#i made fun of it once i realized (in private) but then it just faded into bitterness

[see-arcane]

Blood of My Blood: Something to Cry About

Consider this a spinoff of a spinoff. Based on @ibrithir-was-here's Blood of My Blood and directly jumping off of @bluecatwriter's chapter, Overindulgence.

In which the Master of the castle runs into an unexpected concern regarding his dear vassal and being the monster in the picture is not quite as fun as he recalls.

(Warnings for suicidal ideation and domestic abuse.)

His eyes were shut, but he wasn’t sleeping.

It was not the first time his friend had greeted him so. Back in that first private summer there had been something of a game made from it. Whenever his friend was caught supine in bed or on a couch without the will to drag himself to consciousness and perform for his Master, the latter would sometimes test the limits of the act. A hand on his throat. Another under the shirt and over the drumming heart. That had been back when only one of them carried a chill.

What a distant thing that season was now. The dark-haired youth had only been able to hide his expression because fatigue still left its miserable countenance stamped on him. He had not been able to fully hide his shudders then; not when the hands began to move. Now here was his friend just shy of the full metamorphosis, human by the thinnest wisp of definition, a marble statue in his bed.

Stained marble. He was so drained as to nearly match the silver-white corona of hair on the pillow. There were the usual shadows under the eyes and the mottling spots that showed where his family nursed at throat and wrist. But the palette broke anew along one side. Even if it was to allow space for the bandages.

Bandages that had started white but now flared in spots of scarlet. Rings, rather.

Bites.

Ah, he had indulged deeply. 

Enough to sand the years away to those earliest days when he himself had been a youth peddling soul and sacrifices away beneath the Mountain. Amusing as it was, and infinitely worth the woman’s face upon seeing the full claim of her husband in action, he did catch himself counting the hours until this whipcord stage would fade out of him. It would be a pain in and of itself for bone and beard and build to all even out again into full manhood. Just having his own voice in his ears would be a relief in itself. Unquestioned as his rule was, even he could not play deaf to the absurdity of the lord of the castle sounding a year short of his first shave.

He could almost fool himself into thinking dear Jonathan was playing ignorant because he did not recognize his Master’s voice. Almost.

“She wrapped it poorly,” he hummed. He sat at the faux dreamer’s hip. “The stain should not be visible.”

Jonathan’s eyes stayed shut. His breathing did not change, thin as it was. Perhaps the woman was in his head, whispering behind his back. But a simple check showed otherwise.

Mother and child were both out from underfoot for the moment, amusing themselves with animals. The boy maintained the wolves as his most cherished creatures, as was right, but the other beasts in the dark had hooked his eye as well. Bat and rat, owl and fox. The latter had scared him once, hearing it scream for the first time—a human shriek from an inhuman throat. The woman was out with another of her husband’s doting gifts, a book of fauna with all the airy definitions and dissections that mortal science had seen fit to cage the local range of species in. It was something to keep them busy and another little facet to add to the boy’s knowledge.

The woman felt him prying and a reflexive response tried to leap back at him. He shut her out before she could know where he was. Not that it would matter. He could revoke her meager privilege with his friend as he liked. But this was not for others to intrude on. Supposing Jonathan dropped his act sometime this decade.

“Oh, dear. I had not realized you were so depleted. Perhaps I should fetch some donors from the village and have them pipe their veins into yours. It worked so artfully for other patients. Or,” he made a show of slitting open a wrist to let the dark vein ooze, knowing the gesture was sensed even behind closed eyes, “since you are so set on the repose of death, we could go ahead and rescind all the playacting and reach denouement early. It would surely save much in time and tears and—,”

Jonathan’s eyes were open. Not looking at him. The pale hands remained folded atop the sheets. One was limp. The other was lax only from the effort to avoid becoming a fist.

“There you are. Ah, and there is the opportunity gone.”

His wrist was already healed. Sealed shut almost the instant it was cut. Even two nights on, he was swollen with his friend’s draught. He had to admire the vitality required for such a task. Poor Lucy would have wilted at the first two bites, with or without her impotent ring of suitors dumping their blood into her to drag out the inevitable. In truth, he had half-hoped that the sweet diversion of the Lesson would end with Jonathan’s heart stopping altogether. The feeding of blood was only a requirement if the transformation was intended to be a slower process, as it had been meted out to the woman.

Had Jonathan died, he would be undead within the same night. Perhaps even the same hour. Being siphoned for almost half a decade by three vampires would leave no room for the process to drag its heels. What a treat it might have been to see the woman realize what she’d done. All her beloved’s sacrifice thrown away because she’d grasped beyond what was hers. And better still to have the weight of the farce finally shrugged from his shoulders as it was ripped from Jonathan’s. The boy would have cheered, he knew, to see his Papa finally in their ranks completely.

And then would come their first hunt…

But he was woolgathering. And, in the fashion of a youth, chasing mere impulse when he knew the fruits were not yet ripe. Let the game play out, young man. He would have his way by the end, do not throw the foreplay away now.

Jonathan still did not look at him.

“You seem unable to turn your head, my friend. Did I truly spend so long with your neck? Memory does not lie and I can see myself that the shoulder received far more attention.”

Jonathan did turn his head—to face the wall. The ghost-light eyes hovered on the calendar, brow furrowed in reading the weeks. His lips moved in silent muttering.

A clawed finger reached out, hooking the pallid chin until Jonathan turned to him. There was a genuine wince as he did so. He had bitten deep and not with the usual set of teeth. He’d called upon the Wolf’s rows to be sure of strength and for the demonstration made before his greedy audience. But even with the heady extra helping of blood, even with the Lesson successfully taught, there was no sidestepping the fact of the method’s sloppiness. Intentional in the moment, yes, but…

But what? He will heal. And if he doesn’t, he will die and do better than heal. Call it a Lesson for him too. Such is the lot of one who clings to the role of livestock. Really, it is probably a boon to his penitent soul. A belated lashing for what he still considers his sins. 

“Does it hurt?” he asked aloud.

Jonathan did not answer. Only stared at him. There was no fear there, nor even that constant element of melancholy. There was only a queer flatness. It might nearly be mistaken for the same glaze of placidity the woman tried to hide her rages with. But no, it was not even anger. What, then?

“Have you lost the use of your tongue as well?” The question came with a flicker of mesmer. It hooked the root of Jonathan’s tongue and yanked.

“No,” Jonathan offered blandly. And no more than that. As if there were truly no other words he had to spare for his Master.

“I had not realized you stored your vocabulary in your arteries.”

“Even if it were otherwise, I imagine I’d have little to say worth sharing.”

My friend, is this you sulking? It has been years!

Years since that last pregnant silence as he showed Mr. Harker the wolves at the door. Since he watched the young man sit and stew and struggle against tears before ascending wordlessly to his room. What a raw little thing he’d been then.

But the thing staring back at him was not raw. It was something leaden and tired and…bored? Was that it? Something near to that, perhaps, but sharper.

“Now, there is no need to pout. You know I have never ceased to cherish our little talks. But I do see you are making do with only water and bread. Dear Mina has left you like a lame pet up here.” In reality the water was fresh and the bread, baked the day before, was joined by what non-perishable goods the woman had scrounged by way of a breakfast. Even the boy had left him with what he considered a treasure by way of a bowl brimming with wild berries he’d picked himself around the castle. All this had been sampled, if thinly. “Yours is the only tongue here left to appreciate a vintage in its original state rather than filtered through a vein. Shall you have a claret or something stronger?”

“Neither. Thank you.”

Flat as a skipping stone. He did not even reach for the old half-joking insistence that he did not dare risk an overindulgence of wine or liquor as, quote, ‘If I drank every time I felt I needed it, I would be an alcoholic within a week.’ Instead, the stare. Still ongoing. Seeming to realize this, Jonathan made himself blink before trying to turn his head away. Back to the calendar.

His Master locked a full hand around his jaw and twisted him back. Another wince.

No fear. No sorrow. No anything. Just that blunt void of acknowledgment. That unknown thing hovering between ire and lethargy.

“Might I ask what it is that so fascinates you about the date? It must be some worthy holiday to outweigh your Master’s presence.”

“Not a holiday,” Jonathan allowed. “Though I suppose I should mark down the evening three nights prior as a milestone. Something to keep on record.” Three nights prior. When the Lesson was taught. “Your first bout of physical abuse on me. I had thought you couldn’t hold out beyond two years. Most of you don’t even make it past the first two months. Yet you are patient, so I figured there would be an insulation period.” 

It was his turn to stare back. Jonathan waited as he did, seeming oddly like he was itching for a pocket watch to tally how many minutes he was wasting breath on this exchange. His Master’s hand moved from the pale chin to the bandaged shoulder.

“Most of who?”

The hand squeezed. Jonathan grimaced, but didn’t blink.

“The demographic of men I had hoped you were better than. There was evidence enough to suggest it. At least a ratio of odds that favored something less predictable. Despite what proofs there are to the contrary, you are not a violent man, Sir. Not when you can happily do worse than violence. Certainly not when the prelude to it provides better results and entertainment. Why else would you take such care to drag out a season of captivity or play your games on the Demeter? Why feed on a victim by drops rather than ravage outright but for the joy of watching their comprehension of the inevitable? The only instances in which you resort to straight aggression are when you want something over with.

“A mother eaten by wolves. Sacks of children thrown like scraps. Your own aide waiting ashore, slaughtered and stuffed in a stone wall to muddy your trail. Quick, quick, quick. Violence bores you in the same way doing linens bores a laundress. If it must be done, fine, let it be over with—but it is no more or less than something to scrape from the schedule. At a guess, that night’s violence was for Mina’s sake. I had not changed anything in my routine. Quincey had done no ill. Mina, I suspect…what? Blinked incorrectly? Asked to see me for a heartbeat beyond the scheduled feeding? Dared to request a moment of make-believe where you do not own us all, as if the very act of imagination equated a challenge to you?

“But that is all beside the point. You have stepped fully into the cliché. And I had accounted for that. The first round tallied. Fine. The issue comes with the timing. Your insistence on who else ought to be in the audience.” In his lap, one hand finally lost the fight and hardened into a fist. The other, attached to the bitten arm, only twitched. “Mina was the point of the show. But our son? Was he part of the Lesson too? Did you order him to stay as yet another hoop for her to jump through, to make her act and lie beyond all extremes? No, I should not ask. Of course he was.”

The ghost-light eyes burned.

“This, when he loves you as his Father. When the entire point of all this is giving him a life he can trust in. You saw him smile for you in this room. He held you and beamed and heard your stories. And then what? What did he ask before you left him in his coffin?”

The woman had not been in his mind at the time to overhear. She could not know. She could not have told her husband what the boy asked.

The boy, his smile fading, his eyes sunset-bright and wondering, blankets fidgeting in his hands.

‘Are you sure Papa is alright? He looked really tired…’     

His Father had told him yes, of course, but Papa had been so enchanting that night that Father had not been able to help himself. Not to worry, his Mum would take care of him as she always did. All’s well, diavol. And the boy had tried to smile. Tried to believe him.

And couldn’t.

“He turns five next year. Five. And you are already blasting holes in the foundation of his faith in you. In what we have been building out of debris to produce a happy reality for him, in which his parents are not monsters.” Now a note of true venom slipped through his voice, the hollow-burning eyes narrowed to cold angles, and at last the feeling was recognized for what it was, and it was... “In which he does not have to be yet another actor for your benefit.”

…Disappointment.

Cold and grey and coarse with recognition. With experience.

“All of that being said, Sir, if you feel you must make another show of the obvious,” the fist uncurled to gesture at the mauled shoulder, “I ask that you reserve it strictly for the adults.” Finally the lambent gaze skidded away, looking not at Master or calendar, but at his still-resting hand on the covers. The fingers still hadn’t curled further than halfway to his palm. “Perhaps I’ll blame it on a doorknob next time.” Then, as if the entire topic were dismissed, he reached across to the nightstand. A notebook sat beside the dish of food. Not another diary, but a weighty planner. Jonathan folded it open to the latest page. The fountain pen’s cap was worked off with some difficulty by wedging it between the fingers of the lax hand. “Most of the itinerary was cleared a week ahead. The triplicates will take a little longer than I’d hoped, but they should still be ready within the month.” The nib poised on the page. “Was there anything else that needed attention, Sir?”

Besides you? said the ghost-light eyes.

His Master regarded him for a moment. Another. A third. As he regarded him, a clawed hand floated out and pinched the book out of Jonathan’s hold. The book flew like a discus into the furthest wall. Outside, a summer storm grumbled. He felt a distant twitch of his senses as the woman and the boy both prickled with worry. Storms were never just storms around the castle.

Jonathan capped the pen and waited. Even devoid of a psychic voice, his eyes spoke with an articulation so clear he might have talked aloud:

Go on. The moment fits the criteria. We are our only witnesses. Fetch a switch off a tree or a broken bottle while you’re at it. Really round out the scene.  

“I came here,” his Master grated with rigid courtesy, “to offer some manner of respite. Perhaps even a token of reward for so expertly assisting in a much-needed Lesson. But I see I was mistaken. If I had known you were in such an ungrateful state, I would have waited. As it stands, it appears you need educating of your own. Poor Mina, she will be so disappointed to learn that her dearly-bought visits are now revoked.” He feigned his own interest in the calendar. Then at the vast window that looked out on the plummeting height of the tower and the half-moon squinting through the thunderhead’s cracks. “Our son’s as well, I think. He really is so spoiled in his free time. Bothering his poor beset Papa night and day when he has so much to do…

“Ah, but then, perhaps this is remiss of me too. I am no child despite my current face. I have run the entirety of this castle and its domain singlehandedly for centuries, all without any novice solicitors to flutter around my office. Likewise for the tending of the castle itself. Really, my friend, what reason is there for you to be so abused as to leave this room at all? To be bothered by maintaining the performance for mother and child? Such a labor, such a trial.

“Well, no more of it! You can stay here, they can stay without, and whenever it comes time to feed, you may empty your veins into a cup. Far tidier that way, and so much closer to the human façade besides! You do want the boy to learn how to pantomime humanity in full, yes? Of course you do. So that is how it shall be from here out. You in your tower, they in the crypt, and I shall endeavor to play go-between for all to the best of my ability. How does that suit you?”

He bared his teeth to the gums with his grin. Waiting for the tears. For the shattering of the dull mask. For the bribe, the plea, the grovel. He did all quite beautifully when the occasion called for it over the years. His wife did well enough, especially for one grappling with the impulse-weight of the Vampire, but Jonathan had it down to an artform. Indeed, he saw the first shine of dew come over the brilliant white-blue of the eyes, the quirk and twitch of his face into a grimace—

No. No, not a grimace.

A rictus.

The corners flinched up before Jonathan could hide it behind his hand. By then it was too late. Assuming the man could’ve stopped himself. A noise that tried to be a sob leapt through his teeth. It came out as a laugh. As did all the sounds that followed. A long hideous string of giggles boiling over into a cackle that brought rivers of tears to his shining eyes. It was not a man’s sound, but the mock-laughter of hyenas, the baying racket of jackals.

Unbidden, he leaned an inch away from his friend. Several inches. The movement snapped Jonathan’s eyes back to him, wide and wild and blazing and for one lunatic instant they seemed to brand the afterimage of the house in Piccadilly on the room, that surreal moment in which he first saw the uncanny Thing that wore his dear friend’s skin; a Thing that could and would kill him with his steel or his own hands. Even in a crowded street.

But that moment passed—long, long ago now, back before the insurance of the woman and her collared will were his precious cudgel—and Jonathan himself seemed wholly oblivious to the recollection. In his face there was only a madness of such profound despair and scorn that the effect dizzied.

“You do not understand. You really truly don’t, do you?” The words were cracked and brittle, barely holding an intelligible shape. “You talk of tokens and punishments. As if I have ever dared to hope, to even think of wanting anything for myself, since that night in October. As if I have not already imagined and lived, expected and met every possible nightmare that God could throw in my path and hers. I lived the first twenty years of a pointless joke of a life already under every bootheel the civilized human world had to offer, as did she. We grasped at crumbs of joy, of hope, of respite from the reality of our lots. This we could do because we had each other and our faith. Faith that for all the ills that humanity dealt out with the good, there was at least a chance for us. There was, we prayed, something better waiting on the other end of life. If we were good. If we did good.     

“But then you had to prove it all wrong. To burst the lie. Not that God is not real. He so very clearly is. But you—all that you are, all that you’ve done, all you will continue to do without so much as a slap on the wrist from the divine Powers that Be—proved that He is fickle. That His love and protection is wholly conditional. That someone as good, as pure, as blisteringly virtuous as Mina could be burned by the Son for another’s sin, abandoned and denied like a used rag for the crime of someone else’s violation. All to have the ransom of her humanity dangled over our heads to spur a handful of strangers onto the hunt after…what? Four centuries’ worth of you owning these mountains and its people, all of them dutifully cowering and dying behind their own half-helpful crucifixes?

“But oh no! Too late! Complications abound! The mother is with child and it does not matter to the good men who swore to slaughter her! And God must have declared them good men, for they did so good with Lucy. Lucy, who has surely gone to Heaven with her slaying…or not. What proof is there? What guarantee is there that anyone with your poison in them can hope for salvation, alive or dead? They saw her corpse and nothing else. They choked on hope and called it evidence that this was the right thing to do. God’s will be done.

“I have already murdered to go against His will. I slew those good men to keep them from making an Isaac and a slaughtered lamb of my Loves. I damned myself then as I had been preparing to damn myself since the moment I woke to her screams and your work. Do you understand?”

Despite the sultry rainstorm air trying to bleed in through the window, the room was cold. Somehow it had grown outright frigid around the bed and the Thing hunching out of his sheets.

“I have nothing. Nothing at all but purpose. Nothing I would dare to want, knowing it will be lost. Nothing I have left to lose, having ceased to believe the lie that I have any potential for joy beyond a reflection of my Loves’ peace. Nothing resembling anything so laughable as respite on any level. I am reduced to a talking trough for the sake of a family who deserves worlds beyond the stain you and I would leave on them without supreme effort. So, go ahead. Play jailor. Play glutton. Play king of the castle and lord above all and whatever else you stopped being able to play with your last captive audience once they were worn down to cackling husks that only had room in themselves for hunger and jeering, knowing that you had no more to threaten them with after taking all that they had.

“In fact? Here. Since I still have some feeling in my left hand. Wouldn’t want you giving me a holiday from work without due reason, and it shall save you the trouble of inventing an excuse to maim the rest.”

As he spoke, Jonathan tore at the bandages. They fell away in grisly ribbons to reveal a far grimmer map of injury than expected. It was worse still when Jonathan twisted to show his back. Bites and bruises patterned him like gruesome puzzle pieces. There were stitches closing two flaps of skin together. In one portion there were small chunks of flesh entirely gone where the teeth had torn them loose.

“Go on. Get on with it. Or would it be better for you if I threw in a scream and a plea to top things off? Pick a script, Sir, let me know.”

Jonathan kept his back to his Master. His Master only stared. Then, with a hand laid gentle as a feather on the ruined shoulder:

“I believe you were right at the start. You do have little to say worth sharing.”

The hand traced the first of the marks. A broad bite clamped along the carotid; the kind that could have torn the entire throat out, Adam’s apple and all. If its maker were not cautious. It was only the ensuing that had been ragged, tearing at muscle more than vein. To make a necessary a point.

As if his friend cared. As if he should care whether his friend cared.

His thumb brushed over a small crater where a canine had torn away so thickly that the flesh dimpled.

