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autumnalwalker · 5 months

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Empty Names - 24 - Nostalgia

Author's Note: In which Ashan tests out some new types of magic, remembers childhood trauma, revisits his hometown, and learns a bit more about Carnette Bridgewood from Road and Sullivan. See the tags for additional commentary. Word Count: 17,474 Content Warnings: "Genre-typical violence" in the form of a fight between a wizard and a monster. Dead animals (died offscreen). Anxiety over past trauma.

<-Previous Chapter Masterpost “Get away from him!”

“Teacher, what is going on?”

“Did you really think you could hide what you did? What he is?”

“Ashan, just look at me. Everything’s going to be alright.”

“What is he talking about?”

“Put down your staff Glassgaze. Even you can’t stop all of us at once.”

“Watch me.”

*******

Ashan lies in bed on the hazy verge between sleep and waking, trying to sort newly unblocked memories from dreams. He realizes his eyes are wet and he sits up, breath hitching and body shuddering as he clasps silken bedsheets to his bare chest. The forgotten experience from a decade ago is now as fresh in his mind as if it had just happened yesterday, and it is difficult not to fall back into the mindset of the frightened child who went through it.

He attempts to still himself the way he always does but his mind jumps to the one who taught him that technique and the image of her lying bloody and burnt from a failed attempt to protect him. The child he was back then had not yet mastered that stillness to keep his spells precise. He had not yet had to perfect that stillness to keep himself sane while unable to comprehend the language of his own thoughts.

A more external grounding then. Something anchored in the here and now. The smoothness of the sheets between his fingers. The gentle weight of the blankets on his legs. The barest blue glow of morning light leaking through the window blinds to lend a suggestion of shape to the patterns embroidered on the gauzy bed curtains.

He had not expected to get so used to sleeping in a bed. Not after so many years simply suspending himself in midair with magic overnight in order to conveniently sleep anywhere. It is the blankets, he thinks. There is something strangely comforting about their layered weight.

He waves a hand and the curtains around the bed and over the window slide open to let in the sun. There is the desk beneath the window with its pile of tomes borrowed from the Manor’s library. There is his neatly folded robe within easy reach atop the bedside table. There is the white laptop gifted to him by Eris where he left it on the vanity across the room from him. Despite having so little, he has still marked this decadent guest room room as his own.

It is a strange thought, having a room to call his own. It feels presumptuous and nostalgic all at once. He and Aliana had always been on the road. The longest the two of them ever stayed in one place was a single season, and even that had a deadline from the start after which he knew they would move on again. This current arrangement, as far as he has been able to tell from talking to Road, appears to be indefinite as long as he wants it.

The last time he had his own room to live in rather than to stay in was when his parents still thought he was alive.

He catches sight of himself in the vanity’s mirror and stares down his reflection until its expression is as calm as it should be. He squeezes the bedsheets to himself one last time before letting them fall, getting up, and dressing himself.

Properly attired he is no longer Ashan, the scared child who just watched his mentor fall and had his potential sealed away. He is the wizard Glassheart, traveling adventurer and protector of those in need.

Yet still the preserved memory throbs like a reopened wound seeking acknowledgement.

He looks from the stack of tomes with their arcane lore of a dozen worlds’ spells to the sleeping laptop with its queued videos of this world’s contemporary makeup styles and techniques. On any other day he could easily lose himself in either for hours, but right now he needs something more solid to distract himself with.

Climbing out the window and testing his reflexes with a spell to slow his fall makes for a decent start.

Making a morning ritual of exercise helps, and by now he has almost memorized the winding trails of the Bridgewood Estate’s extensive gardens. Focusing on one footstep after another during a brisk jog is its own form of meditation, and should that not prove enough to occupy his mind, identifying the rare flowers and herbs as he passes by is an engaging challenge.

A maintenance golem pauses its gardening to wave a spindly leg at him and Ashan nods back to it in acknowledgement. It is always the same one that waves to him on these morning jogs. While they all might look like identical shiny black orbs on spidery legs, he has learned to pick out variations in their animating auras in his time here. He wonders if the sorceress Bridgewood explicitly designed her creations with distinct personalities from the start or constructed a malleable template that would naturally produce emergent behavior over time. Either one would be an impressive feat in its own right, especially considering the sheer quantity of the constructs keeping the manor and estate grounds clean and orderly in their maker’s absence.

The minutes pass by in a pleasant strain of muscles and lungs. The paving stones beneath his feet. The floral scents upon the breeze. The sunlight on his face. Anchors to the here and now. The dark, sound-proofed tent and the enchanted shackles around a child’s wrists were years ago, not last night.

He rounds the bend in the path to the gazebo where he has made his habit of performing his more stationary morning exercises and finds Road already there. They are holding a cloth-wrapped bundle in one hand and staring up at the star-painted inner dome of the gazebo’s ceiling.

“It used to shift in real time to reflect the sky on the opposite side of the earth,” Road says when Ashan joins them in admiring the mural. “I wonder if it froze the moment Carnette was gone or slowly wound down. I bet Sullivan would know.” They blink and turn their head to greet Ashan with a warm smile. “But it’s too beautiful a morning for thoughts like that. Join me for breakfast?”

They punctuate the offer with a raise of their carried bundle.

“I appreciate the offer,” Ashan replies. His mind leaps back to the images that plagued him during the night and he cuts off the second half of that sentence.

“Wonderful,” Road laughs. “Well, come one, I was just on my way to a perfect spot.”

“I take it you have recovered,” Ashan observes as he follows Road deeper into the gardens. “Bridgewood said you were feeling unwell.”

“Oh, nothing that a good night’s sleep or two couldn’t fix. As Sullivan so likes to remind me, even heroes need to sleep. The worrywort.”

They round another bend in the garden trail and arrive at a patinated copper gate beneath an arch of ivy. It creaks as Road pushes it open without slowing their gait. Only when they realize Ashan has stopped to stare do they pause to turn around.

“This is the entrance to the hedge maze,” Ashan says. Thus far he has limited his exploration of the interior of Bridgewood Manor out of respect as a guest. He has avoided exploring the maze out of wariness. While he has explicitly been granted free reign to explore the Estate’s grounds, labyrinths are potentially dangerous conceptual archetypes at the best of times, and all the moreso when created by mages. To attempt to navigate one crafted by the sorceress Bridgewood herself…

“It would be quite the adventure to explore, wouldn’t it?” Road invites. “Even the maintenance golems barely come in here anymore and Sullivan’s focused all his attention on the Manor, so there’s probably things in here Carnette never got around to showing anyone.”

A thrill of exploration trickles down Ashan’s spine, the likes of which he has not felt since the last time Aliana took him into an ancient, monster-infested ruin years ago.

“Not that we’ll be going very far in for now,” Road amends. “But even a little taste of adventure makes wonderful spice for a meal.”

Ashan follows them past the gate and down the overgrown marble staircase beyond. Vines and fallen leaves from the overhead trellises crunch underfoot as they make their descent. The only view of the maze below is through stained glass windows more interested in displaying their images than allowing a view from above by which to plan a route. Dryads dancing in a ring. A carnivorous plant surrounded by bones. An arachnoid flower whose web drips with nectar. A waterfall spilling into a pool full of treasure. The scenes go on.

“Are these all vistas to be found within the maze?” Ashan asks.

“Hard to say,” Road replies, “but knowing Carnette, she probably at least planned to include them all at some point. Who knows which ones she ever got around to and which ones she changed her mind about or got bored with. The one time she threw me in here and told me to try to solve the maze, it was still in the early design phase and I know she expanded it after that and took at least some of my feedback into account.”

They reach the bottom of the stairs and the stone walls give way to towering unkempt hedges. Road pushes on through the leafy branches stretching out into the path and Ashan conjures a marker beacon to follow back, just in case.

“I am not sure where to begin unpacking that,” Ashan says.

Road laughs and turns a corner, their voice making it easy for Ashan to follow them even when out of sight. “It was my first time meeting her. Sullivan claimed that the two of them were past the ‘trying to kill each other’ stage of their courtship and wanted to introduce us. Turns out he’d been talking up my skills as an adventurer and she thought it’d be entertaining to test those claims so she rearranged the layout of the Estate to make us traverse the hedge maze in order to reach the Manor. Between you and me, I think she was a little bit jealous and wanted to see how Sullivan and I held up under pressure together.”

“And the offering of feedback?” Ashan asks, choosing not to pursue the questions raised by the jealousy part.

“I don’t know that she ever went through with it, but she’d been toying with the idea of plucking adventurers from worlds like Orthon and Dorbreith - and maybe even people from other worlds like this that don’t acknowledge ‘adventurer’ as a profession - and offering them boons if they could successfully make their way through. I told her that if that’s what she wanted then she needed to make the traps and puzzles less deadly and put in more safe areas where challengers could stop to catch their breath.”

“But… why?”

“Well, not to brag too much, but if Sullivan and I were making it through by the skin of our teeth then most anyone else she was likely to chuck in here at random was going to wind up dead and I wanted to prevent that if I could. Even we had to cheat towards the end by baiting the invincible minotaur golem she had stalking us into mowing down the walls for us so we could skip straight to the exit.”

“While that raises a number of other questions, what I meant was why would she go through the trouble? What did she hope to get out of such a convoluted and colossal undertaking?”

Road shrugs. “Entertainment? Another way to spread her reputation? Subjects to test experimental hypotheses on? An audience to show off the fruits of her hobby to? Carnette was never someone who did anything for just one reason and she enjoyed keeping those reasons obscured. She and Sullivan had that in common.” Road pushes down an overgrown hedge patch, stops, and gestures for Ashan to squeeze past them. “We’re here.”

The maze opens up into a hexagonal courtyard. Flagstone pathways meander from the corridors at the corners to converge on a shaded bower next to a fountain that spills into a pond. Beneath the bower’s flowering canopy sit a mosaic-topped table surrounded by wicker chairs and a marble pedestal. Atop the pedestal is an orb the color and texture of tanned flesh, half as wide as Ashan is tall. Ruddy tendrils flow down from the base of the orb and into the grass. Roots, Ashan takes them for at first.

Ashan approaches the bower and the orb within with less caution than he normally might. Surely Road would not plan to share a meal next to something dangerous. Pondering the orb, he can tell that it is both alive and magical, although he cannot identify the type or origin of either aspect. He steps into the bower’s shade and the orb’s surface begins to ripple in an undulating, swirling pattern. Its top half contracts, becoming pear-shaped, and then curves to one side, evocative of an animal cocking its head in curiosity.

Ashan flicks his wand into his hand by reflex at the unexpected movement. The no-longer-orb rears back, stretching and flattening into a fan reminiscent of a cobra’s hood. What are probably bones become apparent beneath what is now obviously taut skin.

A hand alights on Ashan’s shoulder. It feels just like Aliana’s whenever she was about to either calm, encourage, or praise him.

“It’s a psychically reactive art piece,” Road says. “Most Culescun flesh sculptures are shaped to resonate with and emanate an emotion, but this one copies and syncretizes the feelings of the viewers. I’d been wondering where it ended up ever since Jero visited a while back.”

Ashan’s wand slides back into his sleeve. The sculpture becomes a swirling orb of ponderous curiosity once more. The hand lifts from his shoulder.

“So this was xyr gift to the sorceress Bridgewood for assisting xem in xyr exile?”

“The very same,” Road confirms while unwrapping their bundle on top of the mosaic table. It is a simple spread. A loaf of bread, a block of cheese, and an apple. “It seemed like a shame for it to be stuck down here alone for so long without stimulation. Given that this maze doesn’t rearrange itself anymore, I imagine you could bring the others down here sometime if you felt like it. I’m sure Lacuna at least would get a kick out of it.”

Bones press against the sculpture’s skin from the inside in alarm.

“Stimulation?” Ashan asks. “It is not sapient, is it?”

“Of course not. Jero’s got too many ethical standards for that, even if Carnette didn’t always.” Road plucks a pair of crystal goblets dangling from vines that let go with a tug and walks over to the fountain.

“What do you mean by that?” Ashan follows Road.

In the nearby pool, several of the sculpture’s red tendrils have grown feathery fronds that wave in the current created by the fountain’s overflow. Ashan recognizes them to be gills, of a sort. A gill-less red tendril snatches a water-striding insect from the pool’s surface, dragging it under and enveloping it.

“Carnette and I often didn’t see eye to eye on matters,” Road says while rinsing the goblets in the fountain. “I’d hesitate to call her outright malicious - most of the time anyway - but she had a tendency to overlook the fact that whatever she was doing might affect real people. And when she did go out of her way to do something good, well, like I said, she never did anything for just one reason.”

“I see,” Ashan says. “I had always heard conflicting stories about her, but on Orthon at least the tales singing her praise always outweighed any warnings of wickedness.”

“She always could be talked down from her worst impulses so long as there was someone willing to try, I’ll give her that. And she’d usually answer an earnest plea for help, even if she did dress it up in a speech to justify how she was just using the opportunity to further her own unfathomable agenda. She and Sullivan are alike in that way too.”

Road passes Ashan a crystal goblet filled with cool, clear fountain water. The stem is still wet from the rinsing.

“Cheers,” Road says and clinks their vessel to Ashan’s.

Ashan touches the glass to his lips and catches the faintest whiff of sweetness over rotten eggs. Road has already drained theirs in one long drink and is moving to refill it, so he takes a sip. It tastes of sugar and sulfur.

Road takes a seat at the table and the sleeve of their purple jacket trimmed with green extends into a clawed gauntlet that they use to divide the cheese and cut the apple in half.

“For all that those two fed on each other’s chaos at times,” Road continues, “they actually mellowed one another out in the grand scheme of things.” The gauntlet retracts and Road breaks the bread by hand. They hand half the loaf across the table to where Ashan has seated himself. “He misses her, you know. He hides it, but I’ve known him longer than I can remember and this is the first time I’ve ever known him to grieve.”

Ashan’s gaze snaps up from the fruits and nuts filling the bread. “Why are you telling me this?”

“A couple of reasons.”

“Much like the sorceress Bridgewod herself?”

Road laughs. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I? But really, I’m just looking out for my friends. I’ve found that people function best when they have more than one confidant they can talk to, and while he’ll never admit it, something’s been eating at Sullivan lately and he could use another friend.” A smile, more mischievous than Road’s usual, but no less warm. “And besides, I think he’s taken a rare liking to you, not that he’ll admit that either.”

“I have no interest in courtship,” Ashan says flatly.

“Not at all what I meant,” Road chuckles. “And don’t worry, neither does he. Those days are well behind him. As I said, friendship. Merely something to consider at any rate. The abrasiveness is mostly a mask, I promise.”

“I shall keep that in mind,” Ashan concedes. “And your other reason?”

“I figured you could use a diverting conversation and it seemed like a potentially engaging topic.”

The sculpture twists itself into a knot.

“You did not encounter me by chance this morning.” It is a statement, not a question.

“Not exactly,” Road admits, “but not exactly not either. I guess you could say I’ve got a knack for showing up where and when I’m needed, even if I don’t fully understand the why of it. The info gathering that Sullivan - and now Lacuna - do simply speeds up the process and makes it more efficient. I can tell when it’s happening though, and when you showed up I made some educated guesses.”

“Such as?”

“No offense, but speaking from experience, you strike me as the kind of person who holds things in until they get to be too much and spill over, and given that there was mention of you and Lacuna possibly attempting to remove your seal yesterday it seemed likely enough that something from that might be bothering you. So, if you want to talk about it, we’re in a safe place and you have my word no one else will hear about it, and if you’d rather have a distraction, we’re in a place built by the most famous mage of the last few centuries and I’ve got stories to tell. Or I can shut up and we can enjoy a beautiful morning in silence.”

Ashan nods and chews his bread in silence, pondering the orb, the one it was gifted to, the one so willing to talk about her, and the offer they made.

The silence of a peaceful morning where decisions can be put off for at least a little while.

Ashan takes a sip of the strange water and conjures a set of razor thin barriers to further slice his half of the apple and cheese.

The sorceress Bridgewood…

Unlike wizard, witch, or enchanter, the term sorcerer is not so much a description of how one’s magic works, but an accusation. Broader than titles such as pyromancer, warder, or cleric that refer to the types of magic one specializes in, “sorcerer” is a term reserved for mages who practice magic that is considered taboo, whether because it is morally abhorrent or just too dangerous for anyone to safely or responsibly control. Stealing or binding souls. Communion with the eldritch. Mind control. True resurrection of the dead. City-leveling evocations. Not always a mark of evil, but always one of danger. Someone might delve into forbidden sorcerous arts with the best of intentions meaning to use them for good; or simply be overconfident enough that they really think they can control what generations of mages before them have failed.

And then there were the so-called “true sorcerers.” Every couple centuries or so someone usually shows up with the talent and skill to actually command that kind of power without destroying themselves and everyone around them. Maybe once a millennium there would be such an individual who refrains from abusing their power to the point that they become threats to entire countries, if not entire worlds.

Or so Aliana had taught Ashan long ago. According to her, the only “true sorcerer” like that alive right now in this world cluster is - or now rather was - the sorceress Bridgewood. It was a name he had latched onto ever since he first heard it. In his early teens he had occasionally fancied himself as aspiring to the title himself one day. The day he mentioned that to Aliana was one of the few times she ever snapped at him. That conversation makes more sense now.

