#girls and rusted industrial buildings

[transmissionsfromthebattlefield]

Zero plus two equals one...

In Bethlehem, PA on Friday.

#me #photos #selfshot #impromptu photoshoot #NoMeansNo lyrics #0+2=1 #Bethlehem PA #SteelStacks #steel plant #blonde #natural smile #vicious side bang #girls and rusted industrial buildings

[cathode-raygirl]

Salvation for a Broken Bot (Chapter 1)

An amateur repair girl finds a severely damaged android abandoned in a junkyard.

This first chapter is sfw but subsequent chapters will be 18+ only. Content warning for a description of a character in a state of disrepair with implied eye trauma.

If you have any questions or feedback feel free to comment or send me an ask!

Rose had visited the abandoned junkyard several times before, but this was the first time she'd come with the intention of stealing.

Half a mile away from anywhere of note, the only sign of civilisation was the distant hum of cars driving down the A22 in the distance. The sound felt relaxing to her, like the waves of the ocean.

She approached the chain link fence surrounding the complex. Someone had repaired the hole she used to enter last time, but she had come prepared. She rummaged around in her backpack and retrieved a pair of bolt cutters. Expertly praying apart rusty segments of fence with her tools, she breached the defences and found herself in a sea of discarded garbage.

From handheld items like phones and radios, to larger appliances like televisions and fridges, the junkyard had it all. But there was one particular prize she was looking for: A robot. It was rare but not unheard of for companies like Ashdown to dump their decommissioned workers in facilities like these, and she was planning on...

Hmm.

She wasn't really sure what she was planning on doing to be honest. Selling one for parts? Repairing it as a passion project? She told herself she'd figure it out later. There wasn't even a guarantee that there *was* anything here anyway. Better to not get her hopes up too early.

She gripped the scanner in her left hand. She'd spent the past week building it, the perfect device for combing for artificial life. The android designs that Ashdown Logistics pioneered had distinctive battery designs to accommodate for their intense workload, and it quickly became the industry standard. If she was able to locate a power supply with the scanner, she *should* be able to locate a bot. In theory. The scanner wasn't picking anything up yet though.

She turned on her torch and began walking deeper into the facility. The scanner's range wasn't particularly good due to the sensor she'd opted to use so-

Her eyes lit up in excitement. A figure! In the distance! Unmoving!

She crept up towards it, her eyes filled instantly with recognition: The body of a robot, slumped backwards over a pile of broken televisions, a steel rod driven perfectly through its left eye, pinning it in place. Most of its pure white hair had been torn away, the few remaining patches blowing gently in the wind.

Its chest had caved in as well, and the silicone plates that covered its rusted internals were covered with dirt and mould.

Rose wondered what had happened to it, how it could have gotten this damaged. It was hard to make it out in the state it was in but it seemed to be some kind of worker bot? Definitely not anything that would normally have combat experience, that's for sure. If any robot rights groups found out about this they'd be having a field day. But more than that... She wondered how her scanner never picked it up.

She ripped the steel rod out of its head and flipped it over. Its charging port was missing, a large cavity in its place. By the looks of it, someone had forcefully removed the battery and several other key components by the looks of it. What *happened* here?

A mystery like this was irresistible to her. If she could somehow repair it, she could interrogate it, and then she potentially had a story she could give to the press, or even one of the robot rights groups. They'd been springing up a lot recently and she was sure at least one of them would take interest. 

She dragged the bot through the muddy ground, through the hole in the fence, and loaded it into her car.

Rose sat on a chair in her workshop, staring at the android in front of her in contemplation. The first thing she needed to do was assess the damages and figure out if it was possible to salvage the bot. A more talented maintenance girl would probably know by now, but Rose was just a hobbyist, so she *really* needed to know what model it was. 

The sticker with this valuable information on had long since been washed away by rain, so she had no choice but to begin disassembling its head in the hopes of finding a motherboard. 

After half an hour's work, the bot's head laid sprawled out in pieces on her desk. She admired the beauty of the intricate mechanisms in front of her, how so many tiny parts could come together to form a believable imitation of a human face. At least, they would if they were in good condition. She could already tell that most of them had either rusted beyond repair or been badly damaged by the blunt force of the steel rod, so they'd have to be replaced. Still, the process should be simple enough once she got the model number.

Inspecting the motherboard, she noticed a peculiar chip with a pink heart on it. She'd never seen something like that before. She took a photo of it and made a mental note to reverse image search it later. Turning the board over, she was met with an unfortunate sight: The Ashdown Logistics logo, and the model number 4MB-3R. 

Ashdown's androids were known for being made with parts that were as closed source and proprietery as physically possible. They refused to release any data sheets or schematics, and the parts that *could* be bought were insanely expensive. No one, not even the smartest engineers of their rival companies had been able to figure out how to create even an imitation of their personality chips, so they held a complete monopoly over the robotics industry. 

Not only that, but the 4MBs were several generations ago. In fact, Rose was almost certain that they had been discontinued in 2002. By now, they were onto the 8MB range, which were mechanically unrecognisable from their 34 year old counterparts. 

Rose slumped backwards into her chair. There was absolutely no way in hell she would be able to buy any replacement parts for this, and she doubted that she'd be able to find any more 4MB units, let alone a 4MB-3R. She had no idea what the difference between the sub units even was, but she was certain it would be significant enough to hinder her progress.

She sighed. It looked like she'd need to take matters into her own hands. There *was* a crude accessory that was compatible with most androids she'd encountered before: A modified cathode ray tube screen could be used to visualise a robot's thoughts. With some training, she was sure that the 4MB-3R could teach itself how to use one as a face. It wouldn't be a great solution by any means but it'd definitely be better than having a caved in, unmoving face. And it wasn’t like the bot would be stuck with it forever, just until she found something better to use.

As for the rest of the body? She could replace the charger port with an external charging system she had lying around, and she was sure she had some spare torso pieces buried *somewhere* in her workshop. There were obviously a lot more parts missing but it'd probably be best to get the basic functionality working first. After all, she wouldn't want to put effort into building a body for an android that might not even be capable of turning on anymore. 

She gazed out her window wistfully, watching the cars pass by below her. In a way, Brighton looked like a giant circuit board, the roads forming tracks between the various buildings, which resembled cathodes, diodes and chips. Or perhaps it was the other way around, and circuit boards looked like cities. 

Despite living in a bustling city, she could never shake away the loneliness she felt in apartment. She was a single, lonely electron in a vast uncaring circuit board, but perhaps she'd be able to find a companion in the form of this bot. And if not, it'd certainly give her something to take her mind off things for a while.

[ Chapter 2: Reconstruction ]

#my writing #ashdown logistics #robot girl #robogirl #robot maintenance

[everydayyoulovemeless]

Old Fashioned ↠ The King x Reader

➼ Word Count » 0.7k ➼ Warnings » None ➼ Genre » Romantic

Music rang throughout the crowded rooms in the School of Impersonation as the broken-down jukebox sang sorrowfully in the corner. Its glitched and sporadic chants did little to dissuade the gang from enjoying themselves, however, as they all still seemed to have about as much fun as if the music were clear.

You leaned against the wall behind the makeshift bar, watching as the King members ran around drinking and dancing on stage. The white dress you stole from the Ultra-Luxe fitted you nicely as you cradled your own alcohol in your hand, enjoying the multiple Elvis songs that the members took turns singing into the busted microphone.

You jumped in surprise when you heard your bell being rung, you're eyes scanned over the rows of barstools before they landed on the King. "Sorry, baby, didn't mean to make ya all shook up like that.".

You grinned at him, "Don't worry about it. Here for another drink?"

"I sure am, could you get me one for the heart?"

"One for the heart? Did one of your groupies leave you?"

His blue eyes locked onto yours for a minute before he replied, "Yeah, somethin' like that."

You rummaged around in your crates before pulling out a bottle of beer. Simple, but he seemed to enjoy them well enough.

"I'm worried about you, King, did something happen? I feel like you're never hanging around your girls anymore." Normally you'd see the two women he was usually around at least once a day, but it'd been around a week since the last time you saw them.

"I'm hangin' round you, ain't I?" He said, offering you a quiet 'thank ya' as you handed him over the drink.

"You know what I mean." You said, leaning against the counter to better level yourself with the man who sat on the bar stool before you. "What's going on? Was there an argument?"

His fingers tapped rhythmically on the counter, supposedly a nervous habit, although, you don't ever think you've seen him anxious in your life. "Would you mind comin' upstairs with me? I'd rather talk with you in a more uh—secluded location."

"You're the boss." You quickly wiped your hands off onto a rag before following closely behind him up the stairs of the relatively large building. You ran your hand along the rusted railing as you went, you were slightly anxious about what he wanted to talk to you about and prayed that he wasn't mad about the whole 'banned-from-the-Ultra-Luxe-for-not-following-industry-rules' incident. You thought you brushed most of it under the rug, but maybe something happened to reach his ears all the way out in Freeside?

"Sooo, what'd you wanna tell me? I hope I'm not in trouble." You joked, attempting to alleviate the tension that was slowly starting to set. You'd been in the King's room many times before, most people have, he's not very strict about who can and can't wander up to that floor, but seeing it without all his usual girls made you feel confused and slightly uneasy.

"(Y/N), I don't know what's overcome me but I can't seem to shake you from my thoughts." He blurted, placing his hands gently on your shoulders.

"What?" You asked. This wasn't where you thought the conversation would go at all.

"Listen, you don't gotta say anythin' right now. I get that I'm technically your boss an' all that, but—well—I just wanna offer you this dance."

You giggled, flattered at the offer as you stepped closer to drape your arms around his neck, his hands instinctively sliding down your waist. "Of course." Is all you said before he began to sway you across the wooden floors that still held sturdy after all these years. The old-fashioned slow dance didn't mix well with the songs the others blasted downstairs, but it didn't seem to matter, the King still handled you delicately as you danced. And when the music started to slow, he dipped you down, kissed your temple, and let you go.

He wrapped your hands around his arm as he led you to the pool table that sat off to the side, "How 'bout a game of pool?"

#the king #the king nv #the king new vegas #fnv #fallout new vegas #fnv x reader #fallout new vegas x reader #new vegas #courier six #courier 6 #falloutober #fallout new vegas fanfiction #fallout new vegas fanfic #fallout nv fanfiction #fallout nv fanfic #fnv fanfic #fnv fanfiction

[random-thought-depository]

Final half of a teaser for a fanfic that will probably never actually be written:

Some of this is copy/pasted with modifications from Strangler In A Strange Land, which I am riffing off. I also took a little inspiration at one point from Homocadherin y.

Skipping over a bunch of stuff that would happen in the actual story...

Summary: plot would very approximately follow that of Strangler In A Strange Land with Eva in place of Amber but, of course, setting up the twist that Eva isn't the actual serial killer, her vampire mom is, and this story's version of Annabelle is a Dorley graduate whose motivation is they're understandably extremely angry about the whole forced feminization thing and who's been targeting sponsors and people who participated in abductions as revenge. Eva uses Lucie to lure Annabelle into a trap and then kill her, but in the process Lucie finds out about Eva's hyper-empathy.

"You're not really a killer, are you?" Lucie asks.

There is a long hesitation, and then Eva says, "I've killed deer and such things."

"But not people," Lucie says, "You couldn't."

Eva says nothing.

"You know the person who actually did those murders though, don't you?" Lucie says, and then "It was always your mother, wasn't it?"

There is a long, pregnant hesitation, and then Eva simply says "Yes," and then Eva tilts her head a little and smiles disturbingly and says, "Would you like to meet my mother?"

Lucie has never been able to figure out Eva's ethnicity. She guesses maybe Egyptian or something; brown skin, black hair, dark brown eyes, aquiline nose. She'd thought he was darkly handsome as Francis, and Dr. Baker did her usual excellent job, made Eva a beautiful woman - or so Lucie thinks, anyway. Insofar as Dorley's girls discuss Eva's looks, it seems to be a divisive subject; people tend to find her either darkly beguiling or creepy and off-putting.

She looks strange.

Ears a little too big. Strangely big jaw. High, sharp cheekbones, and brow ridges a little over-prominent (but the eyebrows themselves are thin). Strangely asymmetrical features; a common unkind judgment is that she looks very subtly deformed. She's wasn't that unusually big as a boy, but she's definitely quite on the tall side, well over six feet tall, and solidly built, and is strangely strong, in a way the hormones don't seem to have effected much; she's definitely got an intimidation factor going.

The most disquieting thing isn't structural; it's the way she moves and the way her eyes move; it doesn't seem quite right.

When Eva smiles and shows her teeth, her front teeth look disquietingly pointed, and her canines look disquietingly big.

Eva brandishes a heavy ring jingling with any number of keys, and after a moment’s deliberation, unlocks a smaller door set into the larger cargo entrance. Inside, the building is cavernous and filthy, if surprisingly well-lit by a row of narrow, dirt-spackled windows placed high up along one wall. Rust-caked industrial equipment hunches menacingly astride narrow concrete channels, and it’s as the women carefully pick their way across the remains of a long, ceiling-mounted rail, now fallen among the detritus littering the floor, that the place seems to snap into focus for Lucie as having once been the final destination in countless animals’ journey through life.

“Why have you brought me to an old abattoir, Eva? Lucie asks, not sure she really wants to know the answer.

Eva says only, "Follow and you'll soon see." Lucie follows. The pair skirt around an ominous steel vat wreathed in collapsed ductwork and choked with debris fallen from the high, arched warehouse roof. “This place is a wreck,” Lucie comments, somewhat unnecessarily.

“Protective camouflage,” Eva answers, from slightly ahead, her voice echoing eerily. “The renovations were confined to the lower floors. It only seemed appropriate.”

“Renovations? Isn’t this place abandoned?” Christine asks.

“Only to look at; in fact, I own it,” Eva replies lightly. “Or, well, ACR Logistics does, and through them Highline Holdings, and on and on via a whole labyrinth of companies and financial instruments until ultimately there’s me as the sole shareholder, so in effect I do.”

Lucie’s thoughts on the notion of Eva owning a mouldering abattoir occupy her for long enough that the pair arrive at a filthy, pitted steel door, half-hidden by defunct machinery yet suspiciously accessible via a cleared area of floor behind a row of pipes. Eva opens what looks from the outside like a fuse box, but the machinery inside is suspiciously computerized, suspiciously modern, and suspiciously clean.

"Only me and Mother can use this entrance," Eva says, "Won't open for anyone else. Which is why I show it to you. Other staff uses different door."

"You have other staff?" Lucie says. Eva doesn't respond, but touches her finger against a small screen in the disguised terminal. The machinery lights up, and an incongruously normal, neutral, feminine computerized voice says, "Fingerprint confirmed. Begin voiceprint identification and pass phrase sequence. Enter first pass phrase."

Eva says in a slow, clear voice, apparently to the computer, "Your son, your only son, whom you love."

The computer says, "Enter second pass phrase."

Eva says, "For there are eunuchs who were born thus from their mother’s womb, and there are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake."

The computer says, "Enter third pass phrase."

Eva says, "Then God blessed Noah and his sons, saying to them, 'Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the earth. The fear and dread of you will fall on all the beasts of the earth, and on all the birds in the sky, on every creature that moves along the ground, and on all the fish in the sea; they are given into your hands. Everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I gave you the green plants, I now give you everything.'"

The computer says, "Voiceprint confirmed. Pass phrases correct. Submit to blood leuenkephalin test."

Eva sticks a thumb into a niche. There is a raspy sound. After a few moments the computer says "Blood leuenkephalin confirmed. Identity confirmed. You may enter." A loud mechanical clangy sound issues from the door, but otherwise nothing happens.

Eva pulls the door open manually. It is, apparently, quite heavy. She grins, showing disturbingly pointy teeth, and says, "Final layer of security. Door too heavy for most humans to shift."

After Lucie passes through, Eva closes the door behind her and touches a button. Lucie hears mechanical components working; she assumes it is a locking mechanism, securing the door behind them.

She really doesn't like this, but at this point she's honestly kind of afraid to say anything.

Most humans? What an odd way to say most people.

Beyond the door there is a corridor like a giant pipe tilted at a sixty degree angle, almost circular in cross section, its circularity interrupted only by a stairway, a maze of pipes near the ceiling, and a bend at the top that creates room for a small platform. Eva leads her down the stairs with a teasing, wordless smile. It is dimly lit, dim enough that Lucie has to be careful with her footing. Eva says, "Sorry about the light. Human staff don't use this corridor much."

That odd phrasing again! Human staff!

At the bottom of the stairs begins a corridor, lined in cheap wood-effect laminate and more brightly lit by fluorescent strips, with evenly-spaced doors on either side, a place that feels at once too familiar and too strange in ways Lucie is having a little trouble putting her finger on...

The strange: an odd roundedness everywhere. An arched ceiling. Doors and doorways with curving corners instead of being the usual simple rectangles. A curving surface where the walls join the floor too. An architecture without right angles! And high ceilings and near the ceiling there's an oddly complex maze of pipes, so many that part her suspects that some of them don't actually have anything in them and are just there as, apparently, a gratuitous architectural flourish. It reminds her of a jungle gym or... Somehow a more chilling analogy suggests itself: a simulation of the dense branches of a forest, a place where something that can climb might hide and watch what's happening below and move around without being easily spotted from below. The lighting is arranged so the bottom eight feet or so of the corridors are well lit but the pipe area above it is deeply shadowed; this no doubt contributes much to the impression of a sinister, jungle-like space.

The too familiar: correct away that strangeness, remove that strangeness, adjust her mental picture of the space to what it might look like with more conventional architecture, and it starts to look a lot like...

Oh my God!

Eva apparently reads and correctly interprets Lucie's dawning horrified comprehension, because Eva spreads her arms to indicate all that lies ahead and exclaims “Welcome to Dorley Hall!”

“You built your own Dorley?” Lucie breathes, utterly appalled.

“Kind of," Eva says, “It’s mostly just the holding area, if I’m honest, and it was mostly as a cheeky in-joke. The rest is quite different. And I'm sure you've noticed we changed the design a little."

Eva shows Lucie one of the cells. It's quite similar to the ones at Dorley, except, again, for the persistent architectural insistence on roundedness, on lack of sharp angles. It extends even to the cot, toilet, and sink; all curves and rounded corners. Even the lamp is round. Even the pillows are round. Even the sheets and blankets have round corners. Some hunch makes her look under the cot, and she notices even the supporting struts under the mattress have a strange, curved, liquid-looking design.

No neat rectangular bars that could be torn out and turned into an improvised cross.

There's a common room, again eerily similar to yet different from Dorley, almost everything the same if only you correct for the persistent emphasis on roundedness and the strange, vaguely sinister jungle of shadowed pipes above and the lighting arranged to keep that jungle of pipes deeply shadowed. Again, the roundedness extends even to the furniture. And Lucie notices there is no TV, in fact no arrangement for visual media of any kind. And she notices there's a big oval gap in the wall above the door, that would... That would allow somebody to move from the hall to the common room by climbing around in the shadowed pipes, without having to come down to the floor and come in through the door.

Is it just her imagination, or does Lucie hear a soft scuttling somewhere above her?

“How was all this even built? You can’t have done it yourself,” Lucie asks. “Were there contractors or something? How would you keep them from telling anyone? Wait, you didn’t…?”

“Perish the thought, darling! Far too much fuss and mess," Eva says, "No, a couple of lazy afternoons getting a grounding in architecture were enough to draw up blueprints that could pass for a gym or some sort of training centre, and then I simply handed over enough money that nobody worried overmuch about any funny little quirks. The real trick is hiring one firm to do part of the work, then another to do the next bit, and so on. Nobody ever sees the full picture. And then, oh no, the money runs out and the work is abandoned before ever being finished. So sad, such a shame, on to the next job. No, I guarantee the people who worked on this place haven’t thought about it in years."

A horrible suspicion compels Lucie to investigate the operating theatre. It too is replicated here, though with some additional supplies and equipment the original version doesn't have. There is a large stock of antibiotics. There are things that might be related to pregnancy, child-birth, post-birth gynecological care, and pediatric medicine. And there is an unidentifiable machine poised over a seat with restraints.

Eva notices Lucie staring at that last thing and says, "In your institution we discover surprisingly effective human control system. We learn from you and copy you, but add some innovations of our own. This machine is Mother's personal invention. Dampens and disrupts certain human social modelling and self-monitoring networks. Makes humans... dream less intensely. A little more like us. Our subjects, like yours, often start socially maladjusted, high anxiety, obsessive-compulsive behaviors, scrupulosity, etcetera; are happier after we give them this adjustment. Disrupts gender identity too, so goes well with the castration and feminization. It is... most humane. Our programme is more humane than yours, I think."

Lucie backs away and accidentally hits some button, switch, or touchscreen control. A recorded voice begins issuing from some speaker. It sounds wrong, high-pitched, sing-song, the pitch range too wide, the pace wrong, sometimes too sibilant, sometimes spat with a brutal hardness that makes t's and hard c's almost click-like; it says, "In the alley, you do not resist. Only your conscious mind requires this narrative of overwhelming force..."

Eva quickly reaches past her and shuts off the recording. Too quickly. The movements are disturbingly fast; they feel almost inhumanly so.

Eva has other things she wants to show Lucie.

There's a... nursery? Something like that. A place with bunk beds and toys. There are four children there. They look like they could be Eva's relatives; they swarm around Eva, are clearly familiar with her, and Eva hands out small candies and a few toys from her expensive designer purse.

The children seem curious about Lucie too. One of them asks, "Is this a new Auntie?"

"To your question, no," Eva says.

The child sniffs at Lucie almost like a dog and says, "It smells like an Auntie!"

"She's from the other place," Eva says.

"Oh!" the child says, as if that explains everything, and to her maybe it does.

Eva doesn't exactly explain all this to Lucie, but these children are vampire/human hybrids. Mother thinks that kidnapping young men, extracting their sperm, brainwashing and castrating and feminizing them, and then impregnating herself with their stored sperm is a capital idea; it means her bloodline is now the only path their genes have to the future, and she thinks that binds them to her. Eva suspects Mother vampiromorphizes humans a bit there, but she's never been good at getting Mother to change her mind about anything.

Lucie asks if any of the "Aunties" are around right now. They are not. They're all away in Mongolia right now, digging up a particularly promising middle Eemian bone bed. Archaeology is one of the primary utilities of the "Aunties" to Mother, and it is an important part of her project.

"Mother's around though," Eva says, "She's been watching us the whole time we've been here. She'll show herself if she feels like it."

In the inverted well of darkness above, amid the shadowed pipes, something scuttles.

"Is that Mother?" Lucie says quietly, pointing upward.

"Oh no," Eva says, "Mother would never make that much noise! That's just Sasha! Remember when I retrieved my frozen sperm from your institution? Sasha's the one Mother made with that. So she's three-quarters Mother, so she's a lot more like her. She likes to hide, like Mother. Would you like to see our bone room?"

There is a lab of sorts, containing protective see-through cases in which very old-looking bones and bone fragments can be seen. Ancient vampire bones, though Eva doesn't precisely explain this to Lucie. Searching the world for vampire bones is one of the primary tasks of the "Aunties" (Eva has given them all a thorough education in the relevant fields of archaeology - Mother prefers to not have to deal with teaching humans, who are very slow, need to have things explained to them repeatedly instead of just getting everything immediately like a vampire would). Mother has been trying to extract DNA from the ancient bones; she plans to use it to clone some long-dead vampires, adding vital genetic diversity to her growing family. They have managed to scrape together more-or-less whole genomes of multiple individuals and are almost ready to create the first clone zygote; if all goes well it should be implanted in Mother within a year. Between such cloning and careful alternate inbreeding and out-crossing of the hybrids, Mother and Eva are optimistic that a viable vampire population can be established, that their family can continue.

Eva shows Lucie an oddly lumpy partial skull, indicates various parts of it with a pencil, says, "Teeth and jaws didn't preserve, but low facial symmetry dead give-away and DNA extracted from two remaining molars confirms!"

After they leave the lab Eva goes very still and quiet for a few seconds and then points up at the shadowed low-visibility area near the ceiling and says "Mother's here. Up there, with Sasha. Been following us for a while. Would you like to meet Mother and Sasha? Would you like to meet my Mum and my daughter?"

Two things that are human-shaped but a little too long-limbed and a little too tall and moving too fast descend from the shadowed space near the ceiling.

#Blindsight #The Sisters of Dorley #cw: incest #kinda #cw: kidnapping #cw: brainwashing #cw: forced feminization #does being made more Scrambler-like count as bimboification?

[carewyncromwell]

“All I want is the wind in my hair -- To face the fear, but not feel scared...”

x~x~x~x

🌹 HPHM Cardverse developed by @ariparri​​ // learn more about Abraxan Derby here! 🌹

x~x~x~x

Abraxan Derby was a sport both native to and most popular in the Land of Clubs. This didn’t mean, however, that it didn’t have its fans elsewhere. Even in the Country of Spades, where street cars were pulled by mechanical creatures rather than flesh and blood ones, there were those who loved the freedom that the white winged horses represented. One of those such Spades was the young woman who would eventually become the Queen of Hearts -- Carewyn Cromwell.

From the time she was a little girl, Carewyn had always been enamored with the idea of flight. She found peace looking out from the highest height she could whenever she most wanted to be alone, and her older brother Jacob -- who worked for the Jack of Spades, Duncan Ashe -- used to love treating Carewyn to rides in the royal zeppelin whenever he could wrangle it. The young redhead’s love of flight also extended to winged horses. Although growing up in a rather poor home had made it so she couldn’t afford to travel and thus had only ever learned how to ride mechanical horses, Carewyn loved the thought of one day riding a real horse, especially an Abraxan. She got her chance, surprisingly enough, the day that the Country of Spades’ university hosted an Abraxan Derby competition.

