#that wretched playlist made me do that

[senditcolton]

hits different

do you think i have forgotten... about you?

series masterlist | playlist | word count: 9.3k a/n: here it is! the finale of the "we're a bad idea" series. it's crazy to think that this series started on a complete whim and turned into this. i had so much fun writing this for you all and screaming about it with you and... gosh, just, thank you for all your support! I hope you all love this conclusion as much as I do. warnings: feminine reader, teammate's sister, age gap. smut! heavy handsy make out, oral (f receiving), protected penetrative sex. Disclaimer: Reading/creating content for married players isn’t for everyone. Please don’t read if you don’t vibe with it, but don’t attack me or others!

It felt like something out of a goddamn movie.

The way your eyes locked onto each other the very moment you settled next to Shannon at the altar. How the scent of the flowers that Emily had chosen for your bouquet suddenly became overwhelming. The feeling of heat that rushed through you – a heat that had nothing to do with the warm July afternoon and everything to do with the blue eyes that had captured you under their gaze.

Not the mention the film reel flashback that replayed in your head of those months when you allowed him into your bed and into your heart. And how he broke you into a million pieces and sent you running to Los Angeles to escape his hold on you.

Almost two years and three-thousand miles between you and him. You thought that would be enough.

But, even after all of that, it seems that you still couldn’t forget Matt Martin.

And based on the beating echoing through your ribcage, it was obvious that your wretched heart failed to remember how much it hurt whenever he was around.

The string music dancing on the breeze lifts to a crescendo and you almost scoff at the irony; like the universe itself was trying to arrange a reunion worthy of an Oscar-winning romance. Then you heart stutters when you see Matt lift from his seat, his eyes still locked on your frame and you fear that a love confession was about to fall from his lips.

Thankfully, that doesn’t happen. Instead, he turns from you, directing his gaze down the aisle.

The embarrassment rushes through your body and you have to shake your head at your dramatics; at the way you made yourself the main character in a moment that was anything but yours.

This was Scotty and Emily’s moment – their wedding, for Christs sake. Your eyes divert to the end of the aisle, watching as your soon to be sister-in-law walk to your brother, her stunning white dress flowing behind her. You sneak a glance at Scotty, watching his eyes water as Emily takes those final steps towards him. This was the reason you were here. Not Matt Martin.

Somehow, you manage to make it through the entire ceremony without looking out to the audience and those ocean blue eyes. When you walk back up the aisle for the recessional, your arm linked in Sebastian’s, your gaze locks with Matt’s once again before he disappears from your sight.

It’s a moment of reprieve as you sneak back into the cabin where you and the rest of the bridesmaids had spent the night, a deep breath lifting your chest.

You should’ve known he would be here. He was your brother’s teammate, a fact that you were all too aware of when this tryst began. Still, you hoped you wouldn’t have to face him. Not because you hated him or because you had moved on. But because there was still a part of you that craved him, that couldn’t let him go.

There was an ache in you and it felt like only he could heal it.

How? The answer to that question was still uncertain. You didn’t know if you needed him to apologize, or give you closure, or tell you everything you’ve always wanted him say. But you weren’t ready for it, whatever it was.

And when you walk into the reception area where the guests waited, your heart proves how unprepared you were based its reaction when your eyes find Matt. And the gymnastic routine it does when you realize that he was seated at your table, only a few spaces away from you.

Dinner is excruciating. It feels like a choreographed routine as you stop your head from drifting too far to the right to look in Matt’s direction, pretending that you don’t feel the weight of his stare, laser-focused on the toasts and your brother’s first dance. And when the dance floor opens and the mingling begins, the reason you fly from your chair was to greet other guests, performing your duty as a bridesmaid.

Not because you were desperate to delay the inevitable conversation you knew you had to have with the one man you had been avoiding.

Blissfully, a familiar voice calls to you from across the space and your eyes lock onto Mat Barzal, frantically waving at you from one of the other tables. You smile, walking over to him as he rises from his chair and hugs you, your name falling from his lips with that bright cheerfulness that you heard so frequently over Facetime calls and nights out in LA when the Islanders came to California.

“How are you doing, Barzy?” you ask, pulling away from the hug.

“Pretty good,” he replies, his hand falling to the shoulder of the pretty brunette occupying the seat next to him. “Have I introduced you to Lyla yet?”

“Well, you’ve talked about her enough that I feel like I’ve met her before,” you laugh as you steal Mat’s seat from him, holding out your hand before formally introducing yourself. “Good to officially meet the girl that stole this idiot’s heart.”

“Nice to finally meet you too,” Lyla says, taking your hand in hers. “Although, I will be honest, when I first saw your name on Mat’s phone and how many Facetime calls the two of you shared, I was a little concerned. Thought you were a long-distance girlfriend or something.”

“Completely understandable,” you laugh, admiring her candor. “But there’s nothing to worry about. He’s a little too sweet for me.”

“I’m standing right here,” Mat huffs and you look up at him with a smirk.

“It’s nothing you haven’t heard before.”

Your relationship with Mat Barzal was the one thing that had shifted in the years you were away but it definitely changed for the better. He had turned from a potential romantic partner to a true friend. That shift – one that was brought on after a night of too many French Blonde cocktails – lifted a weight off both of your shoulders and opened the door for an even deeper connection with star winger.

“I hear that I have you to thank for him asking me on a date,” Lyla says.

“I did nothing but push Mat to ask for the number of the pretty girl at the gym that he spent almost a half-an-hour raving about,” you laugh, loving the way both Lyla and Mat’s cheeks flushed. “You had him whipped before he even knew your name.”

“Oh, trust me, I figured that out eventually,” Lyla jokes and you can’t help but scoot in, ready to hear all the embarrassing stories that Lyla was willing to share. And share she did. It seems like hours of laughter and conversation, Mat even dragging a chair over and joining in – although most of his comments are attempts to defend himself. Eventually, Lyla gets up to run to the ladies room, departing with a kiss on Mat’s cheek and you can’t stop the smile that appears when Mat’s eyes stay glued to her as she walks away.

“I like her,” you say, calling his attention back to you. “She’s way too good for the likes of you.”

“Oh, I know,” he laughs, taking your jest in stride before sipping his beer. You see his hazel eyes bounce across the room, pausing momentarily before they return to you. “Have you talked to him yet?”

A sigh rushes through you as you shake your head.

“I still can’t believe I told you about him.”

“You told me like… eight months ago. Besides, you can only blame yourself.”

“Hey, I can also blame copious amounts of alcohol.”

“Yeah, alcohol that loosened your tongue and sent his name falling out of your mouth,” Mat quips, his eyebrow raising. “Along with your dinner.”

“Please don’t remind me,” you say, your mind jumping back to the night in question.

It was November, when the Islanders played Los Angeles. You and Mat met up at a local bar – just the two of you and it was that night that your relationship changed completely. Because in your inebriated state, Matt Martin’s name slurred from your lips while Barzy was attempting to shove you into an Uber.

Despite facing the wrath of his coaches, Mat helped you back to your apartment and kept you company that night, his reasoning being that he wanted to make sure you were alright and a California road trip allowing him the time to do so. It was over greasy eggs and bacon that he asked why you said Marty’s name. And you told him.

You even told him about the night of the charity gala, emphasizing that you never meant to use him like that. And that the reason why you never took him up on his offer to be more than friends was because you didn’t want to use him more, keep giving him false hope.

The truth stung him for a few days but after giving him the time and space he needed, the honesty and clarity brought the two of you closer. Now, he was the only person in your life that knew the whole story of why you left Long Island. And, like the good friend he was, he kept your secret all that time.

“You know you’re going to have to speak to him at some point,” Mat prods.

“I know,” you quip, playfully rolling your eyes. “Doesn’t mean I can’t avoid him for a few more minutes.”

“You’ve been avoiding him for almost two years. Don’t know if a few minutes is going to help.”

“When did you get so wise?”

“You can thank Lyla for that,” he smiles and you watch his whole expression soften at the mere sound of her name.

“She makes you happy.”

The sentence is more statement than question. You were there on the other end of the line when he talked about the first time he saw her. You gave him pep-talks and advice on how to ask her out. You helped him plan dates and dinners. It was obvious that this girl was something special to him.

“Happier than I’ve been in a while.”

“Then why are you still sitting here talking to me?” you say. “Dance at a wedding with your girlfriend.”

“Alright, I will,” Mat laughs, standing. He doesn’t depart immediately, choosing instead to lean over to you with a serious look in hie eye. “But you have to promise me you’ll talk to Marty.”

Another sigh escapes you as you let your head turn to look at the reception hall, your eyes glancing off the crowd of guests before landing on Matt, leaning against the wall, talking to Cal and his wife. As if he can feel your eyes on him, his gaze drifts to you and you watch a myriad of emotions dance on his face, each so subtle and fleeting that you couldn’t even begin to decipher what he was thinking.

“He’s been asking about you, you know,” Mat’s voice sounds, pulling your attention back to him.

“He has?”

“Yeah. Asking me, Scotty, Emily, anyone really. How you’re doing, what you’re doing.”

“What have you told him?”

“Just surface level stuff: your job, your complaints about the weather and LA traffic, things like that. It seems like he wants to talk to you,” Mat says. “So, you should talk to him. If nothing else, you might at least get some closure.”

You exhale, you mid swirling with the information that Matt Martin was still thinking about you, maybe in the same way you were thinking about him. Your head was a mess of doubts and hopes and fears and longing and desires. You just breathe through it all, pulling Mat into another hug which he reciprocates.

“You’re a really good friend, you know that right?” you ask, your voice muffled by his tuxedo.

“So I’ve been told by this really cool Los Angeles girl who overthinks everything.”

You laugh as you let your arms fall, Mat shooting you that crooked smile before he is walking away. You see him intercept Lyla as she re-enters the reception area, taking her arm in his and pulling her to the dancefloor, the smile on her face brightening as Mat leans in and kisses her cheek.

There was a part of you that twinged at the sight. You knew it was jealousy – not the traditional jealousy but a different form. You weren’t angry that Mat found joy with someone that wasn’t you, but envious that he found someone, period.

Especially since you were unable to move on from the man you shared a scandalous but exhilarating few months with. The man you promised yourself you would forget.

But then you hear his voice sound from behind you and feel that exquisite ache that you had never been able to soothe throb in the center of your chest.

“Hey.”

You turn to see him standing behind you, his suit looking almost too perfect for his body, his hair tousled and falling over his forehead. You watch as his blue eyes rove over your face and you wonder what he’s thinking and if all the same emotions are flooding his system the way they were yours.

“Hi,” you whisper, cursing your voice for coming out sounding so timid, cursing yourself for still allowing Matt Martin to make you feel small. But instead of that cool smirk that used to always appear at the sound of your frailty, his face remains impassive, his eyes flicking down to the now vacant seat next to you.

“Could I sit?” he asks and your head spins, not only because of the gentleness of the question but the fact that he even asked at all. The Matt Martin you used to know would’ve sat down immediately, invading your space boldly and brazenly for no other reason than to get a rise out of you.

You nod, watching him settle down into the cushioned seat and take a sip from his whiskey glass, his eyes still on you. It takes an immense amount of effort to break your gaze as you reach for your own wine and letting the smooth oaked flavor dance over your tongue.

“How have you been?” Matt breaks the silence again and you know you hear a hesitance in his voice, like he is unsure if he should even be addressing you.

“I’ve been alright,” you reply, your own voice thick with trepidation. “You?”

“It’s been decent.”

“I’m sorry,” you say, and his eyebrows quirk up in curiosity at your words. “For your injury. The playoffs,” you elaborate. Your gaze stays locked on him, trying to understand the micro-expressions that pass over his face.

“Thank you,” he replies and you just nod, taking another sip of your wine. “Didn’t know if you were even watching.”

“Wanted to support my brother.”

“Right,” he sighs. “Of course.”

You hated this. Hated the weight that hung over the two of you like a lead curtain, making anything beyond small talk too difficult to say. You weren’t sure how to surmount this obstacle, not sure if it was even possible to overcome. But someone had to be brave and attempt that first step.

With a deep breath and another sip of liquid courage, you turn you attention back to Matt.

“Was there… something you wanted to ask me?” you question, the words as stilted and unclear as the intention behind them.

Matt looks at you, his blue eyes wide as he absorbs your words. It is a moment of stillness before he is finishing off his whiskey and setting the glass on the table, lifting himself out of his chair. Your heart flips in fear that you said the wrong thing, that you ruined the moment before it could even take shape but that concern is silenced when Matt stands in front of you, holding out his hand, his palm upturned.

“Dance with me?”

Of all the questions that you thought Matt Martin would confront you with, this was one that you were not prepared for. A sentiment that is echoed by a bewildered ‘what?’ falling from your lips.

“Will you dance with me?” Matt reiterates, the request turning into a genuine question. Would you let him take you out onto the dance floor and into his arms again?

Your eyes rove from his face to his hand, still outstretched. The hesitance lingers in you reflected by the way you lift your own hand, your fingers curling back in a moment of uncertainty before you allow them to touch his. They glide against his calloused skin, wrapping around his palm, his own fingers winding around your hand.

Another glance up at him shows you the slightest smile playing at his lips. But it isn’t twinged with the familiar undercurrent of cruelty or power. Instead, it looks like relief.

He gently tugs you upright before leading you to the dancefloor, the refrain of a slow melody encompassing you moments before Matt’s arms do the same. He adjusts the grip on your hand while the other finds a respectful place on the small of your back. You let your own free hand lift and rest delicately on his bicep as the two of you begin to sway.

The silence between you remains even as the music rises and falls. You still avoid looking in Matt’s eyes, content to stare at the hardwood floor even though you can feel the weight of his gaze. In the back of your mind, you knew that if your eyes locked with his, you wouldn’t be able to keep your composure.  That possibility was to be avoided at all costs. You couldn’t let Matt Martin regain the control over you that he used to have.

“You look beautiful.”

Those three muttered words, the compassion behind them, makes your resolve crumble, your eyes darting up to meet with his.

“Thank you,” you say, your voice breathless – the exact opposite of the curtness you wanted your tone to convey. But perhaps it wasn’t your choice to soften your words. Maybe it was subconscious, based on the way that Matt held you, the way he spoke to you, the way he looked at you. It felt different.

He was different.

“I missed you,” he whispers; the first real confession of the night.

“Matt,” you sigh, the cynic jumping out to protect your heart – the one that he shattered.

“I know,” he says. “I know what you’re going to say.”

“How can you?” you challenge him, the small flame of anger that you held flickering in your chest.

“You’re right. I have no idea what you were about to say. But I can make a guess.”

His words extinguish that resentment as soon as it appears, your eyebrow raising in surprise – not only towards his words but in his concession to you, he deference of power, the pendulum swinging in your favor. Your silence allows him to continue.

“I know I haven’t given you any reason to trust me,” he begins. “For you to believe anything I say is the truth. But I guess… I’m just wondering if you would give me a chance. Let me prove it to you.”

“Prove what to me?”

“How much I missed you. How much I care about you.”

He pulls your closer to him and you allow it. You let him hold you tighter until your chests press together, the smell of his all too familiar cologne flooding your senses. You swear you forget how to breathe when you feel his hand trace up your arm before resting against your jawline. The gentle press of his fingers guides you to look up at him, his thumb caressing your cheek.

“Let me prove that I was an idiot for ever letting you go.”

You can feel the tears prick the corner of your eyes and you know Matt can see them, watching as they well up on your lower lashes. His words seemed so sweet, so genuine, and you so desperately wanted to believe them. But there was still that voice in the back of your mind screaming, ‘this is what he does; he’s an expert at speaking these saccharine words but you know they’re never fulfilling.’

But here, now, he was promising to prove it to you.

The words of acceptance are dancing up your throat, hanging on the tip of your tongue and at the edge of your lips. But before you can speak them into existence, the universe silences you once again.

“Alright everyone, please clear the dance floor and let the bride and groom have one private last dance. Make your way to the front entrance and get ready to send them off in style!”

The MC’s voice booms from the speaker, pulling your attention and your body away from the gentle hold of Matt. The uncertainty and distrust take advantage of the interruption to reassert itself in your mind.

‘This was a sign,’ it said. ‘The universe is protecting you from getting your heart broken again.’

But when you look back, your eyes connecting to Matt’s once more and you still see nothing but yearning on his face, you feel your own longing surge again.

“Meet me by the fountain when this is all over?” you ask.

“I’ll be there.”

This time, you really do believe him.

You meet with the rest of the bridesmaids and hand out the silver streamers. You are blessed with an immense amount of coordination and impeccable timing as the streamers pop right as Scotty and Emily make their way through the crowd and hop in the car, already packed with their suitcases and honeymoon plane tickets. It is another few moments of clean up and meeting with the wedding coordinator before you are able to run back to the cabin where you and the other bridesmaids stayed for the past two days. You grab your overnight duffle bag, slinging it over your shoulder before making your way through the country club and out to the garden near the front entrance.

The two aspects of your personality were still at war with each other as you entered the terrace. Part of you prayed that Matt would keep his word and be there, just like he said. The other part prepared itself for the possibility that this was all just a cruel joke, an elaborate attempt for him to keep his hooks in you.

But when you walk out and see Matt standing next to the stone fountain, his profile illuminated by the garden lights, your desire once again silences the doubt in your mind.

You wanted to trust him. Sure, you might get hurt. But you could also heal.

That hope was worth the risk.

Matt hears your heels clacking against the pavement and turns to face you, his lips curling in a gentle smile at your approach.

“You’re here,” you say, breathless, as if your brain still didn’t trust that this wasn’t all a dream.

“I told you I would be,” he replies, holding out his hand to you again, another offering for you to accept or reject. This time, your hand slides easily into his, your fingers intertwining.

There is a pause, as if neither of you expected to be in this situation. Now that you were, you were both unsure what to do next. The uncertainty sinks into you, your voice breaking the silence in an attempt to continue the moment.

“I was planning on getting a room at the hotel airport,” you explain. “If you want to join me.”

You swear you see a flash of surprise cross Matt’s face at your suggestion before softening, a look of gentle exasperation painted on his features.

“Is that how you think I’m going to make it up to you?” he asks. His tone isn’t frustrated or offended. Instead, it’s curious, like he truly wonders if that’s what you thought of him. Or if that’s what you needed from him.

The ache that rushes through your body, reminiscent of the desire you always felt towards him but multiplied tenfold, gives you your answer. The months you spent denying your hunger for him, the ways you explained away the pain of losing him as something akin to withdrawal, how you used those brief moments of happiness to justify your choice to leave, keeping you handcuffed to the idea that you would be better off without him… they all melted away.

You wanted him. You’ve always wanted him.

You step forward, pressing your body close as you look into those eyes that haunted your dreams.

“It’s how I want you to,” you whisper, the response to his question cutting through the night air.

There is no clear indication on who moved first but you find it doesn’t matter when you feel the press of Matt’s lips against yours. This kiss itself is delicate, as if he was careful not to cross any line, any boundary that you wanted to place. But you had no sense of restraint.

Your desire surged forward, free from the cage that you kept it locked in. You release your grip on his hand and your duffle bag, your free hands flying up to his hair, tangling in the silky locks as your body presses impossibly closer. Matt takes your desperation in stride, his own arms wrapping around you, holding you steady. Your tongue presses against the seam of his lips, silently begging for access which he gives. A whimper escapes your throat, the taste of him on your tongue only increasing your craving. You can feel Matt’s grip tighten in response to your sounds, his fingers crumpling the silk fabric of your dress as he swallows every desperate noise that he pulls from you.

Somehow, the kisses slow until your lips are falling away from each other. Matt keeps you near, your forehead pressed against his, the warmth of his breath fanning across your cheekbones.

“Let me take you home,” he murmurs and you don’t even think twice before your head is nodding in agreement.

The car ride back to his place feels both familiar and foreign. The air between you is still thick with need but those powerful emotions are lightened by the feeling of Matt’s fingers intertwining with yours over the center console, the way his eyes dart over to you, looking at you as if he couldn’t believe this was real. You were sure that your face conveyed the same thought.

He pulls into the driveway, the porchlight gleaming like a beacon in the darkness, calling you back to him. His grip around you is firm as he walks you to the front door, escorting you across the threshold and your eyes take in the sight of a house that you felt you knew like the back of your hand. The pillows on his couch were different as was some of the art lining the walls but besides that, it looked exactly how it did the last time you were there.

You hear Matt kick off his shoes behind you and you aren’t sure if it’s habit or muscle memory that pulls you forward, your own heels tapping against the hardwood as you wander deeper, your body guiding you to the staircase. Your hand wraps around the wooden railing as you begin your ascent to the second floor. Matt is close behind you, his own steps slow and measured as he lets you guide him up the stairs and to the first door on your right.

The master bedroom is more of the same, the smallest and subtlest of changes catching your attention as you walk into the room. You can hear the small click of the door latch finding home echo and you turn to see Matt leaning against the doorframe, his eyes observing you in the low lamplight.

Your smile is all the encouragement he needs to push himself away from the door, crossing the distance stretched between you in only a few steps. His hand lifts to cup your face, your eyes locking with his before he is capturing your lips in another kiss.

In the safety and security of his bedroom, it seems as if both of your desires were unleashed with a vengeance. His hands pull you closer and your own scramble on his body, wanting to feel every inch of him, wanting to recommit his shape to memory. You are pressed against him, pushing him deeper into the room, your feet moving across the carpeted floor. He lets you manipulate him, walking backward and holding you against him as if he wanted no space to separate the two of you ever again, be it three-thousand miles or three inches.

It isn’t long until his body is falling to sit on the edge of his mattress, his thighs spreading to pull you between them. His desire to have you close is reciprocated, your body moving on its own accord. Your hand mindlessly reaches down to grip the fabric of your dress, pulling the midi hem higher to allow you to climb into his lap without hinderance, your legs straddling his waist.

Matt’s hands grip you tighter, pulling you close, the movement of his lips against yours never ceasing. Your own hands return to tangle in his hair, the taste of him more intoxicating than all the bottles and glasses of alcohol that you drank trying to forget him.

If possible, your desire ratchets up another level and your hands fall from his hair, tugging off his suit jacket. You blindly reach for his tie, undoing the knot as Matt’s hands wander all over your body, grabbing your ass, pulling your hips down to meet his. A moan rumbles from your chest as you feel the hardness of him pressed against you, your lips falling from Matt’s. He doesn’t seem affected, his own lips moving to kiss your neck, his hands still tracing your curves.

You are blind with lust as Matt’s head dips across your collarbones and the top of your decolletage and you let your instincts guide you, your fingers finding the buttons of his dress shirt. Each clasp is unfastened deftly and as soon as the shirt falls open, your hands sneak underneath the fabric, pressing against Matt’s warm skin. You can feel the strength of his chest, the movement of his muscles, and the pounding of his heart underneath your palms as they glide up, pushing the material off his broad shoulders. Matt’s hands only depart from your body momentarily to rid the shirt from his frame completely before he is pulling your lips to his again.

Your hands drift back down to his abdomen and you can feel his muscles clench in response to your gentle touch. It’s another generous roll of your hips against his before your fingertips find the button and zipper of his slacks. You blindly undo them just enough that you can slip your hand beneath both the waistband of his pants and boxer briefs.

“Fuck, sweetheart,” Matt groans against your skin as your hand wraps around his length. Another rush of heat flows through your body at hearing the familiar pet-name fall from his lips. Your own lips twist in a smile as you give him a few languid strokes, relishing in the way his moans vibrate against your skin – the way he weakens for you.

The need to make him unravel more takes over as you begin to pull away from him, your body scooting back in order to dismount and fall to your knees in front of him. But before you could even drop a single foot onto the carpeted floor, Matt’s hands hold you firm, halting your motions.

“No,” he whispers, pulling you back to him. “Not tonight.”

You stare at him, your eagerness to have him in your mouth mixing with the confusion of why he was preventing you from doing just that. The immediate response he gives you is another kiss, his hand returning to rest against your jaw. When he does pull away, you hear his sultry timbre echo around the room.

“I should be the one on my knees worshipping you, not the other way around.” 

His declaration burns through you, igniting a need that had been left untapped for years.

You were used to submitting to Matt Martin. You thought that you loved it. But now, here he was ready to bow to you and your desires and your will. That thought alone made a fire pool in your lower stomach, your lips pressing against his again.

His hands tighten against your skin, securing his grip on you as he lifts himself from the bed with you in his arms. The sensation of the smooth sheets pressing against your back is almost instantaneous, Matt’s lips falling from yours to retrace their previous pathway along your jaw, down the column of your throat and across your collarbones. You are about to lift yourself upright to pull the material of your dress away from your frame but Matt’s arms keep you pinned against the mattress. Instead, his hand simply tugs the fabric up, painstakingly exposing more of your skin to the cool air until the silk is bunched around your waist.

You feel Matt’s smile against your skin as his lips continue their descent, kisses placed against your stomach before he presses a whisper of one right above the edge of your panties.

“So fucking beautiful,” he whispers, his eyes darting up to look at you.

The only sound that your voice can manage is a whine but it’s enough for Matt, his elegant fingers hooking and twisting around your waistband. Your head falls back as you lift your hips to help him pull the soft cotton away. He tugs the material down your legs at a painstaking pace, lifting your feet to unhook the elastic from around your ankles.

You expect – no, you need him to return to the apex of your thighs. But you soon realize how much Matt meant it when he said he planned on worshipping you.

His hands guide your feet to rest on his muscular thighs as his finger unbuckle your shoe, sliding it off before repeating the action on the other side. He lifts your leg, your bare heel now resting on the back of his shoulder and you sigh when you feel his lips press against your calf. They linger as he makes his way back up your frame, a kiss pressed on your shin, your knee, your inner thigh.

It feels like reverence. It feels like devotion – to you, to the way you make him feel.

Your hand reaches down, tangling in his hair and gently tugging him closer to the place you needed him most. Matt lets you guide him and, after he brings both of your legs to rest on his shoulders, his arm wrapping around your waist, pinning your hips to the bed, he finally – finally – presses his mouth against your core.

A relieved sigh escapes your chest as Matt’s lips move, his tongue darting out to trace your folds. Your sighs turn to whimpers to moans as he continues his ministrations, remembering all the things that make your breathing hitch, your thighs shake. Remembering all the ways you come undone.

“Still so sweet,” he murmurs. “Still so desperate for me.”

He resumes his movements, winding you up in the most deliberate way. Your free hand twists into the sheets as he drags you closer to the edge, his tongue diving into your cunt before lifting to flick against your clit, the action causing your hips to jolt from beneath his strong arm. You swear that you are about to rip his sheets based on how tight you are holding them.

You’re too strung out to see Matt’s eyes lift, him noticing the death grip you have on the soft cotton covering the mattress. In your haze, you can feel the grip he has on your thigh loosen and depart but your mind doesn’t understand the reason until you feel his hand dancing across your fingers twisted in the sheets, silently coaxing you to release the fabric. You do and as soon as there is space, his fingers filling the gaps between yours, holding your hand tightly as his mouth continues to work its sinful magic against you.

Your orgasm hits you unexpectedly, your back arching off the bed as the tidal wave of pleasure crashes through your body, radiating from your stomach down to the tips of each limb. Your hand tightens around his so firmly that you believe you must be cutting off circulation. But Matt doesn’t seem to mind, squeezing your hand tighter in response. He moans against your core in response to the taste of your release flooding his tongue, the vibration sending another round of shudders down your spine.

The feeling of Matt’s mouth and hands leaving you ignites a new wave of desperation, one that is only partially satiated when he returns to hover over you, kissing you deeply. You moan into his mouth when you taste the tang of your own essence still coating his tongue.

“I can’t believe I forgot how good you were at that,” you exhale when your lips fall from his.

“I don’t think I’ll ever forget how gorgeous you look when you cum,” he murmurs, his head dipping down to your neck, his quiet assertation making you smile.

You let him press his lips against your throat, content to lay beneath him for the moment. But when you feel his hips roll against yours, his own hunger for you and your body not yet satisfied, another ache of need hits you. You pull his head back up to your face, capturing his lips in another feverish kiss.

Matt’s body hovers mere centimeters above yours, his hips pressed against you. The position makes it easy for you to hook your leg around him. Using what strength you had, you somehow manage to flip the two of you around, Matt’s back crashing onto the bed, your body now suspended above him.

You break the kiss, lifting yourself upright with a grin on your face as your hands trace over the ridges of his chest. His own hands dance up your thighs, sneaking beneath the hem of your dress to caress the soft skin around your hipbones. In the span of a breath, your fingers bunch the silken material of your gown, gathering it in your hands before you pull the fabric over your head.

The gentle sharp inhale of Matt’s breath as your body becomes entirely exposed to him is music to your ears. There is no stopping his hands as they continue to drift up your body, gliding over the curves of your hips and waist, dancing across your ribcage before coming to cup your breasts. He caresses the sensitive skin, his thumbs reaching to brush against your nipples causing your head to fall back, a soft plea for him to continue falling from your mouth. He listens, his fingers roving across your body, as if there was not an inch of skin that he wanted to leave untouched.

“Such a gorgeous perfect body,” he mutters, making the pool of desire within you fill again.

You lift your hips up only so far as to reach behind you, tugging at the fabric of his slacks and boxer briefs; a silent request. His hands fall from your body to pull the material down his legs and you feel him kick off the only remaining barriers between your bodies. You lean forward as you kiss him again, your hips sinking back down. A simultaneous moan escapes both of you as you grind against him, your arousal coating the soft skin of his shaft.

There is want and then there is pure unadulterated need and the latter is what takes a hold of you now. Your lips fall from his as you stretch your body forward, your arm reaching for the nightstand drawer, the place he used to – and now you hope still does – keep his condoms. Your progress is halted briefly by Matt’s head lifting to wrap his lips around your nipples, the action making another gasp sound your throat. You persevere, albeit somewhat distracted because of Matt’s ministrations, pulling open the drawer, relieved to see the box in the same place, thankful that not everything had changed.

But as you reach for one of the square packets, your eyes land on a stack of envelopes pushed against the other side and you swear you see your name scrawled across the white paper. You don’t have any time to linger on them as you feel Matt’s teeth gently nip at your skin, pulling your attention back to him.

“Please, darling, hurry up,” he implores, dark blue eyes looking up to you. “Need to get inside you.”

Who were you to deny him?

Your fingers grasp the foil, your body returning to its upright position above him. You rip open the packet, pulling the rubber from the confines and preparing it before you reach behind you, taking Matt in your hand. He throws his head back, his hair haloing around his face as you give him a few languid strokes before sliding the condom on.

There is no waiting, no more hesitation as you lift your hips up. Your free hand presses against the center of his chest for balance as you guide him to your entrance. You aren’t sure if it’s him or yourself you’re teasing when you slide the tip of him against your folds once, twice before you align yourself to him.

Your mouth falls open in a silent moan as you sink down, the stretch of him entering you delectably foreign and yet comfortingly familiar. Matt has a similar reaction to the sensation of your walls wrapping around him, his hands flying up to your hips, his grip tightening around you so much so that you swear you’re going to have bruises in the shape of his fingerprints the next morning.

“Fuck, darling,” he growls as your hips meet his, him bottoming out inside of you. “Still feel like fucking heaven around me.”

Your only response is a whimper as your eyes flutter shut, both of your hands now resting on his chest, using him for leverage as you begin to move. Matt guides the motion of your hips, helping you bounce on top of him, letting you grind against him, more sharp gasps falling from your lips as your clit rubs against the taut skin of his lower stomach.

“That’s it sweetheart,” he praises, fingers brushing against your skin as you ride him. “Take what you want from me. It’s yours to have.”

You whine, grinding your hips even deeper onto him, one of your hands lifting to tease your nipples. You missed this, the feeling of Matt hitting spots so deep in you, spots that no one else had been able to find before and since.

“God, I missed this,” Matt groans, echoing your thoughts, his eyes devouring your body. “Missed you.”

His words force you to open your eyelids and when your eyes lock, you almost cum simply from the way he is staring at you: like you were the most beautiful piece of artwork, like you were sculpted from the purest marble, crafted from the finest paints. Like you deserved to be hung in the Louvre.

“Matt,” you whine, his name falling from your lips in a plea as your movements falter against him.

“What is it, sweetheart?” he asks, his own voice strained and earnest. “What do you need?”

“Need you to fuck me.”

“Yeah?” he questions. But unlike the times before, he’s not asking in order to tease you, to be cruel, or to force you to beg him for a mere sliver of his attention. He is asking because he wants to hear you say it – wants to hear you confess that you’ve missed him and that you’ve been wanting him as much as he has been wanting you.

“Please,” you reply. “Please, I need it. I need you.”

Your words aren’t twinged with contempt, nor are they wretched from your mouth unwillingly. They fall from your lips because you mean them, because you want to beg for him – not the other way around.

A gasp is torn from your chest as Matt lifts himself up, his chest pressing against yours. His hands trace your spine, one burrowing into the hair at the nape of your neck, the other resting heavy on the small of your back. He pulls you to him, kissing you again and swallowing every noise that falls from your lips as he drags your hips into his.

You weren’t sure if it was because you were wound too tight or that you truly couldn’t comprehend what was happening because before you knew it, Matt had spun you around, flipping you once again so you were the one laying against the sheets. Your legs instinctively wrap around his hips and before you can moan at the feeling of him thrusting into you, your sounds are muffled by his lips again.

Matt eventually breaks away, one arm reaching back to grip your thigh, pulling one leg higher, the new angle causing every stroke of him to brush against that damnable spot that made you see stars. You cry out, your head collapsing against the bed, Matt’s name falling from your lips.

“Fuck, I missed this,” Matt mutters, keeping his steady pace as he watches your body respond to his movements. “Missed how beautiful you look underneath me. Missed this perfect fucking pussy. Fucking taking all of me like it’s made for me.”

His possessiveness makes you whimper, the high-pitched sound catching his ear.

“That right, baby?” he asks. “This cunt still mine, even after all this time?”

