#prospect ezra

[orangechickenpillow]

Pedro Pascal and the daughters that came back

#the last of us #prospect #prospect 2018 #prospect movie #tlou #tlou hbo spoilers #tlou spoilers #tlou hbo #prospect ezra #prospect cee #ellie tlou #joel miller #pedro pascal #bella ramsey #sophie thatcher

[morallyinept]

Helianthus - An Ezra One Shot 🌻

Summary: Ezra and you have docked on a planet that harbours a pleasant surprise for you both.

Pairing: Ezra x F!Reader (No name or physical description of reader. It’s you, bub.)

Word Count: 3.4k

Scoville Smut Rating:🌶️🌶️ “It's the emergence, of.” 

Check out my Scoville Smut Ratings here. 

Warnings/Triggers: Established relationship/unprotected PIV (wrap up, folks!)/fingering/kissing/reader is in the very early stages of pregnancy/mostly soft mush with some Ezra spiciness

NSFW. MINORS DNI! OVER 18’s ONLY. YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT YOU READ.☝🏻Don’t come at me; you’ve been plenty warned. 

I write for me, and I share with you. If this story isn't to your taste, that's fine. Just slip quietly out the back door. No need to make a fuss. It's just a work of fiction.

Author’s Note: Ezra and sunflowers - what more could you want? 🌻

MAIN MASTERLIST | EZRA MASTERLIST | FLORA & FAUNA MASTERLIST

Enjoy! 🖤

In the hazy realm between wakefulness and dreams, where misty clouds encircle an electrifying peach glow, breathy snuffling tugs gently on the strings of your consciousness. 

The lightest sensation of touch - a soft nuzzling against your cheek - pulls you back from the brink of satiated sleep and into the warmth of him. 

It’s a gradual awakening, the back of your eyelids swathed in sunlight from a wayward beam in the hatch spotlighting over your face. The slow unfurling of a tight bud at the break of dawn, you emerge from a gossamer veiled cocoon of unconsciousness to the feel of his large, pore-filled nose gliding planes over your jaw.

Flutters of his dark, fanned lashes are felt as he forges a path up to your forehead before placing a tender kiss on it with soft, cracked lips, making you smile. 

You feel his hand, warm and rough, sliding delicately up your arm. Fingers stroking the skin back and forth over your shoulder with blunt nails. Eliciting warm tingles; the fine hairs standing tall powered by need and a pulling want that pools in your belly. 

His lips trace under your jaw, a wet tongue slithering out tasting the skin there, ripe and fruitful. When he reaches your bare nipple, the sheet sliding down your body with his movement, you can’t contain the contented, sleepy moans vibrating on your lips as he sucks it into a hardened pebble around his insidious wet tongue.

“Awake?” He murmurs, kissing over the swell of your breast, plump in his hand. 

As you slowly blink your eyes open, the warm, intense browns meet you with a tender intensity. A crooked grin, a flash of yellowed enamel and the cracking of skin over his pink grin greet you - marred, hawkish features that are all his own and yours to savour.

Your voice barely whispers, "I was hoping to steal a few more moments of sleep. How rude."

With a gentle chuckle heavy in his throat, he drags his lips up the juncture of your neck. “Alluding to the pretence of your slumbersome charade. Your smile gives you away every time, Birdie.”

“And here I thought I was being subtle this time.” You sigh as he cages you under him, teeth perniciously tugging at your nipple again. 

“Subtlety has no place between us,” he says as he sucks it gently back in the warmth of his mouth.

You hum out as he suckles, thick fingers tracing patterns on your cheek, thumb gliding over your lips. You taste the salt and soil in the whorls of his print, nipping on the pad.

A tidal wave of warm breath bathes your face as he grunts into it, eventually finding your lips. His tongue seeks your own to exploit. Your hands engulf him close, a red giant swallowing him whole.

“Ezra…” You whine, your legs wrapping around his paunchy waist, and you realise a rough layer keeps you from him. “Your suit is on.”

“It is indeed.” He murmurs haughtily into your skin, teeth grazing.

“Take it off.” You sway.

His tongue licking tracks makes you whimper. He looks up at you and shakes his head of greased, mussed waves stuck against his forehead. “I have meticulous plans that you won’t scupper.”

“And if I refuse?” You pout, wrapping your legs around him tighter.

He groans as you rake your nails at the back of his skull in the slick oil of his hair. A move that you know will wilt him into subjugation.

“Do you know what you do to me, foul temptress?” He growls as he snatches at your hand managing to only capture one with his singular mitt. He nips on your fingers and you hiss. 

“I can feel it.” You muse. You reach for his turgidity with your other, trying to get inside his suit, but he soon stops you. 

“You’re insatiable,” he hums, licking his bottom lip. He then bites into the flesh at your neck, faint purple violets bloom on your skin from the marks of his teeth. “You’ve slept all day. I’d like to show you something before it gets dark. Put your suit on.”

You whine, a noise akin to a strangled squawk. He watches you reluctantly shuffle into your suit, chewing on his lip and humming as his beady eyes trawl up and down your body.

“Saturation?” You query as he reaches for the latch on the inside door without hesitation, or a helmet.

“No need. The air, while thick, is plenty breathable.”

“How do you know?” You baulk.

“This isn’t my first foray." He remarks with waggled eyebrows. "Took to scouring the landscape with thorough reconnaissance of our environs in search of any auspicious indicators of coveted resources. The discovery of a hidden cache would be a boon to our expedition.”

You shake your head at his length of explanation. “And did you find anything?”

“Something.” A conspirator of delight, Ezra guides you from the lander pod with a playful gleam in his dark eyes. 

“Where are we going?” You query.

“A little way up there.” He points with his only hand to the beacon of lumpy hills in the near distance.

The planet is green, lush and reminds you of a home you once knew. Breathable air, blue skies and dappling bokeh sunlight. It’s been a while since you both stumbled on an Eden to rest your weary bones and crooked backs.  

“Bit of a trek.” You mumble, relishing the chance to have stayed in the cot, warm and snug in some lucid dream long since forgotten.

“Merely a twilight hike.” The fervour of exploration imbues him with an indomitable vigour, a grin flashing at you over his shoulder that’s as infectious as it is alluring.

As you near the summit, the sun streaking fire in the sky as it sets, he stands waiting for you to catch up; his hand reaching for yours as you approach with creaking knees and rasping breaths. 

“Kevva, that’s steep.” You puff.

“Lying horizontal all day will render your fitness lacklustre,” he mocks.

“My lack of fitness is all your fault.” You remark with a wry grin. 

“I don’t recall nearly this much complaining at the time.” He wraps his arm over your shoulder. “Close your eyes.”

“Ezra.”

“Indulge me, pet. Close your eyes.”

You do as he asks and you feel him prod you some paces forward. His breath is felt on the conch of your ear, warm and moist when he guides you to a suitable stop. 

“Open.” He purrs.

You sigh out with an immediate smile. “Oh, Ezra…” 

“Resplendent, isn’t it, Birdie?”

“Did you know this was here when we docked?”

He shakes his head with pursed lips. “Happened upon them during my early ramble. I was quite taken with them.”

“They're beautiful.” You agree. 

“Go on, get up close and personal.” He takes your hand in his and leads you down the hill. 

The sunflowers stand tall and proud, their sturdy stalks reaching skyward like nature's sentinels. Each intricate disc of petals, a radiant burst of yellow, catches the fading sunlight, creating a mesmerising dance of shadows and highlights across the expanse of the field that seems like it stretches on for eons.

As you walk through them, the sensation under your boots is a soft, yielding carpet of grass and fallen petals and seeds. The gentle crunch of earth beneath is accompanied by the occasional release of a subtle, herbal fragrance, as if the very ground exudes the essence of sun-soaked vitality.

With each step, your fingertips brush against the velvety petals, and you can feel the delicate texture beneath your touch. The petals are soft, leaving a subtle, powdery residue on your skin.

You wander through their obliesk mazes, pushing your way through clusters with an awed mirth as he follows. You take a moment to steal a glance back at him over your shoulder and he’s stopped, looking upwards with eyes closed and breathing in. 

There’s a quiet intensity about Ezra as he stands there, taking in the vast expanse of the alien, yet somewhat familiar, landscape before him. His eyes, usually so alive with energy and steely determination, now hold a depth of emotion that you’ve rarely seen - a mixture of awe, wonder, and perhaps a hint of vulnerability.

You observe the play of emotions across his face - the furrow of his heavy brow as he concentrates, the slight quirk of his lips as a sense of wonder washes over him. The intensity in his dark eyes as they capture yours. 

"Well, hello there, pet," he says, his voice low and filled with affection. "Caught me admiring the view, did you?"

“We both are.” You simply say, reaching for him. 

As you both wander deeper into the labyrinth of the sunflowers, you can’t help but feel a sense of whimsy taking over you. He stops to pluck seeds out, tearing open a head and offering you some as they roll around his teeth.

"They're so beautiful," you remark, your voice filled with wonder.

Ezra nods in agreement, his eyes alight with mischievous excitement. "They are indeed.”

"I feel like we're in our own little world here," you say.

He squeezes your hand gently, his touch reassuring. "That's all we need.”

As the sun sets, he invites you to recline amidst the golden blooms, your head in his lap looking up at the sky, lost in a burrow of thick stalks. The anticipation that had danced in your eyes now transforms into a quiet serenity as you lie together, surrounded by the sunflowers' nodding heads seemingly miles above you in the sky.

Your fingertips, still adorned with the powdery residue of sunflower caresses, trace idle patterns on his hand as you clutch it close.

Above, the leaves create a natural canopy, dappling the sunlight into a mosaic of dying warmth as the cobalt bleeds in.

Lying amidst the sunflowers, you become part of the landscape - a living diorama where nature itself paints the backdrop for your being. It's not just a surprise; it's a moment of shared bliss, a poetic pause in the heart of the sunflower field on a foreign planet far from anywhere you could call home.

Companionable silence joins you both for a while, a break in Ezra’s beaky ramblings, content to simply be together in the midst of such natural splendour.

You turn your gazes upward, greeted by a luminous river of stars. His eyes, now reflecting the twinkling lights overhead, find a mirrored universe in yours. The sunflowers, though no longer in focus, cast long shadows that seem to reach towards the cosmos.

His accent, reminiscent of stout Southern edification, begins to expound upon the wonders above as he points out constellations and planets that twinkle as little beams of light.

"The beauty of the universe is unequalled." You conclude dreamily, your head resting on Ezra's thighs, his thick digits weaving and stroking under your jaw. 

From this position, you can see the vast depths of it, curling its fingers out to beckon you to dip your face into its secrets. 

"Lies." He retorts with a little snicker. "I fear the universe has met its match." He tilts your chin so you’re facing him and those deep brown eyes regard you sincerely. 

"You like to talk, Ezra." You smirk. 

"I mean it " he assures. “Look at you, the stars are blushing.”

You smile, feeling your jaw ache as he strokes under it with his only thumb.

“Have you ever pondered the nocturnal inclinations of sunflowers?" He breathes out looking up at them.

"Can’t say that I have.” You smirk. "Regale me, o' skilled raconteur," you tease as he tugs on your chin.

"It's a fascinating theory I came across - a notion that in the absence of the sun, these golden blooms, like erudite companions, turn toward each other. A celestial dance, if you will, where they share their stored energy."

“A cosmic conversation among sunflowers. I never thought I'd be part of such a poetic moment." You snort with a giggle. 

“Oi. Mock me all you like, woman.” Ezra nudges you with a twinkle in his eye.

"Oh, I do."

"It's as if the sunflowers are sharing secrets, don't you think? A botanical confabulation beneath the cosmic theatre."

“Botanical confabulation? You sure have a fascinating way with words, Ez."

"Imagine if we could decipher their floral discourse. What tales do you think they'd share?"

You sit upright. “That they do wish you'd shut up and kiss me.” You say, pulling him towards you for a deep, saturated kiss. 

He sighs into you as you comb his hair back, your thumb lingering in that stark blonde piece of the moon in his hairline. Your hand grips his right shoulder, stroking down gently until it stops where he ends. You squeeze and caress the stump gently.

"You know, when you do that, I feel whole again." He breathes, nuzzling into you. "Confounding in it's whimsy."

“You’ve always been whole to me, Ezra.” Your nose traces the wiry route of the scar under his left socket.

"I won't get to feel your hand in mine." He says, casting a gaze to his stump. You’ve altered his fraying suit so his sleeve no longer flaps about, patching it tight and padding it. Some days he swears he can still wiggle his fingers. 

"You have another." You say, taking his hand and kissing the pads of his digits before slowly sucking the middle into your mouth.

“Careful,” he hisses, eyes turning as black as the sky above as he watches you suck it all the back to your throat.

You smile as it pops wet out of your mouth and he pulls you close against his chest. 

“Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad if we missed the sling back… stay here a while.” You murmur as you take in the sights of the sunflowers cresting and creaking above you.

“Thirty turns until the next sling if we linger.” Ezra ponders, running the fuzz of his lips over your crown.

“Mm.” You nod. "We have the means."

"I'm concerned by your raffish approach to this contrite endeavour, however serene. Wouldn't you feel more secure in a near proximity to the birthing pools?”

“We've a while to go yet.” You reassure stroking under his chin in the wiry, greying hairs there. 

He slides his swamping palm over the small swell of your belly, rubbing back and forth gently. “That’s as maybe, we can come back. Bring the Niblet when all is well.”

“Or we could settle, make it a home.” You sway.

“A find of a calibre we've not yet encountered... feasible to some end.” He grazes your jaw with his nose, lips kissing you side on as you cup his hawkish face. “You know I would give you the universe, pet.”  

“I already have it.” You say, staring up at him. 

“Oh, the hackneyed piss that pours outta your mouth,” he smirks as you giggle into his face. 

“Now you know the trite that I have to endure that comes out of yours.”

“Hokum. You love the elucidation of my wayward charm.” Ezra sneers. 

“Among other things.”

“Such as?” He smirks.

You sit upright, slowly pulling the poppers open on his suit. He doesn’t resist as you pull the zip down revealing his chest and belly. You hold yours taught so he can unzip it, revealing the naked flesh underneath it.

He leans forward, sucking mouthfuls of your sumptuous skin into his mouth, hissing as you find the dripping swell of his cock.  

“So that’s what you’re getting at?” He smiles crookedly at you as you work him in your palm, rolling back the skin to reveal a ruddy bulb.

Thick and sticky, he fills your hand. Feeling the rough material of your suit pressed into the crease of your cunt as you wind your hips desperately against him, moaning with frustration keening into his mouth. 

“Be careful you don’t overplay this distraction technique.” 

“I have no idea what you mean,” you simply smile, standing and removing your suit entirely.

“I am immune to your tactics.” Ezra assures as he lets his eyes wander freely over your body as he strokes his cock in want.

“Are you sure about that?” You mirth as you sit in his lap. He’s considerably hard as you subtly grind against him as you kiss. 

“Should I aid you in your release, pet?” He taps your clit gently making you squeal. “Shall we make the sunflowers recoil in their chaste shrewdness?”

“Let them gossip and blush.” You nod into his face. Your fingers curl around his thick length, stroking as you kiss him some more.

“Mmhm. Hold it like you love it, Birdie... yeah, just like that.” He drawls at you. 

“Scoundrel.” You groan.

“I am but incorrigible.” He smirks. 

Your kisses are desperate, incisors and tongues, far reaching and choking. His pads swipes against your clit again and you cry out as your whole body jolts with pleasure, his fingers soaked already. 

"Sweet Mother of Kevva… a parched man could never drink you dry." He sucks you from his fingers, before slipping them inside you. 

You groan out, long and laboured as he strokes your spot with ease, fingers as thick as his cock as they pump and uncoil the muscles from your bones. 

“Gently, does it, hmm?” He cajoles as he brings you to the brink.

“Ez… mmm,” you can feel it bunching tight, the knot unwinding as he lets you soar into the heavens above, watching in rapt attention as you shake in his lap. 

He drones out as you line yourself up with him and sink down slowly. Knees in the soil and fingers in his mouth. 

“Shit,” Ezra groans as you slide all the way down. Eyes paused in a mid-possession as your cunt squeezes and your back breaks. 

“You seek to annihilate me, don’t you?” Ezra rasps as you rock on him, broad shoulders in your teeth as you kiss indents in them. 

“Ezra, fuck!” You whine, feeling him bottom out and fuck up into you with the simple flex of his hips.

"Give me another one of your kisses, Birdie. Take me back to paradise." 

The way he fucks you is like poetry in motion. His gaze unwavering, his touch never faltering. The softness soon replaced by desperateness; fingers bruising more violets into your skin as he clutches you for balance. Kisses with more bite, pants that start to howl. 

“Ezra,” you whine, holding onto him. “Kevva, I’m close…”

“Let me have it,” he coaxes, turning your face to him, watching as your eyes cloud over under a sky full of iridescent stars. "Beg me to fuck you harder." Ezra hisses to you.

"Please... h-harder-" Your body convulses around the rapture of him. 

"That doesn't sound like begging to me." He taunts with a sly grin. “You have my cock in you, pet. Make me fuck you with it.”

“Please! Mmm fuck, please!” You grapple at him, nails drawing blood in their grazes, his teeth bared as you pull at his greased roots. “Give me all of you, Ezra!” You growl. 

“Your cunt is just full of me,” he rasps, your breath bouncing in the back of your throat with every hard thrust. His babbling eutony filling your ears like cotton as you fade out into the white noise. 

Just barely hearing the clicks of your kisses and the lewd squelches of you around his cock. 

He feels you burst, sees it, hears it. Dissolving him to dust in your solar flare. In that moment, you're his, wholly. And he swears to Kevva he feels something akin to unwavering love rattle through his punctured bones. 

The push of you onto him with his hand makes you gasp as you grind and gyrate, your clit pressed in and rubbing against the patch of coarse hairs that you soak sticky with your slick. 

“Hm, hm, hmphf…” he grunts, small and ragged as you work, nostrils flaring under the steep hook of his nose. Plush lips pressed into a thin line as he strains. 

He throws his head back growling, teeth bared at the universe above, howling throatily as he spills inside of you. His thighs shake, rioting of their own accord as you watch them ripple and tense.

His eyes are squeezed shut before opening them with blown pupils and a slack jaw. They glide down to yours, mouth panting into that wolfish, crooked grin. 

“Birdie, I’m still pouring… look, look what you do, exquisite creature.” He pants, sweat slick hair creasing on his forehead, that little blonde patch rip curling in its defiance. 

You settle against his clammy chest when he comes to; he lays back with you in his arm as you cup and stroke the stump gently tracing the knot of scar tissue until your fingers still.

You both sleep there, under the stars, in the dirt and leaves of the sunflower stalks protecting you both in their intricate cocoons. 

In the morning, when the sun rises and the sunflowers turn their heads in its direction, conversing in their unspoken language with the bright star, Ezra wakes you again with those soft, gentle nuzzles, humming the secrets of the universe inside your ear.  

Thank you so much for reading, I really hope you enjoyed spending time in the sunflowers with Ezra. Let me know your thoughts. And I'd appreciate a re-blog if you enjoyed what you just read so other's can enjoy this story too - thanks so much!🖤🌻

MAIN MASTERLIST | EZRA MASTERLIST | FLORA & FAUNA MASTERLIST

#pedro pascal x reader #pedro pascal #ezra prospect x reader #ezra prospect #pedro pascal characters #prospect ezra #prospect film #jett's writing

[fuckyeahpedropascal]

Pedro boys fashion matrix

* Click for higher resolution

• Masterlist •

This one took me ages to make, and it's probably one of my favourites I've made so far. Which is your favourite category?

Commentary below the cut:

Survival chic

Joel, Frankie, Ezra, Mario

These boys have it tough. Be it an apocalyptic world, somewhere in the Colombian jungle, or on another planet entirely. And yes, I had to add Mario.

Fun fact: all four survival boys wore gloves in the show/movie.

Office basic

Dave, Max P, Javier, Mr. Ben

I do love a shirt and pants ensemble sans suit jacket. I might be biased, but Mr. Ben might have stolen the show with his sexy specs.

Office chic

Whiskey, Javier, Max Lord, Marcus Pike

These are some sharply dressed boys. The tailoring on Whiskey's suit in particular is *chef's kiss*.

Military chic

Javier, Dave, Veracruz, Pero

Pedro boys look good in fatigues, huh? Although Pero does steal the show with his medieval armour.

Extra AF

Oberyn, Din, The Thief, Meemaw

These guys (and meemaw) need no introduction, am I right? Neither does meemaw, with her rip-off Anna Wintour bob and fancy frames.

Comfortcore

Javi G, Dieter, Joel, Charlie

These are the guys you know would be so soft to cuddle with. Except Joel, who's definitely all contractor™ muscle underneath that tshirt he keeps wearing inside out.

Leather mavens

Marcus Moreno, Dio, Zach, Oberyn

The people have spoken - they want Moreno in this matrix, and I’m not complaining! We know these boys look good in leather, but Oberyn’s head-to-toe leather fight look is something else (tragically it proved to be fashion over form).

Related posts:

Pedro boys hair matrix

Pedro boys facial hair matrix

How long will Pedro boys survive the apocalypse

Pedro boys chattiness matrix

#pedro pascal characters #pedro pascal memes #pedro pascal cinematic universe #pedro pascal #pedro boys #tlou #the last of us #joel miller #mandalorian #din djarin #narcos #javier pena #javier peña #triple frontier #frankie catfish morales #prospect ezra #pedro pascal snl #kingsman golden circle #agent whiskey #jack whiskey daniels

[avastrasposts]

A Baker's Dozen

Series Master List

A collection of fun and fluffy one shots set in the same bakery. Twelve Pedro boys, twelve stories, twelve recipes.

Part One - Dieter Bravo

Part Two - Din Djarin

Part Three - Joel Miller

Part Four - Oberyn Martell

Part Five - Ezra

Part Six - Javier Peña

Part Seven - Marcus Pike

Part Eight - Jack Daniels

Part Nine - Pero Tovar

Part Ten - Javi Gutierrez

Part Eleven - Dave York

Part Twelve - Frankie Morales

Part Thirteen - Frankie Morales returns

Bonus chapters:

Part Fourteen- Ezra returns

Part Fifteen - Pero returns

A Sourdough TedTalk (not a fic, just me indulging in my favourite type of bread)

#a bakers dozen #pedrostories #dieter bravo #din djarin #joel miller #oberyn martell #prospect ezra #javier peña #marcus pike #jack Daniels #pero tovar #frankie morales #javi gutierrez #dave york

[xxhypersomnia]

EZRA Retrofuturism Lockscreen Set

Here it is 🤞🏼 LOCKSCREEN SET AVAILABLE IN STORIES & TUMBLR 🧡

All edits watermarked 💧 please use/share/credit

#pedro pascal #pedro #pedro pascal fandom #pedro pascal characters #pedrohub #wallpaper #pedro lockscreen #lockscreen #where do i find me an ezra #prospect ezra #prospect movie #Ezra #jose pedro balmaceda pascal #pedrito #Spotify

[absurdthirst]

Happy Father’s Day to any fathers in our fandom and an honorary one to the man who loves to play one!!

(Jack Daniels DESERVES to be mentioned too)

#pedro pascal #happy father's day #Oberyn Martell #Dave York #the mandalorian #max lord #marcus moreno #joel miller #prospect ezra #frankie 'catfish' morales #agent whiskey #alllllll the fathers!!!!

