#this one goes with the songs that hit fuckin different

[nolita-fairytale]

make my heart surrender | carmy berzatto x fem!reader | chapter four: friday

pairing: carmen berzatto x fem!reader

warnings: lots of swearing, angst, use of she/her pronouns, friends to lovers, smutty smut-smut, this is an 18+ chapter so minors dni, no use of y/n, second person pov

word count: 6.7k

summary: buckle up people, because this is a long one! tonight is the night: the night you and marcus' dessert menu goes live, the night you meet natalie berzatto, and the night that truths are revealed.

a/n: is it hot in here or is it just me? who's ready for some smut? this will be the last chapter i post till sunday/monday, so we can all sit with this. hear me out: it's not that i think carmy is really good at sex. but there's so much tension between these two, i think reader is good at sex, and there's something to be said for being so turned on by the other person that it just hits different.

and here is that song -- the jazz standard turned acoustic cover.

read: part three | masterlist

Friday

“Just remember that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here. You just have to deliver a really damn good dessert time after time,” you instruct, setting Marcus up, pre-dinner shift. 

“I think we should focus on the burnt basque cheesecake in lieu of the classic. You already have a heavier lift on the bake for the chocolate cake. That way, whatever happens with the mixer, or the ovens… this version of cheesecake is pretty forgiving. And you don’t have to fuck around with a water bath just yet.”

“The tiramisu is perfect because it’s a no-bake option, and you can mix it up with different kinds of flavors – call it a special.” 

“Like what we’re doing Sunday?” Marcus suggests, in reference to the strawberry, lemon, and mascarpone version you be doing at the end of the week.

“Exactly,” you reply.

“Hell yeah.”

“It all fits into the menu so nicely too: elevated classics.”

“A play on tradition.”

“Exactly."

“Ah, I see you, chef,” Marcus nods along, excited about tonight’s R&D night. 

The game plan is to serve smaller portions of each dessert for the price of one, then get feedback by the end of the weekend. 

“Hey, family’s up in a minute. You guys ready to roll tonight?” Carmy asks, stopping by you and Marcus’ little pastry corner. 

“Yes, chef,” you both answer, in staggered timing. 

“She got me workin’ on a strawberry compote. Here, try it, chef,” Marcus encourages, grabbing a clean spoon and scooping out a spoonful from the deli container it’s been stored in. Carmy takes it, putting the spoon in his mouth and he tries the compote. 

“That’s gonna be really good with the tang and slightly bitter outside of the burnt cheesecake. Good work, chef,” he congratulates, inspiring a grin across Marcus face. 

“I’m learning so much from you. Seriously. Thank you, chef,” he says, turning to you. 

“Hey, you’re the one that made the compote,” you reply, redirecting the praise back to him. “Just sayin’.”

“Family’s up!” Sydney calls out to the whole kitchen. 

You lock eyes with Carmy, and he nods towards the front of house as if to say, ‘follow me.’ You and Marcus file in through the limited space that leads from the kitchen to the front counter, then finally, into the dining area of the restaurant. Carmy had told you all about the hellish remodel of this place – that the two tops, booths, and bar remodel had taken for-fuckin-ever. That it looked like nothing more than a diner with a few arcade games before the reopen. 

“Hey, thanks for jumping in so that Angel could cover me the other night,” Ebrahim says to you, as you find a seat next to Carmy, and across from Marcus. 

“Oh, it’s no problem. You feelin’ better?” you ask back. 

“Very much so. A little rest and a little maraq digaag and I’m good as new,” he answers. 

“What’s good, Jeff? Surprised you’ve stuck around this long. Glad we haven’t scared you away yet,” Tina greets. 

Carmy’s shocked, considering Tina rarely warms up to anyone. 

You chuckle in response. 

“It takes a lot more to scare me away, chef,” you reply, confident that you can keep up with everyone’s witty banter. Even though you’ve been welcomed in over the last few days, you know that they were a family before you came. 

And will still be one after you. 

Right. Because this is temporary. You’re only here for a week, you remind yourself. 

“Yeah, thought she’d be long gone after workin’ the line the other night,” Richie chimes in. “Especially considering she’s way out of your league, cousin.” 

“Yeah, yeah, fuck you,” Carmy shoots back, almost instantly. 

“I’m just glad you’re here now. Man, it’s been three days and you’ve leveled my shit up already,” Marcus compliments. 

“Besides, it’s nice to have some solidarity amongst the little boys club we work in every damn day,” Sydney points out, eliciting a scoff from Richie.

The two of you share a look, like a psychic high five or some shit. It begins to dawn on you that you could get used to this: this kitchen, these people….

“What? You got something against women supporting women, Richie?”

“Oh, so what? You’re the voice of feminism now, Syd?” Richie spits back. “Holy shit! Did you guys know that we were here in the presence of the new voice of-.”

You watch as Tina and Gary slump in their chairs, as if to say, ‘here they go again.’

“Don’t be such a prick, Richie. Oh wait.” Sydney challenges. 

“You know what-?” Richie starts up, before being swiftly interrupted.

“Damn, Syd. This is fantastic,” you interject, your voice louder than normal, in reference to her family meal. “These tostadas are fuckin’ perfect and I’m gonna need the recipe.”

Richie continues to go on about god knows what, distracting himself, as Sydney mouths a, ‘thank you’ across the table towards you. You nod towards her as if to say, 

I got you.

*

“Hey, I’m a little behind on plating. Sorry, chef,” Marcus apologizes, and you can tell he’s stressed. He gestures towards the plates that are ready to go out to the bar. 

He hesitates before asking, “Oh and uh… these ones are ready to go out. Can you-?”

“‘Course, chef,” you answer, a mini-pep talk coming his way. “But uh… before you keep going, Marcus, take a breath. I know you struggle a little with pacing – you want everything to perfect – but, it’s gonna come with practice and repetition.”

You can see that he’s flustered – a little frustrated even. 

“Expediting during dinner is a whole other animal, and it’s just night one. You got this,” you reassure. 

You and Carmy had such different leadership styles. While you both had come up in the same kind of kitchens, you didn’t like to yell unless you had to. You were here to teach, and you can’t remember the last time someone screaming at you had ever helped you learn something. 

You’re more than happy to support him by taking these plates out. You spent the first half of dinner service plating so that he could get some face time with customers – since you’d be asking for feedback. Then you’d switch halfway through service.  You also thought it might be good practice for him to lead, considering they’d need to hire more help with the new menus. 

You take a look at the ticket, one dessert tasting - two people - bar top, before taking the dessert plates out to the designated seats at the bar. There’s a gorgeous blonde woman sitting next to a guy in a sweater vest, as you make to approach the bar top. 

“Hi, you guys,” you greet, a cheerful smile on your face. “Sorry to keep you waiting. We’re testing out a few new desserts for our dinner menu, so I’d love to hear what you think.”

“Oh this looks great,” the woman says, looking at both perfectly plated desserts. 

“Here we have a burnt basque cheesecake with a strawberry compote, The Bear’s signature chocolate layer cake, and then a classic Italian tiramisu,” you explain, walking through each piece. 

“Wow,” the man marvels, almost as if he’s surprised. 

You share your name with them, and let them know that, if they have any feedback, that they can ask for you. As you turn to go, the woman calls after you, stopping you. 

“Wait,” she says, her eyes lighting up. “You’re Carmy’s friend.”

“Yes.”

“Pete, it’s Carmy’s friend!” she exclaims, nudging the man next to her with her elbow to try to jog his memory. “You know! The one that’s staying in our airbnb.”

“Oh!” he says, as the light bulb goes on in his brain. “Yeah, we’ve heard all about you.”

“I’m sorry,” the woman apologizes. “I’m Natalie, his sister, but you can call me Sugar. This is my husband, Pete.”

“Oh my god! Natalie! Yes, I’ve heard so much about you too,” you reply, finally registering that this was the same woman in family photos that Carmy had shown you years ago. “It’s so nice to put a face to the name. And great to meet you too, Pete. Seriously, thanks for letting me stay at the place. I mean, you really didn’t have to.”

“Likewise,” she says back. She scoffs before rolling her eyes and continuing. “Leave it to Carmy to ask us for a favor and not even introduce you to us, that soft shitty bitch!”

“Babe,” Pete starts. “Maybe we shouldn’t be so hard on Carmy, you know, in front of his-.” He gestures towards you and you’re not sure what he thinks you are to Carmy. 

Sugar brushes him off with a, ‘whatever,’ before you notice that they’re both in need of clean forks. 

“You guys need clean forks. I’m gonna-,” you start. 

“Oh no! I uh-, let me get it,” Pete interrupts, practically jumping out of his seat. 

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” he agrees, leaving the two of you alone. 

You lean against the bar top towards Sugar. 

“Well, he couldn’t get out of here fast enough,” you say with a laugh, stating the obvious. She laughs with a nod towards her husband. 

“Yeah he’s… special,” she replies. “I think he uh, I think he just wanted to give us some time to talk.” 

You’re not sure what to say next, because you’re not sure what you and Carmy’s sister, one you’ve never met before, would have to talk about. 

“So how’s the place? Do you have everything you need or-?” Sugar begins, in reference to the airbnb. 

“Oh! Yeah, no it’s great. I’ve got everything I need. Again, thank you. You really didn’t have to do that.”

“No, we wanted to!”

“Thanks…” you trail off, suddenly feeling a little uncomfortable – nervous, maybe? Yep, definitely nervous, you realize, as you begin to ramble. “It’s a really great apartment. Beautifully styled.”

What the fuck are you even talking about, you think to yourself.

“Oh, I did that! Styled it, I mean,” Sugar’s quick to respond.

“Oh, wow!” you say. Were all the Berzattos creative? “Yeah, I just-, I really appreciate it. Made getting out here a little easier.”

“No, yeah, it’s-, it’s no problem,” Sugar continues. “Really… anything for a friend of Carmy’s.” 

You’re not sure why it’s so awkward, and it feels like you’re somehow both dancing around something you’re not even sure you should be dancing around. 

“I hope you don’t think I’m a total bitch for saying this but,” Sugar starts, cautiously. While she doesn’t want to make her brother look like a total loser in front of you, she’s also unsure of how else to say what she says next. 

“Bear's never really had any friends… not a lot of them, at least. So I-. Thank you. I mean. For being his friend, I guess… is what I’m trying to say.” 

Bear.

You figure it's a family nickname. You wonder why you’ve never heard it before, and yet, it’s no surprise that he kept it from you. He’d been so evasive about his family when you’d first met. For a bit, it just felt like a topic that was off limits.

You take a beat, processing what she’s just said. In some ways, you always knew that Carmy was a bit of a loner, but you could feel the weight of what she’s saying – how much it meant to her. 

“I know he’s not always easy to love but. I don’t know. He acts like he doesn’t need people, and I know he does. I mean, people outside of this fucked up shit hole anyways,” she continues, gesturing to her surroundings. 

You agree with a small laugh, “Yeah, he can be a real dick sometimes. That’s for sure.” 

“Seriously. Thank you,” she says, genuinely. 

“Of course,” you reply, making sure she knows that her words mean a lot to you. You take a more playful tone as you continue. “To be fair, we did meet in another fucked up spot. Not so much a shit hole though.”

“Yeah, and there’s that,” she sighs, lightheartedly. 

“I’m just glad he has someone. He needs someone. Even when he doesn’t want to.”

The rest of dinner service is a blur, as your mind continues to incubate on what Sugar had said to you. You let your interaction with her sit there, but try your best to focus on supporting the rest of service. 

You all work together to wrap up the evening – a chaotic dinner service with a lot of lessons learned. You and Carmy are the last to leave as you notice he’s wrapping up a few things in his office. With your jacket on, backpack slung over one shoulder, you stop by to say goodnight before heading out. 

He’s sitting in the chair, furiously scribbling a few notes down on a few pages of graphing paper. Your eyes flicker over all of the silly doodles on the whiteboard behind him. 

“Hey,” you say, causing him to look up from his notebook. 

“Good service tonight,” he says back. 

“Yeah,” you nod in agreement. “Desserts were a hit.”

“I heard,” he replies. 

You wait for him to say more, only he doesn’t. 

“So, I’m gonna get out of here. Marcus is gonna fly solo tomorrow morning, so I won’t be in till the dinner shift,” you start, shooting him a polite smile. 

You take a few steps away from the office before he calls out to you. 

“Hey!” 

You stop, taking a few steps backwards so that you’re standing in the office doorway once again. 

“You hungry?” he asks, tentatively. 

There’s a look in his eyes that you can’t quite identify: a little nervousness, and something else you haven’t had a chance to name yet. It’s like he’s not ready to part ways with you yet. You smile back at him, hoping to quell whatever nerves he has about the question he just asked you. 

“Always, Carm.”  

You’re tired and your feet ache from a particularly busy service, but you’re not ready to part ways with him either.

“Watcha thinkin?” you ask curiously, sliding your other arm through the loose strap of your backpack. 

“Can I cook you something?” he proposes, hopefully.

You laugh. 

“Is that even a real question?” 

You wait for him as he wraps up his notes and gather his things. Carmy slips on his jacket and ballcap, ready to head home with you. On the way, he lights up a cigarette, offering one to you, but you tell him that you’re trying to quit – or at least trying to cut back. It’s not a long walk back to his place, and you anticipate it being something along the same lines as what he had in New York: facebook marketplace couch, minimal food in the fridge, a TV and a bed. 

Nothing else – just a place to sleep, before he spends most of his day at the restaurant. 

When you arrive, you’re not surprised to see that your assumptions were correct. Carmy flips on a few lights as you follow behind him. You drop your book bag onto his couch, slipping your shoes off and removing your jacket, as Carmy bee lines for the kitchen. You hear the faucet turn on as you tentatively explore his small apartment, before meeting him in the small kitchen area.

He takes his time, washing his hands, before drying them on a dish towel and throwing it over his shoulder. 

“So what are we makin’, chef?” you inquire.

“We aren’t making anything. You’re gonna sit right over here,” he begins, gesturing towards the area across from his gas stovetop. “Oh shit. Hold on. Let me grab you a-.”

“I’m good here, chef,” you interrupt, making a sound as you hop onto the kitchen counter. You immediately reach for the bag of chips he’s thrown onto it. It’s not even closed properly with a clip or anything so expect them to be stale as you pop one of the chips into your mouth.

“Sour cream and onion? Change up from your regular doritos, huh?”

A small smile spreads across his face as he moves around his kitchen, locating a quarter sheet pan. He opens his practically desolate fridge, pulling out a fresh brick of pecorino romano, guanciale, and a few eggs he throws right into the pint-sized deli container that lays on the sheet pan. The rest follow: an unopened pound of dried spaghetti and black pepper, before he gently places the sheet pan on the counter, beginning to preheat two pans on the stovetop. 

“Are you-?”

“Uh huh.”

You smile to yourself. He’s making one of your favorites: carbonara. 

The first time he’d made it for you, you had just started spending some of your days off together – had just agreed to be a part of each others' quarantine pods. You knew he had Italian-American heritage but it was blatantly obvious when you took your first bite.

“Holy fuck,” you had practically moaned at your first bite. “This-, please don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m pretty sure your talents are being wasted on fine dining, my friend. This is… this is fucking unreal, dude.”

You had tried to convince him that this is the food you both should be cooking, but he vehemently denied the idea, insisting the fine dining was the highest on the food chain and the only way he could make a name for himself. 

He’d been drinking the kool-aid. You both had. 

You sit quietly, as Carmy works. You watch as he cuts perfect lardons, then renders the fat from the cured pork bits. The smell of the guanciale begins to fill the apartment, and Carmy opens a window, just to let the smoke dissipate. 

“You can uh, put some music on if you want,” Carmy says, motioning towards the small bluetooth speaker he has on the coffee table. You agree to, hopping off of the kitchen counter and making your way towards his living area to set up the speaker.

You flip through your phone, looking for a good playlist to put on, settling on one of your dinner party playlists. The speaker booms with the sounds of an old jazz standard, redone as an acoustic cover, and you turn the volume up a little as the water for the spaghetti comes to a boil. 

You spend time looking through Carmy’s bookshelf. It’s filled with thick-spined cookbooks from James Beard winning best restaurants and chefs. You drag your fingertips over the spine of a few classics, but settle on a fairly new book, written by someone at the New York Times. 

“Do you have any other books besides cookbooks?” you call out to him. 

He lets out a dry laugh and you take it as a no. 

You make your way back to your spot on the counter, sliding the open chip bag over, before hopping back up to your seat. You flip through the cookbook as Carmy stays busy with the pasta. 

It’s quiet moments like these that you’ve missed so much. Some days the two of you could talk for hours about sous vide vs reverse searing, and the right way to make a fucking bearnaisse sauce. Other days, Carmy wasn’t much for conversation, and you loved those ones equally. Sometimes, you just wanted company, so he’d come over and work on a recipe and you’d read while he worked in your kitchen.

You could just be together, and it was nice to feel that again. 

No awkward tension of things left unsaid. 

But there was a different kind of tension that seemed to linger between the two of you and you wondered if it had always been there. Had you just never noticed? Between the little comments from Richie about being out of his league, and Pete’s open-ended ‘not in front of his’ you wondered if everyone knew something you didn’t. 

“Which one’d you go with?” he asks, continuing his graceful dance around the kitchen. 

“Korean American. Eric Kim. I hadn’t had a chance to pick up a copy for myself yet, actually,” you answer, flipping through the first few pages.

Your met with quiet as you continue your story.

“You know we’re kind of friends. We went out for drinks a few times. Before I quit my job. Went dancing in the east village and stayed out till two in the morning bar hopping and gossiping about our mutual celebrity crush, Timothee Chalamet,” you add, your attention still fixed on the vibrant, colorful food photographs. 

“Timothee Chalamet, huh?” Carmy asks, amused.

Your attention isn’t on Carmy, or what he’s doing, save for the sounds of him moving around the kitchen. That is, until you look up to find him unceremoniously close to you, peering over onto the page you seem so fascinated with.

“Jesus Christ, Car!” you gasp, surprised by his close proximity. Your heart was beating faster as he took a step back.  “You scared the shit out of me!”

“Sorry,” he mumbles, his head hanging as he takes a few steps back. “Didn’t mean to.”

“No, it’s okay!” you assure. But it’s too late, so you change the subject, deciding to finish your story. “Anyways uh… I had to hang out with someone after you left New York. Make some new friends.”

“We both know you’ve never struggled with that,” Carmy points out, eliciting a playful eye roll from you. 

He returns with the most aesthetically pleasing twirl of spaghetti carbonara. It’s so perfect you almost can’t fathom eating it. He hands it to you, then returns to his kitchen counter, plating a second bowl for himself.

After finishing the second twirl, he carelessly tosses his carving fork into the sink, opening another drawer to grab two forks for eating.

“Come on. You don’t want it to get cold,” he encourages, handing you one of the forks. 

He waits patiently for you to try it first, so you dig your fork in, creating a spaghetti twirl that hugs the fork, before raising it up to your lips. You open your mouth, taking a bite, before closing your eyes in absolute bliss.

“I can’t fucking stand you.”

He smiles, and it’s the biggest smile you’ve seen on his face this whole week. 

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. I mean. Fuck you. Like… absolutely fuck you.”

He laughs, finally picking up his own fork and digging into the second bowl he’s plate for himself. 

Holy fuck, is it out of this world.

“Like, do you think they’re such a thing as a talent aggression? Like a cute aggression, only I want to squeeze your head off because you’re so damn talented-kind of aggression?” you pitch your idea to him, playfully. 

He laughs, a blush spreading across his cheeks, “Uh… no. I don’t think so.” 

Carmy rests his back against the counter, as you eat together, side by side. You eat quietly, exchange looks and quiet giggles as the two of you finish your pasta, slurping up the cheesy, egg-yolk coated noodles. When you finish your bowl, you put it down on the counter next to you, throwing your head back with a sigh. 

“Thank you,” you say, fully satisfied as you feel the dopamine rush of eating carbs. 

“That good, huh?” he asks, a cocky smirk on his face. 

“So good,” you exhale happily, as you rest your head on his shoulder. “And you know it, you asshole.” 

He chuckles, turning his head towards you just as you lift your head off of his shoulder, your faces mere inches away from each other. You watch as his face turns a few shades darker, the blush across his cheeks running through his whole face. 

Are you two fucking idiots to pretend that you were just friends?

Yeah. Yes, you are.

“Sorry, I’m, I didn’t mean to um,” he stutters, beginning to pull away from you.

“Wait,” you call out, reaching out to stop him. You grab his arm. 

And there it is again… the tension. That thing that, even when you had talked it out, has remained between you two. He stops moving, his eyes fixated on your hand – the one that’s reached for him. The one that feels hot against his skin. 

“Carm, I-. Um, I’ve really missed…” you stammer through, trying not to sound as breathless as you feel. 

I’ve really missed you.

“... your carbonara.” He looks up at you with those beautifully sad, cerulean blue eyes, and if you weren’t breathless before, you certainly are now. 

“You should make this more often,” is all you manage to get out, and you know you sound helpless. 

He doesn’t know what to say back. That he can hear the ache in your voice – a yearning for him that he never imagined anyone could ever have for him. That it’d be world war three, trying to get a carbonara on the dinner menu. That screaming would ensue over a goddamn emulsion. That there’d be no way to pull this off authentically, and that he’d have to use heavy cream, and no fucking way would he compromise on that. 

On your favorite fucking dish. 

That he only has these ingredients on hand because he went out and bought them in preparation for your visit. 

That he only got them for you. 

Because he maybe only wants to make carbonara for you, and only you, for forever and ever. 

That he’s missed you too, and that wanting you is one of the scariest things he’s ever felt. 

His eyes flicker from your hand, the one still holding onto him, and then back to your face. He’s not sure what possesses him to do it, but he can hear his brother’s voice in his head, let it rip, pushing him to lean in – even closer towards you. You wrap your fingers around his arm, encouraging him closer to you – if it’s even possible. Your foreheads meet and it’s as if all the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. It’s like your vision narrows and the dimly lit apartment has faded away behind you. 

It’s just you and him. 

You feel dizzy – in the most delicious way possible.

You’re not sure who moves in first, but the tip of his nose is ever so gently bumping against yours. You brush the side of your nose against his, neither of you daring to take a breath. 

“Carm?”

He doesn’t answer, so you gently begin to leave a kiss against the corner of his mouth. 

“This okay?”

Then the side of his top lip. 

“Mhm,” he nods, eager to continue where this is going. 

Then you pull back, pulling him towards you so that, as you remain perched on top of his kitchen countertop, he fits perfectly between your knees. You lean in to kiss him, and this time, it’s not as hesitant… not as cautious as you’ve both been. 

No, these kisses are different, each one opening up the door to more and more – more want, more need, more lust – and as it blooms, as it blossoms, you feel Carmy’s hand move gingerly to cradle your face as you fall down the rabbit hole. Your fingers tangle into his blonde curls allowing your sheer want for him to consume you. It’s lips, and tangled tongues, and tentative, soft moans as you continue to pull each other closer and closer.

And you slowly begin to understand: the lingering tension, the avoidance of labeling you from his brother-in-law, why he’s been terrified to say a damn thing to you this entire week.

As much as you tried, and as much as he’s tried, neither of you had put that night behind you. 

Sure, it was shitty timing, and sure he wasn’t in the right headspace then. But now? 

Now, could be different, if you’d let it. 

Carmy pulls away from you, reluctantly, his face hot before asking, “You uh, you wanna take this somewhere else?”

His tone is hopeful, as if he’s the teenage dirtbag asking the prom queen out – like if you heard him, and you laughed in his face, he simply wouldn’t survive it. 

But your response is quite the opposite, and he feels silly for worrying, as you manage a breathy ‘yes’ going back in for one more kiss. He gives you some space to hop off the counter and you grab his hand, leading him towards his bedroom. It’s not a huge place, so you put two and two together about where that is. Carmy leaves the lights off in his bedroom, the only glimmer of light either of you can see comes from the living room lamps, and the kitchen overhead. 

With his hand in yours, you pull him towards you again, and he’s more than happy to let you lead. You begin to kiss him, taking note of how perfectly his top lip feels nestled in between yours. He follows you down to his bed, hesitant to put his full body weight on top of you. You giggle into the kiss, pulling him down to you. 

“I’m not a porcelain doll, Carm,” you tease, gently. 

You feel his lips twist into a smile against yours, as he begins to leave sloppier, wetter kisses down your neck. You allow him to explore as his hesitation lessens, his hands beginning to bunch up the hemline of your shirt. Higher and higher. And before you know it, you’re taking it off, impatiently throwing it somewhere you’ll barely remember in the light of day. You pull Carmy back down for another kiss, this time with a little more intensity, as he covers his body with yours, his hands and mouth exploring every inch of newly revealed skin that he possibly can. 

You’re not sure when his shirt joined yours on the floor but before it registers, you’re running your fingers across the muscles of his back, exploring each peak and valley. You hiss in pure pleasure as he pulls down one of the cups of your bra, his tongue running across one of your nipples. You can feel him smile against your skin, a well-won reaction from the pleasure he’s giving you. His other hand reaches up to give equal attention to your other breast, and moments later, you’re both impatiently pulling your bra off. 

“Wanna try something,” Carmy murmurs, his eyes meeting yours. 

You can feel the wet heat pooling between your legs as you breathe out, “Okay.”

The anticipation is building in your body and you feel like your head might explode. Carmy busies his mouth once again, leaving kisses down your torso as his hands begin to fiddle with the button on your jeans. You giggle, more than willing to help him out as he gets them undone, lifting your hips so that he can slide them off. 

