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shadowxamyweek · 4 months

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What The Fuck Do You Mean They Gave Amy Rose an Eating Disorder

Alright. I said I’d talk about why I think Amy has an eating disorder, and so here I am, ready to throw down.

Disclaimer!

Let me explicitly say- there’s nothing wrong with exercise and there’s nothing wrong with going on a diet. Not intrinsically, anyway. If you’re being smart and healthy about it, you’ve got good people supporting you or you’ve got your own good mental supports to make sure you’re not hurting yourself, that’s awesome. I am not saying these things are evil. What I am saying is there exists a very dark and obsessive undercurrent to *any* sort of health choice due to cultural expectations that, if a person is not careful about, they can get sucked into.

Trigger warnings!

This is very 'Dead Dove, Do Not Eat.' We're gonna be talking about eating disorders and self harm. It's right here on the tin. If you don't think you're gonna be okay reading this, then don't. I want you to be safe. I believe I've tagged this appropriately, but if I've missed something, please let me know.

What even is an eating disorder?

Broadly speaking, it is any behavioral condition characterized by abnormal eating habits. Some eating disorders stem from physical difficulty with eating that becomes psychological, while others originate due to psychological issues themselves. There are eating disorders that occur because people just wish to be in control of something, those that originate due to side effects of medication, those that occur due to side effects of other psychological conditions like anxiety or depression.

This is to say- not all eating disorders are due to an obsession with body image.

However, it cannot be understated just how many people develop an eating disorder because they are obsessed with body image.

I am of the opinion Amy falls into the latter category, that she is obsessed with body image and, due to that, has an eating disorder.

So what’s going on with Amy?

Let’s look at Sonic Battle (2003). It’s a PVP fighting game for the Game Boy Advance, picking up the plot directly after Sonic Heros and introducing us to Ermel (who would die and come back as Germel). Much like the previous games, you would have a singular plot that was divided into sections. We will be focusing on Amy and Cream’s chapters within the story.

Amy Rose (X)

Cream (X)

Battle is what introduces us to Amy’s boxercising. Originally, she started it to get stronger, Cream citing Amy’s desire to keep Ermel safe after briefly getting kidnapped. However, once she realizes she can lose weight via this method, she becomes obsessed. Cream talks about it, seeming visibly uncomfortable with Amy’s fixation on losing weight, but we don’t really get much in the way of details until we actually fight Amy and see this weightloss obsession in action.

In the Amy chapter of the story, she takes Ermel back to her apartment to train. They set a goal of 5 KOs, then 10. Amy feels faint, citing lightheadedness. Ermel leaves her alone in her apartment.

The next time you see her, only a few moments later, Cream is there. Turns out Amy was so lightheaded she had to go for a liedown. Cream says she’s worried about Amy. Specifically, she says she’s ‘burnt out,’ from overworking herself. Amy promptly comes back from her short break, stumbling into the room, to which Cream exclaims they can’t keep going because Amy can’t walk straight. Amy tells Cream she’s fine, and proceeds to start another goal of 10 KOs.

After that, Amy wants to keep working out, but she’s reaching her limit. She’s unable to speak more than a word or two without gasping for air. Insisting she can keep exercising, she tries to excuse herself to ‘change tactics’. When Cream follows her, it’s revealed that Amy’s been wearing excessively heavy weights on her arms and legs during this entire training spree.

Amy says to go for another goal of 10 KOs. Cream, visibly upset, says that Amy has lost her focus on training. Still, you fight her anyway.

After this, Amy collapses.

She is able to pull herself together after a second, rushing off with Ermel to keep fighting in search of the Chaos Emeralds. Cream seems relieved that Amy’s alright, saying, ‘she’s the strongest woman I know.’

The relief does not last long. After you finish Amy’s chapter, you switch to Cream’s. It opens up post boxcercise with Amy congratulating Ermel on getting strong. Cream noticeably stays very quiet during the exchange.

Then, Amy asks, ‘how much did I lose today?’

Ermel tells her that she’s burned 1000 calories during their workout session. If she wants, she can lose a kilo/2 pounds-ish per three days if she is able to keep this up, but she will have to eat only 700 calories a day max and drink 4 liters/ 1 gallon-ish of water a day. Amy gets very excited. She also says she’s going to purchase some ‘super diet-machine.’ to further her progress. She thanks Ermel for helping her get closer to her goal.

After a bit of a back and forth, Cream says to Ermel that Amy is really getting into this dieting. When Ermel asks, ‘Is getting thin good?’ Cream explains that Amy wants to be thinner so that Sonic might like her back. Ermel, understandably, doesn’t get it. Cream replies that, sometimes, a person will do anything for someone they love. Ermel stays silent, and Cream says that one day, they may eventually understand.

(I swear there’s an additional dialog option if you go back to Amy’s place to talk to her where Ermel suggests she eat nothing but lettuce leaves, but I have misplaced my own copy of the game and cannot verify this. As such, I am not going to use it as evidence, but I do ask that if anyone DOES have the game, fact-check me on this place. I’d like to know if my memory is correct or if this is just a fabrication due to… everything mentioned above.)

So okay, that’s the beats of the story. Now let’s talk about dangerous exercise and diet culture:

Exercise and Eating Disorders

Boxercise feels like a direct parallel to stuff like Jazzercise (60s-80s) or Zumba (00s-10s), which is just normal exercise with a twist of some sort that make it palatable for mass engagement/marketing. These different fun and exciting methods (and they can be- they can be fun- I’m not even gonna lie.) of workout were often sold as methods of both gaining strength and losing weight, but the losing weight often becomes their focus. This game even calls out the ‘this will make me stronger�� to ‘this will make me thin and desirable’ mental pipeline that can happen in the culture surrounding these sorts of exercise methods, unfortunately fostered despite whatever intentions their creators or individualized mentors had. There is nothing wrong with any of these styles of exercise. However, overexercise can be a hallmark of an eating disorder, and a culture of obsession that can surround fad exercises promoting extreme weightloss is dangerous. (X) (X)

It’s not new. The culture around these fad exercise methods might create a special sort of vortex, but look closely, and you'll likely pick up a few people with the same mindset at any old gym. ‘If I just keep pushing, if I just keep going, if I ignore the pain, I’ll be who I want to be.’ That’s how people get permanent injury, from Jannet going way too hard at pilates to Keith pushing far too much weight.

Speaking of weights- We are lead to believe that Amy has been wearing weights this entire time. I don’t just mean for the fight mentioned above. Think about it- she takes them off during that massive workout/fight, but when did she put them on? We don’t see it. We’ve been with her nearly the entire time. This reads to me that she has had them on the entire day, not just for her exercising.

It should be noted that wearing weights in this manner for an extended period of time can lead to damage (X) . As an aside, I have found no studies on the matter, but at least half of the people I know who have also had an eating disorder at one point or another intentionally weighed themselves down in some manner thinking they could burn more calories by doing whatever it was they were doing. This includes wearing training weights all the time, overfilling backpacks and carrying them around, and other things.

It’s not the exercise that is bad, it’s not the method that is bad, it’s not most of the community that is bad, but there is (and has always been, and will always be, unfortunately) a portion of it with this dangerous mindset that a person can get sucked into if they are not careful.

Due to the evidence above, it seems clear to me that Amy has gotten sucked into this mindset.

That’s just a part of it though. The restricted eating is where it gets really solidified for me.

Diet Culture and Eating Disorders

Now, obviously I’m going to be going off of human numbers, so if you wish to counterargue that ‘oh well they’re smaller/different species of course they’d need less calories’ that’s fine- feel free to do so- but just understand I personally don’t think the text was written with that sort of calculation in mind.

The average human body, even if it is a body largely at rest, needs about 2,000 calories a day to help maintain good health (X) (PLEASE ignore BMI it's a bullshit method of measurement). Various fad diets or crazes have come and gone across the centuries, with focuses on trying to achieve whatever body type was popular in that moment.

‘This will make you sexy. This will make you wanted. This will finally make someone love you. Before, you were unlovable. After, maybe you’ll have a real chance.’

Noticeably, in the fad diets of the 90s into today, the focus for a lot of people attempting to lose weight has been ‘restrict your caloric intake.’ That’s not a problem until you start cutting out foods with nutrients the body needs to survive and/or getting to under a 1,000 calories a day (X).

Despite what a lot of popular caloric or generalized eating restriction diets will tell you, if you keep your body from energy, it will go into protection mode. Protection mode is where your body acts like it is starving, because it is, thus slowing down its stash of burnable energy. Your average caloric burn then DROPS. This causes it to become harder and harder to lose weight the longer you starve yourself, which creates a vicious cycle.

Furthermore, if you are both working out and dieting, you need good caloric intake when working out in order to help facilitate building muscle. If you don’t eat properly while working out, you don’t build the muscle you should and, in fact, you can lose muscle or cause permanent damage since your muscles won’t have the tools/energy to repair themselves after workouts.

Crash diets/workouts like this are also not sustainable. There have been dozens of studies on how losing weight too quickly can be bad for the body, but beyond that, the mental tax of trying to maintain a non-maintainable lifestyle of limited eating/ overworkout often ends in a massive rebound (a rubber-banding if you wanna call it that) due to lethargy or mental fatigue (not helped by the lack of food.). That plus a brutalized metabolism will cause people to gain the weight they lost back, make it more difficult to lose, and might ultimately result in the person gaining more weight than they had previously. Again- vicious cycle. (X)

But the dieting industry, the diet culture doesn’t really care about that. It largely doesn’t care if its product or concept or whatever hurts you. Its job is to make money.

Because here’s the thing- Most people have a part of themselves, however small, that would love to change. Most people would like to be liked, to be needed, to be desired in some capacity. Due to this, a person's self worth is often tied up in some part of themself, often something that is visual, often something that, if given the opportunity, they’d change.

How does continued hunger relate to mood?

The concept of being ‘hangry’ is pretty well known. (X). Be hungry long enough, you get physically unwell, and you can unlock a special sort of anger that only comes with being hungry.

Not just that, but being hungry for extended periods of time can also cause issues with mental clarity (X).

It goes just beyond hangry though. Food and nutrition have long been understood to affect mood and mental well being, though not to the scientific degree able to be achieved today (X) . To summarize as simply as possible- your gut biome, which is dictated largely by your diet, directly impacts mental and physical wellbing. If your gut biome is maintained as it should be, then you overall will have a healthier mental state and overall feel better. If your gut biome is poor, due to undereating or lack of intake of needed nutrients, your biome will start to wither. This will directly impact your mental and physical wellbeing. (X)

I’m not going to dwell on this for terribly long, but I want to bring it up in correlation with the previous two sections because who amongst the Sonic crew is often labeled as being emotionally unstable and prone to moodswings?

Amy Rose.

Who is often fingered as having outbursts of volatile anger?

Amy Rose.

And who do we see starving themselves in game and working themselves past the point of exhaustion?

Amy Rose.

Listen, I confess this one is a bit of a stretch. It’s more of a continuation from the two other points that I sort of wanted to point out. If you can understand the previous arguments for her overworking and underfeeding herself, then this one feels like a natural third component in that and, as such, I felt it should be at least mentioned.

What I Personally Have Seen in Regards to Eating Disorders in Media while Growing Up.

Thank goodness so much has changed. I remember eating disorders taking up whole episodes in television series, whole issues in comics, whole books in novel series, and it has largely evaporated. The problem is still around, because of course it is, but it is far less of a joke now than it use to be.

When I was growing up, there were a lot- and I mean a lot- of stories that said, ‘Oh, if you were just a little better, someone would love you. Someone will notice you. If you were prettier, cooler, thinner, buffer, whatever- people would notice you. Someone would love you. Maybe even that specific person you wish could love you back.’

‘If you just tried a little harder, maybe it’ll happen.’

And you saw this in the real world, in the marketing, in the fashion, everywhere. Advertisements pushed that if you didn’t fit this very specific, narrow, palatable concept of beauty, then you weren’t worth anyone’s time.

When this was portrayed in media, it often manifested directly into characters doing insane things to change themselves. Sometimes it was their style of dress, or their personality. Oftentimes, it would manifest in them trying to get buff or be thin.

With a lot of stories, the character often came to the conclusion of, ‘Hey, just be you. You’re good as you- don’t do things to impress other people. Don’t be who you’re not because you feel you have to.’

But it was a coinflip as to whether or not the story would prove that to be wrong or true.

Worse still, even if the lesson was still ‘just be you,’ the whole ordeal was often portrayed as a joke.

Specifically, women- girls- working out to exhaustion, starving themselves, was portrayed as a joke.

If the goal of the story was for comedy, and the end had the character revert back to who they were previously, it can usually be put into one of two categories:

‘How could you be so stupid? How could you believe you ever needed to change? How dumb are you to fall for social pressure like that?’

or-

‘How could you be so stupid? How could you believe you could change? You’re not strong enough to change. You’re too you to ever be liked.’

On that note, let’s back up and return to Amy.

I’m the sort of person that’s got a narrow focus when it comes to Sonic properties. Specifically, if it’s not game canon, it’s not canon to me.

However, in understanding that other canons exist, other properties within the Sonic universe exist, I won’t ignore them. Even if I don’t think they’re canon, if there is a throughline within, I cannot help but to notice.

So it’s with this in mind that I ask you: Do you know of Sonic Spin and Dash?

It’s a manga. Put out in the early 00’s, it was a little series of comics that focused on Sonic, Tails, Knuckles, Amy, Shadow, and Eggman having arbitrary interactions. They’re largely cute and lighthearted. I couldn’t tell you officially what the official age demographic would be for them, but I’d have to guess something fairly young.

Volume 6 is titled, ‘A Maiden's High-Tech Diet.’ In it, Amy freaks out about having gained 3 kilos/ about 7 pounds. Despite the fact that she’s a growing girl, this deeply upsets her. She asks Tails and Sonic not to eat (in front of her? At all? Unsure.) while she’s trying to diet. Eggman shows up and offers her a solution- a diet machine that will help her achieve the weight and look she wants so deeply. 3 days later, Amy approaches Sonic again.

She’s emaciated. Wobbling in from off-stage, unable to even speak a sentence without pausing, she asks Sonic if she’s looking thinner.

Let me rephrase- she’s asking if she looks ‘thin enough’.

Eggman, via his dieting ‘robot’ which really is just a mech he’s hiding inside, asks Amy and co. to perform more insane tasks to weaken them and cause them to be too exhausted to fight him. However, even during this, Amy has other ‘slimming’ products that she’s bought which she uses to defeat Eggman.

In the end, everyone exhausts Eggman, causing him to give up his scheme and leave. By the end of all of it, he himself is looking thin, having worked off much of his weight in this charade.

It’s just played off as a joke.

Alright, but that was early 00’s. How’s Sega been about Amy now?

Well, this hasn’t really come up in games again, thank goodness. I reiterate- times have changed, and I’m very glad about that. That doesn’t mean this sort of thing is entirely gone, however. This image is from Sonic Channel in 2022 (X).

The image is accompanied by this caption:

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“Otome Straight!” Emmy is passionate about boxercise , saying it's perfect for dieting

Indoor training on rainy days is perfect! Bouncing the punching bag and working up a good sweat with Emel's support

"Mom, do your best. Ato Sukoshi."

Let's keep a healthy body with training for the rainy season !

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Once again, we have this focus on dieting and food reduction. Again, not a bad thing- perfectly normal- but the reason I take pause is because of the crossed out icecream picture.

@mysuperlaserpiss - I hope you don’t mind, but I wanted to bring up your comment on that initial post I put out.

…Yeah. Yeah, I 100% agree.

So when conversations around eating disorders comes up, one of the first things to discuss is, ‘what is your relationship to food?’ Essentially, it boils down to: do you see food as fuel and that it is a normal thing to have, or do you see it is something you have to earn/avoid? (X)

Amy beating the shit out of a punching bag sporting a crossed out picture of icecream, talking about dieting, smacks of, ‘you see food as something you have to earn/avoid,’ to me. It’s as simple as that. This appears as though she’s beating the desire for certain foods out of herself. Simply put, that’s not healthy.

Okay, so what?

Man, I don’t know.

I don’t know, alright? I don’t know.

I’m biased. I was inundated with the idea of ‘you need to be better’ from a young age from all angles. I am strong, but not appealingly buff. I am not what I'd call heavy, but I'm most certainly not appealingly slim and doctors have always bitched about my BMI (which again- terrible system to work off of). Not that long ago, I was hiding weights under my pant legs even in the dead of summer thinking the extra weight on me when I moved about my day would help me burn calories. Not that long ago, I was walking around 30km/18 miles a week on top of doing several hours of intense exercise a week, all while only taking in around only 500 cal a day. I am constantly combating the idea that i need to deserve to eat, but if I eat, I won’t be loveable. Yeah, I’m doing better- significantly so- but I am a biased, untrustworthy source to write about this and I recognize that. I am biased because I’ve been through it. I am biased because I have lived this very specific, isolating nightmare, and no matter how much better I am now, there are still days where all I can manage is a couple hard boiled eggs and maybe canned low-sodium fish.

