#if that doesn't scream hospitality to you then what will

[canirove]

Rice, Rice, baby | Chapter 31

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Masterlist

“I'm so sorry, Declan. I swear I thought this time was the one.”

“You don't need to apologize, Liv.”

“Don't I? It's the third time I've thought I'm in labour and then…”

And then nothing. It is just another false alarm.

My due date is in a couple of days, but for the last week I've been feeling all types of cramps and discomfort, and we've ended up at the hospital twice. 

The first time was while Declan was at some kind of pre-season training camp in Portugal and I was alone in the house with his mum. When I described to her what I was feeling she also thought the baby was coming, so we called for a taxi and went  to the hospital. But after a quick exam, they told me everything was ok and that it wasn't time yet. While all that was happening, Declan had already packed all his things and was about to jump into a car and go to the airport. 

The next false alarm was at night, the pain being so unbearable that I woke up Declan with my screams and scared the hell out of him. But when we made it to the hospital, it was gone. They checked me again just in case something was wrong since the pain had been horrible, but they only told me that the baby was in the right position and that everything was ready.

And then, we have today. We were having lunch with his mum when I started to be in pain again, and this time it was different. So we packed everything, called my doctor… and halfway there the pain was gone, which makes me think that it may have been just air if you know what I mean.  

“What you are feeling is normal, Liv” Declan's mum says. “It is your first pregnancy, you don't know what to expect.”

“Yeah, but… You all must be so tired of me…”

“I could never get tired of you, Liv” Declan says, giving me a look that makes my stomach do a flip, something that definitely doesn't help with all these false alarms.

“Thank you. I guess” I manage to reply.

“Why don't we finish having lunch? We can still warm up everything” his mum says.

“I think I'm gonna go take a nap. Resting may do me good.”

“Then I'll save you some food for later. You need to eat and keep your strength just in case.”

“Thank you” I smile.

“Do you want me to help you go up the stairs and get in bed?” Declan offers.

“I'll do it myself, don't worry.”

“Ok” he nods, his eyes fixed on me as I leave the kitchen.

━━━━━━❃━━━━━━

“Breathe, Olivia. Breathe” I say to myself while looking at my reflection in the bathroom’s mirror, my hands grabbing the sink with such strength that my knuckles have turned white. “That definitely felt like what they say your water breaking feels like. But maybe it wasn't that. Maybe… fuck!”

No, that was real. That pain was very real.

“Ok, ok” I say again as it goes away. “You have to go downstairs, Olivia. You can't start yelling like a madwoman and scare everyone” I say as I slowly leave the bathroom, focusing on my breathing like I was taught. “Step by step. And we breathe. We… breathe.”

As I walk down the stairs, I can hear Declan and his mum talking in the kitchen.

“I was going to tell her, mum. I was finally going to do it. But then the accident happened, her dad kicked her out and I just… She was too vulnerable.”

“But you have to tell her, Declan. You are about to have a baby together!”

“I know, mum. But it isn't that easy.”

“Why not?”

“Because in case you've forgotten, I behaved like a dick with her and broke her heart. I hurt her really bad, mum. Really, really bad. I can't just go to her now and be like, hey, Liv. I'm in love with you and have basically been since the day we met.”

He… what?

“Fuck!” I cry, making both Declan and his mum turn around to look at me while I hold onto the kitchen door's frame as if my life depended on it. 

“Liv! What are you doing here? Are you ok?” he says, quickly running towards me.

“I think this time it isn't a false alarm.”

“What?”

“I suddenly woke up from my nap feeling something weird, went to the bathroom and I think… I think my water broke.”

“Are you sure?” Declan mum's asks me.

“I… Fuck! That hurts!”

“Mum, we have to take her to the hospital. I also think this is it.”

“Take her to the car, I will go grab everything else.”

“Ok” he nods. “Liv, it's time to go” Declan says.

“I can't.”

“You can't?”

“I'm not ready, Declan. I can't do this.”

“Liv… Liv, look at me” he says, cupping my face and forcing me to look into those blue eyes of his. “You can and you will. You are the strongest woman I know.”

“But it hurts so much already. I can't do this for hours.”

“You can and you will do this” he repeats. “I believe in you. Now let's go” he says before lifting me in his arms and carrying me to the car.

I can do this. I can.

━━━━━━❃━━━━━━

“I can't believe he is real.”

“Neither do I” Declan chuckles. 

I had done it. I had actually managed to do it, and he was here. Our healthy and gorgeous baby boy.

“Who do you think he looks like? My mum says he is just like me, but I don't see it.”

“I think he looks like himself” Declan says, caressing his cheek. He is sitting on the bed with me, one arm around my shoulders while the other rests on mine, both of us holding the baby. “Our nameless little man. Though I've found a name that I think ticks all the things you want and like.”

“Really?”

“Yep” he nods. “I was waiting until he was born to tell you because of what Georgina said, that sometimes babies are born and the name you've chosen for them doesn't fit them. But I don't think that would be the case. I think this name is perfect for him.”

“And are you going to tell me what's that perfect name or…”

“Oliver. Oliver Rice.”

“Oliver…” I repeat, looking at him. At this tiny human being who has completely changed my life and put it upside down. 

“Usually when people find out that they are having a boy they name him after the father, a grandfather, an uncle… But why not after his mum?”

“What?” I say, looking back at Declan.

“I thought of Oliver because I was thinking about you… Olivia” he says, those blue eyes of his that I truly hope the baby also has, meeting mine. “You are one of the most amazing women I've ever met, definitely the bravest and strongest. What you've done today is just another example of it. And I think that one day, when he is old enough to understand it, he will agree with me and say that being named after you is the biggest honour evertouche.”

“Declan…” I whisper, not being able to contain my tears. Again. I've lost count of all the times I've cried since I gave birth.

“Oliver also has a good nickname: Ollie” he says, wiping away some of my tears, the feeling of his hand on my face making me gasp. “I think it is cute and a bit cheeky, which is something I have the feeling he will be” he smiles. “And even though your names may be similar, Liv and Ollie aren't, which means no one will get confused, and that was something very important on your list.”

“The most important one” I chuckle. “Well, that and that it sounded good with your last name. It isn't an usual one.”

“Oh, I know” he laughs. “But Oliver Rice has quite a nice ring to it, don't you think?”

“It does” I smile. 

“And if he was already going to have my last name, it was only fair he was named after you, Liv. It takes two to make a baby, and you've actually been the one who has done all the work.”

“Are we calling him Oliver, then? Ollie?” 

“You have the last word, Liv.”

“Then welcome to the world, little Oliver” I say, kissing his forehead. “And thank you for everything, Declan. I don't know what I would have done without you.”

“Like I just told you, it takes two to make a baby. I would have never left you alone or on your own, Liv. Never” he says. 

“Thank you” I whisper as I lean forward towards him. Towards his face, his lips. I so want to kiss him.

“Liv…” he whispers back, also moving closer. And then… 

“Liv!” Madders says, walking into the room. 

“Bloody hell” Declan mutters.

“Oh my God, Liv. He is here!”

“Hello, James” I say, trying to smile and forget that he just ruined a perfect moment.

“You are a mum, Liv! And you a dad, Deccers! Can you believe it?”

“Not really” he says, his hand giving my shoulder a little squeeze before he moves from the bed. He hadn't left my side since Oliver was born, and now it feels so weird to not have him next to me… Almost as if something was missing.

“I saw your mum outside and she said that everything went great and that you are feeling good. Or as good as one can be after bringing a child to the world” Madders chuckles. “Can I hold him?” he asks. 

“Yes, of course” I say. 

“Hello there, little man.”

“Careful with…”

“Declan, I'm a father of three. I know what I'm doing. But guys, he is gorgeous. Are you sure he is his?” Madders says, nodding towards Declan with a teasing smile.

“You are so not funny, James” I reply, rolling my eyes.

“I'm sorry, I'm sorry. But he is one of the prettiest babies I've ever seen, and as newborns they all are quite ugly, to be honest. You should see my photos” he chuckles.

“Nothing has changed, then” Declan says, teasing him back.

“Touché” he laughs. “Did you finally pick a name? You can still use James if you can't decide, you know I will be honoured.”

“We actually have. Oliver. Oliver Rice” I say, reaching for Declan's hand. 

“Ollie to friends and family” he says, taking it and interlacing his fingers with mine.

“Ollie… I love it” Madders smiles. “My gorgeous nephew Ollie.”

“And Godson too if you'd like.”

“What?”

“You are my older brother, James.”

“Yes, but… What about Declan's brothers?”

“Oliver is the sixth grandchild in my family. We all already are Godfathers of someone” he shrugs.

“But… are you sure? I mean, what about Micky? Or Mason. Or Sonny! He would make an amazing Godfather too.”

“He would, I agree. But like I said, none of them are my older brother, James. Only you” I smile.

“And Van de Ven actually is an old fling and Mason an old crush, aren't they?” Declan teases me. “That could make things awkward.”

“Oh, shut up!” I say, trying to hit him but only managing to make him laugh.

“Guys, I…” Madders says. “Thank you. Thank you very much.”

“Thank you, James. Neither of us would be here if it wasn't for you. Especially not him.”

“Definitely not him, no” he chuckles. “My beautiful Godson and nephew Oliver. Ollie” he says before kissing his head and starting to tell him about all the things they are going to do together as he grows up while Declan and I just smile at them, our hands still linked together, my head resting on his arm. 

[cool-ghouls-in-school]

WHY IS THIS SO FUNNY 

[batemanofficial]

i need weed. i need a medical card so bad or im gonna go out of my fuckign GOURD

[celestiachan]

what do you mean you weren’t allowed outside??

well you see i am a firstborn and i have a vagina

[isolationaroundus]

I guess I am finally here... At this point in life that I was afraid of reaching...

[infiniteglitterfall]

know someone who enjoys horror stories? share this one! it's true!

hahahahahahahahahaha aarrggghhhhhhhhhh 3,000,000 deaths due to COVID-19 last year. Globally. Three million. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. The reason people are still worried about COVID is because it has a way of quietly fucking up your body. And the risk is cumulative.

I'm going to say that again: the risk is cumulative.

It's not just that a lot of people get bad long-term effects from it. One in seven or so? Enough that it's kind of the Russian Roulette of diseases. It's also that the more times you get it, the higher that risk becomes. Like if each time you survived Russian Roulette, the empty chamber was removed from the gun entirely. The worst part is that, psychologically, we have the absolute opposite reaction. If we survive something with no ill effects, we assume it's pretty safe. It is really, really hard to override that sense of, "Ok, well, I got it and now I probably have a lot of immunity and also it wasn't that bad." It is not a respiratory disease. Airborne, yes. Respiratory disease, no: not a cold, not a flu, not RSV.

Like measles (or maybe chickenpox?), it starts with respiratory symptoms. And then it moves to other parts of your body. It seems to target the lungs, the digestive system, the heart, and the brain the most.

It also hits the immune system really hard - a lot of people are suddenly more susceptible to completely unrelated viruses. People get brain fog, migraines, forget things they used to know.

(I really, really hate that it can cross the blood-brain barrier. NOTHING SHOULD EVER CROSS THE BLOOD-BRAIN BARRIER IT IS THERE FOR A REASON.) Anecdotal examples of this shit are horrifying. I've seen people talk about coworkers who've had COVID five or more times, and now their work... just often doesn't make sense? They send emails that say things like, "Sorry, I didn't mean Los Angeles, I meant Los Angeles."

Or they insist they've never heard of some project that they were actually in charge of a year or two before.

Or their work is just kind of falling apart, and they don't seem to be aware of it.

People talk about how they don't want to get the person in trouble, so their team just works around it. Or they describe neighbors and relatives who had COVID repeatedly, were nearly hospitalized, talked about how incredibly sick they felt at the time... and now swear they've only had it once and it wasn't bad, they barely even noticed it.

(As someone who lived with severe dissociation for most of my life, this is a genuinely terrifying idea to me. I've already spent my whole life being like, "but what if I told them that already? but what if I did do that? what if that did happen to me and I just don't remember?") One of its known effects in the brain is to increase impulsivity and risk-taking, which is real fucking convenient honestly. What a fantastic fucking mutation. So happy for it on that one. Yes, please make it seem less important to wear a mask and get vaccinated. I'm not screaming internally at all now.

I saw a tweet from someone last year whose family hadn't had COVID yet, who were still masking in public, including school.

She said that her son was no kind of an athlete. Solidly bottom middle of the pack in gym.

And suddenly, this year, he was absolutely blowing past all the other kids who had to run the mile. He wasn't running any faster. His times weren't fantastic or anything. It's just that the rest of the kids were worse than him now. For some reason. I think about that a lot. (Like my incredibly active six-year-old getting a cold, and suddenly developing post-viral asthma that looked like pneumonia.

He went back to school the day before yesterday, after being home for a month and using preventative inhalers for almost week.

He told me that it was GREAT - except that he couldn't run as much at recess, because he immediately got really tired. Like how I went outside with him to do some yard work and felt like my body couldn't figure out how to increase breathing and heart rate.

I wasn't physically out of breath, but I felt like I was out of breath. That COVID feeling people describe, of "I'm not getting enough air." Except that I didn't have that problem when I had COVID.) Some people don't observe any long (or medium) term side effects after they have it.

But researchers have found viral reservoirs of COVID-19 in everyone they've studied who had it.

It just seems to hang out, dormant, for... well, longer than we've had an opportunity to observe it, so far.

(I definitely watched that literal horror movie. I think that's an entire genre. The alien dormant under ice in the Arctic.)

(oh hey I don't like that either!!!!!!!!!) All of which is to explain why we should still care about avoiding it, and how it manages to still cause excess deaths. Measuring excess deaths has been a standard tool in public health for a long time.

We know how many people usually die from all different causes, every year. So we can tell if, for example, deaths from heart disease have gone way up in the past three years, and look for reasons. Those are excess deaths: deaths that, four years ago, would not have happened. During the pandemic, excess death rates have been a really important tool. For all sorts of reasons. Like, sometimes people die from COVID without ever getting tested, and the official cause is listed as something else because nobody knows they had COVID. But also, people are dying from cardiovascular illness much younger now.

People are having strokes and heart attacks younger, and more often, than they did before the pandemic started. COVID causes a lot of problems. And some of those problems kill people. And some of them make it easier for other things to kill us. Lung damage from COVID leading to lungs collapsing, or to pneumonia, or to a pulmonary embolism, for example. The Economist built a machine-learning model with a 95% confidence interval that gauges excess death statistics around the world, to tell them what the true toll of the ongoing COVID pandemic has been so far.

Total excess deaths globally in 2023: Three million.

3,000,000.

Official COVID-19 deaths globally so far: Seven million. 7,000,000. Total excess deaths during COVID so far: Thirty-five point two million. 35,200,000.

Five times as many.

That's bad. I don't like that at all. I'm glad last year was less than a tenth of that. I'm not particularly confident about that continuing, though, because last year we started a period of really high COVID transmission. Case rates higher than 90% of the rest of the pandemic. Here's their data, and charts you can play with, and links to detailed information on how they did all of this:

Here's a non-paywalled link to it:

https://archive.vn/2024.01.26-012536/https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/coronavirus-excess-deaths-estimates

Oh: here's a link to where you can buy comfy, effective N95 masks in all sizes:

Those ones are about a buck each after shipping - about $30 for a box of 30. They also have sample packs for a dollar, so you can try a couple of different sizes and styles.

You can wear an N95 mask for about 40 total hours before the effectiveness really drops, so that's like a dollar for a week of wear.

They're also family-owned and have cat-shaped masks and I really love them. These ones are cuter and in a much wider range of colors, prints, and styles, but they're also more expensive; they range from $1.80 to $3 for a mask. ($18-$30 for a box of ten.)

[shanieveh]

— “ who did this to you? ”

; genshin men as your enemy (with benefits)

pretends not to care (he massacred them all) — kaeya, albedo, childe, zhongli, ALHAITHAM, scaramouche

He immediately tries to keep an aloof facade the moment he let out those words. It wasn't that he actually cared? Like come on, you're the most annoying person in the world. But when you finally tell him those annoying bastards names in quick succession they were hunted and destoryed.

There was something so annoying about your face getting hurt he just couldn't pin point why. Maybe it made you more annoying? Yeah, probably that. He doesn't care at all. But he will never have the guts to tell you what actually happened to the ones that hurt you.

cares more about your well being — diluc, KAVEH, kazuha, XIAO, tighnari, freminet, ayato, heizou, lyney

His usual sour expression became that more of concerned but angry all the same. He checked for wounds, brought you to the medic. The guy was acting pretty strange.. too strange. Maybe it was a prank? That's what he thought too, why... why was he helping you this way?

When you told him the people who did this, he was never one to forgive them. But none of that mattered when you looked in pain. Wait? Wasn't this his enemy. He shouldn't think like this. But... fine just this once. Both of you are sure this will be the one time he cares for you. How foolish.

ready to put people on their graves— wriothesly, dainsleif neuvillette, PIERRO, childe, scaramouche, xiao, CYNO

It was to the point he was even screaming for you to give out their names. And as soon as you do, he marches out of the hospital and kidnaps them one by one. No one will escape. No. One. At this point, he didn't even think that both of you were enemies or that this isn't how he was supposed to feel. He didn't care.

And as he cleaned his blade at the end of the fight, this time he showed no mercy. Maybe in your point of view he hated you, and at some point he also thought he did. But now, staring at what he'd done, hate isn't that far from love. And love isn't that far from revenge.

just glad you were okay — freminet, bennett, ITTO, gorou, thoma, tighnari, KAZUHA, chongyun, diluc, baizhu

Who in the world can possibly harm you like this? How dare they? Why would they? But it doesn't matter what the name is. With an first-aid kit in hand he cleans up your wounds and wipes your tears. This was the same man you keep arguing with. The same you hated above all else.

You've never seem him gentle, but now you did. Cherishing this, you know you'll use this whenever both of you fight. But... no that would be too cruel. He looked so pretty doing it, like an angel rather than demon that was him everyday. So you just kept it in your heart, a memory forever lasting.

[peachesofteal]

Through Me (The Flood) - secret baby fic Simon Riley / female reader 18+ mdni, these two and their usual kinks, mention/discussion of pregnancy, Simon in his BDU so... you know.

You have a stage five clinger.

That's the only way to describe Simon lately. He's your shadow. The only time he separates himself from you is to take care of the baby, and even then, he's usually always in sight line.

Most people would feel smothered. Annoyed. Fed up, probably. You would have too, with past partners. But for some reason, with him, the irritation doesn't exist. He's working through something in his mind. Repairing something. Healing something. Even though the day in the hospital is long buried, you know it still sticks with him, the evidence clear in the way he still treads carefully, still handles you gently in bed.

