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2kmps · 7 months

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vampire x reader one-shot | 16.1k

story summary; you're a crime scene cleaner who happens across an advertisement for a mansion housekeeper in exchange for room and board. it's close to work, close to your university, and an easy job. the ultimate package. right away, you notice the owner's beauty as well as his eccentricities, but decide to commit to it. the spiral into depravity and debauchery begins when you're tasked with cleaning the site of a savage murder, solidifying you as a irreplaceable treasure.

story warnings; bloodplay, extreme dubcon, explicit noncon, cigarette burns, wounds inflicted on mc, implied masochism, extreme sexual sadism, hypnotism, graphic violence, gun violence, body gore, graphic details, heavy prose, unreliable narrator, religious themes, exploration of morality, obsessive + possessive behaviors, implied stalking, choking, murder, graphic depictions of crime scenes, manipulation/emotional manipulation, this entire oneshot is an allegory.

read the warnings! mdni under any circumstances! the events within this one-shot are not indicative of my personal viewpoints

thank you, @ceruleansol for the excellent proofreading.

this is a repost from my deleted blog, cardeneiv. please reblog/interact with this piece!

Another internet search bore fruit.

The image bouncing back at you from your phone had been hastily taken with a tremble in your hand, all the while launching a few too many cautious looks across your shoulder to either end of the dim, long hallway making up part of the second floor. There wasn't any particular rationale for your apprehension and busy eyes but the belief the mansion owner wouldn't be too pleased to see you taking pictures of his valuables rather than cleaning them.

That fear hadn't stopped you from reverse image searching a good couple of curiosities over the widening gap of time you had been living there.

Tonight was a Chalmette table vase displayed on a pedestal in the hall; brassy gold gilding cradled a somewhat drab white bloom that reached high and sprouted open to a hollow inside. Similar surviving articles went for thousands.

You totaled the prices of everything so far as enough to outright buy a house on the more modest side of town.

There was a daring thought that loomed in the back of your mind, an ugly little thing that told you one or two missing antiques wasn't any big deal. He wouldn't miss them, let alone even notice they were gone, because he was the strangest man you had ever met.

Four months ago, he had only ever introduced himself by the name Montague, letting an anticipatory stillness hang in the air while you waited for him to finish. He never did, handsome features lifting as his dark eyes thinned and smile inched higher. He had you in a tight handshake.

"I enjoyed reading the resume you sent in with your response to my advertisement." He had traces of an accent intact but had cleverly adapted to one more common to the area. "You're the first person I've come across wanting the room who's done that. It really stood out to me. A crime scene cleaner? Must be a difficult job."

"I know it was probably overkill, but I think this will be perfect for me." You were led to a suede armchair, his hand anchoring onto your shoulder to lower you into the seat. He sat across from you in something similar, one leg crossing. "I recently had to move out of my other place, and the university will be about an hour closer. My work won't be as far of a drive, either. I—I, uh, clean some gross stuff, so taking care of your house won't be anything."

Even after that spiel, Montague never let his smile slip. Rather, it seemed to widen as though delighted by your oversharing. He looked like a man basking in glee over a rare find, an offer he couldn't possibly turn away.

"All amenities in the house are yours." This was after he showed you to one of the rooms on the second floor: a capacious, well-dressed space behind a red door at the end of the hall. "As long as you listen to a few rules and keep things clean, we should have a very amicable... cohabitation."

You thought it was an odd choice of wording. "Okay. Well, what do I need to know?"

"No guests." It was immediate, his tone suddenly a touch edgy, razored, unyielding. "Not unless I give you explicit permission beforehand. I keep many important valuables; they're very dear to me. Also, do not invite anyone in unless I am there."

Again, odd, but it was his house.

"Sure," you said agreeably, having half the thought to write down these peculiarities of his. "What next?"

He was set on your shoulder, reaching out to pull a thin, frayed thread off of your jumper. "The downstairs—as in, the basement—is my personal space. If I need you down there, I will ask you for you to go down. You can go anywhere else in the house, on the property. None of it concerns me."

"Why the basement, though?" It felt damaging to press a question like that so early on, but you figured it was innocent enough. "This house is so big that we could be on the same floor and hardly see each other."

The muscles around his mouth twitched slightly, only once. You still noticed it. Noted: he didn't like to be questioned. "Sorry, I'm not trying to-"

"It's cold downstairs." he injected, shifting to look around the room as though taking in the newness of it as well. "I make sure it stays comfortable all year, all throughout the house, but the cold suits me best."

With how downright frosty his skin felt in that handshake earlier—on a mild day in mid-spring—you thought that explanation checked out. He must have only just come up to greet you at the front entrance.

You tried to forget the feeling. "Alright. Next?"

"Oh," he restrained an unseemly laugh, using one hand to crowd into a pocket on his dark blazer, "there is nothing else, at least nothing pertinent. It's my understanding that we're both quite busy, so this would be the current arrangement unless something changes."

What changes? You wanted to ask, thwarted to silence when he revealed some sort of silver thing pinched between his fingers with a thick handkerchief. It was a dainty-seeming contraption with chains linking several old skeleton keys at the end. The fabric he used to hold the clip concealed all of the elegant tracery that made up its shape.

"Traditionally, this is called a chatelaine. It’s something I’ve modified for you to get around the house. It’ll be easier to clean." Montague said, fast to force the mess of cold silver and chains into your palm, rubbing down his fingers with the handkerchief afterward. "The smallest key is to your room. The largest one opens the doors to go outside, so don't lose that. One of them is meant for doors in the basement—can't recall which."

He could see the wariness behind your eyes, a worrying crease forming in your brow. "This house has been around for a long time. I've just never gotten around to modernizing the locks."

Other questions came to you, but he hardly acted interested in entertaining them. You let him swivel on black soles, stopping him just as he reached the doorway.

"Why haven't other housekeepers worked out?"

Montague let his fingers rest on glazed woodwork framing the threshold, drumming out a soothing rhythm while considering an answer for all of two seconds. "In short? They couldn't follow the rules. Now, let me show you to the yard."

Afterward, the so-called cohabitation had become a seamless blend for you both. You had learned right away that Montague wasn't one for idle chatter and niceties without purpose. He had deviated from it once, on move-in day, to reassure you that the mysterious nature of your life schedule and odd hours you were called to a clean scene wouldn’t be a source of concern.

Shortly after settling your things around the house, the reason for his amenable attitude was a little more apparent. Several times a month, you would be pulled from your forensics projects to the landing at the end of the hall, piqued by fresh voices always indistinguishable at first, and folded your waist over the railing to see down.

The top of his head, hair short, impeccably styled, and ash-brown, was the first thing you noticed, followed by someone on his arm. Sometimes a woman, sometimes a man—always conventionally attractive, always utterly enraptured by him. It struck a nerve with you once or twice, finding your thoughts swimming bitterly: Of course a man who looked like him would go for types like that!

Why did he act so much differently with them than you?

He wasn't nearly as friendly and affable as he was making himself out to be.

You stopped peeking down on him after an instance where his eyes shot straight up, pinning you where you stood. He simpered at you before leading his companion away to the basement, and that was it. You never saw them leave and never bothered to ask.

Tonight was different, however, both in the way you nearly toppled the two-figure Chalmette vase off its pedestal with flighty fingers and a duster, and the echo of a scream piercing the hollow halls to you. It stayed in one spot on the first floor, luring you down the center staircase with your duster clutched to you like a sword. At that point, your heart bursting in your ears was louder than the agonized cries resonating around the corner.

You looked around, spine wrapped in dread as another scream, weak, garbled, and wet, came from the basement, and then nothing at all. It was soundless in the house. Distantly, one of the clocks mounted in the kitchen archway toned onward. You followed its beat with the shuffle of your feet.

Hello, hello? Those words clung tightly in your throat, yet you were too afraid to announce yourself like that. Still, nothing came as you slowly pulled at the basement doorknob, brass and freezing and unlocked. The stairway plunging down inside was filled with inky black, so dark you couldn't get your eyes to adjust to it.

Is everything okay down there? Hello? Hello? You ran the imaginary chatter through your mind, lips sealed but trembling during your slow descent, the path now illuminated by white glow from your phone. At the bottom, the stone stairs turned into seamless gray marble and red wetness crawling toward the soles of your slippers.

"What–" You gasped, taking a step back while flicking the flashlight higher, deeper into the basement. The vivid red puddle glistened in your light, widening around a motionless figure with pale skin—a blonde woman you didn't know. Her face pointed up at the ceiling, twisted in terror, black tracks of mascara curving along her cheeks.

She was naked on the floor, surrounded by her own blood, something you didn't have to look at twice. Your breaths grew harsh, taking in the sight of her neck, or lack thereof; there wasn't much left of it. Only a few stringy bits of sinew and muscle kept it from a full decapitation, and blood still pulsed out in spurts from mangled arteries and veins.

A motion nearby made your nape prickle. It was like feet padding across wet pavement after a fresh rain, except this smell carried the malodor of rust and something sour under your nose.

You settled a pillar of light on the source, capturing the view of Montague standing amid the bloodbath, sickly skin bare and saturated in rich crimson.

Something was wrong with him, came an instantaneous, instinctual reaction the moment his head spun toward you, catching pale eyeshine in the white light.

The bones in his jaw cracked as the length of it began to recede into the semblance of something more man to you, rows of jagged teeth retracting into the depths of his throat until only a pair of long incisors remained.

Montague skimmed the tip of his tongue along his lower lip, smiling at you affectedly, saying as though it were some trife thing, "She started screaming."

You were gone and out of the basement after that, clearing the woman's body and kicking away the slippers on your feet when they squelched with blood. Montague said something after you when shrieks ripped out of your lungs and reverberated through the house. You winced as the basement door let out a hollow rattle when he collided with it, heart matching the rhythm of the skin on your feet slapping against old marble, thoughts disarrayed, frantic the closer you got to the front door.

Almost there. Almost there. Almost there. Oh God! Oh God! Oh God! You were panting in unison with the vicious chants.

The doorknob was in your hand. The door was open—and it was thrown shut with the force of your body thrust against it, fingers wrenched off of the handle and enveloped in Montague's cold fingers as he pushed himself flush into you.

You felt his palm clamp around your mouth, whittling your screams into panicked whimpers, nostrils flaring with your ragged breaths.

"Ah, no, no." He had to stoop his neck to talk into your ears. "Shh, shh, shhh. Far too loud. I don't like screaming. Shh, shh, shhhh."

Tears seared red behind your eyes, making you think you could follow the warmth down your face as they filled the crevices in his hand. "It's really, truly a pity. She was a pretty one but far too smart. I'm usually decent at picking out the ones who wouldn't suspect anything or, at least, catching them before they try to scream.

"You'll have to forgive me. I swear to you I'm not ordinarily that messy. I prefer to keep everything tidy, especially so you don't have to go down there. After all, you're already so busy. You're already doing so much. I can't recall when I last saw you relax."

The weight of his palm softened, a wordless agreement that you honored with continued silence as he used that arm to lean against the door. His voice shifted around your head to your other ear. "That's it. Just wonderful. There's no need for screaming, is there? It's only the two of us."

"Are—are..." You couldn't get it out, lips and throat suddenly sucked dry. "Don't kill me, please. Please. Please."

His chest quaked while a subdued, eerily delighted laugh hissed through his lips. "Kill you? Oh, no, no, no. Never. How could I ever kill you when you're so remarkable? My home has never looked so beautiful and lived in. I'm enjoying how it looks with you in it."

You wilted away from his lips sinking to a spot below your ear, now taking far too much notice of his erection curving up along your lower back. It felt disgustingly wrong to wonder whether the violence and blood turned him on, or it was you and your fear. The man wasn't even human; that much was clear.

"What are you?" There was no shortage of daring questions in your arsenal. Montague was beginning to find the charm in them.

"That's quite difficult for me to answer." He let his chin lay on your shoulder. "I've been called many things over the centuries. I suppose the closest anyone has ever gotten is vampire, but even that's not quite right. You're free to guess as much as you'd like, though."

He was satisfied when you didn't, freeing the weight off of his arm to slide his hand under the hem of your shirt, fingertips still slick with that woman's blood as he explored your navel. You were too aware of the roundness of his fingernails stepping across your flesh, sometimes pressing deep, and other times a light touch you needed to scratch. His throat vibrated against your shoulder.

"What are you thinking? I'd love to hear it." He wanted to devour your fear in more ways than just feeling you wince. "Well? Tell me."

"I want to go." Go? Where could you possibly go that he couldn’t find you? If he ripped out the side of a woman's neck, he could track you down.

He leaned his cheek into your ear again, relishing the warmth that spread into him. "Where would you go? Who would you tell? Humor me, where is the first place you'd go?"

"The police," you said.

Montague let out a pleased hum. "Of course. It only makes sense to report a terrible scene such as that to them. Forensics and the police play together often, don't they?"

Your nod was weak.

"I know how hard you've been studying, how much stress you're under to commit to your degree, your work—to me." His hand crept along to your stomach, fingers splaying wide across the protective layer of skin and fat. "Let's say they were to find something I left behind. Who becomes a suspect in their eyes when they learn that I have someone who tidies up after me? Who knows the dirty insides of cleaning up anything and everything?"

You were starting to panic, fitfully struggling against his body. It's like he was made of stone. "They wouldn't accuse me of murdering anyone."

"Haven't you seen the news lately? Are you so sure?" he said derisively. "No, perhaps you're right. Maybe you'd be fortunate, and they wouldn't have your head for murder, but they would certainly try to peg you with something else. As an accomplice, maybe? And that's assuming that I don't disappear and let rip you apart.

"Can you imagine it? Can you feel your heart break at the very thought of losing it all? Your degree? Your job? Safety? The world is cruel, darling. You'd never have another moment of peace or anonymity. Anywhere you'd go, you'd be found, every alias sullied with your sins. All because you decided to speak up about it."

You knew he meant to send you downstairs to do something about the mess, spend hours scrubbing and mopping until what had once been there was a secret that thickened your tongue and made it hard to swallow.

No one would ever find out, but you would carry it in every waking thought until, one morning, the cute barista on Market Street had an eerie semblance to that dead woman, and the light roast in your hand suddenly looked so red.

"Thump. Thump. Thump." Montague mocked the heavy thrum of your heart behind your ribs, his cold fingers skimming your nipples before resting over your sternum. "You can go if you'd like, but I'll find you. I'll hear your little heart until it bursts and drag you right back here. You're mine."

