#perhaps i also like deceptive looks

[nomiyakazehaya]

am i weird for being obsessed with the idea of a stealthy and lethal assassin megatron? i know she's usually associated with the more aggressive and forward gladiator warrior archetype but. something about a big, tall mech somehow knowing how to maneuver and slink around ever so covertly, how to kill a target as quickly and efficiently as possible, yet still manages to be so quiet and graceful on her feet all the while pulling all that weight back just does something to my brain.

that's so. hot and intriguing to me.

[notmyneighbor]

Let Me In ~ Doppelgänger Francis Mosses/The Milkman x Female Reader

Chapter 1

Word Count ~1k

Rating ~ Explicit

CW ~ blood and gore, character death, eventual smut(not in this chapter)

Excerpt ~ You know it’s not Francis peering at you through the glass window.

You know it, even though he looks exactly like him, every feature carefully duplicated: the sleep deprived smudges on the frail skin underneath his eyes, the narrow chin and a long nose, that unblemished complexion as smooth and pale as the milk he delivers.

They’re getting better at the replication.

It’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart from real humans now.

Also available on AO3

Fanart used with permission @kaworinx on Instagram and TikTok

You know it’s not Francis peering at you through the glass window.

You know it, even though he looks exactly like him, every feature carefully duplicated: the sleep deprived smudges on the frail skin underneath his eyes, the narrow chin and long nose, that unblemished complexion as smooth and pale as the milk he delivers. They’re getting better at the replication. It’s getting harder and harder to tell them apart from real humans now.

Yet there’s still something off. Something in the way the flesh sits on his bones. Almost a shift, like a mirage in the desert: a shimmery, not quite real haze that’s there and gone again in the blink of an eye. He lays his fingers against the glass, splayed directly across from your face. The pretender’s lips curve into a smile. “Let me in,” he says, and it’s identical to the real milkman’s voice, that same sleepy, gentle tone you’re used to hearing day in and day out, and your heart lurches. When had it happened? When had he been taken? During a delivery? Lured into some back alley? Some devious doppelgänger asking for help, maybe, and of course he’d obliged, he was kind like that, he’d never refuse anyone. You envision the wire rack cradling the bottles of dairy product dropping from nerveless fingers, the glass shattering. White mixing with the bright red blood that leaks out of him all over the pavement.

You wince at the gruesome image. Poor, trusting, foolish man.

“Let me in,” he says again, and the words drag at something deep inside of you. A glint of something feral in the dark eyes now. This imposter knows you can sense his deception. “I know what you need. I can give it to you…”

Another chord strummed on the string of your spine, vibrating along your body. Had he taken over Francis’ thoughts? Sorting through the milkman’s memories like digging through a box of old photographs, perhaps. Choosing which ones to keep and which ones to discard. Had the unfortunate third floor resident known about your hopeless crush? He must have. How else would this creature target your desires so readily? The knowledge of this wounds you. Francis had known, and he hadn’t acted on that knowledge. No return of your feelings. Maybe he’d just been shy.

Or maybe he just didn’t feel the same way.

“You must be so tired, working so hard. You deserve to rest. Collect a reward.” His tongue darts out to moisten his lips and this is the first foreign gesture that completely confirms your suspicions: this is not Mr. Mosses.

Everything you need is right in front of you. The entryway door is still securely locked. The rotary phone is mere inches away. You can call in the team at any time now. Save everyone. Except for Francis, of course; it was too late for him.

“Sweetheart, please let me in.” Attracting flies with honey. His voice dripping affection. His fingertips blanch against the glass. The brim of his cap slides further down his brow. A single track of perspiration leaks down his cheek. The body still fighting, even now. Resisting. Rejecting the invader. But it was too little, too late.

“I can’t let you in.”

His head snaps up and the eyes are bloodshot, spidery lines of crimson streaking across the white orbs. A thin trail of saliva drips from one corner of his mouth. “Can’t, or won’t?” Straight to vinegar now. Acidic tone. It lashes against you. You’re shaking.

“I know what you are,” you declare in a whisper.

The replicant raises his free hand, fingers curling into a fist before striking the pane. It rattles in its casing and you gasp. You’d always thought the material was shatterproof. “You don’t know anything. How can you? You run unchallenged for a small fraction of years and you think you know all there is to in the universe. Such arrogant, fragile things you are,” he murmurs, and the sudden calm unnerves you even more than the rage.

You begin to reach for the receiver and his fingers slide down the glass, squeaking as they go. “Wait. Don’t do that.”

You pause, hand still outstretched. “I don’t have a choice.”

“You do have a choice. You don’t have to be one of the mindless sheep.” His nostrils flare, inhaling deeply. “Francis loved that fragrance you wear. He liked so many things about you. You’ll never know how much if you make that call.”

You suck in a sharp breath. Was it true? Or just a ruse to get you to spare him? “He’s gone. There’s no getting him back now.” Your voice warbles, your fingers trembling as you reach again. Making contact with the ebony plastic this time.

“He’s right here. You could have him. All you have to do is let me in.”

You lift the receiver from the handset cradle. The spiral cord connecting the two sways like a tightrope beneath an acrobat walking its length. You feel like that performer. Teetering on the edge between life and death. Yours. The people in the building. You have a duty to protect them.

The uniformed man’s eyes slide closed. Dark lashes light as moth’s wings kissing his cheeks. He’s humming softly. A melody you’d heard every time Francis had left for his route. The tune unfamiliar. But it’s his. Had always been unique to him. Why hadn’t you asked what song it was? Why hadn’t you…

The handset drops back down and the dial tone is silenced. His eyes reopen. “Let me in, love.” The softest, sweetest smile. You reach for the buzzer. Staring at your hand as if you don’t recognize it as your own. “I’ll give you everything you want, sweet girl.” Nearly to the button now. “There you go. Just a little more.” Contact. The light flashes and the magnetic locks release, granting the doppelgänger access.

[yinyuedijun]

translation

Aventurine doesn't like being understood, but he does like understanding other people. It is essential for manipulation, for scheming, for control. And he likes controlling you especially—for keeping you close but your heart a comfortable distance away, for opening your legs when he wants the pleasure of your body, for playing your emotions however he needs. And the day will come when that skill will be invaluable—the day when he must die without shattering you. (Or: You are the only person in the universe who understands Aventurine in his mother tongue. He often regrets teaching it to you.)

5k words. gender neutral reader, established relationship, angst, non-graphic sex (reader bottoms, anatomy neutral), themes of cultural loss, references to slavery, aventurine’s canonically implied desire to die. MDNI.

Aventurine cannot lie in Avgin.

Deception does not come easily to him in his mother tongue. His command of it is too weak—and too kind. The universe was a different place in the days when his life was coloured by the warble of Avgin dialect. It felt simpler, partly because he was a child and partly because Sigonia was yet untouched by outsiders. There were no corporations, no casinos, no commodity codes. His entire world was sand, desert, mother, sister, father (or more often—ghost), goddess, tent, wagon, luck, sin, rain, blessing, Avgin.

Katican.

Aventurine is sure that he knew more than just those words. He was fluent as a child. He had conversations with his sister that were complex enough to make his heart hurt, though perhaps his heart was just constantly aching anyway. But the rest of his early words escapes him. He could maybe dredge them up if he thinks long enough, but he also isn't sure if his tongue and lips could form the shape of them anymore. Sometimes he still counts in Avgin, memorises phone numbers in it, but he doesn’t remember the last time he actually strung together a full sentence in the language.

When Aventurine was first stolen into slavery (a word that he had not known as a child, and still doesn't know in Avgin), he wasn’t given a Synesthesia Beacon. He had to rely on his ears and his wits, deciphering the harsh edges of the Katican dialect and then the strange garble of Interastral Standard Language. By the time he had a Beacon installed, it was already translating all speech into Standard—his dominant language.

Sometimes he feels a little aggrieved by it, but at least it wasn't Katican. He'd have blown out his brains if it were.

But it is easy to console himself: Avgin is not a useful language anyway. Dead languages have no value, and the Avgin dialect was killed along with its people. You can’t perform commerce in a dead language, can't negotiate contracts, can't enter a gambling den and use your silver tongue to rob people blind. You can't use a dead language to fell governments and extract resources; you can't use a dead language to bring an entire planet to its knees. You can’t use a dead language to gamble your life; you can't use it to save yourself from the gallows.

You cannot deceive people in a language that is defined by sand, sister, goddess, ghost.

Aventurine cannot lie in Avgin. His command of it is too weak, and there is no one left to which he can lie, anyway.

When you ask Aventurine to teach you his first language, he gives you an amused look.

“Why Avgin?” he asks. “No one speaks it anymore. I can teach you Common Sigonian if you’d like. Or we could learn Xianzhounese together. Maybe Intellitron code? I know a little.”

“You speak Avgin,” you argue.

“Not often,” he says. “And badly when I do.”

“But it's still your language. And I want to understand you.”

Aventurine has to stop himself from laughing. Understand him? He hates being understood. When people understand him, it makes him predictable. And unlikeable. Hardly a position from which he can manipulate people in.

You understand him well enough to know that.

“You'll have to give me a better reason than that,” he says neatly. “Make it worth my while. Reward me.”

You look at him as you ponder, your eyes lingering on his. Perhaps trying to read him, though he prefers to think you're just enjoying the sight of them.

“I’ll teach you my language as well?”

“You mean—you'll reward my hard labour with more work?” he says, lighthearted.

You frown at him despite the joke. “You don't want to understand me better than what a Synesthesia Beacon would allow?” He blinks, pausing. “It’ll be convenient too. We can talk shit about other people in public and no one will understand us.”

Aventurine considers you. He doesn't like being understood, but he does like understanding other people. It is essential for manipulation, for scheming, for control. And he likes controlling you especially—for keeping you close but your heart a comfortable distance away, for opening your legs when he wants the pleasure of your body, for playing your emotions however he needs. And the day will come when that skill will be invaluable—the day when he must die without shattering you.

He also likes the idea of talking shit in public.

“I'm listening,” he says, voice lilting. You lean in, smiling. Sweet. It makes his heart feel something he isn't used to. Something addictive. Something disgusting. He scrambles to cover it with one of the usual tools: humour or distraction or maybe just plain old lying—his most reliable weapon.

“I'll throw in a kiss?” you try.

He hums. “Just one?”

“One per day.”

“Three.”

“You drive a hard bargain.”

“Well, I am a businessman.”

You snort, but he knows you're endeared. You have very noticeable tells when you’re flustered.

“Okay,” you say. “Three kisses on days you teach me.”

“Deal.”

Aventurine remembers more Avgin than he thought he would.

It comes to him slowly, painstakingly. You aren't interested in structured lessons, and he wouldn't be able to provide them anyway. He has a nonexistent grasp of grammar aside from this sounds right and that sounds strange, and Avgin dialect is both so niche and so dead that no textbooks are available. The scholars have abandoned the language as much as the politicians abandoned its people. Aventurine only has you, his fragmented memory, and whatever questions come to mind as you live out your days with him.

Mostly, you ask him about basic vocabulary. Sometimes you ask him to repeat sentences from your conversations in Avgin, like he’s some kind of multilingual parrot. Each prompt forces him to wade through the fog in his mind, the one that’s been shrouding his childhood memories until now. He's startled at how naturally the old words roll off his tongue: One, two, three, four. Good morning. Good evening. Good night. Sweet dreams. Five, six, seven, eight. You're lying to me. Why do you always lie to me? I don't know what you're talking about. Nine, ten, eleven, twelve. Welcome home. Have you eaten? Have some bread. I made you stew. Twenty, thirty, forty, fifty. That was dangerous. I thought you wouldn't make it back to me. Sometimes I think you want to die. One hundred, one thousand, one million, one billion. I'm sorry. Come here. Let me kiss you. Don't cry. Don't cry. Don't cry.

When you say, How do I ask you to let me hold you, he answers easily. He'd heard the words so often as a child: Let me hold you, Kakavasha. Let Mama hold you. His mouth forms the sounds without conscious thought.

He regrets it almost immediately.

When Aventurine hears it from you—stilted, halting, but no less gentle—he stops breathing. Let me hold you. You say it all the time in Standard, but it feels different in Avgin. More painful. A strange sense of panic closes in on him when he's wrapped up in you, thinking in Avgin, thinking sand, sister, goddess, ghost. He holds you tightly, like the rags cut from his father’s shirt, or his mother’s locket won back from the shell-slashers, or a bag of poker chips beneath a card table, clutched within his trembling grip.

“Aventurine, is something wrong?” you ask in Avgin, and he replies in Standard with his usual smile.

“Hm? No. What could be wrong if I have you here?”

Lying is one of his greatest tools. Sex is another one. So he says, “I think I'd like my reward now,” and he runs his lips along your jaw, your pulse, the spot over your heart (there's a word for that in Avgin but not Standard, he tells you), until you're laughing. I thought you wanted three kisses, you tease, and he replies, Who said I wanted to kiss you on the mouth?

But he coaxes open your thighs, and once he's inside you, he collects his payment properly. He kisses you, and kisses you, and kisses you—and you swallow his lies whole.

There are some things that Aventurine doesn't teach you. Mostly, they’re things that he can’t teach you.

There are countless gaps in his Avgin. His speech is painfully childish—probably more childish than it was when he actually stopped speaking it. He doesn't know how to swear (something that disappoints you) and he doesn't know how to flirt (something that devastates you). He doesn’t know any words that would be useful for work either: commercialization, governance, stakes, winnings, profit. When you ask him what his job title is in Avgin (“Was senior management even a thing in Avgin society?”), he laughs and gives you the word for gambler.

Then there are the words that he remembers—has remembered his whole life—but never says. Not to you, and not to himself. He doesn't teach you any prayers. He doesn't teach you any blessings. He doesn't teach you about Mama Fenge, or the Kakava Festival, or how the rain fell when he was born. When you ask him, What holidays did you celebrate when you were little? he shrugs and says, We didn't have any. Sigonia’s too bleak to do any partying.

Then you ask him one day, while your bodies are spent in the afterglow of sex, sticky with sweat and sweetness, how to say I love you. And he goes quiet.

Love is a cheap word in Interastral Standard. In the language of globalisation and trade, love has been commercialised, commodified, capitalised for power. You say it to him in many contexts: I love this, I love that, I love you. He hardly ever reacts, and he's never said it back. It would feel unnecessary and also cruel if he did: Aventurine has only ever said the words himself as either a joke or a manipulation.

But love feels different in Avgin than in Interastral Standard, doesn't sound like a thing that can be traded or bought. Kakavasha only ever said the word love to his mother, to his sister, to his father's grave. Love in his mother tongue feels priceless.

When Aventurine thinks about you saying it—I love you, Kakavasha, in clumsy, earnest Avgin—something so painful swells in his throat that he can hardly breathe.

“There is no word for love in my language,” he tells you.

You blink. “Okay, then what's an idiom for it?”

“There is none. There’s no word or phrase expressing love.”

You raise a brow. “That’s hard to believe.”

“Is it?” He smiles. “There’s no Avgin in the known universe who cares about love. Only scheming, thieving, and treachery—and you can't do those things when love is involved.”

