#he doesn’t even care that his hair isn’t as gold as he used to be or there’s a new scar disfiguring his face or that he’s not as lean and

[swordmaid]

also (im still thinking abt the post canon jb au from the prev post) I really like the concept of jaime thriving post war. like he’s happier because he’s alive! and brienne is here with him! and brienne (bc I think she likes to watch him) would notice that he laughs and smiles more freely, that there’s no cutting edge to his smiles or japes and he’s generally more relaxed and laid back. brienne also noticing jaime getting more wrinkles around the eyes and mouth bc he’s smiling more, and his hair is starting to gray around the temples but it only makes him more attractive to her For Some Reason. she’s not gonna delve into why she thinks that’s attractive by the by, jaime is generally regarded as ‘Hot’ by the entire realm so she IS allowed to think he’s attractive too. and she is Allowed to like his secret soft smile that he gives her time to time, and the fact that she always feel nervous after but in a good way does not mean anything either. by the way. she’s allowed to think he’s hot too…!

[highvern]

Drive Me Crazy

Pairing: Jeon Jungkook x f!reader

Genre: smut

warnings: strangers to lovers, virgin!JK, dry humping, oral sex, cum eating

Length: ~3.7k

Note: yes i'm insane. no i won't be taking further questions. thank u @gyuswhore for chaperoning my descent into JK madness

summary: You're not the only one with a shitty dating life. Your driver seems to be having a worse night than you can imagine. But things take a turn for the better in the backseat of his car.

m.list

This blog is intended for 18+ only! Minors/blank blogs will be blocked.

“Uber for Y/N?” you ask, stumbling into the backseat. “Thanks. God, you wouldn’t believe the night I’ve had.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” the man, Ian according to the information on the app, gasps. 

“Sorry, didn’t mean to startle you.” You’re a wreck; makeup running, clothes damp from the rain peppering on the window. The last thing you want is some hot guy as your driver for the short journey back to your apartment but at this point you can’t muster the energy to care. 

“Uhhh—”

“You probably don’t want to hear about my shitty night.”

“Well that and—” he starts, cut off before he can say more by your tipsy motormouth. 

“Where does a man get off telling me he isn’t interested in gold diggers when he’s a public school teacher? No offense but what gold?” you ramble. “Not to mention, when I told the waiter to split the bill he asked if I thought he didn’t have any money. Like make up your mind dude.”

“What the fuck?” he asks lowly.

You nod in agreement, hands thrown wide in exasperation. “That’s what I’m saying!”

“That’s fucked up.”

The thickness of his voice doesn’t register in your mind, a broken edgy scratching at the edges of your brain but it doesn’t signal any significant interest “Oh, that's not even the worst part.”

“There’s more?”

“He said ‘I asked too many personal questions.’”

“Like?”

“What he liked to do for fun, if he’s originally from the city, do you like dogs or cats? Literally anything I could think of because apparently he’s allergic to carrying a conversation.” In your hand, your phone rings with an unsaved number. “Hello?”

“Hi, this is your Uber. Did you mean to cancel your ride?”

“What?”

“Ian from Uber? I’ve been circling the block and haven’t found you and you weren’t answering your phone.”

“Oh! I’m sorry I’ll just—cancel. Yep. Bye.” You stare at the equelly unease expression on Not-Uber Driver Ian’s face, muddled brain racing. If he isn’t your driver that means you got into the car with a random man. 

“Who the fuck are you?” you scream. 

“Who the fuck are you?” he yells back.

You fiddle with the door handle, unable to grab a hold with shaky hands. “Oh my god, you’re a kidnapper.”

“I’m not a kidnapper!”

“That’s what a kidnapper would say!” You fumble for the pepper spray in your bag only to find it absent. It’s not your usual bag. It’s the nicer one that barely fits your phone and chapstick. Damn it.

“YOU GOT IN MY CAR,” he argues.

He makes a good point. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I tried but you talk a lot.” 

Another good point.

“Oh my god, what the hell,” you gasp. “Why are you sitting here with the doors unlocked? I could have robbed you.”

“I used my last five bucks to buy this ice cream. Just kill me instead.”

You balk. “That’s so sad.” 

“Yeah, I’m aware.”

“You’re a horrible kidnapper.”

“And you’re a pretty shitty carjacker so I’d say we’re even.”

If he was dangerous he's had plenty of time to prove it. Instead, when he looks back over the center console, all you see is the red rimmed eyes of a kicked puppy with a bird nest for hair. A ridiculous expression for a man of his size but you pity him nonetheless. He’s harmless. Pathetic. But harmless. 

There’s a story about him and you’ve always been curious. “Okay, not-Ian, why are you sitting in a parking lot eating ice cream on a Friday night? Kidnapper thing aside, this is just sad.” 

He’s hot. Even in nothing but sweats and his own misery. The intimidating kind of handsome that people, men and women, pine over. Hand themselves over on a silver platter if he so much as asked.

“Thanks,” he grunts, going for another spoon of ice cream. 

“So why are you upset?” The rain outside intensifies, setting the scene to bare your souls in his cramped Toyota.

“Ugh…” he hesitates. 

“You don’t have to tell me, but I don’t think it can be any more embarrassing than what I just went through.”

“Wanna bet?”

“Why not? If it’s more embarrassing then I won’t steal a bite. Is that chocolate?”

“Cookie dough,” he corrects. “This girl I’ve been talking to ditched me.”

“Because?”

He prepares with a deep breath, steeling himself against whatever motive his fling had. “I’m a virgin.”

“What?” you ask dumbly. Virgin.

Chin tipped back, he swipes at his face in embarrassment. “I told you it's embarrassing.”

“You’re eating your feelings because you’re a virgin?”

“Yes.” He waits for your interjection. When it doesn’t come he hesitantly continues. “And the last person I told laughed in my face and started hooking up with my roommate. So…”

“What a bitch.”

“Yeah. People just assume I’m some kind of man whore.” He explains, head banging against the wheel. “But I’ve never done anything besides… ya know?”

“I have no idea, complete stranger.”

“Like hand stuff.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely a virgin,” you snort. “Move over, I’m coming up.”

Shimmying into the front seat takes more coordination than you’re prepared for. The hem of your dress rises to brazen heights, a draft curling around the edge of your panties. Its a feeling you assumed would be happening with your date and not in the car with a random stranger. But beggars can’t be choosers. At least it’s good ice cream.

He pointedly avoids looking anywhere close to your legs. Polite. Innocent. Virginal. How cute.

“Thank you. That makes me feel so much better.” His eyes roll as you settle into the passenger seat, snatching the container and taking a bite from the same spoon he’d been using. 

“Sorry,” you say after swallowing. “Is it because you don’t want to? Because that girl can go fuck herself then.”

“No, I just, I don’t know. I get nervous? They’re expecting someone who knows what they’re doing and I have no idea. And then all I can think about is what if I’m bad at it which makes me more nervous and then I feel like throwing up.”

“Please tell me you haven’t thrown up on a girl.” 

“Ew, no,” he laughs, taking a bite for himself. “I just make an excuse to slow down and then leave.”

“Okay. Well…” You try to think of something, anything, that could make him feel better. It’s not everyday a stranger spills their guts about lacking sexual experience. “So what if you’re bad? It’s not like you can’t get better.”

“Okay, but what girl wants to sleep with a guy who’s bad in bed?”

“How do you know you’re bad if you’ve never even tried? It’s different if you’re bad and you don’t care. Just tell whoever you're with you’ve never done it before. If they don’t jump at the chance to teach you then they can fuck off.”

“Well, Mina rubbed my face in it—”

“Oh fuck her. She seems like a bitch.”

“You’re not wrong,” he says. 

Rain drizzles on the windshield, obscuring the lights into messy streaks. A flood of memories surrounding your own virginity rush to the forefront.

Your college boyfriend, Jimin, wanted to wait. It was cute. High school sweethearts going to the same school, taking similar classes, holding hands in the library. You thought he wasn’t ready and you respected it, found it endearing that he wasn’t like most of the guys your friends dated that couldn’t wait to do it.

Or you did until you decided to surprise Jimin for his birthday with breakfast in bed and got your own surprise. A girl, naked in his bed, Jimin’s own clothes scattered around the room.

You broke up with him right there. Two days of crying later, you invited your lab partner, the one Jimin couldn’t stand, over.

It was Yoongi that sent a selfie of you two cuddled up in bed to Jimin. He still likes to cash in on that favor whenever he needs a dog sitter.

Yoongi knew there were no feelings involved. A simple favor in the form of revenge against a shitty ex. Maybe not-Ian is your chance to pay it forward. By the looks of things, you wouldn’t be suffering.

“Ya know, some girls like guys who are inexperienced. It’s hot knowing you can teach someone how to be good in bed. Like an ego boost.” You shrug. If he wasn’t looking at your legs before but he sure is now. Pink ears and round eyes, his fingers twitch in his lap as you suck the spoon clean. At least the hour spent shaving your legs isn’t going to waste. “Besides, you obviously care how the other person feels, which is more than some dudes.”

“Why would someone not care if the other person feels good?” he asks, tone laced with disgust. “That seems like the entire point.”

“The world is full of mysteries.”

“My name is Jungkook by the way.”

Jungkook. Fitting somehow. It tastes good on your tongue. Like the cookie dough ice cream.

“Y/N.”

You end up in his lap in true stereotypical fashion. A too long silence, his eyes on your mouth and yours on his. Someone leans forward and now you know Jungkook is a great kisser with even greater upper body strength.

His inexperience shows in the fine details: shaky hands, hesitant tongue, waiting for you to take the lead as not to offend. It’s endearing. Someone as big as him treating you with such gentleness. But it means he’s thinking about messing this up and that’s the opposite of what you want. 

You kiss him deeper, a grip on the side of his neck that he eagerly surrenders too. Your other hand wedges between your chests. Teeth nipping at his lip, you rock against him, palming against the soft cotton sweats until he’s plump in your hand. 

“God,” he chokes. His own hands busy themself on your body, one at the seat of your ass, teasing the edge of your dress where bare skin peaks out while the offers a tight grip at your chest, pinching your nipple in desperate retaliation.

“Feel good?” You rut again, a tease for your own pleasure in the form of Jungkook’s heavy breath. It’s decent contact on your core, not enough to get you off but plenty for right now.

Kissing is well in his realm of experience. Obvious from how quickly he finds his bearings, licking behind your teeth. It’s good. Better than dry humping his thigh in the front seat should be. Vision dark from his hands frantic at your ass, thighs rising to meet every torturous curl against the heat of his lap.

You fall into his shoulder, drool staining his sweater as you pant. “Ever had your dick sucked?”

“No.” 

A vein raises across his neck and becomes your new guidemap. Your hand at his crotch squeezes, his cock twitching at the action. “Do you want to?”

“You don’t have to,” he hisses. 

You squeeze his cock again, enough for a needy drive of his hips in response. “I want to.” 

“Seriously?” he marvels.

“If it’s cool with you.” You nose along his jaw, teeth scraping red over his skin. His stomach dips under your hand. “Get in the back, I don’t need to get caught with your dick in my mouth.”

“Holy shit, don’t say that.” He kisses you again, firmer this time. 

You crawl back through the narrow opening between the front seats, ass on full display for Jungkook’s eyes. The heat of his palm ghosts over your legs but he doesn’t touch. The deliberate arch in your spine isn’t enough to break his self control just yet.

He comes next. The struggle is endearing, half stuck between the seats and wiggling forward. “I think I’m stuck.”

“Why didn’t you just go around?” You snort, grabbing around his arms and pulling to no avail.

“Too late now.”

You're both laughing. Breathless because Jungkook is lodged between the seats with zero hope. “Why are you so heavy?”

He wiggles through with your help, nearly elbowing you in the head in the process. But he’s in the seat with his lap as prime real estate. You try to commandeer the space once again but Jungkook stops you. Instead, he settles between your legs, weight pinning you into the door. Broad shoulders block out the light but you take it in stride, fisting the back of his sweater as he finds your pulse.

“Can I go down on you?” He nuzzles down your throat, mouthing the spots he’s learning make you putty in his hands.

“Yeah, sure,” you hiccup. “That’s fine.” 

Jungkook crams between your legs, bending in half on the floor like a contortionist. The sparse kisses across your thighs would be a blatant tease if nervousness wasn’t rolling off him in waves. He’s eating pussy for the first time and acting like it’s open heart surgery.

“Calm down.” You brush a hand through his hair, attempting to be comforting. 

“I am calm.” A bold faced lie. Even in the darkness of the backseat the signs of his impending nerves are obvious. 

“You’re shaking,” you say. “I’ll tell you what feels good. You’re not gonna mess it up.”

An open mouth on your core kiss leaves you sweating with a weak hum. At least he knows where the clit is. Or has a vague idea of its presence. Jungkook presses his face further into the cotton, suffocating himself without realizing. 

“O-oh,” you hitch.

Humiliation brews from such a visceral reaction to something as basic as a kiss over your panties. But Jungkook is out of his depth here and any reaction will stroke his confidence. 

He ducks away, watching you with rapt attention. You’re the teacher and he’s a student eager for whatever validation that may fall from your lips. “Good?” 

“Yeah, do it again,” you praise. 

He nods before diving back in, throwing your legs over his shoulders for better reach. Your pulse jumps with juvenile eagerness. Like it’s the first time you’re left with a boy unsupervised and his hand is the first real thing to touch you between the legs. It makes you feel dirty. Has your hairline sweat and tongue go dry. A bold wash of his tongue couples the next kiss, hot and wet as he laps against the fabric until your own arousal mixes with spit. 

"You fucking liar,” you croak. The back of your head knocks against the window, hips rolling into his mouth.

"What?” Jungkook asks, leaning back but just barely. His breath fans over your skin, a shiver crawling up your spine. “Did I do something—" 

“It’s good. So good,” you praise. “Touch me more.”

He jumps at the chance. Your panties tear down your thighs, out of the way with some rough maneuvering. Bare for his eyes, Jungkook takes more than a fill before diving in for another taste. But not until he spits on your clit and rubs in the mess with his thumb. Your thighs spread wider to accommodate a hard pass of his mouth, more wet kisses burning your cheeks.

“Jungkook, fuck,” you sigh. “When you said ‘hand stuff’ what did you mean?”

“I’ve touched a vagina before if that's what you're asking.”

You swat his hand. “Don’t say vagina, it makes me feel like I’m at the gynecologist.”

“Sorry, a pussy.”

“Don’t say it like that either, weirdo. Have you fingered one?”

Pointed silence is answer enough.

“It’s okay. I’m not gonna make fun of you. Just don’t put a finger in my ass and you’ll be fine.”

He doesn't laugh at your poor attempt to cut the tension but he releases a weighted sigh, muscles sagging an inch. Better. Instead, he focuses on stroking you to life between your folds, fingertips nudging your bud teasingly. 

“Use your mouth some more and then finger me too,” you beg. 

“Uh—how many? I don't wanna hurt you." He’s unsure despite the obvious twitch in your thighs. It burns depravity through your veins. His innocence is hot. Jungkook doesn’t even realize how fucked up he has you from some softcore porn level touching.

"All of them. I don't care, I’ll tell you if it’s too much."

One hand firm on your stomach, keeping your dress out of the way as he spreads your insides with two. The first strokes are meek. Nothing to scream over but he’s learning and that’s what's important. Seconds tick by and Jungkook finds a hesitant rhythm. Wet noises echo with each slow sheath, reserved but stretching you all the same. The wet strokes of his tongue are there too, placating just in case. A soft curl of his fingers makes your hips cant into his mouth. 

The fogged windows are a dead give away to what's playing out in the backseat. If anyone stumbles down the sidewalk then you’re both dead but Jungkook’s mouth is distracting in the worst way.

And then he licks between his fingers, tongue slipping past his knuckles for a pure taste of your arousal. You go fuzzy at the edges, thighs squeezing tight until he’s forced to keep them spread or risk having his head crushed.

“Oh–fuck me, god.”

It’s not fair. For him to be good at this so quickly. To delude himself into thinking he could possibly be bad, trying to convince you he’d be bad. Complete unfair how ill prepared you were for Jungkook worshiping your pussy like he’s never tasted anything better.

He really needs to be more confident because, in the cramped back seat of his car, you’re losing your mind and it’s barely been ten minutes.

“Can I—” he asks around your clit.

“Do whatever you want, just don’t stop,” you ramble. “Jungkook, fuck.”

A hand of your own sinks into his hair, angling his chin for better access. Wet echoes fill the car, sharp mewls from your lips adding to the noise. Nerves blazing, your ride his mouth for all its worth. Eager slippery circles of his tongue against your clit intensify, built on praising moans of his name.

“Fuck. Tastes good,” he grunts. A squeeze of your hand, the one not pulling his hair and then he’s finding your chest, blind groping until you guide him to your nipple and curve into the sting of his grip. He twists it. Hard. 

You want to cry. The sweat suck of his mouth, fingers confidently curling it that spot that makes the air thinner in your lungs. Moans die between your teeth. Too quick into the next sensation to revel. There isn’t a thought other than Jungkook, Jungkook, Jungkook.

“Jungkook!” you cry, grinding into his fingers. Your teeth clench as a third one stretches that extra inch. Stiff in the thighs, you force yourself down into the friction. His tongue hardens, perfect for use as you hump his face weakly.

Your legs kick, scrambling under the sharp pleasure. He’s got you melting into nothing right on his carseat. Jungkook doesn’t lean back to ask for more confirmation; just takes the signs for what they are and keeps going with renewed stamina at the promise of your pleasure. 

“I’m gonna—oh, god. Yessss,” you hiss. Nails sharp against the back of his neck, Jungkook buries his face in your cunt. 

You go rigid, voice breaking into a desperate whimper. Jungkook has the sense to keep going, lashing at your clit over and over with each desperate pulse of pleasure through your veins. Flashes flare behind the darkness of your eyes squeezed tight. You make a few more desperate noises, lurching in his hold before falling lip and worn.

“Fuck, okay. Okay,” you whine, pushing him away from your core before the stimulation becomes too much.

His mouth is drenched, cheeks and chin smeared with your orgasm. A flash of tongue collects some of the mess but you drag him into a kiss before he can go for seconds. First time eating pussy and he’s one for one. If that doesn’t help his confidence then nothing else will. 

“Give me a second and I’ll blow you,” you pant into his lips. 

“I-it’s okay.”

You pout at the brush off, a deep kiss as you invade his space. “I promise I want to.”

Your hand goes for his pants just to be captured with his own. His fingers are still soaked from your insides. “No, I…I came too.”

“Really?” you ask in awe.

Jungkook is embarrassed again. “Sorry.”

“Don’t be. That’s hot.” You kiss him again with a gentle suckle along the curve of his lower lip. Jungkook drinks it in, crowding you back into the door again like you aren’t a pile of mush. Your back hurts from hunching over for so long but you let him keep you tangled up for a little while longer just to feel the shuddering exhale from his nose across your cheek. “Can I see?”

He swallows thickly before rolling down his sweats. The thin fabric of his boxers are wet, sticky under your shaky hand. You dip below the waist band, fingers grazing the limp ridge of his cock. He’s stuck in the inbetween of soft and hard but still hot and heavy in your hold. Your core throbs in interest at the feeling. 

Jungkook shivers as you swipe at the slit, collecting a bead of cum. You want to get your mouth on him but he looks like he might cry if you keep playing with it.

When your hand retreats, rising to your lips for a taste, his eyes round, mouth gaping over silent words. The pink of your tongue comes out, lapping at the thick mess coating your thumb. 

“Is it okay if I get your number?” he asks after the initial shock wears away.

“Yeah,” you snort. “You can have my number. You can give me a ride home too. And we can do that again in my bed.”

The glee on his face is worth the disgusting mess between your thighs. “Hell yeah.”

Taglist: @tomodachiii @cvpidyunho @miniseokminnies @ddaengpotate @arycutie

@gaebestie @primoppang @gyuguys @mine-gyu @doremifasire

@missminhoe @toplinehyunjin @crvs4vldtn @prettygyuuu @sliceofwoozi @writingbarnes

@dokyeomkyeom @christinewithluv @minwonfairy @idkjustlovingbts @wobblewobble822 @futuristicenemychaos

@seungkw1 @horanghaezone @jespecially @scoupsjin @isabellah29

@luvseungcheol @crisle19

© highvern. copying/reuploading/translating my work anywhere is strictly prohibited.

[ghost-proofbaby]

15 with Eddie? :)

i woke up this morning, rolled over, and immediately wrote this all on my phone. wasn't even 8 am and i was already all mushy and horny for this man. enjoy whatever this is (morning sex. it's morning sex and being in love) <3

15. "I had a very nice dream that started like this."

warnings: smut, p in v, oral (f receiving), afab reader but no pronouns used, a lot of religious imagery idk why it just... worked?, not edited, 18+ so minors do not interact

pairings: eddie munson x afab!reader

wc: 2.9k+

join the smutty party! send me one of these smut dialogue prompts with a character

The sun hadn’t even rose yet. The sky simply lighter, a gentle omniscient light peaking through the curtains, holding little to no warmth yet when you first awoke. The room is shades of grey with hints of violet, soft pinks just on the horizon but not quite painting the scene. 

It’s nice — it’s serene.

You can feel him breathing behind you. Still there, still warm, still holding you with one strong arm around your waist as his nose brushes at the nape of your neck, his snore rustling your hair ever so carefully. It’s almost enough to soothe you back to sleep; counting his deep intakes of air, exhaling in time with him, sinking deeper into bed sheets that are stained with the smell of his cologne and shampoo. Almost.

But when you first awake, you have a different idea in mind.

