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eowynstwin · 3 months ago

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peristalsis - iii

selkie!soap x reader. depression. suicidal ideation. strangers to "lovers." cunnilingus. analingus. spitting. piv. doggy. missionary. rough sex. size kink. breeding kink. biting. mean soap. manipulative soap. smut. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

The ocean calls the seal to return, and you finally heed the growing chill you’ve been ignoring, as well as the complaints of your nearly-empty stomach.

Starvation is not on your list of preferred ways to end your own life, so you check the fridge Johnny said he had stocked. What you find is disconcerting—hoping for snack foods, pre-packaged conveniences, you instead find a carton of eggs, hard cheeses, condiment bottles. Milk in a jug, green herb bundles, sticks of butter, and an unopened package of bacon.

The freezer is much the same. Bags of vegetables and meats like shrimp or scallops. Frozen loaves of bread. Not even a single carton of ice cream. When the pantry also yields nothing more ready to eat—no chips, no cup ramen, no cans of soup—you give up.

There’s a hierarchy of action you’re willing to take to preserve yourself, organized around a precept of energy expenditure—eating spends less than cooking, so you focus on the former and do not practice the latter anymore.

Even though most food has lost its taste by now.

So you lay down on the couch. Sulking, maybe, but it’s the only halfway satisfying thing left to you. You angle yourself toward the shelf of books it faces in place of a TV; it’s mostly romance novels. Bright pink or blue or violet or red spines facing outward, most of them already cracked and creased down through their titles.

Did Johnny stock those for you too—emptying the shelves of a thrift book store for a woman he knew would be alone—or are they just set dressing for his dream of a honeymoon getaway?

You start thinking about the cliffs by the cove.

They’re not very tall. Maybe three stories. You would feel the impact—and it might not even work. You would lay there at the bottom, in the packed sand, broken. But alive to feel every consequence of it.

You might still die, but it would be slow. Someone could find you, and save you. Probably Johnny. You might be permanently broken—worse off than when you began.

It’s not an option.

You could have just bought a gun if you stayed home. It would have been cheaper, and faster—

Anxious energy needles at your legs and prickles along the insides of your palms; you sit up, agitated. Your stomach bubbles as the acid inside slides around with nothing to eat into. You scowl at yourself and retrieve Johnny’s jacket from the floor.

It’s colder outside than before, when you leave the cottage for the third time that day for the walk to Vatersay village. You can see it from the front door of the cottage, only about a mile away, and as you get going, you find a walking trail cutting through the machair grass leading in its direction.

The sky darkens far earlier than you expect, on the way. You hadn’t thought you were far enough north for that. Absent of city lights, the Hebridean starscape peeks through gaps in the moonlit clouds overhead, winking to life as the sun retreats around the earth’s curve. You pause—even your ennui is no match for the cosmos—looking to see if you can find the arm of the Milky Way, but the autumn sky does not seem inclined to show it to you.

By the time you reach the village outskirts, warm rectangles of yellow light are already brightening the windows against a heavy blue night. You get directions to the pub from an older man walking his dog—Last Cull, it’s called. You find it with a carved wooden sign, adorned with the silhouette of a lounging seal, hanging by the door at the front, and walk in.

Johnny said that less than a hundred people populate the island; when you walk in, at least a third of them must be here, and their collective chatter, along with the sounds of drinking glasses clinking or hitting tables, and the warble of classic rock music, all rush at you at once when you open the door, carried on a wave of orangey lamplight and the smell of hops and a burst of thick, hot air.

It’s more life—more sound—than you were remotely prepared for, and you freeze in the threshold. You stand there long enough that, worse, several heads turn to look at you—

The outsider.

You duck your head, and look at the floor as you direct yourself at an empty stool at the bar. Your purse beats against your leg with every quick step, heavy with a tourist’s excess preparation, and following eyes lance you like pins through a butterfly’s wing.

A man in a beanie and mutton chops is wiping a glass dry behind the counter; he looks at you drolly when you sit down.

“W’can I get you?” he asks, surprising you with a distinctly un-Scottish accent.

You blink several times. “Um…”

The bartender is immediately unimpressed. “Liverpool, love. You drinking or eating?”

You flush. “I’m sorry—um—both?”

He nods. He does not offer a menu. “Right.”

He disappears with the same abruptness of manner behind a swinging door, leaking greenish fluorescent kitchen light around the edges and through the circular window set up in the middle.

Whatever waves you made upon your arrival already seem to have dissipated, ineffectual in the long-term; conversation in heavy Scots flows around you, relaxed and indistinct. The pub is warm with body heat, little groups of islanders pulled in close together around pints and tankards and easy conversation.

These people likely have known each other for years; seen each other grow up. Watched time etch lines across one another’s faces. You can’t really understand the words being exchanged between any of them, but the tenor is familiar. None of it is especially important to say to one another, you know—it’s the back and forth that’s the point. The sway and rock of practiced call and answer. Of knowing, when they say something, that a response will be given, even if the response is something that’s been said a thousand times before.

You run your fingers along the dented surface of the old bar. Shift in your stool. Pick at a sliver of skin coming up from one cuticle. A single drop of oil in the middle of an ocean.

The bartender returns to you from the kitchen, no food in hand. Instead, there’s a new expression on his face—a hammer aimed at your protruding nail. His eyes are narrowed; his brows are drawn together.

“You’re Soap’s tourist,” he says.

“Um,” you say, pinned under the intensity of his stare, “no?”

He rolls his eyes. “Johnny MacTavish. Everyone else calls him Soap.”

“Oh.” You cannot guess at all where this conversation might be going. “Yes?”

“He cooks for me some nights,” the bartender says. “He’s in the kitchen right now. He says dinner is on him, and he’ll bring it out soon.”

“He’s here?” you demand, jaw dropping.

“Some nights,” the man repeats. He picks his drying rag back up, and gets to work on another glass. Your association with Johnny—Soap—seems to have unlocked in him a geniality that would otherwise be inaccessible to you. “Lad was right chuffed when you rented out the croft. Hadn’t seen him that excited in ages. Wouldn’t stop talking about it for a month.”

He hasn’t offered you a drink and doesn’t seem inclined to. Still intimidated, you don’t ask.

“He told me I was his first guest,” you say, worrying at your cuticle.

“Mm-hm,” responds. Then he eyes you. “See why he was so worked up now.”

You stop your jaw from dropping for a second time, but only just—the weight of Johnny’s hand ghosts down your back, aided by his scent radiating from his jacket, released from the fibers it’s seeped into by your body heat.

“How—um, how do you know Johnny—Soap?” you ask, awkwardly.

“If he told you to call him Johnny, call him Johnny,” the man says. “Was his captain, once upon a time. Served together in the SAS. Name’s John Price.”

“Nice to meet you, Mr. Price,” you say.

He grunts. “John’s fine. He been behaving?”

“Um,” you say, entirely unsure how to answer that, when the kitchen door flings open.

“Bonnie!” Johnny exclaims, apron-clad, rosy-faced, and grinning wide.

He’s exchanged his heavy sweater for a lighter, cream-colored henley, sleeves rolled up his broad forearms. Combined with the cinch of the apron strings around his middle, it highlights and flatters the athletic build of his silhouette. The hem of his kilt flutters around his knees as he hurries over.

“Hi, Johnny,” you sigh.

He balances a steaming dish on one hand and carries some silverware wrapped in a napkin in the other. The plate tilts precariously as he directs himself at you, but the food survives as he slides it in onto the bar in front of you.

“Shoulda told me you were comin’ down, or I’d’ve had somethin’ better ready to make!” he scolds, though he’s clearly too pleased to mean it.

On top of a ceramic plate, the glaze spiderwebbed with cracks from age and constant use, three oblong triangles of fried fish rest atop checked wax paper, attended by a large stainless still cup of large wedge fries that you remember are referred to as “chips.” Beside that is a small cup of some white condiment you don’t recognize. Everything looks fresh from the fryer, as if Johnny could not wait one second to long to bring it to you.

“Oy, lad, how come I don’t get that kinda table service?” someone yells out behind you. “M’ I not pretty enough for you?”

A chorus of laughter answers the teasing. You hunch into yourself.

“Go back to your pint, Angus, ya weapon!” Johnny returns grandly. Then, to you, “Here, this is the best thing for it—”

John Price has already stepped far aside; you and he watch as Johnny retrieves a long-stemmed glass from a shelf, and then pulls a bottle of wine from a low fridge. He sets the glass beside your plate and uncorks the bottle—bicep quivering as he works the screw—and then, thumb in the punt, he pours out a stream of white wine one-handed.

“Tossers over there’ll call me mad but Sav Blanc with a fish an’ chips is pure class,” says Johnny. Then, to your horror, he sets his elbows on the counter in front of you. “Go on, have us a bite.”

You stare at him agog. His cheeks are flushed red, and you’re not sure it’s from the heat of the kitchen or—his gaze flicks to your mouth and back—something far less comforting. He stares back at you, grin unmoving—eyes bright and vibrant and too intense to hold contact with for long.

You look down at the meal again. The fish looks crunchy and thick with golden brown crust; the chips are sharp at the edges and dusted with salt and some sort of green seasoning. The smell is impossible to ignore—hot and floury and oily.

You take a chip and dip it tentatively into the white sauce. Johnny’s eyes dance with excitement as they follow the movement. When you take a bite, the bitter tang of tartar meets your tongue and mixes with the mild potato as you chew.

It is only just shy of hot enough to burn but—it’s good. It’s delicious. It’s the best thing, you realize, that you’ve tasted in you’re not sure how long.

You do your absolute utmost to prevent that from showing on your face.

“It’s good,” you say, and take another bite.

“Barry!” Johnny enthuses. “Now have a dram, go on.”

Rather than allow you to pick up the glass like a normal person, Soap lifts it in one large hand—knuckles and wrist peppered with dark hair—and brings the rim to your mouth. You have no choice but to take a sip as he tilts it toward you, or else end up dribbling white wine everywhere.

You must begrudgingly agree, as it passes across your tongue, that it pairs very well with what you’ve eaten.

You nod at him in lieu of another response; the corners of his eyes crinkle. He sets the glass down and slaps the counter with both palms, pushing himself away from it.

“Enjoy that an’ I’ll be back for ya in a mo,’” he says. With a bounce in his step, he disappears back into the kitchen.

John Price throws you another droll look. “You’re never getting rid of him now.”

When he turns away to address another patron, you scowl at his back.

Johnny comes in and out of the kitchen several times, as you pick at the food. Whatever his usual habits as the pub cook, it seems he’s in a magnanimous mood this evening, bringing orders to every table and chatting with anyone who catches his attention.

And a lot of people catch his attention. Island native or not, it seems that Johnny is everyone’s favorite boy—and it’s hard not to see why. He throws bright smiles at everyone who speaks to him, pats shoulders, trades good-natured Scottish ribbing with anyone who throws it his way. He’s familiar, it seems, with everyone he talks to—or he’s good at making it seem that way.

And the effect it has on everyone he talks to is obvious. Weathered faces, the kind that seem to rest at a permanent, severe frown, rise to beam as brightly as the sun after Johnny spends a minute or two checking in on them. Fond eyes follow him around the pub; the conversations at tables he visits keeps a lively tenor even after he leaves it.

You reach for your wineglass and drink deep.

“There we go!” Johnny exclaims, noticing.

He does not leave you neglected, of course—he keeps circling around, looking at your plate, and then at you, and filling your glass when you empty it. It strikes you as rather sweet until he starts availing himself of a mouthful every time—turning the glass so that his lips cover the marks yours have made on it.

When about half of your plate has been cleared, and Johnny is returning from delivering a tray of sandwiches to another table, he comes up behind you and leans in close, hands curling around your shoulders. Mouth brushing your ear.

“Dinner rush is almost done, bonnie,” he murmurs, butter-smooth and low as banked embers. “Then I’m all yours.”

A tremor runs up the nerves in your spine; you sit up straighter when he pulls away, the fine hairs on the back of your neck reaching toward him as if statically charged.

You catch John Price eyeing you again, expression blasé. You flush up to the roots of your hair and avoid looking at him again.

Eventually, the pub begins to vacate, somewhere close to ten in the evening. No city bar, this one, even on a Friday night. You finish three-quarters of the bottle of wine in between turning the fish and chips into mush and crumbs, finally pushing everything away from you as the last stragglers jingle the bell above the door.

Then it’s just John Price, pulling on a coat, Johnny doing dishes in the kitchen, and you, alone, sneakers hooked to a rung on the barstool.

John Price sticks his head through the swinging door. “We still doing Sunday, Soap? Or d’you have new plans?”

“Course doin’ Sunday!” Johnny yells. “Canny wait!”

“Alright. I’m leaving, lock up when you go.”

And with that, John Price gives you a cursory nod, and makes his exit.

Soon after, Johnny exits the kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel, the motions making his pectorals twitch and flex. His apron is gone, the little v of his shirt collar exposing dark, curling chest hair.

The odd pelt—you realize, from your experience this morning, that it’s a seal’s��still hangs around another plaid kilt.

Your heartbeat is hot and heavy in your ears. You stare at him, lips pressed together tightly, a tremor working its way between your shoulders.

He tilts his head toward you, eyes half-lidded. When you meet his gaze again, his smile is set at an expectant angle.

“Drive me home, Johnny,” you finally say, wine and humiliation pulsing through your veins.

He drives you home in silence, and rests his hand on your thigh the whole way there.

You don’t move it. You don’t react, either—even when his pinky flicks against the seam of your leggings, right where it lays against your pussy. He roves his spread fingers and heavy palm all across the length and breadth of your thigh, cresting down over your knee and back up again, squeezing and massaging the fat of your quad.

You don’t say anything. He does not prompt you to do so. The corner of his mouth, when you look to him at your side, catching his profile, is curled.

The silence continues when he pulls up to the cottage—even the wind is light and quiet, as you unlock the door to let the both of you in. The night sky is cobbled with clouds that pass over slowly, letting only slivers of moonlight reach the earth, so inside the croft is dark and murky.

You don’t move to switch any lights on. Nor does Johnny, following close behind you.

Out of sight, it seems your body forgets who—or what, even—is following you. He is only a presence at your back, a body taking up space, and in the darkness, with only your hindbrain to rely on, he could be anyone.

Anything.

You stop in the middle of the living room. He hovers behind you. Not quite touching—but close enough to feel the gravity of him, strong enough to pull you in.

You drop your purse on the couch, and make to shuck his jacket—his hands take hold of the shoulders, allowing you to slide out of it. The deep, even pulse of his breathing is right there at the shell of your ear.

“Bonnie,” he murmurs, husky.

“I’m,” you say, “I’m going to use the bathroom.”

A pause. Then—“Alright,” he purrs.

You escape.

In the mirror above the sink, you look yourself in the eye. What you see is nothing you haven’t seen before—pitiable, needy, pathetic—and it’s nothing you have any desire to confront now. If you think too hard about it—if you ask yourself what you should be asking—there will be no coming back from it.

He’s been dangling this in front of you this whole time. It’s no fault of yours for taking it. This once, you aren’t to blame for what happens next. This once.

You run the cold tap over a washcloth and dab cool water across your face and down your neck. It does little to regulate the heat flushing through you.

If you don’t go out there now, he might leave.

You throw the cloth into the sink basin and open the door.

And Johnny is there, standing right there in front of it, leaning casually against the opposite wall—

Completely naked.

You stop dead.

Gray moonlight falls across his body in a thin haze. The bulky, sculpted planes of it roll with dense muscle and dark hair, which is thick and curly across rounded pectorals and joins in a broad stream down his abdomen. Twisting into a nest at his groin, they cushion a long, wide cock, uncut, half-hard—

That jumps at your appearance.

He meets your eyes. They are silvery and sharp, even in the gloam. Drags his gaze down—leveling it with your tightening nipples. Then he reaches to his side and twists the doorknob to the bedroom.

It swings open. Empty bed in the doorframe.

His cock jumps again. A diamond-drop of moisture beads at the tip.

“Go on,” he murmurs.

You walk in, barely aware of your own footsteps. His bare feet cross the floor behind you, and then the door shuts again.

He does not say another word as he approaches you; you do not turn to face him. You stand as if restrained in place as large, warm hands skim the dip of your waist, slope easily down your hips and up again; he pinches the hem of your sweater and lifts. You raise your arms, lost in the fugue of your pounding heart; he brings it over your head, and tosses it to the side.

Rough hands smoothing over your bare skin, almost like sweeping away dust. He unhooks your bra with startling dexterity—fingers slide beneath the straps and loosen them down your shoulders. Hands dipping down your chest, edging under and replacing the cups around your breasts.

His thumbs press your nipples in, circle around them; you gasp, flinch back against him, and feel his cock, fully erect, nestle in the cleft of your ass. He huffs a laugh into your hair.

His hands return to your waist, and they slide down, pressed open against your sides, as Johnny goes to his knees behind you. He grasps the waistbands of both panties and leggings and—face centimeters away from the globe of one ass cheek—pulls both down in one smooth, soft sweep.

It feels like being skinned. Your heart beats a hammer in the arteries against your throat. You nearly lose your balance, tilting when you lift one foot out of your clothes, before one of Soap’s hands return to your waist to give you ballast. Holding you up like it’s nothing. He squeezes the meat of your hip tenderly, massages the give of it with the tips of his fingers, skin warm and rough against yours.

The moment you’d first caught sight of Johnny in the airport, he’d slotted cleanly into a certain taxon of manhood; one need only to examine his morphology briefly—the mohawk, the muscles, stubborn refusal to cover his knees even as winter fast approaches—to understand that his is the lifestyle of the fast-living. He leers. He gropes. He runs down what he sets his eyes on whether his prey likes it or not.

An organism with cheap pleasure on its mind, and nothing more. Johnny’s bull-focused intentions had stunk acrid and obvious the moment they’d fallen upon you—aimed, you thought unceremoniously, between your legs and nowhere else.

So why, as his hands drag up the backs of your thighs, is he touching you so tenderly? Teasing you open, rather than prising you apart. Touching you as if he’s in no hurry to do anything else.

It feels like an insult. It feels like mercy you didn’t ask for. Without thinking, without knowing you’re going to do it—you slap his hand away.

“Is this going to take all night, or are you going to get around to fucking me sometime soon?” you snap, galled.

An indrawn breath. His or yours, you’re not entirely sure.

Then he rises up, shoves a hand hard between your shoulder blades, and you topple forward onto the bed, flailing, landing face-first, as Johnny knees up behind you.

“So that’s how you want it, then,” he says. Nonchalant. “Aye, I can do that. Come here.”

You don’t have time to scramble away before rough hands grab your hips and yank them back, pulling you up onto your knees, and with no more preamble Johnny shoves his face into your naked pussy from behind. Immediately hot and star-bright; thumbs hook into your outer folds to spread you open moments before his tongue burns a stripe from clit to perineum, no slow build, no warm-up, before he starts eating you out like he’s starving.

You shriek from the sudden contact, hips jerking, but his hold is iron, and the more you resist the more he tightens his grasp, fingertips digging down near to bone. He licks at your folds, at the dips between them, as if he’s pulling swipes of you away on every taste bud, imprecise, mouthing your cleft as if he means to swallow it whole.

When you reach back with one hand to grab his hair—to hold him where he is or shove him away, you’re not sure—he releases one hip and shackles your wrist in his fingers, bending your arm at the elbow and pinning it to your lower back.

“You asked for it,” he growls against you, “and now you’re gettin’ it,” another dig of his tongue around your entrance, “so don’ fuckin’ complain.”

He pulls away and abruptly spits on your asshole before diving back in. With the thumb of the same hand around your wrist, he smears it around, dipping just inside at the same time his tongue breaches your cunt; you feel teeth press against your perineum for a breathless moment before he lets up, and then he prods your clitoris with little jabbing licks, forcing his way up under the hood that fails to protect it from his onslaught.

You have a free hand—you reach back to slap at him again. The theory of insanity proves true; one wrist joins the other, and Johnny uses his own weight to move you as he likes, arms curled over your hips, rocking your entire body against his mouth, lips smacking against you as he alternates between licking up the slick that abruptly starts welling around your entrance and sucking your labia between his teeth.

He grunts and snarls after every brief surfacing for air, every time his tongue touches you again, as if every new taste of you in his mouth is better than the last. His hands tighten into vices around your wrists as he buries in deeper, groaning, shoving his face against you so hard it thrusts your hips forward, which he greedily drags back, and then he flutters his tongue against your clit as if to punish you for his own forcefulness.

“Johnny—” you cry, “Johnny, slow down, slow down—!”

A climax swells within you before you have any time to prepare for it, a closeout curling in so fast that it hits you before you can brace. Johnny thumbs your ass again and suctions his lips closed around your clitoris, tearing a scream from your throat, ripping your orgasm even further out of you as you suddenly, violently convulse.

It jerks you in his grasp, as if whipping you, and then, as fast as it came at you, it recedes; you sag, dizzy and gulping air, but Johnny’s mouth opens around your pussy again as if nothing happened, tongue and lips losing none of their frantic voracity.

“Johnny,” you whimper, “Johnny, I came, you can stop—”

“Don’t give half a shite, am no’ done,” he snarls, accent thicker than you’ve heard it before.

Your breath shudders out of you as he runs the edges of his teeth up your folds, and then, briefly, the flat of his tongue circles your asshole, before dipping back down into the heat of your cunt. He catches your clit again in a quick succession of sucking kisses, loud and wet and pulling at it so hard that tugs at nerves all the way down your legs, spasming through your calves.

Your breath thins in your lungs, escaping you in high, reedy whines, and finally, he pulls his mouth away—only to replace it with his hand. He transfers your crossed wrists into one grasp, wedging all four fingers between the split of your cleft and shaking it vigorously, like a dog might with a small animal clamped in its jaws. He follows this with several rapid slaps against flesh that is already screaming with overstimulation—

And then the head of something hot and hard parts you, circling to find its target, and with as little preamble as he began Johnny shoves his fat, rock-hard cock into you, all the way to the base in one harsh thrust.

It shoves the air from your lungs in one go, leaves you no room to breathe in before he grabs your wrists again, like reins, pulls halfway out, and rams back in again, setting a brutal pace, his thighs slamming against the fat of your ass at a rapid staccato that shakes the old bedframe on its creaky legs.

He barely pulls out as he fucks you this way, thrusting short and hard, your face crushed against the bedsheets as he uses your arms to pull you back against him to meet every thrust. The fattest part of his cock catches your g-spot over and over, bright and hot as iron pulled from a fire, and you can’t even get enough breath in your lungs to do more than whimper every time his hips meet yours.

“This is wha’ she fuckin’ needed, hen, aye?” Johnny snarls. “Hissin’ an’ spittin’ like a stray cat, didnae know wha’s good fer it, jus’ needed a big cock in ‘er wet cunt, didnae she?”

A long, shaky moan is the only response you can give. Fast, fast and hard—he bucks against you wildly, violently, sending shockwaves up your body that jounce your breast and ripple across your blazing cheeks. Your mouth hangs open at a loose angle—if you try to close your teeth, you might accidentally bite into your tongue—

He releases your wrists, and your arms fall hard to the bedspread. Then he bends over your back, planting his hands in the spaces over your shoulders, making a cage with his his body. It changes the angle of his thrusts, lets him force his way in even deeper, kissing the head of your cervix. You climb your hands up the bedspread, claw at his wrists with your nails, but you might as well be a curl of wind trying to knock over a pillar of stone.

“You can bitch an’ whine all you wan’ at me, bonnie,” he says, a nasty thread in his tone, “but I know mean pussy just needs some pettin’ to make it nice again, don’ I, now?”

You try to struggle under him, search for some sort of purchase in the sheets beneath you, and for a moment you think he’s making space to let you; his weight retreats as you rise to all fours, but then one solid, beefy arm closes around your neck in a chokehold. He brings the both of you up, settling you over the cradle of his thighs as he sits back on his heels, clamping your back against his chest.

His free hand snakes down between your thighs, finding your clitoris again with rough, abrading calluses. A hard, grinding roll of his hips, upward and forward, pushes it up into his touch, like the crest of a wave, but gravity gives you no escape on the downwell; he pushes and pulls you as he likes, heel of his hand digging hard into the sensitive edge of your mons.

You scrabble with your hands for something to hold onto—you find the brackets of his wide thighs, wiry with dark hair, and dig your nails into hard, tensed muscle. He only laughs in your ear, speeds the rhythm of his hips, pinches your clitoris between his fingers and drags it around.

“Told ya, bonnie,” he gloats, taking the lobe briefly between his lips, “she wants it—” and he pushes his cock in deep, shaking his hips “—bad as he does.”

He reaches further inward and splits his fingers around his own girth, pressing upward—as if he intends to shove them in too, and choking for air as you are you think deliriously that they might just slip in, no resistance, aided by the wetness free-flowing now around him, dripping in long streams down the inside of your thighs.

Inescable—no matter what you do, it’s nothing to him. You thrash against him, whining through gritted teeth in frustration, but he only moves with you, anticipating every direction you might blindly throw yourself in to get away. You cry out in wordless fury, slapping whatever parts of him you can reach, but it doesn’t matter. There is no purchase for you anywhere, nothing you can use to grab back any sort of control.

He’s too big. Too strong. You finally begin to comprehend it in a way that had been impossible before. Looking at him from a few paces, Johnny is easy to take in; easy to summarize and dismiss when you can see the whole of him at once.

