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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 18 days

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Where Will All The Martyrs Go [Chapter 13: The Regrets Are Useless] [Series Finale]

A/N: Below are your final predictions. Let's see how you did... 🥰

Series summary: In the midst of the zombie apocalypse, both you and Aemond (and your respective travel companions) find yourselves headed for the West Coast. It’s the 2024 version of the Oregon Trail, but with less dysentery and more undead antagonists. Watch out for snakes! 😉🐍

Series warnings: Language, sexual content (18+ readers only), violence, bodily injury, med school Aemond, character deaths, nature, drinking, smoking, drugs, Adventures With Aegon™️, pregnancy and childbirth, the U.S. Navy, road trip vibes.

Series title is a lyric from: “Letterbomb” by Green Day.

Chapter title is a lyric from: “Whatsername” by Green Day.

Word count: 6.1k

💜 All my writing can be found HERE! 💜

Rain pours outside the cabin, mist-shrouded pine trees and still dark water, a place in southern Oregon called Lake of the Woods. The twin-sized bed with a thin foam mattress was once used by kids attending summer camp, capture the flag and s’mores, hikes and scary stories, but now the children are ghosts and the monsters are real, stumbling down streets and lurking in dark places, licking blood from what’s left of their lips.

Aemond is here but he’s also not, a castaway on an island where the world never ended, his hands in your hair as you straddle him, your hips moving tentatively, his lips and teeth at your throat, the sharp points of his canines like fangs.

“Am I doing this right?” you murmur doubtfully. “I feel like I’m definitely not doing this right…”

“Shh, you’re great, you’re incredible.”

“I’m sorry I don’t know how to do everything already, I’m sorry you have to teach me—”

“Stop,” Aemond commands, a sharp sigh through your hair. “I love this. I love you. I want to teach you things until the day I die.”

The nervous tension in your muscles unravels—peddles thrown into water, campfire smoke vanishing into indigo night—and now his hands are on your hips, steadying you, guiding you. You link your fingers around the back of his neck and try to find a cadence that isn’t uncomfortable, ungainly, effortful. You wanted to try this. You want to experience everything with him.

“Take your time,” Aemond is saying like it’s difficult for him to keep a train of thought, his eye closed, his cheeks flushed, blood-colored blooms like a dusk sky. “I’m fine down here, don’t worry about me…”

Rain drums against the windows; lightning flashes in the sky and thunder growls. From the front porch of one of the other cabins, you can hear the indistinct droning of conversations and Aegon strumming the acoustic guitar he brought from the beach house. It’s something you’ve overheard him singing before, one of his strange midcentury darlings, a song that should be too old for him to know the words to.

“All you big and burly men who roll the trucks along

Better listen, you’ll be thankful when you hear my song

You have really got it made if you’re haulin’ goods

Any place on earth but those Haynesville Woods…”

Your skin gleams with a cool sheen of sweat; there is a draft through the cabin walls that makes you shiver as you cling to Aemond. You roll your hips a certain way and he moans—suddenly, involuntarily—and you know you’ve found the right rhythm.

“It’s a stretch of road up north in Maine

That’s never ever ever seen a smile

If they’d buried all them truckers lost in them woods

There’d be a tombstone every mile

Count ‘em off, there’d be a tombstone every mile…”

Aemond is kissing you deeply, desperately, trembling hands and gasping shallow breaths. And there is not just euphoria written into the lines of his face; there is disorientation, there is wonder. He barely manages: “Alright…um…if you want me to last longer than about thirty more seconds, you should probably slow down…”

“No,” you tease, grinning as you bite at his full lips.

“When you’re loaded with potatoes and you’re headed down

You’ve got to drive the woods to get to Boston town

When it’s winter up in Maine, better check it over twice

That Haynesville road is just a ribbon of ice…”

Aemond cries out, louder than you’ve ever heard him before—you’ve never had privacy, you’ve never truly been alone—and then again, a helpless ecstatic sound, pleasure so overwhelming it almost starts to feel like pain.

“Quiet!” you whisper, giggling, touching two fingers to his mouth. “Everyone’s going to hear you.”

“Oh my God,” Aemond says. He falls back onto the mattress and brings you with him, his arms wrapped around you, kissing your cheeks and your forehead as the two of you lie there panting and entangled, his blue eye astonished. “Okay, okay, I need a minute. I think I just burst an aneurysm.”

“I killed you?” you purr with feigned distress, basking in your conquest.

“You can kill me whenever you want. You can kill me five times a day.”

“When you’re talking to a trucker that’s been haulin’ goods

Down that stretch of road in Maine they call the Haynesville Woods

He’ll tell you that dying and going down below

Won’t be half as bad as driving on that road of ice and snow…”

Aemond stares up at the ceiling—a steep gable roof, a motionless fan—and now you can tell he’s thinking about his family again, discorporate screams, misplaced trust. Otto Hightower’s bones were found in the shower, meaning he likely died before or not long after their power failed and water would have run out in the municipal system. They were probably killed before you and Aemond ever met, distant galaxies lightyears away, remote long-dead stars. And so all the blood you paid to get to California was wasted.

“Do you ever think about the people you have saved?” you ask gently as your fingertips trace the ridge of his scar. “You stitched yourself back together. You healed Aegon’s burns. You sutured Cregan’s arm. You got me and Rio down from that transmission tower.”

“I guess I did,” Aemond says, but his voice is ambivalent, as if none of these things count. He has not found someplace safe for you yet. His job is not finished; his triumphs may only be temporary.

“Aemond…back in Pennsylvania…why did you decide to help us?”

“Luke spotted you guys, and we all talked it over. If it had just been Rio, honestly, I wouldn’t have taken the chance. A man his size, and possibly armed…could be trouble, you know? But I figured since he was traveling with a woman and you seemed to be with him by choice, he was probably okay. And then when we first met, he was so protective of you…didn’t want me touching you, didn’t leave you alone…I realized he had to be a good guy.”

“He was,” you say solemnly. I was supposed to remind him about the racks. I was supposed to warn him. But you didn’t warn Rio about what was waiting to kill him in that sand-swept grocery store in Winnemucca, just like you didn’t warn Jace about radiation or Baela about the way the rungs of the ladder that ran up the side of the grain bin were rusted and creaking, and maybe there is more than enough blame to go around.

“And then after Battle Mountain, as soon as we found the gasoline and ammo, I knew we had to go back for you. It hit me all at once. I couldn’t protect you by leaving you with Rio and Cregan. And I couldn’t let you go. I’ve never had something like this before. I didn’t know it existed. I told the others we were turning around, and Aegon said: Thank fucking God. Rhaena took off sprinting towards the car.” Then Aemond kisses you again, but tenderly this time, slowly, like you’ll have forever and there’s no need to rush. “I’m going to get you to Odessa. I’m going to take you somewhere safe.”

The rain is stopping; there are still a few hours of daylight left.

~~~~~~~~~~

“Hey, Chip Skylark. Check it out,” Aegon says, grinning at you from where he’s sprawled on the wet dock and smoking a cigarette, wearing his neon green plastic sunglasses, his left leg finally freed from its bandages and on full display. You’re all wearing the same things, stolen t-shirts and shorts, sweatshirts at night when it gets cold, sneakers you can walk hundreds of miles in; but Aegon won’t give up his Sperry Bahamas. “It’s nature’s tattoo.”

You sit down beside him and admire the scar tissue, red knots and white cords, jagged terrain like a mountain range, organic highways and bridges and trails. “It’s a roadmap.”

“That’s appropriate.”

You’ve been traveling on foot for two weeks since Criston’s white Tahoe ran out of gas and was abandoned in the town of Mad River, California. Now you are only about ten miles from Odessa, close enough to reach in half a day but too far to get into town before nightfall. This time tomorrow you’ll be there, and it will either be a haven or a wasteland, and if Rio’s parents’ community in Odessa has disappeared then so has your last idea for where to go. Absentmindedly, you skate your fingerprints over the bumps and grooves of Aegon’s leg like a blind man reading braille. He shifts and clears his throat; you’ve made him uncomfortable somehow. You lift your hand away.

“I’m sorry, does that hurt?”

“Nah. I can’t really feel anything besides pressure. The nerve endings got fried.”

“Oh.” But now you don’t know what you did to upset him. Aegon doesn’t provide an explanation. Down the dock a ways towards the shore, Rhaena is reading The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and listening to the pink Sony Walkman formerly owned by a little girl named Ava. Inside whirls Green Day’s 2004 album American Idiot, which Aegon took from his bedroom at the beach house to add to his CD collection, a cultural archive, a gift for posterity. Cregan is teaching Daeron to fish with poles he found in one of the cabins; Helaena is bringing them worms. Aemond and Luke are gathering things dry enough to burn—books and wooden chairs from inside the cabins—and piling them up so Cregan can cook dinner once it’s caught.

“So,” Aegon says, changing the subject, scrutinizing you as he puffs on a Marlboro Gold. “Everything going okay?”

You know what he means; he must have heard Aemond earlier. “Yup.”

“Got it all figured out?”

“Sure did.”

“Great. I’m happy for you,” Aegon says, and yet there’s a twinge of melancholy he’s trying to hide. It must be hard for him; he and Daeron are the only single ones.

“We’ll find you some suitable candidates for your harem when we get to Odessa.”

He chuckles. “Oh, come on.”

“Guys, girls? Do you have a preference?”

He’s smiling wistfully down into the water, a dark rippling mirror. “I have too specific a preference, that’s the problem.”

“Yacht girls in bikinis. Golf cheerleaders.”

“There are no cheerleaders in golf, you yokel.”

“Okay, well…I’m sure you’ll be very popular with the lonely, traumatized, widowed women of the apocalypse.”

Aegon gazes morosely out over the lake. He pitches the end of his cigarette into the water, and your eyes catch briefly on the black ink of the tattoo on his forearm: It’s not over ‘til you’re underground. “I don’t know. I’ve been sober for two weeks and now everything is annoyingly clear.”

“What’s bothering you?”

He waits a while before he answers, evasive. “I’ve never been good at anything.”

“Everyone feels that way sometimes. Luke thinks he’s not good at anything either.”

“But Luke’s nice. I’m a rat bastard.”

You laugh. “You’re kind of nice, Aegon.”

“Yeah right.”

“No, seriously. I like being around you. You make me feel better. You’re like…” You ponder how to word it. “I feel like I could tell you whatever and not worry about being judged for it.”

He snorts. “As if you’ve ever done anything judgeable.”

You shrug, peering out over the lake. “I abandoned my family. I stopped sending them money, I stopped calling. And when everything happened…the zombies, the world ending…I didn’t even consider going back to Kentucky to try to help them. I went west with Rio instead. And now they’re probably all dead and it’s my fault. That’s evil. I couldn’t have gotten away with that level of betrayal. I must be cursed.”

Aegon is watching you, eyebrows raised. He has never heard this before. “But your family sucked, right?”

“Yeah,” you admit. “I think it would be hard to argue they didn’t.”

“So fuck ‘em,” Aegon says simply.

You smile at him, touched, grateful. “Okay. Fuck ‘em.”

“I’m relieved my family’s gone,” Aegon confesses, something so brutal he’d never tell anyone else. “I mean…I feel kind of bad about my mom and Criston. But as long as they were alive, I’d always be the person they raised. And if I could bring someone back, it wouldn’t be any of them. I’d pick Rio.”

“I would too,” you say softly, staring down at the faint burn marks on your palms from when you were stranded on that transmission tower with him, talking him out of suicide, so adamant that both of you were going to make it to Oregon. And you were wrong.

“So if you’re cursed, Pita Chips, sign me up because I’m right there with you.”

Rhaena pulls out an earbud and says to Aegon: “I don’t get this album.”

“What?!” he exclaims.

“It’s so good!” you concur. On the shore, Cregan is spearing several gutted rainbow trout on sticks so they can be roasted over the fire. Ice is gleefully gulping down fish organs.

Aegon continues: “Whatsername! St. Jimmy! Jesus of Suburbia!”

Rhaena blinks, glancing between you and Aegon. “But neither of you grew up in the suburbs.”

“It’s not about the suburbs, Rhaena!” Aegon replies with frenetic hand gestures. “It’s about being disillusioned and angry and failed by all the adults in your life, and self-medicating, and losing love every time you get a taste of it, and wanting to burn everything down and start over. It’s about hating the world and the world hating you back.”

“Okay, sure. I still don’t get it.”

You say: “You might have had too happy a childhood.” And you and Aegon burst out laughing.

“You guys are so weird,” Rhaena says, but she’s smiling. She stands up, gives Aegon back his Walkman, and walks to the end of the dock where Cregan is cooking the rainbow trout. Aemond and Daeron are gathering up the aluminum buckets found at the campground and set outside earlier today to collect rainwater. There is one five-pound bag of trail mix left to share, and then all the food is gone. If Cregan doesn’t kill something, you won’t eat.

“We should go help them with dinner,” you tell Aegon.

He groans. “Should we really?”

“Yeah. We should.”

“Fine.” He takes your hand when you offer it and struggles to his feet. Then you inhale a lungful of the scent of roasting trout, and startlingly powerful nausea punches through your stomach, so repellant you have to clamp a hand over your mouth to stop yourself from retching.

There has to be something wrong with the fish. It’s never smelled like that before.

Aegon seems baffled. “What? What’s wrong?”

“Does the trout smell right to you?”

Aegon sniffs the air like a labrador. “I guess…? I barely smell anything.”

“Well you probably destroyed your nose cells with all the coke.”

“That’s discriminatory. Addiction is a disease.” But his brow is furrowed with concern. “Seriously, are you okay? You look awful. Not like that. You know what I mean.”

“I’m fine.” You don’t feel fine; but everyone down by the fire is chatting and joking around nonchalantly, and surely if there actually was something wrong they would have noticed. “I’ll be back in a second.”

“Sure,” Aegon says, perplexed.

You hurry past the others and take refuge in the cabin you’re sharing with Aemond. Inside the trout smell isn’t so strong. You sit at the edge of the bed and suck in several deep breaths, trying to calm down, willing the confounding wave of nausea to pass.

Did I eat something bad, did I get bit by a spider or something…?

You are checking your arms and legs for little raised bitemarks when Helaena enters the cabin and shuts the door behind her. When she opens her burlap messenger bag to root around inside, you glimpse photographs she must have taken from the beach house, the frames left empty on the mantle of the fireplace. Then Helaena pulls out a pregnancy test, just one, Clearblue.

You gawk at it. “What are you doing?”

“You look sick,” Helaena says matter-of-factly.

“Yeah, but I don’t think it’s that.”

She is puzzled, wide innocent blue eyes. “Why not?”

“Well…I mean…that would be freakishly quick, wouldn’t it? Like…quick as in immediately. People can’t get pregnant the first time they have sex, right?”

“Huh. They really don’t have sex ed in Kentucky,” Helaena says, and leaves you alone with your pregnancy test. You don’t feel so nauseous anymore, but you sneak around the back of the cabin to take it anyway, because now you’re thinking about the possibility with a vividness you’ve never experienced before: a round blossoming belly and tiny handprints and Aemond cradling his child in his arms. And by the time you get the result, you aren’t even shocked. It feels like something that’s supposed to happen.

You and Aemond don’t have a moment alone together until after dark, sitting on the porch swing outside your cabin for first watch, everyone else asleep, Ice dozing serenely by your feet. The only sounds are the breeze through the pine trees, cool and damp, and the hoots of owls, and the chirping of crickets and cicadas.

“So guess what,” you say casually as moonbeams float rippling and fractured on the surface of the black-glass lake.

Aemond smiles drowsily, not expecting anything. “What?”

“In approximately eight months, I might be having your baby.”

At first, he doesn’t speak; he only studies the test when you hand it to him, and then looks at you like he’s not convinced you aren’t angry, like he can’t quite bring himself to believe that you’d want this with someone like him. “Are you afraid?”

“No,” you answer honestly. Maybe you should be, but you aren’t. “I’m hopeful. I feel like as soon as I realized it, everything got brighter. And now I’m thinking about the future instead of the past.” They’re not going to grow up like I did. They’re never going to think they aren’t loved. “What should we name it?”

“Not Otter.”

You laugh, trying to muffle it so you don’t wake anyone. Ice lifts her head and stares at you curiously, her shaggy grey ears straight up.

“I don’t know, I’m terrible with names,” Aemond says; and now he’s smiling again, a wide radiant smile, and you know he’s thinking about the future too. “Hope or Peace or something. Something happy. Something about starting over.”

You take his hand. “I can’t wait to start over with you.”

“Just one more day,” Aemond says.

One more day.

