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ciphykiss · 11 months

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< incubus (iii)

blade x f!reader; nsfw, mdni (pls) somnophilia, slightly graphic violence

Love escapes Blade the same way dreams do, lost to hellscape, a curse, and raining swords; each one a reminder of his betrayal, her curse, and him, vengeance immortalized; it is the only thing he is allowed to feel, tastes as bittersweet as liquor once shared by brothers under moonlit nights, the reflections of crescent halos carved into bleeding rivers of a world long destroyed…

He hangs about the other stellaron hunters as a poltergeist; though Kafka trusts him (with her life, he’d presume, but also less), and the young one pesters him to pursue her games, Blade finds himself incapable of forging the bonds that haunt his sleep; the sword of a friend, the back of another, the scabbard of his master, and all the wild blood his brethren shared when they raced through the skies of Cangcheng before it befell calamity to the world-devourer, Rahu;

Why did you do it, he wants to ask, daydreams of asking; he is almost-afraid (he no longer fears, not really), facing eyes of seaglass in mourning.

For love, he who had once held his soul will reply; for love, time and time again…

—all for a promise.

The promise of his own death, as destiny’s slave had foretold—there is nothing else of want, nothing else of need. There is nothing else he desires as man would, nothing more than a wound to fester and rid him of his misery—fin.

Or so he thought.

He tells himself it is but a fleeting twinge; not quite longing, nothing more than a tug of his fate-strings, toying with him once more.

But he is from a time before starskiffs and the banishment of desire; he can recall the legends of his great-grandmother, besotted with a man destined to live a fraction of her own, the birth of her bloodline done through the dreaming; and though he has never quite experienced it himself, he is well-acquainted with both the stories and instinct of passion, enough to know the dangers—how it drives men and women alike to madness, the brink of insanity, and back to adoration once more. He doesn’t understand it, not really, until the day he meets you.

It is all very banal, he thinks, because he doesn’t even have to look at you to know you are his. He feels it in the air—the hurried, impatient clack of your heels, sweetness of your words (even when you assail him with your questionnaire, as grating as nails on a chalkboard, he’s more annoyed at the fact that he doesn’t want you to stop talking) and the scent—

He doesn’t consider himself particularly Foxian, not after generations of outmixing had thinned the blood of the old. To his knowledge, his predecessors had only passed down their knack for artismanship; apparently, desire was part of that package, because the moment your fingers brushed over the side of his face, he could smell the aftermath of your frustration and solo-pursuit of pleasure, a lingering fragrance no amount of hand-washing could cover up. He knew he had to have you then, one way or another—something had shifted inside of him, like the maw of a wild beast being lured by first blood. Yes, he would have you—if not in the waking world, then in the dreaming, and if not your flesh, then in spirit. You’d made him realize a starvation that he hadn’t known existed; neither love nor affection, more carnal than a means to an end.

He knows this is not love; love is lost to time and his curse, gnawing away at the cadaver of his heart. Yet, he can’t help but bury his nose into the phantom of your flesh, teeth grazing your nape as he opens his mouth to devour—

Your legs curl around him in a vice that eclipses both wedding bands and vows, fingers awry in his hair; he has to bite back a sigh when you yank, sinking deeper into the skin of your collarbone to mask it. Both your strangulated hiss and whimpers have his blood rushing to his head, as distant a song as sirens ashore; he feels as though he’s in a haze, lost in a tangle of hair, threaded fingers, and not-quite flesh, and how long had it been since he’d laid in the embrace of arms—

They could not compare. A body would no longer do; it had to be you. Youyouyou, and only you.

So when you cease your pouting and opt to gather around his neck for a kiss with strands of his hair slipping past your face, he doesn’t refute—how can he, when he feels how you would’ve been his whole had he met you those long years before his demise, how he would’ve chased you to the moon just to crown you in jade and silverwing (would’ve could’ve should’ve), but now all that’s left of him is hollow and bone, and you? You’d just have to make do with a corpse.