The push of his body gradually faded away, giving your chest the room to expand, leaving you to gulp quivering, greedy breaths that didn't stop even as the pads of his feet grew distant.

He called back to you, "Give me ten minutes or so, and then come down."

You were already partway through the front door with your car keys to pop the trunk when, floating like a spectre's moans in still night air, his voice reached out once more, "You may want to clean up yourself first. You have blood all over your face."

༺ ♰ ༻

A damp towel came before your descent back into the basement. In tow on your shoulders were three bags of absorbent, the fancy stuff hospitals liked to use to throw on puke and piss and anything else they just lazily wanted to sweep around. It worked for blood in smaller quantities, blood that was still wet, anyway.

The woman hadn't been dead long enough for her body fluids to dry, so you didn't anticipate needing anything except the basics stowed in your car trunk.

You weren't sure what you expected to see down there, noticing the lights were turned on high, fully illuminating the gray marble, the furthest reaches of the blood puddle with your slippers saturated dark red and ruined. What came as a shock was the woman's dead eyes and shredded neck being nowhere in sight.

Montague had moved her body but to where?

For some reason, you were drawn to ridiculous spots like the walls, ceiling, and tiny cramped corners that he could have feasibly stuffed her in. There was no sickly trail of blood leading any which way, droplets only reaching as far as the stairs and first landing where you had been pursued—nothing else.

Where did he take her?

Part of you was ready to turn a blind eye to all of this because you knew you would have to in order to keep everything. If you kept your head low and groveled a little bit, maybe he'd get bored and leave you alone, biding you the time you needed to finish your degree. But, that'd be two years of this.

You weren't sure you could stomach it.

As you moved granules of absorbent through blood with coarse bristles from the kitchen broomstick—shifting the puddle more than the actual absorbent—you wondered if he could hear your heart now from wherever he was.

You thought about a lot of things while letting your eyes roam the space. It was enormous, taking up the entire underside of the house, outfitted impressively with mahogany accents, sprawling bookshelves, armchairs, and loveseats pulled tight in leather and velvet. Across the room was a disheveled bed, creamy sateen sheets in a luscious heap but otherwise undisturbed.

To the adjacent end of this expanse were two doors you didn't notice at first, one a little taller than yourself in height, about as wide as any normal arm span, and looked old, so old that everything else was too new. Even from where you stood, you knew it'd take a skeleton key. The other door was more coherent with the rest of the basement, cleaner but certainly still part of the house's original construction.

By the time Montague had returned, you already had much of the ordeal pitched into a biohazard bag with some trace remnants putting you on your knees to scrub away. You hadn't realized he was even there until the tips of his shoes—brown leather loafers with a scalloped tassel near the toes—appeared in your peripheral, sending you launching back onto your hocks.

"This work is spectacular. I knew I had a good feeling giving that room to you." he said with a beguiling smile. All of the blood was gone; he was clean in a dark dressing robe with black trousers, a look you hated that you saw as alluring. "Don't forget to clean the floors upstairs. We made quite a mess there as well."

"What happened to that woman?" You were asking your pesky questions again. Montague wasn't so sure he found them as charming now, but you were still a prize.

You leaned away as he crouched in front of you, nearly risking the soles of his shoes in the blood and hydrogen peroxide. For the first time since meeting, you kept eye contact and saw that his reached a depth you didn't think could be possible for a human. He wasn't touching you, yet it felt like he had you caged, trapped in a vise that held you tight.

He did touch you then, grazing the side of your face with a thumb. Suddenly, he brought it to his lips and licked it as he rose to full height.

"You still had some blood just there on your cheek." There was an armchair a few feet away that he dropped into, withdrawing a gold compact from a chest pocket on his way down. "Don't worry. I wouldn't ask you to carry away the bodies. I'm not that Roman."

"That's not what I asked." you rejoined.

Montague tucked a cigarette between his lips, igniting it with a match he kept inside the compact. His first few puffs looked like they calmed him as he crossed a leg and settled deeper into the leather. "You shouldn’t expect answers to things you don’t need to know—or want to.”

But he humored you with a slight lean of his head towards the old door far away. "The original owner of this house was ingenious and built tunnels that were used to shuffle people in and out. Mistresses. Servants. More unsavory things—you must remember the era. At any rate, it stretches beyond the house and some ways off. I do not recommend ever going inside."

You understood now why you never saw any of the dates he brought home leave. And you believed every bit of his warning.

It inspired you to move away from the grim reality dwelling beyond that old door. You hovered over the same spot, drenching the floor with more of the disinfectant, grasping for a distraction. "I didn't know vampires could smoke. Isn't blood enough for you?”

Montague flicked his cigarette over an ashtray beside his chair. "Well, we all have our vices. Mine just happens to be five or six of these a day. Keeps enough of the edge off so you get to sleep at night."

Something about that comment made the entire stretch of the basement feel so confining—claustrophobic, even. Your back was wide open to it, to his ravening gaze and leather toe turning fluid circles as though to pace himself before lunging.

"I have class in six hours." You finished the job by tying off the bag. "I'd like to get the upstairs done and take a shower."

"Of course. Try to get some sleep, you've had quite a night." He didn't move to see you out. "Oh, and leave the bag. I'll dispose of it."

༺ ♰ ༻

Meredith Nimu died approximately twenty-three days ago after a stroke left her immobilized in her favorite armchair. Her body wasn't peeled away from the murky-green polyester until day twenty-four, following enough neighbor complaints about a bunch of rats dying in the vents.

Getting rid of the chair was half the battle in this case, something that Meredith's overzealous, recently divorced daughter spouted off as sacrilegious. She insisted that the carpet cleaner she used for her obese dogs with raw patches on their legs could do it all. Your supervisor had been inflectionless when telling her it didn't work like that.

One of your teammates, a middle-aged black man affectionately nicknamed “Hoss” had unceremoniously slammed the apartment door shut and flipped the lock so the daughter's rancorous eruptions were somewhat contained outside. The other half of the duo responsible for pitching the chair, T.J., a white man who could never tan, wheezed out a laugh as he labored a hard bristle brush through the gunk left behind from Meredith's decay.

"Boss ain't gonna be happy about that." T.J. couldn't commit to the act of a brownnoser even if he wanted to. A couple more chortles rattled through his respirator. They were infectious, ridiculous sounds that coaxed similar from Hoss when he rejoined the effort to get the job done and over with.

You could still hear the daughter on the other side of the door, never once allowing your supervisor a word in edgewise. A part of you wanted to pity her, perhaps conjure up a shred of empathy for someone so completely enmeshed in the throes of grief and anger. She was clearly spiraling, her entire life yanked out from under her—and she was free-falling with nothing to catch her, no thin wire she could snag in the bend of her fingers and watch as the velocity of that cruelly, cleanly severed white tendon and bone.

Where would she fall after that? You didn't know. You didn't care. She could regain control over her life even without fingers, but what about you? No one understood how disconcerting it was to know that your survival depended on a vampire's good mood.

An old woman was meant to expire, but you were young and had aspirations—yet that could be stolen from you just as quickly as a clot could kill the brain.

It wasn't fucking fair.

Hoss had called out to you repeatedly until the hard brushes stopped scratching the floor, and he and T.J. were settled back on their heels, staring at you. You were used to leveraging your commitments in life as a means to get them off your case, but even they could tell this was different.

"You've been real spacey lately." It was enough to gently reel you back to the moment, eyes unstuck from remnants of putrid matter hidden under a deluge of chemicals and soap. Now you were thinking that the landlord would probably have to replace this entire spot in the flooring. It would be an expensive fix.

"Everything okay at home?" Hoss tried again, emulating fatherly concern in his tone and sidelong stare. It was something he couldn't help since you were so similar in age to his adult kids. "I don't think I've seen you eat today. We oughta finish up here up and grab somethin' quick on the way back.”

"Sorry, yeah, it's just the usual things." They didn't know what that meant to you, but readily accepted with dour expressions masked by their respirators. "I think I saw a gyro truck down the street."

As many times as you had regurgitated the same thing when they pried into your well-being, you were surprised they still asked at all. That made it hard to wave after them as you pulled the lever to the trunk, waiting to be left alone once the job was done to stack half your weight in absorbent until the back bowed to it.

It was just past two in the morning when you were locking the front door of Montague's sprawling estate behind you. Every time you did, a part of you hesitated to seal it the whole way, as though if you did, your final traces of freedom would be stripped away entirely.

"Welcome home!" Montague came out from prowling somewhere in the shadows, seeming to materialize from the darkest parts your eyes couldn't adapt to. He was in a dressing robe again, this one forest green with gold embroidery and a burgundy handkerchief tucked away nicely in his breast pocket.

He already had a cigarette lit between his knuckles, fussing with the little stick as he went to an open window, sucked in, and expelled pungent gray smoke. "I apologize. There's a bit of a mess for you tonight. It's unlike me to be so untidy, but it shouldn't take you too long—oh, darling, don't make that face."

"Why can't you get blood from other sources, like a blood bank?" It's been on your mind for a while, but Montague had a habit of turning petulant if you asked him too much.

He was in good shape tonight, though, despite still puffing away antsily. "Where's the satisfaction in simply being given what I want? Blood banks are a finite supply, but out there"—he gestured through the open window—"there is an infinite supply from any walk of life that I so choose. Did you know that not all blood is equal?"

You sensed him at your back, awash with that same vulnerability as the night on your knees in the basement. He strolled along with you while you collected your things, examined his leftovers, which fortunately wasn't as sensational as before. It looked like a Rorschach inkblot almost, purple-red and pristine, obviously untouched for some time.

Just like that dead blonde woman, there was nothing left behind of the victim except what Montague was too careless to handle himself.

"The worst blood is what you find in hospitals or on the streets. It doesn't matter their type; it all tastes like shit." he continued, even while you worked. Just like before, he sat himself nearby and observed your process with gross fascination. "In a pinch, though, I do what I must. It doesn't matter if a man is homeless or a woman is looking for a night out. When I hear their hearts dance, that thump, thump, thump—oh, I have to have it. I can taste them through their skin, even before I sink my teeth in.

"The fear in their eyes. The ragged breaths I see in their chests, watching their bellies pulse. I like to think in those moments they know exactly what's going to happen, like little flies in a spider's web."

Montague let more smoke slither out from his lips in skinny, swirling wisps that dissipated once it touched the air. The haze of it remained, just traceable to your eye. "I always find it interesting that they all struggle, even as they're writhing in their own blood. Sometimes I'll count how long it takes for them to die."

These weren't confessions of a madman because that would imply he was human. He was treating you akin to the way an old man recounted the fondness of his flawed, flickering memories. There were sensations of joy and affection in the work he did, a true love and visceral desire for carnage and suffering that made it hard for you to stomach.

A few times throughout his soliloquy, you needed to bear your weight on the kitchen broom to keep yourself from toppling from nausea.

You shouldn't have been curious. "Has anyone ever survived?"

The surrounding space grew darker, not from loss of light but from the way his lower face sunk behind the hand wielding the cigarette. You saw his smile widen through sickly appendages and faint smoke.

His response pierced straight through you. "I'm looking right at it."

Suddenly, the urge to run rushed forefront in your mind, an instinctual reaction that you had trouble wrestling over with logic. The broomstick was easily pulled from your fingers and discarded onto the floor with a reverberating clatter that made your spine race with cold needles as Montague stepped into your proximity.

You shivered against the hands slowly climbing your neck to the underside of your jaw, cradling your face as he lifted it to meet his eyes. Something was so wrong with how black they were; you didn't see a pupil, nor did your reflection stare back at you in them. It's almost as though there was nothing there at all, the dark of them growing into an abysmal chasm that made your vision cross and blur, eyelids weighing like lead when you felt him kiss you.

His lips were the same kind of cold as the rest of him but full and unrelenting, never granting you the chance to mold the kiss in any other way. Surprisingly, the taste of stale smoke on his breath was just slight, a mediocre vexation you overlooked the moment his hands started groping you under your clothes.

And you didn't think much of it when your back settled into the clean linens on your bed, skin flushed with the crisp evening air and lips mapping their way south across your stomach and navel, delving lower to your core. It was too dark in your room to see down your body at the top of Montague's head, but you felt him with your fingers, coiling pieces of his ash-brown hair to your knuckles while he pushed your thighs wide open for him.

An anxious patter swelled in your chest, a vague understanding that something was horrible about this, but you were too wrapped up in a dreamy fog to think about it. More than the resounding boom of your heart, you heard your own breaths dissolve into lewd moans and slurred pleas for him to do more, more, more.

It didn't sound like you.

It didn't feel like you despite knowing that build-up in your abdomen better than most things in your body.

The hands in his hair, the back bending off of the mattress like an archway, the shaking limbs, and the cries begging for more were someone else entirely up until the very moment rapture fluttered behind your eyes in searing white, body deluged in hot release that left your scalp tingling and toes curling and spend on your sheets.

"Give me more." You tasted him again, his tongue pushing hard into your mouth where those salty notes of yourself lingered on your cheeks. His silhouette melded with the rest of the room, tangible only in the way he roamed every surface of you.

Montague had shucked the clothes from both your bodies earlier, preferring to lean into the flush of heat you radiated. Everything was only skin-deep away from him; he could feel your pulse throb on his lips when he teased himself against your carotid, your radial, trailing all the way to the powerful beat of your femoral nestled there in your groin.

His teeth came close many times to piercing you, allowing him a sliver of a taste like a parched king waiting for a drop of golden wine. But half the thrill of having you around was denying himself of you, knowing well that if he were to start, then he'd never be able to stop, and he'd fully hamper your dreams of escaping.

The air smelled like you now, heavy and like damp skin and your fluids soaking into the linens. He watched your face bunch and fall apart when he split you open with his cock, hips colliding, your skin sure to bruise as his thrusts turned savage. There wasn't much left in his heart anymore. Most of it had atrophied over the centuries, and yet the sound of yours spurred him on.

He could follow the path of your blood through your body, an extensive subject he had studied and dissected at length in his lifetime. The most vulnerable spots were gorged and worked the hardest, almost glowing red through your skin for him. When he thrust a little bit harder, a little bit faster, and felt your fingertips pushing against his chest, he heard your heart be the loudest it ever had been.

"That's it. That's it. That's it." His own breaths were ragged now. The sheer exhilaration of pushing his lips deeper, hot sweat leaving a slick layer on them, and that one big artery in your neck pounding out was doing everything for him.

Your frantic pants were a close second. He could feel you unraveling, tightening around his cock until you were soundlessly writhing on the mattress, clutching anything you could bunch together. The final few thrusts he made were purposeful; they were forceful and jolted your body, a show to make sure you wouldn't forget the feeling of him inside of you.

