Leftovers [1/3]

Simon Riley x fem!Reader | a non-canon addition to my mafia!141 series |

part 2 | part 3

warnings: unhealthy thrupple relationship, hurt/some comfort, slight dub-con, possessive Simon, smut, (f!recieving oral, fingering, p in v) 6.5k wc

Mr. and Mrs. Price don't know how to take care of you properly. Simon is hellbent on saving you, no matter the means.

The first and only rule that came with living with the Prices was that no matter how much you thought otherwise, they didn’t really love you.

It didn’t matter how sweetly Mrs. Price kissed your forehead, her lips would never grace yours, and despite how deliciously Mr. Price would pump his fingers into your cunt he would never bless you with the opportunity to take his cock. Above all else, they first belonged to one another before ever belonging to you. All you were good for was being their sweet little pet, nothing but a catalyst for their pleasure; their favorite aphrodisiac.

There were worse things in the world to be, and being a pet wasn’t all that bad. The Prices kept a roof over your head and gave you meals at least three times a day, if not more. Every now and then while Mr. Price was away at work, you and Mrs. Price would fall asleep on the couch together. Hours later you would wake up with your head on her chest, but you wouldn’t dare to stir her awake because the sound of her heart beating was more captivating than anything that droned on the television.

But she would always wake up when Mr. Price came home, and she’d drag you off to the bedroom where they’d strip you bare like some spectacle. Mrs. Price’s lips would devour every inch of your skin, kissing your neck, chest, and breasts; kissing everything except for you. Meanwhile, Mr. Price would fuck his fingers into you and growl every time his wife giggled at your moans. His cock would harden in his pants, a sight that you would never be able to see, and just as you came undone on his fingers his lips would always find their way to her instead of you.

They would laugh and giggle as you squirmed underneath them and coo about how adorable you were. How soft and pliant you were for them, such a good and well behaved pet. They would kiss your body a few more times before tucking you in for the night and leaving you alone to do their own lovemaking elsewhere. That’s how it always ended. Always the lover, never the loved, but that was okay. At least you weren’t alone.

Things started changing when Mr. Riley showed up.

He showed up at the house one day by invitation from Mr. Price and nearly scared you half to death. Like a ghost, he seemingly appeared in the living room one evening and took up all the space on the loveseat. Perhaps that’s what had intimidated you at first, just the sheer size of him. He stood taller than Mr. Price did, and the bulging muscles of his body was proof he could rip you in half if he so pleased. Then there were the faded scars on his face, the ruggedness of his features and the piercing expression in his dark brown eyes. He looked at you like you were a meal ready to be eaten. Or, maybe you just wished that he would.

Mr. Riley was a quiet man, you learned. He hardly spoke throughout dinner and when he did he was rather short and blunt with his responses. Though he was a man of few words, everything he said seemed to have some sort of meaning. There was something about his voice that made the hair on the back of your neck stand on end and you nearly choked on your food at the sensation. It wasn’t at all unpleasant, and if anything the deep timbre of his voice was rather soothing, and you liked the teasing nature of his banter with Mr. Price. Perhaps you enjoyed it too much.

There must have been something about the way you looked at Mr. Riley that caught attention. Truly, you meant no harm by it. Art littered his arms in the form of dark tattoos that you couldn't pull your eyes from because you had never seen ink cover the skin of someone so beautifully before. Never seen anyone quite capture the well formed muscle and veins like had been done on Mr. Riley’s arms. And really, the scars on his face and his crooked nose intrigued you. There were stories waiting to be uncovered, literature that hid behind the depths of his eyes. You just wanted to read it. That was all it was, you swore it.

After plates had been cleaned and the table was cleared away, you learned you were not as subtle as you thought you were with your minor infatuation with your guest. Not even your intense stare at the TV screen as you pretended to pay attention to the movie Mrs. Price had picked out was able to throw suspicion off of you. Just as you had gotten settled on the sectional next to Mr. Price, you felt a hand rest on your shoulder, quickly followed by a hot breath on your ear.

“Pet,” Mr. Price whispered, “my friend looks lonely over there. Why don’t you keep him company?”

His proposition made you tense against his side and he chuckled at your failed attempt at keeping cool. Keep Mr. Riley company? Once more your eyes found their way to him and you felt your throat tighten at the thought. Were you supposed to sit by him? Entertain him? No, that felt wrong. You belonged to the Prices, not their friend. Then again, you were instructed to keep the man company, and good pets do as they’re told.

Without so much as a word you rose from your spot on the sectional and quickly made your way to the loveseat Mr. Riley had settled himself on. It was difficult not to fall into the gravity of him when you sat next to him as his weight shifted the cushions, giving you no choice but to all but lean into him. You heard his quiet hum in surprise, as if he hadn’t expected you to just so blatantly sit next to him. You caught him look at you for a short moment, but you kept your eyes glued to the TV as if he was never there to begin with, and eventually he looked away.

Embarrassment. It was the only word you could think of to describe how you felt sitting next to that man. Conversing with others wasn’t exactly your forte, it’s why you agreed to throw your old life away when Mrs. Price invited you into a relationship with her and her husband. They would take care of you, and you wouldn’t have to be perceived and go out and about in the world. They knew full well of that; perhaps that was their way of having some fun with you.

Things were fine until halfway through the movie when Mr. Riley put his arm around you. There was nothing you could do but fall against his side as his firm hand settled against your waist. He held you close to him as if he had no intention of letting you go, and yet acted as if he had never done so in the first place as his attention stayed fully trained on whatever boring movie droned in the background. Blood gushed in your ears and panic settled into your chest. Surely that had broken some sort of rule, and yet when you glanced over to the Price’s with wide eyes, you realized that they couldn’t even care less.

So you took a deep breath in some attempt to calm yourself, and once the blood settled in your veins, you realized that you could hear Mr. Riley’s heart. Each beat was strong and steady as if it had never wavered throughout its entire existence, and its reverberations were so strong you could feel it pulse throughout your own body. You took another deep breath, this time more content, and realized you rather liked the smell of him too. Some sort of dark, soft aroma mixed with the faint scent of cigarettes. It was comforting, perhaps the most calm you had felt in a long while.

“Cute, isn’t she?”

It wasn’t until Mrs. Price spoke that you realized you had fallen asleep like that, tucked into the side of a man you hardly knew. Cold hands pulled you away from the warmth that was Mr. Riley, and half awake you were brought to your room without the chance to glance at him from over your shoulder. Despite it all, Mrs. Price cooed at you while she laid you down in your bed and tugged the blankets over your body with a simple kiss to your forehead.

“Goodnight, pet,” she cooed before closing the door behind her.

That night you fell asleep alone in your cold bed while dreaming about the warmth Mr. Riley had given you. It was something you could only ever pray for when craving something from the Prices, and yet he had given it to you so willingly, as if you didn’t deserve anything less. Maybe it was unfair of you to compare the people who had given you so much to a man who you hardly knew. Friendly. That’s all he was. But it didn’t end there. Every time Mr. Price invited him over, he always directed you to Mr. Riley’s side eventually, talking about how lonely he looked, or that you should be a good host to him.

Soon enough it got to the point where you didn’t even need prompting; you already knew your place was next to Mr. Riley. Curled against his side, hanging off his arm, even sitting on his lap, in one instance. Each touch that he gave you seared across your skin, but it was always respectful, nearly too respectful. Fingertips always gliding along your waist but never dipping low enough to caress your hips or grope your ass, nor high enough to brush against the underside of your breasts. His touch always left you craving more, and yet that was something he didn’t seem to intend on giving you.

He did, however, give you a new name. Sweetheart, he called you. It was something he whispered to you at first from the safety of the confines of his arms, as if he worried Mr. Price would overhear him and reprimand him for it. Then he became a bit more brave. He called you sweetheart when he asked you to pass him the salt at dinner, and then again when you eventually fell asleep on the couch and he offered to carry you to your room. Some strange part of you wished he stayed with you that night, but you knew that thought alone made you a bad pet, wanting anyone other than the people you belonged to.

But the thing was, the more warmth Mr. Riley showed you, the colder the Price's home felt, because even after all that time, it wasn’t really your home.

“Hey, sweetheart.”

Loud music and even louder people caged you into that VIP room, suffocating you to the point you nearly passed out. It didn’t help that Mrs. Price had dressed you up like her personal doll, slathering makeup on your face and throwing you in a skimpy dress, you hardly recognized yourself in the mirror. And still, despite it, Mr. Riley had found you and settled on the spot next to you in the conversation pit.

“Mr. Riley,” you greeted as you uncomfortably pulled at the skirt of your dress.

“Mrs. Price dress you up in that?” he asked.

You half expected him to wrap his arm around you like he did every other time the two of you were close to one another, but he didn’t. Perhaps there were too many prying eyes nearby and he didn’t want to spark any rumors. Either way, his presence alone was comforting enough. You always hated going to Mr. Price’s club, and that night was no exception. Too loud, too many eyes, you were always out of place.

“Was it that obvious?” you asked with a half-hearted chuckle.

“Just doesn’t seem like you,” he responded gruffly.

Of course not. Extravagant things weren’t meant for a pet. “Yeah. Probably not.”

Even from a distance you could still make out the faint scent of him. That warm musk mixed with tobacco had started to smell like home. And it was wrong, you were sure of it by that point. At what point did Mr. Riley become more comforting than the man and woman you lived with? But at that moment, with so many people crowding you, you didn’t care. Closing your eyes, you blocked out everything else around you except for him. There was no music, no mingling guests, no rancid scent of alcohol; it was just you and him.

Until the sudden sound of clapping brought you back to reality, anyway. Your eyes shot open and you were met with the same view as before, just more still. A quick glance around revealed everyone staring at Mr. and Mrs. Price, who stood at the front of the room, all cooing and cheering and clapping for them. They held one another as a few people rushed up to talk to them, where you heard squealing and several pats on the back. Confused, you turned to Simon with your head tilted to the side like a curious dog.

“What happened?” you asked.

With a simple nod of his head, Mr. Riley gestured up to the couple at the front of the room. “They just announced Mrs. Price’s pregnancy,” he said.

Those words left his mouth so simply. So nonchalantly. As if you should have known.

You should have known. But you didn’t. Because no matter how much you tried to convince yourself otherwise, they didn’t really love you.

You’d forgotten the first and only rule.

You didn’t know how you ended up on the terrace, you just stopped running when the cold night air hit your skin. Despite the way your tears muddled your vision, everything became painfully clear. This was their plan all along. To get pregnant, to start their life and continue it without you. It’s why they never kissed you, only ever played with you, refused to fuck each other in your presence; you were always meant to be disposable. Why continue to take care of a pet with a child on the way?

And it hurt because you knew you’d never have that. Never obtain that unconditional love, a kiss on the lips, a cock in your cunt, a child in your arms, because you had been the Price’s plaything. Their pet who never dared to bare her teeth. You’d never be the sweet little wife, only some poor, skittish animal that only knew how to play. But you craved it so bad you swore you’d die. You wanted to be someone’s wife, someone’s lover, to be loved, to have kids and a home that wasn’t cold as ice.

That life just wasn’t for you.

“You alright, sweetheart?”

Somehow, Mr. Riley always seemed to find you. It was as if some invisible string had been tied between the two of you, and no matter how knotted it got he would always make his way back to you. Unsure if you should welcome his presence or not, you kept your hands firmly on the terrace railing and your red eyes focused out on the city in front of you. Your tears blurred the sparkling lights so much that you could nearly confuse them with stars if you squinted hard enough, yet that realization did nothing to quell the anxiety and terror that ate away at your stomach.

“I’m alright,” you pitifully assured, although you weren’t too convincing.

Mr. Riley’s hand touched the exposed skin of your back where his thumb started to rub small circles into your flesh. You nearly crumbled at the contact as you were drowned in the overwhelming urge to throw yourself at him, to beg to be loved even if only for a short while. Instead, your grip on the railing only tightened as you focused all your energy into not letting another tear fall.

“John told me to watch you for the night. Take you back to my place,” he said softly.

His words weren’t surprising. Sending you off to spend the night with him was just the next step to getting rid of you. Why would they want you in the home when they’d have someone new to prepare for? You were certain your room would be turned into a nursery before long. After a moment, you turned to face him and you did your best to muster your strongest of smiles as you ignored the stinging behind your eyes. He looked at you with such pity that you nearly broke into tears once more.

“Lead the way.”

It had been so long since you had visited someone that you forgot what it was like to walk into a room and not have every inch of it memorized. Mr. Riley’s apartment was something you didn’t recognize, yet it wasn’t completely unfamiliar. In a vague sort of way, it smelled like him, and that was enough to calm your nerves and silence the pain that festered in your stomach. It was rather plain as far as decorations went, but it was cozy and warmer than anyplace else you had been for quite some time, and that was more than enough for you.

First order of business was getting you a glass of water, something Mr. Riley took care of right away. Such a small gesture, and yet it had your heart swelling in an odd and unfamiliar way. Still, you were thankful for something to soothe your sore throat, and the two of you sat in silence on the couch as he ensured that you drank every last drop.

“Do you wanna change into somethin’ more comfortable?” he questioned when you handed him your empty glass.

“I don’t… have a change of clothes,” you said meekly.

“You can wear some of mine,” he insisted.

Something within you wanted to decline. Wearing his clothes certainly broke some sort of rule, and you doubted that the Prices would be happy with you for it. But then there was a pang of sorrow that echoed throughout your chest, a painful reminder that you no longer belonged to them, and probably hadn’t for quite some time.

Like a lost dog, you followed behind Mr. Riley until you reached his bedroom. His bed was bigger than you had anticipated it to be, significantly bigger than yours, and it was well made. A dark duvet covered the expanse of the mattress, and when you sat on the edge of it you sunk into it as if it welcomed you home. Maybe if you laid back on it you could fall asleep and never have to face the painful truth of the reality you found yourself trapped in.

It didn’t take him long to fish out a simple shirt and a pair of drawstring shorts for you to change into, but when Mr. Riley turned to face you, it was as if he had turned to stone. Maybe it was the tear-smudged makeup stains on your face, or the fact that he hadn’t seen you look so content until you sat there on his bed, but he looked at you with such intense pity your chest ached. Eventually he got his body to listen to him and he carefully approached you and set the clothes on the mattress next to you.

“I’m sorry,” he said unprompted.

“For what?” you asked, eyebrows drawing together.

“That they abandoned you.”

Hearing it outloud was more excruciating than the initial realization. Abandoned. Tossed aside. Just a spare. Your chest ached so fiercely it felt as if your body split in two, and there was nothing you could do to stop the tears and sobs from flowing forth. It was pitiful and pathetic, and you hated how terribly small you felt. There were so many tears inside of you that you could wipe the earth clean with them, yet as you cried you didn’t feel any less dirty or used.

Then the bed sunk down next to you, and instead of sitting on the mattress you had been scooped up into Mr. Riley’s arms and into his lap. His arms were the only thing that held you together in that moment, and he carefully tucked you underneath his chin and squeezed all the sorrow from your body. A cautious kiss pressed into the top of your head, slow and wary as if the very act itself was forbidden. When you didn’t protest, he kissed again, and then again, as if he couldn’t get enough. It was the closest thing to being loved you ever felt, and that realization only broke you further.

“I just… I just wanted what they have,” you admitted once your sobs had dwindled to small hiccups. “I always thought that they’d let me be a part of it eventually. But I’ve been waiting so long and then… then they get pregnant without telling me and I realized I’ll never be good enough. Never enough to be kissed, or held, or loved. That’s all I wanted.”

After placing one final kiss against the top of your head, Mr. Riley carefully moved your face away from his chest to tilt your head up to force you to look at him. Irritated from crying, your eyes were a bright pink shade, and so terribly swollen you had difficulty opening them fully. Still, his thumb smoothed over your mascara-stained cheek and you felt his grip grow tighter around you.

“You deserve so much more than what they did to you,” he whispered, his whisky scented breath fanned across your face. “They were selfish, yeah? Dunno how they could be. First time I laid eyes on you I wanted you. Wanted to love you, to prove that you’re worthy of it.”

A few more fat tears rolled down your cheeks at his words just for him to quickly wipe them away. You had never received such kind and comforting words from anyone before, least of all the Prices. But his words held meaning, you knew they did. How could he look at you so softly and lie? No, it was impossible. His words were true and you could feel your want grow in the dark cavern of your stomach.

“Mr. Riley…” you said at a loss for anything to say.

“Simon,” he corrected. “Say my name and I’m all yours, sweetheart. I’ll give you that love, that life, you deserve.”

Maybe it was wrong to want him as badly as you did. Something dark and primal inside of you craved him and every inch of his tattooed skin, and yet you felt shame for feeling so. But why? You had been abandoned. A bit of comfort was the least bit you deserved.

“Simon,” you whispered.

His lips crashed into yours not even a second later, and the feeling nearly had you sobbing into his mouth. It felt so pure, so overwhelming. Finally, you could taste someone. Taste the spice of whiskey and the smoke of cigarettes rather than just the salt from your tears. By instinct your arms wrapped around his neck and you pulled yourself closer to him as if you wouldn’t be satisfied until you were nestled in the warmth of his chest inside of his ribcage.

Eventually, your bodies collided with the mattress and you found yourself caged in by Simon’s arms as he hovered over you. His tongue slipped into your mouth and you felt him groan into you like he had never had such a tasty meal. Then his lips began to wander, and he kissed along your jawline, neck, and further down to your stomach. It was the first time someone kissed your body and it felt like you were being given something rather than having something taken away.

“So gorgeous,” he whispered against your stomach. His hands dipped underneath the short skirt of your dress and pushed it up over your hips, exposing your panties. You let out a shaky breath as he kissed your clit through your underwear, and you realized you had never had someone’s mouth on you like that before. “Wanna taste you, sweetheart. Tell me I can.”

It was strange to have someone ask permission before doing something with you, and you felt your throat grow dry at the thought. Strange emotions swirled like a storm in your head where sorrow mixed with desire among other terrible conflicting emotions, and all you could muster was a simple nod. You just wanted it all to stop, for him to take away the pain no matter the cost.

“Need you to use your words,” Simon mumbled against your heat.

“Yes!” you spoke. The word erupted out of you with little regard for any of those confusing feelings muddling your mind. “Please…”

With a swift yank Simon pulled your panties past the swell of your hips and you raised your legs into the air to let him pull them fully off of you. After tossing them somewhere behind him, he lowered himself onto the mattress and kissed your cunt once more, this time fully bare, which sent a jolt throughout your body. He hardly gave himself the time to admire your body before his tongue began to greedily swipe along your clit. It felt so foreign and unfamiliar yet so intense you found your legs instinctively squeezing shut. Simon only chuckled against you as he pressed his hands on the inside of your thighs to keep himself from suffocating too soon.

There was nothing you could do to stop the way your back arched off the bed in pure bliss. Already he had given you more pleasure in a few moments than you had received in your entire relationship with the Prices, and you bit into your lip as you mumbled out sweet nothings into the heavy air above you. Once you had grown wet enough with his spit and your own arousal, Simon carefully slipped a finger into your heat and you gasped at the sensation. You had never felt so full before and your muscles pulsed around him in greedy response. Despite all the pain and heartache you experienced that night, nothing could drown out the overwhelming mantra of more that reverberated throughout your entire body.

When Simon pulled away from you, your first instinct was to sit up and pull him back to you, but you paused when you saw the way he looked at you. Dark, heavy eyes pierced through you, and you watched in awe as he sat back and slid his shirt off his body in one swift motion. He was so big. Hardened muscle covered with a thick layer of skin and healthy layer of fat, he collapsed on top of you where his lips were on yours once more. His taste was different this time. It wasn’t just whiskey and cigarettes. There was this earthy sapor mixed with it, and it took you a moment to realize that you tasted yourself on his lips.

Then something ripped. Threads of cloth tore a part, and you realized you could no longer feel the dress around your body anymore. Whatever clothing you had worn had been replaced by Simon’s chest pressing against yours, and the skin to skin contact made your head spin.

“Don’t need that anymore,” Simon mumbled against your lips. “Don’t need anythin’ of theirs anymore, yeah?”

You nodded in agreement until you remembered what he said earlier about using your words. “Yeah,” you breathed.

His lips descended down to the soft tissue of your neck while he started to grind his hips against yours. The rough fabric of his jeans were all too stimulating against your needy and swollen clit, and you whined into Simon’s neck as you writhed underneath him.

“Do you want more?” he asked as he continued to grind his hardening bulge against your sex. “I’ll give you anythin’. Just gotta ask for it.”

“You,” you blurted out without so much as a second thought. “Please Simon, I need you.”

There was no more time to waste. With one hand, Simon reached down and unzipped his pants where he released his painfully hardened cock. You felt as he teasingly ran his leaky tip along your slit, smearing precum against you until he carefully dipped down into your hole. Hardly even an inch inside of you and you realized he was significantly girthier than his fingers were, and you found your head falling back against the mattress with a moan at the stretch of him.

“So goddamn perfect,” Simon grunted as he continued to push deeper and deeper into you. “Gonna give you the whole world. Anythin’ you want. Deserve so much more than them, fuckin’ christ, sweetheart.”

More tears poured down your face by the time he bottomed out. It was all just too much, so much anguish and love melding into one confusing feeling in your mind. Yet Simon kissed away every single tear as he began to carefully thrust into you. Each time he moved in you an all consuming wave of pleasure rippled through your body, forcing moans to mix in with your cries in some sort of lamentable symphony.

“I know, I know,” Simon cooed as he placed a fat kiss against your cheek. “You’re mine now, yeah? My girl. Gonna treat you properly. I’ve got you, love.”

Through it all, he was so soft with you, so warm, and you felt that heat begin to pool in your stomach. Every thrust into you marked you, it scratched away the essence of everything the Prices had done to you, what they didn’t do to you. Every empty space that had collected dust inside of you was filled by Simon and the searing passion he pumped into you. That was all you had ever wanted. To be seen, to be touched, to be loved. You had finally found it.

When you came, you did so with a sob. Muscles seized and you wrapped your arms so tightly around Simon’s neck he had no choice but to collapse against your chest as he continued to thrust into you. Your tears soaked into his hair as you sloppily kissed the top of his head, body still craving more of him despite the endorphins that ravaged your body.

“There she is,” Simon sighed, his voice a low rumble. “Doin’ alright, sweetheart?”

“Please,” you begged. “I need it. Need you to come, please Simon.”

Your plea sent him toppling over the edge and he slammed his hips against you one final time before he held himself there with a thick and strained groan. His cock twitching inside you was an unfamiliar feeling and yet you relished the way he filled you, warm cum soothing an ache only he could tame. Your grip around his neck loosened as you felt yourself melt into the duvet. All that pleasure, that love, finally got your mind to fall quiet.

Once Simon managed to catch his breath, he gently pulled out of you before falling next to you. Strong arms maneuvered you onto your side where he pulled you against his chest where he held you firmly against him. As usual, his heart pounded strong and steady in his chest, and the longer the two of you laid there the more calm it grew. Whatever tears you needed to cry had all fallen, and there was nothing but pure bliss that settled over you as you nuzzled against his body.

“I love you,” Simon said. He said it softly, as if it was a secret. Something special that only you could know.

You couldn’t remember the last time someone whispered that phrase to you.

“I love you, too.”

That night was the first night in years that you didn’t fall asleep alone, and when you woke up you realized it wasn’t a dream. His arms stayed wrapped tightly around you throughout the night, and you woke to the scent of his musk and you couldn’t help but smile. Really smile. It was real and you were there and you were loved. You buried your face further into his chest and he reacted in kind by pulling you closer.

“Mornin’ sweetheart,” he hummed.

Humming back, you stretched your limbs with a groan that left him chuckling and he placed a quick kiss on your forehead. He sat up in bed and pulled away from you, which left you whining, until he reached down towards the foot of the bed to grab the clothes you weren’t able to change into the previous night.

“What do you want for breakfast?” he questioned as he handed you his shirt.

Such a simple question, really, and yet it felt so much more important than that. This was the conversation lovers had in the morning. Contemplating, you took the clothes from him and set them beside you as you tilted your head and shrugged. “Whatever you feel like making.”

A small smile pulled at his lips, crooked and scarred, as he glanced toward the bedroom door for a short moment before his attention returned to you. “Alright, I’ll go get started. Take your time, yeah?”