It starts off innocent enough. Small movements as you press yourself further back into Eddie, minuscule wiggles to just be close to him. You’re still half asleep and yet, every atom in your body is desperate to melt into him. You need every inch of his skin pressed tightly into yours. Your vision still blurry, but the instinct to burrow more tightly into your boy impossible to miss.

“I know you’re awake,” he suddenly murmurs into your neck, voice muffled and rough with his rest.

You hadn’t even noticed the change in his breathing. More focused on the ache between your thighs that you had woken up with. 

“Sh,” you jokingly whisper, smiling as you force your eyes back closed. He can’t even see your face, but it feels right to put on an act, “You’re gonna ruin it, Munson.” 

“‘M not ruining anything, baby,” he nearly slurs. His arm tightens around you, encouraging all your squirming, pulling your hips back to be flush with his a little more urgently.

He’s hard against your lower back. His flimsy boxers do nothing to hide his excitement. It isn’t particularly surprising — most mornings he wakes up hard as it is — but it does cause a soft stirring within you. Encourages your hips to swivel once more, action a bit more pointed, just enough pressure to cause a low groan to slip almost inaudible from between his lips.

“Careful,” he warns, voice a bit louder now. His tone is still gravely, scratching an itch of the farthest reaches of your mind. Somewhere between a cat’s purr and the sound of tires on dirt roads when your favorite person is returning home. Comforting. Serene. 

You press into him further, shamelessly grinding now, eyes still shut, “What? ‘M not doing anything.”

He doesn’t need to see your voice to hear that sleepy grin.

It doesn’t happen quickly — there’s no rush as he slowly tugs at your body, encouraging you to rotate so that he’s no longer spooning you. Your back digs into the mattress holding the warmth of his body from the entire night, wrapping you up in a bliss that’s impossible to replicate. His smell, his warmth, his presence. You don’t think you’ll ever tire of mornings like this, especially not when you finally open your eyes to find him propped up on his elbow, looking down at you with half-lidded eyes and a half-smile that accentuates  his left dimple. 

He’s fucking beautiful. It takes your breath away.

“What’s got you so excited this morning, hm?” 

The light has grown ever so slightly brighter, just enough as though it whispers, look at him. The room is still grey, but your boy is a vision of colors. Dark russet eyes with streaks of gold that the sun couldn’t compare to, chestnut hair that sticks up in all the wrong places from his slumber, skin that washes out in the pale winter morning and only makes the contrast of the soft fuchsias and violets blooming along his neck from the evening before more apparent. He’s softer than any sunrise, more relaxing than any bath he’s ever drawn for you, more calming than hearing your favorite song strummed out on muted guitar strings. 

You love him. And that only really fuels your flames.

“I had a very nice dream,” you mumble, squinting up at him, bringing a hand up to his cheek. Your touch is delicate as you trace over his stubble, painting mindless patterns briefly before cupping the full side of his face and threading your fingertips into the edges of his hairline, “A very nice dream that started just like this.” 

He rolls his hips against your side, peering down at you as he does so, letting you guide him closer until his lips barely brush yours. 

You can hear birds chirping outside. There’s the rumble of a truck engine. The creak of a nearby front door opening and shutting.

The world is beginning to wake up, but you’re not quite yet ready to share the day with anyone but him. 

“You did, did you?” he’s awake enough now to tease you, body slowly inching its way over yours, arms on either side of your head to hold his weight. The plush comforter slips down, exposing his bare shoulders as his torso serves as your new blanket, “Tell me ‘bout it, baby.” 

Your legs fall open instinctively, making a home for him and only him. A space between your thighs perfectly carved out for the shape and weight of him as he slips into place, hips digging into yours, a homely and familiar position you’ve found yourself in a hundred times before. 

It never gets old. It never elicits any less of a reaction from you, always pulling the softest of gasps from your throat as he leans his head down to trail his lips down your exposed neck. 

The sound has him pulling you into him a bit more urgently, but his pace never quickens. He’s taking his time. You two have all the time.

A car alarm, distant as could be, sounds off. A voice of a neighbor echos across the trailer park. 

Maybe it’s an adoring husband wishing goodbye to his wife for the day. Or a mother, rushing her children for school. There’s a million and one scenarios, thousands of strangers beginning their dreary week, but you only care about the warm welcome of the day that he offers you. 

Anything but dreary, even in tired morning light.

“You were kissing my neck,” you say, careful to be as silent as can be, even if it were just the two of you in the room. The world doesn’t need to know you’re awake yet; it doesn’t deserve your attention like he does yet.

His teeth graze unintentionally against the soft spot below your ear, “Like this?”

“Just like that.”

For emphasis, you lift your hips, seeking out his with ease. You can feel him, pronounced as he presses against the thin fabric of your underwear. There’s too many layers between the two of you, too much cotton and linen in the shapes of his t-shirt you’d worn to bed and his damn boxers, but they’ll come off eventually. 

Eventually. There’s no rush.

Your head tilts back in a sigh, and he pauses all his kisses to ask, “What next?”

“Keep going,” you squirm, hips continuing to roll, flames of desire lighting in your gut, dancing as soft as the morning light, “Keep going, please.” 

The night before, he would have teased your desperation. 

But right now, with just you and him and the ghost of sleep, he’s not in the business of taunting. 

He listens, a hand coming down to your hip. Not holding it down to the mattress, but simply holding. He lets his thumb slip beneath the t-shirt, lets a rough callous built up from years of guitar and working on his van brush roughly over your skin with the most sensitive of intentions. 

Slowly. If the morning wasn’t so heavy still on the two of you, weighing down every movement, slowing every reaction and pacing every adoring kiss, this is the part where the two of you might have grown a bit impatient. More nipping, more bruising gripping, more complaints of going further, further, further. 

But today? In this moment? The two of you have time. 

A dream sequence of his wandering hands slipping that old faded tee up until it’s finally bunched at your chest, until he’s finally peeling himself away from your body and he’s lifting it over your head. Every move is brimming with a love you never thought possible. A love to swim in, a love to sink into. One with the capability to drown the two of you, but it only breathes a new life into both of your lungs. 

When his lips wrap around a nipple and your back arches, that love thrums a bit deeper, coiling up your insides and urging your fingers to tangle up into his curls. 

You need him closer.

“So beautiful,” he whispers against your skin as he mouths at it, “So, so fucking beautiful.” 

The back of your skull digs deeper into a pillow engrained with the shape of your head from years of rest, a soft laugh slipping in between your blissful breaths, “Don’t lie. I’m a mess right now.” 

You were. And so was he. In a barely awake, subtle and tired way. Messy hair, messy marks of sleep across cheeks, messy breaths not yet minty from a morning routine the two of you followed like a religion. 

His head lifts, eyes glowing in the limited light, “I like your mess. As a matter of fact, I love your mess.” 

His hand on your hip squeezes for emphasis. 

You look down, wordless as you drink him in. A vision between the pinks dancing through the curtains, a godly presence as the dawn breaks. He’s a salvation, a new beginning and a new ending. He’s everything fairytales had tried to convince you existed in your youth. Prettier than any angel, warmer than any sun. 

And he’s yours. In this moment, and in all the next ones.

“I think I can make an even bigger mess of you, though, if you’ll let me,” a devilish smile finally overtakes his features and both of those dimples you’ve become so unintentionally fond of make an appearance. 

He dips his head, lowers his voice, lets his lips explore. You nearly pray to the Heavens above as you feel his hand slip from its gentle cupping of your hip, moving to slip nimble fingers beneath the band of your panties — but you don’t. Not a single God would care about what’s happening right now.

Just two people, two souls, twisting up in their bed sheets. Finding each other, finding divinity, before the sun even has a chance to stretch its arms fully over the horizon.

When he sinks lower and his face disappears beneath the cloak of the comforter, you hold your breath. When his mouth finds your cunt over fabric, you release it with a moan.

“That’s it, baby,” he encourages, both hands pulling off your underwear, pressing a hard kiss one final time over the cotton before he slips them off, “Keep making those pretty noises for me.” 

Your thighs drape over his shoulders, heels digging into his back as he begins his morning worship. All lips and tongue and finding the right places as fast as possible. Not out of a rush, but out of practice. He knows your body like the back of his hand, and he proves it. 

He knows exactly how hard to suck on your clit once he’s captured it between his lips. He knows exactly where to trace his tongue, circling your hole in lazy circles, not quite teasing but not quite succumbing as he lets you buck your hips in reckless abandon. When to speed up, when to slow down, when to add a finger and when to let the gravel of his voice vibrate against your core — he knows you. Through every little whimper, through every soft chanting of his name, through every tug of his hair. 

And he knows you well enough to know when to stop his ministrations, pulling back only to crawl his way back up your body, his boxers slipping off somewhere in the process. 

You’re still all over his lips as he kisses you fervently, slick and sticky and a little tart as his tongue dives into your mouth.

And just as he knows you, you know him.

You’d lied, of course. You hadn’t really had a dream just like this. You can’t even remember how you’d awoken with such want, but all that mattered is you had. You’d woken up to an all-consuming need, even if your half-conscious state, and you’d woken up to him.

Your hand reaches down between the two of you, wrapping around him carefully. Your skin is still cooler than his, it’s always cooler than his in the dead of night, and he hisses at the content.

“I love you, you know?” you quietly confess to your lover, as though it might be a sin, as though it might be the greatest secret to ever be held on a patient tongue. 

His skin is nearly velvet under your touch, pliant in your palm as you stroke him. Each movement and twist of your wrist begins to unravel him, his head dropping to the juncture between your shoulder and your neck. Every pant of his breath brushes skin just as his snores had. 

Gold litters the shade of sunrise entering the room, but the only warm colors you care to entertain are the ones in his eyes as he finally looks at you and tugs your hand away.

“I love you more.” 

You could argue. You could fight him on it, start to rattle off your list of all the things you adore about him, prove that no one has ever loved another person in this lifetime the way that you’ve loved him. The freckle below his right eye, the chip in on of his canines from an accident in his youth, the scar on his left knuckles from the first time he’d tried to do a trick with a butterfly knife at nine years old. The jokes he interrupts your day so kindly with, breaking up the mundane with laughter that seemingly fuels you to carry on with your time until you’ve returned home to just him. The passion that flows inside of him until it pours out over everything sacred to him — his music, his interests, his friends, you. A passionate and devoted man, yours to have and yours to hold.

But you don’t argue the point. You just smile as he kisses you, deep and searching, as he lines himself up with your entrance.

He loves you more, you love him most. He’ll figure it out — eventually. 

The stretch of him is pleasurable, just like it always is. Filling you, warming you, making that closer you crave so ardently nearly tangible. Every roll of his hips has him reaching spots inside of you to elicit stars to cloud your vision. The morning light, the white hot pleasure — you don’t care what makes your vision blue. You only care that it does, all your mews and all his groans entangling up in the air. 

Your palms slide over the back of his shoulders, your fingers dig into soft skin that you’ll spend the rest of your days memorizing.

Eddie. Eddie, Eddie, Eddie.

No prayer has ever been repeated with such need or belief as his name from your lips. 

And he returns the favor. Gasping out your name, somehow finding himself just enough in his right mind to continue to whisper sweet nothings against your ear, timing them with his leisurely thrusts.

“So fucking tight and so fucking good to me,” he manages to gasp, digging his hips in a little harsher, “Could stay here forever. Kind of want to stay here forever.” 

You don’t know how he’s coherent; you can’t form a single response, eyes rolling, hands clinging to him tighter. 

“Look at me when you cum.” 

He knows you. He knows you very well. You hadn’t even noticed that coiling in your stomach or the fluttering of your walls when he calls you out, forehead pressing to yours as your eyes open to find his. 

It’s not world-shattering when the waves come — it doesn’t have to be. It’s something to wrap around your entire essence, something to soothe and something to coax you into oblivion. Something to get lost in as his movements stutter and his own eyes grow heavy.

He doesn’t close his eyes, and neither do you. Lost in that pleasure, and lost in each other. 

You’re still rhythmically clenching around him when he comes, filling you up with warmth, burying deep in you and holding there as his mouth falls open and you're quick to pepper his outstretched neck with kisses. The smallest reminders of all the love you have for him. The gentlest of devotions, sprinkled across the skin of a man who will always know an affection like no other. Not everyone in the world will be so lucky as to know the fondness you offer him, and as far as you’re concerned, that’s how it should be. 

Curses spill as his movements slow, before finally stilling. He drops his weight onto you, exhaustion finding its way back into his bones. 

There’s things to do, a day to begin. Work and people waiting on you two, responsibilities to worry about and daily mundane accomplishments to achieve. But for now, it’s just the two of you. Awake with the rest of the world, but completely separate as you cradle him and he holds you. 

“That was one Hell of a way to wake up, sweetheart,” he murmurs into your skin, and you only throw your head back in a laugh.

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[revasserium]

Why does this scream second chance romance?

reqs are open!

at first sight

hayato suo; 6,284 words; fluff, slight angst, fem!reader, no "y/n", passing mentions of divorce, childhood friends to lovers, hurt/comfort (a little), the slowest of burns, suo is a simp, introspection, more plot than not

summary: and isn’t it strange, that a person doesn’t have to be dead to serve a haunting, how there only need be absence and sorrow and the utterly world-ending ache of what used to be?

a/n: this was not supposed to be this long or this self-indulgent but welp.

He sees you sometimes in his dreams, in the spaces right before he falls asleep — that sweet, weightless, liminal space where anything and everything is possible, even probable. He sees the shape of your laughter, feels the weight of your breath, can almost taste the sugarplum sweetness of your smile. He’d lose himself, then, in the firefly lights of your eyes.

On those nights, he wakes up with a scream curdling up the back of his throat like soured milk.

Because no matter how hard he tries to hold onto the good memories, the ones bathed in the precious, pale gold of summer sun, truth always slips through like a sharp, silver knife. Cold. Ruthless. Unrelenting.

“— so, I know we don’t know each other very well but�� you’ve done so much for our shop and my grandma is so grateful and… it always makes me so happy to see you come by —”

The girl in front of him is pretty, in the delicate, unassuming way that all young girls might be called pretty. She is dark, pin-straight hair and thin-rimmed glasses. Suo can tell that she’s put on a sparkly sheen of lip-gloss just for this occasion. Her cheeks are tinted sunset pink; there’s a letter in her hands.

“Thank you,” he says, dipping his head, his hand linked behind his back, his expression schooled into one of polite affectation, the most gentle rejection. He listens to her run herself out, babbling on about visits and admiration and the shape of him outside the shop window, how her heart would skip a beat. He finds himself, wistfully, thinking about the shape of you — when you were small enough to wiggle under the fence in his backyard, dirt caked under your nails, your hair always chopped short, one of your front teeth missing as you tossed pebbles at his windows.

“I’m… sorry,” he says, finally, when the girl presses the letter into the center of his chest, bowing low enough for her long silky hair to cover her face. He slowly folds his fingers over the letter, giving her hand a squeeze as he presses it back towards her.

“B-but…” she looks up; there are tears in her eyes, “why…?”

“I suppose,” he says, voice light and conversational, almost as if he were remarking on the weather, “I’m just not the dating type.”

The girl mumbles something before sniffling and wiping at her eyes. She is, Suo admits, not a very pretty crier. But then again, he thinks, most people aren’t. She nods again, as if to herself, clutching her unopened letter to her chest before dropping into another deep bow and dashing off. Suo can hear the clipped echoes of her sobs as she races down the near empty streets, and he sighs.

He turns on his heels and makes his slow way back to his own house, the place small and empty, but clean. The single wooden shelf is lined with books, alphabetized. His futon is folded neatly in his closet. He goes through the motions of making tea, pouring the boiling water over the dried leaves, watching them unfurl. He breathes in deep and thinks of you —

You were the one who first taught him how to brew tea, your small hands not yet big enough to hold a teapot proper, but whatever you’d lacked in skill, you made up for in determination. He’d always admired that about you, the sheer recklessness of your nature that bled, somehow, into courage in his young mind.

“Careful! It’s hot…” he’d warned, reaching out to catch your wrist, but too late, the water had already spilled a little and you wince, but you don’t let go, your arms quaking as you set the scalding teapot down, biting down on your lips to keep from crying out.

“I know it’s hot! But you gotta use hot water if you wanna make good tea!”

And there, through the misty haze of steam rising from the pair of cups, sitting across the table from you, Suo thinks you’re the most beautiful creature in the entire world.

He loses you, he reflects, the same way he loses most things in his life — accidentally and to the well-tempered beat of fate from which no one can escape. One minute you were right there in front of him and the next, well…

“Moving…?” he says the word as if he’d never heard it before. You sigh, nodding, staring listlessly into empty space, your knees curled up and pressed into your chest, your chin propped on your crossed arms.

Suo blinks, “But… where are you moving to?”

You shrug, “Tokyo, I think,” you say the word with a soft resignation only found in those who have seen and lost, seen and lost again. Suo thinks he understands; looking back, he’s not sure he did just then.

“Because of… your dad’s work?”

“Yeah. He says that if his company does well there, we’d be ‘set for life’ — whatever that means,” you say, picking at a bit of invisible lint on your sleeves.

“But… what about your mom? And the teashop?”

You purse your lips, mulling over your words as if you’ve got a sour cherry pit caught beneath your tongue.

“She says… she can’t leave it. So… she’s staying here.”

“Oh,” Suo says, sitting back against his bedroom wall. Even back then, he was smart enough to understand the implications.

You nod.

Judging by the look on your face, so are you.

“So… when…” he can’t really make out the words; there’s something stuck in his throat that feels oddly like an entire handful of sand.

“End of the month,” you say, finally looking up at him to catch his eyes. And there, he sees the insurmountable sadness, the longing he’d sometimes catch a glimpse of in the slanted summer light. As if you’re waiting for him to do something, to say something. He could never figure out what exactly it was you’d wanted him to do. To say.

Stay.

He’d later realize.

Please.

He’d repeat the words to himself in the encroaching dark, lying on his futon, watching the light cast on his walls go from white to gray to gold, and slowly, sinking into cool, hollow blackness.

Don’t go.

He mouths the words until he can almost taste the shape of them on his tongue. He swallows around them like a fistful of sand, flips onto his side, and tries to go to sleep.

You appear before him like a daydream, a near mirage in the summer heat. One second, he’s laughing with Nirei at something Sakura’s said, and the next, he’s standing stock still, staring at the end of the street where he’s sure he’d just seen you —

You look older now, but then so does he, and your hair is longer, but the shape of your laughter, the light of your eyes — he wouldn’t miss those anywhere. Not then, not now, not ever. Even after all these years.

“Suo-san…?” Nirei peers up into his face, tugging on his sleeve.

“Hm? Oh sorry — I just thought —” he glances back at the end of the street. Just a large van and a few young workers, hauling things out from the back.

“Oh, there’s a new teahouse opening in town! That must be them, moving in!” Nirei says, cheerful and oblivious as always.

“What’s a teahouse do, anyway?” Sakura asks, picking at his ear and flicking something off the end of his pinky.

“Uhm… make tea?” Nirei offers.

“Yeah, but don’t we all know how to make — where the hell’s he goin’?”

Suo takes off down the street, whipping passed their usual haunts, the taiyaki shop, the okonomiyaki stand, Pothos cafe, to the corner of the street, just where the sidewalk threatens to curve into some more residential place —

“Oi!” Sakura calls after him but he doesn’t listen.

There — that sound. Sugarplum and silver bells.

The space is undone, the door propped open with a wooden crate, the young men with the moving company tutting as they grunt and step around Suo to carry more boxes into the space, setting them down along the walls.

“— there’s good, oh no — not that one — that one goes… oh here’s good! Thanks!”

You.

He sees you like something from his wildest daydreams, the shape of you in smoke and stardust — the light twisting and twining around you as if it knows, treating you differently than it might all the other people and objects in the room, focusing around you to paint you in richer tones, in brighter lights and deeper shadows. The air seems to gather around you like a held breath.

And for a moment, Suo himself forgets quite completely that he himself might need to breathe as well.

You turn your eyes on him and the world seems to shift focus like a camera lens shifting zoom. Everything blurs, sound slows, drags, distorts. The room around you fades until it’s nothing more than a suggestion of shapes and space.

Suo sucks in a breath.

“Sorry — we’re not quite open y…”

Your voice trails off, and vaguely, Suo thinks that you sound different than you did before. But there’s still the same lovely cadence to your words, the rounded edges, the crispness of your diction, the sheer weight of your conviction in the things you say and how you might will them into truth.

“It’s… been a while,” he says. His own voice is weak, wavering, dry and scratchy and sounding nothing like himself but he sees the moment you recognize him, wholly and completely.

“H-Hayato-kun!”

“Oi, Suo — who’re you —” Sakura rams a shoulder into him at this exact moment, Nirei pattering close behind, trying to hold him back. Sakura blinks at you, his head flicking between you and Suo as if watching an invisible tennis match. And then, some understand seeps into the depths of his eyes and his cheeks go a ruddy shade of pink.

“Uh — sorry, I didn’t — who —” he looks bewildered and awkward all at once.

“We’re Suo-san’s friends — from Boufuurin!” Nirei cuts in, finally succeeding in tugging Sakura to one side and peering around the rather narrow door frame. He bows slightly before jumping half a meter in the air as a mover clears his throat loudly behind the group of boys now clogging the door way.

You jerk out of your reverie and point the mover towards an empty corner before making your way over, your steps steady. It takes everything in Suo’s being not to move, to neither shift forward, to press into your personal space just to make sure you’re really real, or to turn tail and run till he doesn’t have the breath to keep running any more.

He can’t tell which he’d prefer more, but he knows that neither is the best option right now.

So, he forces himself to stand still, to wait for you to come to him.

And you do, drifting over in a cloud of light linen and a flower patterned apron.

“Hi! Long time no see!”