The clean linens were sodden with cum, some still dripping out of you while you lay there, legs splayed enough so you wouldn't feel it stick to your thighs. Whatever haze had been hanging over your eyes before lifted away, leaving you ruined and exhausted on the sheets but not alone.

"You've got class in a few hours, don't you?" Montague said from above, shoulders nestled in your headboard while one leg hung off the side of the bed. He was smoking again, acting the calmest you had witnessed him. "I don't really think you're in any shape for that. Why don't you stay home today?"

You were too spent to respond to him, somehow using the occasional breaths he blew out into the vast room to lull you into a dreamless sleep.

༺ ♰ ༻

Shin Nakamura had been a selfish man in life. Mid-fifties, thinning hair, and twice divorced from women who knew better—his tenants did not. He had built a reputation on the north side of town for hidden costs and faulty appliances that were never fixed. Once or twice in the past four years you had cleaned up scenes, they came out of Nakamura's buildings in the summertime, stuck to the floor and infested with maggots and flies in different orifices.

Everyone had asked at one point, yourself included, how he was able to get away with that level of blatant cruelty and disregard—and the answer was as simultaneously simple, complex, and terrible as poverty. The north end was an area notorious for local crime and violence, but more than that, it was forgotten in favor of gentrifying other areas of the city—pretty little boutiques that'd make a splash on social media and a couple of upscale dining spots, all of those meant to change the online scales deeming an area's walkability, and therefore, profitability.

The blind eye most city commissioners turned to the north end made it an easy life for Shin to do as he pleased without many consequences despite living in the area himself. Most of everyone found it an odd sort of justice when he was discovered in his office, unrecognizable from how badly the dozens of stab wounds had disfigured his face and body. One look was enough to know that it was personal, a tenant who had received their condemnation via a neon-pink eviction letter hastily taped to an off-white door.

Only, this time, Shin chose a person backed into a corner at their breaking point. There wasn't much left to lose, yet Shin had ultimately lost it all. Rumor had it that no one sold out the tenant who committed the crime, something even the more moralistic part of yourself could fathom.

These were the cases that painted a grim picture of your future in forensics and often speared to the front of your mind at the worst of times—could you really be part of the reason why a person shattered by the powers of society goes to jail?

Shin Nakamura was a terrible man, but were his crimes punishable by that sort of torture? What about the tenants who probably heard Shin screaming for help, crying in agony—were they any better than murderers themselves?

What did that mean for you? An accomplice who quietly scrubbed clean murders at a monster's behest, you allowed those people to be swallowed up by Montague under a guise of fear, or was it selfishness?

That discomfort lasted you your entire shift, like an incredibly nauseating pill with a bad smell that sat in your nose for hours. You couldn't wipe away the thoughts like you could dried blood on smoke-stained walls or lumps of serrated flesh and fat wedged between slabs of wood on the floor.

"Man, he coulda been cleaner about this." T.J. had his feet planted solidly on the middle step of a ladder, well at work with a long-handled brush pushed flat to the ceiling. The splatter had gone that far, earning a few awestruck coos from him and Hoss earlier. "It would've made our lives easier."

It was a normal joke.

You'd laughed at the exact same one many times before, even finessed your own commentary in there on occasion because the dead can't sue, and a murderer had no rights—but now, you thought it'd taste bad on your tongue.

The two hulking men noticed, far sharper than you gave them credit for. Or maybe you were just worse at hiding things than you thought. They didn't allude to anything until everyone was packed up in the van, dried from the sweaty protective suits and summer heat by the AC.

"Listen, it ain't my business, and I swear I've been trying my best not to ask." There was a furtive look linked between Hoss and T.J.; it was something they had talked about when you weren't around. "That guy you're living with. He isn't doing anything to you, right? You used to talk about him all the time in the beginning. Haven’t heard a peep about him in ages. God, you're not living in your car, are you?"

From the outside in, you weren't doing much to try to embellish fancy stories and reasons onto your drastic change over the months. You simply let it be and navigated every day with the hope you'd remember where you were going with your head down. It probably didn't look too good to a paternal man like Hoss, and to T.J., who had several younger siblings.

"No, it's not him—" But, of course, it really was and everything surrounding his cruelty, everything he made you do, and what you never refuted. "I'm just perpetually exhausted. I'm sure you've heard that from Sylvie and Deshaun while they've been in uni."

"All the damn time." Hoss beamed, chest perked a little higher with the mention of his children. It wasn't enough to diffuse the tension lingering in the van, however. "Just know, I'd do for you what I'd do for my babies—put the fear of God in that man. If he puts a finger on you, you let me know."

T.J. gave an agreeable hum, fingers sticking to the steering wheel as he moved them around, making a turn down some street. "We'll catch him by surprise and everything. I'll call in a couple favors, grab a few shovels and bags of cement from my dad's place. It's all good."

For some reason, their entire spiel only spiked your uneasiness, and suddenly you were far too aware of your bladder. It was enough initiative for T.J. to floor the gas and get back to headquarters, giving you the chance to break away and race the remnants of daylight all the way home.

༺ ♰ ༻

It had never happened before, but you managed to catch Montague by surprise when he walked through the front door to find you standing there in the foyer. The kitchen broom wrapped in your hands was a nasty ploy, along with the look you cast between him and a young man not any older than yourself.

Again, just like all the others, you didn't recognize him. Montague's victims were fast, fleeting fixations for him, none worthy of names or an identity in his eyes. You suspected this guy was much the same.

Montague's bewilderment was swept away by a smile and laxing posture. He had settled back into his element. "You're home early today. I didn't expect to see you until much later. Not much to the scene, I assume?"

"It was pretty bad." A certain stiffness trailed on the end of your words, letting them echo through the hall and hang in the cool evening air.

The young man was fast to perceive that tension: the tightness in your shoulders, fingers subtly wringing against the cracked wooden broom. Montague's anticipative smile climbed higher the longer he looked at you.

Would it be such a bad thing to turn around and pretend you had never seen him come home with that other man? You considered doing it, hiding upstairs and using your headphones until everything seeping through turned into an amalgamation of ambient noise that meant nothing to you, and you willed away the guilt like you'd always done.

In that moment, you thought about Meredith Nimu's apoplectic daughter, a woman so embittered by her own suffering that she was foul and relentless to anyone she crossed paths with. You thought about Shin Nakamura, a greedy, pitiless man who'd rather let coroners scrape up his tenant's remains rather than grant them mercy while they were alive and had been left in pieces because of it.

You thought of them and all their wickedness and edged your gaze towards the young man still standing in the doorway with his hand holding it ajar, clean fingernails picking at chipping paint, just steps from outside. "I think you should leave."

Run! Run! You'd better run away as fast as you can! Nothing would stop Montague from keeping his prey there, if that's what he chose to do.

He did the opposite of that, and that was, simply, nothing at all. No pretty blandishments, nor a mouthful of teeth. Rather, now, he was particularly piqued by what you were trying to do.

To the young man, he had meddled into something rather egregious, probably convinced it was extramarital. You battled a surge of pride blooming inside you, shifting your chest a little higher, anchoring your spine back into your body.

"Don't come back here." You didn't need to say anything else. He was gone after pinching out a look of disgust towards Montague, tutting at him with his upper teeth showing through a curled lip.

Nothing happened for a while, not until the front door was secured after his departure. You were left to that responsibility, triple-checking the lock, while Montague ambled deeper into the house, but not too far away as you could follow the leisurely path by his heel strike. There was a rhythm in how he moved. It was deliberate, as though mimicking something.

It took you five paces to figure out he was miming your heartbeat, and he only stopped once it quickened in your chest. He appeared from around the corner, still taking his time reaching you, toying with some trinkets displayed on shelves built into alcoves throughout the lower floor.

You couldn't explain what you were feeling at that moment. Of the thousands—maybe millions—of victims Montague had taken in the previous times, you had just deprived him of one. That man would continue living, and he would tell his friends tomorrow about the weird night he had, and he would never have to be grateful that you saved him from a hellish death.

Yes, oh yes. Even as Montague approached you, carried by his deft gait with both halves of his gold compact open in his palm, you couldn't help but be in complete awe of yourself.

A life continued outside of this mausoleum, and it was all because of you. You were entirely different from Meredith Nimu's daughter and Shin Nakamura, and, for once, your hands weren't sullied by bleach, blood, and body matter.

All that heaviness you had been carrying was suddenly so much lighter, and you felt like your chest could open up as wide as the room where you stood. The breaths you took were dry and cold in your throat, yet fresh as though you were walking outside in wintertime.

Montague must've seen something he didn't like on your face because he sucked down on his cigarette for a while, winding his wrist with it at his side once he was adequately calm.

"Did it feel good? I've only seen you this happy while I was fucking your brains out." It was jarring to hear him talk like that. He took another quick drag and let it out slowly as he rounded you. "Truthfully, darling, I didn't think you were the type to break the rules—on purpose, anyway. But I suppose we all get a little wound up every now and then, right? I've already forgiven you."

And then, you watched him drop the cigarette to the marble and snuff it underfoot until the weak ember was turned to soot. A black smear was left behind when he took his foot away. His stare into you was unwavering.

"Clean it up."

You figured this was how a frightened animal felt when it wanted something within reach of an observant predator because you were trying to think of all the ways to get close without getting too close. It was a pitiful, humorous sight to him, seeing your steps forward so light and on the verge of bolting. But he showed no intention of doing anything more.

Still with the broom in hand, your knuckles turned stark around the handle while sweeping the remains towards you. It would take more elbow grease to get up that smudge, and he knew that just as well.

He reached for the broom and snapped it to a halt, making you jump, jaw clenching. A noiseless gasp lurched in your throat, his fingers wound tight into the hair at your crown as he yanked your head back to show all the fleshiness of your neck.

"What will you do about it, darling?" His lips were already cold and flush to the artery dancing in the curvature built of skin, muscle, and tendon.

Your teeth chattered as the wetness of his tongue followed that intricate, breathtaking network inside of you as far as the neckline of your shirt would let him.

"A man has to eat. Have you ever seen it? A man near starvation and the sorts of things he'll do to survive? Why, I've heard stories of desperate, little men eating their own lovers—their children—themselves just to claw around for a little longer. It's inspiring, I think."

He dragged you away then, up the stairs and through the hallway on the second floor to your bedroom, fingers still nested your hair until the moment you were shoved down onto fresh linens. There wasn't anywhere for you to go once he joined you on the mattress, feeling it bend towards his weight.

"Don't be afraid." he said this with all the fond familiarity of a lover, blunt fingernails digging crescents into your thigh through your clothes. In the waning moonlight that filtered through the dusty window over your bed, his pale eyeshine snared you like roots bursting from somewhere within your busy sheets to keep you there—keep you tame. "That's right. Come to me. Come to me."

There was a new drowsiness behind your eyes, one you couldn't stave by blinking. Montague's face was closer now, and you were struck with just how beautiful he actually was. The longer your gaze lasted, tips of your fingers exploring every shape and edge of his exquisite features, the less you were convinced he was a threat to you—that he couldn't have possibly been all that you'd feared up until now.

"I want you." His lips inched up like he expected you to say it. He felt your hands rest on the sides of his face, guiding him down into a soft kiss that he returned, that he kept clean and let you command until he was bored with it. You chased after him, lower lip pulled between both of yours and eventually out of reach. "Don't you want me too?"

"I wish you could understand just how much I do." He rummaged his pocket for the gold compact, losing it somewhere in the sheets, and then busied himself with stripping himself and you of clothes.

Each piece discarded showed a greater expanse of your skin, a delight in his eyes because he could see that gorgeous webbing of arteries and veins throughout you, even in the darkness, through every defense your body created to protect you from every bacteria, virus, infection—from him.

He didn't need the breath, but he took one and held it anyway.

You withered against his touch, those freezing, lithe fingertips traveling down all the areas where he wished his teeth could be, clear down to your groin. His smile stretched, feeling you search eagerly for a fistful of his hair with his lips smoothing across your inner thigh and then going higher.

There was warmth between your legs, a colorless glisten that leaked out onto the thin sheets, darkening a spot on them that tempted his tongue out for a taste. He came close to entertaining the notion of giving you that glimpse of heaven, allured by your hips leaping off the mattress and against his face.

"You really do think this is all about you." Montague kept you still by pressing down into your abdomen as he rose onto his knees, erection fitting tight between your bodies in the moments before he guided himself lower and hitched up into you.

The sharp motion knocked a startled gasp out of your throat, where it quickly dissolved into a slew of filth and breathy panting. Your nails clawed into your palms, a sight he thought to make worse by digging himself deeper into you.

Montague had no issues biding his time this way, looming over the sprawl of your body beneath him, manipulating parts of you until he saw your face flinch and the first moans of discomfort shake all the way from your chest, up, and through your teeth. They matched the pace of his hard thrusts, smothered by sharp slaps of skin that carried in the inky air.

Indeed, I can wait. That thought of his unsatiated hunger melted in the back of his mind with the precedence of arranging the course of blood in your body. The drum of your heartbeat was deafening to him, but it wasn't enough.

It wasn't loud enough.

He wanted to be able to envision the arteries and veins bursting in his teeth, saturating the sheets and walls and both your bodies in hot red. He wanted it to paint his skin while he fucked you to absolution.

"It really, truly, is all about you in the end, isn't it?" He could still speak clearly, despite you being unable to utter noise beyond the air being forced out of your lungs. "You really are magnificent. How could I ever think to let you go? Not after everything you've done for me, how beautiful you look next to all of my things."

His hand shifted away from your abdomen at last, tracking across the soft span of your stomach and the muscles spasming there under his fingertips.

All he would have to do is dig through you a little bit, and he could bury himself in those twitching fibers and insides. But he continued on his path to your pert nipples that he rolled against his palm a few times, higher still to fold his fingers together against your sternum where he felt your heart thundering there against your ribs.

"Thump. Thump. Thump. Thump," came his mocking chant that cracked into raspy moans as he lingered there. It had been a long time since something had made him feel this good. He had forgotten what bliss was truly like.

He reached your neck before long, trapping the underside of your jaw against his knuckles, forcing you to see him as his weight bore down on your throat. You both heard the cartilage and muscle in your neck shift, a subtle crack that sent your limbs flailing. You were thrown out of the rhythm of his thrusts in an attempt to grab at him.

