in a way that would be awkward if you weren’t already so desperate to feel the contact.

“You didn’t answer me, baby-girl. And I don’t like repeating myself.” He breaths against you, as he tugs on your collar. As you lick over your lips, you breathe him in through your nose. 

“Yes.”

“Yes, what, baby? I need to hear you say it.” Though you are too close to him to see his full smile, you can feel his lips raise against yours and you shiver at his control.

“Yes, I like when you play in this pretty pussy, Papa.” Aaron takes a deep breath, as he bites his lip at the sight of yours. Plump, perfectly two-toned, ready for him.

“Good girl.” His free hand guides your chin down so that he can kiss you properly, a short, triumphant battle of his lips against yours. Then, his hand trails down your neck, brushes past one of your nipples and lovingly caresses your belly before it lands below your hips at the spot you needed him most.

Lax, only for a moment on his overarching teasing session, Aaron strokes your clit with his middle and ring fingers, effectively tending to the ache you had begun to feel. A certain pulling, needing, yearning begins at your core, and though he had just started, you could feel your climax rolling in quick.

“Oh, shit.” You moan, your chest heaving up and down as the pleasure is fast-tracked through every vein, in every limb of your body. As Aaron continues stroking his thick fingers through your enhanced moisture, your eyebrows turn upward at the overwhelm, your thighs snapping shut instinctively.

He didn’t miss a beat of anything your body was saying. His intent glare left the space between your thighs, which was covered now, to meet your pretty little love-face. 

“I need you to open your legs, baby.” He coached you gently, being sure to keep his cool. It was clear between the two of you that this was your first time exploring a relationship like this and he didn’t want to punish you until you knew exactly what you were doing, and the consequences that your actions came with.

Panting breaths sound from your lips as you try to gather yourself, opening your legs in slow motion. The feeling of his fingers still on your pussy was enough to make you cum right now, but you stay as composed as you possibly can, wanting to hear him tell you that you could.

His fingers begin to circle your clit yet again, and this time you breathe deeply through this feeling, your back naturally arching as he took you all the way to your oblivion. Strategically, Aaron begins to let go of the leash, kissing down your chest and swirling his warm tongue along the sensitive skin as you try to keep it together. Your eyes roll back as full, melodic moans fly from your mouth at his efforts. Nothing has ever felt as good as his hands and tongue on you. Nothing.

“Oh my Goddd…” You call out, your body beginning to convulse with your imminent waterfall. Just as quickly as you had made it to the edge, Aaron’s soft voice was threatening you to step back from it.

“Mnh, mnh. You better not cum, hold that shit Y/N.” As he stopped his tender hand from stroking against your folds, you let out a weary breath. Slow, torturous kisses played at your breast that was closest to his lips, and as he laid his flat tongue against your nipple, you bit at your bottom lip. That motherfucker. 

“Hm’my God, Papa.” You purr, a moan lacing your lips as he begins to suck at your plush bosom. Feeling your pulsating clit along his fingers, Aaron lightens his hand on you, teasing an airy finger along the silhouette of your plump pussy lips. Popping your boob out of his mouth, he looks into your eyes with nothing but desire. 

“Mmh,” He gravels in his low rasp. “You ready for this dick, princess?” 

You nod your head quickly, though you know he wants words, but when you open your lips to answer, all you can give is a trembling moan. With a dark laugh, his large fingers are back at your clit, rubbing you to your end. A drawn out moan fills the air around you as you close your eyes, taking in the continued dopamine hit. 

Like clockwork, your body begins chasing that zenith that you were told not to go towards, and your hips grind into the fingers of the man pleasing you. The extra friction with his steadily moving fingers causes you to turn your head to the side, hiding your blissful face with your arm. This time, even with every whimper and every fractal of breath, Aaron continues to caress your burning core, watching your torso as your lungs expand with air, and then contract on your release. 

“That’s right, cum for Papa.” He coaxed, not breaking the rhythm he had as fingers grew stickier with your natural elixir. Once you got your permission, it was like your body pulled from reservoirs and released every ounce you could muster. Your legs trembled as you cried out for more? Less? You didn’t really know. Everything was so blurry now, your eyes barely open as you continued to drip your juices all on Aaron’s willing hand. 

His hand coated in your clear honey now, he stroked your clit a few more times, and then, he stood from where he had crouched beside your bed. Looking down at just how spent you were, he gives you a moment of breath as he walks around your mattress, making sure to grab a pillow as he makes his way to meet your hips. 