[fuckyeahdindjarin]

Pre-TLOU Writers Archive

A resource for finding pre-TLOU Pedro Pascal characters fics

Part 1: A to H

@absurdthirst

@agentwhiskeysdarlin

@albertasunrise

@alwaysbethewest

@amywritesthings

@artemiseamoon

@astoryisaloveaffair

@autumnleaves1991-blog

@azertyrobaz

@beecastle

@beskarberry

@blueeyesatnight

@brandyllyn

@bunniesofsteel

@butchmandalorian

@castleamc

@chaoticgeminate

@charnelhouse

@chews-erotically

@clints-lucky-arrow

@coastielaceispunk

@concussed-to-pieces

@criticallyacclaimedstranger

@deadhumourist

@din-jarhead

@disgruntledspacedad

@djarinmuse

@djarinsbeskar

@elvenmother

@ezrasbirdie

@fanfoolishness

@fic-appointment

@firstofficerwiggles

@flightlessangelwings

@foli-vora

@foxlace

@frannyzooey

@fromthedeskoftheraven

@fuckyeahdindjarin

@generalfoolish

@gnpwdrnwhiskey

@goodwithcheese

@green-socks

@grogusmum

@guess-my-next-obsession

@haylzcyon

@heythere-mel

@honestly-shite

@hopeamarsu

ARCHIVE MASTERLIST

#pre-tlou writers archive #pedro pascal #pedro pascal fandom #pedro pascal cinematic universe #pedro pascal characters #narcos fanfiction #tlou fanfiction #the last of us fanfiction #kingsman fanfiction #triple frontier fanfiction #mandalorian fanfiction #javier pena x reader #javier peña fanfiction #javier peña x reader #agent whiskey fanfiction #frankie morales fanfiction #ezra prospect #prospect ezra #frankie catfish morales #joel miller fanfiction #dave york fanfiction #max phillips fanfiction #max lord fanfiction #javi gutierrez fanfiction #tuwomt fanfic #mando x reader #mandalorian x reader #the bubble #dieter bravo fanfiction #dieter bravo x reader

[jessahmewren]

🌿Back in the Green🌿, a work I commissioned from @lights-on-the-ridge to compliment this part of my Cee and Ezra series but, really is for everyone. Enjoy, Prospectors!

#So this is the most beautiful thing I've ever seen? #prospect fandom #prospect movie #prospect 2018 #the green #cee and ezra #ezra and cee #prospect cee #cee (prospect) #cee prospect #ezra (prospect) #ezra prospect #prospect ezra #pedro pascal fanart #pedro pascal characters #pedro pascal #sophie thatcher #prospect fan art #fan art #digital painting #commission #ezra fanfiction #I cannot stop looking at this #i am so happy

[pineappical]

headshots of some of my favorite mustachio’d guys 💛

#steve rutherford #pat butcher #bullet train tangerine #dutch van der linde #ted lasso #holland march #bradley bradshaw #irving bailiff #prospect ezra #IM NOT TAGGING THE FANDOMS TOO FUCK THAT............. #pn.art #this took... way too goddamn long honestly. *keels over and explodes into a billion pieces* #i really enjoyed doing this though :3 its SO fun #look at my obsessions boy. look at them #i swear i also draw guys that isnt ted lasso. i promise. HAJGKVHJAGDHJF #I KNOW THEYRE MOSTLY WHITE DUDES THEY HAVE ME IN A GRIP :/ #'i dont have a type' explain this then girl

[orangechickenpillow]

go watch prospect 2018 this is a threat

#prospect 2018 #prospect #prospect movie #prospect ezra #prospect cee #ezra and cee #my edit

[morallyinept]

The Pit - An Ezra One Shot

^ Sound on 🔊

Summary: Ezra and you stumble into an ominous pit on a prospecting mission for coveted azure diamonds on the Narillan moon, and find more than you bargain for.

Pairing: Ezra x F!Reader (No name or physical description of reader. It’s you, bub.)

Word Count: 11.9k 👀 'Issa long one!

Scoville Smut Rating:🌶️🌶️🌶️ “You tell me I’m doing well, and then, you try to kill me.”

Check out my Scoville Smut Ratings here

Explicit - DARK-ISH themes/kinks/smut. Possibly an attempt at macabre/gore type horror? Ezra being a roguish douche (but that’s why we love ‘im). Tentacles. Lots of tentacles. Sex/Unprotected PIV (wrap up, folks!) Oral/insertion/pregnancy/birthing some weird stuff/alien life forms/interspecies intercourse/some mild dubcon/anal/slight hints of cannibalism, because at this point, why not? 🥴 And some other fucked up shit that my brain rot conjured up. Did I mention the abundance of tentacles?

Sci-Fi/Horror-esque. There’s some plot in there somewhere, I swear to Kevva.

NSFW. MINORS DNI! OVER 18’s ONLY. YOU ARE SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR WHAT YOU READ. ☝🏻Don’t come at me; you’ve been plenty warned.

Author’s Note: Had this idea slithering around the ol’ noggin. Figured Ezra would be down because he’s fancy like that.

I am well aware that this won't be for everyone. If it's not for you, that's absolutely fine. Just quietly slip out. No need to make a fuss.

I'll have more Ezra that's coming soon, in different varieties/genres.

I'm pretty happy with the way Ezra talks in a manner befitting for him in this. I took my own advice. But I'll let you guys be the judge of that. Let me know if I captured him.

Enjoy! 🖤

MASTERLIST | EZRA MASTERLIST

“... Blasted, shit-eating things, channel rats. Did I regale you with the time my crew and I were subject to an unfettered infestation?”

Ezra prattles on ahead of you, further up the caverns, the light from his helmet casting an eerie glow about the dark boulder formations.

As far out as he is ahead of you, stepping oafishly over a knuckle of rocks, his voice is sound and droning inside your ear and there is no way to drown him out. Unless you garrotte him, of course.

Now, there’s a thought.

“Yes,” you sigh wearily. “I’ve heard all about the fucking channel rats.” Clubbing him to death with a rock sure sounded like a mighty fine idea about now.

You’re blinded by a small, white light flickering into the back of your retinas when he stops and turns to look back at you.

“Irritation becomes you, Birdie.” Ezra observes with a breathy gruff. It sounds like the crash of the ocean on Lau inside your ear. "Still captivating though."

You're beyond irritated having had the misfortune of listening to him rabble non-stop on this Kevva forsaken journey into the back end of the universe’s rectum it feels like. One that you’re beginning to regret inherently.

“We’re lost, Ezra. We’ve been lost for hours now. I thought you said you knew-”

“-Know these caves like the back of my right paw, yes. That is what I confirmed.” He offers a crooked smile as he waves his stump at you as you catch up to him. "Well, that's not at all disconcerting now is it?" He teases as the place where his right hand should be is filled with an obvious emptiness.

He frowns when you fail to laugh. “I may have offered you a partial truth. But I'm fairly certain I can navigate us to the root of our coveted gain unscathed.” He adds.

“Fairly?”

“It’s a diminutive guarantee.” Ezra affirms with a serious face. “Although, if I’m to be completely notwithstanding, Narilla is a place I’ve not set foot on before myself. But I've conversed greatly with those who have.”

“Fucking great.” You gripe as you reach him.

Your hair sticks to your face with sweat inside your helmet and it irks you that you can’t simply wipe it away as it catches on your lip tiresomely.

Traipsing around this dank, humid cave system on the forgotten moon of Narilla, with the wily and grossly unpredictable prospector as your guide, is not exactly the mission you'd envisioned when he’d lured you in over strong stout on Puggart Bench of such a daunting, yet rewarding charge.

You’d sat bemused, a few tables away with your scuff booted feet up eavesdropping, as you nursed your own beer, at vicarious tales of skulduggery and betrayal - his own included.

His aquiline face was well known around these putrid parts. As much as you’d love to avoid a feculent swamp like this on The Pug, populated with unsavoury characters in their swarms, it was a necessary evil to hear of good places to prospect now they’d closed up the Bakhroma route for good.

Kevva knows that prospectors could pilfer and loot better than anyone in The Fringe, and your own talents attested to this. Ezra too, had garnered himself an erudite reputation, even if marred in deceit, and a small fortune to retire from past ills that haunted the creases around his sullen eyes.

But yet he was still greedy for more as he bewitched you with promises of riches that would weigh down your pockets despite the preposterousness of it all. Such is the nature of a prospector; their greed knows no bounds. Cannot be satiated. And he could certainly talk the alluring talk, that was for sure.

Something more had drawn you in though; something about his Southern loquacious snap in which he weaved the threads of the fable about his eventful escape from the green moon of Bahkroma; an arm lost to it as well as some semblance of sanity it appeared.

He spoke through glassy, dark eyes, wide with tenacity, sluiced with the oncoming inertia from the hops and grains, and his story pulled a crowd of fellow miners and prospectors keen to hear the anecdotes pouring from his foam drenched moustache, as ludicrous as they were.

Most dismissed it as the drunken ramblings of a mad man quacking into his drink; scarred by his time on the haunting moon and her secrets, and perhaps it did drive him crazy to some extent.

However, Ezra rambled on animatedly about plentiful azure diamonds to anyone that would listen that were hidden in the caves under the frozen surface of Narilla. His story was backed up by those who had heard their own quips. Someone who knew someone who had garnered the moon's wealth for themselves, it was all the same spiel.

Like the twinkle in his eye, you simply couldn’t resist the temptation of their siren call and offered yourself up to accompany him on the collection of such rare, precious gems - Kevva knows the fortune was needed on your part - when a scant few turned away unconvinced. Gems that would fetch much more than Aurelac on the black market anyhow.

Whilst some of the gnarly men expressed their keen interest, Ezra denied them, setting his deep eyes on you.

I require a right-hand… woman, Ezra had stated, looking you up and down with something else inside of his vortex gaze as he supped at the foam from his weighty glass.

He’d shooed away the other potential partners in favour of you and your shapely form that he drank in as much as the beer.

You’d discussed with him the terms and your share of the haul, insisted on absolutely no impropriety, (for which you fell short on later that evening) and here you both were now, docked and stationed on the frozen moon and wandering around the intestines of the caves listening to him harp on about everything and nothing, and all that was gassy air in between.

Your teeth ache from all the grinding.

“Can you attach a slurry? I'm irrevocably parched, pet.” Ezra asks you, panting a little. There's condensation frosting around the rim of his helmet and sweat beads glistening on his forehead.

"I'm not your pet."

"Merely a term of endearment. An otherwise befitting compliment may be too fruitful to assume your acceptance into anything more than acquaintance." He shrugs.

"You assume much." Sighing, you busy yourself with the idle task as you attach the pack to the back of his cargo belt and cap it into the feeding tube for him.

“Do you have any idea where we are?” You query, checking your chronometer and scanning the vast dark abyss that presents itself to you.

The green icons and symbols are blurring faintly through the invisible static, fading like emerald apparitions.

Back on the lander, the static interfered with everything as soon as you entered the atmosphere, and it only unnerved you that, if things should go awry, you would be out here by yourselves.

“Shouldn’t be much further ahead, I’d wager.” Ezra breathes around his straw inside his helmet. He licks his lips as he watches your scornful look tossed back at him. He simply offers you a knowing smirk.

“Lead the way,” you instruct with a knitted brow.

You follow him further into the breach of the dark; the strobes from your mutual head lamps making eerie patterns on the rock walls that claw and silently growl as they come to life like shadow puppets.

A while later Ezra stops dead in his tracks, raising his singular left hand. You hadn’t noticed he’d stopped; too occupied with convincing yourself that you weren’t seeing ominous things slithering around in the shadows.

You walk right into the back of him; your helmet bonking against the back of his. You utter some annoyed profanity that fuzzes into his ear piece.

“Kevva! What's that smell?” You question, wrinkling your nose as it seeps through your respirator. It smells like tar, coating the back of your throat in its thickness like amber tobacco as you inhale.

Ezra studies the wall beside him carefully, noticing the ominous sheen and runs his gloved hand through the goop that coats it.

“The stench emanates from this peculiar secretion.” He pries apart his velvet fingers and the sticky substance is stringy between the fibres. He lances you a look with keening eyes.

Your mind is flooded with skewbald images of your cunt slick beading over his lips, making them shine up at you as your thighs cushion either side of his head. Your groans, his lavacious grunts, batter around the back of your skull and leave broken contusions.

The shiny strings snapping on his gloves serve as a harsh reminder, which you're certain he's recalling in all it's sordid vividity too. Your pussy certainly is as it clenches involuntarily.

“Gross.” You declare as he tries to stifle a wolfish grin at your reaction.

“We push on, Birdie.” Ezra announces, wiping the slime down on the thigh of his olive flight suit.

“Stop calling me that.” You mutter, following behind.

“Well, you won’t tell me your name so I have to call you something.”

“No names.” You remind him.

“I recounted mine freely.”

“No names.” You confirm.

"Kevva's sake, you are stubborn as you are loathsome, woman." He mutters.

“That’s not what you said the other night." You smirk.

"I divulged a lot of soundbites that eve." Ezra can still hear the sounds you made around him, not put off by his apparent incapacitation. “As did you. But yet a mere name seems implausible.”

"Do you ever shut up?"

Ezra thought for a moment then smirked brazenly. "Only when a succulent quim takes throne on my face."

You roll your eyes. "Look, we get the diamonds, we leave and I don’t have to suffer your intolerable, repetitive anecdotes ever again. My name is irrelevant in the grand scheme of things." You growl, sucking your bottom lip into your teeth.

You can hear him chuckling away in your ear piece with a wheezy rasp. “Desperate to be rid of me already? I might flirt with the offended.”

“Pfft. You’ll get over it.” You mirth.

Although a shifty flush creeps insidiously into your already overheated cheeks, as uninvited images of him grunting as you sat on his hawkish face invade your mind like knives at a target board.

He could certainly put that mouth to good use. The thoughts your mind still conjures makes the inside of your helmet stifling.

The smell gets stronger as you meander closer to wherever the heck it is that Ezra is leading you into. A wider cavern opens itself up and you climb upon its slope exercising caution at his instruction to follow.

“One slip and the void will take you,” he warns with a simper rolling around his dry lips.

“Don’t tempt me,” you reply sardonically. You both step slowly and carefully along the ledge as the vertigo sways you towards its jaws. Steadying yourself, you push on behind him.

The tar-like smell intensifies when Ezra announces you’ve both arrived. Although you're hardly impressed - it's just another cavern like the million you’ve already hiked through to get here. You watch as he unclips his helmet spokes and the hiss of his respirator sounds snakelike inside your ear.

“Can we breathe down here?” You question warily at his flippancy.

“Assist me, would you?” He asks as he inhales through a toothy grin, nodding.

Once your own helmet is off, the subtle breeze of clean oxygen hits your face, cooling it. It's incredibly warm down here, considering the moon is in the midst of a deep freeze on the surface.

You watch as Ezra steps forward to another ledge and looks down. “There,” he points.

You step forward yourself and shine a light and are aghast at what you see.

A writhing mass of black, wet tentacles, twisting and undulating in an eerie dance. The glistening surface of each tentacle reflecting an otherworldly sheen, while they move with an unsettling fluidity.

Unfathomable thrumming spirals are spilling out around the pit below the ledge, moving in a coordinated, yet unpredictable manner, in various girths and lengths. Slick as they writhe against one another, pulsing like a singular heartbeat.

“What is that?” You mouth incredulously.

Upon closer inspection, faint iridescent patterns shimmer along the length of the tentacles, creating an illusion of ethereal beauty amidst the stark darkness, like they almost glow in places. The patterns shift and change as the tentacles move.

As the mass undulates gently, it seems to emit a low hum, barely audible, but one that can be felt deep within your chest, resonating with a haunting melody. It's a sound that stirs emotions buried in your subconscious, eliciting a mix of awe and wonder, tinged with an underlying sense of unease as you feel prickles shoot down your spine.

“Our entrance. Hmm. Bigger than I was infromed. No bother. We'll go through it.” Ezra pulls down the zipper of his flight suit and begins shaking it off of his only arm clumsily.

“Wait, what? Through it? What the fuck is it?!” You query, wide-eyed.

The enigmatic display of black, wet tentacles in this mysterious mass is a surreal and haunting sight, one that leaves you captivated by its beauty, while your rational mind reminds you of the depths of the unknown that lie within.

All you can envision is teeth. Sharp, piercing teeth.

“Take your suit off, pet.” He instructs calmly.

“Ezra.” You shake your head concerned.

He rolls his suit over his stump and down to his thermals. “It protects the diamonds. We need to go through it. We’ll pass right through, out to the bottom when they see we're not a threat to them. No harm done.”

“Are you fucking insane?”

“That's yet to be determined officially.” Ezra responds nonchalantly. “Although, I’ve been reassured that this is-”

“Wait, you’re basing this off of hearsay? How do you know that thing won’t fucking eat us?” You're sweating again.

Ezra rolls his suit down to his ankles and begins pulling at the lace of his worn boot. “I don’t.” He simply retorts.

“No.” You shake your head adamantly. “You can go and die if you want. I’ll wait here.” You’d encountered many odd alien-like entities in your time prospecting, but this? This is something else entirely.

You peer carefully over the ledge, seemingly unable to look away at the mass of tentacles that are free of suckers. They're just smooth and slick in their perfection. Lost in the horrific beauty and mystique of the scene, you feel a magnetic pull, as if the mass of tentacles beckons you to join its dance.

A part of you yearns to step closer, to unravel the secrets it holds, and yet another part hesitates, fearing the unknown consequences of such a connection. In the midst of this ghastly display, a heavy feeling of dread envelops you, like an invisible hand tightening around your heart that crushes.

“Nu-uh, Birdie." Ezra warns, darkly. "We go together as agreed upon in our oath. You need to play your part and help me to retrieve the diamonds. Can’t embark on this without you, given my infernal impediment.” Ezra turns to look at you with those muddy eyes, and it's beguiling as it is dangerous.

You stare down at the pit unmoving.

"No harm will come to you under my watch." He reassures, but it fails.

"Don't make promises you can't keep."

He simply offers you a small smile. "Can but wait, Birdie. Let's get a leg on."

“I must be fucking insane…” You mutter, shaking your head. Sighing, you take off your own suit and strip down to your undergarments.

“Good girl,” you hear him say.

You catch Ezra glancing at your bare legs as you're dressed in nothing short of flimsy shorts and a thin camisole that barely covers your modesty under your thermals.

His own undergarments are a frayed t-shirt and some fusty long johns that sit awkwardly under the small paunch of his soft belly.

But he seems to pull them off as your own eyes sway towards the memory of his body on the fraying futon as it writhed and shuddered whilst you sucked down the swell of his cock, back in his dingy bunk apartment nestled in the Noki District on The Pug.

For a man of his advancing years, you think him to be attractive in a roguish kind of way; a scummy diamond in the rough. Scummy enough to have let him eat you out, anyway.

Breathing calmly - or at least trying to - you sit beside him on the edge of the pit staring down at the glistening appendages that swam in a hypnotic pulse against one another.

The sounds of their wet slick can be heard as they slide and pass over one another in heaving waves; a wet shine evident on their alien corium that glimmers at you.

You’re not sure why you're doing it, but you reach forward instinctively and feel the skin of one as you run your palm over it gently, awed by the sensation that leaves prickles flooding down your spinal cord.

The electricity creeps up each nodule and into the bottom of your neck. It feels comforting, soothing as the previous hesitation you felt is washed away in a calming opacity that soon melts your eyelids shut.

The tentacle arches up into your palm, bumping it benignly as its secretions coat your skin with a cooling, thin substance that feels miry as it greets you.

As you attempt to retreat, the allure of the scene grips you, holding you in a trance-like state, unable to tear your eyes away from the eldritch horror that unfolds before you. It's as if the entity, sensing your fear, seeks to draw you deeper into its realm, to become a part of its ancient enigma. To whisper it's secrets in your ear.

The luminescence now reveals disturbing images etched into the tentacles' surface - visions of cosmic terrors, nightmarish landscapes, and grotesque creatures. Each tentacle seems to bear the collective knowledge of the horrors of the universe, driving you to the edges of precarious sanity.

A cacophony of unnerving sounds emanates from the mass - the raspy whispers, unnerving wails, and an ominous heartbeat that seems to reverberate through your own veins. The dread within you intensifies, and an overwhelming feeling of claustrophobia engulfs you as it reaches its zenith; as if the darkness itself is closing in on you, and it has snapping jaws.

“Birdie,” you can hear Ezra bleed into your ominous tranquillity, but he sounds so far away. Like his voice is at the bottom of a metal wire, sounding tinny and ruptured.

The sudden panic in his voice shakes your foundations leaving you unsteady. But it's not him making you sway as you open your eyes to see yourself falling, face first.

You’re tethered by the tentacles wrapping around your ankles and wrists and pulling you forward into the mass of them.

“Ezra!” You gasp trying to repel them as they reach for you, but the combined strength of the slithering organs is undeniable.

You're both immobilised as you're dragged down into the pit. Ezra disappears first; the whites of his wide eyes are the last thing you see before you're blinded by the black.

The stickiness coats your face, your eyelids. It slicks through your hair; a clear, thin mucus that smells like musky, rich leather and allows you to move freely through the tentacles as you descend further.

"Birdie!" You hear Ezra call out to you and you call back frantically. "Just relax, it will pass you right through."

"Relax?!" You splutter when you feel the prevalent tightening around your waist. It's too tight as it starts to bind and crush against your pelvis.

"Trust me!" He calls again. Oh, if it were that simple, you snarl to yourself.

You try to calm yourself, relax as he so eloquently puts it. But it’s hard; the panic seeds and flowers in you and the coil only tightens under your rib cage in response. It knows your fear.

As it embraces you, tentacles wrapping around every limb and numbing them out, you feel the weightlessness of your body as it travels to the back of your cranium and ignites. You can't see anything, just the never ending void of black that hurts your eyes to try and strain them to reach beyond it.

A sense of foreboding lingers, as if a malevolent entity from the mass of tentacles watches from the shadows; its sinister presence ever-present in the periphery of your senses.

As you sink through the darkness, the very air seems heavy with an oppressive weight, and the pulsing surroundings of the tentacles appear distorted, as if the boundaries between reality and the unknown have blurred.

Each sound in the darkness makes you jump, fearing that some other force might be lurking too close.

A small glimmer fizzes somewhere in the distance, blink and you’d miss it. Purple, maybe blue flashes that spark through a plasma network of neuron pathways that fire and snap ahead. A brain that grows in size and expands. A dying star implodes and blinds you for a moment.

You gasp out in awe and are then fully weightless; floating in the violet nebula that’s haunting in its brilliance, its swirling tendrils stretching across the cosmic canvas like an ethereal tapestry.

As you gaze at the purple nebula, a sense of calm washes over you, momentarily easing the fear and tension that had consumed your senses previously.

The swirling clouds of gas and dust seem to dance with grace, performing an elegant ballet that holds you in rapt attention. You forget everything, you forget it all.

You can't feel your limbs, you can't feel the weight of your bones or the blood in your organs. You can't smell or taste. You're deafened by bubonic silence save for the heavy whooshes of your own breath inside your ear canal.

And then the nebula shrinks, collapsing upon itself into two tiny balls of light that morph and shape into eyeballs with irises the colour of those tasteless Bitz Bars you’d endured on lengthy missions.

The eyes stare at you, they see into you; unblinking and you can feel them rifle around inside the deepest trenches of your mind, picking and rummaging with spidery fingers. And you can only let them as they see all of your sordid secrets and lay them out like sharp medical instruments.

Then thin, wiry nerves root and track from behind them; a skull forms around the eyeballs. Muscles and viscera wrap and coil around a skeleton as the skin grows over it like fungi and tans in colour.

Ezra is before you; naked and plump in his lower belly fat and a thick, flaccid cock hangs between his legs. He’s staring back and floating like you are in this chaotically still space. His stump bears no scars, just perfectly smooth, taut skin around the missing bone like marble.

You can only watch as his cock stiffens and begins to drip mercury. You’re not sure where it comes from, maybe something in the stratosphere, maybe something in your core, but the overwhelming feeling of desire bubbles and courses through your veins making them burn under your skin.

You feel the tentacles again, pulsing and vibrating around you.

There is no other sensation except the feeling of his only arm pulling you towards him and then his lips are crushing against your own, smothering.

You're not repulsed as you taste him; his invading tongue filling your mouth and sliding down your throat that opens willingly for him.

You let him in, you want him to be inside you like this, even though somewhere inside of you, your voice is shrieking and howling at you to resist the ratty bastard. It’s a need that requires satiation.

Any resistance is smothered by the heat between your legs; the wetness that leaks from your swollen cunt lips and mashing into the meat of your thighs as you squeeze them together deliciously to equally appease and chase that desire.

You feel his ever-growing tongue reaching into the back of your oesophagus and expanding; sliding deep down into your guts as you choke and splutter around it as it restricts your airway.

Breathing through your nose is impossible as it fills with the sticky mucus that attaches to the fine cilia suffocating you further.

You try to resist now, to pull away but your limbs still won't work. Your fingers won’t cooperate. You can't feel them. All you can feel is Ezra invading your body through your mouth and licking out every crevice of it with his elongated tongue.

You can feel the cramping in your stomach as he prods around down in there, pushing against your muscles and fat; crushing your offals and lapping at your stomach acids.

You want to scream so badly, but all that comes out around his tongue is moans of abject satisfaction. Your own voice, your own sounds are so alien to your ears. You're enjoying this and you want more, so much more from him.

