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serpentandlily · 7 days

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Lost in a Labyrinth - Azriel x Reader

Lost in a Labyrinth Part II - Azriel x Reader

Summary: Lonely and heartbroken after his near kiss with Elain, Azriel finds himself at the door to the most exclusive pleasure house in Hewn City, The Labyrinth, taking Rhysand’s cruel advice. What he expected to find was a pretty girl to warm a bed with him for a single night. But instead he finds something he never thought existed—his mate. A mate that is tangled up in something far more sinister than he could ever imagine.

Warnings: smut (minors dni), reader is a prostitute, uncomfortable situations (nothing extreme)

a/n: thanks for all the love on the first part! Hope y'all like this one just as much!

➻❥ Part I

─── ⋅ ∙ ∘ ☽ ༓ ☾ ∘ ⋅ ⋅ ───

Part II

─── ⋅ ∙ ∘ ☽ ༓ ☾ ∘ ⋅ ⋅ ───

“You look well rested.”

Cashmere winked at you from her seat in front of her vanity. She was brushing out her long hair, getting ready for the evening. You let out a sigh and plopped down at your own vanity in the dressing room.

“I am,” you replied. “Someone bought out all my nights this month but no one’s shown up. It’s…strange, don’t you think?”

Cashmere shrugged, going back to looking at her reflection in the mirror. “Seems to me like you’ve got yourself a secret admirer.”

You began putting on your makeup for the night, not that you’d have any clients. But you were still expected to be in the Courtyard for a bit. “Secret, maybe, but they're definitely not an admirer. If they were, why wouldn’t they come get what they paid for?”

“Some of these Lords just throw their money around to impress us. I wouldn’t think too much about it, Serenity,” Cashmere said. You fought the urge to cringe at the fake name. “Consider it a vacation of sorts.”

“Until Lydia finds out,” you snorted. “Then she’ll probably double book me.”

“Just rub some kohl under your eyes,” Cashmere suggested. “Make it look like you’re still having sleepless nights like the rest of us.”

“Not a bad idea.”

More girls walked in and you fell silent. Telling Cashmere about your current situation was one thing. You trusted her as a friend. But some of the other girls would likely pass on the information to Lydia and that’s the last thing you wanted.

You finished your makeup before shrugging on a new lingerie set with a dark pink silk robe over it. You followed the girls to the Courtyard, ready to perform your nightly duties so you could retire back to your room for another peaceful night alone thanks to your mysterious donor.

─── ⋅ ∙ ∘ ☽ ༓ ☾ ∘ ⋅ ⋅ ───

Your vacation was short lived because the next day, Keir showed up and requested sixteen specific girls, your name included, for a party that was being hosted in Hewn City with some elite nobles. Even the High Lord and Lady would be present apparently. Not that you’d be allowed to approach them. Every time you worked these kinds of events, all the girls were given strict instructions on how to dress, what to wear, and what Lords to entertain.

A dress was waiting for you in the dressing room. It was a long black dress that fell to the floor with two slits on the side to show off your legs. It was backless with a few thin straps that criss crossed on your lower back. Sitting beneath it was a pair of silver heels and on your vanity sat a matching silver jewelry set.

You had to forgo your bra for the dress, likely the reason it was chosen. You did a sultry smokey eye and dark red lip for your makeup before you pinned your hair into a pretty updo to show off the back of the dress.

By the time you were finished getting ready, the other girls were too. It wasn’t long before you were being led into the throne room. During parties like this, only the elite and those invited had access to this room in the castle.

The ebony floors were polished, the carved pillars spanning so high you could hardly see where they connected to the ceiling. Various nobles mingled together, sitting on settees, smoking cigars, with glasses of wine and whiskey in their hands.

The High Lord and Lady sat on their thrones on top of the dais at the front of the expansive room, dressed finely in all black with their crowns on their heads. Standing next to the High Lord was the General, the big, brutish Illyrian. Next to the High Lady stood the Shadowsinger, his eyes scanning the room. You’d seen the Shadowsinger plenty of times during the occasional trips your High Lord and Lady made to Hewn City. But that night he had walked through your doors in The Labyrinth, you had been taken aback by how beautiful he was.

Memories of your night with him flashed through your head and you tried to fight off the blush and heat that started coursing through your body. Azriel had been a generous lover. Far more generous than your other clients, that’s for sure. He had actually cared about your pleasure. Not to mention he was the hottest male to walk through your doors.

It was a pity that he had disappeared so quickly and never returned.

“Alright, girls, you know what to do,” Lydia hissed at the group of you. “Do not embarrass me. Anyone who steps out of line will receive a new mark.”

That was the last thing you wanted to do. You looked down at your hand, at the small tattoo on the inside of your ring finger. You only had two more marks left. Two marks and then freedom would be yours.

You started mingling with the various Lords, pretending to eagerly listen to them brag about the most mundane things like their latest hunt or new investments. Servants meandered around, filling wine and whiskey glasses.

When you were younger, you had accepted them like most of the other girls. Having a little alcohol in you always made the night easier. But you were going to steer clear of it—not wanting to jeopardize your progress with Lord Keir and Lydia.

You started making your way towards the front of the room. You had to steer clear of the High Lord and Lady but the wealthier and more important males always sat near the front. And if you caught the attention of someone Keir wanted gone, that would be just an extra bonus to the money you’d be making off them.

You were used to eyes trailing after you everywhere you went, but something else was tugging on your senses, making you feel not like you were being ogled at like always but watched.

Your eyes darted around until they landed on a familiar pair of hazel ones. Azriel hadn’t moved a single step from his post but his eyes were on you. Your steps faltered for a second, taken aback by how intense his stare was.

Was he scared that you would out him? Address him in front of his High Lord? He should know that you couldn’t. The same way he couldn’t mention anything that took place in the Labyrinth.

Your name being called shook you from your thoughts.

Your attention was pulled to a handsome male with long, white hair that matched his equally pale skin. Lord Thanatos’s golden eyes were running up and down your body as he sat sprawled in an armchair like it was the High Lord’s throne. He beckoned you to him with two fingers.

Your heart dropped to your stomach as you had no other choice but to go to him. He was your least favorite client but he had a weird obsession with you. It was rare for him to choose any other girl in The Labyrinth besides you. You gave him a seductive smile, slipping into your role for the night. “How may I help you, my Lord?”

You let out a small gasp as he latched onto your wrist and pulled you onto his lap. The Lords around him all snickered. He brushed your hair to one side before whispering in your ear, “You’re going to be helping me a lot tonight, sweetheart.”

Your insides shriveled up. Lord Thanatos was your least favorite client because of how rough he was with you. But he paid a lot of money so Lydia and the guards often looked the other way, only sending a healer into your room once he left.

“I’m looking forward to it, my Lord,” you purred, resting a hand on his chest. You weren’t, of course. Not even because of the pain he’d inflict on you but more so because Lord Thanatos was Keir’s secondhand man and closest confidant. Which meant those two lines tattooed on your finger would still be there when you woke up tomorrow morning.

Lord Thanatos went back to chatting with the various nobles seated on the couches and settees around him. If it wasn’t for his wandering hands on your body, you would’ve thought he was ignoring you. His hardening cock that was pressing into your backside had you shifting as much as you could to his thigh. You glanced around the room only to find Azriel’s eyes still on you. His fists were clenched, his face frozen with a hint of anger. Anger and something else that seemed suspiciously like longing.

You shifted again in Lord Thanatos’s lap for an entirely different reason now.

Cashmere happened to be walking by when Lord Thanatos grabbed onto her wrist and yanked her down to sit on his other thigh, forcing the two of you to share the small space.

She giggled. “Two of us? Don’t tell me you’re getting greedy, my Lord.”

You exchanged a small look with her. It didn’t happen often but sometimes clients wanted to take two girls at once. You preferred when you were chosen along with Cashmere, because you two were close friends which made it less awkward.

“I think Serenity wants someone to play with,” he smirked, his thumb brushing the underside of your breast. “Isn’t that right, sweetheart?”

“Anything for you, my Lord,” you smiled. “You know how much I love to please you.”

He leaned back in his chair and tossed his arms behind his head like he commanded the room. “Go on then. Kiss.”

You glanced at Cashmere who gave you a dip of the head so you reached forward and hooked some of her ginger hair behind her pointed ear before kissing her lightly. She tasted like cherry wine. You pulled back after a second and for some reason, your eyes caught Azriel’s. He was closer now, leaning on a pillar, wreathed in shadows—watching. He twirled his dagger in his hand with ease.

“Oh come on, Serenity. Don’t play coy,” Thanatos laughed. “I know that mouth can do better than that.”

Cashmere grabbed your face lightly, her eyes shining with a look that urged you on. You kissed her properly this time, caressing her face. This time the two of you gave the Lord what he wanted. But you could feel Azriel’s overwhelming stare still on you.

It wasn’t until your lips were swollen and you were panting that you finally let up. You could feel your lipstick smeared all over and wiped it with your hand.

“Oh, she’s made such a mess of me, my Lord,” you pouted. “Will you excuse me so I can fix myself up?”

“Sure, sweetheart,” he said, pulling Cashmere closer to him. “But don’t keep us waiting.”

“Of course,” you said with a nod, rising from his lap.

When you glanced at the pillar Azriel had been leaning on, he was still staring. It was a bit unnerving. You let out a shaky breath and quickly hurried out of the throne room and into one of the bathing chambers down the corridor. You rested your hands on the edge of the sink, staring down at the basin. You just needed a breather. Just a second to collect yourself.

Not a moment later, you felt a prickling sensation on your skin and the hairs on the back of your neck rose. Your head shot up and you left out a gasp as your eyes met a pair of hazel ones in your reflection.

Azriel stood behind you, his shadows swarming him.

You whirled around, backing into the sink.

“What are you doing here!”

Azriel took a step forward, out of the darkness.

“You shouldn’t be here,” he stated in a low voice that had goosebumps rising on your skin.

You crossed your arms, staring up at him entirely confused both by his appearance in the bathroom of all places and his remark. “Shouldn’t be where? In the bathroom?”

“No,” he growled, stepping closer. “You shouldn’t be here, at this party.”

“What do you mean? You know what I am. We were hired—” You cut yourself off as you had a realization. “It was you, wasn’t it? The one who booked up all my nights?”

Azriel said nothing, gave no reaction other than his large wings twitching. You swallowed thickly and turned back around, away from his daunting stare, finding it easier to stare at him through the reflection on the mirror. You summoned your small clutch with some magic before pulling out your tube of lipstick.

“Look, Azriel,” you began, starting to apply your lipstick. “You’re not the first male to feel ashamed after sleeping with me. If you’re doing this to absolve yourself from whatever guilt you have, consider it forgiven.”

Azriel stepped closer, his face darkening. “I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood my actions. I do not feel ashamed because I slept with you, angel. I’m ashamed that I made you sleep with me.”

You shoved your lipstick back in your purse, turning around to face him. “You didn’t make me do anything. I knew what this job entailed when I signed up for it, okay?”

“But is it…is it what you want?”

You shrugged your shoulders. “I can’t say it’s been a dream of mine. But it's a hell of a lot better than being sold off to some male and having all my freedoms taken away.”

Azriel ran a hand through his dark hair, tousling it. “Those shouldn’t be your only two choices.”

“Well, take that up with our High Lord, Azriel, I don’t know what to tell you,” you sighed. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, my client is waiting—”

You went to brush past Azriel to the door but he grabbed your wrist to stop you.

“Don’t,” he breathed, “Don’t go. I know you don’t want to be with him. I could see it in your eyes.”

“I don’t have a choice, Azriel,” you snapped, trying to pull your wrist free. “So let me go.”

“Sounds like you’ve already had all your freedoms taken away,” he bit back, his grip unrelenting.

“You know nothing,” you argued. “If this is the one thing I have to sacrifice to keep all my other ones, then so be it. Besides, I’m almost—”

You cut yourself off, cursing in your head at your slip-up. No one could know about the deals the girls at The Labyrinth had with Keir. If word got out because of you…

“Almost what? What were you going to say?”

Azriel’s eyes were pleading with you, like he was hanging off every word that came out of your mouth. You let out a shaky breath and shook your head. “Nothing. Nothing, forget it. Now, please let me go. You’re going to get me in trouble with Lydia.”

You tried to leave again but Azriel pulled you back. “I can’t stand to see you look so miserable with him. Please, let me help you. I paid for you tonight; I’ll go tell Lydia that I’m taking you back to the—”

“She won’t care. She’s just going to give you your money back,” you cut in. “Lord Thanatos pays a lot of money to have me. More than whatever you gave her.”

“Then I’ll pay twice as much as him,” Azriel stressed. “Or whatever I have to in order to make sure he doesn’t end up in your bed tonight.”

“I take my orders from Lydia. What she says goes.”

“Fine, give me five minutes,” Azriel said with heavy resolve. “Just avoid him for now and I’ll sort it out.”

You looked at him closely. “Why do you care?”

“Don’t…don’t ask me that,” Azriel murmured before he disappeared in a whirl of shadows, leaving you stunned and confused.

You left the bathroom finally, making your way back to the throne room. Your mind was screaming at you to go back to Lord Thanatos before you got in major trouble, but something else in you wanted to listen to Azriel. You had no idea why. You grabbed a champagne flute off a tray from a server and made yourself look busy near a pillar that concealed you from Lord Thanatos’s view.

Five minutes passed and you were beginning to lose faith in Azriel, resigning yourself to the night with Thanatos when he stepped out of the shadows behind you. You let out a gasp of fright, spilling your full glass of champagne. Azriel grabbed the empty glass from your hand and set it on a table before taking your hand in his and guiding you away from the pillar.

“I sorted it out,” he whispered under his breath to you. “But Lydia seemed…suspicious of my interest in you.”

“What do you mean?” You hissed back.

“She’s wary of you being a spy for the High Lord,” Azriel answered, quickly.

You held back a laugh at that. “Then I guess we’ll have to make her think you’re interested in me for…other reasons.”

Azriel stopped and pulled you close to him, leaning down to whisper in your ear, “Don’t get me wrong, angel. I am interested in you for all those other reasons, too.”

A chill skittered down your spine and you looked up at him with a coy smile. “Good, that’ll make this easier than.”

“Make what easier?”

“The show we’re going to put on for her,” you whispered.

Azriel’s cheeks turned a bit pink and you just knew you were going to have fun with him.

─── ⋅ ∙ ∘ ☽ ༓ ☾ ∘ ⋅ ⋅ ───

Azriel found an armchair next to some empty couches in clearsight of Lydia and sat down, spreading his legs apart in invitation and patting his thigh. His face was unreadable as you sat in his lap, tossing an arm around his neck and throwing your legs over his thigh, leaving them to dangle. He placed an arm around your waist, his hand lying flat on your stomach, and pulled you closer to him.

Azriel leaned in, whispering, “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable.”

“You won’t,” you replied, honestly.

His eyes searched yours for a second before he nodded. You placed a hand on his chest, running your fingers over his leathers. “Aren’t these a little constricting?”

His throat bobbed as he swallowed harshly. “I’m used to them.”

You hummed, your eyes darting towards Lydia to see her watching the two of you. “Well, I much prefer you out of them, shadowsinger.”

Your words had their desired effect. Azriel’s chest rumbled with a quiet growl, his hand caressing your waist. You giggled, pressing a few kisses to his jaw. His scent of cedar and night-chilled mist seemed to envelope you. He gripped your dress in his fist, his entire body tense.

“Tell me something about yourself,” he whispered, lowly. “Anything.”

“What do you want to know?”

Azriel nudged his head into the crook of your neck, inhaling deeply. His breath ghosted over your skin, causing goosebumps to spread. “Something real.”

You were never very forthcoming with your clients, always keeping your personal details secret and making up stories and lies to feed their curiosity. But something made you not want to lie to Azriel.

“My name is Y/n,” you started, shifting closer to him so no one else could overhear anything said. His hand that was on your waist slipped to the exposed skin on your back, his fingers lazily trailing up and down. “I was born to a low-ranking noble and his bitch of a wife, my mother. I was going to be sold off like cattle to some Lord who had already gone through three wives—you can guess what happened to them—but my friend, the one you saw me with earlier, helped me escape.”

Azriel’s grip on you tightened, pulling you flush against his hard chest. You melted into the heat of his body, the thin dress you had on did nothing to keep you warm. The hand that was on your back slipped to your thigh, parting your skirt so he could touch your smooth skin. Your heart jumped in your chest.

“Tell me their names,” Azriel growled into your ear. “Tell me their names and consider them gone.”

You laughed, darkly, twisting your arm around his neck to stroke the hairs at his nape. “No need for that. They’ve been…taken care of.”

Azriel’s other hand drifted up to your throat, grasping it lightly and tilting your head back so he could pepper his own kisses along your jaw and neck. Your breath hitched and you found yourself grinding down on him, gasping as you felt his hardening cock. Suddenly, none of this was pretend. Had it even been pretend in the first place? No…no, it hadn’t. You had been burning and burning for him since the night he had stepped into your room.

“I’m sorry—”

You turned to look at him and kissed him firmly before he could finish his sentence. He groaned as your lips met his and you pulled away entirely too soon, lingering only centimeters away.

“I’m not,” you purred.

Whatever resolve Azriel seemed to have, whatever dignity of yours he was trying to preserve, all of it was forgotten in the moment. He lurched forward and kissed you again, his hand on your throat angling your head to his liking—the rings on his fingers were cold against your heated skin. You moaned at the feeling of his soft lips, at the taste of him.

His tongue swiped your bottom lip and you gave into the subtle request, parting your lips for him and deepening the kiss. The hand that had been rubbing circles on your thigh slipped dangerously close to the place between your legs that seemed to be begging for him. You’d never been so turned on in your life. The thrill of knowing eyes were on you and the feeling of Azriel consuming you caused your brain to numb all thoughts.

His hand on your throat slipped down your side, his knuckles running along the side of your breast. You arched into his touch with a mewl and he answered with a small huff, his wings twitching. Meanwhile his tongue was still exploring every inch of your mouth, claiming you in a way that had you throbbing in his lap.

Azriel pulled away, leaving you panting for air as he began to trail kisses down your jaw and neck again. His wandering hand landed flat against your stomach, pushing you farther into him until you were flush against his body, your legs falling open to either side of his thigh. Your half-opened eyes darted around the room.

It seems Lydia had lost interest in the two of you but another set of eyes were on you.

“The High Lord’s watching,” you murmured as he tugged on your earlobe with his teeth.

“I don’t care,” Azriel growled, his mouth moving to nibble on the delicate skin of your throat.

“He’s not going to get mad that you're allowing yourself to be seen with Hewn City scum?”

“Fuck him,” he snarled, biting down on your skin and causing you to gasp. He soothed the mark with his tongue before kissing his way up to your mouth again. “Stop talking about another male while you're sitting in my lap.”

“Yes, sir,” you smirked before he kissed you again, his hips thrusting up into your backside. You groaned, your core rubbing against his thigh with his movement and causing a strike of lightning to flash through your body. The need for him was overwhelming. You’d never felt this way towards anyone.

His hand drifted higher on your thigh, until his thumb traced the inner junction between your thigh and hip and felt the wetness that had started to spread there. A small whine came from the back of his throat that had butterflies fluttering in the pit of your stomach. You pulled away from his kiss to stare up at him with lust filled eyes, his own full of hunger and craving.

“Azriel?”

“Yes, angel?”

“Get us out of here.”

Azriel didn’t need to be told twice. His shadows engulfed the two of you and transported you to your room in The Labyrinth. You were on your knees before him not even a second later, overcome with the need to taste him, to touch him, to devour him whole. You pulled at the laces on his pants, your fingers working quickly. Azriel’s hand slipped into your hair, fisting your locks in between his fingers.

“Angel, you don’t have to—”

“Azriel,” you cut him off, staring up at him with hazy eyes. “Shut the fuck up.”

Before he could reply, you yanked his pants down causing his large member to spring up, already hard and leaking. You nearly groaned at the sight. He was so big, so big and thick. You leaned forward and pressed a kiss against the head of his cock and he hissed, his fists tightening in your hair.

You stared up at him as you took his cock in your hand and licked up his entire length. He let out a loud moan, tossing his head back at the pleasure. You smiled at the sight, your other hand sliding down your body between your legs, hoping to relieve some of the throbbing.

But Azriel growled and yanked your head back.

“Don’t you dare touch yourself,” Azriel commanded. “Only I get to touch you there.”

If it had been any other male saying those words, you would’ve laughed in their face. But it coming out of Azriel’s mouth only made your throbbing intensify. You whined, but listened, grasping his cock with both hands and finally taking him in your mouth.

“Fuck,” Azriel hissed, guiding your movement with his hand in your hair. “Fuck, your mouth feels so good.”

Your thighs rubbed together at his praise and you continued to bob your head back and forth, swirling your tongue under his cock and running it along his veins. His hips began to thrust in time with your movement, his hand guiding you to take more and more of him in your mouth until he was fucking your face.

“You’re taking me so well,” he moaned, thrusting into your mouth. “Good girl.”

You choked, tears beginning to slide down your cheeks. Normally you would hate a client treating you like this but with Azriel it felt different. Maybe because his rough taking of you was coupled with small words of praise and encouragement, urging you on.

“Just like that,” he groaned. “Fuck, angel, you look so pretty with your lips around my cock.”

You whimpered, taking more of him until his cock was hitting the back of your throat. Your hands jerked the part of him you couldn’t take because of his unbelievable size. His groans and growls kept you going, kept the fire between your thighs burning. You needed him more than you needed air.

Azriel yanked you away from his cock by your hair and you whined at the loss of contact. He pulled you up off the floor, his eyes nearly black with lust. “Take off your dress,” he ordered.

You maintained eye contact with him as you quickly stripped yourself before him. The air around the two of you was intense, the need for one another so tangible. In this moment, you weren’t Serenity, the prostitute who worked here. But Y/n. The girl underneath the mask.

“Get on the bed,” he demanded. “On your knees.”

You scurried to the bed, doing as he asked. You were entirely exposed to him in this position, your arousal dripping down your leg. You could hear him taking off the rest of his leathers and waiting in anticipation until his hands fell on your hips, rubbing them softly.

“Gods, you are so beautiful,” he murmured, one hand trailing up your back and gently moving your hair to one side so he could see your face. His cock rubbed against your folds, gathering your wetness. “Fuck and so ready for me.”

“Azriel, please,” you begged. You could feel yourself gripping around nothing, needing to be filled by him and him only.

“One day, I’m going to worship your entire body,” he grunted. “But I need you, angel. I need you right now.”

“Please,” you begged again. “Take me. I’m yours.”

Azriel slammed into you so quickly, it knocked the breath from your lungs. You moaned at the feel of him, at being stretched so thoroughly. He waited a moment, his breathing labored, allowing you to adjust before he slid back out and roughly thrust back in.

“Say it again,” he growled, taking a brutal pace, slamming into you over and over again.

You whimpered, “I’m yours.”

“Again,” he snarled, his pounding into you causing the whole bed to shake.

Your eyes rolled to the back of your head at the intense pleasure. Your whole body was tingling at his touch, at his words. “I’m yours, Azriel. I’m yours.”

One hand stayed on your hip to help keep you in place while the other slithered up your back and into your hair, fisting it again. He pulled your head back, exposing your neck as he drilled into you. Your back arched as you cried out at the feeling. You had already been so turned on, your orgasm was quickly building.

“More,” you groaned. “More, Azriel, please.”

He growled and yanked you up by your hair, pulling your body flush against his. The new angle felt deeper, his cock brutally hitting you in that sweet spot that had you seeing stars. His hand traveled from your waist to your breasts, squeezing and caressing them. Your head fell back against his shoulder as your body arched into his touch.

He released your hair to rub circles on your clit, leaving you both breathless and screaming.

Your body was entirely his in this moment. He controlled every ounce of your pleasure, every cry that came from your lips. You had never reveled in giving yourself up like this before. Not until Azriel came.

“Azriel…I’m gonna….I’m gonna,” you panted, the lewd noise of skin smacking together the only other sound in the room.

“Be a good girl and cum for me angel,” he whispered, huskily, in your ear.

His words pushed you over the edge and your orgasm slammed into you. Your entire body clenched around him as waves and waves of pleasure crested through you. Your vision went white hot with it. Azriel’s name fell from your lips like a Devil’s prayer.

“Fuck,” he hissed, fucking you through your orgasm. Until you finally came down from your high, your body slumping in his hold. He let you fall to the soft bed, your face smashing against the cushions as he held you up by your hips. His rhythm became desperate, feral until he finally came, burying himself in you with a loud growl.

You were both still panting as he slid out of you with a hiss and fell to the bed next to you. He wrapped an arm around your waist and pulled your body on top of his, letting his wings stretch out. You laid a cheek on his chest, feeling safe as he wrapped both arms around you.

“Don’t leave this time,” you whispered.

Azriel kissed the top of your head. “I won’t.”

─── ⋅ ∙ ∘ ☽ ༓ ☾ ∘ ⋅ ⋅ ───

Three days later, you were sitting in Lydia’s office, your nightgown covered in blood, a numb look on your face. Keir was standing before you, leaning against her desk with his arms crossed as he sneered down at you.

The burning on your ring finger was lingering, one of the tally marks gone.

“Lydia tells me that the shadowsinger has taken a special interest in you,” Keir said, stroking his jaw. Your eyes remained distant, staring past him to the wall.

The blood was still warm on your skin and you knew the body lying in your bed hadn’t even stiffened. You knew better than to talk during these meetings, allowing Keir and Lydia to converse with each other while you sat there.

“Show me your hand,” Keir ordered.

You lifted your arm, holding it outstretched to him. He took it, twisting it to see your ring finger.

“She only has one mark left, my Lord,” Lydia added from behind her desk.

“I see that,” Keir said, letting your hand drop. “Your last target is the shadowsinger. Kill him and you will have completed our bargain and will be free to go.”

Your heart dropped into your stomach, your eyes going wide as you finally looked at the male standing above you. “W-what?”

“You heard me, girl,” he snarled. “Kill the shadowsinger and you’re free to go.”

Kill the shadowsinger and you’ll be free to go. Kill the shadowsinger and you’ll be free to go. Kill the shadowsinger and you’ll be free to go. Kill the shadowsinger and you’ll be free to go.

Keir’s words played in your head over and over again as you made your way to the bathing chambers to finally wash the blood of your latest target off you.

Kill Azriel and you’d finally be free to leave this place. Finally free to take all the money you’d been saving up and leave this damned court to build a new life for yourself. The dream you’d had all along. Kill Azriel and your dream of being free would finally come true.

Kill Azriel.

Kill Azriel or…don’t and end up stuck here, lost in The Labyrinth forever.

─── ⋅ ∙ ∘ ☽ ༓ ☾ ∘ ⋅ ⋅ ───

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#acotar #acotar fanfiction #azriel #acotar x reader #acotar x you #azriel x you #azriel x reader #azriel shadowsinger #azriel fanfic #azriel acotar #azriel angst #azriel smut #azriel x y/n #azriel spymaster

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softlyspector · 8 months

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Summary: All you do is want, while Joel worries he won't ever be enough.

Find out how it started: You put aside your touch aversion for a tattoo from Joel.

Pairing: tattoo artist!Joel Miller x f!Reader

Word count: ~9.2k

Warnings: slow build, no outbreak tattoo!au, just the barest hint of angst/argument, the ‘believes they’re hard to love, loving them is like breathing’ trope, tattoos and getting tattooed (the process isn’t really described), reader is touch adverse, vague mentions of a past abusive relationship, insecurity, self confidence issues, abandonment issues, anxiety, lots and lots of intimacy and touching, mentions of arousal, Joel gets to have both his daughters in this

A/N: Hello, so here we are at the final part of this lil four part thing. This fic owns a piece of my heart now, and I hope it's found somewhere to live in yours too. It's special for a lot of reasons, but the support its gotten has really been something incredible. Thank you for being so kind and lovely.

Once again, we’re ignoring canon and pretending like Joel can draw for this fic, thank you. Thank you for reading! As always, I would love to know your thoughts! Please please please, be sure to leave feedback!

“You didn’t have to do this, you know.”

Joel glances up at you from where he’s kneeling on the floor. A lock of gray hair falls to the middle of his forehead. You reach down, without thinking, and push it back into place, letting your fingers trail through his hair. He always wears it so carefully parted to the side, especially now that he’s let it grow out a little longer.

You picture him standing in front of the mirror in his bathroom brushing his hair and feel something warm and fluttery beat against your ribs.

The image comes easily because it’s not something you have to imagine but remember—Joel tilting his chin down, eyes on his reflection in silvery morning light.

Pink stains the tips of his ears when you let his hair slip softly from between your fingers.

“Yeah, I did,” he disagrees before laboring to his feet. You hook one hand beneath his elbow and help him up. His knees pop and he hisses. “It’s past due we fixed it, anyhow. Past time I let you get back to your own life,” he continues, not pulling his arm away from your hand as he stoops down to shove the screwdriver in his hand back into the toolbox on the floor.

You like the way he says we.

You rub your thumb against the inside of his elbow as he straightens again with a groan that means his back is aching again. “Well, now you get your house back to yourself,” you tease.

“Ain’t like you’re trouble to have around,” he grumbles.

You keep a steady pressure on his arm, because you like the way his skin feels under your hand, warm and pliant, like he’s been in the sun. You like the way you can feel the shift of muscle and the micro jump of tendon beneath your fingertips.

You don’t like admitting to yourself that you like touching him, that you like the way he lets you hold on to him but so rarely tries the same with you.

But, you’ve come to realize over the last week, where you shy away from touch, Joel craves it; he’s positively starved for it. He tries his best to hide that he wants for anything at all, but you see it.

He would never ask for anything from you; it’s anathema to who he is, to ask for care. He’s stubborn and a little proud.

When the locks that fit your door weren’t in stock at the local hardware store and Joel insisted on you staying with him until they came in, you saw that want first hand.

He’d been busy for so many years—with work and his kids and his business and his brother. He’d lived in a busy house with a revolving door of people who constantly needed him. And now, he lives alone and away from his kids. His schedule is one he sets for himself, with easy, quiet days. His girls are busy, Tommy has his own family, and his house is empty.

Maybe Joel would never admit it, but he is lonely.

Staying with him for a week had shown you just how much he wanted—touch and companionship and company—and just how absolutely solitary his days were, especially in the evenings. Guilt like a tide had washed over you. How closely he paid attention to you, how cautious and watchful and giving he’s been, and you haven't really done the same. You haven’t tried to give him anything, to meet him somewhere in the middle. You hadn’t even thought of it.