I don’t know what to tell you. All I know is what I’ve been through, and when I look at Amy, when I look at her storylines through the games, I see a portion of me that I never would ever want to see in anyone else.

I see someone desperate to be wanted. I see someone disoriented and angry from lack of food. I see someone hurting themselves thinking it's normal to do so. I see someone trying and trying and trying so hard to fit this idea of ‘perfect’ and falling short.

There’s a lot of conversation right now around Amy’s character. How she was presented in early games vs now is significantly different, so of course it would be a subject of conversation. Sega seems to be trying to bring the characters into a new age, both in terms of the 2020’s and in terms of the characters' age themselves. There are those that say that Amy’s new presentation is due to her becoming older and more mature, while others argue that she’s become a shadow of her former self.

I can see both sides of the argument. Of course I can- I’ve been with this characters since almost the beginning. Still, when I look at the changes in Amy Rose, when I look at how happy she is, how energetic and content, my knee-jerk reaction isn’t to start wagging fingers.

It’s just, ‘Ah. Good. She’s eating.’

#amy rose #eating disorders #tw // ed #tw // eating disorder #tw // self harm #headcanon #*drags hands down face* I'm glad I finally got to write this- I've been wanting to write this for a long time- but wow I feel sick

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scatterbrainedbot · 10 months

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I AM SPINNING I AM PACING I AM FULL ON FROLICKING IM SO EXCITED

@d1sc0rd1a THANK U FOR THESE TAGS

okayokayokayokay so pretty much all of these questions will be Officially Answered properly in the character design/intro pages im working on but also i am physically vibrating with excitement about the fact that you noticed all these details and i have very little self control so! lore dump time!!!

(minor tw for mentions of leos self-harm/self-destructive anxious behaviors and unhealthy coping skills)

- mikey does indeed have curly fur! i believe he would be considered a 'rex' rat (pictured on the left) for this trait? though the curls can be more easily seen on mice (pictured on the right). or, at least it seems that way. have not delved too deeply into the details of rodent genes and husbandry, but id assume its the same sort of mutation considering curly haired mice are also referred to as rex sometimes? either way hes a extra floofy bby 🧡

-as for raphie, unfortunately being more fluff and less shell than the average rapheal comes with its downsides. especially if you and your brothers occasionally encounter things like territorial dogs, hungry cats, or sewer crocodiles while exploring places ur dad said not supposed to go. (most of his scars will have more ninja related stories, but his ear i think got messed up from something very animal. probably around age 11 ish? old enough to sneak out from dads protection but young enough to not fully know how to handle himself alone against real danger. thankfully his ear injury looks worse than it actually is for the most part, as the damage was largely to the outer ear. his hearing wasnt super affected, except that he now has a bit of a harder time being able to track/pinpoint noises origins if its on his right side.)

-also yep! dons got some glasses that just clip/rest on the bridge of his nose! theyre mostly just for home use, as they do fall off if hes knocked around. in the field he has some goggles he tends to use (theyre helpful as they have multiple additional functions like heat-imaging, extra zoom/telescoping, and recording capabilities. but also theyll give him headaches if he wears them for too long without breaks). contacts are theoretically also an option but he absolutely hates the sensation of putting them in. so sometimes when hes tired he'll just not bother with either clips or goggles and just squint and struggle. leo hates when he does that lol.

-speaking of leo, he is def an anxious baby :) he has a few patches of fur missing on his hand cos he has the tendency to tug on it while hes thinking. he yanked and chewed on his own tail a lot when he was younger too, which is why when hes older he usually wears some wraps to cover the scars left from that behavior. he finds those scars specifically to be kinda embarrassing and shameful because they werent from any battle or life-lesson, just his own 'inability to control himself'. all of his brothers have repeatedly called him out on the fact that that is not a healthy way to think about his anxiety or mental health, but leo insists hes fine. hes kinda convinced himself that a proper warrior always has control over his own body* and his own thoughts, thus he should be able to just like willpower-brute-force his way into 'being better'. (this line of thinking pisses raph off so much he has to leave and go hit something)

Splinter also tries to talk him through some of that internalized guilt/shame/everything, but splinters very metaphorical, poetic, and indirect when it comes to talking about Big Things, which combined with how much leo gets caught in his own head, makes it kinda hard to gauge how much these talks actually help

*this is made extra fun considering leos also ftm trans, so he is faced with a body that fundamentally disobeys him perhaps more than the average rat-man.

-and im still going back and forth between a few species for splinter, but im leaning mostly towards an African Spurred Tortoise! they have these beautiful if kinda subtle geometric shell patterns and are the third largest species of tortoise in the world. the only thing that doesnt fit perfectly with Splints is that (allegedly) their lifespan in captivity is around 50ish years, whereas im p sure Tortoise Splinter is well over 75, probably closer to 90 when the boys are born and hes mutated into Old Man Papa.

but maybe hes just a particularly long lasting African Spurred Tortoise.

the Hamato family has taken very good care of him for many decades after all. :)

(well. until everything all fell apart, that is.....)

#tmnt #rat sons #my art #tmnt au #literally bouncing around the room thinking about this all #my downstairs neighbors are gonna hate me #ask reply #sort of???#pats leos fucked up lil head #this bad boy can fit so much projection #get out of ur head idiot ur family loves and wants to help u #also looking at the chaco tortoise and ploughshare tortoise for splinter thoboth of those are smaller species than i think he is

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carlsangel · 5 months

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DON’T BE SORRY

carl grimes x reader

(carl comforts you.)

tags: angst, fluff.

masterlist here!

TRIGGER WARNING: SELF HARM, DEATH

You used to feel so alone, so empty. Like nothing could fill the pit in your heart where you stored the love from your family. They were everything to you, losing them made you feel endless pain that would never go away. You couldn’t cope with it all, you only felt pure affliction.

The one way you knew how to cope was something you had to hide, at least you felt that way. You didn’t know what to do without your family, you’d felt like somehow it was all your fault. Maybe you could’ve done something, be more useful and actually save them. Maybe it wasn’t helpful to take it out on yourself instead of putting the anger towards what actually killed your family, the walkers. You couldn’t help it though. You truly felt you killed your family.

It occurred to you that maybe the last thing you’d need in this world was to inflict more pain on yourself but it had somehow made you feel better, like you were getting what you deserved. You could get by a while without hurting yourself but occasionally situations would happen that reminded you of everything.

There was one time in particular that really got to you. You were tracking a deer for a while, granted tracking wasn’t your best strong suit but you thought you’d give it a shot. You followed it for hours. You successfully shot it and it ran but it didn’t get far. When you got to it, it was taken down by a swarm of walkers. It just looked too much like when the same thing happened to your family. You burst into tears and ran.

It was a common thing for this to happen but one day, someone saved you from the swarm. He came in with a couple others and they took them down for you and invited you back to their settlement. You almost wanted to say no. You didn’t want to risk caring for more people, losing them and then pay the price for that loss.

The boy who saved you was named Carl, he was your age and he quickly became your best friend, eventually your boyfriend. He managed to make you feel okay about everything. He told you how it wasn’t your fault, that you shouldn’t blame yourself for the death of your family. He was so gentle with the way he treated and loved you. There’s nothing he loved more than gently kissing around your body but you made it a point to him to not kiss your arms, you tended to pull away.

You didn’t want him to know, you were worried of what he’d think of you. He never gave you a reason to believe he’d be angry at you or anything like that but you were still nervous about it. He never wanted to pry as to why you didn’t want him kissing your arms because he respected you enough to not mention it unless you did.

You never planned on telling him, but you didn’t want him to find out either. Unfortunately, when he did find out, it wasn’t on your own terms.

“Hey wake up.” Carl pokes at you while you were sleeping peacefully in your bed (you guys had nightly sleepovers.) You pry your eyes open and look up at him, sort of giving him a mean look for waking you up. “Cranky.” He says, looking down at you with a cute little smile. “Yeah cranky. I’m so sleepy.” You sit up and yawn while he walks around the room. “We have to go check the snares my dad put out yesterday. He’s hoping for rabbits.” Carl explains, grabbing clothes from your closet and tossing them at you.

“Rabbits? For what?” You stand up slowly, stretching out your limbs. “Uhh I think Carol wants to make some stew. I dunno.” He replies briefly. You finish up changing and arm yourself with a handgun as well as a large knife. You both head out to go check the snares. The first two you checked were empty, which made sense since Rick set them out late last night in clearer areas.

When you get to the last snare, the both of you were pleased to find out that it caught a larger rabbit. You unlatch it and pack it away. “Carol’s gonna be excited. I know she’s been wanting to make stew for a while-” You were cut off by the sound of guttural screams coming from somewhere deep in the forest. There was no doubt you’d follow them to help whoever it was.

You and Carl ran through the woods, following the screams with your guns in hand. The screams get louder and louder as you approach and you pray that you’ll be able to save them. When you reach them, it was too late. The man was already on the floor, being ripped to shreds by the undead. Carl was with you, but somehow that didn’t seem to help this time. You remember your family, you couldn’t save this man just like you couldn’t save them. You run off back home, not even taking the walkers out, not waiting for Carl.

You go home in tears, you walk up the stairs not acknowledging anyone else who lived in the house because you simply couldn’t look at anyone. You change your clothes to try and distract from the pain of it all and blink your tears away. You stand for a moment trying to navigate what exactly to do next but your mind strays to one solution. You walk over to your dresser and dig to the bottom where you kept a little box. The little box where you kept razors. Every time Carl looked for clothes for you, you were worried he’d find it. He never did.

You grab the box and contemplate for a moment. Did you want to do this? It’s been a while since you last indulged but something about this time was different. You head over to the bathroom and shut the door. You breathe heavily, thinking about the man. His life ended because you didn’t run fast enough. Your mind was made up.

You sit on the edge of the tub and set the box of razors on the toilet lid. You open it and take one out, looking at it while wiping your tears away. You slide your sleeve down a little and stare at the scars from past times you’d done this before. You go for it, but are interrupted by the sound of voices downstairs. You listen for a moment before putting the blade back up to your arm. Before you know it, Carl bursts into the bathroom.

“Oh, I-I’m sorry-” He looks at you and the blade in your hands as you scramble to put it away and hide the box. “N-no I’m sorry I shouldn’t be…” Your voice trails off as you try to find the words to explain yourself. “Don’t be sorry.” He walks closer to you and kneels so he can see you better. He takes off his hat and places it on the counter. He rests his hands on your knees as he looks at you with pure love.

“Is that why you don’t like the kisses?” He lifts his hand up to wipe the tears from your face. He holds your cheek delicately and you nod into his hand. More tears roll down your face and he leans in closer to kiss them away. “They told me you were upset.” He says, referring to the Alexandrians you lived with. “It was the man, wasn’t it?” He holds your hands, gripping them tightly. You nod once more. He pulls your hand up to kiss them. “That’s not your fault. None of this is your fault okay? I promise you, I’d never lie to you.” He murmurs, kissing your hands between each sentence. You knew he was being honest, he always was. Carl never beat around the bush, but he was never brutally honest, he was always soft with you.

“Can I…?” He gestures to your arms and looks to you for approval. You look at him and hesitate but nod, sniffling a bit. He rolls your sleeve down slowly and he looks at you before leaning down to place soft kisses over your scars. Didn’t leave a single one un-kissed. He pulled the sleeve down your other arm and repeats the process. Every single scar was kissed. He always knew how to make you feel loved. He looks at you and studies your face like he’s done thousands of times before. He leans up to kiss your nose, then your forehead and then your cheek.

Carl leans forward and hugs you tightly. He sits there and tells you how much he loves you over and over.

Now, your heart feels fuller than ever.

a/n: i hope i did this well, i really like it even though i’ve never written a fic like this before. it took me a while to get out bc i really did my research for it to make it best i could. i also had a ton of school stuff to deal with. thank you anon for the request <3 my inbox is nowww empty so if you guys want plsss send some requests.

#carl grimes #the walking dead #twd #carl grimes twd #carl grimes fanfiction #carl grimes fluff #carl grimes x fem!reader #carl grimes x reader #carl grimes x y/n #carl grimes the walking dead #carl grimes angst #the walking dead carl #twd carl #tw s3lf harm #rinas writing 🌀

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neverendingford · 5 months

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#tag talk #the self harm is mostly I think about body dysphoria. the desire to carve my body into a different shape.#as soon as I get my insurance sorted again I gotta start asking about options for surgery cause I will go broke if I have to. I need change.#I need to change my body because the chest changing is good but damn that bottom region needs some serious damage done to it.#anyway. my shoulder doesn't hurt as much as I thought it would but the x needed touching up so you know.

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joelmillers-whore · 1 year

Text

Hard Light | Chapter 1

summary: when a new english professor begins teaching your class for the duration of your semester, you can’t help but develop an innocent crush on him. he’s as off-limits as he can be, but that doesn’t deter you in the slightest. after a drunk night, you accidentally email him something that wasn’t intended to ever be seen by anyone. but that doesn’t matter. it triggers a misunderstanding that manifests into an affair with your professor who is twenty years your senior. nothing good could come of this, right?

pairings: professor!joel x college student!reader

word count: 2.2K

series or one-shot

warnings: 18+ explicit, minors DNI, no mention of Y/N, alternate universe, professor/student relationship, eventual smut, self-esteem issues, workaholic, joel x female!reader, infatuation bordering on obsession (stay delulu friends), some sexual thoughts, masturbation (f), joel being a huge tease lol, (will add more tags as i write)

AN: i am so excited by the response that my joel one-shot got a few days ago and i’ve been itching to get something else out to you all. big, giant forehead kisses for those who want one, i love you all. so, anyway, a mini-series about professor joel is coming at you fast. i’ve written the first few chapters, so expect those in the near future. i’m thinking once a week? this fic is going to be something else and i’m so excited to share it with ya’ll. enjoy, and let me know what you think. find my ao3 here for more content and other fandoms.

You were running late for your shift at the coffee shop on campus, rummaging around your dresser, trying to find the low-cut black top you always wore when you had a shift. You weren’t usually one to feed into the peer pressure of those around you, but push came to shove when you found it nearly impossible to keep yourself afloat as a twenty-something student without the added extra tips from your part-time job.

So what if you had to show a little bit of cleavage? Right? There was no harm. Student loans were a bitch and on top of rent and food costs, you had to get a job at the coffee shop and balance a full course load just to make ends meet.

A thought popped into your head and you rushed to your laptop, throwing it open as you checked the time; 5:45 AM. If you busted out your lightning-fast typing skills, you would have enough time to catch the next bus and make it to campus with five minutes to spare. If only your crappy second-hand computer would work.

The thing honestly sounded like a chopper engine, getting ready for lift-off. You were surprised you’d gotten this far with it. Not that you weren’t appreciative, your older brother had passed it down and it had relieved a huge weight— and expense off of your shoulders.

You tabbed into your school portal, typing in your credentials and selecting your English course. You sighed heavily, as you skimmed over the assignment for this week, something to do with a sonnet that you couldn’t care less about. You loved school but ever since becoming an English major, the spark that you once had for literature sort of just evaporated.

You couldn’t tell if it was because of how busy you were with everything else that you just couldn’t find the time to enjoy it, or the thought that really scared you, you had fallen out of love with it.

It had been two years of go, go, go and you were, for lack of a better word, burnt out. You’d tried dropping courses last semester, thinking that you just needed a little bit of ease when it came to your course load, but when that didn’t solve the problem and only made things worse for you, you spent the last two semesters trying to catch up and get yourself to a place where you could finally breathe.

But it wasn’t easy. You were only now caught up to where you had been, the illusion that you were someone who could afford to take time off and slow down was a distant memory.

In bold letters, the words Paid Internship jumped off of the screen. You smiled as you leaned in closer to the screen, making sure you read through everything correctly. This was the break above the surface that you needed, the reprieve that you had been chasing. A paid internship was exactly how you’d be able to make more money and maybe have a little breathing room before you worked yourself into an early grave.

You clicked the mail icon at the top and clicked into a new email, deciding that the worst-case scenario was that you wouldn’t get the internship. All you were doing was inquiring about the application process. Best-case scenario; you’d get it and make some extra pocket money.

You saw the time, cursing under your breath as you slammed the laptop closed, grabbed your phone out of the charger and ran out of the door. You couldn’t be late, not again. You texted your co-worker Jeremy to open the shop without you and explained to him that you were running a few minutes late, as you barely made it to the bus. You climbed on board, scanned your student pass and found a seat near the back. Your chest was burning from the rush of trying to make it on time, but you could breathe easy now.

You checked your messages mindlessly, scrolling through a bunch of unread ones that you didn’t have the heart to answer.

Before you knew it, the familiar monuments and buildings of UT Austin came into view, and the subtle change of scenery from downtown to a more densely packed area made your heart skip a beat. It was the same each time you were back on campus. Which, these days, was often. Sliding out of the seat, you made your way to the front, thanking the driver as the bus came to a complete stop.

The coffee shop was only a short walk from the bus stop but even still you quickened your pace. You didn't want to leave Jeremy alone for long, you already felt bad enough about letting him open by himself. You stifled a yawn as you pushed open the door to the small cafe, leaning your body into the door, slightly cringing at the shrill sound of the bell.

