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shootybangbang · 2 years

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[Talking Bird] In which snares are sprung

[Ao3 link]

Enormous thanks to @verai-marcel and @reddeaddufus for editing this! If you like Talking Bird at all, definitely consider checking out reddeaddufus' fic Red Dead Pursuit, which is absolutely kickass and fun as hell, and Verai's new fic Not What He Seems, which contrasts low/high honor arthur with smut that honestly had me sweating at work.

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“Trelawney’s in town? What for?”

Even now, Arthur can see that smug glint of implication in Trelawney’s parting statement, and it rankles him like a horsefly bite. A constant, stinging irritation on the periphery of his consciousness. Three’s a crowd. “Mentioned somethin’ about gettin’ supper,” he replies.

Your eyes brighten. “He’s bringing us food?”

“Doubt it. Said he’d be back here tomorrow morning to take you to the station.”

“So he’s leaving me here alone. In his caravan. With you.”

“Seems like it.”

Every contour of your face speaks the word why in silent judgment. He can feel it coming, the outburst of suspicion that you’ll level at him. That you should level at him, all things considered— some big bastard who’s manhandled you from Strawberry to Rhodes, leaving behind corpses here and there like sprays of buckshot. But all you do is frown and consider him, looking him up and down as if this were some sort of formal introduction instead of an uncertain junction between states of captivity.

“Well then,” you say. “I hope you like cheese.”

Arthur lets out a whistle that drags just long enough to be insolent. “Hit your head pretty hard when you slipped in there, huh?”

“C’mere, and I’ll show you what I mean.”

You walk back into the caravan with the door left ajar, clearly expecting him to follow. The long rectangle of light that stretches from the threshold tapers like an inverse shadow. He hesitates before he steps into that brightness, gripped suddenly by a nonsensical notion of indecency. But he pushes past it, the same way he’s pushed himself past certain moral boundaries and phases of pain.

A chopping board placed on the side table has been plied with a messily sorted spread of fist-sized cheeses. They’ve been cut to various states of consumption, laid out like a pungent map of Trelawney’s questionable taste: the waxed wheels with just two-o-clock slivers cut from them a clear measure of disapproval, the triangles cut painstakingly thin replete with ringing (if diminished) endorsement. Flanking it all like an honor guard are four bottles of wine, only one of which stands more than half full.

You stand beside this assortment with a paring knife drooping from your slack fist, attention caught completely by the enormous moth laid flat against the wood-slatted wall. Gossamer wings like pressed spring leaves, bronze eyespots like holes in a mask.

“What?” he asks. “Never seen a luna moth before?”

“Is that what that is?”

“Yeah. Lots of ‘em around this time of year.”

“Not in the city.” Your voice is wistful with something that looks like it hurts, some deep set channel with everything else denied to you coursing through. Very reluctantly, you tear your gaze away from the insect to alight on him instead. “Don’t kill it, alright?”

Those four words feel more a slap in the face than any insult you’ve thrown at him so far. You don’t even seem to have meant it as a slight. Just a reasonable request you might make of a man who’s spent two days showing you his penchant for ending lives.

You take his silence as dissent and move to cup the moth protectively in your hands. But you hesitate in that last millisecond before contact, afraid to grasp it for fear of tearing its wings, and it darts away in a downward, spiraling swoop, angling to snare itself in a fatal revolution round the oil lantern. Arthur shoos it away from the flame with a swat of his hand.

You cross the length of the caravan in a few furious strides and smack at his forearm. He snatches your wrist out of the air, and when you try to jerk out of his grasp, he tightens his fist just short of bruising.

“You bastard, I told you not to—”

“It’ll burn if it flies into that lantern.”

You go quiet, and an abashed “oh” falls from your mouth like a tree falling in a forest— like if he doesn’t hear it, then maybe you can pretend this didn’t happen. When he releases your arm, you let it flop limply against your side, all the will snuffed out of you.

Meanwhile, the moth sets itself on the corner of Trelawney’s bed like a tired paper triangle.

“They’re dumb as hell, these things.” Arthur pinches the riding glove off his left hand finger by finger, so slowly that the slither of leather is barely a hiss when it leaves his skin. He approaches the moth with the movement of a man who’s been submerged in molasses, his every motion pulled through space gradual and smooth, and muffles his steps by leaning his weight on the sides of his boots rather than the heels. “Ain’t smart enough to get scared, so long as you don’t make any sudden movements. And sometimes you can… here, look.” He perches his hand against the side of the bed like a bridge of flesh and bone and bumps the very tip of his finger lightly against the the moth’s furry body, gentle as only a pickpocket knows how to be.

The moth clambers onto his hand with an ungainliness contradictory to the grace of its flight and, having been yanked headlong into miraculous disbelief, you stare at this feat as though he’s just turned water into wine.

“Put your hand out,” Arthur says.

You do so with such a ready obedience that it stirs in him the thought there might be other things you’d comply with just as trustingly, were he anyone else. Situations involving the view of your bare shoulders when he’d gone to check your arm, the wrapped towel tucked tight underneath, what might have been revealed were it to have suddenly fallen loose.

He exorcises that damnable image immediately.

With a delicate turn of his wrist, he touches the back of your hand and tips the moth diagonal until the furred insect reluctantly seeks more stable ground and scuttles begrudgingly onto your knuckles.

You smile. First at the moth, beaming at it with the same sort of soft, stupid look someone else might give a kitten, and then at him. And he realizes with a stomach-turning pang that this is the first time he’s seen your face without some trace of darker emotion clinging to it. Almost charming, Trelawney had said earlier, and suddenly that descriptor doesn’t sound quite as impossible as it had before.

Arthur swings the caravan door wide, and night unrolls from the frame like an expanse of clouded ink. “Bring it here,” he says. Again your immediate acquiescence, like a glimpse across the other sides of the bridges he’s burnt.

You come to him with the insect sedate and oddly unafraid as it sits there on the back of your hand— reassured by the unspoken understanding between fragile things, he guesses. When you step over the threshold and onto that short wooden porch, you lean out over the railing as if it stood over a moonless sea, then spur the moth to flight with a flick of your wrist. It loops and flutters like a shimmer of green light, blinking smaller and smaller until it disappears into the trees.

In its absence, the surrounding forest seems to radiate black and empty. Sound dominates in that void. Crickets and cicadas, that high chirp wrapped within a drowning hum. The occasional startling snap of sticks breaking beneath the tread of passing animals, whether predator or prey yet unknown. The carousing, drowsy merriment from the drunks still thronging their dimming fire.

“Hey, Morgan.” Your voice is so subdued that it nearly blends into that low tumult.

“Hm.”

You glance up at him for just a fraction of a second before continuing. Like lifting the lid just a crack on a box that may or may not contain a viper. Wrapping your arms around yourself as if you might somehow be cold in this sweat-drenched clime, you ask, “Am I still being kidnapped?”

He’d have thought the answer to that apparent by now. The fuck kind of kidnapper hands his captive a fucking LeMat? Lets her sit unattended for a three hour bath? For a second he thinks you’re trying to make some sort of bad joke, but the nervous clutch of your fingers in the fabric of your shirt shows that you’re serious.

Are you really this stupid, is what he means to ask, but the words that spill out of his mouth, the thought skidding through before he can properly pin it back, is: “If you want.”

“What?” Your grip loosens, incredulous.

When you ask him why in hell you’d ever want such a thing, he finds himself pondering much the same. But the answer comes to him with the sudden, unexpected surety of a scrape of bark in the midst of a fall, something to dig his fingers into and anchor himself against though it skins him raw. “Gives me a reason to care that you ain’t dead,” he says. “Or worse.”

“You’re suggesting that I might’ve been either one of those things otherwise.”

“It’s possible.”

“Then back there, with the raiders. If you weren’t kidnapping me, you’d have—” you say it like you’re praying for him to deny the accusation. “Would you have let them…”

That terrified, fear-blind noise you’d made when that skinny Raider had touched your face. God, he could have carved the bastard to his very spine for that transgression alone. Would have, if circumstances had allowed for it. Your heart had thudded hummingbird quick beneath his palm when he’d tried to discreetly calm you down— a firm press of his hand between your shoulder blades— which of course hadn’t worked, why would it have, considering he’d just held a gun to your head the day prior. The swell of violence in him had stretched tight and inevitable as a bubble in blood then, as he’d felt the manifestation of your panic. Scared of the Raiders, scared of him.

“No,” he says, and leaves it at that.

“This is your way of threatening me, then.” The floorboard creaks beneath your backstep, and through the shrill note of alarm in your voice is an undercurrent of useless fury. A fierceness culminating in nothing, just a snatch of rage swept aside like a passing breeze, for all the threat you offer. “You’re saying that if I intend on boarding that train tomorrow, you’ll hurt me.”

You drift your hand towards your pocket, where the paring knife’s handle peeks out like a notched rectangle of spectating cherrywood. Goddamn fool, as lost in all this as a songbird tossed into the ocean, all that frantic flapping doing nothing to bear you upwards.

“No, I ain’t gonna hurt you. Be wastin’ my time, ‘specially since you seem so intent on gettin’ yourself killed one way or another. You think a flimsy little thing like that,” he nods at the knife, and you flinch your hand away from it like you’ve been nicked by proximity. “Is gonna save you from a man twice your size? If I were in a worse mood, I’d have broke your wrist just for thinkin’ about it.”

You grab your right wrist in your hand as if to preemptively soothe it.

“The way I see it,” he continues. “If I ain’t gettin’ anything outta this, then there ain’t much reason to stick around. I’ll kip out there by that fire with the rest of those lowlifes, then ride west come morning.”

“…That’s it?”

“Yeah. That’s it. Figured you’re more trouble than you’re worth at this point. Last thing I wanna do is get involved in some messy Chinatown affair I got no stake in.”

The stricken, wide-eyed expression on your face puts him in mind of things he’s watched bleed out. Second by second, something vital draining away. “Trelawney.”

“Yeah.”

“What’d he tell you?

“Told me all of it. The pimp. The debt. Your husb—”

“Don’t call him that.” You spit those words sharp as a polished blade, amputating his sentence as though it were something gangrenous. “Feng wasn’t… I mean, we weren’t…It was a purely legal thing. A favor I did for him.”

“You married a man as a favor?”

“Yeah, to keep him from getting deported. Because I was born in this wretched country, so I have citizenship, and— don’t fucking look at me like that!” A snap of anger fulgurates across your face like a white-veined flare of lightning. But just as quickly, it is gone, dissipating to a glare as sullen and weary as a drowning rattle of distant thunder. “Like I’m some stupid girl that he tricked and strung along. It was my idea to begin with. He didn’t even want to take me up on it at first. Because he loved her even then and he knew that I— he said he didn’t want to hurt me. Didn’t want to damn me to a life where I could only ever be someone else’s mistress.”