“The counterseal ritual worked,” Ashan says, breaking the silence, “but the blocked memories of the seal’s application have come back unexpectedly vividly.”

“As if no time has passed at all since the memories were locked away, perfectly preserved and ready to throw you right back into who you were at the time,” Road whispers.

The sculpture grows spines in surprise.

“How did you know?” Ashan asks.

“Personal experience. There’s a reason I’ve come to prefer amnestics and wipes over blocks. They’re not as precise or complete, but even if the memories do come back for whatever reason, they tend to be blurred and as dulled by time as memories normally would be. Less risk of dropping you into the deep end of unprocessed trauma out of the blue that way.”

“I see. You do have a great deal of experience with aiding those who inadvertently fell through the Masquerade.”

Amnesticization for the sake of Masquerade preservation is the one exception to the proscription on mind-altering magic. Of course even non-mages that work with potential Masquerade breaches would be well-versed in the different methods of allowing people to return to their mundane lives.

“Sure, let’s go with that,” Road says. “But as for your current situation, you’ve got options. Amnestics to dull the pain are technically an option, albeit not one that I would recommend for a variety of reasons. Then there’s the old standby of ‘cope, drown it out, and live your life until it fades like any other bad memory,’ which has its ups and downs. Or there’s the hard but effective route of trying to work through and process it, but that’s not going to happen in a single morning and from the look of that sculpture over there, you’re not up to doing much more talking about it right now anyway.”

“Not so much, I fear.”

“Nothing wrong with that. And if you like, remind me later and I can get you in touch with some therapists I usually recommend to first timers Backstage. But for now, any requests for a story? Sullivan’s the real teller between the two of us, but I’ve been told I can be distracting when I want to be.”

“Thank you, truly,” Ashan says. “Although one thing I feel I must share lest I leave her reputation unnecessarily tarnished is that I know for sure now that my ment- that Aliana was against the application of the seal on me and only conceded to play her role in binding my magic after she had exhausted her other options for protecting me at great cost to herself.”

“I’m glad to hear you weren’t betrayed in that way too.”

“It does not change the fact that she ultimately kidnapped me without any intent of bringing me back home. It is a solace that I am still deciding what to make of.”

“I know the feeling.”

“But as for story requests, perhaps a tale involving the sorceress Bridgewood? We are in her home afterall, and, after her consort, I imagine you knew her best.”

Road grins and leans in close over the table. “Oh, I’ve got a few I could tell. Remember our fair lady of the green? The minor goddess who helped us out with the Logos quest? So, a while back some produce corporation was imprisoning and exploiting her to increase crop yields and was blatant enough to feature her as a mascot in their advertising…”

*******

“Please, just don’t hurt him!”

“You’re in no position to make demands Glassgaze. Count yourself lucky that none of the elder mages you felled before we put a stop to your outburst died.”

“He’s just a child. He hasn’t hurt anyone.”

“He just cut maestro Silverthorn’s arm off to protect you. He’s an anchor world mage whose magic is unbound by logic or rules and with more potential for power than I’ve ever seen.”

“I’ve taught him control. Restraint. Honor. Do you really think it’s luck that no one died today?”

“Honor? That’s a joke coming from you. You’ve taught him enough to be dangerous by giving him a taste of combining magic systems from outside his homeworld. Or did you really think you had the next sorceress Bridgewood on your hands?”

“That’s still no reason to kill him. You’re talking about executing a child for being a potential threat. Bind him if you have to, but please, don’t hurt him.”

*******

Ashan raises his arm that isn’t temporarily paralyzed and accepts Road’s offer to lift him off the floor of the gym’s sparring ring.

“Good match,” Road says. “If you’d had more room to maneuver you might have had me.”

Eris and Lacuna had already been at the office when Ashan and Road arrived after breakfast. They got to talking about the nullification of the seal on his magic and one thing led to another and soon enough Eris proposed a sparring match to see what he could do. To Ashan’s surprise, Lacuna demurred from watching a display of the magic she had helped unlock in favor of staying in her lab to catch up on work. Ashan won fairly handily against Eris and then Road asked if he was up for another round.

It ended much as any match against Road does, save for the fact that he got them to draw that energy sword of theirs against him for the first time.

“A good match indeed,” Ashan says while Road pulls him to his feet. He sways, off balance from one arm limply dangling as dead weight, and Road waits until he steadies before letting go and handing him back his wand that he had dropped when their blade of orange light disrupted his motor control.

Yes, a good match, or at least an educational one. A reminder that theoretical study of varied forms of magic and the sudden ability to access them does not automatically equate to mastery. And loss does ever carry its own opportunities.

Ashan touches his wand to his numb hand and focuses on a spell he has been wanting to try for some time now, ever since encountering that first tome borrowed from Bridgewood’s library. That tome, Whispers of the Sun, had an entire chapter dedicated to spells of healing flame as a prime example both of how pyromancy can be more than the pure destruction commonly associated with it and of how varied the approaches of traditions originating from different worlds can be when arriving at the same end state for a spell. Some of those spells were crude acts of cauterization. Others grew out of the concept of fire as a cleansing agent burning out impurities, sometimes symbolically and sometimes literally.

This spell is rooted in the conceptualization of the sun as the ultimate source of all life and fire as an extension of the sun.

Some spells require incantations, be they poetic verse to manifest a concept or nonsense syllables meant to resonate on esoteric frequencies with the universe’s vibrating threads. Other spells require gestures, be they precise hand signs and dances drawn from a deep canon of tradition or simple focusing motions bridging the gap between visualized will and manifested physicality.

This spell requires a prayer.

It is a wordless prayer, as all the deepest prayers are. It is a praise of the sun. It is a cry for the comfort of warmth. It is a recognition of connection and promise of care. It is more witchcraft than wizardry. It is not a technique of precise formulae and methodology. It is a gift that asks only for a reverent heart.

Reverence has never come easily to Ashan, but he hopes that wonder will make an adequate substitute to the recipe as he casts his mind back.

The warmth of a roadside campfire and the end of a day’s travel and the countless stars overhead. His first time seeing a farm in person and the rows and rows of green leaves turned to face the sun. The sight of the sky after weeks of exploring underground ruins and the tears the light brought to his eyes. The hearthfire at a bustling inn and the realization that he was living a scene out of a fantasy. A dragon’s blazing breath and the eggs it incubated while he and Aliana watched from hiding. The smell of his parents’ cooking wafting across the yard and the knowledge that it was time to come inside from his play. A towering white tree whose bark glitters more like crystal than wood while its mother-of-pearl leaves make a shifting rainbow above.

Three times Ashan sat beneath that tree and each time was the closest he has ever felt to reverence. The first was as a child, roughly a year after his abduction, and it was a surprise gift from Aliana in an attempt to share someplace special to her. The second was at the end of his training, waiting for seven days for a branch to fall so he could carve it into a wand as his mentor had done with her staff, and afterwards Aliana bestowed upon him the epithet of Glassheart to anoint him as a peer rather than a student. The third was on his last day on Orthon, after he learned there had never been an intent to bring him home, and it had been at Aliana’s request for one last detour before taking him home so that she might say goodbye.

He understands that goodbye better now.

White flames spread from the tip of his wand to envelop his hand and crawl up his arm, illuminating the sleeve of his robe from within. His fingers twitch involuntarily as sensation returns, first as warmth, then as a pins-and-needles tingling. The sensation and the twitching moves up to his elbow; to his shoulder. He feels the air grow cold around him. He feels himself start to sweat. He feels a pang of hunger. The flames grow brighter and spread to his neck.

Ashan Glassheart clears his mind and the flames flicker and go out.

His arm feels feverishly hot and the tingling sensation persists, but there is no pain and he has full motor function once again.

The full process took seven seconds, but it feels like much longer.

He is holding up his hand and flexing his fingers, about to comment on the spell working better than anticipated for a first try when an unexpected voice interrupts him.

“I see we’re doing self-immolations today,” Bridgewood - the current Bridgewood - lilts. “Someone should have told me, I would have brought marshmallows.”

“Ashan has healing magic now,” Road says. “He just cured the paralysis from my sword.”

“No offense,” Eris says, “but if that’s healing I think I’ll take my chances with my own regen. I’ve had my fill of mages lighting me on fire.”

“Is that surliness I hear?” Bridgewood croons. “Sounds like someone lost her match.”

“Gonna have to try harder than that to bait me,” Eris says nonchalantly. “Yeah, I lost this round, but that just means our score is tied again. Besides I’ve figured out his tells with glow color and magic type so I’m feeling pretty good about next time.”

His tells? What is she talking about?

“Okay, why’s everyone staring?” Eris asks.

“There is no color-coded glowing to my utilizing different magic systems,” Ashan says. “Not to the mundane eye anyway.”

Eris closes her eyes and massages her temples with one hand. “Oh goddammit…” she mutters.

Bridgewood’s smirk beams wide. “Well now, as positively delicious as those implications might be to unpack, we do have work to be doing.” He turns to Road. “My friend, I’ve finished the sorting of which of those cursed trinkets to hold back as bait, so you and muscles over there are free to finish your wrapup deliveries from that job. Excuse me, that ‘mission’. Wizard boy, you’re with me. There’s a crossover point I want to assess as a staging ground for our ersatz smuggling route and a monster that’s wandered out of it to harass the locals so we’ll be making with the proverbial bird stoning.”

Eris stares Bridgewood down, swallows whatever words has in mind, and turns to Road to say “I’ll get the vans ready.”

It occurs to Ashan to wonder just what she and Bridgewood spoke of in private before and on their long way back from assisting the changeling siblings yesterday. He would have expected more pushback from her against Bridgewood’s apparent giving of orders, especially given the friction between them up until now.

He considers questioning the directives himself (is not Road the one who should be issuing such commands?) but decides against it for now. If there is good work to be done then what does the organizational structure matter? Better instead to focus on the most relevant information.

“So, where is this crossover point?”

*******

“There, there. None of this is your fault. You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“But… but… hi-his arm! And your head! And everyone is… and they are saying-”

“Shhh… You did nothing wrong. All that can be healed. I’m going to make everything alright and in the morning this will all just be a bad dream.”

“Glassgaze, the elders are ready for you. And your… charge. They said to remind you this is your last chance to back out and let them do a full sealing. Otherwise any future transgressions of his are on your head.”

“Tell them they can wait another few godsdamn minutes!”

“They also said to remind you that if he ever leaves this world then you can consider yourself exiled along with him.”

“Fine. It’s not like I ever planned to take him back home. Now let us have a moment.”

*******

Ashan looks out the window of the armored van at the greens and browns of the rocky hill country as the vehicle bounces and jolts its way down an offroad trail. That boulder. That gulley. That stand of mesquite and mountain cedar trees. The more he sees the more the suspicion that has been growing since passing through one of the Bridgewood Estate’s tree portals becomes a certainty.

“I know this place,” Ashan observes.

“Good,” Bridgewood replies from the driver’s seat, “that means I was on the money about which crossover point you absconded through as a kid.”

“Why are we here?”

“My friend and I believe the unknown group that caused that nasty business with the dead dragon getting a ship stuck in its skull back on our first outing has been targeting smuggling operations passing through crossover points in order to acquire various illicit magics and technologies while leaving no witnesses. Our backup plan if other avenues of inquiry fail us is to leak a rumor through certain channels which I know are being monitored that a certain sorceress’s private collection has been burgled and moved off world in order to lure this group into a confrontation. We’re here to assess the nearby crossover point to make sure it’s a suitable staging ground.”

“That is not what I meant. Why this crossover point specifically?”

One last bounce and a swerve to keep the armored van from barreling into an arroyo and the suggestion of a trail turns into an unpaved road through the hilly backwoods. The trees here are short and srcubby, but they are thick enough to block any good view of the surroundings.

“A few days ago the techie flagged a series of cryptid sightings in the area as a potential job to follow up on,” Bridgewood offers. “No direct human contact yet, but a mild correlation to a suspected drop in local wildlife populations. Not too unusual with the nearby crossover point. It seemed minor enough that I normally would have set it as something for my friend to occupy themself with in between bigger jobs with the rest of you lot, but I figured we may as well make this outing the stone to kill both of these birds with.”

“Are you being evasive or simply obtuse? I doubt my personal connection with the area is a coincidence.”

“You’ve got that right,” Bridgewood chimes. “Say, you never learned to drive, did you?”

“What?” Ashan blinks at the sudden non sequitur. “No. Why?”

“Would you like to? This is a pretty easy stretch of road and there’s no one around to try to pull you over, as hilarious as that would be.”

“I shall pass.”

Bridgewood shrugs, taking both hands off the wheel in the process. “Suit yourself. According to television, it’s supposed to be an effective bonding and trust building activity.”

“That may well be,” Ashan begins slowly, “the most blatant attempt to change the subject I have ever witnessed.”

“Oh if that had only been a conversational redirection you never would have noticed,” Bridgewood chortles. “How about this then? Answer a question of mine and I’ll answer the question you seem to think I’m avoiding.”

Through a break in the trees, Ashan sports a familiar creek out the window. They are moving away from the crossover point and towards town. Searching for the cryptid first then. That would make sense if the goal is to do a catch and release back through the crossover point to whatever world it slipped in from. He thinks back to how long it took him and Aliana to make this trek. Far slower having been on foot but the route was more direct.

“Go ahead and ask your question,” Ashan says. “We have plenty of time and I have few secrets.”

“Excellent,” Bridgewood purrs. “Now tell me, what do you think of my wife?”

“Excuse me?” Ashan stutters.

“Carnette. The sorceress Bridgewood. My dearly departed wife. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you going all wide-eyed fanboy every time you encounter one of her creations. I’d like to know why. Around these parts her name gets spoken in frightful whispers more than open adulation.”

“On Orthon,” Ashan says after a moment of consideration, “she is considered a living legend. Some would even go so far as to call her a heroic figure, although there are some popular stories that would dispute that.”

“It’d hardly be the first time someone made that mistake,” Sullivan laughs, “but do go on.”

“To begin with, it is said that almost two centuries ago, as a mere teenager, she arrived on Orthon out of the blue and within the span of three years mastered seven different Orthonian magic styles - four of them considered forbidden arts - and averted a calamity brought on by a megalomaniacal cabal. Even without those feats, her very presence revolutionized what we knew about interworld travel and branching anchor theories of cosmology. The sporadicness of her presence over the next century arguably taught us about that field as much as she did herself.”

“But who was she to you?”

“By the time I arrived on Orthon she had not been to that world in over half a century so by then she was more like a historic folk hero that few other than elder mages had ever met in person. They say that the continental Convocation of Mages that sets the regulations on magic in the region my mentor and I spent most our time in was originally formed by her old adventuring party and that on her final visit she contributed directly to laying the foundations for the modern academy system of teaching wizardry that my mentor learned from.”

Ashan feels his cheeks grow warm with the realization that he is stalling.

“On the most personal level,” he continues, “she was someone to aspire to. The bards all had at least one story of the sorceress Bridgewood in their repertoire, the mysterious mage from another world who mastered the forbidden arts without being corrupted by them, saved the world, and went on to invent whole new fields of theory. Even if more than half of the stories were nonsense, that still left enough truth to make the very concept of a ‘true sorcerer’ synonymous with her name. For a time, I thought that if I could be great like her I could prove that I was also an exception to the trend of anchor world mages being dangerously unpredictable, power hungry, and literally fueled by their own ego. I dreamed that if I could do that I would not have to hide what I was anymore.”

“You thought that even with the darker stories floating around about her?” Sullivan asks. “I don’t have nearly as many ears on Orthon as I would like, but I know at least a few of those made it over there. Void Without, I’m sure a few even originated from there.”

Ashan’s gaze drifts back out to the dirt road in front of them.

“I was a child at the time, projecting onto an icon. Even the best stories about her portrayed her as a hard-to-work-with eccentric, so I rationalized that between that and her more sorcerous arts she was bound to have a few enemies that spread lies over the years. That rationalization stopped after I told Aliana about my dream and she grew truly angry with me for the first and only time. Or so I thought. Knowing now what I had been made to forget, I wonder if it was fear that she was feeling. Fear of losing me or fear that she was wrong about me, I know not. All the same, I took that as a sign that those darker tales must be somehow true and began focusing on being good, possibly great, in my own way instead. Or at least in Aliana’s way.”

The van’s interior falls into the near silence of bumpy roads and long-restrained confessions floating unexpectedly free to breathe.

Ashan turns back to face this Bridgewood. At last the desire to know gets the better of him.

“What was she like?” he asks of the other Bridgewood.

Sullivan’s ever-present smirk softens into a genuine smile. It is as disconcerting as a cat suddenly sparing its prey.

“Carnette is… the most absurd woman I have ever met. She’s a brilliant scholar with a wicked sense of humor capable of vacillating between childish whimsy and ruthless practicality on a moment’s notice. Any so-called heroic act she ever took was motivated by amusement, utility, or spite. She has more power than most could ever dream of and her favorite thing to use it for is interior decorating. At least one secret door in the Bridgewood Manor is opened by the theme song of a children’s cartoon. She delighted in making a show of academically eviscerating anyone espousing theories of magic she thought were hogwash and then literally eviscerating the fools that fell back on insults and challenges to duels in lieu of sound defenses. I know of at least four different instances where she all but abducted random people off the street, ran experiments on them, called it a gift or blessing, set them loose, and then spent years observing them in secret to gather datapoints for whatever hypothesis she was testing.” Bridgewood takes his eyes off the road and locks them with Ashan’s. “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“No,” Ashan says. He wishes it were otherwise. It almost is.