The Land of Clubs and the Country of Spades shared a border, and it couldn’t have been more stark. As soon as one left the perimeter of the trees of the Clubs’ northernmost forest, they would be immediately greeted by a wide-open, industrial landscape decked with high-rise buildings made of iron and glass. It was only this forest and these buildings that separated the grounds of the Land and Country’s respective universities...and it was to hopefully foster good relations between these two schools that this competition was held.

Carewyn herself wasn’t attending university yet -- she was still only a lass of fifteen, though a very capable one. She’d more than made an impression at the court of Spades, after all the times she’d gone to visit Jacob and his “boss,” the Jack of Spades. Some even suspected that the hard-to-please Ace of Spades wished to enlist Carewyn to work for her in some not-too-distant future, though Carewyn didn’t show any particular enthusiasm for the idea. Instead Carewyn chose to work as a shopgirl part-time, so as to help financially support her family. As soon as she was done with her classes, she’d immediately dash out to catch the trolley, putting on her best shoes and her nicest pair of gloves while riding to the general store, and then she’d quickly fix her short ponytail and give herself a quick look-over in the shop windows she passed on her way over. Once she’d arrived, she’d immediately get to work behind the counter, bustling about to help the store owner with his customers and setting out on foot to deliver packages of goods across town.

This day in particular, at the end of her shift, the store owner sent Carewyn southward to deliver some packages to the university dean’s house. It was an address Carewyn was used to visiting -- the dean had a wife and several daughters, all of whom he loved to spoil with gifts, so him ordering stylish new dresses, jewelry, and shoes was a regular occurrence. Carewyn tried not to feel too jealous when she saw the pretty pearl drop earrings one of the dean’s daughters took out of the smallest of the boxes: the only earrings Carewyn had been able to afford were the rusted, clumsily-carved, flower-shaped studs she was wearing now.

Once Carewyn had finished her final delivery, she set off on foot back uptown so she could take the streetcar home. Her way was halted, though, by the commotion in the streets.

During the first round of the university’s Abraxan Derby, a particularly nasty foul had resulted in one of the Land of Clubs’ horses getting badly spooked by  some firecrackers in the Spades’ side of the stands and its rider getting thrown off his horse as it took off into the air. This very same Abraxan ended up just as spooked, however, when it flew right into the path of a zeppelin, weaved down right into the path of a very loud construction site, and then finally zipped right into the very loud incoming traffic of several dozen streetcars.

Alarmed by the sight of the poor, panicking creature, Carewyn pushed her way through the bewildered, wary bystanders, fearlessly rushing up toward the winged horse. Although truthfully she hadn’t known how to calm a real, living horse any better than anyone else around did, Carewyn tried her best, speaking to the white steed as calmly as she could.

“Easy now,” she whispered, taking off her black lace gloves as she approached, “easy...”

The horse flapped its wide wings as if to ward her and everyone else off, but Carewyn nonetheless stood her ground. Several law enforcement officers tried to intervene, whether by urging Carewyn “out of harm’s way” or to grab the horse’s reins, but their loud voices only served to make the Abraxan more nervous.

“Stay back!” Carewyn hissed at them under her breath.

She turned back to the Abraxan, keeping eye contact with him as she kept a respectful distance. The creature was not going to let any of them get any closer, even if they did want to help -- that much was obvious.

Carewyn racked her brain, trying to think of what to do. She had to calm the poor thing down...

The red-haired shopgirl took a very careful step forward. The Abraxan padded the ground anxiously, its eyes locked on her. Not entirely sure what made her do it, Carewyn offered the horse as brave of a smile as she could and started to sing to him.

“The pale moon was rising above the green mountain...

The sun was declining beneath the blue sea

When I strayed with my love to the pure crystal fountain

That stands in the beautiful Vale of Tralee...

She was lovely and fair as the rose of the summer,

Yet ‘twas not her beauty alone that won me --

Oh no, ‘twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning

That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee...”

It was a modest, old-fashioned melody -- a folk song, full of admiration. And perhaps because of the sweetness of Carewyn’s voice and the smile that made her voice and eyes sparkle, it held the Abraxan’s attention, making it focus on her enough that it slowly settled down. Finally Carewyn was able to get close enough to touch it, but she moved slowly, holding her hand out in mid-air a foot or so away from its nose for the horse to smell. At last the Abraxan blustered softly through its teeth and bridged the gap between them, bringing its soft, velvety nose up to her hand. Carewyn’s eyes shone like stars as she brought both of her hands gently along its snout and stroked its neck.

“Oh, you are beautiful, aren’t you?��� she whispered. Trailing a hand along its back and wing made her wistful in a way she could hardly explain. “You poor, sweet creature...it must be so much louder here than you’re used to. It’s no wonder you’re so frightened...”

“Indeed.”

Carewyn looked up.

The crowd parted for a young dark-haired man only about a year so older than Carewyn to pass through. He was dressed all in loose-fitting, breezy green, and something similarly bright white walked alongside him. The young man’s Abraxan’s wings were folded up at its side as he led it through the crowd toward Carewyn.

“I’m afraid the stables and woods back home are remarkably quiet, in comparison to your city,” he said calmly.

His black eyes ran over Carewyn’s hands up onto the horse’s face and then back onto her with interest.

“...I must thank you for restoring some peace to her spirit.”

Carewyn blinked at the young man in surprise.

“...She’s yours, then,” she surmised.

“My teammate’s, yes,” said the green-dressed man.

Before he could say anything else, however, the traffic in the street seemed to reawaken. It seemed that now that the Abraxan wasn’t flying around like crazy, all of those people who’d been on their commute home or to work had lost their patience.

“Oi, can you take it outta here?!”

“Get outta the way, will ya?!”

“Move it already!”

The Abraxan started to neigh restlessly at the blaring horns and clanging bells, and Carewyn hurriedly tried to calm it by stroking its mane.

“You horrid people!” she scolded them. “Don’t you see you’re making it worse?”

“Clearly they don’t,” the man said very coolly.

Bringing a tanned hand through his own horse’s mane, he quickly leapt up onto its back and took hold of the reins.

“Can you ride, miss?”

Carewyn was taken aback. “...I know how to ride a horse, yes.”

A mechanical one, at least.

“Well, then,” the man said, undaunted, “best be off.”

With this, he took off into the air.

Carewyn glanced at the white Abraxan at her side and then up at the green-dressed man flying just over her.

Well, it really was the best way to get this poor thing back where she belonged, Carewyn supposed.

Despite her slight misgivings, she climbed up onto the winged horse’s back. Taking hold of its reins, she then took a deep breath.

“Let’s go, girl,” she whispered in the Abraxan’s ear.

She flicked the reins. The Abraxan reared back, its wings fully extended, making Carewyn’s heart slam against her ribcage as she clutched its neck harness for support -- and then, just as abruptly, the horse had taken off, soaring up into the air.

It was stunning. Oh, Heavens above, was it a thrill! To be so weightless and so above it all -- it was like pure, exhilarating freedom was coursing through her veins with the heat of hot iron!

Carewyn felt her face flushing with joy -- she felt like a child, uncaring that her hair had come loose of its usual ribbon or that it was flapping loose in her face. She didn’t care how she looked in that moment, or what anyone might say. In this moment, here -- she’d never been happier, in her memory.

The green-dressed man flew up alongside her, his soft black eyes and large white smile rather bright as he considered her.

“Your course is worth several rubies,” he said.

Carewyn glanced up at him questioningly.

“You are a very skilled rider,” he clarified himself. “You’d be an admirable opponent, or ally, were you to fly in the derby.”

Carewyn shook her head modestly. “Thank you...but I’ve only ever ridden mechanical horses, prior to today. I’m hardly experienced enough.”

“But does your inexperience not make your talent all the more remarkable?” the young man challenged her. “You bonded with your steed with nothing but heart and instinct, rather than tried-and-true knowledge or experience.”

“Yes, but if people were relying on me to help them succeed, I wouldn’t want them to choose me just with their hearts,” Carewyn said very firmly. “I’d want them to know I was the best choice, that I’d be the best I could be -- be everything they need me to be, and then some -- and that I’d do the best I could for them, too.”

The green-dressed man cocked his eyebrows. “It seems your standards for yourself are even higher than your flight trajectory.”

He soared around her in several graceful loops, his hands not even touching the reins. Carewyn watched him with admiration despite herself -- he was a very, very talented rider.

“Urge her up with a light tug to the reins,” the green-dressed man encouraged her. “Then lean to one side, pressing your foot up against her flank.”

Carewyn did so, and soon she was soaring up and over him. Her face brightened with a smile, and the green-dressed man grinned at her as they weaved back and forth.

“What’s your name?” he asked her.

“Carewyn!” she cried over the wind. “Cromwell!”

He swept right up alongside her, their horses’ wings brushing up against each other’s.

“I am Orion!” he answered as he passed.

Orion came up and over Carewyn, completely upside down, before charging ahead.

“Are you a performer, Carewyn Cromwell?” he called back over his shoulder.

Carewyn flicked her reins, determined to catch up.

“No! I’m a shopgirl at Pique’s General Store. And a student -- though I hope to work in law someday -- ”

She came right up alongside him, so close that their shoulders touched.

“And what of you, Orion?” she asked him. “Are you a professional Abraxan Derby player? Or do you hope to be?”

Orion beamed. “I wish to fly free. That is all I dream and wish.”

Carewyn felt her smile widen, both empathetic and charmed despite herself.

“And to win your matches, I would think,” she said a bit more coolly.

“That wouldn’t hurt,” Orion said amusedly.

For the next half-hour, Carewyn rode alongside Orion, perfectly matching his speed even as he weaved up over and around her. At several points she even overtook him, dodging and soaring like a shooting star around him. Orion’s black eyes sparkled brightly as they flew together -- as brightly as Carewyn’s own blue eyes were, if any outside observer were to have taken notice.

At last, the two made it to the university, to where the rest of the Derby players were waiting. The next match was set to begin, and the Land of Clubs had been a little tense about how long their captain had been gone. Orion, however, soothed their concerns with relative ease, his smile and aura remarkably calm.

“A rider without his steed is akin to a shooting star pinned to the earth. Although yes, one could shine brightly while stationary, that star would lament being so locked in place, unable to fly across the sky.”

His eyes flitted over to Carewyn brushing her loose hair out of her face as she disembarked. As she did, she reacted with surprise as her hands ran over her ears and a flash of faint resignation rippled over her face.

Orion approached her, and Carewyn immediately put on a smile as she faced him.

“Well...” she said slowly, “I suppose I’d best be getting on. I hope your match goes well...with how good of a flier you are, I’m sure you’ll be brilliant...”

“You’re welcome to stay and watch,” Orion invited her.

Carewyn’s smile softened. “Thank you...but my brother will be getting off work soon -- he’ll be worried, if I’m not home when he gets there...”

She curled her loose hair behind her ears. Orion noted immediately that she was only wearing one flowery earring made out of crudely-shaped steel.

“Did you lose your earring?” he asked.

“Yeah,” Carewyn said offhandedly. “I suppose it must’ve come off, while I was riding. But it’s all right -- I’ll save up for a new pair.”

She extended a hand to Orion. He looked down at it, before gently taking and shaking it.

“My team and I owe you a debt, Carewyn Cromwell,” said Orion. “Thank you.”

“Nonsense!” huffed Carewyn. “Why, I only did what anyone would’ve done, in my place...”

She brought a gentle hand along the back of the Abraxan she’d ridden, and the winged mare brought her nose up to Carewyn’s cheek with an affectionate murr.

“Perhaps,” said Orion, “but you were ultimately the only one who did it.”

He inclined his head to her, his black eyes glinting with a touch of mischief as he smiled.

“I lament that we probably won’t meet again, unless by chance. But perhaps if you were to become a performer, as I supposed you might be, you might have more reason to travel to the Land of Clubs.”

Carewyn beamed. “Or maybe once I graduate university and have made my own way in the world, I’ll have more chance to go where I want. Then I can visit you, just as well as you can visit me.”

Orion’s eyes sparkled. “May we both chase that freedom.”

~*~

By the following night, Orion had already departed back to the Land of Clubs. That next week, though, Carewyn was startled to receive a tiny package in the mail, addressed from the Land of Clubs. Inside was a pair of sparkling emerald green earrings shaped like clubs and a very short note --

I hope these are a suitable replacement for the one you lost. As much as your talent in flying is worthy of rubies, I thought the stone of intuition better suited your aura. If nothing else, a green clover seems good company for the Rose of Tralee.

I sincerely hope our paths will cross again.

Fairfarren,

Orion Amari

Carewyn wore those earrings nearly every day from then on, taking exquisite care of them all the while. She even wore them after she moved to the Kingdom of Hearts and -- not long later -- became their Queen. By that point, Orion had likewise become King of Clubs: a role that Carewyn knew very well Orion would’ve likely never chosen for himself, however much he felt an obligation to his people, country, and allies to care and provide for them.

As much as the two royals had to perform on protocol, though, they still always enjoyed whenever they had the chance to collide again. At least then, for part of that time, they could chat, banter, and confide like ordinary people...as friends would...free of their duty and obligations, if only for just a little while.

#hphm #hogwarts mystery #cardverse au #hphm cardverse #carewyn cromwell #orion amari #my writing #aesthetic #moodboard #yay queen of hearts and king of clubs! #yeah I kind of intend to leave their relationship vague in this universe #you can see it either romantically or not because really either way these two really respect and understand each other #I love giving these two a history with abraxans though because in my canon for them they both have abraxan patronuses!! ;~; #the rose of tralee is a traditional irish folk song that was popularized in the victorian era #so yeah -- its era fits the steampunk country of spades and its theme suits the woodsy land of clubs! #'pique' is what the french call the suit of spades :D

[crescentblossom66]

Dead Bird Metro: The Tale of two Girls Chapter 12

The lasting silence the once busy industry district came to know in the recent years got broken by the loud click clack of the wheels that belonged to the the fastest and sturdiest train the metro had to offer, the Owl Express. The atmosphere aboard said train was rather gloomy, a sense of dread and uncertainty loomed over every passenger. The one who was affected the most, however, was the little girl that operated the train and tried her hardest to keep it together to make sure that no one would panic.

Hattie managed to stop the train more or less at the station, she had underestimated the speed they were traveling at, so the first wagon missed the platform. She winced a little as she stopped a bit to harshly and the train jolted a bit, the old bird made it look so easy, she could already hear the others complain about having fallen over or having tripped due to the sudden stop. The young girl opened the doors and the owls exited, most of them looked shaken, whether it was due to the shock of the stop or what happened earlier, she didn't know, nor did she have the time to care about that at the moment.

“Alright everyone, see this building over there-” she pointed at a large office building, the windows were smashed in and the walls were sprayed with graffiti, but it was the closest to the station and wasn't wide open like the most of the warehouses whose huge gates had rusted and were now permanently stuck at being open.”-this will be our base! Look around a bit and see if you can find anything usable, like food or water, stuff to sleep on would also be helpful!” With that most of the owls dispersed after they either saluted her or nodded in approval. Only Enrique stayed by her side.

“I found some cans of food in the caboose after I searched for anything that could help us. I'll carry them inside.” She nodded and approached the old office. The girl shivered a bit after the first thing she noticed was the cold wind that blew through the abandoned lobby, the big panorama window was smashed in, just like most of the other windows. The first thing they had to do was sweep away the shards and barricade the broken ones, lest the cold would lower moral even further. She continued to explore the first floor that also had a cafeteria that looked mostly in tact, and a meeting room. The girl shook her head at the broken glasses and plates. Why do people like to break things so much? She would have done the same if she'd explore an old, abandoned place, but this was rather inconvenient now!

Obviously the elevator was out of order, so she took the stairs to the other two floors. Both of which sported just what you'd expect to see in a run-down office building; broken chairs and desks, PC monitors whose screens were busted, a few laptops, and a whole lot of printing paper. As she was inspecting the roof, she noticed a group of owls frantically scramble back to their new base. She hurried down the stairs, praying that they hadn't come back to tell her that the Nyakuza had followed them. The Metro Owls practically tripped over each other, the fear in their faces already confirming that they brought bad news.

“The Penguiads...the Penguiads are on their way here! They're coming from the east!” One of them yelled at the top of his lungs, making Hattie flinch under the news. No...why were they here? Their boss was gone, how could they still...Bow!

“You! Rally the others together!-” She told one of them glaring at him after he hesitated to move, due to his legs shaking too much. “How many are there?!”

“A-Around maybe 50, they're traveling in a long convoy of cars!” 50, considering her own dwindling numbers, it would be risky to attack the penguins, even if she had around one and half times her number. Losing any more would crush all hopes of having even the smallest chance to win against the Nyakuza.

Hattie balled her hands to fists and stormed outside. “Enrique, get everyone inside once they arrive! I'll take care of this!” The eagle-owl nodded reluctantly, seemingly aware of what she was planing.

“Be careful, amiga...” The brown-haired girl headed east to confront her enemies. The decision she made would ensure the safety of the Leowles, no matter what would happen, she just hoped that her judgement was right.

-

Bow looked out the window, absentmindedly watching the scenery go by, wondering why all of this happened to them. She cleared her mind, and focused on what they had to do now. They needed to find shelter, and they needed to recover and then reclaim their lost territory, but the penguins were in rough shape, no way would they be able to...-Her thoughts trailed off when she noticed a vehicle parked in front of a building up ahead, not just any vehicle, it was a train. She sat up and gave the other penguins a signal to stop, which they did with a loud squeaking of the tires.

“Stop the car, Dave!” He did as told without hesitation, the purple-eyed girl just about managed to stop herself from hitting the dashboard after having removed her seat belt to get the others to stop.

“What's wrong?...-” He squinted a little and leaned forward to take a closer look at the vehicle parked at the station ahead before he leaned back, rubbing his forehead. “-uhh, this is really bad. This...this train doesn't belong to the Leowles, does it?” Bow exited the car slowly, after spotting a figure that slowly started to move toward them, alone. As the person got closer, and she saw the bright, yellow feathers on each side of the headband blow in the wind, she knew who was slowly advancing toward them.

“Sorry to say, Davie, but that's them.-” She said in a serious tone, muttering another line as she began moving toward the other girl. “What is she planing?” Why would Hattie move all the way out here? Bow knew that the Penguiads were in no shape to fight, they needed to be careful.

“Tell the ones in the back to watch out for a pincer attack! I don't know how many they are!”

“What are you doing, Bow? Get back here!”Dave demanded concerned, she only gave him a smile and wink before she turned back around to face her former friend. Bow drew her dagger as she approached, making sure that the other knew that she was ready for a fight, should it come to it. Hattie responded in kind, drawing her knife from her jacket.

Both stopped a small distance away from another, scrutinizing the each other, trying to figure out the intentions of the other girl. “What are you doing here?!” Hattie yelled at the other in a serious and quite hostile tone which caused Bow to narrow her eyes at her and for her grip on the dagger to get tighter.

“I could ask you the same thing?! What business do the Leowles have here?!” Bow noticed that the owls seemed to rally behind Hattie, a considerable distance away, at least that meant that they weren't attempting to attack them from both sides. Maybe Hattie hadn't thought about doing that.

“We're claiming this district as our own, leave or face me in a duel!” Bow's eyes widened. Why would Hattie want to face her in battle alone instead of attacking together with her gang? Bow turned around briefly, looking at the beat up and tired-looking penguins, before she turned back.

“Where is the catch?! You can't tell me that's all there is to it, you Leowles never play fair!” Bow spat back. Hattie turned around and looked back at the others, a small smile spread on her lips before she turned serious again. She grabbed her knife tightly and took a deep breath.

“There is none! The Leowles will withdraw should you kill me! Should I win, the Penguiads leave, it's that simple!” She wanted to add that she just wanted to avoid further bloodshed, but decided against it, maybe the penguins would attack the owls, and she had no idea in what condition her enemies were in.

She assumed she had guessed right when the other agreed to her terms, they were probably just as worn down as they were. “Alright, I'll accept you're challenge!” Bow decided after looking closer at the owls, they looked just as worn out and hurt as the penguins, she wondered if the Nyakuza had attacked them as well, considering that only about a third of the Nyakuza had targeted their hideout.

The penguins and owls watched in suspense as the two girls charged at one another, both ready to die if it meant that her family would live. “Bow this is way to dangerous, stop!” Dave screamed in panic, and wanted to join the fight. The harsh glare and Bow's words forced him to stop.

“Don't worry, Dave! I won't lose!” Bow predicted the stab attack that Hattie used frequently and jumped backwards, the blue-eyed girl shrieked as Bow's dagger left a bleeding cut in her arm.

“Hattie! Withdraw! We'll...We'll find another place, amiga! We need you!” The girl hardly responded, he only got a short answer, as she twirled around and cut Bow's leg after the latter failed to realize that Hattie only feigned to attack her right side, only to attack from the other.

“I won't let you get harmed further, we need as many of us as possible if we want to fight the Nyakuza!” Hattie's eyes gleamed with hatred as she spoke the name of the rivaling cat gang. Bow's assumption must have been right, the Leowles were attacked by the Nyakuza, too. That was why she wanted to fight her alone, just like her Hattie wanted to protect what remained of her gang...her family.

Bow realized that they had a common enemy in the Nyakuza, and as she dodged Hattie's attacks she could see the rough state of both her penguins and the owls that followed Hattie. “Why aren't you fighting back anymore! Stop making this harder!” Hattie's attacks lost their viciousness after she noticed that Bow had stopped attacking her and was instead only dodging. Was she trying to wear her down? Was she trying to manipulate her into letting her guard down? Whatever it was she was doing, it made it harder for her to see her as a faceless enemy, nothing more than an obstacle that she needed to eliminate.

“This is stupid, Hattie, so very stupid.” Bow started to tear up after she realized that she was actually fighting her former friend to the death. She realized that Hattie wasn't just a coold-blooded, cruel Leowle. Just like her, she was just a young girl trying her best to keep it together. “I don't wanna fight you, can't we just go back to being friends?”

“What are you saying?! We're from rivaling gangs, Bow!-” The Leowle girl started, pulling her knife closer to her and assumed a defensive stance after Bow lowered her dagger. “-I don't want to fight you either, but...that's just the way it is now.” She looked down a bit, tears were filling up her eyes as well. There was no easy way out of all of this, not after everything that happened. Both of the leaders of the gangs were gone, due to something the other did. How was she going to forgive Bow for getting her grandpa to prison? “You...because of you my grampa is in jail, they'll probably kill him there!” Hattie's anger flared up again, but she missed the other, due to her tears blurring her eyesight.

Bow didn't fight back at all, she didn't even move when Hattie's attack barely missed her. She knew that they had a common enemy, and that fighting her now would only make things worse. Even though many Penguiads lost their lives due to the bomb and even though their feud had been going on for years, now was not the time to fight each other. Not with the Nyakuza still out to kill both of them.

“I can't forgive you or the Leowles for what you've done either-” Bow started in a quiet, even tone, looking at the other kid that was trembling with rage, sniffling and wiping away tears that clouded her sight. “- but we both have a bigger problem now...the Nyakuza.” That send a jolt through Hattie and she almost dropped her knife to the ground.

“You...you want us to join forces?” Bow nodded. Hattie looked at Bow bewildered, the owls behind her and the penguins on the other side started to mumble among themselves. Hattie thought about it for a moment. They had a better chance with their forces combined, it would improve their odds to get rid of those pecking cats. Before she could make a decision, a voice spoke up behind Bow.

“If allying with you means that Bow will be safe, then...I guess we don't have a choice.” That was Dave, Bow smiled, she knew that he'd understand.

“I hate you Penguiads, don't get me wrong, but we have to get rid of the Nyakuza, if that means turning enemigos into amigos then I think I can live with a truce.” Behind Hattie Enrique crossed his wings, glaring at the penguins and then looking at Hattie for the final say in the matter. She contemplated for a moment longer. She didn't quite trust the penguins, but the owls still outnumbered them by a bit. They would be complete idiots if they tried to back-stab them.

“Alright, but only until we got rid of the Nyakuza. After that we go our separate ways again.” Hattie agreed, and Bow looked at her and the owls before adding something.

“We share everything we have and make sure to treat each other with respect-” She looked over at her penguins, “-We won't pick on you, so you don't pick on us, understood?” Bow glared at the owls, and Hattie nodded, before she put her knife back inside her jacket and went over to Bow, her hand outstretched for the other girl to shake. Bow grabbed her hand after also sheathing her weapon, and gave Hattie another one of those wacky, dramatic handshakes which caused the other girl to smile a bit.

-

It took a few days for everyone to adjust to the harsh change. Most members of both gangs avoided interacting with the other gang's birds, but a few seemed to take the change exceedingly well. When Hattie walked to the meeting room on the ground floor of the office building, she found her right hand man and the penguin called Dave chat about how they ended up in their respective gang. Hattie herself was still a bit on the fence about all this, but Bow seemed to already try to at least get along with the owls she encountered. It wasn't as easy for the blue-eyed girl, most penguins gave her a death glare, most likely because she was the reason that their boss was badly injured. Bow occasionally talked to her, but it was awkward now, gone was the ease with which she could talk with her before, it made her a little sad.

She made her way into the room and scribbled some things down on the white board. She had already decided what they needed to do next. The owl and the penguin that had been talking in the lobby, both entered the meeting room, Enrique sat down on the second chair in the front on the left side of the room while Dave sat down on the second chair on the right. The first on each row were for Bow and her. The curly-haired girl burst through the room and muttered a 'sorry' before she sat down next to Dave.

