#to love is to enter terror | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

mamayan · 7 months

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You up? Give us some delicious yandere stuff 🙏 let's say... Fae King yandere and changeling darling 😏✨

This turned into a full fic :3 ~★ In honor of some monster fucking!

Yandere! Dark Fae King x Darling! Changeling

tw: NSFW • Obsessive/Possessive Themes • Non-Human Morality • Kidnapping • afab Reader • Dubcon • Oral (F) • Grooming (reader is of consenting adult age) • Forced Mating • Imprisonment • Violence (not toward reader) • Implied Murder • Rough Sex • Praise • Overstimulation • Dumbification • Belly Bulge • Size Kink

Part Two: Here

“…hic…sniff…”

Dark eyes glanced into the cool night, curious as to what creature was disturbing his evening.

“…hic…” it came again, much to his chagrin.

The still lake reflected the full moon like a mirror. To his left, not too far off, he honed in on the disturber. Something small and curled up. Shaking. The oddity enough to catch his full attention as he stood silently. The night his home and prison as he swiftly left in a puff of smoke over to the location of his intruder.

You.

His first instinct to end your miserable life, a human somehow entering his domain and crossing his barriers, but upon a closer look… he realized you were of his own kind.

A changeling at that. An abandoned fae left to die in the hands of mortals. Few if any live to maturity like this, but your short human stature led him to believe your growth was surely stunted due to neglect. Young fae needed abundant love and care in their infancy, the first 100 years of life incredibly crucial for their development. Least they end up like him and his kingdom. You were even younger than full maturity, though your physical body had completed it’s growth, your magic was weak and juvenile.

You were making odd noises which drew his curiosity, moving closer to your form, face buried in your lap as you hunched over your drawn up legs. Your feet were bare as the edges of the water lapped at them. Clothing sparse and tattered, rags unfit for even a human, let alone a Fae nearing maturity.

“Noisy little thing,” he hums aloud, startling you as you jolt and nearly throw yourself into the water. Your neck snaps up, pretty face swollen and blotchy from tears looking up and up until you saw a creature looming over you.

Your scream is cut off by a clawed dark hand, slapping over your mouth and muffling the cry as you try to jerk away in fear and panic. He watches in mild amusement, snickering as you realize your struggle is futile and efforts dying down. “Scream if you like, but none other than I will hear it out here.” He assures ominously, thin onyx colored lips pulling back to bare his razor sharp canines and pearly teeth at you. His grin savage and delighted in your terror.

He watches curiously as your wide doe eyes well up with tears, the crystalline droplets spilling up and over your cheeks, soft lips quivering beneath his palm. You reminded him of an animal imploring their predator for mercy by revealing their underbelly. There was a word for it…

Cute. His mind conjured at last. He found you cute, a changeling bold enough to intrude into the kingdom of the corrupted. You hadn’t even dropped the mirage covering you, old magic from your biological family still covering your natural appearance to mimic the human you parasitized off the life of.

“Why do you cry little one?” He asks softly, attempting not to terrify you further and avoid his questions.

You hesitate, but his molten gold eyes seem to melt through your defenses despite his dangerous and beautiful appearance. “I’m wrong,” you sniffle, grateful when he removes his enormous hand off your face, the sharp claws tipped in gold frightening against your soft breakable skin. “All wrong… and I don’t know what to do.” You curl back up around yourself, as if he too will cast judgement upon you.

He awkwardly mimics your stance, curiosity blazing as watches you in fascination. You find the way his monstrously large form contorts to sit like you somewhat baffling and amusing, less frightened now that he doesn’t seem to wish you harm.

“How are you wrong then?” He pries further, cupping his defined jaw and leaning into his hand as he observes.

“I’m not…I’m not human—I’m a—a—,” you stumble, unsure if this night is even real anymore. The shock so great you’re still trying to cope.

“A faery?” He supplies, amused by the way you gesture with your hands, expression so open and easy to read. “A changeling raised amongst humans to feed off their happiness?” His deep voice purrs it happily, as if he’s glad for it.

He is. His hatred of humans not something he feels the need to hide.

You appear devastated though, “I didn’t mean to—I don’t want to hurt or make anyone unhappy.” You mumble miserably, tugging at your hair and skin, as if that will dispel the magic which hides your true appearance.

“That’s just how our kind is, we need that happiness to grow properly.” He rubbles, eyeing your shocked expression. “We also happen to be fickle creatures ironically, and if a newborn is thought to need too much care, it is pawned off on humans who have more patience.” He clarifies, smiling as you seem to take him in with new eyes.

“You— are you a faery too? You just seem…” he chuckles as you awkwardly trail off.

“Evil? Centuries ago humans once called me the devil,” he laughs, his dark hair falling into his face like a waterfall as he shakes the loose fluffy curls, his pointed horns jutting from the top of his forehead jet black and smooth like ivory. He was too beautiful to call a devil, though you supposed it could be because of that which he was deemed so. His every feature seeming to catch your gaze with it’s beauty.

“I was going to say different…” you trail off shyly. “You don’t seem evil to me at least.”

He pauses, taking you in again as you regard him with those harmless eyes still wet with drying tears. It’d been centuries too since he’d left his kingdom, the entrance to the veil this lake he occasionally comes up to lounge by. He hasn’t seen a human since then, let alone a changeling or uncorrupted little faery like you.

He likes those pretty tears. He finds it annoying you shed them for humans you should guiltlessly take from.

His smile widens, eyes glittering mischievously and nearly glowing as he leans closer. The smell of sugar and cinnamon wafting off of him as you breathe in, nearly gasping as your mouth waters.

“How’s this little one? I’ll teach you how to be a faery, to show you there is nothing wrong with you.”

His eyes, where they should be white are entirely inky black, golden irises with reddened pupils framed by dark thick lashes, looked sincerely upon you.

He seemed genuine and kind despite his towering humanoid figure which looked to be capable of killing you easily.

It warmed you though, the thought of wanting to belong strong as you nod with a smile.

“I’d be eternally grateful.” You nod.

Sealing your fate.

“Tell me your name.” He asks sweetly, because despite his menacing size and sharp teeth and nails, your new friend was nothing but kind and gentle with you.

“Y/N” you reply easily, letting him playfully ruffle your hair as he picks out the leaves which got tangled in your locks from your travels here.

When he repeats it though, wonderful shivers shoot down your spine. He smiles, cooing at you like one might a baby as a he teases, “Such a cute name for a cute faery.”

You weakly protest, but fall into easy laughter as he swiftly changes the subject.

He was discussing proper fae etiquette. The basics, to not say please or thank you or I’m sorry. They all meant you expected more from the other or wouldn’t reciprocate, and that was just bad manners.

His soft hands, which could easily cover your entire face, were settled on your upper arms, having sat you in the grass against his chest.

He liked holding you close. Your little figure so soft, and from the dark circles beneath your human appearance, he assumed the neglect from the humans you resided amongst was growing worse. It was bad for your development.

“You should come live out here, they are vile creatures you know.” He comments every time you visit, though he never forces you to stay with him.

“It’s because I make them unhappy…” you explain sheepishly.

He shakes his head, thick brow arching as he rolls his eyes. “You are nearly completely mature now, you suck no happiness from your surroundings anymore silly girl.” Your confusion was palpable as he sighs and further explains, enjoying the squish of your tender flesh as he lightly squeezes you.

“While it is true fae infants are quite the hassle to raise, it isn’t as tortuous as humans make it out to be. In fact, most fae will take their child back if not treated well by their human surrogates.”

You hum, relaxing back against his warm chest and breathing in his sugary scent.

“So why wasn’t I—,” you stop short, brows furrowed but no longer speaking.

He doesn’t pry further, leaning his chin atop your head as he looks out at the lake.

“You won’t tell me?” You push, annoyed how he dances around your question endlessly. Your companion close enough that you feel insulted he won’t reveal it.

“My name is not to be uttered aloud, least calamity befall this land~” he’s teasing, you know he is, but still he refuses to divulge his name. “I gave you mine,” you argue again, huffing as he chuckles and lightly shoves you to your back on the grass, leaning over you and caging you in beneath him.

The moon is bright like the first time you’d met, illuminating his other worldly beauty.

“If you wish to call me something, call me Master,” he laughs, his sharp teeth no longer scaring you, but making your thighs squeeze together whenever he flashes them. He acts nothing like an immortal being, too immature and jovial to resemble someone having lived for thousands of years.

“So why do you get my name, but I don’t get yours?” You question in annoyance, avoiding his kiss to your cheek by jerking your face away. He huffs, sharp gaze daring you to dodge again.

You do. Earning yourself a warning nip to your collarbone as you yelp.

“Mean!” You cry, pushing at his chest as he snickers.

“Yes little flower, I am very, very, mean.” He rumbles, chest literally vibrating much like a cat does to purr.

“You give me weird nicknames…” you mutter, giving up as he licks your cheek. You don’t fight it, even as it feels foreign to you, trying to accept this side of your culture.

He licks your neck, lavishing the point where your pulse races with wet kisses and you tremble and struggle to act unaffected beneath him.

His smile is dangerous outside your view.

“Star!” You giggle, his rumble of irritation not the least intimidating to you as you roll away.

“That is an awful nickname.” He hisses, face twisted in disgust as you throw out the most horrendous names you could conjure in your pretty head at him.

“Lumi!” He growls.

“Then… Kitty?” He nearly bites you, careful not to play too roughly as he lightly tackles you down.

“If I give you a nickname, will you cease your little game?” He feels his anger fade as he wraps his arms around your smaller figure, easily pulling you into his lap. You don’t even flinch, too engrossed in your amusement to care where he handles you. You nod happily, your wish finally being fulfilled.

“Very well you stubborn creature,” he chides, “In addition to Master, you may also call me King.”

You frown. Clearly displeased by the lack of intimacy in the name. He laughs, amused by your obvious dislike. He kisses your puffed cheeks, over your pouty lips, and down to your vulnerable neck. Snickering as he goes, adoring how you so easily become pliant for him.

“I am teasing pretty flower, there was a time long ago I was called Ava, will you settle now?” He asks, voice husky as he sucks a mark into your skin, your little whine flaring his desires.

A strong urge to press you down and mate you nearly overpowers his control, but he merely holds you close and breathes your floral scent in to calm himself.

“I still prefer Kitty…” His eye twitches.

“Ava… this feels weird…” he pauses, looking down at your small form still cloaked like a human. Weak beneath him, partially nude as your skirt is pulled up to your soft belly. Your thighs are spread and shaking, his lips sucking another mark onto the thin skin of your inner thigh while you writhe.

He had your wet dripping slit open to the night air and his lustful gaze, begging for his tongue to taste.

“You don’t want to please me?” He asks, purring as you pout but deny. You were such a good little girl for him after all, so eager to learn and soak up his attention.

He resumes, licking down your thigh until his face rested above the warm mound you so sweetly offered him.

“You’re being so good for me petal, can you keep your legs open or should I help you?” He doesn’t need to look up to know you’re shaking in arousal and embarrassment. He can feel the tremors through the air as you struggle to keep your thighs spread as he asked.

“I-I need help…” you admit, feeling terribly hot as he keeps licking you, except where you seem to ache for him to lick.

He easily shifts forward, arms wrapping around you and letting your legs rest over his shoulders as he finally lets his tongue slip out to taste you.

You glance down, choking at the sight and feeling as he lets his entire tongue come out, the appendage inhumanly long and colored purple. It feels strange, the wet slimy feeling of his tongue slithering through your folds, but when he nudges the tiny nub hidden above your slit, you moan.

It sends jolts of electricity through you, hips canting up so he can to lick there again, earning you a hearty chuckle as he obliges. Licking and even curling his tongue around it, riling you up as your tiny hole leaks arousal and drips down your ass to the earth below.

“You’re making a mess petal, do you feel good? Should I stick my tongue inside you this time?” You moan, feeling the muscle prod at your unused vaginal entrance, too hazy to bother responding. He doesn’t wait for your answer, letting the thin tip of his tongue lap and taste your heady desire before poking and wiggling inside you.

It has your legs shooting straight, back arching as he holds you down with one large hand placed over your belly and chest. He groans as he feels the molten texture of your insides struggling against his intrusion, trying to force him out of your tight heat as he surges forward.

The tip of his tongue curls, swirling up and knocking the air from your lungs as a rush of hot liquid spills from your insides for him to drink down.

You shook and twitched, moaning and curling your hands around his curved horns like a handle.

The touch sends blood racing to his cock, as he moans and loudly slurps your cum down with audible squelching, enjoying the cries you released into the quiet night.

He lets you rest as he pulls back for just a moment, your body limp and panting as your high comes down.

“Good girl~” he praises, leaning over you to kiss softly at your sweaty skin, licking that too and tasting the sweet and salty mixture.

Then he’s pressing his lips against yours, forcing them open to sneak his long tongue inside your mouth, filling it and claiming that space too as his own. You’re helpless to resist, delirious on pleasure as he devours you, wiggling muscle curling and rubbing erotically around your own.

He tastes like sugar and something heavier, more musky, as you come to realize it as your own taste.

“Is this… really normal…?” You can help but ask as he pulls away, his lips still sticking close to trail kisses across your skin.

“It’s quite normal little flower, are you shy still?” He asks curiously, lifting one of your small hands and bringing it to his face, his size dwarfing you considerably. He lightly nibbles on your fingers, making a giggle bubble up as you smile and then squirm when he grins and licks your hand instead.

“A little…” you admit honestly. Always so honest and open.

He nods, as if completely understanding.

“That’s alright, we’re in no rush, I’ll teach you slowly…” there’s something else not said in his words, and you’re left drunk on his pheromones and lips as he distracts you. Then he’s kissing down, discarding your clothing and leaving you naked for his mouth and curious fingers.

Your breasts are lavished in his saliva, pebbled nipples sucked until standing upright before poked down with the tip of his tongue playfully. Always so playful, Ava nips and teases your skin, blinking innocently when you moan and glare accusingly.

“It’s not my fault you enjoy this so much petal~” he pouts, looking comical and so harmless, his glittery gold wings, almost translucent behind him, fluttering as if indignant to your silent accusation.

The golden tattoos which marked his skin more visible tonight, his clothing more minimal in his wish to feel more of you as he explores and plays.

Then he’s parting your thighs and throwing you into ecstasy again.

“Who did it?”

You sat curled around yourself, terror and dread swirling inside of you at the new side of Ava you’d never been graced with before.

The side you supposed was reserved for his enemies, but now showed to you.

Despite your fear, the tears spilling down your cheeks, and the injuries you bore, you still remained stubbornly silent.

He was going insane with rage and anguish.

You truly were a flower. So delicate and easily destroyed.

“Y/N… while I am being reasonable…Tell. Me. Who. Did. It.”

For all the times he’d made himself smaller, less alarming and more charming than his true nature called for, it made this time more appallingly. He stood to his full height, like an unwavering tree he did not budge or allow you to leave, golden eyes flaring and mixing with his red pupils to create something alarming. Even the markings which covered his dark skin seemed to glow and match his eyes, magic crackling in the air and silencing the night further.

As if the stars and moon were frightened too.

Still, still, you did not speak, even as he closed in on you, your fear so strong it almost choked him. Almost. He was too angry, too furious with the humans he liked to cast out of his mind. They needed to be taught a lesson it seemed. Their fear of the Fae renewed. They were becoming arrogant, as if their species was even in the same standing as them.

Your pretty injured face and form, battered from abuse and humiliation, was all the information he truly needed.

If you wanted to protect them, and not tell him, then he’d just punish them all as if they were the culprits.

It soothed him finally, his decision made as the ominous energy around him faded slowly. He let his rage dissipate, worry and concern bleeding through now as he crouched and shuffled towards you, claws spread and outstretched towards you.

“Come here Y/N, keep your secrets, but allow me to hold and comfort you…” his eyes darkened, the glow leaving behind almost a copper color, somber as he looks at you. There’s not pity in his eyes though, as you swallow and sigh in relief, grateful to crawl into his warm embrace where it feels safe.

He’s gentle as he wraps you in his arms, lips and tongue soothing as he tastes your tears and blood.

He grits his teeth, focusing on your scent and the feel of you to calm himself again, before letting his magic seep into your skin. You easily absorbed it, soaking it up like a sponge as your pain and injuries heal.

“Ava—?” Your eyes widen, amazement in their depths which stroke his ego as he taps his forehead against your own. His horns slightly tangling in your hair.

“Do you not want to drop the illusion on yourself?” He asks softly, staring at the human image your portray. He didn’t want to admit it, but it enraged him to see you still trying to live amongst them.

You seem surprised, before looking away nervously.

“It just feels strange… to not see myself anymore,” you confess, burrowing deeper into his chest while enjoying his ability to heal and soothe you. His sugary smell lightening your heavy heart.

He nods slowly, eyes staring at nothing over the still lake.

He holds you a little tighter.

Then you’re asleep.

The burns and screams of the people echo, the night come to life with flames and chaos.

Ava stands leisurely, smile filled with fondness as he watches the human village he’d followed and found to be your residence burn.

He’d spent all night playing with them, listening to them confess the awful things they’d done to you, said to you, and tried to do to you. They even thought of sacrificing you to some nonexistent deity, which only prolonged the nightmare he’d turned the populace into.

He laughed as the sounds swirled into music for his ears, the sharp points curling in delight as he hummed a tune older than the trees towering in this forest.

The night was still coming to an end sadly, and he’d need to return to your unconscious body still where he’d left it.

He didn’t want to let you wake in your new home alone after all.

His body covered in the blood of mortals he’d torn into and feasted on, Ava left them to perish.

Alone you woke. In a bed four times the size of any normal one, within the walls of a palace you’d only ever seen depicted in stories told by faraway travelers.

You glanced down, at hands unlike ones you were accustomed to seeing. You were nude, unable to hide from yourself as you felt tears begin to sprout. The illusion magic wasn’t working, and you couldn’t understand why.

This body was your true form, not that of the human you continuously tried to convince yourself you were. You hadn’t showed Ava, too afraid he’d see your appearance and dislike you for it.

While he was magnificent, you felt puny and odd.

A hiss snatches you from your self loathing, eyes flicking up to land on the one you’d just been thinking of.

He was covered in something, though you weren’t entirely sure what until he moved closer. The pearls lining his chambers glowed softly, his appearance more vibrant as he closed the distance between himself and the bed you laid on.

You sucked in a breath, realization dawning as the red contrasts against his skin. His lower face completely smeared in it, but his lips seemed clean. Until he grinned, red stained sharp teeth with chunks of dark meat stuck in between.

You remembered briefly him mentioning being mistaken for a demon.

You finally understood as a strange fear blossomed in your gut and you scooted away. Confusion and terror consuming you, but your body not catching up with your mind, because it recognized his scent and touch. You didn’t move quick enough, a clawed hand easily curling around your ankle and tugging you close. You slid smoothly over the cool silk, brought close to his body radiating heat. He only wore trousers, his taloned feet bare and ankles revealed as he’d cuffed them up to avoid bloody human fingers trying to grip them.

“Oh my little flower, look at you,” his eyes are swirling melted gold, enchanting and so disorienting. His beauty becoming savage with the blood and human flesh he adorned.

“A-Ava…” you want to ask, but you also don’t want the answer.

Did he find out who hurt you? Or was it unrelated? It seemed too coincidental.

Your chest constricted painfully as he stared down at you in wonder. Your true form so lovely it took his breath away, your image so fitting for you it was a wonder why you didn’t prefer this over your human mirage. Your ears, pointed like his own, were curled down a little with your emotions, as his eyes traced your face.

The shape was the same, your body still so small, and your eyes still expressed every little thought without fail.

He hated to admit it was even cuter, though he mused it was likely because he was the first to see your true form.

An abandoned young changeling, one he only took mild interest in, had him so thoroughly ravenous for all of you now.

“Isn’t this more comfortable petal? Instead of masquerading as a filthy human, aren’t you happier to just be you now?” His callous words seem off, but you can’t quite fathom it all as the shock settles in.

“My precious flower faery, are you scared?” Yes, you wanted to scream, as his bloody face and body near you, his sugary scent over powered by the scent of iron and death. Fae hated iron. He shouldn’t be comfortable.