You feel your mouth fill from your gullet upwards; something warm rising up from the back of your throat from around his tongue as it floods you. Its viscosity bubbles and pools out the side of your lips and down your chin.

Ezra pulls back and you see it; his tongue now black and shiny and no longer pink and fleshy - or human. The flippering tentacle disappears back into his smiling mouth as you gasp for air.

You cough up a thick, white substance that projectiles from you, choking you as you heave it out down your chest.

Somewhere, you know this taste; familiar from your own experiences of swallowing unworthy men’s loads on your knees as they ejaculated into your eager mouth on lonely nights around The Pug.

Somewhere through the heady confusion, you know this is wrong on so many levels as you belch and splutter through bringing up the seminal pearl flow in droves.

A subtle yet unsettling change occurs. The glistening black, wet tentacles from the malevolent mass re-emerge in the scene, twisting and snaking their way into the cosmic display as you splutter.

At first, the juxtaposition of the tentacles against the cosmic backdrop seems incongruous, like an intrusion of darkness into the splendour of the nebula.

However, as you watch, you begin to sense a strange harmony between the two that bleeds into your skin.

The tentacles are back around your body, cinching and curling around your waist, clamping around your wrists. You feel the alluring tickle of something travelling up your thigh and your eyes widen.

“Ezra… It’s-it’s-” you stutter as you feel it snake up your inner thigh and under the hem of your shorts.

“Let us in, Birdie. It’ll feel so good.” Ezra drenches the promise inside your ear, licking and sucking the shell of it. His fingers skim your clit, furrowing inside your shorts and opening your lips for the tentacle to slip fully inside, filling you up. “We’ll make you feel so good.”

You cry out as it slides in, slippery and thick. It stretches you wide, a slight burn from the jarring friction that soon settles into undulating pleasure.

It shouldn’t feel like this, it shouldn’t feel so… good.

You feel a mix of emotions - fascination, fear, and an inexplicable sense of reverence - as you feel it penetrate you deeply. The tentacles, once harbingers of horror, now evoke a different kind of awe.

“Fuck, it feels so good...” You chime falling backwards into the universe.

“Mmm, there you go,” Ezra smiles and you feel his fingers slipping quicker over your engorged clit making you flinch and breathe out dust each time he flicks it. “Let us fuck you, little bird. We’re one now.”

You can hear Ezra; the haunting groans and gasps fill your ears like lead. It’s everywhere around you, echoing and you can’t escape the sounds of his pleasure on loop as you’re fucked by the rogue tentacle stretching you out the further it whelves inside of you.

You can see yourself, devoured by the coils slipping all over your skin; watching yourself get dicked by this entity that knows what you want, knows how to pleasure you like no man could.

Your pussy welcomes the deep thrusts it gives you and you writhe and moan, losing your eyesight. The features on your face dissolve away leaving you a faceless putty for them to remould and sculpt, and you twist and bend to their will.

You’re lost to it; succumbed fully by an invading desire and heat, and the sounds of Ezra’s grunting hammering inside your ears as it rocks through the nebula; a big bang of grunts and heady snarls that rip through the very seam of existence.

But when you finally open your eyes as they grow back into your sockets, he’s no longer there.

All you can see is the nebula again. All you can feel is the fullness between your thighs; the never-ending release it offers as it pumps you full of its seed. The nebula winks back at you and pulses around the edges.

You feel the bunching behind your stomach walls, the fluttering of your pussy spasming and squeezing as you’re pulled apart and smashed back together again, at one with the cosmos.

You cry out; you can see your voice as it shatters into metallic fragments and rains chrome glitter all over you that coats and nicks your throat.

Your gasps birth new stars from your mouth as they find their place in the dust and gases that swirl around your body, completely obliterating it.

And when it’s come and gone, the waves settling as you fall still from the exhausting aftermath, there’s nothing once more; just the never-ending expanse of black.

You breathe out through soaked trembles, and just as he advised, the grip falters and you descend again slowly through the pulsating coils that slide sticky against your face and gums.

You drop and land clumsily onto something solid; the hard, real ground. Your tailbone hits it first and you wince.

Your fingers shakily register the feel of something you recognise and yet it doesn’t seem entirely real as you scrape your brittle nails into the rock beneath your face to be sure.

But your cunt is still contracting; squeezing around a vacant space where you were sure you were penetrated and filled by something thick and binding, and oh so fucking good.

Something that felt indescribable and you mourn its loss irrevocably.

You eye him carefully as he looks back at you with a singular outstretched palm laced with blisters and callouses lanced towards your face.

Ezra helps you up onto jellified legs and above you the tentacles writhe a lowly metre or so above your heads in a hypnotic dance that seems to defy and mock gravity.

Ezra reaches up, his only hand brushing against the swell of the membranes that roll and curl tightly around one another.

"Curious…" He mumbles as the slick glides effortlessly through his calloused fingers; a cosmic ballet of twisting and pulsing.

“What is it?” You ask, dumbfounded and awed.

Your voice doesn't register as your own. You feel like you’ve been swamped in a heavy sleep, plagued by dreams of untold, lucid delights that you can still feel throbbing on your clit.

You’re unsure if it really happened or not and try to shake the delusion, yet you feel yourself pining for it.

You peer at Ezra carefully, looking for any sign that he endured a similar experience, and yet his face is as unreadable in its mischievousness and stoniness as usual.

Your skin feels wet and sticky, your mouth remembers the taste, and his body mirrors your own, coated in the shiny lacquer from passing through the tar coils. His hair is slicked back and darker, almost black, save for the white patch that is stark in its platinum yellow glow; a tiny sun being swallowed in a sea of putrid oily tufts.

The undergarments cling to his skin, saturated and binding and making no attempt to hide the swell of his cock inside of them.

As he glances at you with an astonished smirk, you feel something pull tight in your abdomen; a distant hunger gnawing at the edges of rationality and the sense that you’re unable to get a firm grip on reality anymore.

“A cephalopod of some origin, or many. I've heard tales of Krakens before, but not like this.” Ezra admires bewitchingly as he strokes above him. “It feels…” He closes his eyes and you watch him rise on his tiptoes with a small smile blooming over his mouth. “Sentient.” He concludes through a nasally breath lost inside his thick drawl.

He drops his hand slowly as a lone tentacle feeds down from the others in front of him. You watch rooted as it rubs itself across his broad chest and slithers around him. It runs between his thighs and he moans as it brushes against his cock.

"Uh, this one seems incredibly obliging," Ezra exclaims as he glances at you with astonished mirth bleeding into his ratchet peepers.

You watch it disappear down inside the back of his long johns.

He groans out, his body jars forward but he doesn’t fall; the tentacles have him secured by his arm and back as he becomes weightless in front of you.

“Ezra,” you start forward to assist him, but are stopped when he hisses out, baring his teeth.

He loses his eyes as they roll back into his skull.

“Fuh-uck,” he whines loosely as though his teeth are no longer in his mouth, and you realise you’ve heard this sound before; the sounds of pleasure bursting through the cavity of his chest into your ears.

The same noises he made under you on The Pug with mouthfuls of your seeping cunt.

The tentacle penetrates him and you're drawn into the vortex of his mouth pulling your eyes from their trenches to drink their jelly. You can only watch, body pulsing, skin fraying, as it fucks him right in front of you.

"Kevva, that's deep," he groans, with a blissed out smile.

Then you feel it; it's warm as it glides over your navel and across your skin leaving a moist, sluggish trail. The tentacles bring you together, cocooning you both as Ezra pulls you towards his chest.

And you're not resisting again, instead letting him welcome you into his one-armed embrace.

His body feels good against yours, too good. Like the slats in your rib cages were meant to interlock.

It seems as if he can hear your thoughts and you watch as he opens his chest from the centre; fingers ripping through flesh as he pries open his bony cage and welcomes you into the balloons of his lungs.

Your nose wanders and inhales through his papery bronchioles; they dust into your face like fluffy dandelion seeds and float into the ether.

"Need you inside of me," you groan to him as if in a trance as his sticky heart jostles against your lips as it beats.

You lick across it, sucking on a throbbing ventricle delicately as his blood coays your teeth, and he whines out louder as he ejaculates into his long johns.

“I already am,” Ezra grunts, eyes rolling to the back of his skull again like loose marbles as the crest of his hips buck forward.

You pull back to see him whole once more and glance at the huge, black shape filling you up, fucking into you.

His own cock is hard and weeping pearly globules of come as it rubs against the tentacle with fantastic friction. Your fingers peel him apart; stripping him down to the hard, muscled core of his dick, and he writhes and groans under your touch as you obliterate him.

You look back at his face and he’s swallowing down a thick tentacle inside of his plush mouth before yours is invaded again by the wet velvet.

He fills your holes, all of them. You can feel him stretch out your pussy, sliding in and out with his thick appendage that makes you buck uncontrollably. He feels so plentiful and thick. He slips into the tight crevice of your ass, filling and stretching you wholly and he's inside your mouth; feeling him graze at the back of your throat as he thrusts and chokes you.

He's everywhere, and yet Ezra pulls you close into his scarred chest again whilst he himself is filled in every orifice he possesses and it's still not enough.

He wants to climb inside your skin. You know it, because it's exactly what you want. It’s what you crave. To rest in the sponge of his brain.

You can hear him insipidly rambles to you all the ways in which he wants to devour you for eternity.

His whines set your skin alight; the oil burning you up as it sears and chokes you. That tar-like smell wafting around you both as it smokes you out and leaves you breathless.

“I can see it,” he mutters, but it doesn't come from his mouth, no that’s full of the pulsing thick membrane that fucks him like they fuck you.

Instead, you can see his voice, moving across the nebula as he sings on music scales, lighting up the treble clefs with supernovas.

“Can you see it, Birdie?” He asks you, each red giant twinkling with his din and tone before it dies, and you can. In their dance, the tentacles reveal a deeper truth - that even the most terrifying entities can be transformed by the beauty and wonder of the cosmos.

They are a reminder that in the vastness of the universe, there is a balance between darkness and light, chaos and order, horror and beauty and you understand that now as you approach another climax.

“It’s so fucking beautiful.” You gasp, tears filling your eyes.

You arch your back; your spine cracks through each vertebrae as they pulverise into dust and you collapse in on yourself, boneless and spent once more.

You can feel it and it feels exhilarating to die and be reborn over and over.

You gush around the tentacle and onto Ezra’s soft stomach swell as you come unrestrained, and for what feels like for infinity.

You’ve never fully understood the meaning of the word euphoria until now.

Soon Ezra lets go of you; his own body arching grotesquely and crushing inwardly. His mouth opens as the tentacle ejects, spewing out thick, creamy liquid in a silent scream as he rolls back into the mass of pulsing coils to be devoured all over again.

He twists and turns and you see his left hand come down his shoulder, tugging at the skin below his blade that houses his clipped stump.

Then another hand, and another; more human hands that are his own with the thumb on the left side and all with the tiny bullseye tattoo inked and faded on the web of skin between his thumb and forefinger.

His various left hands are pulling the skin open so you can see his spine through the tears. Small, onyx tendrils move under the bones and he bleeds out that thick, seminal fluid between his contracting muscles.

Ezra removes his skin like removing a sweater and you scream into the void.

Birdie.

You hear him through the sludgy goop inside your ears; a faint rumble of your body as you are gently shaken awake by thick fingers pulling you out of inertia.

You're on the ground again and the pit of writhing tentacles is still a dark swarm threatening to rain upon your heads. You stare at it, watching it pulse and simper. Trying to understand its secrets, its desires.

Trying to detest it with every fibre of your being but not quite managing to.

There's a chasm where that feeling should be.

Ezra's worrisome face pulls your senses towards him and you clutch onto his arm, reassuring yourself that he's real. Real muscle and bone.

You flinch when you think you see something move under his skin, but it’s just his vein as he tenses.

"What did you see?" He asks you darkly. His eyes are as black as the darkest corners of the universe.

"See?" You ponder it dumbly for a moment as it all floods back to you.

“You were screaming.” He explains.

"I... I'm not sure." You mumble.

"I've deduced that this creature can telepathically link itself to our minds in a mere quest of bewitchment. It can show us our wildest, unarmed desires, or toss us into a gully of the most sordid nightmares." His eyes have shifted into something that you’ve never seen on his face since meeting him - fear.

"What did you see?” You prompt him instead, sitting up. Your head feels like it’s been split into two and neither of your brains can comprehend this scenario fully.

His eyes drop to you and he helps you to your feet clamping his singular hand around your elbow as he yanks.

"Felt so real," he utters through a clenched mouth. Or surreal. You're not quite sure what he says as your face draws up to his.

He glances at you and touches your cheek, cupping it gently. You feel the thick pad of his thumb pull on your bottom lip as he admires the wet, pink flesh of your gums with some irreverent hunger.

"So real." He repeats with darker, hooded eyes.

"Ezra," you steer, peeling his fingers delicately from your skin, despite them soldering into your flesh, and he seems to snap out of it.

He recoils back as though he has been stung. "We need to find a way to leverage our exit." He announces flatly.

"What about the diamonds?" You rub at your arms and they don’t feel like they are attached to you anymore. Neither do your legs and it takes you a moment to realise you are standing freely on them.

"They don't appear to be harbouring any gems down here. I fear we may have been taken in by a ruse." He scowls bitterly.

"You mean you were." You mutter. “I just stupidly came along.”

Ezra sighs loudly and sharply and steps forward craning his head up to the tentacles. He mutters something that you don’t quite catch.

"You're expecting them to give us a ride?" You scoff at him.

"Do you have a more eloquent stratagem? I'm all ears."

"Yes. I'm not going in there again." You say with an inherent coldness prickling at your skin. But yet it’s still hot and dense between your legs.

"Tell me woman, what's rattled you with the visions they gave you?"

"It doesn't matter," you say, turning away from him.

Although you’re not entirely sure if they were just visions. You search along the sharp rocky walls and follow them round with your eyes and there is no obvious sign for escape.

The only way out is back up through them. If they will allow you to leave, that is. The thought makes you cold.

“Birdie, I…” Ezra starts and pauses for a moment. “I know this outcome isn’t what we forecast when this expedition matriculated between us.”

“You think?”

“But I must riposte, that we need to find a way out and the only one presented to us is from whence we came. So if you would find it in you to trust me, then I believe I can lead us out of here fully intact.”

“Trust you, you say?” You snort flippantly.

“Yes. A big ask, I am well aware of its weight.” He scowls at you this time.

“We did things.” You breathe. "You and I, we... copulated."

The words roll off your tongue and you want to shove them back into your mouth and suck the fat from them, but he’s already heard them and is mentally clipping them apart in his bank of memories to keep the best of them - the most sordid.

“I remember vividly our foreplay on The Pug, but you insisted on no penetration and I kept my word. I may not be a gentleman, but I'm no cavalier scoundrel."

"Yes, I know-"

"-Was a satisfaction garnered for us both as I recall. No-one has ever... ” His head snaps towards you with intrigue. "Are you keen to indulge the liasion?"

“No. I mean... Here. That’s what I saw. We didn't just play this time. Us. It’s what I-”

“Felt.” Ezra finishes for you and you nod as you realise that’s what he felt too. His cock, still tenting against his undergarments, reassures you of that.

“And then we were apart. Like, pulled apart from the insides. I watched you remove your skin. Was it real or did we dream it or…? Kevva, I have no idea what is fucking real or not right now.” You mutter, running your hand through your damp, disgusting hair.

“Did you hit your peaks of satisfaction?” Ezra asks.

"What?"

"Did you come, pet?"

Your cheeks feel hot and you fold your arms sighing. “Yes.” Your stomach pulls tight and it makes you grit your teeth.

“As did I.” He admits freely. "Felt like I couldn't stop. It was kinda nice. Tingly."

He closes his eyes and you watch as his free hand drifts down his sternum and palms his cock over the wet fabric with a soft squeeze, clearly not deterred by your presence.

“It wasn’t you. I mean you weren’t inside me, but you were all the same. It’s confusing. What does it want?” You ask looking up at the swell that seems to hum again. Your palm is running gentle circles against your gut that feels hot.

“I don’t believe it wants anything insidious. It just feels and thrives like we do. It has cravings.” Ezra explains, wandering closer under the centre of it.

You shudder and ponder the creation of such an organism, that you summarise mentally and agree, is not too dissimilar from yourself or Ezra. It exists in the most basic of forms, to feed, to fornicate, to-

You feel a sharp twinge in your lower belly and groan.

“You creamy?” Ezra asks.

“Yeah just… Aaargh!” You hiss and double over clutching your stomach. Horrific cramping churns inside of you and you watch aghast as watery blood trickles down your thighs and legs.

“Ezra!” You shriek hysterically, but he’s wrenched away from your aid as the tentacles swoop down and grab you up in their clutches.

His frantic voice is drowned out as the black takes you again.

This place is too bright.

It glitters and glares at you in a striking cobalt like you’ve never seen before. It takes a while for your eyes to adjust but when they do, you find yourself sprawled on a never-ending bed of sharp diamond pieces.

Millions of them are scattered over the ground, around your feet; cutting into your buttocks and back as you’re spread over them like you’ve been dumped in here carelessly.

They’re protruding out of the rock walls and you can see them sparkle above you, twinkling like distant stars through a kaleidoscopic blue galaxy.

Your fingers rifle through them and clutch them, squeezing the shards. You watch as your skin is pierced and bleeds, yet you feel no physical pain.

The beauty stuns you for a moment and you forget your predicament for a while as you just marvel in the perplexity.

But you’re soon shoved back into it when you feel the cramps twist up your cervix and you scream out in agony.

“Ssh, it’ll soon be over, dove.” You hear Ezra’s soothing drawl and see a million of his hawkish faces in every facet gleaming at you.

He crunches over the diamonds as he walks, bare feet bleeding and he’s naked. Cock lithe and hard, dripping with a pearly secretion you long to drink from.

He no longer has a stump where his right arm should be, but a long thick tentacle that pulses and squirms excitedly as he strides towards you.

He crouches down at your feet, parting your thighs and runs his tongue up the sweaty streaks of them.

“Ezra, what the fuck is happening?” You gasp and grunt through a fierce contraction. Your insides feel like they’re ripping open and your cervix tightens in a way you’ve never felt before.

“Hush now. You give it what it wants and we can have what we want.” He runs his tongue over the bubbly seam of your dilated cunt and sucks upon your clit hungrily for a beat, pulling a convulsion out of you. “Play your part, Birdie.”

You hum out, head lolling backwards as you can’t help but succumb to the intense sucking on your bud from his lips.

“We knew you’d taste so good.” He whines and the thick black of his arm scales your throat and wraps itself around you, choking you as you gasp.

You cry out as another contraction bears down on your uterus and you can feel a heavy rush followed by a saturated squelch.

Ezra draws back and watches keenly as you birth the pupate azure eggs planted inside you. You scream through it; the agony makes your cunt and womb feel like they’re on fire and he coaxes you through it, lapping up the amniotic fluid each time you disembogue it out.

Sparkling diamonds fall from your hole and Ezra leads you into a jubilant climax as he sucks on your clit and furrows his fingers inside to help pull them out.

The diamonds shatter as the tiny organisms inside birth and slither away into the walls; the glittery shells they leave behind are your trophy.

You watch, astonished and soaked in sweat, as they vacate the discarded diamonds to join the mass of tentacles where they’ll grow and eventually breed another like you who should be so gluttonous as to seek their treasure.

You give it what it wants and we can have what we want.

An exchange. A life cycle. A quid pro quo.

Play your part, Birdie.

“Mmmaaaah!”

Your attention is diverted by Ezra pulling another orgasm from you into his mouth. Then, he’s climbing up your body like an arachnid. His tentacle arm slithers behind you and he spreads you open with his thick cock.

He brutally fucks your spent, stretched hole; his seed soothes the pain, numbs it out almost like a leeches bite.

You cling onto him as he grunts and wheezes inside of your ear.

“You did so good for us, Birdie.” He praises and you can’t help but smile and welcome him in fully as he drills so deep inside of you that you can feel the tip slither out of your mouth between your teeth and into his as he kisses you; becoming an entwined ouroboros of unrelenting pleasure.

It feels like it will never stop as his hips crack and hammer into yours, and you pass out, weighted down by exhaustion of all extremes.

Puggart Bench, 4 cycles ago...

“I feel some convival attraction to you, despite my infructuous emancipation of it.” Ezra says as he sups at his glass of golden suds. "Your pluckiness appeals to my better nature, Birdie."

"That's the beer talking." You smirk.

He eyes you with a slightly arched brow and wet pink lips. The foam of his beer drags along his moustache and you watch him lick it clean with a quick flick of his tongue. "A siren, no doubt... I'll willingly drown in you."

"Stop with the sweet talk, prospector and get to the point." You mirth. Although his carnal wooing leaves sweat beading on your skin.

“You understand the objective?”

You nod. “Seems simple enough.”

You’d discussed it at length despite the slight buzz you’d gotten from the beer intake, and yet the plan came together without as much input from yourself. He knew the route, he knew the place. He knew where the diamonds were.

And he did all the damn talking.

All you had to do was assist him with the manual labour of it all, as he put it. Mine and prospect. Fly you both in and out too. An extra pair of hands where he only had half.

But it seemed a little too good to be true and you went to question him further when you felt someone knock into your chair from behind.

A wayward hand was felt trying to cup your breast and you grabbed it and squeezed it in a tight crush.

“I’d rethink that, friend. Unless you still want this hand to jerk you off tonight?” You spoke over your shoulder to the drunk assailant trying to grab at you.

He dribbled something shy of an apology onto your shoulder and you let him go, not before removing the ring on his middle finger that encased a shiny, expensive looking gem. Might fetch some credits for your inconvenience.

“Fiery one, aren’t you?” Ezra mused as he observed the whole thing.

“Just another night in this squalor. I can hold my own.” You replied, stuffing the ring in your pocket.

"Good. I require you strong. You play your part, Birdie. I'll see that you're rewarded handsomely for it."

"You speak as if mining diamonds is a dangerous art. It isn’t. I’m fairly astute in the work of dirty hands."

"These aren't just ordinary diamonds to cut your teeth on." He leaned in, placing the glass down on the table with a heavy thud.

You could smell the stink of the alcohol on his breath and that putrid musk of sweat wafting from him, mixed in with something else sweet and foreboding.

He smelled like death - sweet, alluring death.

His scruff was oily and scattered across his ageing, tan skin and throat, and his dark brown eyes bore into your own for a few moments, contemplating.

Ezra ran his hand around his grazed chin, rubbing at the stubble there now peppered with scabs and grey whiskers as he mulled over the thoughts about you accompanying him in his mind.

Black gunk was embedded in his nail beds. His hand was large for his frame, like a great big shovel for a palm; one that could crush a human skull with little effort, you thought. Once armed with two, you could only speculate as to what vile menace those hands could have caused.

“Where do you come from?” You ask him curiously as you sup. That stark blonde streak at his hairline catches the light and looks like it shimmers at you with tempting promises and false conviction.

Ezra looks up at you from his position at the table and smirks. “Where do you come from?” He challenges back.

He looks at you with a haggard expression that is unchanging. It begins to creep you out a little bit the more you see it, making prickles rise on the back of your neck. He suddenly has a way of making you feel nervous for no reason at all.

And men usually don’t make you feel nervous.

You draw back with a contemplative hiss. “The less we know about each other, the better.” You taunt. “No names, for instance.”

He's already haunting your blood as you feel it warm under your skin, and the slick bubble of sweat upon the back of your neck makes its presence known.

“Why the ambiguity?” He questions with a glass stare. "My name is Ezra." He casually tosses his name in front of you on the table, expecting you to return.

But you don't.

You're feeling prickles run all over your skin. You just want to wash him away with the grime and murk that coats his breath.

A spooky, amaranthine being regarding you from opposite the table and he smirks crookedly again through those swollen lips, pursed out, yet remains tight-lipped. You wonder what they taste like.

You wonder whether his foreskin his clipped, what his come tastes like.

“Getting cosy isn’t my style, Ezra.” You mutter, gulping back more foam and blinking the wanton haze away.

“Well regardless, what a delightful romp it would be to charter to Narilla with you, pet. I’m in if you’re in.” Ezra says after some time of eyeing you.

“I’m in,” you agree, sealing your fate. “Although, wouldn’t you rather have some strong muscle to offer us some leverage in case things go awry? There’s plenty of dick-for-brains to choose from.” You glance around the bar at the crass prospectors and miners in all their lunkhead glory.