The attention, the devotion, doesn't bother you. The need to reassure him drives you into his arms as often as possible, and when he holds on longer than usual, you never pull away.

The last day in your apartment is bittersweet. Mostly packed up, only the skeleton remains, a shell of what was once your home. You expected to feel sad, mournful, as you sweep up the dust in the living room, but your emotions are conflicted, a turbulent sea of satisfaction and already growing nostalgia. You're ready to turn the tide, move forward, while still appreciating the place you became a mother.

You're grateful to Gaz and Cami for taking Orion all day. They're at home, no doubt spoiling him rotten, while you try to wrangle dust bunnies and cleaning the oven. You get lost in the chore of trying to clean up, distracted enough you don't hear the door click.

When heavy footsteps sound in the entryway, you turn.

And lose your breath.

He's in the uniform again. The more formal one, the one that Price makes him wear for meetings. It fits him like a glove, snug in all the right places, and there's no denying what it does to you.

You're already wet. Just staring at him.

He smirks. "Alright?"

"Oh, yeah, I'm just... I'm almost done." You gesture uselessly around the kitchen, half pointing to the oven door, eyes still trained on him, sweeping up and down, over and over.

He steps closer, head cocked, leaning into your space just enough your body instinctively closes the gap. "See something you like honey?"

"Y-yeah."

"Gon' tell me what it is?"

"You look good, in the uniform." You clear your throat. "I... I like it." Your hand unfurls, palm flat, and he tugs on it, folding it over the hard bulge in his pants.

One moment, you're looking up at him and the next you're being spun around, back to his chest, thick fingers plunging into the waistband to tug your panties aside. He groans, stroking over your clit. "You're bloody soaked f'me."

"For you." Is all you can manage, voice twisted into a whisper, and he rips your pants down to your feet, lifting them out to kick your legs wide.

"Hands on the counter," he presses you forward until you're nearly at ninety degrees, cool air ghosting over where you're exposed, slick and swollen. "There we go, jus' like that." He grips fistfuls of your hips, your ass, and then tugs at his zipper, its echo instinctively rising you up onto your toes. He's still in his uniform, completely dressed, and you stare at him over your shoulder, legs trembling, soaking it in. You think you might be drooling. Blunt pressure notches at your pussy, the crown of his cock working its way forward before he slams the rest in, your scream pinging through the empty flat. "Fuck."

"Simon- ah,"

"I know, sweet girl, I know. You can take it, pussy looks so good stretched around me." He's teasing, in control though the clench of his jaw hissing through his teeth is clear, hips snapping over and over, rocking inside you. His lips graze your temple, breath hot on your cheek. "I want you to stop taking your birth control." You shudder, clenching around him. "We're ready, mama. You're ready. Let's," He shoves deep, deep enough you turn to liquid, body bending to accommodate, "have another baby." The rough fabric of his uniform pants scrape against your ass, brush and burn delicious with a bite, and you moan.

The mind has a funny way of erasing the memories of birth. Oxytocin is a finicky trick, the halo effect obliterating trauma and replacing it with joy. You can't say no. You don't want to say no, and the idea giving Orion a sibling, holding another sweet, squirmy baby in your arms, one with Simon's eyes, detonates in your heart, flutters spreading all the way through to your fingers and toes. Your spine arches, hips flexing back towards his own, and he chuckles-

before pulling out and flipping you over, hoisting you up onto the counter with your legs wrapped around his waist. Your eyes roll backwards as he slides home again, pinching your jaw between thumb and forefinger. He looks at you expectantly. Waiting.

The agreement sears on your tongue, incendiary heat forcing its way through your lips. "O-Okay."

"Say it." He thrusts, rubbing your clit at the same time, rolling you close to the edge. "Say yes daddy like a good girl."

"Yes, daddy." His nose touches yours. For a moment, you're both suspended, pupils dilated, sharing the same breath, the same DNA, the same blood. He slows down, and you squirm. "No, no don't stop- p-please-"

"'Say yes daddy, I want another baby' and I'll make you come mama. Tell me." He licks your cheek. You're barely hanging on, holding the front of his uniform. He teases your clit again, working it slowly, and you whine.

"Yes daddy, I want... I want another baby." It's enough. Enough for a dark glint to spark across his eyes, the same glimmer you see from time to time, the possession, the instinct, deep rooted desires.

It sends you into orbit, head tipping back, his teeth on your neck, the two of you coming together and riding through the wave until it's over, and he tucks you into his chest, cock still seated deep.

"I love you." He murmurs. "I'm gonna take care of you this time. I'm gonna be here." You don't ask about the what ifs, what will happen when he's away, what if he misses it. You just bask in the warmth of the moment, and sigh.

"I love you too."

[gremlingottoosilly]

Wifey!Reader trying to surprise visit him at work only to witness how Pushover!König is like at work

You stare at your soft, kind, a bit of a weak husband as he slams the recruit's body to the ground and stomps on them. Twice. Screamed a bit for good measure and then hauled other recruits to get them to the hospital before he got some other lazy ass out in a chair. The recruit missed the training one time and was a bit snarky about it. You're not sure what you were expecting when you married him. A colonel from a mercenary organization is as socially inept as those people can be. You're basically his only social link, barely holding on to dear life as you were trying to convince him to be just a bit less sociopathic. You thought he'd be...fine. Somewhat. A little bit more adjusted than usual. You were not expecting him to yell at someone like that. To know so many ways of belittling someone. And also look hot doing it. Konig, of course, is terrified when he finds out you are here, looking at him like a deer stuck in headlights. He made sure to keep his professional and personal life separate - to always make sure you are getting the best version of him he can give to you. Now, of course, it's kinda pointless. You know this crazed look of his, the cold steel of his eyes as he looked at you, his triumph slowly melting into shock...and you were so fucking aroused it made your stomach twist. A mix of panic and pleasure, your silent desire for him to be the one standing over you, toying with your helpless body as if you were nothing but his helpless little pet. You made sure to ask him to be a bit rougher in bed after this one time. Maybe manhandled you a bit, some dirty words thrown in your direction as you imagined him taking you a bit more forcefully. Your poor soft husband will have to take his work attitude again...and it's not like he doesn't enjoy it.

[suiana]

✎ yandere! mean boy . . .

✎ yandere! mean boy who's one of the most popular guys in the entire university. he's hot, smart, rich... he was perfect! ...but of course, he had a bad side to him as well. a side that you knew too well but others didn't. have i mentioned that he's only mean to you?

✎ yandere! mean boy who makes your university life as hard as he can. from minor inconveniences like bumping into you, to trying to ruin your reputation by gossiping about you to his friends. you're starting to wonder if he likes you? i mean, why else would he do this? you're not even in the same major! spoiler alert, he does like you. wow, who knew 🤯 ps, his friends are annoyed whenever he brings you up because once he starts talking about you he can't stop 💀

✎ yandere! mean boy who is very obviously in love with you. yeah, sure he might try to ruin your life but... he also spoils you! i mean, don't you see those gifts he left in your room? the new outfits in your closet? or the way your grades suddenly rose? that's all him! so... you should fall for him too now, right? boy is delusional 🔥🔥

✎ yandere! mean boy who's completely obsessed with you. unfortunately, poor fella doesn't know how to process his feelings and only shows disdain to you openly. if only you knew of the way his heart quickens every time you glance at him, or the way he jerks off to you to the numerous pictures he secretly took which are plastered on the walls of his mansion... he's such an idiot! when all he wants to do is worship you, he insults you instead :( not to worry... he'll be openly worshipping you soon enough. soon...

"watch your step."

he hisses as he glares at you. you only roll your eyes, continuing on your way to your lecture hall as you text your friend. seriously, this day was already bad and he just had to be here to worsen it? what luck you had.

you quicken your pace, trying to get to your location faster which only resulted in the university's mean boy (correction, he's only mean to you, so he's a secret mean boy) scowling and stomping right over to you.

"i said, watch your step!"

he yells out, grabbing your shoulder roughly as he turns around to face you. his hands shake slightly, still gripping onto your shoulder as his cheeks brun red. was it from anger or embarrassment? you'd never know. all he ever shows you is his disdain after all.

you stare at him with an irritated expression, eyeing him up and down before apologizing half-heartedly.

"sorry."

you then try shrugging his hand off you, clearly more annoyed than worried as the male continues to stare at you with an unreadable expression. cheeks flushed as he roughly takes his hand away before stomping off like an angry child. you merely shake your head at his actions. what a drama king he was.

jeez, he really is weird. always targeting you, and you only... what did you even do to get on his nerves? all you wanted was a peaceful university life! with good grades and a nice set of friends, and maybe even a lover if you were lucky! but no, he just had to have it out for you every. single. day.

and yet, he always seems to have a red flush on his cheeks whenever he does so. and the multiple times you've passed his friend group he always seems to be talking about you. is he bipolar? does he secretly like you? is he a tsundere?

you grumble slightly as you quickly rush off to your lecture. damn, he made you late. what an annoying guy.

meanwhile, your secret mean boy was struggling to contain his screams as he hid behind a wall after stomping off. with laboured breaths, flushed cheeks and hearts for pupils, he giggled like a patient from the mental hospital.

ah..! you touched him! touched him! if he imagines hard enough, he can pretend you're gently carressing him! that you're looking at him just like he looks at you!

he shakily stares at the hand you swatted away, smile errily wide as soft giggles escape him. ah, you're so cute when you look at him like that... when you look at him in irritation... would you look like that when he exposes the fact that he loves you? or when you're married and he accidentally burns his food? would you push him away and quickly cook up another meal?

he giggles like a high school girl in love, breathing growing increasingly erratic as he places both his hands over his chest.

ah...

he wants to touch you again.

he wants to see more of your expressions.

he wants you.

and he will have you.

whether you like it or not.

[nanamis-angel]

𝐆𝐢𝐫𝐥 𝐝𝐚𝐝! 𝐏𝐭.𝟐 ♡︎

♡︎ ৹ Girl dad!Nanami who practically passes out when he finds out you're pregnant with twin girls.

♡︎ ৹ He loves being a dad, especially to his little girl. But to go from one to three is a huge change and it's two more girls!! But nevertheless, he's over the moon.

♡︎ ৹ Girl dad!Nanami who can't wait to tell your daughter about how she's going to be a big sister.

♡︎ ৹ The two of you sit her down and explain to her that she's going to have two new little sisters (in the easiest way you can explain babies to a three-year-old, that is). She jumps up and down, squealing about just how happy she is.

♡︎ ৹ Girl dad!Nanami who spends extra time with your daughter so that you can rest. Being pregnant with twins isn't easy.

♡︎ ৹ He takes her to the park, he sits and plays with her, he puts her down for her naps and for bedtime. Anytime you're too exhausted to give her your full attention, he's right there and ready to help. Even after she's asleep, he always makes sure you're taken care of.

♡︎ ৹ Girl dad!Nanami who can barely rest when you go into labor.

♡︎ ৹ He's going to have two more daughters. He's going to have three kids. His wife is in labor--with twins no less! So, maybe he panics a little but he tries to keep calm and make sure you get the help you need.

♡︎ ৹ Girl dad!Nanami who cries when he hears the individual cries of both of your newborn baby girls.

♡︎ ৹ He doesn't cry often, but boy do the tears start falling. He loves his family so much and now that there are two additions to your little family, there are two more people to love. This is the dream he's always wanted. His daughters are safe and healthy, you're safe and healthy. What more could he ask for?

♡︎ ৹ Girl dad!Nanami who does the so-called "Hot dad walk" out of the hospital, this time carrying two car seats.

♡︎ ৹ He hears you giggling and turns around to see you filming him. He assumes this must be another one of those "tiktok trends" you try to get him to do all the time. But in all realness, seeing him walk out of there with the car seats makes you want to have another kid with him already.

♡︎ ৹ Girl dad!Nanami who softly instructs his oldest daughter to be gentle while holding her little sisters.

♡︎ ৹ "Be gentle with them, sweetheart... They're very small and fragile." He can't help but smile big as he sees his daughter's face light up with joy. Her little sisters and her best friends are finally here. Even if she has to wait a while before she can play with them.

♡︎ ৹ And finally, Girl dad!Nanami, who regardless of the sleepless nights, the screaming, the crying, and all the other drama that children bring, just truly loves his life and his family.

♡︎ ৹ It was his dream to settle down and start a family. Now he has a beautiful, kind wife and three wonderful, healthy daughters. What more could he ask for? :)

a/n: had to do more because its girl dad nanami, obviously. <3 (hearts divider by @/s-h-o-w-y) tag: @o-ikawaii 🩷

[hairmetal666]

Steve knows he falls in love too easily. Nancy told him, Robin too.

But falling in love with Eddie Munson is hard.

They're supposed to be friends after Vecna. They're supposed to be friends, but Steve can't get past what Eddie did in the Upside Down; how he put himself in a position to nearly die, how Dustin got hurt. It's not fair. He knows it's not, but it doesn't make the anger go away.

Eddie's part of the group now, though, and Steve won't leave him out, no matter how angry. They're all at movie nights, at pool parties, at Hellfire, at Corroded Coffin gigs. It's just that Steve and Eddie don't speak. And Steve is okay with it. If it's what it takes to make sure that they're all hanging out together, not talking to Eddie is a small thing. He's pretty sure Eddie doesn't mind. At least, he seems as uninterested in hanging out with Steve as Steve is with him.

It doesn't need to be anything more than that, and it isn't, not until Steve goes upstairs to get more sunscreen during one of the pool parties, and walks back downstairs to find Munson waiting for him in his kitchen.

"You need something?" He asks, unable to fully hide the way he jolts with surprise.

Eddie twists the rings on his fingers, something Steve's noticed he does whenever he's nervous. "You have a problem with me, Harrington?

"No, of course not," he answers too fast.

"C'mon, man. You can barely stand to be in the same room with me."

"That's not true! We're in one together right now."

Eddie rolls his eyes so hard that it has to hurt. "Don't do that. Don't pretend like you don't know what I mean. You can't stand to be alone with me for more than thirty seconds."

Steve splutters, searching for a plausible reason.

"Is it cause--" Eddie swallows, hand going back to cup his neck. "Is it cause you heard me tell Robin that I'm gay? Back at the hospital. Is it because--" he cuts himself off.

Something in Steve's chest clenches hard, warmth swooping dangerously in his stomach. "No," Steve says, means it. "I didn't hear. I didn't-- it has nothing to do with that. It's--that's cool. Thanks for--yeah, that's cool."

Eddie's smile is a brittle little thing. "Then, what else?" Eddie pulls a chunk of hair over his mouth. "I can't think of any other reason you'd hate me so much."

"I don't." And Steve hopes it's coming off as genuine. "I promise."

He can't help remember the camaraderie, the understanding, that started to grow between them in the Upside Down. The "don't cha, big boy?" of it all. They could be friends. They should be.

They shouldn't get into it. Not right here, not right now when the kids' splashes and excited screams filter through the sliding door.

"You're a shit liar, Harrington."

"Ed--I'm not--"

"You know what? Don't bother. I'll just--" He jolts in the direction of the front door.

"Don't be stupid, Munson."

"God, I can't believe I didn't see it before. You just fucking loathe me."

"I do not. Grow up."

"Oh, yeah? Then what's your problem?"

"There isn't--"

"Stop lying!"

"You didn't fucking think!" He shouts. Loud enough that the noise outside cuts off. "You pulled that shit in the Upside Down and you almost died! Dustin got hurt!"

Eddie blinks his big brown eyes in stunned surprise.

"I told you, I said, 'dont try to be cute or be a hero or something.' And you know what you said? Do you?"

Eddie won't look at him now. "I had to make a choice, Steve."

"It was the wrong one!"

"I would do it all again. No matter what you say. I would do it to draw the bats away. To protect Dustin."

"But you didn't."

"There was no other way to stop them, Steve! They would've gotten through, into Hawkins."

"It doesn't matter."

"You weren't there! You can't tell me--"

"Yes, I can! I know."

"You don't! You think--"

"I almost lost you!" He screams. "You nearly died in my arms, Eddie. And for what?"

Falling in love with Eddie wasn't easy. It was blood and near death; it was weeks in a cold hospital room while Eddie existed in a drug-induced twilight state; it was agonizing convalescence and physical therapy and changing bandages; it was Eddie leading dnd sessions with bright eyes and contagious enthusiasm, herding the kids to the arcade and video store, theatrically serving snacks at movie night; it was festering, senseless anger at the near loss of something.

Eddie's lips tremble. "Steve, I--"

"It doesn't matter." He turns away to slide a hand down his face in an effort to wipe away the emotion. "You're fine and we're--it doesn't matter."

"I'm sorry," he whispers. "Steve, I'm sorry. I wanted--I thought it would help. I thought--"

And Steve has to admit, he does, the whole terrible contradiction of it all. "I know," he whispers back. "I would've--I know."

"I thought I was protecting Dustin. I thought I was buying you guys time with Vecna." Eddie's voice breaks. "I didn't--I--" He squeezes his eyes shut.

In the quiet of the kitchen, they gravitate to one another, foreheads resting together.

"I should have been there, Ed. I shouldn't have left you two alone. You almost died, and I--"

"Sweetheart, I'm right here. We're right here."

They don't kiss, but they're close enough that their mouths brush with each breath they take.

"Don't do that, again." Steve clenches his fists into Eddie's cutoff t-shirt. "Promise you won't ever--"

"I promise, Stevie. I promise. I'll be by your side until the very end, whatever it is."

[timkontheunsure]

"and if he's only here as a prisoner, what kind of monster does that make me?"

Ok think I've finally worked out what was bugging me with them miscommunicating when Blitz yells.

"Would he want me if he were free?" Stolas' starting premise is if Blitz wasn't ok with the deal, and didn't like him; then he's a monster and an abuser.

If it's was only sex to Blitz, then he's just like Stella.

It's why he gives up, saying he has his answer; when Blitz assumes the crystal must be a prop for more of their deal.

"tethered to someone in such an unfair way". Ok this bit had my mind immediately go to the divorce.

The marriage was arranged by someone must more powerful than Stolas, to someone he'd never choose for himself. An "entire life's been written in stone" in fact; he thinks he's done the same thing to the man he loves.

While it is perfectly reasonable for Blitz to get angry, feeling blindsided and dismissed; asking for a "fucking minute", the next bit reads very differently to both of them.