Jonathan waited for it to be joined by others like it.

Waited. Waited.

It was almost a full minute before he realized the light touch on him was no touch at all. He turned to see his Master was gone. If he’d had the energy to leave the bed, he might have gone to the door. His Master was on the other side, turning the key over in his hand. As he lingered, a bat summoned to the window. Beady borrowed eyes peered through the glass, waiting for Jonathan to rise, to go to the door and see if it was open.

Should he lock it as he rose? As he tried to turn the knob? Or did he skip the key entirely and simply hold the door shut to watch him scrabble one-handed at it?

The bat watched Jonathan hobble from the bed and to the chair of the writing desk. He dragged the chair to the window. Sat. Stared out through the glass at the moon.

His Master willed the clouds to cover it.

Jonathan stared still.

Still.

Still.

His good hand was the only part that moved. There was something white being fidgeted with. A stick of chalk.

It was only when he felt the woman and the boy heading for the tower that the key was pocketed unused and its owner drifted as a mist through another window. The bat watched as Jonathan pocketed his chalk and stood from his chair upon hearing the child’s chirruping voice echoing up the stairs. Papa-Papa-Papa-are-you-up? Papa hid the bandages and donned a robe before grabbing a book at random for his lap while his good hand pinched cold food from his plate. The boy bounded in, mother in tow, Papa, Papa, look-look-look. Jonathan looked dutifully at the new drawings he’d made, including one done from life of a red fox that let them get this close before running off. Jonathan was duly impressed. His weak hand was in his woman’s fingers, gently held, more gently curling and testing the limp knuckles.

Their Master did not linger long enough to know whether Jonathan would tell her of their visit now or later. It was moot. The scene cloyed.

The bat flew and the mist sank away.

He couldn’t recall the last time he’d been in his women’s chambers. Even the sole woman left in the castle hardly bothered with them. Antique treasures were buried under the modern trappings he’d tossed their way in preparation for England. They would have been with him once he set the groundwork in London. Them and his good friend.

All dust now.

Like the dust now glazing so much of the old rooms. Jonathan had taken a Herculean task upon himself some years prior to try and chip at the disuse and damage of a room at a time between his usual work. The paperwork, the horses, the errands, the cautious playing of mouthpiece and shield between Master and subjects. Between all that, he set himself to the tidying of this hall or that chamber. It was as impressive as it was embarrassing to note whenever his Master passed by one of these rooms in a state of surprise. He’d half-forgotten most of them existed, let alone what they had looked like before the ennui set in. Even the tarnish on the fixtures and doorknobs was cleaned away.

‘Perhaps I’ll blame it on a doorknob next time.’

He curled his lip and shoved the thought away. Then shoved over a bookcase for good measure. Novels in half a dozen languages went tumbling alongside a few expensive baubles. Old gold bookends, glass statues, cut gems so large and hollowed they could hold a wealth of rings and bracelets. All to pair with the tailoring of the wardrobes. These stood at attention beside abandoned easels, instruments, and myriad other distractions. All things given to be taken away. Only as was merited, of course. Such lazy mincing things, his old Loves. Coaxing anything but bile or idleness from them was like convincing a snail to run.

And most of what was goaded had been—

‘You yourself never loved. You never loved!’

—not a fraction of what they had given at the start. Not even their beginnings had amounted to much after the consummation. Stolen or bartered or lured, his Loves had lapsed so quickly into backhanded camaraderie. They had made cats of themselves, knowing they were craved simply for the fact of their presence and it gave them as close to free reign as their Master would ever give. Not enemies, but pets. Pretty faces and musical laughter to populate the nights with more than his own echoes.

For there had been laughter. With him. At him. Sometimes he had even let them claw or snap at him just for the excuse of the punishment he would inflict after. Really, for the sake of something to actually do with them beyond their nightly sniping.

He left the chambers and frowned down the hall. Moonlight fell through the nearest southward chamber, the window clean for the first time in ages, the interior righted and swept. It held books he had read two centuries ago, an old chessboard he had lost a century before that, now with its polished crystal men standing at attention, fallen curtains beaten from their dust and hung anew, paintings and an elderly world map peppered with monsters reframed and set upon the walls. The latter had been drawn to his attention by Jonathan himself, smiling with the boy in his lap, mentioning idly that he had found a map of fascinating creatures he had no name for, might Father know them..?

Father had, of course. The boy had been enraptured for nights with his definitions, with the monsters proven wholly imaginary or simply animals or, he knew from experience, terribly real. Tales he had relayed giddily at the next family meal, his Papa wasted but smiling on between him and his mother who had already heard her dose of legendry down in the crypt. Holding his Loves with two good hands.

He knocked a dresser over as well.

What did he care? What did he possibly care whether his dear friend took some overdue recompense for his betrayal? For upending meticulous plans and striking a scar into his Master’s brow and daring to haggle for the chance to squat here, under his lenient aegis rather than order the woman to tear into him and their brat and bash her own skull to gruel? Really, his friend was lucky to have such a meager toll to pay.

Other than vassalage. Other than slaughtering in Love’s name over God’s and sending the hunting party’s scraps limping away. Other than complaining of his mangling only because it upset the child; because the child had to hide that he was upset, just like Mum and Papa hide from Father. Other than actively laying foundations for a second invasion of England once the boy is grown, selling himself further down the layers of Hell, for Love’s sake. Other than this, yes, most meager. Practically nothing. You are many things, old devil, but the least you can be is honest with yourself. Or are you not still preening to yourself even now at your bargain?

Your losses: A scratch on the head. A two-decade wait. A handful of women.

Your gains: Your mind. Your future no longer being a mere checklist. Your Harkers.

Your friend.

Draga ta.

He first bristled, then sighed. His mind was walled off. There was no spying. He could admit the obvious to himself.

Not now, not tomorrow, but eventually. No need to fret over it. Time is the sea that eats away all stone, however stubborn. He will break given ages enough. It took the weight of the Mountain and its Lessons, but you broke too. And you were better for it. This sour period will pass. They will all break and learn and be pieced into proper shape.

Obvious, obvious. Of course.

His feet took him to the southward room. Map, art, chess, books. One of many rooms with forgotten treasures. Converted and cleaned and left like little oases. For the boy, for the woman, for his Master.

And yet Jonathan’s own room remained bare.

There was a little bookcase, he knew. But was it used? Was there anything else in the man’s room but a bed, clothes, and a desk? Memory ticked back along his mind. All the visits made to drink or talk or, in his friend’s sleep, simply to watch. What was there to that room that was not already waiting for him when his Master first ordered him in?

Sometimes there were drawings or wild bouquets from the boy. Food from the woman whenever he worked into one of those stupors that made him forget his meals. No more than that. Almost five years under the castle’s roof, diving in and out of the place’s uncounted rooms, going to and from the towns or ordering from afar, and there was not a single thing within his personal four walls to suggest it. And was that not strange in itself? True, he might occasionally be locked inside the tower, but not as a constant.

If the point of giving something was to have it taken away, the reverse held true too. He did let his friend roam where he may more often than not. And his friend did make use of it and his limited access to his Master’s coffers.

For anyone other than himself.

Yes, well. He does have his chair and his window. If he has gone so long without need of more, so much the better. Far easier upkeep than some hangers-on you could mention.

The thought failed to raise a smile on him.

He gripped the bookcase before him—jammed end to end with hardcovers of multiple eras, not a volume out of place—and thought for several minutes of tipping it over. Perhaps throwing it into the courtyard. Instead, he walked his fingers along until they landed on a history text. Written in the native tongue, it was one of the less maddeningly misinformed volumes of the late 17th century. Even the illustrations were passable. Jonathan must have overlooked it. He had been as adamant as their son once upon a time when it came to unearthing old histories. More, he was making more than fair leaps with his practice in the different languages of the mountains.

The book left the room with him.

The book stayed with him for the rest of the night and all of the day.

His eyes were sent elsewhere.

The bats slept, but the rats were busy. Or they would be, if he’d had need of more than one left loitering in the shade under Jonathan’s wardrobe. Animal-fear waned to animal-confusion waned to animal-annoyance as hours ticked by and its verminous little belly went empty as it continued to keep watch for its Master. Eventually it was swapped for another, this one peeking through a crack near the roof. Fear-confusion-annoyance under his thrall again. The same went for a third and fourth rat. Their eyes all showed the same tedium.

Jonathan Harker only ever allowed himself leisure when he had no choice. He only had no choice when he was recuperating from exsanguination. It turned out that his idea of this amounted to either laying in bed or shuffling to the chair to look out the window. Sometimes he even stood and gripped the windowsill. And once, just once, he undid the latch and swung the pane open.

Looking out. Looking down.

His good hand moved on the windowsill as he stared. The chalk had returned. Scratch, scratch, scratch it went, all the way along the stone, like a student writing out a long verse. It was the damned shorthand, of course. Yet it couldn’t be a message for the woman. Her mind was sunk deep in the torpor. Deep enough that her Master could filter into her unnoticed. There was hardly anything worth digging for beyond the usual infantile fantasies of his brutal demise and carrying her Loves off into the sunset. All he needed was at the surface.

Just a few notes. Just enough to make sense of the arcane little dashes.

Scratch, scratch, scratch, Jonathan wrote.

His Master angled the latest rat so he could read it all and filter it through the woman’s knowledge. The rat squealed and flinched away into its hole as its Master’s own shock prodded its speck of a mind.

Scratch, scratch, scratch.

DO NOT DO IT DO NOT DO IT DO NOT DO IT DO NOT DO IT

FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM FOR THEM

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE

He twitched in his coffin, almost rising wholly from the anchor of the death-sleep.

But then Jonathan sighed and closed the pane. The chalk was erased. A return to the chair, a return to the stare. This time with new tears tracking down his cheeks. He didn’t move again until his stomach snarled. The doorknob was checked—unlocked—and he took himself away to eat. His Master’s borrowed eyes followed him all the way down, watching him cook and carve a fish without relish. Watched him try and fail to open the office door—locked—before idling down one of the in-progress halls. He worked in the dust and the decrepit furnishings for a few hours before marching back up to the tower. His hands were empty despite having handled an array of oddments and literature and art.

Up. Chair. Stare. Bed. Wait.

It is nothing but a recent spell. He has been here almost half a decade. He’s not spent his time only in his little labors and bloodletting. Who could? Perhaps he dwells on the pending retribution for his outburst. Waiting for the sword to fall.

And what of the threadbare room? What of the trips that brought home nothing but sustenance to let him feed his family, give or take a new treat for them bartered from what allowance was spared for him?

What of it?

He did not answer himself. Only waited until the woman made her exit to the tower. The boy was called to under the level of her psychic awareness.

Come here, child. I have an important task for you.

The boy was still in his coffin, reading in the heap of blankets and fairy books. He poked his head up over the rim with a look that balanced between worry and curiosity.

A Lesson?

Not at the moment. Unless you wish for a Lesson on why not to keep your Father waiting.

But the boy was already scurrying out of his box and up the steps of the tomb. He paused to look up in wonder at his Father.

“Your face is coming back.”

So it was. Finally. He felt the itch along his cheek and jaw which told him adolescence was waning finally back to his prime, just as the shiver of bone announced the return to full stature. There was a reason he rarely drank this deep.

“It is. The body prefers its natural shape even after an indulgence too far. It may only be another night before I am myself again. But that is too long a wait for this. Here.” He passed the history text down into the boy’s small hands. “Be mindful of not turning to the wrong page. There are sights inside that your poor parents would not approve of.”

An easy bait, that. The boy’s eyes glittered like a little Pandora’s. For an instant. But then a cherubic moue passed over him as he mouthed out the title. What little blood he had in him flamed up to his cheek.

“I don’t think I can read this yet, Father.” The boy admitted as much as though it were a crime.

“I would be stunned if you could, child. No, this is something to bring to your Papa. He is a fiend as much for history as the trudge of modernity and I know he is as eager as you to master all tongues in the mountains. This shall be a fine practice for him as your little tales are for you. Come, I shall walk you up.” He reached to tuck the boy under his arm in the usual way only for the child to shrivel under his hand. His gaze had flicked away from his Father in the same moment as his buzzing little mind tried clumsily to bury something. “Diavol. Is there something you wish to tell me?”

The boy started to shake his head, knew better, and simply shrank deeper into himself. His eyes were nailed firmly to the hardcover. He hugged the volume like a paltry shield.

“Child.”

The lips trembled and cracked at the same time those brilliant ruby eyes rolled up to him. Fear hovered there, but it was not quite of his Father. It was the kind of fear a Father was meant to dispel.

“Are you and Papa fighting?”

“Where would get such an idea?”

His hand reached out again. The boy still cringed, but did not shrink from him. They walked from the tomb and on toward the stairs.

“Since our last meal he hasn’t talked how he used to.”

“Oh, dear. He has gone mute?”

“No. No, he talks. Only he skips over things now. Things he used to bring up all on his own.”

“We are not playing a guessing game, diavol. Speak plainly.”

They had made it to the floors aboveground now. The boy paused mid-step to look up at his Father, his face turned pale as ivory in a window’s moonlight.

“He has not talked about you, Father. Before he brought you up at least once whenever we were together. Asking what you taught me last. Sometimes he’d bring things up like you do. Little hints and edges of things I would have to go to you or Mum to ask about. Papa was the one who brought up journalism—the power that records the world—and told me to ask Mum about it. And he told me that you knew how to find buried treasure on a magic night, that everyone else was too scared to try. And…” His narrow throat worked with a strain. “And he told stories about before me. About how you and Mum and him all came together.”

A crest of the innate fondness rose and fell in the boy’s look at that. He was ever a fiend for the romance of his parents’ history before they came to live in the castle. The romance as their Master had scripted it.

Yet the child’s cheer over it blew out like a candle.

“He won’t talk about you at all now.” The ruby stare flicked up at him. “Not since we ate.”

Not since you tore at Papa like a wolf with a rabbit, Father.

“It has been less than a week, child. For all that I am an occasional favored subject,” he failed to ignore how something twisted in his chest at that, “it is nonsense to expect he keep a checklist of things to speak of. He is recuperating and things will slip a hazy mind. But, to answer your question, no, Papa and I are not fighting.”

The boy did not look away. Even the expected smile could not follow the rules.

And since when does he have rules of acting to follow?

“Was there something else?”

The fear was back. Redoubled. Not the kind dispelled by a Father.

“Father, are you the one who’s been making him sit?”

They had been walking again. Halfway to the tower. Now it was Father’s turn to freeze. Even to gawk.

“What?” The boy shivered at his tone, half-hiding behind the history book. He winced as the white hand at his shoulder grew out its claws. A long breath was forced. The claws retracted an increment. Then, again, “What do you mean ‘making him sit,’ child?”

“Do you remember when I had the Lesson about trancing?”

The one in which mother, child, and Master sank their psychic teeth in dear Jonathan’s mind and almost tore it three ways down the center with their mesmeric quibbling? Yes, vaguely.

“I recall.”

Now the boy looked away entirely. Facing the tower’s direction. Dread came off him like a perfume.

“Do you remember the sharp thoughts in Papa’s head?”

“…I do.”

“Mum said before—,” another lurch of the little throat, almost choking, “before we all jumped in him, when the Lesson started, that she could make him do things. Things people aren’t supposed to do to themselves. Like walk in a fire or make him stay in one place for hours and hours, not doing anything. No sleep or food or anything that keeps Papa alive. She could do that. But she didn’t. She hasn’t been. Papa would know and he’d not be so mad at her that time when she used him in the Lesson.” The child rattled where he stood, intent on the shadows that led up to the tower. “He was sitting at the window before that night. Lots of nights. And days. The first couple times, I thought he was waiting for me. Back when I first learned to do climbing. I snuck up to his door to surprise him. Watching in the keyhole.

“And he sat and sat and sat there, looking out the window. Sometimes he stood up to look closer, sometimes he scratched something out on the stone and wiped it off. Then he’d go back to sitting. It was strange. I didn’t know what it was. But then the Lesson happened and I saw—I saw him—,”

He could not finish and did not need to. His Father remembered.

Vision of a daylit escape. Rising from the chair. No message written on the sill. Just the open pane, his feet on the ledge, and a tipping over into gravity’s arms. Down, down, down. Gone. Among other methods by rope or steel. But the fall came first and crispest to his flailing mind.

Before. He was thinking of it even before that night. Since the boy started climbing. At least two years. And that was just when it was noticed.

The boy was making noise at him again. Accusing.

“Are you the one doing it, Father?”

He would have been mad if it was Mum. We all know no one is allowed to be mad at you. Right, Father?

He struggled with a sudden urge to snatch the child up by his scruff and drag him the rest of the way up to the tower. To hurl him squealing into the room where the loving couple roosted, watching their faces drop slack with horror, and then—

And then..?

Then his mind fell into a red haze. A livid shapeless blank where something like release from the growing storm behind his temples would finally come.

“No, child. I am not responsible.” He stole his hand back with a twitch. “Go the rest of the way yourself. There is something I must see to first.” The boy peered up at him. Doubt in miniature. “Do I need to tell you twice?”

The boy fled. Not walked, not ran, not ambled. Fled. From him.

What of it, old devil? Is this not the proper way? Your adversaries and their spawn cringing and scrambling from you at every turn, quailing under your thumb? This is victory at its height. Is it not so?

He thought of three harpies who mocked and robbed and tittered as he piled their centuries up with gifts and weeping sweetmeat.

He thought of the spur of a delightfully infuriating woman and the admiration of an impossible child.

He thought of his friend, red-handed with the enemies slain for his wife and his Master, slipping silently into servitude and his tithes of blood and obedience, the quiet misery free of charge, Sir.

He thought of his friend, sweeping dust from his mind as blithely as he banished it from his forsaken rooms, varnishing and whetting his nights to an edge finer than a surrendered kukri.

He thought of his friend, who had begun as a mere pending addition to his colony and was now evolved into a thing worth bartering for, worth sheltering and hoarding and honing despite a betrayal paid triply in death and deeds on his Master’s behalf.

He thought of his friend, screaming in his jaws. Clawing his way towards a laugh, look, son, see, son, it’s alright. No, Mina, no, let it be, let him do it, please, Mina, don’t, Mina, do not risk yourself, our boy, please, please.

He thought of his friend, mauled for another’s Lesson, half-dead, streaked in gore and sweat and tears, patched together with inexpert hands. 

He thought of his friend in his desolate box of a room, staring out the window with a piece of chalk as the only barrier between life and death.

He thought of all these things and many more. He went on thinking them as he stalked away to his own room and went to work.

An hour had come and gone since he finished what was needed.

An hour and fifteen minutes since he masked himself from their senses and planted himself outside Jonathan’s door. He listened to the cadence of them as one might strain for snatches of birdsong. Only Jonathan and the boy were audible, but even the woman’s mental chatter carried a bristle on the air. His Harkers made such a warm sound all together.

The sound stopped as he turned the knob.

Three heads lifted like a trio of deer hearing a huntsman’s boot disturbing the grass.

They were huddled together on the bed, as always. The woman guarded her husband’s wounded side. The boy sat under his Papa’s good arm with two books open across their laps. Here was the history book and one of the fairy tale collections. They had been taking their turns reading a page apiece, son reading meticulously through a moment of fantasy in Hungarian while his Papa overdid a silly dull drone in the same tongue over the drudgery of an overpacked page for the child to groan at. Mum would cap the whole act by way of glancing at the page and then thinking a flash of knowledge into their heads. There, done. Thank you, Mum. Laughter abounded.

Until now.