"There you are", a male voice called, making your head snap up. You wiggled your nose, the familiar timbre of your ex-boyfriend's voice ringing in your ears. "It's about time you got your ass down here".

You snickered, shrugging your heavy bag off of your shoulder, and dropping it behind the counter, turning around and greeting him with an unamused smirk.

Jeremy and you had gone out for a few months last year, it was your first and, as of right now, the only short-term relationship that you'd had in college.

Dating your co-worker, even in a relatively small place like the coffee shop on campus, almost always spelled trouble, but Jeremy was not the type to hold something like a failed relationship over your head. He understood that school was a priority for you and making a living for yourself came first, even above something like a relationship. It might not be the healthiest way to live, but it was how it always was.

Jeremy and you had developed a fast friendship, one that went beyond the romantic relationship that you'd had last year. You parted amicably and now, you had someone you could confide in, someone you could trust.

"Why don't you say that to my face?", you teased, raising a brow at him over the milk frother you were setting up.

Jeremy threw his rag down and stalked over to you. "You're snippy this morning", he chided.

You banged into his shoulder playfully, "Doesn't help that I have to see your ugly mug first thing in the morning".

You snorted out a laugh and Jeremy looked at you, feigning defensiveness, "Ouch", he paused, returning back to his post near the coffee machine, "Remind me how we ever went out?".

You scrunched your nose and threw your rag at Jeremy, hitting him square in the face with it, "That was rude".

He shrugged his shoulder, "You started it".

You both devolved into a fit of giggles and fell into a comfortable silence, setting up and getting the coffee shop ready for the day. You had a half-day shift to look forward to and then you had class until the late afternoon. The days were long and the nights were longer.

You usually found yourself nose-deep in your textbooks, more often than not, or some classic novel that was required for class, not moving from the couch until your eyes were red and you were seeing double.

Only then did you retire to sleep, crashing hard until you had to wake up and do it all again the next day.

───── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ─────

The coffee shop had been bustling with people since six in the morning, and at one in the afternoon, it hadn't let up, only now you had to go to class. Waving Jeremy goodbye, you sidestepped Tara, the fourth-year who was covering the rest of the afternoon and closing shift.

You'd crossed the far side of campus, passing by the science building and one of the massive libraries that had acted like a second home to you back when you’d been studying for exams when you were a freshman. You could thank your obnoxious roommates for that one.

Entering the lecture hall, bodies pressed into you as you weaved through the growing crowd, trying to find a spot in the middle where you could see and hear your English professor. But also blend in with the masses. As if the universe had other plans in mind, and everyone suddenly showed up to the Tuesday lecture all at the same time, you found yourself picking a seat near the front, an exasperated groan leaving you.

You hated sitting at the front, not because you didn't want to get called on to answer something or because you didn't know the answers, but because you did. You wanted to get through your four years as quickly and unscathed as possible and if people knew, mainly professors, that you knew more about the subject matter than you needed to, you'd surely get called on more often, making you stick out in ways you didn't want.

It was a terrible curse, going through life with the self-esteem that you did. But it was how you were raised. Blend in. Don't be too loud. Be quiet and only observe. Nerves rapped at your insides when you thought about getting called on when class started. Your heart rate ticked up and you found that your hands were beginning to get clammy, your throat constricting with each breath.

You rubbed your hands up and down your thighs, grounding yourself with the sensation of the material.

With a jump, you sat up straighter in your seat, being jostled from your thoughts by a loud slam. You snapped your head toward the entrance, eying the person who had startled everyone. It was a man carrying a briefcase.

Your lips tilted up at the edges, amusement tickling you when you thought of anyone using a briefcase nowadays. But here this man was, head down as he made his way to the front of the room, toward the desk.

You couldn't help keeping your eyes trained on him. On how his slacks tightened around his butt, moulding to the shape and curve of it. You bit your bottom lip out of reflex, your eyes dragging down the length of the mystery man who had crashed your lecture. Maybe he was a TA? Your brows furrowed when you thought about how your professor was nowhere in sight.

The man with the briefcase placed his case on the desk, turning to face the audience of students who blinked back at him, who now settled down enough to hear him speak. Air caught in your throat when his eyes flicked momentarily to you, and lingered on you for half a second longer than you'd expected. He had massive, warm brown eyes, and soft wrinkles that danced at the edges of his eyes when he smiled, making him seem more boyish than he appeared.

He looked older than a TA would but then again, who were you to judge someone's position in life? You thought that his age did nothing to undermine just how attractive he was, if anything it added to it.

The man, who may or may not have been moonlighting as your English TA cleared his throat, nodding his head, "My name is Joel, well, Professor Miller to most, but 've always been a little bit more informal than my peers".

He began to circle the wooden desk nervously, his large hand finding the edge of it and stroking it far more sensually than necessary. You flexed your fingers, gripping the arm of your seat to stabilize yourself. "So, you can call me Joel from here on out... since we'll be seeing more of each other from now on".

Murmurs began to break out around the lecture hall, and confused and hushed whispers followed.

Professor Miller— Joel, mumbled something incoherent, and you were unable to hear it from where you sat. He cleared his throat again, "Professor McCarthy has taken a leave of absence, so I'll be filling in for him for the remainder of the semester".

You crossed your legs, feeling heat rise and a furious blush break out across your face, and shuffled in your seat, a loud creak emitted from it and you stilled, praying that the loud sound had only been heard by you and no one else. But when you lifted your gaze, Joel's eyes were already locked on you, blown and brimming with cautious inquiry. A touch of a smirk graced his lips.

"And I look forward to getting to know each and every one of you, personally". His eyes were still on you, not ready to release you from their hold.

His tongue darted out to wet his lips and you couldn't help but stare. You had every reason to look away from him, he was your professor and given the clear age difference, he was someone who was off limits. But when he didn't look away from you either, trapping you with his gaze, your face heated up, suddenly aware that he was purposely staring at you.

You swallowed thickly, heart hammering as Joel's eyes finally drifted away from you and back to the faces of your classmates. He continued on with addressing the class, and you noticed that he avoided your eyes for the rest of the lecture.

Only one thought rang through your mind as you tried and failed to focus back on the lecture. This was going to be one long semester.

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merakiui · 2 years

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Absolutely love the possessive ex Scaramouche ramble in tags, please feed us more of that.

Gladly!! :D

(cw: yandere, extremely toxic ex scara, modern au, unhealthy behaviors/relationship, stalking, coercion, obsession, forced marriage, violent/suicidal threats, manipulation, mentions of intoxication/alcohol, implied self-harm)

The two of you were what everyone calls ‘high school sweethearts.’ You met him in the cafeteria when the both of you were first years. Despite the scowl etched on his face, he looked lonely sitting all by himself while everyone was finding tables, old and new friends gathering in groups. He’d ignored you, even scooting further away when you’d attempt to move closer. Even though he seemed so averse to you, you remained, silently eating your lunch. Neither of you said anything, but you did introduce yourself. He scoffed under his breath.

You started to sit next to him for every lunch, and he continued to give you the silent treatment. You never pressed him for conversation, instead choosing to enjoy silence while you ate and admired him from the sidelines. He never looked at you, always facing forwards and toying with his chopsticks, bending them so far until they were ready to snap. Eventually, he seemed to grow accustomed to this routine because many weeks into the semester he turned to address you.

“Why do you always sit by me? Don’t you have anyone else to bother?”

“Maybe. But I don’t think anyone’s as mysterious as you are.”

“‘Mysterious…’ Yeah, whatever.”

That seemed to be the catalyst because, as sardonic as he was, he’d begun talking to you. And it wasn’t long until he started to warm up to you every lunch until the both of you were exchanging lighthearted banter. Your friendship would only grow from this point onwards until, at the end of your first year during a study session to prepare for finals, where you were both pulling an all-nighter at your house, he’d asked you out. And you said yes, and the both of you had gone from best friends to lovers within the span of a year. The both of you were each other’s first partner, so it made doing things as a couple even more exciting because neither of you had any experience with dates or holding hands or kissing.

Kuni wasn’t a bad boyfriend. In fact, he was very loyal and sweet. He’d stand up for you if anyone was being rude to you or scrutinizing your relationship with hateful eyes. The two of you were nearly inseparable. When you weren’t spending time together in school, you were out doing things together. And when you couldn’t meet up in person, you’d text or call, sometimes talking late into the evening about all sorts of things. You were so immersed in him that you failed to notice the red flags slowly raising over time. But looking back there were a few notable ones.

He never invited you to his house. In fact, you’d never even met his parents, whereas he’d been to your home so often that your family practically became his own. He hadn’t mentioned anything about his family, and if you tried to suggest going to his house for dinner so that he could introduce you to them he was quick to change the subject. For a while you’d push this, more curious than concerned, but eventually you’d drop it when it became clear that he wasn’t going to divulge anything on the matter. That had stung, but you snuffed those feelings in favor of focusing on other aspects of your relationship.

The second red flag was just how clingy he became when the both of you were in your third year, having been together for two solid years. You never noticed it before because you loved him, but when friends had pointed out how attached he seemed—and it was to rather unhealthy levels, according to their observations—to the point where you were the only person he’d ever formed a bond with while at school you started to see the cracks in what felt like the perfect relationship. He’d text you every single day, at every single hour, all the time. He’d call you nonstop, even more so when you didn’t immediately pick up.

The third red flag coincided with the second. When you couldn’t make it to your phone, he was quick to blame himself and those around him for being responsible for your deteriorating relationship. Did I do something wrong? Are you mad at me? Did those guys bother you again? They probably told you some stupid shit about me, right? Don’t listen to them. Hey, you’re not mad, right? Call me back. I need to talk to you. Just text me when you can, okay? (Name), please don’t leave me. I’ll fix whatever’s wrong. Just promise you’ll stay. Messages of these kinds were what you could expect to receive from him. He’d fluctuate between self-loathing to loathing those around him within seconds, shoving blame onto classmates who’d bully him for being that “weird emo kid with too many piercings” and anyone else who tried to, in his words, “come between you and me.”

By the end of your third year, you started to fall out of love. He was so very dedicated to this relationship, evidenced by how much effort and care he’d put into it, but his clingy behavior was stifling. You’d lost some of your own friends because he chased them away, and it felt like you couldn’t do anything without him breathing down your neck. If you wanted to go anywhere with a friend or two, Kuni had to be there to accompany you. If you looked at another for too long, he’d think you were cheating. If you didn’t text or call him at certain times, if you failed to pick up, or—Archons forbid—you left him on seen, he’d spiral.

Kuni had this habit of sounding dangerously self-destructive when he feared you were being unfaithful or he thought you were going to break up with him, which meant you’d have to sit on the phone for hours convincing him that you loved him, that you’d never leave him, that you’d always be here for him, that you were sorry for not responding, that he needs to calm down and please, please, please don’t do anything rash. Those phone calls were always so stressful. You cried a lot; you’d beg him to put the knife away when he’d threaten to use it on himself, on you, on anyone who might try to take you from him. And, after a few hours of this, he’d be back to his usual self, as if a switch had been flipped. You could hear his adoring smile in his voice when he spoke, when he’d lovingly whisper into the phone, “I’m happy you’re mine. I love you so much.” And you’d shakily parrot the affirmation, too frazzled to say or do anything else.

One of your best friends Rosalyne, who you’d befriended in the midst of all of this, had been so supportive the minute you spilled the truth to her. Kuni hated her the most because she wasn’t afraid of him. Because she’d shut him down when he tried to pull you away from her. Because she wouldn’t approve of any of his toxicity. Rosalyne would take you on shopping sprees, brunch dates, and jogs at the local park. She was plenty of good to outshine Kuni’s bad, and the more time you spent with her the clearer your head would become. The both of you had plenty of sleepovers together, and she let you rant your heart out while she listened. She’d tell you to break up with him, but you’d agonized over how terrifying that would be. You couldn’t bear to tell Kuni the truth—that you wanted to separate because things had turned so rotten—because you were so scared. Scared of him and what he might do.

Scared that if he really did take a blade to himself it would be your fault. He told you that a lot. That it would be your fault if he did anything. That his blood would be on your hands. You believed him every time.

By your final year, you’d already had a plan for university outlined and you’d started applying to a few in advance. You never told Kuni about any of them because you worried he might apply to each one in hopes of going to the same school as you. And when there was the dance for the graduating class and Kuni had asked you to it, you’d told him you were going with Rosalyne and a few other friends as a group. He didn’t like this, as expected, but you’d been so sick of him and his behaviors that you snapped and spilled everything to him. You’ll never forget the look on his face when you told him that you were done with the relationship and that you never wanted to see him again.

He looked as if he could lunge at you and tear you to bloody ribbons at any moment.

You graduated single and so very refreshed, and your summer had been filled with friends. Kuni didn’t message you at all, which was surprising considering you were certain he’d spam you relentlessly after the break-up. But he never did. In fact, you never saw him again. Graduation had come and gone, and now that you could recover from such a terrible relationship he was becoming less of a burden for you. For a while you were anxious. You kept expecting to receive a phone call or to see some news about Kuni, but neither ever came. Rosalyne told you to stop thinking about him. It would only make you even more paranoid and that wouldn’t do your mental health any good. You were so grateful to have her in your life, but most importantly you were glad Kuni failed to scare her away.

Now you’re a second year in college and things have only gotten so much better for you. You and Rosalyne still keep in touch despite going to different schools. She’d gone to a university in Snezhnaya, while you enrolled in one in Sumeru, and you’ve blotted Kuni from your mind. You’ve made a fresh group of friends while attending classes: criminal justice major Shikanoin Heizou, creative writing major Kaedehara Kazuha, musical therapy major Venti, botany major Tighnari, and so many more wonderful people who have all welcomed you into their circles.

So when Venti drags a familiar face to your usual weekend outing, which is really just a retreat to the forest for drinking and smoking, creeping cold settles into your bones. He looks awkward with Venti’s arm slung around him as the more bubbly of the two drags him towards the bonfire, where you sit with the others roasting marshmallows for s’mores, and it’s a look that is so uncharacteristic on him. What’s even weirder is how friendly everyone greets him—as if they all know him—and you’re completely lost when they turn to you and ask if you’ve met Kunikuzushi.

“No,” you lie through your teeth, forcing a pleasant smile and extending your hand for a stiff handshake, which Venti snickers at. “No, I’ve never met him before.”

Apparently, he’s in one of Venti’s classes—it’s a course he’s taking solely because he needs the credits. Tighnari knows him because they usually work the same shifts at the campus café. Kazuha knows him from his linguistics and philosophy classes. Heizou’s ate with him in the dining hall plenty of times now and they’re also taking the same psychology class. It feels so genuine and yet so fake at the same time. Too perfectly manufactured to be a mere coincidence. But you do your best to push past these suspicions, and when he sits across from you, smiling at you and saying how nice it is to meet you, the warping flames paint his face in devilish shadows. That’s what you think he is when he acts like a completely different person from how he was when you dated: a devil who’s good at being kind and outgoing, noisy and abrupt, and always so foul-mouthed, but in a way that makes him charming. Your friends are so enthralled. They love him and his sense of humor. They love his quick wit. They love how fun he is. And suddenly weekends spent in the forest aren’t so enjoyable.

You do your best to overcome your doubts. For a few months you’re on edge. How he even found you is a mystery. Surely he wouldn’t stalk you and enroll in the same college just to get revenge or…whatever vengeance he wants from you. But when he treats you to coffee, when he brings you and the others pastries every other morning, when he invites the lot of you to study at the library, when he tells the funniest stories while crossed and everyone’s giggling like schoolgirls it really feels like he’s…healthier. Like he’s turned a fresh page in his life and is starting anew. Like he’s changed for the better.

Perhaps he just doesn’t remember you. You’ve changed your style over the years, so it’s possible he’s simply forgotten your image and can’t place memories to your name. Eventually, after soothing yourself with these theories, you begin to accept his presence in the group. He fits in so flawlessly, as if he’s a missing piece to the puzzle, and you can’t believe you’re admitting this, but you like this version of Kuni. He’s confident, not cocky. He’s kind, not rude. He gives everyone space. In fact, he rarely texts frequently in the group chat. And he’s funny! He’s so funny. You don’t think the Kuni from your past was ever as funny as the Kuni who regales everyone with lighthearted stories of how he once took in a stray cat that turned out to belong to his neighbor or how his old job had the strangest customers.

Maybe he truly did change. Maybe all of these coincidences really are coincidences. Maybe it’s for the best that you leave the past in the past.

Finals season looms, and the group hasn’t had time to meet up outside of class. Venti has tried to persuade everyone to come study at his apartment. His roommate won’t care (yes, he will. Xiao hates it when everyone gets blackout drunk and he has to wake everyone come morning), but if you’ve known Venti long enough you’ll know there is no studying that happens at these study sessions. This is probably the reason why he’s had to repeat a year.

