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yeyinde · 1 year

Text

after dark

Keegan P. Russ x f!Reader

⟶ WARNINGS: 18+ SMUT; P-in-V sex; female reader, female gendered anatomy; gratuitous use of kid; slight body worship; established history/relationship; canon-compliant, takes place after Sin City; minor game spoilers; mentions of death (canon-compliant); war; fluff - this is honestly just gratuitous smut and my awful attempt at fluff ⟶ WORD COUNT: 9,7k ⟶ SUMMARY: you want to see him break. ⟶ NOTES: my first foray into Keegan! this took a bit of time since i wanted to include so much, and it ended up growing a little out of hand. i might expand on this/make it into a series potentially (just small drabbles). Keegan was so fun to write for!

Keegan looks good like this. Laid out, bare; skin stained with the bites of your nails, the nips of your teeth, nestled evenly amid the smattering of battle wounds and blemishes that colour him in a rich history wrought with gunfire and calamity. (You often tell him that the two of you are kismet. He says Momus just has a sick sense of humour.)

The milky white expanse of his torso is littered with scars, and you map them with your greedy eyes, drinking each bloom of imperfection that stains his ivory skin. Finding new ones that weren't there before.

Blades, bullets, burns, pockmarks—many from weapons you can't even begin to name, to know—all etched into sinew. Into bone.

They mar him in a brutal smear of varicoloured hurt. A mosaic of near–death laid out like Orion, curved like the tail of Sagittarius. It's spooled, knotted, in a way that makes you think of Lyra. Of the stars you can see so clearly now without any light pollution around to smog the indigo sky above.

The scars are healed in uneven patches; some darker, uglier than others. Raised welts, bumps. Deep indents in his skin, cutting through muscle and tissue.

There is no sense of structure in the gashes that line his body—silver, to red, to purple, to black—and you know they were collected over time. Over years, decades, before you ever met him. Knew him.

(The only one that looks familiar is the jagged hole on his shoulder where he stepped, stupidly, in front of a bullet for you.

Stupid, because no one, especially him, should risk themselves for you.)

They sit, carved in flesh, as a testament to his nomadic lifestyle, one drenched in danger, death, and calamity. Shadows moulded into man. Into ruined skin and jagged bone. Deadly forces of nature hidden in the craters where the earth split into twos, threes. Triplicated ravines clogged with the rubble of was once life. Peace. Home, maybe.

A tenuous fallacy, now.

But they risk everything—even themselves—for it, and the proof of their commitment, the dedication to the cause, is smattered across his torso for you to see.

The exploratory tips of your fingers, dripping reverence and featherlight, ghost over his flesh, over the blemishes that decorate his body, taking them in, feeling them.

Some are baby–hair soft, silky sateen; they sit in thick, raised welts of scar tissue clotted over each other. Others are rougher than sandpaper, gritty like stripped lath. They feel like tree bark under your fingers. Scabs. Fresh, new.

You wonder if he remembers each one of them—how they happened, where, by who; which ones hurt the most, and which ones took longer to heal. He might, you think.

(It's him, after all.)

Catalogued pain organised and filed away. Locked in a safe box inside the enigma of his head, and kept there for safekeeping.

But it's not gone, not put away.

(It's always within reach.)

Phantoms congeal in the corners of his eyes sometimes when you happen to touch one, to reach out and grab him by the arm, or the hand, the wrist, and you see the brief flash of recognition in cut slate. A distant fog simmers up from the depths; veiled blue. A past you're barred from touching, knowing.

It's not pretty, kid, is what he told you when you asked. Not like you. No sense ruining something like you with all that ugly.

It was the end of the conversation. Locked away for good, and brassbound with a warning sign, rusted and aged, that read: do not enter.

So, you don't.

But sometimes, like now, you like to take them in. To see the contrast between your blemishless skin in comparison to his. Worlds apart. A cosmic chasm of experience and life needles between you, and yet—

You brush your fingers against the marks, and have never felt closer to him, despite everything inside that tells you you're wrong.

You place your hand flat over a cut over his breastplate, right where his heart thuds against your palm, and wonder what near–miss he escaped from that caused this. The other slides to his stomach, his muscles flexing, rippling, under your touch, and you brush your thumb over a circular hole under his solar plexus.

You think, then, of the years you spent underground, running through the barren safehouses that dotted the landscape, only to come away with minor cuts, abrasions. The worst of them all is a small scar near your wrist where you burned your skin with cooking oil.

You've never met the end of the blade—not until him.

"What are you thinking about, kid?"

His hand lifts—skin littered with small knicks and cuts, a burn on the back of his hand that almost matches yours except his was caused by a Molotov cocktail and not youthful ignorance (a world of difference, a chasm)—fingers sliding over the curve of your cheek. His slate–blue gaze is fixed, unmoving, on you.

It was those eyes—cenote blue—that drew you to him in the first place. Teal in tenebrous. They haunted you for months. Wordlessly following your every move, drinking in the expressions that flitted over your face. Taking stock of you. Measuring you. Your accomplishments. Your worth. Assets.

Survivability.

("Pretty low," Merrick says, plain and brutal, and the rawness of it rumbled through the hollow crevasse you found yourself in. Low. Lower than low. So low it was almost a miracle you survived as long as you had.)

Keegan said nothing at the time. He stood back, hand gripping the butt of the rifle, eyes fixed on you, unwavering. Unforgiving.

It was easy to take his silence as cold. Distant. Bundled up in thick layers of muskeg, in icy separation.

You did—at first.

An active war zone was not a place for a civilian. Merrick told you as much when he found you, taking refuge in a dilapidated home split in two, and welding only a metal bat you'd grabbed on your travels. Your only protection against an enemy that has no qualms in murdering innocents. That uses guns and heavy artillery to decimate the soldiers, the allies who jumped oceans to fight alongside the troops.

You lit a lantern one night after settling down in a broken home, and woke up to the barrel of a gun pressed to your temple.

It was Ajax who saved you.

"Hey, uh. You're American, right? What are you doing in a place like this?"

You didn't trust them.