But now, at your back—he feels vast. Enormous. An undulating wall of a hard body flexing against you, mooring you to it, all heat and sweat and sharp, animalistic grunting as it pistons into you from behind. The hand manipulating your clit is wide enough to cover your pussy entirely; the pillar of his body doesn’t so much as shudder as you struggle, instinct overriding desire as you try to escape the lightning-streaks of pleasure he carelessly sends through you.

You are too primed from your earlier climax to possibly last, and Johnny seems to feel it—you flutter and clutch around him, the sensation almost painful, but when both your hands fly to the one between your legs he only increases the pressure.

“You gonna come again, bonnie?” he sneers into your ear. “Jus’ tiring yourself out, poor baby. Fightin’ it so hard, an’ it’s gonna happen anyway.”

It does—he starts slapping your pussy again, right above where his cock stretches you to your limit, quick and sharp, and you break with ragged scream, arms flailing out uselessly, nails finding his forearm around your throat.

“Johnny—” you cry out, “Johnny!”

“Fuck,” he groans in your ear, “steamin’ Jesus, fuck—”

Suddenly he pushes you away from him, and you flail again as you land face-first into the pillows. His cock slips out of you entirely, even as you’re still clenching around your orgasm, but you have no time to react, either to mourn it or be relieved, because Johnny grabs you by the thighs, flips you over in one motion, and drives back in again before it ends.

“Fuck, bonnie, so good, fuck, do it again—”

He throws your legs open, leaving your calves to shake in the air as he fucks you faster. You nearly fold in half under the force of his thrusts, knees hovering nearer and nearer to your ears. Each slap of his hips against yours ricochets up your body, and, with nowhere else to go, back down—you ring like a bell, shaking all the way into your marrow.

“Soap,” you whine, “Soap, it—I—I can’t—”

Suddenly he grabs your face in his hand, so tightly he squeezes your cheeks together, pushing out your lips, and he lurches forward to get in your face. Fury blazes from him.

“I told you,” he snarls, “to call me Johnny.”

It shocks you so much that freeze up, going completely blank. The dark, sharp lines of his brows arch dangerously over flashing eyes.

He shakes your face. “Say it.”

“J—” you slur, unable to shape it in your lips properly, “Johnny.”

His nostrils flare wide. Fury is replaced by triumph. “Good fucking girl.”

He slams his mouth against yours.

The first time he’s kissed you, and he gives you no chance to participate in it. He purses your lips with the pressure of his hand to meld with his, opening your jaw wide enough to thrust his tongue behind your teeth. The force of it presses your head back into the pillow. It’s an attack; it’s an onslaught. And—if the grunts and groans Johnny makes in his throat as he does what he likes with your mouth are any indication—

It’s what he’s really wanted this whole time.

Everything else, he’s enjoyed. But this—his mouth on yours, lips moving together, saliva pooling and seeping between the seams—is the prize he’s aimed for all along.

It touches something inside of you. Something tiny and ugly. A thing that you’ve wrapped up in nacreous layers of shame and guilt, lodged in your soft tissues, and tried to forget about.

It sends your arms to wrap around Johnny’s neck, fingers digging into the shifting muscles of his shoulders. You close your thighs around his waist, crossing your ankles, and roll yourself up into every meeting of his hips with yours.

He moans, higher, and drops his full weight over you. His belly meets yours; his chest crushes your breasts under his. He uses the full brunt of his weight to rut into you, crashing his hips against you, stealing the breath from your lungs—

It’s an old trick you’ve learned from small experience, inhaling when you feel the rush coming—as if climax blooms in the lungs rather than the clitoral head, and filling your alveoli gives it no place to expand. It’s useful to prolong satisfaction, to stave off the end.

Johnny does not give you opportunity try. The only thing he allows you to occupy your mouth with is his, and as hypoxia thins out your bloodstream—as you begin to struggle for air—you go rigid with your third climax beneath him.

However long it lasts, you don’t know. It freezes you in place, in time. It wrenches your head back, arching your spine, tears one long, broken cry from your throat.

“Fuck yes,” Johnny gasps, feeling you clamp down so hard around him it seems you may never release him. He moves to bury his face in your throat. “Fuck yes, fuck yes, fuck—yes—”

His tempo falters, signaling the end—

Realization—“Wait!” you find some presence of mind to cry out—“a condom! We didn’t use—”

“It’s got a’go somewhere hen, an’ I’m no’ wastin’ it on yer belly,” he snarls, “just—just—yes—fuck—”

Then his teeth come down on your neck, hard, as his hips beat against yours, and then he buries himself to the root with one final, full-body thrust. He shakes his hips flush against yours as he groans long and loud, cock pulsing inside you, wet heat flooding you in jets, so full that it spills back out to drip down between you.

He pants hard into your shoulder. Your own breath labors, vision swimming.

A cloud covers the moon outside. Johnny makes no move to pull away from you—instead his arms wedge beneath you, banding around your back, and he rolls you both to your sides. You feel him kissing the sting his teeth left on your neck, as you lay there together, sweat cooling on your naked bodies.

Eventually, he pulls back enough to look at you. You have no time to arrange your expression, no idea even what you might want to present to him; whatever he sees on your face makes him smile, crinkling the corners of his eyes.

“There’s my bonnie,” he murmurs, and the next kiss he gives you is soft and very sweet.

Your lips rise to meet his without you thinking about it.

He strokes your back very gently. Sooner than yours, his breathing evens out. Even as he softens inside of you, he keeps his hips against yours.

“Johnny,” you whisper.

“I know,” he says. “I know. Just a little while longer. Can you do that for me? Aye, you can, I know it.”

You should say something about spermicide. Plan B. But the look in his eyes is so soft, so content, that you put it away for later. You just hold his gaze as he looks at you like you’re everything that could ever make him happy.

He kisses you again. Soon, the heaving of your chest abates. Exhaustion pours through you in one drenching wave; you turn your head to yawn.

“Go to sleep, bonnie,” Johnny croons, pressing his fingers into the soft part of your lower back. “I’ll clean us up, aye? You just sleep.”

You don’t have the energy to fight anymore. Soon, you’re slipping away—you’re aware for long enough to feel it when he finally pulls away from you, when he runs a warm washcloth between your legs, and then when he slides back into bed beside you and pulls up the covers.

Then you’re gone.

Sometime after midnight, you half-wake.

The moon has moved far enough across the sky that its light floods the bedroom through its one window, casting everything in silver. Your eyes open slowly, blurred with sleep; Johnny is still beside you.

He’s sitting up against the headboard; eye-level with you is his waist, covered by the thin bedsheet. You draw your eyes up his body slowly—there, his navel, dark hair curling around it. There, his chest, full pectorals rising and falling slowly with calm, even breath.

When you reach his face, you find him looking down at you, corners of his mouth curled. You meet his eyes—

The moon reflects in them. Disks of shifting light in both pupils.

Some part of you, buried in your hindbrain, shouts with alarm. It’s far away, cottoned with sleep. Muffled enough by the soreness of three full-body orgasms to be ignored.

Johnny reaches out and drags the back of one finger along the wounded part of your neck. Touch feather-light.

“Why are you here?” he asks.

Vaguely, you remember that you’ve answered this question before, but that doesn’t feel consequential. Any part of you that could protest is still lost to sleep.

As is any ability to dissemble. The truth—the thing you attempted to abandon, that has followed you regardless—slips out.

“Nobody wants me,” you whisper.

So quiet you fear he won’t hear you, and ask you to repeat it.

But Johnny tilts his head. The curl of his mouth softens to something almost kind.

It doesn’t quite get there, because a gleam of satisfaction that you cannot name colors his shining gaze.

“I want you,” he murmurs.

His broad hand covers the crown of your head, and he strokes your hair. The tide of sleep comes back in, and you know nothing more.

chapter 4 early access

#soap x reader #soap x you #john soap mctavish x reader #john soap mctavish x you #john soap x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish #john soap mactavish x you #soap mactavish x reader #soap mctavish #john soap mactavish #mwritessoap #madi writes #selkie soap #peristalsis #remember that hot chef who went viral recently? that's who i'm trying to evoke with pub cook soap

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eowynstwin · 2 months ago

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peristalsis - v

selkie!soap x reader. depression. strangers to "lovers." shower sex. cunnilingus. smut. manipulative soap. oysters as an aphrodisiac. unstable narrator. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

You watch him over an open book.

It’s an old romance, something from the eighties. Classic bodice ripper, billowing sleeves, tight corsets, mullets and heaving bosoms and all. Naturally, it’s set on a pirate ship, the heroine as the unlucky spoils of a merchant ship raid and the hero a lusty captain able to pierce her virgin’s desire for sexual depravity.

It could only have been more pointed at you if it had been set in the North Atlantic—it isn’t—but you glare at Soap’s back anyway.

He must be able to feel it, because he stands straight at the wheel, shoulders thrown back, occasionally flexing.

The freak.

You’d realized the joke he’d been making, once your heartbeat had slowed. Hiding the pelt somewhere obvious enough for you to see it. You live in the age of the internet—you know what it’s supposed to mean.

And you kind of hate him for it. Now, post-coitus, you can’t shove it away into a box—he is the most attractive man you’ve ever encountered. Rugged and handsome, competent at everything you’ve seen him do, seemingly at home wherever he finds himself. Everything makes him smile. Nothing seems to disconcert him.

And a nice big cock he actually knows how to use. Certainly the best lay you’ve ever had.

What every woman traveling solo, you think, longs to encounter on a solo trip across the world, but will never acknowledge looking for. An answer to an unaddressed desire; proof that satisfaction is out there to find, if it’s searched for.

A lover with no conditions. Someone willing to strip your inhibitions away, knowing your protests are only token.

You had not been searching. You’d given up searching.

And now he mocks you—with every satisfied glance he throws over his shoulder.

“Good book?” he asks, all casual and pleased. “S’ one a’my favorites. Tell me when you get to the naval battle.”

You frown. “You haven’t read this.”

He gives a little huff of amusement. “Read all of ‘em, bonnie.”

No, this is where you draw the line. A good cook, a good fuck, and a romance reader? No. No, you absolutely will not take this.

“Sure you have, Johnny,” you grouse, “you read every single stupid book on that shelf. Sure. Hell, you’ve read books that aren’t on that shelf. You’ve read every new release from the last six months, even. Why not.”

He looks at you again over his shoulder, mouth curled. “Aye. Needed ideas, once a’knew you were comin.’”

He says it matter-of-factly, with only a little bit of pride. As if it was a natural step in the process of getting ready for your arrival—renovate the croft. Stock the fridge and pantry. Plan some island excursions.

Study the erotic mind of the average woman to divine how best to seduce her.

Your frown deepens, and you lift the book higher, making it a barrier between you and him. Loser. Couldn’t he just go to the mainland for a few days if he wanted pussy? Not like it would be hard to find, for him.

You resolve to ignore him for the rest of the trip. A petty endeavor, maybe, but it’s the only one you can make.

But six hours is six hours, and you can’t read the whole time. Periodically you have to get up to stretch your legs, and the windows wrapping around the bridge draw your attention to the sea outside.

Johnny drives the trawler at a remove along the coastline, keeping close enough to the islands for easy viewing. The denizens of the Hebrides are out en masse, enjoying the clear weather, joyfully populating the land- and seascape in the absence of human interlopers.

Porpoises, so much smaller than you might have expected, periodically catch the wake of the boat, swimming alongside, playful and curious. Gulls loop in the air above the dunes, fronds of grass fluttering in the breeze. Gannets, stark white, arrow down into the waves, wings folded back pin-straight as they spear their quarry—silvery fish that boil the surface of the water in their frenzy.

Some removed part of you enjoys their pleasure secondhand. The normally-grey ocean is vibrant in the sunlight, crystalline and sparkling and as blue as Johnny’s eyes.

He seems to be in a good mood, too, although that could just be because you let him fuck you. You feel his eyes on you even as you refuse to look at him, dancing along the curves of your body the same way his fingertips might.

At one point—“Bonnie, I know you’re sulking an’ all, but c’mere.”

He gestures you over to the cockpit, and—embarrassed at being called out—you join him. He brings a hand to the small of your back, stepping behind you and pointing over your shoulder.

A gray wall of passing cliffs, and crags of rock jutting up from the churn at their base. You see ten or twelve grey-and-white seals lounging across every available flat surface, some cuddled in groups of three or four, apparently unbothered by the periodic spray of breaking waves.

“No’ where I’d choose to have a kip, personally,” Johnny says, sounding amused.

You turn your head to look at him, hard. His eyes soften when they meet yours, and he tilts his head to kiss you, undeterred even when you flinch away from it.

His hand tightens across your back, fingers digging in. He sucks your bottom lip between his and caresses it with his tongue, as he edges beneath the hem of your shirt to spread his hand across the warming skin of your back.

“I’m mad for ya,” he murmurs when he pulls away, blush high on his cheeks.

“It’s been two days,” you deadpan.

He presses up behind you, open hand sliding around to press into the low part of your belly, right at the sensitive crest of your mons; you can’t help your gasp when, at the same time, his erection nestles into the cleft of your ass.

“No’ to this,” he purrs in your ear. “Feels like it’s been forever, for this.”

When his fingers start making their way beneath the waistband of your pants, you grab his hand and wrench it away, scoffing.

“You’re just a fucking horndog,” you sneer, betrayed by the heat spilling through your core.

“Aw, you break my heart, bonnie,” Johnny simpers, but there’s a mocking edge to it. As if he knows exactly what you’re hiding.

You step away from him, folding your arms across your chest and staring out at the basking seals instead. Then—

“There’s one in the water,” you say.

A few meters away from the rocks, a round head pokes up from the surface, bobbing with the rise and fall of the waves. Its eyes are slitted closed, nostrils dilating.

“Aw, he’s bottling,” Johnny says affectionately, when he comes over to look. “Look at his wee face.”

You remember suddenly your encounter of the previous day—another lone seal, resting apart from its fellows.

“I saw one on the beach,” you say, “yesterday, after you dropped me off. A big one. You didn’t say they might show up.”

“Male?” he asks, and you nod. “Peripheral male, then. I’m no’ surprised.”

You sigh. “And that is…”

As if magnetized, his hands find you again, this time settling on your waist. It seems that Johnny’s touch is something impossible to escape, in his vicinity. He drags them down over your hips and back up almost idly, as if he’s not even thinking about doing it.

“There’s dominant males, and then there’s the rest of ‘em. Only the dominant ones get to breed at the rookeries, see? And the rest of ‘em have to wait around for the females to leave to have their chance.”

He leans into you from behind, nose in your hair, and you hear him inhale as his hands tighten.

“Once a peripheral male finds a female alone, separated from the colony, ready to go back out to sea—well, that’s his chance to pounce.”

You frown, mostly to yourself. “No matter how the female feels about it.”

“We’ve been over this,” he chides.

He brings his lips to the curve of one ear, then the soft spot behind it. His nose finds the juncture of your neck and shoulder, where the capillaries that he broke with his teeth still throb whenever you press your fingers to them. He inhales again, deeply.

“Why do you do that?” you grouse, unwilling to give him the win.

“Like how you smell,” he says, doing it again.

His tongue caresses the bruise before he closes his mouth over it—but he goes no further than to kiss your neck twice more before returning to the wheel. It leaves you reeling, half-dizzy with arousal, and when you stomp back to your seat with a frustrated growl, he only glances over at you, smirking, and laughs.

He finds a berth in the early evening to park the trawler, and at that point you’re thankful for any kind of solid ground to set your feet on, as well as enough open air to disperse whatever pheromones have saturated the enclosed space of the bridge.

You’ve been half-tempted the whole time to make him drop anchor and drag him belowdeck toward the nearest flat surface big enough for the two of you to share; as it is, you’ve simply stewed in your own juices instead, hot with angry arousal and ignoring the slick pooling in the gusset of your underwear.

Johnny steps out into the cooling air in his usual kilt and sweater, and you once again huddle in his jacket, aromatic with his musk, as he leads you onward. This time, unlike the last excursion, he insists upon holding your hand the whole way, callused fingers worming their way between yours, the captured air hot and humid between your palms.

Callanish turns out to be a henge of standing stones.

Meters-tall megaliths, squarish and narrow like broken teeth, surrounding a burial site and extending in two directions as if lining a road. Inevitably evocative of its cousin Stonehenge, with the notable exception that you are allowed to go up and touch the stones with your bare hands.

“They used ‘em for that TV show,” Johnny informs you as the two of you circuit the main ring. “Well, no’ these, they probably had styrofoam for that, but they got the idea from these.”

You lay your free hand on the nearest stone; it’s cold, and rough to the touch, a day’s worth of sunlight evidently not sufficient to warm it. Tiny spots of moss and lichen cling to the old stone, green and eggshell white.

“Why are we allowed to touch them?” you say. You think of bronze statues, rubbed to a golden gleam by millions of tourist hands.

“That’s Lewisian gneiss, bonnie,” says Johnny, laying his hand, much larger, next to yours. His thumb teases the side of your pinky. “Doubt you could make much of a mark on it. This rock here? Three billion years old.”

You look at him, seeing his profile. The expression on his face is soft—not unlike the way he looked at you earlier, on the way here. He spreads his fingers over the stone, tendons furrowing down the back of his sun-weathered hand.

“No’ just older than us,” he continues. “Older than what we used to be, a’fore we were us. Was there when we first made fire. Was there when we came down th’ trees. Was there all the way back when we left the ocean for the first time—”

He looks at you, then. The setting sun catches in the dips of his irises, setting jewel blue aflame.

“An’ it’ll be there, bonnie, when we go back.”

The wind curls around the stones with the chill of the oncoming night. Even despite the jacket, despite the walk up to the site—you feel it penetrate beneath your skin, deep into your bones.

You choose derision, to reject the shiver.

“And you have this all memorized,” you say.

Johnny doesn’t respond. He continues to stare at you, mouth in a relaxed, but inscrutable line.

You suddenly remember that you do not know this man; though he’s told you enough about himself to fill out his background—you don’t know him. You don’t know how he feels about most things, what’s important to him, why he may find one thing or another meaningful. Not the way you’d have to, in order to understand why the gaze he fixes on you feels so significant.

Whatever you’re supposed to understand in the way he looks at you now, you don’t have the ability to discern. The only thing that occurs to you is that, perhaps, you’ve finally managed to offend him.

It does not satisfy you as much as you might have imagined—

In fact, the thought drops through your belly like a rock.

Again. You did it again.

In the one place you thought you’d never have to face this—you did it again. Here is someone who seems to like even the worst of you, and you somehow found an even uglier side of yourself to show him, a squirming thing that cannot help but sling itself around with no heed for the damage it can cause.

But when you open your mouth to say something reparatory, something that certainly won’t fix what you’ve broken no matter what he might say, his expression softens into something thoughtful.

“Visited when I first came here,” he says. Completely unbothered. “After the discharge an’ all.”

You blink. Sharp heat and the numbness of cold, warring across your face.

“Why?” you ask.

“Dunno.” He shrugs, and lifts his hand from the stone, smiling ruefully. “I was a bastard back then. Didnae wan’ anything’ to do with anyone anymore. Mad at the world, a’was.”

Shucked like an oyster; scaled like a fish. Heat wins out, even in the growing chill. Tender skin scalding itself.

“And what,” you say, reflexively nasty, panic whirring up behind your breastbone, “you thought—you’d get some sort of, magical insight here?”

Johnny laughs. “Naw, a’was just pissing my money away, bonnie. Thought I’d come up here an’ try t’ knock one over.”

Tight chest. Can’t breathe. You step away from him, far away, hide it like you’re looking at another of the standing stones, but a stabbing pain spears upward through your diaphragm.

In—count—hold—out—

“Could you?” you ask, wringing something like a normal tone out of your voice.

“Nope. Paid for it later, though.”

He says it casually. He hasn’t noticed. You reach out to the new stone, drag your fingers overtop of the rough surface, imagine every little bump flipping the friction ridges of each print like pages of a book. Cold—the rock is cold. The wind is cold, and sharp with the smell of rain. The jacket is heavy on your shoulders.

The jacket smells like Johnny.

“I’m sure the park wardens weren’t happy,” you say, feeling your heart slow in your chest.

“No,” he says, and—with the silence of a lightning strike—“I drowned, afterwords, first time I went to sea.”

You look back at him. The wind picks up, ruffling the ends of his mohawk; on the horizon, a rind of darkness splits the clouds from the earth.

“You drowned?” you repeat.

The hem of his kilt flutters and dances. His gaze is intense—the angle of his brow unreadable.

“Aye, bonnie. I did.”

Your ears begin ringing—as you stare at him, you get the sense of dreaming. There’s a distinction to Johnny that contrasts the landscape framing him, a sharpness so focused that everything else lenses around him.

“Why—why are you here?” you find yourself asking, though you’re not entirely sure why. The question leaves you as if surfacing on its own power.

The corners of his mouth quirk—although for once, he doesn’t smirk at you, the way he always does.

“You tell me,” he murmurs.

He holds you in the tilt of his head; in the depths of his eyes, currents pulling you downward. You inhale, and expect, for some reason, water to pour into your lungs.

Then a gust of wind buffets the two of you. Johnny turns, surveying the sky. Breaking the spell, he says, “Come on, let’s get back. I don’ like the look a’that storm.”

Halfway back down the path, the front overtakes you; rain begins sheeting down, ice cold, needle-precise into your hair and down your collar. Johnny grabs your hand again even as you start worrying about slipping, and though the torrent veils the way, the both of you make it back to the trawler in one piece.

Back on the bridge, a red light blinks on the panel by the wheel. While Johnny attends to it, flipping a switch and bringing a microphone on a curly wire to his mouth, you squeeze your hair out over the sink nearby.

“This is Soap on the vessel Sea Ghost,” he says, and waits for a response.

“Soap. Drop anchor somewhere. Looks like a storm’s coming in,” a gruff voice comes in.

“Yeah, Cap, we noticed,” Johnny says with a laugh, turning and smiling at you. “We’re moored, dinna fash.”

“Good. Looks like it’s just for the night. Clear enough in the morning.”

“Barry. You got everything? Shops’ closed tomorrow.”

“Never will understand why. But yes.”

“It’s a holy day, Captain,” Johnny says pleasantly.

Price grumbles something about damn Catholics and their damn rules, which just makes Johnny laugh.

Then, “Gaz is here. Made it in after you left.”

Johnny’s posture shifts. Similar to a dog hearing the turning of a doorknob; amorphous attention coalescing, finding a target to point at. Anticipatory. Tail twitching, winding up to wag.

It’s a new reaction, to you—you’ve never seen it before.

Johnny lifts the transmitter to his mouth. He holds it there for a silent moment, before saying, “And Simon?”

No response from the other end of the line, pulled taut, as if snagged. Then Price responds “Haven’t heard yet.”

Something passes over Johnny’s face. Some flex of the muscle in his jaw. An expression held in check.

That’s—

That’s familiar.

“Alright. Back tomorrow then.”

“See you.”

He replaces the mic on its hook.

Thunder claps somewhere over the distant, open ocean. The trawler creaks and groans as the wind swirls around it. Yellow lamps illuminate the warm, wooden space, but are unable to penetrate the lowering blackness outside.

Tension—you can feel it drawing tight, see his shoulder blades shifting closer together. It aches in the muscles of your own back. He faces away from you, like you’re not there—

He turns to look at you. He’s smiling, but it doesn’t look quite real. As if he’s forcing the expression on his face.

“Poor bonnie,” he croons, looking you up and down. The tenor of his voice is saccharin-sweet and thick. “How’s a hot shower sound to warm up, hmm?”

Your belly pinches. “Sure.”

He leads you down a steep flight of stairs into the stomach of the boat, showing you into a single bedroom. The space is cramped, wedge-shaped—barely enough room for the double bed shoved into the middle of it, sheets and blankets gathered in rumples across the top. The unique musk of its occupant wars with the smell of lacquer; the walls are lined with orangey planks, evoking the sailing ships of old.

Directly to the left of the entrance, an open door leads into a small bathroom, into which Johnny guides you, hands on your hips.

“Go’ plenty a’ drinking water stored upstairs so take all the time you like,” he says. “Here, lemme show you how the taps work.”

You half-expect him, after the instruction, to stand there and watch, waiting until you undress. And he does hesitate for a moment, hovering in the threshold, before giving you a practiced grin, telling you to enjoy yourself, a closing the door behind him.

You stand in the middle of the tiny room for an uncertain heartbeat. Assumptions lurching. Almost—hoping.

His heavy footsteps climb back up the stairs.

So, you peel off your damp clothes and drop them into a pile on the floor, stepping naked into the shower. It’s far less mildewed than you might have worried of a single man living alone. Hot water chases cold out of your hair, streaming with pressure far superior to the cottage’s installment.

You realize your toiletries are still above deck, in your bag, beneath the two paperbacks Johnny packed that you haven’t gotten to just yet. You could step out after him—

You don’t do that anymore. You promised yourself.

The floor sways as the shifting sea rocks the trawler in its berth. You reach for the bar on the wall to steady yourself.

One version of yourself is sometimes able to fool the other. The truth is, you could have told him to stop at any time. Put your foot down, hard. Just because he owns the house you’re staying in doesn’t mean he gets to decide what your entire vacation is going to look like.

You scoff at yourself, without any humor. Vacation. Like you’d ever believed this was anything more than self-imposed exile.