He tells himself he’s had his fill, then finds himself chasing your sulking mouth the next night. You ask questions, you throw your fits; you demand answers, bite his lips, draw blood, and everything else under the moon. He tells himself he only needs you for your body, your kiss, but finds himself indulging you, time and time again; your more vapid queries, hazy, slow-blinking eyes, and oh, he’ll give you the illusion of domestication, letting you braid his hair, pulling you up by your waist when he wanted to taste, your lashes fluttering low at the spontaneity of his wanting.

But he won’t let you think (even for a moment) that he is something he isn’t—never whispers of sweet nothings, never a kiss to quell your nightmares (he is your nightmare), only the cold press of his mouth over your pulse, bruising teeth, and kisses that sought to devour, not guise as tenderness.

He doesn’t hope it is enough; it doesn’t matter. You have him (what is left of him), and it will have to be enough, because neither can he change, nor can he let you go.

ꨄ︎

You don’t fail to consider your demonic rendezvous could be the result of a faulty product, so you discard your fantasia for a new one; and so you sit, splayed on your bed (in proper nightwear this time), keeping vigil at your nightstand. The incense burns through the holographic figure of Lan; your room fills with the scent of ambrosial-root and alien flora, the former previously shunned amongst the commonfolk of the Luofu until Tingyun had parrotted the benefits of the immortal root as a soft drug for anxiety and insomnia; you’d made a note to chide Whistling Flames’ production quality the next time you met up with her for lunch if this dream… panned out…

The drop to your dream world is unceremonious; perhaps it’s the result of your previous night, but you find yourself with more heightened awareness than ever before (you wonder if this is what those medicus loonies refer to when they boast of “lucid dreams”). A world bathed in fog-mist and the herbal decay left by smoking pipes, your head resting on silk sheets, feathered pillows, with kiln sake cups identical to the ones bartered at Tingyun’s merchant guild resting an arm’s length away.

You sit upright, scanning your surroundings; no sight of cracked skies, rain, or the pungent blooming of spider lilies.

“...hi?” Your voice echoes through your dreamscape. You feel stupid.

Perhaps it had been a fluke; maybe Tingyun had been right. You begin to doubt yourself, gnawing on your lower lip, before a metaphorical lightbulb beams in the recess of your mind;

“...the fisherman would marry, and the Foxian, enraged and heartbroken...”

“Of all men,” he hisses into your ear, the bite of a wolf from a dark fairytale, “him?”

A fifty-fifty shot, you decide; he’d failed to kill you the last time he’d seen you riding Jingyuan’s face, allowing enough bravery for you to conjure up an imitation of the general.

It’s harder now that you’re not, well, as needy as you were when you’d first met; you envision the hair cascading over his shoulder, long and curling, a single, aureate eye, hands, calloused from battle and gripping the hilt of his war-spear,

“Enough.”

Your stomach drops. So it hadn’t been a fluke, and you were being haunted by the spirit of some deceased Foxian posing as an intergalactic war criminal you’d just so happened to think was bangable. That, or—

“So you really are stalking me,” you accuse, turning to your side. You observe him from where he stands, towering over you with his hands crossed over his chest; he looks more irked than truly jealous, maybe because you’re not half naked and in the process of climbing to a dream-climax; you rest your cheek on your palm, propped by an elbow, and sink a jade-collared foot into the water at the edge of the bed. He stares (or so you assume; it’s hard to tell by the blindfold), unamused when you flick at him, the droplets dematerializing into the fabric of his trousers. “What? Not joining me today?”

For a long while, he says nothing—in silent contemplation, while you pretend to pick at your nails in mimicry of indifference. Please don’t look at me, please just walk away, please let this be just a real—dream—you hear the ripples indicating his footsteps, crowns of spider-lilies rebirthed in his strides until he rests on the edge of the bed, black hair pooling into the silk.

