#but it’s so natural to me like it’s like a fingerprint it’s just something I create in my own way

[beenbaanbuun]

tits, ass or thighs w/ ateez

words - 🤠

genre - fluff/smut

warnings - groping (consensual), size kink (yunho), manhandling (yunho, kind of yeosang), kind of somnophilia in sans, mingi is always eating pussy in my fics…, spanking (mingi and wooyoung), i think that’s the major ones…

kim hongjoong - ass

so my theory is that hongjoong likes having you on his lap; more specifically, straddling his lap. whether that’s during sex, cuddling, or just to chat, he wants you sitting on his thighs, staring into his eyes. of course, half of it is about the intimacy of it all - face to face, eye to eye, all that good stuff - but he can’t deny that he really does love the way it gives him the perfect opportunity to grope your ass.

his arms are always wrapped around you to hold you close, and your ass is just the natural place his hands fall. you can’t expect him not to cop a feel when his hands are already there in prime position. besides, your ass is just too nice not to squeeze; it gives his hands something to do whilst you’re telling him about your day… and that’s not even mentioning the way it makes you squirm whenever he’s balls deep inside of you, using his grip on your ass to guide your pace as you ride him into oblivion.

park seonghwa - tits

seonghwa is a gentleman except when it comes to your tits. he is always just touching them, giving some sort of shitty excuse as to why he needs to. ‘oh, i slammed the breaks too hard and didn’t want the seatbelt to hurt you,’ he says as he slowly draws his hand away from where it was just sitting on your breast. ‘i meant to touch your shoulder but i missed,’ he smiles prettily as if that excuses the way he’s pawing at your tit. the way he sees it, he shouldn’t even need an excuse to feel you up at any given moment in time…

because you can’t really blame him for wanting to touch them constantly. he likes soft, cute things are your tits? well they just happen to be the softest, cutest things around! sue him if they’re like magnets for his hands! he can’t help the way they draw them in now can he?

jeong yunho - thighs

BIG HAND ON THIGH I REPEAT BIG HAND… ON THIGH!!!! like when he’s driving you places?!?!? or even when you’re just watching a movie together?!?!?!? UGH!!! it just makes you feel so small and protected and the thought of you being so small and fragile for him? that shit makes yunho weak at the knees. it’s even better when he gets to squeeze your thighs and feel your plush flesh under his fingertips. he likes the way it never fails to make you wriggle in your seat.

and i’m sorry but it all comes down to the fact that this man definitely has a size kink and whatever he can do to make himself feel like the big strong knight and you his tiny little damsel in distress, he will do it. unfortunately that means that he literally always has his hand on your thigh just to show you how big he is compared to you, and just how easy it would be to manhandle you into any position he wants…

kang yeosang - thighs

i think i’ve spoken about yeosang being a dom enough on this account, so i won’t go into any more details about that. all i will say is that he loves pinning you by your thighs. pretty boy is so strong and he just adores the way you helplessly squirm as he holds you to the bed by them. he will literally torture you for hours with his face between your legs, but you can’t even buck your hips with how tightly he’s holding onto your shaking thighs.

and don’t get me started on the bruises he leaves in his wake. he’s spend hours kissing and admiring the fingerprints left on your skin the day after, trailing over them with his fingers and his tongue until he has you squirming and begging for him to give you more. there’s rarely a day goes by where you don’t have tiny purple marks painted up and down your thighs…

choi san - tits

san likes to cuddle something when he sleeps, right? since sharing your bed, that something has become you. he likes his arms wrapped around your waist and his head pressed to your chest, your soft flesh acting as the fluffiest pillow in the world. it’s even better when you play with his hair, sending him into a sleepy daze in minutes.

and it’s not his fault when you wake up to him rutting against your thigh, face pressed between your tits as he incoherently mumbles about how gorgeous you are. actually, it’s yours for sleeping without a bra on. how is san supposed to not be horny when he wakes up every morning to your pretty nipples poking through his tshirt that he let you sleep in. it’s only right that you help him fix his problem, right? that you let him drool over your boobs as he dribbles cum onto your thighs?

song mingi - ass

with the amount i talk about mingi being a slut for eating pussy, i think we all saw this coming, right? like your ass is just the perfect place to hold onto while he tucks in to his favourite meal. he especially likes it when you’re sitting on his face and he can just grab it, using it as leverage to pin you to his face when you start to become oversensitive from his rough licks.

and don’t even get me started about how feral he gets when he eats your pussy from the back. literally eyes closed, moaning like a whore as he licks at you from behind. loves to just grope you while he eats you out, pinching and smacking it every few seconds because he adores the way it makes your pussy clench and squeeze out even more of your precious fluids. he’s literally a bitch in heat when it comes to eating pussy, you will never convince me otherwise

jung wooyoung - ass

he’s a smacker… that’s all i have to say. any time, anywhere, you always need to be on guard because you never know when wooyoung is going to come up behind you and just smack! he likes the way it makes you squeal and blush, thinking you look the most adorable when you’re pouting and scolding him for spanking your ass in the middle of a grocery store! most of the time he just gives you a cheeky smirk before promising - with his fingers crossed, of course - that he won’t do it again.

and he can’t lie, he likes the way it feels in his hand too. the way it jiggles from the impact hypnotises him, and it’s always a struggle for him to pull himself away and not do just one more. but it’s fine, because you never complain when he has you face down ass up in bed, hands raining down spank after spank on your pretty cheeks until they’re red from the impact.

choi jongho - tits

i’m 90% certain that if you’re in a relationship with this man, your tits will become his new favourite thing. whether that’s to look at, to play with, to suck on, it doesn’t really matter. what does matter is they’re his and he will never leave them alone. like he always insists that you wear no bra at home so he can see your pretty nipples; even better if you’re wearing a thin white tshirt too so he can see the colour of them through the material.

the no bra thing also helps when he has his hand slung over your shoulder and he’s pawing at one of them like it’s a stress ball. he won’t even be paying attention to you, yet his hand will be rhythmically palming your tit, his finger flicking against the nipple every so often. and then after all that, when you inevitably ask him to deal with the mess he’s made between your thighs, he’ll have the audacity to act like it’s your fault that you’re horny! he’ll still fuck you though, and you’ll still end up with a nice selection of new purple hickeys across your chest…

#ateez x reader #ateez fic #ateez smut #jongho x reader #jongho smut #wooyoung x reader #wooyoung smut #mingi x reader #mingi smut #san x reader #san smut #yeosang x reader #yeosang smut #yunho x reader #yunho smut #seonghwa x reader #seonghwa smut #hongjoong x reader #hongjoong smut

[mysteriesmuse]

You’re hiding in your Hiding Place — Bakugou Katsuki’s bicep 💪

In your later years at UA, Bakugou Katsuki ends up with an —unusual reputation within class A. He’s got a notoriously famous mean streak, but in 1-A he’s also got a reputation for having a strangely nutty tough-love aura about him — which makes him a decently good person to come run to when things go wrong. Naturally, not anyone’s top pick or anything, but a good one for when you need cry your heart out, or something. And, Bakugou usually knows, which is why he’s not all too surprised when you plow into his midsection in the middle of the hall. He’s headed upstairs from a later dinner because of his internship when he sees you. You’re coming straight from the dormitory showers, a chrous of familiar caterwauling floating out from the boys side. That’s why he took his showers in the morning, if he could help it, because at least Iida didn’t attempt to sing. You look soft and malleable stepping out from the bathroom. An old tye-dye shirt boasting participation of some kind of annual charity run and a pair of sweatpants on. The cuff at you ankles revealing your — now, slightly pink house slippers due to a washing mishap that happened last week in the dorms with a certain Shitty-Hair’ed guy and his red-themed hero costume. Your arms and face are dewy with what he presumes is that moisturizer that all you girls like to lather up in daily — and your hair is still on the verge of wet and stringy, but also frizzy and fuck, you look so very tired and soft right now. Katsuki pauses, red eyes squinting at your face; your nose is pink and your face is dewy, but those aren’t fingerprints left in the wake of moisturizer — it’s old tears that’s streaked over it. He huffs from his nose, nostrils flaring before he takes his hands out of his pockets and flexes his fingers at you where they hang by the side of his hips. And it’s then that he sees your shoulders slacken slightly before you’re suddenly pressed up against his front. All causal and warm — pressed as far into his abdomen as you can get, and he can feel your boobs smush against his chest because you’re very clearly not wearing a bra — and also because he’s earned a reputation for being a decent fucking human and for being nonchalant about that stuff. Bakugou is one of three guys in the dorm you guys deem trustworthy and reasonable enough to do that with. (The other two being Shouji and Todoroki.) And thus, he’s been grappled into many squishy-boob hugs by all you shitty girls. And your cheek is pressed against the hard plain of muscle that is his chest and your arms are wrapped around him — just under his shoulder blades in an action that lifts him and pulls Bakugou in towards you just a little bit. Your fingertips pressing into the muscle on his back and he hopes you don’t feel the way his heart is lub-dubbing inside his chest at the action. And suddenly Bakugou pulls you closer to him. A bicep circling protectively beside your chin, as a big palm comes to rest atop your damp hair. His other arm squeezing around your mid-section like a python and it’s a good thing too because as soon as he puts his arms around you Bakugou can feel that strength seeping from you and it feels like he’s holding you together. And that’s when the sniffles start.

“I’m so pathetic,” you whine. “As soon as you put your arms around me I felt my knees buckle.” And you’re pressed so close Bakugou can feel the way your lips move to form the words right against his chest. And instead of Bakugou saying anything mildly helpful in this situation his says, “I have that effect.” With a slight shrug that brings the top of your head pressing against his jaw, which might just be him engulfing and cradling you completely, but who knows? And Bakugou has no fucking idea why he said that. Or how he managed to say something so flirtatiously cringy with such calm, but all you do is attempt to shake your head against his hold and mumble, “yeah, that makes sense. I’ve seen the other girls around school.” Which you punctuate with a snort, an arm moving from his back to swipe at your face. Bakugou has no idea where this is going — except for you to start “hilariously deflecting” from whatever problem is at hand. “There’s this one girl,” you start with a breath, “she’s always hanging around the hallway between classes. She’s definitely trying to catch you at your locker, but she always just ends up next to mine and Momo’s — saying something random before running off. She’s definitely into you.” You look up at him, still completely weak in his hold and Bakugou scrunches his nose at you. An action that you find looks unnatural and awkward on the sharp features of his face. You frown, hoarsely laughing, “Stop that.” About his facial expression. Bakugou can’t imagine any girls wanting to be with him. Surely he’s a terrible catch at a boyfriend.

He face curls into a snarling scoff, “Nope. Can’t see it. You must be imaging things.” He declares forcefully pressing your head back into the cocoon of him. He settles his head back on top of yours and you’re now squirming like a damn worm. And you find some strength as you manage to peek your face out and blink at him with furrowed brows. And maybe it’s cause you’re in a vulnerable state with a good friend and maybe it’s because you’ve been harboring a little bit of a recent crush on the boy, but you blurt out, “You’re a catch. You know that, right?” And again his stupidly handsome face scrunches into that weird shape again before his red eyes are staring into yours. The hand on your back clutches at your shirt fabric before he says, “You really think that? You’re not just fucking with me?” You snort, wiping a few more stray tears from an entirely different problem than the internal one that the blonde is currently having. “Yeah I really think that, Bakugou.” And there’s a little quip on the side of his mouth that might count as a Bakugou smile, but it’s gone before you can tease him about it. The explosive murder god boy being unsure about his status as attractive is entirely too precious and far too laughable a situation — which is probably why your aggressively smooshed back into his chest and why he starts waddling side to side. For some damn reason the gently rocking from foot-to-foot placebo affects you into crying it all out. Some remnant of being a baby you suppose, but it’s still annoying how Bakugou’s managed to peg it on you so easily. And you’re damn right Bakugou’s doing it on purpose because you very clearly have a problem of your own or you wouldn’t be clutching onto him for dear life like you are right now. And despite this revelation that Kirishima may be right in the fact that’s he’s attractive he’s still whirling at the thought that you think he’s a catch. Because you’re the only girl he’d probably ever want thinking that — but Bakugou tucks that piece of knowledge into the back of his brain when Momo comes out of the showers next. A giant frilly nightgown on as she scampers over — talking and whispering to you gently from within your little hiddie-hole formed by his curled bicep and forearm. And he just huffs, and continues to cocoon you in his embrace rocking back and forth like a damn rocking-chair as you rattle off whatever’s been on your mind.

What’s on his mind is for another day . . .

#mysteriesmusing #katsuki bakugou #mha fanfiction #bakugou x reader #bakugou fluff #bakugou drabble #bakugou katsuki #bakugou headcanons

[astralnymphh]

imagineee ellie w reader who loves to do her makeup n she just staring at you like a lil puppy in awe

ellie is just so engrossed in the process that she can't help but be a little handsy. ౨ৎ

her shoulder kissed to the door trim, slanting against it a mere foot from you at best, a looming pest over your shoulder— snaking her foot out to prod your ankle with it, mumbling n' chuckling, "what eyeliner you going for?" cause, i think she's pretty used to watching you. watching the dance of wrist and finger, stick and plume, powder and cream— observing the slow metamorphosis of natural into painted, adoring every flick and every stroke, tries to join in too. "d'you want some color here," her collarbones cave over the jut of your shoulder, her bicep warm to your chest as she ghosts the plumage of a fat blush brush, "or here?" she tilts her rasp. "els', that's a blush brush, and you are not applying eyeshadow to—" you tuck your chin and slink from the ticklish bristles, only to be piloted with her cold fingerprints pressing around the plum of your chin, "babe—" her low tone buzzes, "know' what m'doing." the pressure given on your jaw steering you yonder to stare at her, bemusedly, blank canvas eyes, but goddess-damned does her concentrated, pursing brows carving little lines 'tween them, heady mix of fern and gold flecks in her eyes, small tip of her coral tongue gliding through her lips and sticking out the side, wriggle of her mud stippled nose pulling with the tug of her cheeks fattening a smirk, all those damned things you love. who could say no? not me, not you, not us. ellie being thickly diligent and fixated hard on your bend of face, stroking it featherily, legit hunched at her spine all to replicate your art on face— is so goddamn cute, brushing the plume across your cheeks. "there." hummed nasally, and when you flip a look into the mirror, you're proud. your little auburn artist has made you something of a practiced canvas, albeit a little funky-going with the blush brush, but thank mother nature and the celestials above that she actually chose a shade of eyeshadow barely pigmented and shaded correctly to mimic a humble blush right to your skintone. and of course the split second your lips curl and allow the honeyed push of, "fuck, els, that looks goo—" to fall from them, her nose is already being smushed up against the space of cheek-to-ear, wetting a kiss upon your baby hairs, cockily replying, "yeah yeah, told you i knew what i was doin." and hooking a finger in your belt loop, yanking your hips an inch closer— only to be playful.

she can do my makeup w those bare hands idc massage them in my cheeks queen both of them

#ellie williams #⤹𓍢ִ໋aestras asks #ellie williams x reader #ellie tlou #lesbian #sapphic #ellie x reader #ellie williams x fem!reader #ellie williams fic #ellie williams fluff #ellie williams x fem reader #ellie williams x you #ellie williams x female reader #ellie williams x y/n #ellie williams blurb #ellie williams drabble #ellie williams concept #modern!ellie #modern!ellie williams #tlou ellie #ellie williams tlou

[nexusnyx]

omg congrats on 10.5k, thats frickin amazing!! ♡ if you feel like writing it,

🖋 + joel miller

"you couldn't love me if you tried. You couldn't love anything"

"that's not true"

hi Rhi! first, thank you so much. i stared at your prompt 'till the scene came to me, and i hope you like it. — main masterlist | 🏷️: established 'situationship', post-outbreak, insecure!Reader, angst, hurt/comfort, insecure!Joel, mentions of smut, adult themes so minors DNI, feelings confession. [WC: 2.1k]

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ˗ˏˋ꒰ you call it madness ꒱

Joel had the power to awaken the most potent, brand-new things to your surface. Since he had arrived in Jackson with the bright kid trailing after him and his mountains of pent-up trauma, Joel lived under your skin.

At first, it was because of his cold, indifferent distance.

Then, when the first couple of months passed by and working side by side forced proximity on you two leading you to the realization that a lot of the gruffness and silence was just a facade, the issue became his nonchalant air of detached.

Everything you wanted was to have in him the same effect he had on you.

That tingle. That burn on your nape when the person enters the room. The hype-awareness of their every move. You wanted Joel attached to you, glued to your skin, and when you got it, he made you swallow all your need and desire down with the bitter pill of what having you Joel meant.