“Yes,” comes your reply, wrapped in a strangled moan. “I’m all yours. I’m still yours,” you gasp out, your hips desperately chasing his.

“And I’m all yours,” Matt replies, his head dropping down to kiss you again. “Let it out, sweetheart. Let me hear you.”

He doesn’t speed up, content to keep his languid pace, steadily driving you towards that cliff. The noises that escape you are incoherent, a jumbled mess of curses and pleas as your walls flutter desperately around him. It feels like the most deliberate and exquisite torture, a pleasure that you would welcome time and time again if he would let you.

“Come on, darling,” you hear Matt’s voice whisper in your ear. “Remind me how good it feels when that beautiful cunt cums around me.”

It is the quiet demand that has you falling off the edge, your muscles stiffening as your orgasm hits you. You can hear a faint growl rumble from Matt, murmured praise being spoken into your skin like a prayer as he fucks you through it, your legs trembling as they fall from him.

Matt’s movements finally increase in speed as he chases own climax, each move of his hips making you whimper. You tug his head to you, kissing him fiercely and swallowing his groans as he stills and you bask in the sensation of his cock pulsing inside of you.

Your labored breaths mingle as you stay wrapped up together, sweat drenched foreheads pressed against each other as you both collect yourself. Matt’s hand, the one that that had been gripping your thigh, lifts to brush your hair away from your forehead as his eyes appraise you. You can’t stop the way your eyes close as he leans in, kissing you once again, his tongue dipping into your open mouth and you whine as you feel him slowly pull out of you.

He places a gentle chaste kiss against your lips before lifting himself off you, walking around the bed. Your eyes track his movements, watching as he stops at the nightstand, the top drawer still open. There is a flicker of some emotion that crosses his face before he pushes the drawer closed before disappearing into the ensuite bathroom. You hear the water running before he returns, a warm damp washcloth in one hand and a t-shirt in the other.

Matt gently presses the washcloth against your skin, starting at your forehead and temples before descending until he reached the apex of your thighs, brushing away the lingering wetness of your release from your skin. He throws the towel into the hamper and holds out his hand, which you take. You let him lift your torso off the sheets as he hands you the t-shirt. He holds you steady while you slip the soft cotton over your head, the worn Maple Leaf emblem resting on your upper chest almost completely faded.

You collapse back against the sheets as Matt pulls on a pair of boxers before climbing next to you. His arms wrap around your body as he settles behind you, pulling your back close to his chest. Your own fingers lift to absentmindedly play with his as reality crashes back over you.

You aren’t sure what to say, if there even is anything to be said. You don’t want to ruin the golden halo of peace that surrounds the two of you but you knew you couldn’t just leave it like this. There were still too many questions unanswered, still too much uncertainty.

“What are you thinking about?” you hear Matt’s husky voice whisper from behind you. You sigh, wiggling in his grasp. He loosens his hold enough for you to spin and face him, his blue eyes soft as they take in the sight of you in his bed.

“A lot of things,” you answer, the response vague enough to let him decide whether to press on or to leave it at that. He decides to do the former.

“Like what?”

Your eyes lift to think, picturing the mess of thoughts in your head as you attempt to untangle each. The loose threads seem innumerable, too many to choose which was the most important to tug and which could be saved for a later moment. So, you just latch onto the first image that appears in your mind.

“Could I ask you a question?” you say, eyes connecting back to him.

“Of course.”

“When I was in your nightstand earlier,” you begin, carefully observing even the tiniest reactions that tug at Matt’s expression. “I saw a stack of envelopes and it looked like they had my name on them. What are they?”

There is a myriad of emotions that dance across Matt’s face, each more fleeting than the last before his features settle to what looks to you to be apathy or resignation. You feel your heart panic as his body turns away from, fearing that you spoke the wrong words – said the wrong thing. But it quiets when you watch him pull open the nightstand drawer, his hand reaching in. Your eyes follow his movements as he pulls out the stack of envelopes before spinning back to you.

“They’re for you,” he says, holding them out towards you. You take them from his hands, the bundle held tight by a rubber band. Your fingers flip through each of them, finding your name written on every single one. Your eyes dart from the paper back to him and you swear you see his cheeks tinge a lightish pink.

“My therapist suggested that I write you letters.”

“Your therapist?”

“Yeah. I started seeing him shortly after you left,” he explains, his hand reaching behind to awkwardly scratch at the nape of his neck. “Realized that there was a lot I needed to work on.”

“Why didn’t you send them?”

“I didn’t know your new address,” he tells you, the candor in his voice strengthening as he continues. “And I was too proud to ask. Besides, I wasn’t sure if you even wanted to hear from me. Thought you might throw them away if I did send them.”

You don’t respond, neither confirming or denying his assumption because in that moment, you weren’t certain what you would’ve done if a letter from him had appeared in your mailbox.

“What’s in them?” you ask, choosing to revert to a safer statement.

“Things I wanted to say to you. Things I never said to you when you needed to hear them. Everything I wanted to tell you but never got the chance to.”

There is a silence as you take in his declaration, your curiosity piquing as your fingers trace the edges of the envelopes. There is a desire to read them but also a fear, unsure if the contents would contain blame or apologies or gaslighting or regret.

“You don’t have to read them now,” Matt speaks again, his voice drawing your attention back to him.  “You don’t have to read them at all if you don’t want to. They’re yours to do whatever you please.”  

Something inside you tells you that it’s dangerous; that it’s a bad idea to open them. To trace over the words and strong emotions that forced him to put pen to paper. To allow Matt Martin back into the heart that you’ve spent years repairing. But when you feel his hand trace down the side of your face, his fingers twirling a strand of your hair, you realize that that line had already been blurred beyond recognition.

You didn’t know what a bad idea was when Matt was around. You had already done so many things that you shouldn’t have with him. What was one more bad idea compared to the thousands you acted on before?

What was this bad idea in comparison to one that brought you to Matt Martin’s bed in the first place?

Your mind swirls with all the drastic changes you had experienced in such a short amount of time. How different the world felt right now versus a few hours ago. How different the man sitting next to you was from the man you left in a Long Island bar two years ago. You felt as if you lived twenty lifetimes since you woke up. The past, the present, and every possible future tangled together in your mind, an amalgamation of all that had happened and all that could happen.

But you didn’t want to think about that right now. All you wanted to do was sink into Matt Martin’s arms and hold him close.

So, that’s exactly what you did.

You gently turn away from Matt, reaching up to place the stack of envelopes on top of the neighboring nightstand. There was still uncertainty whether you would read them, but the action of keeping them meant that you would consider it. And when you face Matt again, it seems that – for him – that was enough. This time, it is you who reaches out to intertwine your hand with his, scooting closer to him. He follows your lead, his body sinking into the mattress until you are pressed together, side by side. Your head comes to rest on chest, your eyes closing, the sound of his strong heartbeat echoing in your ear.

Right before sleep overtakes you, you manage to whisper to him the truth that your heart sang out, the sentence that you realized you couldn’t deny even after months of trying to do just that.

“I missed you too.”

The last thing you register is a soft kiss pressed onto the crown of your head, and encompassed in Matt’s warm embrace, you let the feeling of peace wash over you.

… but it’s gonna be alright. I did my time…

a/n 2.0: I did decide to leave it a little open ended because i just liked the feeling of it better. but if you want to know how what i think happens after this, i will direct you to this mashup

tagging the babes who made writing this so rewarding: @texanstarslove @comphy-and-cozy @smileysvech @laurenairay @dissonannce @cowboybarzy @cellythefloshie @provokedgoalie @m00nlightdelights @tkachvkmatthew @cixrosie @alwaysclassyeagle @geospatialharmony

[atinylittlepain]

joel miller x f!oc

story playlist

monsters are made of myths. in this story, two myths become one. two myths are in love. they are in wretched love.

warnings | 18+ this is a work of contemporary horror | literally cannibalism, and the trappings of it - love as consumption, non-graphic death, murder, grotesque depictions of food (normal food) and eating (normal eating), non-graphic references to unhealthy parental relationship (abuse and neglect), descriptions of dissociation, smut, strange neurotic processes in general

word count | 17K (yes, really)

a/n | this fic is partially inspired by the movie Bones and All, and it is my attempt to get Bones and All right (read: better) - i cannot stress enough that this is a work of horror, and as such, deals with unsettling imagery, subject matter, and emotions. read with care. special thanks must be given to @pr0ximamidnight and @wannab-urs who loved these two characters enough to keep me writing them, thank you, my darling friends, i hope i've done them justice. and thank you, dear reader, for coming along on something of an odyssey.

Monsters, she thinks, are hewn from guilt and shame. She is trying very hard not to feel either of those things about what she must do. But some slippery part of her still supposes that she has been a monster for a very long time, maybe even from the beginning. When did it change? When are monsters made? Like everyone else, she drank from her mother’s breast. Some time after that then.

What she does remember is not regretting it, any of it, until her mother taught her it was something to regret. Shame in the whites of her eyes, the dark ring of her open mouth, stricken in a scream. She has only ever met one other person like her in all her time skipping from town to town, a few years younger than her, but older in her confidence, her certainty in who she was. And like her, the first time, a babysitter, blood in the bathtub. She took her ear clean off, and the girl’s father found the scene when he got home from work, babysitter having fled, baby still in the tub, gumming on something pink and soft in her mouth. He had been afraid, she told her, that she could have drowned. Never mind the ear. Monsters are loved too, after all, a wretched thing of love. 

For her it had been a finger. At least that’s what her mother told her, easy to wrap her small mouth around. She believed her, vaguely remembering the flicker of red nail polish, bitter amidst the rest of sense and sate. What she does remember, the feeling of fullness. What she does remember, her mother making a myth out of her, conjuring up some way to explain this condition of hers. Condition, what she decided to call it. An affliction of appetites, something to be controlled, to be smothered under the thick swaths of what her mother taught her. How to be normal is really just another way of saying how to hide. And she hid for a very long time, weak and wan and wanting things she knew she shouldn’t be wanting. Until, eighteen, and their tenth packed car and dark house and her mother telling her that she was no longer interested in this myth, this unmaking of a monster. You are what you are and I have tried, I have tried, I have tried, but you are what you are. 

Not just guilt and shame, monsters are made in the breadth of a back turning, in eyes settling somewhere up and away. Monsters are made in a leaving. Everyone has already left. So what else is there to do but eat?

She likes the song that’s playing in the convenience store, the light haze of it, staticking from somewhere overhead. Hazy in the afternoon slump, everyone making minced conversation about setting the clocks back last weekend. Her watch still reads an hour ahead. 

I feel the earth move– she needs toothpaste.

I feel the sky tumbling down– and soap.

I feel my heart start to tremble– but there’s an empty promise left in her wallet.

Whenever you’re around– soon, she will have to stay.

I just got to have you– soon, she will have to pretend.

Baby– make-believing normal.

I just lose control– make a little more money.

I get hot and cold, all over, all over– before another leaving.

Tumbling down, tumbling down– before another fullness. 

“Excuse me.” A man, somewhere in her periphery, and the quick realization that she’s been standing in front of bars of soap, considering what it would feel like to slip one or two into the pocket of her coat, standing there for a bit too long. Shrug and shuffle to the side, a quiet sorry, keeping her eyes down, but in a quick flicker, she sees his face. Fang recognizes fang, always. 

He looks tired, like if not for whatever weight is pulling at his shoulders, he would be much bigger, much badder. Worn thin at the edges, wings darkening beneath his eyes, he spares her a single glance, disinterested, picking up two bars of soap, the kind that smells clean and young and kind. As he leans down, she sees the glint and flirt of gold dangling from his neck, a cross. But she knows, she thinks she knows. When you are rare like this, it isn’t difficult to know another myth when you see one. 

She watches the heels of his boots clip down the aisle toward the checkout, there and gone, and she does not follow. This is not something that should be followed. She knows, she knows. She tried once, with that girl. That girl who had different ideas about what their myth meant, their mouths, who decided that cruelty felt good, who decided to play the part of the monster with a terrible flair. No, this is something best done alone, and worst when it is shared. 

A single bar of soap sits heavy in her pocket while she pays for a tube of toothpaste, the man already gone, mercy. And the evening unfolds like it usually does during these times of motion. Still enough gas in her car that she can crawl a few miles down the interstate and find a quiet place to pull off for the night, somewhere green, somewhere with trees. Summer, the heat turning cool and sticky as it starts to darken, and a routine that is familiar to her by now. Windows cracked just enough to let a thin stream of fresh air in without threatening danger. And she folds the fact of her body in the backseat, tucking all her angles beneath a worn blanket that she keeps folded in the trunk during the day. Always memory before sleep, though her mind has made motheaten, misshapen murmuring out of the most of it. The fullness is always what remains. And that thick curl of shame. 

Here is how her mother made her. She broke skin and pulled out a rib of her own, made flesh of her flesh, tended to the wound until it was something else. There was no father, and there was certainly no god. At least that’s how her mother told it. You came from me, mine, this is mine, me and you and your mouth that must stay closed because I love you even though you are like this, awful, you are like this and I love you. But that love stretched thin, snapped, bleeding gums and broken teeth and never again. A goodbye that she is still saying, that she curls herself around in the backseat of her car in the summer when it’s warm enough for leaving. 

…

Maybe a foolish thing to spend what’s left of her money on. The waitress is very pretty though, a flush of red curls piled on her head, red lipstick too, crackling with her smile and bleeding into the lines around her mouth. Pours her a dark cup of coffee and leaves the steaming pot of it at her table. She pours three plastic thimbles of cream into it, two packets of sugar that she doesn’t stir in, lets it settle, biting down on the grit when she tips the last of her cup back into her mouth, and repeats. And the pretty waitress brings her two plates, so hot that they leave red welts on her forearms when she sets them down on her table, pinkened pain. Scrambled eggs, grease and sweat pooling beneath their lingering heat, bleeding over into two pieces of bacon, blistered crisp. A stack of pancakes, the sheen of butter seeping down, she pours enough syrup over them to pool thin and flooded on the plate. Collects a little of everything on her fork, the soft give of protein and matter, everything sagging in the sweet stick. Hand to mouth, but she stops, stuck, seeing him sitting alone at a booth across the diner. And he sees her too. A meal much like her own, enough to give someone a stomach ache. His eyes fall away from hers just as soon, and she watches him pass a knife through a piece of meat, flesh on his fork that he pockets into his cheek, jawing it down. She works her mouth around her own bite, teeth hurting with the snap down onto metal, the scrape of the fork. The food turns to sweet, soft mush, rolling around on her tongue, swallowed hard. 

He’s watching her again, working his jaw in a slow shift, and this time, his eyes don’t leave hers. She plucks a piece of bacon off her plate, pinched between thumb and forefinger, bites down again and sucks the salt from the dried flesh. He finishes a piece of toast in two bites, mouth screwing to the side, the dip and bob of his throat when he swallows, muscle moving muscle. Sweat is starting to prickle her scalp, the soft stretch of her stomach with her meal, warm and sick and sloshing. She doesn’t chew her eggs, swallows them, slipping down her throat with the rest of the salt and sate. His eyes fall to her hands, the smooth procession of fork and knife making mince out of her pancakes. She sucks the syrup out of each bite, works the sugar down first before swallowing the rest. His meal, almost completely gone, dragging a finger through a smear of ketchup he had been steeping his hashbrowns in, sucks the remnant red into his mouth. She can almost hear the hum that bobs in his throat, even through the murmurings of the diner. And he is very beautiful, beneath it all. The crooked strength of his nose, his brow, the drop of his lashes over the tops of his cheeks when he takes a pull of coffee. Unabashed, she stares, and he stares back, a darkened dare, watching the movements of each other’s mouths.

And just like that, she’s still chewing when he gets up to leave, not sparing another glance her way as he shoulders out the door. Her chin tilts, neck stretched to see him get into a blue pickup truck with a slam of the car door. He’s gone like a thin flame of lightning. She feels like she’s going to throw up. But she doesn’t, pays her check and stumbles out into the starkness of the morning. It’s a Saturday, and families are congregating for breakfast. She watches, slumped in the driver’s seat of her car, a sliver of a little girl and a little boy crossing her rearview mirror, holding onto hands attached to bodies that are cut off from view. She sighs, sits up straight and turns the key in the ignition. 

…

It’s a half-hour worth of driving later when she sees that blue pick-up truck again. Midwest, middle of nowhere, fields of ruin, and that truck, still and silent next to an abandoned barn made of rot. Middle of the day, the sun a flirting threat high in the middle of blue shock, but there are very few people out here, no one around to see her pull off the side of the road, get out of her car, and start swaying through the tall grass toward that truck and the barn. 

He is beautiful like this too. Slinking out from behind the barn, his eyes flickered low like he knew, he knew. His shirt is ruined, dark, damp. White t-shirt bled red, and the strange starkness of that gold cross glinting around his neck. He drags the back of his hand across his mouth and makes the mess worse, smears it up to the height of his cheeks, across his forearm. And his eyes, his eyes, swimming, darkness starting to drip down his face, starting to meld and mix with the rest. Beautiful, and so very sad. 

“There’s nothing for you here.” Low, the shivering thrum of it murmuring from somewhere between his ribs. Some kind of twang that sharps in her ears. She can’t find words of her own, still where she stands, beneath his hunkered gaze. When nothing comes, he sighs, shakes his head, walks right past her to his truck, keeping a wide breadth of distance between them as he does. 

“How did you know?” The question tries up her throat once, twice, before it finally jerks out into sound, stopping him before he opens the door to his truck, squinting at her over his shoulder. 

“It’s not hard to tell.” And in the space that follows, something is understood, confirmed. It’s starting to dry on his skin, in the scruff along his jaw, dark. The strangest hunger, the sharpest, an awful ache just looking at him. But he’s already leaving, not another word when he gets into his car, and the silence is a command in and of itself. I am and you are, and it will be a blessing if we never cross paths again. Again, gone, parting the sea of withering  grass with the slow trundling beast of his truck. 

She does not look, does not see for herself what lies behind the barn. She already knows. 

…

Like a child, her cheeks flamed with tears, scrubbing at the salt as soon as it falls. To put it simply, her car stopped, a few last wheezing rolls, and it will not start again. And there is no one to call, not out here, between states, between time itself. Eventually, the panic gives way to a dull surrender. She leans against the side of her car, tips her head back to let her face flush in the last slip of light, the sun fretting at the edge of the horizon. Memory is never far when she lets her eyes close. Something normal, driving down the street outside of house number five, her mother letting her, teaching her. She had laughed, giddy, running her palms along the wheel. Back then, flight had felt more like option, and less like routine. Those last few years, and the quick succession of escapes. 

She was out of control, her mother’s words, and she felt it too. Felt like a fine thread of hunger had been stitched through her spine and was pulling painful, the sharp tug toward destruction. And when the thread snapped, it was all she could do to find something to close her mouth around. Those last few years, they moved more than they ever had, every couple of months when she would inevitably mess up, making a mess of everything. Much easier now to always be leaving, because staying was never really an option. 

It’s heard before it’s seen, the crackling of gravel, of tires and brakes slowing down. She lets one eye slip open in a thin slit, squinting in the final slip of sun. That blue pick-up truck, sidling up behind her car along the shoulder of the road. He makes no move to get out, but he does roll his window down, and that’s enough for her to walk over to the side of his car, smalling beneath his steady eyes. He’s clean now, she thinks she can even smell the soap on him, that same soap that she stole a bar of and has been holding under her nose in the nights, something of comfort before she sleeps.

“You’re like me.” The words come from somewhere unnamed inside her, what might be called courage in someone else, and it seems to surprise him too, his brow jumping before furrowing back down. 

“I am.” 

“Where are you from?” A stupid question to ask someone like her. She doesn’t blame him for remaining silent, lips pressed in a thin line. So, she tries again.

“Where are you going?” 

“West.”

“Where west?”

“Just west.” Silence again, a single car hums by them. He clears his throat.

“Is your car broke down?” 

“I think it’s dead.”

“Is it worth fixing?”

“No, probably not. And I don’t have any money left.” 

“Do you want a ride?” Myths are made in the fine split of choice. She is walking into a new one. 

“Okay.” 

There is very little of herself to collect. A bag in the trunk of her car with a few spare clothes, her blanket, a bar of soap. The rest can be left behind. 

“I’m Joel.” All that he offers her when she slides into the passenger seat, a glance that falls on the curl of her hands in her lap. 

“I’m Maeve.” 

It has been a very long time since she has been a passenger in someone else’s car. Sixteen, maybe seventeen, leaving always looming, but she had been doing well for her mother. Well enough to get a date with a shy boy who sat behind her in seventh period math. He took her out in his car, fall and dark and dim and something light threatening in her chest, stealing glances at each other as he drove them out to that spot that everyone parked at. Lovers, lovers, lovers, young limbs tangling in the backseats of cars, damp windows and fog twirling up skirts in the wash of headlights. And they had parked, and shy boy had stuck his shy tongue in her mouth, and she had liked it, she had liked it. And of course, it went wrong, blood and body and blood and she ran home with salt stinging down her cheeks. She didn’t mean to hurt him. She never meant to hurt anyone. This isn’t a hurting thing, at least she didn’t want it to be. Her mother had slapped her, hard, sending her neck turning to one side before collecting her up in her arms and making it all better, making a leaving for both of them.

Now, with her temple pressed against the window of the passenger side door, silence save for the thin voices on the radio, she thinks of that boy, and how carefully he had cupped her cheek in his palm. She wanted to kiss him, she wanted to love him. But she didn’t know how to without biting down.

For as long as she can remember, alone has meant monstrous. Evidence of defect, deformity, the delineation between others, normal, the world, and her, somewhere on the periphery, always. But she wasn’t always alone, and for a while, that was enough to convince her that normal was possible, that, no, not a monster. She had her mother, not alone, not a monster. Clinging to not alone so hard, and in turn clinging to her  mother so hard, that often her fear, or love, or the product of the two, would get her hurt. 

She was hungry for touch as a child, and her mother was unwilling to give it to her in the amounts she wanted for. Her mother, her mother, locking her bedroom door from the inside so she couldn’t turn the handle and slip inside and ask for a palm on her back to calm her nightmares. She would curl up on the pilled carpet of whatever house they were in at the time, back pressed to the door like maybe she could feel her mother’s respiration through the wood, something to soothe down her spine, thumb tucked into her mouth. And in the mornings, bleary, jostled awake by the slow fall backward when her mother would inevitably open the door to her room. Lying on her back in the doorway, blinking up at her mother, grave and grim, who was always frowning, always sighing. Not again, not this again, not you, doing this again. Her mother would step right over her, the hem of her dressing robe brushing against her body as she did, and even that was a relief to her, touch of some kind.

And her mother did love her, in some way. Loved her the way one loves a monster. At arm’s length. That doesn’t mean much to monsters, though. They want, they hunger, just the same. She has wondered, from time to time, if it was the way her mother loved her that made her worse. To go hungry like that for so long, no great working of the imagination to consider how a body might solve that problem in another way. But no, she knows, this is something essential, something curled close inside her. This hunger has been there from the beginning. After all, the finger, the red nail polish, she was just a baby then. She likes to imagine how her mother loved her before that happened. There was a whole year of life before she became a monster. What is love like when people will actually look you in the eye, when every touch does not come tentative as if through the bars of a cage? Sometimes at night, she will wrap her arms around herself and trace her palm along the span of her back that she can reach. Something like that, she imagines, it would feel something like that. 

Something like what she is seeing now, sitting in the pew ahead of her. Husband and wife, and they are very old, the fine threads of age mottled on the back of husband’s hand, spread between his wife’s slight shoulder blades, her pale blue sweater, gold band glinting. His thumb moving back and forth, a smoothing thing, smoothing and steadying thing. The sermon, the prayers, the withering coughs of the staggered crowd all fall away. Small salvation in the steady rhythm of touch, it mesmerizes her. Things like these are always over before she’d like them to be, the husband’s hand falling away as he and his wife both rise from their seats, the sudden shuffle making her blink back into place and space. Plenty of people are getting up, sliding out of the pews to line up down the aisle. Joel, one of them, a gasp of cool air in the empty space he leaves beside her. 

She doesn't know what they are doing in a place like this. She doesn’t think, up until recently, that she had ever been in a place like this, if she’s being honest. Her mother wasn’t religious, and it always seemed to her like churches were somewhere good people went. So no, she had never been in a church before. Not until she started traveling with Joel. 

He tries to find one every Sunday if he can, in between towns and states and strips of road. Usually, he will manage to, he doesn’t seem to care what kind. Last week, Presbyterian, and the week before that, Baptist. This week, Catholic. They all seem the same to her. But then again, she doesn’t listen closely to the sermons, focuses instead on the movement, and making her own like theirs. Here is what she has learned, when you talk to God, look up, and look sad. What else she has learned, at the end, there is always an eating. Bread and wine placed on soft, trying tongues, and some kind of prayer draped over the entire thing. She watches Joel, every week, take communion until she doesn’t even have to watch. Keeps her eyes closed and pictures the drop of his jaw, the slow pull of his throat. She knows it, she knows it. What she doesn’t know is why. Not much room for a God like this one in their particular myth. Though Joel seems intent on it, and she is in no position to challenge this routine. A month traveling together, and still such strange silence between them. But on church days, he is always more likely to speak. 

There’s only a few other people who don’t get in line to receive communion, and all them, herself included, are met with the heavy sweep of eyes, soft shakes of heads that tells them no, should not be here, no, not for you. A childish thought that she keeps to herself, not for Joel either, no matter how he plays pretend at it, gold cross glinting like a rotten tooth rendered good at his neck. A thin flare of jealousy, maybe, that he can believe in good so easily. 

But maybe Joel is good, she thinks, in spite of what they both do. He certainly seems good walking down the aisle, polite words soft in his throat and a nod for her to follow on his heels and out to the parking lot. These people, church people, will never see them again, and that is a mercy. 

“Where are we?” 

“We’ll be in Kansas soon.” He always answers that question with the future rather than where they are in the present, always forward motion. All that he offers her, folding his worn map back up before he pulls the truck onto the road. 

Joel has some money saved from a past staying. And she told him that wherever he decided to stay next, she would stay too, paying him back for what he has already spent on her. He seemed neither moved nor impressed by her affirmation, eyes slipping down somewhere to the side, a sigh. At the very least, it’s a comfort to her, the promise of somewhere for her, for a little while.  

“Should we try to today?” 

“We don’t have to do it together. If you want to, today, that’s fine. I don’t mind.” The words feel stupid in her mouth, and the sharp look Joel gives her before his eyes return to the road tells her as much. 

“It’s safer if we do it together. Less of a mess.” It doesn’t feel that way to her. She knows what he means, but still. Not to her. Shameful to her, that someone else sees her like that. Shameful back when she had been traveling with that girl, that girl who would grin through it, teeth stained and tarred and making her sick up in her throat with shame, with cruel terror turned inside herself. But Joel isn’t like that. No, there is something different to how Joel tends to this. 

Now, alone means go, green light, good for taking. They watch for alone, parked in rest stops, gas station parking lots, all the in between places, places where the loneliest people tend to linger. They’ll spend whole afternoons in some various slump in or against his truck, squinting down in the sun at bodies moving around them, moving through. Today, they pull off at one of those long haul trucker stops, a gravel lot full of slumbering beasts of cars, cargo, men mincing around, stretching length back into their tired bodies. And they watch. And they wait. Teeth aching.

Joel distracts her, sometimes. Her watching him watching the world. It seems like he moves and something pressed beneath the thin crust of the ground moves too. Big man, silent as a fist man. But he is nice and gentle and kind. Small words for a big man. A kind of manners she has never seen before. She watches him now, the soft squint of his eyes under the sun’s cool heat, leaning against the side of his truck with his hands tucked into his pockets, ankles crossed. He looks so casual, but she knows that there’s a wire strung taut in his spine, quick flickers of want, of hunger. She feels it too. 

“Joel?”

“Hmm.”

“Can I ask you something?” He doesn’t say yes, but he doesn’t say no either, ducking his head down in a way that shows her he’s listening. 

“How many others have you met?” Like us, the implicit understanding of like us. Something strange passes across his face, quick pinch, smoothing itself out. 

“A few.” 

“How many is a few?”

“I don’t know.” 

“Well, how many do you think there are in the country?”

“I think that’s a useless question.” He doesn’t say it mean, more matter of fact than anything, though it still feels like a swift loss of breath in her lungs. She pinches her mouth shut, a flume of embarrassment warming beneath her skin. But Joel pays her no mind, his gaze has settled on someone. 

They’ve only done this together two other times, but it’s been enough to know there’s a particular way Joel goes about this. Always alone, always men, trying for the bad ones. And how they decide who is bad is, at best, a childish logic. Alone, for one thing, both of them understanding how that can translate into bad. The loud ones, the brassy, blundering ones, ones that bodies move like they know violence intimately. It is all a game of chance, though Joel seems so methodical. Regardless, it makes her feel messy, smeared and stupid for the way she used to go about this, which is to say, with little thought for anything save the ache in her gut. Yes, she had rules of her own. Never children. Rarely women. As alone as she could find them. It was in the mechanics of it that she always failed, and this failure curdled into something close to cruelty, something she had a hard time stomaching. 

But not Joel. Joel is painfully careful in how this is done. The first step is always the waiting, seeing if a body will stick around in this in-between place. And in that waiting their hunger grows teeth of its own, hunkering their shoulders, making them as small as the curl of their guts. And when a body stays in that in-between place, a trucker who seems to be resting for the night, wandering idly around the lot with a cigarette held loose like a prayer between his lips, that’s when Joel moves. This part is not difficult for Joel, because he is kind and gentle and nice. Quiet, he smalls himself, makes himself anyone that could be anyone else. 

And when he does it, he does it in the night, pale slants of the moon’s watchful gaze washing down on him. And when he does it, he does it with his hands. Not a word, not a whimper or whine, just a final puff of breath when he is done, something absent floating up in his eyes. In the close brush of trees a few yards away from the rest stop, there will be nothing left to find when they are done. Down to the ankles, and then some. 

She hates doing this with him, to have him see her in it, and in the after of it. The sate feels good, but the shame fans a perfect flame up her neck. And she cries, she always cries, and he refuses to look at her when she does. They stumble into the rest stop bathrooms and wipe away what they can from their skin. This is no clean thing. She will feel the stick of it on her for days afterward, she always does. But she will feel good too, full too, and it will only make the shame worse. 

“Why do you cry like that?” It startles her, stops another sniff from hiccuping up her throat. He doesn’t look at her, keeps his eyes focused out on the flare of their headlights eating away at the road, driving back into the night. It’s difficult to look at him, the pearling stains of it that he missed down the line of his throat, the darkening of the front of his shirt, pink-tinged skin, hard to scrub off. Not difficult in that she wants to look away, but difficult in knowing that she should want to look away, though she doesn’t. Beautiful, eyes blown into a sad melt from beneath his brow, his jaw working at some phantom feeling. No, she shouldn’t, but she does. 

“It feels like I should.”

“Well, you don’t have to.” A little sharp, still quiet, but enough to make her heart twist. The rest of their drive is silent, eventually, pulling into the vacant yawn of a motel parking lot. 

Joel goes into the motel office after hastily changing into a new shirt, her eyes slipping somewhere else, but not without a glimpse of bare skin. He’s better with people than she is, and she is still inconsolable, shaking in the passenger seat and trying not to look at her hands, the thin curl of red under her fingernails. She lets her gaze unfocus on the blinking neon sign, vacancy becoming less of a word and more of a throb in her skull. 

“Come on.” He opens her door for her, snapping her back into awareness, and he’s not mean about it, but he is exasperated, dragging his palm down his jaw, already rounding the car to pull their bags out of the bed of the truck. She wishes she could be like him about this, so matter of fact, so mundane. Where did he learn that from? Who taught him to be like that? Who loved him like that? He is far more free than she is, she thinks. She wishes he would show her how. 

This is part of the routine too. They stand, hip to hip, at the cracked sink in the bathroom of their room and they brush their teeth. Their work is meticulous, rounding every canine, making gums bleed with too much pressure. She flosses twice, then brushes again, spitting pink into the porcelain. Joel prefers mouthwash, swallows two stinging gulps of it, trying to kill something from the inside out. It makes her stomach hurt to watch the dip and bob of his throat. 

He lets her take a shower first, the faint sound of late night news filtering in through the cracked bathroom door. She scrapes at her skin with her fingernails, scrubbing down until it stings, until she’s certain that a layer has been sloughed off. She uses the soap that he uses. She smells like him. Clean and good when she looks in the bathroom mirror again. 

Cheaper to get one room with two beds, she never sleeps under the covers. If she thinks too hard about what other lives have breathed on this bed, what cellular remains cling to these sheets, she will make herself sick. So she curls close to one edge of the bed, letting the light from the television blur into meaningless shapes. Joel comes out of the bathroom clean as well, the soft ruff of his hair, the stretch of muscle in his back beneath the thinness of his t-shirt. She watches him sit down on the edge of his bed, elbows resting on his knees, the glinting dare of his cross hanging from his neck. 

“Can I ask you something else?” She regrets the words instantly with the sigh that slumps down through his shoulders. Not supposed to speak, not after. Though he still turns his face over his shoulder to look at her, eyebrows jumped in something like assent. 

“Why do you wear that?” Nod of her head that she hopes he understands, and he seems to, pinching the teardrop of gold between thumb and forefinger.

“Because I believe in it.”

“Why do you believe in it?” 

“I’d like to think there’s something that will forgive me when I say that I’m sorry.” And she can understand that, though she gave up on sorry a long time ago. Her mother used to be the one to receive her sorry. Her sorry, met with scorn, with a scoff, the whites of her mother’s eyes rolling with her sorry, the flat of her mother’s palm making contact with her sorry. Much easier, she thinks, to offer sorry to something that will never actually answer. You can believe anything you want that way. 

“I wish I wasn’t like this.” She’s never said that out loud, sighed out loud, her chin propped in her palm where she’s laying on her side. But it is the crux of all her wanting, and there is a sorry threaded through it. Wanting for something else, to be anything else other than this. 