Suo registers faintly that though your hair is longer, but your bangs are still choppy, and the ends of your hair badly cut, as if you’d gotten annoyed one day and tried to do it with kitchen scissors. He bites back a smile at the image. But there are other subtle changes too — the round babyfat on your cheeks slimming out to a sweet, heart-shaped face, the hugeness of your eyes, almost alien-like in your child years, now balanced out by the depths of your features. Your lips are small and plush as an overripe plum — that, at least, hasn’t changed in the slightest.

“Yeah… what… are you doing here?” he asks, still struck dumb by the sight of you here, in Makochi.

You raise an eyebrow and Suo almost feels the motion like a gut-punch, the familiarity of it overriding your older features until he can’t really tell if he’s living in the present or if he’s been suddenly and unwillingly shunted into the past.

You scoff, “Opening a teahouse, duh!”

Nirei laughs and Sakura lets out a snicker that kicks Suo out of his stupor. He clears his throat, having the decency to at least look abashed.

“Sorry, yes — that much is obvious. Is there… anything we can do to help?” he tries to ground himself in the established notions of aiding the citizens of Makochi. At least here, he knows what he has to do. His voice evens out, his smile returns.

You regard him with that same, questioning look before casting your eyes around the room.

“Sure! Plenty to do if you guys have the time —” and then you start pointing to the various tasks they might help with.

Nirei and Sakura jump to, already used to the pattern, with Suo trailing behind them, moving slower than usual, his limbs feeling heavy, as if they’re full of lead. It takes them the better part of the afternoon to help you set up most of the bigger pieces of furniture. And somehow, by the time they’re done, a good chunk of the freshman class is there, chattering and laughing, lounging at the newly built tables.

“Alright! Who wants some tea? Fresh and on the house — consider it payment for a job well-done!” you clap your hands, grinning as the boys all cheer.

Suo keeps quiet, sitting at a corner table with Sakura beside him, Nirei across. It isn’t until Sakura digs his elbow rather painfully into Suo’s ribs that he turns his face towards them, hitching a smile to his face.

“Hm?”

“What’s with you?” Sakura asks, never one to mince words. Across from them, Nirei nibbles on his lips as if debating on whether or not to add on to Sakura’s line of questioning

“What do you mean?” Suo asks, folding his hands carefully on the table. He’s not fooling anyone; he knows, but that doesn’t mean he shouldn’t at least try.

Finally, impulse wins out and Nirei blurts out —

“You’ve been staring at that girl all afternoon and — and I’ve never seen you look at anyone like that before. And you’re the one that gets the most confessions out of anyone in our year, so it figures that if this girl c-can capture your attention like this, she must be someone really special.”

He finishes slightly out of breath, before ducking behind his little notebook, even though he’s holding it upside-down.

Suo lets out a helpless laugh.

“I didn’t know you were keeping track of how many confessions all of us got — that statistic seems irrelevant to our fighting abilities, no?”

“Quit tryna change the subject,” Sakura cuts in, loudly.

Suo sighs, nodding, “I was getting there. We —” he cuts off, clearing his throat as he feels his entire body catch on the edge of the confession.

He takes a deep breath and starts again, this time, pressing a slight smile between his lips, taking on a tone as if telling a story about someone else.

“We were neighbors growing up.”

Nirei blinks, “Is… that it?”

Suo’s smile goes a bit stiff and plastic, “More or less.”

“Liar,” Sakura folds his arms, frowning as he stares Suo down. His cheeks are still pink, but there’s a determined glint behind his eyes that never bodes well.

“Ah… well,” Suo weighs his options, but then lilts his head and shrugs, “you caught me — we were a bit more than just neighbors… more like childhood friends.”

Sakura narrows his eyes but doesn’t push. Suo looks down at his hands, laced carefully on the wooden table before he speaks again.

“We… spent a lot of time together and… her mother owned a teashop like this one.”

“Oh! A family business!” Nirei says.

Suo opens his mouth to correct him but your voice cuts him off.

“You still have them!”

A finger slips along the long tassels of his earring and Suo nearly jerks away, casting his eyes up to find you, a familiar teapot in your now steady hands, your eyes somehow bright and dark at the same time as you look down at him.

“Oh… yes, I —” again, he feels his throat catch, “of course I did. You were the one who made them for me.”

You let out a light laugh, setting a few teacups down at their table and prepping their tea.

“You didn’t have to — I’m surprised they held up after all these years. You know I bought the red beads at the craft store right?”

“Yeah, you… you used your New Years money. I remember…”

“And you helped me pick out the tassels from the lady who sells lucky knots at the market!” you say all this as if it weren’t one of his most precious memories, as if he hadn’t gone to great lengths to make sure the earrings you gave him (one of the only things you’d ever given them, other than perhaps a broken heart) never came to any harm.

Across from him, he can see Nirei putting the pieces together. Next to him, Sakura seems stunned still by the same revelation.

“If I’d know you’d like them so much, I would’ve made you a few more pairs. At least that way, you can try to match them with your clothes,” you grin, leaning down to seep their tea. Suo watches as the hot water washes over the dried leaves, rehydrating them till they each unfurl into their own shape. A deep, floral fragrance fills the air and he feels his stomach both twist and settle in the same motion.

“Jasmine green,” he says.

“Mhm. Your favorite. It’s a little basic but I love it too.” You shoot him a surreptitious wink. Then, you pause, “Ah — but it might not be your favorite anymore, I guess —”

“It still is,” Suo says before you can second guess yourself.

The smile that re-alights your face is nearly blinding in it’s brilliance.

“Anyway, I’ll leave the water here for you guys, yeah?” you set the teapot down next to Suo’s elbow, flash them all one more smile before twirling around and going to serve the next table.

It isn’t until much after dark that everyone leaves and Suo, having made up some vague excuse to linger, finally has you to himself. You hum as you flit from table to table, wiping them down and pushing in the chairs. Suo watches you for a solid minute before moving to help.

“Thanks,” you say, as he helps you push in the last chair and you wipe a forearm across your forehead with a long breath, “phew! Ma really made it look easy back in the day, but this is hard work! And we’re not even officially opened yet!”

“We’ll come by to help whenever we can,” Suo says, the response automatic.

You nod, folding the tablecloth neatly into a square and setting it on the counter.

The silence thickens around you, swirling and charged. Suo grasps for something to say, anything to say. He wishes you’d do something — turn on a light, hum another song, say something strange and outlandish, punch him, perhaps.

You do none of those things. Instead, you wipe your hands on your apron and turn to look at him, your eyes huge in the darkness.

“I’ve missed you.”

It nearly knocks him from his feet. The quiet force of your words, the raw-edged honesty behind them. The way your voice doesn’t waver. The way you say them not like an accusation but an admittance. He thinks he really would’ve preferred if you punched him instead.

“Yeah,” he says, feeling breathless, heat cresting up his chest, and suddenly, he’s thankful for the darkness within the not-yet-opened teashop.

“I’ve missed you too.”

He feels hollowed out by the confession, as if just speaking the words had carved him clean, so clean that the words echo through him, reverberating through his bones till he feels it down to his marrow. He hadn’t known that missing a person could feel like this, or that the word could mean so much until he’d said it out loud.

Missing. The lack thereof. A nothing where there used to be something.

It is a wrongness in the matrix, a hole, an abnormality.

It’s as if he’d been sleeping on the mattress from the Princess and the Pea ever since the day you’d left, a subtle incorrectness that permeated every single moment of every day, so obvious in it’s presence that it had folded back into itself and become something.

That the lack of you was a presence in and of itself, a living ghost that had loomed over him, slinked behind his shadow, hovered over his shoulder until —

He reaches out to touch you, fingers skimming against the skin of your cheek.

You lean into his touch, the motion slight but he catches it almost immediately, and the force of it is the catalyst that propels him forward. He tugs you into his chest and holds you there, burying his face in your hair.

“I — I’ve missed you…” he says again, and you nod, fingers crumpling in his school uniform as you press your forehead into his chest.

“Y-you’re so much taller than before — it’s not fair,” you say, your voice muffled by his shirt. He laughs, ruffling your hair for a second before his fingers so soft and he’s running them through from root to end.

“If I had a sister, I’d tell her to keep her hair long, so I could braid it,” he’d once told you when the two of you were barely in elementary school. You’d tugged at the ends of your chopped short hair and frowned.

“Ugh — I could never grow my hair out long. It’ll just get in the way!”

“It’s longer,” he says now, tugging at the ends even as he takes half a step away, releasing you from his embrace. You glance down at the uneven bits, crinkling your nose in distaste.

“I — I tried to grow it out but… I kept getting annoyed.”

“Yeah, I thought so but… I’ve always liked your hair short.”

“You have?”

“Yeah —”

I’ve always loved everything about you.

He swallows, “Short hair… just fits you.”

You stare up at him for a second longer before nodding, your eyes flickering away.

“Yeah. Guess it does, huh.”

Something clunks in Suo’s chest.

You turn away and he has to physically beat down the panic rising in his chest.

“W-where do you live now? I’ll walk you back. It’s not safe to walk around alone in the dark,” the words tumble from him like a bag of spilled marbles, scattering across the hardwood floors.

You turn back to regard him with a curious look.

“I — I live above the teahouse. So…” you shoot him a lopsided grin, a finger pointed up towards the ceiling of the teahouse.

“Oh. Right.” Suo blinks, watching you watching him before he notices the flight of stairs behind the open door in the back of the room.

“You wanna walk me to the stairs?” you ask, grin slanting sideways till its positively devilish and Suo feels a shiver kiss it’s way up his spine.

“I mean, it’s dangerous to walk alone in the dark, right?” you tease, before turning and slinking towards the back room door. Suo hesitates for a second before he sighs, shaking his head and following behind you.

He pauses at the foot of the stairs just as you pause on the step right above him. You twist around to face him, and the sudden closeness catches his breath in his lungs. Like this, he can feel the heat of your skin, can smell the shampoo in your hair — the same one you’d used when the pair of you were still kids, apple blossom and aloe.

You cock your head, your faces now on a level, your eyes searching his.

It’s so dark, but even in this lack of light, he can make out every single feature of your face.

“I think I can make it up the stairs by myself,” you say, your voice barely more than a whisper, conspiratorial and low.

Suo lets out a small laugh, nodding, “Good. It wouldn’t be right for a gentleman to leave a lady feeling unsafe at this time of night.”

Your head slowly cocks the other way; he’d almost forgotten that habit of yours, like a sparrow listening for the rustle of leaves or the first breath of autumn wind.

“Since when’ve you been a gentleman?” you ask, still in that soft, whisper-voice, the kind of voice that compels the listener to lean closer, to tip forward until they’re falling into something they don’t even have the name for —

“And… more importantly, since when have I ever been a lady?”

He kisses you then. Or perhaps, you kiss him first. It doesn’t matter — or perhaps it does, or it will. But not now, not in the soft, nebulous darkness that surrounds you, not when your fingers are curling into his hair and his palms are settling at your waist.

And there are no fireworks, but there is light — electricity coursing through his body and yours, neurons firing and firing and firing. A cataclysm of yes and more and finally.

The first time you break apart, Suo is breathless; the second time, he feels punch drunk; by the third, he’s determined that this must be what it’s like to be thoroughly inebriated. His head is spinning, his face is hot, he has to remind himself of where his hands might be — oh, there — one in your hair and the other pressing you to him so hard he’s certain it’ll leave a mark.

The thought pleases him more than it should. Or perhaps it pleases him just as much as it should and always will.

“H-Hayato…"

“Mm — stay — please…” his voice is nearly broken as he drops his had into your shoulder; he takes a shaky breath, “don’t go.”

You let yourself be held, the pair of you propped awkwardly on the first few steps of the stairs, your fingers threading through his hair.

“I’m not going anywhere… this is my house now.”

Suo nods, vaguely aware that there are questions he wants to ask you — how’s your mother? Where’s your father? How are you here, alone, opening this teashop by yourself? Living here, by yourself?

But he will get to those later, tomorrow maybe. Right now, he forces his head up and regards you with hazy, blown-out eyes and kiss-slick lips.

“If I sleep on the floor, can I —”

You laugh, running a thumb along his cheek.

“We’ve shared a bed before and nothing’s happened. You don’t have to sleep on the floor — bed’s big enough for the both of us.”

Suo presses his lips for a second before shaking his head.

“It’s not that. I just… don’t think I could trust myself.”

There’s a hoarse, ragged edge to his voice that has you chewing on the inside of your cheek. He glances up the stairs and offers you a weak smile. You consider him for a second more before nodding.

“Yeah, c’mon. I’ll show you where the futons are.”

Upstairs, your bedroom is silver and alien with moonlight. It seems too bright, too sharp. But you step into it and suddenly, everything is alright again. You both wash up in silence, and you dig up an ancient band t-shirt from somewhere in your closet. He wonders how long you’d been here already — how many days and night he’d spent mere minutes from you.

He lays down in the futon after you slip beneath your sheets. He watches the shape of you as you shift this way and that.

Finally, you say, “Night, Hayato.”

“Sweet dreams,” he says.

And he falls asleep counting the sound of your breaths against the rhythm of his own, thundering heartbeats.

“Y-you what?!”

Sakura’s face is tomato red and Nirei looks just about ready to go into anaphylactic shock. Across the classroom, Kiryuu, who’s obviously been listening in, catches Suo’s eye and gives him a cheeky thumbs up.

Suo smiles, cheery and unabashed.

“I slept over.”

“B-b-but — you — I — she just —” Nirei seems to be fighting against some invisible force inside himself even as Sakura continues to gape.

Suo chuckles, nodding.

“Yeah, she moved here last week — it’s a total coincidence that we met up again. She had no idea that I was even here.”

He thinks back to the quiet moments of the morning, of waking up to find you sitting up in bed, staring out the window, your hair mussed and a little frizzy. He remembers the way the morning light had dappled the soft of your skin, how you’d smiled and asked him how he slept.

“Well. Better than I’ve slept in…” he clears his throat, suddenly self conscious of the gravel there. And here, in the unforgiving light of day, the night before seems miraculous and distant. Had he really held you in the dark like that? Kissed you till you’d said his name like something of a prayer?

Had he really held your hand all the way up the stairs?

You catch his eyes and smile, and like this, looking up at you as the rising sun halos itself around your shape, Suo wonders if he still might be dreaming. Because surely, surely — heaven couldn’t have been so close as this.

“So, what do you want for breakfast?” you ask, swinging your legs out of bed, your pale feet pattering against the fresh tatami floors. Suo is momentarily stunned by the sight of your bare legs, the large shirt you wore to bed now somehow terribly short and insufficient as it brushes by the middle of your thighs.

He swallows and forces himself to look away, to shake his head and focus on the words you’d said.

“Whatever you want to make,” he says, by way of an answer.

You hum as you cook, putting a bowl of rice in the microwave and putting on a pot of water to boil. The kitchen here is smaller than the one up front, in the main body of the teahouse, but it feels more homely, every surface effused with a sort of lived-in quality — clean, but rounded at the edges as if worn down by the love of days and weeks and months.

“How long…” he tries his voice again, only to find it wanting. He lets his words trail off and hopes that you understand.

“Hm? How long have I been here? Just a week. It was weird — my mom had bought this place a while back, and started the renovations, but I’d never had time to visit.”

“And where…” again, his voice trails off, his palms pressing flat to the thin counter, his eyes tracking the shape of you as you flitter through the small kitchen like a bird or maybe just a trick of the light.

“She’s not here,” you say, your movements slowing as you take the boiling water from the stovetop and pour it over some rough tealeaves, letting them seep for a few minutes before straining them out and tossing them into the trash.

“She’s… in Tokyo, finalizing the divorce with Pa.”

“Oh.”

His mind makes several inferences at once, even as he watches you soak the rice in the steaming hot tea and split the ochazuke into two bowls.

“I thought they’d… already done that,” he admit, nodding his thanks as you hand him a bowl and offer him a container of store-bought furikake. He takes it and shakes some over his bowl before handing it back.

“Yeah. Most people did.” You don’t offer up anything more and the both of you eat in silence. He polishes off the entire bowl and feels the heat settle in his stomach like a gap being filled.

“So… will she come after… everything is settled?” he choses his words carefully, peering up at you over the empty dishes. You slurp noisily at your own breakfast before licking your lips.

“Yeah, but who knows how long that’ll take? Might be weeks, might be — years, or something…” you drag the back of a hand across your lips and reaches over to pluck the empty bowl from his hands, dropping everything into the sink to soak.

“C’mon, don’t you have school or something to get ready for?”

“So… she’s here to stay?” Nirei asks, his eyes a bit overbright as Suo relays a version of the story, skirting tactfully around the more tender parts.

“Yeah, as far as I know. I promised we’d come by after school today to help her set up some more — you don’t mind, do you?”

“Nope! Not at all!” Nirei beams, but Sakura’s eyes are narrowed. Suo turns his gaze on Sakura and tilts his head with a questioning smile.

Sakura’s cheeks redden, “It’s just — ah, whatever — never mind!”

And no amount of prodding or teasing could tantalize him into saying more.

Time passes by strangely after that — at times slugging by slow as molasses, at others jumping forward in great leaps and bounds. Suo spends nearly every waking moment when he’s not at school or on patrols with you, sometimes simply sitting in the corner of the teahouse, flipping through a book, watching as you served your growing roster of regular customers, at times helping you catalogue new shipments of tea and organizing them by type, brew time, and temperature.

Sometimes, when the light catches you in just the right way, Suo finds himself arrested by the sight, and it’s times like these when he’d tug you forward, a finger under your chin, his lips gentle on yours till he can taste the tang of your smile.

“I heard you’re quite the lady’s man,” you say, casually one day, brewing a test batch of a new varietal of white tea.

“Oh? And where might you have heard such a thing?” Suo grins, pillowing his chin on the heel of his hand, watching you as he always does.

“Just the baker’s granddaughter — she goes the prep school I do, you know the one in the next neighborhood over?”

“Ah… that.”

Your grin goes lopsided as you carefully blow on the top of your teacup and take a dainty sip.

“You got your hair cut,” he says, smiling as he rakes his eye over the cut of your bob, tickling just beneath your earlobe. You go slightly cross-eyed as you tug a strand down over your forehead before blowing it away again.

“Yeah. Figured it was about time I got a proper haircut.”

“I liked it the way it was before.”

“You did?”

“Sure I did. I’ve always loved everything about you.”

Between you, a single column of steam rises in a slow, lazy spiral from the surface of your half-drunk cup. And like this, Suo thinks you’re still the most beautiful creature he’s ever, ever seen.

Your blush is quick and brilliant. Your eyes cut away; you push your hair behind your ears.

“Don’t changed the subject — so what’s this she said about you not really being one for dating, hm?”

Suo shrugs, “I’m not.”

You quirk an eyebrow.

“Then…” you blink at him, cheeks flushing darker and darker, “what do you call this?”

Suo fixes you with a steady look, and now, his voice doesn’t waver when he speaks to you, because he knows that he’d never let the certainty of you slip away from him again. This time, he knows the words to say — knows without the shadow of a doubt his truth, and yours, too.

“I don’t know what I’d call it but… I know that I’ve never really believed in dating.”

You lick your lips, setting the cup down with a soft clack.

“Then what do you believe in?”

Suo doesn’t miss a beat.

“I suppose… I’ve always just believed in soulmates.”

Your mouth falls open ever so slightly. Suo smiles as he reaches forward to tug the strand of hair free from behind your ear just to run his thumb over the smooth, silken ends.

“And, I’ve always, always believed in love at first sight.”

[that-nerd-who-writes-fanfiction]

I was talking with my friend about which of the knights would immediately support Merlin’s magic when it’s revealed and which of them would need a little more time.

Then we started thinking about how Merlin reacts when Arthur is threatened, and how he doesn’t care who it is but he’ll fight anyone to protect Arthur.

And because I love angst too much, I brought up how hurt Arthur would be at his best knights and closest friends assuming the worst of him.

I’ve had this stuck in my head for a few days so thought I’d share:

———

There’s some sort of emergency, either a magical creature or bandits while the knights, Arthur, and Merlin are all on a hunting trip. Arthur’s life is in danger so Merlin acts without thinking to save him, revealing his magic to everyone. (Only Gwaine and Lancelot know, but Merlin doesn’t know that Gwaine knows yet.) Merlin is left standing in front of Arthur with his hand out to stop the threat while the gold leaves his eyes.

Arthur: You have magic…

Lancelot and Gwaine both come to Merlin’s defence, saying something like

Lancelot: *standing protectively by Merlin* Sire, he’s done nothing worthy of punishment.

Gwaine: *grabs his sword and stands protectively by Merlin* if you hurt him, and it’ll be the last thing you’re capable of doing.

And seeing them both defend Merlin over his magic so easily, the rest of the knights join in too. Leon knows Merlin and Arthur are as loyal to each other as they come, and Elyan and Percival have both seen magic - good, bad and indifferent - outside of Camelot from their travels so while it took them a second longer, they do side with Merlin.

Leon: Arthur, think this through,

Elyan: *holding his sword* I can’t allow you to hurt him.

Percival: *puts a hand on Arthur’s shoulder threateningly* Merlin’s as loyal as they come, surely he deserves a chance to explain himself.

Arthur isn’t even holding his sword, he dropped it during the fight which is why Merlin had to save him. He’s just looking at Merlin with hurt in his eyes, then at the knights looking something close to betrayed but also hurt for them believing he could ever hurt Merlin. The thought never crossed his mind until Gwaine said it.

Merlin stops looking at Arthur and glares at the knights, stepping away from Lancelot and Gwaine to make it clear that he doesn’t want them to side with him. He then magics Elyan’s and Gwaine’s swords into flowers so they aren’t threatening Arthur. Then he stops holding anything back so his ‘Emrys filter’ disappears and Merlin gets to be threatening while being openly protective.