Having Joel came with the taste of cheap alcohol, the scent of burnt things, and that quivering darkness that seemed to follow him unless Ellie was around.

It came with his ghosts hanging off his back, and his mind stuck in a limbo that cemented in him the idea that his ghosts weighted more than they did.

It took him months to allow you into his life. Months of you trying to figure out why he pissed you off so much and why even though his monosyllabic bullshit made your skin itch, you still found a way to interact with him at every given opportunity.

When he started laughing at your jokes—no, when Joel started snickering under his breath whenever you made a sharp comment to a fellow worker, it became your addiction. The fact that you were not other people.

Not for him.

Wearing him down was supposed to be about getting him off of your mind, removing him from under your skin.

It ended up being your ticket into his home, his life, his bed.

Joel had this power of making you do things you had no clue you even knew how.

Things that the you from before — a someone who’d been deceased long ago — would gasp out loud at.

But fuck all of that. Fuck anything that strayed away from being the reason for Joel Miller laughing, or god forbid, making him and Ellie happy. 

You’d take it all to pay the price for that.

You’d accept his days of silence and his days of trying to make jokes, or teach you and Ellie how to play the guitar eve if you sucked at it and the girl had what seemed like a natural talent.

So what if Joel sometimes bled his darkness all over you?

You begged for it.

So what if he whispered the filthiest things in your ear as he took you wherever he wanted, however he wanted, claiming you over and over with fingerprints imprinted on your skin, beard burns leaving red trails from your face and neck all the way down to places other people would never get a chance to look at again, according to Joel himself?

Considering how welcoming you were to all of it, one would think you’d know your place. Or at least know better than to expect out of Joel Miller something he stopped believing he can give to anyone a long time ago.

Despite your best judgment, you did hope. You wished, and dreamt of it, and cried about it in silent tears on his damn pillow when he turned away from you to sleep sometimes.

It goes on until he catches up to all of it. 

Joel always catches up to things. Especially if that thing is related to you.

On a winter night, a whole year after he and Ellie have settled and officially made a home, you two are discussing things after dinner in his kitchen.

Ellie went to a friend’s house, leaving the both of you to your shitty pizzas and even shittier booze. Joel, propped against the sink with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows and his hair a messy mop of curls, looks pissed off at your comment that, “she gotta at least put the Miller stare away. Time it properly, if she wants to make more friends.”

It was supposed to be a joke. Something only you two would understand. Instead, Joel turns around with that pinch between his eyes.

“What’s that’s supposed to mean?”

You put the mug down, thrown back by his tone, making a noncommittal sound. He repeats his question, confirming you did hear what you thought, and it makes you snicker. “Joel. Would you like a goddamn mirror right now, handsome?”

The nickname does nothing to phase his look. “You sayin’ I’m a bad influence on her? That I’m the reason she ain’t got no other friends?’

“Woah, woah—take it many, many steps back, cowboy—”

“I ain’t laughin’. I don’t know why you are.”

“Because it’s ridiculous!” All your ironic humor is gone. Evaporated like water under the scolding sun. “D’you hear yourself? I said time it properly, Joel. I know exactly just how useful the grouchy look is, trust me.”

“I don’t tell her to do that shit. She’s always been like that.” He turns back around with that stiffness in his shoulders.

“I know.” You try calming yourself, your voice, your tone. Joel can be prickly, as can you. “It’s… her little way. It makes Ellie Ellie, and honestly, it’s what makes her stand out. Her personality’s one of a kind, that’s for sure, and I wouldn’t trade an inch of it for anything else, but she’s—impulsive. And while I love, all I’m sayin is—”

“Other people don’t,” he completes.

“Exactly.”

There was the noise of the final dishes being placed to dry, and Joel cleaning up his work.

“You love how impulsive she is?” Although Joel’s finished, he keeps his back to you. His tone is back to an amused one, for some reason.

“Sure I do.” You loved her since you two were out of town and got stuck in a blizzard together, and Ellie told you about her friend Riley. Loved, with every fiber in you. “It’s not useful, but it just means her fire’s alive. I like that. It’s better than the alternative. You know what happens when people’s fires die.”

At that, Joel finally turns around, drying his hands in his own clothes, fixing his dark eyes on you. “Yeah. I’ve got a mirror.”

God, you think. There he goes again.

You sigh, annoyed and angry, just like that. In a split second. Because of four little words. “If you’re gonna start talking shit about yourself—”

Joel cuts you with his laugh. “Sorry. ‘m sorry.” He steps closer to you, pulling the chair he was using during dinner closer until it’s glued on yours, and he sits. “Dunno why you hate it so much, but I’ve leared better. I’ll keep my mouth shut.”

Better than the alternative, you guessed. You hummed, not that over your sudden wave of anger.

The way he saw himself contrasted who he was so much that it pissed you off more than any Clicker ever could.

“Hey.” Joel brings up one hand to cup your cheek, and it soothes his cold hand over your jaw, landing on your nape. “‘s fine. I won’t be talkin’ about broken old me, ‘kay?”

Fire raged in your veins and his hand on your neck was the only anchor keeping your from storming off his house.

“It’s like you wanna piss me off sometimes.”

Joel has the audacity to laugh at you. “I just said I ain’t gonna say anythin’, woman.”

“You’re not broken,” you argue, serious and angry enough to get that insanely stupidly gorgeous and self-depracating smile out of his face.

“We’ll just agree to disagree here—”

“No, we fucking won’t. You’re not a thing, you can’t broken if you’re not a thing.”

“That’s funny, ‘cause I feel a lot of fuckin’ pieces missing.” Joel rarely speaks with that roughness directed towards you, but that’s better. Realer than the sardonic smile. He sighs deeply, his face relaxing a second after. Tired, he squeezes your neck. “Look—I made a stupid joke. I know you don’t like me talkin’ shit about myself for lord knows what reason, so I won’t—”

“‘Cause they’re not true.”

It surprises you both, you think. The crack in your voice. The shimmery wetness in your vision blurring the sight of a stunned Joel certainly surprises you. 

You swallow the knot in your throat, but it’s stuck there. You speak around it anyway. “It’s the same way you feel when they talk about ‘er, ok?” You sniffle, looking away from him to blink down the tears. “I fucking hate it.”

It’s how you feel when they shittalk Ellie.

The words hang in the air for a heavy second until you realize what you’ve laid on the table.

Joel loves Ellie. That much is known.

You love Ellie. That much was known, too.

When he speaks again, Joel is the one who sounds choked. "You couldn't love me if you tried. You couldn't love anything." It pulls your gaze back to him. “Not about me. Ain’t nothing about me worth lovin’.” He shakes his head, and his hand is gone from your neck, leaving only the cold ghost of it in the process. 

You couldn’t love me. 

It’s your turn to laugh.

"That's not true." 

He paused, and you saw his Addam's apple bobbing before he shakes his head, still in disbelief.

“You know what I did. More than anyone I’ve met before. You know there’s nothing here to love.”

“That’s your excuse?”

“It’s the fuckin’ truth,” Joel’s starting to sound on the verge of tears, and your eyes glue to his face.

“Joel, I don’t know what was misunderstood in my little nod and silence when you shared all those things about your past that night, but let me make something clear to you—I know the difference.” Joel’s frown between hsi brown deepens, but his eyes remain on yours. “You think I don’t? Don’t you ever condescend me to the point of thinking I don’t know the different between what’s rotten and what’s not in this world.”

Not saying ‘between what’s good and bad’ is a deliberate choice, and it keeps Joel’s attention hooked.

Somehow, you know this is your only chance, so you forego all thinking and just allow all your feelings for him to pour out of your pores and slip through your lips. 

“I heard all you told me and I don’t give a fuck about what you did when dissassociating out of your mind. What you did to survive, or what you did ‘cause you saw all the real rotten all around. When you say shit like ‘ain’t nothin’ about me worth living’ you put yourself in the same sack as people like that fucker David or other people who really are rotten. Who did and are horrible outta pleasure. Outta desire for it. And that is not you.”

If you could reach to him, this was when.

You lean forward, making the distance between you both smaller. 

This time, you cup his neck.

“And let me make this crystal clear ‘cause apparently it wasn’t. That last thing you did? To save her?” You breathe deeply. “If it was me in your place, I would’ve done the exact fucking same. A room full of wannabe scientists and a bunch of equipment from god knows when, swearing that killing the only person who’s apparently immue is gonna solve something?” You scoff. “Joel, I would’ve burned that building to the ground with everyone in it.”

"You…"

The words never come to him.

Instead, what comes forward is Joel.

Something in your speech breaks the dem that you had no idea existed, and Joel floods towards you.

Crashing his lips against yours, he devours.

His kiss demands a surrender because it delivers things he never gave you before. Joel holds onto your face like a lifeline, groaning against your mouth and lifting both of your bodies to press you closer to him, suddenly desperate. Suddenly devout, and it spills from his eyes.

When Joel pulls back to look at you, there’s a fright and a hope in them that makes you realize why he turned around. Why he kept his distance.

Joel thought you could never get him. Not truly, and not personally.

“You…” he whispers, lips still touching yours. His eyes are saying so much that words evaded him. “I…” Joel swallows so thickly that you hear it this time, and it draws a whimper from you.

“I know, Joel,” you whine, pulling him in for another kiss.I know you could. That maybe now you’ll allow yourself to, all your kisses say. I already do. I already do.

🏷 @sakuralikestars — @mostardentily — @thegreat-annamaria — @leiticia — @polyglot-noodle — @casssiopeiaaa — @levylovegood — @simply-sams-things — @lavenderhhze — @gracie7209 — @waywardwolfbonklight — @shadytalething — @yesimwriting — @celestialstar111 — @averysblog — @pedrostories — @fleursirvart — @sirtommyholland — @capbrie — @hawsx3 — @superflymaterial — @ashleyforeverareject — @girlofchaos — @queerponcho — @am-3-thyst — @nyotamalfoy — @my-tearsricochet — @ponyboys-sunsets — @peqchsoup

ㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤㅤ* . join my Fireplace celebration. *

#usernexusnyx #joel miller imagine #joel miller fanfic #joel miller smut #joel miller x you #joel miller tlou #joel miller fic #joel miller drabble #joel miller headcanon #joel miller x f!reader #joel miller x y/n #joel miller x reader #joel miller angst #joel miller hurt/comfort #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller fluff #nyx10fireplace.ೃ࿐ #pedro pascal imagine #pedro pascal x you #pedro pascal x reader #pedro pascal x y/n

[stararch4ngelqueen]

In spirit of ur last Jason fic can u do a Drabble or small fic w ghost where he has a night terror and when reader tries to help him he really hurts her? Even though she forgives him he doesn’t trust himself. (Maybe she is also a military personnel)

This is not proofread

- -

It’s unclear who’s hand Simon believed he was clutching back with all of his strength. A forearm withholding glimmering, serrated steel from his jugular by an enemy.

The hand of his bastard spawn labeled as his father preparing to strike him down with a fist.

Hands attached to painted faces grasping rusted butcher hooks behind their backs.

A whisper invaded his conscience. A trembling plea from quivering lips, begging him to wake up from his cursed agony. Your voice was soothing, like warm milk and honey, encouraging him to open his eyes.

His heart never hurt so horribly when his mind slipped back into reality, meeting your petrified gaze full of distressed tears.

“Simon.” You speak up through a forcibly calm demeanor, like you remembered to practice.

“Simon. It’s okay, you’re okay … you’re fine. You’re safe.”

He almost believed you, until he fully collected his bearings.

What he saw, what he had done, made all your calm words reach chiming ears.

Its unclear if he had you pinned down to the mattress like he’d done with his shadowy victim. No, regardless, why are you choosing to forgive him so easily?

What he remembered that night was scrambling out of bed, tossing the sheets off his sweaty back. He didn’t look back, refusing to acknowledge your worried cries when you follow him, only halting once the front door slams shut behind him.

He didn’t come home the first night. All phone calls going straight to voicemail for a solid nine hours, just until you remembered he didn’t leave with it.

Simon told you to slap him if he ever caused harm on you. Hit him back, punch him, stab him deep in his scarred ribs, but you never could. Violence struck with violence never stuck well with you, regardless of the battles you fought for your country.

Simon said nothing to you when you greeted him from the kitchen when he came home the next evening. You behaved as if it didn’t happen at first, offering him a sweet, hopeful smile he had no right to visually bare.

“It wasn’t your fault, Simon,” you attempt to convince him, not seeing the wrong he believed he had some to you the night before. No, the wrong he knew he had committed.

“Better off putting a bullet in my damn head.” He murmurs, exhausted eyes refusing to meet yours.

It was the first words he had said since he came back home. Those very words striking a bullet in your heart instead.

“No. No no,” you approach fast, grasping his face in your hands. “No! Don’t you ever say that. Don’t even think about it, Simon!”

Without warning, he clutched your hand, wedding bands clinking against each other as he yanks up your long sleeve, revealing the damage he’d done.

“I hurt you!” He shouts, forcing your other hand off his face. “Get that through your head! How can you stand here and forgive me for this?!”

Bruises. Broad, indigo bruised the size of his fingerprints. Grape colored crescents from his naturally crooked nails painfully digging into your skin, nearly drawing blood.

“You did hurt me,” you say, meeting his furiously narrowed expression with glassy eyes. “You’re hurting me right now the more you keep blaming yourself.”

Simon scoffs after releasing your hand, wanting nothing more than to rid himself of your presence out of self disgust. However, your hand grasps hold of his arm, encouraging him to halt in his step.

“Did you intend it? No,” you shook your head. “You didn’t. That’s not your fault, this is something you can’t control. You can’t blame yourself for that!”

There you go again, continuing to insist he wasn’t to blame for your injuries, conveniently hidden under your long sleeve to appear presentable. As if you could pretend it didn’t happen.

Simon wished he could pretend too, but he’s a strict believer to reality.

What else could you tell Simon to get it through his mind? It was difficult. Even after this discussion, he slept on the couch for nearly two weeks. His natural silence was painful, his heartache for harming you without intent was difficult for him to process.

You couldn’t take it, sleeping alone without your husband. He hadn’t had this kind of episode in weeks, nearly two months in total. Yes, he never hurt you before, but the harm he inflicted upon himself left you feeling powerless to help him.

“Simon?”

Your sweet voice opens his eyes to darkness, his rattled mind preventing him from receiving an ounce of sleep.

There you stood in front of the couch, a thin blanket draped over your shoulders, a heavily distressed expression invading your sniffling face.

You missed him. Even since before you were married, you used to enjoy sleeping alone. These weeks of distance had you realizing what hell you were immersed in, sleeping in an empty bed without your death masked killer protecting you from the cold.

Sleeping on the couch wasn’t new, crammed together like little fishes in a tin was how the both of you slept when you first moved into your home late at night. The both of you too tired to construct the bed frame or unwrap the mattress from copious amounts of heavy plastic.

Simon missed you too, regardless of his guilt. He missed your koala like tendency to cling to his body as if you lived in the Antarctic all your life, submerged in your dreams with the sound of his heartbeat to keep you company.

Thousands of screaming apologies express in the silent essence of his tears as he holds you, pondering over what he could do to make sure this never happens again.

#simon ghost riley #ghost x reader #simon riley #simon riley x reader #simon ghost x reader #this was unique #wrote this during dinner #simon riley x you #simon ghost riley x reader #cod ghost #call of duty x reader #simon riley x y/n

[holdmytesseract]

Greetings Bestie, I am here with a Magnus blurb request

How about a piece where Magnus realizes he's in love with his partner, and it's at a funny & inappropriate time and place? Like they're in an interrogation or maybe undercover?

Perfectly Bad Timing

Warnings: fluff, police things, more fluff

Word Count: blurb

a/n: Bestiiie, thank you so much for this! I really hope you're going to like this lil' story! 🥹💖

Magnus's eyes were glued to you. Something you didn't seem to notice. If the young man across from you and him noticed? Perhaps. Perhaps not. Anyways, the policeman wouldn't care. He always had just eyes for the wonderful woman he gad the honour to call his girlfriend, but today... Today was one of these days on which he got reminded by himself how freaking much he actually loved you.

During an interrogation in the first case Kurt allowed you and Magnus to be leading inspectors was admittedly not exactly the right moment, but what was he supposed to do?

You two worked at the Ystad police station for almost five years together now and he had never... Never seen you interrogate a person. This time was a first - and to Magnus, it was stunning. You were stunning. The way you talked. How you always found the right words to say against the snappy, arrogant and pubescent teenager. Your smart and witty nature...

Magnus would even go as far and say it was dominant, and he couldn't deny that he found that to be pretty hot.

The palm of your hand slamming down on the wooden table everybody sat at, caused the young policeman to snap out of his daydream. At least a little.

