#not canonical that he has them on his chest but well to me he does . | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

macfrog · 26 days

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san angelo | one shot

what happens when joel miller meets his star-crossed lover?

big love to @mrsmando and @5oh5 for cheering me on with this one, and @bageldaddy for being my eyes, my ears, and - only sometimes - my brain.

pairing: joel miller x fem!reader summary: it's the summer of two thousand eight. after two weeks following his little brother cross-country on the back of a harley, joel follows him through the doors of a dive bar - where fate delivers him to you. warnings: story is inserted into canon, so cordyceps outbreak happens, sarah dies (off-page), joel dissociates, doomed love, lots of mention of fate, alcohol consumption, reader is a smoker, cursing, drunken one-night stand, oral sex, unprotected piv, joel's cock is massive, a lot of angst, a lot of fluff, a lil smut to tie it all together. enjoy! word count: 9.8k

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Palm lines.

It’s the first thing he thinks as soon as she stops moving in his arms. The second her little whimpers cease, the moment her chest stops heaving and her eyes glaze over. Suddenly, Joel’s little girl weighs more than he can bear.

Palm lines. And he has no fucking idea why.

He closes his eyes and there you are. The whir of the ceiling fan, the tinkling of bracelets loose on your wrist. You have sorta earth hands, you told him. Or, well – they could be water, if you look at ‘em this way. I don’t really know. I’m still learning.

You told him that air hands were long, spindly. And Sarah was always a lanky kid – tallest on the soccer team, head and shoulders above the other girls by the third grade. Her hands, he thinks, must be air. They must be.

Her fingers are still twisted around his right now. Lifeless, slippery with the blood still wet and quickly cooling.

Joel cradles her, squeezing so hard that he wonders whether he might be able to fuse their bodies together. Lock them in some white-knuckle grip so that he never has to let go of her – never has to leave this hill covered in dirt and blood.

His palms are ruined; a maroon river carving its way down his heart line, dirt deep in the groove of his life line. Why does he even fucking remember what they’re called?

Why the fuck are you what he’s thinking about, right now?

“Tommy,” he says, opening his eyes again. “We gotta…we gotta get to…”

She’s limp, draped over his thighs as though she’s nothing more than a stretch of crimson curtain. He looks down at her and begs her to come back, begs her to open her eyes and look up at him again.

But the night is passing and she’s still not breathing. Dawn is breaking and Joel’s daughter is dead.

He sucks in a shattered breath. “…to San Angelo, Tommy.”

The younger Miller stuffs his gun into the back of his jeans and paces over, soles coated thick in shit and grass. “I hear you, Joel.”

“You ain’t listenin’ to me, I –”

“I’m listenin’ fine, Joel.” Tommy hooks his hands under his niece’s arms. “Now, help me lift her. We can’t…” his voice strains, fighting the death grip his brother has on the girl, “…we can’t leave her here.”

Joel’s frozen to the spot; sinking further and further into the earth. Staring at his open hands, the stains like rust on his palms. He says to San Angelo again, and Tommy snaps.

“Jesus, Joel, enough! I’ve heard enough goddamn it! I see your hands, now – we gotta fuckin’ bury Sarah.”

Your fate line, your nail tickled, and Joel held his hand steady, It can change, if something big is coming.

Somethin’ big? he asked. A little younger, a lot more naïve. Still a healthy dose of belief in the world, an echo of the god-fearing faith that raised him.

His hand felt so light, cradled in two of yours. He half hoped he’d never have to let go – just lie there with you forever. Your legs tangled with his, the sheets disturbed; the room injected with amber from the streetlights outside.

You nodded. A big shift, or something.

And he scoffed. He actually scoffed, right there and then. Incredulous. The hell kinda big shift is comin’ our way? he asked, laughing.

You just smiled back, shrugging. You were so fucking casual, that whole night. It would’ve unnerved him, if he hadn’t been so swept off by the sparkle in your eye, the glowing cherry of your cigarette.

Guess we just gotta wait ‘n see.

It’s August thirtieth, two thousand eight.

Almost five thousand miles on the back of a Harley, and Joel just wants to go home.

He arches his aching back, palms flat against the crests of his hips, and blinks in the light from the food mart in front of him. Twenty-six, he thinks to himself, only twenty-fuckin’-six.

It’s ninety degrees out. An uncomfortable heat, for a man who feels ten years older than he really is. For a man who hasn’t had a decent shower in almost two weeks. For a man who’s spent the last six hours tailing the brake lights of his little brother’s bike.

The sweat gathers sticky between his shoulder blades, prickles along the nape of his neck. There’s dust spattered down his bare arms and buried in the grooves of his knuckles.

He’s tired. He’s tired, he’s dirty, and goddamn, he wishes he was back home.

He holds a hand up to shield his eyes from the sun, the yellow sky melting to a purple haze. Squinting, he follows the soar of two swallows overhead, looping through the sky, until he’s rubbing the image from his eyes with the back of his wrist.

He’s gotta remember to call Sarah before she goes to bed.

The door opens with the tinkle of a brass bell older and rustier than Joel feels. A swaggering figure splits the glow from the store in two – a figure with a pack of Marlboros in one hand and an already half-empty bottle of water in the other.

Tommy holds them both out to Joel, who swipes the water with a scowl.

“Ain’t killed you yet, brother,” Tommy scoffs, stuffing the cigarettes into his back pocket. He swings a frayed-denim leg over the seat of his Harley.

Joel drains the bottle, panting as he crushes the plastic in one fist. “Damn near tryin’,” he mutters, tossing it in the trash. He runs his tongue across his bottom lip.

“Where are we?” Tommy asks. He glances over his shoulder, staring from the cracked roads to the telephone wires overhead. A Syclone pulls into the lot; a dehydrated squeal as it rolls to a halt.

“San Angelo,” Joel says. “Only a few more hours to go.” He settles on his own bike, pulling his leather jacket over his shoulders. “We passed a Super 8 coming into town, if you feel like restin’ up. Or – we leave now, be home around midnight.”

Tommy chuckles. “What’s the rush? We ain’t gotta be anywhere anytime soon.”

And Joel agrees – for the most part.

His mom is watching Sarah while they’re gone, and he reckons she’s hardly missing him. Too smart for her own good, Joel’s realizing: plotting and scheming her way into staying up past her bedtime, drinking Pepsi at dinner, watching Curtis and Viper – and swearing that her dad lets her do it all, too.

But, still. He misses his kid.

It’s the most they’ve ever been apart – time or distance. The longest he hasn’t had her climbing up his back or hanging off his arm. The least he’s been called Dad since he was eighteen years old.

He just…misses his kid.

He sighs, drumming his fingers on the body of the bike. “Tommy, I gotta get back home to Sarah.”

“Look,” Tommy says, and Joel knows that the argument is lost already, “By the time we got back, she’d be asleep anyways. Let’s leave in the morning – first thing, I swear – and we’ll be home in time for breakfast. Deal?”

They stare at one another, a stand-off in the parking lot. Both waiting for the other to break. The swallows gather on the roof of the store, basking in the weak wash of flickering fluorescents.

“Come on, brother,” Tommy pleads, “It’s one more night.” He lifts his helmet, punching it over his mop of shaggy hair, and kicks the bike to life.

Joel growls to himself, watching it drift over to the side of the road.

He considers heading to the Super 8 alone, grabbing a room only to shower and get some food, then hitting the road and leaving his little brother in the dust. Waiting for him to stumble through the door tomorrow morning – tired, groggy, probably hungover – while Joel, fresh as a daisy, drizzles syrup over Sarah’s pancakes and pours her orange juice.

He’s a pragmatic man. He’s a grown-up. Scares away the ghosts and ghouls and monsters of his daughter’s nightmares. Shushes her back to sleep in the crook of his arm, tiptoes as lightly as he can out of her room so as not to wake her.

Things like God, like the universe, things like horoscopes and laws of attraction…for the most part, Joel can do without them. Has done his whole life.

But then – the glow of indigo overhead, and the mysterious shadows lurking behind the buildings. The birdsong tittering in his ears, the twinkle of the sun in Tommy’s helmet – something distant in the dusty sphere.

Something, someone, winking at him from far away.

Something a little heavier than the breeze nudges at his spine, and Joel’s arms lift – fitting his own helmet over his head. He swings the heel of his boot into his kickstand and revs the bike, Harley roaring as it joins Tommy’s out on the boulevard.

Murphy’s is a small, green bar on the corner of an intersection. All peeled paint lettering and buzzing fluorescents – the y burnt out and pulsing.

Joel doesn’t think Tommy picked it for any reason other than the huge Lone Star mural on the side of the goddamn building, the way he tosses his thumb to it as they park up. A squint smirk on his face, muttering something like ‘s good to be home, big brother, as they hook helmets over handlebars.

Tommy leads Joel inside, their boots tacky on the wooden floor. Walls paneled by aged frames and sun-bleached photographs; air hanging thick with a smell like vinegar. The babble of slurred conversation is pierced by the sharp crack of pool balls breaking.

Metal-plate belt buckles snaked through strained jeans; low eyes which shift to size-up the two strangers. They all turn back to their fingerprinted glasses when Joel and Tommy settle into an empty booth.

It feels hotter in here than it is outside, stuffier. A thick humidity which clings to Joel’s bones, humming like the string lights draped from beams above his head.

Tommy reclines between the creaking leather cushion and the wall. He pokes at a yellowing poster of some Western, hums to himself, and then looks across the table.

Joel’s eyes loop once around the room before they meet his brother’s. “What?” he asks.

“First round is yours, old man.”

“Oh, is it, now?” He cocks an eyebrow. “Thought this was your idea?”

A weedy grin stretches across Tommy’s lips. He needs to fucking shave, Joel thinks. Whiskers poking from around his small mouth like pine needles. “’s my birthday trip,” he reasons.

And can Joel argue with that? Does he have the fucking energy? Will it get him out of here and back to Austin any quicker?

“Goddamn it,” he grumbles. He pushes himself to his feet, heels of his palms against the tacky wood.

He wanders over to the bar, tugging on the front of his tee to unstick it from his damp chest. Slots in beside an ivory cowboy hat with a pair of jeaned legs. The man fixes his bolo tie and watches Joel’s hand as he flags the bartender down.

And then he feels it.

You.

Then he feels you.

First, the weight of you – crashing some into his back. He shunts forward from the suddenness of it, knocking his ribs against the bar, and lifts a hand to brace himself on the ledge.

And then – heat, like an iron. Like every hair and freckle on your skin is branded into his the second you come into contact with him. A feeling like the roll of a wave against his spine, a hand hooked around his forearm when he begins to turn.

“Shit,” you hiss, steadying yourself on the curve of his shoulder. You glance down at your feet, clicking between your black boots. “I’m sorry, that was…that was my bad.”

“’s alright,” Joel says instantly. He holds his arm still until you let go and he sidesteps – though only a little. He watches, dumbstruck, as you rest your elbows on the bar and lean forward. His eyes linger on your back, trailing the crisscross straps wrapped tight over your spine.

You squint up at the menu pinned above shelves of crystal bottles. Your eyes move back and forth across the chalkboard, slowly descending until they’re meeting his in the speckled mirror opposite – a sweet smile growing on your lips.

It runs like whiskey through Joel’s veins: warm and dangerous.

And the way his head spins, the way the world blurs for a moment into one swipe of color around you; the way your cooing laugh echoes between his ears long after he’s heard it –

Joel’s already intoxicated.

He’s still staring when you pull back and motion to the bar. “You can go first, by the way,” you say, waving a hand. “I wasn’t cuttin’ in line. Just trying to read the drinks.”

“I’ll wait,” he replies, remembering how to be polite, how to be charming. Old cogs long out of use jerking to life inside him again. “Can’t read any of ‘em, either, anyways.”

It draws from you that same little laugh, a puff of air from your nostrils. You nod, biting your bottom lip.

He’s quickly forgetting why he’s stood in this room, why he’s in this city. He’d probably forget his own fucking name if you asked him right now what it was.

“’nother drink, darlin’?” a low voice interrupts, and you’re turning away.

Joel’s eyes follow you – a moth chasing something golden and radiant – as you face the wiggle of a snow-white mustache poking from beneath the brim of that ivory cowboy hat.

You shake your head, lifting two fingers with a bill slipped between them. “I’m good, thanks, George. Maybe next round.” You wave to the kid behind the bar – some name that Joel’s too fucking mindless to hear. Too distracted by the glint in your eye, the sparkle of your crescent moon earrings in the light.

If only he knew this feeling. If only he could put a name to it. As familiar as the sun and yet, brand new like dawn. His stomach swirls in a fleet of butterflies – as though he’s fifteen again, bumping elbows with his high school crush.

You nudge him, thumb pointing in the direction of the bartender.

Joel shakes his head. “Ladies first,” he says, heart skipping when you hold his stare.

“Nuh-uh,” you shake your head, “Told you I ain’t jumping in.”

He asks the guy for two beers, barely taking his eyes off you. “Alright,” he leans in, lowering his voice, “Then let me buy you a drink. Make up for gettin’ in your way just then.”

You prop your chin on your knuckles, grinning as you push your twenty around the wooden bar top, dodging pooled rings of alcohol like it’s an arcade game. “I don’t do that,” you say, eyes tracing the slick trail left by the bill.

“Do what?”

“Accept drinks from strange men in bars.”

His tongue presses against the back of his teeth, the taste of humor honey-sweet. “Yeah? ‘n how long have you known…” he nods to the – what is he, sixty? Sixty-five? – year-old on your right, “…George?”

Your gaze lifts, eyes wide. Apparently as impressed by Joel’s confidence as he is himself. “We’re actually in a very serious relationship. Marriage proposal imminent.”

“Damn,” he mutters as the bartender reappears with two Coors, “And here I thought I had half a chance.”

You hum to yourself, studying him. Looking from his jaw across the span of his shoulders, his wide-knuckled hands and then back to his lips. Curious and wary, judging the strange animal stood before you.

And he knows he’s weathered from the weeks on the road, and all the years before that. Dirt under his nails and the light sheen of sun on his forehead. The flecks of gray through his thick, brown beard.

You take a deep breath, eyes twinkling, and tell him, “I’m here with my friend.”

“Ain’t that lucky?” Joel glances at Tommy. “I’m here with my brother.”

You look across to the dirty blond, sat tilting a glass candle in his hand. “He single?”

Joel nods. “Is she?”

You nod.

“Alright. You wanna come sit with us?”

Your smirk answers his question. You take the beers, rings clinking off the glass. “Rum,” you call over your shoulder, wandering off, “I drink rum.”

Joel’s gaze lowers to the sway of your hips. “Rum it is,” he says, turning back to the bar.

“So…a cross-country bike trip, and you wound up in San Angelo?”

You’re on your fourth drink, the first one Joel hasn’t paid for – and he only allowed it because it’s a Diet Coke (and maybe you got to the bar first, held his wrists with one hand so he couldn’t stop you from slapping your own money down).

“Yep,” Joel replies, pinching the lime from his drink and dropping it onto a napkin. “Just passin’ through. Shower, sleep, then head on home.”

“Where’s that, then? Home?”

“Austin.”

“Austin,” you pout, “Nice.”

Joel smirks, licking citrus from his fingertips. “Is it?”

“I’ve never been to Austin,” Brooke chirps, fiddling with the umbrella in her piña colada. She twirls the paper canopy and glances up to Tommy.

He snaps out of his slack-jawed gaze when he realizes what she’s implying. “Oh – yeah, well…” his head wobbles as he stutters, “…you two ever come down that way, we’d be happy to, uh…show ya ‘round, huh, Joel?”

Joel doesn’t reply, staring back at his brother with the same amused expression you are.

You’ve been an inch apart all evening – doused in the dive bar darkness, the shrouded conversations and muffled TV static. The tip of your nose and curve of your shoulders lit only by the luminous signs dotting the walls.

Tommy and Brooke are already deep in conversation again about the best car Tommy ever owned. Joel watches as your eyes flit between the pair, entertained by the way they trip over each other’s sentences. Your cheeks lift when Brooke lays a hand over Tommy’s, and he squeezes her fingers back.

Where did you come from? Joel’s thinking. He takes a swig of his whiskey, feeling your eyes on him. As he lowers his glass, you lift yours. When he turns in his seat towards you, you’re already facing him, back against the wainscotting. He smiles, and so do you.

Every movement feels choreographed, some merry dance only you two know. You’re in your own little world.

Where did you come from, again, and where have you been my entire fucking life?

“So, what about you?” Joel asks instead, swallowing – all warm-bellied and brave. “You grow up here?”

You shake your head, taking another sip. “Nope. Just liked it enough to hang up my coat for a few months. I grew up in Phoenix.”

“You travel a lot?”

“I’ve been around. This is the longest I’ve stayed in one place since I was a kid.”

He thinks of home: of Austin and its silver-snake river, burnt-orange jerseys and the pleated bunting lining Sixth Street. He thinks of late nights on lawn chairs, nursing a beer and shooting the shit with his brother. Keeping their voices lower than the buzz of the cicadas, looking more at the dusky sky than at each other.

“You don’t ever get tired of it?” Joel asks. “Of moving around so much?”

You scoff, breath clouding the inside of your glass. “Three weeks on a motorcycle starting to get to you, huh?”

He breathes a laugh, loose again. The cicadas fade from his ears.

Your head tilts in a shrug. “I don’t know. I guess the universe keeps on surprising me.”

Joel doesn’t do this. At least, he hasn’t done this since he was a teenager – crate of beer under his arm and a chest full of courage. He’s long forgotten the feeling of heat blooming in his cheeks, the twitch of his heart anytime you look at him.

But fuck, if there isn’t something about you. Something in the way you move, the way you look at him. Something in the way you play with your straw, knocking ice cubes around and chewing on the plastic once you’ve drained the glass.

Something – though it’s a little too early and Joel’s a little too tipsy to tell just what. He tries to remember that he’s pragmatic. A grown-up. He chases away the monsters in his daughter’s –

“Oh, shit,” Joel says suddenly, scrambling to pull his cell from his pocket. It’s nine thirty. He was supposed to – “I forgot…”

A miserable tone from his Motorola cuts him short. The screen flashes an empty battery before fading to black. He jams a thumb into the keypad a couple more times, cursing at the winking symbol.

“Someone you gotta call?” you ask.

He meets your eye and winces. “Yeah, I’m…I said I’d call an hour ago.”

“You wanna use mine?” You twist around, fishing in your purse for your own. “We can go outside.”

“No, no, it’s…it’s alright, I’m sure she won’t mind, she –”

You shake your head. “Shut up. Come on, let’s go. I could use some fresh air, anyways. Be back in a minute,” you tell Brooke – who nods and turns straight back to Tommy.

Joel extends his hand to help you out of the booth, then follows you to the door. The cool air tugs every nerve in his body to attention, pin-sharp when he steps out of that lazy heat. Under the emerald glow of the Murphy’s sign, he settles his glass on a window ledge. “Next round’s on me, alright?”

You roll your eyes, pushing the phone against his chest. “Just call, Joel.”

One last apologetic glance, and then he’s dialing. He makes to wander along the curb, the tone already pulsing in his ear, when he notices –

“You ain’t brought a jacket?”

You’re sitting on the ledge, clutching your elbows. Swatting midges from the light you’re bathed in, charms on your bracelets jingling. “Hm?”

He tuts. “A jacket. Here.” He shrugs his own off, sitting it around your frame. It’s warm from the bar and from Joel’s body heat, and you sink into it – letting the dark leather drown you as you rummage through your purse again.

“Nice,” Joel’s eyes narrow, “Fresh air.”

You hum into your hands, flicking your lighter. The cigarette trembles when you murmur, “We all got our skeletons, I guess.”

He turns on his heel when a familiar voice picks up.

“Hey, hey, M–Yeah, sorry it’s late…Yeah, we got held up. My phone died, so I’m using…Is she still–? Can I–? Oh, Sarah. Hi, baby.”

His little girl begins chattering down the line immediately, telling Joel everything she’s been up to since they last spoke this morning.

“…and then, Emily thought I was one of the Armadillos – I don’t even know how, ‘cause they play in red, remember Dad? – but she did, and she slide tackled me so bad that Coach Thomson had to sub in Akari for me so I could ice my ankle. Grandma was kinda mad about it, but she took me to Burger King after to cheer me up, and…”

Joel wanders back and forth, smiling to himself and scuffing the heel of his boot along the concrete – barely able to squeeze more than two words between her chirping. It’s all, Yeah, baby? and Wow, sweetheart; all uhuhs and mhms until she finally quietens, excitement plateauing again.

“Alright, well. You know what time it is, right?”

“Yeah,” Sarah groans. She knows it all too well.

Bedtime.

“…But you didn’t call when you said you would, Daddy, and it’s Saturday, it’s –”

“I know, baby, I know. I’m sorry. Just…somethin’ came up. But I’ll see you tomorrow, right? We’ll be back before you know it.”

“Where’s Uncle Tommy? Can I talk to him?”

Joel turns to face the bar. “He, uh…I’m not with him right now, sweetheart. I’ll tell him you asked after him, though.”

Sarah concedes, and then begins asking questions Joel knows she’s only asking to stay on the line a little longer – to stay awake a little later. But still, he answers each one – humoring her and, at the same time, letting himself listen to her voice just a little more before he has to let her go.

He thinks of scooping her up in the morning; thinks of being slumped on the couch after dinner with her head on his stomach – fast asleep with whatever movie she chose droning on in the background.

Despite the thousands of miles and close to two weeks between them – she makes him feel closer to home. She always does.

When Sarah asks where he is, he glances your way. Clocks your flat expression, the half-burnt cigarette hanging from your fingers.

You flick ash to the ground. Eyes unreadable beneath low brows, a tiny crease between them that Joel’s only just seeing for the first time.

“Uh…” he clears his throat, “…just a little – a little north of you, baby. Home first thing, I promise.”

He tells her he loves her and she says it back, and he tells her to sleep well and she says that back, too. And then he’s hanging up – Alright, see you soon, bye, Sarah, bye-bye, byebyebye – and pressing his thumb into the red button.

He wanders back over to you – ears flat like a guilty dog, though he isn’t quite sure why. He mumbles a quiet thanks as he passes the phone back, then stuffs his hands in his pockets.

You lean back, ankles crossed, studying him. Swirling what’s left of the cigarette in your fingers – the smoke lifting like a winding snake to the dark sky. “So,” you pout, “What are you doing flirting with me, if you got a wife and kid back home?”

His jaw ticks, a hand coming up to scratch his beard. “I don’t have a wife,” he says.

You stare blankly, filter back against your lips. “Okay, then – a girlfriend. Does she know you’re out tonight with us?”

He shakes his head. “No wife, no girlfriend. I don’t have an anything.”

“But you have a kid.”

Joel nods once, tongue in his cheek. “Uhuh.”

And then the penny seems to drop. A small oh; your jaw slack and eyes wide. The cigarette smolders between your fingers. “Fuck,” you whisper, “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“No, hey,” Joel steps closer, “You didn’t know. It’s alright.”

He straightens the jacket on your shoulders. When you finally look at each other again, you snort.

“Sorry,” you repeat, shaking your head. “Is she okay? Your daughter – is she…?”

“Sarah,” Joel says. “She’s…she’s fine. Thanks.”

You look down, stubbing your cigarette against the brick. Voice quiet, you ask, “Her mom’s not around anymore?”

Relief settles in his chest: you’re softening to him again.

Joel slots onto the ledge at your side. Shoulder to shoulder. He reaches behind and lifts his drink. “Not since she was a year old.”

Your mouth pulls in a wince. “Jesus. That’s rough.”

He doesn’t reply. He doesn’t have to – you’re not asking him to explain – and he doesn’t want to, either.

You’re not stupid – you’ve seen enough of the world to hear what he’s really saying. The darkest, dustiest corners of it – all the places no one ever wants to look.

You don’t seem disturbed, barely even moved by the reality that…well, shit happens. People leave, families break; a two-car driveway is suddenly taken up by just a pick-up truck and a little pink bike with tassels.

He figures you get it. You don’t need to know how can that be? – you just…know that it can.

“So, uh…” you look up at him again, “…my apartment is, like, five minutes away if you wanna…you know. You can charge your phone, can shower – if it’s bugging you that much.”

Joel’s eyebrows lift. “Oh, really?”

You simper, eyes thin. “Really.”

“Charge my phone ‘n shower?” He stands, palm flat against the wall above your head, and leans in. His face is inches from yours.