“It’s not your fault, being like this.”

“I should be able to control it.”

“You can’t, Maeve, you can’t.” She knows that, nods her knowing to him before sitting up and curling her chest over her knees. There’s comfort, at least, in sharing this understanding, in finding control in other ways. 

“Why did you let me come with you?” 

“That’s another question.” His words curl with the smallest smile, a rare thing as he turns to fully look at her, something softening, something slipping. 

“Did you follow me, Joel?” She ruined it with that, she knows, his face falling into something darker, shadows dipping and bending around his eyes, something dark swimming in his lashes. But some part of her already knew. There are no coincidences in a myth like this, everything must be chosen. 

“I did, I’m sorry.” 

“Why did you follow me?”

“I was confused by you.” He speaks so quietly that she keeps her body perfectly still so she can collect what little sound there is, the low thrum of it, something cracking in his voice. 

“What do you mean?” 

“I knew you were like me, but I didn’t understand how that could be possible.” She knows that he doesn’t mean the possibility of others, he has met others before her. Her confusion must be evident on her face, because he offers her a weak smile, his hands in an anxious clasp in his lap, working a steady rhythm into his knuckles. 

“I didn’t think people like us could be good like you are.” These words, what finally shocks her, a surprised yelp of a laugh frightening up her throat, though he is serious, unwavering, and she finds herself becoming angry. How dare he tell her what she is. How dare he hope like that, amidst all this rot. The most they have spoken in their month together, and this is what he says? How dare he say good with so much certainty, and lay it at her feet like it is hers for the taking. A sick joke, more cruel than anything else. 

“I’m not good, Joel.” 

“You are, I see it.” She feels tears starting to ache behind her eyes again, and she is too tired for another flood. All she offers in response to him, a quiet I don’t think so, leaving no room for argument when she lays back down and turns out the lamp on her nightstand. With her eyes closed, she can hear his quiet sigh, the slow shuffle of his body laying down, the softening of his breath. 

She hates that she liked the way good sounded coming from his mouth. 

“Alright?”

“Yeah, I’m ready.”

“Are you getting that?”

“No, no.”

“It’s nice.”

“It’s not practical.”

“You can get it, if you want.” She considers it, letting the fabric fall between her fingers, a brief wanting that she lets dissolve with a shake of her head, the small pang of it settling in her stomach. There’s no point in getting something nice like this dress, light blue with buttons down the front. It’ll just get ruined anyways. No, instead she sticks to the sensible stack of t-shirts and jeans, some sort of dollar deal at the Salvation store on denim today. Joel takes the bundle of clothes from her, his palm cupping her elbow for a moment, and she thinks he might ask her again if she wants the dress. She’s grateful that he doesn’t, that he takes his hand away, because if not, she might have said yes, might have given into that want, and that would be something she simply could not do. 

They move strangely around each other. Days bleeding weeks bleeding months. Very little progress made in the push west, following a coiled snake of a path, zagging from state to state. Pieces of each other, collected slowly, carefully. Joel is from Texas, and, like her, Joel tried at normal for a very long time. He got further in normal than she ever did. Had a daughter, had a family. Held on long enough to see her into adulthood. He writes letters to her now, though Maeve tries not to watch him working. The shake of his hand, his shoulders, not for her to see. Sometimes the letters get sent, if they are in the right place at the right time to make that happen. Sometimes the letters are left behind in their wake, a prayer to something much larger. 

She tells him a clean version of her own myth, leaving out what she can, leaving out the mother when she can. She is learning the power of deciding for herself where she comes from. She is learning the power of looking someone in the eye, and of them looking back. 

Joel pays for their new clothes, and she sulks, lingering amongst the racks like a despondent ghost. In part, his money comes from the wallets of the people they find in the in-between. It had upset her when she discovered this, and while he had been apologetic, always quick to soften when she prickles, he was still firm about it. She couldn’t exactly argue with his logic, doing far worse things, after all, but she still tends toward steel when money leaves or enters his hands. It makes her nervous, and it makes her sad. Because she knows with no uncertainty that Joel is good, she knows that now. A shame, that all his goodness must get confused in what they must do.

“How much longer do you think?”

“Maybe twenty minutes, we’re close now.” Something that she knows he is doing for her, and only for her, which makes it lovely, and dangerous, and a little dizzying. It had been an idle, errant thing on a morning a few weeks ago, looking at the creased map over the dash of the truck and trying to make sense of what should come next. Arizona had seemed like a tenable answer, and a memory had floated up, something she had seen on the television as a child, something she couldn’t quite believe on a hazy afternoon, turned upside down on a couch they’d be leaving behind soon. A chasm in the earth, somewhere split open, somewhere to look inside of and see whether all wounded things bleed the same way. Sheepish, she had mentioned it to Joel between the cracks of her fingers held over her mouth, hiding the want that was curling at the corners of her lips. And he had said okay, as if it were as easy as that, as if want could ever be as easy as that, asking and receiving. A silly thought, she wondered if he wouldn’t say the same thing if she had pointed up to the moon instead. She thinks that he would. 

The truth, she likes Joel, in a way that makes her nervous. Likes the quiet hum in his throat while he drives, likes his palm between her shoulder blades, an absent-minded touch that she tries hard not to lean into, likes the steadiness of his breath in the middle of the night. Above all, she likes him looking at her, and she likes giving that back to him, looking right back at him with only kindness, a foreign mercy.

“Have you been before?”

“No, never even been in Arizona before.”

“Thank you, Joel, for doing this. I know it’s silly.” His hands flex along the wheel, a light jump in the tendons of his fingers, a glance her way in the passenger seat before his eyes settle back on the road.

“It’s not silly. We needed somewhere to go.” Always needing somewhere to go, the in-between of the in-betweens. But here in the cab of his truck, it seems like time might forgive them, might let them slip by. She’s worked up something that kicks like courage over the months, enough that now, she will often reach across to him and take one of his hands in both of hers. And he will let her. Always that first tensing, touch still tentative, though the lines of his palms will smooth out eventually, pressed close and tight with hers. She likes to hold the pads of her fingers over the soft inside of his wrist, let the beat there lull her into line with the murmuring engine. And he lets her. 

It’s a perfectly normal scene when they get there. Tourists, teeming, tired parents and kids tugging at pants, at hands, at each other. And Joel, clearing his throat a few times, a shake in his hand that she knows well as they walk out to the edge. She hooks her arms over the railing, leans over until her stomach starts to lurch, eyes dizzy from the vast swaths of red and orange grit, crags and peaks and dry brush all around, down into the canyon. 

Because she is so good at leaving, she can do it without even having to move muscle. A little leaving, she watches herself from somewhere suspended, and in her leaving eyes, she watches the small mechanics of her body climb over the rail and leap out into the sinking blankness. But a hand on her shoulder draws her back. She finds Joel looking at her with a cloudy focus, a soft frown that she watches pinch and pull into a thin line. He clears his throat again. 

“Is it what you imagined?” 

“It’s in color.”

“What?”

“When I saw it on the TV it was in black and white. This is better.” Relief, she thinks, something that smooths his brow and the wings of his shoulders. Maybe even a smile. She offers him one of her own, slight slippage when her gaze wanders over his shoulder. Hand in hand, a halo of golden hair like corn silk, a daughter at her mother’s hip, both of them walking away from the edge. Probably back to their car, probably back to their home, to dinner, to bedtime, to mother brushing her daughters corn silk hair with hands that could not even imagine violence. Saying I love you with mouths that could not even imagine violence. 

And Joel turns around to see what she is staring at, and she sees in the planes of his back the same tensing she feels, the same tensing that comes with knowing that something has been lost, and that it can never be retrieved, returned to. When he turns back around to her, steel has resettled in his jaw, but something is swimming hazy in his eyes. 

“We should go.” 

“Okay.” She takes one more look at the open wound, one more imagining of slipping into it, letting it swallow her whole. And then, well, they do what they always do. They leave. Somewhere inside of her, she is telling her mother that she finally got to see the Grand Canyon. 

…

She thinks she might be hurting Joel. Not directly, not intentionally. She’s been trying to wait out her hunger, staving it off, and he in turn has been doing the same. Testing and trying the boundaries of how long she can hold onto normal, and it hurts, and she can see that it hurts Joel too. Waiting like this, going without like this, strings him by a livewire of his want, makes him jumpy, slow to soothe, to sleep. She can hear him shifting around in the night in the close quiet of their motel rooms, restless, wanting. Sometimes, he will sigh, get up, moving quiet in the dark, the thin slice of sound when he opens the door and steps outside. He goes and sits in the truck. She knows, she has stepped into the corner of the motel room window and seen him with his temple propped in his palm, made small in the cab of the truck. This waiting is tiring. This waiting has teeth and claws and growls. This waiting, this hunger, is enough to make an animal stupid, shivering like static. 

And he has done this nice thing for her, taken her to see the black and white wound in color, and so, she decides that the waiting is done, for now. So they do the thing that they do. They find a place that is in-between, and they begin a different kind of waiting. 

“I want to see this time.”

“No, Maeve, it’s not something you should be seeing.”

“It’s nothing new to me, Joel.” She needs to see, she thinks, needs an accounting of every part of him. In the past, it has always been an unspoken routine. She would catch glimpses of it, of him, of his hands closing around something fragile,  but he wanted her to have nothing to do with it. It’s not like she hasn’t done it herself. The whites of the eyes, and the collapse of the lungs one final time, wretched things she understands.

“I’d rather you didn’t.” His voice borders on the edge of pain, the tendons in his neck playing a hurt tune, and for a moment, she thinks about backing down, letting this go. But she can’t. To do what she wants to do, she must know every part of him, this too. 

“Please.” And he’s not going to say no, she knows that. He has turned her into a terrible king in some ways with how little he says no to her. She grows greedy with it. A child growing up with so much no will hoard whatever yes they can find. 

He doesn’t say anything else, returns to his waiting in the gas station parking lot, with perhaps an edge less patience, shifting in his boots and squinting into the dry shock of the afternoon. She presses her lips together to keep any more from coming out, turns back to the strange landscape surrounding them, the desert, the resilient death of it. And as always, if you wait long enough, someone else will come staggering into the in between. 

It begins like it always begins. They wait until the bruising pall of night washes the cracked earth purple, all the other nighttime creatures starting to yip and titter, working themselves up into their usual routine. But this time, she is there when Joel approaches the man, there to watch something else slide into the place where he is kind and gentle and nice, there to watch him, with the calm strength of a storm, take the man out into the quiet judgment of the desert. 

She stands and she watches a scared animal whimper and wriggle in a merciless trap. Joel’s hands are around the man’s neck, hunched over the strange slump of his body, a thin frown on his face and the slightest pinch between his brows. She can’t look away, her eyes stinging, unblinking, wide and receiving this part of him. And Joel is looking right back at her with the same intensity, eyes lit up in a slash of moonlight. And the man refuses to die. Still struggling, clutching at air and hoping for a savior. And the errant realization that she is someone people need saving from, a quick flash of lightning in her mind. Her stomach starts to churn. 

“Please, please.” It isn’t the man that’s saying it, she realizes. It’s Joel. Quiet and broken murmurings, pleas, prayers, for this to be over. This time is different. Joel, usually so clean and quick and quiet, is struggling. And it isn’t because the man is big or battering, actually quite slight, actually still slumped, but wheezing lost breaths, heart still beating blood and body. Broken cries like an animal caught in a trap. She covers her ears with her hands, but the sounds echo, and the sounds  will echo for a long time. But she can’t look away, not even when thin beads of silver start to fall down Joel’s face, crying, and still pleading for the man to die. And when nothing else works, Joel does turn violent, a quick shock of it in the way he makes simple work of the man’s neck in his hands. She lets out a shriek that she cannot hold back, hot shame following close on its heels. 

Joel is pale, face flushed wan and weary. He swallows hard a few times as he straightens his spine, letting the body curl limp on the ground. Hot salt starts to skate down her face, both of them crying now, shivering with it. 

“I can’t, not this one.” His face crumples at her words, something close to agony that makes her stomach swoop and curdle. She has seen every part of him now. There will be no returning from this.

“Maeve, please, I–” 

“I’m going to wait in the truck.” Already turning her back to him and stumbling toward the faint, fluorescent pulse of the gas station in the distance. He does not stop her, and she is grateful for it. 

The worst part, she is still very hungry. Her shame growing wings that batter against her ribs, because beneath the horror and the guilt, there is still that hunger, made worse now by how close she came to sating it. Like a petulant child, frustrated, and on the brink of going full-tilt. She sits in the passenger seat of the truck and presses her forehead against the window, cool glass providing the smallest comfort. 

And when Joel eventually returns to the truck, he is not covered in it. She knows he is still hungry like her. She does not want to know what was done with the curled body, and he does not tell her. 

They are silent, small, slow moves. She keeps her temple pressed to the passenger-side window, shoulders shaking with the smallest sobs. And she isn’t sure if it’s the hunger, or the shame that is making her cry, and not knowing only makes her cry harder. 

She doesn’t know how long they drive for, but eventually there is a motel, and eventually she is standing in the bathroom of a motel room, and he is standing next to her, and they are moving like they had not failed. She brushes her teeth twice, until it hurts, and like always, he lets her have the shower first. She wants it to burn, and so it burns, coming out from under the water with skin welted and washed thin. And when they pass each other in the doorway to the bathroom, their eyes still don’t quite meet, nothing is said. 

Something strange is settling inside her. She doesn’t lay down, runs her palm across the static fuzz of the television, over the pixel-pocked face of the person delivering the evening news. And when that isn’t enough, she presses her cheek to the low-humming screen, curls her arms around the back of the television, and holds herself there. And for a moment, it’s as easy and as simple as how good that warmth feels, the mumbling drone of sound in her ear. She pulls herself away from it when she hears the water shut off, and there is a moment of reckoning, recognizing, when he comes to stand in the doorway to the bathroom. Hair dark and dripping darker onto his t-shirt. He looks at her, and she looks back, her hands fisted in the fabric of her sweatshirt. He looks small, he looks sad, he looks like he’s about to ask her for something. She would give him anything he could ask for, she would try, the realization as clear and clean as the blade of a knife. 

“I’m sorry, Maeve.”

“You don’t have to be.”

“I couldn’t. Not with you there like that.” 

“It’s okay.”

“I wanted to keep good for you.”

“You are good, Joel.”

“Please, don’t.” A monster, broken, a monster, bending, a monster, brought to the ground. A monster in tears. Something seems to split inside him, the fragile threads of his strength flailing and failing. And she surprises herself when she goes to him before the first shaking crack of a sob can rack his chest, curls arm around shoulders like she knows what to do. He’s saying something that sounds like sorry and she’s saying something that sounds like forgiveness, managing enough movement to get them to the edge of one of the beds, to sit down still holding him. 

That cross hangs from his neck like a wretched joke, the small shiver of it. He cries, big man, big strong man. And she holds him, lets him shake with sorry and promises him that he doesn’t have to, that he is okay, that he is good, and in turn, it feels good to give these things to him. 

Eventually, the shake starts to smooth, and when she takes his face in both her hands, he leans into it, eyes heavy and worn weary, but something bright still when he looks at her. 

The thing is, Maeve knows very little about what care looks like. Most of what she learned came from the same black and white fuzz of a television. Beautiful women and beautiful men and their beautiful lives. In the movies, care is a delicate hand at the cheek. In the movies, care is a complete embrace, arms in arms and faces tucked into necks. In the movies, care is having someone to come home to, someone to love. When her hunger was at its worst as a child, she would sit as close to the television as she could get, unblinking, should she miss the moment that the beautiful woman and the beautiful man would kiss. 

And when she got older, she learned a little more about what care is, and more importantly, what it isn’t. There were boys whose violence shocked her, and in turn were shocked by her own violence. There were men that made her feel foolish for expecting care, and there were others who were just plainly mean. One comes to mind, a man whom she got on her knees for. Strange, how women are made gods on their knees, fleeting, foolish gods. And she felt wanted, looking up at him and him looking down at her. And she was wanting too, the thick curl of it in her stomach that was different from any other want. But that had changed very quickly. She didn’t like the way his hand gripped the back of her skull and she didn’t like the crude words he dribbled over her and she didn’t like that it didn’t feel like care, knew that it wasn’t care, it was a cage, and it was too much, and it was all she could think to do because she was afraid, she was afraid, and wanting, and afraid of her wanting, and she was young. So she let a different kind of wanting, different kind of hunger take over. And instead of a god on her knees she became a monster all over again.  

She has not tried for care since then, not for a very long time. But she thinks that she would like to now, with Joel. And so she does, tentative at first, the soft presence of her mouth at his temple, the round of his cheek, the drop of his lashes brushing against her skin, something shy about it. She lays another at the corner of his mouth, and it is an asking, it is a choice, it is a new myth made possible, one in which they can both be good, one that is constructed out of care. An answer in the tilt of his head, in the aligning of mouths, in his palm spanning her jaw, holding her now, holding her still in a kiss that teaches her a new kind of hunger. 

They move like they have both been wanting for a very long time, and they have, after all. The act of give and take, and she wants to take so much, give so much, perfect, pooling pangs of want when she lets his tongue into her mouth, a sharp sigh in her nose. Both turn pliant for the other, his hands at her hips, coaxing and curling her into his lap, and her hands in his hair, tilting his head back how she would like it so she can taste the sharp of his jaw and the soft hollow of his neck. For a moment she pauses, mouth pressed to the jump of his pulse, and she breathes because he smells like him, like that soap he buys wherever they go, like something else human and pleasant and real. And he lets her, runs his palms up the track of her spine, a soothing, steadying thing, only stilling when she lifts her face from the crook of his neck. Breath and beat stop briefly when she looks at him, the dark awe rounding his eyes, cheeks flushed down devastating and lips parted. She has never been looked at like this before. She likes being looked at like this. 

“I think that you’re beautiful, Joel.” It makes him shy, and awful, it makes her smile. She keeps him from dropping his gaze in denial with her hand at his jaw, holding him there and pressing a small thing of a kiss to his lips. And what unfolds afterward happens slowly, something on the verge of timid in how they move, like at any moment, flight, fleeting and fled and gone. But that does not happen, but they both stay, and they both grow more confident every time touch is answered with more touch until they are both bare, and they are curled around each other on the bed, the closest to holy she thinks she could ever get in the sense and sate of skin pressed to skin, a warmth that is so new it stings salt behind her eyes in overwhelm.  His brow pinches at the sight of her first tears, showing her how gentle he can be for her with the fragile presence of his thumb gathering the salt before it can fall. 

“I’ve never met someone good like you.” Awful, she believes him when he tells her this, hope unfurling in her chest and flushing up under her skin, a terrible heat that flickers and flumes when he begins to shift down her body, moving muscle how he would like it to move until she is splayed for him, her knees falling to the sides to allow the breadth of his shoulders to settle between them. He rests his open mouth over the soft inside of her thigh, his eyes flaring up to hers beneath the dark fan of his lashes. And this is care, she thinks, soft jaw and soft teeth where they could turn so violent. Soft only for her. He holds her in the soft bleed of his mouth, dragging heat to her cunt. He takes from her, eats at her pleasure, pulling muscle and bone into a taut line of want, her whole body strung in a snarl as he takes and takes and takes, his mouth, and his fingers, and yes, she thinks, anything else she could ask him for. He would give it to her. Gives and gives and gives until it’s his name in the back of her throat, something that borders on pain with the way he continues to mouth at her through it. She tugs at his hair, begging mercy that he finally allows, up and up and up until she’s tasting herself on his mouth and the solid weight of him is smoothing the kick of her pulse, her chest. 

The roll film starts to melt and pop at that point. Not like the movies, some myth of their own, making myth out of their want. She opens for him, a high, animal keening in her chest when his hips settle against hers. And it is not grace, it is not beautiful or merciful. It’s want distilled, and it makes them move ugly, animal, accepting and open to each other, a little bit frantic, frenetic and fizzing. Skin slicks with salt, turning everything hazy, everything close and cloistering and she likes it, the feeling of overwhelm, blatant and battering and him, all she can think about is him saying her name, saying his want and calling his want by her name. And in the aftermath, they barely move, remain pressed close like stained glass starting to melt into syrup. 

He holds her in a way she didn’t think she’d ever be able to ask for, tucked close to the steadiness of his heart, a sound that soothes and reassures her that yes, this is real, yes, this is shared. 

“This is a good thing.”

“Yeah, it is.”

Want is whispered on broken exhales, and accepted into willing mouths. Monsters that are no longer monsters in each other’s company. 

Some things make the hunger easier to stomach. This is one of those things. This is care. She is learning how to receive it, and she is learning how to give it. She is learning that she might like giving it more than she could’ve ever imagined. She didn’t know how to for such a long time, after all, that it is something entirely new, something that feels good. 

And in that care there has been a staying. Small, but still, she can’t remember the last time she spent a week, let alone two,  in a single place. They get a motel room with a kitchenette, and she knows that money is starting to become more of a question than an expectation, because neither of them are doing the thing that makes them monsters. Playing chicken with each other’s hunger, but filling in the ache with other things.

Joel buys her that dress, light blue with buttons down the front, watches her put it on for the first time in the peeling mirror next to the bed, sheepish and smiling, rubbing his palms down his thighs. She flushes, and any hunger is smothered beneath a fine flume of want, and of something else. Something like power, being seen like this, and seeing him like this, his eyes heavy and lingering. And how easy want like this becomes, him reaching out and her responding with two steps into his arms. He drops to his knees before her, sweet in his supplication, bunches the fabric up at her hips, and gives a little more to her from the soft hinge of his mouth. A fine fissure splits and snarls in the mirror that day from the way her skull makes contact with it, perfect arc of pleasure and she doesn’t even mind the pain. 

They go to the grocery store that’s ten minutes away and pretend at normal. They buy white bread that’s so soft, she watches the easy give of it with the press of her thumb, how it reforms itself around the indent through the crinkling plastic. Tomatoes, and mayonnaise, and salt, and they sit in the back of his truck, and she watches him slice into the perfect, red skin, juice dribbling from the clean break. The end of summer, sun flirting and flaring on their curled backs in the motel parking lot. He makes them sandwiches, and she sighs at the taste, golden and the grit of salt, and the soft stick of bread to the roof of her mouth. A hum in her throat when the sense of it all slips down. She watches his jaw work. 

How nice, to let days go by in something close to stillness. She learns his body, lays him out on the coarse sheets and puts her mouth wherever she would like to. Because she gets to have him, however she would like to have him. And so she does. Lips to the center of his chest where she can feel the kick of his heart, to the soft catch of his stomach where he holds his breath, watching her beneath the shy fan of his lashes, light and shadow flickering with the trying twirl of the fan. And she’s so soft for him, only for him, soft jaw and teeth and tongue, taking him into her mouth and humming at the salt and sense of it. That gold cross glints above her with the rise and fall of his chest. And she could, and he could. As easy as exhaling, as easy as the hinge of the jaw. Though they don’t, though they don’t. They sate each other in different ways. 

He coaxes her up and up and up, squeezing at the soft of her hips, a preening laugh getting stuck in her chest when he pulls her down onto the open heat of his mouth. Sweat beads and bends in all the soft places in the close swelter of the afternoon and she exults in it, watches her hips move in the sliver of mirror caught in the corner of her eye. His hands splayed against her ass, making flesh give, animal mouthings that make her shiver. She feels beautiful. Looks back at the woman in the mirror and the woman looks back at her and she feels beautiful. 

And when they settle down around each other, when his hips press close to hers and she’s looking at him and he’s looking at her, she can begin to believe that they aren’t monsters at all. Monsters couldn’t love like this, at least she doesn’t think so. 

“Can I have one of those?”

“Mmm.” This is the way most afternoons go. Bare, they don’t leave bed again, making a game out of reaching whatever they could possibly need. She stretches one leg out, toeing at a carton of cigarettes strewn on the floor until it’s within arm’s reach, Joel’s hand held steady on her hip to keep her from slipping. Smoking, she has found, is an excellent way to press the hunger down and away, tendriled tempering. She curls back into his side, plucks the lighter from where it was tucked in the carton and settles a cigarette between his lips. The pull he takes once it’s lit jumps and jags the tendons of his throat. She lays her mouth there, feels the thrum it drags from him, and like divine machinery, it makes a smile start to curl and round her cheeks. 

He offers her a drag, and she takes one that is a little too much, makes her eyes water while he rubs his palm up and down the bare breadth of her back, soothing, all easy, easy, Maeve. Sheepish, she tucks her face down along the line of his clavicle, a small sound of protest in the back of her throat before she can stop it when his palm stills, though he’s quick to pick up the smooth circuit. She flushes, because he has made her greedy with all this touch, all this give and take, ask and receive. A different kind of monstrous, what he has made her with want made real. 

“Maeve?” She already knows that tilt to his words because he has tried this a few times now, that little edge of pain that comes with hunger. She sighs, but she does lift her head so she can look at him, the slight pull of his frown, waiting for the question that’s coming. 

“Will you eat?”

“I don’t need to.”

“Maeve.”

“I don’t, Joel.”

“I know you do.” And the unsaid of it, because I do too, because I am in pain too, because we are the same, and we must not forget that. Yes, she can set the hunger down, but there is always the picking it up, always the remembering. It turns her quiet, turns her stomach too, making her sit up, Joel’s hand falling from her spine. He sits up with her, ducking his head to catch the slant of her gaze, eyes rounding and wet. 

“Baby, all you gotta do is eat. I’ll take care of the rest.” She sighs, letting her cheek fall into the cup of his palm, fighting a question that is threatening in her throat, and that has been for a while now. She wants to know how long, just how. He held onto normal for a very long time, and if he could, maybe she could as well. Maybe this could be enough, her cheek in his palm. But, at least for now, she will not ask that, will not try that, because she can see that she is hurting him again, dark wings beneath his eyes, jolting with unanswered want. She knows that hurt, and was fine with hurting herself for a very long time, so long as it meant a gentle hand from her mother, a promise of staying. But this is different, because even when she isn’t hurting, even when she isn’t hungry, Joel doesn’t look away from her, doesn’t leave, doesn’t punish or preach. Relief, she thinks, is all he feels when she’s full. And that’s a kind of care that is new to her as well. 

She lays her hand over his, turns her face into his palm to the fated lines there. 

“Okay, we’ll eat.” 

Eating means leaving, and they both know that, but just the promise that this hurting will soon be over is enough to ward off any worry with skittering fingers. They slink out of bed, get dressed in the wavering light of the single lamp in their room. By now, night, dark and close when they step outside, that late summer cooling that comes when the sun slips down beyond the horizon. 

They haven’t, not since she refused to, not since Joel wept. And she feels a fine thread of worry tugging in her stomach, trying not to look at him too hard as they drive through the night toward some in-between place. But there is nothing to worry about, because Joel takes care of it. And so they are full again, and so they aren’t hurting any more, stumbling through the desert brush beneath the merciful glow of the moon, dark, dark, dark. 

It is amazing how little time something so monstrous takes when it is done so carefully like this. In the passenger seat, she presses her palm over her mouth, feeling the dried stick there. And in turn she reaches over to him, lays her hand over his mouth in the same place, feels the same tack there. Like her, like her, like her. He kisses the cup of her palm without ever taking his eyes off the road, the jump of muscle in his forearms, in his knuckles curled around the steering wheel. 

They are quiet when they get back to the motel, curling around themselves to conceal the truth of the stain, of the darkening damp smeared down their fronts. And this routine starts the same. At the sink, the toothpaste and the floss and the mouthwash. But there is no separation when the steam of the shower starts to seep. They both strip down and step in together. Before he can, she is already pressing her palms against his chest, holding him in the stream of the shower. She cleans what remains from his skin, water pinkening in the drain. And when she’s satisfied with that, she takes his skull in her hands and tips his head back so she can thread her fingers through his hair. He hums, eyes slipping shut in pleasure made pure. And she is so gentle for him that even now, so dizzyingly full, she has a hard time convincing herself of her own monstrosity. 

He surprises her when he takes over, beginning his ministrations with his hand holding her chin, fingers tucked at the hinge of her jaw to hold her steady, hold her mouth open so he can run the pad of his thumb over her teeth, pressing at the sharp of her canines, something dark laying heavy over his eyes. She tries for a grin, though it is only a crook of the corners of her lips with the way he is holding her face. And when she bites, just a little, holding his thumb in the merciful pressure of her teeth, he laughs, a quiet murmuring sound as he watches her from beneath his lashes. 

“Be good, please.” And she is good for him. Good means not biting down. Love means not biting down, at least not too hard. Instead, taking his thumb into her mouth and curling her tongue around it. She sucks, and he groans, and it sends a new want stuttering up her spine. Close to frightening to want and be wanted so regularly like this. The cool tile is holy against her spine, shivering down a perfect prayer. He holds her there, and she lets him, and they do something about the hunger that remains. 

When the water runs cold and clean, they get out, continue a routine that looks normal, settle down around each other in bed. Joel puts on the evening news and she keeps her ear pressed over his heart, lets the flooding beat of it drown at that slick slither of shame, still there, always there. But then, but then.

There is a woman on the news. A woman who is crying. A woman who is surrounded by the small flicker of candles held in hands, held in vigil. And the woman is crying because her husband never came home. Three weeks ago, and her husband didn’t come home, and her husband isn’t, wasn’t, the type of man who would just leave because they had children. They had children, and their father never came home. And Maeve sits up because when they show a photo of the husband, the father, she recognizes him. That night when she refused and Joel wept. She recognizes him, and her stomach starts to curdle. And Joel recognizes him too, sits up too, a careful, quiet call of her name, low, so as to not scare her into flight. But she is already shaking her head no, no, no, no, shirking and shrinking away from his touch, curling up on the end of the bed, all her angles tucked up close as panic turns into sickening white noise in her mind. 

They had been careful, hadn’t they? Always careful, always the in-between, always people that couldn’t possibly have someone waiting at home for them. After all, it isn’t hard for like to recognize like. And they were careful, and they were kind, and they always tried very hard to be gentle when they had to do what they always have to do. Not enough though, none of it, enough, and it was never going to be. 

Joel turns off the television, his movement fragmented in the melt of her tears, catching stained-glass glimpses of him kneeling in front of her, pleading, or praying, or something in between the two. Please, baby, please will you look at me? It’s not your fault, it’s mine, it’s mine, it’s mine. You’re good, you’re so good, please, I’m sorry, please. And it’s please over and over again, and she’s shaking her head no over and over again, trying to wrench away from his hands holding her face steady. 

In the perfect cradle of a pain like this, there is a regression, something childlike in the logic of making it better. Something young in the way he unclasps his cross from around his neck and tries to give it to her, tries to lay it against her sternum. And something young in her too, throwing a perfect fit when he tries to make this right the only way he knows how. She shows him her snarl, thrashes and tears the chain away from her skin, throws it across the room. Terrible, she regrets it immediately, regrets the way his face falls, the way he sinks back into himself. She has hurt him, and this time, on purpose. 

He gets up with a sigh that sounds very tired, doesn’t say another word as he crosses toward the bathroom. She can’t look at his face right now because it will make her cry even harder, so instead she lets her vision blur and unfocus around his form, a silhouette with his forehead resting against the bathroom door frame. 

“I’m sorry, Maeve.” All that he offers, slipping away, slipping out of sight and into the bathroom, and that young part of her panics. No, needs him to be where she can see him, where he can see her, needs to fix this. She gets down on her hands and knees in a blind stutter, runs her fingers along the grimey baseboard trying to find where she threw that wretched chain. And it’s no use because when she does find it she sees that the clasp is broken clean off, golden bones in pieces, glinting in the faded carpet. She picks up what she can find of it, feeling small, shivering small when she pads into the bathroom. 

He’s sitting on the edge of the bathtub, big man made small just like her, curled over himself with his head in his hands. And now would be a good time for her to leave, she thinks. Leave the cracked pieces of his faith on the counter and start walking in any direction away from here. She is familiar with this kind of leaving. All those years ago, and her mother in a similar posture of prostration, of surrender to this thing that she could not fix for her daughter. Her mother, asking her to leave. And Maeve, finally given an opportunity to succeed in what her mother asked of her. Yes, she is very good at leaving when people get tired of her, or frightened of her, or tired of being frightened of her. She has done it many times now. 

“I’m sorry, Joel.” And the rest is said too, in a sodden slur when she holds out her cupped palms to him and shows him the broken pieces, something about her fixing it, with money that doesn’t exist, and in a place she doesn’t know, and with hands that seem to only be good for greed. But he accepts her sorry, curls his palms around hers to close her fingers over the wreckage, a prayer that she is relieved to partake in. 

They are ruinous. But they are in love. 

A strange, slow slump over the lip of the tub, and he pulls her with him. The porcelain, or whatever it is, is still pearled damp from their shower earlier and the bare skin of her shins sticks and slips as she settles in his lap. She holds his face in her hands, thumbs stroking at the soft skin beneath his eyes. And he’s beautiful, and she’s already forgiven him, and she never wants to hear him say sorry again because she would continue to forgive him for any and all of it. She wants a world for them in which they never have to say sorry.

“Joel?” He is listening, though he doesn’t say anything, and she allows something like hope to lurch hot and hazed in her chest.

“Do you think we could be normal together?”

Silence, for a long time. The sink faucet drips.

“We could try.”

Two years pass. 

It is the longest she has ever managed normal.

The truth is there was money, because her mother did love her in her own strange way. She had never touched it before though, there never seemed a good enough reason for it. But this seemed good, like the best possible reason, really.

They get an apartment in a town in New Mexico with a name that doesn’t mean anything to either of them. Something they could both agree on, the hard bake of the sun and the dry air. 

They both get jobs in the first months. She works at a grocery store, smiles bright at the mothers that bring their daughters along on their weekly errands. He works with his hands, and comes home in the slow slump of the afternoon smelling like cedar and salt. She licks it off his skin and runs her fingers through his damp, darkened hair most nights. 

