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moon-light-jukebox · 4 years

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Learning Styles - [Reid x Reader]

Summary: Reader has worked hard to get to the FBI, but a misunderstanding has her feeling insecure.

Pairing: Spencer Reid / Fem!Reader

Word Count: 2.5k

Genre: Fluff

Rating: PG

Content Warning: Mention of normal criminal minds stuff briefly.

A/n: I got these two requests and they were so similar I decided to combine them. I hope that’s okay, but I feel like the stories would have been almost identical.

Requests: - I have a fic suggestion. Reader pretends to be dumb but is actually really smart. I’m thinking of that quote about marilyn ”you have to be really smart to pretend to be dumb”. One day spencer realizes that reader is smarter than she lets people know.

- Hi! Can I request a spencer reid x reader fic where reader isn't great with numbers but brilliant with behaviour and humanities (i.e. literature, history, sociology, up to you)? Maybe a dash of insecurity to spice things up?

-- Learning Styles --

My favorite professor in college told me that everyone learns differently; what works for one person won’t work in the same way for another. We are all different human beings that are shaped in different ways.

I had always been oddly insecure about my intelligence level. One of my earliest memories was my mother yelling at me while I sat at the kitchen table when I was in first grade. I was the only kid in my class who still hadn’t learned how to read. I just didn’t understand. All of my friends were progressing so much quicker than me and my mother was losing patience.

It wasn’t until my grandmother stepped in that everything changed. My elementary school teacher was training children to read by memorizing sight words, a concept I didn’t understand. When my grandmother sat down and taught me phonics. I distinctly remember everything snapping into place.

I was in 1st grade and reading at a 7th-grade level by Christmas. Once I finally understood my learning style, I really began to thrive.

But no matter what I did, I could still hear my mother yelling at me, telling me I was stupid.

In my line of work, I see just how much the throw away comments that parents make can shape a child’s development. Luckily, those comments just made me a bit insecure, not a murderer.

Up until I was 22, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do beyond this desire I had to help people. SSA David Rossi had come to guest lecture in one of my abnormal psych classes during undergrad. After I heard him speak, I was done. I couldn’t have done anything else with my life. I had obtained my master’s in psychology before I joined the FBI.

It took some time, but I was finally assigned to the Behavioral Analysis Unit at Quantico. I was so excited on my first day that I remember my hands physically shaking.

Until they weren’t.

I can still remember my first day so clearly. SSA Hotchner had introduced me to the team, saving the “best” for last.

“And this is Dr. Spencer Reid,” he had said. “He’s our expert on…well, everything.”

Reid was my age and he had his Ph.D. I remember feeling awed by him.

Until I didn’t.

"I hold 3 Ph.D.'s in Chemistry, Engineering, and Mathematics. I also have BAs in psychology and sociology."

I remember my jaw almost hitting the floor. While I was impressed by him, I wasn’t insecure about my place on the team.

Until I was.

My grandmother may have helped me master reading, which opened the door to me mastering anything else I put my mind to…except math.

I was fine at statistics, luckily. You couldn’t get a psych degree without a ton of statistics work. But statistics was different, I could see the practical use of statistics. I just couldn’t wrap my head around calculus or algebra.

On my first case with the team, Reid had calculated some insane mathematical equations on the whiteboard, running down the probabilities and applying a mathematical formula to the unsub’s behavior.

It wasn't until later, after the case was solved when I was standing in front of the whiteboard that my confidence was hit. Reid had come into the room and saw me looking at his work.

“Don’t bother trying to understand it,” he had said. “You’d have to be a genius to understand what I do.”

I didn’t have a word to describe the feeling that settled in my stomach at his words, I wasn’t sure such a word existed. The feeling was cold and heavy, but also made my body burn with shame.

I had just offered him a tight smile before I left the room.

On the plane home I had made a decision. I was no match for Dr. Reid, I doubt anyone was. So, I would take myself out of the competition. I couldn’t get hurt if I wasn’t playing the game.

And that is how the next year of my life went. I allowed Dr. Reid to explain things to me that I was an expert in, never saying a word. I acted like I didn't understand concepts that I had written papers on. The only thing I didn't dumb down was my profiling skills. Those were necessary for my job and for saving lives.

I don’t think anyone realized what I was doing.

Until they did.

The team had been called to Colorado to assist in capturing a serial rapist.

All of our cases bothered me, every last one…but something about ones with this vile element really struck me.

We had the unsub’s name, Tyler Childress. He had spent time in prison for sexual assault and burglary. It seems while he was in prison, he spent time perfecting his methods; it was only by pure luck that we found his fingerprint inside the victim’s house, making him the main suspect.

When we paid Mr. Childress a visit, he had managed to get the drop on Prentiss and Morgan, allowing them to escape. Morgan was furious.

All of us were sitting around a conference table in the local prescient while we let Dr. Reid talk.

I was trying to be calm, I was, but my nails were digging into my palm so deeply I was worried I was about to draw blood.

“Guys,” the expert on everything said. “He has to have some sort of accomplice.”

Rossi just sighed. “But the profile doesn’t point to him being the sort to do well with others; he’s a narcissist.”

Reid wouldn’t budge. “I know that, but he isn’t intelligent enough to pull this off alone. He’s just not. He had an IQ test done when he was 20. He scored in the mentally handicapped range. I’m telling you he has to have help.”

“Are you sure, Reid?” Hotch asked.

“Positive. I have his results right here.”

“IQ tests aren’t a good measure of intelligence on their own.”

I was so startled that someone had contradicted Dr. Reid that it took me a second to realize it was me who had contradicted him.

He turned to face me; his brown eyes wide. “What?”

Well, in for a penny, in for a pound. “IQ tests aren’t a good measure of intelligence.”

Dr. Reid laughed. He laughed at me like my comment was funny. “I don’t know where you heard that,” he began.

But I interrupted him. "IQ tests are classist and oftentimes racist. The man who invented the IQ test never intended for it to be used as a complete measure of intelligence. He regretted making the test.”

Reid sputtered. “You…it’s not racist!”

“Yes. It. Is.” I ground out. “If it wasn’t it wouldn’t be illegal to administer an IQ test to a black child in the state of California.”

"Wait, it's illegal to do that?" JJ asked, her brows drawn together.

"Yes. There was a court case in the 1970s over it. Teachers were using tests to separate white children from black children. The black children were put into special education classes they didn’t need to be in. Just because the teachers didn’t want those children in their classrooms.”

I should have stopped, but I was on a role. “They’re also inherently classist. How can you expect a child to answer a question about Romeo and Juliet if they haven’t heard of it?”

That had Dr. Reid scoffing. “Everyone has heard of it.”

I shot to my feet, unable to hold back anymore. “No, they haven’t. Children in underfunded schools that don’t have access to resources might not have heard about the most famous play in history because their school wasn’t able to provide the materials to teach them about it. There was a study done in a remote part of Russia right after the IQ test was invented. Every. Single. Person. Scored in the mentally handicapped range. Because they didn’t understand.”

I knew my voice was rising but I couldn’t stop myself. “Once the researcher took the questions and applied them to things they understood, they all scored as above average. They didn’t understand math as an abstract concept, but they understood it when it was applied to their businesses, to something they actually knew about.”

I cleared my throat. “The test isn’t fair, it’s not equal. Tyler Childress didn’t go to a good school and he didn’t have a stable home life. You can’t use one measure to calculate his intelligence. He’s gotten away with 7 assaults so far that we know of. He’s not stupid.”

The entire room was silent once I had stopped speaking. I couldn’t bring myself to regret it though. What kind of person was I if I played dumb because I was afraid of being mocked when a monster was out there attacking women? No, those women deserved to have me at my best.

And I’ll be damned if I wouldn’t give it to them.

Rossi spoke first, his eyes twinkling when he looked at me. “Took you long enough,” he said. “But y/n is right. We trust the profile; we don’t let personal bias cloud the way. That’s how we catch this bastard.”

Later that day, we were cleaning up the conference room while the local police processed Tyler Childress.

Pathological narcissism is a complex disorder, but we followed the profile and Rossi was right. Hotch set up a press conference in which JJ and Prentiss took center stage. They tore Childress’s ego to shreds on live television.

His narcissism wouldn’t allow that to slide. He got angry, he made a mistake, and we got him before anyone else got hurt.

While the cat was out of the bag about my intelligence and that made me nervous, I couldn't regret any of it. I got to be the one to tell our last victim that we got him. I got to hug her while she cried because now that he was locked up, she felt like her healing could begin. I wasn’t sure if my rant about structural racism and the classism of IQ tests actually helped anything, but that didn’t really matter. There was one less monster in the shadows.

Today was a good day.

I was alone in the conference room, untacking photos from the evidence board when I heard someone clear their throat from behind me. I turned my head to meet the wide, honey brown eyes of Dr. Spencer Reid.

Oh boy, I thought. “What’s up, Reid?”

He shifted from foot to foot, his hands twisting in front of him before he crossed his arms over his chest. “I asked Garcia to look into you.”

My eyebrows drew together. “I’m pretty sure any nefarious things I had done would have popped up on my initial background check.”

“Right, I didn’t mean like that,” he mumbled, the apples of his cheeks turning pink. “I asked her to look into you academically.”

Shit.

He went on. “You double majored in psychology and sociology before you got a master’s in cultural psychology. She pulled your thesis. I just read it.”

“I see.” I turned my attention back to the board.

“You also guest lecture on cross-cultural psychology at Georgetown several times a year. And you’ve co-authored two papers since I’ve known you.”

Meh, it’s three. But that doesn’t matter. “Did you read those too?”

I took his silence as confirmation.

He was so quiet I almost thought he had left, but the crackle of energy I felt in the air told me he hadn’t. “Do you need something, Dr. Reid?”

"Why didn't you get your Ph.D.?"

I had answered that question many, many times. “I didn’t need a doctorate to do what I wanted to do. I didn’t want to waste time. Once I figured out what I wanted, I charged at it.” Which was a far more honest answer than most people got about that from me.

“W-why did you pretend to be dumb?” he rasped out, causing me to look back at him. “32 days ago, you let me explain the long-term effects of gerrymandering and the complex causes of poverty.”

“Of course, I did,” I said, frowning. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“One of the papers you authored was about generational poverty.”

“Just because I know a lot about something doesn’t mean I can stop listening to information. That sort of thinking breeds ignorance.” I smiled, unable to not tease him just a little bit.

Reid took a step closer to me. “You didn’t answer my question.”

I just shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t have a good answer.”

In all the months I had known him, Spencer Reid had never touched me, not even so much as a finger brushing against mine when he handed me something. That fact is why I was so startled when I felt his hand on my upper arm, turning me towards him.

He licked his lips, his eyes darting around. “Did everyone else know?”

I shook my head, my teasing mood long gone. "No. I mean, clearly, Rossi suspected but…No, I didn't tell anyone else."

“I just don’t understand. You’re brilliant.”

I scoffed. “No, I’m not. I’m decent a psychology, sociology, stuff like that. I can’t apply math to behavior to find patterns. I can’t even calculate how much something is gonna cost when it’s on sale without a calculator half the time.”

‘What do you…” Reid trailed off. “Wait. The very first case. You were looking at the evidence board.”

Goddamn eidetic memory.

The boy wonder was on a roll now. “I told you that you’d have to…is that why you didn’t tell me?”

What else could I do? I just nodded.

Those brown eyes closed, and he let out a groan. “I said that because I thought you were going to…I was worried…” He huffed out a breath and opened his eyes. “I wanted you to like me. I didn’t want you to think I was just a nerd.”

Now I was confused. “Why?”

Spencer Reid’s blush went all the way down his neck. “Well…I just…Morgan said I should just talk to you. But I’m not…I’m not good at that. I panic, then I start to ramble. Like I’m doing now…”

“Reid,” I interrupted. “I’m not playing dumb now. I really have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I like you,” he blurted out right before he smacked both of his hands over his face. “Oh my god. I sound like a child.” I thought I heard him mutter idiot under his breath. “Emily says that my IQ gets slashed to 60 whenever I see a pretty girl.”

Much like that moment all those years ago when I was a child, I felt everything click into place. Oh.

I couldn't suppress my smile any longer. I rose up on my tiptoes and pressed a kiss to his cheek. "Well, we've already gone over how IQ tests aren't a good measure of overall intelligence."

With that, I quickly stepped away and hurried out of the conference room, leaving a stunned genius in my wake. When I turned back to look at him, I saw his fingers brushing over the place where my lips had just been.

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alldayangst · 3 years

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love someone for loving you (Peter Parker)

All of my fics are LGBT and PoC friendly. Soulmate and uni AU.

PAIRING: Peter Parker x reader, Brad Davis x reader (for like, a second)

Warnings: Makeout sessions. Characters drink but they’re of age to do so in this fic. Peter says ACAB and if you disagree with that & can’t have a mature convo about it, then this isn’t the blog for you. This fic isn’t all the way accurate to the MCU timeline. Harry [Osborn] and MJ live in Queens. Betty, Flash, Ned, Brad, Peter and reader all attend NYU in Brooklyn.

Thank you for reading if you make it all the way to the end! Word count: 4.2K words.

Happy reading!

“You’re so fucking hot, y’know that?” You were making out with Brad in your dorm room, with the lights off. Brad was a nice enough guy. Had taken you out on a few dates. Told you your hair was pretty. Said he’d like to get to know you more. But you’re not as eager to take things further because something in your heart just knows he’s not your soulmate. And you’d like to wait a little while for the novelty to wear off before you did something you regretted and entered a relationship you’d known was doomed from the start. “So fucking hot.” Brad kissed along your neck, big sloppy wet ones that left saliva trails from his lips to your neck.

You didn’t like that kind.

And that was another reason you knew you and Brad weren’t destined, because your soulmate would just know what you like, know you like the back of their hand. Right? Right.

It’s then that Brad tries to take your jumper off, but your soulmate tattoo is on your ribcage, and in this world, letting someone see your soulmate tattoo is probably makes you more vulnerable than getting naked in front of them. You try to pull your jumper down, but Brad doesn’t get the hint and tries again. You place your hands on his chest. “Not today, Brad.”

You don’t see Brad again. And maybe Brad was your soulmate because he led you to Peter. But Peter definitely wasn’t your soulmate, and I’ll tell you why you know that.

“Y/N!” Betty waved as you stumbled back into the party, shoes placed on improperly and no part of you subtle to what you’d been doing with Brad in your room just a few minutes ago. “Not you out of your room so early!” Your room door slammed behind you as Brad left your room, jacket in hand.

“Didn’t get any?” Betty made a fake pout at you, smoke breezing past her face as you stood there awkwardly, unsure of what to do as you found yourself in a circle with two of Betty’s friends she’d had yet to introduce you to. Sometimes, you wished Betty was your soulmate, but Betty made it clear before you signed the lease that you weren’t her type and truly, you couldn’t see yourself being anything more than friends. And you were the best of friends. Meaning she’d always be the first to comment heart eyes under your pictures and tell you to get that outfit because your booty was doing the thang in that pair of trousers.

Things would just be easier, if they were easy.

But things weren’t handed on a silver plate for you like they were for others; where they’d been friends with their soulmates since childhood, or lived up the street from them or their soulmate saved their life or something else blindly obvious. And, desperate to find the gold in the treasure chest, you moved upstate to school at NYU. Because great minds and all that. You stood in perfect silence for a minute, chaos never ceasing to happen around you, before Betty decided to make the strangers next to her strangers no more. One shook your hand and said, “I’m Ned.” Oh. So this is who Betty had been raving about? Betty grimaced and placed her hands together to plead with you not to expose her consuming infatuation with her new boyfriend. In a bid to divert the focus, Betty patted the back of the slightly taller one next to Ned, with wispy brown hair and eyes like fresh, raw cocoa. “I’m Peter, nice to meet you.” He shook your hand.

“I’m Y/N, it’s nice to meet you guys.” You sway your attention back to Ned with a smirk on your face, Betty clutching her solo cup a little too hard, her inner monologue begging you to knock it off. You knew Betty was going to get you back for this, but you needed somewhere else to fixate your gaze since you weren’t sure you could trust yourself not to ogle at Peter. With Brad’s saliva on your neck and having only known him for all of twenty seconds, you weren’t sure if Peter would take to any romantic advances. You weren’t even sure if he’d met his soulmate. “So, I’ve heard a lot about you, Ned.”

“All good I hope.” Ned replies and the room glints with his boyish grin.

“Well-” You didn’t get to finish your sentence, and it was probably for the better. Betty grabbed Ned’s arm, vodka making tiny puddles on the floor, with a huge fake smile plastered on her face. In turn, that only gave you a great, genuine smile, loving to tease your friend. “Baby! We should go to another side of the party!”

“What about Peter?” Ned’s voice was getting lost in the jungle of party goers. “Peter can come.” Peter turned to go follow his friend, but not before mumbling a low, “See you around, Y/N.”, snaking his arms around your back, pulling you in for a quick hug. “See you around, Peter.”

He didn’t reply. Peter could only give you a thin lipped smile, packaged with a lazy half-nod before he was absorbed by the population around him, just as his friend was. And you cursed yourself that night for not taking your chances and saying more.

History was an 8am class, your only class in the morning. You woke with a a dull ache in your head and a dark mark on your neck that lasted longer than your relationship with the guy that gave it to you. The last thing you wanted was to run into Brad. But destiny offered you the next best thing.

“Oh. Hi, Flash.” You attempted to cover your face with your copy of Romeo & Juliet - if your soulmate was here, the last person you wanted them to see you with was Flash Thompson. Flash was walking backwards as you were walking forwards, unamused by his efforts to corner you. “Can we talk, Y/N?” Flash was Brad’s best friend, so you knew you were in for trouble.

“Can’t Brad speak to me himself? His mouth was working last night.”

“I can see that Y/N. Nice hickey.” You cringed, and Flash could tell he was running out of time to bemuse you. “Brad doesn’t want to bother you if you’re not interested-”

“Oh, so you decide to bother me instead.” You remark, and hop over a couple of steps so Flash had to awkwardly speed up.

“I just wanted to ask where you and him stood. Like, are you breaking up with him? I thought you had a pretty good thing going on.” His pace started to slow again as you slowly ascended up some of the last sets of steps. “I mean, seriously Y/N? What if you guys were soulmates? I wouldn’t wanna give up so easily.”

“That’s true.” You looked down at your sneakers. You hated this version of the world you lived in. Everything was driven by concepts, whether it be the concept of soulmates or the concept of time that left your campus filled with students five years older than they really were, or the concept of good and evil that spawned superheroes who you weren’t sure did more damage to the world than they gave back.

Overall, the concept of fate was once you had to always wrestle with. And you thought that maybe yours was standing at the top of the steps to rescue you from this conversation, ready to make Brad feel the trip of the guilt he and his friend tried to make you feel for not feeling the same way. “Y/N! We have class, c’mon!” Peter waved his goggles at the top of the steps, a knowing smile on his face as Flash looked up at him and glared.

Peter just had to steal his thunder on a sunny day.

You ran to meet Peter at the top of the steps. “Thank you for bailing me out. You’re a hero.”

Peter was startled. “Who, what, when, where, me?” He scratched the back of his neck and gave you an uncomfortable, stammered loop of laughter. “Hero? Not me. I’m just good ol’ Peter.”

You chuckled as you breathed out another ‘thank you’ and returned the hug Peter had left un-exchanged last night. “I’m guessing you have bio?”

“Guilty as charged. So what’s your major?”

“English Lit.”

“Oo, how long are you planning to work at Starbucks?” Peter remarked as he held to the main door open for you. “Peter?” He hummed in response. “Fuck you.”

You sat next to Betty in History, the professor droning on about something that made you question why you continued to take History, but as your best friend snatched your book from you, you were reminded. “Star crossed lovers, eh?” Betty skimmed through the fights and the love scenes that all culminated to the uncertainty whether Romeo and Juliet were even supposed to be together.

“Seems like you and Ned these days, huh.” You couldn’t believe that it had taken Betty three months to allow you to meet Ned, nevermind his cute friend. Ever since the ‘boyfriend’ label had been slapped on their little love affair a month and a half ago, you were beginning to see less and less of your best friend. It felt like two people paying for a single household, and with your lease ending in a short time, you worried Betty would almost evaporate from your life completely.

“Almost.” Betty tried to keep it hush, sheepishly grinning, but gave in completely in record time. “We said we’re gonna show each other our tattoos tonight!” She squealed, another student shushing her from the row above.

“Woah, that’s big!” It genuinely felt as if the wind had been knocked out of you. You realised you’d never gotten as far as Ned and Betty without either you or you partner showing your soulmate tattoo; and when they were never the same, you broke it off. “What if they’re not the same?”

“They will be.” Betty smiled. “I’m sure of it.”

Two loners getting together was never a recipe for success. Betty had given over your number to Ned, who handed it over to Peter, who’d texted you asking for you to come over: ‘wanna make it up to me for this morning at the steps? my bestie is with your bestie, so u wanna get pizza? do you like pineapple?’

Sure enough, you were over at Ned & Peter’s within ten minutes, Peter swinging the door open dressed in a tight red and blue top, a hoodie sparsely covering it, with an overexcited greeting of “Mi casa es su casa!”

The energy wasn’t returned. Not just yet. You had to be sure of something first. “Don’t tell me that there’s an American flag top under that hoodie.” Peter looks down at his Spidey suit which he’d completely forgotten he had on between scaling the ceiling in anxious anticipation of your text back. “Having such a boner for the USA is kind of a turn off.”

Peter started cussing under his breath and quickly turned to zip his hoodie all the way up. When he turns back to you, it’s word vomit. “I’m not saying I don’t love this country, I mean, I love Queens. I mean-”

You raise your eyebrows, curious to see where Peter would go with this. “The NYPD fucking hates me,”

“And what would they want with your little ass?” You walk into the apartment. He’d never admit it, but Peter kind of likes the way you bust his balls. It puts him on the spot, makes him want to tell the truth to you about who he really is.

“I mean, I can’t really say-”

“OK. I don’t wanna be an accessory to anything so,” You laugh. “I won’t push. ACAB.” There’s a thud that follows you closing the door.

“I agree. ACAB.”

A few hours pass with Peter and he’s beginning to unravel. He shows you the photos he’s taken over the years, several of them featuring a fair haired boy you’d never seen around campus before. “Is he your soulmate?”

Peter nearly chokes on the coffee he’d prepared for himself. “No. Harry? In his dreams.” He sets his mug down. “No, uh, that’s my friend. He lives back home in Queens.”

“You say back home like Queens isn’t a 10 minute drive from where we are.”

“Yeah. But it’s not right here.” You weren’t sure if you’d bruised Peter’s feelings, so you move onto another photo. There’s a polaroid that makes a thin pile with another on the table.

It’s the New York City skyline, from all the way up.

“How’d you get a photo from all the way up here?” Peter grabs the photo underneath it, but not before you catch a glimpse. The glossy paper is adorned with an image of a beautiful girl, black necklace around her neck, the scribbles underneath her photo reading ‘MJ, Pre-blip’.

You think this girl is too gorgeous to just be a friend.

But judging by the way Peter reacted when you suggested Harry was the same, you kept quiet. He didn’t want you to see it anyway.

“I’m really sticky and I climb up walls.” Peter being Peter is relieved he told you the truth, even if you didn’t know it.

“You’re weird, kid.” You thought you were being smooth, but you couldn’t help the way you look at his lips like they hold the answer to every question you’d had in your life.

“Uh-huh. But you like a bit of weird. Maybe Brad was too square for you.”

“Huh?”

“Huh.”

And then when you and Peter kiss, you suddenly understand what poets mean when they call your lips jigsaw puzzles, because yours and Peter’s slot perfectly together. And you get why there’s all these love songs on the radio, and you feel the Earth shift in your mind and you just know this is the unmistakeable indicator that Peter is your soulmate. Another reason you and Peter are destined, when he goes to kiss your neck, it’s like soft little hot touches.