You look up, mirroring his expression. “Yes,” your voice curls in a half-truth, “What’s the big deal?”

“What a goddamn line,” Joel says, smirking. “How long you been sittin’ on that one for?”

His blood thrums faster, harder, louder in his veins when you stand up, hands on your hips.

“It’s not a line, I’m serious –”

“I didn’t take you as the type, baby, I really didn’t – but if that’s how you wanna play this, then –”

He feels you before he sees you moving, like he’s stood at that bar all over again. Your hands on his jaw, your chest pressed to his. Your lips – soft as satin, with a tinge of sweet rum and smoke – against his.

Joel barely misses a beat. He closes his eyes and lifts a hand to the back of your head, kissing you back. It’s dizzying, the taste and feel of you so close; the wet of your tongue on his. The little scratches of your nails in his beard, the moans caught in your throat.

Dizzying – and fucking perfect.

You break apart and lean in to each other, catching your breath. Joel’s hands slip beneath the heavy leather of his jacket onto your waist.

“Unless…” you whisper, pulling away from him, “…you don’t want to. In which case, I’ll just…” You twirl back towards the door, batting your eyelashes.

Joel smiles. He catches your wrist and reels you back into his body. “I want to,” he breathes, kissing you again. “I want to.”

“Let’s go.”

You make it to your apartment door, fumbling with your keys – and Joel’s hands are glued to your waist.

You miss the lock over and over as he kisses your neck, grazing the skin with his teeth. Anything to satiate the hunger quickly taking over, the tightening in his jeans.

He pulls you against his hips – rough denim grinding into the curve of your ass. He can smell your flowery perfume, a strange melding of peony and menthol sharp in his nostrils.

It’s the hungriest he’s ever felt, he thinks – a starved animal pinning his prey to her flecked apartment door. He pauses, bottom lip damp against your neck; breathing a liquor-laced laugh over your skin.

You jam the key into the lock. The door finally shunts open and you spill inside, dragging Joel with you.

Your place is dark. Angled strips of streetlight thrown high up the bare walls and across the ceiling, splintered by tilted shades. The spill of a blanket draped over an empty couch; a pair of sneakers left on the rug. Joel’s knees brush by a houseplant guarding the door – heavy leaves which pfft when they sway out of his way.

It’s half-decorated. Temporary. Caught somewhere between home and away. Little fragments pieced together into something the shape of home: a mosaic vase that scatters light across the surface of the coffee table; a beaded curtain pinned around the closet doorway.

Like you’re a little magpie, collecting trinkets of silver and gold until your nest feels like yours. Bags dropped long enough to keep a Monstera plant alive, not to put nails in the wall for the frames propped against the skirting board.

You shrug Joel’s jacket off, dropping it over the back of the couch. When you spin back around to him, he lifts your chin with two fingers and presses his lips to yours. You lead him down the hallway, tumbling into your room.

He follows you over to your bed, collapsing onto a tousled mess of sheets with his hips between yours. The hem of your dress rides up your thighs, bunching around your hips and revealing a flash of pink lace underneath.

The world around him seems to sober up for a second, sharpens into focus. It begins to seep in: the realization that he has you – some girl he met no more than two hours ago in a bar – pinned to your mattress. A slick gathering in your underwear and a weight building in his.

Right now, he should be sinking into squealing bedsprings in a Super 8. Bathing in the flicker of a television set twenty years too old. He should be showered and rested – ready to head home at sunrise, if not sooner.

But then something led him to you, and – well.

There’s no fucking helping him now, is there?

Joel’s fingers hook around your panties. He pulls down, leaving a trail of kisses along your bare leg, until that same pink lace is dripping from your ankle.

His eyes flash up to yours, love-drunk and sparkling. He pushes your knees apart, watching your velvet folds open for him, and – oh, he thinks, staring at the glistening arousal smeared around your cunt. Such a slick little mess for him already.

“Goddamn, darlin’,” he licks his lips, “She’s so pretty.”

You hum, hands lowering. Your fingers separate, spreading your pussy for him. Your middle finger swirls around your clit, dips along your seam. And the n, silky and shining, you lift your hand again and slip your fingers into your mouth.

“Tastes even better than she looks,” you murmur, dappling your fingertip along your bottom lip.

Joel growls. He pushes down on your thighs, ignoring your little yelp, and drags the tip of his tongue through your slit.

“Oh, shit,” you gasp, back arching. Your fingers knot in his hair, twisting and tightening. “Shitshitshit.”

“Mhm,” he hums against you, tongue pushing inside.

Fuck, you’re just so perfect: so soft and warm and fucking dripping for him. He laps at your sweet center, wet already spreading all over his mouth and beard.

A dampness blooms in his boxers. He’s throbbing, fucking aching the longer he goes untouched. He grinds against the mattress, denim rough against his solid erection.

He lifts his chin, panting – satisfied by the way you squirm under the weight of him. “You like that, huh?” he asks, a sodden kiss to your mound. “Fuckin’ love it.”

He spits a thick bead of saliva, watching it dribble down your folds to your ass. His tongue swipes it back up, circling your clit, all slippery and swollen.

“Fuck, Joel,” you moan, tugging on his hair. Your legs spasm, hips lifting.

He loves the sound of his name when you say it. Broken in two, a lilt to it as it rolls from your tongue and down his spine. Like it’s yours as much as it is his, now.

He sucks hard on your clit, his tongue flicking. And he can tell you’re close; can feel your hips starting to lose rhythm, see your back desperately arching higher and higher.

Joel groans, pushing up to hover over you. He cups between your legs, dabbing two thick fingers at your entrance, and pushes in.

Your pussy draws him in knuckle-deep. Your chest lifts, the loose neckline of your dress exposing more and more. You grab your breast, pinching your nipple – a roll of pebbled flesh between your fingertips.

He lowers his lips to your ear – watching as you toy with yourself. “Come on, baby,” he grits his teeth, “Give me one. Let me feel this pretty cunt.”

Your head rolls back into the pillow; a high sob as your orgasm crests. Clamping tight around him; a warm flood down his fingers.

Joel kisses you as you come. You look so pretty, he thinks, with ecstasy behind your eyes and his fingers between your legs.

Christ, he wants to be inside you so badly. Wants to feel your cunt do all this around his cock instead.

The blood rushes between his hips.

His fingers slip in and out, bringing you back around. Joel’s lips are on your neck, murmuring, “Good girl, that’s my girl,” as you resurface.

Your eyes open again – glossy, glazed with the aftershock of your high. “Fuck,” you breathe, playing with the hem of his shirt.

He pulls his fingers out and sucks them clean. Whips the tee over his head in one motion; another kiss tucked under your chin as you peel your dress from your body. He tosses it to the floor.

Still dazed, your body still trembling, you ask, “Do you have a condom?” All dreamy and distant, your hands trailing along his belt.

Joel pauses. Tilts his head, frowning. “I’m on a road trip with my brother, baby – the hell would I bring condoms for?”

You roll your eyes, sighing. It’s the cutest thing Joel thinks he’s ever seen. You thread the belt through the loops of his jeans. “In case you meet a really cool girl at a bar and wanna take her home, maybe?”

He lifts his eyebrows, impressed. He slips his salty tongue over yours again.

You moan at the taste. “It’s just I’m…I’m all out.”

His belt drops to the floor; buckle clinking against hardwood.

“Well, shit,” Joel whispers.

It’s not exactly a scenario he predicted, setting off from Austin. Meeting you wasn’t on the bucket list for the trip. It’s another three, four, probably five things to add to the list of shit he doesn’t do, shouldn’t do, wouldn’t fucking do if it hadn’t been for you.

No, Joel thinks, groaning as you palm the solid shape of him – he didn’t bring a goddamn condom. Jesus, the most he has in his pockets right now is fifteen bucks and a stick of gum.

You unzip his pants, shrugging the denim loose. “We can just do it…without,” you offer.

Joel stares down at you. “You sure?”

You nod, biting your lip. “Just pull out, right?”

“Just pull out…” he echoes. Your hands are cold on his heated skin, but he’s not about to fucking stop you.

You tug his underwear down with his jeans, following the darkening hair from his navel down. Another quiet pull out passes your lips – your voice dissolving when you spot the thick base of his dick.

Joel’s shaft springs free, heavy against the inside of his thigh.

“Holy shit.” You push yourself up on your elbows, eyes flooding black.

His tongue runs along the bottom of his teeth. He thrusts forward into your hand, a glassy drop of precome dribbling from his slit.

Your thumb swipes across his flushed tip, fingers wrapping around his width. You roll his balls in your other palm, massaging and squeezing just the right amount.

“Easy, easy,” Joel whispers. Too much, too soon. He can’t come yet, not until he feels your fluttering cunt around his cock.

Instead, you reach up – snaking an arm around his neck. You pull him back down, his naked body flush against yours, and hike a knee over his hip.

He grinds into you, his cock nudging between your legs. They fall apart for him – pliant and keen, like petals unfolding. He covers himself in your slick, his tip catching below your clit.

“Pl-ease,” you whine, scratching at his shoulders.

Joel nips at your damp neck. “Please, what?” he taunts.

Your breath is hot against his cheek – a stifling request which curls up in the shell of his ear. “F-fuck me.”

And his hips roll into yours.

“Jesus f…” your face buries into his chest, “…you’re…you’re so fucking big, Joel, I can’t –”

He nudges between your walls, groaning into your skin. You’re even tighter around his cock, even cozier. “I know,” he pants, “I know. Take it, baby, know you can take it.”

You stretch around him, opening up the deeper he pushes. “Fuckfuckfuck,” you pant, the thick hair at his base finally brushing against your clit. “Fuck, Joel.”

“Look at me,” he taps your jaw, “Hey. Look at me. Breathe.”

You exhale, hot and shaky across his lips.

“Good, that’s good.” Joel nods. He holds you by the waist, lets you adjust to his size.

He pulls back, your cunt clamping around him. Halfway out, and then in again. Feeling you open up, inch by inch, until he builds a steady rhythm.

“Jesus, baby, she’s so…” he moans, “…she’s so goddamn tight.”

You drape an arm over his shoulders, a hissing pain where your nails dig into his skin. Yelping each time he bottoms out, your leaking cunt wrapped snug around him. “So – goddamn – big,” you whine, a ruined smile on your lips.

He slams his body into yours again, watching the way your tits bounce. Nipples hard, skin tacky and shining with sweat. Your pussy pinches, and he starts to unravel.

Fuck the road trip, Joel thinks, fuck all of it. This is where he should be: in the middle of your bed, burrowed deep between your legs. This is the only place he wants to fucking be, right now.

So he fucks you harder; the headboard hammering against the wall. A fistful of the pillow, his knuckles whitening. He guides his cock when he slips out – a filthy sound as your clutch sucks him back in.

“Fuck,” he growls, gripping your hips so hard he worries he might bruise you. His thrusts become sloppy – quick and desperate.

“So close,” you gasp. You’re squeezing him so tight that he sees stars. “I’m gonna – I’m…”

Perfect, Joel thinks, watching you bloom. You’re so fucking perfect.

He coaxes you through it. Slows enough to feel you come around his cock, your warmth as it gushes all over him. “That’s it, baby, I got you. Shit, you’re gonna make me come.”

He pulls out just in time to coat your stomach; a throaty groan as he comes. He pumps his shaft, covering from your sternum to the plush of your tummy. It dribbles down your waist, spurts between your breasts.

He collapses over you, pressing his forehead to yours. His dick, soaked and softening, smears the ejaculate across your skin.

You giggle, leaving sticky kisses along his beard.

“You okay?” he asks, breathless.

You nod, and his tongue dabs at the inside of your lips. You taste like sex and sweat – sweet and salt.

Joel shifts to the edge of the bed. He feels you follow, your lips featherlight on the curve of his shoulder.

You make to stand – going to clean yourself up, he reckons, your tummy dripping with his semen – and he locks a hand around your bare thigh.

“Stay,” he says, voice low and rough – sex still smoldering. “Let me get you a towel.”

You smile, resting your chin on his shoulder. Your fingers link around the other side of his waist. “I’ll get it. Just relax.”

And for a minute or two, you stay like that. Hooked onto one another, tired eyes closing over, breathing in rhythm. Your cheek on his shoulder, your knee brushing against his tummy.

It’s simple; quiet and still. Joel feels like half a person – the other half tracing her chipped nails along his bare thigh. Eyelashes fluttering, teeth holding back a grin that she thinks might give her away.

Eventually, you move. Shimmy yourself down the mattress, swipe a crinkled tee from the ottoman – and slink off to the bathroom.

Joel lies back against the headboard, body sticky hot. He watches the shadow of your figure stretch across the open door. His eyes drift upwards to the looping ceiling fan – only half as dizzying as the sound of your humming in the next room.

And just when he starts to think he might be fucking missing you, you reappear in the doorway. Leant against the frame, some worn band tee hanging from your shoulders. Arms crossed; smiling back at him.

A rush of words floods to the tip of his tongue. You look beautiful. Your makeup’s smudged, chains of your necklace twisted; your shirt is frayed and splotched with faded stains – and you’re the most beautiful thing he’s ever laid eyes on.

He holds his arms out and you prance over.

You crawl over his figure, kissing your way up to his lips, and then turn in his lap. Cradled against his broad chest, your head nuzzling into the dark threads of hair between his pecs. You clasp one of his hands in two of yours.

“Offer’s still there for a shower, if you want it,” you whisper, kissing the pads of his fingers.

Joel tilts his head, mumbling against your temple, “Will you be in there with me?”

You answer something shaped like a tease, just as sharp with wit – but he’s too busy watching your nails trace his open palm. Too distracted by the sweet scent of your skin: a fresh burst of fruit, singed with the edge of tobacco.

“What do you do for work?” you ask.

He makes some sort of sleepy sound – a grunt, a hm? into your skull. “Oh, uh – I’m a contractor,” he says.

Your chin lifts. “That why your palms are all…?” Your thumb strokes light as lace against his worn skin.

“Probably,” Joel admits. He draws shapes on your thigh with his free hand.

“Do you sand the wood with your bare hands, or somethin’?”

Joel scoffs. “Alright, alright. You liked my hands plenty, twenty minutes ago.”

Your cheeks lift, a low hum caught in your throat. You angle your head to let his lips trail along your shoulder, pressing into the hinge of your jaw. A dark nail following the landscape of Joel’s skin – each score and divot, the callused pads at the bottom of each finger.

“You have sorta…earth hands, I think.”

It sits in the air for a few seconds before Joel turns to you. “What?”

“Earth hands. Or, well – I guess they could be water, if you look at ‘em this way.” You open up his hand, fingers stretched. “I don’t really know. I’m still learning.”

He looks down at you. Feels the now-steady pulse of your heart on his sternum. “Learnin’…hands?”

You snort. “Palm reading, Joel.”

His brows draw tight. He licks the inside of his whiskey-stained cheek. “You’re into all that hippie sh…stuff?”

You knock your knuckles against his chest, still staring at his hands. The hills and their valleys, the ravine-like lines; the worn skin and hatch marks.

“Let’s see…Your heart line,” you whisper – more to yourself than Joel, but he’s listening all the same. “It’s pretty deep, which means the relationships you’ve had have been…important. But it’s kinda…it tails off right here, see? It’s broken. So…I guess they didn’t end too good.”

Joel raises an eyebrow – playful, encouraging your timid smile. Keep figuring me out, he thinks, stoking the curious flame behind your eyes. “Alright,” he says, “Now tell me something you didn’t already know about me.”

You gawk, holding his wrist up. “You don’t see that? The way it breaks up? I’m not bullshitting you, Joel, it’s –”

“Naw, I see it,” he nods, squinting a little at his palm, “Just – tell me more. What’s all these other lines mean?”

“Well,” you adjust between his hips, “you got your life line right here. Short, which means –”

“Don’t tell me that part.”

“No,” you roll your eyes, “It just means you’re independent. You never needed much from anyone. And it runs past this mount – these are called mounts – right here. Venus: all to do with love and sexuality.”

Joel holds your open palm next to his, comparing them. He takes less than a second’s look, lines his lips to your ear and says, “Seem like a pretty good match to me.”

You wriggle when he tickles your ribcage, trying to twist out of his grasp. You’re laughing again – the same laugh he’s been hearing all damn night. The same giggle that’s had his stomach somersaulting since he first heard it.

The room seems to light with it, this glow he feels from you – as if you’re the sun. Spent and still half-drunk; lazing with a stranger in the middle of her bed. Tracing the lines and scars on his palm, telling him how logical and grounded he’s supposed to be.

As if the world orbits around you – everything you touch turning to molten gold. And for what feels like the hundredth time tonight, Joel looks at you and wonders: Where the hell did you come from?

You hold your hand against his, folding your fingers perfectly together. The evidence of your night flaking from Joel’s knuckles; sweat still simmering on the nape of his neck.

He hasn’t done this for years. Hasn’t felt this gentle aftermath. It’s usually a rush, a hastened zip and clink of his pants. An awkward dance, plucking clothes from the bedroom floor and pacing back to his truck.

It’s never like this. Talking and laughing, holding and kissing. Questions about his parents and yours; his biggest dream as a kid, or the time you broke your arm falling out of a tree.

He tells you stories about growing up with Tommy; tells you Sarah’s favorite flavor of cake. He tells you about the time they tried to make it for a school bake sale, forgot to turn the oven off, and almost burned the damn kitchen down.

You snicker and tell him that never would’ve happened if you were there.

Yeah, well, Joel smiles, I wish you were.

He notices you’re drifting off, despite your slurred protests and your weak grip on his wrist. He pulls you under the covers, curving his body around yours, praying that the quickening drum of his heartbeat won’t wake you.

His nose nuzzles into the curve of your skull, his hands link in front of your tummy. And he wonders whether his body was made with yours in mind.

He glances out at the sky – light starting to bleed from the horizon – and wills the turn of the sun to slow. Only a little; just let him stay here a little while longer.

Just a little while.

Dawn forces her way in eventually – more unwelcome than ever before.

There’s a throb between his temples which swells to life when the light floods past his pupils. “Jesus Christ,” he grumbles, face turning back into the pillow. He gives you a gentle squeeze and then pushes up from the mattress.

You roll to the middle of the bed, still sound asleep. The sun spills golden all over the valleys and crests of your body. The bedsheets carve pathways up to your hips, dipping at your waist.

Last night, there was something so mystical about you – so otherworldly. Joel felt himself drawn towards you like a compass needle shooting north, the second he felt your weight crash against his spine.

A figure behind a cloud of smoke, like the mountaintops disappearing into a thick mist. And now, blood drained of alcohol, you’re just you.

Your shirt is twisted around your shoulders. Your lips puffy, mumbling to yourself in your doze. Makeup smudged like chalk under your eyes, and still – just as beautiful. Just as radiant as you were ten hours ago.

Joel rubs his eyes, sitting on the edge of the bed. He blinks down at his bare feet, the morning sharpening into focus. As he lifts his phone from the nightstand, the cable drops – hitting the wooden floor with a snap.

He pauses, shoulders hunched. Hears you stir over his shoulder, and turns around.

The earth of your body shifts beneath cotton hills, clouds of sleep clearing from behind your eyes. “Hey,” you whisper, voice pretty and broken.

A little bird in the palm of his hand – that magpie curled up in her nest of gems and trinkets.

“Hey.” He leans down and kisses your cheek. “Sorry, darlin’, I didn’t mean to wake you.”

You wrap your arms around his wrist, tugging. “Are…are you…leaving?”

Joel feels a pang in his chest, and he doesn’t know why. He takes a deep breath. Your scent fills his lungs and steadies his heart. “I…” he sniffs, “…I gotta go home, baby.”

You give a slow and heavy nod. “S-Sarah…”

He strokes your head with his thumb. “Yeah. Shh, go back to sleep. It’s still early.”

He glances at his phone – it’s just after six. He knows Tommy will be waiting for him, parked outside the Super 8 and wondering where the hell Joel is. He knows Sarah will be, too – sat by the living room window, listening for the rumble of their bikes.

And still, he thinks – How do I fucking leave you? Leave this?

He shouldn’t even be entertaining the thought. He has a kid waiting for him back home; soccer practice, packed lunches, homework and bedtime stories. He has work to do, bills to pay, a roof to keep over their heads. It’s all waiting in Austin, two hundred miles away.

As though you can see the question flipping in his mind, you pull him closer. A weak finger in the palm of his hand, drawing circles. Your bleary gaze meets his, and you whisper, “In the next life.”

Joel smiles. Twelve hours ago, he’d have laughed at the idea of it. Now, he’s not so sure. He kisses your knuckles, muttering, “Promise.”

Another wave of sleep washes over you, and you’re gone again.

Joel pushes himself from the bed, reaching for his clothes. His back twinges as he stretches, pulling his T-shirt over his shoulders. He steps into his jeans; pinches his belt between two fingers and lifts it from the floor.

He leans over and tilts your shades the opposite way, dulling your bedroom. He unplugs the charger, neatly winds the cord, and sits it on your nightstand. He fixes his side of the sheets: folds them over the mattress, tucks them in at your back.

With a deep breath, he makes for the door.

His jaw turns, eyes still low. Your dress is in a heap at the foot of the bed; a tube of lip gloss lying next to it. He looks up, following the landscape of sheets – the slope from your ankle to your hip. Your hunched shoulders, your cheek smushed into the pillow.

If he looks too long, he’ll never leave.

The image burns golden into his eyes. He hopes for half a heartbeat that you’ll wake again and pull him back into bed. Kiss him all over, whisper something sharp and sweet in his ear. Touch him and graze him and wrap yourself around him – anchoring him right here and now.

But you don’t.

And Joel slips out of the room.

Jackson stirs to life over his shoulder.

A white lump in the snow-covered valley, the settlement seems so far away now. Tommy sets off up ahead, leading the way to the outpost. The blizzard is picking up – it almost swallows the silhouette of him whole.

Joel had tried to warn him: the weather would be too bad to see five feet in front of them, never mind any infected. But Tommy argued with the same determination that dragged the pair of them into that dive bar thirty years ago, and Joel didn’t have half the energy nor the will to argue back.

He’s thinking about you. He always is.

Your searing gaze over the rim of your glass; the weight of you against his chest. The tickling of your nail on his palm, severing each line and changing him forever. You and your palm lines.

You were just learning to read them. Joel didn’t know a thing about any of it, and he told you so. You took his hand in yours and said, Here. Let me see.

He runs a thumb down his fate line, swaying in time with his horse. And he shakes his head with a little smile – he still remembers which one is fate and which is heart.

He still remembers all of it. He has earth hands. All salt and soil and solid as stone. His earth hands have gotten him this far, right? Twenty-five years and he’s still here. Gray and grown; stiff joints and sewn-up scars.

His head line has channeled more strangers’ blood than Joel can count. Mounts that’ve stopped breath in the throat of any man who crossed him. He doesn’t think you’d recognize his hands anymore, if your fingertips traced over them again. Broken and bruised and bloody.

And he doesn’t think he’d want you to – doesn’t want you to meet the shadow of the man you knew back then. He’d prefer you remember that same brown-eyed, soft-touched stranger with enough charm and naivety to survive anything. No need for bone-breaking fists or bloodstained hands.

Where are you, he wonders?

The answer knots deep in his stomach: the same old rope twisting into the same old shape. A fist of anger, of guilt. Some terrible cocktail of both, spilling poison through his veins.

He’s terrified to wonder what might’ve happened if he had ever made it back there. What he might’ve found in your apartment – what he might not.

Where would you have gone, that day? Would you have fled, or would you have stayed?

You were smart, he knows that much. He saw the cogs of your mind turning right in front of him, standing opposite each other in that bar. Barely thirty seconds in and he could’ve sworn you had him all figured out.

But – oh, Jesus, you were kind. Open and willing to help a stranger with a dead phone and a tired smile. Would that kindness still glow as bright against the flicker of a world on fire?

A lone hawk swoops down before him, shooting straight between the pines. Joel slips his glove back over his freezing hand.

He thinks about you every day. Every fucking day, and it never eases. Never loosens. It keeps him up some nights – the truth he’s too afraid to look square in the face.

You live now in the back of his mind like a little ghost. His little ghost – still floating around that dusty city; the warm light of life and innocence still bright in your eyes.

Tommy glances over his shoulder. He gestures ahead as if to say, Would you take a look at this goddamn storm?

And Yeah, Joel thinks, I’m lookin’, brother.