Simon Riley made you feel like a princess and you held nothing in your heart for him but adoration as you watched him slip out of the room, still half naked. Just like he had said, you took your time getting ready, and even then it still wasn’t all that long. You fixed up your appearance as best as you could without a mirror before slipping his shirt over your head. It was long enough that it fell down to your mid thighs, and because of that you didn’t bother with the shorts, or your still slightly damp underwear from the night before, either.

Sizzling bacon and freshly warmed toast greeted you by the time you meandered into the living room, and you smiled to yourself at the sight of Simon cooking in the kitchen. You drooled at the way the sinewy muscles in his back flexed as he worked, and you couldn’t fight away that odd arousal that bloomed between your legs. Deciding that it was a good idea to get some food in your system before attempting to initiate anything physically demanding, you instead sat yourself on the couch.

Your phone sat face down on the coffee table in front of you, and your stomach dropped at the sight of it. Something twisted in your gut at the thought of unlocking it and seeing no messages, at realizing just how little the Prices surely missed you. Yet, you needed to bite the bullet. How were you supposed to start your new life with Simon if you were still holding onto the ghosts of your past?

With a shaky hand, you reached for the item and quickly turned it on. You prepared yourself for its mocking screen, for the heartbreak you knew you would be able to mend later, and yet it still wasn’t enough. Nothing could have readied you for the twenty missed phone calls and the countless texts from both Mr. and Mrs. Price. Begging to know where you were at. Asking if you were safe. Pleading with you to come home. Saying that if you hadn’t responded by noon they would call the cops in fear that the worst had happened to you.

Your throat dried out and you couldn’t stop your lips from trembling. Why did they do that? Was it supposed to be some sort of sick joke? Proof that no matter how far away from them you got you could never escape the hold they had on you? No, you listened to the voicemails. Listened to the way Mrs. Price’s voice quivered when asking if you were alright, when she begged you to come home, and you nearly sobbed.

Something was wrong.

“Simon?” you asked as you snuck into the kitchen behind him.

“Yeah?” he asked as he turned around to face you.

He froze the moment he saw your face. He could read the trepidation on your face as if it were the morning paper, and he quickly placed down his cooking utensils. You hated the way he looked at you with such care and yet with some sort of knowledge, as if he already predicted what you were about to ask him.

“Did you lie to me last night? About Mr. Price asking you to take me home with you?” you asked.

“Yes.”

His response came quick and without hesitation and that almost made things worse. You wished he had paused for a moment to think about the way that word would shatter you, and yet he didn’t. Tears pooled in the corner of your eyes and you found your face falling into your hands in disbelief. He lied to you. He fucking lied.

“Sweetheart, what’s wrong?” he asked as his hands brushed against your shoulders.

“They’re going to be so mad at me,” you cried as you pressed your palms into your eyes. It had to be a cruel joke. You wished it was. They hadn’t given you up at all, and you were going to have to pay the price for betraying their trust.

“Hey… hey, look at me,” Simon ordered as he pulled your hands from your face. The way his hands engulfed your wrists was almost laughable, and you didn’t bother to fight against him. “I thought we agreed that you’re mine now. You’re mine, and I’m yours, yeah?”

“But you lied,” you retorted.

“They were neglectin’ you!” he corrected, and his voice boomed with such strength you nearly cowered. “Would you have followed me if I hadn’t said that to you last night? Or would you be stuck in that house with partners who wouldn’t even tell you that they were havin’ a damn kid? No, you’re mine now.”

One of his hands dropped down between your legs, and you gasped as your back came in contact with the counter. He palmed at your naked cunt, felt the way his cum oozed out of you at the gentle pressure of his fingers and the sudden tensing of your muscles.

“Do you really think they love you enough to take you back like this? With my cum inside of you and the taste of you still on my tongue?” he questioned. “I did what I did to save you. I was tired of seein’ them treat you like that. I’m not lettin’ that happen again.”

Words failed you and all you could do was stare up at him and cry. It was all so wrong and yet something in the back of your mind screamed that he was right. He was right because in one night he had given you everything you had all but begged of them to do for you in all the years you had been together. Even if they still wanted you, maybe they really didn’t deserve you. But you would still have to face them eventually. Admit that you were running away, that you didn’t belong to them anymore, and that thought terrified you.

Giving up, you collapsed against him and allowed all your anguish to spew from your eyes. Just like the previous night, his hold on you was strong and caring, and he did so without hesitation. After all, you were his girl. He saved you, and he had no intention of letting you go.

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On The Run Part 1

The Barn

mdni

cw: violent behavior, suggestive themes, i will get better at this i swear

It’s a downpour tonight. The roof overhead rattles with the force of the winds outside, keeping you awake. Your eyes drift towards the window periodically, watching the lightening illuminate the night sky, thunder rolling closer and closer as the wind hails. Your four loyal, massive Tibetan Mastiffs lay around your bed, dead to the storm raging outside. You’d normally have them out in the barn, but with how terrible it’s coming down you would have felt terrible.

But now you lie awake, worry in the pit of your stomach. Some of the goats had just given birth, and with this storm you knew the kids had to be distressed, and their bleats often agitated the horses.

You absentmindedly reach down to run a hand through Dixon’s fur, who lets out a pleased huff, nuzzling your palm. You try to let the beat of rain lure you to sleep, eyes finally feeling heavy as your breathing evens out.

But then you hear it, over the raging of the storm you can still hear your stallion, Sebastian, neighing, and then the pound of his hoofs against his stalls, and you're flying out of your bed.

Nothing spooks your stallion, absolutely nothing.

You race down the stairs in just your nightgown, rushing to pull on your boots, no socks, as Dixon, Grimes, Judy and Maggie come bounding after you. You throw open the door, the screen slamming against the house from the wind but you pay no mind, running towards the barn, barely catching yourself from slipping in the mud.

The closer you get, the louder you can hear all your herd. Your hearts pounding harder than the rain when you reach the barn doors, and you can hear the dogs barking behind you as you reach to yank open the double doors

Locked.

Your barn is never locked.

From the inside.

“Hello?!” You yell, slamming your palms against the wood, guilt wracking your body when you hear something scurry away on the other side.

“What are you doing in there?” You scream, shaking the handles with all your might, but they hold strong, and after a harsh yank, your hand slips, sending you flying into the mud.

You can hear what can only be described as chaos in the barn, and tears prick your eyes as you crawl forward, banging your fists against the doors.

“PLEASE! Please don’t hurt my animals! They’re already scared! Please- AH!” You scream as the door flies open, sending you face first into the barn floor.

You barely register the blood dripping from your hands as you scramble to stand up, taking in the scene.

The mares were going wild, bucking and kicking the doors of their stalls while Sebastian raged, having busted his door down, prancing infront of his ladies protectively.

Your goats were huddled in a group on the corner, the kids tucked between their bodies and the sheep standing in front of them, shaking so badly their wool was trembling. The rest of the stock is scattered, hiding in various corners of the barn.

You whistle, which immediately catches Sebastian’s attention, huffing and puffing.

“I’m here! It’s okay, ma is here!” You hush them, slowly walking towards the stallion with your hand out, palm up.

He neighs, tossing his head, leaning down to sniff your hand, when he stops, and suddenly a new sound reaches your ears.

Dixon and Grimes are growling out a warning.

Before you can even blink, there’s a hand over your mouth. Your gasp is muffled at the pressure of cold steel at your neck, an arm wrapping around your chest pulling you into a firm, solid figure.

“Not. A. Sound.” A gruff voice barks in your ear, and your blood runs cold.

“Lock the doors back.” The man orders, and a sinking feeling overcomes you when you hear a new set of footsteps. You stumble as you’re jerked back, Dixon barking as you start to thrash, kicking your feet, but the grip around you tightens.

“Fuckin- Knock it off!” He growls, pressing what you can only guess is your carving knife painfully against your throat and Grimes lets out a guttural sounding bark before lunging, only to yelp when a foot shoves him back, and you thrash harder, attempting to nip at this man’s hand.

“Stop you little fuckin-SHIT!” He bellows as your teeth sink into his palm, not releasing until you taste his blood splash over your teeth, and then you’re on the ground.

“Little bitch!”

“Don’t touch my fucking animals.” You spit, turning to stare up at the intruder, just to be met with a ski mask and cold eyes. You can’t help but freeze, the carving knife glinting in the low light of the barn.

He’s quick, and you try to stumble to your feet, but you're once more in his grasp. You go for a punch, but he catches your wrist easily, pinning your arm behind your back with one hand and yanking your forward with the other, pinning you against him, and the knife is at your throat again.

“Let’s try this again.” He says between clenched teeth, tightening his grip till you whimper.

“Ghost. Lighten up.” A voice pipes up, raspy and stern with a commanding tone. The masked man, Ghost, rolls his eyes, but loosens the hold he has on your wrist.

“Who else lives here?” He questions, and it feels as though a bucket of cold water has been dumped over you.

“No one…” You whisper, squeezing your eyes shut when his grip tightens once more. “Don’t bullshit us. Who else lives on this land with you?!” He’s in your face, making you open your eyes, tears blurring your vision.

“It’s just me I swear!” You sob, feeling the tip of the knife digging into your skin. “I swear to god it’s just me, you can go check the house-“

The pressure of the knife is gone, and the shock of your bare knees hitting the barn floors barely phases you as Dixon and Grimes dart to your side, whining softly as they nudge your hands with their heads.

“Think she’s telling the truth?” A new voice speaks up, a thick Scottish accent ringing in your ears as you try to put distance between you and the four, you are finally able to count, men standing in the middle of your barn.

“Explains the massive mutts.” Ghost grunts, glancing at the four mastiffs, who you push behind you, shielding them, trying not to let your fear show more than it already has.

“They aren’t mutts.” You hiss, Judy nuzzling her giant head into your back as you shuffle them back, away from these men.

You hold your head high, but your lip can’t help but tremble when all their eyes turn to you.

“You sure there’s no one else in that great big house?” The older man with scruffy facial hair asks with a tilt of his head, and a spark of agitation flares in your chest. Why did they want to know so badly? if they were going to…

If they were going to kill you, surely they would have done it by now, right?

“I swear on my life.” You plead, voice cracking. You’re horrified when you realize your nightgown has been soaked through this whole time, noticing the way the one with the mohawk, the Scot, keeps eyeing your bosom. You look away, cheeks burning as fresh tears prick your eyes.

“Soap, Gaz. You two go check the house. Report back to me, I want a moment with her.” The unnamed man ordered.

Mohawk and a dark skinned man nodded, heading out of the barn. Ghost passes one of them the carving knife, and your fist curl in your lap.

“What do I do Price?” Ghost asks, and the man, Price, waves a hand, eyes trained on you. “Search the surrounding area, look for anyone hiding on the property.”

“Understood.”

And then you were alone. The barn has settled, most of your animals having made their way to the farthest wall behind you. He approaches you slowly, cautiously eyeing Dixon who raises up, baring his teeth, but you click your tongue, and he steps back immediately, sitting at your side like a statue as the others guard the flock.

You feel a puff of air breath against your head, and you can’t help the wet laugh that bubbles out when you realize Sebastian is standing guard over you.

“Seems you’ve got yourself quite the protection.”

He muses, eyes bouncing between the animals.

“They were abandoned when I found this place.” You confess, a slight tremble to your voice as you watch Price crouch in front of you. He’s quiet for a moment, eyes flickering over your form and you wrap your arms around your middle.

“If my men are walking into a trap, whoever is there will be killed.” He says simply, tone almost bored and you feel your face pale.

“They’re not! This is my land! Mine!” You insist, frustrated tears falling freely as you flex your fingers, muscles tense.

“Tiny little bird like you, all by herself?” Ghost scoffs as he returns, and you feel your ears burn.

“What did you find?” Price asks him over his shoulders.

“Can hardly see shit in this rain but I found no one. There’s a truck around back but the engine seems shot.” He shrugs, eyes peering at you through that ski mask and you avert your gaze.

The doors open against, the other two rushing in, soaked to the bone.

“The house is clear sir. Only one room looks lived in, two guest rooms down the hall on the upper level and a small library on the ground level. Gaz found a shotgun by the front door.” The Scot, Soap, you gather, reports back to Price.

“I told you. It’s just me out here.” You mutter, and this time Ghost is crouching in front of you, grabbing your chin and forcing you to look at him.

“You hiding from something little bird?” He asks, cocking his head to the side

“You’re the ones breaking into my barn and scaring my animals!” You snap, trying to get out of his grip, but he only holds tighter.

“You’re a little fighter aren’t you?” You see his eyes crinkle, and you're shocked this man even knows how to smile under that mask.

He releases you, standing up and stepping back to stand with the other three men, who still loom over you. You feel like a lamb being sent to the slaughter house, and you bury one of your hands in Dixon’s thick fur to ground yourself.

“Please-“ You start, voice shaking, and you feel a tear slip down your cheek.

“I don’t have much, there’s maybe three thousand dollars in the safe in my closet. I’ll give you the code just…” Your voice trails off, a sob slipping past your lips and Dixon whines, low and sad as he places his giant head in your lap.

“Please don’t hurt us. D-don’t hurt my animals- I won’t even call the cops, it would take the nearest deputy three hours to even reach my house.” You beg, exhaustion and nerves taking over as your shoulders slump, trembling with your quiet sobs.

You see Price’s boots approach you, and he tilts your chin up, and you flinch when he brushes a tear away with his thumb.

“Stop all these tears pretty. We don’t want to hurt you or your little farm.” He coos down at you. Confusion swirls in your head, making you dizzy as another sob can’t help but slip out, Price cupping your cheeks, shushing you softly as he wipes your cheeks.

“I don’t understand…” You whisper, searching this strange, terrifying man’s face for any sign of deceit, but he just grins at you.

“You told us the truth. Very good.” It sounds almost like praise the way he whispers it to you, and you whimper, shame filling your stomach. You look away from him, taking a shuddering breath as you struggle to compose yourself.

“Let’s get you back inside hm? Can’t have you catching a cold.” He tsks, and before you can argue, you’re being lifted into his arms, tucked against his chest. You try to struggle, but the adrenaline has worn off, confusion left in its wake as these strange men usher the herd into their correct pens, Soap barley escaping one of the Roosters pecking at him in defiance, before pausing.

“I don’t think I want to mess with this guy.” Gaz mutters, the three of them staring at Sebastian, who stares back, as though daring them to try and corral him.

“He.. He’ll go back in his stall once it’s quiet… You scared them…” You mutter, tired as you give in, resting your head against the strong chest you’re pressed against, and you feel Price’s grip tighten.

“You’re freezing sweetheart, let’s get you out of these wet clothes.” He murmers, and your heart skips.

“I can do that myself.” You hiss, staring up at him with narrowed eyes, despite the fact you can feel your cheeks burning.

He just laughs.

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bobiologist

7 months ago

holy fuck that was so hot

7: Night Shift

art by @exorbitantsqueakingnoises

you work in one of the tourist traps along a popular beach pier known for its party scene. it's a night like any other. you have no idea about the unusual party crashers who are about to show up and ruin everything.

->original work. explicit; contains non-con, graphic descriptions of violence, feral behavior, hard vore, mind control, terato, non-human genitalia.

Last week, it was “Greek Gods of the Sea.” Togas and tridents, mostly, some seashell bikinis, a few fake beards stuffed with plastic starfish. They drank too much and cranked the music too loud, but that’s nothing new. Everyone knows what to expect from the Lucky Rock Pier Party People Association (“Lurpppa” to the local news, “Trouble at Ten O’Clock” to your fellow boardwalk employees, “Those Fucking Kids” to beachfront property owners).

You wear headphones most nights anyway, desperate to keep the shrill, repetitive carnival songs of the pier funhouse from being seared into your brain. They don’t bother you much because the sign at the front says there’s no bathroom and all the hot dogs and funnel cakes are further down the boardwalk, but a few will trickle in just for something to do. If they spot the freezer, they’ll huddle around the glass and stare like the Mona Lisa’s in there, agonizing over a choice between an ice cream sandwich or fruit pops.

Tonight, it’s a glow party. Neon beach balls and glow stick arches. You can’t hear the noise they’re making through your headphones but you can feel the bass throbbing through your feet. Someone’s probably going to call the cops again. The tourist family population retreats this time of night so it’s just you, the handful of shops still open this late, and Trouble at Ten O’Clock. This one’s more fun to watch, at least, bright and colorful like the spill of noctiluca. They’re vivid in glow-in-the-dark body paint, covered in luminescent stripes, swirls and splatters.

A few of them come stumbling up the pier earlier than usual. Three women in different halter tops, painted with matching curly cues and butterflies on their faces. One of them wanders off to look at the tote bags. Another, much more inebriated, leans heavily against her friend. The designated driver, you assume, who drags her to the freezer to pick out something to eat. You glance down at the beach and see one of them sitting on Lucky Rock, the jagged chunk of stone sticking out of the water not far from shore. You’re not sure how he climbed up the slippery, steep sides but he’s definitely not supposed to be up there. The people on the beach are way too excited about it, gathered around cheering and hollering.

Three ice cream sandwiches are dropped on the counter in front of you. You lift one side of your headphones and shrieking noise rushes in, the glow party just as raucous as you expected. “Will that be all?” you ask. The woman nods. Her friend starts to fall over and she has to support her weight against her shoulder. You ring up the total and she groans. Everything on the boardwalk is three times the price it should be, but she adds a tote bag when the other woman wanders back with one and tosses their ice cream inside. “Thanks, come again,” you call, sliding your headphones back on.

Ten minutes until closing time. Not much to do but sweep out the sand gathered in the doorway and tidy up the disaster zone a horde of children made of the stuffed animal section. Sharks and dolphins on the top shelf, turtles on the second, fish and starfish on the third—

Something moves in the corner of your eye. Startled, you turn and find a man ambling slowly through the store. A stray from the glow party, you think at first. Then you look again, paying attention this time. He looks like all the partygoers down on the beach, a silhouette with luminescent edges, but he shouldn’t. Not under the store lights. He’s midnight blue from head to toe beneath intricate glowing patterns, chest and shoulders speckled with small dots like cyan freckles with larger spots along his sides. Thin stripes trace the outlines of muscle beneath the skin, turning into a spiral pattern at his hips.

Which you can see, you realize, because he’s naked. No swim trunks. No speedo. He’s wet and dripping all over the floor like he just crawled out of the water, a puddle slowly growing beneath his feet, and you can follow the course of every droplet as they roll slowly down curves and valleys of lithe swimmer’s muscles. Some of the lines on his torso are moving, you realize. Horizontal squiggles on either side of his abdomen flinch and pulsate.

Gills, you realize. The pieces come together all at once in your mind. Despite working the boardwalk as long as you have, you’ve never seen a sea muse before. Most people haven’t. They’re skittish, you’ve heard. They prefer quiet coves and grottos, places humans have a harder time reaching. Safer that way if they decide to shed their tail and sun themselves for a while. This one certainly doesn’t seem bothered by the commotion down at the beach, poking through the t-shirt rack with long, clawed fingers. He doesn’t look much like the pictures you’ve seen, either, but all the pictures are of muses lurking in tropical reefs, big-finned and colorful like bettas. Beautiful like him, but not bioluminescent and not quite so large. He must come from deeper, colder waters.

You set down a stuffed octopus as gently as you can but he hears it, turning swiftly to face you. Your heart races. He has the large, eerie eyes of an abyssal creature, glowing half-moons gleaming underneath wide silver irises and black sclera. Nobody prepared you for what to do in this situation. Do you play dead? Raise your arms and make noise to scare him off? What you mistook for slicked back hair is some kind of shimmery membrane. It flares out like the neck flap of a cobra in a threat display, but it starts to sag and flatten the longer you stare at each other. His eyes move slightly in their wide sockets, looking you over head to toe.

An uncannily human smile spreads across his face. He makes some odd gestures towards you. His mouth moves. He’s talking, you realize, trying to communicate. You almost lift your headphones off but your brain catches up at the last second. You don’t know a lot about sea muses but you know enough to keep your ears covered.

He blinks, staring at you in almost comical wide-eyed confusion. Then he smirks, his gills fluttering with laughter. He starts pacing back and forth, slowly inching closer like a shark circling prey in the water. He’s between you and the door so you inch towards the register counter instead. Maybe you can slip out the back?

He stops suddenly, leaving some distance between you. He speaks again, tapping the side of his head and pointing at you. You shake your head and he frowns, but he doesn’t give up. You watch, morbid curiosity overpowering your fear, as he starts to move in a slow, seductive manner. It’s some kind of dance, you think, arching his back and extending the membrane on his head again, bioluminescence glittering on thin, translucent flesh. He holds your gaze as he runs a hand down the center of his chest, over his stomach, down to his pelvis and—

You’re not entirely sure what you expected to see between his legs, but it’s still a bit of a shock. The thick, jutting member is deep indigo at the base and a lighter aquamarine down the length. It barely resembles a human cock except in its vaguely phallic silhouette, oozing from an engorged sheath that dribbles cloudy slime. The shaft is smooth with a gentle upward curve, thick and shuddering with unnatural flexibility. It narrows to a soft triangular tip. Two additional appendages unfold from his hips. They remind you of crustacean legs, rigid and insectoid. They bend along two joints, pawing at the air with their sharp claw tips.

The sea muse makes a thrusting motion. The tentacle-cock wraps around his hand, drooling like a tongue. His bioluminescent patches flash and dim like a flickering candle. You’re no marine biologist but it feels safe to assume this is a mating display.

“Uh. No? No thanks,” you say.

He grins. You see a row of daggers for teeth. He speaks slowly and your heart skips a beat when you clearly read the words, Are you sure? on his lips.

“I’m sure. Thanks anyway.” Maybe you should be flattered. You’ve never heard of anyone getting hit on by a sea muse. He lets out a big, disappointed sigh, extra dramatic so you can’t miss it, and gives himself one last stroke before he moves on. You half-expect the cock to slither back into its sheath, but it stays obscenely hard and straining upright between his legs.

To your dismay, he doesn’t leave but instead pokes around the shop some more. He wanders to the left, examining surfboard keychains and hibiscus shot glasses. He wanders to the right, squinting at the postcards. Eventually, he makes his way to the freezer and slides it open with some difficulty. His head membrane flares out wider than you’ve ever seen it the first time he sticks his hand inside. You wonder if he hissed. He tries again, pinching a fruit pop in its colorful package between his claws. He rips the plastic open.

“Hey!” you say. “You can’t just—”

He looks back over his shoulder at you, eyes narrowed and membrane spread in warning. You turn away and continue to mind your own business.

The glow party seems to be winding down. The beach balls are all sitting in a pile. Some of the glow stick arches have toppled over. The pounding bass isn’t shaking the pier anymore. You see a lot of people lounging in the sand, rolling around, stretched out together, a bunch of them writhing—

Oh, you think. That’s bold, even for Trouble at Ten O’Clock. There’s no mistaking those thrusting, grinding, back and forth movements for anything else. There are a few couples scattered around but most of them have settled into a spot worryingly close to the water, seafoam rushing around them whenever the waves come surging up the beach. They tangle together in passionate motion, kissing and caressing and fucking like it’s the last night of their lives.

Something about it unsettles you. They’re being so rough with each other. This isn’t a slow, sensual orgy but a frenzy. Mindless, animalistic rutting and forceful movements. You see mouths open in silent screams. Some of them aren’t moving. Some of them are trying to crawl away but they’re being dragged back by the ankle, the hair, the arm, pulled through the dark sand. Why is the sand so dark? And wet, glistening where the tide hasn’t risen yet.

The horrific realization grips you slowly. You’re in denial. You must be having a nightmare. A man tries to claw his way up the beach but someone else pins him down, straddles his back. You don’t see what happens, can’t make it out in the dark, but the paint on his body stretches and splits, and the sand darkens in a liquid motion under him. A woman arches her back in the throes of ecstasy, surrounded on all sides by eager, thrusting bodies. They’re biting her, you realize. Their heads lower and blood splashes the sand. Through all of it, she squirms and rakes her fingers through the sound as though she’s never felt pleasure like this before. Someone crawls between her legs and she opens them eagerly, loops them around the waist of something that is not human, you realize. None of the ones surrounding her are. They glow more brightly in more precise patterns, membranes pulsating, gills fluttering.