“Nothing will go awry.” Ezra shakes his head. He clears his throat. “You’ll do just fine. You're Kevva sent for it.”

You feel his eyes drink you in as they wander over your body and you consider for a moment if you’ll end up back at his place tonight riding his face.

The idea isn’t as heinous as you’d like.

“A quick expedition then.” You confirm.

“That it is. We needn’t linger on the moon in the throes of a harsh winter.” His eyes dart away as though recalling something execrable as he struggles to swallow his beer. “In and out.” Ezra clarifies. "It'll be over quickly."

You nod once in agreement.

“There is a price for what you seek, prospectors. Especially you, girlie.” A foreign voice comes from beside you on the adjacent table.

A man with one eye glares under the shroud of his hood at you. A horrific scar as deep as a magenta trench replaces his other eye. Encrusted with old yellow skin like scales that were in various decays of flaking.

“Balderdash and frivolous superstition.” Ezra simply rebuts and knocks back the remnants of the amber beer down his throat.

“What do you mean, a price?” You query with a lazy smirk over your own numb lips to the creepy eavesdropper.

“He means nothing. Just trying to rile you, Birdie, is all. Come on now, we’ll drink some more. I insist. Celebrate our impending agreement.”

"Are you trying to get me drunk?" You muse.

"Why? Is it working? Am I attractive enough to you yet that you'll let me…" he looks up and down your body and licks his lips. "Indulge?"

"You're so presumptuous, Ezra" You smirk. "Maybe I'll be the one to indulge."

Ezra sways you up towards the bar with him and you think no more of it.

Later, you do indeed indulge, and ride hard on his hawkish face as he makes you come hard through juddery breaths as he fucks you with his serpent tongue relentlessly.

You can feel that heady pull on your clit as he sucks out your pleasure greedily in droves whilst you fist through his greasy hair in rapture as you grind your cunt against the furry graze of his chin.

As you suspected you would.

But now, that odd stranger is here, in the diamond pit with you; staring you down with his singular ragged eye watching as the glory of Ezra buries himself inside of you, and that man is whispering to you and now you know.

He was right, there was a price for Narilla’s diamonds.

You know everything now.

“You knew, didn’t you?” You question Ezra as his silhouette fuzzes into clarity.

The look on his face tells you all you need to know.

Of course he did. It all makes sense now.

“It’s why you favoured me over the other miners to accompany you; because I have a fucking womb!” You spit. "This was my part to play, wasn't it?"

You throw the diamonds you’d been holding at him, and he flinches as they pelt at his feet; his coveted prize.

“Birdie-” He holds up his palm, open in surrender.

“Don’t. Fucking. Call. Me. That!” You launch yourself at him and you both clatter to the stony ground.

You claw at him, aiming for his bastard face, but his free hand captures your fist. He clamps his legs around you to stop you gaining height over him and rolls, pinning you beneath him with ease.

For a man with one arm, he's still incredibly strong and slippery.

“No harm done.” Ezra sneers as you falter; his grip on your wrist flexing it backward a little until you feel a subtle crack and you hiss. “You fulfilled your part, yes. That is true. You got yourself remunerated. We’re free to depart now. It’s how this arrangement works.” He says, darkly.

“I should kill you, you piece of shit!" You seethe at him.

He looks offended. “Now, now. You weren’t saying that earlier when I was buried deep in the hilt of you.” He smirks sinisterly.

“You weren’t,” you shake him off and he rolls onto his back and snickers though rasps. “It wasn’t real.” You affirm, sitting up and flexing your wrist.

"Are you sure?" He questions you smugly.

"No. It was just-" You shake your head.

“Real enough for you to gestate and birth its offspring in droves.” Ezra reminds you.

“You want to lose your other fucking arm?” You warn through a snarl.

He sighs, the smirk dying. “You can’t simply procure the diamonds; you have to replenish your fill. They won’t let you leave if you just take from them. You have to have something to offer in return.” His eyes fall on your body, hungrily. “As I man, I can’t replenish. But you can.”

“You're not a man, you’re a fucking insect!” You rile.

“If I had delineated you the truth, you would never have accompanied me on this treacherous quest.” Ezra mutters, annoyed with clicked lips. “You were an unwitting comrade in my mournful web of deceit, I admit. I'm the arachnid, and you the fly..."

"Fuck you."

He snickers breathily. "I harbour no ill will towards you. You’re quite amiable despite your folly. I would have never let any permanent detriment come to you, Bir-.” He stops short of the moniker as he witnesses your stony glare.

“That’s fucking noble of you.” You growl.

“You’re still alive, yes? All supple appendages intact?”

You glare at him some more.

“Then we completed our charge fully unscathed and significantly richer for it.” Ezra simply says with a casual shrug of indifference.

You really want to punch him and feel his large nose shatter under your knuckles.

“What we possess now is incredibly rare. So few venture here because of the down payment required. You'll be a queen among mere men. You should think yourself fortunate.” He puts, examining one of the diamond shards carefully.

“Tell that to my insides!" You snap. You can still feel the ache; the rawness from the unexpected birth.

"It's what your glorious body was made for. To bear the fruit of life, is it not?"

"That," you point towards the swarming cluster "is not fucking fruit, Ezra!"

Ezra sighs and reaches for you gingerly. "I am burdened with my part in this. I am a host to belligerent shame. Honesty is a skill I do not possess in its entirety. But you and I, we make a damn hoot of a team."

"The prospector and her pimp!" You scoff.

"I'll make it right, if you’ll permit me?"

His deep, brown eyes bore into you and you feel something wobble inside you.

“I meant it when I said I liked you, pet. That clandestine night on The Pug with you? Kevva, it replays in my mind and won't let me have no peace. Your cunt stink is still all up in my sheets." He licks his lips, sucking on the bottom and recalling your taste for a beat with a satisfied murmur - a groan that your skin ignites to in response.

"Who would desire me like this now aside from the whores on Luxillion who take my credits and don't remember my name? They just remember this..." Ezra glances down at his missing appendage.

"I ponder if it was pity on your part, and I would not linger in offense if it was, but regardless, it was something. To me. And I do not take the pleasure you offered me so freely, and with an inkling of that desire for yours truly returned, lightly and with regret." He finishes.

You sigh and shake your head, unable to ignore fully the fizzing inside your veins as he says it, how earnest he suddenly appears.

Despite yourself, that night with him was indeed... something.

There was something so deliciously unkempt about him. Frivolous around the seedy murk. Something that your better nature repelled against, and yet caved to all the same.

“How the fuck do we get out of here?” You groan, looking up at the swarm of tentacles engulfing the only means of escape.

You're not sure if you can take another mind fucking, or a physical one. But your pussy clenches and it zaps on your clit regardless.

“The way we came in, I have already iterated that escape route to you, despite your reluctance to partake. It seems appeased, I think. Satiated. Might pass us up without further incident.”

"Well, I guess we have no choice." You utter.

Ezra gathers the diamonds and shoves them into his wet pockets until they bulge. He looks at you forlornly. “Thank you,” he notes.

You soften despite yourself. “Hold my hand this time. I don’t want to be separated from you and left behind now you’ve gotten what you wanted. I would expect no less from you.”

You can feel it on your skin. The dread. The desire the pit had for you. The fact that, despite his slimy betrayal, you still feel it burn in your core when he smiles crookedly at you.

"I would gladly leave these treasures here, if it meant not taking you with me." He says through molten brown eyes.

"You're so full of shit." You sigh, smirking.

Ezra reaches out with a timid grin of his own and you step forward, interlocking your fingers tightly in his.

“That's as may be, but I won’t let go.” He promises and you believe him as his thumb strokes over the ridge of your knuckles.

You feel his sincerity crush the bones in your hand.

“Once we get out of here, I think I never want to see your face again.” You warn him, but you can feel that your resolve already has cracks in it as you offer him a small, twinkly smile.

“That might be difficult…” Ezra holds up your interlocked hands and they are no longer hands in a muscled knot.

Instead, they are a singular arm that starts from your shoulder and ends at the ball joint on his. The skin is perfectly smooth and there is no separation on where you begin and Ezra ends.

“What the fuck?” You gasp.

“Embrace it, Birdie. It’s the only way we’re getting out.” Ezra smirks. "One last hurrah." He laughs and his breath suddenly smells like the dead Trogs on Ajaxia, as you inhale it into your stomach where it soils and grows roots.

You feel your toes leave the ground as the tentacles lift you upwards. Your joint appendage with Ezra stretches as you feel them try to separate you both.

Somewhere under the muscles and sinew, you grip onto him and he grips you back just as hard.

The nebula rises above you both and you cover your eyes with your free arm as it swells in intensity and size.

Your hand is pulled out of his from under the skin, like taking off a glove and Ezra desperately pulls you into his lap. You wrap your legs around his waist tightly locking you in and he grunts at the welcome intrusion from the crest of your pelvis crushed against his own.

"Not letting you go," he assures. Or warns. They sound one in the same.

His free fingers now push into your skull, sinking into the soft jellied mass of your brain and your own hands grip onto his shoulders, sinking into the bone beneath his flesh.

They slide in so easily, like fluid and you gasp out as he fills your cunt; that pulsing cock free from his undergarments and pumping his spend liberally into you and doesn’t stop. It floods your pussy, leaking out around his fat shaft and dripping down your thighs in thick globules.

“You taste so good, Birdie.” Ezra rasps and his voice is sulfuric. “We could devour you for eternity.”

He pulls back and his mouth is full of your milky flesh; your blood pooling from the corner of his lips and you hear his molars crunch through your bone fragments.

“Stay,” he wheezes. “Stay with us here and let us live inside you.” He pleads as he takes another bite, consuming you whole; his cock thrusting deeper into you and you groan and wail as he drowns you.

You can feel it filling you, that thick seminal fluid pouring from your ears, your nostrils and your eyes.

You're slipping, fading.

You want to stay but you know you should be somewhere else. Somewhere you’re not sure is real and you only dreamed of it.

But the nebula… it’s so fucking beautiful.

To never see it again wrenches your heart. You pluck it from your chest; a mass of sloppy ventricles and offer it out to the amethyst abyss.

You watch as it disintegrates into ash in your palm. You can still feel Ezra filling you, drowning you and you know this is where you belong.

You belong with them; this mass of tentacles that feeds you everything you could only ever imagine and crave. At one with the universe and home inside of the purple nebula that speaks the same language as you and shares a brainstem and-

“Birdie!”

You’re wrenched and you surface; spluttering as your grapple for the ledge with slippery fingers.

Ezra pulls you over, groaning with the strain as you topple onto him and gasp out. The diamonds spill from his pockets around you both and he pants into your face, his own reddening from the exertion.

“I got you,” he says, his face shiny and wet. "Easy now."

Your shaky fingers around the familiarity of his brackish features as you realise you're back on solid ground and out of the pit.

You can feel his chest heave against yours as you're crushed to him; his arm tight against your back.

“You didn’t leave me in there.” You marvel at him with those pink cheeks around his scruff.

“Do you think me completely unscrupulous, woman?” He frowns.

You lean in and kiss him, planting a deep relieved smooch onto his chapped lips and he’s taken by surprise.

You suck on his tongue and your kiss erupts into something unfinished. He groans back into your mouth as you can still feel how hard he is, how he pulses under you with need and it spreads into you.

“So, I assume by this mere token of affection, you no longer wish to gut me?” He gasps around your mouth.

“No, I still very much wish to,” you smile. “But right now, I just want you inside of me, Ezra. Fuck me.”

His grip on you strengthens. “I can certainly oblige to that,” he gruffs. "Seeing as we almost perished today."

"Almost," you growl.

He pushes his head up to kiss you again. He wastes no time and reaches down as you both fumble around your sticky, cloying undergarments.

He shimmies his long johns down his thighs as best as he can, pulling out his turgid cock that's pulsing with need and slippery with pre-cum.

You pull your shorts to the side as you sit down on him, sinking all the way down to his swollen balls.

“Fuck, Birdie... Better than the visions,” he whines, the cords in his neck straining and pupils blown wide. “So tight..." He gasps as you start rocking on him. "Oh, forgive me, pet. I won't last.”

"I don't care." You grunt wanting him and taking him, as you grind your hips back and forth sloppily.

He feels fucking divine; packing you out and stretching you through this frantic, clumsy fuck you’ve instigated, and you deduce you’re probably still out of your mind on whatever it was that had you feverish and delusional in the pit.

But it's of no matter; you’re too riled up to give a damn about anything else other than your release. And you want nothing more than to soak him.

It’s fast approaching as you grind down harder on him. You can feel him in the places where you’re still raw and tight, but you push through it; the pleasure is your driving force and it bubbles under your abdomen muscles and makes your toes spark.

"In Kevva's name, I swear you're magnificent," he rambles, reaching up with his free hand to grope and palm your breast over your camisole. He watches as you slide up and down on his cock, bewildered and in awe as your slick oils up the dark hairs around the base of him.

"Oh shit," he cants.

You suck on his deceitful tongue as you ride him and milk his cock for all it’s worth. Your peak is so close, quick and bursting like colourful strobes under your eyelids as your clit rubs deliciously against his fuzzy groin curls.

Your walls tighten and flutter around his girthy muscle buried to the hilt in you.

“Mmm fuck, Ezra, I’m going to-” You pant.

“Me too, come for me. All over my cock.” He hisses. “Now! Gah, sweet mother of Kevva,” he groans. “Ohshitohshitohshit… oh-oh shit!"

You tense and shake over him like an earthquake; eyes rolling back into your head and fingers digging into his chest meat.

Your thighs smack against the soft paunch of his stomach as you slow your pace and ride it out until the stars dissipate and that purple nebula fades into the black for good.

A small part of you is sad to see it go.

You feel Ezra pulse and fill you with his own warm heat and it spills out of you as you collapse onto his sternum, your cheek sticking to his wet clothed nipple, satiated and exhausted.

You glance at your discarded flight suits, after what feels like an eternity later of just laying stuck to him and listening to his heartbeat ebb, before you’d entered the creature's pit and realise this was all so very warped and that you actually made it out unscathed, like he had said.

Like he'd promised.

You’re still unsure if it all really happened or if your mind is playing tricks on you. All you can remember is the violet beauty and the feeling of being filled so deeply.

You feel his thick fingers run through the oil of your hair gently rousing your focus. "As much as I'd enjoy staying here with you on this idle precipice, it appears we should make haste to depart before anything else untoward occurs."

You nod and glance up at him, placing a gentle kiss on the scarred skin of his stump poking out under his t-shirt, which makes his eyes glisten at you.

You shuffle off of him and reach for your suit, careful not to eye him and a small part of you wanting to forget it all.

But you can’t forget a man like Ezra so easily - he’s furrowed in too deep already; got those grubby, thick fingers embedded deep into your skin and poisoning you with the dirt that constantly lives under his nails.

He bore witness to your ruining down in the pit, your undoing.

He was there with you as your skin was flayed down to the bone. The complete annihilation of your soul as it tarnished before him. He sought to devour the nerves under your flesh, the depraved delights that the pit drew out of you and into his waiting and willing mouth.

He didn't choke on you like you wanted.

Ezra regards you with a shine in his dark, beady eyes and offers you a small, creeping smile which you can’t help but return as you both dress and reattach your helmets.

The diamonds glitter all around your feet and the euphoria of knowing they’re yours is a little overwhelming.

"I would kill for a shower right now." You say as you follow him back the way you came through the internalised cave systems. Your body stills feels sticky and wet under your flight suit.

You hear him guffaw inside your ear. "Is there not a sanitation pod housed on your lander?"

"No," you frown. "Was too expensive to rent one with luxurious amenities."

"A shame." He concurs. "Although, we can bathe in the waters with the nymphs on Luxillion now if we wish."

"Luxillion?" You snort. "Burning a hole in your pocket already?"

"A man can but dream." Ezra husks inside your ear. "What of your ambition, Birdie?"

You shrug. "Haven't really thought about it."

"You can afford to mull it over some." He crackles.

"Yes I can," you smile, realising that both Ezra and you can simply afford anything you want right now. No matter how ludicrous a thing it is that you desire.

Back in the confines of the lander, you take the controls as Ezra tucks your share of the diamonds into your knapsack.

“If you’ve short changed me, I’ll hunt you down, prospector.” You warn him though a short side glare.

“Perhaps I should recount if you make tempting promises such as those, Birdie.” Ezra quips and smiles at you like a dim light bulb before it runs out of juice.

The thrusters roar into life and the lander pod launches into a frosty orbit. The static still blocks everything out as you fly blind up into the ether. The radio comms crackling and tinny in their off-beat drones.

“Don’t call me that,” you simply say; a small smirk of your own breeding across your lips that you lick away.

“Then what do I call you? I wish to let it roll off my tongue when I fuck you some more back on The Pug.” He simply croons.

You scoff. “You’re so presumptuous, Ezra.” You shake your head with a breathy snuffle of a laugh. “Perhaps, I’ll be the one to fuck you."

And the thought makes your clit throb excitedly, despite it's over-stimulated ache.

"I'll ensure you're held to that bold proposition, pet." Ezra simply clicks his tongue around his teeth, the taste of you still in his gum meat somewhere.

"I would expect no less from you." You quip.

You feel his singular hand creep onto your thigh and give it a good gentle squeeze. Instead of being disgusted, you smile and enjoy the pleasure it evokes through your bloodstream as he warms you.

You then surprise him by caving and finally revealing your name, casually letting it flow from your lips as you release the landing gear.

"Well, it's nice to finally meet you." He grins slickly at you in some deft accomplishment. "Wasn't such a hard endeavor now, was it?"

Ezra sits back in the nav seat smirking as you launch fully into The Fringe, leaving the delectable nightmares of Narilla behind you both.

MASTERLIST | EZRA MASTERLIST

I really hope you enjoyed reading this Ezra story of mine. I had a lot of fun writing this and really wanted to challenge myself with this genre. Please let me know your thoughts. I'll be writing more Ezra for sure. 🖤

#ezra prospect #prospect ezra #pedro pascal characters #pedro pascal #ezra prospect x f!reader #ezra prospect x you #ezra x female reader #ezra prospect x reader #ezra prospect smut #ezra x you #ezra x reader #prospect film #prospect 2018 #prospect movie #prospect #pedro pascal smut #pedro pascal character fanfiction #pedrostories #pedro pascal stories #jett's pedro boys #jett's writing

[fuckyeahpedropascal]

How long will Pedro boys survive a zombie apocalypse?

* Click for higher resolution

Disclaimer: I haven’t seen WW84 (but Max looks like easy clicker pickings) and this is quite a limited selection of Pedro boys, so friendly discourse definitely encouraged for this one!

No commentary - discuss!

#pedro pascal #pedro pascal memes #pedro pascal characters #joel miller #pedro boys #tlou hbo #the last of us #dieter bravo #the bubble #ww84 #max lord #tuwomt #javi gutierrez #jack daniels #agent whiskey #kingsman golden circle #oberyn martell #dave york #pero tovar #prospect ezra #frankie catfish morales #frankie morales #triple frontier #din djarin #the mandalorian

[avastrasposts]

A Baker's Dozen**

Ezra part two

Ezra’s chapter finished second in the poll about who should return to the bakery, and it made me so happy. I'd never written Ezra before and he was a challenge! But the story came together well with the help of his language and personality. But it was also sadder than I planned it to be, and I really wanted to revisit him and continue the story. So please enjoy part two!

(I'm editing and posting this in slightly more unconventional circumstances, so please excuse any errors!)

With a sigh you lock the front door of the bakery and flip the ‘Closed’ sign to face outwards. It had been a long weekend, lots of customers, and not all of them very polite. And to make matters worse, your shop assistant, the high schooler who’d worked extra on weekends, had been accepted at the last minute into their first college of choice and this was your first weekend without them. You’re exhausted and looking forward to your day off tomorrow.

The knock on the back door makes you jump just as you turn off the lights in the shop. Cautiously you walk to the back room and stop by the door.

“Hello?”

“It-it’s me, Ezra,” comes a muffled voice in a stutter from the outside, “P-please…I..”

You don’t need to hear more, you rush to the door and unlock it, throwing it open and the man on the other side almost loses his balance, propped up against the door frame. His appearance makes you gasp, reaching out to steady him as he wobbles. The stark blonde patch in his hair is plastered against his forehead, stained with blood from the cut just above his eyebrow, another cut marks his cheekbone, a bruise already blooming around it. From the way he’s curled his arm around his torso, you can tell something’s hurting his chest.

“Ezra, what happened?” you wince, helping him to step through the door, his face twisting in pain as he puts weight on his left foot.

He only grunts in response to your question, inhaling sharply as you carefully try to take his weight.

“Lean on me, let’s get you to the chair, I’ll call an ambulance, it’ll be ok,” you say, making him lean on you as much as you can as he hobbles into the kitchen and sinks down on the chair with a groan.

“No, no ambulance, I am not that badly off,” he says, shaking his head as you pull over the stool on wheels and make him put his injured leg up onto it.

“What happened, Ezra?” you ask again, sinking down to get a better look at him. He’s pale under his golden complexion, his eyes glassy and unfocused.

“It’s nothing, no matter, I just need to-,” he says, but even as he says it, he closes his eyes and breathes in through his nose, his hand tightening over his chest.

“Ezra,” you implore again, putting your hand on his uninjured leg, “you’ve turned up, injured and bloody, weeks after you disappeared, and you try to tell me it’s nothing? Do you think I’m that stupid?”

With that he peels his eyes open and looks down at you, and the pain in his eyes almost makes your heart stop.

“Ezra…” you implore again, softer this time, “be honest with me, I want to help, you know that.”

“I’m…I’m ashamed…” he whispers, his eyes falling to your hand on his leg, “you know what I am. I know I left you without explanation last time, after you were so kind to me. And here I am, needing your help again, because I have no one else to turn to.”

“Just tell me what happened, please, Ezra,” you say, “let me help.”

“I…I’ve…some men…” he begins, his eyes still on your hand on his leg, “I’d fallen asleep on the bus stop bench, and some men seemed to take offense,” he looks up at you, and you’re suddenly reminded of the mask Ezra is so skilled at pulling up over his true face, it’s firmly in place now, his hesitancy gone as he picks his words.

“They decided to make me leave by shoving me off the bench, and I twisted my ankle as I fell. When I couldn’t get up they roughed me up, threw me in a dumpster when they were done. I hurt my side trying to get out of it, fell badly when my foot gave up,” he gives you a humorless laugh, “Turns out climbing out of a dumpster with only one good arm and leg is rather tricky.”

“Ezra…that’s terrible, we need to get you to the ER, they need to check your chest, you may have broken ribs,” you make to stand up but his hand comes out and grabs yours before it leaves his leg.

“No, please, no, it’s not necessary,” he says, squeezing your hand, “I just need to clean the cuts and, if you have one, a bandage for my ankle so that I can at least stand on it while I make my way home.”

“You need to get your ribs checked, Ezra,” you reply, not taking a no from him, “and you might need stitches on the cut over your eye, it looks deep. Please,” you add as you see him shake his head again.

“Sweet girl, I can’t, please just let me get cleaned up and I’ll leave, I won’t impose on you again.”

“Ezra, you’re not imposing, except with your stubbornness, I’m taking you to the ER and that’s it. I’m not letting you leave without getting looked at by a professional.” You pull your hand from his and reach for your coat and he gives a forced little chuckle, smiling without mirth, his hand coming up as if to make a dismissive gesture in the air, but you stop him. .

“And don’t try that act with me, Ezra, I spent enough time with you last time to know when you’re lying, either to protect yourself or me.”

His hand falls back down, his shoulders slumping, “Your eagerness to help does you credit, but you don’t understand,” he says as you shrug into your coat.

He’s shaking his head, staring down at his solitary hand, picking at a fleck of blood on his stained pants, and you wait for him to press out the words. His words failing him in a way that is so far from his usual unstoppable stream that it makes you stop and look down at him with even more concern as he continues to pick at the blood.

“I…I simply don’t…I don’t have the…means, I just…can’t pay it,” he stutters, clenching his fist tight, his voice defeated, “I have no insurance…I don’t even have a valid driver’s license, they will not even let me in…” He doesn’t meet your eyes as you move closer to him, but he shakes his head again, his shoulders lifting up to his ears as the tension builds in his body, “No address.”

You sink down in front of the chair, taking his hand, stilling it against his leg, unraveling his fist as he sighs again.

