#k'tara tyatu

[thatsadorbsyo]

K’tara - Crux (1)

(cw: allusions to off-screen death and violence)

A few weeks ago, I asked Makoto what sort of shit inspires somebody to join the Matsuoka family, and he had a whole laundry list of reasons to give me straight off the dome. A few are born into it like he was. Some of them have bought into the glamour of it, sold on the frosting without ever tasting the cake. Most of them are just people with nothing of their own who crave the safety of having someone to tell them what to do. Or people who surround themselves with the trappings of power and hope, one day, to be powerful men themselves.

Then I asked him what might make a guy leave the family, and Makoto put both hands on my shoulders and told me, dead in the eye, that nobody leaves the Matsuoka family alive. Well, I left, didn’t I? What’s that tell you? I was never really in it to begin with.

Story of my fucking life.

It’s no different on this Voyage. I’m here, I’m working alongside them, but I don’t belong with these people. My energy isn’t welcome. That isn’t something that anyone has said to me, but it ain’t like anybody has to say it out loud in order for me to feel it. Only a handful of these chucklefucks have even attempted to talk to me, and the few who have tried to look at me don’t even really see me. I’m sure they think they do.

It’s not like I make myself easy to be seen, but for once I’d like somebody to just meet me where I’m at, you know?

I’ll do what I always do. Slip in, follow only the orders that appeal to me, disappear whenever they try to press me for anything else. I’m here to right a wrong that’s been done to me, to correct a schism in my family. I came to sever the threads of imperials, not to dig around in an Allagan garbage dump. Doing my job isn’t contingent upon making friends with my cohort, nor doing their damn chores for them.

It just--

I just--

She sighs, the first gossamer threads of a cracking web beginning to show on her bravado.

This really just proves my fucking point, doesn’t it? That I can’t blame K’dasi for reaching out and taking that kind of acceptance the moment it was offered to him. How rare is that, to have brothers who would die for you. Could that be me?

How many times have I told Makoto that I was there to fly with him or die trying? When has he ever shown me the same sentiment? When has anybody? I meant every word. I mean it every time, and nobody ever shows me the same loyalty, the same love.

I tell myself that I’m different from K’dasi because I’ve never turned on my own fucking people, that I may do bad things for bad men, but at least I’m doing them to bad people. Matsuoka might be a monster who loves the company of sycophantic catfish men, sure, but that Tanaka woman was a serial murderer, Taketora was an assassin and loan shark, Maxime was a drug pusher preying on the hopeless, the list goes on and fucking on. All of them deserved what I delivered to them. They all begged for comeuppance, through action and deed. I’m not sorry.

But then I think about--

I--

I remember that old woman. The aging performer, the one who was up late sewing dresses at the Star Sapphire Theater the night I lit it up. My first job for Matsuoka, the botched revenge arson that cost Makoto one of his fingers for how severely I fucked it up. I think of her trapped in that dressing room, choking on smoke while I slipped out into the night, just like I always do.

It wasn’t on purpose; the place was supposed to be empty. I didn’t mean to kill her, but I don’t remember her name. I don’t know that I ever knew it at all. I haven’t thought about her in a year, maybe longer. Did I ever feel shame about that? I don’t remember. I can’t remember--

The question ain’t whether it could be me. It is me. My brother and I are no different, not really, not where it counts. The things we would do for love are inexcusable. But we still do them.

I--

She breaks, self-doubt splintering through her for the first time that she can truly remember.

I don’t think I can do this.

[jancisstuff]

[thatsadorbsyo]

thought.....bubbole

“Ghostie just has that look. I know fire when I see it. Spent too fuckin’ long with it on the tips of my claws not to know when someone’d torch the whole city just to feel a little peace. They're just better at hidin’ it than I do. I don’t got the patience for that shit.”

[thatsadorbsyo]

Isabela - Dragon Age Nancy Downs - The Craft Mai - Avatar: The Last Airbender Vriska Serket - Homestuck Akali - K/DA (League of Legends) Jack - Mass Effect

one for k’tara too... because why not

blank template here

[thatsadorbsyo]

First and Last FFXIV Screenshots 2019

Tagged by @thedarknesssings!

Jan 1: Testing some Reshade options on K’tara.

Dec 27: Documenting some changes to Maya’s appearance.

[thatsadorbsyo]

trying out a new haircut on k’tara and idk how i feel about it yet

[thatsadorbsyo]

K’tara - Trash Fire

((cw: drug and alcohol abuse, emetophobia warning))

I had to clean up another magnificent mess last night. Makoto called me about two bells past midnight, and of course I was right in the middle of something--the something in this case being a midlander named Nicole--so I finished the job quick and then trucked on over there, hands still stinking of pussy, just in time for him to throw up all over me.

It’s glamorous work, the shit I do for him.