Silently, he sat the pillow beside you, and used his free hand to hook a thumb into the side of his briefs. He pushed the dark fabric off of his hips slowly and stepped out of them when they circled his feet, letting his thick, long shaft make its introduction to the room. Just as you caught your breath, he brought his slick covered hand to his girth, stroking his dick with the lubrication of your essence.

With a soft, breathy moan at the sensation against his rock hard growth, he continued readying himself for what he was about to do. When your eyes finally flutter open after processing such a steep climax, you are met with the view of him stroking himself zealously. He had to be about 8 inches…maybe more? Definitely more.

“Oh, fuck.” You curse yourself for being so ready for it earlier. For a moment he makes note of your reaction, and a faint grin tugs at his lips as he watches your eyes follow his hand up and down his length. He frees his hand to handle you just a bit, turning you to your side so that he can position your pillow underneath your hips to match the height of his, his muscles flexing with the movement.

Once you are positioned perfectly for his intention, he steps closer to you and lays his warm shaft along your abdomen. A breath hitches in your throat at his size in comparison to you, and you tense just slightly though you are curious, and needy. A bad combination.

“No need to be nervous, baby-girl. You know I’m gonna take good care of you.” His hands trail up to your thighs, rubbing his thumbs along the plump flesh in an attempt to pull you back in. Aaron’s eyes soften as he watches your body calm under his touch, and he can’t help but bite his lip at the delight he felt in being able to do that for you. Creating and calming your storms.

“Use that safeword if you need to.” His voice is velvety in its depth, assuring you that he would only take tonight as far you wanted it to go. With lowered, adoring eyes, you nod your head as your center yearns to feel him now.

“Yes, sir.” You nearly whisper. A deep breath raises Aaron’s shoulders as he keeps his mind together despite the sounds you make for him. On his exhale, he trails his heavy hands up your thighs to meet the bend of your legs, holding you in place for the unforeseeable night. 

Acute breaths sing through your lips as you await Aaron’s penetration. Angling himself at your wet entrance, he pushes forward, feeling your warmth envelop him until the give of your walls becomes unyielding. 

“Ugh, fuck.” He moans heartily, a jump in his stomach alerting him of the effects of your juicy, wet pussy. 

The pressure of him begging at a depth you hadn’t had in too long causes a certain levity to reach your legs and they begin trembling in his hold as you groan at the feeling. He just stays there though, stroking half of his length into your tightness, his dark eyes gazing at the way your slick covered his dick. 

“So tight around me, baby.” He breathes out, his chest rising and falling slowly as he regulates himself, seeking a slower pace than what his body was agreeing to. Your wetness sounds around his thick shaft, his soft thrusts readying you for even more of his length. 

As soon as you feel like you can take more, you try to control your moans so you can request what you need in your nicest voice possible.

“Deeper, Papa.” A moan follows your demand, and then your pussy squelches around his lovely thickness. “Please.” 

Hesitantly, Aaron takes in your body’s reaction to him, and as he sees the true bliss your body is in, he fulfills your request, slowly though. As he goes just an inch or so deeper, he watches as you release a throaty moan, loving how he felt inside you. A couple more inches, a couple more pants at how he is filling you up so easily. And then as he gives you all of him, you clench your teeth over your bottom lip, your eyebrows upturned as you muffle a groan at the pressure.

He strokes slowly, trying to allow you to get used to him, but as he sees your face relax again, and your hips begin to rock into him just a little, he goes a bit faster. The heightened speed with his gentle, deep strokes was enough to have your eyes rolling to the back of your head yet again. The little pinch of pain at his size was driving you just a little wild.

“Ahhh, mmh.” You cried out, a moan reaching your lips as tears welled in your eyes at the many different sensations of the night. Aaron was steady breathing hard at the intensity of your tightness clamping around him, huffing out a husky moan here and there. He was definitely enjoying himself, but your soft cries had him worried he was going too deep too quickly. The last thing either of you needed was for him to damage something.

“Tell me how it feels, baby.” He squeezes at your thighs for stability as he feels a telling levity in his core. A silken moan is all you can muster at first, and then you look ahead of you at his piercing gaze.

“Mm, hurts…so good, Papa.” As if your words gave him permission to feel the full extent of his pleasure, his shoulders drop as he feels himself twitch within your walls. His plump pink lips part to release a hearty, drawn out moan and he continues stroking to your continued gratification.