He’s hesitant, and you’re trying your damnedest to be patient as he takes his sweet time to marvel at your almost-naked body. 

“So fucking perfect,” Carmy whispers, in between leaving wet, open mouthed kisses across your hip bones. You can hardly breathe, panting out loud as he continues his exploration. You make space for him between your legs as he slips his hands into your panties, dragging a finger up and down your dripping sex.

He checks in with you, gauging your reaction, and you nod as he continues what he’s doing. 

“This all for me?” he asks. He means for it to sound confident, but as the words leave him, he sounds more surprised than anything.

Before you can answer, he’s pushing your legs wider, his tongue gently running across your clit, causing you to cry out to the gods. He’s tentative at first, but it doesn’t take long for him to gather up the confidence to keep going, with the noises you’re making. At first it’s all tongue, licking, circling and flattening up against you, but you’re losing your mind as he adds his fingers back into the mix. His fingers are buried deep inside of you while his lips and tongue are bringing you far past your edge.

It’s as if the only words you can remember are his name, and ‘fuck.’ 

You feel his lips curl into a smile against you as he murmurs, “Just wanna make you feel good.”

You can feel it – your climax – building up, and Carmy groans, rutting his hips into the bed as he can no longer ignore how hard he is. 

“Carmy, yes. Don’t stop, please. I’m-,” you beg, your voice shaking.

And he has no intention of stopping till he gets what he wants – till he makes you cum. He works you through your orgasm, groaning against you as you cum on his tongue and around his fingers. You swear for a moment that you can’t hear a single thing as stars fill your vision. As you come to, it starts with only the sounds of the heavy pants that escape your mouth. Carmy sits up, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. 

“Holy fuck,” you say, breathless. 

Carmy lays over you once again, kissing you, and you can taste yourself on his lips. 

Your hands fumble with the button on his jeans and you order, no patience left in a single cell of your body, “Off. These need to come off.”

He chuckles, hurrying through the removal of his jeans. You’re so eager to feel the weight of his body on top of yours again that you pull him back down to you before he’s even able to properly take them off. 

He’s kissing you again as you reach down, grabbing his hard length through his underwear. He’s thicker than you remember. You slip your hand into the waistband of his briefs, causing him to grunt. He hisses your name as you wrap your soft hand around his dick, bucking his hips into your hand. 

“Do you have a condom?” you ask, desperately. “I wanna feel you, Carm.”

“Mhm.”

He doesn’t keep condoms around. It’s not like this happens very often for him. But Richie had thrown a pack of condoms at his head the minute he found out that the friend that was coming to visit was a girl. Richie had teased him with some stupid quip like ‘don’t forget to wrap it up, cousin. No one wants a mini-eleven madison park dickhead running around here.’

He hadn’t expected this to happen. But it’s not like he’d thrown the condoms away either – tucking them into the single drawer of his nightstand. 

You wait as he reaches over and pulls out a condom from his nightstand. You want to ask him about why he has them, but as long as you get to feel him, you’re not sure you care. 

You’ve been here before with him, but this is different. He sits up on his knees and you follow him, pulling his briefs down properly and giving him time to roll on the condom. He follows you back down onto the bed as you wrap a leg around his waist so that he can fit perfectly between yours. 

He waits a beat, and then you feel his thick tip pushing against you, causing your breath to catch in your throat. He rubs the head up and down your slick core, before slowly beginning to push into you. 

You both gasp at the feel of each other. 

“Fuck. You’re so fuckin’ tight,” he moans, dropping his head into the crevice of your neck. He hopes you can’t tell how utterly helpless he feels.

You hiss at the way he’s stretching you open, the pads of your fingertips digging into his arms. You’re holding onto his arms for dear life as he fills you all the way to the hilt. You let out another moan as you as he stays there for a moment. 

“This okay?” 

You nod, pulling him down to kiss you again. You start moving your hips against his as Carmy gives you shallow thrusts. 

“Hold on,” he breathes out, holding your hips down for a moment. “Just-, just give me a second.” 

And you do, allowing him to collect himself, before he’s giving you shallow, gentle thrusts. 

But you’re in desperate need for more. 

“Carmy?”

“Yeah?”

“Fucking move.” 

Finally, finally, he pulls almost all the way out, before driving himself back into you, earning a cry from you as the pleasure is just too much. 

“Oh fuck!”

You want more. You want everything and all of him and so much more. And he gives it to you, continuing to check in that what he’s doing is okay. Before you know it, you’re begging him to go faster, harder, convincing him that you’re not fucking breakable and that you want more, grasping at the sheets and his biceps, and his curls –  anything you can hang on to as he’s bringing you over your edge again for the second time tonight. 

You’re crying out his name as you cum, and Carmy thinks it may be the sweetest, best thing he’s ever heard in his life. He fucks you through your climax, beginning to slow down the pace of this thrusts. He pauses, kisses you long and hard, passionately pausing just to be in this moment with you. 

“Carm?” you manage to get out. You wonder if he can hear how much you want him just by the sound of your voice. 

“Hm?”

“I wanna ride you,” you say, and you can feel that your words have gone straight to his dick as he twitches inside of you.

“Yeah?” 

“Yeah.” 

The two of you clumsily change positions – him on his back staring up at you in awe, like how the hell does that perfect, beautiful, creature want to be here with me now? You reach down, guiding him back inside of you and you’re both gasping at the contact. You begin grinding your hips against him, watching his eyes roll back as you make your movement a little bigger. 

“Jesus Christ,” he sighs out, the pleasure of it all taking over his brain. 

You know he won’t last much longer as you begin to ride him, rocking your hips back and forth. Carmy hands are on your hips, then running up and down your torso, grabbing your tits, and then they’re pulling you down to him for another passionate makeout as you continue your movements. You can feel his thrusts becoming more erratic as he starts thrusting up into you. You keep riding him, reaching for his hands and placing them along your hips. 

“Show me how you want it,” you whisper in between kisses. 

“I think this is nice,” he manages to say. 

“Show me how you want it, Carmen,” you demand, emphasizing your need for him with use of his full name. “Let me make you cum.” 

You squeeze his hands against your ass, egging him on, and he’s not sure what he’s done to deserve this. He holds onto your hips, before thrusting up into you, setting a bruising pace as your moans become louder and louder. You scream out his name, as he brings you closer and closer to your high, chasing his with him. 

He grunts, his thrusts becoming sloppier, messier, more desperate and you let him use your body in the most delicious ways. 

“Are you gonna cum?”

Instead of answering, he’s driving into you like a fucking mad man, and you’re riding him through his high till you both collapse. 

Carmy lets out a strangled moan as he cums, so you begin to slow your movements. You’re breathless, hunched over him, your foreheads touching as you exchange a laugh.

It's a kind of 'I can't believe we just did that' kind of laugh.

“Holy shit,” he says, shaking his head. 

“Yeah,” you agree, a stupid, blissed out smile on both of your faces.

“That was-.”

“Yeah.”

You get off of him, allowing him to get up and dispose of the condom. He’s not gone long before he returns to you, wrapping the both of you up in his sheets and into his arms. It feels unlike anything you’ve ever had. 

It feels… magnificent. 

“Stay with me tonight?” he asks, leaving a few soft kisses along your shoulder. 

“After that?” you giggle, as his lips against your neck begin to tickle. “You’re not getting rid of me, Berzatto. Not a fucking chance.”

read: part five

taglist: @lazypeachsoul @bookwormvoyageuse @allthefandomstogether @gaysludge @sobshoney

#carmy berzatto smut #carmen berzatto x you #carmy berzatto #carmy x oc #the bear hulu #the bear fx #jeremy allen white #carmen 'carmy' berzatto #the bear marcus #sydney adamu #the bear tina #richie jerimovich #carmy berzatto x reader #carmen berzatto x reader #carmen berzatto smut

[libraryofgage]

Saw the Barbie movie the other day and Billie Eilish's "What Was I Made For" (click the song title to listen to it lol) hit so fuckin different good lord. Anyway, it's perfect for Steve angst with a dash of platonic Stobin and romantic Steddie fluff so ;)

---

Steve is five when he learns that he was made to keep his parents together. At least, that's why his mother made him.

He learns it one night when his father is staying late at the company (before his mother started accompanying him all the time, leaving an empty house and Steve behind; Steve can confidently say his presence did, in fact, fix their relationship: it gave them something to unite against). His mother is three large glasses of red wine in, draped inelegantly on the couch and slurring her words with a glassy film covering her eyes.

"Steven, you were supposed...supposed to make him stay," she says, her fourth glass of wine dangerously close to spilling across the white rug. "An-and he's still gone! What did we do wrong?"

Despite the use of "we," Steve knows very well (even at the age of five) that his mother means "What did you do wrong?" He doesn't have an answer for her--he never will--and that seems to be just one more thing she holds against him.

Steve is seven when he learns that he was made to keep the family name strong and respected. At least, that's why his father made him.

He learns it when his father brings him to work, his stern expression and tense shoulders telling Steve to behave himself, to be seen and not heard the entire day (he did, and it worked a little too well; after falling asleep on the couch, his father had forgotten him at work, leaving him to spend the night in the locked office). His father is sitting at his desk, expensive pen in hand and phone just hung up after a tense conversation that ended with the most genuine smile Steve has ever seen from him.

"Steven, I hope you've been paying attention today," he says, placing the pen on the desk and fixing him with a suffocating gaze. "You'll be working here one day, and I expect you to make something of yourself when you do. You're to be a model man, someone I can proudly introduce to others."

When his father says proudly, Steve knows he means that he can't do that now because Steve has yet to make something of himself. Steve nods once, says a firm but not too loud, "Yes, sir," and his father goes back to work.

Steve is sixteen when he learns Nancy made him her boyfriend for...for a distraction? Because it's what was expected of her? Because she was curious? At least, that's what Nancy seems to be saying.

Honestly, Steve isn't sure she knows, either. But she definitely knows that he wasn't what she wanted, that he wasn't what she expected, that he couldn't live up to the expectations she had made for him.

Either way, he learned it over the course of their relationship, but it all hit him at the very end, when fights and names (idiot, asshole, and dick, to list a few) compounded into a breakup that left him aching, angry, empty, hurt, and desperate to know what he did wrong.

Maybe then he'd be able to save himself from making the same mistake over and over. Because it must be him, right? It must be something he's doing; if only he could figure out what that is.

Steve is seventeen when he learns that maybe he was made to be a shield. At least, that's how he understands the plan Dustin comes up with wherein he calls Steve their tank.

He learns it when they're huddled together at some point, readying to face demodogs and whatever else the Upside Down has decided to throw at them. Dustin is explaining the plan, his eyes bright as he throws around terms Steve can't recognize. "And Steve is going to be our tank," he says.

"What's a tank?" Steve asks, at least certain they don't mean the military kind of tank.

"Like a meatshield, duh," Mike tells him, the explanation short and quick and then disregarded in favor of the rest of the plan.

Maybe Steve should have felt hurt, but part of him is more excited by the fact that he could do well as a tank, a meatshield. He could, in fact, be made for that role. He's great at taking a punch, great at jumping back to his feet, great at putting himself between the kids and whatever wants to kill them.

The only way he could possibly fail at being a shield is by dying, and he doesn't plan to die just yet.

Steve is eighteen when he wonders if maybe he's made to love. At least, that's a realization he has after befriending Robin, getting tortured together, and learning he doesn't need romance to love someone. It's a realization he throws himself into wholeheartedly one day when he looks at Robin and sees her trying to drink a slushie with a Twizzler.

"I think I love you," he blurts out, unable to hold the words in and feeling bad for it when Robin subsequently chokes on Twizzler and Cherry slush.

She spits out the slushie, tosses her Twizzler into the cup, and spins around to look at Steve. "We've definitely talked about this, dingus," she says, narrowing her eyes in suspicion. "You got amnesia or something?"

Steve rolls his eyes and pushes her. "Not like that. I mean, like, a friend. I love you, Robin. You mean a lot to me, and I hope we're still friends when we're 80 so we can make fun of other people in our nursing home."

Robin breaks out into a grin that she quickly suppresses. "Ugh, affection," she sneers, turning her nose up. It lasts all of three seconds before she glances at Steve from the corner of her eye and adds, "I love you, too, dingus."

Steve is nineteen when he decides that he's made for love, to give and receive and bask in its warmth. At least, that's what he decides when he's with Eddie, sprawled across his bed and listening to the mixtape he made for Steve.

They've been dancing around each other for a while up to that point: obnoxiously obvious flirtations, finding any excuse to brush against each other or share space or lean together, creating reasons to hang out with some as simple as "I'm just bored." Steve has been enjoying it; they both seem to understand what's inevitable, and they're just taking their time getting there.

And right now, listening to Eddie sing along to Metallica, Steve thinks that he wants to stop dancing around each other and dance together, instead. So, he turns onto his side, places a hand on Eddie's arm, waits until Eddie is looking at him with a bright smile and curious eyes, and says, "I was made for loving you."

Instead of the joy Steve was expecting, Eddie just looks confused. "How'd you know that was the next song?" he asks.

"What?"

"On the mix tape. I Was Made for Loving You by KISS. That's the next song," Eddie explains.

Steve blinks and frowns. He sits up, throws a leg over Eddie's hips, and settles on top of him. Eddie doesn't look surprised, since it's not the first time Steve has done this. Usually, it just means Steve wants him to pay close attention. "I didn't know it was the next song, Eds."

It takes a few moments for Eddie to fully understand what he means. And Steve gets a front-row seat to the confusion that morphs into understanding that morphs into amazement. "Oh," Eddie breathes, pushing himself up to rest on his elbows. "Could you say it again? I don't think I heard you the first time, Stevie."

Steve snorts but humors Eddie anyway. "I was made for loving you," he says, softer this time and leaning closer.

"Yeah, much clearer that time." Eddie's grin is wide and blinding before he closes the distance between them. "I was made for loving you, too, sweetheart," he whispers back, his words pressed against Steve's lips and searing into his heart.

#steddie #steddie fic #steddie ficlet #steve harrington #steve harrington angst #steddie fluff #platonic stobin #stranger things #stranger things fic #Barbie movie soundtrack hits different ngl #can we also talk about Steve just being barbie? #like #he starts as a Ken and becomes a Barbie #tell me i'm wrong you can't #also I'm realizing Steve is a character that turns in my mind at supersonic speed #and Steddie by extension cuz gosh those boys could be so good together

[galaxysgal]

frat boy lip seeing someone else flirting with you and he gets MAD jealous—especially if it’s someone from his fraternity

god is real and my prayers have been answered. i love frat boys. it's an unhealthy addiction, really. anyway heres a blurb bc i love this so much!!

you were all dolled up. your showiest top in your favorite shade, a tiny black skirt on your hips. you paired that ensemble with platform sneakers and your staple jewelry. your hair was perfectly curled, half back in two braided pigtails, with stray curls framing your face. your lipstick complimented your skin perfectly, and your eyes were lined in the same shade as your top. you looked hot.

you looked hot, and lip was ignoring you.

you justify it to yourself, he's busy working the bar, dispensing out beers to the brothers in his frat, and pouring shots and cups of punch for every blonde bitch that was already far too gone.

you rolled your eyes, turning back to the pledge in front of you. he had some dumbass ballcap backward on his head and a tee unbuttoned down to his chest. what was his name? john? or, josh maybe? josh sounded right. he was flirting his ass off with you, and making the situation even more unbearable by telling you repeatedly how "nobody has to know baby," and "gallagher won't mind sharin' will he?"

you were disgusted. you would've slipped away from his slimy ass about four songs ago if it weren't for the fact you were boxed in by drunk girls to one side and a grinding couple on the other. you nod with a tight-lipped smile as josh tells you about his parents lake house, his slurred words going in one ear and right out the other. before you know what's happening there's a hand on his shoulder and lip is barking an order at him.

"hey pledge! your turn on bar, get ya ass over there. now."

"yeah yeah, whatever. asshole." josh replies with a roll of his eyes. he goes to leave but lip stands in his way.

"what did'ya just fuckin say to me?”

you see the color drain from josh's stupid, smug face and he forces down a gulp. "y-yes sir," he stammers out.

"that's what i thought." lip says. he lets a beat pass before he ticks his head towards the bar. "no drinkin' back there either!"

you cross your arms, glaring at him for a split second before lip's hands are on your hips and your back hits the wall. he kisses you stupid, all teeth and tongue and desire. he presses into you in an almost needy fashion, with one hand squeezing the meat of your ass.

"my girl," he growls in your ear as he pulls away.

you laugh breathlessly. "well, that pledge over there seems to be under a different impression. kept tellin' me you wouldn't mind sharin' me." you tell him, watching his face contort into an incredulous smirk.

"oh yeah?" he asks, twirling the two of you around until your back is to his chest and he's against the wall. he sways your hips to the beat of the music, lips caressing your ear so you can hear him over the bass. "well, don't you worry y'pretty head, okay? i am not fuckin' sharin' you. an' that asshole has no fuckin' chance of becoming a brother here. i saw the way he was bein' with you."

you smile to yourself, moving against him with more freedom. "y'were lookin' at me?" you ask.

you feel him nod, fingers digging possessively into your hips. "all fuckin' night. couldn't take my eyes off ya."

#lip gallagher x reader #frat!lip #mags writes #🍃 posting #this is sooooooo #im so unwell ab this please send in more asks im begging #frat lip WILL be my entire personality

[simporado]

You’re somethin’ else

Bakugo Katsuki x Reader

Summary: The same words said to you in different points of your life, all still manage to make you blush everytime.

Content Warning/Tags: Fluff, Making Out, Implied/Referenced Sex, Implied Sexual Content, Drunken Confessions kinda, Mutual Pining, Reader-Insert

MDNI please 🔞

Today was work study for you and some of your classmates. You were out in patrol with with some of the heroes from the company you were interning in. You had been patrolling for about 30 minutes now. As you and your fellow hero turn a corner, you see Deku, Shoto, and Bakugo walking towards your direction.

Deku spots you first, “Oh! Y/n-san! What a coincidence.” Bakugo and Shoto then turns to look at you. “Hi guys! you were out on patrol too, huh? How’s that going for you all?” You asked. Bakugo puts his hands in his pockets and slouches, “Hah. No ass-beating’s happened yet and its a fuckin waste of my time.” Deku calls out with a small “K-Kacchan..” in the background when suddenly, a scream was heard. You all turn to the direction of the sound.

A villain attack. You all spring into action. You, Deku and Shoto evacuate nearby civilians away while Bakugo immediately goes for the villain. the villain had a quirk where they could aim in various directions and multitask. When the villain had Bakugo at point range and a civilian was nearby who would for sure get hit, you immediately moved to intervene. You had used your quirk to simultaneously move the civilian safely, Bakugo out of the villain’s shot, THEN delivered a blow to the villain enough to get him distracted.

The police had finally arrived and restrained the villain with anti-quirk cuffs. Shoto was briefing the police while Deku aided in bringing civilians to get first aid. You and Bakugo had been talking to an officer as well. After the officer left, you were about to turn on your heel “Well, I’ll be on my way. Great job in handling the villain as usual, Bakug—“

“I didn’t really do shit…” Bakugo interrupts. “You… handled that well more than any of us.” You blink at that then smile, your hand reaching to scratch at the back of your head in bashfulness, “Well, we all did what we could and succeeded, didn’t we? That’s still a win.” and you smile. Bakugo stares at you with an unreadable expression then looks away. Then, you feel your cheeks heat up as you heard what he whispered to himself, “Heh. You’re somethin’ else.”

-----

Your classmates from UA decided to get together after working hard being Pro Heroes. It was a hangout in Momo’s place since she had the largest space to accommodate all your classmates. It was mostly the girls and the “bakusquad” who had planned it. “C’mon, it’s a great opportunity for everyone have fun and catch up! Plus everyone’s schedules aligns by then, so there’s no other perfect time.” Mina had said. And you did agree, it was a much needed relaxation after working hard being a pro hero.

You hadn’t planned on drinking too much, but it must have slipped your mind because everyone was having a really great time. Karaoke was brought out, and Kirishima’s folk song performance had most of you dying of laughter. Some of the guys looked like uncles it also made you laugh so hard, you couldve busted a lung. Iida, Sero, Shoto, and Shoji standing at a corner, a hand holding their beers and the other either at their waist or in their pockets, chatting amongst themselves. Others went and played Just Dance, You, Mina, and Ochako being the ones playing more then others.

Whenever you danced, you felt eyes focusing on you but refused to acknowledge that and played it off as being delusional. You tried really hard not to scan the room and see who was watching, you really did. But before you could stop yourself, you found yourself locking eyes with a pair of red ones, who was sitting at the couch nearby. The shock must’ve been great because you didn’t notice you both were just staring for so long.

“Oh, we’re almost out of cold drinks here!” Kaminari announces from the table, and it snaps you out of your daze. “I’ll get them. There’s more in your fridge, right Momo?” you asked, volunteering mainly to excuse yourself. Momo turns to you from the table, “Yes, they’re in the fridge. They’re still unopened in crates so it’s quite heav—“

“I’ll come with.” Bakugo interrupts Momo. “I need a cold one.” he explains, raising the empty beer in his hand as if to emphasize. He stands from his seat and stops right next to you. You stare at him wide eyed and in shock, and he just raises a brow at you. After shaking off the shock, you quickly realized he was waiting for you to go first.

When you get to the kitchen, you open the fridge to grab the beer crates. Bakugo reaches to get the crates from you, but you didn’t let him. He tuts and forces the crates out of your hands, only to quickly put in on the nearby island behind you and trap you between his arms. against the island “Why’re you carrying a lot.”

You blink at him confused, “What?”

“I mean, just let me fuckin’ do it...”, he pauses, “for you…” You didn’t know how to respond. You figured he was drunk with the way he’s acting. But then again, so were you with the lack of response your brain had been giving.

Before you could say something, he drops his forehead to your shoulder and you stiffen. “You’re too fuckin’ cute.” He groans into your collarbone before softly kissing your shoulder, your collarbone, going up your neck until he stops at your cheek. You both stare at each other, his eyes silently asking if he can continue. You raise your hand to grab at his collar and pull him to your lips. You felt a flutter in your stomach when he leans more into your kiss, releases a sigh of relief through his nose, as if he had been meaning to do this. You gasp in surprise when he starts to swipe his tongue on your lips, and takes that opportunity to shove his tongue in your mouth. His hand on your waist pull you tightly against his body and his right leg pushes up in between your thighs. He pulls away, both your spit still connected. “Fuck, you’re something else.” He says panting, pupils blown wide.

Your half-lidded eyes widen at his words but before you could respond, Kirishima enters the room loudly. “Momo said to bring all of them out, so I came to help—“ You and Bakugo already had distanced yourselves from each other when Kirishima’s eyes lands at you both. Bakugo wordlessly brings out the two crates from the island and walks out the kitchen past Kirishima. “You okay, y/n? you look red in the face.” You cup ur face then fan yourself, “Do I? I mean, haha, Momo wasn’t kidding when she said they were heavy”, you lie as you thumb at the fridge. Kirishima just smiles at you then you both carry the remaining ones out the kitchen.

It was already late in the am, and most of your classmates were passed out. You couldn’t stop thinking about Bakugo since the incident in the kitchen, especially the last thing he said to you. You scanned for him in the room, only to find him going up the stairs. You don’t

know what compelled you to follow, but you were already on the stairs. When you got up, you didn’t see where he went. Just as you were about to walk to a direction, a hand grabs you and pulls you into a room. It’s Bakugo. And he’s got you against the door.

The room was dark and the only light was coming from the window. He leans into you, forehead resting against yours, his hands on your hips. He opens his mouth to speak, “I—“ but before he could finish, you wrap your arms around his neck and kiss him fervently.

—————

Nothing but heavy panting fills the darkened room. Pants alternating between the two of you, eventually your breathing slows in sync. You're straddling his hips on top of him, brows furrowed and both eyes closed as you bask in the afterglow. Both of your hands at the sides of his waist on the matress, the proximity allowing you to feel his slowing pants on your face. You slowly open your eyes only to see him already staring at you. Somehow you couldnt begin to describe the look in his eyes. Disbelief? Adoration? Love-

As soon as the last thought hit you, his fingers comb through your hair from the hairline at your forehead down to the back of your neck. His hand ends up cupping your jaw, thumb carressing the skin of your cheek. He lets out a deep sigh, "You're somethin' else" he whispers, mouth adorned with a soft smile.

Your eyes widen before chuckling and he frowns. “What’re you laughing ‘bout?” he asks. “Nothing, just remembered you first told me that during work study before back in UA.” you cross your arms on his chest and lay your head down on your arms, tilting up to look at him. “Left an impression on me because it was the first time you had complimented me.” Katsuki’s eyes go wide and blushes. “I… pushed myself to say that ‘cuz you looked hot, beatin’ the shit outta that useless extra and all. Realized I’ve never really seen you in action before that.” and now your red in the face at his confession.

He smirks in amusement at your flushed face, as if he knew what you were thinking, before wrapping his arms around your waist and slowly bringing you towards his lips to kiss you once again.