The truth is, water takes the shape of the container it fills.

There’s a chill still present in your hair follicles. Impossible for you to identify until now; live with an ache long enough and it stops registering, until it’s balmed with a moment of relief. This is where the addicts begin; experiencing, for the first time, a complete absence of pain, as if it had never been there in the first place, and, once that pain is restored, the ruthless pursuit of its elimination.

Cold rain outside, warm rain within. You stand in the flow, listless. Steam rapidly clouds the empty spaces around you, gathering in droplets on the wall, drizzling down again.

That’s where the mistake is. Pain is never defeated—only deferred. Its panacea provides only diminishing returns, until it’s useless. Until you might as well be swallowing sugar pills or drinking seawater to assuage your thirst.

But you keep doing it. You remember too well how it felt. You chase it down because now you know how it feels.

At some point you have to understand that it always ends poorly.

The bathroom door opens again, and then the shower door, spilling yellow light into the shadowed recess—

Johnny.

The expression on his face is inscrutable; mysterious, as his gaze moves down your body, following the streaming water. Your arms curl around your chest in a perfunctory attempt to conceal yourself, even despite the futility of the effort.

He’s naked, and half-hard, a refrain on the previous night. One hand holds the travel-size soaps and gels that he must have dug out from your bag. He steps in behind you—enclosing the two of you in together.

“Sorry, bonnie,” he murmurs soothingly in your ear. “Had t’make sure we were tied up for the storm.”

The space is not even suggestive of being big enough for two people. You hear the squeak of the shower wall against his shifting back, hot skin slipping against yours as his hands draw you back against him by the hips.

“Dinnae want you t’slip an’ hit your head,” he murmurs, massaging the fat of your pelvis, as if there’s any reason to make excuses for what he’s doing.

Half-raised hackles petted down too easily. You relax into his touch, even as you disdain it. Your heart tremors in your chest.

“What’s going on tomorrow?” you finally ask. “Who’s Simon?”

Pathetic. A jealous lover, after less than forty-eight hours.

“Old task force,” he answers, kissing the back of your head. “Little reunion, food an’ beer, mostly.”

You half-expect him to go immediately for your breasts, or maybe your pussy. His cock is stiffening against the small of your back. But instead, he opens one of your bottles, squirts some pearly body wash into the palm of his hand. Rubbing a little to lather it, he puts his hands back on your hips, and begins massaging it into your skin.

Inward, up your stomach. Pressing into the soft parts of it, with the water slicking his way. His mouth touches the back of your neck—softly. Tenderly. With all of the languor you rejected the previous night, and not enough space for you to slap it away again.

His lips press inward, looking for the bite he left, which he lays his tongue on as if in contrition, licking it like a dog with a wound. The comfortable warmth of the shower swelters with his added body heat; the steam pulses in time with the heavy beats of your heart.

One hand slides up your body, fording your thoracic arch, the wedge of his hand ascending the length of your breastbone. He cups your jaw, bubbles between his fingers, one of your breasts nestling between his bicep and forearm.

He tilts your head to the side as he cranes his head further into your neck, lipping at the space behind your ear, kissing delicate, sensitive skin, as his other hand drags soap around your ribs, beneath and over both breasts, up into your pits and back down again.

A doll in his hands, bent along the shape of his will. He shifts his hips, frotting his erection against you.

“Johnny,” you breathe. “Johnny, this isn’t anything. This doesn’t mean anything.”

“Aye, bonnie,” he hums. “Whatever you say.”

He licks a hollow in your throat.

His other hand dips lower, sweeping down into the crease of one thigh to round the lower swell of your hip; then back up again, fingers spreading.

The stall compresses your arms close against you; the only space you have available to lay your useless hands is on his arms. The dark hair you find with your fingertips is coarse, wiry, plastered to hot skin with water. The spray seeps between the both of you, streams in the runnels of flesh pressed together.

Between your legs, your clitoris heats, awakening even though untouched. You give a small whine, and Johnny huffs a little chuckle in your ear, suckling your neck as his fingers make the descent back, rinsed in the falling water, teasing your pubic hair before nudging your folds apart.

He finds you slick and aching. He only dips lower briefly to wet his fingers, and then, as he settles a light touch over where you’re most desperate for it, relief razes through your nerves in a sudden wash.

You search for the back of his head, slotting your fingers into the ends of his mohawk at the nape of his neck. He hums against you, hand dropping down from your jaw to cup one breast in his palm, weighing it, thumb flicking around the pert nipple in the same tight circle he draws around your clitoris.

Orgasm, usually so obvious on approach, sneaks up on you, quick and quiet, but when it takes you it floods you, rather than knocking you down. You tremble all over, the follicles on your scalp standing on end, the nerves down your back and sides bending like dune grass to a wind.

Your long, breathy cry reverberates against the shower walls, and you lean heavily back against Johnny’s body, grip tightening where you have your hands on him.

He twitches against your back, but he makes no move to chase his own climax. He only turns you carefully, when you recover, and lays his hot, open mouth on yours, tugging your hips close enough to trap his cock against your belly. This time, the wall is cool at your back, the crown of your head moving against it as Johnny angles himself deeper, sliding his tongue between your lips.

“C’mon,” he says, when he finally pulls away. His pupils are huge, black dilation swallowing the blue. The spray fills the empty spaces between the strands of his mohawk, fluffing the hair a little as it courses down the shaved sides of his scalp. “Need to get my mouth on you again, bonnie.”

This time, when he eats you out, he does it at his leisure. Licking honey off a spoon. So lightly that you whine at him, find the energy to bitch at him to do it like he means it, but tonight he does not indulge you.

No—he mouths at you, eyes closed, curly lashes against his cheek as you lay belly-up on the rumpled sheets of his bed. The heat of his tongue in your cleft is the only source of warmth you have as the rain lashes at the outside of the trawler, but the hot shower still lingers in your skin—

Humid. Sticky. Sweat gathering beneath Johnny’s palms where he holds your thighs to his ears, as if mimicking the way your sex will clutch around him when he enters you. Slick and tight and viscous.

When he crawls up your body—nosing at your belly, your breasts, inhaling as if your musk is something he’s trying to get drunk on—he fucks you slow and deep. You stop being able to tell if it’s the storm rocking the boat, or the weight of his hips rolling against yours, one of his hands on the headboard for leverage and the other on your mons, pressing down with the heel of his hand to feel the head of his cock moving in you.

Tacky skin catching on the grind; heart speeding up as he grins at you from above, thumb tapping your clitoris. Enough to wind you up. You reach for his hips with your clawed hands, digging your nails into the meat of his ass—firm, muscle tensed, twitching every time he bottoms out.

“Johnny,” you finally beg, on the edge of a sob, “please, Johnny, please—”

Breath leaves him like a steam valve turned, pressure carrying an uninhibited moan. He ignores your plea, hips rolling slow, forcing you to feel every inch of him in and out of you, every ridge—every vein pulsing on the surface of his cock.

His eyes are closed still; when the widest part of him catches the rim of you around him again, his mouth drops open, lips pink and bitten.

Lost—he’s lost in pleasure, in the feeling of you around him, pulling him in. You watch his chest as it heaves, the flex of his stomach as it tightens—the twitch in the muscles of his arms as the impact of each thrust ripples up his body.

Look at me, you want to say. Look at me. I’m right here. Look at me.

“Again,” he groans, choked, restrained, hands gripping your hips. “Say it again, bonnie—”

“Please—” you whine, on the edge of a sob, “please, please, please—”

Thumb metronoming at a quick tempo where you need it—you seize, back arching, tightening around him so narrowly you could force him out—

He snarls, sharp and hard, thrusting into the resistance, hands falling to fist in the mattress. Breath coming rough and fast, sweat dripping from his forehead into the cups of your collarbones and down between your breasts. Hard and fast now, pushing in as far as your body will let him, and a final, long moan tears from his parted lips, liquid heat flooding you as Johnny goes rigid with a climax following only moments after your own.

Pelvis flush with your thighs. He doesn’t let a drop escape, pushing against you, lifting your hips from the bed.

“Tha’s right,” he slurs, eyes hazy when they open. “Tha’s right, that’s where it belongs.”

He collapses on top of you, almost crushing you with his weight, as he seeks your mouth out with his. He moves his hips against yours with shallow thrusts, whining in his throat.

“Didn’t you—” you pull your lips away, too hot, too cold, buzzing and exhausted, “didn’t you just finish?”

He tongues at your cheek instead, and then down your neck. “Doesnae matter, is no’ enough. C’mon, bonnie, wrap your legs aroun’ me, please…”

After he is finally spent—long after you’ve had enough energy to do more than lay beneath him and let him use you as he pleases—Johnny diverts briefly to the galley, bringing back with him a plate of oysters and a pry knife. It’s his bed, so you don’t complain about shell fragments, but you resolve to make him change the sheets anyway, shifting uncomfortably to find a spot that isn’t soaked.

“Was on this boat,” Johnny says, as if picking up the thread of a conversation only recently dropped. He picks up one of the oysters and shucks it open. “When I drowned.”

The way he says it, you’d think it was a casual thing, something he barely thought about anymore, but the line of his brow is low and serious.

He hands you one half; you bring the shell to your lips and tip it upward. Brine slides across your tongue, flesh smooth and buttery. Johnny watches you with soft eyes before having his own.

“Price was with me. I told him to fuck off, but he said he wasnae gonna let me take it out alone the first time ever. I was a bastard back then, I told ya. We went out in a storm, like this one, even though any eedjit could take a look outside and know it’d kill him.”

You flick at the edge of the shell with your fingernail, looking down at your hands. “Why’d you do it?”

“Dunno. Had somethin’ to prove, I guess.”

“That you could still do stuff like that?”

He doesn’t respond, so you look back up at him. He angles his gaze toward the mess of your hair—the new hickies he’s left on your neck—the bead of your nipples in the cold. The hard angles of his face soften.

“All my life,” he says, measuredly, “all I wanted to be was a soldier. An’ I couldnae anymore. Even though I was better. Hell, I was better than better. But I couldnae go back. That was it. It all wen’ on withou’ me.”

He breaks open more oysters as he talks, hands steady and deft around shells and knife. When he finishes, he slides the plate into your lap, and reclines to face you on his side, propping his head up with his hand.

“We wen’ out when the waves were as tall as a man, an’ us hangin’ onto the railing for dear fuckin’ life,” he continues. There’s a faraway quality to the tone of his voice. “Only life wasnae so fuckin’ dear, was it? I could’ve held on tighter, I think. I fell off.”

“And Price pulled you out?”

That feeling again, meeting his gaze; caught in the arms of a whirlpool, being dragged down. A vial in a centrifuge, constituent parts separating.

“No,” he says, “he didnae.”

“Then…”

“Eat, bonnie.”

There’s a stillness to him that feels unnatural. Johnny is a man who should be constantly in motion, gesturing with his hands, bouncing on the balls of his feet, tapping any available surface with rolling fingertips. Instead, here in front of you, he’s still as a statue. Chest softly rising and falling, but otherwise completely placid.

He gazes steadily at you, down at the plate, and then back up. You sigh, and pick up another shell.

“I don’t remember exactly what happened. I remember getting pushed down deep, real deep, then getting forced up again, on a current or something. Not far enough to get any air, mind. I thought, I’m gonna die out here, an’ I didnae want to.”

He shifts then, a little forward toward you.

“That seemed important, you know? I didnae want to die. Dinna think the sea would’ve given me up f’ I did. It knows. Sometimes it doesnae care. But I guess that time, it did, ‘cause after I blacked out, next thing I know I’m wakin’ up on the shore.”

Something hard shifts in your belly.

“Cap found me a bit later, bringin’ the boat in. Gave him a real scare. Think it turned some of his hair gray overnight. After that…a’was no’ the same. How could y’be, after that?”

You—you don’t want to know any of this. You don’t care. You didn’t ask. His story drops expectation on your shoulders, heavy, custom-tailored, laden with understanding that sands your abraded nerves.

All of this is too much. The damp sheets beneath you, the food, the sex. The fact that you picked the last place in the world thought you could ever meet anyone, let alone someone who—

“And now you have a seal fetish,” you sneer.

Who understands.

Indulgent. This is indulgent, reckless, idiotic in the extreme.

Soap reaches out, and wraps a large, sun-brown hand around your wrist, the one still holding the oyster. Pulling it towards him, he opens his mouth and then tips the flesh from the shell. He slurps it down, noisily, mimicking the sound of his mouth and tongue on your pussy.

“Something like that,” he says, with a sharp, cocky grin.

He changes the sheets. Dims the lights. Plasters himself around you as the storm blows itself out, arm heavy over your waist, thigh and knee nested inside yours.

He’s warm at your back, musky with the mingling aroma of dried sex and sweat.

Sturdy. More real than anything that’s ever put its hands on you.

Johnny, who the sea loved so much it spat him back out. So treasured by the world that a bullet to the brain couldn’t even take him away from it.

Who, by the sound of it, means so much to the people in his life that they would follow him to the middle of nowhere just to keep an eye on him.

Bile churns in your stomach.

next chapter early access

a/n: two chapters left!

#soap x reader #soap x you #john soap mctavish x reader #john soap mctavish x you #john soap x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish #john soap mactavish x you #soap mactavish x reader #soap mctavish #john soap mactavish #mwritessoap #madi writes #selkie soap #peristalsis #'i'm going to write shorter chapters' writes this monstrosity #i am so not happy with this but we forge ahead nonetheless #hopefully I can get 6 up in EA next week. maaaaybe a double posting since the epilogue won't take long to edit. i think.

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eowynstwin · 4 months ago

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peristalsis - i.

selkie!soap x reader. suicidal ideation. strangers to "lovers." . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

When your mother asks you if you’re planning to kill yourself, you have to lie to her.

To be fair to you, it’s a half-lie. You have no plans. Courage, you find, is as slippery as an eel in gloved palms—you don’t actually think you could do it if you tried. You’re deeply averse to pain of the bloody sort, and doing the deed would take a will and an energy you don’t really have.

But still. You’ve stopped looking both ways when crossing a street. You forget the stove is on, hot oil in the pan popping like the report of a handgun. The sound of shattering glass is the only thing that makes your heart sit calm in your chest, and the only thing that can make you fall asleep anymore is the notion that when you die, the earth will welcome the molecules of your body back into its folds.

So a half-lie is not the truth. You sit in the terminal, the afternoon smell of airport coffee in your nose as you swear to your mother that you’re not looking for a cliff to jump off of, or a convenient wave to pull you under. You’ve always wanted to visit Scotland, remember?

You can’t tell if she believes you. Probably not. People not planning to kill themselves don’t blow their savings on a first class ticket over the Atlantic with no scheduled return flight.

Especially not after quitting their job.

The flight over the Atlantic is uneventful. Quiet as money can buy. You sip champagne at your window seat, recline as far back as you can go, and watch the ocean, far, far below. Its depths exceed, you remember, the heights at which humanity can fly—but you can’t really tell, looking at it from so far above. It looks like nothing less than a thin veneer stretched overtop the crust of the earth. A puddle that could barely cover the soles of your feet.

There’s not a single murmur of turbulence across the fifteen hours you’re in the air. Much that you might’ve welcomed it.

Your connecting trip to the Hebrides is much shorter. The massive sprawl of Glasgow shrinks and recedes as you leave it behind, replaced not long after by a spit of an island chain that, from a distance, hardly looks worth populating.

You land on Barra, on a sandy stretch of beach still wet and compact from the receding tide. There’s a cottage here with your name on the rental agreement for the next month, and your mind is already there ahead of you, thinking about arranging your toothbrush and toothpaste on the bathroom counter and sitting and listening to nothing but cold island wind in the grass. The cottage’s owner has graciously agreed to drive you there.

When you step off the plane, you miss him at first. You’re expecting someone completely different—an older man in cable knit, perhaps more mustache than face, and the morose demeanor of someone for whom sunlight is as common on the island as veins of gold. So your eyes skip over the younger man, even despite the sign he’s holding with your name on it.

But then you look again. Because with a man like him, you can’t not look again.

He’s wearing a sweater, sure. But he also looks like a rugby team maverick—burly and tall, rugged, tattooed, flaunting a dumb haircut because he’s handsome enough to get away with it.

He stands out from the few people in the airport as if the whole world has adjusted its lens to bring him into focus, sharpening his image such that anything in his periphery is too blurry to notice. He does not in the slightest look like he rents out an old fisher’s croft in the least popular place in Scotland.

But then you catch your name. Do a double take. Clutch your suitcase handle a little tighter, because when you approach, the man’s eyes widen, look you up and down, and then crease with a too-confident smile.

“Bonnie!” he exclaims when you introduce yourself. He has a deep, rough voice, burred and low. More still, he’s kilted, plaid hanging at muscular knees, with an odd speckled pelt slung around his hips.

You’ve never seen that before—maybe it’s an islander thing.

“You must be Mr. John MacTavish,” you say. Up close, there’s a weathered look to him, as if buffeted by the salt in the wind.

“Johnny’s fine,” he says, winking. His eyes are a lively, vibrant blue. The color of the ocean in some place much nicer than this one. “Welcome to Scotland!”

Then, incredibly, “Johnny” pulls you into a hug before you even realize what’s happening, brawny arms closing around you like the noose of a snare. You go rigid—what the hell?—but this man, whom you have met only just now, doesn’t seem to notice, compressing you against the blazing pillar of his body in an embrace that flattens your lungs behind your ribs.

“Um,” you manage. He smells like axe body spray and diesel fuel, and cold ocean wind. It wipes the forefront of your mind blank, like sweeping an arm across drawings etched in sand.

After at least five whiplashed beats of your heart, Johnny pats your back several times and lets you go, grinning.

“Sorry, bonnie. Scots are huggers.”

Then without warning, he reaches for the handle of your suitcase, warm hand nudging aside your own. “Let’s get you down there ‘fore the tide comes in. Canny wait t’show you the place, I fixed it up m’self.”

You let him take your luggage and follow; he sets off at an energetic clip that you struggle to keep up with. He gestures with his free hand as he talks, motions rising and falling with the tenor of his voice.

“You know you’re m’first guest? Was startin’ to wonder if I was gonna have to sell the place, no one seemed all that interested. Guess I can see why, no internet, barely any signal. Me, I think that’s a good thing, people spend too much time on their phones, y’know?”

You make a noncommittal noise.

Were you this cold before he let go of you?

“But it’s a great little place to get away, I promise you, nice and quiet, and I updated everything m’self. Radiator in the bedroom and everything!”

Another noise from you.

Thankfully, you reach his car—a small truck, older than the both of you, with only one row of seats and what looks like large spools of rope in the bed. Johnny pauses briefly to secure your suitcase beside them with a couple of bungee cords, and then opens the passenger side door for you to get in.

“It’s not too far from town too,” he continues as he slides into the driver’s seat. You attach your seat belt. He does not. “You got your essentials there. A supermarket—think you call ‘em grocery stores? There’s that and a cafe and a pub. No bank though, so let’s get cash now if you need it.”

“I have some.” You’d exchanged for a few hundred pounds in Glasgow.

“Good! You want to stop by the store? Took the liberty of filling up the fridge too, but if there’s somethin’ you want—”

“No,” you say.

“Alrigh,’” says Johnny.

You feel his eyes on you—when you look at him, he’s smiling again. You are not pleased to find, through the benefit of close proximity, that he has dimples.

“What?” you ask, suddenly self-conscious.

“Nothin,’” he says.

Johnny drives you across the causeway from Barra to Vatersay, the latter of which, he helpfully informs you, is populated by less than a hundred people.

“More wildlife than anything,” he comments, as the ocean outside the window passes by. The water is dull and gray, hidden from the sun by an overcast sky. “That’s what the tourists come for. You here to see the seals?”

“Seals?” you ask.

“Aye,” Johnny says, grinning. “They come here for breeding season.”

You ignore the quirk of his eyebrows.

The cottage stands alone, a ways out from the island’s main village at the top of a modest hillock. Island grasses sway along the dirt road as Johnny directs the truck upwards, coming to a stop a few meters away from the house proper.

It’s quaint. Thatch roof, cobbled walls. A generator hooked up on one side. There are flower boxes flanking the front door, although nothing’s in bloom; it’s the wrong season for it. The window frames are unpainted, and the glass panes, despite looking recently cleaned, are crusted with salt at the corners.

And it’s smaller than it looked in the pictures online. Even close up to it, the blue-grey sky overhead, swimming with dun-colored clouds, swallows it up.

You exit the truck into a cold breeze that tugs at the collar of your fleecy sweater. You’d read online that this time of year was the last gasp of summer into the autumn months in the Hebrides—it hardly feels that way, with the chill that drags its fingers across your hairline.

“It’s on a septic tank so y’ve got alright plumbing,” Johnny goes on, hefting your suitcase over one brawny shoulder. “Canny say much for the water pressure in the shower, but other than tha’ it’s alright. Matters more that it’s hot, ‘f you ask me—and it is! Come on, I’ll give y’the tour.”

The cottage is not big enough to warrant one. Johnny shows you the four rooms—kitchen, sitting room, bathroom, and bedroom—in under five minutes. It ends with him leaned up against the counter, arms folded genially across his plush chest, grinning at you like he knows some embarrassing secret of yours.

“Was thinkin,’” he says, scratching the stubble on his jaw with one thumbnail, “this’d be kind of a honeymoon thing, y’know? That woman with the time travel show, lots a’folks been comin’ here lately ‘cause a’her.”

“Is there anything else to do here besides look at seals?” you ask.

Soap gazes at you through half-lidded eyes, smirking. “I dinnae think you leave the bedroom much on a honeymoon, do you?”

You flush. “I never really thought about it.”

“So you’re no’ married, then?”

“No. Not—not interested.”

Johnny lifts one brow. “In marriage?”

“In anything.”

He keeps fucking smiling. You have a barely controllable urge to smack him; you settle for wringing the hem of your sweater, imagining it could be his neck.

“So what brings y’here, then?” he asks, tilting his head like a cat playing with its food. “If no’ a honeymoon?”

You frown.

The truth is, of course, that nothing brought you here. Vatersay, nor the Hebrides, nor Scotland itself were actually of any consequence. You’re ambivalent about the ocean, and you certainly don’t care about seals.

You just hadn’t been able to think of anything you wanted when you asked yourself that perennial question. You wanted nothing.

You wanted nothing.

So you found as much nothing as you could and bought the soonest first class ticket heading toward it.

Your only stipulation had been no language barrier—so here you are now, cursing the lack of such, because it means this man, who belongs on this island no more than you do, is bothering to try and talk to you.

“Just wanted some peace and quiet,” is what you decide to say.

“Needed a change, aye?” Johnny nods sagely, as if understanding. “I did too, when I came here. Was in the army. Special forces.”

“O-okay,” you say, because you hadn’t asked.

“Didnae plan to stay,” he continues.

He turns his head to look out the kitchen window; on one temple is the ghost of a scar. A starburst-ripple in the shaved side of his dark hair—nothing more.

But something about it suggests that the wound it closed around was a horror to behold.

Then he turns back to you, the corners of his mouth quirked. “But somethin’ about this place is hard to leave.” The quirk turns into another smarmy grin “Bet when your month’s up, you’ll know what I mean.”

It seems rude to say probably not. “Maybe.”

The radiator in the kitchen breathes a swell of warm air through the room, blooming with Johnny’s diesel-and-ocean scent. There’s very little space between you, him against the counter, you across from him at the sink. Johnny’s bulk claims what little room there is to maneuver, and if you tried to move away, it would require first moving closer.

“So,” you begin.

“Here,” he intercedes. “Wanna show you somethin.’”

The only reason you comply is because he leads you outside, which is a step closer to him finally leaving you alone. Johnny circles around the cottage, revealing a footpath that leads down the hill. The ground transitions from soil to sand as you both walk; the wind picks up as the sound of waves grows. Eventually you reach what turns out to be a small cove, hidden by the curve of the island, flanked on both sides by cliffs of only middling height.

The tide is only now making its way in; probably why you hadn’t realized it was here earlier. You think you’ll be able to hear the waves when you go to sleep tonight.

“Oh,” you say, unable to hide that it’s impressed you.

“Yeah,” Johnny replies, smug. “All yours. Come down whenever you like. Dinna recommend skinny dippin’ this time a’year, though.”

You look at him, intending some sort of flat response, but what you see stops your words up in the chamber of your throat.

There’s something…different about him. There’s a sharp glint in his eyes that wasn’t there before. A dangerous cant to the angle of his grin. He suddenly feels very real to you—

Like standing in front of a wild animal.

Realizing, at the same time it does, that there is no barrier between it and you.

He looks you up and down. He doesn’t even try to hide it; too-blue eyes jaunt from yours down to your throat, the span of your shoulders, lingering on your chest before drifting down your stomach and hips. His nostrils flare as he inhales deeply, shoulders lifting as his chest expands, and you get the strange sense that he’s trying to smell you.

The ice that slithers through your veins, drips down the rigid column of your spine, wars with the spike of heat that breaks across your face. You feel here. You feel very present, your heart pumping wet in your chest, electrical wisps zipping to every nerve ending and back up your cerebellum to remind your brain of every part of your existing body.

Suddenly you are in Scotland, thousands of miles away from home, freezing fucking cold, only half of all the money you have in the world left in your bank account. Tomorrow stretching out in front of you. The next day after it.