Didn't trust anyone.

You'd spent too long cutting through the thickets of the surrounding overgrowth, hopping from one ramshackle house to another to lay low, to hide from the people who wandered past, looking for survivors, hostages, to give into that part of yourself that longed for people. For normalcy. The road jaded you a little. Isolated you.

It was safer.

The people you stumbled across either tried to pick you bare, taking the meagre belongings you scrounged together until there was nothing left but the thin skin covering your body, and your will to live.

Or they tried to kill you. To use you.

Hostages. Civilians used against the threadbare resistance. Their safe return in exchange for more land, for surrender.

So, you hid. Got good at it, too.

("Too fuckin' good," Merrick hissed, shaking his head.

The only one who was ever able to spot you was Riley. Keegan, sometimes, through the lens of his rifle.)

When they found you, you tried to run, to fight. Enemies. All of them.

It was Ajax who stopped you, who talked you off the ledge.

"Come on, we're not gonna hurt you."

"Heard those words before."

"How long you been out here for, anyway?"

"When did ODIN destroy New York?"

"Jesus, kid."

"Stupid," Merrick said. "That's what you are, Cali. Stupid as hell."

And Keegan—

Said nothing. Nothing.

He doesn't like you, was your first thought when it all added up, stacked together. The avoidance, the distance. He wasn't cold, but he didn't try to get close to you, to get to know you. He just—

Watched. Waiting, you thought, a touch bitter, for you to die. Like they all expected you to when you said you weren't going to the safe zone. That you were staying, and you were looking for them—your brother, your father.

Then—

Stay behind me, always, kid. You got that?

If you can't see my back, you wandered too far.

Eat. You need it more than I do.

Watch your step. You'll fall into a crevasse if you're not careful, kid.

The second: he likes you too much.

And now—

Your hips flex. A slow, teasing roll against his pelvis, and it's that indelible sight of sky blue eyes shuttering out of view when his lids lower, lashes fluttering, that nearly sets you on fire.

The press of his cock makes your nails dig into the constellation of scars on his chest, clinging to him as licks of pleasure flicker up your spine. Nerves smouldering at the stretch, the feel of him seated so deeply within you.

"Thinking about you," you murmur, breathless. Raw.

You wonder if he remembers the rainy days in San Francisco, the sunrise in Los Angeles, huddled under the waterlogged crater of what once was Pacific Avenue and Venice Boulevard with the same touch of halcyon fondness as you do.

You think, then, of the fusillade following you in the ruined husks of the streets, enemies on every corner, of the six-day hike between the cities to reconvene with the others, lost somewhere in the decimated coast.

A little part of you still hopes he does despite the stress, the tension, the danger; the separation, the distance, that cracks between you, louder than a thunderclap.

That he thinks back on that time when it was just you and him, and no food, no shelter, and feels something more than the gritty reality of everything falling apart around you.

Of death, and the stench of rot, and decay, and the overgrowth of vegetation that sometimes felt like it was trying to reclaim you along with its land. The vines that curled around your ankles when you idled, or slept—shackles that refused to let go. Gunshots in the night. Predators roaming wild and free in what once was a metropolis.

Then, softer, you add:

"Always."

You speak it reverently, as if the word, the sincerity in your voice alone was enough to somehow shade the gossamer of calamity and horror you faced together into something pink, something roseate. Something fond, and wonderful, and good despite all of the ugly and the bad that stacks up, deeper than the hole punched through San Diego.

(Down so deep you sometimes think you can see the eerie glow of molten rock below.)

Keegan says nothing, gives nothing away, but you catch something in his gaze shift, relent.

Another inch off the thick veneer that keeps him from falling into you fully, that keeps him from letting you in.

It's the slow erosion of his defences, the ones that make him say, yeah, kid, whatever you say when you bring up the smouldering ruins of Death Valley, when you slipped your finger in the cut of his mask, and tugged it down below his chin. Your nail caught on the bridge of his nose, but he didn't flinch at the thin white line you left behind, the sting. He didn't move. Didn't blink.

Didn't push you away.

He let you. Let you press your sun-chapped lips to his for the first time with nothing more than an easy, kid—don't start something you can't finish before he gives in. Kissed you against the grainy sand that scorched your skin.

You used to think he was cold. Unfeeling.

But now—

Shadows dance over his face when the clouds drift over the milky moon hung in the indigo aether, but you catch the rubicund smear over the bridge of his nose when they part. Pretty pink dusted in soot. An ethereal chiaroscuro etched into his flesh.

You feel his chest shudder, expanding with his rippling inhale.

—You know that, sometimes, he just feels too much.

You hitch your hips again just to watch him flinch beneath you. The breath stutters out of his chest, lips parting on a grunt when you grind over him. The pinched knot between his brow is stained with bliss, and deep like the crevasses ripped through the earth.

The hand on your cheek jerks, tenses. His fingers curl around the back of your skull as his eyes crack open once more when you settle. Heavy lidded, stained the residuum of soot and grease paint the lukewarm water wasn't able to scour off.

You meet his cobalt stare, and feel the breath catch in your throat.

When you whisper this to him, his hips jerk again, flexing, under yours.

"Fuck, kid. Don't go starting something you can't finish."

His words nudge something inside of you, and the slow simmer of competition roils through your chest.

"Can't finish, huh?" You murmur, and keep your eyes fixed on his as you lift your hips. The drag of his hardened cock sliding against your walls has pleasure liquifying your core.

When it's just the tip you clench around, you pause, a small smirk curling over your lips. You'll make him break. Make him eat those words.

But Keegan can read you like an open book.

His hand lifts from your hip bone, sliding up the flesh of your torso until his fingers are perched in the gaps between your ribs, holding you steady.

"Easy now, kid," he whispers the words low, voice breathless, humid. "Don't bite off more than you chew."

In response, you sink down an inch.

It makes him choke a little. A wet noise spills out from his mouth, teeth flashing when they burrow into the plush give of his full, pink lips. The tendons in his neck strain, pulse throbbing in tandem with your heartbeat. Linked, you think, a little delirious, even like this.