“I’ve always liked you since then, Y/n. You really are somethin’ else.” He says with such serious eyes yet full of emotion. You lean up to kiss him at that, then lay your head down on his bare chest. sleep starts to overtake you as you listen to his heartbeat. "I like you too, Katsuki. I think you're really something else too."

~~~~

originally posted from ao3, link below!

this is my first fic ever like. no cap. sponsored by my delusional simping brain.

i hope you enjoyed reading nonetheless! thank you for reading mmmwak

#bakugou x reader #bakugo katsuki x reader #bakugou katsuki #bakugou x y/n #mha x reader #reader insert #bakugo katsuki #katsuki bakugo x reader #bakugou x you #bakugou fluff

[gasolinerainbowpuddles]

'Til Death Do Us Part║ ⓛⓘⓜⓘⓣⓔⓓ ⓢⓔⓡⓘⓔⓢ

| 'Til Death Do Us Part | fourth and final part of the Whistle in the Dark limited series ║ series masterlist ║ main masterlist ║ | PAIRING(s): Joel Miller x married!fem!OC

| RATING: explicit material | 18+ | WORD COUNT:  20.2k 👀 | CONTENT: Dead Dove Do Not Eat, deranged Horny Demon Hours shit, cuckolding!, erotic gore, feticide/miscarriage, acts of service: extreme mode, bodily fluids in places they shouldn’t be, torture, brutality, inappropriate use of handheld tools, mental manipulation through violence, menstruation-centered erotic acts, cumplay?, kidnapping, the vibe of the pottery wheel scene from Ghost except violent, discussions of verbal/emotional/physical abuse, so much blood from multiple people, bloodplay, lots of things with a knife, WHAT!TOWN?!Joel

| SYNOPSIS: The tangled web of Matthew's deceit and manipulation have ensnared you and crafted a dismal end.

Please be aware that this installment in particular might be potentially triggering for SA/DV survivors who have dealt with the legal system and its many, many failings for the most vulnerable populations. Please read with care. 💜

You hear the dull rumblings of voices. The cadences vary from deep to soft to rushed and even some hazy amalgamation of all those things. Your head is pounding. Everything sounds like you’re underwater. Your lungs hurt like you’re underwater, too, like you’ve been submerged too long and haven’t taken a proper breath in ages. You’re stiff. You’re sore.

You’re alive.

The voices are becoming clearer - or maybe just louder - as they try to speak over one another. You can make out the sound of someone’s pitched, anxious whispering before a flurry of responses – 

“ —don’t give a flyin’ FUCK what any of ‘em hafta say.” “—protocol that can’t just be ignored.” “—obviously not what’s goin’ on here, Joel.”

Your head is throbbing with indecision over whether or not you want to try moving a limb. You manage a twitch of your fingers on your nondominant hand. That goes okay, so you chance some movement from the wrist up. Instant stiffness and discomfort. You whimper. The voices continue.

“—takin’ the law into your own hands–”

“—fuckin’ makeshift town at the end of the world. Ain’t no fuckin’ laws anymore, Tommy.”

“—always been a weak spot for you, Joel.”

The overhead lights sear your vision when you finally work up the strength to open your eyes. The blinding rush acts as some sort of sensory accelerant, a deluge of sensations hitting you from all sides at once now. Almost all of it is painful and prickling. Your eyes snap shut. You’re hyper aware of the fabric laying against your skin, rubbing and gritting against you even though you are still. The dull, tired thrum of your heart beats in time to some lost song. The escalating volume and tension of the argument happening at the end of your bed – what you assume is a bed, anyway – makes your head feel worse. 

Sound comes easier and clearer from one side of your head, the side that Matthew didn’t pummel.

Matthew.

Nebulous recollections leap into your consciousness, sharp and clear. The memory of him striking you makes you jerk. His taunts, his promises of your death and possibly his own if things didn’t go his way…

Matthew was going to kill you and then probably himself, all while Joel watched. The stimulus to cry comes over you, but no tears come. Exhaustion won’t allow it.

You hear a voice directly above you. “Baby?” It’s Joel, but he sounds off. He sounds worried. But Joel didn’t worry. That wasn’t like him. He just handled whatever came his way and moved on. This antsy, apprehensive voice belonged to a different Joel.

The sticky accumulation of grime and dried spit made it hard to move your mouth to respond. You wince at something wet and warm being gently dabbed against your lips.

“Hold still, honey. Just a minute now,” he soothes.

You peel your eyes open with immense effort and wait for the blurred shapes to come into focus. 

Tommy. Maria. Joel.

Hushed, sniping whispers shoot back and forth. You blink away the haze and take in your surroundings. It looks like the clinic. If you had any energy left for humor, you’d laugh at the irony of it all. The last time you were here was when you and Joel were treated for injuries you sustained on patrol together. It was the same day you’d walked home after being patched up only to discover Matthew and Natalie together in your bed. Your thoughts turn to ruminations of how this could’ve been avoided if you’d just told everyone the truth about Matthew right then and there. Maybe none of this would’ve happened. Maybe you wouldn’t have put people’s lives in danger.

“M’sorry,” you wheeze. It hurts to talk. You wonder how long you’ve been out.

“Don’t you dare,” Joel warns, stern and unwavering.

“Take it easy,” Maria calmly suggests. You aren’t sure if she means you or Joel. Probably both.

“Been through the wringer,” Tommy adds quietly. “No need to push yourself too much.”

You move your moistened lips back and forth a few times to prime yourself for speaking. “Where is he?”

The room is quiet as if they were all hoping it would take longer for you to arrive at that question.

“He can’t hurt you,” Joel insists. “Locked up. Can’t hurt nobody. Not anymore.”

“He’s being held at the correctional center until a clear narrative of what happened can be established,” Maria supplies, sounding almost clumsy in her terse delivery.

“He-He came into—was too fast–couldn’t–”

Your explanation is cut off with a cough. Your mouth is scratchy and dry. Joel helps you to sit up straighter, drawing a hissing groan of pain from you, and tilts a cup of what you assume is water onto your lips. You gently sip in small increments.

“How long?” Your voice is thick with sleep and pain.

“Been here a few days is all,” Tommy answers. “Been comin’ and goin’ but mostly just sleepin’. Got you some medicine onboard to help with it all. Been worried. ‘Specially this one.” He juts his chin towards Joel, who scowls in their general direction.

You’d grimace if you could stand the discomfort of it. You’d roped Joel into your bullshit just like you’d dreaded. Your mind warpspeed shifts to Ellie. Ellie. You startle in your weakened state. Joel seems to understand.

“She’s okay. Knew somethin’ was up before she even made it through the door. Smart kid.”

A heavy sigh of relief escapes you. With the situation as dire as it had been - and still is - Matthew only managing to harm you was the best case scenario. You maintain a neutral face as Joel fills in the blank spots in your memory. How Ellie had come back home to gather some clothes for her sleepover. How she’d felt something was off when she sensed the unnatural stillness of the house. How she spotted Matthew hovering over your unconscious body and thought he’d killed you.

Your heart wrenches at the thought of her seeing you like that. Ellie didn’t deserve this. She didn’t ask for this. You’d brought pain onto her and Joel both. As Joel recounts how she’d run to Tommy’s for help, your lungs feel like they’ve shrunk. Apparently Matthew had been taken by surprise at her appearance, forgetting that she even lived there.

Leaders in the community spoke with Tommy. Spoke with Ellie. Even spoke with Joel and Natalie’s dad, after it came to light that Joel had sparked something in this entire collapse. Matthew had scrambled like a coward once Ellie outpaced him and went running for help. He was apprehended within the hour, and you were whisked away to the clinic even sooner.

Ellie showing up to get those clothes had probably saved your life. Your stomach gnaws and shreds itself with that piece of knowledge. This is exactly the sort of thing you’d wanted to avoid, and here you’d put so many through so much unnecessary hurt in such a short span of time.

Your stomach only felt all the more gutted as you listened to Tommy and Maria explain that interviews had been going on all while you’d been unconscious and Matthew had been in a retaining cell. Several of Matthew’s “conquests” had heard of all the news with his newly pregnant partner and the inappropriate conduct with a minor. They’d been called upon to share their testimony as to whether or not Matthew had ever suggested or carried out violent and abusive behavior towards them. They all truthfully attested that he had never been anything of the sort.

Joel shot Maria a nasty look when she volunteered the information about a few of them floating the idea that you had probably injured yourself and somehow lured Matthew to talk with you so that you could claim he’d done all this damage to you.

An idea that you were so desperate for revenge and to ruin his life that you would concoct an elaborate sort of story where such a thing would’ve happened. It was just the natural outflow of the groundwork he’d laid over the weeks about how you were supposedly physically aggressive, how you’d put hands on him before, how you weren’t the same person behind closed doors, how he’d finally put his foot down and left you.

It wasn’t just the town gossip Angelica that had been feasting on the morsels of lies that Matthew had been steadily feeding to sources that were sure to pass along such salacious information. Unfortunately for you, Matthew had always been a manipulative smooth talker, always ten steps ahead of you. He’d been setting the stage for this sort of situation, smart enough to assume at least a few of his past lover’s responses to the questions would lean towards this bastardization of events. So before anyone had even testified yet, he’d already fed the story to the leadership council. He fabricated some story about how you’d asked him to talk, and he felt sorry enough for you to agree to it.

Joel tries to shut the conversation down when he sees the tears brimming along your lashline, but you shake your head and insist on hearing it all. You have to know what you’re up against, and as Maria continues, you realize just how much of a monster you’re facing.

As it stands, his account of events is the sole firsthand statement on the situation, and it’s just as pernicious and artful as you would anticipate from a man like him. By his version of things, you’d begged him to talk to him, and he’d pitied you enough to oblige, meeting at Joel’s house as planned. When he came upstairs to find you, he discovered your intentional, self-inflicted injuries along with an already disrupted room, all meant to signal a struggle had taken place. You’d taunted him for walking right into your trap, insisting that Joel would be home soon and would react to protect you once he saw the scene you’d created. You’d laughed in his face about Joel fighting for your honor, willing to kill to protect you. All of it an elaborate ruse you’d arranged just so you could physically assault him and threaten his life. 

He’d enacted just enough self-defense to prevent you from fatally attacking him, avoiding your blows whenever possible because he didn’t want to fight back and hurt you somehow in the process even though it would’ve been in his right to do so. Ellie’s surprise appearance was “an intervention from the Lord above,” or so he’d thought at the time. When she discovered him standing calmly over your unmoving body, he realized she’d fallen right into your plan as well, running off thinking he’d been the perpetrator in all of this. Fearing that she was running to find Joel and bring him back to the house - just what your masterplan had been all along - he’d fled.

He didn’t deny the large kitchen knife he’d had on his person in the house, claiming he’d gone to grab it at some point when he’d finally managed to subdue your attacks. It was the only self-defense he had if you woke up and started attacking him again. His entire narrative was one of self-defense, of fearing for his life, of fleeing on foot once he feared either Joel or his brother Tommy were going to return with Ellie and retaliate for the perceived attack.

You feel frozen to the spot as you listen. The icy sense of dread crept through your veins as it all sunk in.

The boxes from unpacking had been strewn about and a mess as you’d tried to work through them. Coupled with the upturned items in the bedroom, it presented a space in disarray.  It backed up his version of events.

His body was riddled with defensive wounds from his fight with Natalie’s dad. Even with the word from John that he had in fact had a physical altercation with Matthew, it made it impossible to determine when and where his injuries had been sustained since no one else had seen Matthew between that encounter and his encounter with you. It backed up his version of events.

For all the ways he’d wronged you, he’d shown love and tenderness to a constellation of lovers, all of whom had truthfully testified that he had never once laid a hand on them, been verbally aggressive, or shown a hint of a temper. It backed up his version of events.

Your history of coming from a violent upbringing, of how you’d grown up in a world where it was normalized, was perhaps the source of your “continuation of that cycle” simply because “you’d never known anything else.” It was a particularly cold-hearted blow, and it backed up his version of events.

The knife in his hand, the weapon for his own protection if he were put in a dire spot because of your insistence on physically assaulting him, could’ve easily been used to murder you. But he didn’t. He’d had plenty of time to do it if that had been his intent, so why was he instead just “hanging around”? Why, if he had gone there to assault and murder you, hadn’t he just done it? It backed up his version of events.

He was not striking you, harming you, or aggressively engaging with you in any way when Ellie came home. She’d only seen him calmly waiting with your unconscious form. Her insistence that “it obviously didn’t seem right” fell on deaf ears. She’d only been telling the truth when she testified that she didn’t personally witness any attacks from either party.  It backed up his version of events.

With a “beautiful baby on the way” and the path to “finally making decisions for a better life,” the legitimacy of his motive was questionable at best. You on the other hand had been left “bitter and jilted” by his decision to break things off and move on with someone else. He had everything to live for, everything going for him. You’d lost everything and been “left behind.” It backed up his version of events.

Each intricate, sinister lie entwined delicately into the next, so well explained and proactively contradicting to your version of events - the truth. Each fictitious strand clung to the next until a tapestry of deception had been woven, blanketing any hope you’d ever have in refuting each of the claims. He’d gotten ahead of the narrative, all because you were drifting in and out of consciousness from the battered state he’d put you into, no less.

He’d already won. He’d already won, and you hadn’t even had a chance to speak a word of truth.

The strict orders from medical staff to “take it slow” were laughable. A handful of residents were calling for your own stint in a retaining cell until all the investigation had been completed. That handful grew over the next several days while the council continued gathering all the information about the situation, getting witness accounts starting from when you got back from the patrol trip. It was a lot of information to go through and determine what was true and what wasn’t, what was embellished or glossed over.

You never strayed from the truth when you gave your piece to the Council, but it felt like it didn’t even matter. It had already been whittled down to a “he said, she said” situation. You wanted so badly to keep the faith that Council was simply doing their due diligence in getting all the facts prior to making such a huge decision as whether or not Matthew would be asked to leave Jackson…. or perhaps you. After you’d been placed on house arrest in lieu of a retaining cell - thanks to Maria’s shrewd intervention - you knew you’d truly lost.

It didn’t matter that Maria had convinced them – lied on your behalf —  that you weren’t medically stable enough for the holding cells and would require frequent medical supervision. It didn’t matter that she’d gently coached  you on the importance of delivering your official testimony without the visual of Joel next to you. It didn’t matter how she’d pressed the importance of not reacting to anything too abruptly unless you wanted to paint yourself as the violent, volatile assailant that Matthew had claimed you were.

None of it mattered. You’d been abused for so long. You’d been through hell with Matthew. You’d lost so much. He humiliated you. He beat you. He intended to take your life that day. And yet, here you were, sat in the same room with said man who looked deceptively forlorn and stressed. You had to watch and calculate every action and reaction of yours today so that you were a believable victim, a credible picture of a woman wronged, the embodiment of the innocent hostage to an opportunistic man. Nevermind the fact that the man in question had nearly killed you and would attempt it again if given the right opportunity and was only a glance away from you this very moment.

There wasn't a large number of people present for the hearings. The town Council. Founding residents. Longtime respected pillars within the community. All were called upon to hear your official testimonies of your version of events. Matthew went first. He tucked his body into itself, looking smaller and more unsure. He didn’t look at you. You couldn’t look away.

“I-I was trying to do the right thing, is wh-what I thought. Ya know, talk to her even though I knew she wasn’t too happy about me ending our relationship,” he sniffs pathetically. “I just.. I didn’t think, even after all she’d done to me, I didn’t think she’d do this. I mean, the whole set up. Framing me? Trying to trap me into a place where I’d lose everything because - I don’t even know -  I guess that’s what she felt I’d done to her?”

He shakes his head and laughs humorlessly at his hands that he fidgets back and forth nonstop. All a carefully curated and executed display from a master manipulator.

“I’m not gonna sit here and say I’m proud for all my actions. I know messing around with somebody who’s close to 18 doesn’t mean they’re an adult yet. She was the only one I’d ever — I never went after somebody just because they were younger. It was a stupid, stupid decision. I was just– I was just so lonely.”

He rakes a hand through his hair, mouth opening and closing like he can’t quite believe things had “gone this far.” When he shifts in his seat, you notice several others in the room readjust their own posture, maybe out of discomfort or maybe just subconsciously mirroring Matthew’s body language. You keep your teeth clamped together to stop from worrying your lip so hard it bleeds.

“After all the constant verbal takedowns and abuse from her—” he glances your direction for only a moment, just long enough for others to follow his line of sight and see he is talking about you, to you “—I was just broken. I-I wasn’t even myself anymore. I started making choices that aren’t me. I started getting with any woman who’d have my company. I was desperate for it. Desperate for anything other than the hell that was waiting for me at home.”

He shakes his head again, producing big tears to gather and fall down his face. He hitches his breath and sniffs louder now.

“I made bad choices, and I own up to those. But the idea that after finally being man enough to leave that type of situation…. To finally make a home and start a family with somebody who loves me and cares for me… It just doesn’t make sense. Why would I throw all that away? What, because she was with someone else? Of course not!” he laughs in that same humorless way again.

“I just only hoped he wasn’t gonna get it bad like I did all those years. I hoped and prayed she’d find peace with him - with anyone. If she could find some peace, maybe she wouldn’t need to do all of that, you know? To find whatever it is that she’s looking for, because god knows I’m not it.”

He pauses to wipe the palm of his hand roughly against his cheeks to clear away his tears. “I wished for so long to be able to be the guy to help her. I didn’t know why I wasn’t enough, I just knew that I never was.” He hangs his head in his hands for a moment before looking upward as though seeking divine guidance. 

“I just ask that the council please take into consideration her upbringing. The day I met her, she was getting beat to death by her own damn flesh and bone. Her father and brother were set to kill her. Can you even imagine that? That type of evil? How can someone coming from that know any better? She needs help. She doesn’t need to be kicked out of this place. I know what she’s done is horrible, but please, if there’s anything that can be done to-to, I don’t know- to rehabilitate her or therapy or something. Please don’t send her out those gates to die. Please. I may have decided to break things off with her, but I still care for that woman so deeply. Please.”

You feel close to retching. He’s made a strong case for himself all while casting a shadow of doubt and fault in your direction. You can feel the eyes of every Jackson resident called to attend the hearing falling squarely on you, but you can’t bring yourself to look at them anymore. What if you don’t convey the right emotion? What if your efforts to not empty the contents of your stomach onto the floor right now somehow read as guilt or remorse? What if your nerves and body language and facial expression and sounds and posture are interpreted as some admission of wrongdoing?

You can’t stare at your hands any longer if you want to avoid appearing like you’re hanging your head in defeat or regret or fault, so you settle for pushing through the queasiness and scanning the faces of the Council in front of you. A few faces remain stony or neutral, but just as many if not more have softened or, worse, looked away from Matthew at the discomfort of seeing a grown man weeping so openly. If it isn’t seen as an authentic act, that would have to mean he was some brutal, manipulative monster to fake such a moving display of grief and pain - a monster they’d allowed to live right under their noses this whole entire time. Admitting that’s who he really was would be in part admitting their own fault at not keeping Jackson safe.

The lie is working.

Midday break is called, and the air in the room feels like every particle of oxygen is dampened and weighted with the inevitability of your downfall. Matthew was going to walk away from this situation unscathed, and then he was going to kill you. 

You just have to sit and wait for him to kill you. 

The tremble in your hands is such that you can’t get a firm enough grip on the doorknob to get into the private adjunct room where you’d be spending break. Ellie reaches around you and turns it quickly, giving you a gentle nudge inside with Joel following closely behind. The door is no sooner shut than you double over a bin and start heaving. Joel doesn’t make a face or comment on the odor. He just helps you get straightened up before taking out the soiled container. The smell of your ruination lingers as you collapse into a nearby chair and break into sobs.

Joel returns with food you can’t imagine stomaching and water you reluctantly sip. He doesn’t speak, just pulls you close against him.

“He’s gonna kill me, Joel,” you shake out. “They believe him. He’s gonna walk away from this, and then he’s gonna kill me.” The last few words dissipate into a hitched octave, full of fear and defeat.

“No he ain’t,” Joel corrects sternly. You can only shake your head and cry, at a loss for words in this surreal situation.

“They can’t actually be buying that story!” Ellie argues. “Nobody would believe that shit! Right, Joel?”

When Joel doesn’t rush to corroborate her assessment, Ellie seems to deflate a bit. “You-you’re not serious. People think he’s innocent?”

Her tone of comprehensive disbelief is as fitting now as ever. You can’t believe this is happening, but at the same time you also know deep down this was always the only way this would go.

“We know the truth, Ellie,” Joel sighs. “People are weak. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my life, it’s that you can’t count on people to do the right thing.” He finally pulls back to look at you. Your face crumples when you catch his apologetic expression. He’s as powerless in this situation as you are.

“But what about all those times she saved your life on patrol? And taking up for everybody’s shifts and covering people’s asses? How the fuck is that a bad person? Somebody that would plan something awful like that? Like, what? There’s no fucking way!” she sputters.

You blink unfocused at the floor, unsure of what to say or do. You want to comfort Ellie, but you don’t want to lie or get her hopes up. You know how this story ends.

“I don’t even give a shit if you did do something bad to him. Fuck it! I don’t believe him. I believe you. And he deserves every bit of what he gets, and then some!” Ellie asserts in a passionate appeal.

Despite everything, you smile to yourself. Ellie and Joel might not be blood, but they are certainly family in the way that it counts. And these two staunch supporters were in your corner, so you must be doing at least one thing right.

Joel cups your face in his hands and directs your attention to him, all  fiery eyes and steely expression. “No one is going to hurt you. He’s not going to hurt you.”

He says it with such firmness and conviction, you want to believe him. You brush away the fat tears slipping down the curve of your cheek. It’s silent again in the room, and Joel goes back to just sitting with you and holding you. He’s quiet and a little detached. It’s probably for the best. If he starts distancing himself now, it might make it easier on everyone when this too good to be true dynamic comes to an end.

The end of break comes and goes without anyone arriving to collect you for the afternoon session. Ellie points it out, the first person to speak in what seems like forever. Just as Joel starts to get up to see what the delay is, Tommy scoots into the room. He gives you a sympathetic, curt bow of his head and glances at Joel.

“Listen, I think there’s some funny business goin’ on with Matthew. I don’t know exactly what the hold up is, but I’ve seen a few of the higher ups come and go outta his room.”

“What the fuck is that s’posed’ta–” Joel starts as the door opens again.

Maria and another Council member squeeze into the ever shrinking room. It’s one of the members who had looked away while Matthew forced himself to cry. The air feels thinner with all the crowding and news of Matthew’s odd behavior. Somehow you still hold enough space for worry that they will be able to smell the remnants of your vomit from earlier.

“Alright, folks, sorry for the delay. Looks like we’re gonna pick up tomorrow morning from where we left off today. The, uh, other party isn’t in much condition right now to carry on, so we’re gonna adjourn for right now,” the Council member explains.

You don’t even have to turn to Joel to know his nostrils are flared and fists clenched. No one says anything, and the palpable tension in the room hangs awkwardly in the space.

“He put forth a request for additional time to collect himself after the ‘emotionally draining’ testimony that was given this morning. Given his disposition we all saw and the fact that it’s not our intent to put anyone into a position of distress during this process, Council has granted his request on a one-time basis,” Maria adds.

You bite back a scathing remark. You have been nothing but distressed. You just didn’t have the luxury of letting your emotions run wild lest you portray yourself as some volatile, unstable person - the type of person who would do all the things Matthew has charged you with. You can’t afford the negative attention that a big show of emotion would likely garner, so you just do all that you can: keep it calm and keep it moving.

You wish that you’d been able to get the first word. You wish you’d been able to get ahead of the narrative so that it benefited you - benefitted the truth. You wish that you could also be seen as brave and raw and moving if you cried in front of everyone. But Matthew had got the drop on you and delivered his “authentic devastation” to a panel of sympathetic ears. His inability to control his emotions was not a point of instability or weakness in their consideration like it might be if the roles were reversed.

