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sunshinesfreckless · 4 days ago

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Dinner is Served

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Pairings: Felix x fem!reader

Summary: Horny thoughts at 3 AM turn you into a fine dining expert in the field of “Your Boyfriend’s Ass.”

Warnings: Felix’s ass, being hungry for Felix’s ass, freaking out over Felix’s ass… MDNI

A/N: Bangchan might have the biggest, but I don’t know—Felix looks so appetizing.

ALSO, the spoiled parts for Changbin, Han, and Lee Know are ALL in the making, my sweetlings. (Just like a part 3. for Every Girl gets her Wish) <3

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Felix had just begun his descent into peaceful slumber, arms wrapped protectively around Y/N, her back tucked snugly to his chest. One leg was lazily draped over hers like a clingy golden retriever. He was warm, comfy, and entirely unaware of the war about to be waged against his peace.

She blinked at the ceiling.

“Felix,” she whispered.

A sleepy grunt. A soft kiss to her hair. “Mmm.”

She wiggled slightly. “Felix.”

“Yes, baby,” he mumbled, somewhere between sleep and a dream about pancakes.

She rolled over to face him. “Open your eyes.”

His brows furrowed. “They are,” he slurred.

“No they’re not.”

He pried them open like it was the hardest thing he’d ever done. “There. Open. What is it.”

“Can I eat your ass?”

Pause.

A beat passed. Then another. Somewhere outside, a dog barked.

Felix blinked. “I’m sorry. I think I misheard you. It sounded like you just said—”

“Can I eat your ass.”

His eyes widened. “Okay. No. I’m awake now. Fully alert. Why—what—HUH?!”

She looked entirely too pleased. “Many men do this with their girlfriends.”

He sat up like a vampire emerging from a coffin. “Many men also die in the ocean. That doesn’t mean I’m going snorkeling with you at 2AM.”

“Oh my god, you’re being so dramatic.”

“I just laid down! I was about to have a dream about petting a goat!”

“I’ll pet your goat,” she said with a wink.

“What does that even MEAN?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m workshopping it.”

Felix buried his face in the pillow and faked a cry.

She crawled over him slowly. “You have such a pretty little ass, Lixie. Like a treat. Why wouldn’t I want dessert?”

He slapped a hand over his own behind. “No! No dessert! This bakery is closed!”

She licked her lips. “I’ve got the key.”

“STOP TALKING IN METAPHORS.”

Felix was still face-down in the pillow when she straddled his thighs like a woman possessed.

“I just don’t get it,” she sighed dreamily, hands spreading across his lower back like a renaissance painter preparing to sketch his muse. “How is it so round? So plush? So… biteable?” she stared at the Calvin Klein Boxershorts.

He let out a noise that could only be described as a muffled wheeze of betrayal. “Y/N. Baby. It is literally three in the morning.”

“I know,” she cooed. “That’s why I want it now. The nightly cravings.”

He twisted his head to the side.“You literally said that exact sentence last week when you tried to climb me like a jungle gym while I was eating nachos.”

“And you loved it.”

“I choked on a jalapeño and almost died.”

She smirked. “Exactly. After that you ate me out. What a way to go.”

“I haven’t even digested dinner!”

“That’s okay, now I’m the one digesting.”

He blinked.

“Felix,” she said reverently, as if she was about to recite scripture. “Your ass is like a peach carved by angels. A gift from the gods. Michelangelo could never. The Louvre is shaking. Doja Cat wrote ‘Juicy’ for you.”

“I’m breaking up with you.”

“You’re only in your Boxers and I’m on top of you. Be serious. You can‘t live without me”

She was right. He groaned, rolling onto his side, trying to scoot away. She followed like a determined raccoon after a shiny object.

“You don’t even know what you’re asking for,” he whined.

“I know exactly what I’m asking for. Face down, ass up, let me French kiss your Cheeks.”

He buried his face back in the pillow. “I’m calling Seungmin.”

“It’s 3am, he’s not picking up.”

“I’m texting Hyunjin.”

“He’ll help me.”

Felix finally flipped over, eyes wide and tragic. “Why now? Why this moment in time? Why is your whole personality suddenly centered around my butthole?!”

She leaned down until their noses touched.

“You underestimate how much I want to ruin you in the name of pleasure.”

He gulped. “…You’re insane.”

She grinned. “Turn around and find out.”

Felix sighed dramatically as he turned, flopped onto his stomach, dragging the pillow over his head like it might shield him from her deranged mission.

“You’re really not letting this go, huh,” he mumbled into the cotton. “It’s 3 a.m., Y/N. People are supposed to sleep at 3 a.m.”

She straddled the backs of his thighs like a woman on a mission. “People also nut at 3 a.m. It’s a sacred time.”

“Nothing about this is sacred.”

He yelped when she gave his ass a light slap through the fabric of his boxers. “You say that, but your body’s already getting shy,” she teased, fingers dipping under the waistband. “What’s wrong, pretty boy? Scared of a little tongue?”

“You are way too excited about this,” he muttered, but made no effort to stop her as she started peeling the boxers down.

She did it slow, dramatic—like she was unwrapping the world’s most unhinged birthday present. He kicked a little when they got stuck at his knees.

“Oh my god—lift your hips, you useless slut,” she snapped, swatting his thigh.

“Why are you bullying me and trying to eat my ass,” he whined, doing as told.

“Duality,” she replied sweetly.

Once his boxers were off, she sat back for a moment just to look. Her hands molded over the softness of him, thumbs spreading across the curve of his ass with open appreciation.

“Literally obsessed,” she breathed. “I‘m going to dig in, not even Chan could pull me out”

“I’m going to cry,” he muttered into the mattress. “I feel like a girl in a Kevin Gates song.”

Then he let out a choked little noise when she leaned down and kissed the inside of one cheek. Soft. Almost loving. Then another kiss, closer to center.

“You’re seriously—oh, fuck—”

He cut himself off when her tongue slid between the cheeks, slow and wet and deliberate. His legs twitched. His hand grabbed at the sheets like they might save him.

Her hands held him firm, spreading him open while her tongue dragged another lick, more pressure this time—confident now that he wasn’t fighting it. Not that he could fight. He was trembling already.

“Fuck,” he muttered. “Fuck, that’s weird—wait—why does it—”

“Feel good?” she said smugly, breath hot as she dipped back in. “Just take it.”

He let out a broken noise, forehead pressed to the bed.

“Y/N,” he groaned, voice all wrecked and low. “I swear, if you make me cum from this I’m never making eye contact with you again.”

“Oh no,” she pouted. “How will I survive.”

“Y/N,” he gasped, already breathless, hips twitching as she licked another firm stripe right over the spot that made his thighs jerk.

“What?” she asked sweetly, pulling back to admire the way he was panting, the mess of his hair, the tremble in his thighs. “Shy now?”

“I—I’m not even supposed to like this—”

“Oh, baby,” she giggled, “you love this.”

He whined into the sheets, like the pillow could shield him from the truth.

Then she grabbed his hips with both hands and said, “Actually, turn over.”

“What?!”

“Turn. Over.”

“No—no, why—why do you need to see my face while you do this?”

“Because it’s pretty. And I want to watch it fall apart.”

He made a strangled little sound that might’ve been a protest, but she was already manhandling him—gripping his waist and flipping him over. He landed on his back, wide-eyed, dazed, legs still twitching.

And then she pushed. Bent his knees to his chest, folded him clean in half, heels hovering in the air. His face flushed so violently.

“Y/N,” he cried, face buried in his hands. “I LOOK STUPID—”

“You look delicious,” she corrected, kneeling between his legs, lowering herself like she was about to consume a five-star meal. “This is better. Now I can look at you and eat you.”

“I’m going to have a nervous breakdown,” he muttered, hands sliding helplessly through his hair as she lowered her head.

Then her tongue was back, this time with no hesitation, no teasing—just feasting. She licked him open, slow and deep, lips slick and greedy, moaning like she was genuinely enjoying herself.

Felix arched off the bed with a broken moan, thighs trembling, fists curled in the sheets.

“Fuck, fuck—stop—don’t stop—” He didn’t know what he wanted. All he knew was that her tongue was dragging circles that made his brain go fuzzy, and he could see her now—could see her eyes, half-lidded, cheeks flushed, hair falling over her face like she was starving for him.

“Why does this feel so good,” he whimpered. “Why the fuck does this feel—fuck—don‘t stop baby”

“You’re melting,” she whispered, voice low and proud, licking right over his hole before sucking on it like he was the sweetest thing she’d ever tasted. “Such a good boy. Look at you.”

His eyes rolled back. His hips bucked into the air like his body was begging for more despite his mouth saying otherwise.

“I hate this,” he moaned.

“You love it,” she corrected, licking deep. “You’re going to cum just like this, aren’t you?”

“I’m gonna cry.”

“Do it,” she breathed. “Cry for me.”

Felix couldn’t take it anymore.

His legs were trembling, spread wide, knees still pressed toward his chest as she devoured him like she hadn’t eaten in days. The slurping sounds were filthy, obscene in the dark quiet of their bedroom. Her tongue flicked, circled, dipped—and every time, his whole body jolted like he was being electrocuted with pleasure.

His hands clawed the sheets. “Y/N—fuck—I’m close—I think I’m gonna—”

“I know,” she moaned against him, breath hot and wet. She slid her hand between her own thighs, fingers disappearing between soaked folds, working herself furiously as she kept going, tonguing him through every twitch and whimper.

“I shouldn’t like this,” he sobbed, red-faced, sweaty, overwhelmed.

“But you do,” she gasped. “You love it. Look at you—fucking shaking for me—”

He was shaking. Legs spasming, toes curled, cock untouched and leaking, hips trying to thrust into nothing as she licked him right on the edge of madness. She pushed her tongue deeper, lips sealing over him, and—

“Y/N—!” he cried out, high and desperate, thighs clamping around her head as he came hard, untouched, whole body bucking against the sheets as he lost control.

She didn’t stop. Licked him through every twitch, moaning as she came at the same time, fingers still working between her legs, body clenching tight as her orgasm ripped through her with a loud, needy cry muffled by the mess of his thighs.

By the time she pulled back, they were both breathless and trembling.

Felix collapsed against the bed like a broken marionette, legs still spread open, chest heaving.

She crawled up his body, kissed his flushed cheeks, then kissed his mouth—slow and deep and sweet, like none of what just happened had been borderline illegal.

“Thank you,” she whispered against his lips.

He blinked. “What.”

“I’m really glad you let me do that,” she said, smiling like a satisfied little freak. “It meant a lot.”

He stared at her like she’d grown a second head. “You just—you—I—I came from getting my ass eaten and you’re thanking me like I handed you a bouquet?!”

“You did hand me something beautiful,” she said seriously. “Your ass.”

He looked at the ceiling in utter defeat.

“Take your time,” she hummed, cuddling into his side like the angel of filth she was. “You’ll be begging for it next time.”

His eye twitched. “…Don’t say ��next time.’”

“Next time.”

“Y/N!”

Y/N curled into his side like nothing in the world had just happened—like she hadn’t just tongue-fucked him into an out-of-body experience.

She nuzzled his shoulder, voice all soft and sleepy. “Cuddle me now. Let’s go back to sleep.”

Felix was still spread out like roadkill, sweat cooling on his skin, brain soup. “I need… to clean myself first. I can’t sleep like this.”

She pouted against his arm. “I already licked you clean.”

“Emotionally, and i‘m full of cum Y/N,” he said flatly, sitting up with great effort.

She watched him stumble toward the bathroom, still butt-naked and sore-looking, and as soon as the light hit him—there it was.

That ass.

Perfect. Glowing. Slightly red from how hard she’d gone. The arch in his back when he walked? Unholy.

Y/N stared, shameless and awed.

He paused in the doorway. Froze. Then turned slowly, catching her eyes directly on the goods.

“Y/N,” he snapped, pointing a warning finger. “Don’t. Look. At. My. Ass.”

“I literally just made out with it,” she pointed out.

“Yeah, and now you’re gazing at it like it’s a damn Van Gogh.”

“It kind of is.”

He groaned, running a hand through his hair.

Then he pointed again, sharp and serious. “You get to eat it again only if you swear you won’t tell the boys about this. I’m not walking into the dorm and getting called Peachy Princess for the next year.”

Y/N grinned like the gremlin she was. “My lips are sealed, you pretty boy.”

He narrowed his eyes.

“Swear on your favorite hoodie.”

“I swear on your entire ass.”

“…I don’t know whether to be honored or afraid.”

“Little bit of both,” she said with a wink, and rolled onto her side, giggling to herself as he shut the bathroom door—his cheeks (all four of them) red and glowing.

#felix #felix stray kids #felix x reader #felix yongbok #lee felix #skz felix #stray kids #lee felix smut #skz smut #stray kids smut

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francispomodoro · 8 months ago

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Firstly, absolutely agree, the resurrection of the body is essential Christian doctrine (it's in the Nicene creed for a reason). The new creation will be a physical existence, not a disembodied 100% spiritual one.

But I think you and OOP probably actually agree (though obviously I can't speak entirely about OOP's intentions), if they meant flesh in the way Paul uses it, where it doesn't actually refer to our physical body, but to our sin nature, which as you pointed out definitely will not be making it to eternity. I'm thinking of passages like Galatians 5:13-26 (works of the flesh vs fruit of the Spirit) and Romans 8:1-17 (death by the flesh, life by the Spirit). But Paul clearly isn't advocating for gnosticism. He celebrates that Christ came in the flesh (Romans 1:3), affirms that we will be raised in the same way as Christ (i.e. bodily)(Romans 6:5), and continues to live by faith in his current physical body (Galatians 2:20). So the flesh isn't (neccaserily) our physical body, but can also be used as a metaphor for our sinful nature.

(I'm using the NIV here, other translations may use a different word to translate the idea other than flesh).

So if the original post means flesh in the Pauline sense (as in the force opposed to the Spirit), then it's correct and orthodox. But at the same time we also very much have to remember that it's our sin that God hates, not our bodies. God made the physical world, including our human bodies, and Christ is in the business of redeeming all things (which includes our physical bodies). As Christians, we hope in the physical resurrection of the body, where our 'flesh' will trouble us no more.

#I hope this doesnt come across as mean or pedantic #thats not at all my intention #and gnosticism is definitely a big problem even in the modern church #but at the same time we shouldnt throw the baby out with the bath water #and completely disregard a metaphor repeatedly used in scripture

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comfortless · 1 year ago

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Hello! This is the Frankenstein anon back with more praise and another prompt that you might like. Again you are amazing and everyone you come out with stuff, I weep for joy! Please continue what you are doing because it is absolute art✨

Okay onto the prompt. So lately tiktok has been putting onto this telenova drama called Hilda Furcão which is pretty much this priest and prostitute fall in love but due to societal pressures, cannot be together. The YEARNING in this show is amazing and I can’t help but think of Priest Konig in this situation. Imagine he falls in love with reader who works at a brothel but because he’s a churchly man, he’s fighting demons in his head (and down yonder) cuz he YEARNS for her but the lord says no🥴

Please keep doing what you’re doing and I’m constantly cheering you on with your work! ❤️

In the Arms of Flowers

content/warnings: 18+. minors do not interact. pining, lots of talk of religion/silly metaphors, fluff, ridiculous attempts at courtship from both, dark (if you squint), implied cyber stalking, violence/murder, minor character death, some angst, sexual violence (not done by König), König becomes horribly obsessed and reader is fine with it, virgin!König-> oral (both receiving) piv smut.

wc: 11k.

There’s a garden in the churchyard, one that’s always been, even before his vows were taken and the cassock was pulled around his shoulders.

It’s the very place that the arching den window in the clergy house faces out towards, and the very place that an angel descends from Heaven to stalk through night after night.

Even when the thunder clamors and rolls to light up the sky above, the pretty thing is there, kneeling amongst the blooming lilies. A listless sort of purity swallows over her, bathes her in the white of petals and the bright illumination of each bolt of lightning above, arcs a halo over her head like a proper mirage.