Those first few months, there is a mattress, and not much else. It is enough. They put it in the middle of the apartment. They eat and they sleep and they talk and they laugh and they fuck and they watch the sun rise and fall in the harsh way it does from that mattress. They are very happy. 

And then they get some more furniture, and then they start saying hello to their neighbors when they pass them in the hall, and their neighbors start saying hello back. Normal slips into the corners of their lives like the most gracious guest. 

At the end of that first year, when it seems like normal is going to stick, Joel sends a letter to his daughter with a phone number scribbled in hope at the bottom of the page. He waits by the phone the whole week after it’s sent like an anxious ghost, makes himself sick with waiting. And when she does call, Maeve catches glimpses of him from the end of the hall, a smile, and quiet wonder in his voice. He’s not interested in going to church any more because now his daughter calls every Sunday. He sits down on the floor with his chin tilted to the side to accommodate the stretch of the coiled phone cord and he talks all morning with her. 

In the second year, Maeve finds that she likes to paint. There’s an art supply store in town, so she quits her job at the grocery store and goes to work there, gets enough of an employee discount that she can buy paints and brushes and canvases and an easel over the span of a few months. She likes the desert, likes its colors and its quiet assertion of life, so that is what she often paints. And Joel likes to watch her in the evenings, she sets up her work in front of the crooked palm of windows in the living room, an errant hum in the back of her throat to whatever song is playing on the radio. Eventually, every night, when she is doing more swaying than painting and her eyes are starting to squint shut, he gets up off the couch and pads over to sway with her, her head falling back to rest against his shoulder as he coaxes her tired body into his arms. And from the faint glow of the windows stacked and ordered alongside a few dozen other glowing windows of the apartment complex, it looks like love, because it is. 

She finds that she likes routine, likes being bored and boring. She likes that the things she worries about now are small things, like what they're going to have for dinner, or whether they’ll go to the weekly tenant meeting on Thursday nights. She likes waking up in the same bed every morning, and she likes that he sleeps on his stomach when he’s actually comfortable in a space, splayed and cheek rumpled on his pillow, an arm always extended toward her, draped over her. She likes the weight, the reassurance of it. And in the mornings he is slow to wake, all soft murmurings and soft eyes, still shut even when she presses her lips to his temple, though a smile will usually start to curl smug when she does. Good morning, good morning. It is good, all of it, so good that it makes the dormant hunger hurt a little bit less.

They eat breakfast together, leaning against the kitchen counter. Eggs and their golden tears splitting and spilling on their plates, strong coffee that he takes black and she takes with cream. Their mouths work hard around normal. She packs lunches for them both, late summer again, tomatoes again, sandwiches again, the way that he made them. And on her break at work she does her best to get it down, pinching the crust off first before eating the rest. But no, that other hunger doesn’t go away. It makes sounds a little sharper, and lights achingly brighter, it makes the steady beat of the sun fierce. But she thinks she can manage it, because she wants all this normal so much more, hunger for hunger, and want for want, a careful game of tipping the scales. 

Joel’s birthday is in a few weeks. She’s been working on a painting for him, difficult to keep it a secret with the way he is always over or under her shoulder, a hum in his throat because that’s beautiful, baby, you work so beautiful. But somehow she’s managed to keep it hidden. And today she picks up two fresh tubes of paint, pigments that she needs to finish her work. She’s painting a sunset for him, a landscape that they both know, a wound in the earth, that canyon that they visited once. She hopes he’ll like it. She thinks he will. 

She always gets home later than he does these days because he got a promotion, baby, big man, good man who got a promotion, baby, who’s a boss now, baby, working with his hands, baby, good, honest work, baby. He's already showered, hair damp and dripping dark down the back of his t-shirt, the small slide of muscle as he stands over the stove and stirs something that smells good. That same hum in his throat when she twines her arms around his stomach and presses her face into the back of his neck, deep inhale because he smells like that good, clean soap he always uses. 

And it’s all the quiet, normal things, greetings, and how was your day, and it was good, baby, how was yours, and mmhmm, good, this looks good, you look good, good, good. He turns in her arms and smacks a kiss to her mouth that makes her laugh, makes her hungry. 

“I got some new paints.”

“Oh yeah?” Somehow, squirreling around each other, he tucks her into his side, arm easy and slung around her shoulders while he continues to stir pasta and sauce in simmering pots, steam and savor washing over their faces and turning skin tacky and flushed. 

“Mmhmm.”

“Gonna paint something beautiful, baby?” Baby, baby, baby, his cheeks round with the word every time. She especially likes it, usually late at night, or early in the morning, when he slurs and stumbles over Maevey baby, Maevey, Maevey, Maevey. Heavy and sweet like thick syrup in his throat and it nearly brings her to tears it’s so nice coming from his mouth. 

“I’m gonna try.” 

“Always beautiful, always make things so beautiful.” It’s almost absent-minded the way he says it, intent on getting food on plates with only one free hand, but it still makes her stomach swoop and buoy something awful. 

They eat dinner, and they sit on the couch, and he watches her work on a different painting until the sun slips under and washes everything down dark. And they get ready for bed, moving around each other in a routine they don’t even have to think about, settle down around each other and turn out the lights, quiet whisperings of love, touch that expects more of itself for a very long time, easy, patient, soft. When she feels and hears his breath slip into that slow resonance of sleep, she moves as quietly as she can in getting out of bed. She’s been hiding his painting in the hall closet where they keep their winter coats tucked. They have winter coats now. 

She works in the quiet clutch of the night, eyes squinting in the dim light she allows for herself, working partly from memory, and partly from  mythology of a place in their shared past. The painting will be finished soon. She thinks she’ll have to give it to him early if that’s the case, giddy with the idea of finally sharing it with him. 

When she’s satisfied with her progress, still night, still close and dark and quiet, she tucks the painting back into the closet, careful not to let anything brush against it while it dries. And when she returns to bed, Joel is still asleep, on his stomach now with his arm outstretched toward her side of the bed. Nothing is easy like it is to slip back under with him. 

She’s going to finish the painting tonight. The thought makes her rush a bit in closing the store. It takes her three tries to finally get the key to click into the lock. If she does finish it, she thinks she might have to wake him up right then and there to show it to him. And she floats home on the prospect of that, smiling, easy greetings to the people she passes on her way up to the apartment. 

“Joel?” A fine whisper of worry when she doesn’t find him in the kitchen making dinner. He must have had a longer day at work, she figures, just now getting home and getting cleaned up because she can see the light slipping down the hall from the bathroom. 

And the rest happens in a strange, slow unraveling. 

Later, much later, he will tell her that she screamed when she opened the bathroom door. She will not remember that. What she will remember, the awful resignation, that understanding like a small death, that she was never going to be able to walk out of her own myth. And the blood on clean, white tile that had never seen blood before. And blood on him, on his hands and on his face and down his shirt and all over and all over and all over. 

Later, much later, he will tell her that he thought he was going to die when she told him not to touch her, when she skittered back so hard she tripped and fell in the hallway when he reached for her. What she will never tell him, she sometimes wishes she died then and there.

From the glimpse she caught, there is very little left of what he has done, only remnant viscera in the bathtub. But she doesn’t see any more than that, because she is on the ground and she is pressing her back up close against the wall as far from him as she can get and she is sobbing and yes, she is screaming. Ruinous, wretched ribbons of sound ripping through her chest. It is a mourning sound. And he drops down to his knees, reaches in the space between them, but thinks better of it with the way she shrinks away from him. Pink streaks of tears down his face, he pulls at his hair in something that looks like agony. He cries with her, and he prays to her. Like a chant, like an invocation, like one last plea for salvation, I’m sorry, I’m so tired, I’m sorry, I was so tired, I’m sorry, I couldn’t, I’m sorry, I love you, please, I’m sorry, please. And she cries harder at the broken sound of his wails, fingernails clawing at her chest like she might be able to plunge through skin and muscle and find the sick, stuttered beat of her heart that is in such perfect pain. The horrible truth is she had already forgiven him the moment she opened the bathroom door. The horrible truth, they are in this myth together. 

Eventually, when there is little left for her to mourn, the cries stop, everything swollen and slumped and sodden. She doesn’t wince or recoil when he reaches for her now, crawling to her on his knees, wrapping his arms around her waist and pressing the crown of his head into her stomach, still shivering in his sobs. And because she has already forgiven him, it is hardly difficult for her palms to find the shake in his spine. She doesn’t even have to think about it, holding him a little tighter when his hands grasp at the fabric of her shirt. 

Still, pain. Later, much later, she does not let herself think of that day too often. Of the painting that was never finished. That was left in the hall closet to dry with a sunset that wasn’t yet complete. Because if she does think of it for too long, that pain will tear open inside her all over again, and it will turn her hateful, and she doesn’t want that, not for him, not when he tries to show her how sorry he is every day. Sorry that normal ended like that. Sorry that there was always going to be another leaving. 

They leave, together, the next morning, silent as a grave. And in all the years of wandering that follow, they never return to New Mexico, a space sealed off like a tomb of the past, of a promise that could never have been kept. 

…

“Are you cold?” 

“A little, but it feels nice.” Still, he doesn’t think twice about offering his shirt to her from where it had stayed dry and folded at the edge of the lake, warmed by the sun and clinging to the pearling damp on her skin. It’s summer again, and they are in some in-between like they always are, and he is trying to find what joy he can for her like he always is. And it is a good day, one of their better ones, so she tries for what she can of a smile from behind the tuck of her knees up against her chest, squinting in the bright halo around him. He smiles too, a shy, small thing that looks like relief, and when he curls his arm around her shoulders, she lets him, tucks  into his side, and they sit at the edge of a lake in the in-between, soft grass and mud and the mild kippering of insects all around them, baking in the sun. When he holds her like this, when normal starts to creep in, so do the tears, but she tamps them down with a hum in her throat, some song that he sighs at, tucks his face into the hollow of her neck so he can feel the thrum of it from the source. He holds her like he is waiting for her to shatter, something desperate, but something fragile. And she drags her fingers through his hair, now drying in fine waves beneath the sun, and it is a moment that will have to be enough. She is learning what to hold onto, and what to let go.

“Joel?” He hums his listening, though he keeps his face ducked down to let her continue her ministrations. 

“We should probably leave soon.” 

“Yeah, we should.” And it is this string of words over and over again, the finely stitched pattern of their lives held in the cradle of these few words. She thinks that she has accepted this, settled around this, grown around the rot until it has become something else. Sometimes, she wonders if they are real, if she is real. Watch two myths walk away from the edge of a lake. It is summer, and  two myths are holding each other in their arms. It’s only real if you watch. The rest of the time, they define real for themselves. Real in touch, in sun on skin, in mouths and hands on skin. They make each other real within their own myth. All of the time, they are in love. Some of the time, they are happy. 

But before this, before now, before all the miles they have crawled in the time following that staying that turned into a leaving, she refused to eat for another two years, despite his coaxing and cajoling. And it weakened her, made her mean and sharp, and eventually withdrawn, curled like a corpse in the coarse sheets of motel beds, letting her eyes glaze and glass in the glow of the television. Lover turned patient, any care and keeping was done by his hands, moving her in a pleading pattern of preservation. Please, baby, I need you to eat, I love you I know you love me so eat, all you have to do for me is eat. All she offered in response when he would start to pray to her like that, her palm lifting in the air, and dropping back down as if judgment had been passed.  In the night, he curled his body around hers, and it was the strongest she got to feel, him weeping against her spine.  And in the waking day, death seemed inevitable, seemed like grace, and one day, she told him in what voice she had left that she would like him to, to her, of her, if the time came soon. And she hoped the time would come soon. And he got very angry, it shocked her how angry he got. Voice like thunder and lightning in his hands, shattering whatever would break against the walls of their motel room. The vision of a man who did not know what else to do. The vision of a man losing. And that broken, beating thing inside of her lurched because she loves him. Loves him, loves him, loves him. And so she eats with him. And so she lives with him. And so they walk through this myth together. Her in the passenger seat and she takes one of his hands in both of hers and keeps it for herself in her lap and he lets her. How could they be monsters? How can this be called monstrous? They are in love. They are in wretched love.

And before this, before now, when a new couple moved into that apartment in New Mexico, clean, white tile clean and white again, ready to fill the rooms with their own kind of love, full and good, they found a near-finished painting in the hall closet. A painting of a wound in the earth, and the flame of a sunset. They thought that it was beautiful. 

[tadpolesonalgae]

Eris x reader: Pomegranate Seeds

A/N: So they don’t really have kings and queens in prythian but for the sake of clarification because I feel that using Lady is an odd descriptor, I’m using Queen the first time. (I was listening to a greek mythology playlist while writing this!)

Warnings: wine?

Word Count: 1,844

“To a new world.”

Raise the glass, clinking with his own, ringing like tiny silver bells. “To a better High Lord.” Caramel softens at the edge, whiskey swirling as he inclines his head, the two of you drinking deeply. Ruby liquid warms your throat, pooling in your stomach, poised to soften your mind.

Drink quietly for minutes, taking in the beauty from the uppermost levels of the palace. Forest stretching for miles, red and oranges cooling beneath the moonlight into somber, neutral shades. Leaves flutter below as wind runs her fingers through the lustrous mass, dancing through, skating across the trees as she sweeps over the landscape.

“Part of me never thought the day would come,” Eris admits, quietly. “That his immortality would prevail over my own, and this relief would never arrive.” Shafts of moonbeam smoothen the planes of his face, bathing him in ethereal silver, wine dappled with sparkling light. The deep emerald of his waistcoat is darkened by the night, shade cast down the strong lines of his body as he braces his forearms on the balcony railing, caramel corduroy tailored to perfection. He’s dappled in jewel tones, the ruby heirloom sitting pretty around his thumb, the just-licked crimson shining resplendent like wine.

“It’s fictitious; yet here we are, standing triumphant.” Brows dip in the centre, a look of tired frustration marring his features. “I don’t feel victorious at all.”

Watch him sidelong: the downcast gaze, wine sitting discarded atop the railing, breeze kissing the soft, silky hair from his face. Take another sip of your drink. “This isn’t like you,” you reply quietly, “since when has inebriation made you so morose?” It’s true intoxication tends to macerate his normally abrasive personality, but not to the point of sombreness. Tonight he’s almost melancholy.

“I’m nowhere near the peak of this mountain. I thought at least from here it would be within my sights, yet I feel as though instead I’ve stumbled upon a crater,” he mulls bitterly. “A crater so great it would take the rest of my centuries to halfway circumvent the perimeter.” His head dips, staring into the blood-red pool of liquid. It simmers slightly in response, filled with effervescence.

Lower the glass from your lips, gently putting a hand over his shoulder. “That’s why you have me. We’ll get further as a pair than if you insist on wretched solitude.” Molten caramel warms your skin, brow dipped at the centre, poised to protest. “We’ve made it together this far, Eris. I’m not about to back out now. We’re in this for the long run.”

He watches you silently, absorbing the steadfast reassurance of your palm, savouring the solace of your touch. Moonlight sets your skin aglow, bathing it in silver—how you shine. The soft cream of your dress transformed by the night into something diaphanous and celestial. Contained within the gossamer is a dusting of warmth—the colour of rosey moonlight.

Takes it all in, and commits the silence to memory. The tranquility of your touch, the innate comfort of your person. Do you know he would have undoubtedly crumbled had you not been at his side? Swallows thickly—the new world has already begun. Changes will be made, battles will be fought, failures will be suffered, but progression is imperative.

“I want to be better than he was,” Eris says quietly. It’s always been his goal, but has it ever been voiced? Or has it been kept silently locked up, fearful of who might hear and hold him accountable. “Then you’ve already succeeded,” you respond, taking a sip of your wine. “Really, I had thought you to be much more ambitious.” Eyes flick to his, ready to push him further. “Where’s your discipline gone?”

He regards you quietly, then stands from the railing. Takes a deep drink from his wine before turning to face you, one side of his face bathed in silver. “I want to be better,” he repeats quietly, “I will be better.” The edge of your mouth raises with pride, pupils dilated from the many glasses that were consumed prior to the toast. “I want to make the Autumn Court my Court. And I want its citizens to think of it as home, rather than their birthplace,” he admits, at last voicing his wishes. “I want my people to be proud of their homeland; to also desire its nourishment.”

Eris takes in a slow, deep breath, air trembling within shaky lungs. Nerves wriggling beneath his skin under the intensity of your gaze. The depth of understanding between you. Steadies himself for the first step of change.

“I want my Court to be blessed with a strong, sound-minded ruler,” he begins, eyes latched with your own. “Someone who’s fair, and just, and kind without being weak.” Your hands join on their own, independent of conscious will, fingers sliding across calloused palms, roughened from sparring and flame. “Someone equally capable of keeping their head under duress, as their humour.”

You scoff, rolling your eyes playfully, “I’d hardly describe your backhanded compliments and bladed jabs as humorous, Eris.”

He smiles a little, one that’s initially difficult to place. Until the day is recalled. The day his youngest brother had fled to spring after having his beloved executed before his eyes. The first, and last day Eris had ever disobeyed his father. You still remember the pulse of his heart, the same smile he’d given you—full of nerves, and mild terror—knowing he was doing something that scared him, but that had to done.

“Maybe not,” he admits, lightly squeezing your hands. Only now making you aware of their tremble. Does he know you can feel the spike of his pulse? Hear the nervous beat of his heart? “But I’m not speaking of myself.”

Your brow dips, furrowing as you peer up at him, wondering what plan he’s cooking up within that wonderful mind of his. Always one for strategy. Gives you another squeeze. Spine straightens. “Centuries ago, I was set on completing this journey on my own. I was the only person I needed; the only one I could depend on when things went wrong. And I will stand by my past resolutions.” He swallows, gaze steadying, familiar certainty returning to his eyes. “But I don’t want to, if I don’t have to.”

He’s talking in riddles; you have no hope of following what he’s talking about. But he sounds confident and assured, so you’ll trust him. “I want someone by my side,” he continues, quiet but firm. “I no longer want to complete the journey on my own.”

Heart warms in your chest, unable to help the smile that softens your mouth, emotion welling across your breast. “I’m right here with you,” you murmur, peering up at him. He nods, that slightly nervous twist to his lips still prominent. Takes a deep breath. Mouth shifts into a serious set, features changing to sincerity, the swiftness catching you off guard. “I want you to be at my side,” he says frankly; earnestly. “As my Queen.”

The title clangs through you, eyes widening, lips parting, breath sucked from your soul. He maintains his hold, keeping you steady. “You’ve made it clear you’ll walk this path with me. Proved time and time again you can be resourceful, and understanding, and diplomatic. What difference does it make if the next time you appear before my Court, you wear its crown? Have equal dominion over that land you care so greatly for, despite the ruin my father tried to inflict upon it because he was too miserable and sour to make changes?

“He was drowning in his own wretchedness, so condemned everyone else to his fate. But you kept your head above the water, and fought for your right to life. You survived, and made something for yourself.

“I can think of no one else more deserving, more right for the throne, than you.”

You stare at him, speechless. Hands still grasped in his own, the band of his heirloom burning into your skin. “Are you serious?” You manage, disbelieving. Heart matching the pace of his, thundering in your chest. “Completely,” he replies. “I believe you are worthy of the title, and will be capable of taking on that responsibility.” Swallows thickly. Exhales heavily. Beat raising higher. “I understand you may have concerns: I am asking a lot from you. Requesting you dedicate the rest of your life to the Autumn Court, and in doing so, also to me. It is not purely objective reasoning that forces me to make this selfish appeal; it would be deceptive and insolent of me to invite you into this contract without revealing to you the full scope of my wishes.”

His attention remains steady and assured, but it’s as though he’s been stripped back a layer, petals peeling away to reveal his golden centre. Raw intention being laid bare before you.

“The truth is, there is no one else I want as my Lady. You made me feel like myself in a way others have not. Have imparted upon me the feeling of having a home in another being, and for that I have never sufficiently expressed by deepest gratitude and fear I will never be able to.” The moonlight spills into his whiskey and caramel gaze, sending sparkling starlight glittering like crystals. “I swear on the few things I still hold dear—you being one of them—that I will do well by you. I will be a better High Lord than my father, but also a better husband, if you will gift me the chance.”

Words flutter through your minds, boggled and scrambled from his proposition. There’s always been an undercurrent between you, becoming more and more prominent in recent decades. His father couldn’t have chosen a better time to kick the bucket—sick bastard. “Your court would never accept my word, even as the new Lady of Autumn,” you manage distantly, mind spinning from the sincerity of his piece.

It’s his turn to quirk his lips, “what’s a Courtful of males in the face of your ambition?” Challenge practically drips from his mouth, eyes gleaming in the night, heating with molten determination. He’s won already, and he knows it. The pull between you irresistible. Muscle looses it’s taut tension. “I did say I’d be with you every step of the way, didn’t I?” His features shift to something gentle and tender, thumb swiping across your knuckles. “You damned yourself from the beginning,” he murmurs, one hand raising to your jaw, allowing a moment for you to pull away. You lean into him. “Don’t call a life with you a damnation, Eris,” you murmur onto his palm, tilting your cheek, knuckles brushing beneath your lashes. “You’re the best damned thing that’s every happened to me.”

Hear his heart spike at your own confession, temperature raising. The slight pressure he applies to the space below your jaw—an almost subconscious request.

Lips part in response, allowing his sweet relief to sweep in.

You thought it would never arrive.

General Taglist: @myheartfollower @tcris2020 @mali22 @amygdtjhddzvb @sfhsgrad-blog

[cherubispunk]

CHERUB (PART I) - Dealer!Joel Miller x AFAB!Reader

summary: your uncle can’t pay for his weed, joel finds another form of payment.

a note from Lucy: SHEEE'S BAAACK! im sorry but someone had to do it. I took it into my own hands. Hate myself...but I love this. When fleabag said ‘I am a bad feminist’>>>.

playlist | alternate banner by THE cherub @ramblers-lets-get-ramblin

wc: 3377 Warnings: 18+ MDNI! DARK CONTENT! no outbreak (but Sarah still dies sorry), no use of y/n but joel calls the reader ‘Cherub’, porn with little plot, bombastic age gap (reader is in her early 20's and Joel is in his late 50s), Smut, dubcon, P in V sex (unprotected), Creampie, Cumplay, dom!Joel sub!reader dynamic, sex as payment for drugs, allusions to oral - m receiving, Fingering, ever so slight assplay, Choking, gagging (not on his d tho *sigh*), panty sniffing and stealing, Light Spanking, mentions of using drugs such as weed, alcohol consumption, Smoking, use of pet names (baby, cherub, angel, good girl...etc), Joel being foul mouthed, cursing, dirty talk, spitting, spit play. Some of the most animalistic, disgustingly wretched and vile porn I have written thus far...with so little plot that this earned me my place in hell. Big Dick Joel Miller comes as his own warning.

series m.list | m.list

It was no delicate whisper, or hushed uttering that Joel Miller was now everywhere in you. Scraping the backs of your teeth, festering like a virus in your bloodstream. Melding to the marrow of your bones. The walls of your cunt. 

He had a devastating habit of seeping through the cracks of your closed lids. Ready to pillage and plunder his way through your head in its numbed state of sleep. When you could have finally— finally stopped and not felt. But he ebbs deeper.

He did not belong there.

He would not belong there. You’d not give him closure to live and breathe in intimate parts of your anatomy. The only place he would be from now on was between your legs. And maybe in your bed until the wee hours of the dry morning. 

That is where you would let him sit.

That is where he would stay. 

You hate him. You hate his face. You hate his voice. Hate his fucking temper. But worst of all— the cataclysmic catalyst in your small world of four bedroom walls—you hate how you don’t hate him at all. Not really. Your heart wouldn’t let you. It would break your own ribs clean in two to lurch from your flayed chest and into his palms. If only he’d open them. 

Joel Miller gnashed you between his teeth to let you splatter past his lips on the sun cracked dirt. He circled you like a wild cat. His pretty gazelle. Graceful, light on her feet. You felt the splintering distraction of him in the base of your skull. Dull and aching. Still there to rot into earth.

You came for the pleasure but you stayed for the pain. 

Distraught with him, you contemplated desertion. Something akin to treason for his tyranny. Cowardice churning at your gut. The pleasure you would draw from the curling scowl of his coarse brows. The thin line you’d make of his lips and dark mist of hickory that would cloud his eye and better judgement. 

But then what? You soon learned  that if it wasn’t devastating, reaping its agony in your silly little fractured chest— you didn’t dare need, nor crave it. Joel Miller was harrowing. 

Broken. Broken, broken, broken — Maimed, shattered, blistered to burst like waterlogged paint. He made you all, and nothing. Made you shrivel into your own shell at the phantom of his thought. Baring your teeth at the need to divulge in feeling deeper than satiation. 

—

You’d cycled back home, hair damp and lank with rare Austin rain. Slow circles of the pedals around a pivot, swerving gently from one side of the empty road to the other. Eyes ahead of you. It was like you were floating in a daze under the yellow saturation of the streetlamps. Past shabby housing estates back to the trailer park you called home. Tips from tonight tucked into the pocket of your apron, ready to be stored under the mattress in the moth bitten pillowcase. Ready to find your flight out of this town. 

You skidded to a halt in the pebble speckled dirt outside your trailer, brakes squealing in protest. Standing to lock up your bike to the railing by your uncles beat up, busted down truck. A heavy thunder cracked above, a swollen storm cloud rolling in to send the summer out on its departure with a bang. September was here. And the air smelled acidic with the promise of downpour. 

Glancing at the trailer next door, you came to realise your neighbour was in. Lights on, music rattling aluminium walls of his shabby home. You had to fight the urge to roll your eyes at him as he caught your eye in his window. Watching, thumb swiping over his lower lip as he eyed you in your uniform. A stupid yellow dress and pinafore, scuffed mary janes, frilly white socks. Ketchup stains. Doe eyes glued to him, you saw a swallow pass down the thick column of his throat. His deep hickory eyes were dark black in this light, pupils blown to devour the colour.  

Before the heat licking up your cheeks could pull to your centre, you moved one foot in front of the other, crashing through the door. The TV was on, a barbaric film of screams drowned out the thunder outside, rattling in your ears. Jarring? No. The regular. Your uncle, ever the washed up cop out he was, was on his fifth beer, no doubt would send a nightcap of whiskey down his throat before lugging himself off to bed. The bottle hung limp in his drunken hand, loosely dangled over the armrest of the leather couch.

He did not spare you a glance. 

“I’m home.” You called out to him, waving out a hand in his direction. His sunken stoner eyes didn't drift from the box television in front of him. Merely garbled grunt, followed by a beer burp passed his lips. You sighed through your nose, teeth set on edge. “You had dinner?” 

Another grunt. One you took as ‘the fuck do you think?’

You sighed, “Okay, i’ll throw somethin’ in the oven, yeah?” This time he did not spare an answer. 

You took it as a blessing. Could have been worse. He could have struck you for being late, taking on overtime for Dee, the young mother who worked alongside you on friday evenings. You needed the money. Uncle Luke got laid off last month, turning up to the impound lot drunk, reeking of hard liquor and staggering around machinery. 

So you left it at that, disappeared to hide your money, counting out the bills into piles of ten. Just shy of ninety six dollars. All gathered and stuffed under your mattress. Next was dinner. Nothing much in the fridge, a box of frostbitten waffle fries, out of date in the back of the freezer. Or leftover pizza from the night before. Why not both. ‘Have a feast!’ you humoured yourself dryly. 

It was an hour or so later into the evening when your uncle finally spoke up, empty plate resting on his beer belly, another belch to punctuate the first words he said to you all evening.

“Do me a favour and drop by Joel's will ya, doll?” You sat up, looking at him from the lazyboy seat you perched in, feet kicking down from the coffee table. 

“Joel’s? Why?” He looked over to see your brow furrowed in question. 

“Usual dealer is outta town. Joel’s hookin’ me up with some in the meantime.” 

“Come on,” You sighed, tilting your head at him the way a parent would do with a child in pity, “I thought you were clean.”

“It’s just weed.” He snapped, voice gruff in his thick drawl, slurred. “Aint gonna fuckin’ kill me. But you might. Expensive brat.” 

The thought flickered across your mind to argue. Fight back. Tell him you were fighting tooth and nail for the rent due next month. But the bruise of his handprint and the simmering burn of his slap to your face the night before stopped your words dry in your throat. 

“Fine.” You sighed. 

And so, with heavy feet and a grudge in your tight chest, you ambled on over to the next door, knuckles rapping on his door three times quickly. 

Joel Miller opened the door with a puff of air out his nose, cigarette hanging loose from his lips. A barrel chested man in a tight wife beater and low slung dirty jeans, brow set in stone. The corner of his lip curled into a sneer of a smirk, taking no shame in the fact he was eyeing you head to toe. The devil down smirk. It made something disgusting tug at your insides, pool deeper in the thick of tension. 

“What can I do for you?” He asked in a drawl, crossing great oaks of arms over his chest. The neck of his tank let tease a smattering of salt and pepper hair over the top of his chest. Bristly, wiry. You ignored the urge to feel it catch in your nails. Do the same with the scruff, scant over his jaw. The same gradient. Just as coarse. 

“Um,” You eyes dropped from their ogling to the step your feet were planted on, head hung with them, “Uncle Luke said you had somethin’ for ‘im.” You mumbled after clearing your throat. 

“I do.” He nodded, pinching his cig between his thick thumb and forefinger, taking a drag and parting it with his lips. He squinted as he exhaled, the stench of the cigarette catching bitter in your nose. “He sent you over here to get it? A sweet lil’ thing like you.” 

You nodded hesitantly, still not daring to look at the man in front of you. Above you. He chuckled inwardly at your display of subservience, cock twitching behind the zipper and denim of his jeans. “Look’t ya.” He mused, tossing his dying cigarette onto the gravel, hooking his tobacco stained fingers under your chin to lift it. While your head tilted up at his touch, your eyes strained to stay on the floor. He watched as the stretch of your neck struggled to accommodate a nervous swallow, skin rippling deliciously under his hold. “Lil’ angel aint ya?” He thumbed your head to the side, eyes relishing in the sight of more skin, the wash of yellow light over your profile. “A Cherub.”  Cherub. That’s what he named you. His little Cherub who was defiled and taken in a heated, frantic assembly of limbs. Pulled to fire at hell's mouth. Joel Miller's mouth.

Still you looked down. “Look at me, Cherub.” And with a heavy sigh you did. That was what was so easy about Joel. It took nothing to obey. Nothing to give in and keel over at his side. “That's better.” He mumbled under his breath, watching the rise of your chest. You could feel the pert tips of your breasts pebble at the meeting of his eyes, mixed with his touch. How delicate it was now. How deranged it would be later. “Come on in…Cherub.” He practically crooned the pet name, stepping aside. 

You passed the threshold, a mistake for the best and words parts of you. Because stepping across that line was the damning event in your experience of Joel Miller. Pandora’s box had been opened, left to decay in the woods somewhere as evil poured guilt free from it.

He rummaged around for a second, pulling a clear plastic ziplock bag from a duffel in the corner, dangling it in front of your face. A dirt green, clustered in form. You reached to take it, but he snatched it back with a cruel smile, making the walls of your stomach curl in dread, jaw clamp shut. 

“Luke’s gotta pay up, first. He give you money for me?” You shook your head. His eyes clouded darker.  “No?” He raised an amused brow, “How you gonna pay for it, Cherub?” 

You're stumped. “I– I…” Your voice died in your throat. But Joel can seemingly peer inside you to your own mind, part it like a page of a book or your own legs. 

“I don’t want your money, baby.” 

“Woulda been mine, anyway.” You sigh. And he narrows his eyes at you, tutting in disappointment. 

“I can think ’f one thing that’ll make it up to me.”

And that's how you ended up here. His thick, intruding fingers hooking into your mouth, unhinging your jaw as he speared you on his cock. Everything about him was larger than life. Even the way he breathed was domineering. Fucking you with flared nostrils that gave way to a billowing a breath. The other hand at your neck, revelling at the feeling of your pulse hammering under his splayed palm. Worming your way though cracks in his thick ribs while took you.

He had folded you in half, pressed the knobbles of your knees up to the sides of your head as tears ran thick, hot and slow down your temples. He made it hurt. But you loved it. Needed him to evaporate into air so you inhale him. Devour him. 

He grunted, watching in furrowed brow amusement while his thumb pressed into the soft flesh under your jaw, middle and forefinger coated in your slick form earlier and now your own saliva. 

It was a primal image. One some may find disgusting. To see him bent over you and ravaging your cunt raw. Bleeding you dry of a semblance of sanity. It was so easy when the tip of his hot, angry cock nipped at the mouth of your cervix with vigour like that. His hand is at your throat, pressing a purple bruise into your flesh over the old one made by another man. For you to marvel at later when he once again staggers from bed to refresh himself with a cool beer, clutching the ache that curled at the base of his spine. 

In his eyes, you needed a big god. A man to keep you to yourself. Never have you stray. Ground you with the slamming of his pelvis into your hips. Legs parted for him to eye the very core of you. The seam he would part with two fingers, hot, needly, wet for him. Aching and pinching and shuddering around his digits, tongue, dick. Letting him invade you like the good girl he told you you were, crooning into your ear with hot damp breaths. 

Joel dredged up an ache of humanity in you that felt numb so long before. Lay dormant in the chasm of your stomach. Swallowed like a peach pit to choke on later. After the sin had dried like the sweat on your skin.

“Fucking easy, ain’t ya, Cherub.” He would say as he penetrated your walls, invaded your mouth with his fingers. His lips draw open mouthed, wet kisses to the delicate column of your throat, down the bone between your breasts. Then he leans back, watching intently as his hips slow to grind, dragging the slick of your walls to drench the base of his cock. Ready for you to take down your throat later if he wished to meld you into that position. A hand let free the grip on your throat, instead watched with fascination as he slapped your tit, took the swell of it in his palm, cupping it, tugging at your pearled nipple. “Gonna take all of it for me, Cherub.” 