"You really are despicable, aren't you?" He let out a gleeful laugh, letting your fingers turn ashen while you wrung his wrist. You weren't able to do much with your legs except use them to plant your heels into the mattress, vaulting your hips in the air to try to wrench yourself free. His cock slipped out of you, but he was hardly bothered by that.

"Does it feel good that you chased off my guest? I could get him back, you know. You're aware of this. I know you are. But righteousness just feels so… rewarding, doesn't it? You couldn't resist. Desperation must've been eating you alive."

Strings of saliva glistened in your mouth, breaking apart the further your jaws spread. You were convinced, in that moment, that you would die like that in a silent scream. None of the words that Montague spoke truly reached you, not as your chest quivered and lungs burned as though swallowed in an inferno.

"Every misdeed in life vastly outweighs the good, you know? The scales have never been leaned in our favor—not I, and especially not for you. If that's the sort of thing you believe in. Isn't that what you're taught? Goodness for the sake of salvation at the end of a short life of inhibitions? How miserable." Montague took his hand off of you and let you breathe.

You sucked in crisp air, gasping from your side through wet coughs and the sourness of vomit spat out on the floor.

Your respite was brief, weight on the mattress shifting as the hair on your scalp was used to lever you to your knees, body suspended upright only by his fingers tangled at your roots.

"This is all I can see." Montague loosened his hand from your head, moving south along your spine to your ass. He kneaded the bruised parts of your hips for a while after, lips ghosting their way along your neck up to the ear. "All I can see is what's right in front of me. And how it tastes. All that matters is that I have my fill—and that I feel good."

He smeared slick into the heel of his palm, rolling the head of his cock in that mess as he instructed you with every bit of lewdness how he wanted you to bend against the headboard, how far apart for you to spread your legs for him.

Every bit of it was humiliating for you, while he wished he could memorialize that moment of sinking back inside of you as your breaths broke into stifled sobs, face warped by anguish.

"Does it hurt? Tell me, I have to know, what does it feel like?" He enjoyed the suspense of not receiving an answer, listening as your fingernails dug tracks into the wood headboard and the dark room filled with obscene wetness that grew louder as his thrusts turned wild.

"Mmm—" He hinged forward, bracing his weight on top of your hands with his own. You shied from the surge of coolness that came with his cheek pressing yours. "You and I aren't so different. It makes me wonder if you actually like this. Isn't there something so freeing about it?"

"Mer—mercy, please." It was a coarse whisper from your dry throat, so much of your time having been spent with your mouth agape. The idea of having you that way was as tantalizing as all the others he thought up. "Montague, please—mercy."

Oh, now you were begging.

This was more than what he deserved. He managed a few more thrusts, spilling over into you by the third with a moan that he felt no shame to leave ringing in your ear. "Every part of you, every single part—I'll burn myself into your skin and your bones. You'll feel me in your veins, your blood. I'll make for certain that I'm all you remember—forever."

The vastness of your bedroom had grown warmer, permeated with the thickness of sweat and salt that left your palms slick against the headboard. You let your body slump against it, skin sticking to the wood. It didn't offer you the relief you wanted at that moment: a glass of ice water, all the tenderness of a soft bed to lull you into a blank dream—you just wanted to rest.

Montague knew this just as well, fishing his compact out from a muddled heap of linens and clothes. He checked inside to grab one of the two cigarettes left, making a mental note he'd need to replenish again tomorrow before lighting it and savoring it. At this rate, he anticipated he'd be empty before the end of the night.

For a while, he sat there cushioned on his haunches, admiring the way the smoke coiled towards the ceiling in dainty wisps and mingled with the stench of sex.

"It's not enough." he said, barely eliciting more than a glance from you. His current cigarette was already burnt to the filter, forcing him to pull the last and light that one too. "This is my last one. Such a shame."

You smelled the smoke strongly now, just seconds passing before you were yanked across the bed onto your back, the soreness in your scalp near excruciating as you yelped. Montague made a place for himself between your thighs again, leering down the length of his nose at you.

If he wanted to, he could trace the dread etched in your features with a finger, feeling all along your hot skin, into all the cavernous lines he wished he could preserve—right there, just like that. There had never been a more gorgeous visage than the one you wore right now. Only your gleaming, glowing, pink insides were more beautiful.

He watched your lips twitch while he teased a fistful of his hard cock against your sorest spot. You were swollen and bruised, and he could only imagine what it felt like when he bottomed out in you again.

The curve of your spine arched off the mattress, fingers frantically raking the air at him, reaching for any part you could sink into to get him out. Even your body seemed determined for the same, wonderfully stimulating walls squeezing around him.

It made a shiver roll all along his spine to his tailbone, eyes rolling up towards the ceiling, with his first thrusts feeling positively divine. Especially when you jolted, an almost exaggerated response amplified by jagged cries and wet gasps you couldn't seem to swallow back down into your chest.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry—" You sputtered around the mucus piled in your throat. "Montague, I'm sorry. Please, stop."

He had burned away half of his last cigarette when he leaned over you, his body eclipsing what poor light had managed to illuminate the room for you. You could only follow the dainty mesmerizing glow that worked away from his mouth—his exhale barely masking a moan that he blew away with the smoke—and towards you.

"Keep doing it." His other hand was crawling up your neck, forcing you to suck in a hard breath. "Beg me again. Keep doing it."

All sound but the steady pulse of the headboard striking the wall had deadened, lasting well until the moment the cigarette touched your skin—and you screamed. Your throat vibrated, suddenly stopping when his palm closed around you again, silencing all your noise, his thrusts sloppy and rough while you thrashed under him.

This time, he kept you pinned by his chest, letting your feet dig for traction and slip and slide on the sheets. The bright smolder turned dark as he twisted it into your neck, taking all the remnants of restraint he had not to drill into you as far as it could go. He curled his tongue behind his jaws, keeping them tight.

Montague let go of your throat to allow you the grace of a stifled wail before that same hand sealed your lips. "Ah, ah. You know better than to scream. Shh, shhh, shhh. It's such an ugly sound."

He rubbed the cigarette into your skin until it crumpled, leaving him to lament for a moment once flicking it away to the floor. For him, it left behind a beautiful burn: raw, mad, red, and enticing. As his hand fell off of your mouth, daring you to do more than whimper and cry, his tongue was already flat against your wound.

"Oh, God," you wheezed, voice hoarse and jarring with the force of his hips knocking into you. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry! Stop, stop, stop! I swear I'll never do it again! I swear. I swear!"

Montague caught the wrist you swung at his head, giving the taste of your seared flesh time to settle on his palate before turning towards the pulse in your thumb. He tried to match how he was fucking you out to how it throbbed on his lips.

"Oh, I'm well aware that you won't do it again. That much is a given." His strokes into you were suddenly languid and intentional, so achingly deep that your eyes rolled back. "I've already said that you're forgiven, haven't I?"

You could barely speak over the depth he reached. It didn't feel right. "Th-then, why?"

A smile flourished across his face, but your eyes couldn't pierce that dark veil to see it. You could feel the damp path he left on your wrist, how the muscle writhed all around the sprawl of your veins, going as far as to wind your fingertips before it receded back behind his lips.

"Because I'm enjoying myself." There was a weight of finality to those words before his mouth engulfed the side of your wrist, away from your fragile network of bluish-purplish channels. And when he bit into you, it was the incisors that sank through.

You didn't know what it was. A clamp seized you by the neck like his fist, steeling itself there and robbing you of a scream. The pain was unlike anything else—paralyzing and deep, like a pair of sharpened, narrow skewers made of molten fire piercing you with such an agonizing ache that you could do nothing but lay there.

But you still felt everything he was doing.

His thrusts had grown truly vicious, chasing a high that came as the warmth of your blood seeped from a pair of punctures he had created. The steady flow he fed from was something he lapped on at his leisure. Enough of it streaked the length of your arm and dripped onto your bedding, onto your naked, warm skin when he guided the fall over your neck and chest, south to your stomach and abdomen. He let it fill and pool the seams of his fingers while smearing it with the fluids between your bodies.

At last, breaking the trance to speak, feebly, in between intermittent pockets of pain and numbness rolling through you, you asked with some hopefulness, "Are you going to kill me?"

"You? Kill you?" Montague dropped your wrist. It felt like a limp, dead thing that didn't belong to you. He dove at your neck for those drops he teased himself with, nudging your chin high with his nose to reach it all. "Death would mean letting you go. You're all mine, darling. Whatever other existence waits beyond death will never have you."

His tongue wet a trail to your chin, collecting a watery essence of blood and spit that he pushed into your mouth. Your lips were sealed by his ravenous kiss, relenting to the thickness of his tongue swirling the taste into your cheeks and down your throat, a nauseating intermix of iron and stale smoke that lingered and made you pucker.

And then, you heard him back in your ear, craning his neck only as far as to aggravate the cigarette burn with his breath. It gave several angry throbs. The weight of his body was almost flush on you, spreading the blood around as though your skin together was a single canvas.

To his eyes, it bloomed breathtakingly, seeping into every crevice, pore, and scratch that made up your design, an impermanent stain that he could saturate you in again and again and again. The things he whispered in your ear were vile and wicked, all on unlabored breaths while his strokes turned sluggish and stayed seated deep inside you until the final hitch of his hips left you full of him.

"I don't think you should go to work today."

You were only scarcely coherent of him—or anything for that matter—eyes unmoving from the black void above and unfeeling of how he chose to manipulate your body, still, hours later. All you could think about was the flutter of your lashes weighing down heavily over your eyes and how this world only survived on suffering such as yours.

༺ ♰ ༻

A small pile of things was arranged fussily in a duffle bag Hoss had given the day you returned to work after an impromptu leave of absence. It had only lasted three days, just enough time to acclimate to the pain that seemed to synchronize to every part of your body, throbbing everywhere, all at once, and at times with sharpness so great it toppled you to the ground. You could only lay there—wherever you dropped, on whatever cold slab of marble or concrete until it dissipated, unfurling from your limbs and organs to a rapturous wave of relief that melted the tension out of you.

It had only happened once while at work on a scene amidst a balmy summer night and came out of nowhere like an electric shock surging to your fingertips and toes, a hammer landing on your bones and leveling you on the sidewalk leading back to the company van. And that was all it took to incur a ruinous sort of anger in the two hulking men.

"You're going to take this bag, pack some shit, and you're leaving. Tonight." Hoss had to shake out the dust on the old duffle bag he pulled from somewhere in his car. "You ain't gonna tell me the reason, but I know he did something to you. T.J.'s calling in a favor."

"No. Don't—don't do anything. Don't try to come to the house—" There was a bandage around your wrist that you couldn't stop fiddling with. "I don't know what'll happen if you do. Just fucking don't."

"Nah, not us." T.J. slapped his phone back into the clip on his belt loop, eyeing the motions of your fingers on your wrist uneasily. "One of my old buddies—name's Roscoe—said he wants to handle it. Apparently, he and your guy have a history of some kind. He says to be ready to go by three."

The meaning behind what he said was left nebulous and concerning to you, even after you returned home with the duffle bag and started pulling things from your closet. Some ways across your room, high up on the wall and out of your reach was a clock. Its monotonous ticking brought your eyes over to it.

It was just after one-thirty, still enough time to change your mind if you wanted to. There was something so effortlessly easy about following along to the whims of other people. It felt safe, reassuring—their confidence was infallible. Not once in four years had T.J. or Hoss given you a reason to doubt their intentions, but right now, it boiled over in your mind.

But where will I go? What am I going to do? He'll find me. He'll find me. Montague would find you, but he wouldn't stop you from leaving. You could see it with clarity—him perched on the armrest of a chair, watching you walk through the door. He'd give you a headstart, a few days, maybe a few weeks.

You weren't sure you knew what to do without him. There was nowhere else in the world you could go, no one you could confide in that wouldn't be destroyed. He would keep your heart beating all the while breaking you apart until he had his fill, reminding you that this was how it was meant to be. This was how he showed you how you belonged.

And you—silly little you with your consciousness floating on the fringes of inscrutable ecstasy and some personal purgatory built on agony in your bones and blood—would believe him.

"Going on a trip?" His voice drifted to you from the doorway, far sweeter than it usually was. "I wish you would've told me. I can't imagine what it'll be like without you here in this house. You breathe life into it."

He was lured over by your silence, fitting his fingers between your shoulder blades to push along your spine, easing away the discomfort that had settled there. It was hard not to lean into that relief, a misstep that shattered any lasting hold of willpower when he stooped his neck to sweep you into a kiss.

"Why don't you stay instead?" He knew you wouldn't be coming back, not without dragging you back himself. "Stay with me instead. Right here. In this bed."

"Montague, stop—" He pressed down harder on your lips so those words withered into guttural frustration in your throat.

The duffle bag was flung far away, opening space on your bed for him to lay you out and begin to unravel the bandages around your wrist. Once he had access, his mouth was already full against the two puncture sites.

"Stay." He wasn't playing coy now. "I'll take care of you. It wasn't enough before. I can see that now. What can I do? It'd be too easy to break your legs. What if I chained you to this bed? What if I locked you up in this room? I wouldn't mind keeping you downstairs with me, but it would be too cold for you, I think."

"I want to leave." you said, mustering your composure through tight lips while he teased the infected purple holes with his flatter teeth. "Let me go."

He smiled derisively. "I don't think you know what you want."

"I—" You balked at him, reiterating with a stumble, "I—I just want to leave. Get off."

"How will you ever survive without me?" You didn't know if you'd be able to. "You'll be all alone, all alone in a world that's just ready to tear you open and spit you back out. I've told you before: Society doesn't reward virtue over vice—only those who play along. You won't last, not after you've known and tasted me."

You couldn't bring yourself to say anything, whereas he swelled like a man who had salvaged a victory, lying himself down to kiss you again—

And then, the doorbell rang with an immense melancholic echo that you could feel vibrate up your arms and legs. Nearly a year later, you were hearing it for the first time and grasping onto the lapels of his suit vest, keeping him still when you remembered T.J.'s promise.

"Ignore it." you said.

"We have a guest—" Something in his tone made your stomach clench. "It's not polite to leave them waiting, especially at this hour."

Montague had untangled himself from you and was gone before you could stop him. Another wave of pain put you on the floor when you moved. Drool piled from your mouth. An ache so unreal pounded in the wrist he had played with. The crawl to your duffle bag was far, arduous in that every inch felt like carrying stones on your back.

I'm going to die. I might as well already be dead. You didn't have any more time to wait, so you slung the strap over your shoulder and used the wall to guide you along the quiet hallway, bumping into every pedestal and display where Montague's most treasured things had stayed undisturbed.