You choked, jerking back and trying to crawl away from him, but he still had your ankle caged in his hand.

He laughs, but it’s empty and devoid of any true humor as he stares down at you with something dark in his gaze.

He yanks you back, harshly and sending a jolt of pain up your leg as you cry out, pulled back beneath him as he crawls onto the bed over you.

He’s too close, nausea consuming you as you smell and see the gore adorning him.

He finds your useless fear amusing and annoying all at once.

“I asked you a question little flower.” He grips your face, smushing your cheeks and making you look at him.

He rolls his eyes as the tears you so love to shed spill down your cheeks.

“Yes… I-I’m scared…” his smile softens, almost becoming sweet and familiar.

“Good. You should be.” Your blood runs cold.

He has the mercy to bathe, but not alone. You watch as the spray of water from some sort of piping turns pink as it disappears through tiny holes in the marble floor.

He’s nude, like you, and even though you cower and try to turn away, he easily stops any and all retreats with hardly any effort.

“I thought you didn’t like the blood? I’m still not clean petal.” His fluffy curls are flattened by the water falling above, the warm spray soaking you both as you try not to wonder why the sticky redness won’t just wash away with the water. The dried portions difficult to get off without physically touching and rubbing him with your soapy hands. You wanted to know why he was doing this, being so mean.

His ears look more distinct with his hair flat, onyx horns prominent against his forehead as his lashes hold droplets of water to frame his golden eyes.

You try not to show it, but as the blood clears and his dark smooth gold lined skin is revealed, you notice the hard lines of muscle and purple veins which protrude.

You only come up just below his chest, and you can’t look down, least you see it again.

He was making you nervous and scared on purpose, but you couldn’t understand why.

Like a coward you didn’t ask either, because you feared the answer even more.

Ava shifts, fingers coming up to cup your face in his hands and tilt your head up as he leans over you and blocks the water falling. His claws jut out beside your head, one lightly tickling your pointed little ear.

He licks his lips, loving the sight of you soaked and naked, your pretty form so enthralling to his eyes he struggles to contain himself.

“Do you want my help…?” His tone is condescending, eyes uncaring in the least about your inner turmoil.

“Here,” he drops one hand, engulfing your wrist and forcing you to plant your hand against his abdomen. “You have to wash like this—,” he teaches patiently, like none of this was happening and everything was fine. He moves your soft little hand back and forth, the soap quick to wash away as the water continues to fall. “You need more soap petal.” He informs gently, moving to stop the warm spray and letting you both stand in silence now, drops of water falling the only noise besides your breathing.

He sighs when you don’t move, your eyes trained on the corner of the spacious bathing room, where an in ground bath rests. He would take you to the hot springs later.

He fills the hand he has control of with soap, and amuses himself with using it like a washcloth, your little fingers curling as your lips tilt down into a frown.

“Since you need the help,” he goads, watching as those sweet familiar doe eyes flash up a glare from the corner of your eye.

He smiles, a nasty grin filled with something sinister as he chuckles darkly. “Don’t want to be my good girl anymore?” It’s a loaded question you’re unsure of how to answer.

It hardly matters as he forces your hand down, until you jolt at the change in body part you were touching. He forces your fingers to close around his throbbing length, unable to touch or fully wrap around it as your head jerks instinctively to look at what he was making you do.

“A-Ava—,” you try to pull away, but to no avail. He only hums, the soap like lube as he uses your hand to jerk his cock, amused as you stare in shock. He won’t let you go, not when the sight of your smaller form holding his leaking rod is so arousing he comes a minute a later. Hips thrusting with the timing of the squeeze he forces your hand to hold, hot ropes of his seed shooting out onto your chest and belly as he cages you with his free arm from moving away. He allows his purple tapered tip to smear the remaining pearls of his seed on your skin, ignoring your whine of protest as he paints you.

“Fuck, that’s it, be good for me pretty girl,” he growls lightly, chest rattling as he releases his pent up frustration on your confused form.

Really, you couldn’t be more adorable covered in his release looking dazed.

His golden eyes heavy lidded as he crouches down to catch your lips in a heated kiss.

You swallow nervously, staring at Ava as he stares at you from across his bed chambers.

You’d fallen asleep after… after bathing, if you could even call it that, and awoken later to find yourself alone again. Ava missing and your body covered by fine silk sheets while you slept.

You’d scrambled about the room looking for escape, finding nothing but a single exit locked, which Ava now stood before.

He wore a pair of silken sleep pants, tailored to his enormous figure as well as a matching robe left loose and revealing a majority of his chest and abdomen. His wings weren’t physical but a magic which naturally formed behind him, you’d learned.

The gold markings on his body were duller than earlier, his eyes less vibrant and more cool as he looks at you.

He seems more… familiar. Less of the Ava covered in blood and flesh of humans and more of the one you’ve befriended.

He’s silent, unmoving as he stands still in the doorway.

You don’t want to make the first move, unsure in this new environment, but you similarly disliked all of this distance and miscommunication between you both.

You moved cautiously, much like the skittish animal he likens you to in his mind, off the bed. You’d wrapped yourself in one of his sheets, his scent clinging to you the only thing stopping him from tearing it off you in annoyance. He stays put, muscles taunt and jaw clenched as you approach him like he might harm you.

He debated it.

Briefly showing you why you should be obedient and just listen, but dismissing it in favor of you liking him at least to some degree.

When you reach him, he merely stares down at you, face impassive unlike your nervous and awkward expression.

“Ava…?” He finally shifts, leaning down to close the distance a little but still not touching you. It’s you who initiates, because he’s certain he’s trained you well enough in your past touch starved state that you can’t resist the comfort and warmth he provides. You wrap your arms around his waist, pressing your figure to his while looking up with those honest eyes he adores.

He finally relaxes, your touch so addicting he was unable to resist wrapping you further into his embrace while lifting you up. Your legs wrap around him instinctively, warm bare cunt now pressed against his abdomen while your arms come around his neck. The sheet loosening and falling down to pool at his feet. He finally smiles at your flustered state, not letting you climb down to grab it, instead moving you both towards his—your—bed and easily laying you down to drape over you.

“You’re calmer than I imagined you’d be…” he murmurs against the skin of your neck, kissing up to your jaw. “Should I prepare for your wrath later little flower?” He muses, lifting up to look at your expression.

“Was that blood… from a human?” You look guarded but he isn’t surprised.

“Yes.”

“Did you kill them?” He affirms again.

“Was it because of… me?” Those sweet eyes looked so haunted as you asked, as if you knew what he was going to say.

“No. It wasn’t because of you.”

You check his face, as if he were a human and would lie to you as they do.

“Then why did you do it?” You breathed, sagging in relief beneath him. His lips twitch, molten eyes shining with adoration as he looks upon you.

“They greatly offended me.” He answers vaguely, but it was the truth. They offended him by breathing and walking the earth. It was a direct insult to him. They only met misfortune because they caught his attention.

You seemed happy to accept whatever rid you of any guilt, looking up at him less fearfully now that he was clean and not being mean to you. Though, you both shared very different definitions of being “mean”.

“Am I staying the night?” You asked him curiously. You had thought he’d brought you here as he didn’t know where your home in the village was when you’d fallen asleep.

He shook his head, lips curling higher.

“You’re staying forever.” He declares, sweet scent filling your senses as he comes close enough to kiss you.

Then he does.

You thought his teasing was funny, lips tilting up finally as the awkwardness dissipates and familiarity rises.

This is your Ava, warm sweet Ava that smells so good it makes you crave sweets you cannot afford.

He presses you further into the unfathomably soft bed, his lips demanding as you open for him.

“Ava,” you break the kiss, breathing heavier as he growls and nips at your bottom lip, a shiver wracking you as he leans back enough to meet your gaze. “What we’re doing… it’s what lovers and spouses do isn’t it? At least, this is what human lovers do…” your voice becomes smaller as he stares down as you with an expression you couldn’t name.

“And?” He encourages.

You look away for a moment, gathering your thoughts before remembering out of all the cruelty in the world, Ava was the outlier.

“Is that what we’re doing? Like lovers?” You felt too embarrassed to directly state it, to say it aloud, and equally scared this isn’t anything different than exchanging a handshake with another faery to him. It was different to you.

“Do you want it to be?” He leans down, placing a feather soft kiss against your temple so you couldn’t see his eyes glowing bright. “Do you want us to be like lovers little flower?” His voice is deeper than usual, strained almost as he holds himself perfectly still above you.

You take the time to think, much to his displeasure, but when you answer it was everything for him.

“I do.”

He places a chaste kiss to your lips, his own tilting higher and higher until he’s grinning gleefully.

“Then that’s what we’ll be.” He confirms, and you miss it.

You miss every little trap he’d laid, each tiny piece of the puzzle forming around you like a cage. You miss everything and it’s too late to go back now. Ava muses wickedly, as he kisses you more sensually, lets his claws drag so delicately down your soft skin, he thinks how stupid you are.

“I’ll be all yours if you ask for it Y/N,” he speaks directly into your pointed ear, hot breath making the tips curl as you whine. The way he says your name is different than usual, more serious and seductive. You realize this seems wrong somehow, the way he’s making you melt so easily like this, how your panic and fear evaporated so quickly. You aren’t given time to think further, when he shifts and sits up. He sneers when you attempt to cover yourself again, gripping your wrist and lightly pulling you up too. On your knees, you face his chest, eyes looking up to see his heated expression.

Ava cups your jaw with one hand, and pokes at your lip with the other.

He doesn’t ask before his thumb invades your mouth, and you fight not to bite down or jerk away with his pointed claw inside.

He’s exploring, squeezing your cheeks until you open wide so he can playfully run over your sharpened canines. Curiously playing with your tongue until he leans down licks it with his own. It felt strange and erotic, your body vibrating with nerves and budding arousal as he explores you.

“Ava…” you wanted to touch him too, but he didn’t seem to be listening as he lets his hands trail down to cup your breasts, thumbs rolling over your nipples as your back arches into them.

So you let your own hands wander, bolder than usual as you feel his solid form beneath you. His skin is much softer than it appears, strange markings and golden symbols flat. He had no softer points aside from that, muscles like stone and occasionally uncomfortable to lounge against due to it.

He squeezes your waist, smiling mischievous as you yelp and glare at him. He does it again, finally chuckling as he lets his hands slip to your ass.

This time his squeeze makes you gasp, as he parts your ass cheeks and allows your heated core to be exposed to the air. His claws so careful not to tear your skin open as he drags you taunt against him, rutting his hardened cock against your soft belly.

He moans aloud as he sees the tip poke out between you, your breasts above a delicious sight as he does it again and again.

“You drive me wild pretty faery,” he smiles, licking your cheek as he easily lifts you up to toss you to the center of the bed. You sink in, huffing but giggling as he crawls over you, looking like a dark angel as he covers you completely to capture your lips in a much more filthy kiss.

“I want to devour you,” he purrs, licking and kissing down your neck and chest, spreading your legs. “Make you mine completely,” you moan, feeling delirious as he finally licks your sloppy pussy.

You moan when you feel his fingers prod your entrance, sharp claws gone and retracted as he pushes one inside you while he laps at your clit. It feels different and firmer than his tongue, able to rub and stretch you better as he begins sucking on your puffy nub and purring deep in his chest. “Your little nub is hard~ are you feeling good?” He teases, wiggling the tip of his tongue over your engorged clit.

Then he’s pressing a second finger in, a mild burn heating your core as you gasp and try to shift away to no avail. “So sensitive,” he murmurs, spearing them into you, your soft gummy walls forcefully spread around the two digits as he noisily slurps. He’s being messy and a bit rough, but your moans spur him on as he groans into your pussy when you begin clawing at his hair and whining.

“Ava! S’too much! Can’t—!” You squeak and almost bite your tongue when you cum, pussy sucking his fingers deep and massaging them as you soak his hand and face.

He doesn’t stop, eyes glowing bright molten gold as he watches you squirm and babble senselessly while he stuffs a third finger into your poor overstimulated cunt. Your little hole stretched wide around him, and he’s content to watch as your greedy lower mouth takes it as he pumps them into you.

You’re less amused though, body thrumming as the pleasure becomes overwhelming and you panic.

“Stop, I’m gonna make a mess, Ava stop—!” You cry out, eyes watering before tears fall as you struggle to stop the powerful pressure building in your core, hurting you with the intensity as he pushes you further and further. “Your insides are steadily swallowing and sucking my fingers in, aren’t you a little lewd?” He asks, unaffected by your dull nails digging into his forearm, eyes trained on your drooling hole below.

He’s got an iron grip on your hip with his other hand, nails digging into your flesh every time you try to squirm away. “You’re so lovely like this petal.”

He’s fascinated when you break again, clear fluid squirting up and out from your squelching pussy as he continues to shove his fingers in.

You cum so hard it nearly causes you to lose consciousness, eyes rolling back as you twitch and moan as the dam inside you bursts open.

You whine as he pulls free, hand dripping in gooey arousal as he brings it to his lips and slurps it up without any decorum, appearing almost starved as he gazes down at you with the eyes of a predator. “Messy girl~ I’ll teach you though,” his lips pull back to reveal his sharp teeth, “When you feel so good you think you’ll break, you’re supposed to say I’m coming, do you understand?” He asks darkly.

“No more…” your weak plea only makes him smirk, kissing you softly as he slides forward and uses both hands to cover your hips and lift your lower half up.

Your eyes feel heavy as you force them open, slow to realize that his enormous cock is now laid over your pussy, pulsing and dragging back and forth through your slick folds. The thick veiny appendage causes your trepidation to rise, realization dawning that he intends to fit that inside of you.

“It won’t fit—,” you weren’t being cute or coy, because while you may not be human, your form was still the same size as one. He was much, much bigger, and his cock certainly fit his proportions. You try to catch his attention, unable to close your legs with his body between them. “Ava,” He’s truly not hearing you at all, too enthralled and excited as he lubes his massive length up with your juices. He’s shaking a bit too, heart beating rapidly in his chest as he coos down at you mindlessly, golden orbs almost unseeing at this point as he lines up with your entrance.

“So good for me petal~ you’re all mine aren’t you?” He breathes, and you feel the weight and pressure begin as his tip breaches.

“Wait, stop Ava—!” You whine as the sting becomes a burn and then you’re being filled to the point of excess as you struggle to breathe anymore.

“Shh—♡,” he hushes you, pained as well due to the pressure around him, strangling him as he grimaces and drags back out a little before surging forward. “You’re mine now petal,” he groans.

You’re unable to form words as he works his cock into you like a piece which doesn’t quite fit, bullying and stretching you open to forcefully fit himself.

He leans more weight down onto you as you struggle and writhe, noisy cries falling on deaf ears as he feels himself slipping deeper as your body finally gives up on keeping him out. His tip touches your cervix, before shoving even further and smashing it up as your stomach aches in protest.

You lay limp as he finally bottoms out, twitching with your mouth open and drool pooling down your chin as you feel nothing but the feeling of him inside you. He huffs a laugh, the way you look ruined before he’s even gotten started.

You look like a doll in his grasp, his cock extending your stomach a little as it twitches inside you. Your thighs ache as they’re naturally forced up, unable to spread fully enough for him to settle so he’d merely folded you and pressed you down to prevent escape.

“You did it pretty girl, look at you~” he grins, one hand leaving your hip to press on your belly, making your eyes widen and roll back as you whine. “You took every inch of me in this cute cunt didn’t you?” This male over you isn’t familiar, even as his sugary scent seems to increase and smother you, he seems foreign in his words and actions.

The inconsistencies are difficult to track as he drags himself out of you, the fullness replaced by feeling each ridge and bump of veins decorating his cock as he slides out.

Then he’s pushing in again, stealing your breath and ability to think as he starts to fuck you.

“Don’t worry petal, I won’t hurt you,” you can’t quite understand as he pushes his thick rod inside you, brain shutting off as you go pliant in his hold. “I’ll go nice and slow so you never forget,” he moans as you tighten and jerk, “who owns you.” He’s holding back with all his might as you spasm and grip him in inside of you, walls sucking him back in as he moves to exit.

You make him forget.

As you slick his cock up with your juices, he begins to slip in easier, folding you down further into a mating press as he looks down at your teary face. You make him forget all the time he’s spent alone. Your moans increase as he picks up the pace, pounding nice and deep inside of you and ridding you of any thought beside him. He slips a hand down between you both, claws retracted completely as he softly presses on your swollen clit and throws you reeling into another orgasm around him. “Say it petal,” he grits out, the feeling of you tightening drawing his own end. He’s hardly able to move inside you, short thrusts all he can manage as he drags you over the edge.

“I’m coming—!” Your head tips back, neck bared to his eyes as you cum for him obediently.

He fills you up right after, heavy engorged balls drawing up as he pumps his first load of the day into you. His thrusts not stopping as he rocks forward, expression relaxing as his magic swirls inside of you, his mating mark slowly sinking into your soul as he works to keep his seed deep within your womb. You’re too fucked out to notice, the pleasure and pressure overwhelming your senses as you try to rest now.

Except his cock doesn’t soften.

He thrusts hard once he’s sure his bond has settled, feeling you so much deeper in his soul as he drags his cock out almost all the way. “It’s like your little hole misses me already,” he smiles, watching as you flutter around his tip as if to tell him you don’t want him to leave. “Tell me petal,” he slides back inside, jolting you awake as you stare incredulously down at where you both connect. The slick sounds of him slipping into your sticky wet entrance haunting as you whine, hands digging into fine silk as you try to push away.

He only presses you down harder, cock burrowing deep as if to anchor you. His eyes are wild and swirling, the color so bright it’s almost blinding in the dim room. “How does it feel to lose?”

You blank. His question not making any sense as the room spins and you’re overcome again with pleasure so intense it makes your toes and feet curl in the air where they rest.

“How does it feel to be utterly mine for the rest of eternity?” You gasp, tearing at the sheets as he picks up the pace, balls slapping against your ass as he begins to truly fuck you now. Enormous cock working you into a frenzy as you yelp when two fingers pinch painfully around a nipple. “You’re not going back pretty girl,” he laughs, face wicked and beautiful as you look up through blurry eyes spilling tears. “You’ll not return to that filthy human village,” he releases your sore nipple in favor of loosely gripping your throat, feeling your pulse beneath his hand. “You are not in the land of Fae sweet flower,” he lets his lips ghost over yours, his tip bullying your cervix as you writhe and move to claw at his shoulders. “You are in my kingdom, ours, where the corrupted Fae separate themselves,” you’re lost, eyes crossing almost dumbly as you come again, choking as you cry out his name.

You can’t move even an inch, unable to even squirm as you’re forced to take each punishing inch of his cock and he ruts into you.

“Your pussy keeps tightening up when I tell you all the ways you’re mine. Do you like this?” He delights in your pathetic attempt to push at his chest, clearly finished despite his balls still being heavy with his seed he intends to spill into you.

“A-Av-Ava!” You struggle to form even his name, let alone any sentences as he keeps up his fast and brutal pace. Though, from his perspective he was still holding back as he moans and spills himself inside you again.

“Yes flower?” He coos, pushing your hair out of your sweaty face as he pulls out just enough to grip your thigh and turn you on your side, sliding back to the hilt again. He hugs your leg to his chest, working his cock at a new angle in your abused pussy still spilling cum from earlier. “I’m listening,” he chuckles, knowing you can’t speak, aware his cock was keeping you like this.

Words die down as he uses his hand not holding your leg up to grip your hip, holding you still while pushing his hips forward, railing himself inside your exhausted body. Your head rests against the bed, mouth open as your saliva soaks into the sheets, eyes staring at nothing as you feel another impending orgasm approaching.

Ava doesn’t mind, adoring the cute cock drunk expression as he uses you like a toy, filling you up over and over while you slowly lose your mind. “I’m sorry—Ava please, I’m sorry,” your slurred speech and delirious voice make him laugh. Genuinely amused by your rambling, “Why are you sorry petal? I’m not mad,” he catches your lips, tongue invading and swallowing your cries. He finds you so cute.

His cute, stupid little changeling, so trusting and unaware of his unsavory intentions.