Arthur says, “But you did it anyway.”

“I did.”

“Why?”

“He was my friend. He…” You scuff the side of your boot against the caravan’s iron-wrought railing and face away from him, hiding in the curtain of damp hair that spills down when you lower your head. “Feng was the first man who ever treated me like a person.”

“You’re goin’ this far— runnin’ opium and riskin’ your neck for a dead man’s wife— just ‘cause he was nice to you.”

A silence like a rope beginning to snap. When that first strand breaks, the rest will follow like a chorus of plucked strings.

“I’ll tell you something I never told Trelawney.” You speak these words more to the receiving air, the humidity so thick it may as well be an onlooker, than to him. “You know about the claim that pimp put on Feng’s wife, right?”

“Yeah.”

“There was a second claim he put out. And that one was for me. Because he owns me too. I’m—” The words lodge in your throat. You shake your head and, meeting his eyes now, appear ready to be sick. “I’m his daughter. I was born to his favorite whore. And daughters and whores, they’re both just things to be bought and sold.”

You let that last statement drop like an absolute truth, something carved out on a stone tablet and wielded by old men to justify the yoke of their dominion.

“When he laid that claim for me, I hadn’t seen him in eighteen years. But he recognized me quick enough. Because I look almost exactly like her, apparently. Like my mother. Except I have his eyes,” you say, looking up at him now with those same eyes dark and fathomless as the sunken chamber of a gun. Something lethal lodged in that hollow, narrowing black, recipient undecided.

“That bastard thought I was Feng’s concubine. Everyone did, back then. So he went after him for unlawful seizure of property. Theft, essentially. Which isn’t an uncommon sort of dispute for Chinatown courts. Ordinary enough that Feng and I, our… our ‘employer’ has its own insurance set aside for that sort of thing. They paid off my fee immediately. But they wouldn’t pay Mei’s. Told Feng that one woman was enough. The pimp proposed a trade then. He said Feng could keep his wife if he handed me over instead.”

In another life, another time, another permutation of reality, Arthur might have offered up a kind word. Instead he stands silent as a marble pillar, and just as cold.

“But Feng said ‘no’. Didn’t even hesitate. Told that piece of shit he’d kill him with his bare hands if he tried to collect on either Mei or me. And then he died for it. So yes,” you say, and the brief, unhappy smile you flash at him now seems impossibly sad compared to the one you’d given him earlier. “I guess I am doing all this just because a man was nice to me. Which I suppose is very stupid. But that seems to be fairly typical when it comes to me.”

That last sentiment he can agree with wholeheartedly. A blinder and more pointless sort of loyalty he’s seldom seen. “Seems so,” he says. He leans his elbows against the skinny metal railing and hunches forward like he’s on the deck of a ship, looking out at a choppy plain of possibility. “Don’t sound like anything I’d want to get ten feet near of. I prefer my kidnappings nice and simple.”

“Guess that makes sense,” you say, and if he didn’t know better, he might have thought that the gentle, quiet affect of your voice sounded like disappointment.

“But at the same time, it don’t feel right lettin’ you off like that after what you stole. Thousand dollar scores ain’t exactly easy to come by.”

Soft as a ream of silk spread over a knife, you ask him, “Will you be keeping me, then?”

Keeping me. It’s strange wording— puts him in mind of keeping a dog by his side or catching a sparrow in his hand— and it occurs to him now that perhaps you’ve been kept in some capacity your whole life. Shuttled from one owner to another, and he’d be the last, because the few things he keeps, he doesn’t let go.

Hell if he doesn’t need a burden like you dragging him down. Not now.

“No, I ain’t keepin you,” he says. “Either way this goes, you’re free to get on that train tomorrow mornin’.”

Incomprehension strikes you dumb for several seconds. Warily, as if he’ll retract that allowance if you poke about it too hard, you ask him, “What kind of kidnapping is this?”

You’re peering up at him like he’s cheating at cards. Trying to pick out his sleight of hand, searching for a tell that might betray his intentions. Standing there in that black shirt worn slate grey through too many washings: grief fading through the span of months to a dull and unquantifiable dampening of emotion. The fine tailoring is ragged at the edge of your sleeves, and that tear near the shoulder is a view into things forbidden to him, with its window of raw skin— no bandage, probably didn’t know how to tie it off yourself, impractical idiot. In a few moments now you’ll tell him to fuck off, for which he’ll be immensely grateful, because he has not the volition to do it himself all of a sudden, to banish himself as he should.

But before that, he may as well bind up your cut one last time, put his mind at ease that whatever end you might meet, it won’t be one he might have stayed.

He has a vague idea of what compels him to linger like this when he’s so clearly unwanted, and with a bitter pull of irritation understands that Trelawney has engineered this trap for him personally.

Not once has he alluded to them, those two mounds of gravedirt tamped down by repeated cycles of rain and sun. By the time he’d ridden back to that quiet prairie town, enough days had passed that the first, pioneering spikes of grass had begun poke through that loose-packed soil, the comfortless reminder that life, in some continuation, might yet persist. The splintery wooden cross, the smaller one beside it listing slightly crooked from its unevenly lashed horizontal slat, and it had been this last, inconsequential injustice that had finally sunk him to his knees, with a crush of impotent rage that had smothered almost instantly to a numb, despairing emptiness with the understanding that any retaliatory violence he might commit would do nothing to remedy that already sown. It had dug in and sealed like a shard of shrapnel in his heart, memories surfacing like the periodic shed of metal from flesh. Behind him, the empty house’s broken-latched door had clicked a message to nobody as the wind tapped it over and over against the wall.

Though it shouldn’t really be much of a surprise that Trelawney, so talented at sifting through the finer elements of people to locate which nerve in particular he ought to press to incapacitate, might have seen something of it in him.

Some nameless Chinese whore and her son. The father absent, some big bruiser type needlessly dead through his own stupidity. And the one vertice connecting him to any of this— this common tragedy repeated in a thousand unique instances every day, none of which he has any stake in whatsoever— some little fool with whom he’d shared a rainsoaked moment below an overlook.

Arthur answers you by asking, “D’you know how they raise hogs ‘round here?”

You’re so caught off guard by the sudden shift to animal husbandry that you forget to be offended. “Huh? Hogs?”

“Cut a notch in their ears, then turn ‘em out into the woods late spring. Come fall, when they’ve gotten fat from chestnuts and wild apples, you go back in to find ‘em and rope ‘em home.”

“So you’re going to wait for me to become improbably rich, and then you’re going to kill me and possibly eat me.”

Christ, you’re dense. “Means I’ll come back and collect, alright? You owe me a thousand goddamn dollars, and I’ll be damned if I don’t get it back one way or another.”

“And that’s… if I let you kidnap me,” you say, enunciating each word with care. “Otherwise you’ll be gone by morning and I’ll never have to see you again.”

“Right,” he says.

The side of your cheek is tinted faintly gold by the light struggling through Trelawney’s curtains. A Midas graze, the surrounding dark lapping at you like seawater. In that weak luminescence, you look him over. Measuring out something, and he’s not sure whether it’s equilibrium you’re seeking or some definitive pull downwards. Weighing. Deciding. Might as well be holding a pair of scales for all the deliberation you’re giving him now.

After he’s suffered that silent examination for nearly a minute, his pulse ticking in his neck like a stopwatch all the while, you ask him, “What kind of notch are you going to carve in me?”

“Fer chrissakes woman, you ever hear of a metaphor?”

You raise your eyes to the dust-fragmented sky like you’re checking whether the stars have rearranged themselves to read “YES” or “NO” in the most fundamental of auguries. When you drop back to earth, you won’t meet his eyes. “It’s still mosquito season down here,” you say, dissembling, trying to tell without telling the conclusion you’ve come to. “You’ll get malaria, sleeping outside like that. I wouldn’t be opposed to you setting up beside the stove instead.”

He shuts the door behind himself as he follows you inside, and watching that narrowing strip of night snap to nothing is like watching the hand of god reaching down over a crossroads and smearing away one arbitrary trail until it is just a blur of dirt on the side of the road. Nothing to suggest it was there but what remains etched in memory.

You’ve already switched your focus to foodstuffs, unknotting the twine crisscrossing the butcher paper wrapped cheeses casual as anything, back turned to him without a second thought.

All your trepidation of him appears to have vanished like a dying ocean wave sinking into sand, the grasping edge of cold water melting into the fragmented pieces of things trod and crushed to anonymous dust. The ease of that trust given, stepping guileless into a narrow, private space with a man reeking of blood drawn from someone else’s unguarded neck— if he’d suspected it before, then he knows it now: there is no way in hell this solitary venture you’ve set yourself on will end well. Only a fool would so readily take the promise of a stranger as given truth, and only a dead fool the promise of an outlaw like himself. For all your outward cynicism, you’re far too quick to fall into the slightest semblance of kindness.

Lee, you fucking moron.

You ask him whether or not he’s got any food left in his saddlebags, gesturing towards the meager fruits of your foraging through Trelawney’s many cabinets. The stingy bastard had secreted his stash inside a cleverly hidden rollup-compartment that had been tucked beside his desk like a hidden safe. “I think the man might subsist solely on wine and cheese,” you say. “But all I’ve had to eat today is a single shitty apple, and I could probably eat everything on this table in three big bites.”

Arthur picks up a Riesling that’s about a third full, takes an evaluative sip, and walks outside. When he returns, the bottle has transfigured itself to a cracked loaf of sourdough and a roll of salami big enough to beat someone to death with. All procured through the alchemy of barter and the unspoken persuasion of the gunmetal at his hip.

While he peels the skin off a section of sausage and starts cutting off thick rounds that stack on the chopping board like irregular coins, you ponder that the spread looks like something that sounds vaguely like “a shark-tree board”. When he tries to repeat the phrase, you laugh, and the light of it doesn’t completely fade from your mouth as you sit there across him at that cramped table. Like the twinned flash from a gleam of sunshine when one looks away, that stinging blur of brilliance.

The cheeses are as foreign to him as any other thing dredged from the shelves of high society, so when you begin sorting them into two separate piles, he has not the faintest idea of what criteria you might be judging them against. “I’m taking out the ones I think you might not like,” you tell him when he gives in to the urge to ask. His opinion of you begins to feebly rise from the pit he’s consigned it to, only to plummet still further into the dirt when you follow up with, “Because you probably have the palate of a five year old.”

He says it without thinking. “Yeah, well, we didn’t all grow up rich enough to waste our time on things that taste like shit.”

That afterimage of levity on your face disappears. You begin sawing at a wedge of parchment-colored cheese as if it has somehow impugned your honor by simply existing. “You think just because I grew up with a pimp as a father, I grew up rich? I used to eat things out of the trash when I lived in that brothel. Then I got picked up by missionaries, and they thought anything fancier than marmalade was a sin.”

