#helen x john wick

[overheardatthecontinental]

Chapter 16 of Endlessly Dangerous now up :)

John led Helen away from the club but didn't lessen his grip. There were still enemies and people who would be watching from the shadows. Even in the haven of the Continental, he was taking no chances. 

He frowned as they reached the elevator, remembering that they would have to see Charon to get the room key.

Helen’s presence would likely keep the Concierge from saying anything too outlandish.

He pressed the call button and the doors opened immediately. He led her in, pressing the button for the lobby.

Chances were that Winston had already told Charon about the room he had set aside for them but he needed to think about how to phrase the conversation to make it sound as unsexual as possible. Charon would not have forgotten their little rendezvous in the gallery.

He couldn’t stop Charon from having seen the footage but he could try to minimize the damage.

The doors to the elevator closed and Helen turned towards him, reaching her hand up to his neck.

“Hels,” he murmured, “What are you doing?”

She answered with a teasing smile. “I wasn’t done yet,” she told him, pulling him down for a kiss.

At once, all thoughts of propriety went out the window. He wasn’t done, either

She’d caught him at the right time, he thought. Between the danger of the gallery and the insanity of M’s apartment, John's ability to see reason was greatly diminished. And the kiss in the club had only whet his appetite for more.

John grabbed her face, backing her against the elevator wall, pressing his body into hers.

Helen moaned. Her hips rolled against him as her tongue swept at the seam of his lips. Away from prying eyes, he deepened the kiss. He let one hand curl into her hair, holding her just where he wanted her while the other hand massaged its way down her neck, her back.

Her slitted leg rubbed against his and Christ, the things he could do to her with just a little more time…

It wasn’t fair that every time they started, he knew they would soon be interrupted. That the elevator doors would open.

And yet, he was more afraid of Helen making a move when they were truly alone. 

He was getting closer and closer to being unable to deny her anything. Would he be able to resist her if she tried this upstairs, in the room that had been booked? Maybe they should just go home. At least there he could lock himself away in his room.

There was a ding and the elevator came to a stop, the doors opening.

John broke away, his breathing heavier than it had been after killing three men earlier. 

He quickly attempted to compose himself.

Helen, to her credit, simply grinned at him and walked out of the elevator like she hadn’t just been rubbing up against him.

He followed her out into the lobby. Only a few guests remained; the rest either tucked away in their rooms for the night or relaxing in the club below. Which meant that only a few people were watching him hurry after Helen like a dazed puppy as she made her way to the front desk.

“Hey, handsome,” she said, leaning against the desk.

John did his best to ignore the flutter of annoyance at the endearment.

“Hello, my dear. I’m sorry we did not get the chance to catch up earlier,” he said, sounding genuinely remorseful. “Are you doing alright?”

“I’m fine. M’s focusing on John more than he is me.”

If she meant that statement to ease Charon’s current opinion of John, it didn’t. The Concierge just ignored his presence.

"I worry about your health.”

Helen rolled her eyes. "My health is fine."

Charon raised a brow. "I doubt the stress is good for you."

“No more than it has been for the last year,” she pointed out. Her tone was casual but John could detect the barest hint of bitterness in her words. Then she smiled, like nothing happened and added snarkily, “When this is all over, I'll be sure to consult my pulmonologist.”

Charon frowned. 

“Winston said he set aside a room,” John said, interrupting before Charon had a chance to reply.

The Concierge’s eyes flashed to John, even as a cordial smile graced his face. “He did.” Then to Helen said, “I hope you don’t mind– I upgraded you to a suite.”

John had stayed in the Continentals across the globe thousands of times. In between living situations, he’d often resided in New York for weeks at a time. He’d stayed in nearly every room over the course of many years.

While there were certainly suites with single beds, John was willing to bet that Charon had placed him in a suite with multiple rooms.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

“It was no trouble. Believe me.” Charon passed the keys across the desk with his best customer service smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Enjoy your stay. And I will see you tomorrow?”

Fuck. John had almost forgotten about lunch with Charon’s family. 

His hopes of not having to deal with the Concierge outside of Continental grounds were quickly dashed. What were the chances that Charon would follow similar rules in front of his family?

John could just imagine Charon lunging across a table to hit him or asking for help bringing something in from somewhere and attempting to strangle him.

“Of course,” Helen answered with a smile. “Good night!”

“Good night,” he echoed as Helen turned back to the elevators. As soon as her back turned, the Concierge’s expression darkened.

Great. Fan-fucking-tastic.

John said nothing, choosing to follow Helen instead.

The elevator doors opened. Several people already occupied the space, likely leaving the club to return to their rooms. He recognized a few by face and none by name. 

It was probably a good thing, he thought. An empty elevator on the way to their room was almost tempting fate.

Still, John made a show of wrapping an arm around her.

To Helen, it was probably a mild form of PDA but to everyone else in the elevator, it denoted possession. And, in the unlikely event that anyone tried anything, he'd be able to maneuver her quickly.

He'd never seen so many people conscientiously avoid looking at him.

The ride up was slow as they waited through multiple stops before finally getting out on the fifteenth floor.

Their suite was one usually reserved for dignitaries: members of the High Table, traveling nobility, and their entourages. John had never stayed in such a room but had visited often enough when accepting assignments or negotiating contracts.

It opened into a large sitting area, complete with a breakfast nook, a bar, and a couch in front of a large fireplace. A balcony ran the length of the suite, with its own table set. There was an executive area with a decent-sized table and an office set for meetings and three bedrooms attached. Each room had its own bathroom with the master bedroom including a large tub and separate walk-in shower.

Helen set her purse on the bar as she explored the space, oohing and aahing at the amenities attached. John took off his jacket, tossing it on the arm of the couch. He sat back and watched her check out each of the rooms in turn.

“This seems just the slightest bit excessive,” she said as she exited the third bedroom.

He agreed but avoided pointing out the obvious. Charon had very purposefully given them no excuses to wind up in bed together.

Which was definitely for the best.

Probably.

He was almost certain.

“But, damn, look at all this space.” She glanced over her shoulder with a playful smile. “If we move the coffee table, I think there’s definitely enough room for you to do a pirouette or some shit.”

John chuckled. “You’re not letting that go, are you?”

Helen shot him a look that answered the question for him.

He couldn’t bring himself to be annoyed or disappointed. That sheer look of joy in her eyes made his stomach twist.

“Where did you learn?” she asked, crossing the room and taking a seat next to him on the couch. She angled towards him, her arm on the back of the couch. She rested her head in her hand.

“It was part of our lessons at the orphanage,” he admitted. “Then, at the theater we stayed at when we moved to the U.S.”

Helen blinked. “You lived in a theater?”

That was harder to explain, involving a great many details about the Ruska Roma community and their role under the Table and the Director’s attempt at bringing them prominence and prestige.

He tried his best to simplify it. “The ballet teacher from the orphanage decided to migrate to New York. She bought a theater and renovated some of the upper levels into living quarters. Brought some of us with her to work.”

Helen frowned, her brow furrowing. “How old were you again?”

“When we moved?” He shrugged. “Nine or ten, I think.”

“So, are child labor laws not applicable in the underworld?”

John shook his head, vaguely amused at the innocence of her question. “The entertainment industry has a lot of loopholes.” He left out that no one particularly gave a fuck about a bunch of immigrant kids, provided they had a roof over their heads. “But, no, the underworld doesn’t really care so long as they’re not drawing attention to themselves.”

“Hmm.” She hummed, clearly unimpressed. “How did you feel about it?”

He shrugged. It had been so long since he’d given that time of his life more than a passing thought. “Didn’t really know anything different. And life here was better than in Belarus.”

“You must have been good. For your teacher to have chosen you to go with her.”

He tried to imagine the Director giving any sort of compliment beyond, “That wasn’t terrible,” or “I’ve certainly seen you do worse”. He doubted she’d ever deemed anyone’s work as good. But she had favored him, at least to some degree.

“I was alright,” he said. “But it’s been a long time.

Multiple decades had passed since he’d done more than basic warm up stretches.

He’d be lying if he said that ballet training hadn’t prepared him for some of the work he did. The discipline, the dexterity, the ability to withstand tremendous pain without flinching… But he hadn’t actually danced since leaving Tarkovsky. 

“How long?” 

Jesus, he felt old thinking back to the last time he’d been in that theater. “About thirty years.”

Her brow raised. “So, you really didn’t like ballet.”

John returned her look, teasingly challenging the assumption. “I was a small, teenage boy in a world where might was right. Being decent at ballet did not result in acclaim.”

She pulled her head out of her hand, dropping her arm behind him so that her fingers slipped under his hair and traced the back of his neck.

“You expect me to believe the girls weren’t all over young Jardani?”

He tried not to have a physical reaction to the way his given name sounded on her lips. What had she asked him again?

Right. Girls. That was almost laughable.

“Hardly, they tended to go for the other guys.”

Although he’d still been a young teen when he’d left Tarkovsky, the girls around him had never shown any such interest. He’d been friends, or at least friendly, with quite a few of them. They were far more likely to ask him to practice with them or study than anything seemingly romantic.

“Or your oblivious nature strikes again.”

Now John raised a brow incredulously. “Oblivious?”

There were a lot of words he’d used to describe himself but oblivious wasn’t one of them. It couldn’t be, given how many enemies he had.

She gave him a pointed look. “O-bliv-ious.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I’m talking about the fact that anything short of a proposition seems to go over your head.”

“That’s not true,” he protested. He’d fully admit that it had taken him a little bit to realize that Helen had been flirting with him but, it wasn't that long.

“Okay. What about tonight?”

What about tonight? He thought.

“You mean…” he wasn’t sure how to politely word what they had done before going into the actual gala. “The South Wing?”

Helen snorted, her face pinched as she tried and failed to fight a smile. “No. Me directly telling you to kiss me doesn’t count, although it does prove my point. I’m talking about when we first arrived at the gala.”

John blinked, still unsure what she was talking about. After a minute of recounting their arrival in his head, he shrugged.

“Oh, sweet Jesus. Vivien, John.”

“Vivien wasn’t flirting with me,” he said, shaking his head. They’d talked for all of a minute before she’d left and none of them had said anything of note. “She knew I was there with you.”

Helen burst into laughter at that. “You’re adorable if you think that makes a difference. Did you really not notice the way she was looking at you? Or how devastated she was when you didn’t recognize her?”

He blinked again, trying to recall anything from their short encounter. “How was any of that flirting? She barely said a word to me.”

“Okay,” Helen said, shaking her head. “Now I’m feeling a lot better about how long it took you to realize that I was flirting with you.”

 He opened his mouth to respond before realizing he didn’t know how to actually respond to that. 

“When one person has romantic or sexual feelings for another person,” she said slowly, as if explaining a basic principle to a child. John half-glared in her direction but Helen didn’t appear to care. “Usually, they’ll try to establish some sort of connection either with their words or eyes or even physical touch. Or, what we would call flirting.”

“Okay, I get it,” he said dryly, rolling his eyes.

“It’s often done without actually stating explicit intent,” she continued, ignoring his words even as she grinned in his direction. “For example, one might stare a bit too long. A touch,” her hand caressed the back of his neck, “might linger.”

"Helen," he murmured, unsure if he was saying her name as a warning or a prayer.

Helen reached around him, resting her forearm on his shoulder. The hand that had just been rubbing his neck dropped to her skirt, which she pulled open at the slit. Before he had time to even wonder what her next move would be, she leaned onto her arm and swung a leg over his lap until she was straddling him.

“Or they might lean heavily on innuendo. Hinting at what they’re thinking and feeling to see how the other responds. In cases where one person is a little dense, the other might have to be very direct: tell you flat out that they want you to kiss them.”

Fuck. 

She was close now. Her face was only a few inches from his own. He would barely have to lean forward to kiss her. His hands dug into the couch cushion below them as he attempted to keep them still.

How the fuck was he supposed to resist this?

And why the fuck was he still trying?

Her tongue darted out, wetting her lower lip as she gazed across at him.

“Hels,” he said, desperately trying to think of something he could say to make her understand.

She gave him a soft smile. “What’s your excuse this time?” she asked in a teasing tone. “You won’t kiss me unless there’s an audience? I’m too vulnerable to know what I’m thinking?”

He had a good one, somewhere. Some sort of excuse, in the back of his mind, for just this an occasion. Locked and loaded.

Of course, that was before Helen rolled her hips against him. His cock, which had been half-hard since she kissed him in the elevator, was straining against his pants already. And he was unable to shift without her feeling exactly what she was doing to him.

Did she think he didn’t want this?

That he hadn’t imagined how she would taste and feel and look under his hands and mouth? That he hadn’t already brought himself to release with her name on his lips?

His resistance had never been about him. Not for a second. It had always been about her. 

And since his excuses had fallen flat, perhaps it was time for the one weapon in his arsenal he typically avoided. Honesty. 

“You know I want you,” he said, thinking back to every superfluous touch. Every shared smile and lingering glances. The kisses and the oh-so obvious excuses. Helen teasing him, daring him to cross the line. “You know.”

“Then why are you fighting this?” she asked, not unkindly.

John really wished he could remember. He paused, forcing himself to come up with something. Anything.

"I'm trying not to take advantage of you,” he said tightly, almost pleading with her to understand his plight.

I want you. I want you so much I think it might ruin me. And I know I don’t deserve you but I’m trying.

"Take advantage?" she repeated, sounding amused. “Okay, I don't know if this is some outdated attempt at chivalry or whatnot, but this is the twenty-first century. I am an adult. And, no matter what you and Charon seem to think, I am fully capable of making my own decisions and setting my own boundaries."

Was that what this was?

He’d been trying to protect her from the part of him that was like Mikhail– dark and selfish and obsessive– by going as hard as he could in the opposite direction, all the time forgetting that it was never his decision to make. The when and what and how were not up to him and him alone.

Helen had the say. 

Helen had the only say that mattered.

John swallowed, so close to losing complete control and taking her without another thought. He forced himself to slow down.

He wasn’t M. 

“I need you to be sure,” he told her, even as his hands relaxed from the cushions and trailed up against the bare skin of her thighs. “Because, I swear, Helen, I am so much worse than M ever could be. And I will not let you go.”

She didn’t respond right away and the silence made the beating of his heart seem deafening.

John didn’t know what he would do if she went back now. If he would be able to release his grip on her and let her slide off his lap without moving, stopping her or begging her to come back. He wasn’t certain he’d truly be able to let her go, if that was her wish.

In the darkest thoughts he usually ignored, he could see himself becoming desperate and unhinged. Following her, even when this was all over and M was dead, under the guise of protecting her. But no matter how hard he tried, he always seemed to cross the line.

Helen placed a hand on his cheek, her thumb brushing an exposed patch of skin.

“You can protect me from the rest of the world, John. But I don’t need you to protect me from you.”

She leaned forward, crossing the distance, and kissed him.

That was enough.

The days of holding back, of ignoring his instincts in favor of conventional reason– which he didn’t understand in the first place– were gone. He had tried to be careful and gentle, knowing what she had been through. He’d tried to become everything that he thought needed.

John had given her every opportunity to turn back.

Now the dam had burst.

His hands, which had been resting on her thighs, shot up until they reached her hips, his long fingers reaching around to dig into her ass. He used the leverage on her to hold her steady as his hips rolled up, grinding against her lap.

Helen moaned into his mouth and he could feel her try to move against him, but his grip was too strong. He would let her move of her own volition soon enough but he needed her to understand first.

She said she didn’t need him to protect her from himself.

He didn’t say it out loud but he taunted her all the same. Prove it.

Because they weren’t going to come back from this. 

He rolled his hips again and Helen responded by deepening the kiss, her tongue brushing against his. He answered in kind, sucking on her tongue. She tasted like the fruity drinks from the club.

He liked it.

Suddenly, John wondered what else he could taste for the first time on her tongue.

He opened his eyes, breaking the kiss and caught sight of her face. Her cheeks were flushed, her features tight with desire.

Again, he grinded up against her and watched her tense further. She inhaled sharply and bit her lip as he continued to hold her in place. Helen reached for him but John did not hesitate, releasing her hip to snatch her wrist and pin it back to the couch.

“Not yet,” he told her.

“John,” she murmured, somewhat breathlessly as her eyes opened.

He didn’t respond. Instead, he squeezed her wrist before his hand migrated back to her hip, and then both hands sank lower, past the hem of her dress. John watched her carefully for any sign of uncertainty.