You lose consciousness and count when he comes with his hips pressed deeply into your ass, pressing you belly first into his hand as he keeps you angled up to meet his thrusts. Your sensitive chest rubbing against the silk below, body limp as your world goes black and you convulse around him.

This time he lets you fall flat into the soaked bedding, taking his still hard cock out so he can pry apart your pussy lips and watch his release ooze out of your gaping hole.

His golden eyes flick up to your sleeping form, lips pulling as he coos, “Cute~♡” before he’s stuffing you full again, merciless as he leans on one arm to keep from crushing you as he continues to drill into you.

Even when you regain consciousness, trying to crawl away from his torturous pleasure, he only grips your arm and twists it gently behind you to hold. “You’re soaked and so hot inside, do you know how crazy you’re making me?” He groans, almost sounding like he’s in pain as you squeeze and come again. “I’m not letting you go, stop trying to run. You’ve already lost sweet girl.” As he lifts his hips, tip still encased by your wet hot heat, he eyes the slick mess which coats you both and connects you to him. “Go ahead and go crazy too, be good and listen.” He laughs, slamming back in and making your back arch as you nearly scream, feeling him so deep it makes you wonder if he’s going to break you. You really will go crazy, it’s a fleeting thought stolen by his cock once again, but you truly worry as he drowns you with euphoria and madness.

He’s hunched and leaning over your back, letting his tongue and teeth tease your ear so sweetly while he pounds you stupid, whispering to you things you won’t remember.

“You wanted my name so badly, didn’t you my lovely mate?” He knows you don’t understand, but it doesn’t stop him from speaking on, husky voice lulling you as you cry and lose yourself to pleasure. “I’ll tell you since you’re being so good, taking my seed so well~” he lets a little more weight settle on top of you, his cock nestling into your deepest parts with it.

“I am Avarice.”

Post dividers by @cafekitsune

#Dark Fae King x reader #Yandere Fae King x reader #Yandere Fae #monster smut #Greed x reader #Fae smut #faecore #yancore #yandere x reader #fae king #yandere smut #Dark Fae #kinktober fun #request filled #afab reader #Fae x reader smut #changeling #changeling reader

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rose-tea-and-strawberries · 12 days

Text

when their tsum courts their crush

I write reader as female

Masterlist

♠️ DEUCE SPADE ♠️

i love the fact that tsum tsum deuce is basically delinquent deuce, only smaller and cuddlier

like deuce explains, he’s very aggressive and quick to anger - it has no impulse control and can and will fight (i.e. headbutt/drop itsy bitsy cauldrons on) anyone

like, unlike its human counterpart, it doesn’t even pretend to behave or be seen in a positive light, let alone act like the model student deuce is aiming for

but, like all things, there is an exception - and that, dear prefect, is you

you see, tsum deuce is an absolute terror to everyone - everyone except you

in fact, the second it sees you entering the rose maze (trey had you on speed dial the second tsum deuce appeared - everyone say ‘thank you, trey’) it comes bounding over to you and just leaps into your arms

and it just…stays there, all happy and content

and you just look down at this tiny, happy little angelic bean in your hands whilst every single person in heartslabyul is just gawking at how this demon just did a complete 180 degrees personality flip the second you showed up

human deuce is absolutely red faced and has suddenly become very interested in the grass whilst everyone is just giving him the biggest side eyes

so you, being the kind-hearted, altruistic person you are, just smile at the bean in your hands and cheerfully inform everyone that you wouldn’t mind babysitting tsum deuce until crowley finds a way home

everyone except deuce (and grim) is happy with this development

now human deuce already finds it hard to talk to girls but he especially finds it difficult whenever you’re around because he’s literally got the biggest crush on you and has been dying to confess but is way too shy to

but tsum deuce? tsum deuce has no such inhibitions

it will cuddle and snuggle and nuzzle up to you, rubbing against your cheek as it sits on your shoulder or hands as it rests in your palms

tsum deuce likes to grow big so that it can 1) be carried around in that child hug carry that parents do and 2) sit on your lap like a bond villain cat so that you can stroke its head and body

human deuce is not happy with either of these

like tsum deuce is just basking in your endless affection and endeared giggles whilst deuce is suffering so much that even ace gives him somewhat-sincere consoling pats on the back whenever you’d call the little tsum ‘sweetheart’ or ‘dear’ or ‘poppet’ or ‘darling or ‘angel’ or ‘cutie’ - and the list goes on…

what’s worse is that whenever you’re not looking it gives the most deadliest glare to its counterpart and when you turn around it looks back at you like ♡✧(^ ᴗ ^)✧♡

like deuce knows that he’s supposed to keep his head down and nose clean like a good little honour student but his delinquent switch is wobbly on even the best of days and seeing you be so happily touchy-feely with that smug little rascal really does not help those buried instincts

don’t get him wrong, he’s flustered beyond belief at the sight of you being so affectionate to his lookalike but his annoyance and jealousy take precedence

it all comes to a head when the cheeky bugger decides that its had enough of just receiving your kisses and just full on plants his ‘mouth’ on your lips

it takes everything in deuce to not full on punt it into the sun - especially when you look so flustered as a result, a gorgeous blush spreading across your features as you giggle at the little thing

deuce narrows his eyes - game on

❤️ ACE TRAPPOLA ❤️

@disney when are we getting tsum tsum ace? He’s the only first year to not have a marketable plushie

now ace has no problem with you being affectionate to his tsum

at first

you see ace and his tsum get along very well since they have very similar personalities

the two knaves of hearts just love causing trouble and making mischief together

but being so similar means that at some point they’ve got to clash

and clash they do >:)

when you come strolling in, tsum ace happily greets you and you, having been filled in on the situation (“thank you, Trey”), are more than happy to keep it entertained so you pet it and coddle it and dole out your sweet affection

and, honestly, it was a huge ego boost to see his crush being so sweet with a smaller version of himself

of course, he’s going to be all ace about it and tease you like “why are you so affectionate with mini me? do you have a crush on me or something? don’t worry, i understand - i guess i’m too irresistible even as a tsum” with his signature grin

but then the novelty is very quick to wear off when practically all of your attention is being given to the little bean - especially when he realises that his tsum has just as big as a crush on you as he does, and he’s very quick to act on it

like human ace, tsum ace flirts by peacocking, living off of your praise like it’s the oxygen it breathes

and unlike human ace, tsum ace doesn’t tease you, which kind of gives him a head start

basically tsum ace is an ace who doesn’t hide his insecurities and feelings for you behind a guarded wall of playful teasing and fake carelessness

it would show off by doing card tricks for you, using its own miniature deck it got from seven knows where to do all sorts of tricks - that do genuinely impress you

and with every successful trick you’d clap your hands with stars in your eyes and fondly coo at it

and it would eat all of your praise up – with every flirty behaviour you would enable it with more positive reinforcement, spurring it to get bolder and bolder and ace is absolutely dying next to you

ace has a habit of ruffling your hair so tsum ace likes to sit on your head as you go about your day and everyone can swear they see sparkles surrounding the two of you

(ace doesn’t notice because that’s what you look like to him anyway)

you even gave mini ace the glacé cherry on the iced bun you had for dessert that day, hand-feeding the sweet fruit right into the little tsum’s mouth right in front of Ace’s cherry pie (and no, not even the taste of his favourite food can wash away the bitterness corroding his tongue at the sight of you and his tsum getting all buddy-buddy, not when something so much sweeter is just out of his reach)

quit paying attention to it! doesn’t it have its own y/n to flirt with?!

then, at one point, tsum ace has conjured up a tiny rose and has gifted it to you

“for me,” you smile at the tsum and the tsum nods, happily jumping up and down in front of you, “oh you shouldn’t have.”

you carefully take the rose from the tsum and gently pick the tsum up and place a kiss right on its head

“thank you, tsum ace,” you say, giggling with fondness, “that’s for being such a sweetheart.”

ace’s hand clenches around his magic pen and he swears right then and there that it’s no more mister nice guy – no more hiding behind poorly crafted taunts in fear of what ifs

he’s confessing to you by the end of the day even if it kills him

🦁 LEONA KINGSCHOLAR 🦁

honestly, leona couldn’t care less about the little things that came from the sky - not his circus, not his monkeys

though he was kind of miffed when his dorm thought he had turned into that stubby little thing

he’s surrounded by idiots

he just palmed his own tsum off to ruggie and went off to the botanical gardens to nap

it was during one of his relaxation sessions that he heard your voice, only you were talking to someone

turns out that ‘someone’ was his own tsum that was happily snoozing on your shoulder

apparently the little guy didn’t take kindly to being babysat by ruggie so it literally hunted you down and refused to leave your side

you didn’t see any problem with this

so you just continued on with your day with a tiny version of the big kitty of savanaclaw

please understand that leona is a very jealous and greedy lion - he gets incredibly possessive if stray cats get close to you, let alone when you shower Grim with your affection - and now there’s an equally as greedy mini leona that’s demanding your attention

like it made it clear that it was trying to monopolize your attention, tail swaying in delight as you would pet its head or play with its ears - all things that you’d do with the bigger leona

it would jump up and press its head against your forehead, cheeks and mouth so you would kiss it back with your own lips (and leona just looks at the little judas all betrayed because you’ve never kissed him ever and he’s just so angry and jealous that he doesn’t even tease you about it)

so instead of spending time with him, where he rests his head on your thighs as you weave your fingers through his hair, you’re playing around with the tsum, giving it the affection that was rightfully his

at one point, it was still dozing off so you placed it nice and snug in the breast pocket of your blouse, making Leona’s right eye twitch uncontrollably when he could tell that the little deviant wasn’t even actually sleeping

honestly, he scoffs, faking sleep is the oldest trick in the book - and he knows that because he uses it on you all the time

you even played chess with it, and to leona’s surprise it was actually pretty good, only his slight amusement at watching you lose was tainted by how you were suddenly praising it for being such a good player - he’s good too! praise him!

he had finally reached his limit when his tiny doppelganger used its growing abilities to be large enough for you to wrap your arms around and bury your face into, your lovely features smiling in content as you happily sleep, unaware of the burning jealousy and intense scowl leona is giving the tsum in your embrace, or of the smug satisfaction said tsum is radiating

now leona is a man of strategy, of patiently waiting until it’s the right time to pounce, so for now he’ll just settle at baring his fangs at the little runt - he’s spent his entire life being second best (both to his brother, his nephew, that damned lizard), there is no way he’s going to be outshone by a furball that has no idea of the hierarchy of the food chain here. you’re the one thing in his life that he refuses to have taken away, even if it is by himself

and when you wake up?

you better be prepared

💙 IDIA SHROUD 💙

tsum tsum idia is such a sweetheart

while it does have idia’s social anxiety, he does hang around with you through the halls though by ‘hang around’ he’s usually buried in your pockets

tsum idia doesn’t have og idia’s fire hair but it does run naturally warm, which makes it the perfect warm pillow for you to snuggle with

idia didn’t have any strong feelings for his tsum. ortho loved it and it made you happy and that was it.

but it soon became a problem when it made you too happy

you see, idia had made a tiny little tablet so that you could play with the tsum whilst he was busy doing one of his own games

and like his counterpart, the tsum was good

too good

so good that you kept on praising it and snuggling with it every time it won

and apparently the tsum was in possession of some preloaded charm stats because it would keep on endearing you by texting you blue heart emojis or cute stickers that would make you coo at it

and watching you be so outwardly affectionate to someone that wasn’t ortho or grim definitely stung inside

even if that someone was a cuter, cuddlier, plush bean version of himself

so he just amped up the volume in his headset to drown out the sounds of your laughter and continued playing as he internally lamented how he was such a boring otaku that even a tsum has better moves than him

when it got late and you were about to leave (much to idia’s disappointment), you stood up only for the tsum to jump onto your shoulder and happily jump in place

“oh,” you giggle, “do you want to come to ramshackle with me?”

the tsum jumped up and down, indicating yes

“alright then,” you smile and turn to idia, “i guess we’ll see yo-”

“no-” he blurted out, the ends of his hair bursting into pink at the sudden silence that envelops the room, “i-i mean, you can stay. here. not here my room here - like here in ignihyde here. we have a spare room. unless you’d like to sleep over here in my room. if you want to that is. you don’t have to if you don’t want to infactyoucanforgetievensaidanythingohmysevenwhydidihavetoopenmymouth-”

“it’s okay, idia, i understand,” you say, “looks like we’re having a sleepover!”

maybe he should be a bit braver more often

#twst #twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland x reader #twst x reader #deuce spade x reader #twisted wonderland headcanons #twst headcanons #leona kingscholar x reader #idia shroud x reader #ace trappola x reader #fem reader

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risuola · 8 months

Text

TOO MUCH — F. READER x GOJO SATORU

Lately, it felt like not a second pass by without some new curse appearing somewhere in Japan and both you and Satoru had your hands full of work for few weeks, but when he comes back home, exhausted to the bone, his composure snaps and he unloads his frustration on you.

cw: angst, verbal abuse, hurt/little comfort, mentions of blood and hurt, reader is injured, mental exhaustion — 2,5k words

Too much. Too much of everything that piled up on Satoru's shoulders, weighing him down so heavily that he almost couldn't breathe. It felt like the world was on fire, curses crawling out of every shithole in Japan, most of them first or special grade, spreading nothing but death and chaos. So many people killed, so much blood and pain he had witnessed in the last few weeks, it drowned him in exhaustion and helplessness. Satoru Gojo, the strongest sorcerer alive, and yet he felt so helpless in the current situation. He traveled from town to town, fighting these terrors, but the lives that had been taken away, he couldn't bring back, and he used to think that he was immune to it already. Turns out, one can never be immune enough.

You had your hands full with work as well, but you stayed in Tokyo. The situation drained your energy too, the cascading waves of sadness and sorrow made you feel like you couldn't think straight, but you pushed through. You felt so weak, but had to be strong, everyone had to be. All of your sorcerer friends were just as engaged in the fight as you were, just as tired and distressed, but the show must go on, as they say.

You and Gojo weren't officially a couple, though everyone knew you were together. You were friends, yes, the kind of friends who kiss and have sex. The kind of friends that use pet-names and fall asleep while cuddling naked. Shit, you lived together for a few months, you know everything about him and he knows just as much about you. And you were happy, sharing every moment. He always said that you bring him so much comfort, that he feels like he can be openly himself when he's with you and be accepted for it. Nothing could ever bring you more joy than the man you love feeling comfortable with you.

That being said, it wasn't the best time for your relationship slash situationship. He was more out of the house than in it, and you were just sleeping there, barely. It's been going on for a few weeks already, and it's just now it’s beginning to finally calm down. Few weeks of constant fighting for everyone involved in the jujutsu world, but it started to slow down. So you knew that Satoru would finally return home.

It's when you showered and put on your pajamas that you heard the keys twisting in the lock and the doors opening. Putting on a smile, you rushed to welcome Gojo home, but the moment you saw him, you knew he's extremely exhausted.

Satoru entered the house already annoyed by the conversation he had with Gakuganji a few moments before. That old fart had the audacity to nag him about his methods while he himself was sitting in his cave sipping green tea, not caring one bit that the world was drowning in curses and blood. He threw the keys on the shelf, kicked off his shoes and took off the blindfold, then looked at you, all clean and comfortable in your pajamas. He scoffed quietly.

He felt like his own body was falling apart, everything hurt, his head was pounding, his eyes were burning. Even though he was actively healing himself, the side effects of everything were getting to him. A few weeks of nonstop fighting, of domains, of reds, blues, and purples, and so much physical combat had left him hanging on the last thread of his composure. The usual mask of cheerful carelessness long gone.

Suddenly he wished he could enter the empty house, throw away his clothes, collapse on the bed dirty and just fall asleep, but he couldn't. You were there. And there was never a time in the past when he wouldn't be absolutely overjoyed to come home to you. Even when tired, he wanted nothing more than your arms around him. But not right now.

"Satoru, hey," you greeted him, keeping your voice soft and on the quiet side. You knew him so well, you could see how fatigued he was and frankly, you couldn't blame him. Being the strongest had its downsides, one of which was being very much in demand, and sadly, no one could take his place. "You're exhausted, huh?"

"Look at you, so damn perceptive," he snapped harshly, his eyes cold and empty as he looked down at you. He walked past you to the kitchen to grab a bottle of water from the fridge.

“Are you hungry? I can make you someth-“

"No, just shut up, you cannot make me fucking anything," once again, his tone was cold as he snarled at you. It was the first time so much cyanide spilled out of his mouth and he just barely opened it. At first you tried to understand it. Things had been really draining lately and you knew he was angry because he was tired, but it hurt nonetheless.

"Alright," you sighed, deciding it's best not to get deeper into the conversation when he's so argumentative. "Do as you wish, get some rest, Satoru."

"You know, why instead of telling me what the hell to do, you just don't leave my house, huh?", Shut up Gojo, he screamed at himself subconsciously. "Why are you even here anyway?" Shut. Up. " All comfy when I'm constantly on the job?"

"I know you're tired, Satoru, but I've been on missions too. I'm tired too," you looked at him in defeat, unable to keep the smiley mask on. There was so much wrong in this situation, so much anger being thrown at you for no reason whatsoever, and you had every right in the world to be just as angry as he was, but you just chose not to. You wanted to welcome him home with warmth, comfort him, and keep him up even if you felt down. You wanted to soothe his aching body when yours hurt just as much. Or worse. You were badly injured during the last few battles, but Shoko had her hands so full, you told her you could wait, and you hid all those wounds from Gojo's eyes so as not to worry him.

"'Yeah, your little missions,'" he bit, and your brows furrowed at the sound of his words.

"What does that even mean?" you asked, slowly feeling the heat of anger coursing through your veins. "I'm first gra-"

"I don't care what you are. You're still nothing to me. I deal with real shit, not those..."

You slapped him. Or at least you tried, your hand stopping just short of his face, and it surprised you to realize his limitless was still on, even though he was home already. He was still in fight-or-flight mode, still feeling threatened enough to keep his defensive techniques activated.

"Just what do you think you're fucking doing?" he growled, taking your wrist into his grip, the squeeze shooting shockwaves of pain through your nervous system. "Did my words hurt you? Did the truth hurt you so badly that you thought you could actually hit me?", his tone had a taunting undertone, and when you looked into his blue eyes, you saw nothing but cold. "Funny little thing."

"Let go, Satoru."

"Oh, I will. And when I do, you'll get your useless ass out of here. I'm not your boyfriend, we just fuck, we're not in a goddamn relationship for you to be here all the time. I need my space."

Gojo hated every word that fell out of his mouth, but now he couldn't take them back or erase them, and he didn't exactly know how to act now that he had said them. Immediately, he let his limitless inactivate, hoping you'd want to slap him again. Shit, he'd even accept a kick in the balls, but you remained silent, just looking at him. He could tell by the way your eyes glistened in the sharp artificial light of his kitchen that there were tears threatening to come out, but you didn't cry. Your jaw clenched for a moment and you lowered your hand.

"Right," you exhaled deeply, feeling the hurt burn your heart and soul. The smoke of sadness already flowing through your veins, your cells, your mind. "You're right, we're not. Here," you performed a theatrical swing of your arm, displaying the interiors to him, "your fucking space. I'll let myself out."

"Y/n..." he tried, but you were already in the room, changing from your pj's to sweatpants. He stayed in the kitchen, hoping you'd just jump into bed and maybe cry about it all, and he'd just come back later and comfort you when he wasn't mad anymore, but it didn't go that way.

Once he saw you again, you were heading towards the door.

"Y/n stay, don't be silly, stop," he tried to grab you, but you slapped his hands away.

"What, does the almighty, fucking honored one wish to add something to his oh-so-wonderful speech?"

"No, I'm sorry, stay," he took your hand forcefully, pulling you into his chest, but you fought back, not wanting anything to do with him right now. He had said too much. You knew it was all driven by his exhaustion, but it was far too much.

"No, Gojo, I don't want to stay here. I'm more than pleased to leave you in your space. There's no damn reason for you to share your precious air with such a useless nothing."