You look at him in alarm. “Why are you saying that?” You're practically squirming in your discomfort. “I don't know why you think I'd believe such a racist stereotype.”

“It’s not a stereotype,” he says. “I'm not talking about the Avgin culture. I'm talking about myself.”

After all, he is the only Avgin left.

It is an unfair thing to say. A cruel thing to say. After all the laughing and kissing and crying and fucking, after all the tender eyes and gentle words from you—it is probably the worst pain imaginable: I don't give a shit about you. He waits for you to cry.

But you only stare at him calmly, studying him. You brush the hair out of his eyes, seeing them clearly.

“If you lie to me all the time,” you say in Avgin, “eventually I'll stop believing anything you say.”

Aventurine is speechless. His heart does that addictive, disgusting thing again. He thinks about leaving, but then you say, Let me hold you, and he can't do anything other than obey.

Avgin dialect was once included in the Synesthesia Beacon list of functions. The Intelligentsia Guild added it before the Second Katica-Avgin Extinction Event, when the IPC was trying to get a political foothold on Sigonia via the Avgin people. The language was alive then, with enough value to be included into the Synesthesia LLM by the linguists.

But since the Extinction Event—since Kakavasha ran away from home—the Synesthesia data on Avgin has been stagnant, a fossil. Aventurine knows because he's subscribed to software updates for certain languages (Avgin Sigonian, Common Sigonian, Interastral Standard, and now your mother tongue). He gets pinged every time there's a new addition for slang, for neologisms—but there hasn't been a ping for the Avgin dialect since he had the Beacon installed. The live translation function hasn't even been available since the previous Amber Era. When he checks its page on his Synesthesia app, it's very clear why—

SIGONIAN, AVGIN DIALECT SPEAKERS: 0 STATUS: Extinct END OF SERVICE: 2156 AE

The complete death of the language has led to an irritating dilemma for you and Aventurine. You keep running into words that he doesn't know—this time not because of his childlike speech, but because they never existed in his language to begin with. Ocean, tropical, rainforest. Starskiff, accelerator, space fleet. Stock market, shortselling, mutual funds. Black hole, event horizon, spaghettification. All things that never came up for Kakavasha, but now come up for Aventurine, and the language has not evolved to include it.

He always wants to switch to Standard to discuss these things, but you're insistent on speaking in Avgin as much as possible. He doesn't know why, but he doesn't mind humouring you—partly because he likes to indulge you, and partly because he’s grown used to hearing the honeyed timbre of Avgin dialect in your household. The place would feel strange without it.

So you start filling the gaps with other languages, filtering them through the lyricism of Avgin. Loanwords, he thinks they’re called. You take ocean, tropical, rainforest from Amazian; starskiff, accelerator, space fleet from Xianzhounese; stock market, shortselling, mutual funds from Interastral Standard. For the astrophysics terms, you try directly translating them—with limited success.

“Can't I literally just say ‘black hole’?” you ask in Avgin, and he nearly spits out his coffee.

“Please don't. That's a dirty word.” He can't bring himself to say what it means, but from the way you’re laughing, you can clearly guess.

“I thought you said you didn't know how to swear.”

“You've just reminded me how.”

“You're welcome.” You look on the verge of cackling. Aventurine finishes his coffee and wonders when you're going to surprise him with your newfound vulgarity.

“Let's just do the space terms based on Standard,” he says. Begs.

“No, that's so boring.”

“Then let's do your language.”

You open your mouth. Close it. Give him a blank look.

“You don't know how to say those words in your mother tongue either, do you,” he intuits.

“Well, ‘spaghettification’ doesn't really come up in everyday conversation, does it?”

“Then maybe we don't need it.” He smiles, senses an opportunity. Smells blood. “How about ‘love’? I'd much rather know how you say that. I bet it sounds beautiful.”

You give him a long look. Your eyes are vulnerable when you share it: Love. I love you. He’s fascinated by the sound of it. Your voice is never that fragile when you say it in Standard. It's never so earnest. He repeats it, staring at you, and your gaze falls to the ground. His mouth curls.

“I like it,” he says. “Let's use that. It'll sound nice in Avgin.”

You try to recover. “Sure. That works. But back to ‘black hole’—”

And the two of you continue like that for days, weeks, months. It feels like a complete bastardization of his mother tongue on some days, in some conversations. Almost unrecognisable. But it doesn't feel bad. It’s all he has, it's all you have, and when he walks into your home, he starts speaking it without thinking: your bastard, patchwork language. The Avgin dialect that exists only in your house. A tongue that can only be understood by a liar.

And then, one lazy Sunday morning, he gets a familiar ping. He expects it to be Interastral Standard, as usual. The language balloons with each planet that the IPC colonises.

But instead, he opens his screen and freezes.

SIGONIAN, AVGIN DIALECT SPEAKERS: 2 STATUS: Endangered. SERVICE RESUMED: 2157 AE NEW UPDATES: 103 loanwords and 5 neologisms added.

He can't stop looking at the status. Endangered. Endangered, which means dying, but alive. The Avgin dialect is alive again. The Intelligentsia Guild determined it, so it must be true. But Aventurine can't agree: there are no Avgin speakers in the known universe other than the two of you, and what you speak isn't real Avgin. The Avgin spoken by his mother and father and sister is dead; the Avgin spoken by Kakavasha is dead. The festivals are gone; the deserts have been terraformed. There are no wagons; there are no dances; there are no prayers. There are no blessings, and he has no home—

As long as you are alive, the blood of the Avgin will never run dry.

His throat locks up.

“Aventurine?” you ask. Your voice is drowsy, but concerned. “Is something wrong?”

He looks at you from his phone, a polished smile on his face.

“No.” His syllables are plain and efficient in the noise of Interastral Standard: “Just looking at details for a new assignment. It’ll be a long one.”

“Oh.” You frown. “Will you be away from home for a long time, then?”

He stops himself from swallowing. “Yes, I'll be away from the house. For several months, probably.”

“Okay.” Your voice is small. “Take care of yourself, okay? I'll miss you.”

Each word you speak resonates with heartbreak. It always does in these conversations, even in Standard—but the sorrow is amplified in Avgin. His mother tongue has an inherently sad quality to it, he's noticed. His people have lost so much over their history—their language is one of loss. It's his language of loss. Kakavasha did all his grieving in Avgin; Aventurine has never felt sorrow in Standard. When the language died, so did Kakavasha—and all his regrets with it.

“You'll come home to me, right?” you ask. It's a beautiful sentence in Avgin. A heartrending one. He feels something that he hasn't known since he was a child.

It's a feeling he has to kill.

“Yes,” he says in Standard. “Of course I'll come back.”

This is not the first time that Aventurine has been mistaken for dead, but this is the longest time.

The latest world to join the IPC network was a tough acquisition. It had been ruled by a despot who wreaked havoc on both the people and the planet, and who was too stupid and reckless to resolve conflicts with his trade partners. He probably would have blown up the whole star system had he been left to his own devices. Aventurine had no qualms about bringing him to ruin, nor did he have qualms about nearly dying in the process.

If things had gone his way, he'd either be dead or missing. This would have been the perfect opportunity to do the latter, actually—to be freed from the IPC. Free to drift alone, speaking with strangers in strange, unfamiliar tongues. No connection to his past, to the cruel history of his luck, to his commodity code. No tether to his inherently unjust destiny. But instead he's back in your house, pockets heavy with his borrowed wealth, speaking to you in his bastardised, childish Avgin. I'm sorry. Come here. Let me kiss you. Don't cry. Don't cry. Don't cry.

Your Avgin is—shockingly fluent. He doesn't know how. He can't think about it right now. All he can process is the wounded animal noise of your speech as you yell at him, as you cry. Like an injured songbird, or a weeping child. Why did you leave, why did you lie, why do you always lie to me, why don't you give a shit about me, you spit. Why do you want to die, why do you want to die, why do you want to die, you keep saying. Sand, sister, goddess, ghost, he keeps hearing. Sand, sister, goddess, ghost. Don't leave me, big sister. People will die. Why do you have to go?

“I’m sorry,” he tries again, this time in your language. “I'm so sorry. Come here. Let me hold you.”

You collapse into your mother tongue. Aventurine is both relieved and horrified. Relieved that he doesn't need to hear the language of his grief—horrified that he needs to hear yours. He's never heard you cry like this. He's never heard you break like this. These must have been the words you used when the soldiers found you hiding in your closet, when they dragged you out of your home. You were just a child.

Aventurine doesn't know the words you are using—you've never taught them—but he still understands them.

You're very malleable when you’re sad; even more so when you're hysterical. Aventurine understands this about you, and he understands how to calm you—this time in your native tongue—and he understands how to kiss you. He understands that you need to feel close to him. He understands that there are ways to accomplish this other than sex. A normal person would talk it out, have an honest conversation, come to a mutual understanding, and maybe even stop trying to kill himself. They wouldn't fuck you into the mattress while your face is still wet with tears.

But Aventurine is not a normal person. He doesn't know how to have an honest conversation, and he doesn't want to be understood. Lying is his greatest weapon, and sex is a close second. So he kisses you until you’re too breathless to cry, fucks you until you can't think, and makes you come so hard that you’re in too much bliss to grieve. And maybe it's horrible of him, but he enjoys it. He enjoys the way your body takes him in so easily, the way your nails dig into his back, the way you tighten around him when you climax, so wet and needy for him. The way you beg for him in your language for liars as he spends himself inside you: I love you, Aventurine, I love you, I love you, I love you—

Only because it feels good. This is all only because he enjoys fucking you. This is all only because you enjoy fucking him. This is all it'll ever be, and it'll be this way until he gets to meet his end.

(Some months ago, Aventurine started dreaming in Avgin.

It surprised him when he first noticed it. The last time he remembers having a dream in his native tongue, he was twelve years old and still in chains. And even then, it had become a sporadic, strange thing. Awful to wake up from. One minute he was with his mother and sister on a cool, rainy day, speaking fluently in Avgin as he laughed and played—and the next minute, he was being shaken awake in his cage, hearing the cruel lash of Katican.

But ever since he's started speaking Avgin with you, he's been dreaming in it. Vividly. Sometimes he's a child in these dreams, and sometimes he's grown. He's always back in the Sigonian desert, among the tents and the campfires and his family wagons. His mother and sister are alive. Sometimes his father is too. The skies roar with thunder and the stellar winds are always harsh, but they always keep him cocooned up in their arms. He's always warm.

Sometimes Aventurine dreams of nicer days. Clear skies, warm sun, cool breeze—all blessings from the Mother Goddess. On these days, he tends to be an adult, and you tend to be there with him. Your Avgin is fluent but strange, filled with funny loanwords and peculiar slang. His father likes the neologisms and starts using them—but only in wrong ways. His sister finds it embarrassing and keeps apologising to you.

His mother loves you. She loves you so much it hurts. This is how I know you're blessed, Kakavasha, she says, glowing. You’re so lucky to have found such a kind person.

Kakavasha knows this. He knows he's lucky, and in his dreams, that isn't a bad thing. In his dreams, his luck means that his home is not violently excised from his heart: his father never dies; his mother never dies; his sister never dies. The tents are not burned; the wagons are not destroyed. He is never forced to forget his people's dishes, their songs, their language, their joy. And in his dreams, his luck means that he meets you anyway, without all the loss and the chains and the lying.

In his dreams, he is able to bring you to the desert. He is able to teach you the Avgin he spoke as a child, to cook all the meals his mother used to make, to share with you their coffee and their tea. He teaches you prayers. He teaches you blessings. He tells you about Mama Fenge, about how the rain fell when he was born. He takes you to the Kakava Festival, shows you how to dance, sings to you all the Avgin songs until you're singing back. He presses his palm to yours in prayer; he kisses you in devotion, not avoidance.

Sometimes the two of you still fight, the same fights that you have in real life, but he handles them with honesty. He listens to you. He apologises to you. He tells you that he’ll change, and he means it—because this world is a kind one, and he has no need to be so cruel to you.

In this kind world, when you lay in bed with his arms tight around you, you smile at him and say, I love you, Kakavasha. You say it in Avgin—real Avgin, not the dialect born from genocide and deceit—and when he responds, there's not even a little bit of insincerity in his voice. Because Kakavasha never became Aventurine in these dreams, so he has no Interastral Standard in which he can lie to you, no silver tongue with which he can manipulate you, no commodity code that inspires his fear of being controlled by you. Kakavasha only knows Avgin, and he only has his sand, his family, his goddess, his home.

And he has you. Finally, he has you.

He kisses you, and kisses you, and kisses you—and then he tells you the truth.)

.

.

.

Aventurine cannot lie in Avgin.

You noticed this very early on: whenever he lies to you, he always switches to Interastral Standard. Probably he wouldn't be able to do it in his mother tongue. His command of it is too weak, and the words he knows are all too kind. He speaks with the innocence of a child, and children cannot deceive people in the way that adults can. Children cannot perform commerce or negotiate contracts. They cannot use a silver tongue to rob people blind. They cannot save themselves from the gallows.

So Aventurine’s Avgin is defenceless. Vulnerable. So vulnerable it hurts. You are not so vulnerable in your first language because your captors spoke it on occasion, and you learned to lie in it to gain their pity. You told Aventurine that knowing it would help him understand you, but this was a deception. Aventurine’s mother tongue was a language of trust, but yours is a dialect of abuse.

The Avgin language died before Aventurine could be gutted by it; this is why it disarms him so completely. This is why he’s so indulgent and so warm when you use it with him, why he yields to all your requests. Not requests for money or gifts—you’re certain those are meaningless to him—but for affection. Let me hold you. Let me touch you. Let me kiss you. He can never say no.

This is also why he loves hearing you speak his mother tongue, you think—it makes him feel at home, it makes him feel safe. Maybe it even makes him feel loved. He never seems so at peace speaking any other language, so you try to use Avgin as much as possible. You like seeing him happy. You like it even if it means you need to teach him your own native language in exchange, even when it means you need to hear him say all the things your captors used to say. You don't mind it if it's him. You never mind the harm he inflicts on you, especially not when it brings you closer to him.

It is convenient that he cannot lie in Avgin. You only wanted to learn it in the first place because he talks in his sleep—mostly in Standard, but sometimes in his native tongue. And now that you know he cannot lie in Avgin, you also know he's always being honest in his dreams. Honest when he throws his arms around you in his sleep. Honest when he grabs you so tightly that you bruise. Honest when he buries his face into your neck and whispers prayers into your skin.

Most of the words he says are common ones, the earliest vocabulary that he taught you. But there are some things he's withheld from you—and to learn those things, you had to track down linguists from the Intelligentsia Guild, bribe them with your dirty money, have them give you all their deprecated, extinct data. It felt two-faced, and it was violating, but it was the only way. You already know that Aventurine would rather die than translate his feelings for you, would never want this part of himself understood.

I'm sorry for always leaving you.

I'm sorry for making you cry.

I can't bear the thought of losing you.

Freedom would be too lonely without you.

I don't want to hurt you anymore.

I don't want to lie to you anymore.