Show me you can take this. That you want this. That you want me.

Finding none, he continued to push his hands up her thighs. His right hand brushed over the lacy holster, his thumb grazing the weapon there.

He liked its placement.

The idea of reaching under her skirt, finding the hidden gun, and shooting someone from between her thighs was… gratifying.

John pushed past the holster, continuing up until the dress was past her hips.

Keeping one hand locked on her hip, the other trailed across until it slipped beneath her underwear to cup her.

She sighed softly and squirmed against his hand. Her eyes fluttered shut, which would not do.

Fingers digging into her flesh, he ordered, "Look at me."

Helen's eyes dragged open and remained lidded but she complied.

"Good girl," he said softly, rewarding her by rolling his palm. She sucked her lower lip and John watched as her fingers curled into the couch but she remained still as she kept her gaze locked on his.

John ran two fingers along her wet slit before slipping them between her folds. They ghosted her clit, stroking over the sensitive bud gently. Helen tried to push up against him but he was faster, moving just enough out of reach that she couldn’t follow him.

Pouting, she asked, “You gonna keep teasing me?”

John raised a brow, continuing his ministrations with the softest of touches to her clit. He could feel her tensing in anticipation under his hand.  “You wanna talk about teasing?”

Helen shot him a pointed look in response. “It’s not my fault you wanted to take your damn ti–” 

Her words cut off in a gasp as John’s touch became hard.

He smiled to himself as he watched her face tense, lips parting.

John sought her entrance, his palm indirectly continuing to stimulate her clit, as he slipped one finger inside her. She clenched around him and, Jesus, how was she so fucking tight?

As if she could read his mind, Helen confessed, “It’s been a long time.”

She didn’t have to say more. He understood what she wasn’t saying.

M had been watching her for more than a year and in that time, she hadn’t been with anyone. She hadn’t even dated, afraid that anyone in her company would face the consequences from the crazed stalker. 

He wasn’t going to think about that now. More importantly, he wasn’t going to allow the memory of M to taint their time together.

John licked his lips as he stared into her whiskey-colored eyes.

“Then, I’ll have to get you ready, won’t I?”

John wrapped an arm around her waist and spread his hand between her legs, still keeping his finger inside her. Before she could blink, John flipped their positions, moving so quickly she didn’t even realize what he was doing until her back hit the couch. She gasped as she landed and John dropped to the floor, between her legs. They fell open to accommodate him.

He ripped her panties away, and buried his face against her. His tongue found her clit, wasting no time in lavishing her.

“Fuck!” she swore and John could see her throw her head back out of the corner of his eye.

He removed his index finger from inside her and replaced it with his middle finger, allowing it to become equally soaked in her. John removed that one, as well, before taking both fingers and running them in a circle around her entrance. He could feel the flutter of her pussy even from there as his tongue continued to devour her.

Her hand grabbed his hair, holding his head in place as she moved against him, her breath becoming heavy.

He could easily escape. Even without hurting her, John could think of at least six ways to get her to release him. Maybe next time, he would. He could demonstrate just how easily he could overpower her.

John was beginning to think she might like it.

For now, he had more important things to do than prove a point he wasn’t sure he remembered.

He sucked on the bundle of nerves, smiling against her as she moaned, rubbing herself against his face.

She’d told him once that sex could be fun. He was beginning to think she might be right.

Gently, yet without slowing down from the care and attention he was giving her clit, John pressed his fingers back inside her, together.

There was a sharp intake of breath as he began to slide his fingers into her until he’d reached his knuckles.

John looked up at her. Her eyes were closed, her face still tense with growing pleasure. Her updo was down, her hair falling all around her. And with his mouth on her clit and his fingers inside her, she’d never looked so perfect.

He started slowly, eyes locked on her face, as he began to pump his fingers inside of her, curling them towards himself on each pump. Her hips jolted in response and John began to stimulate her clit in time.

A string of swears and nonsensical affirmations began to pour from her lips as John began to speed up each stroke.

This he understood. Far more than emotion and communication and those little important lessons that had been missed in his youth.

Physicality made sense.

For the most part, bodies worked the same. Areas that were vulnerable or sensitive to pain were also sensitive to pleasure. 

You could not be an expert in one without having some understanding of the other.

John could barely form a sentence about what he felt for Helen but he could manipulate her body until she was writhing beneath his tongue and crying out his name. He felt her clench around his fingers, her muscles spasming as he continued to lick his way through her orgasm. He didn’t stop until her body went slack.

He looked up from between her legs. Her chest was rising and falling rapidly, her lips parted as she breathed. Her eyes, which had fluttered shut, opened again as she looked back down at him.

Her hand was still wrapped around his head, tangled in his hair. Helen guided him up until he was draped over her, and kissed him gently.

He wondered if she could taste herself on his lips– a thought which made him infinitely and impossibly harder.

“Not that that wasn’t wonderful,” she said between kisses, reminding him: “But we have our choice of available beds.”

And if that wasn’t the smartest thing he’d ever heard…

John kissed her once more before taking a hold of her thighs and guiding her legs to wrap around him. 

He wasn’t as young as he used to be and was slightly at odds with the fact that most of his skill came from hand-to-hand, but he was still very capable. With a practiced ease, he rolled off the couch, planting his feet beneath him as he pulled Helen up with him. 

Her arms wrapped around his shoulders as she kissed him again. Thank fuck he was a multitasker.

He felt her moving against him before hearing the sounds of her shoes falling off one by one.

John followed suit, kicking off his shoes and toeing off his socks as they hobbled towards the bedroom.

Setting her on her feet as they reached the bed, John's gaze raked over her. Past her flushed face and swollen lips and over her mussed dress.

"Turn around," he told her.

Her teeth grazed her lip as she turned, like she knew what was coming.

He pressed a kiss to her back, between the base of her neck and the top of her dress. He pinched the zipper between his fingers and began slowly dragging it downward, continuing to place kisses down her back until he could no longer reach without kneeling. Then he rose, his tongue trailing the path that his lips had just taken.

Helen shivered in his arms as he reached his full height.

His hands reached the straps of the asymmetrical neckline. He spread it open and over her shoulders before letting it fall down her curves.

John’s mouth watered as he soaked in the sight of her.

He’d been right about the tattoo on her hip. The floral vines stretched upward over her waist on one side while another elaborate bouquet rested on her opposite ribs, just below her arm.

He touched the bouquet, hand running along the top of the tattoo before arching around and cupping her breast. His other hand lazily traced around her stomach and he pulled her back against him while his thumb played with her nipple and her head fell back against his shoulder.

Helen began to move, her ass rolling back against his cock through his pants.

John placed a kiss on her shoulder as his hand moved to massage her other breast. He pinched her nipple as his teeth nipped at her throat. He paid careful attention to every sound and jump that accompanied his actions. Cataloging them in his head with every intention to come back to it later.

Her voice was heavy as she told him, "If you keep making me wait, I'm going to hurt you."

"Promises, promises," he replied, mocking what she had said to him in the gallery earlier that night. 

She turned in his arms, going straight for his belt. Her hands made quick work of the buckle before she tugged it loose, along with the button of his pants.

Well, if that was how she wanted it…

John pushed her backward towards the bed as he quickly discarded his pants and boxers. Helen bounced on the bed, completely naked, save for the holster at her thigh. His gun was strapped to her. His mark was left on her, keeping her safe. 

He pressed a kiss just above it before taking out the gun and unsnapping the holster. He brushed his thumb over it, checking without looking that the safety was off before he placed it on the nightstand.

He climbed back over her, wrapping an arm around her waist before he pulled them both farther up the bed. Her hair had completely fallen out of the earlier bun and fanned out around her.

Helen reached for him immediately, pulling him down to press her lips to his. Her other hand slipped between their bodies as she’d reached his aching cock. Her fingers wrapped around him, running along his length.

He bucked against her hand.

He’d been half-erect for the better part of the week but he’d been hard as steel since the moment she’d climbed onto his lap.

 There was still so much he wanted to do. He’d barely had the chance to explore her body. He’d yet to trace her tattoos with his tongue and he’d barely touched her breasts. But he wouldn’t last long if Helen continued to stroke him the way she was.

He caught her by the wrist again and forced her hand up and over her head before he could embarrass himself in her hand. 

Helen shot him a glare before reaching with her other hand, which he quickly caught, as well.

Later, he thought to himself. She could do whatever she wanted to him later. But right now…

“You’re mine,” he told her.

Helen made a passive show of resistance, fighting against his grip in an attempt to reach him again, but they both knew it was futile. 

She licked her lips and swallowed. “Then, prove it.”

He intended to.

He released her hands, one arm moving to her side to prop himself above her as the other reached for his cock.

Her hips jerked in anticipation as John rubbed the head against her soaking folds before setting himself against her entrance. In a rare display of gentleness, John pushed slowly inside her. Her breath hitched while he buried himself completely, forcing himself to give her time to adjust.

She felt heavenly. There was nothing on Earth that could possibly compare to the way her body felt beneath him, around him. Her arms encircled him and she curled her head into the crook of his neck, giving an experimental roll of her hips.

The small thread of control snapped.

John drew back and thrust inside her, reveling in the sharp moan that accompanied his actions. He did so again, watching her face contort in harsh pleasure.

“Fuck, John,” she moaned as he hoisted her leg up and around his waist, pulling her closer to him while he grinded down against her.

It was everything he’d wanted, everything he’d hoped for. Except, “Jardani,” he corrected, suddenly desperate to hear his true name on her lips again.

Her eyes flashed in recognition, a tender expression blending with desperation.

“Say it,” John demanded, thrusting deep within her.

“Jardani,” she half-said, half-whimpered as his onslaught continued. Her heel dug into his back as Helen met him stroke for stroke. “Jardani."

That was nearly enough to make him come. He was so fucking close. Each time their hips met, John had to stop himself from losing it and letting it be over. 

Already, he could feel himself teetering on the edge, growing closer with every gasp and moaned Jardani.

A wealth of new, unnamable emotions began to swell within him. He couldn't distinguish one from the next but he thought he might die if he lost this, if he lost her.

Beneath him, he could feel Helen’s body stiffening. Her grip around him tightened. Her nails dug into his back.

He reached between them to find her clit and push her over the edge again. He could feel the moment she fell over it, her core spasming around him as she cried out his name. She fell beneath him, hips still moving against him absently while she panted.

With that, he gave himself to focus on his own rising need for release. He pumped in and out of her limp body, listening to the soft words that fell from her lips until he, too, reached his precipice. He spilled inside her with a string of broken Russian before collapsing onto her body.

John breathed her in as he came down from his own high.

Helen’s arms tightened around him as she placed a kiss on his neck. The possession he felt was overwhelming. The thought of anyone even coveting what he had made him nearly murderous, and he couldn’t quite narrow down why.

As Helen’s kisses reached his mouth, he forgot about the question and soon lost himself to her again. And again.

It was hours later, after Helen had fallen asleep that the question came back to him and he realized the obvious answer.

For the first time, John Wick had something to lose.

#overheard at the continental #john wick fanfic #john wick fanfiction #john x helen wick #helen x john wick

[kiwisbell]

helen ; chapter one

dear joel

Si vis pacem, para bellum. Or, the inciting incident.

series masterlist | my masterlist pairing: joel miller x f!reader tags/warnings: 18+ (MDNI), john wick AU, (retired) hitman!joel, husband!joel, graphic violence, established relationship, artist!reader, love as worship (and blasphemy), blood + injuries, murder, cars, joel lifts reader once, reader has hair, oral sex (f receiving - aka munch!joel returns), married fluff, angst, threats of rape/SA, home invasion, disgusting awful men, childhood/religious trauma, the typical alcohol + smoking + profanity, erotic paintings, dividers by @/saradika word count: ~ 8.2k a/n: so i'm posting this and sprinting away because i'm terrified. that being said, this story means more to me than words can say and i sincerely hope you enjoy what i have to offer. thank you so much for reading, and please let me know what you think!! gigantic thanks to @cavillscurls for beta reading this chapter and being generally incredible throughout this whole process. i couldn't have done it without ya baby ❤️ next

PREFACE

“Love is my mover, source of all I say.”

— The Divine Comedy: Inferno, Canto II.

The blood is tangy, near-sweet, as he swipes his forearm over his mouth and smears crimson on his shirtsleeve. It tingles faintly on his lips and crackles, warm as the melt from a late-winter snow. He feels it settle in the grooves of his palms, the hairs of his beard. He’s drowning in it. 

Joel Miller grins as the punch rocks his jaw. 

His opponent hits hard, but he’s slow. He’ll take five punches in the time it takes to wind up for one. Joel brings his arm up to block the next and delivers a blow to the sternum with his knee as his opponent’s guard drops. Wide open, the man stumbles a few steps back, choking down the telltale wheeze of being winded. Joel marches forward, relentless in his crusade, grasping him by the scruff of his neck, teeth bared like a mad wild dog, and bears his skull down on the side of the railing. Around them, the wind howls and lashes at his clothes, but he still hears the pained scream as if it were poured into his ears. 

The man drops to his knees, and Joel grabs him again, bashing his head repeatedly against the steel bar, the lapel of an Italian leather coat bunching between his fingers, tainted by rainwater and the fist of the man who's about to take his life. 

And fuck, Joel wants to make it last. 

But there's a knife in his opponent’s hand, conjured from the darkness of his coat pocket, and Joel must release him to avoid the lethal slash of the blade. Blinking blood and lashing rain from his eyes, the man lunges with a snarl, and Joel recovers from his lost victory, stopping him with his fingers curled around his opponent’s wrist. He brings his hand to the crook of the man’s elbow and uses his leverage to snap the bone.

Yowling, the man drops to his haunches, the knife clattering to the ground. Joel, chest heaving, stands over him, flexing his fingers as he readies his fist for the killing blow.

His name leaves the man’s bloodied mouth, accompanied by a mouthful of crimson-tainted saliva spat on the ground at Joel’s feet. 

“Joel…” He lifts his head, cradling his own broken arm, and sneers. There’s a chilling glow of satisfaction in it. “Did you get your perfect life, Joel? Do you really think you’ve won? It won’t ever stop. Not after you’ve killed me, not after you’ve killed all of them. Is that what you’re going to do? Kill them all?”

Joel staggers backward to pick up the knife, clamping his hand over the curve of his opponent’s shoulder, and drives the blade down into his neck.

“Yeah.”

He leaves him slumped against the railing, choking on his own blood, and limps his way to one of the beaten-up Range Rovers whose front right bumper was totaled in the crash. Joel groans as he settles into the front seat, gnashing his teeth together as he lifts the hem of his dress shirt to inspect the damage. 

The bullet has pierced the soft flesh of his stomach. Blood blossoms bright through the white fabric and spirals outward. Joel blinks away rainwater and pulls his phone from his pocket, the screen smeared with blood. He doesn’t know if it belongs to him.

He grits his teeth and makes a call. 

In the back of his head, Joel vaguely recalls an old song of prayer. He used to watch others sing it while he lingered in the shadows at the back of the cathedral. He would memorise the shape of the words leaving their mouths and wonder how a benevolent God, who had shaped man—perfection—from red clay, could have made him. 

He would lower his head as if swept up in a tide of repentance, examining the bones beneath his hands. The flickering of tendons. The bulge of veins as he delicately folded his fingers into a fist.

Red clay. Blood. The old dance of serpent and man.

He was fourteen when he escaped.

Joel looks down at his bloodied hands. They’ve grown since then. They’re stronger, thicker, scarred. There are no pictures of him as a young boy, but if he saw one, he knows he would not recognise himself. Not his eyes nor his hands nor the set of his jaw. God makes man makes boy. He is destined for Hell.

The call goes to voicemail. 

Joel curls his hand into a fist and whispers a prayer.

Something cool and wet collides with Joel’s forehead as he stalks into the airport. It’s begun to rain. 

His target gate is close, and he's early. The press of bodies begins to crowd him. Prickling body spray and sickly-sweet perfume and sunburned skin from Spring Break return flights. Joel shoves through them, unseen, unnoticed amid the rowdy din of reunions. The collar of his shirt sticks to the nape of his neck. It’s the sensation of being strangled, clammy palms slick against his own skin. He adjusts his jacket and tightens his grip on the black fabric dangling from his hand. 