Merlin: All of you, stop. If anyone harms a hair on Arthur’s head, I’ll reenact every attempt on his life that I’ve stopped since coming to Camelot on you all, but this time they’ll be successful. So help me gods if you hurt him, I’ll hurt you enough that your great grandchildren will still be feel that pain.

Arthur: …

Everyone is stunned, Arthur feels overwhelmed by everything and isn’t exactly processing, but he’s hopeful when he sees Merlin still caring about him.

Merlin: *turns to Arthur* I’m a sorcerer, I have magic. I use it for you, Arthur. And whatever you decide for my fate, I’ll accept it willingly.

Arthur: We’re going home. You’ve got a hell of a lot of explaining to do, Merlin.

Merlin sighs, relieved that he isn’t about to lose his life, and immediately goes back to his servant duties, handing Arthur his sword and getting the horses. The knights collect their things, murmuring to themselves and subtly watching Merlin and Arthur while they talk too quietly to be heard.

Arthur: Thank you.

Merlin looks over, confused and raising an eyebrow in a way he really shouldn’t at his king, but it’s reassuring to Arthur that they’re still Merlin and Arthur despite the magic.

Arthur: For not assuming the worst of me.

Merlin: You’re too good for that, Arthur. Even if you did get angry, you’d have every right to after I lied for ten years. For what it’s worth, I am sorry about that.

And it seems so simple in the way Merlin says it, like they can get through this just like they’ve gotten through everything else so it’s going to be okay. So Arthur tentatively accepts it in that moment, whatever ‘it’ is that gives Merlin magic because he’s definitely still got questions.

Arthur: it’s… well, it’s not great. I won’t pretend I’m not upset, but at least you didn’t go shouting about it in court.

Merlin, flashbacks to when Gwen was accused of witchcraft: yeah… good thing…

———

That’s all I got. I’ve still got really bad brain fog so I’m not sure how coherent this is, I’d settle for passably readable at best though. I’ll probably write something more for this when I can focus on anything for more than five minutes without feeling like my head is going to explode, but for now I’m just gonna leave this here.

[kacievvbbbb]

I’m not someone that particularly cares about a ship being canon or not, in fact I would rather the media I consume have no romance at all (giving my blog confusing yes I know)

But there is something about the canon ties between Shanks and Mihawk that drives me feral with need to see what their whole deal is.

Because like there are so many little inconsequential details that when taking separately seem pathetic and weak. But then put together it feels like it paints the picture of a larger undeniable connection and understanding between two wildly different men.

The fact that their main color is both red (Mihawk’s is a more wine dark red than Shanks’ bright red and a little more “subtle” given that Shanks is literally called red hair) but even then their main symbols, their identifying features, are red! Mihawk’s eyes and Shanks hair (yes while I love the gold and think that’s better I cannot ignore the fact that Oda consistently colors in Mihawk’s eyes red even though the gold is infinitely more popular)

They have the same birthday, are practically the same height, both with the promises to our two main protagonists to meet them at the top with a parting “gift”, both serve as a mentor to the protagonist (mihawk literally thought zoro how to kill him 😭), both with the bird(ish) iconography.

The fact that Mihawk, Mihawk! A man whose introduction was that he didn’t care much about anything and caused destruction on a whim, cares enough about what Shanks thinks to mentally apologize before trying to kill luffy (what the fuck).

The fact that whitebeard felt the need to reference his duel with Mihawk in his conversation with Shanks, despite not really being very relevant to the conversation and the fact that this is the first we’ve seen shanks in years and it is brought up in the same context as his relationship with Buggy (an already established relationship) reveals his relationship to Roger seems to point to the fact that this duel between Mihawk and Shanks is an important relationship to shanks. It couldn’t just be to show strength because he was about to clash with whitebeard the strongest man. It’s also hard to notice that those two relationships didn’t end particularly well for shanks.

Also the fact that it was Mihawk out of every character , Mihawk that brought luffy’s bounty to Shanks. Something he obviously knew would mean a lot to him. I used to think the scene was just there to show us how big a deal Shanks actually is like look at that fun childish alcoholic gang inspired our main hero? He’s actually a super big deal and he used to spar with the strongest character by far we had seen at that point (it wasn’t even close) and they fought on equal footing. It added a new layer of mystery to Shanks.

But it’s also the fact that even now with Mihawk’s bounty Shanks was mentioned and he’s the only one who this was mentioned for. Crocodile is just for his df and intelligence and they don’t mention that he literally tried and almost succeeded in subjugating a country and he was beat by luffy “or smoker given how many marines actually know the truth” even buggy who was literally Shanks’ sworn brother under the pirate king doesn’t get a mention like that. But Shanks and this duel is so integral to Mihawk’s character that it’s mentioned along with the only other long lasting fact we know about him and that is that he is the World’s Strongest Swordsman. Isn’t that fucking insane.

And like I feel insane scrapping all these details together as proof of something because they are all (besides the duel) the barest bones of a connection but god it is actually driving me insane.

And I’m not saying Mishanks is going to become canon or that it should or that I even particularly want it too. What I do want is to see how deeply these two are connected. What are these red strings of fate tying them to each other. Why can’t apparently ten years of little contact sever it? I swear to god if it’s actually nothing much I will lose my fucking mind. If nothing ever comes of all of this I will actually go insane. How can some people look at this and not see foreshadowing!?!?!!

[raineandsky]

#120

When the villains caught wind of a new hero on the team, they’d all taken interest. When someone came back claiming he’s blind, it’d sparked a whole new debate.

Straightforward, they’d all said. He won’t even see us coming. They’d laughed at how easy it’d seemed.

The villain feels like they’ve stumbled on a pile of gold when they come across the hero. He’s running his hand along something on the fence in front of him, something that the villain will later realise is a braille description of the view ahead of him. A white cape drifts around his ankles, an equally white suit flattering against his typical heroic body, the lightest of smiles on his face as his fingers trace the patterns of dots along the railing.

The villain can’t help but grin as they slowly make their way towards the poor hero, so oblivious, so stupid. They’re barely a hair breadth away, their dagger practically unsheathing itself, when the hero spins towards them with a swish of his cape and a flick of a blade.

The villain barely reels back in time. Staying quiet doesn’t occur to them when they’re startled. The hero looks like he’s staring right through them, an arrogant smirk on his face.

“Ah,” he says brightly, “you’re one of those criminals I’m meant to be looking out for?”

The villain sidesteps, careful to keep their footing quiet, but it doesn’t matter. The hero’s head cocks towards them as they try to step out of his blade’s path.

“You’re almost silent,” the hero continues. A smirk adorns his face, intrigued. “Incredible.”

The villain is close enough to strike, the hero looking slightly too far beyond them to be right in his assumptions. The villain shifts in fast, their dagger poised. The hero dodges back and retaliates with a swing of his own.

The villain stumbles out of reach and the hero follows. The villain’s unprepared; they were expecting a hero who’s unsure who they’re looking for, where the villain is. They were expecting an easy plaything that they could stab when they got bored.

But this—the hero is nothing but brazen confidence.

The villain shoves their dagger up to meet his blade, throwing his arm out. They move in for another strike but the hero’s already recovered. His blade easily tucks under their arm and slices into their side.

Something of a strangled gasp escapes the villain before they can stop it. They stagger back, a hand touched timidly to the wound, their eyes flitting back up to the hero. He simply waits, his blade crimson and his eyes blank. How? How?

“Would you do me the honour of telling me who I’ve met?” he asks, as if this is nothing more than a casual meeting between friends of friends. The villain wants to snap him in half for the audacity.

“That’s none of your fuckin’ business.”

“Aha,” the hero says, almost a laugh, “You’re [Villain].”

The villain can only stare at him in horror. The hero seems to feel the tension in the silence, because he continues. “You’ve a bad mouth, favour in the blade, light on your feet.” A teasing smile. “And you’ve a smooth, caramel voice I haven’t heard in many like you.”

“Wh— Excuse me— You—” 

The hero just smirks, the stupid smirk of someone who knows he’s untouchable in every sense of the word. “Flustered by compliments, too,” the hero finishes with a laugh. “Good to remember for next time.”

“I’m not flustered!” the villain finally manages, “and my voice isn’t caramel. That isn’t a thing. You sound stupid.”

“I’m happy to be stupid if it means I can recognise you as the villain who speaks in caramel.”

The villain’s side is beginning to really ache. They need to be somewhere that’s not here when it inevitably gets worse. “Do what you want. I’m going home.”

“May I escort you to a prison cell?”

The villain barks a laugh, their side practically splitting with the forced fakeness of it. “As if you know where the agency is from here.”

“I always know where I am, [Villain].” A smile again, softer this time. Knowing. “You underestimate me for a characteristic I think makes me as interesting to you as you are to me.”

The burn in the villain’s skin is an ode to that. “Sure.” The villain turns on their heel before a thought occurs to them. “I’m going to walk away, loudly. Do me a favour and don’t fucking shank me when I do.”

The hero’s face twists back into a smirk. “As long as I hear you moving away. Until next time, [Villain].”

A blind hero! everyone had cried. It’s almost too easy!

The villain scurries away with a gash to the side and a slam to their ego, and they know now to know better than that.

[1800titz]

Hi friends! I’ve been sitting on this for about 3 months now and had the spontaneous urge to share. More lengthy authors note is over on wattpad. ٩(◕‿◕)۶

This one is going to be a long, chaptered fic, and here's the first chapter!

Also, big thank you to Miss @freedomfireflies for her help brainstorming <3

WC: 6.5K

Harry thinks that prissy, pretty little princesses stowed away in his cabin, tied up with ropes like haphazard, shibari interpretations, outweigh all chests, upon chests, of dainty sapphire emblems and chunky pendants of gold. This particular …treasure, in fact, is worth far beyond her weight in pure gold. A sight for sore eyes, too. Still sopping from the sea, her low-cut neckline clinging to her flesh and her skirt sheerly draped over her parted thighs. 

It’s a nice view. 

Seren doesn’t know how she’s ended up strapped to some horribly uncomfortable stool in a rocking room that’s wood, ceiling to floor. 

Well. 

She knows that the boat she was on was a victim of piracy. She knows that the ship, aimed for Holland, met an unsightly demise at some point, in open ocean, between Rotterdam and Harwich. She knows she’d been in a cabin of the Mary when the first strike landed, when flames erupted over the forecastle, when the deck turned to screams and a beautiful morning of calm skies, wisps of white she’d admired minutes prior, meant virtually nothing to the tightening in her chest. 

The pirate leans back against the wall. His eyes, like emeralds, wind over her shape. She grits at the balled fabric between her teeth, chest heaving. He’s a man — a man’s man, unlike in appearance to the men she’s used to spending her pastime around, back home. The kinds who wither at the sight of the wrong fork at the dinner table or something, and turn their noses up at the thought of carrying something heavier than forty pounds. The kind whose hair coils pristinely, seemingly solidified rock in place. The kind who carry umbrellas to ward off the glaring rays of the sunlight as they stroll through the courtyard of shrubbery in their fancy shoes and fancy garments. This man is not that type of man. 

He’s different, she can see it just in the way he carries himself. He’s not scared to get his hands dirty, he’s not scared to do the work. The crest of his left cheekbone wears a scar, a nick, so small she wouldn’t see it had he not stepped into the buttery beam of the daylight cast through the little window on the precipice of wall and ceiling, particles of dust dancing in the makeshift spotlight. His fingers, adorned with chunky rings, his hands — they’re calloused, like a laborer. She can see it from her view. His garb is simple, clad over his skin for purpose and comfort, solely. 

But simple isn’t the term she’d deem best to describe him, not with his myriad of accessories, from the trinkets glinting from his holster, to his plethora of rings, to the mysterious, rusted key that dangled in the glen between his pecs. That one’s highlighted against bare skin in the vale of his haphazardly unbuttoned shirt. From there, she can see ink over his torso, carved in shapes over swarthy flesh. All sorts of pictures; beaks, and wings, lines of careful shading and others of jet emphasis; thicker, deeper sketches in contrast.  

He’s clean shaven, which is unlike any pirate Seren’s ever heard tall tales of. His mouth is pink, cushiony in shape, and when the corners of his mouth turn up, dimples wink awake beside the curl. An even slope of a nose, and jade irises that brew with mischief. Seren can almost see the way that the flinty shade would brew with a storm, like the sea. If he wasn't a pirate of the boat that’d throttled her own, sent it spiraling into the ocean as nothing but husks of chipped wood and dying ember, maybe she’d find an alluring quality to him. But it’s not food for thought. 

“Should we try again?” he prompts, in his tantalizing cadence. 

When she’d heard him speak, for the first time, she was floored. An Englishman. An Englishman, youthful and spry,  sailing a pirate ship, and pillaging when so much more could be in the books for such a man. So much potential, wasted. What a crying shame. She’d heard of pirates, of brutish criminals from her homeland, but they were always, for some reason or another, older, unprepossessing, scarred and crude with unkempt beards and a lack of morals, too far gone to redeem. They had eyes much too hungry for riches, and lewd, groping hands that were much too focused on flesh. Seren eyes his hands. They’re colossal. He hasn’t touched her in that way, not like that, but the lazy smirk over his plush mouth, the way his irises rake over her neckline, down the meshified front of her dress — that practically urges her not to count her blessings too soon. 

When he squats just ahead of her, watching her in pause, his eyes glinting with this sort of condescension, because she’s indisposed and at his whim, Seren wishes her legs weren’t bound to the legs of the chair. She’d kick him, if she could. She’d scream, and kick, and claw, and—

“Are you going to start shouting again? Is that what you’re thinking about?” he murmurs, the corners of his mouth buckling. When she’s unable to respond, for obvious reasons, the man cups his palm over the shell of his right ear and twists his head a tad, leaning towards her a smidge. 

“M’gonna need an answer, if you’d like to me to un-gag you. M’specifically gonna need a no,” the pirate prompts, a jesting air to his tone that Seren would love to crush. Her chest is still heaving from the last screaming fit, from the first time he’d tugged at the rope pressing to her cheeks and pulled the smushed fabric off of her tongue. His mouth twitches wryly. 

He plants his forearms onto his thighs, casting his gaze to her as he weighs out the options, lips crooked, but eyes narrowed, just a bit, in a way that wordlessly suggests she comply. 

“Let’s give this another go.” 

When the man digs his forefinger under the abrasive rope and yanks it down, over her chin, and then plucks at the outside of the makeshift gag, Seren doesn’t nip at his fingertips. She’d tried that, the first time, but he’d retracted before her teeth could come into contact, his mouth jolting at the fire within her he’d underestimated. She expected a smack, she’d expected her neck to twist as her cheek bruised in response to the attempt, but he’d just stuck his tongue against his cheek, all mirthy, until she’d started to scream. Then he’d gagged her again. 

So. 

That was a failure. 

The second the back of her throat meets the air, rather than the garbling cloth, the young woman starts screaming. Again. He’d kind of expected it. It’s a very lovely attempt, she’s quite loud, and all, but unfortunately, her efforts are sort of moot. That kind of thing tends to happen when you’re miles, and miles, and miles out in the open sea aboard a ship of men who work for the opposing team. Harry would clap if he wasn’t putting on a show of tucking a finger into his ear at her shrill cries. Eventually, he just watches her, letting her scream for a bit, and she holds seething eye contact as her help rises in pitch. 

“Okay— alright,” Harry shakes his head, balling the cloth, daubed with her saliva, and shoving it past her lips haphazardly. She attempts to spit, but can only wriggle as he presses the rope back over her mouth like the task is effortless. 

For a moment, neither of them say anything. The princess can’t. Harry tuts. 

His tone carries notes of amusement when he tells her, “You’re quite pitchy. D’you know that?” 

Seren stares him down. 

“Have you got rocks in your head?” his lips nearly jolt up at the blunt nature of his own inquiry. They don’t. “I tell you not to scream,” he waves with an arm, “you scream anyways. I say, let’s try one more time, because— you know. Maybe you didn’t get the memo, the first time.”

The princess watches him talk, bemused. He gestures with his arm like a tired parent, stressed and lecturing a menacing, little child. 

“And you yell again. So I’m wondering, have you got rocks in your head?” 

Seren says nothing. She does wriggle in the restraints, like his question has insulted her enough to launch at him. But she stills when he squats ahead of her, once more, her heart hammering behind her ribcage. 

“Who’s going to rescue you?” the pirate asks. It’s obviously rhetorical, and he knows she can comprehend that much. When the roll of her chest slows and she settles back, he can see it in her eyes that his point has left her crestfallen. His mouth quirks, and Harry presses again. “Who?” 

When he knows that the message has sunk in, when she stares at the wall behind him, blankly, the only evidence of her consciousness being her glazed over gaze and the flare of her nostrils on every inhale, Harry sighs down at his palms and shakes his head. 

“I’d just like a chat.” 

Seren twists her head away. As much as the binding over her neck and face allows for, anyways. Harry tuts. 

“So glum. You’re alive, aren’t you?” he cocks his head, voice low, “You’re not at the bottom of the sea. Not like your little boat.” 

Those words hit a nerve, he can see it in the way she side-eyes him, the flame reignited, kindling in her scorching gaze. The pirate nods down at his hands, twisting a ring with a ruby red gem, like a shitty mockery of a moment of silence. 

“It can’t possibly be comfortable, sitting with your mouth full, like that. And you must be thirsty, what with all that saltwater you were gargling,” he raises a shoulder, a coy reasoning to his speech. 

Seren doesn’t want his stupid water. He’d probably poison her, have his way, and roll her off the ship, back into the raging waters he’d pulled her from. Harry blinks. She doesn’t offer an inkling to show that she’s willing to comply, but he stands and reaches for the rope, digging the pads of his fingers under the binding, over her cheek. His forefinger brushes the corner of her parted lips. 

“Third time’s the charm.” 

Though, he doesn’t sound the least bit convincing, not even to his own ears. He cradles the square of cloth between his fingertips and listens to her screams for a moment. 

And then he startles her when he starts to harmonize with her screeching pleas. The first one is enough for her vocal chords to stutter, for her to jolt back in her seat, alarmed. 

“HELP!” Harry calls, stretching the vowel outweighing her own scream in volume as the young woman’s own dies off, and the princess balks, startling in the ropes at the sound. He takes a pause for a deep breath, and screams again, “HELP!” banging on the wooden beams over the ceiling, bumping with his palm loudly, in an outrageous display that’s clearly meant to taunt. The sound of him striking it, alone, causes her to jump in her restraints.

He’s unhinged. Seren is convinced. Her spine straightens out like an arrow, and her shoulders square as she ogles the bizarre display, watching him strike over the ceiling, the walls, stamp the soles of his boots against the floorboards. After a second, he settles down. His hand is crooked against one of the beams overhead, and his gaze roves over her slowly. Purposefully. The corners of his mouth curl up sardonically. 

“It’s not a very nice sound, is it?” 

He’s deranged. His screws are loose, Seren decides, her eyes still wide as the racing pace of her heart settles in her chest — but any man who sinks ships for fun, in the open sea, who sails and pillages, and murders innocents with a hunger for riches, has screws loose. These aren’t insightful revelations. Maybe she’d just expected him to be less …bizarre, in their interrogation. He was going to get his answers out of her — they were his, they were going to be, and there’s no kidding about it — but the young woman is unsure of what answers he’s looking for or why. Why, why, why. Why did these pirates sink her boat? It was nothing but a small ferry in comparison to the opposing monster of a galleon. It wasn’t even a merchant ship, there were no riches to be stolen. Ironically, the pirate reaches a hand out, and Seren fidgets until his fingers clasp over her ruby pendant. He lifts it from her skin with prodding fingertips and a gaze of scrutiny. 

She won’t give him answers, the princess decides. Whatever dialogue he may want from her, she won’t comply. She doesn’t know what he has in store for her lack of subservience, but she doesn’t care. She will not bend her will for this mangy brute. 

“This is a pretty piece.” 

Loose tendrils, clumped wetly, sway as she jerks her neck to tug the pendant from his grasp. She fails. His digits twitch and flex over the pendant, and the chain digs into the skin at the back of her neck with the faulty motion. The corners of his mouth quirk up as the princess makes an mmph. 

That’s a pretty sound. 

“M’not going to steal it. What kind of a man do you take me for? We’re good men here, on this ship,” the pirate declares, a sort of vehement passion to his statement, but the crook of his mouth says it’s an unlikely story. 

So do the remnants of her boat, somewhere at the bottom of the sea, Seren thinks dryly. Maintaining eye contact, he lets the pendant settle back between her collarbones. It is a pretty piece, Harry wasn’t lying. Real gold, too — no princess would wear something less. But he’s got no need to pilfer it from her. Every molecule of her being, every cell, will pay out tenfold the cost of the necklace. It’s with that thought that he fixes the gag back into place and leaves her, trussed to that chair in the cabin. 

“Ta,” the pirate bids in his slow roam towards the door, a glance aimed over his as he tucks his fingertips into the belt holstering his array of daggers, one handle bejeweled. The look he fixes her is sure, the kind that’s relaxed, but showcases that his word is final and will be the outcome. “Chat soon.” 

Fun fact; being tied to a shoddy, little wooden chair for hours on end fucking blows. Especially when your hands are bound, in such a way where the rope weaves through the pegs of the back of the chair, keeping your joints wrung together tightly. It’s really aggravating to have a coarse rope, its weaving splintered with pinprick-y tufts, stuck up over your cheeks to hold some sordid rag in place between your teeth. 

It’s safe to say that the experience is not one of Seren’s most favorite past-times. She’s not sure how much time has passed before that heavy wooden door creaks open on its hinges, again. Only a few hours, it must be. The crack of a window behind her hasn’t broken with nightfall, though the light cast through its opening has dimmed, if only a little. 