All he wants is to go home. Jackson, Austin, the bedroom of your apartment in San Angelo. Just let me go back.

He blinks, and the snow melts to cracked asphalt under a lilac sunset. Tommy’s holding handlebars instead of reins. The horses’ hot puffs of breath darken to clouds of smoke, choking from the exhaust pipes of the Harleys.

You’re somewhere on the other side of town, waiting for him in the faint glow of a jukebox. Sipping what’s left of your rum and Coke, fishing a twenty from your purse for the next round.

Just let me go back home.

He tugs on his horse’s reins and pulls off after his brother.

#joel miller #joel miller fic #joel miller x reader #the last of us #tlou #tlou fic #joel miller smut #joel miller one shot #san angelo

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visionsofmagic · 7 months

Text

◜ mk1 men using their powers while f*cking you ◞

▸ includes: reptile, sub zero, scorpion [mk1 versions] ◂

▸ tags: nsfw content, explicit language, inappropriate usage of power/abilities, f!reader, kind of drabble, short, canon as possible as I can, licking, watching, petnames, fingering, edging, human form!syzoth, rude and sharp!sub zero, lover!mk1 characters, brat!reader, heat, cold. enjoy! ◂

▸ notes: watched 4+ hours cutscenes of mortal kombat 1 game and well, kind of fall in love with 80% of mk1 characters, so, couldn't help but write for a few of my fav characters from the game. requests open for the mk1 characters as well & have fun while reading, thank u! ^^ [can publish part 2 of this if you would like too!]

REPTILE is a shy lover. he finds himself trying to hide his nature whenever you two have sex not to hurt you because he knows you’re still fragile even though you try to believe otherwise. he never transforms into his reptile form while fucking you, so hard for him to do that but he would rather endure than hurting you in any way. however, that doesn’t mean he lacks fun and any sort of kinks in sex, no, contrary to that, syzoth has a kinky personality that allows him to like watching you, both as general and in bed - he can’t help, especially not when you’re so beautiful leaning on the bed you two are sharing, trying to give yourself pleasure with your fingers while screaming his name because he is away for a mission as you still believe - not knowing when he will return but here he is, standing right in front of you, watching how your fingers disappear inside your folds, going in and out, mouth agape, moaning his name over and over again as if they’re his fingers - or even his cock inside your walls. he likes how you miss him enough to do all of these.

invisible to your eyes, he watches you until he’s sure you’re so close to the edge, then, chuckling teasingly, he appears slowly, giving you a heart attack right there but you forget all about it when his fingers replace yours, smirking like a brat, green eyes position on your pretty face as he looks at you fondly.

“you’re so needy for me that you can’t wait for a few hours until I return, is that it, pretty?” he chuckles, head tilting and he listens to your pleases like they’re the prettiest sound he has ever heard. he makes you cum, more than once because he says, “if that is the case, I will fuck my pretty girl so deep that she will never forget it even when I leave.”

SUB ZERO is not gentle at all when it comes to having sex with him. he prefers to make you remember who you belong to, whose name you’re screaming, and who makes your legs shake in weakness because he fucks you that good. he doesn’t think about what a kink is in detail but he knows he has a few and he uses them with you without hesitation. you like them as he understands from the voices you make, the expressions your face has, and cumming all over him without announcing because you can’t hold them any longer.

he knows he shouldn’t use any of his abilities while fucking you but he can’t help. he breaks his discipline side and uses them anyway from time to time while having sex with you; decreasing his body temperature when he fucks you behind, kneeling down until your naked back touches his bare chest so that you get close to cum, feeling a sense of chill.

he does that with some parts of his body either; his fingers when they travel on your body, in your mouth, between your thighs and holes - the tip of his tongue when it enters your pussy, making you lose your mind. he even changes its temperature from time to time only to earn the sounds you can't think you're making. he doesn't stop with his attempts of fucking you 'till you have a non-functional brain because of only him - his thick cock, the way he fucks you into oblivion and not holding himself back from using his abilities to his advantage to make you realize only he can fuck you like this. he's fond of your screams after all, begs that want him to stop because it's too much for you to handle go to deaf ears - not even when it's as cold as under a frozen surface of a deep sea.

"so cold, huh?" scoffs, humiliating your pathetic condition, "what were you thinking anyway whore?" he asks, poison in his voice, deep. "think that I would hold back because you beg so nicely?" laughs, holds your hair tightly as he fucks you from behind. "they're only praying for me to go deeper, my pretty slut." and he does - going deeper and colder each passing time and you only can take it all - you're his own pet to enjoy in the end.

SCORPION is a cute lover. he doesn't hurt you in any way as possible as he can, protecting you at all cost, keeping his fire at a minimum level whenever you're around - except while fighting of course. he never uses his abilities against you but oh, he can't deny that he loves it when you are a total brat, asking him to do such naughty things in bed, including using his fire to make intimate sessions more intense than it is needed - you both need it as you say, believing you can endure it and in the end, he accepts your pleases, allowing himself adjoining a few things he can do without hurting you.

firstly, he just uses it on his tongue when it enters your wet pussy, licking from your inner thighs to inside, giving you euphoria. he makes sure not to burn you, enjoying by himself too after seeing how turned on you are in these moments. he is a man who wants to please his lover more than himself in the first place - a gentleman. then, it begins with these simple pleasure times - it evolves into something that even you can't imagine happening and it takes you a long time to realize how scorpion has begun to his abilities on you in order to turn you on often; the cute lover discovers how you're affected by heat - in general, so, he thinks a way to make your heat go up without noticing he's the one who is doing it by increasing his body's heat as he comes near you, giving you hotness you can't ignore and start taking off your clothes one by one.

of course he acts innocent, asking how he can help you, and then smirking, saying how he makes you hot by just standing beside you. catching you in a trap with all his desires to have you, he reaches his plan's top point when you have a sports bra and shorts on your body and nothing else. oh, how he feels a kind of achievement when you agree with him, being naked and having one of the best fucking in your entire life to get rid of your heat after getting horny because of being exposed in front of the man you love.

"my love, you give me a heat even my own power can't give; you have no idea how I am burning for you." he smiles down at you, eyes burning with sparkles of fire, "oh - beautiful, the most beautiful thing in the whole universe I have ever seen. let me burn you the way you are doing to me, my love."

3K notes · View notes

seeingivy · 10 months

Text

birthmark

satoru gojo x f!reader

satoru’s suddenly more appreciative of scars

content warning: MANGA SPOILERS, canon divergence bc im not gege and they all deserve to be happy, reader described as pregnant, giving birth/c-section, hospitals, pain (kinda), big brother megumi + tsumiki, lil corny family,

an: happy fathers day to our fav dad :DDD reader is described as having dark hair in comparison to satoru but tbh every hair color is dark compared to white unless you have white hair them im sorry

“Hi baby.”

“What do you want, Satoru?”

“I wasn’t talking to you.”

You take your eyes off from the screen to find Satoru lying across the couch, his head very close to your stomach. His blindfold is hanging around his neck, his shiny, blue eyes staring right at the bump.

“He doesn’t have ears yet.”

“You don’t know that. We have father-daughter telepathy. She can hear me.”

“If anyone was going to have telepathy with him, because he is most definitely a boy, it’s going to be me.”

He rolls his eyes, lying his head against your stomach as he continues staring down - his eyes focused. You reach down, pressing your hand in his hair as you start carding through his white locks.

“What were you like as a baby, Toru?”

“Horrible. Came out super late, cried all the time, total sweet tooth.”

“I asked about you as a baby. Not now.”

He rolls his eyes, sitting up to ruffle your hair. You shrug him off before leaning your head against his shoulder, his hand placed directly on your stomach, which he does almost every time he’s near you. You can hear his stupid voice in your head. She has to know I’m here too, not just you mama.

“Shut up. Stop bad mouthing me in front of our child. That’s not a healthy parenting model.”

“You screamed my head off for throwing out your precious kikufuku in front of Megumi last week. Healthy parenting model, my ass.”

“Well some things are just unforgivable, sweetheart. And he’s a big boy now.”

He leans over and presses a kiss to the top of your head, before pressing his cheek against your hair. “What was my baby like as a baby?”

“I came out super early. I think they had to stay in the hospital for a few days because I was too weak. But after that, I think it was okay.”

He leans over, pressing himself harder into your frame as he squeezes. You place your hands in his hair again, running through as you wait for him to talk. He’s thinking - too hard.

You understood that a baby, a real one - not grown up and super self sufficient like Tsumiki and Megumi were - was anxiety inducing. But ever since you had told him, Satoru was stressed out, more than usual. Shoulders always tensed up, freaking out over painting the room or assembling a crib, or picking a godfather.

“Love?”

“Yes, Satoru?”

“Do you think…the baby will be scared of me?”

“Because you’re the strongest? Of course, not. Megumi and Tsumiki always thought it was so cool when they were little, smacking their tiny little hands against it while laughing.”

“No, no. Not because of that.”

You push your palms against his cheeks, pulling his face out of the crook of your neck. He looks into your eyes, the look shy. His eyes waver down to his arms, littered in scars, before looking back up. And now you get it. He’s talking about his scars.

They’ve faded over the years, from back when Megumi was still possessed by Sukuna. You remember when they were angry, red and fresh, when he came home, and nearly made your heart drop out of your chest.

And when it was well and over, you had kissed them hundreds and hundreds of times over until Satoru knew, with full confidence, that you love him. And Megumi had apologized, millions of times before he understood that none of it was his fault. You love Satoru. Scars and all. And you love Megumi. Possession and all.

“Satoru. You know that we all-”

He shrugs you off, the look exasperated.

“I know you guys love me. But I’m talking about the baby. There’s just so many of them and they’ve faded a good amount but-”

You lean over and press your lips to his, kissing him softly before you let go. You can feel him deflate at the sensation, giving you the smallest of smiles when you pull apart.

“You guys have father-daughter telepathy. She could never be scared of you.”

You see the smile spread across his face as he rolls his eyes at you, shaking you at the shoulders.

“So you agree? She’s a girl.”

“No. He is most definitely a boy. But I’ll let you have it for tonight.”

“You’re so generous.”

“I know Satoru, it’s one of the best things about me.”

You feel him cup his hands around your face as he presses a light kiss to your nose.

“Yes. It is.”

“I was being sarcastic.”

“I know that, love. But I wasn’t.”

Unlike Satoru and much more like you, your baby is born early. What you thought was a routine ultrasound turned into an emergency c-section and your little baby coming a little earlier than you had planned.

That was hours ago. Satoru has been watching you, your chest heaving up and down as you sleep, since they moved to this room. Your daughter, because Satoru was right, was down the hall in the NICU, in a tiny little plastic incubator. With Megumi and Tsumiki.

This day had already been too hard for Satoru. And it wasn’t even over yet. Watching you get pushed onto a table, your baby coming out and not crying, finding out it was a girl but you weren’t even conscious enough for him to stick it to you, having to pick who to spend his time with.

He picked you. Because Megumi promised that he’d watch her there, make sure she wasn’t alone. He knows how much it meant to the two of you to get to meet her together so he’ll wait. I mean, that is his little sister and all, he doesn’t mind watching her. After Satoru agreed, he couldn’t help but smile at Megumi, literally sprinting down the hall to meet her where Tsumiki was waiting.

He watches you shuffle in your sleep, your eyes fluttering open. He nearly knocks the table as he stands up, placing his hands on your arms as you wake up.

“Satoru.”

“Love, oh my god, I was waiting for you. To wake up, I mean. Are-are you okay? Does anything hurt? Do you want me to get anything?”

He watches your eyes pinch shut as you raise your hand, clamping it right across his mouth. Your little raspy voice breaks out and he can feel the tears streaming down his eyes at the sound of it.

“Do you ever shut the fuck up?”

He can’t help but laugh, the tears still streaming down. God, he loves you. Bedridden and still giving him fucking attitude. You’re okay and sassing him around and he loves you.

He watches the smile spread across your face as you keep your hand there, now wiping his tears off. You look around the room, the crib still neatly made.

“Wait, where’s-”

“Down the hall. Megumi’s there with her.”

“Her? It’s a girl?”

You can feel the pride bustling in your chest, the tears now filling in your eyes. She’s a girl. Your tiny little baby that you were carrying for the past months was a girl. You can buy her little dresses and teach Satoru how to braid her hair and-

“Told you so.”

“Shut the fuck up. I know you’re not sticking it to me while I’m literally in a hospital bed. Need I remind you, that you did this to me.”

“How did I do this to you?”

“You knocked me up!”

You both laugh as Satoru helps you up into the wheelchair, pushing you both down the hallway to where she was.

“You see her yet? Is she cute?”

“No, it’s only been a few hours. I wanted to see her together.”

He swings the door open, pushing you to the front into the room. You can see Megumi seated right next to the little box, his hand inside with Tsumiki watching from the other side, her eyes focused on the crib.

But you don’t take notice of your baby first. What you notice first is the shirts Megumi and Tsumiki are wearing, matching pink that say “big brother” and “big sister.”

“Satoru. Don’t tell me you guilt tripped them into wearing the shirts.”

They both run over at the sound of your voice, pressing you into a hug. You reach forward, resting both of your hands in their hair as they help you up, holding you steady in the air and running their eyes over you to make sure you’re okay.

Satoru had bought the five of you matching shirts to wear when the baby was going to be discharged. And they were corny as fuck. With dad, mom, big sister, big brother, and baby written on them. Megumi said he was going to burn his in a fire. You and Tsumiki hid yours somewhere in the basement, pretending you lost them. Satoru found them in five minutes. But here they are, wearing them.

“You don’t have to wear those. I’m sure he pulled the whole, my wife is dying, my baby is sick but-”

“I didn’t ask them to wear those. At least not today.”

You look over to find Satoru smirking, worst than he ever as before, at Megumi especially, as he starts ruffling his hair, cooing over how cute he was.

“Just, shut up about it. I thought it would make your depressed ass laugh.”

“Toru, quit bugging him.”

You press a kiss to Megumi’s cheek before Satoru crushes him in a hug. He’s always been your sweet boy.

You and Satoru slowly shuffle over to the little box, sticking your hands in to hold hers. Her eyes are pinched shut, a tuft of dark hair at the top of her head. You can feel the tears rising in your eyes, quickly glancing over to see Satoru crying too. Megumi and Tsumiki are on the other side, directly across, sweet smiles pressed on their faces.

“Dark hair, Toru.”

“Just like her mom.”

You both can’t help but stare at her, rustling around in the little crib. But what catches your eye is the dark patch of red on her left eye, instinctively reaching over to touch it.

“Megumi. What happened?”

“We think it might be a scar or something. The doctors said she’s okay though, it doesn’t hurt her or anything.”

You immediately crane her head over to Satoru, whose switched spots with you and is now softly pressing his fingers over the skin. You lean over, whispering in his ear as you both watch her.

“Think she looks scary with her scar, Satoru?”

“What the hell are you talking about? She’s perfect.”

“You guys match. A scar for her and a scar for you.”

He looks over and you watch the realization spread across his face as he understands what you’re getting at. He gives you a sweet look before pressing one the softest kisses to the top of your hair. He’s crying even harder now, his entire frame shaking. Fucking sap.

She curls her hands into Satoru’s, squeezing his pinkie finger.

“What the hell, Toru? She didn’t do that for me.”

“It’s father-daughter telepathy, love. You wouldn’t get it.”

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targaryen-dynasty · 22 days

Text

STRESS RELIEF.

Daemon Targaryen x female!Reader

WARNINGS: SEXUAL CONTENT-MINORS DNI; implied canon typical incest/ targcest (no named relationship other than husband & wife but reader speaks high valyrian), oral (m receiving), balls sucking, balls worship, cock slapping, breeding kink, fem reader (no mentions of appearance)

WORDS: 2.9 K

NOTES: I KNOW I said you won't get anything from me for the next two weeks, but this is an old story I love and edited, and I'm always in the mood to suck his balls. Ty Lana @zaldritzosrose 🤍

❗️𝐚𝐝𝐝 𝐲𝐨𝐮𝐫𝐬𝐞𝐥𝐟 𝐭𝐨 𝐦𝐲 𝐭𝐚𝐠𝐥𝐢𝐬𝐭!

The door to your chambers bursting open with a thud, the thick wood slamming against the old masonry of Maegor’s Holdfast, is what forcefully pulls you out of your slumber.

As your eyes shoot open, you need a few seconds to adjust to the dim light of your chambers, the flame of the fireplace long extinguished and indicating it’s been a while since you found sleep.

Every sense of tiredness that has lingered in your bones vanishes suddenly at the noisy intrusion, more so as you spot the armor-clad silhouette of your husband standing at the threshold of your marital quarters.

He appears to be even more bulky and bull-like with the natural broadness of his shoulders accentuated by the heavy armor and the golden cloak, and just that sight alone has an aching desire filling your veins.

It’s the closer look you take that makes you aware of his labored breathing, chest rising and falling with heaving breaths, almost seeming as though he’s in great stress.

Whenever Daemon barges into your chambers at this hour, still wearing his armor, you know he needs to be consoled and pampered.

“Husband?” Your soft voice finally pierces through the silence, still thick with sleep from being awoken so abruptly.

A few, determined strides is all it takes him to enter the room, closing the door behind him as loudly as he’s opened it before. Although you know something is plaquing his mind, and that he’s not usually as harsh towards you as this, you still flinch at the thud.

Sitting up straight with the bedcovers bunched in front of your breasts, you have a puzzled look on your face. One of the few things Daemon has established fairly early into your marriage was the strict prohibition of you wearing any kind of smallclothes or nightgowns to bed, as he wants you to lie just as bare next to him as he always does.

He always states that there are quite a few practical reasons for it, with easier and quicker access to your cunt being the main one of them. Albeit you know for certain that he just loves to feel your skin on his when he falls asleep, solely embraced by the warmth and softness of your body snuggled up against his.

Clashing of metal accompanies his heavy footsteps as he approaches you, stern gaze fixed on your small frame.

The closer he gets, the more you are able to make out his chiseled features with long strands of his silver-blonde hair framing them perfectly. Even in the almost non-existent light of your chambers you notice the dark blown eyes, the adored lilac almost fully eclipsed by pitch black.

“Va aōha ybon,” he rasps, voice deep and commanding, and leaving no space for any kind of objection. On your knees.

You comply swiftly, the bedcovers thrown aside to reveal your naked form. A somewhat feral growl ripples through your husband’s chest at the sight, the curves and dips of your body enhanced by the light the moon casts through the windows.

The stone floor feels cold and hard as you sink to your knees, causing you to shift your weight from one knee to the other and back, trying to mend the discomfort at least slightly.

It usually requires your help to strip him off his heavy armor, but much to your surprise, Daemon manages to shred himself out of the majority of it all by himself, driven by sheer lust and hunger for you.

Where his silver hair is usually well combed and neat, the loose tresses now cascade down his shoulders and back visibly tousled and dirty.

Your hands lie folded in your lap, thumbs brushing over each other in a way to keep yourself calm. You have been married to Daemon for two summers, but know his silence never means anything good. It is threatening, and more often than not getting you into trouble, because he always has something to say.

As he stands in front of you in his full glory, only clad in a pair of dark breeches and a loose tunic, you hesitantly reach to place a hand on his sturdy thigh while his hand cups your cheek in return. Finding yourself leaning into the touch, you’re quickly repulsed as you catch a whiff of what smells like sweat, dirt and… iron.

“What have you done today?“ you ask innocently, though you aren’t sure if you want to hear his reply – that means if you even get one.

While the pad of his thumb brushes over the curve of your lips, his other hand slowly unlaces the front of his breeches, easing the confines of his half-hard member, and causing a wave of arousal to seep out of your cunt, anticipation making it clench around nothing.

“Oh, we have restored law and order,“ he purrs, the cocky smirk on his lips indicating that he’s more than satisfied with the outcome of it all. “The Kingsguard cleaned the streets from the city‘s scum.“

Listening intently, you just nod in acknowledgement, not at all surprised by your husband‘s actions. “And does the king know you did that?“

“I do not care if the king knows or not,“ he spits, impatiently tugging the front of his breeches down just enough to free his cock and stones. “He is blind, guided by the incompetent leech that claims to be his hand.“

A musky scent hits your nose when you catch sight of his thick cock. His musky scent, mixed with the salty smell of sweat. It has you licking your lips like a greedy whore, and if anything, you love it. It’s a sharp reminder that you have married a hardworking and ambitious man, and not a boy.

Your hand instinctively curls around his member, your index finger and thumb barely touching. His girth has always been something that impresses you. He’s considerable, leaving you wondering at times how it even fits into your mouth and cunt.

You slowly tug him to full hardness, stroking him the way you know he likes, even though your pace is a bit slower than usual. You listen to him rant about his brother, and the insolence of his hand, Otto Hightower, merely humming whenever your husband expects you to.

Once his cock stands to full attention, throbbing in your hand, you release it and instead fondle his stones, heavy and hot in your hand. The fleshy pouch they sit in is a bit darker than the rest of his pale skin and visibly sagged, but doesn’t hang too low.

Your actions earn a disapproving tsk from Daemon, despite the visible twitching of his cock at the new stimulation, and he wastes no time in fisting a good bit of your hair to shove your face towards his crotch. The scent is more prominent the closer you get, but not at all repulsing. Instead, it arouses you even more.

You’re not sure if it’s Daemon‘s usual lack of patience or his abnormal obsession with the king and his entourage that makes him greedy and needy for your touch, but you decide to not give in to him so easily.

Gently squeezing and fondling the sack of his stones, your tongue licks a flat stripe from the base of his member up to the bulbous tip of it. A salty taste lingers on your tongue, the few beads of his arousal quickly gathered and swallowed by you. You hum appreciatively at the taste, seemingly pleased to witness the affect your touch and presence has on your husband‘s body.

A sharp tug on your hair catches your attention and makes you yelp, your wide eyes finding your husband‘s demanding ones. “Quit playing games,“ he growls. A warning. But he should know by now that you are not one of his hounds, and what works with them doesn’t necessarily intimidate you.

Your tongue swirls around the tip of his cock, kitten-licking it until his heavy pants are replaced by annoyed huffs and grunts. Daemon doesn’t like you teasing him – not when he craves relief.

You keep your eyes neatly trained on him, studying his changing expressions to know whenever you’re playing with fire, and when it is best to follow his commands. Switching the positions of your mouth and hand, warmth brushes your face before the familiar musk seeps into your head.

Closing your eyes as all your senses are clouded by him, you latch on Daemon’s sac of stones, nuzzling your nose into the dark, coarse hair to take one of them in your mouth. Low purrs ripple from your throat, sending vibrations through his body.

You haven’t noticed, but your thighs clench and unclench repeatedly with each suck of your mouth, trying to soothe the aching settling at the apex of your legs. However, it doesn’t grant you the friction you crave.

“My, my, now look at that,“ Daemon coos. “Sucking my stones like a common whore. So desperate to have your mouth filled by me, hm?“

The condescending tone of his voice sends shivers up your spine, and you keen at the degrading nature of his words, moaning around his slightly slacked flesh.

Daemon is unable to tear his dark blown eyes from your full mouth struggling to take both of his stones. You’re trying so hard, but your mouth isn’t slack enough, causing you to nearly choke yourself trying to please him.

Droplets of your saliva dribble from the corners of your mouth down your chin, gathering in your jugular notch, and really making you look like you belong to the Street of Silk; a common whore desperate for her mouth to be stuffed by something, and not caring if it was filled by his stones or cock.

While you are messily suckling the sack of his stones, you tease a few licks up his length, tracing the prominent vein on the underside of it with the tip of your tongue.

You relish in the way he twitches and squirms under your touch, the deep grunts only spurring you on even more. But you also are soaked for him, core clenching and aching, begging to be used.

Daemon has started to tug himself off at the sight of your lips around his flesh, big hand the perfect size for his considerable length, while his other tightly fists into your hair to keep you where he wants you.

You hollow your cheeks around him, sucking with the tip of your tongue dragging over the sensitive skin. The familiar taste of manhood lingers on your tongue, and your jaw goes slack, finally managing to engulf his whole sac with your mouth. But when you try to pull away for a breath, Daemon only snorts and pulls you right back to his stones.

He harshly tugs on your hair, tilting your head back so you are forced to look at him when he slaps his hard cock against your face. Your saliva adds a sheen to his flushed skin, making him glisten in the dim light, and catches your attention, your eyes trailing over the length of his cock – you want nothing more than to feel those veins on your tongue.