"You spring this feeling bullshit on me. Are you fucking kidding! *Kicks open the door* Can I get a Fucking minute to think after everything you put me through! You pompous rich Asshole! *Stolas' flinches the same way he does when Stella screams at him.*

"Treat me like one of your little butler imps. You can't just Dismiss me like that. I mean you royal Fucks think you can think you can do this every single time. Like you can just play with our feelings, because we're smaller and not as important. Well I'm Not letting you bitch. *Flinches again* Let's Go!".

Blitz is telling Stolas that he doesn't want to be sent away, and that he wants think about it. His abandonment issues are fully kicked in.

He's trying to force Stolas into a fight, to get him to engage with him. Likely a repeated pattern from his last serious relationship with Voroskia.

Trying to pick a fight, to get to make up sex, to get them back to 'normal'. Because that's how he's been dealing with their "complicated" for a while now. If it's about sex he knows how to deal with what they have.

(Blitz is word perfect on the fight with Verosika after all; so they probably got back together a few times after stealing from her).

Blitz immediately goes to "I can do better", and try give it back; when he thinks Stolas doesn't want to see him anymore.

"you royal Fucks think you can think you can do this every single time."

But that's not what Stolas is hearing right now. Stolas hears is 'your all the same. All royal are as bad as eachother'.

It's very close to Striker explaining how the world works during his torture.

And now he thinks that the only man he's ever loved hates him because what he is.

That's what he meant by "think so of low of me".

And he's not exactly wrong. Fizz even calls Blitz on hating that Stolas is a prince.

And Blitz does say "They're all the fuckin' same". (Blitz isn't wrong for calling out Stolas on how he treats his staff either)...

Then there's the bit that seems fairly contentious. Stolas portaling Blitz out.

Stolas is a domestic abuse survivor, only a couple of weeks out of the hospital, because his wife tried to murder him. He's going freak out at loud voices, angry swearing, and doors being kicked in.

He going assume that this is Blitz getting a few kicks in on the way out; not him genuinely trying to talk through their problems just because of the format.

They are both stumbling over eachothers trauma landmines here.

Neither is wrong.

Not Stolas for walking away, or making the shouty person leave.

Not Blitz for getting scared, upset and feeling abandoned. Thinking Stolas isn't giving him a chance to think it through.

Blitz is going to get that time he wants to think it over. It's not an all or none thing.

He now has his business safe and secured in his own hands, and knows that Stolas likes him too. Those are biggys.

It's entirely up to Blitz what he wants to do now.

[yeyinde]

dangle on the leash | Simon "Ghost" Riley x F!Reader

The flimsy sarcophagus housing all his wants, his desires, cracks open when Price announces that his missus is pregnant. Ghost cocks his head in consideration. Intentionally knocking you up is amoral. Probably illegal. Somehow, even more dastardly when the reason for it is simply selfishness. Want. Greed. Hunger. But he's a rabid dog burning with the urge to bite. No one should really be surprised when he finally decides to sink his teeth into you. Unfortunately, that hail mary Price sent into the aether never reached you.

(your bird is too big for a cage— —but maybe a collar would do.)

this is a babytrapping fic lmao but please read the tags carefully. a companion piece to this (Price + babytrapping).

DEAD DOVE. SMUT. 18+

HARD WARNINGS—coercion. dependency. intentional alienation. unsafe, unprotected sex. this very much toes the line of noncon (that is still very dubcon even when consent is given) in many ways, notably: somnophilia, and condom/contraceptive tampering. intrusive, violent thoughts. mentions of violence. manipulation; slight gaslighting. implied kidnapping. references to past abuse (Ghost), brief mention of drugging/threats of drugging (ambiguous as to if it was ever followed through on or not, mostly just Ghost's internal monologue unfiltered). ADDITIONAL TAGS—smut. rough sex. unsafe sex. dom!Ghost. mean, obsessive, unhinged!Ghost. spit kink. dacryphilia.

he's feral, but he's yours. too bad for you, no one is really sure if that's a good thing or not.

One of the things Price often tells new recruits is to shove their old life into a box. 

“There's home,” he huffs, fingers twitching as if he's subconsciously flexing around the hilt of a lit cigar. “And then there's work. Whatever box you decide to put this, or your family, your personal life, into is your choice. But for fuck’s sake. Keep them separate.” 

Most of the new recruits are fresh off selection, shaded sickly chartreuse, and take his words as a literal gospel. Work, this; home, them. They don't start to unravel the second part of his gruff speech until much later. Until they can't wash the blood from their hands, and the scent of their mum’s eucalyptus hand soap is nauseating. Unfamiliar. When being in civvies feels like wearing skin that doesn't fit, and everyone around you is alien, foreign. They don't know. They'll never know. 

It's only when they find themselves gazing at the clock on the wall of their family home, counting down the minutes until their mandatory leave is over do they realise that home is the barracks. 

That's something Ghost has always understood. Maybe it was because his home life was already in ruins, tatters. Beer soaking into the knock-off Persian rug a cousin nicked from a flea market when he was nine. No fine china in the cupboards because it'll end up in shards on the floor. Plastic plates and forks and cups. Always. Howling in his head. Screaming from down the hall in his mum's room. His bedroom door creaking open at night. The anger, the curdling fear (shameful—be a man; punch him back, hit him before he hits you, you useless prick—), of not knowing whether or not it was his dad, high as hell and itching for a fight after busting their mum’s lip wide open, or Tommy sneaking into his bed at night because his is soaked in piss and he can’t sleep when they scream at each other like this.  

(Funny that, he always found; neither of them could ever sleep when it was silent, either.)

Blood on the linoleum. Trying to eat burnt toast and overcooked beans with a busted lip and a twinge in his jaw—

(Fractured, they'll say later, years later, during his mandatory medical checkup when he's first recruited. Healed all wrong. Son, didn't anyone take you to hospital?) 

He understands the separation between home and work—even if the former lost all relevancy nearly a decade ago. Back when he buried them all. Was buried himself—

What Ghost never really understood was the box. 

Shove it into a box. 

When he asks over cheap whisky somewhere in Siberia, Price tightens his fingers around his glass before bringing it up to his head. His index finger juts out. He knocks the tip of that bruised, scabbed knuckle against his temple. Once, thrice. Levels Simon with a pointed look he both can’t understand and somehow knows all too well. 

“Up here."

“Paid nearly fifty quid for that,” he grouses, shaking his head. “Think I've been ripped-off, Price.” 

Price scoffs, places the glass down with a hollow thud. “Don't be a fuckin’ muppet, Simon—” his real name makes his shoulders tense. Around the barracks, they know him only as the Ghost. “You put it away somewhere. Hide it. I don't fuckin’ know. But if it keeps you goin’, keeps you sane, and doesn't become a mess I gotta clean up, well—”

The implication is stark. Heavy. 

Price was always good at chiselling through layers of accumulated indifference to get to the madness within, but considering Ghost’s past and his mile-long rap sheet, the warning digging into his words like a dull blade isn't unwarranted. 

Old dogs, he'd called the pair of them when they first met. There was a sharp keenness in his eye when he lifted his hand, waved his cigar toward the tangled mess of scar tissue crisscrossing his face (made with a dull, rusted knife, one that gouged out deep pocks of skin, ugly fuck, looks like the badlands, don't he? like a postcard from the Grand Canyon, sweetheart. not so cute anymore, are ya, pretty boy—), and said, “well, you're fuckin’ rabid, ain't you? Better put a muzzle on that before it becomes a problem, mm.”

His problem, specifically. 

And Ghost gets it. Thinks Price might understand that particular brand of madness—despite growing up on literal opposite sides of the track, his Manchester to the others Liverpool; poverty and prestige—if only just. Because Price seems to be able to curb those baser impulses in a way Ghost hadn't yet mastered (and won't for quite some time yet). He's put together. Sort of. Respected. Normal.

The men in the barracks don't look at him and flinch. 

But he sees the way the man's eyes linger in the crowd, shrewd and careless, before falling on the pretty bartender in the back. The one with roses in her eyes and a smile full of dandelions. Soft, like butterscotch. It's here when they darken. When he reaches, almost angrily, for his whisky. Pats his chest with a heavy fist searching for his cigar. 

She's a sweet thing, he reckons. All pretty and trusting. Birds like her make his head itch—

“Don't even think about it, Simon,” Price grumbles, and it feels like territorial posturing, a challenge he almost raises to meet with his chin, if only to make Price fluster, but it's hollow. Empty. He denies himself, too. The prick. 

“How'd you do it?” He asks, and doesn't specify. Doesn't think he needs to. 

When Price swallows, it looks like a grimace. “Years of practice.” 

He considers the weight of it, his eyes straying back to the woman behind the bar. She's tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, wrist delicate like bone china, the kind they could never afford, and for a moment, the intrusive thoughts, the ones he gets sometimes about wanting to tear things to bloody pieces, rears—

It's stamped down in a swig of flat lager You stupid fuckin’ mutt, Price would say tomorrow morning, shaking his head. You always think with your prick? 

Simon cranks his head sharply to the side instead. The resounding crack seems to echo through the empty pub. 

Price just shakes his head. “Christ. No one ever house break you, yet?” 

“Yeah, they did,” he rasps, staring at the bartender who gazes back at him now. Skittish, unsure. Not so sweet after all. She looks away, cowed. Her hands tremble. He leans back, and hums. “And now I piss outside, like a good ‘ol boy.” “Ain't nothin’ good about you, Simon. Fuckin' Christ—”

And he's not wrong. 

The Ghost has a reputation of being a cold-hearted bastard. A Frankensteinian beast cobbled together with spare parts robbed from a jailhouse graveyard. Worst of the worst. An arm from a mass murder. The leg from a spree killer. Heart a patchwork mess of ichor and sulphur. Sutured together with barbed wire. 

It's all sort of macabre. Rather trite, too. 

The rumour mill in the barracks is insatiable.

But sometimes, he wakes up and he's still buried. Still dead. Dirt in his throat, lodged in his nose. He breathes in and feels pebbles scraping his lungs. Feels worms in his ears. Maggots in his head. 

They crawl through his grey matter. Leeches burrowing into his thoughts, sucking the good in him dry. 

Or, whatever's left of it, anyway. 

He thinks with his teeth because it's easier that way. Cold, calculative instinct. Just barely boxed into a neat package slapped on the desk of Price's higher-ups. 

A good man, they say, and turn him loose on the streets. One of the best we have, as he breaks jaws, and tears through jugulars. A force to be reckoned with. 

They hand him a gun, a rifle, when the bloodied footprints leading back to camp become too much of a hassle to clean. Shoot from a distance. He takes to it like the bulk of metal was made for his scarred hands. Scythe to a Reaper. 

It feels like bloodletting. Draining him of his anger, his fury, until a cold, gnarled indifference curls in the basin left behind. Icy, frigid. Down to the bone. 

Sometimes, he doesn't remember what it felt like to be warm, even buried under a thick balaclava and layers of military fatigues. 

Frankenstein’s monster. Patched together from the rotten remains of horrible men. 

And as he stares in the mirror at the patchwork ruins of his face, his body, he wonders if there's some truth to it, after all. He's pretty sure if someone cracked his skull open—again—they’d find rot. Tumulus. Infested with maggots and worms. Cobwebs behind his eyes. In his nose. His brain perfectly preserved: a zombified tombstone. And oh, how it hungers. 

Wants. 

But in a box it goes. One shaped like a coffin. Placed pretty in the back of his broken head. 

He stares in the mirror and thinks he sees something moving under his eye. Wriggling around. The temptation to claw it out rears, but the shredded tissue on his thighs reminds him of what happens when he listens to that insidious hiss in the back of his head (some amalgamation of his old man, and that bastard—) and goes searching for gold in bone marrow. 

He huffs. Fingers curling around the porcelain. His head is rotten. Putrefied. He can feel the decomposing sludge press against his temples. It grows teeth sharp like a razor blade and hacks away at jaundiced bone. Ghost lifts his hand, digs his fingers into his temple. Down boy—

(Simon doesn't even want to consider what his heart must look like, then.)

Cold-hearted, sure—

But he likes sweet things. 

The kind that will undoubtedly give him cavities. A spillover, perhaps, when candy bars were too expensive, and the only dessert he was given was a toffee by the neighbour when she wasn't moaning to his old man about all the shit he and Tommy got up to. 

(Bruises came afterwards, the colour of liquorice. Sour cherries.)

Unfortunately for him, sweet things don't like him much—a shame, really. Simon has always had a sweet tooth. 

His rough edges are too sharp for their liking, and Simon's—

Intense. Like a dog with a bone, he doesn't know when to let go. When to unhinge his jaw from the morsel between his teeth. He bites hard. Shakes his head. Tears into the things he wants until it's bloodied meat pinched in his incisors. 

And so, they keep their distance. Like they can smell the rot on him. The funeral dirt. The stench of an unearthed sarcophagi. 

Sometimes, though, the wiley ones will inch closer, looking to get messed up badly by a bad man, and it makes something inside his head howl when he turns them down. Following Price’s creed. Can't give in to the pretty ones, he'd said. Nothin’ but trouble. 

Trouble, like a pair of shackles. A noose. Trouble, like gentle, clean hands and fragile bones. Fine china. Fine powder. The marshmallow soft kind of trouble that will melt in the acid that leaks from his pores. Aqua regia. Attacking anything that gets close. 

(Breakable, is what Price means. Pretty chew toys that are beyond repair once he's finished with them.

He must think Ghost is some sort of psychopath—)

But still. He stays away. It's easier on base, in safe houses, too far out from the general public to have to worry about doe eyes and soft touches. He doesn't need it, anyway—

Then comes you. 

And the forfeiture of his self-control. 

You're trouble of a different kind. 

Trouble, like the end of a sledgehammer. Trouble, like the grill of a car. The barrel of a gun. 

In the shape of a battering ram, one strong enough to dislodge the madness in the back of his head. Where the corrosive acid should ruin you, eat you alive, it doesn't. Not with your tantalum skin. 

But oh, do you pack a punch—

At first, you think he's homeless. 

Some scruffed-up man sleeping on a park bench outside of your apartment. 

In another life, he might have been. He isn't a stranger to bad habits, and had the military not been his only choice in life for some semblance of good (laughable, considering what he does for a living), he could see the threads of his life leading him here. Drugs. Manchester is good for it, this he knows all too well. Especially the shithole neighbourhood he's from. 

He doesn't clue into this, though, until you glance at him, warily, and then shuffle into the cafè he’s holed outside of, the place where his current target gorges himself on steeped tea and crumpets. 

(Price's dry text sits, open, on his burner phone: and don't fuck this up—)

It feels a bit like an omen. Made worse when you meet his gaze through the glass, and—

Well. Shit. 

The impact is a collision. Hitting a pole at top speed. Metal bent around concrete. 

His teeth ache (so, so bad—).

You emerge from the small building a few minutes later—the faded eggshell with chocolate trim is nauseatingly sweet against your pastel yellow raincoat—holding a takeaway bag, and balancing a tray of coffees in your hand. 

He tenses. It's instinctual. There's nothing about you that's an immediate threat to his person—unless you plan on adding to his scars with the tip of your umbrella, the scalding coffee in your hand—but it's odd, isn’t it? No one approaches him. Not unless they have a reason to. 

And no one, in his experience, ever has a good one. 

“Hi,” you chirp, disarmingly sweet, as you come to stand in front of him. His jaw aches. Even sprawled across a bench, you're barely looking down at him. Sticky, cold fingers tap a strange rhythm down his spine. “I, um, hope this isn't weird, but I saw you sitting here, and—well. I got this—”

You wiggle the bag. He smells something greasy. A breakfast sandwich, he's sure.

It's an unusual assassination attempt. Price will be livid. 

“What for?” He rumbles, sitting up in the seat. The shift of his bulk seems to make you nervous. You take a step back, and he fights the urge to follow. To back you into a corner. No escape. 

You regain your footing, even if the smile on your face wobbles. Weakens under his flat stare. Some people can smell the rot on him. 

He wonders if you can, too. 

(Pity that. You're a pretty bird, ain't you?)

And the way you take him in lacks a distinct thrum of hesitation, fear that’s normally there. It occurs to him, then, that you see him as just another man. Just another person. 

(“deader than a doorknob, this one. such a goddamn waste, boss. he was a fun one, wasn’t he? should we burn ‘em?” 

nah. bury him out back—)

It's laughable, really. A joke. He has the urge to crack one—sick and awful enough to make that little smile on your face wilt. Wither away. Almost does, too, but it get tangled in his throat when he feels the weight of your stare on him. 

The easy sweep of your eyes is barely discrete, but it's clinical. Pitying. But the softened edges of that empathy dissolve as your pretty head adds up all the numbers on him, coming to a standstill. Your eyes linger on his wrist. The gold of his wristwatch peeks out beneath the black sleeve of his hoodie. An intricate web of complex timekeeping that only he's privy to. A little luxury he picked up in Italy when the cash he'd been given was getting too tiresome to carry around. 

Dead men, after all, don't need bank accounts. 

And then—

You fluster. “Sorry, I just thought—”

It clicks, then. The pity. The soft words. The goddamn coffee— 

His gums itch. He has the sudden urge to be mean about it. Pick you apart in this street until nothing but embarrassment and humiliation remains. 

“That I was homeless? ‘nd you brought me, what? A coffee? ‘ow sweet of you. Some breakfast, too. Well, aren't you a lovely girl?” 

You are embarrassed. It blisters across your expression. Has your hands trembling around the cardboard tray, spilling droplets of coffee down the side. Your head is bowed, cowed in shame. It reminds him of that bartender some years prior. Pulling away when the bad dog growls—

But there's a thin sheen of intrigue in your eyes, burrowing holes into the shoes in front of you; a tangled knot of want coiling in the heat of your embarrassment over this blunder. Over offending him. 

Well—

That's new. 

Some get off on it. On humiliation. Specifically, of the public variety. He didn't take you as the type. The way you twist, squirming in place, is odd, though. It doesn't fit as well as he originally thought. No. It's not the public shame, but—

Him. 

Ah. 

Sweet, sweet girl. 

(So naïve.)

He reckons he could get you to do just about anything to make it up to him. You would, too. You're soft enough to be submissive, to bow your head in contrition, but there's a flicker of defiance in the jut of your chin when you lift your head. 

This is a blunder and you're sweetly embarrassed, sure, but it isn't enough to break you. 

And now Simon just wants to ruin you. Teach you a lesson about bad, vile men—

(Something you'd welcome with open arms, wouldn't you?)

“Didn’t know Manchester was so charitable,” he rasps. His throat is dry. Parched. He reaches for the coffee—black, with extra creamer and sugar on the side, tucked neatly in a little bag; fuckin’ hell. Ain't you just adorable—and places it on the spot beside him. “I’ll be takin’ this. Will need it for later.” 