~~~~~~~~~~

“So what am I going to do in Odessa?” Luke asks as the eight of you—nine, if you count Ice—trek eastbound on Route 140. You are about five miles from Lake of the Woods and halfway to your destination. It’s only 80 degrees and overcast, good walking weather, although there is a looming threat of rain, occasional rogue drops and far-off rumbles of thunder. “Everyone has valuable skills except me. Chips has great aim and can build things, Daeron has his compound bow, Aemond is basically a doctor, Rhaena is learning how to shoot guns and treat injuries…”

“Aegon has skills?” Cregan jokes, casting him a good-natured grin. Aegon acts like he’s going to whack Cregan with his golf club, which he’s spinning around haphazardly. Both his Marlin .22 and acoustic guitar are slung across his back. There aren’t many bullets left, but everyone has a few.

“Aegon can navigate,” Luke says. “And probably impregnate ten women a day. Very useful during a population crisis.”

“We don’t need that in the gene pool,” Rhaena notes.

“You wrote stories in college, right?” you ask Luke.

“Screenplays, yeah,” he says hesitantly. “But I wouldn’t say I was super talented or anything.”

Aegon claps him on the shoulder “Well I’ve got good news for you, kid. A big chunk of the world’s screenwriters are probably dead now. So you’ll look so much better in comparison!”

“Thanks…?” Luke says.

“What I mean is,” you continue. “You could write books for people to read, since there aren’t really libraries or Barnes & Nobles anymore. And you could interview people to get their life stories and then record them so they aren’t lost forever. The next generation should know what the world was like before the zombies.”

“Yeah,” Aegon says as he pets Ice. “Someone has to tell them about blue raspberry Icees, right Blue Raspberry Icee?”

“Maybe,” Luke says thoughtfully, and you notice that he’s smiling a little.

Ice begins whining, and there is a rustling in the woods to the north, low-hanging branches of bigleaf maple and dogwood and Douglas fir trees being forced aside. “Zombie!” Aegon announces, pointing. Immediately, Daeron nocks an arrow and then releases it, and the figure draped in the shifting shadows of foliage drops to the ground.

“Hey Aegon,” Daeron says after a few seconds.

“Yeah?”

“That was actually a zombie, right?”

“Totally,” Aegon replies, but he doesn’t sound certain.

Aemond turns to his older brother accusingly. “How sure are you?”

“Like…50%.”

“Aegon!” Rhaena cries, petrified, and everyone rushes off the road to investigate.

Blessedly, the felled creature is long-dead, a former park ranger whose tan uniform hangs in gore-stained tatters. The nametag reads: Underwood. The arrow pierced its soft rotting skull and remains lodged there until Daeron pulls it out to be used again, giving Aegon an impatient scowl as he does.

“Close call,” Aegon tells him. “Think they would have charged you as an adult?”

“Lord almighty, that gave me a scare,” Cregan says, chuckling. Helaena spies a blackberry bush and begins picking a handful, and Cregan goes over to join her. Rhaena and Luke are telling Aegon that he needs to be more responsible and should have waited for Luke to confirm it was a zombie with his binoculars. You exchange a glance with Aegon: he rolls his eyes, you offer a smirk of commiseration. Ice is already trotting back towards Oregon Route 140.

You haven’t told anyone else that you’re pregnant yet, but eventually they’re going to notice that Aemond won’t leave your side. He sighs and asks you: “Have you had enough of this little field trip?”

“Definitely.” You head for the road. Aemond walks with you, placing you not on his left side but on his right where he can see you. You ask, smiling: “You don’t trust me to watch your blind side anymore, huh?”

“I prefer the view the way it is.”

You are only a few steps from the black artery of pavement that cuts through the Cascade-Siskiyou National Monument, a 114,000-acre preserve of wilderness that somehow—although it is 2,500 miles away—reminds you a bit of eastern Kentucky, endless emerald forests, the omnipotent shadows of mountains. And because you are on Aemond’s right side, he can look down and see something just in front of you on the earth strewn with knobby roots and pine needles and dead leaves.

“Don’t!” he shouts, snatching your forearm and yanking you backwards, and he’s never touched you like this before—so forcefully, so violently—and you stumble and almost fall, and your arm burns and aches where he grabbed you, and people are asking what’s going on, and you peer up at Aemond with confusion, fear, mistrust.

“Why…?”

And then you hear it rustling from the same place where you were standing a moment ago. The others yelp and dash out of the way as the snake escapes into the woods, a drab spotted olive green, a rattling tail, an angular skull like an arrowhead.

“Aemond?” you say, because he hasn’t moved, hasn’t made a sound. He looks down, and your gaze follows his. On his right calf, just a few inches above his ankle, are two small puncture wounds from the snake’s fangs, each dribbling a thin river of blood.

“Northern Pacific rattlesnake,” Helaena says, her voice shaking, tears welling up in her horrified eyes. “Venomous.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Aemond has one arm draped across Cregan’s shoulders, the other over Aegon’s. He’s moving slower, or is that just your imagination? His steps are less steady, his breathing more labored. His leg is swelling, a deep blue phantom of a bruise spreading beneath his skin, so tight it looks like it might split open.

“We’re almost there,” you say; you keep saying it, because hopefully that will make it true. “We’re only a few miles from Odessa, and we’ll find people who can help us.”

“Aemond, you’re a doctor,” Luke says.

Aemond’s voice is weak, pained, hazy. “I’m not a doctor.”

“You know what I mean!” Luke yells, frantic. “How do we fix you? What can we do?”

“Nothing,” Aemond says listlessly. “There’s nothing you can do without a hospital. I’ll either get better or I won’t.”

“People in Odessa will know how to help,” you insist. “They’re outside all the time, they hike, they hunt, they fish, they’ve seen snakebites before. They must have. They’ll have treatments.”

“Aemond,” Rhaena breathes, and you turn to see there is blood running from his nostrils. You scream, and Aemond touches his fingers to his face and then watches as they come away bloody.

“Put me down,” he tells Cregan and Aegon.

“No—” you begin, but then his knees buckle and he’s on the pavement anyway, blood pouring from his nose and his lips, blood filling up his right eye. Cregan walks to the shoulder of the highway, his head in his hands. Aegon stays beside Aemond, and you’re kneeling there with him, both of you using anything you have to clean the blood from Aemond’s face: the corners of your shirts, your bare hands.

He’s covered in blood, you think. Just like Jace, Baela, Rio.

“Can’t clot,” Aemond is murmuring. “The venom causes coagulotoxicity. Internal bleeding too. I feel like…like there’s all this pressure inside…”

Rhaena is taking Aemond’s pulse like he taught her to, fingers on the underside of his wrist. “It’s really faint,” she says quietly.

You grab a plastic Gatorade bottle filled with rainwater out of your backpack and tilt it against Aemond’s crimson-stained lips. He manages to swallow some of it. “Aemond, listen to me,” you say as calmly as you can. “You’re so close. We’re almost there. I need you to hang on a little longer.”

He shakes his head, slow dizzy motions. “It doesn’t matter.”

“They might have doctors in Odessa.” This is a fantasy, but you can’t resist it.

“Even if they do, there won’t be any antivenom. And it’s too late anyway.”

“No,” you say savagely, a sob ripping through your throat. “We didn’t cross 3,000 miles so you could die here. I won’t let you. It doesn’t make any sense. It’s not fair.”

“Aegon,” Aemond says, reaching for him, drained and fumbling.

Aegon catches his hand. “I’m here.”

His eye—crystalline blue corrupted with red, blood in clear water—drifts to his brother. “You have to get her to Odessa. You have to help take care of everyone.”

Aegon is weeping. “Man, it’s supposed to be you. How can I still be here if you aren’t?”

“You can do this,” Aemond says.

“I’ll try.”

“I love you.”

“I love you, Aemond,” Aegon says, then crawls away on his hands and knees and collapses on the pavement, gutted, inconsolable, hemorrhaging grief instead of gore.

Everyone is crying and touching Aemond—his face, his hands—saying goodbye, accepting tasks, and they come away stained with red, and rain has begun to fall from a dark sky growling with thunder. Rhaena takes his medical kit. Helaena takes his Glock and stows it away in her messenger mag. Then Aemond looks for you, and now you are alone with him here in the middle of the highway, two golden lines on black asphalt, and with your thumbprint you whisk away the rivulet of blood that is spilling from his eye.

“You’re going to be okay,” he whispers as his heart fails, as his lungs fill with blood instead of air, as his pores leak rust and ruin. “Odessa will be everything we hoped for. I just won’t be there with you.”

“You can’t leave me,” you’re saying as rain patters against the road. I left my family and now my family is leaving me.

“Love,” he sighs, almost too softly to hear. “I don’t want to.”

You lie down on the pavement with him and rest your head on his chest, feel it rise and fall beneath you as the rain descends in sheets. And then Aemond exhales, deep and rattling, and he never tastes oxygen again, never speaks, never touches you. You don’t move from where you’re lying. You’re there until you’re drenched to the bones with rain and the world is a cold mist of pine trees, of wilderness, and you can never go back to any of the places you’ve been before, you can never get back the people you’ve left there.

Aegon is shaking you. “We have to keep moving,” he chokes out through tears.

You reply without looking at him. “I’m giving up now.”

“No you’re fucking not. We have to walk to Odessa.”

“Everyone’s dead in Odessa. Everyone’s dead everywhere. I don’t want to be here anymore. I don’t want to stay in a world like this.”

On the periphery of your vision, you can see Aegon glancing at the others, standing just off the highway and under the canopy of the pine trees. He seems defeated, he seems lost.

Then suddenly Aegon turns back to you. “Hey!” he screams, so loudly you jolt upright, your palms on wet pavement, rain dripping from your hair. “I’m still alive. You’re still alive. This isn’t over yet. I said I would get you to Odessa, so that’s where we’re going. Stand up. Right now.”

Aegon holds out his hand. Thunder booms, lightning strobes, and then you take it. He pulls you to your feet and hesitates, as if he didn’t think he would get this far. Then he throws his arms around you, a crushing desperate embrace, a wordless devotion, a silent vow, sobbing into the curve of your neck, tasting the copper and iron of his brother’s blood on your skin.

“We have to keep moving,” he says again, like an apology, like he understands how impossible it feels. “The storm’s getting worse. It’ll be too dark to see soon.”

“We can’t leave him alone like this.”

“That’s not Aemond anymore,” Aegon pleads. “Aemond’s gone. And he would want us to live.”

Now the others are here on the road too: Daeron, Helaena, Cregan, Rhaena, Luke, Ice whimpering and licking scarlet stains of blood off your hands. You’re all holding each other; you’re all any of you have left. Cregan carries Aemond off the pavement and on a patch of grass alongside Route 140, the seven of you cover his body with branches of pine needles and white petals from dogwood trees. Rhaena is the first person to begin walking again, heading east. One by one you follow her. The downpour is torrential; if you are attacked now, you are nearly blind. Aegon stays beside you no matter how slow your steps are. You think if he disappears, you will too; the strings that tie you to the earth will fray and unweave and your bones will turn to mist, your voice will only be the wind howling down mountainsides. You have no way of knowing how long you’ve been walking or how many miles are left. You wonder what will happen to Aemond’s child if there is nothing for you in Odessa.