With everyone’s schedules packed with academics, it’s difficult to find a time where everyone can get together to study. You think you might just be better off studying on your own, but Kuni’s message of you wanna pull an all-nighter for these lame af finals together?? accompanied with a photo of snacks and coffee, any thoughts of studying alone instantly vanish.

This is how you find yourself in his dorm, sprawled on his bed while he sits on the floor, whacking your dangling feet when they get too close to him. His roommate Albedo is currently out tutoring a few students at the library and won’t be back until much later, so it’s just you, Kuni, and a pile of textbooks and notes. You’ve hung out with Kuni a few times and he was great company during each. You’ve also fallen asleep in his dorm before, when you’d come over to binge a show the both of you enjoy, and you’d lost track of time and had slipped into a dream halfway through the marathon. You’d woken the next morning with Kuni looming over you, grinning deviously and holding an uncapped marker. He’d leaned down and whispered, “You drool in your sleep,” and you’d swatted at him and groused about how you were sleeping so peacefully when he just had to ruin your sleep (and your face) with his antics. And then there was that time when you were so drunk at that one party and you could hardly stand, he’d been there to help. He even stayed with you for the rest of that night, offering his assistance when you became nauseous or needed water or a snack until you passed out.

Despite your initial apprehensions, you consider him a friend. He’s no one nearly as close as Rosalyne or your other friends. He’s just a mutual friend, someone you’ll spend time with when you feel like it, but you don’t truly need him in your life. That, and part of you still struggles to trust him after all of the stress and unhealthy obsession he subjected you to.

“Kuni,” you whine, lifting your head from the textbook. “Can you get me some water? I’m thirsty.”

“Do I look like your maid?” he snaps, immersed in organizing his notes. “Get it yourself.”

“I’m picturing it now and you’re in a frilly dress and—”

“Forget I asked.” Setting his notebook down with an exaggerated sigh, he crosses the distance to the mini fridge and withdraws a bottle of water.

Grinning, you slide off of his bed and reach for it with a grateful hum. He smirks and takes a step back, holding it away from you.

“Seriously…”

Rolling your eyes, you lunge for it and he side-steps you with the practiced grace of a cat. You brace yourself against the wall and swipe at him. Again, he dodges, unscrewing the cap and shaking the bottle teasingly.

“I think I’ll take a sip for myself. All of this studying has left me so parched.”

“No fair! That’s mine!”

“Is it?” He pulls it away from his lips to observe the bottle and feigns surprise. “That’s weird. I don’t see your name on it.”

“Look closer!” you exclaim, but just as he’s about to humor you you pounce, tackling him to the ground—there’s a beanbag cushion that breaks your fall—and the water spills all over the both of you in the midst of the tumble. A slew of colorful words stick in Kuni’s throat and your laughter rings out melodiously. You seize his wrist and hold it down while reaching for the bottle in his other hand, where there’s still some water left. He struggles halfheartedly, relinquishing the bottle with a disinterested scoff, and you pull away from him to down what’s left.

While crushing the plastic bottle into a ball, you notice something on your palm—the palm that had grabbed Kuni’s wrist—and it takes a minute before the skin tone-colored substance registers in your mind.

Concealer.

You peer at him and notice that he’s cradling his arm, and confusion sprouts.

“So funny,” he spits with a hollow laugh. “You owe me a new beanbag if this one’s ruined.”

“Hey, hold on. What’s with the—”

“Forget it. You got your water, so let’s get back to studying. Or do you no longer want to be a perfect student?”

Without thinking, you grab his arm as he’s standing and when you look at his forearm you can see where the water’s started to wash the concealer away. Curiously, you scrub at it while he tries to yank his arm away, but when you unearth a dozen scars littering his wrist and climbing the length of his arm that creeping cold from before returns.

And suddenly you’re brought back to those phone calls—the ones where he’d threaten suicide and murder—and you stumble back as if you’ve been burned, half-expecting to hear those threats once more. Kuni’s staring at his wrist, his features twisted in grim disapproval, and for a moment you think he looks…hurt. Or maybe that’s sadness you see. Whatever emotion it was, it doesn’t linger because a quiet chuckle slips past his lips, and the sound is so very frigid it has your blood crystallizing.

“It really hurt when you said you never wanted to see me again.” Kuni peers down at you, and his eyes that had once been so bright and filled with light are dull and dark. “But nothing hurts more than loving you.”

You open your mouth to say something—anything—but the words won’t come. You’re rooted to the ground, horror slinking through your body and rendering you immovable. Your heart is in your throat, pounding so loudly it’s practically a drum, and a cold sweat washes over you.

“Each time I found myself hating you, I thought it was odd because I love you so much. I can’t possibly hate the one I’ve loved all this time.” He scowls. “But loving you hurts. Loving you feels like chewing glass and drinking poison. Loving you isn’t fair because while you moved forward with your ‘friends,’ I was forced to stay behind and pick up the pieces of what was left of you. So for every moment I couldn’t stand you, I tallied it on myself so that I’ll never forget the times I loved you so much I hated you.”

This can’t be happening, you’re thinking, curling your hands into trembling fists. He changed. He changed, right? This isn’t the same Kuni from before. This isn’t…

“And when I saw how well you seemed to be doing without me, I hated you even more.” Without warning, he’s grabbed your arm and hoisted you up. You open your mouth to scream, but no sound comes—not that anything could when he’s pulled a switchblade from his pocket and poised the pointed tip at your jugular. “You have poor taste in friends. Those guys suck.”

Tutting, he shakes his head at you like a parent might when scolding a child, and says, “Do you know how fucking tiring it was pretending? You think I care about pastries and stupid campfire stories? You really think I’d ever want to associate myself with that sorry lot?”

“K-Kuni, please let go of me. I… I’m sorry. I didn’t know you were—I’m sorry. So please just…”

“And then the first time you see me after all these years apart and you had the gall to lie to my face! ‘I’ve never met him before.’ Bullshit. You just didn’t want any of your loser friends to know our history, right? Because you’re ashamed to have known me, right?”

“That’s not it! I… I was just—I didn’t… I was… I just…”

“I… I… I…” he mocks, shoving you down onto the beanbag. It dips under the sudden weight, and you sink further into it when he points the blade at you. “Stop tripping over your tongue. I should be the one near tears! You cast me aside and then forgot all about me. You abandoned me when I needed you most.” His voice cracks at that last sentence, and your heart skips erratically.

“That’s not what happened! We needed space. I needed space. You were being too—” You stop yourself, unsure of how to phrase it. Too controlling? Too dangerous? Too scary?

“Lucky for you, I’m willing to overlook these past...slights.” The blade twirls effortlessly in his grasp, and you heave a relieved breath when he’s no longer pointing it in your direction. “Marry me and we’ll forget all about the past. We’ll start over.”

His demand almost stops your heart altogether. You stare up at him, mouth agape, and mumble a disbelieving, “What?”

“You heard me.” He seems to soften with his next words, and for a moment he looks and sounds like the Kuni who hangs out with you and your friends. The harmlessly fun Kuni who always takes such good care of you. “You’re the only one I’ll ever love, so let’s get married.”

“K-Kuni, I can’t... I really can’t...”

Within seconds the blade has found itself on his wrist, pressing into delicate flesh. Not enough to cut, but if he applies more force you’ll definitely see blood. You choke on a horrified gasp.

“What was that?” He raises his brow at you, challenging you with a calm smile.

Your mind reels in an effort to conjure a plan. What can you even do? If you take the blade from him, will he turn his anger on you? Will you have to wrestle him into submission? And if you do manage to get out of his dorm, will anyone believe you? He’s painted himself in such a pleasant light. Your friends love and trust him! So what can you say? And if there isn’t any solid proof, no one will even entertain bringing the authorities into this mess.

“I’m waiting, (Name). Are you really going to make me add another tally? Do you really want me to hate you again? Oh, but maybe I should start marking you! We can add a slice for each time you failed to love me. That way we’ll both look like used cutting boards.”

You need help, you want to say, but the words escape you.

Instead, you nod hastily and say breathlessly, “Okay, yes! I’ll marry you!” Swallowing your horror, you glance at the blade as it’s lifted from his skin. Thankfully, there isn’t a cut. “I... I’ll marry you, Kuni. So... So please don’t hurt yourself. Please.”

It feels like you’ve been strangled for an eternity, so when he finally pockets the blade the air in your lungs returns and you collapse against the beanbag, chest rising and falling in short, panicked breaths.

“Good.” He bends down to your height, grips your chin with cold fingers, and forces you to meet his adoring stare. “We’ll look at rings tomorrow. Or maybe you’d prefer bracelets instead? I can be flexible but only for you, so you’d better be grateful.”

You swallow rising bile and nod. “T-Thank you.” You’re not sure why you’re thanking him when he hardly deserves it, but it feels like the right thing to say to ease the tension.

Kuni’s eyes sparkle, no longer a void of endless darkness, and when he leans in to capture your lips in his your heart sinks. You really can’t run from your past, can you?

#genshin chit chat #yandere-romanticaa #yandere scaramouche #scara says he needs you but what he really needs is a therapist first and foremost #adding heizou into the mix!!! he probably takes notice of your change in behavior #and confronts you one on one to ask if everything's okay #and he looks so concerned and his voice is so soft and so you break and spill everything #and he nods while he takes in all of this information before offering to help #he knows the law (he's studying it after all!) so he can help you #but what heizou doesn't tell you is that the law might crush one evil person but it can easily protect other evils :)#especially him who is oh-so-honorable and sweet #you'd never know he wants to be more than just friends #and that he has a journal detailing your every move #but also i like the idea of heizou being a genuine friend and the two of you grow closer while trying to find ways to get scara caught #and taken away from you for good #but yan!heizou just hits so deliciously orz #also also!! adding in rosalyne~~ she went to the same uni as kuni (in snezhnaya)#but when he finally found out where you were he transferred #and rosa only realized they went to the same school when she found out from ajax (who also attends the same uni)#kuni probably worked part-time as a hospital receptionist before he transferred schools #and he's pretty sure the doctor there is a serial killer or he's just on the border of criminally insane (this is dottore after all)#(me looking at every way i can insert each harbinger into this au >:D)

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sarahowritesostucky · 7 months

Text

📖"Temporary Custody"

Rating: Explicit

Pairing: Steve x ofc x Bucky; Steve x Bucky

Word Count: 3620

Tags: Dom/sub, bdsm au, dom Bucky, sub reader, hurt/comfort, enemies to lovers, gay sex'n'stuff, straight sex'n'stuff, Steve being a literal Golden Retriever, mental health issues, dub-con, forced submission, referenced childhood abuse and resultant mental health issues, bakery au, m/f/m, gentle domination, total power exchange

Summary: The stigma and shame of being a submissive has kept Mary unfulfilled and in the closet her whole life, until an inciting incident leads to Bucky and Steve taking her in and giving her everything she was always too afraid to ask for.

Trigger warnings: This story contains themes of eating disordered behavior, body image issues, childhood abuse, self-harm, and alcohol abuse.

Wait! I haven't read an earlier chapter of this fic! Story Masterpost

6. Somethin' with Bananas

Steve

Steve wakes up to Bucky spooning him, pressing his morning wood against his ass. He hums with his eyes still closed, enjoying the feeling. “Mmm, g’morning.”

Hands slide onto his hips. “Mornin’ Sunshine.”

Steve smiles. “Sunshine” is one of Bucky’s favorite pet names for him. Steve is rather fond of it too, after so many years together. His husband has a knack for making him feel special like that. “What’re you doin', Buck?” he warns softly, still smiling because he likes the feeling of being explored, even if they can't take this far right now because of—

“She left for work a while ago,” Bucky murmurs, the answer to a question that Steve hasn’t asked. Alone time doesn’t happen as much as it used to, these days. "Left a bunch of baking stuff out on the counter. There's a note threatening us with mortal peril if we eat any of her bananas."

"Hmm." Steve yawns deeply and wiggles his butt back against his husband's noticeable hardon. "Whas'she makin'?"

"Dunno. Somethin' with bananas." Bucky’s hand slides to the juncture of Steve’s legs. He palms the half hard line of his cock from over his briefs, massaging the bulge as it grows. Steve moans a little and tips his head back to Bucky’s shoulder, a wordless request for kisses. Bucky starts lavishing his neck with attention while his hand continues its slow work.

Steve loves moments like this. Early morning, the sun barely out and the world quiet, the bedroom air still and thick from sleep; easy, instinctual fucking; simple and not complicated, just the two of them loving on each other. He inhales a little sharper when Bucky finally slides his hand under the waistband of his underwear. “Yeah,” he whispers.

“Mmhm.” Bucky kisses his neck. “This what you wanted, Honey?” His hand is wrapped flush around Steve now, skin on skin. He strokes once up and down and gives a squeeze, starts up a slow, tight rhythm.

“Oh.” Steve bites his lip, eyes closed as he just feels what Bucky’s doing to him. “Mm. Mmhm. S’real good.” He shivers when Bucky’s thumb swipes at his cockhead, spreading the wetness around and pressing firm against his slit. “Fuck …”

“Always were a leaker,” Bucky says lowly. “You get so wet, Honey.”

“Buck,” Steve whines. He loves Bucky’s talk in bed but he’s never been able to handle it. It turns him into a pitiful mess, every time.

Bucky

Bucky just chuckles, knowing the effect he has on him. He’s Dominant. Winding Steve around his little finger comes naturally to him, and Steve can’t say he doesn’t like it. “You were making pretty sounds in your sleep,” Bucky says, murmuring the words in between kisses on Steve’s neck. “Moaning and moving your hips a little.” He demonstrates, pushing his own hips up against Steve’s ass. Steve makes an embarrassed, whimpery sort of noise that goes straight to Bucky’s cock, and he shushes him. “Shh, no. It was hot, Stevie. You were feeling real good in your sleep, huh?”

“Y-yeah.”

“What were you dreaming about?” Bucky presses his thigh forward, between Steve��s legs, crowding him that much closer. “Hm?”

“Her,” Steve says breathily. “I … h-her.”

“Mary?” Bucky grins against the skin of his neck. “Having dirty dreams about our girl, huh?”

Steve moans—whether at Bucky calling her ‘their girl’, or at the way his other hand is now reaching down to cup Steve’s sac, isn’t clear. Bucky gives a gentle squeeze and tug, then rolls the weight of his testicles in his palm. Steve, who’s always been keen on having his balls played with, moans louder and nods against the pillow. “Didn’t mean to,” he says, as if he needs to defend his character.

Bucky grins like a shark and nips his earlobe. “Course not. You just couldn’t help it, could you? She’s always there, moaning around bites of cream filled pastries, showing off her ass in those leggings—”

Steve groans.

“—Giving us attitude every day like she wants a spanking, but dropping so sweet by the end’a the night.” He can see pink spreading around to the back of Steve’s neck and shoulders now. His Stevie colors so easily. Bucky licks delicately along the shell of his ear and whispers, “Tell me. Tell me what you did to her in the dream.” Steve moans and doesn’t answer for a long while, maybe too distracted by Bucky’s hand that’s still stroking him slowly. Bucky stills, opens his hand and presses Steve’s cock up against his stomach. “Steve,” he warns. “Tell me.”

“... Wasn’t me,” Steve mumbles, embarrassed. “It was you. You were touching her, fucking her.”

Bucky’s guts tighten in arousal. “Oh?” he breathes. “You like thinkin’ about that? Like thinking about me laying her out? Her spreading her legs for me right here on this bed?” Steve groans and nods, whining impatiently and humping forward for more. Bucky chuckles and takes him in hand again, squeezing his shaft and fondling his balls. They’re tighter now, drawn up closer to his body as he gets more worked up. “So?” Bucky needles, when he still hasn’t gotten an answer. “Is that what you want?”

“Bucky, nngh, Yes, alright?”

“Mmhm.” He chuckles softly and nuzzles Steve’s neck, enjoying his husband’s flustered state. “But you know, I think I’d like to watch you.” He can just picture it: Steve’s muscled, strong body moving over her soft curves, his big hands holding her open gently—because everything Steve does is gentle—while he makes her cum on his cock. “Yeah. You like that idea, Big guy? Me too. I wanna watch this big fat dick—” he squeezes his fist on Steve— “plowing her sloppy, making her cum so good she even cries a little bit.” Steve whines again, and Bucky hums in agreement. “Mmhm. It’d be so hot, Stevie.”

Steve squirms against him in distress. “I, I’ve never … With girls I mean. I’m not … I’ve never …” he peters off, and Bucky’s got no idea what he’s saying.

“What?” He frowns and ruts his erection against the cleft of Steve’s ass for a little relief. “What’re you talking about, Baby? You’ve been with women before. College?”

Steve shakes his head against the pillow. “No, I mean I … I don’t know what to do. To make ‘em feel good. I’m … not good at it.”

Bucky actually stops what he’s doing. Steve grunts at the lack of touch, but Bucky just hushes him and pulls on his shoulder, urging him to turn over. “Hey. C’mere. Look at me.” Steve’s face is indeed colored pink when he turns to lie facing Bucky. His eyes flick up briefly, but dart away again, shy. Bucky’s heart squeezes. “Oh, Honey,” he says, bringing a hand up to cup Steve’s jaw. “Who told you that?” He thinks of murdering whatever coed bitch might’ve made Steve feel self-conscious.