(You often tell him that the two of you are kismet.

He says Momus just has a sick sense of humour.)

His fingers tighten on your ribs. The other hand falls, palm swallowing your breast, fingers digging into the flesh once before sliding down, pinching your nipple between his calloused thumb and forefinger. It sends shocks of pleasure ricocheting down your spine, and you arch into his grasp, eyes dropping.

"That feels good—"

"Yeah?" He husks, lips curling into a rare smile, a grin. "Like that, huh, kid?"

The raw timbre of his voice coils over your flesh, and you shudder at the liquor-rich sound, eyes blinking open to drink him in.

The spark of pleasure that glimmers over his expression, eyes dark, eclipsed, and saturated in bliss, makes something coil low inside of your belly. A molten heat that leaks into your bloodstream until it bubbles, froths.

Keegan is a slow burn. A steady crescendo of pleasure that builds and builds in evenly spaced increments until your head is molasses-thick from the endorphins that saturate your synapses.

Keegan is always so giving, so quiet with his affection; picturesque stoicism even when he has you bent over, battering his cock into you as you lose it amid the unrelenting waves of euphoria that bloom inside of you, singing hymns in his name, and only just lucid enough to round the vowels out. He rides you through it all without cracking. Without rupturing from the pleasure that thickens the air between you until it's syrupy and heady with the scent of sex.

And it's good. Always.

You love the way he handles you; love the way he splits you apart atom by atom until you're an impending explosion, leaking bliss into the warmth of his mouth when you breathe his name. Raw, exposed. Bare and flayed by his scorching hands, and hungry lips.

Keegan touches you with the same delicacy as he does the rifles in his arsenal. A finely tuned weapon, honed and perfected in his hands. He drags only the best out of you, and knows where to press, to nip. He knows your body like he knows the inner workings of each gun he carries.

He's adroit in combat, and it bleeds over into the soft, plush give of your body beneath him.

It's often thoughtless—done purely on muscle memory, and instinct alone. A primal switch in the back of his head he commands at will, one now grounded and circuited into making you tremble, gasp, and moan his name the way you know he likes best.

Keegan leeches his own release from the aftershocks of your pleasure, pounding desperately into you as you clench around him, back arched and toes curled. He fucks you through the remnants of your climax until his own takes hold, and spits his bliss into your body, groaning low in your ear.

But everything—everything—is for you.

He takes where he can as he fractures you into pieces, into fragments of yourself. Crumbling in ecstasy under his touch. Broken, shattered. Rendered into a trembling mess of pulp beneath the bulk of his body.

He's a lesson in patience, in tenacity.

Usually.

But now—

You set the pace. Control the motions.

(And you want to see him break in the same splintered pieces he leaves you in.)

"Just sit back, and let me make you feel good."

He draws a sharp breath, eyes fluttering, widening slightly at your base command.

Something gnarls over his exposed face, a frisson of affection, and softer than anything you'd ever seen before.

It's rare you get to see him so bare, so open.

"You do," he rasps, words sticking between his teeth. "More than you know."

He swallows thick, eyes skirting away from you as if to gather himself together, to calm the racing of his pulse that beats against the pale skin of his throat.

Comfort is taken in composure, in distance, and you can see him grasp for it, reaching for that same phlegmatic control even now.

You don't let him find it. Won't.

You take a quick breath to steady yourself, fingers sliding down his damp chest, nestling in the messy smear of hair that sticks to his skin, grainy and gritty from salt and dirt, and then you drop.

The blunt head of his cock bludgeons into a fleshy spot behind your navel that has your ears ringing, head tipping back in pleasure. It's good—so, so good—and you can't stop the whine of his name, broken and fraying at the edges, when you sink down to the base, swallowing him whole in the right clutch of your cunt.

White noise, static, flashes behind your eyelids, catching in the pale moonlight. A slurry of soporific pleasure spools inside your head, saturated with bliss, and edging into that indelible equinox of pleasure and pain when his head kisses the seal of your womb. It flexes against your mettle, pushing the limits of what you can reasonably take, but you grit your teeth against the strain, and breathe.

You won't break first.

Not when his eyes roll back a little as you shift in his lap, brow furrowed into a deep ruck of pleasure at the feel of you around.

The overwhelming feel of him buried deep behind your navel notches into too much, and the ache of it pulses like a heartbeat in your sternum, knocking the breath from your lungs, but you hold steady amid the waves that crash over you, that threaten to consume you. To drag you under.

White-hot pleasure lashes at your spine. Congealing inside the pit of your lower belly. A molten puddle of nirvana that steadily thickens into a coiled knot, gnarling within you. A spool of bliss, slowly unravelling under the stretch of him, the grind of his pelvis against your throbbing clit..

It thrums in your veins, your bones. Madness bleeds in at the edges; blurred lines of so good and too much too full and you find the equilibrium, the perfect zenith, when he groans your moniker, Cali, out between gnashing teeth.

The brassy rasp of his voice centres you. Grounds you. You inhale the tang of him until your lungs begin to burn, to ache. You feel them pressed taut to your ribs where his fingers sit, nestled between the gaps of your bones. Firm, steady.

You exhale in slow, measured increments, feeling the way he throbs against your walls, in your throat. You take it all in, all of it. Him. The firm press of his body beneath yours, thighs spread to fit him in the seam, makes you relax, ease into the press of him. The fill.

Keegan's hands twitch. His hips lift slightly, an unconscious movement. An accidental proxysm. His ironclad resolve, the honed stillness of an expert sniper in perfect control, command, of every limb, every muscle, every movement, and breath, crumbles like papier-mache with the tight clench of your pussy around him.

It edges into delirium, into that burning sense of conquest when he grunts, and rubs a spot inside of you that feels like heaven itself is nestled behind your belly button.

(A fissure. A crack.)

The steadying breath he takes draws your attention back to him, to the sheen of sweat drenching his brow, the smear of charcoal he couldn't scrub away. It stains his skin permanently, now. A tattoo of battle grease, war paint, that he can't be rid of.