Panic, which you thought buried, turns over in your belly, grave-dirt too light to keep it down. Hard earth is beneath your feet. A light drizzle is starting overhead. You begin to shiver, your nervous system’s effort to warm your hairless mammal body up, to save you from the cold and the wet and the fucking predator standing two paces away from you while gazing at you like it can’t wait to break your bones open for the marrow inside.

“Okay,” you finally snap, though you’re unable to keep your voice from quivering. “I really appreciate you driving me, Johnny, but—”

His eyes flash. The ocean-depths of them shift with an awareness beyond your ken, the dark edges deepening, the vivid blue swirling. The expression on his face transmutes into something unknowable—like the difference between the look on a pet dog’s face and a wolf’s.

Something isn’t there that should be, and what is in its place is entirely unfamiliar.

What is in its place is something your species evolved long past being able to understand.

Then, as quickly as it appeared, the flash is gone. Johnny is human again, as if he had always been in the first place. The thin crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes crinkle, as he gives you what he probably thinks is a sympathetic smile.

He doesn’t seem able, or perhaps willing to hide how amused he is, though.

“Long flight, I know,” he croons, meeting your gaze again. “Dinna worry, bonnie, I’ll let you get your rest.”

Whatever you were about to say dies. Your mouth hangs open. Johnny backs away from you, hands casually in his pockets.

“I’ll take you to see the seals tomorrow!” he calls to you before he turns away. A sudden gust ruffles the pelt hanging around his hips. “I know all the best spots.”

He throws you a casual wave, and then disappears over the rise.

You do hear the waves that evening, when you lay down to sleep. The covers are soft over you, cozy and warm even as the ocean wind hums outside.

You can’t stop shivering.

a/n: last fic of the year (probably)! i'm so into this one tbh. i figured out the ending a while ago and i'm so dang excited to get to it.

#soap x reader #soap x you #john soap mctavish x reader #john soap mctavish x you #john soap x reader #soap mactavish #soap mactavish x reader #soap mctavish #john soap mactavish #how the hell is his last name even spelled #mwritessoap #madi writes

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eowynstwin · 3 months ago

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peristalsis - ii.

selkie!soap x reader. depression. suicidal ideation. strangers to "lovers." . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

You sleep long enough that, when you wake up, you have enough energy to cry.

It’s a big one. The kind of cry that threatens to turn your throat out, with how hard you sob. Alone in the cottage, far away from anything resembling civilization, you wail like wounded animal, choking on your own tears and mucus, losing track of your body buried underneath the covers—

But it happens at a remove. You watch yourself implode from someplace deep inside, not entirely sure why it’s happening at all—but long past trying to figure it out.

This is how it’s been for a while. There’s nothing special about it anymore. Nothing urgent. Most of the time, you are a blank space of a person, a vacuum where joy or rage or fear should be, but occasionally some maelstrom or another kicks up to fill it in, and your only course of action is to ride it out until it ends.

You’ve stopped trying to fix it. And you’ve stopped hoping anyone else can, either.

So you cry, until at last, you’re empty again. Or you’re too tired to continue. The difference is negligible, but functionally irrelevant. Once it’s done, you get out of bed.

The pressure in the shower is as weak as Johnny reported, but the water is indeed warm when you turn it on; you stand naked under the flow, arms hanging at your sides.

The day stretches itself out before you with nothing to occupying it, just as you’d planned. Nothing to work towards; no effort to put forward. Nothing, thanks to your choice of locale, to feel guilty about not seeking out.

A day of peace and utter quiet.

Suddenly—violent banging, somewhere in the cottage. It startles you; you jump so sharply at the noise that you smack your wrist on the soap caddy attached to the shower wall. The banging comes again—annoyed, you realize with no little bemusement that someone is at the front door.

You wrap yourself in a towel and hobble out of the bathroom to answer it, a piece of your mind on your tongue, dart-shaped and ready to fly—

Of course it’s Johnny.

Johnny, big and burly in a sweater, kilt, and pelt once again, two paper cups balanced in one large hand and a grocery bag hanging from the other. Whose dark brows shoot up his forehead as his eyes travel with surprise, and blatant appreciation, down the dripping length your body.

“Well, good mornin’, bonnie,” he purrs.

“What,” you grunt. A cold breath of wind chooses that moment to force its way through the door, gasping across the shower water still running in rivulets from your hair to the rolled edge of your towel. Goosebumps erupt from your bare skin in millions of simultaneous pinpricks—you flinch bodily at the chill.

“Ah, hell’s bells, don’t just stand there,” Johnny says, following the wind. “It’s freezin,’ go on, let me get in, hurry.”

You let him step inside, for some reason, and he shuts the door behind him with the heel of his boot. He wastes no time after that, heading to the kitchen to set down his things.

“Brought breakfast!” he says cheerfully. “There’s this bakery on Barra I thought you’d like, fresh doughnuts and coffee. Dunno how you take yours, but there’s sugar in the pantry and cream in the fridge.”

“I don’t want breakfast,” you say.

“What? ‘Course you do. I’m no’ takin’ you seal-watchin’ on an empty stomach.”

He starts unpacking the grocery bag and setting things on the counter while your jaw hangs open. Several things occur to you to say—I never agreed to that and what the hell is wrong with you, for starters—but your stomach growls at him before you can. The aroma of fresh-baked pastry wafts through the kitchen when he opens one box, and he turns to grin at you, cheeks dimpling.

“Do you get dressed, bonnie,” he says. “It’ll still be here when y’get back.”

It is less polite than he perhaps intends it to be, given that his gaze travels appreciatively across your bare shoulders. You cross your arms fruitlessly over your chest and, nothing else for it, retreat to the bedroom, feeling his eyes on you the whole way.

You return to the kitchen after having pulled on wool leggings and the same fleecy sweater from the day before. Johnny, one hip set against the counter, has a cup of steaming coffee in one hand and a half-eaten cruller in the other, crumbs at the corner of his mouth.

“Got anythin’ heavier?” he asks around a chewed-up mouthful. “Gets cold out there.”

You look down at his bare calves, broad and taut and covered in a down of dark hair. “You seem alright.”

“I’m used to it,” he says, shrugging—the muscles flexing under your gaze.

You purse your lips. “I don’t have anything.” You hadn’t intended to leave the cottage overmuch.

You approach the counter. Johnny does not move a centimeter, forcing you to stand close as you pick through the two boxes of doughnuts and feel the body heat radiating off of him, displacing the scent of fried dough with his musk.

“That’s all right,” he says. You’re close enough to hear the way his voice hums deep in his chest. “I can keep you warm.”

You snatch a plain glazed from the box and take two very large steps away from him. The hair on the back of your neck lifts as you press against the sink behind you. If he notices your reaction, it doesn’t seem to bother him in the slightest—he lifts the cup to his lips and drinks, eyes sliding closed with simple, obvious pleasure, dark lashes curling against his cheek.

You take the brief respite from his gaze to stare at him. In the morning light, on a full night of sleep, you can almost believe that whatever you’d seen in him yesterday had been nothing more than a misfire of exhausted synapses. An overlay of a dream; a circadian prompt to rectify nearly seventeen hours of sleeplessness. You’d been cold, and tired, and hungry. That was all.

You bite down on your doughnut, not really tasting it. The nerves along your spine twitch and contract around the memory of his flashing gaze.

His eyes open again, and he smiles at you. “Good?” He flicks a look at the single bite you’ve taken, looks at your mouth, and then waits for your reply.

“It’s fine,” you grumble. Then, “How did you get here? I didn’t hear the truck drive up. Do you live close by?”

“Sometimes,” he says. He looks pleased that you’ve asked, that you’re interested at all, and you immediately regret inquiring. “Live on a boat, me. Moored in the cove right now.”

“A…boat,” you say.

“Aye.” A wisp of dark hair, something he must have missed when he gelled his mohawk this morning, flutters as he nods. “Nice and cozy. Not as grand as all this, mind.” He gestures around with coffee and doughnut at the less than five hundred square feet of the cottage. “But it’s still a sight nicer than some other places I’ve slept.”

He’s likely hinting at his military service. “Okay,” is all you say, unwilling to entertain it.

He smirk—undeterred. “We’ll take her out once you’re ready.”

“I never said I was going.”

Dark brows lift. “Got somethin’ else planned for today?” he asks, incredulous, as if he never imagined you wouldn’t want to hang out with him.

“No, I—”

You wrack your brain. You have no intention of explaining to this complete stranger that the last thing you’d wanted to do, when you booked this trip, was really anything at all—and in fact, you hadn’t even considered that that might be something anyone else would care much about.

Much less proactively address.

“No,” you repeat, sulking.

Johnny considers you, chewing. His eyes do not stray, this time, to places they don’t belong; but there’s an insight to them. A sharp awareness. A perception in his gaze that is just as undressing, as if whatever is going on with you is visible to the naked eye.

“I figure,” he says, slowly, as if to coax, “you put your wee shoes on, an’ I’ll pack this back up, and we take it along.”

“You don’t have to do this,” you grouse. “I don’t need you to, like—be my tour guide.”

“Aye, but that doesnae mean I don’t wanna,” he retorts, smiling.

He shoves the last bite of cruller in his mouth and gazes patiently at you as he works it with his jaw, the muscles flexing along his temples as he chews.

Exhaustion, your constant companion, stares you down alongside him. It would take so much more energy to fight him than to go along with whatever he has planned. Energy you just don’t have anymore. And going along doesn’t mean you have to pretend to enjoy yourself—it’s not like you care enough about Johnny’s self-esteem to conjure up a happy face to show him.

You can go, and be a bitch about it, and once you do maybe he’ll realize you’re not at all worth the effort he’s making, and then finally leave you alone.

“Fine,” you say, which is how you end up on a fishing trawler headed south toward, ostensibly, a colony of breeding seals.

It’s an old vessel—that much is obvious. Its edges and corners are dull with the passage of time and constant maintenance, scuffed by innumerable passes-over with cleaner and cloth. Mildew competes with the aroma of fresh varnish as Johnny leads you onto the bridge, which is mercifully closed in from the ocean wind.

The interior is mostly wood of a warm, orangish variety—you can’t tell if that’s a decision made with aesthetics or function in mind. The space comprises a kitchen, surprisingly well-appointed with a stove, sink, countertop, and fridge, and a small sitting area with both couch and booth seating. Surrounding windows allow in the grey light of the morning.

“Bought it off an old bloke on Lewis,” Johnny says, taking his place at the wheel, which is in a little alcove off the kitchen.

If you’d thought steering a boat would have curtailed his chatting, you’d have been wrong—he seems to have no trouble with that and talking, incessantly, at the same time, as he pulls the vessel away from the cove and into the open water.

“All his family moved to the mainland, he told me, an’ this is after generations fishin’ these islands, even makin’ it through the Clearances! No money in it anymore, he said, not like you could make in some office somewhere countin’ someone else’s money.” He checks something on the dashboard in front of him, but it doesn’t distract him for long. “Held on for a while, but people just kept leavin,’ an’ he was gettin’ too old to go out on his own. Got such a good price on it, I think he was just happy someone else was gonna take up the tradition.”

“Did he sell you the cottage too?” you ask, and then dig your nails into your wrist for encouraging him.

“Yup,” he says. “No one else wanted it, but me? I saw somethin’ special about it.”

He turns to smile at you—no doubt pleased you made the connection. You avert your gaze.

“Imagine someday I’ll have my own family here,” he continues. “Good place for it. Nice and slow, not like city living. Can hear yourself think out here. Perfect place to have a few wee ones.”

“If people stop leaving,” you mutter.

He turns to you again. “I’m no’ worried about that,” he replies. He’s still smiling. “You came here, after all.”

You have nothing to say to that.

The trip is a short one—Johnny brings the trawler alongside an island he informs you is called Mingulay, a square mile smaller than Vatersay’s tiny dot in the North Atlantic. Unlike the latter, he says, this island has not been inhabited since 1912, and has been completely reclaimed by the ocean and its wildlife.

After he drops anchor offshore, Johnny disappears down a steep flight of stairs below deck, which he had not offered a tour of, and emerges a short time later with a large, bulky coat.

“Didn’t I tell you?” he says proudly, holding it out by the shoulders. “Here, turn ‘round.”

You pause in the middle of reaching for it. You don’t know exactly why you comply—it occurs to you that if you grabbed for the jacket, he could simply not let go of it, and you would end up exactly where he wants you anyway. So you lower your arm and, resigned, give him your back.

He steps up behind you. Warmth pours off of him, more than you think any human body should be able to generate.

You hear him inhale, deeply, as he brings the jacket to your back. As you slide your arms into the sleeves, you feel his exhale on the nape of your neck, teasing through individual follicles of hair.

“There w’go,” he murmurs, much closer than you expected.

You can hear the low hum of his voice in his chest; his hands linger on your shoulders far longer than they need to, heavy, big enough that his index fingers brush along your collarbones.

When his hands make to slide down your back you step away from him and fumble to zip the jacket up; he chuckles lightly behind you. When you turn to face him, his lips are curled—smug.

“Alright then,” he says. “Let’s get out there.”

He rows the two of you to shore in a small kayak, two pairs of binoculars in your lap as you huddle away from the wind. You’ll be walking to the haul-out, he says—getting too close to the breeding grounds, which he calls a rookery, would spook them, possibly causing a stampede.

“It’s grey seals we’re gonna see,” he explains as the two of you pick your way across the rocky landscape. “Not the biggest haul-out you could see, some colonies get into the thousands, but we’ll have it all to ourselves.”

He insists on taking your elbow every time the two of you cross particularly uneven terrain, even though you don’t need it. You think he takes your attempts to shake him off as proof of your lack of balance, because he grasps you all the tighter every time.

“I’m not a child, Johnny, I can walk on my own,” you finally snap at him.

“Just bein’ a gentleman, bonnie,” he replies nonchalantly. He does not let you go.

As you get closer, you hear the seals before you see them, and when their voices reach you across the open island, you stop dead.

Groaning, grunting, hissing in a cacophonous chorus. Some part of your hindbrain double-takes, reshuffles itself—some ancestral instinct always on the lookout for predation. If you’d been given a chance to guess what a colony of mating seals might have sounded like, you’re not sure you could have guessed what they sounded like.

Certainly not like what you hear now—

Like people.

Johnny grins at you when he notices. “Aye, it’s a right ruckus, innit?”

He leads you up a small rise, where he has the two of you settle belly-down over the machair to overlook the wedge of rocky coast that the colony has claimed for its own.

And when you finally see it—it’s underwhelming.

Perhaps two hundred long, fat bodies, in varying shades of brown and grey, lay indolently along the rocks, in groups of three or four, some heavily galumphing from one place to another while others roll occasionally from side to side. The shifting winds catch their scent and blow it uncaringly into your face; you nearly gag at the admixture of dead fish and ammonia.

It doesn’t escape you that this is a rare thing to witness; you are not wholly immune to the fact that you are only a hundred meters away from something most people only encounter on a screen. It’s just that without a swell of awed music in the backdrop, or a narrator’s breathless wonder at the miracle of pinniped life, what’s left for you to observe is a population of wet, stinking animals, shitting where they lay, vocalizing without cease while they laze about doing basically nothing.

Johnny does not seem to notice your disillusionment; he hands you one pair of binoculars, and directs your attention to activity along the shoreline. You follow to where he’s pointing; one larger seal is hassling a smaller one, which snarls at the aggressor as it thrashes around with its substantial bulk.

“Little one there—” Johnny says, “that’s a female, probably obvious. Big one knows she’s ready to mate, can smell it on her.”

The female bares her teeth and lunges at the bigger male, which flinches back but holds his ground.

“Doesn’t look like she agrees,” you mutter.

“She’s just givin’ him a hard time. She’s all in heat, see? Just makes her cranky,” Johnny says. You feel his eyes on you, and lower your binoculars to look at him. “She’s got to fight to feel all in control.”

You flush. “Right.”

“You don’t think so?”

“No,” you say. “He’s—he’s just bothering her.”

He gazes at you for a moment, contemplative. Corners of his mouth quirking upward. He does not reply for a long moment, long enough that you have to avert your gaze from his.

“Nah,” he finally says, and you don’t think you’re imagining the low, sultry note in his voice. “She wants it bad as he does.”

You scowl, uncomfortably perceived, and return your binoculars—the pair is still facing off, gurgling and growling at each other. The female is slim, almost sleek, unlike most of the other seals populating the rookery.

“Is she sick?” you ask.

“Hm? Oh, no, she’s alright. The mums lose a lot of weight when they nurse. Takes three weeks, and they don’t eat in the meantime.”

“Jesus.”

“Be nice if the dads ever brought ‘em a bite, aye?” Johnny agrees. “Deadbeats, the lot of them.”

The two of you survey the colony in silence for a moment. As the morning wears on, the cloud covering thins overhead, allowing cool sunlight to filter through. The temperature doesn’t rise in response; begrudgingly, you tug Johnny’s jacket a little tighter around you.

Then, suddenly, his hand lands on your back, between your shoulder blades.

“Got some pups over there,” he says. “Look, by the kelp.”

You find them; smaller bodies, white dinged with wet sand and dirt, lounge near their mothers or wriggle with aimless difficulty. They’re fluffy and round as plush toys, with shining black eyes and noses, and once Johnny’s pointed them out you can differentiate the higher, sweeter pitch of their cries from the overall cacophony.

“Sometimes,” Johnny murmurs, “search and rescue’ll get called out because someone thought they heard a baby crying. Some kid stranded or lost, right? Turns out to be a baby seal.”

“That’s kind of scary,” you say.

“Aye,” says Johnny. “Always makes me think that’s where the old legends come from, about seal people or mermaids.”

A small ways away, some of the mothers lay with their pups far into the surf, letting the waves break over them. You watch as one mother thunks her large head overtop of her pup’s as the water rushes toward them; the pup wriggles, and then, as the wave engulfs them, it begins to thrash, whipping up a panicked froth.

“Time for swimming lessons already?” Johnny muses. “Seems early.”

You’re horrified. “She’s going to drown it!”

The hand still on your back pats you consolingly. “Just watch,” says Johnny.

The wave reaches as far up the shore as gravity allows, and then begins to recede. The pup’s thrashing calms as the air meets its face once again; the cow allows the pup to lift its head, and after a few sputters, the pup seems no worse for wear.

“They’re hardier than they look, bonnie,” Johnny says.

His hand, heavy and warm even over his borrowed jacket, slides down from your shoulders to your lower back, and then he rubs, slowly, side to side, as if to comfort you—but the knobs of your spine contract at his touch.

“Last of the births this season, looks like,” he says. “Mum’s getting ready to leave—probably not the only one.”

Something hard drops into your stomach.

“They leave their babies?” you ask.

“Aye. Once they’re done nursing, they mate, and then they go.”

You look back at the other cows with their pups. One baby has its muzzle to its mother’s belly, quivering and suckling, while she lays with her head on a patch of grass. She looks uninterested—more, she looks disinterested. As if how voraciously her pup is nursing has nothing much to do with her, and she’s bored of even having to think about it.

Bored—and already looking forward to the next part of her life without a baby in it.

“That’s horrible,” you say.

“They’re solitary animals, bonnie,” Johnny says, not ungently. “The only time they’re really all together is for this.”

A line tightens between your stomach and throat, and you feel it start to build between your ribs. A tremor—foreshocks. The wind picks up, bringing a sharp chill off the ocean and up the rise that cuts into your stinging eyes, abrades the naked skin of your hands and the exposed part of your neck.

When you look through your binoculars again, you wonder how many of the pups you see have already been abandoned.

“Aw, bonnie,” Johnny says. There’s a kind of pity in his voice that has your hackles raising.

“I want to leave,” you say, yanking away from his touch and shuffling down the incline. “Take me back to the cottage.”

“Bonnie, it’s okay!” Johnny protests, rolling to his back to look at you as you stand. “The pups make it, they figure out how to fend for themselves.”

You glare at him, vision blurring. “All of them?”

Some part of you knows you’re being irrational—knows that nature is a cruel home, and that many children face worse fates than the seal pups. Abandoning the young, the needy, is no aberration; it is, in fact, far more the standard than the human practice, which lingers for decades—

Most of the time.

Johnny has no response. He holds your angry gaze, brows drawn low, mouth pressed into a thin line. It’s the first time that cocky aura, which seems to rest in every fine line on his face and every angle at which he holds his body, is completely absent.

He isn’t reflecting your anger back at you, though—he’s internalizing it. Letting it hit him, you think, and trying to use it to figure you out.

You do not want to be figured out.

You scoff again. “Take me back,” you repeat, and then you start walking in the direction you came, without waiting for him to follow.

Johnny drops you off in the cove, and thankfully does not linger this time before he departs—he bids you farewell after rowing you to shore, contemplation on his face, and then leaves you to yourself.

You retreat, seeking the cottage’s empty quiet.

As you perch on the couch you listen to the radiator hum—the wind blow over the reeds in the thatch roof—your own heart beating a drum in the arteries of your neck.

Percussive. Quick and hard. Like heavy knockers on a door. Pounding as if to burst through.

You realize you’re still wearing Johnny’s jacket, and you throw it off, disgusted with yourself. You get up and pace, and try to ignore it lying in a heap on the floor.

You do something you swore you wouldn’t do the moment you set foot on the island—you turn your phone back on.

True to Johnny’s word, there’s no signal. You picked this island, this part of the world, for a reason; for the past several years, a slow exodus from the British isles has vacated the need for dedicated cell towers or satellite or internet access, especially given that the only ones who remain are too old now to want it or need it or know how to use it.

It’s isolated. Cut off. Left behind by anyone with better options, and only clung to by those trying to preserve the only way of life they know.

Some kinder part of you belongs with that demographic; the part that was telling your mother the truth, before getting on the plane.

The rest of you holds your phone up and starts walking around.

In the furthest corner in the bedroom, you find a single bar of signal. A tiny chip of connectivity—a thin, frayed thread. Something you lied to yourself about cutting.

It’s a weak connection. Unstable. It could take a while—you stand there, waiting.

The screen dims. You tap it again.

Blank.

You unlock it, look through your apps. Wonder if maybe your notifications are bugged by your new SIM card.

Nothing—

No one.

You whip around and, with a cry, pitch the thing at the far wall—it hits the stone with a crunch, falling to the floor in pieces.

You’re out of the cottage then in a mad dash, door slamming behind you, driving yourself back into the wind. Far away—you want to be far away, far from everything, so far that nothing could possibly reach you. You trudge down the path toward the beach, banding your arms across your chest, shivering in the cold, and yet you hardly feel it.

Not worth it. No point. Waste of your time. Energy. All of it. Stop trying. Stop wanting. Nothing. Nothing. You want nothing.

You’re halfway down to the shore, not really knowing what you’re going to do when you get there, when you catch sight of a body on the sand.

You gasp, a sharp breath down your larynx, and freeze in a dead halt.

The body is completely still.

A swimmer? A diver? It’s dark, like it just pulled itself out of the ocean—or washed up—

Then, it moves. A twitch, a ripple across its bulk, and your chest rapidly decompresses.

A seal. It’s a large seal, lounging alone on the beach.

You stand motionless. You’re very close—much closer than you and Johnny had been at the rookery. You hadn’t contended with the sheer size of the animals, tucked safely up and away from them, but there is no illusion of distance now.

It’s the biggest one you’ve seen today, you’re sure of it. Bigger, you think, than most adult men. Its pelt is a riot of every shade of grey, splashy, like liquid paint thrown across a canvas. Black speckles scatter overtop of marbled white and cool slate, and down the center of its back is a broad, dark line, soft at the edges, which reaches all the way up to the top of the seal’s head.

The bull—it must be male—turns over. It lifts its head, and opens its eyes—

Fear suddenly zips up your spine as it looks right at you.

You stumble backward and trip on your own feet, landing hard on your ass. Johnny’s care with keeping enough distance from the colony rushes back to you, along with the warring couple’s bared teeth.

They can’t move that fast on land, right? They aren’t interested in people, right?

You scramble backward. It’s so much bigger than you ever would have imagined. If it got to you—threw itself over you—it could crush you with its weight alone—

The bull watches you placidly. Unperturbed.

You pause.

Its small eyes are dark and glossy—watchful and focused. The whiskers on its muzzle twitch a little as it takes you in. It breathes, deeply and evenly, huge body expanding and contracting at a slow, calm tempo. Its—his—nostrils flex, widening and narrowing, as he blinks docilely.

Unafraid.

If anything—curious.

Then he snorts, and wriggles in place. It startles a laugh out of you, more reaction than humor. Still watching you, the bull lowers his head back down, resting it again on the sand.

Your heartbeat abates. He doesn’t move again—nor does his attention leave you. Slowly, you sit up.

Wary. No sudden movements.

He doesn’t react; only continues to watch you.

You draw your knees up. Wrap your arms around your shins, and dust a bit of sand from your leggings. Rest your chin in the crevice between your knees.

There’s an intelligence in the bull’s eyes that is fathoms deep. There is a massive gulf between his experience of the world and yours, millennia of evolution separating your species from his—and yet…as you hold his gaze, you recognize the look in it.

Him, seeing you. And seeing you see him. The pendulum swinging between awareness of each other, and recognition of that shared awareness.

An empty space in the cloud cover passes overhead; sunlight touches the earth, warms it briefly before disappearing again. You wonder a little why this bull isn’t with the other seals.

Johnny would probably know.