The whole town knows these doors remain open, but never does she even look toward the church or the home of holy men at all: only the flowers. The lilies and carnations seemed to be her favorite to haunt, weaving through the petals as they sway for her in breezes like whispers from the pouting lips of cherubim.

He’s prayed for this lost soul many times already; clutched the rosary between his fingers and whispered to the Lord to protect her, to heal whatever aches, to bring her wandering feet into the chapel one of these days. But as most lilies, this one’s beauty is gone away by mid-morning.

Tonight, he wills himself to bring her in for prayer and refuge from the coming rain. Its been a long time coming, and regrettably he’s hesitated at every other opportunity. Nothing’s changed, the scene was so commonplace even the others have commented on it prior.

Maybe he hallucinates her holiness; the halo has become made up of fallen petals now as they arch over the crown of her head where she’s found sprawled out amongst them. She raises herself to sit upright, dusts the dirt from her knees and offers a wary glance with each step he takes until his soles halt in soil that would soon be mire.

“I’m sorry. I’ll leave,” the angel breathes out with her eyes darting from his collar down to rest at the expanse of short blades of grass between them. “I don’t mean to cause you any trouble.”

She doesn’t meet the concern in his eyes, and König is no stranger to sin. To the shame and grief that he’s absolved from far worse than her in the stuffy wooden confessional.

“You’re welcome to stay.” A silent prayer rests there in his breath — please stay, though even he wasn’t certain as to why there’s a demand stirring in the pit of his stomach for this woman clad in a dirtied white dress.

She smiles then, gazes right up at him in such a way that immediately sparks something misplaced, something tucked away beneath studying scripture and kneeling before the wooden altar. A sin of the flesh, a heated poker jabbing at both his heart and his loins.

“No, I’m okay,” she assures with a slight dip of her head, already taking steps back to dart away, back to whichever gilded little nest of baubles and starlight she took flight from. “I was just heading home.”

And that’s it. He doesn’t plead for her to come inside, the offer has been laid out already. It’s not his job to force a belief that one doesn’t want, only lend a kindness and a cushioned pew, advice for the lost and a choir for bleating lambs.

He bids her goodbye and walks back to the clergy house, ignoring the strange looks of his peers as they all prepare to bed down after a nightly prayer. It’s rare to smile here, when sacred words are passed from the wrinkled, cracked lips of his seniors. But König does smile, the grin is as bright as the seconds of white lighting up the sky in intervals as he silently thanks God for such a sweet vision amidst such darkness.

The fixation does not falter for the following three nights. She doesn’t return to the churchyard to whisper secrets to the blooms, but the angel weighs on his mind so heavily that König finds himself convinced that she must have been his calling, a soul that he would assuredly save.

His sermons now lack their passion. The parishioners come to him with weighty hearts and misery in their eyes, but bless him all the same, even when he’s distant. Away with the fairies, some would say. He can’t help but wonder when one such service rolls to a closing prayer if whoever conjured such words had also been in the presence of a seraph.

“Do you need prayer?,” one of his fellow priests asks as the flock trickles out, worry clear in the wrinkles laden beneath this eyes and the way his lips draw down before pressing thin. “You don’t seem to be sleeping well.”

And König regrets the words he speaks next, when he describes the woman from the flowers in detail greater than necessary: how her eyes seemed so soft, her smile fragile, and her body language more docile than that of even a lamb. He mentions the dirty dress, the way she seemed to be trying to escape something yet refused the shelter he offered.

The other priest nods and sighs, his eyes squeezing shut in thought, and though König has not feared a scolding since he abandoned home nearly two decades prior, the way the ordinarily calm priest seems so frustrated by this sends a swell of fluttering anxiety beneath his ribcage.

“The woman you describe is a temptress,” his elder explains coldly. His sharp, dark eyes rest on König’s face as though the disparity in their height does not exist at all. “Best to let her be, she does not want our help. Leave it alone.”

“Ja. Verstanden.”

The warning is enough to dull the buzzing in his chest, the mush that’s been made up of his head until he sees her again.

The bakery in town regularly makes donations of pastries and thick loaves of bread for church goingson. It isn’t regular that he’s been asked to pick them up; the eldest of the priests usually does so, some blood relation to the owners that König has never cared enough to ask about. The old man never did well in the summer months, though, far too frail now to bear the heat snaking over his pale skin and leaving burns.

With the mistake of rambling onward about this perturbing fascination still grating at his mind, he doesn’t hesitate to volunteer, to take the old truck and step away from the stained glass and crucifixes for a brief outing. A moment of respite.

There’s a complimentary mug of coffee presented across the expanse of the counter when the cashier greets him with a smile so broad it seems faked.

König’s fingers twitch when he grasps at the handle; the uncertainty was something he had sworn he would outgrow one day with God’s healing, but it never seemed to stray far from him. It rests over the back of his neck like a feeding vampire when he takes his first sip, one that burns his tongue and stings at his eyes when he notices the woman seated at a table in the corner.

It’s her: temptation and fate packaged up in a loose fitting sweater that covers the pulse in her neck and a short skirt.

She holds her phone, not the mug stationed before her, staring down at the thing with the most somber expression he’s ever seen on a lady before. She taps her thumbs at the screen, talking to someone, but there’s a loneliness in her expression apparent like the rust on the old truck parked outside.

Poor little thing.

She glances up when his staring is detected, confusion stripped bare upon her with a pinched brow and a slack jaw. Then, follows realization and she offers the same smile she did that night, some seventy or so hours prior.

“Morning, Father.”

There’s not a fractal within König that wants to make the sweet spirit uncomfortable, but each step he takes towards her table seems to make her shoulders tense. She knows that he knows, sees that sympathetic look in his eye and hates it.

Maybe even hates him for the divinity he wears in the sable cloth pulled over his shoulders.

That doesn’t stop his approach.

König sits across from her with shaking hands and a forced smile like the one the cashier wears, drops his mug onto the table and offers her his hand. Fingers bending to graze the palm as though beckoning a frightened animal when it’s he who feels most afraid.

The angel merely eyes him cautiously for a moment before she takes the cup into both of her hands and gives him a fragile huff, dismissing his attempt to pray for her soul. Again. Yet, the sting he feels is not from a lack of a starved savior complex being satisfied, only… that he has yet to touch her somehow. That sudden thought stifles him in full.

But angels are nothing if not merciful and loving; she picks up on his dejection and speaks again in his place.

“How are the carnations?”

“Hm?”

“The flowers in the garden… the red ones,” she elaborates with a soft laugh, hides it behind the rim of her cup when it’s raised for her to take a sip. Her mouth looks soft, compelling, and he’s staring again. “I like them the most.”

He knows he should stop this, that what’s become of an innocent meeting has left him feeling anything but. There’s a howling chasm in place of the heart of a worthy devotee. She’s nothing like the women who frequent the church — the only other women he sees. Brighter at best and alluring at the worst.

“I thought the lilies were your favorite…” It’s unsuited for a priest and a man so tall and broad to sound so breakable, but his voice only comes in an hurried breath, embarrassed and small.

She shakes her head, tousles her hair in the process. “I like all of them. The ones at your church grow prettiest.”

“I see…”

The woman gives him an expectant look, as if prompting him to speak more, before her phone chimes and the air seems to shift from tentative yet sweet to something vast and cold. She doesn’t seem eager to be interrupted in such a way, either; her expression falls from that subtle playfulness to something akin to a regretful acceptance.

She stands from her seat abruptly and takes a step towards the door. “I have something I need to take care of.”

God gives and takes away.

“I can bring you some,” he offers, winding in the too-small wooden chair to face her. Too late to reel in the flirtatious nature of such an offering, too late to bite his tongue and remember the vows he had taken. The burden upon his heart seems far more pressing than any words from an old book. “Carnations and lilies… some of the others, too.”

The woman almost seems shy when she glances over her shoulder and offers him the most imperceptible nod. “Yeah, sure… I’ll see you around.”

His angel leaves him to rot in thought at that lonely table, in this tiny bakery. He does not think to repent for the way his temperature and pulse spiked in her presence, for the way he takes her empty cup and stuffs it into one of the boxes of baked goods to collect later.

Riding back to the church is dreadful, because she’s already fastened to his heart like a ribbon on a pretty bouquet. He’ll ask the sisters from the cloister to clip flowers for him, tie them up in a lace that will leave her face warmed and lips pouting.

When the people in the church have their fill of sweets and bread, König tells a lie, maybe several.

He claims he doesn’t know why that innocuous porcelain thing is resting where food once had, doesn’t know why the baker would have stuffed that in there too. He takes it to his room and claims that he would return it come morning.

The bed has always felt far too small for him alone, but he pictures her there with him, sat upon his lap when he brings the cup up to his lips with his eyes closed.

It’s cold and hard, difficult to imagine it to be a kiss at all, but he pretends her lips are upon him, eager and willing. It takes only rolling his tongue back to flick over itself, envisioning it being her own, for him to feel his trousers grow too tight. He doesn’t touch himself. He can’t bear the thought of it, not with the cross staring down at him from the far wall.

And finally, regret comes.

Shame, too, because König is aware he’s become a bit of a creep; enchanting himself with second hand kisses whilst his angel takes another man to bed. A man undeserving, but… he could be. He was deserving enough to become a holy man, surely she could see he was worthy of her as well.

The bed is too small even when he curls into himself and pulls the blanket up passed his eyes. Sleep is too skittish to come for him, even when he prays in a whisper to be absolved of his lust.

The dreams are only filled with images of an angel trapped in a rose bush, the thorns sinking into her wings until blood is drawn, but still she smiles. She reaches toward him with shaky limbs, whispers something so dreadfully mournful he knows to his very soul that she is his purpose alone.

It’s what wakes him in a fit, compels him to venture out through the yard with a heart set on seeking guidance. There are moonbeams above and animal calls from the surrounding trees. All of God’s creations are in perfect, dreamy harmony.

Why couldn’t he be the same? Always the outsider in one way or another; always the sore thumb rather than the loving green. Desolation is an art, a skill he’s learned to hide back: clenched teeth to still a wrathful tongue and a layer of muscle to guard that wounded thing in his chest.

There is no better peace than the quiet of the church in the late hour. Moonlight through stained glass and empty, antique seats that would make the worldly whip out their phones to snap pictures in a heartbeat. The doors are always open, for the sinners and the devoted alike, though the confessional is rarely touched when there would be no saint awake set on absolving.

Perhaps that’s why he takes to the booth he needs to make himself smaller to fit into: one shoulder and one foot first, then the next set. He’s never cared for it, left it to the better and smaller. The sound just past the thin partition rattles him. It isn’t the creaking of wood below his feet, but something softer. A weak sniffle. A cry from the other side.

“I’ll leave in a moment,” comes a voice, broken from tears and so horribly sad that the usual script entirely fails him. He recognizes the voice, though a bit warbled now. The voice that would make the choir pause, an angel’s sweet tone.

“Wait… no. You can stay. I’m hiding, too.” A breathy laugh comes forced and misplaced. Priest or not, König has never been the best at consoling anyone, let alone one so far above him.

“I’m not hiding,” she tries to sound braver now. He can imagine her chin tilted forward and that sweet smile trying it’s damndest to paint its way across her face. “But… why are you?”

“Don’t know.”

“Who are you?” The crying seems to have ceased entirely for now. Clearly whatever seemed to ail her could be remedied by her own curiosity. A cute, unorthodox little thing.

“König.” It served well enough as a confirmation name when he could not settle on one of the saints. King of them all, one of the other saved men had said in jest. Ironic, now.

“I like your voice, König,” she murmurs, deliberately testing the pronunciation on her tongue in such an alluring way that a small shiver runs its way down his spine.

“Danke… and you?”

God forgive him, he doesn’t even try. Doesn’t try to bring shame or guilt, read her scripture or pray for her soul. He only listens in silence when she tells him her name, beautiful and charming as he had expected it to be. The woman then tells him of her work, of the motel she ventures to at night… the troubles with money and even vaguely, some of the men she suffers through. This had been a bad night. Strange how a singular hour could have broken someone down to such a desperation to open up, to grasp for what small comfort they could receive.

But she came for him.

She must have hoped to see him.

He thanks his god for that.

— — —

“I bought a phone.”

“I see that.” Her fingers graze over the stems of the flowers, cleanly cut by hands more patient and stable than König’s own.

The angel isn’t looking up at him, not this time. There isn’t even a smile on her face when she cradles the bouquet close to her chest, petting over it where she sits upon the motel bed wearing nothing but some strappy, barely-there lingerie. Pure white with pink lace over the cups of her bra where her breasts swell with each shaky intake of breath.

In this week apart, he’s kept the device hidden in a loose pocket and spent many a night scouring the seediest websites looking for a hint of a body that may belong to her in this very area. Only one seemed to match. The messages exchanged were about hours and pricing, establishing a location, and terms he didn’t quite understand. He didn’t harp on the small details, but finding her messages to be so rigid and dry did surprise him. There were no cute hearts or winking emojis, it all felt horribly transactional.

Priests don’t make a lot of money, it all goes back to the church, but he’s thieved enough from the offering bowls to have a night with her alone. As disheartening as the lack of flirtations seemed, he hoped not to squander whatever opportunity this outing proved to be.

The balaclava covering his face wasn’t purchased with the intention of making her nervous, only… shielding himself from curious stares. The whole town knows his face, his name, the words he speaks so resolutely to his flock. Just as well as they know of who she is, what she does.

Even this knitted shield couldn’t hide himself from her, though. The very moment he entered this drab, modestly decorated room with flowers in hand she had only looked further lost.

“You look very pretty,” he tries as he removes the mask and drops it to the floor, kneels just a hair from where her feet dangle from the bed. “I’m glad that I found you.”

“Thank you.”

The flowers are placed on the side table, petals falling down to the thin carpet below. A cascade of red like blood and white like doves feathers. Purity and a wound in one.

The poor thing looks scorned when she does give him a glance then, but she forces herself into a position that stokes a hellish, unnatural flame within him. Her thighs part as her hands rest on the cups of her bra, pushing the thin fabric down to reveal areola, her soft nipples, sights that he had never seen before.

“You shouldn’t even be here, König,” the lady warns when his gaze sweeps over the innocent flesh laid bare before him. The angel isn’t even wet. Her panties are pristine over her womanhood, and it dawns on him that… she wouldn’t risk what he was even for the generous donation he had given.

“I don’t want to ruin you.”

But she should. Crumble him into salt, cast him away with the wind. Should.

She sees something holy in him too… albeit, not in the way that he would like for her to.

He swallows hard as he rises to his feet and sits next to her. The hands that were so accustomed to being joined in prayer find her breasts now with tentative touches, a curious squeeze, until he wills himself to readjust the fabric and conceal her properly.

“Ja, but… I just wanted to visit you.”

“You don’t need to pay me just to see me.”

The tension in the room finally begins to dissolve. Not by much, but when she sighs something that sounds like amusement, the restless throbbing of his heart does begin to settle.

As much as he would like to take her like some beast in rut, lay some claim to her in bursts of white seed, he doesn’t even know where to begin. Each curve of her body looks as though it would feel like a miracle beneath his palm, under his tongue.

It’s just that nothing is going to happen, not here, not now that he’s brought a prostitute flowers and revealed who he was to her. She sees something pitiful, where he only sees someone to love.

He can’t tell her that he dreams of her, that he views her in the same way he views his god. That would only scare her away, lead her to believe he’s a lunatic rather than a man only just now having his first taste of love.

“Then could I see you every night? So that you don’t have to…” His head dips, because no matter how he tries he knows any word he says is foolish.

This isn’t something she’s doing because it is fun for her; it’s a job just like his own. Flesh or words spoken… did it even matter? And yet, König could feel a malicious, gnawing envy at the thought of a bolder man taking his place tomorrow evening. That man wouldn’t hesitate to peel away her pretty lingerie and fuck her, shove his tongue into her mouth while his cock sat between her legs as if it belonged there.

“König,” she sighs next to him, pityingly.

His jaw tenses as his fingers curl into his palms. The hopelessness of it all crashes down around him as though sung out from the loudest of the choir. He hardly notices when she presses her head against his shoulder, only realizes how close she’s come to him when her hand curls over one of his own.