As his cock repeatedly makes contact with your swollen lips and cheeks, the indecency of it all sends heat straight through your body, for it’s the first time he has ever done something like that.

Daemon bows forward, looming over your frame but coming close enough for you to feel his breath fanning over your face. Goosebumps prickle on your skin, and his intense lilac eyes send desire straight to your jumbled mind.

“What a wanton harlot you are,” his tongue darts out to wet his lips. “Whores of the Silk Street do such things.”

While his degrading words go straight to your head, making you eager for more, you still cower beneath his dominating presence. “Yn ao hae ziry,” you reply, cocking your head sideways in an innocent way. But you like it.

It seems that your feigned innocence doesn’t convince him, because you suddenly feel something warm and wet dripping down your cheeks; his saliva. He has spat on your cheek, spreading it over your heated skin with a satisfied smirk ghosting over his features. Daemon rarely enjoys having you talk back at him, to tease him, and right now clearly isn’t one of those moments.

At the realization of what he’s just done, you feel your voice tighten in your throat, your lips pressing into a thin line as embarrassment floods your veins.

“Gaoman, yn…,” he muses, bending back and tracing the tip of his length along the slit of your pouty lips. “...nyke hae ziry tolī skori gaomā daor ȳdragon rȳ mirre.” With these words leaving his lips, his cock hits your cheek once again, almost as if he’s making fun of you. I do, but I like it more when you do not speak at all.

The grip on your hair loosens only for him to cup your cheek, fingertips digging sharply into the flushed skin of your cheeks. His other hand repeatedly taps the tip of his cock against your swollen lips in a demanding manner, begging for entrance.

“Open your mouth, or else I am opening it for you.”

You wet your lips, just the mere thought of having him down your throat causes a sense of soreness to linger in the back of it, and Daemon seems to notice your apprehension.

“I see your mouth begging for my cock, you filthy slut. Don’t act like an insufficient brat for you have done this plenty of times before.” He is right, but that doesn’t mean you’ll ever get used to his sheer size. Your thoughts, however, are cut short because Daemon isn’t Daemon, if he doesn’t take matters into his own hands.

The tip of his cock prods against your lips, and with the grip on your face tightening, you are all but forced to part them for him. There’s only little to no time to adjust to his size granted to you, because he sheaths himself inside of you in one, swift thrust.

A few seconds pass in which neither of you moves. Your nose is nuzzled against his pubic bone, the tip of it brushing the wispy trail of his hair, and you try to stifle the urge to gag and choke around him, your hands getting ahead with clutching his muscular thighs to keep yourself grounded.

Every muscle of his body twitches with pleasure as he grows accustomed to the warmth and tightness of you, his head tipping back to release a bawdy groan.

And then his hips start to buck into your mouth, allowing a wave of fresh air to fill your lungs when he almost completely pulls out; only the tip remaining embraced between your lips. A firm hand locks behind your head to stop you from pulling back.

Daemon’s hips thrust into your mouth with reckless abandon like he belonged into it, the bulbous tip hitting the back of your throat but never giving you anything you can’t handle. He knows you can take it, and that you like it.

The lewd noises of his soaked cock easing in and out of your warm mouth fill the room, spurring him on even more. At this point, you are soaking wet for him, droplets of your arousal leaking onto the stone floor beneath your legs.

Your cheeks hollow around him as you choke and sputter around his length, spit dribbling down your chin and bosom. His stones tighten with his cock throbbing on your tongue, ready to spend himself down your throat at any given moment, your previous teasing clearly coming in handy.

There are tears brimming in your eyes, unhelpful when all you want is to look up at him, watch how he scrunches his brow and puckers his lips as he gazes at you in rapture.

“That’s it,” Daemon groans, the pace of his hips faltering as he chases his release. “Take it all.” And that is when you felt it.

His hot seed spills down your throat, coating your tongue. You gag slightly when his hips start to stutter, cock twitching and pulsing with the force of his peak. Droplets of his seed spill from the corners of your mouth, mixing with your saliva and dribbling down your chin while you struggle to swallow the rest.

Nonsense spews out of his mouth as his groans grow more wanton, no doubt losing awareness of his volume. You are destined to be the main topic of the court's whispers in the morrow, just like your mother and father have been before you.

His fingers comb through your hair slowly, stroking your head as if he’s thanking you for a job well done, while he rides out his peak with languid thrusts of his hips.

When he finally stops to regain his composure, chest rising and falling with each heavy breath he takes, he allows you to pull back from him, a string of your saliva connecting your swollen lips with the bulbous head of his cock, only breaking as you lick your lips to gather the remnants of his spent.

“Ñuha sȳz riña,” he rasps, pulling you up on your feet to capture your lips in a heated kiss. The taste of him on your tongue spreads over his tongue and causes him to groan. My good girl.

Like a man possessed, he flips you around and easily throws you onto your marital bed. When you land on your stomach with him following closely behind, mounting you and straddling your arse, you squeal and chuckle, ecstatic that it’s finally your turn.

“Tonight is the night I shall put a child into you. I want to see your body swell with my seed.”

Daemon Taglist: @barbiedragon @hypocritic-trash-baby @schniiipsel @avalyaaa @baizzhu @yn-jackson

502 notes · View notes

softlyspector · 9 months

Text

Decaf

Summary: After your first tattoo session with Joel, you can't stop thinking about him or, his touch. And it terrifies you.

Read Honeyed first where: You put aside your touch aversion for a tattoo from Joel.

Pairing: tattoo artist!Joel Miller x f!Reader

Word count: ~10.1k

Warnings: a smidgen of angst for fun 😌 then comfort, slow build, no outbreak tattoo!au, the 'believes they're hard to love, loving them is like breathing' trope, reader has issues with touch and is mostly touch adverse (joel's workin' on that though), tattoos and getting tattooed (the process isn't really described), description of a past abusive relationship and a bad experience getting tattooed, undefined unresolved previous trauma, insecurity, anxiety, loneliness, Joel gets to have both his daughters in this

A/N: This is dedicated to all of you who are also touch adverse. I hope you like this part as much as the first, and feel seen and heard. I love you and thank you for being so kind and open with your love and your own experiences. May you find the patience and love you deserve in your own Joel.

Once again, we’re ignoring canon and pretending like Joel can draw for this fic, thank you. Editing this was a labor, so if there are any mistakes blame my tired eyes. Thank you for reading! As always, I would love to know your thoughts! Please please please, be sure to leave feedback!

Joel doesn’t want to walk you home, though he figures he should.

It’s the polite thing to do. The kind of thing his mother and grandmother raised him to do.

And it's got nothing at all to do with prolonging this very long day with you. No, nothing so self serving and selfish as that.

His little doe he’d lured so close, still so out of reach with hidden tattoos not on her hip. It’s scary, the want that wells up in him, the desire to see you step that much closer to him, until you feel safe enough to nestle in his shadow.

If you were the deer, he should be the tree, the shade, the haven.

Rage, incandescent and warm and comforting in its familiarity, wells up in his chest again when your earlier admission plays through his mind.

Nothing brings his anger, quick and deadly, like those he cares for being harmed. Rarely did he see cause for it to break the surface—not since Sarah was born and he had a better example to set, not since Tommy calmed down and stopped getting in so many fights.

This, though, with you—the thought of you being harmed, brings it all rushing back. He hopes to never lay eyes on your ex, for everyone’s sake.

I had bruises for a couple weeks after, you’d said. It hurt. He wanted it to hurt.

Those words had stung on their own, but then you’d continued.

I think he wanted to brand me. He wanted to leave a piece of himself on me, whether I wanted it or not.

It grates on him, that anyone could hurt you that way, that anyone would even think of it, and get away with it.

You’re happily finishing the last bite of the quartet of tacos he’d gotten you, unaware of the turmoil that drags taunting claws into the fleshy parts of his chest.

You nod along to the Cash song still playing over the outdoor speakers, though now at a much lower volume as the night wanes later, a content expression on your face.

He likes watching you eat, likes it even better knowing you’re eating something he got you. It satisfies something weirdly primal in him.

The side of your leg is still pressed to his, warm and pliant even through two layers of denim. The buzzing flaxen glow of the sting lights halo over your head; it casts your face in shadow, the long feathers of your lashes spiking down your cheeks.

You seem more relaxed now. The tension in your shoulders has loosened, the crease between your furrowed brows gone as you ball up the used napkins and toss them into the little paper boat the tacos had been on.

He refuses the last few sips of lemonade, and so you drink the rest instead.

“Well,” you say, your voice a little sheepish and shy, that soft round look coming back into your eyes. He imagines you with the twitching, sensitive ears of a doe, poking through your hair, alert and suddenly wary of the extended hand you’d been so trusting of minutes before. “I should probably let you go. It’s late.”

You say it like you think you’ve been keeping him there, taking up his time that he’s eager to get back.

But you haven’t, and he isn’t ready to let you go.

“I’ll walk ya home.”

“It’s alright,” you say dismissively, gathering the trash and standing before he can do it for you. “I’m only a couple of blocks over,” you say over your shoulder as you walk away.

“I’d feel better if you let me,” he admits, following close behind you.

You toss the trash and then turn back to him, nervously running your palms along your thighs, eyes flicking over him. “This is a safe little town, you know,” you reassure him. “Like, I’m pretty sure my neighbors don’t even lock their door.”

Joel blinks. “But you lock your door, don’t ya?”

An inexplicable smile pulls your mouth up at the corners. “Yeah, Joel, I lock my door.”

“Good,” he says gruffly, shoving down the protective feeling that had been rising in his chest. It’s an insane feeling, one that sets something he thought long dead on fire within him.

You just watch him for a moment, knowing eyes sliding over him. “Well,” you relent and jerk your head toward one of the side streets. “I’m this way, if you’re sure you have time.”

Like time had anything to do with it.

He gestures you ahead of him, his eyes falling down the curve of your spine, the shape of your hips and thighs. He’s still trying hard not to think about the bumblebee and the antlers tattooed somewhere on your body, all the parts of you he hasn’t seen.

He’s trying hard not to think about a lot of things.

Like how your skin felt under his hand, dewy and warm. How he’d spent most of the day with his hand covering yours, the hummingbird beat of your pulse against his fingertips.

He’s trying not to think about how good you smelled that close, raw and unfiltered, how irritated he had been when the sharp smell of disinfectant had chased it away.

You carried the smell of summer with you wherever you went, like sunshine and coffee, iced sugar and coconut.

He walks with you through the navy darkness in silence, the flash of amber street light the only thing illuminating your way. It feels nice. He feels like the rest of the world has turned its face away, that it's only you and him and the ghostly eyes of the white glow of the moon peeking through the quickly dissipating clouds.

The Texas dry heat would be back with a vengeance in the morning, but for now the street is pleasantly humid. The air still smells like petrichor, like damp concrete. He should savor it. Tomorrow, the blindingly hot smell of asphalt and dust will return and chase this moment in the dark with you away.

You seem almost better suited to the dark, to the quiet smooth pleasantness of it, like your fear can’t reach you there if it can’t see you, if you can’t see it. Like a prey animal that only ventured into the safety of night.

So he lets the silence last, because it's comfortable, and he’s never been one to fill silence with unnecessary chatter anyhow.

He can’t remember the last time he did something like this, felt the brush of someone else’s fingers through the dark and the accompanying zing it sent up his arm. He forgot how amplified everything could feel, especially in the low light.

The walk to your apartment is short.

You only live a few blocks from the center of town, and only a few streets over from the studio. He imagines you walking this path each day with the intention of coming to see him, with the intention to walk by the studio, even before you knew him—in the sun, all summer.

You live above the town’s sole bookshop. It’s cute, like the rest of the town is. It’s unbelievable how idyllic the town is, like it’s cut straight from the pages of a romance novel, or one of those shitty Hallmark movies.

He stands just outside the circle of the security light that blinks on over the door. You fiddle with the lock for a solid minute, jiggling the knob just so and then twisting the key in a pattern that you seem to know well, until it finally yields and opens.

Joel clears his throat. “Y’need someone to look at that?”

You don’t seem to hear the question mark tagged onto the end of the question, or to realize that he’s offering to fix it. “Yeah, I know,” you roll your eyes. “I’ve asked my landlord to look at it a couple of times already but they haven’t gotten around to it—”

“I can take a look for you sometime,” he clarifies. “It won’t take but a minute—”

“That’s alright, Joel,” you interrupt quickly and dip your head, embarrassed suddenly. “I’ve let you do way too much for me today. Everyday.” Before he can contradict you—because he isn’t sure what the hell you feel he’s done for you, you step back through the door and hover there in the doorway, shifting from foot to foot.

The security light casts your face in harsh shadows, the dark stairwell behind you reaching black claws out to hook around your frame.

You open your mouth but nothing comes out. You just linger there, fidgeting with your keys, looking for all the world like you have something you want to say to him, like you don’t want him to go either.

Joel watches you, waiting for you to say something, to be the one to sever the connection between you and say goodnight. His chest feels tight as he waits for you to decide, waits for you to decide his shade was a place you could be safe.

Besides, he’s still trying to figure how to say goodbye to you, still trying to figure how he’s supposed to pry apart the sticky want that thrums against his skin. Still trying to figure out what exactly had gotten into him, what had gotten into him in the weeks and months you’d started coming by.

He supposes it's just been a long time. He supposes he’s just out of practice at having feelings for someone.

It’s been just him and his girls and his brother for so long.

He must take too long trying to figure things out because you smile at him and glance away, your expression apprehensive and unsure. “You will let me get you back for the tacos someday,” you warn softly. “‘Night.”

Then you shut the door. He hears you bang up the steps, your footfalls fading until he can’t hear them anymore. The security light flickers out and he’s plunged into semi-darkness, but he doesn’t move until a light finally comes on in one of the upstairs windows a few minutes later, the silhouette of your body outlined behind a sheer curtain.

It’s only then that he turns away and walks back the way he’d come. He smiles to himself and then feels stupid about it.

He’s too old, he thinks again, for his chest to be twinging the way it is, to be smiling in the dark, and missing someone he just left.

He’d see you tomorrow, anyway.

Just as he always did.

Just like you always do.

Joel is distracted the day after your appointment.

Your scent lingers in the air of the studio. He mistakes every shadow that passes the front window for you. The image of you under the soft light in the center of town is imprinted behind his eyes. The way you’d smiled, the feel of your skin under his fingers—soft and damp in the humid air that had ballooned after the day’s rain, consumes his every thought, has his eyes shifting to the front window every few seconds. His back gives an unpleasant spasm from how quickly he turns at even the slightest noise, always thinking it's you finally pushing the door open.

But he sees more than your shadow and the ghost of your silhouette in the window.

Joel sees all the imagined, soft skin under your clothes where an antler tattoo is hidden. Untouched, unexplored skin that he would very much like the chance to explore and touch, if ever you gave him the chance, if you ever wandered that close.

It’s a fine idea.

That you’d come into the studio and lean against the counter and watch him work on a design for someone that isn’t nearly as important as you are.

But, the day wears on, and you never show up.

The day after Joel tattooed you and bought you sugary lemonade and tacos under golden light that you etched divine, you don’t stop in.

You don’t even walk by.

It isn’t unusual for you to go a few days between visits to the studio. He tells himself that it’s normal, fine, that you have a job and a life and that sometimes you don’t get the chance to come by. He tries not to worry about it.

On the second day, with your image still fluttering behind his eyes, the weight of your gaze still heavy on his skin, he starts sketching another design for you. It distracts him, at least, because you don’t come in on the second day, either.

You don’t come in the day after that either, or the day after that. His girls stop by for dinner on Friday evening, and Ellie crashes on his couch for the night to help out in the shop the next day. All that Saturday, all he can think about is you, pushing the door open slowly, pausing in the entryway like you always do with watchful eyes, skin shimmering with sweat from the sun and heat, cups of coffee in hand, one for you and one for him, just like always.

He imagines you smiling at him, your shoulders loosening when your doe eyes land on him, the uncertainty and trepidation melting away because it’s him. Because it’s just him. It’s just the two of you.

But the image, the fantasy, never comes to fruition.

Ellie snaps at him around noon to stop being so fucking weird, dude.

Sundays—the shop is closed, so he doesn’t see you then.

By Monday, five days after he tattooed you and walked you home in the dark, as the sun sets on a ragingly warm evening, Joel is convinced that you aren’t going to come by the studio anymore.

He keeps working on your new design.

Then, a whole week goes by, and then another, and you still don’t drop by, you don’t even walk by, though he catches a few glimpses of you down the road—in front of the boutique, the coffee shop, the record store a few doors down. He sees you at the farmer’s market that pops up every Saturday in the town’s center.

He dreams of you, dreams of the willowy, softly plush curves of your body. Joel dreams of you at home with him, in his bed. He dreams of pushing your shirt up, palming every delicate part of you, tracing his fingers over your hidden tattoos.

He always jolts awake when the dream version of you pushes him back and kisses him hard, his hands cupped around you, your thighs, your breasts, the dip of your waist and belly.

It’s distracting, the ghost of you everywhere he looks. He can’t even bring himself to take your painting down from the front window. The doe you don’t see yourself in.

Adjusting to your absence is hard. He hadn’t realized you’d wormed your way into his daily life so firmly, like an invasive species the environment grows around, and turns when it's taken away.

In one particularly low moment two weeks on, he takes a stroll a few blocks over, worried that something might have happened to you, that something might be keeping you away. He sees you inside the bookstore you live above, newly purchased novel in hand, feet curled beneath you on a sofa in the window.

You seem fine, though an inexplicable twinge of jealousy plucks at his heart. He never thought that you might hang around the other shops like you did with his.

And you never come by.

You don’t owe him anything, certainly not your company.

He resigns himself to not seeing you until your second session, when he’ll finish your tattoo and probably never see you again.

Joel scares you.

His hand lying over yours all day; his offer to fix your door; the way he looked at you intense and heavy and waiting, wanting—it all terrifies you.

The words to invite him up for something to drink had sat heavy in your mouth before you changed your mind and left him where he stood. You’d bothered him enough, taken up enough of his time.

You aren’t sure what southern manners had led him to take you to get tacos and lemonade but surely he’s had enough of you.

I’ve let you do way too much for me, you’d said. And he hadn’t disagreed.

Instead, you lurch up the stairs, let yourself into your apartment and stand breathing hard in the dark entryway, back against the door. Your forearm aches just a little, but in the pleasant way it always does after getting tattooed, instead of in the painful, raw way the one from your ex had.

The familiar itch below your skin that had started with Joel’s art is now overwhelming, because you know what the shape of his hand feels like. You know the precise weight of his palm over the back of your hand, and against the column of your spine. You can’t forget how his jean clad thigh felt against yours, how nice the brush of his fingers had been through the dark.

His voice was so low and graveled when it brushed against your skin, it tingled through your whole body, down to your toes, to the pit of your belly. It was low and intimate and felt like everything he said was just for you, like it had brushed against every tiny hair on your body.

I’m not markin’ you, because it's not mine. It’s yours. It’s for you.

They were words for you, special for you, reassuring to you, spoken so kindly and in defense of you against someone he would never meet, over something that was not his fault and that he hadn’t been around yet to prevent.

There’s a kinetic energy under your skin that burns, like pages of your story with him are already set aflame. Don’t burn this bridge, you think and lean hard back into the door. You close your eyes and tangle your fingers together, squeezing so tight it hurts, until you pinch your skin. Please don’t let me burn this bridge.

You like Joel, more than you have any right to. He feels safe and sure and solid; he’s kind. He scares you, but in a way that makes you want to claw your way through the dark back to him, to see if he’ll touch you again, speak low and kind just for you, work on art made just for you.

When you finally catch your breath, you flip on the lights and toss your keys down as you cross your small apartment. You scrub a hand over your face and take a deep breath from between your fingers.

A moment later, you pluck up the courage to glance out the window, just in time to catch Joel’s broad shoulders turn the corner in the distance back onto Main Street.

Something in your chest pangs, the strings of your heart pull tight and hard up against your lungs until your throat closes.

The feelings he planted in your chest, nestled among your ribs and wove between your veins, seem unfair. It seems horribly unfair, harsh even, that you should be left with the tips of your fingers smoldering, hesitantly reaching out for more.

He’s left a sea inside you, a lonely dark hole. You knew it was there, that black, open emptiness. You’d felt it all your life, but now you know what it feels like when someone sees it, shrugs, and asks to be a part of it. You know what it's like, now, to have someone stand, patient and still on the shore.

He’s left you wanting, craving something that you’ve feared for so long, that always felt wrong. And when your skin started to go tight and your muscles contracted and pulled, he’d somehow known, heard the pain buried away, and released you.

You can still feel the ghost of his knuckles brushing against your wrist on the dark walk to your apartment. You can feel his thigh against yours while you ate tacos together and listened to the folks of your small town laugh and dance to old country music. You can feel his palm cupped around your wrist, dwarfing your hand beneath his.

You can still feel his calloused fingertips, catching at your palm and the inside of your wrist.

He makes you feel safe and seen, like it’s okay that you lingered in his studio for weeks, bothered him endlessly, without any guarantee that you might one day schedule an appointment and actually get tattooed.

You thought the wantneedpull would subside after finally starting the tattoo but its only gown. The pain you waited for, the urge to flee from your own body never came with him. You want him closer, want the warm rough press of his palm against yours. You just want—you’ve never really wanted anyone closer but you want him closer.

You want Joel so close that nothing else bleeds through. You want to melt into the palms that cupped you so gently, so carefully.

You want to become carefully molded wax in his capable hands.

Inexplicably, for the first time in so long, you want someone to touch you. You want to feel Joel’s hands everywhere, anywhere he could reach and even all the places he couldn’t.

And it terrifies you.

You mean to go back to your normal routine, but the first morning you try to stop by the studio, you can’t make your feet carry you there. You pause halfway between the coffeeshop and the studio, Joel’s usual order clutched in your hand.

The gnawing, empty, raw hole inside you has only grown. You look at your pretty tattoo and think of the gently rough hands that had created it, the furrow between his brows while he worked, the scar over his nose, the strong, broad slope of his shoulders, and you feel anxious.

You want it so badly, and yet—

He’s just your tattoo artist. He probably only put up with you hanging around his shop everyday, bringing him coffee, talking his ear off, because there was the promise of money, the promise of work.

You’d just done the stupid thing and gotten attached to him, to the studio, to your fucking tattoo artist. You are just a client and you long to melt into him. You long to press yourself against him, feel the crush of his body against yours.

That want makes you wary, phantom pain, phantom aversion crawling beneath your skin right after.

It makes your head spin, it makes you feel crazy, that you can’t even decide what you feel, what you want.

It’s better if you stay away, give yourself time to forget the itch, forget the feel of his hands, so you turn away and circle the block, back to your apartment where you set the cups on your kitchen counter and take a deep breath.

Your chest is tight, your mind a snarl of half formed thoughts.

Tomorrow, you think, will be better.

But it’s not.

Each day you think about going over, and you don’t. You feel wound tight, like clockwork left to rust. You dream of Joel, his hands everywhere and nowhere, the warmth of him like a ghost you can’t shake off.

The feelings you try to avoid, the desert dryness of need and emptiness that the loss of his touch inspired, doesn’t go away. It gets worse; it outweighs the fear, the aversion.

You only dare to go as close as the record store, checking he was still there, like the whole place would suddenly disappear if you stopped going by, like a witch’s cottage after a botched, half-worked spell.

You feel cursed, like soot, like a monster waiting to steal the soul of the light.

You’re burning your bridge and you don’t know how to stop.

Joel is still there, where he’s always been. His art is still there, though you’re so far away now, you can’t see it clearly anymore.

But you notice among the still ever rotating collection of art and pictures in the window, one always remains.

You know without seeing it that it's the painting of the doe looking over her shoulder, bees flocking like long forgotten gods around her ears.

Ellie and Sarah ask about you on the third Friday that goes by without you stopping in.

The temperature has cooled off a little, the warmth of summer receding just the tiniest bit. The kitchen table is laden with chinese takeout boxes, rice already spilled across one of the placemats.

“You haven’t been talkin’ about her so much,” Sarah notes curiously.

“Yeah, and you’ve been way more cranky than usual,” Ellie adds.

“Ain’t had cause to see her,” he deflects, reaching for the yet un-spilled carton of rice. “Hasn’t been in the studio since her first session.”

The kitchen suddenly falls silent, the clatter of cutlery deadened as it’s set on the table. “What do you mean?” Sarah, he thinks, sounds mildly offended on his behalf.