Your headphones are ripped away, clattering uselessly to the floor. You hear an awful cacophony of moaning, screaming, begging, and weeping. You think, for just a second, about running. Your muscles tense and your heart races. Where? For how long? You don’t know but you’re willing to try.

“Where are you going?” says the sea muse and you can’t move a muscle. His voice is low and melodic. You hear the ocean when he speaks; the hiss and splash of the shallows, the heavy drone of the deep. “Hm? Do you want to join them?” You hear the wet slap of his footsteps for the first time as he comes closer. His hand grasps your chin lightly, barely applying any pressure, but you feel compelled to turn around. To look up at his sharp-toothed smile and the gentle pulse of his bioluminescence. “My shiver is down there. Frenzying,” he says. He turns your head to the side, just far enough to glimpse the gruesome scene on the beach, then returns your gaze to him.

“Please don’t,” you say hoarsely, your throat constricted. “Don’t make me, don’t—”

“It’s been so long,” he says, and your mouth snaps shut. “Since I last came ashore.” He walks backwards, his fingers still ghosting against your chin, and you follow. You don’t want to but your legs move on their own. His voice is addictive. You hang on every word and you hope he never stops talking. The silence between makes you tremble. “Even longer since I last mated. You can see it. You can tell how long I’ve waited, if you look.”

You don’t want to look but your eyes betray you, gaze lowering to the slithering thing between his legs. It curls around itself impatiently like a snake. Another glob of slime slides slowly from its sheath and dribbles on the floor. The way it moves frightens you, the base twitching and undulating, slug-like.

“You want this,” he says. He takes another step back and you rush forward. He strokes beneath your chin.

You shake your head desperately. Your mouth is trying to shape the word “yes.”

“You do. You want this.” His back hits the register counter and he leans against it, spreading his legs wide. “You want to taste me,” he says, his voice dipping lower.

You drop to your knees so fast it hurts, feeling the blooming sting of new bruises. It doesn’t matter that you’re terrified. It doesn’t matter that the thing bobbing in your face is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. You open your mouth and suck the strange, pointed head without hesitation. The sea muse moans and your thighs quiver, inner muscles clenching on nothing. You have to hear it again.

“You need it,” he purrs, thrusting shallowly. You bob your head, taking him deeper every time. He hits the back of your throat quickly, his cock eager and probing at the inside of your mouth. “You need me to spill inside you. You need everything I have to give.” You moan and choke around his length. His hand rests on the back of your head, forcing you down further. His thrusts get harder and faster, crushing your nose against his slick abdomen.

Some part of you is screaming at the alien movements of his cock, how it nudges and prods and tries to snake down your throat, but you can’t focus on that. He doesn’t let you. Every grunt and moan, every hiss of praise, makes the fear even more distant.

“You need—oh, yes,” he groans, clutching your head with both hands as he pounds into your mouth. “You need to mate with me. You need—mm, suck on me, suck on the tip—fuck, you need my milt. I have so much and you need all of it.”

You make a humiliating, needy sound when he suddenly pulls you off of his cock. It slips out of your mouth reluctantly, the tip sliding back and forth against your lips. He drags you to your feet by the forearm, shoving you against the register counter. He bends you over it, tearing at your clothes with his claws. You cum when he blows softly against your ear. You’re still shivering, clawing mindlessly at the counter when he kisses and licks the shell, sliding his tongue into every little dip and groove.

“Do you want me?” he whispers. You hear a slick sound, a grunt, and then his hand is at your entrance. He uses the pads of his fingers but he’s not very careful. His claws prick your thighs as ass while he smears thick, warm globs between your legs. “Hm? Do you want me?”

“Yes,” you sob. You arch your back and try to press your hips back against him. He makes a growling sound against your ear that makes your knees buckle, nipping the lobe playfully.

“You want to be fucked?” One hand reaches around and roughly works your sex, spreading a warm, tingling sensation. “Want to be filled with milt?”

“Yes!”

His cock slides along the curve of your ass, teasing you. Then it slithers down, sliding into just the right angle with the tip pushed against your entrance. “Good human,” he purrs, and your eyes roll back in your head. His tip presses inside and then he’s thrusting hard and fast without warning. More slime drips from his sheath and slides down his length, the tingling slickness easing his punishing rhythm. It wouldn’t matter if the lubrication wasn’t there. You can’t do anything but lay there and gasp and meet his thrusts, needing his cock inside you more than you need to breathe.

Those sharp, grasping appendages hook around your thighs. You feel them lock into place, their grip tightening until you’re right up against the sea muse’s body. His thrusts don’t slow at all. If anything, he’s even rougher and faster, deep humping thrusts that make you tremble and scream. He keeps talking through all of it no matter how winded and breathless he gets, keeping you right on the precipice of orgasm after orgasm with filthy whispers and wet, open-mouthed kisses against your ear.

“So tight,” he hisses. “You feel so good, squeezing me like that. You want it so much. I’m going to give you everything. You’re going to be so fucking full.” His hips stutter, losing rhythm. You cum again just as a rush of warm wetness pulses inside you, spurting every time the sea muse thrusts. Thick, creamy liquid churns and foams at your entrance, a trickle dribbling down your thigh. You hear a few drops hit the floor under you. The sea muse rides out his orgasm with long, loud moans that send you over the edge again and again. He crushes you against the counter, hips rolling. One last, slow thrust fills you with another hot gush of his strange cum.

He breathes heavily. His hips sway while he’s still sheathed inside you and his cock curls just the right way to make you sob for mercy. “Hm? You think we’re done?” he murmurs. “I told you. It’s been a long time. I still have so much more to give you. And you want it, don’t you? You need it?”

“Yes,” you say, your voice quivering and broken. The sea muse starts to fuck you again and all you can do is let him.

You don’t know when it ends. It could be minutes, or hours, or days. The passage of time is measured in breaths and heartbeats and orgasm after orgasm. The floor is slick and sticky under you, a white puddle of milt steadily growing. You think he bites you but you don’t know. It all feels good, especially when he tells you how perfect you are, how sweet and submissive, how well you’re milking his cock of everything he’s saved for this moment. He makes you ride him once, seated on the counter while he bounces you in his lap. He digs his claws into the meat of your ass and leaves marks.

You don’t know who finds you. Someone else who works the pier, probably, too horrified and embarrassed for both of you to stick around. The Coast Guard sweeps the water but the sea muses are long gone, leaving nothing behind but the mangled leftovers of their frenzy. The bodies glisten in the sand, torn to shreds like a burst whale carcass. By sunrise, the flies and the seagulls are swarming. You’re escorted to an ambulance with a blanket over your shoulders. The first person to look you in the eyes tells you, very quietly, that you might want to quit your job and consider moving inland.

“Those are mating marks,” he says. You don’t know how he can possibly tell, given that they’re everywhere. Jagged, oozing circles dot your shoulders, arms, thighs and back. “Because they’re at a very precise depth. Meant to scar, not to kill. That means it’s going to come back.” They tell you not to look at the water but you do, one last time, before you leave. You don’t see anything. That doesn’t mean anything. The water’s deep and it seems to go on forever.

That night, in a hospital bed, you have a dream of someone singing to you. It sounds like the ocean filling your ears.

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try not to eat challenge failed

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bobiologist

9 months ago

Hello there! My family needs to leave Gaza out of necessity . I suffer from nightmares that are so closely resemble reality that I no longer Differentiate between reality and a dream.Thank you for taking your efforts and time in reading my plea. There are no words to describe the horrors unfolding in this place,never expected to find myself in this situation. Because of this horrible situation I have decided to come before you guys for a financial support so that I can evacuate my family from this hell that we are into.The funds will be strictly used for the evacuation . I will personally bear any additional expenses incurred.Your support will make a significant difference in alleviating the suffering of my family ,We urgently need any kind of support before it is to late. As time ticking away translates to lives lost in Gaza I'm here and ready to answer any questions or concerns you may have.Kindly reach out and connect with me

i don’t have the means to donate but i can reblog!

and y’all should too.

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bobiologist

9 months ago

third hour of the night

Baby Trap + Gaz x Fem!Reader | 24k

The latest brush with death opens a wound, a chasm on the underside of his ribs that hungers for something he can't discern. He eats and it’s still empty. Gorges himself tirelessly but the maw still growls for more.

(He thinks it might be a sense of homesickness. And his home has always been you.)

OR: Icarus tries a different approach to capture Apollo once and for all.

18+ | SMUT: dubcon. baby trapping, contraceptive tampering. emotional manipulation. brief violence, near death experiences. obsessive/possessive Gaz. jealousy. unsafe sex. breeding. implied stalking. trauma and the consequences of almost dying several times. reckless behaviour.

MASTERLIST | A03

The thing about dying is that it tends to put everything into perspective.

Things like the fleeting, ephemeral blink of life itself. The fragility of human existence. How vulnerable this glasslike body of his really could be.

In a matter of seconds, he would have been erased. A soot stain on the pavement where the metal frame of a small charter plane impacted the ground, bursting into flames almost instantly. Incinerating him. Melted skin, charred bone. Suffused with plastic and steel. Entombed in a crumpled husk of iron and pipedreams.

The real cruelty, he finds, is how empty this brush with death leaves him. Gaping. A chasm. He sticks his fingers into the hole and feels nothing—

Nothing but hunger.

It happens in a blink.

Eyes open, and he feels like Icarus. Wings of metal, feathers, and beeswax. He soars above the treeline in a seamless incline, gaining altitude over the ochreous dunes in the distance. The great pyramids that once took dominion in his field of vision were soon to be specks in his periphery.

There's something about flying that makes him feel both endlessly invincible and damnably fragile at the same time.

Man's hubris—

Eyes half-mast, squinting against the smoulders of the sun, he feels the heat on his skin as they grow nearer to its coruscating flames. The window is hot. He places his palm against it. Feels the tremble of the machine as it works against gravity to free itself from those stifling confines.

Kyle’s eyes slip closed—

—and he's suddenly reminded of why hubris is defined as a defiance of the gods.

(Nemesis rakes her nails down the metal flesh of the bird, unyielding its wiry skeleton underneath; where are your wings?—

—man, willful creatures with their desire to be within the stars; cosmogyral. and oh, she laughs—)

Like Icarus, the plane meets the sun in a hard, hateful kiss, sputtering out in a series of agonising whimpers. The cockpit screams. Howls, shrieks, warning them all of an impending doom—

(—apollo, apollo, apollo—)

And then he's falling. Weightless. Wingless.

(too low, terrain, terrain; pull up, pull up—)

“Fuck!” The curse is garbled in his headset, nearly swallowed by the agonal hiccups of the plane nose-diving to the ground. “I don't know—I don't—” (—pull up, terrain, terrain; pull up, pull—); “we're stalling, we lost the engines, we're—”

In his periphery, he can still see the blurry blots of the pyramids smeared under the plunging freefall to the ground that Pharaohs have kissed with the soles of their feet. They flicker in and out of his line of sight, a taunting reminder that his kin don't belong in the skies. That they build from the ground up.

Amid the chaos, Price shouts something—a warbled hiss, words stuck in the back of his throat, limping out of his pale lips in a wheeze; gravity wraps a mocking hand around his neck, giving a tight squeeze. Kyle can see the whites of his knuckles against the armrest, skin prickling with goosebumps as they're dragged back to the dirt.

by the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return

He folds suddenly, torso flopping down over his thighs, hands screwing themselves angrily against the nape of his neck. Protective embrace. Through the angular cut of Price’s bent arm, a blue eye gleams in the flickering dark—electricity cut; the only light source inside the cabin a devastating flash of sun each time the plane rolls—and the anger there, he knows, is pasted evenly across his face.

Fuckin’ helicopters. We'll take a bird instead.

Hubris, he thinks, just as Price barks out, get down, Sergeant!

Survival training ensures his movements are fluid. Unconscious. He tightens his body into a ball, hiding all his fleshly organs from spilling out across the aisleway. Scarred palms cupped over his head, his stem.

Couched into the claustrophobic space between his knees and the hard plastic of the seat in front of him, he finds he can't breathe like this. That training hadn't prepared him for the way gravity feels when it's trying to crush something into dust—but he heaves through the hypoxia, blinking furiously against the phosphenes spooling like ink blots over his eyes.

There's a whistle in his ear, a swooping nausea in the pit of his stomach. He tastes blood in his throat. Feels the fluttering winds of his trapped heart beating against his larynx with every swallow.

His thoughts are tangled. Knotted. The edges fray, unravel. It slips through his fingers, translucid. Weaving through the gossamer fogging through his mind. A thick, impenetrable cloud of mutinous emotions. All frothing over the other, intangible. They're drowning each other in a desperate bid to stay afloat, and Kyle can't bring himself to reach for one over the other, opting instead to save none at all.

There's a roar. Brontide. It echoes in his head as the pyramids once again fill the entirety of his vision. Close to the earth. Close to death—

Kyle doesn't pray. Doesn't beg for forgiveness, for salvation.

His mum might. He thinks he ought to, but where he should find repentance, sorrow, fear, he instead feels anger. Uncovers it like a forgotten relic. A childhood toy. Holds it like a knife to his throat.

It's vicious, this fury. This rage. Consumes him from the inside out, blisters through his veins. Chokes him—

In between the apoplectic bitterness, memories flicker by. Broken, fractured remnants of a youth wasted in his grim, spiteful anger. Ironic, now, since he tastes fury, bellicostic and wrathful, in the back of his throat, bubbling up, florentis.

Bathed in the endless red fury of his mindseye, he thinks of his mum. Standing up in church, her fingers knotted tight against a rosary as she murmured along with the passages, his father sat beside her. His brothers, and sisters. The life he led up to this point, and then—

—you.

Life in stages. Snippets. Him, you. It rushes by in a maelstrom of want, need, and anger.

It's short. The distance between knowing you and now charted in a paltry decade; an infinitesimal amount of time that leaves him feeling bitter, and regretful. He barely had you, and now—

Reincarnated as Icarus. Cobbled together from clay and feathers, subsumed with the ghost of a wilful man. Haunted by fate. Tortured with the endless agony of a looping, meandering death to kiss the sun and fall from grace, wingless. Scorched.

His life is a mere echo. Smoke from a snuffed flame.

And you— You. You, you, you:

Kyle finds you when he's running after a man through the tangled, indifferent streets of London.

Weaving, bobbing around the crowd gathered around—clusters of tourists standing still on the sidewalk, forcing the herd to mould around them; idle passersby meandering through the throng of a Saturday afternoon rush—the man he's chasing uses them all as an obstacle. A place to hide.

It nearly works, too. And if anyone else had been pursuing him, Kyle knows he'd have been long gone already. Seamlessly swallowed up by the rabble.

But Kyle's different.

For the entirety of his career, Kyle has been told he's more instinct than man. Reactive. The sort of person that was undoubtedly reincarnated from a wolf, one who used to prowl the boreal forests for musk ox and caribou.

When people run, he just—

Chases.

It's innate. in his blood. Instinctual.

And everyone knows better than to run from a predator. To trigger their prey (hunt, kill, consume) response.

So, when the man slips from his partner’s grasp and flees down the crowded streets of London, Kyle doesn't think. Not for a second. He locks his eyes on the man's back and follows.

He cuts a jagged path down the crowded streets, using the meandering passersby to his advantage. Thrown down to the pavement as obstacles in his pursuers' way, ones meant to trip Kyle up. To gain ground, put distance between them.

It's a futile effort in the end. He loses momentum and speed with each person he shoves, and Kyle soon closes in on him, less than an arm's length away. So close Kyle can taste the pungent burn of his cologne in the back of his throat, fingers reaching, nails grazing over the polyester fabric of his jacket, and—

You're there. Suddenly. All at once.

Thrown, roughly, into his chest. The only thing keeping you from breaking your nose on his kevlar being your fists touching his sternum before the rest of you followed.

Eyes wide, wild with fear, shock, you gaped up at him, blinking fast. Your pretty mouth opening, closing. The broken words swallowed down, crushed under the weight of your confusion, your fear.

With your chin tilted up, he could see the curve of your vulnerable neck, eyes drawn to the shadows under your jaw where your heart pulsed against your skin. Vein throbbing in tandem with your heartbeat.

Reflectively, his hands jerked up. Arms locking around you, palms bracing you—one falling to the small of your back, the other cupped protectively against the nape of your neck. It brings you closer to him, pushes the endless softness of your body into his hard, unyielding armour.

And—

Well.

It's not often—if at all—that he loses sight of a mission. Let's himself become distracted, pulled away. And even now, he's not. Not really. He can still see man in his periphery, nothing more than a bobbing head of blond hair, and he knows that his partners are waiting for him by the entrance of an alley. Crested above the crown of your head, he sees one of them—Marcus, he thinks—jump out, tackling the man to the ground. Domhnall follows suit, gun cocked, and aimed at the struggling man's head, finger never having left the trigger once since he set off in pursuit.

Kyle never had to give chase, anyway. But the man ran first, and—

A bad idea, really.

The men he works with now often joke that he's more instinct than man. Chasing after moving targets like a wolf trying to run aground an elk. Under the perceived stupidity of the action lingers a honed strategy. One passed down for aeons.

Chase, keep pace, until something gives. Something breaks.

And it's never him.

Until now.

You just fit. Like you were made to be in his arms.

Kyle knows, muted and distant; the thought all tangled up in the back of his head, that he should let go of you now. Gently nudge you on your way. Out of sight, out of mind. Go back to where the man is being wrangled into cuffs amid an agitated crowd murmuring to themselves, all trying to peek over the shoulders of the other officers, ones now congealing into an imperfect circle after spilling out of the blacked-out Tahoe parked near the curb. They'll need help to keep the crowd from fringing on their arrest. Kyle knows this. Knows, too, that he ought to join.

But he doesn't.

Can't.

In the gloom of a midday drizzle, you burn.

Bright. Ferocious. The coruscating gleam of your gaze is enough to render him to cinders at your feet. Burnt sage, sweetgrass. Bushels of charred barley. Ceremonial in this poignant unmaking; this chiseling down of his being into ash at your altar. He's swept up in it. The thick smog that congeals around you in a dense plumage of smouldering earth. Hallowed lands.

It razes him.

You: apollo—this devastating creature of pure light.

He wants to bask in it. Burn his flesh on your ethereal glow. Leans in to feel the white-hot lick of flames dancing, cosmogyral, across his flesh.

(Godlike, but you fit in his arms with an ease that belies your otherworldly splendour, that defies the partitioning between man and god—)

“Hi,” he says instead, the word chipped down to the marrow. Bare. Fractured. “You okay—?”

It's here, in this pardoning breath, where he finds the extent of your facile mortality. Beneath his hands, you're supple. Soft. Through the knitted cashmere of your sweater, he can feel the heat of your skin bleeding into his palms. His fingers clench, and he meets pillowed bone.

You're fragile. Vulnerable.

(a man threw you into him with an ease that prickles along his nape; chase hunt consume:

protect. shield. provide—)

Instinct, he thinks. More urge than man. Primal. Animalistic.

Kyle can't remember the last time he felt like this way about anyone. This heavy, poignant drive to burrow his face into your neck, to breathe in the loamy scent of you, and bite down, claim.

His teeth ache. He flexes his jaw to stem to throb under his canines. Wet, pulsing—like an infection (a heartbeat).

As saliva floods his mouth, yours opens shallowly in a huff.

“I'm fine,” you're saying. Dazed, windswept. “I'm—”

He clings to you harder. Knows that his grip is undoubtedly popping blood vessels under your skin like bubbles, but he needs this. Needs time. Needs you.

A minute longer. Just a minute more—

If it hurts, you don't make any show of it. Impassive in your shock, you gaze at him. Flay him alive under the burning charcoal of your heavy stare.

He thinks—

this is it. my apollo.

—but someone is calling his name. Fingers pry apart his hold on you, shoving him back into the iron embrace of his peers.

“I’ll take over, sir,” he hears through the clamour of noise. “I’ll take them to the paramedics to get checked over. You can let go now—”

“C’mon, Garrick, let go—”

The commotion heightens. Through the hands, the shoulders, the push and tug, your eyes never waver from its perch along his thundering jaw. The anxious, angry pulse of his ire blooming viciously in his veins.

(how dare they—? how dare they touch you—)

Your mouth opens again. Soundless, but he hears it like a gunshot.

“Go.” And then: “I'll be fine.”

It breaks. His partner wrenches him back, stumbling under the sudden momentum as Kyle lets his fingers ease up, releasing you. You're dragged away, swallowed soon by the crowd, but like a hunting dog, he doesn't look away. Can scent you even when you're gone; a thick, earthy scent collars around your neck, and leads him back to you.

He moves to follow it—

A hand lashes out, slams against his sternum. “Kyle! Come on, man, we got a fuckin’ criminal to detain—”

He blinks, wrenched from this reverie, this stupor. “Fuck,” he spits, tasting ash between his teeth. “Fuck—!”

“You never think,” is what his higher-ups often tell him after he sprints, full throttle, at a target within seconds of them making off. “Your performance is incredible, Garrick, but you just never think before you act—”

This isn't true. Kyle thinks a lot. All the time, really. Kyle's mind has the propensity to spin itself into exhaustion; to never cease. A constant loop. Endless spirals.

He thinks about everything. Nothing. All of it shaded in both abstract ideas and concrete plans.

Because the thing is:

Kyle sees the world—or rather, situations—as a chessboard. Pieces, pawns, meant to be moved in a preordained sequence.

But telling people who believe that the definition of subordination is waiting for the green light to trickle down from several floors above despite those men only having fragments of a puzzle is a lost cause. A battle he's never, ever won before.

So, he relents. “Yes, sir.”

Relents so much that his palms carry jagged crescent moons across his life and heart lines. Swallows down the fury, the rage, even though it blisters through his veins. A permanent, simmering agony burning him up from the inside out.

Flashes a grim salute to hide the hissing vitriol as it claws up his throat, tearing tissue as it climbs, until all he tastes is blood flooding his mouth.

“Good,” they simper. “Keep that up, and maybe one day, you'll be where I'm sitting.”

His ambitions are worn on his skin. He feels something hot, sticky, congeal between his fingers, and knows that he'll soon be wearing a pastiche of ananke’s brode on his flesh.

Ambition, he finds, feels like choking himself until his vision goes blurry around the edges. Until hypoxia bleeds in, dripping down his periphery in tarry black splatters.

It feels like swallowing his tongue. Burying himself alive on his—

draw the line wherever you need to, Sergeant.

—righteous fury.

His palms itch,

like an infection. untreated. left to rot. gangrenous. septic. his blood is polluted. he feels the fever run, red-hot, through his veins, charring bone.

marrow burns to ash. he finds a peculiar comfort in the fire.

moth to a flame. maybe it's only natural, then, that he goes to find you.

The scent trail fades, erased under the stale tang of a restless crowd; admixing into the nauseating smells of London after dark.

But where it began, he finds a flickering ember. Discovers your chevelure, and winds it around his aching palm until it hides his brode under starlight.

Everything is murky grey, but he finds you in pure white. The cashmere sweater is a beacon, luring him in, and he hides his intentions under the guise of militaristic concern. Altruism. Crossing t’s and dotting i’s. Tells the paramedics hanging loosely around you that he has a few questions for you. Purely professional.

They don't question him. Eagerly offer up your name, your date of birth, your address, your status. He doesn't even have to pull rank to get it. When he bites into the thought, it tastes of bittermelon.

How easy could it have been for anyone to discover, then. To pick pieces of you between their fingers, plucking ripe cherry tomatoes off the stem.

Kyle bites back a snarl, and offers then a wide, gleaming smile instead. Baring teeth. Says, “thanks, mate,” and weaves around them before they can see his fists shaking by his side.

He finds you standing by the curb, curled fingers tucked tight against your temple as you survey the throng of lingering onlookers with an impassive, flat stare. Limned in hazy red and blue, you look almost like a picture. A painting. Something archaic. Special. He wants to hide you away from the prying eyes of the reporters congregating down the street, all rallying for the biggest headline on a new story.

At the same time, though, he wants to stay aside. To watch. To let the rest of the world see you behind a thick sheet of plexiglass. Visible to their voyeuristic gazes but untouchable to all,

(bar him)

His heart thunders when you turn. Chin tipping, tucking against your pearled collar to peek over your shoulder. Even in the matte grey gloom of London, you burn. He blinks. Blinks again.