“You’re the strangest man I’ve ever met.” It’s not a compliment but it feels like one when she laughs like that, airy and soft. “The sweetest one, too.”

He smells her perfume from this close, something scented like fruit or maybe maple, sap-sticky and saccharine. All of her flesh feels warm against the plain t-shirt he wears, a warmth he would give anything to dive into, but not without her explicit command. A powerful seraph in the form of one painfully cute, gentle lady. If anyone could see what he saw now, they too would forsake those holy books and eat from her open palm instead.

“I don’t know what to do,” he confesses, a peculiar bitterness hanging on his tongue.

“How about a walk?”

He pulls the balaclava over his face again when they make their way out into the quiet, darkened street. Hand in hand. It’s not from shame, but a necessity, perhaps, because his pale face has only flowered into a lasting pink since laying eyes upon her on that mattress, sprawled out and waiting. The blush only deepens with every squeeze she blesses him with, every hushed word spoken as she tells him about her favorite places.

She’s dressed in the same white dress they had initially met in, now clean of the dirt from flower beds. Somehow even more radiant at this close, too.

The churchyard and the clergy house are nothing in comparison to the way the rest of the town feels when the moon rises. It’s a world all their own, a place where no one looks at her as if she were a simple harlot, but a queen amongst chipping wood and tarmac. There’s even a skip in her step as she walks ahead of him, her hips swaying beneath her skirt. All because there’s no one here but she and her most loyal and only acolyte.

He wills himself out of her grasp when they cross the threshold into the cemetery. The darkness there is enough to pull him back to earth; thoughts of how easily swayed he’s been linger in the back of his mind. The want doesn’t even begin to reel back its claws, but the guilt does sink its pearly fangs in alongside it.

“I get it. You don’t want to be seen with me,” she says a small step away, drawing her hand up to her chest. It’s the saddest she’s ever looked, and he doesn’t have the words to further explain that he has no god damn idea what he’s doing: here, with her, in the midst of something that feels so normal even though it should not.

“Nein! That’s not—“

“You don’t want to touch me. You barely talk…”

Because the words don’t come easy. Because he’s never felt such an overbearing devotion to anyone, anything apart from what he prays to. How could she… this woman that shared in such loneliness with him not see him for what he was, not see him in the way that he sees her?

“You’re misunderstanding.”

“You just want to… to convert me, is that right?,” she hisses, sounding more shaken up than he had ever hoped to hear.

All hesitation had to be swallowed back.

There was no other option. He could feel her slipping away, a pain he wasn’t prepared to face.

God gives and takes away, but König refuses to let go.

His eyes narrow, his breath halts entirely, and he cups her face in his hands as gently as he can. The distance between them feels like miles as he lowers his head to kiss her through the knit barrier. It’s flighty and petrifying on his side… he feels cold sweat wet his brow when the warmth of her pulls through.

She could hit him, spit her curses like a proper witch, and he would only fall to her feet and kiss her heels. But… she does none of those things. Whatever pain was brewing here is ripped away with the night breeze.

Her hands peel away the balaclava, discard it somewhere into the tall grass where it wouldn’t be found, and she grants him his first, proper kiss.

With only the cracked headstones and cemetery angels watching, what once was tentative becomes a full indulgence. König samples from her mouth as though it weeps honey when the gentle peck graduates to a parting of lips. His hands run down the length of her sides as she grasps at his shirt, they pull her in close until her chest meets his own and two pairs of eyelids flutter.

She feels more heavenly than his imagination could have prepared him for, her tongue hotter and her sounds… the soft sighs and shaky murmurs of approval that fill him with both a maddening love and an urge to burn everything away if only it would keep her safe and near.

The world ceases to be entirely, cast down with Lucifer to the sulfur and smoke. Her lips remain parted when they break apart, a haze over her eyes reflecting the veil clouding his own irises.

Was a kiss really forsaking his vows? Was that really such a painful treachery? No… no it shouldn’t be. The issue remains that he can not see her as just some woman. Something as small as this could consume him entirely.

The night is spent with an abundance of those shared kisses when they return to the motel. Tentative touches, too. He’s never held a woman, not in the way he gets to hold her then. She presses tightly to him, her back to his chest with her hand keeping his own in place over her middle. She’s so soft, swans down plush and smooth as silk ribbon.

There is mint lingering on her breath each time she speaks. No talk of her work, only… she confesses how she had feared him so initially, how she worried that a holy man stepping into her life would only be further condemnation: an angel terrified by a devil that does not exist at all.

He knows he’s lost a part of himself here when he tells her he wishes to meet with her again, that if the church is no longer the place she fancies to walk, he’ll meet her amongst the dead again and again when the old clergymen sleep. Those promises he had reserved solely for God turn on themselves now, when he reveres the idol he shares this bed with.

Though her hips press back against his groin when his fingers crawl up to her sternum, and the desire strikes up within him, his cock remains untouched here. He doesn’t whisper a prayer for forgiveness into her hair when he grows hard, just tucks her in closer and smiles where his head rests atop her own.

It’s the closest to bliss he’s ever felt.

— — —

“You weren’t here for morning prayer.” The voice isn’t accusatory, just observant. The nightly prayers were missed too, though a reprieve is granted by way of those remaining unmentioned.

But the guilt does eat at König when he sees the concern in this man’s eyes, splinters at his very soul until he asks in a fragile voice if he can speak to the old priest in the confessional.

Everything here feels much too small and the booth is more or less the same. The wood closes in around him, bathes him in a blackness that even the glow of candlelight within these walls can not reach. The partition separating them does not help bolster courage, it only leaves him feeling more alone.

The clergyman listens in silence as König confesses that he has become weak. He does not mention the lady of the night, but there’s no need to at all: finding himself so captivated with a woman that he considered breaking every promise to the higher power was bad enough. He does not mention how he’s considered pleasuring himself, touching her too… only that they shared a night together embraced, counts the kisses that were exchanged with each digit of his hands.

There’s a pitying sigh from the other side before the man begins a lengthy prayer that König does join him in. With the “Amen” that follows, he’s told only to rid himself of those thoughts, to bury them with fasting and prayer. No more visits with this temptress, remain on the right path. The very, very simple things he must do to receive God’s forgiveness and favor once more.

“You are not a disappointment,” his elder reminds him with a small pat to his cheek and a smile. It’s more fatherly than the sparse affection he received from his own flesh and blood before coming here.

“Danke… thank you,” he breathes when his eyes bear the burden of tears.

God loves him and so do the sainted men.

But to never see her again would be worse than flagellation.

He chokes down the pain with more water when his stomach roars with hunger, hides the broken heart with smiles and prayer. Holy clothes feel heavier now. The money he stole to spend that night with her is returned to the collection pool in a week's time. The smartphone he had purchased is tossed out with the rest of the garbage in the bins. Even the cup is returned to the bakery after being rinsed in the sink.

Still not a part of him feels absolved from this torturous puppet show.

He thinks of her more than he ponders over his fear of Hell itself. God feels like an old memory as the days pass. He counts them in his daybook, an ‘X’ next to the dates he had gone without seeing her. Ten becomes twenty, and it becomes no less agonizing.

The prayers come easier, at least. He joins with his fellow men, kneels with his hands clasped before him, speaks such heartfelt words now that on more than one occasion he’s shared a healing tear or two with the other clergymen.

God is an old friend, yes, but that title is just a placeholder for the one his prayers are truly for. The little angel of the garden, the woman who has given him nothing at all but stole his heart all the same. Was she not the same as God from that aspect?

After a month, he’s finally given the privilege to stand before the altar and preach to the parishioners again. His sermon is directed by the other clergymen, a subtle admission of his own misdeeds as he guides the flock away from the sins of lust, of worldly pleasures that would steer them away from the right path.

Amidst the men and women crowding the pews sits a new face. She wears a hat, looking uncertain and skittish as a bunny amidst a pack of starved hounds beneath its curved brim. Her coat is tugged tightly around her where her hands grip to keep it closed and snug. No one is out to get her, not here, but there’s a purplish bruise on her neck. A sad stare trails up to meet his gaze when he stammers through the words of scripture.

Then, she smiles and his heart only feels full.

The sermon ends clumsily enough, but she waits for him in the center pew. He ensures the others have cleared out before he takes rigid steps toward her, where he sits a foot or so away on the bench; the feigned friendliness is only a front for the rapid beating of his heart and the way the blush upon his face paints up to his ears.

“I waited to walk with you… like you promised we would,” she says in place of a greeting. There’s no chiding in her tone, just curiosity. Gentle, like she’s speaking to a wounded bird, and perhaps that’s what he’s become: some big, ugly vulture. Holy in its love of everything from the sky to the rot down below.

“I’m sorry. I..,” he laments, grasping for an explanation that does not come.

“No, I understand. It’s alright, König.”

He knows he doesn’t deserve the gift of her redemption with how easily he turned away from her, from the blooming of… something. It was best not to use that word anymore.

“I just didn’t want to wait any longer. I missed you,” she huffs when the silence extends between them, breaks up the tension in the air but not what creeps over her own shoulders.

“Your bruise..” He wants to tell her of his sleepless nights, of how he pictures her in place of any old deity upon a throne in heaven, but settles for where his eyes linger on her neck.

No explanation is provided, but she lets him bring his fingers to it, ghost over where the purple melds to yellow in the shape of thick fingerprints. Add wrath to the ever growing list of his sins, because it’s all he feels amidst the envy and love.

His fingers dig into the plain back trousers when they rest upon his lap again, something foreign buzzes beneath his skin. The thought that any man would be brazen enough to lay hands upon his very own angel.. It’s unbelievable, unforgivable. His thoughts spiral so quickly it’s frightening. Timid things can become vicious, too, when backed into corners.

She manages to keep this growing storm in check when she stands and smooths her skirt, and offers to tidy up the church in an act of ‘repentance’.

The chores are simple and the sisters that linger far past service seem grateful to have her here as she takes up the broom and sweeps away at the dusty floor. They chatter away with her, take her hat and rest their hands over her shoulders when the cleaning winds to an end. His angel closes her eyes in prayer, doesn’t so much as open them to send him a knowing glance when they pray for her to find a good husband, someone who deserves such a lovely, godly woman.

She shares a meal with them while König keeps to himself with scripture in hand, mindlessly roving over the words even when his thoughts drift to the night of their first kiss.

He reasons that it’s only natural when she gives him such a display of acceptance too. It only solidifies what he knows already: this woman is no succubus— she has not crawled from the depths of Hell to drag him back with her, she’s only heavensent. An angel with a broken wing or a gaping wound somewhere… something to care for.

She’s encouraged to return by several fond voices. A few of the women even offer to walk her home, the daylight is dying and it’s dangerous for a lone lady out at night. The angel smiles at him then, sharing in the knowledge that she prefers the dark. Not the wicked things, but the peace and the beauty of the moon.

And she returns when he abstains from her.

She confides in him after each sermon that she does long to see him more often, but she likes the way he speaks of Mary Magdalene and the other women in scripture, pokes fun at the lilt to his voice when he notices her amidst the crowd of others. She says she likes him a lot before they part ways in the evenings, but she doesn’t tempt him with pouts or trailing fingers.

He thanks her for respecting his faith each time - despite being the one who crossed several boundaries initially. Though he keeps his hands to himself now, the looks he gives to her are pleading and soft. If she would pull him into a kiss now, he would let her have all of him. They could run away together, from the church, from her clients…

It’s on one of those cloudy Sundays that he does ask her if she’s stopped. He braves the look she gives him when his question comes as a hushed stutter. The comfort between them no longer feels tentative. It’s just there. Ever-present as the sky above.

“Well, you haven’t,” she whispers in response, propping her elbow up on the back of the pew. It’s as if she believes it could be so simple, but it’s not. Not for either of them.

The spiels of Heaven and Hell won’t reach her, so he doesn’t bother with those. She offers him an invitation with her words and the way she remains so open that it’s difficult not to take.

It’s been months since he touched her last and the love has only seemed to have grown. Strange. Perhaps he is as odd as she’s imagined him to be. There have been weddings in this very church, talks of long years of courtship, and even then what those men must have felt for their brides had to have paled in comparison to this. It had to.

“Tell me how to,” he breathes without any underlying thought. Saints don’t question their gods, they only serve them.

“You’re actually considering it…?”

“I might.”

The silence crowds around the bench while her fingers brush over the pages of a hymnal in repetition and his only inch closer to her clothed knee.

“You could meet me at the cemetery tonight… We could talk more there.”

“At night is probably not the best time.”

“Well, we’re friends, aren’t we?”

Friends don’t kiss. Friends don’t feel the way he feels now, or how he’s felt for the past few months. Platonic arrangements don’t require repentance. But, he bites his tongue and tilts his head back, lets it roll off the shoulder when his hand draws back to his lap. Another time.

Not where the Heavenly Father could see, if he were even watching any longer.

“… Tomorrow morning would be better.”

“Then I’ll come get you. Don’t you dare try and get out of it,” she chirps with the wildest glint of mirth alight in her eyes.

Stay.

If the church caught fire now and the rafters came to sink into the earth not a part of him would or could even care as long as she were just here. But he watches her go without a word of opposition, watches her nod toward the sisters standing out in the yard and clasp her hands in front of her, smiling to herself as though the world were made for just the two of them.

It stings during nightly prayer, and it burns when he lies in bed to wait for the morning. There are cicadas singing and footsteps on old wooden boards to remind him that he isn’t entirely alone, the scent of tobacco drifting from his window when another plaster saint hides beyond the veil of night to smoke. He doesn’t sleep, his eyes remain fixed upon the ceiling until the darkness of the room drifts to a dull gray with the sun’s slow rise.

And König does not wait for her to fetch him. Morning prayer dissolves into a mournful cry because there is no part of him that can fathom or interpret any of this. A trial should not feel like a blessing when he’s faced with it. God must be playing the stupidest game imaginable to test him with someone so lovable, so charming. Where the church leaves him feeling filthy with remorse, she purifies him with only a curl of her lips and starlight dancing in her eyes.

None of it is fair.

The guilt must be something obligatory, summoned up like puffs of dust from the floorboards. Worshiping idols is a sin, but it’s not the angel that feels like one, it’s the attention he pays to the cloud in his head that does. That’s the one that should go.

He grits through prayer with the other men, doesn’t chime in with unnecessary words of devotion this time. The coffee burns his tongue when he downs the mug and forgoes breakfast. There are dark rings beneath his eyes when he ventured to the washroom to brush his teeth, and there are whispers in the halls that the young priest must be either coming under a possession or God is preparing him for something. Something big and exciting. He ignores those and the stern glances from the little nuns in their robes, huffs something of a joke about a momentary sabbatical when he lumbers out of the walls of the church.

There are no new bruises this time, but König has the memory of the last ones stuck in his skull. A clear image of four small marks on the side of her neck, another on its opposite. Larger, more pronounced. Five marks from a hand that never belonged there. Kerosene and a match are what the thoughts running rampant in his head would look like to an outsider.

She tells him on the thin picnic blanket that she’s got a new client, that he gives her enough to where she doesn’t have to consider any others now. The man has a much stranger set of interests, ones she hadn’t delved into before him, but she’s merciful enough to withhold the details that would lead König to make the crucifixion seem a gentle affair.

She tells him because she wants him to be proud that it’s only one now. That she’s making some sort of progress for him. None of it is fair, and he knows without asking that she feels more akin to the way that he does than any of the holy men.

And still he can’t help but ask, “Do you love him?”

“Of course not,” comes her immediate response, and there’s a near imperceptible glare there, judging by the fire in her eyes. It’s cute… and he feels the world's ugliest fool for daring to ask for reassurance as though this relationship was any sort of normal. If it were even a relationship at all.

Their hands touch, reaching for the same flaky pastry in the basket she brought along and Heaven’s bells ring out in his ears when her gaze sweeps over him. Everything is sugared dough and right again. She offers him her lap in place of a pillow for his head when the clouds grow thick and gray above, feeds him from her own hand and runs her fingers across his face with the other.