It’s the same pirate as before. All glimmery jade and the bare vale of tanned skin from the unbuttoned sector of his shirt, where she makes out a faint dusting of chest hair, between his pecs. 

The princess is still a gorgeous view, in Harry’s opinion. Her thighs are still splayed, but her cream dress has dried some, now, and so has her hair. It’s wild, mussed and frizzy. A half-soaked clump rests over one of her eyes. 

“Hello to you, too, darling,” he says in response to the glare she fastens him with through the one that’s visible, like instant daggers. The corners of his mouth crook. He ambles toward her with a steel cup of …something. Something mysterious, something unknown, something she eyes warily up until the point where he’s towering over her. The young woman tears her gaze away, casting it up to his handsome face, instead. 

He pries and tucks his digits up under the rope that’s settled over her cheeks and drawn ruddy hues, but he pauses before he pulls it down. 

“Y’gonna get loud?” 

Seren doesn’t say anything. In fact, she sort of can’t, which is quite nice, Harry thinks, but she doesn’t even make a garbled sound to appease or amuse him. The captain is thankful for what little fragments of peace he’s been granted before he’s forced to endure her ludicrously grating screeching. He weighs his options for a moment, but ultimately, tugs. 

Of course, the second he’s pulled the cloth out, the young woman is screaming, of-fucking-course she’s screaming. And at this point, it’s so obviously a ploy to irritate him, and Harry would laugh if the whole display wasn’t so vexing. There’s a tick in his jaw when he sets the lip of the tin cup to her parted, strawberry mouth, roughly — and he wouldn’t be so rough if she wasn’t so fucking loud — and tips. Instantly, that shout is garbled by liquid. It morphs into a cough and a much more tolerable string of sputters, as water leaks over and drenches down her chin, her chest, the front of her dress. 

“There we go,” the pirate says, the smooth baritone of his cadence louder over the fit of her coughing, “Attagirl. That’s much better.” 

He doesn’t tip more of the beverage into her mouth — a ransom on a princess who’s drowned in her own lungs is worth virtually nothing — and lets her cough and sputter a little longer. She strings together a sequence of breaths he deems good enough, before he smushes the rim of the metal cup back against her bottom lip. 

“Drink,” Harry advises and nudges the tin back in a way, again, so that the liquid sloshes and spills out into her open mouth. 

This time, she doesn’t cough. She expects it, the water. The princess affixes her top lip lower to siphon the beverage and takes a few swallows. Harry watches her throat bob, and he watches a little rivulet escape, too, dribbling down the corner of her mouth in a little streak. It drips down her chin, down her neck. His pupils follow the trail. He gives her a little break part-way, once the tin is close to empty and her neck is craned back with the swallows. He draws it away. Good. That was good, nice and easy. As easy as it could be, given the circumstances. 

Except she fixes him with this horrible glare, again, as he pulls the cup away. This glare that speaks volumes, this glower that should warn him of his error before he lets it happen. Harry doesn’t catch the drift. Only a glimpse of her cheeks puffing before she puckers her lips and spits the remnants at him, coating the bottom-most half of his linen with a mist of the water. His belt too, and a bit of his trousers. 

And then her mouth is empty and she’s just scowling at him, head tipped down in a way so that the chunk of her frizzy tendrils settles back over an eye. Harry doesn’t waste a second before angling the cup, miffed, and flinging what little water is left in the cup right back in her face. 

And the way her eyes screw shut, the way her lips fall open in silent appall the second he returns the energy, (except, he’s far more polite, in his humble opinion. He doesn’t spit at her like an improper animal), when she’s doused in the chilled liquid, and it coats the face-framing layers of her hair, her lashes, and drips down her chin — that’s the highlight of his day. 

He doesn’t instantly fix the gag back into her mouth, or slip the rope back over her irritated skin. He watches her, his jaw set, and when the young woman opens her eyes, she sees that storm brewing, manifesting — the kind she’d only imagined prior, in the flinty green of his irises. Like he’s harnessing his own composure. But then he takes a step back, and just. Leans against the closed door. Like he’s scoping her with his gaze. Like she’s just this shiny thing for his sight to pore over. 

And Seren thinks that feels worse than if she were to face the bite of his skin against her own, the swat of his palm against her cheek. She’d rather that, honestly. 

Her skin is cold from the water. She’s still sort of reeling that he’d done that, to begin with. He’s drumming the pads of his fingers against his bicep, over the nearly-sheer, cream sleeve of his shirt when he asks, a serious note of authority to the molasses of his speech, “Do you know who I am?” 

Seren curbs parroting the question wryly. As much as she’d love to tell him her father will torch the ship he rides upon and hang every member of his crew, him and his stupid fucking dimples included, she’s sure that all she’ll receive in response is a grating twitch of his pink mouth. 

“Hm?” he prods, making a show of cupping a palm behind his ear and steering his torso forward a smidge, half-expecting her response to be a series of shrill cries, for the hell of it.

Her answer is not one he expects. Frankly, the man doesn’t expect an intelligible response, the history of her opting for incoherent shouts, considered. But she speaks, afterall. It’s soft in decibel, feminine, and pleasant — her voice, unlike the aimless yelling he’d become accustomed to. Even still, it carries that undeniable note of derision. 

Seren tells him, “Someone …terribly disturbed.” 

Harry almost can’t help the way his cushiony mouth quirks. 

Almost. 

“Disturbed?” he scoffs, sardonically mirthy, “She spits at me like a fucking …filthy animal, and I’m disturbed. Aye, I’m disturbed.” 

The princess makes daggers with the gaze she sends in his direction. He lets her simmer in the wake of the light insult, for a moment, just drumming over his bicep, his mouth twitching in a kind of way that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. 

“I’m the captain of this ship,” Harry supplies softly, jade narrowed. 

There’s a twitch to her face then, something that slots by and withers in the blink of an eye. Something like recognition. And, fucking finally, Harry thinks — he can practically hear the angels croon at the crumbs of reception, from her, to his authority. 

“That means,” he motions out with the cup, his other arm still crossed, fingers wrapped about his waist now, “I’m in charge.” 

His voice is soft-spoken, a croon that spells it out for her, if she hasn’t already caught the drift. 

“I’m in charge of this ship. This crew,” he takes a step forward, ducking his chin as his eyebrows tip up a bit, “And you. And that means I’m in charge of what happens to you. So don’t you think it’s in your best interest to behave?” 

If he expects her to bow down and kiss the toes of his scuffed boots, the young woman doesn’t bite the bait. 

“You’re nothing but a mangy sea brute,” Seren declares, then, her chin held audaciously high, despite the ropes binding over her breasts and the foreboding ocean that sways beyond, with ravenous threat. He could lug her off onto the deck and chuck her off the plank, tied just like this. 

He doesn’t.  

He just stays leant against the wall, arms crossed over his bare chest. 

“Mangy sea brutes,” the pirate weighs her words, nodding slowly as he purses his lips in deliberation. And then his brows pinch together, “that’s quite insulting, actually. I take pride in my appearance, I’ll have you know.” 

“Mangy,” the young woman confirms, venom in her tone. 

The pirate props himself up and off, taking a languid step, each syllable of his cadence laced with condescension, “Now, rugged—“ and open mouthed smirk, a nudge with his chin, “I’ll accept. You don’t think I spend time in front of the mirror, darling? Mangy. What a rude word. I wasn’t aware that Siren, Princess of Essex was so abrasive.” 

There’s a flicker of something in her eyes when they flash to him — something like sharp surprise, mottled with pique. Like she didn’t expect him to know who exactly he was harboring upon his ship. The corners of his mouth crook. She’s seemingly appalled that he’s done his research. The glint of shock is gone, as soon as it shows itself. 

“Oh,” the captain takes a slow step forward in this sort of way, as if his body language is entirely meant to taunt her, hand in hand with his tongue, “I see. You thought I didn’t know who you were. Just some nameless, pretty little thing on my ship.” 

It’s a purposeful dig — the mispronunciation of her name. It’s only a vowel off, it could be chalked up to simple error, but it’s blatantly to mock her. Really, it’s a funny little dub since she enjoys spending so much screeching like the nuisance of a blaring alarm that just won’t shut off. It’s meant to demean her, to belittle her, because not even her name, blue-blooded and all, is worth correct pronunciation. That’s what she seems to hone on from the whole revelation, Harry finds. 

“Seren,” she corrects with bite, that same glower she’d worn prior reincarnated. 

The man takes another step. He cups behind his ear, and Seren promises herself that the moment she’s freed, she’ll personally chop off his stupid fucking ear for all the times he’d cupped behind that shell of it that way, so condescending. “What was that?” 

“Seren,” the young woman scowls, “Seren, Princess of Essex.”

He pauses, a cinch in his brows with this patronizing nod, like he’s weighing her correction, and then he tells her, motioning with an arm as the cinch relaxes, “Siren, Seren. Tomato, tomato.”

He motions with his palm nonchalantly. She wants to bite at his fingers. She doesn’t. 

“How dare you?” the young woman says instead. 

Harry’s mouth quirks. How dare he? What a pompous inquiry, molded by prissy lips. 

“How dare I?” the pirate repeats, and then just lifts his shoulder in a casually apathetic shrug. He takes a third step forward, raspberry lips smug and curled, “I just… dare.” 

And before the princess can voice her obnoxious protest, he shoves the cloth into her mouth and tugs up the rope, plucking a garbled sound of anger from her in the process. 

The silence is wonderful. 

By the time Harry returns to her for the third time, it’s well past nightfall. Light stops leaking from the crack of the window. Seren watches the shift, the way it rolls as the hours tick by, in the room. It morphs from behind her, its bright gold slipping into a darker orange, mottled with pink, and then dimmer, and dimmer, and dimmer, as minutes leak away, until all that’s left is dusk and the glow of the moonlight. 

The door creaks. She almost doesn’t see it, but she hears the pad of his boots over the wood and twists her neck to catch the sight of his legs as he steps through the threshold. 

“Honey, I’m home,” the pirate calls. 

Her eyes strain their sockets to catch the moonlight cresting off his cheekbones as his head dips, the dimpling that rises awake beside the corners of his mouth as they turn up at his own jest. He’s holding something. The captain winds around her, through the coat of darkness, and settles somewhere she can’t see. A thump, like something being set onto a table. Then, soft breaths fill the void of the silence. A strike of a match. Her eyes are forced to adjust to a warm, buttery glow as the little beam of fire, merged to a lantern, and then another, sends gold bouncing wall to wall. 

That’s when Harry sees that she's managed to make a home for herself on the floor, the chair she’s been restrained to tipped on its side. He almost doesn’t think anything of it, for a split second, but then, as the pads of his digits work buttons through their slits to disrobe, the pirate casts his gaze up for a double take. A twisted coil of satisfaction blooms in his chest as he observes her, the thought that whatever faulty maneuver she’d made to escape had resulted in this, and, well. That makes something joyful and mean bud. 

Seren listens to his boots, the step of them slow against the floorboards, until she sees him towering over her, in her peripherals. Her pupils shift. 

“Comfortable?” his brows climb with emphasis. The work of his fingertips over the buttons on his shirt are sluggish. Tired. She notes that motion, too — that fact that he’s actively shedding clothes. Nonchalantly. And it must show in her eyes, then. Something vulnerable, something uncomfortable, something raw, and petrified, because, yeah, she’s a petulant, little princess strapped to a chair in his cabin, against her will, and she fights him tooth and nail in every instance that he comes to visit her. But she’s a princess strapped to a chair, against her will, and it’s nightfall, and his skin is growing more bare, square inch by square inch, as the seconds pass. 

He must note that — whatever that shows, because the quirk of his priorly mirthy, strawberry mouth slips a tad. And then his features shape something relaxed. Something tired, again. Like he’s too worn. 

The sarky comment has those same traces of exhaustion seeping into it as his dismissive gaze disengages, honing on the work of his digits as he loops the final button through, “Don’t flatter yourself, sweetheart. You’re not my type.”

The cloth slips apart, showcasing more skin. A line of hair from below his belly button, in soft, dark wisps that melts off behind his belt. Sturdy muscles of his abdomen that ripple as he moves, chin ducked—

His palms cup over the belt of holsters, and that clinks as he discards it, too, winding around to, she assumes, set it somewhere. And then, more skin to pore over when he returns, the sharp cut of a V, decorated with laurels, emphasized by the low hang of his trousers. He cocks his head down at her, like he’s contemplating. Contemplating what, Seren’s unsure. He moves out of her line of sight again. 

Her arm aches. She’d tipped over onto it what felt like hours ago, and it’d taken the brunt of the fall, lodged against the side of the chair with the situation of her joints being married in the bindings, behind her. She’d managed to roll forward on her shoulder, just a tad, so that the press against it wasn’t constant, but it still fucking hurt. Her palms, down to the tips of her digits, were numb, she had this heinous crick in her neck, and she’s sure that the moment she’s able to stand her tailbone will hurt like hell. If she’s ever allowed to stand again. Maybe he’ll hurl her into the open ocean, strapped to this godforsaken chair, afterall. 

For now, he just hauls her up. His touch — warm — skims the opposite arm before his palm wraps over the beam over the back of the chair and tugs, leveling her with ease. The young woman squeaks against the gag as she hovers, terrified to drop straight onto the limb again. She doesn’t. The pirate sets her straight with a tired grunt. His sight scales her arm, the one she’d toppled onto, and Seren can’t see, but she assumes it’s not in the most pristine condition. And then his touch smooths over the ache, a crease over his brow bone as his eyes pry, and she bristles. 

His mouth twitches, but it’s tired. Tired after having to deal with her, tired from whatever he’d spent his time doing beyond the cabin. Tired after sinking her ship and taking her hostage, Seren thinks bitterly. How exhausting. And Harry takes his hand away. 

From her new, upright view, she can see that little metal cup — the same one he’d brought her hours earlier. He’s set it onto the table, and she knows it wasn’t there before, which means he’s brought it with new water. Seren turns her head to face it. It’s the most she can manage given that she can’t tell him what she wants, what with the gag and all. 

“Thirsty?” he notes, chin over his shoulder in her direction as he shimmies the sleeves of his shirt off. Seren eyes the expanse of naked skin as it expands, from cuts of muscle to ink sunk into the flesh of his arm. Certainly, if she wasn’t before. 

The princess doesn’t answer. She can’t, and she’s not going to resort to a string of pathetic hums to get his attention. The captain sets his shirt onto the table in a pile of disarray, beside his belt, and takes the cup. When he makes his way over to her, Seren’s eyes don’t follow his figure. And for a moment, there’s only a deliberative sort of silence. She doesn’t look until he talks, until his tone is far more serious than she’s heard thus far. 

“If you spit it at me again, I will personally make sure you lick it back up, off the floorboards.” 

And wisely, she doesn’t spit the liquid back up at him when he tugs the gag free and tips the rim of the cup against her mouth. Seren doesn’t doubt he’s the type of man to follow through on his words. But that’s not why she drinks — she drinks because she’s fucking thirsty. Her tongue’s gone dry, and the back of her throat pinpricks with an uncomfortable soreness, and because the lukewarm liquid feels good spilling down her throat. She cranes her neck back, throat bobbing, and doesn’t stop until he’s pulled the cup away himself, and a little rivulet of water dribbles down the corner of her mouth. She takes a big gulp of air and expels it. 

And then, with angry sorts of eyes, the princess declares, “I’m hungry.” 

“You’re hungry,” the pirate mirrors, but it’s only wryly amused — his tired, sardonic smile doesn’t reach his eyes, and he sets the cup back onto the table with little urgency to get her food. “We don’t offer room service.” 

“You haven’t fed me once today,” Seren declares indignantly when he winds behind her, out of sight. And then there’s a sigh and a creak, the kind that seeps from mattress springs compressing. “This is— this is cruel, I’ll have you know. This is torture, this is—“ 

“Thank you for your honest review, we’ll make sure to take your feedback into account,” Harry chimes at her in true, facetious fashion, scrubbing over his eyes with a palm as he knees his way onto the bed. And then the pirate tells her, with a more serious note to his drawl, before she has a chance to interject with another complaint, “If you’re going to talk all night, I’m going to put your gag back in until the morning.” 

Seren doesn’t say anything. Finally, she doesn’t say anything at all, and it’s splendid. It’s peace and quiet, and all he hears, for a perfect moment, is the creak of the wood and the subdued roar of the waves. 

“I don’t want to stare at the wall,” the princess speaks, eventually, like a petulant child. “Why am I staring at the wall?”

“Because …that’s the way the chair’s facing,” Harry responds, matter-of-factly and almost instantly, sure that a note of irritation has managed to teem into the words despite his best efforts. He will not let her know that her efforts of poking are chipping at his composure, he won’t. 

And for another moment, Seren doesn’t say anything. He lets his eyes drift shut. 

“I want to face you,” the princess says, eventually, and her tone implies she’s taken the bridge of silence to build the phrase up into something more demanding, something royal and authoritative. If he wasn’t so fucking tired he’d laugh. 

“You want to watch me sleeping?” she hears the pirate from behind her, his honey-smooth drawl grown raspy and lower from, seemingly, exhaustion, “That’s an odd request.” 

Her brows furrow as a scowl paints her mouth. The bed creaks in the gap of quiet. Every hair stands on end when, suddenly, he’s inches from her, his presence looming and warm from behind, with calloused fingertips brushing the side of her neck in their venture towards that godforsaken gag. 

“Just turn me!” Seren shrieks, “Just turn me, and I’ll be quiet!” 

He doesn’t put the gag in. He winds around her, hand still on the rope, his features shaped with apathetic seriousness, “If I turn you because you want me to turn you, what good am I at putting my foot down? Hm?”

Seren blinks up at him.

“Please,” the princess tells him, hushed and earnest, “I don’t feel …safe.” 

His brows twitch. There’s something that blooms in the jade at her admission, but it flits by, gone as quickly as it’d appeared. And then his brows furrow, and he looks absolutely exasperated, the subtle downturn at the edges of his mouth emphasized with the roll of that same jade. The pirate scoffs, and his boots stomp over the wood, each step an inclination that his frustration has leaked into his body language. 

“I told you—“ the legs of the chair screech against the floorboards — he doesn’t even grunt as he maneuvers her with ease, the motion rough like it’s a chore, “—that you’re not my type. Not everybody wants to fuck you, your highness.” 

Seren blinks, pupils poring over the priorly unseen sight of the opposite end of the room. A slit of a window, brushing the edge of the wall that merges into the ceiling. A bookshelf of literature and knickknacks. A dresser, a queen-sized mattress on the floor. The pirate still looks absolutely miffed when he walks toward the table with the lantern, bare shoulders squared and the muscles in his back rippling. He sets the light out, kicks off his boots, and falls into the bed unceremoniously. 

It’s a victory. 

And for a moment, Seren thinks he’s just going to wordlessly roll over to avoid her prying gaze. He doesn’t do that. They bask in the crash of the waves outside, the darkness, and their quiet breaths. He’s got this knack — Seren’s learned. This skill of morphing from sarcastic and teasing to broodingly serious, and it’s mercurial, sort of. She wonders if this brooding side’s what’s brought him to lead an entire ship. 

“Be quiet now,” the pirate drawls from the sheets, in that broodingly serious cadence, “If I hear another word, I’ll personally carry you out onto the deck, and you can sleep in the chair out there.” 

The man rolls over to face the wall. Seren doesn’t say another word for the rest of the night.

[itstimetojellyfish]

Rest, I’ll watch over you . ( Jiyan x reader)

so….. this is another fic! I really hope you enjoy!

You have to run .

The Tacet Dicords are increasing in waves .

No, why would you run? Don’t you have people to tend to? The soldiers need help , you are the only medic on filed . You cannot run . You must help others .

So you do , you bolt around , dodging Tacet Dicords lunging at you . You continue to help others , tugging them ,holding them , healing them .

After the same cycle repeats over and over again , you get used to it , settling in .

That was a mistake .

You weren’t so lucky now . The Tacet Dicords came upon you in waves , you struggle weaving around them trying not to get injured . You manage to survive for a while , but too soon , your legs collapse and the world goes black , the only thing you saw was every monster out for your blood .

Was it a peaceful dream? Did you have a dream? You can’t remember.

You drift in and out of consciousness, voices talking constantly. Yet , in your haze , you can always hear that voice , always . The warm , soft gentle voice you always heard when they would comfort you , or hold you in their arms , or praise you . Who was it? It’s on the tip of your tongue…..

Ah …. Now you remember…. It’s your lover , Jiyan ….You could never forget his teal hair and warm voice . How could you?

But…. This doesn’t sound like him … he sounds worried… that’s not good…. Why? Is it because of you?… How sweet , but he doesn’t need to worry .

Deciding that you’ve been keeping him distressed long enough , you attempt to open your eyes and stop studying the back of your eye lids .

That didn’t turn out well .

You were greeted with a blinding light that sliced through your nerves and left you defenseless against the searing laser that burned your eyes.

You groans and tried to move your hand to block your face and save you from the searing light , but to your surprise, instead of your hand that covered your eyes , a hand clad in gold armor covered your face for you .

You looked around to see soft honey eyes looking back at you with such worry .

You reach for him only to be met with a burning pain . Wincing you look at your arm , only to almost puke .

Burned to a molten red with multiple scars around it , some flesh poking out while the rest curled in unnaturally . You looked away immediately. Would Jiyan not like you anymore?…..

As if he knew what you were thinking , he gently rubbed his hand across your arm , avoiding the wounds , as he kissed your forehead , gently murmuring sweet nothings .

“ Dear… please don’t worry , I’ll love you no matter what , if anything , I love you even more for attempting to help others . “ His voice was sweet at first , but then it hardened . “ However , I will not allow you back onto the battlefield. Your arm has retained multiple damages and it’s likely your nerves will not work properly… You can’t ever do that again . “

His voice wavers as he gives in and places his head on your collarbone . “ You made me worry so much ….”