After this admission, you keep your head ducked down and your lips pursed, admonishing yourself for having dropped that morsel of misery so unnecessarily to a stranger.

But he chips at that imposed silence, curiosity piqued. “You, a missionary kid?”

“Me, a good little Christian girl. What, is it so hard to believe?” Abruptly, and in an obvious attempt to shift yourself out of observation, you hold out a thin sliver of cheese that flakes crumbs over the table. “Eat this.”

“What is it?”

You tap at the label written in spidery print on the butcher paper and pronounce what’s written there completely contrary to how he would have done so. How-da, or something.

Arthur nibbles at it. Not bad.

“How’s it taste?” you ask him. The (much bigger) slice you’ve cut for yourself has a cookie-cutter sized bite missing from it.

“Like cheese,” he says.

Unamused, you stare at him with irritated schoolmarm eyes until he feels sufficiently uncomfortable. Extracting answers from him under duress. “Sweetish,” he appends.

“You like it?”

“S’alright.”

The complexities of food and drink have never particularly interested him. Details that fine are reserved for those with the luxury of choice. But as you run him through that array of cheeses like an obstacle course, providing him commentary on things like flavor (it tastes less like ass the longer it’s in your mouth) and texture (what’re those crunchy bits? no idea, sorry) and aroma (try not to breathe in when you eat this) in terms that he can understand, he supposes he can maybe see the appeal of such things. Just a bit, though it feels disconcertingly like stepping into the life of some fop who could do with a little robbing, if only to keep him in check.

You announce the name of each cheese you present to him like displaying a host of foreign dignitaries for show. Appenzeller. Asiago. Parmigiano Reggiano. When you begin presenting him with samples sliced from varieties originally delegated to the discard pile, you start to stumble. Some of these you’ve never seen before. Sheep’s milk Pecorino is a novel experience for you both, and together you gag and curse and horf down enormous chunks of bread and sausage in an attempt to get the taste out of your mouths. It’s Trelawney’s favorite, judging from the size of the wedge he’d left behind.

All the while he tries to build from what disparate pieces of yourself you’ve shown him the image of a pious young girl, hands pressed together in loving devotion to christ. Knelt with your head bowed down and your lips moving silently in devout prayer, probably beseeching things like, “O lord, if it please you, I beg that you might grant me the ability to kill a man through spite alone.”

The look on your face after he’d shoved you in the mud today had spoken such a wish plain as day. And at that wayward brush of recollection, the unbidden memory of how you’d felt beneath him comes rushing back in a repressed flow of blood directly to his cock. The arching of your back against his chest as you’d tried to lift yourself off the ground, thrashing wild as an unbroken mare in the attempt and unintentionally rolling your hips against his groin. The miles after for which he was glad you could not see him, riding with a persistent erection that had dogged him on and off for the better part of an hour— and that has returned now with the vengeful force of something spurned.

A forked ache divides him like a river. Wanting desperately either the momentary soothe of slipping into the woods to take himself in hand, or some sort of diversion to free him of this inexplicable fixation— let a tree fall on this caravan, a condemning clap of lightning incinerate him, a gunman come barreling through the door. Anything.

“What’s the matter?” You pass him the last, precious inch of the Merlot you had both deemed acceptable. “The Pecorino still bothering you?”

Your lips are stained wine-red, and for a single, vile second he wonders how it might taste, sipped there from the vessel of your mouth.

“I just can’t see it,” he says, wrenching that impulse away like the teeth of a sprung steel trap.

“Can’t see what?”

“You, as a good little Christian girl. Sat up all prim and proper in a church pew.”

“Am I that unpleasant?” you ask, sounding flippant but waiting for his response far too attentively to appropriately feign disinterest.

The correct answer here is: Yes.

“Just can’t imagine how some missionary kid winds up workin’ as a drug mule,” he says.

You lower your eyes and regard the stub of leftover sausage, the uneaten pecorino, the bread crumbs speckling the chopping board, those last remnants of what has been torn to pieces and consumed. The unwanted dregs left behind to be swept into the rubbish bin. You flit your hand to the section of shirt at your stomach and grasp a tight pull of fabric. “A series of very bad decisions,” you reply.

The whole day now, silences like the one that pervades now have cropped up through the easy wade of conversation. Islands on which he again finds his footing and regains some measure of rationality. Beached there, he asks himself what the fuck he thinks he’s doing, sketching landscapes in your ledger and pointing out pheasants. Making cryptic half promises he’ll break without a second thought.

“Do you think I’m a coward,” you blurt suddenly. “Running opium to the railroads like this when the right thing to do all along would have been to just take her place?”

You ask him this as though he were some great arbiter of truth and he is at a loss as to how to respond.

“If I’d traded myself in, he’d still be alive. I should’ve done it right away.” The hand in your shirt twists at the cloth, tendons ridging up with the strain, but your voice is still mild. You might have still been discussing the finer points of Parmesan, for the discordant lack of acerbity in it now. There are words lurking behind that cracking calm that, if he lets you speak them aloud, will haunt him long after he departs, like an imprint of carrion birds on a distant edge of sky. “It would’ve only had to have been for a little while. Because I’d slit my—”

“You ain’t a coward,” Arthur interrupts. “You’re an idiot.” He laces the statement with such heavy condescension that you raise your eyebrows to be accosted with it so suddenly. “One of the biggest idiots I’ve ever met.”

“What does that make you, then,” you retort, hackles predictably up again at the insult. “Getting robbed by one of the biggest idiots you’ve ever met.”

“I guess an even bigger idiot.”

He says this stonefaced, and you both glower at each other until you can no longer suppress the twitch of your smile. He mirrors it, bites back a laugh, then lets it fissure through when you finally let out a reluctant giggle, rupturing that simulated resentment like a secret spring.

You laugh until you’re gasping for breath and wiping your eyes on your sleeve. With that mirth still on your lips, you ask him which does he think a man could better live with himself being, a coward or an idiot?

He answers “idiot”, thoughtlessly.

The curve of your mouth diminishes to a sweetness bordering melancholy. You thunk your elbow against the table, lean your cheek against your palm and, bizarrely, give the copper bathtub set behind him a long, penetrating look. “You’re probably right,” you say, with the finality of a conclusion reached, a trajectory chiseled into granite. Impossible to efface without carving and carving that surface until its wound has been leveled.

Later, he will pinpoint this as the crux of the events to follow. An axis that he’d planted unawares, with no way of predicting all that would catch and fester and bloom in its gravity.

“Morgan, I…” A cautious sweep of your eyes like you’re testing the give of some new ambiguity. “I’ve got a proposition for you.”

He has a notion already of what you’re going to ask, and a seep of bitter cynicism begins to filter into his demeanor like arsenic to soil. It makes sense now, why you’re being so amicable all of a sudden. Just trying to charm him into doing you a favor.

Well. You’re not the first one to try. And you won’t be the last.

“If you’re gonna ask me to off that pimp for you,” he says. “Forget it. I ain’t gonna kill a man if he ain’t wronged me.”

When did you learn that empty shell of a smile, the insincerity in it reflexive as a hand flung up to fend off a blow? In the year since your husband had been killed, or before? During the eighteen year span between slipping out and falling back into the fingers of the man who’s owned you, or had it been ingrained even earlier than that, during that unknown period prior?

“I figured not,” you say. “No, I was thinking that you’re, uh. You’re kidnapping me, right?”

He replies, “Sure.”

“And that means you’re expecting about a thousand bucks from me.”

“Mmhm.”

“While I was in here by myself, I was thinking—”

“Well, that don’t sound promising.”’

You draw in a deep, wavering breath. Nervous as hell, but trying hard not to seem it. “How would you like to make more than half of that back by Friday?”

He asks what the hell you’re talking about.

“Did Trelawney tell you what I used to do for a living?”

“Said you used to host poker.”

“I still do, when my itinerary allows for it. Which isn’t very often. But they’re holding a game four days from now, on Friday. And since I’m heading into the city tomorrow, I’ll be available for it.” He’s heard that tone of anxious, eager planning before, the kind that prologues ill-fated scores, speaks of unnecessary blood and miles of regret. “The boys playing this week are old money. And every time we get high rollers like that, we stock $1200 in the safe to start off with.”

“You’re suggesting I rob it.”

“I can set it up,” you say, sounding bolder now, like a self-assured amateur who’s walked through a mapped hypothetical multiple times and confused it for experience. You begin blueprinting details the way he might lay out the pieces of a gun, telling him about the parlor’s firearms policy, the low roof just outside the balcony that he might scramble across to escape, the supreme bribability of the local police. Only you and the owner know the safe combo, so what he ought to do is hold you at gunpoint and have you open it by force, then get the hell out and rendezvous discreetly a couple hours later, so you can split the profits and—

“Hold on,” he interrupts. “What makes you think you’d see a penny of that money the moment you let me outta your sight?”

The possibility that he’d leave you high and dry doesn’t seem to have crossed your mind. You blink at him as though he’s shoved a lantern in your face.

“You ain’t ever planned anything like this before, have you?”

“No, but—”

“But nothin’. You spend even a single second thinkin’ any of this shit over? Why the hell would I bother forkin’ any of that cash over when I can just turn tail and run?” Arthur sits back heavily in his chair and crosses his arms, irritation biting up his throat. “That ain’t even mentionin’ the fact that you owe me close to that whole sum already. Hell, at this point I’d consider that extra $200 well-earned collateral for all the shit you put me through these past couple days.”

“I don’t know,” you admit, and it only serves to stoke the burgeon of unwarranted anger that flares in him now.

“Yeah. You sure as hell don’t. Look at yourself. Trustin’ some bastard outlaw to do right by you. Thinkin’ he’d do anything other than screw you over. Lettin’ him get you in this fucking caravan, alone. Jesus christ, Lee. If I were anyone else, you’d likely be dead right now.”

“If you were anyone else,” you say. “I’d have never opened that door in the first place.”

And in the wake of that statement, he swears he can hear the clean, metallic snap of a thin strip of metal slamming against wood. The sound of a sprung snare.

———

In the baffling weeks trailing that disastrous first encounter, he never was able to hate you to the degree he would’ve liked.

Truth be told, there’s not much of that day he can recall. Snatches of memory scattered amongst a merciful dark, with his own consciousness woven in and out like a thread on a loom. Tenuous, only a hair’s breadth from breaking.

He remembers a whiplash of white-red pain stretching across his torso. You, knelt beside him with your hands and eyes frantic, demeanor teetering between coarse and gentle, as if you couldn’t quite decide which to settle on.