“I didn’t come for you, you know,” you grumble at him.

The seal blinks. Awareness notwithstanding, you don’t share any language.

You sigh. “I guess you didn’t come to see me either,” you say.

But you don’t move away.

And you stay like that for a long while, you and he—regarding each other as the wind breathes out across the shore.

a/n: follow for more seal facts™

Also huge thanks to Lev for trawler listings/info. Didn't explore it much this chapter but Soap's boat will show up more soon :)

#soap x reader #soap x you #john soap mctavish x reader #john soap mctavish x you #john soap x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish #john soap mactavish x you #soap mactavish x reader #soap mctavish #john soap mactavish #mwritessoap #madi writes #am i happy with the photos i used? no #am i going to make an effort to change them? also no #does that image of a whirlpool look terribly erotic? oh yes #selkie soap #peristalsis

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eowynstwin · 6 months ago

Text

clawing at the door

ghoap x reader. jealousy. bisexual soap. bisexual ghost. emotionally constipated ghost. manipulative soap. ghost likes em thick. lightly explicit. MDNI. ao3

When Ghost first sees you and Soap together, his jealousy is hard to parse. He doesn't quite understand what he's feeling.

On the one hand, Occam's Razor. Simple explanations usually prove the truest. Soap is his boy, has been since Las Almas, and you are an interloper in their hard-won dynamic. Ghost does not absorb others into his life lightly, even less so then he allows them to strongarm themselves beneath the mask. He doesn't particularly like people, isn't really fond of their tendency toward abject mortality.

Soap's strong arms are a rare exception. And Ghost has nearly died too many times not to admire a nice round ass when he sees one—the kind that glistens and quivers beneath the weak spray of a communal shower. Some part of him has always kind of supposed the sergeant had been showing off specifically for him, too, when he dropped trousers and moaned like a whore when the hot water started flowing.

The boy certainly dogs his steps like that's the case.

Then, you: showing up on base one day, Soap's hand spread wide and possessive on the small of your back. Jewel-bright eyes following your every move. Blush high and feverish on his boy's cheekbones every time you throw half a smile his way.

So it's envy. So it's a crush, unrequited.

Simple problem, simple solution. Getting over by getting under and all that. There are apps for every heartache, and plenty of hard-bodied gym rats out there tripping over themselves to bottom for a brute like him, who can actually throw them around.

Not two minutes after making his profile (military, six-five, top), likely candidates start filing themselves into his inbox. Some part of his ego is gratified, at least. The influx of taint pics certainly confirms for him that his vanity, in fact, is justified, even if the last thing he wants to see is some random stranger's asshole.

He messages a jacked brunette with brown eyes and dimples, who led instead with a comparatively tame "hey big guy," and lets him pick the bar where they'll meet up.

And it's...fine.

The guy is fine. Equally as attractive in person as on camera, with curly hair and short stubble. He's there before Ghost, and directs an easygoing smile at him when he drops onto a stool at the bar beside him.

He doesn't even question the mask, though his eyes linger on it, half-lidded, the kind of way that suggests he's figuring something out about himself that he hadn't considered before. Not the first time it's happened for Ghost.

The problem with fine is that Ghost can't work up even much of a chub talking to him. The guy has a nasally voice and a friendly attitude that makes Ghost's teeth go numb from the sweetness. When they sequester in the dingy pub bathroom, the guy goes to his knees like an angel, and Ghost's cock actually softens more, thoroughly bored already with the notion of this random guy’s mouth on it.

The problem is, Soap would bust Ghost's balls for this.

Sure, Ghost could get him on his knees. Soap is a good boy, he'll take an order if he's given one. But he's also a fucking brat, and the moment Ghost pulled his cock out Soap would immediately start complaining about it.

Too big, too ugly, not hard enough, and when was the last time Ghost washed that fucking thing? How romantic, LT, making him suck Ghost off in a pub bathroom, hasn't he ever heard of good old-fashioned wooing?

He'd complain, Ghost knows, because he'd want, more than anything, for Ghost to just cut through the bullshit and shove straight down his throat. He'd run his mouth because the only thing he wants Ghost to do is shut him the fuck up, for once, and make him actually work for the praise they both know he's so desperate for.

And Ghost would give it. If Soap earned it. The fight isn't about winning.

This guy isn't putting up a fight. He tries nicely, licks all over the limp-hanging head and pale glans, but Ghost ends up making some excuse—Dad has cancer, Mom died, the usual—and leaving him there still on his knees.

He deletes the apps. He can invest in a fleshlight, and find some porn star another with enough of a resemblance to be functional.

Less of a hassle for everyone involved.

Problem solved.

And then he encounters you again.

You're walking out of the supermarket one night, with two huge bags over your shoulders, digging through your purse out in front of you. He has to stop you with one hand on your shoulder to keep you from running into him.

The evening is warm; your shirt is a thin camisole with little elastic straps. His palm meets your bare skin, and finds it soft and dewy with a little sweat.

You look up, startled, blinking as if caught in a bright light.

"Oh," you say, "Ghost, hello!"

"Bird," he grunts, wondering why he's surprised that you recognize him.

He pulls his hand away, and still feels the imprint of your body heat in its grooves.

"Sorry, I should have been looking," you say, smiling. It's a friendly expression, open and innocent—a daisy's petals spread on a clear day. "Johnny's making beef wellington tonight when he's off duty, so I went and got everything."

Ghost frowns. What kind of boyfriend lets his girl do so much heavy lifting?

He helps you carry the bags to your car. He's jealous, not an asshole. You thank him with a breezy laugh when he closes the hatchback—

"I'm sure Johnny wouldn't mind if you stopped by for dinner," you say, folding your arms across your ribcage. It presses your tits together as you cup your elbows in your hands, pronouncing the line of your cleavage with an uncomfortable eloquence.

"Busy," Ghost says immediately, staring very hard into your eyes. "Thanks."

You shrug, unperturbed. "Anytime. Good night!"

He stands in the carpark for a full five minutes after you drive away. He thinks he can feel his own heartbeat throbbing through the palm he touched you with.

Well, then.

Bereft of any opportunity to get to know you—as if it would even be appropriate—Ghost stalks social media until he finds you through Soap's Instagram. Your account is private, so he sends a follow request, expectations very low that you'd allow someone with a blank sky for a profile picture and only one post on their feed to follow you, "sghostriley" notwithstanding.

But—you do. And suddenly he has a decade of material to peruse, beginning with your last year of secondary school and leading all the way up to present, the most recent photo one of you and Soap at the top of some mountain, grinning at the camera in your hiking gear.

You don't post very many pictures of yourself, he finds. Instead you document interesting food you eat or make, crafts you're working on, nice scenery you caption with variations of "saw this on my walk today :)". It's all very domestic, sweet in a way without being saccharine.

Soft, really. Totally separated from the hard edges of the world he and Soap routinely throw themselves along.

And yet, honest in a way that makes your version of the world feel more like the real one, and his and Soap’s the nightmare.

Ghost hasn't been with a girl—let alone been interested in one—in years. It isn't that the attraction had ever died, exactly. Rather, it simply became so complex, so twisted in on itself and trapped beneath years of grown-over scar tissue, that he'd made an unconscious decision never to confront it. He ignored Price’s stories about his wife’s antics at home, Gaz’s perennial heartbreak after strings of failed dates—

Soap’s lurid bragging about the women he’s taken home from various pubs.

(Were you one of those pub girls?)

So, here it is now, confronting him instead. Reminding him, in a pretty camisole, just how very much it exists.

In the carpark, there’d been a bead of sweat slipping down your neck as you’d waved him goodbye. He finds himself wondering how long it would’ve taken to slide all the way down to the slope of your breast, if he didn’t catch it with his tongue first.

He continues through your Instagram. The majority of your selfies show up, he guesses, after the beginning of your relationship with Soap.

Earlier pictures of you make your discomfort obvious. You don't like the way you look, and it shows in the tension on your face when confronted with a camera lens. But later on, you gain confidence. Your expressions are softer as you show off a new haircut or glasses.

And when the first picture of you with Soap shows up, it's like seeing someone glowing from the inside.

Your head is tucked into the juncture of his shoulder and neck. The smile on your face is soft, small and lovely in how little you're clearly thinking about it.

You're happy.

It floors him. A happy girl, settled into the embrace of a man who’s made her feel that way.

Piece of work, he is. Could ogle another man's ass without shame, but present him with that man’s girl and suddenly it upends his entire sense of self.

Some old cunt psychiatrist would have a field day analyzing him.

Ghost skips the apps and, following in Soap’s footsteps, heads back to the pubs.

It’s worse.

Not that he doesn’t have options sidling up to him, that is. It seems like all he has to do is sit at the bar and wait, and women circle their way into his orbit, not really talking to him but letting him know, simply by hovering, that they’d love for him to talk to them. Batting their lashes, laughing near him seemingly at nothing.

Up to him to make the first move then. It seems to him like the rules haven't changed over his long absence from the dating pool.

Therein lay the snag—Ghost doesn't know how to talk to women. Not that way, the way one says without saying it that he'd like to take her home and bend her over the back of his couch. Say that to a man at the right bar and that was his evening sorted, but Ghost has a feeling that won't play as well among people with cat-shaped brass knuckles on their keychains.

He's not much of a talker, period. Soap yaps enough to fill in his side of the conversation whenever they're in the field. And you...well, he doesn't know about you. Ghost has the uncomfortable feeling that he'd try for you, and fail miserably.

The bartender slides a drink in front of him, distracting him from his agonizing. When Ghost gives him a questioning look, he nods in the direction of a table behind him.

One of the barflies has made the first move.

She winks at him when he raises the glass at her. She’s pretty—her dark makeup makes her eyes look angular and mysterious, and her red dress is tight, thin, and low-cut. Her exposed chest shimmers, as if she dusted some sort of powder across her collarbones before making her way here.

Sparkly and colorful, like a lure on a line. Ready to hook something and pull it in.

(Your camisole had been threadbare and lined with cheap, fraying lace. A favorite of yours, probably, something you wore when you wanted to be comfortable, and didn’t care who thought what about it.)

Ghost notices other men are eyeing the woman, and a couple of them send nasty glares his way. That is, they do before promptly averting their gazes once they see what he looks like.

He can have this, then, if he wants it. He just has to reach out and take it.

He feels your warmth in the palm of his hand again. The breeze of your laugh brushes his cheek with a soft touch.

He sends the woman one of her own drink, drops forty quid on the bar, and leaves without looking back.

Another dinner invite comes his way, this time courtesy of Soap himself.

“She told me she met you at the store,” Soap says, one afternoon when they’re in the changing room. “Really nice of you to help her out, LT.”

“You weren’t there to do it,” Ghost grumbles. Soap has been prancing around shirtless for fifteen minutes, faffing about while Ghost waits for him to leave so he can adjust his erection.

“I didn’t tell her to get everything!” the sergeant protests. “She just went and did it herself.” Then Soap’s eyes go all dreamy and stupid. “She’s grand, isn’t she.”

Ghost grumbles again, something noncommittal.

“Anyway, dinner’s at seven, and I’ll send you the address,” says Soap, pulling a thin t-shirt over his head. Ghosts watches him yank the hem down over his pecs, covering the toned plane of his abs.

Soap winks at him. “See you there, Ghost.”

Ghost grunts.

Soap does, in fact, see him there.

He goes out of resignation. Or maybe with some notion that seeing Soap and you together again will finally vanquish whatever sits on his chest so heavily whenever he thinks of the two of you.

Soap’s the one to answer the door. “There he is, the braw wee bastard!”

“Soap.”

From the looks of it, it’s your flat. It’s nicely decorated without being too over-designed, something warm and comfortable and welcoming. When Ghost steps inside, he’s hit immediately with the smell of seared pancetta and garlic.

The sergeant leads him through the flat. Ghost has a bottle of wine under one arm, having remembered at the last minute he should probably bring something along. You’re in the kitchen, stirring a pot on the stove.

“Hi, Ghost!” you chirp when you look over your shoulder. “Ooh, good, that’s drinks settled. Hope you like bolognese. It’s all I know how to make.”

“S’fine,” Ghost says, which he would say even if bolognese made him violently ill.

“Ach, you can make more than that,” Soap says, retrieving three long-stemmed glasses from a cabinet. “Pour a nice glass of water.”

You snatch the dish towel hanging from the oven handle and give it a snap in the general direction of Soap’s ass. He laughs and dances out of the way.

“There’s a bottle opener in the island drawer, Ghost,” you say cheerfully. You're pretty tonight, in a loose t-shirt and soft-looking joggers. Casual, like you don't have a guest over at all.

Like it's just a night in with your boyfriend.

Ghost pops the cork as Soap sets the glasses down. After he pours, the sergeant delivers a glass to his girlfriend, and there’s a brief moment of quiet as everyone sips and the sauce on the stove bubbles.

It’s all so nice and normal as to make Ghost’s hackles raise just in anticipation, although he knows there’s no reason for it. Truthfully, he almost hadn’t come. The thought of you and Soap, and Soap and you, in the same room, together, a unit, had made his stomach clench up so tight that he though he might not be able to get any food down.

But some part of him needed to come, and see this. Test out Pavlov’s theory, to see if enough negative reinforcement could break him of this borderline manic fixation. If he could associate Soap and you with romantic nausea, and nothing more, maybe he could finally stop jerking off every night to no satisfaction.

Because he had, in fact, found a porn star who looked like Soap. More tattoos, and a buzz cut rather than a mohawk, but Ghost couldn’t be picky.

The real shock had been to find that this proxy often partnered with a girl who looked enough like you to be uncanny. Too skinny, definitely, but in the one video Ghost had watched of them together, he could have sworn, as the lookalike reamed her from behind—

That it was you looking at him over your shoulder.

Looking at Soap. Or, looking at Ghost, behind him.

At that moment in the playback Ghost had come so hard, cock blazing red and raw in his hand, that the notion had liquified a little. So he couldn’t be sure what the thought had originally meant.

He hadn’t been brave enough to watch another.

“This isn’t bad,” Soap says after tasting the wine. “Nothin’ on a good whisky, mind.”

“Don’t neg your lieutenant, Johnny,” you say. “This is good, Ghost, thank you.”

Hearing Johnny fall from your lips so casually threads something uncomfortable between Ghost’s intestines. Uncomfortable, because he likes it.

Had Soap told you to call him that? Or had you decided on it all on your own? Did Soap think of Ghost whenever you said his name? Did he think of you whenever Ghost did?

“Simon’s fine,” he replies.

It escapes him before he even thinks about it. The same way he’d taken his mask off in Las Almas and looked directly at Soap, wondering in some hidden part of himself if the sergeant was impressed.

“That’s a nice name,” you say, swirling the wine in your glass. You take another sip, closing your eyes to savor it, and then, tilting your head like a little bird in thought, you pour a stream of it from the glass into your pasta sauce.

“Suits him, aye?” Soap says, side-eyeing Ghost with amusement. “Right posh name he’s got for a big scary bugger. Hidden depths, him.”

“Yeah, unlike you,” you snark, stirring.

Soap slaps a big hand over his heart. “Ach, lass, you wound me always.”

“Someone has to keep you humble,” you say, grinning. There’s a charming twinkle in your eyes.

“You gonna let ‘er get away with that, sergeant?”

He surprises himself by saying it. But something in the way you and Soap bicker—absent of the usual sugary drivel, as if the two of you have skipped over the honeymoon phase and stuck the landing right into stable commitment—invites him in.

It's magnetic, almost. It seizes the spinning needle in his brain, draws it to a standstill. Evens out the landscape, so he knows where he can go.

“You’re absolutely right, LT,” says Soap, who smacks his lips, sets his wineglass aside, and bum-rushes you.

You shriek as he captures you in both arms, lifting you off the floor and whirling you around—both the spoon in one hand and the glass in the other fling drops of red and white absolutely everywhere. And then you’re giggling as Soap wedges his face between your neck and shoulder and shakes his head like a dog, probably biting down.

Soap growls; a big smile takes over your face, eyes squeezed shut as you laugh breathlessly. The sergeant’s broad, brown forearms have yours pinned up against your chest, pressing your breasts together.

“Not fair, Ghost!” you exclaim as Soap’s growling noises turn into obnoxiously loud kisses. “No pulling rank in my house!”

“Two against one, hen, you’re outnumbered,” Soap counters. “What should we do with this one, eh, LT?”

“See if I ever cook for you two again, is what!” you protest, still grinning with delight. You kick your legs to no effect.

Soap, also grinning, slots his face back into your neck. You giggle again, complaining that it tickles.

Some incomplete circuit finally connects.

Order given. Girlfriend “punished.”

Soap making you laugh because Ghost told him to.

Not one. Not the other. Both.

“Think we can let ‘er off the hook this time,” he says, feeling dazed.

The pictures on your Instagram, with you and Soap together. The both of you, smiling together, wrapped around each other, standing at the top of a mountain and grinning what the two of you get to share.

Soap's hand spread on your back.

“Aye, sir,” Soap says, setting you down. You’re still laughing a little as you go to check the sauce, and Soap finds a towel to clean up the mess he made. Ghost reels in the meanwhile.

There’s an imprint of Soap’s teeth on your neck.

They wouldn’t be there if Ghost hadn’t sicced Soap on you.

He’s still reeling as you begin plating dinner, and Soap sets out the silverware. When everyone sits down to eat, the sergeant tops up everyone’s drinks.

“I hope you like it,” you say to Ghost, setting his plate in front of him. There's a shyness to you, a verity to your concern for his opinion.

“Oh, he will,” Soap says, grinning.

He trails the tips of his fingers along the back of your arm as he directs that jewel-blue gaze at Ghost. It's sharper than Ghost has ever noticed before—

“The LT has good taste. Don’t you, Ghost?”

And with his other hand, he raises his glass to the knowing smirk on his lips.

a/n: I can't use arse, I know it would be more accurate but I just can't I'm sorry

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eowynstwin · 6 months ago

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by the way Soap eats ass no matter what you've got between your legs BUT there's a special place in his heart for going down on pussy, making his way further south as the bird he's got in his arms protests, and then hearing those protests turn into soft, breathy little moans as they realize oh, that feels really good—

#mwritessoap #soap x reader #he likes unlocking things in people

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eowynstwin · 7 months ago

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Don’t wear a thong around Soap. You’ve been warned. The moment he catches sight of it, you’ve already passed the point of no return—he’s hooking it with his fingers, dragging you to him and pulling until the gusset is yanked tight against your folds, tight as a bowstring and pinching around your clit like a bully. Soap is so mercilessly curious whether or not you can come from this alone, and if not—well, here, bonnie, why don’t you rub up against his thigh, see if that helps any. No? It doesn’t? Maybe you’re just not trying hard enough, go on—try harder.

#mwritessoap #soap x reader #john soap mactavish #mean bully soap supremacy

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eowynstwin · 2 months ago

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peristalsis - vii

selkie!soap x reader. depression. strangers to “lovers.” suicidal resolve. major character death. violent drowning. a reckoning. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

When you’re sure that Johnny’s friends have left, you return to the beach. The wind has died down in the late afternoon; the clouds sit heavy and motionless in the sky.

Night is coming, and it promises to be cold. It hangs in the wary stillness of the air, in the waiting quiet. The seabirds’ calling is absent; the dune crickets’ singing has ended.

He’s there on the sand. Somehow, you knew he would be. Felt it, even before he came into view. He stands by the kayak, almost as if he’s been waiting there for you.

You hold the folded pelt with both hands against your stomach as you approach. The fur is so soft against your palms, your fingers. Cool from having spent a night in the ground.

He looks at it with sharp eyes. Then, up to you, expectantly.

His eyes on you in the cottage bedroom, moonlight shifting in them. Teeth in your neck. The taste of brine in your mouth.

Pearls in your memory. Parting gifts to enjoy, as you come to the close.

“Missed you at the end there, bonnie,” he says, even and purposefully steady. “The boys were glad to meet you.”

He’s known—the whole time. He always has. You don’t know how you know this, but you do.

“I’ve had a nice time with you, Johnny,” you say, when you’re only a few paces away from him. “But I think it’s time for me to go.”

Three days. That’s all it’s been. Nothing much, objectively, to say goodbye to. A good way to end things, truthfully, with the aftertaste of good food still on your tongue, the heat and girth of him still lingering inside you. The etchings of his calluses still fresh on your skin.

A kind ending. A gentle one. Better than you and he deserve.

You hold out the pelt.

He looks at it. Mouth a tight line. Brows low and flat. Then his gaze moves to you.

“Where will you go?” he asks, still steady.

“I’m not sure,” you say. “Maybe—Amsterdam. Does it matter? I don’t know.”

“Just like that,” he says flatly. “After everything.”

You frown. “I was always going to leave, Johnny. Remember? I only booked the place for a month. This is just…earlier.”

Something frenetic buzzes in his posture. The slight lean forward in the way he stands. The angles of his face seem harsher, more pronounced. Eyes dark as wet stone.

“Johnny, just—” you shake the pelt at him, still holding it out. “Just take it, okay?”

He looks at the pelt again, and then back at you.

At it, then you.

It—you—

Johnny lunges.

In one swift surge forward he snaps the pelt from your hands and flings it aside. As it flutters to the ground his hands whip at you, seizing fistfuls of your shirt a half-thought before you realize it, wrenching you forward.

“What the fuck?!” you cry, but then you’re off your feet, falling toward him, arms flailing as you lose your center of balance. You topple into him, and he hooks you beneath the shoulders with the iron bands of his arms, stepping away from the kayak, and only for a moment do you think that maybe he’s going to bring you back to the cottage before he starts dragging you in the opposite direction—

“Johnny, no,” you breathe, as you hear a wave break on the sand,“Johnny, no!”

You start to kick and thrash. You throw yourself against his grasp, dig your heels into the sand, try to find the meat of his forearm with your teeth, but he is resolute. Unstoppable.

You start to scream.

The waves eddy around your feet, rise up to engulf your ankles, your calves, as Johnny roils the water with wide, unfaltering steps, deeper in—

The water closes around your thighs. Your waist.

This is happening. This is really happening—

“Had a month to get to this, bonnie,” says Johnny, over your screaming, rough and harsh and completely unrecognizable. He slings you around to face him, jaw set hard, the muscles in his temples flexing as he clenches his teeth. “But I guess we’re doin’ it now.”

“Johnny,” you plead, “please don’t, Johnny, please—Johnny, no, no, no, no—!”

He clamps his hands on your shoulders and shoves you downward. You claw at him, push against the seabed, but your lover is too strong, immune to your fighting, and you are barely able to inhale before he forces your head below the water.

Frigid cold—it rushes into your ears, through your hair, knife-sharp and paralyzing. Salt flooding the open canals of your nose—

You close your throat. The surface swirls above you, distorting him, rippling and folding in on itself as a wave recedes. Hope waits for the retreating water to expose you, but he has dragged you out too deep, far enough that even the lowest point of the backwash still submerges you.

Seawater, eroding cilia, ramming against the rolled stone of your epiglottis. Burning the film of your corneas.

You reach up, swinging your hands at his face, but the distance of his straightened arms, muscles flexing to hold you down, is too great; you beat at empty air, or collide with the rock-hardness of his shoulders.

Another wave comes in, deepening the surf around you. You kick out, knee upward, wrench against him—you just need him to loosen his grip once, for just one moment, and then you can get away. You try to pry his fingers up, but they may as well have rooted in you.

Lungs pulsing. Throat already fighting to open. Chest heaving, diaphragm beating upward to pull in air. Pain lancing up your chest, unimaginably sharp, head so heavy it might burst—

You throw yourself to one side, kicking against the sand, and physiology subsumes your control. The cost of fighting is breathing. The floodways open—the ocean rushes into your throat—

Salt abrades the walls of your esophagus, claw-slashing downward. Acid bypasses the filters of your alveoli, honeycomb structures collapsing to the pressure, to the spasming of your lungs desperate to send oxygen to the rest of your body. Your diaphragm contracts—your chest convulses to cough, to force water out, only to welcome more of the sea in.

You beat at Johnny’s arms again. All you manage is to throw water against him. He is a sea stack above you. A pillar. Unmovable.

Holding your body against his in the bedroom, frighteningly strong, moving against you like the ocean itself—

The water churns above you with your struggle. You cannot see his face. All you see is the unstable shape of his silhouette, wavering lines distorting the edges as the corners of your vision darken.

More seawater, expanding your chest. Heart stuttering between your lungs, yanking in the last of your oxygenated blood, with nothing to send back out. The weight of your body swells, arms too heavy to hold up. They crash into the water before you force them back up again, searching and unwieldy.

Perception narrows. Him, and you. That’s all.

Sunlight through the window the next morning, rimming him in gold. The heat of his shoulder pressed to yours.

The seawater steals the tears from your eyes, throat convulsing on a sob you cannot make.

Grinning as you shared oysters.

You slap your hands against his arms, clapping your palms to whatever they can find, begging, praying—

Him moving inside you, his warmth, his smell, the weight of his tongue in your mouth. The tug of his hand on your arm.

His smile, his voice, his hand in yours—

Fists like weights holding you down. Fire in your chest. Too full.

Upward—something in you tugging upward.

You want to live. You want to live. You want to live—

It’s done.

Johnny lifts your body from the surf and carries it back to the beach. You fit in his arms as if they were the mold you were cast from.

He knew you would the moment he saw you in the airport. Perfect. You were perfect for him. He saw it in the angles of your body, the way you stood, the emotions moving behind the mask of your face.