Bridgewood softly shakes his head and returns to watching the road in time to steer around a pothole trying to become a sinkhole. “Of course you don’t,” he says. “You never met her. Stick around long enough and one day you will.”

“You speak as if she is still around.”

“And you use ‘we’ when referring to the people of Orthon.”

The silence of a linguistic habit considered and questioned.

“If I may,” Ashan asks, “how did you meet her?”

Bridgewood cackles and turns out of the brush onto a paved road.

“I take it that is an off limits question then,” Ashan says.

“Oh, no, I’m a veritable open book when it comes to that tale,” Sullivan lilts. “I tried to kill her several times and she found it endearing. Eventually we landed ourselves in a business arrangement of a marriage contract where I would get the money and status that goes with the Bridgewood name, and she would get a conversation partner who wasn’t terrified of her and a willing test subject for her more outlandish experiments. I’m laughing because now you know what it looks like when I redirect a conversation.”

“Oh.”

“Got so excited to learn more about the great sorceress Bridgewood that you forgot why you were even answering that question, didn’t you?”

“It was rare knowledge from a rare source with a rare opportunity. The other answer could wait,” Ashan says. It is as true a statement as saying yes would have been, if marginally more dignified.

“Ha! You really are a wizard through and through. I even got you monologing earlier.”

“I did no such thing.”

“Oh, then I suppose that was the normal sort of gushing at length about your childhood idol and spilling all your complicated personal feelings with barely any prompting because you’ve been alone so long you don’t know how to regulate sharing to any rate between all or nothing.”

“I do not gush,” Ashan says after a moment of recovery. “Now, you have a question to stop avoiding and an answer to give.”

“Struck a nerve there did I? You’ll have to forgive me, it’s like a reflex when I see them exposed.”

Ashan stares Bridewood down coolly. The smile has regressed back to a smirk. Outside, the forest has thinned out into unkempt fields separated from the road by fencing wire strung between wooden posts. There were horses in those empty fields when he was a child.

“Fine, fine,” Bridgewood relents. “I chose this specific locale and your company in particular because I wanted to see how you would react. Yesterday with muscles was wonderfully informative and productive, both in observing how she handled seeing off that changeling pair and in the little chat we had on the way back. I hoped to do the same with you.”

“But why?”

The smirk grows wider. They pass by a once-whitewashed house with a corrugated metal roof. More are coming up.

“Let me answer that question with a question,” Bridgewood trills. “And it will be part of the answer, even if it doesn’t sound like it at first.”

“Very well, but this had better be the last such evasion.”

The van slows as it comes into town. Single-story houses and trailer homes line either side of the road. Most have modest sized yards surrounding and separating them. Some of those yards are strewn with cheap plastic lawn furniture and children’s toys. Some sport kitschy ornaments. Some (usually but not always the fenced-in ones) have animals; goats, dogs, pigs, a few chickens. Some have all of the above at once or nothing but overgrown weeds.

Bridgewood leaves Ashan hanging in silence to take in the familiar milieu before finally asking his question.

“If you could go back to your family, pain free, with everyone’s memories modified as if you never left, erasing even the pain your leaving had caused, would you?”

The van slows to a stop at an achingly familiar intersection without traffic light or stop sign. Ashan’s breath hitches. Mercifully, Bridgewood continues on through instead of turning left.

“That is not a hypothetical worth engaging in.”

“Whoever said it was hypothetical? All manner of people owe me favors and Carnette left me with many a useful trinket. I could make it happen. Say the word and you could live a peaceful life with your family as Adr-”

“That name is not for you to say!” Ashan snaps before Bridgewood can finish the utterance. More calmly, he continues, “The Count of Curses and Dust made me a similar offer. They would have bought that Name and bequeathed it to a changeling to return in my place and live that life so that I might live this one without guilt. What you propose would be the opposite but the same. I would no longer be Ashan Glassheart. Either deal would mean losing a part of myself.”

The van turn takes the next right turn to continue meandering through the tiny town’s only real neighborhood. A white pickup truck without tires lays rusting in front of a mobile home with a collapsed roof. Once, there was an old woman who paid a young boy in cookies to weed her garden and showed carrying a pot of soup up at the door of anyone with a sick child.

“Then why not bring your family Backstage? The Bridgewood name is useful for getting people to turn a blind eye toward such a minor Masquerade breach.”

“Even if they forgave me and accepted me back, the work I do is dangerous. I do not know that I could bear to put them through the new pain of worrying about me every time I go out.”

“Why not settle down with them then? There’s no shortage of jobs in Crossherd for a mage willing to work on utilities. There’s not a direct bridge to the pocket dimension around here, but the conditions are ripe for someone of your talent to make one. You could be a wizard and have your family without worrying their pretty little heads.”

“I have the ability to do good in a way that others cannot. It would be wrong for me not to.”

“How selfless of you,” Bridgewood condescends.

They pass by a house recognizable by its plastic lawn flamingos. The house on either side is boarded up. Back when the sun had not yet bleached the flamingos white or rendered them brittle and full of holes, two children that went to elementary school together fought with sticks they said were swords until they put aside their differences and turned their attention to the terrible pink dragons threatening the kingdom. Today, those no-longer-children glance at one another through tinted glass without recognition.

“Only mostly,” Ashan admits. “I cannot deny that I enjoy what I do. Felling monsters. Bringing villains to justice. Protecting those who cannot protect themselves. There is a… joy… to playing the role of hero. No, more than that. It is a part of me as much as either Name.”

“Congratulations,” Bridgewood chirps. “That is exactly the set of answers I hoped you’d give.”

“So this was a test.”

“Think of it as,” Bridgewood drawls, “an assessment of compatibility.”

“For how you and I will work together?”

“Quiet Void, perish the thought. Compatibility with my friend.”

“You mean Road.”

“I’ve never had another.”

“They mentioned something about that this morning.”

The smirk flickers to a grimace.

The van turns back onto the closest thing the town has to a main street. There’s a church on the corner for a god the boy who would be Ashan never understood. Nor did he (nor does he) understand why there were three churches in town all to the same god. Nor why he always had to wear his most uncomfortable clothes and wake up early just to hear an old man drone on in a voice that put him to sleep whenever it was not a story about lion dens or fighting giants with slingshots. The sign for the country barbeque across the street is gone. There are more churches than restaurants in town now.

“Look wizard boy, I’ll tell you what I told muscles yesterday. My friend is about as close to perfect as humanly possible, but at the end of the day they are still human, which means one day they will slip up, and when they do it will be bad. You need to watch out for that.”

“That seems like perfectly obvious advice about anyone working on a team doing what we do.”

“You still haven’t noticed, have you? The way they make everything feel like it’s going to be alright just by being there? How easy it is to trust them and go along with whatever course of action they suggest? That voice saying that even when a job goes badly surely they’ll find a way to get you out? Not that they can help it. It’s just the way they are now.”

“It almost sounds like you are telling me to be wary of Road.” The very notion feels wrong.

“I’m telling you to be wary of yourself for my friend’s sake. The worst they’ve ever been hurt was always because the people around them put them on a pedestal. I’m hoping that you and muscles have enough in common with them that you won’t be so blind. The techie’s a lost cause, but as long as she’s content to stay in her lab playing with her toys she shouldn’t be too much of a liability.”

“I see.”

“No you don’t. Not yet, and if there’s a drop of Fortune’s heart that doesn’t hate me yet you never will.”

The silence of uncomprehended warnings, outgrown smallness, and withered remembrance. Ashan looked up his hometown once after Eris gifted him his laptop. It confirmed the impression he got when he first returned to this place alongside Aliana. He was not the only one that left this place for good. The population today truly is but a fraction of what he remembered.

“What if I had not given the answers you hoped for?” Ashan asks.

“Ah, classic wizard,” Sullivan chuckles. “Asking questions you’re better off not knowing.”

“A question I am better off knowing then: What manner of creature are we searching for? ‘Cryptid’ is a designation vague as it is broad.”

“I don’t rightly know. The reported sightings were all contradictory when they described it as anything more than a shadow moving in the night. It could just as well be multiple creatures or a shapeshifter. If I hadn’t had access to first hand confirmation that this place has a history of monsters crossing over –” Bridgewood glances pointedly at Ashan “– then I might well have written the whole business off.”

“You sound far too amused by your own ignorance,” Ashan says.

“Mystery is one of life’s greatest spices.”

“Let us get on with the solving then. I assume you have already gathered the names and addresses of those who witnessed this alleged cryptid.”

“Obviously, but as long as I have convenient bait and a local expert on hand I see no reason to involve middlemen when I can skip straight to luring our quarry out.”

Ashan silently chides himself for not having seen this coming. Magic is spread thin and weakened on anchor worlds by their nature and monsters whose very biology relies on magic instinctively find themselves drawn towards those whose presence warps reality’s rules to their will so that they might sustain themselves. That was the very reason he needed rescuing by Aliana all those years ago. For similar reasons, wild and predatory monsters on other worlds will often target young and inexperienced mages as their favored prey. More powerful mages however, are treated as greater predators that all but the mightiest monsters will give a wide berth.

“Suppressing my presence to avoid attracting monsters was one of the first things I was taught,” Ashan says, “and even if doing so were not a subconscious reflex for me by now I suspect that my aura would function more as repellent than as bait.”

“What, your mentor never taught you aura flaring?”

“I am aware of the technique, but it is a pointless one. It takes little practice to control how much one passively warps the ambient flow of magic, so it is useless as a tool for gauging a mage’s power when they may just as easily be hiding their potential as bluffing about their strength. Moreover, it is crass.”

“Crass? That’s the first time I’ve heard that.”

“Vulgar as a contest of urination.”

“Huh, must be an Orthonian thing. Anywhy, I’m going to kindly request that you do that to make yourself look as appetizing as possible.”

“What part of it being a crass and useless technique did you not understand?”

“In that case I’ll just need to find some other poor unwitting schmuck. If there’s a monster hanging around for as long as this one apparently has been, then odds are decent that there’s a potential mage in town.”

Ashan follows the nod of Bridgewood’s head out the window and realizes that their van has slowed its cruising around town to a crawl in front of the high school he never got to attend. Ashan waits for the pang of loss for a part of growing up he missed out on, but it never comes. That realization brings a loss of its own. How disconnected from one’s own culture must one be to not even feel a desire for the milestones that were denied? He tries and fails to imagine what it would have been like, sitting in classes and studying all day, making friends his own age, joining a club or band or sports team. All he has for context to build the fantasy off of is a handful of blurry memories of elementary school and television shows. It all feels so alien to him now.

What would he even have been doing at that age? High school spans four years, does it not? So the year spent sailing the western archipelago up through the infiltration of the gala at the oasis palace a year before his falling out with Aliana, with the catastrophic failure of his old translation charm roughly halfway in between. No wonder he cannot relate.

“If you’re looking for your baby brother,” Bridgewood says to the staring Ashan, “classes don’t start for another two weeks and he won’t be attending here for another couple years yet anyway.”

The question of why he would be looking for his brother dies on Ashan’s lips and his stomach drops alongside the crumbling barrier between compartmentalized knowledge. He is in the town where he grew up and his family lives. He is in a town that is being stalked by an unknown monster. His family is in a town with a monster. He was attacked by monsters and saved by mages seven times as a child although he was only allowed to remember the last time. He has a brother who has never met him and is only slightly older than he was when he was taken.

“We are not using my brother as monster bait,” Ashan says coldly.

“Of course not,” Bridgewood replies, unperturbed by the condensation gathering on the van’s windows from the sudden drop in temperature. “You know as well as I do that magic has nothing to do with bloodlines. Your parents might have let you run wild in the woods to live in whimsy and believe in impossible things, but him they shower with so much protective affection that the possibility of playing in the backyard unsupervised or visiting friends without a chaperone could never even occur to him. No fairy tales in that household anymore to inspire another child to go wandering off. If he ever develops any potential for magic, it won’t be until he’s out on his own, burned out from the med school path your parents already decided for him and wondering what else he could have been.”

“What.”

Bridgewood grins wide, showing too many teeth for a proper smile.

“Why, my dear fellow, it’s my job to know these things. I dare say that I know more about you and your compatriots than you do yourselves. I know why muscles never got to meet her grandparents or even learn their names and why her parents were so dead set on assimilation. I know that the techie’s great grandparents were a pair of witches and why they kept their kids in the dark about it.” He leans across the van’s center console as close to Ashan’s face as his seatbelt will let him and tilts his head sideways. “And I know that Aliana Glassgaze is currently on this iteration of Earth.”

There is hunger in those dark eyes, and for the first time in years Ashan’s instinct is for flight rather than fight as he reflexively shrinks back into his seat.

Bridgewood snaps back upright and the seatbelt whirs to catch up with him.

“But that’s beside the point,” Bridgewood chirps. He stares at the seemingly empty school and blinks several times in rapid succession. “Pity. Nothing appetizing amongst the summer school kids taking makeup classes. Always a tossup whether groups like that are going to be against the grain enough to be prime candidates or too beaten down in their self-worth to have any chance at all.”

The van lurches back into motion once more and Ashan recovers enough to say “We are not kidnapping children to use as monster bait.”

Legs burning from strain long after losing the strength for another step. Each breath like knives in his lungs long after he’s covered his mouth to muffle the sound. Crying in the dark long after tears have run dry. The sight of eyes shining in the dark. The smell of rancid breath. The sound of heavy footsteps drawing closer.

“There is a cave in the woods on the far side of town from whence we arrived,” Ashan says. “I played there often as a child and if there is a monster, cryptid, or other fiend in the area, it will likely be making its lair there, and even if not it is a secluded enough spot that when I make myself into a lure there should be no risk of a Masquerade breach.”

“Excellent,” Bridgewood replies. “Let’s be off then, shall we?”

For all Bridgewood’s earlier chattiness on the way in, the drive out of town is mercifully quiet with no words exchanged beyond the occasional instruction from Ashan to take a turn. This lasts until they pass the small cemetery at the edge of town.

“Do you want to stop and pay your respects?” Bridgewood asks in the softest voice Ashan has ever heard from him. “I find it helps.”

“I would rather you not joke about that.”

“I’ve left four different graves with four different names on three different worlds. Saying goodbye always helped me move on.”

“I have already seen it once and that was more than enough for a tombstone with a name that is not dead.”

“I see.”

The only other words spoken for the next quarter hour are a single “Turn off here” from Ashan, followed by a “We shall walk the rest of the way” five minutes of unproductive off-road driving later.

These woods and hills are more familiar than the town. Less changed. Less diminished. Maybe the trees feel shorter now that he has grown and maybe their distance from his old home no longer feels so great now that his world is bigger, but they are still dense enough that it does not take Ashan long to lose sight of the van. As he comes to the rocky ledge he once scrambled to climb up and over, he finds himself, for a moment, back in those long summer days of trekking out from the house at dawn and exploring uncharted lands full of creatures he still is unsure if they were imagined or not. And then he casually waves a hand and ascends a ramp of glass to the top of the ledge within a forest that was charted long before he was born. He hesitates to focus his senses on the mystical just yet. He has not made up his mind how he might feel if he were not to find his childhood playmates.

The sight of the cave freezes Ashan in his tracks once he locates the opening at the end of an unassuming shallow gulch.

Darkness. Wedged back into a crevice to hide. Curled up on top of a thin mattress and chained to a tentpole. Waiting for the not-a-dog to either give up or find and gobble him up. Waiting for the frightful old men to decide his fate. A light in the dark, a screech, silence, and a voice telling him he is safe now. The light of a tent flap opening, silence, a hug, and a voice telling him that she has a plan to keep him safe.

Faded memories from long ago swirl with the preserved fears of a child who had not yet processed and overcome his fear of the close dark spaces he gained two years prior.

Focus on the here and now. The late summer breeze on his skin. The buzzing of insects in his ears. The sight of a metal grate over the mouth of the cave.

That last one had not been here before. Ashan goes to investigate, concerns of lurking cryptids forgotten for the moment. The metal is rusted where the black paint has worn away and a grimy padlock holds the hinged segment closed. An orange and white sign bolted to the bars warns of danger and a second plaque affixed atop that one says a child died here.

On that fateful day, all those years ago, Aliana told the child she would later name Ashan not to look while she cast the glamor to disguise the remains of the strange hound that tried to eat him. To further distract him, she had assigned him the task of setting up a trail for others to find the cave. In that energized state of having just gone from terror of impending death to the promise of being a real wizard doing real magic, it had seemed like a game. Did she cast something on him to stifle his fear at the time? All the same, he still snuck a peak at what his soon-to-be-mentor was doing.

The sight of her dragging his own dead body into the darkness of the cave became a recurring feature in his nightmares over the following weeks. They continued until the night that he confessed what he saw to Aliana. That was the first time she hugged him. It was also the first time he caught her quietly crying when she thought he was not looking. The former became frequent and regular. The latter would not occur again for several years.

“Now that’s curious,” Bridgewood’s voice brings Ashan’s voice back to the present as he kneels down next to the young wizard. “It looks like water’s flowed through here lately but there’s no branches or other debris stuck on the grate, and everything else around here is dry as a bone. Hmmm… Terrible idiom, that. Bones are wet and full of marrow when you first pull them out.”