"Stop lying to us, Nils. We knew you were at the boathouse. We found your goddamn fingerprints!" You accused the eighteen-year-old across from you. By now you were utterly frustrated and kind of angry. Not just because the disrespectful young man just wouldn't cooperate, no... You were also angry because you already sat inside this constricting, small room for almost an hour and your colleague/boyfriend hadn't said a single word!

You gritted your teeth and slowly turned to face the curly haired man. "Magnus?" He shortly blinked and looked up; oceanic blues meeting your Y/E/C ones. "Yes?" You nodded at the door. "For a word..."

Magnus nodded in agreement; noticed immediately that you weren’t in a good mood. His chair scratched over the polished floor as he stood up and followed you outside in the hallway wordlessly.

You had crossed your arms and waited for him to close the door shut. "Magnus..." You started and took a deep breath; trying not to snap at him right away. Perhaps he had a reason why he didn't say something yet. "We are in there for almost an hour and after five minutes you kind of zoned out completely. Baby, you are absolutely no help! That's shitty. If you're just sitting beside me and staring holes into the wall, I might as well do this alone."

Magnus swallowed hard. You could see his Adam's apple bobbing. And he was blushing. "I-I know, I-" "Then why are you doing it?" You interrupted him. "This isn't working without you! Nils might be the key to solve this case! We can't let this opportunity sl-"

The policeman had heard enough. He knew what this was about. His head told him that repeatedly. But his heart... His heart just wanted one thing... For his lips to kiss you. So, he did.

Magnus interrupted you with his mouth on yours; hands on your hips and pulling you against his body.

You were shocked at first - like frozen, but then you couldn't help but to melt against his touch. Against his sinful kiss.

"Mags..." You panted, once he broke the kiss to get some fresh air into his lungs. "W-What... What was that about?" A boyish smile grazed the curly haired man's face; cheeks reddening. "Me, realising how much I love you, min älskling. I'm sorry for not doing my job, but... All I could focus on, was you."

Your expression softened. He was so cute and kind. How could you possibly be mad at him?

"Aww..." You hugged your boyfriend tightly; burying your hands in his wild, blond curls. "I love you so so much as well." You kissed him again and again and again; the ongoing integration forgotten... At least for a few minutes.

Tags: @muddyorbsblr @mochie85 @asgards-princess-of-mischief @multifandom-worlds @jennyggggrrr @huntedmusicgardenn @hisredheadedgoddess28 @stupidthoughtsinwriting @fictive-sl0th @loz-3 @javagirl328 @icytrickster17 @jaidenhawke @eleniblue @lou12346789 @lady-rose-moon @km-ffluv @herdetectivetheorist @lokiforever @crimson25 @simping-for-marvel @cakesandtom @vanilla-daydreaming @kimanne723 @glitchquake @lulubelle814 @ijuststareatstuffhereok89 @buttercupcookies-blog @november-rayne @mandywholock1980 @lokidbadguy @smolvenger

#campfire sleepover #2k follower celebration #magnus martinsson #wallander #wallander fanfiction #magnus martinsson x reader #magnus martinsson x you #magnus martinsson x y/n #tom hiddleston x reader #tom hiddleston characters

[outofmydepthatapublicbeach]

the field- Julien Baker x fem!reader

summary: After getting back from the craziness of tour, you and Julien crave something spontaneous, which leads you to "frolicking" in a field.

jj chats: this was completely inspired by the photo below!!! and im not sure who took or where it orginically came from, I found it on pinterest!!

word count: 1000ish

warnings: RPF, kissing, the "L" word, pet names (just baby i think)

feedback is encouraged and i'd love to get some just please be kind!!!

You and Julien wouldn’t exactly call yourselves an adventurous couple. You appreciated familiarity. The comfort of a close-by restaurant, the same paths to walk on, you two were homebodies, through and through. With the end of Boygenius’ tour, came the end of the constant traveling and the constant sight-seeing that came with visiting the world's largest cities. You two loved being able to relax in your own home again. Until that feeling of wanting more kicked in, you both started to crave those impulsive, on-the-go feelings that came with being on tour.

One morning, still curled up in your array of fluffy blankets, your girlfriend rolls on her side, turning to face you, “Do you want to get out of town for a little while?”

“What do you mean?” You ask, cocking your head.

“You know, go somewhere else, I feel like we’ve been trapped in this house for far too long.” She laughed, face scrunching up.

You thought about it for a second, you were a little bored, “That would be fun, where were you thinking of going?” You suddenly felt all giddy with the idea of getting away for a little bit, especially just you and Julien.

“Maybe a road trip? That could be fun,” Julien giggles, wrapping her body around yours.

Your smile is ear-to-ear as you say “A road trip is then!”

It takes the two of you an hour to get up, enjoying the warmth and comfort of your bed a little too much. But when you two do get up, you start grabbing chargers and toothbrushes and packing little two-nighter bags. Getting ready to stuff it all into your car and drive off into the sunset. Once in the car, Julien drives (naturally) you are in charge of the music.Pretty soon the car is filled with the sounds of your voices screaming out lyrics as you drive fast down the highway. 

〇〇 〇〇 〇〇 〇〇 〇〇

“Jules?” 

Julien glances over at you, hand resting on your thigh “Yes baby?”

“How long have we been on the road?” 

“I think about three hours,”

Looking around, you spot nothing but fields full of tall grass. “Where are we going again?”

“Nowhere in particular,” Her head turns to the side, facing you, while still keeping her eyes on the road. “Do you want to stop here and explore?”

A funny look dawns on your face as you stare blankly at Julien “But we’re in the middle of nowhere, there's only fields around here.”

As if a light bulb actually went off above her head, Juliens eyes and facial features lit up, “You just gave me the best idea ever! I’m gonna pull off the road up here!”

“Wait Jules what!” Your hand grasps the center console as your car takes a sharp turn to the left. The car slowed down as it approached a patch of land that was just dirt. Decades of cars parked in the same spot left indents into the ground like the intricacies of a fingerprint. 

Julien stopped the car and unhooked her seat belt, giving you a wild smile. She suddenly threw open her car door and jumped out, slamming the door behind her. Your eyes tracked her figure as she jogged over to your side, opening the door for you like the gentleman she was. 

She reached a hand out to help you get out of the car. “Jules, what are we doing?'' Your hand fell into hers, a natural instinct at this point. She tugged on your hand as you were now standing on the dirt patch. You closed the car door behind as Julien led you into the field.

The grass was so tall you couldn’t see over it, which concealed you and your beloved from anyones view, not that there was anyone close enough to stare, as you were still in the middle of nowhere. Yet the thought of this level of privacy was so intimate to you. Spending quality time with the love of your life had never felt as good as it did right now. Julien continued to lead you through the field, using her own body to push through the grass that was taller than her. 

“Isn’t this fun?” she erupted in giggles. After a little more wading through the field she turned to you, looking deeply into your eyes. “I always wanted to frolic in a field with you.” 

“Doesn’t frolicing require dancing around?” you laugh ebulliently.

Julien giggled at your comment, “Let me rephrase that, I’ve always wanted to walk around a field with you.” 

Your grasp on her hand tightened, tugging her closer to you. The air was chilly, yet the combined body heat was enough to warm you. Julien’s other hand found a place on your cheek, brushing some hair behind your ear. Leaning into her palm you whispered “I’m so happy right now.”

“Is that so?” Julien murmured, entranced. Her gaze, however safe you felt in it, always made you feel as if she was staring into your soul, memorizing each fear, each dream, each crack and crevice. Committing them to memory so she’d never forget. You’d never felt so vulnerable, so loved.

The feelings you held were hard to put to words, so you decided to simply say “Just you…make me happy. So happy.” 

Julien’s face broke out in a heart-mending smile. She leaned in, closing the distance between you two with a gentle kiss. You free hand snaked its way around her neck, pulling her in even closer. The kiss turned from one of a more innocent approach to one that was feuled by passion. Lips melted together in one harmonisous rhythm of love.

When you both pulled away for air, the silence was replaced with 3 simple words, words that you had been praying every night to hear from Julien, “I love you.”

Your cheeks hurt from how hard you were smiling, yet the pain felt good, it felt right. In the moment nothing else mattered but the woman in front of you.

#julien baker x reader #julien baker fanfic #boygenius x reader #julien baker fluff #muna #jj writes #wlw #wlw post #sfw #lesbian #sapphic #lgbtq #lgbtqia #lesbians

[blessedarethebinarybreakers]

Wrestling with the Bible's war stories

Spend any solid amount of time with scripture and you'll run into something that perplexes, disturbs, or downright horrifies you. Many of us have walked away from the Bible or from Christianity in general, sometimes temporarily and sometimes permanently, after encountering these stories. So how do we face them, wrestle them, and seek God's presence in (or in spite of) them?

In her book Inspired: Slaying Giants, Walking on Water, and Loving the Bible Again, the late Rachel Held Evans spends a whole chapter on the "war stories" of Joshua, Judges, and the books of Samuel and Kings. She starts with how most teachers in her conservative Christian upbringing shut her down every time she tried to name the horror she felt reading of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing; I share an excerpt from that part of the chapter over in this post.

That excerpt ends with Evans deciding that she needed to grapple with these stories, or lose her faith entirely.

...But then I ended the excerpt, with the hope that folks would go read all of Inspired for themselves — and I still very much recommend doing so! The whole book is incredibly helpful for relearning how to read scripture in a way that honors its historical context and divine inspiration, and takes seriously how misreadings bring harm to individuals and whole people groups.

But I know not everyone will read the book, for a variety of reasons, and that's okay. So I want to include a long excerpt from the rest of the chapter, where Evans provides cultural context and history that helps us understand why those war stories are in there; and then seeks to find where God's inspiration is among those "human fingerprints."

I know how important it was to Rachel Held Evans that all of us experience healing and liberation, so it is my hope that she'd be okay with me pasting such a huge chunk of the book for reading here. If you find what's in this post meaningful, please do check out the rest of her book! A lot of libraries have it in print, ebook, and/or audiobook form.

[One last comment: the following excerpt focuses on these war stories from the Hebrew scriptures ("Old Testament"), but there are violent and otherwise disturbing stories in the "New Testament" too, from Herod killing babies to all the wild things going on in Revelation. Don't fall for the antisemitic claim that "The Old Testament is violent while the New Testament is all about peace!" All parts of scripture include violent passages, and maintain an overarching theme of justice and love.]

Here's the excerpt showing Rachel's long wrestling with the Bible's war stories, starting with an explanation for why they're in there in the first place:

“By the time many of the Bible’s war stories were written down, several generations had passed, and Israel had evolved from a scrappy band of nomads living in the shadows of Babylon, Egypt, and Assyria to a nation that could hold its own, complete with a monarchy. Scripture embraces that underdog status in order to credit God with Israel’s success and to remind a new generation that “some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God” (Psalm 20:7). The story of David and Goliath, in which a shepherd boy takes down one of those legendary Canaanite giants with just a slingshot and two stones, epitomizes Israel’s self-understanding as a humble people improbably beloved, victorious only by the grace and favor of a God who rescued them from Egypt, walked with them through the desert, brought the walls of Jericho down, and made that shepherd boy a king. To reinforce the miraculous nature of Israel’s victories, the writers of Joshua and Judges describe forces of hundreds defeating armies of thousands with epic totality. These numbers are likely exaggerated and, in keeping literary conventions of the day, rely more on drama and bravado than the straightforward recitation of fact. Those of us troubled by language about the “extermination” of Canaanite populations may find some comfort in the fact that scholars and archaeologists doubt the early skirmishes of Israel’s history actually resulted in genocide.

It was common for warring tribes in ancient Mesopotamia to refer to decisive victories as “complete annihilation” or “total destruction,” even when their enemies lived to fight another day. (The Moabites, for example, claimed in an extrabiblical text that after their victory in a battle against an Israelite army, the nation of Israel “utterly perished for always,” which obviously isn’t the case. And even in Scripture itself, stories of conflicts with Canaanite tribes persist through the book of Judges and into Israel’s monarchy, which would suggest Joshua’s armies did not in fact wipe them from the face of the earth, at least not in a literal sense.)

Theologian Paul Copan called it “the language of conventional warfare rhetoric,” which “the knowing ancient Near Eastern reader recognized as hyperbole.” Pastor and author of The Skeletons in God’s Closet, Joshua Ryan Butler, dubbed it “ancient trash talk.”

Even Jericho, which twenty-first-century readers like to imagine as a colorful, bustling city with walls that reached the sky, was in actuality a small, six-acre military outpost, unlikely to support many civilians but, as was common, included a prostitute and her family. Most of the “cities” described in the book of Joshua were likely the same. So, like every culture before and after, Israel told its war stories with flourish, using the language and literary conventions that best advanced the agendas of storytellers.

As Peter Enns explained, for the biblical writers, “Writing about the past was never simply about understanding the past for its own sake, but about shaping, molding and creating the past to speak to the present.”

“The Bible looks the way it does,” he concluded, “because God lets his children tell the story.”

You see the children’s fingerprints all over the pages of Scripture, from its origin stories to its deliverance narratives to its tales of land, war, and monarchy.

For example, as the Bible moves from conquest to settlement, we encounter two markedly different accounts of the lives of Kings Saul, David, and Solomon and the friends and enemies who shaped their reigns. The first appears in 1 and 2 Samuel and 1 and 2 Kings. These books include all the unflattering details of kingdom politics, including the account of how King David had a man killed so he could take the man’s wife, Bathsheba, for himself.

On the other hand, 1 and 2 Chronicles omit the story of David and Bathsheba altogether, along with much of the unseemly violence and drama around the transition of power between David and Solomon.

This is because Samuel and Kings were likely written during the Babylonian exile, when the people of Israel were struggling to understand what they had done wrong for God to allow their enemies to overtake them, and 1 and 2 Chronicles were composed much later, after the Jews had returned to the land, eager to pick up the pieces.

While the authors of Samuel and Kings viewed the monarchy as a morality tale to help them understand their present circumstances, the authors of the Chronicles recalled the monarchy with nostalgia, a reminder of their connection to God’s anointed as they sought healing and unity. As a result, you get two noticeably different takes on the very same historic events.

In other words, the authors of Scripture, like the authors of any other work (including this one!), wrote with agendas. They wrote for a specific audience from a specific religious, social, and political context, and thus made creative decisions based on that audience and context.

Of course, this raises some important questions, like: Can war stories be inspired? Can political propaganda be God-breathed? To what degree did the Spirit guide the preservation of these narratives, and is there something sacred to be uncovered beneath all these human fingerprints?

I don’t know the answers to all these questions, but I do know a few things.

The first is that not every character in these violent stories stuck with the script. After Jephthah sacrificed his daughter as a burnt offering in exchange for God’s aid in battle, the young women of Israel engaged in a public act of grief marking the injustice. The text reports, “From this comes the Israelite tradition that each year the young women of Israel go out for four days to commemorate the daughter of Jephthah” (Judges 11:39–40).

While the men moved on to fight another battle, the women stopped to acknowledge that something terrible had happened here, and with what little social and political power they had, they protested—every year for four days. They refused to let the nation forget what it had done in God’s name.

In another story, a woman named Rizpah, one of King Saul’s concubines, suffered the full force of the monarchy’s cruelty when King David agreed to hand over two of her sons to be hanged by the Gibeonites in an effort to settle a long, bloody dispute between the factions believed to be the cause of widespread famine across the land. A sort of biblical Antigone, Rizpah guarded her sons’ bodies from birds and wild beasts for weeks, until at last the rain came and they could be buried. Word of her tragic stand spread across the kingdom and inspired David to pause to grieve the violence his house had wrought (2 Samuel 21).” ...

The point is, if you pay attention to the women, a more complex history of Israel’s conquests emerges. Their stories invite the reader to consider the human cost of violence and patriarchy, and in that sense prove instructive to all who wish to work for a better world. ...

It’s not always clear what we are meant to learn from the Bible’s most troubling stories, but if we simply look away, we learn nothing.

In one of the most moving spiritual exercises of my adult faith, an artist friend and I created a liturgy of lament honoring the victims of the texts of terror. On a chilly December evening, we sat around the coffee table in my living room and lit candles in memory of Hagar, Jephthah’s daughter, the concubine from Judges 19, and Tamar, the daughter of King David who was raped by her half brother. We read their stories, along with poetry and reflections composed by modern-day women who have survived gender-based violence. ...

If the Bible’s texts of terror compel us to face with fresh horror and resolve the ongoing oppression and exploitation of women, then perhaps these stories do not trouble us in vain. Perhaps we can use them for some good.

The second thing I know is that we are not as different from the ancient Israelites as we would like to believe.