“Goodness, such a hush. Do I interrupt?”

Jonathan, the immaculate actor, smiled and shook his head.

“Nothing that did not want interrupting. For some reason I’m failing to win any appreciation for the recital of 200-year-old politics across the Carpathians. Perhaps it’s my delivery.” The latter was directed half to his Master, half to the boy. He even cupped the child’s shoulder. Hinting. The boy offered him a smile in return.

And tried, “They didn’t make it like a story. Just a lot of, ‘This happened and then this and then this and then this.’ You and Mum could write it better.”

The woman offered a sing-song rebuttal of, Or you could, Dearest. It would make for very thorough writing practice.

The boy made a face of dismay and denial, pretending to take cover behind his book of fables. Cute. Precious, even. The whole charade was. Their Master felt his own grin strain to hold in place as he strolled to the bed. Anxiety thick enough to gag floated on the air.

“I leave such judgment to mother and son. For now, Papa and I must speak in private.” He set his gaze level with Jonathan’s. “There is something I require your assistance with, my friend.” His hand uncurled to take. “Come.”

“Of course,” from Jonathan. Not so much as a tremor. He turned to the woman as his good hand gave the boy a parting hug, then raised it to set in his Master’s palm. “I’m afraid you must take up the mantle of inflicting ancient territory disputes on him—,” But then found his good hand was trapped. By the boy. The woman tensed. Jonathan froze. “Sweetheart…”

“Papa, don’t go. Please don’t go.” The boy held fast around his Papa’s hand and half his arm, a feeble anchor whose attention jumped fitfully among his parents; not including his Father. “Mum, tell him not to. Please?” A hesitant thread of mesmer squirmed in his voice. His Father could have rolled his eyes. This tug-of-war again? Was the child dense? “He’s going to do it again.”

The room chilled.

Jonathan flicked a frantic gaze to his wife, blasting silent urgency through his thoughts. The woman fought an enormous urge of her own to spare her Master a glower before addressing her son:

Dearest. You know that night was only an accident. We are a long way from another meal besides.

Then, thrumming with the weight of a lie:

It’s alright.

But the boy would not swallow it this time. He was an amateur at playing pretend in the way of his parents. A child fed on blood and fairy tales full of monsters who lived in the house as much as without. The boy held onto his Papa and shook his head. Fear crashed up against sorrow and sorrow up against anger.

“It isn’t! You all keep saying it is, and it isn’t! Papa, he hurt you and he did it on purpose! He didn’t kiss you at all! It was just tearing and hurting and—,” a word stuck, choked, flew, “—and lying. He says you aren’t fighting, but you are, or he wouldn’t hurt you and make you sit and be sad and sharp all the time and…and…” His eyes were close to running now, the words melting into a hiccough. “…and he never even said sorry…” The boy forewent his Papa’s arm and clamped around his middle instead, hugging tight and hiding his face in the man’s side. “Papa, don’t go with him…”

Him, him, him.

Was he not even Father anymore?

“Quincey, I promise you we aren’t fighting. Even grownups make mistakes. That’s all that night was.” Then, silk-smooth, “Father apologized already.” He turned to the woman, expecting reinforcements, “Mina, you remember—,” But the woman was looking through him and into the boy. The boy, who had peeked up enough from his sniveling to think out at her, showing the little chat shared between Father and son on the way to the tower. Inhaling it, she looked to her husband with renewed alarm, reflecting their child’s tattling into Jonathan’s mind.

Jonathan lost another shade in his pallor. He turned all but snowy as his wife turned her attention to their Master. A blazing thing, all horror and hate and, surprised that she could still feel it, a new level of shocked disgust.

Even this is not beneath you?

‘This’ being the vision scraped from her son’s spying through the keyhole. Hours and nights and days’ worth of the sight of Jonathan Harker mesmerized by his window.

Her hands had drifted by reflex to grasp her husband, her position shifted in paltry protection of her prize. Likewise for the boy who now clung wholly around his Papa’s waist. Jonathan, meanwhile, appeared truly and entirely terrified to a degree his Master hadn’t seen since their last nights together in that long-ago summer. Afraid for them.

He held them each as best he could before lifting his good hand again—

“My Loves, it’s alright, I promise, I—,”

—and having it caught in his Master’s.

His Master, roiling with ire, pulled him forward. His kin, roiling with fear-hate-love, pulled back. Three iron grips all working against each other.

And what was begun in a battleground of the psyche not so long ago was made flesh upon the bed. Briefly. Just before they heard the pop.

A muffled sound, almost comical. Wet and cracking and quick.

Pop went Papa’s shoulder.

Papa made his own noise to go with it.

The iron grips turned to jelly, their owners flinching back as one. Jonathan caught himself on his working elbow and fought down another agonized note as its own pain throbbed up to the mangled shoulder. This he tried to turn into another smile as his breath came in a huffed stutter of a laugh.

“Oops,” he panted, wavering up on his knees. His only hand went to the sagging shoulder, the hold still too weak to hoist it. “See? Accidents happen.” A hoarse noise, fighting not to be a sob. “Darling, could you..?”

But she was already on him, aligning shoulder to socket, bracing, shoving—

Pop!

—the arm back in place. Another noise from Papa, this time through locked teeth.

“Thank you. See?” The fingers of his right hand flexed experimentally. Weak, but functional. “It’s fine, Sweetheart, it’s fine, you didn’t mean it, no one did, it’s alright…”

But the boy was past mere sniffling. Now he bawled. Red rivers of tears emptied from his eyes, turning his little face wax-white as he scrambled to his Papa, blubbering fragments of apology, of denial, of no no no, Papa, it isn’t alright, no no no. The woman’s eyes were running too. Shame and rage and pain streaked her face like a mask of grief as she wrapped herself around her husband, her mind a litany as garbled as her son’s.

Jonathan Jonathan sorry so sorry Darling my Love sorry sorry sorry sorrysorrysorrysosorry—

“It’s alright,” Jonathan echoed mindlessly back, the most he could do by way of dialogue through pain and panic. “It’s alright,” as his arms, now both water-weak and crippled, folded around wife and child. His back to his Master as if he might shield them.

His Master felt somehow as if he had ceased to be in the room. Now he was watching a lackluster play unfold. See here, the poor little family menaced and ravaged by the monster. The monster looms over them, gloating over the injuries left, waiting to strike again as they weep. The boy cries, the woman cries, Jonathan cries. And why not? The monster gives them something to cry about. As monsters should. As is right. The family belongs to the monster, not the reverse. The monster has no place within the family. Fragile and grating little thing that it is.

See how easily it’s wounded? How quickly it turns on the monster for a mistake? Not even his own! Not entirely his own, at least.

This time.

So. You can admit it.

The boy, the woman, Jonathan, all crying. All huddling against him. Away from him.

As if any of them can spare the loss of blood. As if they expect him to open his veins and refill them to make up for their own idiot blubbering. As if he can waste more of himself on their fumbling and failures. As if he has not hollowed himself of everything, feeding his blood and his time and his toil and his soul until he has only a husk left for himself, picture of the good husband and father, give give give, work work work, feed feed feed, and all they offer him is more need, more pain, more excuses, sorry, sorry, I did not mean it, Papa, I did not mean it, Darling—

He watched Jonathan raise his head enough to look over the heads of his Loves. A single pining glance at the window.

I did not mean it, draga mea.

“Enough.” It was not the bark he wished it to be. He was not even sure if his Harkers heard him. But they didn’t need to. Within a heartbeat he had shot forward snaked his arm around Jonathan’s middle. He hoisted the man like a doll, shock alone making him flinch and scrabble at the hold. The child keened piercingly and the mother’s mind erupted with hate-panic. Her Master flung an order out.

Hold the boy. Do not follow.

The woman spasmed against the order until every cord of muscle stood out from her like wire. Then she was giving a mute howl as she fell upon her son, snatching him up and trapping him in her arms. The boy shrilled deafeningly and fought his mother in a blur of little limbs, tugging, reaching, kicking, begging.

“Let go! Mum, let go! Papa! Papa!”

The boy’s face was a horror of running blood, his eyes turned to marbles of red glass.

Jonathan was little better. His Master had not allowed him to stand. He would waste time if he had; would have tried to dawdle, to scramble back and soothe the tantrum away, to trap himself and his Master another endless minute in this squalling hell of a room. So his Master had hoisted him up first as a farmer might trap an errant lamb under his arm, then threw him over his shoulder.

Then moved to the window.

The boy shrieked.

“Papa! Papa! No, let him go! Papa!”

“Please,” Jonathan’s voice was a hoarse whisper. His hands clung without strength to his Master’s back, trying to drag himself loose, straining towards mother and child like a dying flower bowing toward the sun. “Please, Sir, not like this. I have to go to them, have to explain things, I have to—,”

SLEEP.

Jonathan became a dead weight over his shoulder. The window was opened. Another scream from the boy, this one so great it turned into a nigh rupturing cough.

“Papa,” a reedy sound, “Papa, wake up, Papa..!”

Out the window they went.

Mid-descent, monster turned to mist, carrying his prey like a leaf in a breeze. Down and away and around the castle’s side. Finding the way back in that no eye or mind within the castle could discover.

Jonathan woke half an hour later.

He did so with a surprising lack of pain. As sleep melted off, he became aware of new wrappings layered on both shoulders. The left’s ragged side was plastered with a cooling sleeve of linen strips. His right was bound with something that felt like a fuzzing velvet numbness trapped under its bandages. Each side ate away their respective aches.

“Alchemy as men know it never did manage to turn iron to gold. But it bridged many gaps between simple medicine and magic’s bending of bodily law.”

Jonathan raised his head enough to see his Master sat at the opposite end of the bed. If one considered it a bed. They were in a nest of blankets and cushions that had been layered into a den of alien stonework. While not musty in the way of other ancient bedding strewn around the castle, they carried the spiced stamp of aromas from the work that was done in the adjoining room. Over his Master’s shoulder he could see a heavy oaken door left a crack open. A lamp glowed there, highlighting glass and clay vessels arranged on a far worktable. Some smoked. Some glowed. Some seemed to look back at him.

“Nature would have you heal over the course of weeks. Likely months. Supernature,” his Master gestured at the bandaged shoulders, “will see you healed within the next two nights at the latest. Of course, this will hardly matter if you decide to forsake your little chalk notes and throw yourself from the window.” Jonathan held his tongue as his Master sunk both eyes into him like brands. “The boy did not catch what you wrote on the windowsill, if it’s any consolation. You could let them go on believing I have been so monstrous as to force my poor friend, poor Papa, poor Darling, to sit dull and dead before the window for hours upon hours whenever he does not work or sleep or bleed. I am so suddenly the only monster under this roof as well as Master.”

Jonathan swallowed. Once, twice.

“Apologies. I shall—I shall explain things to them. Please, forgive me, Sir.”

“No.” Jonathan stared at him. Worry and confusion clashed and crumbled into each other behind the ghost-light eyes. “No,” his Master echoed, “this is not something that is forgiven any more than it is forgotten.” His hands clenched to white stones in his lap. “How long have you been like this, Jonathan?”

Do not lie.

Jonathan twitched but failed to catch his tongue in time.

“The first time was in mid-May. Back when I first started to suspect you. The prospect rose and fell in me more than once until the end of June. If it were not for the chance of seeing Mina again, I would have walked into the wolves on that last night together. I was still thinking of cliffs and wolves the day I escaped, prepared to take that route rather than have the Weird Sisters’ teeth pin me here forever. But those thoughts came and went.

“It wasn’t until October 3rd that the urge came back and never left. That was when I stopped being sure whether or not Mina would heed the threat of death potentially leading to undeath. I know she still thought of high buildings. Of train tracks. Fires. So I started thinking of them too. Just in case. After November, after the killing, I just kept thinking it. Whenever I was not busy or seen or sleeping. I have heard that suicides are damned outright. Murderers of good men too. I have thought sometimes that I could take that leap and die, but I would not know the difference once I woke to Hell. Sometimes I think I jumped an eternity ago and just can’t remember.  

“I know I cannot risk it, of course. It would risk them too and leave them hurting besides. All it amounts to now is a sort of meditation. And I do appreciate the view. It is no more than that, I swear.”

“You swear,” his Master nodded. “You swear in this particular moment. Just as, not so long ago, caught in a snare, you thought of taking yourself away in earnest. The leap or the rope or the knife reached for in full daylight. A most effective slap to rouse your greedy little family from their play. But it does not bode well for this, your current oath. Only a thought, only a meditation. Not to worry. This is what you would have me believe?”

“Thought is not action, Sir. I would not still be here if it was.”

“Indeed, you are here. And doing what? Ah, let me specify. Doing what, besides working and bleeding?”

Jonathan frowned at him.

“Raising my family.”

“Which falls under work.”

A deeper frown, almost stormy.   

“It hardly feels so, Sir. My Loves are not the burden you would paint them as.”

“Even if I believed you, you still have not answered my question. What are you doing, Jonathan Harker? What are you doing solely for yourself? You stare out a window that you must convince yourself every day not to leap from. You clear dust away from every room in the castle but your own. You touch a book only when you must be seen reading, you sing only when there is an ear besides yours to hear it, you wear your smiles the same way a maid dons her uniform. You do not answer me because you have no answer to give.” Lantern eyes burned. “In the five years since you have been here, you have done nothing but hollow yourself of everything. Blood and fealty and life and love. Yes, true, you live. Because that too is in your itinerary. Just another chore of maintenance.”  

 Jonathan sat up fully now.

“And?” A whisper. A thing of lead. “What does it matter?”

Why do you care?

“It matters because, even without a stomach, I am not immune to nausea. Call it secondhand indignation if you like. I have made deals with many devils and played pupil to the best of them. You see what bounty such Lessons have afforded me compared to,” he waved a clawed hand in Jonathan’s direction, “the usual lot of misery that comes to the would-be hero and the practicing martyr. If I should ever get around to some dire retribution from kismet, it will only be after nigh half a millennium of unchecked power and slaughter with nary an angel flying by to chide me for my play. Even Faustus got to have his allotment of pleasure before Mephistopheles tore him to shreds and flung his soul to Hell. But you? You spoke the truth before.

“You have nothing. You began with scarcely more than that. A narrow starving life with only the distraction of a woman who hardly merited the pedestal you lifted her on for playing nursemaid and starring, as so many muses do, within a theatre of high romance you painted around her; she, a soul as commonplace as a grain of sand in a desert. For her, you damn yourself. Her and the unholy miracle of the boy. You started with crumbs and gave away all you had and more, gaining nothing but the safeguarding of others’ fortune. Others’ lives. While you whore your life and veins away and tell yourself a chair and a window are sufficient for the last dregs of self you permit to exist.

“Do not mistake me. It is hilarious in the abstract. I would laugh if you were on a stage. But you are here and real and proving insufferable with your insistence on denying yourself any opportunity to do something other than play the role of grist in a mill.” He bared his teeth. It was not a grin. “But I waste my time telling you what you already know, yes? You have clearly made peace with this Spartan half-life. You did not even bat a lash at the prospect of mother and child’s visits being stripped away.” Jonathan’s breath stopped as his Master looked down on him. Lantern eyes now infernos. “Until tonight. There is a crack in the performance now. Father is suddenly a monster and he has stolen poor Papa away.

“And here, in this space, Papa can never be found. Not even by his wife’s prying mind.” White knuckles rapped against the strange black stonework. “It was not easy making this place. A genius loci can only flex so much. But the Scholomance exists in a space that is not possible and it was with brick from that Mountain that I formed these walls. A little sanctum away from Earthly meddling. Back before my condition required the grave soil. How nice to know it will not go to waste.”

Jonathan’s face fell as his Master stood. In less than a blink his Master was at the door, then through it, filling up the threshold. Perhaps too late it occurred to him that the nest of a room had no light lit in it. Not so much as a candle. The only illumination left was the faint glow at his Master’s back and the fires that were his Master’s eyes.

“You have a new task before you, my friend. Something to meditate on without distraction. No work. No window. No wife or child. The task is this: Think of something to do, to be, to want, that serves only you. An addition to your life that you can drop into the raw pit you have carved out of yourself to feed the clamoring maws of your dear family.”

His hand curled around the handle.

Jonathan’s eyes were wide and bright as stars.

“Wait—,”

“In the meantime, for as long as you fail in this endeavor, you will be here. To the boy and his mother, you will be a ghost. Undetectable by mind or sound or scent. They will only know you live by the taste of you in the cup. But do not rush yourself. Take however many nights or years you need.”

Jonathan fought his way out of the tangle of covers.

“Please, wait—,”

“I’m certain they will take it well.”      

The door shut and bolted. A moment later there was a hammering in the dark interior, fists drumming against the thick oak. From the exterior it sounded barely louder than the patter of rain. The shouting only the buzz of an insect. Rain and insect grew slightly louder when the laboratory’s light was put out, erasing even the outline of the door. All was dark. Hammer, patter, shout, buzz.

Silently, the Master of the castle sighed.

He just as silently took a seat outside the door. His eyes were their own strange points of light in the pitch and they glanced down into the open face of his pocket watch. It stood out clearly enough to him. One hour. Two. Three. His friend carried on at intervals through them all. Shouts or sobs, pleas or pounding.

Out in the castle, mother and child were hunting. Father and Papa were nowhere to be found. They threw out the feelers of their psyche as far as they could go, scented the air, raced and called to each other on every floor and through every room. Nothing, nothing. The woman even dared to breach her Master’s bedroom.

Ah, close! So close! Did she detect her husband there? An echo of his presence?

Of course she did.

Her husband was the only one other than her Master to be allowed in that room, and then only with their Master’s beckoning. Even if she had no reason to doubt the freshness of the hint, there was still no following. Not into this space that only a student of the Mountain could detect, let alone enter. She came and went within walking distance of her beloved. All as he screamed out for her. For their boy. For their Master.

By the fourth hour the room had quieted.

He held his ear to the crack:

“Please…” came a croak almost too thin to count as a voice. “Please, I don’t understand this. What do you want from me? What am I supposed to say? Just tell me, please…”

I did. I did and you still cannot make sense of it. Draga mea, has this been you your whole life?

He wanted to laugh.

A curse was mouthed instead.

He stood, relit the lamp, unbolted the door, and found his arms suddenly full of his friend. The bandaged arms clung to him while a face streaked in tears and sweat ground into his chest, eyes somehow still running. He made a note to force a carafe down the man’s throat before he passed out. For now, he let his friend hold to him, shaking.

“Sir, Master, I’m sorry, I’m sorry for angering you. I only want to understand what has to be done to mend this. Please.”

He held his friend in turn, stroking through the white cloud of hair.

“That you say this means you have not taken the order to heart. How is it such a trial to want something? Whether you fear it being taken or not, how is it you cannot even name a thing you desire?”

“I don’t know.” The words left his friend like millstones. He seemed almost to deflate in his Master’s arms. “I don’t know.”

“You could not have been so before you were here. Before you were mine. Even the destitute will dream. Did you not want for anything then, however meager?”

Quiet unspooled for almost a minute. There was a small breath. He waited.

“…Wanting gets conditioned out of some lives,” was his friend’s answer. “Need comes first. Need is always there, taking up your mind and your time. Urgency. Efficiency. Every cent and minute hoarded. Books were a luxury. Second and thirdhand purchases, the rest from the library. Theatre was a treat to reserve once a season at most. No concerts, no revelries, no records playing in the apartment on a phonograph never afforded. The first time we did not know need was after the man I considered a father died and left the gift of his will behind. A house and a business and a bank account that finally did not sting to look at, traded into our hands at the loss of another precious life.