You suck in a deep breath, gazing up at the now storm-cracked skyscape. You hadn't exacted the details of your so-called “plan” this far, half-expecting the circumstances of last night to have been explained by a crumpled club receipt or markered-star hidden away in some crevice of your body. You sit upright, swallowing the pounding of your heart, and brace yourself for a change of course;

He makes no movement of protest when he feels you crawl over to him, throwing the weight of your arms over his shoulders. Not even a compression, you sulk, feeling unyielding, lean muscle. Experimentally, you rest your chin at the juncture of his neck and shoulder, breath fanning over his bone-like pallor; you draw circles into the water with your feet, brushing against the flower stamens, willing the thrum of your heart to quiet.

“You’re awfully quiet,” you observe, voice muffled against the fabric of his coat; he smells the same, smoke and rain, the perfume of his hair an aquatic floral that has you near-salivating and Aeons did you wish you’d meet a man of his allure in the Luofu (without the homicidal package). “Need another projection of the general to get you going?”

It’s meant to be in jest, but also to test his limits; your eyes flicker up just in time to see his jaw flex. The spindles of a lily curl around your ankle and bite, causing you to squeak and fold your legs into the bed. Okay, maybe too far. You can’t help but glare at him (not like he can see it), rubbing the now crimson splotch. Bastard.

“Not cute,” you comment, tugging at the tassels of his collar. He makes no effort to stop you, even as your hands roam his hips, pausing right below the navel, and then working up to his chest, the other tangling in the fabric holding together his garment; it doesn’t take you long to to unassemble his shirt, mouth working down his nape, uncaring of the roadblock of his bandages.

Your fingers arch at his collarbone, having spidered to a two-fingered tilt; he feels you smile, tapping a nail over his skin.

“Aren’t you being too good today?” You wonder, eyeing the faded scars scattered along his torso like a belt of heliobi; you wonder if they belong to the demon-spirit or the space criminal himself, and could he possibly be the real Blade?

Only one way to find out; and you’re determined.

“Not entertained?” You hook your legs on either side of him, then, sliding down to rest on his thighs; you feel him at large, breath momentarily catching in your throat—eyes on the prize, stay focused—before you rest on the blindfold separating the wonders of his eyes from yours. He feels incomplete, unreal; he is, but not like this. You refuse to have him like this.

“Let me see you,” you whisper, and before the weight of your words can sink in, you reach out to yank the knot fastened behind his head.

What you see has your blood turning to ice, the hairs on the back of your neck standing pin-straight, and both your hands flying to your mouth to quell the scream that threatens to perforate the dreaming; because there, where his eyes should be are inky, sightless orbs, no sign of pupil nor sclera; twin voids, like staring into the end of the world. His thighs shift, and you nearly choke out a sob.

“What do you see?” He murmurs. “Is it all you dreamed of?”

There is something sickening in his voice, encapsulating darker hues still; you squeeze your eyes shut, urging your heart to recover from its whiplash. When you open them, you stare at his mouth instead. It’s prettier, despite its velvet cruelty.

“What are you?”

He doesn’t answer, not for a long while; a stray wind blisters your cheek, enshrouding you with dark hair and the scent of him once more. You don’t remember a hand caging your hip, nor the one that had wound around your ankle, only now when he toys with the jade ornament that dangles off it; his grip doesn’t slacken, however, as if afraid you’d take off running at any given chance (he’s not wrong).

“The eyes are incomplete,” his answers are as vague as the real one, and you’re beginning to wonder just how accurate a Foxian’s charades can be. “They only see as far as they know; the rest is filled by imagination.” He smiles, then, wretched and alarmingly beautiful; “Did you see something monstrous?”

“You act as though that pleases you,” you rasp. At that, your dream demon leans in, smile taking a sharper turn as he forces eye-level contact. You have half a mind to scream, cry; conjure up a physical wall, render yourself blind. Anything to not have to glimpse into that void once more.

“Make no mistake; I am a monster.” His breath ghosts over your mouth like claws from inside a coffin. “That is what I am, what I always will be; do not dare dream otherwise. There is no prince waiting for you under this beast, no declarations of love and adoration; I am not like the ones they paint in stories. Do not expect a shelter from your nightmares; in time, you may find they and I become one in the same.”