I missed you.

I want you.

I need you.

I love you.

end

afterword

[catsvrsdogscatswin]

I've had this thought swirling in the back of my head for a while, but it's finally congealed enough that I think I can make a coherent pitch, which is: I think RWBY's problems with the more vitriolic part of its fanbase partially stems from the fact that RWBY is a deconstruction that doesn't advertise it's a deconstruction.

RWBY's status as a deconstruction is pretty textbook. It takes apart standard fantasy, shounen, and anime tropes in order to analyze them and their deeper meaning and then reassembles them in new and interesting ways for the plot/characters/series. Thing is, it never says that outright in promotional material, which can lead to later outrage in fans.

See, unless their way of discovering new shows is to close their eyes and stab their finger at random, most people tend to choose series to watch/read based on expectations. Maybe a friend said they'll like it because it has [insert thing], maybe they read the summary and were intrigued, maybe they thought the poster/cover art was cool, whatever. These small pieces of information are generally enough for people to make a snap-judgment of the style and genre of the series, which they can then gauge against their personal tastes and decide whether or not they want to try.

Most of the time, this works just fine. Well-written deconstructions also generally give the viewers some warning/buildup before they take a hard swerve. See Madoka Magica: the magical girl paradigm is shaded by the possibility of death as soon as we're introduced to it, then there's an onscreen death with blood, and then a few episodes later we eventually realize the Faustian bargain of it all. Even innocent viewers who stumbled into watching it, unaware of the show's reputation, would go "Oh, wait, this is not going in the direction magical girl shows usually go" by a third of the way through.

The thing is, with RWBY, this does not happen unless you're paying a lot of attention and/or looking for it. And neither the cover art nor the summary nor, I believe, the fanbase gives a lot of warning about the swerves ahead.

In fact, RWBY initially bills itself as a pretty standard shounen anime. The main protagonist is hinted to have Special Powers and gets into the Magic Monster-Hunting School in the first episode, and the first two-and-a-half seasons are taken up by her and her friends' superhero-esque slice-of-life shenanigans as they thwart robberies and terrorist attacks and gear up for a tournament arc against the looming background of a larger conspiracy.

Then in the last half of the third season the villains' entire Rube Goldberg machine of a scheme snaps into completion and the plot twists so hard the entire genre takes a hard right. If you're used to character analysis and common anime tropes, this is not completely a surprise -up until this point, RWBY's character arcs and plot have been subtly traveling in non-traditional directions that hint of greater flexibility in genre treatment ahead- but if you're not... well.

Thing is, people watching RWBY up until this point have signed up for pretty standard shounen and they've been getting it, but the third season's ending smashes that all to bits. From then on out in RWBY, it's like they ordered fries and suddenly got a hamburger. It might be delicious; but it's not what they asked for, what they wanted, or what they paid for, and they are, justifiably, displeased.

So when the reasonable people either adjusted their expectations or sighed, shook their heads, and clicked back out (perhaps with a grumble and a scowl), the unreasonable people dug their heels in and began insisting that everybody was Getting The Show/Character Wrong and that CRWBY is ruining it, because the fact that RWBY's method of deconstruction is to put standard tropes in a blender and then arrange what's left in deceptive patterns means that said unreasonable viewers can scan the bare surface and argue that all the stereotypical stuff is clearly still under there, somewhere.

So they're continually trying to drag RWBY back to the tracks of a typical shounen anime series (it's closest relative), which creates a dissonance between the show they're watching and the show they think they're watching. They're trying to turn the hamburger back into fries, basically, except that doesn't work and just frustrates everyone involved, because you're trying to make RWBY into something that it's not. Hence, this attitude probably starting/fueling some of the more contentious statements in the fandom, i.e.:

"Ironwood was right the whole time" (in most action movies and shounen anime, allied military leaders are trustworthy beyond reproach)

"Adam's character was wasted" (we all know how much shounen loves their powerful warrior antiheroes)

"Ruby and the others are in the wrong about [insert thing]/or for doing [insert thing], and this is bad writing!" (shounen protagonists don't usually make more than One Very Big Mistake over the course of their entire careers, which is usually fixed/overcome/redeemed via an appropriately rigorous training arc)

And to be clear, there's nothing wrong with shounen tropes or shounen anime. They're wonderful storytelling devices in their own way and their own time: but if you want standard by-the-book shounen without any new and interesting concoctions, then RWBY is definitely not the show for you. And most people don't find that out until it's too late.

[endless-ineffabilities]

le marquis et le moineau

Marquis de Gramont x f!reader

themes: angst, twisted business associates(?) to lovers, dubious morals, the Marquis has his eyes set on you and only you (but you don't know that ofc)

a/n: this bloody Frenchman has been plaguing my thoughts (thanks to a very sinister portrayal by one Bill Skarsgård). Mind you, I still haven't even seen the film John Wick 4, but I'm a fan of the series, and the morsels I've seen of the Marquis have been more than enough to give rise to a new lil fixation.

word count: 932 ▪︎ more of moineau ▪︎ other works

It started as a little game.

Just some passing fancy between yourself and the Marquis.

Or at least, that was what it was supposed to remain. Only that. A game.

But you should have known better. You should have known that any game played with Marquis Vincent de Gramont may eventually turn deadly.

Your high-risk job at the Continental usually also reaped the highest of rewards.

Tip off the right person and receive a gold coin. Deliver a message, without any bumps or bruises to all parties involved, and your reputation would be given a much-needed boost or two.

This business was danger wrapped in deceit wrapped in glamour. And you knew how to deal the right cards.

Although it seems, things are not as easy when it comes to the Marquis.

Vincent was every bit a menace as his reputation decreed. The Marquis tasked with restoring the authority of the High Table, he was nothing short of cunning and ambitious, prepared to take down any and all those who posed a threat to his objectives.

Dangerous. Deceptive. Glamourous as well, mind you. He was perfectly suited to this world.

He was also brazen, pretentious, snobbish.

And beautiful.

He knew just how to tug at your strings and make you bend. Or at least, he always tried to.

Like he was doing then, in one of the bigger rooms in his palacial estate, wherein only the two of you stood with only a few feet in between.

"What did we agree upon, mon moineau?" His silky accented voice implored.

My sparrow, he called you. The reason for which remained undisclosed to you, not for a lack of trying to wrench it out of him.

Why couldn't he call you something sweeter? Of the more classic French romantic sobriquets?

Chérie, perhaps. Mon amour. Mon coeur.

But no. You were stuck with measly ol' "my sparrow".

Of course, not that it mattered. Perhaps the Marquis reserved his sweeter words for those he actually cared for. At the very least, well-regarded enough to be associated with. Those impossibly beautiful and refined members of European aristocracy that he was so often rumoured to be wining and dining.

Unlike you. Renegade, foul-mouthed vagabond.

You stared up at his pacing figure. "I am fully aware of what we agreed upon, Vincent. What I have done does not breach that. I am perfectly capable - "

His head snapped to you menacingly. "You could have been killed, moineau."

You shrugged. "Consequences. I did not enter this damned line of work without considering the risks. As it goes, getting killed would not exactly be an uncommon occurence."

"Don't jest." He shut his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose, in obvious annoyance.

You took a step forward, trying to find his gaze. "And if I were to... pass... so what? Everything would simply go on. The truth is that I'm already a ghost. Doing what I do in our world makes me some kind of spectre. I am already not there."

You knew this. You repeated this to yourself when you woke, and before you went to sleep. It was the only truth you could hold on to.

Until him. Until some buried, twisted part of you began hoping that he would care.

But hope is a dangerous thing.

You continued, as he kept looking away. "You would go on. Perhaps even find a new sparrow to play with."

You felt it. As your words hung in the air, his entire mood shifted. He straightened, and with both hands burrowed in the pockets of his impeccably tailored trousers, his eyes land on you.

He slowly took a step forward, and then another, until his figure loomed over you.

In all your shared moments, you learned to discern the quick switches in his temper and his expression. But not enough, not completely.

The look he was giving you then was impossible to read.

"You think..." His left hand drifted to the hem of your blazer, toying with it. "... that I..." His index finger then drifted upward over your silk shirt, stopping in between your collarbones. His tongue briefly darted out to wet his lips, catching your eye. "... would simply replace you?"

You finally felt his touch on your face, his fingers delicately caressing your jawline.

He made a fleeting tsk tsk sound with his tongue, as if in disapproval.

"I believe you underestimate just how much you matter to me, mon moineau."

You did your best to remain unfazed. This was the game, wasn't it? Whatever you might think it can become, what you hope it can unravel into - set it aside as delusion.

Don't fall.

It's just a game to play.

Don't fall.

You took a deep breath, then smiled sweetly. Mockingly. "What makes you think I would even pay any mind to how much I matter to you? That line of thinking doesn't work for people like us, Marquis."

"People like us," he repeated, amusement furrowing his brow. "Non, mon moineau. There are no other people like us."

He leaned in, eyes not leaving yours, all but eliminating the distance between your faces. You could feel his breath on your skin, could count the faint spotting of freckles around his nose.

You wished to ask him what he wanted, but held back.

No. There was something better to say.

"What are you waiting for?" You managed to voice the words despite your very heart lodged in your throat.

He smiled, proud of his precious sparrow.

"Mon coeur... I've been waiting for you my entire life."

Ahhh! 🖤 Everybody say thank you Bill Skarsgård and the on-set stylist for the visual treat that is the Marquis.

I'm not even sure if this will find the right crowd - seeing as my lovely followers are of the HotD persuasion. But oh well, I had to get it out of my system.

Could be more of this... idk 🤷‍♀️ Rest assured I haven't forgetten about all my series works, even the ones I haven't started but said I would do...

[meanbossart]

hey! so i absolutely adore DU drow and i have my own dnd character who's a sort of dark-urge-type murdercreature, and i thought it would be fun to draw them together.

this is illiam, he is a deep gnome rogue who is over a thousand years old and the most divorced man alive (alive being debatable). he's a freaky little liar with +10 deception and makes it everyone's problem.

knowing me there's definitely some shit i need to fix but ill do it tomorrow and perhaps even post it, if thou wouldst not mind it.

anyways. your art inspires me. thank you for being you.

OH I FUCKING LOVE YOUR STYLE I'm such a sucker for angular shapes and sharper edges, and it's so beautifully complemented by this soft coloring and lighting you chose!

Your rendition of DU drow is phenomenal, I LOVE your take on him - the beady little eyes, the kind of puzzled look, the body-language and shape, absolutely nailed his vibe.

And Illiam sounds like a riot, I don't know how he got to this point where he's got a knife to DU drow's throat and both his hands busy, but I can make a few guesses LOL ALSO I SEE A HINT OF A PHENOMENAL ARRANGEMENT OF FACIAL HAIR, GOOD FOR HIM, FLAUNT IT IN THE FACE OF THIS SMOOTH-CHINNED FREAK - HE COULD ONLY DREAM OF SPROUTING SUCH A GLORIOUS STACHE

THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR THIS LOVELY PRESENT, AND BY ALL MEANS POST WHATEVER ART OF THEM YOU'D LIKE SO I MAY DEVOUR IT WITH MY EYEBALLS

[rinbowaman]

Hsjaksis this idea has been in my brain for so long but imagine demon heeseung who watches little church girl y/n ever since she turned of age, he's smitten,he wants her but also knows that her purity is too strong and he can only touch her body if she gives him permission,so he has to use deception. Pretend to be someone else to earn ur trust, making u suck on his fingers by telling u that it will earn u god's grace. Overall heavy on corruption if u catch my drift. He will slowly prepare you for himself cuz u r oh so sweet and innocent completely unaware of the pleasures of the human body

”A Test of Will.”

WARNINGS: Unprotected sex, slight breeding kink, corruption, deception, demonic HS x Y/N. Stealing y/n's virginity, possessiveness, secret admiring, cursing, I think that's it.

I apologize it took me so long to post. I got super jet-lagged after our flight back home the other day. But without further ado, here is (sorry it's not proofread) the one shot, "A Test of Will." REQUESTED.

Begin Read:

For as long as you can remember, you loved and praised God, taught to submit into his will whenever he desired or called upon you. As a young girl, you wanted nothing more than to become a bride of Jesus and yearned to remain everlasting and pure. It was a life you loved and respected, being the daughter of a pastor and the wife of a devoted homemaker. From the moment you understood speech, and emotional love, it had always been ingrained in your head to please him and only him.

So, you did.

The first moment you realized the importance of your obedience to the Holy spirit was after you turned seven and your family coordinated your Baptism at the local church, one your family had been attending for years. Donning all white, looking as angelic as the Renaissance paintings, you gained holiness and rebirth as God's child, watching as everyone gathered around and sang praises and cheers. It was a joyous event that displayed your conformance to the standards of God's holy will. Among the chanting choir, one particular guest lurked from above, watching with intrigue. Despite being uninvited, he remained to observe the Holy ritual while being unheard and unseen.

He hovered high above, over the large grand fountain, and watched as the priest gently dipped your frail body in the water, allowing you to rise and take your first breath. Seeing how you smiled delicately, accepting your dedication to fulfilling God's will, creates a smirk in defiance to form gracefully on his dark lips. Now, this ritualistic occurrence was not unique to him, but he could care less, for the event wasn't the reason for his stay. It was you that he was interested in. Your innocence appealed to him, and the strength of your devotion, especially at such a young age, what an enchanting young girl you were. Perhaps he'll possess you and devour your soul while you sleep, letting you die while he tucks your spirit away for safe keeping.

Spreading his wings wide, they rested against the cathedral ceiling; the darkness of the spikes and bat-like features looked as if it smeared the face of the great mother Mary and baby Jesus, tainting their warm faces with the hue of black and blood red. His lithe frame is sharply adorned in an all-black suit with fingerless gloves, while his hair is stained royal purple. Gravity did not affect his demonic nature; no one would have been able to notice him even if he decided to become visible to the mortal eye. He took on a perfect stance of a straight stand, parallel to the roof of the ceiling, with arms carelessly crossed and a raised hand stroking his lips by the lead index. Chuckling, he becomes amused and admires your happiness in becoming one of them, another tribal animal that falls into the pretenses of spiritual love and devotion, neglecting the nature of your mortal existence and desire. That won't do for him, considering he can only devour your spirit when it is strong in faith.

……………..

Years have passed since then, and the hellish guest permanently remained in your life, unbeknownst to you. It was enjoyable for him to watch you grow, molding into a prideful young woman. He admired your dedication but grew infatuated by your stubbornness. You had no problems remaining vigilant in keeping your chastity, but it wasn't easy. As you came of age, you longed for a sense of touch and physical companionship. Most times, you continued to plow through life with your dedication strong and steady, yet some moments you questioned if you were doing enough, feeling complacent with your current path and therefore drifting in thought, wondering if there is more to life than just serving the Lord.

It had hit you hard upon graduating high school, you realized that your greatest wish was to do more, thus furthering your motivation to stay on the current course. Especially after observing your peers, watching them take part in dating, following the natural courses of love, marriage, and family life. You did everything you could to take your mind off it, from actively volunteering in holy community services to leading Bible study every day, but none of it gave you the strength you needed to stay engaged with your dedication to God. Unfortunately for you, he had sensed it and took great delight watching as you tried fighting off your instinctive desires as a mortal woman.