You look like you want to protest. Fight back. His hackles rise, ready for it—eager. Something anticipatory, dark, bleeds through the moulted mess of his head. Sickly. Terrible. He thinks about what you'd look like sprawled under him, shaking and begging for more, for him to stop—

Fuck. Birds usually make his head itch, but you make his fucking skin crawl. 

In the end, you just huff. Roll your eyes. He wants to chew them out of your head. Pop them between his teeth. He bet you'd taste divine. 

You walk away from him before he can. You don't look back once. 

Pity, he thinks. Someone's gonna snatch you clean off the streets like that—

Hours later, he sends Price a text message with the coordinates for where to pick up the package Ghost left. 

He considers it a blessing when the man sends him back, good job, now get a pint from me as a little reward. Can't say I don't treat my team well. 

A reward, huh? 

Well. With your stature in comparison to his own, Ghost easily can see you being considered a pint. 

So, he follows you home, and tallies this one as being on Price. 

It's easy. Too easy. He slips deftly behind you, tucked away from view, and masks his footsteps under the echo of yours until he's standing in the shadows outside of your house. This, too, feels like a blessing. It's a duplex. He waits for one of the lights to flicker on, and—

The window brightens. Room number two. 

He hums, and palms his pockets for the pack of smokes he nicked off the man. Needing something to take the edge off. To quell the urge to bite. 

It's even easier to engineer meetings. Random run-ins. All blamed on happenstance, chance. Of course. This towering mountain of a man with his thick manc twang—the sort of gallows humour that can only be found in the blue-collar streets of Salford from the nasty old men squatting on the corners—must have better things to do than stalk you. Surely. You're not special enough to be hunted, right? 

Still. You're a touch wary of him. Distrustful. You keep your distance—six inches for Jesus Christ, aren’t you a peach?—and try to skirt the line between neutrally polite to the strange man loitering outside of the shops you frequent (your schedule burned to his memory, naturally) and that fascinating skittish intrigue from before. All simmering heat. Blunt want. The kind wrapped up in silk threads. 

It's interesting to watch it play out when he steps closer and all those long-forgotten instincts in the back of your head flare up. The shaky step you take back. The inward frown of confusion when you're not sure why your body craves space, acting almost on its own. And then the sweet defiance that breaks over you. The intentional step closer. The feigned warmth in your tone as you talk to him.

It's easy to pocket the uglier aspects of his personality. The coldness. The indifference. The flat, droll insincerity that leaks into his tone. All of it shelved, locked away, and he's not sure if Price would be happy that he listened to what he said, followed his example, or furious that he's bastardising it to lure this pretty fish in.

)The latter, undoubtedly. But Simon gets a sick kick from it all.)

Especially when it brings you closer to him. Thaws you as you rationalise his reaction during the first meeting, gears spinning. Kicking up excuses. 

Anyone would be angry, offended. It's natural. He's alright now—

It makes you look at him differently as you forcefully fight the urge to flee. 

Silly bird. 

Wary eyes rake over his massive bulk. Brows furrow at the series of black medical masks he wears in public. Always. That, in addition to the heavy black of his wardrobe—black jacket, black hoodie, black leather gloves—sometimes makes you glance at him with a touch of worry. Fear. Probably wondering if you brought home a delinquent. 

But it changes when he rolls up his sleeves one day after you've been moaning about your broken beach cruiser (the, I don't know, chain—or something—keeps catching—), and crouches down to fix it. 

There's a hitch in your breath. A distinct swallow. A guilty tinge of something shy, deliciously so, shading your eyes ruby-red when you look down at him. 

And ah—

Sweet little treat snagged on the line. Ain't he a lucky lad? 

It's all the better when you do the work for him. Reeling yourself in, practically throwing yourself in his cooler when you ask about his tattoos, carefully—considerately—nudging the topic away from his ugly scars. 

He guts you clean as he tells you he's in the military. Top secret, pet. Don't ask because I'd hate to ‘ave to hurt a pretty face like yours—

You preen under it. Pet. Pretty. You don't even notice when he slides his knife over your scales, dices you up on his chopping board. 

You're the picture of sweetness when he unkinks the chain in your bike, and sets it straight. All happiness. Smiles. Appreciative glances. You flutter your pretty eyes at him as you say—

“Thank you—”

You're waiting for a name. His belly rumbles. He could eat, he thinks, and licks his teeth. 

“Simon. Simon Riley.” 

The risk-reward ratio is balanced when you breathe it out between plump lips, chasing the end of it with your tongue. He wants to eat it out of your mouth. Swallow it down. 

You touch his arm, hand warm, soft. “If there's anything I can do to pay you back—”

He takes you out for a kebab later on. Nudges you out of the way when you open your wallet to pay. Draft girl. Naïve, too, because he can feel the heat in your cheeks from where he stands, reaching over to snatch the bag from the man with a grunt. 

You must think him quite the gentleman. So trusting. 

Doesn't matter. He lets it take root. Especially when you shyly invite him back to yours to eat. 

He makes a feast of it, and fucks you on your mint green chaisse after he's finished. 

(Not on birth control, you say, and hand him a box of condoms, suddenly shy. It's unopened. He hums, and burns that to memory.) 

He keeps his distance—an easy feat when he's halfway around the world, and you're stuck in the gloom of Manchester. 

It's purposeful, of course. He made a promise to Price not to give him a reason to worry, but fuck—

You're proving hard to quit. He's never had anyone cuff him upside the head on his bullshit. Not anymore, anyway. Not as the Ghost. He likes the thrill of it, of this chase. 

You don't let him steamroll you when he's in a mood to fight. You punch back, hitting him right in the mess of his guts, and fuck. Fuck. He's a little bit obsessed with it. With you. This wily little fish that acts so shy when he's got three fingers buried in your cunt, but rides him after like you're starving for it. Clawing at his chest. Scratching his arms. It's raw. Primal. He wants to break you—this fiery little kitten that bites his fingers until they bleed, and then purrs in his lap as he drives a pickaxe through your head, shredding logic into pieces. Rummaging around until he nicks the optic nerve that lets you see red. 

You’re everywhere. In everything. In the back of his head, under the howling that hadn't stopped since you trailed your finger down the jagged topography of his bare chest, digging your nail into the crude x across his heart, and whispered, soft and sweet: you're all kinds of fucked up, aren't you? 

A bludgeon to his self-control—

He resists. Has to. Is mean about it, too. Doesn't tell you where he's going (it's need to know), or what he's doing (would ‘ave to bash your pretty ‘ead in if I told you), but keeps you strung on the line (keep thinkin’ about that pretty cunt of yours; can't wait to come ‘ome and ‘ave you sit on my ugly mug—). 

It's dangerous, this game of his. Thrilling for all the wrong reasons. 

But he’s a good mutt. Good—

Until the text. 

The one you send to him when you're out with friends. A picture. You're in a pub somewhere in Moss Side, a drink in hand. A gaggle of nobodies crowded around you. It makes sense, he supposes. There's that old idiom—you’ll trap more flies with honey—and he doesn't know anyone nearly as sweet as you. 

His sweet girl.

(you fuckin’ mutt—)

Ghost stares at you for a moment, teeth aching. The little ensemble—a crop top and jeans—is a vision, he reckons. But it's spoiled when he catches more eyes on you than pointed at the camera. Practically spilling out of your top, aren't you? 

He breathes heavily through his nose. Tastes guncotton in his throat. 

Ghost commits every face to memory, and then calls you. 

You're drunk. Too drunk to remember it tomorrow. Stuck in a pub on what's supposedly a bad part of town. Chatting away about going to your friend’s house. He gets the address, and something sour twits in his stomach. Shit council houses. 

“That safe?” He asks, leaning back in his chair. He's already chubbed up in his slacks at the slur in your voice. “And dressed like that? Didn't take you for a slag—”

It makes you sputter on the line. “I'm—I’m not—”

You're so quick to placate him. So hasty to make him happy. Please don't be angry with me, Simon. I'm just having some fun—

The claws and fangs are tucked away when you're drunk. He shoves the information in the cache, eyes burning. Head aching. He's feverish. Hot under the collar.

Odd considering he's dead—

“Sounds like you will be.”

“It's not like that—”

“‘ow would you know? Might meet a nice fellow. Might take him home.”

“I don’t—I wouldn't—”

The sniffle makes him throb. Fuck. “Yeah? Well, ain't none of my business, I reckon—”

“It is.”

“Oh? How's tha’?”

“I—I like you, Simon—” he can taste your embarrassment through the phone. He didn't even need to bring you flowers and you're already boxing him into monogamy, confessing to him. So sweet. So tender. If he were a better man, he might have told you to sober up. To talk about this tomorrow. 

Too bad for you, he isn't. And what’s worse is that he’s a loyal bastard, too. 

But that's later, and right now—

He's halfway across the world, and you're vulnerable. In the den of hungry mutts. 

It’s charr in his throat. Anger in his veins. “You like me? An’ you go out dressed like that?”

“There's nothing wrong with how I'm dressed—”

He sucks his teeth. “Dunno ‘bout tha’, pet. You look like you're achin’ to get fucked.”

You take a shuddering breath. “I just want you—”

“Yeah?” It's a growl. His cock spits prespend in his trousers. “Then be my good girl. Go home and wait for me.”

It's quiet on the line. He catches the hitch in your throat, the sharp exhale, like you can't really be sure if he's serious or not. He says nothing. Waits. 

Where there would have been a fight—fists and teeth and snarling words—you quieten in the silence. Docile. Submissive. It's in you, he knows. He saw the glimpses back when you first met, when he'd bent down and fixed the bike he broke. All it needs is a little—

“Jus’ worried about my sweet girl, is all.” 

And you relent. 

Corrosive oil spills out of the necrosed holes in his head. It curls over his thoughts, liquid sin. He takes himself in his hand, blood pulsing in his veins, white-hot, damning, and bares his teeth at the urge to come to you, to push you down on the floor, and mount you like a snarling beast—

“Good girl,” he growls when you tell him you'll call a taxi, that you'll go home and have some wine with your friend instead.

Friend. Friends. 

He'll have to do something about that. 

(The thing about deprivation is that it bleeds into a vicious sense of possession when it's finally obtained. Greed. His wants have wants, have wants—

A perfect ouroboros. One you feed into almost destructively.)

Because the thing is—

Simon wants to tie you to his bed. Keep you locked up in the safe house he has in Manchester. Chained, shackled. A prisoner with him as your iron guard. 

It isn't just fantasy, either. 

The flies that congregate around you are an annoying, incessant buzzing in his ears. Remora clinging to the biggest fish. 

But they're easy to scatter when he waves his hand. 

(Waves off. Threatens with bodily harm, with physical aggression—

Same thing.)

The sting in his knuckles and the blood on his shoes are worth it in the end when your tantalum skin cracks. An aggregate of beautiful lines, pretty in their fragility, their brokenness. He wedges his fingers between the splints, widening the chasm to pet at the sticky-soft centre hiding beneath all that rough rock. Sweet girl. Hard candy enclosing taffy-softness. 

His coos melt you to the consistency of mercury. Liquid silver pebbles along your lash line, spilling over in a dizzying display of raw vulnerability. 

It makes every predatory instinct inside of him bristle. Locking onto the sweet lines of crystalline sadness that run down your cheeks. It has his heart racing. Eager, anticipatory. The thrill of the chase, of running you down into the ground until you're fine powder under him. 

And it’s there, it's in his arms—the maw of a beast—where you seek comfort, lamenting the loss of your friends, your coworkers. No one wants to hang out with you anymore. They don't return your calls or answer your texts. 

What did I do? You sniffle, throat bared. Belly turned up. 

Flooded with tears. The lachrymal face that peers up at him makes his teeth ache. He rolls his head back, feels himself thicken in his pants. 

Simon loves it when you cry.

“Fuck ‘em,” he rasps, words sticking to his dry throat. “If they can't see what a catch you are, then they don't even deserve to breathe the same air as you.”

It makes you cry harder, makes you mumble into his chest about how lucky you are to have someone like him. Someone who cares. 

His breath hitches. Warm floods his veins, fever-hot. 

“Thank you, Simon—”

And then you, smooth silver and wickedly sweet, cradle him in your palms as if you could hold all the broken pieces of him together. 

He thinks it's cute. 

Doesn't really have the heart to tell you it's a lost cause.

“Anytime, pet.”

And you're perfect, too.

You take this mangy mutt into your house, and let it eat your food, sleep in your bed. You let him fuck you stupid, and listen so prettily when he convinces you to let him spoil you. Let him pay your rent, your bills. Let Simon dote on you the only way he knows how—mercilessly possessive, and a touch cruel, mean—but you roll over, showing your belly. Submissive and sweet. 

It's even better when you try to lash out at him with a collar in the shape of his teeth branding your neck, spitting and hissing like a feral cat who doesn't know yet that's claws have been clipped. Only to then curl up in his lap, purring as he strokes your fur, and carves out a place for himself in your life. 

He wants to sink his teeth into you, and you think he's a big dog. Undomesticated. One who comes and goes as he pleases. A stray. A mutt. 

It's said fondly. Full of love—

His mouth is full of cavities. His teeth ache. His gums bleed. 

(do you know he's rabid? that the faded name on his dog tags once read cujo—)

Everything about you makes that sludge flood behind his eyes, pounding rotten fists against his temple. take, take, take; mine, mine—

The howling doesn't stop. It tells him to press you into the mattress and fuck you stupid. Tie you to the bedposts and never let you go—

He throws fists in the dark, trying to hit the madness in his head. Ends up with bloody knuckles and laughter in his ears. 

(a voice of reason says, your bird is too big for a cage—)

He clings to it. 

You're warm beside him. Burning hot. He syphons it from your veins when you're asleep, pulling you close just to feel something on his skin other than dirt. Other than blood. 

It's easy to pretend he's fine with these little nips. Leaving teeth marks in your neck. Bloody rings snaking up your thighs. 

He wraps one hand around both of your wrists, holds them high above your head, and tells himself it's enough. Shackled by him, under him, as he takes you apart, pulling at your sense of independence like the gnarled fingers of winter bringing defoliation to summer's bloom, but even with this, all of it, he still aches. Still wants. Needs—

Stupid fuckin’ mutt. 

Then you bring his hands up to your throat, letting him wrap his bearish paws around your delicate neck, and he knows these little bites will never satiate the hunger in his guts. 

He wakes up the next morning feeling warm. Full. Edges softened, if only just, by the sticky sweetness of your breath ghosting over his chest. 

Simon curls his arm around you, holding tight.  He won't let go. Won't—

Hide it. Put it away. 

Ghost does neither of those things. He buries it, instead.  

But in doing so, you find cracks in the foundation. Ones that are just big enough for your willfulness to slip through. To hand him back the cash he gave with a scoff, and a, i work, too, you know? i don't need your money, Simon. that's not why i’m with you—

(All he hears is, I don't need you.)

And then you send him a text. I'm going out with friends from work tonight. We're going drinking. I'll talk to you tomorrow! 

In the zombified remains of his head, a new howling starts. The hisses tell him you're pulling away, running from him—

It's a big world out there. It'll eat you whole—

Like Tommy.

The thing about want is that sometimes it grows teeth, hands. Claws. Without a body of its own, it tends to mould itself after its maker because that's all it knows how to do: devour, consume. Yearn. 

He shouldn't be too surprised to find that this need of his has dug itself out of the grave he buried it in. 

(he did, too—)

The flimsy sarcophagus cracks open when Price announces that his missus is pregnant.

The howling in the back of his head stops abruptly. The pulsing ache in his temple abates. It's heavy, this weight. This absolute, utter emptiness—

No. It's not hollow. The chasm isn't drained, it's—

(In the silence, something growls. Feral. Possessed.)

—full. Perfect equilibrium. All of the patchwork parts of himself, the ones that don't quite fit, suddenly find synergy. 

Communion. 

Ghost cocks his head in consideration.

(your bird is too big for a cage—

—but maybe a collar would do.)

—after all, could you ever leave him with his name etched into your womb—

In leaving the key under the mat for him to come and go as he pleases, you've left yourself vulnerable. But—

Not anymore. 

He has a safehouse he'll take you to. You'll let him, too, because it'll be the best choice for you. The three of you.

He's never entertained any ideas of family, not when the closest approximation he has is drenched in gun oil and smells of smoke from artillery fire, but the howling in his head quietens at the idea of it. He can't shackle you to the bed—stupid fucking mutt—but he can tie you down all the same. Make you his. Wholly. Always. 

And the thing is—despite a pickaxe making figure-eights out of his grey matter; lead poisoning and rust giving him these sour, awful thoughts about locking you up in his house, leaving you a needy mess, dependent only on him—Simon supposes he knows right from wrong. 

Intentionally knocking you up is amoral. Probably illegal. Somehow, even more dastardly when the reason for it is simply selfishness. Want. Greed. Hunger. 

But in carving himself a place in your life, he failed to realise that the walls behind him closed in. No way out. And so, his only option is to go forward. To keep moving.

He'll be crucified for this, but that's fine. 

He doesn't intend for you to find out, anyway. It'll be an accident. He came home early, and found you drunk. Drank with you. Your drunken idiocy merged, creating a terrible, noxious cocktail of awful, bad choices. Permanent ones. Irreversible. 

(You're so sweet, so docile when you're drunk—)

It'll be easy to convince you. To play the part of a stoic man suddenly in turmoil. You'll offer to get rid of it, a suggestion that he'll flinch at—a cornered dog, a hand raising in the air. You'll whimper. Shake in his arms as you tentatively smooth over the wrinkles in his brow, murmuring out your options in a stilted breath.

You'll be a Riley before the end of your term. It's only proper, he'll mutter, stiff and uncomfortable, and you'll melt. Liquid tantalum in his palm. The fruits of his labour laid bare, seeping from the corners of his mouth. Tucked tight between his teeth. Mercury he can swallow down, keep in the bracket of his rotten ribs. Safekeeping from this world that just takes. Devours. 

But not if he eats you first. 

The mere notion alone serves as an anchor, locking him to the seafloor. The tumult in his head calmed at the promise of owning. Biting to claim. To have. Greedy for it. For you, and the strange sense of quiet your proximity brings him. The warmth, too. 

He's a rabid dog. This he knows—has known—for quite some time. Indisputable. It pools in his mouth. Liquid sin. Makes him ache for just a sip. Unquenchable, though, because he's wary of water. Hydrophobia, but only for how it washes his efforts away. Cleanses. 

The urge inside of him to bite, to infect, quietens when he gets closer to you. 