The rain is stopping. Now you can hear crows, woodpeckers, formations of geese honking in a foggy sky and squirrels scrabbling up tree trunks. Falcons perch watchfully on dead power lines. Rare aisles of sunlight are breaking through dissipating clouds.

They rise up out of the verdant jungle, a tangle of Pacific ninebark and blue elderberry: four figures in green camouflage, two men and two women, all wearing tactical sunglasses and wielding assault rifles, M16s you’re fairly sure, automatic and with 20-round magazines. Daeron moves to nock an arrow and then stops when he sees you’ve put up your hands. The others follow your lead: palms empty, willingly surrendering.

It’s them, you think dazedly. The people in Odessa. They’re alive, they’re real.

“Please cooperate and hand over all your weapons,” one of the women says, fifties, muscular, alert hawkish eyes.

No one moves. Then you unholster your Beretta M9—received from the U.S. Navy almost exactly five years ago, a different lifetime, a different world—and hold it out to the woman in your open palm. And now everybody else is giving their weapons over too: Aegon and Luke’s .22s, Rhaena’s Ruger, the spare Ruger and Aemond’s Glock hidden in Helaena’s burlap messenger bag, Daeron’s compound bow, Cregan’s axe. Ice peers up at Cregan anxiously, her yellowish eyes wide, but she wags her tail when he runs one of his large, calloused hands over her rain-soaked fur.

Aegon is still clutching his golf club. One of the men stares at him, incredulous. “You can keep that, son,” he says.

The woman nods to the men. “Nick and Glen will escort you five miles up the road, and then return your weapons. We ask that you keep moving and do not turn around. We don’t want trouble, but we can defend ourselves. Don’t think you can double back tomorrow and try to loot us or anything. This is your only warning. Do you understand?”

Aegon nudges your hand with his knuckles, then taps you harder when at first you’re too shellshocked to notice. You have to explain. You have to tell them why you’re here.

“I…I…” You begin, unable to make the words leave your lips, rats from a sinking ship, plummeting bodies from a burning building. Here you stand on a precipice, and with so many other people to save. “I served in the Navy with Bryan Osorio. We left Saratoga Springs together. He told me it would be safe here.”

Now they are interested. Slowly, the woman lowers her M16. “You know the Osorios?”

“I do.” I’ve known them for half a decade.

“Could any of them identify you and verify what you’re saying?”

“His wife, Sophie. She’s blonde, and she likes elephants, and she had a baby recently.”

The woman is scanning the faces behind you. “And where’s Bryan?”

“He’s not here anymore,” you say, and now you’re sobbing again. Aegon is squeezing your shoulder, his head bowed. “I’m sorry. I wanted to help him get home. I was supposed to warn him, I was supposed to stop it from biting him, but I didn’t and now he’s gone—”

“Okay, okay.” The woman motions for you to calm down, but her voice is kind. “Who are these guys? Your colleagues, your friends?”

“They’re my family.”

“You can vouch for them?”

“Yes.”

“You’ll all submit to searches for bitemarks?”

“Yes.”

The woman turns to the men she called Nick and Glen. “Take them inside, will you? Get the ID verified and then we’ll process everyone.”

“Got it,” the older man says. And then, to you and your companions: “Follow me.”

Nick and Glen lead you into the forest, the canopy of pine needles so thick the daylight turns to dusk, and you think of lightning bugs, of firelight, of drinking Guinness on the beach with Rio on Diego Garcia. There are several patrols, groups of four or five, that approach to stop you until they see Nick and Glen and wave you through. Then the trees open into a meadow of buttercups and daisies and pink fawn lilies, and beyond that an immense village, some houses decades old, others currently being constructed with logs from pine trees. There are hundreds of people tending to livestock, hanging up laundry to dry on clotheslines, digging in gardens, making candles and soap and butter. There are children playing without fear, giggling as they chase after scampering dogs, challenging each other to games of kickball and Uno.

In front of one of the houses that predates the apocalypse, brick with a screened-in porch, there is a small blonde woman standing in a garden, smiling and chatting with a middle-aged couple. The baby she carries against her chest in a blue sling has dark curly hair like Rio’s.

Sophie and the baby are here. They’ve been alive the whole time.

You rest a palm on your belly without realizing you’re doing it. “What happens now?” you ask Aegon.

“The rest of our lives.”

It is unimaginable, it is impossible, it is so full of luminous potential you feel like the light will spill out of your pores like blood, it’s an oasis, it’s a second chance, it’s an island in the vast lethal untamed blue of the Indian Ocean.

“Let’s go,” Aegon says softly, taking your hand and leading you across the field of wildflowers, kaleidoscopic blooms in the last days of summer.

#aemond targaryen x reader #aemond x you #aemond x y/n #aemond x reader #aemond targaryen x you #aemond targaryen fanfiction

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wh1msic4lwasab1 · 6 months

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𝐂𝐨𝐜𝐤𝐞𝐝 𝐧' 𝐋𝐨𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐝 ︻デ═一

synopsis : gun play w/boothill ;)

tags: bounty hunter!reader, cowboy on the run boothill, lots of filth, gun play, mentions of alcohol, vulgar, dubcon(?)

wrd cnt: 1.3k+

a/n : read his lines in a country accent 🙏 ( i’m from the west coast pls forgive me if it doesn’t hit 😭)

As you rode into town, the sound of horseshoes clanking on the dusty road filled the air. Your mission was to track down a notorious criminal named Boothill, who had a hefty bounty on his head. You followed about a dozen loose leads and ended up in the western region. As the sky was soon to be painted orange and pink, you decided to take a break and rest for a while.

After tying your horse to the hitching post outside the local saloon, you walked in, eyes scanning the room for any sign of your criminal. The place was nearly empty, save for a few rough-looking gunslingers and the bartender.

As you sipped some booze, you couldn't help but feel a little restless. You had been traveling for days, tirelessly pursuing Boothill, and a part of you was desperate for a break.

But is it ever really that easy? Just as you were about to get going, a voice interrupted your thoughts.  “Thats some damn good whiskey, have a nice evening lil’ lady.”   You looked up to see a man behind you, he downed the rest of your drink before slamming it back down on the bar, walking away while tipping his hat and flashing a teethy smile.

“Hey- Wait!” You scramble out of your chair, grabbing your things, and run to the back of the saloon, slamming the wooden doors open as you look across the balcony to the desert sand.

Suddenly, you feel a large hand cover your mouth from behind you, and hear the doors swing shut.

“Shhhh Shh Shhh…don’t scream too loudly darlin’…not yet anyway.” Boothill whispers into your ear, his warm breath sending shivers down your spine.

His rough hand caresses your cheek before sliding down your neck and gripping your throat, “I reckon you’re the little bounty hunter looking for me, aren’t cha?” You nod slowly, trying to stay calm as his grip on your neck tightens. “Well, sweetheart, you can give me that gun of yours.”

With hesitation, you give it to him, understanding the severity of your situation.

You hear him chuckle, pushing you onto a nearby table and bending you over it.

“Now…What do I owe the honor of your relentless search for me? Are ya a fan? Got a crush on me?” He giggled,holding your wrists together tighter as he pinned you down.

“You’re quite the pretty thing, I gotta say. You can’t just be out for me over a few bucks?”

Anger flares in your chest at his arrogant statement, but you’re too defeated to muster a response.

Boothill takes notice of the fire in your eyes and smirks. With lightning quick movements, he reaches for your hair and tugs your head back, exposing your neck to him.

He trails kisses down your jawline, down your neck, leaving small marks along the way. You moan as his lips graze your skin, and you can feel him smirking against your neck. “I figure we have some fun I before I leave ya in the dust, darlin’,” he whispers, his voice husky with desire. You can’t help but feel a hint of disappointment at his words, but the pleasure he’s giving you quickly dissipates that thought.

You feel his hands run up your back, and then suddenly, he slaps your ass hard, causing you to cry out in surprise. “So feisty…but I like it.” He grins, before spanking you again, sending pleasure shooting throughout your body. He continues to spank you, harder and harder, until you’re gasping and moaning, completely lost in the sensation.

He pulls away, smirking at your pleading expression.

“Turn around,” he commands, and you do as he says.

He grabs your face, jaw in his palm as he makes you look up at him. “Tsk- Can’t even look me honey? Hmph, quite disrespectful no?”

“Disrespectful? You don’t even know my name- Ah!”

With a heavy hand, he grabs your neck and pushes you down on the table, lips connected as well as lower halves.

You’re panting and flushed, your body aching for more of his touch. “You look so pretty like this, all helpless and wanting. I could have you right here, right now, but I want to take my time with you. You did go through all the trouble of finding me, no one’s got this close.”

He smirks, his other hand trailing down your chest and cupping your breast. Your breath hitches as he squeezes and massages your breast, his thumb brushing over your hardened nipple.

“Please…” you beg, voice strained under his hand and unable to contain your desire any longer. He chuckles,

“Oh, you want me already? Well, I guess I can’t disappoint a cute little thing like you.” He unbuttons your jeans and slides his hand down, his fingers teasing your clit through your panties, making you moan loudly. “You’re so wet already, darlin’. Are you this turned on just from my touch?” He smirks, before sliding your gun out of his holster.

Panic set into your entire being, was this how you die? Too distracted by being fucking horny. Shot by your own gun? You almost screamed.

Before you did, Boothill held a hand over your mouth.

He could see the fear in your eyes, soon resting them.

He trailed the gun down your cheek, feeling the cold tip run over your nipple and then your stomach, before you feel it through your panties; rubbing against your folds.

You exhale deeply from your nose, eyes closed shut as you feel him press the weapon to your clit, chuckling at your expressions.

“Look at you…your drippin’ sugar.”

He rips your panties off, watching you spread your legs farther, giving him such a better look at your messy, glistening folds; ready for whatever he gives you.

You feel the gun spread your lips apart, the muzzle engulfing your clit and flicking it so rough your legs started to shake, feeling boothill lean down to talk to you.

“This is the best bounty hunter out here? All I can see is a horny little bitch.” He says with amusement.

Without much warning, he trails the gun down to your hole, pushing it in so slowly as he watches the way your brows contort, your hole expanded wider than it had ever been, the girth of the gun beading through you.

Boothill’s smirk widened as he watched you take it, inch by inch. He leaned down to whisper in your ear, “That’s it, darlin’. Show me how much you want it.” His words only fueled your desire, and you start to grind your pussy against it.  Boothill let go of his grip on you, wanting to hear your pleading voice again. He didn’t even restrain your hands anymore, knowing he had you wrapped around his finger, and this gun. You could feel yourself getting closer and closer to the edge, and you beg him, “Please...please let me com- I…go, let me go.”  He chuckles, “Not yet, darlin'. I want to see you squirm a little more.” He starts to move the gun in and out of you, the cold metal adding an unknowingly amazing sensation, making you moan even louder.  The combination of the gun and Boothill’s skilled hands on your body brings you to the edge quickly, and you feel yourself clenching around the gun as you come undone. Boothill watches with a smirk as you ride out your orgasm, his finger teasing your clit.

Once you come down from your high, Boothill pulls out his gun, licking a stride up the side.

He removes himself off you, putting your weapon back in your weak hand..”You can have this back honey, and when you touch yourself- which I know you will, make sure to think of the things I did to you when you try to get off with your gun…Hope you find me again!” And with a wink, he disappears into the desert, leaving you with a thrill and memory that you'll never forget….and half naked on a back patio table.

whimsic4alwasab1 ™ - do not copy, translate, modify, or claim any of my work as your own.

#jo’s posts #boothill #boothill smut #smut #hsr #hsr boothill #hsr boothill smut #honkai smut #honkai #honkai star rail #hsr smut

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emlovessid · 8 months

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@jegulus-microfic february 5, hormones, 173 words

When Sirius and Remus had first gotten together, Regulus lost count of how many times he’d walked in on them practically devouring each other, groaning as he joked about needing to wash his eyes out with soap.

“Hormones, Reg. They’ll hit you one day, too,” Barty would say with a sympathetic sigh whenever Regulus complained.

He hadn’t quite believed Barty, coasting through his teenage years enjoying kissing and sex, but never feeling the unbridled need to be constantly at it. Until he met James.

James’ lips are trailing down his neck, Regulus trying to bite back the moan that’s clawing up his throat, lest he give away to the room full of people on the other side of the door that he and James are not just grabbing more wine like they’d said.

He hates the fact that he’s thinking of his brother while James has a hand down his pants, but he can’t help the thought that creeps into his mind as James brings their lips back together.

I get it now.

#jegulus #jegulus fic #marauders #sometimes i write things

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vanwinkle11 · 1 year

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Tide pools along the Lost Coast Trail on January 30, 2023

#the lost coast trail #lost coast trail #the lost coast #tide pools #hiking #backpacking #trekking #california #norcal #photography #shot on iphone

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valhikes · 1 year

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King Range National Conservation Area, California.

Day 6 was generally spent on the Cooskie Creek Route through the King Range. One of the best reasons to get off the beach and see more when hiking the Lost Coast Trail.

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heavysighing-dreamyeyes · 1 month

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On Muddied Stones

Part Three of this pirate!au. Stubborn, self-sacrificing love because sometimes we don't realize what's best for the people you love is you. 18+ warning, beginnings of smut that gets cut off, MDNI. Angst and a bit of a cliffhanger. ~2.5k words

Your husband guides you into the store, smiling easily as he leads you towards a mannequin, "Welcome to Vixen's. Mari is the best at what she does."

You tilt your head curiously, "And pirates would know which seamstresses are the best?"

He laughs a little, "She is the best designer, treasure, you'll see," and he lowers his voice to lean down and whisper, "But she's also the best weapons smuggler on this coast."