Joel waits by the gate, his eyes flitting between its apex and the people milling about him, reuniting with partners and parents and children. Nobody seems suspicious, but his fingers still dance upon the blade hidden in the inner lining of his leather jacket. Those performing wide berths around the scowling man try not to make eye contact. Most don't notice his presence at all. 

He waits, flicking his sleeve up every couple minutes to check the time on the inside of his wrist. Every tick of the thin hand registers in the pulse of his heart against his ribs. 

He hears the suitcase before he sees it—and it’s hard to miss. One wheel is wonky, and the case stutters in its path along the polished floor. It’s huge, pink, hideous. 

His hand dropping from the blade in his pocket, Joel makes his move. 

You see him approaching and drop the lopsided suitcase, shrieking as he takes you up in his arms. 

He swings you around twice, holding you firm against him, your fingers grabbing desperately at the locks of his curly, brown-grey hair. Joel nestles his face in your throat and breathes in: vanilla and shampoo and the unmistakable scent of a you he can never shake. Home.

You shudder into him, your feet barely scraping the floor as he holds you around the waist, one hand cradling the back of your head. Joel lets his eyes close. 

Daisies made of diamonds dangle from your wrist, connected by a fine golden chain. He can feel the faux petals dig into the back of his neck, etching their shape into the phantom pain of the ink peeking out from his collar. Sometimes, his skin would pull back with the needle, briefly protruding from his body like a tent made of flesh, as if grasping feebly onto some innocent time before the black hands of Dürer were permanently his. His to remember. His to loathe. 

There is a slight in the way his gift to you, wrapped snugly around your wrist since the first anniversary, kisses the old wound, the tip of the cross, and all he feels is the echo of agony. He holds you tighter.

“Can’t breathe, honey,” you croak, shoulders shaking with laughter. 

Joel mutters an apology, loosening his grip on you just enough to pull away and cup your face in his hands. His thumb traces the curve of your jaw, and you beam up at him, smoothing back the hair you’d tousled with your fingers. A curl swoops back down over his forehead.

“Hi,” you say softly. 

“Hi,” says Joel, already on his way to kissing you, his mouth slanting over yours. 

He tastes of mint and smells of his dark cologne, pine, Joel. Your Joel. And you kiss him like it—your hand cupping the nape of his neck, the other sliding up his strong, broad back, your lips meeting in a consuming kiss that knocks you off-kilter. He bends slightly over you, keeping you upright with a large hand on your lower back. 

“Never leave again,” mumbles Joel, grinning against your mouth, his hand sliding down your arm to your left hand, where two glimmering bands rest on your third finger. Your hands intertwine, and he bumps his nose into yours. 

You give him another short kiss. “Get me out of here.”

Joel slides your raincoat over your shoulders and you slip your arms through. He presses his lips to your forehead and closes his eyes, letting himself linger briefly in your space before he scoops up the handle to your affront of a suitcase and escorts you out back to the car. 

He opens the passenger-side door to let you slide into your seat, securing your case in the back, and makes his way around the vehicle. You reach for the collar of his jacket and pull him toward you for a kiss, grasping his jaw between your thumb and forefinger. He grins crookedly when you pull away, bushing the pad of his thumb across your cheekbone. 

“Missed you,” he says.

You sink your teeth into your bottom lip. “Yeah? How much?”

He reaches across the console and kisses you deeply, making you gasp into him as his hand slips underneath your silky little blouse and fits his fingers in the grooves between your ribs. Your skin prickles with goosebumps under his touch as his exploration migrates to your belly, sliding south, ever lower, his hand playing at the waistband of your panties—

“Okay,” you laugh, smacking his hand away. “Okay. You’re paying for parking, Miller.”

“I’ve got money,” he says plainly, dipping his head to kiss you again, his pupils fattening as he tries to gorge on all of you at once. You place a hand on his chest, enjoying the strong pulse of his heartbeat where you typically rest your head, and gently push him back. 

“Take me home,” you coo, your gaze sweeping fondly over the face that hasn’t changed, that you cannot forget, “and show me how much you missed me.”

His wedding band coolly kisses your cheek as he retracts his hand, reluctantly turning his key in the ignition. “Yes, ma’am.”

He’s always been a meticulous driver, expert in the way he flattens his palm on the wheel, his other on the back of your headrest, turns the car out of the spot, and merges onto the freeway. When he no longer needs his other hand, he gives it to you, and you bring his long-scarred knuckles to your lips. 

His hands are marked by years of use, of abuse, speckled with little white scars, freckles, divots, curves. You already know the lines in his palms, have traced them and painted them and put them under sensitive study with your body. But you turn his hand over nonetheless, your own fingertips careful in their examination, following their contours as if searching for a change. But they’re the same—he’s the same—and so you tuck your fingers between his and bring your palms together in a warm, awaited kiss.

It’s only been a month, but you study his profile as if years have passed. He’s still Joel, still surly, plush lips curved into a permanent pout, the space between his brows marked by a ponderous gash, the vein in his throat fluttering in silence when a driver cuts him off or he spots a car following too closely. He’s a good study, practised in his stoicism. 

His nose is artful. Its convex slope, pronounced, strong, curves deliciously into his upper lip, the soft greying hairs in between a space of waiting. His mouth, soft, learned, often languageless, is what you know best of him. You know it like your own—can trace its shape in the dark, hands behind your back. The strong jawline, the slight wrinkles beside his eyes, ones he never had before you met him, the patches of skin disrupting the fullness of his beard: they’re the picture of the man you married, and there’s always something you’re disappointed in discovering you’ve missed. A something you’ve never noticed, a something you wish you could go back and add to all your canvases. 

When you left him at the airport, it was a freckle just beneath the hollow of his throat. Now, it’s the frayed hairs just behind his ears, crimping in frizzy patterns that don’t match the languorous curls on the rest of his head. They look singed, as if he’d put a match to himself. 

Maybe it’s making up for lost time, for all the days you’d missed being away from your Joel. But there’s a second, smaller something: the little round scar beneath those wild hairs. You lift your hand to it, and before your thumb can make a pass over the white, puckered skin, he speaks. 

“It’s a burn.” Merging off the freeway, he pulls into a gas station. His fuel ticker is tapping gently at the E. “From a cigarette.”

Your heart tips off the edge of a yawning chasm, and your hand pulls back in a wary twitch of your fingers. Throat tightening, you feel a distinct pressure behind the T of your nose and forehead. “From the people who raised you?”

A muscle in his jaw spasms, and he lifts your joined hands to his mouth. “None of that,” he says softly, meeting your eyes that well with unshed tears. 

No tears for me, he once said to you. Not until I’ve earned ‘em.

You sniffle, watching him nuzzle his cheek against the soft flesh of your wrist, his lips finding your vein and following it halfway up your forearm. 

“Tell me about your show.” 

You let him tuck your tears away in the grooves between his joints and smile. “Successful, but lonely. So many people knew my name, and I’m pretty sure I knew about a quarter of theirs. Made me feel like some snobbish pig.”

“Nah, that’s my job,” says Joel. “Everybody loves you, baby.”

You roll your eyes. “Either way, the gallery was a hit. The triptych sold for the highest at the auction.”

Joel smirks. “The nude ones?”

“Yeah, dirtbag. The nude ones.” Your smile is dry, still somehow saccharine. 

“I liked those,” says Joel, fingers playing upon your upper thigh. 

“Perv.”

He playfully smacks your thigh. “Goddamn right.”

“It was good. It was. But I missed you.” Your voice breaks, and Joel squeezes your fingers in response. “Could hardly sleep without you there.”

He nods like he knows. And you know he does; he barely sleeps, even if you’re on top of him. “I know everybody loves you,” he says, “but next time you go away, remember I love you most.”

You blink away the shimmer of tears so you can see him clearly. “Casanova.”

“That's right,” he says, nosing his way into another kiss. “Don't ever leave me again, baby. My heart can't take it.”

You shake your head, laughing into his mouth as your tears slip onto your tongue. “Never again,” you whisper, “unless the hotel food is good.”

He nods. “I’ll make an exception, long as I can go.”

You grin. “You know… if I’m at home all the time…”

“We’re not getting a puppy.”

“Joel—”

“No.”

“Don't you want to make your wife happy?”

He faux-snaps at you like a dog, catching his teeth around your earlobe. “As a goddamn clam.”

You gasp as you feel his mouth suckle gently at the sensitive spot beneath your ear. “I… I want… We should at least talk about…”

“Hmm?” 

He’s playing with the hem of your blouse, deft fingers leaving warm imprints on the soft skin of your belly, fingers enveloping your precious heart when he places his hand on your upper back. The organ pounds under his touch, pouring its blood into his palms. 

You haven’t felt his touch in so long.

“I want…”

Joel hums again, prompting, his pinky finger dipping under the strap of your bra and pulling back, snapping it against your skin. 

“What was I talking about?”

He chuckles, bringing his lips back to yours. You grasp for him greedily, trying to fix him to you this time, your fingers bunching the fabric of his T-shirt. But he’s pulling back, his forehead falling against yours. 

“I’ll consider it,” he says, “if you can convince me.”

Giddily, perhaps stupidly, you smile. “I’m very prepared to convince you.”

“Uh-huh. I don't doubt you, baby. How ‘bout you let me fill up the car first?”

The throbbing bass of house music Dopplers as another car approaches the gas station. Three men exit the vehicle, one of them already lighting a cigarette while the other two make for the convenience store. One is wearing a backwards cap and the other a pressed suit. 

Nice move, you think, sinking back in your seat a little as Joel slides out of the car, smoking by a gas pump.

“Nice ride,” says the man at the opposite pump, puffing at his cigarette. 

“Thanks,” says Joel with a polite smile, locking the nozzle in the fuel tank and folding his arms over his chest. He’s hovering by the passenger door, halfway to blocking you from view.

The man surveys the hood, his fingers gently tracing the cool silver. “Boss Mustang 429. She a ‘70?”

“‘69,” says Joel.

“Very nice,” muses the man, drumming his hands on the hood. You feel the crude vibrations in your spine and straighten in your seat. This man—this kid, all his puffing and grinning and loud music—is bad news. Your stomach coils taut when his gaze shifts from Joel to you, staring hard through the windshield. 

“How much?” he asks Joel. 

You notice the minute stiffening of the muscles in Joel’s shoulders. “What?”

“How much for the car?” 

Joel pushes off the car and dislodges the pump, brushing the kid aside on his way back to the driver’s side. “It’s not for sale.”

The kid wanders to the passenger-side door before Joel can turn on the car and roll up the window. He leans his elbows just inside, his face mere inches from yours, and you can smell the sickly, cloying smoke of his cigarette as he blows it in your direction. 

He says something to Joel in Spanish that makes your husband’s hand still on the wheel.

And your Joel, your courteous Joel, your never-the-shit-stirrer Joel, narrows his eyes at the kid and says something in kind, his voice a low scrape that shudders through you.

It’s too fast for you to hear, and you never learned Spanish, and you were under the assumption (until right fucking now) that Joel never did, either. But he starts the car and rolls up the window, and you’re peeling away from the gas station before the kid can reply. 

“That was…” You cast around for the words and instead rest your eyes on Joel, whose jaw looks ready to snap. “Joel, honey, when did you learn Spanish?”

He’s silent for a long while, and you would assume that he didn’t hear you—if you didn't know that he has stellar hearing. When he pulls onto the long stretch of road, signalling your first firm tug away from the stifling noise of civilization, he finally speaks. 

“Picked it up in the Marines.” 

“What did he say to you?”

Joel’s skin is stretched taut over his knuckles. “Somethin’ stupid.”

You hum, letting him linger in silence for the remainder of the trip. Scenery, green and grey sky and the drizzle of rain, swoops by the window, and you're going home. It isn't much different from what you found in Vancouver, but it's familiar. It’s the smell of the air after the rain and the way your shared home comes into view the same way it always has. 

It isn’t a modest home. You and Joel had it built before the wedding, both eager to get away from the city and exist in relative peace when your job allowed it. It sits low and broad, geometric pillars framing the front porch, sleek modern lines in black and white. Your compromise: he assumed responsibility for the exterior, and you took everything within. Joel pulls into the garage, next to your beige SUV, and helps you and your hot-pink luggage out of the car. 

The walls are littered with canvases. Mostly, there are paintings of Joel. The first time you brought him to your studio, a few weeks into the relationship, he’d sat stone-still for hours. You don't recall even a twitch of a finger. He’s in shades of blue, red, green, grey. He’s sitting, standing, lounging, sleeping. His lashes lie in repose over his cheeks, eyes closed, sometimes open, often averted. You’ve captured him in bed, by the pool, in the kitchen, in your studio. Like a spider, you’ve ensnared his shyness, his care, his devotion, weaving it into a tapestry of oil, watercolour, pastel. 

You’ve never sold a single one. This Joel—whose eyes are sometimes closed, sometimes open, often averted—is for your eyes only. 

The curls at the nape of his neck are creeping under the collar of his jacket. Winding your finger around a rich brown lock, you give him a tug. “You haven't been taking good care of yourself.”

Joel brings your hand to his mouth, kissing the rings on your finger that bind you to him. “You told me you liked it long.”

“You told me it itches.” You shrug his jacket off his shoulders and trail your hands up his muscled arms. “It's not about me, honey.”

Joel hums, cradling the crown of your head in his palm and pressing a lingering kiss to your forehead. “When will you learn”—another hand around your hip, tugging you forward by the small of your back—“that everything is about you?”

You narrow your eyes at him. “That's a good answer, Mr. Miller.”

He grins crookedly, backing you against the kitchen counter. “Yeah?”

You scratch his scalp and feel his mouth descend on your jaw. “Mhm. You’ve been practising.”

“Didn't have much else to do,” he grumbles, fisting the fabric of your blouse and untucking it from the waistband of the old jeans sitting low on your hips. “My wife was gone.”

“You're getting whiny,” you chide, smacking his hand away from your fly. 

“Is it working?”

“You really wanna make your wife happy?”

“Yeah, baby. Yeah.” He looks down at you like he's close to pleading. 

“Then you'll let me cut your hair,” you purr. 

His pout lasts as long as it takes for you to get his hair soapy and your fingers in his curls, massaging slow and sweet. You take your time ridding him of the excess length, chopping carefully, your hands assured of their strength. You tell him to tilt up and look down and to the side, honey, and he obeys because it's your hands, and your voice, and he's pliable as molten glass. 

You get lost in the musical shhhick of the scissors cutting through hair, humming a tune that does not match, and he's reminded of ballet. Watching you in the mirror is like seeing the dance through a glass he cannot permeate. You may be touching him, but most times he's struggling to grasp you in your entirety. 

He sees an angel in his sleep, reaching out with a hand made of gold to guide him up from hell. 

You tell him more about the gallery. You tell him about whale-watching and being too seasick to take photos for him like he'd requested. Joel wants to shake his head but he stays still and tells you it’s okay, baby, all I wanted was to know you were happy. 

And you tell him I was happy. But it would've been better with you.

And he's joking, telling you I’d be throwin' up on the other side of the boat, but his body feels cold when you set down the scissors and leave his side. 

“How’s Tommy?” you ask, rubbing gel between your palms. This, he knows, is your favourite part: styling him up all pretty like your personal doll. 

It’s his favourite part, too. He holds you around the waist while you work. “He’s panicking.”

“Oh, come on,” you laugh. “He's read every book on the shelves. And your brother doesn't read.”

“Books can't prepare you for the real thing,” says Joel. “‘Least, that's what Maria told him.”

“Maria’s probably right.” You thread your fingers through his locks and watch with a smile as he closes his eyes, his forehead dropping to your belly. “But that doesn't take away from the fact that Tommy will make a great dad.”

Joel hums, pressing a kiss to your belly. “He’s been askin’ after you to paint their nursery. Want me to tell him to fuck off?”

You're beaming, curling one lock of hair around your finger and dangling it teasingly over his forehead. “Tell Tommy I'd be delighted. Maria shouldn't be doing any of that, pregnant as she is. You should smack some sense into your brother.”

“I tried every day when we were little. Didn't take.”

You give his styled hair a finalistic tug and brush it back from his ears. “Such a good model for me,” you coo, dropping into his lap, “just like always.”

“And what do I get?” he says, watching his own hand cup your breast, thumb ghosting over the soft swell, obscured by layers of fabric. 

Your wicked eyes feel heavy on his skin. “What you always get.” 

You take his hand in yours and lead him to the bedroom. You’ve done this a thousand times, it seems, this methodical undressing, made new with every hour spent apart. The dance replenishes in the sunlight, coming alive as spring blossoms, never stale, never withered. There is something new to discover each time. 