There were times when his invisibility was clicked on or off, depending on his mood, yet it didn't matter for each time that he was present, he remained undetected. Whether it was appearing as the air itself, or disguising as one of your friends, teachers, or even your parents, he gained interaction to hear how lovely your voice became with age. He had found you peculiar upon discovering you as a young girl, but seeing how you grew into the dedicated young woman you are today, he was obsessed. Who could have ever thought that demons could gain affection and desire for humans? It wasn't natural nor was it normal, but there is a first for everything, including him. The last straw was when he lay, relaxing himself on your bedspread, watching as you remained oblivious to his unobtrusive presence. Figuring you were going to conduct your normal routine in changing inside your closet space, he relaxes on your bedding, already knowing that your inclusive habit was due to your shyness in changing out in the open, despite being nestled in the privacy of your room…or so you thought.

It's true, that you have made a habit of changing in discrete areas such as your closet or your bathroom, but time has an effect on everyone, even God's most dutiful child. Sure, you were still fruitful and pure, but as you matured, you found it nearly silly

you weren't as shy as you were before. You were a fully, blossomed young woman who helped and loved her family and had prospects to attend the university of your choice in the oncoming months, all with the attending hopes of joining a nunnery and becoming a bride of his holiness.

His brow raises when he notices you undressing. Shifting his gaze, he looked confused for a moment as you broke out of your traditional habit, and stripped off your clothing delicately until you reached full nudeness. It takes a lot for him to become shaken, it's never happened before, but you accomplished a feat that many, including the demons of Hell, found impossible to achieve. There he lay, iris expanding and glowing red as he noted the suppleness of your soft skin, how you tenderly removed your skirt, blouse, and the undergarments that cradled your luscious breasts and the simple white lace that protected the heart of your core. It was at that moment for the first time since he discovered you, he realized that he was not just intrigued, but obsessed with having you. His infatuation develops into something deeper and stronger upon seeing your bare form, he had to keep you, shower you with his darkness, and hide your lightened heart away for only him to admire.

………………

"Y/N, come here sweetheart, and meet the new priest who has graciously volunteered his services to our church."

You had just returned from your college orientation and noted an unfamiliar umbrella staged by the front door upon entry. Your steps were timid, but you approached the living room steadily, catching sight of your mother and father both speaking to a tall figure, with his back facing you. Your mother catches your entry and bids you to introduce yourself, and you had every means of doing so gracefully, until he turned around.

"Y/N, this is Father Ethan, he has come from far away and is blessing our church with his devotion and preaching of God." Your father added on, continuing your mother's praise of the rather young-looking man that stood before you. He had dark, shiny black hair, was lean, and had a handsome face; for a priest, he was unlike any holy servant you had ever seen before. He was Asian, though you couldn't pinpoint which national region his ethnic background came from, and didn't probe to ask as it would have been too rude. You smiled sweetly and finally gulped faith before emitting your first words in greeting him.

"It's…nice to meet you, Father Ethan. My name is Y/N…."

"Well hello, it's very nice to finally meet you, Y/n. Your parents were spending the last hour boasting about you."

Looking over to your parents, Father Ethan displays a sly smirk as he crosses his arms and swings his body before returning his gaze to your direction. Your parents nod with approval and gleam proudly. You couldn't be entirely sure but there was something strange about your meeting with Father Ethan; there was an unusual level of attraction that you felt towards, and from him.

The next day, you carried out your diligent duties in leading Bible study for the younger age group. Walking in, you immediately became aware of the stark emptiness inside; no one was around, yet the candles were lit. Making your way down the aisle, you looked around and peeked between the benches, only to find that the main hall was just as empty. You stood before the holy cross, admiring the small statues and chalices that decorate the platform where the priest conducted his prayer and Biblical lecture, when suddenly a deep voice emerges from behind you. "You're here for Bible study?"

Sharply turning, you set your eyes on Father Ethan. He stood straight and tall, wearing a casual black suit with a white undershirt, partially unbuttoned. "Oh, I'm sorry Father, I didn't know you were here."

"Pay no mind, and no need to apologize." he slyly smiles in response.

Surrendering a faint nod, you smiled sweetly before clearing your throat. "Are the children here?"

"Oh you mean the ones you're leading for the lecture? I'm afraid not, everyone had prior engagements set in stone and couldn't make it."

Stroking his chin, he flares his infamous smirk once more, locking his gaze and finding you heavenly and delectable.

"You know…y/n….your diligence and faith towards God is astonishing."

"It is?"

"Mmhmm…I wonder if there is anything you wouldn't do, all in the name of your love for him."

Your eyes slightly widen as you lean in, enhancing the value of your statement. "There isn't…I would do anything to show my loyalty and to become closer, I intend to be a bride of God."

"You want to be a nun?"

Nodding, you shifted your gaze to the side upon feeling his gaze examining you with intrigue.

"Interesting." Walking towards you, his hand reaches down and gently cups your cheek. Just as he expected, your skin was soft and supple, the strands of your hair grazing against his knuckle felt like silk threads, and you warmed his coldness in an instant. "Hm…pretty."

You were taken aback by his statement, as he displays a devious smile. "No-no…it's okay. I'm not going to hurt you…in fact, I'm here to help you to get closer…"

"Closer to God?" your eyes began to water, yet you couldn't help it, you became curious by his rather bold statement. Chuckling, he bites down on his lower lip and steps back. "You wanna see proof?… You wanna see a miracle…y/n?"

Nodding once more, you watch as he takes one of the empty chalices in his hand and flicks it. The chime of the brass echoes through the main hall and into the massive foyer. Presenting it to you, you gently cradle the cup in both hands and become stunned upon seeing that the chalice was filled with blood-red wine. "I-is….is this?…. How?" You snapped your gaze over to him, curious for an explanation as you were quite sure the chalice was empty a moment ago.

"Are…you an….are you an angel?… Father Ethan?"

"Something like that." tilting his head, he continues to flash his devilish smile before whispering once again, "Something….like that."

Looking down at the chalice, you smile softly. "Can I ask why you're here?"

Playfully rolling his eyes to the side, he shrugs his shoulders before emitting an answer. "Just here to help preach his desire."

"….What is his desire?"

"You really want to know?"

"…..Yes…."

Snapping his hand forward, he snags your wrist and rapidly pulls you close, pressing you chest to chest. "First…." he softly lets out into your ear before he slowly licks the nook of your neck.

"Father! W-what…!"

"Shh….I said…everything is going to be alright…don't you trust me?….If you don't, I guess I can leave and you'll be forever marked in his eye as someone who went against his will…."

Gasping, you desperately voiced out your objection. "No! That's not true! I would do anything for him, even if it meant giving up my happiness. That's how much I love him."

"Huh…that right?" Rolling his tongue, he tilts his head and peers his gaze into yours. "You know what would make him happy?"

"….No…would you tell me?"

"Its easier if I showed you…come here."

Gripping your shoulders, he straightens your posture and squares you up with his frame. He leans in and places a soft and sensual kiss on your neck, stirring a vibrating sense to riddle deep inside your gut. Giving you the thrill of passion, he presses his parted lips against yours and harshly breathes out, coating your skin with the warmth of his exhale. Slowly, his tongue trails through his mouth, feeding its way through your lips and smears his saliva over your tongue and cheek. Your brows furrow in fear and worry, but slowly transitions into delight once you reminded yourself of how Father Ethan was bringing you closer to God, or so he says. No one could blame you, after all, seeing his talent with what he did to the chalice was proof enough that he was not an ordinary person. But what was he exactly?

Your thoughts were interrupted when his grip changes, holding your firmly by your waist while he buries his tongue deeper. As soon as you let out a gasping moan, he takes things a step further by smoothing his palms over every curve of your body. Hesitant, you try to push yourself away, yet his hold on you remained strong and he continues to shower you with the passion of his sinful touch. "Stay close to me, I promise I'll show you heaven."

"O-okay…." you faintly whispered, unable to make any sense of what was going on. You knew that what he was doing was a sin, something your parents had warned you to avoid. However, when he began feeding his hand under the hem of your dress, and smother your neck and chin with his dangerous kisses, you faltered at the sensation, keeping in mind that you were displaying your loyalty to God and his will.

"F-Father Ethan…I…I can't breathe…" you whimper as he forces your head to tilt back, allowing him a wider range to lick and nibble the skin on your throat. "It's okay, I'll fix that in a second." He mumbles.

Turning you around, he was abrupt and rough with his movements, he could tell that you didn't seem to mind, at least it didn't sound like it. Since he started to rub your inner thighs, your pitch sounded more pleasurable and less fearful. Either you were too trusting towards him, or you were melting at the feeling of being ravished by his hands and mouth.

Piercing your entry, you gasped in shock upon realizing that his hand had made its way under your panties, taking advantage of your partially exposed cavity. "Wait! Wh-what are you doing!?" you gasped out, placing your hands on his shoulders as he inserts his fingers, lifting you upwards in the process. "Dont worry…its all in his will, remember?" Father Ethan smirks as he burrows his face into your neck, groaning against your skin. "You wanna be closer to heaven, riiiiight?" Gripping a handfull of your hair, he forcefully tilts your head to the side and bites, "Ah! That hurts!" Resetting your position, he looks down at you under heavy lids, his smirk completley gone but the lust in his eye remains. "Tell you what, if you're good, I'll show you my wings."

You looked up, completely bewildered. "You have…wings?" He nods his head as he pets your hair, it was at that moment you were convinced he really was an angel. Sensing your instant will and obedience, he ignores in confirming the validity of your submission and instead, turns you around while ripping your dress in half. Shredding off your undergarments, you cover yourself as you stood fully nude with his frame pressing against you from behind. "Did you know that you've been lied to all your life?" kissing your back, he leaves a lengthy trail down your spine as he plasters his lips onto your skin.

"W-what do you mean?" You ask in all earnesty, trying to refrain from releasing your desperate moans of pleasure as you relish in the sensation of each kiss. With his lips pressed onto your lower back, he grips the back of your thighs before mumbling against you, giving a slight tickle. "God would never demand that his creations to be so ignorant as to dismiss their instinctive will to learn the life lessons of pleasure, pain, and happiness. It's what humans are meant to do in their short lifespan." Biting down, you felt the sting of his demeanor on the back of your shoulder. "I'm sure he appreciates the spiritual faith in his name, but what good is flesh and blood if not without the practice of tasting, feasting, and desiring the need to touch and be touched."

Counterattacking his resolve, you whimper your words, trying your best to maintain composure. "Flesh and blood is all but a facade, its our will that remains everlasting and true."

Chuckling, you feel his teeth against the back of your neck as he responds in amusement. "Hmph…that right? Well then princess, let's see if we can break that will of yours."

He wastes no time and begins to insert his lengthy shaft into your womanhood. Even though you hadn't given him consent, you weren't resisting to the act, so long as he kept his promise in bringing you closer to God, among other things. True, you wanted to be closer, you wanted to see Father Ethan's wings, and you wanted to enter heaven, but there was also the longing built up within you that desired for him to do more. The feeling of his thickness filling you became the most painful and pleasurable sensation you've ever felt; you nearly questioned how you could have gone so long without experiencing it, when a quick thrust on his part pinched you with sharp pain.

"Ugh….it-it hurts! F-Father Ethan…."

"Call me Heeseung baby." Be breathes out in a low groan.

"He-Heeseung?"

Noting your perfect pronunciation, he showers you with praise as he continues to lick your neck. "Very good. You have a gift of tongues, don't you?"

Fully leaned forward, he coats your back with his chest, sealing his muscle as he stuffs his entire girth in between your wet folds. "Ready to see Heaven?"

You hesitated for a second, but nodded as your body shook vigorously from the immense pressure. "Alrighty then." he smirks, just as he starts his thrusts back up. "Wow…you're fucking perfect, aren't you?"

He starts slow, but picks up the pace as he continues to pump his lengthy cock in and out of your entry. The bulging tip harshly taps against a sweet spot that lays dormant inside of you, something you never knew existed until now. In and out, he steadily increases the pace, the sound of your skin wrapping his, squelching as he thrusts ferociously with the hidden intentions of staining your internal spirit with the darkness of Hell. He goes faster, your body jolts forward as he slams his cock deep inside each time, with his thighs slamming against your own and his groin popping against your derriere. Lost in the whirlpool of erotic pleasure, your moans were interrupted as you felt his fingers crawling up, around your neck, and onto you chin. Tapping his finger against your lips, he lets out an indiscriminate tone and smirks out another one of his chuckles. "Open." Bidding to his demand, you part your lips and watch as he slips his index in and rubs the inside of your cheek. "Good girl…"

Just as you started to question his claims, his voice punctures your thoughts when he asks you, "Can you see them?"

Never losing his momentum, he continues to pump his cock, disrupting the tightness and elasticity of your feminine virtue, jerking your body back and forth from his performance. Confused by his formulation, you were about to bid him to elaborate when suddenly you saw the glowing of spheres surrounding your bodies. Thrusting, your body motions forward and back as he pulls you by the hips, making it nearly impossible for you to admire the majestic beauty of what appeared to be stars, encircling you.

"W-what….ugh!"

"I told you, didn't I?…I'd show you heaven…"

Seeing the evidence of what you could only surmise as divine intervention, you submit fully by extending your arms overhead and plastering your forearms against the wall, spreading your legs even more and allowing him unbarricaded access. Arching your back, you perk your rear cheeks upward, wanting to see and feel more.

"Yeah? Bet you wanna see more, don't you?" he scoffs in between his growls. Nodding, you bend and submit every inch of your will and begged him to do more. "Huh….if only everyone you know could see you right now….what would dear mommy and daddy think if they were to see their precious daughter getting fucked…hmm?" Following his words, he speeds up his thrusts as he firmly grips the center of your throat. "Keep yourself steady baby….you feel so fucking tight like this."

Following his instructions, you keep yourself arched as you feel his thrusts going in deeper and harder. His fingers rubbing the side of your neck as he holds you down, pinning you against the wall while he takes advantage in fully penetrating you. The more he did, the more you saw. Soon the entire hall was filled with the glowing spheres; you watched as they fluttered around and looked too beautiful to be real. They had to be angels; small and delicate cherubs that were enhancing the legitimacy of his claims.

In between your pleading moans, you faintly smile as you felt wholesome in seeing what others could not, all due to giving yourself up to this man. Letting him continue, he delightfully takes you in and punctures your entry for hours, painting your skin blue, purple, and red by his licks and nibbles. He kept going and going, your body became numb and the pleasure wore off, the only thing you could feel at this point was prickling pain and sting, yet each time he sensed your weakened state, he taunted you with his words, teasing as he scoffs them out. "Are you giving up on me? Should I stop?"

You shook your head every single time, maintaining your stance so that you could continue to be closer to your faith, to which he would respond with a chuckle, and a dark decree. "Gonna fucking break you to pieces, girl."