"Oh," you murmur, surprise pitching in your voice.

He grins widely at you and pulls your hand up to kiss your fingers, "Pick out anything you want, love, I'll be right back." You watch quietly for a moment as he steps away and disappears behind a curtain leading to the back of the store.

You start to busy yourself by picking over materials and colors of the displayed clothes, eventually settling on a dark gray, cotton cloak with a hood. It will suit the purpose of blending in with a crowd. You fidget with the material between your fingers, lost in thought.

"Is that all you picked?" Jason's voice draws you to attention and your gaze flicks to his.

"It's all I needed," You tell him, eyes trailing to the women gracefully walking out from behind the curtain. She gives you a knowing smile and a wave.

"Ah, I figured as much. Mari will have some things sent to the ship for you," he says idly, taking the cloak from your hands.

"Things?" You question, "But I don't need–"

"You do need, my love," Jason cuts in, gently pulling the cloak around your shoulders and fastening the clasp. "I took you to my ship with nothing but the clothes on your back. Allow me to remedy that, and have things of your own brought to our cabin."

He leans forward and presses a kiss to the crown on your head, then draws the hood up, voice fond, "A perfect fit. Do you like it?"

"I do, thank you," you answer softly, and you find yourself leaning into his touch.

"Good, I'm glad you approve, darling," Jason says, tracing his thumb over your cheek affectionately, "I would keep you like this forever, if I could, but I believe we have more things on your list to buy."

"Don't we have to pay?" You ask, eyes darting over to Mari, who offers you a sly smile and a wink.

"All taken care of," Jason answers, nodding to Mari as he takes your hand, leading you back out onto the streets. "Shall we get your hair pins next, my love?"

"I– yes," You mumble, reeling slightly at how sweet this is. How much of your husband you still recognize in the man most people fear. It makes guilt coil in your stomach, at the thought that you've been planning to leave. But how much can a few weeks of kindness make up for years of separation?

He squeezes your hand, and leads you along to a stall with a variety of scarves and pins and handkerchiefs, "Here, treasure. Take your time."

You pick over the hair pins slowly, selecting three. A simple, glossy black pin. A shiny silver pin, dotted with glistening red gems. And pin engraved with a golden snake, its eyes made of piercing green emeralds.

"And this one," your husband says, holding up a pin with a rose etched from silver.

You falter, "Our gardens had roses. You planted them after we got married."

"Aye, I remember," he says fondly, and carefully sets the pin in your hair. He nods in approval and digs a few coins out of his leather pouch, dropping it in the vendor's hand, all without taking his eyes from you, "You look beautiful."

He steps closer to you, guides you to his body with his hands on your hips, "So beautiful. I always remembered you in our garden. Surrounded by flowers, petals in your hair. I'd imagine children running past your skirts, a babe in your arms. And your laughter. Always you smiling." He's rambling, his voice gentle as he leans down to press a kiss to your shoulder.

You exhale shakily at the thought of children, "It's a shame we can't have a garden on the ship."

He laughs and nuzzles your throat for a moment before pulling back, "Mm. Yes, treasure, a shame. I could build you a new garden, a little place to keep your flowers. Would you like that?"

You blink at him, and the pins in your pocket feel heavy. You're keenly aware of the rose in your hair. You feel your voice come out unsteady, because you've always been able to see that life with him, "What about your ship and crew?"

He lifts your hand to press a kiss to your knuckles, "My ship will be fine. My crew is more than capable of keeping her afloat. And I've enough gold to keep us comfortable for the rest of our and our children's lives."

You're not exactly sure what to do with that, "I guess raising children on a pirate ship might not be the best environment," You murmur and your eyes fix on a merchant's caravan for a moment.

He laughs, his hand settling on the small of your back to lead you to the next stall, "We can have both love. A few weeks at sea, a few in your garden. There's nothing I wouldn't give you. Now, books next, darlin'? Something to fill your lovely head and the ship's library?"

"The ship has a library?" You ask curiously, wondering if you had missed it when you were exploring his ship.

"I'm having one built," he drawls, like it's nothing at all.

"You're- What? Where?" You stumble out, trying to figure where there could possibly be room on the ship for a library.

"In one of the storage rooms, treasure, it wasn't being used anyway. Ah, here we are," Jason nudges you towards a vendor with more books than you've ever seen, effectively ending your line of questioning, "Pick out whatever catches your eye. I'll be right back."

He presses a kiss to your cheek, and you watch as he lazily heads over to women selling baskets.

You hastily pick out the first book that looks interesting, and Jason raises an eyebrow at you when he strolls back to your side, "Only one book, love?"

"Just one is fine," You answer, reaching to take the basket.

He moves the basket from your reach, "Pick out a few more, darlin'. You're not being greedy. It'll be good to have something to do at sea, right?"

He watches you closely as you nod, and go to pick out two more books a little more carefully, "Good. Now pick out two more."

You frown, "This is enough."

"Two more, treasure," he says softly, reaching for the three books in your hands. He pulls them from you gently and sets them in the basket, "go on."

He hums in approval when you pick out two more novels, and he drops coins in the old vendor's hands. He takes the books from you, "Very good, love. What did you want next?"

"That was everything," You answer quietly.

He smiles brightly, "Then, there's a bakery I'd like to show you. They have croissants, love, with chocolate on the inside. But, first," he says, mischief glinting in his eyes as he leads you away from the marketplace, and into an empty alley.

He places the basket on the cobblestones and gently pushes your hood back, admiring your face as you watch him with confused eyes, "What are we doing, Jason?"

"This," he mumbles, pressing a firm kiss to your lips. It catches you off guard, and he kisses you again and again until you're both panting, "so perfect, my treasure." He trails kisses up to your ear, nipping at your skin, "so clever and lovely and sweet."

"Jason," You protest as he starts to lift your skirts. He hums softly, kissing your throat as he turns you around to face the wall, pressing his stiffening cock to your backside.

"Jason," You try again as he traces his fingers up your thighs, exploring and relearning what makes you shiver.

"You're trembling," he notes, pressing more kisses along your neck, "Don't worry, love, I've got you."

"Someone could see," You mumble, eyes darting as you brace a hand against the wall, his weight behind you making you unsteady.

"Let them," he says simply, and the sound of his belt clinking makes you tense.

"Jason– wait, I–" You stumble out and he freezes, fingers stilling against your thighs and mouth leaving your skin, "I feel like a whore."

He makes a choked noise and drops your skirts, turning you back around with panic in his eyes, "Love, no, I would never– the last thing I want in the world is to make you feel that way. You're my partner, not some wench," he says your name, strangled and pained, "I love you. I swear it. I wasn't planning to– this was the first secluded spot I could think of, treasure. All I ever think of is how much I want you by my side. This wasn't supposed to hurt you. I never want to hurt you."

"I'm not hurt," You mumble, embarrassment and unease settling in your stomach as you avoid his eyes.

"Love," he breathes out, "I'm sorry."

"Don't be," You say quickly, adjusting your clothes and cloak, "I– this is what your life is, isn't it? Danger and thrills and all that comes with being a pirate."

He frowns, reaching for you, starts to say your name. "Will you take me to the pastry shop?" You cut him off instead.

He studies you, concern and apologies written clear on his face. He then nods slowly, and bends down to pick up the basket filled with your books, "This isn't– treasure, I've only ever been with you. You know that, right?"

You nod, "I know."

Jason doesn't quite look like he believes you, but offers you his hand hesitantly. You don't miss the way his shoulders drop in relief when you take it, "The bakery, then," he says gently, leading you slowly through the winding alleys and back onto the streets lined with stores.

"Jason," You call, pausing outside an expensive looking shop.

His gaze snaps to you immediately, voice eager yet careful, "Yes, love?"

You gesture to the store, "They sell rings."

His eyes light up and he steps closer to you, "You want me to buy you a ring, love?" He exhales softly when you nod, and he lifts your hand to kiss your wrist.

"Can I wait out here? With the books? I'd like to sit on the bench. And, ah, be surprised by what you pick," You say, drawing out your words.

"Of course, darling. Anything," he agrees easily, immediately guiding you to the bench and placing the basket next you. "I won't be long." He hesitates again, before bending down placing a tender kiss to your cheek.

You watch as he disappears into the store, and every fiber of your being knows this is your only chance. If you're ever going to leave, to let him go so both of you can move on, now is all you're ever going to get.

It makes you sick with guilt, thinking of the way he looks at you with adoration, but he's in love with a memory of the past. He should be focused on his future. He's a pirate lord now, and he has a full life, a new family, and new adventures where you don't fit.

To tie him to a life of flower-filled gardens when you've seen first hand how much he loves the salt and sea, is something you could never do.

You stand on shaky feet. You leave the basket of books on the bench, you take the hair pins. Jason will look for you. His crew will look for you. He might even think you've been kidnapped. So, you have to be clever. You've always been clever.

You force a practiced, perfect smile to your face, one you've worn for the past two years around Gotham's finest nobles. You approach a young woman, "Excuse me, Miss? I love your cloak, would you want to trade it for mine?"

She looks surprised, but when her eyes dart over you and lock on the insignia engraved on the fastening of your cloak, she seems much more interested, "Oh? That's– a cloak from Vixen's?" You nod innocently, and she smiles greedily, "yes, let's trade."

You both unpin your cloaks, and as you walk away, drawing the light gray material over your head, you hear her chirp about how naive people from outside Star City are, how they don't appreciate how hard it is to get any clothes by Mari.

You have to be fast. You've learned how to be fast, to disappear into crowded streets during the years Jason was gone. It's not long before you're standing in front of an elderly man ticking off items on a list. "Sir?"

He looks up at you kindly, but looks can be so deceiving. It's a risk you're willing to take, you decide, and force back the thoughts that it's unfair to be testing your husband in this way. You hadn't meant for it to become a test, but in a way, it is.

Lies spill easily from your tongue, "I heard your wagons are traveling to a village near my sister's home. Is it possible I could pay for passage to ride with you?"

He smiles at you, eyes still soft and kind, "of course, Miss. There's room. You're welcome to sit in the wagon," he offers you an aged, calloused hand, and you take it as he helps you into the wagon.

"Thank you," You murmur, grateful you didn't have to steep to bargaining with the hair pins just yet.

He nods, voice soft and knowing, "We'll be leaving in just a moment, Miss," he draws the canvas of the wagon closed, and you settle yourself between boxes and sacks of goods.

You busy yourself with picking at your sleeve as the caravan starts to move, the rumbling and shaking doing nothing to calm your nerves. You keep your head down, and wonder if he's even noticed you're gone.

The horses whine and cobblestones turn to dirt roads, the sounds of the city grow dull. You risk a glance out the wagon towards the port city. There's no smoke from fires, no screams or alarms raised.

It had been so easy. So painfully simple. And there's no way for him to track you down. No way for him to know if you're still in the city, on ship, or in a carriage. There's no trail for him to follow. No lighthouse that leads to you.

Tears start to spill down your face before you even realize you're crying. You tug your knees to your chest. You're heading inland, far from any ports where ships could chase you. If you went through enough towns, you'd be impossible to trace.

You could disappear almost entirely. And why would he look for you? Abandon his crew and the sea to find you?

It was for the best, you tell yourself as you muffle your tears into your traded cloak, for both you. It had to be done. You had to leave.

There was never any other choice for either of you, than to end the dying chapter.

Part Four | Even More Headcannons

#jason todd x reader #jason todd #x reader #jason todd x y/n #jason todd x you #18+ mdni #pirate!au

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oathkeeper-of-tarth · 2 months

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One really tiny but really flavourful detail in BG3 for me is one of the steps in the "Find the Nightsong" quest. The quest in itself is a big fave of mine, not just because of its buildup and dramatic twist and the fact that it deals with my personal favourite character, but also because of the way it winds through all three acts of this immense game. Here, though, I want to highlight a small and relatively early portion of it.

Initially, when you are sent after the mysterious and much sought-after relic called the Nightsong - classic adventurer stuff, really, there's even a wizard in a tower who'll pay you for it - all you have to go on are rumours that it is hidden in an old Selûnite temple in the region you happened to crash in. And sure enough, you explore the cool temple ruins, maybe you do a little puzzle-solving to open a sealed moon-themed door leading to a passage deep below - or you get into the Underdark via one of the other routes available. In any case, once there, you find the tragically doomed underground outpost some of the temple's residents tried to establish, as well as several records of their final hours. But there are no signs of the Nightsong or anything related to it ever being there at all. At that point you have no more info to go on, and your quest journal updates to say so:

Explore the Underdark. The trail goes cold in the Underdark. Where is the Nightsong?

Except... there is something here. And that something is a book - not an ancient record, but a recent publication: This tome appears fairly new-printed; it can't be more than a decade or two old, the item description says. But above all, it is very conspicuously and prominently placed at the foot of the large statue of Selûne that dominates the remnants of the outpost (and that, as part of its defenses, shoots rather deadly magical moonlight beams until you disable it).

The book is called "In Search of the Nightsong". It is marked as a quest item and it is there purely to provide you with a lead and to bridge the gap until the next bit of insight into the Nightsong you will get (which is at this point probably quite a ways away in Act 2, other than the possible tidbit around Nere and the collapsed bridge as you approach one possible end of Act 1). You are absolutely meant to find it and read it.

Fascinating that such a seemingly valuable object has proven so difficult to track down. Indeed, treasure-hunters the realm over have travelled to the Sword Coast with one goal in mind: To find the Nightsong. Yet each by each they have failed, indicating dead ends, rebuffs, or else disappearing altogether. My latest enquiry was with a half-orc named Graly, who insisted he'd come as close as possible to the relic as one may go without forfeiting his or her life. He indicated that the object is not, as most reports indicate, in the Selûnite fort adjacent to the river Chionthar. It is, in fact, held in an old Sharran fortress somewhere in the environs of Moonrise Towers. However, Graly reported that some kind of potent shadow prevents one from approaching where this fortress might be.