Maria catches your eye. Her frown morphs into a tight lipped line, like she wants to say something to you but can’t. She looks at Joel for a moment before focusing on her counterpart.

Tommy clears his throat to dispel some of the charged climate. “Alright. Thanks for lettin’ us know. You need any help gettin’ him back to the retainer, Cliff?”

The Council member shakes his head. “Appreciate you offering, but I think they got it handled. He’s pretty out of sorts at the moment. Don’t think it’ll be much trouble getting him back.”

Tommy nods an acknowledgment and turns to Maria. “I’ll see to it she gets back to the house.” He tips his head your direction. Maria gives a quick thanks and heads out behind the other Council member, giving a tepid, short goodbye.

The walk back to Joel’s house is a disjointed, hazy blur. You’re inside, although you don’t have a clear notion of when that happened. Joel helps you out of your jacket as you stare blankly ahead. You hear Tommy murmur something to Joel that sounds something like “she alright?”

“Hey.” Joel’s voice is grounding and firm. You blink a few times and lock eyes. He’s grasping your arms like he’s holding you up. He might be. You’re not entirely sure at the moment. Every ounce of energy has been zapped from you. It all feels like a waking nightmare.

Low words are exchanged, and Ellie leaves the three of you in the kitchen. You settle clumsily into one of the chairs at the table and rest your head in your propped up arms. Joel and Tommy continue a conversation you drift in and out of.

“Considering he’s goin’ back to a retaining cell, there’s not a whole lotta reason people are gonna find to assume he’s just fakin’ it all. Ain’t the most lavish of places ‘n all that. Council meeting space is a lot more comfortable than that, so ya can’t say he’d be in some big rush to get back there,” Tommy reasons.

“Piece of shit just wants everybody to sit with his bullshit statements from this mornin’. Sleep on it and get his lies all embedded in their heads,” Joel scoffs.

“I don’t doubt that,” Tommy agrees gently. “I’m just sayin’ that you gotta keep in mind how things look, is all.”

“Are they going to ask me about his testimony?” you rasp.

The two brothers turn to you in sync. Joel is the first to pull a chair up next to yours. Tommy opts to stand at the end of the table with one hand mindlessly picking at the tablecloth.

“What do you mean, honey?” Joel asks softly.

“He talked about stuff. Today. And if I’m supposed to… defend myself, or whatever, I just– I want to know what sort of questions they’re going to ask me,” you explain.

Tommy and Joel exchange a look. You lick your dry lips and force the words out.

“Am I– Do I have to talk about my–about my dad and brother?” you choke out in a whisper.

Tommy scratches the back of his neck and looks away in much the same way as others had done to Matthew this morning when the discomfiting outpouring was too much. “I, uh, I reckon they might wanna follow up on some of what he shared, yeah. To get your side of things.” His expression pinches into an uncomfortable frown.

Your face falls when he confirms what you already knew: you were going to have to speak publicly on the most horrendous times in your life, and for no reason other than Matthew had purposefully brought it into the fold. You wrap your arms around yourself and rest your forehead against the table as you begin to cry for the millionth time today.

A strong hand from either side rests on your shoulder and back. Joel rubs small circles while Tommy gives a supportive squeeze. The tears flow freely as your fate comes into the clear. You were never going to be able to pull off being more believable than Matthew. You were never going to be able to remain composed enough to make it through this. Matthew was going to win, and then he was going to kill you.

“We’re gonna figure somethin’ out. I promise you that,” Joel vows.

“I can have Maria come by later to get a better idea of what we’re workin’ with exactly come tomorrow mornin’,” Tommy adds.

Joel pulls you against his side and wraps his arms around you. “Do you trust me?”

You blubber that you do, but it’s a mess of tears and snot as you try to explain that you’ve underestimated Matthew too many times to not have learned your lesson by now.

“Not this time,” Joel disagrees. “We’re gonna stay a step ahead of him. No matter what.”

You let him herd you into the bedroom that he’s completely rearranged so you’re not reminded of what happened here not that long ago. You’re sure Matthew prides himself on leaving you with that particular mental scar, the sacred comfort of you and Joel’s shared bedroom now tainted with memories of one of the scariest moments of your life. Joel had offered to move you both into the guest bedroom across the hall, but you declined. It felt like giving in, giving Matthew another win.

Now you aren’t so sure it really matters.

You settle into the cold bed, trying your best to focus on the scent of Joel on the sheets, and let your eyes flutter shut when he presses small kisses to your temple before going back downstairs to talk with Tommy.

The mellow sunlight filtering through the window suggests you slept longer than intended. Your muscles are sore. Your movements are stiff. How long had you been asleep? The whole hearing process must’ve truly exhausted you. Surely Joel would’ve woken you up if Maria had already arrived.

The smell of eggs wafting up the stairs leads you to the curious sight of breakfast on the table. Panic sets in once you register that you not only slept through the afternoon and the entire night, but you’d also missed Maria’s visit and advice. You hadn’t prepped at all. Joel assures you he’s got it covered and asks you to just take a breath and eat something.

You aren’t sure you can eat, but he coaxes you into some bites. He looks exhausted, like he hasn’t slept. He promises you that he talked with Tommy and Maria and feels confident he can lead you in the right direction. You have no choice but to trust him. Ellie stays home today at Joel’s request. You ask how he managed that given how passionate she was yesterday. He shrugs and gives a noncommittal answer. You don’t press him. In all truth, you’re grateful that she won’t be present for today’s proceedings.

Prying eyes follow your every step to the Council building on Main Street. You refuse to meet any of them. You’re ushered by a standoffish attendant into the same small room where you sat for break yesterday and wait to be called into the main room.

You mention to Joel how odd the attendant was acting. He agrees but doesn’t seem all that surprised. Just as you’re getting the sense that Joel isn’t saying everything on his mind, the same Council member from yesterday enters the room.

“Cliff,” Joel greets curtly.

Cliff nods back in lieu of social niceties. “So it seems that Matthew was going through something more than we realized. We have reason to believe that, uh, that he has left Jackson indefinitely.”

Your shock propels you out of your seat. “What?!”

Joel stands quickly beside you and echoes your disbelief. “Who the hell let him leave?!” he thunders.

Cliff puts his hands up, palm side out, as if to allay the sudden uproar. “We’re gathering information as quickly as we can. We were alerted just this morning about all of this.”

“He tried to fuckin’ MURDER HER, and you’re tellin’ me you don’t know where he is?!” Joel bellows at a slowly cowering Cliff.

“We are doing everything within our power to sort this out, and I assure you that you aren’t the only one who is invested in getting to the bottom of this!” Cliff asserts with a put-on bravado.

“How do you know he left? Who let him past the gates? Who saw him?” Joel demands, rounding on Cliff.

“I’m not able to answer every single question you have, Joel,” he sputters. “I already told you this is a fast developing situation, and we’ve only just started piecing things together. It’s best if everyone just keeps a level head, alright?”

Joel doesn’t look much satisfied with Cliff’s offerings. “Keep a level head? KEEP A LEVEL HEAD?”

“Joel!” Maria barks through the door as she rushes in and shuts it behind her. “Enough! You’re so loud I can hear you down the hall!”

“What kinda establishment you got here, huh? Fuckin’ would be murderers just waltzin’ outta their cells as they please and nobody is any the wiser?” he spits.

You wrap a hand around Joel’s arm, and it thankfully seems to calm him a little.

“Joel, she just brought the letter to us a few hours ago. We’re trying to keep a hold of the situation, and you going off isn’t helping,” she chides.

“What letter? Who?” you choke out. You cling to Joel’s arm to steady yourself as the realization that Matthew has escaped starts to sink in.

Maria’s face softens as she turns to you. “Rachel. Rachel Harmon. She discovered a letter on their kitchen table early this morning. It was addressed to her with a portion written to the Council.

“The dipshit stupid enough to get knocked up by that psychopath?” Joel snips.

You give his arm a gentle squeeze. He glances down at you. You give a small shake of your head. Not now. He understands and chews the inside of his cheek against his molars.

Maria shuts her eyes and sighs, exercising some self-control in the charge of Joel’s anger. “His pregnant partner, yes,” she firmly corrects. Her eyes shift back to you. “I know it has been a difficult process, but if you could look at the letter and possibly verify whether it is his handwriting…”

“You manage to fuck up the VERY SIMPLE TASK of not letting a fuckin’ wannabe murderer escape, and now you’re askin’ his latest victim to help you? I don’t fuckin’ think so!” Joel thunders. He puts himself between you and the others.

“With all due respect, Joel, that’s not your decision to make,” Maria snips back in the same level tone as before.

“I’ll look at it,” you agree. Everyone turns to look at you as you stand there, shaking and trying to hold it together. “I can tell you if it’s his or not.”

“No. The reason Rachel can’t verify his handwriting — the fuckin’ father of her baby — is because Rachel doesn’t fuckin’ know him. Nobody does in the entire godforsaken place,” he finishes with a scowl thrown towards Maria and Cliff. “She knows him better than anybody – and she’s been tryna tell y’all the truth about him – but y’all wanna play this pretend court of law bullshit where there’s supposedly some kinda due process. As if she didn’t end up black and blue from that prick. Y’all seemed to forget all about that with his little waterworks yesterday, huh?”

Cliff looks appropriately chastised. Maria fixes Joel with a stern frown. “If you’re done showing your ass, we have work to do.”

You tug at Joel to get his attention. His angry face meets yours and deciphers the resignation written into every frown and troubled wrinkle.

He huffs and glares at Cliff and Maria. “Bring the letter.”

Cliff volunteers himself to fetch the letter, probably in an effort to excuse himself from Joel’s wrath. Maria holds steady and suggests everyone take a seat and take a breather. You slump into the chair. Your adrenaline is shot. Your mind feels like all the crucial cogs have hit a rut and won’t turn the gears. All the backup machinery of your mind is trying to keep up with things well beyond its capacity. When Cliff returns with the letter, it takes a moment to focus on the document placed before you. Your eyes adjust to read its contents.

𝚁𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚕,

𝙿𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚎 𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚊𝚢 "𝚐𝚘𝚘𝚍𝚋𝚢𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚗𝚘𝚠" 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚔𝚗𝚎𝚠 𝚢𝚘𝚞’𝚍 𝚝𝚛𝚢 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚝𝚘𝚙 𝚖𝚎 𝚘𝚛 𝚖𝚊𝚔𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚍𝚊𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚜 𝚝𝚛𝚒𝚙 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚖𝚎. 𝚆𝚎’𝚟𝚎 𝚝𝚊𝚕𝚔𝚎𝚍 𝚜𝚘 𝚖𝚊𝚗𝚢 𝚝𝚒𝚖𝚎𝚜 𝚋𝚎𝚏𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝚊𝚋𝚘𝚞𝚝 𝚠𝚑𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚘𝚛 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚢𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚝𝚑𝚛𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚌𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜 𝚠𝚊𝚜 𝚒𝚗 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚋𝚎𝚜𝚝 𝚒𝚗𝚝𝚎𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚝. 𝙸 𝚠𝚊𝚗𝚝 𝚗𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚗 𝚝𝚘 𝚐𝚛𝚘𝚠 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚏𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚢 𝚝𝚘𝚐𝚎𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚒𝚗 𝚊 𝚜𝚊𝚏𝚎, 𝚗𝚞𝚛𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚎𝚗𝚟𝚒𝚛𝚘𝚗𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙸 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚔 𝚠𝚎 𝚋𝚘𝚝𝚑 𝚊𝚐𝚛𝚎𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙹𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚜𝚘𝚗 𝚒𝚜 𝚗𝚘 𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚌𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚞𝚜.

𝙸’𝚟𝚎 𝚕𝚎𝚏𝚝 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚎𝚗𝚘𝚞𝚐𝚑 𝚜𝚞𝚙𝚙𝚕𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚕𝚊𝚜𝚝 𝚖𝚎 𝚘𝚗 𝚖𝚢 𝚓𝚘𝚞𝚛𝚗𝚎𝚢 𝚝𝚘 𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚔 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚘𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛 𝚊𝚛𝚛𝚊𝚗𝚐𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝𝚜. 𝙾𝚗𝚌𝚎 𝙸 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚍 𝚊 𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚌𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚞𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚛𝚊𝚒𝚜𝚎 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚏𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚢, 𝙸 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚛𝚎𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚗 𝚝𝚘 𝙹𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚜𝚘𝚗 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚋𝚛𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎. 𝚈𝚘𝚞 𝚊𝚛𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚘𝚏 𝚖𝚢 𝚕𝚒𝚏𝚎, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙸 𝚌𝚊𝚗’𝚝 𝚜𝚊𝚢 𝚑𝚘𝚠 𝚖𝚞𝚌𝚑 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚖𝚎𝚊𝚗 𝚝𝚘 𝚖𝚎. 𝙸 𝚙𝚛𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚜𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙸 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚏𝚒𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝚙𝚕𝚊𝚌𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚞𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚕𝚒𝚟𝚎 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚕𝚒𝚟𝚎𝚜 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚠𝚊𝚢 𝚠𝚎 𝚍𝚎𝚜𝚎𝚛𝚟𝚎. 𝙸 𝚌𝚘𝚞𝚕𝚍𝚗’𝚝 𝚛𝚒𝚜𝚔 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚘𝚞𝚛 𝚋𝚊𝚋𝚢 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚒𝚗𝚐 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚖𝚎, 𝚋𝚞𝚝 𝚙𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚎 𝚔𝚗𝚘𝚠 𝙸 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚋𝚊𝚌𝚔 𝚠𝚒𝚝𝚑 𝚊 𝚗𝚎𝚠 𝚏𝚞𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚞𝚜 𝚊𝚕𝚕. 𝙸 𝚕𝚘𝚟𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞. 𝙸 𝚠𝚘𝚗’𝚝 𝚋𝚎 𝚐𝚘𝚗𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚗𝚐. 𝙿𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚎 𝚝𝚛𝚢 𝚗𝚘𝚝 𝚝𝚘 𝚠𝚘𝚛𝚛𝚢 𝚝𝚘𝚘 𝚖𝚞𝚌𝚑.

𝙻𝚘𝚟𝚎, 𝙼𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚠

𝙰𝚗𝚍 𝚝𝚘 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚑𝚒𝚙 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙲𝚘𝚞𝚗𝚌𝚒𝚕 𝚘𝚏 𝙹𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚜𝚘𝚗, 𝙸 𝚑𝚘𝚙𝚎 𝚖𝚢 𝚊𝚌𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗𝚜 𝚑𝚊𝚟𝚎𝚗’𝚝 𝚛𝚞𝚒𝚗𝚎𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚢 𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍𝚒𝚗𝚐𝚜 𝚠𝚎 𝚑𝚊𝚍 𝚛𝚎𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚍. 𝙸 𝚓𝚞𝚜𝚝 𝚍𝚘𝚗’𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚗𝚔 𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚛𝚎’𝚜 𝚊 𝚜𝚘𝚕𝚞𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚋𝚘𝚝𝚑 𝚘𝚏 𝚞𝚜 𝚝𝚘 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚢 𝚒𝚗 𝙹𝚊𝚌𝚔𝚜𝚘𝚗. 𝚃𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚠𝚒𝚕𝚕 𝚋𝚎 𝚊 𝚏𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚑 𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚛𝚝 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚖𝚢 𝚏𝚊𝚖𝚒𝚕𝚢, 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝙸 𝚑𝚘𝚙𝚎 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚞𝚗𝚍𝚎𝚛𝚜𝚝𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚊𝚗𝚍 𝚊𝚌𝚌𝚎𝚙𝚝 𝚖𝚢 𝚌𝚑𝚘𝚒𝚌𝚎𝚜. 𝙰𝚙𝚘𝚕𝚘𝚐𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝚏𝚘𝚛 𝚝𝚑𝚎 𝚜𝚞𝚙𝚙𝚕𝚒𝚎𝚜 𝙸 𝚝𝚘𝚘𝚔. 𝙸 𝚍𝚒𝚍𝚗’𝚝 𝚝𝚊𝚔𝚎 𝚖𝚘𝚛𝚎 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚗 𝙸 𝚗𝚎𝚎𝚍𝚎𝚍. 𝙸𝚏 𝚢𝚘𝚞 𝚜𝚎𝚎 𝚏𝚒𝚝 𝚝𝚑𝚊𝚝 𝙸 𝚛𝚎𝚙𝚊𝚢 𝚝𝚑𝚒𝚜 𝚏𝚊𝚟𝚘𝚛, 𝙸 𝚊𝚖 𝚜𝚞𝚛𝚎 𝚠𝚎 𝚌𝚊𝚗 𝚌𝚘𝚖𝚎 𝚝𝚘 𝚊𝚗 𝚊𝚐𝚛𝚎𝚎𝚖𝚎𝚗𝚝 𝚞𝚙𝚘𝚗 𝚖𝚢 𝚛𝚎𝚝𝚞𝚛𝚗.

𝙿𝚕𝚎𝚊𝚜𝚎 𝚕𝚘𝚘𝚔 𝚊𝚏𝚝𝚎𝚛 𝚁𝚊𝚌𝚑𝚎𝚕 𝚒𝚗 𝚖𝚢 𝚊𝚋𝚜𝚎𝚗𝚌𝚎.

𝚁𝚎𝚐𝚊𝚛𝚍𝚜, 𝙼𝚊𝚝𝚝𝚑𝚎𝚠

Your stomach bottoms out as you scan the lines of text. “That’s his writing,” you confirm with a feeble shake of your head. You can’t understand how he escaped or why. It didn’t make any sense. This wasn’t like him. Your tongue feels thick and heavy as you try to find the words to express these concerns.

“Doesn’t explain how he managed to escape,” Joel clips.

“We believe his, uh, emotional difficulties yesterday were enough of a distraction to the attendants that they didn’t notice him taking the key off them,” Cliff explains with a notable pink flush on his cheeks.

“So you got swindled, and now a murderer is on the loose?” Joel sneers.

“Joel, if you can’t keep it civil, then I’m going to have to ask Tommy to see you out of here,” Maria warns.

“You want to keep things civil, but you can’t even keep one asshole in a cell?” he bites back. “You’re tellin’ me nobody noticed he was gone in the middle of the night? How in the fuck did that happen, huh? Somebody sleepin’ on the job?”

Cliff adjusts in his seat and sits a little taller. The rosy flush morphs into a deep red and spreads down his neck. “He, uh, he arranged his bedding to look like—”

“You gotta be shittin’ me,” Joel snorts in disbelief. “He bundled up some blankets to look like a body? Like in the fuckin’ movies? And you fell for it?”

Cliff clears his throat and can’t quite meet you or Joel’s eye. Maria huffs, clearly exasperated by Joel’s condescending ire.

“Sounds real fuckin’ convenient, doesn’t it? That he managed all this by himself?” Joel challenges in a low, dangerous voice.

“Watch it, Joel,” Maria cautions. “If you’re suggesting there’s some sort of foul play or outside help, you’re dead wrong, and I’d be careful going around making such bold, suggestive claims.”

Joel laughs without a trace of amusement and sits back in his chair, crossing his arms. Maria’s jaw clenches tight with annoyance. Joel had told you before how his and Maria’s relationship was rocky at best, and this entire situation was just oxygen to a flame. You respected Maria greatly, but it felt good to have Joel stick up for you so fiercely.

“We’re done here. Until y’all get your shit together, don’t come botherin’ her. I’m walkin’ her home, and I’m gettin’ a rifle from the patrol station. You have my word if that asshole shows up, I’m shootin’ him dead on the spot.” Joel’s nostrils flare, hands slamming onto the table as he abruptly stands.

Much to your surprise, neither Cliff nor Maria take him to task on any of it.

“Come on, honey. Let’s go home,” Joel says softly to you, extending his hand for you to take.

True to his word, Joel obtained a firearm and made no attempt to downplay his intent to use it if necessary. He kept by your side, gun ready at all times, as the days pressed on. Tommy stopped by a few times a day, sometimes with updates and sometimes with nothing. By the time day three rolled around, you hadn’t learned anything that made sense of the ordeal.

Matthew had managed to steal his cell key from an attendant, leave his cell with a decoy blanket body in place, get into his and Rachel’s house to write and leave the letter, sneak into reserves and stables to gather up supplies and a horse, and, perhaps most daring of all, getting past the main gates. All without being seen or caught.

It wasn’t that he was incapable of such deceit. It’s that he left when he was already winning. That’s what bothered you the most. He was winning, and Matthew would never forfeit an opportunity to get the best of you and put you in your place. When you’d mentioned this to Joel and even Tommy, neither seemed too concerned with this crucial piece of the puzzle. Joel himself had said that you knew Matthew better than anybody, and it was starting to wear on you that even he wasn’t taking your concerns seriously. He insisted you just needed to keep a low profile and rest. Your pure exhaustion meant you didn’t put up much of a fight to his insistence.

Rachel gave her account to the Council regarding her and Matthew’s previous discussions around leaving Jackson. She tearfully recounted the few times he had spoken to her about “needing to get out of town in a hurry,” but she “never thought he meant like this.” You believed he’d had these talks with her, but not in the context of starting a new life somewhere else. You knew with every fiber of your being that he had spoken about leaving Jackson in a rush in reference to murdering you and either taking himself out with you or fleeing before facing the consequences, whichever came to be the right choice at the time.

It was coming up on five days since Matthew left. You provided your testimony yet again to the Council but didn’t share anything you hadn’t already. It was just under 15 minutes when they’d called everyone back into the room to announce you were considered absolved of any potential wrongdoings as it was impossible to confidently confirm which party had committed what actions. You were given a stern warning that any “untoward behavior” would result in immediate cause for dismissal from Jackson. You agreed to the terms, knowing that you had never been and never would be a problem.

Despite your partial exoneration, it felt like a hollow victory. You still fret to Joel about when Matthew returns and in what capacity. You’re worrying yourself sick with the looming fear of his return. If he was able to evade watchful eyes and escape, he was more than capable of getting back inside the settlement and doing god knows what. What if he didn’t find anything out there? What if he decides to come back and stay? What if he changes his mind and insists that you should be made to leave Jackson instead of him?

You sleep to get away from reality, but your dreams are plagued with nightmares of Matthew above you, choking the life out of you. You can hardly eat. Joel seems so calm somehow. You don’t know how he manages it. It might just be a show of strength to make you feel safer, but all it’s done is make you feel more frustrated. Why doesn’t he seem concerned? Why doesn’t he have the same energy about “staying one step ahead of Matthew” that was so fiery just a short time ago? A week out from your gift of grace from Council, you can’t take it any longer. Matthew has been gone for almost two weeks, and you want to tear your hair out.

“Why don’t you listen to me?” you whisper. Talking any louder guarantees you will break into a fit of tears. You’re afraid. You’re sleep deprived despite sleeping almost constantly. You’re hurt that Joel seems so detached and unbothered from the situation.

Joel’s head snaps up from his task. He frowns in confusion. “What do you mean, honey?” He sets his things aside and moves towards you. 

You take a step away and hug yourself, shaking your head. “I-I keep telling you that something isn’t right, but you don’t seem bothered at all. I feel—I feel so alone, Joel.” So much for not crying. The hot pinch in your eyes spills over as you bury your head in your hands. 

Joel is quick to snatch you up into a tight embrace. “No, baby. You’re not alone. You’re not alone.” 

He rocks you side to side and shushes you. You can’t shake the feeling that he isn’t on the same page as you. A sickening thought tears through your mind, one you hadn’t felt since that day when Matthew gave his testimony.

“Oh my god,” you breathe. “Are you… Do you want me to go?” Your eyes go wide in dismay. Of course. You’ve been so distracted with everything going on that you didn’t even stop to consider the obvious: Joel wants out. This is too much for him. Too much for Ellie. This isn’t what he signed up for, playing personal bodyguard to you 24/7. He wants his life back. You can’t even blame him. Why would he choose this? Why would he choose you?

You’ve already accepted it before Joel can reply. You feel completely numb. Matthew was right. All those times he tried to tell you that no one would want you, and you decided to believe otherwise.

“What?” Joel scoffs. “What the hell? No, I don’t want you to leave! What the hell are you— Why on earth would you—” He shakes his head like he’s offended you’d even suggest such a thing. He’s gobsmacked into silence as he searches your face for some sort of clarity.

“But you—you’ve been so distant with all this Matthew stuff. A-And I just, I know it’s too much–I’m too much, and—” You ramble and try to control the flood of tears cascading down your face and neck.

“No. No, honey,” he says flatly. He shakes his head again like he can’t understand how you’d come to that conclusion. He sits you on the couch and pushes himself between your legs. He cradles your face so that you’re eye to eye with each other.

“I’m in love with you,” he states with conviction. Not a hint of reluctance or hesitation is in his voice. You can’t understand it.

“What?” you choke.

“I said I’m in love with you. I love you. It scares the hell outta me, but I do. I love you. I don’t want you to leave, not ever,” he continues. He closes his eyes and rests his forehead to yours.

“You? You love me?” you repeat.

He nods firmly a few times and pulls back to look at you. “Yeah. I do. I really, really do.”

“I–Joel—” you break. “I-I love you, too, Joel. I love you so much. I’ve loved you for so much time now. It’s been so much time, Joel. I never said it. I thought I was going to die before I could tell you—thought he was going to kill me before I could—”

Joel cuts you off with a deep, biting kiss. Your breath comes ragged and frantic with the reciprocal admission and overwrought nerves. You can’t stop crying, and you’re not even sure you know why you’re crying or what you’re crying about at this point. Everything has come to a bottleneck, and there’s no stopping the outpouring  deluge.

Joel draws back for a moment to catch his breath. He considers you with a contemplative gaze for a moment before speaking. “I’m so sorry, honey. I’m sorry I’ve been so preoccupied that I wasn’t pickin’ up on how alone I was makin’ you feel.”

You swallow and ask a question you aren’t sure you want the answer to. “What’s b-been keeping your attention?”

Joel’s lips form a thin line. He holds your searching eye and finally nods. “I haven’t been honest with you. Been waitin’ until it was the right time. I guess now is the right time.”

Your mouth turns down at the vague explanation. “Joel, I don’t know what—”

“Tonight,” he interrupts. He sounds resolute, like he’s finally decided on something. “Tonight I’m gonna show you. Get some rest. You’re gonna need it.”

You aren’t sure how you’re supposed to sleep after all of that, but you try anyway.

You’re quiet as the horse carries you and Joel through the dense wooded areas outside the settlement. You’d exited through the cover of a passage at the edge of the barrier you didn’t even know existed, but you didn’t ask questions. You just sat quietly and waited to see what Joel was going to show you, what the answer to all your questions was going to be.

The moonlight slipped through the branches, the dapple of a dull glow lighting the path forward, wherever that may be. You hug close against Joel and rest your head on his shoulder as the horse meanders further, past the dam, past the typical patrol points. You hold on tighter at his instruction when he turns off into a steep, obscured ravine. It levels off at the bottom, and you’re beginning to wonder just how far into the outlands this clandestine destination is. Joel slows the horse to an ambling gait and veers into an overgrown pocket of woods.

“This is it,” he announces calmly as he dismounts. He assists you off the horse, and guides it into a concealed alcove already housing three other horses. The only indication that this is even frequented by travelers is a dug-out firepit some several yards away. You start to ask where you’re going now when he points out the telltale edge and turn of a man made structure in the compact stretch of greenery and woodlands. You’re almost a stone’s throw from the camouflaged house before you recognize it, hidden in the distance to anyone not already familiar. He holds firm onto your hand as if you’re one surprise away from being scared off completely. He guides you through the entrance of the house after brushing aside well-placed bits of facade and coverings.