You barely had enough time to process his word's let alone respond, all due to his last and final effort in increasing his speed. "Oh fuck you feel so good…going to make me cum."

With tears staining your cheeks, you shook your head as you helplessely leaned your head against the wall's surface, already having done too much to suddenly stop now, not that he would ever let you. Punching your internal gut, he goes faster, deeper, and harder. Your breasts bounce fiercly as your hair flies forward, your skin tainted red as he drags his nails and digs them in. Reaching your breaking point, a sharp, stabbing sensation pierces your clit as overstimulation takes effect from the constant throbbing of his cock. "Please! No more! I-I cant!"

Your scream was all he needed to hear before he releases, fully submerging his cock deep as he groans into your ear. "My little slut...you feel me turning us into parents?" Filling you, your walls become stained by the creaminess of his seed, the warmth of it all eases you inside and out. When he was finally done, he slowly exits, releasing his grip and letting you drop to the floor. You whimper as you lay weakened, your womanhood destroyed and beaten, and all he did was stand feircly tall as he smiled deviously. Grabbing hold of his cock, he slowly strokes it as he watches you faintly struggle up. "How pretty…I'm going to have fun keeping you all to myself."

Looking up, you tearfully watch as his blackened hair turns purple, his eyes glowed dangerously red, and his lips darken. The white spheres around suddenly turned black, formulating into wild shapes of various demons with jagged teeth and elongated tongues that practically reached the floor. Beyond frightened, you gasped out a series of whimpers as you used your arms to back away, only to meet with the wall behind.

"What?…Scared?" he chuckles, taking his steps closer to you. "Didn't I promise to show you my wings? My pretty...pretty....pretty wife..."

Furrowing your brows, you looked at him mercifully when he abruptly stretches his neck. From left to right, a series of cracks could be heard as he hovers his chin over each shoulder, his lids remained partially shut, revealing the rolling of his eyes towards the back of his head; with a subtle groan, he releases his bat-like wings as they extend high and wide. Covering your mouth, you gasp in horror as you begin to sob hysterically. What have you done? Who was he and just what did you allow him to do to you? The entire afternoon spent with him taking away your purity.

"Y-you're….you're not an angel…." you muttered out, watching as he reopens his eyes and tilts his head. Gazing at you with a smirk that pitied your oblivious state of mind, his eyes drift and takes in the miraculous sight of you from head to toe. He loved how broken and helpless you looked, trapped against the wall as you attempt to cover your breasts and bring your closed legs in. With a pleading tone, you asked with sweet innocence in your voice as your eyes pushed out fresh tears. "A-are you….the Devil?"

Smirking, he takes in a final step and kneels down before you, leaning in for a kiss. Holding your head steady by a fistful of hair, he gently pulls your head back, and whispers before sealing your fate eternally, having special plans in store for when he brings you back home with him, leaving you unfound and forever a mystery in the world you were born into.

With a deep tone, his lips brush against your own as he responds…

"Something like that…"

Taglist: aiden2001 , heeseung-min , lathan1510 , rayofsunshineeee

[adrift-in-thyme]

@uncleskyrule happy belated birthday!!! Thank you so much for your patience while I wrote this! I hope it's worth the wait!

------------------------------------------------------------------

Four knows what sleep deprivation looks like. 

He’s seen it spelled out on his grandfather’s face when long days turn his usual joviality to melancholy exhaustion and draws the shadows of half moons beneath his eyes.

He’s seen it painted across Dot’s beautiful features after an arduous night when the memories resurface, memories of a leering crimson eye, of claims to possession hanging heavy over her, of cages and darkness and smothering magic. 

He’s seen it shadowed across his own face too, when the battles within and without grow to be too much, darkening his features, drawing them thin, sucking the youthful fat from his cheeks, the light from his eyes.

And he’s seen it…on the faces of his brothers.

On Time’s when the moon is full. On Twilight’s when a quiet twilight falls and skeletal trees whisper in tongues known only to some. On Wild’s when the amnesia recedes, Warriors’ when phantom lips press across his cheek, Wind’s after he awakens screaming his sister’s name. On Hyrule’s when he gives too much, Legend’s when the adventures he never speaks of tell their tale in his petrified cries at night…

And now on, Sky’s.

Some may find it strange for a man who can drift off practically anywhere to suffer from fatigue. Add to that uncanny ability, Sky’s penchant for seeming one of the most mature of their little group, the most…put together.

But Four is well acquainted with the deceptions someone can tell through demeanor alone. He himself has been dubbed mature, put together, responsible. And while, yes, those labels are true (Four would certainly be cross if people decided to start dubbing him childish or, Hylia forbid, a disaster as they call some more unruly children in his Hyrule), the lie rests in the assumptions they bring about.

Beliefs of invincibility and impervious spirit. Beliefs that there is no need to be gentle or kind, no need to offer respite or lighten the load.

It is the same fate their leader suffers so often, the same Warriors and Twilight sometimes crumble beneath. Suffering silently, yet always strong. So strong.

And Sky…

Sky hides it better than anyone.

Four is uncertain whether or not he is the only one who notices his distress. Perhaps, he is. 

It doesn’t matter though. In fact, if he is the only one who has taken note of it then it is all the more important that he do something before Sky’s inevitable collapse.

But life never makes things simple. And in the end, he’s too late.

It has happened too many times now — a portal that separates the heroes into mismatched groups. Four thinks that perhaps, after his near defeat at the combined hands of the champion and the rancher the Shadow is attempting to be more careful. 

More conniving. More vicious.

Attack first and you won’t be defeated. Such is the attitude of wild animals and beasts. More than likely, the Shadow shares it too.

This would explain why in addition to splitting the heroes up, this portal also dumps them right onto a battlefield.

Or at least, it does for Sky, Legend, and himself. Four can’t be sure what the others are facing. But he can only pray it isn’t a sand-drenched dungeon packed with redeads and stalfos.

The unearthly screeches of the emaciated corpses fill his ears as he fights, teeth gritted, heart pounding. It’s all the three heroes can do to stay out of reach of their paralyzing cries.

Back up to escape one beast and you nearly collide with the mad swing of a stalfos’ claymore. 

Four winces as the very tip of a blade slices across his left arm and leaves an angry gash in its wake.

That’s going to need a bit of potion to remedy.

Beside him, Legend growls what sounds like a curse as he plunges his hand into his pouch and retrieves a fire rod. He brings it in a sweeping horizontal arc. In a blaze of blistering heat, a group of the monsters fall.

“Well done,” Four says with a breathless smirk. He plunges his sword into the gaping chest cavity of one of the stalfos still struggling for survival on the darkened floorboards. With a raspy exhale, it dissolves into ash. “I think you just turned the battle in our favor.”

“I’d better have,” Legend huffs. “The sooner we get rid of these things, the sooner we can get out of here.” He screws up his face in a grimace. More monsters crumple beneath his skilled hands. “It smells like death.”

It does, indeed, Four thinks as, finally, the last of the monsters fall. The stench of it hangs heavy, permeating the thick darkness that surrounds them, wafting from the thin threads of light carrying from faltering torches. 

But now that the battle is over they can focus on escape. Hopefully, to a place where it proves easier to breathe.

He sheathes his sword, glances around. The gash on his arm throbs and the various bruises and smaller cuts he earned join in its stomach-churning beat. Still, it could have gone far worse. 

“We all okay?” Legend asks, bangs falling into his face as he replaces his fire rod. 

“Yes,” Four says. “How about you…Sky?”

His voice pitches an octave higher as he catches sight of the Skyloftian, turning the question almost into an exclamation. 

The knight lies crumpled where he had stood mere moments before. The Master Sword lies fallen beside him, his cape flows over him like a blanket of snow. His breath comes in shuddering gasps that grate upon Four’s ears as he races to his side. 

“Sky!” 

He shakes him, slightly, and hazy blue orbs flutter open. Sky groans. 

“What happened?” Legend drops down beside him, panic in his voice and a half-empty potion bottle in his hand. “Did a monster get him?”

Four shakes his head. “I don’t think so.” A quick inspection provides no sign of blood or other injury. But Sky’s face is ashen and he shudders as though in the throes of fever. “Sky, are you hurt?”

“N-not hurt.” Sky curls his fingers into a fist, as though attempting to gather strength. “J-just…just…” He swallows, tries to drag himself up, and nearly collapses again. It’s only Four and Legend’s quick movement that keeps him upright. “‘M fine.”

“Like hell you are!” Legend’s eyes are blazing with emotion now. “Sky, what happened?”

Sky shudders again. He glances down at the trembling hands he has folded into one, white-knuckled fist. There is a certain helplessness in the look.

“I dunno,” he croaks. “Was fighting and the room start-started swirling.” He curls in on himself further, and Four wonders if the next shaky exhale brings tears with it. His voice is very small. “I just-just fell.”

“And you didn’t have the strength to get back up,” Four says, solemnly. An idea is already forming in his head, a confirmation of what he has witnessed these past few hellish weeks. 

I should’ve acted sooner.

But there had been fights both in and out of the group, and injuries and secrets unveiled. There had been discussions long overdue, restorations to be made in the face of pain and sorrow. And he, he had been in the midst of it all. 

Between explaining the Four Sword and its powers and making up with Wild, he just hadn’t found the time…

“You haven’t been sleeping, Sky…have you?”

Now, Sky raises his head, glazed eyes focusing unsteadily on Four. Slowly, he shakes his head.

Legend blows out a sigh. He sits down beside Four and brings a dusty hand over his sweaty brow. 

“Sleep deprivation? Yeah, that’ll do it. How long haven’t you been sleeping?” 

Sky swallows. A beat passes, then another. The oppressive feel of death begins to crowd in on Four again. He struggles to breathe beneath it.

Then, “Since Twilight,” Sky whispers, and Four’s heart plummets to the depths of his stomach.

Legend’s hand falls to his lap with more viciousness than defeat. His face screws up in an expression that toes the line between sorrowful and intensely irritated. “I knew something was up! I knew it! I should’ve — ”

“Couldn’t have done anything,” Sky croaks, leaning further into Four’s touch. A small smile quirks his lips. “Was me that should-should’ve d-done something in the…in the first place.”

Legend’s eyes narrow. “What do you mean?”

Sky looks back down at his hands.

Another theory is beginning to form in Four’s mind now, joining with the previous one, enlarging it, and embellishing it until things start to make sense. A theory born out of something Sky has said before, a snippet he had overheard and tossed aside in favor of giving his full attention to fighting the Yiga that had taken Wild captive.

“I’m sorry, champion,” the Skyloftian had said as he had helped Warriors tend to the boy’s wounds. “I was late…again. I’m sorry.”

“You blame yourself.” Four measures the words carefully, speaking each one with intricate precision. Lest he step in the wrong place and cause them all to plummet. “You blame yourself for what happened to Twilight.”

Sky lifts his bloodshot eyes. A tear wells in one of them then spills over to slither gracefully down his cheek. 

“Why would you blame yourself?” Legend asks, even as comprehension burns in his violet irises. “It’s not your fault the rancher got hit. You weren’t even near him when it happened!”

“I was near enough.” Sky’s voice is quieter than ever now, more like a whisper than anything else. “I know the skyward strike. I could’ve hit that…that thing if I’d been…b-been faster.” His breath hitches. But to Four it sounds defeated more than panicked. “I was late and he paid for it. I’m a-always…”

He curls in on himself, weighed down by exhaustion, shuddering with pain and sorrow. Legend looks at Four and Four looks at Legend. Then, slowly, together they reach out and draw Sky into their arms.

It’s strange. Four hadn’t taken Legend for someone willing to show physical affection freely. But he embraces the Skyloftian as though it is no price to pay. As though he has done so before.

Long nights. A shuddering sob. Soft feet dressed in boots with wings adorning their sides. Whispers in the dark that exhaustion muddles before Four can make them out. Amethyst eyes staring from over a hazy cloud of silken white. Sliding shut as a larger form huddles deeper into an embrace.

Sky shivers again and Legend holds him tighter.

“It’s not your fault,” Four murmurs, pouring every ounce of confidence he possesses into those words and praying that it is enough. “It’s not your fault, Sky. You did everything you could do for him. There’s nothing else you could have done.”

Sky doesn’t reply. 

They hold him, whispering assurances, as his tears wet their tunics and his fatigued body quakes beneath the burden he forces it to carry. They hold him until, at last, in the murky darkness, surrounded by carcasses of monsters and piles of resting sand, he drifts off.

In the arms of his brothers.

[yuellii]

catch me before daylight

feat. ningguang, scaramouche ( separate )

𝐈𝐍 𝐖𝐇𝐈𝐂𝐇 they react to your words, “if i die tonight,” and how they respond to it

note. female reader, not proofread, nudity (ningguang)

NINGGUANG.

Her robe falls to the floor in a heap of mess that once was not there. Perhaps it was a few moons ago, such a splitting time when she was still organized and clean—a time she can’t remember well anymore.

In here, it’s a steaming warm bathroom. In here, there is a possibly twisted sense of tranquility that seeps through the cracked, marble tiles. In here, a certain scent floats around, so atmospheric it could choke her with a dream of death and delight both at the same time.

But, in here, there is you.

“Ningguang,” you addressed from the tub, brows quite visibly furrowing together at the sight of her lowering herself into the warm water across from you. “You shouldn’t bathe with a sickly person.”

She scoffed rather insultingly. “You’re too naive to think a little illness can affect me.” The look on her face was more than annoyed—perplexed at the littlest of things, actually. You could see the way she scrunched her nose merely as she removed her clip from her hair, not to mention the hand motions she makes of discomfort as she settles into the tub. And yet, you frowned all the same. She can’t hide it, truly, the tired look in her eyes, whose concern shines brighter than the sun. The little shifting glances she makes only screams how badly she misses you. “And besides,” she continued with a tremble upon her lip, “look at you. You’re so weak you cannot even clean yourself on your own.”

You could not help but laugh lightly at her comment. To anyone else, they might’ve taken it as an insult, but you’ve come to accept it. These arms of yours were now too frail even carry a tub of water.

“Your sickness is getting worse day by day,” Ningguang scolded, “and yet you were still ambitious enough to try and bathe here without my help?”

“But the duties of the Tianqian is to rule and control commerce, not to babysit some poor, poor person.”

“But the duties of Ningguang is to care for her lover.”

Your heart fluttered as you fell silent, but in a way that practically jabbed at your stomach and made you feel sick.

A deafening silence is what spread throughout the messy bathroom, lined with your tossed clothes, medicine bottles, robs, and the likes. There was something distasteful in the air, and you know it was all because of you. To be a setback did not feel pleasant, even as Ningguang scrubbed soap in your hair with the most gentlest of fingers, and even as she poured water from above your head.

She wasn’t that deceptive, honestly. You could see it, everyone could see it: The tire in her eyes, the overworked callouses in her hands. It was hard to look at your lover and see the dark circles under red hues that used to be so full of joy and sparks of mischief. She loved you, maybe too much, and it showed. You hated looking at her. She could never fathom the way her gaze made you feel, one that was so full of adoration for you, but also a sliver of pain given by the same person she loves. You receive her love, but is your love in return even worth it?