You were one of them, something he could keep on the second floor with the rest of his stuff, but unlike brittle porcelain and fraying embroidery—he could break you as much as he wanted, again and again and again, and fit you back whole. He could do it forever while you wasted, longing for an end he would never give you.

But as you crept along the bleak wallpaper and all of his curios, you were so gentle with them, steadying any wobbling base or piece as you went. The central staircase was close, voices at the bottom of it faint and unintelligible, drifting alongside you as though part of the house—

The air exploded.

Just once.

A single gunshot brought back all the alertness to your body, neck and shoulders at full length, pain dulled to where you could shuffle faster and look off the bannister at the landing below.

Montague was staring back up at you from the floor, entirely still and soundless. His jaw was unhinged, askew, frozen in a position that should've been impossible. A black hole gaped between his eyes, but didn't bleed.

"If you're not ready, that's going to be bad news." Another man stood nearby sheathing a gun, unfamiliar and yet with sameness in the way his gaze felt hollow and reached through you. "I'm repaying my debts. I'd like to make good on this one."

You were slow descending the stairs, even slower while you rounded Montague's body and denied yourself the chance to stop. Something invisible wanted to pull you to him, plow your knees into hard marble and weep over his chest. However, your insides bending in disgust and twinges in your bones kept you onward.

This man, Roscoe, was just as sickly-seeming and gray as the other, every slot of space on his arms and neck filled with images of religious iconography and portraits of saints—Mary being the only one you recognized with just a glance. It was tempting to touch him, something he noticed and stepped out of your reach.

"Is there another way out of here?" He made a weak motion towards the front door just ajar, but his eyes were stuck on the wrist wounded and unusable to you now. "We need to go. Now."

You were racking your brain for an answer, turning half-circles in place before pointing to the archway with a clock. "There's a backdoor, but the yard is fenced in and there's nothing but forest for three miles. There's also—"

Roscoe waited expectantly, ushering you to continue when he went for the gun in its holster. "Start moving, we'll figure it out." He unloaded another round into Montague's head, a near indecipherable twitch in the fingers made the hair on your neck shoot straight out. "Silver only keeps him down. It won't kill him. Go!"

"Th—there's, there's the basement." You smacked your lips, trying to swallow around a bulge in your throat. "There's an old door. He said there are tunnels, but I don't know where they go. I don't know if he was telling the truth. I don't—"

He threw a hand into your back, thrusting you forward at least three feet. You almost didn't catch your footing. "Then that's where we're going."

"Not a friend of yours then, I assume, darling?" Montague's voice from the floor was as much of a relief as it was terrible. The silent gaps of air all around were disturbed by sharp snaps and cracking bones as his jaw moved back into place and he sat upright over his thighs. You were transfixed by the silver bullets being sucked into his skull, holes shrinking until they closed completely. "I'm not surprised you're still fraternizing with the wrong crowds, Roscoe. You and that entire Society have always been a fucking eyesore."

Roscoe readied his aim. "Parasite."

Montague laughed all the way to his feet, tugging at the edge of his vest to make it neat again. He opened his mouth just enough to let his tongue roll out, shards of silver bullets tinkling as they hit marble underfoot. "You can't take what's mine."

He looked to you, stepping closer every time Roscoe moved you back with his arm. "Come here. Come back to me, darling. This is where you belong. This is your home. You belong here with me, here with everything that you know."

"He doesn't mean that."

Another gunshot snapped you to attention, blinking out of a stupor you hadn't realized you were in.

The bullet landed in Montague's forehead, teetering his balance in such a way that his back curved towards the floor, arms hanging like useless instruments, yet he still somehow kept his soles planted. "Time to go. Get to the basement."

Roscoe didn't fail to reach you this time, running tight on your heels through the house to the basement floor. He stopped partway to the old door to help you scour the duffle bag for a key—one attached to the chatelaine Montague had given you the day you accepted to move in.

Your breaths were ragged, heart ablaze and beating against your ribs. In that moment, as you flipped through the assortment of keys with an unsteady, slippery grip, you wondered if Montague heard your blood racing in your veins, if he could follow the suffocating drumbeat your heart made in your ears.

Just above, fast approaching the locked basement door, came a thunderous roar so inhuman and reverberating that it scared the clip of keys out of your hands into a clattering heap on the floor. Time was up.

"Move!" Roscoe shoved you aside, illuminated by the hectic flare of your phone as he fit his fingers through a gap in the door and ripped the entire thing off its hinges. He pulled you by the scruff of your shirt and heaved you inside the tunnel. "Go! Go! Go!"

The first thing to hit you was a putrid smell intimately known but always through protective equipment and a respirator. And as you went deeper into the tunnel, led by a single route and the light off your phone, the dirt packed under your feet turned soft, sinking to the tops of your shoes.

And then, you saw bodies.

Numerous—countless corpses in varying stages of decay with twisted faces reflected your terror and pain right back at you. Most were intact with missing limbs or dark red chasms in their abdomens that had been scraped hollow and dry under the white light.

A few had been fully decapitated, briefly reminding you of the dead blonde woman from that night, but most of what lay stacked against the tunnel walls were emaciated figures with skin pulled so taut to their bones you could still make out their faces.

You were doubled over your knees, sucking in fetid mouthfuls of air and retching them back out on the ground. It burned in your throat, in your nostrils, and behind your eyes, but stifled your sobs as Roscoe dragged you alongside him.

"What did he do? What did he do?" You were crying, wheezing out those words on every shallow breath you took all the way to an end just ahead.

The more you thought about it, the more you smelled the rot, tasted the bitterness of your own vomit, the more came out. "I don't want to die! I don't want to die!"

Roscoe had to let you rest in the grass once you both surfaced. One of the exits turned out to be near the house, less than half a mile. But the tunnels kept going and so did the bodies. You suspected that there wouldn't be any reach of that underground labyrinth that didn't have some form of decay along it.

The thought brought the tears back, but now you could relish the sticky summer night humidity and touch dewy tendrils of grass under your hands.

"Can you drive?" Roscoe had a pair of keys hanging from his index finger, giving you a long moment to take them. He saw confusion in your watery stare. "I'll tell you where to go, just drive."

That's how it had been for hours at this point. You kept your hands locked around the steering wheel, one stronger than the other, gnawing the inside of your cheek while ruminating everything—tonight, the night Montague had bitten you, every other night before that, and your decision to have ever trusted him.

"How long ago did he bite you?" Roscoe had the seat reclined, arms over his eyes to shield them from oncoming headlights. "It doesn't look good."

You tested your grip on the steering wheel, but you couldn't do much without a sharp sting in your wrist. "I don't know—a couple weeks ago? I've tried everything short of going to the emergency room."

"That won't help," he said. "Modern medicine can fix a dog bite, antibiotics can kill an infection, a vaccine can protect you from a virus. Those aren't going to do any good."

Solemnly, you asked, "Am I going to die?"

Roscoe didn't sit up but had your wrist in his hands, turning it in little ways that didn't aggravate you. Besides the occasional glare from passing vehicles, there was no light in the car, and the holes in your skin were hardly distinguishable, though they had gotten darker. You weren't able to move it with any ease now.

"What you need to know right now is that he's never going to stop following you." He put your hand back on the steering wheel, careful as he enclosed your fingers around it. "It doesn't matter how long it takes, what you do, where you go—a parasite finds a host, and it latches on. And it doesn't let go."

You glanced between him and the road several times, tongue wetting the dry parts of your lips. "He's a vampire—you're a vampire. There's got to be something—"

Roscoe finally sat up in his seat, now cramped sideways with his shoulders flat to the window. The car veered a bit into the other lane. "You need to understand something. What you're saying would imply he ever had any humanity. Vampires are created." He paused for a beat, waiting for the realization to strike you. "Montague was never created."

"What—what the hell is he, then?" A horn abruptly blared by, prompting you to yank the car back onto the correct side. "He drinks blood. He has teeth. He—he hunts. He doesn't like silver. His eyes are the same as yours."

Roscoe lowered his gaze, but remained in that uncomfortable position. "There's a story I heard about him once. I don't remember the details except for one: ‘If the devil exists, they're one in the same.’"

You kept your eyes on the road, counting every car that flitted on past. They were probably going to work at this hour—green numbers on the dashboard showed it just after four—and they'd be able to have a place to return to at the end of the day. Now, you didn't belong anywhere, and twenty-four hours from now you still wouldn't.

The town where you had lived with Montague for a year was long behind you, backtracking would take hours, and you wouldn't know how to get back from the direction that Roscoe had told you to go. Dim streetlamps and cozy houses with spruced yards had morphed into an endless network of concrete, signs, and off-ramps to places you'd never heard of.

It was scary how everything could change in one night, and how it did. The only semblance of normalcy to you right now were the aches throughout your body, which had returned the moment you fully comprehended that you had escaped that house.

"Why…" Roscoe looked up at you, seeing your lips shake and eyes turn red. "Why do I want to go back to him?"

He fixed himself right in the seat, tousling a hand through his hair while looking out through the windshield. "You shouldn't do that. But you'll never be able to stop running."

You never saw Roscoe again once the car ride ended several thousands of miles later, mentioning something about how he repaid his debt to T.J. and had disappeared from a restaurant you both walked into. When that happened, you sat paralyzed at your little table for most of the day with a soul-crushing realization that you were truly alone with nobody in the world—

Just like Montague said you would be.

And, for the sake of others, you'd never be able to have anyone else in your world.

It stayed that way for close to two years. The hardest part hadn't been the homelessness or constant vigilance, not the door revolving each person to come into your life since, but the fact that you still yearned for what you once had. Everything so awful about what you experienced sometimes looked like heaven when you thought about it, like soft, cloudy nostalgia from a time where the throes of agony were all you had ever known.

You were capable of thinking soberly as well, and with that came the understanding that a part of you would always want that time back—want him back. He had left you with a permanent scar and neurological damage that could never be corrected. It was anticipated you'd lose that wrist at some point in the future, but for now, you could still hold a cup and brush your teeth with enough conscious effort.

The pain never went away either, but you refused to let it impede your work in the field. And your two roommates were a couple of engineering geniuses who'd managed to make the flat more accommodating to your needs. They'd been patient with you during every step of your transition into a new life, calling you an enigma because you had nothing to your name except a dusty duffle bag and a "strange-looking dog bite" on your wrist when you first met them.

Sometimes, especially on the weekends after clinking together enough shot glasses, they tried to probe your brain for some clue as to who you were, who you had been historically. You had decided it was better that they—that no one—knew about it or what actually existed out there in the world.

And when you returned home from the lab late that Saturday night, you were surprised to find the lights off and the flat immersed in the kind of soundlessness that made your ears feel clogged with cotton.

You were slow in lowering your backpack to the floor, keeping the front door slightly ajar so a slither of light from the residential corridor slipped inside. "Jordan? Felix?"

No answer. You didn't hear anything from their bedrooms upstairs either.

"Jordan?" The nearest light switch didn't work, neither did the one after that, or any others you hunted down with the diffused beam from your phone screen. "Jordan? Felix? Are you guys home?"

It was possible they had gone out somewhere for the night and just hadn't mentioned anything to you, as unsound as that logic actually was, considering it simply wasn't their personality. But as you wandered through different rooms checking the switches, you knew you were rationalizing to keep yourself in check.

The light from the hallway still piled inside like a narrow pillar, raising all the hairs on your neck and arms, knowing that it wasn't a building-wide outage. They had never left you in a situation like this before. Something was wrong.

"Jordan! Felix! Whe—" Your foot nearly shot out from under you when you slid through something slick on the laminate. After a moment to fix yourself, bracing the edge of the countertop with a clammy palm, you steadied the white glow of your phone at the floor.

There, glistening back at you, was the vast richness of blood in a tall puddle that spread like long winding tendrils through grout in the flooring. It looked almost black under your light at a certain angle, estimating it had been there for several hours—untouched.

You held in a breath and grit your jaws together as the more you moved, the more you saw. And when the top of a head came into view, silky hair shining like fine thread before clumping together at the base where the blood had pooled the most, it was everything you could to keep yourself from hitting the floor.

Both of them were there, perfectly out of sight of the front door and completely unrecognizable. Their bodies had been left in one piece, though where their faces had once been were cavernous holes with pale, pink ribbons of flesh and fat left behind. The roundness of their skulls let blood fill inside it like a vessel. What little pieces of brain matter remained had floated to the surface.

You staggered back from them, phone loosening from your weak hand and returning them to the maw of darkness, while groping the wall behind you as far as your arm could reach. This wasn't a result of crude knife work or even bludgeoning; no, it was a slow kill, one meant to steep someone in torment so immense that you prayed to whatever was out there that they succumbed immediately.

"Help…" Your voice was trapped in your throat, barely registering as a whisper even to yourself as you sidled along the wall. "Someone—anyone, please help."

The patter of your heartbeat was torturous. Your every step back to the entrance was leaden with fear. You couldn't get your legs to move fast enough, and the light reaching in through the gap seemed to stretch on forever—further, further, and further still.

You thought back to that day you met Montague and shook his hand, noting how unnaturally cold it had been despite it being a nice day in spring. You remembered the dead blonde woman with mascara tears, and the bodies he used to decorate the tunnels, and the young man who was able to walk away that night believing it was all some shallow quarrel—never knowing he had sealed your fate.

You regretted all of it.

The door was in your reach now, and you could get out, call for help, and go back to running. This time, you wouldn't be tricked into false satiety or let anyone too close. You would see mountains and forests and oceans a thousand times over before you stopped again.

Two years hadn't been enough time for you to accumulate many things, you thought. It wouldn't be hard to leave most of it behind, just like you had before. You would unpack that old duffle bag from the back of your closet, fill it to the brink, and that would be enough.

You had your hand over smooth metal, but that cold reached greater depths in you as the door was pushed shut from behind, light shrinking away through the slot until you were swallowed whole in the dark.

"Hello, darling. I've missed you." He sounded the same against your ear. For a split second, you felt relieved. "Don't worry about cleaning up. We're not staying long."