“Just what I said,” he grumbles.

He doesn’t need to look up from his plate to know Sarah and Ellie are exchanging a look. “Why not?” Sarah ventures to ask, her tone calmer.

Joel shrugs and finally looks up at his kids. Sarah’s head is tilted to the side ever so slightly and Ellie’s brow is furrowed. “Busy, maybe,” he explains. “Got better things to do.”

“Bullshit!” Ellie explodes suddenly. “What happened? Did you do something stupid?”

He sighs hard through his nose and shovels orange chicken onto his plate with more force than necessary. “No.” Then he reconsiders, goes over every moment of that day again in his mind. How much he touched you, selfishly, when he knew you were adverse to it. “I don’t know. Could be she was only around this summer to see if we’d make a good fit.”

There’s another beat of silence before both girls are arguing with him. He lets them go on protesting it for a few minutes before he waves them down. “She’s got a lot goin’ on that you two don’t know. Somethin’ might’ve spooked her that I didn’t realize.”

“Like what?”

Your ex-boyfriend and your badly healed tattoo flashes through his mind. The bruises you said you’d had for weeks afterward, how badly it had hurt. The way he’d held onto you all that day.

Guilt pools in his chest, floods his lungs.

He doesn’t know what might have spooked you.

Just hopes it wasn’t him.

“Well, have you tried to talk to her?”

Sarah peers at him with wide eyes, fingers delicately folded around a pair of chopsticks. “No,” he admits.

Ellie makes a discontent noise. “Just fucking talk to her, man,” she says.

“You always do this, dad,” Sarah says suddenly, shaking her head.

“I do not—I don’t—” he stammers. When was the last time he’d had the opportunity to fuck something up? “What are you talkin’ about?”

They both shrug. “It’s like you don’t ever wanna be happy sometimes. She makes you happy and you always think of everybody else, it's okay to think of yourself sometimes. Maybe whatever’s going on with her doesn’t have anything to do with you. Not everything is your fault.”

He can’t figure a way it's not about him, though, that it might not be his fault.

Joel clears his throat and looks down at his plate. “All right, tell me what you two’ve been up to this week.”

“Hey Joel.”

Joel glances up, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose. You’re distorted in his vision for a moment before he reaches up to take them off.

Your shape comes into sharp relief, a balm after not seeing you for so many days. You look cheerful, happy to see him.

Excited, even.

He hasn’t seen you in a month.

You’d messaged back and forth with his kid about your appointment, about today.

He hasn’t heard your voice in a month.

Seeing you now, despite thinking about you, dreaming about you everyday, makes some part of him close off, go cold and hard. “Howdy,” he says, his voice toeing the edge of polite and flat. The smile on your face fades a little.

Though the sunshine is bright as always, the air outside is chilly for Texas. You’re wrapped in a sweatshirt. For the first time since he’s known you, all of your tattoos are hidden, most of your skin is covered.

You blink owlishly, your fingers flexing nervously around the cups in your hands. “I brought you coffee,” you offer.

He makes a noncommittal noise and jerks his chin towards the door behind the counter. “C’mon, I’m already set up.” Joel turns.

“Oh,” you say, your voice following him to the back. “I’m sorry, I didn’t think I was late.”

“You aren’t,” he grumbles softly. “Had another client this mornin’,” he says, needlessly adjusting and straightening the supplies he had set out, keeping his back to you.

He isn’t sure how he’s supposed to get through this with you—ain’t sure how he’s supposed to make sense of how much it hurt that you’d stopped hanging around. There’s a feeble little thread of hope in his heart that you’ll explain it away, that you even noticed you’d changed your routine. A tiny, weak little thing that makes him hope you thought about him too.

Stupid.

That painful tug of hope makes him feel like a teenager, like an idiot kid who read into every little thing like it was a sign until reality started to distort.

He’s always been that way, hopeful and goddamn stupid. It’s why he hasn’t really been with anyone since Sarah’s mother left. It’s how he got tangled up with Sarah’s mom in the first place. He gets stupid when he thinks he feels something, and he’s never been good at figuring how to hold onto something like that, something so delicate.

He always ends up loving too hard, too much. He always crushes the thing before it has a chance to bloom. His girls, they were his only exception, the one thing he was mostly good at taking care of.

“Guess the coffee was a stupid move, huh?”

Joel turns at the sound of your voice, pulled away from the half self-deprecating thoughts floating through his mind, and finds you hovering awkwardly in the doorway, fingers fidgeting anxiously around the cups. You look like you did the first time you came into the shop, stiff and unsure, wide eyes peering at him like you’re waiting for him to give you a reason to run.

The doe waiting for the snap of the twig beneath a hunter’s boot once again.

Something twinges in his chest, the sharp pain slicing through bone and tendon.

He doesn’t want to be the hunter to your doe.

“No,” he straightens, making an effort to soften his voice. “‘Course not.”

You step cautiously closer, extending one of the cups toward him. “Well, it kinda is.” You smile a little. “You won’t be able to drink it while you work, contamination and all. I just—I was on autopilot again, I guess.”

He takes it from you, the paper cup warm in his hand, and tries not to think about how autopilot for you meant unthinkingly buying a cup of coffee for him.

Again, you’d said. Have you done it before? Accidentally bought coffee he never received?

“Well, thank you, sweetheart.”

You swallow and glance away, nodding at the ground instead.

A long silence stretches between you, and unlike all the times you came into the studio before—it's awkward and heavy. He takes a sip of the coffee and finds it sours instantly in his stomach, mixing unpleasantly with the nerves.

Yeah, he’s exactly like a damn kid.

And he’s not good at this. He’s never been good about bridging silent gaps.

Not with words, anyway.

It doesn’t help that you seem to take up the whole room, the smell of sun and coffee and leaves curling on the air.

He sets the cup aside and goes about washing his hands instead. “Go on and get comfortable,” he directs over his shoulder. “Just like before.”

When he’s done scrubbing his hands in the sink and putting on gloves and fighting the urge to inhale the scent of you penetrating every cubic inch of air in the room, he turns to find you sitting and stripping out of your sweatshirt.

He inhales sharply when the shirt beneath lifts with the material, exposing him to a strip of your skin. You tug it back down, hiding skin that he’s dreamed of in the last three weeks, that he’d like to tease his fingertips along, if you let him, if he could lure you that close, convince you to trust him that much.

It seems like a fucking pipe dream now.

You look soft and rumpled as you fold the sweatshirt, fisting your hands anxiously around the edges of it in your lap.

The tendons in the back of your hands flex, bone straining against the flesh. You’re tense, nervous.

“You’re alright,” he drawls, despite himself. The words come out soft, and your shoulders loosen and slump as you release a breath. Whether you stopped coming around or not, he doesn’t want to make you uncomfortable. “C’mere and lemme see it.”

You offer your arm to him and Joel takes your wrist in his hand, just like he had the last time he’d seen you. He’d touched you a lot that day, and you had let him. You’d let him touch you even after you left the studio and he hadn’t had a good excuse to keep doing it anymore.

Now, he relishes the feel of your delicate skin against his again.

“Looks good,” he says, stepping unconsciously closer to you. “Healin’ good anyway.”

You glance up, the side of your knee brushing against his thigh. Warmth radiates from your body, and settles into him in the invariably cold studio. A smile tugs at your lips and the tension disappears from your forehead. “You’re allowed to compliment your own work, you know. It’s beautiful. Probably my favorite.”

He doesn’t answer, fighting the clawing ache in his chest. “I do okay, I guess,” he concedes, turning your arm. “Just glad I didn’t hurt ya.”

You frown but don’t say anything as he goes through the motions of cleaning your skin and settling in on the stool next to you. You settle back in the chair, a cloud of your scent caccooning both of you, undercut by the annoyingly sharp smell of the disinfectant.

He covers your hand and squeezes the tight fist your hand curled into until you release the tension and relax. “Good,” he murmurs. “Good job.”

You chest hitches and you glance over at him, the movement sharp, but he doesn’t look back at you and you don’t say anything.

It’s quiet for a long time, just the buzz of the tattoo gun to keep him company.

He wonders what it is you’re thinking about. Though your body remains loose, the furrow between your brows is pinched tight in thought.

Joel doesn’t bother you, focused instead on his work, on monitoring the flex of your hand beneath his. He doesn’t strictly need to touch you like this, but he wants to, and it seems like you don’t mind.

At least, you hadn’t minded a couple weeks ago.

Maybe that’s what has your forehead so scrunched up. Maybe—

“I didn’t think you would.”

He glances up, those big eyes he sees in his dreams staring down at him. “What’s that?”

“I didn’t think you would hurt me. I mean—really, I’ve only had one bad tattoo experience,” you say with a roll of your eyes, dismissive of your own pain, like that’s not one too many times. “The rest of my—the rest of my issues are mine. Even from before that happened.” You don’t look away from him. “Besides, Ellie assured me beforehand that you have a light touch.”

Yeah, he thought he’d heard her saying that. He’d been both embarrassed about it and warmed.

“Well, I guess she’s right. Never had any complaints.” He leans back and takes his hand off of yours, flexing his fingers and stretching out the pinch in his spine.

One thing he did not relish about tattooing was the way he had to be hunched over. It makes him feel achy and old even if he knows it’d be much worse if he was still working with Tommy.

You nod and fidget with the hem of your shirt with your free hand. He watches you for a long moment, still not saying anything.

Even though things are a little awkward, he feels better, having you there again; knowing for sure that you’re okay because he’s seeing you with his own eyes. His kids might be right, that it’s all right to think of himself for once. Or, as Ellie put it, to just fucking talk to you instead of making assumptions.

“You ain’t been around much lately,” he offers, extending that metaphorically slow hand to you as he always has, asking for the nugget of whatever truth you held onto so tightly.

Maybe it was never about him, just as Sarah had said.

He looks away from your eyes, goes back to tattooing your arm, filling in your piece, the design he’d worked on for a whole summer. Just for you.

The tattoo suits you. He feels an odd kind of pride that you liked his art enough to trust him with designing something, with putting it onto your skin, and your trust is something he never could have hoped for.

“No,” you start, your voice a bit hoarse. “I guess not. I—I just figured that I didn’t have an excuse to stop by anymore.” You pause and swallow. Your voice is clearer when you speak again. “And you’d already been so nice about me taking up your time.”

Joel has to pause again and glance up, just to judge your expression. To see if you’re serious.

You aren’t looking at him, but staring at the far wall as though the most interesting thing you’ve ever seen is etched there. Your features are tense, like you’re trying not to show what you’re feeling. “Taking up my time?”

You shrug, the easily startled anxiety threading back into your eyes. “And,” your voice is shaky as you continue. “I was a little—I don’t know. Afraid. I guess.” Something must show on his face, the swoop of his gut visible on his features because you hurry to explain. “I just…I’ve never trusted someone the way I think I trust you. So. That’s scary.”

There’s a lot of things he could say, a lot of things he should say, but Joel isn’t exactly good at that kind of thing. He just knows he hates when you look at him with trepidation and weariness.

So instead, he covers your hand again and squeezes tight. He refocuses on your tattoo, on the transformation of your skin. He isn’t sure what to make of what you’d said about trust, or your honesty about it, so he pushes down the feeling that wells up into his gut at that admission. “Well, it ain’t no trouble. Havin’ you here. It was mighty quiet without you around.”

It’s hard to say, somehow, the words sticky and catching in his mouth. A quiet descends in the wake of his words, the low buzz of the tattoo gun driving him crazy. He wishes you’d say something, anything, but he doesn’t have the heart to look up and see if you’re looking at him with big, startled eyes.

“Oh,” you say eventually, softly.

And then—“It was quiet for me too. I missed coming by. Why didn’t you ask after me? Ellie could have gotten to me.”

Joel had considered it. He’d figured you’d had good reason to stay away. And he guesses you had, just not the ones he thought.

It hadn’t been about him, really.

“You’re real skittish,” he settles on telling you the truth. “Didn’t want to push you further than you’d already gone.”

He nods, wipes your skin gently with a damp paper towel. “I looked out for ya. Kept thinkin’ y’da come by.”

“Oh,” you say again and this time the word is laced with surprise. “I…didn’t know that. I looked for you too.”

Joel shrugs in what he hopes is an offhand manner. He cares more than he wants to admit, more than he can admit.

“It’s just because you missed having someone bring you coffee,” you tease gently when he doesn’t respond.

He snorts and the lingering tension dissolves. “Don’t do that again,” he says, still not looking up at you. “Coffee or not.”

Joel shrugs on a dark red flannel before he shuffles you out the shop’s front door.

The air is chilly but dry, and it burns the inside of your nose. In truth, the temperature is mild, not worthy of shivers or flannels, but compared to the unending heat of summer it's practically cold outside.

The skin of your forearm feels warm beneath your opposite hand clutched over the fresh ink, safely and carefully wrapped. You can’t stop looking at your now completed tattoo, still smiling to yourself about the way Joel seemed irritated that you not only paid him for his work but tipped him too. You told him to think of it as repayment for the tacos and lemonade but that had only made him frown harder.

“You don’t have to walk me home,” you say, even though the last thing in the world you want is for him to let you go on alone.

“Sure I do,” he says, turning away from the door.

Arguing wouldn’t change his mind, and you don’t really want to anyway.

Joel urges you down the sidewalk, his gait jilted and slow.

There’s an inch of space between you as you walk down the lamplit street. The horizon is a haze of orange, casting the wide open sky in shades of lavender and periwinkle as it darkens and evening sets in. You can feel the heat of Joel’s body, so close by.

It’s nothing compared to his hand over yours, the warmth and all consuming size of it. You don’t know if you’ll ever have cause to feel his hand again, now that he was done tattooing you.

Joel shifts so his hand hovers at your lower back, guiding you lightly. The gesture makes your skin prickle pleasantly, itchy with heat and that strange want that never went away. You wish he’d put his hand against your spine like he had when he’d gotten you tacos, so you could lean back into it, so you could feel the pressure of his hand.

He doesn't. Joel walks you along the street quietly, his hand painfully close to you and yet not close enough.

That alone makes you ache.

You don’t expect him to say anything as you walk along, mainly because you’re the one that’s always nervously chattering at him, half waiting to be snapped at. He tells you about Sarah’s course load for the upcoming fall semester and how Ellie’s nearly done at her apprenticeship. He talks quickly, like he’s trying to catch you up on a month worth of things you’d missed, like it mattered to him that you had.

He tells you about the clients he’d tattooed, and the designs he’s still working on. He wavers when he mentions the designs and you hope maybe he’ll ask you to look at some of them but he quickly moves on.

When you get close to your apartment he abruptly goes quiet and pulls his hand away from your back. Just like the last time he hovers just outside the halo of the security light over the door.

You struggle with the door like you always do until it finally pops open with a groan. This time when you hover in the doorway, you pluck up the courage to ask what you hadn’t been able to the last time.

“Would you like to come up for some coffee?”

“Late for that, ain’t it?”

Your heart sinks, breaks somewhere along your ribs. “Guess so,” you admit, gripping the edge of the door. “Thanks for walking with me, I’ll, uh—”

“But I would like that,” he cuts you off. It's so unlike him that you just stare for a moment. “If you’re offerin’, that is.”

You smile. “I am.”

He gestures you forward, reaching out to catch the door in his hand.

You slide into the dark entryway and Joel bolts the door shut behind you before following you up the stairs to the landing where you unlock your apartment door without so much struggle. “I can look at that other door,” he offers again, sounding sheepish this time, like he’s sorry for bothering you about it again.

“I’d like that,” you say, and let him in ahead of you.

You flip on the lights as you move past him to the kitchen, tiny and cluttered and too warm. You sweep your mail off the breakfast table and point Joel into one of the chairs when he starts to shrug out of the flannel.

Both chairs have jackets hanging from the back but he just drapes his over what’s already there. His shoulders strain at the material of his shirt, bunching around his biceps and under his arms, across the incredibly broad plains of his chest.

You yank your eyes away from him when you start to follow the vein in his arm, thinking you’d like to know what his skin tasted like there.

Heat floods your chest at the thought. It’s unlike you, makes you feel shaky in a good way. It’s been years since you’ve thought that about someone, and try as you might you can’t remember if you’d ever looked at your ex and thought something like that.

You wonder what that bit of skin feels like, how soft and firm the inside of his bicep must be.

He looks comfortable and domestic in the warm glow of your overhead kitchen light when he sits down.

You can’t look at him for too long without something in your pulse jumping, a raw little needy nerve that demanded attention. You want him to touch you again, to reach out and hold your hand so delicately in his.

Instead of dwelling on that thought, you turn to your coffee pot, deftly fixing it to brew before you turn to rummage through your fridge. “I have something stronger, if you want it. I don’t like drinking after getting a tattoo.”

“You shouldn’t,” he advises. “Ain’t good for healin’. You should eat somethin’, though.”

“I figured you’d have something to say about that,” you roll your eyes and turn to put the blackberry pie in your hands onto the table. “I won’t complain this time as long as you have some with me.”

He stares up at you, an odd look in his eyes. If you didn’t know better, you’d say it was affectionate. “All right, dear.”

Dear. That’s new. It makes you feel light, like bubbles are popping in your veins.

You nod at him, warmth spreading beneath your skin, before pointing to the pie. “From Flu’s. You been to Flu’s? She has the best pie. It’s blackberry.”

“Sure, me and the girls have been a few times. Coffee’s good there. Blackberry’s one of my favorites,” he rumbles, and you can’t tell if he’s lying or not. You have a feeling that even if Joel hated pie and was allergic to blackberries, you’d never hear a word about it.

Joel doesn’t look away from you. His gaze slowly shifts from your eyes, to your hand planted on your hip. He slowly reaches out and curls his hand around your wrist. The slow way he does it stills your heart and all the worries shelved inside it. All the room he gives you, to be skittish, as he called it, and afraid, makes your throat go tight and hot. He handles it like it’s not something to fix, just something to accommodate, figure out with you. “Thank you, sweetheart. Why don’t you sit down and I’ll get the coffee?”

“It’s my house,” you gripe softly, no bite behind your words. His skin is fever hot against yours, like an ember pressed against your jumping pulse.

But just like the last time he tattooed you and insisted on something to eat, he scoffs at you. His thumb slides across the inside of your wrist. “And you were the one that lost blood today. Sit, and tell me where your mugs are.”

You slowly sit across from him, your wrist still in his hand. “Good,” he releases you and stands. The little bit of praise goes straight to your belly, just like it had at the shop. It settles warm inside you, a good kind of tense. “Cups?”

You point him to the correct cabinet, exhaustion overcoming you all at once now that you’ve sat down. You watch him pour the coffee, offer to get you cream or sugar even though he doesn’t know where those are either. You have to point him to where the plates, and then the cutlery, are kept.

It's an odd little hope that flits through your mind, one that wishes for a day when he would be familiar enough with your things that he wouldn’t need to ask.

He returns to the table and cuts two even slices of pie and plates them before returning to his chair.

You’re just about to dig your fork into the pie when his hand curls around yours again. He isn’t looking at you when you glance up, glad that he still wants anything to do with you, that he so carefully touches you, gives you the thing you crave and fear and are too afraid to ask for.

“Don’t do that again.” He squeezes your wrist gently, voice that quiet, low drawl, an echo of what he’d said earlier.

It’s the same thing he’d said at the shop and you don’t have to ask what he means. You wouldn’t anyway, not when the vulnerability in his voice seems to cost him.

He’s not sure how it happens, how he spends all night at your kitchen table with your trembling pulse beneath his hand.

He’s too old to be doing this type of shit.

He’s got an ache in his neck now that’s going to get him teased by just about everyone. His girls and Tommy already get on him about being a crotchety old man—between the glasses he refuses to wear besides anytime he needs to read something small and the landline phone and his attitude generally.

Yeah, his neck and back issues are going to be next on the docket.

But he can’t really bring himself to care, not when he’s gotten to sit with you through the night and listen to your voice, not when your hand is still securely within his and you haven’t given a single indication you’d like him to let go, not when your calves are crossed with his beneath the table.

He lets himself imagine it better, imagine it more.

You curled in his lap, head on his shoulder, fingers tangled up in the fabric of his shirt or knotted into his hair. In this stupid little dream of his, you’ve just woken up instead of staying awake through the night. You say good morning and he pours you coffee.

He thinks, too, of pressing you back into the table, finding what lay hidden on your skin. He’d go to his knees for you, he’d worship at your feet, if you asked him to.

He wants it so bad he can taste it, but he settles for what he has here with you, the limit you’ve guided him to, hands tangled and legs crossed.

The sun dawns a white gold through the sheer curtains over your kitchen windows. You’d never pulled the heavier drapes closed and the street light had cast your face in shadow when you flipped out the harsh overhead light.

You watch the sunrise, and Joel watches honeyed light shift over your face.

He likes your little apartment. It’s cluttered and homey and reminds him of his parent’s kitchen when he’d been growing up. You have art and photos stuck to every inch of bare wall. The blanket over the back of your couch and the shaw over one of the chairs is crocheted. There’s evidence of all kinds of little projects scattered around your apartment.

Even the little breakfast table he sits at is hand painted.

“You never said you were an artist,” he’d said early on in the night.

“I’m not,” you’d ducked your head and deflected. “Not like you at least. It’s not like I’m any good.”

You’re plenty good. “Right,” he agreed. “Not like me. It's better than mine. You could do your own sketchin’ for a tattoo.”

Even though you’d been embarrassed he could tell you were delighted he thought so.

Now you turn your face toward him in the comfortable silence that’s descended, half your features in shadow. You smile and your teeth shine. “Good thing today’s a Sunday, right? You don’t have to worry after rushing to open the studio.”

You tug your hand back from his and stand, gathering both mugs before you cross your tiny kitchen to set about starting a new pot of coffee.

He watches you, absently stacking the plates crusted with blackberry filling.

Your shirt rides up a little when you reach for the coffee canister, a thin strip of skin showing between your rumpled shirt and your jeans. He’s reminded again of all the places he wants to touch you, to touch the soft curves of your body, trace that line of skin and seek out each of your hidden tattoos.

Not on your hip, you’d said.

So where? Where hasn’t he seen?

The velvet of your thighs, the silken skin of your ribs and back, between your breasts, your sternum.

The kitchen fills slowly with light, orange and red on the far wall, undulating lines of light slicing apart the worn wooden floor. He picks apart the place with his eyes while your back is turned—the paintings and photos you don’t think anything of, the postcards stuck to the fridge, the hand painted, hand knitted-ness of everything, the mismatched mugs and glasses, chipped at the corners, the tiny dish of kibble on the floor—

“You got a cat?” He figures he would have seen a dog by now.

You turn and follow his eyes before you smile. “Sometimes. He comes and goes whenever he likes. He’s not really mine.”

“How’s that?”

“How’s what?”

“That he comes and goes?” Joel stands, meanders a couple steps toward you, trying to discreetly stretch out the throbbing nerve in his back.

“I leave the window cracked in my bedroom.”

And he hates that, just like he hates the thought of you leaving your door unlocked and he just like he hates the thought of you struggling with the door in the middle of the night when he hasn’t walked you home. “Shouldn’t be doin’ things like that.”

“Knew you wouldn’t like it,” you smile, repeating your earlier sentiment and he has a feeling it’s going to become a common refrain. “He’s probably sleeping just now.”

He shakes his head, the corner of his mouth twitching. “You’ll drive me crazy.”

“This town is the safest place I’ve ever been.”

“Hate to see where you’ve been before.”

You laugh and ask him if he wants to get breakfast when—

“Shit,” he slides a hand over his face. “I told my girls we’d have breakfast. Start of the school year tradition, Sarah's first day back is Monday. I gotta drive down to Austin.”

“It’s still early,” you reassure him without turning, but he can see the way your cheek curves with a smile he can’t see. “I’ll put your coffee in a thermos to go.”

Joel takes the last few steps toward you and leans against the counter. Your breath hitches and your eyes flick up to his, big and shining bright as they always are. A slash of sun falls over them, lighting up your irises. The coffee pot bubbles and hisses, percolating slowly and you don’t look away.

Your lips part softly and your breath fans across his chin. “Don’t gotta leave this minute. I got some time,” he says, watching those doe eyes of yours flick across his face, to the corner of his mouth.

You move a bit closer, your foot slotting between his, and he feels like you’ve finally drifted close enough. Finally come close enough to feel safe, to rest.