I don’t know how long he’d been at it by the time I got to his apartment, but when I let myself in, he was facedown in his bed and hyperventilating into a pillow, surrounded by a stack of paper scraps he’d been scribbling on in a drug-induced frenzy. It was all in Hingan so I couldn’t read any of it, but it was clear that he was getting more and more frenetic about it until he burned himself out and called me to come wipe his ass.

The rest of the paraphernalia around the bed was exactly what you’d expect. Some bottles, some packets that had once held tablets or powder. I bagged it all up to burn later, and I took his madman’s prophecies or... poems... or whatever-the-fuck they were and stacked them up nice and neat on his desk, while he rambled into the mattress about the shit he was putting himself through the ringer so hard just to forget.

I guess that pipsqueak brother of his from back home went and got his smile extended, by a couple of ilms along one side. Couldn’t pay his loans.

That’s shitty fucking luck, man. I’ve never met the guy, but I feel bad for him. Feel a bit like I should send him a card or something. Hey, I’m sorry that you’re so bad at money that it’s gonna do you in, probably more sooner than later. I hope you win the lottery and things take a turn for the better, primarily because I don’t wanna have to clean up that mess too when Makoto is faced with having to deal with your corpse and finds that he can’t stomach the job. Do you think they make those?

I wish the story ended there, but it got even weirder after that. See, the stuff about his brother? That’s shit I can understand. That’s some regular salt of the earth hoodlum bullshit, and it’s all very unfortunate, but it happens all the godsdamned time, and the sun keeps showing its cheerful idiot face in the morning despite it all.

The stuff Makoto started blathering about after that, though? Straight up fucking clown shit. You know those happy assholes who make beanies out of foil and hang out in the woods late at night, thinking that the swamp lights you can sometimes see lighting on fire over the Clutch are actually coded messages from across the veil?

It was kinda like that. He felt a dire need to impress upon me that there are other worlds than this one, grabbed me by the shirt and twisted his fingers into my jacket like he thought he was gonna drown, looking up at me with those dead eyes he gets whenever he’s really and truly lost in the sauce. Then, with all the gravity of a man about to impart the very soul of the universe, all the secrets to life and death, he told me that he has a date to get probed by an alien, to get fucked straight up the ass by an extraterrestrial being who punched its way through the fabric of existence for the express purpose of plundering Makoto’s virgin fuckhole.

He seemed to think this was really fucking funny, the most hilarious joke he’s ever told in his miserable life, because he started laughing so hard he puked all over my lap. Painted up the floorboards real good all around the bed, too.

He’s mixing drugs again, it’s the only explanation. That shit’s gonna get him killed.

I think he blacked out after that, and maybe that’s for the best. For once in my life, I really don’t wanna deal with the drama that comes with him remembering all the shit I gotta do to take care of him. He doesn’t like it, but he also won’t stop asking me to do it all the same. If this makes me just another martyr, I’m prepared to deal with that, but I wish he’d gone ahead and called his prick of a boyfriend to come clean up the dumpster fire instead of me. This isn’t supposed to be my job anymore, stopped being my job the moment he said he didn’t wanna know me like that any longer.

He needs somebody to talk to about this shit who isn’t me, but fuck if I ain’t gonna answer his call every time anyway like some kind of hopeless chump.

[thatsadorbsyo]

K’tara - Cleaning Up

What kind of fucking yakuza can’t even knock over a bank? It’s pathetic, right? I mean, can’t be just me that thinks that--it must be objectively hilarious, because I laughed in Makoto’s face when he told me just how catastrophically they ate shit. Maybe I should feel bad about that, but I don’t. Couldn’t help it.

I think that was the beginning of the end for us, now that I think about it. The look he gave me. Said that he’d be finished with me in a heartbeat, if this stupid world would let him. But we can’t afford to be done with each other, we’re both too wrapped up in the other’s shit. We know all of each other’s secrets. I need him, no matter how sick he is of me.

He needs me too. Said as much, and I believe him. Isn’t that fucking special? I believe him, every word he says.

So. I’ll do what I always do, which is clean up the godsdamn messes his inept junkie ass leaves behind like a paper trail, burning down everything he leaves a mark on so nobody can figure out what we’re up to on the backburner. I’ll scrape up his filth and eat it, and that way no one on the outside’s the wiser about what we’ve got cookin’ in the pot.

This might represent some sort of personal growth, I don’t know. The fact that I’m still happily sucking down his nonsense and farting out solutions for him, even when all I really wanna do is drag him into the mud and cut his face to ribbons. That’s progress, right? Better than the last time this happened. Guess sometimes that’s all you can ask for, baby steps, a slow ascent through the sludge. Even if it’s just to keep your own ass afloat.

I do feel bad for Banri, though. I feel bad for what’s waiting for him when he gets back to Kugane, ‘cause I’ve seen what happens to yakuza who fail their missions. I’ve stitched the pieces back together with my own hands, stretching skin over severed bone with my bloody fingers and sewing it shut.