Joel kisses you, staggering backward until he’s sitting on the edge of the bed. You climb onto his lap without breaking the kiss, your arms winding around his neck as he tucks you into him. His cock is a hard, heavy weight between your thighs, accustomed to the touch of his hand alone in the month you've been apart. 

The revitalising warmth of skin-on-skin strikes him true, blooming like blood from his heart. He clutches you so close that your heartbeat skitters from your chest to his, your mouths exchanging breaths, your bodies sharing heat. He knows nothing but the shape, smell, sound of you. 

He trails his knuckles up and down your spine and wonders if he can make certain that he will die like this. He doesn't want to know an afterlife. It will spoil the memory of his very last moment, when he brings you in close and kisses your soft cheek and lets the darkness gently pull him down. 

The sisters at the orphanage would tell him things. You will never know peace until you know Him. You cannot know a person’s love until you know His. You will never understand, child, what it is to breathe, until every breath you take is in His name. Joel drags his open mouth up the column of your sternum, its golden pillar, his tongue dipping to taste the nectar that pools in the hollow of your throat. He tastes you instead, and he feels he has not cheated God. 

You gasp his name as he licks molten salt from your skin, and he feels the golden hand curl around his heart. His lids grow heavy with every taste. Intoxicated, he seeks more, putting his mouth to the crook of your neck. Your back arches, your chest flush with his own, melting and moulding together. Every second of time spent apart withers and dies. 

You have taken Joel to bed and felt him angry, happy, morose, insatiable—but the Joel you’re feeling now is tired. A drowning man finally cresting the surface, he touches you like he never will again. Your skin bunches and folds under his too-eager hands, rubbing you raw. Your muscles pull taut as you try to accommodate his frantic mouth. He bites you and your lips part in a silent scream. He pulls your hair and you gush, your chest hot, prickling with friction and sweat and heat. 

There is anguish in the way he holds you. It feels deep as a wound, old enough to still ache when it rains, old enough that you were never around to know him when it was cut into his body. You want to rescue him from the wordless pain, the agony that has no name. 

You want to know what has made him this way. Because there are times when you see your husband and it strikes you suddenly that a different person exists in the black of his eyes. Because there are parts he keeps hidden, for your sake or his. Because there is a little boy in his chest who's been hurt and you do not know how to save that sliver of him. 

Leftover hairs from his trim sting as your bodies slide together. Your scalp prickles at the desperate way he holds you at the crown of your head. You whisper his name and he looks up at you in the darkness, and there is water brimming beneath his irises. 

“Tell me what you need,” you say. 

He brings his hand between your thighs and touches the wet, warm place he seeks. You nod, letting him roll you onto your back, his mouth trailing kisses down your navel. When you squirm, he pins you by your belly, his palm flat to your skin. When you mewl his name, your chest heaving, he nods his head in reply, dipping his head and sliding his hot tongue through your slit. 

Joel is the prayer you chant. He kneels at the edge of the bed, bringing your thighs around his ears, closing his lips around your clit. You cry out, your hand flying to his hair, tugging him closer, eliciting a groan from his chest. It rumbles through you, his face buried in your pussy, his hands fastened around your thighs. He places searing kisses between your legs, lighting you ablaze, leaving scorch marks wherever his lips touch you. 

“Tell me you're mine,” he says, and the fractured sound of his voice cuts into your skin. He's watching you, his pupils puffy and seeking, hands squeezing, desperate. “Please.”

You whimper at the sight of the kiss he places on your clit. “I’m yours,” you tell him, reaching for his hand and threading your fingers through his. “I’m your wife, Joel. I’m not going anywhere. I’m yours and I love you.” 

He lowers his head, an apostate seeking redemption, and his tongue slides heavily over your clit. At the suction of his mouth around the slick pearl, you gasp, “Oh, God,” your head thrown back, your spine arching into his palm. The cut of the diamond on your finger is sharp against his skin. 

Joel relishes the cool bite of the gem as he licks through your folds and his saliva mingles with your wetness. He kneels with fervour, presses his mouth to you as if whispering his confessions through the lattice, and makes you his. 

The flat of his tongue is scalding, his palm a brand. He licks and sucks until you’re quivering, suffocating his hand in yours, and he wants to bare the imprint of your sigh forever. He should be the one submitting to you, and here you are, lending him your body to please, if only for another moment. Joel flicks his tongue over your clit, takes it into his mouth, and makes you sob his name. 

I’m yours. 

Yours. 

And it sounds so permanent that, for a second, he believes it himself.

You come with your back curving and your hips grinding and your nails in his skin. Joel doesn’t stop until you’re begging him to, until you push yourself onto your elbows and tell him to come here.

You swing your leg over him and bring your mouth down to his. Joel squeezes his eyes shut and kisses you so deeply that it bruises him somewhere he cannot reach. His hands cupping your face. His cock heavy between your bodies. The sun lowering, casting you in bronze. He loses his grip on the world.

“Now,” you whisper in the growing dark, “it’s your turn to tell me.”

You lift yourself onto his cock and bring yourself down, and Joel’s fist opens against your back. “I’ve been yours since the restaurant,” he rasps. 

You beam at him, and dusk ends.

There is a thumping beyond your bedroom door.

Joel hears it before you. In a flash, he hooks his leg under your knee and rolls you over, pinning you under his body. He reaches for the nightstand on his side, throws open the drawer, and pulls a gun. 

You grasp his shoulders, nails digging into flesh. Eyes meet in the slippery darkness. Wide, careful. Words wordlessly exchanged. 

Your fluttering heartbeat begins to pound in your ears. The noise migrates down the hall. 

Footsteps. 

In the kitchen, glass shatters, and your stomach swoops, down and back up, lodging in your throat. 

“Joel,” you whisper, your own voice trembling out of you. He shakes his head, his finger coming to his lips. Your body begins to tremble. The chill digs a pick into each knob of your spine as it climbs up to your brain stem. 

Your home begins to pound with its very own heartbeat. You can hear its tightly-wound tension in the walls. Nobody breathes except for your husband, slow and steady, hovering over you with a gun in his hand. 

You hadn’t known he owned a gun.

His hips ground you against the bed and his fingers intertwine with yours, bringing your hand to his chest. His heart pounds strongly into your palm, his eyes narrowed, fixed to you. But you know his focus is split down the middle, divided between keeping you safe and listening. 

Your breathing peters out until it’s silent as the breeze outside the window. A man’s voice carries from the kitchen, and another answers. Joel shifts slowly off the bed and brings you with him, handing you his T-shirt and boxers. He tucks himself into his jeans and pulls another shirt over his head while you silently dress. The fabric slips from your hand as your trembling fingers struggle for a purchase. Once you’re dressed, Joel pulls you into him, pressing his lips to your forehead. 

“Under the bed,” he whispers. 

Oh, fuck that.

“You want to go out there and confront them by yourself? Are you fucking crazy?”

He shuts you up by lowering his mouth to yours in a scorching kiss. “Do not fuckin’ argue with me,” he rasps, his teeth scraping against yours. You open your mouth to do exactly that, but another glass shatters, and you flinch away. 

“Under. The. Bed.”

And he’s gone, leaving you alone, helpless, the predatory prowl of his gait something unfamiliar to you. It’s learned, utterly silent, the curve of his elbow guiding your gaze to the gun held behind his back. His head juts out before him, peeking around corners.

There are dust bunnies underneath the bed. You’re a better cleaner than Joel, but he makes an effort. He gets lost in it sometimes, sweeping his way through the house as if there’s a grid on the floor, precise in his methods. He doesn’t attend to the details, like the corners of the trim or the grooves in the floorboards. And yet, your floors are polished. Your plants are watered. He cares for you in quiet ways, when words fail. 

Your heart thuds against the hardwood through the thin fabric of his T-shirt. It smells of rain and him. There are no more noises coming from the kitchen.

You drop your head into your folded arms and will yourself to breathe. The claustrophobic space between the bed frame and the floor edges in on you. The only light disrupting the vignette is the small lamp. You’re alone. 

When you lift your head again, a pair of heavy black boots stares you right in the face. 

You bite down on your scream as your heart swoops down into your stomach, pressed hard against the cold floor. Though you do not breathe, the thrum of your heart echoes in your throat as the sputtering of an engine in the dead of winter. The boots leave scuff marks on your floors, the boards groaning under the weight. The owner is heavyset, likely male from the size of his feet. And he's calling for you. 

“Here, pretty kitty.” He pitches his octave high as he taunts you. “Come on out, sweet girl. Don't make me mad.”

You watch the path of his boots across the floor as he approaches the nightstand, throwing open the drawer and rummaging through your belongings. 

Objects roll under the bed with you as he periodically drops them, careless in his vandalism. Your journal lands next to your head with a thunk, and you hear the low buzz of your vibrator in his hand. “Hmm, kitty likes to play.” And it lands on the floor, rolling to a cool stop in the groove between two boards. 

Petrified, you can only watch him stalk across the room, his heavy footfalls thundering in your ears. He whistles a tune you don't recognise, and you wonder what's taking your husband so fucking long. 

Joel, cries your heart as the man halts in his tracks, lowering himself to the ground, taking a knee. JoelJoelJoelplease—

And there's a spark of recognition when your eyes meet in the dark, like you've been acquainted with their black depths, before you're scrambling out from under the bed and kicking him square in the face with the heel of your foot. 

He grunts, holding his nose, free hand grasping for you like wisps of smoke. You crawl to your feet and begin to run, only for him to wrap one cold hand around your ankle and pull. 

You crumple back down to the floor with him, barely saving your own skull from cracking on the hardwood as you throw your hands in front of your eyes. The impact to your elbows radiates up to your neck, and you scream your throat raw, kicking out at your assailant, your blood roaring, weeping. 

With a firm kick to his throat, you force him to let go, his hand flying instinctively to his windpipe. He wheezes something crude, probably, but you’re running—limping, mostly, slamming the bedroom door behind you with a shattering thud that quakes the frame.

“Joel!” you cry, turning the corner in the hall, feeling the walls as you go as if your own home has become foreign to you. What if he’s dead? What if you’re about to stumble over his body in the dark—the only body you’ve ever been able to know as something more than a vessel for art, for a painstaking study? That body, the body you could trace in the black with fingertips, not brushes, does not make itself known. 

“JOEL—!”

A hand comes to rest on your cheek. It is not Joel’s hand. It is no hand at all, but the edge of a blade, a cool stinging thing that nicks the tender skin beneath your eye. 

Blood from his nose drips down his mouth, staining his teeth red. You feel a small thrill of victory. 

Joel is on the kitchen floor in a heap, vaguely stirring from the impact of a baseball bat to his ribs. The bat which a second intruder now uses to smash the framed pictures on your wall. Glass rains down on him. Shards have cut Joel’s soft belly, shredded the fabric of his shirt. Your captor holds you by the hair.

A third man smokes a cigarette, sitting on your countertop, swinging his feet back and forth, and it strikes you that he’s really only a kid. Twenty-five at most. You know young hands, young eyes. Your pencils and paper know them better. 

“Nice of you to join us,” says the man from the gas station, making shapes of the cigarette smoke. You watch the way it curls around the low-hanging light. 

“Joel,” you whisper, the salt of your tears stinging in the wound on your face. “Baby, please… get up…”

“He’s fine, chiquita,” says the kid. “Don’t waste your energy.”

Joel’s eyes peel open, his hands blindly grasping for something he does not have. He’s curled in on himself to protect himself from the inevitable next swing of the bat. You wonder if he’s been struck in the head, and you can feel pieces of your heart slowly wilting as petals untended.

His gun, you realise, your eyes dropping to the belt of the man who holds you hostage. It’s tucked into his waistband, but you cannot reach it with your arms trapped in front of you. His arm is a heavy band around your chest, glueing you to him, helpless. You’re fucking helpless and you cannot get to him and he will die.

Your Joel will die and he will know pain in the way you want him to know love. 

“Let him go, please. You hurt him.”

The kid sniffs, tossing his cigarette to the floor beside Joel and jumping down from the counter to stomp it out with an expensive sneaker. “He disrespected me,” says the kid, leering down at your half-conscious husband like a speck of dirt on a polished glass. “But he doesn’t matter.”

You choke on your sobs, writhing in your captor’s grasp in a futile effort to feel not-so-suffocated, not-so-stuck. “You can have anything you want. Please, take anything. We have money, we have cars, we have paintings. They’re worth something, I promise you. Just—just look up my name. They’re worth a lot, please, just take them and leave us alone, please—”

The anger explodes through the gash in his face where he’d put the cigarette, that yawning maw eager to swallow blood and pain. “I don’t want your fucking paintings!” he screams, stalking toward you and yanking you free of the other man’s grasp. 

Your stomach swoops as he shoves you, hard, to the floor. This time, your arms do not take the blow. It is your temple that absorbs the impact, striking hard on a floor already flecked with blood. Black seeps through paper. Your eyes darken. A man—you do not know which—is speaking.

“Go on, Emil, have some fun with the bitch,” he says. “We can put her up in the kennel when we’re done with them both.”

You hear the rustling of a belt as the man above you flicks open his fly, laughing all the while. 

You're still blinking hard to clear the fog when you hear a growl rumble in your husband’s chest, the faraway noise of a fist meeting flesh, the scuffle of feet across your freshly-washed floors, the first gunshot. 

Your cheek meets cool hardwood as you succumb, the shape of your Joel’s rage etched into your eyelids. 

There’s a painting on the wall depicting two bodies in orgasm. Curved spines, feverish hands, dimples where fingers meet flesh. There is a hole in the canvas where the woman’s heart should be. A splatter of blood taints the image where the man drags his open palm down her back. 

His face is obscured, but his mouth is on her throat, exposing the cut of his jaw. The scruff of his beard. Careful strokes of oil paint join their bodies in harmony. It’s knocked askew on the wall. 

He’s rusty. 

He can feel it in the taut pull of his shoulder as he brings his arm back for the death blow. The blade comes up against the rough skin beneath the man’s chin, slicing him open just beneath the scruff of his beard. Blood bruises the hardwood floors, and although the man is already dead, Joel grasps him by the hair at the crown of his head and brings him down against the wall. 

His shoulder aches. His finger joints crackle. His knuckles are already bruised, his abdomen sore. He spits out pinkish saliva and turns his attention to his next job. 

His gun now back in his hand and its thief dead, Joel puts a bullet between the eyes of the third man, and another in his chest. The baseball bat clatters to the floor.

He thinks of the first time he wanted to kill for you and couldn’t. 

A man at the bar had groped you while you were out with friends. A little tipsy, you told Joel as he tucked you gently into the passenger’s seat, wrapped in a pretty black dress, and fell promptly asleep. He remembers the cool flutter of your hair from the air vent. He remembers the way your lashes spread like spider legs on your cheeks at every red light, the way the street lamps turned you golden. 

He remembers the man’s name. His face. His address. Some of the little wrinkles in his brain still hold echoes of information he'll never need again. But he keeps it tucked up there anyway. Maybe it reminds him of what he could never do, now that he had you. 

It seems the rules have been bent. 

Glass crunches underfoot behind him. Joel turns just in time to see the retreating figure, the fucking coward, sprinting for the door. He fires a shot that chips a piece of drywall and goes nowhere significant. Cursing himself, Joel hears the roar of his Mustang come to life as the kid leaves with his fucking car. 

Everything has a price, he'd said, blowing smoke in your face. Including your bitch. 

Joel curls his hand around the hilt of the knife. Blood begins to crust along the edge. Some of the blood, he realises, has been stolen from your sacred body. There is a cut on your cheek. 

And does your bitch have a price? Joel had replied, glancing behind the kid at the lackey he'd brought along. He seems to like you. 

You teeter on your way to standing, and Joel rushes to catch you before you can hit the floor. He flicks on the safety and sets his gun aside, cupping your face in his bloodied hands. 

Your eyes, blurred with tears, struggle to meet his. They're fixed to the man in a heap over Joel’s shoulder—the man who'd cut you. 

“Baby,” he says. 

Trancelike, you shake your head. 

“Baby, I gotta see you're still with me. Don't look at him; he ain't important right now. You’re important. Hear me?”

His voice is gentle, guiding, his thumbs hooked just behind your ears, hard eyes flickering between each of yours. 

“You killed them.”