(You tell yourself it isn't jealousy that congeals at the base of your throat when you see the blemish on his skin, and wish, so desperately, that you could brand him the same way. Mark him, too.

To crawl inside the brackets between his ribs, and suffuse your atoms to his until every pump of his heart sends blood roaring through your veins.

It sits there, bitter and acrid, when you try to swallow it down, refusing to budge.

Stupid. Stupid—)

You take it all in. The racing of his pulse, the slow, deep inhales, and the way he reaches out, struggling to control the impulse, the instinct, the want, to greedily take more and more from you.

"Keegan," his name falls between your teeth, breaking in the middle when you roll your hips, and catch the flash of gritted teeth.

The thin strands of sangfroid he managed to snag in his grasp are released when your voice crests over his name, cracked open and wanting, and desperate.

It tastes of victory when he groans yours in return—not kid, not Cali, but the one you whispered to him that first night he found you in a desolate husk of what was once someone's home—and bucks into you in a stutter.

You meet him again, pelvis kissing his until it suctions the air from your heaving lungs, and you can feel him pulsing in your sternum. A red-hot blade snug against your jugular.

The thin skin of his eyelids crinkle when he squeezes them shut against the feeling, the overwhelming pleasure, of being buried balls deep inside of you.

Your ribs ache. His fingers burrow into the flesh that separates each rung, clinging to you, and keeping you perched on his lap as he struggles to catch his breath.

It rips open something inside of you—something deeper and fuller than sex, than shattering his ironclad resolve—and the sight of him, chest heaving, eyes heavy and black with desire, and the soft way he crumbles in your hands, makes you think of the morning rays of the sun brushing over the broken landscape. The moments of peace in the midst of war.

You think of him, and the tick in his jaw, the gleam in his eyes, the same shade as crushed bluebonnets, and think of kismet once more as you pant out his name.

"Ah, fuck—," sweat drips down his brow, and you follow the droplet until it falls, soaking the jaundiced pillow below. "You keep that up, kid, and you'll be tapping out soon enough."

It drags a huff from your chest. "It was once. And you made me run through San Diego for hours before, and—"

"It was fifteen minutes. We ran a block," his hand falls from your breast, palm swallowing the side of your thigh. "You lasted five minutes on top before you begged me fuck you instead. Said you were tired."

"I was," you whine, muscles flexing when you lift off of him again. You feel the ache in your muscles already, the burn of exertion from sitting atop of him like this, knees wrenched apart to accommodate his bulk between them. "But I wanna make you feel good, Keegan."

The sharp sting of his nails catching your flesh makes you gasp. "C'mon, kid. Easy now."

The low commands roll off of his tongue with practised ease, and you slip a little further into that inky madness that smells of fir boughs, sticky spruce sap, and ripened satsumas. You breathe him in and taste dusty pomander balls, and pinyon in the back of your throat.

"Keegan—"

His hips lift, pushing into the soft, wet clench of your cunt. "That's it. Nice and steady."

He guides you along—a maestro stroking the keys of a piano as he plays his grand requiem. You struggle to keep up with his pace, the way he pistons into you, notching his cock into that soft, sensitive place inside that makes your eyes brim with unshed tears of bliss.

Each deep thrust makes the head of his cock kiss the plug of your womb—just a brush, just a tease—but the burning sensation of blistering pleasure and wisps pain, of too much and too full, have you spiralling down the precipice faster than you expected.

It's a dizzying descent, but you match his tempo as best as you can, determined to ride the torrent of ecstasy that runs down your spine in a thick, dulcified rivulet.

Still. Still. You can't help but bask in the way he melts in your hand, rendered into malleable polymer with just a twist of your hips, a clench of your cunt. It's electrifying. Addicting.

The high of it all brims deep in your head, blooming like a sickness that clots along the seam, noxious and heady.

You can't stop the satisfied curl of your lips from growing, slowly and languid, when you bear down on him, taking him to the root.

His grunt reverberates through his chest with enough of a punch to rattle your bones.

Seeing him desperate is intoxicating.

"What happened to your composure, Keegan?" you mewl, heading rolling back. "My big, quiet soldier is so talkative now—"

Rough palms sear the flesh of your hips when he grabs you tight in his unyielding hold, keeping you fixed on him.

You try to move, but he tightens his grasp, refusing to let you budge.

Frustration curls inside of your chest, and you glower down at him through glassy eyes brimming with tears. "Keegan, I wanna—"

Your words dissolve into a low keen when his hips lift again, battering into your cunt in an unrelenting wave of thrusts that force the protests from your lips.

"Talkative, huh?" He grinds the words out from between clenched molars. "That was your goal, eh, kid? Break me?"

He punctuates each word with a brutal cant that feels like a battering ram to your skull until the weakened bone splinters, shatters, and he punches through.

"Kee–ah, ah, fuck—!"

"That's it," he husks, tone liquid. His fingers spear into your flesh, tight enough to bruise your bone. "Just like that, kid. You wanna see me break? Lose control?"

Heart in your throat, all you can do is whimper around the pulse in your esophagus, and struggle to find purchase under his unrelenting onslaught.

His hand lifts, falls to your shoulder when he stills, keeping you locked tight to his pelvis, cock jerking inside of you. His fingers curl over the ledge, gripping bone, and then he tugs, pulls.

You fold easily in his grasp, lowering your chest until it rests over his, sweat-slicked and warm. The scrape of your sensitive nipples over his coarse, damp chest hair makes you moan, clenching desperately around him at the sparks of pleasure roiling through you.

When you settle over him, his hand moves, slides to the back of your skull, and wrenches you even closer to him, until your forehead meets his, and the soft bump of your nose catches on the bridge of his, right over the thin line you left on his skin. Healed, now, but you wonder if this is intentional. If it's—

Keegan breathes heavily through his open mouth, breath mixing together with yours, a humid coagulation against your lips where condensation gathers on the dip of your chin.