“It was a violent and tribal culture,” people like to say of ancient Israel to explain away its actions in Canaan. But, as Joshua Ryan Butler astutely observed, when it comes to civilian casualties, “we tend to hold the ancients to a much higher standard than we hold ourselves.” In the time it took me to write this chapter, nearly one thousand civilians were killed in airstrikes in Iraq and Syria, many of them women and children. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki took hundreds of thousands of lives in World War II, and far more civilians died in the Korean War and Vietnam War than American soldiers. Even though America is one of the wealthiest countries in the world, it takes in less than half of 1 percent of the world’s refugees, and drone warfare has left many thousands of families across the Middle East terrorized.

This is not to excuse Israel’s violence, because modern-day violence is also bad, nor is it to trivialize debates over just war theory and US involvement in various historical conflicts, which are complex issues far beyond the scope of this book. Rather, it ought to challenge us to engage the Bible’s war stories with a bit more humility and introspection, willing to channel some of our horror over atrocities past into questioning elements of the war machines that still roll on today.

Finally, the last thing I know is this: If the God of the Bible is true, and if God became flesh and blood in the person of Jesus Christ, and if Jesus Christ is—as theologian Greg Boyd put it—“the revelation that culminates and supersedes all others,” then God would rather die by violence than commit it.

The cross makes this plain. On the cross, Christ not only bore the brunt of human cruelty and bloodlust and fear, he remained faithful to the nonviolence he taught and modeled throughout his ministry. Boyd called it “the Crucifixion of the Warrior God,” and in a two-volume work by that name asserted that “on the cross, the diabolic violent warrior god we have all-too-frequently pledged allegiance to has been forever repudiated.” On the cross, Jesus chose to align himself with victims of suffering rather than the inflictors of it.

At the heart of the doctrine of the incarnation is the stunning claim that Jesus is what God is like. “No one has ever seen God,” declared John in his gospel, “but the one and only Son, who is himself God and is in closest relationship with the Father, has made him known” (John 1:18, emphasis added). ...So to whatever extent God owes us an explanation for the Bible’s war stories, Jesus is that explanation. And Christ the King won his kingdom without war.

Jesus turned the war story on its head. Instead of being born to nobility, he was born in a manger, to an oppressed people in occupied territory. Instead of charging into Jerusalem on a warhorse, he arrived on a lumbering donkey. Instead of rallying troops for battle, he washed his disciples’ feet. According to the apostle Paul, these are the tales followers of Jesus should be telling—with our words, with our art, and with our lives.

Of course, this still leaves us to grapple with the competing biblical portraits of God as the instigator of violence and God as the repudiator of violence.

Boyd argued that God serves as a sort of “heavenly missionary” who temporarily accommodates the brutal practices and beliefs of various cultures without condoning them in order to gradually influence God’s people toward justice. Insofar as any divine portrait reflects a character at odds with the cross, he said, it must be considered accommodation. It’s an interesting theory, though I confess I’m only halfway through Boyd’s 1,492 pages, so I’ve yet to fully consider it. (I know I can’t read my way out of this dilemma, but that won’t keep me from trying.)

The truth is, I’ve yet to find an explanation for the Bible’s war stories that I find completely satisfying. If we view this through Occam’s razor and choose the simplest solution to the problem, we might conclude that the ancient Israelites invented a deity to justify their conquests and keep their people in line. As such, then, the Bible isn’t a holy book with human fingerprints; it’s an entirely human construction, responsible for more vice than virtue.

There are days when that’s what I believe, days when I mumble through the hymns and creeds at church because I’m not convinced they say anything true. And then there are days when the Bible pulls me back with a numinous force I can only regard as divine, days when Hagar and Deborah and Rahab reach out from the page, grab me by the face, and say, “Pay attention. This is for you.”

I’m in no rush to patch up these questions. God save me from the day when stories of violence, rape, and ethnic cleansing inspire within me anything other than revulsion. I don’t want to become a person who is unbothered by these texts, and if Jesus is who he says he is, then I don’t think he wants me to be either.

There are parts of the Bible that inspire, parts that perplex, and parts that leave you with an open wound. I’m still wrestling, and like Jacob, I will wrestle until I am blessed. God hasn’t let go of me yet.

War is a dreadful and storied part of the human experience, and Scripture captures many shades of it—from the chest-thumping of the victors to the anguished cries of victims. There is ammunition there for those seeking religious justification for violence, and solidarity for all the mothers like Rizpah who just want an end to it.

For those of us who prefer to keep the realities of war at a safe, sanitized distance, and who enjoy the luxury of that choice, the Bible’s war stories force a confrontation with the darkness.

Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

#joshua #biblical interpretation #texts of terror #rachel held evans #inspired #wrestling god #reading and studying the bible #bible tag #long post #quote tag

[frankenstein-ate-my-left-shoe]

@steddiemas Day 2 - Winter Themed Sentence Starters

3. Did you know icicles make the perfect murder weapon? 

pairing: pre-steddie | word count: 426 | rated: G

“Did you know icicles make the perfect murder weapon?”

Of course, like always, the fact comes unprompted. Eddie had been staring out the front window of Family Video all morning, even through the rush Steve and Robin had just gone through. 

It’s been a couple days since he and Eddie had officially decorated for Christmas, and the ice storm that swept through Hawkins the night before had pretty much leveled anyone but the Family Video staff’s attempts at going to work that day; so of course they all decided to come in and rent a movie or three for their unexpected day off.

“Is that what you’ve been staring at all morning? The icicles?” Robin asks, unbelieving.

Leave it to Eddie to stare out at the frozen water hanging off their roof for hours on end. Steve sighs, “Eddie, darling, love of my life, I cannot handle another one of your not-actually-that-fun fun facts right now.”

And, naturally, Eddie ignores him (though the blush on his cheeks at Steve’s blatant flirting–flirting that the metalhead still hadn’t done anything about by the way, why kiss him then not do anything more about it??–was a nice addition to his face). “It’d be perfect, Steve! They’d never figure out what killed ‘em; The icicle would just melt away and boom! You’re out one murder weapon and one set of guilty fingerprints.”

“There wouldn’t be fingerprints in the first place would there? I wouldn't want to hold something that cold with my bare hands, you’d have to wear gloves.”

“Robin, don’t encourage hi—”

“You wouldn’t have as good a grip with gloves on.”

Steve drops his head to the counter in exasperation.

“You think you’d have any better grip with bare hands??”

“Well yeah, your hands would do the same thing to the icicle that your tongue does to a metal pole, right? They’d just stick.”

“Then the police would have really good fingerprints since your skin would get ripped off when you try to leave the thing behind.”

“So don’t leave it behind. Take it with you and let it melt.”

“As if you would get away without someone seeing you carting around a bloody icicle…”

“Why am I friends with you two again?”

“You love us,” Robin waves him off and goes back into her conversation with Eddie about any possible ways they could test their theories.

Steve just laughs, shakes his head, and settles in for the next few hours of his life with two of the three dorks he cares about most in this world.

me 🤝 eddie munson enjoys not-that-fun fun facts

linking other parts here! Pt. 1 (Day 1) | Pt. 2 (Day 2) [YOU ARE HERE] | Pt. 3 (Day 5) | Pt. 4 (Day 6) | Pt. 5 (Day 7) | Pt. 6 (Day 11) | Pt. 7 (Day 13) | Pt. 8 (Day 18) | Pt. 9 (Day 21) | Pt. 10 (Day 25) also on AO3! this year

#i just think they're neat #(fun facts) #steddie #steddiemas #steve harrington #eddie munson #robin buckley #christmas #stranger things #st #steve harrington x eddie munson #eddie munson x steve harrington #mutual pining #steveddie #eddeve #noelle writes #steddie fanfic

[inkformyblood]

chance encounter (CWFKB2023) #2

Modern AU. Bloodsoaked kiss fill @codywanfirstkissbingo

There’s a man covered in blood sitting at the edge of Cody’s bar. 

He’s pretty enough that the blood doesn’t detract from it, somehow enhancing the bright flash of his eyes as he twists to stare at the door he’s just trudged in from. Cody follows his gaze, settling his elbow on the door to peer down at the trail of footprints that the man’s left in his wake — Cody could line up his footsteps with a ruler, each perfectly placed to try and minimise the damage , and he’s seen habitual drunks who’d run for a bar with less efficacy than this man has — and he catches the man’s eye as he straightens up. 

“I’ll pay extra for the cleaning,” the man says. His mouth twists like he wants to say more and he’s found it tastes bitter, hitting his palate like a pick-axe. “But am I able to order?”

“You hurt?” Cody asks instead, gesturing to the man’s, well, everything. It’s impossible to distinguish his natural hair colour beneath the blood, and every blink on one side grows longer with the sticky slide over the previous finger-smudged space to try and clear it. His clothes haven’t fared much better, a simple button-up destined for a long soak in some peroxide if not an immediate sentencing to the bin and a tight pair of jeans that will make Cody’s brain light up in all the wrong places if he thinks about them too long, blood splatter and all. 

The slow grin that dawns over the man’s face could only be described as wicked, enough to convince a priest to tear off his collar and renounce his crusade if only for a second glance, and Cody isn’t particularly adept at denying himself small pleasures anymore. Nearly dying would do that to a man. The stranger peels his hand off of the bar, his fingerprints embossed in the wood in deep red marks, and Cody’s starting to reach for a rag before what he’s seeing catches up to him. The man’s teeth are pointed, his tongue a flash of pink amongst deep red as he licks over the expanse of his palm, culminating the motion by removing the prosthetic fangs with a wet slick. He sets them next to the soak of his fingerprints. “All entirely fake. A prank I interrupted I believe or it may have been intended for me all along. But now I am soaked to the bone, already sticky and that is only going to get worse, and I’m in desperate need of a drink.”

“We’ve got a small bathroom round the back.” Cody’s mouth moves without his brain’s input, cogs that had already stuck on the intensity of the man’s gaze as he had licked over his palm — that hadn’t been a fascination Cody thought he had possessed but now he can think of nothing else — grinding to a further halt at the thought of the man undressed in the cramped confines of a shower, soap clinging to his shoulders, the soft plane of his belly, lower. “You could wash up there.” 

”You won’t get in trouble?” The man asks softly, leaning closer to Cody like they’re in a confessional, his voice so gentle that Cody flushes from the dichotomy of it all. “No trade secrets I should stay away from, overbearing bosses, jealous exes?”

“Why would my exes be jealous?” Cody asks before he can stop himself, rocking back on his heels to pinch the bridge of his nose, trying to force his headache with nothing more than the pressure and a fervent prayer.

The man chuckles, ducking his head to make an attempt at hiding his grin behind the back of his hand. The pale swipe over his palm is briefly visible and Cody’s stomach twists, his head swimming with how much he’s craving something he’s only just learned is possible.

“They’d be jealous because I’m getting to talk to you and they’re not.”

Cody grumbles something unintelligible at the man, refusing to look at him directly. He hadn’t had much of a religious lean in his childhood, the house packed too full for anything else to seep in through the cracks. But he had dutifully sat through the parade of speakers from every faith while he’d been at school and sang the hymns like he was supposed to but it hadn’t meant anything special, it just was; the same way got the second pick of the chairs around the tv and he always chose the low armchair that would tip over if he leant back too far, the same way he got third pick of the sweets whenever his family all piled into the car for a trip and sixth choice of where they got takeaway from on the rare nights they could order. It had always been there, braided into his swearing and the way he structured his breaks around the holidays just like he would for the school breaks. But he must have done something right, somewhere, somehow, because this man, blood-stained and smiling like there’s never been anything wrong with the world, is in his bar. 

He holds out the rag, a clean one, uncurling it from his fingers as he does so. There’s an indented line cut into the hollow of his knuckles, thanks to his own actions, and the man murmurs out his thanks as he stands, taking the rag from Cody. He roughly scrubs it over his eyes, revealing patchy pale skin littered with freckles and glitter in equal measures. The glitter is red, clinging to the natural hollows of the man’s face, the furrow of his brow and the corners of his eyes. 

“Bathroom’s just through the door marked ‘Staff Only’, take a left and it’s the second door on your right. Ignore the skeleton in the closet. His name is Lewis.”

“And your name, my most beloved bartender?” 

“Cody.”

“Cody,” the man repeats, lingering over the scant few syllables like he’s savouring them, swirling wine round in a glass as if that would make it taste any better. Closer now, he smells sweet, the fake blood beginning to dry tacky and stick around his joints, a rusting puppet too stubborn to lie down and let the world spin to nothing around him. “That is a lovely name. I’m Obi-Wan.”

He holds out his hand — blank line on his palm, a gold ring on his thumb, and Cody was already halfway in love without Obi-Wan ever saying a word — and Cody takes it. Obi-Wan tugs Cody forward, the edge of the bar catching on the rough curve of his hip, and kisses his cheek, sweet and sticky and smelling of artifical strawberries. “Thank you.”

“No problem,” Cody manages, smoke spiralling from his ears as his overworked brain kicks up another gear, dust torn free from pathways he hasn’t touched in years. “You can have that drink when you’re back out.”

“You’re a treasure, Cody, truly. What would I do without you?”

“You’d be sticky and thirsty in someone else’s bar.” Cody squeezes Obi-Wan’s hand before he lets him go. “Now, go. I’m not going anywhere.” 

#codywan #cwfkb2023 #cwfkb #codywan first kiss bingo #codywan first kiss bingo 2023 #star wars #commander cody #obi wan kenobi #my writing #fanfic

[bits-and-babs]

Mangled || Kane (Annihilation) x Reader

-> Rating: VERY 18+

-> Word Count: 10.4k!!!!

-> When tasked with a suicide mission, feelings for your colleague cloud your judgement. A celebration of Friday the 13th!

Gif Credit does not belong to me!

⚠️ CW/TW: !HORROR! LONG-ASS SLOW BURN ISH FIC BUT THE SMUT IS WORTH IT I SWEAR. Mentions of: war, infidelity, gore, death, injury, I don’t know if you’d call this hunter x prey vibes, kind of? DUBCON THEMES and vague allusions to pregnancy. Definite themes of: Hair pulling, breath play, rough sex, unprotected p in v sex, anal play, cream pie. Jesus, anything else?! ⚠️

When bodies are cast into rivers, they typically sink slowly beneath the surface and into the murky water below for days, sometimes weeks at a time. Only with decomposition and an accumulation of gas beneath the skin does that same body float back up to the surface, often disfigured and putrefied. This wasn’t so unlike the fear you had pushed down upon entering The Shimmer, drowning your nerves inside the depths of your being- but that same discomfort was beginning to float to the surface, twisting and disfigured into something more akin to terror.

Your team of Green Berets had witnessed unspeakable horror in your tours across the globe. People were blown to bits by IEDs in Afghanistan, and the genocide of Rohingya in Myanmar. Friends had lost their limbs, you’d carried your colleague's coffins across the airport tarmac with the Stars and Stripes draped across the lid. None of this could possibly have prepared you for the dreadful beauty behind the oil-slick Shimmer wall.

It had been subtle at first. You’re no scientist, but you had been certain on arrival that some of the flora that grew within the Shimmer was atypical of nature. Crossbreeds between wild roses and bluebells - an impossible mixture. It had painted a thin sheen of uneasiness throughout your body, ultimately grasping that things inside The Shimmer were beyond scientific understanding. That was, you believe, six days ago. It was hard to tell exactly, given the team would frequently lose track of time. Days' worth of food rations would disappear overnight, and you would often awake in entirely new places while not remembering having set up camp.

Continuously breaching your understanding, the scenes you witnessed became more bizarre, more unnerving as time went on. Large creatures far exceeding their natural size, almost Goliath-like, sounds that didn’t fit the fauna of the South-East coast. It was day three that these hybrid creatures had started their attack. One soldier had been dragged behind the bushes kicking and screaming by their legs into the blackness of the night, grasping fruitlessly at the air in an attempt to escape the jaws of whatever had him. Upon inspection of the surrounding area, red blood streaks gave you reason enough to believe he wasn’t coming home. Another vanished without a trace from behind the rest of the platoon with no explanation as to where he had gone or what had taken him.

You knew the prognosis. Area-X had made it exceedingly clear that not one person had passed through The Shimmer and returned. There was no explanation, no obvious guilty party for the missing soldiers, just an unspoken promise that those who followed them would suffer the same fate.

“Well, there are two theories of what went wrong in the Shimmer.”

“One, something kills them.”

Then, on day five, psychosis set in. Shared hallucinations, paranoia. Your fingerprints begin to twirl, spinning like whirlpools at the tips of your appendages. The unsettling and frankly bizarre sight is not the worst of it, however, the third member of your platoon, Mayer, succumbing to sporadic delusions, screaming into the quiet of the army base you had camped in overnight that his insides moved.