As he says that last part, Bridgewood runs a finger along the condensation gathered at the bottom bars of the grate, revealing it to be more viscous than water. To Ashan’s disgust, he licks his finger clean afterward.

“Was that truly necessary?” Ashan asks.

“No, but it was informative,” Bridgewood answers as he stands back up. “I do believe we have an ooze on our hands. Or maybe a slime. I never could remember the difference.”

“An ooze is an undifferentiated mass whereas a slime has a central core,” Ashan says.

“I’ll take your wizard’s word on that.” Bridgewood taps the grate with a knife Ashan did not see him draw. “Anywhat, shall I open this up for a spot of spelunking?”

Just another summer day of adventure. Just another afternoon with friends he was not ready to call imaginary just yet. Just another fun game. A new creature he had never seen before and a hungry growl that set him on edge. A brave stride forward and a sandwich offered in friendship. A bitten hand and a flight to a favorite secret place that was not as safe as he thought.

“No need,” Ashan says. “Better to draw it out into the open than to potentially fight in tight quarters.”

“In that case I’ll make myself scarce while you make yourself bait,” Bridgewood proposes as he follows Ashan out of the gulch and onto the hill above the cave entrance. “I’ll be watching for the moment to make my move.”

“Shall we agree upon a signal for when to make that move?”

“No need. Now if you’ll excuse me, it’s time for me to make myself unpresentable.”

With that, Bridgewood unbuttons his yellow vest and slides it off. With a flick of his wrists he inverts the garment and Ashan catches a glimpse of the inner lining as it flips around to become the outer pattern. There is an impression of a color almost but not quite violet; an extra-spectral blend between stygian blue and self-luminous red. And then Bridgewood is gone with a record skip hitch in the sounds of the woods.

Curiosity regarding how Bridgewood disappeared right before his eyes loses the battle with Ashan’s relief at not having eyes on him for this next part. Even if a part of him knows that Bridgewood is technically watching from hiding, the lack of a visible witness eases the embarrassment of what he is about to do.

It is said that each mage perceives the way magic flows through and intertwines with the background of reality differently. To Ashan, it has always appeared as something like floating threads, colored shapes, and heat haze refractions in the air; nearly imperceptible whenever he is not actively focusing on them but always there and ever moving on arcane currents. Anything living or possessing a mind causes an interruption in this flow, whether as a slow spot to gather in and concentrate like most people, an obstacle to divert the current around like Eris, or as a bubbling spring adding its own chaos of colors and threads to the stream like the average mage.

Most mages learn early on to suppress their own aura of distortion to just-noticeable levels. Too quiet and it is as if one has something to hide. Too loud and it is a terrible rudeness to every other magically-sensitive individual around that has to put up with such noise. To flare one’s aura to make more noise than necessary is the domain of untrained children and hot-blooded youths thinking with organs other than their brain as they try to show off. And even without considerations of etiquette, there are the practical concerns of overactive auras attracting monsters or spontaneously manifesting unintended effects on one’s surroundings.

Thus are the ingrained best practices that Ashan shoves to the side in order to mimic the telltale signature of a mage accidentally coming into their powers for the first time. At first he attempts to relax to loosen up that self-restraint, but the exercise is self-defeating. Restraint is his resting default and too much of his training has inextricably intertwined the concepts of calmness and control.

Agitation then. Ashan opens the mental compartment he has tried to sequester his younger self’s regained memories in all day, reaches in, and grabs ahold of those feelings. The excitement over arriving at the Convocation of Mages after a week of thinking they would not make it in time, which led to his running off on his own. The confusion at the strange things one of the elder mages he recognized from the previous year started saying to him. The fear when he heard his mentor shout at the elder to get away from him and the things the elder said in return as six more elders filed in to surround her. The desperation that caused him to lash out at the mage that finally managed to land a hit on his mentor. The guilt over his conjured barrier slicing the elder’s arm clean off. The despair at the sight of Aliana falling beaten, bloodied, and restrained when she had been so close to saving him

The anger.

At her for being reduced to begging.

At her for proposing that they seal away his potential.

At her for taking those memories away from him.

At her for taking him away.

At her for making it all seem like a game.

At her for failing him.

At himself for being angry when he knows she only ever did the best she could for him.

Ashan wraps his arms around himself. He closes his eyes. He curls in on himself. He falls to his knees. He shudders. He throws his head back. He opens his mouth wide to scream.

No sound escapes his lips. No tear escapes his eyes. No catharsis finds him.

The air ripples and shimmers around him. Glassy conjurations flicker in and out of existence. Frost coats the ground.

It all stops even more abruptly than it began. With an abashed effort, Ashan reins himself and his aura back in, cheeks flushed with embarrassment at the unseemly display. Even apparently alone in the woods, he cannot help but feel much as he would as if he had just caused a scene by screaming at the top of his lungs for no reason in the middle of a crowded street.

He distracts himself with the more delicate task of keeping his mage’s aura of reality distortion just slightly more noticeable than normal while also intermittently flickering it in and out. If that initial flare had been a piercing cry of pain, this is the weakened flailing that follows it. The tired wiggling of the worm on the hook. Not something that would fool anyone intelligent and trained, but enough for a beast or the insatiably curious.

Enough time passes in the eerie silence of woods gone quiet that Ashan begins to worry he overdid the initial flare and scared off his quarry instead of luring it in. Then he catches sight of something moving between the trees, obscured by the tangle of low-hanging branches that nearly touch the ground. The silhouette is that of a deer, but the gait is all wrong. Once it finally emerges from the tree line into the clearing of the hill Ashan stands atop of the reason for the wrongness becomes apparent.

It has the shape of a deer, yes. It even has the skeleton of a deer arranged in mostly the correct configuration. Yet it lacks the flesh of a deer, save perhaps for a few mostly-digested scraps hanging suspended alongside dirt, leaves, and twigs within the translucent cyan goo that has wrapped itself around those bones. It half shambles, half undulates closer in a loose imitation of quadrupedal locomotion.

A slime then, not an ooze if it is capable of this level of mimicry. But then why is there no central nucleus in sight for him to extract and incapacitate it?

Ashan’s contemplation of the apparent contradiction in esoteric biology is cut off by the sound of movement behind him. He turns his head, keeping the slime deer in his peripheral vision, and spies a dog. Then a coyote. A second deer. All reduced to skeletons lending shape to cyan slime and still not a core in sight. A smaller bone-filled blob drops out of the second deer’s abdomen and assembles itself into a rat, or maybe a squirrel.

Ashan stays still, allowing the slime animals to get closer, surrounding him. The first deer stops just outside of arm’s reach, then collapses into a blob, contracts, and launches itself at him. A quick rotation on his heel and Ashan propels himself into the air atop a conjured spiral. He lets the spiral fade, cups his hands as he falls, thrusts his arms downward, and slides down the side of a glass dome as it appears between him and the now trapped slime animals.

Ashan steps back from his conjuration and draws his wand. The creatures begin pressing themselves against the inside of the dome and he can feel the barrier grow thinner as they absorb its magic. No matter, a few quick lashing motions with the wand is all it takes to reinforce the conjuration. So long as the slime animals trapped inside do not concentrate their efforts all in one spot he can easily keep up such a simple spell for more than long enough to convert the dome to a sphere to transport to the van and from there to the crossover point.

He raises his wand and the dome stretches to raise with it. He makes a scooping motion with his free hand and the dome reshapes to reach under as well as around. He makes a fist and the great floating glass egg full of slime and bones and dirt contracts, merging the slime animals into one another. Or ooze animals. Still no sign of a core, strange as that strikes him.

A tingling sensation around Ashan’s ankle draws his attention downward to see a tendril coming up from the soil. The buried gelatinous mass shoots out of the ground, climbs up his leg, and keeps ascending until it bursts out from the high collar of Ashan’s robes. He has barely enough presence of mind to take a deep breath and close his eyes before it envelops his face. It tries and fails to push between his tightly shut lips and eyelids while he tries to slide his hands between it and his cheeks.

He forces himself to stay calm. Focus on what he needs to do, not on what will happen if he fails. A precise-yet-simple forcefield that moves outward with his hands is all it should take. He does not even need to get all of the ooze off in one go, only the majority so that it lacks the force to keep pushing. An easy feat.

The ooze works its way up his nostrils and into his ears. His sinuses ache from the pressure. The tingling intensifies into a burning. Serenity is lost. The conjuration flickers out. Ashan’s hands start frantically tearing at the thing trying to digest his face. His eyes shoot open from shock and pain.

On the other side of the blurry cyan haze there is a flicker of chimerical violet.

The ooze, slime, or whatever it was is gone and Ashan is gasping for air. His vision is clear save for the tears of irritated eyes. The burning is now a rapidly-fading tingling and the pain inside his head has reduced to a dull throbbing.

“You’re welcome,” Bridgewood whispers from behind him, close enough for Ashan to feel his breath on his ear. “Now look sharp, your new friends have gotten out of their playpen and want to say hello.”

Ashan wipes his vision clear and looks up to see that the slime animals are indeed upon him now that he dropped his conjuration in his moment of fear. He attempts to say something and falls into a coughing fit.

“Still need a moment?” Bridgewood purrs. “Then allow me.”

Ashan feels a hand on his shoulder as Bridgewood pushes past him. The back of his head and his shoulder come into view. And then the not-purple of his inverted vest.

Bridgewood is gone again. Ashan is breathing easier and his eyes have stopped watering. The slime animals have all been beheaded.

Being headless only stops them for a moment before the blobs around their skulls extrude pseudopods to reconnect to their bodies and lift them back into place.

“I do so detest oozes,” Bridgewood’s voice echoes from somewhere amongst the trees. “Utterly unsatisfying and unproductive to stab. I’ll leave the rest of this in your capable hands.”

“You would abandon me?” Ashan calls out while tossing up a quick barrier between himself and the slime animals.

“No, but this is one of the rare problems that can’t be solved well with knives, so there’s not much else for me to do here unless you want me to try eating the rest of them and that doesn’t work well with live capture.”

“Surely there must be something you can do.”

“How about moral support? I have full faith that you won’t make the same mistake twice and can handle the rest on your own. Go team.”

Irritating though his delivery may be, Ashan has long held enough faith in his own skill to agree with Bridgewood’s assessment. Now to prove them both correct.

A conjured ramp that retracts behind him as he ascends suffices for getting Ashan off the ground to forestall any additional subterranean surprises arising from momentary overconfidence. Curling the edges of this new platform into a bowl around him prevents the bone-wearing mimic slimes from reaching him by launching themselves up or combining their masses to extend a single long pseudopod. Adding lotus-like layers to the protective bowl gives him time to analyze the situation uninterrupted when the creatures try to eat through the conjuration.

Standing nearly level with the treetops (not that they are much more than twice Ashan’s height and he has never been called a tall man) Ashan gazes down at the slime animals below as they mill about and start to haphazardly merge with one another in an attempt to reach him. He still maintains that the prey mimicry is too complex for an ooze, so where are the cores necessary for processing that behavior? Within the animal skulls, taking the place of the digested brains like a hermit crab repurposing a mollusc shell perhaps? Partial merging or absorption of those brains – whether physically or psychically – would aid with the mimicry as well.

An interesting theory, but how to keep the ooze still enough to safely perform the delicate operation of opening the skull to confirm without damaging the potential core within? Freezing has proven effective in the past when facing such monsters alongside Aliana, but that has never been Ashan’s speciality and he is far enough out from the crossover point right now that he is still relying on thermodynamic redirection to power his spells so too much lowering of the ambient temperature could cause complications down the line.

Ashan cocks his head in consideration of the conundrum for a moment and then lets out a hum of realization. His ability to access other magic systems is no longer sealed, and he is passing familiar with a foreign style lauded for its efficiency in energy draw.

Ashan focuses on the gelatinous mimics below and intones the words that caused him no small amount of grief a month ago.

Winter's lash falls harsh. Wind bites, snow cuts, frostbite gnaws, Scouring flesh and soul.

The storm drowns voices Blinds the eye, and steals all warmth Nothing left but white.

BLIZZARD!

The Dorbreithan Long Chant spell completes and a bitter chill wind swirls about the slimes below. Their movements slow as frost forms on the surface of their cyan bodies. Once that ice spreads inwards in crystaline formations toward the suspended skeletons within, the mimics have come to nearly a complete stop. That is enough to work with, although it takes Ashan several seconds to mentally wrestle with the unfamiliar spell to get it to cease its effects lest it do permanent damage to the slime cores he hopes to extract for relocation.

Once the blizzard wind stops, it is a simple matter to conjure a barrier thin enough to act as a guillotine above the neck of the devoured coyote and let it fall. Then it is a mere flick of his wand to draw a wire into existence and reel the falling goo-covered skull up to him.

Fishing with only conjurations as tools had doubled as both training and a means of keeping himself and Aliaina fed on the road since the early days of his time on Orthon. She started him off with nets before moving on to hooks and lines conjured directly into the fishes’ open mouths once he learned finer control. Later still came the creation and manipulation of razor-thin barriers in the place of knives for preparing and fileting the catch. Or at least on the days when Aliana was not feeling lazy enough to simply drop the catch and a portion of river water into her own complex conjuration combining autoclave, centrifuge, and blender. In retrospect, getting used to the alleged stew of superheated fish slurry might explain Ashan’s general ambivalence towards the taste of food.

At any rate, it is the experience in dissection and bone removal that is relevant now as Ashan peels back the wriggling semisolid layers of slime from the coyote skull hovering in front of him. The glass scalpel that appears at the tip of his wand is sharp enough to glide through the minimally digested bone like bread crust and he does so with a steady hand. He cuts out a square from the top of the skull and pulls it out to reveal… nothing. Only more undifferentiated teal jelly fills the skull’s inner cavities.

Ashan takes a step back as the slime surrounding and permeating the skull begins to flail pseudopods once more with full motive ability despite still harboring an unabated outer layer of frost. Ashan flings it outside of his observation perch, back to the ground with the rest of its mass, and takes another look at the scene below him, trying to figure out what he is missing.

More of the slime animals have arrived and more amorphous tendrils like the one that grabbed him earlier are beginning to extrude from the ground. Strangely, the new arrivals that were not present to be hit by the Blizzard spell also carry a layer of frost cold enough to cause the ambient humidity to condense into a thin mist around them. None of the creatures seem to be hindered by the cold any longer. Stranger still, now that Ashan thinks about it, the soil layer here should not be thick enough for a slime or ooze to hide within. But if there are cracks in the limestone beneath the soil leading to the cave below…

Ashan’s eyes skip over one particular point between the trees, and his train of thought is disrupted as everything shifts slightly, from the movements of the slimes below to the positions of the clouds above. He tries to find and focus on that spot again, and once more there’s a skip as if a fraction of a second was lost.

Concerning, but he can confirm what that is once he tests the other hypothesis he was building up to. Ashan picks out the straggler furthest from the growing mass of prey mimics and begins another chant that was once used against him.

Storm's wrath gathering, Glistening blades fall and scourge Earth lies bare, burnt clean.

LIGHTNING!

With the final word Ashan points his wand at his chosen target. The air takes on the scent of ozone. His hair rises from the static. A bolt streaks from the tip of his wand and splatters the slime furthest from the main group, scattering the bones of the hopefully wild pig it had consumed.

As expected, over the course of the next minute, the slime pig pulls itself back together, albeit sans half its bones. More importantly, sparks between arcing between other slimes that he knows he did not hit with that spell. That supports one hypothesis, but best not to rely solely on sight.

Ashan closes his eyes and opens his less physical senses as much as he can. It is no substitute for vision when navigating, but much like smell or touch, that is not its primary purpose, even if it can augment. “Looking” down he confirms that the slimes, while barely disturbing the flow of magic otherwise, have become reservoirs and conduits for the energy comprising the spells he threw at them. Though that reservoir thins in the empty space between the slime animals, “seen” like this it is all one continuous manifestation. A continuous manifestation that, though dulled and made hazy by the intervening stone, extends underground into the cave below where it flows down into a distinct central nexus.

Ashan returns his focus above ground to the point his eyes refused to see and finds what he can only conceptualize as a gaping hole in the fabric of everything. In all his time as a wizard, Bridgewood is the only individual he has ever encountered with such an overdone metaphysical cloak. Watching and waiting from the sidelines, just like he said he would be.

Ashan is about to open his eyes and act on his confirmed suspicions when another set of presences further out in the woods catches his attention. They feel familiarly green to him, with hints of orange, and purple, and gray. Fae, he now knows to classify it as, albeit vastly different in power and temperament from the Count of Curses and Dust. He thinks once upon a time he simply called them friends.

For just a moment, Ashan allows his expression to twitch into a smile. Resolve redoubled, he opens his eyes but continues to stare at nothing. Eyes fixed forward, single-minded and unfocused he holds his wand upright in front of him. His glass gaze stares through the candle flame that ignites above the wand’s tip and pours his will into it, fuel for the fire. The glass lotus descends to the ground, unfurls, and fades, leaving him exposed.

The slime animals… no, the singular slime with multiple remote segments mimicking devoured prey does not approach him. It is too enraptured by that. Through the flame Ashan can feel its simple mind relaxing just as well as he can see the skeletons surrounding him go limp as the slime nodes containing them begin melting down into shapeless blobs.

It is surprisingly hard not to let himself mirror that feeling and sink with it.