"No, no, please," he begged, his anger slowly being overtaken by panic. The sound of his last name felt cold and unfamiliar as it rolled off your tongue. "I'm sorry, please stay. I didn't mean it. Fuck, I didn't mean any of it."

"Please, take your hands off me," you told him more quietly. You were tired and now emotionally drained as well. All you wanted from this evening was to cuddle up with him to sleep. To bask in his warmth, knowing he's safe and home, to feel his skin against yours, to breathe him in. But no.

"No, I won't," he lowered his head and buried his face in your neck. "Please, I'm so fucking sorry. I didn't mean it, I'm just so tired. I feel dead, there has been so much fighting and pain and suffering and death all around me these past few weeks. I'm sorry, y/n," his voice faded to whisper as he rambled against your pulse.

"Gojo..."

"I don't think you're useless or nothing. Fuck, what have I done" he was spiraling slowly into a panic attack. You could feel his heartbeat getting hectic, his breathing uneven, and his grip on you so tight it hurt. "I am nothing without you. Please stay."

"Gojo."

"I love you," he whispered, his tone breathless, and at first you thought you had heard him wrong. He had never told you that. Not even once. "I love you so fucking much, please. Slap me, kick me, punch me in the dick, I don't care. Just don't leave me. I'm so sorry."

"Satoru, please, it hurts..."

"Hurts?", he froze. What hurts? Did he hurt you? The thought frightened him, not only did he insult you for no damn reason and now he caused you pain? As if burned, he let go of you completely, raising his hands as if he wanted to keep them in sight so you knew he wouldn't hurt you anymore. "I'm sorry."

"I've been fighting for these weeks, too. I'm tired too. I would never compare myself to you, but I gave it my all, too," you exhaled deeply. "And I know you're exhausted, Satoru. So please go to bed and get some sleep. I'll just go home."

"Here is your home, with me."

"Here?", you briefly looked around. It was a place you loved because it was filled with him. It was where your heart wanted to be when you felt safest and happiest, but now... "Suddenly I feel like an intruder here. I feel like I shouldn't be here."

"No, please don't say that. Listen, y/n, love," he dropped to his knees, took your hands in his and kissed the tops of them gently and tenderly. "Please, stay with me. I'm an idiot. But I love you. And I need you here, I need you in my life. I want you by my side."

"So, what do you want us to be? You said we're just fucking. God, I thought we were at least friends, if not a couple, but..."

"I want us to be everything. I want you to be my friend, my partner, my lover, my wife and my entire world."

You sighed. Deep and slow, pushing the air out of your lungs, letting your whole body deflate as you took his hands and pulled him up.

"Go take a shower and come to bed. You need to sleep it off. I need to rest too."

Obeying, Satoru rushed to the bathroom and you made sure to lock the doors, turn off the lights and took the time to change back into your pajamas. Sitting on the bed, you finally felt the tears running down your face. They brought you some relief and you let them flow freely, desperate to get it out of you before Gojo came back. It pained you how wrong the evening went and you wondered if there was anything you did to cause it, but no. It wasn’t your fault. You didn’t deserve it. And you should leave him there alone, just as he wished for. Then why were you still here?

"Please don't cry," his long arms wrapped around you from behind, enveloping you in his warmth. The light sweet scent of his body wash pleasantly filled your airways and it's out of habit that you leaned into him. "Will you ever forgive me?" he asked, gently wiping the tears from your cheeks. Slowly, he laid you down on the pillows and took his usual place beside you.

"I will," you sighed, already feeling the discomfort. "But please, let's change sides."

Satoru didn't understand at first, but he did what you asked anyway. When he saw you exhale in relief as you turned to the other side, his brain clicked. Moving his hands in the most delicate way possible, he lifted your shirt a little, revealing the many layers of bandages, already tinged with red that was seeping through them slowly.

"God, you're wounded. That's what was hurting you when I held you... I had no idea why you didn't tel-, ah, because I was being an asshole, right," he sighed.

"Yeah, I wasn't going to tell you anyway. I'm fine, just Shoko had her hands full, so I told her I'd wait a day or two. It's just a scratch, really," you told him, fixing your shirt. "Please, let's get some sleep, okay? We'll talk about it all later."

"I love you," he whispered, pulling you to his chest and planting a kiss on the top of your head. It was only now that he could feel his body relax, with you right next to him, your heartbeat syncing with his own, and all of your loving aura filling his body. And he realized that the words he never had the balls to say out loud to you now felt natural, rolling off his tongue. "I love you so much."

"You idiot," you sighed, closing your eyes and slowly melting into his form. "I love you too."

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halcyone-of-the-sea · 4 months

Text

PREY

PAIRING: Hunter!Simon 'Ghost' Riley x F!Werewolf!Reader

SYNOPSIS: There’s blood on your hands again.

WORDCOUNT: 16.8k

WARNINGS: Intense gore, body horror, death, mutilation, weapons, firearms, knives, intended harm, violence, blood, descriptions of wounds, angst, fluff, protective!Simon, religious mentions, period time standards for men/women (1700s), etc.

A/N: The first of my reverse AUs is finally here! Enjoy!

*I do not give others permission to translate and/or re-publish my works on this or any other platform*

The tale of the Werewolf extends back to around 2100 BC. It was written in The Epic of Gilgamesh, scored into a clay tablet by hands long buried—a corpse forever still in the earth so deep, the bones have yet to be found by greedy eyes. Perhaps the oldest surviving story in human history, and there is still a passage that bleeds into stories hundreds of thousands of years later.

In such, Gilgamesh, a man on the search for immortality, rejects a woman for the reason of turning her previous husband into a wolf.

“You have loved the shepherd of the flock; he made meal-cake for you day after day, he killed kids for your sake. You struck and turned him into a wolf, now his own herd-boys chase him away, his own hounds worry his flanks…”

And then, the tales spread, changed, through history and through spoken words of caution. Like water trickling from a well, down the shape of the wooden bucket delving deeper and deeper into a pit of age—of caution.

“The Beast of Gévaudan. Man-eater.” Through France

“He has a wolf-head, you know? Tall thing—short brown hair all over him.” Through Scotland

“Beware the man that changes shape under the full moon.” England.

Now, in the late seventeenth century, it all comes to a head. Even the people in 2100 BC knew that someone who changes into a wolf, or some bastard-like imitation of one, was very much real; it is very much an affliction that overtakes sense and reason. A curse.

Transferable down to the saliva of one entering your bloodstream.

You must never get within the beast’s sights.

—

There’s blood on your hands again.

Hunched over, your body quivers, and the bareness of your flesh in the moonlight is of little concern to you—trapped in a fetal position while the chilled wind howls.

Howls.

“Get out of my head.” Your fingers grasp at your scalp, pulling; ripping. A sob jaggedly slashes your throat open. “Please,” you rattle in a fast breath, the grass snapping as you writhe. “Get out of my head.”

It had happened once more, and you can’t remember any of it.

The forest is deathly still. No birds sing their songs—no breeze moves the long grass, patches trampled down around you as if a beast had staggered into the small clearing you’re lying in. Maybe it had. There are shadows that listen to your quiet panic, the low whines and gasping quivers of your throat; from behind the trees that speak in the way that only they could. The deep night creeps into you, and the moonlight bathing your flesh doesn’t push back the terror in your bloodstream.

Your body burns like you’ve broken every bone twice over, and judging by the blood stuck in between every line and dip of your skin, to anyone walking past, the analogy could be very real. Fingers flexing and bending, you try to force out the venom inside of your head with desperation befitting a dying dog, spine visible out of the skin of your back as you sob all the harder.

You tried to stop it—you had; you always do. But, just like every month when the full moon mocks you with its silver-hued face, it never works.

It never works.

Your eyes stare at nothing as you lay here, in this place of grass, blood, and bile, of corruption as deep as a vile sin of flesh. It came over you like a wave, fingers trapping your throat and bearing it to the caress of fangs. There were different names for it here, miles from your village and the terrified eyes that search the tree line; names coming from the hunters and their black deeds.

Shapeshifter.

Demon spawn.

Werewolf.

“I can’t take it anymore,” you shove the side of your head into the ground, pushing the torn earth away from the cuts of long claws. Tears flood the dirt until it’s wet and muddy, pushing the crimson stains on your skin away in long streaks. “It hurts, God, please, it hurts.”

The sound of your hysterics rises and falls in the stillness—the inactivity of fearful birds and beasts wondering if your fangs would rip from your gums and your claws would tear from your fingertips. Fur along your body the color of which leads to stories of their own spreading far and wide.

The White Wolf. The Specter of St. Francis’ Village. A hound from Hell.

More pale than snow, and sharper seen than a knife or blade through the black trees. Even if the memories of your shifts were fuzzy at best, there were flashes of those who’d seen your gargantuan form from the confines of their stone-cut homes. Those wide eyes. Yelling—screaming; sprays of blood as heads were separated from bodies—

“Stop!” You scream, your legs kicking out as your toes scrape the grass. “It’s not me! It’s not!”

There’s a call of alarm from deep within the woods, the flash of torches and bellow of hunting dogs. They’re running you down, you’d forgotten that in the depths of your breaking mind and body, and by the time your elongated limbs had set themselves back into a more human-like appearance, your spine cracking at every vertebrae, it had slipped your thoughts entirely. It always took you a long time to understand what had happened after…everything.

But even now, the shouts of the hunt are pointless to the visceral breaking of your consciousness, stuck between leaving bloodlust and knowledge of horror. There’s flesh in your teeth, and you wail before your fingers drag down your face, cupping over your ears. In the back of your skull, the panting of dogged breath echoes; running, blood, blood, blood. It’s a dance of fangs, of pale fur, staining every inch and flooding the back of your mouth. Drinking it down like water.

Flesh—lovely, disgusting, flesh rent and torn to the bone with smacking gums belonging to a square snout.

Who had you killed this time?

By the time the dogs had tracked your scent to your curled body, it was already too late.

“Here!” Male voices shift in and out on the backs of crows, hard and cruel. “It’s here!”

“Get the dogs on it!”

“It’s not me,” you mutter incessantly, not truly understanding what you’re saying as hounds burst through the bushes, all snapping teeth and slobbering tongues your eyes widen in an instant. Panting, your jaw clenches; long whines move your throat.

“What…?” Blinking quickly, the dogs surround you—having to be at least ten of them on their nimble legs and thin tails. Everything is distant to you; separated. A knife could be driven through your heart, and you wouldn’t even realize it until minutes later, bleeding out on the grass.

The hounds are afraid of you.

They dart forward and balk back, your scent driving them up a wall until rabid slobber drips from their maws. Torchlight pulls through the trees—quicker now, running. Fangs nick your shoulder and you yell, shoving up to your backside as the world swirls, shuffling away as the dogs snarl. Their eyes are red-huen. Drunk off fear and order.

Your head darts and shifts, blood dripping off your chin to travel down the flesh of your stomach and navel—so much crimson that the whites of your eyes are violent under the moon. Hands slipping over the wet grass, your face pulls and slackens in delirious confusion as you try to stand but fail. You cry out in sharp pain, and the dogs go wild in their kill circle, nearly attacking one another in anticipation.

You glance down and see the black crossbow bolt sticking out of your thigh.

The scent of wolfsbane in the air only then becomes clear to you, and the realization is slow. Wolfsbane—you’d been told about it by the village priest. It makes beasts of the night dumb and weak; minds unclear.

In a moment of clarity, the reason behind your incurable hysteria becomes clear.

Lungs heaving and eyes far-off, the hunting party bursts through to where you stay, and you look up in animalistic fear. Figures dip and slip into one another, faces becoming demons as the visages melt into twos and threes. You yell out, sniffling and sobbing, trying to back up until the hounds grapple onto your shoulder and rip a chuck out of your arm. Screaming, your hand moves back, shoving at its snout before hands staple themselves to your wrist.

“No!” You wail, injured leg dragging as you’re forced back into a heavy chest. Hot breath fans against your neck as multiple grips pull and touch you—shackling you down with rope and chains. Your throat screams itself raw, kicking and struggling futility. “Let go!”

You’re too weak—too drugged off wolfsbane and blood loss. Rotting teeth move across the canvas of a smeared painting, you can’t focus beyond the riot of your heart inside of your ribs.

Grubby hands snap under your chin, digging into your flesh as you cry, not able to move as the restraints are tightened. A silver muzzle is slapped over your jaw. Dark eyes shimmer as you rage—aggravating the bolt wound until fresh blood forms a puddle on the ground, which the dogs lick their lips at.

“Look at that,” a low, lust-filled voice eases out, and hands around your body tightening as you squirm, head spinning. Silver and wolfsbane. Your eyes snap to fight the sudden flood of fuzzy heaviness in your body. “Pretty little Hell-Beast, eh? Almost seems a bit strange to have the Spector be her. Think that hunter shot the right bitch?”

“Course,” another grunt, a hand grabs the top of your head, jerking it up as your head lulls along with the force. You can barely focus on the words being said. “He isn’t a fuckin’ twat. Killed a werewolf in the next village over, too. Heard he skinned the fucker and took its head for his mantlepiece—just like the vampire skull he wears.” A pause. The dogs are still barking—echoing out in the trees. You can’t feel your legs. “Isn’t that right, Hunter?!”

A shout is sent into trees as your panic breeds with the drug, eyelids drooping as your head is snapped and moved by your hair. Your buggy eyes don’t focus on the man until he steps into the torchlight, the crowd parting for him as the metal of your chains drags and clinks together.

It’s as if the very blackness of night takes human form.

The man, the Hunter, is tall—very tall. He looms like an aloof animal over most of the others here with his dark boots and his black hood, and yet, under the fabric, there is no whisper of his face.

Only the upper visage of a pure white skull, and two long, needle-pointed teeth where canines should be.

“Ghost,” one of the men laughs, groping at your bleeding thigh before you shriek, muffled from behind the muzzle, and weakly kicked out. “Good shot, Mate. Right in the meat of the thing. Gave a good trail for the hounds.”

Ghost blinks slowly, grunting under his breath as the large crossbow in his hands is shifted. He stays silent as your visible pulse hurries on as if you were a rabbit and not a wolf, watching from under the cover of his hood. The darkness of his clothes is blue in the moon—silver buttons down the length of a loose shirt and pants stuffed into boots. The hood is attached to a jacket, which itself extends down to his knees and sways lightly with every shift. The silent resting of weapons and tools is not lost to anyone.

Belt of filled vials and large knives; a firearm over his back, and two pistols hidden on either thigh. That crossbow was still in his hands.

Brown eyes openly dig into your soul, dead as a corpse, and your voice whines as your thigh is finally released with a laugh. Your vision blacks and comes back a moment later as you try to breathe from behind the muzzle, gasping. That skull on his face…you don’t like it. It scares you.

And the Hunter only continues to watch numbly as his wide shoulders stay stationary.

“Get the cage!” Someone roars, and you flinch, shrinking until a dog with short fur comes and nips at your ankles, the man holding you grinning sharply as you sob and shake.

“C’mon—expected more of a fight from you, Spector. Getting bullied by dogs, now? Ain’t that a twist of fate, then. Bet this devil’s whore can’t even walk with all that wolfsbane in ‘er, eh?”

A grumble of chuckles as the rattle of metal is in the distance. You grow more fearful, mind flashing to a burning stake and the trials you’d seen in village after village. No—no they can’t put you in a cage; they can’t put you on trial.

They’re going to make it hurt.

“Say we try it out.” A shadow comes closer and grabs you by the arm, ruthlessly shoving you to the ground. You cry out as your spine meets the earth, arms and legs kept under chains that tangle and screech in their metallic way. The rope that holds the muzzle pulls against your neck until you can’t breathe except in ragged wheezes.

“Go on,” they taunt, some holding back the rampaging dogs just to watch you flail and shimmy. Your face grows hot as you struggle to sit up—shaking so violently you can’t focus on anything but the quiver. “Put on a show for us, Beasty!”

Death would be better than this.

Tears hit the ground as the cage is finally brought into view, the men all groaning and annoyed that you hadn’t even attempted a forced shift or a desperate run into the trees.

Ghost’s fingers, you notice from the side of your blurring eye, tighten minutely around the body of his weapon. You do not doubt that he’s wondering if it would be easier to just put a bolt through your eye right now.

“Get it loaded up,” the Hunter’s voice is accented and gravel-like. As if rotting wood is being peeled back and scraped along gravel, he stares at you for a long moment and then glances at the dogs. “And get those fucking mutts under control.”

“Which one?” Is the low-blow joke, and the ruckus of loud amusement that follows makes you want to die.

It’s not your fault, how do you tell them that? It’s not your fault.

Your throat bobs in an attempt to speak, but you can’t move your jaw from behind the restraint of your face—held tight to you as the men come back over and grapple for you again. The priest was right, wolfsbane makes werewolves sluggish.

You can do nothing as you’re ruthlessly dropped into a silver cage, borrowed, no doubt, from the Vatican itself, and christened with holy water. But it was a funny thing, really, and the dark humor wasn’t lost to you even like this. There was nothing godly about this contraption.

Locked in, you shove yourself immediately into a corner and hunch over, grasping at your thigh as the bolt still leaks fluid in a long trail over the ground. The pain is so great in your head, that the physical agony is little—a bullet wound to a sliver.

Your temple slams into the metal, smacking into it as your eyes shove themselves closed.

Head hurts—hurts. I can’t think. Can’t think. It’s humming, my skull is breaking open.

Bile pools in the back of your throat, but the muzzle keeps it in, leaving you gagging as the cage is lifted with a grunt and carried by long poles; back to St. Francis' Village, no doubt, but you can’t…focus.

“Think you might ‘ave given her too much, then, Hunter,” one calls, slapping Ghost on the shoulder as the crowd follows after the panicking quarry. The large man only gives him a look from the side of his eye and the villager pulls away immediately, awkwardly chuckling before hurrying off after the others.

Brown eyes watch your bare body hunch and spasm, pupils wide as you’re carted off.

He’d been generous with the wolfsbane, truth be told. He’d expected you to be…Ghost’s dark brows pull in from behind his grim mask…he’d expected you to be different.

Humming under his breath, the Hunter watches the torches disappear into the trees and lets his gaze linger on you.

There was something…off.

Blinking, he turns, eyes studying the place where they’d found you with sharp attention that misses nothing—not even the birds that come back to settle into the trees again. Large boots shift through the grass, and as he’s re-settling the crossbow in his hands, his eyes find something glinting.

Watching, Ghost takes another step and brings his body to the item in the grass, hidden, before he kneels. Digging with large digits, the Hunter’s hands loop through the chain of a necklace, dragging it through the torn earth until he can gaze at it fully under the light of the moon.

Blinking in slight surprise, Ghost finds the body of a silver bullet hanging from the confines of a leather strap. Brown eyes shifting to look over his shoulder, the man listens to the cheers and merriment of the hunting party mutely. A simmering understanding brews in his gut. It’s only one that you could know from years of experience doing just as he had—hunting and being hunted in turn with a knowledge of all things dark and unholy.

It could never be easy, could it?

A low grunt later, the man sighs out a deep, “Fucking hell,” and moves to slowly stand, slinking back into the darkness.

—

They kept you in the cage and set it on display in the middle of town for days.

Shivering now from the cold more than the wolfsbane, you stay collapsed into yourself as people come past to poke and prod at you—even sticking knives into the slits of the cage and digging them into you like an animal until your flesh was marked and brutalized.

You don’t remember what it’s like to not be bloody.

The bolt wound was festering; infected. You dare not touch it, because the pain only makes you want to vomit, and if you do, you’ll most likely suffocate on your own bile before the trial ever happens.

Yet, on the fourth night of this, as your eyelids flutter and your body grows weaker, a shadow comes to visit.

“You weren’t born one.” It isn’t a question, but the sudden voice makes you startle.

Eyes locking onto Ghosts’, your mind flies with fear—thinking that perhaps there’s more abuse that you’ll be put through. But no…the man has no weapons on him tonight. Only a long knife at his belt. The mask stays.

You stare, unable to speak as your fingers twitch.

Grunting, Ghost’s head tilts, gaze moving up and down as you curl in tighter around yourself. A cold breeze rips through the square, and your eyes clench closed with breaking will. When you open them again, the Hunter is kneeling by the cage, and holding up something in his hand loosely.