You have a million and one questions, and a singular unknown has been halfway answered when your eyes adjust to the dimly lit interior. Two of the horses must belong to Tommy and Natalie’s father, John, who each sit on aging furniture in what you think was once a sort of living space. They offer a quick greeting, one that you’re too flummoxed to return. They don’t seem surprised at your unannounced arrival. You realize Joel must’ve already looped them in. You know it’s all in due time, but it’s difficult to not grow impatient and nervous as to when exactly all your questions will be answered.

“I’ll holler if we need anythin’,” Joel informs the pair before grabbing a flashlight from a crooked end table and leading you down a dark hallway to the left. He stops in the middle of it, checks over his shoulder that you’re out of earshot, and runs his eyes lazily over your features. “You doin’ okay?” he asks softly.

“I don’t know what’s going on, but I guess I’m alright. Just sort of feel, I dunno–” You aren’t sure why you’re whispering, but it feels appropriate for conversation in the mysterious, dark hallway of the secret, hidden house. “I trust you – I do – but I’m just getting more and more nervous with every—”

Joel grazes his thumb across your bottom lip. “You don’t need to feel nervous, pretty girl. Not anymore. Never again. I told you I got you, and I do. So now I’m gonna show you, okay? Can you let me do that? Just hold on for a little bit longer for me?”

You swallow down your fear and concede to his plea. “Yes. Okay. I can. I mean, I will.” A deep, grounding breath, and then, “ I’m ready. I trust you.”

Joel shoots you a lopsided grin. “There’s my girl. Pretty thing.” He leans down to give you a quick kiss, and you chase his lips when he draws back. “Plenty of time for that soon enough.”

He walks you to the end of the hallway and stops short of the solid paneled wall. He runs his hand down the edge of the decorative molding, stopping on some unseen point and pressing into it until a soft click sound is heard on the other side of the wall. “Hold onto my shoulder on the way down, okay? Don’t want you fallin’.” He nudges the bottom of the wall, and the entirety of it swings forward, revealing a small opening and staircase.

“Ready?”

Your eyes go a little wide, jaw a little slack, but you just nod and grab onto his jacket as you both descend into the murky space. You duck your head a few times whenever Joel does. He’s clearly been here many, many times to be so well-acquainted with every low hanging beam and jutted bit of framing. You reach the bottom and pause again. He raises a hand to the side, flicking some other out of sight thing, and a camping lantern washes light over the room.

The damp air fits the visual of the area, but it lacks the musk of an unused space. Evidence of human movement and activity are visible here and there despite it being mostly bare. “Hidden basement? Was it always here? This has always been here, or–?”

“Yeah. Came up on it by surprise a long time ago now. The work of some doomsdayer, probably. Took us a long time to find it. Got real good use out of it lately, too.”

You scan the room for some indication of what he could mean. A long folding table lines one wall, filled with random supplies and curiosities. Odd pieces of furniture are scattered here and there. A closed door leading to who knows what. Rolled work blankets, tarps, and crates lie in organized piles.

“Is it some secret outpost or something?”

“Somethin’ like that.” Joel fiddles with your hand in his. Buying himself some time before–

“Why’d you bring me down here?”

He continues across the space with you and hesitates outside the closed door near the back of the basement. He waits until you meet his gaze before saying anything. “Listen to me good now. We’re gonna go in there, and I need you to promise me if you need to get outta there you’ll say somethin’. No judgment from anybody if you do, alright?” His stare could bore holes into your head with the intensity of it.

“O-Okay,” you agree. You don’t know what’s inside that would potentially be too much for you, but you know he wouldn’t mention it if he didn’t think you needed the preemptive permission of an out. He nods, searches your face with an inscrutable look, and leans down into a soft kiss. He slots his mouth against yours in a slow rhythm, siphoning the jittery anticipation from you with each pass and pull of his tongue against yours. Your weight slowly gives way to his clutch, and you give and give and give your anxieties over until you feel significantly calmer.

He pulls away, appears content with your pacified demeanor, and rests his hand on the doorknob.

“I’ve got you, honey. Just remember that.”

 He eases the door open, pushing it wide so you can see inside without having to enter. There’s already a few sources of light, but Joel flips something that powers a long row of bulbs. Matthew’s panicked eyes lock onto yours, a frenzied recognition taking over, and he strains against the rope bandings that hold him in place. He’s bound to a chair in much the same way as the first time Joel tied him up during your first time together. His muffled pleas and screams aren’t entirely intelligible past the wad of fabric shoved in his mouth. You let out a soft gasp at the sight of him, a little roughed up but mostly just looking terrified.

“This hopefully clears up why I wasn’t seemin’ too concerned with whether or not he was comin’ back to Jackson,” he supplies quietly.

“You-You mean…” You glance up at him, dumbfounded and at a loss for words.

He nods his head and watches you carefully, searching for some sort of upset or anger or disgust at seeing your ex-husband being held captive and worse for wear.

“But that day at the meeting! You were-You were so upset! You… was it all…..” You struggle to verbalize a logical train of thought. Joel had been pretending to be just as in the dark as you actually had been all this time. An apologetic frown pulls at the corners of his mouth.

“After that first day of the hearing, I knew we couldn’t count on those people to do the right thing. I told you I was gonna protect you. Keep you safe. I already failed you once. I wasn’t gonna fail you again.” He fixes you with a soft, remorseful look.

“Joel,” you choke. “You-You went and–after it— but, how?”

He takes a deep breath and steadies himself like he’s been waiting to finally tell you the truth, to impart this secret he’s been keeping from you for your own good. “He’s pissed off enough of the guys in Jackson that finding a few helping hands wasn’t too grand of a task,” comes his simple explanation. He glances over to Matthew with a look of pure disdain. “Had a few that owed me a major favor. Knocked his dumb ass out and took him out the back. Tommy already took the supplies, and I met him with the horse at the back passage. John lugged him on the horse here.”

You blink slowly, trying to absorb all this new information and connect it to what you already knew - or thought you already knew. You’re in such a state of shock that you don’t catch Matthew’s increasingly desperate, stifled calls for help. Joel rolls his eyes and shuts the door so the conversation can proceed in peace. 

“But the letter,” you sputter. “How?”

Joel looks at the ground and knocks the toe of his boot against it a few times before looking back at you. “Might be for the best if we don’t get into that.”

“No, Joel,” you say with a tremble. “I want to know. I deserve to know.”

He shakes his head in agreement and reaches out for your hand, which you readily place in his. He hesitates a few times before speaking. “I- I  don’t want you to be- I don’t want you to be afraid of me, honey.” His head lists back and forth, his eyes locked on where your hands are clasped together. “Done some bad things in my life. Not proud of all of it, but not really too sorry for it, either. I just… don’t want you thinkin’ I’m somebody you gotta be afraid of.”

With what seems to be a great amount of effort, he looks at you again. You hold his stare, a steady and unconditional hope and confidence meeting his look of insecurity. “I trust you,” you remind him firmly. You gather his hands together in yours and press them against your heart. “I trust you more than anything. I trust you with my life. I’m not afraid of you.”

He wavers for a moment before steeling himself. “I threatened to hurt Rachel and the baby. That’s how I got him to write that letter,” he admits. “Had to get him to talk, and quick, and I knew threatenin’ that would get him to write whatever I told him to.”

Your brow pinches together in an unasked question: how could you leverage something against him that he doesn’t actually care about?

“Yeah, it’s a little more’n what it sounds like. I–” he pauses for a beat before starting again, once more sounding uncertain of himself “–I don’t want you to see me different, when I tell you. Don’t think I could take you feelin’ scared of me or scared that I’d do anything to you – ever.”

You could understand his reluctance to bare these dark parts of himself. You’d spent most of your life in the long shadow of fear, the torrents of violence delivered by the mouths and hands of men you should’ve been able to trust. It was all too predictable that Joel would just become another perpetrator in the long line that existed before him, fitting into the established pattern. 

Except Joel wasn’t like anyone you’d ever known, was unlike any man you’d shared space with. He jumped the circuit that had been assigned to you - the circular loop of pain and fear - and became the break in the sequence. The disruptor of the inevitable. The arm that links to yours instead of bending it backward until compliance is yielded. Joel had decided that the cycle of your suffering stopped here, and god help anyone who got in his way.

“Scared? Of you? Joel, the only thing that scares me is whether or not I can ever be for you what you’ve been for me.” The words slip out gently, like they aren’t all sharp edges patched together with threads of hope. He moves to cut the conversation from its trajectory, but you press on before he can stop your moment of timid confession. “I don’t want pieces of you, Joel. I want it all. Just like you say you want all of me. So– I’m asking you to-to trust me with the truth, the way I trust you with the truth.” You level a firm, probing gaze and watch as his reservations abate.

“I’m not stupid, Joel. I-I know what him being here– I know what it means.” You straighten taller, pushing and pressing yourself to show the faith you have in yourself and in Joel - in the two of you. “I know that he’s– I know he’s not going to-to live. I know he’s not going to survive this. He’s not going to walk out of here.”

“That ain’t up to anyone but you,” he corrects. Before you can ask what he could possibly mean, he clarifies. “Told ‘em it wasn’t anybody’s decision ‘bout what happens to him but yours. Weren’t too happy with me about it. Wanted to kill him the first night – especially John – but ain’t nothin’ gonna happen that you don’t want to happen.”

The weight of his words settles slowly, a viscid cloud that ripples and sweeps through you. Matthew’s far off, muted cries for help are the only sound other than the pounding pulse in your ears. He took your life and bent it to his will, and now he was at your mercy. His fate lies in the palm of your hand because Joel stopped others from taking that decision from you. Because Matthew had hurt you more than anyone. Because Matthew had taken the most from you, wanted to take everything from you, it should be you to decide what happens.

Because Joel wanted to give you something you’d never had before: the power to dictate your life.

Your lip quivers with the comprehension of it, the magnitude of the gift he’d gently laid at your feet, as if it weren’t the most profound gesture anyone had ever bestowed you. Your lungs pull for the inhale that will balloon your chest against the constricting cage of your ribs. You have to get it together. You have to let him know he can tell you anything, can tell you everything, all without the fear that it will be too much and be the reason you walk away.

“Because you love me.” It’s not a question. It’s an answer. An explanation of why this man in front of you would do all of this.

“Because I love you,” he echoes. His lips press into a tight line. Consideration. Resolution. And then–

“I said I would—” He falters again, searching your face for the fear he so dreads will take hold and fester in you, the fear of what he is capable of, even if it’s done with the intent to shield you from harm. You give his hand an encouraging squeeze. “I told him I’d  drag her here, blow her brains out, and rip his kid from her stomach. Make him hold it until it didn’t move anymore. Kill off the future of him if he didn’t write what I told him to.”

You gulp back a gasp. “A-And would you have…? You would’ve done that?”

“Didn’t need to,” he replies instantly, skirting the question.

You press his hand firmer against your chest. “Would you have done that, Joel?”

“Yeah,” he finally admits. “If it meant gettin’ Matthew away from you, if it meant protectin’ you, then yeah, I would’ve.”

You gently nod, swallowing down the ebbing jolt of his confession, and bring his palms against your cheeks. You pivot to kiss them each in turn before looking up at him. “These hands are for– they’re for loving me. And protecting me.” You tilt towards him to emphasize your belief. His shoulders sag with relief, your sanction of his ill deeds loosening the tight nieve of guilt around him.

“And I know whatever happens in there–” an aside glance back at the door and back to Joel “–it’ll be okay. I’ll be okay, because you’re with me.”

He gives you a pointed nod and presses a kiss to your forehead. “I got you. I’ve always got you from here on out. I need you to understand, honey.”

“I do. I understand.”

 “Then let’s get to it, sweet girl.” 

With that, he opens the door again and drags in a heavy blanket from the other side of the basement. The distinct clink and clatter of metal can be heard even through the thick fabric. He motions for you to follow him into the room and close the door. You push it shut and watch as he hauls a cushioned chair from the corner of Matthew’s room and sets it up a few feet away from him, dead center.

 Matthew’s eyes dart wildly between the two of you. You jump at the unexpected slap Joel lands against Matthew’s head. “Shut. The fuck. Up.” Matthew quiets down instantly and stills. “I’m gonna tell you this one time: do not speak unless spoken to. You will listen to her. You will answer whatever question she has. You will not lie to her. If you lie to her or start gettin’ outta line, I will gladly set you straight.”

He rips the fabric gag from Matthew’s mouth and throws it on the floor. His breathing is audible and strained without the obstruction. Joel wraps an arm around your middle and pulls you down onto his lap, sitting in the armchair he’d arranged directly across from Matthew.

He leans forward, hugging you against him. I’m here. You’re not alone. Take the power you should’ve always had. Get answers to the questions you deserve to have answered. His hands splay wide across your chest and belly, an anchor to him. He runs his nose along your neck and hairline,  presses his lips gently against your ear. “Go on. I’ve got you.”

Matthew has been sitting silently as instructed, waiting on your permission to engage. Something turbulent and mirthful stirs in your gut. You can feel it spreading through you like a beast intent on carnage. It takes a few moments to recognize the feeling for what it is: power. The expression “drunk on power” finally made sense. The feeling of confidence, strength, and command makes your head buzz. It occurs to you that while this is your first time wielding such authority, it is likely Matthew’s first time experiencing the other side of things, not having any control over what’s going to happen next.

“How do you feel?”

Your question catches them both off guard, although Joel doesn’t show his surprise other than tensing for a split second underneath you. Matthew’s eyes squeeze shut, his frown deepening as he shakes his head side to side. He takes your line of questioning as a sign of possible mercy – all that understanding and patience you’ve been leached of your entire life.

“I’m fucking scared!” he croaks. His voice sounds weak and tired. “Every time they come down here I don’t know if it’s gonna be the time they kill me! Please just tell them to let me go! I’ll fucking go, I will! You’ll never see me again, I swear it.” He leans as far forward in his chair as he can manage, his desperation for your leniency coming off him in spates.

“What about Rachel? And the baby?”

Again, they both show their surprise at your choice of question. Matthew’s face flashes an answer before he can speak: what about them? Of course. Why should he care about the woman he’d impregnated out of spite? She was nothing more than collateral in this entire thing. His rooted seed in her belly nothing more than a guarantee of his lineage, a point of ego.

He works his expression into more of the calculated veneer he’s perfected over the years. “I-If you would– Listen, of course I care about them both, of course I want to take care of them both—”

You don’t bother listening to the rest. His words slacken to a halt as you turn your head towards Joel. “He’s lying to me, and you told him not to,” you say softly. Something eager and electric sparks in his eyes. “Yeah, I think he is, baby. I don’t like that one bit. What do you think?”

Matthew stutters but keeps himself from speaking, rightfully afraid of Joel’s correction.

You rest your hands atop his where he cradles you against him. “Do you remember in the cabin when you told me not to feel bad when bad people get what they deserve?”

He holds back a smirk. “I do.”

“Do you remember what I told you I liked seeing and wanted to see again?”

He doesn’t downplay the depraved grin spreading across his face. “I think I do, but I sure would love if you reminded me anyway.”

You turn to face Matthew and swallow down the delight at his anxious urgency to understand what is happening. Your expression is cold, unfeeling. “I liked it when you cried, Matthew, and I like it when Joel makes you cry—” you turn to Joel again, whose face has darkened and acidified, the drip of a lethal edge pooling at the verge  “—so, I want you to do it again. I want you to make him cry, Joel. Make him cry for me.”

His smile is infectious. “Thought you’d never ask.” When he tilts you closer to his face and kisses you gently, it’s your turn to be surprised. “I love you.” A tender reminder, something free in the way he says it now that it’s already been said before. Like he wants to say it as many times as he can. Like you’ll understand how much he means it the more you hear him say it.

“I love you, too,” you whisper back.

You both ignore Matthew’s break in protocol as he rushes to explain his sincerity. Joel is in no hurry, knowing that his leisure only works Matthew into more of a frenzy. He walks calmly to the blanket he’d brought in earlier, unwraps it,  and studies the contents for a moment. Opting to forgo anything in the selection, he saunters over to an ever distraught Matthew. The glint of a small blade from Joel’s back pocket catches the light.

“NO NO NO,” Matthew starts chanting, an octave higher reached with every utterance.

You flinch when Joel swings his arm up, barely stopping the momentum of it in enough time for the sharp edge of the blade to tamp directly against Matthew’s cheek. The room is quiet again. A slip of crimson trickles between the bulge of his flesh and the blade. His jaw trembles with the effort of keeping still so as to not deepen the cut.

“The only reason you ain’t laid out and bein’ beat to death right now is because of her, so I suggest you count your fuckin’ lucky stars that she’s the one callin’ the shots,” Joel growls. His fingertips are white from where he grips the hilt of the blade so tight you can practically see the itch to drive it further in.

Matthew’s eyes lock onto your face. Like the rabbit whose leg has been snapped in steel teeth, he feels the walls closing in around him. Something about your presence makes this all the more real somehow, you think. You drop your gaze, suddenly feeling uncertain if you only liked the idea of Matthew suffering and might not be fit to actually witness it. As if sensing your thoughts, Joel flicks the blade closed and returns it to his pocket.

“Now listen real close,” he drawls. Matthew’s face pouches out in little pockets of flesh between Joel’s stretched fingers where they grip his skull. The dig of Joel’s thumb into the new sliced divide of flesh triggers a string of pained gasps. “My girl wants to see you cry, so you’re gonna give her some tears. If ya can’t squeeze ‘em out during some heartfelt somethin’ or other, I’ll just hafta think of somethin’ to motivate ya.” 

Joel watches you from the corner of his eye, waiting for you to take the lead when you’re ready. He senses your uncertainty at commanding the situation just yet and continues.  A fractured cry pierces the air as Joel wedges his finger deeper into the cut. “Lucky for me, I’m feelin’ real creative today.” 

Matthew shakes his head, although you’re not entirely sure which part of it he disagrees with. Joel doesn’t seem to notice or care and continues on. “So how about you start bein’ honest and start from day one. I wanna hear all the fuckin’ mistakes you made and all the shit you took for granted. And god help you if ya start lyin’ or fakin’ some crocodile tears.”

You find Matthew’s eyes again, settled with a defeated acceptance, and he looks scared enough that you think he might actually just tell the truth for once.

“W-When we met– the first time we met–” he sputters. He squeezes his eyes shut like he’s closing himself off from his current predicament, as if he can separate himself from the lies he’s told and his obligation to now recount the story in truth rather than through his lens of manipulation. “When I saw you, I just– I did think they were raiders. Your dad and brother. I did. But. I just thought– I knew I could catch them off guard and take them both out. I just–”

His eyes slip towards Joel, a mistake warranting censure. Joel grips his head in one hand and forces his focus towards you again. “You’re tellin’ her, not me. So keep your eyes on her when you’re talkin’.”

“I wasn’t sure if I was going to kill you, too, or see if maybe you could be useful to me in some way,” Matthew confesses in a bungled rush of words.

“What do you mean?” You swallow down a sick feeling and aren’t sure you want to know the answer. He’d been a liar since the very beginning, and it took you so long to see it. You’d been such a fool for so fucking long. Knowing the extent and depth of the deception only magnified the hurt stemming from this level of betrayal.

“He means he kept you around for a warm, wet hole to stick his dick in,” Joel snarls.

“It wasn’t just that!” Matthew pleads. His eyes nearly slip back to Joel, but he recovers at the last moment. “I swear! If-If it was just that I could’ve just raped you! You were already so beat down it wouldn’t have been hard!”

Your stomach sinks hearing him share this alternate version of events, something so perverse from what you’d always remembered it as. “Am I supposed to be flattered by that, Matthew?” Your voice breaks ever so slightly. You hate showing weakness, especially under the circumstances.

At least Matthew looks appropriately chastened. “I’m telling you the truth! You said you wanted the truth, and I’m doing that! PLEASE!” His lip trembles with unfettered panic. “Maybe I wasn’t some-some knight in shining armor like I had you believe, b-but if I didn’t actually want you I would’ve just dumped you sooner! You have to see that I’m telling the truth about that! I did like having you around!”

“Having me around for what?” you bite back. The look on Matthew’s face says Joel’s assertion about being a “warm, wet hole” wasn’t very far off. “So that’s really it then? Just somebody to use? Somebody to make you feel good? To be, I mean– to be, what? Forever in your debt? Someone who-who was so fucking–” you cut yourself off before the heat pinching in your eyes forms tears. You shake your head side to side to collect your resolve. “Someone who was so fucking grateful to be out of their situation that they wouldn’t even notice all the fucked up parts of their new one?”

Your voice has grown shaky and hoarse at the effort of holding back tears. Matthew’s face twists into something akin to an indignant sneer. “You can’t blame me for every little thing, you know. You didn’t have to follow me around like a lost puppy. You were plenty grown enough if you wanted to—”

The sneer morphs into a grotesque contortion of pain as Joel drives his knife straight into Matthew’s lower thigh and twists. The shocked scream erupting from him is almost as jarring as the brutal drive of the knife springing up blood through his pants.

“Let’s try that again,” Joel drawls. He yanks the blade from Matthew’s leg. The claret drips fall like a quiet rain against a window, and it makes you feel unfamiliar with yourself when you register the sort of calm it brings. The gentle pitter patter of rain against the pane. The soft spill of Matthew’s blood onto his clothes and the floor. Something contentious and changing, something ready to cleanse away the before. 

You sit up straight on the edge of the chair and grip the arms, looking on in revulsion and enthusiasm. The ire churning in your gut unfurls into licking flames of white heat. “A lost puppy you were more than happy to keep on a leash,” you warble back. The edges of your vision blur in equal, indignant fever. You shove yourself up from the chair, legs shaking with the surge of emotion you no longer attempt to subdue. Hot bands of wet splinter over your cheeks, a fit pair with the jagged breaths you pull in. “How many?” you snap. “How many women were you with after you told me you loved me and cared about me?”

Matthew’s mouth hangs open as if it awaits the strangled sob in his throat to dislodge itself soon. “PLEASE,” a gasp of a prayer for your mercy.

“Ain’t a quick learner, are ya?” Joel laughs to himself, calm as ever while he jabs the flat side of his hand directly against Matthew’s windpipe. 

He sputters and coughs before quickly choking out an answer. “I don’t–cough–I don’t know. I have to think!” He tilts his head back, his eyes chasing an answer along the ceiling somewhere. “I-I’m think–jesus christ I don’t know. It has to be….” He trails off with a small rocking motion as he tallies his indiscretions. “I think thirteen,” he finally decides.

“Can you even name them?” you challenge. He makes it through the first handful quickly, but his memory is hazy from when he’d finally given in to the practice of unabashed, serial infidelity. With a promise of “help” from Joel to remember the rest, Matthew manages to focus and list off names that amount to a grand total of seventeen. Seventeen others he’d sought out and prioritized over you, over his commitments and promises to you.

“Why?”

Matthew squeezes his eyes shut tight again in anticipation of the response to his truthful but less than palatable answer. 

“Because I could.”

He waits for the strike or the blade to come and peels his eyes open when it doesn’t. You can see Joel’s entire frame taut beside him, fuming at the gall and arrogance. You signal for Matthew to continue answering.

“I-I knew you’d never do anything about it. I knew you were too scared no one would want you. I knew you wouldn’t ever think of crossing me.”

A physical pain roosts in your chest. He was right. You never did anything about it - not until Natalie. Even after Natalie, you remained boxed in by your own fears of having to present yourself as enough for somebody else, as if anyone would want you. You’d never crossed Matthew because he was something rather than the terrifying prospect of nothing. But none of that mattered when he made you feel so alone anyway. It didn’t matter when he isolated you from even knowing yourself.

“Joel, can I have your knife please?”

His eyebrows shoot up, hands deftly placing the weapon in your open palm. “Gonna show me some techniques, baby?” His smile falls a little when he sees the fearfulness pulling at you again. “Or are you gonna let me join ya?”

“Together,” you agree.

Matthew thrashes in his bindings. Pitiful calls for you to just wait and hold on a minute fall on deaf ears. Joel kicks his chair to the ground and gives a hard push with his boot to position him onto his back. You motion towards the gag, which Joel shoves back into place. You brace yourself over Matthew’s feet and remove his shoes and socks. The sinew of his muscle flexes as he tries in vain to get away from you. Joel kneels behind you and steadies you in his arms. Matthew’s neck is craning, eyes bulged with horror, as he watches helplessly.

“Can you…..?” you trail off, not sure how to ask what you want to ask.

Joel follows your line of sight to the arch of Matthew’s foot. He holds you in the cradle of his arms, back to chest, as he places his hands over yours and the knife clutched there. “I’m right here. You go on ahead, sweet girl.”

