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the-art-of-ancunin · 4 months

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Sweetest Sin [Smutty One-Shot]

Summary: Father Astarion Ancunin is approached by a married couple within his congregation to seek out their beloved daughter and guide her back onto the path of righteousness, fearing for their child's immortal soul. Though reluctant, he agrees to do what he can to shepherd their lost little lamb back into the Lord's loving light...that is, of course, assuming he can overcome his own dark desires.

Pairing: Priest!Astarion x Female!Reader

Content Warning(s): SMUT, loss of virginity, dirty talk, religion kink, priest kink, creampie/breeding kink, corruption kink, p-in-v, unprotected sex, oral (Female receiving), fingering (Female receiving)

Please let me know if I missed anything.

Also, I did not proofread this, no beta-reader, so it might be shit. We'll find out together.

Word Count: 5.4K

The grand archway of the cathedral framed Father Astarion Ancunin, his tall figure casting a shadow against the golden light that spilled from within. Despite being a creature of darkness, he had become an integral part of the town of Emberwood, serving as their shepherd of light. His vampiric nature had initially drawn cautious glances, but the townspeople's faith in him seemed to outweigh their fear. They flocked to the cathedral and found solace in his words, a paradox that the elf would have scoffed at decades ago—a vampire spawn preaching salvation.

"Good evening, Father Astarion," Mr. Tiller called out, his voice warm as he passed by with his family. "Your sermon today was truly moving."

"Thank you," Astarion replied, his smile genuine but unable to reach the depths of his crimson eyes. "Peace be with you."

For a quiet moment, the pale elf held up the silver band on his finger to catch the light, marveling at the small miracle that allowed him to walk under the sun. This ring symbolized not just his commitment to his vows, but also to a life he never thought possible. Each day, the weight of his past sins grew lighter as he embraced his newfound purpose with tentative gratitude.

"Father?" A timid voice broke through his reverie.

"Ah, Mr. and Mrs. Silverleaf." He recognized the couple instantly, their devoutness etched into every line on their faces. "What can I do for you?"

"Your words—they're a balm to our community," The man began, wringing his hat between his work-worn hands. "And…we hate to ask but…well, we've come to ask a favor, if you're willing."

"Of course. Speak freely," The priest encouraged, folding his hands before him in a gesture of openness.

"It’s our daughter... She strays further each day from the path of righteousness," Mrs. Silverleaf confided, her voice laced with worry. "She has no care for piety or decency."

"Her soul, we fear, is in peril," her husband added, his gaze pleading.

"Would you speak with her, Father?" The woman asked. "Perhaps guide her back to the ways of the faithful?"

The couple's words hung heavy in the air, a weight that Astarion couldn't quite shake off. He knew his duty was to guide and correct those who strayed from the path of righteousness, but the thought of speaking with you, their fierce and free-spirited daughter, filled him with conflicting emotions.

On one hand, he felt a sense of obligation and responsibility towards your soul, which they clearly feared was in jeopardy. But on the other hand, the memory of you tore through his mind like a stormy sea, tempting him with desires he had vowed to renounce.

The request coiled tightly around his heart. The memory of that first night that he had laid eyes upon you surged forward, unbidden and wild. It had been a chance encounter at the tavern, where he had gone to seek solitude among the clamor of tankards and low-burning hearths. You had burst through the door, a vision of ferocious vitality, your presence so startling that even the rowdy din of the establishment had hushed for a brief moment. There you had stood, cloaked in the glory of your conquest—a deer, by the looks of your spoils—and had commanded attention with the ease of one who knew their own power.

"Talia, go fetch Lorrick! And tell the cook to get his shit together, yeah? We're having fuckin' venison tonight!" you’d declared, voice rich with triumph.

Astarion couldn't help but watch you, his eyes tracing the line of sweat that made a glistening path down the column of your neck. Each droplet reflected the light from the hearth, casting a warm glow on your skin. Your soft hair cascaded messily down your back and beckoned his fingers to explore its texture. The sight of you- so raw and vibrant - was like a sharp blade to his senses, breaking through the protective walls he had built around his chastity.

"Father, will you not try?"

The distant echo of Mrs. Silverleaf's voice pulled Father Astarion back to the present, interrupting his thoughts. He nodded absently, his mind still consumed by the image of your mischievous smirk. Despite his inner turmoil, he affirmed to the couple that he would speak with their daughter, a wave of heat flushing his cheeks at the thought.

"God bless you," Mrs. Silverleaf and her husband intoned together, their sincerity in stark contrast to the hunger gnawing at Astarion's resolve.

"Peace be with you," he replied hollowly, his own words drowned out by the cacophony of conflicting emotions within him.

As the couple disappeared from view, Father Astarion turned back to face the sacred confines of the cathedral. Its cool silence offered no refuge from the heat that still coursed through him, memories of his struggle against temptation flashing through his mind. He had whispered fervent prayers and battled against his desires for flesh and sinew that night at the tavern.

"Forgive me," he muttered to the empty pews, unsure if his words were meant for his deity or for himself. His duty was clear - to meet with the girl and guide her towards the light. But as the sunset painted the stained glass windows in fiery shades of red and gold, Astarion couldn't shake the feeling that he was about to enter a battle for which he may never be fully prepared.

Taking a deep breath, he steeled himself and called upon every ounce of divine strength to fortify his spirit. He would offer counsel to this wayward lamb and do his best to protect her from darkness. But as he locked up the church and began to trudge his way towards your home, nestled at the far edge of town, he couldn't deny the thrill of forbidden excitement coursing through his veins, like a fire burning just beneath his skin. Though he knew that this could prove to be a rather dangerous task, one that could potentially lead him down a path of temptation and ruin...for the sake of your immortal soul, he was willing to take the risk.

The dying embers of the day cast a warm, orange hue over the town as Astarion tread softly along the dirt trail, his boots pressing into the uneven ground scattered with pebbles and twigs. The outskirts where you resided was tranquil, the only sounds were his solitary footsteps and the distant chirping of crickets. He could see your home now, a quaint cottage that seemed to be in a perpetual embrace with the encroaching forest. The air was scented with damp earth and the sweet tang of herbs that hung from an overhang, swaying gently in the evening breeze.

"Ms. Silverleaf, it's Father Astarion," he called with measured calmness, rapping knuckles against the wooden door. His voice felt strangely intrusive in the stillness. "Your mother and father bid me to speak with you."

Silence greeted him, thick and unyielding. He knocked again, a little louder, allowing authority to lace his tone. "Ms. Silverleaf, please. This is a rather important matter."

The quiet persisted, and a frown teased at the edge of his lips. 'Perhaps she is out,' he thought, but something about the soft glow from within your home suggested otherwise. He reached for the doorknob, finding it unlocked. A moment's hesitation lingered like a warning. With a breath to steady himself, he pushed open the door and stepped into the muted warmth of the interior.

"Y/N?" he ventured again, voice barely above a whisper as he closed the door behind him.

Before him, the small fire in the hearth crackled its last dance, casting flickering shadows across the room. Astarion scanned the space, noting the absence of any presence. His gaze fell on the simple furnishings, the homely touches that bespoke a life lived simply yet fully. In that moment, he felt like an intruder in your world, privy to a privacy not his own.

His ears, sharper than most, caught the faintest sound—a rustle, a breath hitched in distress. His dead heart sank. 'Might the girl have injured herself?' The concern edged his thoughts as he moved silently, his steps practiced and light. The noises grew clearer, more defined, and his pace quickened with a mix of worry and something less definable.

"Y/N," he called out softly, reaching the slightly ajar door from behind which the sounds emanated. With the utmost care, he nudged it further open, just enough to allow his eyes to seek out the source of the commotion.

He stood motionless, his hand still resting on the door, as the scene within unfolded before him.

His eyes widened, the crimson depths reflecting a scene of forbidden desire. There in the dimly lit chamber, the air thick with the scent of sweat and desperation, you writhed upon your simple bed—a vision of unbridled sensuality.

"Gods above," he murmured under his breath, unable to tear his gaze from the sight. His voice was a mere whisper, lost amidst the symphony of your pleasure.

Your small fingers danced along the slick folds of your sex, each movement deliberate and hungry. Lustful whines escaped your lips in ragged sighs and your moans pierced Astarion's heart like an arrow. You were yet unaware of his presence, lost in your own world of ecstasy.

"Y/N," he finally managed to say, louder this time, but the plea in his voice was drowned by your cries. You did not hear him, or if you did, you gave no indication, consumed as you were by your own touch.

'Stop,' he thought desperately, 'you mustn't witness this.' But his body betrayed him, rooted to the spot, drinking in the sight of you. The heat that had been kindling within him since he'd first laid eyes on you now blazed uncontrollably.

He watched, transfixed, as your back arched, your breasts rising and falling with each labored breath. The soft mounds were flushed with arousal, your nipples taut and begging for attention. Your other hand alternated between caressing your breast and pinching your rose-colored nipple, sending ripples of pleasure through your body.

"Please," you gasped, the word a prayer for release. "I need... I can't..."

Father Astarion felt a surge of protectiveness, intermingled with a darker, hungrier sensation. He knew that he, a man of the cloth, should not be standing there, should not be watching this intimate act of self-pleasure, yet he found himself entranced by your uninhibited display.

"Is this what you seek?" he asked silently, the question for himself more than you. "To be the one to push her over that edge?"

His blood roared in his ears, drowning out the remnants of piety that screamed for him to leave. There was a battle raging within him, between his vows and the yearning to step forward—to replace your hands with his own, to taste the salt on your skin, to hear his name on your lips instead of the silent gods you seemed to be reaching for.

Another whimper, more tortured than the last, pulled him from his daze. He took a half-step backward, the creak of the wooden floorboard underfoot sounding like thunder in the quiet room. Astarion’s throat was dry, his body tense with longing.

"Forgive me," he whispered, turning his face away, though his eyes betrayed him, sliding back for another glimpse that lasted far too long. "Forgive me..."

His breath hitched, a silent witness to the carnal symphony playing out before him. Shadows clung to the corners of the dimly lit chamber as the fading light of day bathed your writhing form in an ethereal glow. Your fingers, slick and unyielding, danced fervently within yourself, your movements both desperate and deliberate. The decadent chorus of your pleasure—a blend of wet, rhythmic sounds—sent involuntary tremors through his body.

"Gods... yes, just like that, please..." Your voice was broken and full of lust, a prayer for release that echoed off the walls.

He swallowed thickly, the taste of his restraint bitter on his tongue. His hands, traitorous and curious, sought the heat beneath his breeches, and he winced at the contact – a touch both foreign and achingly familiar. The sensation clawed at his resolve, tearing at the fabric of his vows.

"Ah... A-Astarion..." you moaned, your voice slowly morphing into a sinful incantation - a desperate plea to the heavens, or perhaps to the depths below. His name rolled off your lips like a sacrilegious mantra, stoking that fire within him into something unbearable.

"Gods above…," he whispered under his breath, a ghost of words lost amid the melody of your solitary passion. Envy gnawed at him, its sharp teeth sinking into his heart as you envisioned another, even if that other bore his visage.

"Please... Fuck - ruin me..." you begged the illusion, your back arching, your body tightly stretched like a bowstring. The priest within him recoiled, but the man, the primal creature lurking beneath the clerical collar, stirred from its slumber.

"Enough," He hissed to himself, his conviction giving way to carnal desire. He could no longer be a mere observer, a passive guardian of sanctity. As you called out for him, in flesh or fantasy, he felt that familiar longing within him awaken. With a growl, he shed his clerical collar and entered the room with purpose. This was no longer a soft tread of uncertainty, but the confident steps of a man who knew what he wanted. You needed him, craved him, and he... he needed this. Gods above, he needed this.

"Ms. Silverleaf," he said louder now, his voice cutting through the haze of your ecstasy.

Your eyes snapped open, bright and piercing, locking onto his deep, vermillion gaze. Your silky hair cascaded around your face as you stilled, your body drawn with anticipation. In that moment, your eyes were a tangle of fire and gold, two stars colliding and igniting a blaze that consumed you both. Your stillness was a bird poised on the edge of a branch, ready to take flight at the slightest movement. And in that moment, the question hung in the air like a forbidden fruit, tempting and dangerous: Which would it be? Salvation or damnation?

"F-Father Astarion," you breathed, a mixture of surprise, embarrassment, and something...darker. Something hungry .

The pale elf stood tall and imposing in the dimly lit room, his pastoral leash discarded and forgotten on the floor. The light streamed through the window, catching the soft curls of his silver hair and casting an intimidating glow in his intense eyes. You laid bare before him, a true vision of ethereal beauty - your pleading eyes and wild hair fanned out around you, nearly forming a halo around your glistening, desperate form.

"Tell me, my child," He began, his voice low and steady, "What manner of evil has reduced you to this? A whimpering, sodden mess baring yourself so shamelessly before a man of God?"

"Please, Father...I-I’m so sorry. Please…p-please help me," You whimpered, your voice soft as velvet.

"Of course, child," His voice was a soothing balm, yet it was wrought with an undercurrent of something depraved. "Would you have me guide you in prayer, to cleanse these wicked ideations from your soul?"

Your head shook, a silent bell tolling 'no'. His gaze never left you, sharp and probing as he began to unfasten his shirt, each button relinquishing its hold with deliberate slowness. The pale flesh beneath his priestly attire came into view - his lean, muscular body sending a sharp jolt to your needy cunt.

"Or perhaps," he continued, his tone laced with concern, "you'd prefer I summon the physician? They might concoct a remedy for your... afflictions ."

As he circled the bed, the air around you charged with unsaid words, he grazed your cheek with his knuckles, the touch feather-light yet scorching. Your skin burned under his caress, your heat evident to his discerning touch.

"Ah, you are quite warm," he murmured, almost to himself. He leaned closer, his breath fanning your face as he tenderly pushed away strands of hair that had clung to your dampened forehead. "What then, my dear, do you seek from me?"

You swallowed thickly, your body betraying your desires with a soft whimper. "I don't need a doctor, Father," you managed, your voice barely above a whisper.

"Then what?" Astarion whispered back, his proximity intoxicating.

Your breath hitched; you bit down on your lower lip, trapping it between your teeth. In a voice suffused with shame and longing, you uttered the words, "Touch me."

Astarion clicked his tongue, a reprimand and a tease all at once. "You know that is not possible. My vows..." He let the sentence hang, unfinished, yet heavy with implication.

But desire was a siren's call, relentless and seductive. As your fingers resumed their salacious dance, the soft wet sounds that they made reached his ears, sending a bolt of raw need through him. He watched, transfixed, his body responding despite his resolve.

"Is this a habit of yours?" he asked, his voice husky with restrained passion.

"No," you breathed out, your movements unabated.

"Has another taught you such pleasures?" His inquiry was both invasive and achingly tender.

"N-no. Never," you admitted, your voice tinged with innocence and discovery.

He hummed, acknowledging your confession. "There is much to learn about one's own flesh... to understand what brings pleasure, what stirs the soul."

"Please," you gasped, your plea floating between you like a fragile leaf caught in a tempest. "Help me, Father... Show me how to feel good..."

"Perhaps," he whispered, his voice a thread of silk amidst the tension, "a slight... guidance would not be deemed sacrilegious." The words felt foreign on his tongue, like a dark incantation that could unravel the very fabric of his being.

Your eyes fluttered closed for a moment, as if absorbing the gravity of what he proposed. Your lips parted in a silent plea, your desire an unspoken prayer that beckoned him closer.

With reverent trepidation, he extended his hand, the silhouette of his fingers ghosting over the valley of your chest before descending. The heat of your skin seared his palm as he cupped your heavy breast, feeling its softness yield beneath his touch. Your sharp intake of breath was both a torment and a balm to his conflicted soul.

"Ah..." you sighed, a delicate sound that underscored the urgency of this illicit communion.

Astarion allowed himself a moment to marvel at the responsiveness of your body, the way your flesh puckered against the chilled air, inviting his thumb to graze over the tight peak of your nipple. To him, it was the first transgression – a tactile whisper that spoke volumes of forbidden pleasures yet explored.

His hand trailed lower, a painstaking journey across the landscape of your ribcage, the undulating terrain of your belly, each movement deliberate, a testament to the restraint he fought to maintain. It was an artist's touch, painting strokes of fire upon your canvas of anticipation.

"May I?" The question hung between you, laden with consequences yet to unfold. His eyes sought yours, seeking absolution in their depths. Your gaze held his, fierce and unyielding—a mirror reflecting your shared hunger.

"Please," you breathed, the single word a key turning in the lock of his resolve.

His fingers, cold and steady, grazed the small of your waist, drawing your attention away from his eyes to the point of contact. You shuddered as his touch met the sensitive skin just above your hips. His fingers traced the delicate curve of your pelvis, kneading it gently, exploring your body with the reverence of a man discovering the wonders of the world for the first time.

"You are beautiful," he whispered, his fingers tracing the delicate lines of your hip. "Sinfully so, darling. But your wants, your needs... they are only human."

Astarion's eyes lingered on the curve of your hips, tracing the silhouette of your form with his gaze. The desire within him threatened to consume him whole, promising to both destroy and purify. He knew that once he crossed this line, there would be no going back. You were both aware of the weight of your transgression, heavy like a shroud about your limbs.

But your voice broke the silence, another soft plea that cracked the veneer of control he had so meticulously constructed. "Please," you begged, your voice trembling.

His fingers found you, hesitant at first, exploring the soft folds that lay between your legs. The air was heavy with the scent of arousal and anticipation, a heady cocktail that intoxicated you both. Astarion was no stranger to the touch of a woman, but this was different. This was sacrilegious. He could feel the weight of his vows bearing down upon him, threatening to suffocate him, but he persisted.

Your body tensed at his touch, the resistance only serving to heighten his desire. As he continued to explore you, he whispered softly into your ear, "You are allowed to feel pleasure, sweet girl. It's alright..."

Your breath hitched as his fingers delved deeper, your body arching against him in response. He could feel the heat radiating from your core, the pulsing life within you behind the delicate tissue that covered your being. He had never felt anything so alive, so vital, so right.

His fingers continued their exploration, sliding gently against your skin, tracing the pathways of your desire. Every touch was a caress, a promise, a confirmation that you were real, that you were there, and that he was not alone in this sin.

As his fingers continued their journey, he felt a surge of pure lust wash over him. He knew that he could not resist any longer. He needed to feel you, to possess you. He needed to experience the fullness of your passion and the sinful pleasures that awaited him.

He could feel your heart racing, your breaths becoming short and ragged as he touched you. Every touch, every brush of his fingers against your skin sent electricity coursing through his veins.

"Gods," you keened, your voice a desperate plea for release as he slowly sunk his middle and ring finger into your tight channel. Your body trembled, and you pressed yourself against him, urging him to continue.

Astarion released a long, shuddering breath. This was madness, this transgression. But the need was far too strong, too powerful.

His pale skin almost seemed to shimmer as he shifted his position on the bed. His scarlet eyes, usually so intense and piercing when preaching from the pulpit, were now dark with lust as they focused on your form laid out before him. The contrast between you was stark—him, the embodiment of forbidden restraint, and you, the very image of uninhibited desire.

"Father," you panted, your voice a sultry melody that tugged at the most carnal parts of him, "please..."

He slid his fingers deeper, eliciting a sharp intake of breath from you. The sight of your pleasure, the way you arched beneath his touch, drew a low groan from Astarion's throat. He was no longer the vampiric preacher who had given his life to God and vowed celibacy; he was a man, flesh and blood, driven by primal urges he could no longer deny. Your scent filled his senses, intoxicatingly sweet, and it sparked a curiosity that overshadowed all rational thought.

"Gods, I shouldn't..." He murmured, more to himself than to you, but the words died in his mouth as his tongue dared to taste the honeyed sweetness of your center. The flavor burst upon his senses—a delectable mix of sin and innocence—and his groan vibrated against your sensitive skin. It was a sound of pure, unadulterated need.

"M-more...please..don't stop," You encouraged breathlessly, your eyes half-closed, hands finding their way into his silver curls, urging him closer.

Astarion complied, his once-hesitant licks becoming more insistent, delving into your folds with fervor. The holy man within him screamed for repentance, for restraint, but he was drowned out by the carnal beast that had been awakened. With each stroke of his tongue and curl of his fingers, he mapped out every contour of your dripping cunt, committing your responses to memory like sacred scripture.

"Ah, Astarion," you moaned, a symphony to his ears.

"Y/N," he whispered against you, his voice husky with passion, "you taste positively divine ."

As he continued to worship at the altar of your body, the church bells of propriety and oath rang distant, irrelevant. In this moment, there was only you and the undeniable truth that you were bound by something far stronger than doctrine. The friction of his fingers inside of you, coupled with the relentless pursuit of his tongue, stoked a flame within you that threatened to consume you both.

"Father," you gasped, your plea a beautiful litany, "Aah - Gods, yes.."

Your hips bucked beneath him, the fierce desire in your eyes melting into a tempest of ecstasy. The supple flesh of your sex clenched around his fingers, and the sight of it, the feel of it, sent a shiver down his spine. The moments of hesitation were a blur in the past, all that remained was the hunger between you, the natural dance of bodies, the silent pleas for release.

He felt that familiar throb of anticipation, the prelude to a world of pleasure and sin. It would be a fall from grace, a transgression of the utmost magnitude. But he knew, deep down, that his heart would break if he denied you the satisfaction you so desperately craved.

He could feel the tension within your body, the resistance slowly fading away as you came closer to the edge. Your breaths, once short and gasping, now deep and labored as you allowed yourself to fully succumb to sinful bliss.

His fingers, still buried inside of you, crescendoed their rhythm, matching the tempo of your heartbeat. He traced the swell of your clitoris with his thumb and lapped at the nectar that spilled from you, staining his lips with its sweetness.

"Astarion," you whispered, your voice a low, sultry moan. "Please, I need more."

He understood. He needed more, too. He plunged his fingers deep within you once more, eliciting a scream of unadulterated pleasure. The supple flesh of your sex clenched and spasmed around him, and the sight of it, the feel of it, drew a deep growl from within his chest.

His breath was a harsh rasp, his every sense alight with the raw scent of desire that rose from your flushed skin. Withdrawing his hand and mouth from your quivering, wet warmth, he couldn't help but admire the sheen of arousal that coated him, a decadent gloss that marked his sin as much as it did his yearning. He gazed upon you, reclined and panting, through eyes hazed with lust, finding you all the more enchanting for the sweat that painted your delicious curves.