“Yeah,” says Joel as the pad of his thumb traces the soft skin beneath the cut on your cheek. Your fingers curl around his wrists as if you’re trying to strangle him, temper him. 

“You’re hurt.” Your soft cry inverts his ribs, sits heavy and wrong in his chest. When your glassy eyes slide to meet his at last, Joel remembers the second time he wanted to kill someone and couldn’t. 

A man from your past had visited your apartment and told you he wanted to try again. You'd politely escorted him out and laughed it off. Terrible in bed, you’d joked. 

Joel remembers kneeling in the cathedral, surrounded by the lick of a thousand votives coaxing sweat from his glands, as he tried and tried to find faith and only felt the agonising scrape of the floor against his kneecaps. 

He remembers the first time devotion meant something to him. In the name of your second gallery showing. Paintings lined the walls depicting couples in embrace. “Which one is us?” he asked. 

“I don't sell those,” you’d replied. 

“Why not?”

“Because you're only for me,” you told him. “But I’ll tell you a secret.”

He’d ached to hear it. Even leaned in, a co-conspirator. 

“There isn't any devotion in these paintings. They're all hired models.”

“Then why bother at all?” he'd asked. “Why call it that?”

“Because I like showing people that there’s love in the world. And because devotion means something to me now.” You’d looked up at him and tucked your hand in his and he knew what all those nights spent kneeling meant. 

Faith, he thinks now, glaring at the shallow cut on your cheek, is knowing your purpose. 

The wound is his purpose. 

“I’m not hurt, baby girl. We need to pack a bag, okay? I have somewhere for us to stay.”

“Are they—are they coming back?” you ask, your bottom lip wobbling. 

Joel swallows bile and a bit of blood. “No. No, they won't be comin’ back. But we need a safe place while I take care of things.”

“Take care of things.” 

Your echo is ominous in his ears, and when your eyes leave him again to watch the way the blood trickles into the grooves between the floorboards, Joel knows what you will say next. 

“Who are you?”

#fic: helen #kiwisbell's fics #joel miller #joel miller x reader #joel miller smut #joel miller x you #the last of us #john wick au #joel miller au #joel miller fic #joel miller fanfic #joel miller x female reader #joel miller x f!reader #tlou fic

[greenmanalishi]

*CHAPTER 4 SPOILER*

#but is it a spoiler #john wick #john wick chapter 4 #john wick chapter 3 parabellum #john wick chapter 2 #keanu reeves #keanu reeves memes #john wick memes #john wick fanfiction #john wick x reader #john wick meme #keanu fucking reeves #keanu fanfiction #keanu reeves fanfiction #john wick fanfic #john wick 2 #the matrix #matrix #Helen wick #greenmanalishi #meme #john wick smut #keanu reeves smut #keanu reeves x you #keanu reeves x reader #keanu reeves imagine #john wick imagine #keanu reeves fanfic #keanu reeves x y/n #john wick x y/n

[evren-sadwrn]

i love how in scenes where john wick thinks about his wife, there’s always either light or the color grading turns into yellow/gold

helen will always be symbolized through sunlight/light because SHE is john’s light. the reason for his defiance against the high table and the reason he is so disciplined into getting the freedom he deserves away from the criminal underworld

#john wick #helen wick #helen x john #john x helen #character motif #bridget moynahan #keanu reeves

[johnwickb1tsch]

picture of domesticity ~ john x wife!reader fix it imagine

So... what if you were married to John Wick and the writers didn't kill you off just to give the male protagonist the excuse to go on a rampage? And everything John goes through in the movies is so he can come home to you, rather than agonize in just the memory of you?

You're in the car with your new puppy Daisy on your lap when Iosef proposes to buy the 'Stang. John does not like it when he leans in the window, leering at you as much as the car. You don't understand the exchange the men have over your head, though you understand John's body language all too well.

When the creepy boy goes you turn to your husband, hugging Daisy to you. 'It's so hot when you speak Russian," you say, trying to lighten the tension in the car.

He looks at you with an eyebrow raised, the corner of his mouth ticking up despite himself. You've always had that effect on your so- serious husband.

"What did you say?" you ask.

"I called him a bitch."

You giggle, scratching Daisy's ears. "John!"

"What? He said it first."

You sigh and reach over to take John's hand, feeling the tension thrumming down his arm. Usually you can calm him down with just a touch, but this time he remains wound as a spring. You have just been for a drive in the country. 'Let's go home, baby."

He does not calm down when you get home either, though. He is quiet in his agitation. But you know his every tell by now, and you know something isn't right.

He disappears into the basement for a little while. When he returns, he doesn't smell like book glue, but something more chemical.

Gun oil, you realize.

It's been a long time.

"Is everything OK?"

Now you are beginning to worry.

"I'm sure it's fine," he says, opening his arms to you. You snuggle on the couch with Daisy for the rest of the afternoon.

When you wake to the sound of a crash downstairs you almost are not surprised. John's side of the bed is empty. Daisy tries to dash away towards the ruckus, but you secure her in the closet, but not before withdrawing your Beretta 9mm from the jewelry safe.

It was a wedding present.

By the time you descend the stairs, the intruders have been rendered into corpses. John stands in the kitchen with a blood spattered face, looking feral. It catches your breath in your throat.

You are not half as horrified as you should be.

You have not seen that suit in a long time.

Only later do you find out it was the son of your husband's old associate, Viggo Tarasov.

John says the matter is closed, but you aren't so sure.

When a beautifully dressed Italian with impeccable manners appears at your door, your heart falls to your feet, and you just know they are going to try to take him from you again...

#john wick #john wick imagine #john wick x you #john wick x reader #john wick x y/n #keanu x you #keanu reeves #john wick x helen #helen wick

[lycheeloving]

trying my hand at John Wick texts. broadening my horizons, etc

#i imagine this is in a timeline without Helen (like you're there instead of Helen. and he kidnapped you.) so no dog. #and he lets you have a phone bc um I wanted to write this. maybe you can only contact him with it and nothing else? something like that. #lycheewritings #john wick x reader #yandere john wick #yandere!john wick #yandere #reader insert #x reader #yandere texting #jw

[romangoldendreams]

If he had any damn purpose in this life, it was to save her.

#constantine #john wick #john x helen #helen wick #constantine x angela #rachel weisz #john wick 1 #saving her #eddie x lily #brokeness #keanu reeves and rachel weisz

[thewhumpcaretaker]

Cover I drew for my WIP, The Broken Veil, a Helen Wick x John Wick fanfic. Check my pinned post for updates!

#john wick #john x helen #helen wick #john wick fanfic #john wick fanart #john wick whumpee #character resurrection

[askjohnwick]

The Broken Veil Masterlist

The Broken Veil, a John Wick x Helen Wick fic, has migrated from The Whump Caretaker, my main blog, to this side blog. I don't intend to write more, but please feel free to enjoy and to review what is available.

AO3

Cover

Chapter 1: Let Me In

Chapter 2: The Price to Pay

Chapter 3: Miracle

Chapter 4: Always Exist

Chapter 5: Bloodless, Airless

Chapter 6: The Horde

Chapter 7: How to Shoot

Outline for Rest of Fic - in case you wanted to know where it was going

#john wick #john wick fanfic #john wick whumpee #john wick x helen wick #john x helen #whump fic #assassin whump

[overheardatthecontinental]

Endlessly Dangerous, Chapter 18 is now up!

#john wick #overheard at the continental #endlessly dangerous john x helen wick #otp: your best friend #otp: daisy #helen x john wick

[kiwisbell]

helen ; chapter three

the red circle

Si vis pacem, para bellum. Or, the truth.

series masterlist | my masterlist pairing: joel miller x f!reader tags/warnings: 18+ (MDNI), john wick AU, hitman!joel, husband!joel, established relationship, artist!reader, love as worship (and blasphemy), sacrilege in the name of romance, flashbacks, graphic violence, guns, blood + injuries, mentions of rape/SA, cars, bill is here, joel is still a bit of an idiot, childhood/religious trauma, hitman!joel finally hitmans, criminal underworld, secrecy/lies, betrayal, ANGST (still unresolved oopsie), we're getting there though, exposition, conflicting emotions, joel's tattoos are sexy but they're also plot-relevant, Sleeping Together, but not like That, the typical alcohol/smoking/profanity, dividers by @/saradika word count: ~ 7.6k a/n: this chapter marks this fic being halfway done already, which is madness. also, can i just say that i'm loving the amount of people who've specifically been watching john wick because of this fic?? this is my agenda!! as always, thank you so fucking much to mya baby @cavillscurls for beta reading this fic and being, idk, generally the loml. i hope you enjoy chapter 3, my friends! i'm sorry it's been such a long time coming, but life lifed, y'know?? prev | next

“How much?”

“Two million. For now, at least. It’s open.”

“Goddammit, Tommy.”

“I told you to be careful, brother. Now look at you. You’re a loose end.”

Joel resisted the urge to toss his phone. The shower continued running in the bathroom, muffled by the closed door. 

He couldn't lose you. He didn't know life without you. Love had no name until he knew you. He'd christened it with that first kiss, maybe even in the first breath he'd shared with you.

If there was a chance Cabrera’s kid could come back for you, even if just to hurt Joel, he needed to see this to its end. There was no choice. 

“He tried to rape my wife,” said Joel. “He's lucky I’m only tryin’ to kill him.”

Tommy only sighed, and the call ended.

I married you, Joel.

I loved you.

You lied to me.

He rests his elbows on his knees as he watches you doze. The sunlight shines neatly through the break in the curtains, and you squint against it in your sleep, turning over with a little huff and bringing the duvet over your head. You’ve always needed total darkness for a half-decent sleep. 

You’ve been crying. The tears leave remnants on your cheeks, a dryness at the outer corners of your eyes, salt seeping moisture from your skin. He’s never known a thing so soft as the drag of his hand down your back. 

I loved you.

You lied to me.

You will never understand. There are reasons—too many to count—that civilians cannot know. He may have gotten you to relative safety in the Continental, but there are a hundred dangerous people in this building who have a long-standing grudge against Joel Miller or the man he worked for. A hundred people who would take you as collateral the moment you stepped outside the grounds. But as long as you remain inside, you’re safe.

He just needs to finish the job. He needs to see it through, and he’ll be out. You’ll realise he’s done it all for you.

I loved you.

Sitting on the edge of his bed, he watches the rise and fall of your chest beneath the sheets. He broke your heart last night. He watched you turn in on yourself, your eyes so cold, so far away. He listened to you scream, and inside he pleaded: Keep hitting me, baby. Keep shouting. Be mad. He wanted you loud and furious and spitting fire. If you were angry, you still cared. He could work with that. 

And to see you walk away, the fire frozen over, the fight in your marrow sucked out… 

The anguish of losing your ire still stirs in his chest. The guilt peels him away in layers. Acid. 

She’ll understand, he tells himself, you, anyone who’ll listen. She’ll get it someday—why I did it, why I lied. She’ll forgive me.

Forgive me, baby. Don’t let me live the rest of this life never seeing you smile.

“Stop looking at me,” you grumble, your eyes still closed.

Joel averts his eyes. His throat feels tight. “You sleep okay?”

You haul yourself upright and stretch out your back. Joel studies the curve of your spine and the nape of your neck. You’re the muse painters rave about. The reflections of sunlight on water at dusk. The pond of water lilies. 

“You didn’t. Your sheets haven’t even moved.”

“I can’t sleep without you.”

You give him a heavy look, your eyes bleary with sleep. “You managed all those years before me, Joel. Let’s not do this.”

“What if I want to do this?” he says, dropping to the floor next to your bed and taking your hands in his. You try to pry yourself free, but he drops his head and traps you in his rapt vigil. 

“Joel…” Your voice is still groggy, but there’s agony in the way you say his name.

“You’re my wife,” he says against your skin. “You’re the only person I’ve ever loved. You’re the girl I saw that night in the restaurant with the pretty eyes and you’re the girl I called every night just so I could hear your voice, and you’re always gonna be the only fucking girl for me. You’re my reason for everything, baby. I need you. Please… please just understand. You have to know that.”

You’re silent for a long while, your legs curled under you as your own husband kneels as if in prayer. Your throat burns with more tears you have little energy left to shed. You whisper his name.

He looks up and you find you cannot meet his eyes. So you stare at one of the patches of skin that disrupt the brown-grey of his beard. “That first night at the restaurant,” you say, trepidation colouring your voice blue, “you disappeared after the second course. When you came back, you told me you had to take a call. Was that the truth?”

Joel’s eyes are frantic in their search for an answer. “Don’t,” you snap. “Don’t lie to me again. Was that the truth?”

“There—” His voice cuts off, his eyes shuttering. “There was a target. That’s… why I was there in the first place.”

Your sob dies in your chest. It doesn’t even make a noise. You wrench your hands out of his, and he lets you, still kneeling at your bedside like a lost sinner. “Love has never been the problem. You might love me, but you’ve never told me the truth. Not from the first day.”

One of his hands wraps around your ankle. “I wanted out. I wanted out my whole life, and you’re the one who made me find the way. Cabrera, he… He gave me an impossible task. I completed it. And I gave you this ring.” He brushes his thumb over the knuckles of your third finger where your bands are still secure. “You said yes. You married me. Doesn’t this mean something?”

The sound of your hollow laugh hurts more than any words you could use to cut him. “It did,” you confess, “when I knew exactly who my husband was.”

He shakes his head, his lips parting in another desperate cast, but you’re standing up and crossing the room, gathering your toiletries for the bathroom. “What happens now?” you ask. 

Joel stares at the ring on his finger. “I’m going to talk to the Manager. You have to stay here.”

“Okay,” you say softly. Your back is rigid. “Just tell me something.”

“Anything,” says Joel. 

“If I asked to leave,” you whisper, “would you let me go?”

Joel feels his heart crack in two. He remembers the small outdoor wedding, in the heart of May, when he’d seen you walk down the aisle toward him and struggled to find the words, as he always did, that would be good enough. 

I vow to love you, he'd said, his hands trembling as he took yours. I vow to be your partner in all things. I vow to show you every piece of my soul, the way you've given me yours, and to be gentle with your heart. 

I vow to be the man you want, the man you need, and the man you love. 

He’s failed. He knows that. But you smiled at him that day, your eyes brimming with tears that turned black from your mascara, and you kissed him before the officiant said the words. 

I loved you.

“I’d do anything you asked me to,” he says, “but not that.”

Joel made a stop at the Continental Tailor before he went to find the Manager in the lounge. He paid the Tailor a bit too much for the new suit, he realises now, the sleeves a bit too tight, the pants not quite tapered. He was dressing a different body than the one he knew all those years ago. 

Joel weaves through the darkness as a crooning voice sings something about evil men up on the stage. The band is playing along, a smooth jazz tune, and the bodies around him smell of expensive cologne and perfume and vodka. He remembers with a start why he hated this place so much. 

Adjusting his jacket, he finds the Manager sitting in the VIP section on a long curved booth upholstered in crimson velvet, sipping a dry martini. 

“Joel,” he says, lifting his glass in toast. 

“Bill.”

The Manager doesn't look particularly thrilled. “You know there’s an open contract on your head. Who did you have to kill to end up back here?”

“Just a couple people.” Joel sits opposite him. “I need information.”

“And you're here on more business. Does your consort have anything to say about that?”

Joel curls his fingers into a fist atop the table. “I’m invoking my guest privileges. And she is my wife.”

Bill sniffs in amusement. “So, you did end up marrying the gal. Good for you, Joel. She's a stunner.”

���Fuck you, Bill.”

A short, booming laugh. “Nobody will so much as look her way. You have my word and all it means.”

“Doesn't mean much,” says Joel. “I’m just visiting.”

“Don't be the idiot I know you aren’t,” says Bill, leaning forward and setting his glass aside. “You dip so much as a pinky back in this pond, and you won’t get out so easy. Sometime, somewhere, someone’s going to come to you with another impossible task.”

“And I’ll complete it,” says Joel. “Emiliano Cabrera. Where is he?”

“You really wanna do this, Joel?”

“Yeah.”

“Your wife may be safe now, but she won’t be forever.”

“That’s why I’m going to finish it. That’s why I’m going to kill him.”

The Manager sighs, polishing off his martini. “You know damn well business will not be conducted on Continental grounds, Joel. You may as well go have a drink at the bar, take a load off. I can’t tell you anything while you’re inside my hotel.” 

Joel suspected as much. “Then tell me something you can.”