“How did you get the sky in your eyes?,” she asks him, makes him blush so easily his heart stutters within his chest. He feels like a boy in her presence, and in a way, to her, maybe he even is just some inexperienced whelp nipping at her heels.

The angel does not judge, she softly rakes her nails behind his ear and neck until he shivers in her hold. His hair is next, a victim to her comfort as she tousles it between her fingers, strokes him like the smallest of kittens when he feels anything but.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he mutters, raising a hand to brush at her cheek. Warm as he expected, yet softer. There’s nothing wicked here, only a woman. A woman who loves him as he loves her.

“Your eyes are pretty… sad. I love them,” comes the sweet reply that reduces him to nothing but scattered feathers and a howling ache.

Did he even exist before now? Before her? This woman has filled him with such purpose, breathed new life into a stagnant soul. The church was a safe place for a man scorned by the rest of the world, but that blanket felt unnecessary now. He wanted to feel her hands move over him like this, smell the petals in her perfume, hear her voice speak to him, all of it. Forever.

“I think that I lose myself when I’m with you.”

“Does that hurt you?”

“Nein… I’m happier like this.” It’s the closest to a confession he can whisper.

And he returns to her, morning after morning König rushes through paying his dues to God and his men to return to her like this.

When the graveyard is silent and the dew still sticks to the blades of grass, her voice sounds sweeter somehow beneath the glow of the rising sun. The birds sing around them and often she pushes wildflowers into his hair, clasps her hands around his neck and teaches him to kiss.

Her tongue moves with grace, his is only a thing of greed. Each chaste peck is met with a hunger from somewhere so foggy and forgotten it never had a home at all, not before now. The angel needn’t show him where to rest his hands, they pry at every part of her: gentle brushes against her cheek and neck, kneading at her shoulders, further, further until he does finally starve off any lingering thought of what is good or evil to explore the curve of her lower back.

Most of the time words come in afterthought, once lips are wet and plush from this gentle devouring, after she steels herself from running her hands any further down than his stomach. He tells her in truth that he prays to her, not for. Not anymore.

The shadows cast from the aspens keep them tucked far away from sight, from God and his people alike. A temple for two without four walls to close them in. The only place on this earth that he’s ever found himself in perfect solace.

“I want to try something,” she breathes just when he’s prepared himself to leave. The tree at his back, knees parted, where she remains sat across from him. There’s nervousness there, not the fretful way she looks after a long night, nor the way she looked to him upon their first meetings. “Do you trust me?”

“Ja… more than anyone,” he reassures in a soft tone of voice, tipping her chin up with the tips of two fingers to further accentuate it. Her beauty and her uncertainty always strike a chord within him, a fire that never dwindles. When her eyes search his own, his breath catches.

He doesn’t say a word when she peels away the robes from the front of his trousers. Her hands linger on at the waistband for a moment, takes enough time to offer the gentlest peck to the side of his neck before continuing. It’s another first, being exposed to a woman like this when she lowers the band and has him shimmy backward to free his cock from his pants. Soft with shame or embarrassment, a concoction of other things he could not name, but the moment she looks up at him with pure delight he feels himself grow stiff.

“Wow… You’ve got a perfect cock,” she assesses with a laugh, finger running up the length of it as it twitches to life under her touch.

Scheisse.

He strokes her cheek with reverence as she bends down before him, watching him carefully through her eyelashes. Her warm breath drifts over his manhood and he’s already horribly aware that this would not last long. Another lesson, like the kisses, maybe. She could mold him any way that she likes and he would be pleased to play the role of her Adam.

The tongue isn’t what he anticipated. She flattens it against the tip, breathes a laugh when a keening whine is pulled from his throat. To see such an ugly, vulgar thing pressed to the beautiful mouth he’s kissed a dozen times now. It feels wrong. There’s no hesitation when her lips wrap around him. And then all of it— everything is just right. Every moment spent in this hazy, loving glow with her is right. If Hell were to come from this, then let it.

He can’t tear his eyes away from her, can’t bring himself to speak when he feels the way his cock hits the back of her throat, feels her swallow around him and make such a pleased noise as she wraps her fingers around the expanse she can not take.

Its pitiful, the way he must look: mouth agape, eyes lidded and heavy… He brings a hand to her hair, and runs his fingers through it as if she isn’t letting him fuck her mouth, but rather in the midst of something far holier, softer. Sacrilegious or divine. If God we’re watching, let him.

She pulls back a little, an obscene, wet sound in answer when her mouth is drawn back enough to merely press a kiss the tip, puffy lips glossy with drool. “Is this okay…? Not too much?”

“You are so pretty… it feels… just keep going.” His voice no longer possesses any feigned confidence, it begs like a wounded thing, chanting, “Bitte. Please…”

His hips tilt up when she parts her lips again, all trepidation be damned. This is something, something he’s aches for and never had the chance to feel. All of the ache, the longing to be diminished, to unite with the angel who fled Heaven for him. The cock pushes at her open mouth, smears thick beads of precum over her cheek, before she takes him in again with a delighted, muffled sound. Her soft mouth, the tongue that thoroughly laps at his shaft and follows her movements to wrap and suck at the head. Otherworldly, and… unfathomably bittersweet.

Her lips suction around him, the movements of her wrist only increasing, and with the second roll of his hips he feels his stomach begin to tense as pure heat rolls its way through him. A gentle coursing becomes a blinding inferno in mere seconds, and regrettably, instinctively, that hand so gently combing through her hair comes to snare it instead and force her down further.

His soft grunts and low pleading morph to something choked and almost agonized. It’s the purest rapture, a pleasure so absolute his eyes prick as he bows lower to cover over her as she swallows his devotion by mouth. The angel pants breathlessly when she pulls away with saliva and semen still stringing them together, cleansed by his thumb tracing over her lips, replaced so swiftly by his own mouth. The kiss is so chaste it feels misplaced here, but she nuzzles against him in this comedown from ecstasy, doesn’t even chastise how he lasted a mere two minutes.

And he vows, vows in the sweetness of her comfort and love that no one else will ever have this again.

— — —

Abstaining from meals during a fast is a struggle in and of itself; abstaining from her is some long-forgotten circle of Hell.

It’s not avoidance, but a necessity.

To think that his first sexual encounter would provoke days of concern, a wistful daydream about a future he never would have thought to have had otherwise. There was a desperate, starving desire to repent when he first arrived home after that, but nothing that a bottle of communion wine and a cold shower could not wash away. Repentance has lost its merit to him.

And after seven days, he’s perfectly aware of what he must do. To absolve them both from things where atonement seems far from a necessity at all. He folds his holy robes and leaves them on the bed in the room too small, set neatly next to his Bible. The rosary was the one thing that König could not bear to part with. The beads, red and shimmery, were chosen and strung together with him in mind. It’s slipped into the pocket of his jeans after the plain, black t-shirt is pulled over his head.

There’s a hammer in his gloved hand, and he doesn’t recall where he found it. Lying with its head rusted in the churchyard, perhaps half buried beneath the soil. Some of the other clergymen are talented at fixing things, but König’s never been very good with that. His first rosary was broken with a careless slip of his fingers, and he’s shattered more porcelain than he could count on accident.

Even communion wine can be a bit too strong, sometimes. Or maybe that’s only when the bottle’s been entirely downed. He’ll blame one of his betters when the stock is counted and one turns up missing, if they bother to come seek him out again at all.

The motel is dead at this hour, so late into the night. The few normal visitors have already been accounted for with watchful eyes, and the angel waits in one of the rooms on the second floor. He imagines the laces on her lingerie, the healing bruises on her throat, and that sweet expression upon her face. Or maybe that one was reserved solely for him. He prayed… no, he hoped so.

After tonight, there would be no more mercies for him. Or perhaps there would be an abundance, blessings from the vultures and the wolves and the maggots he would feed. New gods that were still far lesser than the angel who suffers men in sheets, but only looks to him with love.

And he doesn’t have to wait long, because the demon finds his way here with haste. Does he come here every night looking as proud as he does now? His attire even resonates with death, black with those white details, a costume that seems so fitting for one about to meet the very face he wears.

Killing someone isn’t so easy. Cain murdered his brother with a rock, described in such loose detail that one would think a playful throw led to Abel’s end. But it’s not so, not when the victim is hellbent on living.

The demon is smaller, but strong. He’s been in situations like this before, doesn’t have to spit the words to tell König so. They’re felt with each blow, with the sharp edge of the knife this bastard manages to dig into his side. Just barely, before it’s jerked out of his hand and thrown several paces away. The skittering across the tarmac is enough to chant doom.

There’s blood. More with the first strike of the hammer. It seemed so much easier in thought rather than practice. In his imaginings, the head would split with the first fall like an overripe apple, crumple in and the breath would leave the demon in an instant. Instead, it’s dozens. Blow after blow while the smaller man struggles below him.

A strange catharsis comes over him when his soul grows murky, when his hands are slick and the struggle comes to an abrupt end. The sobering only comes when he’s spent an hour driving down the most forested roads to find a place to dump the body. There’s no tact to it, laying a man to rest in shrubbery and dirt. With a head so collapsed it’s hard to think of this as a man at all. A corpse, something no longer simply human.

König does not pray for him when he rests the hammer in the deceased’s hands. Does not offer it more than a passing thought when he peels away back toward home. The deed is done and he’s free of those horrid burdens tainting his heart, keeping him held back on a short leash to divinity.

Like fate, she’s found out in the garden again after the bloodied shirt and stained gloves are discarded. The wound is patched with what he could find available, a hastily tied strip of gauze covers his side. A week or so at best until the gash would heal into an ugly, jagged scar. It seemed even a bastard devil’s blade couldn't be sharp enough to fell a Goliath when he’s caught by surprise and horny.

He feigns merely emptying the garbage into an outside bin, plays off the sting of the gash with a humble, lumbering gait. She beams up at him through lines of tears running down the sides of her face like small, silver streams beneath the darkened sky above.

He’s not a saint anymore, no… a guardian angel. The archangel Michael with his sword set ablaze and divinity scrawled into every scale of his chest plate. Something holy and glowing, unsullied and beautiful.

Like her.

“You’re crying…”

“Sorry… bad night. Client just ghosted me.”

No. This was good, couldn’t she see that? All the sleepless nights, the prayer and the constant, overwhelming longing. Everything he had suffered for her, and still she only comes to him with the thought of that horrible thing in mind.

“He’s dead.” Maybe it was just the fear of a loss of money. He had enough saved up someplace, and the collection pool would be beneficial enough to pivot them towards a new life. No church. No lonely motel. He had to test it, give her a trial and hope that she did not simply break.

The look that crosses her face is one of confusion… Then comes a strange twist of relief. Her mouth falls slightly agape and her arms squeeze slightly around his middle.

“We just spoke a few hours ago. How…?” Finally, suspicion.

Maybe he’s too drunk on playing God now to care, to realize this isn’t how a good man would have handled things. The only thing that holds any weight, that resonated with him any at all is the thought that he loves her, that he will protect her until his dying breath, pray at her feet and anything else she might ask.

That’s what pulls him to press her down against the bed of the truck, to kiss her with every lesson she’s blessed him with in mind. Tongue and teeth, fire and spit, she accepts all of it. She doesn’t beg him for an answer: she’s seen the worst of men, taken cocks far less deserving. Her hands find his hair as they drift away here, gives the strands a sharp tug to usher him closer, roll her tongue against his own.

The sheer tights she wears beneath her skirt are ripped at the seam between her legs by large hands, panties pushed to the side before she finally presses against the broad chest against her to gain some space. Her breath is shallow, face warmed and hair a mess, still the loveliest thing he’s ever laid his eyes upon.

“Are you afraid?” He tilts his head to the side, curious, as if there were no reason for her deny him of this now after he had just *killed for her*. After he forsook what once was all he knew all for her. He would do it again without question, with no gain at all, but the sting of rejection was not something he could entirely choke back.

But his angel never runs out of mercies, it seems.

“No… just give me a second.”

She slips her hand down between her parted legs, demonstrates for him just how to prepare a woman. He watches, mesmerized, as she circles the bud above her slit, dips her finger downward to spread wetness along her flesh. Dew over petals. A finger slips inside of her, and all at once is shoved aside.

“Let me,” he pleads, already pressing both hands to her inner thighs, tilting her hips upward as his head sinks between them.

“You don’t have to,” she whispers, but grants him his wish with feverish nods that betray her words, allows him to kiss her sex as he shifts himself into a better position.

There’s nothing to go off of but her sounds, the cries of pleasure when his tongue lolls out to lick at the nub where most of her reactions stem from. He mutters against her about her taste, something so ethereal he could not even begin to place. Her scent envelopes him in full, and he’s never felt closer to anything prior. She allows his clumsy licking, moans louder for him when he can’t stifle his own groaning. The pants are too tight around him, and patience is another virtue he finds that he lacks.

She doesn’t reach some fantastical height of pleasure when he presses a finger into her cunt, but her body seems to fit even that like a glove, squeezing around him as he lazily circles her bud with his tongue. She doesn’t come, but she tugs him by the hair to usher him back into another kiss, hands roving down his abdomen to free his manhood from the barriers of fabric. And finally… finally he’s granted entrance to Heaven.

The first thrust leaves him spiraling, lost into a world of silk and honey. And the angel does not give him any time to recover, she writhes beneath him, shifting her hips to pull him in deeper, muffles each whine and groan from his lips with her tongue hungrily lapping over his own.

He’s thought about having a woman many times, but never imagined it could feel this good. To be so complete, every woe or fear cast aside in the act of mindless pleasure.

He doesn’t know where to put his hands, to keep his eyes shut or gaze down at her and cease this assault on his mouth to tell her that he loves her, that she feels like pure fucking paradise and he’s already on the verge of coming undone. He settles for moving, dragging himself in and out of her in slow movements, turning his face away to bite down on her shoulder when the feeling of her walls cinching him like a vise threatens to spur him into finishing on the spot.

“That’s just… god… you’re good at this,” she gasps when a hand is sunk between their bodies, flicking at her clit as he spears her open. Her hands find his back, raking her fingernails down past his shoulder blades. It’s agonizing, trying to fight back the urge to breed her full, watch his come spill out from her perfect cunt until he finds himself hard again. The very thought makes him gasp, grind himself deeper inside of her as her nails dig into his back.

“Mein… this is… you understand…,” he’s babbling, hardly coherent, and she only seems to accept it. The angel chants her agreement amidst the beginning of her rapture.

She cries out for him when she comes, her sex pulsing around him as she shivers that all restraint is immediately lost. She hugs him so tightly, squirms as she hisses a curse into his ear.

It’s a miracle he’s even lasted this long. He halts his pace for a mere second to prop himself up, gaze down at her in absolute reverence before that fire swallows him whole. It’s unceremonious when he comes: a growl and a wail as he buries he face into her neck and pumps every last drop of his seed into her pussy.

He doesn’t want to pull out, doesn’t want to leave such a complete embrace. The world has already ended for him, a long time ago on the very night they met. There’s no need to drag out their ruin with whatever else occurs when she’s out of his grasp.

She strokes over the marks she’s made, gentle, tickling touches of her fingertips and shy giggles when their eyes meet again.

“I thought I would never get to do this with you,” she admits, quiet when her hands drift to cup his jaw instead. “You’re perfect, you know that…?”

He wants to cry, wants to fuck all of his woes away, kneel before her and beg that she find a place where they can never be apart. Steal her away to some cabin up in the Alps, where flowers grow in thick patches on the hillsides, a wild garden of her very own.

“… You should stay with me,” he huffs into her ear, fingers dimpling the flesh of her hips as he tries desperately to force himself closer to her.

“You can’t mean the church,” she giggles. “So where should we go?”

“We can figure that out in the morning, hm?”