When you’d pressed a makeshift compress against the laceration in an attempt to staunch it, the dispersion of agony had run deep as bone, and he’d groaned out loud. Clumsily, like it was a skill that had long ago rusted away, you laced your fingers between his. Ran your thumb over his knuckle in a repetitive arc that had drawn his attention sure as true north: a stirring barely strong enough to point a thin strip of metal towards itself, but there nonetheless, present and unseen.

“It’s okay,” you kept repeating. Forcefully, like you might make it true if only you sounded certain enough. “You’re gonna be alright.”

That whole time, you’d talked to him. Pleas and scoldings, interspersed with the occasional (failed) attempt to comfort him.

“Mister, can you hear me? Don’t close your eyes.”

“For the love of god will you stop trying to sit up.”

“Well. At least you picked a pretty place to get knifed. Because as far as last views go, this one’s not bad.”

Pain-hazed and supine, the only thing he’d been able to see then had been your face, contrasted by a painted sky. Strips of cloud patterned like the belly of a fish, scales lit pink by the setting sun, blue where they faded into evening, swimming into some greater dark. A stranger with a smear of his blood drying on her cheek, smiling weakly at him. You thumped him companionably on the shoulder and said, “That was a joke. Please don’t die.”

And he agreed, only half sarcastic, that there was no finer sight.

Somewhere amidst all that confusion, buried between visions of solitary death and the pricking of needle and catgut, he’d felt droplets falling on his face and neck like a warm rain.

“I’m sorry.” Your voice fractured, like the broken pieces of someone else’s life. “God, I’m so sorry. It was all my fucking fault.” And you’d spoken something that sounded like a name, apologized to it over and over again.

He recognizes now that you’d been saying, “Feng.”

———

He jolts awake that night from his place on the floor with his shirt soaked with sweat and his cock shamefully hard. Breathing in deep, he briefly drags his hand over his face before squinting in the dark to pick out familiar shapes and anchor himself back to reality.

The stained-glass window. Three wine bottles, their insultingly piddling contents like slivers of shadow painted over blue glass. A neatly folded pile of butcher paper, with a rat-king crumple of knotted twine resting on top. The woman still asleep in the high-trestled bed beside him.

You lay curled and compact atop the sheets, fully clothed. In that swampy Lemoyne heat you’d chosen to eschew blankets completely, and the view of you exposed there evokes a sense of transgressed vulnerability that does absolutely nothing to diminish his erection.

Fresh air and a few minutes to himself. That’s what he needs.

Arthur steps outside hatless and finds the drunks gone, their fire burnt out. When he sits on the front step of Trelawney’s caravan, its tin-roofed fellows ponder him through lightless windows and empty doorways. In that woodland-bound clearing, every mechanism of manmade illumination rests unattended, stifled by dead ash. Only a fall of moonlight to navigate by, settling over everything it touches like silver dust. It gives the world a look of commensurate abandonment.

He’d dreamt of you, and the inquiry you made before inviting him in.

A dreamscape of a barely-lit caravan eave, dipped in night. Somewhere in that absolute dark, the tidal roar of ocean waves hurling themselves onto the shore. You stood in that shaded enclosure of struggling light, and confronted him.

“Are you going to carve a notch in me Morgan?” you asked. “Mark me so that I know who I belong to?”

“Fer chrissakes, I said it was a metaphor—”

You grabbed him by the wrist and dragged his hand to wrap loosely around your neck. It was impossible for him to pull away, transfixed as he was in that manner so particular to dreams. The lodestone of a man’s dread compelling him as though every bit of iron in his blood yearned for it.

“Will you carve it here?” you asked, with his palm against your throat and his thumb on your pulse.

“Lee, what—”

You tugged him downwards, guiding him below the collar of your shirt to the delicate swell of your breast. Your nipple peaked softly against his skin and he could not help but cup you there, weighing the rounded warmth of you in the well of his hand. “Or here? Or… maybe…”

Your free hand lifted to touch the shallow mar of a scar on the side of his face, then stroked past his cheek to brush against the nape of his neck, urging him to incline his head. He yielded to that unspoken request at once, and in the last empty inch between both your mouths, you’d said:

“Maybe I’ve already carved one in you.”

He’d woken then, recoiling in his bedroll as though stabbed.

It’s the cumulative brunt of isolation that’s causing this, Arthur decides. Too many years spent without a good fuck, and then the fit of your body beneath his own a stubborn stimulus too recent to forget. Nothing personal in it— no more than getting a hard on from looking at a dirty photograph.

(your hand holding his tight, slippery and warm with his own blood. the rust-colored crescent he found smeared around his knuckle the morning after, painted and repainted there from the constant rubbing of your thumb)

Goddammit, there is nothing for it but to take this in his own hands and wring it out of himself. Arthur trudges a few paces into the woods, until he’s well out of sight but before the caravan vanishes from his periphery. He stands behind the shelter of a large chestnut oak and unbuckles his belt.

As he frees himself from his pants, he spits on his palm and wraps his hand around his shaft, jaw clenching at that first, tentative surge of pleasure. Closing his eyes, he tries to construct a vision of lust deliberately crafted to be the inverse of yourself. Voluptuous and unreservedly sweet, honey given without the sting. Unwounded. A figure of bland perfection, straddling him and encouraging him to fuck into her.

The view of your back last night as you’d twisted rain out of your hair. The burnish of firelight on your skin. Everything about it improbably pretty, something about the angle of your face and the uncertain flicker of bright and dark that made sureties fluid as water.

That memory alone is enough to dart a shiver of arousal through his blood. Precome drips from the head of his cock in a thin, translucent strand as a betrayal born of his own body. The sigh he lets out is sharp with discontent, quiet with surrender.

May as well indulge. If this is like any other temporary fixation he’s had, the lucid mortification after will burn this from him like a fever.

Two travelers huddled beneath an overhang, sharing the same fire. He’s nothing but a passing stranger in this sad hypothetical, all his sins unknown to you. And you, no fears to unfound.

You’ve been sitting beside him a long while now, heaping an interminable series of questions upon him regarding his travels, when you begin complaining about your wet clothes. He politely turns his head as you begin unbuttoning your shirt.

You ask what he’s doing.

“Tryin’ to be a gentleman for once,” he replies.

“Arthur.” When he looks back at you, he finds you exasperated. “Just how dumb are you?”

Too proud to admit your affections, even with your shirt half undone. You scowl and blush at him at the same time, but that contradiction fades into a pure distillation of need when he crosses the divide and kisses you. He holds you to him with an arm around your back, pressing his hand between your shoulder blades to measure the span of each beat of your heart, tracking the gradation of it from hummingbird quick to a slow, steady reassurance.

He doesn’t bother peeling you out of your shirt. Just lays you down and tears the damn thing open, smugly enjoying the stuttering transition from your indignant rebuke to the trembling, drawn-out “oh” you let out when he kisses your breast.

In the few times he’s had the opportunity to do so, he’s always been struck by how similar sometimes the look of tenderness resembles despair: the same downturned eyebrows and parted mouth, the same aqueous gleam at the corner of your eye. In isolate images, one can hardly tell the difference, and so it’s not hard for him at all to imagine the expression you might gift him with then.

In the dispassionate realm of reality, chestnut bark draws thin scratches on his skin as he braces his forearm against the tree, panting. Somehow he’s already close, that warm ache curving up quick— it all makes more sense to him now, he thinks, no small measure of relief accompanying the realization. Must have been weeks since the last time he’d properly gotten off, and it could only be in the midst of that lack that he’d be desperate enough to consider you, of all people.

Desperate enough to discard that careful fantasy of foreplay completely and plunge frantic into inelegant fucking.

Your thighs straddle his hips as he takes you on your back. He’s slid in deep, and fucking christ, you’re so tight around him that it nearly hurts to pull away. But he does, again and again, that small agony rewarded each time by the helpless moan you let out as he buries himself to the hilt.

He hunches to better watch you fluster. Wanting him without cure, and so charmingly embarrassed by that flaw that you can hardly look at him. You periodically turn your head to the side to avoid eye contact, and yet your iris keeps flicking back to glimpse him. In that attempted denial, a confirmation beyond anything you might’ve said with words.

You let him pin down your wrists with willing captivity. Let him touch you, though in every new inch there is a forgiveness he’s done nothing to deserve. Let him kiss you as he fucks you, and somehow have the grace to kiss him back, chasing his mouth with yours and murmuring, “Arthur, oh—”

He comes so abruptly that it surprises him, and exhales shakily as his seed streaks pale across the ground. The hasty scatter of dirt he kicks over it feels insufficient at best.

A single, golden pane of light flickers now in that clearing when he reenters. It radiates soft through Trelawney’s curtains, then blinks a sudden flash of dark as your silhouette briefly eclipses it. When he opens the door, he finds you standing by a chair, resting the heel of your boot against its seat as you bend forward to tie your laces. You stop short when you see him, the expression on your face the convergence of fading anger and rising relief.

“I thought you left,”

“Wouldn’t leave without my hat.” He gestures towards the table, where the rope-brimmed gambler rests like a reproachful reminder.

“Oh. Well, I… ok.”

You both stand staring like you’re waiting for the other to say something important. Something definitive to guide you both out of the strange nook of acquaintance you’ve dug yourself into.

“I’m going back to sleep, then,” you say, finally.

As you haul yourself back atop Trelawney’s ridiculously theatric bed, he lies back on his bedroll and contemplates the ceiling so as not to contemplate you. Counting wooden waves and whorls that glare back like shifting, underwater eyes in the candlelight until you lick the pads of your thumb and pointer finger, and pinch that flame dead.

It’s been not ten minutes since his last orgasm, but his cock has already begun to stiffen again at just the flash of your tongue. Arousal washing back in defiance of his vain hopes of resolution.

“Morgan.”

“What do you want.”

“The thing we talked about. Tomorrow at four. Will you…”

You’re still sitting on the edge of the bed, watching him. The spill of moonlight that drips through the stained glass window splashes part way across your body, and casts the sliver of bandage beneath your torn sleeve bright as a beacon.

He turns onto his side and addresses the wall. “Said I’d think about it.”

“Can you maybe try to think a little faster?”

“Can you maybe shut the hell up and let a man sleep?”

The bed creaks as you shift your weight atop it. Arthur glances furtively over his shoulder to confirm that you’re laying yourself down, not coming down to confront him.

Nothing but your back for him to glare at, but even then he can tell that you’re sulking. Once or twice your shoulders tense up like you’re about to sit up and snap at him, but he watches your silent invective wane each time until it weakens to the indifferent surrender of sleep.

Domesticity has been creeping up like a high tide. At his ankles at first, seemingly harmless. But each passing second spent standing on that dissolving shore makes the prospect of extricating himself more and more difficult, and in no time at all a man can find himself weighed down by the wages of his own incautious stupidity, no choice but to dig his heels in and drown.