“Alright, now that we are all here, let me start explaining the plan.” The eyes of the two birds and Bow were on her as she turned back to the crude drawing of the big shopping mall, which now served as the main hideout of the Nyakuza. “We have one major problem we have to take care of first before we can even think about attacking the main HQ-” She used a thin, long stick she found outside to point at the base.”-The Empress has way too many cats at her disposal, they're outnumbering us by quite a lot. We have around 125 birds in total, most of which are still quite injured, that puts our number even lower.-” Dave rose a flipper quietly. “-Please keep the questions for after I'm finished.-” He lowered his flipper quietly.“-But that is still not our biggest problem-”

Bow just didn't even raise her hand and just spoke what came to her mind.“Then what is?” Hattie rolled her eyes a bit annoyed.

“I was getting to that...The biggest issue is that she'll likely attack us after she's settled into our territories, I have no doubt that she wants to get rid of us before we try something like what we're about to do.-” The others nodded along, if the cats attacked them like that it would be over. “-We're going to attack them, and reduce their numbers before they have a chance to attack us. Any questions before I go on?” Dave once again rose his flipper and Hattie prompted him to speak up.

“How many can fight?”

“Around 100 most of the owls are okay, a few got hurt doing reconnaissance work, but are mostly okay, some of penguins are hurt because...-” She looked away, feeling kind of bad, and awkward after basically being cause for them being hurt. “-of the bomb.”

“Go on, amiga.” Enrique saved her out of the weird pause for which she was thankful. She flipped the board over and it showed three pictures, just as crudely drawn. The first one showed the central station. “Due to both of our families needing a rest, Bow and I have decided to attack the cats at our respective territories. I'll go and find the old, abandoned train in the back of the tunnels, I kinda know where it is, but I think I'll have to search a bit. The train had a bunch of explosives on board that were way to hard to transport through the metro without the police knowing about it, so it was abandoned there. I'll then take said train and make it explode near the station.” She waited for questions, but it appeared that they had none, so she continued by pointing at the second drawing which showed a theater.

“Meanwhile Bow will go to the old theater where the Penguiads stayed earlier, she'll sneak below and destroy the old wooden structure of the theater, which should make it crumble.” Bow nodded and Dave gave her a worried look.

“Are you sure, you want to go there alone, sis? The place is full with cats by now.” Bow just leaned back and nodded.

“I got this, also we need you to do something else.” She looked at Hattie who continued with the third and final picture.

“You two will work together for this one-” She pointed at the two birds in the room, “-you will attack the Robinstro, you know the big, fancy restaurant that was just a bistro a few years ago?-” They nodded, “-You will make your way over the rooftops to the back of it, it's the safest route. After that you'll enter the sewers under the place and then you'll have to be quick. You'll need to ignite the gas in the pipe that leads to the big gas oven they have, that will mean, however, that once the oven up there explodes, the fire will spread through the tunnels. You need to get out or you'll get fried.”

“Oh man, quite the dangerous mission you're giving us here, Hattie.” Enrique folded his wings as he thought about the plan. She nodded.

“I know but this is the only way that I can think of that will get them off our backs for a little while. They'll need even more time to regroup after that.” She dismissed them shortly after, as none of them had any questions regarding the plans. All four of them knew that following day would be quite hectic.

#dead bird metro au #ahit hat kid #ahit bow kid #ahit conductor #ahit dj grooves #inspired by the au from #the confuktor #ahit fanfic

[jonathanvik]

Luyten V - Chapter 1

Pain lanced through Rosemary’s legs as she dragged herself through the ruined building. She warily eyed the ceiling, fearing the rickety structure might topple at any second. Half had already collapsed, making her trek to the basement nail-biting.

But Rosemary pushed ahead anyway. After all, dying early would doom humanity forever. She gave her left arm a quick glance and winced. The infection had already spread to her shoulder blade, the thick glowing purple undulations sickening to behold. Rosemary figured she had an hour remaining until the parasitic infection consumed her whole. But that didn’t matter. She’d complete her task well before then.

“Well, shoot.” Rocks had collapsed over the door leading to her destination. Refused to be deterred, metal squealed as Rosemary pushed against it with her infected arm. Sweat dripped down her brow as she forced open the metal door, beaming as she spotted what she hoped would be the home of humanity.

“There you are, girl. You can’t imagine how pleased I am to see you.” She tapped at some keys, grunting in satisfaction as all systems read green. It won’t do to send her creation if it didn’t work.

“Still, doing this will doom me and everything I worked towards for the last twenty-odd years,” she mumbled to herself. This wasn’t a decision she made lightly. Heck, this half-baked scheme might not even work. Or worse, doom all history in a paradoxical tangle. Still, she had little choice. The Altair had ruined her precious planet beyond repair. It’s only a matter of time until they spread their infection across the entire galaxy.

“Macauley better be right about this.” With more taps of the key, everything was ready. She only prayed this would work. They hadn’t exactly tested this yet. Oh, well. Nothing for it, she supposed.

“Hey, kiddo. I’m sure you’re surprised to see me,” Rosemary said in her final message. She couldn’t send the Luyten V without explaining its purpose. “Now listen to me carefully. The Earth’s fate hangs in the balance.”

---

“I don’t like the looks of this corridor.” The avatars on Rose’s computer screen said. The animesque girl’s eyes darted from side to side, her animated expression turning pensive.

“Creepy. Maybe you should turn back?” Rose said, tensing with her favorite Vtuber star, Stella Kilonova, as she explored further down the pitch-black corridor. The dilapidated industrial complex sent waves of unease through Rose, its metal rusted into an ugly orange. 

Rose hated horror games, never having the nerve to play one herself. She watched as Stella directed her character past some pitch-black window. Rose tensed, fearing something jumping out at any second.

The horror came as expected, bursting from the window in an explosion of glass. The indescribable horror lumbered forward, and Stella screamed. Her avatar, a blue-haired girl with twin starburst hairpins froze, pupils widening in utter terror.

To illustrate her fear, Rose posed a scared emoji with Stella’s face in the chat. Similar reactions zipped through the chat log as the Vtuber’s other viewers dreaded what might happen next.

“No!” Stella’s player character tried fleeing for his life, but the monster moved lightning fast, its jagged claws lashing forward to gut him. Much to Rose’s astonishment, the blow did nothing. The character bounced back several steps, but seemed otherwise unharmed. Huh, what was happening?

In response, Stella broke into a high-pitched giggle, her avatar laughing and clasping her stomach. “Gotcha!”

“Huh?” Rose posted her confusion in the chat.

The monster attacked again with a terrifying single-minded determination. But its efforts to bash Stella’s character proved futile, the video game character receiving no damage.

“Before I started the game, I entered a cheat code that made my character immune to all damage,” Stella said, amused at the monster’s futile attempts to hurt her, and broke into another laughing fit.

“Hilarious,” Rose said, scowling and voicing her annoyance in the chat. Typical. Stella loved playing these unpredictable practical jokes.

“The monsters should never win,” Stella said with absolute confidence. Her chat remained unamused, many claiming she’d ruined the game. They’d been looking forward to her streaming this game. But, ever the entertainer, Stella showed other fun tricks you could do with this game, demonstrating amusing glitches if the player character hit a wall just right. She had an impressive knowledge of the game.

After closing the game, Stella returned to her default star-filled background and answered some questions from her viewers. She answered each super chat donation with her usual humble gratitude. The cute smile of her avatar made everyone’s previous annoyance with her evaporate like smoke.

“Rose!” Her mother said, yelling up the stairs.

“Yeah, Mom?” Rose yelled back.

“I need help with the groceries.”

“Okay, coming.” Rose frowned, but did as instructed. She’d just watch the VOD repeat later.

“Ugh,” Rose grunted as she lifted the bags onto the kitchen counter, panting as she finally relieved the weight. 

“Mom, look at this.” Rose’s youngest brother, Dan, said, holding up a collection of sticks he’d glued together. Much to Rose’s dismay, the sticky substance covered him everywhere.

“That’s great, dear.” Their mom paused, her tongue clicking when she spotted her son’s mess. Like her mother and little brother, Rose shared her mother’s raven locks. Only her older sister had inherited chestnut hair. Typical. His perfect always needed to stand out. “Look at you. Clean up before dinner, young man.”

“Must I?” Dan said, pouting.

“Rose, can you wash up your brother?” Her mom asked. “I need to put away groceries and start dinner. Dad will be home soon.”

“What? I was in the middle of something. Make Sophie do it!”

“Sophie’s studying right now.” Her mom replied. “She’s studying for her SAT. Lacerta University doesn’t allow just anyone in.”

“Yeah, yeah. Wouldn’t that be a crime?” Like her Miss Perfect older sister even needed to study!

“Rose.” Her mom’s tone contained a warning.

“Okay. Come, Danny boy, let’s get you washed up.” She led her brother by the hand to the bathroom.

The dinner table was a hive of activity as they prayed and dug in. With her father home for once, her mom wanted a happy, idyllic family get-together. Danny was making a mess as usual, while her father sang Sophie’s praises as she recounted a scholarship she’d gotten for her fantastic grades. No one paid Rose much attention as she picked at her Parmesan-crusted chicken. Rose wished she could eat it in her room, as was her habit, and finish watching Stella’s livestream.

Family dinners are the worst. And her father hadn’t even bothered asking about her week, like he didn’t even remember his middle child existed. Noticing Rose’s pensive expression, her mom elbowed her husband hard in the stomach.

“And how have you been, Rosemary?” Her father asked, finally getting the hint. His gaunt face extended into a facsimile of a smile. Rose had always thought her high cheek bones made him look downright skeletal. 

“The usual.”

Undeterred by this bland response, her father pressed the conversation. “Mother tells me you’ve been working on a special project. How’s that going?”

“That? I finished it yesterday.” While not as smart as her perfect older sister, Rose had her talents. She’d worked on it while listening to Stella’s stream. “Got it ticking down to the second.”

Ever since she was little, the mechanical had fascinated Rose. Much to her parents’ exasperation, she’d loved taking apart anything she could get her hands on to learn how it worked. Then she’d reassemble it, making the contraption work better than ever. Her newest project was building a working clock from random scraps she’d collected.

“That’s wonderful. You’ll have to…” Her father paused as his phone buzzed. He quickly dismissed himself to talk in the other room. After a quick apology, her father rushed out the door. There’d been some commotion at work, and his immediate presence was required.

“I’m sure you can show him later when he returns home.” Her mom said, putting a comforting hand on her shoulder.

“Why bother?” But Rose shrugged it off. “I’m going to my room.” Her sister seemed ready to say something. But she closed her mouth, deciding against it. The door slammed behind her as she reentered her room. Much to her annoyance, Stella had already ended her stream.

Rose flopped on her bed, not interested in doing much anymore. She listened as her makeshift clock ticked and tocked. She’d always loved the sound of old-fashioned clocks. It reminded her of her grandmother’s house, a wonderful jumble of random knick-knacks, many dating back a hundred years or more. 

“Should I just go to bed early?” Rose wasn’t interested in socializing. Unlike her perfect, beloved sister, she possessed poor social skills.

Before she could decide, Rose almost toppled off her bed as her entire room shook. “What the heck?” After the rumbling stopped, she regained her bearings.

“What was that?” Rose checked her phone, trying to figure out what had happened. They didn’t live near a fault line, so it couldn’t be an earthquake, could it?

“Are you okay, Rose?” Her mom yelled up to her, concern evident in her voice.

“Fine.” She shouted back. The rumble made her room a total disaster. Rose spent the next few minutes righting everything as she checked the newsfeed. 

“Was it a meteor?” It must have been enormous to cause that kind of tremor. The news claimed it’d crashed about four miles away from her house. The news advised that people stay clear of the crash site. Thankfully, it’d only crashed in a nearby field. No one had gotten hurt.

“I have to check this out.” Rose grabbed a jacket, running out before her mom noticed she’d left. At a hurried pace, she dashed towards the distance crash site. 

Spectators already filled the street as she approached. Police cars and police tape cordoned off the crash site. Officers waved people away, telling them to return to their homes. She tried peering around the crowd, but her short stature made the effort useless.

“I wonder what they’re hiding.” A familiar voice said.

“Oh, hi Hans,” Rose said, her tone neutral. “What do you mean?”

“You haven’t heard?” Unlike her, her classmate stood tall, almost dwarfing her by a foot. Some called him tall, dark, and handsome, but Rose only considered him a jerk. He was brusque with everyone by nature, especially to her.

“What?”

“Before the meteor crashed, something like an aurora borealis lit up the sky.”

Rose only snorted. “No way. That’s stupid.”

“You think? They’re hiding something. Why are they here, then?” He pointed to some men in black in shades. They looked like government types.

“Okay, you might have a point.” Rose scowled. She hated being wrong. “But what are you saying? That it was a UFO? Now that’s stupid.”

Her classmate didn’t reply, lost in his own thoughts. Annoyed by his rude dismissal, she tried to slip past the crowd to get a better glimpse of the crash site.

But her efforts proved futile, a police officer pushing her away. “Return to your homes. Nothing to see here.” Dejected, Rose did as instructed. She spent the night visiting various social media sites for more information. This mystery fascinated her. It was a bright spot in her usually uninteresting life. Whatever it meant, something interesting had finally happened in her incredibly dull town.

---

“What is this?” Agent Millar said, combing a hand through her blonde hair. “It just crashed, but it’s already cool to the touch?” Whatever it was, it wasn’t anything she’d ever seen on Earth. But it couldn’t be a UFO from space. That’d be crazy! The “meteor” sat in the crater, curled up in a ball, its form vaguely humanoid. Could it be some sort of weird new drone?

“Washington has already sent its best minds to the scene to investigate.” Her partner, Agent Gaddas, replied. He adjusted his shades for the fifteenth time, a habit he displayed when nervous. “We’re seeing about moving it. But I doubt it’d be easy.”

The UFO had to weigh at least 250 tons, standing almost the size of a two-story building. She frowned as something caught her eye.

“What’s wrong?”

“I thought I saw a light.” Something on the UFO’s surface had flashed purple. Not from the UFO itself, but from the odd grim covering it.

“What? D-did it just move?” She could have sworn the grim had just undulated. 

“We have a problem, I think.” But her partner never finished his words.

The odd ooze leaped from the UFO, plopping to the crater floor. Whatever the substance was, it was alive. Its body became more solid, taking the vague outline of a great cat. A single eye cracked open on its forehead, studying them with alien intelligence. Her partner reached for his weapon. But that’d been a mistake. Sensing his hostile action, the creature lunged with impossible quickness. Gaddas didn’t even get to scream as the monstrosity consumed him, the poor man flailing as the monster’s body absorbed him on contact.

Much to her confusion, the UFO lit up, emitting a sound like an engine starting. But Millar never got a chance to consider what the sound meant before the monstrosity pounced, her body dissolving in seconds.

---

“Did you see the crash last night?” Vera asked, leaning over to talk with Rose over her seat. Since class hadn’t begun yet, students took full advantage to socialize.

“Not much,” Rose said, shaking her head. “When I’d gotten there, the FBI or whatever had cordoned it off already.”

A sly look overtook her friend. Her mouse-like face turning mischievous, She knew something. Vera paused, waiting for her friend to squeeze the information out of her.

“What is it?” Rose said, finally relenting after an awkward few seconds of silence.

“I live nearby, right?” Vera said, her voice a conspiratorial whisper. “I saw the lights everyone’s been talking about. I was out walking Mr. Fluffy when it happened.”

“You saw something? Really?” The red-haired boy sitting next to her said, pushing up his glasses with a finger. His name was Georges, he’d been her next door neighbor forever.

“Oh yes! And not a giant rock, either. More like a giant man forged from metal, like a titan from myth. It had battle paint over both eyes. Its face was something fearsome, like a demon!” 

“Now I know you’re pulling my leg.” Rose still wasn’t buying the story.

“Cool.” Georges, however, seemed more inclined to believe this fanciful story. 

“The light appeared way high in the sky! The figure fell at least fifty feet! It curled up into a ball to protect itself.” Vera said, continuing her tale.

“So, it’s not from space? Wait, are you saying? It’s a giant robot?”

“Exactly!” Vera wanted to elaborate more, but Mr. Lynn cleared his throat to get the class’s attention to start class. He was a balding, middle-aged man with a slight limp in his left leg, a result of a terrible football injury thirty years earlier. 

Rose, however, was only half listening to the history lesson. Had a giant robot crashed in their sleepy little town? It sounded hard to credit, though it sparked the imagination. While taking her notes, Rose doodled tiny robots in the margins, each more fanciful than the last.

“Okay, class, read Chapters 3 and 4, and don’t forget the chapter questions at the end. They’re due tomorrow.” He wished to say more, but a sudden, ear-piercing crash interrupted him. It wasn’t like the impact from yesterday. It sounded closer. Had a building just collapsed?

“One moment, class.” Without another word, Mr. Lynn retreated from the classroom. He spoke with another teacher, each reading something on their phones. The entire class was on the edge, their nerves fraying. 

��A monster attack?” A student said, his phone out, despite this breaking the rules.

“What? Impossible! Monsters don’t exist!” Another student cried, incredulous. Arguments broke out as everyone declared their own theories, each more outlandish than the last. After twenty minutes passed, their teacher returned, clearing his throat to catch everyone’s attention. 

“Class, school is canceled.” While his outward expression remained calm, a fretful look hid behind it. “In a calm, orderly manner, follow Ms. Sagan outside. A school bus will be ready for you.”

This earned confused glances from his students, but his expression brooked no argument. “There’s no time to explain. We’re taking you to somewhere safe. There’s nothing to fear.”

Someone screamed, and everyone turned to what Vera was pointing at through the windows. Her heart caught in Rose’s throat, she froze like a deer caught in a headlight.

The creature was enormous, dwarfing the surrounding buildings. It was a creature from a nightmare, a cross between a feline predator and a ferocious lizard. Spikes ran across its spine, its scales the ugly color of bruised flesh.

“Go, now!” Mr. Lynn said, pushing his students towards the exit. 

Rose screamed as the monster turned to face their direction. This was impossible. This had to be a nightmare. With a casual sweep of its tails, it demolished a nearby building. Dear God, she’d passed that store every day without thinking, and now it was gone, history. The monster stomped in their direction, mouth open to gobble them whole.

A deafening howl resonated through the school as the monster cried out in pain. A jagged line ran across its scales, blackened like coal.

“What the heck?” Rose’s breath caught as a red figure appeared from behind a building.

Much to her astonishment, it was the metal creature Vera had described. Its appearance was fearsome. Yet Rose got the distinct impression of a metal sentinel, a guardian here to protect humanity. It wore armor shaped like a knight’s chest plate, its body an orangish red hue. It stood even taller than the monster, strong and proud. The fearsome, proud face was like Vera described, with two horns pointing from its metal skull.

Instead of dealing with the stunned monster, it stomped right towards them at frightening speed. Stupid. Why had she assumed the robot was there to protect them? Rose turned to flee, but a hand reached out and smashed through her classroom’s wall. She collapsed, shaken by the sudden impact.

The metal colossus’s chest opened, revealing an impenetrable black void. A fretful Georges screamed her name, reaching out to grab her hand so they might escape. But tendrils shot out from the metal creature, grabbing Rose in a vice-like grip. Try as she might, they were impossible to escape from.

“Rose!” Georges’ frantic plea was the last thing she heard before darkness consumed her.

----

“What the?” Rose shook her head, confused. Much to her relief, she wasn’t dead. Something soft sat under her. Cushions? 

“Where am I?” Everything was pitch dark. Rose flailed around, trying to find a light. Illumination suddenly blinded her as a screen turned on. A woman of early middle years greeted her, her raven-colored hair in a short bob. 

“Mom?” No, but something about the face displayed on the computer screen seemed familiar. Wait. Rose’s heart dropped into her stomach. This was her face, older, more battered but clearly her own visage!

“Hey, kiddo. I’m sure you’re surprised to see me.” An eye patch covered one of the dark-haired woman’s eyes. She looked haggard, like she’d suffered through terrible starvation. Yet, her single eye blazed with intensity, a candle that refused to be blown out.

“Now listen to me carefully. The Earth’s fate hangs in the balance.There wasn’t anyone else I’d trust my Luyten V with. Use it to fight, defend the world. Or else, everyone is doomed!”

#anime stories #anime #action #fiction #stories #luytenV #science fantasy #science fiction #sci fi and fantasy #scifi #giant robot #super robot #literature #vtuber #female protagonist #female hero #magical girl #action adventure #time travel #fate #story #written story #Luyten V

[aclslibrarian]

Rust in the Root

UnCovered review by Nancy Wessler, Librarian, ACLS Mays Landing Branch

Rust In The Root is a spectacularly well-written historical fantasy set in an alternative version of 1930s America. In this universe, an event known as the Great Rust has blighted large swathes of the nation, leaving them uninhabitable and destroying their mechanical infrastructure. Uncontrolled magic use has been blamed, and the practice is now heavily regulated. Those who get to wield this power, those left begging for scraps, and those greeted with suspicion fall along America’s traditional fault lines–allowing for a brilliant, if not bleak, exploration of the ways in which Black bodies and talents have always been exploited and sacrificed in the name of American industry.

Enter into all of this: 17-year-old Laura Ann Langston, a small-town girl struggling to survive in the Big Apple. She came to the city to pursue her dream of gaining a license to practice magic so that she might establish her own magical bakery. Fate, however, has far greater plans for her. It’s not long before she’s caught up in the effort to mediate the effects of the Great Rust and begins to uncover the dark secret at the heart of the American Blight.

It must be said that Laura Ann makes for a wonderful chosen one–headstrong and resourceful, confident and forthright; she’s got all of the bravery of an archetypal hero but refreshingly lacks their tendency toward self-sacrificing. And her flaws only make her more engaging. She is surrounded by an excellent supporting cast, the majority of which are African American, and any romances to be found are queer.

There is quite a bit of world-building at the beginning of the book and a decent amount of jargon to assimilate. This may be off-putting for some readers, but after the first few chapters, the book moves at a nice pace. This is a fantasy, as has been said, and there is a certain delight that comes from seeing unicorns in Central Park; but there are also strong elements of horror and definitely some gore. Just as she did in Dread Nation and its sequel, Ireland proves herself very adept at creating a sense of creeping dread and inescapable wrongness. This is a dark story, make no mistake.

That said, the story is not without light. Indeed, this is ultimately the tale of a girl who looks into the darkness, sees all the horror, and says, “Enough. No more. I’m changing things.” It’s a joy to watch her fly.

#read #Atlantic County #aclsreads #aclsuncovered

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[bondsmagii]

same person who asked about spelunking (sorry i binge your blog every now and then and keep finding things i wanna hear about this time!) But you mentioned one of your most terrifying experiences involved dolls, I'd love to hear about it if youre comfortable :>?

oh it's fine, don't worry! I can always appreciate a good old fashioned bit of curiosity. I suppose it's only fair that with all the creepy experiences I take from other people, I finally give a statement of my own. buckle up, though, because this one is a long one.

So, this all happened in 2011-2012, and it began in Belfast, Ireland. A friend of mine, Caoimhe, had started studying at Queen’s University, and she had moved in to student accommodation in the student district nearby. I was studying in Scotland at the time, but thankfully the summer and winter holidays provided me with three months off each, so I would frequently return back to Ireland and catch up with the people who’d stayed there. Caoimhe’s place, being situated in the city and in a university district, was obviously the place to hang out and party, but before I even arrived Caoimhe warned me that the place was… odd. Now, as anyone who’s ever met me knows, I absolutely love creepy stuff and I have a tendency to bring it out in places and in people; naturally I asked for details, but Caoimhe said she wanted to see what I thought when I got there. Considering I was going to be there that evening, I was able to have a modicum of patience.

I get there in the late afternoon. It’s summer and everything is still bright and lively, and the street looks normal. Parking is only on one side of the street; on the other side is a row of buildings, three floors high. Most of them are split into houses, but there are a few businesses there, too – a nursery school, a hairdresser’s, that kind of thing. I get out of the car and go and knock on Caoimhe’s door, which is between two businesses. She opens the door, and immediately tells me she cannot wait to hear what I think of the place. I have no idea what to expect, because Caoimhe was always the sceptical one and it takes a lot to get her even remotely excited about anything spooky, but I realised what she meant within about five minutes of being in the house.

It was the weirdest layout of any house I have ever seen.

Upon entering, I was in a small porch area. Going through the interior door brought me to the bottom of a set of stairs; to the right was a short hallway, containing a bedroom and, at the end of it, a spacious kitchen. Going up the stairs, I came to a small bathroom on the half-landing; turning and ascending the second flight brought me to a small landing area and, directly opposite, a colossal living room. Turning up yet another flight of stairs and there was a larger bathroom on the half-landing, practically industrial – like a large school changing room. There were about eight showers all lined up in cubicles, toilets lined up in other cubicles, and a row of old, almost Victorian-looking sinks. There was no door to the bathroom, either. Just an open archway leading to tiles that looked as though they should be on a factory floor in the early twentieth century. After this, there was another flight of stairs and then a small landing, this time with nothing ahead of it but, to my left, a long hallway. I mean, a long hallway. The longest hallway I’ve ever seen in any residential building, ever, in my life. It went on, and on, and on. From beginning to end, at a normal walking pace, it took about two minutes to walk. There were other doors, but they were few and far between. Only three people lived on that floor, and the hallway just stretched endlessly on. Caoimhe, of course, lived in the absolute furthest room from the stairs. We walked, passing the occasional door, under dim, flickering lightbulbs high up in the ceiling. We had long since walked past the original house we had entered. We were probably almost entirely down the street by this point. There were no windows at all.