You liked that kind.

And a soulmate would just know that, know you like the back of their hand. Right? Right.

Peter rests his forehead on your own, lips swollen. “I don’t want to go anywhere, don’t wanna do anything you don’t wanna do.”

You and Peter cuddle for the rest of the night on his sofa, Ned and Betty doing the same on yours. And the novelty picks back up like clockwork.

“Peter? What if we aren’t soulmates?” you groaned, Peter’s hand on your head, keeping you snug to his chest. You and Peter had been dating close to two months now, Ned and Betty moving to five. In any other relationship, you would’ve called this phase The Ticking Time Bomb. You toyed with the black dahlia that sat perfectly between his pecs. Peter had been to Queens last week. He’d retrieved his necklace from the girl in the photo, MJ. She was an old friend, he said. Him and her? Not meant to be. Maybe in another life, he’d say. Another timeline. Then he’d gesture between the two of you. This. This is meant to be. Us.

Peter shrugged. “What if we weren’t?” Peter had an almost permanent bandage on his ribcage, exactly where your soulmate tattoo was. Where and how Peter got injured was a mystery to you, and he’d never dare tell you no matter how much you pushed. It almost made you wonder if he was keeping any more secrets from you.

You propped yourself up, both hands on his chest.

“I couldn’t move back in with Betty. She and Ned are soulmates, they need their privacy.”

“Who said you’d ever to move back in with Betty?”

“I couldn’t afford to live by myself, Peter. Not everyone had a Stark internship in high school.”

“Who said you’d have to move out at all?”

“If we’re not soulmates-” Peter moved your hands from his chest and wrapped them around your waist, pulling you in for a loving kiss. “What have I told you? You and me, we’re meant to be. Us.”

But you didn’t have the tattoos to prove it.

You and Betty were sitting in History class, ignoring the professor’s droning as per usual. Betty had this beaming smile on her face and you were sure if she didn’t say what was on her mind soon, she was going to explode all over someone’s Henry VIII’s notes.

“Betty?”

“Yeah?” She shrieked with scarlet cheeks.

“Spill.”

Betty let out a breath. “Well, since you insisted.” You couldn’t help but smile at your best friend. “I think Ned might propose tonight!”

“I feel like you should be taking me out to dinner before you dump all this load on me.”

Betty’s eyes glazed over, obviously too excited to contain her emotions. “What about you and Peter? The tattoos must match up since you’ve stayed around this long.”

“Actually, I-”

Betty makes an O face at you, which told you she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “C’mon. You haven’t played I’ll Show You Mine if you Show Me Yours?” Betty was in awe. “Y/N! You must really like him.”

You did really like Peter. That was the issue. You weren’t ready to feel jaded if your tattoos didn’t match up like they all inevitably did in the past. You felt something different for Peter. Betty was right. That was why you stuck around this long. “Hey Betty, is my old room still my room if things between me and Peter don’t work out?”

“Of course, Y/N! I’m here for you til’ the end of the line.” Betty pulled you into a great, big hug.

“OK. Session dismissed.” Your professor echoed. “Everyone can go. Y/N and Betty, stay after please.”

You’d gotten kicked off of History, which was bittersweet. Seeing as History was Betty’s major, your professor had to keep her there - but he was sure ‘she’d flourish once you two were separated.’

You and Betty walked out of the main entrance, Ned and Peter both waiting for you under the shelter at the top of the steps. Seasons had changed. It was far from the summer day Peter had to spotted you on the way to class. “We’re gonna run in, drink some cocoa. We’ll catch you guys later.” Ned shivered as Betty re-engulfed him in his jacket she’d been holding for the scent.

Love was weird, but you wanted so bad to be a part of it.

You turned to Peter beside you. “And what are we gonna do?”

“Swinging.”

“Peter, I don’t swing. I’m perfectly happy in our relationship.”

Peter held onto your waist, your head nuzzled into his neck, not daring to look down at the city below you. This was the first time you’d ever experienced something like this, no doubt, but Peter was getting a strange sense of deja vu.

“Y/N!” You didn’t move from your place in his neck, but he knew you could hear him. “I love you. I trust you.”

“You’re-” You didn’t trust yourself to speak. “Fucking.” You opened one eye just to be sure you weren’t dreaming. “Spiderman!”

“I’m something more important: your boyfriend.”

Leave it to Peter Parker to get all sappy with you in the middle of the sky.

You opened both your eyes now. “What about my soulmate?”

“What?” Startled, Peter lost controls of his webs for a moment, and knocked his rib on the side of a building. Luckily for you, you were lower to the ground.

‘Injury detected,’ Peter’s AI, Karen, stated.

“Yeah, I know, Karen.” Peter stated.

“Is it right there, babe?” Peter nodded, sat on the concrete, and pressed the spider in the middle of his suit. You watched as it became loose.

Your eyes flickered to the bandage on his ribcage. Maybe you had your answers as to how Peter always seemed to be hurt, but you needed your ultimate answer. And it was behind the bandage. “Right here, are you sure babe?”

You were on edge. You weren’t sure what you’d do if fate didn’t allow this to be true. For the sake of your heart.

So you peeled back the bandage.

And you found nothing there but a series of bruises. Your heart was crushed. “Nothing, Peter. There’s nothing there.” You had tears in your eyes, and before long you were ugly crying. This wasn’t a case of the novelty wearing off. This was a case of the novelty being broken down ‘til it can’t function no more.

“That’s a good thing baby, maybe I just need to go to a hospital.”

“No, I mean it Peter! There’s nothing there!” You pull up your heart to reveal a half full shirt printed on your body twenty one years ago, this exact heart only belonging to one other person in the world. But it wasn’t Peter. Even though he had just told you he loved you. “Fuck!” Your voice became incomprehensible, drowned out in tears and squeaks of sorrow. “I’m so sorry, but we can’t see each other any more. T-there is someone out there for me. You need to understand.”

And, unsure if your legs would take you all the way, you made your journey to Betty.

When you made it to Betty’s, she stood in the doorway with a rock on her finger. You couldn’t see that, though, through your tear blurred vision.

“Oh, poor baby.” She immediately embraced you, with Ned circling to your side to group hug you. You sniff into her shoulder. “He’s not-we’re not-”

“My darling.” She pauses. “I’m hoping you got the first month’s rent.” She laughed and you laughed before she pulled you back in her embrace and allowed you to feel what you needed to feel.

It’s often underestimated how miserable you need to be in order to cry yourself to sleep. You didn’t even know you did until you woke in your old room, your old band poster replaced by a calendar titled ‘Ned and Betty Forever’ and you laughed because Ned and Betty hadn’t even known each other longer than than six calendar months.

And you missed your windowsill on which you’d perch and overlook the breathtaking view of Brooklyn, and the even more awe-inspiring view of NYU students hurling after one too many, especially after yours and Betty’s parties.

“Do you guys even clean this room?” You called out. “You got a serious case of cobwebs.”

Peter lowered himself to meet your view. You were about to draw the blinds on him, only to realise Betty and Ned had gotten them removed whilst you were living with Peter.

“Hear me out.”

“I have no choice.” You chew on the flesh of your cheek. “You took a while to find me.”

“You left me for dead.”

It was hard to beat that one.

“Peter, if you have something to say, say it.”

“I’m sorry.” he’s swinging upside down, side to side and it slightly amuses you to think he’s getting dizzy if the last three months were at your expense. “I know how much this soulmate bullshit means to you, and I kept you longer than you would’ve liked. I’m also sorry ‘cause I knew I wasn’t your soulmate from the start.”

You gasp.

“But I wouldn’t in a billion years say that either you or I belong to someone else. MJ is my soulmate, yes. I love her with all my heart, but I believe destiny can change in the same world where people disappear for five years. MJ moved on. I’ve moved on. Who cares about a stupid tattoo? People go to parlours and give themselves their own all the time. People get them removed all the time. I’m getting my black dahlia erased.” Your face softens a little bit at that, you guard slightly down, but you refuse to wave a white flag without first making your point.

You rubbed your rib cage. “I care.”

“Y/N, you’re smarter than to deny what you feel. You’re an English major, studying Romeo and Juliet. You understand the world better than I do, and I’ve been to 600 different versions of it. You have a heart half full on your ribcage and I have half a flower on my foot. Tell me, would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?”

You know the answer’s the same one Betty gave Ned tonight when he got down on one knee, the same response you’d give Peter if he was to ask you the same question, what you’d tell anyone if they queried if you’d go through what you went with Peter all over again.

You pull down his mask, and look deep into both of Peter’s eyes, and still him from swinging. “Love someone for loving you for a change.”

And you don’t have to say it, Ned and Betty hiss it out for you not so subtly from the windowsill in the livingroom. “Yes!”

So when you and Peter kiss, it’s not about novelties or concepts, fate or tomorrow, it’s just the beautiful bliss that is love, in this moment.

The unmistakable indicator that you and Peter are meant to be.

Fin.

Credit for the gif goes to: @/tomhollandnet

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retrievablememories · 3 years

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afterdeath | lucas

title: afterdeath pairing: vampire!lucas x fairy!reader genre: angst, forbidden romance, fantasy, vampire!au request: May I request a Vampire!Lucas with a fairy!s/o (Forbidden romance perhaps?) word count: 8.6k warnings: descriptions of death and sickness, mentions of a funeral, viewing, and funerary preparations, major character death (but...with a slight twist), mentions of blood and drinking blood, smoking cigarettes, arguments/conflict, mentions of physical violence, some romeo and juliet elements? a/n: hmm this fic probably could’ve been more detailed but i was trying to avoid triggering my own damn self with so much talk of death...ha...not sure why i went this route but i wanted a forbidden romance with an actual decent ending for both characters and this was the first idea i had recommended songs: OLLA - jhené aiko

Year 1508

“We’ve felled the demon!”

“Indeed, we have!”

Cheers ring through the dawn as a large group of fairies dance around an immense bonfire, raising their shouts of celebration to the sky. Within the fire burns the body of the Primitiva Vampire, the One and Only Pureblood, haphazardly thrown over the wood pile and relieved of her head—which sits near the bottom of the burning mass of wood, her face still twisted in a mien of anger.

As the sky begins turning lighter with the onset of sunrise, the fairies continue their celebration, staying close to the fire all the while. They carry large flaming torches to guard against any of the Primitiva Vampire’s followers who might try to sneak upon them and strike in that sliver of space where the sun has yet to rise.

The Primitiva Vampire had a long reign of terrorizing fairies and turning humans and other supernatural creatures into vampires. Each transformed being became a terrible revenant, one which viciously hunted villages and stole into people’s homes for more blood, more death, and more unwilling adherents to the vampiric cult.

Mass numbers of fairies had been decimated once the vampires first tasted their blood and took a unique liking to it. For over 200 years, the carnage continued on at the hand of the Primitiva Vampire, who had one day blinked into existence in a way that could never really be explained by any conceivable means, either human or magic. And without ever giving a hint to her strange conception, she tore across cities and towns, converting others into night creatures like herself and building a loyal following of half-bedeviled beings.

When fairy populations had dwindled to nearly extinction-level quantities, they were left no other choice—fight back or be wiped completely from the universe’s ledger. So they took up arms, honed their magic skills, and did just that.

And now, all their efforts culminate in this blood-stained morning. It marks a much-anticipated moment of revelry before they have to return to their posts to watch for the night creatures inevitably waiting on the other side of the sunset, ready to avenge their slain Goddess.

Present Day

“You probably shouldn’t be here right now.”

“I wanted to come,” Lucas replies, taking your hand is his large one. “I wanted to see you.”

“I can figure that.” You laugh quietly, a little afraid to let your voice rise higher in case it carries too far. “But that doesn’t mean you should’ve come.”

Lucas holds your hand tightly. His skin is cold against yours due to his slow blood, and colder still from the chill permeating the air. It’s only one of many vampiric traits that the other fairies would think of as strange or barbaric, but you don’t see it that way. The chilliness just reminds you solely of him.

“Well, I missed you. And I’m here now, so you’ll just have to deal with me.”

The building you’re standing behind is damp, old, and dilapidated, and it’s not even one of your pre-designated meeting places. In front of you is a rusted chain link fence, which barricades a field of tall and unkempt grass. More aged and crumbling buildings scatter themselves across the distance, taken over by grass and climbing vines.

You don’t know what’s out here. This is one place within your district you haven’t been to before. It was Lucas’s idea to come here, after your last meeting place had nearly been discovered and he found it too risky to keep going there.

The entire city of Beijing is split up into different districts, each belonging to a different faction of supernatural beings. Some nonhuman races have close ties with each other and allow frequent cross-district mingling; others are sworn enemies, forbidden to fraternize with each other under pain of death. In these latter cases, crossing into another’s territory without express permission—or in rare situations, ties to a powerful ally (or allies) on the other side—is asking to get arrested, injured, or worse.

Lucas would be your tie to the vampire side and you his tie to the fairy side if your species weren’t centuries-long enemies. Instead, you’re relegated to having him sneak in and out of your district and hide what he is with blood-scent blockers and eye contacts to make the trickery easier to get away with. There’s only so much you can do to disguise your fae nature; stepping into vampire territory would turn you into a shining beacon.

“Hmm…” you sigh, shaking your head with a small smile on your face. You grasp Lucas’s hand so you’re now holding it with both of yours. “How long do you think we can keep this up? Going from place to place like this. Hiding like criminals.”

Lucas gives a lopsided grin—one that cannot morph into a full smile because of the sadness coloring it. “I don’t know. Forever, if we’re lucky.” He chuckles.

You stare at your intertwined hands, unaware of the sheer intensity of the longing expression on your face, though Lucas sees it clearly. It threatens to burn his heart to ash. “Unfortunately, fae don’t live forever like you do, so maybe not. Besides, your people would probably find out and come after me before we could even settle into a ‘forever.’”

He shakes his head fretfully at your words, squeezing your hand. “Do we have to talk about all that now? You know we don’t have much time together. Let’s just enjoy it for what it is.” Lucas pulls you into him, tucking your head into his shoulder.

“That’s fine by me,” you say, and resist the urge to make some dark joke about how scandalous it is for a fairy to have their neck so close to a vampire’s mouth—or a vampire’s anything.

You both stay together in that dingy and old spot for a while, talking in the dark until he tells you he has to go. He follows you the whole way back home to ensure you’re safe, keeping to the shadows until he sees you disappear past your front door. Then, he slips away again to head back to the familiar manor in his own district.

It’s nearly morning when Lucas gets back to the large house he shares with the other six men. By this time of day, he knows they will either be in bed or getting ready to turn in.

“Still visiting that fairy, I see.”

The unexpected voice doesn’t scare Lucas, but it does make his body tense up a bit in irritation and a slight sense of anticipation. He sighs and stops in his tracks on the way to his room, though he doesn’t face the clan leader just yet.

“Is that a problem? Because you know I’m not going to stop.”

Kun makes a noise of disbelief. “Of course it is. You know what the consequences are if anyone outside of us finds out.” Lucas turns to him slightly, and the look on Kun’s face is more disappointment—maybe even slight fear?—than anger. “I clearly can’t stop you from doing what you want to, but I can’t help you if the Association gets involved.”

Lucas rocks back on his heels and sighs, rolling his eyes at the mention of the vampire organization. “Fuck the Association. They’re nothing but a bunch of old ass hags who have no purpose in their lives other than ruling over every other vampire in the world.”

Kun looks weary at his words. “You really don’t care, do you, Xuxi. They’d have your heart on a stake if they ever heard that.” He pauses and rolls his eyes. “They’re also not that much older than me, so I wonder who you’re calling an ‘old ass hag’...”

“Isn’t it a good thing that they won’t hear it, then?” Lucas laughs, but it’s not an entirely humorous sound, and he gives Kun a searching look as his chuckles die off.

“Don’t look at me like that. I have no interest in telling them anything, mostly because I also have no interest in our whole clan being wiped out.”

Lucas nods, reaffirming his somewhat shaky but still present trust in Kun, needing the regular reassurances for his own calm. He stretches his arms above his head and takes a few steps like he’ll go to his room, though he doesn’t move to leave just yet. “Just don’t see what the big deal about all this is. All this over some ancient bloodsucker who died like 500 years ago...who cares.”

Kun winces again, though he doesn’t bother with reprimanding Lucas this time; he only shakes his head and sighs heavily like it’s already a lost cause. “A vampire and a fairy together is more than blasphemy—it’s ridiculous. It’s illogical. They all think we’re bloodsucking demons hellbent on killing them.”

“To be fair, there’s definitely a sect of vampire zealots or two who are trying to do exactly that despite the laws.”

Kun sighs. Lucas is right; what can he say to argue that? “Xuxi…”

“I’m telling you I’ll be fine, Kun-ge. You don’t need to worry about me and Y/N. Things have been going fine for this long.” Lucas nods, then heads off to his room for real this time. Kun watches him leave, feeling a lot less reassured than the younger man.

Ten takes Xiaojun and Lucas on one of their weekly outings to a blood lounge. Blood lounges are an easy and accessible way for vampires to get blood, though the legalities of this practice are a little muddy. Before getting with you, Lucas didn’t mind drinking straight from the source—going to one of the back rooms and sucking some willing, vulnerable being just to the point of death—but now, it feels like a type of transgression. Drinking someone else’s blood can be an intensely intimate act, on the same level as sex depending on the context, and he doesn’t want to do anything to make you think he’d be unfaithful.

To his fortune, there is no club rule about having to feed off other beings; many vampires take their blood in fancy champagne glasses, just like drinks in a human club. He does that now as the three men sit in a darkly lit booth.

Their conversation is unexciting for a while, with Lucas keeping careful not to mention you or any of his recent visits to your district to avoid any prying ears in the lounge. However, things soon get interesting. “We all know how Renjun got taken off the Association’s Registry a year ago, right?” Ten asks suddenly.

“Yes, of course.” Xiaojun answers like he’s already bored of this turn in the conversation. “That’s what happens whenever a vampire dies.”

Ten nods, but his eyes are wide like he has a secret he’s itching to tell. “But I don’t think he actually died.”

Lucas’s ears perk up at that.

“Why?” Xiaojun asks.

“He was seeing that human before he supposedly died, you know—”

“The one who lost it and drove the stake in his heart? We all know how it happened—”

“Can you let me finish? Anyway, I’ve heard some...suggestions that he faked his death—that maybe he got a magic user to set the whole crime scene up and make it look like it was real. Illusory magic, or something like that.”

Xiaojun sits forward. “A magic user. As in a fairy? Or a witch? Who?”

“I don’t know, just someone who uses magic. People are starting to think he and the human faked it all and ran away to Tianjin. I heard someone even claimed they saw somebody who resembled him when they went to Tianjin recently, though I don’t know how true that is…”

Xiaojun’s interest is thoroughly engaged now. “Think the Association will go looking for him, if it's true?”

“I don’t know if they’d care enough to hunt down an unregistered vampire who’s laying low and not creating chaos with other citizens. We all know Tianjin is way more relaxed about inter-species relationships, too. But the Association doesn’t like looking stupid. And that kind of trick definitely makes them look stupid.”

Lucas sits back, taking all of this information in. He is uncharacteristically quiet, but he doesn’t know what to make of that situation or why Ten is telling them about it. He thinks he can guess why, though, by the way Ten’s gaze lingers on him, and that scares him a little. The way this rumor piques a forbidden interest in him scares him. Lucas lifts the glass of blood to his lips and drinks from it, trying to distract himself from the current conversation.

“All this for a damn human. Only an idiot would try something like that,” Xiaojun says, shaking his head.

“Maybe a smart one. It did get him off the Registry.”

“How can you be a smart idiot?!” Ten and Xiaojun start arguing over the semantics of the term, and Lucas watches them in amusement, though his mind remains in two different places for the rest of their time in the blood lounge.

—

Later that night when they are back at the manor, Lucas pulls Ten aside, just like the older man expected him to.

“What’s wrong?” Ten asks, though his expression shows he already knows exactly what’s the matter.

“You...the stuff you said about Renjun earlier. I…” Lucas doesn’t know how to start or break his idea to him softly, so he decides to just say it. “Is it really possible?”

“I think it’s possible. It wouldn’t be the first time someone tried to get off the Registry…though many other attempts were way less successful.” Then Ten hesitates before saying, “You could try it.”

“Are you serious?”

“I am.” Ten’s expression softens a little. “I know you and Y/N love each other a lot, but there’s no way the Association will ever let you stay together if they find out. Y/N’s life could actually be in danger. Both of you are, every moment you spend together while living in these districts. If you really want to stay with Y/N, then…”

“...But I wouldn’t be able to see any of you again.” You and Lucas have become so entwined with one another that he can hardly imagine a life without you, but he also finds it difficult to picture his existence without his brothers. They’ve become like blood family to him over the last couple centuries.

“Yeah.” Ten sighs deeply, and although his reply is short, Lucas knows that one word is carrying the weight of all of his stress and sorrow about the idea. “Maybe we could find a way to visit you sometimes. Get the fairies or witches to do some of their magicky shit.” Ten laughs quietly. “But...it’s still just an idea. You don’t have to do it.”

Lucas shakes his head slowly. He wants to put the idea to bed and try to continue on with his life, managing his clandestine visits to your district when he can. But now that he knows of an alternative way, no matter how unreasonable or unbelievable it is, he doesn’t think he’ll be able to forget about it. “Kun-ge is going to kill you once he finds out this was your suggestion. You know that, right?”

Ten shrugs, and the sadness lifts momentarily in the curve of his lips. “He can try.”

The next time you and Lucas meet up, it’s in yet another different place under an ancient and mostly abandoned bridge. As a precaution, you stand together underneath the darkness of the bridge and stay out of sight, though there are few chances of anyone being around to see you in the first place.

He has to muster up the courage to tell you of his idea, unsure of how you’ll react or what you’ll think of it. It’s a lot to ask of you. Your kinships and friendships are not as extensive as his, only having a brother and two cousins left in the world, but he doesn’t know if he could ever ask you to leave them behind like this. Or if he could shake off the guilt that would remain from it.

“There might be a way for us to change things…” Lucas starts, skipping the build-up because he knows it would take him forever to think of something appropriate to say. “But I don’t know if you’ll like it.”

“Change things?” You glance at him curiously. You wish you could see the deep red of his irises, but they are hidden behind his brown contacts. “As in, with us?”

“Yes. So that maybe we wouldn’t have to sneak around anymore. Or at least...not sneak around as much as we do now.”

“What is it?” you ask. Despite yourself, your wings flutter against your back as wonder and excitement rise in your chest. You and Lucas have waxed poetic many times before about how you wish things could be different; and neither of you have ever been able to come up with a workable plan. But now, his claim that maybe something is possible has you dangerously curious.

“Taking myself off the Registry. I could basically just...disappear. The Association can’t harm what technically no longer exists.”

You stare at him in confusion. “But you can’t do that, right? Only under special circumstances…”

Lucas sees the question in your eyes and nods. “Right. Like if I die…” You flinch, shaking your head immediately. “...or pretend I’ve died.” This makes you pause, not expecting to hear something like that come from him.

“Pretend...you’ve died. Faking your own death?”

“I know it sounds crazy, but...there’s another vampire who we think has done it before. And...it worked. Supposedly.”

You shake your head again, but you turn the idea over in your mind. “How would you even do that? Someone would have to know you’re not really dead. That can’t be as easy as it sounds...”

Lucas swallows hard. “I know, it doesn’t, but maybe if we plan it right...I think we could pull this off. Some of the others...already know about it.” Only Ten, really, but that’ll inevitably change soon.

Your heart is hammering in your chest just thinking about this plan—the small, undefined plan that it is—and you’re unsure how to approach it. “If we leave under those circumstances, we can’t come back here to Beijing. Which means we won’t see anyone else again, our families and friends...”

“You understand that.” Lucas’s voice comes out strained.