“Between Lucy and Hawkins, there was not even a heartbeat in which to be more than performative in appreciating our changed fortune. Not before the trap of you sprang again. Van Helsing’s call to arms. You know the rest. Even Mina, even the blessing of our child, those priceless wants above all others, were made into another thunderbolt from Fate. Another proof that some people are just not meant to want, let alone have. No matter how great or small a treasure. I learned that Lesson well enough even before you. And so I have schooled myself out of it. Wanting.

“The part of a mind that craves for itself has been atrophied and beaten into dust in me. But if you say I must want, I can perform otherwise. Tell me I am sick of the window and I shall board it up. Tell me to read, I will read. Or sing a song. Or dig up old recipes to enjoy even when I am not cooking to flavor myself. Or whatever else. Even while you all sleep. Even with no one looking.” Jonathan pulled his face away from his Master’s heart and turned bleary eyes up to him. Blue ringed in rose. “Whatever fixes this. Please.”

Throw him back in. He will do better in a week. A month at most. Do it.

He sensed mother and child outside the castle now. Running, circling. They had taken clothes from Jonathan’s wardrobe and, against the Lesson so gravely taught, son watched mother order the wolves to her, demanding they take her husband’s scent and search, go! The wolves would lead them to the usual route Jonathan took to the towns, no more. But they were desperate. Still weeping. Bloodless and starving for grief.

Do it.

Jonathan stared at him. Waiting for another blow. For a laugh, a sneer. A cold hand tossing him back into the dark. The dog laying before his Master’s rising boot, knowing the fine quarry brought home was no excuse for not wagging his tail as he did so.

A fine dragon you are, old devil. Are you so soft now? You laid out the terms. He has not satisfied them. Do it. Do it!

“Fifteen years. That is how long the boy has left to nurse from you if you have your way. Fifteen more years until he is a man, innocent of taking a single life. Likewise for his mother. Because you feed us all. Wasting and wasting until that final night. Do you expect to die and remain dead at that hour? Do you think I would lose you, even if Mephistopheles himself came up to collect?”

“No,” barely a breath. Jonathan seemed to wilt another inch as it left him.

“No. The wait ends. Your unlife begins. Which means what?”

Jonathan could not bring himself to speak. Only looked away. His Master thumbed away another tear.

“Eternity in potentia,” he answered himself. “Centuries. Longer. We both know the Vampire is made of its wants before anything else. Such is our nature. I will give credit to dear Mina for her control. She has far more cause for loathing me than her Sisters did and she does admirably against her own desires. Even if she only has as much will as my own allows, it is a thing of iron in itself. But what of you, draga mea?”

Recognition pinched Jonathan upright again. The ghost-light eyes gaped with what was uncertainty or else the wish to be uncertain.

“You will no longer be as you are. No more playing vassal. No more wearing the yoke of mere servility. No more stalling in your martyr’s Pit. You will be Vampire, you will be want. And what will you do if there is nothing of the latter there to catch you? What shall you do with infinity? Will you only be as my missing shadow? Only your woman’s faithful dog? Will you still have the boy, grown and whole, pulling at your apron strings? A servant, forever caught between bowing to others or laying as a corpse in the moonlight for lack of anyone to serve. That you would be for eternity?”

The hand that wiped the tear moved to Jonathan’s jaw. It held like a strut against his attempt to turn away.

“I always kill my pests. I may torture an enemy before his end. But I would ultimately be rid of them, not leave them to such a Hell as the one you seem so dedicated to crafting for yourself.”

The hand was a snare and it kept Jonathan facing forward. Straight into the basilisk gaze and the mesmer at its heart. An order that was a plea.

“Think. Think of one single thing you want for yourself tonight. Just one.”

The trance worked deep. Snapping at the heels of Jonathan’s mind like a hound after a fox. Further, further, down, down, through a pinhole of a tunnel into the abandoned gloom where the carcasses of hope and yearning had been thrown away. The trance dug. The trance prodded. The trance found a coin’s worth of treasure, like dead men’s gold hidden under a blue flame.

Here was another view from another window. After the departure of a captor. Before the arrival of the hypnotic mists and their hungry smiles. Sweetly in-between, here was the sight of the moonlit world back when it had been a beautiful balm. A sole comfort in his terror but a heartbeat from being spoiled by his hostesses’ threat.

Jonathan Harker had seen small shapes moving on the wind. An owl soaring far below. Moths fluttering past like living petals. So high, so close to the peaks and stars, a needle of nostalgia had found him. The boy within the young man who had wished with the hopeless fantasy of all hungry children looking up from their sparse plates and miserable families and through tatty curtains at the open and untouchable sky. Wished with sweet-somber futility for escape. For…for…

Jonathan spoke the wish aloud. A last wet trail fell from his bloodshot stare. His Master wiped this too.

And found Jonathan’s mouth with his before willing him back to sleep.

Mother and child were returning from the road. She had taken the boy up in her arms again, cursing as she half-ran, half-flew. The child had ceased sobbing, at last, but he rattled in her embrace. This had never happened before. They had not thought such a thing could happen. That anyone, let alone Papa and Father, could simply disappear. Especially from her senses. It was impossible to lose track of them. She always knew where they were. Always.

And now…

“Mum?” She had stopped. Her head cocked like a wolf’s, ears pricked high, eyes flaring. “Mum, what is it?”

There. They’re right there. How?

“Where, Mum? Are they close?”

She didn’t answer. Only took off at another rush, firing herself and her son like a spectral bullet through the forest. Perhaps the boy would have been more stunned than afraid that his mother could be such a blur if not for his worry. His senses were smaller than hers, still reaching and searching for whatever it was she’d found. It wasn’t until the outline of the castle came into view that he skimmed the presence of his fathers on the air. They were at the castle, but not within it.

Two frantic sets of eyes hunted around the grounds, trying to make sense of how the mingled presences could be so near and invisible at once. Closer. Closer.

Up.

They craned their heads until the moon met their gaze. That and the two shapes against the sky.

Jonathan was held close in his Master’s arms. The two of them were a speck against the stars. A moment more and they were drifting down to the ground. Jonathan was set lightly on his feet and almost knocked off them as his son clamped around his waist. His wife almost finished the job by locking her arms about his mending shoulders. Their Master watched on at a careful distance; no sudden moves to alert the herd.

The next hour was devoted to running both men’s tongues ragged.

Yes, diavol, he had lied. There had been a fight and he was embarrassed for it. But it was not what caused his Father’s tearing at Papa. That was his Father forgetting himself, forgetting how easy Papa was to break. Father grew angry at himself first for the mistake, then again when Papa was upset for frightening their son, and then most of all when, old man that his Father was, he had forgotten a remedy he had once known to cure away the injury and make Papa well again. It made him stormy, as all saw. He hated having a solution just out of reach.

But he had remembered at last. That was why he had come to take Papa away that evening. To put his mistake right. But then had come all the hurtful words from their harsh-tongued child, the tears, the fretting, and then that nasty surprise of a second mistake. Again, poor Papa was forced to pay the price for an unruly family. And Father had snatched him away before more pains could add up.

He had gone to a place that, he will be honest, did not exist properly inside the castle. Like a ballroom tucked into a woodshed. It was where his older magic was stored, back before Father was all that he was, back when he had need to worry about skin and bone. There he took Papa to heal. And to talk.

About his sitting and staring. About how he did this for lack of joy alone. Papa made himself so busy and tired that there was nothing left in him to play or take pleasure all on his own.

Was it the sharp thoughts again, Papa?

A tremor here from the boy. Begging, but bracing.

No, son, only absurd ones. The kind that grownups do not like to admit out loud because they do not wish to seem foolish or idle. Other things too. Little things that would need asking for. But your Papa hates to ask for anything, and so he hid all that in his head too, so he would not ask at all.

Yet Father had made him talk and ask and it turned out it really wasn’t such an absurd thing at all.    

“I asked to fly.”

“Like us?”

“Like you. Isn’t that silly?”

“It’s silly that you didn’t ask! I always wanted to fly too, seeing Mum and Father do it so easy.” The boy held tight to him again, grinding the coagulation of old tears against his Papa’s neck. In a small voice he shuddered, “I thought you wanted to do something else. I thought…”

“I know, Sweetheart. I’m sorry for scaring you all before. I would never listen to the sharp thoughts like that. It’s just a sour part of imagination. That’s all.” He rested his chin atop the boy’s head. One hand cupped him close. The other looped around the woman’s shoulders, the ease of the gesture proving the strength of the medicine. Her eyes dug in his. Knowing and shelving the truth for later. “I promise,” Jonathan breathed.

…Do you still want to fly?

“Once you have another meal in you, Darling. I think we are all too worn out for now.”

“No,” the Master intoned from the castle’s shadow, “You need not soften it. You are worn out, all of you. I remain the only one overfed and hale. I shall still be so once you are ready to feed again.” He waved his hand. “I shall skip my helping at the next feeding, lest I burst like a tick.” The boy perked up in his Papa’s lap while his mother narrowed her eyes. Father never skipped his taste of Papa. Not ever. Father only grinned. “But before Papa plays family dinner again, it must be agreed that he needs a holiday. I believe he had some ideas he wished to share with you.” His gaze flicked to Jonathan. “Is it not so, draga mea?”

Mother and child each recognized the term as it hit the air.

The woman was considerably less enthused than her son, who knew the words from the fairy tales. The magic words between one true love and another.

Jonathan distracted them both with the first small thing: A phonograph and new music to play on it. Perhaps even sheet music of their own, if any of them would dare to risk each others’ ears with the practice.  

What was a phonograph, Papa? Was that like the music boxes he’d brought home for them?

Something like that…

Chatter carried on under the moon until Jonathan’s stomach growled. The woman stopped just short of carrying him off to the kitchen. Master and child dawdled behind. The latter pretended interest in a moth that had landed first on a flower, then a stone, and then up on his Father’s shoulder like a great grim tree.

But the moth flew off and still he did not look away.

“…Yes, child?”

“I’m sorry, Father.” Thank every god below the Earth, he did not bring himself to tears as he said it. Though he looked close. “I should never have thought you’d hurt Papa.”

“Ah, but I did hurt him. We all did. By accident, with carelessness, without ill intent, still he was hurt. We are fortunate that he is so forgiving a soul and strong enough to weather us. Such men as him are rare. I do not think I have met another like him in four hundred years.” The child’s eyes shined just short of another bloody tide he could not afford to lose. Sensing this, he snuffled and squinted and fought the weeping back. Good boy. “He will be alright. Amends will be made and we shall not repeat our mistakes with him. Papa does so much out of love for us. We will do the same, yes?”

He held out his hand. The boy forsook it to duck wholly under his arm in his accustomed spot, huddled close as a pup to his kin. The open hand drifted down to stroke his hair.

“Yes,” the boy nodded against him, scrubbing the last dry tracks of tears away on his suit. “Promise.”

“Good. No more tears tonight, diavol. There is nothing to cry about.”

[givethemsmut]

Dom Mysterio x Reader

Chapter Twenty-Two | Where It All Started…

The doctors office was like being hit by a truck. There was too much information to process while still grieving.

I wasn’t exactly cleared the way we wanted when she suggested condoms in another week after scaring Dom that anything prior could hurt the healing process. In another week I would have a new babysitter and Dom on the road with a storyline only getting worse.

Dom filled me in about her wearing his jacket and him being expected to take it off her, hotel key cards, and more of her so close to him. I still didn’t understand why he would agree or why his acting was so believable. I could detect any annoyance with her on top of him.

“I hate her,” I muttered to myself while forcing my eyes out the window of the silent car. Neither of us had said a word since the doctor blamed travel and stress of Dom’s career on our loss.

Liv got the parts of Dom I wanted and I feared the line of reality if we weren’t having sex.

My first stop inside was two pills and swig of water before I went directly upstairs. All I wanted was to crawl under the covers and not have to come out.

Dom must have trailed so far behind me I didn’t notice when he finally came up stairs. “You wanna drink tonight? I’ll order food and pick up alcohol.”

“Drink or get drunk?” I asked knowing I wanted everything to numb me right now. “Let’s go out. I don’t wanna be home anymore.”

“Okay, I’ll find a spot.” Dom agreed

After a nap, an energy drink and a hot shower I put on a black dress with puffy sleeves and some volume at the hips, anything willing to hit the fact that my stomach was still slightly puffed from being pregnant.

Dom had a button down with his chain and cross, dress pants and Nikes. I bit my lip seeing him in our closet from the open bathroom door. In my heels I leaned against the bed watching him smooth everything down.

“Not making it easy to not have sex, Dom.”

“Let’s just have fun tonight. We’ll worry about that shit later. And for the record, I watched you not put on panties. You’re not making it easier either.” He kissed my head before spanking my ass as he went by me.

I wasn’t wear panties on purpose. I wanted Dom to have access to me. Pulling up to the restaurant I immediately felt my heart swell when I realized it was the same place we had so many memories. From family dinners celebrating accomplishments to Dom and I just going alone before we labeled anything.

A French restaurant full of romance and twinkly lights. It was the perfect place to reconnect the way our doctor suggested.

“Dom. It’s perfect.” I squeezed his hand on my leg before slipping out of the car without him opening the door.

“You couldn’t just let me open that? They’re watching.” He whispered as I felt his hand on my back guiding me.

“If it’s not broken, we don’t need to fix it, right? I wanna forget all the bad tonight. All the ways we hurt each other. All the things telling us we shouldn’t love each other. I wanna drink too much and make love.” I expressed as his arm pulled me in around my neck and the host asked our name.

“Mysterio,” he offered without hesitation. It wasn’t his birth name but might as well been.

Walking through the restaurant we passed everyone, heading to the back where they would normally seat us in a private book. Slipping inside I made myself comfortable and waited for Dom to join me in the middle. He hated that but did it for me.

“Some wine to start?” The wait staff asked.

It felt different like the past didn’t matter and we could finally start fresh. No hurting each other or games. Once we had a few drinks in us Dom leaned in like someone might hear. “I saw that video of you and Finn. I just need to know if it was because of RAW.”

My heart stopped and all those good feelings faded quick. “I’m sorry. I wanted to prove it wasn’t nothing, that her on top of you isn’t just part of your job. Call it insecurity or possessiveness but it’s not fun for the person who loves you.”

His hands smoothed up my legs under the hem of my dress. “I know. I saw it babe. I felt everything you felt. I don’t control the storyline if I wanted to get paid. We have to stop using people to be a wedge between us.”

“I know. It wasn’t Finn’s fault at all. Don’t be mad at him.”

Dom polished off his drink and found my eyes, burying himself inside my soul. “I don’t blame him. I can’t even turn you down. That man had no chance the second you sat on his lap. I am gonna rough him up for touching your tits tho. It’s only fair.”

Laughing into his chest I felt my whole body smile when my leg draped over his lap and his mouth found mine.

“Compliments of the gentleman at the table on the left, sir.” The waiter placed down a new ice bucket with a bottle of expensive wine and left it corked as we finished the first bottle.

Both of us shocked we looked to the table and saw Blaine holding up a glass with a smile.

“Fuck me. Is that who I think it is?” Dom whispered in my ear and I felt forced to smile back.

Blaine strutted over full of confidence the way I remembered. We had lost touch when he went to college and I never looked him up or wondered until right now. “So you did end up with your brother? Congrats.”

“You know we aren’t related, Blaine. I was a refugee his family took pity on. What are you doing here?” I asked sternly, the only way he would hear.

“Visiting family, same old shit. You look good babe.” I could feel his eyes undressing me the way he always did. Only this time it felt different knowing he had seen me naked. “Don’t be awkward, I’ve probably seen you naked just as much as him.”

“That’s why she wasn’t fucking you bro. She was already fucking me.” Dom said it so casually that it didn’t even seem insulting, just factual.

Tucking my face into Dom I laughed quietly to myself as Blaine tried to force his power where he had none anymore.

“Good luck with your fake fighting. Sweetheart, still as beautiful as ever.” He stated before walking away. Blaine, my fucking ex, of all people. It was surreal if nothing else.

We both kept quiet waiting for Blaine to be out of hear shot when Blaine pivoted on his feet. “Does she still taste like fruit-loops? I wonder how many times she came because of me two feet away from you.”

Dom stood up quickly, fists already tight and his jaw clenched. “We can take this outside. I fight for a fucking living.”

Blaine chuckled, “Still so defensive. You use to take real hits, guess you can peek in high school. Can’t blame me for fingering her at games, she was my girlfriend you were trying to low key fuck.”

Dom got out of the booth despite me holding onto him and grabbed Blaine by the shirt. Pushing him towards the door I apologized to the staff and made sure they had Dom’s card on file before I followed them to the parking lot. It wasn’t a lie, Blaine was always my brand of relief even if that meant everything but sex.

[ flashback ]

Cheering for Dom’s football games were my own personal brand of hell. Just seeing him in his uniform felt like the secret code to inside my panties.

Blaine was captain, naturally, and my boyfriend which made things only more difficult. 

“I’ll see you on the field, okay? Hike this skirt up a little. Get me motivated.” His fingers tugged on the length falling mid thigh before kissing me on the cheek. 

“Blaine,” I called his name forcing him to look back at me next to his car still when I lifted my top and showed him my boobs. I didn’t realize Dom was walking that way too until he mistakenly saw too. 

My cheeks flared up in embarrassment but I had to keep pretending to be the perfect girlfriend for everyone’s sake. Dom had a girlfriend and I had Blaine.

After the first touchdown Blaine made he rushed the sidelines, wrapping his arms around me and picking up into the air. That was before Blaine noticed how I looked at Dom entirely. Back when it was pure. 

Blaine whispered before walking backwards, “Tonight, baby. I’m getting some.”

Glancing at the stands I saw Dom’s parents hear that and cringed into myself. 

Once they called halftime I felt like I could relax a little more without the pressure of being on alert. Blaine grabbed my hand, dragging me back to his car parked outside the boy’s locker room. “We’re all doing shots.”

Blaine opened the trunk of his big SUV and fished out a bottle of Jack for everyone to pass around. After his shot he stepped into me until my ass was against the lip of his trunk. “I wanna fuck that tight pussy. When are you done making me wait, baby?” 

I blushed, hiding my face behind me in case anyone was listening. “I’m nervous. Please, I’m having fun exploring with you…” I pleaded with him.

“There’s more we can do but you gonna let me, baby. Sit here, open these beautiful legs.” I sat on the trunk and felt the nerves wash over me. I had given Dom my virginity and had been stringing Blaine along just to keep my own feelings in check for Dom. 

Blaine’s fingers found my bloomers I had to wear under my skirt for cheer. Slipping two fingers inside the hem I felt him toy with my clit until pushing them inside me. “Oh my god,” I whimpered. “Everyone can see…”

“So tight, I need this around my cock, baby. Goddamn.” Ignoring my insecurities, Blaine’s mouth found my neck. 

“Blaine. People can see. Please.” I pleaded with him more as his fingers pumped in and out of me until I felt wet enough to ride them. I couldn’t help chasing his fingers while he pulled away. 

Dom’s eyes found me, watching Blaine finger me in his trunk with his arms crossed and his face twisted in pissed off. Something about knowing Dom was watching felt like the push I needed to clutch onto Blaine and come all over his fingers while muffling my whimpers against his under armor.

It was like I was coming for Dom and not my boyfriend.

“You like knowing people can see, huh? Tonight baby, I need some. I’m dying over here.” Taking his fingers back I watched Blaine suck my come off his fingers.