“You going to behave if I take that muzzle off?” You nearly gasped at the hanging image of your necklace—a silver bullet on a leather strap; that dark and heavy thing usually kept around your neck. A reminder.

After a moment of wide-eyed staring, you nod quickly to his question, a desperate, pleading thing without the need to utter words. Please, you want to scream at him, take it off.

Ghost’s eyes are as dark as a mound of dirt, sharply intelligent and filled with an unflinching reality. He doesn’t care what you are, and he won’t until you speak to him and let him judge your character far before any courtroom can. The man knows what a lie is better than any priest.

“Good,” he says curtly, accent far more deep as he thinks, re-capturing the bullet in his palm and standing before he shuffles it into his pocket.

You can’t help the anxiety as Ghost moves forward, loping to the side of the cage with the side of his eyes on you incessantly. It’s obvious how his other hand lays limp on the hilt of his blade that, with only one wrong move, you’d feel the chill of the edge with no time at all.

But the temptation of getting this muzzle off was too good to ruin, and so, you stay as still as you’re able as crows call in the distance and the deadness of the town leaks into your blood.

Ghost moves his free hand and orders, blankly, “Closer.”

You hesitate, body tight before you drag your face closer to the bars, angling it parallel with the metal so the tight bind on the back can be taken up. The fear can be smelt the second your eyes have to break contact with his with the turn of your head—neither of you trusts the other.

Ghost hums under his breath at the sight of your broken body coming farther into the open light of the moon, the whites of your eyes all the more visible from under the slathering of blood and tears. He hadn’t been absent to witness the abuse you’d been put through, even if the coin from his successful hunt was feeding him at the inn, a small window allowed the tight view of your torment at the hands of the people you’d once lived around.

But the reality was that you’d killed people—scores of them—and yet the worst part of it was that he wasn’t sure if you even knew that.

It took four nights for him to break his only rule: never get involved after the job’s done.

But the hunch he had was too important to ignore.

Large fingers latch onto the knot at the base of your skull through the cage itself, Ghost grunting at the sight ahead of him. The rope had been gradually chafing over your flesh, peeling back hair and skin until only the bloody meat was left—Simon had to wonder if the people of this village even wanted you alive for the trial or not at this rate. You’d be dead by tomorrow if that infected bolt at your thigh wasn’t taken care of.

Despite himself, a part of his chest tightens at the sight of the thing sticking out of your leg, dripping a yellowish puss. It had been a good shot, and he had overcoated the bolt in wolfsbane.

Ghost hadn’t expected you to be so susceptible to it—most werewolves only got slower, but you…you seemed to have a stronger reaction. He files that fact away and tilts his masked face to the side.

Grasping at his blade, the sound of a knife being slipped out of a sheath makes you startle, jerking your head back and shoving away even as your muffed whine of pain falls out. Ghost momentarily readies himself for an attack, but the way you force your mangled body to the opposite corner has him grumbling out a hard, “Easy.”

The Hunter raises the blade, watching you with unblinking eyes. Your body shakes; panting. It was like calming a feral dog.

“You want the thing off or not? Have to cut it.” Once more, the man rises and walks over, boots almost silent over the small raised platform the cage had been set on like a trophy, you inside are comparable to the golden coins that greedy eyes touch and run their dirty hands over.

Your mind is a troubled thing as you watch this Hunter and his crude knife come closer, kneeling again, and motioning with two fingers to shift your head.

“Out ‘ere,” Ghost says, brown eyes not letting you guess anything about his true motives. “Don’t have time to fuck around. Guards’ll make a round soon and I’d rather not get caught wide-eyed.”

Your brows pull in, hands clenching and unclenching in your lap as goosebumps travel the length of every limb. You were tired—hungry and thirsty; there were open wounds that burned with infection and ones that were crusted over with dirt and grime. You can’t feel your toes, and the tips of your fingers have long since gone numb.

The thought of getting this muzzle off was like the promise of heaven being dangled in front of your nose. Your hesitation this time is far longer than the first, moonlight glinting off the visible blade in Ghost’s hand as he stares. That mask holds death.

The hood is gone from him—only that pale bone left and sewn into dark, dark, fabric. The sharpness of the teeth leaves your throat bobbing in a nervous swallow as your head carefully shifts to rest on the bars. Bending, you present the knot once more and try not to focus on the way Ghost’s attention is fully on your expanding lungs; the pulse that is seen through the meat of your neck.

But he says nothing before his fingers once more grasp the rope and the tip of the knife slips up. You don’t even feel it before the sudden slackening of the muzzle, and then the thing slips from your face before it slaps the bottom of the cage with a dull thump.

The first thing you do is vomit.

Spine pulling in, your body jerks as the bile that had been in the back of your throat rockets out, restrained hands slapping the ground as the acidic concoction leaks from between your torn lips. Face on fire, you choke and retch for what seems like minutes before you can finally breathe in the damp air—the innate shame and disgust rolling through as you cough raggedly.

It’s only after you’d forgotten the man kneeling outside that he seems to remind you of his presence with a grumble.

“Breathe. It’s no use if you can’t speak to me.”

A weak, quivering glare comes across your eyes, saliva dripping off your chin as your tongue moves to lick at your lips. But the brown gaze is as immovable as stone. Finding it pointless, your hands come up and delicately touch the base of your skull, only making you flinch when the fresh blood pools down and over your neck, licking at your shoulders. Tiny droplets fall to hit the metal one at a time.

Ghost’s fingers twitch as he puts the knife away.

“Who bit you?” You stare at him, hands falling before your wrists rub at the aggravated skin of your jaw. He shifts his head, voice slow but heavy. “Speak.”

“...I’m not a dog,” your voice is scratchy, hoarse. You send a small glance his way, mouth open and nostrils flaring in an attempt to bring in the oxygen you’d been lacking.

“Really?” A hidden eyebrow is slowly raised. “Hell, coulda fooled me.”

“Damn you,” you whisper, not meeting his gaze as you shuffle back. The crossbow bolt catches on one of the cage’s bars and you bite on your lip to stop the shrill yell that threatens to exit. Head moving, you lightly slam your skull into the wall in pain.

Breath hitched, you clench your trembling jaw tight.

“Speak or don’t,” Ghost grunts, and he makes a move to stand. “Your funeral.”

A spark of fear stabs you as he begins to shift, and you can’t explain why. Perhaps it was because it was the first conversation you can remember having lately that wasn’t one-sided or on the edge of a blade.

“W-wait,” you stutter, blinking through the blood. The Hunter doesn’t slow, and then he’s on his feet and fixing the gloves over his fingers, flexing his hands before his foot begins to pivot—

“Please, don’t go,” your voice is thin and pleading, echoing through the street. “I’ll answer your questions, any of them you want,” the sentence cracks through a dry throat, tears welling. “Please, don’t leave me here alone.”

Ghost had half of his body turned away before it went rigid; the side of his dead eyes flash to you, swirling with specs of moonlit silver. A hunter and a werewolf lock gazes, great beasts respectively brought together in seconds that seep into slow minutes of delicate need.

Knowledge and company. Understanding and a horrible fellowship.

The Hunter’s eyes twitch in their ever-narrow resting place, glancing away before he mutely moves back to where he was before.

He wastes no time.

“Who bloody bit you?”

You stifle a pathetic sigh of great relief, taking company with a man who had shot you not days before. Yet the ability to speak and be heard was a commodity that was dimming each and every day.

“It was already fully turned,” you speak quickly, tongue tripping. “A big wolf—a gray one with eyes like the sky.”

Ghost glares to the side. Gray? There were no contracts for gray werewolves with blue eyes in the area. Only you—only Specter. The next question is just as stiff.

“When?”

“Three years ago,” your lips move. “Only three years, I promise.” Brown eyes narrow slowly, fingers tapping the fabric of his pants once before he makes a noise in the back of his throat. Ghost’s jaw clenches, mind working through the hoops that need to be jumped.

To you, the questions might seem pointless, but to a hunter, they were important—very important. Werewolves who are born afflicted with this moon-drunkenness are different from those turned by a bite. Not only are shifts from turned werewolves more violent, more deadly, but they rarely know their own actions from that of the frenzy under their skin; those that are born as such are rarely out of control, unlike your faction.

The only question now was if Ghost could condemn you to death when it was obvious your human form was entirely different and you had no semblance of an idea of what was going on. Was it even his problem to care about? Even looking at you now, the man blinked away from cuts and inflicted injuries—the muzzle on the ground.

The blood and the bolt.

He’d known it had been a foolish play to bring all of those townsfolk with him on this hunt but he needed their knowledge of the terrain; he hadn’t passed through St. Francis’ before. At the time, Ghost hadn’t been averse to assistance as long as he got the job done in his own fashion: capture or kill, the contract had stated. Rarely was he known for capture.

Maybe, deep down, he’d known something was already wrong about this.

“Show me it,” the Hunter grunts, staring you down, a deep anticipation growing in his bones. He had to make sure you weren’t lying.

You lick your lips, face pulling with every twitch and sway of your form. The black at the edges of your vision was coming back, and you blinked quickly, chains dragging before you shifted your back with a quivering breath. The punctures were difficult to see through all of the gore, but Ghost made do as he grabbed at the waterskin at his waist and the rag hanging from his belt.

Flooding the fabric in the lukewarm water, he hums out a firm, “Don’t move. Cleanin’ it,” before you feel the press of the rag to your back.

Gasping lightly, you almost jerk away before the sensation becomes a nearly welcomed one—the drag and slight scrape of rough material. Your averted eyes dip lower, staring at nothing as your heart momentarily slows to a normal pace. Ghost cleans the areas where the swell of scar tissue is the most obvious, and, one by one, the violent groves spread out like a slash of paint over canvas. Along the left side of your waist, the blood gives way to a dented ‘v’ shape of healed punctures. Deep, dragging; a point to where your side was almost ripped away before it broke off swiftly.

Ghost’s dark eyes fight the need to widen, and that hidden blankness stays.

A great gray wolf with blue eyes…

His mask tilts, head shifting as his gaze moves slowly. Gloved fingers twitch to touch them, moving in an almost examining way that befits a surgeon and not a decapitator. Your breath is held in the back of your throat, but you sag nearly entirely into the bars of the cage, growing more unsteady by the second.

The scent of infection is so strong it makes your head burn, and you’re overtaken by it as Ghost’s presence suddenly disappears.

You don’t know if it’s minutes or hours before you understand that you’re alone again, but when your limp neck finally turns to wonder where your silent captor is, you are greeted with nothing but moonlight. Blinking through the sludge behind your eyes, the sinking in your gut was stark and sudden—like a knife dragging itself from gullet to navel.

But all you offer is a light whine as more blood moves to cover the places where Ghost’s rag had just cleaned. You were scared of him, no doubt. A hunter through and through down to the vampiric skull on his face and the shroud of death at every inch of his form.

He’d shot you and drugged you with wolfsbane. Found your necklace.

So why had he talked to you?

Your head is too muddled for this, too delicate. Like the crimson under your nails, it dries and flakes off of your brain as the lack of distraction breeds stored agony. There wasn’t anything left to focus on besides the upcoming trial, your death, and the pain that doesn’t let you sleep except for now, on the brink of not rest but unconsciousness.

And at the sound of a key being slotted into the silver of your cage’s door, only then does your body slump with the weight of doom.

You don’t even feel the hand that grasps at your ankle.

—

The sway of the horse makes your teeth clatter with every clop of hooves.

Your conscience mostly comes and goes, only staying in thin seconds where you feel the press of clean bandages on your afflicted flesh and the tipping of warm broth into your mouth. Grass under your head.

Blankets being shuffled over your clothed body when you shiver.

When you’re finally able to speak, when the horse is moving along and hands keep your back stuck to a strong chest, it’s a low, garbled, “Ow.”

Ghost barely blinks down to your head as it slumps to the gait of his horse, glancing before his attention returns to the thin forest trail ahead of him. You’d made noises in your sleep often enough—this was no different except for the fact he felt your shoulders flex.

Slowing the horse with a pull on the reins, the dappled mare settles to a walk.

“You up, then?” Ghost hums, his hand around your waist tightening as you groan under your breath. “Good. Thought I was dragging a corpse—would have wasted my bandages.”

Your eyes shudder as they open into the light, having to focus on moving them before the sting of the sun makes them water. But you do, and then the confusion outweighs the numb stinging of tended wounds.

Head shifting, you look behind you slowly with wide eyes as the horse under both of you snorts.

Brown eyes watch you before a dark brow twitches upward. “What is it?”

You just blink, mouth slightly open.

“Where…am I?”

“Forest.” Ghost states matter-of-factly.

If you had the energy to glare, you would have. Seeing that nothing will get the man into a proper conversation—he was a brick wall even now—you look down at yourself and land on the scarred forearm that keeps you secure on the saddle. Ghost’s gloves were still on, but the sleeve of his dark shirt had ridden back to his upper forearm, and in the wake of pale skin, you find the black ink of all manner of warfare.

Werewolf skulls; vampire fangs and fire. The slash of inkish chains with skeletons.

Your lips thin, your senses slowly becoming your friend again as you stare at the snarling face of a needle-hewn wolf. Eyes tightening as the horse moves to the left, your body follows the reactive action before Ghost’s pressure tightens once more, visibly veins behind the pale flesh. You move on, seeing the thin tunic and pants over your body—feeling under that, the bind of wrappings with the scents of mashed yarrow leaves in the fabric.

They’d been re-applied recently, too.

“Stay still unless you want to re-open them,” Ghost utters, eyes scanning the trees for unseen threats. It was midday by now, the sun high above the trees watching the both of you on your trek to seemingly nowhere. “We’re far enough away, but I want more distance before I take the time to close them fully.”

“The trial,” your arm moves up, fingers grazing the side of your nose before it falls back down. Ghost can feel the air heat with unease. “The…the cage?”

“Trial was two days ago,” he draws, thighs shifting over the saddle. “Give or take.”

The confession isn’t as shocking now that you have woken up here, but the lack of remembrance on your part of that time startles you. It’s a blank slate—just like the aftermath of your shifts. You don’t like not knowing.

The next question comes out with a haggard cough, sweat dripping off your nose. “Why?”

“You’re going to tell me ‘bout the werewolf that made you,” the Hunter grunts. “And you can’t speak if you’re lit up like a pig on a spit. Took you the night we met in the square.”

Through it all, Ghost barely looks at you—always his attention keeps to the trees and the shadows that linger; seeming to listen. He knows more than anyone that they do.

The horse continues on, your pain surfaces again, and with a shuddering breath, you fall into a fitful sleep once more. The arm around your body tightens, and the warmth it lends is accented when Ghost’s shifting gaze glances at the top of your head. He wears an expression he can’t name yet.

When the throws of fever pull their curtains back for the last time, it shows you the slats of the attic above your head, wood polished and clean as the heat of fire moves over your body. Pulling a large inhalation of air into your lungs, you blink softly as if clearing away cobwebs with a broom—willing sense to return in the few seconds it had flown away.

The furs are warm.

In the village, you weren’t anyone of standing. A simple woman—unwed, and, thus, unimportant due to the era the world sees itself in. It wasn’t all bad…namely, it hid your affliction far longer than you could have hoped it did. You had a small piece of family land passed down to you on the edge of the village, and that was where you stayed. Nothing fancy; a hearth, a large, single-room property with a garden and a well. You were known to keep sheep, a fact that had caused perhaps a few hysterical chuckling fits when, every full moon, one or two went missing, but it gave you the ability to accumulate money and, more importantly, an alibi.

Who would suspect a werewolf to own sheep?

But this home already had a more detached feel to it—something removed. The air was sterile, somehow. Groaning, your face tightens before you rise to the palms of your hands, muscles quivering to keep the strength your stubbornness gives to them. Half-vertical, you turn and study the area.

Square, the four walls are stone with mortar and clay to keep the rounded blobs together. You’re on the ground floor, a staircase to the far right while the bed is stuck into the left corner; a nightstand sitting void of all except a single chamber-wick holding an unused candle. A sturdy table with one wooden chair, a stone fireplace set into the same wall the headboard is level with, and a large oak door.

There are runes written on it.

You can’t make sense of what they mean, but when you see them, your tiny-pupiled eyes slip to the rest, all placed at windows or near some point of entry—unassuming things until you realize why they were red in color.

Your shoulders tighten, and whatever bit of magic moves through your skin lets your nose pull to the scent of human blood.

You clear your throat and look away, licking your lips with a dry tongue. Moving your toes under the two bear furs that rest at your abdomen, you notice the lack of earth-shattering pain that accompanies it, and, shifting a hesitant hand, you grab the edge and push it back a bit farther.

Bandages with perfect ties meet you, void of any crimson staining.

Truth be told, you expected more of a Hunter’s home—skulls; trophies. The town always spoke of burnt bodies strung up on crosses that mark the property of those in this profession, a ward and a sign of grim hope. Vampires mostly, wasting away in the brutal sun. Others as well. Werewolf fur and witch bones shoved in blessed boxes.

This place is almost normal, you think, thighs shifting over the dip of the bed as your finger runs the white wrappings where the bolt should be. Your mind dares not go to how he got the thing out of you, and at the stretch of sutures, you take your curious grip off of it entirely.

Looking around once more, your brows furrowed tightly.

Where was the man? The hunter responsible for your current predicament? Ghost. With his vampire skull mask and his black attire—a hellhound with dark ink and intentions. More importantly…

Why were you still alive?

Your memories come back slowly as you stand, bare feet moving to the floor as the tunic over your upper half falls to your knees at the verticality of your spine. They creak a bit, the bones, at the ability to stand fully upwards and not be impaired by bars of silver. A strength seeps through you slowly.

In the deafening silence, you clear your throat tinily and lightly itch at the clean flesh at the back of your neck where the muzzle sat; rubbed raw now scabbed and healing with the spread of natural oil balms. Taking in a slow breath, you step forward with a heavy limp and watch the door, glancing at locked trunks and cupboards, eyes blinking. Your muscles ached, but the sting only served as a way to remind you that you were still here—living. Few in your position were granted second chances.

You’re about to study the runes at the door when you’re called to with the creak of the stairs in your left ear.

“Wouldn’t recommend it.” Your head snaps over, blinking quickly.

Ghost carries the leather holders of his twin pistols in one hand, the bodies of the weapons in them hanging as he comes to ground level one step at a time. Brown eyes glance over through the confines of his skeletal face-covering as he walks to the table, placing down the items.

“Keeps the spirits out—smudge ‘em and the house gets haunted,” he grunts. “Rather not bleed myself again to get the runes copied.”

You stare in mild shock, sound sparking from the back of your throat. “...Right.”

Side-eyeing the markings, you shiver and step back from the door, silent as Ghost seems to focus on his task at hand—looking over his weapons.

Large hands running the metal and wood, the pistols in his grip shift as the drying light of the day streams in through the curtains of the windows. He touches them intimately, knowing every grove and dip until he tilts one and rubs away a slash of dirt from the barrel with his bare thumb.

You quickly turn awkward, looking down at yourself and the bareness of your lower legs. It wasn’t lost to you that the man was the reason you were in this situation in the first place.

“You shot me,” you grumble—not unlike someone who had a knife to their throat.

“Affirmative,” Ghost says nonchalantly. You get a slow, blank glance and nothing more.

“Have you drugged me?” You ask, heart speeding up. There wasn’t anywhere to go—not without an escape plan and with Ghost in front of you.

“Wolfsbane?” The Hunter shifts his thighs, boots moving over the hardwood. “Negative. Not yet.”

“Yet?” An attitude seeps in, lips thinning.

Ghost sighs under his breath, slipping the pistols back into their holsters. “Forgetting about how we met, Love?”

“No,” you huff. “Not really.”

“Perfect.” Eyelids pull down slightly. “Don’t.” Ghost nods his head to the table's chair, crossing his arms over his chest. “Sit.”

“I told you I’m not a—” A sharp, numb look makes your snappy reply stall itself, and you stand there for more than a minute before you find the pointlessness of this.

You limp forward and sit in the chair.