You sigh, wringing your hands. “I do.”

Lucas hangs his head, closing his eyes tightly. “It’s too much to ask of you. We can just forget about this, really. I know sneaking around has been difficult, and I just—”

“I never said I wouldn’t agree to it,” you say softly, interrupting him before he can begin deriding himself about the idea.

Lucas’s head perks up again, and you both look at each other for a long moment. A cold night breeze flows through your clothes and rustles your wings, which remain tucked close against your back.

“Just think of it as leaving the nest, I guess,” you say, though there are tears welling in your eyes. “Growing up and making a life for ourselves. We can do that...right?”

Lucas bites his lip and closes his eyelids to stave off the tears trying to form in his own eyes. “Yeah. We can do that. Even if it’s a bit...unconventional.”

You nod hurriedly, wiping your eyes with the backs of your hands before any more tears can make their way out. “If you really want to do this, then we need to visit my brother.”

—

Your brother is predictably not thrilled about the idea. He likes Lucas well enough, but he’s never been very good at hiding his skepticism about your relationship. Though he would never say this to you directly, he never expected your relationship to make it past a few months; and yet it’s been a year and a half since you and Lucas started seeing each other. Maybe he’d be glad about your relationship’s stability if your partner was anyone other than a vampire. Alas, he instead spends all his time stressing over whether either of you will be found out at any moment’s notice.

“You’re playing with fire,” your brother says as he sits down at his desk within his apothecary office. He shakes his head the entire time, but he rifles through his collection of books on magic anyway. If there is anyone who knows a potion or spell that could work for this scheme and would actually be willing to keep it all secret, it’s your brother.

“I know that, Aldriel.” You cross your arms, sighing impatiently at your brother’s continuous reprimands since you’ve stepped through his door. “That’s why we came to you. You’re one of the best magic wielders and potionists around.”

“Oh, I’m well aware. No need to blow smoke up my ass,” Aldriel replies, never one to let a moment to brag slip away. He continues flipping through his book fast enough to make the words on the pages blur, his brow creased with focus. He is paying attention to the words and pictures on the pages, though you also know him well enough to realize this is him trying to distract himself from the many thoughts that must be crowding his brain.

“Don’t be so worried about it,” you say, trying to speak against the lump that’s suddenly forming in your throat. “You’ve always complained about wanting me out of your hair, anyway.”

Aldriel pauses in flipping through his spell book to look directly at you now, his brows creased even further and his face creating a visage of bitter desperation. “Not like this.”

Sighing, you turn away from him and let him go back to his textbook, knowing you’d probably start to cry if you look at him any longer. And who knows what will happen once that begins.

You go back to Lucas, who is sitting in the other room with his face turned to the window. It is nighttime and the blinds are closed, so you know he’s not looking at anything in particular. His mind must be similarly preoccupied.

“You okay?” you ask, touching his arm.

“Fine,” he answers, though he doesn’t turn to you. He just grasps your hand where it slides down to his own, gripping your fingers tightly. “As fine as I can be in this situation, I guess.”

You sit down in front of Lucas on the floor’s intricately decorated rug, resting your head against his knee. “It’ll be okay.” You aren’t sure of the words when they leave your lips, but you have to believe in them or else all will be lost.

—

You both spend a few hours at Aldriel’s place. At one point, you try to prod Lucas into going back to his clan to avoid raising suspicions for being gone too long—you can just get the potion to him some other day—but he insists it’ll be easier for him to stay and receive the potion now.

Finally, in the hour before dawn, your brother’s door opens and he steps through. “It’s ready.”

Both you and Lucas come alert at that, and you step back into Aldriel’s apothecary to see what he’s developed.

“This is an advanced death glamor potion,” your brother says, holding up a small glass bottle. “It contains a magic incantation that will leave you dead for a week and only a week. Seven days. Your body will remain in perfect stasis, so there’s no risk of the regular side effects that come with death.”

“A week?” you repeat, nervousness coursing through your body. Lucas looks equally apprehensive, and he squeezes your hand tighter.

Aldriel nods, pushing his glasses further up his nose. “That should be enough time to take care of the funeral arrangements and make everyone else think you’ve passed.” He says the last bit while gesturing to Lucas. “I’m not super clear on how vampire funerary customs work, though, so—”

Lucas nods. “No, it’ll work. That’s enough time.”

Your brother’s mouth creases into a thin line. “Good.” He passes the vial to Lucas, makes an expression like he might say something else, and then shakes his head, glancing to you instead. “You plan to go to Tianjin, right?”

“That’s right,” you say quietly.

“You’ll need to find a place to stay, then, until you can get one of your own. And I think we both know exactly where that will be.”

The potion works just as Aldriel said it would. It’s hard to know whether to be dismayed or relieved about this, though the former emotion quickly wins out with everyone.

Lucas takes it a week after meeting with your brother and procuring all the necessary fake documents, claiming it’s best not to wait any longer for it. You feel apprehensive about doing it so soon; or maybe you just want to stall for a little while longer. By now the other five men in his clan all know, each with varying reactions to it but ultimately unable to do anything to change his mind—not even Kun.

On the night Lucas uses the potion, Kun makes one last ditch attempt at reasoning.

“You don’t need to go to this extreme,” the older man insists. Though his voice is cold and sharp and deceptively calm, his entire face is a picture of perfect anger. Everyone had already had their turns talking to Lucas alone and telling him what they needed him to hear—and now it’s just Kun left.

“It’s my decision,” Lucas says, keeping his voice steadier than he feels. “I want to be with Y/N. There is no other way.”

“You’re endangering the entire clan with this. You’d throw us all away for one person?” Kun’s eyes are red-rimmed, but not just from the rage; Lucas knows he’s been crying. Lucas shuts his own eyes, his forehead creasing as he presses the pads of his fingers to his temples.

“Don’t say it like that.”

“That’s exactly what it is.”

“You wouldn’t understand.” Lucas shakes his head, knowing he is treading on very dangerous waters with what he’s about to say. As if the situation weren’t already contentious enough. “You closed yourself off to love a long time ago. After Jingyi died. You just wouldn’t know.”

The vivid red hue of anger bleeds into Kun’s irises at the mention of his late human lover, and he has to make a very concentrated effort not to reach for the younger’s neck. “How dare you speak of her.”

Lucas opens his eyes again and looks directly at his elder now. “You’ve let the Association run your life too much,” he says, though the words come out sounding a bit defeated. He’s not even sure why he invokes Kun’s lover now; maybe he is trying to make the split easier by provoking the other man into hating him. “You’ve let them beat it into you that love is not worth trying for. What did you gain from that, in the end? But more loneliness.”

Lucas gets the breath knocked from him when Kun slams him up against the wall, and the unpleasant sound of wood splintering strikes against his eardrums. A long vertical crack forms in the wood behind Lucas, but not wide enough to make the wall separate completely. Not using his full strength, then, Lucas thinks to himself.

Kun looks for all the world like he might kill Lucas then and there without the younger man ever needing to take a potion—just bite his heart right out. He crumples Lucas’s shirt in his hands, fisting the fabric tightly enough to create small rips in it. His irises are the color of newly spilled arterial blood, and alongside the red rimming of his eyes from his earlier crying, it makes for an agonizing sight—one that sears itself into the back of Lucas’s mind. It’s made even worse by the new tears spilling down the older man’s face.

He chokes out through the tears, “You cannot do this. I raised you. You would have me destroyed twice?”

Lucas wishes he could shut every one of his senses off right now, but he can only manage to shut his eyes, once again, against the pain in the other man’s gaze. “I’m sorry, Kun-ge.”

—

After that, Lucas goes back to his own room and sits on the bed for a long time, replaying the events in his head and growing colder with the realization of what he’s about to do. He stares at the small vial on his dresser until he can’t stare at it anymore, and then he downs it all at once. He looks at the vial with renewed interest as it actually disappears once the fluid is gone, the glass evaporating away in the palm of his hand like water droplets under the sun. No evidence.

Lying on his side, he stares at the wall across from his bed and waits for the spell to begin working. He doesn’t know how much time passes, but eventually his vision begins to blur, almost so imperceptibly that it’s difficult to realize until he notices everything in his field of view is doubled, objects bleeding out of their lines like pictures drawn by a drunken artist—there’s a strange ringing in his ears too, a sound on the edge of his hearing but still present, and he doesn’t know what any of it means, or if this is how other beings feel when they are on the brink of death—it’s frightening, and he feels a momentary pang of sympathy for other nonhumans and humans alike who have no choice but to experience this terrible ordeal at the closing of their lives—

It’s harder to keep his eyes open now, so he closes them and lets all sounds and sensations fade out of his hearing—he only holds one last memory of you in his mind, of the soft and filmy texture of your wings underneath his fingertips, of you laughing whole-heartedly at something silly he’d said, and he joins his hands together in the universal symbol of prayer even as they grow weaker, hoping and praying even to his cursed vampire ancestor that this won’t be the very last memory of you—

—

“Yes, he has...most certainly departed from this world.”

An Association council member known as Belial announces this to the room of men after doing a thorough check of Lucas’s body. His voice is distant and saddened. The texture of it is almost tangible, dragging everyone down with it like a physical thing—akin to a rock being dropped into a thin sheet. “Such a fledgling, too. Truly tragic and strange circumstances.” Belial stands beside the bed, shaking his head and looking down at the still form of the younger man as if he might discover an answer if he stares for long enough. “Was there no indication…?”

“He was probably exposed to bad blood,” Ten replies, his voice tense and quiet. Though Kun is clan leader, he doesn’t say anything at all, leaving all the dirty work of explaining the lie to Ten.

Belial’s gaze turns to Ten. He shifts his head slightly to turn his ear towards him, as if he didn’t understand what the other man said. “Bad...blood? As in death by blood weakness?”

The room feels like it’s been sucked of air once these words are spoken, and the younger men shift uncomfortably. Sicheng never lifts his gaze to look at Belial, though Yangyang’s eyes keep darting between Belial and Lucas on the bed like he’s waiting for something to happen. Hendery is just as anxious beside Yangyang, both of them passing uneasy energy between each other. Xiaojun’s face is still fixed into the same permanent frown it had been in since Lucas first told them of the plan. His eyes remain downcast and fixed on Lucas, silently asking Why did you have to be the idiot this time?

“Yes, blood weakness. He hadn’t drank as much blood as usual in the last few days...maybe he seemed a little restless...but we didn’t think it was unusual. He...didn’t seem sick.”

“Where would he have gotten bad blood from? We vampires always take such care…” Belial’s tone turns condescending, as if he could expect no better from a young vampire—someone not even wise enough to tell bad blood from uninfected blood. How could one let themselves be taken out of this world by such a fundamental, basic mistake? Kun curls his fingers into a fist at his side, though he quickly remembers himself and tries to let them relax.

“The blood lounge,” Hendery blurts out. Every eye turns to him now, and Ten’s mouth thins into an agitated line. This isn’t what they agreed on. “M-maybe it was spoiled blood from the blood lounge. It had to be. He’s more careful than that…”

Belial’s eyes are whirling with so many emotions that it’s hard to pin any singular one down. “Serving bad blood, with or without knowledge of it, is an incredible offense within any vampire district. In that case, the establishment must be shut down—after an exhaustive investigation, of course.” This statement causes more discomfort among the gathered men, almost too much of it to be properly concealed.

“I think that won’t be necessary,” Kun interjects quietly. Belial looks at him with an expression that reeks of offense, and Kun returns the stare, glaring straight into the elder vampire’s eyes. “He died of blood weakness, most likely from drinking from some disease-ridden human. Even though he used the blood lounge and blood bags, he was in the habit of getting outside blood on occasion. It was a moment of poor judgment that cost him his life...and nothing more than that.”

A tense silence stretches over the room, and Belial’s eyes still don’t leave Kun’s. The other men remain statue-still, waiting to see what will happen—if it will work—until Belial says, “Yes. Of course. I’ll file his passing with the Keepers of the Registry, as protocol states.”

The other men stay quiet and motionless until Belial departs from their house.

“You used your compulsion on a council member,” says Yangyang, and even his voice is trembling when he speaks.

“I didn’t think that was possible,” Xiaojun notes, though his tone is more irritated than awed. “They’re all so much more advanced.”

That action obviously didn’t come for free, though, because Kun is holding his head like it hurts, turning away from the rest of them. “Such recklessness is not my style. Primitiva help us all. We’re all dead if we’re found out.”

“Why did you say that,” Sicheng deadpans, his words directed to Hendery. Even though Sicheng hasn’t said or done anything since stepping into the room, he looks thoroughly exhausted. “You almost gave us away.”

Hendery holds himself up on the bed as if he’ll collapse, his body bent with all the weight of their lies. He makes a motion like he might sit on the bed before remembering it’s where Lucas’s body is resting, and he straightens himself with some effort. “I...but he was thinking badly of Lucas. Like it was his fault.”

“It was,” Kun says faintly.

“You can’t let your emotions get the best of you right now. Just let me handle the talking.” Ten’s expression is stressed, and for a moment he starts to wonder if he should’ve ever said anything to Lucas at all.

Xiaojun shakes his head. “For now, there is a lot more we need to do than just talking.”

Vampire funerary procedures are much different from what many other supernatural races are used to—even blasphemous to some. Everything is handled at the home of the deceased instead of a funeral home or mortuary, in keeping with the tradition of honoring one’s vampire ancestors—and ultimately, the Primitiva Vampire. After the Primitiva’s gruesome death hundreds of years ago, all that had been left was her ashes once the fire burned out, but her followers still gave the remains a proper processing and burial.

The men dress Lucas in one of his nicest suits and perform all the necessary actions that would be involved at a funerary home, including preparing the casket. All of them help throughout this process as tradition dictates, though it is more difficult than any of them expected it to be. (No one even makes a dark joke about you’ll have to do this for me when I’m gone, which speaks to their inner turmoil.)

The viewing is equally challenging to get through, if not more.

Many of their vampire friends and acquaintances attend, including various members of the Association. Everyone seems to buy the blood weakness lie perfectly, which means Kun’s compulsion worked as it should have. That knowledge does very little to relax any of them in the grand scheme of things, though.

Though they know Lucas is not really gone, the sight of him lying there in that dark coffin with other vampires looking sadly down at his still face and dabbing their tears away is deeply frightening.

The night of the viewing goes by at a glacial pace, and every other night after that up until the funeral passes even more slowly, like time itself has dropped its speed to prolong the torment.

When the last few straggling visitors for the viewing are gone, the men go their separate ways to try to deal with the not-so-small trauma of the day’s events. Kun goes up to one of the manor’s several wide balconies, one that they’ve all used as a familiar hangout spot or simply a place to unwind over the years. The sun will not rise for another forty-five minutes or so, giving him enough time to sit and think before it becomes unsafe. He is not very surprised when he finds Ten already there, though he decides not to leave.

“You stopped smoking three decades ago,” Kun comments, waving his hand in a pitiful attempt to clear out the smell of smoke filling the air. There’s no hint of teasing or personality in his voice, only hollowness and exhaustion. He sits beside the other man in one of the chairs sat outside. “Where did you even get cigarettes from?”

“Don’t worry about me. This is just for the nerves.”

“Why would I worry, it’s not like you can—” Kun pauses before saying the word they both know, realizing it hits far too close to home right now. Silence falls between them until Kun asks, “Do you actually believe this will be worth it?”

“It will. We’ve worked too hard for it not to be.” Ten takes a drag from his cigarette. “We’re giving them a second chance. Isn’t that something to feel good about?”

“A second chance. How interesting.”

“Everyone deserves one.” Ten glances at Kun from the corners of his eyes and doesn’t say anything more, but Kun already knows what he’s vaguely implying.

“And yet everyone doesn’t get one.”

“All the more reason to take the opportunity when it becomes possible.”

Kun doesn’t reply to that. Ten places a hand on his shoulder, but the older man meets this with little regard as he rises from his seat and walks away at a sluggish pace.

You stand in the train station ready to buy a ticket, clutching documents falsifying your identity and feeling more terrified than you possibly ever have. Today marks the seventh day, and you don’t even know if Lucas is alive right now. It was too risky to have any of the other clan members contact you—not until you and Lucas meet up in the designated place. You know Aldriel is an excellent potion master, and if he says the spell will work as intended then it will, but there’s always that seed of doubt.

Your parting with Aldriel had been typical of your relationship with him—you crumbling before him and him pretending like he was fine, lending enough strength for the both of you to survive on, though you knew he was also bleeding from the heart.

“You better not forget about me,” you’d told him, smushing your face into the sleeve of his shirt to hide your tears, though there was no stopping the flow. It was staining his shirt sleeve right through.

He’d scoffed at you, though it was a watery sound. “I couldn’t if I wanted to.” He’d held your head closer against his shoulder, the both of you glued together in whichever way seemed fit when you’d walked through his door one last time to say goodbye. “We’ll see each other again. Don’t worry.”

You’d lifted your head from his shoulder then, looking at him with an aggrieved expression. “You shouldn’t make promises you can’t keep.”

Aldriel put his hand on top of your head, petting you like a small puppy. It was a thing you’d disliked since you were both children, but which only made your heart hurt even more now. “Have more faith in me than that, dear sister. You’ll see.”

When it’s your turn to get a ticket, you step up to the counter and hand over your information, trying to keep the shaking in your hands to a minimum. The teller behind the counter is also a fairy, their wings tucked against the back of their uniform but peeking out at the sides. You childishly try to take some solace in that, hoping there will be some solidarity between you two. Maybe they’ll be less critical of your legitimacy than any other being might be.

The process is scarily easier than you’d thought it would be, though you are sweating the entire time. A fake name and birth date, and no one suspected anything. All of this would have to be your new identity now if you were to live with Lucas in Tianjin without being discovered.

Getting on the train when it comes is only part of the long journey ahead. It doesn’t provide you with much relief, but you are at least thankful to have one segment of that journey complete.

—

It takes another cab to get to your destination once you’re off the train, but you soon arrive at the house of one of Aldriel’s friends and his similar-name twin—Raziel. Raziel was Aldriel’s most trusted and oldest friend, their woven history extending back to childhood. The three of you had grown up together, and you’d even been quite familiar with Raziel until they left for Tianjin some years ago. Now, you’re back in front of each other again under circumstances that you never could’ve guessed.

“You’re here. Good.” Raziel welcomes you into their house with open arms, tugging you into a jittery hug that you anxiously return.

“Have...you heard anything?” you ask, though you know it’s futile. Raziel wouldn’t have gotten any more information than you have, not until Lucas was standing right on their doorstep. They shake their head and give you a sympathetic look, patting your hands.

“He’ll be alright. Everything will go well. I believe it.” Raziel guides you further into their house, presumably towards the room you’ll be staying in while you’re there. “It’s all so romantic, though—even if it doesn’t feel like it right now. I hope you know you’re doing a good thing, in the end.”

You force your facial muscles into a smile, though it is a ghostly and fleeting one. “Thank you.”

Either way, you will have to wait until nighttime to know if Raziel’s words come true or not; the sun is still high in the sky. It’s only midday. You’ve never before hated the sunlight, but right now you curse the sun’s rays that elongate the time between you and your lover.

—

“You all, give him some damn space,” Ten says, trying to pull the younger vampires away so they won’t crowd around the coffin. “He doesn’t need the scare of his life looking at all your faces when he wakes up.” Despite trying his best to be the voice of reason, Ten also has to refuse the urge to station himself beside the coffin and watch for the slightest movement of eyelids, the tiniest twitch of the lips. His hands shake from the frayed nerves of a week of nothing but death and gloom, and even though he doesn’t need to sleep, he thinks he will be out for at least two days after all of this is over.

There is no set time, no designated signal for when—or the dreaded if—Lucas will awaken. The waiting game feels longer than it really is, especially with the hours until the funeral commences steadily counting down. However, it is not very long before there’s a big sucking breath coming from the coffin, the sudden sound of lungs being filled after a week of complete stillness. Everyone rushes back to the bier when this happens, peering wildly inside the coffin.

Lucas’s eyelids flutter for an eternity before shooting open. He immediately seems distressed upon waking, sitting up out of the coffin so quick that it stutters on its stand, and the others have to steady it before it tips over.

“Xuxi...are you okay?” Sicheng asks, voice hushed with nervousness. Despite his unending anger and distress about the situation, Kun has also crowded in to witness Lucas’s awakening, and he visibly sags with relief to see the younger man is at last awake.

The look in Lucas’s eyes is wild. They are momentarily afraid that maybe something has gone wrong with the potion—maybe it has affected his mind somehow and he doesn’t remember any of them— but then he says,

“Y/N. Is Y/N okay?”

“We don’t know,” Sicheng replies. “I mean, hopefully. But it was safer to not have so much cross-communication going on—you’ll have to go to the meeting spot to find out…”

Though the reasons for this make sense, this does not provide consolation. Lucas fumbles his way out of the coffin with the men’s help. It’s clear he’s still disoriented, which makes them even more nervous, if that’s possible at this point.

“You should drink some blood before you leave,” Hendery suggests, and everyone else agrees. Lucas won’t argue that, so he downs one of the blood bags they have stored until he feels a little more like himself.

“You have to go soon, the funeral is set to start in another hour—we’ll have to leave—” Yangyang warns him, though the words fade at the end of his sentence. He doesn’t know how to continue his thought or how to even begin saying goodbye.

Lucas fills that gap by steeling himself and saying his farewells to each of them in turn, though his eyes are troubled and his chin crumples like he might cry at any moment.

“Don’t say I never helped you out with anything,” Ten says, a few tears slipping down his cheeks. Being separated is painful, but it’ll ultimately serve its purpose of giving Lucas a chance at having a love that none of them could. After seeing Kun suffer the way he did after losing Jingyi, Ten wants to spare another one of his mates from dealing with the same fate.

When Lucas gets to Kun, there is a slight awkward silence and a swift exchange of glances—Lucas’s soft gaze butting up against Kun’s more solid one, which is simultaneously pleading to him and rebuking him for his actions. Still, Kun embraces him tightly enough that their bodies could join together.

“Xuxi…” Kun starts, “I don’t…” And then his words break, leaving an unspoken thought between them.

“One day, you’ll forgive me for this,” Lucas whispers to the older man. Kun gives him an endlessly hurt look in return, silently asking him how he could even conceive those words. When they separate from each other, it’s with much reluctance. Lucas looks at them all and nods once, his mouth tight with grief.

“Right. Time to go, then.”

—

You awake in the middle of the night to cool fingers on the side of your face, which startles you completely out of your sleep. Opening your eyes to an unfamiliar room scares you even more, and it takes you a moment to remember why your surroundings have changed. The knowledge comes back to you quickly when a large palm slips against your own, long fingers twining with yours.

“Xuxi,” you whisper quietly, the sound of his name hanging in the air like a prayer. One of the last few times you’ll be able to freely call him that, except in private.

You can’t see his figure well with all the lights turned out, but he had no problem navigating through the dark to reach your bedside. Wanting desperately to see his face, you fumble around for the bedside lamp switch before turning it on.

“Y/N…” Lucas’s face is suddenly illuminated to you in all its golden glory, a myriad of emotions flickering over his features.

“I didn’t even hear you come in,” you say breathlessly. You’re somewhat sad and wish you could’ve met him at the door, embraced him after his long trip, but it doesn’t much matter anymore because he’s here now.

“Poor Y/N. My baby must’ve been so tired.” Lucas bumps his forehead against yours, his whole body drooping with relief as he practically sinks into you, and you giggle a little as you complain about having to hold his weight up. There is a tingle behind your eyes that threatens to turn into a sudden burst of tears, but you try to hold them at bay for a while longer.

“Are we safe?” he whispers, needing your confirmation. “Raziel said so. But...are we really safe?”