“Ningguang.”

“Mm.” She continued washing you, sitting behind you now as she scrubbed at your back. You could only thank the archons above that you didn’t have to see her face right now.

“If I die tonight…” You almost choked when you felt her hands come to an abrupt stop. “…will you finally get some rest?”

She stayed silent. But there, right on your back, you could feel as her gentle hands slowly hardened into fists. They were balled atop your skin, as if holding herself together, but by gods… she was shaking. It almost hurt to cry, especially when she can’t see you like this. But she couldn’t control it anymore when her trembling arms snaked around your waist, pulling you so close to her. And it was there that she burst, sobbing so painfully against the back of your shoulder.

Her breaths were ragged and shaky, you could barely make out a gravely stuttered line of “Don’t say something like that,” but you still remained silent.

You were both so tired. She was tired of taking care of you, and you were tired just seeing her destroy herself. And yet, even amidst this spiral of madness brewing in her own chambers, she still could not even live with the idea of you dying so soon—truly, who could? But this illness was not controllable anymore; Her money could not buy you health anymore.

She continued to cry against your shoulder even as the warmth started to rise from the water, leaving you feeling emptier than if you were already dead.

And, leaving her feeling lonelier than even before she met you.

SCARAMOUCHE.

“—And that was when I took the gnosis, and ran away with it.”

“Haha, nice fantasy,” you passively grinned, tipping down the front of his hat just to get him annoyed (which was, as always, a success). “But everyone knows that The Fair Lady was the one who obtained the electro gnosis.”

He grumbled. “No, she died.”

“No, she died after securing it,” you argued back. What was common knowledge to you—and, well, mostly everyone—seemed like a completely different story in his eyes, as if he saw the world with a different set of lenses the past century. He told of many tales of the Fatui with a good handful of them being utterly twisted or just plainly incorrect. And, he told some tales that were shocking accurate, definitely far too in detail for a mere ‘wanderer’ to know about the organization.

You asked him, only once. This guy was so cryptic that he never gave an answer you could quite understand.

“Because I’m Scaramouche,” was his answer many weeks ago. “I was the sixth Harbinger, I was there to witness it myself.”

“Like Hell I’d believe it,” you groaned. “The sixth seat has been empty for years.”

“That’s because I’m dead.” And there it was, another cryptic, undefined answer that he somehow just expected you to understand. “Breathing, but while not a soul in the world remembers you, your name, or the things you did—that’s not exactly, is it? In my opinion, I died!” And then he laughs. It’s wholehearted, it’s coming from his chest—a laugher that seems so innocent like he’s the happiest man in the world.

You sighed. “You need to stop lying like this. If you’re dead, then how am I speaking to you now?”

He gasped in an air of carefree excitement. “Oh, oh, let me tell you the whole thing.” And then he talks of Sumeru, the nation you’re sitting in now, and the overthrow of the academic scholars. Which was another weird factor, because you were physically present for this timeline of events. And yet, you don’t remember of a lot of this. A robot, a tree, a fight.

And above it all, a worldwide memory erasure of the man that stood before you now, the man with a big hat, yet no name.

Several days pass, perhaps it’s been months now since you’ve started talking to him. The House of Hearth has you stationed here in Port Ormos, and he somehow knew of its ties to Arlecchino, the mother of your orphanage. It saves you the explanation, you suppose, but his knowledge of the entirety of Fatui operations has you questioning if he really was the sixth, after all. “What’s wrong with you today?” he raises an eyebrow at you, watching as you sit on the grass against a tree, staring into the water

You sadly smile. “The Knave ordered our group to storm the Corps of Thirty tomorrow morning.”

He scoffed so loudly he almost spit on the ground. “That’s probably the dumbest order that crazy woman has ever given,” he complains as if he knew Arlecchino personally. “Those are trained military men on their own grounds, she’s going to get you all captured or killed.”

“Mhmm,” you only nodded, albeit quieter than the crickets in this moonless night. “And I’ll be tagging along.”

“Are you insane?!” he suddenly shouts, and you had to admit this was the first time you have ever seen his face look so furiously in shock. “You’re going to die there, can’t you run that through your thick skull?! You don’t have to follow the orders of that woman, just because she’s insane doesn’t mean you have to do it!”

“Order’s are orders,” you laughed. But it was so down, empty, and pathetic of a laugh that it made him only more crazed over your situation. “It’s whatever,” you quickly brushed off, “You got another story for me tonight, hat boy?”

“I do, actually,” he boomed. His voice was still quite loud… And maybe, just maybe, you could tell a little his exasperation came from genuine concern. “Once upon a time, there was a really stupid girl who made really stupid decisions, such as blindly following the orders of her ‘Mother’ until it got herself killed.”

You scoffed. “Us fatuus are always prepared for death,” you said. Which was true, sure, but… But I don’t want to die. “Hey…”

He looked back to you. Perhaps it was your delusional mindset obscuring your vision right now, but you could’ve sworn—the slightest bit of hope that you changed your mind just flashed against the light of his eyes.

“If I die tonight…”

“Then we’d both be ‘dead,’ wouldn’t we?”

You look at him in a horrified kind of surprise. And he sits there, suddenly smiling at you with the most genuine grin of excitement you’ve seen on him thus far. His demeanor completely switched, like he grasped the opportunity to convince you the moment it was presented to him. “Think about it,” he goes, “you can leave the Fatui just like I did once—and look, I’m fine!—and no know will know! We’ll be like the dead walking among the living, the murderous fatuus now wanderers of Teyvat… Just you and I, isn’t that much more of an interesting way to live?”

To die and be forgotten… To betray the organization that raised you… It never sounded so amazing until now.

“Come on,” he encourages as he extends his hand out to you. “Leave ‘living’ in the past, and be reborn. You can be so much more free.”

Freedom, that was the gift of the dead.

[cheesus-doodles]

Wish

Reincarnation AU! Yandere Gojo

Masterlist | Reincarnation AU Masterlist

found myself in kind of a slump just trying to write anything, please have this in the meantime - will also be trying to answer some asks soon while i work on the longer pieces

‎‎‎

tw: violence against reader, mentions of torture, blood, dead dove do not eat

I'll grant any wish you have. That deceptively loving coo was something you had heard countless times before, combined with a gentle comb of his hand through your locks.

Sure, Gojo, would come your predicable reply, complete with a roll of your eyes, before you go back to whatever it was you did for work.

Good looks, money, power - Gojo Satoru always had had the world at his fingertips. And it would have all been yours, everything mortal possession he owned. He hadn't even asked for much in return, just your utter and completely loyalty and obedience to him. In exchange for the sun and moon, any wish that you had granted at the drop of a hat, that much seemed like a rather paltry price to pay, Gojo would think.

Yet here he was, the sorcerer mused, as he drove another nail straight into your shin almost absentmindedly, the spurt of blood that came rocketing out a tantalising shade of crimson. Your shaky gaze shot up to meet his instantly, pupils completely constricted as tears were forced from the corners of painful red eyes; your cries and whimpers had long died away despite your current obvious suffering, raw throat having lost its ability to produce any sound louder than a grunt.

Leaning over to peer down at you with those infinite crystal eyes, Gojo didn't seem the slightest bit affected by your twisted expression. "See anything yet?" The question was followed by a giggle, the look on your face already telling the man everything he needed to know. Despite your understandable fear of him, you still showed no sign of recognition of the presence of curses all around you, and that was unacceptable.

He did need to make absolute sure that you had complete belief in souls that you could reincarnate back as a curse after all, and there was no way better way than to let you see one for yourself. Some real-life ghouls would definitely make quick work of turning a disbeliever into a believer.

‎‎‎

The night outside was quiet, the ominous heavy clouds that threatened to spill at any given moment a perfect reflection of your current grim predicament. Picking up another nail, Gojo made sure to show it to you before he selected a new spot for his gruesome art, this time driving it into the top of your arm with a whistle.

He didn't want to do this, the white-haired man assured himself, that much he would swear to anyone that would care long enough to listen. Out of all the souls that roamed this mortal plane, you were the last one that he wanted to hurt, let alone kill. Not his beloved darling, his soulmate. But you left him no choice. He simply couldn't let you go, not with the way you lived in his head rent free, haunting his every thought.

Maybe, perhaps if you had been a sorcerer in this life, things would have turned out differently. You would have looked up to him as the world's most powerful sorcerer, would have been taken in by his abilities and the weighty clan name attached.

But that was fine.

"Don't worry," the man patted your mangy hair, gently rubbing two matted locks of hair apart between his fingers. "Everything'll be fine."

It'll hurt for now, that much was certain, but your pain and suffering wouldn't be for naught. Being on death's door was one way for normals to see curses, and he would make sure that your agony would be over quickly.

Taking a glance up at the starry sky that blanketed the empty skyline, Gojo breathed, the fresh air a welcome change from the iron scent of stale blood that clad his clothes. You only ever made a single teasing wish of being immortal to him before, over a cup of coffee at a cafe, before you laughed it off - and you had never made another wish after that. But Gojo was benevolent.

Once your soul was reincarnated as a curse, he was sure he could find some old tool in the depths of his clan's treasuries to force you back into your old body and grant your wish. Plus, it would be so much easier to bind you to him when you weren't quite human, and you could spend the eternity of your next life with him.

Win-win.

[buckrecs]

You are literally doing god work thank you so much for this blog

I kinda have a request if that's okay. Can you please give us some Mob Bucky recs . Series or one shots

Thank you so much

Mob!Bucky

masterlist | req masterlist

Thank you so much:) Here are some Mob!Bucky fics!

* = contains smut

ONESHOT

Kiss it Better by @straywords

You’re not entirely sure your boss with the staring problem even likes you, but you’re determined to do your job either way.

little lilly. by @raysheart

you unknowingly bring out a side of bucky he never knew was there.

*Come Home. by @sinner-as-saint

Bucky comes home to find you and your son asleep in your bed and his heart damn near explodes with how much he loves his family. And after putting your baby to sleep, Bucky proceeds to show you just how grateful he is to have you and how much he loves you... 

That I What? by @itsthewritergal

Y/N’s ex seems to have more of a hold on Y/N than Bucky realised.

Never Giving Up by @itsthewritergal

Reader is ill on the one day Bucky said no interruptions... 

*the proposition of a lifetime by @tee-swizzle

mafia!bucky teaches his best friend how to please a man.

Put My Mind At Ease by @slyyywriting

You married the head of the mob in payment for your father’s debt. The contract includes that you must give whatever Bucky wants. And what Bucky wants is for you to be jealous.

protector by @vxntagedior

the moment bucky fell in love with you

Kerosene by @metalbuckaroo

“You took my heaven away and didn’t think that I wouldn’t go looking for revenge?”

Black Card by @jelsasnowflakes1

When Bucky finds out you finally used the card he gave you he was confused why you only spend 15 dollars with it.

third date rule by @classylo

you had a rule, the third date rule, you had never reached it so perhaps that’s why you were still a virgin...that is until you meet the infamous sweet mob boss.

I Am Your Fall by @sinner-as-saint

You’re hiding from your past, in Madripoor. You did nothing wrong, other than mix dangerous business with a lot of pleasure. You couldn’t go home because... he would find you and Madripoor was the only place he didn’t do business, or had any allies or friends. But little did you know that the mob boss had finally found you after obsessively looking for you ever since you left, and left him in pieces. He didn’t want revenge, he just wanted the one thing he had hopelessly fallen in love with; who also happened to be the one who had betrayed him and hurt him more than anyone or any bullet ever did before - you. 

A Simple Housewife by @beyondspaceandstars

A new member starts getting too friendly with you one night, forcing Bucky to show a side of himself you’ve never seen before. And possibly never want to see again.

Could It Be Fate? by @bxcketbarnes

taken. by @wintersldr1

when you are captured by Bucky’s enemy, he will stop at nothing to get you back, and remind everyone the lengths he will go to to keep you safe.

a wolf in man’s clothing by @witchywithwhiskey

you walk into a bar owned by the Russian mob, and Bucky just has to swoop in to save you—and claim you.

Protector by @cherryrogers

Ironically, the man with blood on his hands and a permanent target on his back was the one you’d never felt safer with.

*My Devotion by @cryptidcasanova

The one where Bucky doesn’t take your breakup well.

SERIES

A Business Deal by @ezm-imagines

Mafia Boss Bucky and Stark Reader agree on a deal to improve their businesses. A deal which will unite them together forever, whether they like it or not. Well, that is if they go through with the deal…

*A Moment of Your Time by @stevesbestgirl

A soulmate AU where the headstrong reader realizes that she’s meant to love the brutal mob boss of New York City, James Buchanan Barnes. She doesn’t want to be a part of organized crime and she doesn’t want to rely on anyone, but how do you ignore your soulmate?

*Deception by @avecra

Growing up in the dark business your father ran, violence wasn’t new to you. Rivalries and bloodbaths were something you unfortunately were used to. And in order to save your father from an unnecessary fight, you force yourself into an arranged marriage with Brock Rumlow. But when he threatens your father over a small mistake on your part, you find yourself in front of your husband’s biggest rival and your old friend, Bucky Barnes. With the shared history between the two of you, Bucky finds himself drawn to you once again, and will risk everything he has just to keep you safe.

Gunslinger by @ghostofskywalker

The bitter reality was this: you did what you had to do to survive. And if that meant going head to head with the most feared mob boss of the city, so be it.

*honey, there is no right way by @bonky-n-steeb

when you agree to be the feared mobster Bucky Barnes’ sugar baby, you expect to get enough money to pay your bills. what you don’t expect is to fall head over heels for him.

*Hostage Of Your Eyes by @sinner-as-saint

You accept an unusual offer made by a very familiar, but dangerous mob boss. And despite the rather bizarre situation and all the troubles which come along the way; old flames rekindle – and you find love again, where it wasn’t supposed to be.

Invisible String by @oitommothetease

James Buchanan Barnes, the owner of the most expensive-looking club in town and your new apartment. He was a dick and you hated him. What could possibly go wrong when you, the new girl in town, start bartending at his club to pursue your dreams?

*Lost Without You by @angrythingstarlight

Soft Mob Bucky Series

Missing by @buckyalpine

Bucky’s baby is missing and he will not stop until he finds her.

Run to Me by @sgtjbuccky

In where you’ve always had a habit of ending up in situations you shouldn’t, and when you caught the eye of the man who ran New York, Bucky Barnes, your life changed. They warned you about him, but the one thing they never warned you about was how you’d always want to run to him. 

*Run To You by @bestofbucky

Mob boss Bucky Barnes hires you to be his bodyguard.

The Light We Lost by @world-of-aus

James Buchanan Barnes had been it for you, and you wanted to believe that what the two of you had, was you making it. You wanted to be the other side of the statistics that actually made it, but your marriage wasn’t meant for this life. You fought hard to make your way back to him, to get him to see you, but life had a funny way of kicking you down when you were already down.

*wrong choice, right places by @mvtthewmurdvck

never wanting to work for him or protect his fiancé, falling for you was the last thing he should do—especially when his boss was zemo, who now ran most of the city.