In fact, your next quest journal update comes from going into your inventory and reading the book:

Find the Sharran Temple. We found a book that told of a secret Sharran temple that contains the Nightsong. It is hidden underground, somewhere near Moonrise Towers.

How did this recently-published book end up sitting there, just waiting for you to read it, in the sealed, long-abandoned outpost, beset on all sides by unfriendly crowds of goblins, drow, minotaurs, a spectator, you name it? And why is this cool to me? Well, it's a bit meta, but it turns out that Selûne, She Who Guides, goddess of, among other things, questers, seekers, navigators, and the lost finding their path, has more than earned her title. And indeed, here we see that both in gameplay and in lore, Selûne guides.

In this particular case, though you don't know that yet, she's guiding you, both the character and the player, to hopefully save her long-lost daughter.

#baldur's gate 3 #bg3 #the nightsong #selune #am i reading a bit much into this? yeah #but that's where the fun is!

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sink-me-in-your-ocean · 1 year

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Careful What You Wish For

Sodo/Dewdrop Ghoul x fem!Reader Smut

W/C: 3560

A/N: Never been more mesmerized in my life then when I went to my first ritual... Unashamedly staring at this fucking ghoul all night. Thank you @endhisbloodlineinmyesophagus for reading this first 💕

Content warnings: sodomy (obviously, which ghoul do you think this is?) m!receiving (oral), fingering, P in V sex, shame/embarrassment, voyeurism. Minors DNI.

“Straight through there, sister, you can’t miss it.” You received an unceremonious shove from Sister Adelaide. After catching yourself on the railing you continued down the curving stone stairwell alone. Your footsteps scuffed along the ice cold, ancient grey stone.

It was freezing in the basement of the ministry, and you wished silently that the good Sister had allowed you to dress properly before she dragged you out of your shared bedroom. All you wore was a black night slip, and though it easily reached to your knees, its lace and satin offered no solace from the nipping, stale air. With no relief from the cold, all you prayed for was that you wouldn’t run into anyone down here.

Finally, you reached the base of the stairs. A single black candle glowed from its head-level position on the wall. You squinted at it, considering it an omen, telling you not to go further. You peered out into the distance, feeling lost already. You can’t miss it my ass. You made a mental note to “thank” the Sister later for her astute direction.

Suddenly, the first long corridor was lit instantaneously by a long trail of wall-mounted candelabras. It provided the only light source as you tiptoed along. The soft, yellow light carried you forth to meet a wooden door. You pushed it open with ease and were met with black darker than night.

You stumble blindly forward through a series of black velvet curtains. Once you step through the first one, your heart kicks up in rhythm, the light seemingly sucked out of the hallway behind you and the door falling closed on its hinges with a creak.

You take three more less-than-graceful steps and shove through one final curtain to find yourself in a dark room, lit by dim blue ambient light. It takes a minute for your eyes to adjust, and you take a quick stock of your surroundings: a dark chaise lounge, in what color you couldn’t identify, a dark multi-patterned rug on the floor, and in the corner at an angle facing you, a large armchair. You sucked in a breath quickly. The armchair had an occupant.

Is that…

Your thought was interrupted swiftly as the ghoul in the chair adjusted his posture, spreading his legs in a wide, almost lazy, “v” shape. The only sounds in the room were the distant hymnal voices in practice above ground, and the thrumming beat of your own heart. Your pulse pounded in your ears. You felt your hands become clammy.

You studied the ghoul as your eyes continued to adjust to the dark room. But you were torn: adrenaline begging through your veins for you to flee, and curiosity ever edging your instincts out of the picture.

As if sensing your thoughts, he moved again to stir your attention. His left elbow came to rest on the tuft of the chair, and he tilted his head as he rested it on his pale hand.

His hands.

You didn’t notice how his right hand had been sitting on his covered thigh, but now you couldn’t look away. His thumb was rubbing back and forth slowly, and even in the low light you recognized his tendons and veins as he flexed. You’d know those hands that belong to your favorite ghoul anywhere. His hands were imprinted on your mind like an unholy relic.

“Sodo.” Your voice was hardly audible, a mere breath coasting over your realization.

The fire ghoul said nothing, instead shifting from the disinterested position he was in to a commanding one, sitting straight backed against the chair. Your eyes found themselves watching his right hand again, as he slowly moved it from his thigh to be outstretched. He made a come here motion using two long fingers. Slowly, sensually beckoning you forth.

Your mouth went dry as the dirty thoughts regarding his fingers snaked their way up from your loins to leech into your brain. You obeyed. It wasn’t like you to disobey any member of the clergy. Especially not a member of the clergy who you’ve got it so bad for.

You timidly close the gap between you two. No words are needed in the exchange, but you size him up anyway. Sodo wears his mask, and he is covered from head to toe in his black uniform, the only exception of exposure being his perfect hands.

He pointed to the cushion at his feet and you kneel in submission. A perfectly obedient daughter of the ministry following the clergy.

“Wha -”

Where your question was going, you forgot immediately, as an old television screen turned on to the right of you. You jumped at the sudden addition of light and crackling sound, shrinking back in temporary trepidation.

How strange.

It was a video monitoring of what looked to be the inside of the dark wooden confession box.

Wait. Something’s -

The metal and heavy cloth sounds of the curtain moving made your stomach drop. You watched in horror as you, well, past you, entered the confession booth and sat down.

You heard the unmistakable words of Papa Emeritus IV. “My child, what makes you appear at such an hour? Have you come to confess what plagues your mind and body?”

“I have. It has been one week since my last confession.”

You knew what was coming next.

“Come, my child, speak what unsettles you, let it weigh on your heart no longer.”

Utterly embarrassed, you tilted your head down to hide your shame at the impending admission coming from your past self. But then, you felt a strong, cold hand grip your jaw, forcing your face up to watch in horror, reliving the moment in confession you had after having one too many glasses of wine at dinner.

“Last night I pleasured myself with the sinful thoughts of a brother…”

“Dio miserabile young sister!”

You bit your lip, both in the camera footage and presently. You had forgotten how Papa Emeritus IV had reacted so outwardly to your admission of guilt. After a pause, he spoke again. “Sister?”

“Yes, Papa?”

“Tell me which one of our pious brothers has turned your thoughts in such a devious way.”

“Uh…” You trailed off, your voice in the recording was meek, you sounded so utterly pathetic.

“Sister? I could just guess if that would make it easier for you.”

You winced at how pitiful it was that he had to coax it out of you. You watched, willing your past self to keep her stupid mouth closed, but of course she didn’t.

“It was… brother Dewdrop.”

“I see.”

In the room you thought you heard Dewdrop make a noise deep in the back of his throat, like a groan. Your attention quickly went back to the video, eyes never leaving the screen as made possible by the ghouls grasp on your face. There was a long-lasting pause, one that made your stomach tighten with the knowledge of what you were about to admit in that wooden box.

“Describe it, my child, you’ll feel better once you get it out.”

In the video you sighed deeply before continuing, “In my thoughts he was fingering me, using two, then three fingers inside me to make me come. Then I got down on my knees for him and serviced his cock, taking it in my hands and mouth.”

You stopped breathing. The sound of your blood rushing in the pulse near your ears drowning out the words coming through the screen.

“Continue.” Came the deep, accented voice of the Papa.

“Then I imagined I was in his lap, and he let me use his cock for my own pleasure. I fucked myself on top of him. Forgive me, please forgive me, I beg of you.” The video cut then, leaving you reeling.

Speaking such depraved filth in confession was mortifying enough, but knowing the ghoul you were speaking about heard it too was devastating. You were frozen in place in embarrassment. At least, you would have stayed that way had you not noticed Sodo’s breathing changed.

He had gotten so close to your face while gripping your chin that you could hear his labored breathing. His breaths came in heavy pants from inside his mask, like a predatory animal behind a muzzle.

Part of you wanted to take off his mask, see his devilish eyes, sharp teeth, and his horns for yourself. To let him bite you, mark you, ravage your body with his tongue and teeth. But you knew he’d want to keep it on, and oh how you aimed to please him.

“Sodo?” Your voice was uncharacteristically quiet as you faced him. His grip did not loosen from your chin while allowing you to move, instead his index finger tapped your cheek in what seemed to be contemplation. What did he want to do with you now? Especially after seeing such a horrific display of lust on your part. You had sounded so desperate, so pitiful in confession. But if he gave you the chance, you’d show him how truly desperate you could be.

He released your jaw from his hard grasp, placing his hands on each of his tightly clothed thighs. You exhaled soundlessly through your parted lips as he cocked his head to the left side. He sat there silently waiting.

Your voice came out timid at first, “It’s true, all of it. Every second of that tape is the truth.” You then cocked your head to the right, mirroring him while still from your position sitting on the floor. You gained more confidence as you continued, “Though I’m guessing you know that. And you knew I’d come here.” Does that mean that he too - that he could possibly -

Your eyes widened as he tilted his head down towards his lap, then back up to you. Asking you to, what, sit on his lap?

Fuck waiting to decipher what he meant, you read deeply enough into his vague expression, and you would do anything to get what you wanted. You stood up quickly, his masked head snapping up to follow you intently. However, before you could crawl into his lap, he reached forward and grabbed your hips, spinning you in a half circle so your ass was facing him. He pulled you back to sit down.

You didn’t have time to react, let alone think before he hooked his ankles around the inside of yours, catching your legs with his respectively. Then, he spread your legs wide, earning a sharp inhale of surprise from you as the slip you wore parted salaciously.

He put his fingers over your mouth and you licked them without thinking. You could swear he made a low, dark sound from behind you. Then he took those fingers and dragged them down the front of your body, tracing down your black garb in identical fashion to his movements during a ritual. He paused right at the hem of your night dress, as it had ridden up. His middle finger hooked under it and pulled it upward, exposing your most upper thighs and your lace black panties.

As his hand moved to cup you through your panties, you shifted your hips back to be more comfortable. You felt his hardness against your rear and felt yourself involuntarily clench around nothing. Fuck.

You couldn’t help but grind your ass back against him, feeling his hardening cock against you was something you thought you would only ever get to dream of. You just hoped he was enjoying your body as much as you were enjoying his.

He hooked a finger in your panties, pulling and then snapping them back to get your full attention back on what he was doing to you. You gasped at the momentary sharp sting. Satisfied by startling you, he traced the seam of your underwear once more, before dipping a callused finger inside and brushing along your slit.

You watched him pull his finger away, coated in your arousal, before going back to your heat and ripping your panties off of you, tossing them to the floor. He put his index and middle finger together and repeated the action of touching you. Sodo dragged his rough fingers through your folds and up to your clit. A whine escaped your lips, and his left hand grabbed your chest and pulled you back so you were resting completely against him. It led you to feel his arousal even better under your ass, and you swirl your hips twice to help spur him on.

Without warning, his two fingers plunged into your heat all the way to the third knuckle. You opened your mouth and nothing came out, only silence as you felt his fingers deep within your aching center. His thumb pressed down on your clit, providing the perfect addition of pressure.

His fingers felt as good as you dreamed they would be, so long, and hitting all the places inside you that were drawing you close to the edge already. He worked you in a steady rhythmic pattern, drawing his fingers in and out of you while circling your clit with his thumb. Just from this you knew your own fingers wouldn’t be enough to satisfy you again.

His left hand moved to your breast, cupping and then pressing his thumb to your already hardened nipple. You knew it was a combination of both the chill from the room and the heat of the moment that caused your nipples to ache against the fabric of your night dress. Sodo used his thumb to circle your nipple through your slip, a mirrored action to his right thumb on your most sensitive bundle of nerves between your legs. Fuck.

Suddenly, you had a feeling of being watched. If there is a camera in the confession box then… maybe… You couldn’t finish the thought, if anything, it spurred you on further. Your head lolled back, resting on the ghouls' hard shoulder as you felt yourself reaching the peak. You had never come so fast before, and you tried to fight it off, but his fingers were like magic on you. He had changed his movements so that his long fingers curled perfectly within you. Each curl of his fingers had your breath hitching and your legs starting to shake. Sodo was a drug you didn’t know you needed and yet could never get enough of.

All the tension that had been building snapped and you came with a broken moan. His fingers never ceased their ministrations, only slowing to help you come down from your high. Soon you were squirming in his lap, the pressure of his calloused thumb on your clit almost painful now.

Your breath came in heavy shudders, your head still resting on his shoulder, “May I?” You circled your hips against his hardness again to punctuate the question. He made a low sound, moving his legs so they no longer held yours apart. You scooted down to the floor quickly, kneeling on the cushion before the ghoul. He wasted no time pulling his cock out for his black pants, stroking it roughly with his right hand twice before looking at you in expectation.

Your hands dragged up each of his thighs as you shifted forward. You made a silent vow as you rose up on your knees and lowered your mouth to taste him. If this is the penance that I will pay after confessing my lust, then I’ll be on my knees confessing every night.

You started at the hot tip, swirling your tongue around twice before placing your lips around him and sucking. It wasn’t enough, not for you, and certainly not for him. You grabbed him in your right hand and licked, your tongue wide and flat against the base of his shaft, all the way back up to the tip again before devouring him. Your mouth salivated profusely as you dipped your head down over and over and over again, massaging with your tongue and sucking expertly.

If your cunt wasn’t already wet from fucking his fingers, it would have been soaked just from this. Him allowing you to touch him, to pleasure him, was your salvation. You couldn’t get enough, high off his reactions to you as you changed pace. The way his breath shuddered, the sounds of his nails scratching on the armrests of the chair, it was all incentive for you to keep going and please him better than you had anyone before.

You dipped your head down again, going as deep as you could to take him all the way back in your throat. You breathed through your nose, ignoring your gag reflex, wanting only to pleasure Sodo.