You're turning now, brows drawing together as you struggle to piece together why he's lurking behind you like a shadow, but—

You brighten at the sight of him. Recognition chewing through megrim. Still curled into a loose fist, you lift your hand and give him a small, perfunctory wave. You must expect him to stop here, a modest, safe distance away.

Your brows knot once more when he doesn't. When he steps, boldly, outside of the lines of societal propriety, and into your orbit. You wear this flummoxed uncertainty like a mask. Kyle finds it more endearing than he ought to. Finds, too, that he wants nothing more than to see you bare.

“Hi,” he greets again, just shy of an arm's length away. Even with proximity, it feels too far. “You alright?”

Breathless, you murmur: “yes,” and then, hurriedly, like you've just remembered yourself. “Thank you. For, um, catching me, I guess?”

Catching you. The wording needles under his skin, an ugly, vicious itch he can't scratch. But he supposes that's what it looked like from the outside in. Stopping a fall. Protecting a civilian.

You were pushed, shoved into him, and he caught you. Held you aloft as his partner took Kyle's place in the pursuit.

So, he takes it. Smiles again, softer this time. All that rugged, boyish charm that his friends used to tease him over.

Deadly that is, mate. Dunno how any bird can resist a smarmy fuckin’ grin like that.

Model, ain't he? Pretty boy. Maybe you should change careers, eh? Bet Givenchy is frothing at the mouth for a looker like you.

And it works. Of course, it does.

Hook, line—

“Had me worried there that he might have hurt your pretty face. Was proper ticked off, so I thought I'd come and check on you—”

At pretty, you duck your head shyly in response, lips warbling around a nervous smile. Eyes bright, gleaming, under the hazy smear of red and blue light.

He makes a show of checking his phone, brows tightening at the time played in neon white.

“Gettin’ late. You live close by? I, uh, I'd feel terrible sending you home by yourself at this hour,” there's an immediate protest on your lips. He nips it with his teeth. Gives a bashful grin. “And, ah, I like talking to you. Wouldn't mind continuing the conversation if you're interested?”

You're burning. Grinning under a plume of demurred appeasement. Sweetened by his bold words, and the wide, boyish smile he wears.

And—

—sinker.

Dazedly, you offer him your hand, stammering as his thumb brushes delicately over your knuckles. Lips wet, glossy. He wants to lean down, lick across them, and taste you on his tongue. But Kyle refrains. Rocks back on his heel, reluctantly dragging himself away.

It's endearing, endlessly sweet when you unconsciously follow. Leaning forward, eyes wide and full of wonder.

In the next beat, you give him your number.

He takes that, too, and holds it.

At the foot of your door, you thank him once again for catching you. The joke rolls off your loose tongue in a playful quip that he snatches up from the air, holds in the palm of his hand.

“Anytime,” he says, softened under the pale moonlight.

caught. catching you.

he sees it much differently.

to Kyle, you were a gift thrust into his unexpected hands. a pretty little box for him to unwrap, unravel.

(his, and his alone—)

As he hits the ground, he thinks of you.

As flames fold over his body, ripping through broken metal, he hears something crack. Hears it shatter.

And he still thinks of you.

Kyle crawls from the burning wreckage with the bloodied, broken tips of his jagged nails digging into the scorched pavement. Emerges a phoenix. Rising from the smouldering husk of a plane mangled on the pavement with fawnlike legs and an ache in his jaw.

Intact, he finds, but there's an echo in his head. The sound of breaking glass. Bones snapping like twigs. Something shatters. Something breaks.

He holds his hand to his chest and knows, then, that it's not so much a fracturing of bone or tissue, but a cage. A prison. Something housing the things he'd rather not think about.

It's fine. It'll be fine.

He crawls through the smoke to get to Price and doesn't think about the oil spill he left behind on the pavement.

Price says, “that was close,” in a tone so unbothered, so unconcerned, that Kyle has to take a moment to reacclimate himself to his trauma after being knocked so far off-kilter. Jerking back into flight or fight after that blase dismissal when the smouldering ash begins to clog the air, spewing noxious poison from the chemicals, the metals, now completely aflame.

He might think Price is numb to this, to falling from the sky like every parable of Icarus he's ever heard (if the ambitious god had metal blades instead of feathers for wings), but adrenaline makes his senses keener. Sharper.

As the idea of his captain being an unrepentant sociopath (the jury, though, is still very much out on that one) starts to congeal from its incorporeal shadows, he catches the shake of his hands as he pats his beast pocket down for the stash of cigars he keeps on his person.

Trembling, white-knuckled. Each pat feels much too heavy than it ought to be. Too forceful.

He gets it, suddenly. Thinks he might understand Price in a way he didn't before.

So, he says, “yeah.” And when it comes out far shakier than he intended, he clears the soot, the iron tang of adrenaline from the back of his throat, and adds: “a bit too close, mate.”

In the end, they take him away on a gurney to a medical ward in a nearby city.

Kyle isn't hurt—barring the contusions, the bone-deep bruises, the cuts, the lacerations—but they pay little attention to his protests when they poke him, prodding at his insides to find a phantom crack in the tender network of his body.

Physically, he's fine. Nothing amiss at all. Everything is in good, working order—if a little scraped around the edges.

They decide to keep him overnight for observation, though. The doctor's worrying about head trauma, concussions. Price, too, is forced to stay—not so much kicking and screaming, but certainly with a lot of complaining that echoes down the hall (bloody fuckin’ muppets—can’t you see I'm fine?)—and he takes a marginal amount of comfort in knowing that he's not the only one on mandatory best-rest.

It all could be worse.

He thinks, then, of Soap. Of the gaping wound in his head—blood spilling everywhere. Ghost leaning over him, sounding less like a human with each harrowing Johnny! that was ripped from his throat.

The endless trawl of uncertainty as they carried him away, his hand falling from the gurney. Hanging there, pale and limp. Jostled with the movements of the medical team as they tried, desperately, to stabilise him.

And then—

The aftermath, he supposes.

Soap sitting up in a hospital bed, head wrapped up in stark white bandages. He smiled, laughed. Said he had too much to do to leave them now, but there was something wrong. Something—

Missing, almost.

Gone.

They don't speak about it, but he knows Price and Ghost feel it all the same. Must, of course, because Price is firm, unyielding, when he tells Soap to piss off somewhere for a while. Takes each excuse to the chin, stalwart in the face of Soap's pleading negotiations.

It could be like that. Medical leave. Mandatory. Something was absent in Johnny's eyes. A hollow vacancy where hazel once burned bright in the gloom.

Kyle places his bandaged hand on his chest, feels every brag of his heart through aching skin, and knows, somehow, that it's not the same. Not quite, but—

He thinks he might be missing something, too. He's just not sure what it is, and that—

That scares him.

Because if he didn't feel the jagged glass digging into his flesh, he might not have known something broke free. Escaped. Fell, perhaps, to its death when the helicopter started to whine like an injured animal, barely able to limp through the sky.

Standard procedure would dictate that he calls someone. Schedule a session with a licensed therapist the moment he gets back home, and let them determine if he's field-ready.

But he doesn't. He thinks about Soap, and the anger in his eyes when Price told him that he was on leave, dismissing him with a simple flick of his wrist.

“How long, cap’n?” He ground out between clenched teeth. “How long are ye sendin’ me away fer?”

And Price just levelled him with a flat look. “As long as it takes, Sergeant.”

That was that. That was—

He's not what compels him to call you, but he does. Drags out his phone from his pocket, unlocks the (cracked, of course) screen with a shaking finger, and pulls you from his contact list. His nickname for you isn't anything special—can’t be, really, in this line of work—and it's boiled down to something so inconsequential, so mundane, that he feels a little bit untethered seeing it now. If he really did die, if he was seriously injured—

How would they know to call you when your name in his phone is simply: doves. A lingering remnant of your second meeting.

Doves. A pretty pair perched on the curb when you met again after texting for a week, pecking idly at the scraps left behind. You surprised him, then, when you materialised out of the air, murmuring to yourself about the sorry state of them.

Too pretty for crumbs, you lamented and reached into your pocket for a rolled-up bag of sunflower seeds. You barely paid him much mind at all, too busy scattering seeds for the birds, and watching as they scurried toward it.

It was the ease with which you moved through the world—seamless, untethered—that drew him in. The peaceful serenity that leaked from your pores, clouding around you, seemed to scour the anger that hung tight to his shoulders, hitching itself across his nape. Weighing him down. You picked the anchor up, letting him breathe for a moment through lungs that didn't feel as if they were being crushed under unfathomable pressure. All his rage accumulating right by his heart now cupped in the palms of your hands.

You turned back to him, then, a defiant tilt to your chin as if begging him to say something about feeding pigeons on the street. Readying yourself for a fight despite the loose set to your shoulders, the flat, open palms dusted with powder from the seeds.

Gone was the sheepish woman who tripped into his arms. In her demurring place stood a thunderclap. A lioness.

He knew, without any sense of uncertainty, that he wanted to know more about you. Everything, if you'd let him.

(And you had. Without any sense of hesitation or uncertainty, you—)

He stares down at your name for a moment, thoughts in tatters much too thin for him to pick out. But he feels. Too much, not enough. Arguably the worst in its abundance, in its raw, fractured ache somewhere deep in his chest.

It's a want. A need. Desperation drapes itself over his shoulders in a way he's never felt before; all soot-stained, and foul. Rank. It smells like an infection: gangrenous and putrid, rotting tissue leaking puss. Skin sloughing off in blackened, festering clumps. The stench of it sits in his nose, clogged in the back of his throat. He can almost taste it.

Despite its nauseating miasma, the horrid tang pooling between his teeth, there's an odd sort of comfort in it. A familiarity he can't place.

He wonders if Soap felt this way after he woke up in the hospital with a hole gouged in his head from a bullet. Left wondering what piece of himself was torn out along with a bloodied, mangled mess of tissue, bone, brain, and grey matter that once filled the space. A vacuum the width of a thumb. A permanent pockmark on his forehead.

The thought shakes him, and drags his tender leg up to his chest, rests his forearms on his knee, ignoring the tremble in his hands, and he calls you.

His face appears on the screen, stuffed into a box. He stares at it as the call connects, taking stock of the way he looks.

In the gloam of an Egyptian sunset—swaths of ochre coruscating across dunes of gold; glinting off the desert sand as if the sun was trying to inch closer to this haven, the place it called home—the cuts on his face are limned, turning the colour of ripened pomegranates; crushed cherries. Highlighted under the mournful torpor of the sun, he looks worse for wear. Bruises under his eyes, framing them heavy kohl. Splotches of yellow—the same shade as a fresh bushel of wheat—halo around the worst of them, painting a striking picture of injury on the high arches of his cheekbones.

He should angle the phone away. Sit back into the deep blue shadows and let the absence of light hide the worst of it all from your eyes. It's what he normally does. What he should do.

But there's a hollowness on the underside of his ribs. A gaping maw that hungers for something he can't discern; rapacious. Unknowable. It wants. Yearns.

(He thinks it might be a sense of homesickness.

And his home has always been you.)

So, he calls. Waits for it to connect. And somewhere in the back of his head, he knows something isn't quite right.

But he doesn't fight it.

Can't, really, even if he wanted to because your face appears on his screen, filled out in a perfect box. The smile is already there, blooming daffodils against dark indigo. The greeting on the tip of your tongue has a flash of pink and gleaming white splitting the tomato red of your lips apart, happiness draping itself heavily over you.

But it falls, instantly, when he moves. Winces. You catch it, then, the unmistakable ugliness splattered across his face. Bruises framed in hazy, blood orange. Cuts illustrated by the last vestiges of a stubborn sun refusing to yield.

Kyle dips his chin. The stitches on his forehead pull against the inflamed skin. It's the worst of it, he knows. It catches in the fading embers of an ethereal twilight, and the hitch in your breath echoes in the room.

“What—?” The words are ashy whisper in your throat, falling over him. A rainfall of soot.

The frown on your face is a dagger. It twists, turns. Scraps muscle from bone. Leaves a gaping hole between the milky bracket of his ribs.

“Oh, Kyle—”

There are a multitude of things he ought to say. I'm fine, first and foremost. And it's the truth. He is. The cuts, the scraps, the bruises, all hurt less than the ache in his head, the throb in his muscles. The fallout from the adrenaline rush following the crash hurts more than anything else.

He should calm your worry. Laugh about it in that paper-thin way he's wont to—like it doesn't bother him, doesn't hurt despite both of you knowing he'll be up all night long for the next several weeks, running along his own desire path carved between the living room and kitchen. Not thinking at all, and—

And thinking too much.

The juxtaposition, a blatant oxymoron, will curdle in his chest, growing moss, leaking spores. He's good at pulling them out before they mushroom inside of him, burrowing deep and leaving gaping pockets behind. Scrapes them from flesh. Douses them with gasoline. Purification with fire.

With your touch. You'll wake the next morning and find him dozing on the couch. Will rain kisses across his face, gentle and soft, before wandering away to make something for him to eat. Later, you'll drag him to the tub. Wash his body as he leans against your chest, the hollow spaces inside of him slowly filling with warm, lavender-scented water.

He'll come back in pieces. Inchmeal. And then hold you as close as he can in bed as though he's trying to fuse your skin together. Crawl inside of you and stay in the brackets of your ribs.

It's all—

Routine, maybe. Carved out from years of this. This slow crawl to the inevitable end, hand-in-hand.

And yet.

(and yet: he can't.)

Can't bring himself to reassure you when his heart is racing in his chest. A naughty child sneaking cookies off the counter when his mum isn't looking.

“Almost died,” he offers, fractured and raw. “I—uh, shit. Sorry. I don't know. Just—needed to see you, is all.”

And it's the truth.

You feel it. You must. The urgency, the desperation. This time is not like the others.

“No, no, Kyle. Don't—don’t apologise. Don't ever apologise, I—fuck. I'm glad you're okay, I'm—”

Pearlescent tears puddle in your lashes. You've never cried before. Not in front of him. Never. Preferring instead to bite your knuckles, to press your face into the pillow. Unwilling to let yourself ask for more than what you think you deserve.

(And it's never enough. Not to him.

your plate is empty, you're starving. but you refuse to eat.)

And when they spill down your cheeks, he leans back with a huff. Satisfaction is whitehot in his veins and he doesn't know why. Doesn't understand how the sight of you crying over him like this almost makes him want to preen. To purr.

Blames it on the fall. On the taste of burning metal still clogging the back of his throat.

“I'll be fine,” is offered, scratched out of his throat with jagged nails. Birthed into the world on a whisper-soft scream. “You don't have to worry about me.”

Your face falls. “Of course I’m going to worry about you.”

“I promise I'm—” he chokes a bit. Tries to cover it up with a cough. The frown on your face grows, eclipsing all the prior happiness that once glowed when you first answered the phone. “I'm good. Just need some rest.”

“Yeah, that might be a good idea.”

The tension is thick. He feels it thrum against his jugular; this living, breathing thing. This heady, undeniable agitation.

Your worry manifests itself in the deep canyon between your brows, heavy and all-encompassing despite your attempts to hide it from him. The weight makes your lip tremble, and Kyle wants to devour your sorrow, your grief, from the source. Taste your sadness. Feel it on his tongue.

He leans against the knotted fingers pressed tight to his windpipe until phosphenes prickle across his vision. Midnight black against burning blood orange.

Breathlessly, he quips: “and maybe to stay away from helicopters, too.”

The laugh you let out sounds like it's underwater. Garbled, choking for air. It's drenched in hysteria, in misery.

He wants to crush it between his teeth, but settles, instead, hanging his head low, shoulders shaking. From the angle, he knows you'd never be able to tell if he was laughing or crying.

(It helps, he supposes, that he doesn't know, either—

Is just slowly being consumed by this vacuum of want, one that keeps tugging at his insides, flaying pieces of himself off and dropping it into the maw.

He wonders, then, what'll happen after he eats himself whole. Will he disappear or will the masticated scraps of himself reassemble into a Frankensteinian lump of who he once was—)

You stay like that for a moment. Both of you pretend you're not falling into pieces for all the wrong reasons.

As he's saying goodbye, you add, nonchalant, unconcerned:

“Oh, David's calling me. I was supposed to help him pick out an outfit for a wedding.”

“David?” His tone is flat. His fingers tighten around the phone. “Who's that?”

“My friend from work. You met him, I think. He was at that party we went to. In Kent.”

“Huh. No, I, uh, don't remember.”

“Oh. Well, I won't be long. And I'll have my phone on me, so if you need to talk, just call, okay?”

You're unbothered. He can understand why. Neither of you have ever really had much reason for jealousy—Kyle trusts you. Implicitly. Both of you have friends of the opposite sex, and there's never been any sense of distrust in that friendship.

But—

David. Something about it burns through his chest, twisting and ugly. And the awful thing is, he trusts you, he does.

You have everything except a ring, and—

Well.

Synergy is a knife sliding across bone. Understanding skirting on the edges of his periphery, within his grasp. Obtainable. He reaches for it, clawing with eager fingers—

It breaks against his knuckles in blooming anguish, dissolving into the same gaping unknown, unknowables, that sets his teeth on edge.

In retaliation, he sinks his fist into the wall, and tries to remember the last time he felt so out of control—

Your conversations take on a strange tone. Jovial, blase, but the topics are endlessly lour.

Things like perhaps the lease ought to just be in your name. And maybe he should update his emergency contact—just in case.

Just in case.

It hangs over you like a stormcloud. Just in case. He can see it in the tremble of your lip, your fingers, ones you desperately try to hide behind sips from your chamomile tea. Faux indifference to the garishness of it all. To the fact that this is a real, pragmatic conversation that's happening, that ought to happen. Because you never know.

But you avoid these conversations by telling him about your day. And soon, your time is divided between pretending as if seeing him hurt like this doesn't make you cry yourself to sleep at night, feigning strength despite the darkening lines under your fatigued eyes in an effort to not become a simpering burden to him when this is just another hazard of his occupation, his chosen career; and helping David search for a suit.

And then a tie. And then shoes. The perfect wedding gift—

Kyle, too, pretends. Acts indifferent. Unbothered. As if it it doesn't irritate him. It shouldn't. He knows it shouldn't. He trusts you. Gives you free reign to every part of himself you'd ever asked to see.

Your palms are the perfect plinth to his aching head. His shoulders broad enough to carry your burdens sat right along with his own. He knows you. Jokes, sometimes, that he could pick out your soul with his eyes closed. And you volley back that no matter where life leads you, you'd always find your way to him.

“Every lifetime,” is whispered between kisses, folded in the brackets of his ribs. “All of them. It's always you—”

So why—

Why does he feel sick to his stomach when you talk about David, as if he'd gorged himself on too much of his rage?

(why, why, why—)

This chasm inside of him grows. Gets bigger. Hungrier.

Where he could normally shove inside a box, ignore it and pretend it doesn't exist, he instead finds fractured glass, fragmented and broken to a jagged point. He cuts his finger on a shard, and watches, hollow, as the blood puddles up, dripping down to his split knuckles.

He gets it, then.

The want, the greed, the hunger will consume him from the inside out.

But what, exactly, it wants is still a mystery.

(But he knows himself. Knows what he shoved into that awful, putrid chasm, and is sure that whatever it is, it can't be good—)

Egypt is a distant memory soon after. An aged polaroid of sunlight spilling over sand, watery and thick; an ocean of ochre, of burnt umber. He thinks, fondly, of the locals and their chatter as it fills the sun-dried streets, with the heat, an oppressive blanket of warmth, tucking against him.

Winter nights are static with the buzz of life. Of distant echoes of temple prayers in harmonic songs; haggling patrons and hissing vendors just outside his window.

Kyle thinks he'll miss this place for it could have been, not what it is.

Because what it is ends up being a cockpit in distress. Wind shrieking in his ear. The crunch of metal slamming with all its might against the cobbled pavement. The hiss of gas.

He didn't know fire could roar like a lion until then. Until it blooms, white-hot and wild, mere inches from his face. The snarling, drooling maws of a starving pride.

Clawing from ash, soot. Metal raining down around him, liquified under the intense blaze of the fuselage on fire. His leg twisted up in the seatbelt. Unable to get free. To get out.

Smoke in the air. In his eyes, his nose, filling his lungs.

He'll die, he thought. Is dying. His fingers scrape over concrete, flesh gnashing against grainy sand. Unable to get a grip on the slick blood that puddles out, staining the pavement and his hands.

He doesn't think of you, but he feels you there on the edge of his periphery. Lingering like a phantom, reaching for him. Get out, get out, get out—

In the bloom of gunmetal smoke that plumes around him like a sweltering cloud of heat and ash, a hand appears. Covered in grit, in grime. Blood.

“—out! We've gotta get out, Kyle. Grab my—”

Pawing in the dark, nebulous cloud, he finds Price's rough hand and latches on, hauling himself to safety. But what emerges from the soot, the smoke, is a version of himself that feels raw, fractured.

He's agitated. Leg bouncing, restless.

Price notices it on the plane ride home, eyes slanting over to stare, pointedly, at the continuous bob of his knee. Up, down, up, down. Kyle should hide it. Bite the inside of his cheek until it bleeds instead, but he doesn't.

It won't be enough to stem this urge to run, to flee.

“Almost home,” Price huffs, shifting in his seat. He, too, seems to feel that same prickling sense of unease. Kyle lets it wash over him. Not quite a comfort, but something. “Get some rest, Sergeant.”

At that, he scoffs. “Feels like I've been doing nothing but resting, cap.”

“Mm, you're young. Take advantage of it while you can.”

As Kyle rolls his eyes at that, Price makes an aborted move, hand jerking to his breast pocket as the plane rocks over a patch of clouds, turbulence shaking the frame. Searching for his cigars. Then angrily throws his hand down, fingers tight around the armrest, white-knuckled, when he remembers he can't smoke here.

“Might be a good time to quit,” he quips, chin jutting toward his hand, fingertips turning pink with the grip he has on the plastic.

Price follows his gaze, staring at his hand for a beat. And then he snorts, and pries his fingers loose.

“Nah, ‘m too old for that nonsense—” Kyle’s brows buoy, but he swallows down the harsh retort on his tongue (aren't you only thirty-eight, mate?), letting Price continue, uninterrupted. “‘sides, will probably need it once we land.”

“Yeah? Why's that?”

He grunts, and settles into the seat. The look he fixes Kyle with feels like having a cold, metal blade pressed to his jugular.

“Gonna have to make a report, Sergeant. Falling from a bird twice now? And what's this? Third time for you? They'll want a review. Full. Will probably make us talk to a doctor or somethin’.” He cocks his head to the side, presses his pink knuckles to his temple. “Make sure we're all right up here.”

Kyle flinches. Tries to hide it with a cough when Price’s eyes tighten.

He's not sure he wants to do any of that. Have someone crack his head open and rummage around looking for defects to toss in his face later on as an excuse to kick him out. Medical discharge. Honourable, they'll say. An early retirement.

“And—” he swallows down the bitterness on his tongue. “And if we just didn't—”

“Can't do that, Sergeant.”

He struck for a moment. Anger quivers in his veins, rearing up like a viper ready to strike. He has to wonder if it was Ghost or Soap, would Price—

“Believe me,” he continues, eyes fixed on the open cockpit. Intense. “If it was just us, if it was one of our own, I'd have said piss on it. As long as none of you were seriously injured, why bother wasting time? But we have to be held accountable now.”

If it was one of our own—

“Right,” he rasps, hollow. Anger scorches his insides. “Okay.”

“Believe me, Sergeant. I want nothing more than to go home, and drink this whole bloody mess away, but—”

“I get it, cap.”

And he does. He's just not sure he can really talk about it in a way that won't show the world the gaping hole in his chest, the hairline fractures that crisscross along him, all screaming the same thing—

Terrain, terrain, pull up. Pull up. Terrain, terrain—

“Gotta let it go, Kyle.”

All he sees is fog. Fire crackling from within.

“And if I can't, captain?”

“Then it's been a pleasure working with you.” Kyle swallows again, blinking furiously against the dense cloud of smoke in front of him. “I know the commander at Scotland Yard. Could put in a good word for you. Might be for the best.”

Anger is a poison, he finds, but fear—

Fear is quicker. A knife to his heart. Left bleeding on the pavement before he knew what hit him.

“Or…” Price drawls. “Hide it away. Nothing bad happened, did it? You're still alive.”