Steve looks mortified. “Nobody did. Just … I could tell. The times I was with ‘em. I couldn’t make them, you know, cum.” He looks so ashamed as he admits it, and Bucky wants to grab him and kiss all over his entire face.

“Aw, Steve,” he coos. “Is that it? You’re nervous about being with a woman again? Not confident?”

Steve nods. He tucks himself against Bucky’s body and presses his face in his neck, hiding there. “Women are hard,” he mumbles. “I like ‘em, but it’s not easy.”

Bucky chuckles a little. “Yeah, that’s for sure. But it’s not that bad, baby. You just gotta know a few basics. Gotta take it real slow and feel them out, find out what makes her feel good. Every girl’s different. That’s the beauty in it.”

Steve grunts and ruts up against him, their cocks knocking together between their bellies. “Tell me?” he asks, eager and sweet. “Please, Buck? Tell me how.”

Bucky feels like half the blood leaves his brain, his dick throbbing anew. “Fuck,” he breathes, crazy turned on at the idea. “You want me to teach you, Stevie? Teach you how to get her crying? Dripping wet? How to touch her so good you make her cum?”

Steve shivers and nods, grinding his forehead into Bucky’s shoulder in embarrassment. “Yeah, yeah I want you to. Want you to teach me.”

Bucky pulls Steve’s head up to make him look at him. His face is pinched—embarrassed but wanting. Bucky curses. “Fuck. Yeah, yeah baby I’ll teach you how. C’mere.” He moves up the bed, pulling Steve’s meaty shoulders to get him to follow, directing him to sit in his lap, back to chest as Bucky props them up against the headboard. He spreads his legs wide to accommodate Steve’s bulk, wrapping his arms around him from behind. “My little overachiever,” he murmurs. “Such a Boy Scout, always wanting to be the best you can be.”

Steve huffs. “Don’t think they gave out merits for eating pussy,” he quips, uncharacteristically lewd.

Bucky barks out a laugh in delight. “Well pay attention, Sweetheart. You’re about to earn that badge.” Steve shudders against him, but he’s leaning back against Bucky, slumped just a little lower in his lap. He’s ready to listen, and Bucky’s fucking hot at the chance to tell. “First thing you gotta know,” he says, speaking delicately and smoothing his hands over Steve’s sides. “Is forget what you’ve seen in porn. They make that shit for us, not them. It’s all fake. No better way to make a girl miserable than to go pounding into her or whatever else.”

Steve makes a questioning noise, and God bless him, Bucky knows instantly that this is news to the big dummy. “But …” he hedges.

“No buts, Honey.” Bucky kisses his ear. “You gotta be so gentle. Always start soft, always go slow. Start that way and pay attention to her reactions.” He skims his fingertips up Steve’s ribs, tickling lightly over to his pecs and back down, making him gasp. “Yeah,” Bucky hums, “Just like that. She might be quiet at first, girls don’t moan all loud right off the bat. They don’t get worked up as fast as we do. They take time.”

Steve nods, panting a little as he listens to him. “W-what then?” he asks.

“Listen to her breathing, the sounds she makes. She’ll start breathing heavier when you’ve got her feeling good, start making little sounds without even realizing she’s doin’ it.” Steve looses a tiny whimper and Bucky grins. “Yeah, just like that.” He reaches down and finds Steve’s cock again, and god it’s sexy how wet his fella can get. He strokes him a few times, just languidly, letting the precum guide the slide of his fist. Not hurrying. Showing Steve what he means when he says ‘slow’.

“Oh,” Steve breathes, sounding gone for it.

“Yeah,” Bucky agrees. “And then when she starts moving her hips?” He presses his crotch into the small of Steve’s back. “Just rubbing herself against you or humping up in the air a little? Oh yeah, that’s when she’s into it.” He brings one hand up to cradle Steve’s pec. “Girls are more sensitive here than we are,” he tells him. He’s looking over Steve’s shoulder now, eyeing up what he’s doing. He flicks his thumb over the nipple—so freaking small and petal pink where Bucky’s are darker. And he’s so responsive, the nipple pebbling up with hardly any effort on Bucky’s part. “Mmhm,” Bucky hums approvingly. “You want to try different things. You can just hold ‘em …” he uses both hands and cups the meat of Steve’s chest, giving a proprietary squeeze. Steve moans and Bucky smiles. “Yeah. But not too hard. Treat her tits like they’re something delicate, somethin’ special.” He makes the motion to Steve’s pecs like he would do to lightly bounce a woman’s breasts in his palms. “And Mary, she’s got smaller tits. A nice, healthy handful, just like you.”

Steve whines and squirms impatiently in his lap. Bucky glances down to check, and sees Steve’s cock; abandoned on his stomach, dark, and leaking. It’s so heavy and thick, the foreskin drawn halfway down the head, showcasing the shiny pink tip of him. Bucky curses softly. Fuck, but he wants to wring an orgasm out of that cock like ten minutes ago. But he forces himself to stay the course.

“When you use your mouth on her nipples,” he whispers, voice soft like velvet in Steve’s ear, “You can lick. Or nibble a little.” He mimics each option with a stroke and then a pinch of his fingers on Steve’s nipples, flicking out with his tongue to get the shell of Steve’s ear. “But I’ll tell you what: most of ‘em like it best when you suck.” He uses all five fingertips drawn together to pull gently at the peaks of Steve’s chest, and Steve makes a hurt, wanting sound. “Yeah,” Bucky agrees. “Suck her nipples. Then fit as much of her in your mouth as you can and suck that too.” He takes pity on Steve and reaches back down for his cock. Steve cries out, and Bucky gentles him. “Shh sh sh. Remember: slow.”

Steve groans, his tight hips flexing and pushing his cock up into the curl of Bucky’s fist. “Buck, please.”

“It’s not about you,” Bucky chides. “You’re a man. You get to cum so easy and all the time. You gotta help her get there, give her what she deserves.”

Steve sobs a little, so worked up from all the teasing, but he falls back into Bucky, relaxing against his chest and laying himself open for Bucky to continue. Pride and adoration for his man well up in Bucky at the show of submission. “Good,” he praises, giving an extra indulgent twist on the next upstroke. Steve’s foreskin moves with the motions, making soft, wet noises with all the precum he’s leaking. Bucky hums appreciatively. “Yeah, lookit that.” He draws his hand all the way up, tight, and then dips his thumb into the folds, rubbing into that wetness, against the sensitive head. “If you’re doing it right, touching her enough, she’ll be wet by now,” he says. “But you still shouldn’t go for her pussy yet. Not yet.”

“What … what else?” Steve asks muzzily, like he can’t think of anything else to do that doesn’t involve his dick getting jerked off or sticking it in a hypothetical pussy.

“Tease her,” Bucky says. “Run your hands all over her body, all over her soft skin.”

Steve sighs happily. “I like how soft they are. Smooth.”

Hearing Steve talk about what he likes about women makes Bucky’s dick throb, and he grinds it against Steve’s lower back for some relief. “Mmhm,” he agrees, moving his hands up and down the skin of Steve’s ribcage, his belly, grabbing on at his hips and giving a proprietary jostle. “Dig your fingers into her, gentle but insistent. Let her feel how much you love her body.”

“Now?” Steve asks.

“Not yet,” Bucky whispers.

“Fuck. Bucky.”

“Tease her,” he insists, ignoring Steve’s pleading. He slides his hands down Steve’s thighs and inwards, pulling them apart. Steve moans and spreads them wide. “Exactly,” Bucky says. “You want to touch her here. Run your hands all over, so close to where she wants it. Remember, if you’ve been doing this right, she’ll be wet by now.” He goes back and strokes the wetness along Steve’s shaft. “Sink down between her legs and kiss her thighs—you’ll smell it.”

“Oh my god.”

Bucky smiles, in love with his husband for how easily he comes apart under his care. He traces down to the base of Steve’s cock, making a vee with two fingers and rubbing the skin on either side. “Put pressure on her mound, really close but not touching where she wants it. Not yet.” His other hand slides down and delicately traces the seam of Steve’s sac. “Tease her, trace her folds. Get a little bit of that wetness and rub it around to make her even more sensitive. And then …” He blows gently on Steve’s ear. Steve moans. “Just like that. You want to wait. Don’t give her your mouth until she’s whining and shovin’ up at you for it.”

“Nngh,”

Bucky chuckles and circles the wet pad of his finger over one testicle and then the other. He nudges at Steve’s taut sac and whispers in his ear. “Push her lips apart.”

Steve is breathing hard through his nose, tense, his dick bobbing rock hard and angry in the air. Bucky has mercy on him and reaches for it, and Steve chokes out a sob of relief at only the slightest touch.

Bucky kisses his temple soothingly. “Shh. Here. Riiight here.” He holds the head between his thumb and fingers and starts jacking just the tip of him, foreskin tugging and gliding in that way that he knows feels amazing for Steve. “Right above her sweet spot, see? You rub on her like this, up and down, back and forth. Work the hood over her clit juuust like this.”

Steve makes a debased groan at the echo of what Bucky’s saying, and how he’s working Steve’s foreskin over the head of his dick. “Fuck, fuck,” he hisses.

“Yeah, you’re close. She’s soaked by now. You think it’s time to give her more?”

“Bucky. Yes, yes, please.” His hips are straining upwards but he lets his head loll back on Bucky’s shoulder, open for what he’ll do next. “Please,” he begs.

“Now this is important, baby, so pay attention,” Bucky says. “Some women like a mouth on ‘em down there, some don’t. Some do, but they have a hang up over how they think they look or taste or something.” Steve makes a sad noise at that, matching Bucky’s opinion that: yeah, women shouldn’t worry so much. Pussy is just generally fucking awesome. “Tell her how much you love it,” he says. “The taste of her, the shape of her lips. Make her feel pretty and wanted.” He’s fondling Steve’s balls anew as he says this, rubbing and rolling them, then cupping his whole palm over them and dipping behind to dig fingertips into his taint. “Come on, Stevie,” he goads, “Let me hear it. Tell me what you’d say.”

It takes Steve a few tries before he can pull enough of his brain out of his dick to rasp, “S’fucking gorgeous p-pussy. So … so wet. Can I lick it Honey, huh? Please lemme lick it. Wanna taste that sweet cunt.”

Bucky gasps, shocked and delighted at Steve’s dirty talk. “Oh, Stevie,” he groans. “Baby. Fuck, yes. I didn’t know you had it in you.” He wraps his hand fully around Steve’s cock and starts jerking him off fast, fast enough that it’s obvious he’s finally aiming to make Steve cum, and Steve chokes on a relieved heave of breath.

"Yes! Oh, thank you!”

Bucky attacks Steve’s neck with his mouth, biting and smearing spit and scraping his teeth over the wet skin. He growls as he watches his fist working furiously over Steve's red, hard dick. “Suck her clit while you fuck her on your fingers,” he rasps. “Tell her she’s a good girl, tell her to ride your face, grind down on your hand. Make sure she knows she’s allowed to let go.”

Steve cries out, guttural and loud like he always gets when his pleasure is cresting. “Bucky, Buck. Honey, oh. F-fuck, m’close.”

“Mmhm. Thaat’s it, Princess,” he says, pitching his voice just so and using that name so that Steve knows. Knows he’s talking to her.

Steve whines, his whole body tight and straining into Bucky’s grip.

“Curl your fucking fingers in her,” Bucky growls. “She’s close. Don’t slow down. Don’t even speed up. She likes what you’re doing now, so don’t you dare fucking change a thing.”

“Bucky!”

“That’s it, Princess, just like that. You’re almost there.”

“Fuck, fuck … ssshit …”

“Ride Daddy’s hand, fuck back on it. Good girl.”

Steve jerks and shouts, cock pulsing in telltale contractions, before searing ropes of come shoot up his stomach and all over Bucky’s hand. “Oh, oh, oh!” He grunts through it with gorgeous sounds, and Bucky’s so in love with the sight of it that he’s not roleplaying anymore when he purrs, “Fucking beautiful, Sweetheart.”

Steve slumps when it’s over, still panting from the pleasure. Bucky eases off, sets his wet and slowly softening dick gently against his stomach. He moves them, guiding Steve to turn over and lie out on his front. He shoves Steve’s legs together and straddles them, swipes his hand that’s covered in Steve’s release into the tight space between his thighs, wetting him up. He growls viciously, pent up and rock hard and ready to fucking cum. He ruts into the wet clench of Steve’s thick thighs, fucking him like he’s got a loose, easy cunt. “Fuck, baby,” he grits, close within a matter of minutes. He chases his orgasm and collapses onto Steve’s broad back when it hits, grinding in hard one last time and shouting loud and guttural with how goddamn good it feels. “Fuck! Ughn, f-ffuuck.”

He comes down heaving, panting against Steve’s skin. Steve is strong enough that he can roll out from under his weight, and he pulls Bucky into his arms and draws his head onto his chest. Bucky goes gratefully, happy to have Steve’s firm pecs as a pillow. “God, honey,” he breathes, wrung out. Steve makes a noise of agreement. They just lie there together, sweaty and spent, catching their breath for a long time.

“... Buck?”

“Yeah?”

“… You’re a good teacher.”

Bucky laughs and crawls up to kiss Steve on the mouth. “Yeah,” he says when they part. “But that wasn’t even the main event.” Steve looks confused for a second, before Bucky slyly clarifies: “You still gotta fuck her. And you know you want to make her cum at least twice.”

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berrybanana-arts · 2 months

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Billford Reccs (as requested!)

@gratych requested some CONSENSUAL Billford as there is a LOT of noncon and dubcon out there... NOTE- Always check the tags!! These are Billford reccs so abusive/manipulative behaviour tends to be in literally all of these even if only as a 'oh god in hindsight this is sad' way.

RF- Researcher Ford (Pre-betrayal) PB- Post-betrayal W- Weirdmageddon AU- Alternative Universe (e.g. One Of Us)

Just as a note- I'm pretty sure ALL of these are Triangle!Bill.

*SFW*

Starstruck by FireFlerg899- RF Cute and fluffy with a hint of angst and manipulation because it's pre-betrayal. What a contradiction! Stargazing.

Something Said Before- FireFlerg899- RF, PB, W Mentions of torture, goes through all 3 eras echoing the same phrase.

To Destroy, To Remake- FireFlerg899- AU, PB Deliciously dark Ford, tempted by power!

Break and Bind yourself to Me- kingsteeth-RF, PB Poetic and different. I enjoyed this.

Future Talk- anysin, RF Bill talks to Ford about the future and coming to visit him. Light warning for pain/blood/emotional manipulation. Funny Bone - anysin, RF Ticking, fluff

Silent Lies- Perlumi, PB Ford reminisces on the past. Minor self-harm, angst, references to NSFT themes but no actual sex.

Knock on My Door- sugarboat, PB (portal) I LOVE this one. Bill finds and patches up a wounded Ford because only HE is allowed to mess with Sixer. Graphic description of injuries, hurt/comfort, weird fluff.

The Writing of Destiny- Nelja, RF Oof. Love this one- Ford believes everything has led him to Bill. Lovely fic.

Reality is an Illusion- chaseandcatch, RF, PB OOF. Sweet and short. Ford looks back on his first journal entry about Bill with... uh... new information.

I can be cruel to you, my love- orphan_account, RF? PB? Unsure. Prose poem, love this series (Hymns).

thoughts that are above you (i've gotten so good at lying to myself)- orphan_account More prose poetry! forever cursed in love are the observant- orphan_account More sad prose poetry. Bill puts Ford in a time loop until Ford gives him the answer he wants.

*NSFT:*

CLEAR consent-

Ford is super duper into it in all of these! Warning, a LOT of these are pre-betrayal and therefore Ford is technically being duped into thinking Bill is his friend so the consent IS dodgy in that way. Enjoy!

I search myself, I want you to find me- dieslaudata, RF Bill is having some fun with Ford's body while Ford watches. Consensual possession.

Contrast- dieslaudata, RF Choking, in a sexy way rather than a dying/torture way. Love having to clarify that /hj. Consensual possession. Holding Onto Everything- sugarboat, AU, PB AU where Ford accepted Bill's deal many years ago and they are in an established relationship, of sorts. On One Condition- anysin, RF Voice kink, conditioning, coming untouched, etc

Calling You- anysin, RF Ford summons Bill in a more... Unconventional manner.

Up to the Neck- anysin, RF Jealous Bill. Short, but Bill's blustering always amuses me.

Everything Stays- sugarboat, RF "Only one of them sees the inevitable end approaching"- LOVE this caption. PWP, tentacle sex, praise kink.

First- Pengychan, RF Fluffy, awkward, cute!- "Full access to one’s mind comes with a few downsides, like stumbling on private fantasies the All Seeing Eye could have lived without ever having to see. Not that they’re not kind of flattering. And really, there’s a first time for everything."

Count to 100- kikaikitai, RF Ford summons Bill in a more... unconventional manner. Again. This is a running theme in Billford NSFT fics and I love it. Praise kink.