He tried to explain it to Price once—the seeing. The knowing.

How he could look straight at his old captain, for instance, and know, without ever hearing the man say a word, that he felt responsible. For everything. For the gunshot. For the months afterword. Even though he hadn’t chosen to discharge Johnny himself, Price saw the mold of his hands in the shape his sergeant’s life had taken.

It’s how he knows Gaz couldn’t see the change in him, because he saw what he wanted to see—his best mate whole and healthy, thriving in a new stage of his life.

It’s how he knows Ghost doesn’t even recognize him anymore. Not really.

And it’s how he knows you’re just like him.

He lays you down on the sand, cradling the back of your head so it settles lightly down. Stretches your legs to rest straight out. He aligns your limp arms with the length of your torso, turning your hands upward so the sand will not cling to your palms.

Beautiful. Even with your face slack. Eyes half-open, unseeing. Mouth parted; seawater dripping from the corners.

Your feet touched the island the same way his did, years ago. Running away. Looking for the end, without really trying to find it. It was in the set of your brows, the tight pull of your mouth against your teeth.

Life had gone in every direction opposite of your intention. And it had left you alone.

Johnny smooths a few stray hairs away from your forehead, and kisses the place between your brows. The little line that has sat between them this whole time is gone, smoothed away. He kisses the bridge of your nose, and then your mouth, and then stands.

It took him a while, back then, to make the decision. It was hours before he woke to find Price watching him, sitting despondent on the sand, tears tracking salty down the older man’s face.

He goes to the place he threw his pelt away and retrieves it, shaking it out. Holding it in his hands assuages the anxiety that has wriggled in the back of his mind since the day he shoved it into the lintel of the croft. He’d known where it was, but survival instinct prevails over logic—for the rest of his life, he will always fear its loss.

It’s a consequence, but not one he’d been unfamiliar with.

And, in the end, preferable to the alternative.

He lowers himself to the sand a little ways away from you, propping his knees up and spreading the pelt across them.

When he had done this—he’d done it alone. It had been close. He almost hadn’t made it.

If he takes up this vigil—if he stays, the whole time, watching you—you’ll make it. It’s not a matter of hope or belief. It’s a matter of knowing.

He knows every time he looks into your eyes. Every time he’s been inside you. Every time your body has risen to meet his touch.

You want to live.

So he sits back. He keeps his eyes on you.

And he waits.

The sky claps you between its palms and hurls you back down the gravity well—

You vomit up the ocean.

Panting, with burning lungs. Closer—everything is much, much closer, loud and bright, and suddenly, individually distinct.

Channels of sound and aroma dance on the wind—sea salt, the smoke of someone’s grill from the village, burning meat, the rolling crash of the incoming tide, birdcall and the gust of beating wings and—and—

And you can sense them all.

A gap in the clouds lets the sunlight touch the earth.

You move on the sand. Turn onto your belly, chest heaving, empty and light. The cove—you’re still in the cove. There’s the path back up to the cottage. There’s the kayak. There’s—

Johnny, riotous, waiting in the crashing waves.

He calls to you: loud, long, triumphant, teeth bared in jubilation.

You cry out. Wordless. If you’d had any words to say, your lips could not shape them.

You’re alive.

It crashes into you. Alive.

You lift your head into the wind coming off the ocean. It caresses your face softly, tenderly, like a mother’s kiss on your cheek.

Johnny suddenly turns from you and darts into the water.

You wail with surprise. A wave rushes up to where you lay, water licking up the fibers of your body. You’re not ready. It’s too soon. Why did he leave you? What’s happening? Why isn’t the water cold?

You clutch at the sand. You can’t find your legs—you can’t stand up. All you can do is crawl, shuffle your ungainly body forward with the clumsiness of a newborn child. You cry out again, trying to convince him to return, to come help you, but if he hears it, he does not come to your aid.

Another wave surges forward; salt water crashes across your face. You flinch away from it, but something nictates over your eyes, shielding them from the burn.

Once you reach the surf, the water cradles your body, buoyancy easing your way. You submerge, finding something to kick with—

And then you’re gliding.

Murky, and blue. Sand clouding in the tide. But comfortable—cool, without being cold. You remember frigidity cutting into your skin only hours earlier, rending you at the seams, unmaking you.

Now, it receives you like an old friend.

Ahead of you, Johnny moves further out. You can feel him, far out in the distance, tiny eddies of water rippling against your cheeks.

He’s not the only thing you can feel. The radius of your awareness vibrates with blips of movement, darting, swaying, dancing, below and above and all around. It shocks you to realize, and you go still, hovering in place, momentarily stunned by how much there is living around you.

Johnny pauses too, ahead of you. Waiting. A lone distinct figure, patient for you to follow.

You shiver with startled wonder, and resume your way toward him.

The coastal shelf slopes downward, falling away. The water gradually clears as overhead, past the surface, the sun sinks in the sky. Warm golden light dyes the sea around you. He leads you on, further and further, until a forest of kelp grows up around you.

In the turquoise, ribbons of twisting green undulate and twirl, feathery and dancing in the windy current. Silvery bubbles trail toward the sunlight, intermingling with tiny schools of glimmering fish that dart and jump between the fronds. Down below you, red and green algae fur valleys of rock, swaying lazily like prairie grass.

It’s beautiful.

Johnny drifts to a stop in the middle of it all, wheeling around to face you. You approach him, coming in close—and it’s almost like approaching the sun, so much that he radiates across your senses.

His dark eyes hold yours the same way they had that day on the beach, and the pendulum swings balanced now between you.

He brushes the side of his face along yours, and with his touch he leads you downward, following the stipes of kelp toward the stone to which their holdfasts grip. The heat of his huge body warms the water that flows in the narrow spaces between your bodies, even as the coolness intensifies the further you dive.

The two of you draw up along the forest floor—and find the myriad little denizens of the sea. You’d known they were there, at the very edge of your senses, and now they bloom into fullness in your attention.

Shrimp perambulate beneath rocky ledges. Crabs walks along the ridge of a huge boulder, like climbing a mountain. And there, further down, snails in their spiral shells, pulling themselves across the sandy grain. Starfish, in shades of red and blue and orange. Anemones, translucent hair streaming.

Tiny lives—insignificant to you, before. Hardly worth your notice. Now, you marvel at them, reeling. You want to cup them all in your palms and bring them up to clutch against your chest.

Something brushes against you.

You look up—Johnny, sliding along your side, curving back in toward you, then looping underneath. He nudges at you, then darts away; you gaze at him, confused, so he comes back in, shunting you with his body, and once again retreats.

Behind him, you catch a turtle fluttering in between the green leaves. Atlantic salmon chasing capelin. An eel peeking out from its cave. Undisturbed by Johnny’s—and your—antics.

He nudges you again, then backs off, looking at you expectantly. Realizing his intentions, you follow—he makes a low clicking sound in his throat, pleased, and jets into the flowing leaves, buffeting you with the wave he leaves in his wake.

You’re shocked only for a moment before the kelp parts for you in your pursuit. Johnny quickly disappears ahead of you, dipping down below the canopy. You feel him rapidly shrink in your awareness, and you propel forward, scanning for telltale splashes of gray and white, arms of green caressing you as you pass.

You close in on him, but suddenly he evades. You follow again, only to find he’s nowhere in view. Then the chase is on: he stays in one place only long enough for you to catch sight of him before he bolts, or wheels around and backtracks to confuse you every time you approach. Teasing, taunting, flaunting the dexterity he has underwater which you have yet to acquire.

Golden shafts of dancing sunlight begin to dim and shorten as he leads you on. Frustration rapidly builds in your chest, buoyed as your lungs press against your ribcage. You need to breathe, even as Johnny becomes no more than a dot of movement in your senses, confounding you at every turn.

Why is he doing this? Why won’t he stay with you? If you surface, you’ll lose him, but the sudden memory of saltwater flooding your chest has you kicking toward the fading daylight. Self-preservation taking its place at the head of your priorities, and you follow it with no longer any second thought.

Above you shifts a mirror of silk.

You rise. Faster as the weight of the sea lessens, your reflection blooming as you approach, closer and closer to the wedge-shaped face, the large, dark eyes—

You swim into yourself and breach the air. Your nostrils open, and you inhale the wind.

You see the twilight bleeding into the day. Clouds moving quickly off as the sun sinks into the horizon.

Where is Johnny?

You can’t sense him anymore—as you knew would happen—and your chest contracts with fear and longing, suddenly believing you’ve seen him for the last time—that he’s left you all alone, to figure out what to do next, with no idea how to live in the skin of this new self you’ve become.

You give a mournful howl. You don’t want to do this alone, you can’t, you thought you wouldn’t have to—

But in the distance, back the long way you came, you hear an answer.

You whirl around, facing the shore, and almost too far away to see, a dark shape rests on the sand.

Your throat convulses with a clumsy breath, and then you dive. The water parts for your body, sliding around you, streaming through your hair. Faster than you expect, the slope of the shelf draws close, and you jet upward, belly meeting the sand, and when the water recedes and you drag yourself back onto the beach, your own weight settling heavy on your bones, you cry out again.

You shake the water from your head, wailing at the top of your lungs, desolate and blind as you blink the salt away, and then there’s a warm body up against yours, weight melding against you, heat reaching out to drive away a coldness you hadn’t felt until you’d surfaced.

You continue crying as Johnny closes his teeth around a hank of your neck and drags himself on top of you, pressing you down into the sand. You shift to let him settle over you, and all of his weight compresses your body—sandwiching you between himself and the earth, pinning you down in one place.

Something in you still wants to fight. To shake him off—to escape. But all you can do is cry. He enters you with no resistance, and you cry more, harder, until your lungs deflate, and then you take a deep breath and start wailing again.

Saltwater streaming down your face, dripping into your own mouth. Your voice hits the cliff walls, rebounds off the stone until the air fills with your weeping. Johnny shifts on top of you, pressing your head down to the sand.

The vessel you have contained yourself within overturns. You cry.

You cry for yourself. You cry for him. You cry for what you’ve done, what you haven’t, and for what you can never undo. Your lament fills your own ears and spills out again, all across the beach, catching in the wind to fly off into the ether, raised to the birds, to the passing clouds overhead.

You cry with despair of never going back. You cry with the terror of Johnny finally rolling off of you, to dart back into the waves, to leave you here alone again. You cry until your throat hurts, stinging and raw—

And Johnny’s hands, strong and warm, edge beneath your pelt and pull you out, still bawling with every drop of shame you’ve carried in your body since the day you realized you hated yourself.

“Shh, shh,” he murmurs, drawing you up into his chest, arms steady and strong around you. “It’s alright now, bonnie, it’s alright. I’m here.”

You cannot respond to him. Your mouth hangs open only to wail your grief. Your body wracks against him, convulsing, involuntary, as you scream with despair and relief and horror and resolve, too much to contain, too overwhelming now to ever split yourself away from.

You find his arms with your shaking hands and grip on tight. He slips the pads of his thumbs beneath your eyes every so often to clear away your tears, and you feel his mouth press against your forehead. You wait for him to drop you. Wait for him to see the mess you’re making and wash his hands of it.

He doesn’t. Every time another sob wracks you, he grips you tighter.

Eventually—when you begin to wonder if it ever could, if this is all you are now, a squalling bundle of fragile skin pebbling in the cold—it passes.

The next time you pause to draw breath, you find nothing more inside you to disgorge. You begin to shake in Johnny’s arms, trembling with exhaustion, whimpering with clenched eyes.

He breathes slowly against you. Calm and even. He strokes your face with gentle fingers, even and patient, as if there’s nothing more in the world he’d rather do.

You find the courage to meet his gaze when your heartbeat steadies, finding the rhythm in Johnny’s chest to match. You see again what you saw that first day, that next night; you know now what you’ve always known, somewhere inside you. Your face is familiar in the reflections of it in his eyes.

His mouth curls gently as he gazes down at you. His eyes dance in yours, corners creasing as he traces the curve of your cheek. Light catches in his pupils.

You see him clearly, as the sun gives way to the evening, and the moon rises over a cloudless night of stars.

epilogue

a/n: shoutout to @/gildui for suggesting screenshots for that one section of text. Thank you to @/bi-writes for trying to figure out how i could keep the formatting with tumblr's coding. Please let me know if alt text is necessary. God forbid a text-based website allow for formatting said text.

#PSA: had to work around a formatting issue with screenshots #god forbid i want to get stylish #soap x reader #soap x you #john soap mctavish x reader #john soap mctavish x you #john soap x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish #john soap mactavish x you #soap mactavish x reader #soap mctavish #john soap mactavish #mwritessoap #madi writes #selkie soap #peristalsis #if this is weird sorry i've been having vertigo all week

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eowynstwin · 2 months ago

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peristalsis - viii - epilogue

selkie!soap x reader. strangers to "lovers." rebirth. mommy issues. semi-public sex. breeding season. smut. pregnancy reference. the end. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

Your pelt is not the same as Johnny’s.

Its greys are subtler than his paint-splash riot; nearly a solid dove, sparsely freckled with dots of charcoal. It’s lighter in your hands than you think a second skin should be—sometimes it feels so gauzy, so filmy, that you fear to tear it simply by wrapping it around your waist.

(Where it belongs.)

You can’t bear to part with it. You must be touching it at all times, fingers idly rolling a few soft strands of fur, palms smoothing out the wrinkles over your lap. Sometimes you find yourself staring at it, never knowing how long you have been until you come out of the trance with a jolt, neck aching and stomach growling.

You have no idea how Johnny went without his for even a day—the thought of ever putting yours down feels like abandoning a days-old infant.

Truly, though, the real infant is you.

The world touches your senses as if they are brand-new. Every sound is sharper. Every color is brighter. The world has come into focus in such a way that you are surprised you ever thought you could see it clearly before—nothing blurs in the periphery anymore.

It’s as if you have been completely reset. Every nerve ending tuned toward decadence. Everywhere you look, you find something that captivates you.

It makes you dizzy with rapture.

He is terribly amused by it, Johnny. He’s amused by all of it. As you settle into your new self, he watches you quiver and shake on new, coltish legs, and grins amiably at your frustration, quick to smooth over your frustration with his mouth on yours.

He’s been through it, after all. More than once, even—he has two resurrections, to your one.

And you’re quick to accept the appeasement he offers. Your appetites now yawn wide for anything you can fit inside of them, and you are voracious. You bite at him when he kisses you, which only makes him laugh more, and then he drags you down to the floor to rut like he knows you need to.

“I’m going to kill you someday,” you snarl at him, more than once, held against him back to front. “You did this to me, you fucking asshole.”

He grinds his cock deeper into you every time, touching some hidden nerve that has you clenching desperately around him, writhing with every limb as he laughs into your ear. “I could always pull out, bonnie, y’want me to do that?”

You claw at his naked hips behind you with the sharp tips of your nails, digging trails into the sheen of sweat coating his skin. “I’ll fucking kill you if you do.”

You’ve hissed and spat for too long to remember how to speak gently to him, but Johnny takes it in stride. He fits his teeth around your neck and cups the soft parts of your body with hands that can’t seem to get enough of the way your flesh spills between his fingers; when you spasm around him, howling your climax, he wrenches you against him with an iron grip and finishes deep inside of you moments later with a torn moan, thighs and hips hot and flush along your backside.

You threaten to castrate him if he pulls out anytime soon after. He kisses the indentations of his teeth and smooths his spread hand over your belly.

You end up with him, like this, more often than not. He always chuckles at your antics, your clenched teeth, the red lines and half-moons you leave on his back and thighs. Less with amusement than satisfaction—because these days, you don’t walk around without the bruises of his grasp painting your flanks, or the arch of his bite etched into your neck.

He’s been alone, too. He was alone from the start. All of a sudden awake to the world, unsteady with awareness, and so hungry all the time it must have felt like he could never be full—

And he hadn’t had anyone, not like you have him, to hold him in the throes of it.

You catch a look in his eyes, every now and again, and see the echoes of that time. It glints like a shard of sea glass catching rare sun beneath a wave. Dulled edges—he can think of it without hurting anymore. He can remember the craving without succumbing to its dissatisfaction, without falling into the gall welling in his stomach at the injustice of it. This was not always the case, but watching you, now, balms the ache in a way nothing before ever had.

You know this without his needing to explain, and you know it like scenting petrichor in the air. All you have to do is meet his gaze, and you know.

And he knows, too. Everything. You cannot see him without him seeing you, and he’s been looking at you with the kind of eyes you now possess for much, much longer. There is no depth within yourself that you can hide from him in.

He can look at you and know you’re hungry. He can watch the way you wave one hand and know you’re antsy. You can begin a sentence, and he knows the end of it without you having to finish.

It can only flay you to the bone. You are known. From the best to the worst parts of you, Johnny knows them like he knows the creases in the palms of his own hands. He knows the yawning chasm in you that near-overflows with your want, and he does not hesitate once at the precipice on his way to diving into it.

It pulls your jaw tight. You can only shudder with fever at the exposure, and reach for him. Again and again. Swallowing his laughter down like medicine.

John Price, when he finds out, heaves an enormous sigh of relief even your newly-heightened senses couldn’t see coming.

Your new vision peels back the gruffness. The gaze he has fixed on you, this whole time, has not been the apprehensive criticism of a lover’s apathetic friend. Instead, it is the concerned look of a stranger, one who gives a damn about what happens to a woman all alone on a side of the world to which she, until very recently, did not belong.

It had been invisible to you before; a wavelength of color your old eyes were unable to perceive. Now, you see so much of him that you wonder how you could have possibly missed it.

You see his exhaustion. His own loneliness, in self-imposed exile, one eye always on a man he fears will find a convenient cliff to jump off of in a fit of despair. You see sleepless nights, and notice for the first time a gold band on his ring finger, scuffed, in need of a good polish—if only he would take it off long enough to clean it.

“I’m sorry,” you say to him, out of nowhere, meeting the cool blue of his gaze. He doesn’t seem surprised at your understanding. He only nods.

“Ain’t been easy,” he allows.

But now you’re here. He’s not the only one Johnny has anymore. You can see the weight lift from him the moment you tell him you’re staying.

He goes to his office at the back of the pub with a lightened stride and returns, a little while later, with a stack of papers in his hand that he drops on the bar in front of you.

“Take care of the place,” he tells you with a heavy pat to your shoulder. “And don’t let Soap off easy. I’m going home.”

Price leaves you there with the deed to the pub and a casual wave over his shoulder. You do not see him again—though he’s left his phone number in one of the margins.

“Oh, aye?” Johnny says when you tell him, later that night as he’s boiling lobsters for dinner.

He doesn’t respond for a laden moment. You watch your report pass over him like a gentle wave; you see where it could build, where it could swirl up into something bigger, harder, angrier—but it doesn’t.

His back tightens, and then loosens, and he turns to grin at you over his shoulder.

“Barry, there’s a wall in there I’ve been dyin’ to knock down, and he wouldnae let me. Place is too claustrophobic, ask me.”

You arrange the silverware, letting his placidity wash over you.

About a week later, you drive Johnny’s truck somewhere with cell service, and call your mother.

The landscape of her emotions changes as rapidly as an ocean storm; elation and relief, to finally hear your voice. Hope when she asks you when you’re coming home. Confusion—when you tell her you aren’t.

Johnny explained it.

“We canna go far from the ocean, hen. Not for long. It won’t feel…right. I’ve tried. You get an itch, ken? You can ignore it at the start. But it willna go away, and it willna be denied, either. It’ll drive you mad if you don’t go back. So you canna stay away.”

And you’d known immediately what he’d meant—

You can feel it on the edge of the periphery. A lodestone in your belly points in its direction, always. You could close your eyes, start walking, and find yourself on the shore, pelt already in your hands. Sometimes, you find yourself waking in the middle of the night with the sound in your ears, legs twitching restlessly. You feel too hot and too cold at the same time, and thirsty, all over your body rather than just in your throat.

Any thought of moving further inland inspires an existential panic you can’t explain. The notion of a fifteen-hour flight, and landing somewhere that hasn’t seen an ocean for at least a million years, makes your skin feel so tight around your bones that you have to run to the nearest shoreline just to make sure the sea is still there.

You’re on a jetty right now, in fact, watching the water lap against the stones. It was the only thing you could think of that would give you the strength to make the call.

You cannot go home. You know now that somehow, you’d always expected to, deep down. You’d return to the house you grew up in, pet the old family dog. Meet for brunch at the same hole in the wall you’ve gone to for years.

Sometimes the price you pay to become something more does not reveal itself until it’s too late.

So you cry with your mother over the phone, when you explain that it’s best if you stay. You tell her that coming back would only hurt you if you tried, and this time, you aren’t even lying to her.

You don’t know if she’s actually comforted by the conciliatory offer you make of your new job tending bar—she doesn’t need to know you own the place yet—but she sniffles, and puts a brave face on it.

“You always did want to live somewhere else,” she offers, watery—but glad, you hear, that you’re alive.

You bite your lip.

From her, there will be no begging for you to come home. No entreaties of love or need.

When you say goodbye to her, you cry some more—but it isn’t the storm that used to claim you. You wrap your arms around yourself and squeeze, pinch the soft fur of your pelt and roll it between your fingers as you allow yourself to shake and weep, and when you catch your breath, you dry your face and drive back to the cottage, where Johnny is making lunch.

That night in bed, he holds you gently in his arms, rocking his hips into you as you cling to him with your fingernails.

“Don’t leave me,” you whisper in his ear.

He kisses the corners of your eyes before new tears can fall, and tightens his arms around you.

Each day you go to the sea.

It tugs at you, like a child tugging the hem of your shirt. Like a current pulling you outward. You wake every morning thinking not of breakfast, or the day ahead, but of that swaying world, slow and vast, hugging the edges of the land to coax it, eternally, back into the depths.

There is no serenity, now, like the serenity of the water. To enter the ocean is also to let it inside you; the barriers between yourself and the rest of the world thin out. You give some of yourself away, and receive something new to settle in the empty spaces left behind.

You think you understand now why Johnny is always smiling.

The cold no longer stings when you bare your skin to it, down in the cove. The salt-wind of the incoming tide is soft against you as you fold your clothes, beckoning as you tuck them beneath a large rock.

Johnny strips beside you, less careful, balling everything up in an untidy mass, until you glare at him. The intended admonishment falls flat as your glare turns into something sweeter, as the dark hairs on his chest lift with goosebumps.

He grins at you, seeing the shift. “Here, hen?” he teases as he obediently tidies his shirt and kilt. “Out in the open?”

Out in the open.

You draw him to you, dragging him down into the sand; the joining is quick and hard, spurred by the burgeoning need to go under. You cage his ribs with your knees as you ride him, breasts against his chest as you take his mouth without art or finesse. Johnny digs his fingers into the meat of your ass and helps you along with quick, forceful thrusts, and your orgasm prompts his own, inner muscles pulling him deeper as you pant and moan.

Primal. Without artifice. You exchange hot breaths through open mouths as you speak with your eyes, the ocean-blue of his gaze pulling you in. You grind together even after finishing, prolonging it, displacing a little longer the moment that your bodies must separate.

You have him every day, too. Often more than once. He is as essential a need as the sea, and he gives as freely and as frequently as you ask.

After, you both rise, and help to dust the sand away from each other’s bare skin.

Suddenly, you wonder aloud, “If I get pregnant—what’s it going to be?”

Johnny goes still, the hand on your shin stopping mid-sweep. Then, eyes crinkling, he barks a laugh. He kisses your knee and, as he rises, kisses your mons, then your navel, your sternum—

Then the reluctantly smiling curve of your mouth.

“Wouldnae mind findin’ out,” he says, stepping away from you, and walking backward toward the ocean.

His gaze does not leave you once it rises to meet him. It crests around him, embracing him, vibrant and alive and rushing toward you.

You draw your pelt over your head, and follow Johnny into the waves.

a/n: I'm going to put my final thoughts in a separate post. This is the end. Thank you so much for reading!!

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eowynstwin · 2 months ago

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Tbh I think the thing about Soap that makes people so uncomfortable is how clearly he sees everyone—what they want, what they think, and why they decide to present themselves to others in the way they do. I think he sees through deception very easily, he sees through even the very benign, polite masks that people wear, and he’s too audacious not to use that to fuck with people—either for his own entertainment or to get what he wants. And it really does disturb people because he doesn’t look that observant in the slightest, so they think they’re safe around him.

Until he fixes them with that bright blue stare, and gives that cocky grin, and they suddenly feel like they’re not at the top of the food chain.

#soap #I just love him as a manipulative bastard okay #I want him to be slightly Machiavellian #mwritessoap #he’s basically an oc at this point

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eowynstwin · 8 months ago

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peristalsis

In a bid to escape your own life, you run away to the Scottish Hebrides, seeking utter solitude. Instead, you meet a man who won't leave you alone.