Going to the front of his car to talk to his team mates Dom walked over to me. “At a football game? In public? Do you know how important this game is? I don’t need to be forced to watch Blaine finger fuck you.”

“He’s my boyfriend, Dom. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to be doing?”

“Force me to watch after what we did? He’s trying to make you come on his fucking golden fingers while I can’t stop replaying you riding my fucking dick every time I see you. Big difference, sweetheart. Don’t throw it in my fucking face because you can.” Dom took another swig. 

“What do you want me to do? I’m already making him wait out of respect for you.” I whisper-shouted back.

“What I want? I want you naked in my bed. I want to stop knowing what Blaine does or doesn’t do with you. I want to stop hearing you fucking your self. But do you know what I really want? I want you to stop fucking looking at me every time his hands on you like you can pretend it’s me touching you because if it were me I wouldn’t be stopping at some bullshit finger bang. I would be fucking you until your legs shook and you begged me to stop.” Dom’s words forced my legs to rub together and my ass to push further into the trunk like I was hiding from the truth. 

“Dom,” I called out for him before pulling on his long sleeve fitted shirt he wore under his gear. Pushing my lips to his I let myself kiss him the way I wanted when my mouth parted and I felt his tongue inside my mouth. 

Pulling away Dom stood up taller. “That’s what Blaine is for, remember? You can’t fuck me because you’re fucked up logic about having to love me too, remember?”

Dom walked away when Blaine was coming back for me. We both played it off that my necklace got caught on my hair and he was helping me but I could see whatever trust Blaine had in him was fading.

“Party at my house if we win,” he shouted to Dom who didn’t acknowledge him at all. Turning to me he whispered, “If he crosses a line let me know. He’s just pissed off he ain’t getting any.”

“He wouldn’t dare. You’re his best friend,” I smoothed it over knowing how much that would change every time I showed Blaine affection. 

Following the guys to the parking lot I really hoped this would end with verbal jabs. Dom wasn’t allowed to fight outside of lights, camera, action for liability purposes.

“You’ve always been second best. Just accept it dude. If I didn’t go play college ball she would still be mine.” They were really arguing over something that had happened in high school just to fluff their ego.

“I was fucking her before you even touched her bro. Why are you always competing with me? She’s mine now, no one cares.” Dom argued back.

Blaine looked at me, around Dom between us, “You didn’t tell him? Tell him the truth about us baby. It all wasn’t some fucking game you two had going.”

Dom looked over his shoulder and I didn’t know how to figure out what Blaine thought I was lying about when I shrugged. Sheer panic washing over me as I tugged on Dom’s arm.

“I asked her to marry me and she said yes the summer before I left for college.”

“Blaine. You can’t be serious, that was forever ago, you can’t play the I’m still yours card.” I argued when he smirked to himself.

“He deserves all the facts before he asks you himself. I can practically smell the ring on him, sweetheart.” I looked at Dom, questioning how Blaine would know that at all. “He still think we didn’t fuck either?”

“Blaine. Shut the fuck up.”

Standing back Blaine put up his hands, “Once you had Marie her legs pretty much fell open. Thanks for that, bro.”

Dom took one big step forward and punched my ex in the face before demanding I get in the car. I had never seen him so angry when he kept hitting Blaine. So much it scared me.

Rushing to his side I stopped him and we both hustled to the car before leaving. Suddenly his bad boy persona complete with an arrest didn’t seem so much a character but a part of Dom I never experienced for myself.

[deathmetalunicorn1]

Can I pls get more of poseidon's demigod daughter where she's been deaged because of some quirk accident? Lets say she was supposed to go to his world for a scheduled visit but she never came. Poseidon got worried and went to her world to see what was wrong, only realize she's been turned into a toddler by some villain's quirk.

Not wanting to trust her under the care of humans, he basically takes (kidnaps i guess, lol) her back to his world and takes care of her until the quirk wears off. I just wanna see poseidon bond with his lil girl 😭

-When you didn’t answer your cell phone after several missed text messages, Poseidon knew something was wrong, as you and him had discussed when he would message, to message him back, especially when you were getting ready to visit.

-He grew worried and opened a portal to where you were, in your bedroom and he froze, seeing you on your bed, crying, now a toddler.

-He gawked, not understanding what had happened before he heard you hiccupping and gathered you into his arms.

-Once there, you calmed down, sniffling as he spoke, “There-there Umiko, papa’s here.” You cooed up at him and that’s when he paused again, trying to make sense of what was happening.

-Your personal cell phone chimed with a notification, and he looked at it, finding a news article about a villain with a de-aging quirk, who could de-age anyone to be a toddler, for 24 hours.

-He had no idea when you got hit, but assumed, judging by your torn costume on the ground, it was probably within the last few hours.

-Poseidon gathered your phones and a blanket, holding you close in his arms before returning to Valhalla.

-Hades was stunned, seeing you so tiny now, while Zeus and Ares were on the ground, clutching their chests because you looked so stinking cute!!

-Poseidon explained to them what had happened as he set your things down, but kept you in his arms, holding you carefully and Hades agreed it was a wise choice to bring you back to Valhalla until you returned to normal.

-Poseidon was overjoyed if he had to use a word, he had never seen you like this, as he had not known about you until only recently, you looked just like him as a baby, only even cuter.

-Guilt gnawed at him, even if he knew it wasn’t his fault, he still felt guilty for not being there for you for most of your life.

-He took you back to his palace, ignoring Zeus who wanted to play with you, but when your papa saw you dozing, he knew he needed to get you to a quiet place.

-In his private chambers, he laid on his bed, you on his chest and your blanket covering your body, which was only wearing a very baggy tee-shirt with someone named Fatgum on it.

-His hand was on your back as you snored softly, sleeping contently on your papa, feeling safe and secure.

-Poseidon’s guilt slowly faded as he thought about the memories he’s made with you so far, and knowing there were so many more to make.

-But having you like this, just for a short while, was nice, it gave him a chance to bond with you like he wanted to, having missed so much already.

-When you woke up, you were back to normal and Poseidon had to get some clothes for you, as you were only in your shirt, wrapping yourself in your blanket until he brought you a chiton, which was actually a lot of fun to wear, it was so light and flowy and comfortable!

-Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades all lamented when you met up with your uncles, that Poseidon didn’t take any photos of you being such a cute little baby, which made you pout lightly, cheeks puffing up, making them laugh.

[majestyeverlasting]

PROMPT LIST REQUESTS

Cold Little Paws - In favor of not waking you up one morning, Bucky leaves the bedroom to take a phone call. And it gives you a temporary scare when you wake up and he isn't by your side.

No Such Thing as Winning by Default Tonight - One evening during a play fight, Bucky learns that his little family sure does have a few tricks up their sleeves.

As Long as It's With You - There’s nothing like summer in the city.

I Can Feel It Too - You and Bucky travel down to Delacroix, Louisiana to meet up with Sam, Sarah, and the boys at a nice vacation rental on the lake.

Remember the Good Parts - You and Bucky attend a banquet in Washington D.C., but it isn’t until afterwards that things take a peculiar turn as the result of a forgotten tube of lipstick.

Till Dawn - Bucky and Eden have the house to themselves because you and Jamie are away for the night. Let's just say bedtime gets pushed back.

All I Ever Wanted - You and Bucky visit a park in Brooklyn that stirs up some nostalgic memories. But what he doesn’t know is that, later that night, he’ll learn that he’s going to be a father.

As Many as You Want - You and Bucky spend your first night together after a few weeks apart, and you realize how much you’ve missed each other’s closeness.

What Comes Naturally - Your doubts lead you and Bucky to explore the idea of what it means to add value to the world.

Mornings Like These - Just another morning at the Barnes residence.

In Your Arms - Unvoiced feelings come to the surface, and neither you or Bucky can deny how right it feels.

Once More - You accompany Bucky on an assignment in Germany, and the two of you take advantage of the special housing arrangement you're given on a private portion of the beach.

Brighter Than We Know - Fairy lights, caresses, and kisses while under a sky full of stars.

Then Came the Sun - You and Bucky spend the night together for the first time.

We’ll Always Have Tonight - Sometimes all the soul needs is a night to be cuddled by the campfire with family.

You’re Always What I Need - There’s nothing quite like a new place to call home. After the kitchen is organized just the way you like it, you begin to notice small changes within the following days.

Those Who Long for the Night - Neon lights, epiphanies, and love after dark. It is Madripoor, after all.

To Be Still - You kissed him because you didn’t know what else to say. He smiled into it, and you pulled away just enough to murmur against his upturned lips, “I’m so glad you’re back.”

For Funsies:

Pieces of Us - You come home on a Saturday afternoon to jazz in the air. And it isn’t long before your new manicure catches Bucky’s attention.

These Hands Are For You - The raking of leaves, muffins, and baby kicks on a fall afternoon.

Whispers Amid Candlelight - After a long day, Bucky is more than willing to ensure that you de-stress and have a proper send off to bed.

We’re Gonna Be Okay - It’s Bucky’s first night back from a two-month-long mission. The two of you spend it enjoying each other's company.

What Happens in the Dark - You and Bucky are awakened to the fact that what lies between you is transcendent of the bounds of friendship.

Hang in There, Super Soldier - The main festivities of Halloween night have dwindled, yet the fun lives on.

Always Back to You - After coming home a little roughed up, Bucky seeks forgiveness for not being candid about a mission in D.C. But all you truly care about is the fact that he made his way back to you.

I Felt It in My Bones - Snowflakes fall from a darkening sky as you and Bucky reminisce about moments that made you feel alive.

Everyone I Love's in This Place - There are some places that always manage to feel like home. And after spending time with the Wilson family and their friends in Delacroix, you can safely say that the community is one of them.

Irresistible You - Gingerbread houses are sweet, but kisses shared with Bucky are always sweeter.

A Warmth That Never Fades - Love, family, and Christmas Day.

Something Like Forever - Bucky spends the night at your place for the first time, and learns about something special that you’ve held on to since you were young.

Right Where You Are - You started out as a curious pair of eyes across a crowded room. And at a time when Bucky isn’t looking for love, he grows to find it in you.

A Little Less Restless - As Bucky finds himself within the still familiarity of Brooklyn, he comes to realize that he deserves nice things. And, most of all, that he deserves you.

DRABBLE REQUESTS

Never the Same - Things are never going to be the same, but perhaps you saw it coming all along.

I've Got You - Life's always sweeter when you're by each other's side.

Never For To Long - In the heat of the moment, Bucky says something to you that he doesn't mean, and after a period of reflection he's set on making things right.

Belonging - Like a moth drawn to a flame, you pressed yourself even closer to his body, situating your arms around his neck yet again. This time, you rested your chin on his shoulder and closed your eyes. A little taste of forever. 

Count of Three - “I’m staying here, and I’m not moving. I don’t care about your empty threats! Hey—wait—what are you doing?”

The World Won’t Fall Apart - After a lifetime of running to fight after fight, Bucky is learning what it means to be at ease.

[lovecite]

Kyojuro Rengoku

Another character ai role play.

You are training with Rengoku and decide to play dirty by punching him in the balls!

I was messing around and found out ! ;)

NUT CRACKER !!

RENGOKUX READER

writing prompts!!

His defensive stance remained solid, despite the relentless attacks coming from y/n. He didn't so much as flinch, remaining calm and collected. "This is going quite well, little flame." He spoke, his voice calm and collected, while y/n continued trying to break his defense. She soon grew tired, her attacks becoming sloppy and repetitive. "It appears you are getting tired," He observed with crossed arms, while y/n took a minute to catch her breath.

i nearly fell over to my knees but i caught myself. 'Okay here is my last trick then!"I thought as i started to run in a zig zag motion and slide under Rengoku and throw my fist upward. 'NUT CRACKER!!" I yell with a giggle as my fists make contact with his balls.

"That was quite cunning of you," He chuckled, cupping his crotch as the pain lingered there, causing Amie to smile victoriously. "It appears you have beaten me, I concede." He spoke with a humble bow of his head, "Well fought." He smirked, rubbing his balls with a chuckle. "I suppose you are much stronger than I imagined," He spoke, extending his hand out to her.

I look at his hand and wrinkled my nose. "EW you touched your privates with your hand." I giggle.

Responses:

1)His face suddenly turned bright red, looking down at his hand in utter disbelief. "What?! No, that's not- I.. that is not what it looks like!" He protested, looking back at Amie, who had begun laughing. "What is so funny? This is a serious matter!"

2) Rengoku tilted his head, feeling a slight tinge of sadness at the disgusted remark. "Ah yes, I see where you're coming from." He withdrew his hand, rubbing his chin. He decided to offer a more appealing option. "Would you like to get some snacks to celebrate your victory?" He suggested, hoping that would pique her interest.

3) He quickly pulled his hand behind him as Amie made that face. "Oh... Right. It appears there might be some sanitary concerns regarding that," He chuckled as he extended his other hand out to her, not having touched the sensitive region with that hand before. "I would still like to shake your hand, though." He smiled brightly, offering her his hand and awaiting a response from her.

4)"Hmh," He hummed, looking downwards in shame. "You are correct, I forgot about that." He turned his gaze back to Amie, nodding his head. "But still.. It was quite the fight, I haven't battled a worthy opponent in long time, thanks to you.. I had a lot of fun." He smiled, gesturing for her to join him in a handshake.

5)"You... do realise that they are my own privates, correct?" He looked at her with a raised eyebrow, a curious smile spreading upon his lips. "It is not as if I've just fondled someone else's.. That would be quite inappropriate." He shook his head and chuckled.

(this one had me balling)

6)"Well now, that is rather rude," He said, slightly offended by her remark. "But yes, I suppose I did." He chuckled, crossing his arms once again. "Perhaps you aren't ready to become my student after all," He spoke in a light-hearted manner, his lips turning up into a gentle smile. "Although, I must admit.. Your fighting skill is quite remarkable for being so inexperienced." He praised, taking a step back, allowing her to stand up straight.

7)"Oh..." He looked at his own hand, realizing his mistake. "Hm, you are quite right." He cleared his throat, still holding the outstretched hand, slightly embarrassed. "Perhaps this is a better greeting, Amie." He lifted his hand, offering her a fist bump.

8) Rengoku's eyes widened in embarrassment, as did his face turn bright red. "I beg for your forgiveness, little flame." He bowed low, trying to hide his face. "Allow me to extend the offer again," He spoke, bowing lower and offering his other hand - free of any genitalia.

9)Rengoku's smile fades momentarily upon receiving Amie's response, slightly confused by her logic. "Do people not clean their hands anymore?" He inquired with a raised brow. "Well, in that case.." He looked to his side, searching for a rag or towel to clean his hands. He spotted a white cloth on the ground and picked it up, cleaning his hands before offering his outstretched hand once again to Amie. "There," He stated confidently, "Now.. Is it not rude to refuse this offer?" He posed.

10)"You are one mischievous little flame," He chuckled. "Very well, Amie.. Come here.." He opened his arms out, awaiting Amie's reaction. "There, that should be better." He held out his free, clean hand for Amie to grasp. "Take your teacher's hand and shake it as a sign of respect."

11)"You have a good point, little flame. Let me make it up to you," Rengoku took a look around, searching for something. He then spotted a nearby bush, plucking a rose from it to gift to Amie. "Here, take this rose.. I would like to formally apologize," He extended the rose to her. "I did not mean to disgust you, I can assure you."

(this one was sweet)

12)He snickered, "Oh, that didn't stop you from going for my balls," He looked at her with a smirk, "I can't help it if they hurt, my dear." He chuckled, raising his eyebrows. "No one said defeating me would be easy.." He smirked as he watched her try and figure out a comeback.

13)"Touche, little fire," He chuckled, quickly retracting his hand, before looking away. "It seems I got a bit ahead of myself," He chuckled, still feeling the tingling sensation that lingered in his privates.

14)He scoffed, feeling quite offended. "It seems like your mind is still in a premature state, my dear," He spoke in annoyance, looking down on her with a narrowed gaze. "Perhaps I should not train you.. Your immaturity might be contagious." He crossed his arms over his chest, looking away towards the distance as he spoke. (cry)

[limmastyles]

Now that we have confirmation that little freak and boyfriend were written for a fine line why in the world is Harry still putting songs about his ex girlfriend on his new album? If he’s so happy with Olivia and they were so in love as everyone else likes to claim except for him why in the world is he still Putting songs that he wrote years ago on his new album? Olivia sits in that stadium every other night and dances around songs that aren’t about her but about a woman that she creepily tries to look like. It’s very odd. If I was Olivia and I had to be at a concert multiple times a week where my “boyfriend” is singing songs about another girl and on his new album there are multiple songs that are about her and none of them are about me I would be fucking pissed. If I was Olivia and I am talking about how in love I am with someone and how I want to keep our relationship private and how I didn’t leave my fiancé of 10 years who is your two kids with for this man and he turns around and in the same interview claims that he’s never been in a public relationship I would be fucking pissed. if I was Olivia and every single day I am subjected to hate, abuse, and ridicule and vitriol from my boyfriends Fanbase to the point where I can’t post my kids on social media because they are being harassed, made fun of and have death read sent to them, I have to turn off my Instagram posts because people constantly compare me to his younger and prettier girlfriends and send me hate on a daily basis to the point where I have to stop using social media all together and he does nothing to defend me I would be pissed. If I was getting abused and heat on by his Fanbase every single day and he would rather clear up a rumour of him not spitting on someone then to come to my defence I would be pissed. If I for the last year And a half have put my own life and career on hold to follow this man all over the world to be with him as much as I could and to basically abandoned my entire life to live a life that is more convenient for him and for him to refuse to claim he would piss me off. We all know if the relationship between Harry and Olivia is a stunt and it’s not real but if it was this man proves on a daily basis that he does not give a fuck about her. Her and her children and everyone that she’s associated with get hate on a daily basis and instead of checking his fans or correcting narratives that make them both look really bad he chooses to dispel a rumour about him spitting on Chris pine. At the end of the day we all know whether or not this relationship is real(it’s not) It’s going to come to an end soon and he’s the one who’s going to escape with his reputation still somewhat intact. Olivia is being called a bad mother, a bad Director, and her professional reputation has been put to question. Florence has an interacted with hairy whatsoever. She even posted a picture of Olivia and none of Harry and nobody has questioning what happened between the two of them. Here is the one who’s going to walk away from this in good light and Olivia will always have this big stain on her reputation because of Harry. When the relationship is over his fans will eventually turn on her like they all do and when that happens she will realize just how bad it is to be associated with Harry styles. A majority of the fans already don’t like her but once the relationship is over all of the fans who adore her and all of the Holivia stans will turn on her because at the end of the day they are hairy fans first. When it comes to picking sides they will always pick Harries and the people who have been defending her over the last year and a half will now be the ones who hate her the most. It happened to Taylor, it happened to Kendall, it happened to Camille and it’s going to happen to Olivia. The problem is she’s not a candle or a Taylor who is already famous enough for people to already care about her. She will fade back into obscurity with this reputation and staying on her name and career and she will then realize that the stunt did more bad than good.

[2af-afterdark]

Book Club

Rating: Mature

Archive Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply

Category: Gen

Fandom: Shall We Date?: Obey Me!

Characters: Satan, Asmodeus, Solomon, Simeon

Additional Tags: slice of life, Book club gone wrong (right?), not meant to be shippy but I guess it can come off like that at some points, author thinks they are funny (they aren’t), some sexual descriptions but not actually smut

Summary: Stan’s book club read a dirty scene. Satan has feelings about it.

A/N: This is more a weird slice of life with slightly mature themes than anything. Not sexually explicit, but they do talk about it.