“That’s frightening to even think about,” you reply quietly. “We can’t stay here too long, but for now…I think we will be.” Lucas nods without a word, still holding your hand. His blood-scent is completely absent, as it usually is when he’s around you, and you know he’s used the blockers. Soon, with the ability to go out together and not be arrested or threatened for it, that will not be necessary to disguise his vampirism anymore. “It...won’t be easy.”

“No, but the things we want out of life usually aren’t.”

You squeeze his hand. “Raziel will help take care of things for us. It won’t all be trials and tribulations. I hope.” More hesitantly, you ask him, “What was it like? Being dead?” You know that vampires, being once human, still have souls and an afterlife to go to like most other living beings.

The look on his face is worrying. He doesn’t meet your eyes; he only shakes his head and stares at your joined hands. “It was cold without you.” His lips pull into a weak and chapped smile, if only to quiet your worrying, but that doesn’t work as intended. You decide to leave it for now, figuring there will be more time to talk about it when he feels ready.

Turning the light back off, you both press your bodies together as close as they can physically get, Lucas’s head on your chest and his long legs all jumbled together with yours. You fall asleep before he does, lulled away by his comforting and safe presence. He stays awake for a while longer, staring into the dark and the dark staring back into him, before everything else falls away.

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tyb1 · 3 years

Text

If It’s The Right Thing To Do (2)

Part 2

Series List

Words: 2849

Character: Seth Clearwater

Dialogue prompt: I nearly jumped out of my skin, I turned around to see an angry Sam walking towards me with murder in his eyes. He grabbed me then began to shake me violently. “Why didn’t you tell anyone (Y/N)! I’ve been searching for you all morning!”

*idk how to feel about this writing* :(

@anndaydreamer

I awoke to Seth's body pressed against mine. I haven't felt this feeling in a while and yet it was so comforting. As much as I wanted to stay and wake him up with my morning kisses I couldn't. I needed to be home before Sam got up or else we would be in a warzone.

I tried to unwrap Seth's arms from around my waist but he only held on tighter. "Seth wake up! I have to go."

"No, two more minutes I promise."

I rolled over so I could have a better view of his face. He only placed his head on my chest snuggling deeper into the blankets. These were the moments I missed the most. The days where Seth would stay over while Sam was on patrol and him leaving early in the morning so Sam wouldn't catch him. I'd laugh every time he got caught and Sam would always have to give us "the talk" which made me laugh even harder.

"I miss these moments (Y/N). Sometimes I wish things could go back to normal."

"Me too Seth but now we have to keep our distance for our own safety."

Seth groaned, "I can't keep my distance from you."

"I know it's hard but we have to for now."

Seth lifted his head giving me a long passionate kiss. It was one of those kisses where you got lightheaded and it felt like you were in a trance. "I love you (Y/N)."

"I love you too."

Those were the last words I had said to him before I left. He watched me get dressed and walked me out to the front door. Seth even volunteered to take me out to breakfast but I had to decline for my own sake.

I sat in my car for a few moments before I made my way into the house. The house was spotless; there was so much sign of rage from Sam. Everything was in order from the kitchen all the way to the living room. I found this weird because if the guys were over the whole house would smell like muffins and chicken. It was so strange it almost gave me chills to be in here.

"Where were you last night (Y/N)!"

I nearly jumped out of my skin, I turned around to see an angry Sam walking towards me with murder in his eyes. He grabbed me then began to shake me violently. "Why didn't you tell anyone (Y/N)! I've been searching for you all morning!"

"I didn't tell you because I knew you wouldn't have allowed me to see him!"

Sam scoffed, he still had his firm grip on my arms. I glanced behind him to see Quil and Embry with guilty expressions on their faces. It had finally clicked in my head. Both of them had told Sam where I went off before the sun arose. They knew that I was going to see the Cullens. They just waited it out so they could tell Sam that I was with Seth.

I somehow managed to get out of Sam's grip. I walked up to them violently pointing my finger in their face. "You guys really stabbed me in the back like that!? I would jump in front of a bullet for you and yet you still snitched!"

Embry dropped his head lower and began to kick the pebbles on the ground. I could tell from his gestures that he didn't want any parts in the whole situation. Paul walked into the living room with a smug grin on his face"You're the one who went to sleep with the traitors so who really stabbed who in the back?"

I shot a nasty glare at Paul, I wanted to rip the ugly grin from his face. "Go to hell Paul."

Sam grabbed me again pulling me into the house. He sat me on the couch while he began to pace and forth. I watched as he muttered curse words from his mouth, all I wanted was for Emily to show up and get me out of this mess.

"So...you went to the Cullens just to sleep with Seth?" He leaned against the wall while crossing his legs and arms he reminded me so much of a Dad. I always felt like that was his problem, Sam was always too busy trying to be my dad that he forgets how to act like an older brother.

"No Sam! Jake called me and told me that Seth got hurt so I went over there because of how they screamed on the phone. I thought he was dead!"

"Why would you go over there (Y/N)! You could have been labeled as one of them. I had to convince everyone that you weren't anywhere near them. I tried to tell them that you were at a friend's house but no, you were at the Cullens!"

"For a good reason Sam."

"Just like Jacob, Leah, and Seth! They claim that they're over there for good reasons."

I jumped from my seat but quickly sat back down when the vein in his head began to protrude. I sat there quietly. He was speaking the truth and that was a tough pill to swallow. I snuck out of the house without informing him of my whereabouts. I also went over to the Cullens when he specifically told me not to. Sam had every right to be mad and worried about me.

"I'm sorry."

"You have two choices, you can either obey my rules and respect me or pack your bags and be with the Cullens." He left without saying another word, no eye contact or remorse. Emily appeared from the kitchen whispering "I'm sorry."

Once she left I threw my head into a pillow then screamed. Not once but twice, it seemed like nothing in my life was going accordingly to plan. I heard footsteps enter the room, without looking up I had already known who it was.

"Was the sex even good?"

"Paul go to hell with gasoline underwear!"

I brushed past him making sure that I made contact with his shoulder. I walked upstairs towards my room. I fell on my bed screaming into my pillow. "You have two choices, you can either obey my rules and respect me or pack your bags and be with the Cullens" those words kept ringing throughout my head. I loved Seth. He was my whole world but the pack is my family. You never turn back on your family. Sam taught me that at a young age ever since dad turned his back on us. I had to force myself to go to sleep. I didn't want to hear Sams's wrath anymore. It seemed like nowadays I had to force myself to go to sleep to cope with the pain.

I awoke to someone shoving me against my headboard. I opened my eyes to see Emily standing above me with a phone in her hand. "Is it Santa Claus?"

Emily laughed, "No it's someone by the name of Marie. They said you told them to call."

I gave her a questioning look while taking the phone from her head. The numbers that appeared on the phone nearly made me choke on my saliva. It was the same number that was used to call about Seth. I quickly ushered Emily out of the room so I could confidently speak to "Marie"

"Are you freaking crazy Seth? Are you trying to get me on Sam's bad side again?" I placed my back against the floor before I slid down to the bottom. I could hear him laughing from the other side.

"I swear I'm not but I really want to see you. I really miss you (Y/N)."

My heart began to flutter. I got those butterflies again, I've always hated those things they constantly made me act out of character. "I miss you too Seth but I can't risk it again. Sam would have both of our heads."

"Meet me at LaPush beach. I'm on my way right now."

"What!? Seth, I can't!"

"I'll see you there. I can't wait, I feel like Romeo and you're Juliet."

"You know they both die at the end right?"

"Huh, I forgot about that. Well, we're more like beauty and the beast except for you're the beast, and I'm the beauty."

I started to laugh, it was an actual genuine laugh. I haven't laughed like that since we were all together. I hated the fact that our family was so torn apart. I threw my head on the wall trying to stop myself from crying. I couldn't bring myself to speak another word, if I did I knew I'd end up crying on the phone like I did every night since he left.

"(Y/N)? Are you still there?"

"Yeah, I'll meet you there in 10 minutes." I stood up from the floor while hanging up the phone. The door of my room flew open causing me to nearly crack my head open on my desk. I turned ready to fight the person behind the door only to see Emily standing there.

"Were you listening to my conversation?"

"Yes, but I want to help you. (Y/N) I know how you're feeling right now. Your brother is so invested in the treaty and keeping them away that he hasn't taken your feelings into consideration."

I looked up Emily, at first I didn't want to believe it. She'd always picked Sam's side when we argued not once had she taken my side. I was always close to Leah, I hate to admit it but she was more of an older sister than Sam was an older brother. Now Emily wanted to take over which is completely fine but I look at her more as a mother figure than a sister.

"How can I trust you? You're probably like the rest of them."

"When you guys were arguing today I could tell he was really stressed so I offered him a stress reliever." She began to wink at me. I almost threw up the bile that was in my stomach. As much as I didn't want to believe it Emily actually had my back. He'd be too busy with Emily to think about me.

"You're literally the best!" I wrapped my arms around her giving her a big hug.

"If you want to meet Seth you better go now."

I nodded my head then opened my window. I jumped into the tree then quickly made my way down. There was no way anyone would spot me. Collin and Brady were on watch for the night so that meant I could get away with this. I went to my car cranking it once again. This could be really good or really horrible.

The drive to LaPush was very frightening. I kept looking in the woods to see if someone was watching me. I put all of my faith in Emily, she needed to play her part well in order for the plan to work out smoothly. I couldn't afford to be on Sam's bad side again.

I parked near the trees so no one could notice. In Lapush everyone knew everyone so I had to make sure I kept my guard up. I walked onto the beach looking around for Seth but he was nowhere to be found. "Clearwater," I said in a whispered yell.

"(Y/N) I'm right here!"

I turned to see him standing near the edge of the woods. I ran towards him jumping into his muscular arms. My nose immediately engulfed his hazelnut scent. "I missed you."

"You saw me this morning silly." He wrapped his arms around me making sure to support me as we held one another. There was a comfortable silence between us. Neither of us dared to speak another word.

I playfully smacked him against the head. "That's for calling me a beast earlier."

"Ouch (Y/N), You can't get mad because I'm the beauty and the brains of the relationship." He engulfed me in another hug. I began to squirm when he placed kisses on my cheek.

"Seth stop now your saliva is on my cheek." We both laughed at our antics.

"What a cute reunion!" I shot my head up from Seth's neck to see Paul standing near a tree clapping his hands. Embry, Quil, and Jared soon appeared behind him. They gave Seth a disgusting look as if he just murdered someone.

"This isn't your territory anymore Clearwater," Paul said, he stopped with his childish antics and now was serious. He started to walk closer to us slowly sizing Seth up.

Seth placed me behind him taking guard. 'How did you find us?"

Jared laughed, "Your scent couldn't get past me. We thought it was one of those bloodsuckers on our territory. Luckily it was only you and (Y/N)."

I stepped in front of Seth glaring at them. I had never back down to them and today would not be the first. "Just leave us alone. You guys are always ruining something."

Jared and Paul ignored me, their only focus was Seth. "You know what we do to traitors right? We rip them into shreds, ask the Cullens, one inch away from being one with the ground."

Seth scoffed, "You don't scare me, Paul."

The tension in the air grew, I knew deep down that there wasn't going to be a good outcome. Someone was going to get hurt tonight and it wasn't Paul or Jared. Seth had a target on his head and Paul being the hot head that he was wanted to take that target down.

"Mommy isn't here to stop me now Seth." Paul walked even closer to us.

"Paul we should just scare them. Now let's not take things to the extreme." Jared tried to stop him but at the same time, he didn't want to be caught in Paul's wrath.

"Jared, he's a threat to us now, he could go back and tell those bloodsuckers everything." Paul pulled me to the side out of his way then pushed Seth roughly, "Now do something Clearwater."

He winced, that was a red flag in my eyes. Seth still wasn't healed from yesterday, he was still sore. Seth wasn't here to fight he wasn't a fighter he was a lover and yet Paul was still here nagging him.

"Come on Paul just leave us alone. He'll leave!" I jumped in front of Seth once more so Paul wouldn't push him again. This time he pushed me hard into a tree. It knocked the breath out of me, I fell to my knees gasping for air. Seth caught me in time before my head hit the ground.

"(Y/N)! Are you okay?"

"Yeah I'm fine" I actually wasn't fine. My back was killing me. I didn't want to say anything to trigger Seth into phasing. If he phased right now he could pose a threat and that could give Paul the green light to kill him.

"You're not fine. There's blood on my hands and it isn't mine." I reached back to my back and there was a minor cut which caused a lot of blood. Seth glared at Paul, his body began to shake violently. I reached up to caress his cheek. I even tried to turn his head in my direction so he could look into my eyes.

"Seth calm down it's okay I swear." Before I could stop him he phased in front of me and so did Paul. I always hated when Seth would phase. He wasn't a person to just get angry out of the blue, you had to push him there and that's exactly what Paul did.

Jared held up his fist motioning for no one to interfere. Paul and Seth's life was on the line and they weren't doing anything about it. They were trying to rip one another's head off. There was a difference between when they'd fight on the reserve and right now.

"Are you guys crazy!? You're just going to let them fight to the death!?"

"Go stop them (Y/N)."

It was already too late; they were too deep into the woods. There was only one way to stop them and I knew this person would have my ass. I ran from the woods to my car, I needed to get to Sam before one of them got hurt. I sped down the road back to the house as fast as my car could take me. My back was aching and my head was throbbing from the impact. The reserve wasn't that far all I needed to do was make it back home without killing myself.

I jumped out of my car as fast as I could. I left the car running not bothering to cut it off. The front door was locked so I had to make my way to the back. I ran to Sam's door and tried to open it. It was locked so I started to bang on it.

"Sam! He's going to kill him! Please Sam he's going to fucking kill him." I began to sob everything started to hit me at once. I started to punch, kick, and even scream at the door anything to get Sam's attention.

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monstersandmaw · 3 years

Text

Male vampire x male character (nsfw) Part Four

Edit which I’m including in all my works after plagiarism and theft has taken place: I do not give my consent for my works to be used, copied, published, or posted anywhere. They are copyrighted and belong to me.

Sorry for taking 84yrs to post this. I thought I had shared it. Sorry. Hope you enjoy all the same.

Wordcount: 10,904 (story total: 23,704)

Heads up in this part for continued, but easing, tense familial relations, some angst/heartache (not heartbreak though), and some (consensual) blood drinking.

Part One (sfw), Part Two (nsfw), Part Three (nsfw)

Alec let out a shaky breath and crossed to the sofa, sinking down onto it as his legs finally gave out. “Vampires,” he said, hardly daring to believe the word he was uttering.

“Yes.”

“And you’re one?”

“… Yes.”

“And my family…?”

Sebastien’s voice was tight on the other end of the line as he said, “Hunts my kind. Well, those of us who aren’t registered with the ‘Guild of Hunters’ —” his tone turned acrid as he spat the words out, though he kept his voice low and quiet.

“What does that even mean? I don’t know what any of this means… And did you know about my family? I mean, before? When you started dating me?”

Sebastien took another deep breath. “Yes. I knew. And it was a long time before I fully convinced myself that you did not.”

If Sebastien had thought it was some kind of trap, that would explain his reticence at the beginning for sure.

“And were you planning on telling me any of this?” Alec snarled. God, his chest hurt so much. The deception was like Jeremy cheating on him all over again, only this time the betrayal was coming from two fronts at once: from his love life and from his family. Not that he’d had all that solid a relationship with the latter to start with. Perhaps this explained why.

“I hadn’t planned on becoming your boyfriend at all,” Sebastien snapped.

“So, what, I was just a quick diversion? A casual fuck you kept coming back for because I’m such a fucking chump? Is that it?”

“No,” Sebastien sighed. “Not at all. I fell for you. Like the horrid cliche I am, the vampire fell for the hunter, and by then I had no idea how to tell you. I’ve not been with a human before, so this is all very new to me.”

Alec ran his fingers through his dark hair to buy himself a moment. “You… You haven’t?”

“No.”

“How… How old are you?”

“Do you really want the answer to that?”

“Yes!” His phone was slippery in his fingers now from the sweat on his palm but he couldn’t bring it away from his ear long enough to put it on speaker. He needed answers.

With another cavernous sigh, Sebastien said hurriedly, “Very well. I was born in 1897 and turned on the battlefields of the Great War — World War I, that is. I was dying, and a vampire named Felicity who had been working as a field nurse turned me. My first run-in with your family was not long after I moved from France to America. They were working with the American Hunters’ Guild on a case which had nothing to do with me.” He let out a shaky breath and said, “I got in the way and I nearly died. Those were the days before the treaty, of course, and before I moved to England.”

Despite his still-spinning mind, Alec managed to croak, “What treaty?”

“Those of us who get our blood from sanctioned blood banks and do not live-feed are exempt from being hunted like animals.” He spoke like he was quoting from a law code; cold and clinical; detached.

God, the way he said it made Alec’s skin crawl. It was as if he were being permitted to exist on the grounds of good behaviour and, he supposed, that was exactly the case. Even so, Alec couldn’t help the next words that just fell out of his mouth. “So you weren’t planning on feeding from me?”

“Of course not,” Sebastien retorted but then appeared to rein himself in with yet another steadying inhale. “No. It’s been decades since I’ve fed from a human directly. I didn’t plan on starting with you.”

Alec slumped back into the sofa cushions and stared up at the ceiling of his tiny apartment. “Fuck.”

After a long silence, Sebastien’s gentle tenor sounded in his ear. “Are you alright?”

“No,” he said. “I’ve never been close to my family - my dad was always an arsehole, but… I can’t believe Theo’s involved in all this. He was such a sweet kid, and we were really close until…” he swallowed thickly around the rising lump in his throat.

“Until?” Sebastien prompted when he stalled again.

“I can’t believe this is all real,” he muttered. “Until he turned sixteen and started to ‘work out’ with dad. I was at uni by then, getting my fine art degree, but whenever I came home he was just… different. Harder. Sharper. More focused. Guess it makes sense now… Well, as much as… you know…” he gestured vaguely to the empty apartment with his hands, “… as much as all this can make sense. Fucking… vampires…”

After a heartbeat, Sebastien added softly, “Quite literally.”

Despite himself, Alec snorted. “So… where does this leave us?”

Now it was Sebastien’s turn to feel clearly uncomfortable. Eventually he said, “Alec, I don’t think it’s wise for me to see you currently. Not with your family being what they are.”

His heart twisted, even though he’d been half expecting it. “You still think they’d… what, stake you, or whatever it is that vampire hunters actually do to you lot?”

“There are many ways to kill a vampire,” he said flatly. “And your family knows all of them, probably more. You need to work this out with them first as well. Talk to your brother. He seems the more reasonable…”

“I can’t believe Ellie’s in on it as well. And my mother? Fuck…”

“Talk to them.”

“Will I still see you at work at least?”

The awkward silence told him all he needed to know, even before Sebastien said, “I just sent in my letter of resignation.”

“That was quick,” he hissed, stomach dropping. “You only just left.”

“Supernatural speed,” he replied bitterly. “Comes in useful for typing papers and getting out of awkward situations…”

That sparked another question in him. “Supernatural powers, huh? Can you turn into a bat too?”

“No.”

Then he thought of Sebastien’s Halloween outfit. “Wolf?”

He thought he detected a faint smirk in Sebastien’s response. “No, sadly. No shape-shifting for me. Felicity is not of any extraordinary bloodline, and thus, neither am I.”

“Right,” he grunted. “Of course. Is she… is she still around?”

“Felicity? Yes. We meet every now and again. She and her wife spend most of their time in Venice these days.”

“Her wife? She a vampire too?”

Sebastien swallowed audibly. “Yes.”

“Did Felicity turn her too? Would that make her wife your sister?”

“No.”

He frowned. “Did she know her as a human though?”

“Yes.”

After a moment of spinning thoughts, Alec asked, “Did… you turn her?”

“One doesn’t tend to turn one’s own intended. Between a sire and their turned, there can grow… tension. Not always, but it can be enough to ruin a relationship that was seemingly solid before. Something about exchanging blood changes the soul… or so we think, anyway. It was an honour to be asked to sire her.”

“Right.” Alec felt slightly sick. “Will I at least see you before you leave?”

“I think it best if we don’t. Not while your family is still… ‘investigating’ me.”

“Are you really in danger from them?”

“Quite possibly. My name is on the treaty, but…”

Something twanged painfully again in his chest, swiftly followed by the fizzle of fear through his veins. “But what?”

“But vampires and hunters are not supposed to sleep together, Alec…”

“Don’t bang the enemy? How very Romeo and Juliet,” he snorted. “Fuck. Why does every good relationship I have turn to shit?” he asked, not of Sebastien but of the universe itself. “What did I do?”

“Alec —”

“—Don’t. Don’t make it worse by apologising or something. It’s fine. We were only together a month. I’ll get over it. You’ll move on. Heck, you’ll fucking live forever, right? What’s a month to you anyway? Nothing, right?”

The bitterness in his own voice nearly choked him, and without thinking, or even saying goodbye, he just hung up and let his phone lie in his limp fingers on the sofa cushions. It lit up and rang a moment later, but he didn’t answer it. Six more times Sebastien tried before finally giving up.

Kay was an absolute blessing in the next few days.

He didn’t tell her immediately about the whole vampire thing, but after he’d calmed down enough to be able to look at Theo without immediately busting a vein in his forehead, he hashed the basics out with him, and then told her everything. Alec told her about his newly-discovered, secret family occupation which, apparently, stretched back centuries. He told her about the fact that his eldest sister and younger brother were monster hunters in their spare time, and he told her the real reason Sebastien why had vanished overnight without a trace — yes, Alec had gone to his apartment building, only to be politely informed by the doorman that Dr. Dulac was no longer in residence and did not leave so much as a forwarding address.

That, above almost everything else, shattered Alec’s hopes of seeing him again. Like thistledown in the wind, Sebastien had simply flitted away somewhere else.

She took it about as well as he had to start with, but when she saw the seriousness in his eyes, and when, three weekends later, she came to his apartment for a definitely-not-awkward dinner with Theo, she saw video footage that Theo and his father had captured from various hunts of supernatural creatures beyond only beautiful vampires. Then she believed him. Ghouls, ghosts, reanimated corpses, demons… you name it and Theo could tell you about it.

Alec spent Christmas with Kay’s family, and Theo met him for New Year drinks in the city, joined by Ellie. It wasn’t anything like the family dynamic he’d always longed for, but the new degree of openness between them went some way to mending his still bruised heart. Slowly. Gradually. Piece by tentative, honest piece. He never joined in, but Theo started to tell him a bit about what they did. It still sounded barbaric to him, but at least it was true.

He had no word from Sebastien, and the number he had saved in his phone had been disconnected.

With the arrival of spring, Alec found himself more than usually dissatisfied with his job. He was a good teacher, and he enjoyed seeing his students’ talents evolve and grow, but the ever-increasing admin ground him down, and the politics of the faculty and the university as a whole wore on him.

“Have you seen this?” Kay asked one afternoon as they shared a takeaway coffee beneath the drifting cherry blossoms. Petals spiralled down like pastel pink and white wedding confetti, and he watched with an absent smile as a terrier snapped and sprung around on his hind legs trying to catch them while his owner stood and talked with her friend nearby. “Oi!” Kay asked, digging him in the ribs.

“Hmm?”

“Have you seen this?” she asked, shoving her phone under his nose.

He blinked, refocusing his eyes, and read the article’s headline aloud. “Council offers artists the chance to win a sponsored exhibition in the town hall with this unique competition.” He blinked. “So?”

“So?” she gawped. “You can’t be serious?”

“Send me the link. I’ll forward it to my students. They might like that.” That earned him a smack upside the head, and he scowled. “What was that for?”

“Alec, you might be the dumbest smart guy I know,” she said. “I showed it to you so that you could enter it, you giant idiot.”

He blinked. “Me?”

“I saw those charcoals you did the other week of the cathedral! They were amazing!! And the abstracts too… I still want one, by the way.”

“It’s already wrapped up for your birthday,” he groused. “You really think I should do it?”