Your eyes soften .

“ I’m so sorry for worrying you …” You attempt to soothe his nerves but then he raises his head and places his lips on yours .

“ It’s okay, just please… don’t ever do that” He nuzzles your neck gently , careful to avoid touching any wounds as he pampers you in affection.

Soon enough, you begin to tire as your body gives up because of how much time you’ve spent awake .

Your lover notices your eyes threatening to close and reassures you . “ Don’t worry , rest now . I’ll be here when you wake up .“

He gently takes hold of the hand that isn’t injured and kisses it . He then pets your head and gently kisses your cheek .

“Rest , I’ll watch over you “

————————————————————————

I hope you enjoyed this thing! I really don’t have anyone to proof-read this and give any opinions on it so critique is welcomed!

[yourlocalcryptidbee]

⭐Lucifer Morningstar Headcanons

Headcannons about the lovely Lucifer Morningstar and the ways he acts with the even lovelier reader! Grab some snacks and a beverage, get comfy and enjoy <3

~1k words

GN-ish! Reader (mentions of hair long enough to braid that’s it) NOT proof read.

Dude hates crowds, like has a burning(get it? hellfire? burning…never mind) hatred for them, most of them anyways. Crowds, people in general, can’t seem to think for themselves when around him. It’s always ‘whatever you want, your majesty,’ ‘don’t let us stop you, your majesty’ ‘we’ll do whatever you ask, your Majesty’ It reminds him of Heaven and the councils, and the masses, and the sermons….the list goes on. It’s Groupthink on steroids. A complete echo chamber that a young Lucifer tried to break. That version of Lucifer stood up to the majority and lost everything because of it. Of course that man still can’t stand it, especially now that he’s on the other end of it. He wishes that sinners could at least try to have a personality around him, not just a bunch of spineless pushovers, ready to wait hand on foot in fear of being smote.

He likes to watch you, not in a creepy way! At least he hopes that it isn’t creepy to you. Simply put, Lucifer likes to see you there, see you take up space in his home. Although he isn’t apposed to helping cook breakfast or clean, he’d much rather just watch you do it. It’s a comfort thing for him, watching you physically move around and disturb his space reminds him that you’re real and not something his mind made up as a last ditch effort to fix his depression. In the beginning when you would sleep over at his house, Lucifer wouldn’t make his bed after you left. He’d just leave all the bunched up blankets and sheets exactly how you left them. It made him feel less lonely when he had to sleep by himself the next night.

Frivolous. Like, truly does not care how much he spends on shit. Couldn’t even try to think about caring. It doesn’t matter to him. Partly due to his pride, he’s the big dick in charge of hell! of course he has the money for that 24k gold and diamond encrusted something or other. Especially if he’s buying something for you or Charlie. Your wish is his command after all.

His house is sssssoooo dusty. After his divorce he had quarantined himself to his bedroom, bathroom and office. He never went anywhere else in his house, he would portal himself between the rooms when necessary so he didn’t even use the hallways! Which one could imagine would leave a substantial amount of dust EVERYWHERE. He had invited you to his home for the first time on a whim, feeling proud of himself for finally asking and had coincidently walked through his front door, only to cough from inhaling so much dust. That pride turned to horror as he realized he only had an hour to clean his house before you showed up. That man had never moved faster in his life. He was so focused, unfortunately sometimes on the wrong things, I mean why was he cleaning the support beams that were 15 feet high and attached to the ceiling and not, I don’t know, the kitchen!? 

Lucifer cannot throw things away. Just look how long he wore his wedding band after he and Lilith split. In fact, he still has kept the ring after getting together with you, though he’s not wearing it, Lucifer just couldn’t bring himself to get rid of something like that. It still lives in a nice box in the very back of his nightstand. This is even worse when it comes to gifts from either you or Charlie. It could be the stupidest thing and he’ll cherish it and hold onto it for eternity. All those rocks, broken crayons, leaves, and bottle caps that baby Charlie gave to him? All tucked away safely to this day, hell, sometimes he’ll look through it all as a little pick me up. Maybe this has to do with being physically thrown out of his home in heaven or maybe he just is sentimental, even Lucifer doesn’t know.

Loves having his wings be taken care of. It was hard after he fell from heaven, those beautiful white wings now a blood red? Not something he liked to look at. It reminds of what he failed to do and of the pain he created for all of humanity. Having you take care of that is so special to him. You take the time to preen his wings and make sure they’re perfect. One of the things that are constantly reminding him of his failure as an angel is just so easily accepted and loved by you. Something so small to you, means the world to him. You can look at something that symbolizes failure and still love it unconditionally because it’s Lucifer’s? Yeah, he loves it that you take care of him.

Will 1000% make dad jokes when he doesnt know what to say. It’s honestly adorable. This happened on multiple occasions when your relationship was still new. A conversation would finish and there’d be a lull or a pregnant pause, and then he’d just “what-what do you call a can opener that’s broken?”

.

.

.

“a can’t opener. ” 

Cue his quiet, stifled yet awkward laughter at his own joke and the distant groan from Charlie who has probably heard that a million times already.

Has a gift for braiding hair. Honestly, he’s pretty good at styling hair in general but allow him to braid your hair and his talent just shines through. His own hair has some length to it so he has in fact braided his own hair but come on, his (ex)wife and baby girl have some of the longest blonde hair in the underworld, of course, he knows what he’s doing. Doesn’t matter what style or where the braid originated, he can do it. The cherry on top is that when he’s combing out your hair beforehand, there isn’t a single tug. Could this be magic? Yes. Could this also be a skill carefully cultivated over the literal millennia he’s been alive? Also yes.

[korizzybee]

TS&TS - chapter 1

Pairing: Percy Jackson x black!fem!reader

Synopsis: true fulfillment comes from finding a partner who complements and understands you, offering a safe haven to be your true self, regardless of external pressures or backgrounds.

Warnings: none, Y/N is daughter of Apollo, Y/N is the younger half-sister of Clarisse La Rue, sisterly love

Every day was the same for you. You’d wake up, get ready for the day, eat breakfast with your cabin, spar with your older sister, have archery practice with Chiron, get praised by your peers, sneak away to get some alone time, participate in capture the flag, have dinner, sit at the bonfire with your cabin, and then get ready for bed.

Here you are currently, getting ready for the day. Brushing your teeth, washing your face, doing your hair, the usual. You grabbed your bow, wooden bow with Apollo’s symbol engraved in it in gold. It was a gift from him. Many people at camp considered you lucky, to be given a gift from your godly parent was a great honor.

Though you didn’t care for it, you would rather have had his time than this gift. Other than the fact Apollo had it made for you specifically, the bow wasn’t anything special. If anything you hated this bow. You’ve tried burning it, that didn’t work. You’ve tried just getting rid of it on a quest, that also didn’t work since it came back to you a few hours later.

Clarisse tells you all the time that you should feel honored that Apollo had graced you with such a gift, even more honored that he went out of his way to bring you to camp yourself. You didn’t feel honored though, if anything you felt hollow. You and Apollo hadn’t spoken since the day he’d brought you to camp, he didn’t seem sad over the fact your mother had died that day either.

But why would he? Apollo was used to all his romantic relationships not working out, some of them even dying. So what makes your mother any different? That day, he was just making sure his precious little prodigy made it to camp safely. Couldn’t have you dying before you were able to spread your wings…no, can’t have that.

You sighed softly, softening your grip on your bow which you didn’t even know had tightened. Though it wasn’t surprising, thinking about your father always left a bad taste on your tongue. “Wow, you must really hate that bow.” Your half sister, Valerie said with a smirk, her arms crossed as she leaned on your bunk bed. “Is it obvious?” You asked sarcastically with a soft scoff.

Valerie was someone you found yourself being able to confide in if you needed to rant about your father. Clarisse wouldn’t ever be able to understand, she couldn’t. After all, she lived and breathed for Ares’ approval. Just a second of his attention would make her day. She would tell you about how some kids would kill to be in your position, they’d kill to be claimed at all.

She wished Ares had as many expectations for her as Apollo does for you. “You know you can’t escape this, right?” Valerie said as she walked over to you, putting a hand on your shoulder. “I mean, after all, it’s your destiny to become one of Apollo’s strongest children to have ever lived. Isn’t that what he said the Fates have bestowed upon you?” She asked.

“Yea.” You said. “Doesn’t mean I like it though, I mean, what’s so special about me? I’d rather not be claimed than have to be held on this high pedestal.” You tell her. She hummed. “Well, sometimes life deals the worst cards to its strongest soldiers because life knows we can handle it.” She said. “Sure. Let’s just head to breakfast.” I said, shrugging her hand off your shoulder as you left the cabin.

You made it to the dining pavilion and got in line, some nymphs served us our breakfast and we went to sit down at the Apollo table. You noticed some of your siblings’ faces drop when you showed up to the table, but you were used to it. You didn’t have many friends around campus, not because you were shy, but because you didn’t want to potentially leave any of them behind.

That was your destiny, become one of the greatest children of Apollo who ever lived, and then die in glorifying battle. You would die sacrificing yourself so another person could live and you wouldn’t be able to escape it. This part of your prophecy is not something you’ve told Valerie. No one knows this but you, Apollo, and the three Fates. And since no one knows this, many people either assume you’re stuck up and think you’re better than everybody or you’re just shy.

Apparently, your siblings, other than Valerie, see you as stuck up. If there was one thing you hate about Camp Half-Blood, it’s that you have to eat at your assigned tables during breakfast and dinner. If you didn’t, you’d probably be sitting by yourself or with your sister, Clarisse. Maybe even with Luke and Annabeth, they’re nice to you.

You feel like Annabeth and Luke can understand where you’re coming from. Luke’s the best fighter at camp, and Annabeth is Athena’s pride. They’re both held to high regards, destined for great things. You finished my breakfast quickly and discarded your plate. Since you didn’t have to make offerings to the gods until dinner, you just went to the shooting range.

You’d stay there for hours just working on your bow skills, even though you never missed your target. Your bow gripped tightly in your hand and you picked up some arrows that were lying on the ground. Shooting helps you clear your mind. If you felt like you were too stuck in your head and worried about your future, you’d just stay here for hours. And that’s exactly what you did today, stayed for hours.

“So, you’re just going to stay here all day and not come see me at all?” You knew that voice all too well. Clarisse walked up to you, her arms crossed over her chest and her dark brown curls blowing in the wind.

“Sorry, I was just thinking.” You tell her, lowering your bow as you turn to face her. She hummed, looking at the targets that were now covered in multiple arrows (some arrows even having arrows inside of them).

She walked over to the targets, touching the wooden arrows that stuck inside of them. “Definitely the work of a prodigy of Apollo, that’s for sure.” She said, her fingers grazing the arrows. You winced slightly at the word ‘prodigy’. She turned to look at you.

“Why do you hate being his pride so much? That means he’s proud of you and your progress so far. You should be happy for than anything.” She told you. You just shrugged at her words, you knew where this conversation was going. You hated every conversation you two had on this topic.

“I just…I want to feel like a normal kid, y’know? All this ‘being destined for great things’ isn’t who I am.” You tell her, looking down at the bow in your hands. It felt oddly warm, every time you looked at it, it started to feel warm.

“This may not be what you want, but it is who you are.” She tells you, standing in front of you. Her body was blocking the sun from your view. “You were born with talents many demigods could only dream of having, what I dream of having.” She tells you. And here she goes, starting her famous rant about how you should be grateful for the life that was bestowed upon you.

“You were blessed by your father since birth, he and the Fates saw your future. You would become a hero, one of the greatest children of Apollo to have ever lived.” She tells you. “You know how many kids here wish they could just be claimed? You don’t. You won’t understand, because Apollo brought you here himself.” She continued.

“Your powers are stronger than the rest of your siblings. While some can only shoot a bow or heal, you can do almost as much as Apollo can. Sure your powers are still far weaker than his, but you’re not just some average kid of the sun god either.” She tells you, she then put a hand on your shoulder.

“You don’t understand how much I wish Ares would give me that kind of attention.” She says to you. “I’ve been training every day, since I first got here, to be the ideal daughter of Ares and earn just a smidge of his approval.” And this is what you hate about this conversation. You hate the fact that she’s right, she always is.

You don’t have to work hard to earn Apollo’s approval, you know he’s watching you and that he’s proud of your accomplishments. You don’t have to wonder what his face looks like, you’ve seen it up close. You don’t have to wonder what his voice sounds like, you’ve held a conversation with him before. And even though you know she’s right, there’s just something inside of you that stops you from accepting any praise or recognition from Apollo.

You nodded. “You’re right.” You tell her, just like you’ve told her every other time you’ve had this talk. She pulls you into a hug, something she’d never do if there was anybody else around. Not because she’s embarrassed, but because she doesn’t want to be seen as ‘soft’ or ‘weak’.

“I just want you to understand and appreciate how lucky you are compared to the rest of us. I’m glad you don’t have to go through what I do.” She whispered to you. You hugged her back tightly, your fingers gently gripping her orange shirt. She pulled away a few moments later and you let her go.

“I know you’re going to do great things one day, even if you don’t think so.” She tells you. This is what you liked about Clarisse. No matter how many people at camp feared her or how rude she was to everybody else, she loved you. Her baby sister, the one person she knew she could feel loved and appreciated by no matter what. And it’s true, because no matter what Clarisse did, she would never be viewed as a bad person or a villain in your eyes.

“Thanks, Clarisse.” You told her, a small smile on your face. “Anytime, Y/N.” Just as she was about to leave, she turned around once more. “Oh, and be at sword training tomorrow. You won’t be able to use that special little bow of yours in every fight.” She says with a teasing smirk, one you’d grown accustomed to over the years.

“Doubt that, but I’ll be there tomorrow!” You tell her as she turned to leave once more. You sighed once she was gone, and turned and looked at the targets you were previously shooting at. “I’ve been shooting for hours now, maybe I should take a break.” You said to yourself quietly, walking over to the targets and taking the arrows out of them.

It was dinner time, you sat at end of the table with Valerie. “I heard that we got a new camper earlier today, apparently he killed the Minotaur.” She whispered to you. “Really?” You whispered back. “Are you sure he killed the Minotaur, I mean, it’s a little hard to believe since he must’ve not found out he was a demigod until maybe yesterday, right?” You asked her. She shrugged and continued to eat her food.

“You never know, maybe he had an adrenaline rush. That tends to make people be able to do a lot of crazy things they aren’t usually able to.” She said. “Well, how come I haven’t seen him around?” You asked her. “He was with Luke the whole day, and you left the shooting range after being there all day just when they were arriving.” She said to you. “Right…”

You both finished your portion of food and went to pour the rest in the fire as an offered to Apollo. “I saw him today, I mean we didn’t talk, but I got a good image of what he looks like.” Valerie said, scooping her food into the fire. “Yeah?” “Yeah, he’s only a bit shorter than you, and he’s got blonde hair and blue eyes.” She informed you. “He looks a bit scrawny as well. And he also sucks at almost everything here, you should’ve seen him when he tried to shoot an arrow. He almost took everyone’s head off their shoulders!” She exclaimed.

You chuckled at her words. “So the new boy sucks at almost everything? I wonder who his godly parent must be.” Valerie hummed. “I wonder if he’ll even get claimed…a lot of kids are growing up at the Hermes cabin without ever knowing their godly parent, I feel bad for them.” She said softly, voicing her concerns.” You nodded. “Yeah, I wish everyone could know who their parent is, it isn’t fair to them.” You said in agreement.

“Hey, look, he’s over there.” Your sister said, pointing over at him. When you looked over at him, you could see that he was already looking in your direction. For the split second that your eyes met, it was like you could sense something within him. It was like there was a strong surge of power inside of him that needed to be unlocked, you could sense that there was something special about him. Then he looked away.

It wouldn’t hurt to get to know him, right?

[deceitfuldevil]

NSFW Alphabet with Druig the Eternal

Warnings: Exactly as the title states, 18+ minors do not interact. Mentions of overstimulation, assumed unprotected sex, fingering, oral (giving and receiving), praise, degradation, CNC, cream pies, edging, teasing, semi-public sex, choking, gender neutral reader? (Tell me if that’s wrong), not proofread and written when I had been awake for 35 hours straight.

Word count: 2K

A = Aftercare (what they’re like after sex)

Druig has known he has more time than most on this world since the dawn of the earth, and he uses that fact to his advantage when taking care of you after sex. Even after you’ve finished, he never just pulls away to end things. Druig always fucks you through and through your orgasms, his slender digits still scissoring slowly inside of you as the wave of euphoria you just experienced fully passes. He will wordlessly make his way into your mind and repeat over and over again how good you did and how beautiful you look. Letting those soft praises play on loop as he steps away only for a moment to grab a warm cloth to clean you up, then tossing the fabric aside and tucking you into his side as he holds you close until you drift to sleep.

B = Body part (their favorite body part of theirs and also their partner’s)

Druig doesn’t care much for one part of himself over another, but when it comes to you your eyes are his favorite part about you. He loves turning them gold when he encapsulates you with his powers, he loves the way your eyes flutter back into your head as he pleases you so intently, he loves how you will look directly at him as if he’s the most interesting man in the world.

C = Cum (anything to do with cum, basically)

Knowing that Eternals cannot produce children is something Druig used to both of your advantages, because while he still can cum, there’s no chance of getting you pregnant when he does so. So obviously Druig loves to stuff his cum as deep inside of you as possible, in the most primal ways he can think of, always adding in a few more thrusts for good measure to make sure you’re nice and full of his essence <3

D = Dirty secret (pretty self explanatory, a dirty secret of theirs)

After you and Druig established consensual non-consent his favorite thing to do is sneak into your mind when you’re sleeping and make you start dreaming about him inside of you, so that when you wake up it’s the first thing on your mind and you immediately pounce on him, and what do you know, somehow he’s always ready to go.

E = Experience (how experienced are they? do they know what they’re doing?)

Druig is older than some fossils, and he has more knowledge than any well versed historian could ever dream of. So yes, I think it’s safe to say he’s well-versed in pleasing you.

F = Favorite position (this goes without saying)

As much as Druig loves to use his powers in the bedroom his favorite position is when he’s sitting up and you’re on his lap riding him like no tomorrow. Your hands placed firmly on his board shoulders to help steady yourself as you bounce up and down his length, your forehead resting on top of his head as you focus on not finishing too soon while soft whines escape your lips. Your chest right in his face where he has full view of his second favorite part of you. Druig loves when you’re fucking yourself on him and he gets to watch how much you truly enjoy it more than anything else.

G = Goofy (are they more serious in the moment? are they humorous? etc.)

As much as Druig shows his softer side for you, that soft side isn’t around much in the bedroom. In the moment Druig’s main focus is your pleasure, and there’s nothing goofy about that. He won’t crack a joke until you’re throughly fucked out and can’t even understand his words.

H = Hair (how well groomed are they? does the carpet match the drapes? etc.)

He’s no animal, but he always keeps things realistic. The carpet matched the drapes, and he keeps himself fairly well groomed down there because it’s what works best for both of you.

I = Intimacy (how are they during the moment? the romantic aspect)

No matter if it’s a quickie or if it’s an all night long marathon, Druig is always deeply intimate and in the moment with you. Soft, dirty words whispered in your ear to edge you on. Always touching you in more than one place at a time to keep you guessing and begging for more.

J = Jack off (masturbation headcanon)

Jacking off has never been something Druig felt the need or urge to do, but most frequently his hand falls upon himself when his mouth is busy pleasuring you. He can’t contain himself when he hears your beautiful moans and tastes your sweet juices on his lips. Druig will have his nose buried in your essence and moan into your heat as he gives his throbbing member a few swift tugs, holding himself off from doing anything more until you’ve finished first.

K = Kink (one or more of their kinks)

It’s somewhat controversial but as mentioned earlier, consensual non-consent (CNC) is one of yours and Druig’s favorite actives in bed. It’s so relaxing to just let him take over your entire mind and when you come back around you’re completely fucked out. It’s great for Druig too to make you make of mess of yourself for him before diving into you himself.

L = Location (favorite places to do the do)

There’s a lot of places Druig likes to do the deed with you. A beautiful waterfall hidden in the Amazon forest, tucked away in the garden of his followers making, even on the rainforest floor because he loves how primal it feels to literally fuck you into the ground. But his favorite place of all to fuck you is on top of the alter stand in his humble house of worship. Laying your back against the cold flat wood while your arms are wrapped around his neck he’ll imagine that all of his disciples are with you two in the house of worship witnessing the way he is thrusting in and out of you. Because your moans are the highest prayer of all.

M = Motivation (what turns them on, gets them going)

Druig is so completely and utterly obsessed with you that just about anything you do can and will get him going. You’ll be tending to a garden and he’ll tell you how pretty you look on your knees, or it will be extra humid out and you’ll be putting your hair up in a ponytail and next thing you know he’s pulling your hair back and flattening his palm against your neck, telling you your heart is starting to race.

N = No (something they wouldn’t do, turn offs)

Age play is a no for Druig. He never wants to feel older than you, wiser than you, or above you in any way. He wants to be your equal, and doesn’t like to be reminded of all the years he’s endured on this earth before he met you.

O = Oral (preference in giving or receiving, skill, etc.)

As pretty as you look with his cock stuffed down your throat, Druig prefers to be the one pleasing you instead of you pleasing him. He would spend days on end if you’d let him with his tongue prodding expertly at your entrance and his nose pushing up against your clit.

P = Pace (are they fast and rough? slow and sensual? etc.)

A little bit of everything is always the right way to go in Druig’s opinion. He’ll almost always start off slow and sensual, and work in those high energy moments where you’re babbling and screaming his name as he roughly jack rabbits into you sending you over the edge.