Another hand appears from the midst of the fog.

He reaches for it.

“How?”

“Lots of ways. Best one I find is to just give in to whatever it is you're feeling. Let it consume you. Then just bury it.”

“Right,” he whispers, paper-thin. But he gets it now. “Thanks, cap.”

“Anytime, Kyle.”

He does as Price asks. Buries it deep inside of himself, and greets you when you come to pick him up at the airport with a wide grin, and a tight hug. Pulling you flush into his body, breathing in the scent of you until it stains his lungs. Sickeningly sweet.

“I missed you,” you whisper into his neck, words humid against his skin. “So, so fucking much Kyle—”

“Yeah,” he rumbles, caught on the feeling your chest makes when it heaves against his. Little, breathless hiccups of relief, worry. Elation. Fear. It tastes good in the back of his throat when he steals another lungful of your scent. “I missed you, too. Fuck, dovie. Don't know how much I fuckin’ missed you.”

He clings just a little bit tighter to you, holds on a few moments longer than he normally would. Leeches the comfort your presence brings like he's starved for it. Kyle breathes in the scent of you—lemongrass and fennel; sweet and earthy—and feels that gaping wound inside of him close, just a little bit, when you fold him into a tight embrace, letting the vice of your grip speak the words he knows you'll never utter.

Things like, please, don't ever do this to me again; and, don't go, Kyle. Please don't—

There's a multitude of things he wants to say to you. An endless bastion of sorrow and happiness and grief and elation all coalescing into this heavy anchor that hangs off his rib, pulling him down, down, down—

But he can't speak through the pulsing want in his throat. The urge to bite, to sink his teeth into you and never let go.

So, he doesn't.

He holds you back instead, presses your soft cheek to where it aches the most, and buries his nose into your crown.

Tries to satiate himself on the potency of your scent, the way it fills his lungs to bursting, and pretends the gnawing feeling in the pit of his chest is a purr and not a growl.

The ravenous roar of a starving beast, hungering for something Kyle can't name.

(He wonders if Soap felt this vacuum inside of himself, too.)

The comedown of the mission is spent with you tendering his wounds, and pressing trembling fingers to his pulse just to remind yourself that he's alive, that he's here with you. Present as warm flesh instead of a cold box full of ashes.

In these soft, aching moments, he's forced to contend with the fact that he almost died. Again—

—(the word echoing in the recess of his mind, over and over; an accumulation of all those incredible near-misses)—

Almost left you alone in this world with nothing but broken, fragmented memories that would eventually fade. Fingerprints on a rusted handrail. Tangled in a gossamer of time, nearly forgotten as you grew older. Changed. He'd be the ex-boyfriend lost tragically. The one who died too soon.

Someone else, he knows, would take his place when the grief took shape, becoming a corporeal feeling you could tuck away inside your pocket instead of a molten shadow burning you up from the inside out. Ever present.

And that's the thought he gets stuck on. The one that cuts through him the most.

You—his girl—belonging to someone else. Going on dates, kissing each other, laughing together. Falling in love.

It's selfish to want you to stay single for the rest of your life should anything happen to him. Impractical, too. But it needles under his skin. An itch he can't scratch. A want he can't satiate.

It won't even matter much when he's gone. He knows this. But it bothers him relentlessly. Souring his mood for days. Making him retreat, inward, to dismantle this unfathomable feeling taking root inside his chest. This bitterness, this anger.

The thing about dying is that it tends to put things into perspective.

Most common of all, he's told, is the fragility of the human existence, of life itself. Such a shallow thing, in retrospect. Barely a droplet in the unfathomable vastitude of time, and yet—

Something he never really thought about until it was unceremoniously thrown in his face.

It's this, the sudden realisation that he's not as invincible as he's often tricked into thinking, that seems to shake the foundations of his life in ways that would be unthinkable to the him that lived weeks before his brush with death. But that man, that version of him, is swallowed whole by the unrelenting fear that pulses through him each time it passes through his mind.

A fear of one thing:

Permanence.

Or, rather, the lack thereof.

Memories will be all you have left of him, and, well—

That simply won't do.

But the problem is this:

He doesn't know how to fix it. Doesn't know, really, how to stem this nauseating desire, this urge to own, possess, consume that roils through his chest each time he catches a glimpse of you unawares, tending to some mundane task.

The idea of you floating through life without him is not a poison, but a fear. A whitehot agony that trickles down his spine. They're all thoughts that gut him, that make him agitated. Restless. He paces again, roaming from the foyer to the living room, feeling too much like a trapped animal. A snarling tiger in a zoo. He needs an out. An escape—

So he runs.

And sometimes, you join him in the mornings before you have to go to work, setting out for a jog around the block in tandem. There's a quiet ambience to these outings, a comfort that makes him sigh—relieved, in parts, that the ache in his jaw, an unfamiliar urge to bite, abates in your presence. Your proximity is the balm to a hurt he didn't know he had.

Most times, though, he's alone. Left with his thoughts and the taste of iron in his throat as he paces the streets of Birmingham with a lour twist to his lips and a tightness in his shoulders he tries to shake out by running his body to the ground. Replacing the ache in his stomach with one in his thighs, his hamstrings. His lungs. Breathes in the humid air of a midsummer morning until they feel like they might burst.

It works. Marginally. Helps in the same way he's sure chamomile tea before bed does for an insomniac. But it's something. Something to suckle on until the quiver in his guts, the gnawing chasm in his belly, abates. Surrendering—albeit, mutinously—as the heavy taste of iron floods the back of his throat, and lactic acid leaves him groaning in the morning when he swings his sore, overworked muscles over the ledge of the bed.

Kyle's in perfect health. Peak physical condition. The burn in his thighs, the tremble in his knees, is a sign of pushing himself too hard. Of edging to the very brink.

But he can't stop.

Not when his body hums like a livewire. Vitriol coursing through his veins, seeping into his tissue. Infecting him from within until he's irascible. Always on the edge. Always tense. Agitated.

Everything feels like it's plunged underwater. As if he's staring down into the pool of an emerald lake, watching from above on dry land as the world goes on.

(A place, now, where he doesn't belong.)

He knows all too well that this is just a duct tape solution to a bigger, more devastating problem, but opening the floodgates without a sluice will drown him under the crushing weight of what rushes out.

It just makes sense, then, to bury it.

The problem is:

The tinderbox where these awful thoughts, this anger, went to moulder has been crushed, broken to pieces when he fell back to earth.

He has nowhere to put them anymore.

So he keeps them between his teeth, but being so close to you makes him want to bite—

(Bad dog.

Let it go, drop it. Let it—)

Something has to give.

He calls Price.

Hovers in the doorway between the kitchen and the hallway leading to the living room, and tries to pretend that this isn't a cry for help.

Price picks up after the third ring, gruff and irritable. His surly tone balmed by the heavy inhale of his cigar.

He calls Price.

Hovers in the doorway between the kitchen and the hallway leading to the living room, and tries to pretend that this isn't a cry for help.

Price picks up after the third ring, gruff and irritable. His surly tone was balmed by the heavy inhale of his cigar.

“Better be important, Garrick. It's the weekend.”

“Crime doesn't work nine to five, captain. Thought you knew that better than anyone. Must be getting soft.”

“Soft,” he repeats with a derisive snort. In the background, he hears peals of laughter, the distant echo of, only thing soft about you is your midsection, honey. A grunt. A thwap. A squeal.

This must be his wife, Kyle realises. The one he never speaks about directly, but can't stop bringing up in his own way. Home, he calls her. I’m going home. I'll be home for the weekend, don't bother me. Home is missing me, I reckon. Better pack it in, then, boys.

They learned this only a few short weeks into knowing Price. Home, to him, is a person. Her. His wife. The echo, the silhouette; the one who lives in the brim of his hat, the end of his cigar. The scabs on his knuckles.

The one he left at the door when had to beat a man, a father, for information. Picked up with bruised, shaking hands as soon as he was finished. Kept tight in his breast pocket.

This little glimpse into his captain's life, heard through the tinny phone, makes Kyle swallow down his jealousy. The nausea. It's all so—

Sweet. Domestic.

“Get outta here, this is a business call—” comes the brusque rasp, pulled away from the phone, and Kyle heaves out a breath. The voice comes back, gruffer than before. All tenderness shelved back in that box labelled only for her. “This better not be a business call, Garrick.”

“Been thinking about what you said,” he murmurs, and lets his head fall against the wood frame with a thud that rattles through his teeth. “About—lines, you know. And where to draw them.”

“Ah,” Price grouses, huffing. “So this is a work call, then.”

“Dunno, honestly, cap. Just—I don't know. I don't—”

“You bothered me on a Sunday, Garrick. Better know quickly—”

“How do you do it? Going out each time when you—with your—”

“Mm,” he steamrolls over Kyle's floundering question, humming deep in his chest. “I was wondering when this might come up.”

“Were you? Was that before or after the second helicopter crash?”

“Before, smartass—”

“Right. And? Any sage wisdom to impart on me, sir?”

He sucks in a breath. “What's botherin’ you, Gaz?”

Kyle blinks, caught off guard by the suddenness of the question. In retrospect, he supposes he should have expected it. Price is nothing if not brusque.

“My girl,” he murmurs, quiet. Soft. As if it was meant to be a secret. “I just. I don't want to leave—leave her alone,” he thinks of David and has to fight back the dizzying anger that burns through his veins. “I know what this job entails, and I can do it, but—”

“So don't.”

“Don't what? Don't die? That's a little unhelpful considering what we do, cap—”

“No. Don't leave her alone, Gaz. That's really all you can do.”

The thing is, he's sure Price means something sentimental, something metaphorical, like memories. Pictures, videos. Time spent together.

But Kyle has never been much for abstracts in the past. Prefers, instead, the concretes. The tangible. The corporeal. Things he can touch. Feel.

“My wife is expectin’. Has me running around the goddamn city for banh mi so unless there's anything else to add, sergeant—”

Expecting. He knew, of course. Despite Price saying very little at all about his wife, the silence has always been loud. Black and white ultrasound photos, phone calls. Dates scribbled down on the Staples calendar he has spread out on his desk in the office. He misses almost all of them—too busy running drills with new recruits, or on the field (or yelling—you did what, you fuckin’ Muppet?!—at Soap through the phone following his recovery leave somewhere that's need to know, according to Ghost)—but every time, Kyle catches him sneaking away, phone trapped in the crook of his shoulder and ear, muttering low, gravelly, into the receiver.

Yeah, how'd it go? Everything good? Good. That's—

The silence, Kyle finds, is telling.

His own, too, because this revelation seems to have knocked the air from his lungs. He can't—

Can't speak. Not yet. Not now.

Expecting. It's—

A thought. Not particularly something he'd ever really considered much himself. He comes from a large, overbearing family. Functions, dinners. Holidays. All spent crammed into his grandma’s house in Pelham. The unequivocal centrefold. The matriarch of the family.

Caught in the indivisible lines of oldest (between just his parents) and middle child (when including his two half-brothers on his father's side, and a half-sister on his mother's), he's no stranger to a big family. Something he's always wanted for himself, too. A little inkling in the back of his head that rears, purring in contentment whenever they all get together for Sunday dinners at Grandma's house and he's full of good food, lazing on the couch as his family bickers amongst each other over a game of monopoly (his older brother is always the banker, and always, always, cheats with his two younger sisters—twins, go figure).

And his older sister, too, is expecting. Had poked your stomach three weeks ago, teasing, and when can we expect one from Gazzy?

He didn't think about it much—snapped at her for using his military callsign, kissed your temple as you sputtered at her cackling laughter, and then ducked into the kitchen to help his dad cut into the pie the twins, Lolly and Lucy, had made.

(Made, though, as in popping into Tesco and making the decision to buy it.)

And now—

“No, uh…” He swallows. Swallows again. He tastes blood in the back of his throat. Realises, when his hands start to shake and his heart slams into the brackets of his ribs, that it's adrenaline. Excitement.

“Sure,” he rasps out, words slick, tacky with his blood. “I'll, uh, give her just that, cap. And—enjoy your sandwiches.”

“Oh,” he breathes out suddenly, sharp. Deep. “I will. Goodnight, Kyle.”

“Yeah, yeah. ‘Night, sir.”

He says, with all the casualness he can muster, “remember Price? John Price? Yeah, his, uh, his wife is expecting.”

“Oh,” it rings like a gunshot. Your chopstick clangs against the tin of spicy mapo tofu. “That's—wow. A baby, huh? A whole—”

You swallow. Kids are not something either of you gave much thought to. Couldn't with his odd hours, gaping absences, and your school schedule. Nothing ever fit together back then; jagged edges of a puzzle. Lock and key forced to fit.

But now.

Now—

He folds a smile into the crease of his napkin. “Yeah. Price as a dad, huh? Reckon he'd be good at it.”

It makes you snort. “You think so?”

“He's, uh, complicated. But—a good man.” Somewhat. Maybe. “Kids, though.” He lets the wistfulness in his tone carry the burden for him, content to simply exist in this moment with you. Let it saturate the air, perfumed in his longing.

You breathe it in. This heavy, noxious miasma.

“Must be great,” he adds, reaching for another piece of siumai. “Bein’ a dad an’ all. Lucky man.”

Over a steaming plate of mapo tofu, he watches as your expression falls inward. Contemplative.

You know him enough to understand that he's talking about it because it means something to him. That there's a hidden want tucked neatly inside the words he says, whispered echoes of the ones he doesn't. Won't.

And he knows you well enough to know that you'll be ruminating on this tenfold. Replaying the conversation in your head like an old rerun. Over and over again. Needling away at the cadence, the words, until you find something worth digging into further.

(The conclusion, of course, has been laid out from the beginning.

He just wishes he had the wherewithal to see it much earlier through the smoke.)

He licks his finger, and hums around the meaty oil smeared over his tongue.

All pawns on a chessboard. In the gap, he inches his bishop forward.

Slow. Steady.

But you cut him off with your knight.

“Kids are a big commitment,” you're mumbling in between bites of bittermelon drizzled with honey. “And considering the nature of your job—” the slipup forfeits your pawn. You pretend not to notice. “h–his. Uh, his job. I just—”

There's a piece of pale green rind between your teeth. It slips down your tooth when you speak, dropping down to your lip like a flake of fallen snow.

You swallow. Lick your lips. The slide of your tongue drags away the fruit. Like it wasn't even there to begin with.

When you speak, it's softer. Barely a whisper. He wishes you'd yell instead. Scream. It doesn't tremble past a few, gentle decibels.

“—is that really for the best?”

(is it feasible for us?)

Kyle sucks in a breath between his teeth. He knows he has to tread carefully here. The ground beneath his feet was as fragile as eggshells. One misstep—

“Does it matter?” He volleys, paper-thin. “If it's something we—” he comes to a stop, a sudden halt.

Manufacturing a Freudian slip is easier said than done but somehow he does it with ease. Bashful, then. Sheepish. Like he accidentally flashed you his hand. Revealed his secrets. He ducks his head—the vision of embarrassment, now—but it's multifaceted. The move serves to leave the impression of fractured vulnerability. Bares his soul, and all his broken, naked wants with it. But it also gives you a horrific glimpse at the ugly, marbled bruise still popcorned along his cheekbones, his jaw. The tear in his ear, scarred over into a black valley bracketed by red canyons.

Raw, splintered, he adds: “if it's something they want, why does the rest matter?”

The silence that follows is long. Oppressive. It comes about with a swiftness he doesn't anticipate, and spends a considerable amount of time debating whether or not leaving it is the right choice. It's unlike him to be so uncertain. So hesitant.

But this, he reasons, is different than getting a pretty girls number under dubious circumstances, or finessing your landlord into not renewing your lease. This is bigger than the games he played in the past. More is at stake here.

So, he holds.

Watches, quietly, as you fold under the pressure. “It's just—it's a big commitment, right?”

He latches onto your uncertainty with his teeth.

“If you're serious about it—like they are about each other—then what's the problem? I think they'll be fine,” he shrugs, blase. Indifferent. Winces when it pricks against the scab on his collarbone. “‘sides, it ain't like Price is gettin’ any younger. Man's been itchin’ for a family of his own for a long time. Might be the best time, too, considering the man's luck with—uh—”

He coughs into the top of his curled fist when you flinch at his callous implication.

“—just… he's reckless, is all. Might mellow him out. Keep his head on straight if he knows what he has to come home to, and what he'd be leaving behind if he didn't.” Another shrug. “Could be a good thing for him in the long run.”

You take flight as soon as it steals away his piece. Fleeting. Retreating.

You should know better than that.

Kyle always chases the things that run—

It leads him to a pub downtown.

David—fucking David—sits on the stool beside you, sipping on a flat draft, and laughing at something you're saying.

It's innocuous, really. Nothing untoward. No immediate reason for his hackles to raise, hair standing on end like he's under threat.

But he feels it in his bones. Gnarled fingers grazed over his flesh. A warning. Sirens wail in the back of his head, and his stomach drops like he's back in the airplane, the helicopter, all over again. Plummeting to earth. G-force flattening him against whining metal—

He's too close, is the problem.

Curled over you like he's trying to keep you a secret from the rest of the world. Something Kyle knows well—intimately—because he does it, too. Tucks you into his side, barely letting anyone get a glimpse of you. To see you. They can imagine, sure. And sometimes he likes to pull back a little just to let a peak of you be seen only to swallow you back up under his bulk. A taunt, a tease. Waggishly waving his finger at the naughty person who dared look at his sun, his Apollo, without permission.

To see it like this, from the outside looking in—a mere spectator when he's been teaching his hand up toward you for what feels like his entire life—is infuriating. It's voyeuristic, he finds, catching a glimpse of you from the triangular window of the man's arm—elbow on the table, cheek perched on his knuckles. All Kyle can do is squint into this little opening, catching the aftertaste of your smile.

And the problem is, he's entirely too aware of every overprotective boyfriend clichè that exists. Knows, very well, when it stops being cute and becomes an issue. Borderline abusive. Gross. Restraining order worthy.

You're allowed to smile at men who aren't him. To drink with them in fancy restaurants wearing a dress that he picked out. It's fine. He doesn't care. You do it often, honestly. There's something about you that draws people in. Like looking up at the warm sun after a long, dark winter. It's unavoidable. Expected, even.

But—

Fucking David seems to be the exception to his patience. To his goodwill.

Maybe it's the way he pushes your glass toward you, muttering drink up under his breath. Or the way he leans in when you move back. Following you despite the obvious signs not to. Pursuing you—

Even though he knows, very well, that you have a boyfriend.

It's the arrogance, he thinks.

(Or one predator sniffing out the stench of another; lions prowling around the same lioness—)

He doesn't realise he's sneering until you catch his gaze from between David's arm. Feels it then, when he has to let his muscles lax into a smile. Easy, effortless. Just like the one you give him in turn.

Soft, tender around the edges. Melting into happiness within seconds. A rare treat you give no one but him—

A fact that makes David jerk in his seat slightly. Maybe elated by this new look, the simmering heat in your eyes is warm enough to make someone sweat.

Whatever happiness he feels is dashed, though, when he realises your eyes are focused over his shoulder, away from him. Quietly, David turns in his seat, craning his neck over his shoulder to catch a glimpse of what caught your attention so much, and—

It's real sweet, he finds, the way the haughty look on David's face falls, breaking on impact, the moment he locks eyes with Kyle. Shifting into shock, into unease. Flinching almost instinctively, driven to run out of fear.

Like he knows.

And Kyle grins. Gives that boyish smile you tell him, repeatedly, that you fell in love with—soft edges, dimples; lips stretched wide over his fangled canines—and watches the satisfaction drip down David's brow as you extricate yourself from his shadow, and are pulled, magnetic, to Kyle’s side.

Where you belong.

But more than that, where you choose to be.

The weather outside is notably warmer this time of year than it should be, and it sticks, syrupy and warm, to his skin as he sips from his third bottle of San Miguel and picks at the leftovers of your shrimp scampi.

Across from him, David nurses on a ginger and rye, and murmurs to you about something—a show, he thinks—that he isn't privy to.

It's been like this for the last two hours they've sat out on the patio. Not quite an exclusion, not really. You do your best to keep him within this little cosm David is trying so hard to build, interrupting him quietly when he goes on long-winded tangents about something that Kyle isn't aware of, and filling in the blanks.

(it's a reality TV show. we watched something similar, you remember? just like First Dates—)

But he's an outlier here. Gone too much to invest in a show with you like David is, a new addition to your usual friend group. It's never been something he's cared about before. Why stop you from enjoying a show when he's carted away to Mexico or Chicago on another mission, the end date undetermined. Until it's fuckin’ finished, Price used to gripe when he asked. Until we end it.

It can't be helped. But his hands tighten around the bottle, warmed under his palm. Condescension bleeding in rivulets down the neck, drenching his skin. He's angry. Suddenly, viciously. Filled with a sense of irritation that drums up from deep within his chest as David plucks little inside jokes out of nothing, making you laugh, and laugh, and then turn to whisper in his ear about what they mean.

It isn't your fault. It's a catalyst to dating a man halfway out the door on most days, but it itches. Prickles under his skin. Selfishly wanting you all to himself, to fawn over him, and laugh at these little jokes he makes, leaving David on the fringes instead.

Childish. Or—

He'd think so if David didn't shift his gaze toward him each time it happened, lips quirking in a small, satisfied grin. Cats, he thinks. Little yellow canaries. Tries to pull some sense of normalcy from the frothing geysers that roil in his belly, anger sloshing over the basin, drenching everything in a molten ire. Anger. Blisteringly hot.

It scalds him. Scorches his insides as David laughs, again, at a movie Kyle was too busy in Macedonia to see.

When you explain that to David, he cuts a sudden grin at him. “Gone a lot, aren't you?”

And a tension thickens in the air. Drapes around his shoulders, his brow.

“Work, yeah,” it comes out as two, rough grunts. A warning. Stay back.

But David curls his fingers over the rusting wrought iron, peering inside. “Work, hmm? Heard you were military—” his eyes flicker to you briefly, like this is something that might get you in trouble for divulging to a stranger, but they're back on Kyle before he can say anything about it. Something like, don't fucking look at her—

“David,” is what you say, low and soft, and tinged with exasperation like this is an old conversation that keeps popping up, an uninvited guest you can't seem to shake.

The warning is ignored again. Coming from him, he almost understands. Could respect his contumaciousness, even, but you? It makes his hackles raise. A flare of anger pooling in the grizzle, the filament, that holds his knuckles together.

He keeps himself composed. Somehow. Tempers down that urge to bite, to break things, even as David leans back, shrugging.

“Military,” he says again, but this time his lip curls. “Can't imagine you're very well-liked anymore. Considering the state of the world and all.”

His fingers tighten against the bottle. “Yeah,” he bites, grins. Knows it's feral. Ugly. Lip curling over a single canine. “Can't really say I'm in it too much for how well-liked I am.”

“Oh no? Not in it for the glory. The prestige. What do Americans like to say? Thank you for your service—”

“—David!” Your voice comes out sharp. A reprimand. Brows knotting tight together. “That's not—”

“What I do won't end up on the news,” he interjects, and brings his other hand down over your thigh. The sight makes David sniff, glancing away. Anger writ on his brow. Jealousy mouldering in his eyes. Kyle tries not to laugh. “And if it does, it's usually after the bad guy is in the ground, and you find out about it sitting at a desk, twiddling your thumbs all day.”

The table falls silent.

He brings the beer to his lips, taking a generous gulp. Something dark curls in his guts even as David's satisfied smile dwindles.

He sends you home first, watching David move towards the washroom from the corner of his eye.

“You'll be back tonight?”

“Mmhm. Just gonna go for a quick run. Gotta stop and pick up some razors, too.” His hand comes up, fingers scratching at the stubble growing along his jaw. “Gettin’ a shadow.”

“A run, huh?” You don't believe him, but he knows you. Knows you won't fight him too much on it—especially when you think David already left. “And I dunno. A beard might look good on you.”

“Might,” he scoffs before leaning down, pressing a quick kiss to your cupid's bow. “Might not, too.”

“Think you'd look good in anything. Moustache. Beard. Bald. I'm not picky.”

“No, ‘course no,” he teases and holds the door open as you climb inside. “My unpicky girl.”

“That's not a word.”

“Sure it is. Word of the week for Oxford, wasn't it?”