Finally, we get to Caoimhe’s room. It’s practically at the end of the hall; in front of us is a dead end, and a fire escape that cannot exist. All of the buildings on this street are terraced, which means that joining on to this wall should be the next building. There were no alleyways separating any of the buildings at street level – they were all side by side, sharing a wall. I asked Caoimhe about it and she just shrugged, and then pointed to the wall opposite her door. There was another door there, cheaply made, not a fire door like the doors to the bedrooms. It also didn’t fit properly, leaving a small gap and a cool breeze drifting out from between the wood and the frame. I, of course, stuck my eye to the gap and peered in. I could make out nothing aside from swirling dust and the faint outline of the first few steps of another set of stairs. Upon my asking, Caoimhe told me she didn’t know where it went to, and that she and some of the others had tried to prise the door open but given up when it wouldn’t budge. They had even asked the university’s residential services about it, but were told that it didn’t belong to them as tenants and it was best to leave it alone.

As I mentioned before – Caoimhe is not really interested in messing around with this kind of stuff. Practically minded, she spent her time dealing in the tangible, and as a nursing student she had precious little free time. What free time she did have she enjoyed spending drinking, and annoying me by doing lines of cocaine off my books. I love her dearly, but you have to understand that mysteries like this do not interest her at all, but they drive me mad. From the moment I saw that door, I suppose my fate was sealed. In the old refrain of many sorry souls before me, I had to know.

The first few nights I was there was admittedly spent partying and catching up, and nothing out of the ordinary happened. I split my time between staying with Caoimhe and staying with an ex-boyfriend of mine, Brian, who lived about half a mile away in another part of the university district. I was at his place when I got a call from Caoimhe at about two in the morning, telling me that some weird shit was going down and I had to come see. I, of course, ran over there as quickly as possible, to find the house in uproar. Aside from one girl on the ground floor, everyone else lived in the Endless Hallway – all three of them – and they were all out of their rooms and standing in a strange section of the hall about two thirds up. Here, two rooms were located, the doors to which were set back in a little alcove. Opposite this alcove was another fire door that had to lead to nowhere, that I admittedly had not noticed before. I stared at it, confused, and then I was temporarily comforted when Gemma, once of Caoimhe’s housemates, asked me if I hadn’t noticed it before, either. I absolutely had not, and the general consensus was that nobody had noticed this fire escape. It was very difficult to miss, too – it was silver, with the green sign for a fire escape on it, but strangely there was no way to open it from this side. It was just a smooth door – no handle, no push bar, nothing. Being a fire escape door, it should have had a push bar and swung open into the stairwell or hallway beyond, to prevent it from being blocked from opening by a crowd of people trying to escape, but there was nothing. It was like looking at a fire escape door from the outside. Everyone agreed that it could not have been there before; Gemma and Ashley, the girl in the room next to her, were absolutely adamant they would have noticed it, considering it was right opposite their doors; Caoimhe admitted that she probably wouldn’t have noticed it because she wasn’t in the habit of noticing every door she walked by, but she did admit that the colour would have made it hard to miss. I, of course, amin the habit of looking out for such details, precisely for reasons like this, so I had definitely not noticed the door before.

I asked how they had noticed, and Gemma said that she had heard running footsteps in the hallway going back and forth for some time, and as she’d been trying to sleep she had opened her door to tell whoever it was to knock it off. She had found the hallway dark, and the door opposite hers. She had understandably been freaked out by this and banged on Ashley’s door, and the commotion had drawn Caoimhe into the mix whereupon she had said she knew a guy who absolutely had to see this shit and called me. She was correct, and I duly stayed the rest of the night to see if anything else happened. Nothing did, and aside from the extra door that had materialised in the hallway, things were calm for another week.

When it all kicked off again, I was staying over after another heavy night partying. Caoimhe and I were passed out in her room when we were both woken up by an incredibly loud crash. Before we could work out what had happened, lights went on in the hallway outside and we heard Gemma start screaming, and I mean reallyscreaming. Caoimhe and I jumped up and ran out into the hall, sprinting the distance between Caoimhe’s door and the alcove, and there we found Gemma hiding behind her own door and the fire door opposite wide open. It had been flung open so wide that it had crashed against and dented the wall it was on. Ashley was looking at it, dumfounded; Gemma could barely watch. Caoimhe was also not being much help, so – bound by insatiable curiosity and an extreme lack of self-preservation that for me is so often co-morbid with said curiosity – I went forward to investigate. I noticed that the door seemed old, like it had perhaps been rusted in place; beyond it there was nothing but darkness, and cold air moved out of the passage with enough speed that I felt a strong breeze. I had my phone, so I turned it on to use it as a light, seeing that beyond the door was a short landing and then a set of stairs. I went to the wooden railing at the top and shone the phone down, seeing that the stairs appeared to keep going in a half-flight, small landing, half-flight pattern. The stairs were all wooden, and in bad condition. With the girls still nervously watching, I descended the first flight and then turned to look at the next one. It smelled stale now, and slightly damp; I put the brightness of my screen up and saw, arranged neatly at the end of each step, there was an item of children’s belongings – a toy, or a teddy bear. They were all arranged very precisely, one on each stair, all the way down as far as I could see. Where the light gave out, the darkness was so black it seemed to have a solid weight. I decided I was not going down there without a proper light, and as I didn’t yet have one, I retreated back up the stairs. We closed the door over, but it would no longer fit in its frame; a chair was dutifully carried all the way up from the distant kitchen and put in front of it.

I quickly discovered something even odder about that staircase. Probably to the surprise of nobody, it shouldn’t exist. The floors directly below us should have been a hairdresser’s; there was no space for a stairwell and no way to exit on the ground floor. I went outside and checked both the front and the back of the building, and no doors opened anywhere near where the stairs should have come out. There was just no possible way for it to fit, and no point to it being there. It was a dead end in dead space.

Now we get to the truly terrifying part. For several weeks the place seemed to be fine, just the kind of regular haunting I was used to but that the others understandably found concerning. Cold spots, weird noises, strange atmospheres, feelings of being watched… that kind of thing. It made me increasingly uneasy in one particular spot of the house, though. There was one other mystery door that led to a mystery staircase, and that was the strange, out-of-place door opposite Caoimhe’s room. I figured that there was a chance that that door shouldn’t be there, either – like the fire escape, it was a different kind of door to the others, and also like the fire escape, it didn’t quite fit into its frame. I tried multiple times to get in to the staircase beyond, but the door would absolutely not shift and every time I tried, I would soon have to retreat because of an overwhelming sense of sadness and dread. I’ve always been highly sensitive to the paranormal, and anyone who has spent any amount of time with me has seen some inexplicable stuff go down; something I’m known for is knowing things I shouldn’t be able to know. I either just know them – they just arrive in my head full-formed and I know that it’s the truth – or they come to me in dreams. These dreams stand out from the other dreams because they’re incredibly realistic, and even in the dream I know that they’re something else entirely. I’m either myself in the dream, moving around and discovering things on my own, or I’m watching as somebody else does it, silently observing and, unusually for my dreams, with no amount of lucidity at all. I suppose, with all my banging around trying to get up those stairs, I must have finally tapped in to whatever it was that would allow me to know what was beyond it, because shortly afterwards I experienced the worst instance of this of my life.

By this point, I was back at university. I hadn’t thought too much about it all in any detail because classes had started again and I was still exhausted from driving all my stuff back over, getting the ferry, unpacking… moving every three months was a bit of a drag. Despite this, when the dream started, I immediately knew where I was. The building felt different, and all the lights were dimmed to the point they were barely worth being on, but I knew I was back in Caoimhe’s flat and I also knew that it was years before anybody moved in. I stood there and watched as a woman walked towards me down the long, endless hallway. She was young, probably in her mid-twenties, and her hair was a mess. Her face was blotchy and her eyes red; she was still crying as she walked past me. I knew that she was moving out, that this was the final walk-through; suddenly I was the person who was moving in, and I was being handed the keys, and the estate agent was saying that the place was mine and that the agreement still stood: I was allowed to do anything with the place and the price would stay low, so long as I obeyed the wishes of the previous owners and kept the top floor as it was and in good order. I agreed and then I was alone in the hallway.

I immediately walked to the end of the hallway, past the room that was Caoimhe’s when I had known the place, and to the door opposite. The wood looked newer now, and when I pushed it, it swung open noiselessly and without resistance. I walked up a neat set of wooden stairs and the light was warm, sunset-orange. I emerged from the staircase and found myself in a lovely attic room, the sun setting through a large dormer window opposite. The room was a beautifully decorated nursery, with a small bed under the window and a dresser, a toy box, a rug on the ground littered with toys. I looked around, touching the small hairbrush on the dresser, seeing the little blonde hairs entwined in it; on the nightstand next to the bed was a picture of the crying woman I had seen earlier, happy now, holding a smiling little girl of about two or three months in her arms. I stared at this picture for a long time, feeling a growing sense of sadness that deepened into dread. I felt paralysed, unable to turn and leave even as the dread grew and I wanted to more than anything; instead of running, a sudden urge to sleep came over me. I staggered to the small bed, curled up to fit, and immediately passed out.

When I woke, I was on my back and the room was dark. There was enough moonlight that I could see the glint of the picture frame beside me. Immediately I was gripped by terror – I was aware, even then, that I do not sleep in my dreams. I can do a lot of things that most people can’t – I die in my dreams, I read and write in my dreams, I see my reflection in mirrors in my dreams – but I do not sleep. I decided to sit up and see if any of my usual tricks for waking myself would work, but before I could move I felt something shifting in the bed beside me. It was solid and firm and cold; it pressed itself against me with plastic smoothness and then shifted, part of it bending. Out of the corner of my eye I saw something sitting up in the bed beside me. I told myself not to look at it, but of course I did. Sitting next to me in bed was a baby, but at the same time it was a doll. It had the plastic look to it, the strange texture of the hair, the glassy eyes – but at the same time its face moved, its limbs moved, and around the eyes and mouth there was a slight discrepancy, like the whole thing was a plastic mask forced into the flesh of the face. I stared at it, mute, too stunned to do anything, and then the baby doll opened its mouth, revealing sharp, pin-like teeth, far too many of them – and it began to cry.

I have never heard a sound like it and I never wish to again. It was a cry so piercing it was painful; it was a sound meant to terrify. It rose the same dread in me as I imagine people felt when they woke to hear air raid sirens in the dead of night; the distant thud of falling bombs. It was all I could hear and it was all I became. It inspired a blind terror in me that I have rarely known; I wasn’t human as I launched myself from that bed. I was a prey animal in flight, I was running for my life. I jumped from the bed and before I could hit the ground I awoke, miles away, in my dorm room in Scotland – but something was on the bed beside me. I sat up, turned, and the doll was there. It looked at me, grinned, and opened its mouth. Then it started screaming again.

I want to say that’s the moment I woke up for real, but I was awake. That thing was beside me in bed, still screaming, and I was awake enough to panic, to roll out of bed, to stand up, to stare in frozen horror for several seconds, and then to reach out blindly until I managed to turn the lamp on. The room filled with light and still the doll remained, for three or four seconds, still crying that horrible sound, and then it faded. The sound faded with it, gradually, until I could only see an outline on the air, and then it was gone. I did not sleep for the rest of that night. For the rest of the semester, I only slept in the daylight.

I never returned to Caoimhe’s house. I have my answers, which is something, but I do not exaggerate when I say that the cost was far more than I anticipated I would have to pay, and that something of that experience has forever stuck with me. Even now, a decade later, I go to bed every night with the fear that I might wake up in that hallway again, the door at the end of it – and the knowledge that I will go to it, step into the sunset-orange of the space beyond, and go back up those stairs.

#[slumps onto desk] statement... ends #seriously that made me feel some kind of way holy shit i need a cup of tea and a lie down #anyway enjoy one of the most fucked up paranormal experiences of my life i guess #my creepy shit #creeptastic #statements #long post #anon #asks

[mytwilightimagines13]

Memories from the past (Part five)(Caius Volturi)

Word count: 2043

The street was very narrow, cobbled with the same colour stones as the faded cinnamon brown buildings that darkened the street with their shade. It had the feel of an alleyway. Red flags decorated the walls, spaced only a few yards apart, flapping in the wind that whistled through the narrow lane. It was crowded, and the foot traffic slowed our progress. We found another street at the end. The buildings were taller here; they leaned together overhead so that no sunlight touched the pavement—the thrashing red flags on either side nearly met. The crowd was thicker here than anywhere else. We continued the walk through the shadows, even when we reached the plaza with the clock tower in the middle. Coming out of the dark lane, I was blinded by the brilliant sunlight beating down into the principal plaza. The wind whooshed into me, flinging my hair into my eyes and blinding me further. I pushed urgently toward it, not realizing till I bruised my shins against the bricks that there was a wide, square fountain set into the center of the plaza. I glanced up at the clock again. Some sort of pull lured me towards it.

A deep, booming chime echoed through the square. It throbbed in the stones under my feet. Children cried, covering their ears. Alice pulled me towards them back into the shadows. The clock tolled again. We ran past a child in his mother's arms—his hair was almost white in the dazzling sunlight. A circle of tall men, all wearing red blazers, called out warnings as we barrelled through them. The clock tolled again. On the other side of the men in blazers, there was a break in the throng, space between the sightseers who milled aimlessly around me. My eyes searched the dark narrow passage to the right of the wide square edifice under the tower. I couldn't see the street level—there were still too many people in the way. The clock tolled again. It was hard to see now. Without the crowd to break the wind, it whipped at my face and burned my eyes. That was the way we went, towards even more shadows. Edward walked in front of me while Alice walked behind me, gently pushing me into the right direction. I was so mesmerised by the small town and the beautiful plaza it contained that I hadn’t seen the two dark shapes detach themselves from the gloom. "Greetings, gentlemen," Edward's voice was calm and pleasant. “The girl as promised.” “And no harm done. We made sure of that.” Alice said, her hand still on my lower back. "Very well. Shall we take this conversation to a more appropriate venue?" a smooth voice whispered menacingly. “Very well.” Alice said as she gently pushed me for ward. “I will take it from here, miss.” The smooth voice spoke again, walking closer towards me. “Very well, Demetri.” Alice said as she took a step back and the other took a step closer to me, now occupying the spot Alice just seconds ago held. I finally dared to take a closer look at the newcomers. They were both concealed within smoky gray cloaks that reached to the ground and undulated in the wind. The second, taller man still hadn’t moved, but I felt his glare on me. “How can we be sure this isn’t some trick?” he asked. “Your Masters can confirm that it isn’t, as you should know, Felix.” Edward said in a harsh tone. The one named Felix growled at him. Wait, what? Humans can’t growl. "Felix," the second, more reasonable shadow named Demetri cautioned. "Not here." He turned to Edward. "My apologies, Edward. We have had some… disappointments in the past. That is all." My eyes were adjusting to the deep shade, and I could see that Felix was very big, tall and thick through the shoulders. Felix and Demetri stole closer toward the mouth of the alley, spreading out slightly so they could come at us from two sides, forcing us closer into the alley. "Let's behave ourselves, shall we?" Alice suggested. "There are ladies present." "Enough." The voice was high, reedy, and n came from behind us. I peeked under Edward's other arm to see a small, dark shape coming toward us. By the way the edges billowed, I knew it would be another one of them. Who else? At first I thought it was a young boy. The newcomer was as tiny as Alice, with lank, pale brown hair trimmed short. The body under the cloak—which was darker, almost black—was slim and androgynous. But the face was too pretty for a boy. The wide-eyed, full-lipped face would make a Botticelli angel look like a gargoyle. Even allowing for the dull crimson irises. Her size was so insignificant that the reaction to her appearance confused me. Felix and Demetri relaxed immediately, stepping back from their offensive positions to blend again with the shadows of the overhanging walls. Edward dropped his arms and relaxed his position as well—but in defeat. "Jane," he sighed in recognition and resignation. Alice folded her arms across her chest, her expression impassive. "Follow me," Jane spoke again, her childish voice a monotone. She turned her back on us and drifted silently into the dark. Felix gestured for us to go first, smirking. Alice walked after the little Jane at once, Edward following her at once. “After you, mia bella signora.” Demetri said as he gently pushed me to follow them, my confusion most

likely clear on my face. The alley angled slightly downward as it narrowed. My mind was racing as my feet moved forward on automatic pilot mode. What was going on? Where these people some kind of cult? Would I be sacrificed to their blood lusting god? There was a loose curve to the alley, still slanting downward, so I didn't see the squared-off dead end coming until we reached the flat, windowless, brick face. The little one called Jane was nowhere to be seen. Alice didn't hesitate, didn't break pace as she strode toward the wall. Then, with easy grace, she slid down an open hole in the street. It looked like a drain, sunk into the lowest point of the paving. I hadn't noticed it until Alice disappeared, but the grate was halfway pushed aside. The hole was small, and black. I stopped dead in my tracks. “With all due respect, I refuse to simply fall to my death thank you very much.” I said, trying to find a way to run far away from these people. “No worries, signora. Just close your eyes and I assure you that you will be safe.” Demetri said as he gently placed his hands around my waist. I sighed in defeat, knowing there was no way out of this. I was doomed. Death was approaching with every heartbeat. “Very well.” I closed my eyes so I couldn't see the darkness, scrunching them together in terror, clamping my mouth shut so I wouldn't scream. I felt Demetri pick me up slightly and jump down the hole. It was silent and short. The air whipped past me for just half a second, and then, with a huff as I exhaled, he gracefully landed on the floor without a sound. Demetri stood me upright and placed his hand on my back again, ready to guide me forwards. It was dim, but not black at the bottom. The light from the hole above provided a faint glow, reflecting wetly from the stones under my feet. Felix jumped behind us and we continued our stroll in silence. The sound of the heavy grate sliding over the drain hole behind us rang with metallic finality. The dim light from the street was quickly lost in the gloom. The sound of my staggering footsteps echoed through the black space; it sounded very wide, but I couldn't be sure. There were no sounds other than my frantic heartbeat and my feet on the wet stones. The path beneath our feet continued to slant downward, taking us deeper into the ground, and it made me claustrophobic. I couldn't tell where the light was coming from, but it slowly turned dark gray instead of black. We were in a low, arched tunnel. Long trails of ebony moisture seeped down the gray stones, like they were bleeding ink. We hurried through the tunnel, or it felt like hurrying to me. At the end of the tunnel was a grate—the iron bars were rusting, but thick as my arm. A small door made of thinner, interlaced bars was standing open. We all ducked through and hurried on to a larger, brighter stone room. The grille slammed shut with a clang, followed by the snap of a lock. I was too afraid to look behind me. On the other side of the long room was a low, heavy wooden door. It was very thick—as I could tell.

We were in a brightly lit and unremarkable hallway. The walls were off-white, the floor carpeted in industrial gray. Common rectangular fluorescent lights were spaced evenly along the ceiling. It was warmer here, for which I was grateful. This hall seemed very benign after the gloom of the ghoulish stone sewers. The heavy door creaked shut behind us, and then there was the thud of a bolt sliding home. Jane waited by the elevator, one hand holding the doors open for us. Her expression was apathetic. Once inside the elevator, the three figures with cloaks seemed to relax further. They threw back their cloaks, letting the hoods fall back on their shoulders. Felix and Demetri were both of a slightly olive complexion—it looked odd combined with their chalky pallor. Felix's black hair was cropped short, but Demetri's waved to his shoulders. Their irises were deep crimson around the edges, darkening until they were black around the pupil. Under the shrouds, their clothes were modern, pale, and nondescript. I cowered in the corner, cringing against the wall, their red eyes freaking me out even more. They were most defiantly a cult. And I was the stupid lamb that jumped happily and unknowingly into their bloody arms. Bloody hell. Stupid lamb I am. The elevator ride was short; we stepped out into what looked like a posh office reception area. The walls were panelled in wood, the floors carpeted in thick, deep green. There were no windows, but large, brightly lit paintings of the Tuscan countryside hung everywhere as replacements. Pale leather couches were arranged in cosy groupings, and the glossy tables held crystal vases full of vibrantly coloured bouquets. The flowers' smell reminded me of a funeral home. In the middle of the room was a high, polished mahogany counter. I gawked in astonishment at the woman behind it. She was tall, with dark skin and green eyes. She smiled politely in welcome. "Good afternoon, Jane," she said. Jane nodded. "Gianna." She continued toward a set of double doors in the back of the room, and we followed. As Felix passed the desk, he winked at Gianna, and she giggled. On the other side of the wooden doors was a different kind of reception. The pale boy in the pearl gray suit could have been Jane's twin. His hair was darker, and his lips were not as full, but he was just as lovely. He came forward to meet us. He smiled, reaching for her. "Jane." "Alec," she responded, embracing the boy. They kissed each other's cheeks on both sides. Then he looked at the group before his eyes landed on me with curiosity. "Is this really her?" he noted, looking at me. Jane nodded, a proud look on her face. "Nice work." She laughed—the sound sparkled with delight like a baby's cooing. "The Masters will be so glad to finally meet you, madam. Master Caius and Mistress Athenodora especially.” Alec said, speaking to me directly now. I only looked at him in confusion "Let's not keep them waiting," Jane suggested. Alec and Jane, holding hands, led the way down yet another wide, ornate hall. Yup. I was going to die. To some weird BDSM cult… great. Stupid little lamb I am.

#caius volturi #athenodora volturi #volturi #volturi imagine #twilight imagine #twilight #vampire

[thefreakydeaky]

Call Out My Name

Chapter One Title: All I Know

Characters: Negan x Plus Size Reader, The Saviors, The Wives, Eugene

Summary: You belonged to him.Try as you might to pretend indifference, Negan’s very presence has awakened feelings in you that you believed had died with the old world.Is the ruthless King of the Sanctuary still human enough to fall in love?

Warnings: Language, Canon Gore & Violence.

Word Count: 2,930

Careful to avoid making any noise, you pressed down on the stainless steel lever.As discreetly as you could manage, you peered into the communal living space.Sherri and a few of the other wives sat together on the large sectional speaking in hushed tones. Your prison guard however, was absent. You grinned. Dropping all pretense, you stood up straight and let the door swing shut behind you.

“Good Morning.” You called out cordially.

Her eyes gave you an appraising once over. They paused at the sight of the old flannel you had on over your dress.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Negan’s first wife asked sternly.

“Where ever the wind takes me on this fine day, Miss Sherri.”

The remnants of a southern upbringing scolded you for being rude.You knew well that all of these girls had to put up with the boss man same as you,but you couldn’t risk getting caught just to be polite.

“He’ll be angry.” You heard her call after you, but Negan was always angry. So you didn’t let that stop you.

There was no way of knowing how long you had, but you intended to explore as much of the sanctuary as possible. You had been out of the room before, sure, but you had only seen flashes of the place as you ran past.Then there was the mini-mission you went on two months ago to find out what was making Joey late. Once you figured out what day of the week Pastry day was, it was simple.Third day of every week, Joey headed straight for the bakers and stood in line for a good half hour. You left when they handed him the sweet bread and found you could beat him back to the room.That was the most you had seen of the sanctuary since your arrival and was not the best way, you were convinced, to get to know and appreciate the beauty this place might hold.

The Sunlight felt nice for the first few seconds after you stepped out of your building, but soon enough the humidity ruined the moment.

You stayed on the greenery beside the road to avoid burning your feet, following the gravel path to the market place.Careful to avoid the baker’s side of the warehouse, you walked idly passed stall after stall of goods and services.

Your eyes caught on a table of battered shoes. You recognized the pasty ex-alexandrian running the table.Eugene, he was called.You knew this from the stories Tanya told you at dinner time.He was nothing but a blubbering wuss from the sound of it, so you figured you could handle him.You strode confidently to the front of the line and smiled.

“Excuse me?” You found yourself demanding not two minutes later.You glared at Eugene until he looked away.

“You don’t have credit.”

“The hell I don’t!”

“How many more times do you need me to say it?”Eugene repeated a smirk on his lips.

He leaned back in his chair looking entirely too pleased with himself.

“How fucking dare -” You started to shout, your voice ringing out through the warehouse.

Calling attention to yourself was the last thing you wanted to be doing you reminded yourself anxiously. You scrambled to come up with a different tactic.The corners of your mouth pulled up into a practiced grin that you never thought you would have cause to use again.

“My my,” Injecting sugar into your voice, you leaned across the table until you were nearly close enough to touch him.“Look at you! You’ve been runnin’ with the big dogs long enough to do a halfway decent impression, Eugene.”

Eugene’s shifty eyes widened. “You know my name?”

“Negan only ever talks about one genius with a mullet.”You lowered the volume of your voice conspiratorially, “How fortunate you are that my darling husband hasn’t seen through you yet.” You postured, taking a risk. “Maybe, I ought to help him see you for what you really are?”

“He will never believe you.”

“Why not? It wouldn’t make any sense for me to lie about a man I have never met. All i have to do is call into question your history with the people of Alexandria and make it seem like I feel concerned for his safety.”

Metal chair legs scraped against cement as Eugene pushed his seat back and stood.

“I’m g-going out for a smoke.Them shoes better be the only thing missin’ when I get back.” His trembling lower lip killed any affect his wrathful tone might have had on you.

You snickered at his retreat.

Your white dress fanned out behind you as you hurried away brown leather contraband on your feet, eager to begin your self guided tour.

Building after building of industrial rot, a few rusty tin shacks, and a sad row of herbs and spices later, you found yourself in front of the main building itself.

The Sanctuary’s weather beaten concrete face was made of cruel sharp angles. Her broken windows were yellowing jagged teeth.She stared brutally down at you until you couldn’t bare to meet her eyes anymore and turned, walking brusquely away from her frightening visage.

You turned the next corner only to freeze in your tracks.The wet raspy growling filled your ears before the smell hit you.

Walkers

Your eyes swept from left to right a few times trying to count, to keep track and then you realized, that they weren’t coming for you. There was a chain link fence separating them from you.Your brow knitted.They were tied down.They were, for the most part, stationary.Some chained up, some tied up, some stuck through with pipes. It took a twisted mind to come up with such a gruesome thing.

You wondered if Negan had come up with the idea himself.You shook the thought away. You didn't want to know. You made for the only corner of the god forsaken place you hadn’t yet visited.