She rolled her eyes and drained the last of her coffee without gracing him with an answer. Of course she thought he should.

“When’s the deadline?”

“Next Thursday,” she said without looking at him.

Alec licked his lips and swallowed. “Will you help me pick some images to submit?”

Her answering grin was feral.

In all honesty, Alec forgot about having even entered the competition until the letter dropped through his door six weeks later announcing that, to his utter astonishment, he had been selected as the winner. Tears blurred his eyes and he sat down heavily at the tiny kitchen table. He’d never entered any of his own art into anything like this in his whole life, and the first time he does, he gets a whole fucking public exhibition out of it?

“Maybe this year won’t be so bad after all,” he murmured. “New year, new start…” His chest still ached when he thought about Sebastien, and he hoped he was doing alright, wherever he was.

Theo had been searching for him, probably by way of apology for lying to his big brother for all these years, but he’d turned up very little. Sebastien had gone to Venice first, it seemed, presumably to spend time with Felicity and her wife, but had disappeared completely after that, with only rumours flickering here and there that he was in Paris, St. Petersburg, Prague, and then potentially Florence. Maybe.

“Venice seems like a pretty sunny place for a pair of vampires to live,” Alec commented, but Theo shrugged.

“They don’t burn up immediately in sunlight, or your professor would never have been able to take a day-job at the university. They’re sensitive to it, some more than others, but it takes a full day of constant sunlight beating down for them to burn properly.” The callousness of his brother’s response shook him, even after all these months, and Theo must have seen it on his face because he sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then added, “You really loved him, didn’t you?”

Alec shrugged. Yes, he wanted to say. I thought so. “I only knew him for a month or so,” was what he said carefully instead. “And even then… turned out I didn’t know him anyway.”

Theo, who had been lounging on Alec’s sofa with his legs spread and his head tipped back into the cushions while Alec made supper, asked quietly, “Did he seem… normal to you?”

“Normal?” Alec asked, not sure he’d heard his brother correctly.

“Yeah… like… did you ever suspect he wasn’t… you know…?”

“Human?”

Theo grunted and nodded his head. “Yeah. I guess.”

“No. Obviously not. Never crossed my mind. Why would it have?”

Theo scowled and turned his eyes to regard him. Alec knew that Theo looked like a younger version of himself, if maybe in better shape, and he wondered if he’d have the same steely look in his eyes if he’d been deemed ‘man enough’ to become a hunter, or whatever bullshit criteria their arsehole father had used to select which members of his family were to become soldiers and which would live normal lives.

“What?” Alec demanded.

“But you slept with him, right?”

“I’m not talking about that with you,” he said, briefly brandishing the wooden spoon at him.

Theo pulled a face. “I’m not asking about your sex life. Gross. No, I mean…”

In that moment, Alec spotted a flash of something in his brother’s blue eyes that softened him to the kid. He turned off the gas and went over to where Theo was now sitting hunched over with his elbows on his knees, running his hands through his hair. When he looked up at Alec’s approach, his face showed open vulnerability in a way he’d not seen since they were young children and Theo had got himself into trouble at school.

“What’s going on?” Alec asked, seating himself next to his little brother.

Theo bobbed his knee like a deprived caffeine addict and bit his lip. With glassy eyes, he croaked, “I keep asking myself if we did the right thing…”

“What do you mean?”

The bravado of Theo’s early twenties melted away to become a worried, frightened, guilty little boy again and he said, “I mean… if what we do is right…”

“You mean… hunting?”

“Yeah,” he croaked.

“What set this off?”

His brother quirked him a humourless smirk and said, “You always did know when something was bothering me.”

Alec remained quiet, just watching him.

“We teamed up with some hunters from Edinburgh for a ‘vamp gone rogue’ case and we finally found her yesterday. She… She’d been turning people; trying to amass some kind of small army to take over from another vampire further up north. She was insane… like, completely, sociopathically insane, but… the people she turned… they were just…” he blinked, and Alec saw with a jolt that his eyes were full of unshed tears. “They were still just people.”

He feared he already knew where this was going. Still, he asked, “What happened?”

“Father wanted to put them down. They were terrified, chained up… still on the point of lashing out…”

Bile rose in his throat. “Oh god…”

“One of the hunters said she knew of a vampire who could help rehabilitate them; help them adjust to their new lives. One of them didn’t want to live as a vampire though, so father just…”

Theo didn’t need to finish that for Alec to know that father had ended the newly-turned vampire’s life in a heartbeat. “And the rest?”

“The other three went with the hunter. I don’t know what happened, but… I trust her. It’s just… father taught me and Ellie that vampires are mindless killers when they feed… that you can’t get close to them, that all they want at the end of the day is blood no matter what they tell you… but…” he looked up at Alec. “You’ve been fucking miserable since the whole Sebastien shit-fest. I know you’ve been trying to hide it, and you’ve got the exhibition coming up next weekend, and that’s great, but… I know you’ve stopped putting yourself out there. And we did that. We fucked it all up for you. I just…” he ran his hands through his hair and sent it into wild disarray. “I just wonder if you could really have been happy with him after all.”

Alec pulled his brother close and hugged him. “I’m not going to lie,” he murmured into his brother’s dark hair. “I’m furious with father for keeping everything from me, and for making you and mum and Ellie lie to me and Angie about it as well, but… if I hadn’t seen Sebastien’s eyes go red — yeah, I thought it was just a reflection or something — and if I hadn’t seen the way he sleeps literally like the dead… I’m not sure I would have believed you anyway. I don’t forgive him for it either, but…” he sighed deeply. “I forgive you, Theo. And Ellie.”

“And mum?”

“I’m still working on that.”

Theo went slack beneath him and snaked his arms around his brother’s waist for a moment. “Thanks,” he mumbled into Alec’s shirt.

“You’re still coming to the exhibition?” Alec asked as he pulled back and went back to the stove, giving Theo a moment of privacy to pull himself together.

In truth, Alec was a little shaken too. Their relationship had been slowly patched over the intervening months, but it still wasn’t particularly close, and the matter of Sebastien had been a permanent, proverbial elephant in the room. That Theo was questioning their father’s teaching came as an immense relief to Alec though. He poured them each a glass of wine, and the two spent the rest of the evening in a quieter kind of closeness than they’d yet shared.

When the evening of the exhibition drew round, Alec was quite frankly, a bit of a mess.

“C’mon,” Theo grinned, patting the lapels of his jacket down for him and grinning up at him. “Where’s that Twayblade hunter courage, huh?”

“Must have skipped me and all gone to you,” he quipped back. “Fuck. I’m so nervous. Why am I so nervous?”

“No fucking clue,” Theo chuckled. “You’re awesome and they’re gonna fucking love you.”

“Language,” Alec said instinctively and Theo’s laughter redoubled.

“You’re a big fucking hypocrite, you know that?” Theo laughed just as Kay sidled up with three glasses of champagne awkwardly held between her hands.

“Help a girl out here, would you, boys?” she asked, proffering the glasses to them.

Alec resisted the urge to down it in one — he’d probably only choke on the bubbles anyway — and filled his lungs instead with a big gulp of air. He tried to send all his nerves into the air and then blow it out of his body in one heaving sigh to leave him calmer, but it just gave him a head rush, so he sipped the wine and turned to look around the gallery from the corner where he’d been lurking.

“What if no one shows up?” he blurted, earning him a scowl from Theo and a pout-and-eyebrow-raise combo from Kay.

He needn't have worried in the end. The marketing team had done their work, and within an hour the place was heaving and all but three of his pieces had been reserved. Scratch that. Two.

The fact that almost all of his students had turned up as well to cheer him on and trade high fives, and scrounge free alcohol and food from the canape trays, warmed him in ways he didn’t know were possible.

Overwhelmed and a little bit tearful, he stepped out of the town hall’s main exhibition space and into the small corridor that led to a fire exit and a grotty back car park beyond, letting the flush die down from his cheeks. This was what he’d really wanted right from the moment he’d graduated all those years ago; to be an artist in his own right, with people buying his work at exhibitions… It almost made him giddy to think that he had a chance to do this full time now. It seemed that Sebastien had been right when he’d said he could really make something of himself.

Ah, there was the crash in his mood that he’d been waiting for. Nothing good lasts forever, right?

Would Sebastien have been proud of him if he knew about this? Would he have been there that night, by his side? Would they even have lasted that long anyway, even without his family’s interference?

The noise in the room was gradually dying down when he gathered enough courage to step back into the echoing hall. The pale wooden floors gleamed in the low light, the white of the temporary exhibition walls almost glowing, in stark contrast to the black and grey of his charcoals. He’d chosen mostly charcoals for the show, with a few acrylic abstracts for flavour, and apparently people loved them. Every single one had a red ‘sold’ dot beneath the label now, he noted as he cast his eyes around the room.

Then his gaze snagged on someone standing with their back to him, hands clasped loosely behind them, a long, silver-blond ponytail hanging down their back. And Alec’ vision slipped sideways.

Sebastien.

It had to be him.

No one else stood with posture like that. No one else was so tall and lean and elegant and god-damned graceful, even when just standing still. And no one else stood quite as still as that.

He let out a ragged breath and swayed slightly, glancing around. There was no sign of Theo or Kay just then, and only one or two couples meandered admiringly around the room. And there, fixated by one piece in particular, stood Sebastien.

Inhaling for courage, Alec approached and came to an unsteady halt a few feet away from him. He didn’t look real, somehow. His beauty had always been striking, but now in the low light he seemed like a mirage, with his warm olive skin and contrastingly pale hair, that cut-glass jawline and —

— He turned and met Alec’s gaze with dark brown eyes alight and glassy.

“You’re here,” Alec breathed, at a loss for anything else.

“I hope you don’t mind,” Sebastien said, and the sound of his voice sent a wild tingling through Alec’s whole nervous system. The man — vampire — looked uncharacteristically shy, uncertain, as he half turned to face him.

“Gotta say,” Alec said, scratching the back of his head, “I wasn’t expecting to see you again.”

“Should I leave?”

He chewed his lower lip for a second and Sebastien’s eyes tracked the movement before he blinked and looked back at the charcoal in front of him. It was of the Lady Chapel of the cathedral; one of the most tranquil places Alec had ever been. A shaft of light lanced down from a Gothic window high on the right, scattering fractured shards of light onto the stone floor, and behind it, just barely visible as a grey, misty outline, sat the small altar.

“You’re religious?” Alec asked.

“Mm,” Sebastien nodded. “Surprising, I know, given my ‘condition’, but there you have it.”

All the smalltalk then suddenly boiled up into thick irritation inside Alec and he scowled. “Where have you been? And why now? Why come back now? What do you want?”

He must have raised his voice fractionally because the couple admiring the seascape to their left shot them slightly scandalised looks, as if he’d started swearing in a sanctuary, and he bit back the wave of anger, halting it in its tracks.

“Shall we step outside for a moment?” Sebastien asked and Alec nodded tersely.

Passing Kay and Theo who were sitting in the chairs near the drinks table, Alec cast his eyes at them and watched Theo tense visibly. Kay laid her hand on his thigh and shook her head, at which Theo nodded and sat back, eyes hard, mouth set, but at least he didn’t appear to be on the point of leaping out and staking Sebastien on the spot.

Alec mouthed a silent ‘thank you’ at them both, and followed Sebastien out on to the street.

“You’ve patched things up with your family then?” Sebastien began, standing perfectly still beside the brick wall of the Victorian building while Alec paced.

“Mostly just with Theo, but yeah. Why are you here?” he asked again.

“Honestly? I missed you. Couldn't get you out of my head. I went all over Europe, and even to Asia briefly, and nothing I did distracted me from you, from leaving you. I had to come back.”

“You could have called,” he said, instantly regretting the way it came out like a petulant teenager’s sulking.

“And what would that have achieved?” Sebastien asked evenly. “I was hundreds of miles away.”

“You could have come back sooner? Talked to me in person?”

Sebastien sighed. “I was afraid that your family would come after me. I needed to disappear.”

“Theo convinced father to let you go. As you said yourself, your name was on the treaty, and you didn’t hurt me or hypnotise me, or whatever… did you?”

“No,” he said, pale brows pinching with evident distaste.

“Could you have?”

Sebastien levelled him with a dark look. “Yes, but… that’s not something I enjoy doing. It’s a survival mechanism — to make people forget what they’ve seen — it’s not something to be used lightly.”

“Ok, but you could have, and you didn’t, so that was another reason to let you go,” he said. God he wanted to kiss him. The realisation hit him like a gut punch and he turned away. Alec ached inside and out for those lips, those hands, those eyes… “Fuck,” he whispered, barely audible. “Are you staying?”

“Do you want me to stay?”

Alec rounded on him, frustration pouring out of him again. “Don’t answer my question with one of your own. Are you staying or not?”

Sebastien remained eerily calm, but a heartbeat later Alec saw that it wasn’t serenity in his eyes but sadness. “If you want me to, I’ll stay. I want to try again, Alec. I want… I want to be with you. I’ve never felt for anyone what I feel for you.”

“Feel? As in… present tense?”

“Yes. It hasn’t faded. Not with all the days and distance between us.”

“God, you sound like a shitty romance novel hero…” he scoffed. “I almost believe it.”

Sebastien spread his hands and said, “I am who — and what — I am. You know me, Alec, in a way that no one else ever has. I was utterly myself with you, except for the fact that I kept my nature from you. I hope you can at least understand why, if not forgive me. Everything else was genuine. I have never done that — been that open, that vulnerable — with anyone.”

“Even knowing what my family are?”

“Even then.”

Alec looked up at him and saw his own reflection in those dark, rich brown eyes. “Show me.”

Sebastien’s angelic face soured into a confused frown. “Show you what?”

“Your eyes. Your fangs. Show me what you are.”

“Now?”

He looked around. The street was empty on either side, with the only people around gathered outside a bar further up the street.

When he turned back to say yes to Sebastien, he found blood red eyes glowing in the man’s face. “Holy fuck,” he hissed. Every already-chiselled line on Sebastien’s face had sharpened somehow, his cheeks hollowing a little, perhaps to account for the additional hardware he now sported in his mouth, and his eyes seemed a touch more sunken. And they glowed as if lit from within.

Heartbeat thrumming out a wild tattoo, he stepped closer and Sebastien went utterly still. His chest ceased to rise and fall, and he didn’t even blink as Alec raised his fingers to his left cheek. “Show me.”

Sebastien swallowed and parted his lips. Angling his jaw a little to one side, he showed Alec the elongated canines, three quarters of an inch long. “Careful,” he murmured as Alec made to touch them. “Vampire venom is potent, even in small doses.”

“Does it really do what the hunters say it does?”

Sebastien’s red eyes glittered almost playfully. “I don’t know,” he smiled, seeming to relax a fraction. “What do they say it does?”

“Drives your victims wild, acts like a date rape drug, makes humans lose their will and their inhibitions…”

At that, a hardness returned to his features and his lip twitched in a lopsided snarl, like a wolf backed into a corner. “That’s certainly one take on it,” he said. “It creates a rush of euphoria. It’s supposed to make feeding a pleasant experience for all concerned. Endorphins in the blood make the taste sweeter, and the human feels no pain or fear.”

“Right. Gotta say I like that one better,” Alec said with a shaky smile. “But I’m not gonna risk it right here… And fuck me, your eyes are incredible.”

“They’re still red, hmm?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

Closing his eyes and tilting his face upwards a little more towards the cloudy night sky, he inhaled deeply. His features softened again, and Alec watched, fascinated, as the slight bumps behind his closed upper lip slid away into nothing, presumably as his canines retracted into his gums. When he opened his eyes, they were their usual, endlessly dark brown once more.

“Better?” Sebastien asked, oddly self-conscious.

“No,” he said. “Just different.”

Something prickled on the back of his neck and he turned to find a woman silhouetted against the light of street lamp halfway up the road. “Friend of yours?” he asked, tense.

“Felicity. She came with me.”

“Why? Surely you don’t need a wingman… or, you know, woman.”

With a tiny smile, Sebastien said, “You make me more vulnerable than you realise, in more ways than one. And we weren’t sure if your family would be here.”

“Or whether they’d want to flambé you…”

“Precisely.” He inclined his head and the woman did the same, turning and vanishing even as Alec blinked.

“Can you do that too?” he asked, still gawping after her.

When he turned back, he found that Sebastien had stepped in close to him - close enough that his faint, woody cologne wafted gently around them and he felt his knees wobble slightly. He’d missed this. Oh god, he’d missed this. “Mmhmm,” Sebastien hummed. “I can.”

“Kiss me,” Alec whispered. “Please…”

Sebastien didn’t need telling twice. He took Alec’s face in both his hands and crushed a passionate kiss to his lips so hard that Alec’s mind went perfectly blank for a few beautiful seconds. When he came to, he grabbed Sebastien’s narrow hips and tugged him close, making the vampire grunt as their bodies connected.

This time, he took Sebastien’s ponytail in one hand and began to pull on it gently. Sebastien yielded at the pressure and tipped his face back, exposing the entire column of his throat to Alec without resistance. The gesture left Alec stunned and breathless. In his research with Theo over the past months, he had learned that for a vampire to expose their throat to another implied absolute trust. Overwhelmed, he pressed his lips to the bare skin and felt Sebastien gasp, grabbing at his shoulders suddenly to keep himself upright.

Over and over, the vampire shuddered tangibly beneath his touch and gasped sharply again, panting. As he shifted his hips against him, Alec felt Sebastien’s growing hardness, and at the same time, Sebastien drew back, eyes screwed shut. “Stop,” he laughed. “Not here.”

“I want you,” Alec moaned, one hand on Sebastien’s chest. “Fuck, I’ve missed you so much.”

“I want you too,” Sebastien smiled, opening his eyes. They glowed scarlet again. “And because of that, this —” he said, gesturing to his red eyes, “— isn’t going to go away quickly this time.”

“This too?” Alec said, boldly cupping the obvious bulge in Sebastien’s smart black trousers gently with his hand and making the vampire groan.

“Yeah, that too.”

“Your place or mine?” Alec asked with a dizzy grin.

“You decide. I’m booked into a hotel one street over for the next two days,” he said. “If that affects your decision in any way.”

“Yours,” he said. “I… I’ll just…” he looked over his shoulder and caught sight of the exhibition banner dangling by the door. “I should…”

Sebastien nodded slowly. “I’ll be here.”

“You’d better be,” he snarled as he adjusted himself and prayed no one would notice. He took a few steadying breaths on the threshold of the town hall and then disappeared inside.

Kay raised her eyebrows at him when he reappeared.

“Not a word,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Your hair’s a mess,” she said conversationally. “Is it windy outside?”

“Fuck off,” he grimaced and she laughed. “Where’s Theo?”

“He left out the back way,” she said. “But he told me to tell you to enjoy yourself tonight, and that he’ll stand by whatever makes you happy.”

Unexpected tears prickled his eyes and he tugged her into a hug that was probably meant for his brother.

“You can thank us later,” she said, shoving him off her. “Go be with your Prince of Darkness…”

“I’m not sure how much he’d like you calling him that,” he said as he stepped back. “I’ll have to wrap things up here first…”

It seemed to take forever, but he finally found the events coordinator and after an interminable conversation full of congratulations, agreed to stop by the next day to take down the exhibition and sort the sales out. His heart was thudding when he stepped back outside, but he let out a huge sigh when he saw Sebastien leaning against the brick building, face tilted towards the moon that was just peeking out from behind a bank of cloud.

“It’s like one of your charcoals,” Sebastien said without tearing his eyes from the sky.

Alec crossed to him and smiled when Sebastien met his gaze, red meeting blue. Alec slid his fingers into Sebastien’s where his hand hung quietly by his side.

“Ready?” the vampire asked.

Alec nodded, and let Sebastien lead him back to his hotel.

They barely made it into the lift before Alec was kissing him, backing him into the mirrored sides of the lift with a thud before the doors had even closed. He stopped suddenly, drew back and laughed, and Sebastien — who looked like he’d just got whiplash — asked, “What?”

“Vampires do have reflections after all…”

Sebastien rolled his eyes and gave an indecorous snort-laugh. The sound was rich and warm and it filled Alec’s whole consciousness for a moment. “It’s only the antique ones with genuine silver backing that don’t show our reflections. Technology has evolved, thank goodness. Now, if you don’t mind, you were kissing me senseless…”

“Sorry,” he laughed, grabbing Sebastien’s white shirt collar and tugging him down again. They nearly didn’t get out of the lift at Sebastien’s floor, but as the doors began to close again, Sebastien slid his foot into the path of the doors and dragged Alec out.

Clothes landed in a steady line on the carpet between the door of his hotel room and Sebastien’s bed, ending with them both in only their boxer-briefs on the pristine white surface of the bed. Alec was tipped back onto the duvet and lay there staring up at Sebastien who was now no longer hiding his nature from him at all. Red eyes blazed in his face and as he opened his mouth to breath heavily, the tips of his fangs were just visible. There was no denying that he was a vampire.

“Was it like this before?” Alec asked hoarsely. “I mean… did I just not see it?”

“I had to work very hard to rein all this in,” he said, kneeling on the bed and crawling a little way up it. His own boxer briefs strained at the crotch where his erection tented the fabric, and Alec’s own black ones were stained with a little spot of wetness where his cock twitched with eager interest. “I only let it slip once or twice, but you were distracted at the time.”

Alec smirked and then moaned as Sebastien’s palm skimmed up over his groin and over his stomach. He’d always been a bit self-conscious about the softer parts of him, but Sebastien worshipped him like he was some kind of immortal god, lavishing attention on him over and over until he was shaking and gasping and sweating. “Please!” he begged after what felt like hours. “Oh god, please…”

Sebastien slid off the bed and deftly removed his own underwear before encouraging Alec to lift his hips for him and drawing his boxer-briefs down too. Before Alec could think or process what was happening, Sebastien was between his legs again and had swallowed the entire length of his cock to the back of his throat in one.

“Oh fuck,” he hissed, mind whiting out.

Sparks of pleasure shot up his spine as Sebastien worked him alternately with his mouth and his hand.

He teased him, licking the slit at the tip where pre-come beaded profusely now, teasing the delicate folds of skin until Alec thought he was going to shatter apart with want. Just before it got too much to bear, Sebastien would take him back into the wet heat of his mouth and work the underside of his cock with his tongue, swallowing occasionally and making Alec’s head spin all over again.

His balls tightened and he spread his legs wider, instinctively opening himself to Sebastien.

The vampire moaned against his cock and Alec whimpered. Pulling off him, an obscenely inviting thread of saliva and pre-come connecting them briefly, Sebastien sat up and reached for the top drawer of the bedside table. “Vampires neither catch nor transmit diseases,” he said, “But if you still wish to use protection —”

“— I haven’t been with anyone since you,” he rasped. “And I’m clean anyway…”

“As you wish,” Sebastien smiled, withdrawing an almost-new bottle of lube and sitting back down between his legs. Alec eyed it and Sebastien laughed shyly. “I opened it last night…” he admitted and Alec grinned.

That smirk shattered into an open-mouthed groan as Sebastien’s finger slid inside him and he began to prepare him. There was nothing perfunctory about it either. Sebastien took his time to work him open, his fingers fucking into him slowly, almost reverently, until he crooked them and Alec yelled as white-hot pleasure shot through him.

“Still so sensitive,” Sebastien crooned and Alec just shivered in response. His thighs were quivering too now from the effort of not bucking upwards into the empty air, his cock drooling freely over his slightly soft stomach with each futile twitch. He knew he was a wanton mess, and he couldn’t quite find it within himself to care. It seem to drive Sebastien wild anyway.

When Sebastien added a third finger, still stroking up and down his thigh with his other hand, Alec broke.

“Please, please, please,” he whimpered, out of breath and desperate. He cracked his eyes open and looked down at Sebastien to find that his red eyes had been almost eclipsed by his blown pupils. He gave a weak buck of his hips to try and encourage Sebastien to get on with it, but the vampire seemed utterly transfixed by him. He worked his fingers over Alec’s prostate gently but with absolute precision, and it was going to make Alec lose his mind altogether.