You felt his bony fingers slide through your hair and you kept up your movements until he made a fist and yanked hard. Your lips fell from his cock with a soft pop. As your face moved back a strand of saliva connected your mouth to his erection. You looked up at his expressionless mask again.

His silence filled the room. And as he patted his thigh in indication for you to get on top of him, it felt like all of the air had been sucked from your chest. You trembled in your kneeling position on the floor, heart fluttering, and rose, not wanting to vex him by wasting precious time.

You climbed up into his lap like an obedient little pet. The aching within you came to a crescendo as you straddled him, holding onto his shoulders as you centered yourself. You looked into the eyes of the mask, seeing the empty void where his eyes would be. He nodded at you, giving you permission to do exactly as you fantasized about.

You gripped his cock, still wet with your saliva, and lined him up with your center. You dragged the tip of him through your sensitive folds, wanting to draw the moment out just a little more, before sinking down. Only the tip of his thick cock was inside you and already you felt yourself shivering. You steadied yourself again, grabbing his shoulders as you lowered yourself down agonizingly slow. Taking him for this first time had your cunt burning from the stretch to fit him inside you.

His cock was long and thick, but you were determined. Inch after inch you sunk down, and once you finally bottomed out, you didn’t miss how his nails scratched the arms of the chair. His head rolled back slightly, and just that provided the evidence that you needed to know he was relishing this moment too. You wondered how it felt for him, imagining that the ghoul was trying not to come just from the feeling of being inside your tight, wet, pussy.

You rose up on your knees, leaving just the head of his cock inside you before pushing back down in a full thrust. Repeating the motion had you lightheaded already, and you could feel the ridges and veins of his throbbing dick rubbing up against your g-spot with every move. One thing was absolutely certain, you were not going to last like this.

Up and down, up and down, you bucked your hips rhythmically to do exactly what you wanted and fucked yourself on him. You were certain that you held your breath each time you impaled yourself on him, believing that his cock would punch the air from your very lungs if not. The pressure was building again, this time deeper within your core. All the tension was pulling, pulling so tight. Fuck. You wanted to last longer but it was impossible. The feeling of him inside you made that impossible. You gasped, “I’m - I’m going to - Ah!”

A primal sound tore its way out of your throat as you reached your climax. Dewdrops hands grasped possessively at your hips, forcing you to continue to fuck yourself on him through your orgasm. His hands kept you moving steadily on his cock and had you feeling completely overstimulated in seconds. You cried out a series of unintelligible words, the feeling so foreign to you but familiar at the same time. After several more deep, hard thrusts, his cock twitched inside you and you knew he would come soon too. The thought of him coming inside you became your undoing. You came again, screaming his name in praise and adoration and he pulled you down hard one final time before he jerked inside you and you felt his hot load coat your walls. Your pussy still spasmed from your own orgasm, milking him dry.

The two of you sat in silence while you caught your breath. You slid off his lap, wincing slightly as you felt his cock leave your cunt. You stooped to the floor, picking up your torn panties and then fixing your night dress. Straightening up you noticed he had zipped his pants back up and was sprawled lazily in the chair again. His chest rose and fell rhythmically. Is he sleeping?

Before you left the room, a red light amongst the blue caught your eye and confirmed your suspicion from earlier. You were being watched again, just as you had in the confession. You averted your eyes away quickly, not wanting whoever was on the other end to know you had discovered them. Hoping that by doing so, you could have another encounter with Sodo soon if he so wished.

... hope that ticked your taints *with love and adoration* (～￣▽￣)～

#dewdrop ghoul #dewdrop x reader #dewdrop x reader smut #the band ghost x reader #the band ghost x reader smut #sodo ghoul #sodo x reader #sodo x reader smut #dewdrop ghoul smut #dewdrop smut #dewdrop ghoul x reader smut #fire ghoul x reader

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7ndipity · 1 year

Text

Accidental Announcement

Taehyung x Idol Reader

Summary: You and Tae’s relationship is revealed to his members in an unplanned, slightly awkward way.

Word Count: 1.2k

Warnings: suggestive, like one swear, Tae refers to reader as his girlfriend,

A/N: Thanks to the lovely anons who sent both of these requests! I decided to combine them into the same piece, I hope that’s okay. Idk why, but it’s funny to me that I went from not really knowing much about Idol AUs, to having several ongoing series’ of them on this blog!

Masterlist

Requests are open

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The backstage area of the music show was always so crowded and noisy that it made it easy for Tae to slip up beside you without anyone really paying attention, catching your hand in his before leaning in closer than nessary to mumble lowly in your ear.

“I’ve got a room to myself tonight, do you want to come over?”

“What exactly are you suggesting?” You asked, casting a sidelong glance at him, a smirk playing at the corners of your mouth.

“Whatever you want.” He replied, slipping a keycard into your hand smoothly before going back to find his members.

You were a bit surprised by his brazeness of the action, the past few weeks apart while traveling with your respective groups having apparently made him a little more needy than usual, though you couldn’t say you minded.

It wasn’t uncommon for you and Tae to slip off to each others rooms when you found out you were staying at the same hotel, but it was usually brief since there was the constant risk of one of the members walking in on you, due to having to share rooms all the time. But having a solo room meant there was no such threat for once.

You slipped down to his room after he texted that the coast was clear, spending a relatively quiet evening together before getting ready for bed, borrowing one of his t-shirts to sleep in, having conveniently ‘forgotten’ to bring your own pj’s with you.

As you wandered back out of the bathroom, you noticed Tae very engrosed in whatever it was that he was watching on his phone.

Out of curiosity, you snuck up behind him and peeked over his shoulder to catch a glimpse at his phone, surprised to see yourself, winking at the camera as you danced earlier that night during the music show.

“Are you watching fan edits of me?!” You squealed, making him jump and drop his phone, which you were quick to snatch up to get a better look.

“Ya! That was just in my recomendations! Give it back!” He jumped to his feet, chasing you round the bed, but you were too quick, darting across the mattress to save yourself from a full body tackle. You tried to make a dash for the bathroom, but were to slow, as he managed to grab hold of your arm and spin you so you were pinned between him and the front door.

“Give me that!” He giggled breathlessly as he wrangled his phone out of your grip.

“I can’t believe it, you’re such a fanboy!” You laughed, equally out breath, choosing to wrap your arms around his neck both for support and to pull him down to your eye level.

“Only because you’re so cute.” He cooed, catching your lips in a teasing kiss, trailing his hands up your sides slowly and making you squirm against him, momentarily lost in the feel of each other that you didn’t hear the sound of his door knob turning.

“Taehyung, do you know where- Yi-ash!” Before either of you could react, the door had opened, resulting in you and Tae falling out into the hallway, landing squarely at Jin’s feet in pile of limbs.

For a moment, you all froze, staring wide-eyed at each other in shock.

“Hyung, I-” Tae started.

“What was tha- whoa.” The door to the room next to Tae’s opened, revealing Jungkook and Jimin now peering out, equally shocked. “Y/n?”

“Hi, guys.” You said awkwardly, hyper aware of how compromising your current position looked. “Uh, Tae, can I get up?” You whispered, snapping you boyfriend out of his daze.

“Yeah, sorry!”

“What’s going on?” Jin asked as Tae scrambled to his feet and helped you up.

“Nothing! We were just-”

“Does Namjoon know about this?” Jungkook asked.

“Know about what?”

“Oh, for shit’s sake!” Tae whipped around to face the leader and Hobi, who had just exited the elevator, trying to hide you behind his back, as if that was going to help anything at this point.

“What is with all the noise?” Yoongi opened his door, blinking tiredly at the sight of everyone standing in the hall for several long seconds before wordlessly closing the door again, deciding against involving himself in whatever scene was unfolding right now.

“What’s going on?” Joon asked, glancing around at his members, eyes widening slightly as he spotted you, wearing one of Tae’s t-shirts and wishing to dissolve into the wallpaper. “Y/n?-”

“Y/n’s my girlfriend.” Tae blurted out loudly, causing everyone’s attention to whip to him, including yours. ”We’re dating, but I haven’t told the company yet.”

There was another pause as that information sank in, before Junkook spoke again, breaking the silence.

“Way to go, hyung.” He grinned at you and Tae.

“Yeah, good for you guys.” Jimin agreed, shooting you both a thumbs up.

“You’re not mad?” Tae asked, glancing at everyone nervously.

“Why would we be mad? So long as you’re careful, It’s your life.” Hobi said encourangingly.

“Yeah, I mean, I would’ve rather not have found out by catching you two doing that-” Jin said.

“We weren’t doing anything!” Tae exclaimed.

“Tell that to the hickey on you neck.” Jimin chirpped, dissolving into giggles as Tae clapped a hand to his neck in alarm.

“Okay, um, we can talk about this later, can everyone just please go back to your rooms before one of the staff shows up?” Joon said quickly, herding the two younger members back into their room.

“Be safe, you two!” Jungkook called, closing the door before Tae could snap back at him.

“Thank you, hyung.” Tae said to Namjoon.

“Don’t worry about it, man, we’ll talk later.” Joon replied, patting Tae on the shoulder before nodding to you. “Sorry about that.”

“It’s okay.” You said, catching Tae’s hand before making your way back to his room.

“Oh, hyung?” Tae leaned back out into the hall to address Jin. “What was it you came to ask me?”

The eldest member blinked for a moment before shaking his head. “I don’t even remember.”

Tae nodded. “Alright then, goodnight.” He closed the door firmly, making sure both locks were engaged before slumping against it with a groan.

“Well, that’s not how I planned for that to go.” He said, rubbing his face tiredly.

“What? Telling you bandmates about us, or asking me to be your girlfriend?” You asked, leaning against the dresser as you studied him.

“Both.” He admitted, looking at you apologetically. “I am so, so sorry.”

You shrugged. “At least it was just them and not your manager.”

He nodded before slowly straightening and coming to stand in front of you. “Will you let me fix one of my missteps from tonight?”

“Depends which one it is.” You said, smirking up at him.

“Will you be my girlfriend?” He asked you, staring down at you solomly.

“Hmm.” You pretended to mull it over. “I guess.”

“You guess?!” He balked, making you laugh.

“Yes, you goof, I will.” You relented, wraping your arms around his neck to pull him into a kiss.

“Good, I don’t think my heart could take any more surprises tonight.” He mumbled against your mouth.

“Plus, the guys would be upset.”

“The guys?” He raised a brow at you before hoisting you up and dropping you on the bed. “I don’t want to hear about ‘the guys’ again for the rest of the night.” He grumbled, climbing to hover over you.

“Are you possesive now?” You asked, grinning up at him.

“You’re gonna find out.”

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zweiginator · 4 days

Note

I actually need you to keep going on babysitter!reader and Patrick 🙏🙏

patrick’s parents inviting you on vacation with them because patrick’s little sister absolutely loves you and then you can be there to watch her if they end up wanting to stay out late. and patrick comes too. it’s all last minute; he wasnt interested in going until they let it slip that you were coming and then his bags were packed.

arriving at the zweigs’ beach house in malibu and it’s all beachside cocktails and tanning and saltwater in your hair but one night patrick’s parents decide they are going to meet up with their friends who live an hour down the coast.

it’s a chill night; patrick picks up dinner and sits on the couch with you and his sister while you all watch a movie together and then his sister falls asleep and he carries her to bed.

and you hadn’t had a second alone with each other since the first time you had sex so the tension is high and seeing you in your skimpy swimsuits has been driving him fucking crazy.

patrick saying he’s gonna take a shower and he slings a towel over his shoulder.

“wanna join?” he raises his eyebrows.

you fluster and take his hand. and as the warm water trickles over your naked bodies, patrick kisses your shoulders and washes your body for you before shampooing your hair.

your hand trails down his torso and you wrap your hand around his cock. his head lolls back against the shower wall and you suck on the skin right under his ear.

“let me fuck you again.” he cups your face and pushes his thumb into your mouth. “i need it.”

And the shower is big enough to where patrick can lay down so you can ride him his cock slick with the spit you jerked him with. your tits press against his chest as he grabs your ass and guides you down onto his cock.

and both of you are too lost in each other to realize that his parents are home now and you’re fucking their son in their master bathroom.

#ask #patrick zweig smut

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inthedayswhenlandswerefew · 3 months

Text

Where Will All The Martyrs Go [Chapter 5: Heads Or Tails, Fairy Tales In My Mind]

Series title is a lyric from: “Letterbomb” by Green Day.

Chapter title is a lyric from: “Are We The Waiting” by Green Day.

Word count: 5.8k

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“I know he has a scalpel in his bag,” Baela says, meaning Aemond. You are sitting with her on the front steps of a two-story house—1970s construction, split foyer, pale blue siding and rust-red bricks—on Trux Street in Plymouth, Ohio. This town was named for the place where the pilgrims stepped off the Mayflower over four hundred years ago, pioneers who crossed through the doorway of an unfathomably changing world to die of disease, cold, accidents, starvation, violence. You wonder if you are so unlike them. “He’s assisted with c-sections before, if it comes to that. And he has needles and surgical thread. But he doesn’t have any way to anesthetize me.”

Luke and Rhaena are on the roof of the silver Chrysler Pacifica parked at the end of the driveway and surveilling the road. Everyone else is inside tearing the house apart as they try to find the keys. You don’t know what to say to Baela. There is no way to console her except by lying, and she’s too smart for that. “How far along are you?”

“I don’t even know.” She laughs like she’s on the verge of losing her mind. You don’t blame her. “The doctors calculate it based on the date of your last period, but mine was all over the place. I had tried a few different birth control pills and had all these side effects, weird spotting and cramping, no sex drive, feeling depressed, so I just figured I’d go all natural for six months and give my body a chance to reset. And we all know how that turned out.” She skims her palms over the globe of her belly, hidden beneath the flowing periwinkle cotton of a maternity dress she found at the Walmart back in Shenandoah. “I’m officially due in four weeks.”