So fucking unappreciated! Do you think he even remembers that, do you think he thinks about me every time that ugly little stump of a finger wiggles up his boyfriend’s asshole or whatever nasty shit they do together? Fuck. Shit. No, I’m fine.

I’m fine. It’s nothing.

All that aside, Banri being gone really threw a wrench in the works, see? The whole job to come collect you revolved around him being there. It was a three man ordeal. Muscle, crowd control, distraction. I was supposed to be the misdirection, the crazy bitch with a wooden club smashing the altar to dust while Banri scooped you up and Makoto kept the night staff shrinemaidens at bay.

Do you have any idea how pissed I am that I don’t get to do that? How often do you get to wreck a church? Gods. What a missed opportunity in my career. I’ll never forgive you for that.

All that went tits up, and we’d still be twiddling our thumbs up our own asses right now wondering what to do next if not for my brilliance and foresight, wouldn’t we? The moment I met you, I knew nobody’d ever touched you, not where it counts. How you walk, how you speak, how cleanly you fake it all. It’s so easy to make an isolated cunt melt with just a little bit of focused, solid kindness. A thick strap and saintly patience helps, too.

I imagine he’s not gonna thank me for handing you over to him like the fucking gift that you are. It’s okay. I don’t need his thanks anymore. I just need shit to get done, and it’s getting pretty clear that he ain’t gonna do it himself. I don’t mind.

I got some messes to make of my own, all the same. I might be crawling up that ladder, but I ain’t clean yet. There’s a boat from Thavnair scheduled to dock in Limsa here in a few days, and there’s a face on it that I intend to turn to picadillo.

Shit. Where’s my gloves?

Anyway. When you get to Matsuoka, make sure to tell him K’tara was the one who sent you. Can you do that for me, sweetheart? I know you remember the name. K’tara, not his shitheel boy. Me.

It was me.

[thatsadorbsyo]

Ichika - Ego

(cw: sexually explicit content)

My undoing, such as with most things I suppose, began with a spark.

I sensed her eyes on me long before she approached with an unlit moko cigarette, asking with a foul tongue if I had a light. I thought nothing of it. I’m well familiar with being gawked at from across a room while someone tries to place the tug of familiarity at my sight. I left her to her devices, as I often do, preferring to give these strangers privacy for their journeys of dawning comprehension. Sometimes their memories of Kugane’s pleasure district are far too personal for me to insert myself in the process, as much as my ego might like to catch their eyes and make them sweat as they recall my breasts in the theater of the mind’s forgiving soft focus.

Most of them never say anything to me, but she was bold enough not only to stride up and ask for a match, but also to hold her hand out expectantly, the business end of her cigarette pointing at me as though it was a foregone conclusion that I would acquiesce. She stared up at me with big brown eyes, vertical pupils wide with starlight under the Whispered Wish’s porch awning. Her aggressive brows dared me to say no, to have somewhere better to be than consorting with the riff raff of the crowd, much less a fan.

Of course I gave her a light. I love to reward people for having balls.

*

“Heard about what happened to the Star Sapphire Theater. Ain’t that a kick in the dick, huh? Bet you’re glad you retired when you did. Coulda been you in there.” Her smoke blew in my direction every time she spoke, an acrid twinge that perfectly matched her raspy tone. Brash, unpolished. A little too honest. Perhaps it shocked me into being more forthcoming than usual, how close she managed to hit the ringing truth.

“The woman who died in the fire was a close friend,” I intimated, waving a hand in front of my face for fresh air. “A mentor, really. It’s difficult to feel lucky, knowing that she’s gone.”

“Shit, I’m sorry. That’s fuckin’ rough.” For a moment, she looked like she was going to probe further, but blessedly she did not. Rustic, but not completely without manners. “A friend of mine, she dragged me to one of your shows a few years ago when I was in town. Some kind of archery exhibition? But with ribbons? I was pretty blasted for, uh... almost the whole thing, sorry...” Her eyes gleamed with mayhem, not cowed in the slightest. "But do I remember being impressed by more than just your tits. You were acrobatic, passionate. You looked like you had an arrow with everybody’s goddamn number on it, like you wanted to fuck everyone in attendance with one perfect, piercing blow. Guess I can relate to that. It stuck with me.”

I startled into a laugh. She kept doing that to me, somehow. I wanted to keep following the threads her quaint little mouth wove with such harsh color. She spoke in acid yellows and caustic reds, occasionally soothed by a ribbon of velvet purple, and they painted me perfectly. My ego grew accustomed to being sated. “Fumiko choreographed that dance. It might make a felicitous tribute to her memory, should I ever find myself fit enough to perform it again.”

To her credit, the glance she made at my ass was subtle. Had I not been expecting it, I wouldn’t have caught it at all. “Dunno. You look pretty fit to me.” The butt of her cigarette disappeared under her boot heel, and she tilted her head toward the burlesque theater door, her long black ponytail swaying over her shoulder. “Hey. Come get a drink with me. I betcha it’s what Fumiko would have wanted, for you to slut it up right proper on foreign shores. It’s the best thing you can do after cheating death. Trust me, I’d know.”