You lean into him first, eyes fluttering closed, shoulders relaxing against the line of his body. Joel presses one arm around you, slides his fingers along the column of your spine, and for a moment you stiffen in the cage of his arms.

“You’re all right,” he murmurs and loosens his hold a fraction, but your body suddenly goes lax against him. Your nose slots against his throat, fingers curling gently into his t-shirt. You release a long, slow breath against his throat. “You’re okay.”

He isn’t sure what he’s trying to reassure you of, but it doesn’t much matter because you seem to know, to get his meaning.

“I know I am,” you sigh.

He can feel you breathing, the rise and fall of your lungs, the press of your breasts against his chest. You’re soft in his arms. “Good,” he says, nose against your temple as he slides his hand to the back of your neck, keeping you pressed there. “Good girl.” He feels you shiver and holds you closer, tighter than should be possible.

Your hand is hot when it slips beneath his shirt, pressed against his lower back for the briefest moment before it disappears and roots down into his shirt again, your breath shaky.

When he rubs the tense muscle of your neck you make a noise that forces him to stifle a groan and pull back just slightly.

“You okay?” He asks, ignoring the fire burning low in his belly, trying to temper himself.

Your eyes are damp, the corners wet. “Sorry, sorry. Yeah, I’m—”

He cups your cheek, tilts your face up, sweeps his thumb over your cheek.

“I’m just a fucking mess, Joel. I always have been. For a long time, I have been. And I don’t know why.”

“Why what?” His eyes are on your mouth, then your eyes, the image of the divot in the bottom of your lip lingering in his mind. “Sweetheart?”

The big, scared, doe-eyed look you send him breaks his heart. “Why it’s so hard. To touch people and be touched.”

“You’re doin’ okay,” he strokes your cheek again, slides his other hand to your hip. “Seems to me anyway.”

“For now. I’m work. I always have been. And I’m more trouble than I’m worth.”

He thinks of your pretty little apartment decorated with your own arts and crafts that you dismiss with a wave of your hand, the way you think you bother him, your insistence of paying him back for his time. You make yourself small, and he thinks you have more scars and worries from the past than you realize.

“Trouble? You’re the least troublesome person I know,” he says. “My idiot brother, Tommy, now he’s trouble. Still gotta bail him outta trouble sometimes. You? Nothin’ about you is trouble.” You lean into his hand, watching him closely.

He can’t believe his silent extended hand, his patient hand, has been rewarded with this. “And I don’t mind hard work.”

You search his eyes for a long time, not blinking, not looking away, as you reach up and hook one hand around his wrist. He can see you trying to convince yourself to believe him. You swallow and place your trust in him again, if not necessarily your belief. “Okay.”

“All right. You wanna get breakfast with me and my girls? I’ve been wantin’ you to meet Sarah.”

“She won’t mind?” you ask, gently pulling yourself out of his hands, tugging his hand away from your face.

He lets you go, recognizes the trapped, pained, fearful wanting on your face. You need space. “They think I don’t know it’s more for me than them. They stopping carin’ about it sometime in middle school. Hell, Ellie ain’t even in school anymore. I’m holdin’ on to them bein’ kids, I guess.”

You nod. “Okay.”

He stands aside and lets you fix the coffees. He pulls his flannel off the back of your chair when he passes it on the way out and drapes it around your shoulders.

When you’re in his truck, fiddling with his radio, he catches you clutching it closer, your nose dipped into the collar.

💞 Thank you for reading! Comments and feedback are so appreciated. 💞

#joel miller x reader #joel miller x you #tlou fanfiction #the last of us fanfiction #the last of us #joel miller #pedro pascal #pedro pascal characters #honeyed fic

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xxliliana-screamsxx · 1 year

Text

SALLY FACE HEAD CANONS 💙

(I'm bored so why not)

Disclaimer: this contains mild nsfw so if you aren't into that kind of stuff, I have some general HCs too so need to feel left out ☺️ (characters are Sal and Larry 😊)

Sal Fisher 💙

He would most definitely plan treehouse dates

(TW) If you have SH scars, he will draw little stars, cats, hearts etc. Over them💞

He tries to be the giver in the relationship, but he always ends up being the one who has his head buried in your chest

Kiss him all over his prosthetic, he loves it ❤️

If you ask if you can play with his hair, he will 100% let you

Loves it when you scratch his scalp (he has a sensitive scalp so plz run your fingers through his hair)

Back to his sensitive scalp, he wants to tell you how good it feels but he can't describe it without it sounding pervy so he just keeps quiet

Would definitely rest his head on your thighs

You have boobs? Well they're his pillows now

He is great at comforting you 💖

If you're having a panic attack or you're just worried about something, he will be there to help you through it all 😚

His scent is like lavender mixed with a dash of an old book kinda smell and cigarette smoke. Ya know? Since he's around Larry a lot he'd probably have a slight cigarette smell to him.

Larry Johnson 🤎

He's a tits guy...prove me wrong

He's definitely a giver

Smoke sesh dates 😩👌 perfection

This man doesn't give a fuck who's watching, he will gladly make out with you in front of whoever

Just like Sal, he uses your boobs as a pillow

Not so great at comforting people as much as Sal but he tries okay 😭

You know how some plugs 🔌 will gives a few girls the "pretty discount"? Larry will give you that good kush for free and not just bc you're his gf but bc boobies 🧍(can't blame him, boobs are great just not when you have to deal with them 🥲)

KISS. HIS. CHEST. 👏👏

Bro LOVES when you kiss his chest, goes absolutely feral for chest kisses bro 🫠

Loves it when you braid his hair

Will definitely show the gang after you braid his hair

His scent is like fabric softener mixed with cigarette smoke, with a hint of marijuana

NSFW HCs❤️

Sal fisher 💙

He's a switch ❤️

He's a slut for chubby girls (same)

He likes giving and making you feel good but he LOVES it when you make him feel like he's on cloud 9 😌👌

When you guys both started being intimate with each other, he was a nervous boi. Ofc you guys both started out being Virgins and it was quite obvious that neither of you had any idea how to start

Sal was very nervous his first time, so he asked for you to be on top

The boy is touch starved, so when you gave him the littlest bit of skin to skin contact, oh girl he MELTED 🫠

Ever since you guys tested the waters with what you like during sex, he has come to like being the bottom a lot but he still loves making you feel good so he'll do top service 👌

He's a whiny boy, he most definitely whimpers... don't argue with me cuz me and you both know that he would 👁️👁️

Now a question that has probably been floating in all of our minds...does the prosthetic stay on during sex??? The answer is... occasionally.

Though he will take it off sometimes but he mainly takes it off when he's doing top service cuz it's gonna be hella hard to breathe with that on.

Please PLEASE FOR THE LOVE OF SATAN PRAISE HIM 😩🙏

he most DEFINITELY has a praise kink, tell him how good he is, tell him that he's being such a good boy please 😩

Now for other kinks, he doesn't seem pretty vanilla but he also doesn't seem pretty kinky either. So I think he's kinky to an extent, like he'll be kinky with you only if you're comfortable with it

I feel like his kinks are edging, bondage, mommy kink. I feel like he likes receiving edging and bondage to an extent, and the mommy kink was something that he found out he had when you guys were at it

Like imagine you riding him and you keep on edging him and all of a sudden he moans out "mommy~" and it shocked both of you 💀 you guys both stop dead in your tracks and he starts apologizing for calling you mommy and ofc you kinda liked it 👀

So from then on he has gotten a mommy kink from that experience 🫠

Larry Johnson 🤎

Like I said with him being a tits guy, he ADORES your boobs.

When I say he adores them, I mean by full on worship, it doesn't matter if they're small or big as long as they are there, he'll worship them 🙏

He definitely loves chubby girls, don't argue with me about it🧍

About the body worship thing, he will spend hours on end buried in your chest

He'll run his hands over your curves and feel every curve,dip,scars, and any marks you have 🫠(I'm melting over my own HCs damn 💀)

He is a top but a service top 🔝

He's chill with whatever you wanna try in the bedroom as long as you're okay with it

I have a feeling that he would be a bottom for you if that's something you wanna try out

Not full on bottom but the type of bottom that praises you and worships you while you use them

He's good with his fingers fsfs 😩

If you have SH scars, he will kiss your scars and make you feel like the only girl in the world ❤️

I have a feeling that when he climaxes he slurs out something that just makes the butterflies in your stomach do flips like, "God you're so beautiful" "I love you" "I wanna stay like this forever"

High sex...🧍 don't lie you thought about it too

I think that in the relationship he would care a lot about you more than himself and he'd personally come to your apartment and check up on you

His kinks would be bondage, voyeur, edging

His moans are angelic 🫠😩

Okay that's all I got for now baby bats, hope you liked it and I shall disappear for the next week aka going to school and failing all classes in the process lmao. Love you all 💜

#sally face smut #larry johnson x reader #sal fisher x reader smut #sal fisher x reader #sally face x reader #sally face headcanons #sally face #sal fisher smut #larry johnson smut #larry johnson

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ervotica · 5 months

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hey babes, since we both have a raging crush on cato could u do something where a guy is harassing you and he comes to ur rescue 😍 (cliché ik but like he would be so hot doing it, we love a protective man)

pairing: cato hadley x fem!reader

warnings: cato is possessive and hot, the district 6 boy is a jerk (idk if this is accurate to canon at all but idc sue me)

hunger games masterlist

You're watching Cato practice throwing spears with Marvel on the first day of training. You observe the way his biceps flex, pushing the veins out of his arms as he lifts the weapon over his shoulder and puts his weight behind the throw- you really do pity the ones who will be on the receiving end of him in the coming weeks.

You glance down, twisting a knife between your fingers, watching enraptured as it glides through your digits and light bounces from the metallic blade, throwing a myriad of whites and blues across the other weapons hung on the walls.

You don't hear the boy sneak up behind you, his broad hands coming to rest on your waist in a place he most definitely should not be touching; your elbow drives back into him instinctually as you spin to face him, and you pin him to the wall by your forearm. It's the boy from District 6 - Jason, you recall. He's seemed to be keeping a low profile until now, until his disdain towards Cato has seemed to reignite in a bout of fury. And, well, he has to take it out on someone.

"What do you think you're doing?"

He hums noncommittally.

"I think they call this making alliances, sweetheart," Jason says, grinning crudely. Your blood is running hot, rushing in your ears as you push against his neck with your arm and bare your teeth.

"You call me sweetheart again and I'll cut your eyes out. I don't care where we are," you spit, stepping back. "Leave me alone."

His hand bunches into the back of your t-shirt as you start to retreat and he yanks you backwards; your back hits the wall with a loud thump and you hiss, kicking out at him as he presses his chest to yours and rakes his eyes over every inch of your body.

"You don't wanna do this," you laugh, a smirk creeping onto your face that you just can't hold back as you let him hold you there and wait.

"Why's that? I don't see anyone else around," he murmurs, his face so close you can feel his hot breath. "Just you and me."

You raise your eyebrows before you're tilting your head and screaming over his shoulder.

"Cato! Cato!"

Cato's head snaps up and he thrusts the spear he was using into Marvel's hands; he's across the training room floor before you can even shriek his name again.

Jason doesn’t have time to as much as step back before Cato is behind him, chest heaving in a barely concealed fury, pale face flushed and ready for another fight. Jason is lifted seemingly out of thin air by only the back of his neck and he starts to thrash as he’s tossed across the hard training room floor.

“Are you stupid?” he seethes. “She told you to leave her alone! You’ve just sealed your fate, you’re the first one I’m coming after when we get to that arena.”

You creep up next to him, leaning coyly against Cato’s shoulder as you stare down at the District 6 boy.

“I told you. You shouldn’t have done that,” you tease. Cato's thick arm comes up and over your shoulders protectively as he holds him to the floor with his boot clad foot.

"Come on," Cato says. "We're leaving."

His grip is like iron around your hand, his knuckles white as the blood drains from them. You can feel the anger rolling off of him in waves - shoulders squared, jaw ticking.

He drags you all the way back to the tribute quarters, slamming the door closed behind the pair of you and spinning on his heel to pace the length of the room.

"Cato, c'mon," you murmur. "He's just an asshole. He can be the first one we kill in there."

"It's more than that," he groans. "Why does he think he can come and talk to you like that? That prick has overstepped more than once."

"I know." You tug him back towards you and cradle the side of his neck; he's hot, and his pulse thrums under your touch. "It doesn't matter anymore, he's a prick and we'll get rid of him."

"Okay," Cato whispers, leaning down to brush his nose against your own. You hum and push out the creases in his forehead where his brow has knit. His eyes soften at the gesture, and you smile in response, scrunching your nose as he rubs his cheek against yours. He grumbles.

"Stop being so pretty, I'm trying to focus here."

You laugh and wrap your arms fully around his shoulders and neck, reaching up on your tiptoes to slot your lips between his. His muscles, coiled tight and tense, start to relax at your touch. He presses into you, deepening the kiss, hungry for you. He's consumed by it, by the possessiveness he feels over you, by the rage that Jason laid a hand on you at all. You lose yourself in it: in his smell and his touch and how he feels against you enveloping your senses. Reluctantly, you pull away and grin at him, knuckles brushing his sharp cheekbone.

"C'mon, we gotta start making a plan for the games. I'll put Jason first on the list."

#writer #writers on tumblr #writing #cato hadley #cato x reader #cato hadley x reader #cato Hadley x you #writing for fun #thg cato #thg fic #thg fanfiction #the hunger games #the hunger games fanfiction #the hunger games fic #cato hadley fic #cato hadley fanfic #the hunger games x you #the hunger games x reader #the hunger games x y/n

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roosterr · 3 months

Text

i've known war

john 'soap' mactavish x gn!reader wc: 9.3k (whoops) summary: you're alive. he can get you back, he can hold you in his arms again. warnings: established relationship, angst and sadness and depression, hurt/comfort, canon typical violence, graphic description of injury, mentions of torture, eventual happy ending, military and medical inaccuracies, pls ignore any plot holes i beg

requested here! follow up to love you from afar, but can be read as a standalone. im so sorry this took me so long to write lmao.

it always feels like the first time when you kiss him. even now, years down the line, the sparks, the warmth, the daze that you leave him in; he truly believes it will never get old.

the way you look, standing in the open doorway of the helicopter, silhouetted against the bright blue sky, it makes his head feel so fuzzy he almost forgets why you're all here in the first place.

it's the sweet sound of his name passing your lips that pulls him back to the present, your voice sending his stomach fluttering.

"earth to johnny," you chuckle, turning to face him and resting your weight against one side of the open door, "what're you thinking so hard about?"

he can't help the smile that breaks out at the sound of your laughter. "just you." johnny replies, closing the small distance between you and snaking an arm around your waist. you smile as he leans in closer, murmuring low in your ear, "and, how i cannae wait to get ye home."

you laugh again, placing a hand on his chest but not quite pushing him back. "we've got a job to do first."

he takes your hand in his, running his thumb over your knuckles. "then we'd better get a move on, eh?"

"i'll race you," you grin at him, haloed by the light of the sun so beautifully he has to snap himself out of his reverence to respond.

"oh, you're on."

perhaps it was slightly irresponsible the way he was rushing the others along for his own gain, but within a matter of minutes they're breaching the facility and well on their way to being done with this.

it's only when he's stalking along a dimly lit corridor that he slows down. something was bothering him, an off feeling in the back of his mind that he just can't ignore.

before he can think about it any further, a boom shakes the walls, filling the air with dust and obscuring his vision even more. it was close enough to start a faint ringing in his ears, coming from back the way he came; where he'd split up with ghost and, more importantly, you.

he should stay on target, continue with what they're here to do, his job – but what if you were in trouble? if there's a chance you need his help, he couldn't risk it. it takes less than a second for him to turn back, making the decision to check on what caused the explosion before continuing.

quietly stalking back down the corridor, it takes him slightly longer to register the fact that he hasn't heard anything over the radio; no updates, no clever remarks from ghost, nothing. they worked not fifteen minutes ago, just after you'd split up and checked them. surely nothing could've happened in such a short space of time?

he does his best to push through the sinking feeling that tries to drag him down, but it's stubborn, creeping in from the corners of his mind.

he reaches where he left you in half the time it took him to walk away, the intersection of two corridors just as empty as the rest of the halls. he points his flashlight in the direction you went, and the feeling in his gut gets worse.

something glinting in the light catches his attention. the end of the corridor is collapsed, when it definitely hadn't been before, but it's what lies in front of the rubble that he zeroes in on. partially obscured by the layer of filth and blood coating it, there's no mistaking it when he kneels down, dropping his rifle to the ground beside him, and carefully takes the metal in his trembling hand.

it's a pair of id tags.

he numbly calls your name. it bounces off the walls and echoes back to him. the blood runs through the creases of his hand, staining the flesh. the letters of your name are clear through the dirt.

no. you can't be gone.

he looks up to the rubble, shrouded in darkness, back down to your tags, back up to the rubble, and there's a hand just visible under the concrete that looks sickeningly like yours and–

he tears his gaze away, back down to your tags. the chain is snapped, like it had been ripped off in a hurry, as if you'd known you were going to die and wanted to make sure he would find them–

no, no no. you're not dead. you can't be. he just saw you fifteen minutes ago, he bumped his helmet against yours in lieu of a kiss like he always did before you parted ways. you were fine and you were smiling at him. it was only fifteen minutes, you were right here, he can still hear your voice taunting him about the race between you, it was only fifteen minutes–

a heavy hand comes down on johnny's shoulder, startling him out of his panicked daze and instinctively he jumps up and swings his arm at whoever stuck up on him.

ghost catches his forearm easily, his eyes moving between your tags clutched in johnny's fist to the wreckage behind him. when he meets johnny's watery eyes again, the coldness in his gaze seems to soften as he arrives at the same conclusion.

the ringing in johnny's ears hasn't left. in fact, it's gotten worse.

"we– we gotta find 'em," johnny's breath comes out shallow and ragged, the panic slowly rising in his chest through the initial numbness. "fucks sake, they cannae– we– we–"

"johnny." ghost interrupts his sputtering short, bracing both hands on his biceps and giving him a gentle, grounding shake. "...come on."

"no! simon we–" his breath catches in his throat, heart constricting painfully beneath his sternum as he grips the front of ghost's vest in desperation. why was ghost giving up so easily? didn't he care? didn't he want to find you?

ghost lowers his gaze, tearing away from the distraught expression on the sergeant's face. "they're gone, soap."

"shut the fuck up!" johnny growls, despair seeping into his voice with every second that passes without you. he tries to shake ghost's hands off, but he doesn't budge. "ye dinnae ken that! they're still here somewhere, we cannae leave without 'em!"

he's gripping your tags like a lifeline, the metal searing against his palm and heavier than anything else he'd ever carried. he shouldn't have them, they shouldn't be in his hand, they should be around your neck, you should be here, with him, and not…

it's too much. his knees give out from under him and, despite ghost's firm grip on his shoulders, he sinks to the floor with his head in his hands.

"simon, fuck– please…" it's a whisper, under his breath, but he knows ghost heard from how he crouches down beside him, laying an arm over his heaving shoulders as he steadily begins to sob.

it's not real. it can't be real. he wants this to be a nightmare so fucking badly, but the pain in his chest is far too real, his tears burning tracks down his face, the weight of your absence pressing down on him and crushing him under the pressure.

he barely notices when price and gaz appear in the hall ahead of them, just about registering the sound of the debris crunching under their boots as they approach. the pair don't say anything as they take in the scene, looking down with furrowed brows at where johnny and ghost are crouched on the floor.

the captain opens his mouth to ask, but ghost cuts him of with a solemn shake of his head.

words are exchanged, but johnny doesn't hear them. his head feels impossibly light, an expanding pressure beneath his temples that makes it hard to think. the ringing keeps getting worse.

the sound of gunfire makes it through the fog. gaz and ghost each take one of his arms, hauling him to his feet and essentially dragging him after the captain as they make their way back out of the building. he can't bring himself to fight them. he blinks, and finds himself strapped into his seat, the one next to him hauntingly empty.

price is talking into the radio, to laswell he assumes, but johnny doesn't register anything he says – anything except the last two words:

"...one k.i.a."

the air is thick with a kind of tension he's never felt before, a shroud of numbness that he can't seem to shake. when they land it follows them, seeping into the air on base and pushing down on whoever crosses their path. none of them have to ask to understand what happened.

johnny keeps your tags, clutches them close to his heart, and practically bites the head off of anyone who tries to take them from his white-knuckled grip, even as he gets checked out in the medical wing. his quietness puts the medics on edge, he can tell. something about the way he doesn't even flinch when they cleanse his wounds, the polar opposite to his his usual talkative nature, it tells them there's no use trying to console him. they try to convince him to let the tags go, but he doesn't acknowledge their words.

the broken chain stays firmly wrapped around his palm until he's staring down his own hollow face in the bathroom mirror. he'd turned the sink on fifteen minutes ago to wash the blood away, the water so hot it fogs up his reflection, but he can't bring himself to put his hands under the stream.

because it's your blood, not just the usual grime from missions. if he washes it off, he's washing you off, and he doesn't want to do that, no matter how disgusting it is.

there's a knock at the door, and only then does he realise how long he's been staring at the red that decorates his hands. he still makes no effort to move.

despite his lack of response, gaz opens the door and meets his eyes in the mirror. there's a pause as he waits for johnny to say something, but when he only lets the silence go on, he takes it upon himself to approach.

"soap…" he utters, brows tilting in concern watching his friend continue to stare absently into the mirror. with a deep sigh, kyle takes his empty fist and pries his fingers from his palm. johnny's eyes gravitate to the fresh blood that wells up in the crescent indents. watching the red droplets fall, disappearing into the running water, the pain finally registering in his mind when kyle presses a cloth to his hand.

the sting of the hot water is there, a distant feeling as johnny allows him to wash the blood away, never saying a word as he watches kyle's efforts, like an observer of his own form, right there but looking in from the outside.

kyle reaches for your tags, but his fingers barely brush the metal before johnny is shoving him back with a rush of anger that happens so fast he doesn't even have time to process his own reaction.

with a thud, kyle's back hits the wall and for a moment neither of them dare move. they watch each other in silence, wide-eyed shock mirrored in both their expressions.