Incubus- kikaikitai, RF Sequel to Count to 100. Ford loses himself in his sexual relationship with Bill. Weird demon sex, consensual possession, worship, etc. This is a fun one. Obviously manipulative fuckery from Bill. Ford is DOWN BAD, though.

Restless Sleep- GoofyGoldenGirl, RF Massage, fluffy NSFT.

Trignometry- wubub redux, RF Alien biology, Bill helps a 'distracted' Ford concentrate. Ford wants to reciprocate.

Territorial- Pengychan, RF Mentions of sex. Bill saves Ford from a creature torturing Ford with cruel words, pretending to be Bill... Yes, the irony is painful.

Vibe for this section- Consensual! But more dubious/dark than the last section.

Ranges from 'Ford is capital M mad at Bill still but also DTF...' to 'hoo boy this is a little dark!' Read at your own risk, you've been warned. Check the tags!

Are you ready to drink or are you waiting to drown?- sugarboat, AU Body horror, tentacle sex High Esteem- anysin, RF Jealous Ford. No sex, just Bill being very manipulative, gaslighting Ford and telling him what he wants to hear.

Blood Offering- nelja, RF No sex, just a ritual involving self-harm and dark thoughts from Ford as he summons Bill after a long absence.

A change of scenery- nelja, RF No sex but there is burglary, tattooing, and suggestive themes.

Golden Nerd Doll- nelja, W No sex but- objectification, possessive behaviour, etc from Bill who lacks any sort of self-reflection abilities...

Ghosts of Love Past- nelja OK, WARNING, this one is kissing, if not straddling, the dubcon line. I'm popping it on the list because 'non-consensual bondage' is literally in canon. TLDR- Bill chains Ford (Weirdmageddon) and pets his hair. Ford has a visceral reaction to this which he hates/loves/hates.

I hope you enjoy the fics! I've been careful not to spoil them too much but do be careful- Billford is always a tricky one, as much as I love it.

-Berry

#billford #fic recommendation #fic reccs #bill x ford #bill cipher #stanford pines #nsft #mlm #fic rec #ao3 #fanfiction

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iamnmbr3 · 1 month

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(First and foremost, pls write a canon-drarry guide so i don't have to ask your opinion every time lolllll)

Maybe you talked about it but What'd you think of Draco's feelings for Harry in 6th (esp when it comes to Harry being reason for his father's imprisonment) and 7th year each and did it change or he always felt that way? You think whatever his feelings were (esp in 7th yr) were one sided (at that time) and Harry's just sort of caring and pitying him cuz he understands him and draco's miserable and there's not much on Harry's side? (It's so many ppl's theory btw)

IMO Draco had some deep feelings - idk whether i can call it love specifically or not but there was some attachment and trust and care for Harry. Even before 7th year not genuine hatred to cause him real harm at all yk....

Hahaha well that's lowkey what this blog is turning into (and I do have a drarry in canon tag). But also I love receiving asks. Neither you nor anyone else should ever feel hesitant to send me questions. It's fun hearing ya'll's thoughts.

As to your question, I think JKR wrote a 7 book drarry epic by mistake. Right from day 1 they were orbiting each other. I definitely think by 6th year Draco has some (probably repressed and unacknowledged) feelings for Harry. Those feelings are of course complicated by the fact that he and Harry are now on opposite sides of the war, Harry is virulently opposed to the ideals Draco and Draco's side stand for, he and Harry have never gotten along, and now Harry is kinda responsible for getting Draco's dad thrown in prison (and for the task of Dumbledore falling on Draco). So yeah there's definitely resentment there.

Some people have argued that Draco's attack on Harry is a way to keep him safe and send him away from Hogwarts. Personally I don't buy it. Draco is scared and angry and upset about the situation he and his family find themselves in and he takes it out on Harry in an act of vengeance. However, although what he does to Harry is violent and cruel, it's really minor given that Draco is a Death Eater. Can you imagine if Harry was left alone and helpless at the mercy of any other Death Eater? Yeah. It would not end well. Draco doesn't take things very far, waits till his Slytherin buddies are gone to make sure he is in control of the situation and things don't escalate (even though this means being left without backup and potentially getting hurt by Harry instead), and never even thinks of trying to kill Harry or turn him over to Voldemort to be killed.

(I also headcanon that while he boasted about breaking Harry's nose, inside he found that it didn't feel nearly as good as he thought it would, and indeed he feels a bit sick with himself though he ignores it. But that's an aside).

I think those merciful impulses are partly due to Draco being much more averse to violence than his family would like him to be, but also due to the complicated feelings he has about Harry. He doesn't really want to hurt him and he certainly doesn't want to see him dead. Even after the Sectumsempra incident, it is Pansy and not Draco who vilifies Harry. Draco doesn't seem to blame Harry - probably partly because he already consumed by self hatred and perhaps guilt over having tried to use an Unforgivable on Harry, and partly because he and Harry can never truly bring themselves to hate each other. Also when Harry pursued Draco and Snape after the Astronomy Tower sequence (well, really he's chasing Snape but it certainly looks like he's going after all of them) Draco makes no move to hurt him.

The next time they see each other is at the Manor in book 7. Despite the fact that last time they interacted was the Sectumsempra incident Draco doesn't hesitate to risk everything to shield Harry and his friends - even though he intimately knows the consequences of Voldemort's wrath and that he is condemning himself and his family to horrific torture at the best and quite possibly death. He doesn't identify Harry or even Harry's friends. He buys them time. He doesn't report when he sees Harry and Ron have taken their bonds off. He barely puts up a fight when Harry takes his wand. And his wand feels friendly in Harry's hand. I think all that is evidence of not just feelings but strong ones at that. What he did was an act of love.

And again in the fiendfyre sequence he completely loses control at the idea that Harry could be hurt and actually tries to intervene to save him. (Full breakdown of that sequence here).

Similarly I think Harry has more than simple pity for Draco. He's also kinda been fixated on Draco since book 1. By book 6 we get stuff like Harry getting distracted by the sight of Draco changing, getting annoyed when a girl pays attention to Draco, ceasing his investigation into Draco just because it put him at risk, lying to protect Draco from blame after the Astronomy Tower sequence, and worrying about him afterwards. And then in book 7 we get more worrying about Draco, Harry not trying to attack or speak to Draco when he comes into the cell at the Manor, Harry learning to block out Voldemort when the alternative is watching Draco get tortured - potentially to death, Harry dropping everything to rescue Draco specifically from the Fiendfyre (x), and much more. So yeah. Not one sided.

I think by book 7 Draco is in love with Harry, and by late in the book he may not even be able to fully deny it to himself. I think they both had feelings for each other - which were very complicated and contradictory and difficult for them given the circumstances, but definitely mutual and not unrequited. It doesn't mean they'd immediately be besties or fall into each other's arms during 8th year. But there's definitely a mutual attraction going on.

#asks #drarry #hpdm #Draco Malfoy #Harry Potter #dmhp #harco #h/d #harry x draco #harry potter x draco malfoy

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hanayumi · 2 years

Text

𝐭𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐤-𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐛𝐞𝐝

— bonten!sano manjirou x fem!reader x sanzu haruchiyo 🔞

part 2 of brittle to the bone || prev.

if mikey is harsh, imposing, unyielding, then haruchiyo is just that with playful charisma superimposed over cruelty.

wc. ~9k

tags/warnings noncon, predator/prey dynamics, yandere undertones, knifeplay, mild bloodplay, forced infidelity, self-harm, degradation, overstim, mind break, mentions of gunplay, minor character death(s)

notes he’s very mean

snapshot;

Soft. Soft.

Haruchiyo parrots the word in his mind. Almost as if within it holds the secrets to the universe — and that if he keeps saying it, keeps feeling the weight of this single featherlight syllable on his tongue, that it’ll give him a revelation of sorts.

Your skin looked soft and your hand was soft and he can’t help but wonder if every inch of you down to your bones is soft.

∗

Be good.

‘Be good’ — by which Mikey meant, you suppose, no speaking to others in the compound, no leaving the house, no stepping inside anywhere but the bedroom, bathroom, living room, and kitchen… all the places that you’ve been wandering in-between for years without ever going outside. Is there anything else?

Well, you can’t bother yourself to remember. It’s not like you can do anything in here that’ll piss him off anyway. The time you’ve had to spend alone has started to blur into an impalpable being — an amalgamation, of sorts — warping and slowing your perception of reality to a tenth of a millisecond whenever Mikey isn’t around to monopolise your attention.

…I’ll reward you like a good little bitch when I get back. Can you do that for me?

Don’t leave the penthouse. Don’t enter rooms you don’t know. Don’t speak to anyone other than Haruchiyo. It should be pretty simple. Yeah, you can definitely do that for him. You can be good. You can. You’ll show him.

(As long as Haruchiyo doesn’t kill you before you get a chance to.)

You close your eyes, an image of the man with roseate hair floating into your memory. His lilting voice, the rattling of his pills, the way he kissed your hand after introducing himself and the way he smirked when Mikey made his announcement. A prickling chill runs down your spine like cold water.

You clench a bundle of the sheets into your face, burrowing into the lingering scent of Mikey, and decide that you hate the way Haruchiyo speaks. In a slow, condescending drawl, smirk bared, revealing the carious fangs of a seasoned predator, the narrowed slits of his eyes scrutinising (for what, you have no idea) as if he thinks of your life as even more insignificant and disposable as the dirt between his shoes.

There’s another thing, too. Something that fills your little heart with enormous anxiety and forces you on simmering coals within his presence, even now when you’re all safe and sound in this room with its four white walls and thick, locked door.

You can read that grin like an open book.

He thinks that your relationship with his boss has an expiry date. That it’s only a matter of time before you’re disposed of, too. That, without question, you were only there as a form of stress relief, your sole purpose being to tend to his boss’ every need. An emotional outlet, of sorts.

(You hate it because you know he’s right.)

But you don’t tell him that, don’t want to offer him the satisfaction — instead you scamper from his gaze, always slipping out of a room just as he enters it, going as far as to strategically plan out your daily activities to ensure that you wouldn’t be catching any glint nor shadow of that vibrant pink.

And for the most part, it’s working. And even if it didn’t, he has a funny way of looking at everything and anything as if it were leagues beneath him, so much so that you find it easy to simply duck your head and deem yourself unworthy of staying in his presence any longer than you already have. It’s weird, how simple it is to evade him — how predictable, easy, like child’s play. When he has just about given you as much attention as one would to a stray twig obstructing a sidewalk.

So, just like every other nagging worry, you stuff Bonten’s-Number-Two-Sanzu-Haruchiyo away in a cabinet for safe-keeping.

Time without Mikey also means that you’ll at least get a bit more time to yourself (albeit a large portion of it would be spent calculating how to avoid the man he left in his place).

You’re using it wisely, you think — alternating between counting the grooves in the ceiling to toying with the strands of velvet rug in the middle of the too-spacious bedroom, to daydreaming until sprawling scenery of the outside-world blooms behind your eyelids… okay. So you haven’t been able to get anything truly productive done. So what? The word ‘productive’ feels alien in your mind — almost as if there’s something fundamentally cursed about its three syllables, as if it belonged in a realm unattainable to someone like you. You haven’t had to worry about being pro-duc-tive in years. It was always Mikey, Mikey, Mikey.

At some point, you think dismally, I’ll have to get up. But now is not the time. So you count, and count, until you feel your consciousness slipping away, and your eyelids droop, and you sink into a deep, dreamless sleep. Sleep that blunts the ache of isolation and the burning of your bruises, tip-toeing featherlight over your skin like a reminder of the person who left them.

(Mikey doesn’t leave sticky notes on the fridge telling you to remember to brush your teeth and comb your hair. Everything he gives you comes from himself: his flesh and bone, his pain, his heart, his bruises.)

When time meanders forward, and inevitably touches upon evening, and you stir from sleep feeling an unbearable feeling of emptiness in your stomach (almost as if a large cavity was drilled into your abdomen), you shake the drowsiness away starting to feel an oncoming panic that Haruchiyo somewhere somehow found a way to sneak something into your breakfa— oh. That’s right.

You didn’t even have breakfast.

Your gut howls in agony. Reluctantly, you unwrap the self-made cocoon of blankets, preparing the mental artillery required to slip out the bedroom.

Haruchiyo seems to be missing from the kitchen, which is a good thing, a pleasant thing — though you aren’t stupid to assume that he is shirking his duties as your ‘guardian’. Living in a sprawling penthouse with just two people, minus the seclusion, leaves you enjoying an overwhelming sense of privacy most of the time. But now? Now it feels like there’s bear traps under every tile in the floor, shuriken blades concealing themselves behind every groove in the ceiling (there were about 200 that you counted before dozing off).

It takes a few furtive glances down the corridor and you (fruitlessly) keep a knife within arm’s reach (‘I don’t know why I’m doing this it’s not like I’m even capable of wielding a knife’), but you get to work quickly, preparing a decent meal the only way you know how. The purple blemishes lining the expanse of your neck and thighs still throb in protest when you move, although now it’s become a dull, persistent, guileless ache. You’re all alone, since it appears that your housekeeper is nowhere to be found — got scared away, maybe?

Come to think of it, staff don’t stay for very long around the Bonten building (either that or the numbers are endless; every day you see a new face), and you were always too busy to pay attention to anything but the hulking man demanding your attention.

Even so, something about that particular woman made the word ‘bold’ pop up in your mind in thick, underlined letters.

She’s been around for a few weeks now, looking to be about the same age as you (maybe a little older?), and always wore her black hair pinned back neatly, revealing youthful and bright eyes. She isn’t permitted to stay long — no longer than when she finishes up cleaning and cooking food that’ll last the next few days — and neither of you know each other’s names. Though she did offer you the most sympathetic of smiles when the smell of good food left you poking your head into the kitchen. You think of it sometimes, when you’re lying in bed sleepless.

It’s been a long time since I’ve done this on my own, you frown, wiping sweat from your brow. Not that you haven’t cooked before, you have — you just can’t remember when. Your fingers curl feebly around the vegetable peeler, strips of potato skin falling onto the cutting board like ribbons. How long has it been, since you’ve put so much care into something other than Mikey? Again, you’re reminded of how much of your time that he eats up on the regular, like a blackhole both in his presence and absence; like a mechanical heart that your empty cavity of a ribcage can’t pump blood without. The thought alone should petrify you.

Don’t think about that.

There you go again, fretting over things that can’t be fretted about. You stubbornly follow the woman’s phantom movements from what little you gleaned from watching her from afar, guiding your hands over a boiling stove. The sizzles generating at the bottom of the metal pot reminds you of firecrackers. If your memory serves you well, there should be extra seasoning in the top cabinet. And you have to remember to work fast, too, just in case Haruchiyo decides to stick his head out in curiosity.

One by one, along with those forbidden thoughts, the various base ingredients are banished into the pot. Minutes later, you taste the thick broth with a spoon and damn, you realise, this actually tastes kind of good. This actually feels kind of good.

Yeah… yeah no, maybe you’re starting to get the hang of it. Maybe it’ll actually turn out okay after all — the next two days, your isolation, this makeshift stew. Not as good as the woman’s, but you reckon she’d give you a pass for trying. It’s only been a few days tops, but you cave and sigh; you kinda miss her presence. It gave you something to mull over amidst constant chao—

“What the hell are you doing?”

Your blood freezes.

At the doorway, Haruchiyo looks dishevelled, pissed, a single olive eye twitching. Your legs caramelise into a thick hardness, rooting you to the ground. The pot continues to sizzle above the flame. Since when did he…

“C-cooking?” you begin warily, glancing for the nearest exit, trying to keep an impervious look on your face even though every second that slips by a silent fear creeps up on you like a chokehold. You flinch as he stalks closer with the air of a forensic inspector, looking over the mess that is the kitchen, the wildly strewn pots and pans and utensils — all because you panicked and couldn’t find the ones you were looking for.

(Around the counter? No—that will take too much time. What if you shoved your way past him? No, god no—are you stupid? He’d catch you immediately—)

“You’re dumber than I thought,” he snarls, his mouth donning that prized scowl, leaning forward before you can react and jabbing a finger at the cutting board. “You don’t even know how to handle a fucking knife?”

“Wha—huh?”

You blink; the pellets of onion, potato and carrot lie limply on the scuffed wood. Misshapen little pieces, some thick and some way too thin. Your hands lie frozen in time, one grasping at a chunk of orange and the other gradually growing slick around the knife.

He clicks his tongue in disdain.

“At this rate, you’re going to kill yourself before I do.” Haruchiyo and the long tendons of his fingers pry the weighted blade out of the comfort of your hands. Insistently, in a way that tells you he’s mad—oh god he’s mad— but strikingly, without a touch of malice. Is he mad? Is he sober? He won’t turn it—the knife—on you—right? Your breath hitches.

“Mikey would maim me to a pulp if you succeeded in that little stunt,” he arches a brow, as if using Mikey’s name in such a manner left a bitter taste in his mouth. For some reason, blood rushes to your ears as you watch the man in an unbuttoned suit hunch over the cutting board. You give him space to examine the ingredients, biting your tongue in shame. “If you wanted food you could’ve just said so.”