“Ohh, shit.” He can only keep it together for a couple more steady strokes, then he gets a little sloppy as expletives fall from his lips in an attempt to hold on just a little more. Aaron could tell that it’s only a couple minutes, if that, until he releases his load, so he brings a thumb to your clit, rubbing softly to get you right where he is. 

You squirm at the added pleasure, and soon, those tears that were glossing your eyes overflowed onto your temples as you threw your head back. 

“Fuckkk!” You scream out, your eyebrows furrowed as Aaron digs every bit of this orgasm out of you. Every last stroke is accentuated with each of your breathy, succinct moans and his abdomen expands as he watches his honey-tan dick get coated in your glorious juices, and his trimmed pubic hair is decorated in the musky luster. 

“Papa…” Your whisper is hoarse, as an uncontrollable wave of emotions comes over you. Your whole body moves in tandem with the breath that dances through your body, and then it exits through your lips, shakily. 

“Go’ head and let it go, baby. I won’t stop until I get all of it.” Your chest warms at the accented vowels in his speech, and you heed his instruction, focusing on nothing else but him and your nut. Rendered speechless from the snug feeling of his thick shaft between your wetness, you begin to shake, your hips bucking forward as pure energy shoots through you.

“That’s it princess, give it to me.” Aaron coos, rubbing his thumbs in circles along your tender skin. Another breath in is all it takes for your love to come down, sticking to both of you like glue. 

Unable to contain himself, Aaron shoots his warm load into you, his groans loud and gruff. He thrusts forward a few more times as he empties himself, made even more sensitive by your continued whimpering. When he finally pulls out, the combined evidence of both of your pleasure eases out of your opening, causing you to moan softly. 

Breathing heavily as he gathers himself, he takes a moment to walk into your on-suite bathroom and begin a bath for you, using your Dr. Teals Lavender soap. 

You lie there, the distant noise of the running water hitting the ceramic of the tub, lulling you to a calm space. You were already exhausted, and your legs were beginning to throb lightly at how long you’d had them in the same position. 

Aaron walked back into your bedroom with a purposeful stride, stopping at the side of your bed to tend to your obvious needs. He takes the connecting chain between your leather cuffs and pulls you to sit up gently, undoing the collar first and setting it on the bedside table behind him. Then, he gives you a soft once over before he focuses on the small straps on your wrists, unbuckling them as quick as possible and setting them on the bedside table as well. 

He sits down beside you and brings both hands to your face, wiping away the wet streams of tears that fell. Quietly, he places a soft-hearted kiss on both of your cheeks and then on your lips, his gentleness bringing a whole other level of comfort to your mind. As you pull away from the kiss, you wrap your weakened arms around his neck, and he nestles his face in yours as he litters your skin with barely-there kisses. His large hands expand across your back, and he rubs them along your skin, lovingly. 

“You were such a good girl for me, baby.” He tilts his chin down to kiss your shoulder and you move your hands down to caress his shoulders and back, to which he hums in satisfaction. Eager, passionate kisses are delivered from his lips to yours as you rub his back, realizing that you had indeed found another spot of his.

“You’ ready for your bath?” He asks against your lips. You nod your head slowly, giving him a last peck until you are lifted in his strong hold. With a sigh of happiness in reminiscence of the whole night, you lay your head on his shoulder as you get ready to be taken care of by your gentle, dominant giant.

• • •

I do not condone any translations, replications or plagiarisms of my original work. Please do not repost as your own. Reblogs and comments/notes welcome. ♥︎

• • •

༓TAGLIST༓

@userthatlovessmut32 @blyffe @ms-mosley-ifunastyyy

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[remxedmoon]

“shadowy figures appeared before you. apparitions, memories of what once was. reminders of who you’re fighting for. are they your true family, or merely wearing their visage?”

[twohats spoilers below the cut!]

DEATHCARDS!!! WOOO!! that leshy quote isn’t entirely set in stone yet, btw. i made these for a king boss fight i’m working on so realistically he’d be the one narrating? but eh. it’s fun to write in leshy’s voice. anyways, hopefully this won’t be too long?? i’ve got way less design notes this time around, but there’s also 6 cards here and i’m not very succinct. sorry in advance!!

siffrin

2 power - 2 health - 5 bones

loose tail - when a card bearing this sigil would be struck, a tail is created in its place and a card bearing this sigil moves to the right. a tail is defined as: 0 power, 2 health.

steel trap - when a card bearing this sigil perishes, the creature opposing it perishes as well. a pelt is created in your hand.