But a motionless, enraptured slime with its core hidden away is hardly progress towards capture and relocation, so Ashan calls to mind the more advanced applications of this spell he studied in Whispers of the Sun, and puts them into practice. “The Flame of Yearning” that tome from the sorceress Bridgewood’s very own library called this spell, and it is now that emotion which Ashan feeds to the flame. Yearning for two different homes he cannot return to, one just down the road and the other hardly further yet literally a world away. Yearning for three different parents he did not choose, two he ran from and one he drove away. Yearning for four friendships that have already been extended to him, all of which feel varying degrees of confusing and unearned. Yearning poured into one candle flame that becomes a torch, a beacon.

There is more fuel for this flame than he realized he had. Once they have been dredged up, it is a relief to feel the flame consume them. Not that they are truly gone. The flame is a part of him and it does not extinguish when the spell ends, it returns. The healing flame came from without as a praise to the sun for providing the warmth of life. The flame of yearning hails from another world that saw pyromancy as life’s warmth originating from within, and how can one not yearn to connect in the face of a soul bared?

From without or from within, so long as an anchor world mage can hold both as being true both can be called upon.

The yearning becomes the flame that draws the moth and Ashan shapes the feeling into a desire. A desire to approach, to reveal oneself, source to source and heart to heart.

Frankly, such an application treads dangerously close to the sorcerous taboo of mind alteration for Ashan’s comfort. He tells himself that it is just a nearly-mindless slime that he is influencing. What is more, one might even say that he learned this spell, however indirectly, from the true sorceress Bridgewood herself and now he is casting it with her chosen consort and keeper of her legacy for an audience. The old childhood dream rekindles and then becomes further kindling itself.

It is hard to worry about much with such a pretty fire.

The flame fills his vision and his mind.

He has spent nearly half his life with trained serenity.

Calmness and control intertwined.

It is how he keeps his spellcasting precise and powerful.

It was how he kept from going mad when his own mind became incomprehensible.

Falling into the flame feels like such a natural extension of that.

A polite cough from right behind Ashan snaps him back to full awareness. Awareness of the flame sputtering out. Awareness of a quivering cyan blob towering over him. Awareness of a sphere of bones hovering in the center of the slime that is pulling itself closed over a nucleus that had exposed itself to the now-extinguished flame’s light.

Ashan’s stomach drops at the realization that the ball of bones contains at least one skeleton that is human shaped but far too small even for an infant. While no sign of such remains, Ashan is certain it once sported a pair of gossamer wings. He refuses to wonder if it ever played with children in these woods.

The slime shudders, contacts, and stretches to fall on top of the tantalizing young wizard overflowing with magic before it.

Springing backwards out of the way is hardly a challenge for Ashan. Nor is slamming a hollow cylinder through the center of the slime to extract the core like a post hole digger. Nor is stripping away the shell of bones giving a wall to the nucleus.

Wrapping the slime’s core in a floating sphere and then having that sphere grow a series of inward-facing needles to just barely pierce the core’s outer membrane and send it into a paralyzed state is a somewhat more delicate procedure. But it is a procedure he has carried out before, albeit not on so large, dispersed, or magic-absorbing a specimen. Nonetheless, the rest of the slime’s body loses cohesion, dropping the skeletons that had not yet been absorbed into the central mass unceremoniously to the ground.

Ashan lets himself breathe and shiver in the chill that his magic has brought to the late summer afternoon.

“Well done I say. An expectedly excellent performance.”

Ashan turns around to find Bridgewood approaching him, buttoning his vest back into place, yellow side out once more.

“Thank you,” Ashan says with a nod, “and all due credit to you for the role you deigned to play.”

Bridgewood takes an exaggerated bow. “But of course. What is the star without the stagehand? Or the hero without unseen Fortune plucking the strings? As I said when we first met, the spotlight is not for me.”

“I imagine whatever enchantment you have on that vest makes that easier for you.”

“Not an enchantment, but a color,” Bridgewood tuts. “I can never seem to recall the name, but Carnette called it the color of forgetting.” He pouts. “She never would tell me where she found a tailor capable of working with xenochromatic threads.”

Ashan’s stomach drops with the realization of why the world seemed to lurch every time he caught a glimpse of Bridgewood.

“In the future, please provide warning before exposing your allies to amnestic elements,” he states. “Or better yet, refrain altogether. I have had more than enough of my memory being stolen, even if it is only for a second at a time.”

Had Ashan not been staring him down with a glare, he might have missed the split second of Bridgewood’s mask slipping; of the man in yellow going wide-eyed and stiff as if physically struck. When the lazily elegant posture returns, the smirk maintains its absence.

“I’ll see that it doesn’t happen again,” Bridgewood says. The lack of over-acted affect in his voice is as off-putting as his genuine affection when speaking of his dearly departed wife.

“Good,” Ashan replies, wondering what old wound he just touched upon, but still bothered enough to be curt.

The moment passes, the smirk returns.

“Anywhom,” Bridgewood croons, “you go on ahead and get that thing loaded up for transport –” he gestures at the paralyzed slime core floating next to Ashan “– and I’ll be right along after I clean up the leftovers.” He sweeps an arm to indicate the now-inert piles of goo and bones covering the clearing.

Ashan nods in assent and turns to leave. A scooping motion of his hand brings along a portion of the slime’s cyan body mass in a separate bubble. It should be enough to healthily sustain the core for a time, but not enough for it to cause trouble with in the short term.

The walk back to the armored van feels shorter than the trek from it to the cave, even with maintaining a pair of mobile containment conjurations. Is it that the weight of memory is lighter after having faced the place he left his life behind? Or is it the ease of navigating from a recollection whose age is measured in minutes rather than years? Maybe it is simply the benefit of traveling downhill.

Ashan finds the van unlocked. He opens the rear doors, floats the slime in its two parts into the back, speaks the activation syllables to light up the warding glyphs painted on the inner surfaces of the vehicle, closes the doors, and lets his glass bubbles holding the slime vanish. If the captured creature is making any futile attempts to escape its new confines, the wards are keeping it muted and preventing the van from rocking.

A soft rustle of tree branches draws Ashan’s attention and he turns around, expecting Bridgewood or another threat that they missed. His posture relaxes and his wand slips back up his sleeve at the sight of three tiny figures hiding within the boughs of the nearest tree. A brown-and-white-furred bullfrog with nubbly horns. A twelve-legged weasel draped across the branch like tinsel. A humanoid figure barely taller than his hand bearing a moth’s bark camouflage wings. Beings that Ashan now knows to be Nameless fairies without a court or master. In hindsight, it is a wonder none of them ever took his old Name for their own. Or maybe they tried and failed (or were thwarted) and that was one of the six times his memory of the world Backstage was erased before even Aliana found him.

All the same, Ashan smiles and waves to his onetime playmates. They low and chitter and giggle and disappear back into the woods, safe in the knowledge that the latest monster to threaten this place has been locked away.

He wonders if they remember him. Probably not truly. A sense of familiarity may remain, but with how closely Names, memory, and identity are intertwined it is difficult for the Nameless to hold onto experiences which they are not regularly reminded of.

Ashan tears his gaze away from the direction the fairies fled just in time to catch Bridgewood returning.

“Everything’s secure and ready to go I see. Delightful.” Bridgewood leans a hand on the side of the van and blinks at it several times in rapid succession before turning back to Ashan. “As for my end, thanks to one of Carnette’s gifts, I can assure you there’s no longer a trace of our new delicious friend here to be found.” He pats the side of the van and then pushes himself off with a twirl that set him walking towards the driver seat door. “Let’s be off shall we? We still have a crossover point to examine.”

“Indeed,” Ashan says while returning to the passenger seat. “I presume you have some inkling of which world we will need to attune the crossover to in order to return this slime. It is not from Orthon – not unless something has changed drastically on that side of the crossover – but beyond that I am less certain.”

Two doors open and close.

“Right on both counts,” Bridgewood answers. “Yes I do, and no it isn’t. But…”

Two seatbelts whir, stretch, and click into place.

“We don’t technically have to return it to its homeworld.”

A diminished slime silently surges against the wards, unable to reach the front seats.

“What are you implying?” Ashan asks.

A key slides into an ignition lock and waits to be turned.

“There’s a room in the Manor positively packed with stasis chambers for the sort of delectable specimens Carnette liked to collect for study and preservation. We could let our passenger hang out in the back a little bit longer while we survey the crossover point, skip the trip offworld, bring it home, and toss it into storage. Maybe I’d even give you a tour of some parts of the house you haven’t seen yet.”

“That hardly sounds like what we set out to do.”

“Doesn’t it? What are you implying?” Bridgewood’s tone hovers between bemused and mocking.

“First you stride into the room and begin handing out assignments for the day without consultation and now you propose keeping a creature you said was meant to be relocated. Is this organization truly Road’s or do you pull the strings?”

“I assure you, this is my friend’s venture, through and through and everything I do is to support them. This morning was merely me reporting back with the status of tasks that had been delegated to me. We’ve been together long enough that we’ve long since reached an understanding about leeway and how I do things so long as certain lines aren’t crossed, and the important thing in this case is that we keep the creature from hurting anyone without killing it. Storing it in stasis accomplishes that while saving us the headache of interworld transit and ensuring that it won’t ever wander back across the crossover and cause a mess all over again.”

“And Road is okay with this?”

“My friend trusts me enough to not ask questions. But I’ll leave this one up to you.”

“Why?”

“I’m curious. What will you do with the options on the table and what will you tell my friend afterward?”

The key turns. The engine rumbles to life.

“No need to answer now,” Bridgewood continues. “We’ve got a whole drive back ahead of us for you to take your time contemplating.”

The drive passes back through Ashan’s hometown in silence. For all that Bridgewood must surely know why Ashan pointedly looks away from the window when they reach an intersection that they pass straight through, the expected remark never comes. The exposed nerve remains untouched. In that moment, there is no smirk.

Ashan tells himself he managed not to glimpse the couple taking a walk down their neighborhood street with their young son watching the strange, unmarked black van pass through their tired little town.

He suspects that Sullivan Bridgewood saw them clearly.

*******

“Ashan… If you ever remember this, please know that I’m sorry. For everything.”

<-Previous Chapter Masterpost

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hoshigray · 11 months

Text

𝐎𝐥𝐝 𝐓𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐤𝐬, 𝐒𝐚𝐦𝐞 𝐓𝐫𝐞𝐚𝐭𝐬 | toji fushiguro

𝐒𝐲𝐧𝐨𝐩𝐬𝐢𝐬: Your ex-husband bringing the kids over for trick-or-treating is one thing; him wanting to spend the night at your place is another. But it's just for the night. There's no way one night can rekindle some old feelings...right?

𝐂𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬: ex-husband! Toji x fem! reader - explicit content; minors DNI - the reader is around their mid-30s - Tsumiki (age 11) and Megumi (age 9) - mutual pining - kissing/makeout sessions - unprotected sex - Daddy kink - breast sucking + nipple play - fingering (f! receiving) - oral (f! receiving) - spooning + mating press - cervix fucking - breeding kink - praise - clitoral play (pressing and grinding) - pet names (baby, good girl, mama, princess, sweetie, sweet thing) - you and Toji have been divorced for five years - cameos: Gojo, Utahime and Mei Mei - mention of drool/spit and tears - humor bc I'm [not] funny.

𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐝 𝐂𝐨𝐮𝐧𝐭: 7.6k (....dawg.)

𝐀𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫'𝐬 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐞𝐬: happy Halloween, everyone!! so, randomly missed writing ex-husband! toji bc it's lowkey my favorite, soooo yeah, this is what we're doing to celebrate the end of the month! anywho, happy October, beautiful ppl, and tysm for reading my works!! Alsooo, ty for 2.8k!!!

“Trick-or-treat!!”

“Gasp—Oh my goodness!”

“We came to celebrate Halloween! Also, Megumi forgot his toothbrush here again.”

Opening your door to children at the sunset of Halloween day isn’t out of the ordinary or anything special. However, it’s always a pleasant surprise when it’s two kids you hold dear to your heart. You greet them with a hug, two siblings you know too well to say you’re acquainted with. If anything, you’re practically family.

The raven-haired brother, referred to as Megumi, speaks up. “It’s not my fault! Dad was rushing me last time.”

“Because you had to bring your stuffed animals last time, holding us back for your baseball practice.” Tsumiki, the older sister, snapped back. The two argue amongst themselves in front of you as you try to mediate. It’s no avail until another voice comes to the fray.

“All right, chill out, you two.” The voice belonged to the person approaching the porch stairs, your eyesight capturing the familiar figure walking up with two duffle bags. The one standing tall before you was the father of the children, Toji Fushiguro. Who’s also known as your one and only former husband. “Get inside and finish y’r homework, or else we’re goin’ back home.”

The siblings stop bickering and head inside, taking off their shoes at the foyer and walking upstairs. Now that they’re gone, you turn to the man with the jet-black hair, his viridian orbs focused on you. The weather was chilly, so the man wore his usual dark denim jacket over his plain black sweatshirt, matching his jeans. “You look good, big guy. What’s in the bags?”

He greets you with a curled lip, and the scar on the side of his lip lifts. “Picked them up from their after-school sports, so it’s their sports gear and costumes for tonight. Mind helpin’ me here?”

“Hmmm,” you merge your facial expressions to that of faux pondering, turning your back to Toji. “Nah, can’t. Got dinner to finish making.”

“Hmph, should’ve known.” He makes his way through between you and the front door. “Wouldn’t wanna break your pretty nails carrying heavy shit, huh, princess?”

You glare at him using the nickname, hating his patronizing gaze. “From what I remembered, you would never let me carry the heavy stuff because you thought I was too fragile and easy to break. So how about that, Mr. Knight in Shining Armor?”

“Really? I don’t remember sayin’ all that before. You must’ve put me in a spell.”

“Probably, I’ve been told I’m quite cute~.”

“Mmm, nah, more like an old hag of a witch.” Toji barks a laugh at your offended reaction, and he immediately ducks and heads for the stairs when you throw a sandal at him.

“At the very least, say I’m a cute witch, fucker.” You say the final word under your breath, grabbing the sandal you threw and heading back to the kitchen.

To say you and Toji were acquainted with one another would be the biggest understatement of the century. The two of you met a decade ago, fell madly in love, and married within a year of the relationship. When you tied the knot, Tsumiki had to have been two years old, and Megumi just turned one year old. You two had been together for four years after that, and you could confidently say those were one of [if not THE] best years of your life. You often second-guessed yourself being in a relationship with someone who had children, fearing that they wouldn’t like you or ignore you.

However, those worries were blown right away as the days went by. Every time you spent time with the children brought you three closer than ever; it was to the point that they saw you as their mother. How sweet! And there’s no denying that Toji loved you. The man would break someone’s nose for you — yes, it happened before, and it wasn’t pretty — for you were his sweet little thing that kept him going.

Well, if it was so great, why the divorce? Let’s just say you weren’t Toji’s first love. That title would have to be awarded to the Megumi’s mother. Even in her unfortunate passing, you can tell that Toji loved that woman like no other. It didn’t make you jealous or anything, seeing the man you love still mourn for a dead woman. Hell, you’d probably do the same if you were him. But, you can’t lie; it felt like you were cast over a “shadow” when it came to her influence. It was damn near suffocating to bear, especially in those four years of marriage. So, for your sake and his aching heart, you pulled him aside and suggested a divorce. And Toji didn’t fight you on the proposition, signing the papers and setting you free from the thick air.

Although things ended between you two, that didn’t mean things stopped being what they were. If anything, it was as if nothing happened at all. Even if you still don’t live under the same roof, you still make time to hang with the Fushiguros, whether invited to some occasion or exchange phone calls or texts to check up on them. Even now, five years after your separation, it warms your heart knowing that you get to interact with the people you care about.

There are moments you find yourself missing living under the same roof with all three of them and living alone can be pretty lonely. But all in all, as long as they’re comfortable and trust you enough to be around, there’s no need to change things up again. Like right now — the four of you sit at the dinner table eating before the kids go off trick-or-treating.

“Are you going to trick-or-treat with us, Y/n?” The brown-haired child sitting next to you asks while finishing up her dinner.

“Sorry, not this time, gotta be at a Zoom meeting for my job in a few minutes. But I do have someone else to take my place. Gojo will be here at around—Why are you two making that face?” You stop mid-sentence to notice Megumi and Toji at the other side of the table, displaying disgusted facial expressions at the mention of the white-haired other’s name.

“Why him?” They said in unison.

“Why not??” You question their irritation.

“He’s so annoying…” Again, in unison. Proof enough that they’re father and son.

You sigh as you get up to take your plate to the sink. “Oh, come on, you two, it’s not like he’ll be with you guys the entire night. He has a party at a friend’s he’s going to later.”

“Isn’t he too old to trick-or-treat?” Tsumiki questions, noting that Gojo is way past his undergraduate years.

“He is, but whatever gets that prick any free sweets,” Toji answers his daughter before getting up to put his dish in the sink.

You exit the kitchen, head into the living room, and sit on the couch. The laptop you had placed there was ready to open and unlock, and you clicked on applications and windows to look through before your meeting started in the next three to two minutes. He should be here about—

DING-DONG!!

Now.