You garbled out a yes, a cry of submission to him. Before, Joel never felt the acidic aftertaste of guilt for being selfish. Since he lost Sarah, he took it upon himself to have what he wanted and when he wanted it, without a damn for the rest of humanity.

The only time he felt a shred of remorse was when he stole you; Hid you away from the warm, nurturing touch of others' more loving, less brutal hands. But you were his Cherub. All that was pretty a beautiful and to be desired in the world.

With his lip between his teeth, his thumb swiped tight circles over your swollen clit, slick aiding him in the fluidity of his strokes, heavy balls drizzled in your arousal as they slap wetly against your ass. A nod and his fingers slip further into your mouth, opening your jaw wider to peer inside. A glob of his spit drooled past his lips, splattering thick and warm upon your clit. It slid down to your entrance, where he punctures moans out of you, shaft stretching you, fucking you out, and thrusting with the intent to break you. You can feel the curve of it, the vein that runs steady on the underside of it. Heavy, full. You remember the slap it sounded out when you reached to pull it free. Before he parted your legs wide and sheathed himself in your pussy with one swift wane of his hips.

Joel smiles when you sob and break down for him, pull back a layer for him to slip into you. The walls of you drag him down into a grounding. A centre of a universe. Gravity strong enough to implode, create dark matter, compress tightly into a black hole. The centre of his universe. 

“Does my baby want it?” He crooned, and you yelped a yes, strangled by his being. The scent of him clinging to you, your sex. It gnarled at your skin. Scratched marks into flesh. “Does she want to come for me?” 

You didn't have to nod, he made you with his grip on your jaw. It was going to be your answer anyway. “Want you to say it for me too, Cherub.” 

“Yea, Joel!” You yelp, voice shrill, and cracked like the callus on the heel of his hand. “Yes!” 

He grins, wicked and wrapped with the inter to tear you apart from the inside with the jackhammering of his cock inside you, The delicious, toe curling numbness of it inside you. 

“Come on, Cherub, sing f’me.” 

“Yes-” It's a shriek, a quick, frenzied shriek. One that filled the hollow of your chest and then deflated it. “Yes! Please, please, please- Please!” 

Your begging melts in his ears, the sight of eyes rolled back, mouth open for him. And he needs to feel, reaching between where the two of you join with your own hand. The base of his cock now between your middle and ring fingers, his length swiping your fingers in combined precum and slick as he bucks his hips violently. The headboard shakes and trembles beneath his frantic movement. And he presses the heel of your hand into your clit, having you seeing stars. Crying to the heavens you fell from. 

His little Cherub. Plush skin and plump curves for his teeth to sink into and mark his territory. Whenever he may please now. 

“Come.” 

And you do, screaming his name to him as a numb weight fills the pit of your core, has your pussy pulsing in waves, ebbs and flows. It sucks him deeper, a lew squelch gaining his attention when his lower abdomen and balls tighten. He lets out a strangled groan, filling you with one final push upon your cervix. 

It has you gasping for air, chest heaving when he looks down between you, the white sticky ooze of his come seeping from your walls, softening cock still sheathed inside of you. Not ready to pull from the warmth your cunt hugs him with. 

“That’s it, angel, down you come.” He coos, before sifting his hips, leaving you to whine as your gaping hole fluttered furiously around nothing.  

He stands, pulls his jeans on, fly still undone, belt buckle loose and clinking at his sides. He swipes your underwear from the scattering of your clothes over the musty carpet, bringing it to his nose to inhale. “Part of the payment.” He mumbles, not that you’re listening, mind still swimming in its pool of oxytocin. And he slips the lace into his jean pocket, baby pink peeking out from denim. 

“Better get back, Cherub.” Joel said plainly, fingers dancing over your used hole, as cum dribbles gluttonously from it, down your crack to your puckered asshole. He thumbs it gently and you squeal, squirming away. His hand clamps down upon your thigh, dragging you back down the mattress to his unyielding touch. 

“Don’t be ungrateful now.” He growls, collecting the creamy spend with two fingers, scooping it back inside you. Your body jolts from the intrusion, but gathers itself again and desire swims low in the swell of your belly. “Want it all in ya’. Fillin’ you nice and good for me, Cherub. There we are, that’s it.” He smiles, eyes unmoving from your cunt as his fingers disappear inside and stretch it out, scissoring you to overstimulation. “Maybe one day i’ll get to use this one too…” And you feel his thumb once more at your butt, adding the smallest tease of pressure.

Joel pulled back, clapping a hand down on the plush, malleable skin of your thigh. 

“Up ‘n out, Cherub, ‘fore your uncle gets suspicious.” 

You know Uncle Luke won’t know any different. He’s passed out on the sofa when you get in, legs trembling with an ache weighing the marrow of your bones. You shut the door with your back and a shaking huff, tossing the weed onto the coffee table, retiring to your room, sobbing to nothing and no one but your grimy pillow, licking your wounds like the wounded bitch you had now become.

[thus-spoke-lo]

Pain Management // Trafalgar Law x afab!reader // NSFW/18+

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Chapter 8: Long-Term Side Effects, pt I

Chapter Summary: After his near-confession in the quiet of your room, Law takes time to consider your fate, and makes a ruling on the future of your continued care, one that you refuse to accept. Days pass, and as a decision on your future aboard the Polar Tang looms, you make one last effort to tug at the strings of desire that tether your captain to you.

Chapter CW: afab!reader, no pronouns used; gendered pet names [ex. "good girl"]; angst; abuse of authority; obsessive behavior in reader; vaginal fingering; oral sex [m receiving]

WC: 7.6k

Law’s quarters were more claustrophobic than you recalled, and this time it wasn’t just the oppressive weight of uncertainty and his all-consuming presence making the walls close in around you. Stacks of books and papers threatened to topple over at your feet, clothes were heaped in small piles, half-opened boxes blocked the doorway to the lavatory attached to his room; it was barely-controlled chaos, nothing like you remembered from the night you ended up in his room. It wasn’t clear what he had been looking for, but you did have to wonder if he ever found it.

Law sat in his desk chair, leaned forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers folded beneath his chin, steely eyes settling on anything and everywhere in the room except for you and the space you occupied. He scratched at the scruff of his chin, moved his hand to the back of neck and rubbed at his skin, jiggled one leg, then the other, then both at the same time; he didn’t have to say a damn thing to tell you where this conversation was going to go. You stood with your upper arm pressed against his door as though hoping to be absorbed into the metal and escape this discomfort, silently trying to will him to say something—anything—to break the thick tension that was trying to suffocate you, as a sharp twinge manifested in your lower left side.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said, wading into the uncomfortable silence. “For earlier—for the way I behaved, and the things I said. That was—well, I wasn’t quite myself.”

Yet, down to the marrow of your bones, you knew Law had been more himself in those moments than he had been since you’d begun your treatment plan, more honest in the way he looked at you with a covetous desire and the way he seemed to claim your body with his mouth, as though he had something to prove to you, to himself.

“It’s okay, I didn’t mind,” you mumbled, a sudden heat overtaking your ears.

“Whether you minded or not isn’t the issue. Every time we’re near each other, these feelings just start to bleed through and I—I can’t stem it. And what I’m doing to you”—his mouth hung open for a moment, as he fumbled for what should come next—“I can’t keep treating you, and acting like everything is fine. I just can’t.”

“Captain, please.” The way you heard yourself ready to beg was degrading, but you couldn’t stop, even if you tried. It was as if you’d wilt without his touch, wither like a summer bloom in the cold of winter, no matter how the ever-dissolving rational part of you knew otherwise.

“The damage is already done, but I can stop making it worse. Just look at yourself. You’re telling me I haven’t made you like this?” Law’s eyes scanning every inch of your face, analyzing the twitch at the corner of your lips and the rapid blinking of your eyes as you tried to suppress a wretched flood of tears.

“So what if you have?” You threw up your hands while you searched for words. “What is it you said to me that night—the night you kissed me? That maybe I just needed the right man to bring it out of me?”

“Stop. I don’t want to think about that.”

“Why not?”

“That’s. Enough.” The way his nostrils flared and the way he drew out each word made something crumble within you, feeling the last vestiges of whatever romance you thought was tethering the two of your together starting to slip from your grasp. He inhaled deeply, closing his eyes. “I’ve taken this time to consider your situation.”

“Which situation?”

“Your medical care.”

“Oh.” Not the situation of his manipulation and your willingness to be malleable for him. Not the situation of the unspoken needs and desires. Not the situation of the feelings that enrobed you both in some warmth you couldn’t seem to handle without burning each other in the process. “And…what have you concluded?”

“I know we’ve seen a lot of progress with your current treatment plan.” He paused, pressing his lips together in a thin line. “But I think perhaps it would be in your best interest if we went ahead with surgical intervention.”

Your mouth opened, then shut as you groped for a response. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s the most appropriate thing to do at this point. It’s not a guarantee, though. I’ve done some reading and I should be able to treat most of it, but it’s possible it may reoccur. If it does, it shouldn’t be for quite some time—possibly years. It’s hard to say. You may still need, at some point, to have everything removed, but this should at least improve your quality of life significantly in the meantime.”

You almost laughed at the absurdity—that just a short time ago, you had practically begged him in the exam room to do exactly what he was proposing right now, to use his devil fruit and take out whatever it was that made you double over in excruciating pain whenever your body saw fit. Yet here you were, more than ready and willing to deny yourself a long-term solution in favor of spending more of your afternoons in his care and more of your nights rutting against your pillow until your next session, the time in between spent ruminating on the extent of his affection for you.

“Take some time to think on it,” he added. “Just try not to mull it over too long, since we’ll need to contact Strawhat.”

“For what?”

“So we can coordinate your return.”

There it was, the fact that you wanted to conveniently ignore—that this submarine was not your home, that this was supposed to be temporary, that you were always meant to go back to the Sunny—was now shoved directly in your face. Your eyes darted around the room, an overwhelming feeling of being trapped suddenly coursing through you.

“And what if I decline the surgery?”

Law finally looked you in the eye and said your name softly, as though he was trying to cajole a stray animal. “Please.”

“What if I decline the surgery?” you reiterated with more conviction, despite the quaver in your voice. “Then what happens?”

“Let me make myself clear,” he said slowly as he stood, his movements careful and calculated. “I have reached a point where I can no longer, in good faith, continue your treatments.”

“But—but they’re working. I’m barely in pain anymore.” You flinched as another jolt shot through you, as if to taunt you, to remind you just how deeply your need for him was rooted. “This is the first time I’ve felt anything close to normal.”

“I know. And I want to help you. You know I do. It’s all I want.” He winced, looking pained as he spoke. “But this—this has to stop.”

“You want it to stop but you did this to me.” It was petulant and immature, but it was true, at least in part—he exploited the way you felt, somehow must have smelled your desire on you like perfume from the moment you came aboard. And yet, while he may have initiated the manipulation, you played right into it, letting him consume your every thought, your every breath, letting that little infatuation overcome you and almost bury you alive. And you learned, all too quickly, how to tug at the strings of his own yearning, to keen just right and say you needed him through the panting breaths of your orgasm, in an effort to pull him ever closer, to try to stoke coals of his heated desires.

“So then I have to end it.” Law’s voice raised slightly. “I don’t want to see you in pain. And that’s why I’m recommending surgery—I can at least do that for you.”

“You never answered me. What happens if I say no?”

“You know you can’t stay with us forever.”

You felt yourself slowly, surely, beginning to spiral in a way you couldn’t pull back from. “I-I can keep my distance.”

“I don’t think you can. I don’t think I can, either.”

“Then don’t.”

“I can’t have you here anymore.” He crossed his arms over his chest and stared at the floor, rocking back on his heels. “Besides, wasn’t this supposed to be temporary? Don’t you want to go home?”

“But it doesn’t have to be temporary.”

“I think we both know it does.”

You ran your tongue along your teeth, trying to ignore the acid that was roiling in your guts. “Am I free to go now?”

Law wore his concern blatantly in his darkened eyes, more than you were accustomed to—it was clear he wanted to comfort you. He wanted to make the pain stop, just as he always did, make you forget for a moment that you were ever hurting to begin with. But you knew it was impossible to expect—he couldn’t give in to you again that quickly, not when he’d already expended the effort to push you away.

“You’re dismissed, if that’s what you want,” he said flatly.

You scoffed as your palm landed do the door handle. “Is it what you want?”

He moved backwards and leaned against his desk, tattooed fingers gripping the edge tightly, his knuckles turning white. He said nothing, and the only sound in the room was the soft groaning of the ship as it propelled you forward into the darkened depths.

“Well then. Have a good night, captain.”

You waited until you returned to your quarters to become untethered, and you wept foolish, irrational tears into your pillow while your abdomen throbbed, the sound of Law’s voice in your head reminding you not to cause yourself too much stress or else you’d work yourself into an episode ringing in your ears.

It was what you wanted all along—a solution that would provide long-lasting relief, and would let you live a life unencumbered. And yet, you wanted nothing more than to reject it, to stay ailing and helpless, so long as it meant that Law would coo and praise you while he gave you respite on his long fingers, even if he would never return the feelings that grew inside you and consumed you, body and soul. The heaving and bitter tears stopped eventually, and you tried to focus on thoughts of your old crewmates, picturing how excited their faces would be when you came aboard again, faces that faded and smudged like old photographs as you drifted into a dreamless sleep.

----------

You walked past the door to Law’s quarters, just as you had been every evening now for days while your impending decision loomed, following you like an stray dog during your work shifts, nipping at your heels as you tried to converse with your crewmates and act as though you weren’t crumbling inside. And every night, you’d find that the door was shut; you’d stand just outside, holding your fist aloft, preparing to rap your knuckles on the metal but never quite committing before you’d retract your hand and return to your room. There was a part of you—the part that was bound tightly in those vines of obsession and desire and some perversion of love—that knew if you could just spill everything that you held inside you, if you could only make him understand, that you could have what you wanted, what you knew you both desired.

The idea of parting with the Sunny—of walking away from the only family you had left in this world, who knew everything you were and everything you dreamed and hoped to be and still loved you anyway—hurt; it hurt in a way that would leave a scar that never would quite heal properly. But truth be told, you weren’t even sure what your dream was anymore; you weren’t sure why you had become a pirate on a whim, running out of the tavern where you’d worked, bottles of booze tucked under your arms while your boss yelled after you, chasing down Luffy and the rest to tell them you’d come with them after all. It was spontaneous, and it was senseless, but it seemed like the only right choice you had made in your whole life up until then. So what was one more reckless decision to add your list of sins? Was the frantic pull to remain here with Law, to devote yourself to him as your captain and your lover, to follow him wherever the ocean took you, really any more absurd than jogging after some group of near-strangers to hitch a ride to somewhere unknown?

Tonight, you noted on your approach that Law’s door was cracked open just slightly, a low light creeping out, seeming to invite you in. You padded towards the sliver in the doorframe and glanced inside—Law was sitting on his bed under the porthole window, his black bedspread wrapped around his shoulders like a cloak, knees pulled to his chest, a book held tightly in his hands. The lantern above his bed swung gently with the movements of the submarine and cast delicate shadows over him now and again, highlighting the sharp lines of his jaw, the hollow of his cheekbones, the dark circles under his eyes.

It was striking how, in the dim light, he simply looked like a man. Not the stoic and alluring stranger that you’d met aboard the Sunny, not your captain, not your doctor, but just some man—a handsome man that, in another life, you could see yourself meeting for the first time in the dark corner of a bar, or in between the shelves of a musty bookstore, a man with whom you could easily imagine the beginnings of a dreamily ordinary romance. But that was not the fate that either of you had been dealt.

The way the light moved over him was so mesmerizing, your thoughts of what could have been in some misty, watercolor other life so compelling, that it didn’t even register when his low voice uttered, “Yes?”

The dull drumming in your ribcage turned into a flutter as you processed that Law had addressed you, despite the fact that his eyes were still on the book in his hands; only a stammering whisper of nothing managed to make its way from your lungs.

“Are you just gonna stand there, or did you want something?” Law asked, loudly flipping to another page.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt you,” you fumbled, only partially lying. You hadn’t meant to interrupt him yet—you had wanted to enjoy that moment just a little more, revel in the quiet comfort of existing near each other for just a little longer.

He set the book down next to his hip and gestured. “Just come in, before someone sees you.”

After a quick glance down the hallway, making sure it was only you who felt compelled to wander the ship in search of something at this hour, you slipped inside his room, carefully closing the door behind you. You crossed the still-cluttered space, gently moving a stack of textbooks aside with your ankle, and sat down in his desk chair, waiting for him to say something to you, something that would surely sound like “No,” with no preamble or closing statement, but he only smirked at you from the shadows.

“You know you’re not supposed to be here,” he said, his voice as smooth as ever, enough to send a spark up your spine.

“You're the one who invited me in,” you responded, one eyebrow raised in accusation, earning you a soft laugh and shake of his head.

“So what is it you want?” He tilted his head, pulling his knees in tighter to his chest. “I don’t suppose you came here tonight to try to sway my decision?”

“Mm…not really.”

“So why are you here, then?”

It was, at its core, a shameful desperation that compelled you to his quarters—you wanted him to see the mess he’d made of you, how he’d ruined you a hundred times over and made it feel like nothing else would ever be enough, like no one else would ever do. But it was also a desire to lay yourself bare that brought you here, an aching need to grant him the gift of seeing the love that had flowered in the depths of you, to lay your heart in his hands and hope he accepted it, held it close, made space for it beside his own.

The words to tell him that you wanted him—not just his hands, or his sweet condescension, or the way he shattered you into pieces with expert precision—but him, with all his flaws, and all that he was and all that he dreamed, never came, never found purchase in your mind. Instead, you finally muttered a stammering, “I don’t know.”

Law sighed and leaned his back against the wall, pulling the bedspread around him a little tighter. “I suppose you don’t have to.”

“Well,” you asked, the word stretching out slowly, as you rested your elbow on his desk, “why’d you let me in?”

A subtle smirk crept across his mouth as he chuckled and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

Then we’re in this together, aren’t we? you laughed in your head as you both avoided each other’s gaze and sat there in the cool quiet of his room, the groaning and whirring of the submarine filling in the spaces between uneasy breaths. As your eyes moved around the familiarity of his cluttered space, the glossy cover of his book caught your attention.

You couldn’t help but smile as you asked, “Is that a Sora comic?”

“Oh. This?” A dusting of blush coated his cheeks as he glanced down at it, then back at you, fiddling with the ankle of his sock as he did. “Yeah. Just something I like to re-read now and again.”

“How funny. I used to read those—many years ago.” You smiled briefly as the few decent memories of your youth—the ones you could actually recall with any degree of clarity—skimmed through your mind.

“Really?” It was all but impossible to not hear the excitement in his voice, to ignore the way his pupils expanded as you spoke. It was unexpectedly charming to see him like this, all his masks having been removed, leaving you with something close to the truth of him.

“Yep.” You leaned closer and inspected it, tempted to pick it up and hold it in your heated hands, suddenly overcome with the urge to connect yourself to the past you barely recalled and the future you stood on the precipice of. “Lost mine after a lot of moving around, but I remember them pretty well.”

“I hate to admit it, but they’re still some of my favorite things to read,” he grinned sheepishly.

“Maybe I could borrow one some time?”

“I have a few issues with extra copies. I could send some with you.”

—when you go, you finished for him in your head.

The urge to resist—to beg, to plead, to dig your heels into the floor and refuse—was unnervingly strong, but you only nodded, croaking out, “That would be nice,” as you felt the weight of reality press down upon your shoulders and you hung your head, staring at the floor in hopes of melting straight through it.

Another moment of strained silence passed, before you heard a hesitant, quiet question: “Would you, maybe—would you want to read with me? Right now?”

You glanced up and saw Law’s tight-lipped smile, his gaze flitting back and forth between you and some spot just beyond you, his book held aloft like a lure, waiting to see if you would accept the bait.

“Um, sure,” you said as you stood up and crossed the small gap to the mattress.

He held the bedspread out to one side like a bird’s wing, beckoning you to join him. You moved to the bed and sat down, shifting into place beside him, and he gently draped the blanket over your shoulders. You sat there in a strangely comfortable quiet for a moment, listening to each other breathe, feeding off each other’s warmth; you leaned your head sideways and rested it against his upper arm, wanting to absorb every bit of this kindness, to keep it and tuck away inside you like a precious gift.

“Shall we get started?” he asked after a beat, looking at you out of the corner of his eye, a twitch of a smile at the edges of his mouth.

“You don’t mind starting over?” you asked as you saw him pluck a bookmark out of the center and move it to the back.

He shook his head. “Not for you I don’t.”

His tongue poked out between his lips as he flipped back to the beginning, moving through the glossy pages with you, pausing now and again to explain some obscure lore, filling in the things you couldn’t remember about the characters with a charming jubilance that seemed to make his entire body vibrate on a frequency compatible with your own. You kept him buzzing with a barrage of questions—some genuinely necessary to jog your memory, others only intended to get him talking again—and basked in the glow of his excited explanations, wanting only to stay in this space as long as he’d let you. A burning heat spread in your cheeks as you occasionally stole fleeting glances at each other instead of the book, feeling his body press into yours even more as you huddled together under the soft light, unspoken words haunting you from just beyond the shadows.

As he neared the end of the volume, he lingered on a page, and you looked up to see his eyes focused somewhere across the room. He leaned forward and set the book on the floor, before muttering, “I want to tell you something.”

“Captain?” An icy feeling flowed through your veins, and your heart started to pound just a little faster, moving the thin fabric of your shirt.

“When we met for the first time…” He trailed off, running his tongue along his lower lip for a moment. “The night before I left, when everyone was drinking, Nami may have let something slip to me.”

“Oh, did she?” Goddammit, Nami.

“I mean, I didn’t see why you’d—it just seemed like something she’d say to mess with me and get some sort of reaction from me, I don’t know. I just figured she was drunk, and I didn’t really trust her.”

“No?”

“I mean, I wasn’t blind,” he said, bringing one hand to the back of his neck. “I saw the way you looked at me across the dinner table, and how you seemed to light up whenever we talked, and—I think I knew somehow that she wasn’t just making it up. I just didn’t want to believe her.”

You turned to look at him, seeing the strain in his expression, how his admission seemed to agonize him. “Why not?”

“Because I can never lose what isn’t mine.”

He slid his hand under your palm, interlacing his fingers with yours, his skin cool to the touch. A soft puff of air left your lips as you held his hand tightly, and you let yourself wonder frivolous thoughts about what could have been—what would have transpired if he’d said something before you parted ways last time, if he’d only taken you by the hand and confessed his own blooming crush, kissed you softly in the light of the setting sun, held you close to him until you had to watch him leave. Maybe you would have followed him then, or maybe you would have accepted it as just another part of a life constantly in motion. But you weren’t given the option, and instead, a feverish obsession grew inside you like weeds.

“Just ask me to stay and I will,” you whispered, leaning into him more.

“You’re telling me you don’t want to go back?” he questioned, tilting his head back against the wall. “You don’t miss them?”

“Of course I miss them. But—”

“Then you need to go home.”

“Please, Law,” you said, your voice hushed and wavering. “What I need is you.”

His eyes fell shut and he let out a shivering exhale as his name left your lips. “That’s not fair. You know that’s not fair.”

“Neither was making me want you the way I do.” You ran your fingers up his forearm, tracing the outlines of his tattoo.

Law reached across your body and grasped your chin between his fingers, turning your head towards him, your body following, your eyes locked on his. His hand moved up and drifted across your face, his fingertips dragging along the contours of your jaw, memorizing the soft round of your cheek, his thumb sweeping across your lower lip, tugging it down gently.

“You sure you really want this?” he asked, his eyes flitting over your face, as if trying to read whatever words you were about to say before they even formed. “You sure you want this with me?”

“I’m sure.”

It was every bit of permission he needed to drop those last layers of formality that separated the two of you; he leaned forward, his nose grazing yours, and you felt his warm breath spread over your skin. Law’s eyes drifted shut as he tentatively pressed his lips to yours, holding them there as his palm slid down your cheek and came to rest at the back of your neck, cradling your head in his hand. The hesitance gave way at once to hunger, and he softly groaned as his warm tongue slipped between your lips, impatient and demanding, his mouth engulfing yours in long, drugging kisses as he gripped the back of your neck tighter and pressed you into him like he didn’t dare let you slip away.

He laid you down, pulling your body against him as he bit and sucked at your lips, and he slotted his firm thigh in between your legs, pressing up into your clothed cunt as you laid face-to-face. Everything suddenly felt jumbled, hearts racing, hands moving over clothed flesh, tongues tasting the salt of each other’s skin, quiet noises of pleasure mixing in the air between you. Law’s wandering hand found the hem of your shirt and moved under it, the warmth of his palm welcome against your skin. A low growl lingered in his chest as he carefully grasped your breast, kneading it in his hand, feeling how your skin tightened under his palm, before rolling your pebbled nipple between his thumb and index finger until you moaned into his mouth.

He broke away from the sweetness of your mouth to hush you. “You have to be quiet for me, okay?”

“Of course, whatever you say.” You would have agreed to almost anything if meant he wouldn’t stop, if he’d keep you wrapped in his addictive embrace forever.

A familiar shameless grin stretched across his mouth, as he rewarded you with the praise you coveted, the sweet words that echoed in your head: “That’s my good girl.”

His lips captured yours again, as if to keep you quiet by occupying your mouth, and you slowly started to grind against his thigh, needing something to satisfy the ache that was beginning to build. Law groaned under his breath at your movements, and you felt the weight of his own arousal start to press into your leg as he rutted against you, the two of you building a slow and steady rhythm as you extracted your own pleasure from each other’s bodies.

Law gradually moved his free hand down your form, as if he was trying to map every curve, every dip, every peak and valley and commit it to memory. He removed his thigh from between your legs as his large hand slipped down the front of your sweatpants and meandered past the waistband of your panties, his fingertips moving down your soft mound to the apex of your slit. You sucked in air through your teeth as he wasted no time, making firm, persistent circles over your swollen clit, sending a warm rush of pleasure through your lower half.

After a few moments, he unhurriedly slid his fingertips down your dampened pussy lips, slipping his middle and ring fingers inside you, biting down on his lower lip and drawing in a sharp breath as he felt how drenched you were for him, how he was making you as desperate and needy and malleable as he liked you to be. Law crooked his fingers upwards and shallowly thrust in and out, while the heel of his palm pounded against your tender bundle of nerves repeatedly with every movement of his wrist.

“Fuck, I love the way you make me feel,” you huffed into his shoulder, as you rocked your hips in time with his movements, pressing your pulsing clit more firmly against his hand.

“I know you do,” he purred, “why do you think it’s so hard for me to stop?”

It wasn’t going to be long before he’d unravel you, days of wanting and yearning built up inside your core, an impatient heat burning away for him, one only he knew how to quell. Your quaking thighs pressed together around his forearm, and an unbearable need to feel yourself spasm around those long, skilled fingers of his obscured your every rational thought.

“I know you’re close,” he whispered through a cocky grin as his fingers moved a little faster, plunged a little deeper while you moaned into his pillow, a familiar tremble moving through your core. “I can feel it.”

“Fuck, ‘m gonna cum, Law,” you whined against the softness of his shirt, your every nerve feeling like it had been set ablaze.

“That’s it, stay nice and quiet, and breathe through it for me,” Law panted in your ear. “Cum for me. Cum on my fingers like a good girl.”

A sharp wail hitched in your throat and you clenched your eyes shut as you groped at his shirt, grabbing a handful of fabric in your fist. That wire inside you wound tighter and tighter, and with a few last hard thrusts of his fingers, you felt a blinding, white-hot moment of release, your walls fluttering and pulsing around him while you keened his name into his chest, singing it straight into his heart, finally feeling that ache begin to fade with every shudder.

“I love the way you say my name,” he whispered hotly in your ear, his soft lips caressing your jaw and neck. “It’s like a fucking drug.”

He slowly pulled his hand out of your pants and slipped his arousal-covered digits past his lips, sucking every drop of your juices off them. A shudder ran through you as you watched how his eyes fluttered as he pulled his fingers out of his mouth with a soft pop; he eagerly reclaimed your lips afterwards in a greedy kiss, and you could taste yourself on his tongue as it swept inside your mouth.

“You always know how to ruin me,” you murmured as he tugged at your kiss-swollen lip with his teeth, before soothing it with the tip of his tongue.

He nuzzled against your cheek. “I think maybe I was always meant to.”

Your shaking hand nervously worked its way up Law’s shirt, wanting to finally feel what you’d only admired from a distance, touch what you’d dreamed of as you writhed in bed at night. Soft little moans crept up his throat as you ran your hand over the contours of bone and sinew, fingertips brushing over the hard, warm muscles of his chest and trailing down the corrugated leanness of his abdomen. The stiff fabric of his sleep pants scratched against your hand as you moved further down and rested your palm on his clothed cock; he inhaled sharply and you felt him throb into your hand.

“Is this alright?” you asked, stilling your movements and feeling the heat of him against your palm.

“Y-yeah,” he choked out. “S’good.”

You slowly moved your hand over his length, feeling the head swelling against the heel of your palm, feeling how he pulsed with every gentle motion and how a darkened, wet spot began to form from how his aching cock leaked for you with every subtle stroke. Law’s eyes were closed, his eyebrows knitted together in something that looked like blissful torment, soft puffs of breath leaving his lips. His hips rocked against your hand as you palmed him, and you couldn’t help but want more, to have him in your grip without the barrier of fabric between you—to know if the way you’d imagined how he would feel and look so many times was anything close to reality. Your hand moved up and you tried to maneuver past the waistband, but found it to have little give.

“Wait, here, let me—” He hastily pulled down his pajama pants, moving to lay on his back, one arm behind his head, the other stroking the top of your hand. He eyed you nervously, as you took in the sight of his cock for the first time—the thick shaft was nestled in a dark bramble of pubic hair, his length as significant as you had pictured it in your lust-addled mind as you’d grind against your pillow on sleepless nights, the swollen head now a dusky pink as it throbbed for you.

“Fuck,” you remarked without thinking, noticing how it curved upward just slightly, wondering how that might feel inside you, if he’d stretch you deliciously as he slowly pushed into you, if it would hit all those sensitive spots deep within your walls in the way his fingers always could—or better. “It’s…yeah.”

A deep and pervasive blush spread over his face while an incredulous smirk formed on his lips. “So good you’re almost speechless, huh?”

“That good,” you grinned as your hand moved up his thigh, fingers lightly moving over his skin, teasing him with every touch that wasn’t yet concentrated on his twitching length. His quickening breaths were intoxicating, and the way he watched your every movement through his dark lashes, his pupils blown, was heavenly; if you weren’t so very eager to feel his hardness in your hand, you would have tormented him a little more, until his he was practically drooling and frantic for your touch. As it was, you thought he had gone long enough without knowing how it would feel to have you give him as much relief as he always gave to you, until his muscles were sore and he was desperate to cum, and you certainly didn’t want to make him wait any longer.

You wrapped your hand around the base of his shaft, squeezing it gently to watch him swell, before lowering your mouth to him, kissing and running your tongue over the head, tasting the salty, sticky precum that had smeared over it as you had palmed him through his pants. His abs tensed and his hands gripped the sheets as your tongue flicked underneath the tip, then moved to lavish him from top to base, making soft sweeping motions over every inch of his length, coating him fully in saliva that glistened in the dim light.

His mouth hung open as he watched your tongue moving over him, your fist lazily pumping his shaft. “God, it’s even better than I imagined.”

“Yeah?” you asked, the word muffled as you tapped his pulsing length against your flattened tongue. “You’ve thought about this?”

“Y-yeah,” he blushed, his ears reddened. He reclined back on the pillow and laid his forearm over his eyes, not wanting to meet your gaze while he surrendered to some impulsive urge to tell you every sordid secret he held in his chest. “How could I not? I’d come back here at night and sometimes my hands would still smell like you. And—fuck—I’d just lay here and—god, I’d feel so guilty, but I wanted you so bad it hurt if I didn’t.”

“Good to know it wasn’t just me, then.”

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Law muttered breathlessly as you finally took him in your mouth, two fingers and your thumb gripping the base where your lips couldn’t quite reach without a struggle. Even still, you choked a little as he reached the back of your mouth, and the tightening of your throat around his sensitive tip made him thrust his hips, forcing him deeper into your warm, wet mouth. A low whine left his lips as you felt him swell on your tongue, and he hastily moved his hand over his mouth, breathing heavily through his nose as he adjusted himself on the pillows to watch you.

You steadily bobbed your head up and down, moving your flattened tongue over the underside of his shaft as you did, maintaining a steady rhythm as you felt swells of your own arousal hit you with every moan and grunt that he tried to contain. His breaths became quick and shallow as you felt him tensing his body, his free hand now in a tight, shaking fist at his side. A deep groan of satisfaction left your lungs, and the resulting vibrations in your mouth made him whimper quietly, softly repeating, “That’s it, that’s it, don’t stop,” over and over into his palm.

His eyes clenched shut and his hand clamped over his mouth harder, a low groan reverberating in his chest as everything inside of him seemed to coil, every nerve growing taut as your spit dribbled over your hand and pooled around the base of his cock, small rivulets dripping down his aching balls. He tapped your arm frantically, as if you alert you to something, then grew still for a moment and held his breath. With a series of warm and erratic pants, his whole body shuddered and he reached a jarring, pulsing climax, his hips bucking into your mouth as he throbbed and flooded himself into you, hot ropes of his spend landing on your tongue and coating the inside of your mouth while he grunted your name again and again like some lewd mantra. You drank him down as he desperately sucked air into his lungs, letting the last pulsating waves of his orgasm move through his muscles. You slowly pulled yourself off him, sucking on the tip to coax every last drop from him, before giving it a final, gentle kiss and sitting up beside him.

Law’s eyes opened finally, and he blinked hard, glanced down at you to study your satisfied, shameless expression. He finally removed his quaking hand from his mouth, panting, “Shit, did—did you swallow?”

You nodded gleefully, sticking your tongue out at him, as if to prove it, wanting him to see the extent of your willingness to satisfy.