"Look at you," he murmured, voice laced with both reproof and undeniable affection, "such a greedy little thing."

His fingers, still trembling with the remnants of your pleasure, worked at the ties of his breeches with a deftness born of necessity—this shedding of his final vestment felt like the peeling away of his last vow. The fabric fell away, pooling around his knees before he kicked them off, discarding the cloth and constraint alike into a forgotten pile on the floor.

Bare now before you, the dying light cast shadows across his lean form, playing over the muscles that tensed with anticipation. His heavy, aching cock stood proud, a testament to their forbidden ardor, twitching as though it had a life of its own, the tip shining with evidence of his need.

"Can you handle more?" he asked, his voice a low growl that vibrated in the charged air between you. It wasn't just a question of your endurance; it was a challenge to his self-control, a plea for absolution for the hot sin you were about to commit.

Your response was caught in your throat, your eyes wide as you drank in the sight of him. In your gaze, Astarion saw the war between lust and trepidation—yet when you swallowed, it not only discarded your fears but also his lingering doubts.

"Please," you whispered, your voice thick with want. "Take me... I want to be yours."

The words crashed into him like a wave, sweeping away the last of his restraint. A part of him—the man who had clung to his faith amidst a sea of past temptations—whispered that this was the point of no return. But another part, deeper, more primal, rejoiced in the offering you presented.

"Then mine you shall be," he vowed, his mind afire with images of your union, of how he would fill you, stretch you, consume your essence until there was no distinguishing where one ended and the other began.

As he positioned himself at your entrance, the head of his cock nudging against your slick heat, he felt the weight of years of celibacy poised on the brink of oblivion. His heavy balls tightened, aching with the promise of release, the need to claim and be claimed overwhelming him.

"Are you ready?" he asked, his voice rough.

"Yes," came your breathless reply.

And with that single word, Astarion surrendered, gently pushing forward and guiding himself into your tight warmth with a slow, deliberate thrust.

You gasped as his girth split your virgin pussy, your body writhing beneath him, a silent plea for more. Astarion pushed in deeper, sinking slowly into you…inch by agonizing inch until you felt his balls press against the tender flesh of your ass. The sensation was unlike anything you had ever experienced, a divine mix of pain and pleasure that sent shivers down your spine.

"Ohh, Gods above ...you're so tight, little one" he whispered, pulling back just enough to tease your entrance and admire the pink ring of your ruined maidenhood around his shaft before plunging himself into your core once more.

You moaned, your hands clawing at his back, urging him on. “Mmf! Ahh…d-don't stop, please..."

Astarion groaned, his hips bucking urgently against you. He wanted to savor this moment, to take his time, but the beast within him demanded satisfaction. He shifted his angle, his cock rubbing at that sweetest spot inside of you just right as his crown pressed rough kisses against your cervix over and over again, and you cried out in pleasure and pain.

"Ahhh - fuck ," you cried, your voice a mixture of ecstasy and anguish, "Gods, it's too much...I can't-”

"Yes you can," Astarion whispered reassuringly, his breath hot against your ear. He thrust faster, harder, his cock sliding in and out of you with a wet, slapping sound. "You're taking me so well, sweet girl. Being so very good for me..."

Your body arched beneath him, your nails digging into his back as you climaxed hard, your orgasm hitting you like a whirlwind of bliss and agony.

Astarion felt your muscles clench around him, a vice-like grip that threatened to pull him under. His release was imminent, and he knew that once it came, there would be no turning back.

His thrusts became more frantic, the need to conquer your petite body overtaking him. Each movement was a battle, each thrust a plea, each twitch of his manhood a promise. He could feel the sweat dripping from his forehead.

"Forgive me," he grunted, his voice strained, his voice echoing your pleas from earlier. "I just can't control myself around you..."

You let out a needy, lustful whimper as your overstimulated body trembled beneath him, matching his rhythm as you reached once more for the edge of a new kind of bliss you had never known.

"I don't want you to control yourself," you huffed. "I want to feel every bit of you inside me."

Astarion groaned, his eyes rolling back as he plunged into you with reckless abandon, his cock twitching and pulsing within your snug hole. He felt your walls tighten around him, milking him for everything he had to offer. This was it; this was the moment. He knew that once he emptied himself inside of you, he would be lost in you forever. With a desperate cry, he buried himself to the hilt inside of your molten core, stuffing you completely with his thick, neglected manhood as his seed flooded and filled you, a substantial overflow seeping from where you remained joined - a testament to your sinful union.

As he collapsed onto you, his breathing came in ragged gasps. You lay beneath him, your eyes closed, face flushed with the afterglow of your lovemaking. You felt his cock twitching inside of you, still wrapped around him in a tight grip from your shared ecstasy.

He could feel your heart racing beneath him. This was not merely sex or desire; this was something forever altered, indelible in your souls. As your bodies calmed from their fervor, he found himself still nestled within your warmth, where he belonged.

He knew that to stay burrowed within you would be to invite temptation's final caress, but he could not make himself retreat. Not now, not ever. You were his now, and he was yours; there was no turning back...

A/N: If you made it this far, thank you so much for reading! I hope you enjoyed this lil one-shot. If so, it would be super lovely of you to like this post, reblog, or send me a message to lemme know your thoughts. I love hearing from you guys - it makes my little depraved heart so very happy! XoXo

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h0nkch0c0late · 7 months

Note

i will literally do anything for jordan li x fem reader

enemies to lovers

Oh my God anon you are setting me up for such a good plot....you have too much faith in me.

Top Five

Jordan Li x Reader

SUMMARY: You and Jordan had always fought about everything. Whether it was because of something you two disagreed on, or a simple topic, but it was always mainly due to your Top Five rankings. While Marie was put in #1, you stayed in place at #3. As they say: the enemy to your enemy is your friend :)

WARNINGS: swearing, slight Gen V spoilers, implications of sex (not specifically written)

You and Jordan had been enemies since you could remember. Both of your parents had been close friends, and thought that their children would be the same.

That had never been the case, though, as you two had been each other's sworn enemies since the day you had met.

Why? Neither of you really had a reason. It had nothing to do with your powers, and most times your arguments had no real...argument. just pointless yelling.

But then, as you grew up, and you both entered Godolkin, it became more than just pointless arguments.

You spent every day trying to prove who the better person was. Which one was liked best, which one performed the best, etc...

It didn't help your case that Jordan was all buddy-buddy with the headmaster, Professor Brink, which let them be in with the popular crowd.

That didn't prevent you from being #3 for the top five, of course, but you were still upset.

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Its not like you weren't friends with the "popular" crowd either, being friends with Cate Dunlap and Andre Anderson had its perks.

The only downside was that you were constantly in the same room with Jordan when you all hung out together, and she INSISTED on glaring at you every time.

Your response to it was always sticking your tongue out at them like a child, to which they always rolled their eyes.

To you two, it was like a game of cat and mouse, and neither of you could figure out which was which.

To your friend group's eyes on the other hand, it was a game of "who will kiss who" first. They saw your constant fighting as blatant flirting that neither of you were willing to admit.

So, when Marie Moreau came to the school, and Luke had killed himself along with killing Brink, you two finally had someone to be genuinely enemies with.

After all, the enemy to your enemy is your friend, right?

So, while Jordan was thrown to #5, and Marie moved up to #1, you couldn't stop glaring at Marie every time you walked past her.

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As you walked down the path towards the dorm rooms, you had noticed Jordan standing there, clearly upset.

Ever since their rating had gone down, it was like they were a ghost to the rest of the school. You could relate, however, as being #3 wasn't as nice when the top 2 were being practically worshipped for something they hadn't even done.

So, gathering up your courage, you walked over to him, lips casted into a frown, "you okay?"

Her upset expression turned into one of annoyance (defense mechanism due to the fact her enemy was talking to her), and she groaned, "why do you care?"

You rolled your eyes, expecting nothing less from the supe in front of you, "because ever since Marie got to #1 and you got pushed, you've become a ghost. And you seemed pretty upset so...I don't know."

"You're still #3. You shouldn't be caring about anybody who's below you." They scoffed, their eyes refusing to meet yours.

You sighed, "the enemy to my enemy is my friend, I guess? Look, Jordan," You paused for a moment, "I know we aren't the best of friends, but I just wanted to make sure you were okay. I know how close you and Brink were and what happened fucking sucks."

Jordan's eyes moved to look at you, her frown slightly disappearing as she noticed that you actually genuinely cared. "Yeah, I'm fine."

You tilted your head, furrowing your eyebrows as you knew that they were lying, "there's no need to lie to me. We may hate each other but I do know you."

Jordan sighed, "can we not do this here?"

You gave them a look of confusion, "Okay...where do you wanna-"

You were cut off by Jordan taking your hand and dragging you off to their dorm room, and suddenly you found yourself sitting on their bed as they began to pace around. "Of course I'm not okay! Marie took all of the credit for something she didn't even do! She fucking took off! She ran! And it seems like I'm the only one pissed the fuck off about it because come ON! you did more than her! You actually tried to talk to him! You tried to talk him down and yeah it didn't work but you tried! And I fought him! Where the fuck is our credit, huh?!" Jordan ranted, getting angrier by the second.

Your frown deepened as you watched Jordan get heated, "Look, yeah, I'm angry I didn't get any credit, but at the end of the day, the rankings aren't that important to me. And yeah, I'm stuck at #3, but it's been like that for a while. I'm fine with not getting any credit because at the end of the day, it wouldn't have changed anything. You would have been #1, and Andre would have been #2. I care more about the fact that I lost a friend." You explained, standing up and walking over to Jordan, grabbing their hands in your own to stop their pacing.

She stopped in her tracks, her eyes downcast at your interlocked hands, head low to hide the rising blush that began to cover her cheeks.

"But I thought you did care. Yknow, our constant fighting and all?" Jordan questioned.

You chuckled, "Jordan, I constantly fought with you because thats what we do. We're supposed to be enemies, remember? Enemies fight."

Jordan stared at your hands for a bit longer before gathering the courage and looking up, "what if...what if I don't wanna be enemies anymore?"

Your brows furrowed in confusion, "what do you-"

You were cut off by Jordan planting their lips on your own, and you didn't hesitate to kiss back as your hands let go of their's and cupped their face.

And soon enough, you were back on her bed.

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It's a little rushed but fuck it we ball 😎

Also, how do we feel about me calling yall gentlebitches bc I find it kinda funny

#x reader #imagine #jordan li x reader #jordan li #gen v fanfiction #gen v #gen v spoilers #enemies to lovers

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absolutebl · 3 months

Text

This Week in BL - The unexpected rise of cooking crush & seme bjs

Organized, in each category, with ones I'm enjoying most at the top.

Jan 2024 Wk 3

Ongoing Series - Thai

The Sign (Sat YT) ep 9 of 12 - I love this show so damn much. This may be my KinnPorsche. It’s just so endlessly entertaining in a perfectly unhinged way. I love that they looped Tharn’s dad back into the murder investigations.

You know kinksters have invented necklaces that can’t come off… right? Just saying.

Meanwhile, would it still be BL if our seme didn’t wake up from drowning and instantly go chase snake?

No. No it would not.

Remember the one hard and fast rule of BL? When a seme gives a BJ it’s penance. Phaya is apologizing to Tharn for leaving him behind.

Heh. Hard and fast. I kill me.

Pit Babe (Fri iQIYI) ep 10 of 14 - How is this absurd creature managing to rise in the ranks? Pavel turned in some stellar grief and ALANJEFF have my whole heart. I make Ikea puns in the... Trash watch happening here.

Cooking Crush (Sun YT) ep 7 of 12 - The make-out montage was absolutely charming and very much American rom com style - interesting (and rare) to see in a BL (not to mention from OffGun. How far we have come since Puppy Honey?)

Meanwhile, another wonderful grandma in a BL!

Next week we do an actual harken back to Puppy Honey, so obviously I’m now enjoying this whole show way more than before. I think it helped that I watched it earlier in the week, when it wasn’t competing with any other BLs.

Last Twilight (Fri YT) ep 11 of 12 - Not gonna lie, I knew from you all that this was gonna be a rough ep. But I very clearly remember the penultimate Bad Buddy ep so I now have slightly more trust than others in GMMTV on this matter.

That said, this was a crap episode.

You can’t set Mork’s truth and character motivation reveal up like that and then have his lover choose to dismiss him in a way that diminishes not just both character's growth AND all of Mork's actions towards Day, but also our faith in every other character. It was a shitty narrative thing to do to us, and it was a shitty thing to do to Mork. And that doesn’t even take into account the forgiveness allotted by the story to Day’s unrepentant excuse for a mother. The doom should have been handled differently. The mom shoudl have leaned in even more evil and actively lied to split them apart.

I don't know if they can redeem this misstep in the final episode. But I'm interested to see them try. That said, this plot seem to be true to the book.

For Him (Thurs iQIYI) ep 8 of 12 - A major trigger has landed. But also it’s clear who’s fault that incident was... and it’s not Him’s. So Blue's so-called-friend really is unhinged. This episode was a little bit more engaging than last week, but it’s only because stuff actually happened. I’m still not sure I enjoyed it.

Twins the series (Fri GaGa) ep 12fin - Despite the fact that I’ve been annoyed by the show the last couple of episodes, I’m still sad for it to end. It was a good reveal and First had the right response. Also a very sports way to end it. Sprite is a v clingy bf.

In brief?

A messy very Thai pulp sports romance that actually managed to involve sports in an identical twins trading-places plot. Basically Not Me meets HIStory 2 Crossing the Line (although vastly inferior to either) with an endearing main character and a good lead pair (poor things), both soapy and earnest without too much camp. It tried so hard but the plot, side couples, and extraneous characters let us down. Passable if not great. 7/10

Time the series (Thai Gaga) ep 2 of 10 - Eh. Whatever.

My Universe (Sun iQIYI) ep 22 of 24 - skipped this installment

Ongoing Series - Not Thai

Although I Love You and You AKA Sukiyanen Kedo Do Yaro ka (Japan Gaga) ep 2 of 10 - Funny how quickly he retracted that confession and everyone called him out for doing it too soon (including me from a narrative beats perspective). It was a cute screw up - I see what your meta-arse is doing there, Japan. Also our Tokyo-boy’s serious reserved earnestness is extra adorable in the surrounded by Osaka enthusiasm context. His accidental flirting is that much more heart wrenching for our poor baby seme. And they ended this ep with honorific negotiations!! Be still my heart. I’m really adoring this show.

Your hyung romance super fan is back in the game!

Meanwhile the Osaka accent is beyond adorable.

Sahara-sensei to Toki-kun (Japan Fri Gaga) ep 6 of 8 - Japan what are you doing? I do love the not-sorta-ex from the past.

VIP Only (Taiwan Fri Gaga) ep 10fin - I loved all the young people in the hawker center supporting the campaign against the terrible mother. They make a good domestically sappy couple. But that is Taiwan's specialty.

In brief?

A sweet if aimless story about a writer and a chef finding love via noodles, fake dating, and family challenges. If it had a tighter script and a shorter run, more like a KBL this might’ve been quite special. But it didn’t and it lost me too many times. 6/10

I don’t like to be disappointed by Taiwan.

It's done: I Need to Catch up

What Did You Eat Yesterday Season 2 AKA Kinou Nani Tabeta? Season 2 (Japan Gaga) 10 eps - will binge when I have any spare time. 2024 is crazy busy for me so far.

The Servant and the Young Master - from Vietnam so I assume it's on YouTube. I never even noticed. Anyone?

Began Beginning (Myanmar YouTube) - Is TRUST Entertainment bringing us the first ever Burmeses BL? I don't know if it's really the first, but @heretherebedork vouched for it, so I will give it a watch through.

It's Airing But...

[INTERNATIONAL] Cherry Magic (Sat YouTube) ep 3 of 12 - yeah Japan put the smack down on our boys. Sadness. You can use a VPN if you like. Read all about it here.

Beside You (Thai YouTube) - a 3 sp short that's supposed to have started but I can't find it.

Ossans Love Season 2 (Japan Gaga) - 5 years later, will anything have changed? This is Japan so… probubly not. I won't be watching this. I disliked Season one and actively hated the follow ups. No thank you.

Playboyy (Thurs Gaga) 14 eps - Dear Playboyy, it's not you, it’s me… I hate you. You’re about as deep (and as palatable) as a shot glass of cum. While I'm sure you’re someone’s kink, you're my weakest link. Goodbye. I DNFed this at ep 5. Frankly I'm impressed with myself for getting that far.

The Whisperer (Sun ????) 10 eps - Ends next week. Thai horror BL that ALSO involves cheating (what joy is mine). I don't think even the perfect single dimple can motivate me to watch. Word is... it's terrible.

7 Days Before Valentine (Weds WeTV) 10 eps - Giving me Luminous Solution vibes. I'm waiting to binge if safe.

Dead Friend Forever (Thai Sat iQIYI) - horror, meh, tell me if it's worth my time?

In Case You Missed it

All my year-end round ups:

TOP 10 BL Trends of 2023

Top 10 BL Secondary Pairs of 2023

2023 BLs Best Trope Execution Awards! TOP 10

All the BLs Announced for 2023 that didn't happen

BL 2023's Best:

Back Hugs Thailand & Elsewhere

Cute Bits of Domesticity

Boys Feeding Boys

BOOP!

Best Cuddles

Heads in Laps

Touching Head Touches

Thailand Put His Head on Your Shoulder

Put Your Head on My Shoulder (not Thailand)

BEST KISSES (not Thailand)

BEST KISSES FROM THAILAND

Next Week Looks Like This

1/23 Happy Ending is a new high school set Strongberry 20 min short staring the actor who played Milk on Choco Milk Shake, so... YES PLEASE. I'm not sure where it will air but we all have our fingers crossed for Gaga or YT. Or both.

1/24 Love For Love's Sake (Korea Gaga & iQIYI)- based on the Manhwa ‘Love Supremacy Zone’ by Hwacha. A young man is dropped into a game based off a novel he loves. His mission is to make another player, YeoWoon happy. But then the game starts unfolding completely different from the novel.

Upcoming BLs for 2024 are listed here. This list is not kept updated, so please leave a comment if you know something new or RP with additions.

THIS WEEK’S BEST MOMENTS

Viva la BL grandma superiority! (Cooking Crush)

Cooking Crush casually givign us some lovely lesbians (as indeed did The Sign). GL makes for a lovely acessory BL, carry on.

Now GMMTV, give us the REVERSE.

I love this dork SO MUCH. (Pit Babe)

I love that Cherry Magic is doing this scene over. One of my favs from the original.

Yai is BEST BOY. MVP and most likely the winner for 2024's Namgoong award.

(Last week)

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sexhaver · 2 months

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me n bailey marathoned the first season of this show over the last few days. some thoughts:

Alan Cumming, specifically his accent and wardrobe, are by far the highlights of this show. i sincerely hope someone has made an edit compiling all of his outfits without any of the actual gameplay, because he is consistently serving cunt

like just look at this

that being said i did keep seeing him as Fegan Floop from Spy Kids

oh right there's an actual game/competition component to this

im just gonna get this out of the way: the entire premise of the show is fundamentally flawed. they keep trying to make it sound like the three Traitors in the group are "backstabbing" and "working against" the Faithful (non-Traitors), but, like, everyone on the show (Traitor or Faithful) is competing for the exact same prize pool. it's not like The Mole (or any other social deduction game), where the secret evil team actually has different goals diametrically opposed to those of the good team and has to complete them without having anyone notice. here, the evil team just... votes on someone to "murder" every night. that's it.

to emphasize this point: the literal only thing that can ever give you away as a Traitor is being bad at lying/concealing guilt. there are ZERO gameplay differences between the goals of a Traitor and the goals of a Faithful, which means the arguments over who to vote for banishing are based entirely on "gut feelings"

nobody on the show has ever played a social deduction game before. late into the season, there's a day where all 3 Traitors are alive and it's down to 6 people total (so 3v3). anyone who has played Mafia/Werewolf/ToS/etc knows what this means: barring bullshit last-minute rules from the producers, it is quite literally impossible for the Traitors to lose, because none of them can be voted up. it takes 4 out of 6 votes to exile someone, and there are only 3 Faithful left. if no Traitor votes for another Traitor, then it is, again, literally impossible for a Traitor to be exiled. furthermore, if they all coordinate their votes on one Faithful, all they have to do is convince one of the remaining two Faithfuls to vote with them, and they instantly win $180k (split three ways). and hey, wouldn't you know it, one of the Faithfuls (Kate) was already really suspicious, and another one of the Faithfuls (Quentin) said out loud multiple times that he was voting for her!

so what do you think the Traitors did?

god this part pissed me off so much im having to pause for breathe while typing this. okay. so.

two of the Traitors voted for the third Traitor, who got voted off.

after being voted off, youre supposed to walk up to the Circle of Truth and reveal if you were a Traitor or not. the guy who got eliminated (Christian) was entirely too nice and gracious about it. me n bailey discussed this and came to the conclusion that we would either a) out the other Traitors on the stand and explain, using game theory and math, exactly how fucking stupid they are, completely ruining the game for them, or b) pretend to cry a little while walking up to the Circle of Truth but as soon as you walk behind the first other Traitor's chair you flip it over backwards and elbow drop their nose into their face while screaming "YOU STOLE $60K FROM ME YOU SON OF A BITCH"

also the guy who got eliminated (Christian) was very clearly autistic and Every Single Reason the other traitors gave for not liking him was like straight out of the DSM V diagnostic criteria ("he talks too loud and laughs weird", "he's got way too much energy all the time", "his emotional responses don't make sense")

apparently there's a season 2 but i cannot bring myself to watch it after seeing Christian thrown to the lions (ayyy Sunday school reference)

also at one point a Faithful has to leave because of COVID (this was filmed in 2020) so the producers don't let the Traitors murder anyone that night for balance reasons, but to compensate, they tell them they can like. write down three names that will be publicly revealed to everyone the next morning, and then one of those people dies the next night. so obviously this is mostly a nerf for the Traitors because they miss a night of killing someone, but the intention was clearly to give the Traitors an opportunity to sow confusion by putting one or two of their OWN names onto the list to make them seem like Faithfuls. and they even had an extra objective during that day's game where one of the three people could earn a "shield" to protect them that night, so if a Traitor was on the list, they could basically "steal" the shield from the other 2 (since they obviously weren't getting killed no matter what). but i think the Traitors heard "write down three names" and "kill" and had all the blood rush to their respective dicks because they just wrote three Faithfuls lmao. deeply unserious show

#the traitors

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antianakin · 10 months

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@auditect

You seem like you're being genuine about this and asking this in good faith, so I'm going to say this as respectfully as I possibly can: no, she's not.