Your words are swallowed up when the taxi driver asks if you're ready to go. You give him a nod, and Kyle a smile. He watches, lingering by the curb until you're out of sight.

And then his smile drops. His hands curl into fists. He cranes his head over his shoulder, eyes riveted to the washroom door.

There's a choice here, he thinks. Get the shaving cream, the razor. Be the man you think he is. The one who runs after a heaping serving of tiramisu and the leftovers of your shrimp you couldn't finish. Maybe watch that show on Netflix that David was so keen on one-upping him on. Your head in his lap. Soft smiles, taunts. Continue this playful banter you started through until his face is buried in your cunt—victor’s choice, naturally; and you always win—and you end the night whimpering his name, not David's.

That, in itself, is a victory. A win.

But—

He grabs the ball cap from the rack near the door. It's cream-coloured. Team merchandise for ManU. A little red devil stands in the middle holding a pitchfork. Black, western lettering says WE'RE NEVER GONNA STOP. He snorts at it. Macabre. Fitting. And slips it over his head, letting it hang low on his brow.

And then he follows after David.

David stands with his back to the door, hands curled around the porcelain sink as he stares in the mirror, chin titled under the harsh flood of the dull, fluorescent light.

His eyes flicker up when the door opens, widening slightly when Kyle emerges, liquid, in the reflection. But through the surprise, there's a touch of smug recognition that sets Kyle's teeth on edge when it drills into him. A sense of arrogance that makes his fingers itch. Trigger ready.

“Oh, don't worry, mate,” he's saying, a smile curling up the corner of his mouth like smoke. “We've just gotten—” he pretends to think, gaze darting up to the bulbs hanging over his head, smarmy and oil-slick. He must think himself leonine. Victorious.

Kyle wants to wear his bloodied teeth around his neck.

“Close,” he offers, and anger coils inside his guts like tar. “You know, since you've been away, and all. Nothin’ to worry about, though. We're just friends, mate. Promise.”

At that word, his smile turns sharp. Mocking.

“Oh, yeah,” he hears himself saying, words fine powder on his tongue. “Close, huh?”

“Well, she's been a bit lonely, you know. Big change, moving to a new city, an’ all alone. Needed, ah, some company.”

It burns. Blisters. The way this man speaks about you rips through him, bubbling away at his self-control like acid. Alone. As if he doesn't know. Lonely. Like he wasn't minutely aware of how much your dynamic has shifted since college, since he was some beat cop patrolling the streets with too much rage in his veins and no outlet for it, to now—when he's calling you from a medical ward (confidential, no you can't come see him) to let you know he was in (yet another) helicopter crash. Had another brush with death that pitches his mortality in the forefront of his mind like an omen. An obstacle. One that cracked open this sense of want, of urgency, hunger from the abyssal depths of his soul.

But this—

It reminds him of when he'd get into fights in high school. Needling the kids he knew would take him up on his offer, who would meet him in sketchy alleys near council housing where the police were less likely to patrol and the neighbours more willing to ignore it. When he'd mock them, twisting his words, his anger, into a brutal knife until they took a swing at him.

His hand curls into a fist. Muscle memory. It quivers through his joints—this insatiable urge to tear into something he knows will bleed. Will make him bleed. He needs it like a confessional. Therapeutic.

Because the thing is:

Kyle likes the fights. Like the way his knuckles burn, and his muscles ache. The bruises. The scraps. The contusions. The pain feels good. Cathartic. Rapturous.

And really—

He needs to get this awful, terrible demon out of him before the saliva that floods its maw at the sight of you, held back only by sheer willpower and reruns of golden girls on the couch you found by the side of the road, spills over between jagged teeth. Before the leash snaps.

David looks terrified. Scared. He turns around quickly, unwilling to let Kyle have at his vulnerable spine a moment longer. His skin catches on the porcelain rim of the sink as he swings around, the rubbery squeal loud in the sudden hush that falls between them. David winces. Pulls his hand off.

“Look, man—”

Kyle takes a step forward. Another. It's not fun when they shrink, when they shake, trembling as he nears. He likes the idiots who linger outside of crowded pubs on Friday night harassing patrons. They are drunken slobs calling out to the women they see. They fight back when Kyle corners them. Fists swinging, legs jerking out in a poorly timed kick. Slurred words full of vitriol.

At first, anyway.

And then the whine of their polyester tracksuits rubbing across ashlar cut through the alley, and the haze of alcohol saturated their senses. It's around then when they realise just how badly they fucked up.

But David is different.

Posh—even though the notion of the word itself rankles down his back, trickling like slick, hot oil. Pooling in the brackets of his spine.

“You did this,” he says, watching the paper shell of the man crumble. “Shouldn't have fucked with my girl.”

“I didn't mean anything—”

“You did.” He pushes his knuckles into his palm, listening to the satisfying crack of his joints. “But that's what you do, isn't it? Messin’ with things that don't belong to you.”

“She—”

“C’mon,” he grunts, keyed up. Aching for something to hit. “Gonna throw a proper punch at me or am I just gonna have to kick your head in?”

“Maybe she wanted it.” It prickles over his name. “Wants me. Begged me for it. Gonna hit me even though your girl is the one messing with me?”

The sour vindication on his face sets Kyle's teeth on edge. No way in hell. He knows this is what David's type does—losing in brawn, but trying to skew the game by getting in his head, making him lose his composure. Getting under his skin. Because that, in itself, is a victory, isn't it?

Bruises will heal, but this, these accusations, the idea that you want David in some way, went after him to slake something Kyle couldn't is gutting.

And he gets it. Understands why David is saying this, but it doesn't make it any easier to stomach. To listen to.

David sees his fist shake. Pales slightly. “What?” He asks, all false bravado. Broken confidence. Kyle can sniff the blood in the water. The fear in the air. “You gonna hit me, or somethin’, mate?”

And Kyle—

Kyle jerks his head to the side, letting the knot in his neck pop. The sound, ominous and poignant, fills the bathroom, eclipsing the static buzz of the dying bulbs over their heads.

“Nah, mate,” his tone flatlines. “I’m gonna let you swing first. And then I’m gonna bash your face in. S’only proper, yeah?”

He staggers backwards from the crumpled heap of the man—still breathing, he notes with a huff, files it away for later; one less mess Price will have to clean up—and works his jaw. It aches. He tastes blood. Spits a glob of foamy pink onto the floor by his feet. No missing teeth, but his lip is split.

Ah, well.

Kyle feels fine. Drunk, though. Sluggish. Keyed up. Dazed off that post-adrenaline high of sinking his mangled fists into someone; into flesh, sinew, and bones. But—

Intact. Whole.

He likes the sting in his knuckles. The tackiness of blood congealing around his fingers, staining his skin.

Outside of the tangible, physical sensation—

Kyle isn't sure what he feels.

A part of him was hopeful that this would abate the anger in his veins, and stave off some of the agony of an unrelenting, insatiable hunger. But all he feels is numb. Indifferent.

Hitting David doesn't bring him the catharsis he desperately seeks even though it should. If anything, it's made him more anxious. Restless.

He leaves. Needs to—to walk, to run, to escape the crime scene before they find an unconscious civilian in the washroom stall. Flexes his fists, his jaw, as he goes, pacing through the bar, the crowd of people he cares so little for. The cloying scent of alcohol, perfume, stale sweat, cigarettes is a thick, putrid miasma in his nose. He heaves through it, and cuts one of Ananke’s young to ground himself until he hits the door with the brunt of his weight, nearly tripping over himself to get out.

The air outside is humid this time of year. Damp with the rain that's been drizzling down since mid-morning. He breathes in the balminess of it. Wishes, for a moment, that he was somewhere else. Anywhere else. Just not here. Not with that man's blood on his hands. Not with his words hissing ugliness and vitriol in Kyle's head—

He trusts you, is the thing. Knows, without any uncertainty or doubt, that you'd never cheat on him. But—

The thought is there. Not of your infidelity, your betrayal, but of you. You with another man. Someone who is not him. A stranger.

Lonely. Kyle wants to scoff. Wants to scream. He wishes he killed him. Sunk his teeth into his jugular, gorged himself on his blood. Lonely.

As if he didn't fucking know that already.

There's smoke in his lungs. Ash in his throat.

He digs into his pocket, wraps his aching, stiff fingers around his phone, and tugs it out. The blood on his hands leaves sticky smears across his screen. The touchpad barely registers the tremulous prompts he keys in.

Still. Still.

Kyle manages. Finds the contact he's looking for and hits CALL.

He's not even sure if the number is in service, and doesn't put too much hope on it. It really doesn't matter if it connects or not. He's just—

He needs something. Someone.

A clear path. A straight head.

“—this is Johnny. Leave a message aft’r th’ tone, ‘nd ‘ah’ll—”

“Johnny. Fuck, man. I—shit—” Johnny's supposed to be dead. Laswell made them all swear on it. Wear a spiffy suit to his funeral, and dance the choreographed routine in front of everyone of a team in grief. “I don't know why I'm callin’. Just—my girl, my—” doves. apollo. “I don't know. Kinda feels like lately my heads all a mess. I'm hangin’ thread here, and I just—”

need to be told what he's doing is wrong. terrible.

“—could use a friend, I suppose. Ah, shit. I don't know why I bothered—”

He hangs up. Drops his head.

He feels fragile. Like something is going to break.

Feet balancing on a spindle, the vertiginous drop below an instantaneous death, and Kyle—

He catches the moonrise on his way home. Thinks he can see Jupiter lingering in a flickering white light behind it.

In his pocket, his phone buzzes once. Thrice.

can' call right now. shite reception. in some park in canada. nahanni, ye ever heard of it? found a little doe injured in the wood. am takin’ good care’a it. plannin on bringin her home soon. once price sends a plane to pick me up. will introduce her to ya. pretty thing.

anyway. got yer message. see, if it were me. if that were mah doe. id never leave em alone. ahd make em stay.

think ye know what ta do, Gaz.

see ye soon.

—Kyle steps off the spindle.

You usher him in with a wounded noise in the back of your throat when you catch sight of the bruise under his chin, equal parts worried and questioning. He makes a show of shrugging, indifferent, when you take off his jacket, hanging it on the rack for him, and follows you inside when you move back.

“It doesn't look like nothing,” you whisper, so sweet he feels the sugary grain of your words rubbing against his teeth.

“It's just—” he's not sure where it comes from. In for a penny, he supposes, and lets the words flood between you, twisting and sour. “Your…friend, he, uh, caught me when I was about to leave, and—”

The worry splashed across your brow is wiped clean, replaced with disbelief, with shock, and then—

“Oh, that prick!” Anger. The tang of it is electric against his skin.

“Who the hell does he think he is?” Your indignation is blistering. He basks in it.

“It's fine,” he murmurs, soft and low. Quietly reassuring. “I'm fine. You don't have to worry about me.”

“Well, I do, anyway.” You volley back, words tight in your throat.

You're so pretty like this. Illuminated softly in the cool, hazy glow of the television. It's a picture he wants to fold up, put it in his breast pocket for safekeeping, where it will stay warmed by the steady thud of his still-beating heart.

Want pulses thickly in his sternum. The urge, the need, is there, simmering quietly in his periphery. Slowly taking up more and more space as it grows, too big for him to hold back.

And so, he says, “I thought about this, you know. When I—” he stops, adds a small huff. A shallow shake of his head. “Nevermind.”

If this were a movie, it would be a tender, heartbreaking beat. A moment filled with tension and a palpable, heady fear.

You might say to him, please don't ever do that again, or even, please don't go; but he knows you just as much as he knows himself, and so it doesn't surprise him much at all when instead you swallow all of it down, letting it slowly metastasise inside of you, offering a small smile in response instead.

A quiet, “yeah,” following along behind the brunt of your shielded misery. Buried for his benefit, because as much as these near misses might keep you up at night, you'll never tell him not to go.

He adds, “been thinking a lot about what I'd miss out on, too, but—”

Kyle doesn't finish. Doesn't think he needs to. Not when he sees the gears turning in the back of your pretty, tear-filled eyes.

Against the armrest of the couch you'd bought at an old antique store, his hand closes into a fist.

Close, he thinks. But not close enough.

It'd be easier to just flush your pills down the toilet. Poke holes in the condoms you keep in the drawer—just in case. Sabotage you through sugar pills; perfect replicas of the ones you clumsily take each morning, only ever half aware of what you were doing as you lean sleepily against the sink and listen to some podcast you've recently gotten into.

So easy that he buys them without a second thought from some sketchy guy in the back alley of a Tesco Express. Pockets the package, and brings it home to you. Slips them inside the half-empty bottle where they fall to the bottom with a sharp clank. Clank, clank, clank—

The orange-tinted bottle sits on the countertop. Innocuous. Mocking. Everything he wants—you, you, you: forever, permanently—right there in front of him. Within reach. The smooth plastic surface is still warm to the touch from his aching hand—Ananke’s mangled brode on his palm has been itching furiously lately; he thinks he has an infection running jagged down his lifeline, the sink pickled and oozing pale yellow—and he holds it tight. Tighter still. Until the tumid scab on his hand cracks, pops open. Leaks blood and foul rot onto the container. Smears it soft pink with infection.

Kyle knows right from wrong.

His mum is a pillar of the community. A stalwart wall of firm, unyielding faith: the kind that brokers no arguments—do unto others as you would like done unto yourself, Kyle—and offers no retribution. Forgiveness stacks as high as karma. As goodness. As fairness. She wakes up every Sunday morning and goes to church. Spends all afternoon cooking meals for the homeless, the sick, and drags his father along with her as she drops them off at shelters, each with a handwritten passage about love and humility.

He's not particularly religious, but she's never held it against him. Never forces belief when there is none. Content to let him grow into the man he wants to be.

Though—while he shirked her belief, he stole away with her vicious sense of morality. Of justice. Right and wrong.

Simply put: he knows better. Was raised better.

And yet—

Somewhere down the line, his idea of good and bad evolved. Shifted. Cracked. He feels the remnants of it thrum in his veins; this foreign thing—this abrasive entity. It surges. Spumes; seeps in his bones. His marrow. Rewrites his foundation, his sense of self, until it's marbled with streaks of murk. Gangrenous.

Good and bad.

(the and an entire island of its own.)

He wonders if it started with Price—draw the line wherever you see fit—or if it was waiting, a hibernating beast, for someone like him to come along. A pantomime of a paradigm. Mockery of justice. Absolution in shades of self-interest.

Either way, it doesn't matter much. Not anymore. Not when the cage, the iron shackles, housing that monstrous thing split open on the pavement outside of Giza, freeing this starving, angry animal.

And really—

—he’d rather it quenched itself on you than anyone else.

Kyle places the bottle neatly back in the drawer. Slides it shut. It looks the same way it did when he arrived—pristine, innocuous, untouched. No one would know that he tampered with the seal, spilt the pills into the porcelain basin of the sink, ran hot water over them until they dissolved into sugary-white clumps, and washed them down the drain. Gone. Dissipated into a barely noticeable residue he scoops up with the tip of his index finger, bringing the specks closer to his face. It gleams in hazy sunlight dancing through the open curtain.

Kyle brings it to his mouth. Licks it off.

It tastes sweet.

Ananke screams in agony when he grips a fistful of your hair, pushing your head down the length of his hardened cock, all the way down, down—

You sputter around the thick of him, eyes watering. Dripping rivers down to your hollowed cheeks. It pools there. A deep basin. A lagoon. He wants to drink it up—salt water cures everything, after all.

The noises you make—quiet gags, wet chokes—have liquid pleasure trickling down his spine. An endless cacophony fills the bedroom. A soundscape he could get lost in forever—

“Yeah,” he rasps when your fingers dig moons into his thighs. “Such a good girl for me, aren't you?”

The whimper that tumbles out vibrates through his cock, and he grunts with it, a deep groan that you answer by squeezing your thighs together, lashes fluttering. You like the noises he makes. The moans, the guttural grunts. The choked snarls.

His good girl.

“Takin’ me so well,” he's slurring his words, hips pushing with more insistence now. Desperate to spill down your throat. To watch you swallow him. “You always do, though. Don't you? Take whatever I give you, yeah? Gonna take it all now? All of it, yeah, pretty girl?”

He rambling. Words spilling out, breaking against his teeth. Ananke howls when he twists your hair, tugging you closer, closer, until the tip of your nose touches the thick bed of wry curls at the base, swallowed whole. You're crying now—choking. He grunts. It's liquid. Whitehot.

Your mouth is molten around him. He chases it, cock head nudging the back of your throat, bruising it. Ruining it. He wants to paint you in his cum; drench you in it. Mark, mar, your skin until all of the nobodies, the David’s, can smell him on you. Know, without any uncertainty, that you belong to Kyle—

His hips stutter—

“oh, fuck, oh fuck, fuck—”

—and he knows he's being too rough with you. Too demanding. Forceful. Taking his pleasure from your pliant flesh, cleaving pounds of you into his palm for him to keep. Scar tissue in the shape of his name—

His other hand drops, wraps around your throat, and—

Fuck.

He can feel his cock through your skin. The bulge unmistakable through your neck, fattened with the thickness of him.

This—and the hazy sight of you, angelic with your drenched face covered in spittle, pre-cum, and briny tears; eyes blown wide and preyish, full of desperate submission; and clumsy, needy way you hump against your fingers stuffed between your slick thighs, quivering under the unrepentant way he breaks you apart, takes you—pushes him over the edge.

Equilibrium comes on a snarling grunt, wrenched out from the depths of his throat. So rasping, so gritty, guttural, that it hurts. Scrapes against his flesh until it's raw. Bruised.

He feels the flex of your muscles as you swallow. The rasp of your tongue soothing the heavy pulse of the thick vein on the underside of his cock, greedy for every drop he has to give.

It's perfect, he thinks. You're perfect.

(and his. his, his his—)

He leaves later that evening. “Mission,” he offers, a wan grin pulling at the corners of his mouth. “Be back soon. Don't wait up.”

Worry chisels a ravine through your brow. “Is that—” you swallow. He hears the click in your throat. Tastes the anxiety rolling off of you; a sweet deluge. “I mean, you just got back. Are you—are you even cleared yet?”

“Ah, well. About that,” he scratches the back of his neck. Ananke shivers. “I have to do some recon. Nothing serious, but with—with, you know—”

Contrition tights his jaw. He sometimes forgets that officially Johnny MacTavish is dead.

“Oh,” you try to murmur, but it comes out like a whimper. “Okay, well—”

You won't tell him not to go. It's not in you to weaponise your worry against his ambitions, his dreams.

(It doesn't stop him from using this kindness against you.)

He times it well.

Gone for thirty days in a wet, balmy jungle, snacking on nothing but bamboo shoots and moss. Ghost comes with him, shoulders set in a terse line—as usual—but there's a strange ease to his gait, a sudden liquidity to his hardened obsidian that catches Kyle's attention immediately.

“Alright?” He asks, picking his teeth with a needle from a bush. “Seem in a good mood, Lieutenant. Not very typical for you, is it.”

He lifts one massive shoulder in a lazy shrug. “S’nice weather.”

It's humid. Hot. Steam billows up from the boiling first floor and congeals into a thick, dense cloud of heat. Kyle would hardly consider that to be nice weather.

“Oh, yeah. The, uh, one hundred percent humidity is really good for the skin.”

Ghost, for his part, just shrugs again. Rumbles something about misbehaving pets, and obedience training, and seems content to let the conversation lapse into a comfortable silence. Kyle follows suit.

It stays like that for most of the mission—save for the odd quips from Ghost, his humour a peculiar ester that sours, perchlorates, in the back of his throat. Team building, Price would probably say if he was here instead of back in Liverpool, looking at empty lots with his missus.

(wants to build a fuckin' house so we have somethin’ to pass down to the kids—

He sounded angry about it, but Kyle found floor plans laid out across his desk, markings scratched into the margins as he argued with himself—and his wife—about sizing and layouts; the quips between thick, bolded letters (all uppercase) and boxy cursive filling him with a sense of envy so visceral, it made his stomach churn—)

It's almost boring compared to some of the things they'd done. Incident-free—something he knows Laswell and Price will enjoy; less paperwork. Or—

Almost, anyway.

Kyle gets shot in the shoulder the last week of the mission—a surface wound, of course; but it leaves a mangled mess of scabs and torn, jagged tissue on his flesh.

Ghost sees it. Eyes liquid black through the thick foliage, cutting a searing line to where Kyle sits, arm wrapped in gauze, casual despite the burning agony in his shoulder.

“Coulda dodged,” he muses, head tilting to the side in what Kyle can describe as dogish.

Kyle swallows. “Could’ve,” he agrees, and offers nothing else.

“Looks like I’m not the only one training a new dog.” Ghost hums to himself, quietly amused by the puckered skin on Kyle's shoulder. “‘bout time you got a scar to match the big boys, Garrick.”

“Big boys.” He snorts. “And where's Price’s?”

The man's eyes are liquid in the nightfall. Vantablack. He wonders what sort of dog a man like him has at home. What kind would stick around.

Or if it's even a choice.

“‘ave you seen his back? Old dog wrangled himself a little tiger.”

An unknown number texts him later that evening. When he opens it, it's just a blurry picture of a figure bundled up in a tweed quilt, nothing but their shoulders and head visible, as they stare out the window. The room is lit in burnt umber. He catches the corner of what must be a wood stove—the only light source, perhaps. It baths them in a heavy swath of tenebrous on the opposite side of the stove. The other is highlighted in an ethereal, aged orange.

When his eyes slowly adjust to the hazy sfumato, he makes out the distinct shape of a woman. Fingers tangled in the throw. Spilled oil, midnight gloam, against dark blue. What a picture they make.

But why was it sent to him—?

His answer comes a moment later.

think it's time ta come home. know anything about gettin’ a little doe thru customs?

might know a thing or two about that, yeah. probs best to talk with Price.

shite. he'll ‘ave mah ‘ead fer this one.

In the quiet cabin of his airplane, Kyle places his phone on the empty seat, and grins.

Your fingers thread through his, palm kissing Ananke with a gentleness that belies the fire in your eyes. The burning fever as you draw him in, drag him closer.

There's an urgency in the way you reach for him. Touch him. Starved, almost. And he supposes it's only natural when the last time you've been intimate was a month ago—when he spread you out over the sheets and kept his face buried between your thighs for hours; uttering soft hymns, orisons, at the very apex of your altar—and so sparingly between. Too afraid to hurt him. Your worry is now a weapon used against you.

(“you crashed in an airplane, Kyle! there's no way nothing is wrong with you after that. something had to have broken, right?”

right. right. just the fragile walls holding himself together—)

His wince presses the blade taut to your neck. “Sorry, dovie. Hurts a bit—”

Digs it in. Draws blood.

Your eyes drop to his shoulder, wide and wild. Feverish with your worry, your desperation. The wound is bandaged up in gauze—thick enough that it leaves a distinct shape under his shirt. Pokes out from beneath his collar.

There's worry, of course. A bone-weary sort of sorrow that thickens around your eyes, pinches tight on the curve of your jaw.

He wonders if you'll pull away again. Cushion the wound between you like a wall, and keep your distance until the unfounded belief that he's somehow too delicate to touch.

“Sorry,” you murmur, and it's blistering. “I just—Kyle, I—”

You don't pull away.

“I know, yeah? It's fine. I'm okay. Back in one piece this time.”

This time sours in the air. Putrid. Rotten. Your lip wobbles. Lashes puddle with pearling tears.

He thinks you might cry.

(hopes that you do.)

“I know,” is whispered, gritty and raw. “And how long until—until you have to leave again?”

Kyle huffs. “In the morning. ‘m’sorry, dovie,” he leans down, rests his forehead in the crook of your neck. “I tried to wiggle out of it, but we're short a man.”

“Is this even ethical? I mean—” your shoulders shake. He bites back a grin. Your worry so thick, so sweet, in his ear. “You just got shot, and they're sending you back out?”

“Technically, it's just recon—”

“This was just recon, too, and look what happened—”

“Love.” He silences your protests with a soft bark. The way you immediately quieten at his tone liquifies in the base of his spine. “I gotta. I have to go. This is what I signed up for, you know?”