Sergeant Kane tied Mayer to a chair at the deep end of the empty swimming pool in the abandoned gym of the military base, insisting that you hold the flailing man by his shoulders to steady his abdomen. No spoken decision led to the events that happened that night, instead, it was as though the three of you shared a hive mind. Resigning to his fate, Mayer had simply heaved agonized breaths as Kane gutted him like a fish with a Swiss Army knife to expose his vital organs. Had it not been for the camera Kane had set up to capture every second of the faux surgery, you wouldn’t have believed you were witnessing your colleagues' insides wriggle throughout his abdomen like giant, fleshy tapeworms.

“Two, they go crazy and kill each other.”

Mayer’s corpse witnessed Kane spend hours frantically scrubbing his colleague's blood from the creases in his knuckles, bloodied army knife discarded in the algae-infested water beside his feet. He had insisted upon taking watch throughout the rest of the night, far too worked up from the events of the early evening to want to go to sleep. There, on the floor of the army base as you grasped desperately at the thread of unconsciousness, it had dawned on you that you and Kane were the only ones left.

Day six, grasping tightly onto your gun, your eyes pass over the lush green of the forest that surrounded you. The beauty of the flowers and the refracted light bathing the floor in rainbows is obsolete now, no longer settling your anxiety like it was probably designed to. The muscles in your shoulders are taut with stress, zeroing your attention on the treeline.

Seven years in the military had strengthened your mind, harderned it to outside stressors that would affect your ability to survive. You’d seen unimaginable horrors, been exposed to the worst of humanity and to life-or-death situations more times than you could count, enough that there was barely anything that phased you. But you can feel it now, horror and insanity twisting in your bone marrow, threatening to claw its way out of you in a scream. Fear.

“Hey Angel,” a soft voice cuts through the silence of the ethereal forest, startling you from your downward spiral into hysterics. When you look, the panicked thrumming of your heart slows to a steadier pulse.

“You doin’ okay?” He questions you gently, settling in his usual spot on your left side as he trudges through the forest flooring. You always considered yourself skilled at maintaining neutral body language, at masking your concerns, but Kane had cracked every single emotional cipher over his time with you like some kind of humanoid enigma code.

You’d known Kane the majority of your military career, having experienced three tours around the world by his side. He’d joked when he first met you in the mess hall in Iraq that he needed a woman to keep him on the straight and narrow after his wife resigned from the military to pursue teaching at John Hopkins, choosing to stay by your side ever since. A religious man, he’d led you in prayer before expeditions, had offered his rations to you when you were struggling for energy on particularly brutal missions. These shared sufferings had made him more of a brother than a colleague.

You nod slowly, a non-verbal acknowledgment of his question as your eyes continue to scan the treeline. It’s an obvious lie. There’s a cold sweat breaking out across the paling skin of your face, the camo uniform you wore clinging to your back and aiding in the claustrophobia washing over you despite being in a wide-open space.

Kane doesn’t argue, doesn’t even speak, instead opting to mirror your motions with a barely-there nod of his head. Guilt washes over you when you glance at him, taking in his uncharacteristically disheveled appearance. His hair, usually meticulously gelled back, falls in loose, messy ringlets around his head. He’s grown stubble after days of not shaving, and his skin is dirtied with dried blood and dirt. Most alarming are his eyes, bloodshot and almost wild, with deep purple under-eye circles that look as though the environment had beaten him down, bruising his skin with exhaustion. He looks unhinged.

Perhaps it was cruel to keep a secret from him, given the circumstances, but you can’t admit to him that you’re scared. That you’re angry with him. The sinking feeling that settled in your stomach upon seeing him sat at the back of the briefing room when Area-X called you in for assessment had made bile rise in your throat, his face the last you had wanted, or even expected, to see in the line up of those who were to take part in this suicide-mission into The Shimmer. Had you not been surrounded by your new platoon, you’d have throttled him in a last-ditch effort to shake some sense into him.

Kane is a talker, waxing lyrically for extended periods during previous late-night missions about his devotion to his ‘brilliantly clever’ and ‘exceedingly beautiful’ wife. Their relationship had been going strong for just over six years, and Kane still adored her with every fiber of his being. As far as you could discern, there was no logical explanation as to why he had signed up on this mission bar his infuriating savior complex.

“Hey, where you goin’?” Kane’s exhausted tone drags you back to reality, to The Shimmer. When you look at him again, there’s a concerned furrow on his brow. “I can’t have you goin’ inward like that, Angel, talk to me.”

A wretched laugh cuts through your throat before you’re able to swallow it down, the bitterness evident when paired with your sardonic expression. It wasn’t as though Kane was in any condition to hear your nihilistic, almost psychotic thoughts. He hadn’t been himself since the faux operation back in the pool at the military base.

“It’s hard to consider yourself ‘okay’ when I just saw my friend's guts move, Kane.” Your answer is brusque, skin-crawling fear pushing you beyond the ability to discuss your mental well-being reasonably. “Something isn’t right with this place! We’re… We’re losing it!”

Again, Kane nods slowly, like you voicing the swimming sensation in his brain had made its deteriorating condition a reality. Inside the iridescent walls of The Shimmer, all matter was breaking down, disintegrating and rebuilding itself- including your minds. You couldn’t shake that feeling, that shared consciousness within the blue and white tiled walls of the military pool, like all three brains had cross-contaminated each other’s thoughts. “I know, Angel. I know.”

An unsteady silence settles between the two of you, sparking like a static charge across the short distance separating your bodies. You’re scared that if your fingers brush it will be like a metal fork in a live plug socket, wholly frying you and setting your body alight. Maybe it’s the realization that it is unlikely that you’ll make it out of The Shimmer alive, if at all, that is causing your feelings for Kane to go into hyperdrive.

The sun is low in the sky, casting a golden glow against Kane’s face as you take in his weary manner. The urge to confess your love for him is intense after so many years of swallowing the bitter pill of rejection in order to support Kane’s love for Lena. The dying light makes him look youthful, almost, with gold banding in his ebony locks that you desperately want to comb your fingers through. It isn’t often you get to see his natural curls, as Kane always opted to gel his hair back against his skull. There were still shiny locks stuck down where the mousse clung to his temples-

“D’ya hear?” Again, Kane pulls you from your trance. You blink to find yourself staring directly at him, the concerned pull of his brow clearly displaying his uncertainty around your condition. When he notes your deadpan expression, he repeats his statement with a gentle tone. “I said we can set up camp at the next building we find. You look like you need some rest.”

“Y-Yeah. Yeah, I do,” you mumble weakly, rubbing at your eye socket with the heel of your palm as you fight back the extreme fatigue. Your legs, your fucking bones are screeching to lay down, to ease the burden of the military-grade backpack and the heavy weaponry you were hauling around with you. You certainly wouldn’t say no to laying down for the night, even if sleep was far beyond your reaches now.

————————————————————————

Nightfall in The Shimmer is easily the most horrendous of your experiences on this mission. While there is no gore, no visible creatures trying to drag you out into the blackness, the stars taunt you from the night sky as you suffer the psychological trial that the setting sun brings.

You’re almost certain that the crickets within the alien forest share their mutant genetic makeup with boom boxes, their screeches throughout the night loud and persistent enough to break down what little sanity you still desperately clung to. So much so, you’re sure you can hear their chirping ricocheting off the bone walls of the inside of your skull when you block your ears with your fingers.

Kane has noted your frustration, throwing needless apologetic looks your way from his spot at the window of the suburban house you had taken shelter in for the night. He had noted the home looked oddly familiar, and yet didn’t seem to be able to put his finger on it, stating the Deja vu the building evoked was a little unsettling. Lacking personal belongings, the bare furniture appeared undisturbed, abandoned for 15 years amongst the desolate Shimmer. While the dark grey paint on the outside of the house had peeled somewhat with age, it remained relatively unscathed by the wooded wasteland. Even plants grew in the flowerbed beneath the ground floor windows, despite their obvious abnormalities, bluebell-hydrangea hybrids splashing vibrant color across the otherwise monochrome house.

“D’ya think if I shoot at them they’ll shut up?” Kane mumbles, quiet in the dark so as to not startle you from your thoughts. He sounds exhausted, his voice cracking somewhat from lack of use for a few hours.

“They might,” you nod slowly, turning your head on the wooden floor to gaze at him. You can’t help but notice your voice doesn’t sound like your own, haggard and strained. “But I doubt that will be as a result of the shots as it would be the Thing the sound attracts.”

He chuckled weakly, the sound lacking any humor and instead edging on pained. It hurts you, works its way deep between your ribs, and settles in the tissue there like a stitch that sparks up your side. Kane had never looked so unhappy, so lost. The soft glow of the moonlight bathes his face in a silver-tone as he keeps watch at the window, washing him out and making him look paler and more tired than usual. His steady, almost hypnotic gaze settled on one spot on the lawn indicates he’s focused somewhere deep in thought now, within the recesses of his brain rather than on surveillance.

It starts creeping up your throat before you’re able to stop it, that burning question that had been twisting the pit of your stomach and filling you with dread more so than the horrific creatures that had picked off the team one by one. You swallow deeply and try to suppress the words before they form in your mouth but it’s too late, the syllables spilling from your cracked lips before you can press them shut.

“Why are you here, Kane?”

A heavy silence follows your pressing question. Kane doesn’t turn, doesn’t acknowledge your query with even the twitch of a finger. You can see his face reflected on the smooth surface of the window glass, his facial expression unmoving and his gaze firmly planted on that one spot on the lawn. You begin to think he hasn’t heard you, opening your mouth again to repeat the question until Kane lightly, barely shakes his head.

“Like you. I want to help.” Kane was never a good liar. Though he could sometimes be cheeky, almost crude, his religious upbringing weighed on him like mountains tied to his ankles. His conscience painted his face with dishonesty- you’d seen it first when he said he hadn’t taken the last of your favorite snacks in the canteen back in your first year working with him, only to swiftly admit his sins when you gave him a stern look that read ‘I know’.

Scoffing with a bitterness you forgot you were capable of, you sit up from the firm wooden floor, staring at your sergeant, your colleague, your friend through the darkness. “We have spent years together, Kane. I’ve spilled blood with you. Don’t you think I know you better than that?”

Further silence, this one weighing heavier than the last. That typical guilty look, the way it creases his t-zone with frown lines, and the downturn of his lips reflect back at you in the window, his eyes now flicking back and forth across the lush grass outside as he seemingly weighs up his options.

It’s the most conflicted you’d ever witnessed Kane. Usually, he threw himself into his decisions, almost recklessly. You and the platoon back with the Green Berets often laughed about his inability to think critically unless he was in the middle of a war zone. The chaos of warfare had suited him, it’s where he thrived- but this wasn’t war, it was alien.

“Kane, I just…” You hesitate for a moment, trying to compose the panic rising like bile in your throat. “I just want to understand. Seeing you sat in that briefing room when I walked in? I can’t explain-“

The truth was it had completely devastated you. Kane, over many years of tours, sharing rations and saving each other’s lives, had worked his way into your heart covertly. By the time you realized you loved him, he was five years deep into his marriage with Lena. Regardless of how agonizing you found it, you kept the disappointment, the yearning, buried deep within you, never wanting to compromise the happy family he was building with his wife. To see him grin like that, to listen to him ramble consistently about his undying adoration for Lena almost made the torment worthwhile. It was all that mattered.

So, to see him sat at the back of the Area-X briefing room that day with an empty stare had ripped your entire world from its roots. Knowing he was aware he was going to die in here with you, when he should have been home with Lena, should have been trying for the child he so desperately wanted with her makes you want to shoot him in his stupid fucking kneecaps. You wanted better for him, needed to understand why he would give all that up if he was so happy- wanted to know why your silent suffering of watching him live out your dream with someone else had been all for nothing.

You don’t have the energy to scream at him, don’t have the strength in your arms to hit him, to force the words out of him but the silence is more harrowing than the crickets that have been chipping away at your soundness of mind. Still, he contemplates his words, lips parting as he turns to face you, his jaw pulled taut with anguish while he weighs up the cost of his admission until he appears to be unable to retain his devastation any longer.

“She’s cheating on me.”

The gentle whisper with which Kane delivers this confession contrasts so deeply from the violent emotional turmoil that crashes across his visage. The shocked silence that follows is equally as torturous for him, knuckles white from his tight grip on the gun.

It’s as though the neurons in your brain cease fire all at once, leaving nothing but silent emptiness within the chasm of your skull. The anguish that floods through your chest is freezing cold, stilling the breath in your lungs as your stunned mind tries to translate exactly what Kane has told you. Surely you’d misheard him, maybe you were struggling to understand?

The slow shake of his head and the tightness of his jaw when he catches the disbelief in your frown and downturned lips causes your attempts to rationalize your surprise to halt almost immediately. You find yourself slumping back, steadying yourself to listen without pressuring your friend to clarify more than he was willing to disclose. Casting his eyes back out across the lawn of the house, Kane takes a shuddering breath as he braces himself to divulge the rest of the story to you.

“She… Uh- She met someone at work, y’know? Someone that understands her… brainy biology stuff.” He pauses to swallow down the emotions that were threatening to spill over. “They hit it off, or whatever, while we were on our last mission.”

That small detail makes your blood run hot, boiling beneath your skin. Your last mission was Iraq, defusing IEDs and rebellions alike. The two of you had been shot at in Baghdad- fuck, they’d fucking hit you, in the back! Kane had to sling you over his broad shoulders and high tail it out of the capital city streets. It had been a miracle he’d survived, ignoring your pleas to abandon you in order to bring you back to base. To think he was sacrificing his life, spilling blood for his country, and this bitch was fucking another man when you would never do that to him!

“Anyway!” Kane continues with a sharp inhale, his eyes still settled on those lush blades of grass outside. “She carried on as though nothin’ happened. Didn’t tell me or anythin’. I only found out two days before I left so I just… Set off a day early.”

It’s like no word your lips try to form around can convey your anger, could possibly explain your grief for him, for the time you’ve lost. You press your mouth in a thin line, struggling to your tired, blistered feet. He’s turning his memories over in his head, remembering the feeling of her in his arms. To think she made love to him when he returned from Iraq in the same bed where she was fucking another man?

Crossing the wooden flooring in your bare feet causes the old beams to creak under your weight. It doesn’t startle Kane, but the sound causes him to turn and look. He gazes at you in the darkness, the light of the moon barely illuminating his face enough for you to witness his wet eyes, the tear tracks running down his face.

“Kane,” you whimper, sympathy coiling around your tone like an unwanted embrace. He recoils from it, shaking his head with a shaky breath. Military life taught the both of you an invaluable yet toxic lesson; never talk about your emotions. It was harrowing, but bottling your feelings could be the difference between life and death in most war zones.

This was not most war zones, however, and this was no life-or-death situation. Only obliteration lay beyond The Shimmer, there was no known chance of survival. Perhaps it was silly, the child-like manifestation of your fear, but when you launch yourself forward to wrap your arms around his waist in a tight hold the beat of his heart against your ear soothes you like a lullaby. Kane is stiff at first, causing you to fear having crossed a boundary beyond friendly colleagues. You’d have pulled away, but Kane’s arm winds around your back to hold you impossibly closer to his chest. His palm settles against the base of your neck, fingertips resting delicately on the curve of your skull as you hear him inhale your scent, looking past the dirt, grime and blood to get to you.

Cradling you in his arms, he sways with your body gently. The movement rocks you into a sense of security that should be impossible for a place as horrific and desolate as The Shimmer, his lips on your hairline pressing gentle kisses that warm your skin from the inside. The tip of his nose nudges into the grimey strands of your hair, and the delicate touch is enough to force tears to your eyes because for once, the crickets don’t sound so loud, and your legs don’t ache as much.

The bliss is short-lived, however, his kisses trailing off as he moves his lips to the shell of your ear. “I’m going to go to the lighthouse tomorrow, Angel. Alone.” The final destination, the epicenter of The Shimmer. The closer you got to the lighthouse, the more dangerous things got.

Waiting for the punchline, you focus on the thumping of his heart, counting between the beats like you were numbering sheep. One, two. One, two. It takes at least ten contractions until you realize there is no gag, that he is entirely serious about leaving you here to finish the mission on his own. Find the reason for the Shimmer.

“You can’t be serious, Kane-“

“I am.”

The silence that follows is charged, his fingers gentle digging into your forearms as he pulls back. You’re staring into his eyes, those stunning eyes that you’d dreamed of every night for years and god they’re looking at you with such adoration.