When thinking about what's canon and what's not, there are 2 things to consider. One is, was it explicitly said or shown in the canon material (in this case, Rebels)? For example, did you hear anyone CALL Ahsoka a Gray Jedi, or discuss Gray Jedi and then have Ahsoka pretty clearly get associated with said concept? Two is, have you ever heard the main creator of a canon material explicitly state somewhere that Ahsoka is intended to be understood as a Gray Jedi by the audience? In this case that would probably be Filoni, but you can probably count the other writers and even Lucas in this category.

The answer to all of those questions is no. At no point has the concept of Gray Jedi ever been brought up in a high canon piece of media in Star Wars (in case high canon is a new term for you, this includes all of the movies, TCW, Rebels, and the Disney+ shows like The Mandalorian, TBOBF, TBB, etc.). Gray Jedi are FANON because they only exist in a piece of extended universe Star Wars media which, in many ways, works as basically official fanfiction. Nobody working on the more "high media" stuff is ever obligated to keep extended universe stories in mind and adhere to their continuity, but the people working on extended universe stories have to adhere to high canon continuity as best they can.

Obviously there are things that have been brought from extended universe into high canon, but Gray Jedi simply aren't one of them. And, in my own opinion, this is because the entire concept makes no sense with the actual worldbuilding of high canon Star Wars. As much as Filoni shits on the Jedi, he does generally seem to understand Lucas's worldbuilding which makes the fanon concept of Gray Jedi literally impossible. Using a little dark side without it having an impact on you isn't possible. That's not how the Force works, as the saying goes.

So no, Ahsoka's not a gray Jedi in Rebels. She's a former Jedi who happens to keep using her training and her lightsabers to help people in the Rebellion. Even in the trailers for the new Ahsoka show, the tagline says "rebel, outcast, JEDI." There's nothing in there about being gray, there's no acknowledgment of Gray Jedi as a thing. Ahsoka is someone who was once a Jedi and will likely end up a Jedi again by the end of her show because that's the journey we've sort-of seen her going on throughout the different things she's been in.

In Rebels, we see Ahsoka actively working with other Jedi (Kanan and Ezra) to continue work that the Jedi Order had started, we see Ahsoka specifically come along on missions that are Jedi specific problems. She says she's not a Jedi, yes, but in her time, being a Jedi meant something very specific, you couldn't just identify as a Jedi if you weren't someone who was adopted into the Order officially. Ahsoka was expelled and then refused to come back, so she's no longer an official member of the Jedi Order and can no longer take on the title of Jedi. And then the Order is destroyed, so all roads for officially rejoining the Order are now closed to her effectively forever. And this leaves her with trying to figure out what being a Jedi means to her in the wake of that destruction, how can she re-identify as a Jedi without an Order to be a part of, does she even have the right to do so when she hadn't been a Jedi when the Order was destroyed? We've seen characters like Kanan and Cal go through similar arcs and both of them became full Jedi by the end of them. There's no real reason Ahsoka won't do the same given that it's the most obvious place for her to go.

Now, none of that means that if you like the fanon concept of Gray Jedi that you can't just headcanon Ahsoka as a Gray Jedi after she leaves the Order. More power to you! But just because it's a headcanon you like doesn't make it canon. Until it's made explicit via dialogue or something similar in high canon, or at the very least said in an interview by one of the creators, it's NOT CANON.

#ahsoka tano #star wars #star wars rebels #jedi #gray jedi critical #grey jedi critical

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agendabymooner · 10 months

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colour me your colour || toto w. (5)

Summary: Tilly Marie nearly loses faith in her passion as she refuses to listen to everyone who told her to quit. Everyone but one. And it’s the man she met years ago at a racing event she didn’t want to attend. Who would have thought that her father’s partial ownership of three brands could take her to the zone of Mercedes and meet the love of her life?

Chapter summary: Breakfast dates can turn into a shitshow if you allowed pressure and stress to get in the way of your sweet conversation. Plus, it turns out that Toto Wolff knows who she was- only telling her about it as he recalls what he saw few years ago.

Content warning: A case of burnout, brief use of explicit language, people trying to cope by flirting (Tilly), Christian Horner, journalists being too much, Tilly trying not to cry by talking to herself.

Note: Thank you all sm for the 75 followers! I'm going try not to flop this time. Enjoy xx

masterlist

v. how to romance and cry in the same day

“…I have attached the document in this email. If you need help let me know…”

I don’t need help. I need to quit.

If anyone can see my face right now, they will run away knowing that they witnessed steam coming out of my ears. Or at least, that’s what Toto can see as I can see a frown on his face. The paper in his hand is long forgotten as he continues to show his concern. I’m still not looking at him, instead I’m staring at my screen hoping that it’ll crack from the anger that I’m feeling.

Who the fuck decided that it’s a good idea to email someone on a well deserved paid vacation for work? When you can simply just have the person in the next room do it?

Clearly, them. I huff out silently. In an office with fifteen writers, they decided that underappreciated workers should do the revising. I wasn’t alone in this.

They insist on having me work on it, obviously as I remember the 5 missed calls from the office. They have enough time to call me, why can’t they have the time to do it themselves?

“…Schatz?”

I jump in response to the sudden call from Toto, my hands accidentally throwing the phone away. I curse beneath my breath before I reach for it, throwing it into my purse.

His eyes are laced with curiosity, “Are you alright?”

I nod, now remembering I have a company. One that I’m supposed to be entertaining instead of taking the piss from Vogue. “I’m alright, how’re you liking the scone?”

“It’s good,” he nods before he sets down the newspaper in his hand. “You have not touched your food yet.”

Right. My hand reaches for the crumpet in my plate, my teeth digging into my breakfast as I chew quietly. My eyes are still staring elsewhere, and clearly it’s beginning to bother Toto because of the constant dissociation.

“You’re not alright,” he deduces, making me nod in agreement. There’s really no point in denying. Throughout the beginning of our breakfast, I already told him about my work. He knows how miserable and pathetic my life is, and what did he do as he listened? He smiled kindly, his brows laced with concern, everything that I had seen from other people. But he listened, and I like him for it.

Not wanting to elaborate anymore, he notices how quiet I am and so he decides to say, “You were enjoying your research paper years ago, but you do not look like someone who’s been happy with your job for a while now. You should leave the company.”

I pause, looking up at him. He does… “You remember me,” I watch him nod in confirmation as I continue, “you know who I am. From Dubai.”

He only shrugs like I just asked him if the sky was blue. How can he sit here and act like it’s a normal Tuesday? Does he even know what kind of effect he had on me? This utter— he knows who I am and he doesn’t even mention it until now!

He doesn’t read my mind, but he explains, “You are an impressive woman. It’s difficult not to forget about you when you speak so passionately about writing and your courses back then.”

“It was a short-lived conversation, was it not?” I ask him, wondering how he’d managed to remember that whole fifteen minutes. Those fifteen minutes of nothing but university work and exchanging questions felt like a long time.

“I admit, it took me the whole day to figure out who you were,” he chuckles, making me smile. “The conversation we had was… memorable to say the least. But it turned foggy the moment I became Team Principal.”

“You don’t need to explain yourself to me,” I laugh quietly, “If anything I feel bad for not asking for your name. Your teammate had done it for you. Torger.”

He nods, recalling what he’s just talking about before I rattled off about Dubai. “But there’s just something missing from you now that you had back then…”

“…what is it?” Is he this observant? Has he stared at people for a while before telling them what he has noticed?

“The smile on your face,” he answers, his voice showing nothing of emotion as he says, “you still have the passion for it but now… the smile isn’t there anymore. At least the one that goes from one ear to another.”

I can’t even speak. Thank goodness he continues on, “Would you consider it a dream if everyone’s making it a nightmare?”

If the silence wasn't deafening before, I can barely imagine being talkative now. He holds my stare, his eyes softening at the sight. I look pathetic, I just know it.

“I… I don’t even know,” I murmur, running my fingers through my hair. “It’s not easy to get away from the company. I’ve been writing for them and if I left then… I’ve no one to use as a reference… or even take my projects. Seeing as it’s under their license and all that.”

“Ah…” Toto replies quietly, nodding at the response. He leans forward, making me look at him as he says, “But between your ambition and health, I think that you should see your health off first. If they are making it hard for you, your goal is harder to reach.”

My view of Toto Wolff just changed here. Me, sitting across from him with the pessimism that my life carried— I can see him in a new light.

I can see myself in a new light. He isn’t wrong. How am I going to do well in my career if my employers are the exact reason why I’m miserable in the first place? How am I going to find inspiration if all I feel is isolated and locked up?

Why do I continue to act like they’d give me a chance? I’ve brought up the discussion of getting a promotion for two years, and my career is a discussion that they continue to put on hold.

No fuck that.

But still… I can’t quit my job, can I? How am I going to be a successful editor if I’m going to leave?

My inner dialogue clearly has an effect on behalf of Toto’s entertainment. His handsome smile, from what I gather is a rarity, appeared right in front of me as I gulped. Toto isn’t wrong. If I want to be better… just find a place who’s more than willing to help me.

I reach for my tea as I ask, “How are you as handsome as you are good at giving out advice?”

His chuckle melts the stress away for a second, his amusement becoming more clear as he continues to stare at me. Is this what they call heart eyes? Yeah I really don’t want to listen to Daniel or Lewis.

“And how are you as beautiful as you are stubborn?” He asks back, making me giggle quietly as I sip on my tea.

“It’s a requirement if you wish to oppose Christian Horner all the time,” I jest, “you can get away from trouble easily.”

“I’ve seen it yesterday,” Toto sighs contentedly before he smirks, “I am more worried about being disarmed by your strong will and beauty instead of the higher up’s rules and regulations. I hope you’re not the one I have to face in case our teams get into an altercation. I do not enjoy losing to Red Bull, of all things.”

—

The restaurant, while it is in a secluded location by the Silverstone Park, was jam-packed by the time we left after finishing our breakfast. We need to head to the venue soon before Christian gets there. Then maybe I can shit on his life about being late. Maybe.

But our arrival at the Silverstone Circuit was more chaotic.

“Shit,” I curse out, grabbing my Red Bull ball cap from my purse and slipping it on. I can’t even see anything besides from the dark abyss that I called my purse, my hand trying to get a feel of my sunglasses. It doesn’t take me a while to find it and put it on, looking at Toto who’s already on his way out of the vehicle with his bag. Unbuckling my seat, I look at the passenger side as Toto swings it open. He gestures for me to come out, and I do so with a murmur of thanks.

By the time I hopped out of the passenger seat of Toto’s Mercedes, I was already welcomed by the clicking of the cameras. Alongside the annoying noise are questions coming from journalists who wish to ask questions about the qualifying today.

Looking around, however, I notice that there are a certain amount of paparazzi that I grew familiar with. I knew them by faces. And knowing them, they didn’t want anything that had to do with the race weekend. I just went on a breakfast with a CEO and we’re already adding fuel to the fire that was the British media. I gesture at Toto to speed up his walk while we pass by the cameras and the questions.

It’s either I gesture and he won’t understand or I drag him. But grabbing him by the arm will only cause an uproar in the gossip world. People are always thirsty for drama. Getting involved with me, a Hearth child (one that hasn't been on a date for a decade AND presumed to be the It Girl by the media), will only cause more stress on Toto’s behalf. I am not about to let him get through that.

But he doesn’t understand what I asked of him non-verbally, instead he turns around to provide quick answers to questions about today and what may happen tomorrow. I wait there impatiently, looking down on the ground as I wish to no longer gather more attention regardless of the amount of photos already taken of me by standing there.

“What’s your relationship with Tilly Hearth?”

“What are your thoughts about her job in Red Bull?”

“Are you two dating?”

“Toto!” The Mercedes’ PR assistant finally comes as she excuses herself, putting herself in between her boss and the cameras as she asks to have them step aside. Certain paparazzo finally looked at my direction, realizing that they haven't asked me anything yet. I gulped, already backing away from the scene.

The PR assistant tells them that Toto will have enough time to answer later on, but by the time that Toto turns back, I’m already speed walking to the Red Bull hospitality.

And it doesn’t end there. Daniel and Sebastian caught me walking from the direction of the dispersing crowd— where Toto was— and decided that this was their chance to tease me.

Now I’m here with my phone in hand, Daniel still poking me at my side as I grumpily look at him. Apparently, seeing workplace romance is a rarity and so he’s taken this as an opportunity to tell me that he wants to see how my slow burn “relationship” with Toto goes. Relationship. Really!

My phone pings as Daniel perks up and asks, “That Toto?”

I glare at him, “Don’t you even, Daniel.”

“Tilly,” I turn around and face Christian. He gestures for me to follow as I wave at Daniel, telling him I’ll be back.

Christian pulls me out of the garage as I cross my arms. Sensing my annoyance, he sighs as he reassures me, “I’m not saying anything—“

“—yet,” I interrupted him.

“But I arrived just about twenty minutes ago and there are journalists asking about you,” I frown at that. Surely he doesn’t mean… “And Toto. They said you two got here together?”

Oh… of course. Yeah, he does mean the one thing that I hoped he wouldn’t bring up.

“Did you see my Bentley parked outside?” I sarcastically reply. It’s too early for my behaviour, I admit, and it even pisses me off because I can’t be nice to him. But instead of allowing him to reply, I add, “It’s not much of a big deal, is it?”

“It is,” he shakes his head. “Some people are assuming you’re either working for Mercedes or that you’re spying on—“

“Oh for god’s sake,” I roll my eyes. “I am not, I promise. Why am I even swearing I’m not doing anything stupid? I don’t think whatever I do outside work is going to be reported to my father or something.” My hands will literally carry 20% of Red Bull. What makes them think I’ll do something stupid like sell my shares to other rivals?

“Yes but be cautious,” he says firmly, “because no matter how you’ve insisted you’re not doing anything, the media can turn it all around.”

“I know,” I roll my eyes again, I think they’ll pop out of their sockets soon enough. “I grew up in front of cameras, Christian. British media, even. Those journalists outside were people that asked a lot of questions whenever I’m out and about.”

“So you understand how ruthless they could get,” Christian nods, sighing as he leans against the surface. “I trust you enough with PR, I don’t even know why I even pulled you out of the garage when you can handle the journalists on your own.”

“Because it’s with Wolff,” I smirk, “you’re worried about me being snatched by him, aren’t you?”

He scoffs, a chuckle escaping his lips as he says, “He’s not exactly subtle on taking interest in you and your skills.”

“Hm,” I nod, looking eyes moving along the people that walked down to their respective garages. “Don’t worry, he’s not going to be able to discuss any Red Bull-Mercedes business with me. Not unless I have been put to work for it.”

“Good,” he nods again, “good. I would hate to be in the way of your… whatever it is.”

Wow, he’s pretty kind. Maybe because he doesn’t want to lose his patience early this morning. Good.

I’m still standing there when I ducked my head, hiding my face away as Toto walks towards their garage with selected people from his staff. Sensing that he’s away, I look up to see Christian’s smug smile. For someone who doesn’t like Toto, he seems to be enjoying whatever’s going on. Maybe he’s getting a laugh out of this predicament because I was so irritated yesterday–seeing me in a flustered state today is a different story.

“Is that it?” I ask him, my nose scrunching up in annoyance.

He nods and then says, “I’ll stop bothering you about him for now. But, I’d also like to know if you’d be interested in joining the Sky Sports hosts sometime today. You’ve done public speaking before, no?”

I look at him funny. Remembering that I just started today, I felt the need to nod. Nobody knew about my masters. Did they? It doesn’t matter.

“If I have to be,” I shrug.

“It’d be a good thing to bring you there,” he tells me, making me want to roll my eyes. Just a few minutes ago, this man was coming after me about Toto. “Daniel and Sebastian would definitely have a field day if you’re the one interviewing them. What do you say?”

“Is it scripted,” I ask, “or do I have to improvise?”

“To avoid problems revolving bias, I’d say scripted. Unless you’ve a question of your own. Be as entertaining as you want. As long as it’s not going to tell people that you favour one team. I think Sky Sports just want you to be there for the post-qualifying interview.” Me? Just me? No one else’s communications liaison?

“What kind of stories do you tell them,” I frown suspiciously. Second day of work and everyone wants me in their team. He is clearly hiding something. He’s been making sure that I’m doing my job exactly how they want it. Wherever I went yesterday, he made sure that I was the one in front of the cameras. Now he’s asking me to interview the drivers post-qualification. He knows something that I don’t.

“You’ve been mentioned a lot for the past few months,” he starts, “during meetings, FIA, to be exact–”

“I have a lot of questions,” I say, my mouth opened due to the surprise. I was never told about FIA, and being the hot topic of their delegations.

“Your father’s an executive,” he reminds me, “and I know that sounds like Red Bull, or Ferrari or even McLaren are under FIA’s list of favoured teams.”

I scoff, “He owns the competitors in question.”

“I know,” he agrees, “but he only has enough power in each team. He cannot ever interfere with how they operate.”

At least he’s smart enough to do that. If he badly wants his legacy to continue, I don’t think corruption is the way to go.

“What about me? Why am I the discussion of your…meetings?” I ask, internally smacking myself for prying. I always claimed that I liked the feeling of suspense. I didn’t care for details except when I could see them with my own eyes. Now, I’m a child during Christmas - except I'm dreading what’s coming.

He gives me a straightforward answer, “Julius wants you to take control of his shares. He’s up for promotion in the FIA but he can’t just carry us and the other two in his arms without being accused of conflict of interest.”

Oh.

That’s interesting.

Not only is he asking me to do his part at these events, but he’s also selling me out to his own company just so he can continue being who he is in the federation. Greedy.

He didn’t get the memo when I said I wanted to pursue fashion and journalism. He continues to put me in these positions– WITHOUT consulting me. For fuck’s sake!

My lips tighten, wondering if I can say no for today. Technically, I can say no. But my people pleaser demon decided for me.

“I’ll be there,” I murmur, my chest feeling heavy as I breathe shakily.

“What where?” He asks, confusion written all over his face.

“Wherever they want me,” I say, already feeling exhausted and defeated, “just—just have someone take us there before anything.”

“You got it,” he nods, reaching out to pat my shoulder before he walks off.

I look down on my phone and read the text from my supervisor.

“I know you have a part time job this weekend but I would really really appreciate it if you send in your piece so we can go through it together this Monday. Thx xx”

I’m going to cry. Then, after that, I’m going to get ready to put on a smile in front of the camera. Charm works for so many people, at least according to my mother. What she didn’t know, though, is that my charm doesn’t do much to my father.

Maybe if I put on my fakest smile, that’ll charm the pants off everyone. I don’t like the thought of working here, but with no choice, I only have to stand in front of the camera and pretend that I’m enjoying it.

Where’s Toto when you want him?

#toto wolff fluff #toto wolff fic #toto wolff imagine #toto wolff x oc #toto wolff #toto wolff fanfiction #toto wolff x y/n #formula one fanfiction #formula one fic #formula one imagine #formula one x oc #formula one smau #f1 imagine #f1 fluff #f1 fic #f1 x you #formula one x reader #formula one x ofc #mercedes amg imagine

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aihoshiino · 3 months

Note

(139 spoilers!)

I know we all feel extremely disgusted by Airi and thus I started to consider her death. Taiki mentioned that it was a murder-suicide and Akane pinpointed that incident right before the twins were conceived... Which means that very close to HKAI got together (before or after), Hikaru was freed from Airi's control.

Putting my tinfoil hat on but I'm guessing the deaths had something to do with Hikaru. Either he did it or orchestrated it to to happen? (By revealing Airi's true colours to her husband.)

The more I think about Taiki the more I feel for him because dude lived his life thinking his legal father was an asshole & chose to bear his mother's name instead but then 15YL script came out. Just wish that Aqua at least had the decency to catch up with him before all this happened because obviously he knew when he agreed to do it.

So, the timeline for Airi's death is a little weird.

In chapter 68, Taiki says he was 'about five' when it happened which is obviously vague enough to leave some wriggle room for him to be a bit older if necessary.

We know Hikaru was eleven or so when Taiki was conceived and that he's a year younger than Ai, who is a third year middle schooler when she and Hikaru meet. This would place Ai at around fourteen years old and Hikaru at around thirteen as of ch139's movie scenes, meaning that Taiki is one or two years old here and we are two years out from Ai's pregnancy.

That gives us a span of anywhere between two to five years before the murder-suicide takes place.

Depending on exactly where the characters' ages all fall on the timeline, this does all seem to line up with the idea that the HKAI relationship and Airi's death happened in very close proximity to each other.

H O W E V E R. . . We have one major wrench thrown into this by chapter 95, where Saitou states that he clearly remembers when this incident happened and that the news broke while he was in a meeting with Ai about B-Komachi's Dome concert.

I'm not super sure how long it takes to fully plan a concert like that but typically, concerts at a venue like Tokyo Dome are announced six to nine months in advance. Being as generous as possible, let's say it takes another three to six months of planning and negotiations before it gets to the announcement stage. This means there was between a year and a year and a halfs' worth of time prior to Ai's death where this meeting would have taken place, which would place the incident as happening when she was around nineteen or eighteen. Either way, if Saitou is correct here, this means the incident happened well after the twins were born.

So what does this all mean? well what it means is that the oshi no ko timeline is absolutely penised and you shouldn't worry about it too hard.

More seriously, it means we can't really directly place when the incident happened just yet because the information surrounding it is all loosey-goosey. I do imagine it'll come up in the movie at some point purely on the basis of Airi's inclusion and the explicit depiction of her abuse of Hikaru but it's hard to say at this point exactly what came first - HKAI romance or Airi's death?

Regardless... I'm gonna get on my soapbox a little and say (and this is absolutely not aimed at you, anon, bc this is clearly a good faith question and I don't want you to feel bad lol) I am honestly not a huge fan of the idea of Hikaru being framed as culpable for Airi's death.

Like... at the end of the day, Hikaru was a teenage boy when this all happened. Uehara was an adult man. Even if I really stretch my suspension of disbelief and let myself believe that Hikaru somehow knew that Uehara was going to murder Airi as a result... sorry, but Uehara is still the one who did the actual murder! Even if Hikaru was the one to finally speak up about his abuse, it was Uehara who took it to the extreme that he did.