And drown willingly.

————

[Author's Note]

Comments and critique are both highly appreciated <3

The "shark-tree" board is a charcuterie board. It's pronounced "shar-coo-ter-ee" in english, and "sha-coo-[french noise]-ee" in french. Lee is trying to use the french pronunciation. And failing. "How-da" is Gouda. The little crunchy pieces in it are calcium lactate crystals, which some cheeses develop as they mature. I highly recommend it. People also really did raise hogs like this back then, btw. It's a big reason why they are now an invasive species across the US.

#arthur morgan #arthur morgan/reader #arthur morgan/oc #red dead redemption #rdr2 #fic #my work #talking bird #can you tell that when i write things i'm usually hungry #highly recommend a combo of pita garlic crackers and laughing cow herb cheese and sopressa sausage btw

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mothmyspace · 3 years

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dysphania fenestrata

four o' clock moth

location: australia

#moth #moths #mothcore #insects #entomology #bugs #fairycore #naturecore #four o clock moth

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steampunkbunnysworld · 2 years

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Some yellow and blue moths, Idk what their job is but they're there to entertain

#oc: Moonflower #oc: Sunflower #original character #oc #fairy oc #moth oc #four o clock moth #nine spotted moth #character design #my art

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hummingbird-salamander · 2 years

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sky should introduce a bug based season, info-dumping below cut

butterflies and moths would obviously be great inspirations, just look at some of these guys:

^ four o' clock moth, dysphania fenestrata

^ actias neidhoeferi

^ a metalmark, Caria chrysame psittacus

(plus, that would add another meaning to players being called "moths")

but there's other bugs that would make great cosmetics. We already have one spider mask, who's to say we can't have more?

^ a peacock spider, maratus literus

^ogre faced spider, denopidae

Both peacock and ogre faced spiders have very unique eye shapes that would look very cool as mask designs. Their large expressive eyes are amazing. Other cosmetic options could be in the "pants" group of cosmetics, inspired by isopods. Isopods are extremely colorful and would make awesome "pants".

^ Lemon Blue, cubaris

^ Clown Isopod, Armadillidium klugii Montenegro

In conclusion, TCG give us bug based cosmetics.

#if anyone wants to draw these PLEASE tag me #image id in alt text #yeah i just want clown isopod pants #that sky game #sky: children of the light #sky cotl #sky children of the light #arthropods #isopods #leipedoptera #butterflies #moths #spiders

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cuppimagines · 3 years

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What Happens when you Squeal

OH GOD this request was a long time coming, but I finally got it done! This is sorta, an expansion to Harkan’s own organization that he allies with, lotta bug fellas in this one (in fact only bug fellas)

Word count: 2.6k

This was dangerous, but, even if you ran the risk of getting in less than desirable trouble, it’s better than letting more of these guys just roam the streets, being a danger to much more innocent lives. You drove up to the station you intended on turning your evidence for. It was a thick folder, filled with pictures and documents, anything you got your hands on, but all of it had enough evidence to make sure that no loophole in the legal system could get these guys out of prison. You were ready, you were getting out of your car to step up to the station, and that’s when you felt a presence behind you.

“How about coming with me? You don’t need to turn those in,” a deep, gravely voice told you, as a hand gripped your shoulder. Would you cooperate? Or would you still walk in at risk of getting harmed?

“Go on, make your choice,” the same voice said. You sighed, and turned around to face him. The large frame, massive, scuffed hands, a 5 o clock shadow on a strong square jawline. And most notable is the large rhino beetle horn on his face and multiple arms. You knew what he was here for, and who he worked for. You just followed him.

“Let’s take a little drive, your car,” he said, going into your pockets and grabbing your keys. “Don’t try and drive anywhere else, you’re being followed.” You got in your car, and he joined you, barely able to fit due to his size and bulk. He told you where to go, where to drive off to, and after what seemed like way too long, you ended up at a large warehouse that looked like a fortress looming in the night. That’s when you realized as you parked, that there were other lights behind you, a couple more cars. When you got out and were escorted into the warehouse, you saw that there were about, four more men behind you alongside the large rhino beetle man that had a grip on your shoulder. All four other men also were large, with bug like features. A moth, a wasp, a mantis, and a lightning bug. They were looking at you. Looking at you with looks that seemed excited, and hungry.

The warehouse seemed mostly full of crates, equipment, some tables and chairs for workers to take a breather on.

“Is this the evidence?” The mantis held up your folder, and pulled a lighter from his pocket. “Looks like this won’t be of use anymore.” Your eyes widened as you watched him hold the fire over it, before the lightning bug grabbed the lighter.

“Let’s not worry about smoking the place up yet, we got plenty of time,” he replied.

“What are you guys…going to do to me?” You asked.

“Well, originally, we were gonna beat your teeth in and send you out to sea,” the beetle told you. “But then…we found out the private investigator was some pretty little dame. And you’re even sweeter looking in person.”

“Who knew someone with such a face would get caught up with our work,” the moth said with a smirk. “You’re real pretty, so we’re doing you a favor if anything.” You were pushed against a few crates, some that were stacked in a way that let you sit on them as you were surrounded by five large monstrous men. Your knees buckled under you, yet there was some sense of excitement that showed in your face because of how flushed it was.

“Take those clothes off, now,” Beetle told you. You did as he told, your hands going to unbutton your blouse, toss your coat to the side, undo your pants. All the while you were being ogled at, the more layers you took off, the more it was obvious they were going to absolutely ravish you.

“Oh you’re real cute, real fucking gorgeous,” Wasp grinned. “I can’t wait to make you cum your pretty little brains out~.” He was already quick to approach you before you even had your bra off. He groped at your breasts, his hands squeezing them so hard and so roughly that you whimpered in his grasp. Tugging on them as he pulled that bra off of you, rough calloused hands giving them such a rough time, yet you moaned for it. And he laughed in response.

“Pretty little investigator bitch~!” He said as he licked his lips. “You like this don’t you?”

“Save some for the rest of us you fucking idiot,” Mantis got right next to you as Wasp groped you, and he leaned in for a kiss. He tasted a lot like cigars, which didn’t surprise you all too much as he forced his tongue in you mouth. You felt his hand creep down your panties, and his long fingers started rubbing circles in your clit. At that moment, you had to find something to grip onto, and tried reaching up to grab Wasp’s shirt as Mantis’s fingers went so deep into you, so so deep. You moaned and closed your legs around Mantis’s grip, but Wasp pulled away from fondling your breasts raw to keep your legs spread to show the rest of the group.

“I can’t wait to stick my cock in her…” Beetle licked his lips, his pants pulled down already as he rubbed his hard cock through his boxers. As you moaned and started shaking while Mantis was knuckle deep, pounding you with his fingers, Wasp leaned back down, sucking your breast, and you could feel yet another long tongue start to swirl around your nipple. All these sensations, Mantis’s tongue and fingers, Wasp’s mouth and hands on your breasts, you were going crazy, you tried to thrust into Mantis’s hand, trying to reach some form of climax, but no, Mantis decided to pull out when he felt you grip his fingers tighter than before.

“We got her prepped, your turn big guy,” Mantis told Beetle, before tugging a resistant Wasp back.

“Just save some for the rest of us,” Moth huffed. “Once you get a hold of a girl you won’t let go until she’s practically comatose.”

“A fitting punishment though, for a pretty little snitch like her,” Beetle looked down at you, and you looked away a bit nervously. Eye contact, or being looked at by all these men even in your state still made you nervous, you weren’t used to all these eyes on you, and Beetle noticed just how anxious you seemed.

“Pretty girl, it’s okay, we won’t hurt you, we’re just showing you what happens to cute little kittens who squeal too much,” he smirked as his hand ran through your hair. You felt his cock before you saw the monster he was preparing you for. The head of it pushed against your walls, stretching you out so full, Mantis’s fingers couldn’t have possibly prepared you for this off all things. He was thick, long, you already gripped tightly onto Beetle’s clothes as you felt inch after agonizing in.

“Ah- ah! Oh god! I-I…” You cried out the second that massive cock, already halfway in you, completely thrust into you and stretched you out more than you thought you could be.

“Oh GOD you’re a tight fit!” Beetle moaned as he gripped the crates above you with one hand. You were shaking, your mind went blank, your head tilted back. He started to thrust when your grip loosened as you got more accustomed to his size, but that just got you back to holding onto him for dear life and moaning those sweet little moans

“Oh you boys are gonna love her when you get your turn!” Beetle laughed. “You’re a tight little bitch aren’t you? Squealing for me the same way I bet you were gonna squeal to those pigs back at the station!” His one free hand, as two were gripping your hips and one was gripping your hips, had started groping and kneading your breast, that was already so sensitive. Oh god the others were so excited to get their turn with you.

“Don’t fuckin rub it in or I’ll pull you off her myself,” Lightning bug told him. He was hard as a rock, and in excitement his abdomen was glowing a faint glow and his wings flapped, despite him looking pissed off and even jealous. Though you could barely hear him talking over your own moaning and your thoughts completely liquifying. Beetle was so rough with you and he was so so big that your stomach bulged with each thrust of his cock.

You grasped onto Beetle tighter, he was getting rougher and faster, and you could hear his horny crazed grunts and moans. You cried out and gripped his shirt so tightly that you heard a bit of tearing as you reached your climax, and he filled you up with his seed.

Beetle pulled out, and you laid there, limp and breathing heavily. But you knew it wasn’t over just yet. Moth and Lightning bug got you up, in fact Moth lifted you into his arms, gripping your thighs while using one hand to undo his pants. As Lightning bug pressed behind you, you could feel not one but two cocks, the both of them were readying themselves, two perfect holes for them to fuck.

When you felt the two of them thrust into you, you gripped onto Moth as tight as you can, shaking and whimpering at their sizes. Moth sat on the crate, making it a bit easier to both of them to pound you, Lightning Bug even grabbed a fistful of your hair and pulled it, his cock filling your ass, stretching it out, making you scream for the both of them.

“How about you grind on our cocks, princess?” Moth chuckled. “Show is how much you want this…!” At that command, You kept your head in Moth’s chest, and very weakly started grinding into both their cocks, moving your hips as they thrust into you, but your hips already felt weak from the way Beetle had his way with you. Impatient, Lightning bug pressed his body onto yours from behind, moaning as he started fucking your ass more aggressively. Moth was slower, more patient even when his face was flushed and his cock twitched inside you, but Lightning bug was real excited for this, he wanted to break your pretty little ass with each rough thrust.

“Cmon princess~!” Moth tilted your chin up to look at him. He saw your eyes glazed over, mouth open, face flushed as you were being fucked, and he was absolutely infatuated with the way you looked. “Ohhh look at you! You’re so adorable, such a sweet face…we should ask the boss if we can keep her~!”