(a rabid mutt licking at the window you're on the opposite side of, dreaming of just a taste—)

A byproduct of that maddening virus in his veins, the one he must have picked up six feet in the ground. Bite, bitebite—

—and give you a collar in the shape of his teeth.

He finds you in bed. A bottle of wine on the end table beside you, courtesy of your friend. The one lingering remora he couldn't snap at—one who sends you messages about how you are being manipulated. Taken advantage of. Fuck that loser, the latest one says when he picks up your phone, scrolling through the dwindling conversations housed within. Just him now, and them. 

It preaches about empowerment. About how you shouldn't let a man pay your bills (textbook manipulation. he's putting you in a position of dependency. making you feel obligated to stay. it's all on Google, babes. like, fucking get a clue!!!!), or how it's moving so quickly (maybe you should come stay with me in Durham for a bit, hun. get away for a weekend. i worry about ya, is all). He hums, thumbing through the old chats. 

You told her to fuck off about the manipulation, but it came after a lot of, oh, yeah. well, he's just. you know. he's different, and you haven't declined the invitation. i’ll think about it, is what you write. 

It simmers under his skin. That independence he plans on stomping out under his heel. With his kin. 

(sick, sick sick, wrong—)

It's desperation, this. Clawing at the walls—the dirt—until his nails are torn off his fingers. Until his skin splits, peels. Broken under rock and rubble. That animalistic need for air. To breathe. Basic training tells him not to save the person drowning unless he's sure they won't kill him in their struggle to live. But what's he supposed to do when that person is his rotting body, sinking down to unfathomable depths? When all he has is you to cling to—

Damnation built by his own hands. 

You'll die together, he reckons, and tosses your phone on the hamper in the corner of the room. 

Ghost can't remember the last time someone made him feel anything at all other than impartiality. Indifference. Casual apathy. 

Price is the exception to this on the grounds of being consanguineous to him.

And you—

An outlier. 

One he intends on sinking as deep as he can with. Anchored, maybe, by this little plan that beats and pulses in the back of his head. That clogs his throat with a want so thick, he can already taste the brine from the ocean. Water in his nose. Down his esophagus—

Better than dirt, he supposes. And it spurns him forward.

You're malleable like this. Tensile. He bends you easily with just a touch until you're flat on your back, a pillow shoved beneath your tailbone, and stripped. The loose shirt you wear to sleep is hiked up under your neck. Panties are pulled off until your sweet, bare cunt is revealed to him. All pretty and soft, and his. Untouched, he notes, and gives an appreciative stroke over your clit with his thumb. 

It was something you were whining about the other day, panting in his ear as if he wasn't a continent away. Pleading with him on the phone to please, please let you come. 

Simon likes the way you cling to him when it's been a while since something has wrecked you as thoroughly as his cock. When your spoiled pussy was neglected for a few days, weeks, and starved for attention. You were so sweet to him then, cooing in his ear how good you've been, how much you want him and only him, need him. Begging so prettily for it. 

He's almost sad to spoil himself in your cunt when you can't weep for it. Can't bully him closer. Try to claw his eyes out. That delicious push-pull where you hiss at him for pulling away, but whine when he gets too close. 

Sad, but—

Not enough to stop himself. 

You're not wet enough for him to slide inside unprepared—his cock too big, something that makes his bones tremble—and he rectifies it by leaning down, letting saliva pool between his teeth and lips. He holds it there for a moment as he spreads your folds apart with his thumb and forefinger. 

And then he spits on your bare cunt. 

It hits your clit, the thick glob siding down your slit. He reaches between your thighs, pawing at you. Slides his fingers through the slick mess he made, teases around your tight rim. 

Simon usually likes to take his time with you. Lapping at your pussy for hours until you're a weeping, snot-nosed mess whining in the sheets. Spoiled rotten. Begging him to fuck you already, Simon, you can't take it anymore—

He's mean. Cruel. Edges you for hours until your legs shake, trembling around his ears. He never lets you reach that peak—doesn’t let you come until he's buried inside of you. 

Coming on his tongue, his fingers, is rarely a privilege you ever earn. Too much of a spitfire, a spiteful little kitten, to give in and do what he demands. So he keeps you on the precipice until he's ready to fuck you, ignoring your bribes, your bargains. Simon doesn't give in even when you beg, when you relent and tell him you'll finally be good. 

You never are. 

Spoiled, he always huffs. Down to the fuckin’ bone. 

Like now. Pulling away from him. Him, the only person in your life who stuck around. A little bullying (bones breaking, splintering under his fists; the wet, hot smear of blood on his hands, skulls smacking against the pavement—an’ if you tell anyone, he cracks his battered fists and it sounds like a snarl, a gunshot, your parents will be cryin’ over an empty grave—) shooed the gnats away. He took a more clandestine approach to others. Birds that kept circling you tight. Protective, shrill. They made his head ache, but—

(don't want to start nothin’, but i don't want to be alone wit’ ‘er. tried to kiss me, is all. ain't like that, pet—)

It was a test. And they all failed. All but him. 

Yet—

come to Durham. 

i’ll think about it. 

Ungrateful. It's his fault, though. Simon doted on you too much, cosseted by his affection, when he should have clipped your wings from the beginning. 

Ah, well—

Lesson learned. 

You're wet enough now. He pushes in two fingers, scissoring them apart. You'd be yowling at him, kicking up a fuss if you'd been awake. But you're not. It thrums through him. Thick, heady. He likes you like this—probably more than he should. The heat simmering in his veins bubbles. Pops. Sap on charring wood. It clogs his throat with his smoke until it burns, a dry forest fire. 

He needs you. Needs to be in you. He's tired of waiting. Impatience burrows into him like a maelstrom. 

Simon adjusts his hold on your leg, fingers curling behind your kneecap. Steadying himself. His fingers slip out of your cunt with a sloppy squelch that ghosts across his spine. Anticipatory. A touch anxious. He wants you. Wants you bad—

He takes himself in his hand, and slides the weeping tip over your slit. Taps it once, thrice on your clit. And then guides it to your centre. Your warmth bleeds into him. Eager, he shuffles forward. Feeds you his cock. Eyes drilling into the place where his head slips in, swallowed by your sloppy, wet hole. The glands make you stretch around him. Rim pulled taut. 

The sight alone must have been crafted by some Luciferian dream, dangled before him in the shade of nirvana. 

take a bite, it urges. and then take more—

Like this, passed out with your legs hitched over his shoulders, drooling into the pillow unawares, you're just a doll. 

Made for him, and—

“Fuckin’ hell—” He presses into you—cock splitting tight, warm heat—and tries not to lose himself to the sensation of being bare, raw, inside of you. 

—“A perfect fit.”

It's always been condoms. You're not on birth control. Ink blots in his eyes. He goes a little feral with it. Instincts unleashed. Unfettered. 

Simon bullies his fat cock into you until his hips tap the back of your thighs, buried as deep as he can go. It's molten heat cocooning him—a warm embrace. For the first time, ever, he thinks he understands the meaning of home. Sliding home, in particular. 

(Welcome home. Home. Home. He'll make a house out of your body. Sleep inside the brackets of your thighs, head pillowed on your chest—)

As good as you feel around him—slick, wet, and tight—and as much as he wants to saviour the sight of you, passed out on the pillow, cunt split by his cock, he has a goal, a mission, to see through. 

His hand falls, slick and tacky, to your lower belly. Palm pressing against the subtle bulge in your abdomen, the outline of his cock. You always whine and hiss that he's too big for you. That you can't take him to the root. 

Hurts, you complain, hand against your naval. Fingers knotting over the place that aches. 

He presses his fingers there instead, feeling himself under your skin. Changing your anatomy to make room for him to fit—

It lights him in fire. Spurns him on. He bucks into you, pace sloppy, clumsy. Selfish. He's unrelenting as he splits you apart, drilling the full length of himself into your supine body, supple flesh relaxed under him, practically melting into the sheets. 

The thread keeping his resolve, his self-control, sprung up tight begins to quiver. Each piston into you has delicate fingers drumming across the strings of a harpsichord. It reverberates through him, echoing in the stifling, suffocating, silence of the bedroom, overtaking it. Clouding it with the musk of his desire, his devotion to you, to this dream blooming in the prison of his mind. 

Everything narrows into a needlepoint. 

There's just your burning flesh beneath him, softer than it's ever been; pillowy. Welcoming. And the sounds of him fucking into you—lewd squelches, slick and wet; the sound of his cock finding home in the basin of your spread thighs; his heavy breaths, his groans and growls that seem to rattle the bed. The noise breaks, an incomplete requiem of sin in his head, and he loses himself in the lulling notes, dragged under in the bestial beat of taking what his—

A sudden noise shatters through the room. Beneath him, you stir, gasping wetly. The sound mangled in your throat. 

There's confusion in your sleepy, hazy gaze when you peer up at him, lashes clumping together. You moan, whimpering, as you struggle to latch on to the threads of cognisance that he's content to fuck out of you. Your hand lifts, falls to his wrist still pressed against your lower belly. The grip is lax, loose. You’re not pushing him away, but clinging to him. Centring yourself. 

It makes his blood thicken. Has him burning red-hot. 

“Wha’s a’matter, pet?” He taunts, grinding his cock into you hard enough to make your dazed eyes water. Your hand tightens around him, holding steady. “Don't like it? Not fuckin’ you hard enough?”

“Simon—”

His name tapers off into a keen when he angles hips, and starts pistoning into you with a mean, merciless fury. The desperate noises that spill, unhindered, from your slack mouth is the perfect accompaniment to the lewd sound of him fucking your sopping cunt; the piece he was missing when this started. His requiem, complete. 

It's a serrated blade to his self-control, already frayed and threadbare as it is. The pressure makes it snap.

“C'mon, sweet thing. Thought you wanted this?” 

There's a place in hell just for him. It's sealed when you blink your tired, sleepy eyes up at him, mind a slurry of lingering somnolence and the heady alcohol on your breath, and offer a shuddering whimper. Always so soft for him, so agreeable when you’re drunk. 

“So’ry, Simon—”

You can barely string words together. Poor, pitiful you—vulnerable under him. Breakable. Malleable. Anyone else could have tricked you into this same position when he was away. Got you beneath them like this, compliant and unawares, and took what belongs to him. 

(The only thing in this destitute existence he claims for himself—)

Not anymore. Not ever again. 

It's almost callous when he grinds into you. Hateful. Brutish. Furious. And dazed as you are, you barely even flinch at the snarls that spill, unfettered, from the back of his throat. The low groans of him making promises with devils unknown; constructing shackles from brass, iron. 

Entrenching his future in motion, cupped protectively between the parentheses your thighs make around his hips. It's almost a vicious sort of poetry, one laid bare in the odious ruins of that broken thing he calls a heart. Etched into his rotten pericardium. Necrosed devotion. He'll see it through—however noxious, and putrid, you might find the miasmal stench of it spun tight in his web. 

It's for your own good.

And as if you agree, you answer him in perfect euphony, moaning sweetly as you tilt your hips up for more. 

Ghost groans low in his throat, bestial and spinning rapidly out of his control. He feels everything spinning, slipping; the trudge to the finish line narrows into a pinprink. He needs something to cling to, to hold on to with broken hands—

The only purchase he finds is in your demise. 

His hand lifts, shaking yours loose. He reaches up, fingers dig into your chin, forcing your pouty mouth open. You blink at him, sluggish, but he catches the thin gossamer of awareness spooling thin cobwebs over darkened crevasses, covering the canyons in your eyes with cognisance. It makes him leer. 

“Stick your tongue out, pretty girl,” he rasps, words sticking together, muffled under the mask. Crushed aggregate stone under the weight of his own desire. “Tha’s it. Open up nice and wide—”

He lets spit gather again, pooling on his tongue. It's degrading, you always say. Gross. But you swallow it down like a good girl, anyway. Always. You come at him with fangs and claws, but somehow, you always merge in a perfectly dizzying polyphony. 

Ghost spits on your tongue. Lets it land right in the middle of fleshy pink. A sick, twisted pleasure thrums in his veins at the sight. 

There's checking the boxes of an established kink, and this. Horrifically proprietary. Ownership that ignites a fire in his marrow, setting him alight from the inside out. Turns bone into blackened char, cinder. He can almost taste it on his tongue. 

It's made worse, turned frenzied, when you—sweet, perfect, you—bracket it protectively in the curve of your tongue. Completely dazed, head filled with a heady slurry of somnolence and alcohol, but still aware enough to know, even if only through muscle memory, what you're meant to do when he spits in your mouth. 

If anything, you're more obedient like this. Little doll. Coddling it lovingly, this little piece of him that he gives you. 

And it might be the madness speaking—these fraying thoughts take on a vitriolic edge, corrosive aqua regia pooling in his throat—but Christ. He's been stabbed in the guts, repeatedly, and it somehow packed less of a punch than this. 

He wants, wants—

Family never crossed his mind, was never even on the table or something to be considered, but with you it brims. Blooms in rot. Roots in tenebrous. 

He has this insatiable urge to devour you whole so you'll always be with him. The waves of his desire are monstrous. The waters below are rapacious. A gaping maw eager to eat you up—

Pity it’s not an option. 

But he’ll make do. Buy a ring tomorrow. Something pretty that matches your eyes. The curve of your smile. Sanctioned ownership. A collar in gemstones and gold, glimmering and shining bright enough that should any light fade from your gaze, it’ll illuminate in the gloom; twilight made in sorrow. The prettiest blues—

Said eyes water. Ghost’s hold on your face relaxes when you give a muffled keen, cheeks bubbling up against the pressure. Tongue still stuck out even as he takes his pleasure from your supine flesh. Suspended in motion, stasis. Such a good girl for him—

He swallows. Tastes poison, rot, on his tongue. “Swallow.” 

You're a little sluggish, a little slow, but you follow his command all the same. He knows, then, that it could only ever be you. 

No one gets under his skin like this. No one makes him itch, want, crave, as much as you do—

You make a face, twisted up in some amalgamation of pleasure and confusion. It nudges the ruins of his chest and feels almost like a heartbeat when it pulses in his flesh. 

“Simon, Simon—”

His name is all you can say, and he's not sure if you're begging for mercy, or muttering it out into the scant air between your heaving breaths like an obsecration, an orison, but he eats it all the same. Bites down on your pleas, your cries, your prayers, and chews them up between fangled teeth. Takes them down into the swirling pits of his belly where they're eaten alive by what grows in the decay.

(belly full of dirt:

he heaves, and heaves, but nothing comes out even though he can taste humus in his throat, feel worms using his organs like a playground—)

“Somethin’ you want, pet?” He taunts, and shifts his hips back just enough to drag a few inches of his cock out of your drenched cunt. A tease—cruel and mean. He’d get lobbed upside the head for this had you been in your right mind. A tap to his temple, shaking the cobwebs loose. He would have bent down, and sunk broken teeth into your jugular. Merging violence with love until bloody knuckles feel like a kiss. “All you ‘ave to do is ask. Use your words, pretty thing—”

You whine, low and drawn out. A lazy whimper in the back of your throat. “Pl’se—”

You can barely speak. Tongue too thick. Sleep too heavy in your veins. Alcohol, too. A lesson, perhaps, for his willful little pet come the morning when you struggle to measure just how deep into his gullet you’ve let yourself fall. 

He can’t help rubbing salt into the shallow cuts, if only because he likes the way you pout. 

“C’mon, sweetheart. You can do better’n that.”

And damn him—damn you—you do. Your hand curls over his wrist, pulling it close to your mouth where you place a kiss against his palm. Tender. Chaste. Midnight blooms in your eyes, casts shadows under pale moonlight. His breath stutters in his chest when you lean your head back, letting his hand fall to your bared neck. 

Your heavy, lidded eyes gaze back at him, cutting through the shade of night that sews the air like satin. Etched in the file silk is threads of trust in stark white. The kind that bleeds for him; hungers. One that aches, always tender like a bruise. The throb of it echoes between mouldering ribs. Booms between his ears. 

Ghost doesn’t fall into pieces. Doesn’t shatter. No. Something in the splintered remains shifts. Settles. He wraps his fingers around the thick of your throat, thumb notched tight against your pulse, and he feels complete. Whole. Remade from the ruins. 

Your breath hitches. The sound is a gunshot in his ears. He squeezes down, a gentle press. Just enough to make the air spill out of your lungs, to let your eyes water. Lachrymose, eager. It does something to him when you cry. He feels tipped upside down, torn inside out. Left all askew, asunder. He wants to drown in the pebbling river growing against your lashline. Wants to drink it down until it quenches his neverending thirst. Wants, wants—

He feels his name spill from your lips. Brassy and broken, trembling against his palm. A plea—

More.

And he gives it to you. 

Simon hitches your ankle on his shoulder. Adjusts the grip he has on your throat. He settles over your body, blanketing you under his bulk. Stygian beast devouring the maiden whole. The thought amuses him even as it knocks the air from his lungs. 

He anchors himself into the mattress with his knees, steadying himself, curls his other hand around the iron ring of the headboard. All the while, you look up at him—glossy eyes burning coals in the dark, in the gloom. Wanting, hungry. Mouth held open as if you’re waiting for his scraps—

And then he bucks into you, the leverage giving his thrust a savage edge. 

The whines are snuffed out under his palm. Your eyes widen, tears now spilling down your temple, soaking the pillow below your head. 

He groans, head rolling back. “Fuckin’ hell—ain’t you a pretty sight?”

Tucked under him, throat swallowed by his palm. Split on his cock, slick and wet. The tears streaming down your face makes him feel wicked, foul; but the spit running down your slackened jaw quells any doubt. The hand on his wrist holds him tight, tighter still, to your flesh. 

You want this. His spoiled rotten bird.

So, he gives it to you.

Simon’s almost ruthless when he snaps his hips into yours, cooing viciously into your ear about how you feel, how you look, how you sound—so pretty wrapped around him, under him; his little doll—

“S’where you belong, pet—” guttural words spill, flintlike and savage, from his mangled throat. Reinforced with the hateful way he blugeons his cock into you. Times it perfectly with the firm squeezes against your jugular, never letting you catch your breath. Your eyes roll back, legs trembling. Shaking. But you don’t move, don’t struggle. The hand on his wrist is a shackle, and it makes him smirk, scars pulling up in a gnarled mess of mirth; ugly and mean. “Right where you belong. Ain’t tha’ right?”

He leans down, babbles nonsense into your temple. Promises you the heads of gods, the ichor they bleed. Swears he’ll build a shrine for you in Durham.