Her stance squared, chin up in preparation for a gentle rejection, but when I did an accounting of my desires they turned up in her favor. To my own surprise, I wanted nothing else out of the night than to listen to her talk.

*

I don’t know when I made the decision to let her fuck me. It was somewhere between the first plum wine and the third or fourth anecdote about she and her best friend’s myriad triad sexual escapades. She had earned a reward--for her insight, for her cleverness, for finding a way to string words together that actually made my cheeks warm. She had no pretense. Everything that came out of her mouth was pure id.

My own reward was the sheer novelty of a polished wooden cock. I’ve been around the world and never experienced that until now, somehow. It hadn’t occurred to me in all of my years that women could fuck each other like that. Perhaps things would be different if my imagination had struck upon that sooner. Lots of things. I struggle with the accounting on that scenario--the implications are vast and... daunting. Disheartening in retrospect.

It was psychological warfare, make no mistake. Having my face in the mattress and the deep, steady pound of her hips against my backside, a slow and hypnotizing pace set purely for my pleasure, by a cock that would never fire too quickly, or fail to start, or push faster before I was ready. Everything she did was specifically and oh so explicitly for me. She was neither selfish nor greedy, and had no ulterior motives aside from making me come. Gods. To think that I’d never had that in my life. Could this be pleasure? Is this what it’s like to crave more out of pure desire rather than the lingering bitterness of dissatisfaction?

I had to have it again. Immediately, the moment it was done. I sketched a quick portrait of her as she laid in bed after, blowing smoke rings at the ceiling with the perpetually ready cock still standing up straight where it was attached to her pelvis. She signed it with a lazy flourish. K’tara.

I keep it in my purse, touching it lightly throughout the day and letting the thrum of her inside me resonate through my body again, unbeknownst to anyone around me. Fuck. It’s exhilarating!

K’tara. K’tara.

My cunt has ached with bruises and memories ever since. K’tara. I daydream about her hand in my hair, her haunting grind, her sharp teeth. K’tara. I know nothing about her, but I am smitten, my body broken down and laid out into component pieces, every one of them singing. K’tara. My ego is full to bursting.

I need it again. I have to find her.

[thatsadorbsyo]

Makoto - Sea foam, Sea salt

((cw: drug use, sexual language. art by paul juno. erden is @gorgagne-viperidae.))

(A week ago.)

Waking up was a process. It came in waves, his consciousness briefly surfacing just enough to realize how deep it had been, and then sinking back down to chase the gloam, like a dream that Makoto didn’t want to abandon just yet. Facing the morning meant processing what he had done the night before, cleaning up the evidence, and moving on from it. 

Moving on was the last thing on his mind; he wanted to stay in bed and feel sorry for himself, to wallow in this moody haze with the dregs of his bittersweet memories and the smell of somebody else on his sheets. Wisps came and went. The soothing glow of rose gold in his lungs. The arresting weight of orange eyes on him. A deep rumbling voice reverberating second-hand through his chest. “<You taste like seafoam.>”

The halo around his memories obscured just as much as it illuminated, but somehow, it had all gone to shit. That was the sour note at the back of his throat every time he roused, the bone-deep certainty that he had fucked it up and severed whatever tenuous thread he and his companion had started to weave, like a dumbass in blinders ploughing through gossamer. Whatever he’d said, whatever he’d done, it was lost in the foggy bloom of the drugs. Serendipity. He was waking up alone, no other strong, solid body in his bed with him. Some kind of fucking serendipity, his ass.

The soft metallic chink, clink, click of K’tara picking the lock on his door finally broke the spell. It was a mercy. Special delivery, asshole. It’s time to face the music. Makoto squinted one eye open just enough to see the package in her hands, brown botanist’s paper folded over into a lumpy envelope. In the morning sunlight, it was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

The drugs, not K’tara. But she was alright too. A welcome distraction.

“What reeks in here?” She padded quietly across the room to the bed, dipping the mattress with her weight as she kicked off her shoes. Makoto rolled instinctively toward her, looping his arms around her waist and dragging her into the sheets, clothes and all. “Smells like a cum factory exploded, what the fuck.”

“Yeah, I missed you.” It was only half a lie. He buried his nose into her hair, bumping his closed lips against the back of her neck. She smelled like the outside, like grass and ocean spray. Maybe it really did stink in here.

“Open your godsdamned windows sometime, ugh.” K’tara squirmed away from him, rolling over onto her back and balancing the envelope on her belly. She pried it open carefully, unfolding each corner of the paper until the pile of fragrant green and brown buds replaced the stench of last night with a pleasantly spicy herbal aroma.

Makoto groaned with longing. “Roll it for me, babe. Bad trip last night.”