“Oh fuck, you’re such a good girl for me,” he said through shivering breaths, waving you towards him. “C’mere.”

You laid down and he quickly turned over and wrapped you in his sinewy arms, leaning in to kiss you, not seeming to care if he tasted the last drops of himself on your tongue. His hands pressed into your back as he drew you closer, digging into your soft flesh, and you wrapped your leg around his waist in return, pulling his hips against yours until you could feel the weight of his half-hard cock resting against inner thigh, wanting him as close to inside you as you could get him for the moment.

Your body seized mid-kiss as a sudden urgent rapping at the door cut through the thick, sex-tinged air in the room, a muffled “Captain?” coming from the other side.

“Dammit,” Law hissed as he pressed his forehead to yours.

“What should I do?” you mouthed at him, knowing the answer before he could say it.

“I’ll be right there,” he shouted in the direction of the door. He wrested himself away from you and out of bed, untangling from your limbs and the twisted bed-sheets, almost tripping over the pajama pants that were still pooled around his ankles. He stepped out of them, and despite the sheer panic flowing through you, it was all but impossible to not admire his frame, the muscled planes of his shoulders, the dip in his lower back that led down to the slight curves of his ass. He bent down and grabbed his jeans, quickly pulling them on, his breathing still labored as his still-shaking hands struggled with the fly.

He turned back towards you, and you watched as his wrist instinctively flexed, a small ball of blue light forming. You closed your eyes and braced yourself for impact, wondering if you’d get the wind knocked out of you again this time, or if you’d be spared with a softer landing; instead, you felt the mattress shift beside you, a clammy hand settling on your forearm. You turned to see Law kneeling beside the bed, and he reached up to stroke your cheek, worry settling in the lines on his forehead.

“Just wait here for me,” he said, barely audible. “Stay quiet, okay?”

“Sure,” you said with a nod, your words almost eclipsed by the persistent hum of the ship.

“One second,” he said towards the door as he maneuvered over boxes into his bathroom, and you watched as he rinsed his mouth with water and scrubbed his hands, trying to wash any trace of you from his skin. He returned to the door, wiping drops of water from his scruff, and slid out into the hallway, shooting you a quick glance before he shut it behind him.

The lantern above the bed swung a little more energetically as you laid there, inhaling the scent of him from his pillows, wrapping yourself in his sheets, letting yourself live in the delusion, if only for the moment, that this was your everyday—this was the room you returned to at night, the bed you shared as you drifted to sleep, the sheets that would crumple and wrinkle underneath you as you fucked the loneliness out of each other.

A short time passed as you let yourself indulge in fantasy, dreaming of an ordinary kind of love, and Law slid back into his room like an apparition, offering you a tight-lipped smile as he carefully closed the door behind him.

“Everything okay?” You sat up, still clinging to one of his pillows.

He nodded and collapsed into the chair at his desk, interlacing his fingers behind his head and leaning back. “Just something in the engine room, it’s fine.”

“Look, I-I know I shouldn’t be here,” you stammered, suddenly feeling like you didn’t belong in his space, knowing that despite your desires, this wasn’t meant to last, and it would only be a matter of time before he asked you to leave, so you may as well go of your own accord and try to hang onto the whispers of dignity you had left. “I’m so sorry for this, I’ll come by tomorrow and we can work out things with—with the surgery and all that.”

You stood, tugging up your sweats and pulling your shirt down, trying to make yourself look like you had been doing anything other than deep-throating your captain, knowing there was no way to hide your kiss-swollen lips or the smell of desire on you, but you could at least make your clothes appear respectable. As you started to shuffle past him, he whispered your name and a long arm extended out and hooked around your midsection, stopping you in place, and you gripped his firm shoulder to keep yourself from pitching backwards from the momentum.

“Captain—”

“Tell me you need me again,” he cooed as he placed his other hand on your hip and guided you in front of him, his knees bumping against your unsteady legs. “Say my name and tell me you need me.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said in that low voice in that way you couldn’t resist, a glimmer of desire in his eyes, “I want to hear it.”

You straddled his lap, and he placed his hands firmly on your waist, gripping you and pulling you down against him so hard you gasped. Your arms found their way around his shoulders, and you carded your fingers through his thick black hair, gently massaging his scalp until his eyes fluttered and he could only gaze at you through the fall of his dark lashes.

“I need you, Law,” you murmured, your lips brushing against his ear as you spoke, before leaving a trail of soft kisses down his jaw.

“Good.” He shivered under your touch, his voice now a low and hungry growl. “I need you, too.”

“Then don’t make me leave.”

One hand slid up your spine to grip the back of your neck, holding you still, and he placed a careful kiss on your lips, smiling as he pulled away. “As if I could.”

[kiryoutann]

I have read 'a man's heart is truly a wretched, wretched thing' and when I tell you it leaves marks in me, it is. I still can feel the pain, each words, I still can feel it at all. It's been years I didn't read any CoD fanfic and I found you, It's like I've been searching for a mystic flower everyone is so sure it is a mystic but I found it lol, and I also love your writing style. And the funny thing is, I kinda relate to the reader lmaoo.

Idk what I want to write more about this, but I'm glad I found your blog hehe, and dont forget to take care of yourself 🩶🩶

-🍞

when i tell you i immediately smiled when i saw this!!! omg. made my day, made my whole week my whole june and my whole july. thank u for giving me my first feedback for my lil ghost fic🥺💘 you’re an angel

funny thing about me is that i rely on feedback so SO much when writing fanfiction, and usually the lack of it makes me feel like i’m doing smth wrong or that it’s not interesting (i’m TRYING to not do this tho). but when i saw this??? and i read the part where u relate?? THE MYSTIC FLOWER??? ILY ILY ILY FOREVER.

and this is gonna be long and random but GOD. i’m sorry that you relate to it but i hope you can find comfort in the story and the upcoming chapters. AND HEY! sometimes we cope by reading something that we relate to so it’s ok

here comes the long unasked explanation…

the main reason why i came up with the plot is cause i need to get smth out of my system and maybe it’ll help others to process whatever they’re feeling too. and also, it’s the fact that i gotta pour my heart and thoughts that i gathered after making a playlist of it.

so like, the URGE to somehow write it all down, to explore simon’s character, my portrayal of him, and THESE TWO – this destructive duo with the MC and her anxious attachment style while simon’s more on the avoidant attachment side. the way he thinks he’s protecting her, not wanting to hurt her—but in reality it was just some kind of justification for his self-sabotaging habits, his inability to accept that maybe he deserves smth good in his life.

can’t say much about MC cause she’s probably gonna be a more complex character (surprisingly) than him. mostly gonna be linked to her parental issues. my pathetic, sad, love-starved girl who’s gonna learn that maybe mother was right all along – that a man’s heart is truly, a wretched, wretched thing.

can’t wait to share more with u 🍞 anon<33 have a great day lovieee. stay happy n healthy and TAKE CARE OF YOURSELF. xoxo!!!!

[maditalksmusic]

An Analysis of Jeff Buckley's Grace (1994)

I still remember vividly the first time I listened to Jeff Buckley’s “Lover, You Should've Come Over". It was a rainy winter evening in 2021, and I was in a bit of a music rut. Everything I’d been listening to on repeat for the last month or two had become annoyingly redundant, and in a rather torpid attempt to reinvigorate my consumption of music, I decided to put my Spotify-generated “Discover Weekly” playlist. A few songs went by that, weren’t bad per se, but certainly weren’t all that memorable. When that opening harmonium passage graced my ears, chills washed over me. I stopped my Pinterest scroll, turned up the volume, then laid back in bed and just listened. Six and a half minutes later, I found myself uncontrollably weeping. To this day, “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is still my favorite song ever made. 

Jeff Buckley’s charm lies in the fact that, as it was best said by Dominique Leone in her 2004 review of Grace for Pitchfork, he was “a songbird, like the kind that used to receive roses and blown kisses from the debutantes in the balcony after performances.” While technically classified under the extremely broad umbrella that is rock music, Buckley effortlessly blurs the lines of genre on Grace. He incorporates a myriad of sounds characteristic of not only rock, but also jazz, blues, and folk. He got his start in Los Angeles and then moved to New York City and joined guitarist Gary Lucas’ band, Gods & Monsters, prior to entering a record deal as a solo artist. Buckley performed at cafés at tiny venues around Lower Manhattan through 1992 and 1993, most frequently at Sin-é, which inspired the release of his debut solo EP, Live at Sin-é, in 1993. A standout from the EP is “Je N'en Connais Pas La Fin”, which translates to “I do not know the end” is a sort of cover of the original Edith Piaf song, loosely translated to English from the French lyrics. 

Released in August of 1994, Grace is Jeff Buckley’s first and only complete studio album. Since his tragic passing on May 29, 1997, songs from projects titled Sketches for My Sweetheart The Drunk and You and I were released posthumously in 1998 and 2016, respectively. The original version of Grace, distributed by Columbia Records, features ten tracks. However, in 2004, Columbia decided to re-release a “legacy edition” of the album, featuring an eleventh track, "Forget Her", that was never intended to be released. The ethics of that decision are still heavily debated, as Buckley himself stated that he despised the song and did not want it on the album, despite Columbia’s original attempts to convince him to release the track. 

Grace opens with the hauntingly fervent track "Mojo Pin", inspired by a dream of Buckley’s. It’s title is a euphemism for an almost overwhelming sort of addiction to someone, to a point where you have to have them. The term “mojo” originated in the Southern United States in the 1920s, adapted from the Gullah word “moco”, referring to magic, and came to be used as slang for heroin and other drugs in the 1960s. I don’t think this track would have functioned nearly as well anywhere else in the album - it starts off softly, reaching a desperate crescendo by the end of song as Buckley lets his vocals soar with the repetition of “Black beauty, I love you so,” in tandem with an intense snare finish, driving in the sheer emotional power that is held through the duration of the album. 

Following “Mojo Pin” is the album’s title track, "Grace", which sounds completely different, yet still manages to encapsulate the same wretched yet hopeful yearning that is interwoven throughout the whole album. “Grace” was inspired by Buckley’s experience saying goodbye to his girlfriend at the airport. It explores the interplay between the struggle with the passing of time and the ways that love can carry a person through those difficulties. As Buckley croons “it’s my time coming, I’m not afraid / Afraid to die” in the first verse, it’s easy to see death as a sort of beautiful conclusion instead of a violent end. Listening to Grace very closely resembles a religious experience, at least for me. The cover of Leonard Cohen's 1984 "Hallelujah"  featured on the album brings this sentiment to a very literal level. While it isn’t my favorite song on the album, Buckley’s cover is the most beautiful rendition I’ve heard. It remains one of his most popular songs and for many, is a gateway into his music. 

Interestingly, three covers are featured on Grace. “Hallelujah” is known by the vast majority of listeners to be a cover, however "Lilac Wine" was composed by James Shelton in 1950 for the musical Dance Me A Song and "Corpus Christi Carol" is an English hymn written in the sixteenth century. Buckley’s version of “Corpus Christi Carol” is based specifically on an arrangement by Benjamin Britten. Both “Lilac Wine” and “Corpus Christi Carol” have become closely associated with Jeff Buckley as his personal sound still shines brightly through both songs, his unmistakable voice working beautifully with any variety of instrumentation. 

The juxtaposition of “Hallelujah” and “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” immediately next to each other in the track list is a very clever sort of storytelling. Buckley’s cover of “Hallelujah” differs from others in that it doesn’t feel nearly as hymnal. The production is incredibly minimal, putting the width of Buckley’s vocal range on full display. It doesn’t feel like a church service so much as it is akin to finding yourself alone in a cathedral, reaching out from the depths of your soul to bathe yourself in the elusive notion of God’s love. It’s almost as if the music is trying to achieve some sort of salvation before it plunges into the heartbreaking ballad that is “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over”, a song that begs for forgiveness at the cost of mind, body, and soul. Much of Grace has its roots in Jeff Buckley’s relationship with Rebecca Moore, with some even considering her to be his muse. However, “Lover, You Should’ve Come Over” is most specifically about the end of their relationship. The track holds some of Buckley’s strongest songwriting, and quite frankly some of the best in history. “All my blood for the sweetness of her laughter” and “She’s the tear that hangs inside my soul forever” are some of my favorite lyrics out there. It’s a particularly gorgeous song on the record, but live, even if only seen through a decades-old recording, is soul-crushing. The performance Buckley did for JBTV Chicago in November of 1994 is forever seared into my mind. 

The conclusion of Grace has become a rather controversial topic due to the 2004 addition of “Forget Her” with the release of the Legacy Edition by Columbia Records. I enjoy the song independently, but I never listen to it as a part of the album. If  it was added at an earlier point in the tracklist it could debatably work, either between "Last Goodbye"  and “Lilac Wine” or between "So Real" and “Hallelujah”, though I believe Jeff Buckley’s original thought process on keeping it off the album was absolutely sound. The final two tracks, "Eternal Life" and "Dream Brother" on the other hand, tie up the album perfectly. 

“Eternal Life” is the ‘heaviest’ song on the album instrumentally, more aligned with a traditional rock song than anything else on Grace. It stands out considerably from the sounds on the rest of the album, even while those sounds are so wonderfully varied, but it does so well. Departing from the more autobiographical lyrics of many of the songs on the album, “Eternal Life” is focused on the struggles of being human, written as a product of Buckley’s anger, according to Genius over world events such as the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, World War II, killings in Guyana, and more. It’s an expression of an anger shared by many at the time of its release, and an anger that many people today continue to feel as we see the horrendous effects of the Israel-Palestine conflict, the ongoing war in Ukraine, and feel the stress of the upcoming presidential election. “Dream Brother” is an ideal conclusion to Grace. The song serves as a warning in a sense, inspired by one of Buckley’s friends who left a pregnant girlfriend, telling him not to be like “the one who made me so old”, referencing his father, Tim Buckley, who only met his own son once and died of a drug overdose at 28. “Dream Brother” can serve as a reminder to us all to be accountable for our actions and allow ourselves to fully experience our emotions. 

The constant sense of raw and unbridled emotional vulnerability is what makes Grace what it is. I always do my best creative work after listening to some Buckley, because he’s an artist that can open you up and force you to dig into the depths of your psyche by means of song. That emotional vulnerability is the driving force behind Jeff Buckley’s ability to craft such enchantingly gut-wrenching music, and ultimately that is what every listener can take away from Grace. 

[seanofbeankeep]

The character playlists made while reading Neverwinter and some WIP playlists.

Wanted these to feel like their vibe or almost as if you can hear them singing the songs. Or like ‘aah the lyrics line up!’. These get me through the day lol. It’s fun to make these I recommend it for your music vibes too

Drizzt

Top 4

What am I without you - it’s like he’s singing to Catti-brie in this one. It becomes sadder when I think of this in Neverwinter books or ghost king 😭

From chaos to harmony - leaving Menzoberranzan vibes

Don’t look back in Anger - philosophy Drizzt

F.E.A.R - clever song with more philosophy Drizzt

Turned out that Drizzt is from Manchester

Dahlia Sin'felle

Top 4

Riot Rhythm - ride the lightning. I love her fighting style and power and this feels like her charging up her flail.

Mommy Can’t sleep - keep thinking to take it off because it goes so deep in parts like all different parts of her personality at once. Sometimes makes me sad. But also it’s a banger of a song high energy too that makes it feeling like your fighting your way out

True love will find you in the end - Her deep desire to feel love and my hope she will find it

212 - her at her most badass you can’t beat me in battle and battle of words.

Artemis Entreri

Top 4

Running the World - sounds like he’s singing this one for real. He would sing this line to king Gareth.

“Well did you hear there’s a natural order, those most deserving rise up to the top, well I say…shit floats.”

The Cutter - feel like assassin vibes. Feel him doing practice drills with his dagger.

Wretched shades - title works and once again feels like him in fight no lyrics pure focus.

(Hit video limit)

I want to break free - song in his heart powering his will power

Jarlaxle

Top 4

Stayin Alive - Jarlaxle fighting and surviving music is disco

Stand and deliver - while he’s never been a highwayman he would be a dandy highwayman.

Dandy Star - more of a Jarlaxle fans singing this one vibe

Magic Dance - he’s got to have a Bowie song and this is the one imo

Wipe

Catti-brie

Having harder time with her but feel like this one is almost done.

Too 4 so far

Blackbiird - something philosophical for her and something I think she sings in forest or around campfire

King - she’s dwarven royal and her singing more about who she is beyond other estimations

I put a spell on you - I love her wizard self that emerges

You’re dead - might move this one but figured her in fighting music when she’s in fight mode

Zak

Reached my photo limit but its alk rage against the machine and old socialist folk songs like Red Flag.

[jamrockshuffle]

tes·​ta·​ment noun a: a tangible proof or tribute b: an expression of conviction

spotify link / image credit

izzy hands playlist; annotations, tracklist, and details under the cut

Updated 10/16/2023: literally so much manchester orchestra towards the end. but it's MY playlist I'll do what I want

A lot of kind of emotional, dark, passionate ed/izzy in this. So just keep that in mind :) This playlist was started last year. I think all of the songs fit still, but if you're looking for the more season 2 oriented content, I will mark the songs added since it aired. Hope you enjoy! It's nearly six hours I think I have a disease.

As per the uzsh the genres run the gambit. don't say I didn't warn you - All This Time / The Beta Machine

When you rose up this morning Did you take it for granted That I'd be there when you woke? That I'd still be there when you woke? [...] If you want me to adore you Better get up off the floor now I've said all I've had to say But maybe there's some better way

- Lost at Sea / Kellermensch

The war is over and I lost I learned the hard way not to trust It's getting easier every day To watch you slip further away

- You Should Have Known I'd Leave / Vast

Love is cold Love is blind Love is a sea And I don't know what you want But I know it's not me

- Blown Minded / Young Galaxy

In my heart I have lived without aught It's been the war of attrition Between a small-minded fool And sublime intuition

- Breathe / Puscifer

honestly lads I don't know what to say it just goes ok sorry

- Holy My Hand / UNKLE

- Touched / Vast

The razors and the dying roses Plead I don't leave you alone The demi-gods and hungry ghosts Oh god, god knows I'm not at home I'll never find someone quite like you, again I'll never find someone quite like you, again

- The Rat / Dead Confederate

This fucking song. I added it over a year ago but holy shit, has season 2 made it that much crazier. Honestly the entire song is just so... i don't even know what to tell ya tbh I would paste the whole song here if I could Shoot from the back And take good aim Make sure I'm dead Bang Bang 'Cause I'm a rat There's no mistake Under the bed Where you sleep Crush the skull And make me tame Sweep it up Hide it away No morals shown In no way explained Stupid human Shit for brains I am going feral over this song and how it slides in so neatly for season 2 so far (as of posting this, episode 3) I'll follow you Into the grave And at the gates I see the passing say "The judge be judged And all the wretched be saved" I throw my curse All across your days <3 ty for coming to my ted talk

- Lovesong / Snake River Conspiracy

might be a little controversial since it's a cover of the original by the cure, but this is more the kind of music I tend to listen to so that's what's in the playlist lol.

- Structure of Love II (Renholdër Remix) / VOWWS

Take a look at me now Have I disappeared? Is this the structure of love? Are you in here? I can't get you out of my mind Your love is so hard to define

- Tusk / Fleetwood Mac

I've said it before, I'll say it again. PERFECT edizzy song. If you think this is a stede/ed song you're wrong get the fuck outta here

- Bleak / Death Machine

Hold my breath Known I am one of the walking dead you say In my chest, there is a bombing It's made of flesh it's made of flesh

- The End Is Begun / 3

Watch what you say Words can be heard from your grave Pluck from a fist full of straws You cannot resist your tragic flaws And you said what you said That I'd be better off dead Than be fed into the furnace Of the monster Shall I cry, shall I die Shall I be shot through the sky As I fly into the furnace Of the monster

- Breadwinner / BEA1991

- Martyr / Roniit, Saint Mesa

Drop all your hunger, kill your dues So give me shelter, give me proof I'll be the martyr and the muse All of your sorrow, I'll consume

- Man Overboard / Puscifer

- Ennoea / Keluar

- Complicated End Times / O'Brother

You can try and measure what I do By the sweat in my brow But you don’t know a thing about me You want to snuff the fire out

- Goliath / Woodkid

A sustained heart pain and a dark fever How did I get fooled by such a savage curse? The more I forgive you, the more it backfires Now you're dancing through the smoke like nothing else matters

- Beat And The Pulse / Austra

- Spellwork / Austra

I work alone saving my soul If yesterday hurts, tomorrow is worse Send me a sign, for my body's aligned I'm ready to waste all my limbs and my face My pores are wide open And bleed for your potion Spellwork and lies

- Feral Love / Chelsea Wolfe

Your eyes black like an animal Black like an animal Crossing the water Lead them to die

- Drift / So Below

Even if you change your mind It doesn't have to mean that it's over Even when the moment's gone I feel the same Even when you bite your tongue It doesn't have to mean that it's over Even if it all goes wrong I feel the same way, hey

- Dancer in the Dark / Scratch Massive

Where did you go? My mind is gone I'm dancing in the dark Just silent and grey It's just silent and grey

- The More I Sleep, The Less I Dream / We Were Promised Jetpacks

I lost all hope I left it with someone, some time, somewhere ago And I picture it now The house on the hill, with nobody wandering around And I cry like hell I'm hugging the floor and pretending there's somebody else The more I sleep The less I dream The closer I feel Oh my word I'm nothing but a curse Oh my word I'm nothing but a-

- Ship in a Bottle / fin

Oh, captain, let's make a deal Where we both say the things that we both really feel I feel scared and I'm starting to sink And I only sink deeper the deeper I think

- Toma / Puscifer

Stole my patience, stole my pride Snatched the rhythm from my stride Kicked my certainty up the middle Knocked the wind out of my romantic side Hopes and wishes set aflame What's your purpose here, whatcha hope to gain? Took my dignity, you took my dignity Burned a lover so earned an enemy

- The Shore / Woodkid

I walked all day along the shore I was made for loving you I drown my pain in alcohol How could you feel the same way too? My feet will not walk anymore So I guess you ought to know the truth I wonder what I am made for If I'm not meant to be with you

- Restless (16BL Remix) / UNKLE, Josh Homme

Well, I'm all restless but I don't care You don't like me much, well, me neither You go read my mind like some kind of God You live, let's have you trippin' on the same one you lost

- Ship To Wreck / Florence + The Machine

And, ah, my love remind me, what was it that I said? I can't help but pull the earth around me to make my bed And, ah, my love remind me, what was it that I did? Did I drink too much? Am I losing touch? Did I build a ship to wreck?

- Lies / CHVRCHES

Always, we can sing, we can make time Old songs, flood and flame, you could be mine But you got to show me both knees, skin and bone Clothe me, throw me, move me 'til I can sell you lies You can't get enough Make a true believer of Anyone, anyone, anyone I can call you up If I feel alone I can feed your dirty mind Like I know, like I know what you want

- The End / The Beta Machine

A million miles away from you this time I'll do what it takes I'm on my way If lines are in the sand I'll go under If I can make it in time I will bring you back with me If all that's left of you is in my head This is more than a bad dream The end of all I know

- Jealous Sea / MEG MYERS

This whole song... like bruh lmfao Everything's right, everything's wrong When you call my name I can't handle the thought of always being gone When I'm wearing this ring And I want to go out, I want to get drunk Being in love and I don't want to fight But nothing makes sense anymore And I don't think I can stop the jealousy When it comes, it comes like waves and I can't breathe And I don't think I can stop the jealousy When it runs, it runs like lightening through my teeth I want you to tell me what to do I want you to tell me what you need When you look at me like you do Don't leave, I just can't get enough I just can't get enough

- Holy Water / Zippermouth

I don't want you to save me from the demons only you seem to see But don't you dare take my pride away and strip me of my sanity I'm calling all of you out I'm calling out of you in To the party of unnatural sin And my imperfections scare you, I can see it in your eyes Water That burns my bastard mind 'Cause I can love as good as one can love someone In a perfect world is one I will love myself before I will love you

- Die For You / VALORANT, Grabbitz

Now there's only one thing I can do Fight until the end like I promised to Wishing there was something left to lose This could be the day I die for you

- Choke / Hybrid

I'm not explaining myself to you

- Give It Up / Black City Lights

The fever's own Filling in my bones and my blood It's enough But I still can't take it off It's sickening Hands around my neck And my chest is burning with my breathing

- Elijah / Blood Red Shoes

- Love You Wrong / Husky Loops

I've thought about it all along I am sure I love you wrong

- Autumn / Bear In Heaven

Silent romance guided by chance, just like everything Altogether would it ever suffocate the pain?

- Hands On The Bible / Local H

Hands on the Bible Scared like a child God holds you liable For what you've done Homicidal Stared down your idols A pretty baby Never born You can't believe it You didn't mean it But they saw you do it And they know your name

- Touch / July Talk

I want to make some space underneath my skin Cut me open, I can let you in Should I let myself be torn in two? And will you give into that side of you?

- Avalanche / Kosheen

He's nothing like me So wrong and wretched Your safe reality Is living in sketches And live out happiness With no explanation And peer out at the world

- A Long Time Away / Shearwater

A break in the clouds like a crack in a cylinder But now there's blood on the beach and a wreck in the water As the shadow arrives on the face of your innocence You feel the shock in your eyes and the shaking in your own hands

- It's No Good / Depeche Mode

Don't say you want me Don't say you need me Don't say you love me It's understood Don't say you're happy Out there without me I know you can't be 'Cause it's no good

- Always Right / Ramona Falls

God is in the things you love So don't you punch me with kid gloves

- No Tomorrow / The Birthday Massacre

Dedication to the ruin of the light within you Darkness all around It's so easy to let go of all the things that make you true Watch it all fall down You bait me, I follow And if this night feels hollow Then drown me in sorrow There will be no tomorrow

- Flood / Saltillo

I wanna watch you wreck all the paintings in my house As you run down my wall (Holes of my life) Wash away these things I never needed These papers and these clothes

- The Remedy / Puscifer

izzy @ stede bonnet tbh. well, in season 1 at least ;)

- Little One / Beck

Drown, drown, sailors run aground In a sea change, nothing is safe And strange waves push us every way In a stolen boat, we'll float away

- Becker / Autolux

That's delirium's way You know it seems so right All the entertainment they spray Atrocities contrite It brings you back again It finds you every time The blackest quote they spit into the tin can of your mind

- Eyelids / Saro

In my eyelids, I’ve tattooed your words To remember what I don’t deserve Could you be why I feel so empty?

- Found You / Django Django

I've heard my name spoken in vain so many times You called, well here I am, what is yours is mine There's nothing you won't sell But I don't want the wealth you made That's not what I returned for

- Darkness At The Heart Of My Love / Ghost

There's a darkness at the heart of my love That runs cold, runs deep

- Dangerous / Son Lux

I watch you fall Hollow and depleted A city razed Oh, to bury you beneath it

- Numb / MARINA

- Fear and Loathing / MARINA

- O My Heart / Mother Mother

And I throw my heart back to the ocean But it don't go far, it come back floating And I watch it wash it up with the dead fish But it ain't quite dead, it just is like this

- Bones / The Qemists, Kellermensch

Fearless: my heart Open my arms Laying on the dark isle Every way is down

- El Monstro / SkraeckOedlan

(There beyond the dawn we see you, but our longing is an agony) Där bortom gryningen vi ser dig, men våran längtan är ett kval (They have robbed you of your future, we belong together you and I) De har berövat dig din framtid, vi hör tillsammans du och jag

- Relocate / Kauf

Do you feel any better now? I'm trying to follow what you told me I'm just a dog, mystical empathy and carefree I can't forget the skin pulled tight, every letter read Is it your justice we never see? Do you feel any better now? Your father is lying where the bones are A little lost colony from the start I can't forget the skin pulled tight, every letter read Is it your justice we never see? We never see what only you can say We are ready for it

-> SONGS ADDED AFTER SEASON 2 STARTS HERE

- Before We Drift Away / Nothing But Thieves

- A Place To Call Home / Big Wreck

So how do you beg for what's your own Pick the pieces, lick the wounds Stoke the fire, fan the flame Squeeze the clouds until it rains Would you champion the cause? 'Til you find out what you've lost Who do you dare to call your own And where's the place that you call home?

- My Name Is Ruin / Gary Numan

My name is Ruin, my name is vengeance My name is no one, and no one is calling My name is Ruin, my name is heartbreak My name is lonely, my sorrow's a darkness

- Run From Me / Timber Timbre

- Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92: II. Allegretto / Beethoven

- Because the Night / Patti Smith

- Dear Brother / Puscifer

Reminiscing on our indestructible days The party never seemed to end We donkey punched the night away Some risky business, my friend Fortune seemed to favor us 'Round every dark and twisted bend

- The Moth / Manchester Orchestra

This song makes me so insane tbh Forced myself to take a different name Buried with metonymy Decide for me Throw the man you used to be away Bury him with rivalry entirely My entire life you've been obsessing with the light The closer that you get, the further up you've got to climb You wanna hear it hurt, you wanna feel it when he dies If you walk that path alone, you've got to look him in the eye

- Brevony / Ramona Falls

- Graveyard Shift / Battle Tapes

I fell asleep at the helm of a runaway train And laid myself at the feet of what I couldn't slay

- Black Cloud / POSTDATA

There's nothing outside, there’s nobody left There's nowhere to hide, nowhere to run or to forget No one to find you if you ever tried to And nobody tries to Sand in the sky, drowning in the wind Look in my eyes, mama, I've been contaminated Little by little by little, just a little bit Can you forgive me? Can you forgive me?

- Keel Timing / Manchester Orchestra

Yet another song that makes me insane. I put too much Manchester Orchestra in here but I'm living my best life Don’t let 'em in your bed, we're lying Don't let 'em in your bed, he is lying Little more, a little more, he is biting I was folding slowly frozen Changed for you And it wasn't right, but it wasn't wrong It was holy

- Pale Black Eye / Manchester Orchestra

This entire Song is so fucking wild I don't have yours or mine I don't hurt you like I used to Amy, you must be tired cause when you sleep, you sleep alone And understand the throne Cause if he didn't pay what he had paid I'd undeniably become erased So whatever you want Take whatever you need And bite your veins Bleed your pain Into me Goddamn I'm tired of lying I wish I loved you like I used to So hold on, you pale black eye Cause when I sleep, I sleep alone

- Strawberry Letter 23 / Shuggie Otis

- Pygmy Love Song / Francis Bebey

- In The Dark / Cathedrals

I can see you fall apart You turn away and fade out of sight But I hear you call in the night Let it go, let me hold you this time (don’t say a word)

- The Sailor Song / Autoheart

ty @soundless-storm for the suggestion :) I was your sailor, your demon, your lover Your overbearing best friend Hoping for some attention

- Megalomaniac / Aeseaes

Eye to thigh as he sharpens his blade Thick sweat, sick salt, lead bellyaches I don’t know what I’ve been drinking Dripping dread as all the lights start scrеaming Seven-inch steel bolt fed to thе head Now is then and I am now bound to forget The devil wears a cotton dress over his gun Jagged mumbles wispy warbles blushing in the sun

- Rule #9 - Child of the Stars / Fish in a Birdcage

You were a wanderer Back when you were young I remember your eyes were clear Brighter than the sun With hands so soft Delicate and sweet You learned to fall And balance on your own two feet I could only lead you so far I believe in who you are

- Vessel / Dan Mangan + Blacksmith

There are other lyrics in this song that are good too but this just reminds me of 2x01 when Izzy tells Fang to unhand him when he starts to cry Stop Wait Un Hand Me

- Cover Me / Black Math

One hand above the skin My head below the water As I float in the deep As I float in the deep

- Let It Storm / Manchester Orchestra

This is very post 2x04. For the new unicorn :) I don't wanna hold back my faith anymore I don't wanna fall into that man again I just wanna keep both my feet on the floor So let it touch me And let it storm

- Disciple / IAMX

Sorry this song is kind of a lot lol Disciple, I absolve you So forgive yourself enough to obey the naked truth That you need to be owned And you beg to be controlled

- Bed Head / Manchester Orchestra

This song is SO season 2 ed/izzy it makes me so insane it's the entire fucking song tbh I'm posting most of the song lyrics sorry. "Bed Head" is two old friends existing in two separate realities. It's a conversation about the lives they lived, the consequences of life's decisions, and finding purpose in trying to be better. Arguing with the dead I'm not alone but it sure feels like someone left Deaf notes and talking heads Carrying on your debt Blood on the bed head and volumes you left unsaid Let 'em talk and let it habit, now I'm afraid you're alone Oh, my God Let me relinquish and start to distinguish my past, and my time You and I are oil and fire, so Oh, my God Let me extinguish the habit, the sequence, the loss in my mind Now I believe in the ghost Ghost Clawing against your skin Clutching my neck said, "It's all supposed to end like this" You and I are panoramic Now I'm afraid of the ghost [...] Right by the entrance, you broke Finally, reality's taking its hold You're not who you were, but you can't let it go You're not where you're from, but you're always alone So I stick a flag in the ground I think I know who I'm living for now I am what I am, same above as the ground It's not what I want, but I'm figuring it out

I'll keep updating the annotations as I have free time :) the playlist is almost 80 songs long and growing lol. Enjoy!

[huesofvioletandpurple]

A few days ago, the DRDT channel made public a “character song” playlist with sixteen songs inside (link). Naturally, considering this means that every character has a theme song of their own, I became Fucking Obsessed and tried matching each song to every character

Out of sixteen, I have exactly Four I am completely and absolutely confident in. That’s like, (checks notes), a quarter of the songs. I wish four was as neat of a number as three but unfortunately I do not get a choice in that regard. This would’ve been a quick post on which song I think matches with who + why but these guys made me recite an essay to myself as I paced around the room. So they deserve their own post <3.