You could’ve just said so.

Something doesn’t feel quite right about his words, but you’re too relieved to dwell on it. You are graced with a sliver of respite, a moment’s peace; at least you know Haruchiyo has no intentions of killing you. He can’t. Probably.

The silky-smooth incisions he makes on the vegetables and meat send a tremor down your spine, each chop bouncing around in your eardrums. He’s helping you and yet, you almost feel bad for wanting to run. You don’t want to know where he learnt to wield a blade like a razorlike extension of his fingers.

“You know a lot,” you whisper, biting your lip afterwards, minutes in when the aimless hovering becomes too much to bear. What the hell are you doing, trying to make small talk?

“I know enough,” he shoots back, long lashes fluttering like large silver fans as he turns around to squint at you. He likes to look at you as if you were some ancient vase excavated from the earth, you realise. Or like a fossil. As if you originated from a completely different time from him.

Nothing much of a conversation passes between the two of you after that; you awkwardly go through the motions, trying your best to stay away. He mutters some weird cantation under his breath as he sections off the potatoes from the carrots, moves them over to a plate as he readies the meat.

It’s almost faelike, how systematic of a man he is. How quick he is to catch on, requiring minimal instructions from you, despite seeming like a person of inferior culinary calibre.

When he’s done, Haruchiyo pats his hands on his thighs, breathing a sigh. His gaze mulls over the piping stew still bubbling with the newly-added ingredients, before plucking itself away and landing on the door to the study just a distance from the kitchen (his hiding place; his deep cavernous den). Just before he saunters to the room, twisting a hand on the door knob, he says, “I don’t cook, so don’t expect me to.”

(You didn’t.)

It was a brief encounter.

In the early dusk, long after your meal, you hear him crawl out of the study like an emerging creature of the night, and when you’re halfway through turning over a page in a novel (a dusty old one that you found hiding inside the drawers of the bedside table) you hear the sound of cutlery scraping against ceramic, echoing from where the kitchen must be.

It’s strange, the gladness that washes over you — you hadn’t really expected him to react, let alone try your cooking. Come to think of it, you weren’t even sure that he ate in the first place. (He said he doesn’t cook, but he knows the ‘correct’ way to use a knife? Odd.) You frown, none of the words on the page construing a decipherable meaning to you.

Maybe, just maybe, sharing the same space with Haruchiyo won’t be so bad after all (now that you know he eats and sleeps like a human being, is normal-functioning in most aspects of his physical body).

With this thought in mind, you carry on business as usual in your small corner of the house, lightly pondering which part of Japan Mikey has found himself embroiled in.

At nightfall, your ears unwillingly pick up loud thuds down the hallway, and you triple-check that the door is locked before climbing into the soft covers, stifling a shiver. Regardless of whether he’s been oddly tame or not, it’ll take a while to get used to this — the strange, unexplainable things that go bump in the night.

The bed… feels emptier. Desolate. Something feels odd, like the calm before the storm. It’s just your imagination. You close your eyes, falling asleep imagining Mikey’s arm around your hip. Ironically, you can’t seem to sleep well without him.

∗

What is this?

He’s felt like this before, of that he’s certain. A longass time ago. Judging from the huge blip in his memory when Haruchiyo tries to recall, it must’ve been eons since then. Eons and eons and then some, back when inactive volcanoes still spat real, smouldering lava — he’s sure it’s been that long.

It’s curious, and it amazes him more than it disgusts him. He should be disgusted, the logical part of his brain adds; he should have just minded his business and carried on as usual. He should have let you cut yourself in that dangerous manner (what’s a tiny cut going to do, add another notch to the scar-ridden pole?) — let you experience what it’s like to live life with an impish brain.

He wasn’t intending to interrupt. Ten, fifteen minutes must’ve ticked by, with him standing there in silence (you are quite the careless one). He couldn’t push down the onslaught of annoyance at the way you bent over backwards to reach the top shelf — are you trying to make his job difficult on purpose? Haruchiyo is a lawless beast, sure, but even beasts have their master’s orders to abide by, along with a special place in hell for those who don’t obey orders. Maybe that was your goal — maybe you wanted him gone. Maybe deep down you’re a spy sent to eliminate Bonten from the inside.

That is how he almost relished in pure excitement, at the promise of bloodshed regardless of how minor.

And yet, and yet, when he saw the flat silver falling just millimeters short of slicing into your soft digits, something compelled him to step in. (To help? Or to finish the job? No, he knows why. It was to chase this surreal, abstract feeling.)

Soft. Soft.

Your skin looked soft and your hand was soft and he can’t help but wonder if every inch of you down to your bones is soft.

He wonders how you had the time to teach yourself how to cook. Or if you’d already known before you were brought here (in any case you didn’t look very experienced). If the flavourful explosion in his mouth attests to his boss’ favourite dish. Comfort food, his brain supplies. What is that? He never understood the little nuances that people sprinkled in their vocabulary, though the terms lingered in his head like pesky flies. (If it’s shit, it’s just shit, right?)

He’d been so used to the staleness served at dilapidated bars that he’d forgotten almost completely what it means to have a proper meal. If it wasn’t stale or nasty it was too fancy for him to stuff down his throat — he has always been a picky eater, wanted things to be just right, but somehow the smell alone was enough to entice him out of the study.

And when he took the first bite, something strange happened. A feeling akin to warmth flooded his veins. (It’s amazing, isn’t it? It was like poison. His head started spinning and his mind morphed into a jumbled maze of thoughts; so deeply entrenched in its twists and turns he was, left palm slowly running across hedged walls, groping for an exit. Or trying to find whatever treasure, salvation, lied in the middle.) It never ever struck Haruchiyo that you might’ve snuck something extra into the food to incite this wild reaction in him. No— you’re too innocent for that. Kind. Warm. Trusting. Soft…

Not once did you knock on the door. Not that he expected you to. Not that he wanted you to. (You’re stupid but not that stupid.)

He must’ve been in there for hours, oscillating between the fabric of time and space, consciousness and unconsciousness blurring into one.

Flashes — funny things, like trusting someone, like cutting his fingers by accident as a kid, sitting outside the doctor’s office (“What are they going to do to me?” a young boy with flaxen hair whispered. “They will put you in stitches. It will not hurt. Just a few pricks, nothing more,” someone whispered back… who?) — materialise before his consciousness often. Uninvited. Unwarranted.

When he is awake they come to him like blessings, like offerings to a long-forgotten deity. When he is asleep they take on the sparkle and sheen of a fairytale — so blurry and blinding that he could never hope to brush his fingertips across such an ethereal feeling in his mortal life.

Because a common thread was that these recollections (or fairytales, or glimpses into the ether, or as he personally likes to call them, fever dreams) never lasted long.

The feeling always, always chose to leave last — that silent poking and prodding going on without his consent, shady dealings happening at the edges of his conscience that scream at him to mourn for a past innocence, something that he has no chance of ever recovering. Memory, in this way, comes like slippery eels in the palm of his hand: if he’s lucky, he’ll catch one. If he isn’t, oh well.

“Fucking hell,” he grunts, plastering his spine to the back of chair in hopes of relieving the pain throbbing behind his eyelids. Defeat tastes acrid, bitter, on Haruchiyo’s tongue; it’s no use fighting the waves of agony strobing like a heat wave.

His arm adeptly loses feeling and the metal spoon crashes down onto the plate. It’s empty now, and his stomach is somewhat filled. Yet this shitty-ass migraine chooses to latch onto his brain like a leech. God. Can’t you just—I don’t know—let me off? This one, goddamn time, Haruchiyo curses. He’s pissed. He’s sure he left an extra stockpile of that good stuff somewhere…

Old habits die hard, but it’s difficult to dwell on it when all he can feel is gratefulness for his own foresight. Mikey finds ways to avoid him a lot when he doesn’t feel like entertaining his highs, kinda like throwing a bone to stave off a dog’s abundant energy. But for the most part, he lets Haruchiyo do his own thing — lets him chew on the proverbial bone to his heart’s desire. Thus, once again, Haruchiyo finds himself with a fistful of pills. (It’s the only way he knows to curb the pain.)

He’d really meant to pounce on you by now, he thinks, as he swallows another. Gulp. He meant to already sink his claws into your neck, the same way Mikey does. Gulp.

But he can’t. Right now he can’t even stand straight his head hurts so bad. As if something from within him wanted to turn his body inside out, displaying his innards.

And, fuck, when the itch resurfaces again like an old friend, there’s little he can do to stop it. (When has he ever been the type to argue with instinct, after all? If anything… he is a slave to it. It’s understandable. Mikey’ll forgive him. He’s too used to running free, veins pulsing at the first whiff of prey. It doesn’t do anyone good to cage a wild animal.)

Haruchiyo and his dimmed gemstone eyes, clouded over with a drug-filled haze — a comfortable, fitted collar around his neck and the leash held firmly within his grasp. A slave. A weapon to his own instinct. Nature proclaims that it’s law for predators to hunt prey. How many girls has he killed? How many that look like you and how many just to satisfy this instinct of purging prey.

Haruchiyo has lost count at this point. Everything blurs and twists into one: pill-shaped candy, the boy with pale hair, the warmth of the food that felt like a paperweight on his tongue… you clutching the tip of your finger, thick blood gushing out. (The ‘what-if’ that would’ve happened if he hadn’t interfered.)

Deeper and deeper, he starts to feel dizzy, as if he were plummeting down a rabbit hole. He stumbles from the kitchen and into the living room, heads towards the noise that made his ears prick up like a predator groping for blood. Thirst. He’s unbearably thirsty.

It’s not you— is that you? He goes rigid; blinks away hysteria. It’s you.

All he can think of is you— all he can think is, Mikey will forgive him.

∗

At an abandoned dock two cities away a figure sits patiently, embroiled in a decrepit darkness. Moonlight creeps across his hunched back like vines over a wall. Dark bangs fall messily across his face with some strands still matted in a sticky substance. Sweat, or blood. Mikey scrunches up his nose. If you were here, he wouldn’t have to worry about cleaning himself up.

But you aren’t. And the thought is enough to wind a bunch of thorns around his chest.

The cylindrical shape feels strange as heck against the insides of his mouth. He’s poked his tongue through the barrel a few times before, out of pure curiosity, like a cat toying with a ball of yarn trapped in its mitts. But the taste? Well, it’s just as he expected it to be — bland. Flavourless. Unappealing. Just as unappealing as life without you.

(The fuck? Takeomi called me all the way here just to deal with this?)

Then again, he did take a longer time than usual to exterminate the local pest populace. Mikey doesn’t know if this particular thorn in his side is exceptionally formidable, or if he is exceptionally off his game today. (Huh — no, that can’t be it. It’s not as if he saw hostile figures blurring into two then three then four like a cheap ninja trick, even as he struck them down unfazed; not as if, after the tenth one the blood got too heavy for him to focus, and everywhere he turned, intrusive images of your skin plagued his psyche like a disease… no, that can’t be it.)

(…Right? Right. No way.)

He’s miserable. He wants to go home. He wants to hold you and he wants to make you taste the barrel of the gun as he is now — make you run your tongue along its concave shape and ask if you can taste the gunmetal on your teeth and call you pathetic when you start trembling like you always do. Would you let him? (Of course you would. There’s nothing you wouldn’t do for him.) You are obedient, Mikey likes that about you, and you’re always willing to go along with his whims — though, he frowns, it’s mostly because you’re scared. Probably.

Somewhere in the dark a rat squeaks, scuttles into a crack, leaving the timid cry resonating within jagged walls. It reminds him of yo— he throws his head back and gives a long, hard groan, one that spirals in the stillness.

Okay that’s it. He clutches his head. I’m getting out of here.

“Oi. Come, Senju,” he calls monotonously, not waiting up before hopping down, setting his course deeper towards the direction of darkness. A barely audible pair of footsteps follow close behind. But Mikey’s thoughts are occupied; he thinks about the flat surface of the gun and what colour it’d make your skin turn, and he thinks about Haruchiyo sitting faithfully in the penthouse, doing his job. (He’s a little worried, and that’s an understatement.)

Mikey sighs, nose breathing in the musty, oppressive smell of the sea.

One more day and he’ll be back where he was with you; one more day and he’ll be home. But at the very least, he thinks, this little business venture has turned out to be the tiniest bit amusing. His first time exploring Japan in months and he’s already got himself a souvenir to take home.

∗

It’s… raining.

A fine, feathery, bountiful rain that’s only noticeable from ripples of water cascading soundlessly on the full-length window, and floating umbrellas shielding commuters from the downpour hundreds and hundreds of floors below.

From your bird’s-eye view, they all but resemble dewdrops of microscopic colour, so far away that you can barely tell they’re alive. You press your palm flat against the glass, feeling the heat of your own skin absorb the cool surface, feeling the tiny vibration brought forth by the morning raindrops on the other side.

How long has it been? Since you’ve been on that other side?

A backdrop of grey paints the city. A familiar view, but one that you’ve never quite gotten used to. It’s quiet. Way too quiet, at that.

Where is Haruchiyo?

The chill spreads to the tip of your toes when they meet the marbled flooring. You slip off the couch, contemplating the merit in searching for a man you would otherwise do triple somersaults to avoid. Is this a good idea? You chew on your lip. It’s not. But where is he?

You’ve been feeling uneasy for the whole morning. Earlier there’d been a crash (multiple) coming from the hallway, and besides making you drop your book it also brought with it a nauseating wave of anxiety. Not that you expected Haruchiyo to be quiet at all times, goodness no (last night was a test of your patience), but there was a certain instinct imbued into you that made the hairs on your forearms stand on end whenever things were a hint out of the ordinary.

A certain intuition that came part and parcel with living with dangerous, scheming people.

Why is he grunting like that?

(That was a grunt, right? No… no, it definitely was.)

There was the sound of something sharp, like metal, grating against the floor — what was that? You scurry over to press your ear to the door, listening hard for anomalies, trying to conjure up hypotheses in your brain that don’t equal to Haruchiyo throwing a messy fit or getting ready to jump you or — well, kill you.

A clunk. Several thumps. A knife, maybe? Or he could be moving furniture, or, or—he could be practicing with his rumoured katana (you’ve never seen it but heard people talk about it in hushed whispers) — there’s no way to know for sure. All these unidentified sounds send seismic fear rippling through you.

With Mikey there was no need to question anything, because it was only a matter of time until you found out. But now that you’re alone — alone and defenceless and the most vulnerable you’ve ever been since you were fresh out the womb — it strikes a waning courage in your steps as you venture into the unknown, sweaty palms encircling the cool metal door knob, trying your hardest to stifle the click it makes when it unlocks.

Slowly, you tiptoe over to the source of the sound. Because it couldn’t hurt to just take a peek. Right? Just to check in. Just to be safe. Just to make sure he isn’t putting funny stuff inside your cupboards.

And. Well. If you were being honest, being Mikey’s little pet must’ve changed you a lot.

Complacency that thickened your skin, artificial layers of cosmetics over baby-smooth doll fabric. The false sense of protection under Mikey’s invisible iron fist comes with its own, hefty price. It must have gotten to you somehow. It must have done something to build up that liquid courage in your veins, in its own twisted way, surely, because—because no sooner than when you poke your head through the doorway into the living room do you see it.

See them.

You stare at the pile of grisly red organs splattering the cold hard floor; stare at death itself.

And, on top of it, as if crowned the victor, no one but Haruchiyo hunches leisurely over the grisly mound of flesh. Cleaning the mess behind his fingertips with his tongue. Eyeing his handiwork. The glinting edge of the tiny scalpel in his hand still dripping with scarlet, sharp edge pointed towards god knows what’s left of that person ohgod—

Your gut drops to the floor in horror. That uniform. That’s her. That’s the woman. Shit—fuck. What was once a sweet young woman is now a mangled corpse by the hands of Haruchiyo. Something… something is terribly wrong. She doesn’t look like she’s been dead for minutes. No, her eyes are far too cold. Like gaping holes. There is blood from her mouth, no, there is blood everywhere —

Haruchiyo hums, his rosier-than-cotton-candy hair dip-dyed in scarlet. Drip, drip. “Looks like… ah, I’ve roused the attention of our reclusive little rabbit.”

It’s the same man who’d grasped your hand in a courteous gesture just the day before, who’d saved you from slicing your fingers, the same goddamn murderer who’s just got his hands on the only person in years to address you like a regular human being. Idiot. You’ve done it this time. You’re a fucking dumbass. He’s a murderer, murderer — he’s going to kill you.

You’re next.

“What’s wrong, little bunny?” His grin only widens at your stupor, your slow, petrified jaw hanging agape. “You look scared. Do I make you feel scared?”

Your legs won’t budge; you whimper.

Run. Runrunrun — your body is screaming at you, imploring you to hurry the fuck up and run for your goddamn life, but you don’t. Pleas fall on deaf ears. Your body is caught in a bear trap, forcing you to take in the gruesome scene before you. There is so, so much blood. More than you’ve ever seen in your life. And all of it, all of it, is hers.