He says nothing, just stares. Bare-faced, naked. Still smeared in the residuum of his battle grease, the armour he wears to keep himself hidden from the Federation, from discovery, and the freckles of black on his ivory skin look like an inverted night; the endless yawn of the heavens above. You wonder if you can map a new constellation in the dirt left behind, but the notion is pushed down, dissolved, when your gaze lifts, finding his own.

He hasn’t looked away from you at all, and the intensity of his gaze makes you dizzy, breathless. Too many emotions ripple through the mercury depths for you to grasp, but they're soft. Tender. Your heart thuds when you see the endless flicker of them hidden inside, tightly sealed under a rusted lock without a key.

"Keegan—"

He doesn't let you finish. His chin lifts, mouth hooking on yours in a blistering kiss. His tongue slides between the gap of your parted lips, stealing the words that spool behind your teeth.

Keegan kisses you with a deep, almost methodical precision. It's a contrast you can't keep up with; an ebb and flow. He starts fast, harsh. A demanding press of his mouth to yours, unrelenting and eager. It's all tongue, lips, the clash of teeth until yours are stinging and bruised, and then he pulls away until his are just a brush. A ghost of a touch, a whisper.

He holds it there, teasing, taunting, until your lips bloom in a soft pout, eyes turning downward.

"Keegan, please," you whimper into the firm seal of his mouth, so close and yet, so far away. Out of reach. Held there until whatever he wants, whatever he seeks, flashes in the glossy puddles of your eyes.

And then, he gives.

Gives, gives. His mouth devours yours with a steady ferocity like the howling winds echoing through the wizened fir boughs in the desolate forest. He holds you close, a hand fisted against your skull while the other plinths your jaw, thumb stroking the bubble of your cheek.

The pressure of his hold, of his hands, oscillates between firm, unyielding, and keeping you afloat, soothing you.

You need it, you think, when he kisses you like the sudden approach of an avalanche ripping through the thicket, and barrelling down the vertiginous mountain he keeps you locked on.

An ebb and flow.

When your head swims, dizzy with hypoxia that inks across your vision like a Rorschach, he pulls away. Peppers small kisses, nips, over your stringing, swollen flesh, and soothes the ache he left behind.

"I know," is all he says to you before he starts to move. “I know, kid.”

Keegan keeps you locked to his chest, one hand bracketing your skull, kissing you in tandem with each roll of his hips. His other hand settles against the swell of your ass, holding you steady as he bucks into you, bludgeoning his cock into your cunt.

Your hands drop to the pillow under his head to stabilise yourself, pushing firmly into the mattress in a futile effort to keep the brunt of your weight from pressing against him, but he notices.

Always.

His grunt of displeasure is barely heard over the roaring in your ear, the lewd slap of his wet skin on yours, the grind of his cock into your cunt, but you feel it rumble through his chest, reverberating over your lips.

His hand trails up from the curve of your ass, and over your spine.

"C'mon, kid," he murmurs, teeth scraping over your stinging bottom lip. "You're not gonna break me."

His sly words make you huff, and you clench your muscles around him in retribution. There is something blisteringly intoxicating in the low groan that leaves his chest, the pinch between his brow, the flutter of his lashes, lids cresting in pleasure.

It's a small win, a minuscule victory despite losing the war. But it is a double-edged sword that leaves you just as breathless, just as aching, as he is.

You acquiesce to his insistent prods, and slowly, hesitantly, melt into him. With your full weight settling on top of him, Keegan breathes in deep, and murmurs a quiet, hushed: that's it into your lips.

His hands are on you, tugging and pulling until you're flush on his body with a muted groan.

Your arms bend at the elbow, hands moving to cup his jaw in your palms, feeling the scratch of his rough stubble over your life line.

Kismet, you think, and taste salt on your tongue, a humid breeze on your skin. It reminds you of Los Angeles, of the hole you sunk into with him. When you decided in the ramshackle remnants of what once was that, despite everything, all of it, you would follow him anywhere, everywhere.

A confession in the shambles of normalcy, where the cracked Macy's sigh hung suspended on wires, and reinforced by nature. Thick webs of wisteria kept the relic from a bygone era arched over the collapsed ruins of the Beverly Centre. A macabre chandelier: a poignant piece of what is now history. Gone. Erased. Decimated by a weapon meant to protect.

The rest was felled into a deep cavern, karst, destroyed by the beams of inert energy that spliced the world you knew in half. Water leaked in—from the burst pipes, the broken aquifer at the bottom, rainwater, the ocean, and, you think, from when they razed the smouldering husk of the cities on fire with a deluge of water, back when everyone still clung to the belief that everything was going to be okay. It pools at the bottom, a murky abyss of cracked rock, steel beams, and dead wires.

On the surface, something floated past. A bag, maybe. Waterlogged and aged. You fish it out despite the soft rumble from Keegan to stay away from the cenote.

"Currents might sweep you under. Not a place you wanna fall in, kid."

When you dragged it to the linoleum ledge you sat on, the broken logo made you snort.

"Never could afford designer," you muttered and tossed the Balenciaga bag aside.

It doesn't matter. Not anymore. Not here.

You know it doesn't, feel it deep in your polluted bones, and yet—

You stared at the shattered heap of luxury, and couldn't help thinking about those days in the past when you'd wake up after a long trip on the road with your dad, your brother, and the world would feel so massive, so empty. It felt like you were the only ones left. The only survivors.

It eats at you now.

You cried that night. Broke for the first time in months, years. Sobbed into the corner of what was once Macy's or Gucci or some other relic you used to scorn in your youth, and the whole time, Keegan said nothing. Nothing at all.

He just held you when you stumbled into him. Kept you tight to his body as your sobs echoed through the chamber.

Through it all, it was Keegan who kept you grounded. Who stood in front of you, sniper ready, whenever the bushes around you rustled, or the ground trembled with the aftershocks of the lingering explosion that decimated your home. Your world. He was there, his hand on the small of your back, eyes sharp, wary. Kept you alive, fed. Safe.

Safe.

You can only sleep when he’s around. Even when they left you in the safe zone you clawed out of, you couldn’t sleep. Nothing quelled the anxious needling in the back of your head but his presence—solid and steady. An unshakeable rock. Your foundation amid a shattered sense of security.