She had already plucked a bud from the pile, using her claws to pick the little dried leaves apart into tiny pieces, arranging them into a small green hill on a piece of rolling paper. Makoto watched her work with methodic, almost ritual patience, a volatile mixture of pride and lust curling somewhere too far south to be his heart but too high to be his stomach. If Makoto loved her, he did it with some nontraditional organ, like his liver. His kidneys. His unusual guts.

Her joints weren’t as uniform as his. Fatter in the middle, tapering at the ends. She still needed practice, but perhaps this was her calling card. K’tara was here. She picked it up and turned it over in her fingers, passing the cigarette to him just long enough to delicately place the package of buds onto the floor, next to her boots. “I’ve been thinking,” she said with her back turned, hanging off the side of the bed.

“Yeah?” He ran his fingers along the joint, feeling them widen and then dip as he traced its length.

“Uh huh.” She nabbed it from his hand and put it between her lips, lighting it for them with a match from her vest pocket. “You keep sayin’ I need a goal. Something to work toward.” K’tara took a puffing inhale, pinching the joint and squinting at the flavor before handing it back to him.

Makoto didn’t say anything. He sucked smoke with greedy intent, filling his lungs with the dry heat that would settle his wary stomach and begin righting all the criminal wrongs he’d done to his body the previous evening. Maybe even clear the fog from his brain enough to figure out how to even start talking to Erden about it. Gods, everything was a wreck. This was a good first start. This... This was good. He exhaled slowly, feeling every drag of it filter out of him, taking the scattered pieces of his personality and gently clicking them back into place like a puzzle. Finally, he could relax.

K’tara turned her head toward him on the pillow--the pillow Erden had been laying on just hours ago, yes, Makoto could already remember that much--her big brown eyes searching his face, far too soft for what she was about to say next.

“I wanna blow up the Saltery.”

...Fuck, maybe he did love her. Just a little.

[thatsadorbsyo]

K’tara - Testify

You know that feeling of dawning rapture?

It starts in the throat, blocking an exhale so that the air never makes it to your nose. A tightness drips from there to the chest, shallowing your lungs and giving your heart room to expand. It beats like a growing thing, throbbing against your chest like a bird trying to hatch. Your skin is paper thin. You can’t stop it. It’s going to burst out and bleed all over your shirt.

Your mouth is locked in the moment just before a parting of the lips twists into a readable expression, stuck halfway between a grin and a snarl. A thin strip of white teeth is the only clue, with a pink tongue pushing against the backs of your fangs. Pushing until you taste copper, until you realize how hungry you are.

Eyes up. Higher. Higher. Until you can see the black smoke curling in the darkness above the flames, rolling over itself and billowing up into the sky. Until you can see the white in the eyes of the bard on stage, and the blue of their tongue as they speak truth straight into your soul. Blue like flint. It sparks.

You spark. You burn like you’re in a kiln, breath finally whipping out of you as everything hardens in place. You’re locked in the moment, powerless to stop the transformation happening inside you, the imprint being left on your spirit. The moment you try to move, you’ll crack, crinkle, this perfect but fleeting euphoria dissolving away like a husk and scattering on the ground like so much you-shaped clay. The thing it uncovers, the you it leaves behind, is soft and raw-pink. Fresh. New. But you’re not that you yet.

Don’t move. Don’t even think about moving. Not yet. Not yet. You’re not done. The song isn’t over. There’s still pieces of you left to burn.

[thatsadorbsyo]

K’tara - Missive

All K'tara sees in Nihsu’a's bed is a second body under the blanket and a shock of blonde hair lying next to him, but that's all she needs to see to know everything there is to know about what had happened while she was away in Kugane. In that moment, a thick curtain falls over her heart, snuffing out any fledgling emotion for this man she once might have called a lover, smothering anything she might feel for him that doesn't fuel the seed of revenge igniting in her belly.

This is what she gets for trying to surprise her boyfriend. Motherfucker didn’t even have the decency to tell her she’d been dumped.

Her feet stop and her whole body freezes with newly practiced discipline so she can take stock of the room around her. What’s the situation? What are her options? It's dark, with the moon illuminating a few sparse corners of the room in blue and silver. Two people lie sleeping in a bed, and their snores weave the single tenuous thread that cuts through the nighttime silence. She only has a few moments to act before something breaks the peace.

K'tara's hands twitch with the urge to flip the mattress and send them both tumbling, arms and legs akimbo, out of their ignorant slumber and straight into the inferno. One of her knives could cut a pretty picture--or at least a suitably vulgar epithet--into Nihsu’a’s bare chest before he could register what was happening to him. Barring that, she could probably get a few good hits in until he came to his senses enough to restrain her.

He always did look the best when he was bloody and senseless, and K'tara doesn't want to remember him any other way.