The stolen too-big boots kicked up loose bits of gravel behind you as you headed for the backlot. Little did you know that you had an audience.Eyes followed your trek down the road from the loading dock behind you.

The field was inhabitted by broken wood pallets, a rusted up old mercury with bullet holes along the side, some old crates, a busted up head board, ruined tires, and tin sheeting. They lay rotting in the grass.Nearer the chain link fence, lay the final resting place for the few men who managed to stay on good terms with Negan until their last moments. Crude wooden headstones marked with paint stuck out in a bad attempt of making a row.

You slowed down as you reached the end of the pavement and waded into the living green sea of grass hoping not to encounter any snakes.The damp blades were staining the skirt of your dress, but it’d be worth the scolding. A long jagged claw snagged at your dress.You cursed. As you pulled it loose, you realized it was a foot and a half of wood that likely came off of one of the pallets.You tossed it aside and smirked.Now that you’d gone and torn the thing, he would be extra pissed. Hell if you were going to get him good and mad you had better do it well you thought, untieing the bright orange ribbon from around your wrist. Negan's latest gift to you. Each time you saw it, it reminded you of who you belonged to. You frowned as you let it flutter to the ground. It may as well have been a dog collar.

Negan was following you, keeping far enough away not to draw attention.He cursed Fat Joey for letting you out.That idiot was going to pay.He grit his teeth as he watched you wade into the tall grass.Flannel shirt or not you were ruining your dress.Where the fuck was he supposed to find you another dress as nice as the one you had on? The sight of you tugging on your skirt brought his eyes to your wrist. He saw you take off your bracelet and let it fall. Did you have any idea how hard it was to come by anything in bright colors these days?Of fucking course not!You were a spoiled selfish ungrateful untamable thing.He was not going to be taking it easy on you this time.He spotted you staring at the barbed wire topped fence and froze.

He didn’t have to imagine you attempting to clamber over the high fence, face full of determination fueled by spite.He would never forget it.Your last attempt to leave made it clear that you didn’t give a shit about your own well-being anymore.Negan cursed under his breath. God help you if you were stupid enough to pull another stunt like that.Yet he knew way down deep inside, somewhere primal, that you belonged to him.After three years and fifteen failed attempts to leave him, Negan had come to the conclusion that he had to do everything in his power to make you want to stay.

Despite the show and the accusations he had made, alternately burning and bashing some person or another, every time you fucked up Negan went easy on you.The second he’d laid eyes on you, he’d chucked his personal rule book out the window. He was afraid that this made him look soft and that burned his pride like nothing else could.

However, women with your body type had always been his preference and He knew, a figure like yours was a rare find these days. He wanted you. Negan wanted you badly. More than anything, he wanted you to want him to fuck you.It was a frustrating blue balls inducing shit show of a situation.Charming women had always come easy to him. It was his shit luck that you weren’t easily charmed. He followed you into the field. His eye caught the shine of the ribbon easily. As He pocketed the scrap of orange cloth, the memory of your first meeting came to mind.

Your hair pulled back into a braid, a lovely face, enough cleavage showing to catch his eye. Your faded jeans had holes in the thighs and your breathing was heavy from your attempt to out run The Saviors.

You looked so darn pretty kneeling before him.You’d had the audacity to meet his gaze. It pissed him off and turned him on in equal measure.Your eyes captivated him.They were burning with resentment, but no tears.Not his Y/n. You didn’t cry, didn’t beg, and didn’t flinch at the sight of Lucille.Not even after he’d dirtied her up a bit.Near the end of his speech,some traitorous switch inside him had flipped.

“Darlin’, You have got a look in your eyes that says you haven’t been fucked right in years.” He drawled smiling his slick easy smile.”Why don’t you come on home with me, I’ll show you how good it can be with a real man.”

“You expect me to believe that a bean pole like you can handle curves like mine? Honey, I would eat you alive.”

He laughed low and long.The genuine mirth startled everyone, but you.

“Come on, baby. Don’t be like that.I just wanna love you right.”

“Well, I am sorry, Mister Real Man, but your pick up lines are bad jokes at best and that mouth of yours...” You shook your head in disapproval. “So dirty.”

You were meant to be his. No doubt about it.

“Mmm, there are plenty of good things I can do with this dirty mouth and you are curious to find out, I can tell.”

Negan’s big strong hand had fisted into the collar of your flannel pulling you toward him. You stumbled onto your feet to keep from being dragged. Before you could catch your balance, his lips were on yours.

Unbeknownst to Negan, unlike his bat and savior show, the heated kiss he gave you impressed you.

He nipped at your lower lip and turned back to what was left of your group.

“We are gonna do just fine, Dollface. As for the rest of you sorry shits, You are going to bring me my stuff and then go out and get me something nice.”

His hazel eyes gleamed down at you. “We’ll consider it a wedding present.”

Your exclamation was drowned out by the saviors’ hearty laughter as you were forcefully led to his truck.

From the moment Negan made you a wife, you vowed that you would get away from him even if you died trying. After three years and fifteen failed escape attempts, you had come to the conclusion that making him hate you was the only way out of the wives club.

You rummaged through the crates and found quite a few empty glass bottles. They would do. You put them all in the same crate and carried it with you as you counted your steps. You waited until you were at least two yards away to throw the first one.

Thunk

Wading further into the tall weeds and grass he frowned at the unfamiliar sound.

“Well I’ll be damned.” You murmured to yourself as you bent to pick up another bottle.

You glared at the Mercury, closed your fist around the neck of the bottle, and swung. It grazed the roof, but landed on the other side of the car.

“Have you lost your freaking mind?”

Your shoulders tensed at the familiar deep baritone of your husband’s voice. You stood there clenching your teeth, frustrated with the intrusion.You schooled your features before turning to face him.

“Hey there, Sugar. What are you doin’ out here?”

Negan came to stand before you, but he didn’t ask the questions you had expected him to ask.Perhaps, Where in the hell did you get shoes? or How in the hell did you manage to escape a locked room with a savior standing watch?Instead, Negan swallowed his anger and made himself the very picture of patience.

“I could ask you the same question, Darlin’.” He replied.

You stared at him, curiosity battling the wrath within you.

“Well?” Negan prompted after a minute or two of your silence.

Your thoughts raced.

What the fuck?!Why was he being nice?!He should be letting you have it right now! He should be cussing up a storm!

“Just... keepin’ busy.”You said lamely.

“In the junkyard? Playing with glass? That’s a hell of a thing for a Queen to do.” He murmured.”You could have hurt yourself.”

You were disgusted by how genuinely concerned he sounded and cringed at him calling you “Queen”.For weeks now, you had been working on him, from picking fights, to ruining belongings, to giving him the cold shoulder.Until finally you’d been able to break out again.You wanted him good and mad and Negan was not cooperating.

You clicked your tongue against the roof of your mouth.

“Actually, I haven’t been here long.I walked the whole Sanctuary first then ended up here.”You shrugged and made to pick up another bottle.”It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

“Who do you think you are?”

You should have known his anger couldn’t stay contained for long.

“Beg your pardon?” You snapped.

“I said,” Negan growled pulling you toward him by your shirt collar, “Just who, in the fuck, do you think you are?” His eyes glowered down at you.

“Y/F/N Fucking Y/L/N.” You declared and kicked him.

The shock on his face turned to fury. Familiar though the expression was, Negan had never turned it on you.Adrenaline spurred you into action.You yanked out of his grasp and tore through the field.

“Y/n!” He bellowed.

You didn’t dare look behind you as you pushed yourself to run.

#Negan #negan x plus sized reader #negan x reader #the walking dead #twd x reader #jeffrey dean morgan #jdm x reader

[morgana-ren]

Imagine being at a Halloween party thrown by Dabi and someone in a Leatherface costume keeps following you. It turns out to be Shigaraki. You comment on how his human skin mask is cool and how it looks so real, and oddly looks like Bakugo's face. He laughs, tosses it away and leads you to a field of pumpkins, where he non cons you, while Spooky Scary Skeletons plays in the background.

Okay listen, I know this was probably sent in 200 percent as a joke, but that doesn’t mean I’m not going to sit down for an hour and make it work. It’s been a weird week. I can make weird work. 

Like imagine kinda knowing Dabi before the league goes super big. You don’t know too much about him, but he’s a friend of a friend and so on and he’s got the dangerous bad boy appeal alongside those haunting blue eyes, so all ya friends hover around him. So lets say you get invited to his spooky-dooky Halloween party he’s throwin’ in an old warehouse. It’s sort of his last hurrah cause it’s a lot harder to try and bone civvie girls when you’re a wanted villain with your face on the news attached to a criminal group, so he’s gunna throw it back tonight and take what he can get, you feel?

So you and ya friends get all cute and dolled up in your costumes and head out to this bash that’s taking place on the wrong side of the tracks in some godforsaken warehouse. It’s in the industrial zone, which is comprised of nothing but abandoned buildings, squat houses, and old warehouses. You’re pretty sure he just found one and broke the chain on the door and called it a night. That should be your first clue, but fuck it, what’s life without a little risk?

Anyway, a few hours pass and admittedly, you’re a lil’ drunk. That being said, you could swear this dude in a leatherface costume is stalking you. Maybe not stalking you, per say, but he’s definitely trying hard to be where you are. It’s not like he’s easy to confuse with anyone else; his costume is super unique, and if you’re being honest, a little disturbing. It legit looks like that kid Bakugo from the Sports Festival but forcefully mutated in with the classic Leatherface look. Whoever it is, they’ve definitely got an edgy sense of humor. It should spook you, but it’s Halloween for fucks sake! At least they’re putting some effort in! It’s no coincidence that you see him literally everywhere you go, so maybe he likes you?

Maybe he’s cute under that creepy mask.

It’s worth a shot (get it, shot?), so you let him follow you to the bar and sit down next to an equally empty seat, hoping to give off the vibe of ‘quit being creepy and come talk to me.’ 

A few seconds later and surprise surprise, he sits down right beside you. No sense in pretending this is anything other than what it is, so you turn right to him and offer to buy him a drink. 

He stares at you for a minute, beady pupils surveying you beneath that godawful mask he’s donning before he nods. He doesn’t tell you what he wants, so you just order him whatever mixture of gasoline and fruit you get. He just stares at you while you sip at your own drink, and you can’t help but laugh. His eyes are fuckin’ intense, and while you’re already a little tipsy, it’s pretty clear he’s dead sober. Luckily, alcohol gives you a charming ice breaker. 

“It’s probably a little difficult to drink with that terrifying thing on your face, but I really appreciate your dedication to the look.” 

Behind the holes of the mask, his eyes crinkle near the edges. You can’t tell if he’s smiling or snarling, but he’s definitely reacting to what you’re saying. He must’ve decided that he likes you, because he finally reaches behind his head and loosens whatever makeshift strap that’s tangled in his silver, ‘fake’ blood matted hair. 

As he lets it fall away from his face, you study what’s underneath. He’s a little rough around the edges, a little chapped with dry skin and more than a few blisters on his pale lips, but he’s cute and the costume has you intrigued. For all you know, it could be liquid latex. The guy seems pretty dedicated after all. It makes you wonder what is Halloween paint and what’s his actual skin. You kinda wanna lick him and find out.

Shut up, alcohol. 

“It’s homemade.” He rasps out, voice cracking and strained like he hasn’t spoken in days. After a sip of his own drink, he slips a subtle smile as he sees you eying the grotesque costume piece. “I’m glad you like it.”

It’s gross to say the least. Whatever it’s made out of, it’s certainly not plastic or rubber like most masks. It smells atrocious, especially coupled with the must and cheap booze of the warehouse, and it makes you a little queasy as it flops around in his lap a little too lifelike for your liking. It even has pores, for Christ’s sake. Tearing your gaze away from it isn’t easy, but if you look much longer, you’re not really sure what your stomach is gunna do, so you turn your attentions to the owner instead. 

“Are you making a statement or just not a fan of the would-be hero types?”

He giggles a little even though you’re not entirely sure what you said was funny. “I guess you could say it’s both.” 

You sit in an awkward silence, sipping at your drink for a few minutes before another wave of alcohol induced courage lights a fire under your ass. If he won’t talk, you sure as fuck will.

“So, are you a friend of Dabi’s or-” He scoffs, loud and hard, lip curling in distaste. “No. I’m unfortunate enough to know him. We work together.” 

“Really? I always wondered what he did for a living.” 

It takes him a second to realize that’s you’re prodding, and a minute longer to come up with an answer. “I guess you could say we’re sort of... activists or something.” 

“Is that so? He never really struck me as the generous type.”

“He’s not.” He grins like a fox in a henhouse, mischievous and sly like he knows something you don’t. “And I’m not either.” 

“Then why be an activist?” 

His smirk fades, and he nurses his drink, flicking his eyes away from you. “I dunno.”

“What kind of activist are you? Like social or environmental or-” 

“Uh-” He clearly wasn’t expecting this line of questioning. “Political.” 

“Oh, that’s cool! What kind of politics are you guys into? You seem like the anarchy sort to me, but I don’t wanna judge-”

“Are you always this nosy?”

His sudden hostility takes you back a little. Sure, you’re drunk and annoying, but that seems a bit excessive. Maybe this isn’t the tree you want to be barking up tonight. 

“Sorry. I was just trying to get to know you.” 

You turn your body away from him slightly, returning your gaze to the rusted metal behind the makeshift bar. You can see him glaring you down out of your periphery but opt to ignore it. Regardless, he stares for a few more moments before downing the rest of the drink you apparently wasted your money on.  “Well, don’t.” 

Whatever, man. It’s a fucking Halloween party. You can find a different jerk-ass to hook up with, one who at least pretends to be nice until the night is over. Dicks are a dime a dozen in a place like this, and the ‘super mysterious, if I told you, I’d have to kill you’ bullshit charade he’s playing is grating on your nerves. Part of you wants to tell him off for being so rude, but the other part is telling you to just shut up, project your disinterest, and wait for him to leave.

You huff a small sigh, blowing the air out of your puckered lips as you roll your eyes behind closed lids. Your side of the conversation comes to an abrupt halt, and suddenly everything in the room is more interesting than he is. Yet even with the uncomfortable awkward air around you both, he doesn’t leave. He just continues scanning you over as you do your best to give him the cold shoulder. So he really thinks there’s any sort of comeback from that, huh?

Apparently he does. He’s not very good with social hints either. You’ve almost tuned him out when you feel a bony hand clutching your upper arm. 

“Hey, come with me. This place is boring and I’ve got something I want to show you.” 

You turn, shooting him a disbelieving glare, but he’s already slid off his bar stool and is pulling you along with him. He doesn’t bother to wait for your answer, weaving through the crowds and dragging you behind him even as you try to wiggle your arm out of his grasp. Had you been in your right mind, you might have screamed or shoved him and told him to get lost, but your liquor marinated mind makes it difficult. He’s kinda right, after all. This place has gotten boring. All your friends left you behind an hour ago to go find their own conquests and dancing by yourself gets pretty lame after a minute. It’s not like you had anything better to do. 

Alright, fine. Follow the rude guy. He seems pretty adamant about it anyway. 

You try to justify it by telling yourself maybe he’s just super socially awkward or doesn’t have much experience with girls. He could also be one of those super brash, brutally honest people that just says whatever comes to mind. Maybe he didn’t mean it in a mean way. A trailing history of terrible taste in men leaves his unbridled rudeness with a bad taste in your mouth, but it wasn’t like you were planning on seeing him again after tonight. Ride the dick and then ride off into the sunset. 

You both dodge through the groups of people together as he yanks you towards the very back of the warehouse. The couple of doors he leads you through have a fairly prominent ‘Do Not Enter’ sign cautioning at eye level, but he doesn’t seem dissuaded, pulling you through the heavy doors despite the clear warning. A few hallways and dim, empty corridors later and he’s ushering you into something resembling a claustrophobic courtyard outside that joins the warehouse with a few of the surrounding buildings.

It’s very dark outside, and aside from the slight shine of ugly yellow tinted streetlights peeking through the alleyway, you can’t see much of anything. You can’t imagine what on Earth it is out here that he wants to show you, but you doubt you’ll even be able to see it. Anxiety starts to bloom in your chest as your drunk mind starts to realize that you’ve followed a stranger out into a very dark, very isolated area.

“H-hey, I never got your name.”

He laughs softly, coming up behind you and gripping your shoulders in a way that feels all too tight. Steering you forward, he leans in, feet falling in line with your steps.

“You’re right. My bad, that’s awfully rude of me.”

He pushes you forward in a way that seems a bit intense for having just met before latching his hands lazily around the base of your neck and pulling you into his chest.

“I guess it’s a good thing you didn’t know what Dabi does for a living, or else you never would have been stupid enough to follow me out here.”

Okay, it’s Halloween and all, but his brand of prank is starting to feel a little too real. The macabre costume and total boorishness should have been the insight you needed to come to the conclusion that this guy just isn’t quite right in the head, but between the alcohol and your desire to give him the benefit of the doubt, it just never quite clicked for you.

“It’s Shigaraki, by the way. My name. I’m sure you’ve heard it before.”

His wet breath on your neck isn’t the only reason you get shivers. You have heard that name before, only never spoken so casually. His fingers tighten around the tensing muscles in your throat as you swallow down a bombardment of emotion. Panic. Fear. Realization.

There’s a million and ten things going through your mind right now, the foremost of which is why. You aren’t a hero, nor are you a particularly fervent hero supporter. You’re not related to any heroes, and frankly, there’s no one further from the social/cultural hub that is hero society. Isn’t that what this guy gets his rocks off to? At least from the news snippets, that’s the impression you gathered.

You want to ask him why you. Maybe its a selfish question but it’s a question none the less, and one people tend to ask when their place on the mortal coil is being threatened. Yet, no matter how you try to spit out the words, your tongue stills in your dry mouth and refuses to cooperate. The pounding in your chest is giving way to a headache and a serious case of sick, and you swear between the loud pulsing of blood in your veins, you can hear him giggling behind you.

You think maybe that’s a strong enough cue to leave. You can ask him why when you’re separated by a thick layer of glass at Tartarus.

You know, it’s easy to sit back in the comfort of your own home and laugh at the clumsy heroine in any given horror movie who fumbles away from the killer like a newborn fawn just discovering its own lanky legs, but you’re quick to understand just why that troupe is so popular. It takes you a moment to gather the courage to turn on your heel and shove him hard on the chest, and even when you manage, it’s so weak and pathetic that it barely knocks him off balance. It only just gives you enough space that you can dart in the opposite direction. Where you’re going, you have no clue, but it’s not on the forefront of your mind as you pound pavement beneath your shitty costume shoes and shout “Stay away from me!” like some cliche damsel in distress.

Your adrenaline fueled getaway is short lived. A few seconds after beginning your feverish sprint away from what you know to be a very dangerous young fellow, the front of your foot catches on something and sends you toppling to the ground only a few feet from where you began your initial rush. Your fall is less than graceful, and the shriek that emits from your throat before your body thuds to the dirt like a sack of potatoes is far less sexy than anything in any horror movie. The bag you’ve been clutching, filled with nothing but the bare essentials and a half empty flask, is flung from your fingers. Your assailant doesn’t slow-walk towards you in a menacing manner while wielding a knife, but practically jogs over, wheezing with nasally laughter as he grabs you by the hair.

“I bet that went a lot better in your head, huh?”

A lot of things went a lot better in your head, to be fair. That scene. This night. Your life in general. But the little pity party you’re throwing yourself does little to garner his sympathies. No amount of hiccuping and crying fat gobs of tears that leak from your lashes and down into the Halloween makeup it took you hours to do elicits any response from him but what he had already planned on.

His laughter finally dies down and the fingers threaded through your hair manhandle you to your knees before roughly casting you down onto something. Something hollow yet sturdy greets your sensitive, liquor addled stomach as he forces you down and bends you over it. It feels slightly waxy, yet organic to the touch, and seems to wobble around slightly the more he kicks and prods you into a position you’ve seen one too many times in those shitty free pornos.

Pumpkin. It’s a fucking pumpkin.

You can smell the leaves and grass and sodden soil as he positions your hips up in the air, shucking off the costume apron he’d been wearing. Dirt embeds under your finger nails as you struggle to drag the rest of your body over the pumpkin to make your escape, but the hand that isn’t currently fumbling with his zipper is still tightly anchored in your hair, holding you in place. He hisses out a few words warning you against struggling too hard, his quirk is uncontrollable after all.

He makes quick work of the cheap costume bottom, inhaling a ragged breath and digging his jagged nails in a little too tightly to your skin when your ass becomes bared to the cool night air. The sight of you must’ve made him impatient, as he settles for simply yanking up your top along your back to expose your tits instead of going through the effort to try and get it off you. If what you’ve heard is true, he could simply dust it and be rid of it, but he doesn’t seem like he’s in the most centered form of mind right now, and it doesn’t appear like it’s your death he’s after.

No, it seems like he’s after something much more intimate than death.

Your mind is acutely aware of what’s about to happen, but it’s trapped in your paralyzed body, unable to force your heavy limbs to move with the weight of the panic. He’s freed himself from his pants, knuckles bumping against the cleft of your ass with every jerk of the cock that you thank God is hidden from your vision. After a few rigorous pumps, he withdraws for a moment before spitting and dribbling his slick saliva into the palm of his hand, coating his cock and using it as a makeshift lubricant.

When he’s finished making spitting sounds that make your stomach church, he lines his hips against your reluctantly spread legs and you feel the hot, thick tip prodding against the tautly pulled walls of your entrance. It’s enough to renew your childlike kicking and whining, babbling and pleading for him to stop. Regardless, he pays you no mind, opting only to yank his hand from the roots of your hair. It stings and he takes several strands of hair with it, but you don’t have time to focus on the pain as his fingertips dig into the fat of your cheeks, flexing and forcing you to look up at him as he hunches his wiry frame over yours.

It’s hard to see through the haze of tears that blear your vision and thick black makeup caking around your eyes, but you can make out that he’s smiling. If you can call it that, that is. Cracked lips wet and parted, breathing hot, moist breath down onto your forehead. Lips curled upward in a nasty, smarmy grin. A slimy tongue trails along his teeth as he practically drools down onto your shoulder like you’re a thick cut of venison and he’s a rabid wolf ready to sink in his canines.

“You know, I never cared much for Halloween,” His hips cant forward ever so slightly and begins to push the tip inside your unwilling hole. Slowly, slowly at first, but soon with more force. It hurts, morphing from a dull ache into an intense sting the more his girthy length is stuffed snug inside between your thighs. “But Dabi was right- it’s a lot more fun when you dress up.”

To punctuate the end of his sentence, he pulses his hips forward, sinking himself all the way inside and watching with a sick sense of glee as your face contorts in pain. He rolls his hips experimentally against your backside a few times, hissing in slight discomfort at the bittersweet tightness that strangles his flesh inside of yours. It stills him only for a brief moment, long enough for you to truly grasp the horrendous sensation of your body molding to accommodate something too large for it to have been ready to take.

However uncomfortable he may be, it’s nothing compared to what you’re feeling. It seems like a cruel joke that the wanted villain who set his sights on you that night would also have a monster cock, but Halloween was always the devil’s little prank show. He’s crammed it inside you with no regard for the damage it might do, pain radiating in the deep of your stomach as his cockhead is scrunched firmly against the wall of your cervix. Your fingers dig deeper into the dirt, but not to escape. You’re aware you’re too firmly impaled on him for that to be an option, so you settle for trying to give yourself any sensation at all that will lessen the unholy tear of your already sensitive pussy.

Eventually he decides he’s had enough of memorizing your pretty, anguished face, and his movements begin anew. Hips pistoning in a building rhythm, flesh of his thighs slapping obscenely against your bare ass. The protruding stem of the pumpkin grates into your abdomen, forcing pained, breathy ‘ah’s from you with every powerful hump. The anguishing drag of his cock assaulting your insides begins to blend together one after the next, and you do your best to block out the animalistic grunts and a sickening moans he emits with every thrust.

Eventually he lets your face go in favor of sinking his fingers just below your waist to anchor you in place as he pounds away, and you take the opportunity to drop your head in defeat and clench your eyes shut. He’ll get bored of you or he’ll cum. It’s what comes after that you should really be worried about. By the sounds he’s making, he’s far from losing interest. He seems to be getting a bit carried away, muttering something along the lines of “take it, slut” and needing to celebrate holidays more often.

That’s when you hear it.

Spooky, scary, skeletons send shivers down your spine

At first, you think it’s a joke. Like you’re having some sort of twisted nightmare and reality has finally decided to throw you a bone to lead your consciousness back home. But his manic fucking never stops and neither does the pain.

Shrieking souls with shock your soul, seal your doom tonight

A few blinks to clear the fresh wave of agony and one hand digging into the side of the pumpkin to stable yourself enough against his rutting to search for the source of the noise. There’s a glowing light a few feet from you, flashing and vibrating but just out of reach.

Your phone. It’s your phone. Your bag had landed not far from where he had you pinned, and your phone had been thrown from the bag.

Your new October ringtone plays through the damaged speakers, flashing your best friends face on the screen. She’s looking for you, probably wondering where you went. She’d never find you here. No one would.

We’re so sorry skeletons, you’re so misunderstood

Help is so close, yet so far away. Your sobs begin anew, feeling his cock pulse as he whines something about breeding his pretty little bitch into your ear. He’s cumming inside you, papping his hips against you in a shallow, offbeat rhythm. You can feel it, hear it squelching and leaking down your thighs. He came. Inside you. And judging from what few words you can make out between your agonized cries, he has every intention of doing it again.