He guides your hands forward, releasing his grasp on one side to hold Matthew’s foot in place, and you hold your breath as you both plunge the blade into the soft bend of Matthew’s foot. His screams become clearer through the bunched fabric in his mouth. Your stomach turns at the high pitched agony. Joel frames your body closer to his and talks close to your ear. “You’ve got it, honey. You’re doin’ it. I’m right here. You just keep goin’. I’ve got you, sweet girl. I’ve got you.”

The glittery silver disappears into reddening, wet flesh. Before you can pull it back out, Joel turns your wrist to the side and slows the extraction to a brutal crawl of blade against bone. Your hands shake as you enact the most ruthless savagery you’ve ever rendered. Joel’s hushed whispers of encouragement feel nauseating and thrilling. When the blade finally works its way out completely, you release a hard, shaky exhale.

Matthew is sobbing and writhing, his torment discernible even through his restraints and gag. Joel is unphased, passing praising kisses against your neck and cheeks. “Did so good. So proud of you.”

“I did okay?” you shake out.

He leans forward so you can see each other’s faces fully. “Did perfect, sweet girl. Perfect.”

You take a deep breath and center yourself. “Can you help me do it again?”

Joel grins, a sort of fervid vestige of a bedlamite, and says of course he’ll help you do it again and adds that he’ll help as many times as you want, baby. After you repeat the same measured, excruciating puncture on Matthew’s opposite foot, Joel asks a question you’ve only just decided the answer to. 

“How many times you wanna cut him, honey?” He nuzzles against your earlobe, ever patient and calming. You know if you said you wanted to stop all of this and just walk away, he’d do just that. It makes you want to do it even more.

“I-I think that, um,” you mumble hesitantly. You try to block out Matthew’s heaving shrieks. “I think that some smaller ones for the rest. I think, maybe, fifteen smaller ones should make it–”

“–seventeen,” Joel finishes with a sinister chuckle. “Knew I had me a clever one. You’re really somethin’ else, sweet girl.”

You almost chicken out as you start to feel ill inflicting your twisted punishment, a slice into his flesh for each time he strayed from you. Joel as always helps you through it and steadies the blade to create fifteen superficial but sizable slits across the expanse of Matthew’s body from bottom to top. By the final cut, his eyes are far off and fixed on a spot above your heads. Joel jerks the chair upright and wrenches him out of his dissociative escape.

“Wake up, prick,” he snaps. A smack of his palm against the side of Matthew’s head gets his eyes focused on you again. Somehow there’s still the resonance of hatred in his gaze, a burning, putrid animosity held for you. The vitriol that comes into the centrifuge of his sight on you makes goosebumps ripple over your skin.

What feels like hours has in reality only been minutes. The encumbrance of violence has tired you quickly, and you briefly wonder how on earth people can maintain rabid, cruel tendencies for years, even decades. How they aren’t shriveled into a heap after 5 minutes of it. Then you remember, some people thrive on it. For some, it’s the only thing that swells their blood. People like Matthew who can’t seem to stray far from it without it coming back tenfold in its consuming appetite for destruction.

Your stomach burns and clenches. This is not the path you are meant to travel. There’s something decidedly wrong about it all, and you wish you could focus more on Matthew finally getting what’s been a long time coming. Instead, you avert your eyes from his, away from the splinters of torn tissue you’d carved into him.

“Hey.” Joel’s soft voice calls you from your freefall. You look over to find him already watching you, carefully pinpointing each minutia of emotion you can’t keep from breaking through. “C’mere.”

You readily shrink into his middle, his arms coming up to cage you into him. A few deep breaths of him block out the heavy, stale air of the room that’s whirling with the metallic daub of fresh blood. You let him guide you to sit in the lounge chair in his lap. You slump against his warm, broad body. Your head lolls to the side. You feel like you could just shut down right now and sleep for four months straight.

“Lemme help you relax.” The words barely register until the paired action of his hand skimming underneath your waistband catches you up immediately. Your body tenses as you turn your head to look at him. A soft, playful smile graces his lips. His fingertips dip down lower. Your lids flutter closed. Why did this feel so good in such a gruesome environment? How did this feel so germane after all the atrocities you’d just committed against another human? Nevertheless, Joel’s touch is a calming weight, settling over you in an instant.

“Gonna take these off, honey.” The scratch of denim and cotton against your legs is the beginning of your body fully switching over into corporeal awareness instead of the tumultuous sea of your mind. A whiny choke gets caught in your throat when you feel Joel’s hands against your bare skin.

“I know, I know,” he soothes. He spreads your legs across his lap, knees hooked over his thighs. Your curiosity gets the better of you when you wonder what Matthew’s face looks like. 

Cold. Callous. His eyes keep flashing to the cradle of your thighs, spread and displayed.

“Messy baby,” Joel hums with a spark of humor. You aren’t sure what he means until you see the bright blood on his fingertips. “I like you messy,” he grunts, cupping your pussy against his palm. 

“Joel,” you start to protest. As you stare at the menstrual blood glistening on your inner thighs, you realize the gut cramping and sick feeling you’ve been experiencing over the past hour could only partially be blamed on all the torment you’d been inflicting on Matthew. 

“Knock it off,” he warns, sounding stern and resolute, when you squirm against him. You whimper and give in immediately. There’s not much fight left in you when it comes to Joel, not with all the pinpricking blooms of revenge taking to you so steadfastly. He groans against you as he sinks his fingers inside your entrance. His other hand has skirts underneath your top, toying lazily with your hardening buds.

“Gonna let him watch just like that first time,” he husks. His excitement is palpable against you, seeping into you like an osmotic, erogenous stimulant. You can feel him thick and ready beneath you. You lift yourself higher for his fingers to go deeper. He wordlessly complies and drinks in your feeble moan.

“God do you remember how fuckin’ smug he was that day? Now look at him.”

You heed his invitation and focus your hazy attention on Matthew. His eyes are glossy and bloodshot. His nose is dripping. There are patches of bright new blood and auburn, oxidizing blood all over his body. There’s a mixture of dried and fresh tears streaking his face.

“Pathetic piece of shit,” Joel laughs under his breath. He hooks his fingers into you and moves his hand back and forth in quick motions, his palm pressing firmly against your clit. Your legs clamp together reflexively, but Joel pries them back open. You pin the weight of your shoulders against his chest, arching up from where you sit in his lap.

“Give it to me. Come on, baby. I can feel it. You’re right there–yeah, come on–there you go.”

A white heat scorches through your lower belly just as you reach your peak. You’re a writhing mess against Joel, who holds you loosely against his chest. A warm pool of wet gathers on his hand and fingers, bright red mixed in with your slick. Your chest feels hot and prickly as you catch your breath. Already so awash in your afterglow, you list to the side where Joel props you gently against the back of the chair. 

The entire front of his pants are flecked in smudges of scarlet. He twists and turns his hand in the light, admiring the catch of it against the mixture of fluids. He smiles to himself, stands, and saunters to Matthew, whose eyes grow larger the closer Joel gets. Thick bright red blood coating his hand is all the more evident when he flexes it into a fist.

“Bet you thought so many times about seein’ blood pour outta her,” he muses in a dangerously calm voice. “Bet you wanted to be the one to make that happen. Crack her in the skull. Cut her open. Shoot her. Huh?”

Matthew is still as a statue. You find yourself hanging onto Joel’s every word as well, mesmerized and head crooked to the side to witness whatever was going to happen next. Dissatisfied with his question going unanswered, Joel takes his clean hand to grip around Matthew’s sweaty, grimy hair and yanks him to the side. “HM?”

“Yes!” Matthew coughs and begins to cry again. “Yes, I thought about it!”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Joel's entire broad frame is rigid with fury. “You wanted her blood so bad, you can have it.” The high pitched impact of Joel’s drenched hand across Matthew’s cheek practically echoes in the enclosed space. Fresh tears carve a clean line through the smear of your blood on his face. Joel slaps him again. Again and again and so many times you lose count. His face is covered in you.

Matthew had wanted you dead. He’d wanted your blood on his hands. He felt that’s what you owed him. Joel saw to it that the “debt” was repaid, just not how Matthew had envisioned it. It was a due reward for what he’d craved, and it sent a surge of righteous anger through every nerve ending in your body. Joel pauses for a moment to check in on you.

You bend your head slowly in approval. “More,” you whisper.

The million kilowatt, manic grin that brightens Joel’s entire face makes you smile shyly in return. There was something akin to pride there, something that made him swell with it just from you taking control of the situation and taking ownership in this act of vengeance. He loosens some of the restraints binding Matthew to the chair and frees his arms and legs.

With every ounce of energy he has available, Matthew lunges at you, an ineffective movement with his injuries slowing him down. It’s a stumble and a longshot. You’re not even sure why he attempted it. Joel doesn’t look surprised in the slightest. In fact, he looks like he was hoping Matthew might do something so incredibly stupid just to have a reason to further maim him. He snatches him up and sends him flying into the closest wall, crumpling into a heap. Just when Matthew manages to brace himself against the wall and sit upright, Joel’s boot slams square into his back, knocking the air from his lungs.

He twitches and gasps for breath that doesn’t come. He still hasn’t caught his breath when Joel finishes stripping him bare, a constellation of slices and gashes and bruises across his body. Joel kicks him again into the middle of the room, pins him to the floor with a knee between the shoulders. The deft movement of his fingers is mesmerizing as they work over the freshly tied knots around Matthew’s elbows and wrists. Alleviation doesn’t come when Joel stands, fully clothed with a hard foot planted into Matthew’s naked back. Something about this exhibition sends a wave of heat between your thighs.

“If you try that shit again, I won’t be as patient. You understand?”

“Yes,” Matthew sputters against the ground.

“Now, keep your arms out in front of you just like that, and if I so much as see ‘em twitch I will get to flayin’ you with a blunt knife, startin’ from your fingertips.”

Matthew makes a noise that you think can only convey a distraught understanding. You inspect the loops and knots across his body, never truly trusting that it’s enough to keep him contained. Before you work yourself up with worry, Joel walks past you to the pile of tools, plucks one of them up, and returns to your side with it. A flash of light catches against the head of a hammer.

“Let’s show this bastard what puttin’ his hands ‘round your neck gets him.”

Just like he had with the knife, Joel braces himself against you and positions you over Matthew’s outstretched hands, cupping the handle of the tool in your grasp. A visible tremor shakes Matthew’s entire body, but he doesn’t dare move his arms despite knowing what’s coming. To his credit, he doesn’t scream too loud with the first several blows of the metal tool against the delicate bones in his fingers. They bend in unnatural contours after each strike, bits of stark white peeking through gnarled, ripped sinew and flesh.

The shrill din in your ears drowns out his suffocated gasps. Even when Joel helps you stand again, your knees stuck in a tremulous lock, you barely make out his instruction to drive your foot down as hard as you can. His arm curls insistently against your ribcage, holding you upright, coaxing you into delivering the violent stampede of your sole into Matthew’s already ruined appendages. The faint, sickening crunch with each strike, the soft gurgle of blood and liquid as his bone tears through where it hasn’t been crushed already. You start to feel lightheaded and sick when Joel finally pulls you away and sets you in the chair again.

Sound comes slowly back into focus, but you don’t hear what sorts of things Joel is saying to Matthew as he crouches over his pitiful, slumped body. You can only imagine it’s the adrenaline keeping him going right now. Your expression pinches when you see Joel free Matthew of all the ties he’d carefully formed not too long ago. Or maybe it had been longer than you thought. This entire room existed in a vacuum as far as your mind was concerned. It felt as though nothing existed outside these four walls. All that existed was here and now in this moment of wrath and retribution.

Joel’s hands are warm against your face. “Hey there,” he says softly, quietly, with a small smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. He’s bent in front of you, eyes traveling across your expression and taking in every indication of your wellbeing. “Remember if it’s too much, we can–”

“No,” you grit out. The resolve to see this through gives another wind of life. “Keep going.”

Joel’s eyebrow ticks up. “You sure about that? You were lookin’ a little pale back there.”

You shrug. “Not used to this. That’s all.”

He gives you a sympathetic grin and rubs his hands along your bare thighs. You’d forgotten you were only half-dressed. “You promised you’d tell me if it’s too much.”

“It’s not if I’m with you.”

His whole face softens, tender and visceral in the way it reaches out to you and pulls you closer. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” You rest your hands over his where his thumbs rub small circles. “So tell me what we do next. Help me finish this.”

And with no pretense, he ushers you up from the seat and slowly over to where Matthew lays quietly on the floor. “You wanna know what I told him?” he breathes into your ear. The wet of Matthew’s eyes glisten from where he looks up at you. The fabric gag is in his mouth again, although he is entirely unbound. You wonder what it is that Joel said to have him not daring to move again. “Told him he had to come first or I’d start breakin’ the rest of him, piece by piece, bone by bone.”

“Come first? What do you–”

“Hold onto me,” is the only warning you get before Joel is crouched behind you, reaching a hand between your legs and pulling you backward against him. Your body naturally falls open, limbs askew, as you lean into him. His fingers are thick where they breach into your bloodied entrance, still wet with your earlier release.

You quickly figure out he’s working you at such an odd angle with a distinct purpose. The pleasant but unmistakable friction against your g-spot has your legs shaking in anticipation.

“Better get to work. She’s already gettin’ close,” Joel taunts.

To your horror, Matthew drags his mangled hands across the soft length between his thighs in some warped deference to Joel’s warning that he has to reach climax before you do. The gag in his mouth isn’t substantial enough to drown out his anguished sobs. A harsh pinch to your nipple snaps your attention back to Joel. “You focus right here, sweet girl,” he husks. “You show me how good I make you feel, huh?”

You squeak out a moan when he rolls your other nipple between his nimble touch. “Ohmygod,” you breathe.

“Mmmhhmmmm,”  he chuckles low against your temple. “ Mmmhhmmm, yeah, there she is.”

 His fingers work you faster and harder until you’re right on the cusp, closed off the rest of the world with just Joel’s voice goading you to finish. You come with a hard jerk and grab onto his solid forearm as he positions you over Matthew. It comes out of you in steady spurts, the debauched splash of your fluids landing onto Matthew’s bare body and into the valleys and gashes you’d carved into it.

He seizes up, eyes slipping into the back of his skull. You don’t have a moment to consider the acidity of it in his open wounds, how it must make it burn and aggravate the already sensitive gashes, before Joel’s hands are everywhere on you. His voice is urgent when he says he has to have you right now. You say yes because even though your body can’t take any more of it, you want whatever he’s willing to give. You want all of him, to be swallowed whole by his want, to cave into the summon of his body and his mind.

The metallic clink of his belt and rough shove of fabric. You’re practically floating. He lines himself up and pushes in, already panting and sounding close. You cling to him where you can as he begins thrusting. The split of him stings in all the best ways, and you welcome the anchoring sensation of it. “Feel so–hhngg god- feel so fuckin’ good,” he chokes.

Your feeble moan only encourages his steady pace, filling you and spreading you and molding you to him. “I want it inside,” you whimper.

Joel gives a pained groan at your request, his hips stuttering for a moment at the visual. “Yeah? Want me to come inside you again? You like that? Like being full of me?”

You make some unintelligible noise that you hope conveys your affirmation. His gravelly moan works you towards another climax, but the roll of his hips begins to falter. You know he’s close. His body drapes over yours and pushes you both closer to the ground, nearer to the strung out stare that Matthew has in between squeezing his eyes shut tight as they’ll go.

“Oh fuck, please, Joel.” You want to be marked by him, want to be hued by the color of him spilling over into you, the tones and shades of him bleeding into you and staining into one flush of congruency. “Please, I need you,” you cry out.

He empties into you with a ragged moan as you clutch to him and find purchase with your other hand against the erratic rise and fall of Matthew’s chest. The warmth of Joel surrounds you and spills out of you with each sloppy thrust until he’s laying a path of lax, wet kisses along the column of your throat. “Love you. I love you.” He says it over and over like a mantra, breathless and in reverence that you’re his.

And you love him back more fiercely than you might ever be able to put into words. You look down at the man who’d wronged you all the while feeling the protective presence of Joel behind you. This is how it was meant to turn out, you think. A bookend to the first time you and Joel came together. A thought about that first time strikes you.

“I wanna do it like that first time,” you whisper with a turn of your head.

Joel hums in approval and gathers you closer to him. His hand slips lower in silent understanding, cupping your sex as he drags himself out of you. The mixture of his cum, your slick, and your period blood rush out of your entrance and into his curved palm. Joel flicks it, and you watch as it lands with a wet slop against Matthew’s face. Far from the fearful retreat you’d dwelled in so long, a righteous indignation swells in your chest. You lean into it with Joel’s help, letting him guide you into this new side of yourself, one that’s safe to explore and execute with him by your side.

You don’t feel the need to slap Matthew more than once with the handful of fluids. Joel is only satisfied once he’s struck him several times more and spit in his face for good measure. You aren’t sure if Matthew has finally given up or if the blood loss is starting to catch up with him. His responses are coming shorter and weaker.

Joel gets himself situated again before helping you get dressed. You’re sure it’s a sight to see, all the blood and grime and fluids covering you and your clothes. When you tell him you want Matthew brought outside, Joel gives you a dubious look but doesn’t question it. You look on as Matthew hobbles naked up the stairway, down the hallway, and past a curious John and Tommy who follow along outside. You glance around for what you need, finding it on the most level table in the front living area, and head into the cool night air.

No one asks about you and Joel’s disheveled, bloodied state. All eyes are on you for direction. What happens to Matthew is your call, just like Joel said. He holds Matthew at gunpoint, almost comical in the level of overkill. He’s bleeding, naked, and struggling to stay upright. Even if everyone understands he’s not going to survive, you and Matthew both know that the last thing he can keep is his pride and die alone without anyone around to witness such a pathetic ending.

“I know that you are probably going to die out there.” You look up the side of the steep ravine and off to the side where darkness and wilderness lie in wait. Everyone shifts at the insinuation that you will give Matthew the gift of privacy in his defeated, lonely death. “But that doesn’t change the fact that you haven’t asked for my forgiveness. So, I’m offering you the chance to make that right.”

Matthew whimpers, not yet free to die alone and away from prying eyes.

“Beg,” Joel snaps –  a singular, harsh warning.

Matthew meets your eye. He looks genuinely remorseful. “I never–I never deserved you.” You give him the time he needs to power through. He’s already lost enough blood to make just speaking and holding himself upright at the same time physically taxing. You can’t imagine the mental toll. “I know if you told them to kill me, they would.” He pauses to glance Joel’s direction. “I could’ve become a different person. A better person.” He sputters and coughs again. “ You could’ve done that for me - helped me get there.”

Tears flow. Real tears. Sincere tears from a monstrous man. A man who seems to have finally come to realize things could’ve been different if he wanted them to be. He sniffs and coughs and whimpers.

“I can’t ever change how I was—” he pauses to take a wheezing gulp of air “—I can’t go back and undo it. I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head, fat lines of tears splashing off his face.

“I know your heart is– it’s the biggest– you have so much love—”

He pauses again and steadies his labored breaths.

“If anyone had enough heart to forgive someone like me, I know it’s you.”

He holds your gaze, steady and unwavering. He means it.

“Please, please. Forgive me.”

You look at the brutalized, broken man before you, weeping and begging for your exoneration. You glance at Joel who is already watching you with a pensive expression. You look back down at Matthew. He hasn’t looked away from you as he awaits his fate.

“You haven’t earned my forgiveness, and you never will.” 

Your scathing verdict hits colder than the nighttime air. Matthew’s eyes bug out, wide and terrified. You think you hear Tommy laugh. “Put him in the pit,” you command. You jerk your head towards the unlit firepit at the edge of the dense treeline.

John and Joel happily cart Matthew, flailing and fighting with the vigor that is somehow miraculously still fueling his will to live, as Tommy trains the gun on him. They heave him into the hollowed out recess and await your next decree. Matthew is screaming and clawing at the walls. You think if he weren’t so badly injured he would be able to easily get himself out. His current state, however, renders him confined to the small circular space. Your hands shake as you reach into your pocket for the item you grabbed on your way out. A silent mass butts up against your back and steadies your hand. Joel.

“I got you,” he reassures you quietly, softly.

He holds the package in place in your left hand and guides the match in your right hand across the raised pattern of the strike pad. A flash of white settles into a warm orange burn on the end of the match.

“I’ve got you, baby. Go ahead.”

You lean over the pit, over Matthew’s desperate calls for you to not do this, and drop the flame. John grabs something from the side and hands it to Joel. Accelerant. He concentrates the first few spurts onto Matthew’s body before dashing a smaller amount over your flame. He pulls you both back as the fire swirls and shoots and swells from the pit. You close your eyes and lean back into Joel as you all stand and listen to the agonized screams coming from the bottom of the cavity.

Joel pulls you closer to him, pulls you down with him to rest on the stump nearby. The sounds of Matthew’s demise come slower and slower as the blaze consumes him. You turn your body, cradling into Joel’s embrace, and nestle your head against the crook of his neck. It blocks out some of the noise. He dips his head and fills your mouth with the slip of his hot tongue. You drink him in, open wider for him, let him into whatever space of yours he wants. It’s all his. You’re both each other’s. The kiss slows until it’s just lips grazing back and forth. A quiet comfort. A soft soothing. A safe embrace.

“Did I do okay?” you ask in a hush. Joel hears what you’re really asking: Did I do the right thing?

“You did the best you could with what you had, darlin’.”

You nod, mulling over his sage take on your decision to end Matthew’s life. “And was my best good enough?” The last bit comes out in a sort of choke, your emotions getting the better of you.

“You are good enough,” Joel is quick to emphasize. “And it’s high time you started livin’ the life you deserve.”

“I only want that if it’s with you.”

“And I’m up for the challenge of makin’ up for lost time,” he replies with a soft smile.

The tortured cries have died away, lost into the high pitched sound of the wet spots being scorched from the insides of the logs.

“But what about Rachel and the baby?” You fiddle with the button on your shirt. Even though they were better off without Matthew, you still felt the guilt of leaving her with the burden of birthing and raising a child on her own. When he doesn’t respond right away, you turn to Joel. His body is tense with the knowledge of something, another hidden truth.

“Tell me,” you urge him in a hush. “We’ve made it this far. You won’t scare me. Whatever happens, we’re in this together.”

He pulls you closer, some form of self-soothing perhaps, and relents more of the endless dedication he holds for you. “He has no business havin’ a bloodline.” He’s quiet for a moment, weighing something in his mind. Finding the right words. You wait for him, just like he always waits for you. “Won’t be too long now before she turns up to the clinic to find out she’s lost it.”

Lost it.

Lost it?

“You… what does—”

“She won’t know any different. Prolly chalk it up to the stress of everythin’. And she wasn’t hurt in the process, neither, so don’t go thinkin’ I’d–”

“Who did it?”

Joel finally looks at you. “Somebody in the greenhouses owed me. Got a knack for medicinal herb stuff.”

“So–So, what? They made her take something–”

“Nobody made her do anythin’,” he’s quick to correct. “It was mixed in with her food rations. Had the main dose of it prepared in a cafeteria meal she had, too, just in case.” He shrugs. “ Wanted to be sure.”

You swallow hard, not letting the mix of emotions bleed through to your expression. You don’t want Joel to think you don’t trust him, that you’re scared of him, scared of someone who was capable of such a thing - not after everything you’d been through.

“So, you– whoever it was, they gave her something to make the pregnancy fail?” You already know the answer, but you want him to say it.

“Yes.”

You nod, awash in your thoughts and mixed feelings over this splintered arm of a fucked up situation. Joel is unmoving beside you, waiting in anticipation of your blessing or reprimand. 

“No part of him exists anymore,” you say. It’s a plain observation, but you both sit in the spoken impact of it. “No part of him exists anymore, and the world is better for it.”

Your body feels weak and raw, but it’s unlike the weight of stress and danger that’s been plaguing you for so long. No, it’s the fragile heap of newness, the tentative foray of new life. Joel holds you close, coddles you, as you both stare wordlessly into the blazing fire. He watches you from the corner of his eye, only shifting when you meet his gaze. Thoughtful. Quiet.

“You ready to go home?”

Home. You smile at the thought of it, the house you now share, but know that home is truly wherever you and Joel are together. He grins back in understanding.

“Yeah,” you softly sigh, content and sleepy. “Let’s go home, Joel.”