“I know. I just—” your hand lifts to his head, gentle. Fingers stroking over the shaved hair on the nape of his neck. “I can't lose you. And lately, it's like everytime you leave, you get hurt. I can't help thinking, is this the last time I'll ever see him again? whenever you walk out the door. I hate it. I know that's your job, I know that. But, fuck, Kyle—”

“I know, love. I know.” He kisses the warm skin at the base of your neck. You shiver against him, nails biting slightly into his nape. “There's so much I still want to do. So much in life I want, especially with you, but—”

You don't let him finish. Your arms wrap around him, holding him gingerly to your quivering body.

The way you cling to him feels like a victory in itself.

Check—

There's an animalistic desperation in the way you drag him into the bedroom, eyes sparking in the dark. Smouldering embers. Clothes strewn somewhere in the hallway, forgotten.

He worries his jaw to fight back a grin when you knock the condoms from his hand when he fishes them out of the drawer.

“‘s’fine,” you slur, mouthing along his neck. Suckling intently at his skin. “‘m’on the pill. I'm—”

God. You're so sweet, aren't you?

He buries his grin in your neck, biting down on soft skin until his canines catch. Split flesh. Blood wells, trapped under enamel. He tastes the iron as it pools up, thin and watery, and so distinctly you it makes him dizzy. Rust. Ore. A moan is dredged up from the back of his throat as he laves his tongue over the indents, the puncture wounds, he left behind.

You shiver at the sounds he makes, small whimpers tumble past your lips—breathless; shallow and quick, matching tempo with your heartbeat. Tinged with the sting of his bite, the way he sucks around them, irritated flesh; sinks the tip of his tongue into each little split until he can't taste blood anymore. Just salt. Skin. You.

This thing that lives inside of him is hungry. Starved. It growls low in his belly, a tightening heat that blooms with the blood he swallows down. Feeding it. Just a taste. A tease. Barely enough to sate the burn he feels flickering just behind his larynx, soldering through tissue, and tendon. Blackening bone.

You say his name, low and sweet. Peppered out between soft lips.

It's—

A lot. Not enough.

Kyle pulls back, rocking on the balls of his feet just to reorient himself, and then leans down, catching your mouth in a frantic kiss that makes you shiver against him, gasping into it. His tongue delves in, and chases the sweetness of his name still lingering between your teeth.

His hands glue to your skin, featherlight, as he slides his palm over your body. Feeling you. The heat. The goosebumps that break out at his touch. His other hand slips up your spine, curling over your nape.

He doesn't say much else. With the taste of you tucked between his teeth, he finds he doesn't need much else. Just this. Just you.

But you're tugging on him, pulling. Whining into the kiss. Peeling away with a gasp when he pushes you down onto the bed by your hips.

You go down quietly in the dark, eyes wide in the pale blue moonlight; fixed on him as he follows after you—hunt, chase, consume—until he's balanced above you with his palms pressed into the mattress. Beneath him like this, you're a vision. A dream. His heart breaks free, soars. He feels the flutter of wings battering into the cradle of his ribs as he looks down at you.

He almost calls you Apollo. Sinks his teeth into his bottom lip instead. Can't trust himself like this. Not right now.

So, he tries to grin, but it feels worn. Threadbare. “Fuck, you have no idea what you do to me.”

“I have a pretty good idea,” you whisper, gaze dropping down to his hips where his cock juts out, hard. Weeping. Feebly tries to curve up to his stomach but the weight forces it down.

Your legs spread, parting for him instantly. Hands reach, grabbing at his skin, pulling him closer. He goes with a groan, biting his lip when his cock brushes the soft skin of your slick, sticky inner thigh. Soaked, he finds.

“All this for me?” He rumbles, fingers slipping on your skin when he drags his hand down, pushing your legs open further. Wide enough for him to fit. “Gonna give a guy a complex.”

“As if you need another one,” you volley, but it's breathless. Caught on the tail end of a whimper when his hips slot into yours, cock heavy and hard on your soft skin.

“Sayin’ it's too big for you, then?” he teases on the jagged edge of a wide, sharp grin.

The need that blooms in your eyes, the slight part of your kiss-bitten lips, pupils melting over the edges, a total eclipse, makes him want to sink inside of you. Carve a spot just for him over and over again. Make you take him, break apart on the thick split of his cock inside of you. And he only just manages to reign the urge to pry your folds apart, nudge his head into you. Barely holding himself together, fighting for every ounce of restraint he has because as he knows you'll let him—let him slide inside, fuck you into the mattress until you're sobbing—he can't.

Too big, he thinks. Reaffirms. And it comes out as almost a pout.

“Don't worry,” he huffs, bending down to nip along your jaw, fingers sliding over the slick, sticky skin of your inner thighs. “I’ll take care of you, yeah? Get you good and ready for my cock.”

(and more, of course; a lifetime—

but the bite of Ananke’s young keeps him spilling these secrets onto the sheets.)

Kyle likes to think he has a keen sense of smell, and as he buries his face between your thighs, nose pressed tight against your clit, he imagines he can scent the chemical changes in your body. The natural musk of you, more potent now than ever, without the artificial blocks in the way.

Taste, too—

He presses a kiss against your slit before letting his mouth part on a deep inhale, tongue rolling out, pressing between your folds. Parting them. The first touch makes your hips jerk, breath catching in your throat.

You taste good. Earthy.

It's been too long since he tasted your cunt. Feasted. He slips the flat arch of his tongue over you again in broad, heavy strokes from rim to the soft crease between your clit and mound. Drinking you in as the soft moans, the hiccupping gasps, cudgel his resolve.

You babble his name as he presses your thighs flat to the mattress, head buried between them with a single-minded goal of making you fall to pieces with his tongue on you, lapping at your pussy. Tasting for himself the natural tang of you, his machinations seen through to the end.

And you—obvious to it all—whine, eager for more of his touch, as he presses his nose into the soft skin of your navel, and breathes in again.

He pulls you down on top of him after making you clench around him—tight, tied like a vice—three times with his mouth, tongue, his fingers kneading that soft spot just inside your cunt until your legs quivered around him. Until you gushed with your release, cumming on a choked scream.

It made you all pliant and soft, putty in his hands that he can tug as much as he wants, however he wants. Shaping you over the tapered spread of his waist, cock nesting between your hot, sticky folds. Your hands on his chest, breath shallow. Please is whispered out of your bruised lips, sweet and lachrymal. He shivers and licks his lips.

You have no idea what you're begging for. No idea what he plans on doing to you. And he thinks, maybe, he ought to feel some sense of shame for making you take what he gives you like this, making you ride him as he fucks you full. Traps you.

There's a fire burning inside of him. Molten. He reaches down, grabbing his cock. You blink at him, tears clinging to your lashes, before you slowly, clumsily, lift yourself up for him with a soft, heated breath. Like you want it. These awful thoughts sutured between you like a fine, silk thread. He nearly unravels at the seams just thinking about it.

Even playing pretend in his mind threatens to shatter his resolve,

—a golden fantasy filming over his gaze, dusted in starlight; the ethereal glow of ananke coruscating off of Jupiter's elves: you begging for him, pleading with him to sink as deep inside of you as he can get until no dog will be able to differentiate between your scent and his

break it into pieces.

“Want it, don't you?” It comes out sun-scorched. Blistered. Raw.

You whimper when the fat head of his cock catches on your sopping rim, stretching you open for him. He can't decide what he wants to look at more—the sight of himself disappearing into you, or the look on his face when he does—and his gaze swings wildly, a pendulum oscillating between both, greedy for all of it. Sears it into memory. Burns it behind his eyelids.

Kyle reaches up, hands sliding across your body. Feeling the quiver in your flesh, your lungs pressing against your ribs, pushing it out. He wants to touch everything. All of you. Settles, instead, for sliding his palm up to your shaking breast, letting it fall into the cup of his hand. Pinching your hardened nipple between his middle and ring finger. Just. A tease. Barely any pressure. Rolling it between his second knuckles until you're arching into him, desperate for more. More friction, more pressure.

He teases around your flesh until goosebumps prickle over the sensitive skin, bearing his teeth in a crooked grin when you whine, clumsily pawing at his chest and pushing your breasts into his hand.

“Want somethin'?”

Your response is a sharp huff. A half bitten whisper of his name.

“No?” He taunts, shifting his hips under you. Feeling the way your cunt pulses, fluttering over his thick length. “Fine. Guess I'll—”

He goes to pull his hand away from your breast, lips curling into a taunting smirk, but a whine tumbles out. Your hips rock, pressing flat along his cock. The pressure, the pleasure, knocks the air from his lungs, and for a moment, he thinks they popped. Burst. He struggles to fill them when you shift above him, drenching his lower belly, groin, and inner thighs with the wetness that drips, molten, over him. It's good. Too good—

“Kyle,” you whisper, clit pressing taut to the weeping head of his cock. Trapped between your cunt and his stomach, the blunt pressure rockets through him, bringing him close to the edge. Dangerously close. “C’mon—”

He snorts derisively—the impromptu amalgamation of a choked laugh drenched in disbelief and sutured together with the delirium of pleasure rippling through his stomach scrapes over the soft tissue of his throat. Abrasive. Rough.

The air that comes out of his nose, hacked up from the tatter of his lungs, hurts when he spits it out.

“Fuck,” he rasps, rolling his hips into you. Desperate. Eager. It's airy. Loose. He clenches his jaw, grunts a rasping, ugly fuck from between the tight seam of his teeth. “Gonna make me cum, dove.”

It spurns you on. You babble above him—no, Kyle, no, don't cum, don't—but do nothing to stop the quick cants of your hips, fingers knotted into the matted hair on his chest. It's paper thin, barely a whisper when you breathe heavily through your nose and whimper, I want you to cum inside me—

And it's—

It's a thought. A dream. Nothing new to your voracious sex life, really; but the sweet-sour taste still lingers in the back of his teeth. The heady scent of you in his nose.

A single pill placed in each slot—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday—

His eyes roll. Hips stutter.

There's a fever in his veins. An urgency. He groans his assent, hands falling to the expanse of your hips, holding tight as he stops the slow rolls you keep trying to make. He needs to be inside of you. Says as much when you pout at the loss of friction, watching understanding dawn over you. An eagerness that seems to keep pace with his own following quickly behind.

“Yeah,” you say, and the word is obscene. Breathed out on a moan that makes his cock twitch. Then, yeah, yeah, Kyle, please—

He pulls you up, up, groaning when you slide your hand down his chest, pawing at his cock until it's gripped in your palm. The touch burning through him. Skin on skin. Fingers barely meeting around the thick of it.

“Come on,” he rasps, swallowing down the words he can't say yet. Things like take me, all of me, every last drop—

He helps you lift higher. Keeps you steady as you line him up, the head pushing against your slick rim, catching when you sink down, thighs flexing.

It's a slow drop as you adjust to the burn of taking him. Down, down—gasps, mewls, whines leaving your lips with each inch, devastating little ah, ah’s that spin around his head until he's dizzy.

His name is a plea when you can't take anymore, when the thickness of him becomes too much. Eyes misting with unshed tears, bottom lip trapped between your teeth. The look you give him is so pitiful, he nearly whines—

“You can do it, baby.”

It's a shuddered gasp, thin and reedy. He wants you to cry, to weep. To rain your fists down across his chest when the burn of him splitting you open becomes too much, nearly choking on how viciously you spit out his name.

“C’mon,” he slurs, lifting his hips in shallow, lazy cants. Feeding you another half an inch. Another—

“Kyle, Kyle—” you gasp, and he knows. Should take pity on you for the sting, the burden of taking him so deeply, pretty pussy stretched tight around him.

Should—

“Barely much left, dove—” he means to grunt, but it comes out on a growl. His knuckles ache. “You can do it for me, can't you? Take all of me. Been so long, dovie. Been so fuckin’ long—”

It's between missed this pretty pussy on my cock and need you, baby, need you so bad that you break. Trembling above him as another inch is forced into you. Keening when his hands tighten around your waist, fingers biting into your flesh, and he pulls, pulls, at the same time he thrusts up, cunt giving way, opening up for him so perfectly—

“That's it, dovie—”

The folds of your pussy swell around the fat base of his cock, pressed tight to the skin of his groin, and Kyle can't stop the rough moan that spills out, hips jerking at the raw sensation of having you wrapped around him. Silken walls. A slick, feverish heat. You pulse, flesh fluttering over the length of him, and it's somehow both euphoric and uttering damning—the pleasure so intense, it churns his stomach. Makes him nauseous with how badly he wants to stay inside of you like this forever until it's sacrosanct.

You feel liquid around him. All heat and pulsing, flexing muscle. He ruts into it. Cants his hips up, up, little nudges that push the air from your lungs in short, choking gasps.

He lets you take what you need from him first, hands steady on your hip. Palm moulding over your breast, pinching your nipple between his fingers. Leaning up to lave his tongue over the hardened peak you squirm on his lap, bouncing shallowly on his cock. Giving you everything, all of him, as you slowly bring yourself closer to the edge. Face pinched in bliss, eyes squeezing shut, rolling slightly as you work yourself over his cock, hips twitching. Flexing. Your pretty mouth drops open when you lean forward, hands bracing over the swell of his chest, finding the perfect angle for his cock to hit.

His name is a whimper, a plea. A litany of sounds that blister through his chest. A white-hot knife buried in his groin because fucking you is always a sweet sort of agony, he finds; pleasure and pain effortlessly balancing on a razor blade. He breathes around the ache, feeling the threads of his control pull taut over the blade, snapping one by one—

It's a mindless drive for more of that electric pleasure, that blissful pain, when he plants the soles of his feet on the soft sheets, and bucks. His cock bludgeons through wet, hot heat, feeling the silken flutter of you clenching tight around him, and he can't stop the groan from jittering out between clenched teeth.

He knows he won't last. Can feel it well up in his groin, hovering on the edge of a precipice. It's headier, more potent, than anything he'd ever felt. The elation, the urgency—it fills him up from the inside out, twisting in his veins, blotting along his hindbrain. Needing to cum, to fill you up—

Your nails dig into the smattering of hair on his chest, clinging to him as he squares his feet on the mattress, pistoning into you. Making you howl for him—deep, breathless moans rolling off your tongue, bitten out between his name, said like grace as it drips down your chin.

There's nothing better than this, he thinks, arching his neck on the pillow, head thrown back as he thrusts up, meeting you in the middle. Working in tandem. Pleasure is hewn together, tethered until you can't hold yourself up anymore. Until the stretch him filling you up, sitting thick, fat, inside your abused, aching cunt is too much for you to take.

The way you look above him—chin bowed, mouth open as a litany of moans spill out; brow furrowed, eyes listing shut in bliss—knocks the air from his lungs in a painful, agonising punch. You look ethereal, superlunary, as you babble above him, spine bowed in a pretty bow. Taking everything he has to give you—

His palms ache. Itch. Ananke grows restless as his thrusts become sloppy. Desperate.

“Come for me,” he barks. Demands. Pleas.

His hand squeezes tight before letting go, dropping down to your belly, over your mound. You’re slick, wet. His thumb softens over your clit, gentle strokes to bring you to the same summit he stands on, ready to jump. Hips jerking, thrusting into you from below. Fucking into you with steady, deep cants of his hips. Making you take him, all of him.

Your cunt flutters around him, clenching tight. Pulsing little throbs that mirror the heavy brag of his heart slamming into his chest. Made for him, he thinks, eyes widening in feverish delirium as he tries to commit the way you look arched above him to memory. Burning it behind his eyelids.

The pleasure on your face, the desperation, make him break.

He lets go of your hips, slides his hand up your spine, feeling your warm, damp skin under his rough palm as he drags it to your nape. His fingers curl over the back of your neck, a gentle squeeze; a comforting weight—just enough to make melt in his arms, relax, before he pulls you down until you're chest to chest. He snakes his arm out from between your bellies, throwing it over your waist to anchor you down as he bucks up into you. Taking. Taking.

The sounds made when he fucks into your like this, the squelch of your pussy, the slap of his balls on your ass, have his eyes rolling back into his head. Unbridled pleasure bloomed over his spine, spooling in his groin.

He's right there. Right there—

“Oh, fuck, baby—” he gasps out, choking. “I'm gonna cum, I'm gonna—”

He feels his name purr from within your chest before you push back, squirming on his chest as you fuck yourself back onto his cock. Taking him deeper inside of you until he nudges your cervix and makes you whine—

He grasps to find that same thread of control he keeps wound tight around his wrist, an anchor line for him to cling to, but when he paws at the dark, he finds nothing there. Nothing but thick, syrupy pleasure. Bliss. He feels your slick run down the length of his cock, pooling in the tangled hair dusting over his sack. Drenching the sheets.

His hand slides down your back, fingers stretching, reaching, grabbing a fistful of your asscheek in his hand. Squeezing it tight as he pulls you down over him again and again. It forces him deeper, until he's certain that there's no place inside of you that he hasn't touched.

And it's this thought that unravels the knot. Becomes his undoing. His violent end. But it's you bending down, sweat-slick cheek pressing to his chest, murmuring:

Please. Please—

And then:

“Come on,” you moan, the words shuttered out of your chest with the force of his thrusts, head shaking. Rattling. “Cum inside me, Kyle—”

It’s catching sunlight in the palm of his hands, feeling the skin burn, and blister. Apollo in his hands.

“Fuck, gonna cum, love—” he grinds out on a moan, grinding his hips into you in choppy, desperate thrusts until the force it punches through his stomach, leaves him winded.

You drop down on his lap, taking the full, thick length of his cock inside of you as he cums, vision blurring around the edges as he struggles to keep his eyes open, glued to the sight of you taking it all. Every drop—

Through the haze, he commits every blurred movement to memory: your quivering belly; your heaving breast, nipples pebbled and swollen from his mouth. The spread of your thighs over his hips, the way the coarse, thick hair on his groin flattens against your mound. Slick, wet from you. Milky, now, with the steady trickle of his cum leaking out even though he keeps you nice and plugged up. It makes him jerk beneath you, breath coming out in a heavy gust.

his apollo—

His hands flatten along your collar bones, curling upward to shape around your neck. He feels each desperate breath, each swallow, against his searing palms.

He wraps his hands around your neck, and it would be so easy to imagine a collar.

And you lean into it. Your head drops back, eyes slipping closed as you bare more of your throat to him. He folds the tips of his fingers over each other, linking them on the nape of your neck, shivering when the sweet, peach-soft peal of his name slips past your lips—

Yeah, he thinks, fingers tightening on your skin once before he lets go. Drops them down to your belly. Curves over your waist. Holding tight. Tighter.

But not a collar wouldn't look nearly as pretty, wouldn't it?

It's five in the morning when the text comes in.

Sitting between an update from Price (this doctor's a fuckin' muppet—), one from Ghost (how's the shoulder), and something from his mother—a TikTok video he thumbs loosely at, sending a chain of laughing face emojis in response—is a foreign number. According to a quick Google search, the area code—867—is from Canada. The Northwest Territories, Yukon, and Nunavut, specifically.

He opens it, glancing at the string of numbers on his phone, brows furrowing as he tries to make sense of it—

And then it clicks.

Coordinates. Google says they're in Scotland. Remote. Knoydart.

The grin splits across his lips, pulls tight at his cheeks.

Welcome home, he writes. Any trouble with that doe of yours? Customs must've had a fit.

A second later, a message appears. Adjustin nicely to the highlands. Nik did all the heavy liftin. Y’should come visit. See fer yerself.

The bed shifts when you move, pulling yourself closer to him in the quiet dark of mid-dawn. Drawn to him even in the deep of sleep. He thinks of moths, flames, and curls his arm over your shoulders, pulling you closer. Presses a kiss to your crown, breathes you in.

With the phone held in one hand, he swipes his thumb across the screen, typing out a quick reply. Taps SEND. Watches the notification flick from delivered to read before he drops it onto his lap, and lets his head fall back, the grin still tugging on his lips.

Icarus couldn't get to Apollo with flimsy wings of borrowed feathers, and beeswax. The distance between Earth and the sun is too great to fly to. An uncrossable chasm.

So, he brought Apollo to Earth instead.

Just might.

In the quiet bloom of a mid-morning dawn, you find him on the patio, gazing out at the streets below. Brows furrowed in a soft contemplation. It's not something you're used to seeing on his face—this sombre, solemn grey shading his features in a way that makes you feel almost as far away from him as Jupiter.

“What's wrong?”

Kyle tilts his chin up toward you, mouth flattening as he shakes his head. Shrugs.

“Nothin’.”

“Mmhm,” you tease, fingers threading over the hair behind his ears. His skin is warm. Sunkissed. You press your nails to his scalp, dragging them through the thick coils of his hair until you meet the soft dip at his temple. He leans into your touch, forehead resting on the soft bump of your belly.

When he doesn't speak after a moment, you huff. Soft, coy. “Fine. Keep your secrets.”

His nose rubs over the soft cashmere of your sweater. “Been thinkin’ is all.”

“About what?”

He hums, breath warm on your skin. “Want to come to Scotland with me? Get away for the weekend?”

“You think your mum and sisters are letting me go anywhere right now? Pretty sure I heard them plotting about wrapping me up in a mattress so I can't hurt myself or the baby—”

A snort bubbles up. “Mum likes you. Loves you. She's just overprotective. M’sure I can convince her.”

“You think so?”

Kyle is quiet for a moment. A beat. Just long enough to mull over the probability of stealing you away from under his family's nose. Unlikely, of course. When the twins have your weekend booked up already—a movie marathon with nothing but pizza, snacks, and John Hughes.

And NO Gazzy allowed!!!

“Nah, suppose not,” he huffs, placing his hands on your thighs. “If they're being too much, you can tell them to piss off—”

“They're fine,” you shrug. Overprotective, but—

It seems to run in the family.

“I really don't mind.”

He gives in with a shallow nod. “You gonna be okay if I go?”

“I think I'll manage on my own. It's—”

“Yeah.”

Need to know, you remember the big, scary one saying when you met Kyle at the tarmac. His voice low over the whir of the engines in the distance, but robust. Brassy. The inflection is standoffish. Cold. But you saw how he turned back around when Kyle led you away, eerie gaze drilling into his injured shoulder for a moment before calling out to him that Bravo Seven-One was inbound.

The difference between Kyle and the company he keeps always seems to jar you slightly. He's so normal in comparison. So human. Grounded in reality in a way that makes everyone else around him feel preternatural.

“I’ll be fine,” you say at length, hand falling to the soft, barely noticeable bump he rests his head on. A happy accident. You wonder if it overwhelms him a little. Babies. Kids. None of it ever felt feasible before all of this. “Go have fun in the mountains.”

It pulls another snort of him, and he turns his head, peppers a soft kiss to your navel, eyes flicking upward to stare at you. Dancing with mirth. A mordant sort of humour you can't begin to understand.

Need to know, maybe.

“Fun, huh?” It's muffled by your skin. “Think I'm bein’ led to my untimely death, actually.”

“That so?” You hum, a smile curving over your lips. “At least make it look like an accident, yeah? We won't get the insurance payout otherwise.”

“No shit? Murder in the highlands isn't covered? What the hell am I paying nearly three hundred pounds for, then?”

“Peace of mind.”

It makes him snort before he buries his face in your belly, scratching his nose on your cashmere in a small nuzzle.

“Ain't much of a peace of mind, is it?”

“Better now,” you offer, fanning your fingers over the arch of his ear, soothing the tiny pout you can feel forming against your skin.

“Yeah, well—”

His words taper off, lost to a kiss placed just above your belly button. It might be an apology. Sorry for almost dying—

Again.

And as much as you hate that he has to, that he peppers kisses in place of it'll never happen again, or don't worry, I'm here now, you know what this is. You've known it from the beginning. Accepted it as is because with you or without you, Kyle was going to do what he does regardless. Begging him not to, to reconsider, is not a line of selfishness you're willing to cross—

Or, weren't, rather.

Until this. Until now.

This soft, barely noticeable curve seemed to overwrite the desire to let him fly as high as he wanted. To rearrange the stars until he fit amongst them; more dust than man. Selfish, maybe. Definitely.

But the condition was less of an ultimatum and more of a plea. I don't want to be a single mum, Kyle. Perspective, you suppose, does that to people. Changes them. Shapes them into something different.

You think maybe he felt the same way when he bowed his head over the table, staring down at the pregnancy test you laid down for him, and nodded.