GOD it was hard to come up with sigils for this one. since these are boss exclusive cards, i had a pretty limited pool to work with… hopefully this is still fitting

loose tail is the closest i could get to a sigil that avoids death, since sigils like unkillable and many lives were off the table. plus, there’s kinda a connection with him not valuing his own life?? and sacrificing a part of himself? i think it works

steel trap!! this sigil is exclusive to the trapper boss fight! since summoned cards (like chimes and tails) inherit sigils, their tail card will also kill whatever’s in front of it when it’s destroyed! sort of a “taking you down with me” situation.

mirabelle

2 power - 5 health - 3 blood

swapper - after a card bearing this sigil is dealt damage, swap its power and health.

swapper!! this is an act 3 sigil exclusive to swapbot! ahhhhhhhh i had such a hard time trying to figure out another card design for her. i REALLY liked the bellist sigil for her and didn’t really have any other ideas. swapper felt like it fit with the change belief to me! and it also makes her a pretty terrifying card to go up against. since this is a boss card, that cost is basically entirely for show lol

ALT CARD ART!!! YIPEE!! literally all i did was flip her eyes to look angry lol. swapbot’s sprite changes when it swaps so i think hers would too!

isabeau

2 power - 4 health - 2 blood

dam builder - when a card bearing this sigil is played, a dam is created on each empty adjacent space. a dam is defined as: 0 power, 2 health.

fledgling - a card bearing this sigil will grow into a more powerful form after 1 turn on the board.

dam builder feels like a very defensive sigil to me, and it synergizes well with fledgling!! after a turn, isabeau will be doing 5 damage across 3 lanes! good god.

odile

1 power - 2 health - 2 blood

trifurcated strike - a card bearing this sigil will strike each opposing space to the left and right of the spaces across from it as well as the space in front of it.

sharp quills - once a card bearing this sigil is struck, the striker is then dealt a single damage point.

this was the HARDEST card to think up, and probably the weakest out of the bunch imo. i think i really nailed her regular card and i just. couldn’t come up with anything. agonies

i picked trifurcated strike as a reference to her being able to use all three craft types, and sharp quills… i think because of her aversion to touch? i think. it’s been a while since i made these aaaaa

bonnie

1 power - 1 health - 1 blood

waterborne - a card bearing this sigil submerges itself during its opponent's turn. while submerged, opposing creatures attack its owner directly.

leader - creatures adjacent to a card bearing this sigil gain 1 power.

if yall remember the notes on my kid card, this is based on the beta version of that card!! which means that for once i’m not putting bonnie through the torments. hooray!

waterborne is there because they always stay out of danger during battles! plus they’re from a coastal town so it fits on that front as well. i didn’t really think about the actual sigil names for cards this time around but hey! it’s a nice bonus!

the beta card had trinket bearer, but that’s a sigil that would only benefit the player in battle, so i swapped it out with leader! since they can’t be directly attacked, this basically makes them a permanent alpha on the king’s side of the field. also, leader, snack leader, it fits namewise as well!

loop

2 power - 1 health - 4 bones

haunter - when a creature bearing this sigil dies, it haunts the space it died in. creatures played in this space gain its old sigils.

bifurcated strike - A card bearing this sigil will strike each opposing space to the left and right of the space across from it.

“i’m normal about inscryption” i say as i give one of my cards a sigil that only appears in the completely missable rulebook of grimmora’s segment of the finale.

so. haunter! the aforementioned grimmora sigil! this appears on no cards ingame, but cmon. it fits. this sigil reminded me of how loop reacts when you guess that they’re a ghost! in battle, i imagine that siffrin will always get played right behind loop. because twohats

bifurcated strike was added here for the same reason it’s on their normal card! it feels like scissors craft!! i needed them to actually have A Sigil to transfer to siffrin and this felt the most fitting to me.

also, just like the normal cards, siffrin and loop are both the only ones to have a bone cost instead of blood cost! teehee :333

and i think that’s it! i’m not making inhabited versions of these cards because they aren’t meant to be accessible outside of the king fight! also! hi! i drafted this post and wrote siffrin’s segment: almost a month ago! oops!! i kept putting this off… at least it’s actually written out now lol. hope you guys enjoy!!!