Thank you thank you thank you for all the love and patience with this series! I've poured so much into this to get it right and tell the sort of story I feel deserves to be told. I am so proud of it (and that I finally finished it!), and I hope that it can heal parts of you as it did for me when I was writing it.

Many thanks to @jupiter-soups and @ghoulettesinspace for beta'ing and helping see this story come to a close.

Thank you for reading. I love you all. 💜

catch ya later, ♥Puddles♥

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cont'd in comments

#fic: whistle in the dark #joel miller x oc #joel miller fic #pedro pascal characters #cuckolding is romantic #tlou #joel miller tlou

[sorrowfulrosebud]

I know damn well for a fact that Bakugou is deeply frightened of contortionists and double jointed ppl (me). Imagine a reader who’s a total cunt about it 😈😈

The UA’s first years talent show was a complete hit, and being the shy creature you were, you offered to work behind the scenes with Kirishima and the others. It was a total success, with rapturous applause and cheers. However, due to your shy nature, it wasn’t until you had snuck off to the haunted house team that someone had noticed you had gone.

SFX had always been a nifty little hobby of yours; hours spent in front of your bedroom mirror deftly applying latex and fake blood proved to be very useful during Halloween parties, and even day to day practice. That and the fact that you were a practicing contortionist made Shinsou and the other members of Class 1-B sought you out.

“Pleaseeeeeee Kachaan!! The haunted house sounds like so much funnnn!” Kaminari whined, pulling on Bakugou’s shirt. Katsuki knocked his hand away with crackling hands.

“No fuckin’ way, spark plug! It’s a fucking waste of time,” he yelled back. Kaminari glared at him before his face shifted into one of a playful foxes.

“Oooooooh? Is the mighty Kachaan of the Bakugou’s a (dare I say) PUSSY?!” Kaminari exclaimed, emphasising the last word. Katsuki smacked the back of his head in irritation. Carmine eyes glared daggers into the other blond’s skull as Sero slung his arm around his friend’s shoulders.

“Pluuuuus, I heard resident cutie (Y/N) volunteered to be a scare actor. She’s so shy, so it’s difficult to imagine. I bet she looks adorable, like a cute lil zombie who didn’t quite turn,” Sero purred, sleazy grin already applied. Katsuki contemplated before grunting in annoyance.

“Shut the fuck up, elbows and dunce face! Damnit, can’t believe I’m gonna fucking do this,” he grumbled, shoving his hands in his pockets and stomping to the grounds.

After paying for the tickets for all three of his friends (“I’m sorry Bakubro, my wallet is in my other trousers!”), the trio made their way through the house.

Shinso and the others popped out, managing to scare Denki and Hanta with ease. Denki let out the occasional scream and bolt of lightening, causing Bakugou and Sero to smack the back of his head.

The overall ambiance was something Bakugou wasn’t impressed with; cheap lights, a shitty background soundtrack and the few odd jumpscares from his underlings. He would rather slit his throat than admit it, but he was looking forward to seeing you. You had a natural talent for scaring people; being shy and quiet made it easy to sneak up on your friends, intentional or not. So he was intrigued to see how you would pull out the stops.

The final room was cast in a deep purple glow with a large box in the middle. A metal handle was attached to the side of said box, completely still.

Bakugou rolled his eyes and tried for the exit, only to widen his eyes at the locked door.

“T-this isn’t funny man! Open the door!” Denki begged, being scared too much today.

“I’m fucking trying! Stupid thing is jammed!” He grunted in effort. Just then, a creepy song started to play from the music box. The tune of “Pop goes the weasel” filtered through the air as the boys watched in slight alarm.

The music stopped just before the chorus of the song. A slight creak came from the box. A blackened foot crept out, it’s pair soon following.

Your legs tangled themselves out of the box with grace before you manipulated them in different knots and pretzels. Your head snapped to the boys, letting out a terrifying screech as you crab-walked to them with dizzying speed.

A loud scream was let out, but it was not from Denki or Sero. It was from the blonde who was trembling and sparking his fists. Denki had jumped into Sero’s arms as the two controlled their hyperventilating.

You stared at the lads before cackling your ass off.

“OH MY GOD, WAS THAT YOU BAKUGOU?!?” You couldn’t believe it! The stoic faced blond who had stared death in the face more times than a 16 year old should, was afraid of a little gymnastics routine. Bakugou calmed himself down, steeling his nerves before glaring at you with the intensity of a thousand suns.

“Not. A. Fucking. Word. To. ANYONE. Understand?” He hissed through gritted teeth. He couldn’t believe his crush was able to scare him so badly, just by walking on your legs and back weirdly.

Your laughter subsided as you looked at him properly. For some reason, you felt at ease. You rearranged your limbs so you were standing properly. Your newly confident nature gave you the extra push.

“I’ll tell you what. To apologise for scaring you so bad, I’ll take you to that spicy mapo tofu place. Say, Saturday at 1?” You tilted your head, makeup still unnerving your crush.

“Tch, fine. But you’re paying,” he agreed, completely forgetting about his entourage who were staring at him wide-eyed.

You nodded and smiled widely, false fangs glinting in the purple light. You went back to the box, placing yourself in with ease. The door behind the boys clicked, leaving them to tumble themselves out and blink into the sun. It was silent for a whole 15 seconds before Denki opened his mouth.

“OH MY GOD, KACHAAN HAS A DATE!” Denki yelled before Bakugou slapped a hand over his mouth.

“Not a fucking word about today. Understand me sparky?” He hissed. Denki nodded in intimidation.

“Good, now piss off. I need to go get something,” he muttered, pushing past his friends with his phone in his hand.

Boneless Banquet 🥨

Pay for dessert and promise to never do that shit again, and I’ll pay for the next meal

#bnha x reader #bakugou x reader #bakugou fluff #bakugou x reader fluff #bakugou #Bakugou Katsuki #he hates contortionist

[flower1622]

Percabeth lyrics

(The song Him & I belongs to G-Eazy)

Percy:

My '65 speeding up the PCH, a hell of a ride

They don't wanna see us make it, they just wanna divide

2017 Bonnie and Clyde

Wouldn't see the point of living on if one of us died, yeah

Got that kind of style everybody try to rip off

YSL dress under when she takes the mink off

Silk on her body, pull it down and watch it slip off

Ever catch me cheating, she would try to cut my (ha-ha-ha)

Crazy, but I love her, I could never run from her

Hit it, no rubber never would let no one touch her

Swear we drive each other, mad, she be so stubborn

But, what the fuck is love with no pain, no suffer?

Intense, this shit, it gets dense

She knows when I'm out of it like she could just sense

If I had a million dollars or was down to ten cents

She'd be down for whatever, never gotta convince (you know?)

Annabeth:

Cross my heart, hope to die

To my lover, I'd never lie (I love you baby)

He said, be true, I swear I'll try

In the end, it's him and I

He's out his head, I'm out my mind

We got that love, the crazy kind

I am his, and he is mine

In the end, it's him and I

Him and I

Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh

Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh

In the end, it's him and I

Him and I

Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh (yeah)

Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh

In the end, it's him and I

Percy:

We turn up, mobbin' 'til the end of time

Only one who gets me, I'm a crazy fuckin' Gemini

Remember this for when I die

Everybody dressed in all black, suits and a tie

My funeral will be lit if I

Ever go down or get caught, or they identify

My bitch was the most solid, nothing to solidify

She would never cheat, you'd never see her with a different guy

Ever tell you different, then it's a lie

See, that's my down bitch, see that's my soldier

She keeps that thang-thang if anyone goes there

Calm and collected, she keeps her composure

And she gon' ride for me until this thing over

We do drugs together (together), fuck up clubs together (together)

And we'd both go crazy (crazy) if we was to sever

You know? We keep mobbin', it's just me and my bitch

Fuck the world, we just gon' keep getting rich, you know?

Annabeth:

Cross my heart, hope to die

To you, I've never lied

For you, I'd take a life

It's him and I, and I swear (ayy)

'Til the end I'ma ride wit' you

Mob and get money, get high with you, yeah (ayy)

Cross my heart, hope to die

This is our ride or die

You can confide in me

There is no hiding, I swear

Stay solid, never lie to you

Swear, most likely I'ma die with you, yeah

Cross my heart, hope to die

To my lover, I'd never lie

He said, be true, I swear I'll try

In the end, it's him and I

He's out his head, I'm out my mind

We got that love, the crazy kind

I am his, and he is mine

In the end, it's him and I

Him and I

Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh

Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh

In the end, it's him and I

Him and I

Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh

Whoa-oh-oh-oh-oh

In the end, it's him and I

#percy jackon and the olympians #percy jackson #pjo #pjo tv show #pjo series #heroes of olympus #percy jackson heroes of olympus

[sharkface-daydreams]

No, but, OK- Chilchuck and Church would literally be that joke of not liking each other until the moment they both tell everybody else to shut up at the same time and they share a moment- "We are the same... finally, somebody who GETS me". Tex is legit impressed with the union work Chilchuck has set up, she wants to get in on this, does he need a bodyguard?

Laios and Caboose are vibing. Laios also thinks Locus is So Cool, and they're both socially inept in opposite ways, but in the sense that it kinda fits together.

Tucker is over there trying to hit on Marcille and Falin, no need to be jealous ladies, plenty of him to go around, and he'd never want to ruin such a great friendship, just gals being pals. Kai is also flirting by she Knows.

Grif wants Senshi to adopt him (and Senshi is 100% cool with that, this poor boy is so hungry), and he has to ask Simmons- "Dude, is this how you feel about Sarge? Like, all the time?". Simmons is trying to math-hack all the fantasy rules.

Carolina just killed a dragon (what, like it's hard?). Wash is like- "Well, at least nothing is gonna run over me here in wacky magic land", and then the first car in this world ever hits him. Doc is having a FUN time learning about all the weird flora and fauna here, O'Malley is already trying to become some combination of dark wizard/necromancer (but he's not good at it).

Donut meets Evil Aslan, and is just- "OK, I'm just gonna skip ahead and kill you right now. I've been through this song and dance with demon-gods, I know how it goes".

Lopez can eat living armor. like, just "raw" or whatever.

There. RVB-Dungeon Meshi crossover. I got that out of my system

ok it's still airing so my watch buddy won't watch with me yet and i have yet to sit and read the manga so im taking notes

chilchuck is a chad, got it.

caboose immediately gets a new friend, that tracks XD <3 love that for him

simmons is me in an isekai, i hate this, thank you <3

of COURSE carolina kills a dragon. of course <3 i love that for her ('what like it's hard?' elle woods has done so much for this world thank u goddess 🙏) but wash omg 😭⚰ it would happen to him. someone invents THEE first like motorized soap box derby car and itjust fuckin. smashes his kneecaps and keeps going RIP king 🙏

i love. i love all of this. question for you though. i love the implications of Lopez eating living armor raw which i know nothing about. does this count as cannibalism do you think? or do you think lopez sees himself as the ghost within the shell, separate from his armor? (or do you hc there's an android in the armor? :o i do when it's convenient for fic alsdkjflkfd)

also. this makes me think of something i want to share finally. (ill put under a cut bc adding 13 pics is a lot)

a long time ago when this picrew was first available (it's only patreon now i think? ppl kept stealing the assets💢 and such so the artist got understandably mad and took it off picrew site :( i made... RVB RPG PORTRAITS!!!! (they still have an rpg maker one but its very different)

also dont kill me but its taken me 3 years to realise i didn't make tex 😭

Red Team:

Blue Team: (had to put Church between them or they'd fight ☺)

And the mercs <3

#my writing stuff #kind of #this would be a different fantasy au #we just got a letter #rubykgrant #<33333333333333333333333 ruby i love it ty #sorry it took forever i got it JUST as i was gonna put my phone away and go to sleep last night 😭😭 #but aaaaaaaaaaa i love these im so sad the picrew is gone but im even more mad at fuckers who steal art #dont fucking do that!! #dungeon meshi #am i allowed to put that in this tag? its a crossover #rvb #red vs blue #red vs dungeon #hm. or purple vs dungeon #red vs blue vs dungeon? #aaaaaaaaaaanyway #i think my ritalin kicked in. lol. lmao #FUN RVB THINKS #i just remembered my AU tag 😭

[mactavishwritings]

NFWMB - song inspired fic

Soap x Reader

Fluff

tw: mentions of violence

you two are a team. inseparable.

Captain John Price sat across from Kate Laswell, building a special task force. He pulled the file out that belonged to Kyle.

"Sergeant Garrick."

"Kyle?"

They call him Gaz. He never said anything."

Price nodded before grabbing the next two files with a big smile. "John and (Y/N) MacTavish." He smiled fondly at the photos on both files.

"Siblings?" Price shook his head. "No, married. Both SAS, where they met. He's a sniper - demolitions. She's a weapons and hand-to-hand expert. He goes by Soap and She goes by Widow."

Laswell shook her head. "So why both? Won't that cause issues?"

"Not even remotely. She gets the intel, he covers her back. Nothing touches her when he's watching." Price locked eyes with Laswell, who nodded. "Alright deal."

-

You sighed and tilted your head back, hitting the side of the truck. You were in your tactical gear and your helmet. Your husband sat to your right, also in his tactical gear. His arm was resting around your shoulders. You had just gotten word that the two of you were being recruited for a special task force and had just finished a mission.

"What do you think the Lieutenant is going to be?" You turned your head towards Soap, who just shrugged. "Dunno. Maybe a big softie." He joked and you smiled.

Pulling up to the airport, Soap jumped out of the truck and turned, helping you out after. You both turned to see a man in a skull mask. "Must be the L.T." Soap smiled as you heard Sheppard introduced you two to Ghost over the comms. You smiled at him as Soap lightly punched the man's shoulder. "Let's get ourselves a win, yeah, L.T.?"

"Fuckin' hell." You laughed, looking back at Ghost. "Don't worry, it only gets better."

-

Graves blocked the entry way to Alejandro's compound. You stood besides Soap, who hand one hand on his gun and one hand in front of you. You had your hand on your gun and you looked between Ghost and Soap.

Alejandro charged towards Graves and violence broke out. Soap immediately jumped in front of you. You whipped around, going back to back with him. You immediately started shooting, trying to take down some of the shadows. You heard Soap groan loudly in pain and you felt him fall back on you. You gasped and planted your feet, supporting him. "WIDOW! SOAP! RUN!" You heard Ghost shout and you nodded, feeling Soap grab your middle.

He pulled you behind him and he pushed you down a hill and he followed after. You pointed your gun pasted Soap and shot down some of the Shadows that tried to follow after.

You pulled Soap's arm over your shoulder and tried your best to support his weight. "You hit?" He grunted, dragging himself along, trying to move as quick as he could. "No, but you were." You pulled him into an alley, resting him against a wall. "I'll be fine, doll. We gotta find Ghost." You switched through different stations, hoping to find a clear one, mainly finding Shadows talking about you, Soap, and Ghost and needing to find you three.

You felt yourself start to tear up, frustrated. "Now, dolly, please." Soap tried to reach out, but winced. You let your head drop down to rest on his shoulder before finally finding a clear channel. "Ghost? Ghost? This is Bravo-176. Copy?" You tried to speak clearly, but your voice was shaky from the tears.

"C'mon. Let's get moving." Soap kissed your cheek a couple times before you helped him stand again. Soap grunted and you two started moving again. It took a bit but Ghost did get into contact with you two. He told you he was held up at a church in the center of town.

"Meet there. Find a way out of town, copy?" You answered Ghost, who replied with a simple 'copy' and you got moving. "I love you, you know that right?" Soap mumbled, as the two of you moved through a building. You chuckled lowly. "That is why we got married, is it not?"

"Yeah it is. You know that I would never let anythin' touch you, right? I would actually die before that happened." Soap turned his head towards and you slightly paused. "You remind me every mission, darling. Let's keep moving." You pull him along.

You two soon reached the church but it was littered with Shadows. "Ghost! Let's go!" You shouted Ghost ran towards you two. Soap shot at the Shadows as Ghost hopped the fence. You three sprinted towards a truck that Ghost had pointed to. You shoved Soap into the passenger seat before jumping into the bed of the truck. You quickly recovered and started shooting at the remaining Shadows.

"Be careful, doll!" Soap shouted, trying to reach out to you, but Ghost held him back. "I got this, Johnny!" You shouted. Ghost drove the truck through the streets. "Jesus Ghost! My wife is back there!" Soap shouted, turning his body to face you, the back window had been shattered by bullets so he was able to reach you finally. "Johnny, calm down!" Soap grabbed his gun and stabilized it on the back of the truck. "Like hell I will."

He started shooting with you. Soon, all the Shadows became just that. You felt your body collapsed against the back of the truck, feeling the adrenaline finally wear off. You felt a hand on your shoulder and you grabbed it immediately. "You good back there?" You hear your Lieutenant ask and you grunted in response. "In one piece. No hits."

Arriving at Alejandro's safe house, you jumped out of the back and met the other two. After getting inside, you dragged Soap off to patch his wound. It was silent as you worked on the wound, it always ways. You hated when he got hurt and he knew it.

"I know what you're thinking, but I rather it you than me." Soap whispered to you and you shook your head. "You know me." He laughed.

"I know you very well and you know that I don't think having to patch you up, so if you can please not get hurt, I would appreciate it." You leaned down and kissed him gently.

"Sorry doll, but ain't nothing fucks with my baby."

~

this one did not turn out as well as I'd hope but still let me know what you think!

#johnny soap mactavish x reader #johnny soap mactavish #soap mactavish #soap x reader #john soap mactavish #johnny mactavish x reader #johnny mactavish #soap mw2 #soap fluff #soap imagine #mw2 #mw2 x reader #mw2 fanfic #modern warfare #call of duty #soap cod #codmw2022 #Spotify

[scandeniall]

Nvm this interlude

A/n: I post a solid 3 times a year at this point but I’m back at it again with rn rnb!hq agenda. Iwa is Bryson coded inspired by/quoted song. F!reader. Black coded but no real descriptors (mention of changing hair )

Previous rnb!hq pieces: 1 2

Warnings: as usual 21+, language, suggestive, not edited and from someone who hasn’t written on here since Feb (thanks for the love on the last post tho!)

musician!Iwa pens several songs about you long before yall are ever together. He has wanted you for the longest time fr, like damn near from the day he met you. So when yall become friends and ultimately end up “talking” he makes his intentions real clear through not only his words but in his music. Too bad he’s inconsistent.

“Come here,” Hajime pats his lap motioning for you to sit. “Want you to hear this track.” You couldn’t help but eye him with curiosity from your place on the other side of the couch. He’d come back into town a week now and just now found his way over to your place. With you lack of movement he repeated the action, this time reaching for your hand to assist.

“I can listen from over here.”

Hajime can’t help but let out a low laugh. “Just want you to be a bit more comfortable” You don’t miss the way his eyes trail over your attire. Sleep shorts and a tight tank. Once again he reaches for you, a smirk gracing his features when you oblige.

Once seated one of his hands immediately finds itself on you. Slipped under your tank resting heavily on your skin, his other hand reaches for his phone to hit play”

I got thing to say, I gotta talk to you

Touch down, I just touched down

Guess I gotta start the hunt down

“Its an interlude” he hums out bobbing his head at his work. You nod as you continue listening.

Tryna be a better man

Came to tell you that we gotta stop fuckin’ round

"But you look good, I wanna fuck now

Make these other bitches seem basic"

Those words are said directly into your ear his hand starting to massage at the skin around your stomach.

You a goddess you gracious

The other hand that had been holding the phone comes to the side of your face forcing eye contact for the next part.

Im tryna stop you from being famous

From rappers knowing what your name is

I’m barely famous and I hate it.

Iwa maintains eye contact for the remainder of the track. The two of you sit in silence after the song in. His hands running softly at your skin as you sigh.

“What you think. It’s about you.” You nod knowingly trying to formulate the words. He’s essentially acknowledged the back and forth yall had been having for the last several months.

He comes, fucks you and goes all ghost while insisting he cares about you a lot. He knows it’s selfish but can’t stay away from you. He also notice you started taking longer to hit him back up and that you’d been going out more with your friends. Looking as good as ever he couldn’t help but heart react as you’d show your body off in the mini skirt or when you’d switch up your hair and nails.

“I’m glad you also know that you’re fucked up” you scoff attempting to get off his lap.

He doesn’t let you nor does he let the words cut “I been scared. Scared to commit, but I havent slept with anyone since we started”

That revelation causes you to freeze in surprise and gives him the chance to help you shift so that you could face him. Like magnets his hands find their way back onto your body, settling on each one of your thighs.

“Haiji-“

“I’m serious (Y/N). It’s been you since the day we met and I’ve been telling you this. But I know if I step out with you your life is gonna change. You know all the shit that’s been going on with me.”

The seriousness in which he speaks to you makes you listen. You’re usually privy to a different side of him. The joking side, the one who isn’t hiding from interview requests and performing on dark stages.

“Of course i know. And that’s why since the day we met I’ve been careful. But Hajime it hurts when you come over here pretend you care and then it’s weeks before I even get a simple text back.”

He’s listening to your words carefully. Thinking. He knows that no matter his response there’s no going back to how you were.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles taking a deep breath. “But, I wanna be with you. For real. You gonna let me?”

Your eyes search his for any uncertainty but find none. At your nod one of his hands trail up your back. Resting on your cheek he urges you closer until your lips touch.

“Won’t make you regret this baby”

#hq x reader #haikyuu headcanons #haikyuu x reader #iwazumi x reader #hq x black reader #x black reader #hq headcanons #hq imagines

[timedontgiveashit]

Part 2 and 3 of the dead weather live masterpost! 🖤🖤🖤

The Dead Weather video masterpost part 2 (the deep cuts and other fun stuff mostly in bad quality) 1. The Dead Weather - Hustle and Cuss / New Pony - Don Hills - 8/4/2010 The whole Don Hills show is insane, here's a playlist from it watch every video, this is one of their best shows even if it's unhinged af. You can expect some best of Alison moments. She gets me every time when she ends a song laying on the stage. Bonus: Jack gets pissed and starts yelling at the crowd. I love that LJ just casually keeps playing and Dean tries to not laugh.

2. The Dead Weather - Treat Me Like Your Mother - Celebrate Brooklyn 08/03/2010 If I know it well it was their last show in the 2010 tour circle, one of their best next to the Don Hills one, search for every video from this show, this was the last song of the set. The energy is insane, "Stand up like a fuckin' man" is gold and the audience reacts properly. Also if you want to see Dean spit his guitar pick far while wilding on the keyboard this is your video. Bonus: he gives a hug to Alison in the end which is sweet.

3. The Dead Weather - Rolling In On A Burning Tire (live in Berlin) This is a rare treat, they've had this song as a soundtrack for Twilight, I don't think they played it live any other times. 4. The Dead Weather - Bone House (Live At First Ave) It’s rare again from 2010, Bone house just unexpectedly turned into Mile markers at 3:22. It's cool because 30 seconds of Mile markers was the hidden track on the Sea of Cowards album, later they finished the song and it landed on the Dodge and burn album. This is the only live version from it if we don't count the Dodge and burn promo video series.

5. Dead Weather, No Hassle Night/I just want to make love to you This is one of the hottest shit they've ever done on stage, Will there be enough water is one thing, but you know it hits differently when Jack straight up screams he just wants to make love to you. 6. The Dead Weather - Will there be enough water? - Brixton Academy, London - 29th October 2009 I don't think I have to explain the chemistry and Jack's mic drop + bonus from the end of the same show: Jack drags Alison off stage

7. This is an I can't hear you compilation: -Jack pushes Alison offstage -Dean forgets his part, and Jack gets a "guitar bj" lol -They are not kissing -Alison grabs Jack by the hair - I can't tell where her hand goes at some point, but Jack jumps down from the stage that's sure -One of the first live versions of this song -Early version again, Alison is climbing up to places 8. Will there be enough water compilation: -Jack is drunk -Jack tickles Alison lol -They are just cute in the end -The way she puts the mic in front of him -Best version on guitar with the slide ring -Let's sing into each other's mouth even if the mic is not in front of us -Not the usual video angle, if you ask me that's Jack's way to ask for a hug 9. You just can't win compilation - Jack is drunk again but it's funny -Jack is drunk and starts dancing -Jack is not drunk but "dances" with Alison 10. The Dead Weather - A Child of a Few Hours - Vic Theatre Chicago July 29 Just the usual Jack+Alison thing again This is not all, but I'm gonna stop here right now for the part 2, the list is endless, I hope you find some in these you haven't seen yet.

[numetalpuppygirl]

what i'm listening to november 2023. the agony

spot. link//yt link

song notes under cut

Laura Les - Haunted: haunted. by laura les.

Garbage - Queer: stand up for the fag anthem. but also let's be real one of the main draws here is the music video where shirley manson pushes the pov character down to the ground and forcibly shaves your head while singing "i know what's good for you." i'm a lesbian

Chris Fleming - W.U.G.: i've met a couple wugs in my time but more than anything i'm just on my chris fleming shit recently. this one has been stucks in my head sooo bad and bsaically anytime i see the word "guy" it comes back with a vengeance

Limp Bizkit & Method Man - N 2 Gether Now: random lb songs will really just crop up in my rotation for seemingly no reason but really this one has so many good lines and the addition of method man brings it up by so much. it's comical on some level bc it's like why is he here, he's like. a real rapper. and fred sounds so out of his depth next to him. but at the same time they both do actually really pretty good. pull the plug and then jet. MIC CHECK.

Sloppy Jane - Bark Like a God: recommended by a friend. need to listen to the full album but this goes insane goes crazy i mean those damn vocals and the THEMES ugh i mean what else do you need in this world. don't even really know what to call this band but it good and i need more