“But it could happen at any time.”

Baela nods miserably. “My mum had me and Rhaena the…you know…the natural way, and it was smooth sailing. But she needed an emergency c-section with my little brother. What happens if that’s how it goes for me? Do you ever think about all the ways people can die now? It’s not just the zombies. I could get murdered, or fall and crack my skull open, or get a cut that turns septic, or rupture my appendix, or get frostbite or heatstroke, or get bitten by a snake. It never ends. We’ll be balancing on the knife’s edge for the rest of our lives.”

You wish you were better with words; you wish you were someone who spoke effortlessly like Rio or Aegon. You reply with the only thing you can think of. “Humans have survived for hundreds of thousands of years, and for the vast majority of that time with no modern medicine. It was dangerous, and it was painful. But there have always been people who made it. We wouldn’t exist otherwise.”

Remarkably, this seems to help. “I know Aemond will do everything he can for me,” Baela says, more steadily now. “He’s always been the most dependable one. So serious, so protective. Daeron was visiting us in Boston when everything shut down, and Aemond wouldn’t let the kid out of his sight for weeks…then Aemond almost died when he lost his eye and Daeron proved he could take care of himself with his compound bow.” Baela unwraps a Twizzler and takes a bite out of it, gazing vacantly at the sky, calm and overcast now that the storm has passed, breezy, mid-80s. She doesn’t even like them, but she’s been eating through a pack of Twizzlers Luke had been carrying in his backpack for Jace, slow mindless chewing like a cow’s. “Aemond feels responsible for you now. And that’s difficult when there’s so little control he actually has over what ends up happening.”

“Baela…I’m so sorry about Jace.”

“Drowning isn’t so bad, I guess. I hope he drowned. I hope he was dead before he washed ashore and they ate him.” Baela turns to you, eyes glazed. “Do you think we should have shot him before we left the river? To make sure he didn’t die in pain? You could have done it if you wanted to. Your aim is good enough.”

“No,” you say, horrified but trying to soften it. “I think that would have been…immoral.”

“I don’t even have a picture of Jace to show the baby, everything was online or on my phone, and now that’s all…gone. Just gone. Like he never even existed. How am I going to explain to my child what Boston was, or law school, or aerospace engineering, or grocery stores or shopping malls or Instagram, or anything else about our lives before this whole fucking disaster? All they’ll ever know is running from monsters, scrounging for shelter and supplies from the ruins of civilization.”

“The world is going to come back, Baela. Maybe not for five or ten years, and maybe looking a lot different than it did before, but humanity will recover. The Black Death wasn’t the end, and neither were the World Wars or the Mongol invasions or the colonization of the Americas, or famines or floods or volcanic eruptions. The zombies won’t end us either.”

“Do you really believe that?”

I want to. “Yeah, I do. We just have to hold on until the tide turns. We can’t give up.”

“In that case, I’ll try not to go completely insane in the immediate future. Thank God Rhaena and Luke are still here. Do you have any siblings?”

You smile vaguely. “Four.”

“Wow,” Baela says. “Do you know where they are now?”

There is an interruption before you have to decide how to answer: a roaring high above in the sky, a remote mechanical growling. You and Baela both look up to see a jet zooming by, just below the steel grey cloud cover and leaving a trail of condensation behind it like a comet’s tail of eons-old cosmic dust. From where he is perched atop the Pacifica, Luke is pointing at the jet to show Rhaena. Aemond, Rio, Aegon, and Daeron come rocketing out of the house to find the source of the noise. After a moment, Helaena moseys onto the front porch as well, tucking flashlights and napkins into her burlap messenger bag. Meanwhile, Aegon is filling his pockets with packs of Marlboro Golds and orange prescription bottles labelled Percocet.

“Is that an airplane?!” Aegon gasps. “People are flying again?! Oh, we are back, baby! We are so back! I’m catching the next flight to SFO, peace out bitches, no more Oregon Trail for me!”

“It’s a jet,” Aemond says flatly. “Not a passenger carrier. Probably military.”

“Doesn’t look like one of ours.” Rio turns to you for confirmation.

“No, I don’t recognize it.”

“Then who the fuck is up there?” Aegon says. “Canada? The U.K.?”

Rio sighs, ruffling Aegon’s already quite disheveled blonde hair. “Who knows, Honey Bun. Maybe it’s China or Russia swinging by to drop nukes on any survivors.”

“Fortunately, nobody’s going to waste a nuclear bomb on freaking Plymouth, Ohio,” Baela says, watching the jet vanish into the west, the droning of its engines replaced by the breeze through the sugar maples and sycamores, the screeching of cicadas and chirps of robins. “No luck finding the keys?”

Aemond frowns as he shakes his head, tapping his chin anxiously. He knows she can’t walk much farther.

“How do none of us know how to hotwire a car?” Aegon demands, exasperated.

Rio replies cheerfully: “Well, Chips and I have been diligently serving this glorious nation since we were eighteen years old, and you’re all clueless rich kids. So…I think that just about sums it up.”

“I need more arrows,” Daeron says, clutching his compound bow. All the ones he had are now speared through zombies along the river where Jace died. When you snuck away from the farm at dawn, Luke used his binoculars to check the shores; they were still swamped with zombies, even more than the night before. They are pack animals; alone, they are aimless and easily confounded, their memories calamitously short. As part of a group—if they were crows they’d be a murder, if they were camels they’d be a caravan—zombies attract and guide each other, moving symbiotically like planets and moons locked in orbit.

“I think you’re going to have to start making them the old fashioned way, kid,” Rio tells Daeron, accompanied by a rough pat of encouragement on the back.

“What, like with sticks?!”

“Yeah. Use a knife to carve one end to make it pointy and you’re good to go.”

“Love it. Very pioneer.” Aegon holds up a Sony Walkman, pink and covered with Disney stickers, Ava spelled out across the top in glittering rhinestones. “At least I found this. Helaena, do we have any more AA batteries?” She fishes around in her bag and hands him a pair.

Baela gapes at him, but she’s smiling. It’s horrible, it’s absurd, it’s something you can’t help but find a macabre humor in. “Aegon, you cannot use that poor eaten kid’s CD player. You know it’s haunted.”

Aegon sings like a jingle from a commercial: “Little Ava died, RIP. Now I get to listen to my CDs.”

“Oh, that is so fucked up!” Rio cackles.

You say, grinning: “Aegon, I’m really going to miss you when we’re all in heaven at the bowling alley made of clouds and you’re downstairs in the fiery version of the afterlife.”

“Don’t feel bad for me, Chipmunk. You’re the one who’s going to die without ever having an orgasm.”

“You don’t need a man for that, Aegon,” Baela says.

“You definitely don’t,” you agree. Aemond glances over at you, intrigued. You stare dauntlessly back. What? You said you weren’t interested. The corners of his lips curl up in a reticent smile; he looks down to try to hide it. He’s touching his chin again. His cheeks flush pink as his mind wanders.

Rio chuckles. “Oh yeah, I remember your little experimenting phase. Lots of trips to the Spencer’s in the Tysons Corner mall when we were stationed at Anacostia.”

You raise your eyebrows, though you’re not annoyed. “I thought you were never going to tell anybody about that.”

“It’s the end of the world, baby. No time to be shy.” Then Rio asks Aemond: “Since we’re here and it’s quiet, you want to go ahead and check every house that has a car with the fuel cap still closed? There are some minivans and SUVs down at the other end of the street. Even a few gallons of gas will take us farther than days on foot.”

Aegon adds, checking his map: “A half tank would get us all the way to Decatur, Indiana.”

“Yeah, let’s do it,” Aemond says. He offers Baela a hand and helps lift her to her feet. “You guys go ahead, I’ll meet you down at the driveway with the black…what is that, a Honda Odyssey? You know the one, the van in front of the yellow house. Don’t go inside until I get there.”

“Yup!” Aegon agrees as he speeds off, racing Daeron to the house. Rio—not one for sprinting—jogs after them with his Remington in hand, ready to bash rotting skulls in at a moment’s notice. Baela toddles down to the Pacifica to tell Luke and Rhaena the plan, her periwinkle dress billowing in the wind; then they climb down to walk with her. Helaena floats across the sidewalk like a ghost, pausing to pick buttercups that grow up between the cracks in the cement.

Aemond has been waiting until the two of you are alone. “Can I ask you something?”

“Yeah, sure.” A few houses down, a female zombie—early-twenties, white bikini top, red Ohio State shorts—staggers across the yard and in her attempt to snag Aegon falls and impales herself on the white picket fence. She is suspended there, clawing and yowling, her blackening intestines and dark clotted blood staining the wood. Aegon takes his time getting into a stance and swings his golf club like he’s at a driving range. He hits her dead-on, caves the front of her face in, takes a few more shots just to be sure.

“I get what’s in Oregon for Rio,” Aemond says. “Sophie, the baby, his parents. But why are you going there?”

“Rio’s my best friend. He might be my only friend who’s still alive. And when we left Saratoga Springs, he made me promise that I wouldn’t let him die alone. So before anything else, I have to make sure he gets to Odessa and finds his family. And then I can figure out what’s next for me. But if it really is safe there, I don’t see why I’d leave. I’ve never wanted to be on my own. Maybe I can end up having a family in Oregon too.”

Aemond rests his elbows on the porch railing. He’s teasing you. “We’re friends, aren’t we? I’m still alive.”

You tease him back. He deserves it. “I’m not sure about you and me.”

“I’d like for us to be friends.”

“Would you?”

“Resoundingly.”

“Maybe I’ll give it a try.”

He considers you. “You know, Kentucky might have been a good place for you to hide out. And it would be a lot closer than Oregon.”

You stand up, throwing on your backpack full of bullets for your Beretta M9s, beef jerky and peanut butter crackers and granola bars, lip balm, bottles of water, Kleenex tissues, Juicy Fruit, miscellaneous treasures from the road, practically worthless trinkets made so impossibly valuable. “We’re done here, right?”

Aemond is disappointed, though not with you. He has committed an error he cannot understand. “Yeah, we’re done.” He walks with you to the yellow house, your sneakers pounding in tandem on the sidewalk, squirrels and rabbits darting through the overgrown lawns, eastern tiger swallowtails swooping between blossoms.

Aegon says when you and Aemond arrive in the driveway, nodding to the once-attractive blonde zombie pawing and licking at the glass of the living room window: “Who wants to take care of Ryan Seacrest?”

“Got it,” Rio replies immediately. He kicks down the front door, macerates the zombie’s skull with the butt of his Remington, then sweeps through the kitchen and dining room searching for any other monsters in need of hasty euthanasia. He doesn’t find any. He drags the corpse outside to lessen the stench of decomposition and opens all the downstairs windows.

“Commence Operation Find The Minivan Keys,” Aegon says as he rummages through drawers and cabinets. Helaena joins him, seeking so delicately she is almost soundless, her large blue eyes flicking from place to place. Luke, Rhaena, and Daeron stay outside to keep watch. Baela collapses into a recliner in one corner of the living room and is dozing within seconds.

“I’ll clear the upstairs,” Aemond volunteers, then asks you: “Watch my blind side?”

You can’t help but smile; it is a generous invitation. It is an honor. You shadow him up the staircase of olive green carpet, through the hallway, into each of the three bedrooms and one full bath. When you are certain it is safe—exploring the back of every closet, under every bed—you and Aemond begin searching for weapons and car keys. The main bedroom is like a forest: blankets pattered with trees and deer, wood furniture, paintings of the Battle of the Wilderness during the Civil War. You investigate every drawer of the nightstand and dresser, then go to leave.

“Wait.” Aemond peeks out into the hallway to make sure no one else is around, then closes the bedroom door. Your eyes track him quizzically, shy skittish optimism, your head tilted, your fingers finding the dresser behind you, cool rust-hued oak, a color like dried blood. You slip off your backpack. Then Aemond comes to you like a returning comet—once in a lifetime, once in an eon—and holds your face in his hands as he kisses you, soft, careful, unhurried, then turning famished, sweltering incurable hunger. You lift yourself up onto the dresser; your thighs have parted, and Aemond is between them, still fully clothed and leaving yours in place too, so innocent, so spotless, and yet in your mind you are imagining what it would feel like to lie beneath him as he opens and fills you, to be so irredeemably close to another person, to watch and listen as he teaches you what to do.

Right here? Right now?

It suddenly strikes you as too soon; you want this but you aren’t ready. Your heart races, you can’t catch your breath. “I am obligated to make you aware that according to your own calculations, I am likely dangerously fertile at the moment.”

Aemond grins as he bites playfully at your lower lip. “Relax. We’re not rounding all the bases this time.”

His voice evaporates your panic, lulls your rushing blood. Your muscles turn to seamless rippling water. Your bones crave the weight of his. “Yeah, totally, good, that’s good. Just making sure.”

“I want to touch you. Can I touch you?”

In reply, you unbutton your denim shorts and pull down the zipper, slowly, very slowly, your gaze linked with his like torn flesh stitched together. He’s close enough to kiss you again, but he doesn’t; he takes your chin gently and turns your face to the side, admiring the curve of your jaw. Then his lips are on your throat and his right hand is skimming down the front of your shirt, over your belly, under your shorts. You gasp—the foreignness of another’s hand here, the disorienting vulnerability—and Aemond stops.

“No, I’m okay,” you assure him, smiling. You kiss him deeply, your fingertips tracing his scar, the work of his careful, gifted hands. Aemond does not flinch away. He presses his face into your palm, offering himself fully, taking shelter in you. And everything other than him—this house, this world, this age, this westward journey, this apocalypse—goes quiet, quiet, quiet, like when you are shooting, like when you are hammering nails under the sun. Aemond makes everything horrifying disappear. It is the greatest sort of magic you can imagine.

“So,” he says. “What did you buy at Spencer’s?”