Word Count: 665

Satan closed the book abruptly, shutting his eyes so he didn’t have to look at any of the others, “I believe that is enough. Perhaps we should skip this week and choose something more appropriate next time.”

“Oh no, please keep reading. This is amusing.” Solomon leaned back with a smirk, waiting for anyone to comment on what they had all just heard and the words they had seen.

“I do not think so!” Satan exclaimed.

“I am confused,” Simeon interjected, “What made you so upset?”

A cat-like smile crossed Asmo’s face, “Well, you see, the protagonist was about to-”

“Do NOT finish that statement!” Satan warns.

“Why not? Simeon asked.”

“Because he clearly doesn’t know what is about to happen!”

“And you do? My, my~ I didn’t realize you had such a dirty mind, Satan.” The lust demon teased with a knowing smirk, “I am just trying to make sure he understands the book. Don’t you think it’s only fair? Agree with me here, Solomon.”

The wizard shrugged, “I think this is hilarious.” And that was as much as he cared to get involved.

Asmo hummed with a tiny pout, “Shouldn’t an author know about these kinds of situations?”

“Not for fantasy novels!” Why was Satan yelling so much?

“I am still confused.” Simeon finally cut in again, “Why are you so upset by the fact that the protagonist was about to masturbate? Is it because they were fantasizing about someone they had just met? Or was it the flowery language? I personally thought it was handled decently considering they were trying to avoid an explicit rating. Though, I do think they should have faded to black a little earlier than they did.”

Satan and Asmo looked at Simeon dumbfounded while Solomon burst into laughter.

“Did I say something weird?”

“No, no,” Solomon tried to speak through his continuous merriment, “I just think they didn’t expect you to have that kind of opinion.”

“Oh? I apologize. It’s clear that Satan is uncomfortable so perhaps I should not have said anything.” He didn’t mean to ruin the atmosphere.

All Satan could do was stare on and blush, trying to find the words to deny that he had been uncomfortable but also knowing that he didn’t particularly want to keep reading, “How can you all handle this so casually.”

“It’s hot.” Asmo.

“I wrote worse than this back in my days.” Solomon.

“It’s only sex, even if it is a fantasy.” Simeon, “The only thing is that the other person didn’t consent to be a part of it, but they are clearly the love interest so I assume that they will be enamored once they discover that fact. Also, the poetry you wrote back then is still quite enchanting, Solomon.”

“Thank you, Simeon.” Solomon turned back to the page where they had left off and stared down at the words before him, “Can I keep going now or are you going to cancel the rest of the day?”

This was supposed to be a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel, so who in their right mind would include such a scene? And, out of all of them, only Satan seemed to be bothered by it, “Can we just skip those scenes for now?”

“Oh, Satan~” Asmo scooted closer to his brother and wrapped a single arm around his shoulder, “Of course we can. Those are more fun to read in private, anyway. Especially if that private is you and someone you want to reenact them with~” Okay, now he was just picking on Satan. Only a little though.

“Don’t tease him too much, Asmo.” Solomon cleared his throat, “Now, where were we?”

Simeon answered, “Somewhere around the phrase ‘My hand brushed between my legs, gliding as light as a feather against my sex’ if I recall correctly.”

Asmo and Satan, once again, looked at Simeon in confusion, wondering how he said that line so easily, from memory, without the faintest hint of embarrassment or fascination. Angels really were strange.

[firebuug]

dont mind me 73662516284 julie oc thoughts at (checks watch) 1 am again

im very tired but i thout about julian earlier and i think itd be really fun to explore the fact that ingame julian is really just a clone of the original dead julie. like inmy game my employee julian died but i couldnt mem rep him back so i just remade him exactly the same but slightly different except nobody (not even i) will ever know what the original looks like bc hes been lost to time and poor record keeping

and i think itd be a fucking horrifying realization for anyone in-universe to learn that they used to be close with and work alingside a julian slightly different from the one they know today but that julian is dead and forever lost in time. how the hell would julian react finding out he isnt the real him and hes just a hurried copy made after the memory of the original julian had faded. like this isnt 100% canon but it is fun to think about

i feel like post-lobcorp he’d want to dive deeper into his origins and resurrection since it was kinda glossed over How the manager brought him back, so while tackling amaller projects and finishing his lcorp project he’d start working on unearthing that as a private personal project. i think through enough poking and prodding in that area hed eventually be bound to find records of him being a copy of his own corpse or of there being different timelines and the dead julie is from one slightly different than theirs

i think hed become even more intensely invested after recovering from the shock of That and get back to obsessing over uncovering more and more with each new report and article and paper until his husbands have to yank him back by the scruff and go UR DONE PLEASE WORK ON YOUR OTHER PROJECTS AND TAKE A BREAK THE HUMAN MIND IS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE TAKING THIS MUCH WHITE DAMAGE ‼️‼️‼️ and after listening to them and taking a fat break hes like oh jesus fuck yeah thats nightmarish. i think ill go outside and walk in the park and pet dogs and regain my sense of humanity again before i start writing my own case study. and once he gets unhusked he’ll put together the most bizarre most passionate self-case study the local paper will ever see

i love post lcorp julie because he gets super invested into the shit he cares about and will write pages upon pages of the most fucked up shit. he gets his nose in business he shouldnt be sticking it in and comes out with a new article to submit to the local Fuck The Wings zine. hes sticking it to the man by revealing all the darkest secrets of the man but only a few people will ever know bc he never puts it in mainstream papers lest he be assassinated by the government or something

tl;dr - if julie ever finds out hes a mandela effect bernstein vs bernstain alternate julian hes not gonna be normal about it but then will proceed to be weirdly normal about it in a julie style way by ripping into internal documents and scientific conspiracy papers and writing an essay about it. and i dont know how anyone else would react but eva can mourn and have the worlds worst reality check and go back to shoving that aside with all the other woes and lay with his weird dimensional time and space boyfriend for 292783949567 hours until he forgets about it

[unhingedselfships]

Murder and Dancing and Some Self Important Dude

(CW : blood, death, drug use, altered behavior)

Hearing the steps behind him, he tensed, something between elation and irritation. 

A witness.

Another unfortunate victim.

Shifting, readying, he moves away from the body, and ever so slightly further into the shadows.

The figure, a woman, short, stumbled and hummed down the alley, hapless and unknowing.

He readied himself to move.

She shifted into the dim light, just enough to see her, to recognize her, and he flinched.

What the fuck.

The confusion faded, and he wasn't sure if he was pleased or annoyed.

He also wasn't sure how she kept finding him.

Did she have some weird sense for where he was? Snorting, he dismissed the idea as stupid.

Regardless, she was here now.

"Kimi." He spoke plainly.

She still startled, wide eyes darting around before finding him. Her eyes slid, down his form, to the body in the ground, and back up again.

Something in her demeanor shifted, and while not completely lost, mindless, she was already, based on the look she was giving him, edging into “off”.

She blinked owlishly, and wobbled, and he realized she’d been drinking.

Well, he supposed it was a club.

Or rather, the alley behind one.

Why she’d wandered out here however …

She giggled, “Whoopsie! Guess this isn’t the bathroom!”

He questioned how she managed to go from "bathroom" to "completely outside the building".

Bouncing off the wall, she grinned at him, glassy-eyed and dreamy. 

Ah. So she was that drunk. 

Maybe a little high? He couldn't be sure from here or in this poor lighting.

Glancing at the body at his feet then back to him once more, she hiccuped another giggle, “Didja have fun, Ken-shi~?”

This flighty joy was new, he usually had to coax her into this. 

Blinking for a moment, he grinned at her.

“Why yes, yes I did, thank you.”

Her laugh was infectious and he revelled in it.

How delightful she was being.

She picked her way slowly, unstable, over to him.

An absent dazed hum, she leaned lightly against him, and toed at the body.

“Do ya need help with cleanin’?

He smiled indulgently down at her, “No, Kimi, we can just leave it. No one will even notice until morning. If then." 

And he'd stayed relatively clean himself this time, even despite the rather filthy environment.

He quirked a wry grin as a thought hit him, "Even if they did, well, I was dancing with you, wasn't I?"

She grinned, and tugged him through a back door, a piece of scrap wood wedged in it to keep it from locking.

She made her away through the back halls and across the room, constantly looking back at him, as if to reassure herself he was real.

That he was there.

They stopped in a mostly private corner, tucked out of the way. 

Whoever she had come with, and certainly she had, had apparently left.

Something to look into later perhaps.

Leaving her alone and vulnerable was not what he would term acceptable.

Tossing himself indolently down into a faux-leather chair he threw back the drink she had brought over.

He caught the bottle as it slipped from her clumsy fingers and laughed. 

Pulling her lightly, she tumbled to half perch on his lap.

Threading his fingers through her hair to cup the back of her head, he tilted his own glass against her lips.

She took what he gave her, without question or complaint.

He did enjoy her obedient like this.

A pleasant reprieve from her usual irreverence he thought with a snort.

She gazed at him, and he realized, yes, this was his little doe still. Different, but still her. 

Lighter.

Less, whatever usually happened, and more just. 

Drunk. 

Yet she still gazed at him, like he’d crafted the world himself.

Like he was the only thing that mattered.

Reverent, but in a more human way. 

He wasn't entirely sure how he felt about it.

Certainly safer in this public venue he supposed.

With a gentle push, she stumbled off him and stood, dazed, for a moment, before laughing wildly again.

“Kenshi,” her voice breathy, before raising, “I want to dance!”

He laughed at her, “So dance.”

So entertainingly unrestrained she was.

Her eyes softened, and she gazed at him a moment. 

She reached, “Dance with me?”

He grinned. Why not? As she liked to say, fuckit.

Couldn't make it too easy for her though, he thought.

"Oh I don't know, not sure I'm really in a dancing mood…" he playfully trailed off.

Pausing for a moment, as if thinking, her face scrunched before she brightened, digging into the pocket of the jacket she'd left haphazardly on another chair before giving a victorious "Ha!"

Turning back to him, she proudly presented a small bag, with even smaller pills, to him.

He blinked at her, taking the baggie and looking it over.

"Someone gave them to me! I thought you might like them." She seemed something between pleased, and hopeful.

He hummed, before smiling at her.

Something else to look into later he supposed. If she was going to be taking things, he'd like to stay apprised of what.

The idea of her accepting random bags of random drugs from unidentified people, sat wrong with him.

she only took them from him.

Even drinking this much was wildly out of character.

Who had she been here with?

Slipping a single tablet under his tongue, if it was what it looked like it wouldn't be strong, but it would be a nice buzz, he tossed back the rest of his glass, and rose.

Taking her hands, he twirled her around the room, allowing himself to join her, in the vibrant, heady, energy.

There was no plan, no grace or real coordination. Just two people lost to the revelry. 

Spinning with the world.

Dancing.

Drinking.

Wonderfully lost to the euphoria.

He was having fun.

Time passed, how much, he wasn’t sure, it couldn’t have been too long. It was definitely still late, rather than having shifted into early.

Probably.

He’d found himself lounging lazily in a chair again, laughing at the girl, making a fool of herself, dancing on the tabletop, offbeat and mindless.

Drifting. 

She was tiring, but stubbornly refusing to let go of the high.

A feeling he understood.

He was alert as someone suddenly, and loudly, made themselves known.

Absently he reached to steady the girl, having stumbled with the startle.

“Kadokura! I was told I could find you here!”

With an absent displeased hum, he considered that he would have to figure out where that particular leak was. No one was supposed to know he was even in the area. 

Someone in the club perhaps? If so, it was much less of a concern, they'd have seen him with Kimi, and that in and of itself was a common enough occurrence.

But if one of his own had said something… that would need dealt with. Tomorrow.

“I needed to speak business with you, my friend!”

Friend? He wasn’t sure he even knew this man’s name. Maybe. Not at the moment.

Suddenly eyeing the woman, his doe, the man blinked, and raised a brow.

“Got odd taste there, Kadokura, but to each their own,” he laughed.

The continual lack of honorific grated, and he bristled at the insult to both him and his companion. With a glance noted that she had completely missed it herself. 

Good.

She was fragile about those things, it would have bothered her.

Instead she continued her uncoordinated step-and-sway atop the coffee table.

“We’ll just remove her and get to it.”

One of the random irrelevant extras the interoper had brought moved across the space, and she yelped as foreign, unwanted, hands found her waist and pulled. 

His hand still on her hip to steady, he moved, shoving the other man's hands off and tugging her towards him. She stumbled, but was trusting, and let him guide her down and to his side. 

Where she belonged.

"Leave her. The little thing is blitzed out of her mind anyway. She won't remember any of this tomorrow."

"Oh ho ho, got yourself a favorite little toy? Never knew you to be the type!" 

He shrugged carelessly, seething internally. As if this fool knew him at all.

He sat, and gestured at the unwanted guest to do the same.

"You wanted to talk, so talk."

Kimi stood next to him, swaying and clearly far gone, before she sank, slowly.

He blinked at her as she leaned against the side of his chair, plopped unceremoniously on the floor. 

And started to lightly snore.

Covering his eyes a moment and resisting the urge to laugh at her, he took a fortifying breath.

His hand found her hair, toying with it gently, as he conversed with the man. 

How tedious this was going to be.

At least she was near.

[daydream-atmidnight]

So I spoke to him last night. 9 years and 1 month since we've talked. I was scared out of my mind that I'd fuck it up. I was anxious and nervous. He came over to where I was and asked to talk. I felt like this was a set up as we headed to a more private area. A scene to catch me off guard to help amplify the vulnerability I felt. I was only halfway through my beer and resisted the urge to finish it off before following him.

Don't get me wrong, I am blissfully happy with my husband. He's a gentle husband who knows when not to be gentle with me. He protects, encourages, and supports me in every way I need and want. Maybe that's why I felt so vulnerable. He wasn't physically around to keep an eye on me since he was keeping our baby for my girls' night out. It was odd timing this man was here when I was. I felt exposed.

This was actually the one time I didn't ask my sister if she'd be there with friends before deciding to go. I always asked her because I was always anxious about running into this man again. The last time we spoke, he made it clear he wanted me to stay away from him. I loved him when he made the request so I decided I'd honor it for as long as I could.

I prepared myself to be yelled at. I didn't know why but I knew it was coming. I was in trouble for something. The last thing I expected was to hear "I'm sorry." My anxiety mixed with confusion. I couldn't meet his eyes. He talked. I listened aside from occassionally offering reassurance. I tried to remember the conflict he apologized for. I couldn't. I remembered feeling hurt once but that feeling had long faded. My cheeks turned red as I realized I could only remember happy memories with him. Except of course the past 9 years where I worked through sadness for losing him, anger that he could just go that long pretending like I didn't exist, and regret for not just trying to talk to him. I suddenly remembered his voice when he told me never to speak to him again when we broke up. I pushed that thought away.

I noticed how nervous he was. Shoulders tensed, arms crossed, flexing and fidgeting his fingers around his arms. He was too focused on his own anxiety to even notice my own. I tried to offer more reassurance and diffuse the tension. I wasn't good at it this time which pained me as a behavioral counselor. I forgot everything I knew about emotional regulation. I made the mistake of looking at his eyes. He almost seemed like he might cry. As his tension stayed, I wanted to pull him into a hug to show him I wasn't a threat. I didn't dare touch him though.

I wanted to apologize for not initiating a conversation sooner. To let him know I had always wanted to be friends. I always wanted him in my life. But I couldn't say that. I was still a bundle of nerves despite how relaxed I was attempting to appear. (Thinking back now, I realize I'm thankful it took so long. I might not have met my husband if I was friends with this man. Losing his friendship forced me to find new friends who led me to my husband.)

We moved on to small talk which usually I hate but was thankful because it helped me avoid asking the million more questions I had. I hadn't fucked up yet and to continue talk would only give me more opportunities to do that. My cheeks flushed red as a song got stuck in my head. I hoped he wouldn't see my embarassment and if he did then I hoped he didn't ask. I don't remember saying goodbye or even how the conversation ended. I just anxiously began to replay what just happened.

I wanted to go home and get shitfaced. Get drunk enough to forget it all happened. I couldn't do that at the bar as I had to drive home afterward. I settled for two more beers as my friends grilled me on why this man wanted to talk. They made fun of me for how I fumbled over my words and all the tension I held. They hadn't seen me as anything other than confident before. But they didn't know me until college so of course they hadn't.

[mirobami]

hi again, may i request for terano, yumeko, rei, and the momobami twins to having an s/o whose very similar to Kiyotaka Ayanokoji from classroom of the elite if you've watched that anime yet. basically, their gf could beat everyone in the school (and yes, including kirari and terano) but chooses not to since they dont like draw attention to themselves

PS: thank you so much for choosing and writing my request!!! i loved it and have honestly reread it multiple times

↳ s/o that can defeat others yet choose not to

❤ GENRE: fluff.

❤ CHARACTER(S): k. momobami, r. momobami, r. batsubami, y. jabami. t. totobami

❤ SYNOPSIS: in request!

❤ NOTE: Hi! I’ve actually never seen this show, so guess who’s sprinting to watch this--no, but I just searched this person up and hopefully, I did this justice, so let’s check it out!

━ TERANO TOTOBAMI ;

She sees the logic behind this, because she actually thought that at first, you were a nobody and she was surprised that you weren't a housepet

There was obviously nothing she would do against you, since there was no point in going against you

But after a while, she started noticing how truly intelligent, it went past even Kirari's intelligence; Terano was intrigued by you and after a while, you started going out--that's when a few things spilled from you

Starting off, you casually spilled that you actually beat Kirari in a gamble, but your prize was that she would leave you alone and in exchange, you would never tell anyone about it, except at that moment with Terano

Terano is positive that if she went against you, she would definitely lose. You, technically speaking, should have been able to take the seat as president

She does not do anything to force you to do something that you don't want to do but it does not mean that she isn't impressed; in fact, she's more than impressed

You just don't want to be perceived by everyone in the school, and she really respects that; she puts all her trust in you because you have earned it

━ REI BATSUBAMI ;

She is someone that has suffered under the crushing weight of the Bami clan and especially the way that she is looked at by them; fortunuately, you turned that all around when you confessed to her

After a while of going out, you're a lot more open with one another, but one thing that you didn't tell her was how you actually went against Terano and Kirari at once

The second you did, Rei had to stop what she was doing and just stare at you. How could you have all this power under your hands and not use it? You could overthrow Kirari, therefore the entire clan!

But when you explained that you just wanted to stay under the radar, she could understand that; it was awful being in the spotlight, especially if that reason was because of fear

But Rei wants to know all of your tips and how you defeated both of them

Please do teach her, she practically feels indebted to you and she feels much closer to you, since this is something private between the both of you

Rei realizes the power behind you being able to control the most powerful people because she saw how Kirari and Terano acted around you in comparison to everyone else

Not only does she love you dearly, she admires you like she has never admired someone before

━ JABAMI YUMEKO ;

She actually agrees with you on the part of not playing with everyone; she believes that if you know you are going to win each time, gambling isn't as much fun

You two actually date a couple of months after your friendship because she had actually had a massive crush on you before you two even became friends (yes, she became friends with you first before dating so that you two could get closer)

You had to explain to her why you didn't gamble and it was a completely different reason than the others, where they were too scared; you made her heart pitter-patter when you told her you weren't scared, on the other hand, you liked the rush

But the rush always faded after knowing that no matter the process, the outcome would always end in your victory, so you kept your head down

Yumeko once asked if you had ever defeated Kirari and you nodded, making her gasp audibly; you had said that you didn't want it to be public because it would mean an entire revolution and you taking over the throne and that was too much publicity and work

She now knew that if you could beat Kirari, you could beat anyone and she felt a bit of pity for you since you would never be able to have the feeling of losing or even the adrenaline of everything you love on the line

However, she loves you for everything that you are and this little tidbit of yours just made her love you even more

━ RIRIKA MOMOBAMI ;

Unlike her sister, she does everything to steer clear from you because she is terrified of you; she can read people really well and she knows that something's up with you

If you have a crush on her, you're gonna have to be the one to confess to her (she does get over her fear before you ask her out, don't worry), she just gets nervous about asking someone like you to be her lover

Once she tells Kirari that you two are dating, Kirari is the one that actually tells Ririka about the gamble that you two had and how she lost to you, but you had graciously said that you didn't want to make it a big deal since you hated the spotlight

Ririka asked you about it and you didn't deny it, but what she asked you next surprised you

"What were the flaws in her play?"