In the space of an instant, a fantasy ripped through her, leaving her with a breathless ache to beat him to near-unconsciousness, to throw his body against the dresser and goad him into fighting her right here on the floor. The moment his fists hit her, his desire would be an ugly, naked truth to the gods and whoever this new bitch is in his bed alike. He can't resist her when he's angry. It would be so easy. She could already feel the fleshy give-and-burst of his lip splitting over his teeth under her knuckles. She could see the clownish confusion on his face and hear his unintelligible protests like it was already happening.

K'tara takes a breath. She takes another. She times them to match with the subtle rise and fall of the blanket, and each one comes easier than the last, until eventually her hands are no longer shaking. De-escalation, just like Makoto taught her, although she never expected it to work. The impulse passes, but the throbbing in her chest, between her legs, in the balls of her feet remain. Only one thing will sate it now.

Something has to burn.

Quickly and without a trace, she pads silently across the room to grab as many of Nihsu’a’s nicest clothes--temple garb, ornate robes, ritual sashes--from the messy armoire as her arms will hold and carry them out of the traitorous bedroom, through the otherwise empty house and out into the yard. She sneaks through the kitchen and up the stairs with her prize, grabbing a bottle of his liquor off of a counter and opening it with her teeth before crossing the threshold, spitting the lid out to bounce across the sparse lawn. K'tara drops her load in the damp grass and pulls her lockpick back out of the door, erasing her means of entry into his home.

Outside, she gets down to fucking business, the fire in her chest guiding her hand as she arranges his coeurl-print jacket and religious sashes, dousing them all with whatever's left of the whiskey after she's had her fill. Morning dew and clumps of dirt cling to her hands while she clumsily lights the matches and tosses the whole book of them onto the pyre. 

Her missive is as clear as daylight and burns almost as bright, and K'tara lingers to watch the flames dance and flicker along with the pounding of her heart in her ears. She shoves her hands into her pockets, sets her jaw, and stares at the fire until the spark inside of her grows into a ringing cacophony that drowns out her heartbeat. For a long, difficult moment, she’s one wrong step away from lighting his house on fire too.

Then, she's gone. She slips away as easily as she came, and the only traces left behind are the ones she fully intended to leave: the burnt remains of Nihsu’a’s clothes spread out in the yard, nothing left behind but ash and charred grass that spell out HE LIES.

[thatsadorbsyo]

Makoto - Bitter

(cw: explicit sexual content)

It could be hard, sometimes, to tell the worst nights of his life from the best ones. They both usually hit all the same notes, leaving him with vaguely formed memories and the piquant flavors of pain, blood, and smoke on his tongue. He’d already spread enough of that around tonight with his new Xaela acquaintance, and the evidence of their unique brand of revelry was smeared all over the room. A knife wedged into the carpet, a stubbed out cigar butt and a perfectly round little burn stain on the wood floor, sake cups scattered all over the table. He never could turn down a fight, and this guy was particularly compelling, even when he wasn’t throwing Makoto over a table.

His shoulder was still singing a pissed-off concerto from breaking his fall when K’tara showed up at his door not even a quarter bell after the guy had left, unannounced and half-dressed, making further demands of his mouth. She still had rage tears on her cheeks from something--gods only knew--and she was already taking her clothes off before she made it inside, pushing past him and making a possessive grab for his waistband.

The rate at which people were inviting themselves into his bedroom that night should have been a clue that he was about to have a bad time, too drunk and too delighted by his own masochism to avoid getting jerked around by everyone else’s sadistic whimsy, so why had he been half-hard ever since he first hit the ground?

That was what he asked himself as he lifted K’tara up despite his bitching shoulder and pinned her lower back against the wall, her legs spread open around his head so he could dive right in. She didn’t bother to knock, so he didn’t give her the satisfaction of a teasing buildup, instead sending his tongue straight to her clit to sample the salt and the tang of whatever sort of night she’d had before coming over. Knowing her, it had probably been about the same as his.

At first all he could taste was the acrid cigar still on his mouth from earlier, but that was quickly overwhelmed with peaks of tang as he opened his mouth wide and dragged his tongue down, spreading her open like he expected to find a present inside.

The punchline was that she really had brought him a gift, and it coated his tongue with tingling alkaline, filled his nose with zinc and his mind with the whiplash of unforgettable sense memory. Makoto pawed at her with his hands, stretching her further open while she tugged at his hair, grabbing his face and tilting it to the side so he could push his tongue in deeper and better get the flavor, smearing his face with K’tara and the sexual cast-offs of whoever she’d fucked before coming here. Who was he? How did his dick taste? Did he fuck better than Makoto did? For a moment, it was all he could think about, lapping it up and savoring the twisted bouquet of their combined scents like they were notes of one of Matsuoka’s stupid wines.