You just want to socialize but I don’t think we should

#Anonymous #Shigaraki x reader #tw rape #tw noncon #tw alcohol #gagfic #this is a fucking joke and I put no effort into it please know that #I wouldn't actually consider it one of my stories #just a goof lmao #warning not proofread AT ALL #Shigaraki fucks you over a pumpkin #still technically smut tho #You're a girl on a quest for dat DICK and he's a rude asshole #Bakugo may or may not be dead #totally depends on your interpretation #i wrote this on PAIN KILLERS BABEYYYY

[7hyuns]

million dollar man

johnny x reader

warnings; nsfw, slight angst, social class discrimination (? kinda), semi public sex

requested; yes a reallyyy long time ago by @cloroxteen sorry and thank you <3

a/n; please appreciate her this took so long

word count; 17.8k 

songs; when the party’s over - billie eilish, million dollar man / without you / music to watch boys to - lana del rey

The ceiling was leaking again. Noticing made a sudden fatigue creep into your body, your movements slowing to a stop as you stared up at where the droplets of water began to form before falling. You wondered how long the hole had been there, if it even was a hole or simply damp again, how much it would cost to fix. Whatever it was, you knew it would be too much for you to afford. As it seems everything always is. Even with taking a home that was so closely compact to the industrial part of your city, it seemed nothing was at all cheaper.

You thought how fitting it seemed that you had gotten a leak in your ceiling just as fall began. That gave you far less time than you were going to need to scrounge up the money to get it fixed, especially if you wanted to get it done before the threat of part of your ceiling caving in became all too real. Though you heavily doubted that was something you’d be able to do, and considered the all-too-likely possibility of having to do it yourself this time.

At least last year you had been able to work two jobs, and relatively comfortably considering the length the situation of Chicago’s businesses had been going on. It was only just before Valentine’s day that something had gone awfully wrong at one of the stores you worked at, and it found itself closed down. Forty-eight people had lost their jobs that day, which seemed to make finding another forty-eight times harder in the city. For a while you had thought getting by with the one job would be enough if you were cautious – and bought nothing you didn’t absolutely need – but even that seemed a strain these days.

Not only was it fatiguing to see your ceiling giving up on you, it was painful to think that with the way you were living, you would never have anything you wanted. Even if you did eventually work enough to have the things you needed, which seemed a push from where you were standing watching a puddle form on your kitchen floor. In that moment, living had never seemed more bleak.

You walked around the splattering water to reach the cupboard underneath your kitchen sink, looking for the rusted tin bucket that you’d kept from the other times this had occurred. Dropping the bucket with a clash of hollow tin onto wet tile floors, you heard the drops begin to echo onto the surface. Taking a wary glance at the thin puddle on the floor, you realised you would be better off cleaning it up before you relaxed. You couldn’t find the energy, however, and instead made the short trip from facing the back of your couch to sitting down in the small space of the attached living room. Even these short strides seemed too much for you to comprehend doing, and that feeling remained despite you already tucking your legs up underneath you as you sat on the worn fabric.

The couch itself had seen too many years since it had been gifted to your parents on their wedding day to still be considered comfortable by any means. That was only if you stayed still on it for too long, though, which seemed the only saving grace you could find in it. Much like all of your other large furniture items that you’d filled the two main rooms of your ground-floor apartment with, you hadn’t paid for it. Or even picked it out yourself. Your parents had been kind enough to give you the old stuff that had been lingering in the garage of your childhood home for fear of losing the memories attached to them.

Thinking of them when you had a moment to yourself made you suddenly regretful. For what, you weren’t sure. Maybe being away from them both seemed a better idea at the time you left, or maybe you missed the simplicity of life on the further outskirts of the city. Maybe it was only a longing for your childhood to come back so you didn’t have to think about all of the grown-up things for yourself anymore. You had regretted running off what seemed so far since the day you had done it, but there was nothing more you could do now. Sometimes you could barely remember why you had moved to the city anyway. Chasing big dreams, or following someone who was chasing big dreams. One of you had managed to make those big dreams become real, had turned them into a tangible thing.

Looking around your cosy home, it seemed simple to tell that the one who had struck out wasn’t you. You supposed, with the ever-so-wonderful hindsight, moving straight into the city by yourself at a time so obsessed with glitz and glamour hadn’t been such a fine idea. Though you knew the largest reason you had followed the someone else into the city in the first place had been to earn your own glitz and glamour life-style.

Sitting on your parents couch in a flat with a leak in the ceiling, you were beginning to think you should have done what all other American girls did when they were seeking success and education, and moved to New York. Even your friends had spoken dreamily of the big city, saying that’s the only place you could ever hope to find real culture and, as most of your friends insisted, real jazz.

Chicago wasn’t a place of real culture or real jazz, not in any shape or form. You could guess it was warmer in New York than it was in Chicago, too. If you had flourished in a certain area, or if you had a passion, maybe you could have taken the chance and followed it all the way to New York. But you didn’t and you hadn’t. Instead you had moved further into your home city at the worst possible time and found yourself, along with all of the friends who had stayed, shrouded in fear and crime.

You had to remind yourself that it wasn’t all bad. You had to, because otherwise life seemed far too bleak to keep up with. The light rain that was pattering against your window would get worse, you knew. If not over the course of the night then in the morning, surely. The thought filled you with subdued fear. You wondered if the bucket would be enough to keep your stable through the entirety of the fall and into the winter. That was a tricky line to walk, though. If you left it too long, the ceiling would cave, just as the man who had fixed it last time had insisted.

The night seemed to be taking too long, and there was too much weighing on your mind to consider staying awake any longer. You rose up and took long, dragged footsteps the short few paces to cross over the door-frame into your bedroom. You didn’t bother even turning the light on, feeling as though the weight of the world was suddenly resting on your shoulders. You kicked the door shut behind you, tugging your work short off and stepping out of your skirt to pull an older, looser shirt on to cover yourself.

When you had finally crawled into your bed it seemed colder than you had expected. Even the sheets felt icy and uncomfortable when you tugged them up to cover yourself. There’s little more I can do, you reminded yourself, closing your eyes and hoping for warmth. The thought made you want to laugh, with its consistency in your daily thinking. I hope, I hope, I hope. But what good had that been doing you in the last few years, really? You wondered whether the hope of meeting success had been enough for the boy you’d followed. Judging from where he’d made it in such a short span of time, you could only imagine it had been far more than hope that had given him what he had now.

 ///

The books had been handled badly in, “The Ox,” for such a long time that even with having worked there for over a year, there seemed so much to do. The owner, who was only ever briefly glimpsed around the bar once a month gathering his reports, never wearing a name tag, was called Sicheng. You had never found the confidence to ask too many questions about the man – what his last name was (though you had discovered within the pages of the book that his full name was Dong Sicheng and he was around your age), where he was from, why he seemed to have a lack of interest in his own business – though that was the same for many people.

Men in bars loved to talk to anyone that would listen, which happened to be the most difficult job of the women pouring their drinks. And, as usual, women – without the exemption of yourself – loved to gossip about the most interesting things they could find out. The happiest moments in your daily life was when you would be preparing to go home, or even when one of the women would spend their break in your mini-office instead of having to leave the building into the fall chill, would seek you out to tell you something exciting they had learnt. Dong Sicheng had become a natural inquisition for most of the people who had him as a boss, as there seemed to be so little available to learn about him. All they had known upon first getting their jobs was his name and that he wasn’t from Chicago, or even America at all.

Over time, with the information the women working at the bar had collected, you’d put together a vague, blurry image of Sicheng in your mind. His name was Dong Sicheng but oftentimes in letters he received he was referred to as Winwin. He was around your age, he was from China though you didn’t know where. And he was very anti-social. Once a month was about as often as he’d show his face. That didn’t seem too strange considering what it was the women said the men who grew too brave in their drunkenness for their own good.

Most of them said he was part of a gang that had come over from China to work with the American gangs, though you didn’t know how realistic that seemed. All the stories about him seemed in ultimate agreement that he worked in some kind of dirty business. Though, with the state the city was in, you weren’t sure you would confidently say that any business wasn’t like to be dirty. Either way, whenever you looked over the books, you knew that something was out of the ordinary. Too many odd payments were made or received with no reason given, or a short, ‘donation,’ if anything. You didn’t think it was probable that anyone would be making donations to some bar on a main street of Chicago when there must have been hundreds of others in the surrounding area.

You stretched out in your seat, staring blankly at the box of papers you had to sort through today. You didn’t think it would too difficult a task, and you thought if you moved quickly you could get it finished before the half-way mark of the day. Not that that meant too much, your work day would still end at the same time whether you rushed through it or not.

Despite knowing it was a littler amount than you had expected, it didn’t seem to make the first two hours pass any faster. By the first time in the day that one of the women who worked on the bar slipped into your office, every blink was beginning to feel like dragging sandpaper over your eyes. You could still feel the ever-present worry about the tin bucket on your kitchen floor; whether it had overflowed even though the rain was only light today, whether it had been knocked over by some mysterious force.

The woman had been working there just under a year, and was, to your surprise, younger than you. She had come from London hoping to find adventure in the ‘new world,’ which to her, had only been Chicago as of yet. Instead of finding her hoped for adventure, she had found a job in a bar that was possibly run by a gang member, but seemed altogether too quiet to keep her satisfied.

She was frowning when she walked into your working room, her brows drawn and eyes shying away from yours. You rose your eyebrows at her as she began to search the room for something else to look at. “Ada?” She offered you a tight-lipped smile. “Is everything alright?”

“No, I, I need to ask a favour.” She mumbled.

“Alright.”

When she looked at you, you made yourself smile reassuringly at her. This seemed to give her a shred more confidence, though she still seemed hesitant to ask. “I forgot to pick my medicine up this morning.” She declared, looking straight at you.

The difficulty she seemed to have asking the favour made you feel an odd sense of fondness rise in your chest. You smiled warmly at her. “Do you need to go and get it now?” She nodded. “So, what can I do to help you?”

She shuffled on her feet, tangling her hands with one another. “I was wondering if, you know if you had less work to do, if you could watch the bar while I go.” She paused, waiting to see if you reacted. “I would be quick! Not any more than an hour, I promise. It’s alright if you can’t, I could just, go, I could go later.”

You judged by her insistence on going now that going later wasn’t so open an option to her. You made yourself smile again to soothe her worries before you stood up. “It’s fine, I’ll be finished with this work within an hour, anyway. I’d be bored silly with nothing else to do.”

This seemed to soothe her enough for her to nod, though still not without hesitation. “An hour.” She repeated, though you assumed that was more to cool her own guilt.

You nodded. “I’ll see you then.”

After offering you an apologetic smile, she turned and left the room. The click of her short heels resounded until she reached the room where all of the workers left their belongings in the morning. When she was gone, you fell back into your same sense of empty tiredness. The fatigue wasn’t a calling for sleep, more so for some miracle gravitational shift that would change your life for the better. Or simply enough for me to not have to return home to a ruined ceiling. The sense of dramatics in your tired eyes made you wonder how much longer you had before that worry was for your whole home. Even the far away idea of it made your stomach turn in anxiety.

You pushed yourself up away from the table, flattening your palms to provide yourself some stability. For a minute, you stayed like that; breathing deeply and expecting the worst of your future. Yes, let’s follow an old friend to inner-city Chicago on the off-chance that we’ll find the same glamour he undoubtedly will. What a fine idea! And what a find outcome it had evidently been, standing in a room that smelt of woodchips and liquor, desperate to return home to a flat that smelt of mould and old furniture.

Once the angry butterflies having their own little riot in your stomach had relaxed, you stood up straight, and heaved in a deep sigh. “An hour,” you reminded yourself, though interacting with drunk men didn’t seem like it had an amount of time to take before it became awful. It’s only the start of the night, you cooled yourself. You turned, pausing only to wish that you were hidden away in the comfort of you bed once more, before walking out in the main area of the bar.

Despite it being early into the night, it was swirling with movement. The band that Sicheng had play in the bar for most of the week were in full swing, though the awe of their music was drowned out by a collection of drunken young men singing along. You slipped to move past them without alerting them of your presence. Finding your way to behind the safety of the bar at the back of the room proved a tasking challenge, with such a mess of bodies and drinks being jostled and knocked, creating even more of real mess that someone would have to clean when this place emptied later. You felt a stab of pity for them, seeing an older man spill half a pint of his beer onto the floor after stumbling into one of his group.

When you finally shut the little gate behind you, you steadied yourself again. The rising noise of music mingling with the murmuring cacophony of too many conversations happening at once was making your ears ring. Fall had meant the lights had to be turned on earlier in the day, with no natural lighting being enough for the workers to find their way around. Even that seemed to make your head spin. Reminder: no more looking for second jobs as a bar maid.

Someone called out at the bar’s edge, an older man with slicked back hair and a three-piece on, though he seemed to have lost the jacket to his suit. The other girl seemed busy loading a set of drinks up onto a tray, so you exhaled heavily and turned to face the man properly.

Putting on a customer friendly smile made you feel the sleepiness settle more obviously on your shoulders. How much longer can I carry my life on my back? That’s not where it’s supposed to be. But that’s where it was, and if you ever wanted it to be anywhere else, you had to work for it. “What can I get you tonight, sir?”

The man smiled, and you tried to guess whether this would go smoothly or make you wish you were anywhere else all over again. If there was any hint of your distaste for the possibility of him being anything other than amiable, he took it. A friendly smile lifted his lips. “Just two whiskeys, please.”

Your heart settled a bit. Nodding, you turned to prepare the drinks. The smell of the whiskey was potent as soon as you pulled the top of the bottle, like the smell of men mingled with the ash-trays that decorated the tables in here. You poured an equal amount into the two glasses and turned to place them on the bar in front of the man.

He smiled again, dropping the money he was clutching in his hand down onto the counter. He inclined his head in the way men said, ‘thank you,’ when they didn’t particularly want to say it. You supposed that was better than nothing. As much as there was no shortage of people crowding, ‘The Ox,’ they all seemed fairly too preoccupied with there conversations, or with shouting along to the band’s music, to be making frequent trips to the bar. That wouldn’t be good for Sicheng you supposed, but it was something you were grateful for.

Then the door opened, and the bruised blue light of the sky outside was visible again. The noise from the street leaked in only slightly, just by the sound of some argument happening on the street. Take the back when you go home today. Last time, you had been blocked in by the police breaking up another fight-gone-violent, and then by a crowd of people desperate for something to see. You weren’t in the mood for that to be how your day ended again.

You glanced over to the large group of men walking in. They were all done-up nicely; three-piece suits with fine jackets that made you assume they were businessmen, slicked back hair, and cigarettes hanging from their lips. You could have written them off normal customers for a bar like this. Though on your second glance you saw enough to make your stomach drop again.

He was dressed much the same as all of his other companions; his suit was a dull grey, his hair was pushed off of his face, though some of it had slipped from its position, and he blew a cloud of smoke from his lips as he looked over to the bar. You thought, I wish I was invisible. You thought, I hope he thinks I look as good as I think he does.

Either way, you wished your were busy with something else, so you didn’t look like you were blatantly staring at him. It seemed to late for a regret like that one, though. He had seen you, and was making it no secret. You were sure if anyone was paying attention, they could see his eyes blatantly take in your figure, or as much of it as he could with the bar covering you. He turned to the group where they were picking out somewhere to sit, and shouted something over to one of them. The boy looked younger than he was, and laughed at whatever comment he made, nodding and turning to say something to another one of them.

Then he started walking towards you. The crowds of people seemed less of a problem to him than they had been for you, as he simply walked calmly on his path to the bar. When someone stumbled into that path, he didn’t seem to notice them at all, letting them tumble their way back out of it. The ease seemed attractive to you, though you guessed it was because you wished you had that same sense of confidence. Just like when you were growing up alongside him, you had to remind yourself he only had the confidence that you didn’t because he was a man. Boys were always brought up to think of themselves as important, even if they weren’t from the city. Girls, well, that was less of a concern with girls.

By the time he reached the bar, the bitterness you had felt at the back of your throat for most of your childhood had returned. You suddenly wished he wasn’t there, that you’d never had to of seen him again. Especially not when I’ve spent all day thinking of my lack of success. Seeing him in his fancy suit with his fancy friends felt like salt was being poured into your wound.

He grinned as he reached the bar, looking you up and down again. When his eyes met yours again, you held back the pride of having him look so blatantly and pleasantly surprised at the way you looked. You made yourself raise your eyebrows expectantly instead. “What can I get you, sir?” You repeated the question as you’d said it earlier. That way you knew he couldn’t interpret it a different way. Is it different? You weren’t sure. Your ceiling back home was leaking, you had to find another job so you could get it fixed, and you were covering on the bar for someone – you didn’t want to think about how much more of you it would take to start chasing him again.

He tilted his head at you, his grin not faltering. “That’s cold.”

You remembered how you’d smiled at the man before, the smile that said ‘I-am-just-here-to-get-payed-and-I-don’t-get-paid-enough-to-deal-with-you’ and mirrored that action again. “Is there a problem, sir?”

A hint of insecurity was beginning to reach his eyes. His grin slipped just slightly before he lifted it back to its original place. “You haven’t forgotten me. I saw how you looked at me when I walked in.”

You didn’t know how to seem cold when he questioned you. My ceiling is leaking, I am looking for another job to fix it, and I’m covering the bar for someone. I don’t have time to be messing around with him. You sighed heavily, letting him get the better of you as he always seemed set on doing. “Oh yes,” you rose your voice so he couldn’t not realise you weren’t serious, “I remember now, you’re Johnny, we were in the same hometown.” You stared blankly at him. “Ready for your drinks now?”

He quirked a brow at you. “Having a bad day?”

The bitterness in the back of your throat tasted like heat and the aftertaste of whisky. “Perhaps I simply don’t like strangers making snide observations of me.”

The grin fell from his face completely, replaced by a look of offended annoyance. “Good thing I’m not a stranger then, isn’t it, ___?”

“You may as well be.”

“I know everything about you. A stranger would know nothing about you.”

You scoffed. “I see getting your own business didn’t make you any smarter.” You glanced around to check no one else was at the bar waiting on you while you bickered. If I lost this job…There was no one but you and Johnny. “And it would be knew.” You corrected.

He recoiled at the comment, and opened his mouth to speak again before pausing. “You’re right.” His expression turned into one of mock understanding. “The girl I knew would never be as cold as you are.”

The comment stung, digging underneath your skin to wait there until you needed substance to be angry with yourself later. “The boy I knew…” you searched his face to try and find any semblance of how he used to be. The boy you’d chased was long gone, that seemed clear as day to see. Seeing it so up-close to you hurt more than it had when you’d simply pictured it. “What happened to him?”

Johnny shrugged. “He grew up.”

“And became a rich man. I suppose that’d change a person easily enough.”

He laughed lightly, nodding. “Only for the better.”

“I’ve met enough rich men to prove you wrong there.”

“Maybe,” his grin had returned. Though it wasn’t like his old smiles used to be, it was still pleasant to see when it lit up his features as it did. “What about your friends, huh?”

Confusion became evident on your features. “What about them?”

He bevelled his head at you. “Are rich women much the same as rich men? I always assumed they were worse, since their money’s being held by the rich men.”

You laughed. “I would certainly be worse if a man was holding my money.” You paused for a moment before shaking your head and laughing again. “You think I’m friends with rich women?”

“Well, rich women tend to convene together.”

You shook your head in disbelief. “Tell me Johnny,” you began, placing your forearms on the bare in front of him, “why would I be working in a place like this if I was rich?”

He seemed stunted in his point. He shook his head and searched his face to catch any impression that you were joking. “You don’t,” he paused, as if thinking his original words would be too offensive, “you don’t have money?”

I have a leaking ceiling and I’m looking for another job, and now I’m covering work for someone, though you didn’t want him to know about all of that. “I don’t know where you got that impression.” You made yourself laugh again, trying to swallow how hard the reality of how stuck you were as it began to sink back in. Talking to Johnny had almost been enough for you to forget it for a moment. Though only a short moment.

His features had become drawn and serious. Not even that rang a bell of recognition for you. “You must be alright for money if the only job you need is a bar maid, though.” He suggested. You wondered whose conscience he was trying to subdue.

Something inside of you was begging with you not to tell him that that wasn’t true. It pleaded with you to agree, or to brush it off. To do anything that would mean he didn’t figure out your financial situation. You weren’t sure you could handle that kind of embarrassment today. So you only laughed and shrugged again. “I guess so.” You made sure the smile didn’t slip, and hoped that it looked real enough for him to note see through it. You breathed in deeply again, before he could continue speaking. “So, what can I get you?”

Disappointment clouded his features for a moment before he hummed. “Five whiskeys, please.” Even thinking about the price of the order made you feel far poorer than you already were. When the bitterness rose up again, you made yourself force it back. He worked for his money, you thought, but then, so do I.

You put his order onto a tray, “Should I bring this over to your table?”

“No, no,” he took the tray away from where your hands rested on it. “I’ve got it. Thank you.” He dropped the money onto the bar-top. You thought even that much cash would be close to how much you needed to get your ceiling fixed. And he has that to throw away on drinks. The bitterness had the same aftertaste as the overbearing smell of the whisky did.

He only came back over to the bar ten minutes before Ada was supposed to be back. There was a playful smile on his lips that moved up to meet his eyes, and you tried to make yourself copy the action. You failed, only succeeding in smiling a tight-lipped, half-formed look of vague disinterest in his direction.

The expression didn’t go unnoticed. “Too long a shift?” He joked.

If he was still the same Johnny he used to be, you’d say something like, ‘oh, god, you don’t know the half of it!’ But he wasn’t. There were things your pride couldn’t let you confide in him, especially not in a place like this. So you made yourself shrug, and hoped Ada would be late getting back. “I wouldn’t believe anyone if they told me they enjoyed working.”

Johnny laughed, and placed the tray of empty whisky glasses onto the bar-top. A few of glasses clinked when they tapped together. You glanced over at the clock. “Would you believe me?”

“I meant working class people, not businessmen in fancy suits.” You chided.

He nodded in mock understanding. “Businessmen work quite a lot, you know.”

You shrugged. “So do working class people.”

“You don’t.” He grinned.

‘Oh, god, you don’t know the half of it!’ You forced a laugh to pass your lips. “Being around men like you makes up for however much time you spend tucked away in an office.” You tried to sound teasing, but the aftertaste of bitterness lingered on your words.

He didn’t seem to note any animosity, only laughing with you. “When does your shift end?” He questioned, flattening his palms against the bar-top and looking at you expectantly.

Something about the way his hair was falling into his face, with his head tilted and jaw tightened, made you fell the angry butterflies in your stomach soften enough to flutter. He didn’t look like he used to. Despite his words, and the way his brown eyes looked dark enough to be considered smouldering in the golden light, you made yourself raise your eyes in disapproval. “Flirting with a bar maid? Is that allowed for a man in your position?”

He chuckled, and dropped his head for a moment. When he looked up, you felt a blush reach your cheeks as if you were still the same young girl with a silly crush on the boy who seemed so much greater than you could ever be. “Anything’s allowed for a man in my position.”

You scoffed, “I see your confidence hasn’t faltered.”

“I see your unwillingness to answer questions hasn’t faltered.”

Shrugging, you moved to flatten your own palms on the bar-top. Though the space between your heights seemed infinite, you tilted your head up only slightly. “I don’t have to answer your questions.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“Why?”

“Maybe they’re uninteresting.”

It was his turn to scoff. “Flirting’s too mundane for you?”

“I am a bar maid.”

Johnny hummed. “Are you now?”

You recoiled slightly, pulling your hands off of the bar-top and moving away from him. “What kind of question is that?”

“An interesting one.”

Shaking your head, you looked to the door that lead into the room before the staff exit. There was no sign of movement there. Ada was running three minutes late. Somehow that made you grateful. “An uneducated one, you mean.”

“You don’t dress like a bar maid. Or pour drinks like you do it regularly.” He pointed out.

You sighed. “Why’s that any of your concern?”

He furrowed his brows. “Because if you’re not a bar maid, that means you lied.”

“So? It’s not like you need me to tell you the truth.”

“What was that promise we made?” He asked, leaning further onto the bar-top. “That we’d never lie to one another?”

You scoffed again. “Well, we were nine. I can’t keep all the promises I made to everyone when I was that age.”

He fell into a vague silence. You weren’t sure if you were supposed to say something to fill the empty space, though you couldn’t think of anything. Not being able to have the right words to say to him made you feel strange, almost inept.

“Well, whatever it is that you do,” he began, “when does your shift end?”

You laughed, half in disbelief and half in surprise at the surrealism of what seemed to be happening. “When the bar closes.” He hummed in acceptance of your answer. “Why do you need to know?”

“I wanted to take you to the pictures.”

You laughed. “I’m sure that’s what you wanted to do.” You teased, still feeling the anticipation of Ada showing up despite knowing Johnny had already figured you out.

Johnny raised his hands in mock surrender. “You know me. I’m nothing if not a gentleman.”

I don’t, you wanted to say. Instead you made yourself smile the same smile that was a size too small for you. “As are all businessmen.”

He took the edge in your voice as comedy, and laughed loudly again, before shaking his head softly. “You know, it’s quite dangerous for a lady to be walking home in the dark at the same time as drunken men.”

You made a noise somewhere between a scoff and an amused chuckle. “Well, thank you for your concern, sir, but I’m sure I’ll be just fine.”

He didn’t laugh. His features grew drawn in seriousness as he stared at you. “Do you not want me to walk you home?”

The idea of him seeing the very exterior of your building, with its brittle bricks and boarded up windows where different flats had been shut off, made embarrassment flood through you. Though you were sure even if he happened to miss those things in the dark, he would want to come in for a drink. Then he would see the old furniture, the leaking ceiling, and he would know you had lied to him more than once.

You scoffed at him. “I think your intentions might be worse than you’re implying.”

A grin turned his lips up again. The sight of him relaxing enough to joke made the nerves in your stomach cool slightly. “Would you want them any other way?”