Bill’s nostrils flare and Joel feels some satisfaction knowing he can still push the old man’s buttons. “I’ll tell you what: the game has changed since you left it. Your only chance is to get out now, while you still can. What could possibly warrant the Boogeyman reentering the fold?”

Joel licks his teeth. Your eyes blurring with tears as your skull connected with the ground, your body going limp as he stood above you. The clink of a belt buckle echoes still in his head. If he hadn’t been fast enough—

“It’s personal.”

Bill’s gaze dips. “Well,” he says, “then, unofficially, I wish you the best of luck. But, as a former friend”—Joel snorts —“let me give you a piece of advice. Take your wife home and forget about all of this. I like you, Joel, but for her sake and yours, I’d rather never see you again.”

Joel doesn’t take it personally. “Tell Frank I said hello.”

Bill grabs a full glass from a passing server. “Fuck you, Joel.”

He nods his head, closing the lapels of his jacket and slipping the first button through the opposite slit. As the singer on the stage transitions into the next song, Joel orders a glass of bourbon and watches the bartender slide his drink over on a pristine white napkin. 

“On the house, per the Manager’s request,” says the bartender. “Welcome back, Mr. Miller.”

Pristine—save for the small red circle drawn with marker on the centre. Across the bar, Bill raises his glass in another toast, and Joel leaves the lounge, his drink untouched. 

It’s a Tuesday night, and the Red Circle is lined up around the corner. One must know someone to get inside, and that someone must be a paying member. Joel had a membership by default, being contracted under Cabrera, but it was revoked along with his other privileges once he had completed his task. 

You would hate this place. It’s throbbing bass and flashing neon lights and sweat-slick bodies rubbing up against one another. It’s brick and industrial metal and glass and the people don’t mix, either. 

Maybe part of him is hedonistic, too. He doesn’t think he ever used to be. The job gave him wealth to spend that he never cared to; when he met you, he began to understand the pleasure of material things. Gold shone when it hung around your neck and wrapped around your fingers. Diamonds glittered like the jewels in a crown when you wore them on your ears. And when he pulled you close to him for the first time, undressing you slowly, hooking his fingers in the lace panties he’d bought for you and bringing his mouth to the heat between your legs, Joel began to understand the draw of pleasure. 

It isn’t that he’d never had sex before you. He’d just… never been interested before you. Bodies always felt… too cold. They were complex. They were things to be followed, things to be killed. They were names on a piece of paper. They would bleed all their warmth and light into his palms and he would return, limping, to a house he never cared about and absolve himself of red. He’d never known the thrill of a body until he tucked his hand under the soft swell of your naked breast and put his mouth on yours and felt your heartbeat bleed into his hands. He never wanted to wash it off. 

If I asked to leave, would you let me go?

After the orphanage, Joel visited a church only once. 

He hadn’t meant to find it. He’d heard an organ humming from within. The cathedral was taller than it was wide, built for a small gathering. He’d slipped inside during a sermon, delivered by a pastor with white hair and a pair of wilting hands. Joel watched the tremors pass through his face, the agonising pulse of the vein in his throat, the way he would gulp down mouthfuls of water. He spoke with rhythm, with melody, and when he was finished, he grasped the edges of the pulpit, his head bowed in silent prayer. Joel thought he had never seen a more devoted man in his life. 

When the sermon was over, he waited his turn to speak with the pastor. He did not know why. He hadn’t felt a stirring in his chest at the word of God; he never had.

I’ve never seen you in here before, my son.

Joel shook his head, frowning at the ground. I… left the faith, in a way. When I was young. I’m… sorry.

Devotion is a choice, said the pastor, taking Joel’s hands in his own. They were wrinkled, speckled with age spots. Joel lifted his gaze to find the pastor smiling. As with all things in life. Devotion, my son, is not a birthright. We must find it. Though it may not be His word, you will know someone’s word. And you’ll find it will move you enough that you choose to follow it. To whatever end. 

Joel has been slashed, burned, drowned, whipped, beaten, strangled. He could count the telltale black spots in his eyes like dreamers count sheep. He developed a reputation because he was good at what he did. He was efficient, fast, lethal. He once killed three men in a bar with a pencil, they whispered. A fucking pencil. Word in the Underworld spread of a boogeyman who would take your life in your sleep if you wronged the wrong person, if you were just an unlucky bastard.

Their word never mattered. He’d never knelt in the blood of a victim and prayed for absolution. He would never find it, anyway. His soul was black. 

If I asked to leave, would you let me go?

No word has ever cut so deep as yours. How could he wake up every single day next to the love of his life and lie so easily to your face? How could he put a ring on your finger knowing damn well he’d betrayed your trust every second of your time together and you never even knew about it?

How could he wear the mask of your husband and dream of blood on the very same hands that touched you each night?

Joel checks his watch. It’s one o'clock in the morning. You’ve been sleeping since breakfast. You won’t sleep a wink tonight if this keeps up, but it seems you’d rather do anything in the world than speak with him. 

He doesn’t blame you.

He found his word that night in the restaurant. He’d followed it, followed you, wherever you took him. And he will follow you, his almighty word, beyond the grave, to whatever end you decide. 

He will not abandon his faith. His purpose. He will not throw up his hands and let you walk away. He’s made mistakes he cannot mend. He can’t go back to the day you met and tell you all he should have, rules be fucked. He cannot fix what he’s already broken. You cannot put a piece of tape over fractured glass, a bloodied hand over wounded skin. 

He made his fucking vows. It’s time he lived up to them.

Across the street, Joel watches, turning over the knife in his pocket by the hilt. Emiliano Cabrera and his lackeys step out of Joel’s Mustang and toss the keys to the valet. They skip the line, smacking one another around and jeering at the ladies in line, and Joel feels the hunger pull at his teeth. 

His first target is posted by the east entrance. Joel takes the alley, stepping aside trash bags brimming with used needles and slipping the Glock from the lining of his jacket. The weight of it is formidable in his hand. Under the cover of dark, he slides into a second skin, black as the names they call him. Bringing the gun to the back of the guard’s head, he watches those huge shoulders stiffen.

“Francis,” he says politely.

“Joel,” says the guard. 

“Workin’ late?”

“Why?” says Francis. “You want in?”

“Yeah,” says Joel, “I do. You lost weight.”

“Twenty-seven pounds, if you’ll believe it.”

Fuck. 

Twenty-seven guards tasked with protecting the little shit. Joel may have a reputation, but it’s been years. He was ambushed in his own home last night. And after it all, he’d let the bastard slip between his fingers. 

“Why don’t you take the night off?”

Francis lowers one meaty hand to the piece in his ear and takes it out. Turning his head, he says, “Can you at least lower the gun?”

Joel does. “Wasn’t sure you’d remember me.”

“Word’s going around. They say you’re back.”

“I’m just passin’ through.” 

“Sure, Joel.” Francis offers his hand, and Joel shakes. “You better make it quick. I don’t feel like getting fired.”

“Understood.” Joel slips inside, letting the door click shut behind him. 

Even from afar, the music lives in his chest, a writhing thing that seeks departure by way of his throat. He tries to swallow and it wriggles back up again. The bass throbs hard against his ribs. 

There’s a bathroom on the VIP floor. As he sneaks by the frosted glass partition that separates him from the public, Joel hears the squeak of locker doors. He puts his palm on the door and pushes inside.

Did you see the tits on that girl? says one man in Spanish. Emil got a pretty one.

Another lets out a booming laugh. Shut the fuck up, man. Good pussy and you tuck your tail and run.

Yeah? And you're in here because you scored? 

I’m in here because bitches prefer to choke on clean dick. What's your excuse?

Neither feels the breeze of the shadow slipping behind them. Neither of them sees the man in black lock his arm around one of their necks and squeeze until there's no air left. By the time the other has turned on the porcelain sink and begun to splash his face, the boogeyman has him by the scruff of his neck, fisting the collar of his fluffy white bathrobe. The sink continues running, and he’s choking on the warm water as Joel holds him down.

“Jesus! Fuck!”

“Where is Emiliano?”

“Vete a la mierda,” he splutters. “Let go of me, motherfucker!”

Joel takes one of the man’s fingers and bends it all the way back. His screams are muffled by Joel’s hand.

“Where is Emiliano?”

“The bathhouse, downstairs,” he groans. “Fuck, let me go, pendejo!”

Joel bares his teeth, breaks the man’s neck, and leaves him slumped over the sink, the water still running. 

The bathhouse is doused in red and blue. The water is illuminated from within, and the whites in his victim’s eyes glow where he stands half-submerged, toasting a bottle of champagne to his rowdy friends. Joel flattens himself to the wall, listening for the tread of dress shoes. The music pounds too loudly for him to hear, but he can see the shadow before he sees its owner. 

“Clear,” says the voice. 

When he rounds the corner, Joel drives his knife into the man’s throat and silences his gurgling moans by clamping a hand over his mouth. He slides down the wall, and Joel holds his gaze while the light slowly dims in his eyes. 

One. 

Two more men are waiting behind the partition, hands folded in front of them. Joel does not recognise them. Their suits are pressed, Italian; it seems Cabrera has made some alliances. Joel lies his first victim on the ground and prowls toward his next two. 

They go easily: unsuspecting, they bleed out under his blade, choking on their blood, and he leaves them lying by the foggy partition. Three. 

The music is dreamy, the crooning of two voices set to a throbbing track. In the bathhouse, he hears the sloshing of water and the singing of a group of men nearby. They're singing an old folk song, Joel realises. A song about a ghost. 

Hurry, fall asleep, or the Boogeyman will come for you…

They don't sound particularly frightened by the spectre haunting them. Joel watches them toast their bottles of champagne and grab the waitresses’ asses. It's Emiliano and his friends, all right. Joel spots another five guards around the waist-deep water and another two by the doors upstairs. 

There's a childlike self-assuredness about him—this kid. He thinks he's protected, safe, almighty as God. He sings about Joel and smiles. 

A guard leans over him and sneers. “You need to stop drinking.”

“Are you scared of the fucking boogeyman?” jeers the kid. “I’m not! Hijo de puta.”

The guard plucks the bottle from his hand and passes it off. “You wanna vomit while you run away? Or would you just prefer to get shot in the head?”

Emiliano’s haughty sniff makes Joel wonder if a bullet in the head is retribution enough. “Get me another fucking bottle!” he says to his friend. 

Joel picks up a bottle of complimentary cologne and tosses it. The glass shatters, potent liquid pooling on the shiny floor. Three guards flank the partition. The music is too loud to let the sounds of his blade in flesh seep through. 

Six. 

On the other side of the glass, coloured blue and red and slick with humidity, the singing continues. 

From the swamp he will come…

He feels the wet splash of blood on his face. 

… and take the children that don't behave. 

Another man rounds the corner as Joel is tearing the knife from the last guard’s throat. He doesn't have enough time to slash his throat, so he pulls the handgun from his holster and shoots. He crumples to the floor, but Joel’s cover is blown. 

“He’s here! Miller’s here!”

The partition explodes. Glass rains on him as he rolls to evade the gunfire, raising his barrel to strike at the remaining guards. 

Seven. Eight. 

The men by the stairs are shouting some Spanish, some Italian. The music carries on, but the song they're singing has ended. 

Joel finds the man he's been looking for: hiding behind a petrified waitress, Emiliano Cabrera looks like a goddamn child. He's wrapped himself hastily in a bath towel around his waist, and his eyes are wide as saucers. Yeah, Joel thinks, I’m going to enjoy this a little. 

He locks eyes with Emiliano for only a moment. The guards at the top of the stairs begin to fire at Joel. He ducks behind the wall as shots chip brick from the wall or plunk uselessly in the water. By the time he flanks them around the other side of the wall and brings them tumbling down the stairs—ten—the kid has already run. Joel growls at the loss of the kill and follows him into the club. 

With an eruption of deafening music, Joel bursts into the crowd. Behind him, a gigantic LED screen is illuminated with spirals in red and blue and white. Women dance in elevated cages while the crowd below becomes a sea of skin and sequins and sweat. Joel reloads, checks the clip, and resumes his hunt. 

Eleven, twelve, thirteen. Joel feels the punch of the barrel into their chests as he fires, again and again and again. The commotion is lost in the din of the music and dancing. Bodies connect and grind and Joel kills. 

Fourteen. A guard by the wall. Fifteen. Another lurking by the LED spirals. Sixteen, seventeen—two men rushing him in an attempt to ambush, eyes wild with rage and a bit of fear. Joel puts them down like sick dogs and continues to push through the crowd, his eyes locked on the retreating Emiliano, who's waving a gun about like a white flag. 

But it's no surrender. It's a beacon, a sign that the deer is spooked. Joel feels his lip curl. So frightened, he thinks. 

Eighteen, nineteen…

Your bleary eyes, blinking through the pain, limbs limp and helpless as he unbuckled his belt above you. A cut on your face, barely bleeding. The red still consumes him. 

You were so afraid that night. 

Twenty. 

Twenty-one. 

He's getting closer. The crowd parts down the centre as Joel marches toward his goal. But the music is loud and he does not hear the approach from behind. 

The gunshot grazes his shoulder, but he feels the flare of pain ooze its way down his arm. Joel grunts, knocked askew from his path, and turns to forge at his assailant. 

The man is fast, though, and rushes him. The tackle brings him down to the ground, winding him just enough to briefly stun, to send his Glock spinning along the floor. He’s taller, broader, madder. 

But he shoots one-handed. 

Joel knocks the gun aside and it misfires into the gap in the crowd. In the dispersing, he sees more guards closing in his periphery. The only protection he has is the hulking body on top of him. So Joel uses it, bringing his elbow to the man’s throat and bunching the lapel of his jacket in his fist. The guard attempts to reach for the blade in his thigh holster, but Joel reaches down and bends his arm backward until the crunch crackles in his ear. The man howls, and Joel grasps the hilt of the knife. 

Twenty-two. 

He picks up his gun and fires a shot into each of the three approaching guards, but Emiliano has fled to the first floor. Joel grimaces as he stands, blood on his fingertips where he's prodded the wound in his arm. “Goddammit,” he mutters, following his target upstairs. 

The air is dizzying. Hot. Joel never liked clubs. He hated the closeness and the bodies in cages and the way skin felt so sticky, too tight, like he needed to step outside of it. He hated the feeling of being suffocated by strangers, as if any of them could be lurking low in the darkness, waiting to strike. 

He didn't understand the lure of the scantily-clad body until he saw you wrapped in a tight black dress. He didn't know the pleasure of dancing until you took his hand one night, his old vinyl player crackling out Frank Sinatra, and lay your head on his shoulder. It felt like stepping over the threshold into consecrated territory. He should not be touching you. But you were touching him. 

Joel spots Emiliano running for the back entrance, shoving another guard in Joel’s path. 

Twenty-six. 

The final man, approaching Joel from the lounge, pulls his gun in time to shoot, but not in time for Joel to notice. The bullet shatters a glass of wine and topples a waiter’s tray. Joel fires. 

One to go. 

He has no choice but to lunge for the kid before he can run out into the street. Joel’s heart is pounding in his chest, his blood electrified. The take-down is sloppy and his ankle rolls, but Emiliano Cabrera is pinned beneath him and yelping like a kicked dog. 

“My father will kill you,” he gasps, his cheek pressed to the floor.

“Your father knows exactly why I’m here,” says Joel, “and he knows how stupid you are.”

“Hijo de puta, it was just a fucking car,” he spits. “I was just going to have some fun with your bitch. I would've given her back.”

Joel isn't quite satisfied. He turns the kid onto his back and grasps him by the jaw, forcing him to meet Joel’s incendiary gaze. 

“Everything has a price.”

The knife goes in smoothly, the flat of the blade glinting in his gaping mouth. No light flees his eyes. There is nothing but cold slate-grey. And although Joel feels no happiness feeling the pulse slow to a crawl beneath his palm, he does not pull the knife out. 

Your body, sacred, helpless, lying on the floor. A predator’s gaze. The clink of a belt buckle. Joel steps over the body and leaves, limping to the valet and slipping him a golden coin. He slips back inside his Mustang, turns on the engine, and drives back to the hotel. 

You’re tucked in the alcove by the window, staring out at the moonlit night. Your chin rests on your knees as you hug yourself close. The lamp between your respective beds colours the room orange. 

“You’re limping.” 

You haven’t even turned to face him.