“AH- ah…k-keep me??” You whimpered between being pounded hard by Lightning Bug. You couldn’t believe that they were already breaking you enough that you enjoyed the thought of doing this again and again with them. You were going from a detective to a plaything for the men you were trying to lock up, and you didn’t care at all, you really did want this, it felt so good!

“We probably will~!” Lightning bug started kissing your neck from behind. “Gotta keep an eye on- oh fuck…! On our little snitch!” You felt his cock twitch inside you, and he started fucking you faster and harder. Both sensations were too much, you felt overwhelmed in the best of ways and you wanted more. You couldn’t take it, despite your stamina you tried to move your hips against them, begging under your breath to cum, until you felt the both of them fill you up Lightning Bug first following Moth. And god did you cry out as you clenched around both their cocks, your eyes squeezing shut as you rode out your orgasm.

They both pulled out of you, and even though you were exhausted, you knew that this wasn’t the end of it. You tried to stand up, but couldn’t and fell back into Moth’s lap.

“She’s already looking exhausted,” Wasp approached you, and Moth handed you right to him so he could get up. You had to lean against him or else you swore you were going to fall to your knees.

“Don’t forget, this is a punishment for her,” Mantis grabbed you and laid you on your stomach back on the crates. He started to grope your ass, spreading it apart to look at how both holes at this point were stuffed with cum. Wasp tilted your head to the side to look up at him, as he pulled his cock from it. It was one thing to know you had to ride their cocks like this, but looking at Wasp’s size with him very eagerly awaiting your mouth, you weren’t sure you’d be able to take it all without choking.

But, as dazed and tired as you were, you lifted your head up, and brought your lips to his cock. All while Mantis had you inch by inch take his cock in your ass. Mantis practically growled when he managed to fit it all inside you, and your screams of pleasure got muffled when Wasp shoved his cock down your throat. Tears stung your eyes, you tried breathing through your nose, and you looked up as Wasp’s hungry expression.

You felt them thrust almost in tandem with you, as Mantis was deep in your ass, Wasp was deep down your throat. Both sensations were still so new to you, and you felt so dazed and drunk with pleasure that your mind felt like it was melting. So nervous at the start of it, but now you took your “punishment” proudly from them. You grinded your ass on Mantis, and since Wasp’s grip on your head was loose, you decided to bob it up a down kn his cock. You were so eager now, and the rest took notice.

“Little slut likes her punishment doesn’t she?” Lightning Bug smirked.

“God I fuckin love it too!” Mantis moaned. “This whore feels sooo fucking good!”

“We’re bringing her back, we can’t- ah fuck!” Wasp gripped your head and held you there as he fucked himself with your mouth and throat. “We can’t just send her back home-! I need a new fucktoy like this!” Your mouth felt so good to him. Even as your vision grew white and your air seemed to be cut off, you were excited to pleasure Wasp and Mantis. Again you seemed to have a Burst of energy, solely from the fact that these men were fuckin you to a mindless, cock hungry state.

If you could talk at the moment you’d beg to cum, to plead for more, it all felt so amazing! Wasp and Mantis kept a tight grip on you, your head held to Wasp’s hips, and your hips being grabbed and pulled onto Mantis they both came inside you. You gagged and tried to swallow Wasp’s seed. But you had to pull away, it was all way too much and you spat it out. At that, Mantis slapped your ass and you cried out, even though you were exhausted beyond belief.

“We’ll teach her to swallow, for now though…” Mantis pulled out. All five of them were satisfied you learned your lesson as you laid there on your stomach trying to catch your breath.

“Now you know what happens when you snitch, dollface,” Beetle approached you, gripping the red area that Mantis smacked you.

“Y-yes sir…” you whimper. If you had an ounce of energy left, you’d say “If I try to turn you in, would you do the same thing?” But you were limp and exhausted, so easy to pick up as Beetle did and put you in the back seat of your own car as they left the warehouse after cleaning up. A blanket was put over you, and just like that, the moment your body hit the upholstery of the seat, you fell asleep.

#cuppimagines #nsft txt #nsft text #exophilia #terato

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technicolor-overcoat · 2 years

Text

fenestratagender: a gender related/connected to the four o' clock moth (dysphania fenestrata)

tz's notes: i love the way this moth looks

#pro xenogenders #xenogender blog #xenogender flag #xenogender friendly #xenogender positivity #xenogender coining #xenogender #xenogenders #pro mogai #mogai blog #mogai flag #mogai friendly #mogai positivity #mogai coining #mogai #neogenders #- 🫀

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rataltouille · 3 years

Text

HOUSE PLANTS, UPDATE 7

[novel intro can be found here]

HEY ACTUALLY I FINISHED THIS BOOK!

i don't want to get too sentimental [watch me proceed to get sentimental] but this book means a lot to me and i really could NOT have done it without the support of the wonderful folks on writeblr. the writing community is kind of the reason i even started this novel so it means a lot to me that i’ve met so many of y’all here. this is my first ever novel and i’m so glad i was able to make it so far! here are the final stats:

TOTAL WORD COUNT: 81,049 words.

STARTED: april 17, 2020

FINISHED: january 28, 2021

AVERAGE CHAPTERWISE WC: 3242

NUMBER OF CHAPTERS: 25

NUMBER OF TIMES LILITH SNAPS: 2

NUMBER OF TIMES LILITH SUFFERS: you know it’s too much to count.

the last month of writing this novel was so mixed. like before i hit the 70k mark i’d just been slogging through the novel, feeling uninspired and bored of the story. and then january hit and i was like. wait a minute. my deadline to finish it was the 31st of january. and so i basically startled myself into drafting again and then hit another wc milestone and that motivated me?? so much??? like i remember that drafting the penultimate chapter took me a pretty long time but it was so enjoyable because i was genuinely liking what i was writing and that hadn't been happening for the past few months. and then i wrote the entirety of the last chapter [it’s a vignette so it’s pretty short] for an hour until 1 am in my bed with the lights off and boom. it was such an experience. what makes it even more fun is that i’d drafted 75% of the book in my bed with the lights off at 1 am so this was such a nice full circle moment.

i’m also a little insane from all that lack of sleep but it’s okay we don't talk about that.

excerpts:

chapter twenty-one

this one’s a mix of the weirdest and most broad emotions. there’s a funeral in town, willow’s acting shadier than usual, lilith and juniper finally kiss, etc. etc. literally a rollercoaster. also it’s important that you guys know they kissed in a graveyard. nothing’s more romantic than that amirite.

Residual— that’s how we all felt. Just shells that wash away right before they touch land. We lingered like sleep at dawn, like medicine rimming the lip of cough syrup bottles, like fingerprints on fresh glass. There wasn't a permanence in the way we persisted, because eventually, one leaves their nest. They untether from the source in pursuit of the world. How would a dead girl do that? She won’t reside on the fringes of life like a bad dream.

god this prose is so depressing. even i’m getting sad over it and i’m literally an emotionless husk of a person. hey but the description slaps so enjoy.

also if you’ve noticed i’ve been sharing excerpts less and less in the updates despite the chapters being longer on length [these chapters average at like. 5k words] and that’s because i’m finding it harder to share stuff that doesn’t need context / isn't spoilery.

chapter twenty-two

ah yes the angstiest chapter, probably. something happens to willow that lilith blames herself for and this kicks off the final cluster of events that lead to the climax. i love this chapter because lilith gets angry [but at the wrong person aka herself] and we get to see this side of her she always tries to hide!! another thing that happens is that her garden withers so that’s a fun trip

My garden could have been a fallen kingdom. The ferns were rotting from under the flap, their spores gone. Gardenia blooms had split with their petals discarded like an evening gown all around the pots. The mint had binary fissioned and lay in shreds, the jasmine wilted and spread. All of them like war dolls, casualties of my ignorance, beyond saving.

poor garden :/

chapter twenty-three

this chapter. exists i guess. ISDNJSDUH i sound so disillusioned but essentially this chapter was supposed to end on a the ✨big reveal✨ that the book has been leading up to but then something. happened. and i had to move that into the next chapter and so nothing actually happens in this one! like it’s all important things and we’re setting up tension but overall it’s the least eventful of the final story arc.

We stepped together into our house; it had been abandoned for a day but was the exact same. Dust hadn't suddenly piled up in the threshold, sticking to our soles. The air hadn't musted over in the house’s grieving for its sole occupants. The bathtub was still filled. The water skimmed the floor, and I’d decided. I’d stay with you for the whole week, the fortnight, the month, the year. I’d stay inside with you, because me leaving the house, me choosing to spend any second of my life without caring for you, was a mistake. I’d always seen you as fragile, quiet like moth wings and just as delicate. Maybe I’d needed to feel I was protector just as much as I thought you needed me.

i really like this excerpt because it’s very simple and light in terms of prose but also the implications and that purposeful telling at the end really stick with me. exposing lilith since 2k20.

As morning rose the next day, like a curtain lifting, the sun picked itself up from the horizon, shattering cloudlines in a bright, orange glow. The skies got clearer by the hour as summer sauntered in again. Already the habits of my grounding were kicking in; my circadian rhythm bounded to my outside, too, as I instinctively scheduled and compartmentalized my daily life. First, wake up, check on you. Finish chores while making sure you’re alright. School, eaten with worry, but you're capable and you’ll call if you need help. Home, count your pulse as you inevitably slumped in plush sleep— at the coffee table, at the bathtub, in Aunt Hailey’s chair (rare), in your bedroom (rarer). You’d wake for dinner and read until the lights begin to dim and your eyesight tripped. You’d doze off for the rest of the night. Your internal clock was more functional, more efficient, than mine.

obligatory rhythmic everyday life excerpt that's reminiscent of 2020.

chapter twenty-four

THE PENULTIMATE CHAPTER! THE LONGEST CHAPTER!! THE ONE WHERE SHIT GOES DOWN!!! [can you tell it’s my fave chapter]

this took me two whole weeks to draft [it’s around 7.2k words] but it was so enjoyable the whole time!! there’s something so satisfying about making the quiet character, the one who never express anger, finally snap. so satisfying. lilith is actually pretty feral in this and we all stan. it also has a lot of simpler yet more sharp prose? if you know me you know that repetition is literally my favourite device ever. i overuse repetition it’s actually insane. and this one has a lot of that, but in a way that isn't annoying, and i really enjoyed writing it!!