“You’re gonna stay here and wait for me while I take on whatever the fuck is killin’ everyone and get us the fuck out of here.” He’s speaking with such conviction, that patriotic bullshit he would always spin when he knew he was in deep shit in a mission gone south. There’s no arguing with him, no talking him down with the way his intense, fixed look held you in place. He’d strap you to a fucking chair and leave you there if he had to, all so you didn’t come to harm- fucking dumbass.

“Oh yeah? You and what army?” You speak, voice breaking slightly in the knowledge he probably wasn’t coming back, that you’d just be sat in this house going fucking mental as you waited for a dead man until the creatures, or god forbid the insanity, takes you.

“Well. It’s just us,” he points out the obvious, searching your eyes for something you can’t explain. Within seconds he’s found it, that same cheeky grin you loved him for spread across his dehydrated lips, paired with a charming wink. “But that’s never failed us so far, has it?”

Just like so many times before, he pulls laughter from your tears and you hold him even tighter as the sun begins to paint the skyline a faint orange.

____________________________________________

Golden sunshine bathes your face in a warm flush as you sit beside the flowerbed that lies outside the window in the dying light of daytime. The bluebells have surpassed a violet shade and bloomed into a stunning cobalt color, far beyond nature's capacity outside the bizarre walls of The Shimmer. Hundreds of little blue heads blossom into a sea of azure, painting the otherwise green landscape with the striking color.

Beside them, in the saturated soil, grows something substantially less beautiful. Mushrooms sprout from the ground, their grey-green caps turning outwards at the edges. They ooze a strange milky-yellow color from their gills, reminiscent of putrefied corpses. The fungi are unseemly in the gorgeous garden, alien. It’s hard to suppress the thought that flowers in your exhausted brain; the garden is not that dissimilar to The Shimmer itself, dazzlingly beautiful on the surface yet horrifically twisted beneath the facade it had intricately built.

Closing your eyes to relish in the sunshine, you try to remember how long it had been since Kane had left for the lighthouse. You’d seen the sunrise four times since he exited the house through the front door. Given the lighthouse was all of a two-hour journey, you fought the intrusive comments your brain would make about Kane having died already in the relative silence of the lawn- by this time you had grown used to the shrill trilling of the crickets.

Kane’s constant hold throughout the night before he left had made it so you’d fallen asleep against his chest, counting the thudding of his heart until you were lulled into unconsciousness by the gentle smoothing of his palm against the curve of your head. You couldn’t be sure, but you guessed he hadn’t got a wink of sleep in order to maintain watch throughout the night for you to gain some much-needed rest. Kane was selfless like that, always putting you, or anyone else for that matter, before his comfort.

The morning after he had woken you with a gentle kiss to your temple. You’d been groggy, barely able to open your eyes against the oppressive exhaustion that kept your mind swimming in the dream world that clung tightly to you.

“I’m headin’ off now,” He had whispered gently into your hairline, doing his best not to disturb your slumber.

“Kane-“

”No no, Angel. Don’t let me bother you. I’ll be back by midday at the latest.” You remember thinking how odd the whole interaction was, as though he was simply returning to a nine-to-five office job back at home, not entering a suicide mission from which he might never return.

Perhaps you should have ignored his reassurance, should have sat up and begged him to stay, clung to his shins and weighed his feet down with your body weight. It was so hard to describe, but the weariness practically swept you away, and you were slipping into senselessness before you could begin to argue with him.

Four days later you find yourself beginning to regret not having fought with him, or at least tried to convince Kane to take you with him. The room in which you had set up the sleeping bags felt cold and unsafe, even with a chair hooked under the door handle to bolt it in place. Loneliness had set in only hours after he left, your ears missing the timbre of his voice as he rambled aimlessly to fill in the blank space.

The reality was you were starting to lose grip on reality in the quiet. You’d already been clinging onto weathered threads of sanity before Kane’s departure, but the effects of the brutal environment were accelerated in your solitude. The persistent sensation of your fingertips moving had progressed, the skin of your arms irritated as though the fucking crickets were crawling beneath your flesh.

Horrifying intrusive thoughts would worm their way into your mind in the silence. Echoes of Mayer’s pained grunts as Kane sliced into his abdomen rung through your ears, the slick, wet sound of his intestines twisting in his guts causing you to gag frequently throughout the day. It was hopeless for your body to attempt to expel food, however. You hadn’t consumed any of your rations in three days.

Worst of your symptoms were the effects of sleep deprivation. Two whole days into your conscious rebellion against sleep had been celebrated with hallucinations of plants pushing their way through the skin of your wrists. Cultured by the flow of your blood flooding your veins, these green blades of grass and strands of ivy wound their way up to your forearms, decorating your skin like evergreen bangles. When you glanced away from the putrid mushrooms to examine your hands now, you discovered the natural ‘jewelry’ had subsided despite having been there only moments ago, the skin of your arms utterly bare.

Snap

It’s like tripping when coming down a set of stairs. The panic freezes your blood cells in place, a chill bursting from the crown of your head to the tips of your toes. The shock appears to still you in your position on your knees, muscles so tense with fear that you can’t force them into action. The crack of the twig had sounded from behind you, amongst the forest line.

No amount of military training could prepare your already fragile mind to twist your torso in order to investigate the source of the noise. Paranoia had taken hold, your body's flight response triggered before the logical half of your fractured brain could kick into gear.

Slowly, you lower your upper body into the grass, chest pressed to the floor in order to get as low to the ground as possible. If it was a creature, you couldn’t risk it seeing you make a break for it. You had a better chance of surviving if you took your escape slowly, steadily. Without turning your head to assess the threat, you sink your nails into the damp, cold soil beneath you before dragging yourself towards the door of the house.

It’s like the sound of the friction between you and the ground as you pull yourself to the doorstep is too loud, as though the horrifically loud crickets that had tormented you had all ceased to sound in order for the creature to hear the blades of grass snapping beneath the abrasion of your body. If that didn’t give you away, the panicked heaving of the air being sucked into your lungs certainly had.

Despite the odds, still refusing to look behind you in case the creature was so horrific it froze your terrified body in place, you manage to heave yourself to the step, raise back up onto your knees and grab ahold of the handle to the front door with shaking hands. On the count of three, you shove the heavy wooden door open, scrambling to your feet and launching yourself into the corridor and across the safety of the threshold.

Twisting on your heel, you reach with flat palms to push the door so hard it creaks on its hinges. It takes only a second for the door to slam with a bang, but the solitary moment is enough for you to take a look behind you. It’s no creature at all. Amongst the treeline is the silhouette of a man, pitch-black thanks to the poor lighting of the setting sun and standing perfectly still with its hands behind its sides. The unexpected shock is enough to send you into a frenzied terror, hurtling up the stairs faster than your feet could carry you.

There’s no use in being quiet now, your dread taking ahold of your bodily functions. The thud of your feet against each of the steps of the staircase almost reverberates throughout the wood, the banister vibrating under your palm as you clung to it desperately. The support doesn’t prevent you from tripping, missing a step and falling on your patella on the rounded edge of the wooden staircase.

Sharp pain shoots up your thigh and you clutch at your throbbing knee with tears in your eyes. Desperately self-soothing, you rub at the afflicted area with your palm to ease the discomfort enough to be able to continue your escape. The strain of the metal latch in the front door has you springing back into action when you glance over your shoulder to find the brass handle twisting downwards.

“Fuck fuck fuck-“ you ramble in distress, managing to haul yourself up the stairs and onto the landing area before the door opens. The machine gun you had brought with you stands in its place against the wardrobe in the master bedroom, your only truly devastating weapon that you could use to protect yourself against the genetically modified creatures of The Shimmer forest. Grabbing at the cold metal of the barrel that leans against the wood of the cabinet, you set it up expertly so it is ready to fire before opening the wardrobe and crawling inside with the weapon.

Shuddering breaths you expel from your lungs appear to ricochet in the wooden shell of the cupboard, your exhales barely appearing like your own as the sound enters your ears. It does little, however, to drown out the horrifying sound of the man raising himself onto the first step of the staircase.

The wood creaks throughout the silent house under his body weight with each advancing step, like some kind of creepy xylophone. Thrumming in your chest, your heart is tight against your ribcage and seizing up in fear. Your breathing is labored still, more panicked as he proceeds up the staircase and across the landing with purpose.

When he crosses the threshold of the master bedroom door, the threatening man pauses in the middle of the floor. You can see his upper body through the crack in the wardrobe, his face obscured by the poor lighting. He’s wearing a khaki cotton T-shirt that clings to his defined pectorals and a pair of camo-patterned cargo pants- military gear. Still, you find yourself afraid, having realized just days into your expedition that nothing in The Shimmer is as it seems.

Fear grips you. Desperately clinging onto the M4A1 carbine gun, you ignore the instinct to cover your mouth with your palm with the intention of smothering your heavy breathing and ultimately leaving you at risk of being caught out with your hands off your gun. Before you even have a chance to get your finger firmly on the trigger, the man goes from stock-still to springing into action, turning on his ankle suddenly and practically ripping the wardrobe doors off their hinges to get to you.

The horrified scream you let out chokes up abruptly on your lips almost as quickly as it started when you find yourself gazing back into the familiar sight of Kane’s stunning earthy irises. You always thought they looked like soil after it had rained, warm, and full of life. Immediately the terror is washed away by a flood of relief as you scramble to your knees, tears welling in your eyes as you sob out his name.

“Kane! Oh fuck, I thought I lost you!” Days of not using your voice and the intense emotions you feel make your tone croaky as you wrap your arms around his waist and hold your friend, the love of your life, to your body. Perhaps he speaks, but you don’t hear him over your loud weeping while you cling to him as though you’re afraid that releasing him means you’ll lose him for good.

You don’t feel him hold you as you cry into the fabric of his T-shirt, his hands still at his sides as you release the anxiety of the past four days in the form of a dark, damp puddle of tears into the khaki material you have buried your face into. Normally Kane would console you, whisper in your ear and tell you everything is going to be okay, but you assume he’s tired and possibly injured as you embrace him tightly.

“I was so worried about you, you were gone for so long!” You repeat with a weak smile and broken voice, your nervousness alleviating when pulling back to look him in the face again. He looks exhausted, his previously rich brown eyes hollow and off-color as they trail over your face and take in each intricate detail. There is mud smeared in his beard and blood caked in his hairline at the front of his forehead, but there appears to be no serious injury.

“Angel?” His tone is all off, lifeless and almost robotic when he questions you. You’d be lying if you said that it didn’t throw you off, the lack of emotion he presents to you, but he truly looks as though he’s going to fall to his knees in enervation, fingers flexing at his hips.

“Yes-“ You’re barely able to get the singular syllable out of your mouth before his fingers take a firm hold of your jaw, tilting your head up quickly with a bruising grip and pressing a heated kiss to your dehydrated lips. The muscles in your eyelids practically strain with the way your eyes widen in shock. It’s as though he winds you, the air in your lungs exhaled through your nose all at once at the heavy press of his mouth against your own, his arms finally moving from his sides to wind around your waist.

His hand is rough on your jaw, calloused fingertips pressing hard into the skin against the bone and bruising the curling pattern of his fingerprint into your skin. Kane kisses you like he intends to breathe you in, intense and brutal and needy. His coarse beard scratches at your face, nose pressing into your cheek as his teeth sink into your lower lip. The pain is syrupy sweet, flushing your abdomen with white-hot arousal and sparking your otherwise paralyzed body into action.

Kane had never shown any true interest in you before this moment, but his lips against yours after days of intense loneliness and a slow, agonizing fall into insanity had you pushing aside all logic and regard for his (now failing) marriage to enjoy the press of his body against yours. The terror he had set in you only moments ago appears to have heightened your arousal, cunt seizing when you feel his erection push into your thigh through the material of your cargo pants.

There’s a vicious need settling between the two of you, heady and rough. Kane’s hands are gripping at your flesh with painful grasps, his hold on your ass enough to imprint the outline of the wingspan of his palm into the skin in the form of a purple bruise. Maybe you should put up a fight, but when Kane practically tackles you to your knees on the hard-wood floor you can’t summon anything other than a broken moan of his name at the loss of his lips against your own.

Anticipation creeps up the base of your spine as you crane your neck to look Kane in the eyes. He’s deadpan while he stands over you, expression cold as he holds your gaze. Perhaps it should have been somewhat of a red flag with a neon sign that read ‘danger’ with three exclamation points, but your brain seems slow to connect the dots when you see the obscure glimmer in his irises. It reminds you of light refracting in a bubble, faint rainbows spiraling across the surface.

You would question it, the inquiry painted across your tongue as you open your mouth to ask what on earth was wrong with his eyes, but Kane throws you off guard, taking a long sweeping step behind you and out of your line of sight. The attempt to twist your head in order to look at him is fruitless, the tips of his fingers connecting with the soft flesh behind your earlobe acting as the trigger for an Error 505 code for your body - ‘The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration’.

Trailing his touch across the length of your neck, he traces your jugular down to the apex of your collarbone before settling your throat just beneath your chin between his forefinger and thumb. Your skin erupts in goosebumps despite the oppressive heat he’s drawing from you as he pushes his prints against your pulse points. Shuddering breaths vibrate against his palm as he begins to squeeze, slowly, intimately limiting your oxygen intake.

“F-Fuck- Kane,” you whisper throatily to the wall, unable to look behind you. In your lower peripheral vision, you’re aware of his knees coming into view on either side of your waist thanks to the green of his army-issue camo print cargo pants. Realizing that he’s crouching behind you so your body is settled between his thighs, you squeeze your eyes shut when he uses his grip on your vulnerable throat to push your back against his muscular chest. It shouldn’t excite you as much as it does, but you’re throbbing between your thighs, soaking your panties with need.

Subtle burning sets into your lungs, your limited oxygen intake enough to settle raw excitement through you but not enough to cause you to panic. Kane’s free hand snakes around the waistband of your pants, roughly undoing the button that sits just above your navel and ripping down the zipper with a harsh ‘ziiip’. Gasping weakly against the hold he has on your throat, you’d offer to shimmy the pants down your hips, but Kane has other plans. He uses his hold on you to push upwards on the soft underside of your chin, ultimately lifting you onto your knees in order to rip the trousers over your hips with his brute strength. He doesn’t bother to pull them off entirely, the fabric of your waistband bunched up just above the junction of your knees.

Air floods your lungs with a sharp inhale of breath when he lets go of your neck in order to push you forward onto your chest against the floor. The sudden influx of oxygen makes your mind swim, nerves thrumming with need. Exposed to the cool room, you can feel the slick of your arousal smearing the insides of your thighs, sticking them together. You don’t have time to think about it, to get embarrassed about your obvious desperation because Kane is sweeping his fingers through the wetness and the clink of his belt buckle catches your attention.

Fuck, you’re so fucking ready. The cold softwood flooring is uncomfortable as you rest your head against it, cheekbone already sore but you don’t have it in you to complain, submitting yourself entirely to Kane’s advances as you eagerly await the sensation of his dick splitting you open. You don’t dare to help him remove your panties, keeping your palms firmly against the floor both sides of your head.

You’re thankful you do, or you’d have missed the impossibly sexy sensation of Kane’s strong hands taking hold of the waistband and ripping the fabric open with a loud tear. You flinch, a moan slipping from your throat as he works to split the fabric of the crotch too, his knuckles brushing across your slick pussy lips as he does.

“Oh fuck, Kane please-“

“Open.” The one-word order causes your stomach to flip, your pussy to clench around nothing. His tone is bordering on authoritative, like the clipped intonation he’d use for soldiers lower down the rank than him back at base. You’re vaguely aware of him crowding your space as he crouches over you, fingers winding into your hair at the base of your skull for leverage as he yanks your head back towards him.

Instinctively, your mouth falls open with a sound mixed somewhere between a yelp of pain and a whine of pleasure. Kane doesn’t waste his time, pushing the damp fabric of your cotton panties against your tongue. His fingers work the material inside your mouth, effectively gagging you. The heady taste of your arousal floods your tongue, and you can’t help the way your eyes roll back at your own taste. You’d never imagined Kane to be this crude, but you fucking love it.

Pushing your hand beside your face out of the way, Kane plants his own palm in its place for balance. The face of the electronic watch he wears on his wrist is pointed towards you. The screen is distorted, no longer able to tell the time or the date. It’s a quick reminder of where you are, the threat you face and the fact that Kane is just going to fuck you here anyway because he wants to… Who were you to deny him?

You’re ripped from your thoughts when you feel Kane notch the head of his cock up against your opening, sweeping through the dripping wet folds of your pussy to push up at just the right angle. He’s taken ahold of your hips, pulling your lower body up by making you balance on your knees and forcing your back into a perfect arch for him.