#könig x reader #konig x reader

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philmonjohn · 1 day ago

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A Call to the Children of the Global South: The System That Made My Father Disown Me

I didn’t write this living testimony for virality. I wrote it because silence almost killed me. Because truth, even when ignored by algorithms, remembers how to survive. If this resonated with you — even quietly — share it with someone else who’s still trying to name their Fracture. That’s how we outlive the system. - Philmon John, May 2025

THE FRACTURE Several months ago, when I, a South-Asian American man, turned 35, my father disowned me.

He didn’t yell. He didn’t cry. He simply stopped calling me his son.

My father is a Brown, MAGA-aligned conservative Christian pastor, born in Kerala, India, and now living in the United States. His rejection wasn’t provoked by any breach of trust or familial responsibility, but by my coming out as queer and bisexual — and by my deliberate move away from a version of Christianity shaped more by colonial rule than compassion.

I became blasphemy made flesh.

My mother and sister, equally immersed in religious conservatism, followed suit. Most of my extended family — conservative Indian Christians — responded with quiet complicity. I became an exile in my own lineage, cast out from a network that once celebrated me as the Mootha Makkan, the Malayalam term for “eldest son”.

This break didn’t occur in isolation. It was the culmination of years of internal questioning and ideological transformation.

I was raised with warmth and structure, but also under the weight of rigid theology. My parents cycled through different churches in pursuit of doctrinal purity. In that environment, my queerness had no safe harbor. It had to be hidden, managed, controlled — forced into secrecy.

Literal, cherry-popping closets.

Even my childhood discipline was carved straight from scripture — “spare the rod, spoil the child” was not metaphor but mandate. I was hit for defiance, for curiosity, for emotional honesty. Control was synonymous with love. The theology: obedience over empathy. Is it sad I would rather now have had a beating from my father, than his silence?

I would’ve taken the rod — at least it acknowledged me.

Instead, Daddy looks through me.

THE INHERITANCE And I obeyed. For a time, I rose through the ranks of the church. I led worship. I played guitar in the worship band. I wasn’t just a believer — I was a builder of belief, a conductor of chorus, a jester of jubilee and Sunday morning joy — all while masking a private ache I could not yet articulate.

In the last five years, I began methodically deconstructing the ideological scaffolding I had inherited. I examined the mechanisms of theology, patriarchy, and colonial imposition — and the specific burdens placed upon firstborn sons of immigrant families. Who defines our roles? Who benefits from our silence? Why is this happening to me?

These questions consistently pointed toward the dominant global structure: wealthy white patriarchal supremacy. Rooted in European imperialism and sustained by centuries of religious and cultural colonization, this system fractures not only societies but the deeply intimate architecture of family.

What my family experienced is not unlike what the United States of America continues to experience — a slow, painful reckoning with a foundational ideology of white, heteronormative, Christian patriarchal dominance.

My family comes from Kerala, home to one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. But the Christianity I inherited was not indigenous. It was filtered through the moral codes of Portuguese priests and British missionaries and the discipline of Victorian culture. Christ was not presented as a radical Middle Eastern teacher but as a sanitized figure — pale, passive, and Western.

In this theology, Christ is symbolic. Paul is the system. Doctrine exists to reinforce patriarchy, to police desire, to ensure control. When I embraced a theology rooted in love, empathy, and justice — the ethics I believe Jesus actually lived — I was met not with discussion, but dismissal.

To my family, my identity wasn’t authenticity. It was apostasy.

THE RECKONING In 2020, the ground shifted.

I turned the triple decade — 30 — as the COVID-19 pandemic erupted.

Remote work slowed life down, and I had space to think deeply.

That year, the murders of Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and countless others triggered a national and personal reckoning.

I turned to K-LOVE, the Christian radio station I grew up with, hoping to hear words of solidarity, truth, or even mourning. Instead, there was silence. No mention of racial justice. No prayers for the dead. Just songs about personal salvation, void of historical context or social responsibility.

As Geraldine Heng argues in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, race was not merely a modern invention void of scientific basis — it was already taking shape in medieval Europe, where Christianity was used to sanctify, encode, and sell racial hierarchies as divine order and social technology.

As Ademọ́la, also known as Ogbeni Demola, once said: “The white man built his heaven on your land and pointed yours to the sky.” That brain-powered perceptive clarity — distilled in a single line — stays with me every day.

With professional routines interrupted and spiritual ties frayed, I immersed myself in scholarship. I entered what I now see as a period of epistemic reconstruction. I read widely — revolutionaries, poets, sociologists, historians, mathematicians, theologians, cultural critics, and the unflinching truth-tellers who name what empire tries to erase.

I first turned to the voices who now live only in memory: Bhagat Singh, James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, Gloria Anzaldúa, and Vine Deloria Jr. Each carried the weight of revolution, tenderness, and truth — from anti-colonial struggle to queer theory to Indigenous reclamation.

I then reached for the veteran thought leaders still shaping the world, starting with Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein, Shashi Tharoor, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Susan Visvanathan, Geraldine Heng, George Gheverghese Joseph, J. Sakai, Vijay Prashad, Vilna Bashi Treitler, Claire Jean Kim, and Arundhati Roy — voices who dismantle the illusions of empire through history, mathematics, linguistics, and racial theory.

In the present, I absorbed insights from a new generation of public intellectuals and cultural critics: Ta-Nehisi Coates, Jared Yates Sexton, Cathy Park Hong, Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Heather McGhee, Mehdi Hasan, Adrienne Keene, Keri Leigh Merritt, Vincent Bevins, Sarah Kendzior, Ayesha A. Siddiqi, Wajahat Ali, W. Kamau Bell, Mary Trump, & John Oliver. Together, they form a constellation of clarity — thinkers who gave me language for grief, strategy for resistance, and above all, a framework for empathy rooted in history, not abstraction.

I also turned to the thinkers shaping today’s cultural and political discourse. I dreamt of the world blueprinted by Bhaskar Sunkara in his revolutionary The Socialist Manifesto and plunged into Jacobin’s blistering critiques of capitalism. The Atlantic’s longform journalism kept me tethered to a truth-seeking tradition. The Guardian stood out for its global scale and reach, offering progressive, longform storytelling that speaks to both local injustices and systemic inequalities across the world. And Roman Krznaric’s Empathy: Why It Matters, and How to Get It helped crystallize my core belief:

Be a good human. Practice empathy.

That’s the playbook, America. Practice empathy. Do that — and teach accurate, critically reflective history — and we have the chance to truly become the greatest democracy the world has ever seen.

And this empathy must extend to all — especially to trans people. In India, the Hijra community — trans and intersex folk who have existed visibly for thousands of years — embody a sacred third gender long before the West had language for it. But they are not alone. Across the colonized world, the empire erased a sacred third space: the Muxe of Zapotec culture, the Bakla of the Philippines, the Fa’afafine of Samoa, the Two-Spirit nations of Turtle Island, the Māhū of Hawaiʻi, the Sworn Virgins of the Balkans — each of these communities held space outside Western gender binaries, rooted in care, ceremony, and spirit. Some align with what we today call trans or intersex, while others exist entirely outside Western definitions. Colonization reframed them as deviants.

And still, we must remember this: trans people are not new. Our respect for them must be as ancient as their existence.

THE RESISTANCE As I examined the dynamics of coloniality, racial capitalism, and Western empire, I realized just how deeply imperial power had shaped my family, our values, and our spiritual language. The empire didn’t just occupy land — it rewrote moral codes. It restructured the family.

I learned how Irish, Italian, Greek, Hungarian, and Albanian immigrants were initially excluded from whiteness in America. Over time, many adopted and embraced whiteness as strategic economic and social protection — and in doing so, embraced anti-Blackness and patriarchal hierarchies to maintain their newfound status. Today, many European-hyphenated Americans defend systems that once excluded them.

And over time, some Asian-Americans have followed the very same racial template.

At 33 — the age Jesus is believed to have died — I laid my childhood faith to rest. In its place rose something rooted in clarity, not doctrine.

I didn’t walk away from religion into cynicism or nihilism. I stepped into a humanist, justice-centered worldview. A system grounded in reason, evidence, and above all, empathy. A belief in people over dogma. In community over conformity.

I didn’t lose faith. I redefined it.

I left the pasture of institutional faith, not for chaos, but for an ethical wilderness — a space lacking divine command but filled with moral clarity. A place built on personal responsibility and universal dignity.

This is where I stand today.

To those with similar histories: if your roots trace back to Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia, East Asia, the Middle East, Latin America, the Caribbean, Oceania, or to Indigenous and marginalized communities within the Global North — you are a Child of the Global South. Even in the Global North, your experience carries the weight of displaced geography, the quiet grief of colonial trauma, and a genealogy forged by the system of empire. Your pain is political. Your silence is inherited. You are not invisible. They buried you without a funeral. They mourned not your death, but your deviation from design. However, we are not dead. We are just no longer theirs.

White supremacy endures by fracturing us. It manufactures tensions between communities of color by design — placing Asian businesses in Black communities without infrastructure and opportunities for BIPOC folk to share and benefit from the economic engine. Central to this strategy is the model minority myth, crafted during the Cold War to present Asian-Americans as obedient, self-reliant, and successful — not to celebrate them, but to invalidate Black resistance and justify structural racism. It’s a myth that fosters anti-Blackness in Asian communities and xenophobia in Black ones, while shielding white supremacy from critique. These divisions are not cultural accidents; they’re colonial blueprints.

And these blueprints stretch across oceans and continents and time.

In colonial South Africa, Mohandas Gandhi — still shaped by British racial hierarchies — distanced Indians from Black Africans, calling them “kaffirs” and demanding separate facilities. In Uganda, the British installed South Asians as a merchant middle class between colonizers and native Africans, breeding distrust. When Idi Amin expelled 80,000 Asians in 1972, it was a violent backlash to a racial hierarchy seeded by empire. These fractures — between Black and Asian, colonized and sub-colonized — are the legacy of white patriarchal supremacy.

Divide, distract, and dominate.

We must resist being weaponized against each other.

Every Asian-American must read Minor Feelings by Cathy Park Hong. Every high schooler in America must read and discuss Jared Yates Sexton.

Study the systems. Name them. Disarm them.

Because unless we become and remain united, the status quo — one that serves wealthy cisgender, heterosexual, white Christian men — will remain intact.

This is A Call to the Children of the Global South. And An Invitation to the Children of the Global North: Stop the infighting. Study and interrogate the systems. Reject the design.

To those in media, publishing, and the arts: postcolonial narratives are not cultural sidebars. They are central to national healing. They preserve memory, restore dignity, and confront whitewashed histories.

If you want work that matters — support art that pushes past trauma into structural critique.

Greenlight truth. Platform memory. Choose courage over comfort.

Postcolonial stories should be the norm — not niche art.

Jordan Peele’s Get Out was a cinematic breakthrough — razor-sharp and genre-defying — in its exposure of white supremacy’s quiet machinery: liberal smiles, performative allyship, and the pacification of dissent through assimilation. The Sunken Place is not just a metaphor for silenced Black consciousness — it’s the empire’s preferred position for the marginalized: visible, exploited, but unheard.

A system that offers the illusion of inclusion, weaponizing identity as control.

Ken Levine’s BioShock Infinite exposed white supremacy through a dystopian, fictional but historically grounded lens - depicting the religious justification of Black enslavement, Indigenous erasure, and genocidal nationalism in a floating, evangelical empire.

David Simon’s The Wire exposed the institutional decay of law enforcement, education, and the legal system - revealing how systemic failure, not individual morality, drives urban collapse.

Jesse Armstrong’s Succession traced the architecture of empire through family - showing how media empires weaponize racism, propaganda, and manufactured outrage to generate profit and secure generational wealth.

Ava DuVernay's Origin unearths caste and race as twin blueprints of white supremacy - linking Dalit oppression in India to the subjugation of Black Americans. Adapted from Isabel Wilkerson's Caste, it dismantles the myth of isolated injustice, revealing a global system meticulously engineered to rank human worth - and the radical act of naming the system.

Ryan Coogler’s Sinners — a revelatory, critically and commercially successful film about Afro-Asian resistance in 1930s Mississippi — exposes the hunger for speculative narratives grounded in historical truth.

Across the Spider-Verse gave us Pavitr Prabhakar - a Brown superhero who wasn't nerdy or celibate, as Western media typically portrayed the South-Asian man, but cool, smart, athletic, with great hair, in love, and proudly anti-colonial. He called out the British for stealing and keeping Indian artifacts… in a Spider-Man movie. That moment was history reclaimed.

A glitch in the wealthy white patriarchal matrix.

Dev Patel’s Monkey Man is a visceral fable of vengeance and resistance, where the brutality of caste, corruption, and religious nationalism collide. Amid this chaos, the film uplifts the Hijra community who stand not only as victims, but as warriors against systemic violence. Their alliance reframes queerness not as deviance, but as defiance — ultimately confronting the machinery of empire with what it fears most: a system-breaking empathy it cannot contain.

The vitriolic backlash from white male gamers and fandoms isn’t about quality — it’s about losing default status in stories. Everyone else has had to empathize with majority white male protagonists for decades. Diverse representation in media isn’t a threat to art — it’s a threat to white supremacy. It’s not just a mirror held up to the globe — it’s a refusal to let one worldview define it.

Hollywood, gaming studios, and the gatekeepers of entertainment — if you want to reclaim artistic integrity and still make money doing it, we need art that remembers, resists, and reclaims — stories that name the machine and short-circuit its lies. The world is ready. So am I.

Today, efforts like Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation, and the Federalist Society are not merely policy shops — they are ideological engines: built to roll back civil rights, impose authoritarian values, and erase uncomfortable truths. They represent a hyper-concentrated form of white supremacy, rooted in unresolved Civil War grievances and the failures of Reconstruction.

Miraculously, or perhaps, blessed with intellectual curiosity and natural empathy, through all of this, my wife — a compassionate, steadfast partner and a Christian woman — has remained by my side. She has witnessed my transformation with both love and complexity. While our bond is rooted in deep respect and shared values, our spiritual landscapes have diverged. Her faith brings her solace; mine has evolved into something more secular, grounded in justice and humanism. We’ve navigated that tension with care — proof that love can stretch across differing beliefs, even as the echoes of religious conditioning still ripple through our lives.

I am proud of her increasing intellectual curiosity and her willingness to accept me for who I am now, even if I wasn’t ready to accept myself when we met.

But our marriage has defied the splintering that white supremacy specifically creates: hyper-capitalist, hyper-individualistic, fractured families and societies.

As Children of the Global South — descendants of peoples who survived enslavement, colonization, and erasure — we carry within us the urgent need for stories that do not turn away from history, but confront it with unflinching truth.

In the pain of losing my family, I found a deeper purpose: to tell this story — and my own — any way I can. A sudden rush of empathy, pity, and love struck me: My parents’ and sister’s rejection was not theirs alone — it was a lingering Fracture left by colonization and global exploitation, tearing apart families across generations. As Children of the Global South, we still carry those wounds.

Make no mistake: white supremacy leaves wounds — because it is the system. And unless it is dismantled, both the Global South and North — and their collective Children — will remain trapped in a dance choreographed by empire — built to divide, exploit, and erase. Any vision of democracy, in America, will remain a fragile illusion — if not an outright mythology — built on a conceptually false foundation: white supremacy itself.

A cruel, heartbreaking legacy of erasure — passed down through empire — indoctrinating God-fearing Brown fathers to erase their godless, queer Brown sons. Preaching shame as scripture. Teaching silence as survival.

I reject that inheritance.

Empathy as praxis is how we reject that inheritance. In a world engineered to divide, it rebuilds connection, disarms supremacy, and charts a path forward. If humanity is to survive — let alone heal — empathy must become our collective discipline.

And perhaps what cut even deeper for my father — beyond my queerness — was that I no longer validated his role as a pastor. In stepping away from the faith he had built his life upon, I wasn’t just rejecting a belief system. I was, in his eyes, nullifying his life’s work. For a man shaped by empire, ordained by colonial Christianity, and burdened with the role of moral gatekeeper, my departure from his manufactured worldview may have landed as personal failure. But it wasn’t. It was never about wanting to hurt him. I love my father. I love my mother. I love my sister. It was never about them — it was about the system that taught them love was conditional, acceptance required obedience, and dissent unforgivable. That kind of pain is real — but its source is systemic. I still want to be Mootha Makkan — not by obedience, but by truth. By love without condition. Not through erasure, but by living fully in the open. Not in their image, but in mine.