He's handsome, and charming, and unfailingly persistent—and he wears an odd pelt around his waist.

read on ao3

selkie soap x reader. strangers to "lovers." dubcon. breeding kink. suicidal ideation. self loathing. depression. hurt/comfort. angst. smut. afab reader. post-canon. came back wrong.

one . two . three . four . five . six . seven . eight - epilogue

selkie. noun. sel·kie ˈsel-kē : a mythical being with the ability to shape-shift between human and seal forms.

plural : selkies also Selkies or selchies.

commentary track:

original concept what kind of seal is soap? what's up with the pelt in chapter 4? afterword

bonus material:

pinterest board moodboard by syoddeye spotify playlist

#peristalsis #mwritessoap #madi writes #soap x reader #john soap mctavish x reader #soap x you #john soap x reader

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eowynstwin · 3 months ago

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peristalsis - iv

selkie!soap x reader. depression. suicidal ideation. strangers to "lovers." social isolation. self loathing. hint of neurodivergent reader. manipulative soap. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

The other side of the bed is empty the next morning, when you wake up.

You feel it as the dregs of sleep slough off—an absence of weight. The heavy drape of the bedsheets around you. The lone sound of your own breathing, and nothing more—

It shouldn’t punch a hole in your chest. You shouldn’t be surprised in the slightest. What is for other people is not for you.

But you are. It does.

The little speck of hope that has survived every attempt of yours to exterminate it had flared a little brighter, fed by Johnny’s attention. A distant star in a clouded sky, finally reaching earth with its light. Stupid. You know better by now, and it should too. You’ve done this before, a hundred different times, a hundred different ways. The outcome is always the same.

You sweep your hand over the empty spot—

It’s still warm.

Your eyes snap open. At the same moment, you hear movement from somewhere else in the cottage, and then, through the open bedroom door, the warm aroma of coffee and cooking food wafts in.

You sit up. Pull the sheets up with you, clutched to your chest.

“Johnny?” you call. Tentative. Unsure.

“Aye!” a cheerful brogue responds from the kitchen. “Don’ move a muscle, I’ll be right there.”

Something sharp and hot pushes through your veins; the corners of your vision darken with it.

You realize you’ve stopped breathing, and inhale. Your need to be contrary subsumes completely underneath your shock. You sit completely still, suspended in place, as something sizzles in the kitchen.

He traipses into the room in nothing but an apron, carrying a tray with two plates of food and two mugs of coffee, which he sets on the end of the bed before he slides into the empty spot beside you.

You stare as if at a wild animal—if he notices your surprise, he doesn’t take it into account as he curls an arm around your neck.

“Mornin,’” he says, dragging you in for a kiss.

A long kiss—his mouth parts yours to permit his tongue, which he slides against yours as his fingers press upward into the soft underside of your chin. He inhales deeply before his lips leave yours, and you reel, listing toward him, as he pulls away.

“Sleep well?” he asks, hand dropping to your sternum to drag his fingertips between your breasts.

You blink several times. “Uh. Yes.”

“Bet you did,” he says with a grin. Then, he taps your neck—ink-blotting soreness with ungentle fingertips. “Sorry about this. Got too into it.”

He does not sound sorry in the slightest.

“It’s fine,” you say anyway, still blinking in whiplash.

He leans away to pull the breakfast tray up into both of your laps. “Made a classic English breakfast this time, but you eat what you like, bonnie.”

A classic English breakfast turns out to be eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, seared cherry tomatoes, and toast, which Johnny digs into with the gusto of the starving. You select a crunchier-looking strip of bacon and break it between your teeth, but you don’t pay much attention to the taste.

Johnny. His mohawk is mussed from the night’s sleep, and other than the apron, he really does appear to be completely naked. It seems like the first thing he did, when woke up, was not shower or dress, but head to the kitchen to start cooking.

For you. Again.

“Why?” you ask aloud.

He turns to you, one cheek rounded with food, dark brows lifted over bright eyes. “Hm?”

“Why did you make breakfast? You could’ve just left.”

Surprise on his face, freezing his expression. Then, consternation, dragging it down. “I wouldnae do that to you, bonnie.”

He says it so gravely—as if even the notion that he would make an early getaway amounts to betrayal on the deepest level.

“It’s,” you say, “it’s fine. It’s not like this…like…”

Like this meant anything. But didn’t it? You meant to punish yourself, with him as your scourge. A necessary reminder—a bitter pill you must swallow, over and over again.

Who better to deliver it than Johnny, because, hopes aside, he with his rockstar grin and wandering hands had not given off the slightest indication that he would stay the morning after a one-night stand. Let alone get up before you to make breakfast.

You had relied on that.

“I wouldnae do that,” he repeats.

Instead—here he is. Warm, bare shoulder against yours. Lashes dark over an insistent gaze.

You break eye contact, looking at your plate. “Whatever,” you say, for lack of any other response.

You pick at your food—it’s good, same as the meal he made you last night. Not pretentious, like he’s trying to impress you, but genuine and hearty. Tasty, the way breakfast in bed should be.

Puzzle pieces forced to fit together, despite belonging to different areas of the composition. A round peg the perfect diameter for a square hole. Incongruous. Confusing. Untrustworthy.

You continue to study him out of the suspicious corner of your eye as he goes back to eating, though it isn’t exactly any hardship. It seems to be a rare sunny day on the island, with warm, buttery light streaming in from the window. It catches the dark hair on his forearms, casts the sculpted expanse of his freckled shoulders in stronger repose.

You see it again—the wound on the side of his head. Nearly hidden by the dark stubble of shaved hair, but not invisible.

“What happened?” you ask.

He looks at you with a question on his face, and then sees the direction of your gaze. He nods to himself, as if he’s been expecting you to ask this whole time.

“Told you I served,” he said, setting down his fork. Then he notices you aren’t eating much. “Ach, bonnie, don’ let it get cold. You eat, and I’ll talk, aye?”

Begrudgingly, you spear some egg and clamp it between your teeth. He smiles indulgently, and continues.

“So you met Price. Was on an operation with him in London. Chasin’ this real bad fucker in the subway tunnels. He was tryin’ to set off a bomb, but we got to him first. Well, we chased him off the payload, anyways, n’ I’m demo, so I’m the one can defuse it.”

He looks at you. You bite down on a corner of toast.

“Guess he figured that part out, ‘cause not long after I get to the wires he comes back. Nearly takes Price out, so I get after him. Stupid mistake. Price can take care of himself, an’ we had backup. Fucker ended up shooting me in the head.”

Halfway swallowing that same bite of toast, you choke. “You—you got shot in the head?”

He nods. “Aye.”

You look again at the scar near his temple. A starburst, in a whorl of dark hair. Dead center in the silhouette of his profile, as if a paper target at a shooting range.

“Johnny—how the fuck are you still alive?”

He leans back against the headboard, folding one arm behind his head, exposing a thatch of curly dark hair in his pit. He runs his hand through the back of his mohawk, mouth canted at an angle.

“Got no fuckin’ idea, bonnie,” he says.

The expression on his face is, perhaps, the most human you’ve ever seen it. Consternation, maybe. Confusion. Aggravation. You’re not sure what you would call it, but just looking at him, you understand that that exact question is one he’s been asking himself since it happened.

Asking, without finding an answer.

“I’m,” you stammer, “I’m sorry. That’s a stupid thing to—I’m sorry.”

He turns to you and smiles. Chagrined, but forgiving. “It’s all right, bonnie. Have some coffee for me, why don’t you?”

You lift a mug and sip. He’s added cream and sugar to it, the way you’d made it yesterday morning.

“So, I survived it,” he goes on. “Woke up in the hospital a few days later. One in a million chance, they said, but I still had to learn to walk again, an’ I was out. Out, out. Medical discharge, thank you for your service, enjoy the rest of your life. The boys went off to kill the guy in Kastovia or Russia or somethin.’”

Quick as the bullet in his brain. Matter-of-fact. The story ending without him, with no hand reaching out to pull him back in.

Well, not quite—

“And then John Price came here with you,” you say.

He gives you a smile that doesn’t reach his eyes; strained, much like the only smiles you have to offer these days. “Nah. Came out by myself. He came after I’d been here awhile. Told me he was ‘worried about me.’”

The way this conversation is supposed to go, this would be the part where you would say of course he was worried.

“But he didn’t get it,” you say instead, seeing it etched into the grooves of his expression.

Johnny, in exile, alive when he shouldn’t be. Reckoning with the fact that everything he cared about did not care nearly as much about him. Figuring out how to live without anyone else.

Breakfast turns inert on the plate when you look down at it.

“No,” Johnny says, private and intimate, thick as molasses. “He didnae.”

“You seem okay now,” you say, diaphragm pushing the words up your trachea like debris on an incoming tide.

The Johnny you know—the smug, satisfied prick able to laugh at anything and everything—slides back into place.

“Yeah, can’t hide that from you, can I, bonnie?”

He looks at where you’re still holding the sheet to your chest, to the imprint of his teeth on your neck, and then back into your eyes. You know exactly what he’s about to suggest, and you intercept as he opens his mouth to suggest it.

“I’m still eating breakfast,” you say, forcing a whole cherry tomato into your mouth. It pops and squirts between your teeth.

He grins—too knowing. “Ah, that’s alright. M’ takin’ you to Callanish today, and I’ve got a’catch your supper first,” he says.

With that, he slides the tray fully onto your lap and rises, stretching his arms above his head with his back to you, tensing and releasing the muscles as if for your benefit.

“Callanish?” you ask, swallowing.

“Aye, on Lewis.” Then he turns around and, beating a forkful of eggs halfway up, kisses you on the mouth. “Why don’t you take a walk? Pretty today. I’ll be back ‘round noontime.”

Something hard in your chest, held tight between your lungs. Pressure bending the lid upwards.

“I didn’t say I was going,” you reply, but Soap just laughs at you.

He disappears from the bedroom, and you hear him retrieving his clothes from wherever he’d thrown them the night before. You start to shake with the effort of holding in, listening with straining ears as he dresses.

“Left some lunch in the fridge for you!” he calls, and in a stroke of bright luck you hear the front door open and shut before there’s any chance for you to respond.

Wind strokes its fingers through the thatches of the roof. Stillness retakes the vacated space.

You eventually bring the dishes to the sink, tray held in front of you like a shield, as if wary of some predator hiding just around the counter. You approach the fridge and crack it open carefully, imagining a wire you don’t want to snap. There’s a sandwich on the middle shelf, sitting on a plate, wrapped in cellophane.

It breaks open.

Finally, you are alone.

You take the walk.

The sky is nearly cloudless, and the sunlight has transformed the island’s greys into a storm of jewel greens, with what is likely the last warm breeze of the year dancing across fronds of tall grasses. Clouds tower in the sky as if composed and painted there. You lock up the cottage behind you and find a walking trail to put your feet on.

Johnny.

It’s as quiet on the island as you’d hoped. No road noise. No humming power lines, or distant radio on someone else’s balcony. You can hear tiny insects singing together in the sedge, sea birds calling to each other. The voices of colliding winds arguing like old friends in the wide sky above you.

No other walkers on the path. It’s out of season for tourists, the nice weather a rare gift for the people who belong here and them alone.

Johnny.

You’ve tried to be happy. You have.

All you know is that when things start going well, it doesn’t last long.

You don’t know when it began—years ago, maybe, when you first noticed it. The pattern. Something you think of as a chill; rapid cooling, thermal shock cracking the facade.

It happens like this: you find out about group chats you aren’t a part of. Dinners you weren’t invited to. Conversations you might’ve enjoyed, that happened without you.

A problem. A serious one. But you were solution-minded.

For a long time, you puzzled it out. Acknowledged that the common denominator was you, in every circumstance—and so you looked at yourself. Found your flaws. Stared open-eyed into the mirror and confronted your own lack, internalized that no one owed you what you wanted from them just because you wanted it.

Love is action, isn’t it?

So you tried. You really did. You wrote down people’s birthdays. You invited them out for coffee. You commented on their Instagram posts. You messaged first, every time you’ve thought of them, memorized details about their lives, gave them plenty of space to talk about themselves—

After all, no one wants a friend absorbed in themself. People like to be remembered. Thought of. Considered.

You read books others recommended. You watched their favorite movies. Spent evenings catching up on shows they liked so that you could always have something to talk about with them, because that’s how it happens, right? Mychorrizae for the roots between trees. Fertilized ground.

It worked, for a while. And you nurtured the hope that, perhaps, there would be space for you, that something wonderful might eventually germinate.

Maybe conversations would loop back to you. Maybe all you’d done would be returned in kind.

Exhaustion bared a preliminary truth: it would not.

Puzzling more. The next solution presented itself—people don’t stand in front of mirrors all day. If all you do is echo them, what interest will they have in you? You provide nothing new, nothing more than what they already have.

Human beings love novelty, after all. Something new and shiny to turn in the light at different angles. You needed to gleam so brightly that what you’d been seeking all along could see you well enough to find you.

So you worked on yourself.

You took classes you’d been swearing to take for years. Joined a gym looking for endorphins. Dove into crafts, walking groups, trivia nights at the bar. Wrote out a cleaning schedule for your small apartment and kept to it. You spritzed your pillows with lavender, and ate more fruit.

Joined forums for things you liked. Got certifications for work and then chased down the raises they entitled you to. Went to interesting restaurants, found tiny little card shops or foreign grocery stores to explore. Learned to make Pad Thai from scratch.

Rounded yourself out. That’s what you did—you took the raw block of yourself and chiseled down into it, to set free whatever you found inside.

For another while, it was enough. Endorphins make people happy, and all that. And it seemed to be enough, becoming to attract; drops of water usually obey the laws of cohesion.

Only, in the middle of it, you observed the exact same phenomena as before.

Mirrors of yourself in others. People making the same efforts—which bore a richer harvest than you ever had available to reap. Bounties so plentiful they could barely hold it in their arms.

And you, close beside them, trying, and trying, and trying.

Hairline cracks forming.

In the end, still alone.

The teeth of the preliminary truth fit into the lock holding all the rest, and turned open the latch. They flooded your stomach in a rush, expanding, shattering their container, so abundant that they left no room for anything else. And they all connected, ligaments spiderwebbing inward to an undeniable nucleus—

There is something deeply, deeply wrong with you.

Invisible to you, but obvious to everyone else. A thing you cannot fix. A thing you cannot medicate. A thing you cannot self-care away. Unobservable when you look at it; happening just outside your perception.

Something you manage to hide, even unaware of its existence, only for a short while, before it spills out of you and makes a mess for all to see, entirely without you knowing it.

You do not know what it is. You’ve looked and looked and looked for it, and have not found it. You’ve sanded all the edges of yourself, hoping you might unknowingly catch it—but whatever it is must grow back, like a lizard’s tail or the arm of a starfish.

It must be ugly. It must be so shocking that when it rears its head, people feel so sorry for you for bearing it that they’d feel guilty rejecting you outright, and so they recede from you slowly. Masking pity with compassion, and hoping you won’t notice.

There is nothing good enough about you to accommodate for whatever it is. No matter what you do, you cannot make up for it.

So here you are, on a dying island in the North Atlantic. Far away from temptation—from what you can only, inevitably, ruin.

Hounded by a man who it would be madness to think cannot see that.

You watch one foot swing in front of the other, barely leaving any prints in the hard, packed soil exposed by every walker who’s come before you. You hadn’t brought sunglasses with you, assuming that you wouldn’t need them, and the late morning light is too blinding to look too far ahead of you.

Johnny.

It isn’t about you, whatever his interest is. You see that very clearly now.

You picture him—a special forces grunt, riding high on his own masculinity, suddenly cut down. Ripped away from everything that made him him. Cut off from anyone who might be halfway capable of understanding how that might feel.

And you—a lone woman, marginally fuckable. Obviously flawed goods. An empty well of self-esteem waiting to be filled.

Someone he can impress with a wink and a flex, and make himself feel better taking care of.

He’s enjoying getting to play suitor—that’s all. You don’t think you’ve seen many women your age on the island, so for him, this must be a rare opportunity. You can’t, you suppose, blame him too much. You understand what he’s doing, and why.

You’ve done it yourself. Chosen a likely candidate and thrown all your feelings at them until you’ve felt better.

That’s how people are, in the end—that’s how you are. People look to others to get what they want out of them, and in Johnny’s case, he’s getting it. Not even two days, and you spread your legs for him. You let him come inside of you with barely even a token fuss, because he felt you up and smiled the whole time doing it.

He’s using you. The same way you’re using him.

It’s a shitty thing to do. You are a shitty person for doing it.

And so is he.

Maybe that’s why you’re letting him.

When you return to the cottage, you find the door unlocked, and Johnny on the couch with a romance paperback open in one hand. He turns to grin at you when you walk in, and tosses the book on the coffee table without marking his place when he rises. Today, he’s wearing a dark sweater over yet another kilt, but this time—

“Your—fur, thing, is missing,” you say, in lieu of greeting.

He looks down at his hips, patting his thighs with his hands. “My pelt? Ah, yeah.” He grins. “Threw it off in a hurry, can you blame me? Couldnae find it. I’m no’ worried, it’ll turn up. You ready to go?”

You frown. “I guess.”

“Good! I packed your bag for ya already, but you migh’ wan’ to check if I missed anything.”

Your frown harder. “You—what? You packed my bag? Why would I need that?”

You swear his eyes twinkle at you. “Is a six hour boat ride up to Lewis, hen, an’ six hours back, no’ counting how long y’wanna stay at Callanish. Probably dock overnight.”

“I never said I wanted to go!” you snap, marching past him toward the bedroom.

“A’thought we were past that!” he calls after you.

You find your carry-on open on the bed, and furiously upturn it, dumping everything out—it disgorges its contents like intestines spilling from a slit belly. Three romance novels. Toiletry bag, phone charger, jewelry bag, a shirt mismatched to a pair of pants it’s crumpled up with. One pair of socks. No bra, no panties—and you think Johnny might have a shred of decency after all, but when you go to your suitcase, you find your carefully folded rows of underwear haphazardly unfolded, thoroughly pawed through anyway.

Johnny comes into the room as you stand up with appropriate undergarments in your hands, ire shoving smog from your lungs.

“You’re no’ gonna need those, bonnie,” he says with, the ever-present smirk.

“Fuck you,” you snap. You have never wanted to slap someone so much in your life, but somehow, you know he would catch your wrist in the attempt, and just use his grip to pull you in.

And you’d let him.

“Yeah, that’s why.”

You scoff, and go to repack your bag, folding your clothes and tetrising everything together so it will stand on its own when put down, ignoring Johnny’s leering until you turn around. You make no effort to hide how much you’re grumbling about fucking assholes with fucking boats thinking they’re going to get laid again just because they got their dick wet once.

You sling the carry-on over your shoulder once it’s packed and zipped—fully intending to complain the whole way, even as you go along with his nonsense.

It doesn’t feel good, exactly, but you don’t quite feel your stomach up in knots. You feel clear, at least. You know what’s going on. You know the limits of this dynamic. You can deal with it.

“Oh, one thing,” Johnny says, then sticks one hand into a pocket in his kilt.

He withdraws your phone.

Whole again, back together with a gleaming new screen. Nested back in its protective case.

“Saw you dropped it, so I took it to Castlebay to get it fixed,” he says, holding it out to you like a dog proud of the task it’s completed. “No’ a lot of signal ‘round here, but wanna make sure you can get to me if you need to.”

The words enter your hearing like cotton swaps, blurring the deeper they penetrate. You take it from him without a word. You tap the screen—there almost certainly had been signal in town, and repair places usually charge phones for free.

Nothing.

Just the time, and the stock background you never changed.

Stone lungs in your chest. In—one, two three. Hold. Out—three, two, one.

“Thank you,” you say, the words dropping like pebbles from your tongue.

“You’re welcome,” he says cheerily. “An’ I didnae know wha’ y’liked to read so I picked my favorites.” He quirks his brows. “Thought we migh’ get some ideas.”

“Okay,” you say. “Let’s go.”

He makes you brush past him on your way out of the bedroom, and follows on your heels close behind, enough that you can smell him, axe and diesel and salt spray and all.

Too close—because, when you catch sight of something odd, you stop in your tracks, and he runs into you, having to catch you before he knocks you over over. Hands wrap warm around your upper arms, big enough to shackle.

There—wedged in the lintel, above the front door. Barely visible from this angle. A sliver of white spattered with grey. You’re not sure what you’re seeing, until—

“Johnny, is that your—pelt?” you say, frowning.

You point toward it; Johnny’s chin rests on top of your head, hands squeezing. Chest hot at your back.

“Look at that,” he murmurs. “How did that end up there?”

It looks well-packed into the angle of the thatch roof meeting the wall; nothing tossed away in a hurry, the way you imagine Johnny undressed the previous night, could have ended up where the pelt is now.

It was obviously shoved there.

Moonlit eyes dance in your dreaming memory.

You turn around to look at him. You open your mouth to speak, but there are no words waiting to leave it—and he beats you before you can come up with any.

“Why don’ you head down to the beach, an’ I’ll lock up here?” he says, looking down at you with pleased, half-lidded eyes.

A killer whale will toy gleefully with its prey. For hours, flinging it back and forth, punting it through the air with powerful flips of its tail. Whatever animal unlucky enough to have encountered it has no escape—it spends its last moments thrown skyward, soaring through the only habitat it could never understand, before spinning back down to sea, pulled back home by gravity’s ignorant love.

Too stunned on impact to be able to swim away. Still breathing—the body unaware that its life has already ended. Until the teeth closing around its neck is the only mercy it will beg for.

“Okay,” you gasp out, stepping back away from him. He watches as you escape, smiling slightly. In no rush.

Out the cottage door and down the path on shaking legs—you retreat to the kayak waiting on the sand, heart pounding against your sternum again, bolting from something that isn’t chasing you. Your nerves feel raw beneath your skin, unclosed circuits buzzing.

The short burst of warm weather is rapidly cooling; a passing breeze carries the chill of a cold night oncoming. You realize you left Johnny’s jacket in the cottage, but—you’re not going back for it. You don’t want to see whatever you left behind there.

Then you hear Johnny’s footsteps approaching. You jolt, tense—readying to flee. Turning, all you see is him holding the plated sandwich as he crosses the beach, jacket draped over the bend of his elbow.

“Forgot some things after all,’” he says, grinning—teeth clean and sharp.

“Oh,” you say, trying to keep the tremble from your voice, “yeah.”

You take it from him, and see that your hands are shaking. If he notices, he doesn’t comment.

If he notices, he’s probably enjoying it.

“Let’s get goin’ then!” he enthuses, taking your bag and setting it in the kayak.

There is no pelt around his hips.

next chapter early access

a/n: I won't lie, this was a rough one to write. Part of the prose of this chapter is inspired by september is a weary month by Yasmin Belkhyr. Not sure if this is the proper attribution but it's all I can find.

#soap x reader #soap x you #john soap mctavish x reader #john soap mctavish x you #john soap x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish #john soap mactavish x you #soap mactavish x reader #soap mctavish #john soap mactavish #mwritessoap #madi writes #selkie soap #peristalsis #the person in the image isn't meant to be reader—just to communicate the feeling #we FINALLY get to the original pitch lmao #anyway WOOO it's done

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eowynstwin · 2 months ago

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peristalsis - vi

selkie!soap x reader. depression. strangers to "lovers." somnophila. dubcon. smut. manipulative soap. unreliable narrator. terrible food. social isolation. suicidal ideation. suicidal resolve. . Running away from life to the Scottish Hebrides, you meet a man who won't leave you alone. . Masterlist. Ao3.

A hand pets between your legs sometime in the early morning, fingers searching for tender flesh. The other slips up the front of your naked body, cradling one breast, thumb flicking gently across the nipple.

The covers over you are warm with yours and Johnny’s shared body heat, the both of you having gone to sleep naked. His body curves around you, the hair of his chest and thighs tickling your bare skin. Water laps at the outer hull in quiet breaths.

You’d dreamed. You don’t remember exactly what of. Only impressions are left behind—the rocking of the trawler following you into sleep. Darkness. A sense of displacement. Your throat closing and opening.

When you crack open your eyes you feel it in the pit of your stomach. A storm to match the one that blew across the night.

If you give into it—it will hurt. You recognize it in your bones.

Johnny groans behind you when his callused fingers find your cunt warm and soft for him. His cock is a column of heat against your low back, morning-stiff. He circles your clit, mouthing the back of your neck and nudging his knee between yours, hooking your leg over his thigh to spread you open.

Fresh arousal wells up to coat his fingers. You hear him huff behind you, amused; he reaches down between the two of you to palm himself, cupping his shaft up between your folds and thrusting shallowly between them. Catching the flow along the length of his cock.

You don’t move, other than to breathe.

He toys with the breast in his hand as he tracks humid kisses up behind your ear. When he angles the head at your entrance, he slides in with minimal resistance—seats himself to the root.

You release the airy moan it draws from you. Snug—he’s snug inside you, cockhead sitting against your cervix. When he rolls his hips, he barely pulls out, just far enough that you feel where his cock begins to widen, thickest in the middle, before pushing back in again.

He rocks against you, playing with your clit. His other hand moves to your leg, drawing it outward a little farther. You stay limp in his hold, eyes closed.

He can do what he wants with you. Anything. If it keeps what’s happening in your belly contained—anything.

It doesn’t take long—you’re not awake enough to brace against it. He winds you higher and higher until your spine goes-arrow straight, your climax spilling through you, drawing you tight around him, and Johnny pistons into you with a few rapid thrusts before groaning, long and satisfied, as liquid heat fills you once again.

“Mm,’” he murmurs, “mornin,’ bonnie.” Angling himself to kiss the corner of your mouth. “Gonna get us goin,’ hm?”

You’re not entirely sure what he means until he pulls away from you. He stands up from the bed and tugs the sheets back up over your naked shoulders, humming some tune you don’t recognize—it sounds vaguely like a hymn—as he dresses and disappears up the stairs.