Featuring: screenshots, hidden quotes (link) (required reading), and a shit ton of brainrot. explanations are below cut. tl;dr:

Rose is Cartoons

Charles is Asymptotic

Nico is Drawing Pins

Teruko is Good Grief

=

Rose Lacroix is Cartoons

[plain text: Rose Lacroix is Cartoons]

Track #4 is Cartoons by Louie Zong, and I have decided this is Rose’s track too. This is one many, many others have suspected as well. Starting it off with this first because it’s the simplest to explain: Rose is an artist, the lyrics are about art; or, at the very least, uses animation and drawing as metaphors.

Abstractions how I live my day to day, [...] Hard to explain, And to express, Forever just a work-in-progress.

The song in general uses drawing to explain feeling burnt out/not passionate about. Well. Your passions. Rose states herself that her work can only give her catharsis, considering none of it technically “hers” anymore.

[ID: Two screenshots of  Rose from chapter 2 episode 5. She is in the dressing room talking to Teruko, and has her hand on her neck as she looks downwards. Transcript: All I do is make paintings on other’s beck-and-call. It’s been so long that I don’t think I remember how to paint something original anymore. / There’s no value in the creations of someone who’s fallen so far from artistry. The only thing I can get out of art is catharsis. End ID]

Which is even more tragic, considering how she had huge ambitions as a child

[ID: One screenshot from the same episode. Rose now rests her chin in her fist. Transcript: I wanted to be a great painter when I was a kid, but things didn’t turn out that way. None of my original stuff ever sold well. End ID] 

There’s also these lyrics here

Can't hold a pencil or a thought. (Oh uh oh) Can't paint myself something I'm not.

Tryin' to make that ol' deadline, But all I've got are two dots and a line.

Rose knows she’s talented; in fact, I’d argue she’s one of the most secure about her talent than anyone in the class. She understands how useful it is in the killing game when paired with her photographic memory. In chapter 2, however, she hesitates, despite knowing this more than anyone.

[ID: Three screenshots of Rose from chapter 2 episode 8. She is sitting against a wall, knees drawn to her chest as she buries her face in her arms. Transcript of her dialogue: I don’t want to find out what kind of corpse Arei left. It’s easier for me to pretend nothing bad happened and forget about everything tomorrow. / That’s why I’m sitting here, wallowing in my own guilt, unable to do anything helpful. / You probably need me to draw a picture of a crime scene, like last time. That’s something only I can do that can help everyone. End ID]

She doesn’t want to use her talent that way—she can’t “paint herself something she’s not”, and she would “make the deadline”, but she can’t just will herself to simply Do Something when it’s draining and linked to her trauma from the previous case—and she’s more self conscious of it than anyone, that she only has “two dots and a line” —an upset face.

There’s also her hidden quote from the inspect elements of her character page: “In the end, all I can do is watch my wretched life go on.” I think it fits with the general theme of being incredibly discouraged and burnt out. “Forever a work in progress” indeed.

=

Charles Cuevas is Asymptotic

[pt: Charles Cuevas is Asymptotic]

I’ve chosen Asymptotic by (once more,) Louie Zong as Charles’ song. I could say it’s because of the mathsy theming and Charles is literally a fuckging chemist and leave it at that—I almost chose this as Min’s song because of how groovy and nerdy (affectionate) it was. I’m sorry to say it’s because of angst.

We’re aymptotic, Divided, by the smallest, slimmest line

Hey, so you know how Charles has an older brother ?

And you know how he didn’t know this until one of the motives told him ? So now there’s a good chance he won’t remember him fully for a long, long time ?

[you’re] Not imaginary. But it's complex! The limits are infinitely great

Charles now knows of this family member he has no recollection of. He most likely existed at some point—every other secret, though written to show the worst of the cast, are based on some sort of truth. I have a pet theory that his phobia of blood is connected to his brother, considering amnesia of a traumatic event is a common occurrence, and he doesn’t recall the origin of his haemophobia either, which opens up the possibility of them being linked. As long as he has this amnesia, any memory of his brother will always be far from his grasp.

As close as we could ever get, you'll be just out of reach

His hidden quote is about how it’s better to just forget; that means those events weren’t worth keeping.

if you forgot it, then it probably wasn’t important to begin with. none of those memories should ever be kept anyway.

In the context of the creator looking at the lyrics of the song and going “omg that’s blorbo from my brain”, the song refers to him as believing that he and his brother are asymptotes—lines that greatly resemble each other that will never reach, existing in different planes altogether.

=

Nico Hakobyan is Drawing Pins

[pt: Nico Hakobyan is Drawing Pins]

So.

Drawing Pins by Nothing but Thieves ! This song in particular fucking Stumped me. The lyrics are good, they slap, the Creator has fantastic taste in music; I just couldn’t figure out who the Hell it could be. Then, I had an epiphany.

This epiphany, by the way, is also probably one of my BIGGEST reaches. It completely redefines the song—even MORESO than how I treated asymptotic—and focuses hard on One aspect of Nico’s character.

(In my defense, it’s a really huge part.)

I don't feel like I belong Here at all

Tell me what you did it What you did it What you did it for 'Cause I can't figure it out

What do I have to do To be loved, loved by you

These are the lyrics in particular that made me go “wait a god damn Second”.

Firstly, not feeling like they belong.

[ID: Two screenshots of Nico from chapter 2 episode 6. They hold their arm and look nervously to the side in the first screenshot, then bury their face in the collar of their shirt in the next. Transcript: I thought you would laugh at me. I was worried you would pick up rocks and start throwing them at me or pick up clumps of mud and start throwing them at me. / I’m sorry, this never happens! Usually people call me abnormal or say that I’m just trying to be special, in a derogatory way. End ID]

Nico has been a frequent victim of bullying. Even though their current classmates are accepting, that just made them wary that something was off, because their past experiences stuck with them ! I feel like it should go unsaid that that, already on its own, is pretty fucking isolating !

[ID: a screenshot from the same episode. Nico is in the same pose. They say “And then they leave me out of everything and never talk to me again because there’s something wrong with me.” End ID]

So, self-explanatory line in the context of Nico. Cool. Cool. What am I seeing in the other lyrics, though ?

Tell me what you did it What you did it What you did it for 'Cause I can't figure it out

Okay, so. You know Nico’s hidden quote ? It’s “why should I own up for the mistakes someone else made?”, if you’re wondering.

There’s another reason they don’t feel like they belong.

There’s this running thread of Nico misunderstanding social cues, causing conflict and being scorned for it, but never being explained why those social cues exist, leading to them confused on why something so arbitrary is held to such importance. This causes this cycle that they’re just expected to escape, yet not being given the understanding or tools to do.

[ID: Three screenshots of Nico from the same episode. Nico looks down at their hands, then scratches their chin, then buries the bottom half of their face in their shirt. Transcript: If you’re having dinner and want someone to pass the salt, you can say, “Please pass the salt,”  or you can say “Give me the salt.” / One of those things is supposed to be more polite than the other, right? But why? They both meant the same thing. They’re just slightly different mixes of words. / It’s like that. I don’t understand why some mixes of words come off as ‘rude’ and some don’t, even if they mean tthe same thing. End ID]

I suspect the hidden quote is of Nico snapping, of not caring about being polite or nice anymore. They are already honest, which escalated their animosity with Ace, but this time they’re not caving if someone tells them that they’re being “too blunt” about it.

What do I have to do To be loved, loved by you

But it was never on purpose. They are not “blunt” or “brutally honest” to Ace or David whoever because they want to build that kind of reputation. I think these lyrics are suggesting a culmination of their arc, “What can I do to be loved ? Why should I apologise in place of the person who did hurt you ? Why am I constantly apologising for my existence ?

How do I win over people like you?”

I am fully aware that I may be reaching, but if you see the song as a representation of Nico’s rage and resentment that they had to “hold down by drawing pins”, you can at the very least see where I’m coming from.

=

Teruko is Good Grief

[pt: Teruko Tawaki is Good Grief]

Good Grief by Bastille, aka the last song on the playlist !

I’ve seen people say it’s a Whit song, or a Charles song, and I see it ! Death is very important in both of their arcs, and so is their way of mourning. However, I feel like it couldn’t be anyone but Teruko, and I also feel like there’s a very important part of her that people often forget.

[ID: Two screenshots from the episode 1 of the first chapter. They are lines of Teruko’s inner monologue. Transcript: His name, her face, it’s just barely out of reach. I claw and grasp through the dusty haze of my memories. / Choking on my nostalgia, I keep begging for you to come back. End ID]

[ID: A screenshot from chapter 1 episode 9 of Mai Akasaki turning around and smiling at the viewer. End ID]

Teruko mourns.

At the very least, she tries. She misses people. She grieves. That is what drives her distrust—she knows how much love hurts, and doesn’t want to feel that way.

[ID: A screenshot from chapter 2 episode 3. Teruko playing with succulents in her room as if they are dolls. One succulent has an eyepatch and knife, and the other has a knife and a sticky note, with a cowlick resembling Teruko’s. End ID]

Even in this silly moment of Teruko playing with cacti—it shows she didn’t WANT Xander to die ! She misses him. She wishes it could’ve gone better and blames herself for trusting—and notice how Xander in this scenario stands by her side.

Every minute and every hour I miss you, I miss you, I miss you more

She “chokes on her nostalgia” when she thinks of two unnamed people, “begging them to come back”. Will she ever admit it? Fuck no are you kidding me she couldn’t be emotionally vulnerable to save her Life. But Teruko constantly loses and is never given time or space to mourn (That is what I meant when I said she tries), and it’s led her to bottling and hiding them to further isolate herself, to prevent her from losing the ones she loves again.

In my thoughts you're far away And you are whistling the melody, Whistling the melody Crystallising clear as day Oh I can picture you so easily, Picture you so easily

Again, the two people are “far away”, she’s half forgotten after all. But Mai Akasaki’s image is as clear as day. Her memories are one of the only traces of Mai we have at all.

I could repeat myself over and over with pretty much every lyric of this song in particular, so I suggest seeking it out and listening to it yourself. I cannot stress enough how much this song SCREAMS Teruko to me

=

Overall, I’m fully ready to be wrong. I do not have a great track record when predicting story arcs. However, I have thought about this for a very intense bit of time, so this is to work as a way to get my thoughts out there.

I have a few hunches, like Shun-Ran for David or Jotaro’s theme for Xander, but both are just hunches, and neither are as strong as the four above.

Anyways, have a great day ! holy shit this is over 1.7K words excluding the image descriptions.

[atinylittlepain]

Part One | The Hero

gator tillman x f!oc

series masterlist || series playlist

I am the shape you made me. Filth teaches filth. - Anne Carson, An Oresteia

wordcount | 5.2K

content warnings | 18+ this is a work of fiction exploring dark themes related to domestic abuse, corrupt government, physical/religious/psychological trauma, murder, canon-typical violence | dark smut, violent smut, verbal degradation, brief mention of sex work | gator is gross and toxic and what goes on in this fic is a depiction of a toxic, unhealthy dynamic | THESE ARE BAD PEOPLE DOING WRETCHED THINGS

a/n | been having fun working on this one. I can't emphasize enough that this is outside of canon, this is my construction of gator and what I think you'd find in a deeper exploration of him. This is, in part, a work of domestic and psychological horror which will become clearer as the story continues. special thanks to @pr0ximamidnight who is basically the only reason this idea didn't get scrapped.

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Towns like these aren’t hard to come by. Throw a dart in any direction in the midwest and you’ll hit a town like this one. She didn’t bother with the name, something home-baked and wholesome, without a doubt. No, when she was given this assignment, the only name she bothered with was Tillman. 

“So you’re his favorite dancer, huh?” 

“That depends on who’s asking, hon.”

“Someone who can offer you a little more than he can.”

“That’s a tall order, offering me more than he can.”

“Oh yeah? Can I ask how much he’s paying you?” 

“Hmm, lemme paint a picture for you. I’m naked, and Roy Tillman is rubbing bundles of hundreds on my tits. Does that answer your question?”

“You ever wonder where he gets all that money?” 

“So long as he keeps throwing it my way, I don’t really care. I know you’re new in town, sweetie, but a word of advice? It’s best not to question Roy Tillman. Now, do you want a dance? You’re so pretty I might just give you a deal on it.” Cherry red nails flickering like neon gods, but not touching, just grazing the side of her jaw as she tries for a polite curl to her lips when all she’d like to do is scream a few choice curses into the dim, dank smoke of the club. This isn’t the first time she’s been given that advice since she came to Stark County.

“That’s alright, thank you for your time.” The quick recoil of cherry red nails, and her friendly little companion is already flouncing away with a slumped sigh, sequins and skin shimmering beneath the fish-scale flicker of a depressing disco ball. She takes a sharp gulp of her drink, resigning herself to crossing another potential in off her list. 

The problem with men like Roy Tillman is they have a way of rallying a town into troops around them. He brings money, and brawn, and revived religion into the withered veins of a community, and the community in turn suckles on the gleaming mouth of his gun, fed and full and content to allow him to do whatever he wants. And so he does. And so someone like her has to come in and put a stop to it, though that is particularly difficult when no one seems too concerned with letting their bloated king continue his salacious sate. 

“Hi, ladies, you got some for me tonight, huh?” And for every king there is, of course, a prince. A painfully, stupid, inept and inane prince, drunk on power that isn’t even his, and probably will never be his. As far as she knows, Gator Tillman is something of a dress-up doll for his father to move and manipulate around the county, about as harmless as a fly without wings, fondling that gun he keeps in his thigh holster like a second dick and working a fine cloud of smoke around his head wherever he goes, something juvenile about that bright green vape of his. Prince, court jester, whatever way you slice it, the only attention she has paid to him since she got to town has been without a choice when he blusters into a place, so loud you can’t help but turn head and stare. 

“Hey there, Miss Lanie. Surprised to see a fine woman of the law such as yourself at an establishment like this. You lost?” Gator, she has found, has taken a particular shine to making his personal space her personal space. Ever since that first week she was out here and took a trip out to the Tillman compound, father and son in fine figure on the porch, son tucked into the long shadow of his father, telling her in no uncertain terms that her presence was unwelcomed, unneeded, and Gator had made a point of walking toe to her heel back to her car, ducking his head down to wish her a mighty fine day, ma’am, before she drove off. She thinks that he’s trying to fluster her, make her sway in some meaningful way with his schoolboy teasing. At best, it’s amusing. At worst, it’s another something, somebody, getting in her way. 

“I could say the same to you, deputy Tillman. And you know that’s not my name now, be a little smarter than that, else I might get bored.” He has the common sense to blow that sickly sweet vape cloud out of the side of his mouth where he has sidled up next to her at the bar, his face cast in mottled shadows from the thick throb of lights in the club, grin turned red. 

“Mel, that’s what your partner calls you, isn’t it? I’d say we’re on a first name basis by now. Or would you prefer agent Harris? Dad says the only fitting title for a woman is missus, but I have to say, I think I’m a little more open-minded about such things.” At the very least, a laugh over the rim of her glass, concealed by another bitter sip because she knows a boy like Gator collects his wins where he can, and isn’t soon to let go of them. 

“Uh-huh, how progressive of you.” It would be about now in this familiar routine that she would usually leave, an elbow placed pointedly in some soft part of him as she breezed by. She finds people like Gator to not even be worth repugnant, let alone evil. People like Gator are small, used air, sound and motion somewhere in the periphery of what really matters. But tonight, she’s tired, and frankly, she’s failing, and he’s a harmless pantomime of a tyrant. So she lets him play his part, head propped in hand propped on elbow propped on bar. 

“You have a man back in DC, huh? I bet he’s wondering where you’ve been for so long.” Blink, blink, she gives him no answer, just squints a little and keeps her lips pressed in a thin line, waiting to see how else he can flail when given the chance. And he doesn’t disappoint, a little bit of frenetic flair to it, takes another drag on his vape and turns cheek over his shoulder, bolstering morale with a glance at his pack who have all set their sights on the present display of skin and sequins on stage. When he faces her again, she thinks he might try to reach for her, something grasping in his face the dip and bob of his throat. But he knows better. He had put a hand on her back one day at the station, hadn’t even gotten out a Miss Lainie before she was turning heel and jamming her forearm into his windpipe. Yes, he knows better than to touch, but he does lean in, trying for meanness that just makes him look younger with the way it rounds his eyes. 

“Tell me this then, where is your partner? Been a while since I’ve seen him sticking his nose where it don’t belong. He didn’t abandon ship, did he?” Still fresh, still sore, he wins that one, and she knows that he knows he wins because she can’t hide her grimace at the mention of her partner. Well, the mention of the man who was her partner. The man who was called back to DC last week, a sure sign that the powers that be are coming to the end of their rope with this project. They had been out here, grasping at scraps of a paper trail going nowhere, trying to pin down the ghost of the ghost of Roy Tillman for two months, and nothing. She wouldn’t be surprised if she gets a phone call next week calling her back, tail between her legs and an I told you so waiting for her on her desk. 

She offers him no response, taking a deeper drink from her glass so she can have an excuse to pinch her face bitter. He laughs, clicks his tongue, a slick strand of hair bobbing loose with the shake of his head. 

“Well, that’s just not right, leaving you out here all by yourself. Some folks would take advantage of that, you know.”

“Hmm, and here I am wondering where all that midwestern nice everyone talks about is. I guess the time’s are changing.” She makes her grin match his, all fang, all sharps and brights. And she’s had enough, a headache starting to creep in around the edges and make everything a little fuzzy. The cool reality that she will most likely leave this place as she found it, with a man playing God, and the people letting him. She presses a palm into Gator’s  chest, enough of a shove to make him stumble a bit as she gets up from her stool, a clipped command to get away, don’t you have tits to look at? But he still follows her out through the sparse crowd and into the quick snap of cold air that fall in North Dakota seems made up of. Soon, snow, but for now, everything dying and freezing up in anticipation. 

She makes it to her car without paying much mind to his hemming and hawing, though he catches her door before she can close it. For a brief moment, she considers how hard she’d have to slam it to snap his dip-stained fingers clean off. 

“Now, Miss Lainey, just wait a minute. Sadly, I’m not just looking to flirt, I’ve been sent with some business to discuss with you.” The prince sent by the king, glowing and boldening under his father’s trust, she can see the little puff of pride in the way he wedges himself between her car door and where she’s sitting in the driver’s seat, taking up all the space, all the air, that pungent sweet sting of whatever vape flavor he’s sucking on this evening. He plays it up, enjoys that little smack of false power, close-lipped grin and leaning down with his forearm resting on the hood of her car. She remains still, unblinking, unphased, looking up at an overgrown boy. 

“You see, me and mine haven’t been too pleased with how you’ve been bothering folks around here. Asking all kinds of questions and such. It ain’t very polite, and we don’t care much for, uh, not politeness.” Curling her lips back into a snarl of a smile, tilt of her head, she settles the sole of her shoe on top of the toe of his boot, small warning, small something that makes him swallow thick when she presses down a little. 

“You and yours?” Little more pressure, little pinch, the muscle in her leg tensing and tightening with the force of it.

“That’s right.” Wavering prince, weakening prince, a little whimpering prince and she swears she can feel his toes squirming beneath the ball of her foot, pressing down hard now. What she’d like to do is change the angle so the thin point of her heel is what’s digging in sharp. But this will have to do, her smile spreading to show the whites of her teeth.

“Oh honey, the last time I checked, they weren’t yours at all. You were theirs.” She digs down a little more, small twist of the ball of her foot to get that grimace, that grunt of pain she was hoping for. In the cool wash of neon from the bar, his face has gone blotchy, burning up to the mottling tips of his ears. Not difficult now, he’s already stumbling back when she lets up the pressure of her foot, a simple point of her finger in the middle of his chest enough to get him out of her orbit. Slam of her car door and roll of her shoulders because, not that she’d admit it, but that felt a little good, little lick of pleasure in causing a bit of childish pain. 

She hates that it startles her, a little jump in her ribcage. But really, she should have expected nothing less from him. A fine streak of spit on her window, darkened and clouded by dip and punctuated by a slap of his palm on the hood of her car. She catches his grin, distorted by the dribbling splatter, bright white sliver tinged red in neon. A herculean effort, not to run over his foot when she drives away. 

They, the proverbial they, have her set up in a new development of condos twenty minutes away from the heart of Tillman’s domain. It’s white, and square, and sterile, and three stories up. She leans her forehead against the wall of windows and lets it feel like falling while she listens to a voicemail from her boss. Her boss, back in DC, and wondering what the fuck he did sending her out here, no doubt. He tells her as much. Tells her that she has until the end of November to get some real evidence in her hands, or else he’s pulling the plug. That or else looks like going back to DC with her tail between her legs. It looks like a cubicle, looks like clerical work, drowning in the archives until her boss decides that she’s learned her lesson, to keep her mouth shut, and her head down, to not get creative, to not get bold. 

Until the end of November, two weeks to get something, anything, on Roy Tillman, or else. Or else looks like a man playing god, being allowed to continue his game, allowed to keep a whole town on its knees. And his son, his ridiculous, willful, repugnant dog of a son settled at his father’s feet, fed scraps of power and happy for it. 

Bad people, turned sideways people. She knows what they are. And her badge and her gun and even her cubicle back in DC make her good, one of the good ones, the ones that are supposed to get the bad people, turned sideways people. And she intends to. She needs to, really. Needs something she can hang onto like a trophy. Young blood, fresh in the department, fresh out of school, and trying to make something for herself, something she can point to when the rest of the suits raise their brows at her presence. She needs a win, and she’s going to get it, and it’s going to be Roy Tillman’s head framed in a mugshot. 

…

“Are these the records from 2019?”

“That should be all of them, yes ma’am.” Desperate times and all, she’s resorted to drastic measures, nodding a thank you to the officer who dredged up these boxes of arrest records for her. Roy has been known to arrest his own to teach them lessons when they’re starting to shake ranks, and she’s hoping to find old wounds, potential traitors turned informants. 

She hasn’t slept much in the last week. A week since her boss gave her that ultimatum. A week of scrambling for whatever loose ends she could find, threads fraying to film wherever she turned. She hasn’t found a thing. No trail to follow, no willing witness to speak, no evidence of anything. And the most frustrating part of all, the need for evidence seems foolish given how obvious it is. It is campaign season, after all, and Roy Tillman has been out with his crew in fine flare lately. 

Here is what makes up a king and his kingdom. In the past week, five bodies found between here and Fargo. Accidents, they ruled them. So many accidents making up a king and his kingdom. In the past week, six traffic jams caused by Tillman and his thronging brigade of DIY armored cars, the mouths of guns winking out of the windows, American flag bleeding blue and red in a blaze behind them. So much artifice, so much brute force making up a king and his kingdom. One wife, Roy’s wife, sent to the hospital with a popped eye socket. She had tried to go speak to her, and his wife, gruesome blue and black sneer, had kept her busted lips pressed in a thin line. So much brute force indeed. A king and his kingdom. And she is scrambling to find any crack, any slippage to stick her fingers into and make bleed. And now, she only has two weeks left.

The local station hasn’t exactly been welcoming to her, most of the officers knit tight and quiet in Tillman’s ranks, weary glances and outright snarls when she first came in. Most have become tiredly used to her presence in that empty office space, broom closet more like it. Only a few, however, have been cooperative, let alone friendly. Officer Peters happens to be one of those few. 

“You really don’t have to help, you know. I’m probably going to be here all day looking through these.” He hikes the two boxes of records he’s hefting up a little higher in his arms, shrug and smile, and it’s a relief everytime he does that for her. 

“No, no, I’m happy to help. Not much to do around here with, well, you know.” Well, you know. The police in Stark county are something of an empty promise. All the power lies with Roy’s quasi-militia anyways. 

“Well thank you, Dave, I appreciate it, really.” A little bit of kindness, of decency, she is finding, goes a long way for her in a town where she is clearly not welcomed, though that feeling is short-lived, their progress toward that office space halted when another set of hands grab a hold of the box of records she’s carrying.

“Where you going with all this, Miss Lainey? A lady like yourself shouldn't be doing such heavy lifting. Pussy Peters, you really couldn’t manage hauling one more box there? C’mon now.” She smells him before she gets a good look at him, synthetic strawberry haze that churns her stomach. 

On a good day, she would shove the box forward hard enough to make him stumble out of her way, not sparing him another look. This is not a good day. This is a tired day, a failing day, an at the end of a frayed rope day. She stops long enough for him to take it as an invitation to continue running his mouth, all garish grins as his eyes shift between her and Officer Peters, still holding onto the box of records, enough for it to be a tug on her own arms.

“Say, Dave, saw your wife at church last Sunday. She sure looks pretty on her knees. Oh wait, that was after church.” It’s plainly embarrassing for everyone, an awful, stupid and shameless thing to say. Dave scoffs, a quiet alright, Gator before he shoulders past them while at the same time, something is beginning to snap inside of her, a silent snarl. Gator’s smile falters when all she does is stare at him, lips pressed in a thin line. Tough boy turned a fool under her gaze, he shrinks and smalls, clearing his throat and loosening his grip on the box of records enough that she can wrench them away from him. The only sound is the hard click of her heels as she shoulders past him to join Officer Peters in their makeshift office. 

That something snapped starts to shimmer into anger. Sick with it, with all of it. With this town, and these people that speak like this, act like this, carry on like this. As if watching herself from over her shoulder, she’s excusing herself from the office just as soon as she sets the box down, a strange look on Dave’s face, though she’s already turned heel and made her way out into the hall. 

He’s leaning up against the wall, smoking that vile thing, and he shouldn’t be, and it just makes her angrier, shoulders squared as she comes to stand in front of him. Silent for a moment, a puzzled pull to his brows, the quick dip and rise of his eyes, and though he opens his mouth to speak, the only sound that comes out is a high-pitched yelp when she uses the sharp point of her heel this time to drive her foot down over his until she hears something crunch, a little dig back and forth and it makes him keen.

Perfect posture of pain, he keels over with a groan, easy enough to grab him by the nape of his neck and haul him in his hunch down the hallway to the office. Dave looks up, stricken and shocked from where he had already started to sort through the records and she brings Gator right to his feet. She gets a better grip in the back of Gators’ slicked hair to pull him upright. His eyes are scrunched shut, still grimacing in the shock of pain, little whimpers puffing out on each of his exhales. And she likes it, feels good about it. The first thing she’s felt good about in a while, if she’s being honest, a smile threatening as she leans in to speak into his ear. 

“You’re going to apologize to Officer Peters, do you understand?” Little tug, little sharp pull of his neck when he doesn’t answer, and then Gator’s breathing out a yes, yes, ma’am and she likes that too, drinks that down and lets it simmer somewhere sickening inside her.

“Now.”

“I’m sorry.” Not good enough, said with a whine. She tugs a little harder at his hair, pulling his spine into a strung, snapping line while he winces.

“Mean it.”

“Fucking– I’m sorry, I’m sorry, please!” She likes please, didn’t even know she was looking for please, but it almost feels better than the apology she was originally looking for. She would like more please from him. But for now it’s catch and release, he’s limping out of the office the instant she lets go of his hair, and she’s left simpering under Dave’s bewildered stare, fear of god widened eyes and jaw dropped in wonder, or horror, or both. 

Quick shake of her shoulders, shaking something sick and simmering out, and quick heat between her palms with a clap, away from whatever that was and back into these interminable boxes of records. Ready to get to work? Yes. Yes.

By the time they’re finished it’s already mottling blue outside and her eyes are starting to blur and sting. Nothing, no one that hadn’t turned up dead in the last two years, at least. Stiff joints that stay curled into themselves, she hobbles with Dave down into the basement to put the boxes back, blinking hard in the fluorescent light. Not a clue where to go or what to do next and she’s too tired to care much about it, thanking Dave and shrugging into her coat and pressing her fingers into her eyes to rub out the blur before she steps out into the fading light. 

“Hey.”

“No.”

“Hey.”

“No. Go home, Gator. Get some new marching orders from daddy, why don’t you?” She’s satisfied to see that he’s still limping a little, though that squelches and squirms into frustration when he continues to limp toward her. It’s a little slapdash routine she has no interest in being a part of, she opens her car door an inch only for him to slap his palm against it to slam it shut again, back and forth once, twice, three times before she starts to really consider pulling her gun on him, settling instead for another planned assault on his foot. Maybe she’ll break something this time, if she’s lucky. But before she can make contact he’s jerking back, palms up in a shrinking surrender. 

“You’re not gonna find anything, you know, not in there. He keeps things clean.” It’s perhaps the most earnest she’s ever seen him, words said quick on a single exhale like he’s getting away with something by saying them. It makes her pause, makes something slacken, watching the nervous pinch between his brows deepen.

“Uh-huh, and you’re telling me this why exactly?” Whatever that was, it’s already gone, he’s already settling back into the muzzle  his father stitched for him, shift of his eyes and shrug, working his jaw like he has to chew on his words. 

“Just trying to save you some time, Miss Lainey. Not as pretty when you’re tired.” That slick grin, slimed grin of his, and something is pulling sharp and snarling inside her again, a quick flood of anger that she tries to tamp down with a thin smile of her own. He’s not worth all the paperwork it would cause. 

“Right, you have a good night, Gator.” 

“Now just wait a minute–” And that simmering thing, snarling thing, finally bursts. Two months of shoveling through cow shit and coming up with nothing. Two months of people like this, men like this, who won’t even look her in the eye, who have been waiting for the day she leaves just as soon as she showed up. Some foolish part of her thought she’d arrive and play the hero. She knows better now.

 She’s just tired enough, failing enough, that she lets that anger curdle and break inside her. When he reaches for her car door this time, she doesn’t stop herself from grabbing his wrist, using an unsuspecting amount of strength to twist him around until he’s pressed up against the side of her car and she’s pulling on his arm behind his back enough to make his breath pitch and fail. 

“I’ve had enough of you, and your father, and this fucking town that’s too stupid to see that they’re getting fucked every which way you bastards can think of.” He squirms in her grip and she just bears down more, pressing the line of her body up against the back of his to keep him still, twisting his arm a little further, waiting for the pop and squelch of his loosening shoulder socket should he try anything else. His breath comes out as opaque puffs in the cold air, broken whines, eyes pinched shut from what she can see. And she likes it. This, something she can control, cause and effect, pain made real in her palms. Somewhere in the back of her mind, this is wrong, wretched, but the anger and the sheer force of it feels too good. 

“Do you know what you are, Sheriff Tillman?” A little more pull, a little more pinch, pressing him further up the side of her car and he shakes his head, frantic, no, no, no. Crystalline tears threatening along his dark lashes, shaking loose to smear down his cheeks, pale blue in the oncoming night. 

“You’re a dog. You’re worse than a dog. You’re a dog’s dog. You’re a fucking mutt begging for scraps. You think you’re something, don’t you? A fucking nuisance wherever I go since the day I showed up. You’re nothing, is what you are. Nothing. You’re–” At first, she isn’t sure what he’s doing. Strange enough to give her pause, his hips stuttering and jerking against the car and those broken grunts of pain preening out into something else entirely. And just as suddenly she realizes the terrible reality of what she has done, and what he is now doing, ruinous and wretched and so very wrong. 

Her hands tremble where they slacken, letting go of him and taking a stuttering step away. She feels like she’s going to be sick, like some hot shame is pumping and contracting in her muscles, making her weak and sideways, swaying where she stands. He turns around the instant she lets go, leaning back against her car, a doll slumped, no longer being played with, his eyes wide and shimmering wet, lips parted in a voiceless wonder. 

“Why’d you stop?” His voice pitches and breaks. It’s a boy’s voice, young voice, and it makes her stomach churn awful, acrid. Awful, because he means it, because he wanted that pain, that fear, whatever that was that she just did. She doesn’t say anything because she can’t, because something has turned to ice inside her, numb and unfeeling, barely managing to take a jerked step back when he steps toward her. And the parking lot is empty except for them, and the night has come on like a heavy fog, and the world turns into a blue smear when her heel catches on chipped asphalt and she’s falling, and she’s falling, and there’s stinging grit in her palms and an ache in her body and she’s on the ground looking up into the face of a frightened boy, a fallen, foolish prince, pathetic. 

She lets out a garbled shriek when he reaches for her again, willing muscle and sound into a singular command of don’t, do not that stops him in his tracks, his palms wide and stark white, surrender. Unblinking, she keeps her eyes on him, held frozen in a gaze as she rights herself, a little hunched, a little curled snarl through her body when she stands. 

He looks bewildered, no regret or remorse, just that pall of confusion, of uncertainty. And it clicks for her because of course. Of course, that felt right to him. That pain felt right to him. She knows what he is, what he comes from. She’s seen the ex-wive's files, murals of pain inflicted on their bodies, broken birds in a broken cage. Mercy that they escaped. But the prince was not so lucky. Something maybe even worse for the prince. He likes the cage. So of course, the pain and the words and the tears. He was raised on poison milk. Of course, the pain feels good.

“Go home, Gator.” 

“I–”

“I said go home. I’m done.” For perhaps the first time, he listens to her, shrinks back, face washed in shadows with the tuck of his chin, a boy again. She doesn’t look at him, she can’t. Heat floods behind her eyes, washing everything in a weary haze, streaks of light and dark when she finally drives away. 

The seams hold long enough for her to drive back to her all cold, all white apartment, all sharp and all lines and all sterile, stark. And when she does get home, but not really home, not even house, but when she does, she splits into pieces. She cries, and she shakes, and she curls over herself, head in hands. She is failing. 

Awful, all this filth, this king and his wretched domain, cobbled together with lies and guns and a bible. Built upon broken bodies. And awful, the people like it. Awful, she isn’t the savior. She’s a thorn in the belly of this terrible beast of a town, and nothing more. 

But what is perhaps most awful is that for a moment, for a breath, in that parking lot with that foolish, flimsy prince, she was a part of it too. She liked it too. Filth, too.