But for as mocking as these words he murmurs into your ear are, they’re tremulous. Raw. A current roars beneath; a steady stream, a plea, all full of need: stay, stay staystay—

(please)

He buries his nose into your hairline to stem the ravening ache in his guts, breathes in the heady scent of you—of sex, and wine, and sweat. Drags it into his lungs in harsh, angry gasps to stain his skin with the smell of you. Of him. 

It goes right to his head in a heavy rush until he’s dizzy, almost sick, with the swell of it flooding in. An animal, he thinks, drunk on merging pheromones that make him mindless. Unfettered. 

It’s as if he’s driven on instinct alone; his frenzied pace ebbs, grows sloppy. The air around him feels thick. Syrupy. Stifling. The balmy breath in his chest is nearly as unbearable as it is addicting. Sickeningly sweet. Still—

His chest expands, taking as much of the potent miasma into his lungs as he can, filling them up, up, until he feels the edges threaten to brust. It’s only then, when ink moults across his vision, that he lifts his head just enough to shove his mouth against yours, a broken snarl ripping free from his throat as he forces the infectious air into your mouth, down to your lungs. Polluting you with the same sickness. The same rot. 

Little hiccups tumble past your lips as you swallow it down, taking everything he gives you, and he catches them on his tongue. Plays with them between his teeth, basking in the salty tang of you—brine, loam; peatsalt. Ashes, guncotton. Molasses. He’s not sure if he wants to drown you in him, or crawl into the warm, wet cavern of your mouth that pulses around his tongue like a heartbeat. 

Both, maybe. Everything. All of it. 

Always—

But he’s chasing pleasure on fumes. Trying to run with broken legs. There’s nothing refined about this. About the way he cudgels the head of his cock into the places that make your mouth twist away from his greedy lips in a silent scream. His weight is crushing you, he’s sure, but you cling to him harder, holding him tighter. Almost afraid to let go. And fuck—the notion alone is a kick to the chest, harsh and heavy. He nearly gags on the litany of broken moans spiling out of his mouth, landing on your tongue. 

Driven mad, maybe (or pussy-drunk, and high off of his own poison); but in that madness, he discovers this:

Nirvana exists between your thighs. 

Home, too. 

(well—

not yet.)

Pleasure fissions down his spine. The paroxysm taking him deeper into the battle-worn depths of his demise until the walls narrow, closing in. Crushing. No escape. But—

He won’t climb out of his hole he dug. Not until he makes a bed from your flesh; shelter out of your bones. He wants to ingrain himself as deep within you as he can, arsenic subsumed down to your marrow. Poisoned with the fill of him, too sick to let go. 

(Bone nausea. 

A death sentence.)

It metastasises inside of him, filling the barren spaces up until it leaks from his pores. 

He wants it: this dream so tantalisingly close. 

Simon lifts his hand from your throat, and reaches out, grasps at it with a shaking paw—

All it takes is a few crass, careless swipes of his calloused thumb across your clit, cock angled toward that spot that makes you rake your broken nails down his back, yowling in his ear for more, there, please, Simon, please—

You clench like a vice around him. A pretty bow tied up at the base of his cock. He bows over you, grunts spilling from his chest as he sinks his teeth into your nape, splitting skin btween his teeth. The warm, ozonous tang of your blood flooding his tongue is euphoric, eclipsing his mind in a haze of pleasure that crackles and burns at the base of his spine, spitting smoke up his body and into his skull. 

The harsh whine you let out—all prey, all animal; wounded, stuck under his muzzle—has some part of him, basal and inborn, rearing up. Roaring in his ears, ripping talons across the jagged remains of his head. 

(mine, mine, mine—)

He answers your scream with a growl, one caught in the smoke clogging his throat. It sounds inhuman when its wrenched out of his mouth—more animal than man: the devastating howl of a forest on fire—but the feel of it vibrating between his teeth is connatural. Innate. It belongs between his incisors; fits like a puzzle piece in his broken muzzle. Unleashed now. Finally free from this ill-fitting cage he housed it, this goddamn box—

Cobbled together from palm ash and brimstone, ichor and salt. Sewed up with copper sutures in the shape of a man for a perfect fit. 

Every cell in his body screams that he was made for this. To be over you, in you. Maw filled with your blood. Pussy stuffed full of his cock. 

He might not have clawed out of the dirt for you, but this mossy, gnarled lump in his chest beats now only for you. Apodictic. Ironclad. His teeth in your jugular, your life pulsing wetly on his tongue. 

It’s his apotheosis. His end. 

His hips stutter. White noise in his head. It drowns out the shrill screams, the hisses. Everything is just—static. Pleasure of a silent kind, humming, buzzing, and molten. Ghost buries himself inside of you as deep as he can, until his cock is fit snug against the plug of your womb, and lays his claim by branding it with the potency of his name. 

Tidally locked, you’re dragged down the summit with him, tumbling to your demise. Too dazed, too wound tight in his arms, his embrace, to see the jagged rock at the bottom of the hungry chasm thirsting for your blood, you just cling to him. Refusing to let go. 

(silly girl—

His pretty little perigee.)

His body aches in ways that cruelly remind him of his age. Joints stiff, stomach quivering. His knuckles sting when he unfurls it from the headboard, skin pink and raw from the tight hold he had around the metal. 

It’s made worse when he heaves a harsh breath, and pulls away from you with a long, drawn out groan. He settles back on his haunches, eyes searing into the space between your thighs. Messy with his spend. It dribbles down your slit, your ass, pools on the sheets below. 

Your chest shudders, legs splayed out how he left you. He thinks, viciously, of gazelles, and wonders if the blood he feels drying on his mouth looks anything like the muddied mane of a lion after eating its fill. 

“Fuckin’ hell—”

He should clean you up, hide his crime, but he burns the image of you into his head (another tattoo over scar tissue), and drops to a heap beside you. The moment his back hits the mattress and all thoughts of moving are erased in silk, in smoke and clover. 

Chest heaving, slick with sweat, he feels the thrum of his victory in his veins. The high of the chase abates, and he nearly purrs with contentment. Hangs his pride on a pedestal, and doesn’t think about the absence of any guilt. Doesn’t even entertain the thought, not when victory dries between your thighs. When you roll over with a huff, reaching out for him. 

It's as if you're trying to bury yourself inside of him, crawl into the safety of his ribs. 

Ghost grunts, feels his sensitive, spent cock give a feeble twitch on his sticky thigh. The idea of you, blissfully unaware, seeking comfort from the man who writ your body with his virile spend, irrevocably changing your life and entwining it so deeply and so messily with his own that to severe either of you from each other is nearly impossible, floods him with satisfaction so deep, euphorically heady, that his chest seems to shudder. Resounding with some amalgamation of a purr, a grow, so utterly primal, that he sounds more beast than man. 

His roots run deep within you, now, and every misaligned piece of his patchwork body seems to sag and shiver in an almost perfect parallelism. Congruence ascertained with the cupping of you between its mismatched maw. Shackled in a baleen prison. Nestled, safe and sound, between white teeth. 

Ghost pulls you close, holding tight, and hums. As you drool on his shoulder, dripping with his spend, he knows he'll keep you there forever, until you're nothing but bones. 

There's a cloud of confusion hanging over you the next morning, a twinge of uncertainty gnarling across the gaps in your memory. The pieces of a puzzle that belong to a different set. He watches you scramble through them, filling in blanks. Oscillating so deliciously between wariness and discontent. 

“‘morning,” he greets, as if his spend hasn’t dried on your thigh last night. Tucked up nice and tight against your fertile, unprotected womb. As if he couldn't taste brimstone in the back of his throat when you wince as you walk, achy and battle-worn from the weight of his desire crushing you all night. 

“Morning,” it's a sticky rasp in your throat. He wonders if you taste him on your tongue. “When did you get in?”

“Las’ night.”

You nod, but it's absent. Flickering through the timeline of events that aren’t drenched in black, shaded over like a heavy bruise. Your expression is fractured. Raw. Pensive. Something untouchable, unchartable, and yet he reads you as plainly as the tea leaves at the bottom of his cup. 

You don’t remember. Don’t know what to make of this chasm, this fissure, that looms, icy and deep, before you. There’s no anger, though. You don’t demand recompense for what he stole, what he took. The lashings he deserves are tucked quietly between your teeth. Hidden under layers of normalcy to prevent yourself from seeing him as is: a beast. 

“Well, um. Some homecoming, huh?” You joke, but it's hollow. Flat. Fragile like fine glass. You're digging for more. Rooting around to connect these vague, absent dots that linger, lost in the vacancy of your memory. 

He almost purrs. 

He wants to chew you up. Spit you in the palm of his hand. Maybe tuck you in his breast pocket, nestled against the lump in his chest—the one those silly enough to dream might call a heart. Keep you there forever. Hidden in the barrel of his loaded gun. 

“Bit rowdy.” 

It’s horrifically vague, but you cling to the prevacation he proffers to you; a lifeline in the turbulent sea, letting it overwrite the absence, the itching in your skull that must be clanging on the walls, begging for you to run. 

“Sorry,” it's sheepish. He knows the ferality in which you sometimes come at him when he's buried deep inside you is something that makes you twinge with embarrassment. Little kitten clawing at the old dog trying to get it to play. Rolling over immediately when it growls. Docile, sickeningly sweet.

But even naive kittens know to watch out for the frothing, foaming maw. 

“Did you use a—?”

He dips his chin. “I might ‘ave.”

And you take it as gospel. As truth. Why would Simon have any reason to lie to you about this? 

Relief shudders over your shoulders. You relax, inching toward the seat across from him. Gazelle making a home for itself in the lion’s den. 

The spell of unease is broken, now, and you quickly fill the chasm with chatter about your day. Your plans. Asking him how he’s been. 

You shove at the warning signs until they’re hidden away, and ignore the bones of your brethren scattered around you. All because you trust him. 

He aches with the urge to crush it between his teeth. 

And he will one day soon, he’s sure, because it’s just as easy to enact his plan as it was to get you to open the door. 

It starts with him convincing you to drink with him after dinner. Jus’ a glass. Got this fancy bottle. Reckon we should ‘ave some. 

But—

Can’t drink forever—no matter what his dogshit dad thought. 

So, he pokes holes in the condoms you hide in the bedside table, a little wary now. A touch fretful about your contraceptives in a way that makes him preen. You have good instincts, but rarely do you listen to them. Your head must be filled with sirens, but it's futile, he supposes. He's already stuffed cotton into your ears. 

It only feeds into that gaping chasm that bellows up from the depths that this world is not good for you. That it will tear you into pieces, into shreds. You need him. Need the Ghost to protect you. 

Case in point:

You’re needy beneath him, panting and mewling into the sheets as he teases your clit with his thumb. So wet, it almost feels like hot oil on his skin. Syrupy thick. 

In your desperation, you cling to him, throat bared. Fragile fine china. Belly up. Vulnerable. 

You barely notice when he pulls off the condom, crumpling it up into a ball and shoving it in the pocket of his slacks.. Don’t even react when he shoves his bare, raw cock into you. 

You don't even notice. 

(or when he slurs in your ear about how badly he wants to knock you up—breed his pretty girl until she’s stuffed full of him, making life with what he offers. salvation in the form of creation. ain’ tha’ a thought? he huffs into your ear, humid mirth curling over your skin. a stain. and the way it unfetters you—tightening around him, gushing slick—he finds his answer, one reinforced in the rolling of your eyes as your common sense, independence, trickle out of your ears and down your slackened jaw—)

And when that fails, he just slips you a sleeping pill. There's always an easier way to the finish line, he finds. 

(stupid fuckin’ mutt—)

Nothing bleeds from the cracks he wrought, or slinks from the shadows cast by his machinations until weeks later. 

Life just goes back to what it once was—Simon coming and going, letting himself into your home with the door you leave unlocked. You go to work, and chatter aimlessly about this vision you have about a home in the countryside, near the ocean. Saving up—uselessly—for sheep and goats, and the sought-after Highland cows. Chickens and ducks first, you say, and barely notice when his gaze drops, drilling holes into your stomach. Watchful. Leering. 

He can almost scent the change on you. Nose pressed to your skin; bloodhound sniffing the ground. 

Ghost keeps time in the slow, susurrus drawl of your voice sifting through the cotton in his ears, waiting for those precious decibels to catch on, to tilt up at the end as your eyes skim the calendar he keeps scratching x’s across in red, almost delicate, innocent even though it's from his sanguinary hand. A countdown to something you haven’t yet caught on to. 

And it’s all so sweet. 

—the waiting game, the subtle changes, the desperate way you cling to normalcy—

Sweet, like the way you carve this life out for yourself, filled with stuffed animals full of idealism. So much so, that it's almost bitter. Acrid. He watches the light glow in your eyes as your plans take shape, moulding putty between your hands, and like a pit viper, he coils in on himself. Frenzied. Fearful—

But only just. 

The excitation has run its course. He’s drifting, languid, into his scheme. Content. The notion of you slipping from his fingers is a thought that rarely crosses his mind these days, especially when that house on the prairie grows from an occupant of one to two—

“And, you know… when you're not out saving the world—” your eye roll and air quotes make his lips twitch, tugging at the scar tissue, the acid burns, splashed across his mouth. An ugly fucking Pollock. “—maybe you can come visit.”

“Never fancied myself a rancher,” he drawls, just to watch you squirm. Brow furrowing into a deep ravine as you struggle to make your intentions known without actually giving them sound. Skirting around the issue of wanting him there, of planning a home with him. 

(Too much, maybe? Or too soon—? 

if only you knew—)

He finds it charming, really. 

Still—

“It's just a thought,” you mutter, downcast. He wants to choke on your misery. Your sadness. Drown himself in your anger. Float in your happiness. 

Fuckin' Christ—

All this playing daddy in his head has thrown him off his rocker. Made him soft. Sentimental. It's probably why he yields to you. Offers a lazy shrug and another smarmy twitch of his lips. 

“Sounds like a plan,” and the way you brighten is a dagger to his chest. 

And the thing is. It does. It sounds like a dream, a perfect vision. Just—

Maybe not in the way you'd want. 

He's been looking into places unmarred by human hands. Ghost towns, uncharted territories. His home here isn't perfect for it, not like the vast geography of Mexico. The uninhabited wilderness of Canada, places so remote that it's almost untethered to modern civilisation. Islands of forest, mountains, all on their own. 

Vast corners and crevasses where someone can disappear and never be found. 

But those won't work in tandem with his flighty lifestyle. While he plans on keeping you barefoot and pregnant (common sense in the back of his head screams that he's foul, vile, monstrous—), he will continue to work. Has to, really, to avoid suspicion. 

So—

Home it is. 

But he gets inspiration from the Highland cows you coo on about and purchases a plot of land in the Western Isles. Gives this whim of his—yours, really—a concrete foundation made of the abstract. The filament provided by his newly christened Sergeant—an overeager mutt that bleeds warning signs from his pores. 

(don’t get close, reactive dog. will bite—

the little mutt is a great pyrenees, ain’t he?)

But bless Johnny’s bleedin’ heart, he thought as the man prattled on about this cabin he owns. A place of solitude. Could fire a gun and no one would even peek out the curtains. Beautiful, the way all of Scotland is. The highlands, he breathes in that shade of catholic madness only the dutiful soldiers of god's right-handed wrath can be, is where he keeps his home. A place chiselled from stone, surrounded by wilderness that eats tourists alive. 

(he didn’t ask at the time why Johnny was so keen on finding these places scattered around Scotland, ones with little traffic and a nearly negligible amount of souls within the vicinity, but he finds its best not to get too close to mutts crossbred with wolves.)

But Simon is nothing if not devoted, and so. 

You’ll get your fantasy ranch in the middle of nowhere. Your highland cows, your billy goats, your chicken, sheep, and ducks. A baby in your arms, too. One that shows its hand the next morning, dashing all your carefully laid plans. These paths of independence of yours run parallel to his whims but never converge. There’s the potential in this for these fraying threads to split, and diverge. Separate. 

(But it’s all put to rest at the sound of you heaving in the adjoining washroom. His path eats yours until it’s overtaken. Consumed. 

The evasive, unfettered little bird trammelled, caught. Wing-clipped, and all his.) 

Any misgivings the part of his gyri not buried under the frothing mess of his polluted grey matter might have is vitiated by the unwavering certitude that, despite his own gains in this, it really is in your best interest. 

And maybe it's something that should have come earlier in your relationship—however threadbare that word is in conjunction with the unhinged desire blooming in the pit of his chest; madness masquerading as love or some obsessive, desperate facsimile of it. Maybe a proper man, a better one, might have dug down and fully laid out the reality of intertwining your life with the living dead. That the idea of danger, death, and revenge are all everpresent threats scratching at the walls of this sickeningly sweet fantasy you wrap around yourself. 

He’s a dangerous man. A creature of devastation—manmade, bent into, or congenital is yet to be unearthed—which, in itself, brings about a certain lifestyle. One with fewer people around, and always shrouded in secrecy. Friends, family—none of that matters when death curdles gnarled fingers around his jugular. 

You’ll get used to it. Eventually. The only other choice is to let you, his now flightless bird, go. Released back into the wild vulnerable and reeking of his stench. 

You’ll be devoured before daylight, ripped into pieces—only if they’re feeling generous, that is. 

Simon has his own twisted remora. Ones with claws and fangs and a hunger that runs deep. Insatiable. Any scraps that fall from his mouth are devoured before they can touch the sea floor. They’ll crush you in their maw and dangle your mangled body from the gaps between their teeth. 

You’re not made for the wild. Not anymore. You’re meant to be protected. You—this fragile, delicate thing. He’ll hold you close, keep you secure and safe in a mausoleum of your own making. 

This little glass jar domicile. 

A billet in the mountains. 

He’ll fill it with the finest things—silk linens, fine china; mahogany and teak, pink ivory; a bed of soft, downy feathers, sherpa, Egyptian cotton; (sticks and stones and grass and moss). Buy you whatever you need. Chickens and ducks. Sheep and goats. 

They’ll keep you company when he’s away. 

(and if that fails, he can always plan playdates for you with whatever dirty secret Johnny’s been keeping tucked away in the woods.)

He draws an x in the empty, white box of the calendar, the tip of his red marker gliding silkily across the glossy surface. Something unfurls in his guts. Blossoms in his bones. There’s an almost indescribable sense of satisfaction—primal and animalistic—that grows from the upturned dirt in his head. Life composted from rot. 