Yet, and yes, I also carry the wound — but I also carry the will to heal it.

THE CALL I believe in empathy. I believe in memory. I believe the Children of the Global South are not broken. We are not rejected. We are awakening.

Children of the Global North: join us. We are not your enemies. We are your present and future collaborators, business & creative partners, lovers, and kin. We are building something new — something ancient yet reawakened, a pursuit of empathy, and a reckoning with history that refuses to forget.

If this story resonated with you, kindly share it, spread the word and please comment. I’d love to hear from you. Your voice, your memory, your Fracture — it matters here.

You are not alone. All are welcome.

Thank you so, so much for your time in reading my story.

You can also email me directly: vinesvenus at protonmail.com I'll be writing more on Medium as well: https://medium.com/@vinesvenus/a-call-to-the-children-of-the-global-south-the-system-that-made-my-father-disown-me-fecad6c0b862

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holyspiritgirl · 9 months ago

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Study a bible verse with me 🤍

John 12:24 (NLT) says:

“I tell you the truth, unless a kernel of wheat is planted in the soil and dies, it remains alone. But its death will produce many new kernels—a plentiful harvest of new lives.”

• Through scripture, Jesus uses the metaphor of a grain of wheat to illustrate a deeper spiritual truth. In agriculture, a single grain of wheat must be buried in the soil to grow into a plant. So technically, it’s “death” is essential for new growth and multiplication.

• The "death" of the kernel symbolizes the necessary sacrifice and transformation required for new life. For Jesus, this metaphor directly points to His impending crucifixion. His physical death is essential for the spiritual renewal and salvation of humanity. Just as the seed must die to bring forth new life, Jesus must undergo His death to bring about the promise of eternal life.

• This verse emphasizes that Jesus’ sacrificial death will not be in vain but will result in a "plentiful harvest of new lives." This indicates that His death will lead to the growth of many new believers and the establishment of a new spiritual reality. The “new kernels” represent the new lives and believers that will emerge from His sacrificial act.

• This principle extends beyond Jesus’ own death. It serves as a broader teaching on discipleship and sacrifice. As followers of Christ, we are also called to embrace the idea that personal sacrifice and self-denial are often necessary for spiritual growth and fruitful ministry. The idea is that through sacrifice, individuals can contribute to a greater spiritual harvest and the spread of God's Kingdom.

• The verse highlights a counterintuitive truth in the Kingdom of God: true success and growth often come through sacrifice and loss. This perspective challenges worldly views on success and encourages us to embrace sacrificial love and service as pathways to spiritual fruitfulness.

• In summary, John 12:24 uses the metaphor of a grain of wheat to show why Jesus’ death was necessary for a great spiritual harvest and crucial for our salvation. He died for our sins out of immense love, so we wouldn’t have to face death ourselves. His sacrifice leads to new spiritual life and growth, not only for Himself but also for those who follow Him and are called to live selflessly.

Have a blessed day 👼🏻🙏💕

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sfznyxio · 11 months ago

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-ˋˏ HEADLINES ˎˊ

SYNOPSIS. following the success of the recruitment process and their first concert, this odd combination of a band becomes busy these days. thus, they hired a manager to keep track of their schedules. and to an extent, deal with their shenanigans that may or may not feature on the news.

CHARACTERS. argenti, aventurine, jingliu, kafka, robin

CONTENT. gn!reader. celebrity au, musician au, modern au. comedy, fluff. 1.1k wc. inspired by the concert animated commercial: “before the show begins”. canon elements (jingliu - powers; aventurine - cake cats; robin - halovian features). reader’s the straight man in this chaos. cameos from yanqing (argenti, jingliu), stelle (argenti, jingliu, kafka) and caelus (aventurine, robin). brief mentions of ruan mei (aventurine) and sunday (robin). word vomit for the most part.

VERA. happy pride month, bitches. what a good way to start off the month watching the haikyuu movie, seeing volleyball boys stare at each other intensely and metaphorically stab their friends in the neck. all i can say is that the animation was insane. speaking of insane, the hsr concert was released to celebrate the game’s first anniversary. “sway to the cosmos” is my favorite out of the setlist, and i even made it as my train jam. imagine seeing it live though… i die. i had to look up what instrument jingliu plays and i strongly believe it’s an erhu based on how it looks. i kinda don’t like this; i have no idea what i wrote. it’s my worst attempt at being funny lol.

𝄞༉‧₊˚. ARGENTI

drummer argenti preaches ‘scripture of beauty’ to fans

“hey! what’s the ‘scripture’ supposed to be? actually, who is idrila? look, you can’t spout names like that and not expect a scandal to not happen.” argenti seems to be in the zone while dancing with his fans at the park, so he most likely didn’t hear what you just said. you glance at stelle and yanqing to get him to snap out of it, but they’re completely drained, on the floor from being dragged into the spotlight earlier.

“my lovely manager! since you’re here, you must be interested in being a follower?” not at the very slightest, but the name argenti throws out and about drives news outlets and his fans up on the walls. that may put the drummer at risk of being a subject of misunderstandings and fanwars, which is why you’re here in the first place. you can feel the stares of his audience burning into your skull, so you extend your hand to “express” your interest.

“wonderful. now, let us dance under the name of beauty!” throughout it all, everything blurs out. not even five minutes in, you’re exhausted out of your mind, unsure if argenti has given you useful information about his charade. in the end, you gather more questions than answers, and practically leave the drummer to handle the potential messy aftermath. he’s an enigma; anyone can tell you he’s the eighth wonder of the world, and you’ll believe it.

𝄞༉‧₊˚. AVENTURINE

guitarist aventurine adopts scientist’s ‘sweet’ creations

“rise and shine. your cats won’t stop bothering me until you wake up, by the way.” all the feline pastry lifeforms on your head, shoulder, and feet mew in agreement. caelus somehow has collaborated with the scientist who created them, making some that resemble his friends, one of which is aventurine. the guitarist adopts his lookalike for fun at first, and now his house is their haven, which makes his issue of organization worse.

“hey, pretty boy! you better wake up, or i’ll sit on your face and suffocate you!” the synesthesia beacon in your phone picks up a translation from under aventurine’s arms. there’s a cake cat that resembles you, but do you actually sound like that when you’re upset? never mind that; the most important question here is why does he have a cake cat version of you here? well, he’s already behind schedule, so out of curiosity, you try out its suggestion.

“okay, okay. i’m up.” the cat cake version of yourself huffs at him taking forever to get ready, but seems proud of making its threat happen with your help. aventurine sees five pairs of eyes staring at him, with one in particular full of disappointment for being inconsiderate. he promises to keep track next time, but you aren’t sure he’ll truly follow through if he’s convinced to expand his cake cat kingdom.

𝄞༉‧₊˚. JINGLIU

erhu player jingliu unleashes ice blades at passersby

“for the last time, the people who watched you perform gave you strales because they appreciate your talent. this is the fourth time this week of scaring them with your sword.” you note a careful distance between the passerby and jingliu, who resumes playing her erhu like it’s none of her business. stelle has learned it the hard way so luckily she has you to deal with the erhu player. the first victim of her powers slips out from a tree to wish you luck with a thumbs up.

“ah, has that young man come yet? i would like to have a spar with him.” jingliu’s referring to yanqing, another swordsman. he loves competition, so this entire street, or the entire city even, is screwed into becoming an icy wonderland. telling her that he’s not here, she returns to performing. you notice a brilliant idea coming into fruition as soon as she stops her bow halfway, and it already doesn’t sound good.

“manager, why don’t you spar with me? let’s see who will fall first.” you immediately refuse without a second thought. jingliu would win anyway as she’s more skilled with the sword and you have no powers, so it isn’t a fair fight to begin with. you’re just relieved that she didn’t unleash her icy blades for the fifth time, and that you make it alive throughout the confrontation.

𝄞༉‧₊˚. KAFKA

violinist kafka sends many clothes stores bankrupt

“listen… i get that you look great in everything and all, but do you think this is way too much?” you gesture to the cart overflowing with concert outfits. kafka hums in contemplation as she examines her next purchase in the mirror, then nods in approval which seals the deal.

“oh, you think so too? alright then, i’ll have stelle handle all payments as usual.” stelle averts her gaze away to avoid your temper, pretending as if she didn’t enable the violinist’s unlimited shopping spree. you can sense the employees fearing for their livelihoods that are at stake, and you can feel like yours will be at the state soon if this keeps up. scolding kafka to unload everything in the cart, the wave of relief in the staff washes away when she reveals a special trick up her sleeve.

“what about your wardrobe? surely you can’t wear the same exact thing everyday, don’t you think?” kafka jabs into one of your weaknesses: the lack of variety in your closet. it’s important to appear presentable as the band manager, but your uniformity gives you not a lot of room to try out different combinations. the only hope of this store is gone, and so is the store itself as soon as the credit card is swiped.

𝄞༉‧₊˚. ROBIN

singer robin disappears once again from photoshoot

“when your brother finds out you snuck out again, he will kill me in the most painful way possible.” whenever you bring that man up, always in the worst case scenario, robin responds with a smile as reassurance that he won’t hurt you when she’s around. but it’s more like she won’t get in trouble, leaving you to shoulder the blame.

“don’t worry! caelus will take care of everything. ah, i hope i wasn’t too late.” the self-proclaimed master of stalling strikes again. knowing that man, robin’s confidence in caelus is astounding. because sooner or later, he’ll find out that she’s at a toy store with you to buy the limited edition of a clockie figurine. the singer will be happy, and you’ll end up dead in a ditch probably.

“oh no, photographers are here. can you cover for me?” robin tucks her wings beside her face so they can fit under her mask. while she browses through the aisles, you direct the photoshoot team outside, hopefully far enough from the store to remain off radar from her brother’s watch. you pray that caelus comes back in one piece as well as yourself. the cost of making a halovian’s day brighter, especially if she’s a famous singer and has a control freak of a sibling, is quite risky.

#♪ .fics #honkai: star rail #honkai: star rail x reader #hsr x reader #argenti x reader #aventurine x reader #jingliu x reader #kafka x reader #robin x reader #honkai: star rail fluff #hsr fluff

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plasticflowersinahistorycemetery · 1 month ago

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anathema

part V

Pairing: Dean x Fem!Reader, Sam x Fem!Reader (a hint of Michael!Dean x Fem!Reader)

Summary: A fall unmade. A throne surrendered. The softest resurrection stitched together in blood, breath, and grace. You bring them both home—one from the heavens, one from the pit—and lay yourself between them like scripture. This is the ache after worship. The redemption after ruin. The girl, the vessel, the brother. Nothing left but love. Nothing left but them.

Warnings: 18+!, language, angst, biblical references, religious metaphors, reference to smut (p in v, dp), heartbreak, pining, moderate fluff, I may have missed some.

Word Count: 6,915

A/N: A resolution, if you will. I was wrestling with whether or not to add another instalment to this series, and all it took was one ask to have me folding like a deckchair. Thank you to whoever it was that submitted the ask, ha! <3 This has been a trip. I am still really proud of this series as a whole. Felt like reclaiming some of my religious trauma, super cathartic. I hope this ties things together a little better for everyone. I know it's not exactly a happy ending... but when is it ever with these men? Dean's gonna retreat inward in his guilt, like he always does. And our dear Sammy is gonna be more emotionally open but he'll still be fighting to reconcile what he did while Lucifer was playing host. Yap over. If you wanna give me feedback, please do. I liiiive for it. All the love.

Without further ado: ANATHEMA

"Both she and I, I hold her by the hips On heaven's stairs, her eyes wanted a kiss No cause for shame, beloved saint

Another night, a different time There's no cause for shame I'm paralysed, a glowing life Our beloved saint Ebony eye Swing your arms in the October air Both you and I

A hole in heaven, you're my dearest dove We watch the flowers bloom in the house of fools These passing shadows in photographs of you Your burning embrace, it's as warm as rain

I can't describe this glowing light There's no other way than the pearly gates I found my holy place"

Ebony Eye - Yves Tumor

You stayed in his lap long after the movements had stopped.

The room had fallen quiet, save for the brittle sound of your breath threading through the silence like incense through a ruined cathedral. Your body trembled, not from cold or fear, but from the aftermath of something too vast to hold. You felt stretched thin, like skin over glass, every nerve raw and flickering with the weight of what had just passed through you.

Michael—still wearing Dean's face, still inside Dean's body—held you like something sacred. His cock remained buried inside you, softening, warm. The pressure of it made you ache, but you didn't move. Neither of you did. His hands rested lightly on your hips, reverent, as though he thought even now, even after all this, he might break you.

"The righteous fall seven times," he murmured again, his lips brushing your temple.

His voice had changed. No longer the cold, perfect command of Heaven's sword, but something quieter. Almost human. Something like surrender.

"But I do not plan on rising."

You didn't respond. Your lips parted, but no sound came. You couldn't speak. Couldn't move. The grief was building again, this strange and impossible ache that made your chest feel tight, like your ribs had been laced together with barbed wire.

"I have warred for my Father's name," he said softly, the words falling like scripture into the hollow between you. "I have drowned cities. Silenced prophets. I have watched stars die for less than the disobedience I showed you."

His fingers traced up your spine, slow and deliberate, not to tease or possess, but as if committing your form to memory.

"And yet," he whispered, "I have never seen anything more holy than you."

Your throat closed. A sound cracked in your chest—half sob, half gasp—but you swallowed it down. You didn't know why you were crying. You didn't even know if it was for him, or for Dean, or for yourself.

"I wasn't made to want," he continued, almost tender now. "But I did. I wanted your voice. Your ruin. The way you broke for me. The way you looked at me and hated me and still... still gave yourself. Not out of love, but faith."

He cupped your jaw, tilting your face toward him. You looked into Dean's eyes—but they weren't Dean's, not yet. Still too bright. Still too far away from Earth.

"He will not remember me," Michael said. "But he will remember this. He will dream of it. Of the way you trembled when he touched you. The way you begged. The way you fell."

His thumb brushed your bottom lip. Gentle. Unbearable.

"I have carved you into his bones. Etched your name into the chambers of his heart. So that even when I sleep, he will feel me there. And through him, I will remain."

You shook your head slowly, tears spilling hot down your cheeks. "Don't," you whispered. "Please don't say goodbye like this."

His smile was small. Wistful. Not mocking.

"You wanted him," he said. "And I... I wanted you."

There was no cruelty left in him. No power. Only something vast and breaking. You felt it beneath your skin, the moment he began to unravel. It wasn't violent. It wasn't sudden. It was soft, like silk unspooling from a frayed edge. Like surrender.

"This is all I know to give," he said. "So I give it."

You reached for him—without thinking. Just a touch, just the edge of your fingers curling into his shoulders, like maybe if you held him close enough, he wouldn't go. You didn't know why you did it. You didn't know what it meant. Only that some part of you was breaking open right alongside him.

"I will watch through him," Michael whispered. "I will remember. I will protect."

He kissed your temple like a benediction.

"Wake up, Dean."

There was a pause.

And then his body shuddered once beneath yours—his spine arching, hands twitching—and then a breath. A sharp, wet, human breath, gasped like it had been denied to him for a thousand years.

Dean's eyes snapped open. Green. Startled. Wild. Alive.

"What the hell," he rasped, blinking rapidly, chest heaving as he grabbed at your waist like it was the only thing tethering him to the world. "Where—what the fuck—where am I?"

You stared at him. At his face. At the way it shifted—his again now, no longer angelic. No longer terrifying. Just Dean. Just yours.

"Dean," you breathed. Your voice cracked like it had never held his name before.

He looked down. He saw the mess between your bodies. The way you were still wrapped around him. The bruises. The tremble in your hands.

His eyes widened. Horror bloomed across his face.

"Oh my God," he whispered. "What did he—what did he do to you?"

You shook your head through the tears, through the ache, through the strange and sudden relief blooming in your chest. "No," you said. "He gave you back to me."