The Maid of Mr. Barnes by @disasterofastory

You get a job as Mr. Barnes's maid. You heard about the notorious gangster, but since you desperately need money and a place to live, you are not in a position to be picky.

Icarus by @marvellous1917

it’s the day after giving the dangerous mobster his first tattoo, and he hasn’t contacted you yet. What a dick.

[raven-at-the-writing-desk]

“red flowers”: fae, vargas camp 2, and glorious masquerade

THERE’S SOMETHING IN VARGAS CAMP 2 THAT MADE ME DO A DOUBLE TAKE 👁️ 👄 👁️

So in 2-2, the pixies of the forest are trying to put out the campfires. The boys then talk about how there was a miner's campfire a while back that caused a forest fire, which naturally spooked the local fairies. AND THEN VIL GOES AND DROPS THIS DOOZIE OF A LINE:

EXCUSE ME, VI L SIR??????? ?? ? ???? ? ? ?? ? ? ? Did you just say RED FLOWERS? Is that not similar to the CRIMSON FLOWERS/LOTUSES that ROLLO tried to use to establish a magicless Twisted Wonderland in Glorious Masquerade?!

ADDENDUM: I learned recently (very shortly after this post went live, actually!) that the “red flowers” may also be a reference to what the animals in the live action Jungle Book call fires. I’m not personally familiar with this film, so I’ll be running with the crimson lotus/Glorious Masquerade connection for the duration of this post!!

Looking at how the phrases are written in Japanese, they use the term 赤い花 ("akai no hana"/red flower) in Vargas Camp and 紅蓮の花 ("guren no hana"/crimson lotus flower) in Glorious Masquerade. Crimson is basically a specific kind of red, and lotus is just a certain type of flower. Even more damning is that fact that in 3-8 of Glorious Masquerade, Malleus EXPLICITLY describes the spreading crimson flowers as having "a brilliance like that of fire". You can see from images of the crimson lotus that they do, indeed, seem to glow like fire.

If you look at the real life timeline of these events releasing, it also coincidentally lines up!! Like, the original release of Vargas Camp 2 (for JP server) was in mid to late SEPTEMBER 2022. Then Glorious Masquerade would come out mid to late OCTOBER 2022. Vargas Camp 2 was literally the new story event that came out RIGHT BEFORE Glorious Masquerade... WAS THIS FORESHADOWING??????????????? And even more importantly than that... What does this mean for fae??????

One could call "red flowers" just a poetic way for the pixies to label something they don't understand. But what's confusing is that there are clearly also fire pixies living in the forest; we see several of them in Vargas Camp attacking the students. It's not as though the fairies are unfamiliar with fire itself, so why not just call the campfires 'fires'?? What if... (and stick with me here) the pixies named the campfires thus because it's potentially a reference to something far deadlier (than even the forest fire) that they experienced or heard of in their history? In the time period of ~400 years ago shown to us in book 7, we learn that human invaders drove fae out of their homes and began mining their land for resources. This, more specifically, impacts the Briar Country up north, who are fighting against humans that arm themselves with iron (something which appears to repulse the fae). These humans are also known to use deceptive tactics, such as distracting the messenger team of Lilia and co. while they launch an assault on Mallenoa's castle, where she and her unborn son are. So... what's to say they wouldn't resort to other underhanded means as well? Mean such as... utilizing a flower known to suck out the magic from living beings :))) like maybe the... crimson lotus, perhaps?

In Glorious Masquerade, we learn that the crimson lotus has been extinct for a long time now. They were destroyed by humans centuries ago because of how dangerous they were to mages. We don't have an exact number of years, but "centuries" is enough to land it in the rough ballpark of the human-fae war. Malleus himself, who is canonically 178 years old, didn't even recognize the flowers at first (as very few records of them exist in modern times); this could imply that the crimson flowers were around before he was born, which further supports that they were present during the war era.

What's more, if we look at Maleficent: Mistress of Evil (ie the second live action Maleficent movie), we see a VERY strong parallel to the crimson lotus flower. In the film, we are introduced to the Tomb Bloom, a flower that just so happens to also be red and glows a little like fire.

UNCANNY RESEMBLANCE, NO? 🤡

Tomb Blooms are said to grow on the graves of fairies, and, when mixed with iron, creates "red dust". This red dust is considered deadly to fairies upon contact--and in the film, a fairy-hating queen lures a bunch of fae into a wedding venue to eliminate them en masse with the stuff. The crimson lotus flowers of TWST, meanwhile, are deadly on their own, draining the magic out of any magical being they touch (and permanently depriving them of magic once all the magic has been taken out of someone). For fae, who rely on magic for basically everything (travel, cooking etc.), it would be a miserable existence symbolically synonymous with death.

(Side note: in hindsight, this somewhat explains why Malleus is part of the Glorious Masquerade SSR trio. If the crimson lotus flowers were, in actuality, inspired by the Tomb Blooms (something which was weaponized against Maleficent and her kind), then it just makes so much sense for the antagonist of the event, Rollo, to utilize similar plants against Malleus, who is twisted from the Mistress of Evil herself.)

OKAY, now knowing all of that, here's what I propose as a possible timeline of events if we consider all of what I just said: ~400 years ago, crimson lotuses were plentiful. When the human-fae conflict escalated, the human side decided to play dirty to eliminate those pesky fae--because even the great Draconias would be susceptible to the magic-leeching properties of the flower. However, they discovered, upon repeated experimentation, that the flower could also harm their own mages, so they had to reformulate. Maybe this was when they learned that they could combine iron with the powdered lotus (increased surface area, and therefore also increased potency) to create something even more deadly to fae (like in Maleficent 2). Alternatively, this could contribute for the reasoning for the iron armor they wear in battle; iron repulses fae, but it could also protect them from the crimson lotus flowers due to how much of the skin it covers. For example, the Dawn Knight is said to wear a helmet that completely cover the face, and many Silver Owl NPCs do the same. There is little skin visible, unlike the armor of the Briar Country fae. But anyway, the point is that, some way or another, the humans abused the crimson lotus during this time. Once the war concluded (or in the period of reconstruction that followed), fae and humans came to an agreement to destroy all the lotuses as a part of their peace treaty/negotiations, agreeing that it was mutually beneficial to all magical creatures and mages. Humans were mainly responsible for this extinction, as there was a larger population of them that were magicless and could therefore handle the flowers without consequences. Because of the war engulfing an entire continent, fae in other parts of Twisted Wonderland would have heard about the events, fae migrated out of Briar Country to get away from the conflict, OR the conflict itself was a Twisted Wonderland-wide issue, not just contained within Briar Country. Any one of these could explain why eventually pixies on Sage's Island, in the Silent Woods (where the boys went camping), would know of the calamity caused by the crimson lotuses of the past. When they come across wild campfires, the pixies may be frightened by them due to their resemblance to the crimson lotuses and the trauma associated with war because it's human outsiders that are invading their home and propagating these 'fires'... the same situation as the human-fae war. There was the literal manmade forest fire that was far more recent, yes--but again, this doesn't fully explain why the pixies, who should be familiar with fire, would call it a "red flower" instead of just 'fire'. The association with "red flowers" being dangerous may be a result of what they recall from the war--that crimson flower which sapped away their strength and robbed them of their magic. Then, in modern day, we have Rollo somehow stumbling across seeds and breeding crimson lotuses of his own in secret for his own nefarious purposes. History (mayhaps???) repeating itself??????? ?? ? ????? ??? ??

DKJNsfhbvoqef32ygtr69r137fbofasib IDK, MAYBE I'M JUST TALKING OUT OF MY ASS AND EXTRAPOLATING TOO MUCH FROM LITTLE DETAILS 🤡 I just think it's kind of a fun theory, even if the whole timeline ends up being thrown out the window in the next main story update... Don't mind me, I'm still on my "Rollo will come save us all in a cruel and ironic twist of fate" copium--

[luveline]

Can we get like a roan trying to make reader and Eddie make up after they have been visibly upset at each other (but like quiet arguments/none that roan heard)?????

thank you for your request my love! dad!eddie x fem!reader

You and Eddie don't fight a lot, so when you do it's always over something serious. 

You're sitting in the kitchen with tear stained cheeks trying to put pep back in your step before Roan wakes up, a huge cup of orange juice in front of you and a caffeine pill beside it. You argued pretty much all night, and now it's morning, and you're heartbroken. 

The good news is that the fight is for the most part solved. You're trying not to think about it, residual anger and annoyance and a third, awful something coiling in your gut —Eddie being against you is the worst feeling in the entire world, bar nothing. You can't stand it, and perhaps it's slightly codependent to function that way, but he's the person you love most (beside his dark-haired daughter). You're mad at him and you're also so fucking sorry you upset him, and you hate yourself, and you dislike him a little bit too. 

He's drinking a cup of coffee on the other side of the table. You've made up, but you certainly aren't friendly. If you don't tell each other everything it gets worse and festers into cracks you don't want in your relationship. You plan on dying with him, whenever it happens, he's gonna be by your side. If that means being honest to the point of extreme uncomfortableness, so be it. 

So he told you some things about yourself that had been weighing on him, and vice versa. Fights are fights are fights. They suck no matter what they're about, and they leave you feeling grubby, but Eddie always says sorry, and you say sorry too. 

Roan starts to wake up, the sound of her bed springs creaking from a floor away. You and Eddie both stand like you might go get her, which is foreign 'cos most of the time you sit at the table waiting for her. You pretend you'd been meaning to make her breakfast and Eddie curls his hand around the top of his chair as she descends the stairs and walks down the hall to the kitchen.

"Hello," Roan says, practically skipping up to the table. "Good morning! I'm missing one of my socks and um, think it fell down my bed." 

"Yeah?" Eddie asks. 

"We'll find it," you say. 

"Good. What's wrong?" 

She's deceptively smart. 

"Uh, nothing," Eddie says.

Roan climbs up onto her chair with the big cushion. She looks like she might fall. Eddie puts his hands around her waist to prevent any concussions, popping a kiss on her pale cheek. 

"It's too quiet," she insists. 

You flick on the radio and pass over a bowl of cereal for Roan. She likes something Eddie nicknamed 'rainbow cereal', which is all the cereals you buy mixed into one bowl. It doesn't need sugar, but you pretend to put some in there to keep her appeased. 

She stays standing. 

Eddie asks her to sit, and she grumbles and doesn't bother. Sometimes it's better to let her do whatever harmless thing she wants to do rather than start a fight, and you're both clearly much too tired to try. Eddie holds her waist and drops kisses into the top of her head intermittently. You sip your orange juice until it's empty, the radio chugging along in the background. 

"Did I do something?" Roan asks, four spoonfuls in, a frown on her little face. 

"No, baby, we're just tired. Why do you think you did something?" 

"Why are you tired?" she asks, ignoring Eddie's question. 

"We stayed up later than usual by accident. 'Cos we didn't have someone put us to bed." 

"Ask Wayne," she says. She takes another mouthful of cereal, milk sloshing all over the place. 

"Good idea. We'll ask Wayne," you say. 

She's convinced for a time, but breakfast ends, and neither of you know what to do after. It's a Saturday, which might explain the size of the argument. Friday is the most tiring day of the week, every week. Saturdays are empty. You might go see Wayne tonight, but beside that there's nothing planned. 

Roan senses a lack of enthusiasm in the living room.

"Did something bad happen?" she asks. 

"Baby, no," Eddie says, turning down her cartoons a touch. "Nothing happened, I promise. Everything is okay." 

"I don't feel well," she says, and collapses into his lap dramatically, instantaneous dead weight. 

She doesn't understand the anxiety she's feeling. You understand at the very least, so you meet Eddie's eyes and mouth, "Can I tell her? No details." 

He nods. "Sure," he says aloud. "If you want to, go for it." 

He speaks without attitude. You slide closer on the couch, arm pressed to Eddie's, and can't resist the urge to stroke an unruly strand of hair from his cheek. You pause, and then you kiss his cheek. He turns his face to yours and taps your noses together.

You smile, reassured, and squeeze his bicep. 

"Me and Dad had an argument," you confess. 

Roan looks up from his lap. "What?" 

"We had a fight. We didn't agree about something, so we were fighting, and now we're tired because it's hard when you love someone and you want to be on the same page." You blow out a big breath. "But we made up." 

"Doesn't feel like it," Roan says, pushing herself up using both arms. "You're not cuddling or anything." 

"Uh, well…" 

"We haven't had time," Eddie says. 

"Do it now," Roan advises, scrambling backward out of Eddie's lap. 

You're not a wimp, you put yourself under Eddie's arm, and he wraps you up by the shoulder, and you're both kind of stiff but at least Roan isn't worrying she did something wrong. In fact, she looks pleased. She lets Eddie take her hand and doesn't complain when he gives it three big squeezes in a row. 

"You didn't do anything wrong," you say, "you know? It's me that made the mistake, Ro." 

"Me too," Eddie says. 

"Well, mistakes are okay. I make mistakes all the time," Roan says. 

Eddie drops his cheek into the top of your head, defeated and tired and, maybe, maybe maybe maybe, he's happy too. He relaxes slowly, and you let yourself do the same, your arm held across his waist and your fingertips sliding underneath his t-shirt. You feel his skin mindlessly, cool and smooth under your touch, and figure that the fighting has been worth it if it means you get to do this again. 

"Sorry, Eds," you mumble. 

"I'm sorry too," he says back. "I was feeling like a dick yesterday."

"Me too," you say with a laugh. 

Eddie nudges your head with his nose until he can kiss your jaw, a series of chaste, quick pecks. His affection is a blessing. You tilt your head and he makes a disbelieving Yeah? kind of sound, snorting before he tracks kisses up to your cheek and down again. 

Roan jabs her arm with her toes as she stands on Eddie's thigh and hugs him. "See? That was easy." 

You both turn to her with similar motivation. "Super easy," you agree, as Eddie says, "You're right. Thanks, baby." 

"Welcome! Can we find my sock now? My toes are cold." 

You both laugh at her, sympathy and bemusement mixed together. "Oh, babe. We can find you some socks, I'm sorry." 

You stand up and swing her into your arms simultaneously, pleased when she wraps her legs around you and cheers in victory. You're not surprised when Eddie stands up behind you, resting his hand between your shoulders. 

"How about we get dressed? It's Saturday. We can go somewhere, maybe we can go into Indy and have All-American?" Eddie asks.

"Burgers?" Roan asks. 

You laugh into her hair. That's the plan for the day decided —Roan has a one track mind when it comes to cheeseburgers. And she should have what she wants. She saved your Saturday with time to spare.

—

more eddie, roan and reader

[rkeigg]

TW: Radioapple/very bad english.

I'm thinking about the reason why Alastor reacted so strongly to Lucifer... A sudden hc that this is because Lucifer does not demonstrate himself the way Alastor does. Perhaps, being a man who clearly loves drama and attention, he wonders why such a strong angel is, somewhat, crazy?(In a good way)

I'm just thinking, don't take it seriously. Moreover, I'm a sucker for radioapple.

I think the alastor has something similar in my hc🤔:

Alastor is not sure how to feel about this — it seems to be the first time.