Ghost hums to himself when he turns, the sound nearly a purr—bestial as it is, suffocated under sulphur. It reverberates through his chest, trembling across the brackets of his ribs that expand with his deep, heavy inhale—breathing in the sight that greets him like a lover’s kiss

The kebab he ordered lays untouched on the table across from the television—some trashy reality show playing in the background while you tried to eat; a dating show, you’d said when he merely shrugged, having other things on his mind over what to watch while you ate. It all seems to be preserved in time. Frozen in on the exact moment when you’d sniffed the döner kebab he got for you—the same thing you order each time—and then promptly wrenched yourself back, gagging. The sandwich was flung back in the takeaway box before you slapped your hand over your mouth, rushing into the washroom. 

If his phone wasn’t in the other room, he might have taken a picture. A little memento to remember this moment. Framed it in iron and perched it on the desk they gave him back in Hereford, the one just down the hall from Price. 

(ah, speaking of—he’ll have to send that caustic bastard a fruit basket, or something, won’t he? maybe some pretty flowers for his lady.)

His reverie is shaken when the door to the washroom creaks open slowly, and you emerge through the gap with sweat on your brow, knots across your forehead, and a shaking hand resting over your churning stomach. 

Shame, he thinks. He really should have brought his phone—

You lean against the wall, taking in deep, shuddering breaths to steady yourself, confusion and worry knitting over you like a thundercloud. It tastes of ozone when he inhales. An approaching storm. In the blue gloom of the living room, illuminated only by the light flooding out from the washroom behind you and the static glow of the television, you look etiolated. A wilting flower. 

His budding rose. 

He coos. “You alright?”

You glance sideways at the kebab on the table, mouth pinching into a grimace as if to stem the nausea still rippling through you. You stare at it for a long moment, seemingly trying to make sense of the reality sitting in front of you on scratched, old pine; confusion runs laps over the dawn cresting in your eyes. This puzzle is too unfathomable for you to piece together; the keys and slots all askew. 

The air around him grows still. Silent. Anticipatory. A tiger crouched low in the tussock. A little fawn roaming too close. 

There’s a heaviness in your eyes when they flicker back to the wall where he stands, drilling holes into the x. Something implacable frissons over your threadbare expression, fracturing across sallow cheeks. 

The air is electric. It pulses across his bare flesh, irritating scar tissue, acid burns, and scorch marks. His skin prickles at its whisper. 

“Feelin’ sick, pet?” He ponders, playing pretend. He’s viciously, deeply amused at the desperate denial splashing across your cheeks. The thin shade of askance that unfurls like the leaves of a flytrap when you look at him. “Mus’t’a been the kebab. Bad meat, I reckon?”

You offer a weak nod in response, pinching your lips tight together. The matter seemingly concluded, brushed aside. Pocketed for later. 

And you say nothing else for the rest of the night—gaze unseeing, turned inward; pensive—but he purrs in contentment as if everything was alright, sprawled across the couch with his head pillowed against your churning stomach as if he could hear the whisper of another heartbeat from within. 

In the saturated blue light, he catches your eyes listing toward the calendar every so often. Wary. Nervous. He thinks you might say something, might ask, but you don’t. It’s caught on a stilted breath. A harsh swallow. 

All you do is bring your hand to his shorn head, and raze the stumps of your clipped claws against his scalp. It’s almost as if you’re trying to soothe the madness from within. Scratching that itch deep inside until it goes away. Gentle hands play pretend and dress up as a panacea. Affection to scrape the illness away. 

He thinks you should know better than that, even as he leans into it with a soft exhale, more relaxed than he'd ever been his entire life. Content. Unassailable in his conquest. 

Simon has always been more scar tissue than man, and no place is damaged more than the upturned tumulus inside his head. 

But oh. How you try—

His sweet, sweet girl. 

The look you give him the next evening is, in parts, brumous. 

A polynya of dread, worry, guilt, fear that frissons across the deep valleys in your eyes, shaded in plumes of darkness, filled in deliciously with the weight of your beleaguered uncertainty. It yawns out before him, this heavy gloom. 

So close he catch the embers in his hand. 

“Simon… We should—talk. I, uh—”

You hold up a little rectangle, dismay, misery, etched in the blue tinge spreading across your face. It seems to steal the words from your throat, turn them into ash. What else are you meant to say, he supposes, when you look out at the world now from the gape in his maw? 

But there’s a veil of wonderment that hides below the tidal wave; this precious, deadly, undercurrent that rents the air, splits his chest in two.

The happiness, however meagre, thin, it is right now (just a sunken boat on the seafloor), is there. Ripe for salvage, and he sees that it’s handled with care. Cupped between his palms, nurtured by his own conviction to do what’s right, an’—fuck, pet—know this ain’t what we planned, but—

but:

The howling quiets, turns to a low growl, and then a susurrus hum, when you shakily utter the words he was waiting for. 

“Yes, Simon—”

You shudder when his fist closes over your wrist, pulling you into his purring chest. Shaking like a prey animal in the jowls of a beast, bested and ensnared. It has a profound, almost predatory, sense of satisfaction curling over his bones. He knows this was the right choice, and is sure, in time, you'll come to realise that, too. You’re in the early stages, he knows. Prodromal. You need to be handled with care to curb the lacrimation, the hyperesthesia. 

And there’s no one better than him to guide you through the throes of it. To lead you to the unequivocal end. 

He leans down, and whispers in your crown—

“Good girl—”

—and the sound of his voice is gravel encased in sticky, sweet honey. Dark, smokey molasses. The very same cadence as a key sliding inside of a lock; metal grazing metal. Turning—

“If it’s a boy, we’ll name him Tommy.”

Click. 

(he gives you that ring he promised when he takes you to the mountains. you smile wide, and tell him it fits like a gyve.)

Simon stops shovelling his want under the cold dirt and starts burying it inside you instead. Makes a domicile from your flesh; a place where he can rest his aching head every night until the howling scraping down fractured bone stops— (paralytic)

[poisonf0rest]

𝐎𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐜*𝐦𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐖𝐫𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫’𝐬 𝐁𝐥𝐨𝐜𝐤 2

𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐈, 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐈𝐈, 𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐭 𝐈𝐈𝐈

love and deepspace: zayne x fem!reader

tags: smut, teasing, oral, cunnilingus, road head, car sex woohoo, pwp

word count: 6.6K

synopsis: Between being in the midst of your medical residency and being an up-and-coming author, it’s safe to say your personal life has been placed on stand-still. That is, until your editor decided that your next novel needed explicit smut scenes. That is, until your mentor and boss ends up striking a deal for you to help with “inspiration” for said novel. That is, until you fuck Zayne four times and your life changes forever. - partially inspired by manga of the same name by Nae Awaji

original ao3 link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/57209872/chapters/145519015

art credit: @/kaito_aii

This is the last time you have sex on a weekday.

When Zayne left your apartment last night, you tried to write while the aftereffects of everything he did to you- everything he watched you do- still lingered. But you were beyond distracted, unable to even sit still without being assaulted with vivid flashbacks, a mix of mortification and lust coursing anew. 

You shut your laptop and scream into your pillow. 

Only after feeling sufficiently lightheaded do you shut off the lights and try to sleep, but the damned thing avoids you like the plague, and you stare at the ceiling for an untimed eternity. Everything feels wrong. Your blanket feels too thick, your skin too tight, the entire room too warm, too empty.

You don’t get more than three hours of sleep that night.

But it should be common knowledge that hospitals rest for no one, and you jolt out of bed to the sound of your pager beeping, rushing in while the sky is still dark.

The ambulance pulls in at the same time you do and the paramedics are already yelling out the status to everyone at the bay: forty-three-year-old male, chest trauma, performing CPR. It’s a race, a rush and rhythm you know well. You’re scrubbed down and entering the operating room alongside two other surgeons. The patient is intubated and they give the countdown before cutting him open.

It took two and a half hours to perform the surgery and stop all the internal bleeding, and by the end of it, you were exhausted, both physically and mentally. 

But this was the most in control you’ve felt for a while. A sharp sort of stress that forced your hands into a trained precision and your mind into a rigorous sort of calm. It was almost as though you became a different person entirely, one you both admire and hate. 

She’s calm and collected, only speaking when needed in commands to the operating room. She demands respect. She is who your mother is proud of, who you were supposed to be.

You’ve only just washed your hands and finished debriefing when you feel that half of you begin to slip away once more. And as the stress leaves, your mind wanders back to last night. To Zayne.

Thoughts that haunt you for the rest of the morning.

Finally, the clock hits eight and the ER is busy with the morning crowd. You do what you can until the other residents clock in, leaving to finally eat breakfast and get some sort of caffeine before your headache gets any worse. 

Luckily, the vending machine has your favorite melonpan and green tea, and you get two of each. Sitting down, open your laptop and begin eating in the hallway outside the surgery bay, your manuscript staring right back at you, mocking.

Your eyes burn holes through the cursor blinking at the top of the page, and you try to will yourself to just type something, anything, but it doesn't work, and you end up slamming the computer shut with a sigh.

Unintentionally, your male lead has begun to resemble Zayne more and more- not physically, at least- but in his little mannerisms, his overly formal speech habit, and even his uncharacteristic love of sweets. Your lips quirk up at the memory.

But speak of the devil, and he shall appear.

Zayne comes from the other end of the hallway, looking like he also might be coming out from a surgery. He’s only meters away when his eyes lock onto yours.

You straighten against the chair, a shiver of heat racing down your spine as his mere presence sends an onslaught of flashbacks that are nothing short of sinful.

Stop. What happened last night is part of a professional, mutually beneficial deal. Zayne is still your mentor— your boss too, in some contexts— and you refuse to have these thoughts about him in your place of work.

Smiling, your fingers still against the keyboard as you hope the whole thing doesn’t look as strained as it feels.

Zayne looks the opposite of amused. If anything, he appears pissed.

His gaze narrows on you, and for a second, you think you spot something else behind the cold indifference. But the look passes as quickly as it appeared, his face back to its usual stony expression, and you must have imagined it.

“Good morning, Dr. Zayne,” you say.

Zayne stalls, shoulders tensing for a moment before he nods and continues walking. He doesn’t spare you another glance as he passes, doesn’t say another word, the awkward tension so thick it almost makes you choke on your melonpan.

Your eyes trail after him until he rounds the corner.

Well, that went splendidly.

You try to type again, but it turns out your brain is a useless lump of flesh because no matter how many times you read over the paragraph, the words fail to register. You huff out an exasperated breath, slam the laptop shut, and drag yourself to your office to prepare for rounds.

Even so, you go through your morning routine with a strained smile, a newfound weight pulling against your chest, a sharp sort of pain between guilt and longing you’ve never felt before. 

—----

Zayne is going to lose his fucking mind. 

He is an adult, he reminds himself. A well-mannered, respectful, professional adult. 

So why can’t he stop imagining your face underneath him as you come undone? Why can’t he get the memory of every sound you made, the overly sweet way you said his name, the very cadence of your voice out of his head? 

And the way you said please. 

Zayne grinds his teeth hard enough that something clicks in the back of his jawbone, his usual flat expression twisted with a scowl that sends other doctors and residents scrambling out from his path. His clipboard groans under the pressure from his grip, and Zayne can’t make it to his private office fast enough before he slams the door shut and drags his palm down his face. 

He sees you every time he closes his eyes.

“Fuck.”

Zayne swore to himself that helping you would change nothing in the workplace, and yet clearly, only one of you was mature enough to hold that part of your deal up.

This must be a new level of depravity Zayne never assumed he would stoop to.

But it had been torture to only watch you last night. A beautiful, painful torture he would subject himself to again and again and again just for the chance to have you writhing against him like that once more. 

The way your doe eyes had practically begged for him to fuck you all on their own when he forced you to look up nearly made him come in his trousers. And thank god you were too far gone to notice how desperate he was, grinding insistently against your bedsheets while you came around his fingers. And now… 

And now Zayne was fucking hard again in his office of all places. 

It was a wonder he got anything done anymore.

Zayne hasn't had a lover in years and it's beginning to wear him thin. And yet, the idea of finding someone else to satiate his needs doesn’t appeal to him in the slightest. Not when his mind is so consumed with the thought of you, and the sounds you made, the way you looked at him, the way your eyes would roll to the back of your head every time he curled his fingers into that spot inside of you.

God, he should have just asked you out on a date first. 

Restraint had come easy to him. Zayne was practically raised on it, his very life dependent on his ability to restrain his Evol, the lives of others dependent on his patience and restraint in the operating room. 

But no, when it came to you, everything failed him. 

Maybe he had been a little harsh this morning. Zayne doesn’t know. He doesn't want to think about it.

Running a hand through his hair, Zayne imagines bumping into you again. Would you still be happy to see him, smiling as you did this morning, or would you ignore him just as he did you? 

“About this morning,” Zayne stops, restarts. “I’m sorry for avoiding conversation earlier today.” A groan, “No, I can’t begin like that. This morning I wasn’t myself, there was a patient who required percutaneous coronary intervention and the stress must have gotten to me.” 

He tries again, and again, gesturing to his empty office before dragging a palm down his face. “I must be going insane.”

Zayne has never felt more foolish in his life.

He doesn't even have the excuse of a lack of experience in this field. In his previous relationships, he was always the one to initiate dates and intimacy, and it was the same with any relation that had lasted longer than one night.

But you are different.

The thought of taking his time with you makes him weak. To finally have your legs wrapped around his waist, to finally hear his name on your lips, to finally have your body pressed flush against his and hear you beg for him once more.

He wants to do so much more for you, wants you to use him as you need, to take and take everything he has to give. Wants to surrender to your every whim and every outrageous idea you’ve ever had floating around in that unpredictable head of yours. Wants to taste you, and see if you taste as sweet as you sound when you beg.

Wants to know how your cunt feels and what face you would make when he finally, finally fucks you.

God, Zayne wants to ruin you.

He wants so badly it drives him mad.

Zayne can't avoid you, and he shouldn’t. There are still matters to discuss for your novel and a deal to hold up. He is a man of his word.

A date.

That could work. Just a way to get closer, as colleagues, as partners. 

You would have to spend time together outside the hospital, where the air is clear of any distractions and expectations and Zayne can get his head on straight. Even moreso, it should be something nice, something that will hopefully take your mind off your impending deadline. 

Right, that would be perfect. An opportunity to simply be providing you with the proper inspiration and guidance, as a good mentor should, and keep his end of the deal should you ask for another inspiration session.

Turning back in his chair, Zayne begins filtering through his email and paper files, until something slips from the growing stack. 

The annual charity gala.

As a resident yourself, you were likely already invited, so proposing the two of you go together shouldn’t be too ostentatious, right?

Zayne stares down at the gilded gold lettering.

No. It was definitely out of line in so many ways. But the only other option was to continue down this path, to continue fooling himself that he only agreed to be your fuck buddy out of courtesy and care, and not these wretched thoughts that plauge his every waking moment. 

It would mean he’d be completely at your mercy for seeing you next, whenever you needed him. Or his body, at least.

Zayne doesn’t have the willpower to last that long. Besides, this is more efficient.

So, Zayne opens the letter, pulls the invitation card from its envelope, and begins drafting an email to you in hopes of preserving a little bit of his dignity. 

He didn’t even have to wait an hour to get your response: you said yes. 

______

Zayne opens the car door for you, ever the gentleman. 

Sliding into the passenger seat, you take extra care not to snag the hem of your cocktail dress on your heels or the door. By the time you buckle your seat belt, and the car roars to life, dashboard glowing a soft orange.

"Ready?" Zayne asks, adjusting his cuff as he begins to reverse out of the parking spot.

It’s the first time Zayne has formally invited you to be his plus one, and the thought of being seen beside him like this- at such a formal gala, no less- is all at once thrilling and nauseating.

Zayne steals another glance at you, and where your hands lay clenched in your lap. "It’s just a hospital event, you may very well see other residents there."

A laugh. "I'm not sure if that makes me feel better or worse."

Even without the extra stress from attending this gala, your stomach has been in knots all day long-- your manuscript is due in less than a week. You’ve written a lot, and Zayne’s hands-on “experience” helped you get ample inspiration for most of the main scenes. Yet you can feel the deadline creeping up, the sense of impending doom looming over you.

Of course Zayne notices. "We'll try and have fun, it's just a couple of hours. I heard they also have billiard tables, if you’re interested?” A tap on the steering wheel, then he adds, a little quieter, “Your dress is nice. The color suits you.”

You smile, but your eyes don’t leave the road. Instead, you seem to zone out on the row of streetlights, shadows cast over your face as they pass by, one by one. 

“You clean up pretty well yourself, doctor.”

Zayne continues. “Tell me more about your novel’s progress, then. If you need any more assistance…” he trails off, and you feel a prickling heat creep up the back of your neck. Finally, you look away from the window, and Zayne relaxes against his seat. 

So you begin to tell him about the newest trope your editor wants you to include, a classic in enemies-to-lovers books: forced proximity. “The concept is great. Who doesn’t love it when the two characters who swear they hate each other accidentally get stuck together and turned on at the worst possible time?” 

You ramble, propping your arm against the car armrest as you turn to face Zayne. "So,” you say, ”I'm trying to think of ways they could find themselves in such a situation. Maybe they're cornered by guards or captured by a mutual enemy, or we combine the classic injury trope so they can’t move.” 

"That is one option," he says, eyes still on the road. A turn, and Zayne shifts gears as the car speeds ahead. 

“A classic my mind says no, but my body says yes dilemma.” You debate telling Zayne about the premise around aphrodisiacs and sex pollen, but you think that really might be pushing him too far. You are in a car, after all, and an accident is the last thing you want. 

Instead, you ask, "Have you read any enemy-to-lover books?"

He shrugs. "I've had some experience."

"I'm sure you have."

Zayne shoots you a sharp look. Your smile grows, slow and wicked. 

"And I've done a bit of research," he clarifies, voice flat just to prove a point.

"Right, research."

"Well, to best help you, I thought…” Zayne’s brows furrow as he merges lanes, letting the blinking of the indicator fill the silence before clearing his throat. “I thought reading a book or two in the same field would help me understand your own book better. I must say yours is far better written than some of these popular novels.” 

The mental image of Zayne sneaking a read at some filthy romantasy book has you giggling.

"And you’re sure that's the reason?”

"Of course," he says, though his face is slightly pink.

You feign suspicion, poking at Zayne’s arm. "What if this whole time, you’ve been hunting me down as a means to read my unreleased books?  Then the only reason you agreed to this arrangement is because you're secretly a stalker fan."

"Interesting theory,” a smirk, one you see pull at the corner of Zayne’s lips. “But not the only reason."

"Oh? What’s the other then?"

Zayne smiles, the dim light from the dashboard sharpening his features. Another turn, you spare a glance at the GPS only to see you’re nearly at the gala venue. But still, no answer came, not as Zayne seemed to refocus on the road, shifting gears as the light turns green. 