Humming, you saw Ada appear in the doorway. She offered you an apologetic smile, seeing as she was nearing fifteen minutes later than she had promised to be. You imagined the city at this time would be crowded to navigate on foot, so you only shook your head at her. Tapping your fingertips against the bar-top a few times, you offered Johnny a quizzical look before turning your back on him.

“Is your shift over?” He asked, following you along as you walked toward the gate that sectioned off the open area from the alcohol lining the shelves.

A breathy laugh passed your lips. “No,” you responded.

You passed out of the gate, passing Ada as you did. She paused, quirking a brow at Johnny following closely on your heels. Her hand found your wrist as she stopped you lightly in your tracks. “Everything alright?” She asked.

Smiling brightly, you nodded, moving to squeeze her hand, “He’s just an old friend.” You assured.

She studied him for a moment before releasing her grip. “Give me a shout if you need me, alright?”

You smiled at her one last time before moving to make your way back to your small office. Johnny stuck himself to your side, and suddenly getting through the dense crowds of people didn’t seem such a task. There was an energy of confidence radiating off of him that other people seemed to pick up easily enough, scampering out of his path as he walked. When you reached the closed wooden door of your office, you turned to look up at him.

“What are you doing?”

He smiled, tilting his head at you. “Maybe I’d like to see your real work-place.”

Scoffing, you began to push the door open, walking in with him close on your heels. “There you go with your false intentions again.”

Laughing, he stepped inside the small room. “So I’m the one that spends all day tucked away?” You glared over at him, though he only shrugged. “It’s like those fox holes you used to get your foot caught in back home.”

“You used to fall in them, too.” You defended.

He shrugged, walking over to your desk and looking down at the papers discarded there. “You do the books for this place?”

You tilted your head at him, raising your eyebrows expectantly. “Don’t think I have the intelligence for it?”

He smiled, lifting the latest paper you’d last been working, eyes drifting over the words before he looked back at you. “There’s nothing you don’t have the intelligence for.”

His words flattered you more than any of the times people had called you pretty. Strangely, you wished he would notice more of your skills in the work laying out on the table, though you knew that was little enough to show for your intelligence.

When Johnny began walking towards you, you found your breath growing baited. For a moment, it didn’t matter that you didn’t know him as well as you used to. It didn’t even matter that your ceiling was leaking at home, or that you were looking for a second job to try and get it fixed, or that you supposed to be working right now. Even though if I lost this job…

His eyes were searching your face for something. Whether that was hesitancy to kiss him, or a want to kiss him, you couldn’t tell. All you knew was that there was no hesitancy in your mind about him kissing you. Still, he seemed to have frozen in his position, only looking down at you, searching and searching for something you couldn’t see for yourself.

“Johnny,” you mumbled, his name feeling strange in your mouth, “get on with it.”

A grin met his features again. His hands came to cup your face, and for a moment the same searching look came back to him. You moved your own hands to grip the sides of his suit jacket, and tugged him closer. Close enough that you could feel his breath fanning across your face. There was the ever-light hint of whisky on his breath. That was the only thing you could find to dislike about his closeness to you.

When his lips finally met yours, you felt as if something inside of you was settling. Nothing else seemed to matter but the fact that you were finally kissing him. It felt unattached from the dreamy imaginations you’d had about the possibility of kissing him when you were younger. Then, you had always pictured his lips tasting like the candy he used to steal from the shop on the outskirts of the city, and you had pictured his hands feeling soft like the rose petals that grew in his parent’s garden. Now, his lips had the suggestion of whisky on them, mixed with the faintest memory of the cigarette he’d been smoking earlier. And his hands were rougher, and they seemed to shroud your entire face as he cupped it.

The girl version of you would probably have been disappointed at the idea of kissing someone who wasn’t the Johnny she knew. Things, you supposed, had changed quite significantly since you’d moved into the city. And with as little experience – or even basic knowledge – that you’d had with romance, you decided you knew barely enough to know what a relationship was back then. Now, with Johnny’s hands mapping out over your body, something in you decided that this could at least be a learning point. If not of love, then of affection.

When his lips left yours, a flood of disappointment moved through you. As much as a heavy whine wanted to pass from your lips, your pride wouldn’t let it, your lips locking closed. There was amusement lighting up his features, and no matter how hard you tried to force it you couldn’t bring up that bitter feeling again.

You wondered if you should whine again, or if you should complain, or maybe even just pull away and stop playing a game that was so childish in retrospect. At whatever glare had come into your eye, Johnny cocked his head. “Is there a problem?”

You pushed his hands away from you, scoffing as you did. “You’re a tease.”

He hummed, curling his arms around your waist and nodding. “If you don’t want me to tease,” he started, dipping closer to you again, “tell me what you want me to do.”

Drawing away from him slightly, you tried to study him like he had with you. You didn’t know what he’d been looking for, so in turn you didn’t know what you were looking for in him. You felt amusement mingling with excitement inside of you, and only when it met a burst of confidence did you let yourself speak. “Do whatever you’ve been thinking about doing to me all night.”

Another boisterous laugh left your lips. He spun you both around, turning and beginning to walk you both away from the closed door. When you felt the edge of the desk touch the tops of your thighs, you let him lift you. As one hand held you steady against him, the other swiped papers out of the way to make room to set you down. Part of you wanted to be anxious about the work getting muddled, about whatever work you’d already done in the day being wasted, but you couldn’t think about anything other than the way Johnny attached his lips to your neck. Flattening your palms against his chest, you let him begin to push your skirt higher up your legs. When you felt it bunch at your waist, you finally stopped biting back the whine that was sitting impatiently at the back of your throat.

He unravelled himself from you for a moment, “Quite bold of you to assume I’ve been thinking about you all night.”

You whined impatiently again, feeling his hands move higher up your thighs. “Of course you have. I’m a delight.”

He laughed, dropping his head into the crook of your neck to leave more kisses in the bare space there. When you felt his fingers hook into the sides of your underwear, a desperate moan tumbled past your lips. Johnny offered you a mock wary glance. “You’ve gotta be quieter than that if you’re gonna let me do whatever I want.”

You tried to shrug off the words. “I didn’t say whatever you wanted. I said whatever you’d been thinking about.”

“Same thing.” He pulled your underwear the rest of the way down your legs, stopping only to give you a quick glance as you kicked them off. A vague feeling of insecurity came over you then, with your skirt bunched into a roll of fabric at your hips and your underwear discarded on the floor. The feeling wasn’t given very long to grow, with Johnny crouching down in front of the desk shortly after.

There was a look in his eyes that told you he had a million teasing remarks sitting on the tip of his tongue for the sight that greeted him. Though he remained silent as he gripped the backs of your knees and tugged you closer to the edge of the desk. A surprised gasp left your mouth before you had the chance to recover from the shock. You wanted to say that the light chuckle that left his lips was because of something else – some joke his friends had said earlier that he’d only just caught on to – but you knew that wasn’t possible.

Johnny didn’t seem too keen on giving you a clear amount of time to overthink anything. You placed your flattened palms against the desk as he attached his mouth to your heat, curling your lip to bite back the moans that begged to leave your mouth. The noise from outside of the small office seemed distant and drowned out now that all you could fully focus on was the feeling of Johnny’s lips against you. It’s been too long, that’s all it is. Though you wondered if it was really that, or just something too difficult to accept. That maybe this was just another of Johnny’s many skills.

As the coil already began to start forming in the pit of your stomach, you were coming to the vexed realisation that that was going to be the case again. Oddly, even in such an intimate position of him having his head between your thighs, you felt that moving to thread your fingers through his hair would be too much. You wanted to think more about that, but the coil in your stomach was shifting into a pressure that made you try and stutter a warning to Johnny.

But all of a sudden the feeling stopped altogether, and he was pulling away from you slightly. Still with his knees against the floor, he bevelled his head up at you. Your head was spinning too much for you to be sure what expression was casting across your features, but you almost sure it was one of childish irritation. “Problem?” He questioned, running his hands up your thighs from your knees until his fingertips were dancing over your core.

You tried to push your hips forward to gain something more, but the short space you had on the desk prevented you. “Is that you’ve been thinking about?”

“Seeing your face when you start to beg?” He grinned, “Yeah.”

Sighing, you shook your head at him. “I’m starting to think you’re just a bad person nowadays.”

He pulled his fingertips away from you, bringing them to his lips before he spoke again. “Well, just this once, then,” he began, pressing a few light kisses to the inside of your thighs, “I’ll give in and, well, you know – be nice.”

“How kind.”

And then the room felt like it had gone underwater again. The noise that had previously just become loud background volume had turned back into distant, dreamy chatter again. Small moans fought past your mouth, but you reminded yourself of just how awful things would be if anyone caught you in this position. Well, I might finally speak to Sicheng. Nothing’s all bad. But the way Johnny moved his mouth against you made it difficult to think rationally about anything.

When the coil in your stomach began to push against you again, you imagined the worst; Johnny pulling away from you again, or maybe even someone wandering in. By the time you felt the coil snap, you were too distracted by the euphoria of it to think of anything else. It’s just been too long…but you weren’t even sure that by the time your bitterness for Johnny reappeared you would be able to say he had made you feel that good for any reason other than sheer talent.

He remained silent for a few moments, kissing the inside of your thighs softly as they shook slightly in the aftermath. When he rose to stand up, he placed your underwear back at your feet, pulling them up until they reached where your thighs met the table. You pulled in a breath to steady yourself and then let your legs drop onto the ground, lifting your underwear up until they were back into their correct place.

Johnny was looking at you with his head tilted. You glanced over at the old clock that hung above the door and saw it was two minutes until the under-boss for Sicheng would come and throw everyone out. You usually tried to get out five minutes or so before this happened – as did all the women – to give them a safe head-start. Thinking about walking home with packs of drunk men staggering around in every direction, with the high likelihood of rain, sounded like the last thing you wanted to do.

“You gonna let me drive you home or am I supposed to walk you back?” Johnny asked, pulling your attention back to him.

You made yourself laugh, even if the question didn’t directly suggest itself to be a joke. “I guess I’ll let you drive. Only because I wouldn’t want you making two journeys for me.”

He hummed, pulling the door open and waiting for you to walk out in front of him. “You’re such a delight.” He teased, falling in behind you as you made your way through the packs of people. It felt odd that not one of the people crowded into this room seemed to have checked the time enough to try and get out before the rush. Maybe you were just trying to think of anything other than the way Johnny’s hand was resting on your hip so he didn’t lose you as you directed the two of you to the main door. When your hand caught the handle, you hesitated, wondering if you should scrap this entire idea and go out your usual way. Something about leaving the building without telling anyone you’d finished your shift felt unnatural, and made a small tremor of anxiety make itself present.

But there was too little time left for you to push your way back through the crowds to the opposite side of the room. Instead, you pushed the handle down and pulled the door open to let the smell of the city into the main bar room. After a while of living in the middle of Chicago, you got used to the collide of different smells surrounding you at all times. Though in that moment, with your head feeling fuzzy and your legs feeling half as strong as they usually did, everything seemed more present than it really was.

Especially the cold. The second Johnny gave you a light push outside, the icy air curled around your bare arms and the sliver of skin exposed where your socks didn’t meet the end of your skirt. Part of you wanted to push yourself further into where Johnny had wrapped his arm tightly around your waist, but the other – still far more dominant – part of you refused to look like you needed anything from him. Rain was falling harshly against the ground, splashing up to greet your grey socks and darken in shade.

No matter how much you wanted to feel like you were entirely governing the moment between you and Johnny, you couldn’t do much more than let him guide you in whatever direction you needed to take to reach his car. You took the chance to glance up at him, and despite the lack of light, you could tell he still looked just as good as he had when he’d walked into the bar. His hair was growing damp from the rain now, as you imagined yours was, too. But more strands were starting to fall into his face, and he was looking straight ahead with the few directing lights shining in his eyes. He doesn’t look like he used to. Somehow that didn’t seem too important anymore.

He opened the car door for you, grinning tiredly as he gestured you inside. You didn’t know whether to laugh or thank him. If he was the same Johnny you used to be friends with, you would have just laughed and slapped his hand away from the car door. Now that you were both outside, in the real world, the bitterness had transformed into your usual non-purposeful nerves around the businessmen that came into the bar daily.

“Thank you,” you mumbled quickly, shifting in your seat as he shut the door for you. Before he walked to his side of the car, he offered you a quizzical look and then a polite smile. The same polite smile you’d offer a stranger if they had just thanked you for doing something kind for them. Your chest felt drawn and tight.

When he started to navigate his way away from the other swarm of cars beginning to come back to life after being sat in a parking spot all night, you began to try and articulate an excuse. Or think of another street you knew well enough to tell Johnny that that’s where you lived. It had to be somewhere nicer than the one you lived on now, but not so nice that it would seem implausible for you to afford it mostly by yourself.

Johnny turned out onto the main street by the bar you had been working out for a little over a year. A street you had walked up and down a hundred times. “So, where am I going?” He looked across at you, a few strands of hair reaching far enough down his forehead to begin to cover one of his eyes.

You hadn’t been given enough time to think of an excuse that would work well enough to go past Johnny. Instead you only rattled off your address and hung your head, too nervous to see the look on his face as he realised. Whether that was realised you had not-so-directly been lying to him or that you were poorer than he had first imagined, you didn’t know. All you knew for sure was how businessmen got when they were around people with less money than them. You didn’t want to think of Johnny looking at you like that.

The rest of the drive passed in silence. Not an awkward silence, but in the few sneak glances you took at Johnny you could only see him focused ahead on the road. Part of you was surprised that he even knew his way to your street, as you could safely assume he’d never been there before. The rain was hitting the roof of the car loudly, though you found yourself more entranced with the people rushing along the streets outside.

The car passed one of the larger shops in the city, with it’s ‘open,’ sign still high in the window. In the window away from the door, there was a sign that read, ‘Help Wanted.’ A small gleam of hope lifted into your chest. For once, you wanted to feed into the idea that luck was on your side. That hope translated quickly into worry. Worry that you wouldn’t get the job, or that if you didn’t make Johnny stop the car right there and get straight out to apply for it then it would be gone in the morning – even the worry that the other good things that had happened through the day were beginning to make you delusional to see what you wanted.

You stayed silent and let Johnny drive you the rest of the way home. When the car slowed to a stop, part of you didn’t want to get out, in fear of the dream-like haze of the day disappearing. Getting out of the car, closing the door on Johnny – it felt all too much like waking up from some sweet dream. I just don’t want to get out into the rain, that’s all. But lying to yourself seemed to be getting harder and harder.

Pushing the car door open, you tried to think of something to say. A goodbye, maybe, or maybe a flirty suggestion of seeing him again. If it was still the Johnny you had known, maybe you would make that joke. But the man sat in the car with you wasn’t.

When your pause had become awkward and unnaturally long enough for him to tell you didn’t know what to say, Johnny breathed in sharply. “Will I get to see you around, then? Or do I have to charm you into talking to me every time I see you?” He asked, making himself smile to soothe your evident nerves.

It didn’t work, but you appreciated his effort. “Maybe I like to see you make an effort.”

He laughed then, and you wanted to feel confident that it was genuine. The rain was falling harder. “Well, I better get used to it, then.”

A grin turned your lips upwards. Even if it didn’t feel like you were talking to the Johnny you used to know, the Johnny you had followed all the way to the city for the slightest hope of doing as well as he had, you thought you might be able to get used to this new one. “You better.” You assured him, pushing the car door the rest of the way open.

The light feeling had returned to your chest as you hurried to your door. An odd sense of gratitude was in your stomach that he hadn’t made any mention of your living space. You hadn’t gone back to the back room to get your jacket, so you gave morning you a congratulations for forgetting to take her key out of her breast pocket after leaving the house. Johnny offered you one more wave before he drove off, rain water rising from the floor and spraying up as you stood in your doorway to watch.

When he was gone and the door closed behind you, you let out a deep breath you hadn’t known you were holding. Reality was sitting at your kitchen table waiting for you to accept her, as much as you didn’t want to. You dropped your key onto the bowl that held it on the kitchen side, and looked at the floor. The rusty metal bucket had overflowed, water just starting to tip over the side.

You knew you should empty it out and put it back, but looking up, the small leak seemed to have grown larger. The man did the say the ceiling was at risk. You pulled out one of the two chairs at your kitchen table and sat down, staring at the forming puddle. Where earlier in the day irritation and bitterness had been rising to press against your chest, now there was only faint emptiness and a perpetual longing for something you couldn’t recognise. It made you think of the papers thrown all over the floor of your office back at work. It made you think of Johnny, in a strange way. It made you think of the help wanted sign in the window of the shop. Tomorrow, you promised yourself. When you got that second job tomorrow, things would only be on the up.

///

           By the time you got to work the next day, you were late. Or you would have been if Ada hadn’t told the under-boss that you had an appointment to be at that morning. You took that as a thank you for her being late back the other day, and a good thank you at that. Though that had been the only positive for the day. Applying for jobs always set you too on edge, made you too nervous. I’ve done it now, but it was the waiting you hated most.

           The rest of the day you had spent tucked away in your office, picking up your papers and re-organising them while ignoring the growing want to see Johnny that was spreading through you. You had gone a year and a half without so much as speaking a single word to him, you were sure you could go a few weeks.

           And yet, you couldn’t stop thinking about him. For the entire day as you finished the work you hadn’t done yesterday and the work you needed to get done today, you were thinking about him. From the way his hands felt on you to the way his lips felt on you. Even down to the way he spoke. All of it had made you feel almost like you had your friend back, only he was a little different. Maybe you just felt like you had a friend again.

           He showed up again when you had almost finished your day’s work. You had paused midway through writing a sentence to try and guess if the pattering noise you heard was rain or something else. It had made dread fill up within you, imagining the bucket filling up and soaking into your floorboards again. Though, partially, the blame for that is on me. But if it happened again, you didn’t know if the floorboards would hold steady or start to rot.

           Then you heard a knock on the door of your office, and out of fear of it being the under-boss coming in to press more about your late appearance you only yelled back a quick, “Come in.” And then he was walking straight into your office, hesitating only to see if there was another chair somewhere. When there wasn’t, he settled to lean against the walking, kicking the door shut absentmindedly behind him.

           You rose your eyebrows at him, like your natural instinct when you saw him in any mundane setting was to question it. “What’re you doing here?”

           He didn’t laugh in response. His lips didn’t even twitch upwards in a grin he couldn’t quite suppress. The only feeling you could distinguish from him was light vexation. “Doyoung mentioned that you went around there looking for a job.”

           It surprised you that Doyoung and Johnny even had any ties to one another. Their lines of work didn’t seem as if they’d cross at any point, though you supposed most men in any kind of business would seek each other out to grow their circle of affluent friends. Bitterness was resting in your chest again.

           “And?”

           Johnny made a face. “And why do you need another job?”

           You dropped your pen down onto the desk. “Do I need to tell you every time I consider making a decision now?”

           “We’re friends, aren’t we? That’s what friends do.”

           You thought about the events of yesterday and wondered what the answer to that was. “What do you want me to say?” You asked after a moment.

           He breathed in sharply. “I don’t know. Tell me why you need another job or something. This one seems perfectly fine.”

           Perfectly fine, but not enough. Nothing ever is. You didn’t want to have to tell him that though. But thinking of lies on the spot had never been your strong point. Now, sitting there right in front of an attractive stranger-who-isn’t-a-stranger, your skills seemed to have gotten even worse. “I need the money.” You muttered finally, keeping your voice low enough for you to hope that he wouldn’t hear it at all.

           The room was too small and the noise coming from the main room was too low. He heard, made a face of acceptance, and then fell into silence. You didn’t know whether his lack of response was a good sign, that maybe your work ethic had surprised him into silence. Though you could only guess his thought process was one of pity. The thought made you cringe.

           “You can’t get a job there.” He sounded apologetic.

           You looked up at him, screwing your face up. “What do you mean?”

           He loosened up, stepping away from the wall and further into the room. “Dirty money.”

           A light laugh passed your lips then. “I’m pretty sure all money you earn in Chicago is dirty.”

           He shrugged, though a hesitant smile was beginning to light his features up. “The job’s not for anyone who won’t be…you know, making the money directly.”

           You huffed. “Why’d he advertise it in the window, then?”

           “Usually everyone’s assumption is that every job in Chicago is a little bit illegal, at least.”

           Nodding, you picked your pen back up. All on the up. You didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. If it was happening to anyone else, you thought you might find it funny. But the leaking ceiling, the looking for a second job, the never being able to afford anything other than necessities – that was your life. You couldn’t laugh at it until it wasn’t anymore.

           “Why do you need the money?” Johnny asked quietly, the floorboards creaking as he moved closer to you.

           You laughed bitterly, not letting yourself look up at him in case there were tears in your eyes. “You know, the normal stuff. And…” you didn’t want to say it.

           “And?” He pressed.

           “God, I don’t know.” You sighed, suddenly feeling all too suffocated, pushing your chair away from the desk. “I’ve been looking for another job for a while now.” You murmured, hoping it would explanation enough for your sudden drop in interest to the conversation.

           Johnny felt back into a silence that you could only describe as pensive. The room itself seemed to still in its wait for his answer. The only sign that the moment hadn’t completely frozen in time was the noise and movement coming from the main room.

           He cleared his throat, swiping away invisible dust from his hands before mumbling a quick, “I could help you out.”

           You were shaking your head before he finished speaking. Often times, handouts either came because of pity or in expectancy of being payed back. You wanted neither of those things. “I’m not taking handouts.” You declared, picking your pen back up to provide some security for yourself.

           For a minute he looked hesitant. Really, truly hesitant – like he didn’t know if he should say what he wanted to. In a moment of boldness, he let the words slip out. “What if it wasn’t a handout?”

           “What?”

           “What if you, sort of, worked for me?”

           You put the pen back down. The action was beginning to feel repetitive. “I thought you didn’t want me working with dirty money directly.”

           “Who said my money was dirty?” You scoffed, looking back to the desk as he sighed. “I didn’t mean, well, I didn’t mean working, as in typical working.”

           Scepticism showed on all of your features as it ran through you. “Get to the point, Johnny.”

           The same hesitation came back to him. “There’s a lot of, parties, and dinners and stuff when you’re in business.” He started. You nodded and gestured for him to continue. “Everyone brings someone with them, but I, well, I don’t.” He went silent.

           “Are you asking me to come to dinner parties with you?”

           “Sort of.”

           “And you’d pay me for it?”

           “Yes.” It was a statement but he made it sound closer to a question.

           You breathed out heavily, the confusion making your head throb. “Why would you do that? Couldn’t you just ask a girl on a date?”

           He shrugged, as if making up a reason was too much for him to be bothered with. “I’d buy you nice dresses for them, if you wanted. You could come spend some nights at my house. Maybe, if you liked it, you wouldn’t have to work here at all.”

           “Johnny,��� you mumbled, standing up, “I really don’t understand. What would I be doing?”

           His arms curled around your waist. “Pretending,” he said, “pretending that you’re in love with me and that we’re one of those icy affluent couples.”

           “Why pretend when you could go out and make the real thing for yourself?”

           “How would that help you?”

           “You’re doing this for me?”

           He shrugged again. “Well, half and half.”

           Despite yourself, you laughed lightly, dropping your head against his chest. “I’d be getting payed, like I get payed here? To go to fancy dinners?”

           “If you needed me to.”

           “What does that mean?”

           “Well, you know, if you spend some time at my place and liked it, you could just move in.”

           Part of you wanted to recoil, though you stayed in your spot. “That seems like a quick decision.” You huffed. “It all sounds very nice, Johnny, but what happens when you actually meet someone you love? Where would I go?”

           “Can’t you just let me answer that question if we get there?” Something about the ‘if’ gave you a childish hope.

           This is ridiculous. I don’t even know how to make conversation. What a stupid idea. But your ceiling was going to cave in. Even if it didn’t, it was still leaking. You had been looking for a second job for far too long now. You hated the smell of whisky and men packed into bars.

           You breathed out deeply, half in a sigh and half in exasperation at yourself. “Well, things really can’t get any worse.” You untangled yourself from him, searching his face again before answering. “I accept.”

           His lips lifted, the same amusement from the day before coming back to his eyes. The butterflies in your stomach fluttered nervously. I’m ridiculous. How stupid can I be? “You accept?” He grinned.

           “Sure. Why not?”

///

           The first dinner was three days later. You had been coming and going to your work at the bar as usual, too nervous to accept that Johnny’s offer had been real and not some desperate fever dream. In those three days, he’d come by for a few moments at least on each, usually muttering the same comment about you not needing the job anymore. You never had an answer other than a shrug, too embarrassed to ask, ‘is this real? Is this really happening? Have I really gotten lucky?’

           His car was waiting outside for you when you left, just as he had promised earlier in the day that it would be. When you climbed inside, taking a nervous glance at him like you would a stranger you got into a car with, he chuckled lightly. Sometimes you wondered if he looked at you as a stranger or as someone he knew. Or maybe something in-between.

           “I wanted to get you a dress.” He told you, driving you down the main-street in a direction you hadn’t been in before. It seemed uncomfortably surprising to you to see the lines of stores you had never had the money to even consider going into before. It was even more uncomfortable to imagine spending someone else’s money in them.

           “Are you sure?” You asked, though you weren’t sure why. If he decided he wasn’t, you were back to the starting line.

           “Why wouldn’t I be?”

           “I’m not seeing how beneficial this is to you. I’m not giving you anything back.”

           He grinned over at you, laughing softly as he moved one of his hands to grip your thigh. “Would you believe me if I said the pleasure of your company is enough benefit?”

           Scoffing, you shook your head, looking back out the window. “I just might, since I’m such a delight and all.”