You turned to him, then, when the moon drifted over the open crater punched through the earth, and whispered the words he refused to return.

Even now.

But it doesn’t matter. None of it does.

Not anymore.

“Thinkin’ too much,” he husks, nails leaving trails of white when he scrapes them over your skin. “What happened to breaking me, kid? Give up already?”

There is no way for him to know you taste algae in the back of your throat from when he pushed you deeper into the cenote as you ran from the Federation soldiers. When they closed the gap, he shoved you into the murky blue of the grotto below, too quick for you to close your mouth, to not panic when you hit the pool with a splash that echoed on the slick, mossy walls. You breathed in the stagnant water filled with bioluminescent algae, and as gunshots bounced off the jagged limestone, and you drifted down below the buried rubble, you wondered if you’d glow so bright he could find you at the bottom of polluted blue.

(He did. Always.)

Still. You swallow down the tang of salt, and breathe him in, saturating yourself in the loam scent of him—thick musk; burning lignin and scorched evergreen—and let it sit in your throat until all you can taste is him when you swallow.

“Thinking about you,” you say.

He says nothing, but you catch the shudder in his chest, the tremble in his hands, when he slides them over your flesh. Reverent. Halting. The fingerprints he leaves on your skin are stained in chiaroscuro.

He grabs you tight enough to bruise sometimes; holds you so close that you often think he’s trying to absorb you into him. To keep you safe and secure in the bulk of his body where nothing can hurt you, touch you.

Not even him.

So, he pulls away. It’s not distance that pitches itself in the recess of his piercing gaze, but something close to it. Kin. Fear, maybe.

Of this, of you.

The fear started when Ajax went missing, but it was Keegan who held you together.

("It's gonna be okay, kid. We'll get him back.”

Empty promises. Broken pinky fingers.)

You broke when they brought Ajax home and laid him to rest as best as they could, and the marker that signified his resting place—a coded message only they would ever know—was all that remained of the man he fought beside, the man who made a pinky promise to never leave you in a the empty shell of a Walmart parking lot when you told him about the camping trips.

A scrap of fabric. A blood-drenched mask.

You held Keegan as he whispered sorry, kid. Sorry. We tried. We—

Gone. Gone. You think of rubble and the scent of rock dust. The crushing weight of cinder blocks and beams, and what it feels like to stumble when the earth breaks into pieces beneath your feet.

Elias.

And now—

All he has left is Merrick. Hesh. Riley.

Logan—

(“Missing,” the radio crackled a few days ago. “Gone.”)

—and you.

He holds you at arm's length, even now, after coming back to you, after finding you again, because what you offer is different, more dangerous, than theirs.

And despite what they say, Keegan isn’t a man who feels nothing at all.

No.

He’s a man who feels too much.

And he knows this. Knows it like he knows the world is in shambles, knows what the Federation is capable of.

What you're capable of.

You wonder if he's thinking of that now, as the shadows leak back in. They flood the corners of his eyes when he gazes through you, lost in those lour thoughts that rush by in quick succession. Too fast for him to cling to any.

They cut into the crease. The ones that make you think he’s somehow omnipotent, all-knowing. That he can chisel inside of your head, and read the want, the greed, that festers in the rucked divots.

And he isn't sure how to handle it. What to do with the bold, bare-faced sincerity of what you offer him. What you want from him.

Before, Keegan would get so lost inside the maze of his mind that you didn't know how to bring him back. He'd speak only when necessary—just short, clipped words, commands (over there, inside, stop, eat)—and the silence would grate at you. Somehow quieter than he usually was; oppressive.

It lasted for days, sometimes.

It never sullied his ability to aim, to shoot. Survive. Protect.

It was just—

An introspective silence. A storm cloud over blue.

He was thinking too much, and wasn't sure which option to pick, which outcome was best.

You never knew what to say to bring him back. To ground him. All you could do was wait it out until the gyre would fade from his eyes, and he'd turn to you again, clear blue.

Now—

“—You’re thinking too much,” you murmur, mouth trailing loose kisses over his stubbled jaw.

“Just waiting for you to come back to me,” he volleys back, eyes cresting. A tendril of that unknowable something snakes through the gloom of blue, and you reach for it with curious, wanting fingers.

“I’d never leave you.”

Keegan swallows, and you trace the bob of his Adam's apple. A part of you expects it to retreat, to flee back to the safety of its bivouac where nothing can get too close. Nothing can hurt.

But it doesn’t.

He huffs, and the soft expel of his breath, the sinking of his chest, feels a little bit like victory.

“Wouldn’t survive without me.”

It’s as close to a confession as he’ll offer, and you take it with eager, greedy hands, cupping it in the plinth of your palm where it sits, safe from harm, from the world that crumbles around you.

“Neither would you.”

It’s a lie, of course. Keegan is dampening his own chances at survival by keeping you close to him instead of doing what everyone said he ought to, what he tried to do: leaving you behind.

He pushed you away once. You wonder if he thinks of the separation. The distance etched between the two of you. Slowly relearning each other in broken husks that were once homes.

"Drop Cali off at a safe zone, and then come find us, Keegan."

The intention, you know, was to leave you behind permanently. To keep you locked in the safe confines of a safe zone in Oregon, where they pitched tents in an expansive field, and lived off of pipe dreams. Where they pretended they couldn't fear the gunfire in the distance, or smell artillery smoke in the air.

Direct orders passed down through the chain of command, from Elias himself, and yet—

He came back.

("Just gonna do whatever you want, kid. We're headed the same way, anyway.")

“That so?”

"It is."

Keegan swallows. Something yields, breaks.

His palms are balmy on your skin, firebrands. You stare into his eyes, counting the deep ravines of inky black cutting through sapphire blue, and the gyre of those hidden things, locked away and kept at a distance, seem to tremble. Wobble. The edges blur.

A frisson passes over his face, illuminated only by the milky light spilling in from the tattered curtains, and something cracks. Splinters. The fracture makes him flinch, makes him heave under you, chest expanding with the deep drawl of his breath.