He forgot all about his shoulder, ignoring its frantic alarm bells even though the stress of holding this position was threatening to collapse them. The acid of her sex stung the bruises blooming on his face where his eye was already swelling shut, another gift from his earlier visitor, less sensory in nature but arguably more brutal. Makoto always had a way of making somebody his bitch even when he was the one getting the beating--for one thing, they usually weren’t expecting him to like it--and this guy had been no exception.

But... still, the Xaela who had barged into his room and demanded his drunken attention had left behind more than just a mess. Makoto had a lingering thread on his mind, a sticky film of... hm... of something left as unfinished as the half-spent cigar at his feet.

Suck on it, Makoto had whispered, passing the cigar to the other man as a temporary truce offering. How does it taste? The bitter smoke had burned whenever it floated past his black eye, the same way his face sparked in peaks of bright pain whenever the swollen, sensitive bruises brushed against K’tara’s thigh as he sucked on her clit. The pain wasn’t going to let him forget. No matter how deep he sunk into her, he wasn’t going to soothe that ache of leaving something unsatisfied.

Maybe that was why he was so hungry for this simple jealousy she’d brought to him right when he really needed it, so eager to feel it coiling like a nest of snakes in his belly, twining together in an interwoven mess until it was impossible to tell how many different ways he was about to get bitten.

Who was he jealous of here, exactly?

[thatsadorbsyo]

Makoto and K’tara (Undertone, #24)

(cw: explicit sexual content)

K’tara had a new, bitter flavor on her that morning, and even though it had been years since Nishiki, it didn’t take Makoto long to place it. Her hands at the back of his head trapped him between her legs, and despite this novel detail, he wasn’t in a hurry to pull away. The early sun filtered dimly through his apartment window, granting a sleepy warmth to the sheets of his floor futon and his bare legs, making him feel slow, lazy as he lapped away at his companion, cataloging the flavor.

It didn’t bother him, but maybe something else did.

When she finally let him up to breathe, Makoto crawled up K’tara’s body, planting a kiss between her breasts and another in her wild black hair. She looked sleep-stupid and half-awake, her eyes barely opened into slits that focused on his face, with puffy bags resting just under them on her cheekbones.

“Who did you fuck?” he asked, pressing their bellies together and resting the weight of his cock in the crook of her thigh.

“None yer business,” she croaked in reply, pushing her hair out of her face and tying it up in a loose bun at the crown of her head. She left her hands up on the pillow, elbows spread wide on each side of her face as she stared up at him, daring him to ask more questions.

Makoto reached down to line himself up with her and push inside, not giving her any time to savor the sensation before pressing on. “You let him come inside. You don’t let me do that.”

“You’re not my boyfriend.” She lifted her hips to meet him, legs spread just as wide as her elbows, so that her body was completely open to him despite the clipped and closed nature of her words. His face was blank as he scanned her for any sign of weakness or doubt. He wanted to take her at her word, but something just didn’t match up. Something about how she was here with him, waking up in his apartment to find his face between her legs, even though he never brought girls home.

He couldn’t find what he was looking for, so he dropped his head and fucked her, grabbing her ponytail with one fist and snapping his teeth at her throat. K’tara’s deep groans filled the sparse apartment room as she was rocked around the mattress by the force of his jealousy. He raised up on his knees and grabbed her around the throat, watching closely as her face grew red and her eyes finally opened up, wild and angry. “I could be,” he spat at her, letting the undercurrent of his thoughts break through.

K’tara raised her hands between his forearms and spread her elbows, forcing his hold on her throat loose and gasping harshly for air. “No, you couldn’t.” She wrenched him to the side, rolling them over until his back was on the warm floorboards and she was riding his cock, pushing him into the floor with both hands on his chest. The ruined ponytail flopped messily to the side of her head. “...'cause I’m not stayin' in Kugane.”

Before he could talk back, she clamped a hand over his mouth and shoved his head until it clattered against the floor, rattling his teeth. Makoto rolled his eyes with pain, but she only rode him harder, with deeper urgency that left her moaning openly and him struggling to breathe hotly through his nose over her fingers. He tried to speak, to warn her, but all he could manage was a strangled noise in his throat.

“It’s okay,” she panted. “This is what you want, right? It’s fine. Go ahead.” Her words had an uncharacteristic kindness to them, a softness that wasn’t matched by the vicious way she fucked him, unrelenting, until Makoto closed his eyes and chose to let the current take him.

[thatsadorbsyo]

[thatsadorbsyo]

K’tara in Kugane (Fling, #27)

The script was simple. Every afternoon, K’tara stood a certain distance away from a specific stall in the Rakuza district, dressed in simple Hingashi peasant clothes. She leaned against an adjacent building, feet splayed out in the dirt in front of her, and half-heartedly passed out a pamphlet from a stack in a large basket to anyone who passed by.