He clamped damp fingers over your mouth before you could scream.

a/n; I hope this scratched some awful itch for you. onto the story notes:

on montague: what he is exactly is open to interpretation. tell me your theories! his character has been around in my arsenal for a very long time, but as a human cannibal in those days. he's been resurrected into something worse imo. he exists in my vampire universe more as a side-character, and, surprisingly, is not the central antagonist. he is meant to more or less be the embodiment of depravity and the consequence of a being without internal moral compass.

on mc: represents the fallacy of man and how unreliable the narrative of morality actually is, and how we as people have tendencies to twist and turn the meaning of it for our own benefit. mc in this story is not meant to be a good person, but did they deserve condemnation to a personal purgatory?

so, while this is a monster story, I wanted to parallel the treatment mc endures + mindset to the horrors of trying to escape abuse. I wanted to explore this through the lens of a monster story, though. if you suspect you are in an abusive relationship, please reach out to people to help get you out.

what's funny is that this story was originally supposed to be a dark comedy that moved towards something a little darker, and eventually turned into this. montague was initially going to just be a nuisance to mc by inserting himself into friend hangouts because "it's my house".

divider by; @/anlian-aishang

dc divider by; @/benkei-bear

if you read and enjoyed it, please share your thoughts and reblog!!

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ghostheartfelt · 9 months

Text

*:･｡☆ warnings: heavy gore, torture, hurt/comfort, whump, s/a towards reader, men being gross, gunshot wounds, stab wounds, blood and violence, branding (torture method), waterboarding (torture method), reader (thaye) is a badass, first kiss, dismemberment of fingers, eye trauma, protective!ghost, implications of smut/sex, aftermaths of torture. (there is probably a lot i missed, but idc lol all the other shit should b enough warning!!) 〔☆〕 desc: you and the 141 are deployed to austria with the intel of a drug boss known as rolmuth who is harboring romanian soldiers to the east coast to smuggle illegal mercenary personnel into america. what happens when a rapid snowstorm picks up and you (callsign 'thaye') are separated from the others then further captured and interrogated alongside your lieutenant?

—✩ PHANTOM TOUCH ✩—

word count —15.6k

a/n: sorry for my inactivity! the entire time i was workin on this shit... let me tell you.. this is 51 pages on google docs LMAO so i hope the length and word count makes this fat fucking hurt/comfort one shot worth it.

VIENNA, AUSTRIA.

“Move, move, move!” Price yells.

Snow fell and blanketed the ground beneath you, you were dressed in white camouflage tactical gear.

Your movements were slower as you trudged yourself through the snow, you turned in every direction searching for your captain.

Your lieutenant.

Anybody.

Rapid snowy winds smacked you in the face, nearly forcing your eyes shut as you traveled through the gusts.

“Soap?!” You shout, planting your feet below into the patches of snow,

Your arms raise to cover your face.

“Fuck!”

“Thaye!” A voice echoed through the snow that encased you in a blanket of long silence.

Snow nestled into the ground below—everything around you seems to just slow down.

You traipse yourself heavily through the thickness around you as you snap a clip into your M4 carbine, swinging it behind you like it had been previously.

Thump.

Your head droops down and you feel your heart drop into your stomach seeing the body of one of the men you were deployed with face up.

His head four inches deep in the snow and his right eye completely destroyed, his chest marred with several bullet wounds.

The root of his nose is fractured to the point where it’s flattened into what’s left of his skull.

You swallow the knot in your throat that might have also been barf trying to make its way out of you, kneeling down to peel the soldier’s dog tags off of his corpse.

Hudson “Scooter” Wheeler.

It makes you smile slightly, your thumb dragging over the metal tag to wipe off the thickness of blood that had coated the carving of his name.

“I’m sorry, Wheeler.”

The loss of fallen soldiers leave footprints and engravings on one’s heart that never allows them to be the same, again.

You wished sometimes you could just be without the worry about who you have to lose and who you have to save.

Restless nights followed by mornings and afternoons full of nothing but unpromised resolutions. You nearly felt as if insanity would be a better route than going through the pain of losing the people you stood side by side with, enduring the effects of grief, bloodshed, and war.

Although there were moments of bonding and camaraderie that were forced to turn into utter gore and distrust due to the change of the objective that deemed those to turn against one another in hopes of survival and success.

Pride; a fickle sense that could drive an individual to the depths of madness and create a staked claim to prove more power then they own or deserve.

You didn’t understand it. Nor did you want to.

You were left in a society where the drabness of gray ruled the world and pain of loss clenched to the soldier’s hearts almost desperately.

And yet that perpetual colour of gray; a colour so dull but so compelling, it still lights the depths of hell you lived in by merely a petite dose.

Your mouth had begun to feel tacky with your muscles stiffening as the weather conditions intensify by every fleeting moment.

Inside your combat boots, you feel your feet begin to grow numb; similar to the feeling of stepping on fresh-cut grass and grazing dull needles.

Now, you wonder what hypothermia would feel like. You weren’t used to this sort of weather.

Even under your white half-face balaclava, you felt your lips and their absence of moisture.

Still, you trekked forward, squinting eyes searching for any sign of life around you.

Your face lights up at the sight of a shadow-like movement through the blistering storm and rapid winds once you wipe off the frost lingering on your goggles.

They moved closer—it seemed to be one person.

There’s a tree to your left—your legs manage to jerk themselves through the snow until you're beside it.

You cautiously lower your body into the snowpack below you, clutching your rifle in your grip while your eyes fixate on the moving figure ahead of you.

Your finger grazes over the trigger of your carbine rifle.

A leg comes before the torso, then the face.

The skull mask.

Ghost.

Relief washes over you immediately—raising to your knees.

“Lieutenant!” You call.

His head immediately snaps in your direction, and the time spent staring at each other seemed everlasting, though in reality it was just a few seconds before his large hand was squeezing your shoulder and he was right in front of you.

“Thought we lost’ya,” Ghost rasps.

“What’s the sitrep?”

“Enemy force has ordnance on standby—Price ordered all units to the West Safehouse,” he says.

You nod softly.

“Why’d you hang back?”

His eyes widen under his balaclava and you open your mouth to speak—Ghost tugs you by your vest, pulling you to the side.

“Gh—“

There’s a person behind him.

Sounds muffle around you, complete silence surrounding you as Ghost’s head is slammed with the butt of a rifle.

Your hands reach down to pull your handgun from off of your hip, pointing it towards his attacker, squeezing on the trigger and unhesitantly dropping him to the ground before he can double back and finish him off.

No words leave your mouth as you turn in one quick jerk, the barrel of a L1A1 being aimed between your eyes.

Not even seconds later was the thick handle of a bowie knife met with the back of your head.

Immediately, your body meets with the snow, and you feel the coldness of the snow over your mask.

You struggle to pick up your head, pain surging in the back of your head enough to blur your vision.

Keeping your eyes open was a challenge—they constantly blink shut as you watch the enemy force yell at each other, manhandling Ghost by ripping his weapon sling off of him and dragging him by his fur-lined parka.

His body was dragged up into a Humvee and roughly thrown in before you were picked up by your ankles and wrists and tossed right on top of him.

Your head slumps against Ghost’s bicep as you're washed up by incapacity, your mind fogging against your will. Enervation holds you captive and sweeps you off your feet.

You’re met with blackness, next, yet the only thing you could think of was your failure to protect your superior.

☆════━━━┈┈┈┈━━━════☆

You awoke to the sounds of struggling—something teetering on the floor.

It takes a moment for you to come to your senses and stir from unconsciousness, eyes fluttering open to take in your surroundings.

The ever-present smell of waste and deteriorated flesh smacks you with reminiscence, the overbearing cold, the taste of grime, blood, and bile in your mouth.

When you go to move your hands, they’re immobile; binded by thick ropes that with your state of exhaustion and physical weakness, would be impossible to escape from.

Your heavy head manages to shift for oneself to observe the room—your gear was purloined, leaving you in your cargos and a tank-top.

Below you, the ground was concrete and stained with blood that led to the large metal door that had a closed hatch.

Vaguely, you recall in short and brief flashes why you were there, your eyes shutting for a few moments before opening once again.

Ghost.

Where was Ghost?

“Lieutenant,” you cough. “Ghost, wh—“

“‘M here, kid.” Ghost wheezes. “To’yr left.”

Your head turns, stopping at the sight of his mask on the concrete, blood smeared across the maw of the skull, over the eye socket.

“Ghost, are you injured?”

“No.”

Slowly, your eyes trace up the ground beneath you until Ghost’s boots are in view.

His soles skid against the ground as he attempts to drag the dentist chair he’s strapped in. “Fuck!”

You shift in your wooden seat in an attempt to reach your hand down to pull up the velcro flaps of your cargos. You couldn’t reach.

Ghost’s boots stop skidding against the floor as the metal door’s rusted hinges creak, the door being flung open to welcome a man inside—three other men were behind him holding military grade rifles with drum magazines.

The man inside the room raises his hand, offering departure in the Hindi language, to which his men shut the door behind him.

His arms were wrapped behind his back, the sound of his heavy boots echoing off of the thick stone walls.

He walks around the room for a while, allowing you to raise your head to take in who he was.

A European man that’s approximately 184 centimeters with long pushed back shaggy dark hair; his eyebrows arched, a bushy beard.

On his cheek, a nasty deep laceration scar that reaches the end of his eyebrow. Under his left eye, another scar reaches the bridge of his nose.

The man is inches from your face, now, a tilt in his head.

“We see how long it takes to break you, Sergeant.” His eyes crinkled as his lips upturned in a depraved smile.

He lifts himself from his bent position, grips the crest rail of the chair, and pulls you farther from Ghost.

“Who is your commanding officer?” He asks, feet spread apart as he looks down at you to assert his dominance.

“Fuck you.” You bite back.

The man’s hand roughly takes hold of your chin, tilting your head up towards the dangling ceiling light.

“I eat boys like you for breakfast.”

Ghost chuckles beside you.

His eyes narrow as he releases a choked scoff, his head swinging back before bursting into laughter.

“My drug ring reigns across the entire country—my men swarm all city.”

His accent is thick, though his English isn’t terrible.

“It is either you tell me now and you and friend die quick, or you die slow of bleeding until we find on our own.”

“Good fuckin’ luck,” Ghost grunts.

You swallow thickly, groaning as the man pulls your head back by the scalp of your hair.

You purse your lips as you collect saliva from the walls of your mouth, spitting just above the man’s eyebrow and watching as the gob runs down over his eye.

He snarls, dragging an open hand down his face. Using that same hand, the male flexes his hand into a fist and socks you in the jaw.

“Hey!” Ghost shouts.

You hear it pop and you immediately outstretch your neck and slam your forehead into the bridge of his nose, arms jerking in an attempt to escape your restraints. “You motherfucker!”

He lets out a groan, his head flinging back as blood streams down his nostrils, his hand trembling over his nose.

“Bitch! Madarchod! Bevakooph veshya…” He hisses through clenched teeth. “Broke my nose!”

His palm smacks you across the face so hard, a pinkish red hue starts blossoming across your cheek. He repeats it again, then again, and again.

You squeeze your eyes shut, bracing yourself as numbness circles inside the flesh of your cheek, a similar feeling to those static electricity globes that you’d get for your twelfth birthday and press all five of your fingertips against.

“Hey! This is between you an’ me, a’right?” Your lieutenant gives a sharp nod, trying to reason with the man.

He stares at Ghost for a few moments, squeezing his fingers in his fist before leaving the room, the door slamming loudly behind him.

You take the moment to actually look at Ghost, your eyes taking in his features entirely.

From his long and messy dirty blonde undercut, to his shade and stubble.

To his bruised and bloodied lips and the thick scar running from his top lip to the underside of his chin.

To his thick and beautiful eyebrows, the scar on the start of his left eyebrow, running down to the bridge of his nose.

To his deep and all familiar brown eyes—long and light eyelashes accompanying their shape.

To the scar that spread out from the right inner corner of his lip and across his cheek as if it was the engravings of a smile line.

There were several scars littered across the male’s face; each one of vast distinction from the other.

Once again, the door thrusts open and the man returns, cotton wads up his nostrils with another male by his side, pushing in a rolling mayo stand with different tools and items you assumed were torture devices.

“Hey! Hey! What’re y’doing?” Ghost jerks in his seat, his eyebrows furrowing as the man picks up a syringe, flicking the glass and squeezing out a droplet of the liquid inside. “What th’fuck is that?”

“You will have your answer soon enough,” he simply replies.

“Agarwal—blade.”

The second man grabs the rotary tool from off the tray, a saw blade in the other.

Your hands tug against their bindings enough to chafe your wrists, it feels as if your skin is being shredded with a cheese grater.

“Paip rinch, ab.” The taller man holds out his arm, to which the man who was now identified as Agarwal hands him a pipe wrench.

“English, asshole.” You grunt.

He slings it over his shoulder and slowly walks towards Ghost as he whistles.

Ghost’s eyes don’t avert from his gaze, even as the pipe wrench drops from off his shoulder to clatter on the floor, hanging from his wrist and dragging along the ground.

“Who…is…your…superior?” His voice is grim, each word coming out as he takes a step.

Using the hook jaw of the wrench, he lifts Ghost’s chin.

“Piss off,” the blonde huffs.

Not even seconds later does the man swing the wrench around and belt it into his stomach. Ghost lets out a wheeze, his body lurching over in reaction to the sudden pain coursing through him.

“No!” You yell.

“Who.” He asks again with spite in his tone—he was demanding, it no longer was a question in his favor.

“You’ll know who when he comes’a knockin’ ‘n blows lead thru th’lot of ya.” Ghost says with a slight raise in his head.

The wrench is swung back into his stomach, causing Ghost to hurl and expel vomit onto his boots.

“Leave him the fuck alone!” You kick yourself forward a bit using your boots. Agarwal’s hands grip the slat of the chair and pull you back towards the tray.

“No, no,” he nearly coos, yanking your head back by the thinner group of hairs on the nape of your neck.

You clench your jaw and subside, lifting yourself up with your hips to help avoid the pain.

His eye’s strain, beads of sweat rolling down the end strands of his hair regardless of how cold it was inside of the formidable room.

“Get me my player,” the bearded man says as he trails his 12” redwood handle knife across Ghost’s jawline.

Agarwal’s hand releases your hair to your relief and he leaves the room.

“Disgusting—“ the male snarls. “Making mess of my floor.”

Your eyes narrow as you watch a pool of blood start to form as he slashes Ghost’s cheek, a groan spilling from your lieutenant’s throat.

“Fuck you ‘n y’r floor,” Ghost coughs.

He drops the wrench to the floor, then uses a rag that was hanging out of his pocket to swipe off the blood from the knife’s blade.

Two men walk in, one pushing in a record player and the other holding a tactical vest and a book.

Your vest and your book.

His name patch reads “Gamble”, the one who throws your vest and the book onto the floor.

“Rolmuth, the woman—she has had access to our radio frequency and has been writing down our shipment codes and locations.”

Ghost’s head raises, his pupils shrunken as he takes in the sight of the morse code book.