“How—”

“I know how you sound when you walk.” Your temple is cool where it rests on the windowpane, your breath frosting the glass. Joel staggers to the small table and braces himself on the back of a chair as he watches you. 

You’re as warm and bright as the day he found you that night in the restaurant. Your eyes may be a little older, but the glow is the same. He folds his bleeding hands around the back of the chair. Everything around you curls in, darkens, and wilts when it confronts your beauty. 

“I’m all right.” He doesn’t deserve your concern. He’ll swallow any bullet to keep you from worrying.

You stand at last and cross the room to face him. His heart jumps like it’s the first time you asked him on a date. Like the first time he kissed you, his chest taut with tension and nerves and the assumption that you’d reject him. 

“You can lie to me about lots of things, Joel, but I know this face.” The pad of your thumb ghosts over the crease between his brows. “I’ve painted it a hundred times. It doesn't lie.”

It's the first time you've touched him in days. Joel closes his eyes. Part of him, the part that jolts back to life under the tender weight of your soft skin, means it when he says, “I’m okay.”

You seem to ponder him for a moment. “This wouldn't be the first time I patched you up,” you say, as if resigned. “Go on. Bathroom.”

He winces. “You don't have to—”

“Go. And afterward, you can tell me everything.”

The pads of your fingers memorise the ridges on the gold coin. The time is close to dawn. 

He’s no longer bleeding, and although you have nothing close to the Doctor’s prowess, you’ve managed to disinfect and wrap the wound in his arm. You can’t do anything about his ankle, but it’s a sprain; he’ll heal in time. The mangled black and blue on his tender skin reminds you of a night sky without the stars. It doesn’t seem to pain him. It only makes you wonder what sorts of agonies he’s faced—ones you never knew about.

The hurt has festered in your time away from him. He’s an open wound in the shape of a hand on your back, searing cold through to your heart. The hand sports a golden band, and it reflects in the one you still wear. You don't quite know what to make of it now. 

He looks exactly like the man you knew. Not a part of him has changed—he's still scruffy, still tired, still jaggedly gorgeous. You paint him with blurred edges, with blues and greys. Your heart still pulls when you look at him. Your chest still gapes wide open, and he digs his thumbs into the bruises. He lied to you. He broke your trust. And there's still so much of your Joel in him, from the skin to the bones. 

“It’s beautiful,” you muse, turning the coin over. 

“Technically, it’s not money,” Joel says. “It is currency. They can be exchanged for favours, information, relationships.”

“A hotel room,” you add. “Good to know I don’t have to move any savings around. Where have you been keeping these?”

“There’s a safe in the basement,” he says, “under the floorboards. When I left, I buried all of it. Weapons, coins, contacts, anything I had from the Underworld.”

The Underworld. A fitting name, if you’ve made any sense of it at all. “Do the police know about all of this?”

“Most of them are in the pockets of High Table members. Those are the ones who control how it all works. Rules and consequences,” says Joel, “is how they operate. They're what separate us from the animals.”

You lift your brows. “And who sits at this High Table?”

“Twelve leaders. They're the ones who run most of the major crime families and organisations. They control police, politicians, banks—”

Your shuddering sigh makes him stop in his tracks. He watches you lean back in the chair and bends forward slightly, as if tied to you by an invisible thread. 

“So… the girl who serves me coffee on the corner by my office could be part of it.” You frown at the coin in your hand. “She could be a witness, a runner, a messenger. She could be like you.”

“She isn't,” says Joel, “but that is the general idea.”

“But civilians are immune.”

“More or less,” says Joel. “There are… heavy penalties for harming them.”

“Penalties like death.”

“Most of the time,” he says. “And there are rules here, too. No business can be conducted on the grounds of any Continental hotel.”

“Any? You mean—”

“There's a Continental in every major city in the world. It's where we go to remind ourselves we’re civilised.”

“Civilised,” you scoff. “Civilised murder, sure. I’m buying it. And now that you’re back—”

“Visiting.”

You just glare at him, and he ducks his head. 

“—there's a contract on your head.”

Joel nods. “Two million.”

You curl your fingers over the coin in your palm as your stomach bottoms out. “That's a lot of incentive to put a bullet in your brain.”

“They won't,” he says. “Cabrera holds the contract, and he only opened it because of Emiliano. He’d pull it the second I agreed to stop looking for his son. He doesn't want me owing him.”

“I don't know if I’d call that a debt.”

“Considering everything I did for him,” says Joel, a bite to his voice, “anything short of killin' his kid is a favour.”

Despite yourself, you open your hand and slide the coin toward him. “Tell me what you did.”

His head shoots up, his brows knitted together. “What?”

“Tell me what you did to get out. Tell me about this ‘impossible task.’”

“Baby, that’s…” He rubs his hand across his jaw, and it strikes you then how deep those half-circles colour the space beneath his eyes. 

“Stop,” you whisper. It never used to hurt when he called you baby. “Tell me how much blood you thought I was worth.”

Joel’s jaw ticks. His knees barely touch yours under the table. “You don't wanna hear the answer to that.”

“Then start here. What did you do, Joel?”

The sigh he releases feels heavy. “I came to Cabrera, asking him to release me from my contract. He told me he'd let me out, no strings attached… if I hunted down his enemies.” 

Your mouth drops. “Which enemies?”

He picks up the coin and turns it over in his palm. The silence drops an anchor on the ground. Your belly churns with the movement of the golden piece as it catches the light. 

“All of them,” says Joel. “All of ‘em, in one night. That was his impossible task.”

The scrape of your chair legs across the floor is grating. But you stand anyway, your head vaguely stirring with the beginnings of a headache. 

“Oh my God.” 

You barely feel your own hand on your cheek, barely smell the iron tang of blood on him, barely see the red cutting through his pressed white shirt. “How many people?”

Joel shakes his head, his shy eyes lowered, still as the paintings you've made of him. “I… I don't know.” 

I lost count, he means. There were too many, he means. 

Your throat is just wide enough to let your breath escape. The air you take in feels poisonous. He killed every single one of them. All because he wanted to marry you. 

All because he wanted peace. 

“Is there anyone in the Underworld who doesn’t know your name?”

Joel’s repentant silence, head ducked as if in prayer, is all the answer you need.

“How did this happen?” Your voice is uniquely quiet. 

“When I was a kid,” he says, and your heart sinks, “I lived on the streets. Lived like a rat, mostly, but I survived. You know that much.”

You nod solemnly, lowering yourself into the chair once more. “The Sisters reunited you with your brother.”

His dark eyes reflect the lamplight and it resembles a flame igniting in the depths of the iris. “Found me on Canal Street, runnin’ drugs for a mobster I don't even remember. Tommy was only five, but he must've told them about me. They took me to the orphanage and started my training.”

You swallow, your temples pounding. Deep in your gut, something wild and dry begins to kindle. “They were the ones who taught you all of this?”

“They teach the word of God above everythin’ else, but yeah. They train children to thrive in the Underworld. We were taught knives, guns, hand-to-hand. Hell, they even taught us how to dance—how to move faster than the opponent. I knew how to kill someone before I could read.” Joel chuckles, and part of you thinks he actually thinks it's funny. “Probably why I’m so slow.”

You aren't slow, you want to say. You've never been slow, not from the first day. 

The kindling curls and you can feel your mouth pull at the corners. He had only been a child. An orphan. A child had no way to choose, to resist how they were raised. He hadn’t been given a choice—his life in exchange for a roof over his head. 

“Those fucking bastards.”

Joel’s laugh is mirthless. “It was a long time ago. I’ve made my peace with it.”

You angrily swipe the tears that warm your cheeks. “No adult should have that power. They should nurture and comfort and protect, not—” Your breath hitches. “You were a child. You didn't deserve that.”

Your fingers have curled into a fist atop the table. With both hands, he gently lifts your hand to his mouth and kisses your knuckles. You expect it to feel foreign, wrong. It just feels like Joel. 

“The Sisters were cruel,” he says softly. “But I made myself into a weapon. It was the only way I would survive.” He reaches out as if for a wounded deer and brushes his thumb over your jaw. “They never made me believe, sweetheart. That was all you.”

You sniffle, your head bobbing absently. You don't know what to think. You don't know how to feel. Your own husband has been through the seven circles and crawled back out only to teeter back over the pit once more. There’s an ancient weariness in the black of his eyes, an old hurt, a mansion slowly crumbling at the edges. 

“You hid this all from me, and never told anyone,” you say, the ache widening. You find you want to assume, consume, even a modicum of the pain that he's felt. 

One of his shoulders lifts in a mild shrug. “I wanted to forget all of it. I wanted to make something of the new life I’d killed for.” He meets your gaze and you swear part of the open wound in his pupils has sealed. “I didn't want any of it to touch you.”

And you remember lying in bed with him that first night, after that first time, tracing a scar on his back. White and ridged, it spread like lightning feelers from the middle of his spine to the dimples in his lower back. 

You'd put your mouth to his shoulder blade and felt him melt into you. 

What happened? 

The silence that followed could have heard the brush of a feather over skin. 

I was raised in an orphanage. In a church. They weren't kind. 

And that was that. You'd prodded and fussed and he'd said I’m fine. It was a long time ago. 

“But that's what you do, Joel,” you tell him. “You hide your hurt and you bury your feelings and you do it all because you're afraid it'll make everyone leave you.” 

Sometimes he would wake in a cold sweat, heaving, tossing aside the sheets, but he would never make a sound. You'd see him, pretending to sleep, and place your hand over his chest. His fingers would grasp yours as if marooned on the water, seeking driftwood, his hand suffocating yours. He'd keep it pressed to his heart until the beats slowed. 

You regret those times you never pressed. In a way, you were afraid, too. If you opened your eyes, if you asked him to confess, he would close the lattice and turn his back to you. You didn't want to lose him, either. 

But you did. 

“I’m sorry,” you whisper, but it doesn't hold the weight you want it to. It doesn't blow out the candles in the cathedral. It doesn't pluck the scared little boy from the streets or give him a warm bed. It doesn't stop the beatings and the lashings and the pain. 

It does not pry the pain from his heart and bury the shrapnel in your chest instead. It is something he bears, as he always has, and must. It is something you cannot take from him. And you feel more helpless than you ever have. 

He shakes his head. “I know we can't go back,” he says, tracing one of the little daisy charms on your bracelet. “But it feels… good. It feels good to finally tell you. Even if we were too late.”

The sound of his voice breaking shakes your heart loose from your rib cage. 

“Come to bed.” Your voice is raw and used. “Just… come to bed, and sleep.” 

He doesn't dare look hopeful, though you can see the tremor that courses through his hand. He wants to take yours, the way he did the day he proposed, dropping to one knee with your palms flush. 

He looked a little hopeful that day, too. With rapt attention, he'd taken hold of you and said, I love you. I love you more than anything. You’re my best friend. Will you marry me? Will you let me be your husband?

You realise now why he'd let himself hope. He'd gotten out. He'd started his new life. With you. 

You can see his old scars, even in the dark. You think, in all your time together, you've learned his body as you learn the earth you tread upon. The praying hands of Dürer lie beneath the name inked in small black lettering. 

Your name. 

You gingerly reach out and place your hand on his back. Joel shudders. He does not turn to face you where you both lie on your sides. 

“If you bleed on the bed sheets,” you say to the darkness, “will management make us pay?”

He chuckles. “Strongly worded phone call at best. I’ll take the hit.”

You frown, ghosting your fingers over the tender skin around the makeshift patch job on his shoulder. “Does it still hurt?” 

“No,” he says, leaning into your touch, “not anymore.”

“You never told me about this scar on your back.” You touch the edges of the puckered skin. “I never stopped wondering. But I should never have stopped asking.”

“Don't,” he says quietly. “Don’t say any of that like it's your fault.”

The silence bleeds as viscous as an open gash into the dry air. His watch broke the day of your wedding. He told you it was all right, that we've got all the time in the world, and you'd kissed him and laughed. He’d replaced the battery since then, but sometimes the little hand lags behind, as if afraid to chug forward. Afraid to let time, of all silly, trivial things, consume your world. 

“Do you remember your vows?” you ask him. 

“‘Course I do.” 

“Do you remember mine?”

His head bows slightly on the pillow. “‘I vow to be your partner in all things,’” he recites. “‘I vow to protect your heart like it's my own. I vow to take your pain, and to shoulder it so you don't have to.’” 

The tears saturate the pillowcase beneath your cheek. You fall asleep with your arm around his waist, your hand next to his, not touching, but nearly. 

#fic: helen #kiwisbell's fics #pedro pascal #joel miller #joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #the last of us hbo #the last of us #tlou fic #joel miller fanfic #joel miller fanfiction #joel miller angst #joel miller au #joel miller fic #john wick au #joel miller x female reader #joel miller x f!reader

[googoobabajogwick]

A John Thanksgiving.

Words: 3176

John Wick x sibling! reader

Summary: Helen really wants John to invite some family over for Thanksgiving dinner with her family. Hard part is John doesn’t have any family, but he does have you and that’s the closest thing he’s got.

Warnings: weed smoking lol

John and Helen had been married for two years now. He had never been happier. Everything felt so perfect, so normal, so domestic. His wife knew little about his life before her but she still knew he was an ex assassin. It had taken a while for him to tell her but how could he not when they were planning their wedding.

Helen took it much better than expected, though she was mad he waited six months before the wedding. Her family, they were very judgemental. No matter how hard he tried John didn’t feel like he could be good enough in their eyes. He didn’t really care but family was important for her so he tried.

Thanksgiving was coming up and this year the two of them decided to host again. Last year, her family had made remarks on the lack of family on John’s side but he shut them down by saying they were busy. That was a lie. He didn’t have any family, not any he’d like them to meet at least. Yet Helen had asked once more,

“Are you sure? No friends or family you’d want to invite over?” She was careful with her words, John was a solitary man but he thought for her.

“I suppose there may be two people I could invite..” he scratched at his beard.

The way her eyes lit up made his heart soar. There was no way he could get out of this one.

That led him to where he was now. Old ass notebook with numbers important to him in it laid on his worktable. He hadn’t needed it since he retired but some people were in it he thought he’d ask. Those two people were you and Marcus. His two ‘best friends’ as Helen had put it after he explained your relationship.

Marcus was John’s first choice as he had met Helen at their wedding. He’d said yes the minute the words left the ex assassins mouth. A thanksgiving dinner at the wicks house? Now that was just too hard to pass up. The sniper asked his friend if he planned to invite anyone else and when he tossed the idea of inviting you, Marcus busted out with laughter.

“That’s a great idea!”

So here he was, dialing your number on his old rotary phone. It rang and rang to the point he thought you weren’t going to answer. He did feel a bit disappointed, it would be nice to see you and Helen would love to meet you again. Right as he was going to hang up when he heard you answer.

“Oh my God am I dreaming? Fuck you asshole! It’s been so long you haven’t called in months!” You shouted over the phone though he knew you were playing.

“Yeah, sorry I’ve been busy.” He grimaced over the phone, “I, uh, Helen wanted me to ask if you’d like to come to our thanksgiving dinner this year.”

John could hear you as you shuffled around on the phone and then the sound of papers being flipped. He rolled his eyes. You weren’t doing anything, he knew it. His foot tapped as you made him more and more impatient. He knew if you could see him you’d have a shit eating grin on your face.

“Hmmmmmmm.” You exaggerated,” I guess I could come. A little upset that it’s Helen who wants me to come and not even my own big brother though.”

The two of you weren’t brother and sister. He was starting to regret asking you. You were ten years younger than him, a baby found outside in the alleyway. People always made jokes that you two were like siblings and it was true. You teased him like crazy and he kept you out of trouble. When you were ten and he was twenty you’d bug him like an annoying little sister.

John’s punishments when he’d mess up or do something that pissed off The Director, were to help the younger kids learn to fight and shoot guns. You of course were a part of that group and although you annoyed the shit out of him, he was always softer with you. Even when you were fifteen and bit his leg.

“Please be normal. Her family doesn’t know, they are a bit-“ Pretentious, egotistical, snobby, stupid fucking assholes, “Judgy?” He was trying to be nice.

“HA! Me? Not normal, yeah right. See you on turkey day Johnny!”

You hung up and John stood there for a moment. This was a big mistake. Any other day he wouldn’t care. If it was a normal dinner that would be fine but he was really starting to think of the consequences of inviting you to a holiday dinner with Helen’s family. He took a deep breath.

Shit.