"i…" i'm sorry. the words catch in his chest, falling into the void there and never escaping for gaz to hear. he can't let him touch your tags. it's the only part of you he has left. "...don't touch 'em."

kyle squeezes his eyes shut, breathing a deep sigh through his nose. "alright, i'm sorry, i won't touch them." his tone is low and careful as he steps closer again, hands open so johnny can see them. he feels like a feral animal, being coaxed to let kyle approach. "but you need to rest, mate."

the weeks blend together after that day. some days johnny feels like the shock will never wear off, like he's living on autopilot. others, it all comes crashing down on him and even dragging himself out of bed becomes a challenge.

his dreams are plagued with images of you, lifeless and cold. it stops him from sleeping most nights, but others are filled with memories of your life together playing on loop, a constant reminder of what he can never have again.

the room you used to share is always filled with flowers; gardenias, gladioli, forget-me-nots, and anything else he sees that he thinks you'd like. when they wilt, and eventually die, he presses the petals in the pages of his sketchbook, keeping them in a box next to the very first flowers he ever got you, the memories preserved forever under your – his bed.

that same sketchbook that's filled with page after page of your image, some from the multitude of pictures he keeps of you, and when he inevitably runs out of references, he draws you from memory. it gets to the point where he can't pick up a pencil without your face haunting him; you always did love his art, even if he didn't think it was any good.

he knows he's not the only one taking it hard. the others are different too; gaz is quieter, something more serious in his eyes now. the captain doesn't appear moved on the surface, and neither does ghost, but when they look at the empty seat where you used to sit, the memory of you is evident in the way their shoulders deflate ever so slightly.

once word spreads about what exactly happened, the never-ending condolences and pitying looks from the people around base gets old very quickly. they tell him how they're so sorry for his loss and what happened to you was so tragic, and it shouldn't annoy him as much as it does, but he can't help the anger that bubbles up in his chest when they talk about you.

he doesn't want to hear it, and every time he has to listen to their pitying comments it only makes him resent them more. they didn't know you, they didn’t care, they probably didn't even know who you were before you died. they could never hope to understand what you meant to him, to the taskforce, the gap in their team that you left behind.

it's when someone suggests moving on from you that it all finally bubbles over.

six months later, a long time since that day but somehow no time at all. he'd gone out for drinks for the first time in a while, after some gentle coercion from simon, along with another group of soldiers staying on base.

he didn't even want to go, not really, but something in him knew he couldn't carry on like he had been. he needed some form of normalcy, one night where he can pretend everything is fine and you're just waiting for him back home, to just forget.

it didn't take him long to realise going out with them was a mistake. almost immediately he was dragged into a conversation with a few guys from another unit, and despite his many attempts they just wouldn't leave him be.

somehow, after about an hour of mindless chatter, they land on the topic of their love lives and recent conquests, and johnny immediately felt the hair on the back of his neck stand up. he wanted to slip away, avoid what he knew was coming at any cost, but he couldn't get away fast enough.

one of them brings up your name, they all look to him with a sort of curiosity that makes his skin crawl. they ask him if he's planning on staying hung up on you forever. johnny says it's only been six months. one of them laughs and tells him it's just sad, and from the looks of it you weren't anything special.

johnny smashes a glass over his head. price benches him for a few weeks after that.

it's hell, being left behind, alone, while the others went on like usual, and truthfully he starts to resent them all, bit by bit from the first time he's left on the tarmac. it felt like they didn't care, that johnny's heart, his life, his soul has changed but they carried on without looking back once. he isolates and shuts them out in a fit of misplaced anger, building the walls around his heart higher and higher and letting that resentment fester.

the day of your funeral brings it all crashing down. after all those months of waiting, johnny didn't even make it more than five lines into the speech he'd prepared before he's breaking down and stumbling out the side door in a hyperventilating mess. simon follows behind like his shadow, sitting down with him when he slides down the wall with a hand clutching his chest. he cries into simon's shoulder for rest of the service, releasing all the pent up anguish he'd been trying to keep inside in a catharsis he didn't realise he needed.

when they get back to base the next morning, johnny’s practically begging to be allowed back in the field. he found himself missing the chaos, the unpredictability of the battlefield was where he was in his element. this job was how you met, how you got together, how you lived. he never felt closer to you than when he was out in the field with adrenaline pumping through his veins.

it takes some convincing, but price gives in and everything feels like it's back to normal. missions are quieter than they'd ever been, but johnny finds it doesn't bother him anymore. he feels your presence by his side like the sun on his back, always with him, like his guardian angel.

it's six more months before anything changes.

in the back of the helicopter, a few minutes out from the landing site, an oddly comforting sense of déjà vu washes over him. the bright blue expanse of the sky, the warmth of the sun on his skin, he almost feels that if he turned to his left, he'd see you sitting there with that same smile lighting up your face.

his fingers tighten around your tags.

"you watchin', bonnie?" he presses his lips to the cool metal, feeling your name under his skin as he mumbles to himself. his gaze finds the roof of the helicopter, and even without looking he knows the others are watching him, that familiar solemn look on their faces.

they were doing this for you. everything johnny did was for you. he puts your tags safely away in the pocket if his vest closest to his heart.

the helicopter jolts as it lands, and with no more than a second's hesitation he's shooting up from his seat, a renewed energy flooding his body to the tips of his fingers. they step out into the biting air, a chill than not even the afternoon sun could stave off, and quickly begin their march into the small facility.

"you two, take that side. gaz, with me." price commands, and with a sharp nod from the three of them, they split up and begin their canvassing. they were here for intel, but there was no guarantee they were alone, despite the emptiness of the halls they move through.

their footsteps echo off the walls, only the distant howling of the wind outside to accompany them. the hairs on the back of johnny's neck were on end, an unease setting off alarm bells in the back of his mind following behind ghost.

the déjà vu from earlier isn't comforting anymore. he doesn't feel you watching over him, and the feeling only gets stronger as they approach a doorway ahead, bathed in a red light.

ghost pauses in the entrance, looking back at johnny and waiting for his affirming nod before pushing forward. the room is empty, the same as the rest of the building, save for the table sitting against the far wall.

there's something else there, he notices as he creeps closer to get a better look. a frown darkens his expression. it's a laptop, untouched and central on the table, a strange contrast to the almost methodical emptiness around it.

"oi, check this." johnny calls, turning around as ghost stalks over with a similar confusion on his face.

"that what we're here for?" he asks, examining the laptop with a deep frown casting shadow over his eyes.

"looks like it." johnny replies, slowly and carefully picking it up as his frown deepens. he was half expecting it to somehow blow up, but when he lifts the screen it lights up to the desktop with no issue. "that's convenient."

"very convenient..." ghost grunts, jerking his head in the direction of the door and speaking into the radio as he walks ahead of johnny. "price, we've got it. headin' to exfil now."

back on base a few hours later, the four of them with the addition of laswell sit around the table in a meeting room with the doors firmly shut, eyes locked onto the laptop with rapt tension as gaz opens the only file they could recover from the device.

the video starts abruptly with 'the mask' – the pretentious alias of man that heads the organisation they've been steadily eliminating all this time – in front of the camera, the dingy room behind him barely lit, the walls splattered with what johnny could only assume was blood.

"i trust that my message has found you well, task force one-four-one." his voice comes through the speakers, crackly and distorted by the low quality recording. "you have been relentless in your pursuit of us, and i applaud you for your efforts, but it's time to put an end to this."

johnny looks back at price, watching as his expression hardens and his fingers dig into his arms where they're crossed over his chest. it's obvious they've been set up, but it's too late to be concerned with that now. the problem now is how they're going to continue knowing the enemy has information on them that they shouldn't have.

the sound of something being dragged brings his attention back to the video, facing the screen again to see another masked man dumping a person with a bag over their head onto a chair in the centre of the room.

"i have something i believe you will be interested in." the chuckle is audible in his voice even beneath the mask and through the screen.

their wrists and ankles are tied together, and if it weren't for the laboured rise and fall of their chest, johnny wouldn't be sure if they were even alive.

"fuck– a hostage?" price spits, and even without looking he knows laswell is already working on finding a location, if the sound of her rapidly typing is any indication.

"something very… precious to you."

the figure moves to stand behind the person in the chair and yanks the bag from their head. he grabs their jaw and forces them to look up, a sickening laugh meeting johnny's ears as they make eye contact with the camera.

it's…

it's you.

you're beaten and bruised and covered head to toe in blood, but it's undoubtedly you when the faceless man yanks your head up.

johnny's sure his heart stops.

you're alive. you've been alive all this time. in the hands of a terrorist, and within an inch of your life, but…

you're alive.

"drop your investigation of us, and i will let them live." the masked man stalks back around to your side, still holding your jaw in a vice grip. the way you cower, as much as you can with that man's filthy hands on you, it breaks something in johnny. how long have you been in their hands, how long have you been abused by them?

how long have you been waiting for him?

he feels sick to his stomach, but he can't tear his eyes away. the lacerations on your face, the endless bruises littering your skin – when he spots the ones around your neck, he has to swallow down the bile – and how you just seem so tired, barely even fighting to keep your eyes open.

the masked man looks down to you again, pausing as he directs you to look at him through what seems like a black eye. the five of them watch, frozen by shock or anger or both, as the man rears his hand back and slaps you across the face so hard your head whips in the other direction. a pained, defeated sound escapes you, and johnny’s sure a knife to the chest would hurt less.

"do not disappoint me, captain price, or your sergeant will regret it."

the video cuts to black.

the sight of your face is burned into johnny's retinas, every time he blinks your features are there, dripping in your own blood, the only thing he can see.

"kate, tell me you can find this." price growls behind him, his words sounding distant to johnny's ears.

she hums distractedly. "working on it."

their conversation doesn't register, floating in one ear and straight out the other. you're alive. he can get you back, he can hold you in his arms again. it's like his prayers have been answered for once in his life, and it may be some cruel trick from god to find you like this but johnny finds himself praying his thanks anyway.

"johnny…?" simon lays a hand on his shoulder, turning him in his chair to make worried eye contact with his shell-shocked expression. it jolts him out of his thoughts, the energy of the room a controlled kind of frantic as he comes back down to earth.

"that's– it's them, they're–" johnny sputters, gripping ghost's forearm with an absent desperation in his glassy eyes, "simon, they're alive."

he can't stop thinking about how empty your expression looked, the way you didn't have any fight left, and the gravity of what's been happening to you since the moment he lost you slowly creeps up on him.

have you given up hope of them finding you?

"we'll get 'em back, soap, listen to me," price drops a heavy, grounding hand on his other shoulder, halting his spiralling train of thought, "they're comin' home." his voice is resolute, no room for argument where he speaks it almost like a command.

johnny can only nod.

his head is still light as more rushed conversation happens around him. simon's hand is still on his shoulder, and that might be the only reason he hasn't completely fallen apart yet, but the thread is pulling taught enough to snap. his nails carve dents into his palms but he doesn't have the mind to unfurl them.

"sir, we've got a hit." gaz speaks up from where he's leaned over kate's shoulder, a determined glint in his eye when he meets the captain's gaze. johnny’s head snaps in his direction, his pulse quickening with every word that sparks new hope in his chest. "two hundred klicks northeast of where we found the laptop."

"good work, you two," price is pacing back and forth, scratching his beard with a calculating look on his face. they watch him for a moment, waiting for his command on what their next move will be, but johnny finds his patience wearing incredibly thin.

"the fuck we waitin' for? let's get out there'n go after the wee bastards!" he growls, his narrowed gaze darting between price and the others as he steadily grows more and more restless.

simon shakes his head from beside him, "hold your horses."

"this is delicate, we have to do this one right." price pauses, his eyes losing their hardness as he meets johnny's desperate face. "i know how much this means to you, but you're too close to this, soap."

the pause that follows that is so thick with tension it makes it hard to breath. a boiling type of rage bubbles up in his chest, extending to every trembling limb and turning his vision red. there was no way in hell he wasn't going to be there for you every step of the way when – not if – they rescued you.

"ye can get yersel' right tae fuck!" he spits, his face contorted with anger as he shoots up from his chair and points an accusatory finger at the captain. "that's too far, price, ye cannae keep me outta this!"

"johnny, sit down." simon warns, using the hand still on his shoulder to put some space between him and price, but johnny doesn't budge; this was far too important.

"yer aff yer heid, both of ye's! if ye won't let me come, i'll go mysel', ye fuckin' hear?" he growls, shaking free of simon's hand. his glare travels between him and price, hands wound into fists at his sides.

the air turns heavy as they stare each other down. if price thinks he'll back down on this, johnny would love nothing more than to prove him wrong.

he's moments away from meeting his fist to price's face when gaz stands up and gets between them. "that's his other half, sir. respectfully, he deserves to be part of this." he reasons, giving price a firm look and a small nod to johnny. "you'd be the same in his position."

the tension is palpable. he watches over gaz's shoulder as the captain deliberates, clearly having an internal battle over the decision, but eventually he sighs and fixes johnny with a stern look.

price closes the distance between them, patting gaz on the arm as he passes. "screw your head on, mactavish. we only get one shot at this, i need to know i can trust you not to fuck it up."

a spark of hope makes johnny's heart race, and he gives price a single resolute nod of confirmation. "i won't, sir."

laswell stands and walks around the table to stand beside price, a similarly firm expression. "we have to play this carefully. they wanted us to find that laptop, i have no doubt they wanted us to find where they are too."

"so what's our angle?" gaz asks.

laswell and price share a look.

"this has to be off the books, there's no way we'll get clearance for this." laswell answers, her expression turning noticeably darker, looking over to price as she continues, "if we want them back alive, we'll have to act fast. that means we're on our own."

the captain nods with no hesitation. "we are getting my sergeant back. i don't care how we have to do it."

they're loading into the back of a helo not even an hour later. the five of them, along with two field medics and the pilot, with the strict instructions in johnny's head to bring you home or to not come back at all.

there's only one coherent thought racing through his mind for the entire; you. getting you back, taking you home, finding the man that took you away from him – and hurt you – and making him pay.

he fishes your tags out of his pocket and presses them to his lips in a lingering kiss, just like he always does. soon, he thinks, it would be you he'd be kissing, not just a remnant of you.

the flight passes by so quickly it's almost as if he'd blinked and they were landing again.

the air is glacial as they ready themselves, preparing for the mask to put up a fight that they fully intend to win. the plan was decided on during the journey; kate and ghost would provide support from a distance while price, gaz, and johnny would confront the bastard head on. his focus is razor sharp, marching through the trees and underbrush, blood rushing in his ears and jaw clenched painfully tight.

the sky is just as strikingly blue as the day he lost you.

bring you home, or don't come back.

they reach a break in the trees, surrounding the small facility they tracked the video to that looked more like a derelict warehouse than a base. either way, the dark figure of their target is visible against the brick wall, surrounded by a number of his own soldiers – johnny counts six as he, price, and gaz make themselves known coming through the treeline. they share a quick look; they know how this will end.

"well met, captain," the mask calls, slowing to a stop and leaving a few metres of space between himself and the three of them, "will you make the right choice, or will your sergeant suffer for your pride, i wond–"

his monologue is cut short by a shot from the darkness of the treeline and lodging mercilessly into the base of his throat. his deadweight hits the ground with a thud that echoes, and in less than a second bullets are flying.

soap tightens his grip on his gun, raising it to glare down the sights and firing at the soldier nearest to him and dropping him with one well placed bullet to the leg and another to the face once he was on the floor.

another shot from the treeline drops one more; four left.

gaz and price take out another two between them in a similar fashion to soap, leaving two still standing – one of whom was advancing fast with the barrel of his gun pointed at soap while the other backed away.

one more shot rings out from the trees and one more body falls, but the last hostile was far too close for comfort now, johnny had no choice but to tackle him to the ground, narrowly avoiding being shot himself on the way down.

a few seconds pass as they wrestle on the ground, both trying desperately to gain the upper hand but falling just short because of the other. from his peripheral soap can see price running to his aid, but his momentary distraction allowed his assailant to take the upper hand and roll on top of him.

hands constrict around his neck, cutting off his airflow, but a well timed shot from price sends him falling over sideways, sputtering blood from the wound in his side.

soap heaves and cough, pulling air back into his lungs and glaring at the body of the man who almost got the better of him. this only meant they were one step closer to getting you back; he was one step closer to having you in his arms again. it didn't matter if he got hurt in the process.

price's outstretched hand suddenly appears in his vision, "get up soap, we've got a job to do."

his daze melts away and he takes the captain's hand, allowing himself to be pulled upright with an affirming nod shared between them.

"good aim, ma'am." gaz calls over the radio, looking down his nose at the steadily declining state of the mask; his infamous facade now cracked and broken, revealing the agonised face beneath.

"bring 'em home, boys." kate replies, and though he can't see her face johnny can imagine the commanding look she's undoubtedly wearing.

gaz backs away as johnny crosses the mess of crimson and dirt to where the mask lays, sprawled out and immobilised by his injuries but still very much alive, giving the fellow sergeant a respectful nod as he goes. "he's all yours, mate."

johnny stands over his fading form, watching with a detached look in his eye as the blood spills from the gaping wound in his neck with every struggled breath, his disjointed intake of air and the pathetic sputters as he inhales his own viscera. there's not a shred of mercy in him as he gazes down at the man, every bit of agony was completely deserved for what he did to you. the death that claws at him would be a blessing.

he gurgles to johnny, raising a weak arm to brush the hem of his trousers as he attempts to expel the words, "pl–ea– plea-se–"

johnny scoffs, dry and venomous. he has half a mind to leave him to suffer until the life finally bleeds from him, but the pure rage he feels listening to this bastard plead for help after putting you through hell for a year is far too strong for him to restrain.

it's unconscious, the way johnny's arm raises to point the barrel of his pistol squarely at the centre of his forehead. he pauses for a moment, if only to see the fear creep into the bastard's expression before his fingers squeeze the trigger and the light is gone from his eyes.

his chest stops heaving and his hand drops back to the mud, leaving nothing but a few bloody fingerprints in his wake.

johnny pulls the trigger again.

and again, and again, and again, until his face is nothing more than a cavity of gore and lead and the ringing in his ears blocks out everything else around him.

a firm hand comes down on his shoulder and it’s only then does he notice the tension in his muscles and the fierce sneer pulling at his features. his eyes snap to the dark figure in the corner of his vision, meeting the bone white of simon's mask and the frown underneath.

"that'll do, johnny." simon murmurs, his own darkened eyes glaring down at the mangled corpse laying at their feet. he nods, somewhat absently, and turns away from the offending body.

there were more important things he needed to keep his head on straight for.

neither him or simon spare the remains of the mask another glance as they leave him behind. price and gaz are waiting by the entrance for them, and as soon as they're close enough they head together into the dark corridors of the building.

as the creep through the abandoned building, now deep in the cold basement, weapons poised and on high alert, there's a new sense of dread that forms in the back of his mind; what if you're not here after all? what if the mask was bluffing and you're already dead?

johnny grits his teeth and shakes his head to rid himself of that damning train of thought. he couldn't afford to think like that, he wouldn't, but another corridor of empty rooms has his heart sinking like an anchor to his stomach. he's trying to stay hopeful, but every dead end only makes him feel worse.

price grips his shoulder, firm and comforting, with a look in his eye to match as he catches johnny's gaze. "we'll find 'em, soap."

"i know." he replies, but there's a waver in his voice despite the certainty of his words. price doesn't release his gaze or his shoulder until he moves to follow the others.

he doesn't say much else as the search continues. the ringing in his ears is back, amplified by the eerie silence of the halls. he can feel the air getting colder after each empty room the clear.

the time passes arbitrarily, until there's one last room to check. johnny watches gaz and ghost pry it open, the sound of the lock breaking only just reaching him through the fog over his senses.

gaz pauses once the door swings open, his eyes locked onto something in the room as they widen dramatically. he still doesn't tear his gaze away as his jaw falls open, something frantic in the way he yells, "soap!"

a spark of hope strikes his heart and travels to the very ends of his limbs, a new burst of energy filling him as he shoves past his teammates to stand in the doorway and look into the room himself.

it's you.

curled into yourself in the corner of the damp cell, shivering with your face buried in your knees with your hands clamped over your ears. it's almost uncanny, how small you look. the tremble in your limbs, the fear in your quickened breaths, it was the exact opposite of how you should be, but despite it all…

it's really you.

johnny feels his heart swell painfully with relief, and without another second of hesitation he's skidding to his knees beside you and gripping the cold skin of your wrists. you let out a muffled sob at the contact, and johnny feels his blood turn cold when it meets his ears.

"don't!" you cry, weak and desperate. johnny's caught off guard with how you try to rip yourself away from him, the shakes that wrack your body only increasing when he keeps his hold on you. "get off! please– please don't!"

his heart cracks anew at the distress in your hoarse voice. he feels his eyes well up with hot tears that he has to fight to keep from falling.

"hey, it's me! it's johnny, it's your johnny! look at me, sweetheart, i'm here!" he tries to calm you with his words, keeping his voice low between you both, but you keep your eyes screwed tightly shut.

johnny lets go of your wrists to cup your face in his hands instead, gently turning your head towards him and using his thumbs to stroke soft shapes into your cheeks. the gesture makes your breath hitch audibly, and your eyes slowly open to meet his. "that's it, I'm here, i got ye, yer alright."

"don't– i don't– i can't…" whatever you're trying to say is broken up by the effort it takes you to keep breathing through your sobs. you still try to lean away from his touch, but johnny doesn't let you move far. he has to bite the inside of his cheek to hold back his own breakdown.

"no-one's gonna hurt you again, darlin', i promise ye." he murmurs, searching your glassy eyes while he continues to smooth his thumbs over the skin of your face, wet with your tears. "c'mere, i've got ye…"

with little more resistance from you, johnny gathers you into his arms and presses you close to his chest, they way he'd been dreaming off all the time you'd been apart. he pays no mind to the way the hard ground digs into his knees, and instead focuses on feeling the rise and fall of your ribcage against his own, your heartbeat under his fingertips, and the very real sound of your voice.

"you– j-johnny…" you stutter, your hiccuping sobs gradually fading away as you grip the bulk of his vest like a lifeline. "are you… real?"

"i'm real, darlin'," his voice cracks despite his efforts to stay strong for you. he presses his lips to the tip of your head in a lingering kiss, partly so you won't see the glossy tears in his eyes as he tries to stamp them down. "i'm here. i swear, i'm never lettin' you out of my sight again."

the simple feeling of your weight leaning against him is so overwhelming he's worried he might faint. he lets you calm down, rubbing soothing patterns up and down your arms and back and wherever he can reach, even when the position becomes uncomfortable and the dampness from the floor has seeped into his bones.

eventually though, he does pull back, softly shush you when you protest in the thought that he's leaving you, and cups your head in his warm hands.

"let's get you home, eh?" he smiles. your uncertain eyes dart between his for a moment, searching, before you nod. it's weak and hesitant, but the gesture makes his grin stretch a little wider all the same. "c'mon then, think ye can walk?"

johnny sighs when you shake your head, looking down and seeming almost embarrassed by your frail condition as if any of this was your fault. if he could kill that bastard again, he wouldn't even hesitate.

it's no bother to him to haul you up with him, holding you carefully against his chest with an arm under your knees and the other around your back. you still gingerly grip the top of his vest, your free arm looping itself around his neck and pulling yourself as close to him as you can muster. he gives a concise nod to the others, crowded in the doorway, and they begin the trek back to the helo.

the sunlight causes you to bury your face in the crook of johnny's neck, shielding your eyes from the blindingly bright rays. he allows himself a moment of distraction as they cross the clearing to revel in the feeling. he'd feel the sun on his face again, but he'd never again take for granted a single moment he spends with you.

they're almost to the edge of the clearing, almost departed from that haunted place with a graveyard of mangled bodies in their wake, but he doesn't quite make it to the treeline.

a single gunshot echoes through the clearing and before any of them can react, the shell has found its mark in johnny's leg. the force and shock of it sends him tumbling to the floor, scrambling through the blossoming pain to brace his fall on his arms so he won't land on top of you.

there's yelling, returning fire, but johnny can only focus on covering your body with his own, shielding you from any harm that might find you. even through the agony travelling up his thigh, even when the air is still again, and even when his own eyes are threatening to follow yours in falling shut and succumbing to the weakness that drags him down.

when did you shut your eyes? johnny slips his hand under your hand, grunting in his chest as his weight shifts, and to his horror his fingers come back red.

no, no no. he only just got you back, he cannot lose you again.

he doesn't even register that he's shouting – for help, a medic, something – until his weight is being heaved over ghost's shoulder and you're being taken by price, the cracks in his stony expression only fuel the sick dread making its way up johnny's throat.

back in the helo, in no time but he doesn't remember the journey, he tries to push the medic away who starts working on his leg, slurring for them to help you first. they ignore him, obviously, and if he had any energy left he would've berated them for not listening. ghost holds him down as they secure the tourniquet, and as his vision finally begins to fade, he turns his head to the side so you can be the last thing he sees as he slips into unconsciousness.

for once, he doesn't dream of you.

there are no images of your body, laying motionless under the rubble. he sleeps in blissful oblivion, his head completely silent, and wakes a day and a half later feeling more rested than he ever has despite the wound in his leg.

simon is by his bedside when he finally opens his eyes. it's late, the room dark apart from the fluorescent light bleeding in from the gap under the door and simon's phone highlighting his balaclava. he notices the moment johnny turns his head to watch him, because of course he does, and reaches over to turn on the lamp on the side table without a word.

"mornin', lt…" johnny mumbles, voice hoarse and eyes heavy as he pushes through the tiredness clinging to his senses to sit up in his bed. the light is abrasive to his eyes, but he blinks through the sting and manages a lazy smile towards simon.

"evenin', more like." he replies, a trace of humour in the way his eyes lift at the corners. "been asleep nearly thirty-eight hours."

johnny baulks at that, suddenly feeling a lot more awake from the cold shock that passes through him. "thirty–? jesus wept, i need'ta–" he sputters, wide-eyed as he throws the blankets from his legs and starts to get up, "i need'ta see 'em, how–"

before he can get his feet on the ground however, he's pushed back by simon's hand on his chest, forcing him to sit back and acknowledge the pain radiating from his thigh.

"they're fine, johnny." simon tells him, punctuated with a roll of his eyes before he continues, "been in and out of consciousness, but they're stable."

johnny sighs deeply, relief flooding through his body as he slumps back against his pillows. you're okay, you're alive, you're here, and you're home and safe. his thoughts have already begun racing and despite how much his wounds are aching, he's already set his mind to how he's going to see you as soon as possible.

as if sensing his plotting, simon leans forward to catch his gaze and even through the mask johnny can see the look he's sending him.