I also just don't think it really works, thematically speaking, with what Oshi no Ko has consistently said about the way children are exploited and abused by adults in the entertainment industry and how terrifyingly few safety nets there in place to either prevent it happening or help them recover in the aftermath. Given just how few punches the story is pulling thus far with its depiction and condemnation of the horror of Airi's actions and the sheer terror Hikaru shows when faced with her... it's really hard for me to imagine the story making him culpable for her death in a way we are supposed to condemn.

Not only that, but we don't even know if Hikaru was the one to give that info to Uehara. We have speculation on the topic from characters who are generally reliable but it's not something we can say we know without a shadow of a doubt. Not only that, but...

It's possible I'm reading too much into it, but the framing of this exchange seems to imply that - at least within 15YL's portrayal of events - Uehara may already suspect something is going on with Airi -> Hikaru.

#oshi no ko #oshi no posting #onk spoilers #csa mention #hikaru kamiki

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reveluving · 2 years

Text

peeping tom(s) ; rick flag x reader (ft triple frontier boys)

» warnings: smut (minors DNI!), humour

» a/n: separate post based on this ask ‘cuz I went overboard with it <3 don't forget to leave some sugar ᐠ( ᐛ )ᐟ

» m.list (series under 'rick flag vs the triple frontier boys’)

smut includes; possessive!rick (yes he needs a warning-), unprotected sex (p in v, riding), voyeurism, mention of mirror kink :>

» (funny how it's titled after the same-named character who's dea-)

» AAAANYWAY

» Listen here, lil’ lady.

» He’d enter the house, hoping to be immediately engulfed by your love, only to see you peek your head out of the kitchen with an excited “Rick! I’ll be with you in a minute!”

» So, he’s just standing in the living room, arms initially opened before dropping them like 🕴 Hello? Where’s his love?

» But, he doesn’t question you on it, instead, silently moves to the kitchen entrance, seeing you wipe the stack of plates and that’s when he knew.

» They came over.

» He’d slowly straightened his back, walking back to the sofa before removing his upper garments.

» “Those boys came over?”

» “Mhm! Made fried rice, left you some, too,” As good as that sounded, it wasn't his main focus right now, “How was the mission?”

» “Manageable,” Usually he’d give you more than a one-word answer but he sounded disgruntled, as if today’s work was a little out of his control which led to his pissy mood. So, you stayed quiet right after. Not because you were scared, not at all. You just thought he needed some of his own silent me-time.

» Still, you didn’t hear footsteps going up so he was likely still in the living room, waiting for you.

» Honey.

» The moment you left the kitchen to greet him for real, you were not ready for the sight.

» Like, he's just manspreading on the couch with just his pants and gloves, waiting for you to come out of the kitchen.

» You know… that black garment he wore in the Suicide Squad (2021).

» Yes.

» “Rick…?” Just when you thought that dominant look on his face couldn’t get any sexier, he’d beckon you to come over.

» I’m talking ‘bout him doing the come-hither gesture with both hands.

» YES.

» “Come here,” You didn’t dare to question him, not with that look and tone he had, and obediently walked over to him.

» He softened up just a little, enjoying how timid you seemed just by his change of behaviour. Well, shirtless, too but that was just a plus point.

» “C’mon,” It didn’t help that he had to pat his lap, too. He could clearly see what he was doing to you, considering you were unconsciously rubbing your thighs together. So, when you didn’t sit on his lap, he pulled you in by the wrist — not to the point of hurting you, he could never. But, enough to catch you by surprise.

» “Y’like those boys showerin’ you with attention while I’m gone?” His voice was deeper than usual, sending more than just shivers down your spine, more so when he was looking up at you expectantly.

» “Wha-?” Your hands shot out on either side of his head, nails digging into the sofa's headrest, "Rick, we just had lunch together, that's all. Besides,"

» Resting your forehead against his, you muttered.

» "Your attention is all that matters to me,"

» Even despite those four men and their need for your time, your focus will always be on him. Your faithfulness will always be with him, and he knows the last thing you'd do is break that trust.

» But, as your husband, he needed to do the necessary. Reminding you is one thing, but reminding them is another.

» So, he'd leave you in your nightie but move your panties to the side, hitching your breath at the fluttering touches against your wet lips.

» "Did they get you this wet?" He feigned a tone of surprise, a hint of offence, even, which sent you scrambling to answer.

» "N-no!" You shook your head — did he think you wouldn't be so turned on by the way he looked?

» "I-it's all you…"

» You were so tempted to close your legs, embarrassed that your juices were leaking on his clothed fingers and pants, but he was having none of that.

» He'd lean back against the sofa, spreading his arms on the headrest before looking at you expectantly.

» "Well, go on," He ordered, "Ride my fingers first,"

» Who were you to say no?

» You could tell how much he was enjoying this — torturing you by keeping his hand still on his thighs while you rubbed and writhed against his fingers, chasing for that far-away orgasm.

» The grip he had around your waist was tighter than tight — as if he was daring you to escape. The constant squeezes of your ass. His sinful groans directly in your ear before it was only a matter of time before his patience finally ran thin and had you stuffed with his throbbing cock.

» His leather gloves only elevated the combination of pain and pleasure.

» He wished he could see the way your pretty lil' lips gripping him, taking it all in like the good girl you are, and all for him, too. The image only caused him to buck his hips, taking pride in the way you twitched.

» Babe, you cannot tell me that he won’t have a mirror kink after this. He just has to see his beauty in all her glory.

» "Rick, I-I can't," You mewled while your thighs clenched around his, naively hoping it'll stop him from moving.

» How cute.

» "Hm?" He heard you loud and clear, but seeing you like this? Why wouldn’t he want to tease you?

» "I-I'm," You slapped one hand over your mouth — you were getting too loud, too bashful by the idea of your neighbours, especially the Delta boys, hearing you like this.

» Oh, but that was the whole idea.

» "Let all those shrieks out. Let your boys know I'm back," He snarled, surprising you when he pulled your hand away to have you moan louder.

» "Now," He slowed his pace, "You either use the safe word," He began softly, reminding you that you had absolute control if he was doing too much.

» But, the second he knew you didn’t want it to end, however, he growled in the next, "Or fuck this cock like you mean it,"

» Now, you're probably wondering; did they hear you?

» Simple; yes.

» Voyeuristic lil' bi-

» Didn't matter if they heard you shriek in such a sensual way or 'coincidentally' peeked at your little 'activity' through the window.

» Their. Eyes. Are. Open.

» 👁👄👁 -horny in silence-

» From what I can imagine, ranking from most to least embarrassed about seeing you together do the deed would be; Frankie, Santi, Benny, and Will.

» So, Frankie!

» wbk

» He's not embarrassed by the fact that you're having sex or just sex in general, he's just appalled at himself because he didn't look away the second he realized what y'all were up to.

» He did, eventually, but he knew he'll be thinking about it for a while.

» And he's supposed to be the sensible one, too, damn it.

» Theeen, Santi.

» I'm not saying he'll be embarrassed embarrassed but to think he'd see the day where you're in your most vulnerable — your most debauched. He's always complimenting you, partially to irk Rick too but damn.

» Again.

» It won't leave his mind anytime soon.

» I can see him pointing a middle finger at himself in the bathroom mirror like a random scene you'd see in Moon Knight.

» Surprisingly, next is Benny!

» Hear me out; I believe that between the Miller brothers, it's a tie. But, Benny comes in first; he may or may not have thought about finding you in a compromising position but for it to actually happen, and the fact that he's turned on by it too?

» That man is out of there.

» Imagine him rushing out of the house, yelling to the boys that he's off for some last-minute training when in reality, he doesn't want to think about your dripping cunt in the same house as the boys.

» He thinks they'll read his mind idk mf and his logic

» Last but not least, Will.

» Like I said, a tie with his brother BUT! Rather than rubbing one out elsewhere, he finds nothing wrong with doing it at home.

» Is he aware of what he's doing? Yeah.

» Of course, he'll do it in private, but he's not stupid (not to say the others are though. They are just as aware!). He knew his brother wasn't rushing off because he was needed in the boxing ring.

» The same way he knew Frankie and Santi didn't just lock their doors because they're stuffed from the lunch you made.

» Soo, yeah. Possessive Rick + Delta boys and their horn-knee thoughts...

» and I'm over here sweatin'.

» Muuuch to think about.

˚ · . f i n . · ˚

» taglist: @perseone @aria725 @all-the-things-i-done @torchbearerkyle ♡

» gorgeous rose divider by the amazing @firefly-graphics

» not surprising that my favourite ask of the series thus far is a smut HAHA but I do hope y'all enjoy just as muchhh

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chvoswxtch · 1 year

Note

congrats on ur milestone!!! u deserve all the love and followers!!

can we get a margarita with matt something super angsty that turns out could be solved by talking or maybe some jealousy from him? up to u if it has a happy ending lol

nonnie,

i'm going to apologize in advance if this isn't the drink you ordered (& you're welcome to send it back and order another) but I saw 'angst' & 'matty' & 'up to you if it has a happy ending' & i'm rewatching season 3 of daredevil and I was clearly in a fucking mood (mario's in that damn gatorade again) so...

between emo matty & listening to sorry by halsey (which is the song that came to mind while writing this and is also v matty coded) this is what my gremlin brain came up with. 🤷🏻‍♀️

blurb below the cut

sorry

don’t realize how mean i can be

“No one has ever spoken to me like that. Not a stranger, not someone who doesn’t even like me, and certainly not someone that claims to love me.”

He wished that he could say he had never spoken that way to anyone, but that certainly wasn’t the truth. Ironically enough, he never thought of himself as an explosive person, but maybe it’s inevitable when you mix alcohol with a temper-fueled fire already blazing with ferocious anger and resentment. You hadn’t started the fire within him. You were just one of the many pieces of the bridge he was hellbent on destroying that night. Managing to make three different people hate you and erase you from their memory in one night had to be a personal record for Matt. He knew you wanted an explanation, but he didn’t have one.

Was it even salvageable? All Matt could see was ash, nothing really left to restore. He wondered, what was the point? He couldn’t take back the words that he said. And maybe you could forgive, but you wouldn’t forget. He made sure of that. Perhaps you two could start over, put on a brave face for one another, pretend that the past wasn’t hanging around your heads like an ominous storm cloud threatening to pour at any moment. Maybe that would work. But it would be as effective as putting a bandaid over a bullet hole. Sooner or later, there would be nothing but blood.

Why did he do it? How did it come to this? When did you become these people? Maybe Matt lashed out because he felt you slowly slipping away. The sun once rose and set with you. There wasn’t a moment you weren’t speaking, talking about your days, baring your souls to one another once the early hours of the night crept into the sky. But then Midland Circle happened. The he happened, and somewhere along the line, the messages came fewer and far more in between. You had both changed. You were out living a life he didn’t seem to play a leading role in anymore while he was still putting back the pieces together of his, and he was torn between feeling indignant and remorseful. But the blaze of anger didn’t even start because of you. It was someone else that lit the match.

But you were the one out of them all that stayed.

Maybe Matt resented the person you thought he was, because he knew he could never be that person. You had this vision of him in your mind; gilded and polished. A man that was intelligent and kind, charming and passionate, maybe fucked up from time to time but always with the best of intentions. He wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe he was the man you saw. Not the moody asshole that destroyed everything he had built, except the barbed wire fence he encompassed himself in to avoid letting anyone too close. He wanted to be good, and he wanted to be worthy of your compassion and faith. But maybe he knew the truth all along, that he never would be.

So what do you do when you wanna bury all the evidence? To avoid being caught as a fraud and imposter who never should have come into the picture in the first place? Burn it all to the ground. Pour gasoline over everything you love, strike a match, and set a fire that burns so bright even God himself can’t fucking look away. And you do it with all of them until there’s nothing left. And if you wanna do one damn thing right, you set them free. You set her free. You take whatever’s left and your last match and you do the right fucking thing.

So that’s what he did.

He took whatever was left of that fucking bottle and poured it over himself instead of down his throat, taking his place among the embers and waiting for the flames to destroy everything that he had become until there was nothing left.

Maybe Stick had been right all along.

“I don’t know what else to say except, I’m sorry.”

You said that you needed time and space. He nodded, mumbling something that resembled an understanding, but he knew that you were gone, and you were never coming back. It was all gone. There was no second chance, no miracle, no do overs. It was done, and it was his fault. You were the flame that lit up his darkest moments, and he had put you out. You weren't perfect, but you were one of the best people that Matt knew.

He always told you that you deserved more than the way people treated you that had claimed to care, yet he had been worse than all of them combined. Matt felt foolish for all of the times he had sank to his knees in desperation, begging God for someone, anyone. He begged for a sign, that his life wouldn’t always be plagued by trauma and pain. Maybe you were it, and he took it all for granted.

You said you would call when you were ready to talk, so Matt waited by the phone.

And he waited. And waited. And waited.

#matt murdock #matt murdock x you #matt murdock x y/n #matt murdock x reader #matt murdock x female reader #matt murdock x fem!reader #matt murdock x f!reader #matt murdock blurb #matt murdock request #daredevil #daredevil blurb #daredevil request #court's 2k follower celebration #court's 2k friends celebration

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tanadrin · 3 months

Note

...what exactly is the correct, good faith description of how common law constitutional systems work, then? i had conservative parents where extremely literal interpretation of the constitution was always assumed - never really got any perspective on living constitutionalism than that it was always just vague hogwash to justify doing whatever the speaker's exact policy preferences are. i understand that originalism/textualism as used are exactly the same, sure, but that's why i thought the only recourse was to dispense with constitutionalism and even the idea of "rights" altogether and go with a hobbes/schmitt (yes i know he's a nazi) bent. this isolates me from most other politics people on the internet a great deal, obviously! but if there's actually a case for living constitutionalism that doesn't reduce to "everything i want is always mandatory, everything my opponents want is always illegal" that can convince me that'd be great!

Originalism and textualism are not the same thing.

Originalism is the legal philosophy that the meaning of a law is based on the intent of the drafters of the law. In the U.S., this is actually not so hard a problem, because the Constitution was drafted in the 1780s, there was a big ratification debate which involved a lot of the people who participated in the drafting, and they made their own understanding of the text quite clear. Subsequent amendments were drafted even later, and like laws drafted by Congress, there are records of congressional debates and the like in which lawmakers lay out their stances very clearly.

Now, the problem with originalism as a legal philosophy is that you have to actually be good at historical research to apply it correctly. And if you are any good at historical research, and do not arbitrarily cherry-pick citations, you will unfortunately find that a lot of the dogmas of the conservative legal movement are actually not in evidence in the historical debates around the Constitution, its amendments, and significant U.S. statute laws. For this reason, among others, later conservative legal scholars have tried to make textualism a thing.

Textualism is the legal philosophy that the meaning of a law is based on the commonly understood meaning of the law at the time it was adopted. This is a weird approach! Like, I don't know much about (say) customs law, which is a complicated subject; if I tried to apply a customs law adopted in 2024 I would very probably fuck it up at some point. Even a highly trained criminal attorney or intellectual property lawyer might easily do so--the legal profession is big, and requires a lot of specialization! So why do non-expert opinions matter? And if expert opinions are what we are after, who is a better authority than the people who actually drafted a law?

Nonetheless, textualism is a highly motivated approach at avoiding the limits of originalism, and the key to applying textualism is to do your historical research even worse than if you were trying to do originalism. For example, D.C. v Heller (2008) found that the 2nd amendment protected an individual right to bear arms; but this is a terrible decision from both an originalist point of view and a textualist point of view, because we have lots of gun control legislation from much closer to the time the 2nd amendment was adopted in 1791 that would violate the 2nd amendment as interpreted in 2008; it is clear that the 2nd amendment was certainly not commonly understood at the time of its adoption to protect an individual right to bear arms, but was more about protecting the rights of states to raise and arm militias--which also happens to be consonant with a lot of the other historical evidence we have around why the 2nd amendment was adopted, and what the purpose of the Bill of Rights was, vis a vis the restraint of federal power against the states (cf. the Federalist Papers).

A big problem for any attempt at a purely deterministic, mechanistic application of law is that law is not a magical or mathematical formula with a single unambiguous meaning, because we create law through language, and that's not how human language works. Human language is not infinitely flexible, but it is equally not perfectly precise; it frequently admits ambiguity. And how we understand texts, and the values that are key to interpreting those texts, evolve over time: the U.S. Constitution clearly forbids "cruel and unusual punishment," but what is considered "cruel and unusual" in 2024 is very different from what was "cruel and unusual" in 1791. Should the literal meaning of 1791 prevail--in which case the law can only possibly regulate things which actually existed in 1791, and it's perfectly OK for the Feds to ransack your email without a warrant because it's not within your 'houses, papers, and effects'--or should the general principle which is shared between 1791 and 2024 prevail--in which case it's not insane to read the prohibition on "cruel and unusual punishment" as a prohibition on the death penalty if we come to understand the death penalty as cruel or unusual?

All texts require us to negotiate their meaning. This does not mean communication is impossible, or that a text can say anything you want it to mean. What it means is that ambiguity in communication is unavoidable. Law is an effective tool because it is a Schelling point for cooperation, which is what lets us build peaceful and ordered societies, and allows us to do politics without killing each other. Textualism and originalism not only deny the very inarguable fact of ambiguity in language, I think they work pretty hard against law being an actually useful Schelling point, and attempt to turn it into a brute exercise of power. Which is not good if you want a society to actually function!

Outside of originalism and textualism there are lots of different views on legal philosophy and they are complicated. Legal realism and legal positivism are two historically popular schools of thought. The general question of legal philosophy is called "jurisprudence," which is both thinking about what the law is and what it should be; there are literally whole textbooks on the subject. Law is complicated! There is a reason you can get advanced degrees in this stuff!

#i am not myself a lawyer #just an interested amateur #so anybody who has taken an actual jurisprudence class #feel free to weigh in

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analiticalanonymous · 1 year

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Nightmare!Sans X Reader

So, years ago I made this fanfic on Wattpad, and I was super proud of it at the time. I still acknowledge the sheer magnitude of accomplishments and trials I went through to complete this piece. However, it was originally smut, and I was a bit on the younger side when I wrote it originally. To my younger audience who may stumble upon this, that does not make it okay to do the same. I was at risk and introduced to some bad people who were NOT good.

Now then, I want to redo it and get rid of the smut and simply keep it as a angst-to-fluff fix. I saw alot of comments talking about how they cried and were getting emotionally invested when the smut just kinda popped up. And I recognize they were not wrong in the slightest! So I'm going to fix up the grammar and such and update this bad boy! If you log on to Wattpad and saw the original? No you didn't.

⛔⚠️!!Trigger Warning!!⚠️⛔

Mild gore, Abuse, angst, verbal abuse, reader stands up to the abuse, violence, starvation(nightmare and minorly reader), implied suicidal thoughts, depressive episodes, everything gets resolved, flashbacks, nightmares, trauma, neglect, fear, redemption

This is fiction and should NOT be acceptable in real life, if you see or are in a relationship like this then please seek help as this is not acceptable behavior to have. This is fiction and meant for enjoyment, it is written to have a happy ending unlike real life where your decisions determine how happy your ending is. Read with caution.

A long time ago you chose your side in the war of light and dark. To fight alongside either The Stars or The Evil.

And to everyone's surprise, you chose the path of shade..

You were the first ever member to join. In fact. You were there before Nightmare ate that wretched apple. That apple..That damned apple-

Ruined e v e r y t h i n g.

It haunts every thought and plauges every memory you've tried to forget and collect through the years. It slipped it's way into the life of the one you cared most about through deceit and vows of protection. The one you should have listened closer to. The one that needed you since the beginning..

Your heart ache on that day...it was so long ago but the gorey wounds of your torn heart gained that one faithful day still bleeds in heavy streams of guilt-ridden sorrow. You remember the chest crushing anxiety and the adrenaline that tried to pacify. That pulsed in your ears with your tears being the only window to your inner turmoil...

"I-I'll prove to you that my apples are J-JUST AS GOOD AS YOURS! I'LL SHOW ALL OF YOU!" Night declared into the field with a quivering voice. His shrunken eyelights vibrate and blur in his self-destructive state as he curls away from the growing crowd. He resembles a cornered animal simply trying to prove it's capable of surviving.

He looks down at his trembling hands as he noticeably hesitates before a look of persuaded finality stole his true-face away. He opened his jaw and bit into the black gleaming apple, adorned with specks of white in resemblance to the very faint stars beginning to appear above. Its appearance reminding you clearly of it's gaurdians name.

"NIGHT NO!-" You and Dream screamed simultaneously as you both frantically tried to run towards him and reach out for the sinful fruit. Your frantic mind was scattered with a primal fear of what was to come if he followed through and swallowed, the whisper of voices in your mind promising nothing good would come from it, that you needed to take it away before it was too late.

But the damage was done far quicker than anyone could have predicted.

You see, no one knew what would happen if you were to eat an apple from the tree. No matter the species. At least....not at the time.

His ear piercing shrieks strike through the air and were echoed all throughout the valley as lavender tears streamed down his cheekbones in pain. It made you stumble, your eyes widening in brief surprise that seared into unfamiliar terror as you slowly went from a sprint to a weak jog before you halted completely.

He collapsed to the ground clinging onto his head and screaming in a way that made your throat tighten up and your skin crawl. He shakily dragged his hands down from his skull to his throat, hacking and gasping until he began to claw at his very bones sobbing out-

"I-I CAN'T B-BREATHE!!"

His sockets and shaking pupils flaunted his fear and inhanced that gut wrenching sentence into something worse. The crowd surrounding the meadow gasped and murmured to one another in judgemental hushes. They did nothing but watch.

You wanted to scream at them. You wanted to scream at yourself. You wanted to scream at Dream who stood just as paralyzed as you. Scream at anyone- just- S O M E O N E to bloody do something! To help your dear, sweet, Night-

But you can't...your body is frozen, paralyzed by something ancient and primal. You are only a spectator to the horror before you. No amount of willpower could make you budge..

Black liquid began to gush out of his sockets as he choked audibly on some that poured out of his mouth. His normal glowing lavender pupils looked up to yours and shook in horror before they were split in half at the hands of the black substance in his right socket. A ear-peircing scream of agony dies in his throat from the black darkness that drowns him on dry land. It looked to have a mind of its own as it had taken the shape of tentacles and immediately started to latch onto his skull, seemingly pulling itself out of his eyesocket to further spread amongst his body, like a disease amongst a crowd.