The pamphlets were about some guy named Maeda, a vagrant preacher out in Yanxia who was supposedly giving an allied clan some degree of trouble in Doma. Makoto didn’t elaborate, and K’tara didn’t ask. She did flip through the trifold pages whenever she was bored, looking at the colorful woodstamp images and trying to decipher some sort of meaning from the foreign script until her eyes started to cross and the lines blurred, like maybe she thought an answer would pop out of the page if she stared long enough. Were they pro-Maeda? Anti-Maeda? She had no idea.

Mostly all she felt when she gazed at the strange writing was dizzy, but it was almost like meditation. White noise for her restless soul, forced by a combination of ambition and circumstance to stand idly in one spot until somebody said exactly the right phrase when she passed them a pamphlet. Being here, doing a whole lot of fucking nothing and waiting for something to happen, was the negative space on the canvas of her nomadic existence, and it invited questions to fill the void.

Questions like: What if I stayed in Kugane after all?

The thought bubbled up from nowhere while she focused on indecipherable kanji, tapping her feet without rhythm under the afternoon sun. K’tara blinked with surprise and put the pamphlet back into the stack, withdrawing her arms into her sweeping robe sleeves and hugging her chest tightly.

Okay. So the question was out there. What if she stayed?

Kugane was always meant to be a short stop on a longer journey, but there was nothing that said she had to go back to Eorzea after Kimi moved on to the Steppe. Another two-week boat ride didn’t sound particularly palatable, and besides, Kugane had plenty of work for somebody like her. She couldn’t say as much about Ul’dah, where everyone she met had already made up their minds about who she was the moment they met her and noticed the Ala Mhigan dust on her nose.

“Do you bring tidings from the West, ijin?” A middle-aged man asked her, approaching from the nearby stall with his hand outstretched and an expectant smile on his face, interrupting the tranquility of her uncomfortable navel-gazing.

Oh, fuck. That was her cue. “I bring messages of Serendipity, if you’ll have them,” she recited the line she’d been taught, shielding her eyes from the sun with one hand so she could get a better look at the guy. He was clean, with colorful robes and a funky-looking mustache. Rich, probably. Eccentric.

“I would take them gladly,” he returned crisply with a decisive head nod, exactly on script.

K’tara pulled a pamphlet from a second, smaller stack in her front pocket, one that had a little flat package of Serendipity powder inside it. She passed it to him with a curt bow, which he returned in kind before swiftly moving along down the corridor of stalls, leaving her alone with her thoughts once more.

Her head thunked heavily against the wall behind her, rolling back and forth on her shoulders as she grappled with indecision. There wasn’t much in Eorzea that she’d miss. Not the charity that never actually solved anyone’s problems except for inflating rich people’s egos, letting them believe they’ve made a difference in a small folks’ lives. Not the way the Sultana constantly found ways to funnel money from K’tara’s people into her coffers, no matter how much she deluded herself that she was ‘helping’.

Makoto--

No. Makoto was a fling, and it would be stupid to ever think he was anything other than a fleeting... albeit bright and shining... blip on her life’s radar.

Something in her chest lurched, making her stomach nauseous and her skin tingle. A question dug at her, a sliver of doubt that had taken root in her lungs and blossomed into a garden of uncomfortable choices that she couldn’t ignore forever. But... Makoto had helped her, in a real and active way, instead of just showboating in front of her and telling her pointless platitudes about how pretty she was, as if that was something she cared about. He’d seen potential in her, cultivated it, breathed a spark of life into the clay of her pointless existence.

When was the last time she could say that about anybody?

K’tara wiped angrily at her face with her long sleeve, aggressively shoving an empty pamphlet into the hands of some bewildered passers-by. That ache in her chest felt more and more like an obvious answer that she didn’t want to accept.

She had to stay in Kugane.

No sooner had she had this thought than she heard familiar footsteps, the sharp tap of sharper shoes through the dirt in a specific cadence that could only mean one thing. The vice around her heart loosened as she turned around to see Makoto’s face towering over her, blocking out the Hingashi sun.

She was so glad to see him, so lost in her own thoughts that it took a few beats before she noticed how pale his face was, the olive tones of his skin washed out into a sickly grey. It was another few beats before she noticed the bandage around his hand, carefully wrapped but still seeping blood. Her heart, only just freed, leaped into her throat.

“What the fuck happened to you?” she hissed under her breath, the basket of benign pamphlets completely forgotten.

He stared at her with a stone expression, hard and blank but not cold. His eyes searched her face in that way they always did, scanning the myriad fronts she put up until he found a weakness, and then digging in until he found the spot where she really lived. His hand--the good one, the one not dripping blood--grabbed her shoulder, caressing absently but also pinning her subtly to the wall.

“We have to leave for Eorzea. Tomorrow. Kimi must come too,” he whispered into her ear, which flicked automatically with annoyance.

All she could do was gape at him with disbelief. What rotten fucking timing. “Why?”

“I’ll tell you at the hostelry. Come on, your shift is over.” Makoto slid his arm around her shoulders and guided her toward the edge of the city, a pit of confusion growing harder in her gut with every step.