I’d never been in your bathtub before. You haunted the room and it was always yours; I didn’t consider running the tap for myself. Maybe your going out prompted me this time. The water was so high it sloshed over the lip of the tub. The floor was slick like eels’ skin. My skin was blue with cold; the chill gummed my cheeks and ears and I shivered. My reflection stared at me in hatred, the features warped and pulled like taffy. I half-floated, a ghost in liminal space, and the walls were choked with water lines and flower patterns. With my body invaded by alien frost, with the ceiling low and cruel and ready to crush, I cowered. How did you do this every day? Did the clothes make the difference?

lilith’s going through it again ft. willow’s bathtub.

after this it’s a lot of incredibly spoilery stuff!! like the prose slaps but it’s too many spoilers to share. but have another description of the heaviness of midnight because i’m obsessed with that aesthetic

The lock clicked behind me. Silence descended like birdsong and I was paralysed, stuck at the two half-stairs that led to the outer path, stuck at the threshold of no return. My body shook. All around me was nighttime, gooey and heavy. I was unfurling, like a rose, step after step, pushing past the gate and onto the road. The wind was so cold it frosted my tears.

btw the chapter does not end on lilith crying she kind of has a girlboss moment and snaps massively [i mean after all she’s been through she deserves it] and then the main story aka the fictive past ends.

chapter twenty-five

the final chapter, which also happens to be a vignette chapter and is thus set in the fictive present! it’s very short and is only one tiny scene but it really ends on the perfect tonal quality for the novel. i can't share any excerpts because it really is very short so! have this iconic screenshot i took as soon as i finished the draft instead:

[also if you were wondering yes i did type the entire novel [and basically everything i write] on my ipad because i don't own a laptop]

and that really is it! this was such an incredible journey and i’m so excited to share more of my newer writing and upcoming projects with y’all. it feels so weird that this really is the last time i’ll be making official posts about this novel. truly the end of an era.

house plants taglist: @discreet-writer @mp-golfin @jaydewritesfiction @writer-in-monochrome @magnus-s-writes @firesidefantasy @sugarlessbubblegum @theoldcity @n1ghth4wkz @remi-writes-sometimes @suninks @dreamybellatrixanvm @camusbf @fablemancy @isherwoodj @svpphicwrites @spillme @sunwornpages @bijouxs @asadlitficwriter @bookphobe @sirius-xthem @carlyiswriting @hekat-ie

general taglist: @lovingyou-is @haldimilks @andiwriteunderthemoon @coffeeandcalligraphy @shaelinwrites @tuoyu @charles-joseph-writes @eklavvya @wolf-oak @bitterwitchwrites @laughtracksonata @whatwordsdidnttouch @indeliblewrites @thenataliawrites @illimani-gibberish @sienna-writes @jennawritesstories @chloeswords @aelenko @keira-is-writing @cherylinanika @infinitely-empty-pages @jmtwrites @august-iswriting @sarahkelsiwrites @freedelusionbanana

tumblr is being. really really annoying and wont let me edit on the browser so i’ve got the 50 mentions per post mobile thing to deal with. the rest of the taglist will be tagged in a reblog!

#writeblr #am writing #crabappletracking #wtwcommunity #atlastracking #ofcolourtracking #house plants #house plants update #everybody say “goodbye house plants” as i yeet willow off a good somewhere #just ignore how i’ve actually finished the book and this update is a month late please and thank you <3

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thanatophobia-thoughts · 3 years

Text

I want to spend today talking and thinking about superstitions regarding death. Although I am an atheist, I’m not immune, no matter how jokingly I’ll say “I need to eat black-eyed peas for New Years” – I also kind of really feel this, and am already slightly panicking about the fact I’ll be at Disneyworld on New Years, and I’m uncertain how to go about acquiring black-eyed peas.

Will this likely have any impact on my actual luck for 2022? No.

Will I still blame instances of ill-fortune on not eating black-eyed peas? Probably.

I know, rationally, it’s foolish. Outgrowing and moving beyond traditions is a difficult thing, even if we don’t actively believe them.

What are superstitions around death?

Naturally, there are dreams. Dreams of death can herald the death of the person in the dream, or being a warning to yourself, some would say. Obviously, this is all just coincidence, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t unsettle us for a while after the dream.

There are also animal omens of death, including certain owls, crows, bees, butterflies, roosters, black dogs, cats, moths, vultures, and bats. Some of these may be obvious, as scavenger creatures – or opportunistic enough. Others, perhaps less so. Apparently, if a cat sleeps at the foot of a bed, death is imminent. Seeing as I have a cat that does this every night and I haven’t died, I think that can safely be crossed off the list!

Bees and roosters were also odd, and apparently it is when bees swarm around a rotted tree, there will be a death. Also, for roosters, it’s only if they crow at night.

The moth wasn’t clear to me as an omen of death – the butterfly was, given its symbolism and ties to the spirit. It appears tied most notably to the “black witch” moth, where it is believed if a moth enters and exits a home – particularly if an ill person is in the home – then there will be a death.

Adding to that, it is sometimes believed that if a moth visits all four corners of a house, that will lead to death, tying into another death superstition, the number 4. While not applicable with the moth (which is mostly an Americas, and notably, Central and Southern American like Mexico), the number four is often tied to death in East Asian nations, because of how similar Four sounds to Death in many of those languages. This goes on to the point of skipping floors that would be the 4th floor, 14th floor, and things like that. Oddly enough, I noticed a 13th floor skipped in a hotel once!

Which, while not directly related to death, 13 is considered a highly unlucky number that may bring about death, too.

If a flower blooms out of season, most notably a rose, it means doom. Speaking of plants, if a cedar tree dies in your yard, someone in your family will die.

It’s also thought that deaths can only occur when the tide ebbs.

If rain gets into an open grave, someone in that family will die in a year. But, if the sun is shining, and shines on your face at the funeral, you’ll die – there’s just no winning here.

If you arrive late, or early, to a funeral – more death.

And don’t count the cars in a funeral procession! That will only lead to your own death.

If three people look into a mirror at the same time, one of them will die. Breaking a mirror can also be an omen of death, not just bad luck!

If a picture falls off a wall, the person in that picture will die.

If you bake bread, and it splits at the top, someone in the household will die…if you ever need justification to not bake, ever again.

If you sleep with a fan running, and windows closed, you will cause your own death.

If a clock suddenly stops, your death will be sudden. Also, when someone dies, you should stop the nearby clock – letting it run is bad luck.

Opals are an evil stone, and will cause death.

Will-o-wisps or corpse candles are an omen of death – strange lights with no identifiable source.

If you light a candle, and the wax drips down towards you, then you are going to die.

If you hear three knocks, and no one is there, it is death come knocking for you…or your loved ones.

The list of superstitions related to death go on and on, and some seem even contradictory or just simply untrue. Really, they’re all untrue, but that doesn’t stop minds from worrying if something we’ve grown up with in our culture, happens.

The only death omen I tend to think about, when it occurs, are those relating to white horses, crows, or dreams. For the first two, I have to be in a rather specific mood to even notice it, and put it into that context. For dreams, well, dreams are a pain.

The main thing I like to remember is my mom’s interpretation of it, which is that death in a dream is simply something that means “change”. That, and all dreams are usually just our memories trying to organize themselves while we sleep, so it is usually just things from the day, the week, getting sorted while we rest. So it doesn’t really mean anything, and if I dream of death, it’s because I was focused on it.

None of these superstitions really mean anything other than the meaning we give them. That’s the power we’ve given over to things, in an effort to organize our lives. Likely, death followed these kinds of events in the path, and it was easy to blame the incident, and then avoid it. We humans learn like that.

Just like if we get bit by a dog, we may shun all dogs. It’s an extreme reaction to protect ourselves. That’s really what superstitions are – there was a coincidence that happened enough, or was talked about enough, that now the culture shares in the belief that it isn’t just a coincidence.

Some of these are “rational” coincidences. Carrion creatures naturally look like they bring death.

Others may be questionable, like split bread and fans. One has to wonder how that bread one began; at least the fan one I can imagine a paranoid (and unfortunately, vindicated) mother going on about that, but bread baffles me.

This is to show you how many things you may think are ordinary, or even intentional, which in some cultures may be a death omen. Hopefully, it will show you the odds of your particular death omen really being a death omen are fairly slim, and likely the result of coincidences, spread across time like wildfire.

A bad game of telephone across history, that leaves us with these trinkets to cause anxiety.

But really, if anyone has more details about the bread thing, tell me.

#death anxiety #death anxiety help #thanatophobia #death omen #death omens #bread?#bread #please no silent hill memes about bread #i'm pretty sure silent hill isn't responsible for this #superstitions

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luca-moreno · 3 years

Text

void

Luca word vomit idk

“You’re so fucking weird, Moreno,” one of the squad laughs as they haul on their packs.

Earth isn’t at all what he expected.

Bootcamp isn’t either.

The hills in the distance look far away and the day is already hot. Luca feels sweat beading on the back of his neck, runs a hand over his freshly buzzed hair. He used to be so pale, now his skin turns darker shades he never realized could belong to him. He hates this harsh sun, the way its rays bite into his skin like tiny needles. It’s burning him, he thinks. He’ll wake up tomorrow red and sore. How did humans survive this long, on a planet trying to kill them daily?

He flashes the others a tight grin and a shrug and tries not to show on his face how the words bother him. “Yeah, I know.”

The wards weren’t friendly but neither was Earth or the Alliance.

But Luca puts his head down and he works. He runs the tracks, he climbs the walls, he shoots and swears and rolls and he keeps his head down and he’s just another inductee that his barely sixteen sol years flies under the radar to their eighteen. He’s baby faced and green and alone.

Nobody notices.

Wide hands gripped his shoulders and a smile flashed. “It’s not that long, Luca. You just gotta survive two more years. You can do it, I know you can.”

It was hard to hear over the din of the departure lounge. Luca’s throat grew tight as something akin to panic crawled its way up his throat. “I don’t... I know if I can. Not without you.”

Kiosho grins, mismatched eyes under a messy mop of blue trimmed hair. “Sure you can. Just don’t let them give you any shit. And Luca… even if you don’t feel it, bluff. They can’t tell the fucking difference anyway.”

He didn’t make the two years. He barely made it to one.

Code skittered across the screen of the terminal. His heart thumped so hard he could feel it in his ears. He cracked the firewalls like they’re nothing, swooped in and manifested a whole new reality and hoped it wasn’t a mistake.

It was… and it wasn’t and it still didn’t get him what he wanted.

The other boy notices Luca long before Luca notices him.

And why would he? He was just another tenderfoot, another one of the crowd, another pair of boots falling into line and pounding the pavement, another body in the mess hall trying to dig their way through the slop that’s considered to be their meals. Luca listens with half an ear as the gaggle of recruits around him bitch and moan about the food, picking at it unhappily but Luca remembers what it’s like to be hungry. He never protests.

The boy slides into the seat opposite him but Luca doesn’t look up.

“It’s your accent, you know,” the other boy tells him conversationally.