Your soul shattered seeing the monster you have come to love crumple to nothing. Your mind roared at you in frustrated anguish to just- MOVE. MOVE, SCREAM, COMFORT. FUCK- DO SOMETHING YOU USELESS SACK OF- your body suddenly regains it's control and has you stumbling forward on weak legs. This sudden action fulls you with hope. It's at this very moment that your body gives a final flush of determination, flooding from your soul and into your veins, your body finally deciding to listen to your pleads for action. Your feet carried you across the field all the while fighting against your stiffened muscles to race to be next to him and help him in his time of need.

As you wish you had so long ago.

Your attempt was taken from you as you were shoved out of the way by a blunt force. Just before you could reach him. Shooting a frustrated look to your side you try to find what stopped you only to find that it was Dream who tackled you. "LET ME GO-" You were about to demand from him until you looked back over to Night, pausing your squirms of protest as your body slackens at the sight. You see in your previous spot a black appendage stemming from Night jabbed into the ground. It looked as solid and sharp as the finest blade from the greatest blacksmith.

What made you shudder in fear however was that... it...it was lodged right where your heart would have been...

It would have killed you and that was the intent.

"Night please! I beg of you! Fight it- please! You're so much stronger than that stupid apple!" You overlook the mortifying failed attempt on your life and focused on what mattered most to you at the moment. You needed him to ground himself, so you beckon him with anguish and frustration in your eyes, just trying to encourage him. Your hand reaching out to him once again to try and grab his clenched fists, tears pouring out of your eyes as your brows were furrowed with a pleading gaze, you try to latch onto the hope of his life secure with you.

Dream yet again takes your chance and rolled to the side with you wrapped in his arms as another tentacle like appendage struck with the intent to shatter your souls. But the physical damage was pale in comparison to the powerless feeling drowning out all sense of life preservation skills you were facing. You were now stuck and trapped to listen to Night's cries for help and pleas for it all to stop when all you could do was nothing. You struggled once again against Dream's powerful grip.

"I-I'M COMING NIGHT! JUST HANG ON, HUN!" You sobbed out as you fought against Dream's grip with whatever strength you could gather. It did nothing but tighten his hold... "D-Dream please! I need to t-talk to him! I can reach him! I KNOW I can! Let me stop this!" You pleaded frantically with your voice quivering as you tried to get out of his grasp for what you hope to be the last time.

His jaw opened to speak but his words die on his tounge when the spine chilling screams come to a abrupt end with a final weak gurgle resonating in the tense air. An eery hush swept the field leaving you and Dream to freeze.

The uncanny silence engulfs the once beautifully lit meadow, the orange sun rays of the setting sun that usually held such warmth and comfort, now only casted a feeling of unsettled dread with the an ambience that worsened the ache in all the souls present.

Nothing...there was no sound aside from the howls of the strong winds that gently glided through the rustling trees. All that was left for anyone to hear was their own racing hearts and souls thumping in their ears. The silence was deafening. Not even the crickets were chirping their nightly songs. Locusts cut off their mating calls so abruptly you wondered if they had all died simultaneously. Not even the village people were whispering to one another- which was all that they seemed to do when it came to, Night.

Both you and Dream slowly turned your widened eyes to look at Night with the same cautionary snail's pace that made you break your intense eye contact. You see now that he was completely consumed by the black substance.

He was disturbingly quiet and still. Almost frozen in the position he was formally cradled into. "heh..." you both flinch at the low sound and looked to him more closely, getting a terribly sickening feeling sinking in your gut. "N-Night..?" You asked shakily gradually becoming more and more creeped out.

"hehe..."

....

"hehehe.."

....

"-hahAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!" His shoulders jostled with the sinister and deep rolling laughter. His head shot up to look at you both with an intensity that made you tremble.

Only one cyan pupil remained and burned with such reverence you saw its outline when you looked away. But his other pupil, that was ripped apart by the parasitic acting tentacles, was covered by the black tar-like substance that had destroyed his very body. Tears that were once in his eye sockets had stopped and instead began to dry up.

Not yours.

Yours were flowing freely now horrified by the monster you and Dream created, from senseless negligence and ignorance, the consequences of your failure was in front of you... it was all your fault... you never paid as much mind as you should have...

Tentacles shot out from his back, jolting him forward from the sheer force of the tentacles abrupt and forceful escape. This made him grin eerily wide after seeing he now had complete control of them.

"WELL?! DO YOU BELIEVE I'M GOOD ENOUGH YET!?" He stood up, wobbling slightly from his body still recovering from the torture it had just endured. His even deeper baritone voice booms with a new creepy twist behind it. His arms were stretched out wide openly embracing this new form with a wicked smile. Dream teleported both of you away gaining a vast distance from him.

"N-Night-" You tried to speak but were cut off yet again-

"NIGHT WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!?!" Dream shouted just as loud as Night which startled you along with his strong grip slipping around your waist that tightened as he protectively held you to his ribs. "DON'T CALL ME THAT. NIGHT WAS A WEAK; PATHETIC PUSHOVER. I am so much more than that now...I..am your, Nightmare." He barked angerly with a narrowed socket. He looked down at his pitch black phalanges now sharp with claws, curling them into his palm and flexing them as if getting used to their lethality.

Night-or well... Nightmares' eye drifted up from his hands and back up to, Dream. His gaze dragged down to meet your fearful and teary (E/C) eyes. You shook like a child in winter without the warmth of their heart, now frozen under his harsh gaze. He smirked at you with something akin to sick delight. His eye lingered as he looked down a bit, scanning you. His smirk was prominently wide until his gaze halted at Dream and his uncomfortably tight embrace around you.

He growled. His eye now narrowing and glowing brightly with a snarl tugging onto his skull in disgust at the sight he just observed. He shot a tentacle your way quickly. Dream was going to block it but you reacted quicker and shoved him out of the way while shutting your eyes tightly, awaiting the overwhelming pain and burn to tear through your chest; it never did.

You opened your eyes slowly to see the sharp appendage just mere centimeters away from your heart. You looked up to see Night was frozen with a widened socket. He withdrew his tentacle quickly, stepping back with countless emotions flashing on his skull, seemingly frozen in shock. He seemed startled by your action. Or perhaps his own. Either way he wasn't expecting your involvement.

"Y/N! Come here!" Dream hollered and scrambled to his feet reaching out his hand for you to grab. That apparently snapped Nightmare out of his dark subspace as he grimaces and regained his intimidating stature.

"YOU GET EVERYTHING YOU WANT DREAM." Nightmare bellowed with a stentorian voice that booms across the vast open field and echos through the mountains around your village back into your very core where it reverberated, the outburt startling both you and Dream into looking at him. His voice left your nerves feeling shot from the magnitude of primal fear coursing though you, but that ontop of the fact that you're not used to his voice being raised, made you flinch and jump.

"Why don't you let HER decide who to go to instead of you just stealing her away like you usually do." He hissed now looking at you directly.

Your eyes widened at his voice for you. You looked up at Nightmare, mind replaying what you just witnessed him go through, your heart shattered at the freshly engraved memory of his petrified face he adopted whenever he took the bite of the apple and how miserable and angry he looked at you now. His normally beautiful lavender eyes were now buried in goop or masked in a neon teal glow. You looked back at Dream for his response. Would he let you even step a foot away from him? He's stopped you so much you fear he would just snatch you away again.

...

"Fine..." He finally agreed.

"Y/N. Choose. Me or Nightmare?" He asked you sternly as his eyes never left Nightmare's singular eye.

Dream had his arm still outstretched almost as if he was expecting the outcome of your choice. You looked back at Nightmare to see he was watching not Dream but YOU. He had an almost empty look in his eye but with the tiniest bit of patience and calmness that seemed to pacify him enough for your response.

You shivered and blinked but whenever you opened your eyes again you saw him. You saw Night... your lovely Night..you didn't even get to tell him how you felt..maybe...maybe now you could...maybe he could still hear you through all this...Maybe it would bring him back...

Maybe he was still the same Night you fell in love with.

You walked towards Nightmare slowly and cautiously, your embroidered white tunic flowing to the wind along with your free and unbounded hair. The petals from the (Favored flower) and lavender in your flower crown drifted with the breeze and into the paralyzed crowd.

Both Dream and Nightmare seemed surprised when you were now in front of him cupping his cheekbone. Tears of heartbreak streamed down your cheeks as you tried to summon a small smile and offer a comforting expression to him but it was stained with solemn remorse. "I've always chosen you Night.... that has and will never change.." You whispered and rested your forehead against his ribs not minding his newly gained sheen of liquid dripping down to the tip of your nose as you allow your tears to fall alongside the inky droplets to the swaying blades of golden lit meadow grass.

An arm that you identify as his wraps itself around your waist pulling you closer to him. "Well, Dream. It appears that she has FINALLY gotten to decide for herself!" He yelled back to Dream victoriously with a overbearingly smug smile in his voice.

"W-What...Y/N...why? Why'd you go to him?!" Dream asked in disbelief and frustration.

Nightmares' chest rumbled with a chuckle he had that quickly escalated into violent vibrations against your body as he roared out into a fit of laughter. "It appears you just LOST for once! And I didn't even DO anything to influence her! Amazing what someone with free will can decide! HAHAHAHA!" Nightmare jabbed at Dream soaking in his victory of your decision. He calmed down soon after as the air around you became remarkably cold.

"Get used to failure Dream," his grin disappears "because you're gonna be losing a lot more now."

He warned in a voice deepened into something you would connect to the terrors in horror stories. It was full of rage and carried an almost demonic presence to it.

You felt as if you were floating for a second before gravity weighed itself on you once again, nausea was out of the question by now since you were used to the brothers teleporting you everywhere in the village.

He let you go, free to do anything once again. But your emotions took a toll on your body and you crippled to the ground. It was almost as if the gravity of the situation hadn't settled in until now. It knew your sins and deemed you in need of further punishment.

He was your only support you had before that overwhelming sense of reality hit and came crashing down upon your frail body. Looking down and avoiding his eye, you had never stopped weeping, for you knew that the love of your life was nothing but a monster in his place.

"What? Already regret your decision?" He snarled down at you with a grin that bore no semblance of comfort or positivity but bitter hostility. He pushed passed your wilted form with an anger that radiated from him.

You flinch at his tone and harsh action yet looked up to him now equally as far gone as your dearest Night was. After all.. seeing your everything, your life, your love go through so much and disappear behind a beast of what once was...it was traumatic...

"I... I'm so sorry...I made you so miserable all these years without even knowing or acknowledging the signs... I should have been a better friend, I should have told Dream no, I should have comforted you..I...I should have been there..I'm sorry that I failed you.." You sniffled. His eye widened at first and he looked almost pained and panicked in your apology.

He quickly neutralizes his emotions and growls something deeply primal and lined with annoyance. "Quit your pity party and stand up. We have work to do, Y/N." He replied coldly. You felt the command pull at your limbs having you immediately attempt in fear of what would happen if you didn't offer complete obedience to this new momster before you.

Your legs gave out on you halfway, shaky beneath your weight. Nightmare rolled his dimly lit eye and glared down at you as he picked you up with a tentacle of his easily. He carried you for around 15 minutes to a large vacant meadow. It was filled with only the most beautiful flowers and meadow grass you had ever seen, even compared to your original universe.

It was beautiful...why would he take you both here..? You looked at the flowers and back to Nightmare as nostalgia overtook your vision with a memory. You remember how you had made him a lavender flower crown everytime he was sad to cheer him up, but this time seemed the worst so far so you made one with some of your personal favorites to brighten him up. He loved your flowers as well as his own, often claiming how perfectly the compliment eachother. This time he claimed his spell of sorrow was rooted to Dream taking one of his friends before he could spend time with them.

You didn't understand back then who he was talking about. Night avoided people sometimes and was quite shy, so finding friends was not his natural forte. If he had another friend then he would have told you with excitement as well since it was such a rare occurrence. But your curiosity and confusion didn't matter, he looked downright dreadful and somber. You needed to make him feel better and you successfully managed that as well as snagging a smile from him when you offered him reassurances.

'It's okay Nighty! I'll be your bestest friend! And I'll never leave your side for that stinky dreamy!'

You scrunched your nose as if smelling something awful. He bursted into a fit of giggles at your display and flushed a faint lavender. Your chest blossomed into warmth and you set the large crown over his skull. It sunk over his head and slipped around his neck. He straightened up and looked at you owlishly. You both bursted into loud spurts of laughter, the joyous sounds being the only thing echoing in your mind as the memory fades away.

That was so long ago...and things are different now..

So..so..different.

You're ripped from your nostalgic trip when a tentacle shoots passed your head, swiftly moving your hair with the speed in which it moved, and struck the ground with a loud thud.

The surrounding wildlife began to die and wilt, draining of color and life. It was now hideous and dull...

The ground shook and rumbled beneath you both, the unearthly quakes jostles your frame before he teleported into the sky easily remaining in place. He was a moment shy of a large mass of black stone that broke through the ground beneath where you were. And after a few painstakingly slow minutes the shifting of stone settled. The black heaps of rock had constucted itself into a massive castle.

He admired the structure for a moment before he decidedly teleported back to the ground once again. He paused and looked down at himself with stiff dissaproval. His hands raised to hover under his jaw before he slid his hands down his collarbone and ribs, the sludge that drowned his form creating a rippling effect around his hands as his outfit he had worn previously that day had changed his normal attire into a black hoodie that was made of the same substance as him along with loose fitted shorts and sneakers which the likes of which you had never seen. "Much better!~" He said with a smirk that held an emptiness you feel in your chest. It felt sinister..

He stepped through the door laughing dryly at something you can't peice together. This new Night scares you far beyond what your body and mind could comprehend...

You shot up in bed sweating and gasping for air with tears streaming your cheeks. You clawed at your chest right over your heart and soul, it thumped quickly against your clamy fingertips confirming your bodies responsive distress to your dream. Reinging in your erradic breaths and emotions proves to be an incredibly difficult feat.

Closing your eyes you felt as if your head was filled with lead, so you allowed the weight to overtake your heavy burdened skull down until your head hung low in your hands for a minute of reprieve. After a minute or so of drooping under the weight of gravity, you lifted your head in your hands and run them over your face as you continue all the way until you slick back your hair, holding the strands in place against your scalp. You throw your head back to be parallel to the ceiling while manually trying to regulate your breathing.

Calm down...just count back from five..

5.....

deep breath.....

4....

exhale....

3...

inhale...

2..

exhale..

1....

inhale...

You hold your breath until your lungs ached before you released the shaky breath. The light-headed feeling grounded you and calmed your pounding heart. Everything is fine...what happened in the past was simply that. The past...

Leaning against the bed post weakly you swallowed the lump in your throat. Your brows twitch at your efforts to keep a neutral face. It was the past...you've accepted that already...everyone you care about now is okay...they are safe...a smile ghosts your lips at the self-soothing thoughts.

Everything is going to be okay...

A shriek of fear peirces through the once peaceful silence of your room. You slowly open your eyes and simply stare off in the distance with a frown...there went that pleasant feeling you built up to.

You sighed tiredly. Every bone in your body beckoned you back to your bed for more rest...but your mind knew better. It took some serious pep-talking to get up and leave your room. You couldn't care enough to change so you decidedly stayed in your pajama shorts and tanktop that you slept in and headed to the sound of deep rasp laughter. Two distinguishable sets of laughter could be percieved between the screams of terror that you're ears subconciously became accustomed to.

Once you finally discerned where the ruckus was you ended up being brought into the kitchen right down the hall from all of the stationary rooms. You looked directly up where you heard the frantic screams you had been ever so kindly interrupted by earlier, only to spot the culprit. Error was up on the ceiling held up by his own strings and claws. Your gaze lowers to the cause of this reaction finding the instigator to be, Swapfell. Strange..he typically turned his nose up at the mere suggestion to rough housing or pranks. He found it 'too below him' as he put it. Yet here he was, carrying a large bone to knock Error down with.

"I HAVE TOLD YOU TIME AND TIME AGAIN YOU INSUFFERABLE PIECE OF SHIT TO LEAVE MY DAMN FOOD ALONE." Swapfell hollers in his signature outside voice up to Error with a snarl etched onto his scarred face.

You sigh in irritation and walk over to the obnoxiously loud skeletons who just couldn't seem to withhold a fraction of their amusement at the scene taking place.

"Where is he?" You question in a monotonous voice. Keep your tone level and you get to keep your levels, as Nightmare taught you.

"still in his room." Dust dismissed, automatically knowing who you were referencing to, as he barely acknowledged you through his sheer delight at Error's misfortune. Your eyes widened noticeably large. You're exhaustion extinguishing as you're vision is overcome with flashbacks of the gorey tragedy that took place a year ago...no...you can't have them disturb him. Not unless you want another incident...

You stormed over to Swapfell. You were originally going to step in anyways and take your time with the situation but this became urgent. You tried to politely get him to lay off but he refused and pushed you away, cussing you out before resuming his attack.

Your patience has just about run dry at this point so you snatch him by the scarf yanking him off his feet and onto his coccyx, him hissing out profanities and trying to claw at your arm as you dragged him to his seat. You picked him up and threw him into his seat with a glare of finality pinning him down.

Snapping your fingers you point to the seats at the table and shifted your withering glare to the others in a silent command that dared them to defy you right now. They seated themselves soon after at the table with nothing more than some annoyed grumbling. You turn your head to look at Error giving him a nod of approval for him to come down. He knows he's under your protection. He sighed relieved and slowly lowered down to the ground using his strings.

They must have really fucked with him if they got him screaming. His initial response to his phobia being used against him is rage, but it appears some boundries were crossed beyond usual today. Another time for this issue to be addressed. For now you need to make them shut up and aware of how close they got to recieving a hole-punch in their ticket of life.

"what's the big deal N/N? we're just havin' fun!" Fell exclaimed noisily in annoyance. Far too loud in this case...you leaned back to peer into the hallway and took a peek at Nightmare's door at the very end of the hall. Still closed and he's nowhere in sight. Good...he's still asleep...though you wonder how he could with all the comotion this morning.

You turn back to acknowledge all of them. "Oh really? And who's missing from all of this 'Fun' you were having, hm?" You questioned in an overtly exasperated manner and sarcastic mirth taking over your neutral expression.

"um...you...and killer?" Horror slowly questions in uncertainty, completely overlooking your sarcasm and ever so obvious intention of a rhetorical question.

You pinched the bridge of your nose and squeezed your eyes shut at the incoming migraine. You rested your weight onto your dominant leg and rested your other hand into the crease of your elbow. It's gonna be a long day...

"Yes, Sweety..we were missing from the table you are correct on that....but you still forgot someone...how about The King of Negativity and Darkness himself. Hm? Let's add him to the list. And guess what he's TRYING to do right now?" You look to the others for them to come to the realization. Horror was about to speak up but you cut him off before he could start.

"Don't-" you begin sternly before catching yourself and softening your expression and voice. "-answer it, Horror. I'm gonna answer it this time." He curled into himself in his seat.

Poor thing has been having cognitive issues since The Star Sans's targeted his skull injury a few missions ago. He requires a certain level of patience now and since you're the only one with empathy anymore he's latched to your hip most of the time, trying his best to communicate even through the frustrating lows he must endure now. You'll throw them a bone just this once, for him.

"He is resting. Do any of you remember what happened the LAST time you woke him up?" Their reactions varied from skeleton to skeleton but every single one had a similar look of mortified realization.

You sighed for the umpteenth time, exhaustion returning tenfold. God you needed a nap...

"didn't think he was gonna make it to breakfast. 'heard a crash from his room last night and he hasn't made a peep since." Dust shrugs dismissively with a bored expression, eyes wandering from the group as he visibly checks out from this meeting out of pure disinterest of the conversation.

"And you didn't think to check on your king? Or hell, inform me?" You asked with irritation slowly picking away at your resolve.

"he ain't my king." Dust said narrowing his sockets at you.

"Oh! Well in that case I'll tell him that you've fallen out of grace through insubordination! That will be a gruesome execution to watch." You exclaimed with mockingly wide expressive eyes looking down at him with a trenchancy smile.

He stood up abruptly sending his chair screeching against the ground and into Horrors lap. He gripped your arm with an unremitting hold using it to yank you forward into his ribs with a summoned broken bone positioned against your throat threateningly pushing into your pulse.

"don't threaten me, kid. y'aint gonna like what happens." He spat in your face with a sneer.

"Let go, Dust. Now." You ordered frowning deeply, every other Sans whispering amongst themselves and waiting with excited anticipation for the fight about to ensue in front of them. "u-m, du-st.. ya mi-ght wann-a ca-lm d-o-ow-" Error tried to warn but Dust decidedly blows him off as he continued to press the sharp bone against your throat, twisting it until a sharp stinging sensation spread through your splitting flesh. A warmth dripped from your throat. "make. me. bitch." He chuckled menacingly.

A cold glare froze over your undaunted expression. You sieze the wrist threatening your life, twisting it away from you unnaturally, this made him drop his weapon of choice as instincts flooded his mind to attempt to snatch away your inexorable hold. But you continued until his wrist audibly snapped and he screamed in agony. Your face was barren of any emotion as you watched him stumble away from you. You didn't want to have to resort to this method, however, pain is just how Dust learns best sadly.

He curled into himself gripping onto his broken wrist and tucked it into his ribs to protect it from further assault. That was not your plan however.

With his head down you grabbed the back of his skull and slammed it down into your propped knee, hearing a satisfying crack before you released him to kick him to the ground with your right foot pinning him by his ribs. He now whimpers in pain as he scrambles like a bug against your weight. "YOU FUCKING BITCH!" He screeched enraged, winded and gasping in pain. "Oh grow up. You have the HP. You threatened and disobeyed direct orders from the second in command and proved to follow inusbordinate ideals under the care of King Nightmare. You're lucky I'm not telling him as we speak so that you don't get killed." You hissed surprising everyone with your violent and cold performance.

"And what precisely would you not be telling me, Y/N? Why would I kill him?" The hair on your arms all the way up to your neck stands on end at the deep baritone voice that rumbles directly behind you. It held so much menace and suspicion that your heart stuttered in fear.

You whipped around to look at the massive skeleton behind you. His body was mere inches away from your face so you instinctively backed up to look up to him properly. He loomed over you and most of the other Sans's. Error was possibly a foot or less shorter but with Nightmare's massive build he towered over everyone with ease. It helped by feeding into the intimidation and fear that lurked within everyone who was unfortunate enough to be under his watchful eye. And you were just one of the incredibly unfortunate souls to have his attention at all times...