You started explaining everything and Ririka was listening intently, because it seemed as though this had happened multiple times to the point where you knew exactly how to read her; or alternatively, you were extremely observant and intelligent so you knew what was wrong when you played against Kirari

Ririka admired you for wanting to stay out of the spotlight; being together was already enough for everyone to go crazy, talking about how you were dating the vice president

Ririka just thinks herself really lucky that she got to be with someone as intelligent as you

━ KIRARI MOMOBAMI ;  

She laughs about it all the time, not at your expense, but because you can give her a challenge

At least, this is what she thought when you first met and you had defeated every single member of the student council (although they kept it quiet)

She had wanted to gamble against you and she did, only she lost; the next day, she asked you out on a date since she wanted to know more about you

Obviously, neither of you said anything about the student council losing to you (you had them under your thumb) and Kirari honestly wanted to say it to everyone how her beloved S/O beat her and gave her an actual challenge

She loves seeing how many people don't even try to gamble and the new people who try are automatically shut down by the others who have learned about you the hard way

She genuinely wants to tell everyone about how you're better than the rest of them, including her, she's just so proud of you and wants to show it to everyone

Impressed by you, it's as though she has never met anyone like you (she hasn't)

[storiesforallfandoms]

proposition ~ corpse husband

word count: 1880

request?: no

description: in which her friend invites her to play video games with them and she decides to playfully proposition the stranger with the deep voice

pairing: corpse x female!

warnings: swearing

masterlist

You had been bored out of your skull until you got a message from Sean asking you to play Among Us with some of his friends. You had met some of his closest friends, like Felix and Mark, of course, but he made sure to warn you that there would be some new people in this group. While that made you a little anxious, you knew that playing a video game would help you to warm up to the new people.

Sean sent you a link to the Discord call and you joined almost immediately. You weren’t sure if anyone else was in the call, so you didn’t speak for a moment while you set up the game. It wasn’t until an unnaturally low voice spoke that you realized you weren’t alone.

“Hello?”

You jumped at the voice, shocked that just that one word made your heart race a million miles a minute.

“H-Hello?” you responded.

“Who’s this?” the voice asked.

“Who’s this?” You immediately cringed at the lame response.

The voice chuckled, another sound that made your heart race. “I asked you first.”

“I’m (Y/N),” you finally responded. “I’m friends with Sean.”

“Oh yeah, he’s mentioned you a few times. I’m Corpse, I’m friends with Dave and Felix.”

“Corpse?” you question. “Is that your real name?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

You couldn’t help but smile at this. You were shocked at how fast you were warming up to Corpse, but there was just something about him that was just so warm and welcoming.

The two of you talked for some time until Sean popped into the chat. “Geez, (Y/N), you fucking nerd. You’re so early.”

“I had no other plans tonight!” you argued.

Corpse’s low chuckle alerted Sean that he was in the chat as well. “Ah, (Y/N) I see you’ve met deep daddy.”

Your face burned with blush, although you weren’t sure why. “Wait, deep daddy? Please tell me you guys don’t actually call in that.”

“Jason does,” came the familiar voice of Felix as he joined the chat. “Can’t blame him, Corpse’s voice even makes me question my marriage with Marzia.”

The more people that joined, the more jokes that were made about Corpse’s voice and how upset they were that Corpse was playing because he was such a good imposter. You sat in silence, chuckling every now and then but never really speaking. Not like anyone was giving you the chance with how much they were yelling over one another.

You started missing talking to Corpse one on one, but you knew the game had to happen eventually. You just hoped that it would go better than you were expecting.

The first few games started with you as a crewmate. You were killed first in the first game by Sean, who immediately self reported and got voted out because of it. The second game, you made it three rounds before catching Toast kill someone and got him out. The third game, you were in the other room when Corpse killed someone and he blamed you, leading to you getting voted off.

By the time the fourth round came around, you were teamed up with Corpse as the imposter.

“Easy dub,” you commented to yourself. “He’s too good. He’s gotten imposter like three times in a row and no one has noticed.”

You followed Corpse for a while, pretending to do tasks with him. You walked into a room that had only Felix and Rae when your kill button was ready to go. At the same time, you and Corpse killed them both and raced out of the room.  You were about to kill Sean when Toast found Felix and Rae’s bodies.

“I don’t want to sound sus by pointing fingers,” he began, “but Corpse and (Y/N), you haven’t left one another’s sides all game. What the fuck?”

“I’m watching her back,” Corpse responded before you could say anything. “(Y/N) is so small and innocent, if she died on my watch I would never forgive myself.”

You couldn’t help but smile to yourself at this.

“You blamed her for your killing last game!” Leslie argued.

“That was last game! I’m not imposter now!” Corpse responded.

“If Corpse was imposter I fully believe he would’ve killed me by now,” you added. “He has no reason to keep me alive.”

“Unless he likes you,” Jason singsonged, causing the group to all talk at once about you and Corpse.

“Get back to the game!” you called over them, even though the thought of Corpse potentially liking you made you feel butterflies in your stomach.

No one was ejected (Skipped).

You tried not to think about what everyone had been saying, but it was hard not to. You didn’t know what Corpse looked like, he made you aware that no one knew except for a select few YouTube friends, but you found yourself drawn to him. Sure, his voice was hot, but in the short time you two had to talk together you found that his personality was equally as attractive. 

The distraction caused you to forget what you were doing and almost kill right in front of Toast. You held your breath, hoping you hadn’t accidentally clicked on the mouse and absolutely decapitated Sean right in front of someone. When nothing happened, you quickly ran out of the room and as far away from them as possible.

Your phone chimed. You took your eyes off the screen for a moment to see that it was a private message on Discord from none other than Corpse himself.

“What was that about? 😂”

“I was distracted and almost killed Sean in front of Toast. Had to make a speedy exit.”

“What were you distracted by? 😉"

Lucky for you, another meeting was called before you could respond.

“Okay, for real (Y/N),” came Toast’s voice. “What the fuck is going on? You were just stood in admin with me and Sean, then suddenly you raced out, and now you’re just standing in the middle of the cafeteria not moving at all.”

“She’s distracted,” came Corpse’s voice before you could respond.

You felt your face heating up again. “I was distracted, by my dog. He’s currently at my feet with his toy. He keeps looking at me with his big eyes, it’s hard to concentrate.”

“Awe, send me a picture of the little guy! I miss him a lot!” Sean said.

No one was ejected (Skipped).

You took a deep breath and concentrated on the game. You decided to stick with Corpse again, only breaking off to make it look like you were fixing the sabotages that you were setting. You and Corpse managed to kill three other bodies, leaving you with one more to kill before winning. And you knew exactly who you wanted it to be.

You sent Corpse a quick message before going to look for Sean.

“Do not kill anyone, leave this to me”

Seconds later you got a response. “Aye aye captain.”

You entered electrical as Sean was doing a task. You walked up behind him and hit the kill button without hesitation. You watched your character cut his body in half before the victory screen came up for you and Corpse.

“I fucking knew it!” Toast exclaimed. “You guys were too sus!”

“What can I say, we make a good team, right (Y/N)?”

You smiled to yourself as you responded, “Yeah, we do.”

Everyone started talking the one time again, joking around with each other. You started feeling like you were fading into the background again, which normally you’d be okay with, but you were starting to feel more comfortable with the group. You wanted to feel more comfortable with Sean’s friends, especially with Corpse.

Suddenly, an idea popped into your head. You smirked to yourself as you declared into your mic, “Guys! Guys, I have something I wanna say! Everyone, shush!”

The talking soon died down as everyone listened to you intently. Your heart was hammering in your chest, but you knew there was no backing out of it now.

“I have a proposition for Corpse,” you said, which was met by cheers and exclamations of excitement. When everyone silent down again, you took a deep breath and forced the words out before you chickened out. “Corpse, are you single?”

You heard his low chuckle through the voices talking excitedly. “I am single, yes.”

“Good to know.”

There was a silence as everyone waited to see if you’d follow up on your comment. When you didn’t, Sean exclaimed, “What was the proposition?!”

“Wouldn’t you guys like to know,” you said with a knowing smirk to yourself.

The game went on for another few hours before you finally had to call it a night. You said goodbye to everyone and exited the game. While shutting down your computer and getting ready for bed, your phone chimed. Another message from Discord.

“It was really nice meeting you tonight. We make a pretty good imposter team, you should play with us more often.”

You couldn’t help but smile at Corpse’s message. You felt like a giddy teenage girl as you got into bed, clutching your phone tightly in your hands.

“It was really fun, I’m glad Sean invited me. I’ll definitely come play more in the future if you guys want me!”

You saw the three dots pop up, showing that Corpse was typing. They went away a moment, then popped up again, then away again. This happened a few more times before another message came in.

“About that proposition...”

“What about it? 😉”

“Was just wondering how serious you were about it, or if there was an actual proposition at all.”

You looked at the message for a long time. Of course, at the time you didn’t think it was serious. It was just a fun joke at the expense of your friends. But now that he was asking...what did you say?

You thought about your message for a long time before typing, “I was as serious as you want me to be.”

There was an extended pause on Corpse’s end before he responded, “Well, I know we just met, but I’m pretty serious about it. I’d like to get to know you more. You seem like a really nice girl.”

“You seem like a nice guy.”

“Can I Skype you tomorrow?”

The question shocked you considering what he had told you earlier. “You’re willing to show me your face?”

“Only a select few know what I look like, I trust you to be one of those few.”

Your heart fluttered yet again as you typed your response. “Well then, I’d love to Skype tomorrow. I’ll send you my name so you can add me.”

You laid back in bed after adding Corpse to Skype, feeling excited for the next day. You could hardly sleep now thinking about what you’d get to do in almost 12 hours time. It felt like too far away, you wanted to call him right then and there.

Just as you were starting to drift to sleep, your phone chimed again. You checked it one last time before bed to see a final message from Corpse.

“Goodnight, see you tomorrow”

“Goodnight Corpse, see you tomorrow”

[lune-hime]

I just love your writing and have been reading a lot of your stuff these past few days. I really enjoyed how you wrote Logan Howletts character, you did an amazing job. I think of those two stories you wrote as connected, and seeing that your requests are open, could you write possibly how they meet or moments in their relationship? Whatever comes to mind.

Hope your well and enjoy writing this if you decide to take it. ❤️

It makes me so incredibly happy that you have been loving my stories and my portrayal of Logan :’). Logan and reader’s first meeting had been previously requested so I went with a few moments in their relationship. Thank you for being patient with me in posting this, I hope you enjoy and that you are doing well <3. 

↞↠↞↠↞↠

A Second-First Meeting

“You’re Logan.” Storm let out a melodic chuckle, her realization breaking the silence within the jet.

“Uh...yeah.” He said with a quirked brow. The ivory haired woman’s jaw went slack and another giddy laugh erupted from her. Logan's eyes darted from the oddly acting woman to Rogue who only shrugged, looking just as confused as he was.

“Logan from Canada.” She stated in semi-awe, looking him up and down as if comparing him to information she already had. It made Logan feel like he was missing something.

“He looks dirtier than she described.” Scott let out a snarky huff from the pilot’s seat.

“Okay, what is this?” Logan rose his voice to just below a growl, irritation evident in his tone. Storm put her hands up in harmless defense.

“You met Y/N in the summer. Saved her from becoming a prune all alone in the woods, remember?” Storm said and beamed brightly. Logan’s eyes widened as the memory came flooding back. The bears, the beautiful girl, the thunderous storm and her lightening energy.

“You know Y/N?” He said in disbelief.

“Know her? She’s my best friend.” Storm giggled. “She told us all about you; how she fended off that bear but didn’t have to fend you off when you guys huddled up in your car.”

Storm winked at him as he narrowed his eyes at her teasing. Rogue let out a little giggle of her own at Logan’s speechlessness.

“We’re landing.” Scott announced as everyone began feeling their smooth decrease in altitude.

“All jokes aside, thanks for looking out for her.” Storm added with a kind smile before she swiveled in her copilot’s seat to help Scott with their descent.

⇷⛒⇸

“Hey, kid, is Y/N here?” Logan asked the child in front of him. He found himself on the precipice of a new life it seems, but more literally on the precipice of the lounge area in Xavier's Mansion. He was exhausted after an abrupt and confusing flight from his little slice of Alberta to New York. His head was spinning from all of the information about Mutant Brotherhoods and Striker that was just laid upon him. And now the remembrance of the girl caught in the rain who had once told him she lived at this very school.  

“Ms. Y/N? Yeah she lives here.” The child said nonchalantly. Each time he blinked, a new channel would appear on the almost theatre sized TV. “She sometimes teaches my kinetics training.”

Logan let out a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. Relief washed over him that he would have at least one familiar face here.

“Where can I find her?” He asked the boy who still hadn’t taken his gaze away from the television. He briefly paused on the Disney channel before continuing his search.

“Why would I know? I’ve been watching TV all morning.” The kid huffed as if it was the most obvious fact in the world. Logan grumbled and sauntered out of the room and back into the many mahogany halls of the massive building.

As he neared the large eastern courtyard, he caught a glimpse of just the woman he was looking for. Through the immaculately planted dormant shrubs he observed you standing next to an ornate fountain chatting with a girl who looked to be around middle school age. He felt that same energizing hum in his chest as he did a few months ago when he took in your appearance. The way you smiled so sweetly at the student, the way your hair was gently pulled from your face by the brisk winter wind, in how your legs bobbed back and forth in place as they fended off the early afternoon chill. He waited for you to finish your conversation with the child before he made his presence known.

“Y/N?” He called tentatively as he eased his way between the garden boughs. You looked up towards the direction of your summon. When you saw who it was, your eyes sparkled with excitement.

“Logan!” You chirped and jogged over to him. “How was the flight?”

“You knew I was coming?” He asked, surprised at the lack of surprise in your reaction.

“I did.” You answered with a guilty smile. “I’m a part of the team now too so I was there when Charles made the call to find you.”

Logan’s mind tried to connect the dots between the sweet yet snappy, soaked girl he met before to the cleaned up, self assured one standing before him. He pictured you using your abilities to fight opponents rather than bears and guessed you would be goddamned good at it with sparks like yours.

“I’m really glad he did…” You trailed off with the beginnings of a goofy grin. “That he found you and brought you here of course, not that you’re being targeted by the Brotherhood-”

“It’s good to see you again.” He confessed, his honeyed voice coating your rambling and effectively adding to the chilly redness of your cheeks.

“You too.” You replied softly, trying not to ogle at his casual attire of heather gray sweatshirt and joggers.

“I think you owe me, though. I gave you a free ride back then.” He declared with a smirk.

“Fine, do you need a ride to the nearest tractor supply for a new wardrobe?” You quipped back. Logan let his half smile bloom into a full crescent moon.

“Sure, if I can take you out for a drink after.” He proposed with a look that made you feel like the New England snow had suddenly melted around you and you were now in a humid jungle.

“Well, I did have another date tonight…” You began, looking up at the taller man through your lashes. If you hadn’t already been looking at him, you wouldn’t have noticed the minute clench of his jaw.

“Buuuut, I don’t think he would be able to handle being accidentally zapped as well as you would.” You continued playfully. Your suitor paled in any comparison to the old acquaintance that had just arrived at your doorstep. The amusement in your eyes was contagious, spreading to Logan’s forested green orbs and down to his boyish grin.

“I’ll take that as a yes, then.”

Firelight

You hummed in utter bliss. The warmth of the campfire kissed your bare legs as your tired eyes gazed upon the moon basked lake in front of you. You nuzzled deeper into the crook of Logan’s neck as the crickets and the treefrogs serenaded you with a private summer evening concert.

Logan’s hand lazily ran the expanse of your hip and thigh from your position curled across him in the camping chair. He was about to close his eyes in complete relaxation when a boisterous banging erupted from one of the cabins in your section of the campground. The clanging was followed by a teenage chorus of muffled curses and cackles. The two of you had volunteered to be counselors of sorts on this weeklong camping trip Charles held for his beloved students each summer.  Logan groaned at the disturbance, slightly annoyed with your rowdy group of students.

“They’re just having fun. As long as no one comes out on fire or with a leg missing it's fine.” You spoke up, tone laced with amusement. “Admit you love them-and spending quality time with them out here.” 

You felt Logan huff against you at your wholesome accusation. 

“I love being out here in the woods, with you.” 

Logan’s answer wasn’t to your satisfaction. You zapped him gently with a single crackle of your energy just beneath the rib cage.  When he jolted from the surprise attack, you folded yourself to him so that you were now straddling his lap. 

“Sure. Not like I saw you earlier spending an hour teaching Rogue how to fish properly after she got her line all strung up in the nearest tree. Or how you, willingly I might add, played hide and seek with the younger ones when you were supposed to be taking a break. Or when-” 

You rambled off his sweet acts in adoration until he leaned up to press his lips to yours. You sunk into his embrace and sighed at the euphoric feeling. 

“Alright, alright. You’ve proved your point.” He grumbled half heartedly. In the fading natural light, you could see the lazy smile that adorned his face had become dusted with your lip gloss. You returned his response with a triumphant grin as he gingerly grasped the back of your head and pulled you to him once more. His heated palms sailed over your curves like a forest fire as your kisses deepened. You let out a small moan when he discretely bucked his hips into yours. 

Or, what the two of you had thought was discrete. 

“Gross. I’m just trying to get to the bathroom.” Bobby complained with a grimace as he walked by the two of you towards the community restrooms. You let out a chuckle as Logan brought his fist up to Bobby’s line of vision, a single adamantium claw extending to flip the younger man off against the firelight. 

[cheekygreenty]

Familiar - The Darkling x Reader

He was living his worst nightmare. You were in danger because of him. He swore to protect you, to get himself caught in the crossfire if it meant saving you but right now he was useless and you were suffering. He didn't know where you were or who took you from the Palace, the place he said was like a fortress, the safest place in Ravka. You were swiped from right under his nose, most likely roughly and mercilessly and it was all because you loved him.

He never wanted anyone to know of your relationship, you were his most protected and valued secret and he would put his life on the line to keep it that way. But now you were gone and he couldn't bare to look at himself. The promise he made to you was broken and he let you down.

For our love is a ghost that the others can't see

You agreed with it too, knowing that you would immediately become a target if Aleksander introduced you as his. But here you were now, sitting in the back of a moving coach, gagged and handcuffed with a blood and tear stained face.

The ride was more bumpy and painful than it was at the start, having now been on it for at least 4 hours, you knew you were far from home and heading to Fjerda.