“Thank you for letting me stay with you this week,” you say, releasing his arm to press your hand against his spine, rubbing gently. It’s easier that way, you find, subtly giving, easing hurts he wouldn’t admit to. “And for changing the locks. You’re too good to me.”

“No trouble,” he assures you again, quickly. “It’s too quiet without my girls livin’ with me. It was nice. Havin’ you around.” He clears his throat and bushes past the admission. “Anyhow. I’ll let you get settled back in.”

You frown at him, but Joel only puts an arm around your waist and leans in to press a kiss to your temple and then your cheek. “You call me if you need somethin’. Anything.” He says it against your skin, his lips warm and slightly chapped. “Even for nothin’.”

You close your eyes and absorb that affection, let it sink deep into your body, into your blood and bones, the ventricles of your heart.

For a moment, all you can feel is him breathing against you—the patient, steady rise and fall of his breath—before he starts to pull away. You don’t want him to go, you aren’t ready to be parted from him.

You aren’t ready to let him go.

“Joel,” you say and cup your hand around his wrist to keep him in place. “Wait. Why don’t you come in? For some coffee?”

He meets your eyes, searches your gaze for a long moment there in the doorway of your apartment. His brows relax, his mouth softens, and you know he knows exactly what you’re doing, that he’s been found out. He thinks it’s pity and not cloying sweetness, not needling want and a building codependency that you don’t particularly mind driving your request. “Sweetheart—”

“Please? I don’t want to be alone just yet.”

A few pleading words are all it takes for him to crumble. He nods and relents, “All right. Just for a minute, I have a client this afternoon.”

“Okay,” you nod and pull him inside. You snap the door shut behind you and make a show of locking your brand new locks.

Joel rolls his eyes at you, but doesn’t comment, settling himself at your kitchen table instead, toolbox tucked between his feet on the floor. The morning light paints him in sunburst orange and bumblebee gold, rays falling like a halo around him. He taps his fingers against the muraled, painted surface of the table, tracing the lines with one blunt nail.

Unfamiliar want bubbles up in you again. You want to touch him again.

Already.

You just let go of him.

It’s an ache, right in the center of your chest. It feels like something pulsing and raw, infectious and torn.

You’d like to plant yourself against his side and sit in the brutally warm, fall Texan sun shining so innocently through the slats of your blinds.

Cured. Clean.

That’s what you’d be, if you allowed yourself to reach out and grab it.

Instead, you cup your hands against the sides of his face and stroke your thumbs over his graying beard.

You half expect him to pull away, to jolt out of your hands, like you would. And though he does look startled, he doesn’t pull away. Hazel eyes flick up to meet yours. You trace the scar on the bridge of his nose with one finger. “Thank you,” you say again, just so he’ll hear it even if he won’t respond to it. “You don’t have to worry about me but you do.”

He pulls one of your hands away from his face and nods, staring down at the lines on your palm before he hooks your pointer fingers together. “‘Course I have to.”

You keep stroking his cheek, the soft bristles of his beard catching on your fingertips. “Of course,” you say. “It’s what you do.”

Joel thinks you look beautiful. He also thinks you look wistful, with later October light falling in drafts around your shoulders—merigold, sunshine, sepia.

For once, you aren’t looking back at him. Joel catches you looking at him all the time now, mostly at his hands, chancing glances from the corner of your eyes like he would mind you looking. If he thought more of himself, he’d probably say you look at him with a dreamy cut to your gaze.

Your feet are propped on the porch railing. Your jeans and scuffed sneakers are splattered with bright splotches of paint. His guitar is across your lap and Ellie is next to you, teaching you, he supposes. Or at the very least correcting you occasionally as the two of you talk. You say something and she tilts back with a full bodied laugh.

You’d worked with Sarah and Ellie all day, painting the chicken coop in bright swatches of pastel blush and lavender. It sticks out something awful, but he’d said you could paint it however you wanted and he meant it.

Any way Joel cut it, he was outvoted three to one anyhow.

He thinks you probably let Sarah influence the color palette more than you let on, and that makes something ache deep in his chest.

Joel’s not exactly good at saying what he feels, he knows that. He’s always known it.

But he can build you a chicken coop. He can fix your locks and your door and worry about your safety and drive to get you in the middle of the night. He can sketch out tattoo designs until his wrist aches and make you a million cups of coffee.

And you decided to share part of what he gave you with Sarah and Ellie. Whether you know it or not, it means something to him. It brings a tight feeling to the back of his throat.

Though the afternoon is mild, you’re wrapped up in a flannel over your t-shirt. It’s his flannel from that first night he spent at your kitchen table; the one you haven’t given back and that he doesn’t want back.

Joel keeps his eyes on you as he finishes up the last of the chores that needed doing. His back is aching again, a flare of pain that starts at the base of his spine and ends behind his ears.

It was lucky, maybe, that you’d convinced him, in your offhand way, to get chickens instead of horses, that he decided that was the best thing to give you. He isn’t sure he could keep up with much more than what he has.

“You’re staring again,” Sarah says from behind him.

“I’m not,” he snaps.

“It’s okay to stare at your girlfriend, dad,” she says and he can hear the laughter in her voice, the damn teasing.

Joel winces. “That is not—we ain’t—” Not yet. You aren’t anything yet. Maybe not ever.

You’ve bloomed in the last month or so. Opened up, shiny and blush bright. You’re still that watchful little doe, but now you’re one that recognizes something kind.

Not so skittish, not so afraid.

And that’s good, that’s something. But he worries. Worries you’ll start to see he’s nothing but an old man waiting around for his kids to visit, for his brother not to be busy with his family, for you to pay him any mind.

You surely noticed it weeks ago when you stayed with him those few days, all that painful, solitary loneliness that happened so quickly. Maybe you’d noticed it earlier than that, when you stopped coming by the shop after your first tattoo and his days went lonesome again too. It’s not like he has been subtle about how much your absence smarted.

He’s not sure when his life slowed down so much, when he suddenly looked around and realized he missed the noise.

Maybe he’s been the one to pry you open, but if you wanted something better for yourself, something more, he’d have to let you go. It doesn’t diminish all that time he’d spent gaining your trust, that trust he’s still trying to grasp at some days. He doesn’t want you to be burdened by his loneliness, to feel weighed down with it, to feel trapped by it, to feel like it’s your responsibility.

Joel already worries that’s already the case, with how often you’d ended up at his house in the evenings over the past month. But he isn’t strong enough to make you stop.

Still, he could never live with himself, if he were next in a long line to make you feel helpless and trapped.

Sarah rolls her eyes and herds the second stubborn goat into the barn and shuts the gate. “If you say so,” she says. “I’m gonna get Ellie and head out. Busy day tomorrow.”

“Okay, baby girl,” Joel says. Sarah fits herself into his arms and he presses a kiss to her hair. “Thanks for the help. Be safe.”

She pulls away and nods, jogging across the yard without looking back to hop the little fence that separates it from the driveway. He watches Sarah say goodbye to you, the way your mouth lifts in a smile, the way you move the guitar from your lap and lean forward when she climbs the steps to give you a hug.

Ellie gives you a much briefer hug, one armed and slightly stiff before she follows Sarah. He lifts a hand to her, knowing Ellie won’t come over and say goodbye the way Sarah does. She pulls a face at him and waves back as she climbs in the car.

When they disappear in a cloud of red dust at the end of the drive, you lean back and stare down at the guitar again, adjusting the positioning of your fingers on the strings as though nothing of note just happened.

Maybe, nothing of note has happened.

You’d hugged them so easily, smiled at them so warmly. He’s grateful for it, that ease you have with them, that you feel safe and secure. It makes something warm and protective and territorial for all three of you settle in around his ribs.

His girls and you.

Your mouth pulls down at the corners as he watches you clumsily reposition your other hand along the frets.

He tries to repress a smile and glances away from you to continue his work. A poorly struck chord followed by a frustrated sigh echoes across the yard.

You ain’t exactly a natural with the instrument, though you try.

Joel taught Sarah and Ellie to play when they were young. He taught Tommy, when their mother didn’t have time to. He’s happy to teach you now, too.

More notes float on the air, curl into the whispering leaves that skitter along the drive. You aren’t doing so bad, he thinks, when the music suddenly stops.

He turns to peer over his shoulder at you.

You’ve taken your feet off the railing and have folded your arms along it instead, chin leaning on your forearms, head tipped to the side, guitar propped between your knees. “Joel?”

“Honey?” He answers, and you smile. The effect is like being lit from the inside out. You brighten and there’s sunshine in his soul, in all the dark places in his chest.

“Will you play for me?” You uncross one arm to hold your hand out to him, like you could reach him from there if you tried hard enough.

“You were doin’ just fine at it,” he calls back, escorting the chickens as gently as he can into their newly painted home.

You smile at him again. “I know. But I want to hear you and it’s getting dark anyway.”

“Guess so,” he says, wiping sweat from his brow. “Just a minute, darlin’.”

You nod and grab the guitar again to settle it in your lap.

The evening light is bleeding gold through the boughs of the oak that overhang the driveway, the whispers of autumnal, purpled shadows bruise the horizon as the sun sinks ever lower.

With the other goat and his lone sheep herded into the barn, he crosses back to the porch where you’ve lit a lantern and tucked yourself deep into one of the rocking chairs. The blanket he keeps folded over the back of one of the chairs is now curled over your lap. You look cozy, too warm, in the lingering heat of the day. He takes up residence next to you, picking up the guitar you’ve abandoned in his seat. “What would you like to hear, darlin’?”

It had taken a week’s worth of needling for him to play for you, but now he wants to do it all the time.

“Whatever you want to play for me, Joel,” you say, bracing your elbow on the arm of the chair to lean your chin on your hand, eyes already closed.

He plucks idly at the strings, watching your face. You put yourself in his hands so easily these days, without thought or worry. There’s trust in its purest form in your expression, like you’d laid yourself at his doorstep. He can’t imagine you closing your eyes like that, relaxed and at peace, even a few weeks ago.

Joel says your name, watches your eyes blink open, the peaceful little spell broken. You pull back, sitting up straight. Doe eyes meet his, round with question. “Joel?”

“I just wanted to say how pretty you look this evenin’.”

You transform, bloom, duck your head and say nothing. The air is rose colored, heavy with the scent of magnolia.

You aren’t exactly good at taking compliments, either. But that’s something you’re both working on.

“Hey,” he says. You look up and lean toward him again, like you’re so ready to drop yourself into his waiting hands.

And when he reaches for you, you do.

Joel cups his hands against your jaw, and leans in to kiss you. Your mouth is soft against his. You taste like autumn air, and like the spiked sweet tea at your elbow. When you pull back, your eyes are oceans, like soil, like smooth, dark glass.

You also have a dot of bright paint on your cheek that he hadn’t noticed before.

He sweeps his thumb over it and finds it’s stuck there.

“What?”

“Nothin’. Got a bit a’ paint there.” He presses his thumb over it. “I like it.”

You pout at him, watchful eyes hooked into his. “Are you ever going to play for me or are you just going to make fun of me?”

He chuckles and releases your face. “I would never make fun of you, honey.”

“Good,” you say as he strums the strings again. “Or I’ll never paint another chicken coop for you again. Not even if your girls help.”

He likes that you tease him, that you feel comfortable enough. He smiles, stares down at the toe of his boot. “You know you didn’t have to let ‘em.”

“Let them what?”

“Help. Y’know, create a monstrosity,” he gestures to the monstrosity in question, the pink and purple slightly washed out against the blush of the setting sun. “I built it for you.”

Your foot nudges against his and he looks up to find you already gazing at him. There’s something vulnerable in your eyes, something soft and unafraid. “I know. I wanted them to help. I like spending time with them, Joel.”

He nods and you smile. “Colors are kind of awful, though. Looks like one of Sarah’s old dollhouses. Thought you’d do a mural, like your table.”

You laugh, and the sound is something he wishes he could capture, box up inside him and never release. “But it’s mine, like you said. And chicken dollhouse chic is what we were aiming for.”

He snorts, but he feels better about it. “That so?”

“Yeah. Now, play something for me?” You request again softly.

Joel mentally shifts through the catalog of songs he could play for you before settling on a song. When he glances back at you, you’ve once again closed your eyes. Orange light, flippant and fleeting, has drifted across your face in a fiery bar as the sun sinks lower on the horizon. You glow in that beautiful light.

He itches to do something other than play the guitar for you.

Although he’s painted you as a doe more times than he can count, he’s never attempted to actually capture your likeness. He could never do you justice, so he just shouldn’t try. It would be embarrassing enough, if you ever found out that you’ve been the source of all his creativity the last few months. That you are his muse.

The plum color on the horizon has darkened, the navy of the encroaching night feathering against the tops of the trees.

You’ve settled back into a peaceful position, eyes closed as you listen.

He plays through a couple of songs before he glances up again and finds you watching him, your gaze focused on his hands. “Will you ever sing for me?” You ask softly, eyes flicking up to meet his.

He hasn’t sung since his girls were little, not to anyone anyway, and not to anyone that could tell him his voice was terrible.

Even still, he’s never been more tempted.

“No,” he says, even though denying you anything is hard. “You don’t want to hear me sing, honey.”

“But you have such a pretty voice,” you disagree.

He plucks out a final note, music hovering in the air. “That just ain’t true,” he shakes his head and leans the guitar carefully against the bannister. Night has fully fallen, your face is shaded in shadow when he looks at you. “Do you want to stay with me?”

Joel’s offered a few other times, because he always wants you to stay. That week you’d stayed with him while he waited for your new locks to come in at the hardware store had been kind to him. He’d gotten used to your presence in his house embarrassingly quick, and when he got the call that the locks had been delivered, it was like ice sliding down his spine. He’d forgotten, in just days, that you didn’t actually live with him.

That was weeks ago.

And since then, you haven’t stayed.

You usually, always, decline and then he drives you home.

But today is different.

You reach out a hand to him and fold your fingers around his. “Yes,” you sigh.

“Sure?” He asks, surprised. “It’s no bother to drive you home, honey.”

“I’m sure. If you’ll have me.”

“I’ll always gladly have you.”

Your lips curve up, and you duck your head. “What do you want to do for dinner?”

Joel burns whatever he attempts to make on the stove for dinner. He turns to you, with spatula in hand and an irritated tilt to his brows, and asks if you’d like to ride into town to eat at Flu’s.

You agree, and go, still laughing when Joel pulls onto the main road. He grouses under his breath the entire way to town, but he holds your hand against the center console. And when you get to Flu’s he opens the passenger side door for you, then the diner’s door, his hand held lightly against your spine. He tucks his legs around yours under the table, knees and calves brushing together. The diner’s lights are dim and cozy.

He looks soft, in that buttery light. The hard edges of his face ironed out, smile lines and crow’s feet divoted into his skin. He holds your hand on the table, and you watch his fingers more than his face, the rounded swell of his knuckles, the veins in the back of his hand, the knob of his wrist, on which he always wore an old watch that had long stopped ticking. When you’re apart, you find yourself daydreaming of his hands, scarred and broad and warm.

Joel insists on paying, doesn’t let you even consider doing it.

When you climb back into the truck, he puts one hand on your thigh and you sink back into your seat, warm and full and content. You slide your hand over his and feel the rough calluses on the tips of his fingers.

When you close your eyes, you see him working in the sun, poking fun at you while you and Sarah and Ellie paint the chicken coop, squinting through the bright light. He still smells like sun, like warm skin and his cologne and faintly of sweat and whatever thing he’d burned on the stove earlier.

When Joel kissed you that first time, he opened a door in you, one that’s impossible to shut and that does nothing but want.

You’ve never craved touch like you crave his. Even when you feel like you don’t want to be touched at all, you think his hand would be tolerable, would be okay.

You’re painfully aware that part of his appeal is knowing that he would always let you go, that he always knows when it's time to leave you be. And the times you don’t want him to touch you, have been shrinking.

Lately, all you want is for him to fold his fingers between yours, touch the bare skin at the small of your back, to trace your spine up between your shoulder blades, or cup his palm over the back of your neck and tuck you into him.

When you get back to his place, it’s still pretty early in the evening, and all you can think of is ways to get him to touch you again. He turns on the battery powered radio that sits on the porch, perpetually set low on an oldies station.

You can’t look away from him, something like agony twisting in your chest, like there’s a knife between your lungs. He’s talking about something, gesturing across the yard with one hand, his other tangled with yours. Joel’s thumb strokes little circles against the back of your hand, each pass like a bolt of addictive lightning. It’s not enough. His hand in yours is no longer enough.

Joel doesn’t protest when you pull him to his feet when a new song starts up. He gives what you don’t ask for but desperately want. He drags you into his chest and slides his arm around your back, tucking you in close to him. You can hear his heartbeat, feel it pulsing in his chest. He tilts around the porch with you for a long time, even when the music is interrupted by obnoxious ads.

He hums along under his breath and when you slip your hands beneath his shirt to rest against his bare skin, you can feel the vibrations of his voice against your fingers.

You wish you could sink your hands inside him, just to be a little closer. It feels so strange to want that. You’ve never been held that gently before, it loosens a knot you didn’t know existed in the core of your chest.

And you think, even when things with your ex had been good, when he hadn’t been yelling at you or bruising you with a tattoo you didn’t want, he had never held you gently or with such love.

When you pull back, Joel lets you go. There is no fuss about it; there is no guilt.

Eventually, you go inside.

He lets you shower first, just like he always had when you stayed with him before.

After, you watch him brush his hair and then his teeth and something painfully sharp gets caught up inside your chest. It’s hard to breathe around that feeling, that ache.

You watch him get ready for bed, and you watch him groan when he has to stoop down to pick a pair of socks up off of the floor, and you feel something more than warmth flood your heart. It unravels, spools through your veins, and it's so warm it burns.

Joel catches you looking at him, as he often does these days.

He smiles at you, the lines by his eyes crinkling up. He looks domestic in a heather gray t-shirt that sits loose on his frame, pajama bottoms that look as though they’ve seen a few too many years, and glasses perched on the end of his nose. “You all right?”

You nod. “Really good, Joel.”

That gets a little laugh out of him. “Must be worn out,” he says as he sits on the edge of the bed. You lie back and curl on your side, watching him adjust his pillows, admiring the shape of his hands as he goes, remembering what they looked like sun drenched and warm in the yard. He drags his knuckle over the curve of your cheek and neither you nor your body remembers to flinch away. “After all that paintin’ and gettin’ me to dance.”

“It was fun though, wasn’t it?” You ask, suppressing the urge to trace the length of his spine through his shirt. “You liked dancing with me.” You clutch the pillow tighter to your chest and dip your chin into the fabric.

He takes his glasses off and then finally lies down next to you. Nerves burst in your belly when he turns to look at you. “I enjoyed it very much, sweetheart.”

“Good.” You wriggle a bit closer to him.

He watches you and then offers a place for you to fit yourself against his side. You slide in close to him, tucking your hands between his body and yours, slotting your nose against the dip of his collarbone.

He smells good there, like soap and something that’s purely Joel and so soothing, like sage and pine.

“This what you been wantin’, huh?” He asks, stroking your back slowly. You stiffen but he chuckles into your hair. “I mean that in a nice way.”

You lick your lips, feel the shift of muscle beneath your cheek as he reaches to turn off the lamp. There’s no point in denying it. “Yeah.”

“I know,” he says against your forehead. “Me, too.”

You settle against him, the feeling of his palm sliding over your shirt, up and down, tapping over your spine, soothes you. Your stomach flips when his hand drags along the bare skin at your hip.

If you could dig a trench into his bones, take cover there, you would. And still that wouldn’t be close enough.

“Joel,” you say, tracing your hand over his chest.

For once, your voice seems to encourage more than caution and he doesn’t stop touching you. His hand slides higher again and your breath hitches.

It feels so nice, like all the empty places inside you are slowly being colored in, shaded in emerald green and butter, sunshine yellow, jewel bright blue and blush pink.

You curl into him, shakily pressing the hand on his chest up to his neck. You cup your palm there and Joel turns on his side. His hair is soft and a little damp when you dig your fingers into it, the scent of him wrapping around you, cradling you close and safe. Joel touches his forehead very gently to yours, his breath fanning across your lips.

He waits for you.

You close the distance between you, and press your mouth to his.

He sighs into you, his grip tightening on your waist for a moment, and you push yourself closer to the circle of warmth that is his body.

His fingers graze the edge of your shirt, then push it up, rough palms sliding over your back again. His hand is so big, so warm, it spans your back and then covers your ribs. You gasp into his mouth when the pad of his thumb caresses the curve of your breast.

Goosebumps erupt along your body. “Joel,” you murmur against his mouth.

“Mhm,” he hums. “I know, honey. I got you.”

He touches you there again but doesn’t go any further. You shiver and press your mouth back to his, tasting the mint of his toothpaste when his tongue slips into your mouth.

Moonlight filters pale and bright into his bedroom, and when you pull away his eyes are dark, hungry. You wish you had the courage to feed that gaze, but you aren’t there yet. A stab of guilt pierces your lungs. He’s so patient with you, and you can’t help but wonder if one day that patience might run out.

Instead of lingering on that, on wondering how much time you could possibly ask him to give, you offer him something else. “Can I show you my tattoos?”

He blinks at you, pink, kiss swollen lips parting. “If you want.”

“But do you want to see?”

“Baby,” he touches your cheek, traces the line of your jaw. “I’ve been dreamin’ about it since you told me about ‘em.”

You squirm, embarrassment crawling up the inside of your belly. “You have?”

“Mm.” He kisses you again, his mouth lingering long against yours. You can feel the rise and fall of his chest, his breath against yours. “I think about you all the time.”

You get your knees beneath you and push up from your place beside him. Joel turns on his back when you swing one leg over his waist and find yourself, boldly, very much in his lap. His hands anchor on your hips, thumbs beneath your t-shirt.

“Oh,” you say, pressing your hands over his, something nervous wriggling in your gut. “Sorry. Is—”

You try to move away but his grip doesn’t change. “It’s all right,” he says evenly, the barest hint of something tremulous beneath.

Before you can think about it more, overthink being in his lap or how much of you you’re about to show him or how heavy and uncomfortable his hands might become, you release his wrists and tug your shirt up to just beneath your breasts, so your ribs are visible.

Those feelings don’t come though. You don’t feel anxious or weighed down or wrong.

He’s looking at you and touching you and seeing you and it's fine. It’s fine because it’s Joel. No one had ever understood you before the way he has—not your family or your friends or any previous partner. They try, but Joel just seems to know you, understand, without really trying.

Joel clears his throat, his expression unreadable as he lifts one hand to your tattoo. When he traces the ink, you exhale against his curious fingers. It tickles. “That’s real pretty,” he says. “Antlers. It really suits you.”

“Thank you,” you murmur. “Deer are like good luck, I think. They know things.”

He looks at you like you’re some ancient creature he can hardly believe exists. Embarrassment claws at you but you don’t look away. “That so?” He looks at the ink again, tension slicing through the air. “Jesus you’re somethin’.”

You don’t get a chance to respond because he meets your eyes again and asks, “Where’s the bee?”

You laugh and the acid burn of uncertainty disappears. “How’d you remember about the bee?”

“‘Cause I’ve been wonderin’ about it too.” He’s still absentmindedly tracing the antlers, the moss and the flowers that loop through the branches of the antlers. His expression is open now, curious and needy. “It ain’t on your hip, if I’m rememberin’ right.”

You shift your hand to your sternum and carefully tug your shirt up a bit higher. There, nestled between your breasts, is a tiny, tiny bumblebee. “Well, ain’t that a surprise.” He shifts his hand up and covers the bee with his thumb, the length of his fingers sitting right beneath your breast.

An ocean wells up inside you, threatens to break apart your ribs. You lean into his hand, your chest warm, catching, like fire is spreading from all the places he touches you. The knuckles of his other hand drag up your side.

You shiver under his eye, fighting the urge to look away, to tug yourself out of his grip. But the thought of losing his warm hands against you is worse, it outweighs everything else.

“Where did you think it was?” You ask, hardly able to breathe. Everything in the world narrows down to his dark bedroom, his eyes skating over your newly revealed tattoos, milky moonlight parting the tiny space still left between you.

“I couldn’t get it out of my head that it was on your hip.”

You laugh and Joel keeps looking at you, his eyes flicking between your bared skin and your eyes. The room is warm, his gaze heavy. “You’re real pretty. Did I ever tell you that?”

“Once or twice, maybe,” you smile.

“Mm.”

You cup one hand around his wrist, the pressure of his hand against the swell of your breast sending shockwaves through you. It’s all you can focus on, the slow sweep of his thumb against sensitive skin. You push his hand harder against you until it feels hard to breathe.

You think about how much Joel gives you, how carefully he listens even when you don’t speak.

He deserves to know you hear him, too. That you see what he wants, that you hear what he’s saying, and that you’re trying.

“You show me what you think,” you say. “And I—I get it.”

“I don’t think you do,” he says, eyes dark. He reaches for you slowly, giving you time to tell him to stop or to pull away, but you don’t. You desperately want him to keep touching you with his safe, patient, cautious hands.

Slowly, you’re pressed back into the sheets. Joel goans, a pained sound that means his back or knees hurt and he won’t admit it.

He settles himself against you, his body fitted against the cradle of your hips. Joel is heavy against you, but comforting. His fingers clench around yours, and for a long moment he just looks at you beneath him, starved eyes skittering across your skin.

“You all right?” He asks gruffly, like there’s something tangled in his chest. “You say it. If you aren’t.”

“I’m okay.”

You reach up and touch his cheek, then the tail of his eyebrow, as he assesses you. He tilts his chin down, brows lowered heavily over his eyes. You can’t exactly blame him for being cautious. You warned him that you were hard work, and he meant it when he said he didn’t mind, that he didn’t think you were. Caring comes naturally for him. “Really. I would say it. I trust you.”

He nods once and your chest hitches when he dips his head and presses his mouth softly against the bee and then the antlers.

The rough feeling of his beard against your skin tingles. Your eyes flutter closed at the feeling, and you aren’t sure where to put your hands. Joel’s are pressed to your sides, forearms snugly against your body, warm and twitching. You settle on his shoulders, the wide planes of his back, so reassuringly large against your body.

Then, his tongue, firm and soft, slides over your skin. Over the bee and the tips of the antlers strung through with ivy and flowers, over the underside of your breast.

You gasp and arch against him and you suddenly know exactly where you want your hands. You tuck them against the back of his head, threading through the feathery gray strands to keep his mouth against your skin.

Want tightens between your legs, makes your belly ache. Your nipples tighten painfully hard. A whine catches in your throat that you know he hears because he answers you with a low groan of his own against your throat when he sucks a kiss to the underside of your jaw.

It’s overwhelming. You want to push him away and pull him closer. You want to bury yourself inside him and never look into his eyes again. You want this feeling to last forever. You never want Joel to feel lonesome again. You want him to be able to ask for what he wants, to let you give it to him.

Your ex again, flashes through your mind, an unfair comparison. How rarely he’d kissed you, shown you affection, for just the sake of it.

You want you want you want you want—

You want—

“I want you to tattoo the cover up,” you say suddenly. Tears salt that backs of your eyes, tightness itching at the back of your throat. You hitch your knees up around his ribs, fear that he might pull away swimming to the forefront of your mind. It’s dizzying, because your instinct has always been to move away, to put space between you and things that might hurt you. You’ve given Joel so many pieces of you; he could break every part of you, if he really wanted to. “If you still—if you want—I mean—” you stammer.

His head lifts and your thighs clench because you want him everywhere and nowhere all at once. You want him to want you as badly as you want him, and that just doesn’t seem possible. Not in all the ways you mean anyway, the kind where you tuck yourself inside his ribs, and into the dark places in his mind, like love letters that will never be sent.

You love him, you think. You love Joel.

It doesn’t feel like enough. The word isn’t big enough to encompass what he makes you feel. The feelings worming around in your chest are expansive, wide as the night sky, splattered with stars and distant galaxies that have yet to be found, let alone described.

“‘Course I want to,” he says easily. “Of course, I will.”

“Tomorrow?” You ask breathlessly.

“If that’s what you want, honey.”

You nod. “It is.” You suspect you could say you wanted him to do it right at that moment, and he’d find a way to make it happen. He’d drive you to his studio in the dark. He’d sit with you until morning bruised the sky, until the peach of the sun dripped sticky sweet down the horizon. “I want you to do it. I want it to be from you.”

“All right,” he agrees. “Tomorrow mornin’ we’ll go and do it.” His hand slides down your side to your hip, then your thigh. “You okay?”

You nod.

“You have to talk to me,” he says. “I ain’t a mind reader.”

“I know,” you admit. “I’m sorry I put so much on you to figure out.”

“That ain’t what I meant.”

“But that’s what you do. You figure me out.”

Joel pats your thigh and then presses the pads of his fingers to the hinge of your jaw. His eyes search yours for a long time, black in the low light of the room.

He kisses you until you start to fall asleep, the lazy press of his lips whispering things you can no longer hear.

Morning dawns bright and warm.

Joel gets up long before you even stir. You’re curled as close to him as you can get without actually touching him, hands tucked beneath your face, lips parted softly. You’d migrated to the center of the bed, taking up space he’s not really keen on reclaiming.

The memory of your skin against his mouth, all the other places on your body he’d like to touch and taste, is like nectar, like the sweet promise of a good dream after a long day. You aren’t ready for that though. Not yet, anyway, and that’s all right.

But he’s only a man, and he’s painfully hard.

Before, you were like a deer he’d accidentally come upon, skating around the rim of his peripheral vision. Now, you’re still doe-eyed and watchful, but you’re closer; you’re relaxed, lying in the shade of trees you trust, at ease.

Your hand twitches toward him when he presses a slow kiss against your temple, the jump of tendon beneath his mouth soothing somehow. He pulls the sheet up and tucks it around your shoulders, because without him next to you the draft from the fan overhead is too cool for you.

He takes care of himself in the bathroom without much fuss, and then feels a little bit guilty for it when you’re sleeping on just the other side of the wall. It wasn’t the first time though, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.

In the kitchen, he makes coffee just the way you like it, with a little bit of cinnamon in with the coffee grounds. The coffee creamer you like is sweet, so he sets that out with a spoon next to a pale blue mug, pours himself his own cup, and relocates to the back deck.

The trees at the far edge of the property are still dark and skeletal, the thicket full of shadow and the buzz of night insects.

Even at the end of October, it’s still warm. A breeze ruffles his hair, shakes the nearly naked trees and sends a cascade of brown and orange sifting to the ground. Next month it would cool off, just a little.

He hadn’t told you when his birthday passed in September, that you’d inadvertently spent that day with him. Sarah and Ellie had tried to get him to tell you, but he hadn’t been able to stomach it.

Dread accompanies that day.

It hadn’t always, just since Sarah was little, like his body was braced for a tragedy that would never come. He couldn’t have you be a part of that too, though the girls had pointed out you would eventually notice his lack of a birthday, if you were around long enough.

He’d cross that bridge if he ever came to it. It’s hard to imagine he’d get you for that long.

It doesn’t take long for you to find him. The flood of morning sun has passed the tree line and twists dappled green and yellow circles over the deck. When you push open the back door, you have your cup of coffee in one hand and the neck of the guitar in the other.

He’d have to get you your own. Either that, or make one for you.

“Hey,” you smile at him as you set your steaming cup down on the patio table.

“Mornin’. You sleep okay?”

“Mmm.”

Joel expects you to ask him to play, but you settle down in the chair next to his, your bare knee pressed against his, and adjust the instrument in your lap.

The sound is clumsy, but beautiful and careful, when you play. Joel’s glad he decided to teach you. He just listens and watches you. Your expression is thoughtful but closed, like you’re somewhere else. That’s how he thinks too, music in hand, mind far away. He likes that look on you, until you suddenly pause and glance up. You watch him for a long moment with those doe eyes of yours, folding your arms around the body of the guitar.

You lick your lips and his eyes flick briefly to your mouth, the plush curve of your lower lip. He hadn’t kissed you good morning. “I want to figure you out too, you know,” you say.

You hold his gaze for just a second before dropping your eyes to the wooden floorboards instead, fidgeting like you’re repressing the urge to curl in on yourself, fold yourself away. “You got me all figured out, honey,” he assures you.

You shake your head and lift your eyes again, tapping your nails against the wood. “You—” you pause and swallow, “You’re allowed to want things from me, Joel.”

Something falls in his chest, like he’s missed the last step on a long staircase, gravity turned against him.

His heart lurches up into his mouth, tangy with some unknown fear. “I do. Trust me, I do.”

“Why don’t you ask?”

“Honey—”

“I know,” you say softly. “I know. I know how I am and how—” you stop and flounder, frustrated for a moment. “I know I’m not easy to ask. But you. . . I don’t feel that way with you anymore; I’m not afraid anymore. And I want to be enough for you. I hope I’m not too slow about it.” You look away again. “I want you to know you can call on me, too, Joel.”

He clears his throat but the tightness doesn’t go away. “You could never take too long. I don’t mind waitin’.”

“But?”

But, he’s bad at this.

But, he loves too hard, cares too much.

But, part of him is convinced that the loneliness is deserved. Everyone seems to leave him, someway or another. He’s just preparing early for it this time. He’s never held onto a romantic relationship before, so why should this one be any different than all the ones that came before it?

He doesn’t ask for anything, doesn’t want; he gives and cares and that’s why people stay. It really doesn’t have all that much to do with him, or what he wants.

“But you don’t want anything from me?” You ask, your voice noticeably smaller, and the warm morning suddenly feels cold.

“It ain’t that.” He should say more, but nothing else comes out, words trapped like moths inside a lamp.

You swallow and nod, like you’re battering back your instinct to flee, to think the worst. You’ve come so far and it’s hard not to feel a little pride, that you stay, that you aren’t worried, not usually, that he’ll hurt you someway. He’s reminded of the first day he’d tattooed you, how one misplaced word was enough to have you jumping to your feet, fretful and afraid. “I like spending time with you. I like touching you. I can give that to you.”

He doesn’t answer and you eventually continue. “You can’t protect me from the whole wide world. Not even from you. I’m making a choice. To be here with you.” And he knows you’ve seen much more than he wanted you to, that you’ve seen the interior of him, bleeding red, splattered onto everything he touches. You’ve seen the want, the need, and you’re still here.

He’s still not sure letting you care wouldn’t end with you leaving. But he doesn’t see what other choice he has.

“Okay. But you promise me somethin’,” he says. “Just one thing and I’ll try.”

You tilt your head, the picture of a curious little doe, almost nosy, peering into unfamiliar woods. “What?” You ask, looking away as you set the guitar aside.

“If you ever want somethin’ better for yourself. You tell me. And you go.”

Your eyes snap back to his, mouth parted in shock. “Joel—”

“I’m serious,” he snaps and you recoil a little, hurt in your eyes. “You deserve better’n this. Better than a lonely old man.”

You shoot up from your seat in a rare show of anger. And that surge of pride hits him squarely in the chest again. He’s proud of you for that. For standing up for yourself, for letting yourself be angry with him. “What’s that supposed to mean?” Your voice doesn’t raise in volume, but it is waspish, venom laced. “Better? What’s better for me than you?”

“Honey,” he says, softens his voice. “Just ‘cause you opened up with me, don’t mean I think I get to keep you.”

Your shoulders loosen and you step closer. When you reach out, God help him, he leans into your hand.

Gentle fingertips run along his shoulders, bite into the knot at the top of his spine. “Keep me,” you scoff lightly. “I want you to keep me.”

You don’t protest when he winds an arm around your waist and tugs you down into his lap. You’re warm and soft and frowning so hard at him. There’s a divot between your eyes that he wants to press his thumb over, to smooth away. Instead he takes your wrist in his hand and traces the tattoo on your forearm. “You’re the only one who’s ever wondered if they should,” you say. “You aren’t keeping anything. I’m giving you something no one else ever even tried to earn.”

He doesn’t answer immediately, a hot fist around his words. He’d rather walk away, not talk about it, not talk about himself. But that would break all that hard won trust.

“I just can’t have you feelin’ like I’m your problem,” he admits, voice graveled and scraping. “Like I’m holdin’ you down.”

“It’s okay to need people,” you answer, ignoring him. “I want to take care of you too. I want to be here with you.” You slide your hand over his shoulder again. “Even if it's just like this. Especially if it's just like this.” You scratch your fingers through his hair. Sun spills around your shoulders, blinds him when he looks up at you. “I know how much you like it. And you can tell me when you need something. I’m still learning your tells.”

He chuckles at that, let’s you keep touching him, because he does want it and you don’t seem to mind so much that he’s just some lonely man. “All right,” he runs his hand up your thigh to your hip. “Promise me anyway.”

“I promise,” you say. “To learn your tells.”

You make breakfast without burning anything, while Joel watches, hip leaned against the counter. His smile is soft, affectionate.

Warmth balloons in your chest, bursts in your veins like champagne bubbles. You managed to reassure him, you managed to say what you want without feeling bad about it.

“Lonely old man,” you burst out with a laugh. “I’m lonely and old.”

Joel rolls his eyes when you dig your elbow into his side. “You ain’t old.”

“Neither are you.”

Joel buys you coffee from the little cafe you always stopped at before visiting him at the studio. He drives with his hand in yours. He opens the passenger side door for you and gestures you ahead of him into the studio.

After going through the usual motions of disinfecting and sanitizing and picking one of the many, many, many coverup designs he’d sketched for you and getting the stencil on right, you find yourself in much the same position as the first time you got tattooed by Joel.

Joel isn’t talking. He’s taking his time looking you over, intense and careful and muttering about that bastard that had dared lay his hands on you. He’s meticulous in everything he does, but especially when it concerns someone he cares about, when it comes to you.

You’re lying down, studying the side of his face. He touches you without asking, and you don’t flinch once. The memory of his body against yours sends a flushed heat over your skin. Your scalp tingles with it, your toes curl with it.

He finally seems satisfied after a few long minutes, his hand on the curve of your elbow. You nod your consent when he looks at you, tattoo gun poised in his other hand over your shoulder. “Sure?”

“Never been surer.” You smile and then cover the hand resting on your elbow. He gives, you give back. “You don’t like it when I say thank you.”

“I don’t,” he grunts. There's a blush beneath his beard.

You sweep your thumb against his knuckles, and think about how different that first time had been. Joel had reassured you, gave you a physical anchor you hadn’t known you needed, kind and steady and already lodged somewhere deep inside your heart.

Now you can give that back to him.

“Okay.”

But he knows. You know he hears it anyway.

Still, you want to say it.

“Thank you, baby. For giving me back to myself.”

He leans over you, and you tilt your chin up so he can kiss you.

“Couple sessions, okay?” He croaks when he pulls away. “Don’t want to wear ya out.”

There is nowhere in the world you’d rather be.

💞 Thank you for reading! Comments and feedback are so appreciated. 💞

#joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #tlou fanfiction #the last of us fanfiction #pedro pascal characters #honeyed fic

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matthewtkachuk · 3 months

Text

bad at love

Breaking your brother's only unspoken rule—don't date his teammates—has never been an issue in your adult life. Until now.

pairing: jt compher x reader

warnings: angstttt, smut, a minor car accident with mentions of injury (broken bone/concussion), and the usual (alcohol, swearing, etc. etc.)

word count: 4.9k

a/n: hiiiiii @comphy-and-cozy i'm your super secret fic exchange writer! sorry this is a day late and a dollar short. one of these days @wyattjohnston is going to perma-ban me from participating in exchanges. until that date she remains my ever loyal editor. mad thanks to @thomasschabot for reading it first and telling me they loved it even though they're contractually obligated to do so and for physically being there when the fic idea popped into my head <3

It’s not the first time you’ve shown up at your big brother’s house with a face full of tears and a couple bags full of all your worldly possessions. Despite your best efforts and well intentions—if you had to guess—it likely won’t be the last.

It is the first time you’ve done so with him being a married man, and so it’s your sister-in-law whose comfort you really seek and are expecting to pop up behind the slowly opening door in front of you.

Unfortunately for you, and for the poor soul you really don’t know that well, it’s not Kenzy who opens the door but the over-the-summer pick-up from Colorado.

If it had been any of the other, more tenured of your brother's teammates, you might have been waved inside with nothing more than a sympathetic glance and an unspoken ‘again?’.

Instead, JT’s look of utter confusion has quickly evolved into something more akin to a quiet rage, and you’re reminded that he is a big brother himself. The look is familiar to you, having inspired a similar one on Dylan’s face more times than you can count.

It’s been a really fucking long day, and you don’t have the emotional bandwidth to have any sort of reckoning with some guy you barely know in your brothers drive way.

JT’s in the middle of some sort of sentence that begins and also ends with “What—” as you none too gently push past him in order to finally gain entry to the house.

The mix of sympathy and feigned disinterest that greets you on the faces of your brothers teammates who occupy the large sitting room has your stomach rolling uncomfortably. It seemed like the entirety of the Detroit Red Wings were always around to witness your spectacular failures. What must they think, watching you disappear with the next great love of your life, only to reappear once again with bags packed in a manner of months?

You could hazard a guess at what your brother thinks, the variants of ‘I told you so’ that live and die on his tongue without ever leaving his lips. He wraps you up in an infamous Larkin hug that serves to fix a tiny crack of your broken heart, and so you revel in it like you used to revel in the comfort when the pain you felt was because of falling off the monkey bars when you were a kid.

But, he has a house full of hockey players to entertain and Kenzy has a glass of wine with your name on it. Dylan returns to the living room and you slide out to the back porch with your sister-in-law, briefly catching the eye of the one who let you in. You don’t see the telltale signs of judgment reflecting back at you, but maybe something else entirely.

Outside you pour your soul alongside the Malbec. Curled up on the wicker chair under a blanket you tell Kenzy about Owen and the promises he failed to keep. She oohs and ahs at the appropriate times, commiserating without belittling you.

By the end of the night your heart—and the bottle of wine—feels a little lighter. There’s a little less shame as you make yourself at home in the spare bedroom that might as well permanently be yours.

Owen visits you in your sleep, breaking your heart again and again until his face morphs into one with a ginger beard and kind eyes.

Those kind eyes become a fixture in your post breakup life. If he’s not hanging around your brother's house, he’s bumping into you at the local coffee shop you frequent when you’re in Detroit. If he’s at neither, he’s obviously at the games you attend in support of Dylan alongside Kenzy.

At Dylan’s, you barely speak to his teammates and friends beyond simple pleasantries. At your coffee shop, it starts at small talk but grows to be considerable conversations that dip just below surface level.

It’s at Little Caesars Arena where he really endears himself to you though. Warm ups are arguably your favorite part of the games you attend. You like to look out at the signs, from the heartwarming to the obscene—picking out your favorites and giggling about the latter with your sister in law.

Dylan’s always been really good about tossing kids pucks, and his big bleeding heart only grew larger when he got the red C strapped to his chest. Some of the other guys, even some of the so-called vets are less good about it.

JT’s just like Dylan, maybe even a little kinder hearted. He takes the time to read the signs that are meant for him, never turns down a trade for a puck and even gives a stick to a kid whose sign says he came all the way from Denver to watch him, his favorite player, play in Detroit.

It warms your heart.

So much so you don’t even notice you’re staring until Dylan’s slamming himself into the boards in front of you to startle his wife. She rolls her eyes and calls him a name not worth repeating while you try to pretend like you weren’t just fixated on his teammate.

The thing is Dylan has never outright said his teammates are off limits. Not since you were a teenager making eyes at his USNTDP teammates anyway.

The memory keeps you from looking JT’s way the rest of the warmups, but once the puck drops your eyes can’t help but wander.

Wandering appears to be your specialty, considering you’ve gotten yourself lost in the underbelly of the arena.

Your first mistake was leaving Ken’s side—she was your ferryman, guiding you down the River Styx, and without her, you were lost in Hell.

Were you overdramatic? Maybe. Were you lost with no hope of getting out? Still overdramatic, but definitely a possibility.

The walls begin to look the same, and you’re half worried you’ve accidentally fallen into a back room or something stupid when you stumble upon the one who caught your eye earlier.

‘Stumble upon’ is a gracious way of saying you absolutely smack into him and fall on your ass.

He hauls you up effortlessly with one hand and your skin burns beneath his grasp.

“What are you doing?” you both say in near unison before he laughs.

“I was getting my shoulder checked out, what are you doing all the way over here? Are you lost?”

Regardless of what he was doing, JT obviously has more of a reason to be found wandering the halls of the arena. And he’s right, you’re most definitely lost but you play it off like he’s crazy.

“Me? Lost? No, I know exactly where we are,” you bluff.

JT’s eyebrows raise and he nods slowly. “Which is…?”

Well, he’s called your bluff but he also gave you a key context clue. “Near the athletic trainer, obviously.”

He laughs again and it has your cheeks feeling hot.

“Okay fine, maybe I’m a little bit lost and maybe I was contemplating how I’d be trapped down here forever before you knocked me over.”

“I’m sorry, but you ran into me.” You roll your eyes and begin to argue, but he doesn’t let that happen. “Doesn’t matter, I can help you find your way out.”

You swoon dramatically, only half joking as you reply “My hero.”

Now that you’re no longer focused on navigating your way out of Pan’s Labyrinth, you’re free to focus on your close proximity to JT. Based on the way his eyes dart between meeting your own and staring at your lips, you assume he’s just as aware.

Is this not what you’ve been wanting since you knocked on Dylan’s door? But that’s part of the problem, and you’re sure JT is thinking the same. Not only is your brother his teammate—and you’ve always been off limits to your brother's teammates to your chagrin growing up—but he’s JT’s captain, too. There’s a million ways this thing could go wrong and blow up in both of your faces.

You could get caught, and be forced to sit with Dyl’s disappointment. You could hurt the one person in your life who consistently showed up for you and loved you and cared for you.

Not to mention you could risk it all for nothing—could crash and burn spectacularly as you were wont to do. Could fuck it all up with not only your brother, but JT too and be left with nothing. It wouldn’t be the first time you’d gone behind your brother’s back, but you had a sneaking suspicion things would be worse than they were when you were 15 to his 16.

Ultimately you decide fuck it, because what’s life without a little risk?

Tentatively, you slide your hand over the rough beard covering his jaw. When he doesn’t flinch or move away from you, you lean in closer.

He’s not pulling away, but he’s also not moving closer, letting you make the first move.

It’s probably a terrible fucking idea, but you’ve never been accused of being someone who makes good decisions when it comes to romantic partners.

The first press of your lips to his is cautious, barely a brushing of your mouths, just to get a taste. Quickly you become a woman obsessed. Unable to get enough, the kisses turn frenetic, bordering on sloppy.

He reciprocates in kind, his mouth hot and heavy on yours while his hands grasp and pull and hold. His very essence consumes you, taking over all of your five senses and pulling noises from you that you didn’t know existed.

If your arm burned from his grasp earlier, your entire body has caught fire.

You’re unaware or probably more accurately uncaring of your public nature, despite your earlier hesitance. Now you just want more and more and more of JT, as much as he is willing to give and maybe even a little more.

He seems to be on the same page, entire body wrapping around you and pulling you deeper and deeper.

Unconsciously your hands begin to pull at the waistband of his pants and it’s then that the two of you finally separate.

You’re worried you’re going to find regret in his eyes and excuses on his tongue, but he’s just looking at you intently.

“Not like this,” he says. “Not here.”

“I don’t want to wait,” you protest, but he shushes you with his mouth.

“It’ll be worth the wait.”

And worth the wait it is.

It's sexy at first. Clandestine meetings in dark hallways, sneaking in and out of JT’s apartment that’s on the same floor as Jake Walman’s, covert texts and quiet phone calls where you get off on the sound of each other's voices.

It doesn’t take long for you to want more, though. To fantasize about not just what his calloused hands can do to your body, but what it would be like to hold one in your own while walking down the street. To show up at a home game and have everyone know you were there to support not only your brother, but JT too.

It’s a fantasy that is only stoked by the comfort you feel walking around JT’s apartment in just his t-shirt with his number on the shoulder. By nights spent together at his dinner table, on his couch, in his bed. By sweet texts and stupid memes and random photos of things that made him think of you.

You don’t dare speak your desires out loud though. For fear of JT not wanting the same thing or for fear that he would, you’re not quite sure.

It’s a tough situation to be in. One where you’re worried you're heading to a fork in the road that has JT on one side and your brother on the other.

You have no delusions about the two paths eventually forging back together again, know that you’ve come dangerously close to that intersection marked with a big fat caution sign.

Probably you should speak to JT, get on the same page about where you’ve been and where you’re going. Following that, assuming he secretly yearns for the same thing you do, you should probably then come clean to Dylan.

Probably you should do a lot of things, but unfortunately what is done in the dark always comes to the light and sometimes it happens quicker than you can make your mind up.

A road win presumably has JT in a good mood. He’s texted you letting you know he’ll be home before midnight, requesting your presence in his bed.

It’s an easy yes, considering you’re already in the aforementioned bed. It’s nice to get out of Dylan’s house, of the suffocating feeling that you’re intruding in someone else’s home, on someone else’s life.

There’s really nothing particularly sexy about the way he finds you, but his eyes darken upon finding you curled up in his bed just the same. You’re not attempting to recreate a sexy pose from a boudoir photo shoot, and one of JT’s shirts and a pair of boy shorts aren’t exactly fancy lingerie.

That doesn’t stop him from dropping his bag dramatically and stripping from his dress shirt and pants.

“Awfully presumptuous,” you say as if the very fact that you’re in his bed in not much more clothing than he is.

He shrugs, “Not presuming anything. I’m fine if you just want to sleep, but I’m sure as shit not going to sleep in those dress pants. Bad enough I had to sit through a plane ride like that.”

His tone is teasing, but the implication that he would be just as fine falling asleep beside you as anything else pretty well takes all the fight out of you.

“C’mere,” you say instead of a catchy comeback, lifting the covers and inviting him into his own bed.

He wastes no time sliding in beside you and curling up around your body. “Hi.”

You snort and hide your face in his neck. “Corny.”

“I’ll show you corny,” he says, but you shush him by pulling his face closer to yours until your lips brush.

“Thought I was presumptuous,” he says upon breaking the kiss.

You roll your eyes—“Shut up.”—and kiss him again.

He doesn’t manage to keep his mouth shut, but at least this time it’s to slip his tongue into your mouth.

The temperature of the room rapidly increases—between the weight of his body covering your own and your body’s reaction to his fervid kiss, you feel the need to lose at least one item of clothing.

“I need—“

Luckily he quickly understands what you’re trying to accomplish by pulling at the hem of your shirt, lifting off of you long enough to assist in removing it from your body.

He makes a noise of appreciation at the bare skin revealed to him before diving back into your lips, this time with one hand cupping your right breast.

Appreciative noises of your own build in your throat when that hand slides down your body to dip into your underwear. It’s teasing touches at first, until you reciprocate by cupping him through his boxer-briefs.

Finally you both shed that last remaining layer, uncaring of where they end up in the bedroom. There’s a brief pause while he rolls on a condom and then he’s entering your body like it was made for him and him alone.

There’s no rush about his pace, just gentle thrusts and soft moans and sweet praises.

Sex with JT is so good, better than with anyone else you’ve ever been with. He’s the very opposite of a lazy, selfish lover. It’s like your needs and your pleasure come first, and you certainly do too.

The positioning of your bodies is so intimate, bodies close, mouths slotted over each other with intermingling breaths.

You worry you’re getting too caught up in that intimacy, possibly running in a direction not quite warranted and so you seek to depersonalize it a touch.

“Let me,” you say softly while gently pressing a hand against his shoulder, indicating you want him to lay on his back. He moves willingly, even helping you climb atop him.

It feels just as good with you on top, and the bit of distance between your upper halves means you can breathe a bit better.

It’s easy to get lost in the feeling, to tilt your head back and focus on your movements and the feel of his bruising grip on your hips.

Feeling the pressure build in your stomach, you slide a hand down your abdomen to where your bodies meet while the other grasps your breast just for something to hold on to. The added friction to your clit is pulling you closer and closer as you move on top of him.

He’s staring up at you with lust filled eyes, mouth open in a mix of awe and pleasure. A look of almost disbelief on his face. His hands are still on your hips, now helping the movement of your body on his when your body lights up like the fourth of July with your orgasm.

It’s hard to keep moving while in the throes of pleasure, but it’s like JT can read your mind, gripping your hips and thrusting up into you until he finishes too.

Your whole body tingles as you collapse on top of him, relishing in the feel of his arms wrapping around your body. Leisurely you kiss for a minute, until your heart rate returns to normal and you feel like you’re not likely to fall over when going to the bathroom to clean up.

When you return, you’ve slipped on one of his shirts once again. There's a soft look on his face as you crawl into bed beside him. It only cracks when you quietly whisper, “should we order pizza?”

“I think you’re the girl of my dreams,” he laughs.

The room is quiet, filled with only the sounds of your breathing and occasional kissing as you wait for the delivery.

Finally the doorbell rings. “I got it,” you tell JT and pull on a pair of discarded sweatpants before pulling the drawstring so they don’t fall.

You don’t bother to check the peephole, certain it’s your food which turns out to be a giant mistake.

Not only is it not your pizza, it’s also the last person you want to catch you with sex hair in oversized clothing that obviously belongs to the guy you’ve just had sex with.

Dylan’s mouth has dropped so far down it would be comical if it wasn’t also horrifying.

“Dylan I–” you start to explain yourself but pause midway through. How could you even begin to explain?

“I can’t believe this.” He shakes his head, hands curling at his side. “Actually no, I can’t believe this from JT, I can definitely believe this from you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” you snap.

Your brother laughs sardonically, “Well you’re not exactly known for making the right decisions when it comes to relationships.”

JT exits his room, no doubt lured by the loud voices and the lack of food. “Hey man, come on, let's talk about this like adults.”

“Like adults?” Dylan is incensed in a way you’ve never seen before. “Now you want to talk about things like adults? The time to talk was before you started sleeping with my sister behind my back.”

“I’m sorry you found out like this–” JT continues to try to defend himself, defend you while you stand there speechless.

Dylan interrupts, “Sorry I found out or sorry you got caught?”

JT goes to respond but Dylan cuts him off again. “I trusted you dude. I told you she was off limits, and not only did you ignore me, you went behind my back.” He then turns to you. “And you? My teammate? Seriously? You couldn’t have chosen literally any other douchebag to treat you wrong?”

That snaps you out of your stupor. “JT doesn’t treat me bad!”

A different kind of look crosses your older brother's face then. “Well when he does, don’t come running back to my house and crying to me.”

Dylan slams the door and you sit in the quiet of the room for a minute with your ears ringing.

The reality of the situation hits you.

“I can’t stay there, God not only am I a fuck up but I’m homeless too.”

“You can always stay here,” JT offers and it really bothers you that you can’t tell if he wants you to, or if he’s just offering because of his hand in the most recent blow up of your life.

“I’m pretty sure his baby sister shacking up with his teammate he doesn’t want her with isn’t exactly going to win me any favors with Dyl,” you reply.

“Well I’m pretty sure he’d rather you be here than living on the street.”

Ordinarily you think that would probably be true but the look on his face when you opened JT’s door is seared into your mind. “I wouldn’t be so sure.”

In the end you do move your things into JT’s apartment. Kenzy is the accomplice to your crime, helping you pack your things while the team has practice, wrapping you in her arms and telling you that he just needs some time.

“He loves you,” she says.

You’re not so sure.

That’s probably overdramatic. You’re sure he loves you, and you sure hope he forgives you. You’re just worried that this time you’ve both done and said things you can’t take back and you’re not sure how things will move forward from here.

It’s not all bad though.

Living with JT is surprisingly easy, even right one might say. You fit directly into each other's lives like perfect puzzle pieces. His strict routines of practices and morning skates and games—both home and away—allow you the space to complete your own work on your own time. Cooking pregame meals together and curling up beside him when he takes his pregame naps quickly become some of your favorite activities.

You dance around the feelings talk, never quite broaching the subject. But it can’t feel this right if it’s all one sided, all in your head, right?

He’s even kind enough to let you drive his SUV even though the price tag makes you nervous every time you’re behind the wheel. You’re not a bad driver, as evidenced by the fact JT lets you drive the Audi, but you are possibly on this side of over cautious as a result of a bad car accident in high school.

Three home games after your fight with Dylan and approximately zero words or text messages exchanged between the two of you, you find yourself in the passenger seat.

“I could have taken the bus,” you protest weakly, almost knowing exactly what JT’s response will be.

“Over my dead body,” he laughs, eyes flickering over to you before focusing on the traffic in front of him. “Just pick me up after practice or text me if you’re still out and I’ll find a ride.”

“I’m not gonna leave you stranded at the arena, of course I’ll be there after you’re done.”

It’s oddly domestic, kissing JT across the console and then sliding into the driver’s seat that he vacates. You wait as he grabs his gear and walks away, you do really love watching him walk away.

The moment is cut short by catching a glimpse of your brother's vehicle. He’s not in it, obviously already inside the arena, but the sight of it makes your stomach clench all the same.

Thoughts of Dylan and his disappointment and worry that he’ll never forgive you flood your mind the entire drive. So much so that when the next light turns green, you let off the gas without realizing that there is a larger SUV running the red.

It all happens so fast. The screeching of tires, the crunching of metal, the pop of airbags going off and then a blinding pain in your wrist.

In the end, you’re pushed into the wrong lane of traffic, the other vehicle damn near in the passenger seat you occupied only fifteen minutes ago. There’s a distinct ringing in your ears and you offhandedly wonder if this is what it feels like to get boarded.

“Are you okay? I’m calling 911.” The words sound like they’re underwater, and it takes you several seconds to realize they’re being spoken to you. Turning your head to the side, you try to get the words out to say you’re fine, but you’re blocked by the airbag that has gone off near your head.

Emergency services come quickly, a perk of living in Detroit you suppose. Embarrassingly, it takes the jaws of life to peel off the driver's side door to get you out. A cop takes your statement and then you end up in the back of an ambulance. Despite your assurances that you’re fine, one raised eyebrow from the female paramedic and the idea that you’ve probably broken your wrist has you agreeing to the ER visit.

It’s then that someone asks you if there’s anyone you want to call. Heartbreakingly, your first thought is Dylan and your second thought is you’re not sure he’ll pick up.

Your third thought is JT and his SUV that you’ve probably totaled.

One of the paramedics helps you dial the equipment manager’s number, the one you were instructed to only ever use in case of emergencies. If ever there was a reason…

When he picks up the phone, you have to explain that you’ve gotten into a tiny fender bender and if you could please speak with JT and yes I mean JT not Dylan.

“Are you okay?” JT all but demands when he picks up the phone.

“I’m totally fine,” you fib, and then concede based on that same female paramedic once again raising an eyebrow. “Okay so I might have broken my wrist but–”

“Which hospital are you going to?” he interrupts.

You tell him, but try to say, “It’s okay you don’t have to–”

He interrupts again, “I’ll be right there.”

He hangs up quicker than you can ask how he’s going to get there without the car that you’ve wrecked.

True to his word, he’s sitting on a chair in your hospital room when you return from getting an x-ray. He stands abruptly upon your entrance and takes the three strides to stand in front of you before hesitating, like you’re made of glass.

You take matters into your own hands and slide your good arm around his back, careful to not jostle your injured wrist. There's a slight tremor to his body that you feel run through yours.

“I’m okay,” you say comfortingly, rubbing your good hand along his back before pausing. “Your car though….”

The tears are already starting to pool in your waterline as he pulls back.

His hands slide to cup your jaw as he speaks seriously, “I don’t give a damn about the car. It can be replaced, you can’t.” A tear slips out before you can stop it and he brushes it away with his thumb before kissing you softly. “I care about you. So much. And that phone call scared the shit out of me.”

Despite the less than stellar background and circumstances, his words have your heart leaping in your chest. “I really care about you too,” you whisper and kiss him again.

“Where is she?” you hear coming down the hall and it occurs to you that your brother is still your emergency contact.

“Did you tell him?” you ask JT who promptly shakes his head.

You don’t even have time to step back from JT’s embrace before Dylan comes crashing into the room. JT wisely pulls away and gives Dylan the space to place his hands on your shoulders and scan for any signs of injury.

“I’m okay,” you reassure him but the words feel hollow considering they’re the first you’ve said to him in more than a week. “Broken wrist they’re gonna cast and probably a concussion. Can’t say the same for the car.”

Eerily similar to JT, Dylan replies, “Cars can be replaced–”

“But I can’t,” you say in unison with him. “I know, JT said the same thing.”

It’s like Dylan remembers his teammate then, eyes sliding over to where JT stands and then back down to your slowly purpling wrist.

The room is silent except for the sounds of medical equipment and the faint sounds occurring outside the door.

“I’m sorry,” you say in unison with your brother again.

“No, I'm sorry,” he says first. “I’m your big brother and I’ve seen you get your heart broken too many times. I’m always going to worry about you but I was out of line.”

“I’m sorry we went behind your backs and I’m sorry you found out that way. We should have just talked to you, I should have just talked to you.”

“Truce?” he asks, like you’re 10 and 11 again, fighting over something silly and trivial.

“Truce,” you confirm, hissing when you knock your broken wrist as you pull him in for a hug.

Later, when you’ve gotten over the guilt of totaling JT’s barely used Audi and the cast on your wrist is long gone, it’ll be a fun story to tell at parties. About how it took an idiot running a red light for you to define your relationship with JT and to reconcile with your brother.

#nhl fic #nhl imagine #nhl imagines #nhl fanfiction #nhl fanfic #nhl x reader #jt compher fic #shelb writes

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lxmelle · 1 month

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Thoughts/Ponderings/Musings on ch 236. About Gojo reaching Sukuna, his death, his relationships, etc.

I know there are people who really dislike the characterisation here, expressing that Gojo is likely far more kind and caring for his students, etc.

Gege and his infinite wisdom over his creation seems to like encouraging headcanon kaisen, lol. He certainly keeps things quite true to life and allows the reader to make their own conclusions.

It is not my place as a casual reader to judge his writing, and I will defend it inasmuch as I also had hoped for more: Just because it isn’t explicitly said, doesn’t mean those things we have seen about Gojo aren’t true. I agree that it is also a shame that more wasn’t or couldn’t be included in this chapter to either dispel or confirm, but that’s masterful writing in itself, I guess.

I take small refuge in my interpretation that this is a glimpse of a conversation; as in real life, we ease into conversations. I enjoyed the dynamics and overall tone. I like to remember that each expression was a decision made, and these details can hold a lot of weight in meaning.

So we see that Gojo prefaces with something else and was responding rather specifically to Geto’s question regarding his fight, his end.

Geto, a natural conversationalist, who is said to be good at being at Gojo’s level, enquires about his fight - entering into neutral territory after Gojo expressed frustration and being stunned after his sudden arrival there.

Geto reads him / the atmosphere well and responds to tune the conversation to a level he can reach Gojo, despite possibly having a lot to say and catch up on himself. (Like, we never hear him talk about his family aside from confirming they escaped.)

He is showing respect for his friend. What do they have to rush for, anyway? I don’t think there is a specific afterlife if they chose to go south. Time may be infinite?

—

A lot more under the cut. Feel free to skim and apologies in advance for tangents. I hope it makes sense overall. I tried to make it as cohesive as possible despite being lengthy.

:: Beware the Word Vomit, overall reaching, meta, interpretations, some satosugu shipping, and general weaving and stringing of themes. ::

Disclaimer: I’m fully aware I may be wrong, as I am with many things, and you’re welcome to drop me any comments or thoughts.

One of the glaring issues was the “Sukuna glazing” as some fans called it. To see Gojo having regard for Sukuna’s strength doesn’t take anything away from Gojo imho, but I get it. What was all this reaching that Gojo was expressing? Surely that doesn’t that precedence? Of all things, is this what he’s regretting in what is possibly his last significant scene in the manga?

A part of me relates to this outrage, but then I try to bring myself down, because we are often kept out of what intimacies are exchanged between Gojo and significant ones (Geto, students, etc.) and we aren’t / haven’t been privy to many deep and elaborate reflections of Gojo or Geto. All we get are ellipses “...” and depictions of longing stares that don’t quite betray their honest thoughts.

So, within the context of the above, Geto asks directly and Gojo describes. Of course he’d want to know how Gojo experienced it. He’s always been the one who cared about how Gojo actually feels or experiences things. He might join in a bit of friendly ribbing, but Geto and Gojo communicate on another level with banter, etc. there’s a reason they’re each other’s best friend.

I also see an interpretation where it cycles back to love is the most twisted curse: it can save people, but it may hold you back from being the strongest. Love has been a theme since the origin story in jjk 0. Gojo’s love for his students and Megumi may or may not have affected their chances of success, but he nevertheless cares and bets on the future (students).

Geto has always been shown to be Gojo’s significant person - a safe person, if you will. Thematically, their designs are two parts of a whole. Their fates intertwine in so many ways, only to be separated ultimately to death.

Since, he’s described not feeling lonely anymore, through love for this students (his legacy and will) and even more now (for himself) that he was wrong about dying alone. He had wanted to find a way to bring Geto home (to jujutsu high [Geto’s theme song “come back home” given by Gege is all about this after all]) but despite all that’s happened, he is with him at the airport, and Gojo is satisfied enough with that, but won’t waste time not bridging gaps any longer -

Gojo is so very forthcoming with Geto in his adult years. Given the opportunity in jjk 0, he not only asks for his last wishes, but conveys his as well. He then speaks his heart in his conversation with Geto; he is candid, yet serious.

I’d like to think it’s infused with more emotion than he ever did in their early days. He confirms his feelings to Geto and confesses his desire to have had him there to send him off. More on this later.

In the original version of the manga, Gojo momentarily reverts back to the use of “ore” just once, before it becomes “boku” again - a shift had taken place in him due to what Geto said in the past. To demonstrate that in a few short panels is quite something too. People change; we evolve through the influence of significant others.

Gojo knows loneliness as he has learnt about love in its different forms. To really know it is perchance what Sukuna doesn’t, despite saying he does.

From this point of view, he says he is sorry for him, as he’s got empathy for Sukuna; that Sukuna couldn’t learn what he had wanted to convey, but perhaps the emphasis was more of a pity for him than feeling disappointed.

In a typical Gojo fashion, he captures it clumsily and makes it about strength in his speech, as if punches and skills thrown at each other could convey that it doesn’t have to be lonely and that they could understand each other - that having a peer would be interesting / satisfying - perhaps also seeking a sense of validation himself in Sukuna. It’s possibly also what prompts people like Nanami to call him out on the extreme emphasis on strength. But maybe that’s Gojo’s defence mechanism too, who knows. If Gojo had a love language, would it be fighting talk? Ha ha.

This reminds me of how Gojo was perhaps unintentionally condescending to Geto at the KFC breakup scene - it was the final nail in the coffin for Geto and he shut down completely, remarking the now infamous, “Are you Gojo Satoru because you’re the strongest or are you the strongest because you are Gojo Satoru?” But that’s by the by I guess. It wasn’t as if Sukuna was going in for therapy / love intervention with anyone, lol. Fighting was the conversation.

So moving on, what is Sukuna’s perspective and what could it be that Gojo wanted to convey, and presumably died trying? Looking at the next fight, he is asked directly about his perspective as the strongest in history who stands above the rest.

Sukuna. The pinnacle; the epitome of strength, solitude, and one who has cast away everything - seemingly peacefully - in favour of being formidable at the top. Revered and feared in equal measure.

He is so strong yet he doesn’t need anything the others facing off with him seem to yearn. The all want to reach him for their own reasons. Maybe like disciples chasing the Buddha. What is his message? Can I understand him, and he, me? And then, ourselves?

This fight was supposedly for himself too - but what was he yearning? Gojo at first glance appears to wish to defend himself, everyone, and save megumi. Mourn Geto too. From what we understand, he's been lonely, despite this improving over the past year (through his admission to Geto later on in the airport scene).

The mark of The Strongest has been left: As soon as Gojo became strong, Geto left. Geto didn’t love him for his strength - he had to leave; in part, because feeling out of place and left behind in the a shadow of a person who is now living by “the strongest, alone” hurt, making the ills of the world unbearable, as it tipped the balance greatly for him. He could not see beyond Gojo’s apparent selfless selfishness, and he did the same with his own version of it. He had to pave his own way and build another family & world - even if it was a shell of what he had with Gojo.

But I digress. Gojo had strength but it wasn’t enough to reach Geto. He has been using his Strength as a teacher to foster a new generation, allies, in a bid to change the Jujutsu world in a different way to Geto. Yes, they shared a dream. (I hope this comes back into the picture with Geto's side fighting Sukuna too.)

He sees this curse taking shape - first with Yuji and then Megumi. I can’t imagine the outrage, and how it’s internalised by Gojo. He possibly dissociates to some degree, as one wouldn’t be able to function if they carried the weight of the world (in information and in sensation overload) all the time. He’s trained himself to be selective. So, nevertheless, there is a call to defend his title; he is also bored, wants to be a good example, and plays his part to assist with defeating Sukuna - tries to reach him but maybe it just wasn’t his message to relay. Gojo’s job was done here. He got what he wanted - a satisfying fight. More on this later.

We see the futility this far in reaching Sukuna across chapters. Responding to “love”… Harming those along the way carelessly, as he wanders simply proving his existence, as if that alone is enough to justify and bring it purpose. As a calamity or curse, he doesn’t need to consider what he is.

This is the extreme of what strength is - of what Gojo could have become. Perhaps if he wasn't so deeply touched by having someone complete him, so he could be a brat in his youth and actually trust someone to fall back on. And had he not suffered loss through Geto leaving, would've meant he never had to question himself or experience doubt or longing in his life, as he was gifted, was he not? Or was it actually a curse?

Is it meaningful to be the only one at the top of the mountain where nobody can even reach? What good does the embodiment of strength bring, if there is nobody to recognise that it is, no one to yield the power for to give it meaning, and no use for the sheer magnitude of what you can do to give it purpose?

Sukuna says he knows love and cast it away, finding it worthless, that he responds to others’ strength with love through besting them in a fight. He gets his “kicks” like Gojo did to some degree like in the theme song for Gojo by Aviccii:

(Oh, my, my) That's what I get for lovin' you

(Lie, lie, lie) You know I can't live without you

(Why, why, why?) And all the things you put me through

(Cry, cry, cry) 'Cause I'll get my kicks without you

Life must be pretty monochromatic as The Strongest. Rinse repeat until no one is left.

Following the loss of love, Gojo tried to find meaning and pass the time in ways befitting of him too. Everyone has to find a way to move on, right? But it doesn’t mean everyone feels fulfilled or healed. He drilled skills into his tempered body throughout the years of his existence; he wanted to showcase it all to Sukuna - the reason he fought and battled and trained and developed his incredible sense - his spirit that does so for himself (yes he does get kicks from it) but also for others - because Gojo is an evolved form of The Strongest. Maybe The Strongest 2.0 and Yuta is version 3.0. You get my drift.

Gojo is representing the sorcerers of the modern world. Whilst Gege likes to poke fun and say he is devoid of a personality; I’d say that isn’t it quite natural when your role in life has already been partially determined for you at birth? Further, as a “victim” of circumstance due to the setting, trauma and heavy reliance on Gojo to fulfil all sorcerer duties from a young age (esp after Geto left) can certainly leave you in a state of emotional arrested development.

To reiterate, Gojo, unlike Sukuna, DOES find meaning and purpose in his students. He wised up and found the sense in what he and Geto discussed, learning from the past and adopting certain philosophies that suited him.

But still, as the strongest, Gojo was lonely with the line drawn - as a human being (self/identity) hiding behind a living creature (of strength/facade); Gojo seemed to be saying through the blooming lotuses (flowers growing out of literal muddy waters - rich in religious and cultural sumbolism) that he loves everyone but despite that they couldn’t understand him, and him, them. This is the main interpretation that makes sense as Gojo is talking about himself, his allies (esp Megumi), even possibly Geto, but he is also talking about reaching Sukuna.

Considering the possible interpretations for who the lotuses symbolise... he less common one from my readings thus far would be Sukuna; but it kinda makes sense: Sukuna, who was born to unfavourable circumstances, and similar to Hakari who described the strong looking down at others as if they were dirt. And achieving so much like a rising from the ashes. We also see him glorified as the strongest of all time now.

And it reinforces the “unreachability” (made up a word here) and how it was an impossible task in the first place.

The message being: How can Gojo reach someone who does not want to be reached? This cycles back to what he said to Yaga when Geto left. He cannot save anyone who does not want to be saved by others.

If Sukuna was the lotus, and was a beautiful flower in strength that defied odds to bloom in the murky depths of dirt - he certainly isn’t pure as the flower symbolises, but he certainly is some kind of divinity. But I really don’t want to glorify Sukuna.

I prefer the interpretation of the lotus being Gojo or those around him, but narratively, it is simply possible he is describing several people’s parallels here with how solitude accompanies being strong. Sukuna is like the unreachable Enlightened One. Yet, he strangely doesn’t seem to have a solid sense of identity - there is no “I am the strongest” that Gojo embraces, not that this is anything to hinge one’s identity upon, as it is part of Gojo’s problem.

And yet this still brings us to what Gojo wanted to reach Sukuna with aside from a demonstration of his skills. Does Yuta have anything to add to this, as the next Gojo Satoru?

Yuta, if we can appeal to his character for parallels in messages, and if we can consider him The Strongest 3.0 asked Uro - don’t you have a lover or friends? Implying that if one fights so desperately for their own sake, it reaches a dead end fairly quickly. Just WHO are you fighting for, and doesn’t fighting for yourself get a little old after decades?

Even Toji (without his soul when ressurected) instinctively ended his rampage at the sight of what his reason for living was, his son, albeit he cared for Megumi in a very dodgy roundabout way, fearing his closeness would ruin / stain his son. I’m reminded here of how Geto’s body reacted to Gojo’s voice; momentarily seizing Kenjaku by the throat.

Somehow the bond between Gojo and Geto is marking its significance again, isn’t it? They all had reasons they fought for, and through the many evidences of these, we are allowed insight into recurring ones that may hold more significance than others. You know, like: my students are watching, let’s schedule it on the 24th of December.

These are important things to gojo, he is also showing Sukuna what he doesn’t have. He didn’t need to live like a cursed object for decades, etc and his significance doesn’t die when he does. Yes, a big part of Gojo had craved this “all out” but as he lives his life and engages in the battle, all the pieces of WHY, WHO, and WHAT he is wielding power for start to surface.

As the reader we are finding these Easter eggs along with him, because the narrator and Gojo don’t disclose this openly. Gojo has people modelling this for him throughout his short life, and he seems to be quick on the uptake, despite preaching about strength. Maybe he isn’t terribly aware, but he knows more than he lets on - Gojo had a persona.

We probably can say the same about the “I’d win” scene that pretty much foreshadowed his defeat. That kind of a Champion enters the ring without fighting talk?

The scene depicting him reflecting upon his first ever defeat showed him to be chasing a “high” of satisfaction from going all out and fulfilling the itch of Boredom and Loneliness that plagues the unimaginably strong. Pursuing and honing his skill, getting stronger and stronger, drew him further and further away from anything meaningful - ending up in a state where he never really gets the satisfying release he craves.

Like a runner who is only allowed to run at 5kmph for a short distance; an artist who isn’t able to paint their desired masterpiece; a singer whose voice can only whispered to an audience; the strongest weightlifter who can only utilise 20% of his max strength... How terribly dissatisfying.

How stifling it is to have such a limitation. And yes, his skill is limitless. How ironic indeed - the repression, the impotence strength imposes.

And while we are on skill/technique names, others have pointed out before - unlimited void? What a perfect description of what felt meaninglessness / existential emptiness is.

The underside of this however was how it also alluded to the possibility that he was going to experience another enlightenment - but of a final kind of his physical form. It implies he was tired from his isolation or that there was at least no remedy for it, and therefore his present sense of fulfilment was to engage in battle and enjoy it - although he recognised signs of defeat - it would be satisfying as he could go all out or die trying.

It would fulfill the purpose of his existence as The Strongest contender anyway. He, could be the victor, or the pawn, who plays his part in the universe. His reigning time as the champion needed to be defended with dignity anyway. It reminds me of his conversation with Megumi about death and being selfish.

I mean, that's just imbued with meaning there. A whole post needs to be dedicated to It, and I'm not the subject matter expert by a long mile. Gojo’s bottom line was that strength did define him; he was born with it.

Watching Megumi possibly minimise his worth and clip his wings without pursuing / living up to his potential may be a waste, as a person who inherited the skills that took their ancestors down. However, the selfish path may not be for everyone.

Other writers’ meta I’ve read seem to touch on this too - that Gojo unwittingly became a form of the old Jujutsu world himself due to being a product of it himself, but he did do his best by his students to inspire change. This, to me, speaks volumes about him entrusting them to live out their paths upon his passing - what could he do in death, anyway? He taught them the importance of accountability and his own version of the truth - that power and strength - living to your potential is certainly one way of living, and they can expect to die alone, so make the most of their youth!

We witnessed Gojo making preparations for the match, following setting the date on 24th December. How romantic of Geto, to try and either seek Rika in jjk 0 or die to Gojo’s hand - and then now, Gojo, who may mourn Geto again, or die trying on the same day. It begs the question: was he also secretly at peace with the possibility of dying to Sukuna? At not being the strongest? It seems that him being a pragmatist (or “resignation man” as Gege apparently once put it) he would find some peace, especially since he was Geto in the afterlife and could see that his soul wasn’t trapped in his physical body or something - their corpses could be left to the living and Shoko, which seems to be the faithful stance they both take in trusting the living to “carry on” their respective teachings.

Nevertheless, Gojo is trying to reach Megumi here. But as the incredibly gifted, talented, and strongest - albeit as cursed as it is to be afflicted with it all, Gojo may not empathise with the struggles of the weaker. It is reminiscent of how he approaches the battle with Sukuna in the first place. He was challenged and he accepted.

A sport. That's not to say he lost sight of the bigger picture - we saw Gojo making preparations for a possible reality where he does not return.

Unfortunately, his skills also lend towards fighting alone, unless they were back-to-back with him. (I still hold onto the belief he and Geto could be a dynamic duo). Which Sukuna also used against him in their match in order to not get hit. Gojo has never learnt what it would be like to fight with others and it's old-fashioned egoist rules about matches when viewing it as a sport rather than of survival. But, Gojo had changed enough to feel he could reach Sukuna and had desired to impart something - maybe to have significance or be regarded by an equal - once again - for this would be of utmost satisfaction for him to receive.

He had learnt a whole lot about things in his short life. He did well. In a final battle of 3 vs 1? Against Sukuna in the body of Megumi and the 10 shadows that his ancestors had died to? That’s already unprecedented. But strength aside, Gojo had reached many people and it’s time for him to pass on the baton and be where he wants to be, in the version of himself where he is the happiest.

Gojo admits to being wrong about dying alone, further listening to how Nanami and Haibara reflected on the former's death betting on the future seemed to solidify some kind of understanding for him.

That he didn’t have regrets either. He, too, fought for a purpose beyond seeing satisfaction of being strong; it just became evident as it surfaced to his awareness. With his six eyes, he couldn’t see everything. With limitless, he couldn’t reach it all either. Even if you have everything, you can’t do anything. It is not enough to just be strong. And Gojo wasn’t just strong in the end.

He may or may not have reached Sukuna, but maybe, just maybe, in being wrong about dying alone, the necessity for everyone to be both selfless and selfish, was enough for Gojo. To reach and arrive at: Acceptance.

Seems pretty good to me, to be at peace.

—

“The absolute strongest, the loneliness that follows, the one who will teach you about love is... “

Yorozu’s haunting words.

Gojo is not the strongest anymore

Gojo didn’t feel lonely anymore

The one who will teach has taught him about love is...

You, Geto Suguru. It started with you, and it ends with you.

—

Yes, sound the alarm! It's satosugu brainrot headcanon.

Gojo seems to be saying, and I’ll phrase this as if he were speaking to Geto in his mind’s voice:

Yes, I was undeniably the strongest; until I wasn't. It was a fun fight. My students are my legacy; I trust them to take it from here too. They know they have the permission to be selfish. I trust that they have their own wisdom to know the difference; it is up to them now. I did my best to change the world that let us down in our youth; and fostered and shielded those under my care as best as I could with what I had. I think they had some good memories; I sought to give them a flavour of what we had, preserving the treasure that it was for us. I was never the teacher type, but I wanted to do something and clung onto a dream you and I shared.

I responded to others who loved me and surrounded me for my strength (living creature); but for me as a human, I am undeniably greedy and longed, pined for you (the only one who saw me: Satoru). You held the space as my one and only. I let you go back then in Shinjuku, and couldn’t let your body go when you died, and you came back as a puppet... I didn’t get to mourn you, but here we are: dying on the same date a year apart. Others still don’t quite get me (like Nanami and Haibara) but they understand the creature that is a part of me. They accept me; in itself, it’s enough, for a part of it is true.

As for the rest of me: you complete me with your understanding of me; parts of me that I don’t see or have forgotten. Just as unchanging as it was before, I’ve only ever needed you to satisfy me (and ease my solitude) ; no matter who filled the space around me, your absence spoke the loudest, because your presence alone would have been the most profound - I’d have felt satisfied / complete.

And yes, I am 100% romanticising here. Unashamedly!

—

A more pragmatic take would be:

He could be quite simply implying that he carried a guilt for the longest time and the one thing he couldn't achieve was to bring his best friend back home to Jujutsu High. I mean I adore Teacher AU and I'm totally open to this more shonen interpretation too.

The finale was as he entered the other land, in a dreamlike state, he sees Geto, remembers he’s tasked Shoko to tell Megumi, demonstrating he has infinite faith in the next generation to survive, and it’s sufficient, it seems, to have a death without regret.

We see Sukuna offering recognition of his skill and existence after he is slashed, laying on the floor, as it begins to snow. A small smirk appears that seems to also mirror the same on his expression in the cover of volume 26. Satisfaction. Gojo might’ve been a worthy opponent and reached Sukuna in that regard after all; maybe love was not his lesson to teach Sukuna. He has died a noble death befitting of a warrior to be surrounded by camellias.

Gojo Satoru passes onto the afterlife and heads south.

—

It’s controversial somehow; it is both enough, and leaves me wanting more. Here’s to hoping it’s not the last of Gojo (or Geto).

Maybe I did just want to dream a little. Thanks for reading if you made it this far. My tapestries tend to get quite complicated, and I wouldn’t blame anyone if they bailed!

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wellgoslowly · 8 months

Text

Lockwood and Co. How do I begin to talk about this insane universe that has literally changed my life in so many ways in such a small amount of time?

I think it was probably January 27th that I actually got the notification for the trailer for the show from Netflix’s Youtube. I don’t know exactly what it was that made me interested in the trailer in the first place and set it apart from the hundreds of trailers that netflix has posted that I’ve ignored, but there was just something about it that made me think “oh, this looks interesting, let me take a look at the trailer.” Thank god I did.

If I were to go back in time to that version of linnie and tell them that their life was about to be changed, I think they would’ve laughed. At that period of time I’d had a 2 year long hyperfixation on the grishaverse and I couldn’t think of anything that would’ve possibly broken me out of that long ass period of chaos. And then I watched Lockwood and Co and I immediately fell in love with an entirely new world.

Lockwood and co means so much to me for so many reasons. One of them is that I’ve never seen myself more reflected in a character than I see myself in Lucy Carlyle- hence the name Linnie. I didn’t even realize it until Aaron ( @queer-and-nerdy ) pointed it out (after I pointed out how much of a George kinnie they are) and then everything made sense in a way? Like Lucy Carlyle is the truest form of a comfort character for me because we are basically the same person and I never realized how special a character could be until I met Lucy Joan Carlyle.

Another reason why I love this universe so much is because I love found family, and I love the found family that Jonathan Stroud has written. The Iron Trio will always be so special to me because of how often it is shown and how deeply it is known that they love each other unconditionally, Even George and Lucy, who have their differences when they first meet, grow to love each other in their own way and I genuinely believe that the family found within the Iron Trio is one of the most beautiful relationships I’ve ever read or seen portrayed on screen.

I also just truly love the worldbuilding. The world that Jonathan Stroud has created has such an amazing homely feel to it that I will never tire of. I love literally everything about it- the lore, the execution, the way that he was able to make ghosts even more terrifying for such a young audience.

Lastly, I love the fandom. I’ve talked a little bit about how much a kind and welcoming fan space like the l&co tumblr means to me and how I have had rocky situations in a fandom in the past, but I truly cannot even begin to talk about how much this online space has truly changed me in so many ways. I feel like I can have open, honest, and constructive opinions on here without being scared to speak my mind or fear the repercussions of not being 100% happy all the time. This fandom is the most accepting and loving fandom I have ever known, and I’d like to tag a few of the people who have made this place so loving and enjoyable to partake in. Shout out to @ikeasupremacy @oblivious-idiot @losticaruss @youmanynotrestnow @neewtmas @thisgameissonintendo @readyafterthesunrise @waitingforthesunrise @yveni @uku-lelevillain @impossibleclair @donutcats @jesslockwood @kazbrekkerfast @krash-and-co @carlyleandco @biscuitrule @maraschinomerry @lockwood-lover @lvockwoods @givemea-dam-break @someonetooksendnoodles @nomolosk @thedonutdeliverygirl @neverendinglabyrinth @tangledinlove - I defo missed a lot of people but these are just the few that I could remember right off the top of my head <33

All in all, I love this show and these books and this world more than I could ever possibly express. Happy 10th Birthday to The Screaming Staircase, and a very Happy Lockwood & Co Day to all whom I have the honor of celebrating with. I love you all very dearly, and remember: “just reckless enough”.

xoxo,

linnie <3

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flame-resistant · 1 month

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He felt sick. Why did you look at him like that? Why were you being so nice? Why weren't you scared of him like everyone else? It made his skin itch just enough; he needed it to stop.

Content: stalking, death threats, yandere

He remembered you well, the look you gave when you offered him the soda. How you said it was an extra by mistake, a kind gesture that just didn’t sit well with him. What was your game? Didn’t know who he was? Even if you didn’t, how could you not see he was bad news, how disgusting he looked. A bitter feeling entered his chest as Shigaraki watched you leave, off to do God knows what, just a stupid little civilian who didn’t know any better. You made him sick.

It didn’t take him long to find your social media, only a few days of trying to fish for information. The area the two of you met in was near a university, you looked about his age, so a student fit and damn was he correct. Even there you presented as this kind individual who could do no wrong. Helping with the needy and deprived like some saint, an obsessive thought edging its way into his mind. What would happen if someone made you snap? A grin crossed his dry lips as the bright screen created a halo around his thin figure, but he was far from angelic, and he was damned to prove you weren’t as well.

“Hey who is this loser posting hate comments in your posts?” A friend had asked after you received a few hate comments, while cyberbullying and trolling wasn’t a new topic, it was odd that your small blog would be hit. Shrugging your shoulders, eyes skimmed the words from the anonymous user: “fraud”, “die in a hole”, “you think this makes you good?”; it almost seemed this user was taking everything personal. Though you couldn’t figure out just what you did to them specifically.

“It’s probably just someone mad and taking it out on random blogs, no? We never interacted before so we can’t possibly know each other. Look, we don't even follow the same accounts.” That was a good point, your friend mumbled in agreement. Perhaps it really just was some spam account, they only told you to be careful in case it got more extreme.

“Just be sure to take screenshots if they threaten you.”

And you did, the comments not stopping only growing by the hour. It got to the point you had to block the account, something you usually didn’t do but felt pressured due to the volume of spam comments and your friend saying they deserved it. A part of you was tempted to just reach out and ask what their problem was, an idea that was dropped when mentioned in your social group. Brows furrowed as the others called you too nice, that people don’t think like you, that some are just fucked up.

It seemed to be going well, after the block the hate comments stopped, and things started to go back into the boring norm of college classes and hanging out in your free time. A notification on your phone distracted you from the recent discussion with your study group. Blood leaving your being as you read the message sent to you, a new account, but the same words.

“Did you really think blocking me would help? I knew it, you’re just like the rest of the trash in this world. One day you’re going to wake up and everything around you is going to be dead, that goody-two-shoes attitude won’t be able to help you either. You’re all going to die and I’m going to do it.”

All attention was back on you when your phone dropped to the floor, your face pale from the feeling of anxiety growing inside you. Saying a quick “excuse me”, they watched you leave to the bathroom in a fit of paranoia. The mirror staring back at you showed a reflection that was never crossed before; widened eyes and mouth agape as you caught your breath. Mind raced with thoughts as you moved to check the stalls behind you, a breath of relief seeing that you were alone.

After the lovely encounter with your new pen pal, your friends convinced you to go to the police in hopes of finding the creep. Though it was shown they couldn’t pinpoint a good enough address, something about a VPN, your mind distracted by other things than computer tech. Looking out the window, every person became a possible threat. Was it the guy in the hoodie getting into a cab? Maybe the woman who was screaming at her phone while ordering a coffee. Your trust in humanity slowly dwindles, a hand on your shoulder breaking those negative thoughts as your friends give a few reassuring smiles. You weren’t fighting this by yourself, you had support.

Taking the police’s advice on blocking the account and switching your social to private, you had a bit more hope that maybe this would end. The small group headed back to your apartment as your friends discussed how crazy the person was. Your mind once more lost in thought on trying to figure out just what you did. The person said you were a goody-two-shoes, maybe they just meant your social media likes and posts, though something in your gut said it was more than just that. It was like they took your existence personally, as if you had truly offended them. A part of you wanted to at least try and apologize for whatever the fuck you did, but the other part knew it would anger the anon more. For now, you decided to push it aside, you did what you could.

Again, things seemed to be calming down, while it was frustrating to be on private, you knew you had to wait it out until things died down. A few weeks, maybe a month or two? God, you just wanted this to be over with, surely the person must have moved on by now, right? Someone couldn’t be that obsessed with freaking you out. So, after a month and a half you opened up your social to the public again. A few happy comments from some mutuals on seeing you back, glad to hear you were doing well. It felt good, almost therapeutic to have that control back.

Another week and still no hate comments from random accounts, maybe they really did give up? You could be so hopeful. Checking your phone for a notification at the store entrance, you moved to place it back in your pocket before being hit by an oncoming person’s shoulder. A quick apology was sent their way as you fumbled with your phone from almost dropping it. Not receiving a reply, you figured the person was just in a rush. The dark hoodie blending in with a crowd of bystanders. Hearing your phone beep caused your eyes to leave the crowd and until the new notification. A simple sentence message from a new account: watch it.

“So, the creep really does know you? We need to go back to the police!” After the encounter, you booked it to your friend’s place, not feeling safe going shopping alone. Shaking your head, you knew it would be pointless. You didn’t get a good look at the person; from what you could see they looked male but that was just a hunch. The police would just shrug it off like they did before, not enough evidence did nothing to help them possibly hunt down a culprit.

“They’ll just blow it off again, tell me to put my blog on private again. It was torture not getting to talk to my friends outside of our group, I don’t want to do it again.”

“Yeah, but this creep saw you! They literally shoulder bumped you!

“But I didn’t see them.”

The two of you fell quiet, a huff from them knowing you were right despite how annoying and stressful the situation was. “So, the guy can just keep stalking you and the police won’t do shit, ridiculous.”

It was, but it was also legal. An agreement came after this that you wouldn’t be left alone if it could be worked out. More eyes meant more chances of seeing who the guy was, which made sense. Part of you felt bad that your friends made sure to be around before and after your classes and even walking you home. They would reassure you it was fine, that they rather do this than hang up missing posters.

Every now and then a new message would surface from a new account, statements about what you were wearing, even pictures taken of yourself and your friends. Screenshots saved before blocking the next account. It was almost starting to feel normal, as if on cue you knew he would send you a new notification on the dot. And one of those days you finally felt bold, what could he do anyway, you weren’t alone so he couldn’t exactly hurt you, besides you almost wanted him to do something in public to put an end to this and call the police.

moth.eater sent: You should try the mountain dew, maybe it would give some spice to your lame life. netizen.55 sent: Why are you doing this? What did I even do to you? moth.eater sent: I just want to see you tick.

That was it, all he wanted was to piss you off? He was doing a shitty job at that, if anything he was just scaring you into a corner. A phrase you remembered from your psych class came back to your mind, anger was a secondary emotion usually from rejection or fear. This guy was trying to scare you to the point of anger, the thought alone didn’t settle well with you. That rush of adrenaline hitting you once more before you could rationalize your response.

netizen.55 sent: I’m not scared of you.

That seemed to do it, it was the first time he blocked you. A feeling of pride filled your lungs, it’s been a while since you felt this satisfied. You won this weird argument; the block proved it enough. He should leave you alone now.

It itched; his skin never stopped burning despite how much he scratched. Red eyes stared through the screen; past the words you so bluntly wrote. You weren’t scared of him? Maybe not right now, but you would be. Every single person in this stupid world would be, sensei said so after all. The chair rolled back behind Shigaraki as he grabbed his old hoodie.

Final exams were nearing, but now that your number one hater had been leaving you alone it seemed less daunting. Your friends were even able to do their own things again which helped the guilt die down, no more being some protected being. Picking up the last textbook from the library, it was a straight direction back to your apartment. The time showed just past 7:15pm meaning a few hours of studying before crashing. Sounded like a good Thursday to you, especially with no notifications! A need to skip home almost overcame you, though the look of bystanders kept you in check.

With the apartment door shut and books tossed on the desk, it was time to get to work. Cracking your balcony door just a bit to let a breeze in, your eyes moved to observe the text. It was a relatively quiet night, not yet the weekend in which other college students would be howling below after a few drinks. Sometimes a police siren would go by, nothing too dangerous from the sounds of it, besides a few heroes were patrolling the area. Getting up to take a break, the clock now showing 8:43pm, it didn’t hit you how long you had been reading for. A hand moving to massage your face and wake up. One more hour you told yourself as you walked towards the kitchen for a drink.

Weird, did you leave the kitchen sink on? Brows furrowed as you tried to remember each step you made when you got home but couldn’t really focus due to being in a slight daze. Maybe you washed a dish and forgot to turn the faucet off. Shrugging it off, you turned the handle and moved to the fridge. Cold pizza and a few beers stared back at you, a mental note to get more groceries this weekend was made as you went back to the sink. Maybe past you knew what they were on about with the sink being on.

Cup in your hand, you stopped dead in your tracks, eyes widening from what was staring back at you. The hallway that faced the sink was empty, a window at the very back that usually helped you see what was going on in the dark apartment was now blocked by the figure. Red eyes stared back at your own, each step you took to move back was followed by another from the person.

“You said you weren’t scared of me; you look like everyone else who sees me.” The voice sounded scratched, like he hadn’t drunk anything in years, as if he was the embodiment of a desert. If it didn’t hit before, it hit now on who it was. Quick to run to the bathroom door, the closest one that would get you away from the stalker, you let out a strangled grunt when you were shoved against it instead. Face now pressed into the wood as the palm of his hand kept you in place. “I knew it, once that little facade breaks, you’re just as shitty as everyone else.”

“Let go!”

Not caring about the panic in your voice, you tried to turn around or at least get him to move, a “tsk” was heard as the hooded man showed you the cup you were once holding. Confusion turned into fear as the cup began to turn into dust just by his touch alone, a silent warning that you would be next if you kept it up. Still processing everything that was going on, the only question that could come to mind was asked, your nervous system in full overdrive with logic out the window. “Why?”

“I told you; I just want to see what’s under that mask. You should really think twice on who you offer free drinks to.”

Darkness was the final reply you got, the world shutting down around you. If you survived this, you would keep the extra soda for yourself.

#flameresistant #shigaraki tomura #shigaraki imagine #shigaraki bnha #shigaraki my hero academia #shigaraki x y/n #yandere shigaraki #poor reader just had an extra soda

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inklore · 2 years

Text

apparitions.

premise: you don’t know how this came to be; steven fucking you in front of a mirror. your body and pleasure showcased to marc, to prove a point, to show him steven knows best.

pairing: steven grant x (f)reader

word count: 839

warnings: minors dni please, marc x reader are mentioned and alluded in here but not shown, unprotected sex, literally just smut, dom!steven, teasing, voyeurism in a sense.

etc: this is based on this and this ask, i kind of strayed from the initial idea since i plan on writing a version of this, but not quite the same, with marc and other oscar characters, but me writing steven as a dom? shocking i know lmao.

i do not give anyone permission to translate or repost my work, please be respectful — if you enjoyed please comment or reblog!

“Does he do it better than me?” Steven hums, you’ve never heard his voice so deeply coated with jealousy and lust. The dynamic the three of you had was always so well laid out, who spent this time with you one day, or that time another day. Sometimes both of them at once. There had never been any fighting over you, over the moments shared with one of the other. It was an equal playing ground, you adored them both the same as they loved you the same.

Competition didn’t fit into the cracks of this unique relationship, and yet it was somehow showing it’s childish head right now.

Peering from around a corner with a sinister smirk as your palm dug into the edge of the mirror, Steven’s hand moving between your thighs as the pad of his finger rubbed circles against your clit; heavy pants mixed with moans spilling from your mouth, Steven’s dirty words making you clench around his thickness as it fucked up into you.

Your lids feel heavy, the exhaustion of being toyed with and fucked for what feels like hours—all in the means of proving a point—seeping into you bone deep. Steven’s other arm having to hold up your waist to prevent you from falling forward; and just letting him use you.

His reflection shows blown out pupils tainted with determination of sexual prowess. Sometimes a smirk will cross his lips and you know Marc must have said something, must be toying with him—with both of you.

“Tell me, love.” Steven grunts against your ear, “can he fuck you this good? You’re so wet for me, grippin’ me so tight.”

You don’t know how, or why, this came to be; Steven fucking you in front of a mirror. Your entire naked body on display in front of it as he pounds into you, your chest heaving, a sheen of sweat coating your breasts and abdomen as he makes you come for the third time tonight. Part of you wants to feel annoyance or some kind of begrudging feeling at both men using you as some dick swinging contest, but it’s hard to do when Steven feels so good inside of you. When each thrust of his hips hitting your ass coats his filthy words to you—and Marc—so ridiculously obscene, how you can hear the wet noises of his cock merge with your pitiful moans as he uses you, plays with you, toys with you; it’s hard to feel anything other than this, to think about anything other than Steven.

Marc being an afterthought. Only remembered when Steven prompts you again: “thinks he knows your body, how to please you, you were mine first, he wouldn’t know how to touch you if it wasn’t for me. gotta show him how to fuck you right.”

“Steven,” you moan, body leaning back into his until he makes a disapproving sound and is straightening you back up.

“Don’t move, love. Marc needs to see you, needs to watch my fingers play with this perfect pussy of yours. How else will he learn?” You catch a glimpse of Steven’s smirk—at Marc—before your eyes are shutting in ecstasy, the building pleasure of the fingers against your clit, the cock inside of you, and how filthy and needy you must look like right now to Marc all bringing you closer and closer to coming again.

Both boys had a way of mixing pleasure and torture so good that you felt devilish with how bad you wanted them both. How bad you wanted to be face down and ass up for Marc, or spread out atop Steven’s desk for him. Steven had you first but now you belonged to both of them. You were addicted to both of them. Loved fucking both of them. Your mind can’t wrap itself around choosing which one fucks better, which one makes you come harder. They both leave you breathless and throbbing to the point of exhaustion.

But you will gladly let them use you for these silly little games again. Will happily let Steven showcase you in front of a mirror for Marc’s eyes, for him to be envious of; the image of how deeply torn with sexual desire and need he must look like right now makes a shuttering gasp catch in your lungs.

“Tell him how good it feels, tell him you’re mine.” He presses a kiss to your cheek, his eyes shifting from yours to the other side of the mirror. Steven’s saying something but it’s not to you, it’s cocky and sneering and clipped at the end with a deep groan as your cunt clenches harder around him.

“I’m–fuck,” you’re almost there, so close. You can barely keep your neck upright, your eyes barely open.

His lips are pressed to your ear, his pants sending shivers down your spine, “it’s killing him not being able to touch you.” Steven’s fingers pick up speed on your clit, his cock following suit. “Come on my cock love, give Marc a show, yeah?”

#steven grant x f!reader #steven grant x reader #steven grant smut #moon knight smut #steven grant one shot #moon knight x reader #marc spector x reader #steven grant x fem!reader #steven grant x y/n #steven grant fics #steven grant fic #moon knight one shot #moon knight fic #moon knight fics #steven grant fanfic #**

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sunshinevanfleet · 1 year

Text

reflections - s. kiszka

pairing: sam x reader

a/n: i'm back again to feed sammy lane >:) this is possibly some of the filthiest shit i've ever written and it's all sammy nation's fault. thank you for inspiring my naughty thoughts and keeping the gears turning y'all. i tried to incorporate some kind of plot into this, but it is mostly just... straight porn... so there's that. the reader struggles with some insecurities in this one so if that's not for you then i'll see you for the next one. ok love you byeee<3

genre: kinda angsty, smut (18+ ONLY, MINORS DO NOT INTERACT).

word count: 3.5k

summary: the reader struggles with a few insecurities, but sammy's there to show her just how much she means to him.

warnings: negative self-image, swearing, explicit sex scenes, fingering, unprotected sex, squirting, etc.

“What are you doing, my love?” The appearance of Sam’s warm brown eyes from behind the bedroom door startled you. He peeked at you from the hallway, eyes scanning your dolled up frame as you looked yourself up and down in the mirror across from your bed. You fiddled with the neckline of your dress, the fabric plunging just enough to show off a tasteful amount of cleavage. The dress draped over the curves and valleys of your body, in what you thought was a flattering way, until now.

You should have known this would happen. You were notorious for picking dresses that you loved until you had to wear them. At least, that was what you told yourself. Realistically, it wasn’t the dress. Seeing your figure wrapped all up in silk and chiffon, every little detail carved out in the silhouette… You imagined the types of looks you would likely get from his peers, little old you just dragged along to mingle with the talented and famous. Your face and neck flushed, and you turned away from the mirror, stomach churning.

“Can’t you just go without me?” you asked, brushing a loose strand of hair off of your shoulder. A frown shadowed your features as you met his eager eyes, and you felt worse for it. He was looking forward to going to the party, wanting to introduce you to his friends. It shamed you, but you knew you would feel even worse being shown off by him. Absentmindedly, you tugged at the fabric bunching around your hips, trying to loosen it a tad. You were beginning to wish you’d bought something ugly and shapeless; at least then you wouldn’t feel as if your every flaw was on display.

“But I don’t want to go without you.” His gaze fell.

“I know it’s just—“ you breathed a deep sigh, “well, I just don’t think I’m going to fit in. There’s gonna be dozens of beautiful women, all of them fit and dressed to the nines… Supermodels, probably.” You scoffed, shaking your head. It was ridiculous that you’d even tried to get dressed up for this stupid party. How could you ever think you’d look nice enough to mingle with those girls?

“What are you talking about?”

Your voice shook as you spoke, “I’m talking about me, in this stupid dress.” You gestured down at it, eyeing the creamy silk and embroidered florals on the dress. It had been magnificent in the store, draped over the tiny mannequin’s frame like something out of a movie. But here you were, imagining the Instagram models and musicians at the party—all of them long and lithe and graceful.

He finally stepped into the room, fingers brushing yours as he reached for your hand. You pulled away, wiping tears from your eyes before they could smear the makeup you worked so hard on.

“I love you in this dress,” he said softly. Not thwarted by your attempt in avoiding him, he slid his hands gently up your arms. He grasped you by the shoulders, and met your eyes. “You look so pretty, like a fairy.”

You laughed bitterly. It was sweet of him to say, but you weren’t going for fairy. You wanted to be dazzlingly gorgeous like the rest of the women who perused alongside him, fashionable and en vogue. Instead, you felt juvenile. Like you were trying too hard to earn brownie points.

“I don’t feel pretty,” you muttered, your voice dark. You refused to meet his eyes, feeling uglier by the second. The irritation and attitude were doing nothing to make things better; you knew you were being unfair in taking it out on him. You were frustrated that he wasn’t seeing your point.

He sighed, one hand tracing up to lift your chin so your gaze met his. “Is this going to make you feel better? Staying home while I go out?” His eyes were curious, but firm. He wasn’t going to allow you to act unreasonably.

“Yes,” you said, though it was a lie. You knew you would feel worse if he left you behind, but you thought it would give you some form of grim satisfaction. He could go out and mingle with beautiful women all night, and at least then you would have some sort of justification for the insecurity you were feeling.

“You’re a terrible liar,” he said. “I’m not letting you sit here alone, pouting all night.” He released you from his grasp, and removed his suit jacket carefully. He kicked out of his loafers, leaving them haphazardly in the closet doorway.

You watched miserably. “If you want to go—“

“I’m not going without you. Now, we’re going to stand here until you tell me what’s wrong.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Uh-uh,” he shook his head. “After all of that, you’re not blowing me off because you don’t want to talk about it.”

The tears were back, worse than before, now coupled with fresh waves of guilt. You were acting like such a brat. How could you deprive him of a night out with his friends because of your stupid insecurities? Your lip quivered as you looked at him, the words caught in your throat.

“It’s not the dress, is it?” he asked, voice soft.

You shook your head. “No—It’s me… I just—looking in the mirror and noticing how much I don’t look like the other girls that hang out with your friends… I mean, they’re all super skinny and tall and have perfect makeup…” You trailed off, ashamed. You were jealous of them, envy burning deep in your chest each time you saw a candid photo of Sam crowded with a ton of his friends. You couldn’t go a day without comparing yourself, and you hated it.

“Y/N,” he sighed, “I don’t care about any of those other girls.” He sat on the edge of the bed, grasping your hand and pulling you into the space between his legs. His knees caged you in, hands running comfortingly up and down your arms.

“How could you not?” you breathed, restraining yourself from breaking into sobs. Hot tears streamed over your cheeks, smearing your carefully applied cosmetics and making your eyes burn. “I’m nothing like them.”

He laughed humorlessly. “That’s why I love you, babydoll. If I wanted any of those girls I could have them, but I don’t. I only want you.” His fingers danced across your skin, the warmth of his touch comforting you slightly.

You frowned, feeling worse at the affection that bloomed behind his irises. You knew you were ruining your night over nothing. You knew Sam loved you more than anything, yet here you were, hating yourself in this beautiful dress that you had been so excited to wear. The shame worsened your crying. At this, Sam’s arms snaked around your waist, pulling you even closer. He pulled you down onto his lap, nuzzling his face into the crook of your neck. His lips ghosted over the skin.

“Don’t cry, please,” he said, pleading. “You are so perfect, Y/N, I promise.”

You sniffled, trying to stifle your tears. “I’m sorry,” you muttered, wiping your face. “I-I didn’t mean to ruin our night.”

“You didn’t ruin anything.” His voice was gentle, his touch even more so. You felt his hand skimming down the open back of your dress, finding the zipper. “Let’s take this off, hmm?”

You nodded, standing to let him unzip the dress. Once unzipped, his hands trailed beneath the fabric, kneading the skin of your back and hips as he pushed it off of you. You let the straps fall down over your shoulders, sighing at the feeling of his touch. The dress slipped down to the floor. You stood there, bare chested and wearing nothing but a pair of no-show panties.

“Is this okay?” Sam asked softly, his hands sliding up and down your sides.

“Yes,” you breathed. You closed your eyes as his hands massaged your skin. The mirror in front of the bed was no friend to you now, and you didn’t want to see your own ruined gazed in the reflection. Eyes shut, you could just focus on the feeling of Sam’s careful touches.

His breath fanned over your skin, lips meeting your skin in slow, deliberate kisses. A shiver traveled over your body. Your hands found his, grasping them gently as he held you by the hips. His thumbs toyed with the waistband of your panties, as his mouth paid close attention to every inch of your back.

“C’mere,” he said softly, pulling you down onto the bed. You perched between his legs, head leaning back on his shoulder. He hooked his hands beneath your knees, spreading your legs over his own to hold them open. You flushed, still refusing to open your eyes. He took in the sight of you in the reflection before you, eyes drinking in every detail of your exposed body. One of his large hands spread over your lower stomach, holding you steady, while the other trailed up to your chest. His fingers dipped between the valley of your breasts, then moved to brush over one of your hardened nipples. You sighed, settling into his embrace as he petted you gently.

“Hey,” his voice was silken in your ear, “why won’t you look at me, doll?” His hand abandoned your chest, rising to cup your cheek and pull your face towards his. You forced your eyes open, finding his loving gaze. He kissed you delicately, as if you might break, and you relaxed into his touch. You tried to make peace with being vulnerable with him–he’d already seen all the best and worst parts of you, hadn’t he?

“Sorry,” you mumbled against his lips.

“Don’t be,” he responded, the hand on your stomach slipping down to your clothed center. His fingers circled the damp spot blooming through your panties, and you sighed against him. Your neck was craned in his direction, eyes on his concentrated face as he watched you in the mirror. Whimpers fell from your parted lips, his touch sending butterflies blooming through your lower half. His own mouth fell open, panting as he watched himself pleasure you in the reflection.

The hand still cupping your cheek directed your gaze to the mirror; he moved the soaked fabric of your panties to the side, exposing your dripping folds to the air. You saw his fingers swirl around your clit, then dip into your center timidly. Your back arched against him, hips bucking out to meet his touch. You tore your eyes away from your own body, meeting his lustful gaze in the reflection. A tiny smirk played on his lips, noticing the way you began to writhe and twitch upon seeing yourself crumble beneath his skilled fingers. The intensity of his gaze elicited a moan from your lips, and you couldn’t help but look away. Your cheeks stained pink as sweat began to trail down over your temple.

“Don’t look away, my love,” his breath tickled the shell of your ear. “Keep your eyes on me, or I’ll stop.”

“Sammy, please–”

“Beg all you want, doll. If I don’t see those pretty little eyes soon, I’ll leave you here aching for me.”

You breathed sharply at his words; the warmth spreading through your center was incredible. The last thing you needed him to do was stop touching you. Forcing your eyes open, you met his salacious gaze in the mirror, his lip tucked between his teeth. He held your gaze for a moment, but you couldn’t help the way your eyes trailed down your own body. He had one hand holding you close, fingers twisting and rolling one of your nipples. His other fingers thrusted into you, curling up into your sweet spot. You mewled under his touch, reveling in the look that flashed over his face; the veins and muscles in his arm bulged as he increased his speed.

The ill thoughts of your body were long gone now, as you watched the way your body rolled into his touch. You held eye contact with him as you approached your release, a fire bubbling in your stomach as you got closer and closer. He held you in place against him without any trouble. His arms were secure around you, even as you shook and writhed in his grasp. Your chest heaved, your entire lower body clenching as he fingered you with more intensity. He was grunting behind you, your ass grazing his clothed cock with each tiny movement.

“That’s it, sweet girl,” he muttered in your ear, his voice throaty. The sound of it sent a jolt through you, your center tightening around his digits. He moaned at the feeling, attaching his lips to your neck to suck a dark mark into the skin. “You gonna give it to me, honey? Gonna cum all over my fingers? Make a mess for me?”

You whined in reply, nodding your head. He grinned, teeth grazing your skin. If possible, he increased the speed of his ministrations more. You thrashed in his grasp at the feeling, crying out, “Sammy– fuck, I’m so close…”

“I know,” he murmured in that low, saccharine tone. “Make a mess for me, doll. Let go for me–”

A high-pitched cry tore from your lips as you finally reached your release. Warmth spread through your seizing muscles, ecstasy blooming over your entire body as you came. His fingers never slowed once, guiding you through your orgasm as you clenched and tightened around them. His eyes were pleased, cocky as you fucked yourself desperately onto his fingers. He loved having you spread open, the mess of your release dripping down onto the sheets beneath you, soaking them through.

“Oh, please–” you hissed, his digits still curling inside of you. The overstimulation made your thighs tremble weakly. Your mind spun, the drunken haze of your orgasm muddying your thoughts. “Sammy, ah, I’m sensitive…”

He chuckled lightly. “I can see that, pretty girl,” he whispered against your neck. His fingers slipped out of you, leaving you feeling empty. You whined at the feeling, grasping his wrist as he trailed up to your clit, circling it slowly. “Are you too sensitive for me to fuck you?” He asked, his tone teasing.

You sighed, shaking your head. “No, no, please, I need it.”

“What do you need, hm?” You felt his eyes on you in the reflection, gauging your reaction to his words. “Tell me what you need…”

“Your cock, please–” you pleaded, your voice hoarse. “I want you to fuck me, Sammy. Please fuck me.”

His cock strained against his pants at the sound of your begging. He seemed to be satisfied. It took him half a second to free his cock from his pants, not even bothering to remove them completely. One hand guided his length to your entrance, while the other gripped your thigh to hold your legs open. The muscles of your legs trembled at being in the same position for so long, but the pain was numbed by the stretch of him pushing inside of you. A sharp cry echoed from your mouth, and your eyes fluttered closed.

“Ah, ah,” he said, “Remember my rules, honey.”

You nodded, peeling your eyes open. “I–I’m sorry,” you gasped, your nails digging into his arm as he fucked up into you. “Sorry, Sammy. Please don’t stop…”

He smiled. “There’s my sweet girl,” he cooed. “So obedient for me, aren’t you?”

“Y-yes,” you said, holding his gaze. His eyes drank you in, enthralled by the sight of you being split open by his cock. You saw his eyes trail down to his cock driving into your center, the mess of fluids glistening on your thighs and pelvic bone. His brows furrowed as he watched himself fucking you; you groaned at the sight.

“Look at yourself,” he commanded, nodding towards your limp frame in the mirror. “All pretty crying like this for me… How could you ever think I’d want anyone else spread open for me, hm?”

“I-I don’t know,” you whined, the feeling of his length hitting so deep inside of you making your vision go spotty.

“I only want you, are we clear?” He snapped his hips up into yours, his thrusts growing sharper.

You nodded.

“Words, honey,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Yes, we’re clear,” your voice tore from your throat, and he made a satisfied sound. Somehow, he seemed to be going deeper and deeper with each thrust, driving all the thoughts from your head. You could barely function, garbled moans of his name and other praise ringing through the room. It was taking everything in you to keep your eyes open and on the mirror; the view of the two of you in the reflection was doing nothing to help you hold on, either. You were barrelling quickly towards your second orgasm.

“Gonna cum again? All pretty around my cock?”

“Yes,” you cried out, throat burning. He swirled a couple fingers around your clit, sending your entire body shaking at the feeling. That, coupled with his length brushing your g-spot had you disintegrating into his touch. Your mouth went slack, eyes locked on his as you approached your second orgasm. There was an intense pressure blooming in your lower stomach.

“Look at that,” he said, voice dripping with sweetness as he urged you towards your release. “You like watching yourself fall apart on my cock, don’t you, my love?”

You opened your mouth, but couldn’t form any words. Only lewd, mewling noises.

“That’s okay, honey… You don’t have to say it. This pussy tightening around me says it all,” he said, still smug. Then, he moaned quietly at the feeling of you clenching hard around him. “There it is… Let go for me again.”

You did as he said, your entire body going lax as your second orgasm washed over you. The pressure in your lower belly expelled all at once, a feeling unlike anything you’d experienced before. There was a surprised sound from Sam behind you, then an unfamiliar groan from him. Waves of euphoria washed over you, your hips bucking at Sam’s touch as you rode out your orgasm. As you came down, you noticed that things were messier than usual, the sheets and legs of Sam’s pants soaked through with your arousal.

“Fuck, Y/N,” he groaned, still fucking you. “You looked so sweet, squirting all over my fingers and my cock…” His brows pulled together as his pace began to stutter. You felt his cock twitching inside of you, still brushing the spot that made your head spin. You were practically drooling, your eyelids drooping closed as he chased his high.

“Feels too good,” you mumbled drunkenly, your head falling onto his shoulder. You did your best to hold yourself up as he thrusted up into you, but he was doing the majority of the work. You eyed the bulging muscles of his arms as he held you up, your mouth watering.

“You can take it, sweet girl,” he said, concentrated. He was so close, you could tell by the waver in his silken voice. “You can take my cum, can’t you?”

“Y-yes,” you confirmed. “I can take it. Please…”

A contented chuckle left his lips, and he snapped his hips up into you a couple more times. You began to roll your hips down onto him as you felt the muscles of his abdomen clenching harshly.

“Oh, fuck, take it,” he groaned, the warmth of his release spreading inside of you as he finally reached his high. Your pussy clenched around him, urging him through his orgasm as he held you in place. You cried out his name, still rutting against him as the final waves of his release rolled over him. “You’re so good for me, doll,” he mumbled, pressing his lips against your shoulder as the two of you were finally still.

The two of you were quiet for a moment, unmoving as you both caught your breath. Then, you felt him shift underneath you, and his hand cupped your cheek again. He directed your attention to the mirror, where you could see the mess dripping out of your swollen cunt, a mixture of his cum and your own release. The sheets around you and a small portion of the floor at the end of the bed were soaked with your squirt, and your face flushed pink.

“I really made a mess, huh?” you asked, slightly embarrassed.

“You looked so beautiful doing it,” he said, amused. “Fuck, the look on your face while you were squirting all over my cock. Better than any fucking party.” He placed a sloppy kiss against your cheek, holding you gently as he pulled out of you.

You laughed softly, settling back onto the bed. He ran a hand over your stomach, caressing the skin gently. He leaned down and placed a kiss against the soft skin, nipping softly at the place beneath your navel.

“Think you can do it again?” He asked, face framed by your legs as he pushed them open.

Your cheeks burned, but you nodded. “Anything for you, Sammy.”

#sam x reader #sam kiszka x reader #sam kiszka smut #sam kiszka fic #sam kiszka imagine #greta van fleet imagine #greta van fleet smut #greta van fleet fic #greta van fleet x reader #gvf x reader #gvf smut #gvf imagine #gvf fic #my writing

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waitmyturtles · 11 months

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HYPERBOLIC SPOILERS FOR THE PHENOMENAL SECOND EPISODE OF OS2 x BBS x ATOTS

Can I feel so much in just one sitting?! Besides the UTTER giddiness of yesterday’s episode, at least for today, I think I have some actual, sensible, legible analysis to offer. I’m really moved, almost to tears.

I mean, as I blogged just a few minutes ago, part 4/4 of this second episode WILL go down in history in my heart as OBVIOUSLY some of the BEST, most STUNNING content in the HISTORY of anatomical and muscular analysis filmmaking. Yes.

I’m seeing on Twitter some grumpiness for the comedy of this all (the girlies want more woop woop?! I mean?!), but I seriously think this whole crossover set up and the way it’s been written is brilliant. And I don’t think this is just for fun.

But first, regarding the comedy and some other one-off points -- I mean, I knew that all four of these guys would be great, but their comedic TIMING, with the writing, is spectacular. They clearly had a FANTASTIC time filming this, and you can see it -- while they didn’t have much time to actually film it, it’s so well done.

I really want to call it, I really want to see it, I wanna see more subverting of the ships, and I wanna see these guys do more with each other separately -- I’m excited to see the implications of OhmEarth and NanonMix next week, and I think that Aof might be making a huge point by separating these guys, pairing them up together with others, and mixing shit up, because that’s what he does (especially while I have He’s Coming to Me on the mind soon on my OGMMTVC watchlist).

Another one-off point: like I wrote yesterday, we’re getting a double-dose of nostalgia, and I also wrote that I haven’t had to wait NEARLY as long as most of y’all for the return of BBS and ATOTS. But that being said, even though I only watched ATOTS last fall, I actually literally nearly cried when I saw the ATOTS flashbacks and heard the music. Because the way that show was designed in 2021 (I got so much OGMMTVC on my mind) -- those motifs WERE designed to imprint themselves in our memories as remarkable for a kind of cinematic, bildungsroman BL that we weren’t used to seeing back then. That show was nostalgic not JUST for the damn ship, but for Pha Pun Dao, for Chiang Mai, for the Thailand that Aof celebrates vis à vis EarthMix in ATOTS and Moonlight Chicken.

It’s gorgeous, and he knows what he’s doing by putting PatPran in that mix -- another couple at a different stage of their relationship, with a background and shared struggles that are different than TianPhupha’s, but that still offer both freshness AND nostalgia to the backbone story of ATOTS.

What’s moving me about these first two episodes reflects on what I just wrote -- this is no longer a story about Bad Buddy or ATOTS. This is a story about two couples going through their shit. Pat and Pran have ALWAYS been about going through their shit. We went through a A LOT of SHIT with them, including forward flashes after they graduated and seeing how they were faring in their long-distance relationship.

Remember: we haven’t spent ANY time with Tian and Phupha in their relationship yet, ABSOLUTELY NONE. They smooched once on the hill, we saw them cuddle, and Oishii sent us off. So we’re JUST finding out, NOW, how they’re faring, and we get thrown in a fight.

A fight that’s similar to the kinds of struggles that Pat and Pran have already shown us and are showing us now. Tian wants Phupha to see a slice of HIS life in Bangkok. Tian wants Phupha to yield a little, to stop being so stubborn.

Pat wants Pran to open up more. Pat KNOWS why Pran keeps everything so close to the chest. Pat is SO USED to being the balancing effect of their relationship, to push forward, to pull back, but to ALWAYS HOLD PRAN DOWN AND REMAIN AS PRAN’S ROCK, because Pran has not had the same kind of large family structure as Pat could rely on in his childhood and doesn’t know how to take emotional risks. Pat knows this and works hard on balancing it out.

But Pat can go overboard, right, and that’s partly why Pran drove away to Pha Pun Dao -- to prove to himself that he could complete this project on his own, but also, flirtingly, knowing that Pat would ultimately be by his side, and to play the competitive games that these guys always play with each other, because they’re still college dudes with bones to pick.

What we’re seeing is BOTH COUPLES FINDING THEMSELVES IN THEIR MATURING GROWTH STAGES OF THEIR RELATIONSHIPS.

Hello, mic check, there’s something happening here in Our Skyy 2. WHAT HAPPENED IN THE ECLIPSE EPISODES?

Same damn thing, the same damn thing that pissed the girlies off before. WE’RE SEEING AWLLLLLL THESE GUYS IN THE GROWTH STAGES OF THEIR RELATIONSHIPS. Akk was frustrated by all the expressions of care that Ayan is overabundant with. Ayan WANTS Akk to RECEIVE the care, because the RECEPTION OF CARE IS the signal, the trigger, the MEANING of the relationship for Ayan -- it tells Ayan, when I care for you, Akk, I AM SHOWING YOU MY LOVE FOR YOU, and that’s how *I* DEMONSTRATE IT.

Tian: Phupha, come with me to Bangkok.

Pran: Pat, let me do this by myself.

Akk: Ayan, I don’t need as much care as you’re giving me, it’s too much.

Phupha: You’re making only about me being madly in love with you.

Pat: I want to help you, my boyfriend.

Ayan: This is how I show my love for you, Akk.

Y’all. Aof, Golf, these filmmakers. QUEER RELATIONSHIPS ARE RELATIONSHIPS THAT DESERVE THE INVESTMENT AND RESPECT OF EMOTION AND GROWTH IN ART. Not all queer art/BLs need to be about the thrills and frills of the first kiss, of the first sex, of the first whatever. We’re expecting these guys to live together forever in fiction, right? Aof and Golf and the other homies are saying -- kk, girlies, we’ll give you the fan service, alright, but we’re going to show you HOW WE, AS THE QUEER COMMUNITY, DURING PRIDE, GET THERE IN OUR OWN RELATIONSHIPS, TOO, messy details and all. Shit.

Here’s something from reality. I’m the youngest girl of my Indian family -- I was not equal to my older siblings at all, expected to fail, treated as if I didn’t know how to function in society. Y’all can predict what happened. Your gal got a great career, a great family, a husband, the whole thing.

So when I first met my husband, I’m riding my life on my own -- paying my own rent, my own bills, everything. I had already proved I didn’t need my birth family for anything.

But what I didn’t consider during those first years of the relationship was the following: my future husband’s love language was dependence. He was certainly IMPRESSED by dating a woman who had her shit together. BUT. He WANTED me to DEPEND on him, AT LEAST emotionally, if not for other things. I wasn’t going to like, quit my job for a relationship, but -- I was ALSO having REAL trouble DEPENDING on him emotionally.

Like Pran, maybe. I didn’t trust trusting anyone emotionally, because that was a paradigm already created by my family in my upbringing. I had TRAINED myself to NOT need emotional feedback from ANYONE romantically, because I learned to survive in other ways.

Of course, with great communication AND TIME (TIME), I came around and learned to lean on him and trust him.

Aof and Golf are giving their couples the benefits of growth and time to make the relationships better, and stronger, and working, and functioning, and I can’t emphasize enough how REAL THIS IS.

That’s what these episodes are giving me. I WANT TO SEE MORE BLs with established relationships (@bengiyo, @lurkingshan, @wen-kexing-apologist: WHAT DID YOU EAT YESTERDAY FTW). I want to see contextual heartache. I want to see fights. I want to see tears. I want to see snottiness and shittiness and passive aggression, because all of that is worth examining in human emotional art.

That’s real, that’s worth reflecting in art, and I see Aof and Golf doing this on purpose to give RESPECT to the emotional structures that they’ve created in their work.

I’m having so much fucking fun with these episodes, but I should have expected this, I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, that Aof would already render me an emotional mess as well. It always happens. That it’s happening to our BELOVED COUPLES, AT THE START OF PRIDE, I’m just like. We’re just so blessed to have this art to enjoy.

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frenchoravocadotoast · 6 months

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Fundr einn forað

“Fundr einn forað”: Old Norse for “Meet the monster”

Basim Ibn Ishaq x reader

Word count: 882

A/N: I’ve been meaning to write about Basim since Valhalla and I finally found the energy to do so. I really like how his sweet personality differs from Loki's. Enjoy!

You saw it when he emerged from the cave again.

Basim had left the temple physically unscathed, contrary to what Rayhan had warned him about. Truth be told, you didn’t think you’d see him again. Your kind had spoken of the tale for many generations, from Hidden one to Hidden one, all the way to you. Those that dare open the sacred temple are never themselves again - to have their lives spared by whatever being lurks inside is punishment enough, as they later have to face a lifetime of madness. Some don’t even come back out of the cave.

First it was your parents, then Roshan, then Rayhan - everyone around you had warned you not to seek what was forbidden, what was never meant for you to find in the first place.

But it was different for him, wasn’t it? The temple was a mere enigma to you - just an ancient mystery hidden inside a cave, only calling out to you if you entertained the idea of venturing inside, but it never lured you in. Even when he’d first arrived at Alamut, Basim would always stare at the entrance of the cave. You thought it was his longing to join the creed and carry out the ceremony, but now that you saw it, there was definitely something else there. Basim was being lured by something from inside the temple.

It was slippery and fast, but if you were to pay attention closely, you’d see it. All those times you would talk by the cavern, when he’d confide in you about his nightmares - you’d notice it. It didn’t take a keen eye to see the way Basim would keep glancing at the cave, or miss the tinge of red in his pupils that would flee the second he was awoken by his night terrors. It was all the work of a jinni, he would say - but you knew better.

Gods, you knew better. You knew, you suspected, you theorized that something terrible must have been going on. It was deeper than some curse a merchant could have cast on a former thief, or a nightmare caused by stress and physical strain. You’d returned to Baghdad with him, Roshan, and Fuladh, read the scriptures, even visited the House of Wisdom to better understand what could possibly be haunting him. While Basim was busy proving himself to the Brotherhood and fighting the Ancient Ones, you’d buried yourself in books to help him battle his demons, too.

He didn’t know. One day, when he’d come back to the bureau to report his mission, he found you looking through the scrolls. He was well acquainted with your passion for literature, but the moment you’d shown your research to him, he regarded you with warmth in his eyes. You were ranting about all the different ways his night terrors could be tamed, discussed the possible identity of the so-called jinni according to the description he had provided you, made a list of curses and deities that were prevalent in ancient mythologies – and Basim just leaned in close to steal a kiss from your lips, silencing you swiftly.

You knew because you saw the way he looked at you. His eyes were brown, like the dunes of the evening desert - cool and silky sand that shone bright under the sun. Brown like the soil you walked on, the expensive leather of the books at the House of Wisdom, the damp boulders that held up the cave in Alamut. The cave that held the answers to his turmoil.

He didn’t know – but he wanted to. The lack of answers tore his soul apart. Basim just wanted to understand; what beast wanted to torment him in his sleep? Why was it seeping into daylight now, too? Did it seek revenge, when all Basim wanted was peace?

His eyes would crumble every night. You’d see the dunes in his eyes shake in fear, watch them collapse with every ragged breath he took as he held onto you. And there, in the desert night that was reflected in his eyes, a red comet would glint and flee before you could fully register it.

Basim wanted to - no, needed to know. Into the cave he’d have to go, then. Alone.

You knew he’d found whatever it was he was looking for – because he no longer held the posture of a man who was deprived of sleep, of answers. He strode with the newfound purpose of a man who looked almost smug. The novices immediately tackled him into a hug when they saw him come out, and Rayhan joined to proudly clap him on his back. And you? You were relieved, arms wrapped around him in a tight embrace as his arms enveloped you, too. But then you looked up, and his eyes shone red. The sandy dunes were bleeding, seething with anger - and then, the color was gone.

The way he looked at you - it was wrong. Like someone had taken his eyes, painted them to their liking and dipped them in blood. And his smile - it didn’t even reach his eyes. But he was still himself, same voice, same face, same manners, same Basim. Only this wasn't Basim. You knew Basim was gone.

And the man before you knew that you knew, too.

#assassins creed #assassins creed valhalla #assassins creed mirage #basim ibn ishaq #ac basim #ac mirage #basim ibn ishaq x reader #basim x reader #ac mirage x reader #basim ibn ishaq x you #asassins creed loki

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cowboyinternist · 10 months

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hello and welcome to the post where i finally talk about some of my favorite wtnv episode art, because it’s a thing they do that i absolutely adore.

and i think it’s severely under appreciated/untalked about

starting with this one because i think it’s really lovely both in concept and execution. i have the print of it :)

i enjoy this work a lot for a same reason that i love room scenes: story told through subtlety. using the fridge as a canvas, including esteban’s drawings and letter magnets, gives us a window into the lives of these characters that we don’t really see in the typical format of this show. it’s also just really cute??

the subtle references to the past, the constant, and the current really tie the themes of the episode (and the show as a whole) together.

other things of note:

the star tarot card is representative of hope and new beginning.

the exes on the community calendar match up to the day of the month (the 15th).

i really really really like the references to the wtnv novel, because i think the novels are neglected a lot when it comes to the podcast and merchandising.

it knows with a certainty that the people seeing it will understand the niche references on it, and thus does not feel a need to explain itself.

it works really great as episode art, but also wonderfully as a 10th anniversary piece. unlike the poster. which i hate.

like the above, i love this one for several reasons. the composition, the colors, the lettering.

but above all i am a big enjoyer of flower imagery and symbolism.

lavender is pretty well known to symbolize calm, and tranquility. i think most people know that. and i think that reflects the kind of levelheaded and methodical way that carlos finally deals with his problems in this episode.

and i’m hoping the it’s representative of carlos’ mindset in the year to come? representative of him finding peace with his past.

him having his back turned to the viewer gives a sense of withdrawal or running away, but the lavender and calm atmosphere portray an aura is resignation. he’s done running.

other things:

old woman josie says in an early episode that carlos smells like lavender chewing gum

lavender is drought resilient and does very well in desert climates :)

i love this one for the same reason that i have issues with the most recent arc.

the magnifying glass both casts a shadow over and a beaming light into the community that you see in the illustration. it can be assumed that it’s only a matter of time before it bursts into flames and is destroyed under the prying eye. symbolism that is pretty easy to dissect. it tells us exactly what the danger is and exactly what is in danger in a very easy to interpret way.

welcome to night vale has always had a very heavy emphasis on community, but for me that isn’t really shown in this arc.

allegorical meaning aside, it ended up being framed in this way that ended up m very cecil & carlos vs. the night vale community + the uowii. rather than it being cecil, carlos, and the night vale community vs. the uowii. which was so

i think both of those concepts exist within the arc, but the latter is less believable because there’s so much less community detail. characters motives are not described. characters reactions to certain events are brushed past, often with little emotion to them. oh josh is missing? that sucks. anyways. dana is completely innocent? woohoo! anyways. they don’t allow room to for us, and the characters, to just FEEL? which is a stark contrast to the writing of previous years.

night vale as a community is what was at stake at this arc. but the lack of focus on characters and the relationships between them really took the stakes and emotion out of the situation. and, for me, took some impact and comedic value out of the ending.

i remember being really excited upon seeing this episode art because this piece did a really good job at setting an expectation for what the themes of this year would be. the themes were still there, but the writing didn’t do them justice and didn’t give them enough push to make them feel as impactful as they should have been.

this is all that i have the energy to talk about for now, but if there’s other episode art you’d like me to talk about, send me an ask! i’m also happy to talk about my opinions on other merch pieces that they have in their store! :)

#wtnv #welcome to night vale #this was super fun to talk about agh #there’s also a bunch of episodes that don’t have ep art that i would REALLY love ep art for #part one of convincing myself i will NOT be shot in the head for talking about things i like

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3mcwriting · 8 months

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Any Fan’s Dream, Part 23

I don’t know how many of you have noticed but recently my accounts been buggy but it recently got fixed (I think) and here’s a new extra long chapter for u all!!

Taglist: @secretly-sirens, @zeeader, @imdoingathingmom, @x-theolivia, @ainsley-official, @huntress-artemiss, @hoohoohope, @ourgoddessathena, @wiintaersoldier, @vine-enthusiast, @afraidofshrimp, @myfturn, @im-better-than-your-newborn, , @mjaudrey, @igotthisasajokeyetimstillhere, @starr60, @coldmermaidhologram, @daenerysluvrr, @viperchick47, @marvelwomen-arehot, @mynightandstars

"Loki?"

Everyone in the room froze.

Thor was frozen out of shock and disbelief at the revelation that not only was his sibling alive, but that Loki was on Asgard. It wasn't the first time Loki had faked his death so maybe he shouldn't have been as surprised as he was, but he couldn't help it.

Loki was frozen because his big secret had been revealed to his brother--and most definitely not in the most convenient way.

You were frozen for a much different reason. No offense to Loki, but there were bigger things than just his overdramatic death being exposed. In the movies, Loki isn't shown to be alive until Thor: Ragnarok--not only did that happen before then, but it happened a whole year early. Civil War takes place a year after AoU and Ragnarok is two years after AoU, so this had sped it up quite a bit.

Was Odin already on Earth? He had to be if Loki was on Asgard ruling. And that meant that Odin would die in a year and Hela would be released. Out of all the events you wanted to prevent, Hela being freed was the one you felt was the hardest. She was insanely powerful and it's not like you could just keep Odin alive, the bitch was old.

You gnawed on your lip like a rat on cheese, thoughts running wild as you thought of the consequences of Loki being revealed; so drawn into your head, you hardly even noticed the people standing in the doorway.

That is until one of them approached you.

"(n/n)?" A soft voice breathed out. "(n/n), you're here--you're really here. Can I hug you?"

You caught the eyes of the other person standing in the doorway, Natasha looking at you with relief while she ushered Thor and Loki out of the room to give you and Peter privacy.

You looked up, heart jumping at the familiar voice. You met his warm brown eyes, his concern reflected in the depths of the. But it wasn't just concern that filled his eyes, there was something else.

Tears.

"Of course you can," you answered, pulling Peter into your embrace as he sat beside you on the cot.

His arms wrapped around you, leaving you surrounded with a sense of peace. "Are you okay, (n/n)?"

You rubbed his back as his voice shook. "I'm okay, Peter. Promise."

"Next time, I'm gonna be there and- and I'm gonna make sure you don't get hurt." Peter promised, letting the tears fall from his eyes. He didn't want to worry you but..."It was so scary. I thought I'd lost you. You're one of the most important people in my like, you know?"

And that's when you started crying.

You couldn't help it. You had been stressed, sad, and then stabbed, all within the last week. You had missed the days before the Accords when you had trained with Nat and Steve and built all kinds of things with Tony and when you would go back to Peter's apartment and hangout with him.

You were trying to be strong. To be someone who could go up against any opposition and defeat them in the name of the people you cared about. But at the end of the day, you were no Avenger. No superhero. You were just a scared teenager.

"You're one of the strongest people I know," Peter said softly, finally releasing you from the hug. Even as his own face was streaked with tears, he managed to smile at you. "But please don't do these things alone. I'm here for you."

You wiped the tears from your face. "You're an amazing person. I cannot believe how lucky I am to have met you."

Peter pulled you back into a hug, allowing himself to finally relax because you were okay.

Surrounded by his warm embrace and tired from finally breaking down and crying, you allowed yourself to give into your body's desire for rest.

When Natasha came into the room half an hour later, she found the two of you still leaning against each other, Peter's head resting on your shoulder as the two of you slept.

You rolled over, accidentally hitting something. Rubbing your eyes, you managed to clear your gaze before looking at the person sleeping beside you.

Aww...he looks so peaceful...

You moved away from the cot, trying not to wake up Peter as you did so. You felt guilty as you looked at his tranquil expression, wondering if he had really lost sleep because of your decisions. You had done the things you did because you wanted to protect everyone, you didn't want to make them worry more.

You sat up, finally looking away from your best friend.

Wow, he really was your best friend...you'd never had one of those.

It wasn't that you were horrible at making friends or anything, but your life before had been crammed full of studying and making yourself as appealing to colleges as possible. Your parents had only ever pushed you harder and while you knew it was good to want your child to succeed, to them it was more about ensuring that you made them look good.

You'd had the occasional friendly acquaintance and study buddies, but none of them were really close. You'd never spoken about your dreams to them, or given them hugs, or even been that affected if one of them stopped talking to you.

But now you had someone you never wanted to lose.

"You okay, babe?"

You wiped your eyes, realizing that they had misted up while you were lamenting.

You looked at the woman in front of you, allowing a smile onto your face. "I'm good." You stood up and approached her, giving her a hug. "I missed you, Nat."

Natasha hugged you back. "You're crazy. You can't be doing these things. What if you had gotten hurt? Scratch that, you did get hurt. You almost died."

She didn't want to lose you, not when she'd finally allowed herself to care about the people around her.

"I know, I'm sorry." You stepped back. "I just couldn't let the team fall apart--"

"I understand that, (y/n). But please talk to me next time. Or leave a note. You know how bad it was to have you just up and disappear then get a call from Steve that you had gotten injured and might die?"

You looked down, your smile long gone. "I'm sorry."

Her eyes softened and she reached out to tilt your chin up. "I know. I missed you too, (y/n)."

She stepped back. "They said you should be completely recovered in a couple hours."

"Really?" Your eyes went wide. "How? I mean--it wasn't exactly a small scratch. Jeez, Asgard's technology must really be phenomenal. That's amazing." You started thinking about the possibilities, wondering what kind of treatment would heal you so quickly and efficiently that you'd be completely recovered in less than 12 hours after having multiple deep stab wounds.

"Yes, but we're still staying the night." Natasha informed you. "Thor offered and I'd rather you rested for the night before going back."

You weren't about to refuse the chance to have a sleepover on Asgard. "Okay."

"His highness has extended a dinner invitation to all of you." A young man said, standing in the doorway.

Your stomach rumbled at the mention of food. "Awesome. I'm starving."

"Follow me, then."

You and Natasha followed the man, but not before you tucked the blanket around Peter. You briefly wondered if you should wake him up so he could eat, but he deserved to rest and you were sure that you could get food later when he woke up.

You gazed around the palace halls in awe, still in disbelief that you were actually on Asgard. The golden walls, incredibly high ceilings, and the different deities roaming around. You wondered briefly if you would be able to meet Heimdall, but your train of thought was interrupted when you stepped into the cavernous dining hall.

Your eyes practically bulged out of your head as you looked around. The place was big enough to fill several marching bands and all their instruments. How many people ate in this room normally? Anything less than 200 hundred and the space would look empty.

You looked to the only table laden with food, feeling slightly uncomfortable that only one table in the room was being used. With a space this big, shouldn't there be a bunch of people eating?

You and Natasha approached the table, your eyes glancing at the raven-haired one before looking to the head of the table where Thor sat.

"Thanks for saving my life, Thor. Also, how come the room is so empty?"

"Anytime, Lady (y/n)." Thor smiled. "And the room is empty because the majority of people ate about an hour ago. We didn't want to wake you, though."

"Oh." Well now you felt bad. "You guys didn't have to wait. But thanks anyways."

"It is 'no problem' as the Midgardians say," Thor's cheery voice lifting your spirit. "Are you hungry?"

You sat to Thor's right, Loki sitting across from you looking disgruntled. Natasha sat down beside you.

"I am, actually." Your eyes looked over the abundant food, each one making your mouth water.

Thor took a bite out of what appeared to be a chicken leg but about 12 times bigger. "Have anything you'd like! There is plenty to go around."

And he was right.

You dug into the food, picking yourself a variety of the different things set out before you. Each one made you fall in love with Asgard even more. There were gorgeous palaces, amazing people, and some of the best food you'd ever had? It was practically paradise, all you were missing was the rest of the Avengers.

Speaking of...

"Where's everyone else?" you asked Nat.

"They're back on Earth dealing with the exposure of the Accords," Natasha answered. She raised an eyebrow. "You know anything about that?"

"Eh--definitely not." You smiled at her. "I'm glad you came, though."

She smiled back. "Well, someone has to talk some common sense into you and I'm pretty sure everyone else doesn't have any."

While you wanted to protest for the sake of your friends, you couldn't help but agree. When it came to common sense, Natasha was definitely the most capable. Of course, Rhodey was pretty good but you hadn't yet met him so you didn't see why he would come anyways. But at least since Rhodey was back on Earth, he could help deal with the whole Accords mess. You did feel a little guilty about the mess that you left behind when exposing the Accords but it was better than the Avengers being split apart and half of them becoming fugitives.

You took a bite of your food, allowing the robust flavors to invade your thoughts so you could stop yourself before you started stressing again. For most of the meal you were busy stuffing your mouth, surprising yourself at your own hunger.

Thor's voice shook you out of your food-focused haze. "Ah, Lady (y/n) the healing from earlier typically causes the patient to be extremely hungry afterwards. I'm glad to see you eating and healthy." He smiled at you, grin bright and cheery.

You took a moment to swallow your food before smiling back. "About the healing, it's amazing! I don't know what kind of treatments the healers did but they're incredible!"

"Of course they are," Loki scoffed. "We're not some Midgardian hospital."

"Don't diss the hospitals," you said with a frown. "There's a lot of people who work really hard there to save lives."

Loki was silent for the rest of the meal, but his gaze never once left you. He still couldn't quite understand you. Typically humans were easy enough to figure out, but you were puzzling. You seemed to be careless and cheery like some brainless nincompoop but you were much more clever than he initially had given you credit for. You had the eyes of someone who knew more than they should and he couldn't figure out why.

You had told Loki that Thor looked up to him but you said it happened on Sakaar, a garbage planet far too irrelevant to be worthy of Loki's presence. And he hadn't forgotten when you'd told him that Asgard would be destroyed and he should flee to Earth. You talked as if you knew the future.

That wasn't possible, though.

It wasn't that telling the future was impossible, he knew of Asgardians who could do it; but it was a very rare ability and you shouldn't be capable of it. You were a human. Not one of those super-powered mortals like that insufferable Captain but just the same as any other human.

But you weren't.

He couldn't say how, but you weren't normal.

With your craving for food finally satiated, a new craving emerged. You desperately needed sleep. You were full, your mind was sleepy, and your body was sore.

You stood up from your chair at the dining table. "Thank you for the food, Thor-" you yawned, "-sorry, but where are our rooms?"

"Don't worry about it, Thor," Natasha said, standing up. "I'll show her to the rooms."

"Alright." Thor's smile turned fond. "I hope you rest well, Lady (y/n)."

"Thanks, Thor." You sent him a sleepy smile. "G'night Thor and Loki." You waved to them as you left, following Natasha back through the cavernous halls.

You were too tired to take note of the ridiculously large bedroom and instead just threw yourself onto the fluffy comforter on the ginormous bed and sighed as you seemed to be enveloped by it. It was quite possibly the comfiest bed you'd ever laid on and you felt your body relax subconsciously.

Natasha smiled at your drowsy movements, unable to deny her soft spot for you. "Good night, babe. Sleep good."

"Thank you, Nat," you murmured. "You sleep good too..."

And just like that, you were already asleep.

Natasha sighed at the way you were laying on the bed, half your legs hanging off because you hadn't thrown yourself far enough onto the bed. Not to mention the way your face was smushed into the pillows; she was almost worried you'd suffocate.

A loud snore ripped her out of her worrying, making her let out a soft laugh. She approached your sleeping form, pushing your legs all the way onto the bed and adjusting the blankets around you. She smiled at your content expression, placing a soft kiss on your forehead.

It'd been a while since she'd seen you this relaxed, far too long in fact.

With that, she left the room, closing the door behind her.

You took a deep breath in, the fragrant flowers around you making the crisp air smell like spring. You reached out and touched the crimson petal of a large flower, marveling at the unfamiliar plant.

Over half the plants you had encountered while strolling through the garden were new to you, leaving you convinced that they didn't exist back on Earth. Just like normal flowers, there was a large variety of colors and shapes, but unlike normal flowers, none of them seemed the least bit wilted. Not to mention the vibrancy of each and every flower, the colors striking and entrancing.

You continued your walk through the large garden, taking a moment every now and then to stop and look at a particular flower. At some point, you reached a bench that was beneath the shade of a large tree. You sat down, gaze going back to the scenic landscape that surrounded you. At one edge of the garden was the palace, although it was hard to look at with the afternoon sun bouncing bright rays off the golden palace.

You looked down, eyes landing on the two scars in your upper arm.

They weren't very large but the raised skin was definitely noticeable. Although, considering what had happened, it was a miracle that all you'd ended up with was two nickel sized scars in your arm and one on your side. The fourth claw that had hit you had cut you but when it was healed no scar remained.

Looking up, you almost shit yourself, noticing the deity who had just appeared beside you.

"What the fuck, Loki. Who do you think you are, Batman?" You said flatly, your momentary shock fading. "You could've said something; after all, you never seem to have a problem with talking."

"Perhaps I just wanted to see your reaction," Loki sniffed haughtily, his pretentious expression fading when he saw you were grinning. "What? Why are you smiling like an oaf?"

"So what you're saying is that you came out here just because you wanted to see me-" you put a hand over your heart, "-that's so nice of you, Loki!" You were teasing him, but you were happy that he had come out to see you. He seemed to have some sort of fondness for you and you were a Loki simp so of course you were grinning that he'd come just to see you.

He spluttered. "What are you, deluded? Why would I concern myself with an insignificant mortal?"

Even to your ears it sounded like he was trying to convince himself.

You pat him on the back. "Don't worry, hotstuff. I won't tell anyone.

"What does that even mean?" Loki huffed. "You humans and your absurd slang."

"Hotstuff? Oh." You had just assumed he knew what it meant but that was probably stupid on your part because he wasn't from earth. "It just means like, attractive person, I guess? That's the best description I can think of."

Now he looked smug again. "So, you think I am attractive?"

"Duh," you deadpanned.

Loki's face flushed, seeming shocked toward your easy admittance.

"That doesn't mean you aren't a smug asshole sometimes," you added. "But it's cool, at least you're funny."

He was indignant. "Take that back! I am a king and you should give me the respect that comes with that title!"

"As far as I'm concerned, being a king doesn't automatically make you deserving of anybody's respect. You still have to work for it, just like everyone else." You dragged a finger on the stone armrest before meeting his eyes. "All jokes aside, I hope you remember my warning."

Loki stiffened, face going to neutral. "Your preposterous claims that Asgard will be destroyed?

"I know how it sounds but I'm telling the truth." You could see the skepticism in his eyes and you sighed, knowing that if you didn't manage to convince him soon, you'd have to tell him something. "You know how you called me a 'fortune-teller'? You weren't completely off. I know some things I shouldn't and I'm trying to change them. Please, you don't have to trust me, but can you just keep my words in mind?"

Loki had known there was something off about you, even if you had tried to deny it up until now. From your answers when he'd first encountered you, to the warnings you'd given him, and the way you always were so relaxed in his presence. You'd proved time and time again that you knew a lot about the things he'd done and yet you still acted like he was an old friend.

And now you were admitting that you weren't normal, that you knew more than you should.

He knew he shouldn't, but he believed you. "I will keep your warning in mind but be forewarned, I will figure out how you know the things you do."

You gulped, the first time you'd seemed to take his words seriously. You had admitted to knowing things that weren't possible for you to know. If he ever figured out the truth...well, you didn't think you could handle going back.

"How was the garden?" Natasha asked as Thor led you, Peter, and her across the rainbow bridge.

"It was...interesting," you managed, unsure of how to answer her given your conversation with Loki.

"I bet it was," Peter's eyes gleamed. "We're on an alien planet! Think of all the different plants and animals and--gosh I wish I had woken up."

You ruffled his hair. "C'mon, Pete, you needed the rest."

The four of you entered the dome, a person awaiting you there. You almost gasped, recognizing who it was immediately.

Heimdall.

"This is where we part ways," Thor said. "I am glad you are better now, Lady (y/n)."

"Thanks, Thor. But why aren't you coming with us?"

He smiled. "I have some matters to resolve with my brother."

You, Natasha, and Peter all said your goodbyes to him, Peter almost as starstruck by Thor as you had been the first time you'd met him.

Then Heimdall opened the Bifrost and took you all home.

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ggukkiedae · 15 days

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NCT 127 : THE LOST BOYS

Episode 1: Mark tells how he became a K-pop idol. Haechan talks about his supportive mother. Hannah talks about what made her who she is today.

content warning: subtle indication of hannah’s abusive dad

(dialogues written in italics are spoken in english. this only includes hannah’s parts, not the whole documentary. some lines are either taken directly from the boys on the docu or altered slightly)

in the beginning there’s a clip of her sitting after mark

then a clip of her doing a deep breath after mark’s “okay, i’m ready”

after mark trying to answer what does neo culture technology mean, it shows her

she snorts

HANNAH: “You really wanna know?”

when discussing 2018 it shows her after doyoung who discussed the albums they release

HANNAH: “It was a whole new vibe from what i was used to with dream”

after haechan talking about how covid affected them, she was shown

HANNAH: “It felt like everything stopped. I remember hearing the news, looking at Mark and Hyuck, and just wondering about what would happen”

in the la airport clip, it shows jaehyun helping her push a baggage cart while greeting the people cheering for them before cutting to hannah in an interview

HANNAH: “It was honestly really strange to experience that again”

NCT 127 WILL SPEAK OF THEIR CHILDHOODS FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER.

HANNAH: “The start of this, all of this, goes way back to childhood”

NCT 127 RECLAIM THEIR LOST CHILDHOODS THROUGH PERFORMANCE ART

a clip of her walking is shown amidst the montage

NCT 127, WHO DEBUTED EIGHT YEARS AGO, REFLECT ON THEIR PRESENT THROUGH THE TEN MEMBERS’ PASTS AND DREAMS

CHAPTER 1 “EVERY [CHILD] HAD ADVENTURES TO TELL” - FROM THE NOVEL PETER PAN

‘NEO CITY - The Link’ CONCERT REHEARSAL

through the montage while johnny, yuta, and haechan spoke, there are clips of the group rehearsing with her smiling at the members and hyping them up

TAEYONG: "But…"

after the clip of mark looking tired there’s a clip of hannah walking to the side and closing her eyes like she was struggling to keep them open

JAEHYUN: "Mark, Haechan, and Hannah must be having a hard time"

‘AY-YO’ MUSIC VIDEO SHOOT

there are clips focused on her, haechan, and mark in the midst of filming

JUNGWOO: "Mark, Haechan, and Hannah shift between NCT Dream and 127"

JOHNNY: "The three of them have a lot on their schedule. I can see that they’re struggling to keep up with it. But I can see that they want to do it. I’m proud of them."

after the shot of haechan sitting on the floor, it shows hannah and taeyong, the leader’s back to the camera while hannah nods and says something to him

he pulls her to him, letting her close her eyes and lean her weight against him

MARK’S STORY

after johnny, jungwoo, and doyoung speak about mark working hard, it’s her

HANNAH: "I don’t think I’ve ever seen anybody spend more time perfecting what he learned and what he wants to do than Mark does"

after mark goes through the doors towards the end of his part, he looks up and straight into the camera and hannah’s voice is heard “I look up to Mark.”

cut to her in the interview

HANNAH: “I’ve never told him this, but the way he gives everything thrown at him no matter what unit or task he gets, he gives his everything every single time. He works really hard, and that’s something I admire about him… I really hope he doesn’t watch this.”

HAECHAN’S STORY

after taeil talking about haechan being affectionate, it shows a clip of haechan pulling hannah next to him on he couch

HANNAH: "From the very first second we met, he just knew how to make me feel better. He’s the type of person who can lift your mood and make you feel better, all while being someone you can rely on"

after mark, doyoung, yuta, taeyong, and johnny spoke about haechan towards the end of his part, it showed her

HANNAH: “Hyuck… he’ll always do well. He’s naturally smart, gifted, kind, and I couldn’t be happier to call him my twin flame. I believe in him, and he’ll always have me in his corner cheering him on and supporting him.”

after he talks about to what he wants in his future, a door appears

it zooms into the door then shows real life haechan

he lies back down where he previously was

haechan closes his eyes and turns to his left

once the scene cuts mid-turn, it shows hannah in his place turning to her left, pulling a blanket up to her chin

HANNAH’S STORY

there’s a close up of footsteps, making hannah stir in her sleep

her eyebrows knit together and she mumbles “go away. please.”

it cuts to her in her interview

HANNAH: "Becoming a trainee was probably one of the best things that ever happened to me. I remember wishing I could fly away and escape to somewhere I could be happy."

clips of her laughing with her members appeared while she continued to speak

HANNAH: "I got that. Funnily enough, I did struggle a bit with the opportunity I was given. I just wasn’t used to the environment I was suddenly placed in"

JOHNNY: "I’m pretty sure Hannah was terrified of me when we first met" *laughs*

it shows clips:

hannah tucking herself to johnny’s side

johnny resting his arm around her or messing around with her by carrying her in his arms like she were a baby

JOHNNY: "But it was the first time I really felt that instinct of “I have to look after this kid”. She’s practically been my kid since then"

TAEIL: "So many people thought she was cold at first, but Hannah is actually a very loving person"

JUNGWOO: "As a trainee, I always thought she was intimidating"

there are clips shown:

her distributing their takeout

her helping Doyoung with his mic pack

a mini compilation of her standing next to Jungwoo in his first few appearances as part of 127

JUNGWOO: "But being added into NCT, and to 127 specifically, would have been a lot harder for me to adjust to if I didn’t have her with me."

TAEYONG: "It’s interesting because, while Mark and Haechan have always seemed like kids to me, Haeeun, our Hannah, always had an air of maturity to her"

there are clips played while taeyong continued speaking:

her giving comments while monitoring their dance

her seriously watching their performance director explain things

her cooking for the members

TAEYONG: "When she first joined us, she almost seemed to adapt the parent role she has in Dream to us." *laughs* "It was a whole two years before we got her to promise to act more like a maknae, and it only happened when she was an adult"

it cut back to the black room where footsteps echoed instead of a ticking clock

hannah curled into herself

a young voice speaks, but only like he was yelling from the distance “are you okay? what made you like this?”

there’s a close up of hannah’s eyes opening

she jolted upwards, but the scene cuts mid-jolt to show a young girl in her place sitting up in panic, a big white cloth with shadows showing a room as her background

“i don’t like to remember my childhood. at least, not the parts back in my house in england.”

the sound of a door opening made little hannah turn in fear, but she relaxed when a female figure entered the room

the shadow interacted with the young girl’s shadow, stroking the younger’s hair in a calming manner

“but the parts i do like to remember, it was my mom. she treated me with all the love she had, and made sure i had the chance to do what i love”

the camera zoomed in on the girl’s shadow then back out to show her in a gymnastics leotard and sweats

“as soon as i could run, mom signed me up for gymnastics. i went almost every day because i loved being able to do such big movements like that. i entered cheerleading programs for kids as well, learning to be a flyer. then, i came across the studio beside our gym and saw people dancing”

first, the girl did a few cartwheels

the next moment, she picked up pompoms and did a few cheer poses

she then put on a jacket and “walked”

her shadow came in contact with the shadow of a dance studio building, and she stopped

the shadows shifted to look like the girl was standing in front of a window while shadows inside danced

“i decided to add dance to my usual activities. i did all this just to stay out of the house”

it showed the girl doing a quick open style dance before the shadows went crazy

she looked scared

then the shadows stopped in the form of a house and there was silence

she “walked” forward, and the house zoomed in until the front door opened

she froze upon the sight of the shadows of her parents fighting

“the house was either completely silent or really loud. only the extremes. my father wasn’t the best person, but he used to promise me he’d protect me from getting hurt. i trusted him wholeheartedly. that didn’t last forever.”

“i didn’t know for how long it was going on, but his real personality eventually reached me”

it showed the shadows, the father looking like he was angry while the mother looked like she was trying to calm him down

the shadow of the father pushed the shadow of the mother down then turned to the little girl

his shadow got bigger as if he was walking closer to her, footsteps echoing as the only sound until his shadow covered the whole screen, engulfing her own shadow and making the screen go black

“we moved away as soon as we could after that, and mom legally left him, but we didn’t have the proper means to earn anymore.”

the screen was black as she said that before it cut to the shadow of golden gate bridge

the young girl was now hand in hand with an actual woman as they met up with another shadow

“we moved to san francisco to stay with mom’s sister since she offered to help us. i didn’t want to burden my mom since i felt she was healing"

"so i learned to do things on my own. at ten years old i started taking myself to my classes, cooking myself food, doing chores, and whatnot”

the scene cut to show the young girl doing whatever hannah was saying in her narration before the scene changed to the young girl dancing

“i was twelve when i realized i wanted to help earn money for mom. i did it in the best way i could think of as a kid. dancing on the streets”

a close up of a shadow of a man walked towards her, bending down to talk to her shadow

“a man approached me. he asked for directions to a hotel. in my minimal knowledge of korean, i brought him there, trying to keep up with his conversation.”

as the young girl walked with the shadow, it slowly zoomed out to reveal taeyong playing the part of this man

“then, he gave me the chance to audition to be an idol. i knew being an idol could earn well enough to help mom live the life she deserves, so i accepted”

the camera zooms in to the little girl’s hand shaking taeyong’s hand

it zooms out now to hannah dressed in simple shorts and a sweater with the background now pink

“it was hard, you know? mastering korean, learning vocals and rap, and mastering dance while focusing on trying to earn that way."

"not to mention, it was hard to trust people after someone who is supposed to love you and your mom endlessly broke your trust”

hannah sat on the floor and leaned against the pink background

she looked up as a shadow appeared on the side

it zoomed in to the shadow then zoomed out to reveal johnny smiling at her

“but youngho oppa found me. he became my friend, encouraged me, supported me, helped me, and took care of me.”

johnny held his hand out for her

she took it and let him pull her up

then the pink background fell to the ground, showing the rest of 127 waiting for her

“he opened my world to enjoying life as performer rather than just focusing on practicality and introduced me to the people who i’d eventually learn to fully trust with my life and my love alongside my mom”

johnny pulled her over to the other 127 members, where haechan immediately attached himself to her in a hug and the others showed her affection in different ways as well

JAEHYUN: “I think ever since debut, Hannah has only ever glowed brighter.”

DOYOUNG: “She didn’t realize it, but she was made to be taken care of.”

there are clips playing:

jungwoo feeding her

johnny tying her hair up for her

jaehyun throwing her over his shoulder while they laughed

DOYOUNG: “I’m really glad she let us in enough to help her see that she doesn’t have to be so grown up all the time.”

HAECHAN: “Our Haeeunie has so much on her plate, but she’s realizing she doesn’t have to be alone.”

there are clips shown:

mark helping her in the recording studio

doyoung taking plastic bags from her

haechan pulling her closer to him in the midst of a crowded airport

HAECHAN: “I’m making sure she’s never going to have to feel like she has to do everything on her own and that she’ll never feel the hurt of broken promises ever again. We all are.”

MARK: “She’s my little sister, you know? We’ve been through practically everything together. Dream, 127, U, SuperM, hell even variety shows!”

clips are shown:

young her and mark on set for chewing gum

her and mark on tour with 127

them filming in dubai for jopping

various split-second cuts of her and mark on variety shows they were sent on together

MARK: “I’ve seen how much she’s grown, and it makes me pretty happy to witness her allowing herself to live her youth freely. If anything, she’s gonna have to stick with me forever, because I love having her as my little sister. It just wouldn’t be the same without her... Please don't show this to her.”

it cuts back to the 127 members surrounding hannah, smiles on their faces as they walk away

HANNAH: "It's a little strange. You can say I arrived in 127 ready to mother the members and take care of everyone and myself. Instead, they took care of me and taught me to be a kid again. I'm in my early twenties, and they still treat me like I'm a young teen. It's nice to know I can trust my life and my self in their hands, though."

hannah looks back and makes eye contact with the little boy who initially asked her what made her that way in the beginning

the little boy nodded at her then took the hand of the little girl next to him

the little girl waved at hannah telling her “you don’t have to grow up yet. you’re not on your own”

hannah waved back as the little boy and little girl walked towards a door

mark called out to her, making her look at him holding his hand out to her. she took his hand and looked back at the kids

they went through the door and into a cartoon world as mark’s narration about his dream when he was younger started, like the little cartoon boy was telling the little cartoon girl a story

while he was narrating, the two cartoon kids grew into adults

cartoon mark wrote:

WHAT IS NCT 127'S DREAM GOAL?

cartoon hannah touched the writing

HANNAH: “To live a life and a career that we’ll be proud of for a long time. Just act our age and do the best we can with each other by our sides”

taglist: @1-800-enhypennabi @strwberrydinosaur @sunflower-0180 @caratinylyfe @1-800-minji @one16core @kimhyejin3108 @chansols @akshverse @world-full-of-roses @stopeatread @allthings-fandoms

drop an ask or a dm if you wanna be added or taken out of the taglist 🥰 requests are also open!

#hannah.lostboys #hannah #lee hannah #nct female member #nct female addition #nct 127 female addition #nct 127 female member #nct 127 10th member #nct 127 11th member

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thestobingirlie · 1 month

Note

This isn't just a st fandom problem, it stretches across fandom as a whole.

But I think people focus on and constantly bring up Steve's 'sins'/ asshole behaviour while ignoring everyone else's because fandom seems to consider homophobia the 'worst' kind of bigotry. They can ignore racism, sexism, ableism, but they can't excuse homophobia. They only care about any other type of bigotry if they can use it to prove a point.

They bring up Steve being homophobic for using 'queer' against Jonathan in season 1 but they ignore

The kid's, particularly Dustin and Lucas, casual ableism in s1, when they kept referring to El as 'the psycho' and talking about her escaping from Pennhurst, calling it a 'nuthouse', constantly referring to her as the weirdo or the freak

Jonathan's ableism in s2 when he refers to the kids as Will's 'spazzy friends'

Billy's misogyny, referring to the girls of Hawkins High as cows.

Billy's racism. Everything about the way he treated Lucas. Just because the actor refused to say the N word, doesn't make the character not racist. There is more to racism than just using slurs.

Jonathan's casual misogyny, the way he talks to and treats Nancy at times, especially in s1 when they're talking about the photos. And the way he talks to and treats Joyce at times.

These are just some of the examples I can think of just from the top of my head. But they all get ignored or swept under the carpet, because 'not that big of a deal.'

All bigotry is bad. But Steve is the only character that has shown a hint of bigotry and then been shown to move past it. To make amends and show that he is now accepting of it. No matter how much people try to claim that Steve accepting Robin as a lesbian isn't proof of him no longer being homophobic. As if lesbians are somehow less gay than gay men.

i think because the majority of the fandom is gay, they just… don’t really give a fuck about other forms of bigotry.

they really think that homophobia is the worst that it gets. and that homophobia really only seems to apply to gay men, because the way they treat bisexuals and lesbians is…. jarring. to say the least.

obviously the show is set in the 80s, so it’s not like the bigotry is… totally unexpected or out of place. but i don’t think it’s treated or written right within the show, and i think that’s one of the factors that makes people so comfortable with ignoring it.

steve’s homophobia is unambiguously portrayed as the wrong thing. as steve’s lowest point. the actions he has to claw his way back from. but the bigotry within other aspects of the show is just… ignored. it’s just a joke. or not that serious. the characters aren’t punished or proved wrong. (i do kinda think that’s because a lot of bigotry was inadvertent, and more reflective of the duffers as people rather than because they were trying to accurately portray an 80s society. but whatever).

steve’s homophobia being treated as the biggest bad is also kinda weird to me because it doesn’t really have… a ‘real’ target, so to speak. like, the parties ableism is directed towards el, who, while she doesn’t have a canonical disability, is developmentally behind and raised in a lab. jonathan’s misogyny is directed at nancy and joyce, his ableism is directed towards the party, and therefore dustin. billy’s racism is directed towards lucas and his misogyny is spoken to max.

whereas steve (I AM NOT CONDONING HIS ACTIONS THEY ARE WRONG!!!) calls jonathan a queer. who is not a gay man. while it’s still obviously wrong and homophobic, the target of his homophobia is not a member of the community. and yet, people treat his comment as if it’s the worst form of bigotry on the show.

they’re willing to overlook everything else. they’re willing to perpetuate lesbophobia and biphobia, racism and misogyny. they’re willing to write thousands of outing fics where the outing isn’t portrayed as wrong. but steve saying the word queer? unforgivable.

(honestly, though steve’s homophobia is the only form of bigotry that we see treated as wrong and we see a demonstration of steve’s growth later in the seasons. i don’t know if we can even give the duffers that, because robin wasn’t originally going to be a lesbian. which means the duffers were never planning on dealing with any of the bigotry in the show in a meaningful matter. but that’s a different conversation)

#i responding to this and then it deleted the whole thing and man it was painful rewriting it lmak #i’m not rewriting that lmao #steve harrington #stranger things #asks #anon

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waterless-witch · 7 months

Text

Of Knights and Demons

Chapter 4

TW: Rape/Non-con, Dark themes, forced marriages, violence and swearing. MINORS DNI OR I WILL BLOCK YOU

This is my first ever fic so please be nice to me, I’ve also got it posted on A03 under the same name in case anybody would like to read it there.

You are the sole daughter of Byakuya Kuchiki, the sole heir to a noble family. Your father has broken from tradition with his refusal to marry you off against your wishes, instead wishing for you to find a husband of your own choosing. After years of arguing with not only your own family, but the other lords of your court all seems well. That is until a once thought dead knight returns with an army to take your home.

Souske Aizen, a man you once found kindness in has demanded that the two of you are to be wed, with your father still missing along with most of the guards you’re left with few options but to comply and hope that aid comes before anything can be set. How will you stop a man like Aizen from destroying your home and the people you care about? And who are these strange people with bone masks on their face?

Previous chapter

Sleep finds you much easier than you expected and you sleep soundly through the remainder of the night. You wake in the early morning and find that you're alone. Good, you prefer it that way, you don’t think that you could bear to see Aizen right now. You feel disgusting. Your skin is covered in dry sweat, your thighs and core are sticky with the evidence of your consummation, and your eyes are puffy from crying. Your whole body is sore and in pain you realize as you make your way to the bathroom to bathe.

You take note of a beautiful red dress placed carefully over the dresser, but the dress itself is not what catches your eye. No, what catches your eyes is the finely crafted crown that sits atop it. It’s made from beautiful thin crafted metal, adored with vines and flowers just as your wedding dress had been. It looked light and elegant. You walked past it, refusing to even touch it, you refused to wear it today, maybe ever. Definitely never you decide. You would do everything you could to let it be known that you didn’t want any of this. You would not play his happy wife, you’d do what he’d make you to keep the people you cared for safe but you would make sure he knew the depth of your hatred.

Once you entered the bathroom you looked at your reflection, which was a mistake. Your hair was a mess and your eyes were red and swollen. But that’s not what upset you. You choked on a cry as you looked over your body. Your neck was covered in brown and purple bruises, where you neck and shoulder meet there was a large mark from where he’d bitten you and drawn blood. Your hips held more bruises that were clearly from his fingers. It’d take days for all the bruising to subside and you couldn’t stop fresh tears from falling down your face. You turned away from the mirror, unable to look at yourself any longer. You began filling the tub with hot water.

Once the tub was filled you got in immediately even as the hot water burned your skin. You spent at least an hour scrubbing every part of your body raw. When the water went cold you drained it and replaced it with more scalding water and continued. No matter how much soap you used or how much you scrubbed your skin you simply didn’t feel clean enough. After giving up on your skin you began washing your hair and brushing out the knots. You didn’t want to look back in the mirror so you put it up in a sloppy braid while still in the tub. You got out of the tub and pulled on the nightgown from a few days ago, you weren’t going to leave the room but you didn’t want to sit around naked either.

You entered back into the bedroom and thought about what you’d do. You’d not been to keen on the idea of being shown around the manor before but you definitely didn’t want to now, you could already hear the lewd comments Grimmjow would make if he saw you. You thought about sitting by the widow again but you didn’t want to have to look at your reflection. Instead you just went back to bed, you pulled the blankets around yourself making a makeshift cocoon. It took you a good while to fall back asleep, mind to busy worrying about when Aizen would be back and what he’d make you do when he did show back up, but eventually sleep did find you.

You woke hours later to the sound of someone banging on your door. You shot up but didn’t move further than that. You waited quietly, after a few minutes the banging sounded again. “Hey!” You heard Grimmjow shout from the other side. He’d never knock like that unless he was telling you that Aizen wanted to see you and you had already decided hours ago that you would not be doing that. “Look, if you don’t want to come out I-'' he said clearly out of his element and struggling for what to say, “I get it…” To say you were confused would be an understantment, but he continued, “But you have to fucking eat, I’ll get someone to bring something up just tell me what you want.” You didn’t move, you didn’t want to see him or anyone for that matter. After another couple minutes of silence you heard him pound his fist into the door “Stubborn bitch.” He mumbled to himself.

Your eyes narrowed even when it seemed like he was being nice to you he had such a backwards way of doing so that you couldn’t tell what was going on. You couldn’t help but roll your eyes as you heard him start to pace again and mumble under his breath. You laid back down to sleep, listening to Grimmjow’s footsteps. Strangely it calmed you, lulling you back to sleep quickly and without any of the nauseating thoughts from earlier.

The next time you woke up the sun had already set. The sound of the door closing echoed through the room. You sat up only to see Aizen had returned. Instantly you felt sick as his eyes fell to you, he looked you up and down before cocking his head, “While you look lovely I much prefer how I’d left you this morning.” He tells you casually. You keep your mouth shut, staring daggers at him as he strips from his shirt. “I missed you at supper, not feeling well?” He taunts you with a smirk before stalking closer to your shared bed.

You try to crawl away from him but he catches your ankle and pulls you back, flipping you so you're facing him once again. “Please don’t,” you beg willing to try anything to keep his hands off you. “Everything still hurts from yesterday ple-” he cuts you off with a dominating kiss. Your heart sinks and you know what's coming.

He pulls away from you just enough to shush you as his hand moves to tangle in your hair, pulling harshly so that you're looking up at him. “I’ll have you every night until my heir grows inside you, even then I doubt I'll be able to stop. Not when you cry so sweetly for me.” He says, hand still gripping your hair. You feel tears start to form in your eyes again, you know there’s nothing you can say or do that would make him stop. You don’t want to have his children but how could you possibly fight him? Even if you could somehow stop him he’d just have Renji killed and you don’t think you could handle that guilt.

True to his word he’d had you again. Similarly to the previous night he took his time preparing you, forcing you to orgasam twice before he even considered putting his cock in you. You hated it, how he could turn your body against you with such ease. You also came to realize, as he slammed into you just as rough as before, that he liked when you cried. He wanted you to beg him to stop and tell him that you couldn’t take it, he reveled in it. You want to stop crying, hold out and take some of that enjoyment away from him but every time you try to he just gets rougher. He forces you to look at him with a strong grip in your hair as he slams his hips into yours and releases inside you again.

Only this time he doesn’t pull out of you, instead his hand slips between your legs to start rubbing small tight circles on your clit. Your hand shots out before you can stop it to try and grab his wrist to make it stop, you're already overstimulated and you're not fully thinking. Before you can even grab at him the hand fisted in your hair pulls so hard you're afraid he’ll pull a chunk of it out. You cry out and your hands whip to try and pry his hand out of your hair all the while keeping up with his stimulation of your body.

Heavy tears roll down your face, “Please no more.” You whimper out in a way that sounds pathetic to even you.

He doesn't stop, not that you really expected him to. “Gods you’re so pretty when you beg.” He mumbles before leaning over you and kissing you. Between the fullness in your core and his thumb stimulating your clit the knot in your abdomen was building much faster than it had previously. You can’t stop the cries and whines which Aizen seems all too happy to swallow though the rough kiss. It took a minute more before that knot had snapped your back arched as you cried out before sinking back into the bed feeling completely ruined. He pulled away with one quick peck on the cheek before pulling out of you.

He pulled you up to him and laid the two of you down the same as the previous night. One of his hands runs soothingly up and down your back. You want to move away from him or tell him to stop but you don’t have the energy nor do you want to risk upsetting him. You fall asleep quickly and when you wake he’s gone yet again.

~~~

The days that followed happened in the same fashion, you wake up alone and spend the morning hours trying to clean away filth that you knew you’d never be able to, go back to sleep, wake up to Grimmjow trying to get you to come out or to eat something, go back to sleep followed by Aizen having you how ever he sees fit for that night. Even though you’d been sleeping all day you felt exhausted all the time and even though you know you should be eating you couldn’t.

The very thought of food made you sick, not that you would venture out to find it even if it didn’t. Somewhere in the back of your head you screamed at yourself that something was deeply wrong with you but you couldn’t make yourself care enough. Maybe you were going insane, you thought to yourself bitterly.

On the seventh day since your wedding you were making your way back to the bed after bathing when your door slammed open, hitting the wall and reverberating off the hinges. You whirl around expecting to see Aizen but instead Grimmjow stands in your doorway looking positively pissed. You gape at him for a moment not knowing what to say or do. His eyes fall to your neck and in turn his jaw clenched in anger. You quickly realize he’s looking at the marks on your neck and flush in embarrassment. “Get out.” You tell him, pointing towards the door.

His eyes flick back up to meet yours, “You look like shit.” He comments bluntly. You can feel yourself getting angry, you knew you weren’t a pretty sight at the moment but you also didn’t need him to barge in and tell you about it.

You breathe an angry huff out, “Great observation now leave.” You bite back, you don’t know what he wants and you don’t care, he has no right to barge into your room and make fun of you.

He just keeps staring at you until the rattling of metal on metal sounds from the hallway, “Hurry up!” He barks, turning his head to throw over his shoulder. You hear a woman sigh.

Your eyes widen instantly recognizing the sound before she even speaks, “Now don’t rush me boy! I’m old, this is as fast as I go!” The women grumbled back. Her name was Lista, she had been one of the servants at your home, she was a kind woman in her mid fifties with long coiled brown hair that had begun to gray around the roots. She had worked in your family’s garden and since you were a young child you’d often found yourself in her company. She would teach you how much water each plant needed, how to weed the flower beds, and she’d answer every little question your child brain could come up with. She was foreign born and sometimes would tell you about plants that grew in her native home or about how to grow different kinds of food. Sometimes she’d even bring in sketches of said plants that she’d have her husband draw up for you. Once you got older you always made sure to slip her some extra silver or bring her some of her favorite foods from the kitchen. She had a sweet tooth and as a child you loved to share your desserts with her as you sat outside in the heat.

She came into the room pushing a small metal cart with food and a few cups on it. Her hazel eyes meet yours and instantly her expression softened. “Oh baby,” she said sadly as she crossed the room to pull you into a tight hug, “He said you haven’t been eating but look at you.” Lista placed her hand on your head and held you tightly. She was right of course, you’d lost a noticeable amount of weight from not eating.

Before you could stop yourself you were crying into her shoulder, as if a damn had broken you let every one of your emotions flow. She held you for a long time, just shushing you and running her hand down your hair not unlike she used to do when you’d fall as a child and she’d carry you inside to get bandaged. You heard the door close quietly and eventually composed yourself. As you pulled away Lista gave your forehead and light and loving kiss. “I don’t understand, why are you here? What’s going on?” You asked, face still wet from crying.

“You wouldn’t let me help you so I had to track down someone who could.” Grimmjow said from behind Lista, he sounded irritated but far less so than normal. “Which was not an easy task since none of them wanted to give me any kind of information about anything.” He said leaning back against the door.

Lista rolled her eyes, she had never been one to shy away from any kind of confrontation and wasn’t about to start now. “Now listen here boy,” She said to Grimmjow earning her a growl from him, “You have to think about it from our point. Y'all barge in here, kill a whole lot of us, take our lady as a war bride then have the gall to demand to know who she’s close with,” She said pointing her finger at him. “Doesn’t really scream that your tryin’ to help the poor girl.” She finished.

Grimmjow's nose crinkled and his eyebrows furrowed but he didn’t say anything, which was unusual. Lista gently pulled you towards the small cart of food, “Listen to me little lady,” she said, voice much softer than when she’d talked to Grimmjow, “Ya gotta eat, I can’t imagine how awful it is for you here but you have to. People are gonna start to notice that you're not.”

Grimmjow scoffed from behind the two of you and you turned slightly to look at him, “Yeah they are, if I noticed your husband will too, and I can garentee that he’ll force you to eat about as kindly as he fucks you.” Your face twisted in disgust as did Listas.

“The boys right but ignore him.” Lista began as she reached for a small mug on the tray drawing your attention from Grimmjow.

“Can you stop calling me that?” He interrupted angrily. Neither one of you turned around to face him.

“No,” She answered, “Now hush.” You heard him growl again but it was much more half hearted than the previous one. “I had the magisters make this for you, you need to drink it daily but it will keep him from putting a child in you.” Your eyes widen at the realization. Lista gently places the mug in your hands, it's warm and it doesn’t smell at all pleasant but you’re so happy to have it. “The boy has promised to get it to you each day and I’ll make sure that the kitchen staff have it made for you, do you understand?” She asks looking into your eyes.

You nod your head quickly, “Lista, I’ll never be able to repay you for this.” You tell her genuinely. She reaches forward and gives your forehead another light kiss.

“Just eat my dear, don’t let that man kill you.” You nod again and promise her that you will, “I have to go before someone sees I’m gone, but I’ll come back when I can.” Lista says before giving your hand a squeeze. You exchange goodbyes and another hug before Grimmjow opens the door for her, letting her out before closing it behind her.

Grimmjow stares at you for a while before it ticks in your brain that he’s put in a lot of work to make this happen for you. You don’t understand why he’d bother or what he’s seeking by doing so but you’re grateful regardless. “Thank you, again.” You say to him before downing the tea quickly.

He continues to stare at you while you place the mug down, “I already told you not to thank me princess.” He says with no real bite, you think it might be the first time you’d heard him talk without anger or irritation, besides of course when he’d make lewd comments at you but still.

You can’t help but wonder why he’d done it, “Can I-“ you started not really knowing how to say what you wanted, “Can I ask why you went through all the trouble?” You asked quietly. He might not want your thanks but you did want some answers, and maybe if he’d been in a good enough mood to help you he might give you some answers.

“Eat.” He commanded crushing your hope for answers. You roll your eyes at him but pick up your fork and knife and do as he says. It’s been a long time since you’ve eaten anything so you don’t quite eat what you normally would, stomach no doubtably having shrunken a bit. Grimmjow doesn’t leave, there’s an awkward air in the room as you can all but feel his eyes looking at every bruise and mark that Aizen had left on you. “You want him dead don’t you?” He asks out of nowhere.

You stop all movement and look up at him through your lashes. He’s not angry, he’d gone back to lounging against the door and was picking at his nails with his thumb seemingly uninterestedly. When you don’t answer his gaze flicks up to you, “I- uh, well,” you stutter, placing your utensils back down. You have no idea what to answer with. He’s been nicer to you as of late but you still don’t think that you can tell him that you want his leader dead.

He gets tired of your stuttering and spits out, “Well, if you do want him dead you should hurry up and do it before he starts questioning why you can’t get pregnant.” He says it all with such a casual tone as if you were talking about the weather or something else equally as unimportant.

It’s your turn to scoff at him, “Yeah, that’s something I can manage.” You quip back sarcastically with a roll of your eyes. How could you possibly hope to kill a man that could cripple a kingdom?

"You could,” He says, pushing off the wall and walks towards you. He picks up the knife from the cart and reaches for you. You sure he’s about to cut you and you try to pull back but he grabs the back of your head and pulls you closer. He brings the knife close to your eye but doesn’t touch you with it, “The next time he climbs on top of you, put a knife through his eye,” he says before lowering the knife to the center of your neck, “or through his throat. Or learn to live with him.” He says looking down at you, your eyes lock with his and he keeps you firmly in place, “Either way enough of this pathetic damsel shit.” He releases his hold on your head and grabs your arm, placing the knife in your hand.

You think for a long moment and Grimmjow doesn’t move, he just watches you run problems through your head. You shake your head and look up to him, “I can’t, what if I fail?” You ask even though you already know the answer. Aizen would kill Renji, and anyone else he knew you were close to, like Momo or Lista.

Grimmjow shrugs and turns around and starts walking away, “He won’t kill you if that’s what you're asking.” He says in an annoyed tone.

“I know he won’t kill me but he will kill Renji.” You say to his back. He stops walking and is silent for a minute, clearly thinking about something.

He looks at you over his shoulder and his eyes narrow. “Your little knight’s not here anymore.” He informs you. Your breath catches and your heart sinks.

You’d let Aizen do whatever he’d wanted with you and he’d still killed him? Your eyes glazed, “But I- I did what he wanted, I married him. He’s dead?” You say rapidly, tripping over your words the whole time.

Grimmjow scoffs and you think he’s going to insult you again but he doesn’t, “I never said he died.” He says in a harsh tone, “Your brave and valiant knight managed to escape along with an entire holding cell the night of your wedding.” He informs you like you're stupid for not knowing.

You breathe out a sigh of relief, “So he’s not dead?” You ask just to confirm with him. If what he’s saying is true that lifts a lot of weight off your shoulder, you might still be stuck here but at least if you don’t do something perfectly for Aizen he can’t kill Renji.

“Not yet,” he says with another shrug. “Can’t say he won’t be soon though, Aizen’s pissed, sent a whole group out after them. If they’re not back in three more days, me and my group switch with them.” You don’t know why he’s telling you all this but you think this is the most helpful that he’s been. “When he catches them it won’t be pretty, he doesn’t like to be fucked around with like that.” You don’t say anything back and he leaves the room.

You set the knife back on the cart. You think over everything that Grimmjow had told you, you know you can’t kill Aizen, he’s quicker than you, stronger than you and more battle ready than you’ll ever be. But there is another option now. You decide that you’ll bid you time and when the timing is perfect you’ll escape. It might take a while but you swear to yourself that you will. You’ll find your fathers camp and get away from here, Aizen can’t use you if he doesn’t have you. You start making plans on how to do so. Firstly, you decide, you need to figure out where you're going.

That means tomorrow you’ll have Grimmjow take you to the library so you can look over the books and records of where your border camps are. You’ll figure out how to get rid of your guards another day, but for now your feeling much more hopeful.

~~~

Grimmjow brings you supper a few hours later and you eat as much of it as you can manage. Aizen returns a few hours later and the rest of the night follows the same path as all the previous. Only this time you’re not scared to get pregnant. You are still scared of him and what he could do to you but you no longer have the threat of hypothetical children hanging over you. When he finishes with you he doesn’t immediately pull you to sleep like normal, instead his eyes rack down your body causing you to shiver under his gaze as you catch your breath. “You should let yourself enjoy this more.” He says to you.

You look at him before huffing a depressed sounding laugh and looking away. You don’t want to enjoy this with him. You already hate how your body responds to him; you don’t want to give your mind up to him as well. “There’s nothing wrong with enjoying love making with your husband.” He states as if it's a matter of fact.

Slowly your eyes look back to him and you give a small chuckle. “This isn’t love making and it’s certainly not love.” You tell him back firmly.

Aizen’s quiet for a moment, considering your words, “It will be,” He tells you, your eyebrows knit together, “Not today, not tomorrow, not for a long time but you will enjoy what I do to you. What we are.” He says and you shake your head lightly, you will not, you’d sooner throw yourself from the roof. “You will, this is your life now, you can fight it all you want but you will.” He tells you as his hand runs up your leg. You try to pull back but he doesn’t let you. He pulls you down the bed to him before snaking his hand under your back and pulling you so that you're kneeling over his lap.

Your eyes widen and he smirks at you. His hands fall to your hips and give them a light squeeze before he flips you around so that you're sitting in his lap with your back pressed to his chest. You try to move from his hold but he forces you back with a strong hand atop your thigh. You feel his cock twitch underneath you making panic rise in you. His free hand trails from up your stomach to your breast. You shake your head and he chuckles as he begins to flick your nipple. You can’t help but whine in his hold, you’re already so sensitive from everything he’d done to you before this that all your nerves are heightened.

The hand on your thigh slides downwards, between your legs you choke on a gasp as he runs his knuckles along the length of your folds, lightly grazing your clit with every pass. “Please,” you whine, he just hums to you as he continues. “Please stop.” You plead, voice barely above a whisper.

He brings his mouth to your ear, “Beg me to fuck you.” He demands warm breath fanning your ear before he nips at it. You shake your head in denial, you won’t do that, you can’t do that. “Beg me to fuck you,” he repeats, “Or we’ll stay like this all night.” His fingers begin circling your clit in earnest. “I’ll have you coming on my fingers until you pass out and even then, I’ll keep going until you wake back up.” You're crying again, your hands are on each of his wrists trying to stop him but you're not strong enough to pull him away and he just ignores you, “I can keep you here as long as I like.” He tells you.

He doesn’t stop and you try your best to hold out. By the time he pulls a second orgasm from your body you’re crying hard and you throw your head back on his shoulder, arching to try to get away, his hand at your sex doesn’t stop, it doesn’t even slow. You're so overwhelmed and his attention is starting to hurt, you’ve come twice this round and twice the previous and its all just too much for you. He kisses the side of your head gently compared to how he moves his hands. You’re so desperate to get him to stop that you give in, “Please.” You say words leaving you breathlessly and barely audible.

Even though you’re not looking at his face you know he’s smiling as he hums to you, “What was that love? Did you say something?” He asks even though you both know he’s heard you and is just toying with you. You whine pathetically, of course he’s toying with you, it's what he adores most.

You swallow thickly and shutter, his hands are still moving against you making it all the more difficult to focus on the words coming out of your mouth. “Please!” You all but shout.

He gives a small chuckle against your head, “Please what, my love?” He asks and you grit your teeth so hard it feels like they might break. “I can’t help you if you don’t tell me what you want.” His cock twitches again beneath you showing just how much he’s enjoying breaking you down like this, how much he enjoys humiliating you.

Your jaw tightens as more tears of frustration fall down your face. You’re sure you look like a mess but you take a deep breath and say, “Please, Aizen...” He takes a deep breath in as you continue, “Please fuck me.” You beg him in a whisper, you're flushed and humiliated. You don’t think you’ve ever hated anyone the way you do him at this moment.

His hands are on your face, pulling you to meet his lips, back arched against his chest, with bruising force. He moves your head how he sees fit as you try desperately to catch your breath, feeling almost relieved that his hand is off your core. You can’t help but twitch in overstimulation. One of his hands leaves your face and trails down your body, for a moment you're afraid that he’s going to start teasing you again but he moves past your folds. He’s lining his cock up to you again and you pull away for his lips ready to beg yet again for him to please just give you a moment of rest, you know that he won’t stop but you can at least try to take a breather.

But he doesn’t give you the chance to get the words out. Aizen thrusts up into you and from this angle he hits so much deeper. You cry out as he bottoms out, it doesn’t hurt nearly as bad as it had the first time of the night but it still wasn’t exactly pleasant. He breathes your name out and stills, you take the opportunity to take a deep breath. “See that wasn’t so hard now was it?” He asks in a low tone. You squeeze your eyes shut as both his hands rise to your breasts, he teases your nipples making you whine as he stays still inside you. “You will learn to enjoy this sweet girl, I swear it to you.” He tells you before he starts moving inside you, it's not nearly as rough as he had been, not to say that it was gentle by any means but it didn’t hurt like it had previously.

It takes a while for him to find it but after a few minutes he finds that spot inside you that makes you see stars and you can’t stop the lewd sounding moan that it rips from you and your hips involuntary buck with his own. You hand shoots to cover your mouth in shock and you still your movements. Aizen doesn’t let you keep your hand there for long though, he pulls your hand away, bringing it up and giving it a small peck, his other hand falls to your waist to keep you moving in time with him. “I want to hear you my love, I want to know how much you like having me inside you.” He says still trusting inside you, taking special care to thrust just right to keep that spot stimulated. You couldn’t form words and you shake your head in denial as the pain starts ebbing away much to your hatred. You don’t want to enjoy this, you want to scream and you think you’d rather have him fuck you rough than take you in a way that forces you to betray yourself.

He chuckles warmly into your ear and after a while gets you to keep moving in time with him. Then his hand moves from your waist to your core and begins to rub your clit in time with his thrust. You gasp loudly and try to pull away from him, he won't let you though and you know it’s futile. You don’t know why he wants you to enjoy this but he does and he takes care to make sure that he gets what he wants. You can’t think about anything but how his cock is moving inside you as you wither and moan his name in little broken cries. Quickly that knot starts building and you're more of a moaning mess, you're still moving in time with him and can’t form enough thoughts to stop. “Feeling good?” He asks breathlessly with a smile. You hate how smug he sounds, how happy he is that your body is feeling pleasure from him. It snaps something in you and you let your movements stutter to a stop and you regain the ability to think for a moment.

You know he’s only doing all this to upset and humiliate you further. You pull yourself together just enough to tell him, “I hate you.” In a broken whisper. He laughs and picks up both the pace of his hand and his thrusts causing you to scream his name out. His other hand starts forcibly grinding your hips into his own again. His thrusts start losing rhythm and his hand spreads up further. The knot inside you snaps and your unable to stop yourself from sobbing and arching your back with your head on his shoulder as he fucks you through it, still toying with your clit the whole time. He finishes inside you for the second time a few thrusts later, hand finally coming to a rest between your legs. You fall back into him, eyelids heavy and tears still lightly falling.

He rubs your legs soothingly as he untangles himself from you and gently lays you down on the pillows. He leans down and kisses you softly before pulling away to look in your eyes. “Hate me all you want, lie to me and yourself if you must but you did enjoy that.” You avert your eyes not wanting to look at him. He kisses your forehead then laid down next to you and drapes his arm around you.

Sleep does not come as easily as it had been. Instead you laid awake upset. You know it was involuntary but he was right, you had enjoyed that. You were a mess for him, you matched his thrusts and moaned for him. You begged him to fuck you. You hated yourself for how weak you were. How weak you are. You couldn’t pull him off you, you couldn’t kill him and you couldn’t even stop him from manipulating you to do whatever he wanted.

Eventually sleep does come and surprisingly you dream, something you haven’t done in weeks, perhaps you’d been too exhausted. In your dream you are with Aizen again as you just had been, except you're not fighting him at all. You're grinding your hips in time with him and moaning obscenely, his pace picks up and you loop your arm around his head to hold onto his hair to ground yourself.

Except the hair in your hand is different from Aizen’s, it's not styled the same and seems a bit shorter. You turn to look back but a hand grabs your chin and keeps you looking straight ahead. “Something the matter princess?” A voice that is very much not Aizen’s rasps into your ear. Instead the voice belongs to Grimmjow and the last thing you remember from your dream is his strange bone mask pressed against you.

You wake with a shaky breath and wide eyes. Your heart is beating wildly out of control as you try to wrap your mind around what just happened. Behind you there’s the sound of metal rattling and you go to shoot up and see what’s there but a hand shoves you back down. Your back hits the mattress with enough force to knock the air from your lungs and you gasp. You take notice that the hand in question is pushing the blanket from the bed against your upper chest. Your eyes shoot up to meet a set of azure eyes staring back at you.

You flushed being this close to him even though you know logically that he had no way of knowing what your brain had just conjured up of him. Grimmjow’s leaning over you, one knee rested on the bed to be able to reach you and keep you in place. “Unless you're planning on giving me a show I recommend keeping yourself covered princess.” He tells you bluntly as he slowly pulls away from you.

You’re left gaping at him for a moment before your mind starts processing what’s going on. “Why are you here?” You ask in a high pitched tone as your arm moves to hold the blank in place over your chest so you can sit up. It’s early morning, you're still naked and he shouldn’t be in here.

He looks at you a second before gesturing behind him to a plate and cup of steaming tea on your nightstand. “Your hag couldn’t make it up so I brought your food.” He said, irritation thick in his voice.

It clicked into place that he’d promised to bring you the tea every morning and made sense enough. “Oh, t-thank you.” You stutter out quickly not being able to look at him and flushing more in embarrassment. You were embarrassed that you’d thought of him like that even if you were unconscious. You couldn’t deny that he was handsome even with the strange bone mask and near constant scowl, but he was also an ass and was rude to you and you didn’t want to think about him like that. He had kidnapped you and brought you to Aizen. He antagonized you for fun and got angry when you didn’t react in a fun enough way for him. He had been kind a few times but he always took such a bastardized approach to it that you couldn’t tell why he’d done it. He made little sense to you so it made even less sense that you’d be having lewd dreams about him.

You could feel his gaze and your eyes flicked to his for just long enough to see them narrow before you looked away again. You don’t know what gave you away but he can tell that something’s wrong. “What’s wrong with you today?” He asks harshly, eyes still fixated on you.

You swallow and try to think of something to say, nothing comes to you and he starts stalking towards you. In a panic you say, “Nothing!” A little too loudly. Your response makes him stop walking but he cocks an eyebrow and scoffs like he doesn’t believe you, “I’m not wearing any clothes can you please get out?” You say with a bit of distress in your voice as he stays firmly planted. He eyes your exposed neck, shoulders and what he can see of your chest making you tug the blanket higher before he rolls his eyes and turns away. He leaves without another word, slamming the door behind him.

You wait a second before moving to make sure he’s not going to come back in before you reach over and drink the still hot tea quickly. You decide to go wash and get dressed before eating. You planned to have Grimmjow take you to the library so you could look over the geography books and maps and start to figure out where your fathers camp might be. You bathe, trying and failing to make yourself seem clean and brush through your knotted hair leaving it to fall naturally. You dress in a black dress that was left for you with the same neckline as all the rest. You knew your hickies and love bites would be on display but there was little that you could do about that. You look at the beautiful crown that sits permanently on the dresser and leave it there. You won’t wear it. You won’t have anything to do with it. You slip on your flats and quickly eat as much as you can manage.

With a deep breath you go to the heavy door and pull it open. Grimmjow is leaning beside it and his head immediately snaps to you. His eyes widen and he pushes off the wall to fully see you. He looks you up and down twice before his eyes settle on yours and he smirks at you, “Well, look at you all dressed up and pretty again.” He says, making you flush a bit, you’re used to him calling you princess but you were not prepared for him to call you pretty. It’s such a simple thing to say but it gets a reaction out of you which only makes his smirk grow. “What do I owe the honor?” He says smirk never leaving his face.

You keep eye contact with him refusing to keep backing away. “If you don’t mind, I'd like to go to the library.” You tell him. He seems to consider it for a moment and for a second you worry that he’ll refuse but he doesn’t.

He lets out a sigh, “Fine, it figures though, you finally wanna go somewhere and it's the most boring place in the manor.” He said with a roll of his eyes. He led you to the library silently after that, you hadn’t seen anyone on your walk which was reliving in a way. He held the door open for you, the library was huge, far larger than the one at your own manor. Rows upon rows of shelves line the room, all with little engraved plaques to tell you which genres the shelves held. As you walked through the library looking for what you needed Grimmjow trailed behind you, running his fingers lazily over the spines of the books and messing with them as he went.

After a while you had a decent stack of books about previous wars of your kingdom, localized weather, localized geography, as well as a few books on local plants and a book about how to grow different crops to make your pile look less suspicious. Grimmjow, you noticed, didn’t pick anything up but you didn’t give him much thought. You strolled over to a small sitting area adored with a few plush sitting chairs as well as a matching chaise and some small tables. Grimmjow flops down on the chaise as you set your books on the table and sit yourself. “Is this really what you’re gonna do all day?” He asked, looking bored already.

You just shrugged at him, “I like to read.” You say as you pick up the book about wars, hoping to find something about where to locate your father, perhaps see if there was an area that they often came back to for their temporary camps. Grimmjow scoffed and threw his head back and stared at the ceiling. You read the first two chapters before you heard him signing and shifting around. You ignored him and got a single page read before he interrupted you.

“What are you reading?” He asked in an annoyed voice like you were inconveniencing him. You looked at him over the top of your book to see he was staring at you.

“It’s about history.” You said, you didn’t want to specify to him what kind of history. While he had been kind a few times and he’d all but told you to kill Aizen you still didn’t want to chance fate and have him report what you were planning to do back to someone.

He raised a brow at you, “They all about history?” He sneered looking at your stack of books. You were a little worried that he had seen through your white lie but you steeled your face trying not to let anything show.

You shook your head lightly, “No, there’s a few about weather patterns and geography but most of them are about local plants and crop growing.” He rolled his eyes and stretched while you went back to reading quietly.

You made it another few pages before he spoke up again. “Why plants?�� He sneered at you. You look back over at him and he’s resting with his hands behind his head. He’s looking at you again and it makes you wonder if he’d looked away at all.

You fidget under his gaze and shrug, “I like gardening.” You say, he scrunches his nose and furrows his brows at you, “In the warmer months I like to be out in the gardens and take care of the plants, it's nice.” You elaborate to him.

He gives a light laugh, “Of course you do, princess.” He says and it's your turn to look confused at him. “It’s fitting is all.” He tells you, “Of course the prettiest little princess likes flowers and sunshine and shit.” He says and you can’t tell if he means it as an insult or not.

Instead you tell him, “I’m not a princess, stop calling me that.” His face broke out in another smirk and he flipped himself to lay on his side, head resting in his hand.

“Closest thing I’ve ever seen to a princess.” He says smirk growing a bit, “You’re a pretty girl with pretty little dresses that grew up being waited on hand and foot in a manor. You’ve got a strong family name and despite it manage to be the most delicate little thing I’ve ever seen. For fucks sake you had your own little knight and everything. What part of that doesn’t scream princess?” Your face flushes at his words, it's the third time today he’s called you pretty and you really don’t know how to react to it and you’re sure he knows it. It makes your cheeks burn every time and your pretty sure that he’s only doing it to mess with you.

You roll your eyes and he gives a chuckle, “None of that makes me a princess.” You tell him stubbornly. Your face is still burning red but you don’t want to let him win.

He barks another laugh at you, “I guess you’re right,” he says with a light shrug, “You’re a queen now aren’t you? Technically speaking.” He says with a cock of his head. Your eyes narrow at him, and you decide you're done talking to him and resume reading. Or you at least try too. You can feel him looking at you even if you won't look at him. It makes you fidget and you’ve read the same paragraph four times and you still have no idea what it says. Your mind wanders back to the crown on the dresser. He was right, technically but you didn’t like the thought. You didn’t want to be Aizen’s queen, the thought depressed you.

You tried not to think about it and focus on the task at hand but between Grimmjow’s gaze and his words you were thoroughly distracted. You think about what it actually is to be a queen, you certainly don’t feel like one, you can’t see yourself up there with the previous queens. You think about your escape plan and wonder if it’s actually possible, you don’t know that it is but you’d rather risk dying out there than to stay here with Aizen for any longer than you have to.

Then you start thinking about Grimmjow and what an enigma he was to you. He was rude and bold but he could be kind at times. From the first night you’d meet him in the forest he’d been like that. He’d offered you advice but refused to answer any questions and treated you however he felt like. He’d gone out of his way to find Lista to help with the tea and to get you to eat but only after he said you looked like shit and complained that you were boring. Then today he’d started calling you pretty but only in ways that were used to fluster and embarrass you. You couldn’t help but wonder if he actually thought you were pretty or if he was saying it to upset you.

You stopped yourself from that train of thought, you told yourself that you didn’t care why he did it and that you wanted him to stop. What business was it of yours what he thought of how you looked, you were sure he thought you were pathetic already. What did it matter if you were pretty and pathetic? He frustrated you worse than anyone else ever had so why couldn’t you stop thinking about him? You chalk it up to that stupid dream and that you’ll forget about it in a few days.

You reread the same paragraph for the fifth time before he spoke again, “You read a lot before all this?” He asked laying on his back with a thump. “Seems super boring.” He looks at you out of the corner of his eye waiting for your response.

You set your book down on your lap and looked at him. “Yeah I did,” you think back to all the time you’d spent reading with Momo or all the books about flowers and plants from other parts of the world. It felt like such a long time ago even though it had only been a few weeks. You can’t help but wonder if you’ll ever be that girl again, if you’ll ever lay around and read with Momo or if you’ll ever go out to the gardens and pull the weeds out of the flowerbeds. Then you start thinking about your mom. She loved to read and started teaching you when you were three years old, she had always been so patient with you as a child. You remembered when she first got sick the two of you would sit together and read for hours, when she began getting sicker you would read aloud to her so she could relax and listen.

A tear slipped down your face and you were quick to wipe it away, you looked down at your hands and tried to focus on not making yourself more upset. You weren’t sure if Grimmjow had seen your tears but if he did he didn’t say anything about it. “Who taught you?” He asked, looking up to the ceiling.

“My mother.” You said simply, you didn’t want to tell him about your mother. It felt too personal. You didn’t get to keep much of your life private as of late but that felt too private to share with him or Aizen or any of them. He just hummed to indicate that he’d heard you. “Why don’t you go find something to read? You wouldn’t be as bored.” You offer to him wanting to change the subject.

Grimmjow turns to look at you, his eyes narrow and his eyebrows furrowed. You meet his gaze in question. “I can’t.” He bites out angrily.

Your eyebrows shoot up, “You can’t read?” You ask, you knew a lot of servants and common people couldn’t but he just seemed so above it all. You didn’t know anything about his life but you had just figured that he was a knight or some kind of equivalent maybe from a good family but it seemed that wasn’t the case.

He growled and sat up, “I swear princess if you try to make fun of me I’ll-“ He starts to say before you cut him off.

“I’m not making fun of you! I’m sorry, I just thought-“ You cut yourself off struggling for the right words. You didn’t want to make the situation worse by accident but you wanted him to know you weren’t making fun of him. It wasn’t his fault if no one had taught him. “I don’t know, you just seem like you come from some high family or something, I just figured…” You let yourself tail off. He huffed a laugh and you chanced a glance at him, he had leaned back and didn’t look like he was about to rip your head off anymore. “I’m sorry.” You tell him.

He looks back up at you and for a brief second you think about offering to teach him how to read, but ultimately decide against it, he’s not your friend and you have things you need to focus on. He sighs, “Your fine princess, don’t apologize.” He told you before laying back down. He doesn’t bother you too much the rest of the time in the library, in fact your pretty sure he fell asleep for a few hours but that’s fine, it gives you time to examine what you need to in silence.

By the time your ready to leave you have a faint idea of a place your father could be. There’s place high in the northern mountains near the border of your land that would get heavy use up until a few decades ago, it now sat abandoned but if they were fighting with Aizen and trying not to get captured it was a likely place to go. You couldn’t definitively say he was there but it was the best lead you had. You had no idea how to get there or where in the mountains it was but that was a problem for later.

You rose from your chair and stretched out with a yawn, your legs were sore from sitting so long in one position and your eyes were heavy from the strain of reading all day. You looked over to Grimmjow to find him staring at you lazily while still laying down. “Done for now?” He asks and you nod. He rises and leads you through the halls back to your room. Before you can get there you hear voices. Grimmjow's eyes narrow just as Nnoitra and a man you’ve never seen before round the corner.

They’re laughing about something but Nnoitra stops as he sees the two of you, he looks between the two of you for a second before that wolffish grin streaks across his face. “Well look who it is.” He says to the man with him. The other man is slightly shorter than Grimmjow with red hair. He wears a bone mask like the rest of them, it covers his chin and jaw and rises in twin spikes on the side of his head. He doesn’t say anything but he does look you up and down slowly.

“Piss off.” Grimmjow tells them, then stops a few steps in front of you which you're thankful for. There’s something about Nnoitra that terrifies you, maybe it's the way he looks at you like he wants to eat you alive or the way he talks to and about you like you're less than a person but none of it sits right with you.

I wasn’t talking to you,” Nnoitra says with an eye roll. He looks back to you, “I just didn’t expect to see her again. Figured she’d kill herself in all her misery.” He said with a laugh. “I owe Yammy four silver now, he said she’d have to come out sooner or later.” He said continuing to laugh, his red haired partner also gave a small chuckle. He looked down to your neck then to your chest. “Though maybe she’s not all that miserable, maybe she likes getting fucked like a whore.” He sneered at you. Your eyebrows shot up and you flushed in anger and embarrassment. You’re pissed at the very idea that you’d want any of this and the name he’d called you. You're anything but a whore, you’d never even been with a man or entertained the idea before Aizen had forced you to be his wife.

Grimmjow’s jaw tightens and he looks angrier than you’ve ever seen him. “Shut the fuck up, go take your pathetic ass somewhere else. Just because you can’t get your cock wet doesn’t mean we need to deal with your bitchy attitude.” Grimmjow says before grabbing your wrist and dragging you past the two men. The red haired man just watches you two push past but of course Nnoitra isn’t done yet.

He lets out a wild laugh, “Is that what’s going on here?” He asks, you’re confused by what he means until he continues. “Ya been fucking her while Lord Aizen’s not around?” You can hear the grin in his words without looking at him, “She’s got so many marks on her how would he know if you put one on her, smart really. I’d fuck her if I could get close too.” Nnoitra snorted and his partner laughed too.

Grimmjow releases your wrist and whirls around on Nnoitra, sword drawn and pointed sharply to his long neck before you can recognize what happened. “One more word. One more fucking word and I’ll have your head on the damn floor.” Grimmjow says voice low and threatening. Nnoitra held his hands up in surrender but kept smirking all the while. Grimmjow doesn’t move for a while, clearly thinking on whether or not to just kill him and be done with it but something convinces him not to.

He turns sharply and sheaths his sword before pushing you forward back towards your room. He’s silent until you're a ways away from the other two men. The whole way you're tense and thinking about Nnoitra, he scares you, badly. He’s unhinged and you're terrified that he’s going to hurt you one day, he’s all but said he would. “Don’t worry about him princess, we all know what he’s like and no ones going to let him come anywhere near you. Aizen would kill them.” He says trying to reassure you as you reach your door.

You can’t help but think about how he’ll be gone within two days and while you’re not friends he has made it clear that he won’t let anyone hurt you but you're unsure about the rest. What if whoever fills his place lets Nnoitra in? Or what if the replacements themselves are like him? Grimmjow had told you that not all of them were fully loyal to Aizen and you had no conceivable way to know who was and wasn’t. “And when you leave? What about then?” You ask, panic getting the better of you as you look up at him.

His eyebrows twitch upwards in an almost unnoticeable way, his eyes dart around your face before saying, “Like I said, Aizen would kill if something happened to you. While I’m gone Loly will be your guard.” You didn’t know who this Loly was and he seemed to realize that quickly. “You meet her once I think, black hair, pigtails. She’s kinda a bitchy.” He tells you.

You remember her from the day she’d brought you the dress. She hadn’t said anything to you and you were a bit surprised she was a guard but you didn’t voice that thought. “She’s not gonna be the nicest to you but she’s capable enough.” He reassured you. You nodded at him and he looked at you for a moment longer before opening your door for you.

~~~

Your night and following day played out the same as the previous. Aizen came back, did whatever he felt like with you, you woke up, dressed, ate, went to the library then came back only for Aizen to have you again. You started trying to rise earlier to avoid being naked when Grimmjow entered with your tea and breakfast. You're in the bathroom brushing out your hair after your bath when you hear the door open and close. You assume it's Grimmjow and finish with your hair and go to greet him. Yesterday he’d been the closest to nice he’d gotten. He didn’t outright insult you, besides calling you princess but you couldn’t rightfully tell if that was an insult or not. He’d bothered you a lot while you read but you couldn’t find it in yourself to mind it. Sometimes you’d even welcome the brief distraction.

But when you leave your room it’s not Grimmjow who stands in the center of the room. It’s the red haired man who had been with Nnoitra the other day. He looks at you and smiles as you stay put in place. His eyes fall to the deep v-neck of your dress and he licks his lips making you want to cover yourself but you don’t have anything to do so. “Can I help you with something?” You ask, you’re getting nervous under his gaze.

His eyes flick up to you and he looks predatory. “Oh you’ll be helping me alright.” He says before making his way to you quickly. He grabs you by the hair and you go to shout for help but his other hand smacks across your face so hard you're thrown to the floor. He picks you up from the floor by your hair roughly and you feel blood trail down your chin and neck, your lip is burst and your face burns where he came in contact with it. “Who ya callin for? Grimmjow? You forget he’s one of us?” He mocks as he walks you back towards the wall.

He slams your back into the wall hard enough that you can’t breath for a second, he slots one of his legs between yours and you try to push him away. “Aizen’s gonna kill you if you touch me!” You shout, remembering what Grimmjow had said and praying that he stops.

This only makes the man pull your hair harder, pulling you to your tip toes and making you cringe back. “He’s never gonna know, how would he, like Nnoitra said you’re covered in marks. He won't notice one or two more.” You try to kick at him but he just pushes closer. “Never fucked a noble bitch before, can’t say I ain’t excited. You’re a fuckin pretty one too!” The hand not holding your hair grabbed your clothed breast and you again tried to scream, he smacked you again, not as hard as the first but it still hurt. “Don’t make me fuckin gag you.”

Tears fall down your face as he wraps his hand around your neck. You can’t breathe and he rocks his hips into yours while still smiling at you. You can feel that he’s hard but struggling gets harder and harder as you lose air. You’re terrified that your about to black out as stars dance across your vision. You try to pull his hand off your neck but he just smiles brighter and bucks into you harder. You can’t breathe and you’re sure that he’s about to kill you but he eases up a bit, you don’t know why and don’t have time to think about it as you suck in air. Suddenly your door slams open and the stranger's hand falls from your throat completely just in time for you to see the man get grabbed by his own hair and thrown to the floor. You take in a breath but hold it as you watch what happens in front of you.

He hits the floor hard and rolls onto his hands and knees. Above him Grimmjow is advancing on him in a silent rage. You’ve seen him angry before but never like this, he looks feral, like a beast hunting its prey and the red haired man must see it too because he starts crawling backwards and trying to reason with him. “Wait! Wait!” He shouts, still trying to escape. “We can work something out, come on! Grimmjow!” He yells before Grimmjow kicks him so hard he files back a few feet, cracking his head on the floor, spilling blood across the stone.

The man tries to get up and lunge at Grimmjow but he’s stopped before he can advance by a sword cutting into his side, knocking him sideways and back to the floor. He screams as he goes down and behind him Ulquiorra stands behind him with a completely natural and bored looking face. Neither of them look at you, instead they watch the bleeding and withering man on the floor.

Your legs are shaking, you lean back against the wall, legs buckling beneath you and you finally let the held breath escape you. Grimmjow whirls around quickly and makes his way to you grabbing your upper arm gently and pulling you up. His eyes flicker all around your face and he opens his mouth to say something but then closes it.

“Don’t move.” You hear Ulquiorra demand behind Grimmjow. “Lord Aizen’s on his way and you’ll be dealt with.” Grimmjow doesn’t bother to look back at them, instead he looks you over a second time. Grimmjow’s jaw is locked tight, he looks less feral than he had when he was fighting the man but he still looked ungodly angry and you go to apologize but the sounds of shoes hitting the stone floor make you stop.

“Take him to the throne room and wait,” You hear Aizen command, voice angry. You finally look away from Grimmjow's face to the door. There’s at least a dozen servants trying to look in, they had parted to let Aizen through but were still trying to gawk into the room. All of them were your people and they all looked horrified. Ulquiorra grabs the man by the arm and drags him out as the man begs Aizen for forgiveness. Aizen doesn’t even look at the man as he is dragged past. The servants all step back out of his way. You watch Aizen’s brown eyes fall to you, he looks at your blood for a long moment before his eyes snap to yours. He’s angry and you're terrified of him, you’ve never seen him like this but you knew it couldn’t end well. “Everybody out, I need a moment with my wife.” He demands, voice angrier than you’d ever heard. You watch everybody file out, Grimmjows the last one out and he shuts the door behind him with one final glance to you. Aizen doesn’t say anything as he makes his way to you.

#bleach fic #bleach x reader #cross posted on ao3 #grimmjow x reader #multi chap fic #aizen x reader #aizen x y/n #tw noncon

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