Right on cue, you motion for Toji to grab the front door, and he follows your command. “Kids, Gojo’s here!” You shout out to the two kids who still sit at the table. “When you’re done eating, you can go upstairs and put your costumes on. But whoever finishes last has to do the dishes.” You can hear commotion from the table as the brunette rushes to put her dish in the sink and dash for the stairs. Megumi groans to himself; you giggle when you hear him mutter an “Aww man…”

You pull out your headphones to connect to your laptop, put them in their respective ears, and prepare yourself for the meeting. Ignoring the faint passive-aggressive tones of your ex-husband when greeting Gojo at the door…

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

Your eyes flutter open, noticing the lighting change around the living room. The orange sunlight no longer decorated the space, substituted with the gradual darkness that overtakes you. The only source of light you can figure out is the flashing from the television screen.

Aside from the TV, there are no other signs of life. There aren’t any signs of Tsumiki or Megumi around playing or causing a raucous. It could only mean the two are still trick-or-treating with Gojo.

One blink, two blinks. I must’ve fallen asleep after the meeting… You hum while sinking to the couch, burying your face into the pillow.

But…since when did your pillow act like it was breathing with a heartbeat? And…I smelt that cologne before…How?

“Ya awake now?”

You raise your head, realizing you are not lying on your couch. Technically, you were; however, you were lying on something else on the furniture with you – more like someone.

It’s then you realize that you were lying on Toji during your entire slumber, him leaning on the end of the couch, one leg spread to make room for you to sleep on him while you sit on the other. And you can guess that you had your head on his chest, snuggling up to his warm figure. He looks at you with his green eyes now darkened by the room, yet you can see their glow from the television light. And that small smile he gives you, the scar on the right side of his lip lifted upward. The familiar butterflies in your stomach flutter like before. Like old times sake…That must be embarrassing, huh?

You frantically try to get off of him, “Sorry about that, I thought—“

“No, no,” Toji places a stern hand on your back, keeping you from moving further. “You were comfortable.”

You stare at him for a few seconds until your face contours to a look, and a smile starts to creep up while you situate yourself back to your original position, pressing your face back on his chest to listen to the beats of his heart again. “I recall having this couch all to myself not too long ago, so where’d you come from?”

“Well, I wanted to watch some sports highlights, but I figured you’d kick my ass if I pulled you off and had you sleep on the floor instead.” With the click of your tongue, he chortles. You bet your ass I would. “So, I decided to have ya sleep on me while I watch TV.”

“What’s wrong with the other side of the couch? It’s quite vacant and enough for a big guy like you.”

“True,” his hand rubs circles on your back, an old habit he did when he used to have you like this. “But then I’d be lonely.”

You titter. “That’s big for someone who said he thrives on being alone.”

“I thrive being alone when I’m working.” You’re glad he can’t see your eyes roll; he’d probably grab you by the cheeks like a child. “Besides, why would I wanna be alone when I have you for myself.”

And there it is, your cheeks begin to warm up. Or was it because you’re so close to him that his heat is transferring to you? That’s probably it, yeah. Let’s change the subject…”How long was I out for? I remember the kids left around 7:30-ish.”

“Mmm, it’s going to eleven right now.”

Three and a half hours? Damn. “It’s past their bedtime.”

Toji scoffs. The abrupt motion of his chest rising is satisfying in a way that makes you even more comfortable. “You still think they’re gonna sleep with all that sweet shit they got?” He snickers some more as you shake your head.

“They know better. When you guys get home, be sure to put their candy bags on the top shelf of the closet for the morning.”

“Still traumatized from that one time?”

“Uhhh, yes??” The memory flashes to you for a quick moment, but the dread from before still haunts you. Megumi was six years old and Tsumiki seven, returning home from trick-or-treating and immediately tasting their labor from that night. However, what you didn’t expect was for them both to eat almost half their bags. Let’s just say, thanks to their sugar rushes, they didn’t drop dead until the hour hand touched two of the morning. “Unless it’s the weekend, never again.”

The way the older man chuckles is so therapeutic — it nearly makes you want to fall asleep again. “You weren’t the one chasin' Megumi all over the place tryin' to get him to sleep. Little squirt gets his speed from me.”

“Awww, poor you~” You can sense the glare as you respond in a condescending, sing-song tune. “You and him are always butting heads. Like father, like son.”

“Tch, hate that sayin’ so fuckin’ much.”

“Why? ‘Because it’s true?”

“Shut up.” The hand he used to rest his head comes down to pinch your nose. You wriggle out of his hold with giggles, but he happily keeps you grounded to him with his stronghold and a leg wrapped around to prevent yours from moving. “He only listens to you. Such a sweet lil’ baby to you, huh? Puttin’ my own son against me.”

More giggles prompt out of tiny guilt, and you bring up a hand to rub on his chest. “He’s such a bright boy now. Growing up so big and fast.”

“Miki, too. That girl is way too smart fr' me to catch up. And she’s becoming so kind and strong, crazy to think she made me play teacups when she could barely go down the stairs by herself.” Toji hums, the vibrations felt on the pads of your fingers. “Think she gets that from you.”

You shook your head. “They’re your babies. They do amazing things because they have a big guy like you to catch them if they ever fall.”

“Hmm, fair…But let’s not pretend I’m the best dad in the world. Fuck, never in my life did I think I’d be a dad, especially with two kids. I didn’t know shit back then — still! I still don’t know shit.” You don’t say anything, just listening to him voice his thoughts to you. Because he knows you’d listen – you always do. “If you weren’t there for them, I don’t think they’d be shining like this. Y’re definitely the thing that brought us up together. They look up to you so much. Ya did so well with them.”

Nodding aimlessly, his black sweatshirt grazing on your cheek. “Thank you. Same to you. Didn’t do so bad yourself, big guy.”

“Mmm.”

Nothing is said between you two after that. The only thing that makes noise is the voices coming from the television. The volume lowered, an initiative you could guess from Toji wanting you to get some rest. The silence was too awkward that it might torture some, but it was fine where it was. There was no need to change it, especially when you were comfortable in each other’s embrace.

That is, until Toji asks, “Do you miss it?” The rubs on your back go slower, his fingertips drawing a ticklish sensation.

“Of course I do. All the time.” You answer honestly, turning your head to rest your chin on him. Your eyes glimpse directly at his, giving him a tiny grin. “Why ask? I know the kids miss me being around; what about you? Miss me nagging and putting you to work all the time?”

He sneers at your comment. “Every day.”

It was such a simple answer, yet it had the power to wipe that smirk right off your face. Your eyes locked in his sight, and your heart tuning to an irregular rhythm. Oh, come on, Y/n, get a grip! “Ahem—Toji, I hope you know that I never stopped missing everything we had — I never will. Those years that we shared were probably the best I’ve had. We had happy moments, others sad, of course. But, God, do I miss it all. I miss it so much. I miss having you guys here. Miki and Gumi and—“

“Me?” Good Lord, if this man doesn’t stop looking at you with those goddamn eyes of his, such captivating orbs that say more than he lets on. Your breath hitches, and so does the hand on your back. “Hmm? Ya miss me, baby?”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. Why’d you have to call me that? And it gets worse when he places his free hand on your cheek, his thumb brushing your skin while the forefinger teases the lobe and tragus of your ear. Goddammnit…

“...Yes,” your voice was down a whisper, which could easily be mistaken with the television. But you know Toji heard you, loud and clear. “Especially you, Toji.” You said it. The words that he wanted to hear from you. They felt so forbidden to say, yet it was the truth. You avert your gaze away from him. But you knew that wouldn’t work, not right now. Toji taps your cheek with his thumb, and your eyes sheepishly return to his.

He doesn’t say anything, and that makes your heart beat at an unbearable rate. It’s all you can hear when you stare into his deep emerald eyes, the sound of it ringing your eardrums as if you could puke. Your throat running dry, so you gulp to ease the uncomfortable bob. If something could just happen to end this anxious torture, that would be great.

And then your prayers get answered: something does happen. Toji slowly brings his face closer to yours — your body goes rigid, and you instantly face away before the inevitable happens. No, I didn’t mean that!

“Aht aht, don’t do that, baby.” His hand slithers from your cheek to your chin, forcing you to face straight at him. “Lemme see you.”

“Toji, wait,” your voice travels out in a shaky breath. “We shouldn’t be doing this. We can’t cross this line anymore.”

He listens to your pleas, but his body does otherwise. Placing a gentle kiss on your forehead while the hand on your back snakes downward. “Why not?” His gruff voice dialed down to a whisper.

“Because—Mmmm…” Toji interrupts you by licking the helix of your ear. Oh, you slick bastard. “We’re supposed to be done…”

“That’s not stoppin’ me from takin’ care of my sweet thing.” Jesus Christ, you almost melted from the way he whispered that to your ear. He’s pulling out all the same old tricks, and it gets more hellish by the second as you try not to give in. “So, y're gonna let me take care of you like I always do, right, mama?”

Both his hands now rest on your ass, groping it while your hips sway as if they have a mind of their own. The leg between yours comes up slightly, making you ride on it. The heat on your cheeks has already blossomed to your ears, making it hard to think straight. Gripping his sweatshirt, your hips ride his thigh to ease the throbbing sensation that grows with every motion. Good God, you shouldn’t be doing this. You know you shouldn’t be doing this. However, it’s been so long that you felt wanted like this — wanted by him. It’s all the same – his voice, his hands, his words, his body, and the names he calls – yet here you are turning into putty.

“Haaahh, Mmmfff…Toji, please,” Toji withdraws his face from your shoulder, leaving him to examine your expression. You must look so dumb right now, with your hooded eyes and shivering lips. But, at this point, do you even care? “Please…Treat me right.”

One moment, you see his gaze narrow with a devious glint. Next, you’re taken aback when Toji slams his lips on yours, kissing and sucking your bottom lip until you give him access. With a moan, you open your mouth for him and sink deeper into the kiss. Your hands come around his neck, keeping him focused on you and you alone. Not that he would have it any other way.

His strong hands continue to knead your asscheeks while you hump and grind on his thigh. Nibbling on your lip, you whimper helplessly for him. It strokes his ego, knowing he’s making you like this, the fucking bastard. He takes in your tiny cries happily, shoving his tongue to play with yours. You give in to him, almost losing your balance riding his thigh, yet Toji’s lips never leave yours.

You break the kiss to get an imperative breath, panting loudly and sweetly for him as Toji kisses and licks your ear. The sounds make your lower region twitch. “Hnnmm, fuck…That’s my girl. So fuckin’ good fr’ me always, Y/n…” You can feel him slide a hand up to the hem of your leggings, forcing it inside for his thick fingers to brush up on the bare flesh of your butt. You gasp sharply. Him squeezing your butt has you biting down on his sweatshirt. “—Hahhh, Oh God, Toji,” With every squeeze, he inches closer to your panty-covered chasm, where you know he’d find a damp spot. Please touch me. Please, please, plea—

CLACK-CLINK!!

The two of you are frozen stiff when you hear the sound of the door opening and closing, the foyer lights turned on. “Alright~, we got you guys home. See ya later!” That was Gojo’s voice, indicating everyone was finally back from trick-or-treating. This means that Tsumiki and Megumi are about to see you on top of their father, his hand in your leggings and smacking lips with yours. Your eyes shoot wide with horror — immediately remove yourself from Toji and stand up from the couch to pull your bottoms up. You barely had the chance to peek at Toji because the kids already run to the living room to find you two.

“Y/n, Y/n, look!” The brunette was the first to greet you with her adorable pink Barbie cowgirl costume. She and her brother, dressed as Sasuke Uchiha, cheerfully showcased their pillowcases full of candy. “Look at all this candy we got!”

“Wooow, you guys really went on a haul,” you can only hope they can’t see you sweating bullets through your fake reaction. “Wh–Where’s Gojo?”

“He dropped us off here a few seconds ago and left for the party,” The raven-haired boy answered while scanning his pillowcase.

You only nod along until you frantically wipe your mouth, realizing the tiny trail of spit from the corner of your mouth. “Umm—Ahem, well then, I’m glad you two got all that candy. Now, let’s hurry up and get you guys home so you can get ready for school tomorrow!”

But the children didn’t move an inch. Actually, they looked like they were going to tell you something. You lift a brow. Oh no, they’re going to look at each other. They looked at each other and then glanced back at you. Oh, God, no. “Uhhh, Y/n, we were thinking.” Big sister Tsumiki is always the one who asks the following question. “Can we stay over?”

You inhale a massive breath, yet you do your best not to exhale a heavy sigh. “Kids, you promised to keep the overnight stays to three at max per month. This will be the fifth!”

“Yeah, but it’s dark out. Plus, it’s way past our bedtime.” The younger chimes in with a tiny pout. “We’ll be asleep by the time Dad gets us home.”

And here comes Tsumiki with the tag-team response to add on. “And that means he’ll have to make continuous trips back and forth from the car. Picking me and Megumi up, getting our bookbags, the bags full of candy, the whole thing! We already packed up our PJs just in case.”

You stood there staring at the two in astonishment. There’s no way they thoroughly planned this out. There’s just no way… And to make it worse, they were making valid arguments. You open your mouth to say something, but the two give the best puppy eyes they can. The wave of guilt hits like a train, internally cringing. You turn to Toji, who still sits on the couch, and the motherfucker only gives you a shrug. Wow, what a helpful father he is.

You groan into your hands, shaking your head while looking at the kids who wait for your verdict. “…Alright, you can stay as long as you PROMISE to put those candy bags in my bedroom closet. Deal?” The happy smiles and aggressive head shakes should answer your question. “Good, now go ahead and take your showers before you head for bed.” They rushed to the stairs by the time you finished that sentence, so enthusiastic about staying the night at your house, and you can’t help but smile hearing their footsteps run up the stairs.

With that being said, you turn to the older man again. Your brows are trenched down, but your smile is still present. “So, you legit just sat there and let those two tag-team me like that? In my own house?”

Another shrug with a dumb smirk on his handsome face. “Told you: too smart fr’ me to catch up.” You shake your head before exiting to get the kids and guest rooms ready, leaving him with the television.

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

The midnight hour has finally danced its way into the darkness of the night. Halloween is finally over, and the month of October is no more. The pitter-patter sound of the rain cleanses the neighborhood of its merits and festivities that partook hours ago, ready for a new phase of the year to take over.

After having the guest room ready with sheets and sleepwear for Toji and kissing the kids goodnight, you rinse your stress off with a nice shower and put on your pajamas to get ready for bed. After you turn the lights off, you drape the comforter over your figure as your body sinks with the cozy sheets and pillowcase. Your eyes close while focusing on the curtains of your window, the only light piercing inside being the lampposts by the street.

…Well, at least that’s what’s supposed to happen. But that’s not the case because you’re not the only one lying comfortably on your mattress. Instead, Toji is here with you, in your room, on your bed, his chest to your back, and his hand roaming inside your oversized shirt. Your lips are now connected with his, sharing your erotic moans with his enticing groans, and you get a little louder as his fingers cup and play with your breast.

“Mmphh…Ahhhh, I thought I told you you’re sleeping in the guest room—Nmmff!” He tweezes your nipple with his forefinger and thumb roughly.

“And I thought you’d be smart enough to know that wasn’t gonna happen.” Toji kisses the crook of your neck, drawing near your ear for him to whisper. “Besides, look at you. Still sleepin’ with no underwear on?”

“Hmph, only when I have a man around the house.” That answer got you another rough tweak on your nip and a purposeful gnaw to your ear. You knew he’d react like that, never liking the mention of another man leaving your mouth – especially during an intimate time like this.

“That so? What man you know that can handle all this?” Toji then moves from his side to be between your legs, pulling up your shirt to fully expose your chest. And your breathe hitches while his free hand travels down your abdomen to your bottoms.

“Ahhhh, no one. Just you...” You look at him with half-lidded eyes, taking in his reaction to what you said. The salacious grin on his face becoming broader should entail that he greatly loved that retort.

He brings his face to your other unattended nipple, “Good answer, princess.” The nub of your breast enters his mouth, and the wet warmth of his tongue greets it with lapped motions and grazes from his teeth. Despite that, it doesn’t distract you from the fact your bottoms are pulled down with ease and are thrown to the bedroom floor, leaving your cunt out for him, your erotic fluids seeping and glistening from the outside lights.

Toji plays with your folds until he can stuff his pointer finger into your chasm, the insertion resulting in your body’s jolt. It’s been a long while since you had his thick digit inside you, playing and scraping the inner walls to evoke whimpers. God, it felt so good, this satisfying feeling returning to awaken your body to his touch. He interacts with your body as if he’s the only person who knows how to get you going – and it’s the truth. No one can put you in a blissful haze quicker than this man. And you’d prefer to keep it that way.

The addition of his middle finger into your leaky entrance startles you, the thick digit making its way in with such vigor that he uses both fingers to scrape the velvety texture of your walls. Your eyes are now screwed shut at the growing commotion between your thighs, and the heat within your body flourishing all around gets to your head. “—Khmm, Oh fuuck, Toji. Please, don’t stop.”

With a soft ‘pop’ noise from his lips, Toji replies to your demands. “I’m sorry, what’s my name again?” You giggle with trenched brows. Of course, how could I forget?