And though staring into his eyes is akin to being swallowed by the void-whales that drift across the stars only in search of things to devour, you do; you ignore the fear that gropes your stomach, has your hands clammy with cold sweat.

“My little nightmare,” you simper, praying you come off more coy than deathly afraid, “you overestimate yourself. Did you truly think I’d deluded myself with such grandiose? That I’d expect you to fill the void of a real man, buy me a picket-fence complex, and take some revoltingly cute children to late-night starskiff drives on the weekends?” You tug at a strand of his hair, twirling it around your finger; it slips, pliant as silk, and you drop your hand in search of something more entertaining.

His fingers turn bruising; your hand dips past his navel, tugging the loop of his belt free. Absently, you trace the silver of his armor-like garter. “Don’t forget your purpose—here, you are nothing but my dream-concubine, pretty as you may be. You exist to starve me of my fantasies so that you may bring me pleasure yourself, do you not? Fighting words, for one with a goal so…”

Your hands are frigid compared to the heat of his length, giving it a shallow, experimental tug. You hear him affected for the first time, breathing ragged in your ear, and you think he might as well break your hipbone with how tightly he grips it. It is an oddly rewarding sting; you stave off the pain with a giggle, lips brushing over the shell of his ear.

“...endearing,” you finish, teeth catching the flesh of his lobe. You’re only slightly out of practice; gone are the days of experimenting with more than a sloppy, quick fuck in some alleyway of the red-light district, but having a man—spirit, whatever the hell this thing was—of such indomitability crack under your ministrations served the necessary power-high to follow through with your teasing.

You remind yourself it’s all for a greater plan; the plan that suddenly looks as hazy as your fourth shot of tequila on a holiday cruise as you fall into whispering filthy nothings into his ear.

“You poor thing,” you gloat, boring your eyes fearlessly into his; they are half-lidded now, much more tolerable to look at. He presses a thumb warningly down on your pelvis when you arch, knees planted on either side of his hips to support your weight. You grin. “Relax.”

Confidently, you brush his hair out of his eyes—sweat clings to his forehead, jaw worked so tight you know his teeth are gritted. Your hand trails off the side of his face, adoring; “How long has it been since you’ve been cared for? Months? Years? Decades? Why do you deprive yourself?”

He is much too prideful to relent, this you know; because you are not all cruel, you smile, allowing him reprieve in the comfort of your neck. Your dream demon stills at the gesture, muscles growing taut even as he allows you to move him as you please. You laugh, patting the back of his head.

Because he is wholly unused to affection, you kiss the side of his cheek, his hair, base of the throat, and everywhere else when he likely fractures both your pelvic bone and wrist in response to the pace you set. Surprisingly, the wrist he grips is not the one that tugs at his cock, but the one that soothes him by sifting through his roots, as if he is more cautious of adoration than he is lust; you curve your thumb over the tip, and you know he’s close, abdomen constricting, all but cutting off your hand’s blood supply;

Focus. Now’s your chance.

It’s only under the guise of utter sweetness that you manage to pry his fingers from your wrist, lacing your hand with his and releasing him from your other at the same time. He snarls, hips bucking forward at the loss, sounding more animal than man; you use your now-free hand to capture his jaw, the other still tightly wound, and plant a searing, punishing kiss.

It’s humiliating. Would have been pathetic, even, had he not lasted so long and after such a lengthy period of abstinence; and had you been a tad more sadistic. You feel him shudder, the warmth of your mouth and hand-holding too much.

You bite down on his lip. Hard.

It’s difficult, teetering the border between a kiss and mauling his lips off; a plight that has to be overcome, however, as you scrape over the wound and taste blood in your mouth. It’s done. You separate from his person with a gasp, scanning the small, but fresh (and most importantly: noticeable) graze; it would undoubtedly redden and scar, just as your welts had.

Now, all that’s left to do is waltz into your daily session with the space criminal and examine him for a matching wound. Then, you can be sure—

“You.”

…okay, you definitely hadn’t thought this far.