"Oh! Lord Nightmare! How lovely to see you up and alright! Uhm first off I would just like to say good morning-" A growl slices through the air and cuts off your rambling making your body go rigid before you forcefully choke down a fearful squeak. Right. No small talk. Got it.

"-aand that it's really nothing serious, Sir! I assure you that I was just making an example out of him since they kept pestering, Error!" You replied with a faint waver to your voice. His eye narrowed with his pupil shrinking into slits and the frown deepening on his skull.

"You're lying to me now?" He more so stated than asked with hardly witheld malign. You were about to squeak out in defense of yourself before your throat clamps down at his stature lowering, leaning into what you could only assume to be an uncomfortable height, leveling himself with your eyes silencing your silver tounge with a heavy eye. He's daring you to lie to his face. Fuck..

Something in your head screams at you to own up and tell the truth...but you can't...you can't bring yourself to just trade Dust's life over like that...

You'll be punished either way for lying to begin with...might as well make it something worthy of the awaiting consequences.

"N-no, Sir! I would never willingly lie to you, King Nightmare!" You gush out with sweat beading at your temples. Your eyes were wide in what you could only pray to be something close to ingenuous. A snarl started to curl at his permanent grin so you abruptly clapped your hands together enterlacing your fingers with a white-knuckled-grip.

"Oh dear, I just realized something! I'm terribly sorry sire but it appears that I'm underdressed while in your presence! That won't do at all, so if you'll excuse me I'm just going to get dressed." You excuse yourself with a strained smile. A whimper of pain behind you makes you snap out of your prey stricken fog. Ah..that's right. The other's.

You turned your back to Nightmare and faced the gang secretly relieved to have an excuse to look away from that peircing gaze that held so much judgment.

"Someone heal him please, I'll make breakfast today after I get dressed." You speak to the others swiftly and with a respectable amount of authority. This however drops when your gaze falls upon the miserable monster at your feet. "And Dust? Next time. Listen." You looked down coldly at one of the more powerful members of the group now wilted on the ground whimpering in pain because of your strength. He flinched and nodded in acknowledgement to your command. Good boy, you wanted to coo but decided against it in favor to fleeing the dominating aura behind you.

You eased passed Nightmare as if anticipating him to lunge at you and have his shadows swallow you whole once and for all. But the only thing that moves is his narrowly slitted eye light that pins your every move under suspicious judgment. You turned away from him and try to manage a steady and casual pace as you made your way down the hallway. After making a fair bit of distance you turned your head to see if he was still watching you only to find he was now standing at his full height once again donning a rageful glare.

An involuntary squeak of fear escapes your lips and you whipped your head forward-facing to focus of rushing into your room. Once there you shut the door behind you locking it in one swift motion before you leaned your back against it. Sweat dripped from your temple as a panic attack crept it's slender fingers over your skipping heart. Your eyes were wide as you stared at the ground simply trying to wrestle your emotions down.

Calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down, calm down..

You're okay...you're gonna be okay..

..you just need to take it easy..

Deep breaths...

You gulp a shaky breath and hold it.

Why don't you try to find a fun outfit to wear? That'll distract you and cheer you up. It always did when you knew a punishment was to come.

You released your breath when your head started to feel heavy and repeated until your heart grew less and less heavy. Once you found your heart was at a manageable tempo you deemed yourself ready to push away from the door. Walking over to your wardrobe you release a sigh of exhaustion and begin to get dressed.

You were finally tying the last of your clothes together considering your job as done-

"The others informed me of what exactly lead up to Dust being sent to the infirmary. They said he had caused quite a scene. Is that right, Y/N?" Nightmare queries darkly behind you. You leapt out of your skin and froze instinctively with tense shoulders.

Everything around you was abruptly flooded by the cyan light, casting eery shadows that danced with every flicker of his ever so observant eye. The light engulfed everything in your room hungrily leaving nothing but your own shadow to hide in. He was absolutely incensed. You slowly turned around to look up at him through your lashes to see that he was, in fact, horrifyingly furious. His calculative eye held you under scrutiny with little to no care for your ever growing unease.

"Oh..well you know how riled up they can get when they get stir crazy, Sir. He didn't do anything too bad, after all you know how much they like to start silly little fights!" You supply instead of give him a solid answer.

His eye flashes even brighter. "You DARE lie to my face?!" He roared and slammed you into the wall to the right of your wardrobe making you grunt in with the air that was knocked out of your lungs. Tears of fear spring to your eyes in rapid excession. Each of his tentacles strikes through the wall caging you under his sharp talons, dwarfing you more so than you already felt before.

"I HAVE GIVEN YOU TWO CHANCES TO TELL THE TRUTH YET YOU DENY ME THAT RIGHT." He barked with a shrunken pupil and a sharp fanged snarl.

"I-I'm sorry, s-sir!" You sobbed meekly through quivering lips. Never have you been THIS scared of him before...not since he turned into the creature he is today.

His expression briefly softens and his grip loosens its iron grip for only the briefest of moments before returning with a vengance as quickly as he lowered his guard. "Will you make strike three or tell me the truth?" He spat lowly.

Don't do it don't say it-

"Y-Yes...okay it's true! He was adopting a insubordination mindset and he exhibited a minor case of mutiny!" You choked out before you could stop yourself, a feeble prey-routed fear screaming at you to just tell the damn truth.

You began wincing as he pressed you against the wall harder striking an aching pain through your chest and body. You were just so scared...he's become too volatile and unpredictable lately..

"Then. Why. Would. You. Defend. Him?" He demanded with every word dripping with venomous rage. His gaze drifted down to you dripping wound before flashing his eye back to you.

"I-I don't know!" You exclaim the first thing that popped into your head frantically flinching at his fierce glare and striking strength. You sit there for a minute quietly weeping with your shot nerves making you shake.

"You're turning weak." He remarked with disgust and dropped you. He pulls his tentacles out of the wall launching rubble and debris everywhere, scattering it over your frail body like snow and hail.

Your legs immediately give out on you and you fall into a heap of limp limbs cowering in shock before a sob ripped through your body and out of your throat. You shakily clamped a hand over your mouth to contain your pitiful whimpers, curling into yourself to try to attempt to comfort yourself.

He scoffed and turned to leave without another word as you curled up into a tighter ball to cradle your pained soul. Regret...that's what this feeling is...you should've never believed he was or could be what he once was...

The bitter realization makes you freeze with a distant look aimed to the ground, unfocused and dead.

"I should've chose Dream..." you whisper through your trembling hands to yourself.

"W H A T D I D Y O U J U S T S A Y."

Nightmare's booming voice shook you to your core. He whipped back around, his tentacles lashing behind him sporadically, his eyelight blinding with his burning wrath. The realization has anger lapping at your feet over the instinctual fear that fills your body and soul.

Why are you so afraid of the one you had once loved? Why do you let him hurt you with little to no consequences? Why are YOU the one suffering? Having nightmares every night out of guilt for what you could have done for him back when you were young and stupid when he obviously didn't give a fuck about you. Why are you the one clawing for his forgiveness?

Thoughts of brimming bitter anger drowned out every rational thought of yours until it boiled over and you reached your mental breaking point.

"I said.." You breathe quietly almost as if you had a realization dawning on you. Your anger festers until you couldn't contain your disdain for the skeleton before you.

"I SHOULD'VE CHOSE DREAM THAT DAY." You screamed and looked up at him from the ground with hatred reflecting in your burning eyes. With a loud roar of fury he strikes his tentacles towards your cradled body.

You rolled out of the way of his attacks and sprung back up to your feet. You can't stop now, you need to keep going. You need to hurt him like he did you.

"DO YOU WANNA KNOW WHY, NIGHTMARE!? BECAUSE EVERY DAY I WAKE UP FROM THESE- THESE HORRIBLE NIGHT TERRORS THAT LEAVE ME BEDRIDDEN AND WEEPING UNTIL I CAN'T CRY ANYMORE. UNTIL ALL I WANT IS FOR IT TO STOP. BUT I STILL GET UP TO ANSWER TO YOUR EVERY BECK AND CALL WITHOUT QUESTION OR COMPLAINT. AND WHAT DO YOU DO? YOU PUT ME THROUGH HELL AND FOR WHAT?! AMUSEMENT? HUNGER?" You shout fuming at the towering ebony skeleton before you.

"EVERY. SINGLE. FUCKING. DAY. I SIT AND WONDER HOW DIFFERENTLY I WILL NEED TO TREAD THE NEXT DAY TO AVOID A PUNISHMENT THAT IS BOUND TO HAPPEN ANYWAYS." You yelled stomping on one of his tentacles that was drilled into the ground closest to you, making him hiss and try to recede his tentacle from your brutal attack but your weight crushes down on it harder, leading him to nearly strike another tentacle towards. He seems to think better of it because he stops himself for reasons you can't process in your blinded fury.

"YEARS OF LOYALTY. YEARS OF ALLEGIANCE. YEARS OF STRIKING FEAR INTO THE INNOCENT SOULS OF THE MULTIVERSE AGAINST MY OWN BETTER JUDGMENT JUST TO PLEASE YOU. I HATE MY OWN FUCKING LIFE BECAUSE OF YOU. I FUCKING HATE YOU!" You roared huffing from the exertion it took to emote and scream and pin his squirming weapon beneath your powerful heel. This actually seems to make him physically flinch away. He takes a step back.

His tentacles droop in the slightest to his battling thoughts that faintly fight to be showcased across his face like a montage of conflicting emotions in a painting. He seemed to gather himself enough to look away from your fuming person and to the side.

Uttering a simple, "I see..."

His tone was still stern but this time it held something softer than what he used just moments prior. You stepped off of his tentacle shifting your foot back to its original position beside the other.

"I...I used to LOVE you Nightmare..." Your voice warbles softly to him. Calling out for him to say or do SOMETHING that would make you want to stay. He remains as silent as the night, clentching his jaw and looking further away from your hopeful eye.

"...I used to want to be yours and you be mine but I was too scared to ask you. I was so afraid you would have lash out...I had hoped that if I chose you and proved to you my loyalty you would see that but...you ABUSED me all these years.." You choke out bitterly. You start wiping your tears away but they kept rushing to replace the previous ones that still stained your cheeks, much to your displeasure. Your anger was cooling down into a subtle simmer. You felt satisfied that he could finally feel a fraction of how you feel. That he may finally share your burdensome pain.

"I'm the king of Negativity. What did you EXPECT from m-" He attempts to excuse with a bitter bite but your withering glare snapped to look him in the eye, cutting him off promptly.

"-YOU were the king of the night." You start sharply and raise an accusatory finger to him as you stalk forward. "YOU were a guardian to the tree. I EXPECTED you to be better than this-this miserable monster you've become! I EXPECTED you to overcome this stupid apple's effects because of your own moral obligation. I EXPECTED you to do the right thing and end this stupid fucking war centuries ago. I EXPECTED you to come back to us." You snap looking him in the eye with something cold and harsh.

The adrenaline from yelling at something akin to a GOD kept you from backing down. You were possibly two feet away from him when you stopped and glared up at him with tears pooling in your eyes. He glared down at you with an intense expression.

"Then lower your expectations."

He finishes coldly.

You walked passed him in a brisk stride towards your door, unlocking the useless contraption, and stepping outside. "You just did. Good luck Night-" you pause with one foot out of the door. "-Or should I say Nightmare?" You correct over your shoulder harshly and slam the door shut behind you. You catch a glimpse of Nightmares widened eye that flashed one last time before it flickered into a dim cyan, almost taking on a ghostly white appearance. You pushed on and continue walking down the hallway passing by the other Sans's.

"Y-yo, Y-y/N, wh-a-at was wi-th t-he ye-lli- who-whoa...what ha-appen-ed?" Errors corrupted voice glitches beside you as he questions you with a concerned curiosity.

"You're second in command now, Error." You say with no room for arguing. You don't stop your quick stride after you pass him without so much as a glance in his direction, so he scrambles after you until he matched your speed, his steps slow and steady compared to your purposeful strides. "W-wha-at?" He asks bewildered at the response you decided to answer him with. You ignore his questioning surprise and continue on with what you were wanting to say.

"You've been my closest ally through all of these long torturous years here...I would even go as far as to say that you're my closest friend..and I care about you greatly. I just...really need you to understand that." You quickened your pace once his footsteps faltered and he stopped in place, leaving him without another word.

Leaving the castle for good was never an idea you humored no less actively thought about, but right now, it was what you felt was the best option. And you didn't stop no matter the shouts for you to stop.

After a good thirty minutes of walking you made a good distance between you and the prison you once called home.

This should be far enough.

You sigh and thought about where you could possibly go to be as far away as physically possible...somewhere safe from the monsters you were previously associated with. An idea came to mind that lingered until you thought about it deeper. That could work..

You took a deep breath and began to think of the pleasant memories you were forbidden from having. Happy memories of Dream, of Night, of you all those centuries ago flood your head filling your soul with a lightness you were denied of for so long.

A solid minute of these wonderful memories resurfacing into the forefront of your mind is how long it takes before a golden glow shines through your eyelids. You open your eyes to see a trio of colorfully clad skeletons exit the newly summoned portal before you. You all froze, saying absolutely nothing for a minute or two until you launched forward, hugging the skeleton in the center and sobbing into his shoulder. He briefly hesitates at first but hugs back almost immediately, pulling you into a tighter hold. His skull buries into the crown of your head. And right now? You really needed his warm and protective hold.

Fighting was never really an option you let happen with them but that doesn't mean you weren't there for most of the fights by Nightmares command. You suppose you were more like a trophy to show off to Dream of his first ever loss than anything...

Only a moment more of hugging ensued before you regrettably had to pull away, smiling up at him warmly. You missed him...truly you did and you could tell he was relieved to see you as well.

An unsettling chill crawled up your spine and the hair on the back of your neck stands on end. That brief moment of happiness was ripped away from you when the feeling of being watched alerted you of an angry presence. You tensed and perked up looking around cautiously like a deer hearing the snap of a twig during hunting season.

"Guys...get in the portal...now." You order cautiously though your voice remains neutral to not cause a panic. Staring into the treeline you felt the presence most strongly, your intense gaze never breaks from it. Your voice was strong and authoritive as you ushered everyone into the portal, attempting to follow after them, but you were stopped by blue strings wrapping around your leg. A gasp slipped passed your lips when you felt them yank you back making you loose your balance and fall onto your stomach. The buzzing energy tickled almost...

His intent was to capture. Not hurt.

You whirled back to see Error a fair distance away suspended towards the sky, watching you with no particular emotion dominant on his face. It looked like he was experiencing every emotion imaginable at the moment so it was hard to pinpoint anything in particular. It hurt to see him so overcome with emotions but you can't risk consoling him right now. Your gaze snaps down and away from him spotting the others making their way to you both. They were halfway through the vast, black, dead meadow that you faintly remember once held beauty and light.

Their weapons were drawn out with the intent to satisfy their bellicose desires. May it be through scattering blood and dust on a battlefield or causing misery in their weapons wake. Their bones pulsed with adrenaline driven eagerness. They were starved of their addiction, but now they were allowed to feed it once again. Allowed to fight once more and smell their favorite aroma of blood and the feeling of dust whisping about on their skulls, they were allowed to get their fix of taking a life.

Your pupils shrunk in fear and you darted your gaze back up at Error. You were starting to hyperventilate. Nightmare would kill you if you got dragged back..there's no way he'd let you go after the stunt you just pulled.

You looked up at him pleadingly, begging under an airy whisper to let you go, please let me go your soul cried out to his. He looked away trying to avoid your gaze but failed, ultimately trapping himself in your wide panicked E/C eyes. You both stay there simply staring at one another for a long minute.

He caved, groaning in defeat. He releases a string of cusswords and hangs his head low as he cut his strings with one of his sharp phalanges, finally freeing you. His gaze meets yours once more when he offers you a nod of approval for you to escape. You are under his protection now.

A relieved smile blooms from cheek to cheek. You squirmed out of his strings and look back at him making a upside down heart with your hands just before jumping through the portal. A hairs length shy of Fell's outstretched claw being the last image anyone could see.

The portal closes instantly after you exit it and you land flat on your ass. You grunt in pain and flop back, recovering your breath and trying to ignore the soarness spreading through your ass.

"Are you okay, Y/N?!" Dream frets rushing to your side before hesitating and simply offers a hand out for you to take. You laugh breathlessly and nod your head. Politely, you decline his offer, cleaning yourself off and getting up yourself. You looked around getting hit by a wave of nostalgia that drowns you in joyous warmth. The meadow looks as beautiful as ever lit up in a ethereal golden glow.

A warm smile spreads against your chapped lips. For once in a long time...your soul and heart doesn't ache...you feel happy?..yes. That's the word. You feel happy.

"Yup, with a smile as bright as that, you're definitely the Y/N I know and love.." Dream chuckles triggering your own soft laughter. Ink and Blue wish you both a pleasant evening as they go their seperate ways, no longer needed now that the crisis has been averted.

You both sit on the hill you popped onto and stay there settling into a pleasantly comfortable silence, just enjoying one another's company and absorbing the beautiful scenery together with a melancholy feeling shared between you both.

"So, Y/N..you don't have to answer if you're not ready, but I would just like to get it out of the way just in case. What happened for you to summon me?" He asks softly with a patience you have been starved of for so many years.

"Well..." You trail off with a heavy sigh. The exhaustion you felt worsens for every moment your adrenaline fades from your veins.

A few months later

Nightmare was very adamant for your return. That was all he seemed to be trying to do at this point and you just couldn't understand why..

If he's the ever so prideful King of Negativity that you remember having the displeasure of standing alongside for all those years then why was he focusing all his time and resources on recapturing you? He doesn't care about you. He made that clear. So what was he trying to accomplish? What could he possibly gain from ANY of this? Could he be trying to drag you back so that he could make an example out of you? To punish you and hang you out for everyone to see, lips sewn shut for talking out of turn and chains wrapping around your body to prove there is no escaping once you've sold yourself to his cause? No, it couldn't be that...that's far too much effort for his group to follow through with...so what they hell was he doing?

Whatever the reasoning was it doesn't matter now...or at least...it didn't until he got a little too close for comfort. Then you had to hide where you knew he wouldn't go. Not even for you.

In the very tree where he consumed every last apple until his fate, and those tied to him, was ensnared with misery.

You had fought day and night to convince Dream to plant the seeds of the remaining apple so that it could be restored to the ancient majesty it once was. And finally, albeit with heavy reluctance, he listened.

You recall how you all had waited with bated breath, days and nights at a time, to see if the seeds would sprout or if they would wither and die without the sweet fleshy magic-coated fruit that once encased it.

It was Ink's turn to watch over the little seeds one sunny day, to gaurd and check on the progression of the sacred fruit, and it was he who had found six tiny green stems sprouting from the ground. It was such a joyous moment that it spurred a festival in it's honor, and it was all because of the delicate little plants that sprouted from the ground. It sprouted hope into the souls of those who struggled day by day to keep up positive facades. Hope...

....what a strange feeling that was to have again.

And it was with this hope and the help of some powerful monsters that you were all able to contribute a hefty stream of magic into the sprouts to strengthen and assist in it's growth. If you remember right, this was a sacred ritual that was used when the first tree grew all those centuries ago. It was performed annually to ensure the tree was at its strongest each year. Festivals were held in honor of the revitalization of the once reverent tree.

It grew beautifully with the magic supply that never stopped feeding it. Soon enough it towered over some of the cottages from the village and even beyond that at some point.

It was only after the tree started to bare fruit that everyone abandoned all of the built up labor and started to rely on Dream's protection over it. He was happy now, he had his purpose back and he could now gaurd the tree for the rest of eternity like he was trained to do since birth. Everything was finally as it was supposed to be. What it was meant to be,- what it could've been.

You remember you had felt a weight lift off of your shoulders and the smallest of smiles tug on your lips seeing Dream get swarmed by townsfolk congratulating him on becoming a gaurdian once again. He was laughing bashfully but puffed his chest in pride. He was back.

It was the realization that..you did it...you fixed what Nightmare broke- that your body began to sag in exhaustion until you collapsed onto the ground under a large willow tree. The shade offered a cooling sensation across your body that combatted the pleasant heat just beyond the outline of the tree's shadow. You released a shaky breath, the weight of emotion escaping your lungs. You could finally rest at night...you had found your peace...

Though the scars of the past remained, everyone began to gradually move on. The tree was restored, the village was happy, Dream was happy, everything was made right. That heavy guilt you carried from all the years you blamed yourself of the events of that day were finally gone..you freed yourself.

Then, things started to feel like it had when you were far younger...

A little too much like it actually...everything seemed to fall back into the very same routine everyone carried out 500 years ago without problem. It was as if you never left...it was as if nothing ever happened..that Nightmare never happened. And something about that made you feel...uneasy.

You thought you would be happy- relieved even- that your old life was finally coming back to you. That it felt like you never left and that you could carry on where you last left off without needing to make up for lost time. That you could live a life without having Nightmare be brought up by the villagers. You could finally have a sense of normalcy and live the rest of your life how you wanted to now...

But it doesn't feel right......this ending felt bittersweet...

You recall working on your garden one day when a scream echoed throughout the meadow near your home. Everyone rushed to the shriek and to everyone's horror there was ONE black apple in the sea of golden ones. Panic started to wash through the crowd and all hell broke loose. The wide panic worsened when a shrill scream drew the attention to a young woman who pointed to another inky apple hidden behind some leaves. Arguments about what needed to be done and why this happened started and fights broke out amongst the people. Wide spread hysteria ensued.

Some cried, some screamed, some shouted, and some fought. Chaos surrounded you but you stood perfectly still and looked up at the grand tree, staring at the apples that have haunted you for centuries with a look of blank acceptance. You thought you would be mortified like the others, especially with how involved you were last time...but something inside of you was willing to accept it for what it was.

Life needs a balance of good and bad. Which is something that the townsfolk did not seem to understand.

Dream had pushed through the crowd and found you, rapid firing questions of your overall safety, then after securing you- you both stood just under the tree to demand order. You looked down at the barbaric villagers you once thought highly of now with disgust.

You had learned from Dream that Night would often come home to guard the tree with low HP from all of the beatings he had endured throughout the day. Bruised, battered, bloody and broken was what he was described to look like before Dream had to hurry and heal him after he collapsed under pain and exhaustion. It was them who drove him to madness.