Q = Quickie (their opinions on quickies, how often, etc.)

Druig would never turn down a quickie, especially if presented with the chance. Most of your quickies happen when he loses his resolve and just needs to have your right then and there, and there’s nothing more satisfying than simply being able to take you whenever and wherever he wants.

R = Risk (are they game to experiment? do they take risks? etc.)

There’s two kinds of risky situations Druig will put you in. One is when you two have the quickies and he’s fucking you in an open garden or in his house of worship with the door unlocked, and he loves knowing any one of his followers could spot you two at any given moment. The other risky situation Druig likes to put you in is around the Eternals when he will get a little too handsy under the table or even under a shared blanket during movie night, you’re more of risk than he is in these situations because you’re the one who always makes a sound.

S = Stamina (how many rounds can they go for? how long do they last?)

Never forget this man is a celestial, a god essentially. There’s no such thing as needing a break for him or running out of energy in the bedroom. Druig aims to please and please and please you until you can’t take anymore, only when you’re satiated, so is he.

T = Toys (do they own toys? do they use them? on a partner or themselves?)

Technological advancements weren’t always Druig’s favorite part of evolution, but as soon as he learned what good can come from adding a cheeky little vibrator into the mix, it became his new best friend.

U = Unfair (how much they like to tease)

As an eternal Druig does have duties and responsibilities to attend to, and it’s always when he’s about to go off on a mission or busy himself with something else entirely when he really leans into teasing and taunting you. Mostly going inside of your head, telling you exactly what to do, and how you’re going to do it without him ever being there. But hell never let you finish yourself off without him there, but he’ll tease and edge you for hours if he can. He’s unfair but the reward is so worth it.

V = Volume (how loud they are, what sounds they make, etc.)

He’s definitely not overly loud or vocal in bed aside from giving demands and or praises, maybe a little grunting or whining if he’s close and ready to finish. But overall he’s pretty quiet so he can tune into the sounds you’re making.

W = Wild card (a random headcanon for the character)

Druig loves to make you cum as many times as possible, especially if he’s going down on you he’ll make sure to double down on his actions immediately after you’ve finished to build up another twice as intense orgasm.

X = X-ray (let’s see what’s going on under those clothes)

He is handcrafted, not a flaw or an inch missing anywhere on that man. He’s surely not too large to the point where you’re in pain every time, and by no means small in any way shape or form. His girth is slightly larger than average, always a right squeeze of a delicious one. His length will hit your cervix when he’s holding tightly onto your hips and slamming into you repeatedly, other times when he’s not as rough he’s got a bit a curve that brushed against your g spot in just the right place to have you seeing starts every time.

Y = Yearning (how high is their sex drive?)

Druig had a past with people who are now lost to history, but he never felt for them the way he feels for you. Therefore Druig is always yearning for you, willing to take you whenever you ask, and to do whatever you need.

Z = Zzz (how quickly they fall asleep afterwards)

To circle back to the beginning, Druig will always make sure you’ve fallen asleep first afterwards in case you need a glass of water or something to that effect. Once you’re snoring softly in his embrace, he pulls your impossibly closer and allows sleep to take him as well.

—

A/N

Been a minute since I wrote but I’m trying to post at least one fic of some sorts every month and with this I’ll actually still be on track!! Can’t even begin the go on about the shit happening in my daily life but I hope I will start writing again more soon.

Thanks for reading <3

Much Love,

—Skyler

[inoreuct]

a study of bruises, care, and potatoes. 

Zoro’s boots scrape dully as he skids across the deck, bending his knees to drop his centre of gravity, shoulders sinking as he presses a slow breath through his teeth. 

“Is that all you’ve got?” 

He scoffs as Sanji’s stupid fancy shoes come into view, the steel-capped toes he got the cook for his birthday dripping with the same red that’s flowing from his split brow and blurring one half of his vision to shit. Squinting upwards into the light, he finds the midday sun crowning Sanji like a halo, lighting his hair up gold. Beautiful. “Fuck you.”

“Maybe, if you win,” Sanji laughs, easy as anything as he backs away. 

Shusui and Kitetsu sing in his hands as he grounds his stance and spins them around, and he hasn’t unsheathed Wado. Yet. But with the way Sanji’s pushing him back— Zoro grits his teeth and allows a heel to crack across his jaw, letting the momentum turn his body sideways as he ducks low and rams his shoulder into Sanji’s ribs. The cook gasps, managing to drive a knee between them before Zoro shoves it out of the way, spitting out a curse as the swordsman hooks the flat of one sword behind his calf and yanks his leg out from under him, and they hit the ground hard.

Zoro’s laugh rides on his exhale, heartbeat pounding fiercely in his ears, one fist slamming into the ground above Sanji’s head when the cook wraps unfairly long legs around his middle and throws him upwards. It unbalances him just enough for him to go nose-to-plank, just enough for Sanji to flip them and yank Zoro’s wrists down to trap them under his thighs, and just like that—

“Caught you,” Sanji breathes, chest rising and falling rapidly, sweat-damp bangs sticking to his flushed cheek, and Zoro doesn’t fight the grin that bares his teeth. 

“Looks like it,” he says evenly, feeling hardwood press against his skull as he stops resisting. “Come here.”

A blue eye narrows sharply. “Why?”

“Just come here.” His heart lurches when Sanji leans down, suspicious, hair falling over them both like a flaxen curtain. It’s getting long, Zoro notes. Long enough that he could braid it if Sanji wanted. He makes a mental note to bring it up to the cook, waits until a barely-trembling mouth grazes his— 

And cranes his neck back to slam his forehead into Sanji’s nose. 

The cook lurches away with an enraged cry, hands flying to his face as Zoro uses his wrists to lift Sanji by the knees and flip them over again. “You fucking bastard! That’s foul play, you piece of shit—”

Zoro just grins wider, heart pumping hard and body buzzing like a livewire. Sanji looks hot like this with iron dripping off his chin, pooling in his cupid’s bow, staining his mouth rose-rust-ruby even as he smears the heel of his palm over his lower lip, and Zoro isn’t afraid to admit it. 

He watches. Watches Sanji’s eyes drag languidly from the blood on his hand to Zoro’s face, watches him tilt his head, lazy and unhurried, and suck the red off his teeth with that piercing gaze pinning him in place. He tightens his grip on Shusui’s hilt and digs his knuckles into Sanji’s shin as something tightens in his gut. “Never said we had to play fair.”

He watches Sanji’s smile sharpen into something downright predatory seconds before a foot is stomping sole-first into his chest, vicious and just off-centre, kicking the air right out of his damn lungs as he flies back. Fuck, that’s gonna bruise. The pain switches something in him into high gear and Wado’s out of her sheath, a familiar weight in his jaw even as he scrambles to get his bearings, and barely half a breath later Sanji’s on him like a fucking hurricane. 

Another signature roundhouse kick lands on his temple and re-opens the split in his brow, and he would have eaten shit if not for the palm he slams to the deck, pivoting to pop up behind Sanji and swing two swords parallel into his middle. The cook dodges and slips away, driving his heel into Zoro’s hip, and Zoro backs up to give himself space to breathe. 

The sun is blinding even when he isn’t looking up. His breath echoes in his ears, tight as he tries to slow it down, shirt stretching with the heave of his shoulders, pulse a war drum in his veins and his arms nearly trembling with adrenaline and there is blood on his face, in his mouth, sweet and metallic; he spits it in a red splatter onto the ground and sweat nearly steams off his skin. 

Up ahead, Sanji leans back against the taffrail almost leisurely, looking far more composed than he probably feels. He rolls his head back, elbows over the railing as he bares his throat almost arrogantly, and the smug look he tilts to Zoro as he tosses his hair out of his face is a challenge in and of itself.

Zoro crosses the space between them in three great strides and swings. 

He twists and drops low as Sanji slides beneath his sword, and the cook snarls as Wado grazes over his side just deep enough for it to sting. Sanji’s leg comes down over his head and he throws up a forearm, digs his heels in as he braces for the impact, shoving forward as soon as it connects. A knee jams into the same side as before and Zoro wheezes, core spasming, backing Sanji into the railing with a wide arc of his blade before the cook gets that glint in his eye— 

And Zoro gets an inkling feeling that he’s just lost himself this fight. 

Sanji spins to spring off the railing in a tight flip that brings his heel down directly between Zoro’s shoulder blades, and Zoro sacrifices his balance and Kitetsu in one last bid for victory. He reaches one hand over his head and grapples for a handful of fabric, yanking as hard as he can, biting down into Wado’s hilt as his knees slam into the planks.

Muffling his pained hiss into leather, Zoro manages to flip Shusui in his grip before his wrist is pinned beneath Sanji’s hip. Fuck. His free arm is grabbed and wrenched back, a sole pressed to his throat and forcing him into a kneeling backbend. Sanji slowly pulls harder and forces his upper body back as he thrashes, a subtle threat; it’s a futile effort, anyway. The cook’s out of Wado’s reach with the severity of the lean he’s in, neck tense, chin pushed up as cold, blunt steel digs into his jugular. Zoro’s arm strains in its socket, and as much as he is prideful— He knows when to admit he’s been bested. 

“Yield,” he grits, chest heaving as Sanji puts more pressure on his trachea and his lower back strains with the weight of holding himself up. “I yield.”

“…For today.” Sanji slowly lets go, and Zoro groans as he slumps to the deck. “You’ll beat me tomorrow.”

He spits his sword to the side and unfolds his aching legs from under him, starfishes out, tries to catch his breath. The sky is a brilliant, cloudless, familiar shade of blue. Zoro finds himself smiling and throws an arm over his face to hide it. “Hope that doesn’t mean you’ll go easy on me.”

“When do I ever?” Sanji scoffs, tapping the back of his heel against the swordsman’s thigh for good measure as he gets up. “Come on, marimo. Before the sun turns you into a dried cactus.”

*

He’d been right about the bruising. Purple and yellow blooms vivid across the right side of his ribcage, a deceptively pretty splotch that still makes him bite down a groan when he presses into it with cloth-wrapped ice.

“Let me.” Sanji gently takes the bundle from him, nudging him back until Zoro gets the hint and hauls himself up to sit on the table with a grunt. He lets the cook prod at the edges of the bruise with a frown pulling at his swirly brows, carefully rolling the ice pack back over the area, and he grunts as his ribs shift. Wouldn’t be surprised if he’d strained a couple of intercostal muscles.

The urge to scrub a fist over the blood crusting in his eye is tempting but he resists, knowing that Sanji would probably scream at him if he did— However. His lashes really are starting to stick together. 

Sanji notices, because of course he does. “Hold,” he mutters, pulling one of Zoro’s hands over the ice and stretching to wet a clean cloth by the sink. It’s blessedly cool as he sets it to Zoro’s skin, letting it soak for a few seconds before he starts scrubbing away at dried gore and clicks his tongue disapprovingly. “You’re all messed up.”

“And whose fault is that?” Zoro asks dryly. “You kick like a fucking donkey. And twice in one spot? Really?” He ducks his head with a laugh when Sanji moves to yank his earrings.

“You’re infuriating,” the cook scowls, at odds with the slow, meticulous way he rubs the cloth over Zoro’s lashline. “And you were distracted today. What’s going on?”

Zoro closes his other eyes and recalls a fierce grin, blood-slick, golden hair and steel toes and a flawless kick slamming into his jaw. “Dunno. Maybe I just love you.”

Sanji stills, and Zoro clocks his soft, quick inhale before he hears the cook shift and opens his eye. “…I’m still not used to that,” Sanji murmurs, more to the floor than anything else, and Zoro tilts his chin up with two fingers tucked beneath.

“I know.” He feels his own shoulders slouching, sinking as he curves toward Sanji like a planet in orbit. He’s tentative when he cups the cook’s jaw steady and lets go of the ice pack to bring his thumb to Sanji’s bloodied nose, but he twitches back when Sanji hisses. “Shit, sorry, curls. Is it broken?”

“Nah,” Sanji chuckles airily, relaxing into Zoro’s touch and letting his eyes slide shut with a sigh as the swordsman prods at his bridge. “Just tender.”

Zoro hums, unsatisfied. “Pass me another cloth.” He wraps the offered fabric around his index finger and wipes away the blood congealed on Sanji’s lip, turning the cook’s face this way and that to make sure he gets everything as lithe hands press the ice back to his torso. 

His own face’s mostly clean now, but his brow still feels a little stiff when he raises it just to make Sanji laugh. No big deal, though; he expects he’ll scrub down before dinner and drag Sanji with him, because otherwise the cook would stay in the galley all night. Zoro loses his train of thought when blue, blue eyes flick up to his, and his breath catches in his chest.

“What?” Sanji murmurs, his jaw nestled in Zoro’s palm, gaze travelling over his face, and suddenly Zoro doesn’t know what to do with himself.

He’s not a man of words. He never has been, really, but he thinks he could try, for Sanji. The man standing between his knees is a prince, for fuck’s sake, in everything else if not in name. Sanji, with skin the colour of white sand under the sunset, eyes like pools of sapphire crystal, slender fingers and gold-spun hair and kindness in spades, given to everyone with a generous hand, even when life had tried to beat it out of him with a stick. He’s regal. Something out of one of those fairytales that Zoro had never believed in.

He’s regal, and sometimes Zoro worries that he’s too rough around the edges for them to fit. 

And then Sanji cusses him out with a sharp tongue and kicks his head back on straight, and he remembers exactly who he’s dealing with. Who he’d fallen in love with. 

Sanji makes a questioning noise but doesn’t shift back when Zoro pulls him closer, gently carding his hair out of the way to press a kiss to the space between his brows. The strands are soft between his fingers, sweet with the lingering scent of Sanji’s conditioner, and Zoro lets himself bury his nose in Sanji’s crown and just… breathe, for a second. 

Arms slide around his waist, and Sanji’s weight leans into his chest. “Are you alright, chéri?”

“I— Yeah.” He shifts a palm to Sanji’s nape and squeezes, mainly to ground himself. “I’m good, cook.” Up this close, it would be difficult to miss the cook’s slight inhale as he draws back, and he frowns. “Your side.”

“S’fine,” Sanji dismisses, shaking his head with a soft smile.

“Lemme see.” 

“Honestly, it’s just a scratch!”

“Let me see.” The cook huffs and rolls his eyes, stepping back to pull his shirt up over his side and Zoro hunches down, finding a clean corner of the cloth as he scrutinises the thin slice on Sanji’s skin. “Doesn’t look too bad,” he says, cleaning it up even as Sanji mutters an “I told you so” under his breath. It didn’t matter how bad it was. He wouldn’t take it any less seriously. 

Sanji drops his hem back down and slips in close again to rest his cheek on Zoro’s shoulder, hands locking at the small of Zoro’s back, and Zoro smooths his palm over the soft cotton of Sanji’s dress shirt. It’s a texture he knows against his skin. He knows all of it; silky hair and a sharp jaw and a smart mouth, white teeth and strong hands and cotton shirts and wayward kicks to the shin and familiar weight against him as they fall asleep. “What’s for dinner?”

Sanji hums, nuzzling into the crook of Zoro’s neck before he pulls away, reluctant. “Potatoes au Gratin and spinach pesto linguine.” He moves over to the sink, pulling a huge bowl of washed spuds from somewhere, sliding it across the table as he tosses Zoro a paring knife and a pointed look. “Chop chop.”

The swordsman scoffs, leaning back on his hands. “Chop chop, he says. No please, no thank you, no nothing—”

“Oh, come on.”

“No appreciation!” he continues, grabbing a potato and sighing at it sadly. “Or financial compensation, mind you, this is unpaid labour—” 

“Marimo,” Sanji begins, pinching his nose bridge but failing to hide his smile. “Darling. My heart. L’amour de ma vie. Will you please peel the damn potatoes, thank you.” 

Zoro sniffs, but picks up the knife.

“You know, one day I’m gonna tell the whole crew what a drama queen you are,” Sanji says lightly, pulling a cabinet open to grab a box of pasta and grabbing a pot from the shelves below. 

“They’ll never believe you.” Zoro shrugs, a what can you do sort of thing, and points the potato at the cook. “And this is still unpaid labour.” 

“You’ll survive. It’s a labour of love.” 

“Don’t recall ever saying I love peeling root vegetables.”

Sanji throws a teaspoon, and it bounces off Zoro’s forehead. “Not the potatoes, moron, me.”

Zoro can’t find a retort to that, so he shuts up and peels. It’s… good. He doesn’t recall ever smiling this much before everything. Before bloody scrapping and the gentle hands after and peeling vegetables in the easy quiet of the galley while Sanji watches the pasta boil. The cook pushes him, stretches his limits and helps him break down barriers that he would’ve been loathe to tackle alone. Helps him to dress wounds he can’t reach. Sanji holds him with a care that Zoro has never bothered with for himself, and it’s good. 

He's listened to Sanji enough to know that these are baby potatoes, finicky to peel because of their thinner skin, and still terribly tender. Sweet. The one he's working on fits nicely in his palm as he guides the knife, angling the edge the way Sanji taught him. The skin spirals over his thumb as he works his way around and he crosses his ankles when he breathes out.

“Marimo.”

“Hm?”

Sanji’s facing away from him, but the cook turns his head just enough for Zoro to see the shrewd look in his eye. “Depending on your performance in helping with the rest of dinner prep, I may be amenable to discussion about… other kinds of compensation.”

Zoro pauses, blinks, and shakes his head with a chuckle. “You always speak real fancy when you want something, curls.” 

“I didn’t say anything!” Sanji sing-songs, wiggling his shoulders as he stirs the pot. “No guarantees, mosshead. Peel!”

A laugh slips from Zoro’s throat, rich and real. Sanji’s steel-tipped shoes tap on the ground as he moves around the galley, comfortable in his element, and Zoro watches him with a fondness that warms his chest. Their cuts will heal. His bruises will fade from green to yellow before they disappear like they were never there, before Sanji paints new ones under his skin, and he’ll peel potatoes while Sanji boils pasta and they’ll curl into bed together knowing that they’ll wake up and do it all over again.

Zoro slips his knife beneath the last strip of peel and places his potato back into the bowl, pale and sweet and tender.

It’s good. 

[yellowharrington]

jaded -- chapter 2, carmy berzatto x reader

pairing + fandom: carmen “carmy” berzatto x fem!reader (she/her pronouns used), the bear fx

warnings: smoking (both carmy and reader), mention of sexual content, a bit of angst. minors dni with this story please.

word count: 2k

a/n: chapter 2 is here! ty for reading and interacting w this story i very much appreciate it <3 this chapter is a bit angsty and a bit fluffy, pls enjoy!

summary: after you and carmy hook up, things change.

masterlist | chapter 1 | chapter 3

Carmy isn’t good at hookups. Especially after spectacularly fucking it up with Claire, a girl he knew deep down was probably his soulmate, he was feeling pretty fucking gross about the whole thing. He doesn’t deserve it, he doesn’t deserve any of it, and pumping his loneliness into his pastry chef probably isn’t a great idea either. It felt so good in the moment, his hands wrapped around her throat and in her hair, pouring it all out into the messy thrusts. He just thought about how he wasn’t good enough for this, and was just a broken, broken person. 

You knew it wasn’t supposed to mean anything, and you’d heard whispers about Claire in the kitchen between Carmen and Ritchie, and obviously there was a history there. You had tried to pry the story out of Sydney, but she was all tight-lipped about the whole thing, not wanting to “gossip” at work. In reality, you knew she knew Claire and had heard more about what had happened on opening night, and probably just didn’t want to repeat the story to anyone. You could respect it, but at the same time, you needed to know how deep this shit went before you started being your boss’s rebound.

The kitchen that afternoon when you come in for your shift is awkward, to say the least. You ignore him, he ignores you, but it’s tense. When he sees you, all he sees is your lips hung open, moans escaping against his skin, his loose gold chain between your teeth as he plunges into you, over and over and over and…

“Behind, Jeff! Fuck, what is up with you today? Your mind is somewhere else,” Tina breaks him out of his daydream, watching as you ice the dessert in front of you, focusing on the even layers of chocolate buttercream. And you’re not laughing, no, because you don’t know if he’s daydreaming about you or still has his mind on Claire, and even though you may have a big ego, it’s not big enough to think he’s distracted by you at work. It was one fuck, one night, one mistake between two coworkers that you’d never speak of again.

“Outside, now, chef,” he’s suddenly at your station, looming over you just as you were getting lost in the frosting. “I’m fucking busy, Carm-“ you started, before his hand came down on the stainless steel beside you, gripping the edge of the counter. “Now, chef. Please.” You place the offset spatula on the clean plate beside your cake, glaring at him as you walked out back. He immediately pulled out a cigarette to put between his lips, letting the chilled air hit the bare skin of his arms. “What the fuck do we do?” he asks, more into the air than directly to you. You tighten your apron around your waist, crossing your arms over your chest. “Probably fuckin’ prep for service and serve rich assholes some marinated radishes. What the fuck else would we be doing?”

“Don’t be stupid,” he says, and it’s sharper than he intends. “No, I mean,-“ “Look, you’re the one who left in the middle of the night, alright? You’re the one who snuck out and went home before I could say anything or we could come up with a game plan. I don’t care that we fucked, we can forget it, I won’t talk about it again. Swear on my fuckin’ life,” you grab the cigarette from between his fingers and put it between your own lips. “But don’t act like I’m crazy, or like it’s my fucking fault, alright?” There’s a beat as you take a puff of his cigarette, smashing it beneath the toe of your shoe into the concrete. “Sorry for leaving,” he says, finally, “Didn’ know what else to do.” You shrugged. “Whatever, Carm, it doesn’t have to mean anything, if you don’t want it to. I’ll live and let live if you will. Just be fuckin’ cool, don’t tell anyone. I don’t want people to know that I fucked my boss, or whatever.” He smirks, “Heard, chef.” 