“I’m as homeless as an alley cat, you see, sweet girl. I’m ashamed to say I have nothing, nothing to my name.” His voice is low, eyes downcast, and he doesn’t take your hand even though you wrap your fingers around it.

“I guessed,” you say, your voice low, trying to make him meet your eyes, “But you still need help, and I can take you to the clinic down by the church. They can check you out and get you more help, free if you need it,” you give his hand a squeeze, “Please, Ezra,” you implore, “let me help.”

You sit quietly next to the chair for a few seconds while Ezra seems to fight something inside him, his jaw ticking with the tension. With a small grunt, he finally gives you a short nod, his shoulders sinking down again, “You’re too good for this world, sweet girl,” he mutters, taking your hand properly and letting you help him to his feet.

“Not at all,” you reply, getting him to put his arm over your shoulder as you help him limp to the back door again, “but you’re my friend, and you need help whether you want to accept it or not. And I can be a lot more pigheaded than you.” The last you say with a smile in your voice as you help him down the back stairs. And it gets a small chuckle out of him before he winces at the pain.

You get him to sit in the back seat, his injured leg elevated as he grumbles about getting dirt in your car. Rolling your eyes in response, you strap yourself in and reverse out. Ezra shifts in the back, trying to get comfortable, in the rear view mirror you see him gently touch the cut over his eye that’s still bleeding.

“Would you recognise the men who did it?” you ask, looking back at the road.

“Maybe, but I’m not talking to the police,” Ezra replies, guessing what you’re thinking, “They don’t care about someone like me, I’m more likely to get into trouble for bringing their attention to my lack of address.”

“I was just thinking, maybe they make a habit of it, attacking sleeping people, they should be stopped.”

“Not by me, sweet girl, I don’t have enough fight left in me for that.”

You glance back at Ezra again, he never sounded so defeated the last time you saw him, and now he’s leaning his head against the window, staring into nothing, looking utterly forlorn.

Letting the subject rest, you drive in silence the rest of the short way to the clinic.

A nurse comes over as she spots you and Ezra coming through the door and soon he’s been told to lie back on a stretcher while you hover awkwardly nearby.

“Do you want me to wait outside?” you ask him as the nurse leaves to find the doctor on call for the evening.

“Only if you wish to,” he says, dropping his head back on the pillow and staring at the ceiling, “thank you for escorting me, but it’s not necessary to wait, I can manage on my own now. You should go home.”

“Ezra,” you hiss, keeping your voice low in the open room, only curtains separating his bed from his neighbors, “quit being such a pigheaded martyr, you’re such an idiot.”

His eyes snap to yours when he hears your anger, and you continue, “If I didn’t care about you I wouldn’t have opened the door in the first place, and I certainly wouldn’t have cried for a week after you disappeared the last time.”

His eyes widen at this and he opens his mouth to say something but you don’t let him.

“I’m staying. And you’re coming home with me when we’re done here. No arguments, so you can just hold that clever tongue of yours.”

Ezra closes his mouth and opens it again, meeting your glare with astonished eyes as he fumbles for a reply. But before he has time to compose himself, the curtain around the bed is pulled to the side and the doctor appears, followed by the nurse.

Ezra doesn’t protest any more as the doctor treats him. With a small bag of over the counter painkillers in your hand, and a crutch under his one arm, he slowly follows you back to the car without a word. Luckily no fractured rib, but a sprained ankle and a few strips of surgical tape over his two cuts is the tally of the beating, and you’re grateful it’s not worse. You’re even more grateful Ezra found his way back to you for help. You’ll be damned if you’ll let him go back to the streets, even if you have to shackle him to a radiator in your house. Ezra seems to realize this, and doesn’t say anything as you stop at a supermarket on the way home, and return to the car with a toothbrush and various other supplies he might need for his stay with you.

He doesn’t speak until you’ve closed the door behind the both of you and he’s hobbled into your living room. You put the painkillers on the coffee table and turn to help him sink down on the couch.

“Thank you. Truly,” he says, as you put a cushion under his leg, propping it up on the low table.

“Don’t fight it so much next time,” you tell him, “people are nice sometimes.” Straightening up you change the subject as your stomach rumbles, the time for talking is later, “Are you hungry?”

He nods, “Very.”

“I’ve got some leftover pasta sauce and bread, I’ll heat it up for us,” you say, leaving him on the couch. But it doesn’t take long before you hear him hobble after you into the kitchen, sitting down on one of the stools by the island.

“I apologize,” he says, “I was ashamed of showing you how pitiful my life is, both when we met last time, and today. I…I find it hard to accept help, I don’t want to burden anyone with my plight, it was my own foolishness who brought me to this low point. I should carry the consequences of my actions and not burden you with them.”

“Ezra…” you say softly, trying to keep any trace of pity out of your voice, “we all make bad choices, or just have a run of bad luck. Maybe next time I’m the one who needs help, and I hope someone is willing to give it then.”

He nods, but he still looks forlorn and you ache to put your arms around him, but you think he might see it as pity, so you give him a smile, and turn back to the stove.

“You should go back to the couch, Ezra,” you say, “put your leg up again, like the doctor said. I’ll bring you your food.”

“Will you join me on the couch for dinner?” he asks and it’s your turn to nod.

“Of course, I’m starving. Get comfortable, pick something to watch and I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

When you return to the living room with two plates, Ezra has propped his leg up again and readily accepts a plate from you. Some nature documentary is playing on the tv and you gratefully sink down on your end of the couch and dig in. Ezra balances his plate on his lap and from the corner of your eye you can see him struggling with twisting the spaghetti onto his fork with his left hand. His eyebrows are pulled together in frustration and the fork clinks angrily against the plate.

You set down your own fork and leave for the kitchen, returning with a tray on legs, for having breakfast in bed.

“Here,” you say, putting it down and placing his plate on it, “Ask for help, Ezra.”

He gives you an indecipherable look, but you just return to your own plate, your attention on the rainforest birds on the tv.

“Thank you,” he says after a minute, looking over at you.

“You’re welcome,” you reply, giving him a quick smile that he returns, the first smile you’ve seen from him since he arrived back at the bakery.

The rest of the evening passes in companionable silence for the most part. You want to ask Ezra about where he’s been since you last saw him, how he’s been. You know why he didn’t return to the bakery, the other shop owners on the street certainly made it known that they didn’t trust him, and didn’t want him near. And you see now, even more clearly, how little value even Ezra places on himself.

I have nothing to give to anyone.

That’s what he’d written in his note to you, the day after his first visit. And it echoes in the back of your mind as you go over the events of the evening, stealing looks at Ezra sitting in the other corner of your couch.

He came back to the bakery when he was injured, but it seems even that had been a hard task for him, to ask for help, and then very reluctantly accepting it. He’d told you he lost his arm in a mining accident, but you don’t know if that was the true story or not. But whatever the truth is, you’re starting to understand the strange dark haired man with the odd blonde patch, a little bit better. He must’ve been fiercely independent before he lost his arm, capable, his skill matching his sharp intellect. And strong, if the shape of his wide shoulders and broad back is anything to go by. You can still remember how his muscles flexed and bunched under your exploring hands when he’d kissed you in the kitchen, a strength that hadn’t diminished when he lost his arm.

To lose that independence, and then his home, to be reduced to relying on others for help, even with the simplest things, it could turn any person bitter. And yet, the Ezra you met in the bakery, as wary as you’d been of him at first, had been warm and passionate, tender and gentle even. The mask he’d let slip while you baked together, had revealed a man you could fall in love with, even with the circumstances of his life twisting the person he showed the world.

You give him another look, his strong profile lit by the tv, his chocolate hair and beard longer and scruffier than before, more streaks of gray and the bags under his eyes heavy. But underneath the layers of grime, the stress of his life, he’s still a handsome man, albeit a little bit dirty right now. But that’s a problem for tomorrow you decide.

With a yawn you stretch and get to your feet, picking up the plates.

“I’ll get you a pillow and a blanket,” you say, “I left a new toothbrush in the bathroom, and a clean towel.”

“I can’t stay,” he says, predictably, and you ignore him, going back to the kitchen to put the plates in the dishwasher, turning it on before you return to the living room. Ezra is standing by the couch, the crutch under his arm.

“You’re staying, Ezra,” you interrupt him before he can protest, “You’re injured, and quite frankly, you’re dirty. Sleep here tonight, wash up in the morning, and then we’ll see.”

“Sweet girl…I can’t let you…” he begins but you shake your head.

“Do you think so little of me? That you think I’d let anyone, let alone an injured friend, sleep rough on the streets?”

Ezra looks back at your raised eyebrows and challenging look.

“Well?” you ask, “Do you think I’m that kind of friend?”

“No,” he says eventually, a small, exasperated smile, softening his face, “I know you’re not that kind of friend.”

“Good. Toothbrush and towel in the bathroom, go clean up, I’ll make your bed,” you point your finger in the direction of the bathroom and give him a stern look, softened by a crooked smile that Ezra returns.

“Yes, boss,” he says, and hobbles away.

Ezra beds down on the couch and you make sure his leg is propped up by a couple of extra cushions before you retreat to your own bed. You can hear him shifting on the couch, the old thing creaking under his weight, before you drift into sleep.

A loud crash startles you from your dreams hours later, early morning light coming through your curtains, and you shoot up in bed.

“Ezra?” you call out, scrambling out of bed, wrapping your gown around you as you hurry out of your bedroom. You find him by the open front door, cursing silently as he struggles to pick up the crutch from the floor.

“You’re sneaking out,” you state, stopping as you see him straightening up, the crutch still on the floor, his hand on the wall for balance.

“I’m afraid I have to depart, a pressing matter requires my swift attention this morning,” he replies, and oh, the mask is so clearly in place, the polite, apologetic smile, hiding the real man.

“What kind of pressing matter?” you ask, “Let me get dressed and I’ll drive you,” you challenge, crossing your arms and challenging him to just fucking dare to lie to you again.

“No, I can’t let you do that,” he smiles, wider now, even more apologetic, “I must converge with a most disagreeable drifter, a small matter of business I have with him that needs to be settled, I truly do not wish you to meet him. Such a rough, uncouth-”

“Ezra…” you say, your voice a warning, as you bend to pick up the crutch, holding out of his reach. It’s a dirty trick but he won’t get far without it.

“I assure you, sweet girl, I really need to depart, it would not be fortunate for you, or your excellent business, to be seen around town with myself, or this disagreeable man. I can’t bring this misfortune down on you after you’ve treated me with such kindness,” Ezra tilts his head, looking up at you through his dark eyelashes, the ringmaster at work, using his words to bend the audience to follow his ques, to believe his illusion.

You shake your head, and lean the crutch in a corner, away from him.

“You forget, Ezra, that you’ve bared more than you maybe intended to me, and I see what you’re trying to do,” you say, moving around him and closing the front door. “Your smooth lies don’t work on me anymore, I can see that mask you pull up whenever you try to bend me to your will.”

You stop in front of him, and he wavers, the smile, almost a leer, slips from his face. Carefully, as if he’s an animal you don’t want to spook, you bring your hand to his cheek, your thumb brushing across his scruffy beard.

“Ezra…you don’t need to fight so hard. Not with me.”

The mask is gone again, his determination to oppose your will melting away faster this time, and Ezra’s eyes fill with regret as he leans his face into your hand. You seek out his, hanging limp by his side and lace your fingers together, squeezing it lightly as you let him hold on to you for balance.

“I left you a note,” he whispers, “I’m truly grateful, I didn’t want to leave again without explanation.”

“What does it say?”

He sighs, closing his eyes briefly, “Same as I said last night, I don’t want to bring you more trouble, I have nothing to give, I don’t want to be a burden. And I know what you’ll say,” he looks up at you as he hears you inhale to berate him, “You don’t think I’m a burden, that I won’t bring you trouble. But I have not lived life honestly, and the people in this community know me as a trickster who cons them. It can only bring you trouble if they see you with me.”

“Have you stolen from them?” you ask, and he shakes his head.

“Not from them, no. But I have stolen in the past, and not only what I needed of food and clothes. And I conned them, used their good hearts against them, they will not pardon me and see me as favorably as you do, sweet girl.”

You caress his cheek again, “Maybe it wasn’t honest, but it’s not like you forced them to give you things, just like you didn’t force me to make you a soufflé. Even though I realize I was probably just a con to you too.”

Ezra drops his eyes from yours at that, looking away as he gives you a small nod.

“It was a con, at first, I have to admit it. I was hoping for a loaf or two of bread, maybe something sweet, but…the soufflé, it wasn’t a con, I promise.” He looks up at you again, your hand has slipped from his cheek, down to his shoulder, he’s so close you can smell the toothpaste and his unwashed clothes, the antiseptic from the bandage on his cheek and forehead. You remain silent to let him continue, to see if his mask comes up again, or if he tells the truth this time.

“I told you that you captivated me, and that’s the truth, I was watching you the first day I came into the shop, you were decorating a cake, your concentration palpable, you were clearly very skilled. And knew if I conned you, I couldn’t come back, so I bought a croissant…and I left.” Ezra gives you a small smile at the memory, “You wouldn’t even know, but that croissant…it bound me to you, it was that perfect. I couldn’t help but keep going back, to watch you work, to taste more of what you’d made. And then you noticed me, and I should’ve left, but it was too late, I had already made a plan to trick you, another kind of trick.”

“What kind of trick, Ezra?” you ask and he gives you the smallest of chuckles.

“The kind that let me spend more time with you, to let me be seen as something else than the sad, homeless drifter my life has turned me into.”

He sighs, letting go of your hand to drag his rough palm over his face, rubbing at his eyes, “I’ve thought since that perhaps it was the worst of ideas, that I tricked myself more than you. I let myself step into a bubble of what could’ve been, if I had been a very different man, build a fantasy in my head where you…never mind,” he cuts himself off, leaning on the wall for balance as you seek out his hand again, “I never conned you, and I wish things were very different.”

“Ezra, I missed you when you left, and I was hurt and confused by your note and what other people said about you,” you say, taking his hand in both of yours, “but I trust you, even if you don’t believe me, I trust you. And I want you to stay, at least until you’re better, please stay this time.”

“But your neighbors, your shop…” he begins and you step forward, pressing your lips to his, silencing him. He holds himself rigid for a beat, before you feel his lips part with a soft hum.

“Fuck ‘em,” you whisper against him, “Please, Ezra, just be selfish with me.”

You don’t let him answer, but you feel his arm move, circle around your waist and you take it as a capitulation as he pulls you a little bit closer.

The kiss doesn’t last long, just a mark to pick up where you left off the last time in the bakery. Instead you pull back from him after a little while, retrieve the crutch and lead him back to the living room. The note, Ezra’s lopsided, left handed scribble on it, sits on the coffee table next to his makeshift bed.

“Do I need to read it?” you ask and he shakes his head, taking the paper and crumpling it.

“No, I’ll stay, at least until you bid me to leave.”

“Not while you limp, you’re stuck with me for a while, con man.” The last part you say with a wink, teasing him, and you’re rewarded by the dimple appearing on his cheek as he smiles, his face transforming.

“There’s nowhere else I’d rather be stuck, sweet girl,” he winks back.

The morning passes easily, now that he’s decided not to leave as soon as you give him a chance. You make breakfast, stacking the bacon high on his plate, an extra fried egg with the bread and mushrooms, three sausages on the side and a large glass of orange juice.

“Sweet girl, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you stopped me from leaving just to give me a heart attack instead,” Ezra says, eyes bulging as you set the plates down on the coffee table in front of him.

“No offense, but you look like you haven’t been eating that well. Let me spoil you while I can,” you reply, sitting down in front of your own, smaller, serving.

"You’re not mistaken, and no offense taken, it has been a few arduous months,” he says while cutting into the food, humming in satisfaction as the yolk smears the bread. It’s the last you hear from him for a while, the food takes all his attention as he works his way the whole plate, even the extra mushrooms and bacon you slide over. Eventually he leans back, balancing a fresh mug of coffee on his belly, letting out a deep sigh.

“I fear I may burst if I eat another bite,” he huffs, his little tummy expanding as he takes a deep breath, “As usual, you’re too good to me, cream puff.”

“I told you, enough with the baking related pet names,” you laugh, leaning back with your own coffee. “I think we agreed on ‘honey’ last time, but I like ‘sweet girl’ too.”

“Sweet as honey,” Ezra smiles, “such a delectable name for the most captivating of women, for someone with such compassion for the most miserable, unfortunate man. Although…” he tilts his head so that he can look over at where you’re curled up on the couch, “perhaps I’m not so unfortunate, I count myself the luckiest man to have wandered into your particular bakery and then even to be allowed to call you ‘friend’.” His smile is soft, “How did a wretch like me stumble into such fortune?”

“There is that charmer that stole my heart,” you smile back at him, “I’ve missed you, Ezra.”

“I did not want to leave you last time, but you understand now why I told you the illusion had to break?” He puts his mug on the table and takes your hand across the couch as you scooch closer to him.

“I understand, but I hope you know now, that you don’t have to leave, and I don’t want you too… however…” you trail off, as the smell of his unwashed clothes reaches your nose again, “you need to shower, and change…”

Ezra looks down at his clothes and frowns, “I have nothing to change into, but I do agree that these old breeches are somewhat on the smelly side. The rogues that roughed me up made off with my bag and the clothes within.”

“Ezra, you should’ve said, we could’ve bought you something yesterday,” you say, pushing off the couch and going to the hallway closet that holds your winter jackets, “I’ve got an old oversized sweatshirt, a relic from an ex, if you don’t mind?” You hold up the sweater and Ezra shrugs.

“Beggars can’t be choosers, if it fits, I will gladly wear it.”

“I’ll put your clothes in the wash,” you dig deeper in the closet, “these will probably fit, my brother’s old shorts, they’ve got paint stains from when we painted the bedroom, but they’re clean, I promise.”

Ezra accepts the clothes and retreats to the bathroom as you clear up the breakfast. You hear him run a bath, and even the satisfied groan as he sinks into it, making you smile as you load the dishwasher. But the disgruntled growl doesn’t sound good a few minutes later so you gently tap on the closed door.

“You ok, Ezra?” you ask and a grumble floats through the door as something clatters to the floor.

“I find that washing my hair, which it is in dire need of, is impossible with the way this bruise seems determined to burn a hole in my side. I can’t lift my arm high enough. And I only have one of those, as you know.”

“Can I help? Are you decent?”

“Sweet girl, I have no concerns about being decent in front of you,” he huffs, “You’ve already been privy to my very lowest state. Besides, your bubble bath really is very efficient.”

The last thing he says with a chuckle and you open the door. You’re met with Ezra laying back, no, Ezra laying back in resplendence, in your bathtub, all but covered by bubbles and a satisfied grin on his face.

“This bathtub really is a most colossal feature, I feel like I could go for a swim,” he smiles up at you as you bend to pick up the shampoo bottle from the floor.

“I’m glad you’re enjoying it, it’s half the reason I bought the house,” you say, sinking down behind him, “Can’t believe you got me washing your hair too, Ezra,” you mutter, but there’s no venom and Ezra hears the smile in your voice.

“I’ll repay the favor tenfold once I’m all healed up again, honey,” he says and scoots forward, giving you free access to his dark curls.

He’s like a cat, all but purring as you scrub his hair, letting your nails drag across scalp, rinsing it out once and giving it another wash. As you massage his head he closes his eyes and breathes deeply, you’re certain he’ll start snoring any second, and you gently tap his shoulder for him to sit up for a second rinse.

“Conditioner, sir?” you ask him with a teasing tone, as he moans.

Ezra opens one eye and looks up at you, “Are you mocking me, baker girl?”

“Only your obvious attraction to the skill of my hands, your moans are loud enough for the neighbors to hear.”

“Oh, I’ve always been attracted to the skill of your hands, in more ways than one, and I’m sure I can think of other uses for them too,” he winks and closes his eye again, leaving you with burning cheeks as his double entendre makes heat rise in your body.

As you rinse the conditioner from his hair you brush it back from his forehead, running your fingers through the blonde patch, stark white now that it’s properly clean. On impulse you bend down and place a kiss to it as you move to get up.

“All done, sir, enjoy the rest of your bath now.”

His hand comes up and grabs your wrist, surprisingly fast for someone right handed using their left, and he pulls you back down.

“Thank you,” he says in a low voice, bringing you close enough for him to reach up and return your kiss, warm lips pressed against yours for a moment.

“Anytime, Ezra,” you reply when he pulls back a little, your voice barely a whisper. You lock eyes for a few seconds, Ezra’s chocolate brown darkening as he rubs his thumb over the thin skin of your wrist.

“Anytime, sweet girl,” he whispers back and lets you go.

You feel unsteady as you leave the bathroom, slowly letting out a long exhale as you go back to the living room, aimlessly tidying, moving three books from one end of the room and back again twice before you realize what you’re doing and give up. Slumping down on the couch you turn back to the nature documentary from last night and try to zone out, but it’s no use. As you hear Ezra come out of the bathroom you shoot up from the couch and head to the kitchen, doing what you always do to calm your mind; bake.

The rest of the day passes without any more heated moments between the two of you. Ezra rests his ankle and you feed him, he complains that he can’t help you in any way, but you shush him and prop an extra cushion under his leg. From the corner of your eye, you see the soft smile he gives you as you turn back to the kitchen.

When it’s time for dinner you join him on the couch for the Great British Bake Off, a show Ezra is well familiar with but he’s missed most of the past seasons so the evening ends with you going back through the seasons and starting over. Before you know it, you’re lying down, your toes tucked in under Ezra’s warm leg while he absentmindedly strokes small circles on your calf. The whole scene is so domestic, he looks calm, more relaxed than you’ve ever seen him. His whole face transforms as he laughs at the tv, looking over at you to see if you’re laughing too. And you are, but mostly because it feels good to see Ezra so comfortable and content.

When it’s time for bed, you scoot over and kiss his scruffy cheek, smelling your shampoo on him.

“Sleep tight, Ezra,” you mumble, relishing the soft touch of his beard against your lips.

“Sweet dreams, sweet girl,” he mumbles back, giving your leg an extra squeeze, “Do you want me to leave in the morning?”

“Not even a little bit, stay.”

“Then I won’t attempt to slip out unnoticed again,” he says, a crooked little smile at you as you straighten up.

“Please don’t, waking up when something goes bang in the night is not my favorite way of waking up,” you say, “Night, Ezra.”

He does stay, the next day and the next and the one after that. You go back to the bakery on the second day, leaving Ezra sleeping on the couch and come back to find him making dinner, wobbling one foot, chopping a stubborn onion with his left hand. The next day he’s done all the dishes and made your kitchen spotless. You berate him for not resting his ankle but he just shrugs and smiles, his soft southern lilt becoming more pronounced as he tries to charm you into believing that his foot is all better now. When you scold him, he gives you the most insincere puppy eyes, mischief lurking just under the surface until you crack and smack his arm and laugh at him. You almost kiss him, his infectious chuckle, the way his dimple appears as his eyes crinkle. The evenings end like the ones before, tucked in on the couch with The Great British Bake Off, but on the third evening you yawn widely and he pulls you in, his strength no match for yours.

“Rest your weary head on my leg, sweet girl,” he says, putting a cushion propped up against his thigh, “don’t stay so far away.”

You do as he says, and he pulls the quilt down over you and rests his hand on your arm. His slow movements, calloused fingers softly gliding up and down over the quilt, lulls you to sleep and it’s not until Ezra gently shakes you, that you blink awake to the end of the episode, and you stumble to bed after kissing his cheek.

The next day you come home to find Ezra packed up, what little he has, in a plastic bag by the door.

“I reckon I’ve imposed on you long enough, sweet girl,” he says as you question him, “I still limp, but I can walk now.”

“You’re not imposing, Ez, you know that,” you reply, putting down your shopping and stopping in front of him on the couch as he gets to his feet, “I want you to stay for as long as you want.”

He is moving a lot better, you can’t deny that, but the cuts and the bruises are still visible on his cheek and forehead. The bigger bruise on his torso has faded into yellows and greens and doesn’t seem to pain him anymore.

“And besides, where would you go?” you ask. You don’t want to be unkind, but pointing out the obvious flaw in his plan of just leaving seems logical. “Stay here at least until you have a place of your own, you know I won’t let you leave just to sleep in a shelter or in a car.”

“Sweet girl, how long would that endeavor not take me? I have no employment, no money to my name, and without it, I have no choice but to find improvised shelter. And finding a job without an address is not easy, finding a job for a one-armed man? Impossible.” He shakes his head and moves around you, “No, I’d rather leave now, and leave you missing my company than stay and have you tire of my disagreeable old face.”