“Pleasepleaseplease, I need you, please…” he wailed as Sebastien’s mercifully short and blunt fingernail caught him just so and sent another jolt through him.

Finally the vampire moved, but as he withdrew completely, the loss almost shattered him. “Shh,” he smiled, stroking a soothing circle at Alec’s hipbone. “I’m still here…”

Alec whimpered like a wounded animal but his foggy brain accepted that the loss was only temporary, and he watched as Sebastien took his own flushed cock in his hands and slicked lube up the length of it in a couple of efficient strokes, head bowing under the attention it was receiving at last. He’d focused solely, completely, on Alec’s pleasure for all that time, and the realisation sent a fresh wave of lust rolling through Alec’s entire body.

He spread his legs, but Sebastien caught Alec under his left thigh and raised his leg easily, exposing Alec completely. Before Alec could process anything, his tip was nudging at Alec’s entrance, and then he had sunk all the way in to the hilt.

Sebastien froze then, bowed forwards over Alec like a supplicant, canines openly bared, eyes screwed shut, not even breathing.

“Sebastien… please…” Alec grunted. He’d never felt as full and whole as he had with Sebastien inside him, and yet this wasn’t enough. He’d ached for this. For months, he’d ached for it, and still it wasn’t enough. “Bast, please…”

Finally, the vampire opened his searing red eyes and began to move.

Slowly at first, he picked up his pace until Alec’s back was arching and his fingers clawed great furrows in the sheet beneath him. With each thrust, Alec saw stars at let out little fractured, broken gasps. Sebastien was quiet, almost silent, while Alec himself was unable to stop the sounds from tumbling out of him. He moaned and whimpered, gasped and cursed and begged until Sebastien yanked him further down the bed and lifted his hips a little way off the mattress entirely.

From this new angle, it was so blindingly good that Alec went alternately taut and limp with ecstasy. “I’m close,” he gasped over the slap of Sebastien’s hips meeting his skin.

The vampire snarled then; an inhuman sound that sent the hairs prickling all down Alec’s body.

“Come for me,” Alec begged in a whisper, opening his eyes and watching as Sebastien chased his release with a ferocity he’d never shown before. He wasn’t careless with his strength, but he was certainly forceful. Had Alec wanted to grunt ‘stop’, he knew the vampire would halt, but that was the furthest thing from his mind as he watched the flawless perfection of this man above him. “God you’re so beautiful,” he whispered. “Come for me, Bast…”

And at the sound of his name, uttered in little more than an abbreviated wheeze, Sebastien went still, hips spasming as his spine arched back like a bow at full draw, mouth open, head thrown back, fangs bared, eyes rammed shut, a sheen of sweat covering his perfect, bronze chest, his silver hair falling around him like a veil.

The sight of him like that wrenched Alec’s orgasm from him with such sudden force that he almost blacked out, and he clenched around Sebastien’s still-twitching cock as he spilled all over himself. Vaguely, he felt Sebastien trying to withdraw, but he grunted, “Don't… not yet… please… I… unngghh…” Unable to finish the sentence as the last shock waves fluttered through him, Alec went limp against the bed, breathing hard, his blood roaring in his ears.

He wasn’t sure how much time passed before Sebastien did finally move, but eventually he slid his softening cock out of him and Alec grunted at the cool slide of the vampire’s release down his thigh. He was too spent and exhausted to care about the mess though, and as Sebastien collapsed onto the bed beside him, he cracked one eye open.

Sebastien lay on his left side with his cheek pillowed on his bicep, facing Alec with his eyes closed, and he didn’t seem to be breathing. Tentatively, clumsily in the daze of his recent, mind-blowing orgasm, Alec reached out and touched the delicate skin on the inside of his arm. Sebastien jolted like he’d received an electric shock, and opened his eyes. They still burned bright red, but the rest of his face seemed a little softer somehow.

“You alright?” Alec asked.

Sebastien nodded.

“Been a while too, huh?” Alec grinned, flopping back down to stare at the ceiling where little points of light still sparkled across his vision every now and again.

“Not since that last night with you,” he said, words slurred with exhaustion. “Unless you count my rather pathetic climax alone last night, which I certainly don’t.”

“Not at all?”

He shook his head but didn’t speak again. The vampire lay perfectly still — perfectly undead — and perfectly vulnerable beside him without even a sheet to cover him. His cock now lay soft across the top of his right thigh, still drooling a little and making a mess on his olive skin. Not half as much mess as Alec was currently sporting over his torso, he mused with another smile.

With Sebastien showing no sign of stirring, Alec rolled carefully off the bed and headed on shaky legs to the shower. When he returned, Sebastien hadn’t moved, and he slid in beside him, drawing the sheets up around them and lying there to stare at him in the dimness of the unlit room, processing everything. Sebastien was back, and apparently wanted to stay. He could hardly believe how well that day had gone.

Waking the next morning with a cool, lean body pressed against him, Alec sighed, relieved that it hadn’t all been some kind of fever dream brought on by the stress of the exhibition.

The fact that the man next to him was an undead vampire who didn’t breathe in his sleep was a bit unnerving, and the way he had his cheek now resting on Alec’s collarbone and his nose pressed against his neck should also probably have been a bit of a warning, but Alec couldn’t bring himself to move, except to place a soft kiss on his forehead.

Suddenly, as if surfacing from boundless depths, Sebastien’s body heaved and he drew in a great, sucking, rasping inhale through his mouth. His lips brushed against Alec’s pulse and Sebastien began breathing heavily there for a moment.

“That will never not be weird,” Alec murmured.

“Apologies,” Sebastien muttered, trying to roll away. He paused, freezing, and then whispered, “I fell asleep…” as if that was something miraculous.

“Yeah, you passed out almost as soon as we both finished,” he snickered.

Sebastien turned his big, dark, doe eyes on Alec and said, “No, you don’t understand. Vampires don’t just shut down like that the way humans do. We only sleep somewhere we know is secure and safe…”

“Oh,” Alec said significantly as the realisation plunged through him. He tucked his arm under Sebastien’s head and tugged him closer so that their bodies were once again flush with one another. “I’m glad you felt safe…”

Sebastien sighed, trailing his fingertips across Alec’s chest in absent circles. His cock twitched too, and Alec shot him a look.

With a bashful smile, Sebastien said, “I can’t help that I find you attractive, Alec…”

“Wasn't complaining,” he grinned.

It was a long time before they rolled off each other that morning, with the sun well up and the sheets damp with sweat and tangled around their ankles. Vampires, it seemed, had a longer refractory period than humans, but Sebastien also came so big when he did that Alec wasn’t surprised. He gave everything to Alec when he came that Alec could quite happily lie there all day just staring at him as he came down afterwards.

The room was chilly, however, and when Sebastien seemed to have dozed off again around ten o’clock, he headed to clean up. Again.

As the steam billowed around him, he tipped his head back into the stream of searing water and nearly yelped as the shower door opened and let in a rush of cold air as Sebastien stepped into the stall as well. Cool hands found his waist and then strong fingers kneaded his arse appreciatively before Sebastien kissed and nibbled up his shoulder and traps to his neck. Instinctively, Alec tilted his head to one side and Sebastien moaned, pressing open-mouthed kisses there over and over as the hot water coursed around his lips.

The sensation must have been too much for him because he pulled back sharply with a hiss and Alec turned to face him, water still streaming down around them. Sebastien stood frozen, eyes red, staring at Alec’s neck. “I shouldn’t…” he began. “That was stupid of me… I…”

“What happens to the treaty if the human is willing?” Alec found himself asking. He’d thought about it a lot before drifting off the previous night. If Sebastien had wanted to drink from him, to feed on him, what would happen to the tenuous peace between hunters and vampires like him.

“Don’t,” Sebastien said through gritted teeth. His canines were elongated, Alec noted.

“What happens?”

“The only way it’s permitted is if the human agrees by written contract to become the vampire’s source.”

“‘Source’?” he asked. “That sounds like an official title.”

“It is,” Sebastien said, relaxing a fraction and putting his hands back on Alec’s hips. His cock stirred with interest and Sebastien smiled. He leaned back in, as if proving to both of them that he could do this, and kissed down Alec’s neck again from the junction of his jaw all the way to his collarbones. He ground his hips against Alec and they both began to harden again.

Alec’s hand went to Sebastien’s cock and he started to stroke him gently, knowing he was still sensitive from their last round. Sebastien let out a ragged exhale, the cool breath making Alec shiver slightly in the heat of the water.

“So…” Alec pressed gently, thumbing across the top of Sebastien’s flushed cock.

“Hmm?” he asked, a little stunned.

“What is a source?”

“A human becoming a vampire’s source means that the vampire drinks only from that human. It’s… an ancient - ah - custom,” he said, gripping Alec’s shoulders as Alec upped the speed and adjusted his grip to tighten just a little around his now fully hard cock. “Rarely used today, but still… nngh…”

“Mmm?” Alec grinned, loving that the vampire’s thoughts were unravelling under his touch. “Go on.”

“You’re a menace,” he laughed breathily, nipping playfully at his neck and then kissing him hard. Alec’s back suddenly hit the icy tiles behind him and he yelped, rearing into Sebastien who wasn’t all that much warmer, though the heat of the water was raising his body temperature from the ambient temperature of the room.

“So if…” Alec began, somewhat distracted as Sebastien’s kisses continued and the vampire raked his fingers through Alec’s wet hair, scraping luxuriantly across his scalp hard enough to make him break off and groan. “If… if I wanted to become your…”

“Don’t,” Sebastien whispered. “Not yet. Not so soon after… all this time.”

The subtext was clear. Let’s see if this is going to last before I risk my life with the hunters guild and your family, shall we?

“Fair enough. Nothing to say I can’t suck you off now though, right?”

“Nothing at all,” he whispered and then immediately cursed as Alec sank to his knees and did just that.

It was only as he was handing in his own letter of resignation that the truth really sank in for Alec. He’d gone from post-grad assistant in the department to a full lecturer, where he’d stayed for six years, and now he was moving a little way out of the city, and moving in with his boyfriend of a year. A vampire, nonetheless. His life had gone from miserable to wonderful in that relatively short time.

Sebastien met him at the edge of campus after he’d handed the letter personally to the head of department. Standing under the verdant cherry trees, Sebastien looked like a vision. He wore tight, dark jeans and a loose shirt, half untucked, with his long hair tied back in a loose plait, fly-aways wisping around his head like mist. Alec walked straight up to him as the vampire opened his arms, flung his own arms around Sebastien’s neck, and hugged him.

“All done?” Sebastien asked without pulling back.

He nodded and popped back down from his toes. They were both tall men, but Sebastien had a few inches on him still. With a slightly doe-eyed expression, Sebastien smiled and kissed him gently. “I love you,” he said softly between kisses.

“Come on, you big sap,” Alec said. “I’ve got to be out of my apartment at four.”

“Such a romantic,” Sebastien sighed melodramatically.

With Sebastien’s supernatural strength, loading up the little van they’d hired for his stuff didn’t take long, and after giving his keys back to the landlord and signing the final bits and bobs, they were on the road.

The old farmhouse had been a find of Sebastien’s, and it needed some work. “Well, what else am I going to do on long, impossibly sunny summer days while you’re running your own business from the little art studio at the bottom of the garden?” Sebastien had laughed when they’d first viewed it, the back of his hand pressed to his forehead in a terribly ‘put upon’ gesture. “I might as well spruce the place up.”

“It needs more than a light ‘sprucing up’,” Alec had said, brows raised at the rotten wooden beam and the tired 1950’s kitchen. “And don’t tell me you made your wealth flipping houses back in the day.”

“Would you rather I told you I robbed the Bank of England and they still haven’t noticed?” he replied archly before planting a kiss squarely on Alec’s scratchy, stubble-darkened cheek.

With a scowl, Alec had shot him a look. “I honestly don’t know whether that’s a lie or not…”

“It’s a lie,” Sebastien snorted. “I can’t believe you think I’m a criminal.”

“You’re a vampire,” he’d retorted. “You could probably have just walked in there and demanded a small fortune in gold ingots and they wouldn’t have objected…”

“Please. I do have some scruples. And besides, I only use my charms on poor, miserable artists to get into their pants…”

“And their hearts too, apparently,” he’d scoffed as they’d left the dilapidated house with Sebastien’s hand in Alec’s back pocket, fingers firmly cupped around his arse.

It took another six months for the work to be completed, and even with Sebastien’s not inconsiderable talents in the DIY and home improvement departments, they still had to call in a team of builders to fix the pointing in one wall and to sort out a few other structural issues. But by the end of the work, the farmhouse was quite frankly the most stunning place Alec could ever have dreamed of living. Exposed oak beams and a fireplace big enough to park a tractor in were only half of the best features of the place.

One clear, frosty evening in late October, the pair sat outside on the recently finished patio, a small cast iron fire-pit crackling away and sending sparks and heat twisting up into the night sky, a glass of wine each in one hand and their free hand clasped around the other’s.

“Bastien…?” Alec said, not taking his eyes from the mother-of-pearl points of light in the sky above.

“Mmm?”

“I’ve been thinking a lot lately about… about becoming your source.” He didn’t miss the sharp inhale from his partner, nor the way Sebastien went completely still in the wooden chair beside him. He also didn’t say anything. “I’d… I’d like to ask how often you’d need to feed from me, and… what the repercussions would be for me as the human…”

Still Sebastien didn’t speak for a long time, and Alec worried he’d spoilt the serenity of their evening with the sensitive question. Finally, the vampire cleared his throat and Alec realised with a jolt that he was near tears.

“Bast?”

At the sound of the pet-name, Sebastien blinked rapidly and two mirroring tears tracked down his cheeks in perfect synchrony. “I thought you’d forgotten all about it,” he said in a hoarse croak. “I didn’t want to bring it up again.”

“You should have done, silly,” Alec groused, and he was met with a watery smile that didn’t meet his eyes at all.

“Well, to answer your questions,” he said, trying to sound unaffected even if he clearly was. “Every three months is safe enough, so long as you take an iron supplement. If you don’t, you might feel a little more tired right afterwards. We generally take slightly less than a person would give at a blood donation, if that helps put it into context.”

Alec turned and frowned at him.

“What?”

“You’ve gone all clinical,” he said, shuffling a little and setting his wine glass down on the edge of the stone fire pit. “Do you not want this anymore?”

Sebastien swallowed thickly and looked away. In the ochre and copper flicker of the flames before them, his suddenly red eyes seemed to glow like coals. “More than you know…” he rasped.

“Then what’s the problem?”

He chewed the inside of his cheek for a moment before turning back to face Alec with glassy eyes. “I’m frightened.”

Alec’s scowl deepened and he rose from his chair to straddle and sink down into Sebastien’s lap. Settled in his new position, he kissed Bast’s lips and stroked his loose, white-blond hair out of his eyes. “Of what?”

“Losing control. It’s been… decades since… If I hurt you, Alec… it would break me.”

“How about we start small? Just a taste?”

Sebastien looked so young then in the firelight. He suddenly looked like the twenty year old man he had been when he’d been conscripted into the army and sent out to battle to die, only to be turned at the eleventh hour by a nurse in a field hospital who’d seen something special in him. Thank god she had, Alec mused.

Alec leaned back a little and brought his index finger slowly to Sebastien’s lips. The vampire swallowed, red gaze drifting down to watch its approach before looking back at Alec’s face, searching, questioning, doubting.

Alec nodded and slid his fingertip a few millimetres into Sebastien’s mouth. The vampire inhaled, closed his eyes, and then opened his mouth properly. Alec brought the pad of his fingertip to the underside of his right canine, and pressed.

After a moment, the pressure gave way and a prick of pain like a needle pierced his skin. A bead of blood welled there instantly and he withdrew to let it swell. Sebastien clearly smelled the blood because his pupils dilated and he sucked in a sharp breath.

“Easy,” Alec said. “It’s only a drop.” And with that, he turned his finger over and held it above the tip of Sebastien’s tongue.

Paralysed in a heartbeat of terror, Sebastien sat rigid, frozen, wide eyed, but Alec lowered his finger to meet the slight roughness of his tongue, and Sebastien’s eyes rolled. He moaned and let his tongue play across the tiny pinprick wound, fingers digging into Alec’s hips. The tiny wound had already stopped bleeding, but he sucked gently, drawing a little taste more. Then he released Alec and stared at him, a look of stunned awe on his beautiful face.

“How was that?” Alec asked, briefly thumbing a fond arc across Sebastien’s cheekbone before dropping his hand.

“Manageable,” Sebastien murmured.

“Ok, I have to ask, do I taste good?”

The tense spell that encapsulated both of them broke and Sebastien cracked a smile, fangs and all. “Yes,” he rasped.

“So… I can become your source?”

“If you wish it, yes. You can withdraw the honour at any time. I won’t hold you to it.”

“Good to know,” he said, only half laughing. A moment later, he said, “When… When do you want to start… you know… properly. Formally?”

Sebastien’s eyes had drifted to the rabbiting pulse in his neck.

“Now?” he asked. “It’s only been a few weeks since you went to the blood bank though…”

“That’s…” he said, hands finding Alec’s waist and holding him gently. “That probably works in my favour this time. Are you sure you want this?”

“To be ‘yours’ on your terms as well as mine? Of course,” he smiled, and watched as another tear rolled down his perfect olive cheek. He tilted his head to one side, feeling a little sheepish, and said in barely a whisper, “Whenever you like.”

“Really? Now?” Sebastien hissed, chest suddenly heaving. “Just like that?”

Alec laughed quietly. “It’s not as if we’ve just met. I know you, Bast. I trust you. I wouldn’t offer this to just any old vampire, you know?”

Unable to stop the smile from twisting his lips, Sebastien finally relented with a nod. “Alright. But not here. You’re going to want to be more comfortable.”

“But I’m already comfortable here,” he whined playfully, wiggling his hips in Sebastien’s lap, eliciting a deep, rumbling groan.

With a roll of his red eyes, Sebastien sighed. “Stubborn arse,” he grumbled without sting.

“You love my arse.”

“Yes, you’re right. I do,” he said.

Tenderly he ran his thumb down the line of Alec’s carotid and inhaled deeply. “I love you,” he whispered. And then he leaned close. He took his time kissing Alec’s neck until he was gasping and rocking his hips against Sebastien.

“Please…”

“Last chance,” Sebastien said against the skin of his throat.

Alec shook his head. “I want this. I’m yours.”

So the vampire sank his fangs into the artery. After the initial surprise and sting, Alec’s whole body lit up as the venom hit his bloodstream, and he bucked into Sebastien who held him still with what should have been frightening ease. There was no fear behind the gesture, only longing and love and sweet, aching, rolling, unending pleasure.

“Oh fuck,” Alec moaned, going limp in his arms as Sebastien began to feed, withdrawing his fangs to draw more deeply on him while he held him easily in his arms. The vampire moaned, lips locked against his skin so as not to spill anything. The motion of his throat suddenly fascinated Alec as he swallowed down his own life-force, but before he could raise his hand to touch fingertips to his Adam’s apple, pleasure exploded in his mind and he forgot everything.

When he came back to himself, he was inside, lying on their bed, with a small, soft dressing over his neck, and Sebastien sitting quietly on the bed beside him, staring down at him and holding his hand. As he blinked his eyes, he frowned. “What…?”

“It’s intense the first time,” Sebastien murmured fondly. “I did say you’d want to be somewhere more comfortable.”

“ S’perfect,” he slurred. “Fuck me…” he added, more curse than command.

“Maybe later, hmm?” Sebastien smiled. There was a flush to his cheeks that Alec had never seen before, and a brightness to his eyes.

“C’mere,” Alec said, patting the bed beside him. With Sebastien lying silently next to him, Alec rolled over and hooked one leg over Bast’s thigh. “Love you,” he mumbled, sinking into a deep and exhausted sleep, even as Sebastien’s hand came up to cradle his head.

The vampire smiled, kissing his forehead. “I love you too.”

___

Hope you've enjoyed this 23,700k story! Looking forward to your comments as always. Don’t forget to let me know if you did enjoy it by leaving a like and/or reblogging it!

#vampire #exophilia #male vampire #male vampire x human #male vampire x male human #vampire x human

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pynkhues · 3 years

Note

.... any succession fic recs? 👀

Yes!! I haven't read a lot for it yet, but some of the stuff I've read has been staggeringly good. I'm generally more into gen fic in this particular fandom, but have enjoyed some Stewy x Kendall, Gerri x Roman and Naomi x Tabitha too.

A few recs under the cut!

“I wanted to get out. From under all this. Take the money and run.”

Kendall tells Stewy even though he knows he’ll never get it, not like Naomi does. He’ll never understand the crush of it, the heart-stopping head-fucking fear of failing a tyrant. Kendall’s been ignoring the shape of it for a long time, putting pieces of it together in the back of his mind in total darkness like a blindfolded man. It doesn’t matter that one day his dad will die. It doesn’t matter about the money or the hostile takeover or the stolen files or any of it. There’s no running. Kendall’s Logan Roy lives inside his head.

Stewy laughs. Stewy laughs for a long time.

“There is no out, Ken, what the fuck are you talking about? You were born this and you’ll die this. You are what you are, and what you are is a fucking Roy.”

Kendall hates him, for a moment. Lightning-strike furious. What the fuck does he know about any of it, about his dad’s swinging dinner plate-sized hands, about getting 24% name recognition in reliable international polling, about puking every time you think about a car swerving off the road in the rain. About finding out that you can do something unthinkably, unimaginably terrible, and it doesn’t matter to anyone you know but you. There’s a scar on his arm that no one else who hasn’t already been told how it got there can ever know about, and he’s sick of it, and it’s not fair. He hates Stewy for a moment because Stewy’s right.

“I wanted to do the right thing, Stewy, for once in my fucking life.”

Stewy laughs again, more briefly, and the predator flash of his eyes in the neon of the motel sign is a torture all its own.

‘There is no right and wrong, Ken. How the fuck do you not know that yet? Not for people like you. Like us. There’s shit you get caught doing and there’s shit you don’t.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about. You really, really fucking don’t,” says Ken, and fuck, there it is. The road less travelled, that only he has ever driven on. The path he’s down where Stewy can’t follow. That place beyond Stewy Hosseini where he never thought he could go.

“You’re not telling me something, and when I find out what that is, and I will find out what it is, Kendall, don’t you think I won’t, so I am warning you that when I do find out I am going to be righteously fucking pissed,” says Stewy, and if Kendall thought those were a predator’s eyes before—

“Yeah, you will,” says Kendall, because he knows exactly how perceptive Stewy is. Exactly how weak he is. Exactly, precisely what both of them are.

And treat this night like it’ll happen again by postcardmystery. 8k words. Kendall x Stewy. Post s2. (CW: internalised homophobia, some homophobic language)

I tried to pick a shorter excerpt, but I literally couldn’t, this fic is so. good. The voices are pitch perfect, and it’s got this incredible build to it overall that goes back and forth between time and point of views and just rips your heart out. The premise itself is pretty simple – after the press conference at the end of 2.10, Kendall calls Stewy, and they drive through rural America while Kendall has a breakdown, and it’s just - - unspeakably good. I love it so so so much, I have no words.

r/roysucks Connor’s gf just posted on Instagram (instagram.com) submitted two months ago by webbedscrum_2279 23 comments share save hide report

[–] DM_ME_SAMESMAIL 40 points two months ago I too like to escape to my yacht in the Mediterranean when my family and I are on trial for covering up rape and murder. permalink embed save report reply

AITA for accusing my father of multiple crimes on his own news station? By amleth 3k words. Gen fic. Post s2.

And now for something completely different – epistolary fic which is just reddit news threads of the Roy family drama. I love an epistolary fic and this is just totally charming, and made me laugh a lot out loud.