Almeda Riddle - My Little Rooster: Gummo is a 1997 American experimental drama film written and directed by Harmony Korine, starring Jacob Reynolds, Nick Sutton, Jacob Sewell, and Chloë Sevigny. The film is set (but was not filmed) in Xenia, Ohio, a Midwestern American town that had been previously struck by a devastating tornado. The loose narrative follows several main characters who find odd and destructive ways to pass time, interrupted by vignettes depicting other inhabitants of the town.

Destroy Boys - Fences: mostly just real catchy. many such cases. but there is a certain doggish quality to it as well

Enon - Natural Disasters: hi violer :3 ooh ahh the song so catchy the riff so tastey and shiney

Limp Bizkit - The Truth: i watched the band's short film of the same name recently and was pretty underwhelmed. but it did make me wanna go back and listen to the ep! it's been said to death but it's easily some of lb's best work, and not just because it's the serious one or whatever

Repo! The Genetic Opera - Night Surgeon: tbh there should be more repo on here but there's only so much space and this is undoubtedly my favorite track from the soundtrack (although "at the opera tonight" comes pretty damn close!!) i could listen to anthony head go "i remember" like that allllll day. i have been having some serious repo fixation recently i won't lie. give it a watch it's a normal movie

Foo Fighters - Everlong (Acoustic Version): okay look you guys know at this point how i get about everlong. so when i was watching hit film little nicky starring adam sandman and a rather beautiful sequence took place accompanied by a sparse acoustic version still laden in the characteristic warmth of the original song, of course i was hooked. and that's a nu metal-ass movie, too, but this was the pick i ended up making. that's special

Dropkick Murphys - I'm Shipping Up To Boston: WOOOOO BOSTON!!!!!!!! GO BRUINS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GET ME A CUP O DUNKS!!!!!!! WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!! YANKEES SUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! <is not from boston but rather a different place entirely

Fefe Dobson - Unforgiven: why did nobody tell me about this fuckin nu metal x y2k pop fusion. this is like rina sawayama stfu but all the way back in 200-goddamn-3. fefe you were before your time

MGMT - Little Dark Age: i don't know mgmt that well but i heard a little bit of this song in a youtube video long ago and really liked it and could never find it and then i happened to encounter it again and was like oh hello my old acquaintance shall we get to know each other better

Billy Joel - All For Leyna: beginning to realize that billy is good actually. every little part of this song is crunchy and sweet and delicious for me. and god i sure am doing it all for leyna aren't i......

Tom Cardy & Brian David Gilbert - Beautiful Mind: tbh this was far from my favorite effort from either of these guys...... didn't really think it was all that funny. had a very lol random sort of appeal that just didn't hit me right. however it does sound amazing, really clean, and they both have nice voices. plus you know i love them harmonies

Taco - Puttin' on the Ritz: they play this a lot at a cafe i go to sometimes. i used to not like this song but it's really grown on me. it's one of those absolutely one-of-a-kind songs that could have only been a hit at the exact time and place that it was. and i like stuff like that! you might even say i think it's super duper :)

Violent Femmes - Breakin' Up: this song is dumb as balls. and it sounds way better in my head than it does to actually listen to it. but! the video is really cool, with that simple but effective camera trick. i enjoy that

Bowling For Soup - Girl All the Bad Guys Want: if the previous song was dumb as balls, this song is dumb as. like. the epididymis. or like a single sperm cell. i don;t know man it's a dumb fucking song. but it's about a cool rap rocker girl :3 and that's meeeeee probably. when i listen to it i like to rate each lyric on how true it is. watching wrestling? maybe now and then. creaming over tough guys? hmmm no i would simply not do this. but listening to rap metal? turntables in her eyes?? now we're fuckin talkin!!!!!!!!!!

#it has been such a trek through mud to get this out. please enjoy #*char noises* #talking pop

[styrmwb]

Favorite Final Fantasy Music (FFXIII)

Some people hate XIII (a lot of people hate XIII). I am not one of those people (I'm also a Hope and Snow enjoyer so maybe I'm just wrong). I was never quite good at the gameplay, but I really liked the world, and I really liked the music. It's like... the least Final Fantasy out of all the soundtracks? But also in a way that makes it the most Final Fantasy cause of how different it is. The game uses a lot of these 2 motifs (which is cool cause there's like 2 main worlds), and uses a lot of cool vocals and futuristic noises. My man Masashi Hamauzu is back from FFX, and he kills it.

5. The Archylte Steppe Hey! It's everyone's favorite part of the game! This is my favorite version of the "The Promise" motif; the slower tempo befitting the vast field you're running around in. Other than the fact that I love this melody, I'm a big fan of the heavy drums, and that little part where they hold back to let the melody shine through (which is also the part where the notes do that thing where they pull on my heart aaaaa). Perfect song for accidentally getting stepped on by an adamantoise to.

4. Desperate Struggle By all means, considering the context of this song, I should hate it. The amount of times I got doomed or launched into the air and smacked around, is ridiculous. But this song is so fun (especially in theatrhythm). I love the really heavy part where the rhythm gets real bouncy with the triplets, and also the part with the heavy dissonant chords, and the melody they create (buuuuuuuh buuhbuuhbuuhbuuuh buh buuuuuuuuh) it sounds so cool!!!

3. The Hanging Edge After the intro to the game, you're immediately thrown into a fuckin war, and this is what plays. That intro piano is such a unique opening, giving you that feeling of stress very unfitting of the start of most FF games, and then the rest of the song starts to build it up. The strings adding more stress and rising the song further, throwing in the percussion to add that heaviness to the song and the synth to show the vast and futuristic nature of the area, not to mention using the sound of a train stopping as an instrument (wording this as a joke but in context it's fitting)??? This song starts out so cool. But my absolute favorite part is when the fiddle (I think) comes in, and just goes absolutely bonkers with the sickest solo you've ever heard. You can say what you will about this game but goddamn the atmosphere of the opening is amazing.

2. Eidolons Similar to Desperate Struggle, I should hate this song for the very same reasons, but it slaps way too much for me to hate it for any reason. The entire song feels like constant buildup, never truly having a full melody or release, but I think that works perfectly for the stressful and timed nature of the fights it primarily plays on. I love the constant rhythm in the back, the heavy drums and the looping synth; and the guitar is fuckin rocking out the entire time. This whole song is a headbanger, also bringing in the orchestra to keep the same XIII vibe. The echoey nature of the end of the song, the guitar sounding like it's shredding in the distance, is my favorite part.

1. Blinded by Light This is THE XIII song. This is the trailer song, this is the second of the two main motifs, this is the battle song, this returns in the next two games constantly, and all of this for good reason! This song fucking bangs!!! The start is a perfect classic FF battle buildup while having its own unique nature, the drum set and guitar combined with the orchestra perfectly shows you the nature of this entire game's soundtrack, and not to mention. The melody. That violin. That violin is absolutely legendary. I don't really know how to word it, but the way it's composed is like crack for my ears. The high notes it hits, that main BUUUUUUH NUUUUUUUUUH BUHNUHHH NUUUUUUUUUH section is musical gold, and every single time I hear it in any other song that plays in this entire trilogy, I feel nothing buy joy and pure positive emotion.

Honorable mentions go to: The Promise, Defiers of Fate, Saber's Edge, The Sunleth Waterscape, Test of the L'Cie, The Yaschas Massif, Taejin's Tower (boing), and Eden Under Siege.

#final fantasy #final fantasy xiii #textpost #jared's final fantasy music opinions

[cleoselene]

tagged by @emmaswanned

Last song: "BODYGUARD" by Beyonce is what is currently playing

Favorite color: green mostly but also like. Cubbie blue.

Currently Watching/Reading:

watching: it's baseball season so I'm back on that mostly. However I am watching Lost for the first time, but I need to pick it back up. Got delayed in continue for really uninteresting reasons, but i got Hulu and so I can pick it up. I watched nine episodes and I like it!

pretty much all I ever read is the news, and my subscription is to Washington Post, but my friend Slim (he of the "not in Fall Out Boy, but did do an freakin' amazing blues cover of Taylor Swift's 'Mean' you shoud listen to it" fame on my blog) wrote a poetry book and he hasn't gone to press yet but hesent me the pdf. It's beautiful. Slim is a beautiful soul. the kind of person who would give you the shirt off his back if you asked. Don't know if I've ever known a more genuinely generous soul. And he's talented as fuck! Check out his two original EPs they're on all the streaming services, he is Slimtronic 5k. Here's his cover of Taylor's "Mean," everyone go listen! He asked me what Taylor song he should cover and I thought long and hard and decided this had to be it, because he is the type of person to say "why you gotta be so mean?" because he's all about the love and kindness. Like, Dude from Big Lebowski vibes.

been obsessively listening to COWBOY CARTER. DAUGHTER is the one that destroys me. When she goes into that fuckin operatic voice? I had NO clue Beyonce had that kind of high voice in her. her singing and speaking voice too has always been this throaty, deep voice. To hear her suddenly break into Italian on a totally different octave than we've ever heard from Beyonce was MIND BLOWING. I got all goose-bumpy. Plus I loooove the Willie Nelson cameos hahah he is so clearly stoned out of his gourd. "Go find yourself a jukebox, thank yoU!"

watched the 9 part Turning Point Cold War doc on netflix, it was excellent. Then I watched the 9/11 one made by the same people and i felt like that one actually skipped a ton of important events? It wasn't as good I didn't feel

Relationship status: i am retired

Sweet/savory/spicy: savory though as middle age happens and perimenopause continues... the sweet tooth my mother promised was coming has kind of hit

Current obsessions: my vinyl collection. New music the theme for March and April! I cannot wait for TTPD, I feel like it's going to be what I wanted Midnights to be ut who know? Just excited about it. Again, baseball started this week so the sheen hasn't worn off there.

Last thing you googled: 'Three Dog Night wiki' lol I have three dogs (little ones at least) sleeping in my room. it is a three dog night. Did you knwo the name of that band comes from olden days when inns used to rent out dogs to sleep with on cold nights? So a "three dog night" was an exceptionally cold one since you needed to rent three dogs to sleep with you and keep you warm

tagging @sylvieons @an-ivy-covered-summer

#memes #thanks for tagging miss swan #Youtube

[mccoys-killer-queen]

All my comments on the Styx: Caught In the Act tape

I'm SO glad i bought this tape

Tommy on my TV screen hits so different 👁️👄👁️

again, I wanna know what their fucking budget was for the Kilroy film

I WANT MORE OF TOMMY'S ACTING I THOUGHT IT WAS GENUINELY GOOD

I love how pouty faced and dissociative Tommy is the whole time during Mr. Roboto like how the FUCK could he sit that still when that bop was blasting through him

he's just letting Dennis have his pick-me theater kid moment

and that GREASY FRIED CHICKEN STOPPGKAKAKGLG

"and when JY started his guitar solo-" *EVERYONE FUCKING SQUEALS*

this is getting me even more psyched for next month when I see them again

as much as I love this whole tape and am eating it the FUCK up I can totally understand why JY and Tommy hated every second of this (i was in drama club in high school I get it)

(it was here the wine started to kick in)

I stg these ppl only get along when Rockin the Paradise is playing

I'm getting in a habit of saying FUCK IT UP DENISSSS whenever he has a solo

Blue Collar Man- "the DOG and my friends"

TOMMY ROLLING HIS Rs STOP

TOMMY'S ROCKIN OUT AAAAA LOOKATHIMGO HE'S GETTIN SO INTO IT THIS IS HIS MOMENT iM GONNA BE GOING SO FUCKJNG FERAL FOR HIM IN THE 5TH ROW

Tommy pls don't fall I know you're light enough for me to catch u but pls dont fall

"the california state legislature was so loosened up they decided several records including ours had backwards satanic messages on them" NGMSKWKGOGOSLPG

JY'S MAKEUP IS SO HHHHGGGGGGGHHH

I'm such a fucking S L U T for the transition from JY to Tommy's vocals on Snowblind like that shit is better than sex

i'm just realizing now this is VERY different than what I was doing this time last night (touching Phil Lewis)

Tommy: this one goes out to all of you who ever felt like you had too much time on your hands :)

the way he SQUATS like boi he R E A D Y this is his MOMENT 👏👏👏

HIM DOING THE LITTLE HAND MOTIONS

"is it any wonder i'm not a terrorist?? 😃😃😃" TOMMY NO—

i was NOT prepared for him to actually do the unhinged eye stuff

"and IIII DONT KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH MYSELF- so I do this- *plays the solo*"

you may be cool but you'll never be as cool as Tommy Shaw that's the facts

i literally almost spit out my wine at "HE'S NOT THE PRESIDENT"

not prepped for the thing they did by splicing tommy's face bc this tape is almost 40 years old so i thought the tAPE WAS FUCKED UP

the completely unhinged ending Tommy and JY do at the end of Too Much Time by JUMP-SHUFFLING IN SYNC

Dennis and Tommy doing Don't Let It End 🥺 tommy seems to like it so much 🥺🥺

OH SHITTTTTTTT DR RIGHTEOUS IS HERE OH NOOOOOO

SHAKE IT JY FUCKIN POP IT I'M GONNA SCREAMMM

CHUCK AND JOHN I'M GONNA SCREAM

THE CROWD BOOING DR RIGHTEOUS LMAOOOO

the fucking "guitar shredder" made me snort

the angels put too much angel into Tommy when they were making Him

NOT THEM WARPING TOMMY'S VOICE AND THE PIXELATION OF THE FILM

TOMMY IN THE CROWD FUCK IT UPPPPP 👏👏👏👏👏👏

THE WAY EVERYONE'S TRYING TO TOUCH HIS HAIR

Dennis watching Tommy fall into the girls like "you're doing amazing, sweetie"

NOT JY AND TOMMY DOING A CROTCH THING ONSTAGE

TOMMY PLS KEEP SCREAMING AND CRYING OUT DON'T EVER STOP

What i would give to hear The Best of Times live 🥲

tommy's distorted voice in The Best of Times always makes me feel something in my soul i can't explain it

that being said the very end of tommy's solo in that song when the piano just starts to come back in also makes me feel something deep in my soul i can't explain it

that also being said tommy's distorted voice on the line "could bring back paradise" also makes me feel something deep in my soul I can't explain it

Dennis' smile and lil' "thank you"s at the end of The Best of Times 🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺🥺 💙💙💙

I just love that even 40 years ago as soon as ppl hear the first note of Come Sail Away they go feral like they do now

EVERYONE SINGING ALONG HHHHHHHH IT WARMS MY HEARTTT

i would lay down my life if it means i couldve been at this show

((it was here the second glass of wine kicked in))

I SAW THAT WINK JY

Chuck needs to come out of the shadows so we can see his insanely gay outfit

TOMMY BOUNCIN HIS LIL BUTT DURING THE KEYBOARD SOLO IN COME SAIL AWAY 🍑

something in me ascended when JY took over that solo 👁️👄👁️

THE GIRL ONSTAGE ONSTAGE HUGGING DENNIS AND TOMMY PLEASE THEY LIKE IT A LITTLE TOO MUCH THE WAY THEY WERE ALL SWAYING FMSKSKKVOBLF

that lil flick of tommy's wrist is SENDING ME FKANAKKFKG HE'S SO FUCKJNG BABY

UH OH TOMMY'S ON TOP OF THE PIANO

tommy needs to be kept on a leash and that's why i made those memes i posted

uh oh Tommy's convulsing and thrashing on the stage floor

UH OH TOMMY'S HUMPING CHUCK ONSTAGE

it's fine he's okay it's during Renegade he gets a pass on this one this is His Moment™ again

JESUS THAT'S A LOT OF SCREAMING TOM

it's okay it's during Renegade he gets a pass on this one

JESUS CHRIST THAT'S A LOT OF RUNNING TOM

JY and Tommy booty bumping so aggressively

TOMMY'S SHIMMYING FJSNAKKFKGKDK

OH NO THE STAGE IS GETTING RAIDED

JOHN NOOOOOOOO

oh so THAT'S how that guy died

Tommy as Jonathan: Dammit. DAMMIT! *girls squeal*

AAAAAAAAAATOMMYISSINGINGASONGASJONATHANGIVEMEHISTHEATREKIDMOMENT I'M LOVING THIS AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Tommy's eye makeup is also so ✨✨✨

I feel the primal urge to give tommy a bouquet of roses after this show is over

i'm gonna cry Haven't We Been Here Before is just so beautiful i was NOT EXPECTING DENNIS/KILROY TO COME IN LIKE THAT

Fight me on this hot take but Tommy could do broadway and so could Dennis

the SWEAT that is GLISTENING on his face low key looks like tears

RIGHTEOUS 👏 THINKS 👏 IT'S 👏 OVER 👏👏

THE GLOWING GUITAR I'M TRYING NOT TO SCRAAEMAMD

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA TOMMY SING IT KEEP ROCK AND ROLL ALIVE YOU A R E THE MODREN MAN BABEY

I'M GONNA CRY HE'S SO GOOD IN EVERY CONCEIVABLE WAY

TOMMY PULLING THAT GIRL UP ONSTAGE AND SHE LOW KEY LOOKS LIKE ME

that was so fucking good I would KILL to see a rock show that also had a story around the whole set

#styx #styxposting #styx band

[littlegayassbitch]

thinking about the bitb soundtrack

that shit is absolutely amazing, I'm gonna rant for so long about this shit, here's literally every song from it described in great hyper-fixated detail, it gets pretty sad at the end, also spoilers for blood in the bayou!

If you want to listen along with my deranged ramblings about this soundtrack, here is a link.

BEWARE!!! I AM MENTALLY ILL!!! READ ON IF YOU DARE!!

The heartbeat motif for most, if not all of the songs is absolutely gorgeous, I adore it so much, the notes hit your brain in all the right places to make you feel uneasy, and the SoundFont?????? that shit is very much Blood in the motherfuckin Bayou!

The intro and outro are absolute masterpieces and I will listen to them for hours on end like I hear that shit and. AUGHAUAGAHUGA I go rabid

horrors in the bayou??? thats 19 minutes of pure absolute cool!!!! how do you make it like that!??!? It's awesome, it's noises, it's cool, it's slimy, it's slippery! it's just awesome I love it.

wandering around galloway is such an awesome one too, it just... AUGH they really are, they do that, its so surreal!! and the way the notes kinda jumpscare you if you aren't paying attention is so fun

dropping like ravens, bro, I swear to god, I can hear a plop noise in the background, that shit is so fucking cool, it fits so well, it sounds like the noises they would make as they fell, the drum sounds like things hitting metal, and the goddamn music kicking in halfway through is so fUCKING COOL MAN

sludgified... what do I even say???? the buildup is so worth it for this song!!! it's so fitting, and you can tell when each scene is, it's awesome and cool and awesome (but Rat did not deserve this fate, mans was too silly to go that soon...)

touching the forcefield is where the heartbeat motif really comes into play, you can hear that shit all the way through, and I am loving every second of it, I am going absolutely apeshit over this soundtrack, its so undeniably perfect dude

there are people in the swamp. YES, THERE ARE!!! YOU CAN HEAR THE PHASES OF REALIZATION THAT THERE ARE IN FACT FUCKIN PEOPLE IN THERE AND THEY AREN'T SUPPOSED TO BE. IT'S SO STRESSFUL IN A GOOD WAY

OUTRO, IM TALKING ABOUT THIS ONE AGAIN, I LOVE IT SO MUCH, 18892954358324/10 ITS SO PERFECT I ADORE IT SO MUCH THE BEAT AND SOUNDS MAKE MY BRAIN COGS STOP RUSTING

intrusive thought, wooooAAAAAoooo. << it's doing that, it's so ADHD-friendly, I could literally listen to this forever. then it hits you with the METAL SOUNDIN SHIT AND ITS 100000000 TIMES MORE AWESOME

the melted man, it gets its point across so insanely well, the little tink! noises it has like water droplets are so pretty, but like, unsettling, then the beeps of a heart monitor start-up and I justafhjkdshjf AND THEN THE ENDING BIT???? MY HEART RATE GOES UP SO MUCH, STRESS LEVEL IS THROUGH THE ROOF, I LOVE IT

returning to the forcefield is awesome because the heartbeat motif!!!!!!!!!!!!! is back and louder than fuckin EVER. It's so eerie and indescribable, but you have all the words to use, it's so fun.

the funeral, melancholy, Rolans parents (?) are fucking DEAD, It's solemn, it's sad, its a funeral, the piano gets this point across perfectly, and it's so different from most of the other songs that you can tell this scene is a different tone entirely.

secrets of the will, so mysterious, and alluring... what's going on with the will?? What's the answer??? where should Rolan go? what should he do???

now here are some more of my favourites, in a big batch o three

followed, its so... it's such a 'leading up to big important thing' song and its so necessary for this it needs to be eerie and 'uh oh' esque and just AAARGGGHHHHHH

approached. WOOOAH its speeding up!! its getting faster!! we're about to see some action!! Woo! yeah! get approached by your cousin! get stressed! go do that shit!

Hunted. HOLY FUCKING SHIT IS THIS SONG AWESOME, all the buildup, and this does not disappoint! like, it induces so much anxiety in me that I listen to it if I'm tired to wake myself up, its such a good running song, and its such an awesome thing to listen to while writing horror, infinity/10 I love hunted. so so so so so so so so much

THE POST METAMORPHOSIS INTRO!! OH MY GOD!!!! OH MY GOD!!! YOU CAN HEAR THE OG INTRO UNDER IT, ITS SO FUNKY!! SO SILLY!!! THIS SHIT IS AMAZING I LOVE IT SO MUCH

coming home. YeahhhhhHH!HH!H!HHhhHHHH its so much less energetic than the song before it, you can hear how upsetting this scene will be, the piano sounds hopeful, and resigned at the same time. beautiful.

limited time. there is a very great sense of urgency in this one, with the ticking clock in the background, and the strings being played in the back, I'm writing this part as fast as I can because I feel like I'm on a time limit bro it works SO GODDAMN WELL.

the abyss stares back. Water... noises in my ea r s... the droning noises.... the everything..... it makes me feel so trapped, so claustrophobic, my skin has goosebumps listening to it....

cocooned. THERE IS SO MUCH FEAR IN HERE, I CAN BARELY HEAR MY OWN FEAR. THIS SHIT MAKES MY NECK TWITCH /POS I LOVE THE PLUCKING STRING SOUNDS, AND THE WAY ITS SO UNORGANIZED AND YET SO STRUCTURED.... PERFECTION

forgotten promise, this is such a normal song, for the first 10 seconds, then it gets into this odd sort of off-beat-ish faster melody, and I'm here for it, it gets more and more unsettling, you don't know the difference until it's too late. (rip Kian Stone)

a melody better left unknown, more like... a melody everyone needs to hear right now... it's amazingly unsettling, the perfect thing for this scene, it embodies the spirit of what this scene means for the rest of the campaign.

entomophobia. GOD, HOLY SHIT, THIS IS SUCH AN UPBEAT ONE COMPARED TO THE REST. reminds me of the can-can at times, but in like a great way, sounds reminiscent of clown music in the beginning. AND WHEN IT GETS TO THE MIDDLE, WHOO BOY I AM HAVING A FIELD DAY WITH THIS. amazing song, love it, love everything abt it.

heartbeat in the swamp is like the forcefield, but much more... foreboding. You can tell this is a very important point, the droning sounds are much more common in here, and there's more than one at a time. heartbeat motif my absolute beloved... <3

metamorphosis. this song... THIS SONG IS RIGHT HERE. it is spot on for this reveal, the whole thing is so nice to listen to, the clicking-Esque noises, the bug-like rhythm for those clicks, beautiful, and when you get halfway in.... it gets so much more dramatic, and it is deserved for this!!!! it is so dramatic and it fits!!!!!!! love it for this, you go, metamorphosis!!!!

bitb post metamorphosis outro... I am... barely containing myself right now, this song..... AUGH..... listening isn't enough anymore I need to kiss the song. (sorry everyone I may have gotten a bit too much there, I do feel that way, it's a very kissable song.)

The Face in the Bog. oooooohhhhhg its so adgfhjdsghjfhgd the low notes are so ominous.......... love it,..,.. so much.,,,,,, dying currently.,,,

Something Bugging You. YOU ARE RIGHT, ITS THE FACT THAT I AM UNABLE TO DESCRIBE THIS SONG THAT I SO DESPERATELY WANT TO, IT'S SO. PRETTY, LIKE WIND CHIMES, BUT TOO ORGANIZED TO BE THEM, IMAGINE IF SOMEONE WAS MOVING YOUR WIND CHIMES PRETENDING TO BE THE WIND. IT'S LIKE THAT.

Race to the Heart of the Hive. OH MY LORD, THIS IS LIKE, MARIO KART BUT IF EVERY COM PLAYER WAS A GODDAMN BUG AND IF YOU DON'T WIN YOU GET TURNED INTO GOO, AND THE WORLD ENDS, BECAUSE IT IS THE ELECTRONIC BITS??? MARVELOUS, STUNNING, EFFERVESCENT, LOVELY. I AM SO READY TO RUN A MILE RIGHT NOW

Run Away. Now, there is no reason for this to have gone this hard, the start is slow, and its like 'Oh okay, slower song.' and then a bit later. NOPE, ELECTRIC GUITAR BOSS FIGHT MUSIC, the other fight-ish songs were 'fight a bug monster' but this one... this one is a 'Holy shit, your friend is a bug monster, and he's attacking you, and you can't save him, you have to fight against the face of a friend, one who you've just met up with again, one you've just gotten back. You need to kill him.' kinda deal. very much up there in the top 5.

A Moment of Respite. calm before the storm, come chill for 2 minutes and 12 seconds, you need it, you get this time to relax, but be ready to jump right back in.

You will be Replaced. Words can't describe how I feel (jk, they can, and ill spend a while talking about this.) it's like every stressful song in one, it's like entomophobia, but more is at risk, everything is at risk, you need to hurry, you need to finish this. I 100% love this one.

The Queen. It's so... calm at first, like she's a good thing, she's helping, she's nice, even! Let yourself become one with her, she'll take care of the hard parts! but then, halfway mark, she's let down her facade, face the queen, or die. Knowing the odds, you will be struggling to not meet the second fate. she knows you know how unlikely you are to win, and laughs in your face as you fumble with weapons that have no effect, as you hallucinate things in her presence, as you try to bargain with the false face of a long-dead loved one. It's such a regal-sounding piece, and rightfully so, this is the QUEEN.

nwonK syawlA ev'I ydoleM A. The reverse of a melody better left unknown, but somehow the one that fills me with more dread than its predecessor. Reverse audio has always made me uncomfortable, and mix it with the BITB vibe and you have a recipe for paranoia and fear. in a good way!

Rolan's Ultimatum. A reprise of limited time, you can hear the decisions that are having to be made, it's a hard one, sacrifice yourself, and be an unsung hero, or leave, and live a peaceful life, knowing that you have left behind your two best friends, now one, to die. He needs to think fast, or else it will be too late, and he'll have lost both his friends, and his humanity.

You've Changed. Ugh!! such a bittersweet ending!!! We know that Rand is probably bleeding out in the bayou, hallucinating about going home with his now-alive totally human sister. The song is too distorted to offer anything other than death. The end had the same plucking of guitar strings as the bug songs, so he is not alright. I am so sad that they all had to die, they all had lives ahead of them, great ones. Except for Rand... he died a nobody, and he will not be remembered for anything other than his corpse, and maybe a passport. Nothing more, nothing less. He was nobody. And will never be somebody.

BONUS!!

Smoke with the Devil. this song, which played at the end of ep 4, is so great, it's such a sadness-ridden song, Grizzly did so well with this part! His singing is so nice, and if someone shared this song with me and didn't tell me it was from a Call of Cthulu campaign and is sung by a character who tried to seduce his friend's mom and dad and then promptly exploded I would not notice.

and that ends my completely deranged review of the BITB soundtrack, you can find it on Spotify now! You can go on the Patreon and download it from there! If you want to hear more about blood in the bayou from me, ask me, please please please please please I am insane about these 33-year-olds from the '80s I want to talk about them so badly.

I love Blood in the Bayou so fucking much.

#bitb #jrwi bitb #jrwi rolan #jrwi blood in the bayou #timothy rand #kian stone #rolan deep #jrwi #i spent an hour on this shit #it deserves it #go get everyone you know to listen to blood in the bayou #please #AUGH im dying over this #Spotify