You were mortified...all that damage he endured...were caused by the very citizens you grew up under, blissfully unaware of the malicious acts they casted on the one you loved. You were left oblivious to the atrocities committed just under your senses.

You had screamed at Dream demanding why no one told you, especially Night, about the abuse he put up with every day. But Dream could not tell you, for even he did not know...

It was no wonder Night never wanted to go into the village...it was no wonder he burned it down after leaving you at the castle for days. It was no wonder he hated it here. It was no wonder he ate that wretched apple.

The cruelty Night faced just under your nose explained so much about him then and now. You couldn't bare to live amongst the very people who helped in the creation of 'Nightmare'. So you moved your home as far away from that wretched town as you could.

After a while of this wild goose chase to drag you back...they just...stopped looking for you. It was a bit odd at first, you admit you were on gaurd and suspicious, but you obviously didn't mind the peace and quiet.

One day though you were in the middle of cooking dinner for yourself when you heard frantic knocks at your door. You immediately perk at the loud noise, snapping out of your built up concentration you had focused into cooking your meal, and releasing a heavy sigh at being interrupted from your task.

You turned off your stove, setting the pan to the side so it wouldn't continue cooking on the burning stove, and cleaned your messy hands on a towel before you made your way to the door, curiosity getting the better of you at the sheer panic you heard behind the frantic knocks. You open the oak door and are immediately faced with the image of Dream winded and gasping for breath.

Your brows furrow and you reach out to rest your hand on his shoulder blade, perhaps he would like a glass of water? He stops you however and starts to level his breathing. You wait patiently for him to recollect himself before you ask what he needed. This seems urgent.

"E-Error and Horror wish to see you.." He breathes.

"They...want to see me? Dream...They've been trying to capture me for months, of course they want to see me." You say incredulously, but deep down you were overcome with a sense of longing, fighting the desire to race to your boys as soon as you heard they were here.

You couldn't. You needed to make sure Dream didn't think you would return to, Nightmare.

He shakes his skull and looks back at you, "They say it's urgent..."

You sigh. "Lead the way, Sunshine." You concede, understanding that he would not have come to get you if he felt threatened or suspicious of the opposing skellies. It must have been awfully important if Dream decided to listen to them and try to retrieve you.

Ten nonstop minutes of walking was how long it took before you saw Error and Horror stiffly standing in the clearing, looking around at the beautiful meadow you grew up playing in. Ink and Blue were off to the side watching them with crossed arms and weapons at the ready in case they tried anything.

Their eyes finally fell on you, a look of astonishment shared on their skulls and faint colorful hues sneaking onto their cheekbones.

You fight back your growing smirk. You couldn't really blame their baffled reaction to your appearance. Afterall, you were wearing a tailored white tunic again like you had before meeting them, which must have been quite odd for them to see. You hardly ever wore anything outside of the dark themes Nightmare had made for you or the occasional pencil skirt for work. You looked so much better than when you did under Nightmare's 'care'. More healthy and alive.

Nightmare never really...took care of you? Which you suppose isn't an issue since you are a grown adult and all and are meant to take care of yourself. But that doesn't take away from the fact that he often overworked you, causing countless restless nights, and for the rare night you did get sleep he would throw in the occasional nightmare to keep himself energized. This caused a lot of sleep issues and even sleep paralysis. Heavy bags under your eyes used to be more common than the clothes that covered your body, your sickly pale skin and greasy hair was another common feature that you recall having.

You were always left so weak...you constanly looked and felt sick to the point that it was probably the lead contributing reason as to why Nightmare never made you fight. You WERE fed, not to get the wrong idea, but just not too much since you were always piled neck high with work and too busy to be bothered to leave your room to cook and eat dinner. So yeah...he made sure you didn't die but he also didn't really go out of his way to make sure you were okay either.

But now your skin glowed with life and color, you slept perfectly fine and your hair was silky with care now, you look beyond perfect. You look healthy. You were genuinely happy for once too and didn't even dare hide it as your smile was a new and prominent jewel you wore and showed off like a prize.

You collect yourself and turn to ask Dream if he could give you a few minutes to speak with them. You reassure him that they were your only friends while you were with Nightmare and that they wouldn't dare hurt you. He nods slightly in confirmation, signaling to Blue and Ink that they could fall back before he too hesitantly started to turn to leave. But before he could get a few feet away, he pauses mid-step and warns you to be careful. With a warm smile you agree and watch as the distance grew between you all.

Once the trio was out of sight you spun around and ran towards the two scary skeletons with a massive smile overtaking your face. You slowed down to a stop just shy of a few feet away from Error to acknowledge his phobia and breathlessly exclaim-

"My boys! It's so great to see y-"

Your sentence dies midway through with your expression slowly falling from sheer joy to despair after seeing something horrible donning on your friend.

"Oh...oh god..what happened...what did Nightmare DO to you...?" You ask softly with your frown deepening. You started examining the large crack in Error's skull from a distance allowing your sadness and concern to be heard in your voice and expressed on your face instead of physically.

"b-betra-ayed th-he bast-ard by le-t-ting yo-ou g-o.." He replies looking away from your eyes and at the swaying trees.

You curl your outstretched fingers that you just caught subconciously reaching for his scar and press them into your palm, hesitantly pulling away. You sigh and look down.

"I....I'm so sorry...he wouldn't have done this if I had just stayed..I shouldn't have left..." You apologize softly with that all too familiar guilt creeping it's way into your soul again. Survivors guilt can be quite the nasty demon to overcome...

"y/n."

You looked up at the stern voice to see Horror staring you down with a soft look. "... 's fine...you were around 'em fer...longer than any of us...always took...the blame...for us..only a matter of time before..you broke from all the punishments.." Horror said slowly to ensure he would say everything he wanted to and managed it to sound reassuring.

You rush forward, giving him a bear hug that was filled with relief-filled warmth. He grunts in pain but hugs back regardless with a tight hold around your back. He nuzzled into your hair missing your hugs greatly.

You flinch at his audible grunt of pain and reluctantly pull away, you look him over like you had done with Error when you saw them. Cracks spread all along his cervical that led down to his thoracic spine. You gingerly tilted his skull up to better see the cracks and to take in the severity of them.

He allows you to inspect him and waits patiently for you to finish. You graze your thumb over them to feel how deep they went when a sharp gasp makes you pull away and apologize profusely with a hush tone.

You sigh sorrowfully and look down with creeping shame. You push aside your emotions and pull Horror into another warm embrace, gently avoiding his wounds and cradling him protectively, he snuggles into you with a far more pleasant purr.

How could you have left them with such a unstable leader..?

"List-en..as muc-ch as we-e've misse-d yo-ou N/N, we di-idn't come he-ere for a c-catch up..W-e u-uhh...we nee-ed yo-ur hel-p...yo-u p-probably c-cau-ght o-on to ho-w Nigh-tma-re is-n't try-ying t-to get you b-ack any-more..?" Error prompts uneasily. You pull away from Horror to look at Error leaving your hands on Horror's shoulder blades for comfort.

"Y-Yes..." You are already starting to get nervous at his tone.

"Well...he se-ems to be s-show-ing si-gns of h-hope-lessness..." He slowly phrases but your brain promptly shuts down before he can finish the rest of what he was saying. All of the color drains from your face at once..

...no....anything but Hopelessness...

Hopelessness in humans is a feeling that could be overcome...but monsters who are more closely connected with their souls than their physical body....it's fatal...

"-hasn't ea-eaten o-r com-e out-t of hi-is roo-m in d-a-ays..n-none o-f u-s re-eally ca-res but...he's no-ot ev-en cap-able of hol-lding the cast-tle toge-ther. M-ost of th-eir A-AU's ha-ve b-been destr-oy-oyed a-and I do-on't wa-nna de-al wit-h outc-odes in m-y anti-void." You snapped out of your mental-meldown-trance just in time to hear Error finish. You look up to see Error looking down at you.

"A..are you sure he's not just in rut..?" You ask quietly. "We know his schedule." Error confirms your fear.

"Bring me to him." You request without hesitation.

" 'm...not sure that's the...best idea..little lamb-" Horror tries to convince you otherwise.

"Horror...you come here, after months of pure silence on your end to tell me the monster I have known for over 523 years is slowly dusting away to the most dangerous monster affliction known to-date and expect me to stay?" You ask with narrowed eyes making Horror flinch.

You can't forgive Nightmare for what he's done...not yet at least...but even if you don't forgive him you couldn't bring yourself to hate or forget him. You, even though it pains you to admit it, still love him and although you crave the karma he deserves, you can't just let him die. You refuse to let him die.

"..okay..." Horror relents and looks up to Error for further confirmation to whom of which simply nods once and opens a portal back at the castle entrance.

You hop through the lagging portal between universes without question and land with a trained, agile, grace. Your body immediately sets you into a dead sprint after setting foot onto the stone path.

You dash passed the rusted crumbling front gate and the uneven cracks of the stone below the pads of your feet. Error was telling the truth afterall...the castle was crumbling for every second that passed...

Flying up the front stone steps and inside the castle you beeline for Nightmare's room, bare feet pattering against the ground and the train of your tunic flowing behind your inexorable path.

"w-y/n?!" You heard Dust call after you in baffled astonishment. You didn't have time to catch up though and pushed on, adrenaline kicking into your bloodstream at the footsteps and bones that tried to stop you. But the horrid thoughts of Nightmare dusting away before you could get to him feuled you to dodge and weave through each attempt to stop you. The images of his dust sifting through your fingertips pushes you harder and faster to reach his door. You were hellbent to try to stop this, your body refused to calm down, your heartbeat pulsing through your head until you had his door in your line of sight.

You slide to a stop just in front of it and promptly side-kick Nightmare's door down. In the case of an emergency, fuck knocking.

Out of your corner of your eye you see SwapFell, Fell and Killer peek around the corner at the disruption of their solitude.

You look on into the pitch black room to see Nightmare shoot up in bed. He....looks like an absolute trainwreck.

He wasn't well kept, he looked pale, weak, exhausted. His tentacles were nearly touching the ground with how much they droop, his iris hardly glows with the darkness that surrounds him..it was nearly gone....

Fuck...this was the worst case of hopelessness you've seen...

"The fuck?! Who kicked down my godamn d-Y/N..?" He barks weakly at first until his foggy unfocused eyelight zeroes in on you. His harsh expression drops at the sight of you and he doesn't hesitate to slide out of bed to stand in front of you. He looms over you with disbelief filling his wide socket. He shakily and hesitantly reaches for your cheek, as if you were a ghost of a loved one that would disappear if he wasn't careful.

Once his claw gently grazes your cheek he releases a shaky uneven breath neither of you knew he was holding. His expression drops and he just...stares down at you, his eyes' color slightly coming back. Your mouth parts to say something when he shot down pulling you into a desperate hug as he buries his skull into the crook of your neck.

His right hand desperately clutches behind your head, pulling you closer with a iron grip.

"I-I thought I lost you forever...." His voice was hushed and shaky. You felt something hot drip onto your neck that slowly slid down your collarbone and to your chest. You felt Nightmare's breathing against your neck and found it was uneven. You look over his hunched shoulder to see his back rise and fall, almost as if he was hyperventilating...Nightmare was..

..crying..?

A warm sensation that soon cools trails down your cheeks. You realize you were crying as well.

You hug his skull tightly and desperately clutch at his back with your other hand until you collect enough of his sweater to latch onto desperately- to get him as close as you possibly could. You tilt your head over his skull in a action of reassurance. Your breathing was becoming shaky as you whisper-

"I made my choice about who's side I was on long ago, Nightmare..."

You say causing a shudder to roll through the monster clinging onto you before you pull away. You rest your palm on his cheekbone and start to gently wipe away his tears, he had looked so miserable until he saw you. He returns the favor, allowing warmth to bloom through your chest.

Loud whispers cut through your moment behind you making you turn around to see the others tuck away quickly. You look back to Nightmare and tilt your head down with a sigh again. Nightmare will probably want some privacy so that he can keep his big bad persona he likes to show off without coming across as soft. You drop your hand from his cheekbone that he was leaning into with a closed socket, soaking into your touch. You pull away, about to head over to fix the door and shut it since the other's were starting to spy on you both. The Nightmare you know would rather be caught dead then crying.

But before you could even get a few feet away to do so he gently wraps his tentacles around your waist, loose enough for you to pull away if you want, but enough to stop you.

"W-wait! Please...please..don't leave me alone again..." He pleads desperately, pulling you towards him and into his arms. He was once again latched onto you tightly, his head back in the crook of your neck where he promply inhaled your scent to calm down. He...didn't care that the others were watching...?

Oh God that's too fucking cute...But you couldn't help that pang of guilt you felt in your soul when he said 'Again'.

"Nightmare, I'm not gonna leave you again..I was just going to try to close the door..." You say with the most smooth and alluring voice you could in order to soothe him. You turn around to pull him into your chest to strengthen the embrace. He snaps his phalanges, the door flies up from the ground unprovoked and slams shut, looking as if no harm was done only minutes prior.

He lifts you up with ease, much to your understandable surprise, and carries you all the way back to his bed where he sets you down on the messy pile of blankets with tender care. You start to move away but since he was so much bigger than you- you had to crawl away from him rather quickly to make room for him. He flinches and looks on sadly towards the ground with guilt oozing from him as he straightens his back, readying himself to leave. Ah, he must of thought you were trying to get away.

You shook your head patting the spot beside you. He hears the patting and looks up from the ground to look you in the eyes. You repeat the gesture, this time he understands and slips into the blanket pile along side you, releasing a soft and relieved sigh. The bed dips under his weight which causes a crater big enough that it made you slide right next to him. You giggle at the predicament, about to get up and move over when he wraps his arms around your waist with his tentacles and pulls you even closer.

Was...was he..actually cuddling you..? You never thought your dreams since childhood would ACTUALLY come true...you have been waiting your whole life for this...he may not be your darling Night anymore...but with the way he was acting...you may be able to accept this monster in his place.

You wrap your arms around his neck and rest your forehead against his affectionately.

"I love you Nightmare, i'm so sorry for leaving you..." You apologize quietly with tears welling up in your eyes.

"Don't apologize." He demands sternly, making your eyes shoot open to look at him with surprise. "Please...you were doing the right thing. I-I've been so angry at you and punishing you for absolutely no reason and it's all because I didn't want to feel the same love for you that I felt before. I thought it would make me just as weak as I was before...but it was the only thing fueling me. I never wanted to hurt you...I hope you saw that..." He spoke so gently and quietly it was almost like he was a completely different skeleton.

What had happened over those few months you were gone?

"I saw. I saw you trying Nightmare and I appreciate that. As long as you don't go back to being a big bad bossy bully then I won't leave again." You joke trying to lighten things up a bit. You leaned forward, planting a quick and gentle kiss on his teeth with a wide smile afterwards. He flushes into a bright neon blue. "O-Of course, Darling. I wouldn't ever go back to being the way I used to be if it meant losing you again. I love you too much to let you go..my soulmate." He reassures seriously and affectionately. For once in centuries he sounded like...Night again...not Nightmare but Night.

You wipe away his tears that remained, letting your own come out as well.

"That's all i've ever wanted.." You laugh wetly with a bright smile and kiss him on his teeth much longer than the last. He melts into it and kisses back, pulling you even closer to deepen it. After a half minute you pull away for air, blushing profusely.

"The fierce and all mighty Lord of Nightmares is cuddling and kissing me..." You say with a jokingly scandelized expression and tone. He shakes his skull chuckling deeply at your display but lets you continue.

"What a wonderous blessing I am met with~" You tease breathlessly and gently cradle his skull in your hand, pulling him closer again. He melts in your hold with a rumbling purr. "Anything for you, My Queen. I'll change and do it all over again if I must" He says softly. It's now your turn to melt at his words. You'll tell your darling Night that he was free from the apple once you're done smootching the ever-loving soul out of him.

He's back...And this time..

He'll treat you right.

#nightmare!sans #fanfic #x reader #nightmare!sansxreader #undertale #sans #horrortale #errortale #dreamtale #angst with a happy ending #Passive!Nightmare X Reader

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dailyanarchistposts · 5 days

Text

Chapter V. Third Period. — Competition.

1. — Necessity of competition.

M. Louis Reybaud, novelist by profession, economist on occasion, breveted by the Academy of Moral and Political

Sciences for his anti-reformatory caricatures, and become, with the lapse of time, one of the writers most hostile to social ideas, — M. Louis Reybaud, whatever he may do, is none the less profoundly imbued with these same ideas: the opposition which he thus exhibits is neither in his heart nor in his mind; it is in the facts.

In the first edition of his “Studies of Contemporary Reformers,” M. Reybaud, moved by the sight of social sufferings as well as the courage of these founders of schools, who believed that they could reform the world by an explosion of sentimentalism, had formally expressed the opinion that the surviving feature of all their systems was ASSOCIATION. M. Dunoyer, one of M. Reybaud’s judges, bore this testimony, the more flattering to M. Reybaud from being slightly ironical in form:

M. Reybaud, who has exposed with so much accuracy and talent, in a book which the French Academy has crowned, the vices of the three principal reformatory systems, holds fast to the principle common to them, which serves as their base, — association. Association in his eyes, he declares, is the greatest problem of modern times. It is called, he says, to solve that of the distribution of the fruits of labor. Though authority can do nothing towards the solution of this problem, association could do everything. M. Reybaud speaks here like a writer of the phalansterian school....

M. Reybaud had advanced a little, as one may see. Endowed with too much good sense and good faith not to perceive the precipice, he soon felt that he was straying, and began a retrograde movement. I do not call this about-face a crime on his part: M. Reybaud is one of those men who cannot justly be held responsible for their metaphors. He had spoken before reflecting, he retracted: what more natural! If the socialists must blame any one, let it be M. Dunoyer, who had prompted M. Reybaud’s recantation by this singular compliment.

M. Dunoyer was not slow in perceiving that his words had not fallen on closed ears. He relates, for the glory of sound principles, that, “in a second edition of the ‘Studies of Reformers,’ M. Reybaud has himself tempered the absolute tone of his expressions. He has said, instead of could do everything, could do much.”

It was an important modification, as M. Dunoyer brought clearly to his notice, but it still permitted M. Reybaud to write at the same time:

These symptoms are grave; they may be considered as prophecies of a confused organization, in which labor would seek an equilibrium and a regularity which it now lacks.... At the bottom of all these efforts is hidden a principle, association, which it would be wrong to condemn on the strength of irregular manifestations.

Finally M. Reybaud has loudly declared himself a partisan of competition, which means that he has decidedly abandoned the principle of association. For if by association we are to understand only the forms of partnership fixed by the commercial code, the philosophy of which has been summarized for us by MM. Troplong and Delangle, it is no longer worth while to distinguish between socialists and economists, between one party which seeks association and another which maintains that association exists.

Let no one imagine, because M. Reybaud has happened to say heedlessly yes and no to a question of which he does not seem to have yet formed a clear idea, that I class him among those speculators of socialism, who, after having launched a hoax into the world, begin immediately to make their retreat, under the pretext that, the idea now belonging to the public domain, there is nothing more for them to do but to leave it to make its way. M. Reybaud, in my opinion, belongs rather to the category of dupes, which includes in its bosom so many honest people and people of so much brains. M. Reybaud will remain, then, in my eyes, the vir probus dicendi peritus, the conscientious and skilful writer, who may easily be caught napping, but who never expresses anything that he does not see or feel. Moreover, M. Reybaud, once placed on the ground of economic ideas, would find the more difficulty in being consistent with himself because of the clearness of his mind and the accuracy of his reasoning. I am going to make this curious experiment under the reader’s eyes.

If I could be understood by M. Reybaud, I would say to him: Take your stand in favor of competition, you will be wrong; take your stand against competition, still you will be wrong: which signifies that you will always be right. After that, if, convinced that you have not erred either in the first edition of your book or in the fourth, you should succeed in formulating your sentiment in an intelligible manner, I will look upon you as an economist of as great genius as Turgot and A. Smith; but I warn you that then you will resemble the latter, of whom you doubtless know little; you will be a believer in equality. Do you accept the wager?

To better prepare M. Reybaud for this sort of reconciliation with himself, let us show him first that this versatility of judgment, for which anybody else in my place would reproach him with insulting bitterness, is a treason, not on the part of the writer, but on the part of the facts of which he has made himself the interpreter.

In March, 1844, M. Reybaud published on oleaginous seeds — a subject which interested the city of Marseilles, his birthplace — an article in which he took vigorous ground in favor of free competition and the oil of sesame. According to the facts gathered by the author, which seem authentic, sesame would yield from forty-five to forty-six per cent of oil, while the poppy and the colza yield only twenty-five to thirty per cent, and the olive simply twenty to twenty-two. Sesame, for this reason, is disliked by the northern manufacturers, who have asked and obtained its prohibition. Nevertheless the English are on the watch, ready to take possession of this valuable branch of commerce. Let them prohibit the seed, says M. Reybaud, the oil will reach us mixed, in soap, or in some other way: we shall have lost the profit of manufacture. Moreover, the interest of our marine service requires the protection of this trade; it is a matter of no less than forty thousand casks of seed, which implies a maritime outfit of three hundred vessels and three thousand sailors.

These facts are conclusive: forty-five per cent. of oil instead of twenty-five; in quality superior to all the oils of France; reduction in the price of an article of prime necessity; a saving to consumers; three hundred ships, three thousand sailors, — such would be the value to us of liberty of commerce. Therefore, long live competition and sesame!

Then, in order to better assure these brilliant results, M. Reybaud, impelled by his patriotism and going straight in pursuit of his idea, observes — very judiciously in our opinion — that the government should abstain henceforth from all treaties of reciprocity in the matter of transportation: he asks that French vessels may carry the imports as well as the exports of French commerce.

“What we call reciprocity,” he says, “is a pure fiction, the advantage of which is reaped by whichever of the parties can furnish navigation at the smallest expense. Now, as in France the elements of navigation, such as the purchase of the ships, the wages of the crews, and the costs of outfit, rise to an excessive figure, higher than in any of the other maritime nations, it follows that every reciprocity treaty is equivalent on our part to a treaty of abdication, and that, instead of agreeing to an act of mutual convenience, we resign ourselves, knowingly or involuntarily, to a sacrifice.”