“…we can talk this through,” you laugh nervously, raising both hands in surrender. “Let’s—talk, yeah? Like civil people. Iwaswrongpleasedon’thurtme—”

You squeak when your jaw is tucked into his vice-like grip; you shut your eyes, screeching a mantra of wake up wake up WAKE UP—

“You have some nerve.” He chuckles darkly (yes, chuckles; you’re reciting your final wishes at this point, coupled with a few bastardized prayers to Lan, because Aeons, this had to be the last thing you heard), arm crushing you against him; he feels the same as before, relentless, unyielding, rendering you completely at his mercy.

“What did you expect,” you protest, because if you’re going to die, you might as well go out with the last word; “—when you left me so callously last time,” you finish, chin jutted in defiance.

The world above you begins to splinter; you see the fabric of your blackout curtains, spy the string of polaroids dangling from your ceiling. A wave of relief washes over you; you smile, beguiling, and roll over so you’re no longer pinned under him.

“Well, this has been lovely, but it’s getting late—early—and would‘ya look at the ti—!”

He grips your ankle, tugs; your world blurs from the sudden movement, and you drown in the scent of rain and woodsmoke once more.

His mouth brushes over yours, cold, soft—an almost-kiss. You find yourself with an insatiable yearning for those lips once more—the taste of iron and something sweeter.

Your eyes remain half-lidded in want for only half a second; the next, you find yourself letting out a noise torn between a moan and a hiss, feeling the pads of his fingers circling pressure around your clit. Your thighs clamp on instinct, shocked at the surge of pleasure; you can only stare, horrified, into dark hair and the lightly-scarred pallor of his neck.

“What’re you—”

The words die on your lips as easily as the bloom of a strangulated whine; the rare power-trip over your dreamvader had left you rather malleable, and it didn’t take long for him to deem you prepped enough to split in half. The drag of his fingers is haunting; a slow-burning candle, a lull, bandaged thumb working on your nerves while he curls two more inside.

“Entertained?” He breathes, teeth grazing over the shell of your ear the same way you had; but he bites where you had kissed, devours instead of adoring. Your dreamscape spins; you hear the phantom of your own voice in an echo chamber. “Not entertained?”

In response, you can only grip the back of his hair.

“Not quite.” You bite down into the juncture between his neck and shoulder.

“Entertained,” he rasps, and your world is collapsing; vibrations of bent, gleaming white and silver-blue; the surface below you pools, turns to void-stars. You move only with the rise of his chest, the ripple of his throaty voice; your hips move sluggishly against his thigh, knee parting you open, as if you’re in a trance. He sets a brutal pace, dragging your hips up to meet his, and the friction between your clothed heat and his is enough to have you drawing red down his back, pushed to a state of delirium you didn’t think was possible with mere grinding.

Your response is a cacophony of undulated whimpers; you keen, eyes wet and red, every nerve lit on fire, and the very backdrop of your dream world burns behind your eyes;

You search for his lips like a prisoner starved; the stars fall out of his mouth, and you catch them, outpouring into the constellated belt of a dipper.

Entertained? You feel him mouth against the flesh under your breast, voice drowned by the bell of your morning alarm and the purr of early-morning starskiffs making a beeline for breakfast courts. You’re all but a ragdoll now, held up by a single arm. You twist your neck to glare down at him, eyes itching for the waking world.

“Whore,” You accuse, a half-slur; you blink rapidly, eyelashes fluttering over cheekbone, and swear you feel him smile against your rib.

When you come to, you have ten missed calls from Jingyuan, a barrage of worried messages from Tingyun, and a notice from the Luofu’s government hospital on behalf of the reigning High Elder, Bailu.

ꨄ︎

He hears you before he sees you; Blade doesn’t have a chance to look up before you have your hand at his neck, near-strangling; a pressure that likely would’ve had the average man nearly knocked out. Your breath comes out in harsh, sobbing huffs, and you smell salty, as if you’d been crying; that, and of something sterile—rubbing alcohol?