With another sigh, his hand slides down the heated flesh of your back, spreading over the swell of your ass. Before you can say anything in response, his middle finger dips into the valley between each cheek, brushing over the skin of your perineum before dipping lower, brushing over the wetness gathered there.

He drags his finger higher, brushing over the soft skin of your ass. The feeling of it, the red-hot heat of his flesh, makes you keen, tightening around him.

He huffs into your neck, lashes fluttering over the soft skin of your throat when he blinks. "Like that, huh? Want me here, too, kid?"

You gasp when he presses against the rim. "K–Keegan—"

"Not ready yet," he murmurs, and you try to stifle a whimper when he pulls away, heart thudding in your chest at the thought alone.

He catches it, anyway.

"Fuck, kid—," it's a jagged husk; ripped up and shredded under barbed wire. Raw, wanting, and dark. You'd never heard his voice so low, so gritty. When you peer down at him, all you see is the endless ocean in the blanket of night. Midnight blue. It makes you shiver.

You feel feverish when he groans again, when he rasps your name in a way that sounds like it was wrenched up from the recesses of his chest. Buried under soot and ash.

"Gonna take you there," he pants, and you know him. You know Keegan. It's not a suggestion. It's a promise. "Soon."

The thought of it makes something ugly gnarl inside your chest. A possessive thing, out of place in such a moment. Between you and him, and this awful, awful world, greed has no room to grow. To burrow its roots in deep, and yet—

Yet.

You crave him in ways that are unattainable. That belongs to a world that no longer exists in the land you roam.

His fingers pull away, and settle on the tight flesh of your raw cunt stretched around the thick of him. His thumb brushes over your chafed, red skin, eyes softening as he coos at you. A gentle tut when he feels how wrecked, swollen you are from the brutal pounding he's giving you.

You think he might be lenient. Merciful. Might let you pretend you have control again. But when you lift your gaze to his, eyes blurry and lachrymose, all you see is a deep, unrelenting satisfaction cut into deep slate. His pupils ripple. Deep puddles trembling in pleasure.

"Fuck, kid."

He punctuates his words with a slow, full roll of his hips. Slick drenches the tips of his fingers as he feeds you the thick of his cock, feeling the way you swallow him down to the base. To the root.

"Takin' me so good."

His words are slurred, drunk off the spread of you in his lap, taking him into your willing cunt. Eyes flashing with something that prickles across your skin. It should be a warning to you, a siren. You know him enough to tell what those little flickers in his eyes mean, the shadows hidden in the canyons of blue, but he moves before the thought can take root inside the syrupy haze that clots over your thoughts.

His legs slide up, knees bending, spreading, as he plants his feet firmly into the mattress.

"Hold on."

It's all he gives before he pushes up into you, cock sliding in deeper than before.

You gasp, eyes snapping shut when he cudgels against something inside of you that has pleasure blooming in your lower belly.

The angle is different, deeper and fuller than anything you'd ever taken before. Even riding him, sitting flush against his hips, it didn't hit that soft bundle of nerves that has fire licking at the base of your spine.

You moan his name again, low and broken, and Keegan responds with a sloppy snap of his hips that makes your back arch in his hold, toes curling as batters into that place that makes Nirvana bleed over your synapses.

Keegan's hand settles on your thigh, holding you steady as he bucks into you. His other hand tangles in your hair, cupped on the nape of your neck. He tugs, his nose pressing into yours.

"You feel so good, kid," he breathes, sliding his hand down to cup your jaw in his palm. "Squeezing me so tight. Missed your pretty pussy—"

"—Feels so good, Keegan, feels so—"

His lips steal over yours in a searing kiss. Biting, blistering. He devours you whole until nothing remains but the taste of him on your tongue, in the back of your throat. It clogs all of your senses—a brutal assault of Keegan: rich, earthy.

Like this, locked to his chest as he pistons into you, you have very little choice but to take everything he gives you. All of it.

The sounds your bodies make when he's seated in deep, the slap of his pelvis, the wet squelch of your pussy, make you dizzy. Make you keen. Whine. Your mouth drops. Toes curl. Eyes roll into the back of your head.

The cacophony of him fucking into you over and over again fills the empty space around you, sticking to the walls, and the moss-covered floor. It bounces against the lining of your head until it throbs, pulses, and threatens to split you in two. To halve you down the middle where Keegan presses taut to the seal of your womb.

All you can do is cling to him, hands sliding to grasp his thick, rippling forearms as he batters into you. It's sloppy, unrefined, and you've never seen him lose it like this before.

It edges into that precipice of pleasure and pain, both admixing into a heady cocktail of bliss that roils through you.

He trails kisses across your blistering cheek, down your neck. His breath is warm over your skin. The flash of teeth makes you gasp.

"You're gonna cum."

It's not a demand, or a request. It isn't a plea, a bargain. He says the words like he's relaying the time, coordinates, his position. He isn't unaffected—his voice crumbles a little over the vowels, wobbles on the syllables—but this isn't him asking you. He's telling you.

Keegan knows your body like he knows the intricacies of his rifles, his weapons, and he knows, knows, you're going to cum around his cock soon. Can feel it in the way your nails find purchase in the firm muscles of his shoulders, the way you tighten around him like a vice. The sound of your voice when you get closer to that looming precipice he holds you over.

He knows.

You moan his name as liquid pleasure leaks into your marrow, and that vertiginous edge grows closer and closer. You want to warn, to tell him, but Keegan knows.

He hushes you, mouth moulding to yours, and devouring the whimpers that seep out. His hands tighten, holding you steady as he fucks you through it, slowing his pace to the easy grind of his cock against the seal of your womb, dragging over that soft spot inside of you that makes your head spin, and eyes cloud over with bliss.

You moan weakly into the kiss when he slides his hand back, fingers pressing once more against the taut flesh stretched around him. It's too much—the added pressure, the feeling of him bucking into you, brushing over the seam where you swallow him down—and you tilt your head back with a whimper of his name.

"I know, kid," he grunts, teeth catching on your chin. "Gonna cum for me, yeah?"