Just the other day she greeted you with her usual warm smile. Just the other day she was a living, breathing human, who ate and slept and radiated heat.

“Your face tells me you want to run,” he trills, eyes narrowing into slits. “Gonna run away?”

His tone is shrill as a sharpened blade, deranged, with every word mounting into maniacal glee. “Run with your little tail tucked between your cute thighs, back to your big, strong Mikey?”

Bloodshot and unfocused eyes zero in on your face and his body convulses like a zombie erecting from the dead, joints creaking like bars of scaffold. Slowly, assuredly, he rises to one knee, he points the scalpel at his own collarbone, and wait, wait, why is he—

“Look here, little bunny,” he coos, a big wide smile twisting the scars on his mouth; his wrist twitches, yanks, the blade following suit, dipping obediently into his own flesh. His own skin. His own blood that leaks pure sparkling scarlet from a thin crevice.

A scream tears through the room, one you can only feel is yours from the vibrations ringing in your hollow throat — he doesn’t wince. Sheer horror sends your body flying back, hands clasped tight in front of your face to shield you from the deep dark red. This is a nightmare. This can’t be real. Red is matted to pink strands of hair, red is glittering across his mouth like the snout of a beast, red is slowly advancing across the carpet. Wake up. You tremble, whimper. This is bad this is bad this is bad.

A cackle rips into the air, one with a chilling, blood-curdling echo bouncing off the walls, and no sooner than when he takes a step forward does the impenetrable cement in your veins crack.

Fight or flight.

You turn and bolt, feeling the weight of your numb appendages carrying you as far as possible, away from that—that sickening blood, that red crawling ever so closely towards you like hot, molten lava—

You race, stumble, dive into Mikey’s room (Idiot! Mikey isn’t even here! The exit — you have to get to the exit!), managing to grab a spare key off the counter before fleeing like a bat out of hell towards the front door, salvation, the only way out.

“Where do you think you’re going? I’m not done with you yet.”

But then your back’s hitting the wall as you scramble to flee, jolts of the impact swelling up your spine as you hurtle into a dodge when Haruchiyo lunges, bloodied fingertips snatching your wrist and pulling pulling yanking, until the keys crash to the ground with a deafening clatter, until you’ve been sucked into the floor with a scream clawing at your throat, until you’re submerged limb by limb into that deep deep red that you hate.

“NO no no no no, letmego, letmeg—”

“Shh, shh!”

The cool tip of the blade drags along your cheek, thinly scraping against the surface, slicing into half the wet tracks that tears have left on your face so that slivered carmine wells up through the broken skin. His body has no right being this warm, pressed up against you, your knees and arms already going slick with blood. It’s over. He’s caught you.

Your eyes stay screwed shut amidst the barrage of hot tears bursting behind your eyelids. He has you pinned down for good, you realise, a strained whimper fighting its way in the back of your throat. There is no escape. The pain is real. You can feel the slim thread of blood rolling down your cheek, mixing with the tears — only for him to lean closer, lapping up the traces of it with a satisfied chuckle.

His saliva leaves a slimy, wet sensation on your skin. It’s the worst feeling you’ve ever felt in your life.

“Please… I won’t tell anyone… I won’t tell Mikey— please, just let me go…”

“Ah ah ah.” The man — Sanzu Haruchiyo — hushes you again, a finger on your lip, his shuddering breath fanning erratically on your face, his voice fading into yet another hysterical chuckle. But it’s deep, breathy, and taunting, thrumming loudly in his chest, and sending a tremor through your very soul. “I think you’re forgetting a teensy, tiny fact, little bunny— Mikey’s not here.”

Your nose fills with iron when he is this close. Haruchiyo’s eyes — those bulging, green masses of insanity — shift and convulse as if you were faced with the mouth of an abyss. His grip on your wrists tightens to an agonising degree the more you plead and squirm, leaving you with no choice but to hold your breath, hoping desperately that someone will come to your rescue.

Where is Mikey?

You’re going to die here. You’re going to die here… and there’s nothing you can do about it. Pushed up against this psycho killer, who’s just murdered a person innocent of all crime, an outsider who shouldn’t even have been here. Is this how you find closure? From someone other than Mikey?

Manjiro… the thought is enough to shoot a terrible pain in your heart, something unwarranted like denial, like indescribable terror, like—like regret.

I never told him I love him.

Twin dilated pupils absorb the sight of your writhing, suffering form, shuddering in their sockets from unmatched euphoria.

“Why don’t we play a little?”

∗

Truth be told, Haruchiyo doesn’t know what time of day it is, what day it is, and all he remembers is feeling fatigued with an indescribable, insatiable hunger. He thinks he’s never felt so dissatisfied in his entire life.

But this… this is nothing short of a feast, isn’t it?

“You…” he begins, seething through his ultra-wide grin. “You’re a huge slut!”

His hands, not knowing where to touch, land greedily on every inch of your traitorous skin. Groping, taking, as if the gates to heaven inexplicably opened; a creature of hell, he is — a pitch-black entity descending upon a fine-feathered angel. He can’t stop himself, not when you’re so helpless to fend him off.

“If I had known… that you would be going around getting wet at every man touching your little pussy like this…” He bites back a laugh, the scarred edges of his mouth contorting.

You look confused — terrified, but mainly confused. And scared as to why he hasn’t ripped apart your insides yet and god you’re fucking delicious. Your nightdress has long been torn to shreds. Blood — not yours — is splattered everywhere on the marble flooring. Haruchiyo’s obscene groans come like second nature at this point. It’s good, it’s too good — your cries, your shivering, your scent, the way that he can taste how salty your tears are and hear the wetness gathering at his fingers.

“You’re a damned whore, aren’t you?”

You look stunned, stupefied, as if your little brain can’t comprehend what Haruchiyo wants to do to you, as if the squelching noises coming from between your thighs are a mechanism separate to your conscious body — as if they don’t tell him all he needs to know.

“S-stop,” you snivel, wrists straining in his grip, though he thinks it couldn’t possibly hurt from the way you can’t help your half-moans, so delicate and frantic, flitting about in his ears like a pair of small butterfly wings. “Stop, please, a-ah, don’t touch me there—”

“Here? Oh, but what if I want to?”

Frankly, this is the most fun that he’s had in ages — your kitten-like mewls and crystalline tears, soft hips twisting fruitlessly and the friction only serving to make his blood rush south, adrenaline sizzling in his veins even more so than when he was in the midst of mutilating that dumb placeholder, that fake…

“You feel so nice and soft inside, little bunny.”

Haruchiyo shoves his fingers past the lips of your cute slit, prodding and poking like it’s his first time touching a virgin. Warm, tender, and suckling on him like a fawn to its mother’s breast… the gentle clasp of your pussy against his fingers feels like nothing short of heaven. God almighty, no wonder Mikey couldn’t keep his hands off of you. His cock becomes erect, the tip becoming sensitive as it strains against precum-soaked fabric.

He watches you squirm, watches as your tits heave with every breath you take. For the first time Haruchiyo is close to you, closer than ever before, to the point where if he brandished the scalpel now there’s no telling whether he’ll lose control and gouge your pretty eyeballs out in a fit of blind lust. Just like he did to so many others before you — just like those other porcelain, fragile, counterfeit dolls. (Except there’s really nothing that comes so close to perfection as the real thing.)

“What do you think is stopping me from killing you, hm?”

He poses this question in the midst of circling your shining pearl, bringing you closer and closer to climax, coaxing panicked moans out of you as if the realisation just hit you that maybe he will rip apart your insides after all.

Then, when you whine out instead of replying, Haruchiyo pauses, pressing his weight against your soft body for good measure, keening at your smell. He sighs—

“It’s because torturing you fucking turns me on.”

You used to smell like roses — like Mikey. But the you in this moment smells like sex, sweat, and potent iron, blood from his fresh killing and blood from his own flesh and bone; he has never felt such uncontrollable desire in his life. This is it, he thinks, this is the treasure waiting for him at the end of the maze.

His lips latch on and suckle on your exposed nipple, tongue circling and biting and lapping hard until it draws cries of pain. His face returns to your neck, a slimy tongue sticking out and coating you with saliva, feeling himself quiver with desire when your entire body convulses. His hard length grinds against your inner thigh like a mad dog, eager to insert itself into your warm and inviting hole.

But not yet. Just a little more.

He releases your wrists. Sharp nails latch themselves onto your scalp, straining against the roots of your hair to tug you eye-to-eye with his gaze. People like to say that Haruchiyo gets a spine-chilling, deranged gleam in his eyes when he’s in the middle of torturing someone — what do you see this time?

A monster? The devil himself? Or something more divine? Otherworldly? Something like a god?

His teeth sink into his bottom lip; not bad, he credits his brain, eyeing the tremble of your lip and the way tears cascade down your cheeks and jaw and drip onto your breasts, he might just crave to make you worship him. More than anyone else. More than his King; make you become his own private devotee.

“Does Mikey also do this?” Haruchiyo’s gravelly voice whispers filthy vice in your ear. “Does he? Tell me.”

Your back hits the floor. He sticks another finger, two, then three, inside your cunt, wriggling and feeling for the one spot that makes your toes curl and your back arch. Your non-stop whining, your incoherency, your lack of capacity for full sentences, all of it is starting to unravel his control — spilling out like a spool of thread underwater, dispersing never to be reeled in again.

“Tell. Me.”

“N-no!” you rasp, hips quaking.

“Liar,” he smiles. You’re a liar. You’re a filthy liar. He saw you. “What does he do to your little clit, huh? Rub, rub. Oh, you feel so soft and slippery here.”

“Stop, please, a-ah! It’s too much, it’s too much…”

“It’s okay it’s okay it’s okay,” he is quick to comfort, fingers speeding up, abusing your tiny nub, as if his ears were blotting out your frantic cries and tearful struggle. So, so sensitive. He almost feels like you’ll break. “Cum all you want. Again and again. We’ve got all day.”

He attaches his lips like a parasite to your cheek, licking at the small cut, sucking every drop of blood that leaks out, all while his fingertips never cease their momentum. You resist and jerk away from his face, only for him to wrench your jaw tightly in place.

“No, I don’t want to cum, I don’t—” You struggle like a rabbit with its hind legs bound, teeth sinking into your bottom lip in a feeble effort to mute your cries of pleasure. “I-I’m gonna—”

You cum without warning; a spray of liquid pools at your entrance, your thighs spasming under him as if charged with electricity. He coos as if to cheer you on. Fuuuck. He’s not done. There’s no way. Droplets of your juices taste like dews on his tongue; so much he wants to do, but he only has two hands.

As you reel, incapacitated with the afterglow of your orgasm, his palm lets go of your face to wrap around the flushed tip of his cock, giving a few sharp pumps, imagining what it feels like to be buried in your warmth. Well, he won’t have to imagine much longer.

“So pretty, you’d put every other girl to shame,” he mutters, pressing a kiss to your forehead, and another to your lips, silencing your whimpers. “I hated you, god, but turns out you’re good for at least one thing.”

“Let me… let me go…”

“Nah. But did it feel good?” He wants to break you. He wants to see you drowning in so much pleasure that you collapse and black out and crave nothing but his cock.

Your face scrunches up. You’re looking at him, he thinks. Though your expression looks weird, and you’ve stopped struggling.

“Mikey… Mikey’s gonna… he’s gonna be so mad,” you start to hiccup, tears dripping silently onto the marble, bottom lip trembling. Haruchiyo goes still, watching you cry at a loss for words.

He’s confused.

Mikey? Really? At a time like this? And he sees it again. That blatant softness that filters over your eyes — that ickiness. You’re so in love with his King that it’s pathetic.

It hadn’t been obvious before, but it is now. It’s thickening the skin between your heart and the outside world: it’s still there, the veins permeating the layer of visibility just barely, but the pulsing is faint.

And he sneers. Who do you think you are?

“You came because you’re a disloyal whore and you know it. Looks like you didn’t really love him after all, huh?”

At his words, you let out a hurt-filled gasp, as if they made their way into your heart and deposited lashes of agony there. Your mouth hangs open with tears still streaking down your face. The sight makes him want to coo at you.

“Look — you’re all messy and slick down here.”

Before you can tell him to stop, his fingernail scratches your abused clit, hard and fast as if trying to coax another orgasm out of you. Just one more. You can endure it, right? He’s watched Mikey do worse to you. He’s watched Mikey splay your legs open at his mercy and threaten to let every man in the room have their way with you.

Your body thrashes in retaliation but it’s no match for Haruchiyo’s strength, helpless to fight back as he pushes you further and further until you splutter and give a keening cry.

“What would Mikey think if he saw you like this?” he laughs, tuning out your pleas to slow down. “He’d fucking kill you.”

Another spray of your juices — another sharp scream of pleasure. By the third, fourth, your body starts trembling in overstimulation.

“I’m going to make you cum, again and again. Until you regret ever coming here. Make you regret trying to tempt my King.”

Haruchiyo mindlessly nibbles at your ear, before brutish hands reach down to force your legs wider. It’s about time, isn’t it? His cock throbs painfully at the wait.

“No, no, no… you can’t—”

He ignores you, rearranging his hips so they align with yours, gripping your abdomen like a vice as if trying to bruise. More, more, more. All his filthy fantasies start to spill out of the crevices in his brain. All he can do is watch the lavish black rush out in an endless downpour, and he, wrought with an incurable thirst, helps himself to your body, spellbound by the adrenaline you incite in him and the softness and warmth that you—

Ouch. He feels a prick.

From his shoulder, a tiny cut. A warm drop of blood beads at the broken skin. Ah. you’ve got your puny, trembling fingers on the handle of the scalpel.

How clever. A laugh bubbles from his throat.

“Oh, little bunny. Are you sure you want to do that?”

His hand removes itself from your body, snatching the blade out of your grip. You panic and try to retrieve it, but in your moment of desperation he chuckles and slides his cock in, stuffing you with inches of his length at one go, stretching you out like a cushy sleeve.

You yelp, foal legs kicking at air. Haruchiyo takes the time to tuck the blade away.

“Stupid, stupid,” he clicks his tongue as you wail in defeat, tiny paws padding at his chest like you want him to pin you down harder — like you crave for him to abuse your little hole until you can’t walk for the rest of the year. “You’re just a little stupid, aren’t you? Gone all mush-brained from me teasing you?”

He wastes no time in bottoming out, leaving the tip brushing against your womb, beating on the squishy walls again and again. His pace is manic, uncaring, straight from the get-go. Nothing can compare to you. Your tight, slick walls accommodate him so lasciviously, so perfectly, that he swears you know what you’re doing.

“You know what? I’m not even mad. Not when you’re the best fuck I’ve ever had.” His King has an eye for quality, he thinks, adjusting his grip so he can thrust deeper in you.

A mess of blood, cum, tears — a mess that he has made you, forced onto you like ink on a canvas, and he bled a bottomless black. You’re coming around slowly, letting the ink sink into your putty flesh and submitting yourself to the sensation, hips unknowingly rising to meet the timing of his thrusts. That’s more like it, he licks his lips. You’re cute. Obedient. He wouldn’t mind taking you home.

“Hey, hey. Here's—uh—an idea. Why don’t you become my own cocksleeve? I’ll tell Mikey that you—hah—fought real hard, but you just couldn’t resist putting a thick, hard cock inside you. I’ll tell him you couldn’t help it.”

Haruchiyo chuckles mid-pant, having grown rather fond of you and your insides. He’s heaving like a beast, sweat gathering at his forehead, eyes squeezing shut to ride out this pure bliss. It’s a first for him. Has he been doing sex wrong his whole life?

“After my King disowns you… after he throws you out on the streets… I'll pick you up and give you a home. this little pussy… I’m going to make it my own.”

“Ah, ah— sto— ah…”

You’ve gone stupid for good, now. Your eyes are rolling to the back of your head, mindless babbling spilling from your lips (he can barely make out Mikey’s name in poor, broken syllables), your breasts bouncing and pussy twitching as it overflows with juices. All words are lost to you in this state.

And yet you’re still hugging his thickness diligently, just like a custom-made cocksleeve. He really ought to reward you. Haruchiyo reaches down to stimulate your clit and shudders at the feeling of you clenching tighter.

That far-off look in your eyes, your thighs periodically convulsing with spurts of cum spraying out pathetically between your folds — it’s almost too good to be true. You’re spent, brainless, mouth agape and tongue lolling out with drool overflowing from the sides when Haruchiyo finishes in you. He can make out broken parts of your speech: feeble efforts of voicing his name.

Not Mikey’s. His.

“You’re mine to play with now,” he says, throwing his head back in laughter at your pitiful mewls. “What do you think? You don’t have any objections, do you?”

Without thinking, with a heightened lust that betrays all logical thought, he sheathes himself again, all the way to the brim with a heady groan. The cum still potent and thick inside your hole spills out and paints his cock in a hot mess of liquid.

Your mouth opens in a silent scream, eyes glazed over with so much pleasure that you look as if you were far, far above the clouds.

“I'll take that as a yes.”

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