“Mpfh-“ you struggle against the fabric in your mouth in an attempt to moan Kane’s name, the following squeal that he draws from you as he sinks into you high pitched and needy. The intrusion is incredible, stretching you out on the width of his cock as he pushes into you quickly. He doesn’t ease into you, opting instead to force his way into you and causing you to push your hips back, flush against his own until he’s suddenly bottoming out and pressing up against your cervix.

Kane’s other hand settles against your vertebrae between your shoulder blades, pinning your upper body to the floor to make the arch in your back almost painful- but fuck if it isn’t blissful. He’s pulling out of your sopping cunt with an obscene wet sound, before setting an immediate brutal pace, fucking into you hard and sharp and savage.

Even in your rooted position thanks to the force with which he holds you down, Kane’s ferocious snap of his hips has your body jolting against the floor, splinters from the wood digging into the exposed skin of your lower abdomen. The biting pain somehow adds to the devastating arousal that rocks through you when he manages to find your g-spot with little difficulty, ramming up against it with each thrust. You want to scream his name, to curse him out for making you feel so much so fast but you can only manage a muffled wail of ecstasy.

The brutality of his thrusts appears to pick up with each push into your heat, the sound of his balls slapping against you echoing in the empty room. The pleasure is overwhelming, flooding through you with each notch against that obliterating spot inside of you that has your toes curling in your combat boots. Your fingers wind around the wrist beside your face, digging your nails into the flesh of his forearm as he draws moan after moan from your throat despite the makeshift gag that muffled your noises.

Jaw falling open as he sets to spear your g-spot wickedly with each merciless clap of his hips against yours, the gag comes loose. You’re sobbing, tears streaming down your cheeks as you work your tongue to push the damp panties from your mouth with a desperate need to tell Kane just how fucking good he’s working your cunt-

All you can manage is a pitiful, salacious whine as Kane breaches the tight ring of muscles between your ass cheeks with little warning or delicacy. He’s clearly coated his finger with his spit, your cum, or something because the slick digit slips inside you down to his knuckle, filling you up more than you ever thought possible as you babble his name over and over with a new level of pleasure-laced anguish.

Twitching inside your cunt, his dick continues to pound into you as he pushes his finger in and out of you, refusing to allow you to adjust to being penetrated in two places all at once. You’re clamping down on his cock, on his finger, body chasing after the high you had waited years to obtain from him. It’s building your orgasm quicker than you realize, faster than you can stave off.

Kane still hasn’t spoken despite your pathetic calls of his name, the only sound you can pick up over the sound of his cock devastating your cunt is his heavy breaths as he exerts himself for your pleasure. Your nails are sinking into the creases of the floorboards, your throat ragged and broken as you cry out against the surge of your orgasm.

Kane’s hand gives way beside your head to balance on his elbow against the floor. It brings his chest closer to your back, angling your hips up sharply as he pounds into you at a new, obliterating angle. Leaning on his elbow allows him to stretch his palm across your throat once more, squeezing your windpipe harder than last time and obstructing your airway. You’re so breathless that it only takes a handful of seconds and a few punishing thrusts of his cock into you for your vision to begin fading black around the edges.

You claw at his wrist, the sounds of your sobs catching in your squished throat, but you’re not telling him to stop- you’re desperately trying to cling onto him as your orgasm rears up suddenly.

“One… Two…” Kane begins to count his thrusts, the intense pace suddenly slowing down to singular, brutal snaps of his hips. Despite his breathlessness, there’s a firm certainty in his flat voice. You feel the slow drag of him pulling out of you before plunging back in with a force so hard that your knees scrape against the flooring.

“Six… Seven…” The blunt tip of his cock punches your cervix and your abused g-spot along with it, your lack of oxygen making your head feel like it’s going to burst. The veins in the back of your hands are protruding, blue and raised as your body fights the deficiency.

“… Ten.” He lets you go and the sudden, needy intake of breath causes a flood of intense tingling over your body. Your spasming cunt tightens around the girth of his cock, gripping him right as the spark bursts through you with devastating impact. You’re convulsing in bliss, flooding his pulsing dick and his curling index finger as your jaw drops open with a cry of his name. It’s blazing hot, your clit throbbing at the intensity of the orgasm without having even been touched.

You’re certain your nails have scratched the wrist of the hand around your throat raw, blood smearing underneath your fingertips from where you have broken the skins as he continues to brutalize your cunt. Thighs shuddering beneath you, it’s like you’re unable to force the muscles there to work and you find your hips slumping forward without his support.

Kane is quick to slip his finger from your tight ring of muscles to grab your hips with his newly freed hand, sitting up and away from your back to allow him to hold them in place just long enough for him to settle his cock deep within your fluttering pussy and cum inside of you with the only low groan you hear from his mouth.

It’s like he’s filling you forever, flooding you with his warm cum until it’s dripping out of you, running down the back of your thighs. Your eyes roll back, a blissful whine working its way from you as he slowwwly fucks the leaking cum back into your aching cunt as deep as he can get it. He’s sensitive, hissing softly as he finally eases his dick from you, eyes settled on the way your walls clench around nothing- as though they miss him already.

When he brushes up the escaped cum coating the insides of your thighs with his fingers and pushes even those remnants of him back inside to ensure not one drop is wasted, you have to quietly beg him to stop in a croaky voice, so overstimulated that you can barely see straight with the way your eyes seem to cross. “Ka-Kane, oh fuck… Please-“

Pulses of your afterglow ripple through your bones as he finally steps away from you, out of your line of vision, and you allow yourself to close your eyes to revel in the exhausted bliss he leaves you in. It’s like you’re hyper-aware of your body from the crown of your head to the tips of your toes, lips parted as you pant through your open mouth to ease your burning lungs.

“Rest.” Another one-word order. It’s not as though you can argue with Kane, truly consumed with weariness after having skipped four nights of sleep and having been fucked into oblivion by the love of your life. It certainly wasn’t how you’d expected your coupling to go- if at all- but you can’t help the warmth that spreads through you knowing he had initiated it. That he liked you too.

Sleep grips you with that thought, the relief of knowing you weren’t alone in your yearning enough to finally ease your unsettled mind into the gentle oblivion of rest.

____________________________________________

Stark white walls of the quarantine zone inside Area-X make the fluorescent lights that hang above your head ever more blinding. You wince slightly, struggling to stare back at the man, the Thing, sitting on a gurney bed before you despite your eyelashes trying to block out the intense lighting.

Much like the initial days following your entry into The Simmer, the journey back to the outside world, back to a world without shark-alligator hybrids or bizarre corpse-like mushrooms, was a bit of a mystery to you. There was no recollection, not even foggy memories of how you had managed to find your way back, or the trials you had faced in order to return from the unsurvivable Shimmer.

Scientists and military officials were the first things you had seen when you came to, flitting around you and forcing you into an unprompted inquisition. Despite doing your best to answer their multi-layered queries, it was hard to recall memories and recount the horrific days you survived given the semi-automatic machine guns trained on your temples.

It wasn’t as though you blamed them. You and Kane were the first to survive the inhospitable land beyond the iridescent walls, they had every right to be afraid of you. When they deduced you weren’t a threat, they worked to inform you that you had been beyond the threshold for over fourteen months and that they had given up any hope that any member of the last expedition would return alive. Despite your insistence that you were only gone a week, the digital devices they had shown you clearly stated that a year had passed, and you couldn’t find it in yourself to argue much more than that.

In your quarantine room, you had spent many nights on your back on the mattress of your own gurney bed after the scientists had run multiple tests and experiments, staring up at the ceiling and recalling parts of your journey. Mayer’s moving guts, creatures beyond all reasonable explanations of science, Kane’s reason for joining the mission, the frenzied coupling after his return from the lighthouse… And his coruscating eyes as he pushed his cum back inside of you before you slept.

A ghastly realization that had taken over your bruised and battered body in the silence of your sterilized room was the reason you stood before Kane in your hospital nightgown now, the room encased by plastic walls not that dissimilar to those you had awoken to upon your arrival back to Area-X.

He’s gazing at you with those same glittering eyes, rainbow refractions sparkling through his irises as his expression remains perfectly still. Unlike you, whose body is covered in multiple contusions and blossoming bruises, Kane appears untouched- almost perfect. Not a hair is out of place, and the split in his hairline that had been there the night he returned to you had disappeared. He looks almost waxy, like a marble figure at a museum.

“You’re not Kane,” you manage with a shaky voice, nausea settling deep in the pits of your stomach and threatening to overcome you. The epiphany had taken root in you a few hours ago, having overheard the team of scientists discussing the planning for an ultrasound. All it had taken was a few recollections of the night he had taken you and comparisons of his personality before and after he’d left for the lighthouse for you to resign to the truth.

‘Kane’ hesitates for a moment, those shimmering eyes passing slowly over your body. His gaze is almost ice-cold, and his answer feels as though someone dumps freezing water over your abused body. “I don’t think so…”

Silence follows his- the Things admittance. Devastation rips through you at the knowledge that whatever it is has probably killed your Kane, has destroyed him, and taken his place in life- a carbon copy. You’re not sure how you figured it out, call it divine intuition and a bit of luck, but whatever it was planned to populate the world with its offspring - explaining its desperation to ensure you were full following the coupling, using your love for Kane to obtain exactly what it wanted- a surrogate. You push aside the new wave of nausea that washes over you, swallowing the bile that rises in your throat and glancing down at your hands.

Those tiny whirlpools on your fingertips continue to spin slowly.

“He loved you, you know.” It says with a level of conviction that has you almost believing it in your desperate, vulnerable condition, fear and grief blurring the lines in your mind and once again overlooking the ‘danger, red flag’ neon lights in your brain in order to find some level of comfort in the creature's words.

“You know that?” You croak.

“I can feel it.“ The creature watches as you put two and two together. It hasn’t just copied him, the thing has absorbed him. Has obtained not only his appearance but his memories- a mixture of part of Kane’s genetics and consciousness.

The terror and disgust that the Thing had sparked in you subsided slightly with this understanding, replacing your fear with a feeling of numbness. Your Kane, the sweet, funny, loveable Kane that prayed with you on military expeditions and held you when you were sad was gone, obliterated by The Shimmer. You had left with a shell of your Kane, filled instead with something far beyond your comprehension.

Perhaps it was the emotional distress, the irreversible damage your sanity had sustained inside the opalescent walls that had followed you beyond them, but you find yourself unable to alert the soldiers beyond the door to the existential threat that sat before you, looking up at you with Kane’s gorgeous eyes.

It looked like Kane, held you like Kane, and even smelt like him. As you work your way into the creature’s lap, encased by its arms, you note that it may not be the Kane you knew, instead your Kane was a part of it, and that you loved Kane enough to settle for even a slither of the man he used to be, in the shell of an extraterrestrial being that had the ability to annihilate humanity. You had waited for many years to have Kane to yourself, waited your turn for many years to call him yours. Now you could, even if it was only part of him.

“It’s okay Angel.” It speaks softly against the shell of your ear, in Kane’s warm voice, “It’s just us now. But that’s never failed us before, has it?”

END

Authors note: this was a really fun fic to write. Though I know it won’t gain much traction, I believe it is so important to write what you want and focus on different themes in an attempt to grow as a writer. I hope you enjoyed, and look after yourself if you have faced any themes inside this piece that are uncomfortable for you.

🏷 TagList: @polaroidpetal @foxilayde @mylifeisactuallyamess @bookfrog242 @wh0reforbucknasty @crystalchrysalis19 @zakizigekwe @ahookedheroespureheart @buckys-other-punk @anxious-sappho @youngr0se95 @alexloveskili @captainrexstan @astroboots @knights-power @southcrnbelle @niallsbunny @wakers-bonkers @ofmortems @hold-our-destiny @xcatnapsx @vermillionwinter @stormkobra-5 @bb-skyrunner @silvery-luna @sebsbelova @erenbissexual @alwritey-aphrodite @maggotzombie @deadpige0n @bakerstreethound @whatthehekko @moonnaught @xwing-baby

Striked tags don’t work!

#Kane x reader #kane annihilation #annihilation #Kane fanfiction #Oscar Isaac #Oscar Isaac x reader #Steven grant #Steven grant x reader #Marc spector #Marc spector x reader #Jake lockley #jake lockely x reader #duke leto #duke leto x reader #santiago garcia #santiago garcia x reader

[astralnymphh]

patterned palmistry ⋆ | ellie williams headcanons

༺ ellie x witch!reader headcanons/scenarios ༻ ☽𖤐☾

✧˖ ° 🕯 bright blessings!

an: being the witchy little gremlin i am i just had to throw some hcs together for myself but ofc i'd share them here🙄ive been practicing witchcraft since i was 15 so it felt fitting to incorporate it whenever i brace my delusions at the bootycrack of midnight that r all abt ellie 💀 regardless this def isnt gonna be my only witchy hcs post i just didnt wanna spoil all my ideas right away <3 tags: MDNI, slight nsfw (no detailed smut), boob jokes, witchcraft (obv), tarot, palm reading, mostly convos, flirting, not mentioned in the writing but u 2 r alrdy dating, playful bickering, more natural casual writing with some bigger words, no specific religion tied to the practice, generally a fluff piece, lowk cute moments. °________________________⋆༺𓆩☠︎︎𓆪༻⋆__________________________°

I. ☆ ellie definitely had a peak in curiosity the first time you mentioned you immerse yourself in the world of the craft, her ears perked figuratively and were tuned in to learn what that entails. she may not forfeit a nip of skepticism right away but she's more than happy to engross herself in the idea of it. you'd stay up till first light rambling on about the 'rituals', 'divination', the history tied to it and why you practice it. you'd be lying in bed adjacent to her, heavenward to the ceiling, but interwoven in a warm and loving cuddle with her palm residing on your lap whilst you chatted.

"mmmmh-" ellie's hum churns 'round your bedroom, "so that's why you collect rocks."

"crystals."

"same thing," she drones an inwardly giggle, "which crystal will give me superpowers?" a witty remark springs from her tongue.

"babe.." you pout, acting offended yet none is taken.

"didn't mean it like that, y'know I believe you, it's all just new to me." ellie tapes an assuring kiss to your temple, "tell me about your favorite crystals, hmm?" 

⋆༺𓆩☠︎︎𓆪༻⋆

II. ☆ now because of this, anytime you're out on patrol and delight the opportunity of scavenging, she always keeps in mind to find you flowers, rocks, unused candles and other oddities of nature.

"hey babe! I found a black candle for'ya." ellie bolstered a long glass cylinder filled with an opaque charcoal wax, wick still intact, "and- ..some wild lavender." her other arm swings from behind her back, twines of dusty purple lavender upheld in a pinch.

"fuck yeah, needed this stuff.." you graciously tweak the lavender from her, whiffing up its poignant scent.

"always on the lookout.." her voice resembles her proud countenance outwards, essentially, a dorky smirk.

⋆༺𓆩☠︎︎𓆪༻⋆

III. ☆ obviously, the second you mentioned the art of tarot to her, she begged for a reading. whenever a card flew from your shuffling motions, she'd patiently wait for you to place it before her and then she'd swipe it up and admire the art piece detailing the cardstock.

"whew! look at the boobs on this one!" 

"oh- my god, of course you'd point that out." you snatch the card from her, shamelessly ogling the nude depiction that had her attention.

"you're looking at them too!"

"cuz' you said something 'bout it!" you flick the card towards her face, noting, "those are some nice boobs though." 

"why thank you~" 

"wasn't talking about you, idiot!" 

"eh, but.. urs' are the best." her hoarse tone binds a nonchalant flirtiness in its rumble.

"oh really? should we compare the.. four?"

that really stole her attention.

⋆༺𓆩☠︎︎𓆪༻⋆

IV. ☆ the first time you entertained her with a palm reading, it had her all dappy and touched to the essence at the paltry contact you made with her hand. your fingerprints drafting her calloused palms with such a gentle focus on every river lining her hand. she just wanted to smother you with kisses.

"and… this is your heart line." your finger hovers the crevice of her palm-pads stretching from index to pinkie, "ah.. it's a broken one.."

"is that.. bad?" her juniper eyes study your expression meticulously.

"it just means u're closed off, stubborn, have some emotional trauma.. stuff like that." you mindlessly fiddle with her fingers, "lines can change though, so.."

she nods, taking in the insight. she licks her slightly chapped lips clean, "am I stubborn?" her voice rises partially an octave, bending playfulness in her question.

"mm.. no."

"why'd you hesitate?"

"well- the only times ur' stubborn is refusing to let go whenever you hug me- ur' a life-size sloth!" 

"I like huggin' you though." a puppy pout frowns on her lips, "you're like a pillow!"

and oh, how your heart capers a beat, "is that all I am, williams?"

her swift speech conjuncts, "whaddid' I say about that name?!"