“You’re quiet,” she observes. “That’s a first.”

“Yeah, well, the Turks beat it out of me. Gave you a run for their money.” He waggles his eyebrows. “So what is this? Whips and chains? Are we doing the whole boat-sex thing? I heard Shiv and Tom are looking for a third —“

Gerri finds what she’s looking for: a black leather binder. She drops it on the bed and begins paging through it, and Roman cranes his neck enough to recognize that it’s just full of documents, not like, dick pics. “I’ve given some thought to what you proposed a few weeks ago, and I agree that we should make things official in some way,” she says, and he blinks.

“Uh,” he says. “Which — what part of it?”

“Take a look.”

Gerri closes the folio and hands it over. It’s deceptively heavy, and the print on these pages is way too fucking fine, he thinks, paging through it. “Is this some kind of, like, Fifty Shades of Roy sex contract? Because it’s not that I’m not into it, but I think there’s a strong argument for going paperless —”

“Strictly speaking, this isn’t legally binding,” Gerri says. “Just something I threw together with regard to our business arrangement going forward. But with no respect to the family — the past few weeks have really illustrated that no one should take anyone at their word right now. Give me a little more than your word.”

Evacuation strategies for a yacht on fire by devourthemoon. 11k words. Gerri x Roman. Post s2. Explicit.

After the events of s2, Roman and Gerri fake being married as a professional alliance, only, y’know, maybe it’s not so fake. This fic is just so, so much fun, and messy in the best possible way. The author nails all the character voices, and the sex scenes are just the right amount of hot and ridiculous, and I just love it all a lot too.

Kendall estimates it will take an hour for the first articles to go up. Some rapid-fire blog without oversight—the New York Post, maybe, or wherever those Vaulter hippies have skulked off to—will slap a catchy headline on it and report his words verbatim. Give or take a gif of his face when he switches to script number two. New York Times, Washington Post, AP, those fuckers take longer. They like to bleed the story like Middle Ages plague doctors for its marrow, fact-check and add context and analysis and as many backlinks as their servers can handle. Still, a couple of hours, and his face will be plastered on every major news outlet. His voice will play over the nightly talk shows. He’ll trend on Twitter. A few more days, and he’ll be the star of analysis segments, podcasts, weekly briefings. Maybe, fuck it, maybe he’ll trend on Twitter again.

It’s been years since Kendall read Shakespeare. But that shit sticks with you, gets under your skin and emerges when you least expect it, like eczema or Keynesian economics. He knows how the media will spin this. Kendall Roy Attacks CEO Logan for Years of Corruption. Prodigal Son Disrupts Family Legacy to Restore Credibility. That’s how Hamlet ends, right? And Macbeth, Lear, Othello, Romeo and Juliet, even Titus fucking Andronicus. The spilled blood sinks into the ground, the seedlings sprout forth from the soil, and a new castle is built on the bones. Order out of chaos, or at least close enough an approximation that the tabloids will buy it.

Legacy for profit by owlinaminor Post-2.10. Kendall Roy. Kendall through Shakespeare analogies – just - - ooooof. It's a beautiful, lyrical character study that weaves through Roy family history and teases at a future none of them are even sure they want. It's gorgeous writing.

For the next few days Shiv would have to keep the pressure on Kira like an open wound because there were other women, victims that Nate’s people were going to find one by one as soon as that phone call disconnected. Mo was her father’s friend, good friend, for a long, long time. Nate and Gil, Sandy and Stewy, too many sharks in the water and the share price probably dipped to a new low but she would never check a stock ticker. Her husband’s nerves fraying at the edges on national television. She had promised a woman she’d never met before that she would kill roughly one third of the top male executives of her family’s company. Her company.

The last look Rhea gave her before she shut the car door was concern close to fear—no longer the same woman who heard their pitch in the safe room, who laughed with her at Argestes. Rhea had only looked into the abyss; she got cold feet and she didn’t even know what it’s like to grow up in it.

Her family’s company is hers, will be hers. Even from a whale fall, new life would spring.

Feed his flesh to wayward daughters by reogulus. 2k words. Shiv Roy. Set during 2.09.

This entire fic is set around Shiv bribing Kira not to testify, and god, it is so good. It’s bleak and rough, and really hones in on the complex ground Shiv walks as a character. It's another brilliant study of what it takes to be a Roy, and the way they make the awful choices in order to fulfill this legacy that they don't even know they want.

Kendall sets down his fork. “So. Tell me. Is it everything you wanted? Is it what you thought it would be?”

Roman stills. He never does that. He’s constantly a menace in motion, slouching and fidgeting, worse even than Kendall at his amphetamine peak. “What? The view from the tippy-tippy-top?”

“His regard.” Kendall wipes his mouth with the edge of the white cloth napkin. It comes away pink from the steak. “Dad. He’s all yours now.”

Roman still hasn’t moved. Finally, he lurches, like corroded machinery come uncertainly to life. “Yeah, man. It’s fucking tight as hell. I love every beautiful daddy and me moment I was a good enough little boy to earn.” He snorts. “Fuck you.” His face goes curiously slack then, like something Kendall’s own face would do. An intermission in the performance, an energy cut. Something genuine finding its way to the surface. “Why don’t you tell me. When you got everything you wanted, how the fuck did that make you feel?”

Nauseous, is the first word that springs to mind. Sick. Scared. I’ve never had everything I wanted, there’s that. I’ve never once had a single fucking thing I wanted. There’s that, too.

Interim leadership by arbitrarily 2k words. Roman + Kendall. Post s2.

I love Roman and Kendall scenes generally, but this one which features Kendall and Roman meeting for the first time a few months after the press conference in 2.10 is just a bit magic. The push pull dynamic that's just inherent to them mixed with the genuine affection and brotherly love is really special, and arbitrarily embraces both in equal measure. It's a great little fic.

There are lots more of course, and I'd also recommend checking out other works by these authors, but I hope this is a good place to start! :-)

#hbo succession #succession fic #fic recs #welcome to my ama #kendall x stewy #gerri x roman

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venteamocha · 3 years

Note

Hello! Sometimes I see you post stuff from IF blogs and I've recently started playing some IF games, which I've enjoyed so far. Do you have any IF stories you'd recommend in particular? I'm not attached to any particular genre and I don't need romance or a self-insert main character, (though I'm not opposed to either). Though, it's a definite plus if it's LGBTQ+ inclusive! I'm not really sure what the "cornerstones" are of IF so I'll take any and all recommendations haha

Oh god, I play so many IFs. So many. And it’s not even close to all of them, but I’m trying!!

Tbh IFs without romance seems to be very rare, I think because when I think IF I think Choice of Games, and those pretty much always have romance in them. At least, the most well known ones do. But a well done one without romance would be nice too!

Okay, this is a list of my favourites! They’re all LGBT+ inclusive, and most have gender selectable love interests, or at least ones that change gender depending on the gender and sexuality combination you pick. In no particular order, of course. Behind a cut because I’m gonna give them each a mini review. Because I haven’t done that yet.

(There are so many.)

Mind Blind: I absolutely love our big brother Nick, I love how witty and sharp so much of the dialogue is, I love how the MC clearly has a rather large handicap, but is still such an important person to so many people and not looked down on in the slightest. And when they are, we all know it’s because that person is a jerk! They’re not defined by what they aren’t, but what they are, and that’s a great message.

Shepherds of Haven: Part of why I love this one so much is I just love fantasy settings and this one just pulls it off so well. The cast is full of amazing characters, and I gotta say I die inside pretty regularly for not being able to afford the patreon content, lol. The author puts so much amazing stuff on there, and gives us so much great content in the game and through answers on tumblr, and you can tell this whole thing is just the best thing ever to them, and that makes it the best ever for us readers too!

The Wayhaven Chronicles: I’d be shot if I didn’t mention this one, the series that literally killed dashingdon when the book 3 demo dropped!! Again, another author that cares a lot and does their best to do right by their fans. We’ve been given drip after drip of these amazing characters backstories, and I just cannot wait for more! It’s definitely very romance centered, but the overall plotlines are also very good, and I have to say that no matter who I romance, I just feel like the group as a whole is a family. And that’s wonderful.

Speaker: I really like the lore. I really like the lore. I can’t wait until we get more of the overall plotline. Mostly I want my Speaker to get in deep trouble so Seb, Li and Seer (best sister ever) go off and beat the shit out of whatever is causing it. This probably says something about me, but what can I say, I thrive on angst and inflicting near death injuries on my OCs. Sometimes I even kill them, although all of this is offtopic. Or is it? I guess we’ll find out, although I doubt we’ll actually be able to kill off Speaker. And yes, I am definitely playing the Seb & Li poly route. I love them both so much.

Wilhelmina: I love vampires, ok? Ok? And this one is based off Dracula!! The OG!! And you can choose Drac’s gender!! Shit, sign me up forever!! Yeah, she might be literally killing my bff, torturing my fiancé and low key fucking with my mind, but vampires are hot!! Let me live! Or not. But yeah, this is a really well done retelling of the Dracula novel and I like how well it works as an IF. Did I mention I like vampires?? Especially when they get all monstery?? (This one has an MC with a set gender, as it’s based on an already existing literary figure. Mina can have a same sex relationship with dracula, if you make drac a female, or with Lucy, a female love interest.)

More Things in Heaven and Earth: Hi Nell!! First off, I gotta uncover a deep shame of mine. My family literally has a Shakespeare heirloom collection. As in, my greatgrandfather passed down through the family a collection of Shakespeare that was published in 1911. In ye olde englishe. I tried to read it when I was like 10 and was like what language is this?? What the fuck? What the fuck??? And ended up reading As You Like It, a bit of Romeo and Juliet, and a little of Hamlet. Didn’t touch the rest of it. I only got into the other stories through trashy ya reimaginings. That said, this retelling of Hamlet inspired me to go read the whole of the original and now I have a lot of fears for these characters that I’m so much more attached to, oh god I hope my Ophelia has a happy ending. I hope Hamlet himself has a happy ending. The dialogue is so well done, everyone is engaging, and yeah it made me finish an old af book when nothing else did. (This one also has an MC with a set gender, female, for the same reason. However, there are two gender variable love interests, so you can very much play a bi or gay Ophelia if you so choose.)

Guenevere: I love King Arthur. All the myths. I have so many books based on the King Arthur mythos, oh dear god. I love pretty much every version of it. All the movie and tv shows too! I just can’t get enough of those knights. I could go on for paragraphs about how courtly love worked and how all the different social castes were, but I’ll try not to. This series lets you customize Guen as a character to an amazing degree, considering that she’s also based on an actual literary figure like the other two I mentioned above. It really feels like she becomes your own character, and yet she still exists within this world very very well. I worry quite a bit that the author might have bit off more than they can chew with the current book they’re working on, what I’ve seen of it looks absolutely massive in scale. What is out so far is a wonderful read though, full of drama and laughter and lots of chances to make the story your own.

Bastard of Camelot: Yep! Another King Arthur series! Sue me! This one lets you set Mordred’s gender though, so it’s more inclusive in that way. It is very interesting to play as one of the “bad guys” of the King Arthur mythos. You can play them as straight up evil, as good, or you know, a bit of column a and a bit of column b. Or they can just be a rude little shit. It’s got dragons too! You get a dragon pet! Dragons are cool. It can be a bit tough to play sometimes, since a lot of people dislike Mordred quite a lot because of prejudices. Hopefully this will change a bit later in the series if you’ve been a fairly good person up to that point. Gotta say though, as a warning, that Mordred is a product of incest. It’s not glossed over, and it does cause a lot of problems for them in the story.

God of the Red Mountain: I just love that this inspired me to read more chinese mythology tbh. There is just so much here! And it’s just such a good read. I wish I was better at describing things. The MC being a spirit that you can define, the whole setting, most of the love interests also being spirits, the massive amount of history and culture and lore, how it all fits together. It is such a well done story. I really wish it got more attention than it does. I still miss Big Sister. I still can’t wait to find out more about the foxes, and how we can heal our MC.

The Nameless: Another one that lets you play as something otherworldly. I love the lore behind this one, and I love all of the cast I’ve met. I kind of like that our MC isn’t loved right off the bat, that we’ll have to win over all of our love interests and even the other npcs. I’m up for the challenge! Everything I’ve read on the tumblr for these characters just makes me love them all more tbh. I love how much they’ve written for all of them! Most of all though, I love Oisein. All the art of them is just *chef kiss* and their personality is magical.

A Mage Reborn: This is a really recent one but!! Wow, it’s really well done! That cliffhanger!! Oof!! Not many books literally start with killing your MC off! That takes guts! I told the author this already, but I love the way they formatted this, the way it starts with the end, so to speak, and then fills it all out. It just made everything feel so poignant, how MC is literally looking back at all these moments in time in the last minutes they have before they die. Shit. That’s powerful. And there’s gonna be more??? Can’t wait for that angst. Give me that drama. Of course I picked the one who had me killed, that’s just how I am!

These are all just the COG type games, there are a few twine games with graphics I’d throw on here, but the list is long enough as it is and they feel like they’re in a different category to me. Maybe it’s just me?

#if #if recs #rivi's recs #interactive fiction #there are more than these that i like too!#these are just the ones i feel the strongest about #and as i said these don't include the itchio twine ones #there are amazing ones there too but that feels like it should be a separate post?#i'd put links but i think it won't show up anywhere if i do #because tumblr is A Site #i can pass them on though if needed

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engagemachine · 3 years

Note

How would J react if Taylor swore infront/at him?

May 22nd: New update

Anon, I’ve been thinking about this ask for daaaaays. Had to write a fic. This is just part one (turned out a lot longer than I thought it would be--wrote it in one sitting) and I’ll post part two as soon as it’s done!

FYI: This takes place early on in Burn, probably sometime around chapter two, so Taylor is back in high school.

---

It’s still snowing outside when Taylor slides into her seat for third period English. She loves the overlarge windows in here, stretching along almost the entire wall of the left-hand side of the classroom. Black windowpanes showcase the little fountain in the courtyard, the stone benches seated around it, and the long, winding sidewalk where each senior from the class of 2002 got to lay down a single handprint in the cement to commemorate their pending graduation. Taylor thinks she would’ve liked that, to immortalize a piece of herself in that way, inscribing her name inside her handprint. Taylor B. It intrigued her, the thought of someone walking over her handprint years later, wondering who Taylor B was, what she was like, where she was now.

The fountain is frozen over, and the courtyard is blanketed in a thick layer of snow, still untouched. She wonders what it says about her that she often fantasizes about being the first one to run out and ruin it, leave her footprints behind, crunch through snow that is knee-deep, that no one else has sullied yet. There’s something about being the first person to disrupt the beauty of nature. Like stepping on a fallen dead leaf, the satisfaction of hearing it crackle beneath your feet. Or jumping into a still lake, watching the ripples that fan out across the water as you break through to the surface. Like leaving footprints in the sand at the beach, only to have them rinsed away by the incoming tide moments later. It’s a temporary disruption—and perhaps that’s the appeal.

Taylor settles into her seat and takes out her books. The classroom is unusually bright, the sky outside milky and pale as the snow piles up, falling softly in great big clumps. Mrs. Herndan leaves the lights off because they don’t need them.

Everyone is a little more animated than usual. If it keeps snowing like this, they might call it a half day and get to go home early. Taylor hopes that happens, that way she can order take-out and hang out with Mr. J. Maybe they can watch a movie together—something scary, so she has an excuse to cuddle up next to him, if he’ll let her. She’s been testing the boundaries of affection he’s willing to allow her to bestow, and recently she’s been surprised by how much she’s been able to get away with. Just last week she fell asleep next to him on the couch with her head on his shoulder—totally by accident—and he didn’t even move her. Just let her sleep there like that until she woke up, his hand heavy on her thigh, right above her knee, at which point she jumped up, all groggy and still rubbing the sleep from her eyes. She swore up and down that she was sorry, she’d never do it again. She was so afraid he’d be mad, but he just looked at her kind of funny, like he was trying not to laugh, and she blushed furiously and hurried off to her room.

Class is kind of boring, and it’s hard to focus when everyone seems just as distracted as she is. Mrs. Herndan has to stop her lesson twice just to tell everyone to be quiet and put their phones away. Taylor is snapped to attention each time she does. She didn’t even realize she had been staring at the window.

When the bell rings, Mrs. Herndan shouts out their homework assignment for the weekend, but it’s mostly lost to the din of jostling bodies and excited chatter of weekend plans as everyone fights to get through the door at once. Whatever. She’ll just have check the syllabus when she gets home. They’re reading Romeo and Juliet and it’s really hard to understand. Maybe she can find a way to rent a movie of it from the library—there’s supposed to be a version with Leonardo DiCaprio, she thinks. Maybe that’ll help. Sometimes she wants to ask Mr. J for help—and in the past she has, like when she had to make that volcano for science class, and he knew exactly what to do—but Romeo and Juliet is way too embarrassing. All those thees and thous, the declarations of love. Like she could ever ask Mr. J to interpret that for her, not without dying from embarrassment first.

She gets twenty minutes into her next class before they finally call it on the overhead speakers—school is closed. She smiles to herself as she packs up her books, already imagining herself curled up on the couch with her sketchbook and a cup of hot cocoa. She should still have some marshmallows left over—as long as Mr. J hasn’t eaten them all. He’s always eating her snacks. Sometimes, in a moment of pure frustration upon stumbling onto an empty bag or box of secret snacks she had stashed away specifically for herself, she tells him to buy his own snacks, but he always counters with, I did buy these, giving her a pointed look, and, yeah, he kinda did. It’s his money, after all. Not like she could buy any of this stuff without him.

She’s pulling the rest of her books from her locker and shoving them into her backpack when she feels a tap on her shoulder from behind. She turns around to face Jennifer Bartlett—from her geometry class—who is holds out a pink envelope decked in glitter and little metallic hearts.

“You’re inviiiiited,” she sings, thrusting the card into Taylor’s hands. Taylor blinks at her.

“Me?” she asks. Clearly this is some kind of mistake. Maybe a joke.

“It’s a sleepover, so bring a sleeping bag, okay? And like, don’t tell your mom or whatever, but my parents won’t be there, so make sure you just get dropped off in the driveway and none of your parents try to come inside.”

“Oh,” she says, her mind still swirling from the invite. A sleepover. “Okay.” She forces her gaping mouth shut, quickly nods, tries not to look too overeager. “Okay,” she says again, a little cooler, smiling a little. “I’ll totally be there.”

“Great!”

Jennifer bounds off down the hallway, joining a group of giggling girls waiting for her at the end, and Taylor looks down at the envelope in her hand, her name on it and everything. Taylor B.

She bites her lip and smiles.

Taylor can’t get home fast enough.

The bus takes forever, and they have to divert into South Side because of an accident near Paramount Park.

When she finally hops off the school bus and bounds for home, perhaps she takes off a little faster than she should. One moment her backpack is bouncing behind her as she races down the sidewalk, and the next, she’s spread-eagled and lying flat on her back, staring up at the gray sky as snow drifts down in soft little clumps around her. Oof. That hurt. She didn’t hit her head—thankfully—but she managed to scrape her cheek on the icy pile of snow packed into a miniature wall along the edges of the sidewalk. She thinks her cheek might be bleeding.

She doesn’t know what’s more embarrassing: the fact that she fell, or that the bus driver didn’t stop to help.

She winces as she gets up, wipes the blood from her cheek, brushes the ice and snow from her hands, wipes her palms on her jeans. The bus hisses as it pulls away, and Taylor’s cheeks burn. Maybe no one saw?

Her right leg kind of hurts, and she hobbles the rest of the way home, her excitement not dampened as she crashes through the front door, making it halfway through the kitchen before she remembers to shimmy out of her wet boots. Her socks are wet—there was a lot of slush on the sidewalks the closer she got to home—and her feet leave little wet prints on the kitchen floor before she gets to the carpet.

“Mr. J!”

He’s not in the living room, and he’s not in his bedroom, either, when she throws open the door and scans the bed, his empty desk. She frowns, pokes her head around the doorframe to her own bedroom. Not there, either.

“Mr. J?” She goes back to the beginning of the hallway, knocks eagerly on the closed bathroom door. She can see yellow light bleeding out from the crack beneath the door, doesn’t know how she missed that before. “Mr. J, you’ll never guess what happened at school today!” She waits a beat for him to say something—a grunt, even, some form of acknowledgement that he hears her, she’d take anything—but when she’s met with silence, she barrels on. “I got invited to a slumber party!” she gushes. She has both palms pressed flat against the door, is bouncing on the balls of her feet. “I ran all the way home to tell you, I can’t believe it!” she squeals. “It’s this Friday so we have to go to the store A-S-A-P so I can get a sleeping bag, okay? I mean—if it’s okay with you that I can go. But I’m sure it will be because I really want to go and I’ve never been to a sleepover before.” She sighs, taking a breath. He still hasn’t said anything, so she turns her back to the door and leans against it. He has to come out eventually. “And you won’t even have to worry about dropping me off because I can just take the bus, okay? I looked up Jennifer’s address at the library at school and I already wrote down how to get there, so I won’t get lost! Oh, and maybe I should get new PJs, too? And do you think that—”

The door is jerked open so suddenly she doesn’t have time to react, and she’s falling backwards before she can catch herself, straight into Mr. J’s chest.

He’s holding her underneath her arms, and she tilts her head back to look up at him—upside down—as he looks down at her. His greasepaint’s bright. Fresh-applied. She can smell its gummy texture.

She smiles up at him, a little unsure. A little frightened. His eyes are so dark. “Jeeze,” she says, lightly, trying to dissolve the tension. “You have to give me a warning, Mr. J.” She tries to laugh a little, but it comes out stilted, and the look he pins her with makes the smile slip right off her face.

“Maybe I would if I could get a word in,” he replies. He gets his arms behind her and pushes her off him. Taylor’s cheeks burn as she stumbles a few feet into the kitchen. She knows she talks a lot when she’s excited. She’s like a faucet that won’t turn off.

“Sorry,” she murmurs. She keeps her head low, a little afraid to meet his eyes. He’s in a bad mood—but she’s determined to go to this party either way, and she won’t stop prodding until he says yes. She glances up for just a second to catch the narrowing of his eyes, and then his hand is reaching out, closing around her jaw in a way that makes her flinch, pulling her towards him.

“What’s this?” he says. His eyes on her skin burn, and it makes the cut on her cheek throb in memory.

“It’s nothing,” she says, annoyed, maybe a little embarrassed. She doesn’t want to have to tell him that she slipped and fell. Also, can they please get back to talking about her slumber party? She impatiently reaches up and pries his hand off her—he lets her. She ventures a few steps back, watching him, and her back hits the counter with a thud. “But about the party—it’s okay if I go, right?”

He ignores her question in favor of taking a few lumbering steps closer—towering over her—and his fingers around her jaw are much softer this time when he takes it in his hand, tilts her head to the side so the cut on her cheek winks at him in the light that streaks out from the bathroom.

He sounds almost curious when he asks, “Did someone hit you?”

His question feels like a gut-punch. She looks up at him, eyes widening in surprise for a moment, and then her gaze narrows, and she’s a little more forceful this time when she pries his hand off her jaw.

“No,” she snaps. She can’t believe he thinks she got bullied. “I’m not a loser. I know how to fight back if I have to,” she scowls.

He looks at her for a long moment, his eyes hard and calculating, but she makes a point to meet his stare head on. She’s not going to flinch away. After a beat, he grins a little—some secret smile, like he’s in on some joke she’s not privy to.

“Of course you do,” he says.

“So can I go to the slumber party or not?”

Mr. J raises his eyebrows as he thinks about it. “Dunno,” he says, “I seem to recall your last little, uh, party, didn’t end so hot. Maybe you remember,” he muses, leaning down low, so their faces are level, “—or maybe you don’t, since you were high as a fucking kite.”