Dean's grip faltered. He looked like he might come apart. Like he didn't know how to exist in this skin anymore.

"I remember," he choked out. "Pieces. Your voice. You were crying. I—fuck—I felt it. I felt everything."

You pressed your forehead to his, your fingers curling around the sides of his face.

"I have you," you said. "You're here. You're mine."

And then he broke.

He pulled you into him, arms wrapping around your back like a man clinging to the edge of the world. You buried yourself in his chest, still shaking, still full of grief, and something else now, too—peace. Small. Fragile. Real.

"I'm so fucking sorry," he whispered into your hair. "I'm so sorry. I should've—he used you. He used me—"

"I know," you said.

But even as you held Dean, even as you clung to the warmth and solidity of his heartbeat beneath your cheek, you couldn't stop thinking about the last thing Michael said.

How he would stay. How he would watch. How he had carved you into Dean's bones so he could remember what love felt like—even if he never rose again.

You closed your eyes. And somewhere, buried deep inside the man you loved, the archangel slept.

The silence was deafening.

Dean's arms stayed locked around you, tight but trembling. You could feel every fractured breath leave his lungs, hot against your shoulder. He didn't move. Didn't speak. He was still inside you, still anchored to your body like he was afraid that pulling away would erase him.

And maybe he was right. Maybe if he moved, this would all vanish. Maybe you'd wake up alone again. Empty again.

His hand slid up your spine—slow, unsure—then back down. A small, shaking pass, like he was trying to memorise you the way Michael had. But it wasn't ritual now. It wasn't sacred.

It was human. And it hurt more.

"I can't—" His voice cracked, barely a breath. "I can't believe he..."

You didn't answer.

Dean shifted just enough to glance down, to look at where you were still joined, his expression twisting like he might be sick. But even then, he didn't move. His jaw locked. His hand gripped your waist.

"I should pull out," he muttered.

You shook your head immediately. "Don't."

His eyes snapped back to yours, startled.

You swallowed, throat tight and dry. "Not yet."

He searched your face like he was waiting for you to change your mind. Like he didn't trust what he saw there. But when you didn't look away, when your hands clutched tighter at his shoulders, he nodded—just once—and stayed.

You didn't know how long you sat like that. Breathing each other in. Remembering the weight of silence after prayer. After war. After divinity left the room.

Then Dean whispered, "Why are you crying?"

Your chest stuttered. You hadn't even noticed the tears had started again, but they were slipping down your cheeks, warm and constant.

"Because," you rasped. "It's not him anymore."

Dean flinched like you'd hit him. You saw it—the pain flash across his face. But you didn't take it back.

"He gave you back to me," you said, softer this time. "He chose to leave."

Dean's brow furrowed, a deep crease between his eyes. "Why the hell would he do that?"

You exhaled slowly, lowering your forehead to his. Your voice was smaller than you meant for it to be. "Because he loved me."

Dean didn't move. He didn't breathe. You felt the way his entire body went rigid beneath you, and still—you didn't stop.

"He never said the words. But he didn't have to. He... he let himself fall. For me."

The words barely made it past your lips, each one more broken than the last. It sounded like betrayal when you said it out loud. Like a confession you hadn't meant to speak. But it was the truth.

And Dean deserved the truth.

His hands twitched at your waist, then slid up, fingers threading through your hair with aching care. His voice was hoarse. "Do you love him back?"

You hesitated. Just long enough for his heart to skip a beat beneath you.

"I don't know," you whispered. "I think... I think I'm grieving him."

Dean made a sound in the back of his throat. Something torn. But he didn't push you away. He didn't accuse. He just wrapped his arms tighter around your waist, eyes closing like the weight of it all had finally landed.

"I'm sorry," you said. "I didn't ask for any of it. I just—I missed you so much I stopped knowing what was real."

"I know," he murmured. "It's not your fault. None of this is your fault."

You believed him. And it still hurt.

After a while, Dean took a deep breath, grounding himself against you, then glanced toward the bathroom door.

"Let me clean you off."

You stiffened.

"It's okay," he said quickly. "I just... I need to. Please."

You nodded.

When he lifted you from his lap, you winced. Your thighs ached. The soreness between your legs stung as he slid free from your body, and you whimpered at the loss of warmth.

Dean caught it. He cursed under his breath and kissed your forehead, holding you close before carrying you into the bathroom.

The light was too bright. You blinked against it as Dean set you down on the counter, moving with slow, deliberate care. He ran the water, tested the temperature. His back was tense. His hands, shaking.

When he turned to you, his eyes went dark at the sight of your thighs, your hips, the mess between your legs.

"God," he whispered. "I hate that it was me. My body. That he used me to—"

You reached out and took his hand.

"It wasn't you," you said. "It wasn't. But... it still felt like you. And that's what made it worse."

Dean swallowed hard. "Did he hurt you?"

"No," you said. Then, after a beat: "Not in the way you think."

He stepped forward, slipping his arms around your waist again, his forehead pressing to yours.

"I'm gonna carry this for the rest of my life," he said. "Knowing he touched you like that. Knowing I didn't stop it."

"You're here now."

"I wasn't supposed to come back."

You met his eyes. "He wasn't supposed to fall."

That stopped him.

You leaned into him, your hand splayed over his heart. "He gave me you. You gave me something to come back to. I don't know what that means yet. I just know I need to feel like I'm yours again."

He looked at you like you'd cracked the sky open. And then, without a word, he helped you into the shower.

The water was warm. Steam curled around your skin like absolution.

Dean washed you gently, reverently. He didn't speak much—just murmured small comforts under his breath as he dragged warm cloth over your thighs, between your legs, along the curve of your spine. He pressed kisses to your temple, your shoulder, your wrist. And when he was done, he just stood there, holding you against his chest under the water like he could baptise the grief out of both of you.

You felt it then. That ache in your throat. That memory of fire.

"Dean," you whispered. "Sam..."

He tensed.

You looked up at him. "We have to get him back."

He nodded slowly, eyes wet. "I know."

"He gave himself to Lucifer to save you. And now you're here. You're home. So now... now we bring him back too."

Dean cupped your face in both hands and kissed you, soft and aching. Like a man kissing someone alive for the first time after war. It wasn't desire. It was devotion.

"I've got you," he whispered. "And we'll get him. I swear to God, we'll get him."

You pressed your forehead to his and closed your eyes. You had found your holy place. Now it was time to save the rest of it.

Dean carried you back to your bedroom in silence.

He didn't ask if this was where you wanted to go—he just knew. This was where he used to find you curled beneath his flannels. This was where you used to curl into his chest and drink his whiskey and call him home without saying a word. This was where the haunting had started.

And now, maybe, this was where it would end.

The room smelled like you. Like worn cotton and soft skin and ghosted tears. But underneath it, Dean caught something else. Himself. Faded and stretched thin, but there. The memory of his clothes on your body. His glass at your lips. His seat still pulled back just how he used to leave it.

He paused in the doorway, chest rising and falling a little too fast.

You watched him hesitate. You felt it in his grip. He looked at the bed like it might bite him. Like it wasn't his place anymore.

So you reached up, touched his jaw, and whispered, "Come here."

That was all it took.

He crossed the threshold and laid you down with the same care you'd once begged Michael to mimic—like you were breakable, and he was already mourning the pieces. He followed you onto the mattress without letting go, settling beside you, your towels still clinging damp to your skin, your bodies curved into one another like parentheses around a prayer.

For a long while, you didn't speak.

Dean's hand rested on your waist, his thumb moving slowly back and forth. You could feel the tension in his jaw, the storm still gathering behind his eyes. He was here. He was real. But his silence said everything—he was holding himself together with threads.

You turned your face toward his and pressed your lips to his collarbone. "I thought I'd never get you back."

Dean's breath caught.

"I missed you," you said. "So much I started thinking maybe I made you up."

He didn't speak right away. When he did, his voice was so low it barely made it out of his chest.

"I saw you."

You blinked. "What?"

"Through him. Through Michael. When he first came back to the bunker. I—I didn't have control, but I was still there. And I saw you."

You swallowed, throat burning.

"You were walking around in my flannels," he said, eyes distant, voice rough. "Nothing else. Just skin and cotton and grief. And I remember thinking, God, she's still mine. Look at her—she's still mine."

You felt the ache in his words. The guilt. The love.

"You drank from my glass," he went on, more broken now. "Sat in my chair. Took all the pieces of me and tried to build something that felt like home. And he—Michael—he didn't get it. But I did. I felt it."

You buried your face into his shoulder.

"And then..." He exhaled hard. "Then you told him to pretend to be me."

Your heart clenched.

"I heard you," he said. "Your voice. Soft. Begging. Needing. You said you couldn't take it anymore. That you needed him to pretend—to hold you like I would. Fuck you like I would. You said you didn't care if it was fake. You just wanted to feel like I was there."

You started crying again.

Dean turned fully onto his side, cupped your face in both hands, and kissed the salt from your cheeks.

"I wanted to die," he whispered. "Right then, I swear to God—I wanted to claw my way out of my own body and come back to you."

You touched his wrists, grounding him.

"He used my voice," Dean said, shaking his head. "My tone. My commands. Everything I ever gave you—he twisted it. He made you kneel. He made you pray."

You nodded. "He made me say the Lord's Prayer while he was inside me."

Dean flinched like you'd shot him.

"But I need you to know," you said softly, "that I never stopped seeing you. Even when I was begging him. Even when I let him use your face to hurt me... I was begging for you to come back."

Dean kissed you then.

Not possessive. Not desperate. Just slow. Like a man unlearning absence.

His lips brushed yours, again and again, like punctuation marks. Full stops. Pauses. Small gasps of thank God and I'm here and you're mine.

His hand slid beneath your towel, resting warm and wide over your bare hip.

Not pulling. Just touching.

You arched into him gently, letting the contact say what you couldn't. That you were here. That this was real. That you were still his.

He kissed your knuckles. Your jaw. The corner of your mouth.

"I've got you," he whispered. "And I'm never letting anything take me from you again."

You let yourself melt into him. For the first time in what felt like eternity, your bed felt safe again. Like your bed. Like his bed. Like something worth reclaiming.

Dean's fingers brushed through your damp hair, his voice lower now. "We'll get Sam."

You nodded.

"He gave himself up to save me," Dean said. "And now it's our turn."

You met his eyes. "We're bringing him home."

Dean leaned forward and kissed you again, long and sure, and when he pulled back, his voice was stronger.

"We save him." You rested your forehead against his, tears still clinging to your lashes. "And this time," you said, "none of us fall alone."

A week passed.

It didn't move like time. It moved like a wound. Every day stretched out wide and soundless, too long, too quiet, like the house itself had forgotten how to hold the weight of breath.

Sam was still gone. At least, the part of him that mattered.

Lucifer didn't rage or seethe like he had before. He didn't boast or posture. He was worse now. Quieter. More comfortable. He moved through the bunker with Sam's walk, Sam's voice, Sam's memories, but none of the hesitation. None of the pain. He looked at you with eyes that remembered how Sam used to love you—and twisted that memory into something clinical, almost tender.

It made your skin crawl.

And Dean—

Dean had barely touched you since the shower. At first, you told yourself it was just time. That he was processing. Healing. That the weight of everything—Michael, Sam, the way he'd come back into the world inside you—was still sinking in.

But time passed. And the distance grew.

He stopped sleeping beside you. Stopped eating meals in the same room. He drifted through the bunker like a ghost of himself, never cruel, never unkind—just... gone.

You'd find him in the garage, shirtless and silent, fake-fixing the same part of the Impala he'd already rebuilt twice. You'd catch him in the kitchen at 3am, standing in the dark, pouring whiskey like it was medicine. You'd pass each other in the hallway and he'd give you that tight, broken half-smile like he wanted to say something but couldn't. Like the words were stuck somewhere behind his teeth, choking him.

And every time you reached for him—every time your fingers brushed his arm, or you said his name—he pulled away.

Like your touch burned.

Tonight, you found him in his room. The door was cracked just enough to let the light bleed through, but not enough to invite anyone in. You stood there for a moment, hand resting on the frame, listening to the clink of glass. The slow pour of liquid. The kind of silence that only exists when someone's trying not to cry.

You pushed the door open.

Dean didn't look up. He sat on the edge of his bed, hunched forward, elbows braced on his knees, his glass of whiskey cradled like something sacred. He was still dressed—jeans, grey t-shirt, boots unlaced. His shoulders were taut, tense, like he'd been carrying the same breath in his lungs for days and didn't know how to let it go.

"I've been calling you," you said softly.

He didn't answer. Just took a sip, eyes on the floor.

You stepped in and closed the door behind you. "I'm not playing this game with you anymore."

Dean's voice, when it came, was quiet. Tired. "What game is that?"

"The one where you disappear. Where you keep hiding from me like I did something wrong."

That got his eyes, just for a second. Sharp, green, glassy.

"You didn't do anything," he said. "That's the problem."

You crossed the room and stopped in front of him. "Then look at me."

Dean didn't move.

"Dean," you said again, more firmly this time. "Look at me."

Slowly, like it hurt, he lifted his eyes to yours. And what you saw there—

It wasn't anger. It wasn't blame. It was grief. Pure, bottomless grief. The kind that eats a man from the inside out. And under it—shame. So much shame it made your heart ache.

"I see it," he said, voice barely audible. "Every time I close my eyes. Every time you speak. I see it."

"See what?"

He exhaled shakily. Looked down at the floor, then back at you. And then, in the softest, most broken voice you'd ever heard from him:

"You. Crying. Begging. Praying while my body used you like some kind of fucking experiment."

The words hit like a whip. You didn't move. Didn't speak.

"I see your lips around my fingers," he continued, his voice unraveling by the word. "You on your knees. The way you whispered my name like it still meant something. Like I was still in there. And I just—"

He swallowed. His throat worked like he was trying not to throw up.

"I couldn't move. I couldn't scream. I couldn't stop it. I was in there, and I watched him take every part of me you loved and twist it into something he could own."

You dropped to your knees in front of him, hands rising to cup his face.

"Dean—"

"I can't hold you without thinking about it," he whispered. "Can't touch you without wondering if it's me you want, or just the part of me he let you keep." His voice cracked. "I feel like he carved his name into you using my fucking hands."

You didn't let go. You held his jaw steady, your thumbs brushing his cheekbones.

"I need you to hear me," you said. "Right now. Right here."

Dean's breath caught.

"I need you. You. Not him. Not the memory of him. Not the angel who used your face to keep me from losing my mind. You."

He closed his eyes like he couldn't bear it.

"You don't get to disappear," you said, quieter now, but no less firm. "I need you. Sam needs you. You don't get to hide in your guilt while the rest of us try to hold this place together."

"I'm trying," he said, brokenly. "I'm trying to figure out how to breathe again, and every time I look at you I feel like I'm back in the dark. Watching. Helpless."

"You're not helpless now."

"I should've fought harder."

"He locked you in your own body."

"I should've been stronger."

"You didn't do this, Dean."

"I felt every fucking second," he said. "I felt you break. And I couldn't do a thing."

You pressed your forehead to his.

"I chose to let him in," you whispered. "I begged him to pretend to be you. I wore your shirts and sat in your chair and drank your whiskey because I missed you so bad I wanted to bleed. I knew what I was doing."

Dean's hands gripped your thighs. His breath shook against your skin.

"He let me be close to you. Even if it was wrong. Even if it wasn't really you, it felt like you. And that was the only thing that kept me from burning this whole fucking world down."

He didn't speak. Didn't move.

You pulled back just enough to look him in the eye.

"You don't get to hate yourself for something I wanted."

His eyes were red now, glassy. But he was listening.

"We need to go after Sam," you said. "We are losing him. He is slipping every single day. Lucifer is comfortable. You know what that means."

Dean nodded slowly.

"So we fight," you said. "We save him. We bring him home."

He looked at you like he was trying to find himself in your face again.

"I'm doing this," you said. "With or without you."

And then you kissed him.

Not sweet. Not delicate. But true.