This is a spark of interest, barely noticeable bewilderment, slight indignation — more contempt.

After all, the king of Hell is a little different-he's strong, of course he's strong, Alastor, unfortunately, can't even argue with that!

And Lucifer so... So broken.

Hey, he was expecting someone who would be proud of his own strength.

Lucifer doesn't do that.

It doesn't seem so important, it doesn't seem so durable — to be honest, it looks fragile, like crystal.

The deceptive feeling that you grab a thin wrist, pull it towards you, and it will break.

This... Irritate. This leads to some other emotions! And the stupid king is also laughing at him even though he looks like that? It's absurd.

And Alastor echoes, it is unnatural for himself to be angry, catches the pleasure of stupid rivalry in his heart and he goes crazy from pompous behavior.

The Radio Demon listens lazily to the soft voice and remembers it forever.

[datcravat]

if you don't mind me asking, what are your artstyle inspirations?

Not at all!!

Shigenori Soejima and his team (the artists behind persona 3-5) are a huge inspiration. The instinctive look of the black shading, facial structure, and use of gesture really stand out to me.

Hungry Clicker's deceptively candid-looking poses, quick but gorgeous painting style and incredible use of reflected light live in my head rent free! I have all his books! His reflected light inspired me to incorporate that into the black shading to artificially create more depth in a 2D style, and spaces for colour

Kuvshinov Ilya's spectacular understanding of anatomy, colour, and how to make a face look cute as hell really helped me nail making a character look appealing. I also often use their idea to add a soft glow to the black lineart. Recommend studying him a lot

Alphonse Mucha was a master of composition and pioneered the Art Nouveau movement. A legend. His beautiful use of composition, pattern, bold lines combined with photorealistic elements, carefully chosen areas to supply immense detail, is fascinating and I'm trying hard to learn from that. I think combining elements from this with solid black shading could be gorgeous. You also see very little use of perspective in his work.

Helloclonion, to me, is a genius. Their use of black is beyond anything I've ever seen. Just a pure master. The black shading does not look invasive, and there is an element to it that makes it a little more 3D-looking than others, perhaps the use of IRL models. The way they translate real shadows to blackness is something I can't yet comprehend but man, I study their work all the time!! I also got very inspired to use vastly different hues as rim light from them.

Media that's inspired my art a lot are 90s anime (Interstella 5555 is my fave), Steven Universe, Sonic, Crash Bandicoot 2, Ghost Trick, Persona (ofc).

My art looks like this right now:

Hope this is the kind of depth you were looking for, haha. There have been and will be far more than just these inspirations of course, but right now it's very strongly these five!!

[scarletttries]

Romeo Take Me Somewhere We Can Be Alone (Roman Roy Succession Request)

Part Two Available Now!

Pairing: Roman Roy (Succession) x Gender Neutral! Reader

Requests: "Roman x Mattson!reader? Forbidden/secret relationship?" AND "Perhaps some smut for Roman Roy? Maybe Roman being on the more submissive side? Thank you!"

Warnings: Smut, spoilers for the new season.

Word Count: 2.7k

Author's Note: Oh Roman, I'm going to pretend I haven't seen the latest episode so I can continue fancying you without having to think critically about this piece of media 🙃 Thank you to the ABSOLUTE genius that suggested a Mattson! reader, forbidden romance vibe, I loved the request and enjoyed writing this so much, I've gone full Romeo & Juliet! (More like Rome-eo, hahaha I felt like a genius for this). Also this is my first Roman smut so it was a bit of a challenge to try and keep it in the same tone i've written Roman in so far, but I hope you enjoy! As always keep the requests coming :D

Romey-o take me somewhere we can be alone

"Have you had enough of this little ass-kiss fucky fest yet?" You watched the little bubble pop up on your phone and looked across the party in reflex, scanning the crowd until you saw his smug little smile directed your way. You unlocked your phone to reply, scrolling up to glimpse the hundreds of messages between the two of you since you'd met that day at the woodlands company retreat three weeks ago.

***

"Problems working with your older brother? I can relate." You stepped out into the night air to find Roman hunched over the railing of the small balcony, hands threading through his hair so firmly he threatened to pull it out in clumps. His shoulders grew a little less tense as your voice washed over him, hands falling to the edge of ledge as he gestured for you to join him.

"So you're the younger Mattson? You could have fooled me, on account of you not being a massive dick." He laughed at the words but it came out hollow, watching his breath form a white wisp in front of his face in the cold night air.

"Thanks, I try my best to be an actual human being. I hear out of all the Roys you're the most favourable to be around too."

He turned his head sharply to really look at you, the sincerity in your tone and the measured kindness of your words catching his attention.

"Oh yeah?" He probed, hoping another almost compliment would fall from your lips before he did something to ruin this moment. Truth was he'd spend half the weekend watching the way you floated through the conference, poised, humble, soft; the antithesis of your brother Lucas. And so he'd avoided you, sure that any moment spent in your presence would only tarnish the shining light you carried so effortlessly.

"I like to think I've got good instincts for people, and I think there's something about you that's different from the rest of your family. And I mean that in a good way." You were thoughtful as you spoke, treading lightly around the slick man in front of you, sure that one wrong move would have him sprinting back inside, spitting venom in his words as he went.

"That's actually pretty nice to hear these days." Roman replied after a pause, now standing squarely to face you, searching your eyes for any hint of deception and mockery and instead finding a tranquility that washed over him in waves as you returned a smile he hadn't realised he was sharing.

"I'm really sorry about your father by the way. And I'm even more sorry that you have to be here right now." You grimaced at your brother's insistence that this weekend go ahead as planned, every ounce of humanity seeming to leave him the moment his bank account saw a certain amount of zeros. Roman nodded at your words, the taste of condolences still unfamiliar and bitter in his mouth, cursing his father for ruining yet another interaction for him, even from beyond the grave. You read his silence for the pain that it was and set your hand gently on top of his where it rested on the railing.

"Well I should go back inside before any of our siblings accuse us of fraternising with the enemy, but it was nice to meet you. I really mean that."

Panic rose up in the back of Roman's throat as you turned to move away, not yet ready for this moment to end, feeling better than he had in weeks. He ignored the voice crying out inside him to stay strong, to isolate himself, to trust no one, and instead caught your rising hand with his.

"Maybe we could fraternise just a little longer.

***

And so you and Roman had spent an evening sharing in the perils of being a younger sibling in your strange corporate worlds, swapping numbers and an unspoken agreement to keep this from your families as you departed the next day, Roman touching the spot on his cheek you had blessed with a gentle kiss when he snuck into your treehouse to say a real goodbye. And so followed weeks of secret texts and furtive phone calls, pouring out your souls until finally you were back in the same room, parted in a hotel lobby by a sea of political donors and movers and shakers, but feeling only one pair of eyes on you.

"I thought you'd never ask." You sent back in response, locking eyes with him once again and tipping your head toward an emergency exit you had checked led to a service elevator. From opposite sides of the room you each slipped through the crowd, trying your best to be unseen, aware that any of these prying eyes could collapse what you had delicately built with a single passing comment. As you reached the door you did a final scan to ensure there were no Waystar or GoJo members nearby who could catch a glimpse of this subtle rendezvous, before backing through the door yourself.

Roman stood waiting between the open elevator doors, looking almost bashful as you dashed towards him, vanishing into the small metal room as he let the door slide shut behind him.

"Thanks for holding it." You couldn't help the anticipation loaded in your tone, facing Roman and finding him stood barely an inch away from your blushing face.

"I had a feeling we were going to the same floor." He breathed out, eyes wide and hands shaking as they rose to brush either side of your face, the adoration clear in the gentle way his thumbs stroked your cheeks.

Before either of you could think your way out of something good, you leant forward, closing the gap between your lips and sending a whirlwind of warmth and glitter spinning through your bodies, the reunion more than worth the wait. His head bobbed forward to return the gesture, body following the movement until he was pressed entirely against you. It wasn't rough, or frantic, or urgent. It was like deep down you knew you'd be doing this forever, so you had all the time in the world to sweetly caress the nape of his neck, parting his lips for a content sigh that only let you taste more of him.

By the time the lift doors opened on your floor Roman could hardly remember where he began and you ended, unsure how he ever coped being half way across the planet from you, needing to keep you as close as he could for every second you could steal tonight. You could feel it too, the desperate pull of your heart towards him, the air of secrecy that only made you want him more, this forbidden fruit the sweetest you would ever taste.

You could feel his cheeks brush against yours as he fought back a smile at finally having you in his arms, and the physical confirmation you had been feeling this overwhelming chemistry too. He would have berated anyone else for believing in love at first sight, but as you rested your forehead softly against his, feeling the joy emanating between you, he didn't think this could be anything else. When you pushed the jacket free of his shoulders, helping him shrug away the fabric until it crumpled on the floor, he had to stop himself from pulling away. Not because he didn't want this with you. It was really the opposite; he couldn't remember ever feeling this way, ever wanting someone to be so close to him, to feel every part of him, and now he wanted that more than anything with you. But he was scared of being vulnerable, and insecure in his inexperience, completely unsure what real intimacy could even look like.

As you worked through the buttons on his shirt, you could see the gears whirring in his head, the unmistakable fear and excitement of a man that's seen a hard-drive's worth of porn but never felt the touch of a person that genuinely cares about them.

"We can stop?" You offered, pulling your hands away from his shirt, only for him to vigorously shake his head and rip it off himself, a stray button clattering across the floor, disrupting the heavy silence.

"I want to." He insisted, his eyes full of desperate desire as you brought your hands to his now bare chest, his heart hammering in anticipation inside. Unsure of what to do next, Roman firmly grabbed at your ass, voice wavering as he tried to take control, feeling like that should be his role,

"Do you like that, you fucking slut?" Both of your faces seemed to contort in discomfort as the words tumbled out of his mouth, his hand quickly releasing and his eyes clenching shut in embarrassment.

"Sorry Rome, I don't even think you like that?" You questioned softly, bringing your fingertips to sweep delicately over the creases in his forehead, his brow slowly unfurrowing as he blinked his eyes open to see you again.

"Fuck, sorry, I was trying to, you know, talk dirty, be sexy." He waved his hands in a gesture of uncertainty as he spoke, surprised you weren't laughing at him or taking the opportunity to run for the door.

"You know talking doesn't have to be degrading to be sexy?" You replied, the calm, confident smile on your face matched by the alluring look in your eye leaving Roman feeling like a deer in headlights, but praying the car will crash right into him.

"Oh yeah?" He gulped, eyes wide as you nodded, pushing him gently so he could step backwards towards the end of the bed. He let himself drift in your current as your touch laid him backwards, every wave of contact soothing his nerves.

"Can I show you?" You breathed in his ear, settling your thighs either side of his legs, feeling all the more powerful for being fully dressed as his bare chest heaved beneath you.

"Please." He begged softly, letting his eyes flutter shut as your lips found his again, fingers tracing a path down his stomach until they reached his belt.

"I'm so glad I got to see you tonight." You sighed against his lips as you began to undo the buckle, feeling his hips twitch, reacting to even the slightest touch. His head leant forward, trying to chase your lips as you spoke, needy for the taste of your kiss as you released the zip and buttons in your way.

"Me too." He eventually sighed out as your lips moved out of his reach, mapping a course across his cheek until you reached the edge of his jaw, applying a little more pressure until you heard the low rumble of moan escape his lips.

"I like hearing you enjoy yourself." You purred, confidence building as he relaxed against your touch, submitting to your control, putty in your hands. Marking a sweet constellation of kisses over his neck you slowly slipped your hand inside his boxers, running one finger over the length of him and feeling him buck up to meet your touch. Roman had never felt both so excited and so relaxed at the same time, never this comfortable with someone exploring his body before, but feeling like he wanted to give every inch over to your control, sure your loving touch could put all the broken pieces of him back together.

You wrapped your hand around his hard length, pumping over him a few times to gage his reaction. His eyebrows scrunched down towards his nose, lips parting as a moan seemed to reverberate through his whole body.

"Does that feel good?" Your tone was sweet, if not a little teasing, sucking on a spot on his throat that seemed to leave him barely able to spit out an 'uh-uh' in response.

"Good, I want to make you feel good, Roman. Will you let me make you feel good?" You praised, bobbing your head down to his chest and picking up the pace of your rubbing hand. Ability to think and speak quickly surrendered, Roman just nodded, for once unable to think of a quippy comeback and just enjoying someone else taking control and being with him so intimately. He'd touched himself like this hundreds of times, thinking cruel, perverse little thoughts the whole time until he was left sitting in a puddle of his own self-contempt. But with you it felt like something new entirely, something positive, and warm, and with each soft praise and gentle kiss that poured from your lips and landed squarely on his chest he could feel his heart lifting, thinking maybe there's a reason he'll only ever thought of it as 'fucking' and not 'making love'.

Your lips drifted down to his chest, gingerly placing a kiss on one nipple and smiling at the way he squirmed under you, eyes now staring down at you in full adoration like you were the most wondrous miracle he could have dreamt of. You could feel his cock starting to twitch in your hand, cooing over him again, sure this wouldn't be the last time the two of you spend a night hiding in the sheets together.

"You're doing so well, Roman. Good boy."

"You feel - so - good." He panted out, the praise bringing him close to the edge before he could really think enough to stop it. Ignoring your own desire stirring up inside your stomach, you gripped your hand on him a little firmer, leaving the other to trace faint circles over his chest, the lingering damp of your kisses only making him more sensitive. Crashing your lips back against his you swallowed his moan before breathing out,

"Cum for me, Rome, please." His lips pressed hard against yours as his hips started to shake, unable to hold back for a second longer and spilling hot white ropes across his stomach, almost whimpering at his sensitive release, overstimulated but still whining the second you released your grip.

His hands reached up to capture your face, somehow trying to portray a lifetime's worth of gratitude and affection in a single overwhelming kiss, before finally releasing you to breathe. As you rose up onto your knees, surveying the smiling fool of a man lying beneath you, you couldn't help but laugh at the state of both of your suit trousers, marred with streaks of sticky white.

"We might need to hide up here for a while until we get cleaned up and dried off, or this might be hard to explain."

"You don't think we could say two seperate waiters happen to get lucky?" Roman rebuffed, pulling a disgusted face as he wiped a finger over the fluid pooling on his stomach.

"Or one waiter got very lucky?" You suggested with a smile, Roman using every ounce of remaining strength to sit up until his lips could find their way to yours.

"No-one's that lucky, so I guess we better stay hidden. I reckon there's a lot more stuff you could show me anyway." Roman's eyes drifted down your body eagerly, wondering exactly what else he'd been missing by never trying it with the right person.

"You don't think the party will miss us?" You teased, pretending to bat away his eager hands.

"What party?" He scoffed, letting you capture him by the wrists and pulling you back to lie with him, falling so you pinned his wrists either side of him, a position he was more than happy to end up in.

"What about our families?" You couldn't help the worried tinge in your voice as you remembered the seemingly insurmountable barrier that stood between yours and Roman's lives. With unusual sincerity he gazed up into your eyes and said softly,

"Fuck 'em, you're my family now."