It takes a long moment before Luca realizes he’s talking to him. He looks up. “What?”

“Your accent. You probably don’t even realize it, but you do this weird little burr thing with all your words. Like drell and turians do.”

Luca lowers his fork slowly. He’s lost count of how many times he’s had to say it now. “I didn’t grow up here.”

“I know,” the other boy smiles. He has blonde hair, and eyes the colour of earth’s skies when they’re running drills in the daylight. “Neither did I.”

It’s hardly unusual, lots of the recruits where from all over the terminus systems, most shuttled back to Earth for training. Luca holds himself short of leaning into a kindred spirit, if that’s what he even was. He takes a closer look at the boy in front of him - pale skin, long fingers, lean limbed.

His mouth clocks it before his mind does. “Spacer.”

“Yep. I’m Saxon, by the way.”

“Um. I’m… I’m Luca.”

Saxon picks something off his tray and eyes it critically. He glances around before he shrugs and pops it into his mouth. “Sure beats keleven nutripaste, huh?”

Some of the tension around his shoulders seems to ease. “Yeah, it does.”

There’s a lot Luca finds he likes about Saxon, and some he doesn’t.

But mostly it’s how he doesn’t feel so… alien… when he’s with him.

Music croons in the background, some old earth song Saxon had dug up from the archives and Luca strums along on the battered guitar he’d scraped all his meagre credits together to buy. Smoke curls around them, a dusty tobacco that makes Luca’s nose itch and his limbs feel weak. Don't you want to be free? Do you like girls or boys?

“So, do you?” Saxon asks one night, slowly taking the guitar out of his hands. The clouds are rolling in, Luca can taste something in the air that leaves him shivering. The rooftop is his sanctuary.

“Uh, do I what?”

Saxon looms closer. “Do you like boys or girls, Luca?”

Luca’s skin prickles in awareness. In heat. “Boys,” he whispers.

Saxon’s teeth flash in the darkness, and he pulls Luca in.

Luca wakes up alone, head throbbing and thick with something that was once sweet now turned bitter. His body aches, sore in places that he didn’t want to acknowledge and marked with splotches that make him double take when he sees his refection in the mirror.

He runs a hand over the marks and smiles to himself.

The smile doesn’t last.

“Saxon, wait up!”

The gaggle of recruits don’t stop but Luca only focuses on one blonde head. He jogs to catch up, still calling out. “Saxon!”

Finally they stop and Luca can feel their eyes on him. “Uh. Wait, so. I just wanted to-“

“Hey, it’s the duct rat,” one of the men laugh. Barely a man, but solid enough to pass. “That’s what they call ‘em, isn’t it?”

Luca’s gaze swings to Saxon, willing him to look at him. He doesn’t.

“Sax-“

“Give it a rest, Luca,” Saxon shifts on his feet. A glance over his shoulder, a shared laugh and almost an apology but not directed at him. Luca isn’t always great with signals but he can feel the sudden unfriendly prickle in the air, the hostility.

You’re so fucking weird, Moreno.

He opens his mouth.

Saxon walk off.

It happens more than once.

It’s confusing, like trying to hold onto sand slipping through his fingers, up until it isn’t. He finds his space, amongst the twisted wires and loose threads, in the circuitry and flow of an electrical current. He always had an affinity for machines, for tech and code. There were no nuances to wade through.

On or off, I or O. Luca always knew where he stood with his tech.

He chose a path and followed it to the end.

“Hey, Luca.”

Luca’s head snaps up. Saxon is a black shape blocking out the stars in his quiet place. He tenses as Saxon steps into the paltry ring of light thrown off his datapad and sits beside him on the threadbare rug.

“What do you want?” Luca asks flatly. His face still burns from being rebuffed. His ears still ring with the sound of their laughter.

Maybe the first time he might have been able to convince himself it didn’t mean much. A misunderstanding. A misstep. He’s had so many of those here. But by the second and the third it wasn’t possible to kid himself anymore. And Luca didn’t know what else to do, kept going back, pinging like a moth against the light.

On or off. On. On. On.

“Come on, don’t be like that, Luc.” Saxon leans close. He smells like dried sweat and beer, smoky and apologetic as he nuzzles against Luca’s neck.

Luca tries to lean away. “What, so you suddenly remembered I exist?”

“Aw, like I could forget.”

“You tried pretty hard.” Luca tries to climb to his feet but Saxon’s hand snaps out to curl around his wrist. He grips tight.

“Luca, wait.”

“Let go, Saxon.”

“No, Luca. Come on, I’m… sorry, ok? Jesus, just… wait.”

The inside of Luca’s chest is desolate enough not to shove him away. Not yet. He hesitates, allows Saxon to draw him back down onto the rug. Stars slide overhead, a sparkle in the sky that leaves Luca homesick. He wants to curl into himself but he draws his knees up instead.

“You know, you’re kind of a dick, Saxon.”

“And you’re too much, Luca,” Saxon sighs. He slides closer, hands on Luca’s face. Heavy hands that Luca can’t twist away from. “You’re like a puppy trying to hump my leg whenever I turn around. You’re… loud.”

“I am not loud.”

“No, I mean,” Saxon rocks back and waves his hands over Luca, his face twisted into something pained. “This. You. Loud. You can be… suffocating.”

That stings. Luca scrambles back and Saxon lets him go. “You gotta give people a chance to breathe, Luca.”

On or off.

Flick, flick, flick.

Off.

His messages scattered to the four corners go unanswered for months. He doesn’t understand. He came all this way, sold his soul to get here and Kiosho was nowhere to be found.

Luca hunches over the terminal. Frustration squeezes his throat. He’s starting to unravel when he’s never been together in the first place.

“Hey, are you okay over there?”

The sob gets stuck as he sucks in a breath. Blue eyes skim him, kind and warm and more than he probably deserves.

“Sure,” he forces out brightly. Happy face, he tells himself. Squeezes away the dampness. Don’t let them see. “Guess I’ll try again tomorrow.”

Tommorow.

[No new messages]

And so on, and so forth.

Sand shifts under his feet. It doesn’t do that on the Citadel. The walls might shift, but the ground was never knocked out from beneath him.

He wheezes painfully as the screams echo. Dust, that every present choking dust billows up around him and there’s pressure and pain and something wet at the back of his throat. He tries to sit up but his body won’t listen to the signals his brain sends. There’s another boom, another shower of debris and screams and Luca’s world goes dark.

When he wakes up, it’s to silence.

The nurses lean over him, lights shine into his eyes, their mouths move but there’s no sound. No hum of the recycled air, no rustle of leaves as the wind brushes them, no stomp of feet on the sealed paths.

Just horrifying, terrible silence and Luca’s own thoughts and the desperate, sudden urge to claw his way out of his own skin.

He doesn’t realize he might be screaming until the prick of the needle slides through his skin.

Then he doesn’t feel much at all.

It takes him three months to heal his leg and adjust to his new ears. Some days are better than others and the headaches are somehow the worst part. He gets fast at signing to the OT’s and the doctor’s although they’re unimpressed at his mastery of signed curse words and not much else. For a while he’s angry but that takes too much energy and he can’t maintain it for long.

And stupidly, he waits.

The day they tell him they’re going to release him, he finally plucks up the courage to ask. “Did… did anyone visit?”

Where there any messages?

The nurse is sweet, green eyed, red hair and freckled all over her nose like stars in the black. She shakes her head, a smile that smacks too much of pity on her mouth. “No, I’m sorry, honey.”

“Oh.” Luca sinks back against the pillows. “Okay.”

The Alliance took his hearing and replaced it with something half baked, but it’s better than the silence so he doesn’t fuss. They haul him in front of the brass where the truth comes out in incriminating shades of glowing orange and textured lines. A deep dive that wasn’t deep enough, or too deep, depending on how you looked at it.

“Your ID is fake,” they tell him and Luca wants to protest because no, not really. He’s still him. He’s still Luca, some kid from the wards, too loud, too much to hold everything that vibrates inside his bones. It had taken the ride to Earth to be noticed and then the spat in the medical wing to be diagnosed. The meds helped. For the first time Luca’s world evened out.

“Altered,” he’s brave enough to say. “Sir.”

There’s a snap of brows over the datapad. Another officer with a chest full of medals coughs nearby.

“He’s two years in on his training. He’s the legally the right age now.”

“There has to be a consequence. What he did-“

“We’re short on bodies as it is. And with what’s coming... Well, this kid was determined enough to get here all on his own. We should use that.”

All eyes turn on him. “Is that true?”

Luca swallows. “Uh. Yes, sir.”

“Why? Why not just wait until you were of age?”

“I was trying to find my brother, sir.” I was trying to find home.

“And did you? Find him?

“No, sir.” Not yet.

There’s a rolling beat of silence that has Luca’s throat feeling thick. His stomach churns.

“Verdict?”

If they send him away, he has nowhere to go. The Alliance wasn’t home, but it was a purpose.

“Let him stay, but hold back that promotion.”

They send him to the edges of Council space. Too human for the wards, too alien for earth. The things that made him stand out under Sol’s light become useful out here. Batarian, Turian, Drell, even Krogan, familiar to his tongue, to his hands.

He’d almost laugh about it, if it didn’t fucking hurt.

It’s not the glory the recruitment posters promise them. Its blood and guts and screaming and the desperate search for the quiet space in his mind to give himself a moment to just think-

But bullets spray, shields go down, the turret jams.

They die.

They save the colony, but they die.

“Did you see that?” Checo wheezes from beside him. In the distance there’s the booms of biotic explosions and the flash of figures in armor he doesn’t recognize. They’re not alliance, he knows that much. He presses down on the hole in his side and wonders why it doesn’t hurt. It should hurt, right? The bullet tore right through him and blood leaks through his fingers.

He doesn’t know if he’s cut out for this.

Funny how the fates shift. How time and circumstance and one insignificant little moment can set him onto a path he has no comprehension of where it will lead. One second of hesitation, one shred through his flimsy armor that knocks him down but doesn’t kill him and leads him to this.

He’s shuffled into a new squad. Sometimes he’s loud, but they’re louder and Luca doesn’t need to squeeze into the places left behind because they make room for him. Fold around him like he matters. His commander even kisses his forehead like the mother he never had never did.

On or off.

Flick, flick, flick.

On.

The reapers wipe out so much of the fleet. Names of those lost scroll endlessly over terminal screens. A memorial wall crops up in the docking bay and in the ship. Thousands and millions gone.

Two names typed into a search, one the name that had started it all, the other he wonders why.

Too much, too loud.

He was never very good at letting go.

The terminal blinks.

[Personnel unknown]

But unknown was better than dead, right?

#luca moreno #ii guess we just needed to get that out #excuse me while i go cry now

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