“What did you do?” The break in your voice tells him everything he needs to know. When he doesn’t answer right away, you tighten your hold, and he finds himself both smiling and unable to breathe. “You fucking bastard, tell me what you did to him.”

“Whom?”

You let out a shrill, and he laughs, feeling your nails mark over the old scars along his throat, vessels restricting under the abuse; you land a rather solid one across his cheek, enough to have him snap to the left, though unfortunately not enough to break posture. Rather amateur in combat, were you?

“Did you kill him?” You’re screeching now, voice hollowed-out and black with rage, and a small inkling in him whispers that maybe, just maybe he’d taken it too far—but he remembers what Kafka had relayed to him, the script foretold by destiny’s slave, and his own promise, and cannot find it in himself to care. “Did you fucking kill him, you—”

Your words fail you; there’s nothing horrible enough to scream. You want to beat him bloody and tear his hair out from his scalp and kill him, twice as cruel as he had been to Danyin, but—

You fall to your knees, hands flying to your mouth.

“That’s… no, that can’t—that’s not—”

Jingyuan’s hand on your shoulder is a painful tether to reality, and you can only watch as the High Elder rubs her hands over your coworker’s molting form in desperation. The poor Vidyadhara girl looks exhausted, sweat clinging to her forehead as she tries to reanimate a body long gone.

“We found him bleeding outside his post,” Jingyuan says gravely, but you can’t hear him anymore; can’t hear anything, can’t see anything, wishing you could unsee everything. “He had… strangest look on his face… as if he’d seen a ghost… so much blood…”

You spy your own wristwatch coming undone from his now-waxy arms. It clatters to the floor; you stare at it blankly.

“I’m counting on you, friend!”

If only you hadn’t. If only you’d shut your mouth. If only you had. If only—ifonly, Aeons; would he still have been alive?

“[Name]!” Jingyuan shakes you; you wonder how long he’d been doing that, and turn to stare up at him, bewildered. This had to have been a dream, some terrible nightmare. Things like this didn’t happen on the Luofu. It was an era of peace. Things like that didn’t happen to you. Not people you knew. “...Tingyun is heading over as we speak; I do not know what has transpired, but I assure you, [Name], I will do everything in my power to get to the bottom of this, and no harm will come to you, this I swear—”

You want to laugh and cry and tear open the very fabric of reality at the same time. You? How could you possibly have been worried about yourself when you had all but caused someone to die? When you were the reason that—

“...was not something Diviner Fu foresaw. I’ll be taking you off this case, [Name], for time being, and you will be compen—”

“No.”

“...I don’t believe you’re in the right headspace—”

“No,” you repeat, and you’re already standing up, legs moving before your brain can process your destination; Jingyuan makes a motion to grab your arm to stop you, but whatever face you’re wearing has him frozen in his tracks. “I’ll see to it I see this job through. All the way. On behalf of him.”

“Did you like your gift,” he wonders, and suddenly, he is nothing short of hideous—a beast in human skin, scum, something that existed to die; you gnaw down on your bottom lip and taste iron, anything to quell the traitorous tear that dampened his blindfold and ran past his own cheek. “Had you truly let down your guard so prematurely?”

“You monster,” you whisper, finally. “How could you take someone’s life so—so—”

“Life,” he murmurs, “is only made precious through death. A lesson not all learn early, a paradise unreachable for me… ah,” he chuckles, words catching in his throat when you try your damndest to suffocate the piece of shit in front of you.

“Do you think yourself nature?” You grit, voice a clamor; “Do you think yourself above life? What gives you the right to rob another of theirs—are you even human?”

“On the contrary,” he sighs, “I give them a gift of the highest honor—the gift of death. It is all predestined, those I kill; a slave to destiny is what I’ve become. I can only yearn for the day he returns my favor—the day I may walk over the blood I’ve spilt to welcome the end which I’ve sought for… all this time…”

You feel like vomiting. You’d never understood them, neither the woes of the soon-to-be marastruck or the elders, who viewed life as more a chore than something to be cherished; something to squash under their soles. They called it the curse of the abundance, but they had become the true curse—an enemy of life itself.