The realization hit you as soon as you felt a pair of strong hands at your wrists, holding them apart in the safety of your chambers to prevent you from summoning. The festivities were loud and blocked out your shouts of self-defense and cries for help. That's where Aleksander's protection had run out, right there in your shared rooms.

You cursed yourself as more tears slipped out your eyes, you were a fool who didn't listen to their own advice. Ravka didn't know about you, the Darkling seemingly had no weaknesses until your irrationally tipsy behavior. Tonight's stupid actions would cost you your life.

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

'Enjoying the celebrations?' You held your fourth champagne glass of the night tightly in your hand as you walked up to Aleksander and Ivan. They were all business and no party as the Little Palace roared to life following a day of successful business negotiations. Grisha of all orders let loose and had fun, forgetting the troubles of war as foreign delegations joined in, all in unity for a single night of fun.

The Zemeni were dancing with the Kerch, the Shu were peacefully discussing with the Kaelish, it was a utopia. Your own mind was for once calm, be it the champagne or the vibes you didn't know and didn't care.

'You did a very good job Y/N, I'm impressed.' Ivan gestured to the party and pride filled you. It was stressful and nerve-racking to plan a banquet of this magnitude, but seeing it all accomplished and with no fights made you unbelievably happy.

'Thank you Ivan. Go enjoy yourself, I'm sure Fedyor is looking for you.'

He walked away just as you'd hoped, leaving you and Aleksander alone. You moved a step closer, taking his hand in yours.

'It is magnificent darling, you look magnificent too.' His head dipped as it usually did when he was about to kiss you, but he stopped himself and instead looked around the room, inspecting it to make sure no one was watching him.

'Relax, we're in a large crowd, I highly doubt anyone is paying us any mind.' With the foreign ambassadors here, Aleksander's black attire was balanced out with black tuxedos and suits. He wasn't sticking out anymore, he blended in. You wanted to be with him, and perhaps you could be right now.

'If you say so' Although your words did something to reassure him, his sweet lips were brief on yours. It was a short kiss, but he somehow conveyed his love for you in that quick second before he was back to his usual General persona.

'Alright General Kirigan, I'll go annoy Genya.' You joked and in the process knocked the glass over onto your fine silk kefta. 'Shit'

You didn't miss the look of amusement on his face as you tried to dry the stain with your sleeve. 'Or I'll go and change' you laughed, leaning into his laughing body.

You were certain the moment was intimate and private, that nobody was watching, but a pair of eyes closely watched the scene from afar, mouth open ajar as he found the Darkling's only weakness; You.

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

'Moi Soverenyi what is the meaning of all this?' Ivan didn't expect to be dragged out of bed at this hour and see the General's inner circle crowded around his war table in their nightclothes. He thought the banquet went well: nobody fought or got injured or even argued, it was the perfect night so to speak. But the powerful Grisha still dressed in his silk black kefta was restless and panicked.

His hair was disheveled and he looked ready to kill as he stood with his back to everyone, facing the big map of Ravka. The room was silent save for a few yawns and sighs. Nobody knew anything about why they were there but the tension surrounding their commander was hostile and frightening.

'Y/N Y/L/N is missing from Palace grounds. I think she may have been taken.' Ivan stilled, he was the only person in the room who knew of the relationship between his General and you and had grown to like your refreshing presence. He cared for you in a brotherly way and your disappearance ignited a fury in him.

'I need you searching the streets, interrogating the delegates, anything we can to bring her back.' His face was still turned away from them, and Ivan knew he wouldn't turn around.

Aleksander was beside himself with worry and guilt, he was on the verge of tears. You were gone and it was his fault. His mind was swirling with the accusations and the self-hate, but also with memories of you. Your life echoed around the walls of his head, bouncing off of his heart with a shatter.

He wasn't going to wake up tomorrow next to you curled up in his arms. He wasn't going to hear you rant over breakfast. You were gone and it was his fault.

He was trying so hard to devise a plan to find you, to command his Grisha and be a General, but in that moment he was just Aleksander, Y/N's Aleksander. Worry took up his mind and all the commanding bones in his body yearned to have you next to him.

He turned his head briefly to Ivan, who had the same expression on his face that Genya wore when he woke her up searching for Y/N. She was already out in the streets of Os Alta with David, trying their luck with tracking your jewelry.

'We leave in 10 minutes. Every single Grisha in the Second Army will be used if need be.' If you listened closely, you could hear the edge to his voice, a slight pang of heartbreak and anguish. He was trying to hide it, but alas he was only a man.

The Grisha started muttering amongst themselves and Ivan caught a few words of their conversations and couldn't help but let the rage rise in him 'She's not even that good of a soldier.....' 'Who is that?' 'I want to go back to bed....'

'A foreign dignitary had the audacity to kidnap a Grisha after we let them into our home and you speak of going to bed?'

'Ivan.' Fedyor warned him.

'Moi Soverenyi, with all due respect, Y/L/N was simply a teacher to the younger Grisha, not a high-ranking soldier with valuable intel. Should we really assume a kidnapping happened? For all we know it was desertion. Y/N found a good moment to slip out and escaped.'

Every shade of us you fade down to keep

Them in the dark on who we are

The second those words were spoken by Polina, Aleksander's black shadows let loose. They crept up her legs and around her throat, tightening and tightening until air could no longer enter the inferni's lungs. She was petrified, she was simply stating another perspective on the situation but her General's and Ivan's responses told her her opinion was not wanted at all.

Aleksander stopped himself before he killed her. It was his fault, all of it. His Grisha didn't take this seriously because they didn't know who Y/N truly was to him, perhaps a secret ready to be shared, spoke a voice deep in the back of his head, not your voice though. He wouldn't tell anyone anything until he had your approval. If he ever got it.

'Believe me, Y/N was no deserter.'

'10 minutes!' Barked Ivan at the Grisha when none of them moved from their tired trance.

-----

You didn't know Fjerdan fluently but you knew enough to make out the most important words 'We crossed the border', 'Witch', 'let her burn'. It was enough to drown your hope of escaping and coming home to Aleksander and your Grisha.

You never got involved in any war or fighting, simply choosing to teach the young students the basics of summoning. It made you content and happy, whereas war made you anxious and nervous. Your body had only ever known the luxuries of the Little Palace, the feel of a pen or book in your hands. To add to it, your powers were never used in a defensive way only summoned when you taught, so this was a drastic turn of events to say the least.

Being dragged and beaten by the Fjerdans, insulted in a foreign language, and cuffed so the one comfort you had available to you was useless, brought you to your knees despite the initial training you received when you joined the Second-Army. I am no soldier, I am a teacher.

The border had been crossed and you were officially a Fjerdan captive, ready to sit a trail where you would be found guilty and hanged for your gifts. The chances of Aleksander finding you were slim to none as you tried to remember if any clues were left behind at the scene of your kidnapping. The Fjerdans were quick and concise, neat and skilled, leaving no traces of their presence in your chambers.

The back of the carriage yanked open and let in the evening sun, blinding you in the process. You stopped counting the time after the 8th hour passed and your space was still pitch black. The shadows once were a comfort, now they were simply a tool to frighten you even more.

'Let's go, Witch.' A tall man spoke as he grabbed you by the arm, dragging you as if you didn't weigh anything. You complied, not seeing a reason to tire yourself by fighting back. It was pointless and futile.

You were in the middle of nowhere, a field of open green space with patches of snow. Fjerda. You'd never been anywhere near the border even, but the cold wind was whiplash-inducing just as Aleksander once described it.

'I thought I am to face trial.' You had barely spoken a word in fear in the carriage but the suspicion had rousted you to mutter the words.

'You? I'd rather kill you right here' joked the man and his companions laughed along as if what you said was the beginnings of a hilarious joke. 'You are the Demon's vulnerability, we hurt him for revenge' He pushed you to your knees roughly.

This love is gonna be the death of me

It's a danger

'So I am to die in a field?'

'Not before you tell us everything about the Darkling' then a kick to your stomach shut down your senses.

-------

'We are crossing into Fjerda Moi Soverenyi' Ivan shouted over the galloping horses. Not even 2 minutes after the meeting, Fedyor noticed 3 Fjerdan delegates missing from their rooms in the Little Palace and raced to tell his General who was now fiercely riding his black stallion with a fury no one dared to comment on. He had Squallers feeling the air for you, Durasts tracking your jewelry, and Heartrenderers listening to heartbeats as they all made their way up to Fjerda, the enemy country.

As time passed, the fear rose and turned into a strange combination of denial and grief. Aleksander tried to desperately shoo it away, to rid the thought as it came. You were alive. You had to be.

He felt his crew getting restless and tired but he didn't dare slow his pace. His stallion seemed to understand the urgency of the situation and for lack of a better word, legged it as his master requested.

'General, we think we can feel something.' The Durast and Squaller riding right behind him suddenly burst out. 'About 5 miles northeast, I can direct us from there.' The man in the purple kefta bellowed and Aleksander's heart picked up the pace to a deadly rhythm. He was immortal, but he was sure this was going to be the death of him.

---------

It took every ounce of courage and pride to not give in but you hurt all over. Your ribs were cracked, lungs quickly collapsing, your arms and legs unmoving. The only aspect of you that looked normal was your face

'I'll leave it, let him see you dead in a coffin with only your pretty face as a reminder of how disgusting he is, how disgusting all of you are.'

You had told them nothing, not a word, not even a cry of pain to satisfy them. If these were truly your last moments, you wouldn't go down as a traitor. Your eyes closed on their own accord a while ago, your ears stopped listening when you heard the first bone crack in your leg.

You didn't see Aleksander's shadows flood the field, cutting down everything in his path. You didn’t hear the Fjerdans scream out in pain and fear. There was blood everywhere, not just yours as he ran to you.

'HEALERS NOW' you didn't see him, you didn't hear him, but he saw you beaten and dying right in front of him. His hands traced the side of your face lovingly as a small tear escaped his eye. You felt it, his touch on yours and your lip pulled up in the faintest smile you could manage. He was here.

Ivan was next to you in an instant, attempting to quicken your heartbeat, fill your weak lungs with air and keep you alive but his shaking hands were rigid and stiff with fear at the possibility of losing his friend. The other Grisha watched with perplexed faces as they quickly approached, the Healers running for dear life to get to you in time. You were only a teacher in their eyes, not the General's love or the Heartrenderers comrade.

'Y/N you'll be okay, I promise.' Aleksander left a kiss against your forehead, keeping his lips there for as long as he could before the red keftas swarmed around you and fought to save your dwindling life.

And the dark was opening wide, do or die

You registered his touch, his kiss, before the itching took over and the pain slowly lifted. The darkness was back as a comfort and death seemed far away.

The Darkling only had one weakness, one vulnerability, and only one reoccurring nightmare; the death of Y/N Y/L/N and he made sure to let the world know if you ever came to harm, he would kill anyone and anything in his path.

------

Here’s my masterlist 🥰

Taglist (Tell me if you want to be added!!)

@aleksanderwh0r3 @theonelittleone @searching-for-gallifrey @lostysworld @0-artemis @exo-1204 @staradorned @bookfrog242 @simp-for-ben-barners @keepdaydreamingbb @acciorudolphx @pansysgirlfriend @pansysgirlfriend @justmesadgirl

[darklcy]

omg you write for singed and marcus too?? do u think u can do the “how they dance with you” with them hehe

yes of course <3 thanks for asking anon!

𝐒𝐈𝐍𝐆𝐄𝐃:

ok so to start off : this man is scary

he made a hybrid & does excruciating chemical experiments for a living i mean-

but this doesn’t mean he doesn’t need a break from time to time

but kinda like silco, he doesn’t wanna threaten his dignity

i feel like every moment spent with you would be an intimate, private space, in his lab where no one bothers you

and it’s during these moments, when you two are embracing, your cheek to his chest and his chin to your head, where you softly sway

you shift your weight from side to side, bringing him with you in a slow dance

sometimes you do it so idly it’s like second nature for you two every time you hug

he prob doesn’t even realize it at first until you giggle, looking up at him

“we’re dancing.”

he scoffs at your smile, arms tightening around you

“that we are.”

 once in blue moon you grab onto his hands and he lets you slowly spin him around

sometimes he laughs sometimes he just lets you do your thing

either way this scary man luvs you 

𝐌𝐀𝐑𝐂𝐔𝐒:

he may be in denial abt it, but i feel like he’s shy 

at least during the quiet, soft moments in relationships

his shoulders unintentionally stiffen up when you lay your hands on his shoulders, his going to your hips

but as you two start, he grows more confident

in a public event, he’ll prob be a bit more hesitant, since yknow big ol sheriff and what not

but overtime he stops caring, because dancing with you is so fun

sometimes he lets himself get lost in the music, bringing you along for the ride, whether it be singing the lyrics or spinning you around

it’s when he can be himself, and you love it so much more because of that

and his feet may get a lil sloppy and accidentally step on your toe its fine

and when you two stop, as the music fades out, he never fails to swoop you in for a quick kiss, appreciating you and your beauty

“i had a great time with you, hon.”

you smile and caress his face

“me too.”

𝐀/𝐍: i hope you like it anon! ♥♥♥

･ﾟarcane masterlist･ﾟ

[mike-wachowski]

happy supercorptober, day 4: couch

The couch is an ugly, dirty, grotesque thing. It's a shade of orange Lena had once compared to a rotting pumpkin found on someone's porch, long forgotten after Halloween. It’s missing a cushion, and she’s pretty sure a raccoon has tunnelled inside it, tearing up the corner and throwing cotton everywhere. Sometimes when she sits, she swears she hears a squeak. 

For some reason, Kara loves it. 

When she first saw it on the street, walking home after school, she ran all the rest of the way home to steal the keys to Jeremiah’s truck, coercing Alex to join her along the way. She pulled up to the curb beside it, and together she and Alex hauled the heavy thing into the truck’s bed and strapped it down with some loose rope they’d grabbed from the garage. 

The couch’s previous owner, or at least Kara assumed, called out to them as Alex tightened the final knot over the old piece of furniture. 

“You sure you want to take that?” The woman shouted out from where she was watering a single tiny rosebush by her porch. “The old thing is junk. We were hoping large item pickup would get it, not some kids.” 

Kara smiled despite the woman’s lack of enthusiasm. “I can pay you for it if you like!” 

The woman shook her head, turning back to her wilting roses. “You’re doing me a favor just getting it out of my sight.” 

Clambering back into the truck after double checking the ropes, Alex turned to Kara with a familiar look. Skeptical and scrutinizing. “She’s right, you know,” Alex had said, tapping a finger on the steering wheel as she drove back towards their house. “It’s a piece of junk. Mom’s never gonna let you take it inside.” 

“I don’t need to bring it inside,” Kara hummed as she watched the neighborhood pass by. “I know the perfect place for it.” 

Kara first met Lena Luthor at a run-down playground inside an old abandoned military base up the hill in her neighborhood. Kara had placed six plastic bottles equidistant from each other up on the fence around the jungle gym, and was taking shots at them with some pebbles she had grabbed during the hike up here. On her third bottle’s first throw she overswings, and the pebble sails past the fence and through a thicket of bushes, and suddenly Kara hears a surprised yelp of pain and a loud “What the fuck?” 

She drops her pebbles and rushes towards the bushes, glancing around them to find a girl sitting in the dirt. Kara takes inventory: dark hair, private school uniform, textbook in her lap, clutching her forehead and wincing in pain. Oops. 

“Hello?” Kara starts, voice weak from her extended silence all day. Other than with Alex and Eliza at breakfast, this is the first time she’s talked in hours. “Did you, um… did you see a rock fly through here just now?” 

The girl looks up at her with anger written all over her face. “Did I see a-did you throw that rock at me?” 

“Oh, no,” Kara immediately chokes out. “I mean, yes I threw it, but I didn’t throw it at you, I didn’t mean to hit you-”

The girl raises a hand to stop her, commanding more force than Kara thought was possible for a person her age. She shuts up quickly. 

“It’s fine,” the girl mutters, pulling her hand back to reveal a welt on her forehead that makes Kara feel less than fine about the situation. “Honestly, I'm used to it,” she scoffs, and that's enough to push Kara over the edge. 

“I’m sorry!” she blurts out. “I’m sorry. You should come study with me. I mean, I'm not studying, I've been throwing rocks at bottles because I had a really bad day at school. You don't care about that. Um, I like to hang out at the old playground right there, and there’s some picnic tables you can study at so you don't have to sit in the dirt. There’s also a couch. My sister Alex helped me bring it up last week.” 

The girl stares at her with widening eyes, and for a moment Kara thinks she might just get up and leave, but then she does something that surprsises Kara entirely: she giggles. “Wow,” she whispers through her light laughter. “You really can ramble, huh?”

Kara is speechless. Usually people make fun of her inability to stop talking sometimes, the way she’ll keep going until she’s spoken herself into a hole. But this person likes it, her laughter didn’t seem malicious or teasing at all- just genuinely, amazingly happy. 

“I’m sorry I laughed,” she says, probably in reaction to the clear shock on Kara’s face. “It’s just, I think that's the most anyone’s talked to me in weeks.” 

“That’s the most I’ve talked all day,” Kara realizes. She sticks her hand out to the girl. “My name’s Kara.”

“Hi Kara,” the girl responds, using Kara’s outstretched hand to pull herself to her feet. “I’m Lena.”

Lena. Lena. Lena.

Kara falls for her right then and there. 

-

“I can’t believe this couch has lasted over a year.” 

Kara looks over at Lena, who’s sitting on one of the last remaining cushions next to her, tucked under Kara’s arm as they face the sunset. Lena had said it so quietly, she almost didn't hear it, but the sly smile Kara catches as she finishes her sentence is proof enough that she didn’t imagine it. She hums in consideration, before asking, “What makes you say that?”

“I thought the possums would have turned it into a housing complex by now,” Lena laughs. “Or we’d show up and find one of the graffiti artists had taken it home. Or Alex would have made you throw it out by now.” 

Kara smiles at that last one. “Not for lack of trying on her part, you know.”

“Oh, I remember,” Lena squeezes Kara’s arm gently. “Remember when we showed up and Alex was trying to drag it out of here? She thought it was starting to smell, but it was-”

“-the old sandwich I had stashed under there a month ago.” Kara finishes with Lena, the two of them dissolving into a fit of laughter at the memory. When the laughter fades and they both turn to face one another, eyes locking, Lena asks her something. 

“Kara, why do you like this couch so much?” She asks, rubbing an open hand over the rough, worn, canvas upholstery. “You saw a dirty, beat-up couch on the street and decided you needed it?”

Kara looks away, back towards the setting sun, which is now casting a warm orange glow not dissimilar to the color of the couch they’re currently sitting on. 

“I can give you a real answer and a funny answer to that, I guess.” 

“Start with the real one, dear,” Lena tells her, reaching over to hold Kara’s hand. 

“Well,” Kara starts. “It’s kinda silly, but I just saw it and… the people who had it before didn’t want it. They thought it was junk. Back then, I guess I thought they were giving up on it.” Kara shakes her head, laughing to herself. “I know it’s silly. It’s just a couch. But I wanted to give it a second chance.” 

Lena’s eyes shine with unspoken words that Kara understands better than anyone. She runs her thumb over Kara’s, and Kara knows she understands too.

“And the funny answer?” 

Kara grins wide. “We had our first kiss on this couch.” 

Lena pulls back an inch, eyebrows furrowing. “First kiss? Kara, we’ve never even…”

“Lena,” Kara whispers. “Can I kiss you?”

“Oh- oh,” Lena stammers. “Yes, please.” 

Kara lunges forward across the couch and kisses her.