The man holding the knife cracks his head in your direction before proceeding towards you.

“Thaye…” he susurrated.

You don’t flinch when his arms raise to swing the knife over towards your temple, a maniacal laugh escaping through the barriers of Rolmuth’s teeth.

The knife lowers to release one of your hands, though before you can reach for anything, he slams your arm backward against the back leg of the chair, the feeling of your bones snapping beneath your skin causes you to let out a sharp, excruciating cry as your now-broken arm falls limp to your side.

“Thaye!” Ghost shouts. “Fuckin’ bastard…”

“How?!” Rolmuth yelled through his teeth, lips drawn back in a snarl as he nearly foamed out of his mouth.

His fist meets with your cheek and your eyes squeeze together in grimace to the pain as he punches you again.

Ghost calls out your name and you can hear the metal of his chair scrape and grind against the ground.

You feel your cheek begin to swell, the tender flesh on your face blooming into purple and blue bruises.

He walks to the record player and takes a record out of its sleeve that was resting on the shelf of the small table the player was brought in on. It has wheels on it—similar to the mayo tray.

Rolmuth blows on the record, though the sleeve looks too clean to hold any dust, then places the record on the platter. After pressing play, he drops the tone arm down.

The record scratching sends chills up and down your spine before the music almost beautifully fills the room.

Why does the sun go on shining?

You watch Rolmuth pick up a pair of pliers.

Why does the sea rush to shore?

You wonder if he’s going to try to rip out your teeth.

Don’t they know it’s the end of the world,

He clasps them around one of your fingers on your broken arm.

Fuck.

The cold metal around your finger makes you nearly want to cry.

‘Cause you don’t love me anymore?

He was going to rip off your finger.

“Who is your captain?” His hand squeezes the pliers, applying pressure to your singular finger.

“Go…to hell—“

A scream rips itself from your throat as you feel your sinew and flesh tear, the pliers tearing your finger from off your bone.

“Tha’s enough!” Ghost jerks and flails in his seat, there’s a sip of panic in his voice. “Get th’fuck off of her!”

Why do the birds go on singing?

Rolmuth wriggled the rest of your finger off, your eyes daring to skim down to look at the bone sticking out from your knuckle.

Blood spews out of the gore, coating your entire hand and dripping from the crevices of your skin into your lap, staining your cargos, turning their white color into several distinct shades of red.

Rolmuth sets the finger—your finger down lightly on the standing metal tray besides you.

Why do the stars glow above?

A penetrating ringing fills your ears; one so loud it felt like it’d be the cause of your tears instead of the pain surging through the entire left side of your body.

Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

You’re in shock, unable to speak. Your jaw is locked, your teeth are clenched so hard it feels as if you might shatter your teeth.

It ended when I lost your love.

Ghost’s voice echoes in the back of your mind, when he calls out your name, you’re pulled out of your trance. You jerk your slumping head up.

You want to call out his name, but it seems like your throat is swallowing every little word that is being screamed inside of your head.

The room is spinning and you can’t feel your arm, you can’t feel the finger move that was just severed from your hand.

“Look at me, look at me, love…” your lieutenant simpers.

Your eyes search the room until they land on Ghost’s, he sounds far away. You feel your eyes widen as cold metal wraps around another finger once again.

Why does my heart go on beating?

Rolmuth’s lips close in near your ear as he tugs lightly at your middle finger.

“You don’ want to lose this finger, do you?” You feel the man’s hot breath run up the side of your face and brush past your ear.

“Who…is…your...captain?”

Why do these eyes of mine cry?

Every nerve in your body seized, your spine stiffening with every urge to kill the man standing beside you.

Ghost coughs up blood; internal bleeding.

“I’ll fu…cking…skin you…” you croak, your words finally becoming coherent.

He laughs. Rolmuth’s single arm raises in a humorous gesture of surrender.

Don’t they know it’s the end of the world?

Your eyes squeeze shut, though shoot open at the rush of heat, the pliers applying clutched pressure to your finger before Rolmuth started ripping off the second finger, wiggling it until it broke off skin and sinew.

It ended when you said “goodbye.”

“Look at me, Thaye.” Ghost’s voice sounds desperate, so you offer him a short glance as your jaw slacks and your body retracts.

Your strained eyes snapping to the bearded man as he places down your middle finger on top of your pointer finger.

A gag surfaces in your throat and your body twitches as you watch your finger fall and roll almost as if it’s the most natural thing.

Ghost yells your name again.

You finally focus on him, your eyes welling up, reddening and puffing against your will.

“Jus’ look at me, angel,” Ghost’s silked voice calms you, although in a manner you can’t hear him as well as you want to.

Every muscle and ligament inside of you feels tense and stuck.

Why does my heart go on beating?

You had three fingers on your left hand—three fingers.

Thumb, pinkie, ring. Thumb, pinkie, ring. Thumb, pinkie, ring.

“Y’ll kill her, she’s losin’ too much blood—she’s goddamn delirious!”

Gamble’s fist barrels into the side of Ghost’s head, you hear a feral groan leave his gullet.

At least I can still put a wedding ring on my left hand. You thought.

Those three fingers trembled and twitched, it was the only movement on the left side of your body besides for your left eye—is he going to take one of my eyes? Your head is swarming with thoughts.

“Ghost…” you slur, still locked onto the blonde’s eyes.

“I know, love,” he says as gently as he physically can. “So proud of’y…”

His speech comes out as a garble, but you’re still able to understand him.

“‘M gon’ get us outta here…alive, a’right?”

Your head slumps at the attempt of a nod.

“Save y’r energy, lovie.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Agarwal grips Ghost’s earlobe, pulling him closer. You’re not able to cognize his words, but you’re aware of the vexation in his countenance.

You flinch once Rolmuth drops the pliers on the metal tray. He removes his latex gloves that were blanketed in your gore and throws them onto your lap.

“Clean them up—she still is of use to me.” His voice grows more distant as he leaves the room.

Gamble injects Ghost with a syringe that was hanging off of his waist, casting him with drowsiness, his eyes struggling to keep open before he’s blacked out.

“What did you do—…what did y’do to him?” Your eyebrows stitch together. “What did you do?!”

They unstrap his arms from the chair, then his ankles.

“Answer me goddamnit...” You seethe, tears warping in your eyes.

“Shut the bitch up,” Gamble nudges Agarwal in the shoulder before he pushes Ghost further out of his restraints, his body still and unconscious allowing the scarred man to bind his wrists with zip ties.

Agarwal simply nods and paces toward you. The stock of his gun smashed into your jaw before you could react.

☆════━━━┈┈┈┈━━━════☆

DAY TWO.

The woman in the doorway was bedraggled; tired eyes and shrunken tear-stained cheeks.

There’s a light illuminating from the pulled-back curtains—a light so bright it could dry the shining tears that spill out scarlet fluid over the eyes of the miserable.

You feel only patient while waiting for the morning sun to rise over the horizon line of the ocean side.

It’s deteriorating yet caliginous frame of murky grey stone and vast sorrow of an arched entrance sat in disposition from harrowing memories filled with bloodshed, grief, and war.

Your face relaxes at the distinctly ravishing but delicate overcasted ray of light shot down from the amidst along the ruins, the melancholy ambiance nearly sent chills down your spine.

Heavenly cries of forgotten mothers begging for forgiveness of their past sins, children's playful and beatific screams, although it was nothing unknown to you.

Screams were usually followed by split rib cages and bullet wounds—tears, blood, those screams and sweat, you went through it all just for it to lie unheard and forgotten.

You searched the odd and seemingly afterlife-like realm with your eyes, you could only wonder where you were, and why you were there.

Why the flowy white dress draped over your body oscillated with the wind in a gorgeous motion.

You're lifting your head out of the water now.

The taste of salt seems so thick, heavy. Like you could drown in it. Like you could get drunk off of it.

The waves crashing onto shore sound so loud atop the eerie silence, their white crests phasing through your body as if your presence was unknown to them.

You loved the ocean because as opposed to the ones who were supposed to; the ocean loved you and was never afraid to come too close, even at your worst.

As you move farther from shore, the water slowly travels up your body, submerging your frame.

You close your eyes as your head is the last thing the water consumes. You feel the water bubbles tickle your skin and elevate themselves up to the surface.

It doesn’t take long for that familiar burn inside your lungs and that familiar feeling of being gagged by the water to swarm your senses.

Your head jerks up and you let out a loud gasp as you fade into consciousness, slipping into colored imagery instead of just monochrome.

Waking up felt like hell; your mouth was dry and most of your limbs felt unresponsive.

Only when you see Ghost curled up on his side, laying on the floor in front of you, are you able to register where you are and what’s going on.

His knees bucked up into his abdomen with his hands zip tied behind his back and his face battered and bruised.

Specks of dried blood ran from his scalp down his face reaching his compression undershirt.

He was asleep.

There was a gentle rise and fall with his chest—you could still hear his labored breaths from where you were.

It felt colder.

Your eyes wander down to your left hand that was wrapped in bandages that were stained red, your two fingers missing and replaced with nubs that were uneven from each other.

If your arm wasn’t broken, you could use it to break the leg of the chair and wield it against the next person to walk through that large metal door that made you wonder if it was life or death upon you.

If your fingers weren’t missing, you could use them to untangle your restraints on your other hand.

You could barely move your wrist—the pain that swells your entire arm makes it nearly impossible.

Ghost stirs on the floor, his body curling into itself further before his legs straighten out.

“Lieutenant,” you mumble. “What did they do to you…?”

His eyes flicker to yours.

“‘M alive, aren’t I?” Ghost says.

His voice is so hoarse and weak—he sounds dehydrated.

“You are.”

Your eyes close a moment to allow yourself to breathe in the air around you.

The single door breaking up the dull room that held them hostage creaks open on rusted hinges allowing Rolmuth to enter.

Two different men from the day prior push in the same record player and the same rolling metal tray that was stained with your blood.

“Rise and shine,” one says, his boot meeting harshly with the lower section of Ghost’s back.

The blonde’s eyes stay intent on the movements of Rolmuth as he lifts up different record sleeves to read their names. He slides one out and places it on the platter.

That familiar sizzle fills the room before the gentle hum of the music begins.

A short gasp leaves your mouth as Rolmuth kicks down your chair by the back stile, your head immediately jerking forward before it slams down onto the cement floor.

He dismisses the two of his men.

Rolmuth’s hand levitates over the tray and he grasps an old tan hand towel, draping it over your face.

You can hear the buckle of Ghost’s pants tink lightly on the floor as he jerks himself. “Fuckin’ bastard!” He yells.

I don’t want to set the world on fire.

It was going to be okay, you told yourself. You trained for this. Truthfully, you were one of the best swimmers on the task force. You can hold your breath—but if that rag manages to cave in, you’ll most likely panic and lose focus.

I…just want to start a flame in your heart.

“Are you ready for talk, now?” Rolmuth arches over you.

In my heart, I have but one desire…

Your voice muffled, you call him something along the lines of an asshole and a prick, which is quickly silenced by the pressure of water that smacks you in the face.

And that one is you, no other will do…

Ghost watches the man pour a jerry can of water over your face. His breath hitching in his throat watching your body twist and turn trying to evade from the water.

I’ve lost all ambition for worldly acclaim

Your body arches up in protest, head jerking side to side as if it would make it any more easier on you.

I just want to be the one you love…

Focus on the music, you tell yourself. You can barely hear your own voice.

And with your admission…that you feel the same,

Rolmuth’s smile is ear to ear as he continues tipping the canister over your cloth-covered face.

I’ll have reached the goal I’m dreaming of, believe me…

You violently thrust your body, panic surging through you as you feel water invade and swallow your lungs.

I don’t want to set the world on fire…

Involuntarily you gasp and choke in more water, you feel your eyes roll to the back of your head.

I…just want to start…a flame in your heart.

Your throat was burning like scolding lava, your heart throbbing inside your chest threatening to rupture. You don’t dare to make noise.

You’re gagging, gasping, sputtering. That you can’t handle. But you don’t let yourself cry. Not like this.

I don’t want to set the world on fire, honey,

The music is starting to garble.

Why is it starting to sound so distorted? You ask yourself.

I…—you too—uch.

“Stop, y’ll fuckin’ kill her! Bloody tosser!” Ghost grits his teeth before spitting out words.

Now that you have the chance to think about it, that song reminds you of someone.

I just want to start…

Your grandfather—you’d sit on that circular crocheted rug and listen to that song as him and your grandmother baked apple fritter.

A great big flame…

He loved that woman more than life itself; when she’d started to get sick with bone cancer, he helped her bathe, he helped her eat, get dressed.

Down in your heart.

Your mother told you about how he had asked her doctor to keep the fact that she only had three weeks left to live just between them.

You see, way down inside me,

She was still happy. So happy. He wanted to spend those last three weeks with her. He retired from his job and took her to all the places she’d talked about visiting.

Darling, I have only one desire.

She passed away, and he spent every day doing all her favorite things. He watered her plants, he baked. He listened to her favorite songs.

And that one desire is you,

He adopted a puppy—a beautiful Australian Shepherd which he named after her. Your mom would say that your grandma’s being was reincarnated into that dog.

And I know nobody else ain’t going to do.

Would that happen to you too? Who would you want to belong to? What kind of dog would you be?

A deafening ringing fills your ears, you finally stop fighting. Breathing.

“She’s not movin—“ Ghost wheezes. “She’s not fuckin’ movin’!”

He was trained for this. He couldn’t break. He couldn’t.

“Enough!” The blonde yells again.

They could crack him, but they can’t break him. They wouldn’t kill her.

Rolmuth finally puts down the canister and removes the rag from off your face, his body bends over to lift your chair back up.

Your body twitching, struggling to release the water clogged in your gullet

“Wake up, bitch,” he snaps and his open palm cracks against your cheek. Your eyes shoot open.

Your mouth opens, your strained and bloodshot eyes widen with horror as you vomit out water, sputtering between your lips as you hack and gag.

The taste of bile is sickening to your empty stomach.

Ghost calls out your name, catching your attention as you stabilize from your state of stupor.

“So proud of’ya, Thaye,” he groans. “Y’r strong, ‘lright? We’ll kill these bastards, all of’em.”

You can hardly spare the man a small nod before your chin is grabbed by Rolmuth’s uncut nails—blood and dirt caked underneath them.

“You tell who you are work for, I consider sparing life.” Rolmuth runs a blade across your cheek, increasing the pressure slightly to slit your skin—a feeling similar to a paper cut. You moan in pain. “Your friend I can not speak for.”