“One day,” you promise, “you will fear death. One day, you will find something—someone—worth living for, and even your cruel, unbeating heart will take form, mimicking that of a real one. And I pray—I will make sure of it—you die that day, the day you fear death. Until then, I hope you wander. I hope you roam every corner of the galaxy, pushed to the brink of death and reviving once more; I hope you are always unsettled. I hope you never find peace.”

You hear the general’s men burst through the door a second later, ripping you away from the creature. He sits there, in silence and contemplation, and you’re unable to rip your eyes from his form;

His last words are amused, a murmur; the shade of summer trees.

“How odd of you to curse me with what is already reality.”

ꨄ︎

When he dreams, your hands are at his throat once more; you might be crying again, he can’t tell; your tears are corporeal, and he still can’t see you. He comes to the stifling realization that some part of him—a part that should be impassive—does not wish to see you in such a state, your sniffling drawing his ire.

“Change,” you spit, imagining your hands to pop that godforsaken throat open like it should have in the waking world, “stop looking like that. Change. Now.”

He makes no effort to move, as if your ministrations do not bother him in the slightest—just like in the real world. You let out a snarl.

“I warned you,” he says, as you begin beating down on his chest with the ferocity of a dozen wolves, “in time, you would find that your nightmares and I become one in the same.”

“I don’t care,” you howl, fists going raw in their onslaught; “Stop looking like that—that thing. It’s revolting.”

He doesn’t respond; you wail and howl until your throat runs dry and the skin of your palms ache, seemingly, an eternity; you collapse on his chest, and he feels it turn wet with your tears. You’re shaking from exhaustion, anger, something more—too much.

And despite it all, through your rage, you reach an epiphany—a welcome one; for whatever demon may haunt you, it isn’t him. Isn’t Blade. You’d seen him at your altercation, lips unmarred and sporting not a single bruise he would’ve gained in your dream world; and despite the healing prowess of Xianzhou Natives, not a single one sported regenerative abilities to that degree.

You raise your face to meet his, and cup his cheeks—slowly, softly, unlike your prior treatment. It’s a shocking change, one that has him reeling from the whiplash.

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, a hoarse, scratchy apology. “I’ve been taking my rage out on you, but you—you are not him. You don’t deserve it, not really. I—I don’t know your circumstances, or why you’re here… but I don’t think you would have chosen this face. Not if you could’ve helped it.”

He says nothing. He should tell you the truth—observe as something shatters inside you once more, and have you reeling from the impact. He should break you cleanly.

But he doesn’t.

“You don’t have to do anything,” you say, sounding dead. “Just—make me forget. Please. I don’t want to think of anything anymore.”

He finds you completely pliant when he shifts your form on his chest, lacking your usual bite—you say nothing when he moves you under him, hand cradling the back of your head so he can tilt you for a kiss.

Your lips don’t move against his, merely open—you shudder, curling your legs inward instead of at his waist, and he finds himself despising it. You. Him. Everything in between.

You’re crying again. He finds himself unable to do anything other than mouth away your tears, even as you whisper for more, beg, even; an excuse to kiss you once more, again and again, repeatedly; catches them right over your mouth, sweeps that can almost be considered gentle, despite that being the last thing you want (need).

“Fool,” he murmurs, blanketing you in darkness; of hair, fabric, and his hands. You close your eyes, lulled into an even deeper sleep—a dream within a dream.

Before you doze off, you wonder if this is his own way of showing kindness—an effort made so you would not be forced to bear the torment of seeing his face once more.

taglist: @aliceu, @hypernovaxx

a/n: this was so painful to finish mostly bc I had to adult and do actual life things >.> lmk if anyone wants to be added to the taglist! (provided ur not a minor!!) ill probably edit this a lot bc god knows i did not proofread

#this took a while bc work has been a binch & a half #U-U #blade x reader #honkai star rail x you #hsr x reader #hsr x you #blade hsr #honkai star rail smut #blade smut

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