"i'm goin' back to bed, so don't do anythin' stupid." simon begins, pushing himself to stand using the arms of his chair and narrowing his eyes as he leans even closer. "if you rip these stitches, i'll put 'em back in myself, clear?"

"crystal, lt." johnny nods, and simon holds his stare as one last warning before he turns to leave – but not without giving him a firm pat just below his bandages that makes him wince, feeling the silent threat behind the gesture as he watches simon exit silently out into the hall.

johnny swings his legs over the side of the bed the second the door swings shut again, a sharp intake of breath following the movement as his weight shifts. surely he could get to where you are without making his wound any worse, he hard could it be?

he makes it two doors down before he realises that this might've been a bad idea. the muscles of his thigh burn and his breath comes out in heavy, stuttered huffs, but despite the strain on his injured body he refuses to give up before he's seen that you're okay with his own two eyes.

the fourth door he peeks through is where he finds you, the sight of your sleeping form instantly overpowering the pain in his leg. he shoulders open the door and beelines in a limp to your bedside, his gaze never once leaving your face until he's close enough to grasp your hand in a slow, featherlight touch like you'd disappear if he made a wrong move. you don't react as he strokes your knuckles, but johnny is more than content to just sit with you, perched on the edge of your bed and taking in the way your breath fills your lungs, the gentle thrum of your pulse under his fingertips on your wrist.

time passes easily like this, until the minutes have gone by and he can find the strength to lift himself into the bed beside you, snaking his arm around your neck and shoulder to hold you close as he settles in, careful not to agitate any of your own injuries.

"i missed you, my love," johnny whispers, dragging his fingers up and down your arm, pressing his lips to the crown of your head, "i missed you so much…"

your fingers twitch in his hold, the steady rhythm of your breathing hitching as a shaky sigh leaves you. johnny freezes, his hand stilling on your bicep and his eyes growing wide.

"john–" the sound of his name passing your lips pulls him out of his shock, and he pulls back to watch your eyes twitch and flutter open. your voice is raspy and still weak, but not even an angel choir could sound sweeter to him. "johnny…?"

"i'm here–" his voice breaks, but he continues anyway, "i'm here, i got ye." he murmurs, careful to keep his voice low despite how much he wants to cry from joy. "how ye feelin'? you comfy, sweetheart? any pain?" he asks, shifting the both of you to sit against the pillows and keep you nestled against his side.

"i'm okay–" your hoarse response is interrupted by a cough that devolves into wet hiccups, your hands curling tightly into his shirt as you look up at him, "it– am i– it's–"

"shushsh, i'm here darlin', i've got ye." he coos, his eyes welling up to match yours, resuming his soothing touch over your arm. you stay like that, for minutes that could've been hours, gazing into each other's eyes while you softly cry and johnny comforts you.

it aches him to see you cry, but he can't help but awe at how beautiful you still manage to be, with cuts and bruises and tears littering your face. his heart swells in his chest with the love he holds for you.

your hand finds its place on johnny's cheek, your staggered breaths calming down at last. he covers it with his own to feel more of your skin on his. a wince crosses your expression as you try to lean up towards him, but he stops you before you hurt yourself any further and leans his forehead against yours.

you pull his face even closer, digging your fingertips into his cheek in an almost uncomfortable sensation, before brushing your lips against his in something like disbelief. "am i dreaming?"

"no, my love," he utters against your skin, taking your bottom lip between his teeth, nudging your cheek with his nose, "this is real."

your breath hitches again when he closes the little space left between you and presses his lips to yours, encapsulating you in a kiss that holds every ounce of desperation he's been holding on to. it's passionate, all-encompassing, and it reminds him of the first time he kissed you all those years ago. your free hand travels up to his hair, tangling the longer strands around your fingers and drawing a groan from deep in his chest.

he's reluctant to let you when you pull away for air, tasting the salt from your last stray tears as he chases your lips.

"say it again…?" you ask in a murmur, your eyes fluttering open again. the look you give him, one of pure hope that you won't suddenly wake up alone, it makes johnny's heart miss a beat.

he squeezes your hand, turning slightly to leave a kiss on your palm. "it's real, bonnie. i'll die before i ever let you go again."

your mouth opens to say something, but you stop yourself just before you can choke the words out, fresh tears building in your eyes again. johnny gives you an encouraging nod, holding your gaze while you muster the courage to voice what you're thinking.

"i–" you begin, your words catching on a lump in your throat, "i watched you leave without me, i had to watch the helicopter disappear and, and you…" your voice fades, eyes darting between his while they gloss with unshed tears once again.

"sweetheart…" he frowns, his heart breaking anew from the anguish that he never wants to hear in your voice.

you swallow thickly, your hold on his hair tightening ever so slightly. "i thought– i didn't think you'd ever find me…"

"i'd always find you." johnny replies, his resolute tone leaving no room for argument. he touches his forehead to yours again and lowers his voice to continue, "even if i had to go tae the ends of the earth, i'd never stop lookin' fer you."

his words release the fresh tears you've been holding back, and with a quiet sob you drop your face to the crook of his neck, gripping his hair and face tighter still. johnny softly shushes you, rocking the two of you back and forth as much as he can with you held close in his arms.

"you're staying with me tonight…" your voice is muffled, spoken into his neck and sending goosebumps rippling across his skin. a comforting nostalgia follows your words, one he can't help but chuckle at.

"would'nae have it any other way, darlin'."

#soap x reader #soap mactavish x reader #john soap mactavish x reader #mw2 x reader #mw3 x reader #cod x reader #141 x reader #call of duty x reader #john soap mactavish #soap mactavish #roosterr writes

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otakuworks · 1 year

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❛ 𝐒𝐄𝐄 𝐘𝐎𝐔 𝐋𝐀𝐓𝐄𝐑. reborn au

feat. Zhongli x Reincarnated!GN!Reader | PART I | wc. 4.6K

Based on 'See You In My 19th Life' | overview. this webtoon follows the story of a woman who can somehow remember all her past lives.

sum. after a sweet hello, your lips never found its way to say the bittersweet goodbye. because you knew you would always find your way back to him even if he won't recognize you in your renewable lives.

note. some scenes are purposely inaccurate to the canon lore

main.mlist genshin.mlist | xiao ver.

You first met him as Morax, a little child dragon you grew up discreetly meeting at a very convenient time of your day, never knowing what's stored for the two of you.

He first met you as Y/N who resides at the countryside near Mt. Tianheng in hopes to find new things to discover across the vast lands of Teyvat. And he did. He found you.

Young Morax found you crouched under an oak tree, the wind flowing with your otherworldly voice, enrapturing him in blissful comfort.

Perched in the tree branch, he listens intently and let himself melt in your grace. It wasn't the first time he finds you warbling a melodic tune, and each time he comes back to hear more from you, it's always a different song and it wouldn't cease to amaze him how much ditty you know.

He lost count on how often he'd fall asleep with your voice lulling him and wakes up feeling empty as the epilogue of his day is always spent without your presence.

Sometimes he wonders if you know he has been watching you, and if you do, why aren't you approaching him? No matter, young Morax doesn't intend to befriend with you.

But then one day...

"Hello! You must be the boy who likes to hear me sing by the tree."

He was caught red handed, perhaps he became distracted that he didn't realize he's been shamelessly stalking you. He couldn't stop his curiosity to follow you in your way home.

Not only he's been spying on you, now he sounds like a stalker. But you didn't suspect, there wasn't anything to be suspicious of anyway.

"H-Huh? H-How did you know?" He gotta commend you for your keen senses. He's the Dragon between the two of you, which means he's supposed to be the one who has sharper senses.

"You must be good at anything but hiding. I have known you've been following me, but I never get to see you up close, you're really majestic looking, by the way." You chuckled as his poor attempt of masking his flushed face at your compliment.

"I don't mind your company, in fact, I want to be friends with you."

Friends. What a foreign concept for young Morax.

He has heard of that term, it's common among mortals, but he's not a mortal. Does this 'friend' term stretches to immortals like him as well? If so, then he has no reason to refuse.

Says the person who one minute ago thought of every alternative ways to stay out of your way.

He was skeptical at your optimism, most mortals would be astounded at his appearance and try to persuade him to spill whatever secrets he has, but as he got to know you better, he was a bit guilty to categorize you as one of them.

His horns and inhumane features? Young Morax found out you're only fascinated by his unique physical looks. And never doubted it.

"Cool! You have horns just like our boars, where did you get those? Can I touch them?"

"Did you just compare my horns to a pig? Pigs don't even have horns! How disgraceful!"

The sparkle in your eyes quickly died down as it came, and the young Morax feels tight in his chest just seeing your smile turns into a frown. You insulted his pride though!

You mumbled a meek apology but still kept your sheepish smile, a glimmer of hope that one day he'd let you do it.

The next days were spent by you sneaking out your house every midnight to meet up with the dragon, Morax. He's slightly skittish, oddly resembling him that of a cat, which is cute.

You probably shouldn't be calling a literal Dragon cute, legends depicted them as tyrannical creatures who seek treasures.

Ah! Classic children's story to scare the kids away at night, it did affect you in some way.

But you can't help it when he would eagerly look at you whenever he asks you to sing him a song.

You'd sit side by side under the tree, you have to admit he'd either falls asleep amidst your song or asks you for the lyrics so he can sing it to himself too.

You even dedicated a song that lets a certain flower bloom.

"Glaze Lily? What's that?" Young Morax asked with tilted head.

A smile outstretched your lips, "Beautiful, right? It transforms the memories of the land into its fragrance during florescence."

"Really?! Is that why you're always out in the dark?" You chuckled sheepishly, feigning ignorance, "Don't know what you're talking."

You got to know each other, held hands like innocent children, share what little knowledge your pea sized brain can, hug whenever one seeks comfort, eat under the glistening sun.

Morax is... a sensitive individual, albeit rough around the edges, but he's young and still learning, and you're unbelievably patient with his attitude— a quirk from you that he greatly appreciates.

From that, young Morax grew fond of you and it isn't one sided.

He flies by the same tree and gives you random things he finds magnificent, whether it could be a rock he found by the lake or a rare item that no one has ever discovered before.

Well, the legend wasn't lying about Dragons and treasure, for sure

You'd laugh at the strangest things he discovers but accepted them nonetheless. Every object he gives you is worth something.

This has been part of your routine for days, weeks, months, even years maybe. You don't know how much time has gone by whenever you're with him and you never bothered to count.

Before you know it, the two of you are almost in young adulthood, he grew up to be a fine man, much unlike you were expecting. Nothing changed from your friendship, until now.

You were taken by surprise when he suddenly blurted out one day

"I want to show you what I see from up there one day, Y/N."

He gazes at you much differently when he looks at you when you were younger. There's a glint of promise in his eyes that you can't pinpoint, it sent shivers all over your nerves.

"You can just fly me up there, Morax. I'm sure I'm not heavy." You muster a smile in an attempt to ease your quickening heartbeats.

He never gave a reply, he only stared at you so intensely that it feels like he's poking your deepest and innermost thoughts.

The way he stares at you never fails to summon the tickling butterflies in your stomach and the blood on your cheeks. You merely regarded that as your hormones, anyone would be flustered if someone they're close to stare at them like that.

You should've known better that nothing in your world stays permanent. The only thing you remember after that day was his twisted look of desperation to keep you alive and tear stained amber dyes trying to get the last image of you in his memories.

"N-No... Y/N please stay with me. D-Don't leave m-me just yet." It hurts you more than the numbing pain in your abdomen to see him broke down like a cornered prey. So helpless and vulnerable.

"I-I'll always be w-with you, Morax..."

So cruel, just when you've begun to realize the burgeoning feelings you have for the Dragon, fate took you away before you have the chance to confess.

Should you be selfish to confess your feelings to him? If you do, it seems like you'll be punishing him an endless torture ahead, and you would never wish Morax to suffer for eternity.

You only smiled and caressed his horns, even in your deathbed you're glad you died in the arms of the man you ever loved.

At the last moment, you heard the anguished wail erupts from his throat as he clutches your form closer, begging and crying for you to come back, to not leave him like this, that he needed you, that he loves you. His pleas fell on deaf ears, for you weren’t there to hear him anymore.

But it became clear to you that he reciprocated your love.

It came a shocking twist when you opened your eyes you can hear multiple cooing sounds from around you. Didn't I die in his arms? Where am I? Turns out, you were reborn. But not as Y/N anymore and you were given a surname.

Unfortunately, the Celestia isn't so forgiving. You were suffering from an unknown illness that took away your second life at such a young age.

You trained hard and learned martial arts in your third life as you were born from a family whose tradition is to produce well-trained warriors in the future.

Fourth to eight life came by like a blur, there were times when you get to lived as an innocent child only for it to be ripped away a few years later with your past memories resurfacing.

You stopped counting after it hits a dozen, born in different class, society and unnamed nation. There's no point of it.

All you want is to look for Morax, but will he remember you? Will he even recognize you as Y/N? You're no longer the kid he grew fond of. No, you're much different than before.

What about him? Decades have past, does he still know of your name? You could've been a fragment of his childhood that he dare not talk about with his new friends.

Will I make your life more difficult by trying to reconnect with you, Morax?

Those thoughts haunted you for nights, often occuring in your dreams.

But what can you do, you're so far away from Mt. Tianheng, you don't even know if the village you lived in still exists nor do you know if Morax still visits the tree you first met.

Even if you did meet him in your new life, you ought to stay as acquaintances.

Aiding him in the shadows and lessening his burdens within your power.

In your hundredth life, all of your training in your third life is proven useful at the moment. You're known as the infamous warrior with no name that took down the monsters around Teyvat, you were revered to the people in the Guili Assembly.

War is threatening to wage amongst Gods and mortals alike.

When it came, no one is safe in and out of the battlefield. To survive they must fight tooth and nail, paint the lands in sea of red and play the game of thrones.

It was gratuitously morbid, gruesome and unjust. A macabre of series of deaths surrounded your every wake, your hundredth life is the epitome of a living nightmare. Horrifyingly memorable.

You were at the sidelines, watching as the war unfold, keeping tabs on Morax's allies and eradicating whatever threat they face.

That's when you came across the stunning Goddess Guizhong, the Ruler of Clouds, Goddess of Dust. A very close companion of Morax whom he met at the Guili Assembly along with the others.

She's capable and quick-witted, a type of peculiar person Morax wouldn't hesitate to be friends with.

As of the moment, a claymore is alarmingly closing its gap towards her, ready to slice her open.

Then you heard him scream, a cry of a man who's about to lose everything he has gained of.

That cry sent flashbacks of his tear-stained cheeks. No, you don't want to see him like that again! You'd do anything to chase away that vulnerable image of Morax, he deserves happiness and love.

Your feet went autopilot and swept away the Goddess out of the way, severing your lower limbs in the process and instantly killing you. Your eyes opened and you have started your new life.

Was Morax relieve that Guizhong lived? Did he wonder why a stranger would save her? Did he ever ask who you were? Did he... recognize you at the very least?

Your new parents panicked as they tried to appease the crying infant in their arms. Unbeknownst to your pained heart.

You saw for a brief moment before your demise how Guizhong's plausible absence will affect him. He will mourn her death as much as he lamented yours. For decades or centuries, you know he has been scarred by your passing.

You don't want him to go through that again. It's a different pain you feel when you see him tearing up, you rather get minced by a claymore than to watch him break down.

He garnered the reputation of a tyrant— but you knew better that Morax grew up with compassionate heart, he appreciates anyone no matter how insignificant they think they are.

Which is why you hold yourself from meeting him. He may not remember you, but he will certainly get attached to you once you had your way to his heart.

And a dragon who can outlive you in any lives will only suffer more from your death.

You dedicated your lives in living peacefully, learning history and new things as humanity evolves.

You vow to never fall in love if it isn't Morax you'll spend your mortal life with.

Even if he has someone he can fall in love with.

"Have you heard about the land Lord Morax and Lady Guizhong are building in Mt. Tianheng?" Gossips are everywhere about the infamous partners who survived the Archon War, there's no mouth that has not utter their names, and you're no exception.

A grin spreads over your lips as you sip your tea with elegance, "I've heard, I haven't seen them in person but the rumors about them guaranteed they're ambitious people with good hearts."

This has been a hobby you never knew; praising Morax to elate people's opinion about him. It's your small contribution to his flourishing nation.

You want people to love and respect Morax dearly just as you loved him in your childhood.

You prayed to the new Archons for Morax to find someone he can love and lean on. Someone that can be his source of strength to keep living. Someone much better than leaving him with death.

Now that he found someone he can be with, your goal in your next lives is to protect Liyue's history.

From the names of ancient relics and objects, war waged by the Gods, Nations that were built underneath the once blood soaked lands, fallen heroes who are forgotten— you know all of them. You're openly willing to offer tutelage to the inquisitive.

You sighed at the thought, it certainly will be lonely in your part. Immortal gods can still die— a death in which they'd leave their memories behind and start anew. Morax will eventually cease to existence with lovable Nation and Guizhong to remember him.

And you? Countless past lives yet you never found true happiness, and none of them was worth to remember for anyone.

Part of you feels happy for Morax finally moving on from your death eons ago, but you're still human so you're susceptible to those horrible impulses of bitterness at a basic level.

But you don't want to be a person who looks at Guizhong with jaundiced eyes just because you couldn't have Morax, so you suck it up and move on the fact Morax is in love with another.

At least my sacrifice isn't a total waste.

"Aren't they? I've met Lady Guizhong, she's such a beautiful and soft spoken woman. She and the Lord of Geo are a perfect match. I wish the two of them eternal blessings."

A tug at your heart left an unpleasant feeling, your brain tried to reason that at least he's with someone that'll love him more than you did. That can appease your bitter aching heart a bit.

How ironic. You built a nation where you first met me.

And showed her what you can see up there like you promised me.

Is that how you honor my death, Morax?

"Wow! You sure do know many things, Y/N!" The floating emergency food expressed her awe in your display of knowledge and the traveller couldn't agree more with her, "She's right, you never cease to surprise us."

Their exclaims were followed by your enchanting laugh, "I'm glad I can be at your service, Honory Knight."

You were simply ethereal to look at, you maybe a mortal like the traveller but the Blondie thinks otherwise.

Paimon and her travelling buddy met you by the Starnach Cliff when they were attempting to subdue Dvalin. Jean and Diluc already know you're part of the Adventurer's Guild as you often visit Mondstadt from time to time.

They didn't expect you to join them in their excursion in Stormterror's Lair, it turns out you're a great addition to the team.

You befriended with the traveller after the whole Stormterror fiasco and catch up with Kaeya.

You don't stand out the most in the crowd, you can blend in with everyone and no one would acknowledge your existence. But the traveller can sense the weight of the wisdom you withhold.

It almost feels like you're one of the Seven...

"Is there something else I can help you with, Traveller?"

"Huh?! Oh... I— Uhh... You've been telling us stories and fun facts about Mondstadt. If you don't mind, can you tell us about Liyue?"

For an ephemeral moment, the traveller saw your facade crumbles and slowly morphed into a nostalgic expression.

"Hmm. I'll tell you a quick introduction. Liyue is built in Mt. Tianheng after the Lord of Geo attained one of seven seats, unlike the Anemo Archon who's known to not show himself, he descends down once a year to give blessings to the people of Liyue."

"Exactly how Venti told us, but more detailed."

"He sounds a lot more of a decent God than Tone-Deaf Bard."

Her statement elicited a quiet snicker from you, "I'll be off then, I'll see you around soon." Paimon's expression deflated, "You're not coming with us?"

You shake your head, "I'll visit you when I can, until then I hope for your safe travels."

You forced a smile and took a different path from the traveller, as their figures disappear in the horizon, you felt your smile slip up as the sun whisks past the mountains turning to dusk.

Solitude in the dark has been part of your daily routine, you come and go whenever you feel like it, not knowing when to return.

The excuse you told to Paimon isn't entirely a lie, you couldn't bring yourself to go in Liyue when there's active Fatui agents scattered around the vicinity.

Let's just say you're not in good terms with the Fatui. Who isn't?

Nevertheless, whatever curse you have continued to persist in your thousandth life. You roamed around Teyvat and tell stories that even historians don't know.

Repeated lives were lived by just you traversing in each corners of Teyvat that even Archons never knew it existed.

Along the way, you've come terms with your feelings and settled it down like a dormant volcano. Morax is your first love, you enjoyed reminiscing the memories you made with him, you keep those memories locked up in the depths of your mind and often recount them in particular leisure time of the day.

You still love him, and you'll always be by his side whenever he needs a helping hand, but enough is enough, you've suffered enough to your own idiocy and fears. It's time to move on.

Morax continued to strive forward because he has changed, for the better of course. If you want to continue living the next lives of yours then you need to change too.

You met new friends and companions that you begin to trust and have fun with, the traveller and the emergency food included. It wasn't lonely as you thought it would be.

Sometimes you wonder why do you have such curse bestowed upon you. Did the Celestia punish you for a crime? Did you touch a forbidden relic in your first life? Is there a way to get rid of it?

You stopped in your tracks and you gaze up in the sky.

Am I the only one with such curse?

Damn, you really need to get your priorities straight when you have so many unanswered questions.

Basking the remnants of the ever glowing star, you turn around to walk the path that leads you to the Land of Eternity.

A new journey awaits you as you skid through the mycelium path.

Rex Lapis has died.

What a year starting with the news of a tragic death of an Archon.

Fret not Liyue citizens, Rex Lapis assumed the form of Zhongli as a consultant in the Wangsheng Funeral Parlor. In all honesty, he thinks you would facepalm on how poorly delivered that news was.

Zhongli now blends in with the mortals, often strolling to acknowledge the accomplishments he has done as an Archon.

There were too many sacrifices he made just to achieve such title and godly powers. It's uncountable.

Whenever he strolls down the streets of Liyue, there's never a day that he is not reminded of the fact Mt. Tianheng is the very foundation of Liyue. It serves as a reminder that you are his pillar when intrusive thoughts start to linger in his mind.

Oftentimes, your face is only a blur in his memory, no matter what he does he can't seem to remember your face, but your name has been engraved on his mind for eons.

He misses hearing the sound of your name leaving his lips. He misses how ignorant you both were to the world's suffering. He misses your mesmerizing voice that lulls him to sleep.

Whoever fellow Archon listening to his complex thoughts must have heard him and granted his not-so-impossible wish.

"Hey look. Doesn't that sound like a story Y/N has told us before?" A child(e)— no, a floating fae pointed at the storyteller.

But Zhongli couldn't care less about whoever she was pointing. Did he hear her right? Was it just his ears deceiving him?

Y/N... that's your name.

That's the name he longed to hear again.

Why in the seven nations of Teyvat would they mention your name? Is it just a coincidence that someone has the same name as you? No, that couldn't be it.

Something flared inside him, it's been awhile since he felt this excitement, it's not far fetched when he became your friend.

With no recollection, he became friends with the traveller and the emergency food floating companion.

When he asks them about you, an array of hope filled his entire being and he swore his Dragon feature almost burst into existence

Y/N L/N, a member of the Adventurer's Guild, he's certain you've been in Liyue if you know about its rich culture.

But where are you? He wants to go find you. Hug you like when you were kids. Sing him songs. Bring you random things he can find. Speak the words that were left unspoken when you died.

So many questions brooding his mind; are you really Y/N? If so, were you reincarnated? Does that mean you don't remember him?

The elation he felt dropped. Right... he shouldn't be disappointed if it turns out his hunch is wrong. Even if you're not the Y/N he was expecting, he wants to know you as who you are and not compare the similarities and differences you have with the Y/N he knows.

"Oh yeah, Y/N mentioned they'll be visiting Liyue soon, Mr. Zhongli." The Traveler quipped, assessing the abrupt change of emotions on the consultant's face at the mention of your name.

Paimon and her travelling buddy can't help to wonder if you two are acquaintances, or perhaps something more than that. Zhongli seems to be expecting your arrival from now on.

"Is that so? Thank you for informing me, Traveler. I shall see to it that their stay will be comfortable." He smiled.

Stay in what? In the Funeral Parlor? The Traveler sweat drop while Paimon is tempted to point out that's Verr Goldet's job. Good thing their companion put a hand on her mouth and excuse themselves

There's no time to stall! He thought.

He's determined to check it himself, it can go two ways and Zhongli won't be petulant of the result.

Archons forbid if he ever finds you, because he will not let you go.

>> PART 2

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