As he limps towards the front door you feel the slow gears of your brain working until it clicks into place.

“Ezra! I have a job for you!”

He turns and looks back at you, a pitiful smile as he shakes his head.

“Do not make up a job for me. Your kind heart does you credit but I won’t accept any more charity from you, sweet girl.”

“It’s not a made up job, Ezra, I need help at the bakery,” you say, “The high school student who worked extra left for college last week, this weekend was my first without them and I hardly got any baking done. I can’t manage the bakery and the shop at the same time, especially not since I'm going into peak season with weddings and graduations. I need someone to work in the shop and you could do that, even one handed I’m sure.”

“I fear it would not do your business any good to have me at the front of your shop, or do you forget how I conned my way around the last time?” Ezra shakes his head again, turning towards the door to pick up his sad bag of belongings.

“And if there’s anyone who can charm his way back into their good books, it’s you!” you protest, yanking the bag out of his hand. “I need someone who can start tomorrow, someone who understands baking and the things I make, and who is as passionate about it as I am. You’re the perfect fit, Ezra!”

You take a step closer to him, putting your hand on his cheek. You haven’t touched since the kiss in the bathroom, it’s just been a comfortable closeness on the couch. He seems to have been holding back, not wanting to impose another layer of complications to the situation of a homeless man sleeping on your couch. You, on your hand, have been squashing your feelings and urges to touch him, not sure what he feels, if he even wants you close, he seemed so intent on leaving as soon as he could. But now you touch him, stepping over the thin line you’d both drawn, needing him to understand how much you want him to stay, not just for the bakery or out of pity for him.

And Ezra leans his head into your hand as you gently caress his cheek, the scruffy beard soft under your fingers, as he looks down at you, something shifting in him too as you come so close to him he can smell the cinnamon from the bakery in your hair.

“I want you to stay, Ezra. I missed you when you were gone, and I need you, not just in the bakery, but I need you in my life too, if you could let yourself believe that.”

“I’m a selfish man,” he mumbles, his hand coming up to rest on your waist, “I’ve been telling myself to not complicate your life, but if you offer it to me, I’ll take it.”

“Please, take it then, Ezra, I’m tired of trying to convince you that you’re worth something more, just take it, you-”

He cuts you off, his hand coming up to your cheek as his lips find yours, pushing you back against the wall with his body as your brain catches up, wrapping your arms around his neck, fingers finding purchase in his hair and kissing him back.

You sigh into his mouth when he makes you part your lips, claiming your tongue the same way you remember from the bakery, the feeling you’ve been dreaming about since he left. He groans softly, his hand slipping down from your neck and curling behind your back to hold you even closer.

“Tell me again, I want to hear you say it again, that you want me to stay,” he whispers, pulling back just a little and looking at you with his dark brown eyes, filled with need, darkening with lust as you press your mouth to his lips.

“Pigheaded fool,” you smile, “How many times do I have to say it? I want you to stay.”

His responding groan, his mouth opening to let you taste him, sends a sharp jolt of desire through your body. Turning off all rational parts of your mind, you reach behind you and take his hand, pulling him with you through the house. When lead him into your bedroom he falters, an uncharacteristic shyness, or maybe uncertainty, flashing across his face.

“Sweet girl…” he whispers as you pull him onto the bed, making him tumble over you as he loses his balance, “it’s…been so long.”

“Do you want to, Ezra?” you ask, as he holds himself over you on his one arm.

“Yes, very much, I have dreamed so many nights of taking you to bed,” he breathes, his voice low, laced with both trepidation and lust, “I just never surmised you would ever want me like this, and I’m not sure these old broken bones could ever give you the pleasure you deserve.”

“How about we try out your old broken bones and let me judge how much pleasure they give?” you tease him, running your hands down his back, still as broad and muscular as you remember. He chuckles at that, some of the tension slipping from his face as you continue to stroke his soft shirt, tangling your fingers in the curls at the back of his neck, and then back down to his waist again. He puts his forehead against yours, closing his eyes and you can feel his warm breath over your lips, a slow exhale as he relaxes under your palms.

When you slip your hands under the edge of his shirt and pull it off he hesitates, the stump of his arm has always been hidden by his clothes or the bubbles in the bathtub that one time, now you sense his unease again.

“Do you want to keep your shirt on?” you ask, letting go of the hem and resuming your path up and down his back.

“No, no I want to feel your skin against mine,” he mutters, “I’m just afraid…you might find it…repulsive.”

With gentle hands you take hold of his shirt again and push it up his torso, making him roll over onto his back as you pull it over his head, freeing both his arm and the scarred stump. Ezra watches you with dark eyes, apprehensive in a way you’ve never seen him before, watching your reaction as you lean down and place a soft kiss on the scar tissue that covers the end of his arm.

“I’m sorry you lost it, Ez, but I’m glad you’re still here,” you whisper, placing another kiss on the rough texture before his large, remaining, hand cups the back of your head and guides you up to his mouth, his hot tongue seeking yours.

Now it’s his turn to tug at your shirt and you slip it off, tossing it over the side of the bed, letting your bra go the same way. As you sit up, straddling his narrow hips, the apex of your thighs rubs over the growing hardness in his pants, he growls and grabs your hip, rolling his own up into you. You gasp and Ezra pulls himself upright, his eyes now fully dark, lust blown and all trace of hesitancy gone as he pulls your core down over his cock.

“Sweet girl, I’m determined to make you cry my name until your voice is hoarse,” he says, his voice rough and low with a layer of intensity you’ve never heard from him before, “I really have craved you so many nights, dreamt of having you unfold underneath me, make you moan so prettily in my ear again, like you did when I kissed you before.”

He cups your sex with his hand, bringing the heel down over your sensitive nerves, making you ride it through the denim of your jeans, as he buries his face in the crook of your neck. His mouth leaves heated, wet marks on your skin when he sucks bruises into your collar bone. Hand moving over the buttons, he peels down the zipper and you feel him slide down inside your pants, fingers meeting flesh as he ignores your underwear.

“What if I can make you cry ‘Ezra’ in that delicious moan, make you pant for me, with just my fingers buried in your cunt?” he growls, hot breath on your skin, “Will that prove me worthy of your devotion?”

“You-you…already a-are…” you gasp, his fingers slipping further down, thumb finding your swollen bundle of nerves, two of his thick fingers sliding deep inside and curling back. You feel him chuckle against your throat when you buck your hips, demanding more.

“Fuck, Ezra…” you moan, head tipping back, his beard scraping over your throat as he sucks another mark into the thin skin of your neck.

“Let me feel you fall, sweet girl,” he mutters, pulling back, his dark eyes finding yours half closed, blissed out, “So beautiful, captivating, my sweet girl.” He looks hungry, greedy, and he surges forward, seeking out your skin again. You feel his teeth nipping on the curve of your jaw as he curves his fingers deep inside you, finding a spot that sends stars through your veins. Your fingers dig into his broad shoulders, leaving fresh marks on his flesh as he brings you closer to the peak.

“My sweet girl,” he purrs, close to your ear, his thumb rubbing tight circles, “come for me, honey, I’ve got you.”

It topples you over, his dark voice tickling your mind into submission, your back arching, pushing down on his fingers as he brings you through it. You cry out his name, pant it into the dim room, and he licks his tongue over your sweat salt skin.

“Ezra…” you croak, dropping your head onto his shoulder as he slowly caresses your slick folds and pulls out, his sticky hand curving around your waist and landing on your back. It takes a few minutes for you to catch your breath, Ezra mumbles into your ear, his words wrapping around your brain, trapping them in the haze of your orgasm. When you turn your head and scrape your teeth over the thin skin of his neck, your tongue licking the edge of his ear, his breath hitches, interrupting his torrent of sweet nothings. Against your core you can feel his cock twitch, ignored and aching.

“Take your pants off,” he says, the command soft in his voice, “And take mine off too.”

It doesn’t take long for you to rid the both of you of the rest of your clothes. Ezra hisses as you pull his cock free, letting your hand stroke it, catching the weeping head with the pad of your thumb before you stand up.

“How do you want me, Ezra?” you ask, returning from the bathroom with a condom in your hand. He’s flat on his back, his hand slowly moving up and down his cock as he watches you walk naked across the room.

“On my lap, my symmetry is sorely lacking in balance, I fear I might give you a bloody nose if I was on top,” he smirks, moving himself to sit against the headboard, giving his thighs an invitational pat.

“Just admit it, you’re lazy,” you wink at him, “just want me to do all the work.”

He grabs your hip and pulls you down, his hard length pushed up against the soft swell of your belly, “Oh, sweet girl, if I had both my hands I’d trap you beneath me and not let you leave until you were a quivering mess, begging me to let you come,” he smirks, kissing you hard when you bend your head down to him.

He rolls his hips, giving friction to his cock pressed between you, and you feel him hiss into your mouth, groaning deep in his chest.

You push back and unwrap the condom, slipping it on while he watches your hands with dark eyes. When you rise up on your knees, his fingers dig into your hip, his teeth capturing his bottom lip, biting down hard with a groan as you position yourself. With one hand wrapped around his twitching length, the other on his shoulder for balance, you stroke the head through your slick folds, watching Ezra let go of his lip, an almost animal snarl escaping him.

“My sweet girl, honey…” he pants, opening his mouth to continue, but you sink down over him, squeezing his length, and he groans, a low rumbling pressed up through gritted teeth, head tipped back, eyes closed. You feel him buck his hips, his hand guiding your hip, as he tries to fuck up into you and you hold on to his shoulders with both hands, stroking down over his arms, caressing both his good side and the edge of what remains on the other.

Ezra curls his arm around your waist and pulls you down, bucking up again with another groan. He sits deep inside you, making sparks run through your veins, the feel of him giving you as much pleasure as his graveled groans and panting breath. .

“I’m not going to last,” he mumbles, biting his lip again, “I’m…you feel…f-feel so good.”

You roll your hips over him, your clit rubbing against the dark curls at the base, moaning as he bucks up, rubbing over something electric deep inside. The sight of his face tilted back, eyes half closed in bliss, as his arm sits like a vice around your waist, it brings you to the edge of your own climax much faster than anticipated. Your thighs are protesting, sweat drips down your back, and Ezra claims your mouth again, while you work yourself up and down over his slick cock.

He’s rambling, mumbling into your mouth between licks of his tongue, he’s getting messy, kissing the corner of your mouth, down your jaw, burying his face into the crook of your neck while he grinds against you. His teeth sink into your shoulder as he cries out, his body going rigid underneath you, a hoarse shout against your skin and your own climax explodes. You know you’re leaving marks on his skin, but you can’t let go, Ezra is rolling his hips up, pumping himself into you as best he can, pulling you down onto him.

As your muscles relax you feel him loosen his grip on you too, and you drop your head down on his shoulder, caressing his back, his arms, pressing slow kisses into his sweat damp skin.

“My sweet girl,” he mutters, kissing the mark he left on your shoulder, “my sweet, sweet girl,” heavy breaths still making his chest rise and fall as he pants.

You rake your fingers through his damp curls and lift yourself off him, helping him handle the condom and toss it. Ezra stretches out and you curl into his side, sighing deeply and closing your eyes.

“You’re not sleeping on the couch anymore,” you mumble into his chest, and you hear the chuckle rumble under you between deep breaths, still recovering.

“I’m sure we’ll figure out other usages for the couch if you intend to keep this up with my broken old bones,” he says, smiling, his eyes closed as he begins to caress what he can reach of your back.

You both lie in peaceful silence for a little while, your breathing returning to normal, and your bodies cooling down. When the air raises goosebumps on your skin, you pull the covers over you both, and Ezra makes you curl closer to him.

“You really don’t find it repulsive?” he asks after a while, and tilt your head to look up at him, you know what he’s referencing. His dark eyes are turned to you with a questioning look, the smallest hint of worry clouding his forehead.

“No, I really don’t,” you say, moving your hand so that you can caress the scars at the end of his severed arm, “It’s just skin, or proof that you’ve survived something very difficult, why would I find it repulsive? I’m very happy you survived it.

Ezra places his lips on your forehead, kissing you softly while his one good arm pulls you in tighter.

“Thank you.”

“There you go, Mrs Levinson, all set for the weekend, I envy your guests, you sure do spoil your grandchildren! But I know you would spoil me just as well if turned up on your doorstep like a stray dog.”

Ezra gives the elderly lady his warmest smile and a wink, mischief twinkling in his eye as she returns the wink.

“Ezra, you scoundrel,” she giggles, “you know you’re both always very welcome for dinner any day, and I’ll make sure to spoil you rotten.”

“Never would I be so uncouth as to impose such inconvenience on you, Mrs Levinson,” he replies, a hand on his chest in mock shock, “You should come to our house, I’ll cook my famous one armed bandit stew,” he grins and Mrs Levinson giggles again.

“Oh Ezra, you really do brighten my day, you’re such a treasure to have around,” she titters, collecting her shopping bags, “And I’ll be sure to take you up on that offer.”

“You’re too kind, Mrs Levinson, enjoy the rest of your day now, you hear!” he smiles as she gives him a wave and steps out through the front door.

Ezra turns and heads back into the kitchen, where you’re preparing the final batch of millionaire’s shortbread, sprinkling chopped peanuts over the melted chocolate.

“I may have invited Mrs Levinson for dinner,” he says, coming up behind you and wrapping his arm around your waist, “Said I’d make my stew.”

“I heard,” you reply, “your famous ‘one armed bandit stew’? You’re too much, Ez,” you laugh as Ezra chuckles.

“I did always have a flair for marketing,” he smirks, "maybe we should rename the bakery too, make it official.”

“Make it official that the scandalous baker and her ‘one armed bandit’ are in it for the long haul?” you ask, turning around so that you’re facing him and can see his warm smile as he looks down at you.

“Are we in it for the long haul, my sweet girl?” he replies, bending down to brush the strong curve of his nose across your check, pressing a small kiss to the corner of your mouth.

“Well, it’s been two years, and you haven’t tried leaving again, so I think I finally made you realize I want you around,” you mumble as he nudges your head to the side to make better rooms for his kisses.

“You’re stuck with me now, sweet girl,” he mutters, “do you regret it?”

“Not even a little,” you sigh, tangling your fingers into his soft curls and he chuckles.

The bell over the door jingles and Ezra straightens up.

“Go on, Ez, go charm another customer into buying more than they need.”

“Yes, boss,” he smirks, pressing a final quick kiss to your lips before he hurries back into the shop.

“Good afternoon, ma’am, how may I help you on this most beautiful day?”

Part Fifteen

Specifically tagging my Ezra mentor @morallyinept !

 @harriedandharassed @inept-the-magnificent @sheepdogchick3  @readingiskeepingmegoing @noisynightmarepoetry @survivingandenduring @vabeachazn @amyispxnk @oberynslady @vabeachazn @amyispxnk @thewiigers  

#prospect ezra #ezra x reader #pedro pascal character fanfiction #pedro pascal #ezra fanfiction

[pedroshotwifey]

Prompt #36 with Dieter or Ezra? 👀

Hi, my friend! I'm sorry this took a hot minute, but I hope you'll be happy with the result!

Better

Pairing: Ezra x f!reader

Word count: 2k

Tags/warnings: extreme overstimulation, sub reader, use of toys, orgasm control, light bdsm, restraints, tears, piv sex, subspace/disorientation, Ezra being Ezra and saying Ezra things

Summary: You join Ezra on his unscheduled break, not knowing you're in for the ride of your lifetime

*****

“Ez?” 

You walk into your shared tent, confused as to why he’d suddenly abandoned you in the middle of your excursion. The two of you were almost ready to pack up anyway, but you thought the plan was to wait it out until the day was up. 

You come in to find him lounging on the bunk, spread out on his back with exhaustion. He’s breathing unnecessarily heavily, so much so that you would probably be worried if it was anyone other than Ezra. Sure, it’s hot outside, but not enough to entail that. So dramatic. 

“Ez, what the fuck are you doing?” 

His head snaps up this time, like he’s surprised to see you there. That’s when you notice that he has one hand down his pants. 

“Ez!” you gape. “Serously, what the fuck?”

“Sorry, little dove,” he pants, not caring to stop the jerking motions. “I thought I was strong enough to resist the temptation, but alas…” 

“Dude, we had like an hour left, you couldn’t have waited?” 

He just licks his lips in answer. “Well, now that you’re in here, you may as well strip and join me.” 

You sigh and plant your hands on your hips. He can be so damn unserious sometimes. He’s lucky he’s hot as hell despite everything else. 

“Fine,” you grumble and reach to unbutton your pants. You can’t really deny the way your panties started to grow wet the second you realized what he was up to. 

He watches you with a heavy gaze as you discard your clothes to the floor and walk toward him. He’s done the same, pulled all of his clothes off so that you’re both naked as he grabs you to lay you on the cot. You catch a peek of his stiff cock, already leaking and flushed from his playing. 

He immediately settles over you and flashes you a smirk as his hand trails down to cup your mound. You moan when he collects some of your slick and then starts to circle your clit, your arms coming up to wrap around him. 

“I know, flower. Feels good, doesn’t it?” 

You nod at him, burrowing your head in his chest as he works your clit. Your body begins to tremble and tense in anticipation, toes curling into the sheets below you. 

You claw at his back as you come, moaning as he works you through it. He doesn’t let up when you’re done though, instead inserting two fingers into your soaked cunt. You gasp at the feeling and clench around him.

He starts to pump, watching your face as it contorts with pleasure every time he hooks his fingers to find the spot that makes you crazy. 

“Does that feel good, sweet thing?” 

“Mhm,” you whine, trying your best to focus on the glide of his thick fingers and the way his thumb comes up to flick your swollen clit. You know it’s not going to be long before your second orgasm takes over. 

He suddenly starts to go faster, using his whole arm to finger you at a furious pace, his hand turning so that his palm slaps your clit with each bruising thrust. You gasp and clutch onto him, moans spilling freely from your lips. He starts to mix another movement in, too, shoving his hand up and down and side to side in addition to deep and fucking deeper.

His name is on your lips as you come, an explosion going through your body and making you go weak. Your thighs shake and your ears ring with the force of it all. He doesn’t even slow as you go through it, just whispers filthy praise into your ear as he pulls more and more until there’s a third orgasm meshing with the other two. He slips another finger in and uses his other hand to press on your abdomen. 

You’re practically screaming at this point, your body writing beneath him as it tries to escape the constant pressure he keeps on your cunt. It’s so overwhelming and you’re already so overstimulated. Your body is covered in sweat, as is his from his rough movement. 

“Take my fingers so good, little bird. Almost as good as you take my cock” 

You keen up to him, your back arching as you look into his eyes and plead for him to stop that way since your words aren’t going to work any time soon. He smiles faintly and takes pity on you, slowly retracting his fingers. A squelching sound comes from where he disconnects, an obscene amount of wetness seeping out of your cunt. 

“Look at her, she’s so hungry for it,” Ezra observes as he watches your hole clench. 

You just pant, feeling thoroughly exhausted already. But you know you’re not done yet. Ezra hasn’t come, and there’s no stopping until he does. You’re about to offer to suck him off to save your poor, throbbing pussy when he speaks again. 

“Go get one of your toys, little dove. Let’s make this even better.” 

You nod at him, sliding out from under his body in a haze. Despite being so over-sensitive already, you trust him to make it good for you. You walk to your trunk and pull it open, digging around for a moment until you get a grasp on your favorite wand. It’s battery powered and relatively strong. 

Ezra cranes his neck to see what you selected and smiles as you turn around with it. 

“Good choice, little dove. I like that one, too.” 

Then his face lights up in a way that makes you want to bury the vibrator back where you found it. His eyes darken as he reaches his hand out for the toy. Maybe it’s the way your brain has already turned to mush, but you still hand it to him and obey him as he helps you back down. 

“On your back and spread those pretty legs, little flower.”

You do so, but not without questioning him as he starts to dig through his own trunk. “Wha–” 

“Don’t worry, dove. Just lay there and look pretty for me.” 

You lay your head back down on the cot, figuring you might as well save your energy for whatever the hell he’s about to do. You know well enough that when he gets into these moods, there’s no changing his mind. 

But you quickly snap your head back up when you hear a tearing sound. 

“Ez?” 

He looks away from the roll of tape in his hands to see your confused face. 

“Yes, bird?” 

“W-What are you doing?” 

He just grins and walks back to you, ripping the tape further from the roll.

“Legs open,” he instructs, completely ignoring your question. Your eyes widen in realization as he kneels between them and brings your wand up to the inside of your thigh, the tip of it facing your soaked pussy. He pushes your legs open until they start to tremble again from the stretch. 

“Ez…” 

He ignores you again as he keeps the toy lined up and then starts to secure it with the tape. It’s close enough so that if you closed your legs even the slightest bit, the tip would be right on your clit. Your cunt throbs at the idea. And when he reaches up to tie your hands together and leave you defenseless, you let out a moan. 

“Dirty little thing,” Ezra chuckles. “Knew you’d like this.” 

He lowers himself back down and lets your legs lay comfortably without his hips holding them open, the ball of the vibrator resting against your clit. You shiver at the contact, goosebumps popping up in anticipation. 

He watches your face carefully as he reaches for it and presses a button to turn it on. Your entire body jolts at the constant pressure that immediately starts to hit your clit. You whine loudly, squirming and trying to get away from the harsh vibrations. 

“Ez!” you squeal. “‘S too much!” 

“Aw, I think you can take it, little gem. Look at your sweet cunt, already crying for more,” he coos at you, doing nothing to stop it. 

You shake your head wildly as your orgasm starts to build. It’s borderline painful, your body still wiggling and trying everything it can to escape, but you’re trapped. Every time you move your legs to get away, you just press down harder on your clit. You yelp and writhe, even knowing that you’re going to get nowhere that way. 

You’re coming in no time, screaming as the vibrator stays on through the whole thing. Ezra just chuckles to himself as you whine and shake, your brain turning to mush as your ears ring. Everything feels like too much right now. Not just the vibrations between your legs, but also the light coming from the single bulb in the tent, the way the sheets beneath you cling to your sweaty skin, the way the tape around your wrists feels a little too hot. 

You feel for a second like you might pass out, the toy still going even after your orgasm subsides. But then Ezra must turn it off because you’re suddenly coming back down to earth, your panting breaths loud in your own ears. Your entire body sags with relief. 

You barely even register it as Ezra takes his spot back between your thighs, keeping you open for him with his thick waist as he starts to feed his throbbing cock into your soaked cunt. He groans above you as he practically slips right in without any kind of resistance. You moan sharply, your hands fisting air above your head as you take him. 

“Such a good gem,” Ezra whispers to you once he’s fully seated. You can’t even say anything back at this point, far too wrung out to think coherently, much less actually speak. You just  lay there, letting him slowly start thrusting into you. 

You close your eyes, content to just let him find his end. And then you fucking scream again. Everything goes white and your body jolts as he slams hard into you and turns the toy back on at the same time. Tears immediately jump to your eyes as he picks up a brutal pace and holds your thigh at just the perfect spot for that stupid vibrator to have the biggest effect. 

You openly sob as you come again, completely taken by surprise this time. Ezra groans louder, gripping you hard as he pummels his cock into your g-spot. Your tears stream down your cheeks and down your neck, into your hairline, into your ears. 

“Sweet little cunt you have, birdy. Squeezing me so tight.” 

You try to call his name, but it just comes out garbled and pathetic. You’ve never felt this overstimulated in your life, like you’re unable to really comprehend it all. 

“I know, darling thing. You’ll be okay,” he assures you as he puts a hand up to smooth down your sweat-dampened hair.

Finally, his pace starts to stutter and his groans grow louder and more uncontrolled. You’re lost in another wave of painful pleasure when he spills deep inside of you, twitching and making you cry out. He thrusts shallowly, not worried about anything but drawing his own orgasm out. 

“There you go, take it all for me. Just like that.” He leans down to press a soft kiss to your lips. 

He doesn’t wait long after until he turns the vibrator off again, and this time you really do find that you can’t open your eyes. You don’t think you’ve ever been this exhausted in your life. Your cunt throbs and aches, your head pounds, and your body feels like it was hit by a truck as it shakes and trembles, numb in some places. You’re disoriented, not entirely sure where you are or how you got there. 

You just know that you’re soaked all over and in desperate need of sleep. It comes easy with the help of Ezra’s hand petting your hair and his soft chuckle coming from somewhere around you. You don’t bother to try opening your eyes again, you know that he’ll take care of you as long as he’s around. 