“Nmmph, D-Daddy, pleaseee, I’m so clo—Ahhhann!!” He puts his thumb to your clit, grinding down on it unexpectedly. “I wanna cum, pleaseee…”

“Hmmm, good girl,” he teased, laying down kisses, nibbling on the skin of your stomach and inner thighs until he arrives at your leaking slit. Your body jerks up from the bed when you feel the cold, wet muscle slowly lick on your clitoris before ravaging your folds. The sounds of his mouth on your cunt are so lewd to the ear, slurping noises from his lips with the lapping motions of his tongue claiming your come are too much for you. And when he uses his hand to swipe and pinch your clit? Oh, it’s a wrap. Your release comes out without control, biting down on your bottom lip to make sure your cries don’t leave this space for the kids to hear. Their room is on the other side down the hall; tonight isn’t the night for too many risks.

When your trembling body calms down and subsides, Toji withdraws his face from between your thighs. Your essence paints his mouth, and he wipes his chin clean while licking the remnants that coat his scarred lips. “Hmph, missed tastin’ you like that.” You open your eyes when your high finally evades you, watching your ex-husband pull down his sweats. His erection springs out and hits his stomach, your mind going rampant with thoughts as you ogle at his freed limb. Shit, it’s been so long. Will that shit even fit me again?

“Don’t think it’ll fit, baby?” Damn him, he loves teasing you. Toji then discards his black wife-beater, at long last revealing his well-built, brawny physique that has you drooling for him. He uses his hands to maneuver your legs—your knees pushed to your chest as your legs propped up on his shoulders. A position you’re all too familiar with. Your eyes don’t leave Toji’s cock as he aligns his cock to your slick-coated folds. “Take some breaths fr’ me, sweetie. Can’t take care of you when you’re all tense.”

You take up on his advice and begin taking deep breaths, reminding yourself to maintain the steady pattern as he pushes the tip of his dick between the lips of your cunt. Every inhale is where he nudges into the hole of your inner cavern, and every exhale gives you time to breathe out the pain that comes in for a split second. This carries on until the cockhead wedges itself perfectly into your vagina, along with the inches of his girth that stretches until the base kisses your lips, the tip of him kissing your cervix. Tears swell up in your eyes, taking more deep breaths to prepare yourself for what’s about to come.

“Oooh fuuuck…Heh, yeah, that’s my baby right there. Fittin’ so perfect fr’ me, mama…” He puts his weight on you, keeping your figure unmoving under his bow.

“Nmmmf, Daddyyy,” you’re forced to take in all of him, and drool trails down your lips with no hope of taking care of it. “…I’m so full, you’re too much…”

“I know, sweetie, I know.” He wipes your spit after kissing your forehead. How gentle compared to what you’re about to go through. “Gonna move now.” His thrusts start slow for the two of you to adjust to each other; the feeling of his length’s veins coming in and out of your chasm is so euphoric, and the kisses to your cervix want your body to writhe and squirm. But you’re bent into this position for a reason: forced to submit to him no matter what. So you do just that.

Yet your horny haze gets more potent once he picks up the pace, rutting into you with increased speed. Your slit, still sensitive from earlier, gets overstimulated with the constant grazes on your gummy walls and jabs to your tender cervix. It takes everything in your power not to come so early.

“—Hahhhh, Nmmph. Oh, shit, shit, shit…” Toji groans above you, the thrusts of his pelvis increase to an irregular rhythm, grinding deep into your cunt to the point of uncontrollable babbles escaping your lips. His bullying on your insides results in you gripping his length hard, causing the older man to hiss and moan at your contractions. “—Ohhhfuuuckk!! Jesus Christ, baby. Y’re gonna make me go crazy.”

As if that wasn’t already happening now that he pistons his cock into your wetness, your brain turning into mush from the onslaught of ruts to your puffy wet chasm. Tears stream down your face, and more drool follows down with more precise hits to your delicate canal. The pounding in your head makes it hard to think of anything else, the squelching noises and paps of Toji’s balls hitting your cunt making it worse.

“D-Daddyyy, I’m—Ohoooo!! Oh, Jesus, ohhhshit!” You can’t formulate a proper sentence, too engulfed with the electrifying sensations coursing through your body.

“Damn, you feel too fucking good—Hnngh!!” Toji places his forehead on yours, resting his entire weight on you while his hips have a mind of their own. “‘Bout to make me knock you up…”

Oh, good Lord. The mere thought of having a child is the last thing that should be on your mind. But in a time like this, who in their right mind would be thinking straight? “Nnnfff! Oh God, pleaseee, fill me up, Daddyy!” Green eyes narrow with trenched brows. “—Pleasepleasepleaseee!! I want you to fill me up so bad, I want it, I want—Hyaaaaa!!”

How can he deny your desperate, teary pleas when you’re urging him on like this? “Heh, you’re so fuckin’ sexy, mama.” Toji captures your lips with his, your mewls taken by him as you sink further into your pleasurable thrill.

Sporadic thrusts of his pelvis produce more raunchy noises in the joining of your sexes, his heavy balls smacking on your cunt as he drives the base of his cock straight into you. Your slit is now a puffy mess, come and slick form a soapy mess that Toji now harbors a milky ring around his girth. A few rushed, sloppy thrusts heighten your high once more, and then Toji presses his pelvis down to the hilt on one final, harsh thrust, unloading his seed into your aching folds. And your climax follows in a few seconds, the walls of your cunt fluttering on his pulsating dick as your essence soaks him. Your muffled shrieks are received by him, quivering under him until the aftershocks wash through your body.

Once you two breathe at a steady tempo and the nerves of your sweaty bodies fall still, the kiss is broken with heavy pants and a string of spit that links you two together. Toji buries his face between your neck and shoulder, licking and kissing your skin as you’re allowed time to experience your clarity.

“Hmmm…You know I’m not done yet, princess.” Toji mumbles to your ear before stationing your legs off his shoulders for them to rest.

“Yeah, I know, big guy.” You tease him with a breathless laugh, kissing him on the temple. “Always wanting more…”

─── ⋆⋅☆⋅⋆ ───

“…So, you’re telling me you had your ex-husband spend the night? Not just the kids?”

“Yup, that’s what happened.”

This morning was different from your usual routine – well, you can’t say it’s different if you have done it before, huh? After five years of divorce, you thought you’d be so used to waking up and getting ready for work without worrying about others. However, this morning proves otherwise.

It felt natural walking into the kids’ room and lightly shaking them awake, telling them to get ready while you whip up something quick for them to eat as Toji showers (using your bathroom, by the way). Watching the kids run down the stairs and eat breakfast puts a smile on your face, reminiscing about the good old days when they were younger and teenier. It sometimes feels surreal doing the same thing for them now that they’re getting older and taller. But seeing them bicker and interact with each other in your presence never fails to warm your heart.

When Toji’s finished freshening up and loading his kids’ stuff in his truck, it’s time to bid them farewell for their departure for school. You give them final touch-ups on their hair and outfits, reminding them to be safe and not get into trouble (especially Megumi, now that the boy’s been getting into fights). And before they rush to the car, you hug them and give each a kiss on the cheek. Here is where the warm feeling inside your heart begins to deteriorate, not wanting to let them go. Yet, for their sake – and education – you release them and hope for the best.

The last to leave was Toji, who came from the kitchen to the front door with a paper plate wrapped in foil in one hand. His name is written boldly by a black Sharpie. “This fr' me?”

“No, it’s for Shiu Kong, for dealing with you all the time.” You stick your tongue out at Toji as he glares at you, not even moving out of the way while he exits through the door. “You better eat that when you get to work, you have a terrible habit of skipping lunch.”

“Whatever ya say, mom.” He pesters you with the title, knowing you’re technically not a mother anymore. Yet it only makes you smile knowing he notices your maternal side.

“Don’t forget to text me when Tsumiki’s soccer game is next week.” You watch him go down the porch stairs.

“Will do.”He whistles.

“And Toji?”

The man stops walking to turn to you, his forest green eyes fixed on you so quickly that you almost forget what you want to say. Or what you wanted to do. You place your fingers on your lips and blow a kiss with an outward gesture. It was an old habit you did whenever he left, something you can’t seem to get out of practice with. It’s embroidered in your mind at this point.

And when he catches the kiss with his free hand and places it on his chest, it makes your heart skip a beat. Toji grins, “I’ll be damned if that was fr' Shiu, too.”

You snicker with a shaken head. “Drive safe, Toji.” Closing the front door, you stand there for a while. Your smile doesn’t falter; it gets bigger as you replay the moment instead. Thinking about him, hearing him, seeing him, it all drives you crazy. And that’s a good thing…right?

“I don’t know, sounds like you still kinda care about the guy.”

“Of course I do,” So here you are, sitting in your living room enjoying the rays of the sunset decorating the space, in a video call with your best friends, Utahime and Mei Mei. You reply to the former’s comment. “Just because I don’t have the ring on my finger doesn’t mean I shouldn’t care about him. I mean, he’s the father of two lovely children.”

“Shoot, you’re better than me, then.” The dark-haired woman admits. “But you’re kinda proving my point, Y/n. Even when you don’t have the ring on, you two act like the same old couple, and it’s definitely not just for the kids’ sake. Let’s be real here.”

You try to interject, but the pale-blue-haired other, Mei Mei, intervenes, “I agree. It’s one thing if you let the children stay over, but he also wanted to spend the night. Sure, he could’ve been tired from driving all day and such. However, if you’re still seeing a man for the last five years – while legally unbound – and he says he wants to spend the night under your roof, which is rare, that should ring some bells at least.”

“I know, it did…” you nod along with what your friend is saying, throwing your head back with a heavy sigh. “But it’s not like he’s never spent the night here before, nor is he banished from stepping inside.”

“Oh? Then why is this time different from the others?”

Utahime jumps in after Mei Mei’s chirp. “Yeah, you’re telling us about all these nostalgic lovey-dovey feelings as if you’re falling in love with him all over again. What, did you two have sex or something?”

An open mouth, yet no words come out, leaving you in a predicament. You could’ve just lied or swerved the subject to something else. But you didn’t. And the two women on the screen lift their brows with hooded eyes, a look meaning a thousand words. You couldn’t even explain yourself either because a sudden knock on your door captured the attention of all three of you.

You stand up and walk towards the door, your friends still on call on the phone at hand. Opening the door, you’re almost stunned to see in front of you. Tsumiki and Megumi with nervous smiles, and their father at the car collecting the same duffles bags from last night. You’re kidding.

“Hey, kids.” The two of them gulped from not calling them by their names. You bring up the phone to face the screen to them. “Say hello to Auntie Mei Mei and Utahime.” The women on the line smile and wave at the children, who sheepishly wave back.

“Hi, aunties.” Megumi greets them, and then his eyes drift back to you. “So, Y/n—“

“What did you forget this time?” Straight to the point, no room for excuses.

“It was Miki this time! She forgot her soccer cleats.” The older sibling gawks at her younger brother for calling her out.

“Tsumiki, I know you have cleats at home.”

“I do, but these are special! You bought them for my birthday, and I’ve been wearing them to every game ever since! So, I was scared when I couldn’t find them at home.” The brunette was quick to defend her stand. “Also, Dad doesn’t feel like driving up here and then back. So…can we…”

You close your eyes and bring the phone to your face to shield your vexation. Twice in a row, the sixth time this month. You can hear the giggles of your friends from the other side of the phone, adding more fuel to the fire. You don’t look up until you hear heavy footsteps on the porch, seeing Toji holding both duffle bags with a hand and shoulder. He stares at you as you stare at him, a silent conversation on how to handle this situation. And when he shrugs with lifted brows, you realize it’s no use and release the long-awaited sigh.

“….If I see one more thing being left behind here, you guys can’t come back till December, understand?” It wasn’t anything serious, but enough for the kids to know you weren’t joking. They nod their heads in unison while you roll your eyes. “Okay, get in here.” They rushed inside with gleeful laughs, the shuffling of their backpacks following along with them. Your eyes then drift to Toji as he walks up to you. “Did you forget something here, too?”

“Yeah,” you lift a brow when he drops Megumi’s bag to the floor. Before you can register his hand on your chin, you squeak when he brings his lips to yours. It lasted for seconds, but the kiss was sweet and tender, sucking on your lip before letting go with a playful bite. “Meant to give you that when you woke up. Thanks fr' the food, mama.”

Toji picks the bag up and walks inside your home to put the bags in the rooms, leaving you standing on the porch with an astounded expression. You couldn’t appropriately calibrate your thoughts until you heard faint laughs from the phone. Then, you realize your best friends witnessed the entire scene that transpired.

Utahime, with the slyest leer, was the first to say something. “Oh yeah, he laid that pipe on you good, without a doubt.”

“Mhmm,” Mei Mei agrees with a chuckle. “And I'm guessing he’s gonna do it again tonight. Isn’t that right, Y/n?”

You end the video call with a heated face. “Sh-Shut your damn mouths!!” Again, you groan into your hands before returning inside. Thank God I still have those birth control pills...

♱ 𝐌𝐚𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭

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significant-harrasment · 7 months

Text

Ngl having tiddies would solve most if my problems, on top of being exceptionally hot I would have chest to show off renaissance style paintings with elegance as I pose and my Radiance illuminates your life to the one truth, that a I want tiddies ;-;

#Tiddies will save me #a twink with tiddies would be so hot frfr #yes i am speaking about myself there's nothing wrong with me #one time a trans person called me effeminate so I've been pondering the orb for answers #now i know that a man with tiddies #a twinkish man #with tiddies #me #will save my life

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toji-bunny-girl · 19 days

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bartender toji fucking the living daylights out of us after a nasty breakup ? also have a nice day

ON THE H★USE !!

#𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐑𝐀𝐂𝐓𝐄𝐑 𝐓𝐀𝐆 ⟢ bartender!Toji Fushiguro x fem!reader #𝑺𝒀𝑵𝑶𝑷𝑺𝑰𝑺 ⟢ riding the hot bartender after a break up is the least expected thing you’ll ever think of #𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓 𝐖𝐀𝐑𝐍𝐈𝐍𝐆 ⟢ alcohol, pet names, foreplay, fingering, teasing, grinding, pre-cum, no protection, creampie, car sex, nipple play, squirting, size difference, big dick toji papa, alpha toji with xxxxxxxxl dick, multiple orgasm, one-sided drunk sex (?), power play, I’m so lazy to do tags, who even reads content warnings tbh #𝑾𝑶𝑹𝑫 𝑪𝑶𝑼𝑵𝑻 ⟢ 4k #𝑨/𝑵 ⟢ don’t let this flop guys I spent way too much time on this when I should be studying for my exam 😭

“Plus, he literally had to beg me to act like I was cummin’ when he stuck his sorry excuse of a dick in me!” your eyelids hung heavily over your eyes as you exclaimed, brows shooting down in a frown. “Get a load of that guy, am I right?”

“He doesn’t pay for your stuff, and he can’t fuck good?!” Toji teasingly mirrored your tone as he manoeuvre behind the bar, uniform taut from the way he natchly flexed his arms; the bottles clinking as he worked deftly to craft out the beverage you ordered. “What a man.”

It has been 2 hours since you’ve been rambling on about your ex-boyfriend, and the ravenette felt like he’d known this stranger for years—all of his secrets and traits aired into his ears. Albeit, it was getting a bit boring, with the same repeated stories tumbling out of your voluble mouth. But still, he enjoyed chuckling at your adorable insobriety, fuelled by drunken mania.

“Here you go, princess,” a small tug lifted the ends of his scarred lips when your eyes patently glimmered at the newly served alcohol. “It’s the last I can give you, we’re closing…” Toji’s eyes momentarily flickered to his watch, “in 7 minutes.”

“Oh, okay!” you deliriously yawped, downing the beverage into your liqueur-brimmed system before handing him your card, which you aimlessly threw at him, not even lucid of your motions. “Just swipe it.”

Toji simply brushed it off, taking it towards the other side of the counter. He's used to unintentional antics like yours, as long as the tab was paid off he has no problem with them.

15,900 yen.

The digits flashed past his eyes like stars, igniting a luminous glint in his dark emerald orbs. Hell, was it a sum to casually splurge on at some mid-high bar? He’s got a pretty girl with probably an equally pretty amount of personality in her wallet, sprawled on the bar top wailing about her broken heart.

Oh, how he would love to play saviour.

“Here, princess. Time to go home,” he tapped your card onto the counter after the successful transaction. His gruff voice was low as you drifted further from your haywired consciousness and towards a delicious drowse. You didn’t move when he neared your face, attempting to marshal up your scattered coherence by calling into your ear.

Toji sighed as he leaned back onto his feet, and crossed his bulky arms, pondering the ways to get you out of the otherwise empty bar.

It was 12:58 am and the other inebriated customers had gone out by themselves or with their friends dragging them along. Except for you, softly snoring on the sticky counter.

His coworker shrugged at him when the ravennette glanced at the shorter male for help. “Just get her out of here. I’ll clean up the rest, and you owe me this one,” always so kind—how Toji wished he could smooch that man right then.

“Thanks, man,” Toji’s eyes curved in moon crescents, before settling his sight onto your dozed frame. His finger pressed against your temple, and your head lolled to the side in suit of a light push; a trail of drool slipping past your plump lips. You were completely and utterly out of it, huh?

Grasping onto your arm, the male lightly shook you awake, the warmth from his calloused palm stimulating your nerves vivified. “Hey, Mr. Bartender…” you had an uneven smile on your crooked lips, sleepiness bubbling into the air with every laggard blink as you breathily chuckled. “Are you gonna bring me home?”

“I don’t know about that, princess,” his tone was syrupy sweet and it licked the ends of your lips upwards into a velvety grin. “But we gotta go now. Come on,” Toji’s hands came to yours, gently pulling you off of the bar stool. You followed after his guide, slipping your card into your pocket before frisking behind him like a lamb to the door.