Looping your arms around your waist, you glare to the side as your skin crawls at the unblinking eyes that stare. Ghost rolls his shoulders, tilting his head.

“What do you know about the werewolf that bit you beyond appearance?”

“Nothing,” you chuckle hopelessly, moving a finger in confusion. “I…I don’t know why you’re asking me about it—it’s not like I had a conversation with him.”

The Hunter blinks at your sudden confidence, unable to separate your form now from the one in the cage; blubbering ceaselessly in a grassy clearing. But lesser pains always bring out someone's true colors. As long as you told him what he needed to know.

Ghost explains with a sheen of dull annoyance. “Every turned werewolf holds a connection to the one that bit them. It’s pack mentality.” At your blank look, his brows pull in, the mask shifting. “You telling me you’ve never come back into contact?”

“...No?” Your lips dip. “For three years I’ve been by myself with this.”

Brown digs into your face, a small sheen of confusion slipping in to tighten them, around his biceps, Ghost’s fingers twitch.

You lick your lips, speaking up in the impending silence. “I don’t remember anything after I turn. Is that normal?”

“For you?” He mutters, still not taking his eyes off of you. “Yes.”

“I’m not going to pretend like I know what’s going to happen,” you shrug. “But at the very least I want to try and understand why I’m like this.” You open and close your mouth for a moment. “Before you kill me, anyways.”

“If I wanted you dead,” Ghost grunts through a half-amused tilt of his head. He doesn’t beat around the bush. “...You would be.”

“‘Capture or kill,’” you huff. You’d seen the flyers; heard from word of mouth. “Right.” You sigh. “They’ll track you down, you know. They’re not going to just let you take me.”

“They won’t make it through the forest. Bastards would get lost on the trail.” The Hunter moves until he can grasp the waterskin from the counter, dragging it over with his hand. He tosses it to the main table in your direction after he comes back over, and you hesitantly reach forward and pull the top off. Ghost changes the subject back to his studies of your condition closely. Dark eyes slip down your front as your lips part to take up the liquid. “Before your shift, tell me what you see.”

Your throat bobs as you drink the water, thirsty as it soothes your dry mouth. You hum, but the inquiry makes your hair rise. Your arm wipes at your mouth as you lower the waterskin, a small thankfulness in your heart. “It’s less of what I see and more of what I hear and smell—blood; metal. River water. I…” Your chest tightens. “I feel my bones breaking and I hear howling mixing with whispers.”

“Whispers?” Ghost leans, eyes alighting with dim interest. “What’re they saying?”

“I try to block it out,” you whisper, not exactly answering. “Makes it go faster.”

A long nothingness ensues.

The impending night grows deeper, and then Ghost finally speaks again after you begin to shift with unease. He nods firmly, tilting his head as if it’s already been decided.

“Next full moon, you’re going to listen to them.”

Your horrified face snaps up. It’s a moment of stuttering before you force out a heavy, “What? No!”

He’s already turned, moving back over to the stairs and placing one foot on the steps.

“Ghost!” You yell, face devoid of blood.

He side-eyes you. “Go back to bed. You’re dead on your feet.”

And then the same man who shot you in the thigh with little remorse disappears into the attic.

—

The Hunter was a strange beast.

The days the two of you spent together were mostly silent—left with tight stares and tense shoulders. Clipped sentences.

Ghost, for what it was worth, gave you space in this small house; as much as you could get. He kept himself up above while you stayed on ground level keeping yourself occupied. You’d gotten spare trousers and socks, a jacket, and the bed was practically yours with how your scent rolled off of it now. Yet, you had never been permitted to go outside.

You’d seen the land from the windows—careful of the runes, of course, and it wasn’t anything… ghastly. A vegetable garden, a single-stall stable with a dappled mare, and a beaten-down trail out the front.

No livestock.

No bodies.

It was only when you had become ever more curious about your lupine curse that you braved the stairs to the attic—one week into the impromptu stay. It’s funny due to the fact that Ghost had never said that you couldn’t go up there sooner.

You stand now in the flat room with a sloping roof and find the man making bullets. It’s a long table, parallel to the walls in the center of the room; dark and covered in all manner of books and tomes. Grimoires tied up and locked. Racks of weapons with markings and blessings tied to sheets of ribbon…it was something you’d never seen before.

Studying it now, the contents were a dark fascination.

Ghost fiddles with his silver shell, mixing in gunpowder into the hollowness. He doesn’t speak until you do, but he knows you’re there.

“Tell me more about werewolves,” you speak through the air, and he waits before answering. “The ones who are born with it.”

“Rare,” Ghost comments, and you’re stuck by how willing he is to tell you about this. He puts down his bullet and picks up another. “Harder to find, even harder to kill. Unlike you, they know what goes on when they’re running ‘round. Fuckin’ nightmare to pick up the pieces—bloodbath.” You thin your lips. “Not all of ‘em are murderous, but they’re unpredictable. Can’t help but make packs.”

“Instinct,” you murmur, coming a bit closer. Ghost pauses, looking at you before huffing in the form of a gruff ‘yes.’ Your wondering continues. “But why am I alone then?”

“That’s the question,” the hunter says slowly. “Need to figure out why.” Brown eyes slowly move to you. “‘Fore more people end up dead. Or turned.”

“Can I,” you stop at the table, standing opposite the man. “Can I turn people, too?”

“No,” is all you’re given. Ghost’s eyes glint. “And I’d rather you didn’t bite on me to try.”

Your face heats.

Your attention focuses for a while on how he works—prepares for something unseen. He’d said he’d kept you alive to help him find the one who bit you, but he’d also cleaned your infected injuries, bandaged you, and fed you. Kept you warm. Safe. It was far more than could be said about your village.

However, it was strange how Ghost’s stark muteness was something that you found in the darker hours, a small comfort. When the moon was coming in from the windows, and you hid from its rays as if being stalked down, he once found you sleeping under the bed on the floor because of it.

He never said anything, just offered you a silent hand and helped you back out with a slow blink and a tilt of his head.

There was a distrust, obviously, but there was also an unspoken nearness. No one would make any sense of it—you couldn’t either. It was like a wolf and a raven; something built on hesitence but necessity. You didn’t like Ghost’s mask or his brutalist profession of shooting his wolfsbane-coated bolts, and he didn’t like that once a month you turned into a rampaging werewolf.

Comparable things, really.

But even here, in this workshop in his attic, you saw the need for this—for hunters. If you couldn’t stop yourself, there came a time when you had to be stopped. Truth be told, you expected it to be a quick and final end. Maybe that was just a foolish hope.

A silver bullet would have always been your final song, you believed. Perhaps the very one that had once swung from around your neck; the one you’d never taken off until now.

But then, perhaps that would have been your own brutalist profession.

“Thank you,” you nod. Ghost pauses, fingers stained with gunpowder. He blinks at the bullet in his hand as you continue. “I know you don’t care about anything beyond your work, but if you hadn’t gotten me out of that cage they would have burned me alive. Skinned me.” Your tongue pokes out of the side of your mouth. “I don’t know, but it wouldn’t have been kind. Job or not…thank you for getting me out of there.”

“I shot you,” he utters, voice gravel. Ghost seemed confused.

Your lips flick. “I never said I forgave you for that part.”

A smooth chuckle wafts out over the attic and your own softly mirrors. Your head tilts somewhat quizzically. “But, about that…did you mean to put so much wolfsbane on it?”

Ghost shakes his head, grumbling. A small sense of honesty leaks out. “...Expected you to be bigger.”

You blink, and then, a few seconds later, a loud snort echoes like a ringing bell.

The Hunter's unimpressed look only leads you to find him all the more enjoyable. “Shut it. Fuckin’ hell.”

A hand is waved from your party, dismissing the harsh snap. “Sorry, sorry.” You puff out amused air. “Spector not up to your expectations?”

Ghost nearly rolls his eyes, trying to focus on the task at hand. He didn’t mind your company, at the very least he knew he needed to keep an eye on you for any potentially forced shifts or hostile attitude. What he hadn’t expected was to find you so…different from your muzzled counterpart, your shared physical inhabitant.

He could almost call you endearing if he wasn’t so numb to the sight and scent of reality.

“Sightings were far between,” Ghost grunts. “Here-say. I took an educated guess—better to put something like you out of commission than drag my way out of a forest without legs.”

“No apology?” You try, tilting your head.

“None,” is the drawn response. “I don’t have regrets. You’re alive.”

Your fingers touch the outside of one of his journals, tracing the bumps and grooves of age and wear. You hum, but don’t reply. Most of your pains have been pushed back now, even if you still weren’t up to full strength. Food and rest helped, but the anxiety that perpetuated only lengthened the healing process.

When you can’t trust even yourself under the drunkenness of the moon, it only makes your fear of the sun worse. Everything made you afraid—most of all your mind; most of all, the future.

“Why do you want to find the werewolf that turned me?” You have to speak this, have to push. Your curiosity demands it.

Ghost puts the bullet down and grabs a rag from his belt, mask turning to look your way as he brushes off his hands. He pauses, looming with that gargantuan height—natural intimidation in the span of his chest and the trunk that makes up his front. You find yourself in his shadow as he rubs at his fingers with the rag, taking it away and slotting it back into his belt a moment later.

The man’s heat leaks into your body as he blinks over, glancing your form up and down in a single look; keeping a respectful distance but still making his attentions known.

He stares. “If it keeps biting people, there won’t be any villages left to take up contracts from.”

“Money?” You frown.

“Principle,” Ghost counters, chest rising and falling steadily. “There needs to be a middle ground. Too many feral werewolves, too few people. Cut off the head.”

“Ominous,” your form turns to his, itching at the back of your head again—the scabbing skin. “If what you said was true, how do you know the thing isn’t already dead? If it hasn’t tried to get to me, what was the point of making me?”

“Because you hadn’t left St. Francis’ by the time I put a bolt in you.” Ghost grumbles, rubbing a hand on his bicep, itching above the fabric of his tunic. He stretches with a grunt—and you see his shirt ride up and the pale skin underneath. You gawk for a moment at the length of scars and brutal muscle.

“Charming,” you dryly utter, stuttering in a brief second of pulling back your senses, but the Hunter continues on, ignoring you.

“That was where you were turned—your territory. You stayed because your leader is still close by waiting.” Legs shift, and all of a sudden, a body is over you, hands are on the base of your skull, pushing your own away as brown eyes dig into the injury you pick at.

Your breath hitches, tensing for a second as your spine straightens. You watch widely from the corner of your eye as Ghost runs a careful hand over the flesh. He puffs a breath, chest moving in a grunt that is both commonplace and expected, yet the brush of his chest to your shoulder is not.

You restrain a shiver, nostrils moving to the overwhelming swell of leather and gunpowder. Bone fragments; the tang of whiskey.

His skin as he runs a thumb over the edge of your wound.

“It’ll start cracking.” Ghost utters, and through his fabric, you feel the brush of speech. “Have to apply more balm. Stop messing with it unless you want stitches soon.”

It takes a moment more of his surgical study and a small clearing of your throat before you can speak. Your mind changes the subject for you.

“So…if my bite can’t turn anyone,” you breathe, nearly sagging as Ghost’s fingers catch in your hair, shifting it under his attention to get a better look. He listens, you know. He wasn’t good at talking, but he always listened. “Why did they muzzle me?”

For a brief instance, you think you feel the Hunter’s fingers jerk a tiny amount—some reactionary muscle twitch that leads your body to still.

Ghost can’t say why he did that, though perhaps it was the sudden flash of the injuries that he’d wrapped on the road back to his property that went over his eyelids. Or the cage—your pleading face aching for whatever small sliver of brutish company you can get.

The silver bullet that he still had in his pocket, attached to that leather cord. He knew the purpose; the intent. Just as he knew the scrape of scabbing under his fingertips.

“Control,” he grumbles, and it’s all he’ll say.

Your burning face is somewhat down-turned, letting him do as he must, study what he can. He hadn’t made any moves to endanger you, and besides the upcoming full moon, there was nothing here that screamed imminent danger. Danger as a general, yes, of course. You were a werewolf in a hunter’s home—it would always be…your eyes flutter when his fingertips drag over your scalp…it would always be danger….dangerous.

Ghost doesn’t think you notice it, but your eyes are drooping.

He watches after the slight shock wears off, a tiny smirk flickering the hidden skin of his lips after he realizes the reason. If you had a tail, he’d assume it would be moving in a soft arch by now.

The man was mildly amused at that, and before he moved away fully, he had to stop himself from uttering a sarcastic, ‘like that, then?’

He had to remind himself not to get attached to whatever…this was. He was using you as bait, as some key to his problem. Not a companion. The distance here had to be firm and heavy-handed.

“The balm is down in my packs,” he grunts, leaving just as his name implied before you had the chance to gather your bearings and the lack of caressing heat. You startle back to the attic room, eyes wide and face loose before Ghost’s retreating footsteps echo on the stairs. “Don’t bloody use it all, then.”

The front door opens and closes with a pull of weighted wood.

—

“I can’t do this,” you mutter, pacing alone in the middle of the night down in the living room

The full moon was tomorrow.

“I can’t do it,” you itch at the back of your head, peeling at the nearly healed flesh harshly. Your nails dig into the soft tissue, drilling like a knife. A bead of blood slips around your fingers, but it doesn't stop you.

It’s late—late enough to know that Ghost should be asleep by now. For days, the paranoia, just like always, builds until you are nearly as mute as your Hunter. No more curiously searching his attic; no more questions about his job or how he got into this business. Brown eyes had been lingering more as the days went by, this strange companionship growing. You knew, in his own way, he was…worried.

So silent, even he had been getting noticeably uneasy. Shifting legs and quick glances. Nights where you hid under the bed from the moon until lunch came around, Ghost speaking as easily as he could to try and coax you out to no avail. You, a feral dog with white-rimmed eyes.

At supper, only hours before this panicked pacing, you had told something to Ghost that made him double-take.

“If I can’t stop it…I need you to shoot me. In the head.”

He’d never answered, but his eyes seemed to get ever-sharper as the hours continued on. More tense. Ansty.

But…that was his job, wasn’t it?

“Can’t do it,” you murmur. Blood slips down your wrist. “It isn’t right—”

“Spector?” Ghost’s voice had become so familiar to you that the only thing that made your heart skyrocket was the sudden call of it. Your gasp is sharp from behind a panted breath, hand flinching away from the crater you were steadily digging in your skull. A long string of blood trails into the air as your fingers jerk away, and it’s only then that you notice the deep pangs of pain.

Your eyes shudder for a second as Ghost’s form makes it to ground level. He comes over slowly, attention staying on the way the moonlight makes the crimson stains glint from the dripping line seeping into the sleeve of your tunic. He blinks, and you both stand.

The man’s skeletal adornment was missing, though the fabric under remained. A loose sleep shirt and pants, stained by the rays of night.

“Let me see,” he sighs under his breath, a tiny rasp telling of the sleep he’d been awoken from.

“I didn’t mean to wake you,” you utter. He doesn’t seem to care, grabbing your wrist and pulling the limb away as his body takes up presence behind you.

“Was already awake,” Ghost grunts, eyes narrowing in hidden worry. You calm down a bit at that, one less problem to worry yourself about.

The Hunter, quietly, leaves for a second and grabs his pouch near the door. With a muffled command, he nods to the bed until you’re backing up and hitting the back of your knees off of it, sitting.

Ghost lights the candle on the nightstand and opens his belongings with stiff glances your way. He noticeably doesn’t ask why you’ve harmed yourself like this.

“I can’t,” you say it like a plea for help. “Ghost, I can’t do it again.”

Hands fiddle with clean bandages and take out his waterskin. The man douses a rag with the liquid and comes over, shifting onto the bed and lightly turning you so your back is to him—legs half hanging off.

The hard press of cold water makes your breath hitch, and you bite your lip.

“It hurts,” you push out. Ghost knows you’re not talking about the newly opened wound.

“Breathe,” he says to you, seeing the way your sides expand with heavy lungs. Brown eyes flutter from the push of his large hand to the warmth of your shaking flesh. “Tell me about your home, yeah? Heard you lived in your own place.”

The question makes you double-take.

He’s asking me that? Here? Now? Hours away from perhaps another catastrophe?

Yet, you can’t help the slippage of your tongue as Ghost’s fingers rub into your scalp. The rag is lessened, and, soon, the material is rubbed gently over the sore itch of weeping skin. You fight a whimper and reply with an addled mind.

“It…it’s quiet. Calm. I always keep the candles going because I don’t like the dark.” Ghost works quietly and quickly.

“There,” he grunts, glancing at the flickering light of the candle he lit. He’d have to remember that. “And?”

“I kept sheep.”

He pauses, and, without meaning to, a soft scoff bounces off the confines of his chest. It catches your attention far better than a bullet could. Ghost shifts a needle and thread out of his gathering of items, taking away his limbs only for the short while it takes him to loop the two together.

“How many?” The masked man asks, amusement gone just as quickly as it had come.

“Only a handful,” you whisper. Your mouth opens and closes, glancing over your shoulder as the candle-light spills out over the room; casting shadows over Ghost’s face, catching on his long eyelashes. Those browns of his glint like tree trunks covered in dew.

“Please,” your words are muffled. Eyes wide and fearful, there isn’t anything that can console you on this. “You need to kill me.”

There was a dichotomy to you—a violent thing. You didn’t want to die, no, you feared it heavily, more than the moon, but the truth was that you couldn’t keep going through this. The unknowing. The breaking bones, the blinding pain. The understanding that nothing that you do can stop it.

“It hurts, Ghost,” your breath stutters. “More than taking off a limb, more than slicing yourself open and ripping out your intestines—it burns more than the light of the moon.”

The Hunter listens through all of it. He sits, he stares, and he hides the brimming sense of concern behind his dead eyes.

With a pulling of his eyebrows, Ghost’s free hand moves upwards and grabs your chin. Freezing, you study this phenomenon from over your shoulder, face on fire with eyes wide to the pale skin visible to your view. You hadn’t realized until now, but this was the most you’d seen of the man’s face.

You could make out the point of his crooked nose—the strength of his jaw under the form-fitting fabric. Cheekbones and the heaviness of his brows. Wisps of hair. He had eyes like a cat, you had to admit; something sly about them despite the numbness that seemed to extend bone-deep.

But his hands had been kind to you.

Firmly, Ghost’s fingers run your flesh, and he blinks softly before a low sound echoes in his throat. He pushes carefully on your jaw and shifts your head back forward so he can help you. When he lets go, your heart quivers in your breast

“I’m ‘ere,” he mutters, and you feel the first stitch enter the thin flesh of your head. You take down deep breaths, focusing on the scrape of his fingertips and not the point of the needle. Ghost can understand the fear of it—of pain. It’s instinct. He tilts his head and pushes out, “I can only ask for one full moon from you, yeah? No more. I just need one.”

“And if I can’t find the werewolf?” Your voice vibrates with emotion, staring down at your hands as Ghost’s chest brushes your spine. The scent of him was addling your brain; the rub and slide of his hands.

The Hunter’s jaw clenches softly. “...Then I let you go.”

It wasn’t what you were expecting, but anything from the time you’d gotten a bolt through the thigh was unknown territory, and, like a dog without a leash, you’d run into it. Your brows furrow, blood oozing down your neck before Ghost’s grip shifts to place the rag back again, swiping away firmly.

“Go?” He nods, but you can’t see it. “But what about the hunt?”

“I can manage.” The stitching pauses. The air is broken up nearly a full minute later. “You’re not evil.” Before they start up again as if nothing was uttered aloud.

The confession makes the sting in the back of your eyes start up again—a strong thing of confusion and vulnerability. Ghost continues his task, pulling together your skin one suture at a time until the injury is fully closed; clean.

“Chin,” he lowly states, and you allow him to tap your jaw, shifting it up so the wrappings can loop above your ear and over your forehead—securing them.

Even far after the blood has seeped through, the two of you stay.

—

Come morning, you already feel wrong.

Your body stays in bed, shaking—sweating. A large pain flairs in your chest over and over like a pulsing well in the earth, skin twitching with the spread of blood. Ghost sits beside the bed all the while, having dragged over his chair. He leans back into it, one arm over the side, hanging with the thing ever so often moving to rub at the back of his neck.