*****

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#fan fiction #pedro pascal #ao3 #pedro pascal smut #smut #pedro pascal characters #fluff #ezra x you #ezra prospect #prospect ezra #prospect 2018 #ezra prospect x reader #ezra smut #pedro pascal fanfiction #pedro pascal fan fiction #pedro pascal x reader #requested fic

[marisferasiop]

Transplant

Chapters: 2/3 up

Also on ao3 (part 2 now up on ao3!)

Rating: Explicit MINORS DNI- Clicking "read more" implies your consent!

Warnings: canon-typical gore, canon-typical violence, smut, p in v (unprotected, wrap your tool) no creampies, oral, hand jobs, money shots (we don't want apocalypse babies) mention of abortion (in passing- reader is a doctor), tremendous fluff ahead, some angst (re: Joel's insecurities), Ezra is his own warning, Joel is not bi in this but Ezra is (not rly acted upon but mentioned), poly dynamics and conversations, Ellie moving out, Cee and Ellie will be together by the end. Did I mention smut; literally the opening scene is smut.

Summary: You are a resident and the only trained doctor in Jackson. You're bubbly and sweet, outgoing and friendly--- and also in an unlabeled "situationship" with the town scrooge, Joel Miller. He won't say you're together, but he'll scare anyone else off.

When Tommy drags back a half- dead man and girl from a patrol, you dutifully patch them up and help them settle into their new slotted house- across Rancher Street from yours and Joel's houses. Ellie and Cee get in like a bonfire, and when Joel sees how often you talk to your newest patient, his insecurities make him draw up and away from you.

As you slowly give up on him and start something with Ezra, Joel's pining turns to frustration. Tommy convinces him to see if you'd be interested in being a throuple. Surprisingly, you and Ezra are both open to the idea.

But can Joel's insecurities and possessiveness withstand such an arrangement? Or will the blow of another loss be what finally breaks him?

Word count: about 10k (for part one of 3)

Author notes: Eyooooo I'm back on my bullshit with a new addition. This has been on ao3 for about a week. Please like and reblog to spread the wealth! Unlike ao3 this is not an archive and views depend on your interaction! (So does my continued writing!)

Part One:

Joel has got you absolutely wrung dry.

You’re bent over your kitchen island, toes barely brushing the floor and thighs shaking from the aftershocks of your third ( fourth ?) orgasm since he’d shouldered his way through your door nearly an hour ago. Every time you gasp, he snaps his hips harder up into you.

Never fully satisfied with a fuck-and-duck, Joel had strode in, picked you up, kissed you senseless while he shoved your jeans down, smeared you face down across the countertop, and ate you from behind so thoroughly you weren't sure you could even take his cock from how tight he had your pussy clenched around his tongue and fingers.

But he had slipped into you easily, your drooling slick helping his fat girth stretch you wide despite the contractions of your most recent orgasm. He pounds into you now, with you pinioned efficiently under his breadth with a hand fisted in your hair at your nape and him holding your wrist in place behind your back to your opposite hip with the other. His soft grunts and murmured praise make your spine arch. Your hips are already bruising from the counter edge, and you bite your lip at the mental image of seeing that erotic evidence later.

You push your free hand beyond the ledge of the worktop and swirl your fingers over your engorged, oversensitive clit, propelling you quickly into another orgasm- though this one is not as strong. Your body is absolutely exhausted from his diligent overworking.

“ Almost - honey , just –” he grunts rhythmically with the slap of his hips, and pulls out to spill across your ass just as abruptly as he’d dove in. He drapes down over your back, catching his breath with his mouth fastened on your shoulder. You reach up and wind your fingers in his hair, keeping him bowed over you, warm and close, catching your breath. Barely a minute passes before he pulls back and is moving slowly away to the bathroom under the stairs to fetch a damp cloth.

He wipes at the mess between your legs and on your lower back, and you think of him planting a firm hand there earlier to guide you out of the Tipsy Bison after catching a guy just winding down from that day’s supply scouting trip having the audacity to flirt (poorly) with you.

Joel won't say he's yours , or you’re his , but he’ll sure as hell scare off any competition. You’d bring it up if it was bothersome; in reality you sort of like the unleashed, broad, imposing dominance of him, paired with the open availability for sex that he’s left largely up to you. Like an ongoing, wildly overprotective booty call.

The thought makes you huff a quiet laugh into your forearm.

Most of Jackson is still wide-eyed and wary of him. Rumors of how he and Ellie made it back to Jackson are rife with hyperbole- making the nearing-sixty older man out to be some sort of superhuman mass murderer.

You’re just sure that even if he is, he did what he had to to protect his little girl.

Even more rumors abound about how the town’s resident scrooge managed to stake a(n unsubstantiated) claim on the town’s most level- headed and sun-shiney bachelorette- the commune’s only actual doctor.

Joel is tossing the soiled rag in the sink and helping you back to your feet on wobbly legs when there's a pounding at your door.

“Come on, Sunny! We got an injured guy back from patrol!” you hear Brendan, the head of the wall patrol yelling from the porch.

“ Shit ,” you yank your clothes back up in a hurry. You blink up at Joel, pulled too fast from bliss into action. “Sounds like I'll be at the clinic late.”

Joel nods and shoves his boots on, intending to take the back door and cut through the back yard to his house next door. “See ya tomorrow, then, hon,” he murmurs. He drops a kiss to your cheek and shuts the door behind him, locking the knob.

You grab your heavy coat and shrug it on to beat the swirls of snow outside before rushing out and meeting Brendan on the street.

“What happened?”

“Patrol brought in a girl and her dad, he’s unconscious, feverish, and bleeding real bad. Both are hypothermic. Tested negative of course, both of ‘em, but I'm not real sure the guy’s gonna make it.” You are both hurrying across town back to your clinic as fast as the frigid air icing down your throat will let you.

“Animal, infected, or raiders?”

“I think they broke off a slaver ring,” Brendan says quietly, leaning in as you rush up the porch. “That, or some raiders had them for a while . He’s -- I don't know what to make of the arm injury, it’s fucked . But he’s been stabbed in the chest, and Sam said she thinks he’s got frostbite.”

“ Fuck ,” you growl, and wrench open the door to your clinic and rush to the back. Immediately, five heads turn to you and sigh in relief. Sam, your nurse, has an unconscious man hooked up to IV and is covering his freezing body with the weighted damp- heat warming pads from the steamer. You can tell from the port in his throat that she couldn't find a vein in his arms, he’s that cold and dehydrated.

“Everyone out but the girl and whoever found them,” you quip to the group, and three people file out. The girl is on a chair, shivering violently but already has a cup of something steaming cupped in both hands and is still in somewhat damp, bloody clothes, though her wet shoes and socks are on the floor by the space heater. Her face and hands are smeared with dried blood, but from a glance you can tell it’s probably her dad’s. Tommy is standing by her, still and waiting on your opinion. He drapes a blanket across her shoulders and looks to you.

You pull gloves on and check the man’s pulse- it’s weak but there. He’s absolutely frigid to the touch. The fingers on his right hand are completely purplish- black, but the whole arm is a loss anyway. Sam has already pulled off his soaking wet clothes; jeans, socks, and boots, and a damp contrast coat lays crumpled on the pile, arms still laced through with a flannel in the same condition. A wet trail of blood is leaking from the pile and you squint at it; it’s red- fresh . The man himself is in naught but his rank briefs and is positively covered in heating packs and blankets to get his temp back up.

You look directly at Tommy and shake your head once. He clenches his jaw and nods, turning to the girl. “We need details , hon. Anything you can give us that will help. Was this people, or a group of infected? Raiders? Or slavers? A trap? A- a bear ?” He asks, kneeling on one knee by her and speaking softly. The girl is practically catatonic, a feral glint the only light in her eyes. Her clothes and hair are matted down with blood as well, but doesn't appear injured, nothing more than superficially anyway. After a minute, she speaks:

“We were at a- a slave camp. Some raiders had taken over our QZ and turned it into a slave camp, a year or two ago after the bombings,” she says woodenly, staring at the man- who Brendan had told you was her father.

You see no resemblance, but then Joel has none to Ellie. That doesn't mean there's no bond. These days, bonds are often thicker than blood.

“We made a plan, snuck out with a guy who told us he was a coyote- like a smuggler, but for people? - but he just led us to a cabin outside the walls where they take people trying to escape. It was a trap.” Her eyes flick up to Tommy and then back to you.

“They were going to hurt me, and he said to take it out on him instead. So they did that,” she nods to the man’s mangled arm. “And I shot both of them when they were distracted. The second guy, I missed the first shot and he stabbed–” she breaks off, biting her lip, staring at the chest wound. “But I got him , and then we ran.”

“ Jesus ,” Tommy breathes. You grimace and plunge a dose of morphine into the guy’s shoulder. He doesn't even stir. You watch his face, swollen and mottled and bloodied up as it is. He’s got a laceration up into his hairline as well, both eyes blackened and you suspect a broken nose, a split lip and old, dried blood coming out of one ear. You grit your teeth and turn back to the girl.

“How long has it been?” You ask, peeling the flannel he’s wearing off his mutilated arm. The wound is the entire circumference of his arm, like they were literally trying to hack it off slowly, with small tools. They stopped at bone, but you can see scrapings on the white. It wasn't for lack of trying.

“We’ve been running from the cabin for three days. I dont- I don't know how long we were there. At first we had a horse but it spooked and ran off when we came across some wolves, and they chased it instead of us. Crossed the Wyoming border, I think, yesterday. He didn't make it very far. I made a - a draggy– thing . Sled? Dragged him for a little bit. But we haven't had food, or anything, since the horse bolted with our packs. So I couldn't go any longer, and put us down in an old shed that was falling down, but it had a roof. And then he found us,” she glances up at Tommy again, curling into herself a bit.

You nod and turn to Sam. “Get him to the OR and prep for an amputation, and push antibiotics. I'll be right there.” Sam nods and pushes the gurney down the hall, disappearing behind the double doors. You turn back to Tommy and speak quietly.

“How many resources am I using on this guy? I’m gonna have to anesthetize to amputate, use blood packs, antibiotics, and pain meds, that's just to hopefully stabilize him.”

Tommy nods. “Do it. We need more hands. Even with one, he’ll be helpful. And we can train her up in somethin’. Cookin’ or sewing. Hell, she shot two guys, she might be good on patrols or runs, eventually.”

You nod and glance at the girl. “Can you find her a place for the night? Feed her something easy- broth, toast, a warm bath, not hot; she might develop some frostbite. Drink at least two cups of water, and sleep .” He nods and steps back, gesturing for the girl to get up. You call out before they leave:

“Last thing hon- what’s your dad’s name?”

She turns back, looking haunted, and swallows hard, staring at the swinging doors where he was taken. She doesn't correct you. “Ezra.”

________________

“Ezra? Eeeezra , wake up sugar. Come on! That’s it, almost. Little more. Come to me, you’re safe. No- no , don’t. Stay down. Eyes open, sweetheart, come on.”

A soft, soothing voice is luring him toward the light, but an oppressive force keeps Ezra from actually cracking his eyes open. When he tries, light blinds his swollen lids and makes them ache. He groans and waves at whoever is talking, trying to get them to leave him be.

“Sam, dim the lights a bit,” he hears the voice call out, and finally blinks an eye open. His entire body is sore but also feels weighed down and stuffed with cotton. Morphine , some lizard part of his brain supplies.

What the fuck? Where am I?

He tries to lift his right arm and nothing happens. A sharp pain lances through him and then is softened by whatever’s in his bloodstream, funneling into the itchy, ice- cold spot on the side of his neck. He struggles to sit again and feels hands pushing him back.

“Ezra, Ezra ! Stay down, you're safe. We got your girl, she’s okay. You're both safe. You’re hurt, though. Real bad. I need you to stay still. Can you lay back for me and let me see your eyes?” The sweet voice is back, and feels like silk dragging against his jagged senses. Ezra swallows against a bone-dry throat and makes a gritty sound- not words. “Here’s some water- a straw-” you prod the seam of his mouth with something squishy- rubber , he thinks, and frowns.

It is indeed water, a rubbery medical tube cut down into a straw poking out of it, and he struggles not to suck it all down before you’re already drawing away and telling him your name. “Not too fast, you’ll vomit it up. I’m the doctor here in Jackson. Your girl was found dragging you on a sled by our patrolmen, you tested negative for cordyceps so they brought you in. You’re hypothermic, and have a lot of injuries.”

“Cee?” He asks, raspy and uncoordinated. He finally fixes an eye on you, unable to open the other one, and you give him a small smile. “ Soleil ,” he says, and you huff a gentle laugh.

“Is Cee the girl? Your daughter?”

“Where she?” He asks, frowning. The action hurts his whole face, so he stops.

“She’s getting a hot meal and a shower, and hopefully some sleep. She’s okay, she’s not hurt. Just hungry and exhausted and scared. Can I prop you up just a little? Let me know if you get nauseous.” You lift the gurney on one side and prop him up maybe forty degrees when he nods. Ezra blinks around the room, watching it swirl in slow motion. There’s a bag of blood and a bag of IV fluid hanging off a rack above him, and you beside him, and another woman at the corner of the room. The aforementioned Sam , he guesses.

“I need to check your pupils. Gonna flash a light, can you follow my finger?” You cautiously rule out a concussion, though given the state of him, that’s a small comfort. “Ezra- can you remember what happened?”

He blinks at you and glances at the cup of water on the side table. You let him have another drink and take it away again. He feels nauseous. He swallows down the flood of saliva in his mouth and threads his brow together. “Slavers… took over our QZ in Bozeman ‘bout two years ago. I took Cee in when her father was killed. We worked together in the mines, he pissed off the pay clerk one day too many. She and I were running, trying to escape, and they trapped us. Those miscreants were gonna- gonna use her. Rape her. Talked about pullin’ her guts out so she couldn't get pregnant and putting her in the free use ring til she dropped. For the audacity of just tryna escape their manufactured hell. And I couldn't have that, so I told them to do what they would to me. And she- got ‘em. Somehow. Dragged me out half dead. Told her to leave me an’ run, but she wouldn't. Been… a few days, I think?”

“She said three days since you left the cabin. I've given you an antibiotic, painkillers. You just got out of surgery. Do you remember what they did to your arm?”

Ezra slits his one open eye at you and shifts, finally looking down at it. The still shock of his reaction worries you almost as much as the rest of his injuries did.

“I have to admit, I expected that.” he swallows against another roll of bile and drops his head back. “I am feeling nauseous now, soleil .”

You nod and drop him back, bringing a sick tray over in case he vomits. “I’m gonna give you another dose of pain meds and I need you to sleep , Ezra. I’ll stay here,” you tell Sam, nodding to the repurposed sofa along the wall while you push another dose into his IV port. “I’ll send one of the patrol guys over if I need a hand. Go get some sleep,” you tell her. “We can shift off tomorrow?”

“I’ll send Joel over for the night,” she says, and disappears before you can tell her no . You growl under your breath and turn back to your man on the gurney.

“You… don' like this Joel character?” Ezra says, his voice getting low and gritty again as the drugs start to pull him under. You give him a wry smile and scoff.

“It’s not that- he’s a worrier . He’ll sit out there on the porch all night with his rifle and freeze his ass off, and then I'll have two six foot tall, two hundred- fifty pound hypothermic, handome idiots to care for,” you tease, dragging a chuckle and a stilted, pained grin out of your patient.

Ezra huffs in mock offense at you. “I’d need a week of good meals to tip the scales like that anymore, chérie. Especially with the loss of– oh? Maybe eight, ten pounds’ worth of utility?” He glances back down at the tightly wrapped bundle of his amputation and sighs. “Any jobs in this town for a one- armed fella?”

“That is not what you need to be focused on right now,” you chastise. “Give yourself a few weeks. I sure we can find you something to do. We have a couple disabled folks here, you know. They pull their weight, too. It’ll be okay,” you tell him, covering him with two blankets and checking the heater in the room.

You give him your name again when he keeps calling you soleil and chérie , but it doesn't take. He must be delirious considering everything wrong with him right now. You settle back on the bench to wait for Joel to show. “If you wake up, yell at me. Do not try and get up by yourself,” you say, and Ezra nods, already mostly asleep. He finally drifts off a couple seconds later, and you tuck the blankets up closer around his neck, blocking the winter chill and still working to reheat his body. Less than five minutes later, you hear the thunk of the door shutting and move out of the recovery room into the hall.

Only one person in Jackson holds the bell when he walks in. A leftover habit of sneaking places, you assume.

“ Sunny ?” He calls, just before you push open the swinging door to the back.

“Hey,” you say, feeling awkward. “I told Sam not to get you.”

“Why?” Joel asks, frowning. You see that he feels abruptly wrong-footed and keep talking.

“I don't need a guard? I told Sam to go home, I'd call her if I need her. Guy has to sleep it off, he’s quite literally half dead.” You shake your head with a shudder. “Tommy took off with the girl; I don’t know where he put her for the night. She was ok though. Only about Ellie’s age. They broke from a slaver hold .”

Joel’s eyes drop wide and flick back toward the room you'd just come out of. “ Shit .”

“Yeah,” you scoff. “Anyway- go home. Get some sleep. Aren't you on night rounds starting this week?”

“Yeah,” he parrots back, scuffing his boot on the tile. “Don’t mind stayin’ though.”

“You can , of course. But I don't see why you’d sit here all night while I sleep when you can sleep in your own bed, not worry Ellie when she wakes up and you're gone. I’ll be back there if you decide to stay and need something.” You jerk your head back toward the hall and go back, hearing the front door shut behind you.

_______________

You wake up to someone calling your name urgently but not very loudly, and blink your eyes open. You’re confused at first as to why you're on the couch in the clinic until you remember.

Ezra is panting on the gurney, teeth gritted and trying to swallow his pained groans.

“ Shit ,” you jump up and hurry over. His entire body is tense and you can see that he’s making a concerted effort to not hold onto his surgical wound.

“ Please ,” he wheezes, and you realize the time- the morphine you have him would have worn off within the past hour.

“Shit, I'm sorry. Should’a yelled , I told you to. Hang on,” you prep a syringe and feed it into his IV port. Over the next minute, you watch as he slowly unclenches and relaxes a bit, still breathing hard, which you're sure is putting strain on his chest wound.

“Ezra, breathe with me. You gotta slow down- you're hurting the injury to your diaphragm.” His face looks worse today, you note, but the swelling is going down even if the bruising and scabbing is setting in worse. At least it looks like a face today instead of a pile of minced meat. One dark eye focuses on you and he tries to match your breathing; taking deeper, slower breaths that eventually even out. “There we go. Want a drink?”

“Yes, please,” he says, and you refill the bedside cup with cold water and plop the straw in it. He drinks half and pulls a face, dropping back to the mattress. “This nausea. Sucks almost as much– as the injuries,” he grits out, and you smile empathetically.

“You allergic to anything?”

“Nah,” he shakes his head, watching you rifle through a drawer and come back with a nausea tablet in a single-serve sachet.

“Put this under your tongue. I’ll go make some broth. You need something on your stomach,” you explain and drop the tablet under his tongue. He makes a face as the acrid “berry” taste, and you can’t help but chuckle. “Yeah, I hate them, too. I’ll be right back,” you dip out and pad across the hall to the little kitchen. You drop a bouillon cube into a cup and fill it with hot water from the kettle and bring it back, stirring until the cube is dissolved.

“Almost daylight. I expect your girl’s gonna come tearing through here soon, demanding to see you. Anything specific I should say, if you're asleep?” You tip the broth into him slowly and he swallows it with a grateful hum.

“Prepare her for the amputation, I suppose. Not much else to say, is there? I suppose we’ll be directed to living quarters once I'm released from your care, chérie?”

You nod. “Yeah, I'm sure Maria and Tommy are already prepping a place for you two. Depends on where they put her last night.”

“ Cee ,” Ezra says, drinking the last of the soup. “Her name is Cee.”

“ Cee , then. I’ll keep an eye out for her. You go back to sleep.”

Ezra blinks his one working eye at you and lays his head back again, sighing deep. “Thank you, soleil ,” he says, quietly, and you nod.

“No problem. I mean it,” you say when he scowls. “You had a hard time up til now, sounds like. But Jackson is safe. Actually safe. You’ll see,” you smile at him, and he nods off with that final image behind his eyes.

Expecting the girl to show now that it’s daylight, you silently open the door and think about sitting in the waiting room out front. When you step thru the swinging door that divides the comfortable waiting space and the sterility of the clinic rooms, Joel startles awake from his slump along a row of chairs and reaches for the butt of a rifle that isn't there. You stop and blink at him, genuinely surprised.

“Thought you went home?”

He clears his throat and stands up, knees and back cracking as he stretches and straightens. “ Nnngmph . I started to. Then I decided not to.”

“Alright. You ok? Need some ice, old man?” You tease, noticing his wince when he stretches. He scowls at you but there's a smile tugging at his mouth.

“ No . You worry ‘bout your – patient. I’m fine.”

“Technically anyone in Jackson is my patient, as the only doctor,” you say slyly. “Can't get past my perfect bedside manner that easily, Miller.”

“Hmmmph,” Joel comments, wrapping you in a warm hug as he yawns hugely. “I think I experience your bedside manner often enough, sweetheart. But I can’t complain,” he taunts, and you pinch his side, making him chuckle.

The sound of shoes pounding up the porch outside makes you straighten away from Joel’s embrace to glance out the window behind his breadth. “Ah, she’s here.”

Cee bursts through the door with Marnie, the older kids’ teacher, on her heels, calling her back.

“Where is he?” Cee pants, wrenching away from Marnie’s hand when the older woman reaches for her arm.

“Good morning, Cee. Marnie, it’s okay. I expected her this morning.” You turn to Cee, but she’s frowning mightily at Joel, looking him up and down suspiciously. He lifts a brow at her through that permanent frown that everyone except Ellie sees, no longer intimidated by teen girls since re-obtaining one of his own. He scowls back at her, unimpressed, and she flicks her eyes to you.

“Did he make it?” The steadiness in her voice is only betrayed by her lower lip trembling. You nod and lead her back. Marnie throws her hands up with a huff and leaves, stomping off down the snowy porch.

“They plant you with her last night?” You ask, leading Cee through the back. She rolls her eyes and nods.

“Kind of a bitch, isn't she?” You snort and nod at her remark.

“She’s certainly a character. She handles the teens for a reason, though. Strict as hell, doesn't take their shit.” You open the last door and notice that Joel is hovering at the entrance to the hall.

“Gonna go check on Ellie,” he says, eyes tripping over Cee when you both look back at him.

You speak up; “Okay. Tell her I said hi. And tell your brother he's a twat for sending a new kid to stay with Marnie of all people! She’d have gotten a better welcome staying with you and Ellie. Get some actual sleep before your patrol!” He nods, waving a disparaging hand over his shoulder as he walks out. You turn back to Cee.

“I had to remove his injured arm, so expect that. He’s stable, I have him on antibiotics and a blood pack to fight the infection that started up from his wounds. He’s knocked out on pain meds right now. Okay? Any questions?”

Cee shakes her head and tips her brow at the door. “Let's go.”

You open the door and lead her in, watching as she stands at the foot of the gurney and stares at Ezra. She roves over his pulpy face, the missing arm and bandages, the line of red that has managed to seep through the dressing on his chest. You move to replace it, letting her take him in. Eventually she sits, and does end up asking you a few questions. She pets the tuft of blonde at his temple and watches you move around the space. You let them be quiet and alone for a while, listening to Ezra’s wheezing breaths as he sleeps off the meds and you clear up some old-school paperwork files of your various patients at the front desk.

As the day waxes and wanes, you get a man from patrol in for a sprained ankle from landing wrong off his horse onto an icy patch, and one woman in for a pregnancy checkup. The midwife Janet and her trainee Silvia are assisting with a birth on the other side of town, so you check the woman’s vitals and, when everything clears, tell her to come back in a couple days to see Janet properly.

Cee calls you from the hall, urgently, a few times. Once, Ezra is pale and shaking, trying to struggle to a sit and he’s burning up. You cover him in cool wraps and lay an ice pack on his forehead and stomach, bringing his temp down fast. You up the dose of antibiotics and hope for the best, without much to tell you what exactly is ailing him from the inside. Blood samples only go so far with just a microscope to test on.