You feel the trawler rock and shift as he takes it away from the pier, back into the open water. Gray morning light shafts in through the small window triptych above the head of the bed.

You turn onto your back. Johnny’s spend seeps out of you slowly as you shuffle into the heat his body left behind on the sheets. You look inward.

It’s still there. Quelled—for now. If you think too hard about it, you might summon it up.

But Johnny is just upstairs, and the last thing you want is for him to hear you, to hear the poor, crazed animal you can become. There is only so much of you that you are willing to inflict upon him. There is only so much you would ask him to tolerate.

Although it strikes you, as you stretch under the covers, that you don’t believe he would resent you for it.

Probably, he would just wrap his arms around you, and coo at you in that smarmy way of his. No big deal. You can have a breakdown, bonnie, and he’ll make you something for breakfast after. And do you want him to eat your pussy again? Bet you’ll feel better after that.

You almost give in then and there just thinking about it. Wind shear pressing against the inside of your tear ducts.

That would make it worse—if he were to comfort you. You don’t think you would make it out to the other side.

So you swallow hard. Swim your legs through the tangled sheets and find the floor with your bare feet. Your carry-on still sits up in the bridge, so you drag a blanket around your shoulders and climb the stairs to retrieve it.

“There she is!” Johnny exclaims as you surface. He looks over his shoulder at you, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a cup of coffee. He grins at you. “Hell’s bells, don’ you look beautiful.”

You sneer at him, knowing your hair is a rat’s nest and the bags beneath your eyes have had no chance to deflate. Another drop of his cum falls down your thigh; you grab up your bag and retreat back into the bedroom.

When you return to the bridge dressed and brushed, face washed and moisturized, Johnny brings you a second steaming mug, white ceramic, with “Hers” in black cursive printed on the side.

“Stupid,” you say, when you see it.

Johnny kisses the side of your head. “I’ll make eggs.”

“Shouldn’t you be driving?” you ask, as he sets a pan down on the stove. You eye the trawler wheel nervously, waiting for it to spin.

“Is no’ a car, bonnie,” Johnny snorts. “Dinnae have to watch for traffic.”

You eat the breakfast he makes you in disgruntled silence. Overhead, clouds pass, intermittent gaps allowing yellow sunlight to peek through, though never for more than a moment. You might’ve expected the day to be clear again, after the storm.

Six hours is six hours. You return to the novel you began yesterday, perched on the booth couch, though every time the hour changes your stomach draws tighter, as if winched.

At the end of the trip awaits more of the solitude you’ve been seeking. Johnny will deposit you onto the cove, and traipse off to his boy’s night. Possibly his old squad mates—team members—whatever they are, will be staying for more than one day.

You know. You know how it goes.

It’s better this way, you remind yourself. It’s what you wanted.

You pass the crags you saw on yesterday’s journey, and today they are vacant of their pinniped occupants. The island wildlife overall seems to be absent, perhaps hidden away in whatever sanctuary they found during the storm. A few seabirds circle above the dune grass, or trail after the trawler, but other than that, sky, sea, and land are vacant.

You reach the naval battle, and discover what the author spent the most time researching. She describes in exhausting detail how long it takes to load cannons, the role of current and wind speed in the maneuvering of ships, the bailing-out process of a breached hull.

It’s dull, and completely incongruous with the romantic melodrama of the previous chapter. You can see exactly why a former soldier would enjoy it.

You do not tell Johnny you’ve reached it.

Finally, sometime after noon, the cove comes into view. Johnny brings the trawler as close to shore as he can get it, and then drops anchor.

You sling your bag over one shoulder as you stand, lungs shaking in your chest.

“Well,” you say, “have a good time with your friends.”

He pauses, and then looks at you. The expression on his face is completely nonplussed, lips pursed, brows raised.

“What?”

“Your guys’ night.”

“What about it?”

You frown. “Aren’t you taking me to shore?”

“Why would I do that?”

Apprehension trickles down into your belly.

No. Oh, no.

“So you could go meet them?” you say, with growing trepidation.

Realization opens up his expression. Brows lift over blue eyes blooming. “Aw, bonnie, s’that why you’ve been cranky? You think I’m gonna abandon you?”

No—oh, no.

He comes over to you and gently nudges the strap of your bag off your shoulder, smiling.

“Course you’re invited, hen, what kind of bastard would I be if I left you all alone?”

Something breaks.

“No,” you say.

“Yeah,” he croons, bringing his hand to your jaw. Caressing the curve of it with his thumb. “Want you to meet my mates—”

You slap his hand away.

Panic, fully formed, climbs up your trachea.

It’s one thing to be left behind for better friends. It’s quite another to be subjected to them.

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” you snap. Fury boiling. “What the actual fuck is wrong with you?”

Johnny blinks. You wrench yourself away from him, shoving against the pull of his gravity—smacking him in the chest with both of your hands.

“Was it getting shot?” you snarl, pickaxing your temple with two fingers. “Was it drowning? Because something made you fucking delusional, and I don’t know what it was, but I’m fucking sick of it. I don’t fucking like you.”

Johnny’s expression flattens. The gleam dulls in his eyes as he gazes at you.

“I don’t give a shit about you,” you tremble on. “You’re nothing to me. You’re a hookup. You’re good dick and that’s it. You don’t mean anything to me. Nothing.”

He takes a step toward you. You step back.

“And you don’t give a shit about me either! You’re such a fucking asshole, you know that? You don’t have to act like this is anything but you do anyway, and you make fun of me the whole time, because you know I’m easy, because I’ll still let you fuck me, because I don’t have—because I’m just convenient pussy to you.”

He advances. You retreat. The cocky, confident Johnny that has been your unwelcome companion these past three days now is gone, as if a mask tossed away.

The line of his mouth is sharp and straight. His nostrils flare. A severe crease cracks the space between his drawn-together brows.

You’re not seeing the thing you saw on the beach, that first day. You’re not seeing the carefree bar cook or the island enthusiast.

You’re seeing the special forces soldier. Advancing on a target.

And you can’t stop yourself, even as terror runs a live wire up your spine.

“Like what do you think this was, Soap? I don’t care about you. I don’t care about your friends. I don’t care about your life. You’re wasting your fucking time. I don’t give a shit about you, and I never have, and I never will, and you’re too fucking stupid to notice—”

You run out of room to retreat. The backs of your knees run into the booth seat, but Johnny keeps coming. He invades every inch of your personal space, getting right up into your face, staring down at you with a hard jaw and sharp, spear point eyes.

“Stop it,” you flounder, “just stop it, just leave me alone, just—”

He closes thumb and forefinger around your chin and presses his warm mouth against yours.

You fight him. You clench your fists and beat their heels against his chest, but he wraps his other hand around the back of your head and sweeps his tongue between your lips. You screech into his mouth, but he hums back, the subvocal tones of calming an animal before it hurts itself. You sink your teeth into his bottom lip, seeking to draw blood, but it only eggs him on, makes him slant his head to kiss you deeper.

Even as you wear yourself out against him, his grip doesn’t loosen. He holds you in place as you struggle. Frighteningly strong—utterly indomitable; he overwhelms you with seemingly no effort on his part at all.

There’s bitter, black coffee on his tongue. Acidic. He presses it into yours, circling inward, making space for himself where you would give him none—

Insisting on it.

You gasp hard. Whimper futilely against his mouth. A few sharp tears escape the clench of your eyes, cutting down your cheeks.

Your fists land on him one final time, and then remain where they are. Your entire body slackens, submitting. Your lips find the curves in his where they fit the closest, and stay there. Bokeh spots dance across your closed eyes as your alveoli demand oxygen.

When you pull your mouth away from his to breathe, he lets you. Johnny rests his forehead against yours, hands coming around to cup your cheeks.

“Feel better?” he murmurs lowly, caressing the corners of your mouth with his thumbs. “Now that you got that all out?”

You take a shuddering breath. “You’re an asshole,” you repeat miserably.

Johnny kisses you softly again, first on the mouth, then the tip of your nose, then between your brows.

“Don’ be scared,” he says, mouth still on your forehead. “It’s gonna be alright.”

You sniff. “I hate you.”

He huffs—a small laugh, one that lacks his usual good humor. His hands slide down your shoulders to wrap his arms around you, and he tucks you beneath his chin, against his body. Even after so little time, the bulk of his frame is familiar, aligning with the shape of your body.

You don’t hug him back. You let your arms hang at your sides. If you nuzzle your face in between the soft slopes of his pectorals—you will take the truth of it to your grave.

John Price shows up in a motorboat, bringing along with him several grocery bags and a young man close to Johnny in age.

The two grin at each other and embrace, slapping backs in the masculine fashion and making loud, friendly noises as Price sidesteps them to bring his goods to the kitchen, where you’re hiding.

When he catches sight of you, his step falters.

“I don’t know why I’m here either,” you say, preempting him. You’re cloistered on the booth couch.

His mustache tilts at an angle. As with every other expression you’ve seen him make, you have no idea what it means, and it makes your stomach clutch.

Price is saved from having to respond as Johnny drags the other young man in behind him, beefy arm around his neck in a headlock. They’re laughing together, smiles wide as Price sets his bags on the counter.

The three of them populate the tiny space with the ease of years spent sharing little room between them, and you’d be shrinking back into the couch if Johnny’s friend hadn’t already caught sight of you. The surprise on his face is evident, even as he greets you with a polite, “Oh, hey!”

You make yourself stand up, pasting on a smile that feels more like a grimace. “Hi,” you say.

Johnny gestures at you with a proud, open hand, saying your name as fondly as if he’d just had it in a chokehold. “Stayin’ at the croft, the one I told you about? Just got back from Lewis today, we did, showed her the stones and everythin.’”

He winks at you. You fight not to scowl at him.

“Nice to meet you,” the young man says, disentangling himself from Johnny and extending a hand. “I’m Kyle, but everyone calls me Gaz.”

You shake. “Sorry to interrupt your, uh, your reunion.”

You can’t tell how sincere the smile is that Gaz gives you. Are the corners of his mouth too tight? The polite look in his eyes too saccharine? “The more the merrier, aye?”

“That’s what m’saying!” Johnny enthuses.

“Soap been behaving?” Gaz asks.

“Uh,” you say.

“Soap, you got a griddle on this dinghy?” Price calls, setting out packages of meat and buns. He bends down to root around in the under-cabinet, stored cookware clanging as he digs.

“Cap, tell me you didn’t get the patties,” Johnny complains, picking one up. Ground beef pre-molded into burger pucks, shrink-wrapped in their own thin red juice.

“What’s wrong with patties?” Price asks, still half-submerged. “Easy, innit?”

“For kids’ birthday parties, maybe,” Johnny protests.

“When’d you get so fussed about food?” asks Gaz, sipping from his can. “Not like this is London, mate, you get what you get.”

“Some of us have time to eat like human beings,” Johnny snipes. “You might have to choke on MREs, not like the rest of have to as well.”

“Soap,” Price says, “griddle.”

“Oh, nowhere near there.”

“You fucking muppet…”

Gaz and Johnny cackle. Price straightens, frowning gruffly, in a way that suggests he has regularly endured this hazing from the two younger men and no longer has the patience even to scold them for it.

Walking paths made together, now retread. Old stone, formed when the earth was young.

You step backward. Find the edge of the couch with your calves. None of the three men look at you as you settle back down into your seat. Your book lays half-open on bent pages.

“No Simon still?” asks Johnny as he cracks a beer off the pack.

“Still no word,” says Price. “Said he’d try, last we chatted, but wasn’t sure.”

“Hm,” says Johnny, sipping his beer.

His gaze slips over to you. You feel it like a rasp over your bare skin.

He cracks another can off and brings it over, sitting down to sling a heavy arm over your shoulders. You take the beer and open it, but do not drink.

“Not the same out there without you, mate,” says Gaz, folding his arms comfortably over his chest. “Neither of you, really, Cap.”

“Ah, you’re doin’ just fine, I bet,” replies Johnny. “You and Ghost? Dream team, right there.”

“Never gonna be you, Soap,” says Gaz.

Johnny’s replying smile is—contented. Satisfied. As if he’s hearing news he expected, but is pleased to hear nonetheless.

His arm hangs loosely over your shoulders as it continues like that. Johnny and the other two men punt the conversational shuttle back and forth, voices weaving with the cadence of an old scarf unraveling; the yarn thread frozen by time and tension into a shape that can wrap back around its fellows as easily as it came undone.

Unfamiliarity with their rhythm transforms the bridge—which has been, if not a safe space, at the very least something of a sanctuary to you for the past twenty-four hours. Someplace you could be your worst self without much worry of offending.

But Johnny’s old team members are not Johnny. You can’t speak to them the way you have spoken to him. They do not share his knack for inclusion—

At least, they don’t seem to, until, without you expecting it, the shuttle passes to you.

“What made you come out here?” asks Gaz, startling you.

You look up from the can of beer you have been staring at the whole time, warming between your palms, to find Gaz, Price, and Johnny all looking at you expectantly.

“Um,” you say, flushing with embarrassment. Completely unprepared to be treated like a conversational prospect.

“The quiet, didnae you say?” Johnny supplies, laying his hand along your upper arm, rubbing up and down.

He might as well have shoved that hand down your shirt instead—you catch the other two men seeing it. Noting it. Reevaluating who you are, who you might be, and why you’re intruding on their day together.

And Johnny mustrecognize it too, because he squeezes the soft part above your elbow.

Warmth like a candle flame in your chest.

“Yeah,” you say, lamely. “Just—tired, of the city, I guess…”

“I like the quiet too,” Gaz says diplomatically. “Bet it’s good surfing here too, in the summer.”

“No’ much,” says Johnny. “The wildlife’s the point here, innit, bonnie? Great seal watching, out here.”

You meet his gaze. Edges of sapphire blue are soft in your direction, mouth corners curled.

No obfuscation. No derision.

“Yeah,” you find yourself saying—and meaning. “The seals—the seals are cool.”

“Birds, too,” Price says, unpeeling patties after finally locating the electric griddle.

“How can you tolerate mucking around with two old codgers like this?” Gaz laughs.

Something effervescent infuses your bloodstream. Light and bubbly.

“As if Johnny has let me hang out with anyone but him,” you say, as if it has been a desire of yours in the first place.

You hear Price snort at the griddle. Gaz quirks a brow at Johnny without making any effort to hide it, and then clinks the belly of his can against yours before drinking.

You finally have a sip. It’s nice—hoppy, lightly sweet, fizzing on your tongue. Still cool enough to enjoy.

“Might take ya diving tomorrow,” Soap begins, fingertips twirling up your shoulder—

But then a distant voice cuts through the afternoon.

“Oy! Johnny!”

The three of you look around. Soap pulls away from you, warmth retreating with him, as he goes stick his head out of the door.

And then he dashes toward Price’s motorboat.

The engine revs as you, Gaz, and Price follow him out, watching as he speeds toward the shore. On the beach, a large man in dark colors, half his face covered by a black surgical mask, angles toward him, hands on his hips.

Johnny stops just shy of beaching the boat before he leaps out into the water, wades up the sand, and launches himself at the man.

They embrace like tectonic plates colliding. Even at a distance, you can hear the sound of hands slapping backs, feel the way their bodies meet and sway—so resonant with shared affection that you can feel the shocks of it across the water.

Glacial ice pushes through your veins.

“There he is,” Price says fondly. “Knew he wouldn’t miss this.”

“Ghost’s always gotta make an entrance,” Gaz agrees.

Ghost.

Or, as it must be—Simon.

Simon turns the snugness of four bodies into an overcrowd of five. In the bridge, there is little room to maneuver around him, massive as he is, and he seems disinclined not to claim as much space as there is available.

“Bonnie!” Johnny exclaims. “Want you to meet my old partner, Ghost.”

His eyes are dark, the color of a full whiskey bottle. They gaze at you without interest, even as he proffers his huge hand.

“You’re Johnny’s tourist,” he says, in a flat, brassy tenor. The sound of a metal grate closing.

Johnny.

“Yes,” you say, in a voice as irrelevant as a minnow’s.

He shakes your hand with a perfunctory grip, and says absolutely nothing more to you. He turns, and leans his bulk against the counter in the kitchen—galley, Johnny informs, as he explains the ship, and its story, to Ghost in rapid fire.

Had he been as excited to introduce it to you?

Ghost swigs from his beer, mask hooked under his chin. “What the fuck you even do on this thing, anyway?”

“Fish from it,” Johnny says. He’s standing close to Ghost, second can in one hand as he gestures with the other. “Got crab and lobster traps all over the place, that’s where the money is.”

“Always did like fishin,’” says Ghost, as warm to Johnny as he had been uninterested in you.

You cloister back in your place on the booth couch.

You can’t blame him. You can’t blame either of them. You can’t. You can’t. You are extraneous in this situation and always would have been.

“This isnae really fishin’ though, see?” Johnny goes on. “I mean, I use the dragnet time t’time, but rich tits on the mainland, they can get cod anywhere.”

“Become a real foodie, he has,” Gaz chuckles.

“Knob,” Ghost agrees.

Johnny grins. It’s a soft thing, an expression of sinking into warm bath water in a familiar tub. Ghost grins back at him, more with his eyes than his mouth.

If what’s between Johnny, Gaz, and Price is an unraveled scarf, easily knit back together, then what’s between Johnny and Ghost must be the tight-woven threads of fine, raw silk. It’s visible to the naked eye; if you reach out, you think you could brush against it with your bare fingertips.

Impenetrable. Gleaming.

You, a loose, dropped thread.

Price announces that the burgers are ready, and the men crowd the counter before he snaps at them to back off. You hook one heel around the other, twisting your fingers in your lap. An invisible wall between you and them.

The men bring the food over, setting down plates of sliced onion, limp lettuce, squishy tomato. Everything has been sitting out too long. Price sets down a platter of patties, cookie-cutter uniform, some blanketed with yellow, processed cheese.

Your empty stomach cringes in on itself. You don’t want to eat. Johnny slides in beside you, trapping you in, and his friends drag chairs over. Ghost claims the head of the table. They dig into the food with gusto.

“This is awful, Price,” says Johnny. “Told you, shoulda had seafood.”

“I’m sick of fish,” Price grunts.

Something about fresh oysters is at the tip of your tongue, but it’s trapped behind the bars of your teeth. And anyway, Gaz beats you to speaking.

“So you decided to kill the lot of us?” he asks. “Forgot we never let you cook in the field.”

“Nah, that was Johnny’s job,” Ghost says. “Where’s a meathead Scot learn to cook anyway?”

“Quite disrespectin’ my mum,” says Johnny.

They all chuckle at that. It loops around them, that ripple of laughter, and they go on to bandy stories about their captain’s culinary misdemeanors on deployment.

You shrink.

You look at Johnny. His face is animated; vibrant. The lines at the corners of his eyes have not smoothed once, with how much he’s been smiling. It’s as if sunlight is radiating from his chest, warming the room.

It visibly brightens his friends, sitting around him. Price’s gruff demeanor has softened. Gaz leans inward, elbows on the table, as if magnetically drawn. And Ghost—

You catch them exchanging a look. Speaking without words.

You don’t belong here.

The few bites you’ve managed to take of a burger surge against the walls of your stomach. Your trachea quivers against your spinal column.

“I need to use the bathroom,” you say. “Excuse me.”

It halts the flow of conversation. The four men look at you as if suddenly remembering you’re there, expressions paused in whatever shape they’d been in before your interruption.

No one says anything at all.

And why would they?

Johnny stands to let you out of the booth. You extricate yourself, and hold your gaze on the stairwell, refusing to look twice at them.

The belly of the ship swallows you with a whirlpool’s vacuum; you veer into the bathroom and lock the door behind you. Overhead, the conversation resumes, as if you left no empty space within it to compensate for.

Heat leeching up your face. Heart beating against your sternum, so hard it must be about the split the bone.

You don’t belong here.

You start heaving. Big, hard breaths, truncated, refusing both to be drawn in or released without a fight. You stagger to the sink and grip it with both hands, shaking so hard you can barely stand.

You don’t belong here. You don’t belong with anyone. You don’t deserve—

Your stomach shoves upward. You tip your face over the basin, throat convulsing, but nothing comes up.

Your vision swirls. You feel Johnny’s hand on your back, but it’s only a ghost of his touch. He’s still upstairs, with his friends.

You hear a sunburst of laughter above you, hearty and deep and shared by four voices.

Tears start streaming from your eyes, though you can barely feel them. You vibrate. It builds and builds inside you, a scream, a hurricane, gale forces whipping around and beating the inside of your skin. The quiver of your skull sends a high-pitched squeal up through the canals of your ears.

You sink to your knees.

“No,” you whimper, in the midnight zone of your voice, so that no one can hear you. “No, no, no, not again, no…”

The bath mat touches your forehead. Your shuddering mouth hangs open. You dig into the soft skin of your forearm with the nails of one hand, seeking blood.

You are a wound in the world that refuses to close. A cyst. Something here that should not be. Wherever you go is a mistake.

Heartbeat like a drum in your ears. Entire body drawing up, higher, tighter, trembling, seams pulling, self receding, bones exposed, so far out you will never make your way back.

You’re going to burst. You’re going to make a mess, right there on the floor, and they’re all going to come down and see it. It’s building in your throat. It’s at the dam of your teeth.

You wrap your arms around yourself, gripping tight.

You don’t belong here. You don’t belong here. You don’t belong here—

You don’t belong anywhere.

Suddenly, you go still.

Flying debris settles. Your airways open.

Stillness. Quiet. The next breath you take is slow and smooth.

You hear the far-away slosh of the ocean moving beneath the hull of the trawler.

Yes, of course.

You clamber upward, using the counter as leverage. As you rise, you catch yourself in the mirror.

Your face glistens. Your eyes are swollen, bags heavy beneath. It does not reflect what’s behind it—

Tranquility.

It isn’t about resolve, after all.

The truth of it settles gently in your chest. Of course. It’s about certainty. It’s about knowing, in your bones, what should and shouldn’t be. What is and what isn’t.

The way things will be, and the way they won’t.

Simple. Natural.

The evolutionary processes of your body simply hadn’t caught up. The genetic predisposition toward persistence, the silly, reactionary aversion to pain, to danger, the biological imperative of a time before now.

Now—

Turning the cold tap, you wet your fingers and dab at the puffy skin. You pull some toilet paper from the roll and pat at your face. You breathe easily through your nose, and on steadied feet, you leave the bathroom.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” you hear Gaz saying as you climb the stairs.

“Aw, gimme some credit,” Johnny protests.

You stop.

“No,” Ghost says, and it’s odd to hear contemplation in the knife’s edge of his voice. “Somethin’s changed.”

“What’s that?” Johnny asks.

“You’re…calmer,” says Ghost. You hear Price hum. “Never seen you sit this still, not long as I’ve known you.”

You hear Johnny huff a little laugh. “Guess this place’ll do that to you.”

“Hey, Johnny?” you say, surfacing.

The conversation pauses again. He looks up at you. Blinks beautiful, blue eyes.

The rueful smile you give him is easy.

“I don’t feel very well. I’m sorry. Can you take me back to shore?”

Some tiny muscle at the edge of his expression shifts.

You don’t know what, exactly, it could mean, but it doesn’t matter.

“Sure, bonnie,” he says slowly, setting down his half-eaten burger.

“It was nice meeting you all,” you say to the three other men.

They echo something back—insincere. Obligatory, you know. They’ll forget about you the moment you leave their view.

That doesn’t matter either. Nothing does.

You don’t think about it at all as Johnny helps you down into the kayak, taking your overnight bag first and then your hand. It’s cloudy overhead, cool without being cold. The wind is gentle.

He stares at you the whole time he rows. You don’t meet his gaze. Out of the corner of your eye, you can see his eyes narrowed, the line of his mouth tight again.

“Thank you,” you say, when the kayak reaches the beach. “Have fun with your friends, Johnny.”

“Sure, bonnie,” he says.

You indulge yourself—you look him up and down.

He really is an attractive man. Beautiful. Like the crash of a wave. You get that sense again—that he’s more real than anything surrounding him. More real than the ground beneath your feet. Than the ocean behind him.

More real than you.

“See you later,” you say, and turn away from him.

You walk the trail back, thinking about the anonymous feet that carved it into the grass. Years, generations walking the same way, down to the beach and back up. People you’ll never know. A part of something you never will be.

When you crest the rise, you see the cobbled siding of the cottage. You’d never looked at the back of it before—never thought to. It was unimportant in the face of everything else, irrelevant.

Maybe that’s why you look now. The finiteness making room for it.

At the cobbled wall’s base is a little mound of piled sand.

You go to your knees in front of it. The soil is cool to the touch, loose. Easily disturbed.

Somehow, you know what you’re going to find, even as you dig. Your fingers brush against it even before you uncover it fully, and it doesn’t surprise you at all.

Folded tightly, in a divot in the ground, is the paint-splash riot of Johnny’s pelt.

a/n: had to add one more chapter because otherwise this would have been 9k words long lol

forreal this time—two chapters left!!

#soap x reader #soap x you #john soap mctavish x reader #john soap mctavish x you #john soap x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #soap mactavish #john soap mactavish x you #soap mactavish x reader #soap mctavish #john soap mactavish #mwritessoap #madi writes #selkie soap #peristalsis #walked for an hour on the beach today before posting this #very evocative #made friends with a pelican

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