The burly male turned to his wrist after the door swung close in the wake of your exit, checking his watch; it read 1:04 am. The train station is closed and it’s going to kill his conscience if he leaves you by the streets like he always does with intoxicated male customers. He has no idea where you stay anyway—best to call a friend of yours to take you home.

“(Y/N)?”

A grating, vexatious voice called. The two of you swivelled your gaze to the source to find your cheating, insipid creature of an ex with an arm thrown over some chick’s shoulders, chortling at the unstable mess you were. Your eyes were puffy and tumid from the hours of crying slash ranting session, and you were anything but lucid from the way you looked.

How fucking lucky.

“What you got going on here? Getting kicked out of a bar?” your ex taunted, nearing his face to yours as you narrowed your eyes at him.

“Y-You…as—”

“Have the lady some of her space, buddy,” Toji’s authoritative voice prevailed over yours as he pushed the male away, rendering him to helplessly stumble backward into a fall. The woman in his arm hid her giggle with a gasp before helping his fuming ass up, his face beet red from his ignominious tumble.

“Who are you?” he barked, eyelids flying open to show the hidden whites and teeth bared in belligerence.

“A man who can make her cum, without begging her to fake it,” the woman burst into a half-concealed snicker when the ravennette broke the air with his unanticipated words. Your face grew to be saturated with ardent red, from both the intoxicant that coursed through your veins and the sentence you thought you had heard.

“I call it bullshit,” your ex spat with his upper lip pulled up in disrelish. There’s a flash of humiliation in his glare—he knew Toji seemed better than him and it killed him to know you’ve got suitors who are way out of his league.

“It’s true,” you tapped Toji’s metallically stiff chest with a twisted, satisfied smirk on your rat-arsed face. “He toootally didn’t just stick his dick in me and call it a day, y’know?”

“Fucking whore.”

“What d’ya say?!” you screeched, ready to pounce on the asshole. “I sent you to the ER once, and I’ll do it again!”

“Alright, that’s enough, princess,” Toji tenaciously held onto your arm, and you’re stuck by him even without him using much strength. “We don’t want you dirtying your hands, do we?”

A nasty shove met the male’s chest, knocking the air out of his lungs when he hit the ground. It was merely a fraction of Toji’s force, and it already had the male choking to breathe on the ground.

“Speak to her like that again, and it’s not going to be just a push,” you could hear the rise of a dour, serrated threat in his tone, and it begot the asshole to cower back in trepidation.

Pussy, Toji grimace. Albeit he was no saint himself but he absolutely despises the ilk of guys your ex filtered into—boisterous and a bully to women, yet nothing but a trifling mutt in front of men.

A tug of his arm, and your limbs wrapped around his wretched him out of his state of visceral contempt. “Take me home!” you ineptly exclaimed, a gruntled grin on your adorable, roguish face.

Briefly riveting his baleful gaze onto the splayed male on the bitumen, Toji steered you uphill towards the parking lot as you clumsily tottered aside him.

The encounter with the small-dick fucker sure rendered him more understanding of your evening of outburst. Plus, for you to be cheated on that piece of work was truly the icing on the cake. “Poor you, huh?”

“Forget ‘bout him! You were so cool I almost cummed right there and then,” you teasingly giggled as you peered at him through your heavy eyelids.

Fuck—it’s no good for you to be saying that with that look on your face.

His eyes rest ahead the road as you soon come to near the bright red C8 Corvette the woman he’s estranged with had previously gifted him, the car standing out amongst the parked vehicles like a sore thumb.

Your eyes scintillated in awe when the car luridly flashed and beeped in the night, “That’s yours?!” you cried aloud, frisking all the way to the car, before stumbling over thin air and nearly jolting forward into a fall. Luckily, Toji was quick enough to catch you by your arm, saving your knee a painful event of bloody excoriation. “Oopsie daisie.”

Cute, Toji chortled.

Jumping into the vehicle, the potent roar of the engine cut through the midnight air after you’ve settled neatly in the passenger seat, the only thing missing was the safety belt that was supposed to secure your form. Reaching to your side, Toji’s hand briefly brushed over your exposed thigh, the hem of your short dress riding up to merely cover your panty.

A soft, almost inaudible noise fled your lips, and his eyes laid on your face, the faint, intimate gold beam from the street lamp illuminating your glowing features. Your orbs were luminous through the dark, and it roused an innate lasciviousness that lay dormant in his core.

The liquor that flowed through your blood vessels had not quelled through the lapse of time, but it did not take away your clarity to feel the tension that electrified the air molecules into sweltering magnetism. And gosh do you want to snatch the constriction in the atmosphere and tear it through your canines.

“Touch me,” you whispered, so soft and vulnerable Toji could seemingly snap you in half with just a touch.

“You’re drunk, princess,” he reminded, yet he remained unshifted over your smaller frame, his hand merely a molecule from your tempting flesh that sang for his warmth.

“No,” you were firm. Something in you purled, bubbling a heavy, demanding need to have him devour you. “I want you,” your breath was hot, scorchingly so; airy and desperate.

“You want me?” his hand fell to your wrist, grasping your soft skin under his heavy hold, and guiding you over to his seat, straddling his lap. His gaze cut through your eyes, daubing pressure against your jumbled nerves, his intensity threatened to slice through the silky jugular of your vulnerability. And you nearly moaned under his eyes.

You gingerly nodded at him, and you thought the knit between your brows was enough to speak for your neediness.

His grip on your wrist tightened a fraction before you missed the heat radiating from his palm. “Careful, princess. You might regret this,” he had paved a way out, it’s a leave it or fuck it situation served beneath your fingertip—and all the atoms in your body leaped into the growling blaze in the abyss residing in his essence.

“Please,” your voice was barely a note above a mumble, yet the weight of your single word mitigated any marshalled resistance in him.

His hands slid up your thighs, inching under your dress, sending tingles to your throbbing core. The intensity that radiated from him ceased to waver as he leaned against your neck, brushing against your skin as you gulped. Dark, ashen clouds drew above the emerald forest of his before he spoke, almost threateningly against your throat, “I want you to remember every single detail of this in the morning.”

With a breathless nod, you had swung the floodgates of your amenability open to his guttural thirst. The heavy, rapacious waves of your desires crash into superposition. You were the fuel and he was the fire, together the air detonated into space.

His wet lips met yours in a whim, sucking onto your flesh until it stung, greedily tasting every crook and cranny of your wet cavern with the bumps of his tongue. You moaned into his mouth as your hands flew to clutch onto his head, deepening the kiss to reach his insides while his rough fingers sank into the plump flesh of your ass.

Your lips burned with his saliva, and his tongue fluttered with yours. The atmosphere felt all-consuming, gripping onto your throat and restricting the air from flushing down your windpipe. Yet, your core pulsed between your thighs, an excited blaze slowly roaring into something bigger than you could handle.

Your chest rose and fell in a quick tempo when you snatched your lips away from his, grasping as much air as you could within a second before you dove right into him. Albeit your sight was hazy, you caught sight of the luminous flush that panned over his cheeks.

Pretty, pretty. You chanted in your head as your hands slid down to his clothes, clumsily popping the buttons off of the garment that kept the warmth of his skin away from your touch. You want him, you want him.

Your fingers nearly melted when they met his hot, sinewy chest, and Toji’s teeth sank a little too hard into your bottom lip when you teased his nipples under your touch, innervating them hard with every flick. The salient bulge in his pants rolled against your folds, merely separated by an annoying piece of your underwear, and your moans jumbled into each other’s mouths

“Fuck, princess. You’re driving me crazy,” Toji breathily groaned when your sloppy lips sundered apart, a hot string of mixed saliva connecting your swollen, red lips together. His large hands lifted your ass up into the air as he palmed them, the warmth from him sending a snuggly sensation through your body. “It’s no fun when only you get to tease.”

Your eyes playfully gleamed, before the light shot out of the crater of your orbs—his finger pressed against your sodden panty, damp with arousal. The tingles shyly reached through your belly as he rubbed your hardening bud, and your body shuddered against his.

“You’re not playing fair,” he murmured against your jaw, leaving trails of bruised kisses down your jugular. His hand left your heat just as the high came close to your clutch, leaving you with nothing but the lingering cold touches of his.

With a defeated sigh, you ground your knee against his growing hardness, your finger shyly rubbing against the clothed tip of the constrained mount, the spot slowly growing dark from amativeness.

Toji sunk deeper into the headrest as you touched him, his exposed chest ceaselessly rising and falling. His breath hitched in his throat when you twirled his sensitive nipple between your fingers; your heated exhales warming the side of his neck as his grip almost painfully firmed onto the fat of your ass.

You didn’t allow his peaking orgasm to come through, forcing yourself off of his sore, throbbing erection, and your teeth bared into a dirty smile. “I am playing fair.”

“You want to test me, princess?” he chuckled, the bassy timbre of his scratching the knot of an itch inside your ears. A gasp leaped out of your throat as your body jolted forward, his seat clicked backward to its maximum taut, “I’ll make you cry for more.”

You found your back nestled in his stead, your thighs spread open with his calloused hand slipping down your supple flesh. His fingers tapped nearer and nearer to your heat, before slipping off your soiled panty.

“So fuckin’ wet,” Toji sucked an inhale through his teeth as he leered at your dripping sex—thick, rough thumb fluttering friction on your clit once again. Your eyelids flitted shut as you softly moaned against the air, the smell of your arousal filled the confinement of the car; the scent nearly making him growl when it panged hard against his nostrils.

You watched as Toji slipped a thick finger into your velvety folds, feeling it trodding past your walls. Your heat snugly enveloped him as he filled your inside with another digit, his two fingers pressing, and running themselves over your slick cunny. “Gotta stretch you good for me, princess.”

Your back inched into the seat with a contented sigh, enjoying the build-up of ticklish pressure stacking up your tummy. Toji was ridiculously dexterous with his fingers—deftly stroking your cunt, and quick to find the spot in you that innervated your pure senses with a ting.

“S-Shit—” your body was subservient to his touches; your spine curved into an arch, your toes curled tight and your fingernails dug into the flesh of his arm. “M’feel so good. Toji—fuck,” it was as if his fingers were gilded in Eros’ heavenly blessing, the godly grace spilling into your pleasure. Tears began prickling at the sides of your eyes from how hard you were squeezing them, your flailing legs kicking against the dashboard of his car.

“So pretty when you cry,” Toji groaned under his breath, his damp restraints painfully throbbing from the way your squelching walls tightened around his fingers—oh, how he fucking wish it was his cock in you right there and then.

His touches were singing your walls into melting squirts of drool, pearls of arousal weeping between your thighs in the wake of his careful strokes. Never were you touched in such a way, and you felt like balling from how good it felt. “M’ close! M’gonna cum! Oh my gosh—!”

“Come on. Cum for me, princess,” you could hear his smirk in his voice as pleasure kissed your senses, fluttering through your electrified nerves and sending a jolt of tingles all over your body. Your mouth was lax open into an ‘o’, nails marking his skin as they sank deeper into his arm, and your walls tightly spasmed with a wave of rough euphoria cracking your bones weak. You fucking came from his mere fingers.

Your eyes bat open with your lips sundered from your pants, your face ardently glowing from your subduing high. “Fuck…” your wet thighs quivered from the sheer force of your orgasm, and you blinked in disbelief.

Over 2 decades of living and it was the first time cumming from a real man, not your fingers nor toys. But the brawny, sex-dripped male slipping your dress off of your spent body.

You almost fell in love.

Pushing him down the driver’s seat, you crawled over Toji’s firm thighs, running your finger from his chest to his muscle-packed abdomen, then down to the wristband. You were flickering to take charge, and he sank down to your guidance, rough palms resting on your hips.

Your dress was off, divulging the bare curves of your body, sweat-glazed skin iridescent under the moonbeam and your sex-flushed features were begging for him. You look so, fucking, perfect that he had to bite down the need to ruin you on the spot.

His hips impatiently thrust upwards into your sticky cunt, grinding his pack against you, urgency in his essence demanding your heat. “Don’t keep me waiting now,” he purred, with a silent warning tagging behind his words.

Your fingers tugged the waistband of his pants along with his briefs, a drive in you matching his pacing hastiness. His shaft sprang out of its painful confinement, and your eyes nearly popped out from the sheer look of his cock.

He was oozing with sticky pre-cum from his angry, red tip, throbbing veins ran from the base of his length to the curved head—the size of him bigger than any you’ve seen. The smell of his masculine essence hit your senses and a new pool of arousal began drawing in your tummy, your pussy walls squeezing in empty neediness.

“There’s no backing out now, princess,” Toji’s fingers firmly gripped onto your ass, lifting you over his cock, hovering.

“Who said I’m backing out?” you gulped, before lowering yourself down, his fat cockhead kissing your pussy lips before your hips greedily sank down his length, oblivious to the crackle of tingles it would send to your nerves.

“Careful there,” he teased with a chuckle as you let out an instinctual gasp from the way his girth stretched past your velvety walls, the slick sound of your arousal-dripped cunt, and his heavy shaft bubbled into the air, and scorched your cheeks red.

“M-My gosh…” you cried as your hazy gaze fell to the bulge jutting from the inside of your tummy, your walls taut with his heavy cock buried inside you. “I’m s’full, Toji.”

“Mhm,” he cooed, brushing his hands over the sides of your smooth thighs. “But you gotta start moving, baby.”

Gingerly, you lift your hips up before slowly inching them down his length. Your walls clenched as your sex rubbed friction, and you could feel every pulsing vein of his just as he could feel your fluttering warmth.

“Feel good, princess?” Toji asked breathily, your head faintly nodded, but there was a hint of a dubious glint in your fallen gaze, your knees lifting and sinking your weight.

“I need your help…” your voice cracked in disappointment as you paused, tears of frustration edging by your eyes. You couldn’t seem to grasp a steady pace no matter how long you painfully rode.

“What d’ya say?”

Your orbs looked as though they were melting off of your sweat-glazed skin, blinks of fervourish plea clawing from your drunken gaze into his. “Please, Toji,” your voice hitched, and you’re humping his pelvis. “Please…I want to feel good.”

Aww. How fucking adorable.

You yelped when you felt yourself being raised and slammed down his cock, your folds burning with every stretch of your walls. And it feels so good. “Y-Yes…” your eyes closed shut, fingers scrambling to grip his locks. “T-Toji—mhaa!”

“You’re so fuckin’ cute screaming my name,” the curve of his tip perfectly kissed your g-spot with each piston of his hips, and every time the twitching head of his meat met your gummy part, it sent a flash of electricity up your spine.

“S-Sho good—” you slurred through your words, weighed head lolling idly to every thrust of his fat cock.

“No one can get you dripping off their cock like this, huh?”

“Mmh—yes!” the space between your brows was crumpled into a tensed frown, your hips bouncing up and down his thick girth with his hands guiding your pace. “I love it! I love your cock!”

Toji let out a low groan when you cried, bucking himself deeper into your sloppy mess of a cunt and kissing the surface of your cervix. “Fuck—I love an honest girl.”

Your muscles nearly melted off of your bones as he continued to fucked himself deeper than you’ve ever felt, reaching the parts you didn’t know could be touched and your features dropped with his touches on your deep intimacy. A fierce sear of heat burned through your tingling womb, and it threatened to consume your body whole. “M’ cummin’! Toji—!”

“I know, I know, let it out f’me. Come on,” he grunted, keeping his grip firm on your arms as he fucked himself hard and deep into you. He could feel your squelching cunny clench, so tight as for the purpose of milking him on the spot. “Keep bouncin’ on my cock, yeah?”

“Nngh—No more!” you squealed. “N-No—” his thumb drew between your shaking thighs and greedily swiped over your blushing clit. Your fingernails sank into your palms as you gripped for dear sanity, his cock continuously violating your fluttering spots until they grew sore.

“I can make you feel better, princess,” he mumbled tinglingly against your neck, sinking his teeth down your flesh to hold back a shaky moan. His pleasure was inching to fly to release, and your tight clutch onto his shaft was nothing but a catalytic lure.

“S’ hurts—please!” your babbles were almost indecipherable as he rammed into your sore cunt, his fingers digging into your soft flesh holding onto you tenaciously; pushing you right to the edge of oblivion as he clung onto his nearing release.

“Cum f’me again, baby?”

“M’can’t! Still sensitive—!” you cried before another orgasm shot through your core. You felt as if you were sent up into the ether, stars teeming through your body as the waves of pleasure sent you on a vertigo ride. Your gasps dragged through your lips, your eyelids hung heavily over your bleary eyes, with tears slipping down your hot cheeks.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck—M’close too, baby,” Toji swore through his bared teeth, his cock painfully twitching as thick semen surged through his tip—his hips rolled as your cunt squeezed his remaining sanity, popping them like fireworks before they burst into nothingness.

Your essence squirted out of your tensed cunny, shooting with his mixed cum that dripped down his belly. Your breaths shaky and hot with heightened senses, your sticky sex pulsing in overstimulation.

Exhausted, you fell prostrated on top of his hard muscle-built body, head undulating with the ups and downs of his heaving chest. And slowly, your cognisance drifted back into your mind, the aftermath of everything—the alcohol and the sex, pummelled into you like a heavy truck. Unforgivingly so.

“Toji…I really feel like pukin—”

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