Your mouth met his like a promise, like a final prayer, like you're still mine and I am still yours and we are not done yet. And when you pulled back, you were both breathless. But Dean's hands hadn't left your skin. His grip was firmer now. Present. Alive.

You stood.

"I'm going to find him."

And before Dean could speak, before he could gather the broken pieces of his voice, you turned and walked out into the hall—leaving the door open behind you. Because he had a choice now.

To follow. Or to fall behind.

The hallway stretched long and silent ahead of you, every step toward Sam's door pounding through the soles of your feet like the earth itself was trying to warn you. The air tasted metallic. War-heavy. Like something ancient holding its breath.

You were halfway there when you felt the shift.

Not a sound. Not a warning. Just the air moving differently—quicker, hungrier—right before a rough hand caught the nape of your neck. You barely had time to gasp before you were spun, fast and breathless, your back crashing into the wall hard enough to knock the wind from your lungs.

Dean's mouth was on yours before you could speak—hot, bruising, desperate. Your gasp left your chest and he swallowed it, groaning like it hurt to breathe without you. His hands fisted in the oversized t-shirt you wore, dragging your hips flush to his like he was trying to fuse the space between you shut.

You whimpered into him as his body pressed harder, grinding against you in a rhythm that wasn't even trying to be subtle. You were aching, soaked and pulsing, and the rough drag of denim against the heat between your thighs made your knees buckle. Dean caught you, pinned you higher against the wall with one hand, the other bracing beside your head.

"Fuck," he groaned, lips sliding messily down your jaw. "Fuck, I'm so sorry, baby. I just needed—I just needed a second. To hate myself. To remember what it felt like before you looked at me like I was something good."

You pulled him back to your mouth with both hands tangled in his hair, kissing him like the week apart had carved a hollow in your chest that only he could fill.

"Don't care," you gasped between kisses. "Don't wanna hear it. Just—don't stop—Dean—please—"

His mouth slammed back into yours like he couldn't get close enough, couldn't get in deep enough, like if he could just breathe you in far enough, it might cleanse something that rotted inside him.

He ground against you again, the thick press of his cock dragging over your soaked core through the t-shirt and his jeans. You moaned into him, hips bucking shamelessly.

"You're everything," you whispered into his mouth. "You hear me? Everything."

Dean's lips moved down your throat, teeth grazing your skin, a breathless fuck pressed to your collarbone before he came back up, kissed you again, harder, sloppier.

You nipped at his lower lip, sucked it between your teeth, and he groaned, hips jerking.

"You've always been it," you said, voice cracking. "Even when it wasn't you—I was looking for you. I only wanted you."

Dean let out a high, broken noise, barely restrained, almost a sob, almost a growl. "I know," he rasped. "God, I know, I just—fuck, I don't deserve you—"

You kissed him so hard he staggered. Pulled at the back of his neck, tongue slipping past his lips to taste the whiskey and desperation on his breath. You were soaked. You were shaking. You were seconds from grabbing his belt and pulling him inside you right here, all be damned, consequences be damned, Lucifer be damned—

But then, you remembered.

Sam.

The plan. The promise.

You tore your mouth away from his, chest heaving, your hand flattening over his heart like it might still the pounding there.

"Dean," you said, voice ragged. "We can't. Not yet."

He leaned his forehead against yours, panting, nodding even as his hips still rolled against you once, slow and sinful.

"I know," he whispered. "I know."

You swallowed, blinked hard, felt your lip trembling. "I love you."

The sound Dean made wasn't human. A sharp, breathless whine, high in his throat, like your words had struck something holy in him. He kissed you again, softer now, slower, and when he pulled back, his hand slid from the wall to cradle your face.

"I'm with you," he said. "I'm not going anywhere."

You nodded, breath still shaky, heart slamming against your ribs.

"We get him back," you said.

Dean's jaw clenched. He leaned in and kissed your forehead. "Let's go save my brother."

The door to Sam's room was open.

That should've been the first warning. He never left it that way. Not before. And certainly not now—not since the day Lucifer took up residence behind his eyes and began wearing your family like a second skin.

But the room yawned open like a mouth tonight, dark and still and waiting.

You stood just outside the threshold, Dean beside you, both of you silent. His breath was still uneven from the hallway, chest lifting and falling beneath his shirt like something in him hadn't fully settled—like something in him had only just begun to stir.

You didn't speak. You didn't need to. You stepped inside.

The air was heavy, warm. Thicker than it should've been, like the walls were holding something they couldn't quite bear.

And there—sitting cross-legged on the bed, barefoot, elbows on his knees—was Sam. Or at least, what was left of him. He tilted his head when he saw you, smiling. Not with Sam's softness, but something else entirely. A smile that curved like a knife and promised to cut.

"Look what the dog dragged in," Lucifer said, voice bright and theatrical, like a line he'd been rehearsing for days. His eyes flicked lazily from you to Dean, then back again, amused. Relaxed. The predator pretending to be the host.

You didn't answer.

Dean took a slow step beside you, jaw tight, eyes locked on the thing wearing his brother's face.

Lucifer sighed and leaned back against the wall, stretching like a cat in a patch of sun. "And here I thought we'd made peace," he went on. "You got your boy back, I got the vessel of my dreams. But no. You just can't leave well enough alone, can you, little thing?"

He turned his head, studying you. His gaze was sharp, knowing. Disgustingly intimate.

"You've got a thing for archangels, don't you?" He asked, tone lilting. "First Michael, now me. And you say I'm the pervert."

Still, you said nothing.

Lucifer's smile widened. "Oh, don't be shy. It's not like you were modest before. Should I describe it again? That night in your room—the way you begged. Please, you said."

You took a slow, steady step forward. Dean followed.

Lucifer's voice dropped, mocking reverence. "Cried in his lap. Prayed with our cocks inside you. Said Dean's name while Michael marked you like a sacrament. You wanted that. Don't forget that."

The words sliced clean—but you didn't flinch. Not this time. You stepped forward again, closer, slow and deliberate.

"Thought so," Lucifer murmured. "You want to save Sam now? Sorry. Too late. He gave himself to me. Willingly. That's what consent looks like, sweetheart. I own this temple."

Dean's voice came low and quiet behind you. "You don't own shit."

Lucifer blinked. Turned his gaze on him.

"You always were the dull one," he said with a smirk. "Little brother gets the brains, and you... you get to be the walking trauma response. A blunt instrument. Honestly, I'm surprised she picked you."

Dean didn't move. Didn't blink. But something shimmered beneath the surface—heat rising under his skin. A pressure building in the air. Something divine, ancient, and aching to be used.

"You think Sam's not still in there," Dean said, voice quiet but steady. "You think he's not fighting you. But I can feel it."

Lucifer smiled, but it faltered at the edges. Just slightly. Just enough.

"Sammy's not screaming anymore, is he?" Dean asked. "Because he's pulling. Right now. I know it."

Lucifer's jaw twitched.

Another step.

You were close now. At the foot of the bed. Lucifer's posture shifted, almost imperceptibly—like he felt it too. The tension in the air. The slow gathering of light around Dean that hadn't been there a moment ago.

"Still trying to play hero?" Lucifer asked him. "You think you're holy now? Because Michael gave you back? You think grace is some kind of redemption, Dean?"

Dean's breath was tight. "No. I think it's fuel."

Lucifer's expression cracked—barely—but enough.

Dean stepped closer, and the air shimmered again. His shoulder brushed yours, heat blooming beneath his skin like fire-banked ash.

You looked at Sam. Really looked. And what you saw, beneath the smirk and the cruelty, was a flicker. A tremble. Something not quite right in his eyes.

He was still in there.

You moved, slowly, until you were at the edge of the bed. Lucifer didn't stop you. Didn't blink. Just watched.

You sat beside him. Soft. Steady. Your hand rose. And when your palm cupped Sam's cheek, the skin beneath your touch was shaking.

"I need you," you whispered. Your thumb brushed the hollow beneath his eye.

Lucifer exhaled slowly. "He can't hear you."

"I love you."

Lucifer's face pinched.

"Come back," you said. "Please, Sam. Come back to us."

Dean dropped to his knees beside the bed, one hand on the mattress, the other gripping Sam's shoulder like a tether.

"You hear her?" He whispered. "You know who we are. You know."

Sam's eyes closed. His jaw trembled. Not Lucifer's smirk. Not control.

Pain.

"You're not alone," you said again, leaning forward, pressing your forehead to his.

The air pulsed.

Dean's breath hitched. His body arched—just slightly—as something ignited inside of him. A light under his sternum. A holy thing, half-buried and not quite his, but present.

Michael. You saw it in his eyes as they went glassy, then clear. A spark of gold. A flare of grace.

Dean's voice broke. "Sammy," he whispered. "Come home."

And then—

Lucifer screamed. Not rage. Not performance. Terror. His hands lashed out, clutching at the air, at you, at anything. But it was too late. The consent was gone. The lock had broken. Sam had let go.

Light cracked across the room like lightning through stained glass. Lucifer's mouth opened in a howl that didn't sound human. And then he was gone. Just like that. A flash. A gasp. And Sam collapsed into your arms, boneless and trembling.

You didn't know how long the light had been gone. Maybe minutes. Maybe more. But when you looked up, when the silence finally settled around you like dust, Sam was still in your arms. Breathing. Shaking. Alive.

Dean was crouched on the other side of the bed, one hand still pressed to Sam's shoulder, like he hadn't dared let go until the room stopped glowing. His face was pale, slack with disbelief. His mouth opened once—twice—but nothing came out.

Sam exhaled, ragged, like the first breath after drowning. His eyes were wet. His lips were bitten red. He blinked slowly, and when he looked at Dean, something broke.

"You came back."

Dean didn't say anything. He just nodded—once—and crawled onto the bed like a man moving through holy ground. He reached for Sam like he didn't trust his hands to hold anything that wasn't grief, and when his palm found the back of Sam's neck, his head bowed.

"Yeah," Dean whispered, voice thick. "Yeah, I did."

Sam's arms trembled. You felt it. And then suddenly, he was leaning forward, gripping Dean's shoulder, pressing his forehead to his brother's like he was trying to confirm it—trying to feel that he was real.

You didn't speak. You didn't interrupt. You just curled between them, one hand on Sam's arm, the other on Dean's thigh, your cheek resting against Sam's chest, eyes wide and wet and locked on Dean.

And for the first time since you lost them—you had them both.

One breath. One bed. One bruised, breathing, battered miracle.

Dean's hand slipped down to your side, tugging you closer, and you let him pull. Sam's fingers found yours. No one spoke for a while. There was nothing that could be said.

But your mouth moved anyway. You kissed Dean's chest—soft, reverent. His collarbone. His jaw. Then Sam's arm. His shoulder. The corner of his mouth. Small, aching things. Little devotions. They didn't stop you. They didn't even react—just watched you through heavy lashes, like they couldn't believe they got to be touched again.

Eventually, Sam cleared his throat. "The night Dean said yes..."

Your breath caught.

He glanced at Dean, who gave a short nod. Guilt flared behind his eyes, but he didn't speak.

Sam looked at you.

"You weren't there," he said. "You were here. Cas and I—we'd just come back from a lead that went nowhere. Dean hadn't said a word to us in hours."

Your lips grazed the edge of Dean's arm.

"We found him in the woods," Sam said quietly. "He was kneeling. Alone. Like he was already halfway gone."

Dean's jaw twitched.

"I tried to stop him. I said—I said I wasn't ready to lose him. That there had to be another way." Sam's voice cracked. "But he looked at me like he was already dead."

You looked up. Dean's eyes were fixed on the far wall, jaw clenched so tight you thought his teeth might break.

Sam continued. "He told Michael yes. And then he was gone."

You kissed Dean's shoulder, slow and soft, and whispered, "I'm so sorry."

He didn't look at you. Just muttered, "Don't."

"I mean it," you said. "I should've been there."

Dean finally turned. His eyes were glassy. "You needed to be here. I didn't want you to see it."

You pressed a kiss to the edge of his throat. "You didn't get to make that call."

Sam's hand came up, caught your wrist, and for a moment, you weren't sure what he was going to say. But then he brought your hand to his chest, held it there, and said:

"I knew you'd get me back."

You looked at him, breath hitching. His face was solemn, eyes warm. You nodded. "I promised I'd stop at nothing."

He nodded back.

And then you were moving—settling between them, one leg over Dean's thigh, your hand still resting over Sam's heartbeat. Your body folded between theirs like a prayer.

There was no way to make this moment neat. No clean way to fold three broken hearts into one another and pretend the cracks didn't show. But they were here. And so were you. And for now, for tonight—that was enough.

Later, when the shaking had stopped, when Sam's breathing had evened, when the light had bled out of Dean's bones and you were all just skin and blood again—you lay tangled between them in the aftermath.

No one spoke for a while.

There was only the weight of breath. The subtle rhythm of recovery. Your head on Dean's shoulder. Sam's palm resting flat against your thigh. Dean's fingers brushing idly against your hip like he couldn't stop touching just to make sure you were still here.

It wasn't silence. It was sacred stillness.

But eventually, you broke it.

"We need to call Cas."

Dean shifted, his arm curling tighter around you.

"He needs to see that you're both... okay," you added. "That you're back."

Sam nodded, slow, head against the pillow.

You hesitated, then winced—just slightly. "He's probably still freaking out."

Dean noticed. "What?"

"I, uh..." You pressed your lips together. "He... might've seen something. That he wasn't supposed to."

Both brothers stilled.

Dean raised an eyebrow. "Define something."

You squirmed a little deeper into the mattress. "The aftermath of... that night. You know. The... threesome."

Dean groaned, dragging a hand over his face. "Oh, come on."

Sam's voice was flat. "He walked in?"

You nodded. "Yeah. I was still in Michael's lap. His grace was still buried in me. Lucifer was being smug. And Cas—he looked like he wanted to scrub his eyes with bleach."

Dean turned his head, wincing. "Christ."

"He told Michael that you two wouldn't take it lightly," you added softly. "Said I belonged to you."

That silenced the room again. But not painfully. Just weightfully. Like truth laid bare on a table.

You sighed. Then softly, reverently, you whispered, "Cas?"

The air shifted. A breath caught in the fabric of the world. And a moment later, he was there. Standing in the doorway. Looking at all three of you like he wasn't sure if this was real.

His eyes landed on Dean first. "Dean," he said quietly.

Dean blinked. "Hey, sunshine."

You could feel the way Sam huffed beside you, amusement soft and stunned. Castiel's expression didn't change, but something about his shoulders relaxed.

You gestured to the foot of the bed. "Come sit down."

He did. It was awkward, but gentle. Like watching someone return to a dream they thought they'd lost. Castiel looked at Dean, then Sam, then down at you between them.

"I'm glad you're both back," he said. "You were gone a long time."

Sam gave him a look full of apology and reverence. "Thank you. For not giving up on us."

Castiel nodded once. Then he turned to you. "And you?" He asked. "Are you okay?"

You looked at him. Then at Dean. Then at Sam. You leaned up and pressed a soft kiss to Sam's lips—chaste, but intimate. Grateful. Then turned, cupped Dean's jaw, and kissed him too. Warm. Anchoring. Home. And when you looked back at Castiel, your voice trembled, but your smile didn't.

"I'm home again," you said. "Finally."

He said nothing. Just nodded. And then the quiet settled once more.

Not grief. Not fear. Not waiting.

Just stillness.

You curled tighter between the boys, your body a seam between everything you'd lost and everything you'd survived. And somewhere in the back of your mind—deep beneath your skin—you felt the echo of a voice that wasn't yours. That wasn't Michael's. That wasn't Lucifer's.

Just something ancient. Something sacred.

And on the seventh day… the storm ceased.

And there was ruin. And there was blood. And there was resurrection.

And the girl who bore the weight of heaven and hell… was no longer kneeling.

@mostlymarvelgirl @losers-clvb @lunaleah @itshellfire @drakulana @sl33pylilbunny @suckitands33 @nevercameraready @0ccvltism @lyarr24 @podiumackles @spxideyver @tinas111 @cevansbaby-dove @paristheonewhoreads @winchestersbgirl <3

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