Helen, of course, was ecstatic to hear you were coming. You’d met her once and it was at their wedding. She thought you were hilarious and fun but her favorite part was when you’d share stupid stories about her husband. It was nice to hear about his youth as he was very private, only sharing what he thought was necessary.

She herself wished her family wasn’t so rude but she had hope that they would soften up someday. The long haired woman was hard at work in the kitchen with John as her helper. He was a very sweet husband who demanded she let him help. If she asked he would do it all himself. He kissed her cheek as he moved to get the turkey out of the oven.

Marcus was the first one to show up and was leaning against the kitchen island with a glass of wine in his hand. People were starting to arrive. John was thankful his mentor was good with people, already charming multiple of Helen’s female relatives. Everyone was intrigued by him, their in-laws' mysterious friend..

Then he heard it. John and Marcus locked eyes with each other. His friend smirked as your booming bass approached his home. Helen looked up wondering what that noise was but based on her husband’s face she knew exactly who it was. He should have invited Jimmy.

Before he knew it you were letting yourself in. Dressed in a sports jersey, sweatpants and a huge oversized zip up hoodie you called out for him.

“Hello! Jonathan, I'm here the party can officially start!” You belted out while shutting the door behind you.

When you turned to greet him you saw everyone staring at you. They were dressed in suits and dresses. Your mouth was agape. You were always super expressive and sometimes it got you in trouble. About to ask if you were in the wrong house John and Helen ran to greet you.

She was shocked as you grabbed her shoulders and left two big kisses on both cheeks. Then you hugged John hello while also scolding him for not telling you there was a specific attire, not that you cared. They introduced you to everyone before you found Marcus. He looked dashing as ever and you told him so.

Things were going very well so far. Helen’s family questioned you about your profession, finding it very odd when you told them you were a doctor. They believed a doctor would hold themselves to higher standards but you just laughed it off because you were the best of the best.

You didn’t get to see much of John as he was busy following his wife around, hosting the holiday. Your elbow hit Marcus’s arm. He looked at you and chuckled knowing exactly what you were hinting at. Your old friend looked so uncomfortable, not that anyone but you and the man next to you could tell. He leaned down so you could hear him.

“Like a lost puppy, look at him..” He shook his head and smirked.

“I want to say it’s sickening but, I actually find it pretty endearing. She’s a very nice woman.” You watched them.

“That she is, sweet too.” He agreed.

The two of you continued to catch up until the socializing became too much. You excused yourself and went out back to smoke. There would be no way you’d get through this without it. Although you hadn’t ever been to their house you made yourself at home. The cool breeze was welcoming compared to the stuffiness inside. You pulled the pre rolled joint out of your pocket and right as you were about to light it you heard someone clear their throat.

It was Helen. You felt a bit bad because you did pull out drugs on her property but she surprised you by sitting down across from you. She seemed a bit stressed but still smiled at you. You almost had the wind knocked out of you when she asked if you would share. In a way you felt guilty like you were a bad influence on the good kid but she was older than you and you were always told to respect your elders.

You lit the joint, taking the first hit and then handed it to her. She took a small hit and started coughing. You handed her your water and she took a sip before laughing. Your hand brought the joint up to your lip to take another inhale. This was top of the line shit, you hoped she would know that. The warm fuzzy feeling started to settle in your mind and you couldn’t help but laugh with her.

“God, I haven’t smoked in years!” She sounded excited.

The two of you spent the next few minutes in silence just passing the rolled joint back and forth. Half way through it though you started talking. Like weed tended to do, you talked about life and all that jazz until the topic of John came up. She told you she was so happy you came and that she knows he’s happy as well.

You were surprised he hadn’t followed her out here. Helen explained to you that as much as she loved her family she hated that they were so rude about her husband to him himself and her. Next year they wouldn’t host, she had enough of all the tension and how everyone getting along was all fake. You agreed with her and finished the joint.

“Tell me something about him that no one else knows.” She giggled behind her hand.

Helen felt like a teenage girl gossiping about her crush but she had to ask. You brought your finger up to rub at your chin as you thought. What’s something you could say that would shock her or embarrass John. You thought long and hard before the lightbulb went off in your head.

“John can dance. Specifically ballet.”

“No way.”

“Yeah way, he had to wear a tutu!”

“No I didn’t.” You jumped at the sound of his voice.

Damn how quiet he could be.

“I invite you to my house and you get my wife high?” John questions.

“You want some? I have another.” You went to pull it out but he put his hand out to let you know he was okay.

“Don’t be such a fuddy-duddy John.” She chastised him and you almost spit your drink out.

“Yeah John.”

“I came out here to tell you the food is almost ready, not to be ganged up on.”

The two of you laughed before Helen got up to go back inside saying she should probably go inside. She gave him a kiss on the cheek and disappeared into the house. You giggled while lighting up the second joint and he continued to stare at her.

“Did she just call you a fuddy-duddy?”

“Yes. Why what would you have said? Actually-“

“Lame, loser, boring…”

“-I don’t want to hear it.” You snickered and kept hitting the joint.

The two of you sat in silence for a few moments before he let out a sigh. John needed the fresh air, though it might not be so fresh with you here smoking but it was better than in the house. He thanked you for coming and you reminded him that you were always only a phone call away, to which he responded that he knew.

It was nice seeing you, John thought to himself. For how annoying and crazy you could be, he’s glad he did it, and that Helen had pushed him too. He forgot how well you two got along even if he’d only seen you interact once. Meanwhile you were smacked. Maybe you shouldn’t have had that second one. You seemed to overdo it a lot.

Something about the way John was looking at you made you start giggling. When he gave you a confused look you just laughed harder. You were almost laying on the chair as you cackled. It was definitely the weed but you couldn’t breathe from how hard you were laughing. You flicked the roach at him but he dodged it.

“What are you laughing at?” His deadpanned voice made you laugh even harder, which seemed impossible.

“You. Man you’re making me laugh, go back inside! Your lover awaits you!”

John realized he wasn’t going to get anything of substance out of the conversation and got up to leave but not without a small chuckle. You were always so weird but you were still right. He knew Helen was waiting for him and that food was ready by now. You were still laughing as your friend told you to come in for food.

“Give me a minute!” You shooed him away.

*

The air in the house felt almost hot as it greeted you when you came inside. Everyone was sitting at the table staring at you as you made your way to your seat next to Marcus. You looked at them with a raised eyebrow. Jeez, Helen wasn’t joking. Her family did seem judgemental.

“And where were you?” One of the family members asked.

“I went for a walk.” Is all you said even if you wanted to jump over the table and strangle them.

“Smells like it…” Marcus snorted into his glass.

You gave him a light smack and started to fill your plate. The talk of people filled the table but all you could focus on was how good the food was. God damn, Helen was an amazing cook, you don’t think you’ve ever eaten something so good. You thought about how to everyone else you looked more like a hungry dog

devouring your food but you didn’t care.

When you looked up you were correct. Everyone was staring at you. Some in disgust, some in awe and some in confusion. If you looked closer you’d probably see John’s temple twitch at your actions. With slow movements you kept your eye on everyone while still shoving food into your mouth. Helen hid her smile behind her hand.

“What?” You asked with a mouth full of food.

“You say you’re a doctor?” One of the men asked.

You took a big sip of your wine, your mouth was starting to feel dry.

“Yup. One of the best, actually.” Pride, that’s what you felt.

“That’s hard to believe…”

You don’t know who said it but John noticed the way you gripped your knife in your hand. This needed to end now or you’d end it in ways he didn’t want to think about at a nice Thanksgiving dinner with his wife. You stared at the man, almost snarling at him.

“Well, believe what you want but I’ll let you know that I’ve been watching you all night. The way you move your arm I can tell your shoulder hurts you. Is it a torn rotator cuff? I’m willing to bet money on it. Also that your doctor sucks.” Your grip on the knife tightened at the idea of a good time.

“Why you little-“

“Okay! Okay! Let’s just eat. The food is great, let's just focus on the food.” John’s worried voice filled your ears.

The statement was directed more at you, not Helen’s family member. With a slight grumble you let go of the chokehold on your knife and began eating again. Just like that, the whole conversation never happened as you went back into your dream of amazing, sweet and savory food.

*

The night had ended and almost everyone had left. Marcus left right after dinner saying he had something to attend to. It was just you, John and Helen, and also her parents. You were laying on their couch before you realized that you should get going as well. Your bed was calling your name.

As you were getting ready her mother and father walked up to you. You were putting your coat on. Your face did not hide your confusion as to why they were approaching you. Was it because you threatened their nephew at dinner? Not your fault the man had to challenge your skills.

“So, you and John? You’re siblings?” The mom asked.

“Yes, he’s my big brother. He was in charge of me when we were younger.” You smiled.

“In charge?” The father trailed off.

John could feel your schemes in his bones and found you just in time to hear the conversation.

“No blood relation. She’s adopted.” Leave it to John to ruin everything.

“Um you were too! We had a very big family! That was poor.” John just whacked you upside the head when they looked away.

You rubbed the sore spot while grumbling. Asshole.

The parents looked at John and smiled at him and he had to take a second to believe he wasn’t seeing things. Helen’s parents always kept a distance and never, ever smiled at him. Not even at their wedding. It almost scared him.

“We had no idea you were a self made millionaire Jonathan. All while taking care of a sibling. Good job.” Her father put his hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.

John just stood there with his mouth agape. Helen’s parents liked to pretend that he didn’t even exist and now they were smiling and praising him. After a few seconds he shut his mouth and nodded his head. Her parents went to talk to say their goodbyes and left you and him alone.

“Ah Jonathan you have to learn how to work those people. Rich folks, they love any story that fits their narrative. Poor orphan self made millionaire? How inspiring.” You mocked.

John let out a deep chuckle. You were always good at getting people to like you, even if you were annoying and crass. It made sense, you were very smart. You yawned and gave him a hug before he pulled away to open the door for you. You’d already said goodbye to Helen but you called out one more farewell and stepped outside.

“I better be coming back next year.” You laughed when John shut the door in your face.

Helen came up to him and wrapped her arms around him.

“She’s definitely coming back next year.”

He smiled.

“Yeah. She is.”

#john wick #john wick x reader #John wick fanfic #Helen Wick x John Wick

[evren-sadwrn]

anne magill, “shimmer” | anne magill, “walking home through the park” | delta rae, “chasing twisters” | john wick chapter 4 screenplay | thomas pynchon, “gravity’s rainbow” | jessie burton, “the miniaturist”

#web weaving #web weave #john wick #helen wick #keanu reeves #bridget moynahan #john x helen #helen x john #i love you helen and john #i love you helen wick #anne magill #jessie burton #screenplay #script #movie script

[johnwickb1tsch]

FIC:

(most y/n fics are fem gender but [attempted] no real mention of specific appearance, race, body type) The Night Nurse - John x Helen CH 1 │ CH 2 │ CH 3 │ CH 4 │ CH 5 │ CH 6 │ CH 7 │ CH 8 CH 9. CH 10. │ A03

you're the worst thing (i'm addicted to) - John x Helen'sSister!Reader fic │ Part 1 │Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 A03 The Girl Next Door ~ Constantine x Vampire!Reader Fic Part 1 Part 2 (based on below imagine)

Imagines:

John x Helen'sSister!Reader Imagine John Wick x Tarasov'sDaughter!Reader Imagine Constantine x Reader x John Wick Imagine Young!John Wick & Model!Reader Imagine part 1 part 2 part 3 part 4 John x Wife!Reader Fix it Imagine

BITTERSWEET Yandere!John x fem!reader coffee shop au (this totally turned into a fic) Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 PART 6 PART 7 PART 8 PART 9. PART 10 PART 11 PART 12 PART 13 PART 14 PART 15 PART 16 PART 17 PART 18 PART 19 PART 20 PART 21 PART 22 PART 23. PART 24 PART 25. PART 26 PART 27 PART 28. PART 29 PART 30 PART 31

OTHER KEANUVERSE CHARACTERS:

Constantine x Vampire!Reader Neighbor Imagine

Donaka Mark x MartialArtist!Reader Imagine

Donaka Mark x Secretary!Reader Imagine

THE DEVILS' TRIANGLE - Tex Johnson x Reader x John Wick (x Constantine) Yandere Collab with the diabolical @treedaddymcpuffpuff & @sweetwolfcupcake *so many dead doves here be warned...* Original Imagine COVER Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5. Part 6 Part 7. Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 WIP

EXCESSIVE FORCE - Tom Ludlow x Nurse!Reader collab w the AMAZING @treedaddymcpuffpuff CH 1 CH2 CH3 CH4 CH5 CH6 CH7 CH8

#john wick #john wick x you #john wick x helen #john wick fic #helen wick #john wick x helen fic #keanu reeves #john wick x reader #john wick x y/n

[john-bracket]

#scott summers #jean gray #x men #marvel #helen wick #john wick #polls

[r1-jw-lover]

HULLO!!!!! :P

rank your top five fav ships from the john wick series !! :3

Hi, thank you for the ask. Just wanna put a disclaimer that my first venture into the JW fandom was through the fourth film, so my ranking list will be heavily biased on that movie.

John x Caine

It's not even one year since JW4 is out and John/Caine is already on the top ten most written ships on AO3 within the John Wick fandom.

This pairing has just the right amount of bittersweetness and melancholy for me, and putting it on top of the actors' chemistry, the gay divorced vibes, the bickering, friends to reluctant enemies, the parallels, being each other's mirror, their deep trust, understanding and care for one another, you get my number one JW ship on this list.

The friendship between John & Caine is definitely one of the most developed and convincing out of all the friends John Wick had in the series, and in spite of the circumstances forcing them to be pitted against each other, they still managed to find comfort in the other's presence regardless, and I think that in itself is beautiful.

2. Koji x John x Caine

You know what else is better than putting Keanu Reeves and Donnie Yen together in the same movie? Putting Keanu Reeves, Donnie Yen AND Hiroyuki Sanada together in the same movie.

You have already seen the incredible fanart [1, 2, 3] by the wonderful @ibahibut. They are THE old men yaoi of the recent decade of cinema, period.

The dynamics between the three of them are immaculate. Not only you have John & Caine (explanation above), John & Koji are very supportive of each other, and Koji & Caine have both the closeness and the inevitable tragicness that undercurrents their brotherhood.

All in all, I desperately need a prequel series of this trio.

3. John x Helen

It's the only canon romantic relationship in the series so it has to be on the list. Other than the fact that one of them is dead, I think that John/Helen is incredibly sweet, which make the heartaches even more painful.

John's grief for Helen's passing is one of the main driving forces for the character throughout the series. His almost religious love and devotion to his wife is all the more apparent given that Helen is the reason John had fought to stay alive for as long as four movies.

At the end of the day, John only wished to die not as the Baba Yaga but as a loving husband, finally succumbing to his wounds with Helen being his last thought before dying. (TAT)

4. Akira x Mia

Gosh, I love my lesbian rarepair too much. I initially shipped them merely for the shits and giggles (i.e. Akira getting back at Caine by dating his daughter lol), but then I also come to realise their potential as a pairing story-wise.

Outside of the obvious enemies to/and lovers vibes, I could imagine both Akira and Mia inheriting a lot of angst from their respective "father problems" that they must resolve between each other. Will Akira ever tell Mia about her plan to kill Caine? Will Mia ever understand Akira's revenge against her father? Will Mia decide to step into the fold of assassins because of Akira? Will Akira leave the High Table to be with Mia like how John did for Helen?

As a conclusion... Gosh, I love my lesbian rarepair too much.

5. Marquis x Wuxia DJ

The funniest and best crack ship ever made up in the John Wick fandom, and there's just the two of us, hahahaha. They give off high-school exes who are so, so fashionable and serve cunt while talking shit about the other behind each other's backs.

It's number five on my list because it's that good.

Honorable mention: Cassian x Gianna

Before the fourth movie is released, Cassian & Gianna is the only pairing I could see happening in the background. Cassian's loyalty to Gianna even after she died is very touching, and Gianna seemed very appreciative of it from the short interaction they have in JW2.

#jw #john wick #jw4 #john wick 4 #john wick chapter 4 #answered #answered asks #long post #caine #caine jw #caine john wick #john wick x caine #koji shimazu #koji x john x caine #helen wick #john x helen #akira #akira shimazu #mia jw #mia john wick #mia x akira #akira x mia #marquis de gramont #vincent de gramont #wuxia dj #cassian jw #gianna d’antonio