The second time, he complains about the catheter and asks to get up and use the toilet. You send Cee out to the waiting room and remove it, assisting him in getting up and aiming at the bowl with his off hand, which he blushes at but forces himself to remember you are a medical professional . He needs to get up and walk anyway, and you're glad he feels up to it. You let her back in when he’s back in bed and tell her to call you if he asks to get up again.

Tommy shows up in the late afternoon, telling you and Cee that they’ve set up one of the houses on your street, which makes sense- yours is the one filling with new folks now. It's one of the last empty stretches. “House 407,” he hands Cee the keys and glances at Ezra in the bed. Sam chimes in the door, ready to take over for the night, and you’re grateful.

“I’ll show you the house, if you want?” You offer, expecting the girl to turn it down. She stares at Ezra for a long moment and nods.

“Can I come back, after checking it out?”

You nod, smiling. “Let me tell Sam what’s up and we can go.”

“How long have you been here?” Cee asks, plodding through the snow with you.

“Ah, about two years? Not long. Before me they had an old nurse, and she passed about eight months ago now. I was a medic for FEDRA; defected when they started bombing the rebelling QZs about eight years ago. I hopped around for a while, stayed in the wild with a small group for a year. They got killed when we ran afoul of a gas station filled with clickers. Came here in the winter, like you two. Sucks ,” you chuckle, stuffing your hands in your pockets.

“Who’s in charge? Like, is there a caste system?” She asks, looking around at the houses. They're all leftover suburban developments, what would have been solidly middle class Before; nothing terribly classist, but some are decidedly larger or fancier than others on some streets. They all have water and electricity and keep the infected out, and that’s what matters anymore. You say as much, and Cee nods.

“Maria and her husband, Tommy - the guy who found you- they sort of run everything. But it’s a commune - the point is we all have a say, we all share food, essentials, and medicine, and barter goods or skills. We all pull weight, rotate patrols and jobs. Some of us are more specialized, like me, being the doc. But I still have patrol duty, same as anyone.”

“What do you do when you're not saving people or setting twisted ankles or on patrol?”

You pause briefly, thinking of Joel. You huff and shrug. “I like to read.”

“Do you have books here!?”

You chuckle, getting the feel of the young teen quickly. She’s hardy, but still a kid . She reminds you a bit of Ellie, though maybe not as feral. “We have a library, yes. And you’ll go to school when you're both well enough. I expect Ezra can go home in a few days, if he's got someone there to help him take care of some things.”

“Like getting around and cleaning it and stuff?”

“Yeah, and getting used to losing his dominant hand. He might struggle to do a lot of things at first. He’ll feel like his arm is there, sometimes, and reach for things, so he might drop stuff or get frustrated easily. Don't take it personally,” you lean in and stage-whisper, and she nods sagely.

You direct her to turn left on Rancher Street and up a pathway toward number 407.

Your own house is across the street and down two, beside the fenced-off graveyard, which you point out to her.

“My neighbor, Joel, that big grumpy guy who was at the clinic earlier? He's got a girl about your age. Ellie. She’s– well maybe about seventeen now? Ish? How old are you?”

“I’ll be seventeen next month,” she says, glancing across at the houses where you pointed.

You nod and squint at her as she keys into the house and peers around in the dark. “We got electricity, hon,” you remind her gently and snap the lights on and her mouth drops open.

“All this is just ours? We don't have to share?”

“Not a bit. It’s yours. If it's like the rest of the houses in this neighborhood, it's got three rooms and two bathrooms- one in the hall upstairs, between the two smaller rooms, and one in the big bedroom. Tommy and Maria will have fitted you out with clothes, beds and blankets, TP, probably tampons or a cup, soap... Check the rooms and see, I'll wait.”

Cee stops with a foot above a tread and glances back at you. She looks hesitantly up at the yawning darkness at the top of the stairs. “I can come up, if you don't want to go alone?” When she nods, you follow.

She ducks into both of the smaller rooms and investigates the bathroom, which indeed has a stack of toilet paper and a diva cup and instructions on the counter with a bar of soap and a little pot of natural deodorant. “Aw, you got green !” You say, and grin when she frowns at you.

“We make the soap here, in one of the shops. The green one smells best,” you hand it to her and she sniffs it, smiling.

“I don't remember the last time we had soap. Or a hot bath. Ezra’s gonna flip .” She sets the bar down and goes into the larger of the two small bedrooms, sitting on the bed to bounce it. You smile at her exploring the room all over from the hall.

“Wanna see if they put clothes in here for your dad?”

“It’s just Ezra. He and my father dug in the mines but they hated one another. He took me in a couple years ago when the clerk and his goons killed my dad at the mine’s pay table. He had tried to barter his ration chit for more. Ezra knew if he didn't squirrel me away they’d put me in the free use ring with the other orphan girls. I’m sure he thought I'd be useful to him, at least at first.”

You blink at her deadpan and incredibly dark explanation and clear your throat. “ Ezra , then. They probably left a change of clothes for him. Can’t send him home in the snow in his civvies.”

“Do you care to check? I’d actually really like a shower and to change,” she grimaces down at her bloody clothes that Marnie appears to have simply dried and given back to her. Never one for going the extra mile, dear Marnie.

“Sure thing,” you say, and go out across the hall to check.

Sure enough, whoever had stocked the house had left a stack of three flannels, three tee shirts, a canvas and wool-lined contrast coat, a neat pyramid of socks and boxers, two pair of jeans, sleep clothes, and a set of re-soled boots on the bed. The bathroom in the big bedroom has another stack of matching toiletries. You pile up enough to make an outfit and take it downstairs, and wait on the little sofa.

Cee stirs you awake as she plummets down the stairs, eyes wide. You startle, unaware that you had nodded off. “Oh. I thought you’d left,” she says, and visibly steels herself. “Thank you for staying,” she says almost shyly.

“It's okay kid. I know you're not settled. It’s still overwhelming. It’ll take some adjusting. Where are you sleeping tonight?”

She pauses, glancing back up the darkened stairs and then out the window. “Can I stay at the clinic?”

You shrug. “Just tell Sam to let you have the sofa, she can use another bed. Yell at her if Ezra needs something.”

“Okay!” She agrees and shoves her boots back on. You hand her the bag of Ezra’s clothes and tell her the way back.

“Just follow the road to the end and turn left at the street sign. Clinic’s on the right, three doors from the end. Tell Sam I said you could stay til Ezra is released.” You nod at her and she bites her lip.

“Thank you.”

You nod again. “You're welcome , Cee. Go on, I'll see you tomorrow.”

You watch Cee lock up and plod across the road and down til she is out of sight, and go across to your own house. As you stomp the snow off your boots on the porch, Joel opens his door and leans on the frame.

“Jeez, girl. You just gettin’ home?”

“Yeah, just showed the girl their house and sent her back off to stay with her dad. I need to sleep for like, a week ,” you scoff, kicking your boots off into the tray by the door. “You ain't gone on patrol yet?”

Joel hums and looks you up and down, assessing. His deep seated need to care for and simultaneous desire to not care at all is a trait you find both adorable and grating. “Traded this week off; that Tyler kid wants to be home with his wife during the day. She had their kid this mornin’.”

“Ah, right. You wanting to sleep over?” You ask, and he gives you a half smile.

“You just said you needed sleep,” he teases, shooting you that tilted smirk. “Go on,” he waves at you batting your lashes playfully in answer, and you go inside giggling, leaving the door unlocked.

A moment later, probably after leaving Ellie a note on his whereabouts, Joel stomps through the door and leaves his snow-packed boots in the tray with yours after you give him an unimpressed brow at the puddles forming on your floor.

“We just sleepin’ or am I putting you to sleep?” he asks, shucking his coat.

“I’m taking a shower and going to sleep. If you facilitate either of those ends, that’s fine,” you shrug, smiling, already moving to the bathroom under the stairs.

Joel ends up eating your pussy in the shower til you shake apart, then ruts between your soapy thighs until he splashes come on the wall. After rinsing you down, he washes your hair and puts you to bed, spooning up tight behind you to keep the warmth in while you sleep.

The last thought you have before drifting off is that the soft swell of his belly, padded out over the last year or so with a more comfortable life and actual meals in Jackson, is perfectly fitted to the small of your back, and the feeling might just be your favorite part about relaxing anywhere with him.

_______________

You wake up before dawn sprawled across his wide chest, listening to his heavy, even breaths. It would be nice to wake up every day, just like this. But you know if you suggest it, he’ll put you back at arm’s length. So you take what you can get.

You fall back asleep quickly, and wake a few hours later to Joel sitting on the edge of the bed, putting his socks on. The room is much brighter; definitely proper morning now. You stretch and yawn, brushing your fingertips along his hip, and he turns.

“Mornin’, sunshine. You headed back to the clinic?”

“Hmm,” you sigh, stretching. “Soon, yeah. Eat somethin’ and head over, let Sam go home.”

Joel nods and leans down, kisses you on your forehead, then your mouth. “I’ll see you later, then.”

You nod, and he goes. You listen for the door to close downstairs and sigh, stretching a kink out of your shoulder. You wonder idly after Cee, if Ezra made it another night, and decide to eat your toast with sunbutter on your walk across town.

When you get in, you're surprised and pleased to see Cee walking around the waiting area with a dressed and mussed Ezra, his arm slung across her shoulders for support.

“There’s my favorite patient,” you grin, praising his progress. You send Sam home and settle in to wait for anyone to come by. When you finally drop into the rolling chair behind the counter, Cee has sat him down in a wheelchair and parked him nearby. “How you feeling today?”

“I am upright and alive, soleil , neither of which is what I expected to be two days ago. I have already thanked Cee for her part in that, now I must thank you .” he squints one pretty dark eye, the other still puffy and swollen nearly shut, in an approximation of a smile and you can’t help smiling back.

“I told you no problem . You’re welcome . Leave it be,” you sigh, dragging out his chart. Sam had left notes for the overnight, and you verify them with him, mostly to test his memory. He is able to corroborate most of them, though he peers over at Cee twice when he can’t recall a detail.

After making sure he was settled again, Cee had gone back to their home and managed a nap, but a couple hours later he’s up and moving around again, under your watchful eye, and she's coming back up the walkway now. You wonder if she’ll go to the mess hall and bring back lunch. Biting your lip, you decide to try.

“Up for something more than broth today?” You ask Ezra, and he perks up.

“If my doctor says I am able , then I am eager for any rations, soleil .”

You give him a wide grin and a wink. “I can do better than rations , pretty boy. One sec.” he laughs as you hear Cee jingle into the waiting area and you call out to catch her before she takes her coat off.

“Cee! Would you mind getting us all some lunch, hon? Mess hall is across the road, there. Big building.”

She goes, somewhat shy but determined, and brings back wrapped sandwiches and containers of a thick, creamy soup, and herbal tea. Ezra’s eyes nearly bulge out of his head at the spread.

“My word. You are certain I didn't die?”

You snort, your teeth buried in your sandwich, and shake your head. “Nope. I know the food’s overwhelming at first. ‘specially coming from the road or the QZs.”

You advise him to eat slowly to make sure he can keep it down, and he struggles not to swallow it all whole, working to savor every bite. Having to scoop with his left hand slows him down a good bit. You match his pace, which he notices only after several minutes of waffling with the spoon.

“What are you reading there, soleil ?” He asks later, sleepy and full and on a fresh round of painkillers (though you're already weaning him off, he seems to have a low pain threshold).

You hum and turn your three- inch- thick paperback to face him. “Just a historical fiction I picked up. We have a little library, but if you don't give everything a chance, you’ll read through everything too fast,” you scoff. “I prefer the ribald romances and fantasy books, personally, but these are sometimes real gems.”

Ezra snorts and squints at the book. “ Parade’s End, ” he murmurs and frowns. “What’s it about?”

“One’s duty to society and family versus personal preference, really. It’s set during the first world war. The main character is an aristo in a loveless marriage because he and his wife constantly miscommunicate in an attempt to one-up the other. He falls in love with a young suffragette but won't let himself be with her. His wife has a few affairs and his name is sullied in high society by her jilted lover bouncing his check at the bank, so he goes to war to avoid her and the situation. When he comes home he realizes that he is trying to remain old fashioned in a world that is already changed, and living like that only serves to make him unhappy, so he decides to separate from his wife, but he won’t divorce her because of their son. He sends her to live at his family estate in wealth, but makes sure she is unhappy with it. And he lives happily in sin with his suffragette.”

Ezra grins at your summary and lolls his head back on the pillows. “Read some to me? I will probably fall asleep. But I'd appreciate it, chérie . I haven't been able to indulge in a tale in a very long time.”

You scoot the chair closer and prop your feet on the support racking under his gurney, and read in a measured, soothing voice, glancing up every so often to see your patient getting more and more sleepy. Finally, he nods off, and you watch him for a few moments. Cee is snoozing hard on the little couch, and otherwise the room is quiet aside from the susurrus of the space heater whirring, keeping out the freezing temps outside. You go back to your book, one ear trained for the door to jingle.

Three days later, at dusk, Joel appears on your porch to walk you to the clinic and Ellie to her friend Dina’s before he goes on patrol for the night shift. Ellie is by his side, rattling excitedly about a comic one of her school mates had let her read during free time that day. “And she has the last one too ! I’ll get the whole arc and don’t have to make it up myself!”

You catch him through your door’s glass pane as you put your coat on, watching her with that soft half smile on his face, and it makes your own appear.

Early the next morning, Ezra is ready to be sent home; he’s finally weaned fully off the morphine and onto regular pain management for the healing wound on his arm. His diaphragm sounds good, and you had removed the drainage ports in his stump overnight so he could sleep it off and you could monitor it closely until morning. You are putting on your coat, trading off shifts with Sam who just arrived, and giving Cee detailed instructions on how to care for him and the surgery site, what to do if common issues arise, and strict orders for no weight lifting and lots of water and rest.

Ellie’s on your clinic porch when you open the door and usher Ezra and Cee out into the cold. She stuffs her notebook back in her bag, jumps up, and waits by the stairs while you close up and finish talking to them.

“Hey Ellie,” you greet with a grin. Her and Cee eye one another speculatively and she comes to your other side, ready to walk you home. “This is Cee, and Ezra. They came in last week,” you introduce them. “Ellie is Joel’s kid,” you tell them, leaving it at that. You know Ezra and Cee are in a similar situation.

Ellie takes your elbow and you keep pace with Cee and Ezra, walking across as a clump to get dinner at the mess hall before taking them to their house. Cee and Ellie trade small, stilted words across the table, mostly opening up after they find out one another's explosive imagination and love for reading sci-fi.

You grin conspiratorially at Ezra over bowls of soup and he watches them with a fond smile, happy to see Cee coming out of her shell with another kid.

When you leave the mess hall, Ellie and Cee are still animatedly chatting, discovering a mutual love for a space series they had both read bits and pieces of. If one has a knowledge gap, the other can usually fill it, and together they piecemeal the series.

Ezra walks close to you, minding his footing with his precarious balance in the packed and somewhat slippery snow. “I am glad there are kids her age here. In the– hmm. Where we came from, most of her peers were sold off to the mines, or the girls were being abused. About the only useful thing her asshole daddy did was keep her from that. She hasn't had much peer interaction in a few years.”

You hum and nod. “Ellie’s warmed up a good bit. She’s probably a good one for Cee to latch onto, honestly. Her and her old man were just about feral when they got here.”

“ Feral ?” Ezra chuffs, carefully skirting a sheet of ice. You take his elbow and lead on.

“Hmm. Like a couple of cats being brought inside and shown love for the first time,” you grin. “They’d been on the road a long time, coming from Boston mostly on foot. Lots of trouble, being exposed like that. They didn't take kindly to a lot of intervention at first, but I think they came around well enough in the end. Joel’s doing well, Ellie's making friends. Giving folks safety and time makes them come around, usually.”

“Joel. He's come by, yes? The name is familiar, though I admit I haven't been terribly lucid in the last week.”

“Yeah, he was there the first night. I’m their neighbor; you’re actually across the street from us. You’ll see soon, we’re almost there.” (You don't say the rest- that you and Joel have been fucking and sleeping over and kissing and having weekly dinners with Ellie for nearly a year, but if anyone lays ownership he backs away, closes off, and it takes weeks for him to lower his hackles and come back around).

“He’s real handy, used to be a contractor, Before. If you need something done on the house, I suggest coming across and asking there first,” you add, nodding at your house and Joel's. You point them out, the brown of his and your own, next door. “Or his brother, Tommy. That's the guy that found you and Cee on patrol.”

Ezra makes an affirmative grunt and squints at the houses. “We are being watched , soleil ,” he chuckles, and you glance over to see a figure in the early morning fog, thrown into shadow by the light coming through the window behind him. Joel is back from his shift and is standing on his porch, watching you and Ellie walk the newcomers to their house.

“He’s a little overprotective,” you roll your eyes and nod.

“You and Cee are there,” you point across and angle the both of you toward the deep green two-story where the girls are leading.

Ezra’s mouth hangs open while he takes it in, just as baffled and overwhelmed as Cee was a few days ago. “This is all ours? Or do we share with another family?”

You smile, remembering Cee’s similar words a few days ago. “No, it’s yours and hers. We haven't had to start sharing homes yet; and we still have a whole road of empties, and most of Rancher Street is still empty, save for our occupied lots and the graves, so hopefully it will be a while . And hopefully if we’re that big, by then we can build more.”

Cee unlocks the door and you all file in. The girls keep talking and you watch Ezra poke around the space while you wait on Ellie. Eventually, you cock an eyebrow at her and she drops her chin.

“Uh, anyway. I’m across in the brown house if you want to read any of what I have. Just tell Joel you’re looking for me- he looks way meaner than he is. Promise,” she laughs, winking at you. You nod at Cee in agreement and she breaks into a smile. “I’m turning the garage into my room, so hopefully by the time the weather’s warm you can just come back there.”

“Okay.”

“And come get me next door to them if you need help with anything or are having complications. Otherwise I'm mostly at the clinic. If I don't see you in two days for a checkup, I'll come find you,” you level a finger at Ezra and he chuckles weakly.

“I am not in the habit of spurning women, soleil . I’ll see you then.”

You and Ellie leave, shutting the door firmly behind you, and she knocks her shoulder into yours.

“They’re both fuckin’ cute ,” she says slyly, and breaks into giggles when you roll your eyes at her.

“Don't you like Dina ?” you fake a retch and she bends to throw a handful of snow at your head.

“Fuck you dude! She’s banging that stupid boy anyway. Gonna end up in your clinic soon, I'm sure. Idiots. I backed off.”

“ Eew . Was he there last night?” You ask, side-eyeing her slumped shoulders.

“Ugh. Yeah.”

Ah , you think. Bingo . “ That's why you were there so early, making out like Joel sent you to walk me home. You were escaping ,” you poke her in the ribs and she breaks into a grin again, laughing.

“Yeah, I was. Sucks being the third wheel.”

“I agree,” you sigh, stopping at the gate to Joel’s yard. He is still on the porch and watches Ellie walk up. He asks her something quietly, then snaps his gaze back to you. He nods at her and she disappears into the house with a little wave. He comes down the stairs to the gate and frowns at the green house across the way.

“Got your patient settled in?”

You hum, not glancing back. He’s thrumming with some sort of energy- jealousy or territorial puffing- up, your gut says, and you make a concerted effort not to ask or frown back. “Yep, I think he’s made it past the worst of it. Ellie liked Cee a lot, seems like she might have a new friend. That’s always good. The new ones tend to struggle- you two know that as well as anyone else here.”

“She said you had to cut that guy’s arm off?”

You squint up at him and scowl. “I'm not discussing a patient with the likes of you, Miller. But you’ll see soon enough he is indeed missing an arm, and he wasn't when Tommy dragged him in.”

Joel blinks down at you, his frown deepening, before he realizes you're teasing him and it softens again.

“Jesus, girl.” He wraps a wide hand around the back of your neck and guides you to your door, boots scuffing in the crunchy snow.

“Somethin’ happen today?” You ask, unlocking your door. You kick your boots off but he stands on the welcome mat, dripping. Not staying, then. Maybe .

“Nah, just. One of the assholes on patrol said he looked like me.”

You scoff and shake your head. “Maybe severely malnourished and ten or more years younger, sure. Maybe in a different life, even. He’s your height and has dark hair and eyes, built like an upside-down pyramid. No doubt with some square meals he’ll be a brick shithouse like you,” you chuckle. “That's about it. He's from Louisiana, though. Your dad go ‘cross the border and start sowin’ seed in Cajun country when you were a kid?” You giggle, blocking a wide palm when he goes to grab you.

“You stayin’ for breakfast? I've had a soup on all night. could go get your kid.”

“Nah, I cooked. She’s prob’ly over there eatin’ more than her half,” Joel grimaces, looking at the wall like he can see through it into his house, into Ellie’s mind.

Your smile doesn't quite meet your eyes. It's like reopening the scarred wound in his side.

“Alright.”

Joel seems to take it as dismissal (or he was looking for a way to leave, even though he’s the one who came over), and dips his chin at you before ducking back outside and around the picket fence to his own house. You rub your eyes with the heels of your hands and sigh.

Shower, food, bed. Check on your patients. Repeat.

You shuck your coat and beanie and go upstairs, eager to strip off and eat and crash. Bed sounds incredible, even without your preferred space heater of a… Friend . The good news is, with Ezra finally discharged, no one has to sit on- call at the clinic overnight. If someone needs you, they’ll come knocking.

You shower, dress in warm lounge clothes, eat your soup, box the rest for the week’s meals, and crash face-first into your bed within an hour of getting home.

_______________

Joel had already been home when you and Ellie went past, leading the newcomers to their allotted house. You had your elbow looped in the guy’s, Ellie and the girl were ahead, grinning and talking animatedly about something- probably a book, if he knew Ellie at all.

You had a serene smile on your face when looking at him , answering a question and carefully minding the paths in the snow for your patient, and Joel’s heart had clenched up tight. Some ugly part of him walled up, seeing both of you happy and at ease, with himself nowhere in the frame. He pressed his molars together and drew himself up, turning away so he didn't have to watch as you followed them inside their new home and shut the door.

Ellie had carefully and methodically (with all the untrained, blunt force of a hapless teenager) sanded down all the fractured edges he had over their trek across the country and back, and his increasing terror at the loss of control over himself or his situation was only doubling- down the closer he got to you . You’re another person to look out for, who would happily tie their fate to his own; your pain, his pain. Your happiness; his. Ellie has already pulled away from him, sensing his aversion to talking about Colorado and possibly seeing straight through his ocean of lies surrounding the trip, of their abrupt exit.

He isn't sure his heart can take another breach.

He stands in the doorway, his back to you and Ellie in Ezra’s house, and thinks about drawing back from you. Putting the walls up that you’ve come to expect every so often. But then he thinks of the disappointment he will see in your face when he does, and it hurts just as bad as the jealousy does. He tries to make himself not care, but he’s only fooling himself.

He doesn't even know if you like this new guy.

You could just actually be caring for a newly-disabled patient.

You could just pity the guy.

He’ll wait. But he’s not sleeping the day away in your bed. It's the weekend and Ellie is out of school and working on her latest project, moving into the garage and away from him. He’ll nap on the sofa in case she needs him to haul or build or fix something, and train his good ear on her while he tries to rest.

Overnight rounds were a bitch on his joints and back. He’d much rather lay in bed with you and leave Ellie to her own devices; not much trouble she could get in, in Jackson. But that somehow feels like crossing a line, so he stays back and away from it.

He’d rather pull back before you can have the chance.

He’s not sure his heart can take another failure.

-----------------------------🍄-------------------------

Link to part 2

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#joel miller #the last of us #joel the last of us #joel x reader #joel x you #ezra prospect #prospect (2018) #prospect ezra #ezra (prospect) #ezra x reader #ezra x you #reader insert #afab reader #cis AFAB reader #no description #ezra x you x joel #ezra x reader x joel #love triangle #poly dynamics #tommy miller #ellie williams #also on ao3

[the-streamer-girl]

Prospect

Yes, they should! I’ve seen so many comparisons of Joel to Din Djarin, and they’re valid--but if you’re a Pedro Pascal fan and haven’t seen Prospect yet, get on it because you need to meet Ezra. Joel and Ezra are definitely cut from the same cloth and certain moments from The Last of Us are directly parallel to events and dialogue in Prospect. Their accents are even similar! So do yourself a favor and check out this wonderful little indie sci-fi that needs some more love!

#pedro pascal #the last of us #tlou #prospect #prospect film #the mandalorian #joel miller #prospect ezra #din djarin