Taylor balks at him—he never curses, at least not around her—and she can’t help the way her mouth parts in shock. She can feel the threads of hope she’d been clinging to rapidly slipping out of her hands.

Truthfully, there’s not a lot she remembers from that night. Just a bonfire and a stranger’s half-remembered bedroom. The weight of a body she hadn’t wanted, a frisson of fear, electric as it sizzled down her spine, and then fumbling down the stairs, out the front door. Nobody had even cared. And then the frigid moon, the icy bite of wind on her cheeks. She remembers Mr. J, at some point, and waking up in that old airplane hangar, where she’d promptly puked her guts out over the side of the couch. The rest of that night is a blur. It’s probably better that way.

“It’s not—” she stops. Tries to find her footing around the right set of words. She just wants this so badly. It’s her one opportunity to fit in. To make friends. To be somebody. She wants so desperately to try and explain it to him, make him understand how badly she needs this—but somehow she knows he won’t get it. He doesn’t care about fitting in, or being liked—he’s the most unliked person in all of Gotham. Maybe even the whole world.

“It won’t be like that this time,” she assures. “There won’t be any boys there. I promise. It’s just a girl party. And I promise I’ll be really, really good and come straight home after.”

Mr. J’s eyes are dark as he watches her plead her case, and she takes the opportunity to stick out her bottom lip and put on an exaggerated pout. “Pretty please?” she says. “With lots of sugar on top?”

The corner of his mouth curls into a grin. “Okay, baby doll. Since you asked so nicely.”

“Eeep!” She squeals in excitement, immediately perking up, diving forward to throw her arms around his waist. She gives him a squeeze and he surprises her by patting her back. Once. Twice. His display of affection makes her cheeks warm, and she squeezes him a little tighter, happy to bask in the moment. “Thank you, Mr. J.”

Taylor buys a new set of jammies and a sleeping bag. She even spends the whole day prior reading about sleepovers, Googling at the library, getting more and more excited. She wonders if they’ll do face masks, or have a pillow fight, or watch a romantic movie, or paint each other’s nails?

She goes to Mr. J to model her new PJs for him, a yellow top with tiny blue flowers, with little matching shorts and a scalloped hem. She is bouncing around his bedroom—she had a Red Bull earlier for the first time ever, and whoa—and she does a cartwheel on the bed once she has his attention, collapsing into a heap on the floor because she misjudged the distance. She giggles, and then uses the bed to pull herself up while she prances around the room and chatters about her slumber party. She has a little notepad she found in a drawer in the kitchen, and after a few minutes, she flops back on his bed, holding the notepad above her face. She’s making a list of all the stuff she might need to bring. She read online that sometimes you should bring snacks.

“Hey Mr. J, cookies or chips?” she asks.

She turns to lay on her side, facing him, where he’s seated in his desk chair and has spun around to watch her, his fingers drumming against the armrests. His eyes are dark—but he doesn’t give her an answer.

She scowls at his lack of participation, and redirects her attention back to her list, tapping her pencil against her lips.

“Hmm… sometimes cookies have peanut butter, even if they say don’t, and I know lots of people have peanut allergies, sooooo… I’ll go with chips,” she decides, resolute. Her tongue pokes out when she makes a careful, neat checkmark next to the word chips.

She crawls off the bed and skips around the room for a little while longer, clutching her notepad, chattering to herself, mostly. She plays with the books on the bookshelf, all the little knickknacks left behind by the previous owner, rearranging them while she talks, musing about how cool this party’s gonna be, how many friends she’s gonna make. It’s gonna be great.

She lays down on the floor to make some snow-angels on the carpet, flapping her arms and legs slowly, staring up at the ceiling, feeling her energy start to wane. She asks Mr. J if he thinks she should wear her regular clothes to the party, or if she should come dressed in her PJs? And doesn’t he think they’re really pretty? And her sleeping bag comes with a built-in pillow, and isn’t that super cool?

She jolts awake when a pair of arms slip underneath her, hoisting her up, off the floor. She must have fallen asleep.

She frantically blinks the sleep back from her eyes. It’s dark, and she can’t see. “What day is it?” she asks, panicked, her voice cracking. “Is it tomorrow yet? Did I miss the party?”

“Shhh.” Mr. J carries her the short distance to his bed, lowers her to the mattress even as she wraps her arms around his neck, refusing to be put down. She doesn’t even have the forethought to marvel over the fact that he’s just put her in his bed, that she’s lying down on his pillow, or that the covers smell like him.

“But did I miss it? Is it over?”

She thinks she can hear a smirk in his voice when he says, “No, baby doll, you didn’t miss it. Time to sleep.”

He peels her arms away from his neck, and this time she lets him. She sinks into the mattress, and sinks quickly back into sleep.

#anonymous #asks #Burn #Taylor #new update #it's not finished yet but I just wanted to update with what I have to so far :)

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phalliwellz · 3 years

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A small rant on Forwood (and why I don’t like it as both a Tyler and Caroline stan.)

(Before I start I should say I very much like Tyler more than Caroline, so it honestly might show in this rant. Regardless, it’s not an attack on her character, more so how poor writing makes Caroline worse than she actually is. Anywho.)

I legitimately cannot say one good thing about forwood. Except what @/hizziemikaelson actually made me realize was that it was Caroline’s best ship, but Tyler’s worst. Since the show likes to portray Caroline as everyone’s emotional savior, they very much knew what they were doing with getting them together. Ty was the patient, Care was the therapist. ‘Tyler has ‘anger issues’? perfect! Caroline will now be his entire rock because that’s her job and we don’t know how to write this character without EVERYONE falling in love with her in someway because we’re WEIRD!’ Like. lmao what? They made Caroline get so carried away with that shit that it turned manipulative. She subconsciously wanted him to be so dependent on her because someone wanting her for once? So unrealistic! (I say that sarcastically because it’s bullshit, but this is a forwood rant, not a Caroline rant.) and you best believe she used that to her advantage till the very end. She wanted Tyler to be nothing without her. And in the show’s eyes for a very great while, he was. Everything Ty did from s2 to s5 was ‘cause Caroline influenced it or wanted him to, unless it was related to his pack and even then he had to fight to be able to do that on his own. (Remember when she didn’t give two shits that his pack member died? (Inherently cause of Elena and Caroline wanted him to help her save her, might I add.) they made his happiness rely on her. Like I said, he was nothing without Caroline Forbes. Literally. Who swooped in when he was going through his father passing away? Caroline. Who was there when he found out his uncle died? Caroline. Who was DEFINITELY there when his mother died? Caroline. Which isn’t necessarily a TERRIBLE thing, but in this context it’s not cute/healthy, it’s dehumanizing. Because instead Tyler’s grief turns into her grief. We can only focus on Tyler if Caroline is mentioned/in the shot. It’s so fucking annoying, especially as such an extreme Tyler stan. I want to know about Tyler Lockwood, not Caroline Forbes and her werewolf boyfriend. But that’s what they did. That’s what they made forwood. They turned it into in the relationship only Caroline can excel at. He loved and cared for her and at most all she did was like his body and like the fact that he cared about her. I mentioned this before in a rant of mine but Caroline only started dating him because he actually listened to her yap all the time and showed her more attention than Matt ever did. (Without a fight atleast.) other than that, what else did they have? Vampire and werewolf, we’re to believe they despise each other and Caroline and Tyler are mystic fall’s answer to Romeo & Juliet? Fuck outta here. I know Caroline never cared about that boy because instead of actually being furious at Damon for killing him, it was, ‘He was my first love. *Conflicted but ready to get this over with frowny sad face*’ and my favorite ignorant bullshit line that she told KLAUS, ‘You were never the villain in my story.’ Oh, we know. We figured that out when you fucked him in the woods while you were supposed to love Tyler but you know, semantics :).

It’s fucked because I could see the appeal? Like genuinely. Especially as someone who wanted THE BOTH OF THEM to be happy, it could’ve been the relationship where both of them shined, not just Tyler being Caroline’s boy toy and Caroline being propped up as ‘a soft uwu baby next to a bad boy with a mean temper and she has to calm him down all the time despite not being his registered therapist.’ They also wanted forwood to be the one good unrequited ship on the show and Caroline’s first great ship but that’s the problem, it was hers, not Tyler’s. Basically it was Caroline’s world, Tyler was simply living in it.

I feel like nothing defines forwood more than the scene where Tyler finds out Caroline slept with Klaus because everything from that is just them in a nutshell. Tyler trying to calm himself down/diffuse the situation because he doesn’t want to blow up, he knows it’ll hurt Caroline by doing so but he’s hurting, he needs an outlet. Caroline, who’s used to always being his outlet, is instantly threatened and actually doesn’t feel like she should be in the wrong for fucking Klaus, so suddenly she’s nervous and now she’s even more nervous because she can’t calm him down this time. Stefan, with his fat headed ass, instantly only sees Caroline being threatened and can’t even process being mad at her, he tries to defend Care, almost gaslighting Tyler into feeling like he’s the one that should be either apologizing or not taking it so hard. It was such a mess of a situation and such a pivotal moment I don't know how they even survived after that. It showed that forwood was so one-sided. No sex/grief scenes or declaration of love could’ve changed that. He fell in love with Caroline because she was all he had. She fell in ‘love’ with him because she was horny and needed a lap dog to heal her insecurities/wounds. No other reason.

Personally I think they could’ve been more than what they were and could’ve been a great way to show Tyler’s development, Caroline’s development and even that julie & co. actually can make good relationships/have good writing. But unfortunately, none of those things happened except showcasing that Tyler Lockwood never mattered to anyone in the tvdu long before his death and Caroline Forbes is figuratively and literally the golden girl of tvd, despite them trying so hard to make her seem like she’s not. Tyler never stood a chance in that relationship.

#i wrote this when i couldn't stop thinking abt how much i love tyler so #i just have. too many feelings abt this dude #and my rewatch has me so fuckin irritated #like Tyler I’m gon get you outta this dumbass show on god 😭😭#Tyler Lockwood #anti forwood #anti caroline forbes #just in case #Caroline warriors pls know i love her i just don’t like her near my son #the vampire diaries #t rants abt tvd #shit t says

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dropsofletters · 3 years

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how to lose someone in seven steps? | prologue

— summary: love-induced heartbreak is one of the most overrated things to ever be talked about, and she doesn’t get why most of her friends take up on such conversations with sighs following every statement. relationships aren’t something to linger on—but when one of her friends dares her to make one of their infamous exes, whom they had a hard time getting over with, fall in love with her, she takes up on the challenge. earning them? easy. losing them? even easier.

— title: how to lose someone in seven steps? — pairing: wayv x reader (depending on whose route you select) — genre: bet!au ; strangers to friends to lovers!au ; love experiment!au (and other au’s depending on the routes) — type: fluff ; romance ; humor ; drama ; angst (varying according to the route) — word count: 2,821

She once said she’d die the day she fell in love.

It’s one of those rare concepts that her literature teacher loved gushing about when she wrote them on paper. Dying for love, actually, has been romanticized for as long as she can remember. Think The Notebook or Romeo and Juliet—hell, even The Walking Dead could enter in this category in some of their episodes. The toxicity of such matter, however, goes past what she has ever wanted to portray when saying those words. She’d die if she ever were to fall in love.

Because, falling in love feels like dying, and though she hasn’t lived it, she can tell by the look on her friends’ eyes whenever they got their heart stepped on, munched, bitten, spat out at their feet—whatever. Promises of never going through the same thing lived inside her head when she had to push one of her friend’s hair back to have them throw up on the club’s flooring, crying after a break-up. Or, rather, when she saw one of her friends skimming through Instagram for the twelfth time that day and, yes, absolutely, her boyfriend is, still, liking the pictures of a bunch of women with cup sizes bigger than hers.

It’s unnecessary. People dream about it, hear songs about it, but they never quite think about how much they could avoid if they didn’t go around seeking for love, or for one-time-things that will only end up in another person getting entangled. It’s the common mistake of never getting to know another person well, and hence, never getting to know oneself nicely enough. Love starts from the moment we give our first breath.

As of currently, her friend Ada can’t breathe. Or, well, she can—but she chooses not to as she downs yet another shot and weeps at the memory of her latest break up.

The food settled on the table in between the group of eight women smells delicious, but no one has payed enough attention to the meal itself and rather, downed a few drinks for the sake of making Ada feel better. With her makeup running down her chubby cheeks, her once long brown hair cut into a bob after the break-up that has kept her crying for the past two days, and her hands shakingly reaching for the soju to pour some more, she finally takes the first bite of the salad she had ordered, eyes glimpsing at what she never wants to have.

Heartbreak is the ugliest, yet most overrated, thing that could ever happen in this world.

The kind of beauty a woman possesses when getting into a relationship erases itself when she’s out of it. It’s momentary, sure, she’s well aware that Ada will go back to her bubbly, adorable self one of these days, but it’s neither tomorrow nor the next day. “I—I just don’t get it—” And, preferably, the people on the table next to them must not get it as well. They have been snooping on what Ada has been worrying about for the past thirty minutes. “The sex was good. The kisses were good. I just—Why did he have to be such an asshole at the end?”

Ada believes in happy endings, though. When they were children—and she’s one of her oldest friends—, she’d always dress up as Cinderella on Halloween, throwing her shoe around in hopes of someone catching it and looking for her. No one did, but one can only dream. “Baby,” Elena, the classiest of the group, takes out a small handkerchief from her purse before patting it against Ada’s moist cheeks. “That’s what you get for dating an exotic dancer. Who thinks an exotic dancer is going to settle down for them?” She pushes her long black hair away from her shoulders, her porcelain skin matching the deep burgundy of her plush lips. Elena’s beauty is unmatchable.

“I did, b—but…” There it is, the worry, the excuses that come with dating a man. “But Yukhei just seemed different. He always talked about his dreams…and about how pretty he thought I was. It just—” Before she could refill her glass with soju, she takes the bottle away from her.

Heartbreak may have never reached her, but she’s not letting it affect her friend. “Ada, stop it. Enough alcohol for today. Grab a bite or something.”

“Ah!” Ada, as dramatic as always, pushes her head back. “Stop babying me, you’ve all been in this position. Just let me motherfucking drink—!”

Elena sighs from her spot, fingertips running over the glassed table of the restaurant they’re in. Red curtains over glassed windows who trail over the lightened-up city, matching the champagne colored walls. “I didn’t act like this when I broke up with Kun.”

Yifei, who has just come back to the table after a smoke break, ruffles the curled up strands of her bleached blonde hair before scoffing. “That’s because you didn’t love Kun, honey.” Taking her bomber jacket off, she lets her tattoos be on full display, roses and thorns the most outstanding one. “You’ll know what real love is when they leave you for someone else, not when you’re the one leaving.”

“…Damn.” Ada whispers from her spot, licking the outline of her shot glass before sighing. “Did Kun Hang hurt you that much?”

Yifei has thick skin, hurts in ways that no one ever notices, and her love affair from four years ago still lingers within her. “It’s not exactly pain, but when your high school love admits that he’s been in love with this old ass businesswoman for the entirety of your months-long relationship, it hurts.”

“That was four years ago,” Elena answers, swatting her hand in the air. “Besides, I was in love with Kun, but contrary to your two guys…he loved too much. I felt like I was being constricted and, girls, I am a chef—” Pride bleeds from her every word when she takes a sip of her pink champagne. “I know when bad things are cooking up, and Kun was a big red sign for clingy.”

A hiss leaves her lips then, rubbing her hands together. “Oh, damn, we’re getting good spice today, aren’t we? Tearing your exes apart!”

It’s fun—it’s the kind of activity they have to do to have Ada smiling at them. “Well, Ada, now that you’re single, some advice:” Liying speaks from her spot, fixing her perfectly sleeked back bun just to grab a bite of the immaculately prepared carbonara pasta in front of them, twirling her fork in the air. “Never go for younger guys. I went for a college guy, thinking that because he didn’t have much experience, he’d go to me, and because he was rich as all hell, I thought he’d pay for everything…” Liying’s voice trails dangerously, her face without an ounce of makeup scrunching up in disgust. “But younger guys? They’re insecure, end of story.”

It’s a bit difficult to remember who had swept Liying off her feet, considering she’s now happily in a relationship with a journalist. “Who was that again?” She asks, well aware that she is the only one who has stayed single for the majority of their friendship, and Liying turns to the side to look at her.

“Liu Yangyang. Rich nightmare.”

Yifei whistles from her side. “But he was rich. That’s always a plus.”

“Not when he’s always texting you, Yifei.” Liying conquers, pursing her lips in the process. “Like, babe, like, are you sure that you didn’t, like, sleep with someone while I was in Germany? Like, babe, really, like, it is better if you just tell me. Like. Like. Like.” She repeats over and over again, and it’s at this moment that her brain clicks. Right. Liu Yangyang…Liying had introduced her to him once at her birthday event, but she doesn’t remember much from him.

The women around the table burst with laughter, and she looks towards another one of her friends, trying to make Ada feel better. “This group of friends was formed because we all have shitty tastes in men,” Angela instructs, moving her bangs off her forehead to showcase her big eyes, wetting her lips with her drink before hissing. “You remember my ex Ten, Ada? Sometimes, when we slept together, I used to think he was actually getting off to the thought of himself.”

Elena actually snorts at those words, and to have elegant Elena Wang give such reaction means that it is something truly interesting. “No way!”

“Yes! He was too vain. Everything he said was amen.” Angela raises her hands in the air, sighing deeply. “I was saved the day he decided to break up with me.”

She turns to the quiet woman to the side, Shishi’s platinum hair cascading down her back, her thick eyeliner definitely something outstanding about her. “What about you, Shishi?”

“I broke up with someone not too long ago…” The quiet woman says, though the entire table already knows about that.

Yifei groans. “Come on, Shishi, let it out!”

“Fencer asshole.” Shishi, who rarely cusses, lets it out in the air, wrapping her hand snugly around her fork. “Xiao Dejun liked every woman who had good makeup skills. Wear red lipstick and you’re ready to get on his good list.”

Someone lifts their gaze from her phone—Bingbing, happily in a relationship for the last two years, lover of men with smart mouths to carry on with her perfect texting skills. “Can I talk shit about my ex, too?”

“Aren’t you happily married?” She questions, only to have Bingbing waving her phone in the air.

“And I’m keeping my relationship alive because of what I learned.” Bingbing replies, pushing her body forward and resting her head on her interlocked hands. “If a man is hard to decipher, he’s just not that into you. Men are simple creatures, you see.”

“Word to that!” Ada says from her spot, a hiccup following soon after. “Men are simple creatures, because they can’t be considered human.”

For a moment, silence falls around the table and she takes this time to lose herself in the taste of lettuce, tomato and onions sliced together into a perfect concoction with rosy sauce on top. Only when she takes a big bite, downing it with a bit of water, does she realize that all pair of eyes are settled on her. Fourteen eyes capturing her every move is already enough of a terrifying visual.

“What?” Her voice lifts a bit after she says those words, patting a napkin against her lips in case there is something on her lips.

Ada rolls her eyes, too much alcohol taking away her dulcet features. “Babe, tell us about your biggest heartbreak. The biggest asshole you’ve met.”

For a moment, she tries to think. The last date she had was over a year ago…and after losing her time with someone who actually didn’t want to be with her, she cut things off. Not that it hurt, just that she simply decided not to continue dating. It’s a waste of time, seriously.

“I’ve never…had anyone break my heart. If you don’t let anyone do that, it doesn’t happen.” Or so she wants to believe. She never wants to give anyone the benefit of the doubt.

“Come on,” Ada replies, taking her phone out of her pocket and looking for something before turning the screen to her. “Tell me you wouldn’t fall for someone like this. You just have dated people who are not worth a heartbreak, I guess.” A golden skinned man meets her vision, and it’s the first time she has seen Yukhei. His brown hair parts naturally, the dimly lit room letting her see the curve of his plush lips, the straightness of his nose and his big, almost doe, eyes. A glint of sweat trails up his biceps as he places one hand on his head, his collarbones on full display on the picture, and though the image does not go lower, she can tell he’s shirtless.

Attractive and yet, she shrugs. “Too typically handsome. I wouldn’t consider him my type.”

“What she wants is the absolute opposite,” Elena says, already rummaging through her social media. “A goody-two-shoes who would leave everything behind for you: Qian Kun.”

This time around, she gets to see a picture directly from Instagram. This guy’s hair is darker, sporting a chef’s uniform as he lifts a tray of food up into the air. Exquisite at its finest, but he’s not bad looking in any way. Slim lips welcoming a big smile, eyes twinkling in innocence, looking too posh to ever make a mistake. “…Not bad, I like the dimple. He seems too good to break your heart, though.”

“What about an artistic guy?” Angela says from her spot, showing her own phone but from another account. This breakup must’ve been messier, she guesses. “I’m sure you’d get your heart broken by Ten. He’s just…too risqué, you fall for him without thinking.”

This man is seated on a leather couch, a camera up to his face, one of his eyes squinted but the one that is opened lets her see the cat-shaped form of them. His lips are slim, though the glimmer of his cheeks is the perfect highlight, tattoos shaping his form, his legs ones to desire. “Nah, he couldn’t break my heart even if he wanted to.”

It becomes a competition, with Shishi rushing to find the pictures she saved on her phone of her latest relationship, clinging to the side of a man in a white uniform. His eyes are an enigma, though the smile on his face is sweet, his brown hair pushed away from his face. “What about the fencer asshole, Xiao Dejun?”

“He’s okay.”

Then, Liying refreshes her memory of Liu Yangyang. Seated in between a big group of people with a smile on his face, his surroundings rich enough to point out in what kind of party he is, the suit on his body deep blue like the ocean. “What about younger guys? Maybe, she just needs someone who is reckless—”

“I’d crush his heart.” Overconfidence starts to take up on her, taking a sip of her drink. “Give me a better shot.”

Yifei, one of her latest options, pushes her phone forward. “What about Kun Hang?”

She remembers Kun Hang, and the man may be gorgeous—but his goofy ways don’t figure him out as a heartbreaker. “We’d be great friends. I doubt we’d even get together.”

“Last chance, ladies!” Bingbing stands from her seat to get over her, wrapping one arm around her shoulder before showing her the screen. This man is more simplistic, his black hair covering most of his forehead, though the prettiness of his face is not to be missed, plump lips, nicely rounded cheeks, and a look on his eyes that screams ‘boy-next-door’. “Is Dong Sicheng the kind of guy who’d break your heart?”

“Girls,” She says, pushing Bingbing’s phone away before chuckling. “You just give people the power to hurt you. I could make any of these men cry for me if I just put my mind into it. Heartbreak is mental, no matter how much people try to say it isn’t.”

Shishi deadpans, then. “Break one of their hearts and we’ll believe you.”

Ada must have seen a goddess right at that moment, with wings and promises that have her widening her eyes and smacking her hands against the table. God, she’ll be lucky if people stop looking at them for once tonight. “Yes! You can pick someone and break their hearts, and teach us your ways!”

“I doubt this is a good idea…” Elena whispers, though Ada shakes her head.

“Raise your hand if you want her to break your ex’s heart.”

Six hands are raised, and Elena raises it with one final sigh.

It’s one of those ‘a rush in the moment’ things, when adrenaline pumps inside her body too quickly and she’s overexcited. Very rarely does someone feel like this in adulthood—as if youth and power lasts forever, so she puts one hand forward. “Put all your phones down with the pictures of the guys whose heart you want me to break, and I’ll pick someone.”

Cheers fill the air for the tale of a bad idea given by alcohol, but she feels powerful, staring at a group of men that she doesn’t know—men she should hate for breaking the hearts of those whom she loves. It shouldn’t be that difficult, right? If they were able to break her friends’ hearts, she can do the same thing.

Her hand hovers in the air, pondering, seeing, letting her mind choose who would be the easiest, who deserves it the most. A challenge, that’s what she wants—

And a smile appears on her face when she grabs certain phone.

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