(“Yeah, yes. Uh, I'll—yeah. I'll—” he swallowed around the brine in his throat. Salt congealed over his airways until his voice was a rough scrape between his teeth, desiccated. “I'll talk to Price. No more helicopters—”)

There was more, of course. A hashing of everything. All of it spilt out over the table. He gave up as much as he could without sacrificing that insatiable desire to soar as high as he can, untethered to the earth. And you promised to anchor him down when need be. When he tries to fly too close to the sun.

A compromise.

And—

“Bring some flowers for me,” you murmur at length, fingers grazing the shell of his ear.

—an apology.

He keeps his head bowed. “Supposed to be need to know.”

“Call it a hunch, then.”

A snort. His shoulders shake. “Sure. Price’ll love that one. Intuition will sound good on the report.”

“Oh, no. Big, scary military men afraid of a little paperwork.”

“Oi—” His fingers dig into your sides. A playful pinch. You choke out a shallow laugh, raking your nails over his scalp in retaliation, but it just makes him shiver. Groan.

Keep doin’ that and I'll give our neighbours a show—

“How long will you be gone for?”

His lips tug downward. “Just the weekend.”

“Don't have too much fun without me.”

He slides his face over your belly until he's balanced on the tip of his chin. That sombre look is back again. Pensive. Quiet. He'll tell you the truth when he's ready, you're sure, and you brush your fingers over the divot in his brow, smoothing the wrinkle out.

“We'll be fine.” You say, and he nods because he knows. You're safe here. But still—

He presses a kiss to your belly, staring up at you through the golden curve of his ashes. Sombre expression melting into something languid. Lax. Catlike, you think, huffing when his hands curl around the backs of your thighs, pads of fingers dipping into soft skin.

Kyle catches it. Grins. Heat soaks into your flesh where his palms rest, nestled just below the curve of your ass. His intentions are clear, obvious, and you go willingly when he pulls you into his lap, thighs thrown over his.

Your throne, he’d once joked in the early days of dating, when you were still discovering pieces of yourselves in each other’s naked flesh. A truism now because whenever he can manage it, Kyle seems to prefer you sitting on his lap, head tucked under his chin. Within reach.

Always.

His personal stress ball, perhaps. A weighted blanket. As you nuzzle close, his shoulders dip. The tension in his muscles bleeding out by the weight of you on him, the brush of your skin. You press in, leaching comfort from his sun-warmed flesh. Fingers trailing down the angled slope of his face until his jaw is held in the plinth of your palms.

The ghost of a pout still lingers in the jut of his lower lip. You sweep your thumb over it, nail curving along the valley of his cupid’s bow to map the path you know better than your own sloping plains. A kiss to the ridge of his jaw chases away the saturnine shadows still falling across lush beds of gold; sun dusted colluvium.

You taste salt on your tongue when you pepper a kiss just above the arched curve of his cheekbone, his lashes fluttering down, tickling your mouth when he blinks.

It doesn’t get rid of all the Ttenebrae tucked tight inside the canyons of burnt umber, coruscating amber, but flecks of aurate gleam through the shade of eventide. A glimmering gem in a sea of moon white.

The flickering embers of his unease melts with his huff. His thumb strokes along the curve of your ass, settling over your waist. Holding you close. You catch the way his eyes drop briefly down to your belly. The bloom of heat in his eyes. Liquid gold. Darkening as he stares, marbled with possessiveness. With the unfettered threads of satisfaction streaking through.

The eyes of a big cat as he licks the blood from his jowls, his kill still cooling on his paws.

“Better be.”

“Overprotective already and they’re not even here yet,” you tease when he lifts his gaze. Honeyed with want; syrupy with desire.

“Not just for them,” Kyle rasps, his hand sliding up your spine, cupping your nape in his palm. Dragging you closer to breathe his need over your lips. “You're both mine.”

“Kyle—”

“Say it.”

“We’re yours,” you whisper, catching the stutter in his pulse when your hands slide down his jaw, cupping his neck. “Just yours—”

The rest of your words are devoured by his scorching mouth, eaten right from between your teeth. Kyle’s kisses have always edged into consumption, you think. Like he trying to eat you whole—nothing saved for later. No scrap spared. Wasted.

It’s dizzying. Edges into too much, too intense. You can’t keep up with him no matter how hard you try. He’s always several paces ahead, drawing your tongue into his mouth. Letting the sharp edge of his canines graze your flesh, scraping the soft tissue. All you can do is cling to him. Hold on as he glues his mouth to yours and eats—

When he pulls away, giving you a moment to catch your breath, you think you hear him growl, never lettin’ either of you go—

But he drags you back into him a second later, mouth slipping over yours with an untempered hunger. The purr he lets out trembling over your tongue, shaking the thought right out of your head.

Never, you’d say if he let you. If he gave you a moment to think. Peeled his tongue from between the seam of your teeth long enough to let you gasp the words out.

He doesn’t. He won’t.

He drags wet, sticky lips across your cheek, over your jaw, down your throat, before sinking his canines into the throb of your pulse beating under your skin instead. Steals the thoughts from your head as you gasp his name out, followed quickly by please and Kyle, more—

Kyle lifts his hand from your spine, fingers stretching out. Reaching. The sun glows between the spread of his fingers; scintillating like fine, golden mist over his fingers. Beautiful, he thinks when your breath hitches in a shallow gasp; held tight his arm, and—

(with it cradled in middle of his hand, he closes his fingers around the sun until it's swallowed up in his palm.)

—all his.

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fic recs

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bobiologist

8 months ago

DOGMEAT MASTERLIST

BUTCHER!SIMON RILEY X READER

you're aware of him in the same way you are of a livewire. holding a metal rod in a lightning storm. there's a sense of danger that seems to permeate around him; a warning to stay away.

one you're all too keen to listen to.

but it doesn't matter because he takes an interest in you anyway.

i. bos taurus | mafia butcher/enforcer ii. field dressing | slaughterer/murderer iii. ikejime | sushi chef, siren

SERIES WARNINGS: smut. heavy noncon. kidnapping. mentions of violence. butchery. allusions to gore, murder. au | mafia, light southern gothic/70s, very dark&twisted fantasy

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bobiologist

7 months ago

A Hole in the Earth

John Price x f!Reader | read on ao3 | thank you @glossysoap <3 for beta reading

One day, the earth opens up and swallows you whole. There's nothing that remains of you, except John Price's wife.

cw: rape/non-con, abduction, drugging, physical/corporal punishment (being spanked with a belt), non-con touching/groping, non-con medical procedures (lobotomy), forced gender roles, forced marriage, body horror, forced pregnancy, John is not mentally sound, dead dove, one shot, dark fic, i am being so serious when i say reader is forcefully undergoes a lobotomy.

The moment his eyes find you, you’re his — not that you’re aware of it.

John Price is a quiet man who lives a not-so-quiet life, but he desperately wants to. Some deep part of him yearns for a life in a cottage planted next to the lowering seaside thick with brine and mist. There, he could work on the fringes of some dewy forest. Craft items to sell like they did in the times of yore until the scent of some freshly cooked dinner called him home.

Inside the cottage, he would find his wife with a plump, happy child babbling on her hip. She’d smile and greet him while setting their child in their seat and she’d rattle off all the adorable things the baby did that day. He’d stuff himself full, comment on his widening waistline, and they’d spend the evening reading in the living room together. Curled up together like huddling animals until their child was yawning and whiny.

Once the bassinet swallowed his little one whole, and the house and earth was quiet, he’d lay his wife down to rest. Flat on her back, legs pushed up against the press of his hips as he ruts into her. And he’d whisper quiet words into her skin, little thanks for the work she does and the child she’s given him — preemptively thanking her for the next one she’s bound to carry after tonight.

This is the life he’s dreamed of having, and the moment his eyes spot you entering the library, his heart nearly stops.

Here you are — the woman he imagines marrying. Everything about you is perfect. The angles of your body and the poise you carry yourself with as you float between shelves of books. Stalking behind you, he can’t help but think your rump would look much better if you were to change out of those jeans and into a dress like any proper wife would, but he drops the specifics as you settle into a table tucked next to the floor to ceiling windows.

Yes; here you are. The quintessence of the woman he’s dreamed of. Of posture and presentation, everything about you on a physical level is perfect—

—until you open your mouth.

As a friend comes to join you at the table, and your pretty lips get to flapping, John learns much about you and your anomalous life. How you’re studying hard for some degree, about the exam you have on Monday and the way’s you’ve been attempting to mitigate the stress. It’s difficult working towards a PHD. Of being the first woman in your family to attempt to earn such a feat.

The idea of it all makes his head spin as he covertly flips through the book he stopped reading ten pages back. You — with your wide eyes and wet lips — deserve to be taken care of. Living a stress free life where your only worry should be about what to do with the food he provides, or what hobby you intend on indulging on for the day, or what to name the child growing in your womb.

Really, it’s a shame the world has come to this. Where men scarcely provide for the women they marry, and mothers must slave away at jobs they shouldn’t need just to feed their children. A woman’s place is at home, comfortable behind strong walls and closed doors where she can cultivate a family and live a quiet life full of love and warmth.

But John Price is just one man, and he knows he cannot save everyone. The blood staining his hands and the bones crushed beneath the soles of his boots remind him of this fact every single day. It haunts him the way rot precedes death.

But he can — at the very least — save you.

Most creatures wail at the sight of salvation, and you are no different.

It takes time, like all things do, for the drugs in your system to dissipate into your blood. You begin to stir in the backseat of his car around the halfway mark home. John spares glances back at you. Looks at you just long enough to catch the drooping of your eyes and the pinched skin between your brows as you grumble and groan. The bindings on your wrists sour the view you create upon the leather seats, but he tells himself it’s just to keep you — his new wife — safe.

Sweet things like you are known to hurt themselves in their confusion. His deliverance is bound to be petrifying until you make sense of it. Until he can show you the light of safety. Of security.

His light.

“W… what?”

He’s leading you into the cottage — the house he’s always dreamed of — when you finally get your first word out of your mouth. It feels heavy on your tongue. A fat weight that threatens to choke you as you stumble alongside him.

“Easy now, love,” John coos. “Let’s lay down now.”

It isn’t until the next morning that you wake with your wits intact. Finally compos mentis, your eyes flutter open and your heart races at the sight of unfamiliar surroundings and an equally unfamiliar man. These walls are too rich to be part of your flat, and you don’t remember the sheets smelling of tobacco.

A furious ache pounds behind your skull, so much so that you’ve nearly convinced yourself that the scene playing out in front of you is something you’ve hallucinated. John stands in front of you, back turned your direction, as he shamelessly undresses. Worn nightwear is haphazardly tossed into a hamper, and you helplessly witness as the thick muscles in his legs push him towards the dresser.

He’s tall. Towers over most other men. Squinting, you try to scrounge up a memory of the man. Search for something familiar about him, but there’s nothing. You don’t recognize a single thing about him; not the dark hair that covers his chest and stomach, nor the glinting sapphire hue of his eyes as he turns to face you with a smile, now fully dressed.

Too scared to move, the only thing you can do is lay there as he approaches the bed. You don’t realize your hands are bound until he grabs them, kneeling on the floor. Your stomach turns as he kisses your knuckles and thumbs over the newly placed ring on your finger.

“Good morning, my love.”

This — you learn — is your new life. With a dazzling gem on your finger, and a man who claims to be your husband, you find yourself trapped in a twisted paradise of John’s own creation. You are caught in the transitional period of shock and fear. Your body knows this is not right, and it fills your legs with all the hot blood it needs to flee, and yet you are as rigid as a statue. Frozen beneath John’s adoring gaze as he insists on doing everything with you.

He dresses you in pale, milky dresses — no jeans allowed, he says. Leading you around the cottage, he introduces you to every room. The living room, the kitchen, the nursery. Each word he speaks has you swallowing and nodding your head, but you can’t help but think why he would feel the need to show you this place if you were truly his wife like he claims.

Deluded. Erroneous. This man sees love where there is only confusion.

Your fear placates you only until lunch time. Really, it’s John’s fault. He should’ve known that a frazzled woman such as yourself wouldn’t do well around sharp objects. There’s no one to blame but himself for the four tiny holes that dot his bicep. Evenly spaced, the fork prongs don’t make it too deeply into his skin before he grabs your wrist. The muscles in his jaw flex as he huffs, the gentle hue of his blue eyes somehow darkening into something more virulent.

He drags you into the bedroom after that. Mutters something about how ungrateful you’re being as he pushes you toward the bed. You rage against him as he forces you onto your stomach and lifts the skirt of your dress. The clinking of metal sends your eyes widening, and there is an unforgiving agita that thrashes in your stomach.

Would it be easier if you were not aware of the brutality that men are capable of?

“Please don’t,” you beg. “Please, don’t do this. I don’t- I won’t do that again.” You’ve no choice but to beg as your palms push against the mattress, only for you to be shoved back into the bed. “I’m sorry! I swear it!” He’s too strong. “Don’t do this, please…”

You can only sob as he tugs at your underwear, exposing you to him.

Then comes the leather. Harsh, sharp cracks fill the bedroom as John’s belt crashes against your skin. It stings. The pain settles deep into your flesh until you swear you feel it split. Crack open until it’s raw and screaming just as loud as you. Cries rip through your throat until it’s just as sore as your rump, yet you attempt to stifle your sounds as you press your face into the duvet. Maybe, if you try hard enough, you can suffocate in the sheets.

He stops after eight. Figures that two strikes for each hole in his skin is plenty. You flinch at the feeling of his hand rubbing over your skin, as if his touch is the only emollient comfort you need after such violence. His weight sinks into the bed as he leans to you.

“I don’t like doing this, my love,” he whispers. His breath is hot against the shell of your ear, and somehow he sounds sincere. “Please don’t make me do this again in the future.”

It’s humiliating playing into his fantasy. Of being some sweet, submissive and obedient wife. In a way, that’s all he’s rendered you as. Stuffing you in dresses and aprons while cuddling up to you at night as if you’re long wedded lovers. Yet, you don’t know how to leave. You don’t know how to free yourself from this place, so far out of the clutches of humanity. The only human close by is your false husband, and even then you’re not too sure that claim is true.

Sometimes, John talks about things as if you were there to witness them. As if you remember them yourself. About you meeting his best mates or quality time spent together walking along the shoreline that skirts the property. He even laments about the honeymoon the two of you shared together. How he still sees visions of you splayed out on the bed before him — he even admits how disappointed he was when you didn’t conceive that night.

He shares his confession as he forces you to curl up on the couch next to him. His longing words are paired with a lingering hand on your stomach.

Never before have you wished to reach into yourself and rip out your womb like you do now.

Despite living in his delusions, John is otherwise kind — so long as you manage not to crack the eggshells that litter the ground around your feet. You are always fed and watered — like any good husband would do for his wife — and the cottage is always warm. The clothes on your back are some of the highest quality you’ve ever worn, and he has not spanked you with his belt since you attacked him with your dinner fork.

But there is an insidiousness that seeps out of the walls and into the air. It starts with longing gazes that linger on your stomach. Such fixation on your body leaves it riddled with frazzled nerves. You find your fingers trembling at the dinner table as you bring another spoonful of soup to your mouth.

John watches you and daydreams. It’s obvious what he craves, and still you try to convince yourself things are no different as he rises from his seat. Nothing is different as his hands rest on your shoulders, thumbs digging into the taut muscle of your back. Nothing is different as his hands slip forward, kneading along your breasts until his palms are flat on your stomach.

Your spoon drops into the bowl with a clink.

“Come to bed with me, darling,” he whispers, body still hunched over yours.

So you do, because what other choice do you have?

It isn’t until John has you stripped bare in front of him — just like he soliloquized to you about your non-existent honeymoon — that you realize you’d much rather face his belt than this. The heat of his skin against yours. The way his chest hair brushes against your nipples. The scratching of his facial hair on the inside of your neck.

Panic doesn’t truly settle in until his pants come off and you’re able to witness in pure horror just how much he wants you. You watch him with a trembling bottom lip as you lay on your back. Your brain attempts to urge you to flee. It fills your body with more warmth than you can handle, and you fear you’ll melt into the bed long before you find liberation.

He knocks your legs open with a simple swish of his knee. Brutally cold air hits your sex, only to be smothered with warmth once more as he blankets himself over you.

“John,” you stutter with chattering teeth. “I… I think I’d like to go to sleep now.”

It’s as if you made no sound at all. His hips stretch your legs wide, and you can feel the weight of his cock hit the inside of your thighs. Your mind reels; desperately searching for a solution to this impending doom.

“J-John.”

“Sleep?” he repeats as if he just now heard you. His words reverberate in your chest as his head dips low into the crook of your neck. “We’ve hardly started.”

Whatever protest is left inside of you quickly dies down as his lips press against yours. Even the hands you use to attempt to push him away are forced to relent as he weaves his fingers between yours. Intertwined as if you were lovers.

Then there’s the intrusion. The splitting of your cunt as he pushes into you. John meets resistance inside of you as your muscles tense; every cell in your body detests him. Your breathing stops — breathing is impossible when everything in your body seems to turn to stone. Going from the state of liquid to a solid so quickly leaves your brain fuzzy and unable to think. John groans against your lips at your perceived tightness, and then he continues.

Tears stain your face as he bottoms out, bodies molding together until you’re flush tight. Your thoughts go blank as this man — your self proclaimed husband — finds his rhythm. It’s nothing but stark white in your brain until there’s an eruption of terror. Of realization.

The eyes are the window to the soul, and all John’s eyes have done the last few days is dream of a child. Of your swollen belly.

It’s not your first time sobbing on this bed, and you’re sure it won’t be the last. Grief consumes you as you realize what this terrible union means — of what it will do to you, mind, body and soul. Grunting, John attempts to soothe you. He murmurs little praises into your skin but it means nothing to you. The churning of your stomach drowns out his promises to take care of you and the child he’s about to give you.

Still, you cry. Any attempts to stifle them are fruitless as your tears seem never ending, and you can’t even muster a false moan. John huffs as he leans back to look at you — nothing but a wet mess. Eyes wrenched shut, head turned to the side as if you can’t stand to look at him. He attempts to continue, to snap his hips against yours, but his movements cease.

“Really, darling?” he huffs.

When all you can do is hiccup in response, John pulls out. He shoves himself away from you and slides off of the bed with a bestial growl. Trembling, you turn on your side as you listen to his feet carry him away from the bed.

“Ruinin’ the fuckin’ mood,” he grumbles.

After that, he locks himself in the bathroom. When your breathing calms, you’re able to make out faint moans as he finishes himself off. That night, he sleeps facing away from you.

Convinced that you’ve upset John beyond repair, you find yourself playing into the role of his wife more than you usually would. Going as far as to fake smiles when he enters the kitchen, or even trot off across the vast property to give him a glass of water as he splits wood for the upcoming winter. Your skin crawls. Performing such tasks for this monster that’s trapped you to this pitiful existence is the last thing you wish to do.

Still, you’re all too wary of how your fate rests in the palm of his hand.

He does not spit venom at you like he did the night of your failed coitus. There is no shoving you onto the bed to spank you with his belt. In fact, he acts the way he always has. Telling stories that never existed anywhere else other than in fabrication, and holding you close as if he can’t get enough of the touch of your skin.

For a short while, you are able to live thinking you’ve gone through the worst of it — this life as a bride prisoner.

It isn’t until you’re brought to the shed that you realize you are sorely mistaken.

You’re not sure why John has insisted you accompany him outside. There are vague promises of the intention to show you something, yet he refuses to share what. Hand holding yours, he leads you across the soft grass field and to the shed where he stores his work tools. You do not notice the new vehicle parked at the end of the lane, only the bright light that seems to be seeping through the gaps near the doorknob.

John opens the door to reveal a stranger and a table. He’s tall, nearly scrapes the ceiling with the top of his head — taller than John, even. He watches you with dull eyes as he pursues several metal tools on a small cart. This stranger looks up at you as if you’ve interrupted something important. You had expected simple gardening tools to await you on this side of the entrance, and instead you’re greeted with some macabre horror that sends ice down your spine. Leather restraints. A medical mask over a scarred face. Blue gloves.

You’re hardly able to make sense of the scene before you when something pinches the skin of your arm. It stings worse than a bee, and when you go to swat at the sensation, you suddenly feel the tingling mute. There’s a flash of a needle as John wraps his hand around your waist, and your knees turn to water as he leads you further inside the small wooden structure.

“This won’t take long, my love,” he whispers to you as if it’s a secret.

Table. Wood. It hurts your back. Your head. Everything is slow. Obtund. You try to move your limbs but you realize this stranger has already trapped you within the restraints. Something smells sweet. Oddly sweet, and yet clinical. Antiseptic. Iodine. Something. Your head sways as you look for John, but he’s nowhere to be found.

“Does this hurt?”

The stranger's question leaves your eyes fluttering. You don’t realize he’s poking your arm with a needle, piercing your skin in the process, until he forces your head to look at it.

“N-No,” you stutter.

“Good.”

You feel the odd pressure of more injections into your body, and eventually you’re so cocainized you can hardly keep a single thought from fluttering between your fingers.

“What’s… what are you doing?” you slur.

“Fixin’ you,” the man responds, accent thick and voice scratchy. He’s wearing long sleeves, but you can see the tattoo’s peek out right where the latex of his glove doesn’t quite meet the cloth. “John says you’ve been a bad wife.”

A cacophony of thoughts flood your brain. Fix you? Like a pet? Like an animal? No, no but he wants children. So then what? What is there to change about you?

“No… no I’m not his wife,” you babble. “He’s not- he’s just a stranger. He took me. Abduc… ted? Please… you… help me, please.”

The stranger hums, and you catch the dark glint in his eyes flickering as he looks at the ring on your left hand.

“Got a ring, don’t ya? Means you’re a wife,” he challenges. Gloved hands press against your forehead, pushing you against the table. Then, he retrieves something that looks akin to an icepick. Thin, long — like a needle. He presents it as if it’s a tool for work instead of a tool for horror. “Hold still, yeah? And keep talking. Wanna make sure I’m not scrambling the wrong parts.”

It would be easier to say that you don’t remember what happens next — and perhaps you’ve forgotten parts of it — but you do remember. You remember the important bits. The pressure behind your eye as the pick is inserted behind your eyelid. The scraping crunch! of it breaking the thin bone just above your ocular nerve. And then, the cutting. The slicing. Dividing.

Synapses and neurons, shut off. Brain forcefully compartmentalized. Thoughts and memories separated until there is no more anxiety or fear.

There is no more you. That woman before is gone, as are her aspirations. That PHD is no longer just out of your reach, but long forgotten.

You are — as you should be — the perfect wife.

John Price has never been happier. His wife cooks delicious food and decorates the house to her heart's content with pictures and the wildflowers she picks from the lane outside their home. She always smiles when he enters the room, and returns every kiss he gives her. For some reason, she’s grown rather quiet ever since her procedure. Words seem to fail her, but he doesn’t mind her quietness. The only words she needs to convey are with her loving gaze.

It’s those little moments that bring him pleasure, but his true joy greets him when he arrives home from a hard day’s work.

Swaying in the kitchen, child in your arms, you greet John the same way you always do — with a smile. He grins ear to ear as he approaches you, hands resting on your hips as he stares down at his son. A year after your procedure, you blessed him with an heir; a son to nurture and provide for. Only a few weeks old, the babe sleeps soundly in your arms with fluttering eyelids as he dreams.

“Here darling, let me,” John urges.

Slipping his son from your arms, you smile up at him before pressing a quick kiss to his cheek. Turning around, you continue your work at the stove with swaying hips and a gentle hum — the only skill you seem to remember with your voice is sweet melodies. John doesn’t mind it. In fact, he rather enjoys watching you hum his son to sleep as he feeds upon your breast.

Bouncing the child in his arms, John smiles to himself as he watches you. Daydreams bearing fruit in reality, he soaks up every moment of this life he’s built for himself. This quiet life he never thought was obtainable until he met you. The woman of his dreams.

The woman he turned into the perfect wife.

Most creatures wail at the sight of salvation, and you were no different once upon a time ago. A bird always screams when first locked in a cage. But as you motion for him to sit at the table with a fresh plate of food in your hand, John is confident you’ll never cry at his generosity again.

In the end, caged birds always remember how to sing.

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john price x reader dead dove this was utterly insane and i love it

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bobiologist

10 months ago

WIP wednesday featuring a surprise fic that won't be posted for a few months (: