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sil-te-plait-tue-moi · 5 months

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The idler wheel is wiser than the driver of the screw.

Quick summary: After one too many drinks, you find yourself unable to think of anything but a certain smart-mouth detective who is in desperate need of a release.

Word count: 11K (I'm sorry)

Warnings: This is basically just SMUTT with a lil feelings (if you squint) sprinkled in there; kind of angsty at points (mentions of canon-typical death and violence (hellooo they're homicide detectives); gets a bit existential at points, watch out; pretentious.

A/N: YAY! I had this obsession with True Detective S1 all throughout October (watched it at my nan's house lmao), so enjoy the lovechild of that. This is just for fun, so, please, nobody be angry at me if they don't agree with Rust's characterisation, or any of the weird philosophical chat, lalallalal, OKAY ENJOY!!

***

The night air is sluggish and humid with the remnants of a warm summer’s rain, pressing down thickly, close, clogging, simmering just below the surface.

A few times, I’ve interviewed people who live in these sorts of places: motel-types, the “in-between”, where folks stay when they’ve either got no money, no choice or nobody. Other residents include passers-by who’re looking to save money on accommodation, skipping on the fancier places. Not that Louisiana really has any “fancier places”. Places without the paint peeling off walls like dead skin, I guess. A bed and breakfast in the nicer suburbia, with a view overlooking a subpar daydream of a ghost town centre.

I’ve leaned up against the crooked, metal railing, felt the influence of my weight almost sending it and myself crashing down onto the faded parking lot beneath. I’ve leaned up there—after knocking—and waited, waited for a grey face to peer through a crack in the cracked door. I’ve smiled and remarked about how the beat-up, brass numbers up there are hanging by a thread. Sometimes, people are real stingy – they slink out and close the door behind them, or they remain in that little slit, just an eye visible, or they plain shut it in my face. Most let me in right away, maybe a little intimidated by the shiny badge clipped up in my jacket – I’ve sat across from ‘em, felt that mud in the room’s air seep into my pores, inviting me under its still swamp.

Seems like the sort of place for him.

Too many a fuckin’ time, Marty’s come grumbling and muttering into the office kitchen, rolling his eyes, scoffing, huffing, the whole lot. And when I ask him why the strop?—“Ancient fuckin’ philosopher fuckin’ Rust Cohle on it again. Birthday’s comin’ up: get me earplugs and a generous bit o’ duct tape for my dear partner over there, would you?”

Or somethin’ along those lines.

For all his apparent talk about us silly, little “biological puppets”, this seems like Rust’s sort of place. Temporary existence, temporary living. Purgatory?

Whatever.

If you ask me, Rust Cohle’s head is so far up his own ass that it’s no wonder his outlook on life is so dark.

If I was more sober, maybe I’d be thinking about it—about him—less—but this night out has had me so drunk I was maybe even hallucinating at some point. Rust?—sure, he’s been in the back of my mind for some part of the last few months – I have to see him most days I go to work, don’t I? – but, sometime in the space between my third and fourth shot of straight vodka, he was suddenly at the very front of it. I’d seen a guy who smoked like him: cigarette pinched between his thumb and forefinger, a simple, deep drag. I’d thought it was him, but then I realised his face was shrouded in the smoke that he’d exhaled, and I recalled that Rust never seems to do that. Never seems to exhale. All the tar and shit stays in.

With a twist of my keys, the engine rumbles off into more-or-less silence. Fuck, it’s a bad idea, yes, just being here. If he likes to keep his distance, well—he’s entitled to that choice.

I glance over my shoulder, out the window, out at the complex which is all yellow and shining, illuminated by buzzing halogen light bars and, of course, the occasional bug zapper. It’s clean enough. The lines of this parking space were white enough. Apartment 11A, said Marty. Second floor.

“Are you drunk?” he’d asked – Marty, not Rust.

I’d replied, “No,” pressing closer to the phone box in attempts to remove myself from the swarm and bustle of the ladies’ bathroom. And it was an honest reply. Sort of. Despite his scepticism, by that time, I’d long stopped drinking, and all that remained from it was a sort of numb tingle in my fingertips—as far as I was concerned.

I don’t think I’d be in this parking lot, stepping out of my car, if I wasn’t still a little bit gone.

Marty’s sigh had crackled through the receiver. “Don’t bring any o’ tha’ party-this-party-that attitude to ‘im, alright? He’ll hate it.” I’d told him okay, my stomach spiking up with excitement. “Fact is, I don’t think you should go at all. ‘f you do, should be a work matter. This a work matter, detective?”

I’d lied, said yes, perhaps with a slur to my voice.

He clicked his tongue. “Okay, buck, whatever you say.” Then, he’d hung up.

There was something disapproving in the manner of the conversation. I got the feeling that he was talking to me in the same voice he used to lecture his daughters. The only reason I’d called him was to get something from him, sure, so that I could basically get something from Rust, his partner. I could see how that sort of thing might’ve upset someone. Not that Marty Hart should have any right to judge, not when he’s coming into work in the same clothes as the day before, stinking of sweat and God knows what. The unsaid agreement of everyone in the office is to turn a blind eye. I’ve met his wife. Someone should cut off his damn dick.

Quiet, now. Hell, who am I to talk? Marty’s fun to chat with, makes a slow day at the office a little brighter. ‘Course, there’s rarely a slow day at the office.

And I’m at the top of the stairs, now. And I knock—one, two, three—on the pilling, forest-green door. Dulled down 11A. Blinds are determinedly shut, slats flat. For a second, I think maybe I’ll be waking him.

Then I remember Rust doesn’t sleep.

A grey face appears as the door swings just a little ways open, grave and sunken-tired. His expression isn’t so pissed-off as it is just his usual expression.

“Rusty,” I say to him with a small nod, words scraping out dryly.

He doesn’t respond right away – ‘stead, he leans his body out partway, eyes absent like he’s searching for some hooligan criminal in the night.

“Marty told you my address?” he asks lowly. It’s more a statement than anything, but I amuse him with a nod anyways. There’s a cigarette flaring up between his fingers. His hand twitches a little like he’s wanting to take a drag, but his eyes are fixed on my shoes, now, like he’s still coming to terms with the fact I’m a foreign body in his domain.

My toes curl up tight in my shoes – there’s that prick of anticipation again. Ice-cold, you could easily mistake it as dread.

Rust doesn’t exactly subject me to an imploring look—not really his style—but he bows his head down just slightly – that’s sign enough for me. He wants to know why I’m here, and he no doubt wants to know the quickest way to be rid of me.

I sigh. I ask him.

My body trembles, and he notices it, records it, stores it away for later reference, for some other time he’ll find that it and me will contribute to his purpose.

Rust has a face of stone. I get to know it well as I search for a sign there that might let me know what lies beneath. But, of course, a statue is solid through and through. Sharp angles and smooth planes carved hollow. If he’s cold to the touch, I’d like to reach out and be sure. Is he cold where a man ought to be warm? Christ, it makes my pulse jump just to think about it.

There is no greater purpose or cruel intention underlying my words, as far as I’m concerned. Rust, however, lingers there, with his arm up on the door, barricading the entrance, while he peels back and flits over every layer of possible meaning, his attention fixed absently on my left ear.

He then looks at me—briefly—in the eyes, with a sort of paralysing intensity. Even the tingling in my fingers ceases to be.

It takes a moment, pregnant with the chorus of cicadas, crickets and other night-creatures, before he steps back neatly to allow me in.

The door clicks softly behind me as I enter into a room that’s bare as bare can be.

Rust grunts, coming up around me and into the kitchen area. “Want anything?” he mumbles around his cigarette, other hand shoved in his pocket. He’s still half-dressed in his work clothes, his tie strewn on the counter, his blazer slumped over a rickety picnic chair perched up in front of a wall of crime scenes and dead bodies. My eyes linger there—how can they not?

“A beer,” I tell him, still looking at those photographs, then at the stacks upon stacks of books. Philosophy, ethics, religion. Names I’d expect only those with PhDs to know.

“Don’t think you’ve had ‘nuff to drink already?”

I shoot him a look. “I think I can handle it, Rust.” He straightens up, raises his brow. I snort, reasoning, “I’ll only have one.”

“One,” he agrees, opening up the fridge and having a rummage around.

White walls and all of them empty, like some sort of psych ward. Half-sure Rust actually did do some time in that type of care, though, so—shouldn’t make any quips about that. I don’t want him thinking I think he’s crazy – he gets enough of that, I’m sure.

Back at my place, though, I’ve got posters or drawings or paintings up around every corner. My niece’s drawing of a mermaid sits on my dresser, and photographs of my family are displayed in the hallway. One up by the TV, I painted myself when I was in high school. About two years after I graduated, they asked if I wanted my portfolio back, and I’d obviously said yes. And I love my stuff! Some ‘cause it’s pretty, others because of memories and whatnot. Guess some people don’t have that creative trait, or they lose it. Or maybe they detest the sentiments, those strings that have been, are and will be attached to things. When my cousin broke up with her boyfriend, she cut her hair and burned his clothes. “I just want to forget him,” she’d snarled. I’d sputtered a laugh into my tea.

Rust plants a Corona down on the counter, already cracked open.

There’s no mirror in here either – I can’t check whether I look as desperate as I feel. When I focus back on him, Rust is taking a swig from his own beer, turning to glance at the crucifix pinned above the messy mattress on the floor. Huh. Didn’t peg him as a Christian.

His honey-blond hair doesn’t look cold to the touch, that’s for sure ‘n’ certain. Wonder if he just wakes up like that or what. Once, Marty had been teasing him at work, even cracking a smile out of the old guy. “Ain’t them just the prettiest curls y’ever seen, buck?” he’d remarked, nudging into me, cooing at him. Silently, in my head, even then, I’d agreed: prettiest curls I’d ever seen. Rust hadn’t looked up to chart my reaction, but, if he had, he’d maybe have seen my fidgeting fingers or hitch of breath. Or maybe he felt it, heard it.

“Sorry to barge in on you like this,” I offer pathetically through a nervous smile.

He blinks, takes another swig, leaning over the counter that separates us. “No, y’aint.”

Jesus, I have to turn my head and shut my eyes for a second. I don’t particularly believe in God, but I ask Him to please give me the strength to resist my urges and act like a normal damn person for at least a few more minutes. And then I apologise for only praying out of convenience. In the face of temptation. This is why people shouldn’t drink – still, doesn’t stop me from downing a good part of my beer.

I turn to the wall and try to turn myself off a little bit. It’s not hard – Rust still has Dora Lange (rest her soul) pinned up on his wall, naked, blue, stiff. I don’t want to know why, so I don’t ask him.

His eyes are adamant on the side of my head. Funny how he never seems to look at me at the same time I’m looking at him. Pisses me off a lot of the time – not just him, but in general. A lot of people share this same fear of not being heard, not being listened to and not being cared about. Men in particular, I’ve noticed, have a tendency to raise their voice over others’, to yell or shout or hit things or push ‘n’ shove. Marty’s that way – a lot of men at the precinct are, too. Women who are raised to be the listeners sometimes act out in the same way, frustrated at all the things they have to care about that men don’t, burdened with manners and politeness. I used to hate having to listen, to wait for the man who interrupted me to finish speaking. Rust always lets people finish their point, for better and for worse. Pisses me off in a different type of way. I can feel his judgement seeping out of him, so potent that’s it’s tangible, lapping at my feet.

He doesn’t push and shove – he’s a listener, too. Of course, he has that male privilege where his silence has a gravity, a magnetic pull, where mine is simply as is. At least he pays attention. Sure, on the surface, it might look like he doesn’t care at all, hunched over a case file at his desk, back turned to me and the rest of the lot, but proximity has its power – assigned workspaces put with his personality, and he knows what’s like and unlike me better than my sister. He’s reading into my refusal to talk, to face him – unlike me.

“So, you’ve given this some thought, then,” Rust says matter-of-factly, and my tummy bubbles up.

I snicker nervously, heart racing. God, I’d expected surprise, disbelief, outright refusal, maybe even a little disgust, but, when I manage to turn around and look at his face again, it just seems to me like a calmness. Stoicism found in the affirmation, maybe, of his expectations. It’s like I’m walking right into one of those little theories of his: a proved hypothesis.

I take another sip from my beer, feeling too shy for my liking. “Well, yeah,” I drawl, slumping over the kitchen counter and propping my chin up to look right back at him in a surge of liquid confidence. “I always think ‘fore I do anything that’s anything, Rust.”

Almost immediately, he retreats, standing up straight and resting the small of his back against the lip of the sink behind him. He hums, glances away. “We both know that’s a lie,” he combats, hands tucked into his pockets, chin tilted up, eyes down. A mouthful of beer numbs the sting of rejection. “What you mean is you think you can justify all your decisions. You think you can justify why you knocked on my door and said what you said—” he elaborates quietly, eliciting a snort from me, “—but, at the end o’ the day, all your decisions boil down to what you feel is right, not what is right.”

“‘n' you think you ‘n’ you alone know what’s right?”

Slate-grey eyes flit up and down my face, like I’m a specimen on a slide.

“I think that the girl who’s stumbled up on a fella’s door asking him to fuck her is less inclined to know, without bias, what’s right, yes.”

I swallow thickly, sucking the remaining flavour of beer off of my tongue before going in for another swig.

Christ.

Not a single bat of his eyes. Not a quiver of his mouth, not a twitch to his nose, not a morsel of natural, human hesitation. Does he have to be so crass? I did the courtesy of making it palatable, at least to my own ears, with a euphemism. But when have I ever known Rust Cohle to water anything down? No drink I’ve ever consumed will match his body’s preference of alcohol content. He’s nursing his beer close to his chest, but who knows what poisons lay dormant in these cabinets?

“Rusty,” I say lowly, maybe asking for a break – I close my eyes for just a second, part because I couldn’t bear it if I caught some sort of disapproval on his face, and part because it’s just past two o’clock in the morning.

Late nights have consumed my life recently, what with that sicko rapist connected to a Christian fertility cult. Children of God – “go forth and multiply”. His confession had turned my blood cold. Johansson had offered to sit in the box instead, but I did it anyway. I went home and cried over it, then came into work the next day to talk to some press and then receive my new assignment.

He hums, taking a drag from his cigarette, swallowing the smoke down. Rust knows how it is. To be honest, I’m probably the one who doesn’t know the half of it. One night at the office, he’d casually confessed to his insomnia, like he was just commenting on the state of the weather ‘n’ nothin’ else. So, I guess I won’t pretend to get it.

I gnaw on the inside of my cheek. “Are you into that whole abstinence thing?”

The weak light above flickers gently as he pauses, turns the question over in his mind. Anyone else would’ve surely laughed.

“I believe that man is susceptible to desire, yes—but he can resist it and its consequences should his willpower be stronger than the false promises posed by that temptation.

I snort again, because, now, I really am tipsy, and I can’t hold in my attitude any longer. It’s not that I think he’s lost it or whatever. It’s just—he’s so—objectively—absurd. Well—“objectively”. He’s got points, but those points lose all meaning in the spiralling darkness of overthought and deep contemplation wherein he’ll explain that everything really means nothing—and he’ll be right about that, sure, but also unintentionally prove a point about himself. I’d ask him what it means when, in a world where everything means nothing, a child will give their friend a flower found on the way to school, but I feel like his answer would be too morbid for my liking. Does that make me an unreliable source? The fact that I want to live?

He's absurd. He’s also a little bit awry in the head. Don’t know what he’s lost or what he’s lookin’ for, but it’s not a good look on him. He’s honest, yes – that’s a good trait. But honesty without kindness is cruelty. And he is kind – underneath, he’s kind, and I know that because of how hard he works to weed out evil people in this world, most times at his own risk. That’s kindness, albeit unconventional, whether he realises it or not.

The kindness almost cancels out his arrogance.

“So, what?” I challenge under the guise of a teasing grin. “You can go mouthin’ off for hours on end about how up themselves religious people and all’at are, but you can’t draw the similarities between their philosophy and your philosophy? How does that work, Rust?”

While I was working that Children of God nightmare of a case, he just couldn’t seem to restrain himself – every bullshit word that left him revealed to me his hubris. Now, I’m not angry, and he’s not stupid – we’re not arguing. In fact, he seems intrigued, lean body shifted toward me. He sets his beer down on the counter, crosses his arms over his chest after securing his cigarette between his lips, and lowers his head as if to listen to me better.

I sigh, continue. “D’you know what I think? I think you oversimplify humanity. You’re a great detective—‘nd I guess you know it—and, within the confines of your job, it serves you well, makes you good in the box. But your assumptions are too general. People are who they are, sure, but they also decide to be those people. By their environment and those who surround ‘em, people make the decisions that define ‘em. A lot of the time, their circumstances ain’t fair. People born into badness are trapped by the badness—either physically, or up in their heads—and they have a tough time escapin’ it.”

Rust inhales the smoke again, the only evidence of it happening being the soft whisp that curls away from his nose. I wonder to myself how his lungs are still standing.

“‘s that how you explain that—homicide case you’re workin’ on?” Three-year-old boy died of neglect, his siblings found locked in cabinets, one in a dog cage, by their mother and stepfather. Rust’s eyes flash silver. “Killer had a tough time?”

Asshole.

I narrow my eyes dangerously. “Don’t be mean, Rusty,” I scold, and he blinks in concession. “I think evil exists. I think it’s complicated. I think you summarise things that ought not to be summarised.”

He’s silent for a heartbeat. Then, his hand comes up to pinch away his cigarette, and he waves it in a small flourish, explaining, “When I say “people”, I mean society. Human culture.”

“Last I checked, Rust, you don’t know everybody on the planet. You don’t know their “culture”, or experiences.” That seems to shut him up. My eyes wander to his broad shoulders, trail along the meat of his arms beneath the cheap, polyester shirt that hugs close to the muscle, and they linger there like the quiet that settles between us.

He nods slowly, once. “Our decisions define us?”

I bob my head, unabashedly staring at the elegant column of his throat, his neck, and the stretch of tan skin that is settled beneath the white undershirt revealed by the first one, two, three buttons which have recently been undone.

He’s quieter when he asks me, “Well, how does this decision define you, then?” There’s nothing malicious about the way he says it, or even lustful – just a calm curiosity.

“Ain’t it obvious?” I grin again, laugh a little, blush hotly. “I’m horny!” I hide my face in my shoulder, trying to compose the hiccups of laughter in my stomach. “I’m sorry,” I snicker, wiping my palm over my brow, my eyes. “This probably isn’t very attractive to you.”

“You’re a very pretty girl,” he replies. He mutters my name solemnly, like we’re in a formal meeting or something.

I glance up, check whether he’ll offer me eye contact again, but he doesn’t – he’s staring at the wall, lost.

I scoff. “You’re a very pretty guy, Rust.”

God willing, none of the boys at the precinct will ever find out about this. If Marty lets it slip that I even asked for Rust’s address, then I’ll never hear the end of it. Worse, everyone’ll think I’m dead-gone over him. Guess I don’t really fit the standards expected of women around here: “wife”, or “whore”. Or “dead”. It’s hard enough to be taken seriously going about pretending I’m not interested in sex at all. Once sex comes into the equation, I’ll be reduced to that and nothing else.

Anxious, I start flicking up under my fingernails. Is Rust already starting to think those things, too? I’m a great detective, but that’s the only capacity in which he’s really known me.

I wring the neck of my bottle. “I should explain—”

He holds his hand up, stating, “I don’t need you to. Do you feel the need to?”

Curious, wary, I watch his face, a blank slate. Still waters run deep. My eyes drift down, to where his hands are together in front of him, one relaxed beside him the other curled around his wrist with two fingers resting on the pulse.

“No,” I reply.

“You thought it over,” he says, eyes tilting up at the ceiling, aloof, bored, maybe. His words are sort of monotone, like he’s reciting a passage from a book that he’s just recently read: “You chose me because you know me. You haven’t been sleeping well. You’re stressed, you’re scared, you’re frustrated.” He blinks. “You’re attracted to me due to some—unfortunate trigger beyond your control in the reptilian part of your brain.” Brief as the flicker of a candle in a still room, he looks over me, brow raised slightly as if daring me to tell him that he’s wrong. He pauses again, takes a short puff. “It makes you think I can take care o’ your needs.”

Look at the state of him: sallow and wilting on the inside. Reducing me down to a sentence or two, and being right about it.

“Well, can you?” I ask weakly, feeling small. He looks over me, blinks blankly. “How do you take care of your needs?” No reply. “You do have needs, don’t you?” I remark, tapping the rim of my bottle to my warm temple. “Programming ‘n’ whatnot.”

He tilts his head away in dismissal.

I smile, more to myself than to him. “Beat off in the shower, is it?”

For a second, Rust is still. My eyes grow heavy, admiring the strong profile of his nose. He then nods helplessly, like there’s no point in trying to lie.

I hum, a soft, self-satisfied smirk edging its way onto my face. “Must feel like a sin,” I snicker.

He squints slightly, like he disagrees with my logic, but does not interrupt to protest.

“I remember takin’ baths as a teenager and double-checkin’, triple-checkin’ I locked the door,” I confess. “Couldn’t take my time. ‘S that how it is for you, Rust?” I probe, tilting my head to the side, losing his eyes as quickly as I catch them. “You ever let yourself enjoy it? Let yourself want it—?”

“I don’t want it,” he snaps quietly.

“But your programmin’ says you do, right?” I point out, scrambling to hold onto the flaw in his argument. I search his face, my own bright, eager.

He quirks up a miraculous smile, and I myself burst into a wide grin. Still smiling—though, you’d have to admit, it’s such a strange sight, sort of gratifying, almost patronising—he shifts his weight between his feet, scratches at his nose with his pinkie, sniffs, takes a long drag of his dying cigarette. I know he must feel disjointed, though he doesn’t show it: he’s misstepped, and I’ve caught him. And how often does Rust Cohle misstep? I should’ve checked the news for a blue moon tonight.

Interested, now, is he? Breathing quietly, rolling his jaw – he’s entertaining the competition I have goin’ up in my head. From the looks of the gentle smirk on his face, he’s enjoying it, too.

“No,” he corrects with a dry husk to his voice. “No, I know what I want, and, when I think those things are necessary or useful, I know how to get them.”

In this type of context, I’d like to see him try. Though, he is an undeniably attractive man. Thick, solid all the way through, like a rich wood. But he’s got these brittle eyes: fraying.

He continues: “Most of the time, though, what we want is born out of dangerous feelings, like rage or lust. Ruminating on the consequences of those potential actions seems to me the more sensible thing to do than to just leave it and find out.” I sniff. “Desire is inescapable for most, including the sexual kind. I feel it—“ he eyes how I wriggle beneath my skin, “—you feel it. But it can be resisted. You’re lettin’ it dictate what you do ‘n’ say. If I do to you what you want me to, have you thought about how it might affect things down the line? Tomorrow, next week, next month—?”

“Yes,” I hiss, a little too emotionally, such that a gleam of satisfaction crosses his grey eyes at the strain and stretch of my voice. Christ. Desperate much?

I take several seconds to think before allowing myself to speak again, all while staring at him straight on and refusing to look away: I’d just die if I let him catch me out. “Well, how can you be sure of the fallout? How do you know the good won’t outweigh the bad? Not “you” specifically, but, also, yeah, “you” specifically. I can think about something morally ambiguous, and I can evaluate the potential consequences, and, just as you are satisfied to observe, I will decide to follow through with this somethin’ and deal with what I gotta deal.”

He sighs. “Because decisions define a person?”

I tuck my hair tight behind my ears. “Yes.”

And he hums – that beautiful noise resonates in my stomach before sinking down there, low, its weight a comfort. “I agree with you in that respect,” he admits.

A laugh erupts out of me like the sputter of an engine. Luckily, I’m easy to laughter – it’s like me, as is my genuine grin. “Rust Cohle’s agreein’ with me on somethin’?—Call the police!”

“We are the police,” he replies smartly, watching me snort and smile and grow flushed in the face. I feel very grateful to that beer – at least my giddiness can be blamed on the effects of alcohol and save me from embarrassment.

As I simmer down, he looks away, adds, “I agree to an extent. People all think that they’re one-of-a-kind. That they make these—amazing decisions. They speak and do and walk and play and work and fuck and eventually die – all of ‘em.”

“You’re part of the people,” I argue.

He hums, nodding in acceptance. “Yes.”

“If a person acts due to their instinct, whether it’s succumbing to it or fighting against it, then isn’t man simply his programming?” He lowers his head. “You can be aware of it, and you can be a part of it, too. Who are you to deny yourself the good parts?”

He fiddles with his cigarette, svelte fingers nimble and acute. I cross my legs, flex my hips; he notices.

“Because of the consequences,” he replies, a soft whisper.

I thought that everything meant fuck-all?

For someone who sees no meaning in life, he sure seems to spend a lot of time contemplating it. Here, I thought I’d have hot hands sliding all over me, gripping, spreading, pushing, but instead find myself defence in an unprecedented debate.

Rust is breathing slower, deeper, almost unable, now, to look me in the eyes, even look at me in general, whereas, before, it had been a choice, whether that choice be conscious or unconscious. His cigarette burns weakly in his fingers, forgotten. The muscle in his jaw flexes, his expression hollow.

My body buzzes with want, leaves me scrambling for breath like I’ve just run a race. I want. I want, I want, I want. The rough pads of his fingertips, the surest and most confident I’ll have ever known. Sharp tongue, quick and precise. Something about how he smells. All my compliments to pheromones – even in the heavy musk of the bar, I’d smelled him, ashy, warm, alive, and now it’s wreathing all around. Or maybe that’s just me – it’s like when you try to take someone’s pulse with your thumb, and all you’re feeling is your own heartbeat.

I want – my breath trembles with it.

“Rust,” I say softly. He shakes his head a little, looking away still, vulnerable like a wild animal. I sigh, gnawing at my lip. “I really want it. I—I’ve—it’s not just a rash decision,” I explain. “I’ve wanted it for a while, now.”

He shudders – I notice. “Since when?”

I huff out a sheepish laugh, fix my eyes on my restless hands. “You won’t remember it—”

“I will.”

His voice sounds clogged. It sobers me right up.

“A year back,” I tell him. “You were working at the office—late, in the dark. You called me, and I asked you why, and you said—it was because you were tired and thinkin’.” I glance up to check if he’s maybe looking, but he’s not – he’s turned his head even further away. The soft, gentle curls of his hair tempt me.

Blindly reaching for the bottle, securing it almost immediately, he finishes the rest of his beer, then sets it back down.

“I—” he begins, scratching his nose, “—I was—tired.” He pauses to re-thicken his voice. “And—thinking—”

He doesn’t finish his sentence, but the both of us know what he said that night: Of you. Thinking of you—of me .

My stomach flips, leaving me almost nauseous, just like it did when I first heard those words. At first, I thought I’d misheard, that I was so tired my mind was playing tricks on me. Then, I thought he was being cruel, or maybe he was drunk. Those two instances weren’t—aren’t—unlike him, but he never, ever calls to be mean or to be stupid. He’d been quiet and warm through the phone after that, a presence so thick I could’ve sworn he had his arms around me right then. I hadn’t slept well for a time, then, of course, and that made it all the more vivid. His voice had made me shiver all the way through as he told me he had to get back to work.

When I saw him the next morning, I couldn’t look at him. It was the first time I couldn’t, not wouldn’t. It was also the first time I felt him paying attention to me.

I shift, ask the question I’d wondered since that call: “Why?”

A pause.

Then: “You brought me coffee that morning,” he explains softly, speaking to the wall opposite. “I was—looking at the mug on my desk – it was yours. Green one you like to use.” He sniffs. “And…” He teeters on the precipice of that word but does not finish the thought.

Hmm. That’s something to think about. Rust Cohle thinking about me and not picking apart why and why he shouldn’t be. It had been a mindless enough gesture – it’s not unheard of me to be makin’ coffee for other people in the office, not because I have to but because I like to. For the people I can stand, that is: Johansson always, and him for me; Cathleen; Marty, when I’m not pissed off at him; and Rust, from time to time. Everybody knows that green mug is mine, though – nobody touches it, not even the boss. Rust reads far too much into things. Most of the time, he’s dead-on. I should’ve known from the moment I placed that coffee on his desk, from the sharpening of his eyes (that did not spare me a glance) that lingered on my lingering hand on his table, that he knew. Figured out something I hadn’t even quite figured out myself. Not until later that night.

I wonder if he’s ever thought of me when fucking his own hand. I wonder if he thinks about me sometimes, when he can’t sleep, in between horror stories and brutal blows and uncovering the secret truths of the universe. I do, sometimes.

When I push myself back to my feet, stand up, Rust’s attention springs back, and he watches me, looks at me.

Quietly, I relish in the satisfaction of his stare, crossing on light feet to toss my empty beer bottle in the bin. He steps aside to let me open the cupboard under the sink, his hand curled in a loose fist by his side. I’m not trying to tease him – I grant him the space he so clearly needs, retreating about five paces back, leaning slightly myself against the counter.

I could say anything right now, no matter how insane, and he’d treat it with total and utter respect. I could reveal to him the reaction my body has to seeing his fingers fiddle like that with his cigarette, and he’d manage to identify the cogs and wheels in what, when you step back, actually turns out to be a hidden machine. Christ, I could probably remove all of my clothes, stand naked in front of him, and he’d look on as one would look on at a piece of evidence at work. Going over the details, once, twice, scribbling it all down in that big, leather ledger.

Here’s what I think: he needs it. For all his talk about how unoriginal, how predictable mammals are at the end of things, he probably knows that himself. The tension in his jaw, the perpetual tightness of breath. That clipped way of talking he has, wound so tight around himself, like a compressed spring fighting its natural urge to let go.

I could make him let go. Maybe. I wish he’d let me try. It’s nothing possessive, really: wanting to be the one to unravel his tightly coiled body. Just—the release of seeing him be. No thinking in particular – just being.

He is still, however, uncommonly mute, avoiding my eyes.

I sigh. I ask him tentatively, “You think I ought’a be ashamed o’ myself?” biting down on the fleshy inside of my cheek.

“No,” he contradicts.

“But—you think I should be findin’ my fun elsewhere, with—some other guy?”

He sort of pins his hands behind his back, pressing his weight against them there at the edge of the sink. He looks a lot taller from this angle. “I think there’s a lotta fellas stumblin’ over themselves to be with a girl like you.”

“Maybe,” I scoff, “but my reptilian brain don’t want none of ‘em.“ I blush warmly when I glance up and he’s there watching me, though there’s no bashfulness at all on his side of it.

I expect him to maybe dart his eyes away again, like he does, and then walk me to the door, maybe even to the car if I haven’t offended him too badly, and then call it a night. I could stuff it in; I can compartmentalise. Monday would carry on as it always does, except now without the wondering and the yearning and the delusion. Did he have to be so good-looking? His cheap, wrinkled shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows—like they are now—and those lean forearms braced up on the table, caging in the neatly set-out notes scrawled up in his ledger, like they have mind to escape. And he’s—beautiful. He’s tall. Out-of-place sort of tall, where he has this bend to his neck, sometimes, as to not draw attention to himself. Other times, though, he stands to full height, regal, elegant, authoritative, like when he comes out o’ the box.

He sees into people. He feels it all so deeply.

And he’s looking at me, seeing into me, deeply. His eyes are brittle like china pieced back together with store-bought glue. The low light casts long shadows down his neck and harsh face.

“Come here to me, Rust,” I say to him, beckoning him over with a tilt of my head. To my surprise, he does. He does immediately, peeling himself off the counter, eyes drifting somewhere just behind me as if disinterested.

He stubs his cigarette out on an old plate, abandons it there officially, before stepping slowly towards me, feet never dragging, dodging my searching eyes like the plague.

Hmm. Maybe I made a good argument “for” to his “against”. Or maybe he was never “against” to begin with. I’ll watch him carefully tomorrow and see if there was anything I missed.

I reach up and touch his face gently. I used to do this with my husband before he passed, and he’d close his eyes and whisper my name and lean into the touch, tender, loving – my fingers shake slightly with the memory. Rust Cohle does none of that, because he is nothing like my husband. He’s perfectly rigid against my fingertips; his stare flits briefly up right into my soul, his mouth pressed in a hard line. Everything about him is so sharp. The ridge of his cheekbones, the defiant slant of his nose. The lean muscle of his arms and shoulders, slightly sinewy just beneath the skin.

But when I brush my thumbs up along his eyebrows, easing the sharp line between them, he sighs and closes his eyes, neck bowing down, still as stiff as before, just—different. A small gap, an opening, to that locked room of his upstairs.

“Rust,” I whisper, nose brushing his. He hums again, lowly, eyes shut. “What do you think of us havin’ sex?”

“Sex,“ he replies softly, “is the illusion of connection constituted by the release of a mess of happy hormones, simply by touching all the right places—and nothin’ more.”

I hum and watch the look on his face grow brittle as our breaths mingle closely. God, he’s so near to me that my head swings in a bout of lightheadedness, heady, vision centring in on him and only him, such that I wouldn’t know if this place was burning down all around, even if the flames started eating us alive.

“I think you’re full o’ shit, Rusty. Know how I know that?”

He sighs shakily. “How?” It’s like the word is dragged right from the pit of his chest, barely a breath to show for the effort of it.

“I can feel you against my leg.”

He swallows thickly, but he does not blush, and he does not open his eyes. And, contrary to what he might seem, Rust is not cold like stone. When my fingers grow more confident, when they trace and drag lightly along the line of his cheeks, he is warm there. His pulse, when I find it, exists and is hot and slightly erratic, a fact that leaves my mouth dry and open. I can feel the inflexion of his throat as he swallows again, the shift of the skin and the rhythm of his heartbeat, the gentle influence of his breathing.

I wait for him to say something, but he doesn’t. So, I ask him, “Can I kiss you?” ever so gently.

Softer still, he replies, “Yes,” with that slight Southern whistle of his, barely moving.

Give me strength. Give me strength.

That look on his face is filling me with a delicious, vibrating power. As I stretch my neck up to brush a kiss against the corner of his mouth, my eyes are open and watching him, charting him: Rust breathes strongly out of his nose, eyes still determinedly shut, like he’s absent and meditating. He is not tough as stone – parts of him are soft. He barely returns the kiss, but, as far as my brain processes, his lips are soft. Hesitant, maybe.

Then, these soft lips part, and he is sucking in a hot, shuddering breath, capturing me in a deep kiss, as if to breathe all of me in, a strong hand threading through my hair. It hurts a little at first – a small noise escapes my throat at the slight shoots of pain tugging at the roots – but Rust doesn’t seem to notice. Not at first. No, he’s still breathing me in. His lips are dry, rough, a push and tug, a twist, and he’s kissing like a punch, knocking the breath right out of my lungs. Whatever oxygen I manage to hold onto is sucked out of me promptly.

I whine, my body going all slack and tired as he smooths the hair out of my face, palms dragging clean back across my cheeks. Those hands cradle the back of my head, making it impossible to keep my eyes open.

Content, I sigh, eyes succumbing to the sensation and falling shut. The last thing I see is his own eyes slipping open to look at my face.

Boy, he’s a good kisser. Must be that lizard brain he has such a distaste for.

My fingers blindly reach and fumble at his belt, hooking into the waist, pulling him flush against me. Rust must forget what he’s doing for a moment, and he pauses where he is, in limbo, eyes far away. When I begin to unthread his belt from its quietly clinking buckle, he goes stiff again, blinks rapidly before perceiving me.

Holy shit, he’s gorgeous.

His hands hover over my shoulders, not quite committed to the contact.

He’s seeing me—really seeing me—as I unzip his trousers and spit crudely into my palm and curl around the length of him, warm, tight. I begin to understand the gentle throb and strain he feels, a delightful thrill running rapid all through my insides. He feels deliciously alive.

But then he turns his head away, neck straining up, breath choked back in his throat. His hands come away, raised, it looks like, as if trying to seem non-confrontational, trying to come away unscathed from a bad situation.

My stomach burns with desire. “Let yourself like it, Rust,” I mumble against his cheek. “Are you here with me?”

I can feel him swallow.

“Yes,” he responds. I guide his face to me, stroking his cock confidently once, twice, as encouragement, maybe. Temptation. Whatever you want to call it. My mouth waters, my head goes airy, when I feel his sex twitch in my embrace.

“Kiss me again, then.”

And he does. Brows furrowed as if in pain, he does, with the tip of his nose dragging and pressing into my cheek. He kisses me sweetly once, then again, and then pants down hotly into my mouth, hovering there before sliding his tongue deep inside, close, smooth.

I let myself love it. I let myself let go with every kiss he blesses me with, growing looser and easier and lighter each second.

The weight of him in my hand inspires a beautiful urge to have him lay down and let me feel every part of his body. Even though his hips stutter, he doesn’t buck up into my fist, doesn’t whine, doesn’t moan, doesn’t curse. Not yet. He just breathes and breathes, and kisses me and kisses me, like it’s all he was set on Earth to do. All he’s allowing himself to do.

Desperate, perhaps, my thighs are pressed against his, feeling unnaturally weak and warm. The throb between my legs coincides with my heart rushing in my ears, a steady ache, impatient. Part of me wants to drag this out as long as possible, because what if this never happens again?—and another part wants to push him inside me already, have him fill me up, fuck me stupid.

This thought stuffs me up to the brim, like cotton punched down into a pillowcase. I whine shallowly and try to slot his thigh between my own.

A switch in his brain must flick on.

It’s like he’s inside my head, like he’s in on my desperation, like he can see and feel every sinful image and thought circulating my alighted brain. He knows it all so well, such that he uses his hips to press us firmly against the counter, spreads my legs with the nudge of his foot between mine, and immediately pushes the rough pads of his fingers right where I need it, through the fabric of my skirt, letting me grind myself against him, hips and all. He circles there generously. I can feel my need dripping from me. He can too, no doubt.

I sigh, he breathes. I gasp, he breathes. My eyes flutter open and shut, but he looks on, eyes half-lidded but stare immovable.

He then lifts his knee to place against my cunt.

“That feels good, don’t it?” he says gently, rocking me over his knee up and down, back and forth, fingers digging into the soft skin of my hips.

My legs widen. When I gasp out weakly, he raises his brow and scans my face, like he had predicted the shaky, wordless nod that I offer to him too late in return.

“Did you want it like this, girl?” His voice is low, intimate, a hit of something just shy of addictive. “Or did you want somethin’ else, too?”

He kisses the hollow of my neck.

His other hand grips at my ass, up my skirt, kneading the flesh there, manipulating it, and his fingers ghost my slit, spreading me around his knee. He fucks up into my hand. I slide my fingers through his hair, which is soft and warm like butter.

Fuck him. Fuck him and his stupid, pretty curls. I’ve proved my point: regardless of whatever act he may try to put on afterwards, we’ll both know that Rust isn’t as numb as he wants to be, that I made him feel good, that I made him want me, and that he’s hot-blooded and thrumming with life. I can feel how alive he is . I hope he thinks of this again some time, whether by himself or surrounded by people. I hope it drives him a bit mad, remembering this.

A hot, sharp breath fans out across my cheek, his mouth slotting back over mine, open, daring me.

I rut against his knee, my fingers teasing the wet head of his cock. I look down between us, at my hand on him, with half a mind to drop onto my knees and make him cum down my throat.

Rust lets out a grunt and swallows hard again.

Then, he gently grabs my wrist and pulls my hand out of his pants, leaving me dazed and confused. With nimble fingers, he unzips my skirt, pushing it over my hips and dragging his hands over my bare skin. He asks me, “You want the bed?”

I step out of the pool of fabric around my feet, slide my shoes off. “‘s not a bed.”

I slide my fingers beneath his sweaty, white undershirt, feeling the taut muscle there, feeling the steady breaths that contradict his racing pulse. He holds my eyes, dipping slightly when I dip, tilting when I tilt. “Seems like one to me.”

How unlike him.

A smile spreads over my face, and his pupils blow wide, dark, imploring. “You wait ‘n’ see what happens when the dust-mites turn up.”

His eyes on me alone are enough to leave me breathless, chest caving in on itself. Of course, when he kisses me softly, it only makes things worse – his long fingers curl around the base of my throat, watching me watching him, and his other hand slides up under the hem of my blouse, palm spread over my bellybutton.

I sigh, try not to squirm.

“You want the bed?” he repeats, heavy, rough. I bite back a needy whine that sits at the back of my mouth. His fingertips press down slightly into my pulse, tightening my breathing.

I nod. “Yeah.”

Think of all the times I’ve sulked over his lack of eye contact with me. Was I annoying? Uninteresting? That, obviously, was an immature way of looking at things, definitely not improved by my distinct femininity undergoing some kind of unspoken disapproval by most I met on the job. This is the most present he has ever been in a moment with me around.

As he pulls himself away, steps back, his eyes are darting over my face, less like he’s judging me and more like he’s trying to find and memorise every detail. I do that, sometimes: if I pay well enough attention, it feels like I’m re-living the moment when remembering.

His hands slot sensibly into his pockets as if his cock isn’t blushing and poking out of his fly right now, belt undone, hanging low about his narrow hips.

Legs don’t fail me now. I slink out of the glowing kitchen and carry on to where the mattress lies in a dim, blue corner, the strange crucifix watching over, a long shadow cast over the empty wall upon which it hangs. He follows shortly behind me, his warmth radiating out onto my back.

I pause and look out onto the darkness revealed behind the half-open slats of the floor-to-ceiling blinds that shield the room from the window to the outside world.

Rust’s presence is intoxicating behind me. He smells like cigarette smoke, still, enticing. I’m trying to quit, but he makes it damn hard. His nose is just shy of my hair, his body so close to enveloping me into him – the prospect of it makes me shiver in delight. I must hallucinate his fingertips along my spine.

I unbutton my blouse with slow fingers, then slide it off and undo my bra.

His breathing is level and grounding by my ear as he comes close, sliding his strong, wide hand up my stomach, along my ribs, and cups under my soft breast. He rubs over my nipple in gentle circles before squeezing over me warmly. He then comes around to pinch the creamy tissue gentle between his fingers and thumb, closing his hot mouth over, drawing along his feverish tongue. I sigh, stroke his hair, let him press soft pecks and kisses to the curve of the soft flesh and to my sternum.

My fingers, cupped around the nape of his neck, dip under the collar, cool. This touch, for some reason, causes him to make some sort of breathless, pathetic noise against me. His eyes are half-shut.

“Anything else philosophical y’wanna get out before we fuck?” I quip smartly (though, not feeling so smart altogether), hand placed innocently on his hip.

He lifts his head, removes his hands from my body – he looks so tragically beautiful in this light. “You want me inside you?” he asks genuinely, seemingly aloof to the fact I’m naked in front of him, open and wanton and pressing my thighs together, his eyes never drifting from mine.

“What do you want, Rust?” I whisper.

He seems to really think about it – he’s always thinking. Briefly, his eyes flit down to my mouth. Then, he looks away, scratches at his forehead.

After a moment longer, he swallows thickly and tips his head down over to the bed, tells me, “Lie down on the mattress,” in a gentle, decisive tone. He’s so soft-spoken – it makes my toes curl.

I do as told, transfixed by the dark shadow in his eyes, and sink down to sit and then recline back on his coarse mattress, coarse bedsheets, with my weight on my forearms and chin tilted up towards him. He watches me, tucking his thick cock back into his underwear.

Still fully dressed in his work attire, he takes a step forward, looming over me, powerful, assertive. Saliva pools in my mouth—again—as I play with the thought of him sitting heavy on my tongue with his stomach tight, shaking, hands in my hair, fucking down my throat. I would let him. Hell, I’d probably let him do anything he wanted to me at this point.

Does he know that? Maybe. I don’t know.

As he reaches his hand out too smooth the hair out of my face, I try to figure it out, but I can’t – he seems too wrapped up in his own desire to be thinking anything at the moment. I feel a flicker of satisfaction jump up in the pit of my stomach. Or maybe that’s something else.

“Lie back, girl,” he tells me.

My cunt flexes.

I thump onto my back, breathless. “Take off your shirt, Rust.”

Without replying, he sinks down to his knees in front of me, my thighs. Instinctively, I prop myself up and watch him unbutton that wrinkled shirt all the way down, shrug it over his broad shoulders. I could fuck myself silly just over the thought of those shoulders, I remark inwardly. He tugs the wifebeater over his head, lean muscles catching the low light, strong, study, solid, and tosses the thing to the side thoughtlessly. My hands reach out to touch him, to feel him and know him. When my fingers press into his skin, glide up his neck and down over his chest, he sighs deeply. He then carefully removes my hands, urging me to sprawl down under him.

“Said lie back, didn’t I?”

Rust doesn’t say another word before placing his large hands on my knees and easing them apart, lowering himself to press pecks and slow, open-mouthed kisses to my thighs, closer, closer, stroking my sensitive skin gently. I almost flinch at his every touch, like it burns. His face is awful serious, like he’s concentrating. I wriggle in anticipation, eager.

“Rust,” I whisper purposelessly. He looks up, hums, searches my face for anything the matter.

I watch on desperately, on the brink of feral distress. A sob clogs my throat as he kisses my fluttering stomach, ducking his head down and curling his forearms, his hands, around my thighs. The dark stamp of his bone-bird tattoo curls over his arm. I realise he is waiting for my attention to return to him, his eyes patient but glazed over with something cardinal. Hungry.

“Can—?”

“Yes.”

He hums. And then he breathes hotly over my underwear before pressing his nose right there into the damp fabric, inhaling my scent there. I whimper at the pressure he applies with the strong bridge of his nose, at the wetness of his open mouth against me. He breathes heavily into me, groaning slightly beneath it all – I can’t tell past the thrumming of my heart in my ears.

“Rust,” I whisper again, my shoulder straining with the task of keeping me up and looking down at the sight of his sweet head buried between my glistening thighs.

“Lie back.”

He kisses me through my underwear, dutifully kneading the flesh of my hips, my inner thighs.

I thump back against the mattress, helpless, keening into his touch as this grey man roughly tugs my underwear down, down, all the way down, until they’re clean off my body, long gone, and then returns his nose to the cleft of my pussy, unseaming me with his tongue, opening me up, breathing me in. It’s enough to draw a shallow, hoarse cry from me. He doesn’t say anything, and I can’t say anything, biting down on my white knuckles.

Rust licks warm over my clit, sucking gently on the bud of nerves (then not so gently), before sliding down, down through my very centre.

Whining breathily, the twist in my stomach tightens and spasms as he presses my hips and thighs right down against the mattress, slow, strong, giving me time to notice it, realise it, give into it, deny the natural instinct to curl my limbs tight all over his face, his neck, his mouth.

Holy fuck. Rust Cohle has his face buried between my legs right now. I have Rust Cohle’s tongue pushing deep into my cunt – he sighs softly, a sound with its own powerful gravity a black hole to envelop me in, and grinds his hips against the edge of the mattress for a split second, just once. My mind pulses with the thought of making him cum. I wonder if he feels the same hunger.

Then, he’s sinking his long, elegant fingers into me, one, then two, and just the knowledge that those fingers belong to him makes my thighs quiver and shake, makes me sigh again. Thick, confident, they curl inside, slow like an experiment, right up to the knuckle. When he taps up against me, when I squeal and crimp up into his hold, he returns himself to mouth dutifully over my clit. My hand threads itself into his hair, holding him steady – I offer a breathless moan when his grip across my hips loosen, an invitation to begin rolling myself up over his pretty face. He pulls his fingers out of me, wet and hot, and encourages my thighs upon his beautiful shoulders, clinging onto them urgently. He shudders a little, I think, when I lock them firmly around his head and grind myself shamelessly against his mouth, his nose. He moves his jaw, his face, in tandem.

I cum after a while like that, because how can I not? The searing buzz reaches a roiling static.

I go loose, moaning softly, melted down flat, and stroke fuzzy fingers through Rust’s pretty hair as he sucks my clit still, as he inhales again and sighs again, reduced to something primitive and needy.

Thick, my heartbeat throbs and echoes like a drum in my skull, threatening. I feel so full that I could mistake the beat of pleasure for nausea pressing in my throat. It was silly to think that this could all be satisfied just from one time. My eyes closed, Rust’s light touch over my abdomen, up to my throat, is acute and heightened, like a million tiny, individual sparks. His fingers fumble over my jaw, then press lightly over my pulse.

He retreats just as I’m playing with the hairs at the nape of his neck, coming to stand to full height above me, unthreading his belt from his trousers with quiet, precise hands. I press my shaking thighs together, watching him breathe strongly through his nose, trying to remain somewhat respectable in the presence of the darkening look in his eyes that is locked down on my body.

He pauses, wipes some shine from his nose. Before he can continue with whatever, I find myself sitting up on my knees, grabbing his hips hard enough to bruise all pretty and purple, shoving the trousers down to his knees, and palming him through his boxers.

We don’t have to say anything. He just watches me passively, pushing my hair back again, behind my ears, my shoulders, rolling my earlobe softly between his fingertips.

I remove his underwear, take him into my mouth, thick and long and wanting; he sighs, holds my head with two steady hands.

When was the last time someone helped him like this? I honestly couldn’t have told you, even given a loose theory, prior to this moment: Rust is simultaneously the hottest and most non-sexual being I’ve ever come across in my life. He just happens to be beautiful; he just happens to inspire these sort of feelings choking up inside me. No overarching intention that he’ll ever admit to, no vanity, no preening. So strict to himself, so tight, like a piston, something that fights and pushes and hurts.

So, as I hold him firmly and suck at the head of his blushing cock, kissing him, I watch his face, savour the tart taste of him, and press my thighs together: he’s becoming warmer, looser.

Still, as much as I want him, I know he’s wanted me. However vague he tells it, he’s wanted me. Good Lord, he looks even more stressed now, somehow, than when we had just been talkin’. Hands gently cradling my skull, he tilts his head away, watches the cross on the wall, as he succumbs to it, maybe, and begins to gently, languidly fuck my face. I tuck a hand between my thighs, and I love him, my other with the fingers digging into his hip, his ass. If I’m lucky, maybe it’ll leave some sort of mark, just to remind him I was here, so that, when he’s being all indifferent again, with his eyes lowered to the floor as he shares a report with me at my prim, little desk, we’ll both know that we were once in this room together, here like this.

Rust breathes and breathes, almost mechanically, and slides his cock further into my mouth. The weight of him in there drives me half-insane. If I could consume him, envelop him, and we could be one and the same, I’d readily allow it. When he sinks deeper still down my throat, I sigh around him, rub myself the way I like.

His eyes are determinedly shut, like some part of him refuses to be here.

Before I can make him cum, he shakes his head and tugs my hair back a little bit, mumbling for me to stop and sit away.

For all his mouthiness just a half hour ago, would you look at him now?—Rust Cohle, plundered by the human sensation of speechlessness. I’ve never seen him out of his element before. When he comes down and cages me with his body, hot skin flush against hot skin, I don’t mean that in a bad sense. Shit, he’s far from it. But there’s nothing to say. Nothing of note, nothing to pick apart, no deeper meaning, no theory. Just an itch that has to be scratched. He wants, he is, and it’s heaven to see.

In the dark, he sinks in to me as he is, eliciting from me a soft moan that curls over the shell of his ear. I have to bite down on his shoulder when comes the push, the stretch, the sink, the comfort of him inside. I curl my legs around his waist and grab at his ass, willing him deeper still. He shudders silently over me, thick ripples of pleasure rolling through his lean body.

I curse, but I’m sure it barely registers with him.

His head lifts and his eyes clamp shut as he braces an arm against the wall, lifting one of my legs up over his hip and fucking into me deeper, slipping out and in, and again, and again. I know what I’d see if I took a look down, saw his cock pumping into me, but I can hardly do anything but buck my hips up to meet his effort, my stomach stuttering with that building pressure, hands gripping desperately around his neck and shoulders.

Though, I’m not even sure it is effort that’s driving him.

I mumble into his shoulder, dumb, focussing on the feel and press of him in my belly. I doubt he’s really aware of anything more than the sensation of it, evident from the small grunt that passes his lips as he fucks deep in me. His stomach presses heavier down onto mine, crushing a delicious pressure there, teasing out a long, breathy whimper. He snakes an arm around my hips, pushes his free hand to the back of my knee, tilting my legs back a little more, and then pulls me wider. Tight, he moves me how he wants me, my flesh dipping and carving, fucking himself raw with me, with my hot cunt. His mouth moves over mine, not kissing me, not speaking, just there, present, hot, panting. He doesn’t open his eyes, so I close mine, and I breathe.

Rust stutters and cums and spills over into me with a grunt. He pants sharply, harshly, rhythmically into my mouth, tense again, and then he collapses over my body, and he lays there. I lay there too, burning on the far inside.

I think he only really remembers I’m there when I shift under him.

His eyelashes brush against my cheek. “Sorry,” he murmurs, but the sound of his voice scrapes directly against my brain with the shock of a flesh-wound.

I assume he’s referring to the thick cum that I can feel leaking out of me now. He shifts his hips, adjusting himself in the grip of my cunt. My fingers wrap around his arms, squeeze as I feel him easing out.

“It’s okay,” I reply.

He glances down between us and guides himself out with a lewd noise, swallowing hard. I shiver.

Quiet, sedated, he shrugs his trousers, his underwear, off of his ankles, slipping the bedsheet over both our naked selves. His hand spreads and flattens warm over my abdomen, feeling the gentle swell and sink of the breaths I take and release.

#true detective #rust cohle #marty hart #rust cohle x reader #rust cohle x reader smut #okay cool this is a bit niche hope you liked it #this show made me question my life's purpose #the first season at least #thanks matthew mcconaughey #anybody else here like Fiona apple or what

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simpjaes · 5 months

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pizza delivery guy!jake delivering reader an extra large sausage pizza 🤗

i hate how funny this is but also

pizza delivery guy jake:

tags: implied sex (not rly super detailed), reader is assumed to be vegetarian lol

Jake looks forward to his saturday night shifts for a lot of reasons, but none as good as you. The girl who orders for her group of friends at eleven at night on the dot, always two veggie pizzas, and always with a big tip.

You were a regular, of course, who he would jump to deliver to solely to see a room full of pretty girls batting their lashes at him despite his minimum wage status.

It got to the point even, that you'd request for him to deliver your food each time you order. Each tip got bigger, bigger, and bigger, up until Jake pulls up with your measly two veggie pizzas in a new car. With a new jacket, and a pretty smile.

What the pretty deliver driver didn't know? The fact that your friends hype you to try and get his number every single time he delivers.

The fact that sometimes you guys get a bit rowdy and tipsy, and go as far as making jokes about corny porno scenarios where he comes in with a large sausage for you, and oh no! you don't have money to pay! what ever shall you do?

It would stay as a funny little joke if it wasn't for the four plus hours of your friends hyping you. Saying, "come on, you never order a sausage pizza, he'll definitely pick up the hint. And if he rejects you, just play it off like a joke!"

You did. You did order that sausage pizza and, well, Jake did pick up the hint.

Driving to your house in silence, wondering why you suddenly added a winky emoji after his name in the delivery requests. Wondering why you suddenly ordered a pizza with an ingredient that resembles a dick. Wondering why he pulls up and you're alone when you answer the door in a scantily clad outfit and a shy smile on your face.

He's stunned to look at you tonight, to be honest, as he dips his head into your doorway with a confused face.

"Where are your friends?" He asks casually, leaning back and attempting to push your pizza forward and into your hands.

You shrug, pretending that they're not just around the corner listening.

"No one showed up tonight, I'm lonely." You play off the scenarios in your head, entirely because you really could just play it off like a joke.

"O- oh." Jake tries to smile at you, letting the puzzle pieces click together in his head. He really thinks you're implying right now. "I, um, I get off work at midnight, you know. If you're bored."

"Wait, really?" You ask, shocked that he doesn't appear to find this corny at all, but understanding far more as to why he offered when you note his eyes staring straight at the sheer pajama top you're wearing....with no bra.

"Um, yeah...if you want." He asks for your confirmation. "I could probably get off early too, it's slowed down a lot."

You smile, nodding to him as you take the single large sausage pizza.

"Okay then..." You say, kind of awkward and shy because you seriously can't believe that worked. "I'll see you in an hour then?"

He nods with a smile, clasping both hands in front of himself as if to hide the semi-hard on in his pants that you definitely notice.

And then he's gone, and you're standing there with a sausage pizza, a shocked face, and three girls rushing to giggle beside you.

♡♡♡♡

Naturally, and against the will of your friends, you have them pack up and leave the typical girl's night with a very sober uber as you sit in wait for midnight to strike.

And when it does? Jake shows up much as he said he would, in a plain t-shirt rather than his uniform, with a curious look in his eye because it does feel weird that he's here without a pizza exchange.

"So..." He says, rubbing the tip of his shoe into the frame of your door.

"So," You echo him, leaning against the frame yourself as you look at him.

"How lonely are you tonight?" He boldly asks.

You stay silent as you back up and flick your head to invite him in, still in your scantily clad pajamas with no underwear on.

"Lonely enough to order a fucking sausage pizza to get your attention?" You laugh, pointing to the uneaten pizza.

He lends you a laugh at that, which is a very nice sound.

"Was the sausage thing for real?" He finally asks when he sits on your couch with you.

"What do you mean?" You try to avoid the question, feeling dumb for even going this route to do this.

"Like, are you asking me to fuck you or do you actually just want to hang out?"

Well.

"Oh, um," You look away from him with a smile. "Could we not work it out to have both?"

Jake nods with a smirk, hand immediately landing against the button of his jeans as he looks at you.

"I think we can manage that."

And well, you do. Both of you do manage that.

You recall the events to your friends the next day, over how good he worked his tongue between your legs, over how good you worked your tongue on him.

They stopped listening around the time when you described the way you rode him right here, in the very spot on the couch they're sitting.

But their ears perked up a bit more at the description of how big his cock was, and how good it felt to have it split you open. Even better when he filled you up time and time again, until about four in the morning when he finally went home.

The best part about this? You don't even have to order a pizza to look at him next time. All you needed to do was snap a titty pic and Jake was risking his job to rush into your house just to fuck you up and against the little table in your entry way.

It's fun really, giving your little pizza delivery hook-up a quickie before his next delivery that will definitely come a bit later than it's supposed to.

#harthots #jake smut #enhypen smut #ask #anon #.jake

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wynnyfryd · 7 months

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Trailer park Steve AU part 19

part 1 | part 18 | ao3

November

As annoyed as Steve is to admit it, Dustin’s plan actually works.

(And he is annoyed, for the record. That little shithead should be glad he’s still grounded because Steve’s sorely tempted to invite him over just to give him a wedgie.)

Somewhere in the weeks following The Abduction Incident, he and Eddie become friends. Like, real ones. Friends who talk and laugh and shoot the shit in passing, who trade movies and mix tapes and ask each other if they saw the latest headlines in the morning paper.

They haven’t really had much chance to properly hang out, but Steve sees him most mornings, because he promised Wayne to keep making sure Eddie doesn’t sleep in on school days, and sometimes when they’re both around in the afternoons they’ll have a couple beers together, share a cigarette on the lumpy loveseat on the front porch of Eddie’s place.

And Eddie’s…

Eddie’s funny. Oddly charming. Theatrical and weird. Steve already knew that last part, but it’s so much better when it’s not being used as an offensive weapon against him. He likes being in on Eddie’s jokes.

Just plain likes Eddie, if he’s honest.

“Steve?”

Which should be crazy. It is crazy; if someone had told him a couple years ago that he’d be spending his free time with The Freak — that he would regret missing the guy’s Halloween show because of a Family Video shift, or that he would spend a week working up the courage to ask him if he wants to ride to school with Robin and him in the mornings? He probably would have kicked their ass for the mere suggestion.

But now he’s half-orphaned trailer trash who knows that monsters exist, so. Eh.

“Steve! Hello? Earth to Steve.”

Steve blinks, focuses on the fingers Robin’s snapping in front of his face. “Huh?” he asks dumbly.

He expects her to roll her eyes and pretend to chastise him with some butchered version of his name— ‘Steven Cardamom Harrington, were you daydreaming again?’ — but she just snaps her fingers again and begs, “A little help here? Please?” Her eyes are wide, her shoulder scrunched up to her ears with stress, and Steve realizes that:

a) he’s been staring blankly at a cart of go-backs for ten minutes instead of actually doing his job, and

b) the store is suddenly packed.

Friday night, and the rain that’s been hanging over Hawkins all week finally let up, so now everyone and their mother is apparently out running errands.

He moves to man the front desk because the line is almost out the door, and Robin buzzes around the room like a shaken can of pure panic, her bangs sticking to her forehead as she zooms up and down aisles with the restock cart. She keeps making crazy eyes at parents when they stop her to ask about new releases or the age-appropriateness of films, because the parents are distracting her from intercepting their little gremlin children, who keep putting movies on the wrong shelves on purpose just to piss her off.

“Dumbo! Does not go! In the horror section!” Steve hears her bark at a group of third graders, and he has to crouch down behind the counter for a second so she doesn’t see him laughing when she follows that up with a strangled, “Ugh!!!”

Okay.

Entertaining as this is, he’s not getting chewed out by Keith again for missing quotas because Robin blew a gasket and scared off all the customers.

“Hey, Rob?” he calls out to her as he hands a woman her change.

“What?”

“Go take a smoke break?”

He knows she doesn’t smoke. He also knows that sometimes rushes like this get to be too much for her — the noise, the lights, the chaos of a crowd (“the mouth sounds, Steve; good god, the mouth sounds”) — and she needs a minute or twelve to go stand outside in the cool air, flap her hands around and scream behind a dumpster or whatever until she calms down.

Her eyes flash at the suggestion like she’s about to snap at him, but then she takes a deep breath and marches herself out the back door without another word.

With Robin cleared out, the crowd thins out pretty quickly. Steve gets the line taken care of at a speed he’s definitely not getting paid enough to maintain, and the kids get bored of playing ‘rearrange the inventory’ and wander off to the arcade.

It’s sort of soothing, the mindless flow of it: scan, click, click, make change, “thanks for choosing Family Video,” print receipt, repeat. His mind wanders again as he works, but it doesn’t sink into its usual sludge of despair; doesn’t wail ‘house bills mom pills stress fuck-fuck’ like a tornado siren in his head until he gives himself a migraine.

No, he’s thinking about denim. About cigarette smoke.

Crooked smile; Chiclet teeth.

Patches and pins with strange names and stranger artwork.

And then he’s thinking about how this is the second time tonight he’s started daydreaming about Eddie and wills himself to knock it off.

What? The guy’s friendly with him a handful of times, and suddenly he’s, like, obsessed with him?

He’s not.

He's just… pleasantly distracted by him; that's all.

“Thanks for choosing Family Video,” he tells the last customers as he hands them their receipt. The second they turn to leave, he slumps over the counter with his head pillowed on his arms, a wave of exhaustion hitting him because holy shit that was so many people and thank god the store’s finally empty.

The bell over the door dings.

Goddammit.

Steve lifts his head, reminds himself not to scowl at paying customers because he really needs this job, but then—

“Eddie! Hey!”

—

part 20

tag list part 1 below cut let me know if you want to be added tomorrow

@heartsong18 @hellion-child @hiimlevi @hotluncheddie @jackiemonroe5512 @jaytriesstuff @littlebluejane @lololol-1234 @marklee-blackmore @melonmochi @messrs-weasley @mrsjellymunson @mugloversonly @nburkhardt @nerdyglassescheeseychick @noodle-shenaniganery @notsopersonalcharlie @novelnovella @nuggies4life @pending-dope-username @perseus-notjackson @ppunkpuppyy @questionablequeeries @remosdeerica @runninriot @sadcanadianwinter @shamelesspatrolshepherdcowboy @silver-snaffles @singmeyoursimpsong @slowandsteddie @slutforcoffein @solalasoforth @spookednsaucy @steddieas-shegoes @steddie-island @stevesbipanic @steves-strapcollection @taleah-bonnick @teatimeeverybody @th30ra3k3n @thealwithnoname @thespaceantwhowrites @thestarslittleking @thesuninyaface @trensu @violetsteve @wormdebut @yourmom-isgay @zoeweee @zombiecreatures

#trailer park steve au #steddie #steddie fic #steve harrington #eddie munson #robin buckley #my writing #my fic #steve is down ROTTEN lmao

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miss-dollette · 7 months

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COD Fandom rants and Icks.

TW: okay, yall don't take this super seriously. I'm just a person on the internet, so don't blow a gasket. Or do, idc. If you resonate, cool, if you don't, cool. Tell me what you agree with.

The weird age gap, pedocore shit a lot of writers got going on. I swear to God, if I see one more person post an age gap fanfiction of one more MW2 character where the reader is childcoded, I'm gonna fucking rip out a nerve. Can people pls start making x Readers where the reader is 30 or 40?

The Daddy kink bullshit. It's so fucking gross. I know this is fanfiction, and you know, it's all imagination, but do you honestly believe Ghost would have a daddy kink?? The ultimate daddy issue king?? Not only that, but it's just plain gross. I know a lot of you don't have fathers and wanna cope with it, but calm down, geez, for the sake of my eyes.

The lack of Makarov fanfiction that's good. Most of it (what little there is) is bad. Like, I'm sorry, but it's sooo bad.

Can we pls have more housewife fanfiction?? I'm tired of badass readers. I literally stopped reading x reader fanfiction for a while because I was so tired of this. I don't wanna girlboss, I wanna girlwife sometimes, okay?

The bad code names. The amount of people who give their oc the name "Athena" is ridiculous. And if it's not Athena, it's some poetic shit. In reality, if you get a nickname in the military, it's to make fun of you, not to praise your grace and beauty. Don't be a mary-sue.

Bad grammar. Listen, I'm writing this during my 15 minute break, so don't get on my ass about my own grammar in this. When I write actual fanfiction, I use sources to make it good. The internet is riddled with sources. While fanfiction is all about having fun, people want to be actually able to read it.

Okay that's all. For now.

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dilatorywriting · 1 year

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Monster Mayhem: Lion's Pride [Part 3]

Gender Neutral Reader x Leona Kingscholar Word Count: 6.2k

Summary: Your new job as a Full Time Royal Therapist does not pay nearly as well as you'd like. Or, Leona is more of a problem child than he would ever admit, but you're surprisingly okay at dealing with that.

[PART 1][PART 2] [PART 3]

Sometimes you felt like you hardly knew what it meant to be a functional person, living a comfortable life on the fringes of society. So in comparison, trying to think of what it meant to be an actual prince, ruling over all of said society was something you literally could not comprehend no matter how hard you tried to wrap your head around it.

“If you’re a Prince, what were you doing in a hole?” you asked, because you had far too many questions and concerns, and this one at least seemed easy enough to address. And also because you were genuinely pretty curious.

The newly dubbed ‘Leona’ twitched against your back and you felt the low rumble of his snarl work its way from the depths of his gut all the way up through his chest and out his mouth.

“Holy shit,” Ace wheezed. “Screw this. I’m getting out of here before I wind up implicated as an accessory in your murder.”

And so your trusty friend abandoned you to the wolves lions?—darting away so quickly he always forget his bag, shoes, and everything else in the process.

You waved after him as he departed, knowing full well that he’d wind up stumbling back within the week, maybe two at most. He always did, no matter how much he complained about your Present Company. Plain old ‘murder’ was actually one of his more polite accusations. When he’d run into your Hunter friend the first time, Ace had gone on a wildly incoherent rant about how he was going to find your corpse strung up in a tree like some weird, ritual, sacrifice. And then that had devolved into something-something cannibalism or other. The visiting Hunter had just thrown his head back and laughed, positively enamored with the grisliness of it all. Ace had vanished for almost an entire month after that encounter, but he did come back—glaring up at you with a miserable pout like you were the one who’d gone and fucked off for thirty whole days.

Leona snorted and you felt the puff of breath against the back of your neck.

“Coward,” he grumbled, though he didn’t sound particularly displeased about your friend’s sudden departure.

“Fear lets us be brave,” you responded, wise as a sage. Or maybe an old frog in a puddle.

“Yeah?” he intoned, rolling his eyes. “And when’s that little rat ever been brave?”

“There’s always tomorrow,” you chirped, and that snort turned into something dangerously close to a chuckle. Which—gasp!—how dare such a pleasant sound fall from the lips of someone so obstinately determined to be otherwise! You grinned at the low tones of it, only for the snickering to cut off sharply in his throat once he’d realized what he was doing. And then of course he shoved you forward and out of his lap with a great amount of indignant snarling.

You laid there for a few minutes—face down in the sun-warmed grass and laughing quietly about just how ridiculous this stupid Lion was, before finally sitting up with a pleasant stretch. He could put on airs all he liked, you knew there was kernel of something far less angsty and murderous buried at the heart of him.

“So,” you hummed, lazily making your way back to your feet. “What exactly have I done to draw the realm’s Prince to my doorstep?” You squinted at him suspiciously. “You’re not here about the fairy gate thing, are you? Because that was actually an accident.”

“The what?” he frowned, brow pinched in confusion.

You waved him off. “Ah, nothing, nothing.”

Something in his jaw twitched, like now he was going to push the subject out of principle of you being shifty. But he just sighed and brought a hand up to pinch at the bridge of his nose.

“I need your help,” he said finally. Just as crabby as the first time he’d asked, if perhaps just a touch less imperious.

You arched a brow. “I think you’ve mentioned that already, yes.”

Silence.

The Lion stared you down with a slowly deepening scowl, and you stared back with a smile as placid and unmoved as the shallow pond you’d nearly drowned Ace in not an hour before.

“If I apologize, you’ll help me?” he asked after a long moment, the question turning sharp at the end on a bitten of growl.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” you hummed back and he crossed his arms stubbornly over his chest.

“I’m sorry,” he said, with all the pleasantry of someone undergoing a root canal. And all the sincerity of Ace swearing that this was the last time he’d get caught evading the tax man, promise.

You sighed, feeling a bit cheated. But you hadn’t really stipulated anything beyond those two little words leaving his mouth, so if anything, that was on you.

“Alright,” you huffed. “What is it you need help with?”

The Lion glared at you suspiciously for a long moment—glowing eyes narrowed into slits and tail twitching back and forth like he was swatting flies. Finally, he sighed and lifted his hands out in front of him with a pointed flex.

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” he frowned sourly, wrists twisting to display the pointed claws tipping his fingers. “I’m not supposed to get stuck in between.”

Your eyes traced the fluffy tufts of his round ears, the black-tipped tail swishing irritably at his hind, and allowed yourself a melancholy sort of huff.

“But you look good like this,” you pointed out sadly. Because he really, truly, did. Leona without his squishy lion ears would just be… grumpy. Miserable, and angular, and angry. Nothing soft worth coddling at all.

“That’s not the point!” he snapped, baring his overlarge canines at you. There was a darker cast along his cheekbones that seemed to be making a valiant effort to crawl all the way up into his fringe. “And don’t fucking say that!”

You frowned. One second this stupid dick wanted to be praised to the Heavens and back! Practically swanning about, demanding you bow down and acknowledge his blatant superiority. But, oh no. Apparently your meager half-sentence masquerading as a compliment was too much for his delicate, princely, sensibilities.

“Fine,” you griped. “You’re ugly.”

He growled—low and rumbling—and if he was anymore of a cat you’d say you could see his hackles raising in indignation. But before he could launch into another vicious, verbal, evisceration of your person, you cleared your throat loudly in an attempt to get him back on track.

“What do you mean by ‘stuck in between?’”

He sneered down at you testily for a moment before reaching up to pinch at the bridge of his nose again and letting out a put-upon sort of sigh that was not at all indicative of the fact that he was the one asking you for help.

“The Shift. When you found me in that pit, I should have been able to Shift between that form and this one without issue,” he frowned, brow tugging down tight with something a bit more disquieted than his usual, flat, annoyance. “The iron was a problem, but once I was out of the trap, it should have been fine. I’ve dealt with cursed snares like this before, and the effects have never lingered as long as this one has.”

You blinked owlishly. That did sound… fairly unpleasant. And honestly, if you were in his position you’d also be at least a little concerned that something else was at play. But, still, all that being said—

“I’m sorry,” you frowned, more or less genuine. Perhaps leaning a bit harder into less.“But I don’t understand how that has anything to do with me.”

“You were down there with me,” he argued. “You dismantled the trap.”

Uh, yeah. By messing with bits that looked breakable until they broke. Not exactly a high-level intellectual pursuit.

You didn’t say that, of course. Because after a few days watching you scuttle about your homestead like a particularly vocal lizard in the dirt, you were sure he already thought you were stupid enough without you outright admitting to it. Nevertheless, the Lion observed your zip-lipped silence with an ever-deepening scowl.

“You took it apart,” he tried again, nearly a growl.

“Yes,” you said with a nod.

“You know how you did it,” he continued, firm. At your lack of affirmative, he pushed again. “You know. I watched you do it!”

You raised your hand nervously and made a little so-so tilting motion.

Anyone less refined would no doubt have had their head in their hands at this point, but Leona just curled his lip at you and looked like he was fighting valiantly not to put your own very silly head through a wall.

“It was charmed,” he spat. “Bound up with talismans, and cursed down to its very moldings. That isn’t something any random farmer could walk up and break.”

“Oh,” you blinked, taken aback, and struggled to recall if there had been anything so obviously enchanted about the trap you’d fiddled into bits. “Was it?”

And head had officially met hands. He ground his clawed fingers into his temples like you were a headache that with enough determination and massaging he may somehow be able to will away.

“Couldn’t you go just home if this is such a big problem?” you asked, still genuinely baffled at it all. “Get help from your family? I mean, you’re a Prin—”

“No,” he interrupted, emerald eyes gone glacier cold.

You frowned, as unimpressed by his prickliness as you usually were. But something in you was hesitant to prod at whatever it was that had managed to tug a feral rage so tightly across his face—like drawing a shade over a window until the entire home was cloaked in shadow, or slipping away behind a carved mask too heavy to ever wear comfortably. It was an expression so sharp and so bitter that if you hadn’t only just yesterday watched this stubborn man lounge about in the sun as your chickens hopped all over him like he was the world’s most carnivorous jungle gym, you wouldn’t ever have known that they could be the same person at all.

“Alright,” you shrugged, and some of that angry, hunched, defensiveness eased into confusion.

“Hah?” he frowned.

“Alright,” you said again. “We’ll figure it out here.” He glared over at you balefully, and you waved off the obvious retort on the tip of his tongue about something-something-you have no idea what you’re doing-something-something-dangerous risks and lifelong consequences-blablabla. “I have a friend who would know a lot more about those kinds of traps and talismans that I do. He could help, probably.”

“Probably?” he scoffed. Though when he rolled his eyes, they weren’t quite so hate filled—lids hooded with a familiar, begrudging sort of irritation rather than outright malice.

“He’s a bit of an enigma,” you explained—wiggling your fingers in a little, sparkly, dance to emphasize the, well, enigmatic part.

Another huff. But amidst that grumpy bellyaching, you watched those fluffy ears of his slowly perk back up atop his head, and his tail swish leisurely behind him. The Lion certainly didn’t look happy (but did he ever? So was that really a fair comparison?), but he definitely seemed like he’d thawed into something less ‘frigid dead of winter’ and more ‘unpleasantly nippy spring morning.’

“Weirder than you, herbivore?” he sniffed, looking down his nose at you and crossing his arms loosely over his chest. “I find that hard to believe.”

Normally you would too. But, well…

“He’s charming,” you chirped pleasantly, and Leona’s face twisted up like you’d served him a bowl of rancid yogurt.

That night you composed a letter to your dearest Hunter friend. You thanked him for bringing you the White Moor Stag, elaborated a bit on the new marinade you’d been experimenting with, and then ended the whole thing with a polite plea for his aid in deconstructing the mechanisms of a magical trap you’d encountered. You bribed one of your two carrier pigeons with some snacks and watched it fly off into the unknown with a little, cream-colored envelope tied to its foot. Message talismans were much simpler and far more convenient, but the Hunter always seemed to appreciate the personal touch of postal birds.

Leona glared at you from the window, and made some dramatic swipe at your pigeon like he meant to knock it out of the air. The poor bird tottered about like an overfilled water balloon—jiggling and wriggling in its roundness before eventually righting itself and continuing on into the sky with a warbled coo coo.

“Don’t be rude,” you huffed at him.

“I can’t believe you still won’t let me in,” he sneered from beneath the fluff of that blanket you’d gifted him. “I apologized.”

“Yes, but you actually have to mean it,” you explained, not unkindly, as he prowled just beyond the glass. “But we’re making progress!” you beamed. “That’s something! Maybe you’ll make it in here within the next five years, hmm?”

“Or I could just wipe out the entirety of your ridiculous dirt farm now,” he threatened, a bit of that sandy magic swirling sinisterly along his fingers.

“You certainly could, your highness,” you agreed easily. His lip curled unpleasantly, but that glowing, gritty, arcana faded away and he didn’t move from where he’d tucked himself up under the duvet.

After another solid fifteen minutes of his pissy glowering and barbed insults, you pointedly unclipped the ties on your curtains and let them fall shut so that his ridiculous pouting was hidden away behind the thin, cotton, mess of poorly stitched flowers and herbs.

(You did leave a nice dinner plate on the ledge before that, with extra portions of meat and a neatly frosted cookie for dessert. Because as much as your day had been a bit rough, you had a feeling his melancholy extended far beyond being left out in the dark for another evening.)

The next morning, your doddering pigeon returned with an elegantly bound scroll—all embellished with golden filagree and tied up in a neat, crimson, bow.

“Why does this freak call you ‘mon cher ami,’” Leona sniffed, tongue curling awkwardly over the unfamiliar words.

You sighed and debated snatching the letter back, but all that would probably culminate in was the paper in tatters and a smug beastman lording his superior letter-wrangling skills over your head like a trophy.

“It’s just one of his little ticks,” you explained with a shrug. “I told you—he’s charming.”

“Ah, yes,” Leona drawled, tracing a claw along the parchment’s edge with a soft shhhhhft. A raised, white, line cut across the paper’s surface like the beginnings of a wound. “Waxing poetic nonsense in a foreign language. Rambling on about all kinds of useless fucking garbage. Charming.”

“You,” you snipped, reaching out to smack at his tightening grip before he could rend the poor correspondence to bits, “are not one to talk about ‘charming.’”

“Oh?” he scoffed. He maneuvered around your tutting to hold the letter over your head. Typical. When you leaned forward to try and wrangle it back, Leona leaned in closer—eyes going hooded and lips curling into a smug little smirk that promised all sorts of trouble. “Haven’t had any complaints about that before. Who’d be saying otherwise?”

“The person you left stranded at the bottom of a pit, you inglorious oaf,” you griped. His ears immediately swiveled to pin flat against the top of his head, and you used the distraction of his indignation to finally snatch back your prize. “Besides,” you huffed, straightening out some of the new wrinkles. “Not very Prince-like, is it? A real prince would have swept in to save the idiot in distress. Sword drawn, banners flying,” you sighed, a bit too besotted with your own imaginings. “Why did you have to be such a dick, huh? Ruined my fantasies for the rest of my life.”

“And what?” Leona snapped. “Some rogue bastard sending you cursive garbage does it for you?”

“Better than being left for dead in a hole after saving their life,” you smiled—perfectly, poisonously, pleasant.

Leona rumbled something indiscernible under his breath and turned to glare petulantly off across your garden.

“Besides,” you hummed, looking over the letter. “There’s more important things. Like this—right here. Do you know what a self-bored stone is? He’s thinking maybe there was a process like that with the iron shackles. Or maybe something to do with seeping the components in herbs… Hmm…”

“Whatever,” Leona scoffed. “I’ll try whatever it takes to fix this shit.”

You clapped him amiably on the shoulder. “That’s the spirit, tête de noeud!”

“The fuck did you just call me?!”

“Poetic nonsense,” you chirped, and Leona looked half ready to drop you back into the hole where he’d found you.

The first attempt to aid the Lion Prince in his conundrum didn’t go particularly well.

You’d tried to work off of the whole ‘overlap with a self-bored stone’ theory, but all that really amounted to was you gesturing like an over-serious crossing guard for him to walk under every low hanging branch, every arch, beneath the stunted beams of the chicken coop. You dangled rocks from strings and waved around your little creations like slightly more dangerous pompoms.

Penelope clucked irritably when one of the pebbles fell with a plunk into her nest, and Leona frowned up at you from where the wayward chicken had firmly situated herself in his lap.

“How was any of that supposed to help?”

You drew a blank and promised to try something new tomorrow.

The next day you tried herbs. The Hunter had listed off quite a few that were known to cause lingering issues with magical creatures, and you harvested the lot of them from your garden with ease. You held them up to Leona’s face one by one, brow furrowed in concentration, as you waited for… something.

“How is this any better than the rocks?” he complained.

You pushed the bright, butter-yellow, blossoms of some Saint John’s Wort under his nose until he sneezed and shoved you away with a slew of indignant threats to your person.

The following few days were spent perusing your meager library. You carted every book you owned on magic, and binding rituals, and rune smithing out into the yard. Leona looked over at the slowly growing pile of tomes with a truly unimpressed scowl.

“You could have just invited me inside,” he griped, rolling his eyes. He was splayed out in the grass at your side, his head tossed lazily across your lap after he’d complained that he needed at least some leverage to see what you were trying to read.

“Nice try,” you hummed, reaching for your page of hastily scribbled notes. “But you’re not getting off without a genuine apology that easy.”

A week passed in this fashion, with you attempting to string together more and more ludicrous ideas—throwing everything you had at the wall and hoping something, anything, would stick. But Leona’s ears stayed tufted and round. That tail seemed to only grow more twitchy, his claws longer and sharper.

You sent the Hunter another letter and waited anxiously for a reply. When it arrived the next morning, Leona snatched it from your pigeon before you’d even made it out your front door. It was a miserable sort of day—pouring rain and with nothing but the grey cloud cover overhead to color the world.

He read it over once, twice, before dropping it to the ground. You could see the tendons twitching along his jaw, could practically hear his molars grinding in his frustration.

You plucked the note from the grass and looked it over carefully.

‘Mon ami, while I am loathe to address this, perhaps it is not the make of this trap at all that is causing such a vexation? Is there any chance that rather than this being a lingering malady, that this friend of yours was simply unable to overcome the initial curse in the first place?’

You glanced back up at Leona, who was intermittently clenching his fists at his sides. You could see the harsh indentations from where his claws were digging into the skin of his palms.

‘Sometimes such things just happen, je crains. The flesh may be willing, but often the spirit is weak. You mentioned this Roi du Leon has a powerful family he may turn to for assistance. Certainly one of them may be strong enough to overcome this curse for him, even if he perhaps is not.’

“Of course it’s all because I’m a fuck up,” Leona snarled. Some of that spitting, sandy, magic of his seeped into the air. It bit at the rain like an overeager dog. You could see it dancing along his skin—fighting to pull his features one way or another.

“He didn’t say that,” you pointed out gently. “And even if you were, there’s nothing wrong with needing help sometimes. Your family—"

“—Would rather I keeled over dead and stopped sullying my brother’s perfect fucking reputation!” he snapped. “Heir to the King’s Roar,” he scoffed. “Stupid. I was never going to be a king to begin with. And even if I had been born first, they would have deposed me to put their flawless, favorite, golden boy on the throne anyways.”

That... That was a lot. You stared at the pacing Lion with wide eyes—unsure how to help, unsure if any attempts to do so would only make this worse. This was—this was so above your ‘happy, homey, hermit’ paygrade.

“Of course this is all because of me,” he hissed, that roiling, angry, arcana coiling around him like curdled milk. The pupils in his eyes flickered oddly from round to thin-cut, hard, lines. Beastly. “Of course it was because I wasn’t good enough.”

“Leona,” you tried, as gentle as you could be.

The Prince threw his head back and laughed. And laughed, and laughed.

“I should have known!” he cackled, borderline hysterical. “I should have fucking known!”

“Leona—” you tried again, reaching out a hand.

Only to be immediately knocked on your ass by an explosion of magic.

You’d heard of self-destruction—of implosion. The arcane wonders of the world were a wily and unyielding mistress. While creatures like Leona who were so naturally steeped in ancient magics and sorcery could control that beast more adeptly than some little mortal like you, it didn’t make them any less susceptible to its dangers. If anything, they had it worse. It was like sitting in a shallow stream versus wading out into a roaring ocean. So much more opportunity, such a higher aptitude for greatness, but far too easy to drown beneath the churning tides of it all.

The inky, geometric, swirls along his arms pulsed like a heartbeat. They crawled along his skin and traced black patterns into his veins. Even you could feel the horrible, dark, stickiness of it—as the magic ate him alive. His face twisted back and forth between human and animal, and you watched him contort and snarl under the weight of it before turning on you with a vicious roar.

Uh oh.

The first wave of magic seared the ground, leaving nothing but strange, grey, sand in its wake. The more he snapped and clawed wildly at anything and everything, the more that dusty desert spread. You managed to hop out of the way of most of it—sparing a single, sad, thought for all the poor plants you’d worked so hard to cultivate dying a miserable, grainy, death.

The next arc of magic shot straight from his clawed fingers, and it managed to catch the flesh of your forearm. It was sharper than any dagger or sword that you’d ever had the pleasure of accidentally nicking yourself with, and it tore its way down your arm like a raging beast, leaving an eerie, tacky, bubbling mess in its wake. And ouch did it hurt—like someone was taking a fistful of coarse sand and rubbing it into the open wound. You ground your teeth against the strange, gnawing, sensation and hastily wrapped a bit of torn fabric around the weeping gash to keep it a bit more contained. You waited for the worst of it to pass, for that initial bite to fade into a more manageable throb. But it didn’t. It just got sharper and tighter, hotter and hotter. For a moment it felt like your skin was crackling—like firewood popping and splitting beneath the weight of a blaze. From across the field, Leona made a noise like a hurricane given voice, and you bit back a groan.

‘Oh come on,’ you hissed to yourself. ‘Not now, please.’

And while you’d been mostly referring to the Lion losing another brick of his sanity fort, your wound seemed to pulse at the command—a sensation not unlike the soft drone of the wards carved deep into the support beams of your dilapidated home, and an impression of words tingling along your nerves without any real shape or form. ‘Alright. Later then.’ Like a breath of wind along your fingertips. That pulsing doubled back, and the wrap you’d hurriedly tied around your forearm hummed low with gentle arcana.

And then the cracking stopped. Just like that. Like it’d given up on eating you alive and decided to head home early for the day.

Huh, you though a bit dazedly, before hurriedly ducking out of the way of another swipe.

You clutched your still smarting but at least now functional arm to your chest, and Leona turned on you and your ethereal booboo with a raging snarl. But then that glowing glare caught on the blood trailing down towards your wrist in too dark, too thick, rivulets and his eyes went wide. It wasn’t much, but the strange bought of shock rocketing through him gave you a handful of seconds of ceasefire. You reached into your pocket with your uninjured hand and pulled out a thick bit of cardstock. This was supposed to be for emergencies, goddamn it! And you’d spent so much money on this stupid little thing! And—

You shook off the mildly delusional complaints bogging down your brain and unfolded the paper between your fingers. The sigils inked into it hummed against your skin, and the rain sluffed off its face like the cold and the damp were no bother at all.

“Fucking—” you flung the talisman at your ridiculous, rampaging, guest. It fluttered like the beat of a hawk’s wings and dove towards him with just as much vicious precision. “GO TO SLEEP!”

The enchantment smacked into his face with an echoing THUNK and you watched those too-bright eyes of his roll up into his head as he collapsed to the ground in a heap.

With the main source of all the Magical Warfare knocked unconscious, most of the miasma began to disperse—like dust caught up in a gale. The rain washed away the rest. It slid into the mud and seeped back into the earth. The plants and animals seemed to give a collective sigh, and some of your more courageous chickens even started to venture in close to peck at the leftover destruction.

You approached the felled Prince hesitantly. The talisman had been meant for subduing an enemy with a more human constitution, so you doubted it would keep him down for very long.

“Hey,” you grouched, poking his side. He twitched a bit but didn’t move otherwise. “Hey, asshole,” you tried again. Still, nothing. Uh oh.

You reached down to wedge an arm under him and hoist him upright. The singed skin of your forearm brushed along his jaw as you attempted to maneuver his bulk, and his nose twitched sharply at whatever scent was trapped in the dark, cracking, gash there. His brow scrunched up like you’d just doused him in spoiled milk, so naturally you went about waving your wounded flesh beneath his nostrils like the world’s strangest smelling salts.

After a moment he blinked back awake, face twisted up into the most properly disgruntled mien of distaste that you’d ever seen on a person who’d only just barely managed to claw their way back into the world of the living.

“Herbivore,” he rumbled, still looking more than a bit dazed.

Good enough.

You manhandled him back onto his feet as best you could—turning yourself into an impromptu crutch to try and get him mobile again. The sand shifted and sank beneath your heels, making dragging his ridiculous, dramatic, ass even more of a challenge. As you hauled him towards your cottage, you complained to him in earnest. Every little irritation under the sun. Half because you’d probably never have another opportunity to bitch at him so thoroughly without getting your own earful of grievances in return, half to keep him conscious—keep him focused on staying here. With you. And not… Wherever it was he’d gone in those moments of delirium.

“I still don’t get why you call me that,” you griped, readjusting your grip on him when he’d started to slide down to the point his nose had buried itself against your collarbone. “Herbivore. I’ve cooked so much meat for you since you decided to crash here. Talked about how I prepare it, and the flavors I experiment with—I literally gave you some from my own sandwich when we first met! That I ate the rest of! In front of you!—”

When you finally herded him over the threshold and into your little cottage, the wards and their protection slipped around him like the soft current of a stream. You hardly even noticed the way the old magics ruffled his hair—and that was only because you were actively looking, half convinced the house was still about to toss up an invisible barrier and send him sprawling back into the dirt.

Leona wobbled on his feet, and his eyes were still too far away and grey.

You grabbed him by the ear and maneuvered his too-tall self into one of your rickety kitchen chairs. The wood groaned under the sudden press of his dead weight, but it didn’t collapse beneath him so it wasn’t worth fussing over. Once you were certain he wasn’t about to fold over sideways and crumple to the ground (or at least, that he was angled enough over a rug that he wasn’t going to crack his head on the stone floor), you rushed off to your bookcases and shelves and began hurriedly rumaging through your collection of nonsense.

The charms, the charms. Where were your emergency charms?! You’d thought you left them right there on the—Ah! There we go.

You pulled the raggedy binder from its place on the shelf, blew away the coating of dust that had settled over the top of it, and returned to your patient.

You flipped open the worn leather hooks and began sorting through the dozens upon dozens of sheets of enchanted parchment within. They were unimpressive—just small, rectangular, bits of faded paper inlaid with the softest kinds of magic. Not meant for much more than coaxing warmth into chilly limbs or placing a soft kiss over a scraped knee. But medicines were medicines—whether arcane in origin or otherwise. If you—if you just doused him in the things, that would probably work. Right? Of course it would. That made perfect sense.

So you slapped the first talisman square in the middle of his forehead. Leona swayed at the wet SMACK of the paper gluing itself to his soaked-through skin, but aside from the faintest, startled, widening of his eyes, he didn’t do anything else to complain. So you stuck the next charm to his cheek, and then another on the opposite one too.

“Magic overuse is dangerous,” you chastised as you went about layering a veritable novel’s worth of pasty, paper, enchantments up his arms. The soft spells worked their way into his skin, and you watched those twisting, black, shapes skitter back up towards where they’d once sat peacefully curled around his bicep. “Are you trying to kill yourself, hah?!”

Instead of snapping back at you like normal, he just sort of… sat there. Accepting your angry accusations in frosty silence. He absolutely looked like a cat that you’d fished out of a bag in the river. Pathetic, and sad, and droopy. And… quiet. So, very, quiet. You frowned, because as much as you didn’t particularly enjoy being insulted every minute of the day, the Lion’s biting little remarks had become… familiar, at the very least. Even if they weren’t entirely pleasant. Even if he was far from pleasant.

The dampness on his skin was starting to curl the edges of your talismans, and you reached forward with a huff to at least pull the freezing, soaked-through, vest off his shoulders. The leather jacket landed with a wet plap on the stone floor, a cold puddle already pooling around all its stupidly intricate, embroidered, edges. Something fluttered out of one of the open pockets—small, and off white, and crinkled. You stepped over the whole mess to retrieve a pile of towels and didn’t give it a second thought.

“Make a mess of my home, why don’t you,” you complained, dropping one of the towels over the entirety of his head before reaching forward to start drying him off with perhaps a bit more force than necessary. “Drip all over the floors I just mopped, why don’t you. Be emotionally constipated and almost turn my whole yard into a sand pit, why don’t you—”

A hand reached out to snag your wrist, and you let him pull you away from your attempts to rub all that stupidly thick hair straight off his head.

From beneath the curtain of the cotton towel, you could see Leona glaring at the long, dark, scratch curling along your forearm. It certainly wasn’t… nice to look at. The gymnastics of getting him into your cottage had managed to displace the impromptu bandage, so the whole of it was just there. Bruised, and dark, and odd looking. But ugly or not, it was hardly bleeding or anything anymore! And he was the one who had almost just self-destructed in your front yard!

‘Think of the accusations!’ you wanted to wail. ‘Can you imagine the garbage I would have to deal with if I wound up with a dead royal fertilizing my garden?! No thank you!’

But before you could complain about his fussing, his claws flexed against the soft skin of your palm and you saw the muscles along his forearm tense—like he was fighting to keep still.

“You should be dead,” he muttered, terse.

You huffed. “Look, I know you think humans are all sorts of pathetic, but I’m not that—”

“You should be dead,” he repeated, sounding as if the words had to tear their way out of his throat—scraping like shards of glass all the way up.

You stared at his dark eyes and dripping bangs—the shadows playing across his cheeks and the strange, hollow, wrongness that had settled over all of him. With a heavy sigh you plopped yourself down into the chair across from his and dragged a handful of the leftover charms your way. Pointedly, you took one and slapped it over the wound. And then another.

“See?” you said, flexing your wrist in his grip to put the creeping, black, cut on display. The talismans glowed softly against your skin and the lingering whisps of darkness licking at the the injury began to fade. “All better. Not something a dead person would say at all.”

Leona frowned, but at least it looked a bit more annoyed than outright bleak. And besides, frowns were better than whatever that stoic, expressionless, numbness had been.

“Though I appreciate your concern,” you grinned, pointedly sharp and prodding. Like a toddler standing by with a stick, hoping to poke out a reaction. “Truly, whatever would I do without the Great Lord Lion there to fret over me?”

But instead of the acidic ‘I wasn’t fucking worried,’ that you were expecting, or even a more muted grumble of dissent, Leona’s brow just pinched in displeasure and your awkward attempts at teasing faded into terse silence.

“I’m sorry,” he muttered, almost too quiet to hear—his head low and eyes lower.

You sighed and twisted your wrist around to pat at his hand. There was the faintest tremor in his fingers and you tangled your own between them to give him something to squeeze, something to hide the shiver of lingering malaise that he would no doubt deny with his dying breath. You observed the stern, tight, expression warping his otherwise handsome face—the miserable, puckered, angle of his mouth and the way the emerald of his eyes was cut through with a shadow of genuine remorse. You reached out with your other hand to pet at his soft, round ears. They squished flat beneath your palm and your lips twitched up into a fond, little smile. Leona tipped his chin just enough to glower at you from beneath his bangs with no real heat, and you sighed and gave him one more pat for good measure.

“You’re forgiven.”

TAG LIST [CLOSED]

@marvelous-maxi, @ilikefanfics4, @jackalope08, @crocwork-clockodile, @cosmicobubisi, @buttplugs-stuff, @pomefleur, @decemebercircus, @ailynyan, @genzombie, @meliade-ot, @sunlightocean, @theofficialantitherapist, @hermiona18, @sailorenthusiast, @fantasy-dating-sim-trash, @thefiasco-onyourblock, @insideous-beez, @its-clockwork-princess

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#twisted wonderland imagines #twisted wonderland #twst x reader #Monster Mayhem #My Writing #Twst Fantasy AU #Leona Kingscholar x Reader #Leona x Reader #Leona x Yuu #Skin-Changer Leona #Ace Trappola #Rook Hunt #Monster Mayhem Leona Part 3

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ariaste · 5 days

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Is there disability rep in RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND? It seems like pirate books get overlooked for how often they show characters with disabilities.

Jesus christ okay listen. You've activated my trap card, because YES EXACTLY. Disability is one of the CORE TROPES of any pirate story -- is it even a real pirate crew if there aren't people missing some of their bits? And it's not just side characters, is it! Is a pirate captain even a proper captain without a peg-leg, a hook, or an eyepatch?

And yet when we see these characters, or at least when I see these characters, my brain does not register them into the category of "oh, here is a Disabled Character". Like it is wonderful that we are seeing more disability representation in media these days but... It's often not very satisfying, is it? They're like "Here is a very carefully presented Character In A Wheelchair So You Know She Is Disabled-Disabled 😌" and there are all of these rules this character has to follow to be """""properly"""" disabled in exactly one specific way with no variations, and always there is an Issue with her (almost always a woman??) ability to navigate her wheelchair through the landscape so that the media can Prove They Are Being So Thoughtful And Aware Of The Difficulties.

I don't know about you, but for me it always sort of smacks of insincerity. Or like, the overtly intentional and deliberate sincerity, which then comes across as a bit unnatural and uncanny valley. We as the audience are not permitted to simply experience this character as a person, we are forced by the deliberateness of the narrative to experience her as a Disabled Person. Which.... Sure, that's better than not having any disabled representation at all, but there's SO MUCH FURTHER we could go with it! But the first step is for the media creator/s to stop going "look, a Disabled Person [delicate gasp] Wow she's so brave" as if she's a fucking zoo exhibit and start going "look, a Person. she's disabled, and has some other personality traits and hobbies as well."

(I feel like we also went through this journey with Strong Female Characters too, didn't we? Where we had all of these weirdly awkward """sincere"""" attempts at people writing Strong Female Characters and Oooh She Is So Strong, And Ooh Her Femaleness, She Grew Up With Brothers... But that was not what we wanted, we wanted the writers to chill out and just write a woman who was a PERSON and stop making it weird.)

Anyway, back to pirates, because I think we've really been overlooking pirate media for the fact that the disability rep is just right out there in plain sight, and it's so normalized that it would be weirder if it WASN'T there, and the media creator isn't loudly trying to win brownie points for being Virtuous And Inclusive™. (And just because tumblr reading comprehension is piss poor sometimes: yes, there's a difference between trying to be virtuous and inclusive and trying to be Virtuous And Inclusive™, and I bet you can recognize it when you see it.)

Pirate media doesn't make it weird! Pirate media doesn't try to camouflage the fact that a character is disabled ("Yar, and here's No-Legs Bob, on account o' he's got no legs, that'll teach 'im to make jokes like he's pretending to fuck the cannon" "somebody hold me up and i'll fuck the cannon again" "[raucous laughter throughout the whole crew]") nor does it deny that their disability causes problems sometimes (the ol' "peg-leg got stuck in a knothole in the deck" gag, or the classic "whoops, tried to stab someone with my hook hand but they dodged and it got embedded in the planks" gambit). Pirate media offers a huge VARIETY of disabilities too, instead of just One Token Wheelchair User -- you've got people with prosthetic limbs, you've got people partially or fully blind or deaf, you've got people who are mute (and also btw look at this amazing parrot or monkey they have, it killed a man once), you've got elderly people who aren't quite as spry as they once were but oooh they Know The Sea like nobody else, you've got people who struggle a lot with their disability and need extra help and support AND people who are not slowed down at all and just livin' their life the way they do.

Y'know. Actual diversity.

Also the only time pirate media draws deliberate attention to the disability is 1) if there's a cool story behind it that is somehow relevant to the plot ("[captain looking balefully at his hook hand] me hand was bitten off by a WHALE.... i've been chasing that whale for the last forty years....") or 2) if it provides a fun way to show the culture and community of the crew as a whole (see the No-Legs Bob example, above). Also notice that in pirate media, you are allowed to directly address the disability and make a harmless, casual joke about it ("No-Legs Bob" again) and it doesn't feel mean or weird, it's just.... descriptive. It's just the way that pirates be. Yep. No-Legs Bob ain't got no legs. So what? It is there in his name and yet it still doesn't feel like it's the only thing about him.

The vibes are just.... UTTERLY DIFFERENT from the disability rep i've seen in other media. And so i think we should be looking at pirate media more and striving to emulate it when it comes to disability rep, because THERE'S SOMETHING HERE, they're doing something INTERESTING, there is something worth thinking about and studying, what are they doing and how are they doing it and how can we replicate that in other things? (Also, even real life pirates were better about disability than many other folks -- they had PENSIONS for crew members who couldn't work anymore.)

ANYWAY back to your question of whether there is disability rep in Running Close to the Wind.

Short answer: yes. Long answer: do you want a whole inventory?

Captain Teveri has a prosthetic eye (it's covered in gold leaf, inspired by this Tumblr Heritage post which I'm sure we have all seen). Also facial scarring, which is not really a disability but still does not get a whole lot of representation.

Many of the crew have hook-hands or peg-legs

Avra says you are not a real pirate until you are missing some of your bits, and makes some joke about how he only has a Weird Toe or something

A side character, Skully (so called because he has a hobby of carving skulls in things and is currently working on carving a GIANT skull into the face of the cliff overlooking the entrance to the pirate cove, because obviously every pirate cove is required by the Trope Laws to have a skull cliff but my question was WHO PUT IT THERE? answer: this guy), has two peg-legs and a hook hand and still goes abseiling by himself to carve the skull onto the cliff, nbd nbd. Probably got the best abs in the book, but tragically Avra, the POV character, did not think to notice them

Elderly grandmother in a wheelchair who threatens to stab Julian the Super Hot Monk through the ear with a knitting needle

Julian is described as standing out from everyone else explicitly because he's NOT missing any bits and that's odd (comes kinda close to missing some bits, though, he plays around with alchemical explosives at one point. man's on track to be missing a couple fingers sooner or later, so just... y'know, let him cook, trust the process, he's still growing as a person)

(this one is a joke) arguably Avra's Weird Luck Thing could count as some kind of chronic illness, considering that it is a thing which materially affects his life and which he does not have control over and cannot predict when it will come into affect. DISCUSS. (again: a joke)

[steps gingerly off soapbox] thank you for coming to my TED talk

(Also: RUNNING CLOSE TO THE WIND comes out in ten days on June 11th! It's a comedic fantasy novel about queer pirates stealing and trying to find a buyer for the most valuable secret in the world and fighting back against oppressive institutional powers! You can read a review of it here and the first chapter of it here, and you can preorder it here.)

#disability #disabled characters #disability rep #pirates #running close to the wind #alexandra rowland

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myslutwritings · 11 months

Text

Playing minecraft headcanons with the uppermoons (+Muzan & Enmu)

this will be a modern!AU (they’re still demons tho)

•

(this is also my first post lmao)

Muzan

okay it takes a HELL ton of convincing to have Muzan himself play with you.

he views any sort of game as ‘dumb’ or ‘childish’

you try to remind him that it’s not in the slightest but it doesn’t do anything much (bro is stubborn)

he’s the demon king? why should he associate himself with the idiotic games mortals play?

eventually he goes give in (bc he loves you in his own weird demonic way..)

strictly on survival mode. doesn’t care what you do but he sees creative mode as a ‘easy way out’ and he wants to be a hard ass (no surprises here)

kills any mob in sight and any mob that comes near you (claims he does it because he’s the demon king and wants to overpower everything and everyone but in reality he just wants to look out for you)

loses his SHIT when he gets dies in the game (triggers his fear of death lol)

you made a joke about him being like the mobs in minecraft because they burn in the sunlight (like him)

he doesn’t play with you after that but he secretly enjoyed spending time with you! (shh, you’ll never hear it from him)

Kokushibo

doesn’t take too much convincing (thank god)

he lowkey enjoys trying out new things with you! you’ve always done everything for him so the least he can do is return the favor.

probably doesn’t really understand it at first so you gotta explain the game to him

gets frustrated easily in the game but it’s more of a silent rage. you take notice of it because his body language changes so it’s not exactly difficult to spot.

like muzan he’ll kill anything that goes near you. (he’s protective even in the game)

most likely will envy your game abilities. (it’s okay you’ll teach him!)

you find it cute that he’s so serious about it sometimes

The both of y’all share jobs in the game and end up creating a lovely little house!

spoiler alert he burns it down after he finds out you can burn things in the game. he did it for no reason whatsoever.

you don’t really mind all that much though. you’re just grateful you got to play with him!

Douma

douma loves and i mean LOVES playing with you!!

this man is bored. (like all the time) so doing something like this will definitely keep him occupied! but he may grow bored quickly because that’s just how he is.

he still adores playing with you though and wants to do it again!

he’ll praise you for how great you are at the game. literally head over heals for you<33

the type of mf to pick up a flower (specifically a rose) and drop it at your feet in the game.

pouts like a toddler when you don’t notice it:((

“Y/N?! didn’t you see the flower i dropped right in front of you!”

he’s clingy even in the game and will follow you around EVERYWHERE.

he is jealous of your building skills and begs you to build him a house💀

Douma’s fav biome is probably the ice plains spikes biome. anything that has to do with snow or ice!

he too also gets frustrated in the game sometimes and SUCKS at hiding it. he doesn’t have outbursts though (surprisingly)

most likely will rizz you up even in the fucking game😭

then after like a few hours of playing he gets bored and either wants to eat (women) or cuddle with you. (maybe both)

Akaza

Akaza is the most interesting to play with out of them all (because he’s just so goofy when playing)

the only thing that’s annoying is that he’ll chase danger quite literally for fun. he will fight anything. I MEAN ANYTHING.

i pity the mobs who (tried) to attack you..

game rage? it’s in his veins. (it’s semi-amusing to witness him get pissed off)

make sure he doesn’t punch a hole in your TV or your computer (whatever you play on) that shits expensive.

like during his battles bro uses only his fists to kill everything. weapons? nah. pro is anti-weapons. uses his fists for quite literally everything and will throw a fit when he dies.

he’ll praise you whenever you kill anything though! (he’s a sweetheart like that)

he’s like a guard dog even in the silly game. (over protective is an understatement)

he attempts to build you a house (it isn’t too horrible, surprisingly)

one time when the two of you were mining deep within the caves for diamonds Akaza found some and broke/mined it with his fist. (you got so pissed)

he apologized and found you some new ones though! thankfully, he didn’t use his fists to break the block this time.

overall, Akaza really does enjoy playing with you! he grows fond of it and now playing minecraft with him is one of y’all’s favorite things to do together<33

Hantengu Clones

(i’m writing the four of them all together because i’m lazy)

want to know what’s more than chaotic? playing some challenging game with 4 very emotional demons.

At first Sekido immediately rejects the idea of playing the game with you and his three other brothers (the hantengu clones are brothers in this AU)

After a shit ton of persistent begging from you and Karaku and Urogi he only submits in the end and plays (mostly because of you)

Karaku and Urogi literally are beefing the entire time (Sekido’s rage is at it’s boiling point because of those two jackasses)

Aizetsu cries like a baby whenever he accidentally kills anything (except for the mobs)

whenever he sees a mob his scaredy-cat ass sprints away in the opposite direction.

Urogi and Karaku bully him RELENTLESSLY for this. (Aizetsu is a victim)

Urogi is the type to secretly go into creative mode grab a shit tone of diamonds or netherite and is like; “Heyy, lookie what i found!!”

no one falls for his bullishit.

they all protect you in the game and show off in front of you. (it’s embarrassing)

Karaku is surprisingly good at the game but like Akaza he’ll chase danger for fun.

Aizetsu only feels safe around you so he’ll follow you around and cling to you in the game so his two brothers stop harassing him.

Sekido only plays for a few minutes before getting aggravated and just abandoning the game as a whole.

(he is the type to punch everyone playing the game. even you sometimes but Karaku and Urogi mostly fall victim to his attacks)

Sekido surprisingly leaves Aizetsu alone.

the five of you try to create a world where it’s just peaceful (Keep on dreaming, kid. that ain’t happening)

everything goes downhill, half of the world is ENTIRELY demolished and all of you died over 1000 times.

playing with all of them is too chaotic. you can’t really take it seriously. You only can when you’re playing with one of the clones one on one.

y’all didn’t play again after that madness. 😭

Gyutaro

now Gyutaro here is the only chill one to play with. (finally a normal one)

like Kokushibo, it doesn’t take that much convincing! in fact, he agrees to it almost immediately.

at first he is confused and doesn’t understand how to play minecraft but he is a quick learner and figures it out on his own.

Gyutaro doesn’t have a preference for survival or creative mode. He just does whatever you want.

Whenever y’all play in a survival world you two share tasks and duties and actually create a pretty decent looking world!

he still has your back though. Will kill any mobs that interfere with his little home he created with you.

he enjoys building houses and is surprisingly really amazing at it! he finds comfort in building.

however, whenever you, Daki and Gyutaro all play together it’s mostly him and Daki arguing and being all competitive. It’s mostly Daki’s fault because she’s the cause for half of the mayhem that happens in the world.

sometimes Gyutaro plays even without you. (he grew fond of the game quickly and likes the game)

the both of you play together everyday and go onto the same world every time because y’all created a beautiful old-fashioned city on there. (he cherishes it immensely and is insanely proud of the masterpiece of a world the two of you made as a team)

Daki

Daki is infuriatingly annoying but also entertaining to play with at the same time.

she is a giant rage quitter like Sekido and Akaza.

throws tantrums frequently over the smallest things that go wrong in the game.

she will be jealous of any item you get that’s better than hers.

this lil shit steals everything you earn that’s better than what she has. (you notice every time)

you confront her about it and she has the audacity to lie. (like girl yk damn well)

you end up taking your stuff back and she will BATTLE you for it. (you win these matches every time. that alone only adds to her angered state😭)

she will deliberately quit whenever something doesn’t go her way but later come back and declares she wants to try again.

it’s like a endless loop because this happens every. single. time.

(she’s such a brat istg)

will always steal your diamonds and put them in her chest and say she found them first.

while you’re asleep she will secretly go into the world and take all your shit and you’ll wake up back at square one.

(lowkey you want to stop playing with her)

y’all barely even work as a team but when y’all it’s always ha fight (mostly her fault btw)

once she notices your frustrations. She’ll level it down for you so no need to worry! (this earns your respect)

but whenever y’all are in creative mode shes so much more fun and enjoyable to play with!

you two usually build big ass mansions together and with y’all’s godly building skills you two make an incredible looking house and live in it together!

Enmu

Enmu absolutely looooves doing everything with you! he says yes immediately when you ask him to play with you.

after all he’s your personal simp. this fucker will gladly do whatever you say w/o any hesitation.

Enmu has actually heard of the game ‘minecraft’ before but never actually played it and barely knew what it was really about.

oh boy, but when he does he becomes OBSESSED.

I kinda feel like he dislikes survival mode and prefers to be in creative mode! but if you like survival mode he won’t mind trying it out with you.

he likes killing the animals for fun.. will randomly slaughter anything even if it has a family (bro is a sadist after all)

you tell him it’s not necessary to be doing that but he doesn’t care nor listen.

his love language is building you trains in the game. (you love them very much)

Enmu is usually very calm when he’s not on a mission so playing this game only soothes him further and he doesn’t act overly crazy and zesty like he usually does around Muzan

Builds trains every time y’all play and is somehow INSANELY skilled when building them (??)

Similar to douma, he’s the type to rizz you up in the game.

Sulks when you don’t notice him when he attempts to.

He constantly nags you to play with him some more and gets a lil upset when you become tired.

“Oh, Y/N!, how can you be tired? we’re having soooo much fun!!”

forces you to stay up just so he can introduce you his own train world he made for himself. (he named all the trains)

you’re out cold after playing with him every time. High key finds it adorable when you pass out after hours of playing with him. He’s so amused how humans can grow tired so easily.

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eternalfics · 2 months

Text

yeahh I accidentally deleted the request soo.. 😃

saiki with a people pleaser! reader

a/n: hi pookie wookie cookie bear erm sorry to that anon that I deleted their request but that dosent mean that I won’t do it 😘 always will do my pookies requests and these hcs are kinda rough too so

summary: the title..?

warnings: idk.. maybe the insults?

listen, if your a people pleaser type of person. saiki is gonna HATE you. he thinks your fake just like teruhashi and he cannot explain in words how much he hates you. that is if you’re like teruhashi, if your actually a sweet person he won’t hate you as much, he’ll just be confused.

if you guys SOMEHOWWW be friends, saiki will try to encourage you to not listen to what people say. after all, he dosent at all 😹

Short Scenario

“why do you do what people want you to do?”“oh, well. I don’t think I really do that. but I do want people to like me!”

you chuckled nervously, trying to lighten up the mood. it was getting really awkward when you and saiki were alone.

“oh, y/n..”

so yeah after he had sympathy for you for like 30 minutes without showing it, he just knew he had to help you or else he won’t feel well when your not showing others your true personality.

people are begging you to get short hair/ get a haircut because they think you’ll look good with it? forget them, go bald or grow your hair out. people look at you weird when you laugh really loud? forget them, saiki’s gonna tell you a million of dad jokes now. 🤪

he may seem a bit pushy sometimes to change your mind on something when you just want to make people happy, but it’s just that he’s a bit frustrated that this is how people act and how they affect others 😒

Scenario

“what are you doing?” saiki suddenly asked into my mind, he randomly teleported in the corner of my room I was used to it. “oh, there’s a new trend going on. I wanna try putting led lights in my room or else people are gonna think I have a plain room.” you explained to him with a wide smile. “you don’t have to do it, though?” saiki raised an eyebrow. “I know but,” you paused. saiki waited for your response.

“okay fine.”

#kusuo saiki #kusuo saiki x reader #kusuo saiki x y/n #saiki fluff #saiki k x reader #saiki kusuo fluff #saiki kusuo x male!reader #saiki kusuo x reader #the disasterous life of saiki k #saiki kusuo x female!reader

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artificial-transmutations · 11 months

Text

A new character

"I approach the king and bow, before I say: 'Greetings, most noble King Tanarath, first of your name. Allow me to introduce my friends and my humble self.'" Brian said enthusiastically.

There was a moment of silence on the table before Dylan, another of the players, groaned: "Dude..."

Brian blinked and readjusted his glasses. Dylan sighed and explained: "You're not playing your bard anymore. That is totally out of character for a barbarian! Look at your intelligence stat. There's no way your character would even be able to form sentences like that."

"Oh. Right." Brian said. It had been four sessions now since his bard had died at the hand of a wicked owlbear, and although he had been sad about it, Brian had really looked forward to playing something else, for a change.

So, he had created Briarok, his barbarian. While he absolutely loved his new character stat-wise, he sometimes had trouble of actually playing the huge, muscled and dumb-as-a-brick man.

"So, I guess, I just go: 'Yo, king! What's up?'?"

Brian could feel the cringe in the room. Why was it so difficult for him to get into character? Steven, the dungeon master rolled his eyes. "Uhm... okay, let's try this one more time. Before I continue the session, I'd like you to say something in character. You just need to get into it, Brian."

"Yes, Brian, you need to... become one... with... your... barbarian." Dylan mocked in a slow, hypnotic voice and laughed.

"Okay, I think I got this." Brian said. He thought about the character he had created. Brian had chosen the barbarian class because of the raw power and durability it provided. He wanted to be able to protect himself and his friends from harm. Besides, barbarians were just plain awesome. Brian also chose the name Briarok, because he thought it was a cool name.

However, getting into the primitive mindset was difficult for him, especially since he was used to play a bard with lots of charisma.

Brian rolled up his sleeves, took a deep breath and flexed his unimpressive muscles.

"Alright!" he said in a loud voice and nodded.

The other players looked at him with disbelief, before Dylan laughed again: "Okay, that was kind of cool. I give you a 7/10 for trying."

However, something weird had happened. Brian was the stereotypical nerd, with no muscles to speak of. However, when he just flexed, small mounds of muscle popped up on his arms. When he relaxed his arms, however, the bumps did not shrink away again, but stayed visible.

"What the..." he mumbled and rolled up his sleeves further, trying to get a better view.

He could see his own arm, and the small protrusions. It wasn't much, but it looked definitely different from before. Wanting to explore further, his eyes scanned the room before settling on the six pack of large soda bottles on the floor. Usually, he had his fair difficulties lifting the 12 kilograms worth of beverages, but right now, it was easier. It was still a notable weight, but somehow, it felt lighter than before. In fact, he longer he lifted it up, the lighter it felt.

"Hey, guys?" Brian asked, while still staring at the soda bottles.

"Yeah?" Steven replied.

"What's the heaviest thing in this room?"

"Uhm... I'm not sure." Steven mumbled.

"The sofa?" Dylan offered.

"Not sure, but it's pretty heavy."

"Yeah, probably."

Brian placed the large bottle down again and flexed his arms. Bi- and triceps were now clearly visible on them, and didn't disappear when he stopped flexing, like before. His arms weren't the only thing to change, Brian noticed as he went over to the sofa. His shirt clung to his back, as if it was several sizes too small for him and his pants felt constricting as well.

Brian bent down and grabbed the sofa. Were his hands bigger than before? He needed to know now. With a grunt, he started lifting. Very slowly at first, but then it became quicker and easier.

Brian should be confused and normally, his brain would have gone to overdrive, trying to process what was happening, but for some reason, Brian only felt... good about it! His thoughts were slower than usual, but he felt a good deal of pride. He managed to lift a sofa with ease! That was awesome! He bet nobody else in this room was able to do that. He was the strongest of them!

With the sofa safely on the ground, he turned around to look at his friends.

They were all staring at him, eyes wide. Brian couldn't remember having seen anyone looking that surprised. Dylan looked at him and slowly shook his head. "Dude. Did you just lift a sofa?"

"Yeah, I did!" Brian answered with a big smile.

Dylan's mouth opened a little further, and his eyes went wider.

"You're all... ripped and stuff." Dylan remarked.

"Yeah, it's awesome! But sorry guys, I have to get out of my shirt and pants now, they're way to small."

Brian began to fumble on his button fly with his large hands and needed several moments to get it open. The buttons almost flew through the room as he released them.

The reason for the enormous pressure was not only Brian's package. His hips had become considerably wider and stronger. His ass was pronounced and muscular and exerted its own pressure to the construct. However, even though it was not *only* Brian's package, it certainly also had a part: his entire crotch region had become bigger and more prominent. Brian's soft cock made a clear outline on his retro pants. Would it become hard, Brian was sure it would rip right through them.

Brian took his pants off and stood there in only his underwear. It was now tighter than ever and stuck to his body. He gave his friend a broad grin and tried to work on his shirt. That, however, proved to be way more difficult. By now his shirt looked like it was painted on him, showing the clear outline of impressive pectoral muscles and at least a six pack underneath.

"Damn, man! You're... hot!" Dylan said in awe while Brian was still trying to wiggle out of his shirt.

With a frustrated grunt and a gasp from his friends, Brian finally resolved the problem another way. He grabbed his collar with both of his strong hands, and with a bulge of his massive arms, he just ripped the clothing in two, from top to bottom. His undershirt went down the middle, along with the remnants of his destroyed button fly, as he held up the pieces in front of himself.

Victory! He just felt like shouting, so he roared loudly in triumph and threw the remnants of his clothes to the ground.

Grinning broadly, he grabbed his chair and pulled it away from the table before sitting down with his legs spread widely. Man-spreading like that and readjusting his large package shamelessly, Briarok rumbled loudly in his deep new voice:

"Alright! Where were we? I want to kill stuff!"

Dylan, Steven and the other friends had trouble to hide their erections from the display of raw power.

Steven gulped and continued: "Okay, so, after speaking to the king, you venture out into the cold mountains..."

I think I would enjoy playing with that dude afterwards! What do you think? If you want to see stories like this as soon as they appear, alongside exclusive content like the 15(!) picture candidates that did not make it into this story, be sure to subscribe to my riot page!

#male transformation #muscle transformation #dumbing down

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redrose10 · 5 months

Text

Here is Chapter 6! Things are getting heated between the two. I appreciate the feedback and I hope you’re enjoying the story!

Yoongi X Female Reader. CEO/Arranged Marriage AU

Summary: You were selected to marry the wayward CEO/Billionaire/Heir, Min Yoongi. You went into it with an open mind and heart determined to try and make it work. Yoongi on the other hand had no intention of ever letting you in let alone allowing himself to fall in love with you. Slowly you start to associate the smell of cinnamon and vanilla with the feelings of hurt and sorrow.

Word count: 4,322

Warnings: (May get updated as chapters progress): Arranged marriage, cheating/infidelity, hints of smut (Probably won’t get very explicit but we’ll see how it goes), Sexual Assault, Brief mentions of death, Reader grew up an orphan, General Angst, Swearing

After what seemed like forever you and Jimin were having a day together at his place. He put out a spread of various foods and drinks while the two of you talked and caught up with each other.

“How have things been between you and Yoongi?”

“Slightly better I guess. We have meals together sometimes and we talk a little more.”

“He doesn’t shut up about you at work.”

“What do you mean?”, you asked taking a bite of your dumpling.

Jimin giggled, “I don’t know, he’s just always asking about you. Like how you’re doing or if you mentioned anything about him. It’s kind of cute. Like a teenager with a crush.”

“I mean we live together and we’re already married. Why doesn’t he just ask me himself?”

“I don’t know. Yoongi’s always been kind of weird that way.”

“Oh yeah I completely forgot to tell you that he was livid last night about you introducing me to Taehyung. Said he was going to kill you and then fire you. I still don’t know why he got so upset about the whole thing.”

“Well because Taehyung is extremely handsome and also very straight forwardly friendly and kind. He’s a lot of what Yoongi isn’t and Yoongi knows that. I think he was a little worried you’d run off because he knows he wouldn’t stand a chance if Taehyung made a move on you.”

His words caused you to stop and think for a moment. Yoongi jealous? “I mean why would he care so much? I feel like he’s been trying to get rid of me since day one so Taehyung would just be doing him a favor.”

“I don’t know. I think he’s starting to come around a little. Maybe you’re slowly melting away at his ice cold heart.”

You remembered what Seokjin had told you about Yoongi coming around eventually.

“Yeah well tell that to all the women he already cheated on me with. I’m sure that’s still going on somehow.”

“Trust me I know. I’ve had many words with him about that. Now as far as I know he hasn’t been with any women in a couple months. He even transferred out one of his favorite interns because she wasn’t taking no for an answer and kept coming on to him.”

The laugh that you let out bellowed through the room, “Yeah okay. I’ll believe it when I see it.”

After finishing up all the food that was left and helping him clean up you said goodbye to Jimin and headed home. You felt better, lighter even, after spending the day with him. It was definitely something you needed. Getting home you were surprised to find Yoongi sitting on the couch watching a basketball game. He was dressed comfortably in sweats and a tshirt. It was off as you’ve alway seen him in expensive suits. Even his casual wear was usually still designer and well styled. You’ve never seen him look so plain before but he looked happier somehow.

When he noticed you he smiled and told you there was some takeout in the fridge that he had ordered for you just in case you were hungry.

You thanked him and headed off to your room wanting to take a hot shower and get ready for bed as you weren’t really hungry after eating at Jimins all day.

Just as you were about to get under the covers a soft knock appeared at your door. Yoongi was standing there holding a mug which he quickly handed over to you and you smiled at the warm milk staring back at you. You had a feeling that he wanted something more than to just bring you a glass of milk at 11pm.

Your instincts were right because he began to nervously scratched at the side of his neck, “So Y/N our first anniversary is coming up and I was wondering if maybe you would like to go on a trip with me. To celebrate. It’s okay if you don’t want to. I’d fully understand. I just thought maybe we could go somewhere or I don’t know. Again it’s okay if you don’t want to go. I haven’t planned anything yet. I just thought I’d ask to see what you’d say. It’s probably a dumb idea.”

At this point he was rambling so fast you could barely make out what he was saying. Maybe it was the fact that you were so tired or that you were still on a high from the great day you had with Jimin but you agreed. “Sure Yoongi. I’ll go with you. Sounds nice.”

You could see the tension leave his body as well as the surprised look on his face showing that he fully expected you to decline his offer. “Okay, I’ll let you know the details once I have them figured out.”

Nodding you shut the door and climbed in bed with your mind racing. Another week stuck on vacation with Yoongi. Something you had hoped you’d never have to go through again.

A few days went by and one day during dinner Yoongi had told you that the anniversary trip was going to be a surprise. All you needed to know was to pack comfy clothes and that he’d handle the rest.

Two weeks later you were in the passenger seat as Yoongi drove the two of you to your destination. While surprised that this trip didn’t involve a plane you were also excited as this meant you werent going to have to suffer in tropical hell again.

After a four hour car ride you pulled up in front of a large cabin.

“I know it’s not the Alps but I thought it would be nice to go somewhere more low key and quiet. I wanted a redo of our honeymoon since I had purposely picked somewhere I knew you’d hate.”

“I knew you did that on purpose.”, you smirked.

Yoongi opened the front door for you with the code he was given while he went back to the car to grab the bags. The cabin was what you’d always dreamed about. There was a large fireplace with a stack of wood ready to be burned sitting next to it. A big comfy couch adorned with fluffy blankets and pillows sat in front. The kitchen was massive and to your surprise already fully stocked with food. Making your way upstairs to the master bedroom you were excited to see a balcony.

Stepping out you were greeted with the most breath taking view you’d ever seen. Snow covered mountains were framed by tall and full pine trees. Off in the distance a family of deer ran through the snow. You felt like you were looking at a Christmas card. It was quiet and peaceful and everything you could hope for.

While taking in the beauty you didn’t notice Yoongi step out onto the balcony behind you. He startled you as he spoke, “Do you like it?” “Yeah it’s incredible.”, you smiled. It didn’t take long for him to violently start shivering which got a big laugh out of you even though he tried his best to hide it.

“Come on you big baby. Let’s go back inside.”

Once back in the warmth of the cabin Yoongi told you to take a shower or a nap or whatever you wanted and he’d start on dinner.

You opted for a nice hot bath letting the water soothe you. The lavender oil provided by the host adding a nice comforting touch. When you were cleaned and changed into some comfy clothes you went down to the bottom level finding that Yoongi had built a fire and was just putting the finishing touches on the meal.

You both ate quietly before you grabbed a blanket and went to the couch to watch a movie while he cleaned up before joining you. There was an awkward feeling in you. Even though the two of you were married you’d never really spent quality time like this together. You weren’t sure if you should sit right next to him or maybe on the other side of the couch but is that too awkward? Should you share a blanket or get him his own? Let him pick the movie or should you? You felt kind of ridiculous because it shouldn’t be so hard to watch a movie with your husband but at the same time it’s Yoongi.

You wrapped yourself up in the fluffy green blanket and decided to just take a seat on the right side of the couch and let him make the next move. Yoongi walked in a few minutes later handing you a mug of warm milk before taking a seat on the other end of the couch.

“I already chose a movie. I hope that’s okay. It’s one I’ve been wanting to see for a while.”, he said.

“Yeah sure that’s fine.”, you shrugged secretly happy that you wouldn’t have to awkwardly try to pick something together.

After he clicked play you chuckled when you heard the familiar music.

“Seriously Harry Potter?”, you asked.

“Yeah I’ve never seen it before and I’ve been told I resemble one of the characters so I thought we’d check it out.”

Snuggling in deeper to your blanket you smiled and began to watch as the movie unfolded.

The two of you made it through the first movie and decided to also get through the second when about half way through you felt a sudden chill. Since you’d planned to go to bed after this movie you stopped adding wood to the fire and it was noticeably colder in the room. Looking over you noticed the goosebumps climbing up Yoongi’s arm and you realized he was without a blanket.

Knowing that you were probably going to regret it later you scooted over so you were sitting closer to him. Not touching but close enough that you could share your blanket so you reached over and placed half on his lap.

“Here you look cold.”

“Thank you.”, he said with a smile and pulled the blanket up to cover himself.

Once the movie was over and after a passionate review on his part you made your way upstairs when the realization hit you. This cabin only had one bed. Yoongi who was not far behind you stopped when he noticed you standing there.

“Oh um how are we going to sleep tonight? I mean with only one bed?”, you asked.

“Well I thought we could share the bed together. Sorry I guess I should’ve asked you first. I can sleep down on the couch if you’re uncomfortable.”

For a second you really did consider making him sleep on the couch but ultimately decided that the bed was big enough for the two of you to comfortably share.

After completing your nightly routines you got in bed leaving a healthy space between the two of you. Both on your backs staring up at ceiling in silence until Yoongi spoke.

“Red”

You looked over at him with furrowed brows, “I’m sorry, what?”

Not removing his eyes from the spot on the ceiling he continued, “My favorite color is red. When we first went on a date you asked me and I made a sarcastic remark instead of telling you so I’m telling you now.”

You hummed.

“I also do really like to drink whiskey but if I had to choose I would never pass up a glass of ice cold chocolate milk.”

You snorted and he laughed, “You have no room to make fun of me Miss Mug of Warm Milk Before Bed.”

“I love basketball and music. Those are my interests. Growing up I wanted to be a music producer maybe even a rapper but my parents put a stop to that and made sure I would be set up to take over the company instead. Sometimes I regret that I let them stop me. Maybe I’d be a happier person if I went against their wishes.”

“I think you’re pretty good at what you do though. I mean you seem successful. But you should definitely rap for me one day. I’d pay to hear that.”

“I don’t think you could handle my lyrics.”, he said causing you both to erupt into laughter.

After a while of silence he continued, “Y/N I want to apologize for the way I treated you this first year. I know these are just words and you’re going to need a lot more than that from me but I’m going to do my best.”

“I heard from Jimin that you haven’t been hooking up with other women any more. Is that true?”

“Mmhm yeah it is. I haven’t been with anyone in a couple months.”

“Can I ask you another question?”, you asked.

“Go for it.”

“Why were you so determined to make this marriage miserable?”

He let go of a long sigh, “Well it’s kind of a long story. But uh when I was sixteen I met this girl, Mia. After a few months I finally worked up the courage to ask her out and she said yes. We dated for a while and when we were nineteen I wanted to propose. We were young but I knew I loved her more than anything in this world and I wanted to spend my life with her because there’d never be anyone else that I could possibly love that much. She was my everything. So I had this big elaborate proposal planned. She thought I was out of town on a business trip but I had lied about that and I left her a note in our apartment telling her to meet me on the rooftop of our building and I had the whole area decorated with roses and there was a dinner planned and I had a piano set up to play her a song that I wrote and then I’d get down on one knee. But after she was like 45 minutes late I went down to the apartment to see what was going on and she didn’t even read the note because she was too busy fucking some guy in our bed. Then she confessed that she’d been cheating on me the entire relationship and was only with me for the money and perks of my family. So after that I swore I’d never love anyone ever again. If I don’t love anyone then they can’t possibly hurt me like that. So after I met you I wanted you to hate me and treat me like you hated me because then I’d never fall for you but no matter what I did you’d still always be kind and be there waiting for me and putting in effort to make this work. I found myself starting to realize that maybe not everyone is out to just use me and that someone could actually love me.”

You sat in silence trying to find the right words. “I’m sorry Yoongi. That did sound like a really nice proposal though. A lot better than here’s this contract, sign on the dotted line like mine.”

He chucked, “Nah looking back it was pretty cheesy anyways. Maybe one day I’ll give you the proposal you deserve.”

“Okay but I want a song. And there better be a rap verse.”

“Deal. Any thing for you.”

The room fell into a silence after that.

“Anything you’d like to ask me?”, you questioned with a smile wanting to change the subject.

“Nope” he said but thankfully you could hear the playful smile in his voice.

“What is your family like?

You knew he was trying to ask about the orphanage thing without directly bringing it up so you decided to just spill it.

“Umm well my parents were great from what I remember. They were killed in a car accident when I was around five. Then I lived with my Aunt Erica until I was eight when she passed away from cancer. No one else in my family was willing or able to take me in so I was sent to live in an orphanage which is where I stayed until I turned eighteen. Then I met Jimin in college and we became really good friends. When he moved away I was pretty much on my own until I came here. So I guess we’re both just a couple broken hearted people, just in different ways.”

He didn’t respond right away and you weren’t sure if maybe you said too much until he spoke again.

“I’m really sorry Y/N. No one should have to go through something like that. I wish I could take away that pain.”

“It’s alright. Nothing can change it now.”

The two of you talked for a little while longer until finally falling asleep feeling a little closer.

The following day Yoongi took you sightseeing through the little mountain town. You ate lunch at a very cute cafe owned by the sweetest elderly woman who recognized Yoongi and kept gushing about how out of all the places to eat he chose her cafe. She even made him take a photo with her to hang on the wall. The woman wrapped her arms around his mid section clinging to him for dear life while completing how toned he felt which caused Yoongi to turn a shade of red you didn’t think was possible for a person. You got a good kick out of it at least.

After getting back to the cabin you changed out of your snow soaked clothes and agreed to continue watching the next Harry Potter film as a continuation of the night before. This time though without thinking you sat down next to Yoongi and immediately covered both of you with the blanket before grabbing the tray of cookies and various pastries he had bought at the cafe earlier. He gave you a smile before taking one of the cookies in his mouth.

You guys got through two more movies before deciding to call it a night and getting into bed.

When you fell asleep you were on opposite sides of the bed. So you were extremely confused when you woke up a couple hours later and Yoongi was now spooning you while holding you as close against him as you could get. His arms tightly wrapped around your waist as his breath tickled the back of your neck.

Part of you wanted to scramble out of the bed and get as far away from him as you could but another part of you was really enjoying the warmth and comfort of being in his arms.

You tried to distance yourself and push away from him a little but his arms only snaked around you tighter pulling you back.

In your attempt to push away you may have accidentally stirred something in him. Slowly he began placing kisses along the back of your neck and down your shoulder. His hand running down the side of your hip before his fingers began dancing on your thighs. Your body seemed to melt into him.

“Yoongi”, you whispered trying to get a better grasp of what his intentions were. Maybe he was just dreaming you thought. He placed another two kisses to the back of your neck, “Is this okay? I’ll stop if you want.” You really thought about it. Your heart was telling you no but your brain and the rest of your body was saying yes. “You really haven’t slept with anyone else in the last couple months?”, you questioned. “I swear on everything.”, he answered.

Turning over to face him you suddenly felt an extreme wave of nervousness come over you.

“We don’t have to do anything if you’re not comfortable Y/N.”

You nodded, “I want to.”

He kissed your lips before adjusting himself to be on top of you. He began placing kisses along your neck past your collarbone. His hands reaching for the hem of your night shirt lightly gripping the edge. “Can I?”, he asked. You nodded slightly sitting up so he could pull the shirt off you.

“You really are beautiful Y/N.”, he said as his hands traced over your body.

As the kisses between you became more and more intense and his hands seemed to have more courage you felt him begin push himself against you and any apprehension you had went away. It had been so long since you’d been touched like this and you wanted him bad.

The rest of your clothes were removed as were his and your bodies reconnected like a magnet had pulled you two together. Whether it was the fact that it had been so long for you or the way that he took his time making sure to pleasure every inch of your body, it was the best and also most intense experience you had ever had.

Afterwards he pulled you close against him while you both tried to slow down your rapid breathing. He placed another kiss to your shoulder before nuzzling his face in the crook of your neck. Just before he fell asleep you heard the faintest whisper, “I love you Y/N.”

After that you had a hard time falling asleep. Things in your relationship were moving a little too fast for your liking. This is what you had always hoped for and what you had always wanted but after everything that had happened with him you knew you would have to move forward carefully.

Having fallen asleep at some point you were woken up when Yoongi began moving and got out of the bed making his way to bathroom. A few minutes later the shower kicked on so you sat up stretching in the bed to wait your turn.

The nightstand next to you kept vibrating and you saw Yoongi’s phone laying face down.

Every few seconds

*Buzz*

You started to get annoyed but then you worried that something may be wrong. You grabbed his phone preparing to knock on the bathroom door when you happened to glance at the phone screen. There were several texts and missed calls nothing that concerned you as he was a busy guy after all. Until something red caught your eye. A text from someone name Suri. In the text a photo of a woman dressed in a barely there red lace lingerie set. You thought back to Yoongi telling you his favorite color was red. The text included with the photo is what caused the room to spin around you.

“Last week was amazing. Can’t wait to see you again. I went out and got a new outfit for you and in red just like you like it. Maybe don’t rip this one. ♥️😘”

After tossing the phone onto the bed you grabbed your suitcase and started throwing all of your belongings into it. You felt sick. You felt like crying. You felt like throwing something. He lied to you. He lied to you before, during, and after.

Yoongi unknowing of the events that just transpired came walking out of the bathroom towel drying his hair. “Y/N I think we should go back to that cafe for breakfast, they had a croissant sandwich I think you’ll really like, and then maybe walk down to that lake it looked really nic-.” He stopped when he saw you stuffing your bag.

“What are you doing?”

You looked up at him with a tear stained face.

“Y/N what happened? Did someone do something to you?”

“Yeah Yoongi, You!! I can’t believe you. What kind of sick game are you playing? Just when I thought you were changing for the better. That maybe deep down you were a good person and not a self centered jerk.”

“Y/N what’s going on? I don’t understand what happened?”

“Oh cut the bullshit Yoongi. You know if you wanted to just use me for sex we could’ve stayed at home and hate fucked each other or something. You didn’t have to bring me out here and make me think you were actually falling in love with me.”

“Y/N I do love you and I have been trying to change. I’m trying to show you that.”

“Fuck you Yoongi. I’m not doing this any more. Next time you need someone to stick your dick into go ahead and call Suri. It looks like she’s replaced the lingerie set that you ripped LAST WEEK! It’s a cute one too. I was even thinking about getting something similar last night but now at least I don’t have to waste money on it.”

Yoongi took a step forward to try and reach out to you but you put your hands up to separate yourself.

“Y/N nothing happened with her. I swear. I know it looks back but let me explain.”

“Save it.”

Before you grabbed the door handle you stopped and turned to face him, “You know I actually felt really bad for you after you told me about Mia and what she did to you. I understood how you could be the way that you are and I was 100% committed to trying to forgive you and move on with a loving happy marriage. But now, I don’t know if I can ever truly love you Yoongi.”

You slammed the door behind you and stormed out of the house. Thankfully the bus station wasn’t too far of a walk and the cold air gave you a chance to calm down anyways and also have an excuse as to why your face was so red. After buying a ticket you took a seat on a bench near the window to wait for your bus. You really wished you would’ve taken a shower before storming out of the cabin. The smell of cinnamon and vanilla heavily staining your skin, a painful reminder of your mistake from the night before.

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