And M. Reybaud then points out the disastrous consequences of reciprocity:

France consumes five hundred thousand bales of cotton, and the Americans land them on our wharves; she uses enormous quantities of coal, and the English do the carrying thereof; the Swedes and Norwegians deliver to us themselves their iron and wood; the Dutch, their cheeses; the Russians, their hemp and wheat; the Genoese, their rice; the Spaniards, their oils; the Sicilians, their sulphur; the Greeks and Armenians, all the commodities of the Mediterranean and Black seas.”

Evidently such a state of things is intolerable, for it ends in rendering our merchant marine useless. Let us hasten back, then, into our ship yards, from which the cheapness of foreign navigation tends to exclude us. Let us close our doors to foreign vessels, or at least let us burden them with a heavy tax. Therefore, down with competition and rival marines!

Does M. Reybaud begin to understand that his economico-socialistic oscillations are much more innocent than he would have believed? What gratitude he owes me for having quieted his conscience, which perhaps was becoming alarmed!

The reciprocity of which M. Reybaud so bitterly complains is only a form of commercial liberty. Grant full and entire liberty of trade, and our flag is driven from the surface of the seas, as our oils would be from the continent. Therefore we shall pay dearer for our oil, if we insist on making it ourselves; dearer for our colonial products, if we wish to carry them ourselves. To secure cheapness it would be necessary, after having abandoned our oils, to abandon our marine: as well abandon straightway our cloths, our linens, our calicoes, our iron products, and then, as an isolated industry necessarily costs too much, our wines, our grains, our forage! Whichever course you may choose, privilege or liberty, you arrive at the impossible, at the absurd.

Undoubtedly there exists a principle of reconciliation; but, unless it be utterly despotic, it must be derived from a law superior to liberty itself: now, it is this law which no one has yet defined, and which I ask of the economists, if they really are masters of their science. For I cannot consider him a savant who, with the greatest sincerity and all the wit in the world, preaches by turns, fifteen lines apart, liberty and monopoly.

Is it not immediately and intuitively evident that COMPETITION DESTROYS COMPETITION? Is there a theorem in geometry more certain, more peremptory, than that? How then, upon what conditions, in what sense, can a principle which is its own denial enter into science? How can it become an organic law of society? If competition is necessary; if, as the school says, it is a postulate of production, — how does it become so devastating in its effects? And if its most certain effect is to ruin those whom it incites, how does it become useful? For the inconveniences which follow in its train, like the good which it procures, are not accidents arising from the work of man: both follow logically from the principle, and subsist by the same title and face to face.

And, in the first place, competition is as essential to labor as division, since it is division itself returning in another form, or rather, raised to its second power; division, I say, no longer, as in the first period of economic evolution, adequate to collective force, and consequently absorbing the personality of the laborer in the workshop, but giving birth to liberty by making each subdivision of labor a sort of sovereignty in which man stands in all his power and independence. Competition, in a word, is liberty in division and in all the divided parts: beginning with the most comprehensive functions, it tends toward its realization even in the inferior operations of parcellaire labor.

Here the communists raise an objection. It is necessary, they say, in all things, to distinguish between use and abuse. There is a useful, praiseworthy, moral competition, a competition which enlarges the heart and the mind, a noble and generous competition, — it is emulation; and why should not this emulation have for its object the advantage of all? There is another competition, pernicious, immoral, unsocial, a jealous competition which hates and which kills, — it is egoism.

So says communism; so expressed itself, nearly a year ago, in its social profession of faith, the journal, “La Reforme.”

Whatever reluctance I may feel to oppose men whose ideas are at bottom my own, I cannot accept such dialectics. “La Reforme,” in believing that it could reconcile everything by a distinction more grammatical than real, has made use, without suspecting it, of the golden mean, — that is, of the worst sort of diplomacy. Its argument is exactly the same as that of M. Rossi in regard to the division of labor: it consists in setting competition and morality against each other, in order to limit them by each other, as M. Rossi pretended to arrest and restrict economic inductions by morality, cutting here, lopping there, to suit the need and the occasion. I have refuted M. Rossi by asking him this simple question: How can science be in disagreement with itself, the science of wealth with the science of duty? Likewise I ask the communists: How can a principle whose development is clearly useful be at the same time pernicious?

They say: emulation is not competition. I note, in the first place, that this pretended distinction bears only on the divergent effects of the principle, which leads one to suppose that there were two principles which had been confounded. Emulation is nothing but competition itself; and, since they have thrown themselves into abstractions, I willingly plunge in also. There is no emulation without an object, just as there is no passional initiative without an object; and as the object of every passion is necessarily analogous to the passion itself, — woman to the lover, power to the ambitious, gold to the miser, a crown to the poet, — so the object of industrial emulation is necessarily profit.

No, rejoins the communist, the laborer’s object of emulation should be general utility, fraternity, love.

But society itself, since, instead of stopping at the individual man, who is in question at this moment, they wish to attend only to the collective man, — society, I say, labors only with a view to wealth; comfort, happiness, is its only object. Why, then, should that which is true of society not be true of the individual also, since, after all, society is man and entire humanity lives in each man? Why substitute for the immediate object of emulation, which in industry is personal welfare, that far-away and almost metaphysical motive called general welfare, especially when the latter is nothing without the former and can result only from the former?

Communists, in general, build up a strange illusion: fanatics on the subject of power, they expect to secure through a central force, and in the special case in question, through collective wealth, by a sort of reversion, the welfare of the laborer who has created this wealth: as if the individual came into existence after society, instead of society after the individual. For that matter, this is not the only case in which we shall see the socialists unconsciously dominated by the traditions of the regime against which they protest.

But what need of insisting? From the moment that the communist changes the name of things, vera rerum vocabala, he tacitly admits his powerlessness, and puts himself out of the question. That is why my sole reply to him shall be: In denying competition, you abandon the thesis; henceforth you have no place in the discussion. Some other time we will inquire how far man should sacrifice himself in the interest of all: for the moment the question is the solution of the problem of competition, — that is, the reconciliation of the highest satisfaction of egoism with social necessities; spare us your moralities.

Competition is necessary to the constitution of value, — that is, to the very principle of distribution, and consequently to the advent of equality. As long as a product is supplied only by a single manufacturer, its real value remains a mystery, either through the producer’s misrepresentation or through his neglect or inability to reduce the cost of production to its extreme limit. Thus the privilege of production is a real loss to society, and publicity of industry, like competition between laborers, a necessity. All the utopias ever imagined or imaginable cannot escape this law.

Certainly I do not care to deny that labor and wages can and should be guaranteed; I even entertain the hope that the time of such guarantee is not far off: but I maintain that a guarantee of wages is impossible without an exact knowledge of value, and that this value can be discovered only by competition, not at all by communistic institutions or by popular decree. For in this there is something more powerful than the will of the legislator and of citizens, — namely, the absolute impossibility that man should do his duty after finding himself relieved of all responsibility to himself: now, responsibility to self, in the matter of labor, necessarily implies competition with others. Ordain that, beginning January 1, 1847, labor and wages are guaranteed to all: immediately an immense relaxation will succeed the extreme tension to which industry is now subjected; real value will fall rapidly below nominal value; metallic money, in spite of its effigy and stamp, will experience the fate of the assignats; the merchant will ask more and give less; and we shall find ourselves in a still lower circle in the hell of misery in which competition is only the third turn.

Even were I to admit, with some socialists, that the attractiveness of labor may some day serve as food for emulation without any hidden thought of profit, of what utility could this utopia be in the phase which we are studying? We are yet only in the third period of economic evolution, in the third age of the constitution of labor, — that is, in a period when it is impossible for labor to be attractive. For the attractiveness of labor can result only from a high degree of physical, moral, and intellectual development of the laborer. Now, this development itself, this education of humanity by industry, is precisely the object of which we are in pursuit through the contradictions of social economy. How, then, could the attractiveness of labor serve us as a principle and lever, when it is still our object and our end?

But, if it is unquestionable that labor, as the highest manifestation of life, intelligence, and liberty, carries with it its own attractiveness, I deny that this attractiveness can ever be wholly separated from the motive of utility, and consequently from a return of egoism; I deny, I say, labor for labor, just as I deny style for style, love for love, art for art. Style for style has produced in these days hasty literature and thoughtless improvisation; love for love leads to unnatural vice, onanism, and prostitution; art for art ends in Chinese knick-knacks, caricature, the worship of the ugly. When man no longer looks to labor for anything but the pleasure of exercise, he soon ceases to labor, he plays. History is full of facts which attest this degradation. The games of Greece, Isthmian, Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, exercises of a society which produced everything by its slaves; the life of the Spartans and the ancient Cretans, their models; the gymnasiums, playgrounds, horse-races, and disorders of the market-place among the Athenians; the occupations which Plato assigns to the warriors in his Republic, and which but represent the tastes of his century; finally, in our feudal society, the tilts and tourneys, — all these inventions, as well as many others which I pass in silence, from the game of chess, invented, it is said, at the siege of Troy by Palamedes, to the cards illustrated for Charles VI. by Gringonneur, are examples of what labor becomes as soon as the serious motive of utility is separated from it. Labor, real labor, that which produces wealth and gives knowledge, has too much need of regularity and perseverance and sacrifice to be long the friend of passion, fugitive in its nature, inconstant, and disorderly; it is something too elevated, too ideal, too philosophical, to become exclusively pleasure and enjoyment, — that is, mysticism and sentiment. The faculty of laboring, which distinguishes man from the brutes, has its source in the profoundest depths of the reason: how could it become in us a simple manifestation of life, a voluptuous act of our feeling?

But if now they fall back upon the hypothesis of a transformation of our nature, unprecedented in history, and of which there has been nothing so far that could have expressed the idea, it is nothing more than a dream, unintelligible even to those who defend it, an inversion of progress, a contradiction given to the most certain laws of economic science; and my only reply is to exclude it from the discussion.

Let us stay in the realm of facts, since facts alone have a meaning and can aid us. The French Revolution was effected for industrial liberty as well as for political liberty: and although France in 1789 had not seen all the consequences of the principle for the realization of which she asked, — let us say it boldly, — she was mistaken neither in her wishes nor in her expectation. Whoever would try to deny it would lose in my eyes the right to criticism: I will never dispute with an adversary who would posit as a principle the spontaneous error of twenty-five millions of men.

At the end of the eighteenth century France, wearied with privileges, desired at any price to shake off the torpor of her corporations, and restore the dignity of the laborer by conferring liberty upon him. Everywhere it was necessary to emancipate labor, stimulate genius, and render the manufacturer responsible by arousing a thousand competitors and loading upon him alone the consequences of his indolence, ignorance, and insincerity. Before ’89 France was ripe for the transition; it was Turgot who had the glory of effecting the first passage.

Why then, if competition had not been a principle of social economy, a decree of destiny, a necessity of the human soul, why, instead of abolishing corporations, masterships, and wardenships, did they not think rather of repairing them all? Why, instead of a revolution, did they not content themselves with a reform? Why this negation, if a modification was sufficient? Especially as this middle party was entirely in the line of conservative ideas, which the bourgeoisie shared. Let communism, let quasi-socialistic democracy, which, in regard to the principle of competition, represent — though they do not suspect it — the system of the golden mean, the counter-revolutionary idea, explain to me this unanimity of the nation, if they can!

Moreover the event confirmed the theory. Beginning with the Turgot ministry, an increase of activity and well-being manifested itself in the nation. The test seemed so decisive that it obtained the approval of all legislatures. Liberty of industry and commerce figure in our constitutions on a level with political liberty. To this liberty, in short, France owes the growth of her wealth during the last sixty years.

After this capital fact, which establishes so triumphantly the necessity of competition, I ask permission to cite three or four others, which, being less general in their nature, will throw into bolder relief the influence of the principle which I defend.

Why is our agriculture so prodigiously backward? How is it that routine and barbarism still hover, in so many localities, over the most important branch of national labor? Among the numerous causes that could be cited, I see, in the front rank, the absence of competition. The peasants fight over strips of ground; they compete with each other before the notary; in the fields, no. And speak to them of emulation, of the public good, and with what amazement you fill them! Let the king, they say (to them the king is synonymous with the State, with the public good, with society), let the king attend to his business, and we will attend to ours! Such is their philosophy and their patriotism. Ah! if the king could excite competition with them! Unfortunately it is impossible. While in manufactures competition follows from liberty and property, in agriculture liberty and property are a direct obstacle to competition. The peasant, rewarded, not according to his labor and intelligence, but according to the quality of the land and the caprice of God, aims, in cultivating, to pay the lowest possible wages and to make the least possible advance outlays. Sure of always finding a market for his goods, he is much more solicitous about reducing his expenses than about improving the soil and the quality of its products. He sows, and Providence does the rest. The only sort of competition known to the agricultural class is that of rents; and it cannot be denied that in France, and for instance in Beauce, it has led to useful results. But as the principle of this competition takes effect only at second hand, so to speak, as it does not emanate directly from the liberty and property of the cultivators, it disappears with the cause that produces it, so that, to insure the decline of agricultural industry in many localities, or at least to arrest its progress, perhaps it would suffice to make the farmers proprietors.

Another branch of collective labor, which of late years has given rise to sharp debates, is that of public works. “To manage the building of a road, M. Dunoyer very well says, “perhaps a pioneer and a postilion would be better than an engineer fresh from the School of Roads and Bridges.” There is no one who has not had occasion to verify the correctness of this remark.

On one of our finest rivers, celebrated by the importance of its navigation, a bridge was being built. From the beginning of the work the rivermen had seen that the arches would be much too low to allow the circulation of boats at times when the river was high: they pointed this out to the engineer in charge of the work. Bridges, answered the latter with superb dignity, are made for those who pass over, not for those who pass under. The remark has become a proverb in that vicinity. But, as it is impossible for stupidity to prevail forever, the government has felt the necessity of revising the work of its agent, and as I write the arches of the bridge are being raised. Does any one believe that, if the merchants interested in the course of the navigable way had been charged with the enterprise at their own risk and peril, they would have had to do their work twice? One could fill a book with masterpieces of the same sort achieved by young men learned in roads and bridges, who, scarcely out of school and given life positions, are no longer stimulated by competition.

In proof of the industrial capacity of the State, and consequently of the possibility of abolishing competition altogether, they cite the administration of the tobacco industry. There, they say, is no adulteration, no litigation, no bankruptcy, no misery. The condition of the workmen, adequately paid, instructed, sermonized, moralized, and assured of a retiring pension accumulated by their savings, is incomparably superior to that of the immense majority of workmen engaged in free industry.

All this may be true: for my part, I am ignorant on the subject. I know nothing of what goes on in the administration of the tobacco factories; I have procured no information either from the directors or the workmen, and I have no need of any. How much does the tobacco sold by the administration cost? How much is it worth? You can answer the first of these questions: you only need to call at the first tobacco shop you see. But you can tell me nothing about the second, because you have no standard of comparison and are forbidden to verify by experiment the items of cost of administration, which it is consequently impossible to accept. Therefore the tobacco business, made into a monopoly, necessarily costs society more than it brings in; it is an industry which, instead of subsisting by its own product, lives by subsidies, and which consequently, far from furnishing us a model, is one of the first abuses which reform should strike down.

And when I speak of the reform to be introduced in the production of tobacco, I do not refer simply to the enormous tax which triples or quadruples the value of this product; neither do I refer to the hierarchical organization of its employees, some of whom by their salaries are made aristocrats as expensive as they are useless, while others, hopeless receivers of petty wages, are kept forever in the situation of subalterns. I do not even speak of the privilege of the tobacco shops and the whole world of parasites which they support: I have particularly in view the useful labor, the labor of the workmen. From the very fact that the administration’s workman has no competitors and is interested neither in profit nor loss, from the fact that he is not free, in a word, his product is necessarily less, and his service too expensive. This being so, let them say that the government treats its employees well and looks out for their comfort: what wonder? Why do not people see that liberty bears the burdens of privilege, and that, if, by some impossibility, all industries were to be treated like the tobacco industry, the source of subsidies failing, the nation could no longer balance its receipts and its expenses, and the State would become a bankrupt?

Foreign products: I cite the testimony of an educated man, though not a political economist, — M. Liebig.

Formerly France imported from Spain every year soda to the value of twenty or thirty millions of francs; for Spanish soda was the best. All through the war with England the price of soda, and consequently that of soap and glass, constantly rose. French manufacturers therefore had to suffer considerably from this state of things. Then it was that Leblanc discovered the method of extracting soda from common salt. This process was a source of wealth to France; the manufacture of soda acquired extraordinary proportions; but neither Leblanc nor Napoleon enjoyed the profit of the invention. The Restoration, which took advantage of the wrath of the people against the author of the continental blockade, refused to pay the debt of the emperor, whose promises had led to Leblanc’s discoveries....

A few years ago, the king of Naples having undertaken to convert the Sicilian sulphur trade into a monopoly, England, which consumes an immense quantity of this sulphur, warned the king of Naples that, if the monopoly were maintained, it would be considered a casus belli. While the two governments were exchanging diplomatic notes, fifteen patents were taken out in England for the extraction of sulphuric acid from the limestones, iron pyrites, and other mineral substances in which England abounds. But the affair being arranged with the king of Naples, nothing came of these exploitations: it was simply established, by the attempts which were made, that the extraction of sulphuric acid by the new processes could have been carried on successfully, which perhaps would have annihilated Sicily’s sulphur trade.

Had it not been for the war with England, had not the king of Naples had a fancy for monopoly, it would have been a long time before any one in France would have thought of extracting soda from sea salt, or any one in England of getting sulphuric acid from the mountains of lime and pyrites which she contains. Now, that is precisely the effect of competition upon industry. Man rouses from his idleness only when want fills him with anxiety; and the surest way to extinguish his genius is to deliver him from all solicitude and take away from him the hope of profit and of the social distinction which results from it, by creating around him peace everywhere, peace always, and transferring to the State the responsibility of his inertia.

Yes, it must be admitted, in spite of modern quietism, — man’s life is a permanent war, war with want, war with nature, war with his fellows, and consequently war with himself. The theory of a peaceful equality, founded on fraternity and sacrifice, is only a counterfeit of the Catholic doctrine of renunciation of the goods and pleasures of this world, the principle of beggary, the panegyric of misery. Man may love his fellow well enough to die for him; he does not love him well enough to work for him.

To the theory of sacrifice, which we have just refuted in fact and in right, the adversaries of competition add another, which is just the opposite of the first: for it is a law of the mind that, when it does not know the truth, which is its point of equilibrium, it oscillates between two contradictions. This new theory of anti-competitive socialism is that of encouragements.

What more social, more progressive in appearance, than encouragement of labor and of industry? There is no democrat who does not consider it one of the finest attributes of power, no utopian theorist who does not place it in the front rank as a means of organizing happiness. Now, government is by nature so incapable of directing labor that every reward bestowed by it is a veritable larceny from the common treasury. M. Reybaud shall furnish us the text of this induction.

“The premiums granted to encourage exportation,” observes M. Reybaud somewhere, “are equivalent to the taxes paid for the importation of raw material; the advantage remains absolutely null, and serves to encourage nothing but a vast system of smuggling.”

This result is inevitable. Abolish customs duties, and national industry suffers, as we have already seen in the case of sesame; maintain the duties without granting premiums for exportation, and national commerce will be beaten in foreign markets. To obviate this difficulty do you resort to premiums? You but restore with one hand what you have received with the other, and you provoke fraud, the last result, the caput mortuum, of all encouragements of industry. Hence it follows that every encouragement to labor, every reward bestowed upon industry, beyond the natural price of its product, is a gratuitous gift, a bribe taken out of the consumer and offered in his name to a favorite of power, in exchange for zero, for nothing. To encourage industry, then, is synonymous at bottom with encouraging idleness: it is one of the forms of swindling.

In the interest of our navy the government had thought it best to grant to outfitters of transport-ships a premium for every man employed on their vessels. Now, I continue to quote M. Reybaud:

On every vessel that starts for Newfoundland from sixty to seventy men embark. Of this number twelve are sailors: the balance consists of villagers snatched from their work in the fields, who, engaged as day laborers for the preparation of fish, remain strangers to the rigging, and have nothing that is marine about them except their feet and stomach. Nevertheless, these men figure on the rolls of the naval inscription, and there perpetuate a deception. When there is occasion to defend the institution of premiums, these are cited in its favor; they swell the numbers and contribute to success.

Base jugglery! doubtless some innocent reformer will exclaim. Be it so: but let us analyze the fact, and try to disengage the general idea to be found therein.

In principle the only encouragement to labor that science can admit is profit. For, if labor cannot find its reward in its own product, very far from encouraging it, it should be abandoned as soon as possible, and, if this same labor results in a net product, it is absurd to add to this net product a gratuitous gift, and thus overrate the value of the service. Applying this principle, I say then: If the merchant service calls only for ten thousand sailors, it should not be asked to support fifteen thousand; the shortest course for the government is to put five thousand conscripts on State vessels, and send them on their expeditions, like princes. Every encouragement offered to the merchant marine is a direct invitation to fraud, — what do I say? — a proposal to pay wages for an impossible service. Do the handling and discipline of vessels and all the conditions of maritime commerce accommodate themselves to these adjuncts of a useless persononel? What, then, can the ship-owner do in face of a government which offers him a bonus to embark on his vessel people of whom he has no need? If the ministry throws the money of the treasury into the street, am I guilty if I pick it up?

Thus — and it is a point worthy of notice — the theory of encouragements emanates directly from the theory of sacrifice; and, in order to avoid holding man responsible, the opponents of competition, by the fatal contradiction of their ideas, are obliged to make him now a god, now a brute. And then they are astonished that society is not moved by their appeal! Poor children! men will never be better or worse than you see them now and than they always have been. As soon as their individual welfare solicits them, they desert the general welfare: in which I find them, if not honorable, at least worthy of excuse. It is your fault if you now demand of them more than they owe you and now stimulate their greed with rewards which they do not deserve. Man has nothing more precious than himself, and consequently no other law than his responsibility. The theory of self-sacrifice, like that of rewards, is a theory of rogues, subversive of society and morality; and by the very fact that you look either to sacrifice or to privilege for the maintenance of order, you create a new antagonism in society. Instead of causing the birth of harmony from the free activity of persons, you render the individual and the State strangers to each other; in commanding union, you breathe discord.

To sum up, outside of competition there remains but this alternative, — encouragement, which is a mystification, or sacrifice, which is hypocrisy.

Therefore competition, analyzed in its principle, is an inspiration of justice; and yet we shall see that competition, in its results, is unjust.

18 notes · View notes