You groan, “You’re not even listening anymore.” 

“I am.” Zayne shoots you a look from the corner of his eye, one hand leaving the wheel to rest against your thigh. “There is, however, a difference between listening and answering.” 

But now it’s your turn to stop listening. You can’t, not when his thumb does that thing again, tracing mindless circles against your inner thigh while he looks back at the road. 

It does something, to have his hand there, warm and heavy. Something that has your thighs pressing together, heat creeping down your neck.

Zayne catches the motion. Of course, he does. And he squeezes, just a little.

And then a brilliantly wretched idea hits you.

"Do you have any suggestions?" You ask, trying to keep your tone innocent, even as you part your thighs just a little further. "I mean, you did research and all. Surely, you remember something useful about the plots. Or the sex scenes."

"The sex scenes," Zayne echoes, his voice tight.

"Well, yes. They're kind of important. They're why people buy the books." You lick your lips. "For example, surely one of those books you read for research had interesting forbidden tropes?"

"It's likely." His jaw ticks. "You'll have to be more specific.”

"Well..." you draw the word out, shifting in your seat. “You know where else would be a really inappropriate place for a character to get a boner?” Reaching over, you glide your hand up Zayne’s thigh, mirroring his placement on your own. “In a car, doctor.”

Zayne thanked every god for their mercy the moment he got to a red light, car jolting to a halt as he eyed you with a frown.

“Behave," he scolds. "This is beyond reckless."

The genuine frustration edged into Zayne’s voice makes you hesitate, and you move to sit up, retreating your hand from his thigh when it brushes past something unmistakably hard. 

You feel Zayne tense beneath you, the car jerking forward before speeding along as though nothing had happened. Oh, but your lips cracked into a vicious grin as you stretched your way fully over the center console, wriggling your ass in the air on the far side of the seat. 

Really, you should have realized that the stern, self-deprived Zayne gets off on scolding you as much as you did. 

You watch him closely, but despite his harsh words, he never moves to actually stop you. So you continue, scraping your nails up his trousers as your mouth follows, hot breath leaving damp spots against the expensive cotton as Zayne’s thigh jumps under your touch. 

God, the click of his belt coming undone elicited a nearly Pavlovian response at this point, the sound of metal on metal making something in your core flutter. You waste no time going for his zipper, palming at the bulge straining into your touch as it pushes out from between the metal all on its own.

Zayne laments all the trust you placed in him as a driver. Despite being only minutes from the venue, he swore he was gripping the steering wheel hard enough for it to snap. A car behind him honks and Zayne swears under his breath, thoughts clouding over as your hands finish sliding his zipper down, gently palming at his cock as he inhales sharply at the feeling of your hot breath over clothed skin.

And the moan Zayne lets out when you lick the head of his cock is enough to have you gushing. But you never take him any deeper, blocked by your position over the passenger seat, settling with unsatisfactory kitten licks up and down his length, leaving sloppy marks without ever speeding up. 

Zayne shudders, huffing in frustration and restraint as he unconsciously tries to buck himself into your mouth, failing due to the awkward side angle you placed yourself in. Instead, you splay your hands over his lower belly, untucking his shirt as your fingers rub against his v-line, as you begin to suck just barely over this throbbing head. 

“You shouldn’t– fuck." His jaw flexes, and his fingers are white-knuckled, the veins in his forearms standing out with the strain.

The shock of hearing Zayne curse was almost a physical blow. The word was spoken more like a prayer than a profanity, something desperate and violent caught in his throat, a warning and plea all at once. It made something hot coil deep in your gut.

It made you want to push him further.

You must have made some type of sound muffled over his cock because Zayne hisses, his hand coming down from the steering wheel to grab at your hair, fingers threading into your scalp and pulling, just enough to hurt. 

"You are absolutely insufferable." Zayne's voice breaks into a moan. "Stop teasing me."

You pull off of him with a wet pop, sitting up and wiping the drool from your chin. "But I’m hardly doing anything. Don’t tell me you’re getting so hard just from a few kisses."

"Reckless. Lack of foresight. Do I need to teach you how to behave like an adult?" Zayne's grip on the steering wheel tightens, his jaw clenching. You can practically feel the heat radiating off him.

"No," you lean forward and kiss the head, lips wrapping around it as you swirl your tongue. Zayne's foot presses down on the gas and the car jerks forward. "But maybe I could use some help learning my lesson."

You swallow him down, and his hips jump. Humming around him, Zayne’s cock twitches, and before you can stabilize yourself he’s pushing your head down further. You don’t think he realizes he’s doing it, not with the way his hips stutter upwards, thickly corded muscles of his thighs tensing as you nearly choke. 

Another broken moan fills the car alongside the wet sounds of your mouth, drool leaking from the corners of your lips as his cock bumps the back of your throat. You gag, and Zayne’s grip on your head finally loosens, the wheels spinning over loose gravel as you pull off just to breathe.

You can't see him, not with the angle, but the feeling of his eyes on you, burning into the side of your face, and the heavy throb of his cock against your tongue was enough to know just how close he is. 

You're so distracted, tears blurring your vision, that you don't notice the car has stopped, not until Zayne's other hand is reaching over to cup your jaw, forcing your mouth off his cock and forcing your head up to look at him.

The moment your eyes meet, he frowns, thumb rubbing across your bottom lip, cleaning your smeared lipstick and spit from your ministrations. "Look at you," he hums. "What a mess."

The nearby spots in the lot are empty, but you’ve arrived early, and you can see cars parking close enough to send your heart racing. 

You glance at the clock- seven forty-six- and you know despite how Zayne’s windows are tinted, it would take someone looking over from a meter or so away to see the two of you, to see the way Zayne's hands are fisted in your hair, to see you arched over the middle console, to see how hard he was and hear the slick, wet noises you made around his cock.

You nearly yelp as Zayne pushes you off his lap, messily tucking himself back into his trousers before climbing out the door. It shuts with a bang and you’re about to scramble up when you hear the passenger door open and are roughly hauled out of the car and slung over Zayne’s shoulder.

You don’t even have time to scream. The next thing you know, you're being tossed on your back into the back seat, barely having time to right yourself before Zayne follows you, door slamming shut. He's pulling at your dress, bunching the fabric up and around your waist before dragging you under him.

“Did I not satisfy you thoroughly enough last time?” Zayne scolds between breaths, teeth scraping over your pulse point before he bites down. “Or perhaps what I should have realized is that you’re simply a filthy little girl who gets off on being punished?”

The sound you let out is obscene, a whiny moan that has Zayne groaning as he pulls away, his mouth slick and shiny with spit. He grinds his cock against your stomach, his hand coming around your throat and forcing you to face him.

It’s almost effortless, the way he holds you against him, folding your thighs to your chest as he bends to avoid hitting the roof of his car. His cock is still rock hard and pressed against the back of your thighs, only the thin slip of your dress shielding you from his greedy eyes.

"Zayne- fuck, we're gonna be late." You choke out, a gasp following as his hips grind into yours.

“Answer the question.”

Another bite to the plush above your breast and you cry, fearing more for the possibility that he leaves a permanent mark more than anything else. As if hearing that, Zayne bites again. Harder. 

“Yes!” You thrash, trying to kick him off you but there’s little room in the back seats and the leather sticks to your sweat-slick back as Zayne works to pin your hips. “Yes, I’m sorry. I only— I wanted to see how long you’d last.”

A laugh, short and cruel. “How long I’d last?” 

Zayne grabs your wrists and holds them over your head. He leans close, so his lips brush yours when he speaks, and the words are low and soft. Dangerous.

"Well, then. Allow me to return the favor.” Zayne lifts your leg, pressing a kiss to your calf as your foot hits the window, one heel falling off with a thud. “If memory serves me right, isn’t this a trope too?” 

It’s almost effortless, the way he lifts your hips all the way up, your legs kicking helplessly over his shoulders as they’re forced up against the roof of the car. Shifting his weight around in the tight space, Zayne coaxes your calves to cross behind his neck, giving a small grunt as his face is pressed into your inner thighs, one arm straining against the leather of the car seats. 

“Where they’re stuck in a small space, right?” Zayne’s eyes never leave yours.  “Maybe a cave,” his tongue trails up the bare skin of your quivering thigh, “Under a desk,” licking his way up, “in a car?”

He doesn’t give you a chance to answer, not when the heat of his mouth presses directly onto your clothed clit, licking over the lace of your panties as you arch off the leather seats.

You’re already a dripping mess, writhing against the leather of the seats and the hard muscle of Zayne's shoulders, the sensation of his hot tongue pushing against your clit through the lace a painful sort of pleasure. Not enough. Not nearly enough.

Zayne pulls off and stares at the string of his spit and your arousal, warm and sticky, against the soaked patch of cotton between your legs connecting to his lips. Involuntarily, he bucks into the cold emptiness underneath you.

Fuck, he’s so hard he might come from this alone.

You hardly notice, not with the way every muscle and nerve quivers and begs for release, jaw falling slack as Zayne’s lips are quick to tease you again, this time pressing his tongue flat against the crotch of your panties and laving across the entire seam. The gorgeous arch of his nose presses up into your clit, and you moan, one hand flailing backways as it slides against the fogged-up window. 

"Zayne, fucking hell, just eat me out properly!" The curses tumble out of your mouth before you can think of the repercussions, but there was no way he could keep eating you out through the material, no matter how good it felt.

"So desperate." Zayne mumbles between open-mouthed kisses to your cunt, "So needy."

"Fuck- please," You draw one hand through his hair, pulling his face closer. "Please, please, please-"

"Poor thing. I suppose it would be against my oath to leave my patient in such pain." And he roughly presses his thumb up against the hood of your clit.

You sob, hands scrambling for something- anything- to hold on to as they slip down the window and dig into the leather of the seats. But Zayne was nothing if not observant from your last night together, and it doesn't take long for you to cum as soon as his mouth latches onto your poor neglected cunt through your panties. 

Still riding out each trembling wave of your orgasm, Zayne doesn’t fight the way your thighs clench around his head, kissing you through it until he readjusts your legs against his shoulders, forcing you higher onto your upper back. His fingers toy with the edge of the fabric, pleased with the way it sticks to your skin. 

All you can focus on is his breathing, heavy and fast, as he stares down at your cunt so intensely it makes you blush, helplessly exposed with your thighs pinned across his broad shoulders. Spread for him like every inch of the offering he intended on devouring you as. His goddess, his sacrificial lamb. Gods, he wants to know how every part of you tastes.

Zayne’s cock twitches again, and he shudders violently, a fat glob of precum falling onto the leather seats below, mixing with your slick that has already slid down his chin and your thighs.

If left alone, no doubt it’ll stain. 

“Look at the mess you made.” Zayne scolds, forcing your jaw to the side so you can see the puddle staining the seats. You whimper, and Zayne shakes his head.  “Well, we can’t just leave it. I suppose I’ll have to teach you to take responsibility for your actions.” 

Your hips jump. It's so hard to focus when he's talking like that, and the only coherent thought you can muster is that Zayne would be a fantastic writer if he ever decided to switch professions.

But he begins to shift you around, and your brows furrow as Zayne’s hand dips between the two of you, down to the leather, sweeping across the splattered mix of cum with two fingers before forcing your jaw towards him again. 

“Clean up your mess.” 

You think something is permanently fucked in your brain with the way your cunt flutters at that. 

Zayne’s unyielding face stares down at you, his dripping fingers pressed against your lips as you wrap around them and suck. It’s heady, the scent of sex overwhelming as Zayne practically fucks the digits into your mouth, sliding them against your tongue until you gag, thumb tracing loving circles against your bottom lip as though coaxing you to take them deeper. 

Only after gagging twice more does Zayne take mercy on you, withdrawing his fingers from your mouth. Instead, the pads of his fingers press against your tongue, and you take the hint, beginning to suck at them until the taste of you disappears. 

His fingers slip from your mouth, a trail of spit connecting his fingers and your mouth before Zayne breaks it. Your tongue flicks out to swipe at the excess drool, and he wipes your bottom lip. 

“Good girl, tasting just how desperate you are.” Every word of praise Zayne whispers goes straight to your cunt, nearly making you dizzy until he finally sits back. 

“And now…” he finally moves to push the ruined fabric to the side, “I get to taste, too.”

The feeling of his hot tongue directly on your slit nearly has you in tears, and your hand lurches into Zayne’s hair to force him closer. 

“No pulling. Behave,” Zayne warns. “This is still meant to be discipline for your earlier stunt on the road.”

Whimpering, you nod, parted lips swollen and shiny from the abuse Zayne put them under with his fingers. Satisfied, Zayne finally gives you what you need, kissing the swollen flesh of your clit directly before curling two fingers into your aching cunt. 

“Zayne-”

He’s addicted to the way you say his name. He’s addicted, and he’s going to come in his pants if you don’t stop. 

You begin begging again before Zayne covers your mouth with the palm of his hand, muffled cries still enough to drive him insane as he focuses on getting you past that high. 

Despite his threats, you can’t help but tug at Zayne’s hair, needing him against you as your hips began moving or their own accord, bucking and grinding senselessly against his face until you were practically riding his tongue. Chest heaving, you looked up to see him staring directly at you, silhouetted from the car window, green eyes nearly aglow with wretched desire.

Just like that, you’re coming, hard, thighs clenching down around Zayne’s head until he’s certain you’re trying to kill him. But gods, he never wants you to stop.

Addicted, Zayne presses open mouthed kisses to your cunt, swallowing everything you give him as his eyes roll back.

Desperate, you try to crawl away from him, but there’s nowhere to go. Your head hits the car door before Zayne drags you right back, forcing your hips up higher as your back is arched into the air, nearly perpendicular as you sob, legs kicking over his shoulders. 

But still, Zayne continues, and he knows. He feels it the moment your thighs lock up, the way your stomach goes tight and the way your senseless pleading still muffled by his palm reaches a higher pitch. And he takes advantage, not letting up as he curls his fingers until your cunt clenches down on his digits and tongue, squirting into his mouth.  

Almost in apology, Zayne finally withdraws his fingers as he opts to instead clean you directly with his tongue, nose accidentally overstimulating your swollen clit as you weakly fight to push his head away.

Zayne takes the hint this time, lowering your sore legs onto the seats below, finally set on a solid surface after being held in the air for so long. The slit of your dress is askew across your stomach instead of thigh, and Zayne gently tugs it back into place.

Leaning down, he picks up your forgotten heel before slipping it back into your foot, buckling it as you shiver every time his fingers brush your ankle. 

When Zayne finally faces you again, the lower half of his face is a complete mess, and you should be mortified never having squirted before let alone on your mentor’s face. 

But Zayne merely wipes the back of his hand across his mouth, smiling like the slick dripping down his chin was won in victory and not debauchery. “Well then, shall we?”

[midnightwriter21]

demon slayer hcs: motherly hashira!reader x the hashira pt 2

characters: fem!reader x muichiro, sanemi, mitsuri, obanai

AN: this is a pt 2 for the request from @danielle-marie

READ THE FIRST PART HERE

MUICHIRO

I LOVE THIS BABY SM U DONT UNDERSTAND

he's the hashira that ur most comfortable around

he was a hashira before u

but u get promoted and its an instinct

child.

must protect.

at first he probably gets annoyed by you

he's not used to someone caring for him the way that u do

but then one day ur sent on a long mission

maybe a few weeks long

and he finds himself missing something

of course he has no idea what it is that he's missing something

he completely forgot about u

but when you get back to the butterfly estate and he sees u

it clicks

he remembers

he missed you

he missed your overprotective nature

he missed your soft caring voice

he missed the way that you brush and style his hair

he REALLY missed that ^

walks up to u, grabs ur hand and tugs u away

doesn't care if you were talking to someone

and doesn't say a word

brings you to his favorite cloud watching spot with a tight grip on your hand

makes you sit down

and lays his head in ur lap

stop im squealing and kicking my feet from the cuteness

SANEMI

my guyyyyyy

have i ever told yall that i love him?

only in every single thing i post

anyways

he HATES you at first

lmfao rip u

your shy and quiet nature reminds him of giyuu

and if theres one person sanemi can't stand

its giyuu

therefore he don't fw u

and doesn't pay u much attention

UNTILLLLL

he witnesses u pulling genya by the ear to the infirmary after a mission

and telling genya tf off for pulling som stupid shit during the mission

+100 respect right there

not only are u actually talking

but ur screaming??

at his brother??

and taking care of him at the same time?????

my guy is lucky if he doesn't pop a boner right there lmfaooo

starts paying more attention to u after that

and is noticeably a lot nicer and calmer around you

will blush beet red and deny tf out of it if the other hashira comment abt his change of heart

but def develops a soft spot for u

MITSURI

SWEETEST HUMAN BEING TO EVER EXIST EVER

she loves u

ofc she does she's the love hashira

but in mitsuri's mind how could she not absolutely ADORE u

not only are you breathtakingly beautiful in her eyes

but she sees the way u interact with the younger slayers

how u genuinely care for everyone's wellbeing

if she wasn't looking for a husband she would wife u tf UP

she still might lol

mitsuri is gonna go out of her way to become friends with you

she's inviting u to her estate for girl's night with shinobu

she's dragging u along to her favorite restaurant for lunch

she's inviting u to join her at the hot springs to relax

she really enjoys ur presence

even if ur shy she thinks ur very soothing to be around

she loves when you do her hair!!

and when u cook for her??

mitsuri alrdy eats a lot

but if u made the food for her??

girl is not letting a CRUMB go to waste

loves the way u take care of everyone

especially when u take care of her

10/10 would recommend a mitsuri

OBANAI

someone pls love this man

he needs it so bad

so dude had SHIT parents

like bad bad

so when he sees ur interactions with the younger slayers he's prob a lil put off at first

like ma'am?

this is the demon slayer corps??

we don't have time for all ur mothering and coddling

but then he's injured on a mission

and waiting in the infirmary for shinobu to show up and patch him up

and then u bust through the doors???

confused asf

shinobu is on a mission and you've been helping out in the infirmary

so looks like ur the one taking care of him today

and turns out his injury is bad enough to land him an extended stay in his lil hospital bed

and after a few days of u taking care of him

with ur red face and soft stuttered words

he learns that you're not so bad

and he actually enjoys being around you

and being taken care of

won't voice this tho

but when Aoi comes in to give him his meds one day he gives himself away by accident

with a

"where's y/n?"

he's a blushing grumbling mess after that lol

after he discharged best believe the next time he gets injured he's not even going to the infirmary

he's hunting u tf down

nobody else gets to take care of him except YOU

and thats period.