You don’t think he’s moved since he brought it over last night; since he got another candle to stick into the holder—push back the dark. To watch, to study, or just to stave off your rising anxiety is another question.

It’s only after the fourth time you try to rip at the stitches at the base of your skull that he finally grabs your hand and holds it silently. Now, his thumb moves over your knuckles—his gloves back on.

At noon, he tries to suggest eating.

“Hungry?” Ghost asks.

“No,” you say instantly, sweat dripping over your temple, your body partially buried under blankets. “No, I’ll just throw it up.”

Brown eyes glint. “Just one bite?”

Your mouth is already salivating—thoughts of wet flesh and blood in the forefront until you whine and shove your face into the pillow; panting heavily.

Whispers dance in the shell of your ears.

I’m here.

“Go away,” you whisper quickly to them.

Ghost pauses, hesitating. After a moment, his thighs tense with the action of movement, thinking you’re speaking to him. Something swirls in his chest, but he starts to stand nonetheless.

Your eyes widen.

“No!” Both of your hands latch onto the Hunter’s wrist, fear a needle stuck in your gaze. “No, not you. Stay, please.”

A silver cage covered in blood slides across Ghost’s slightly shocked look, but he only licks at the corner of his mouth and slowly leans back once more.

“Not going anywhere,” he says, accent dipping. “Tell me what you’re hearing, yeah?”

His hand slips back into yours, and he presses into your pulse softly, counting. The sun continues across the sky.

“I don’t like how it sounds,” you say, shaking your head. “It’s wrong.”

“Focus,” Ghost breathes, looming closer. His grip squeezes once. “It can’t hurt you.”

You shiver, eyes tightly closed as tears burn the back of your nose. “It’s howling.”

A suddenly gloveless hand spreads up your cheek, resting there and pushing back the sweat that pools. It’s calloused—scarred. You whine, head spinning.

I’m waiting.

Find me.

“I don’t want to,” you utter under your breath, words an amalgamation of slurring gasps.

“Spector,” Ghost calls, head moving closer. “Eh.”

“I don’t want to hurt anyone,” your hurried panic is similar to a mind overdosing on wolfsbane. “Gotta go away—gotta get out—”

“Spec!” The Hunter’s quick bark makes your eyes pop open, and you lock instantly with brown orbs.

They’re tight, unblinking just as always. They offer just a few moments of clarity.

Ghost holds your head still while the rest of you shivers with cold sweats, you can hear the blood inside of his veins; his heart pumping. The scent of his skin was addicting to the point of memorization on the airwaves. You watch, gulping down breaths as your throat bobs.

Eyes dart you up and down, fingers spreading out to offer what little comfort he can. The man wonders if he’s completely in over his head.

Ghost pulls his face-covering up to his nose, and your heart skips beats at the sight of ravaged skin and stubble, scars spreading out like your own. Long ones, short ones, burn marks, and hyperpigmentation. He wasn’t pretty, but he was real.

Oh, he was real.

His grip on you strengthens until all you can focus on is him.

Ghost blinks, and you see his lips move. The gravel of his voice was never more clear. “Fucking hell, keep that head on, okay? Nothing’s going to happen as long as I’m here. I’ve got you.” He sighs out a low breath, thumb running your undereye as the small dribbles of tears begin to sneak out. Ghost murmurs. “I’ve bloody got you, alright? Let it happen—we can figure it out.”

He’d grown fond of you over the course of a month. You were curious; not pushingly so. Honest. Good. You’d been dealt a bitter hand, and damn him if his stone heart wasn’t stretched thin at the raw fear on your face. This wasn’t your fault, but he needed to find who turned you and stop them before it got any more out of control than it already was. If more unstable werewolves went running through the woods, there wouldn’t be anyone left in the territory alive.

“When you turn,” Ghost says as clearly as he’s able. “Go. Don’t fight it. I’ll find you.”

“Promise?” You ask, a weak flicker coming to your lips—eyes vulnerable.

Ghost nods once, and it’s all you need. “I’ll find you,” he repeats. “Doubt me?”

“No,” you ease, clearing your throat. “But…one more thing?”

“Anything,” the Hunter instantly says.

“Just don’t shoot me in the thigh again.”

When the claws start protruding from your nailbeds hours later, you’re bolting to the door with only one last glance at the Hunter and his half-pulled-up mask. Booted feet hitting the wood as he stands, he lets you go even as his thighs tense in a need to run after you. Patience was his beast to tame, but it seemed to have left him in the form of a woman disappearing into the tree line.

There is companionship in broken things.

Your body slips into the forest just as the creak of your bones begins to shift and bend. You fall into a heap, hearing the gargling of marrow under your skin like a call to sea. An urge grows to infect you; a feral need to run and hide. Biting back a shrill scream, a hoarse yell escapes instead—flesh rippling as your mouth opens, fangs breaking the supple mushiness of your gums as blood floods like a river.

Find me.

“Ghost,” you whisper, hands snapping to your head. “Ghost, please.”

Your bullet, you want your silver bullet.

A rabid scream rips from your throat, and back in the house, Ghost’s hands tighten into fists as he glares at the open door. He growls under his breath, eyes tightening in a certain type of anger that brews in his gut. The nights your shuffling woke his light slumber were more common than when you hadn’t, and every utterance was clearly heard to his ears. It had become a curse to him—how you’d met.

A regret was seeping in, a care, and now, as he forces himself to back up and head into the attic, Ghost clenches his jaw tightly. So unaffected by the horror of monsters, he was now at a loss of sense for this growth of feelings.

He wasn’t dull, he knew that some of the contracts he took marked him as a tool and not a person of stable mind. He’d done things he wasn’t proud of, and he would continue to do them for no other reason than they were the orders he was given.

But you had broken a piece of that off of him, somehow, someway, your face had seared itself into his retinas—speared him at the brutality that your community had treated you with. The muzzle. It was cruel, and while Ghost was precisely that, there was a limit.

He did his job, and that was that. Anything after wasn’t his problem.

You became his job, and the one who turned you was an add-on. Maybe if he justified it to himself, he could understand his actions better.

But he was already sprinting to grab his gear when the first howl shattered the night.

—

A white beast prowls the forest.

It stands on two legs, but it isn’t human—isn’t natural. It’s taller than a grown man is; snout pulled back in a soundless snarl that puts dogs to shame with rows of teeth so sharp, they look like pale knives. Its feet—large, splayed—soundlessly skate the ground until clawed fingers slam to the earth.

A nose inhales the scent above the dirt, tongue lulling as a shaggy tail lays limp behind a curved spine. In between the erect ears, under the thick skull of the werewolf, the rolling bumps of a brain spark. A pull.

Find me.

Your eyes are tiny black dots—and they blink once before you rise once more. A great growl moves inside of your chest, the large collection of hair around your neck standing on end.

I’m waiting.

But there’s something that keeps you here—standing in the grass as the moon shines atop your head, your fur nearly glowing even with the stain of bloody injuries. The remains of clothes are about a meter away; only strips of what was.

Your gaze looks over your shoulder, and your gargantuan frame lumbers backward until you can stoop to them—nose once more sniffing with your arms reaching.

Your fingers twitch, blackened claws digging through the ground as a near purr echoes in your throat. The scythe-like additions card across the strips.

Gunpowder.

Leather.

Whiskey.

Something you can’t quite name, but feel drawn to despite the tightening noose at your throat. There was something there you can’t focus on…something that you need.

Your drooling jaws snap, saliva coating the fangs until they drip off one at a time to stain the grass. Body shifting, your head lowers until your wolf-ish visage rubs against the fabric, licking at the sides of your gums as delicate grumbles slip out of your mouth.

A far-off howl leaves your frame freezing.

Eyes slipping back into the feral-inhumanity of a wild animal, your body jolts up, gaze to the forest trees and the rustling of bushes. The swell of rain on the clouds is in the back of your nose, and the previous attraction to the ripped clothes is lost as simply as it had come.

You were being summoned.

Ears twitching, the entirety of your body refuses to move to the sound; tensed and ready to spring on anything that moves if only to let off the spike of anger at the lack of control. The pull grows stronger, and it feels like something is trying to drag you away into the wilds.

This was the sensation you were always trying to fight—the one that led to the aggression; the hunt. You knew that if you followed that howl, whatever was left of your human sense would be gone entirely before you could stop it.

Yet, this time, there’s a nagging need to find the owner, and you can’t remember why.

Your large head tilts, feet spaced as the curve of your spine grows more aggressive—hunching forward as you snarl at nothing, claws shaking as your fur is more bristly than sleek.

Like pure white spikes.

In the back of your head, a thin sliver of a memory slips in. Fingers on the back of your head, caressing calluses and dark, dark, eyes. Clean bandages and gentle touches.

I’ll find you.

If the side of your vision picked up the shadow shifting from far off into the trees, your curled lip never turned that way. If your nose twitched to the heavy weight of a man’s sweat, it never shifted to point as a mutt would to the rustling bush.

Your body bolts after the resounding echo of a wolf’s howl, and it’s no later that Ghost slips after your clawed prints to follow.

—

Crossbow in hand, the hunter’s mask gleams in the darkness, his pale eyes twinkling. Bending down, he glazes at the long pushing tracks of your form—seeing the spray of dirt to the side and the broken branches. Ghost blinks, shoulders tense before he swiftly stands and continues on. The firearms at his thighs lightly rattle, and the bolts in his crossbow are already laced with wolfsbane; silver tips smelt a week ago.

He passes a river with only a single glance at the tossed rocks from the bed, sloshing through the water as the bottoms of his pants get weighed down. Ghost’s mind is on one thing only: make sure this plan won’t get you killed.

The bolts aren’t for you—the silver bullets aren’t for you.

He grunts under his breath, the dark woods casting phantoms over the ground. The Hunter’s legs shift through tall grass, and he carries himself with the ingrained confidence a man of his station requires. If he were anything less than a monster himself, he would have died ages ago. Ghost shoots and lets others come up with the questions, but he could never be called dumb.

Seeing what fast glimpse he had of your shifted form after the last time, he was struck by how erratic it acted. Snapping head, twitching ears, and roving eyes. If he didn’t know any better, Ghost would have called it rabid.

Yet, your actions with his borrowed shirt were…body-stilling, to say the least about it. It had made his gut swirl.

“Give me a trail,” Ghost utters to himself, brown eyes still picking up the dash you’d taken. His agile feet splash through a puddle, the beginnings of raindrops hitting his head.

The man grabs at his hood and pulls it up stiffly, frowning under his mask.

Rain would wash away the tracks.

“C’mon, Love,” he grinds out, body hunched. “Leavin’ me to do the dirty work, eh?”

It’s too quiet—even a collection of minutes later of hard hiking, the trees barely move. There aren’t any birds; no animals beyond the black bodies of crows in the far-up branches, waiting, watching with obsidian eyes that don’t blink.

Ghost isn’t off-put, but the length of his strides gets far tinier, carefully stepping over twigs and rocks like a soldier at war. Then again, he was at war. And if he was caught unawares, there wouldn’t be a bullet to pull out of his side, but, instead, a chunk missing.

His ears were almost ringing from how hard he was focusing.

Brown eyes shift from one area to another, and then, suddenly as if a deer, he freezes.

Ghost’s body winds up, fingers twitching from the stark trigger discipline of his crossbow downward instantaneously. No one but him can explain what just happened, but he knows when he has to listen instead of act. Stuck in a clearing not unlike the place he’s first met you, his feet rest shoulder width apart and his eyes stare blankly into the trees ahead.

Your tracks end here.

From behind him, just as the large raindrops slap the side of his bone-ed visage, the small crack of a twig makes his ears twitch.

A low snarl sets his hair on end.

Looking over his shoulder, Ghost is met with the same color that he’d become so accustomed to in a full month completely blacked out. Void. Lifeless to anything besides rage and bloodlust.

Your white fur was infected with dirt, blood, and leaves—a mosaic of ferality ingrained into your body; pale fangs snapping. The beast slips through the treeline, slapping a veined hand into the soggy earth.

Ghost only watches, eyes a mystery.

His finger shifts over the trigger, and for the first time in his life, he hesitates.

The man looks into your glinting orbs, the dripping saliva on your lulling tongue as your esophagus pants for breath. One hesitation, he always knew, would mean death. One mess-up.

You’d asked him to end it, he shouldn’t feel remorse, guilt, perhaps—he was still human, despite his appearance, but remorse was deeper. It left wounds that were harder to lick clean again.

…So why isn’t he sending a bolt into your forehead?

Ghost remembers the times he’d found you under the bed, your shaking, and the way you hadn’t allowed him to change your bandages the first few weeks you’d stayed with him; didn’t want him to touch you. The nightmares and the small smile you’d gain when he’d spew his dark, sarcastic words as if this was a joke. How you’d always thank him under your breath for the food he’d give you, hunted by his own hand.

A silver cage. Crimson blood. The sight of your pleading eyes when you’d told him to shoot you.

Maybe the two of you were far more alike than he’d dare to admit. And he currently won’t, not even on his deathbed. Not even now.

Ghost watches, and he waits.

He can’t do it.

Your body slinks closer, stalking with the sound of anger, nearly rib-shaking in its volume. Ghost’s jaw clenches, and his body shifts to face yours head-on. At the sight of the crossbow, your snarl turns into an air-biting rage, saliva flying through the rain.

“Spector,” he keeps his voice low, even. The sight he’d seen as you smelled his clothes had to mean something. Ghost tilts his head, moving out a hand from the side of his weapon in an appeasement gesture. “I’m not going to shoot you. We have a job to complete…get those fangs away.”

He wonders if ordering you around will even work. You had told him before—you’re not a mutt. Ghost agrees. No mutt was the size of a fucking boulder.

The werewolf’s claws drag—goring the mud as if a pig to tear apart.

“Spector,” the Hunter tries again. But something’s different about his tone; he drops it, letting it pull on a softer string. “I’m here to end this. We’re here to end this.” He blinks and lowers the crossbow completely. “Breathe. The night can’t last forever.” A breeze whips the trees. “I made you a promise.”

There’s a second, he thinks, where he can see something shift in your gaze, pupils slightly widening above the deluge that wets down your fur into a sopping mess that hangs off muscle.

“That’s a girl,” Ghost grunts, taking a small step closer. “Never told you,” he utters, eyes locked with yours. He sees your nose twitch minutely. “But if we get this right, Spec, there’ll be no more painful shifts, hear me?”

Your dog-ish mouth is closed, hanging off every word as Ghost comes even closer.

“I kill this bastard,” the hunter breathes, gloved hand still outstretched, nearing closer to the near-silver of your form. “The moon’ll have no claim on you. She’ll let you off the leash, Little Wolf. You get to decide when it happens.”

He thinks he has you now, back to some state of recognition in the addled brain that tries to see him as prey; as competition. Ghost’s fingers are close enough to almost touch you, but just before he can brush his gloves over your wet fur, your mouth opens in a display of untamed challenge. Your growl is enough to make the man unconsciously reach for his pistol, and in the time it takes him to realize the fault of it, you’ve already rampaged forward with an unhinged jaw.

Ghost’s eyes widen, taking a quick step back.

Your legs push off, and you shove the hunter out of the way just before the fangs of an immense beast can clamp down on him, your own finding the shoulder of gray, thick fur.

Fighting as wolves do, Ghost only needs a moment to recover and get to his feet, though the sight in front of him can rival any that he’d seen before. His crossbow clatters a few feet away, sending the bolt off into the trees with a metallic ‘twang’.

The two werewolves roll around the pouring clearing, snapping teeth and rending claws drawing blood that’s deep enough to swim in to the green grass. White and gray meld together—blue eyes like a knife to Ghost’s chest when he takes it in from between the sound of tearing fur.

“Bloody fucking…” the man trails, staggering as his palms slap to the pistols at his side. He blinks, shouting in more of a bark than even a dog could imitate. “Spector!”

The wolves pull and rip the other to shreds, flesh torn and limbs grasping for purchase. Bodies are slammed to the ground before getting tossed to the side, fangs flashing in the moonlight. Ghost watches crimson stain your fur a pinkish-red.

He can’t get a good shot.

The werewolf that turned you sinks its claws into your sides, dragging them downwards as you yowl, eyes tiny with aggression before your jaws connect with its snout, biting down with more force than a horse’s hooves. The monster screams—a garbed thing of fangs and saliva.

Just as easily as it called you here to it, as it stalked your Hunter, it bashes your body back into the earth and takes you by the scruff of your neck. Eyes wide in that lupine way, you lock on Ghost’s profile before your body is lifted, and tossed away violently.

Spine slamming into a tree, you hear the cracking and bending of your bones in your ears just after you hear the sharp shout from the man in the clearing, body dropping to a heap into the grass and mud. Angled head flopping back and forth, black infests the edges of your vision, coughing up blood that seeps from between your gums and slips down the back of your esophagus. Fur and flesh are stuck at the base of your throat.

Whining, your limbs drag and pull futility, eyes flooded over with crimson and fogged by rain. A great roar worries the air, sending long shivers over your spine as you try to rise to your limbs, a five-fingered hand slamming you back down.

Just before the fangs can clamp your throat, two great booms burst through the forest.

The wolf atop you reels back, great bellow escaping its throat when you can finally drag your head to look over. This beast was clawing at its chest, shaking its large head in an arch to try and dispel the shock of having two silver bullets entering its back—the gray head snapped around to Ghost, who held his twin pistols aloft with eyes burning with anger from behind his mask. An avatar of vengeance; a bringer of death.

The orbs inside of your sockets widened, nose twitching wildly as you bleat a quick warning bark.

Blue-Eyes rises, body far larger than yours would ever grow to be—on two feet more powerful looking than a bricklayer many years into his craft; tall enough to reach to the sides of black-shingled homes and pull itself up. Ghost takes one look and growls under his breath, knowing there would be no time to reload the weapons in his hands.

So he drops them and pulls slowly at the cruel blade in his belt until the gleam winks in the low light like a curved smile. Setting it in his hands, the small flicker of a sharp smirk on his lips is lost to you.

Yet, there isn’t a chance for some brawl between two beasts—there’s only the flash of pale fur and the final crunch of a body hitting the ground.

You bury your fangs into the wolf’s neck; the one responsible for all of your pain and torment spanning years of isolation. You feel the body seize as it drops, the last remnants of a dying brain trying to fight the inevitable nothingness that ensues, and, you only hold on the harder, the bloodlust seeping back in with every drop of life pooling into your locked jaw.

Your throat releases tiny growls of pleasure, biting a bit to make sure there wasn’t a sliver of a chance that something living was walking away from this scene.

Ghost pauses, and in the back of his head, he knows he should stop you. Brown eyes see the animalistic sheen of enjoyment at a fresh kill, the way you pull at the flesh until chucks peel away from a gurgling wolf. Even when the thing is long dead and the rain still slaps the earth, you barely let go until you get a hold of the meat and tear with a backward jerk of your snout.

“Love,” the Hunter sheathes his knife, taking a step forward. The blood was pooling under your body. How many of those were treatable? He had to know. “Let me see what’s—”

The eyes that lock on him are not yours.

Up to your ears, the entirety of your face was awash with the stain of life, dripping off the whiskers at your cheeks; your chin.

Before he can utter another word, he finds himself on his back with a snapping snout right in front of his face, two dead eyes staring deeply into his own. Ghost sucks down a quick breath, hand snapping to the large wrist shoving down on his chest.

He pants out, gravel accent far more deep than it was before.

“Easy, Spector. Easy. Eh—focus on me.” Your tongue licks at your fangs, body shaking. Ghost pushes out, “That’s it, then. It’s over, yeah? You did it; let's pack it up and head back home.” He grunts. “Recon even dogs get cold in weather like this—the bed’s waiting. Get a nice fire going.”

Ghost sees your face move closer, and his hand minutely shifts to the vial of wolfsbane on his belt. It wouldn’t kill you, but it could put you out of commission until your body shifted back into its proper form. He could carry you back—that wouldn’t be a problem at all.

But he was worried about your injuries. Even now the droplets of blood roll off of you faster than the water can.