“Green Day t-shirts.”

“Sure.”

“And some, uh, battery-powered companionship.”

“Hm.” Aemond’s fingers are moving against you; it is increasingly difficult to respond to his questions. “Internal or external? Or both?”

“Oh, definitely…um…I stayed on the outside, mostly. I tried…oh wow, okay…inside a few times, but I didn’t get much out of it. It was mostly just uncomfortable.”

“No problem. We’ll work up to that.”

“Will we?” You hope you don’t sound too desperate. The warm coiling pleasure is swelling, strengthening, begging to be released, loosed like an arrow or fired like a bullet. Aemond’s fingers slip through your wetness, circling and pressing down harder, insistently, masterfully. It feels different than using toys: it is more gradual, less sharp, helplessly overpowering.

“That’s my plan. If you’ll allow it.”

You exhale a threadbare ghost of a whimper against his throat and then reach for his shorts, fumbling blindly for the button and zipper.

“No, don’t do anything,” Aemond murmurs, soft and pleading, almost like a prayer. “Let me take care of you. Please let me feel like I’m doing something right.”

“You’re doing a lot right at the moment.” You’re close now, your breaths quick and panting. You throw your arms around the back of Aemond’s neck and fold into him, feeling the thudding pulse of his carotid artery beneath your fingertips, the softness of his lips and unscarred cheek as he nuzzles the side of your face. It’s so quiet, but there’s no need to fill the silence, no words, no uneasiness. You’ve always wondered what you would have to do to please a man, what premeditated motions and praises you would offer him, niceties, perhaps even lies. But this is effortless. The shimmering golden glow like sunlight is here, and he is the one drawing it out of you, water from a well, blood from a tapped vein. The only sound you make is a shuddering inhale, but Aemond knows immediately. He closes his eyes, relieved, proud, beaming, resting his forehead against yours.

He asks: “Can I try…?”

“Yes, do it, please, I want you to.”

Aemond’s hand shifts between your thighs, moves lower, and there is a sudden jolt of pain like a pinch, like a bite. You wince before you can think to disguise it. Immediately, Aemond retreats, kissing your lips and your cheeks. “It’s okay, it’s okay. You were incredible.”

You reach for his shorts again and unbutton them. “Show me what to do.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I know I don’t have to. I want to.”

He takes a shaky breath, drags his tongue over the fingers he touched you with, moans so quietly you can barely hear him. He frees himself from his clothes: long and thick, harder than you believed flesh could be. Aemond grasps your hand and places it, demonstrates how to move and how much pressure to apply. Then his own hands drop to grip the edge of the dresser as you stroke him. You nip at his throat, his jaw, the shell of his ear; you coax euphoric sighs from him, feel a high in your bloodstream like something illicit and lethal.

“I’ll be honest,” you say. “I have no idea how that’s ever going to fit inside me.”

Aemond chuckles, distracted. “Women stretch, just like men do. It might take time, but it will happen. And I’ll make sure it’s as good as it can be.”

“I want it to be you, Aemond,” you whisper, and you can feel him throbbing in your hand. “You and no one else. Teach me how to do everything.” Make the world go away.

He gasps as he finishes, a thunderous trembling all over, a gush of white heat that flows over your hand. Curious, you lift it to your mouth. “Don’t—!”

But he’s too late; you lick him from your palm and then recoil at the taste, pungent, bitter, salty.

Aemond laughs hysterically, kissing your mouth and then your forehead. “Oh God, I’m sorry, I should have warned you.”

“I hope I taste better than that.”

“You definitely do.”

You peer up at him, dazed, dreamy. “I really like you, Aemond.”

“You can’t fall in love with me.” It is a taunt; it is a warning.

“If I do, I won’t let you know,” you promise. “You’re on first watch tonight, aren’t you?”

“I am.”

“Then I’ll stay up too.”

“Rio already volunteered to do it.”

“Really, I don’t mind.”

“No,” Aemond purrs, brushing your hair back from your face, marveling at you. “I can’t have you sleep deprived. You’re our best shot.”

“I can handle it.”

“You want to be honest with each other, you want to communicate? I like knowing you’re rested. I like knowing you’re safe.”

The door flies open with a bang; Aegon stands in the threshold. “We’ve got three-quarters of a tank of gas!” he announces ecstatically, jangling car keys in the air. Then he registers what he’s looking at. “Come outside when you’re done fucking.” Aegon slams the door shut; you hear his Sperry Bahama sneakers drumming on the staircase.

“I guess we should go,” you say reluctantly, untangling yourself from Aemond and sliding down from the dresser.

“Wait.” He gets a water bottle out of your backpack, soaks a handful of Kleenex tissues, and gives them to you to clean yourself off. When you’re done, he wipes himself down too. “Make sure you always take a piss after any…activities. We don’t have antibiotics if you get a kidney infection.”

“I know, doctor. I’ve read Reddit threads.”

“Not a doctor. Just a lowly intern.”

“You seem like an anatomy expert to me,” you say, then head downstairs.

The black Honda Odyssey is idling as the last of the supplies are loaded, the windows down, Baela adjusting the driver’s seat so she can accommodate her belly. Everyone piles inside and she steers the minivan out of the driveway and onto Trux Street. Aegon pops one of his mixtapes into the CD player. The song that pipes through the speakers is Prayer In C:

“Yeah, you never said a word

You didn’t send me no letter

Don’t think I could forgive you…”

“So,” Baela says casually, grinning at you in the rearview mirror. “How was the sex?”

“Stop,” Aemond begs, his face going red, smiling involuntarily.

You say placidly: “I appreciate your interest, but that’s not what we were doing.”

Rio turns to Aegon. “Do you know what sex looks like or not, dumbass?”

“They were doing something, okay! Those were not virginal activities!”

“See, our world is slowly dying

I’m not wasting no more time

Don’t think I could believe you…”

You rest your head on Aemond’s shoulder and watch the abandoned houses pass by in a blur.

~~~~~~~~~~

The Odyssey arrives in Decatur, Indiana just a few hours before sunset, gas to spare and plenty of time to find a safe place to spend the night. You break into a house on the outskirts of the west side of the city: a rancher with a screened-in porch, beach décor, bowls of seashells on tables and spray-painted aluminum dolphins on the wall. Baela plummets into sleep immediately, sharing the largest bed with Rhaena and Luke. Helaena writes in her spider notebook for a while before curling up on the living room couch, Daeron sprawled on the floor beside her with a couch cushion for a pillow. Aegon is in what was once a child’s bedroom; you have the bedroom of a teenage girl, perhaps spirited away to friends or relatives in some other part of the country, perhaps dead, perhaps lurching around out in the night somewhere, mad and murderous. Everything is purple, the walls, the blankets, the stuffed animals that form a mountain on the other half of the bed.

You are exhausted, but you can’t sleep. Your thoughts won’t stop racing, stop craving. Aemond and Rio are in rocking chairs out on the porch, keeping watch and working their way through the case of Sunny D they found in the kitchen pantry. You go out to join them, then stop at the screen door that separates the linoleum-floored dining room from the porch. They are discussing you. You sit, legs crossed, listening in the dim silvery light, stars and moon and nothing else.

Aemond is saying: “She doesn’t talk much about where she came from.”

Rio chuckles, a low baritone rumble. “She doesn’t talk much in general. But yeah, don’t expect any juicy revelations. That’s not how she does things.”

“Do you know what her life was like before?”

“I know some of it. I don’t know a lot.” Rio pauses; you can envision him shrugging and running his fingers through his dark curly hair, weighing what you would be okay with him sharing. “I know that when I met her, her mother was calling all the time telling her to send money home. And she’d do it, because she felt like she didn’t have a choice. Then she never had cash for drinks or anything, I was always paying her way, and one day I was finally like ‘Chips, how much do you actually have in your account right now?’ because I figured she must be down real low. Jesus Christ, I couldn’t believe it when she showed me the balance, she had like three bucks left until her next paycheck, and of course then her mother would be calling again. She sent tens of thousands of dollars home that disappeared, poof, gone, without a trace.”

Aemond sounds stunned. “What did they spend it on?”

“Who the fuck knows with those people. Lottery tickets and cigs, probably. Trips to Virginia Beach. Benny Hinn Bibles. And when she tried to hit the brakes, her mother and siblings got nasty, calling constantly and telling her how awful she was and that they were going to starve. I convinced her to stop picking up the phone, but it took forever. I think she knew by then she was going to have to cut them off if she didn’t want to end up back there, but she needed somebody to give her permission. That was my job. As far as I know, she hasn’t spoken to anyone from home in years. Hell, Sophie was her AOP.”

“AOP…?”

“Oh, sorry, Arrears of Pay. It’s the person you designate to get all your benefits if you die in the service. I guess she figured that if our base got bombed or our plane went down or something, at least it would end up with my family.”

Aemond is quiet, thirty seconds, a minute, maybe two. “Obviously my circumstances were a lot different. But I understand having to choose between other people’s expectations and yourself.”

“Why are you asking me all this?”

Another pause; silent thoughts under glimmering stars and the shrieks of short-lived summer cicadas. “She takes me out of this world for a while. She makes the guilt and the fear go quiet. I want to know everything about her.”

When Rio speaks, he is gentle, compassionate. “The hard truth is, the details aren’t my business. They aren’t yours either. When people enlist, they’re starting over. It’s a Get Out Of Jail Free card. It gets them away from home, but it also gets them away from whoever they were before.”

“She said something like that once. Back at Fort Indiantown Gap.”

“It’s a polite way of telling you to shut up.” You know from his voice that Rio is smiling. “If she wants to forget her old life, you have to let her. If you care about her, you’ll want her to be able to move on.”

“I care.”

“She likes you,” Rio says. “But you could still fuck it up. She’s good at finding reasons not to trust people.”

“It’s a bad way to live.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I know. I’m the same way.”

There is quiet now, only the sounds of Sunny D being slurped and cicadas screaming through the darkness. You have intruded enough. You stand and walk back down the hallway, then remember something Aegon said outside a Burger King in Pennsylvania. You go to his bedroom, illuminated by a flashlight pointed towards the ceiling, casting long deformed shadows.

Aegon is lying on his back with his head hanging upside down over the side of the bed—dinosaur blankets, bright red and blue pillows—puffing on a cigarette and listening to his new CD player, previously Ava’s, with both earbuds in. Then he spots you. Still upside down, Aegon hits the pause button on his CD player and says: “Hey, Microchip.”

“What did you mean about people pretending to love you?”

He smirks, shrugs, takes a lazy drag off his Marlboro Gold. “Every friend I’ve ever had has used me for money, mansions, yachts. Every girl I’ve ever fucked has wanted something in return. Mother prefers Daeron, Grandfather prefers Helaena, Criston prefers Aemond, and Father prefers his real estate empire and his model ships. Can you imagine loving a miniature replica of the Titanic more than your own children?”

“No,” you say, honestly and with heavy, gore-red pity. “You shouldn’t have to go back to people who make you feel that way. I wouldn’t.”

Aegon takes another drag as he watches you. “Aemond mentioned you’re from Kentucky.”

“I am.”

“But you won’t be returning.”

“No.”

Aegon nods, like you’ve answered an important question. “Aemond talks about you a lot. It’s cute. It doesn’t make me sick like when he was with Alys. Playing her games, breaking himself in half to follow her rules.”

You peer down at your fingernails, short and functional and unglamorous. You don’t want to hear about the older woman who was his lover, his obsession, his cure, his venom. She was poisonous to him, surely, and yet she was experienced where you are uninitiated and unversed, she had a PhD to compare with your high school diploma. Surely in those seven years he shared moments with her that were divine. Surely even a curse is woven from magic.

“Anyway.” Aegon rolls over, props himself up on his elbows, and extinguishes his cigarette in an empty plastic Sunny D bottle. “I have no particular affinity for my old life or the beach house in California, but that’s where Aemond is going. And I have to be where he is. I have to make sure he’s alright, you know?”

Yes, you do know; that’s how you feel about Rio. “What’s it like? That house up on a cliff all by itself?”

Aegon grins, like he’s caught you in a mouthwateringly compromising position. “Why? You thinking about visiting someday?”

“Just wondering.”

He squirms over to one side of the bed to make room for you, popping in an earbud. “Come listen with me.”

“What is it?”

“Just come over here!”

You cross the room and kick off your sneakers, climb onto the bed, lie down and take the other earbud that Aegon offers you. What you hear when you listen is Don McLean’s American Pie. “Oh, this is ancient.”

“It’s a classic. I wish I’d gotten to live through the 70s.”

“We’ll reinvent them when the world starts up again. Disco and lava lamps and shag carpets. We’ll shoot heroin and listen to vinyl records. Jimmy Carter can be president if he’s still alive.”

Aegon snickers, and then he sings along, hushed but surprisingly melodic, solemn, tender. He’s looking at you expectantly, eyebrows raised, nodding, beckoning for you to join him. You adamantly refuse. You don’t sing in front of anybody, not even Rio.

“I met a girl who sang the blues

And I asked her for some happy news

But she just smiled and turned away

I went down to the sacred store

Where I’d heard the music years before

But the man there said the music wouldn’t play…”

Aegon shoves your shoulder. “I could be dead tomorrow. Don’t ignore me.”

Self-consciously, but smiling a little bit, you begin to sing with him, so softly you can barely hear yourself. Aegon is beaming, small even white teeth beneath sparkling eyes, a murky cool blue like storm clouds, like the ocean, waves lapping at the shores of Diego Garcia, the Gulf of Tadjoura off the east coast of Djibouti, Corpus Christi Bay, places you once never knew existed.

“And in the streets, the children screamed

The lovers cried and the poets dreamed

But not a word was spoken

The church bells all were broken

And the three men I admire most

The Father, Son, and the Holy Ghost

They caught the last train for the coast

The day the music died.”

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