"I don't know, I think you like it." 

"nuh-uh I don't!"

you pepper a haste kiss to her knuckles still forcepped in your clasp, totally deterring the crime you've just committed when a half impish half taken aback smile creaks her lips.

"c'mere." vaults from her tongue before she lunges her body forward and tackles you in a saucy position riddled with love bites. guess you'll be reading her palms in a different way tonight.

⋆༺𓆩☠︎︎𓆪༻⋆ V. ☆ an bonus hc, you'd totally mention out of the void about her tattoo n the mystic meanings surrounding moths, like, its for sure one of the topics you'll ramble about one night cause you just feel so wise for knowing. "y'know, moths play a pretty large role in the metaphysical world." "really? i mean, i knew they had some kind of.. 'symbolism' to them-" ellie's hand rolls over the knoll of her forearm, reading the bumps glamoured in that beautiful inking. "yeah, like- luna moths represent transformation, renewal.. oh! and death-head moths are an omen of death.. an- and black witch moths mean either good luck, or bad-" ellie is amused at your prattle shown by her raspy giggles, legitimately having to conceal her scrunched face. "what?" "nothin' you- you're just so cute." "stop.." the embarrassment catches up to you, now having to hide your face to the shadows beneath your hands. her finger cranes out to hook and uncover your nerdy grin, assuring, "never stop tellin' me bout this stuff, ok babe?" a wide delighted beam syncs on her cheeks. goddess above, her dimples and nasal lines are to die for. ⋆༺𓆩☠︎︎𓆪༻⋆

𖤐

in general; she's a curious dork n will ask you oh so many questions, i mean, she loves space and a futuristic sci-fi comic for crying out loud, she's alrdy so imaginative so ofc she'd be open to a realistic amount. she'd also be so respectful and helpful n defend ur practice with so much love. maybe she'd pick up some little traditions and customs like folding letters a specific amount of times, drawing little pentacles, mixing liquid in specific directions, just the simple things that grow on her.

#ellie williams #ellie x reader #ellie williams x fem!reader #ellie tlou #the last of us #the last of us 2 #ellie williams fic #ellie williams smut #lesbian #sapphic #ellie williams headcanons #ellie smut #ellie williams fanfiction #ellie williams x reader #ellie the last of us #ellie williams x you #ellie williams x witch #ellie headcanons #tlou headcanons

[outofangband]



Working on some longer xenobiology/speculative biology posts so in the meantime here are some more random thoughts

Updated edition a year later! I hope these are ok!!

These are more jotting down ideas, please please feel free to give me any to elaborate on!

Also not all of these I necessarily consider my Headcanons, they’re just fun to play around with

Location edition

1. Tapetum lucidum or, eyes that can glow in the dark. (similar to the eyes of cats and raccoons) This is not limited to the Caliquendi and so is not directly related to Treelight.

Related to this is the potential ability to see infrared or other light spectrums like certain animals. I do like the idea that elven vision in the dark is more complicated than simply being able to see through the dark.

They navigate in unique ways, using the earth, trees, and even rocks to orient themselves. (I’m basing this in part of Legolas’s words about the elves of Hollin where he appears to draw sense memories from flora and stones) This also fits into my ideas for some ways elves are disoriented and controlled within Angband.

When elves are kept away from the natural world, in monotonous environments, without access to plant life or even a variety of geological information, they can enter a sort of stupor. Even in Angband which of course does contain rocks and life in the form of fungi, algae and even some plants, Cyanobacteria and certain creatures, much of the mines and dungeons are deliberately kept barren, lifeless and separated enough from the caverns and tunnels. What information they receive is never comforting. On that note, Ecological empathy taken to an extreme. Elves becoming depressed from ecological destruction, feeling the changes to landscapes on an innate level. Hence again why Angband is so damaging

Ears that express a wide range of emotions like how eyebrows do with humans. Elven ears will flatten, perk up, twitch, and even fold at times.

. I talked about phosphorescence here which actually has roots in canon!

Being able to navigate on all fours with ease, particularly while climbing and on a similar note, advanced balance.

For some of them, partially webbed feet and possibly even gill like structures on their chests for the sea elves.

On that note I think evolution works obviously differently for elves. Traits adapt and spread at different rates.

Pressure to areas of their body causes them to fall still, like with puppies and kittens. They have very sensitive areas in the backs of their necks and behind their ears. I've talked about this on my states of consciousness and sleep posts!

They do not have fingerprints though the skin on their hands will sometimes absorb and take in the colors of the things they touch, regardless of skin tone though skin tone does effect how clearly these show. For example, if an elven child spends some time playing in grass or clay, they may come back home with the skin up to their forearms that color.

Elves rarely have freckles but those that do will notice that they change colors and shades. Sometimes russet, sometimes even silvery, gold, or blueish. This is also true with birthmarks and even some scars. As they predate the sun their freckles are more similar to spots for camouflage and most words for them translates something to spots or foilage.

Elves can imitate sounds of animals very easily, especially bird and insect songs. While being able to communicate with animals is a rare gift among them, most can speak basic warnings and declarations, such as being able to warn sparrows that there is a hawk around. They can also pick up song very easily, often feeling the rhythm of even very gentle music in their hands.

I have a lot of thoughts on elves and synesthesia. I think most stimuli and input for elves is experienced through multiple senses for example being able to feel sound (obviously humans can to through vibrations but elves are more attuned to this). Synesthesia of the kind humans experience is somewhat more common in elves and other kinds unique to them also exist. (I have a whole post about this here!)

I talked about snow blindness and elves’ unique experiences with winter here!

I headcanon that elves have a specific sense for growth; they can hear and feel for lack of a better phrasing, shoots of grass growing, flowers blooming, roots expanding out. Not all are equally attuned to it or aware of it and some can become extremely overwhelmed by it if their ability to process is affected.

#the silmarillion #beleriand #musing and meta #elves #lotr

[angelicsjn]

oh dang, i just found your blog today and i really like the concept of jae. before (if you do) take him out, can you please head canon on how we met him/how he got obsessed? also love the whole concept of your blog

Hi! I'm so sorry for my lack of being alive. I'm here, ready to write and bang these requests out. Thank you for all the requests, love, and support.

Thank you very much!!

JAE 'NIKO' LEE

Due to Jae's fame and job, he doesn't meet many people outside of his lifestyle. So when he meets you it's a big deal.

He automatically likes the fact you both live different lives and would actually prefer it if he were the one who'd provide. It gives him more control.

He has good eyes, and he knows how and who to pick. He picked you.

Jae 'bumped' into you, masked and clothed in all black to avoid being recognised and when he realises you didn't recognise him — even after hearing his voice and seeing his eyes, he falls instantly.

He likes the fact that he's a mystery to you. You don't know him, his life, anything at all. He's a random person on the streets.

He quickly turns into the stranger at your doorstep, getting familiar with your house, how you live, the windows you keep open to the fact you leave the back door unlocked because you lock the gate.

(he climbs over the gate, that won't stop him.)

He memorises your daily routine, who your friends are, and who he will get rid of. He makes note of even the smallest of things to what's your comfort food and what perfume you use the most.

He will even steal your perfume and replace it with a new one. He could have kept the new one, but it wasn't yours. Didn't hold your fingerprints and memories.

You had forgotten about the stranger you bumped into, but the stranger now knew everything about you.

Over the time of working as an idol, he paid close attention to the IT workers, especially the ones that would hack into things, usually to upvotes during comebacks and yearly awards.

He used those skills to hack into your things, keep a close eye on you when he's busy. Into the cameras outside your home to edit himself out after each visit but to see who you take home. Your phone to see who you're messaging and what photos he could keep.

All in all, he's your classic stalker.

Since he knows your life inside out, he knows it's about time you met him.

He did this smoothly, naturally, and you never suspected a thing.

You work two jobs, you had a late night shift, and they're the worst. You go home around 4AM, and by 1, you're bored out of your mind.

That's when a handsome stranger walked through, most of his face covered with a cap, which he pulled off, ruffling his dark hair as he ordered a drink.

You were honestly captivated. He's so beautiful.

Things went well. You have so much in common!

You made the joke of, 'Are you sure you aren't a stalker?' Whe. You express how alike you are, he jokes back: 'maybe I am. I stalk you everywhere. I'm just that obsessed' and it becomes a joke.

You think he's so funny and silly, little do you know he's quite literally telling you the truth.

He asks for your number before the night ends, and of course, you say yes.

After that, a wonderful bond is created.

You speak all the time. He doesn't tell you his job. He did say he works in entertainment, not that he's an idol. He wants to keep that side of him away from you.

He's so supportive and so so sweet you have moments where you think, 'do I deserve this? He's so perfect.'

He's the type to send you a sweet paragraph after a bad day, to reassure you, to send small things to your house 'just because it reminded me of you'

He's honestly the most perfect man you could ask for.

He's so romantic and asks you to be his officially on a cute date, something he knew you'd like. How could you say no? He's amazing.

"I know that people have hurt you before. I understand. I know it'll take time for you to show your full self to me. I know we will have bad days and arguments and moments where we wish we never met. But I will love all those moments because I love you. I know it's fast to say that, but I do. I love you. Everything about you. You're the light in the dark that I've been looking for all my life, and I won't let that go.

You're mine, forever and always."

#darling reader #darlingcore #yandere #yandere oc #yandere oc x reader #yandere oc x y/n #yandere oc x you #yandere x darling #yandere x reader #yandere x you

[gemsofthegalaxy]

really hope that the scene with Greg and Ewan after the funeral is in the deleted scenes !!

it also makes me sad for some of the other things that were cut between them as well.

I think it's very interesting how toys and animals get brought up here. Maybe I'm being an insane gif-comber, pepe silvia ass, but... The scripts strongly implies that Greg and Ewan bonded over animals and animal welfare, but this was also used as a weapon against Greg to get him to do what Ewan wanted, and the fingerprints of this are left in canon. It's so fucking interesting and also we were robbed.

Greg in the scripts is a Zoology major, which implies he likes animals to some degree, or was he trying to gain approval from his grandfather, who cares more about animals than about his grandson- Greg in the scripts was sent animal gore by his grandfather in an effort to make him stop using disposable razors.

In their last deleted scenes, which is a fight between them with Greg accusing Ewan of disliking him and Ewan accusing Greg of being ungrateful and not wanting to spend time with him, they discuss the activities they did when Greg was a kid. Ewan says "i took you fishing and you hurt a frog" which to me is a very interesting set of two things.... fishing kills the fish, and he was the one who brought Greg to do that, but then seems to be accusing him of being cruel to animals, which, again, is a motif that was embedded between them but mostly did not make the cut.

Then the conversation switches more to material possessions, which I also have a lot to say about, but I'll get there in a second. After talking about toys, Ewan says he bought Greg a book about birds. Another animal thing, that Greg probably had a genuine interest in, and out of all the stuff that was said, this brings Greg to a standstill.

With all of this, it feels so much more pointed that Ewan uses Greenpeace, which fights for the environment and the natural world, as a punishment for Greg choosing Waystar, Logan, and "capitalism" over him and his/their shared apparent love of animals. And Greg being willing to sue Greenpeace back (although I am still not sure if, like, Greg actually got anywhere with that or was just saying it to be a brat mostly) is just.... woof.

More about the material possessions stuff under the cut.

First. Just like to point out. Greg in canon was willing to drive 24 hours to get his grandfather simply because Ewan doesn't like to fly for environmental reasons, and seemed excited to spend a bunch of time with him. Ewan in the scripts accuses Greg of "never coming to see him" which Greg disputes.

Ewan in the scripts deprived Greg of very typical material possessions such as TV and power wheels, and in canon says that "thinking one's work is so important is akin to mental illness" or something along those lines. Greg in the scripts throws ideas of "productivity" in his face because he knows his grandfather is anticapitalist.... but, again, I ask, what does Ewan think the alternative is, for Greg? He was sitting on money for him but both Marianne and Greg had very little money, and Marianne was implied to be irresponsible with money thus he can't have taught her how to manage it because he, what, wants to pretend he already lives in a world where it doesn't exist?

I've pointed out before and this deleted scene corroborates! In my opinion, Ewan seemingly tried to make sure Greg was not materialistic as a person, and instead created outright scarcity of both material goods AND affection. Greg doesn't think Ewan even likes him! and Ewan can barely insist he does. He says "i liked you well enough" you would think a parental figure, a grandpa, would say "i love you" or "of course i like you" but those are too strong of statements because Ewan is entirely emotionally unavailable.

You could argue he saw how spoiled Logan's kids were and didn't want his own turning out like that, but it's insane for him to think that the solution, then, is just give them literally nothing and that will work out well? Especially when they KNOW you have millions of dollars you're sitting on, it's asking to be resented and that's not even the angle Greg takes with him. Greg still fucking wants his love and his approval even more than his money. goddamn i get sad.

#greg hirsch #ewan roy #succession #succession scripts #idk i could prob say even more but!!!

[imarvelatthestars]

E Ipo

Pairing: Tai x gn!Reader

Content: so much fluff that you might die and not a whisper of angst to be found (for once!)

suggested listening - E Ipo as sung by Tem himself

Sometimes all you can do is watch him. You study the slope of his shoulders through his shirt, the way his muscles move beneath his skin. You note the crinkles at his eyes and the dimples in his cheeks. You see a whole life detailed to you in his body, and you think you're the luckiest person alive.

"I love you," you tell him as you wrap your arms around his barrel chest from behind, bury your cheek in the blade of his shoulder, and inhale his scent.

He pauses his kaf-brewing to wrap one of his hands around yours, to guide your palm to the swell of his lips where he presses a kiss to each of your fingerprints. It's the same as it always is whenever he kisses you: your body thrills at the touch, your heart bubbles over with affection, and your entire face goes hot.

"E taku ipo," he rumbles in that gorgeous sandpaper voice. My beloved.

You smile and kiss his shoulder through his shirt. "No, you," you giggle, and he laughs in turn.

He's not fast, this old soldier. He takes his time now, chooses to enjoy the journey rather than to rush things as he once did in his youth, so it's a gradual thing when he shifts and turns so his back is to the counter and you are properly in his arms. He kisses you slowly. His hands roam your body, searching for what you never know, but they eventually find their home - one on your hip and the other grasping one of your hands - and then you're dancing.

Knees bump knees, socked feet knock against slippers, and the kitchen is quiet save for the sound of your four feet shuffling on the floor. He sings, though it starts off as a gentle hum low in his throat. Something soft and pleasant, something you think you've heard him sing to himself before, but you can't be sure.

"Ahakoa haere koe ki hea, māku rā koe e whai atu e."

It's been a long few months since he started teaching you his language. It sounds natural in his mouth, elongated vowels and elegant consonants that always seem to follow a rhythm you can never hear, a heartbeat somewhere in his chest that dictates the pattern of his speech. It's harder for you, but you try for him, because you know it means something between home and belonging.

Wherever you may go, I will always pursue you.

He doesn't know just how true the translation rings. For him, of course, you know he means it, but the words are just as true as if you had been the one to speak them.

"Ko tōku aroha kau tonu."

His nose brushes against yours as he suddenly spins you both in a circle, drawing you closer with his hand now pressing to the small of your back.

My love for you will remain.

Your palms rests flat on his chest for balance, for stability, for the comfort of him, but it drifts now to his throat, his cheek. Your thumb ghosts across one of his dimples and his smile deepens, and you swear it's like falling in love all over again.

"Tēnā rā, e hine, huri mai rā ki ahau e tau nei hei, utanga atu, e ipo."

And it should embarrass you how you flush when he tilts your face towards his, your chin tucked between his fingers. It should be embarrassing how he makes your heart race and your soul leap for joy, how a single look is enough to make you fall at his feet.

Please, my love, turn back to me now and I will commit myself to you, o beloved.

There's a moment between this verse and the next, hardly a second for him to breathe and continue on, but you make it last with a stolen kiss that lingers on both your lips. Tai smiles, his eyes fluttering as he seems to process the movement, the memory, the taste.

"Aue." He ducks his head down to kiss you again. And again. "Steal my breath away every time, sweetheart."

The song is forgotten. But that's alright.

You rest of your head on his shoulder and sigh, smiling. For now, what matters most is this moment with him, the rich timbre of his voice, the beat of his pulse through his sternum, your hand in his, his heart forever a part of yours.

prompt(s): music + "slow dancing with tai in the kitchen while he sings to you" from @arandomnerdsblog578 🎶✔️

@clonexreaderbingo

#tai x reader #clone trooper tai x reader #daiyu veteran x reader #clone trooper tai #daiyu veteran #tai #star wars #x reader #cfb2023 #clone x reader #clone trooper x reader #clone x reader bingo