And it all seems alright for a bit. The kitchen is back to normal, you’re back on pace, and you and Carmy are fine. 

- 

The weeks pass and the world falls back into its natural orbit. There’s a hookup here and there, a few nights where he comes home with you after service, all under the guise of a drive home. You feel obligated to invite him up for something to eat (because God knows he hasn’t all fucking day), and before you can get in the door he’s already hot on your heels and breathing down the back of your neck. And there you are, breath hitched in your throat, struggling to get the door open, feeling his hand come around your front and slide into the waistband of your jeans.

Sometimes he stays, sometimes he doesn’t. It’s a toss up if you have to be in for service the next morning, and you usually hear him grabbing his coat from where it’s laid on the kitchen table, the jingle of his car keys in the right-hand side pocket being just loud enough to wake you from your deep slumber. Sometimes you’re coherent enough to ask him to stay, but he’s got one foot out the door and he can easily pretend not to hear you. And it’s fine, really.

A Saturday rolls around, the busiest day of the week, and there’s a few mumbles around the kitchen that Carmy’s in a bad mood today, and he’s not to be fucked with.

You were nothing if not nosy, so when Richie and Natalie are having a heated conversation in the dining room before prep starts, you can’t help but insert yourself. “What’s up, guys? Everything chill?” Richie shot you a look, but not before leaning down closer to your ear, sworn to secrecy.“Claire bitched out Carmy on a drunk phone call last night,” He starts, before Natalie can stop him. “No, it wasn’t-“ “Yeah, it was. It was gnarly. She finally actually got mad about opening night and let him fuckin’ have it, good for her,” he laughs, letting his hands plunge into his pockets. “What did she say?” Natalie’s sweet voice was a sharp contrast to Richie’s, low, and soft, when she replied, “He didn’t say much. Just that she called, and he had his stupid sad puppy dog eyes on, so obviously she must’ve said some… stuff.”

Carmy was scrubbing the floors of the kitchen, head down, obviously not taking any notice to the mini staff meeting in the dining room. “Just don’t mention it, ‘kay? I don’t think anyone’s supposed to know. He hasn’t heard from her in weeks and now he’s all fucked up over it, he’ll probably be a real bitch later.” “Heard, chef. Will try not to piss off Princess Carmy.”

The service isn’t so bad. Carmy’s mopey - downturned eyes, less yelling than you’d anticipated. It’s almost scary; seeing him rather calm, a little sad, reduced to a heartbroken boy who just feels fucking bad for himself. You try to stay out of his way, focusing on getting plates of custard and cake out in time, with no mistakes. It’s a lot of ‘yes chef, thank you chef, great chef’. You’d almost actually prefer it like this.

You find him out back having a cigarette right before you’re gonna head out. He hasn’t bothered to put his sweater or coat on, arms bare against the cold night air as he blows the hot smoke into a cloud above him. “Hey,” you start, sitting next to him. It feels a little odd to be close to him - intimate, in a way that you’re not used to. “You seemed off tonight. Is something up?” You put your hand out expectantly for a cigarette, and he obliges, with his lighter to follow. 

“No, chef,” he starts, dusting some salt from the street off his shoe. “Thank you though.” “You know I don’t have to be chef outside of that kitchen,” you bump a shoulder with him. “You’ve called me a lot of other names, God knows.” He stifles a laugh and looks at you again, with a softness in his features you’d never really seen before. “I just had a rough night last night, is all,” he finishes. “Just feels so fucking bad. I feel like I’m so bad at… this.” He gestures to the night sky around him. “I don’t know how to balance anything. I keep… I keep fucking losing people. People I like, people… people I fucking love. And like, what am I supposed to do about that?” You can see his face get hot as he lets the heel of his hand rub his eye. “You let it happen,” you finish, taking a puff of your own cigarette. “You do what you can and you let yourself feel it and you mourn and grieve until you can’t anymore, until it doesn’t feel right to anymore.”

He nods in agreement, letting you both smoke in silence. “Can I give you a ride home?” He asks, and you know what that means. “Yeah,” you agree softly. “Sure, thanks. Go get your stuff, I’ll wait here.” When he’s back, he locks the back door of the restaurant and lets you stand up first, following behind you.

When you make it back to your place, it’s different. He’s comfortable here now, having been in your space enough times to know where he was welcomed. Normally, it goes like, he’s panting down your neck before you can even get in the door, and once he’s put his stuff down, the back of your knees are hitting the mattress, wet sloppy kisses along your collarbones and neck, down over your breasts and down down down…

But he’s not being like that. When he sets his coat down, he finds his way to your couch. You pull a glass out of the cupboard to fill with ice and cold water, handing it to him before doing the same for yourself. “Can we… can we go to bed?” He asks, and it’s softer than usual. “Sure,” you smile, opening the door to your bedroom and watching as he strips bare, before pulling out a pair of grey sweat pants he had stashed in your closet. You’d stayed the night at his one time, so-affectionately wearing them in the morning to make him a cup of morning coffee, and decided just to wear them home. “Keep them,” he had said to you that day, “just in case.”

When he climbs in between your white sheets, he seems to instantly relax. He generally did after work, from what you saw - and even though he often had a hard time letting the day go, it seemed like whenever he was with you, he could let it go a little easier. You grabbed a pair of pyjamas for yourself and slid them on, before cracking the window slightly and letting the cool breeze in. The chain around his neck glistened in the moonlight, as he let his eyes flutter closed, just for a minute. When you let your hand brush over his arm, tracing the faded inky lines of his tattoos, he opened one eye slightly, eliciting a small laugh from the side of his mouth. “Feels nice,” he offered, soft against the sounds of the nighttime. “Would you be offended if we didn’t fuck tonight?” His eyes are still closed, and even though it seems a bit ridiculous to ask, you can tell it was hard for him to get the words out. It didn’t really mean that, it meant, can we just be here, together, and enjoy each other for a night? Do you want me here if not for that? 

“Of course not, Carmen,” you let your head hit the pillow, kissing his shoulder and letting your hand grasp his bicep. “You never call me Carmen,” he comments, voice soft, before he looks over at you. “I kinda like it. Only you, though.” You let the curls of his hair tangle around your fingers as he started to drift off, you following not long after. And it’s actually fine this time.

[shardminds]

unrequited (terrifying!)

pairing: elain archeron x lucien vanserra rating: t (for too bad they don't kiss in this one) wc: 2.5k almost primary tag: love realisation, laufey - from the start, love is driving me a bit insane

read on ao3 or proceed under the cut

There’s a thin line between infatuation and obsession. A thin thin line. 

Elain isn’t sure on which side of it she stands when it comes to Lucien Vanserra. 

“There’s our foxling!” Cassian calls, after Feyre and a toddling Nyx open the River House doors to the courtier. He’s wearing green again. Emerald, not sage like last time. Elain adds it to the mental list she maintains, of colours she can’t ever look at without thinking of him. The velvet couch beneath her feels hot, or maybe that’s just her. 

There’s half a smile caught at the edge of his mouth, hinting at teeth as he steps into Feyre’s arms. Elain isn’t envious of the way her sister’s arms circle his broad shoulders, or how Lucien leans into them, his own arms wrapping around her back. It was too easy to forget how much Feyre cared for him, of the bond they forged in darkness and the weight of mountains on their shoulders. Elain could see it, like ivy coiled and climbing around a them both. If he held her like that, touched her like that, she might break. Or do something stupid. Like sigh, or melt.

“Lovely as always, Feyre.” He says, pulling back to place a kiss on her sister’s cheek. 

“Speak for yourself! Your hair’s longer.” Feyre picks an auburn braid twisted over his shoulder. It is longer, unbound strands almost reaching his waist. There are smaller braids trailed through it, each one sealed with a golden cuff, catching in the faelight, or the setting sun, or the hearth fire. Had he styled them himself? An image springs to mind of Lucien sat before a polished mirror, candle flickering in the reflection. There’s an unmade bed behind him, sheets soft in the memory, as his fingers twist sections around each other, securing with thin leather and gold clasps. In her mind, he’s topless, for some reason. Perhaps he hadn’t been alone. Elain shakes it off, nails biting into the fabric of her skirts. 

“Things tend to grow over time,” He steps back, reaching down to ruffle Nyx’s hair, fingers carding through dark silk. Elain knows just how soft it is. She’d bathed him this morning. “Just like this one.”

Nyx babbles at the attention, speaking nonsense noises that not even she can understand. He reaches up for Lucien’s hand and grips his finger between chubby palms. Lucien lets himself be pulled, dragged down until he’s kneeling, still taller than Nyx’s toddling height. Feyre’s smile could’ve lit the entire court. 

Things grow over time. Oh, she could write essays on that particular subject. Or several particularly revealing diary entries, at least.

“Just wait until you see him fly.”

Elain had felt Rhysand’s arrival long before the other’s, apparently. Even Cassian started at his interruption from the top of the stairs. He takes the steps a mite quicker than usual, and offers Lucien his own greeting — raising him from the floor before pulling him in for a swift embrace. Rhysand’s warming to Lucien had been inevitable. Each and every one of his inner circle had taken to treating him with something akin to kindness in the years since Hyburn’s defeat and Koschei’s fall. Not surprising. That’s just how he is.

“I dare say I’ll get to witness that treat later,” He muses as Nyx runs back to his mother, gripping at Feyre’s skirts, demanding her attention as he does when he feels he’s been too long without it. “And how are you fairing, Rhysand? Fatherhood still keeping you occupied?”

“In ways I could’ve never anticipated. Is Eris still—” 

“A cunt?” His laugh is whiskey and molasses. Poison and its balm. It doesn’t hurt but Elain steels for it, as always. The weight in her chest begging to be felt. “Of course. I doubt he’ll surprise us by changing anytime soon.”

“I’ll tell him you said that.” Azriel calls from the chaise, furthest away from the fire, strategically placed to view the whole room from his seat. The circlet on his wrist is new, a wreath of golden flame atop his scars. 

“I’ve no doubt you will.” Rhys rolls his eyes. “Can I get you a drink, friend?”

“Or three.”

Elain hates that she wants him so badly. That the mere sight of him curls through her like warm oil and smoke, shrouding rational thought in delirium. Desire is not something so unfamiliar. And yet, if he knows of how she dreams of thicker fingers when touching herself, he does not let on. 

No. He barely even looks her way. Conversation flows without her, thankfully.

In another time, it would’ve been a blessing: To be free of his attention, his expectation. The absence of his gaze is a weightless feeling, similar only to the first crack of thunder after hours of rain, a crack through the silence, a secret finally told. Relief, if anything. That, in itself, should be a comfort. Her mate cannot give her the comfort she needs, but he allows her this. 

But somehow it’s worse. Freefall, instead of freedom. Nightmares wake her most nights, the breath stolen from her lungs seconds before screams think of forming. The craving for gravity roots in her gut like convolvulus coiling around the golden tether of their souls. It calls to her, the bond, so she lets the weeds thrive until it’s nothing but a rope of green, glowing from the inside out, begging it to silence. The phantom tugs between her ribs a memory.

It always burns through by morning. Rich and vibrant and gold. 

“Elain,” 

She whips around, standing, skirts still bunched in her fists. A curl falls free from the updo Nesta had arranged it in before she departed with the Valkyries, all plaits and pins and far too elaborate for something as informal as this. Too delicate. Azriel casts her a look from his perch. Ever the spectator, rarely the participant. A shadow curls around his forearm, tapping patterns against his forearm in a code she doesn’t recognise. “Honey wine?”

He doesn’t say are you okay? or lost again? like when they used to disappear in each others company instead of playing house with the others; talking for hours in the gardens, sat in the rafters of the house of wind, in the library at the river house. Becoming fey had been an isolating experience — nothing made sense then, little more makes sense now — but Azriel had helped in a way. He was her choice, her first friend. 

The tilt to his head, the knife at his belt. He’ll carve the side he wants to pick.

Elain shakes away the wispy threads of a vision. A golden thread, wrapped in soft vines, hums in her chest. There’s no shifting that one, unfortunately. What’s most unfortunate is she’s not 100% sure if that’s a problem anymore. 

“Please.” It comes as a croak. She clears her throat, as if that will help. “Please, that sounds—”

“I’ve actually had some spiced cider imported from our personal cellars back in Autumn,” Lucien starts, seemingly to Rhysand and not her, and yet saving her from the spotlight nonetheless. Cassian, Rhysand, Feyre — hells, even Azriel all look towards the emissary. “Courtesy of Eris, I’ll admit. Although, it is a childhood favourite of mine. Best served hot, if you’re able.” 

Childhood to the fey is clearly much different to that of the human realms. 

“It would be rude to refuse,” Rhys, a smirking Feyre at his side, flicks his hand at the table. A magic trick so practiced, the clink of the glasses on the table is no longer a surprise. 

Cinnamon, cloves, ginger, anise steaming in heavy plumes of steam — It’s him. It smells like him.

A warm glass is placed in her hand and—oh, how stupid she must look staring off into the place settings, attempting to distract herself from draining the whole thing. Bronzed leaves twined with ears of corn and barley, curls of pumpkin vines threaded between goblet and plate and candlestick. Brown and red and yellow and orange and gold. Always gold. Always in her periphery. Always watching. 

Her eyes slip shut, brows furrowing slightly, intentionally underplayed. Best to fake a migraine than to admit the truth. Best to fake anything else than to admit she was wrong all this time.

She’s not been able to look at the colors of change since Eris’ coronation to High Lord of Autumn. On the last night of fall’s end, atop the decorated tombs of their ancestors, only one left noticeably bare. The High Lord wore a crown of oak, thorns and nightshade, set aflame at the last touch of sunset. He looked resplendent, born for the throne, but Lucien— he’d braided strands of spun gold into his hair, then. As usual, she ached to touch them. It’s worse now. Seeing him each time. It’s worse. 

It’s too late. A voice whispers. Her voice. Viscous poison in her head. You’ve made your intent clear. You have been too cold, too distant. You can’t love him. You can’t love him, you barely know him. You owe each other nothing. 

A smaller voice whispers back. You owe it to each other to try.

“A toast,” Rhys starts, never one to let silence poison his home. “To old friends—”

Elain can see him behind her eyes. You’re my mate he says, as the world crashes around them. A bronze skinned fae with dark coiled hair and warmed amber eyes stands over his shoulder, eclipsed in an aura of gold. She is not real, Elain can tell. But at the time— You’re my mate. The fae female presses a kiss to his shoulder and Lucien doesn’t even flinch. She drifts away, but no one says a thing. Not even him, eyes full of an emotion she can’t quite face. Revelation is the closest she’s ever come to deciphering it. She’s seen it since. Too many times. 

Somewhere in the recesses of her closet is the cloak he shrouded her in. 

It no longer smells like him, like woodsmoke and leafmould. 

She wonders if he thinks about it like she does. If he notices its absence in his wardrobe, or misses its gilded collar, brass buttons and plush embroidered lining — now frayed from how often her fingers passed over it. If she returned it after all this time, would he spend the same nights memorising the changes? Evidence that she thought of him, or that she cared at all.

“—and new ones—” Feyre adds, a babbling Nyx muttering over her. There’s a touch of concern to her tone but Elain ignores it. Has to. 

She’s still trapped to the visions behind her eyelids. He sent her music, bird song, poetry, sunlight. From summer coasts to winter peaks, vicious overgrowth of untapped spring to autumn’s ever falling leaves. If he meant to, she’d never asked. Never even thought to query it. Too focused on avoiding the pull in her gut to be near him. Feeding the hesitation that set in whenever it was clear he would be visiting. He was not entitled to her attention because some divine power bound them. She was not entitled to the grip of his hands on her thighs the gift of his private smiles, the press of his palm against her lower stomach— 

Even if she wants it. 

The decision isn’t one of impulse, not really. 

Not often did she give their bond the benefit of the doubt. Not often did she feel along its coiled threads, each one another tie — it was not just one single entity, but thousands. Thousands of minuscule strands, thin as spiderweb. They drip and reform and writhe at her attention, signing as if praised, as if a disciple and she a god. Not often did she thank its weight. But she held it now, inside her mind. Squeezed just a little. Just enough.

She opens her eyes, still only half focused on the table decorations. 

“—and whatever they—”

“New beginnings.” 

Rhysand is interrupted which, surprisingly, is a rare occurrence. Even Nesta had settled into a kind of quiet distaste for his theatrics come family dinner rather than outward ones, but Nesta is somewhere high on the Illyrian steppes, sword in her hand, sweat on her brow. A promise curled behind silver. War fresh queen come reap the soul, and once razed earth combine them whole.

It’s not until she takes a breath that Elain even registers it was her. She was the one interrupting. Mind half curled around memories and prophecy, too preoccupied to stop the thought from slipping past. Rhysand looks her way but she can’t quite meet the question in his eyes. To answer would be her end. Her destruction.

There’s a bundle of ash samaras behind a young pumpkin, tucked into the elaborate table setting. It’s the first time she’s seen them since crossing the wall and, absurdly enough, something inside her clicks. Of simpler times. When life passed by in hazy slow motion. They used to play with them as children, throwing clutches into the air and watching as they spiraled to the ground, like autumn snowfall. She can’t even touch them now. Not without pain. 

But sometimes, it’s worth it. It’s all worth it. 

Elain clears her throat.

“To new beginnings.” It comes more alert— assertive, even. Although, still rough as ash bark in her throat.

The bond in her chest, the one she’d ignored all this time, tugs in response. 

“New beginnings.” Lucien says, in the first words he’d said to her in months— years, perhaps. An echo. A prayer.

“New beginnings!” Cassian raises his glass, then Azriel, Feyre and Rhys, then him. Her throat aches when she looks to him, unready to meet his eyes just yet just in case she can’t tear away this time. Instead, Elain focuses on a broach on his lapel. Hyacinth blooms inlaid with gold and pearl, catching in the fey lights, shimmering. It’s beautiful. 

He’s smiling. This much she knows.

The hot spiced apple tastes like a kiss.

[flowerinjuries]

Hi darling I enjoyed your kink post and I’d like to ask for Mark lee type of bf, thank you

mark lee as a boyfriend…

the soft side:

was super shy around u at first and hesitated to initiate any skinship, but as u two got closer he’d be the type to always have one arm around your shoulders and mess your hair up by playing with it all the time

even though he’s pretty chill and rather quiet around strangers, he won’t hesitate to do small things for you like order for you

but he’s also really protective of you so if anyone messes with you he will 100% tell them to fuck off

mark lee hates to see you upset, so he does absolutely anything he can to see your pretty smile

he loves to buy stupid knick knacks at stores that remind him of you

and he also always picks up your favorite snacks whenever he’s at the grocery store

i wouldn’t call him a romantic person, but he always has you on his mind and enjoys doing small things that bring you joy

this boy loves to make you laugh

you never tell him when his jokes are shitty though because he laughs so hard at them it’s contagious and his laugh is your favorite sound in the world

when he makes you laugh along with him it’s like winning a gold medal in his mind; he takes pride and joy in the fact that he’s the one that gets the pleasure to see you so happy and comfortable

mark loves to be your big spoon when the two of you cuddle, even if he’s smaller than you he doesn’t care

he wants to be the one that makes you feel secure in his arms - it’s not much of a possessive thing, more so he just loves the feeling of wrapping his arms around you and making you warm

this is how the two of you fall asleep the easiest.

he loves to call you “babe” or “baby” and you call him the same

however if you baby him too much he might pout a little (even though he secretly enjoys it) - he loves being your baby boy

mark talks about you ALLLLL the time, this guy does not shut up about you

it gets so bad that when he’s not around you, his friends can sense his sadness and suggest he go to you instead of stay there with them

you and mark are each other’s other half - he’s your sun and you’re his moon

he loves it when you wear his clothes (specifically his hoodies)

it’s become such a habit of yours that you often playfully argue over who owns what

sometimes you both plan on wearing the same thing on the same day - spoiler alert, mark gives in and always lets you wear it instead of him

besides, he thinks anything looks better on you anyway.

a relationship with mark is really easygoing and fun - you two always feel relaxed around each other and very rarely argue - you will eventually get so used to each other you barely need words to communicate

the not-so-soft side (nsfw/18+):

as i’ve mentioned previously, i think mark lee is 100% a switch when it comes to sex

he’s not insanely kinky since your relationship is very chill

it’s usually your decision who should dom when you have sex: 50/50 chance it’s you, same odds it’s mark

the sex is relatively soft and quick, but god mark knows what he’s doing no matter the position or role he’s in

this guy fucks so hard

loves it when you tug on his hair and beg or demand for more from him

he usually always gives you what you want

makes you cum so many times

but he doesn’t dare to edge you

both of you love oral sex - it’s just become a huge part of your relationship

he loves to taste you and to him, sex isn’t sex without going down on you first thing

your moans are his encouragement and he strives to always make you moan as loud as possible

he always leaves cute lil hickies between your thighs <3

runs his hands all over your body and whispers such lovely praises

he just wished you could see yourself how he sees you: the most beautiful person in the world

even if he insists he doesn’t want it, you beg him to let you suck him off or fuck your throat

he loses himself at the sight of you begging and pleading, he fears he might cum in his pants

sucks in his breaths and bites his lip as you give him head while you’re on your bruised knees

you turn him on so so much

your big eyes looking up at him always bring him to heaven

he’s so desperate for more, and the two of you spend the rest of the night doing whatever you want

whether that means fucking until dawn or falling asleep in the tight embrace of mark lee’s arms: you decide!

and that’s what i think it’s like to have mark as a bf!!!

if you enjoyed reading this pls don’t hesitate to send me more asks about any nct member! i always need inspiration <3