Too much.

Brown eyes crease, darting a look down.

“Fuck,” he growls, seeing the carnage and the open meat. “Sweetheart, we need to get you checked out—you need to listen to me. Can you do that?”

He can see the conflict; the internal fight.

Your mouth moves with fast pants, claws stuttering over his gear futilely. You blink rapidly, shaking your large head in fast increments with small snarls.

“C’mon,” Ghost says slowly, fingers looping the vial. “Keep listening. Know my voice is utter shite, but only you can tell me it.”

Your head drops to his chest just as the wolfsbane is popped open, and, for whatever reason, Ghost pauses. He waits.

You take a long inhale of his gear—of the leather and the gunpowder, and just before the Hunter can dump the vial over your skin, the long blackish claw on your finger loops the bottom portion of the fabric under his bone attachment.

The man’s breath hitches as you let it rest along his nose bridge…holding it there as you drag your head upwards as if it were an impossible chore. Your mouth dribbles out gore to his cheeks, but the Hunter stares upwards into your eyes as they soften in a lupine way.

Inexplicably, you let out a bone-rattling sigh and slump into oblivion.

—

Come morning, you sleep under the spread of large fur blankets—clean bandages over your bare frame as the man has tended to you for hours. He mutters for you to slip your arms into a spare shirt after he finds your eyes open, not uncomfortable by your nakedness, though he wants you yourself to be at ease.

His brown eyes are creased, and you can’t remember what you’ve done.

You comply with small grunts and moans; more sore and cut up than you can recall ever feeling as a large tunic is slipped over your head by scarred hands.

Gunpowder.

“What did I—?”

“You finished the job,” he says, sparing you a glance as he shifts back with his eyes averting themselves from your visible legs. The sun seeps in through the windows. “It’s morning.”

You blink slowly, and the man eases you back down into the furs.

“I’m tired,” your voice yawns out—weak and brittle like the hope you’d had that this plan of his would work. Eyes half-closed, they blink at the hunter with a soft kind of care that you can’t remember showing before. Whatever pain medicine he’d given you, it was working. The underlying itch was still as strong as ever, though.

“Tired is good,” Ghost nods slowly, standing still until he crosses his arms and sets his feet. He’s in a fresh shirt and pants. There’s blood under his fingernails; traces smeared over his flesh. “Means you accomplished something.”

“Don’t think that’s entirely true,” you breathe. A pause. “...Why is your mask like that?”

It was half pulled up—showing off his lower jaw and the stubble. The scars that you already have memorized. Ghost shrugs, blinking those dead eyes of his.

“Ah,” he grumbles. “Forgot. Here.”

He reaches up and slips the thing off in one motion. Your loose brain takes a moment to realize the entire face you’re staring into, but the second it does, the image is engraved into your mind forever. You make a noise in the back of your throat.

“Better, Little Wolf?”

“W—” Your lips stutter, new sutures pulling tight. “Why would you…?”

“Hungry?” Ghost asks, quickly changing the subject. “Know you like that venison that I caught.”

“No,” you breathe. “No, I’m not…I’m tired, Ghost. My head hurts.”

A hand sweeps over your forehead, staying as you sag into it with a hum and a fluttering of your eyes.

“Bloodloss,” the Hunter murmurs. “Normal. Go back to sleep; take however long you need. I’ll be here.”

The bond between the two of you has strengthened to that of a silver rope.

“Stay,” you plead under your breath, already slipping back into nothingness with no promise to wake up again soon. “Hold me, Ghost?”

“Simon,” he grunts to only himself, knowing that the words are lost to you. Perhaps that makes him all the more eager to share it with you when you’re better. “Stay still.”

It wasn’t like you could protest.

The broad man slips in, shifting the furs until you’re covered back up and your forehead is to his chest—keeping himself closest to the door where the runes still sit in their bloody glory. If he listened hard enough, he could even hear them humming him a tune.

No song was better to him than the one of your breath at this very moment. Alive. Moving. There were many times in the night that he thought...hm.

“Better, then?” The dry tease slips out.

A kiss to the side of his mouth is what he gets in answer, and he doesn't say a peep more until he knows you’re back in the clutches of a dream—a good one, he knows, because he watches your expressions like a loyal guard dog would.

Ghost, Simon, rests his lips on the top of your head, and in a delicate murmur, eases, “You did good, Love.”

There was much to do, but for now, all he had to do was hold you a little bit tighter and let his stone heart beat a little bit faster.

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atyourmerci · 20 days

Text

☀︎To the light is to the darkness✩

Abby X reader X Ellie

Prologue to vengeance (can be read alone)

☀︎ ☀︎

Summary: Abby is your childhood best friend, you did everything together, taught each other everything. You were utterly infatuated with each other until Ellie Williams enters your world.

Warning: smut, MDNI, porn w lots of plot, innocence arc, mutual pining, lots of sexual tension, mutual masturbation (in the same room, together), fingering if you squint, useless lesbians, lesbian love triangle, abby needs a hug, phoebe bridgers as her own warning, no use of y/n, no physical description of reader

A/N: okay so holy fuck did I get carried away with this one. I didn’t want to leave yall on a cliffhanger but this dynamic deserves more and I don’t want to rush through it. I hope yall enjoy. This chapter is mostly just abby but there will be lots more Ellie in the next chapter promise :)

✩ ✩

“Someone you couldn’t lose. You said we’re not together, so now when we kiss I have anger issues.”

She asked when it had all started. The truth was you weren’t really sure. There was no definitive date or period of time that signified the beginning or end of it.

A relationship that felt more of interlacing two souls into one that resided in two structures. Shared autonomy of mind, breath, word, and body. Unspoken feelings, touches, and stares.

What started in green fields of pink flowers and brown roots ended in dark rooms and pining embraces. Hand shakes turning into interlaced fingers, laughter filled glances turning into tense stares, and experimental pecks turning into open mouthed pants.

The first time you meet abby was at school at 15. Bright eyed and bushy tailed still untainted from the reality of the world around you. You were quite shy in those years, keeping yourself away from the wild hairs of children ready to grow up and take charge. You were okay with the stability of childhood, the sticky sweet feeling of safety and uncharted terror.

Before Abby’s dad had died, before the muscles and long locks of golden blonde hair she was reserved too. Abby was wrapped in a bubble of comfort, a loving community that doted on her. She felt no need to join the crowd of chaos when she had everything she needed.

Well she thought she did…and then she met you.

In class you had your face shoved into a notebook doodling away of ferns and dandelions you had seen in the fields early that day. If it were up to you, you’d spend every last dying breath in the fields, soaking in sunlight and trailing your fingers through the rows of flowers.

Abby sat next to you in class, always too shy to speak up to you. You always seemed so busy, either reading, drawing, or with your head in the clouds, never truly listening to the lecture ahead. She admired your creativity, attention to detail, and the utter sense of unawareness to your surroundings. She wondered why you didn’t talk to the others, you were so inviting, so pretty. She once wished to look like you, how effortlessly magnificent you looked.

She grew too curious, over zealous at the thought of being close to you, understanding you. She knew she had to speak up.

“H-hey you draw pretty cool- I mean- it’s really good…what you draw.”

You had never taken more than a glance at the freckled girl until then. She always seemed just as busy as you, so you never bothered her.

You let out a bellied laugh at the now crimson red faced girl- completely embarrassed by her attempt at recognition.

And that was that. The two of you were inseparable, attached at the hip from then on out.

Abby seemed to understand your weird quirks and odd fascinations. Even when she didn’t, she was there open minded and wide eyed to hear your lengthy ramblings on about nothingness.

Sometimes it felt like you did most of the talking. Not that it was one sided or you wouldn’t let her butt in, but rather she was completely enamored by what you thought. Sometimes all she wanted to do was to hear you talk, you were her favorite person, the own mold of herself.

She wanted to think what you thought, feel what you felt, see the world through your eyes.

As the years went on you only seemed to grow closer to abby as she grew fonder of you.

Some could call it an obsession, the way you treated each other. Not a single thought went by that the other didn’t know. If you were there, so was abby. If you knew something, so did she.

Everyday she would follow you to the fields after school, your special escape you’d learn to share with the other half of your being.

You’d make her lay across the flower ridden fields so you could draw her glistening hair kissed by the whisk of wind. She let her hair grow longer since you’d ask to braid it for her every morning. She liked it short but she wanted to let you have room to make intricate designs and lace them with weeds you’d found.

Abby would playfully nudge you when you’d draw the hump on her nose in the drawings, but you loved it too much to not appreciate it. You loved all the things she couldn’t in herself.

You two spent hours out in the field daily, even when it rained you’d make her dance around like fairies as mud splattered across your shins. Anything you wanted, she’d do as long as it was with you.

That’s when you asked her to try kissing, she’d obliged.

“Have you ever…kissed anyone?” You ask staring off into the cloud painted sky, tall grass framing your bodies.

She lets out a breathy giggle, “no… you would know if I did.”

You shrug, shoulder crashing gently into hers, “I don’t know, maybe it was too embarrassing to say.”

She trails off, “h-have you?”

“No dumbass you would know…” you push your shoulder into her turning to give her a toothy smile, “what if I’m not good when a boy kisses me?”

Her eyes remained trained onto the pillowy cloud, “you can try on me- I-if you want to.”

It was a good idea, she wasn’t going to judge you, she was your best friend, she was only there to help.

“Okay.” And without a second thought your upper body shot up and lent over hers, pressing your lips into her plush pink ones. It was gentle, only a placement amongst the flesh, yet so charged. Butterflies fluttered through your stomach and up to your throat, something you had only felt once before when you and abby went swimming.

Closeness you thought. Being close to someone causes that. How nice it was to be so close to your favorite person, maybe one day you could feel close to someone again.

After that you continued to experiment kissing. At sleepovers you’d talk about the boys you wanted to kiss, then show each other how you would kiss them. It turned into an innocent routine, pecking her before she would leave, kissing her in the fields when you felt the butterflies.

You’d told her about them- the fluttering in your stomach. Whenever you felt them she told you that she wanted to feel them too. Transferring them through the soft pink flesh, she’d say she’d feel them after.

Soon she’d tell you when she got them, to which you’d return the gesture back. As time went on, the butterflies came more often.

People were starting to notice the relationship, started talking about how close the two of you were. You’d shoo off the irrational comments and over zealous accusations, but abby never did. She just didn’t respond.

“Who am I to ask for more? But you’re breathing in my open mouth. You’re the gun in my lips that will blow my brains out.”

Abby started spending the night daily, she practically lived in your room at that point. After her dad died your relationship grew stronger than ever. In such a treacherous time she clung to the only person who truly understood her. Many a nights she spent huddled into a ball in your lap weeping as you smoothed the hair behind her ear and rubbing circles into the grown muscles in her back.

Abby had taken to working her emotions out in physical labor. Now being a solider full time out of school she had grown muscular and more rough. Her heart was still the same for you, but had grown caged off to the people around you.

Her pleasantries for the rest of the community had grown stale, only allowing a few to get near her. But you… there was always an indefinite spot inside her for you.

Since abby was always around now, in the darkness of every night, privacy had flown right out the window. Not that you had minded- there wasn’t much of really anything abby didn’t know or hadn’t seen.

But when that eery sense of familiarity crept up, when the butterflies would come at night.

She had started out sleeping on the extra bed in your room. Before she had practically moved in she’d sleep with you, but since her stay turned to no vacancy she’d taken to given you the last sense of space, even when you hadn’t asked.

In the middle of darkness as the crickets chirped outside the window you’d tell her the feeling had come back, and she’d always agree, and the room would fall silent again.

“Abby?” You call out to a darkened room, illuminated by the shine of the moon.

“Yeah?” She’d call back from the other side.

“Do you ever…fix the feelings of the butterflies. Like make them go away?”

“Uh yeah- sometimes…when it gets bad.”

“I think mine are…bad right now,” it felt embarrassing almost, there was nothing she could do to help, fix your issue. Transferring the butterflies to abby only made them worse sometimes, and you were boiling.

“M-mine too,” she admits.

“You can fix it- if you need to.”

“A-re you going to stop yours?”

“Is that okay?” You say reluctantly into the tense air coating you. Every slight move felt with a million nerves.

“Mhmm,” she responds, a rustling heard coming from her direction.

Soft hums filled the air from the feeling of release you had allowed yourself in the presence of your best friend. Abby’s breathy moans would only follow quickly after your own, never before.

Dual release become a routine. Allowing the sticky sweet sensations of climaxing in the same bedroom of your other half. It became another thing you shared with her, another check on the list of the endeavors you’d participated in with her.

Talks of the butterflies and the unleashing of them never left those four chipping walls. Some things were meant for just Abby’s ears. All best friends must do the same. You’d never heard of others talk of sorts so you sealed your lips, a secret kept like a bird in a cage.

As you both had grown accustomed to the routine things gradually got more intense. Sometimes you couldn’t get the butterflies to fly away even when you tried for hours, panting out whimpers of frustration. Even when they would go away sometimes they would crept back in immediately, your body unable to be satiated.

Abby begun sleeping in the bed with you, to calm the frustrating unnerve you felt after no avail. She’d tell you she wish she could help you, make them go away. She’d do anything to make you happy.

That’s when you started touching yourselves next to each other. The routine was upheld for so long that it felt natural to do it even when she was right next to you. First fully covered, then in undergarments, to finally completely bare.

Seeing Abby’s bare flesh only made it worse. You weren’t stupid, the pieces were falling into place before your eyes. But you hadn’t seen anyone else naked before, maybe it would be the same. Her flesh so pale, her nipples shades of pale pink roses, and the hair that trailed down to her folds as golden as wheat. You had never seen something so magnificent, so beautifully crafted.

That was something you didn’t share with her. The drawings of her bare flesh. You made sure to memorize each chisel, line, and freckle to be as accurate as possible once you got to your notebook. With every piece of her revealed opening thousands of opportunities to draw her art. She was so fucking beautiful.

“When was the first time?” The auburn girl had asked you.

It all had meshed into a blur, what had happened and when it did. When you and abby had started sleeping together it started on opposite ends. Heat not close enough to sting your flesh but the air still tense enough to be cut clean with a blade. As time grew on and the routine becoming daily, the space between you started to close in. Knees brushing as your legs wavered, arms transferring sticky sweat in the blistering heat of arousal.

The inevitable placement of foreheads touching as you watched each other fall apart, watching the butterflies flutter out of her throat with every pant.

From what you could call the ‘beginning’ of sorts, rather an act of mercy, came from her.

You found yourself in the familiar position of unnerve. Rubbing aimless quick circles on your abused clit. It became a matter of principle at the point, needing to fulfill the urge even knowing the outcome would leave you more helpless than before. Abby’s butterflies were far gone, now rubbing lazy stripes down her slit in attempt to not let you feel alone. She never wanted you to feel like she wasn’t completely enthralled by your every move.

Your leg sprawled across her own, wide open, bucking your hips into the air as you let out frustrated grunts, eyes sealed shut in concentration. She just watched. She loved watching you touch yourself. Abby felt like the luckiest girl in the world getting to watch you, kiss you, feel you. She wanted to feel more of you, every atom in your body she’d kiss if you’d allow it.

“Let me help” she said, eyes trained on your open mouth.

Your brain was too fuzzy to even comprehend the depth of the act, so pent up and eager.

“Mhmm,” was all you could muster up. As her calloused fingers transferred from her skin to your abdomen, your body jolted up. You had never been touched by another. Not like this. She took her time running the tips of her fingers from your side to the mound, taking your hand and moving it your thigh so she could replace it with her own.

Something deep in your belly erupted when you felt her fingers meet your clit. A flock of doves released from their cage, a gasping goldfish meeting water. An exaggerated sigh of relief came out as a depraved moan. Every nerve in your body heightened by her gentle touch.

She drew cautious and attentive swipes across the newly swollen bud, watching for when your breath would hitch.

“You’re so warm,” she said studying your face as it contorted in pleasure. Your chin raised high, burying your scalp into the frilly pillows below. She had then studied the flesh around your neck, oh why had she never noticed that. How thin the skin was there, how close she could get to you in that space.

“I-it feels b-better when you do it,” you admit to her, water in her hands, hips grinding into the soft touch of her. “Y-yeah really?” She says, perking up, so pleased with knowing she could make you feel better. She’d do anything to make you feel better.

You let your stagnant hand run down her chiseled chest to meet her mound, her sticky slit pooling at her core. You meant to return the favor, an eye for an eye. “It’s okay- just let me help you.”

You shook your head in agreement, but let your hand rest on the pulsing flesh, you wanted to feel her like she felt you.

With every gentle circle she took you closer to release. It was so much faster when she did it. When you did it together before you would lie there for hours flicking at the raw skin to no avail, but in minutes she had you tipping at your edge.

Her strokes felt akin to the ones on your notebook, gentle and cautious direction, seeking a desirable outcome. You’d thought to picture this, able to recreate this on paper shielded from her eyes. What would she think if she saw them? Maybe you’d grown too fond of the other half of your heart.

“Abby!” You scream out, nearing your pending release.

“Y-yeah? D-does it feel okay- are you okay?” She perks up in concern, helplessly worried she had hurt you.

“Yes- Yes! It- it’s coming,” you pant out, body slick with sweat as your arousal pools below you. A sloppy mess of bodies interlaced with remorseless pleasure.

“Let me feel them, I want to feel them,” abby says inches from your face, intently watching the contortions of your face below her. The butterflies, oh how she wished she could flutter in your tummy as they do so effortlessly.

You cave shamelessly, pressing into the soft pink flesh. You try to keep them stable, but as you reach the cliffs edge you can’t help but moan pathetically into her throat. Your hips thrust into the calloused fingers, chasing the lasting feelings of her, escaping your doom and passing the burden through your lips onto hers.

You did draw of this, and every time after that. It became an obsession, mental images snapshotted to accuracy for replication later.

The routine increased in frequency and intensity. Exploring each other’s most sacred places. She would let you touch her sometimes, but only when she was touching you. Abby seemed more interested in your pleasure than her own. But she cared about you, she never wanted you unsettled. She wanted to be your salvation.

“I ask you how you’re doing and I let you lie. But we don’t have to talk about it, I can walk you home and practice method acting. I’ll pretend being with you doesn’t feel like drowning.”

“Does she make you feel them?”

She asked when it had all started. The truth was you weren’t really sure. There was no definitive date or period of time that signified the beginning or end of it.

Ellie Williams was so…vulgar, erratic, a ticking time bomb. The pieces of the puzzle connected at last when you lied eyes on the auburn haired girl.

She had entered the WLF as gentle as a bomb to a building. Fiery hot attitude, a chip on her shoulder, and drowning green eyes. At first glance she utterly captivated your ever fleeting thoughts.

When she first walked through the corridors of the stadium your eyes fixed on her, staring rudely at her every move. “Who is that, the girl?” You ask the unfazed blonde next to you, too busy working at sharpening a blade, “names Ellie, they say she’s trouble. By the looks of her, checks out.”

“What did she do? Why is she here?” You continue your glare, taking note of the pink scare rippled along the crest of her eye.

You had never drawn anyone other than abby, but the girls features were so strong, the strokes would come naturally in your grasp. A secret muse possibly, even from a far.

“I don’t know- stay away from her. She reeks of trouble,” she’d remark, finishing off the blade and leading you off to a pending mission.

You tried, you really did. She was so compelling, and you? You were a bee to honey. Was she soft unlike her features? Did she speak of the world beyond her? Did she like to watch the clouds mesh into unlikely objects? Did she know of the butterflies and their ever present existence in your lungs?

Your notebook grew of only her, the short frayed hair, the pink scare, the freckles that littered her face. So effortlessly magnificent she was, unknowingly your own secret work of art.

Until abby found them.

Related to this work

Song lyrics: casual , waiting room , cool about it

Moodboard

If you enjoy the childhood best friend trope with abby highly recommend this fic by @kieranscaren she writes beautifully and gave me great inspiration for this work:)

Taglist: @wishbones999 @bookpagecandlescent @littlegingerperson5 @lookforthelight1 @fict1onallyobsessed @shewantstoknow @a-little-bit-of-everybody

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