           Laughing again, he slowed the car to a stop. When you looked up at the shop, you couldn’t stop yourself from gaping. From the outside, you could tell the inside was nicer than your house. And a single dress inside was probably worth more than everything you owned.

           You wanted to ask him if he was sure again, but instead you just let him come round and open the car door for you. You slipped yourself out, feeling his arm curl around your waist as soon as your feet hit the floor. He walked you both up to the door, and in an odd way you felt like you were about to be turned away. In your clothes, looking at the glossy interior of the building, you felt out of place and awkward. Like everyone would be able to tell the second they saw you.

           The woman at the desk smiled brightly as you approached. “What can I help you both with today?” She asked, smiling again. You felt surprise purely at her customer service. No one at the bar was payed enough to put that much effort into their delivery.

           Johnny sensed your lack of confidence in answering. “We have a reservation under Seo.” He told her.

           She nodded, still smiling, and looked down at the books, flipping around a few pages before looking back up. “Of course, sir.” He moved then, walking you both backwards.

           He grinned at the surprise on your face. You felt like a child in a playground far too big for them. He gestured to the door furthest away from the entrance. “That’s the ladies dressing room. Tell them you have the Seo reservation.”

           You nodded. “Where are you going?”

           Laughing, he gestured to a different door. “To the men’s dressing room.”

           “Right.” You shook your head.

           He pressed a chaste kiss to your forehead, shoving you lightly in the direction of the ladies dressing room. “Don’t be nervous.” He assured, turning away from you and towards the other door.

           You paused anxiously, tapping your knuckles quietly against the wooden door. The speed at which it sprung open in front of you almost made you stumble back. But the woman standing on the inside was smiling brightly, and there was something in the curves of age on her face that made a strange part of you feel safe, like her face itself was friendly.

           “Seo reservation?” She asked, moving aside to let you walk in.

           “Uh, yeah.” You answered, looking at your hands as you tangled your fingers together nervously.

           She smiled softly at you, the most typical way of showing pity. She caught your hands and pulled you in the direction of rows upon rows of dresses of all different fabrics and shapes. “Is this your first time here?” You nodded. “Do you know what your reservation says you’re getting today?” Johnny had failed to mention that, you shook your head. She laughed. “Well, you’re getting a dress for a dinner party, and another for today.”

           You didn’t even want to think about how much a single one of the dresses here would cost, let alone two. “Who, uh, who picks those?”

           She smiled softly again, giving you the same look you’d give to a child who had hurt themselves. “I’ve picked out some options for you to choose from.” You nodded, watching as she moved to a certain row and pointed them out. All of them were prettier than all of the things you owned.

           It took you longer than it should have to pick two of the dresses. Every one seemed too nice to see put back on a shelf somewhere until some other rich woman decided that was pretty enough for her. Thinking of ‘some other rich woman’ was also odd, though for different reasons.

           Putting the dress on was the strangest thing you’d done in a while. Stepping into the fabric felt like accidentally stumbling into Johnny’s world. You felt inept, and the tightness of the dress only served to make you feel suffocated. Though the woman gushed a thousand different compliments as she saw you finally dressed. You wondered whether that was part of the job, or genuine joy at seeing you out of your own clothes that now seemed impossibly drab in comparison.

           When it was finally time to leave, the woman explained that the dresses would be payed for at the front desk. She handed you two price tags and wished you a nice day. You clutched the paper tightly in your hands, too scared to look at the price for either. The idea of having to add two numbers that you could only imagine were inconceivably high together was making your head hurt already.

           Johnny was already out by the time you were walking back to the front desk. His back was to your door, and he was busy throwing money down on the counter. You felt a desperate need to ask if he was sure again. But then, as he’d said himself, why wouldn’t he be? He didn’t seem like the type of person to not know what he was thinking. Unlike you, who couldn’t decide whether or not you were even okay with having two dresses bought for you. Even if I could never buy it for myself.

           He turned around when he heard your shoes on the floorboards. He breathed in sharply, and made a quiet humming sound as you got closer. Despite your wish to keep your head up high, the nerves drove you to drop your head as you reached him, handing him the paper price tags. He took a quick glance down at them both, placing them on the front desk before taking more money out and sliding it over to the woman.

           The ease in which he did it made you breathe in sharply. You weren’t sure if that was because of how much it was to throw away, or the innate attractiveness of the action. The memory of that day in your office was slowly coming back into your mind. A flush of heat was creeping up your neck to meet your cheeks.

           “Johnny?”

           He hummed as he looked down at you, slipping his arm around his waist as the woman handed you both back the clothes. “Yes?”

           “Where are we going now?” You asked, trying to keep your steps in line with his ones as he walked you both back outside.

           “Lunch, maybe. Do you want something to eat?” He asked, walking round to open the car door for you.

           After you’d settled back into your seat, you looked at him, curling your fingertips around the inward sides of his jacket. “Like back to your house?” You mumbled, feeling his free hand grip your thigh.

           A complacent grin turned his lips upwards as he cocked his head at you. “Do you think I have a café in my house?” He teased. You groaned, gripping the sides of his jacket tighter. He pressed a light kiss to your lips, moving away before you could deepen it. “You know I didn’t mean you have to sleep with me for money, right? Because that’d feel a little too much for me.”

           You laughed, shaking your head. “I promise I’m not looking to get payed for this.”

           There was an odd look in his eye for a fleeting second before it was replaced with amusement again. “As long as you promise.” You nodded, and he hummed in disapproval. “You have to use your words.”

           You paused, wondering how long you could hold out if you decided not to say it. You didn’t decide to test it out. “I promise.” Then the warmth of his body was replaced with the cold air and he was moving back around to his side of the car. You slipped your legs inside properly and shut the door, hoping to close out the promise of more rain.

           The drive back was more excruciating that you had wished it would be. Even staring out the window at the passing of new buildings wasn’t enough to keep you distracted from the weight of Johnny’s hand on your thigh. Whenever you stole desperate glances over at him, he seemed entirely unbothered, face blank and eyes staring forward. Rain was beginning to patter against the roof, though for once it didn’t worry you. It only felt like background noise. You barely noticed when the car stopped moving, too focused on the focused look on Johnny’s face. It felt stupid, and verging on childish, to be so enamoured with the simplest things that he did.

           For a moment after he stopped driving, he caught your eyes, tilting his head at you. He was searching again, looking for something that he didn’t seem to be able to find. In a strange way, it felt a lot like you were doing the same. He pushed the door on his side open and slipped himself out into the rain. You mirrored his action, though he got to your side before the door swung open properly. He caught it before it could slam into him, cocking his head at you and quirking a brow.

           “Sorry,” you mumbled, letting him offer his hand to help you out. Whenever you’d been caught in rain before, it hadn’t seemed of any importance at all. Now, wearing a dress that cost more than you were willing to think about, an anxious need to be somewhere dry was overcoming you.

           Johnny didn’t seem to have the same concern. His pace was almost leisurely, his arm curled around your waist as seemed his favourite resting place. You couldn’t particularly complain about the offhanded affection anymore, the warmth in his hold far nicer than the biting cold of the outside air.

           If you had been gaping up at the exterior of his house, the inside was almost enough to knock you off your feet. It was nicer than any house you’d been in before, let alone your own. The hall that opened straight from the front door was decorated with golden-painted wooden furniture and ornate fixtures that made your picture of the price tags from today look like child’s play. You swallowed thickly, suddenly self-conscious of every movement you made against the marble of the floor. Everything seemed impossibly fragile, even if rationally it wasn’t. The idea of brushing against any of the items in just the hall made you nervous.

           “You like it?” Johnny asked quietly, curling his arms around your waist as you stared at the painting on the wall. He littered light kisses across your neck, and you tried to clear your head enough to answer.

           “It’s rich.” You mumbled.

           He exhaled a laugh, his breath fanning across the skin of your neck. “Rich in what?”

           “Being rich.”

           He shook his head, turning you towards him. “You’re alright.” He said quietly. “It’s okay.” He assured.

           You tilted your head at him. “I know.”

           “Do you know that you fit here?” He asked, cupping your face in his hands.

           You laughed lightly, shaking your head. “I don’t,” you mumbled, kissing his fingertips, “but I’m not sure I mind that.”

           He hummed, turning you in the direction of the stairs. “As long as you’re alright.” He mumbled, burying his face in the crook of your neck.

           Walking ahead of him felt unnatural, especially when you didn’t know what direction you were taking the two of you. But with his hands gripping tightly onto your hips and pushing you in the right direction, the nerves felt dulled and unnecessary. “You know I am,” you mumbled. His lips were still attached your neck, now leaving marks in their path downwards.

           When you stumbled into a closed door, Johnny detangled himself from you. The few seconds it took for him to push his bedroom door open seemed like too long to have his hands away from you. He tugged you into the room behind him, slamming his lips against yours as soon as you’d pushed the door shut behind you. His hands pushed your dress up as he spun you in a different direction. Your lack of awareness about your surroundings was something you knew you should be thinking about, but the feeling of his hands mapping out over your body seemed too good to waste with letting your mind wander anywhere else.

           When you felt the bed hit the back of your knees, you were reminded again of the day in your office. A flush of heat moved through you as you tightened your grip on Johnny, letting him lift you just enough to be able to put you down on the bed.

           The sheets were soft and silky underneath you, and even the mattress felt welcoming enough to cool any nerves left over under the surface. His mouth was travelling down your neck again, though this time he was pulling your dress down to get more access. The way he adjusted the fabric so carelessly caused your heart to rise into your throat, being able to imagine nothing but him throwing away that pile of money for nothing.

           He didn’t seem too intent on letting you have too much time to think. With his body hovering over yours and his hands getting closer to where you wanted them, your brain didn’t seem to want to work properly. You couldn’t particularly blame yourself. Small hums of his name were the only thing leaving your mouth, even if the strange fear of having another room full of people so close to you still lingered.

           Johnny moved further down your body, kissing over the satin fabric of your dress that was starting to feel all too suffocating as you laughed lightly at him. He grinned lazily, pushing your dress to bunch up at your waist like he had done with your skirt. You let your head fall back further into the comfort of the sheets and the pillows.

           He curled his fingers into your underwear, pulling them down your legs until you kicked them the rest of the way off. The familiarity of the action made your lips lift upwards. His lips pressed lingering kisses to the inside of your thighs, this time, he took his time to leave marks behind. Even if his actions weren’t supposed to be teasing, you couldn’t help but feel that way. A light whine left your mouth as you lifted your hips up from the mattress.

           Johnny only laughed, slipping his forearm over your hips and pushing them back down. He waited another moment, simply observing you as you huffed at him before he moved away from you. Rising up from the bed completely and sitting on the chair at the far side of the room.

           “You want me to touch you?” He asked, eyes full of that usual amusement. You swallowed the pride bubbling up in the back of your throat and nodded over at him. “Then earn it.” He declared.

           “Or I could just do everything myself.” You grumbled, drawing a laugh from him.

           “You could, but you won’t.”

           He was right. Your curiosity was too peaked to not even try to flatter him. “What do you want me to do?” You asked quietly, suddenly too embarrassed to look him in the eye.

           He hummed, as if in mock deep thought. The sound drew another frustrated huff from you, the heat from earlier still making your cheeks flush. The room fell into silence as you stared at the silk sheets. When you worked up your nerves enough to catch his eye again, he was observing you patiently. The look in his eye made you press your thighs together.

           For a long minute it felt like he was just taunting you, waiting to see how much you could take before you had to look away again. The feeling of being challenged was enough of a reason for you to keep your eyes focused on him, even if the confidence in your gaze was artificial.

           A hint of pride was in his eyes when he finally moved, gesturing down at his lap and beckoning you forward. The same air of confidence and power was radiating from him as when he made his way through crowds and watched people move out of his path. It was something you weren’t sure you disliked anymore. There was no bitterness in the back of your throat as you swallowed, only a vague ball of nerves.

           You rose from the bed, almost slipping off and onto the carpeted floor when your dress fell back into place and glided along the silk of the sheets. You managed to balance yourself easily enough, catching your feet onto the floor before you royally embarrassed yourself. It was only when you were stood right in front of Johnny, with his eyes raking over your form, that you faltered again, pausing and not knowing what to do with yourself.

           His hands spread across your hips, pulling you to sit over one of his thighs. When you were finally in place, his hands moved away from you to rest on the arms of the chair. He looked up at your expectantly. “Go on, then.” When you hesitated again, he laughed lightly. “Or do you need my help again?”

           You felt your shoulders tighten in irritation. “Are you gonna help?” You muttered, raising your eyebrows.

           He shrugged, his hands already moving to grip your hips again. He bevelled his head at you as he dragged your core against the fabric of his trousers. The amusement was the only thing you could find in his eyes as your moans grew louder. “I always give in too easily,” he murmured, pulling your lips back to his.

           The kiss was slow and easy, though you were more distracted by the feeling of his thigh underneath you than his lips against yours. Any moans that tried to escape your mouth fell into his instead of getting any further. Though it wasn’t long before he seemed to grow tired of not hearing you as he pulled away.

           By then, the coil in your stomach had already begun to tighten, and the noises you were making were growing in volume. Just when you thought you were going to feel the coil unravel, Johnny’s palms flattened against your hips to stop you moving anymore.

           You huffed in annoyance, trying to move yourself again but not being able to push further past Johnny’s hold. “Johnny,” you groaned, gripping onto his wrist.

           “I did tell you I wanted to hear you beg.” He chided, curling his arms around your waist and rising to stand.

           You gripped to him tighter in surprise, holding back yet another huff as he laughed at you. “What if I don’t want to?”

           He shrugged, dropping you ungraciously onto the bed, making you bounce slightly as you landed. He laughed again, “Maybe I won’t give in this time.”

           You hummed as he leaned down to hover over you again. “You always give in too easily.” You curled your arms around his shoulders and tugged lightly at the hair at the nape of his neck.

He pushed your dress further up to bunch at your hips again, pulling himself away from you for a moment as he dropped his suit jacket onto the floor. His shirt went next, and finally his hands went to grip his belt. When he’d finally gotten himself undressed, he put your hands together and rested them above your head. He paused for a moment, tilting his head at you as you nodded quickly. He wrapped the belt around your hands, tightening it until he knew you couldn’t get out of it yourself.

He reconnected your lips, pushing your legs further apart to fit himself back between them. The moan of surprise that left you as Johnny pushed inside of you was swallowed by Johnny’s mouth on yours. The pace he set was far slower than you wanted it to be, though he didn’t seem to take note of the whines that weren’t able to leave your mouth.

You pulled away from him, “Faster,” you whined.

He slowed down. “What was that?”

You bit down on your bottom lip. “Please,” you mumbled quietly, too quietly for you to fully hear yourself.

“What was that?” He picked up his speed just slightly.

You groaned, half in annoyance and half at the increase of speed. “Please, Johnny.” You said again.

“Please what?”

“Faster, please.”

He finally set a faster pace, letting his hand move between your legs as you moaned louder. When you finally felt the coil begin to form again in your stomach, you let out an embarrassed few murmurs of, ‘please.’ Johnny made no show of having heard you, or if he had, he made no show of caring about your begging.

He bit down onto your shoulder as you moaned louder. “Johnny, please,” you whined, feeling tears prick at your eyes of him denying you again.

He chuckled softly, nodding as his nose bumped against yours before he pressed his lips back to yours. This kiss was more rushed, his free hand wondering as you tilted your head further upwards to deepen the kiss.

He pulled his lips away from yours just as the coil in your stomach started to unravel. His lips didn’t seem to be able to choose one place to kiss. “You’re so beautiful,” he muttered, “so, so beautiful.”

Your head was too fuzzy for you to be able to form words. All you could fully compute was the silk of the sheets against your skin underneath you, and Johnny’s lips pressing lazy kisses to your neck as he slowed a stop. You weren’t even sure when he’d hit his own high, though you knew that he had.

He stayed still for a moment, just stroking his thumb across your cheek before he moved away from you. Oddly, having the heat from his body disappear from above you made you feel empty. He reached to undo the belt that held your hands, and then brought them to his lips to press fleeting kisses there.

“Thank you,” you mumbled, leaning up to kiss him lightly again.

Johnny hummed, moving away from you for a moment as you dropped back to lie on the bed again. You noted then that there was a chandelier hanging from his ceiling. The sight made a cross between a breathy laugh and a disbelieving scoff pass your lips.

“Here,” Johnny mumbled, making you look up at him. He handed you a white-dress shirt that felt clean and soft when you held it.

“Thank you,” you mumbled again, getting up to take the dress off carefully and place it on the chair Johnny had been sat on earlier. When you got back to the bed, you pulled the shirt on, only bothering to do up two of the buttons before flopping to lie on his chest. He pressed a drawn out kiss to your forehead. “Is there really a dinner party tonight?” You mumbled against his chest.

He laughed tiredly, his chest rumbling as he did. “We don’t lie to each other, remember?”

You breathed out a laugh, pushing yourself up from his chest slightly. You glared at him for a long minute before shrugging. “I suppose.”

“Better start getting dressed soon.” He mumbled, pressing his lips to your temple. Part of you wanted to groan at the idea of moving and leaving the house again. The other part of you wanted to wrap yourself in silky fabric and eat a meal that was probably more expensive than all of the food in your house altogether. You hummed in acknowledgement of his words, starting to try and think of all the reasons to detangle yourself from him and start making yourself feel pampered enough to spend a night around people richer than you.

///

           The dinner hall was more than you had expected it to be, which was saying a lot on account of your imagination being particularly overactive when it came to splendour. When you walked in, Johnny’s arm curled lazily around your waist with him dressed in his newest suit, his air tidy and slick again in a way that made him look like he could own the building, you felt immediately out of place. The people surrounding you were about as glamorous as him. And just as rich, you knew. Which meant, of course, far richer than you.

           But then you remembered just how indistinctive you must seem in the situation. Dressed in golden silk, with your hair fixed prettily, you were entirely sure no one would offer you even a second glance for no reason other than to look at your exposed legs. The idea made you feel more confident, so whether or not it was true that no one could tell you were their least favourite thing – as it was, a very common person in the working class – you weren’t particularly bothered.

           Johnny had warned you before you even set off for the party that it would be a dull affair. When you’d first stepped into the hall, with its golden floor – that Johnny insisted was not real gold but was only paint, though you weren’t sure, you didn’t think you’d seen real gold often enough to be sure – and its rows of high chandeliers, and its tables full of rich looking food and decorated glasses, you hadn’t though that possible. Now, sat on your velvet lined chair and listening to Johnny and a table full of older men talk about business, you gave into the possibility that he might be right.

           Their discussions came to a stand still only when the staff came out to clear the tables and ask after everyone’s opinion on desert. Johnny had turned to you, almost as if to check you were still there. You were distracted by then, feeling a stab of guilt in your chest for the staff who had to tidy up after you and everyone else.

           He reached out to stroke his fingertip across your bare collarbones. “I should get you a golden necklace,” he mumbled, “it’d look nice on you.”

           “Gold looks nice on anyone, I’d think.” You laughed.

           He shrugged, grinning as he listened to you speak. “Everything looks nicer on you.”

           Making a noise of mock disgust, you knocked his hand away, feeling it immediately seek out to rest on your thigh. The action made your eyebrows raise as you looked back around the table as people spoke amongst themselves. “What’re you up to?”

           He laughed, lifting his hand further up the skin of your thigh as heat flushed through you. “Can’t I just rest my hand here?”

           “No.” You decided, stopping his hand before it could get any higher.

           “Don’t tell me,” he began, putting his hand back to its original place on your thigh, “you don’t want to do anything in public?”

           Scoffing, you shook your head, “I would never.”

           He bit back a laugh, but his grin told you all you needed to know. “Is this,” he lightly nodded to the table full of unfamiliar faces, “what, too public?”

           “If we get caught, it’s your business.”

           “Hey,” he defended, taking his hand away from your thigh, “my job’s attached very intimately to yours.”

           “Then keep your hands to yourself.”

           “Do I have to keep my hands to myself if we go, well, somewhere else?”

           You rose your eyebrows. “Do you not have any respect for your associates?”

           He grinned again, clutching your hand in his own and shrugging, “Not these ones.” He pulled you to stand with him, tightening his arm around your waist as he looked down at the table with a false look of concern on his features. “Excuse us,” his voice was arid and professional as the others at the table turned to look up at him, “but my girl’s not feeling too well, so I’m just going to help her find the bathrooms.” The table rose in a quiet murmur of acceptances and quick – and most likely detached – worries for you.

           And then he walked you both out of the hall. Only when you got back into the entrance hall with its red velvet carpet leading into the double doors of the dinner room did you let yourself laugh in disbelief. “You’re insane.”

           “If you had to look at yourself in this dress all night, you would be, too.” He defended, pushing the women’s bathroom door open and pulling you along beside him.

           The woman stood at the mirror startled when she saw Johnny beside you, before you cleared your throat. “Sorry, I’m, I’m not feeling very well. I thought it would be best if I wasn’t alone.” It sounded more like a suggestion than a statement.

           The woman nodded in acceptance, smiling pitifully at you the way older women always did with young girls. “That’s quite alright, I hope you feel better soon.” She didn’t offer Johnny the same courtesy, only sharpening her eyes at him and moving past him.

           When the door banged shut behind her, the two of you snickered as he pushed you towards the closest stall. His lips quickly found yours, nose bumping against yours as his hands slid up your dress as soon as he had the lock drawn across.

           He pushed your back up against the side of the stall, his hands already trying to pull your underwear down. “This is quite possibility the least romantic thing I’ve ever done.” You scoffed.

           He pulled away from you, drawing an involuntary whine from your lips. He shook his head, “We can always wait until later, if it’s romance that you want.”

           Huffing, you pulled him back to you by his jacket, feeling the kiss speed up as his hands rushed to go back to where they had been before. His hands curled underneath your thighs, gripping tightly enough for you to have to catch a moan before it passed your lips.

           “Jump,” he mumbled, pressing your back further up against the wall.

           You hesitation for a second, pulling away to offer him a sceptical look before doing as he’d told you. He caught you, keeping you steadily pressed to the stall’s wall. The grip he had on your thighs drew a groan from your lips as his own travelled down your neck. His fingers curled around the sides of your underwear in a manner that was becoming all too familiar. When he’d finally gotten them almost all the way down, he chuckled, shaking his head at himself as they got stuck. He dropped your legs back to the floor, watching you laugh at him as you kicked them off. Johnny caught them before they hit the floor, tucking them into his pocket. You laughed breathily at him, letting him lift you back into your previous position.

           He dropped down to his knees, lifting your legs so they were resting across his shoulders as he placed his mouth straight onto your core. His lack of teasing drew a shocked moan from your lips, your head dropping back to hit the stall wall. As per his usual act, the second your fingers went to tangle in his hair, he pulled away from you. The feeling in your stomach faded as he rose to stand up again, a complacent look settling over his features.

           “Do you know how to be nice?” You huffed, wrapping your legs around his waist again.

           He struggled to unbutton his trousers, grunting at the effort. The complacent look came back as soon as he had them undone, as if he had done everything smoothly in the first place. “I could be a lot meaner.” He promised, pressing his lips to your neck as he pushed into you.

           You dug your nails into his shoulders, dropping your head onto his shoulder to bite down and keep yourself quiet. Back in the room at the bar, you had only been distantly aware of the crowds of people in the other room. Now, with the tables full of people you would have previously thought of as elite with only a hallway to separate them from you and Johnny, you couldn’t be more aware of anything.

           Even with that lingering in the back of your mind, Johnny still made it difficult for you to be able to think of anything other than the way the coil in your stomach felt like forming heat. His lips were on your neck again, leaving behind a series of fresh marks that you were sure would get you some odd stares when you returned back to the table. His hands were gripping your thighs, though you could practically feel his disappointment as not being able to map out over your body like he hadn’t done it before by now.

           This time, when his groans grew slightly in volume, you pulled your head away from where you had been softening your volume in the crook of his neck to be able to see his face screw up as he hit his high. His eyebrows furrowed as dropped his head back, the muscles of his arms tightening as his nails dug into the bare skin of your thighs. You had to drop your head back onto his shoulders when the coil in your stomach began to unravel again.

           By the time the two of you had caught your breath, you hoped that your legs would be steady enough to uphold yourself when he set you back down. On the slight heel of your shoes, your hope suddenly seemed bleak. You wavered, feeling Johnny wrap his arm around your waist to keep you balanced.

           You glared at him. “I thought we came in here to be more discreet.”

           He laughed, “You looked bored, I’m just trying to keep things exciting for you.”

           “I thought I was working? Is work ever supposed to be exciting?”

           A grin turned up his lips. “I think you’ll find this job a little more fulfilling than most.”

           He opened the bathroom door, taking a quick look out before walking the two of you back in the direction of the heavy oaken double doors into the dinner hall. “I don’t feel like I’m working at all.” You mumbled, shifting to look away from him.

           Johnny laughed loudly, pulling open one of the doors as a few sets of eyes turned to look back at you. “Don’t look at it like a job then.”

           You sighed at him, tilting your head up at him as he grinned arrogantly at you. “You’re impossible, you know that?”

           His smile softened, though it stayed dashed across his features as you both reached your table again. He paused for a minute as he pulled your chair out for you, the searching look coming back to his face. This time, he seemed to find whatever he was looking for. “I’ve missed you.” He said quietly, tucking your chair back in.

           You thought, maybe he isn’t so different as I thought he was. You caught his hand in your own, gripping it tightly as you smiled. “I’ve missed you, too.” You responded. And even if the words felt foreign on your tongue, you thought, I’m telling the truth.

#hm. ok #writing #nct smut #nct 127 smut #johnny smut #johnny seo smut #nct u smut #nct reactions #nct 127 reactions #nct u reactions #nct scenarios #nct scenario #nct 127 scenarios #nct 127 scenario #nct u scenarios #nct u scenario