You can't speak, can't talk over the rush in your head, the thick spool of pleasure clotting inside your head, behind your eyelids, in your veins. Molten, liquid. You fall into him as the world around you shatters once more, erupting into white noise, static.

Everything that isn't him—the solid press of his body, unyielding and supine under you; the weight of his hands on your flesh; the painful crescent of his nails sinking into your skin; the stretch of his cock wrenching you open, and filling you deep, deeper than you'd thought possible; the burning heat, white-hot and balmy, that soaks your being from base to empty, empty skull—is sucked out through the broken shell, and into the vacuum of nothingness where it dissolves into embers, ashes.

All you can think, feel, is Keegan.

He works you through it, hand still pressed against the rim of your spasming cunt, feeling the way you pulse around him.

He moans low in his throat, the noise cutting through the gossamer of pleasure liquifying your joints into sticky molasses, and you know he's close, too.

You push back into him, into the sloppy cants of his hips as he leaches the lingering aftershocks of your climax for his own taking, his own rapture.

His chest shudders. Fingers tremble when they run along your skin, grasping, clenching. Keeping you tight to his body where you fit like a puzzle, and he, in turn, fills all of the empty, barren cavities inside of you, leaving no crevasse, no fibril, untouched by him.

You want to give him everything. Everything.

You buck into his thrusts, meeting him in the middle where he sinks home with a grunt that echoes through the hollow spaces of your ribs, and you tremble with him. Satiate yourself on his scent, his taste, the noises he makes, the feeling of his body on yours. Sweat-slicked and fever hot. You douse the burn heat of his in the inferno of your own; incandescent with the molten press of him everywhere.

Your head drops, nose pressed to his cheekbone as you breathe in him in greedy gulps that make your lungs quiver. Filled to the brim with him. Gorged on his taste. Saturated in his scent.

It's good. You're delirious. Mad with it. Drunk on the elixir of his briny skin, and the way he leaks into your pores, into your being.

You push yourself tighter against him until you feel his heartbeat pulsing inside of your ribcage.

His name is ripped from your throat in needy gasps drenched in the potency of your devotion. Shrill hymns that fans over his skin until it prickles, dampening with the humidity of your breath. Stained, then, with you.

"God, Keegan, you feel so good inside of me—"

Slurred words tumble from your sore lips, dipped in euphoria, in bliss, as he batters clumsily into you.

You'll ache tomorrow—already feel like one massive, liquified contusion. He might have to carry you from Yosemite to Coarsegold where Merrick and Hesh are waiting.

They'll know, of course, when you can't stand properly without feeling the stretch of him anew. When your knees wobble and your legs shake.

(But a part of you wants them to.)

"Gonna cum for me, Keegan?" You mewl, nails scratching at his shoulders when he grunts your name like it's salvation. Purpose. "Want you to, baby, want you to—"

His cock jerks, twitching within you, and with a choked, guttural moan, he cums inside of your fluttering pussy. Saturates you in his release that spits, plumes of warmth, against the battered, bruised seal of your womb.

He rumbles your name again, a shattered husk of vowels, consonants, and the ecstasy that paints his timbre sends you spiralling down into an abyss of endless blue.

Keegan's stomach flutters. The skin pulling taut as his muscles clench, seize. You feel the drag of his flesh over your quivering belly; the constellation of scars rubbing over your slick skin. Your hand falls to his shoulder, pressing against the bullet wound left behind when he perched himself in front of death for you. For you.

His eyes slide open slowly, heavy-lidded and bone weary with the shuddering tremors of euphoria that dance between the rucked

The tip of your nose slides over the bridge of his, and when his skin wrinkles at the featherlight touches, it feels a little bit like the scar over his heart.

"Fuck, kid," he rasps, eyes misty and lidded. Heavy pools of mercury you could fall into if you tried hard enough. "You have no idea what you do to me."

He grabs your hand, fingers lacing through the empty brackets until every part of you is filled with him.

Your nail catches the burn mark—a molotov cocktail when the world wasn't in shambles. His thumb brushes over yours—hot oil, perogies, back when your dad took you around America on grand adventures every weekend, and your brother would sneakily eat your fries from the McDonald's bag.

The other snakes up your spine, tangling in your messy hair, and then his lips are on yours. Messy, wet. He gasps into your open mouth as you rock against him, working him through his undoing, his breaking.

You hold his shattered pieces in your hands, clutched tight against your sternum, and wonder, once again, if this is what they mean when they talk about kismet.

"Never gonna leave you again," he rasps, the words clawing up his throat.

The raw, pulpy mess of them sits heavy between you. A promise. Promises. Broken, flayed. A crumpled heap of everything you once were in shambles.

You think of the anger you felt before, when the heels of his palms dug into your shoulder, and he pushed. Pushed you out, away. The bitter resentment, the festering rage.

The agony. The sorrow.

You missed him. His stupid face. His stupid voice. Stupid hands. Stupid humour—soft, witty, and drier than Death Valley. His stupid touch, his kisses. Him.

The loneliness carved a hole inside of you, a crater where only he could fit.

(You sleep better when he's beside you, anyway.)

"I won't let you."

Your lips crook into a small smile, a dawning blitz over a ruined landscape, and you lean down, pressing your lips to his pulse, sliding up until you catch his lobe between the seam.

"Still broke you," you murmur, skimming your teeth over the downy soft hairs that cover the shell of his ear. "Still won—"

His hand moves, braces against the back of your skull, the base of your spine, and then he flexes his hips beneath you. It's quick. A fluid motion. Keegan bucks you off, and rolls you under the bulk of his body within a blink. You barely have time to choke on your gasp when he's already nestled above you, eyes shining in the milky light spilling in from the moth-eaten curtains.

"What—?"

His hips jerk into yours, cock sticky, tacky against your skin, but you feel him thicken with each slow roll he makes into you.

He leans down, bracing his forearm on the flat pillow above your crown, eyes burning embers that spark in the dim light bleeding between the wisps of broken fog that shroud the moon.

"My turn, kid."

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