[wirefucked]

Shuffle your favorite playlist and post the first five songs that come up, then copy/paste this ask to your favorite mutuals 💥

i. push it - static-x

ii. grave wisdom - skinny puppy

iii. the wretched - nine inch nails

iv. the line begins to blur - nine inch nails

v. xenogensis - 3TEETH

sweet of u to consider me among ur faves, kmp 🖤 i don't have the energy to send it forward but any mutuals reading this, consider yourself targeted. post ur shufflefaves, say i made u do it at gunpoint

[immoralimmortals]

A Song With Ten Names

Chapter 37: Yes, to Err is Human, So Don't Be One (5)

Chapter 1 ☆ Previous chapter ☆ AO3 ☆ Featured song playlist

Summary of chapter: Love. Some people love to love. Some people love to hate.

Author's Note:

The song for this chapter is Yes, to Err is Human, So Don't Be One by Will Wood.

Small content warning for mentions of suicide attempts, although they are brief and without description.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Yes, to err is human

So

Don't

Be

One

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

“Are you serious?”

A response like that and it's obvious why the woman squirms in embarrassment, looking away and locking her knees as she holds a prized possession tightly to her chest, though it hasn't been with her as long as the phone she shared with Deidara. Book to her chest, she nearly looks like a schoolgirl; that is, if she was a schoolgirl from Hell. Kakuzu narrows his scrutinizing stare. He’s wearing his face covering and hood, but only the eyes are needed for Jashin’s worst disciple to feel his harsh judgment.

“It’s never...felt like the right time!” Yeah, sure. The lady has time to tell Kakuzu she’s a suicide victim from another dimension but not any to tell her supposed "first friend" she can’t fucking read. Silence alone is capable of speaking this aloud, whether it is from the immortal or if it is her own making. Regardless, the truth of her hypocrisy is enough to make her hum with agitation, skin upon her face bright red. “I know, I know...I’m sorry.”

Kakuzu can’t help but lower his head and pinch his temple at that nonsense. “Takara...it isn’t me you need to apologize to.”

“I know—” The defense is quick...but then hits the reality, and her shoulders drop. “...I know,” she repeats, softer and wiser, hooded gaze locked on the lefthand wall, though it isn’t far enough to keep Kakuzu out of her peripheral, and that alone is enough to make her realize she’s hiding, even if metaphorically. Lids shut and she exhales hard, slumping her shoulders. “I just...don’t know where to begin.”

It is so, so tempting to be a smartass right now, but the tone she carries tells him that’s the last thing she needs. An exhale of his own, lighter behind his mask, and the stitched man reaches forward and gestures with an exasperated “give it” gesture. And though she hesitates, it is only because she wishes she did not have to. All the same, Hidan’s wretched, literally bloody bible is put into trusted hands.

“I’ll do it just this once,” the old man grumbles, though he has no idea what is going to stop her from asking again and him from giving in so readily to those big star-reading eyes. He feels the woman sit by his side as he observes the book itself. “I still can hardly believe he managed the damn thing.” The front cover, barely attached now with how hard Hidan tried to carve his own sigil onto it, is folded open. Hands so practiced with flipping pages feel the age of the ones upcoming, a finger tracing over the folds. “The blood certainly didn’t help the damage this one already must have had…” he laments. Not his kind of book, whatever sort of fairy tale this used to hold, but still seems like a waste... Though perhaps, since it was abandoned, becoming something else at the hands of a crazed prophet was the next best thing.

...The woman is so close, her cheek resting on his bare arm, usual cloak draping on the back of the couch instead of over his shoulders. A palm moves to rest on his thigh, and the way it feels makes him look over to her. To his own surprise, he speaks not with admonishment but with concern. “You’re tense,” Kakuzu observes. She nods.

“Kakuzu…” the performer mutters, looking lost in letters on a page that could mean absolutely anything. “...He made this so long ago...what if there’s something he’s meant for me to know this whole time? Working on the assumption that I just...get it and agree?” She’s already hardly on board with the whole ‘kill people’ thing, if even that. Hidan’s...a lot, to say the least, but what if...what if…?

...There’s a lot of what ifs, all of a sudden. That’s why she hasn’t told him yet she hasn’t read it.

“Like what?” Hidan’s partner prods, trying to decide if he’s savoring the sensation of her touching him so tenderly or merely noticing it, based on how much it’s sticking out to his attention. But she’s just quiet, the words she wants to say either nonsensical or merely impossible to describe. The resulting action is that she sinks ever closer, like she can disappear under his skin.

“Can I tell you something?”

That’s her way of saying she’s asking for emotional labor, which is honestly appreciated to consent to in advance. “...I suppose,” he allows.

Ah shit, where does she begin? There’s a thousand layers with a thousand more strings threading them together, stitching her heart into a whole human being. It’s just something so fundamental that it’s overwhelming to consider, to try to help someone see how you see without getting lost on the way there. Perhaps the only thing that can be done is start at the beginning…

“The...the day we first met,” the woman ties to explain, and she wonders if he can tell how her pulse is racing. “Hidan took me out to eat...and when I told him I was kidnapped...he said I wasn’t pretty.”

Kakuzu’s eyes nearly pop out of their sockets at first, though they soon narrow to nearly slits. “...What.” She squirms yet again, burrowing a little lower into his side.

“It...made sense in the context,” she tries to defend once more, “Talking about...why I might have been kidnapped.”

That doesn’t solve that much for Kakuzu, however. “So what?”

…

So everything, really. Her lungs empty again. What comes next may come across like a non sequitur, though it’s far from it for the traveler.

“Kakuzu...you— you were my first kiss...you know?” And finally, finally, she shifts to look up at him. All of a sudden, it makes sense; face so innocent, hands so scared, heart so gentle. Far, far from how Hidan and Kakuzu have lived their lives. And she picks them...? “And…” a smile flickers, genuine despite her anxiety. “...It was...wonderful.”

It’s his turn to heat up now, though it’s hidden behind fabric. He tilts his head to glance down. This is the first they’ve talked about it since it happened... A quick glance to the exit he faces, a quick sensing of chakra— at least as well as he can— and he decides this is safe, so long as their voices stay low.

“...I’m flattered you think so,” he replies sincerely, though so, so tempted to joke that it isn’t much of a compliment if she has only kissed once. The squiggly, shy smile she gives is more than enough reward for holding his tongue so obediently.

“I love you…!” But then...her expression so slowly drops. “I...need to tell you something." It's so, so worried. "And it’s okay if you don’t like it. You just have to know.”

He blinks with a short grunt. What could that mean? “Whatever you say won’t be as bad as you think it is,” Kakuzu assures. But she shakes her head in disagreement.

“You might not like me anymore,” she says, despite every alarm in her brain telling her to stop here. “And that just has to be okay.” Just as she turns to look away, lest she lose her nerve to talk at all, a leathery hand, as delicately as a brute like him can, takes two fingers underneath her chin and pulls her back. The only part of his face visible, still, are his eyes, but that’s all that’s needed.

“Tell me,” he says. And he means it. No anger, no harm, will befall her today. “It’ll be just fine.”

And maybe, just maybe, it will. The woman’s smallest smile comes forth, a teardrop welling in one eye that she shoves away with the back of her hand; Kakuzu’s own pulls back, allowing space. “Okay…” she promises, steeling herself.

With only the books on the shelf to hear, she tells him a secret. The woman had no idea until...well...the exact day is unknown. It more so...crept up on her. Little by little, it became apparent that a piece of her was becoming more prominent...something she never thought would have opportunity to be heard...and not everyone may understand.

“There’s...something from my world,” she starts, though backtracks already. “Though I suppose it may have a name here, too.” Surely it exists, but is it known? Is it accepted? “It’s...it’s like..." she struggles. "You know how people say they give their heart to you and only you?”

He does, though perhaps he's experienced it in a more literal manner. ...Damn, he’s on fire today. Shame it’s not the right place or time to be stand up comedian. As such, Kakuzu allows the woman to continue.

“I...never really understood it,” she admits, making herself so small, and though something deep inside tells her to feel guilty, her heart and mind both know better. It took a long time to get so far as to recognize this is how she is, let alone speak it. “I always thought of love as...bottomless. You know? Like how it can be unconditional. Energy is real and finite, yeah, but…”

You’re halfway there. Just spit it out.

...

...

“I don’t...feel...love...the same way others do. At least...how most others seem to. I can feel love...for more than one person at once.” And you need to elaborate: “Without feeling the need...to...choose.”

He doesn’t move. Not an inch. That could mean anything.

“Y-y-you don’t have to spend time with me,” she apologizes in so many words, tumbling fast as they can before Kakuzu can interrupt. It’s already unbelievable she’s been kissed at all; what if he doesn’t feel that way anymore? What if she just threw it all out the window?! “If that makes you uncomfortable.”

…

…

A shake.

Her eyes pop wide. She feels him tremble. Bit by bit, the stirring inside him grows. And it scares the shit out of her, so much so she sits straight up and stops pressing skin against skin. It scares her...until…

…

He squeezes his eyes shut...and...

The man chuckles.

To her amazement, from deep in his chest and five hearts, he feels joy. She watches in both confusion and awe, gaze flicking up at down over him as he raises a hand to cover a mouth already unseen. Almost like hiccups, a few more laughs come before the man takes in a steadying breath and opens his eyes once again to look at her. There's mirth in them that perhaps no one else has gotten to see.

“Is that all?” And it’s so silly how she perks up in surprise at that. “Listen..." he elaborates, "I’ve been alive longer than most. Certainly longer than you...unless you’re immortal too.” ...Did he tell her that yet? Well, damn. Explanations can come in due time if necessary. “I’ve seen a lot of unbelievable shit. And duckling?”

Duckling, she hears the word ring in her ear like a sweet, sweet bell.

“That’s far from it.”

...It takes a second before her mouth knows how to talk again. “You...you don’t mind?”

“Again. Far from it,” he snorts, tilting his head and hooding his eyelids so coyly, putting an arm over the top of the couch so as to exaggerate his relaxed state. “I knew from the start. You...just love everyone.” And a raise of the brow with enough pause to make sure she sees it. “...Didn’t I tell you so? That’s why I warned you.” Warned her to be strategic about her affections, that is.

And now her mouth is merely open because she is dumbfounded. “You...knew?!”

And he nods.

Blink blink. “I...oh…” And though her cheeks never stopped flushing, somehow the blush takes on a whole new meaning. Kakuzu...understands. He...understands!

“I’m guessing you’re worried Hidan might not get it, too.”

There it is. The heart of the matter. He regrets hopping right to it, as it makes her shrink up just as much as before, but it needs to be done; she didn't bring this up for nothing. And indeed, she did have purpose: “Well, yeah...but...that’s not really the issue, per say. He just...doesn’t...like me that way. And that’s fine! It’s just…”

…

“You want him to.”

She nods, guiltily. “But the one thing I’ve learned is you can’t force people to change how they feel. You can only change what you do about it.”

“Wise words from a silly little duckling.” And though she smiles again, it is still more nervous than happy, so he has to explain. “Takara...I can’t pretend to know that. What he really thinks.” Of course not. “But. I can tell you what I’ve seen. Even he doesn’t ‘love you’, whatever the hell that really means...the damn man is changed. Trust me. I spend every waking moment with the bastard.”

She spurts a giggle, indignant.

“You laugh, but really,” he returns with the slightest dismissive raise of his wrist. And then he turns forward again in his seat, grasp to return to Hidan’s writings meant only for his disciple. Kakuzu lifts it up in demonstration. “No matter what is in this damn book...he’s not the same man he was when he made it, I figure. You of all people should know that affection is so fucking tumultuous… Who gives a shit if he thinks you’re pretty? He’s your friend.” Then the clincher, asking her to think for herself: "Right?"

That's the hardest part. The bottom lip, already scarred from similar, prior action, is bit. Unable to take it, Kakuzu exhales once more and cups her chin again, leaning close so she can focus on nothing else. If she admires him...he's going to make use of it. The next words are whispered.

“That’s something I never thought he had in him.”

The gentle fingers linger away, the woman’s eyes fluttering as she drinks it all in. “He’s...my friend.”

Kakuzu dips his head affirmatively. “Yeah." But enough of that; too many emotions already. "Now let’s get this over with and read this goddamn book.” Then...a sharpness in his stare, a mischievous gleam. “...Unless you want to tell me more about how the likes of me was your first kiss.”

Though it isn’t the sort of easy choice Kakuzu meant it to be for her, the intended answer is still obvious. Still in disbelief, like it’s all a dream, she nods again herself and slides back next to the large rag doll, so warm and kind despite how hard she makes it to be. Whatever is in that book, it has to be okay.

“Let’s see…” he murmurs, soon as she's nice and cozy. No backing down now...

And the minutes pass like nothing, smooth as melting butter. Hidan’s written word begins with mostly what is expected— the best way to draw your ritual circle, the preferred sources of blood both for individuals and for the spots on their body, the nuances of modern dririmancy— but then, page by page, it drifts into something more...metaphysical.

Kakuzu never really gave due credit before how eloquent his partner can be, how well thought. Of course, he has a whole mindset— a whole religion to justify his actions— but the elaboration of it...the depth of introspection Hidan took...Kakuzu becomes wrapped up in it.

And there comes a point that he begins to read out loud less for the performer and more for himself, his own enraptured curiosity.

There comes a point where a man, immortal or not, has to admit his shortcomings. I’m not a genius. I’m not dumb, but I only know what I know. The thing I pray for most, each time you see me put the pendent up to my face, is an answer. I don’t know what it means for there to be a neighbor I don’t want to lose. That’s Jashin’s core tenant, after all: slaughter your neighbor. But what does it mean if despite all that...I got all this fervor and dedication and hot blood for the slaying...I can’t shake it. There are few people in this life I care about, so maybe that’s it. Maybe all my neighbors have just been dirt under my shoe. Takara, my angel—

Kakuzu, at the time this was written before they traveled to the desert, had never heard him call the woman “Takara” nor “angel.” The remainder of the writing rolls of his tongue less like he’s saying it and more he’s being possessed.

What’s a man to do when someone’s more than just a neighbor?

The man takes a gasp as a sound comes from the person pressed to Kakuzu’s side. He looks to her and instead of a similar expression of shock, she is as relaxed as can be. She exhales, low and soft...and he sighs.

Goddammit...when did she fall asleep?

His deep, gravely voice has put adrift a weary woman, so emotionally exhausted from the events of today, to her dreams at the ocean. He turns back to the book, the words meant just for her from a reaper so desperate for a listening ear, and he wonders how much of their conversations on bounty hunts and religious killings were just talking and ignoring instead of really comprehending. Kakuzu’s jaw tightens. He doesn’t dare read the last page of this book out loud.

I want you to tell me if you love me, too. Maybe then I’ll know what to do about it.

Hidan either knew all along she never read his book, or he’s been waiting all this time, wondering if she’s just sparing him his feelings. Kakuzu, realizing this, throws the back of his skull onto the back of the cushion, hearts so heavy and light all at once he's left to stare at the ceiling. The zombies really, really need to have a talk...especially before whatever these two idiots feel come to a head with all that's been left unsaid.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

This was a mistake, I'll take my leave

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

Kakuzu’s not a sensor type, after all. Of course he heard everything.

Zetsu watches the woman as she sits on the swing all alone once again, kicking her legs despite the length and weight of a billowing eggshell skirt. The black cape around her shoulders flies like the black wings Itachi has used to keep tabs on her in his absence. That dumb smile...the way she plays like there’s nothing better to do...it’s nearly disgusting.

...Zetsu walks up until he can finally be noticed.

Feet in brown boots skid in dirt and dead grass to a stop, though the performer's pleasant demeanor is still in place. “Oh! Hi, sir.”

Sir... She only calls people that if she doesn’t actually respect them; everyone else has made it past “sir...” Yes...yes indeed... As he has suspected, this woman knows what she’s doing. Those eyes aren't bright with friendliness but with challenge. She thinks she is in charge. How very dangerously naive.

And though the dialog between two sides doesn’t escape their own mind, the observer upon the swing can still begin tell something is starkly wrong. She gasps in a staggering, confused way as the creature just continues to loom over her. The quiver in her eyes...yes... She finally gets it... She is reacting!

“...It’s time we exchanged that favor,” the dark voice says, though light could just as easily have agreed. A twitch in her expression, the childish delight merging to horror...it is delicious.

“I’ll tell them,” White Zetsu threatens. “I’ll tell them everything.” He smiles so, so saccharine, just as well as the haunting ghost can. How dare she… How DARE she! She’s had this coming, and so it is so easily, easily savored. “You little ghost...you’re dead and gone. And what to show for it...?”

His shadow casts over her, a woman trembling and helpless to his whims, the shape of those giant teeth framing to close in around her, much like it did the hoshi-nin he killed for her selfish sake. She has no control over him, never did. She can hardly even stutter his name. "Z-z-ze-..."

“You’ll be seen as what you are: a liar! A pathetic little lying ghost with nothing to give except her own life...that is, if you even still own it.” Calm, yellow irises stare much too still-like. The predator has pinned the prey, after such long and tantalizing wait. Her chest rises and falls with panicked breath, much like the running, running rabbit she is cornered by the wolves.

...But he hasn’t even bitten in yet:

“What will you do then?” he says, like it’s nothing. For the second time today, tears well in her eyes and her mouth doesn’t know how to speak, though this is a different manner entirely and he knows it so well. “Where will you run to? Who will accept you? There will be no escaping what you’ve done, Takara.” A tilt up of his chin, a hawk pinning down a worm.

“They’ll even know that’s not your real name.”

And now she has no choice but to talk, lest the woman collapse on herself:

“...What?”

And the complete eye of the plant’s blinks. “What?” he repeats with a coo, so very mockingly. But that doesn't solve it, this problem he's brought forth upon them both.

“What do I…?” she can hardly stutter past the racing blood pounding her ears. “...What...what is it? What? What do I—?!”

…

The lines that make up the white half of his face begin to shift. The curve that makes his grin...begins...to...drop. The worst thing of all, more than anything he has said or ever could say...is refusing her this. And so the stranger so lost begs for her new life again, louder and more desperately now that she has something to lose:

“What do you want…?!” Again, again! Speak! Fucking tell her what this MEANS! “What do you WANT!!!”

Loud enough the trees shake off what few leaves remain on their branches. Loud enough the birds caw in reply. Loud enough...that...—

The man named after tongues no longer knows how to use his own.

—...That he feels her pain in whatever semblance of a heart Zetsu claims to own.

He just stares. There she is, just as he wanted. Scared, desperate, underneath his thumb, remorseful of her actions...and yet.

And yet.

...He is not satiated.

She. Asks. Again. The agony in her voice is tangible:

“...What the hell do you want from me, you fucking MONSTER?!"

...Zetsu does not know. With his continued silence, the woman throws herself off the swing and runs, runs away.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

But before I go, let me know if you see

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

“TAKARA-CHAN!”

She nearly jumps out of her skin as in the middle of sprinting into her supposed safe home, arms with gloved hands close around her, gripping her tight enough to suffocate. Panic comes first— She’s being trapped—!

“Takara-chan, I have news!”

...No. She takes in a deep breath. Pretend you’re fine. He’s not a part of this, whatever Zetsu is doing. Surely not. He promised to protect her, after all. But can he protect from—

“GREAT news!” the cheery fellow sings.

...And though she can’t see his face, the stranger knows by tone that she is supposed to grin. Bit by bit, muscles at the corners of her lips are instructed to upturn. “Y...yeah?”

He lets go just enough to be able to step back, take in the coming delight he's about to bring forth. “You’re going to get more friends!”

…

And something inside her begins to crack.

“What?”

Oh, he needs to elaborate, doesn’t he? “I just got word! Leader-sama and his best friend are on the way!” Yes, yes!!! More people for his beloved to play with! The woman stands there with her mouth open, eyes wide, so she must be still taking the idea in. “They’re coming to meet you! To LIVE here, with us!”

And now, without her telling them to, the muscles of her face twitch her smile wider and wider, uncaring if it begins to look like the grimace it really is

“That’s. That’s...great.”

Shit.

Shit.

Shit.

Fucking SHIT!!!

With a small “oof!” from him as she accidentally bumps, the stranger slides past Tobi and runs away, leaving him wondering if it is necessary for the fool to soften another introduction to their growing family.

Little does he know, a new world is falling apart at the seams. She needs to hold it all in before this sharp crack begins to spread and shatter.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

A little black bag with the toe tag, please

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: *.☽ .* :☆ﾟ. ───

[by-glass-and-waves]

do you have a playlist or like a mixtape for inspiration or setting the mood when writing your stories?

Oh boy I hope you're ready because YEAH I DO

Associating songs with themes/scenes/locations have been my thing for like years and I would totally listen to a song over and over to figure out what happens during each part as well as what themes/ideas fit with a song. I made a few playlists on my oc worldbuilding shit a long while back in this manner heh

My playlist is divided into each AU, complete with weird titles to remind me what is what in each song

It is a work in progress though, a lot of them on the bottom haven't been organized yet and may not even be used actually there's a lot to organize omg

Link is for my YouTube playlist (and if you're on YouTube Music I recommend using the video for the first song because if you select the audio only version it will not give you the remix)

I go by vibes more than lyrics, and I thought that most of these should be more soundtracks though there are some exceptions

Song list/associations under the cut, it'll be in the playlist description as well (it's really long sorry)

Emil Ultimatum - Narinder (Courtship/Depression Quest/Restart) - use the video vers since the song vers only plays Emil (Despair)

Depression Quest

Courtship of the God of Death

Master of Time - Narinder

Dark World - Anupet

Epilogue - The Gilded Cage

Wretched Weaponry (short vers) - The Chained One

Widespread Illness - Prison of the Mind

[Tower of Sunz] - The Wrong Side of Love

Midcentury Motion - Escape

Danger in the Forest - Darkwood

Terra -

ZETA, la chanson - The Wanderer

Esto Gaza - The Heart Shaped Pond

Bran Bal - Eye of the Storm

Currents - Respite

Yoru Vln - The Stars Above

Somnus - Grief in Darkwood

Restart

Freya's Theme - Narinder

Malchut's Song - Shapash

The Kingdom of Noigllado - The Bishops

Kagachi - The First Resurrection

Ristaccia - Chaining the One Below

Trisagion -The Temple (Shapash)

Pandemonium - The Temple (The One Who Waits)

Memoria - Recollection

Once in a Lullaby - The Crystal Temple

Wretched Weaponry (long vers) - The Crystal Temple/Regret

Candy Shoppe - The Blacksmith's Final Gift

Innocent Wish - Yearning

Palliative - Distance

Water from the Same Source - The Admirer/Understanding

Unrequited Love -

Eidolon Wall - The Gateway/The Lands Below

Shadowlord's Castle/Memory - The Temple, Defeated

Eidolons on Parade - Slow Descent into Despair

Sarabande - Understanding/Contentment

When We Finally Fall Asleep, Pt. 3 - Mutual Understanding

Amusement Park - Arms Full of Offerings/Growing Jealousy

Dark Colossus (Kaiju) - The One Who Waits

Copied City - The Gateway

Possessed by Disease - Unraveling

Mourning - The Bishops

19th Century AU

The 13th Anthology - Narinder

Snow in Summer - The Lands of the New Faith

Turii ~Panta Rhei~ - The Dying World

Turii ~Panta rhei~ (Orchestra) - The New World

Main Theme of Final Fantasy V -

Zephyr Memories ~Legend of the Eternal Wind~ -

Saving Words for Making Sense - A Tender Moment

The Disney Afternoon - Town Theme/Respite

Blinded by Light - Crusade

Silver Dragon - Boss Battle

Gods Bound by Rules - Frivolous Masquerade

Blind Justice, le concerto - Blood of Chaos/"What… has become of us?"

Grandma (Destruction) - Guardian of the True Word

…con lentitud poderosa - Threshold of His Temple

Bipolar Nightmare - Betrayal

Black Song White Scales - The Sacrificial Beast

The Sound of the End - The Point of the Sharpened Blade

Raison d'etre - The Final Battle

God Shattering Star - The Final Battle

The Ultimate Weapon - A Heart for a Heart/Sacrifice

North - The Red Crown

Dispossession/Piano Ver. - Aftermath

Dust to Dust - Crossing the River

His Dream - Within the Circle

Theme of Love - No Illusion

Terra's Theme -

Shadowlord - Shamura

Shadowlord's Castle/Roar - Silk Cradle

Sustained by Hate - Revelation/Disappointment

March of the Dreadnoughts -

Atonement - A Heart for a Heart

VS. Star Dream - Kallamar

Midnight Moonlight -

The Final Battle (Magolor's Theme) -

Three in the Morning (Aftermath) - Abandoned/Regret

Destati - Imprisonment

Village of Dali - Respite

Kaine/Salvation - Relief

Alien Manifestation - Bitu

Dwelling of the Ancient Gods - The One Who Waits/The Gateway

Lord of a Dead Empire - The One Who Waits

Between Heaven and Earth - The One Who Waits

Birth of a Wish - The Red Crown/The Deal

A Beautiful Song - vs Heket and Miniboss

Crumbling Lies (Front) - vs Shamura and Miniboss

Song of the Ancients (Atonement) - Baal and Aym

Pascal - Ratau

The Spirit Dais - Bitu

Tango Appassionata - Allani and Narinder

Phantom Forest - Lost in the Gardens of the Ball/Shamura

Aerith's Theme -

Nautilus - The Capital

Yoru Vo - Halycon Harbor (Night)

Moonsetter - Baal and Aym

Requited - Across the Room/The Dance

War & War - Shamura

A Funeral of Flowers (Rain) - Prince Narinder (Unfettered)

A Funeral of Flowers (Thunder) - Prince Narinder (Amenthes)

[the-nation-of-today]

BVB-Versary

🚨WARNING: Big old sappy post ahead🚨

Exactly one year ago today, I listened to Black Veil Brides for the very first time. So now, a year on, call this a narrative about/reflection on the past year.

I’m not usually one to remember the exact date I started listening to an artist so clearly. The only reason I remember this one so vividly is because of where I physically was at that time. Every summer, my family rents out a beach house for a week and we just go and chill. While on the beach one day, I was listening to music and decided I needed something new, I was bored of what I was listening to and needed to switch it up.

Now in May of that year, I had discovered Andy Black and fell in love with the music. I knew Andy was the lead singer of BVB and that I liked his voice so it just seemed right to try out BVB. I knew they were a bit heavier than Andy's solo music, but it was worth a shot since I had been slowly dipping my feet into some heavier music (for me). If I didn't like it, oh well, it was worth a try.

They had a lot of music and I had no idea where to start, so I did what I always do when trying a new artist: I put every song into one massive playlist and just hit shuffle to start getting a taste. The first song that came on was the Re-Stitch version of Perfect Weapon, I'll always remember being taken aback by that first scream. And as I listened more, I started noting down the names of the songs I was particularly endeared to so I could put them on another playlist to focus on them. Eventually, it came to the point where I was writing down every single song that came on. I always joke that something broke in my brain that day, but really it was like something clicked. Whatever it was about this music, it resonated with me on a level that I did not expect.

After my shuffle experiment, I made it a point every day on that beach vacation to listen to one album in order each day, which worked out for the week. I started with Wretched And Divine, mostly because I noticed a lot of those songs were my favorites. Then came Vale, and TPT, and all the other albums. Needless to say, I was hooked. I spent that week consuming as much BVB content as I could find. I listened to the albums, read interviews, watched both American Satan and Paradise City, anything and everything I could find regarding this band or its members. Torch was the first song I really learned, one distinct memory I have is climbing up the beach house stairs and just repeating the chorus in my head to try and get it down and memorized.

We returned home from that vacation, and I had a new determination to learn all of the songs. I copied the lyrics of every song into a google doc, took a screenshot of my BVB playlist to mark off which songs I learned, and began studying. I started with Vale, don't remember the reason why I chose that, and I would just listen on repeat reading those lyrics over and over to drill them into my brain. Every day was BVB for me. I'd pace around my room learning lyrics, finding old videos, just consuming whatever I could. Then, as a treat for surviving a family wedding at the end of the month, I ordered what would be my first batch of BVB merch.

But this wasn't enough for me, I needed more. I turned to Tumblr (it being my main platform) and just began scrounging for content. A lot of it was older, nothing super active, so I resigned myself to just following the tags and finding content that way.

One day in November, however, I reblogged a gifset of the Wake Up MV with some insane tags that you all are probably used to from me. The next day, I got a DM from someone, the person who I reblogged the set from. They saw my tags, and decided that we were the same level of insane and wanted to talk more. We did the social niceties dance for about two hours that day, and once it clicked that we were both insane about this band, that all went out the window and we went unhinged.

This person, who if you hadn’t figured it out already is Sam aka @bornasaint. That day, I had made my first real BVB friend, someone who I could talk to about this band and it was cathartic to just be able to talk to someone who understood me. We were both newer fans, which I think helped in how quickly we bonded. That same month, I started my own BVB tumblr blog (the blog you’re reading this on now, obviously) because I knew this obsession wasn't going anywhere. Also in that month, we started the Black Veil Beloveds server, which was a test run of trying to find more active BVB fans. Obviously it worked, because the BVBeloveds are still going strong.

December of that year, Spotify Wrapped came out as always. Even though I had only started listening in August, BVB was my most played artist of the year at 25,000 minutes played. I was officially deemed as down bad by Spotify. And I was content with that, proud even.

But, soon enough, Tumblr became not enough for me. A lot of it was just old pictures, nothing super current or active. So around February/March of this year, I revamped my twitter that I had barely been using and started making headway into BVBtwt. I'll admit, I was nervous. I hadn't really been active in a fandom twitter space in a long time. But, one day a tweet came up on my timeline asking for people wanting to start a new BVB group chat. I took the plunge, and stated my interest. That group would quickly become yet another set of dearly insane friends. Even though I was a newer fan compared to many and a little bit older than the space I found myself in, I was welcomed in and felt excited to have this again. Something had sparked in me upon finding this band and I felt creatively and socially recharged.

I used to say I wish I had gotten into BVB earlier in my life to experience some of the eras of the band that I hadn't been able to due to not knowing the band existed. But now, I realize that I found them when I needed to, when it was right for me. Call it fate if you will, but I couldn't ask for better timing. This band had defined my senior year of college, so much so that I decorated my grad cap with a lyric from Torch and took them with me to graduation.

And now, one year on, I am at that same house. We rented out the same house from last year, the same one where I spent hours on the deck looking out at the ocean and listening to BVB. That one choice that I made, just to try out this band to see if I liked them, took my life in a completely new directory. A year ago, I never would’ve pictured myself going to a BVB concert and buying VIP for it, but here I am now, 48 days away from meeting them.

And now that I’ve narrated my entire journey of falling in love with this band, some thanks are in order.

First, to Sam, my dear bestie. Thank you for finding my tags amusing enough that you wanted to reach out and thank you for dealing with my insanity, from Bestie Those Are Your Tits to Biersussy and every insane inside joke in between.

To the BVBeloveds, another thank you for putting up with me and my obsession with Andy’s black button down shirts.

To that twitter GC, thank you for being welcoming, our inside jokes have changed me, I don’t know if I’d call it for the better, but they certainly have changed me.

And finally, thank you to Black Veil Brides, for making music that could resonate so deeply with your fans and for solidifying that connection throughout the years.

I promise I'm almost done rambling, but I’ll leave you all with this. My favorite song (if you couldn’t tell by the Everything about me) is Wake Up. That song struck a chord with me, particularly the line “we’ll be here when their heart stops beating”. And I think it resonated with me because that’s the power of music. Even when you are gone, that music remains, those memories remain. Music is eternal, and it changed my fucking life.

So, here’s to my one year BVB-versary, as I like to say, and here’s to many more years of insanity.

[flowers-of-io]

Eris Morn, Savâthun and Xivu'arath for character opinion ask 👀

Eris has been answered!

Sav:

favorite thing about them: [gestures to the whole her & the Traveler plotline] return to the Light or somethin'

least favorite thing about them: she's a horrible person who killed many, many people! And contrary to a popular belief I do not condone literal genocide. Star Jasmine loretab is brilliant and it makes me very uncomfortable

favorite line: "Go on, then. You know so much? Tell me who I am!"

brOTP: I'm torn between Immaru and Oryx here

OTP: the ship economy is in shambles, so I'm here like... either Rhulk or Eris or the Guardian, because there are a few really good Sav/OC fics out there...

nOTP: I've yet to encounter a bad Sav ship ngl. Sav/Crow squicks me a bit because of the power imbalance, but at the same time their dynamic is too good to be a nOTP...

random headcanon: she wears a lot of jewellery. This is what I'm missing in her canon look ngl

unpopular opinion: she likes kids

song i associate with them: please look at this playlist that is my magnum opus, I've sorted it chronologically and have fifteen reason for why each song is where it is. The lyrics doc is like 10 pages long

favorite picture of them: omg I don't know but it MIGHT be that shot of the siblings from the cutscene retelling the Hive's story where Sav is standing with a whole ass cleaver. I love it so much

--

Xivu:

favorite thing about them: she loves her siblings more than the sword logic itself

least favorite thing about them: we still know so little of her current motivations, but if she turns out to be wholly like 'my wretched Savathun, who is Wretched, and a Traitor, and there is no rhyme or reason to what she's done' I will shake her violently. Shush and go read the truest proof of love, and maybe then you'll calm down

favorite line: "He made us strong. He will lead us to infinity. Oryx my Brother loves me and this love is war."

brOTP: Haroktha and the other Super Old Generals of her army! They've been a squad for millennia. Sitting on some stairs deep within the Sea of Screams with a boombox

OTP: I'm wholeheartedly embracing @xivu-arath's aroace Xivu headcanon, but at the same time @aceofdumbass made me promise I'd write her a Xivu/Mara fic and I've been 👀 about this ship ever since...

nOTP: again, in general I don't really vibe with shipping Xivu with anyone but the concept of war itself

random headcanon: she doesn't have a palace in her throne world, and the whole place is more like a boot camp

unpopular opinion: she would still choose Savathûn over the Deep

song i associate with them: guess what? I have a whole playlist! "Do you have a playlist for every character in this fucking game?" Well I don't look very neurotypical do I

favorite picture of them: there are like. three in the entire canon. but I'll choose the one from the Legions Adrift grimoire anthology, where she is spreading her wings over Torobatl