Blood trickles down from the incise, slowly flaring through your cut and pushing from the barriers beneath your top layer of skin.

“F…uck…—“ your silenced by sudden metal on your tongue, scraping gently like a threat.

“I will carve out ur pretty little tongue, cut it in bits, and feed it to you.” Rolmuth coos. “Would you that, yes?”

“Y’sick fuck, get th’fuck away from ‘er!” Ghost attempts to jerk himself up, the bonding on his ankles not allowing him to, his bruised ribs protesting in pain as he lets out a sharp breath.

Your eyes burn into his, your neck flinching as he slowly pushes the blade farther down your throat, his hand prying your mouth open.

He chuckles lowly, small “ah’s” leaving him as he slowly opens your mouth farther to allow the tip of the knife farther down. You salivate, drool racing down your chin and over the creep’s knuckles.

Ghost’s eyes divert from your face to the man’s hands. Disgust laced in his features.

He swallowed thickly, he could feel his skin boiling. He wasn’t angry.

Pissed.

He was incensed.

More than that.

“G..host…” your slightly muffled voice trembles.

His gaze fixes back on yours, watching as your left eye twitches at each of Rolmuth’s motions.

“I know, love…J’s look at me, ‘lright? J’s look at me.”

It presses onto the skin of your tongue, it’s curved edge digging into the fragile skin and tissue causing the metallic taste of iron to taint your sense of taste.

You still bore into your lieutenant’s gaze.

Saliva and blood dribbles down your neck, the sight no doubtedly arousing the male in front of you—his tongue leapt out to slowly trace along his bottom lip.

You might drown in your own saliva at this rate.

Your lieutenant purses his dry and cracked lips, but he doesn’t look away.

He takes the blade out of your mouth, rubbing it against the cloth of his pants to clean it.

Rolmuth raises the knife and pierces your thigh, the feeling of cold metal hitting you first along with the shock, the sound of cloth tearing.

“I want names!” The man hollered, spit landing on your face just below your eyes.

Ghost watches your pupils shrink, his own eyes widening and slowly shifting to your thigh.

An intense tingling sensation swarms your entire leg, then a heat. A heat that felt unbearable.

Ghost searches for your eyes again, his mouth moving, though you can’t hear anything he says.

He broke through skin and sinew, twisting the knife inside of the laceration.

“Talk, bitch!” Rolmuth’s eyes darken.

It takes a few moments for the pain to surface, and when it does, it’s scorching. Your jaw slacks open as your eyebrows pinch together, a shrill whimper escaping you.

“Don’ look, don’t.” Ghost pleads with you. Even he was struggling not to look at your thigh.

It didn’t take eyes to tell there was blood bubbling from the wound and dripping down your pants and trembling leg.

A narrow vertical split across the midsection of the flesh of your thigh. Your eyes didn’t leave Ghost’s.

Was his hair bleached? It seemed like such an unnatural shade of blonde. Brunette underneath. He must bleach it himself.

Rolmuth gave it one more twist, releasing a thin, raw, scream from your throat.

Tears stung the corners of your eyes, but you wouldn’t let them get the satisfaction of that from you. Especially not you.

“They’ll b’ere soon, Thaye.” Your lieutenant says.

“You are weak,” Rolmuth spits. “You will break.”

He rolls his shoulders before gripping your pointer finger and holding a jab saw above it.

Your eyes flicker to Rolmuth’s and Ghost calls your name.

“I want a name!” Rolmuth’s scream makes your head spin.

“Fuck y—“ your voice is replaced with a high pitched cry followed by gasps and whimpers as Rolmuth’s new blade carved through sinew and bone. He lifts up your finger against the blade and with one swift movement, your finger falls onto the floor.

“I’ll fuckin’ kill you, y’bastard!” Ghost’s lips twitching in pain mixed in with a whole lot of anger.

Your body jumps up, an animalistic noise escaping your throat as you swing your head back and wince loudly, the pain in your thigh

“Name! Or I take another!” Rolmuth yells just inches from your face.

You couldn’t handle it—your vision is swarmed by black spots and your head is killing you. Your body is in so much pain you feel so much, but so little all at the same time.

When your eyes roll to the back of your head and lolls, you can faintly hear the man yell ‘shit’ before you’re unable to comprehend what is happening.

Everything fades into a subtle blackness, and the last thing you hear is Ghost yelling your name. Screaming your name.

☆════━━━┈┈┈┈━━━════☆

DAY 4

You wake up to the sound of loud groaning and thumping.

It takes you a few moments to register that you’re awake and you can actually move.

So you do—you upheave your head and take in the light spilling in the room from between the iron barred vent.

It stings your eyes, blotchiness surrounding your peripheral before you’re able to adjust to the light.

Ghost is on the floor taking blunt forces into his lower abdomen—the blonde sputters out a cough as his entire body jerks at the contact.

The man grips the neckline of Ghost’s shirt, lifting his head from off the ground as thick red paste runs down his split and swollen lips.

His legs lift themselves up in an attempt to propel his body up and out of the man’s grasp, but he falls flat as his neck is slammed back onto the cement.

Before Ghost can gasp for air the moment his neck is released, a closed fist slams into his cheekbone, knocking the wind out of him.

“Stop,” you rasp. “Let’im go…”

Ghost is twitching on the floor, blood spilling from his mouth. His entire face is caked in red flakes and black and blue blemishes—the entire left side of his face is fattened with knots.

“No…” you snarl.

The man whirls his head and glares at you, an amused expression of disbelief stamped onto his face.

“No?” He says cockily.

The man paces towards you and cuts off your bindings, bundles your hair in his fist and drags you over towards Ghost, you whine and raise your unbroken arm to try and pry his hands off, but he only tugs harder.

He pulls your hair up until you're positioned on your knees, chin raised up and neck tilted.

You hear a click, it wasn’t a gun.

He unsheathed a pocket knife. It was a fairly decent size. You were tired of seeing knives.

Ghost watches the man’s hand lower to your abdomen, fingers pirouetting across your delicate skin, it sends a shivering fear throughout your entire body like electricity.

“Please…” you meekly whisper, attempting to pull yourself away, your body is so weak from lack of use. Your voice came out as a croak.

His other hand holds a knife that teases the neckline of your shirt.

Ghost thrashes against the floor attempting to wrestle out of his bindings. “I’ll skin you,” Ghost’s voice is hoarse.

“How would you feel If I just…” His fingers trace along the scars on your stomach. “Touch her, ever so lightly…Right in front of you?” The man snickers.

You yelp as his knife cuts a thin line down your blood-stained neckline until your cleavage is exposed.

Tears surface the corners of your eyes.

No, no, no, no…

“Keep y’r eyes on me,” Ghost whispers weakly. “That’s it, love.”

You feel your shirt tear entirely down the middle and fall down your arms, pooling around your wrists.

Your vision blurs and your mouth starts to feel dry, teeth chattering in unison with your trembling lips.

When the knife rests over the center gore of your bra, your breath hitches in your throat and tears bead down your cheeks.

The blade slices through the cloth and immediately your hand rises to cover your nude chest.

Ghost’s eyes stay locked with yours, one half-closed from being beaten beyond his control.

You feel his facial hair scrub raw against your skin, sipping in your fear and vulnerability.

“Team Delta en route for seaside, Corbin, what’s your report?”

His radio.

The man pauses and takes his hand off the midline of your ribcage to grab his radio.

“Delta, this is Pooch on standby—hostages are stable, the woman is awake.”

You release a choked sob, causing the man to release the talk button and bash it against the side of your face, sending you straight onto the floor.

“Thaye…” Ghost croons.

You clutch your chest with your one hand as you feel the right side of your face swell.

“It’ll ‘b over soon,” you tremble, releasing a shaken breath. “They’ll find..us…”

“Shut the fuck up,” his voice is slicked with spite. “Both of you.”

“Pooch, this is Delta, rog that. Don’t kill our intel—0-7, signing off.” It crackles.

You lift your head and turn it slightly, blinking causes the pain on your cheekbone to burn like acid.

“Go to h—“ the radio is bashed into your face again causing your vision to swim and make your head stumble.

The sound of blood trickling and hitting the floor fills your ears, your left palm flattens against the cold floor. Missing fingers wrapped to keep you alive, not because they care.

He punches the radio into your right eye. You keep your head down in submission.

“You wanna act tough? Get treated like you're tough!” He yells.

His hand tugs your head back—you can see your own blood splattered against the communicator before you’re met with the same fate.

Ghost watches as the man beats the right side of your face in with the butt of the radio until it’s practically unrecognizable—caked and blistered. Bruising and swelling so tender on your skin.

He can’t do anything.

He can only watch.

You whimper and cry, hissing through your tears while your jaw clenched, the radio mercilessly landing on the same spot allowing more blood to cascade from the wound.

The last hit is the hardest, sending your numbing cheek staggering back down onto the ground, you wheeze.

If Ghost’s hands weren’t tied behind his back, the man standing above the two of you would be a mangled corpse. He knew that.

Your breaths are shallow and rasped. It feels like hell to breathe—to move your face. Crimson just pools beneath you as Pooch flicks off your gore from his communicator.

He grunts in disgust as specks splatter onto the ‘cleaner’ side of your face. Like water spots on a windowpane or glass shower door.

When you hear the door slam behind you, it makes you flinch.

Your body has broken into tremors now, maybe it’s not tremors—but your spasming.

And your hand is still covering your scar-ridden chest, but you feel like you might pass out again.

Ghost’s own breaths are ragged—you wonder if lunderneath all the blood on your face if you’d look just like him.

“Sleep,” he rasps. “I’ll watch ya.”

You relax as much as you possibly can, your single eye twitching shut in favor of your other one.

All you’ve had these past four days was sleep, yet it didn’t replenish. It didn’t make you feel any less tired or exhausted.

With your bones feeling brittle and sore, it was hard to shift yourself into the mindset of falling asleep, but you tried.

You felt Ghost scoot himself towards you, possibly just to shield your unclad chest and give you a taste of comfort.

Your eyelids feel heavy with pain and fatigue, your body stilling as you allow yourself to sleep.

☆════━━━┈┈┈┈━━━════☆

DAY 5

Your hands are tied above your head, a gag set between your teeth which you gnaw at in an attempt to drag it down to hang around your neck.

Ghost is a few feet away from you—both of you hanging on metal piping with rope around your wrists.

Ghost’s boots were on the floor, he was too tall to hang like you, where you could swing your feet. Did they take your shoes?

You watch the steel poker ignite in the industrial furnace; the end of it glowing all shades of red, yellow, and orange.

It was two different tools Rolmuth was holding, now. They had two different symbols on each one that you were unfamiliar with. He was choosing.

Rolmuth spun the branding irons with his thumbs and pointers, chuckling dryly to himself as he approached Ghost, setting one of them back inside the boiler.

His boots were so loud, they echoed off the walls of the room they were in—It looked like some sort of boiler room, but you weren’t too sure.

You two must’ve been in a warehouse of some sort.

Rolmuth has to look up to look your lieutenant in the eyes.

When they’d woken you up, they threw you a gray tank top, so you weren’t as exposed as you were before.

The Hindi man pulls down Ghost’s gag.

“460 degrees of heat on metal…” he says as he lifts the hem of Ghost’s shirt. “You talk, I spare you more scar.”

“Go fuck y’self, y’manky twat…” the blonde snapped.

An open mouthed yell left Ghost’s throat as the metal is lanced firmly over the middle of his stomach, tugging at his flesh and skin.

Ghost’s eyes squeeze shut as loud whimpers escape from him, ragged winces.

“Stop!” you cry.

God, you’d never heard him in so much pain. You never thought you’d ever hear him scream in agony, in physical pain.

You're forced to watch the smoke trailing up the rod, Ghost’s back arching in tormentation.

“You piece of shit!” You twist and turn your body causing the rope to shred through layers of your skin.

His muscles tense and his knuckles go white from how hard he’s gripping the pipelines holding him up.

Rolmuth removes the metal from Ghost’s skin—it could be described as a flesh eating parasite; the way that his skin sticks to the rod as if it’s desperate for that contact.

A hitched gasp manages to make its way past his lips as he feels a tinge of relief, his body twitching and pained moans and hisses filling your ears.

You jerk your body weight down, kicking your bare feet until you feel the metal start to dent.

Rolmuth sets the iron back onto the furnace over a rack, he’s bending over to adjust the heat, the fire is roaring.

You tug your arms down and you let out a strained whine at the feeling of your wrists starting to bleed.

When the metal gives in above you, it creaks and drops you down.

You slide down the metal and Rolmuth’s body swings up from fidgeting with furnace levers and knobs.

His arms are immediately reaching for his gun while you lift your legs up and kick the heels of your feet into his shoulder blades, hard.

Rolmuth’s head slams back into the brick base of the furnace, he lets out a groan, his form dragging down and slumping against the floor.

Your body lands harshly on the ground, an excruciating response coming from the back of your head.

Black spots cloud your vision as you slowly try to regain your composure. Your vision is blurring, everything sounds far away and echoed.

The gun slides across the floor.

Your jaw clenches as you pick up your heavy head, your eye searching for the gun regardless of the pounding that distracted you.

When you spot the muzzle, you lurch yourself forward and reach, finger grazing the trigger guard before your pulled back by your hair, earning a yelp to leave you.

Your lungs refuse to cooperate in your chest as your scalp is nearly torn from your head.

Rolmuth growls with clenched teeth, pulling you away from the gun and towards him as he kneels himself over you.

This was the first time you were able to get a decent look at his face—if it weren’t for your messed up eye—but you only can see the rage dispersed over his face as his hands gather around your throat.

He slams your neck down, adding onto the pain thrusting through the back of your head.

“Bitch!” Rolmuth snarls.

You suck in your gag, causing panic and adrenaline to rush through your entire body as your binded hands thrash and attempt to push him off of you.

You duck yourself, bend your leg and kick it against his ankle to heave yourself up with all your weight upwards.

He exclaims in his native tongue, some of which you can only recognize as insults and swears.

Ghost calls your name weakly.

Rolmuth’s hands slip from your throat allowing you to breathe and sit yourself on top of him, you tug your body and maneuver yourself until you're behind the man, pulling the knot of your bindings against his throat and crossing them over.

His neck lifts to try and give himself access to air, though you tug and hold his waist steady between your knees.

You yell with your clenched teeth, the fabric between your lips making the muscles in your jaw ache.

Him wheezing beneath you, fingernails clawing at your split and abused hands before he shifts.

“Thaye!” Your lieutenant hollers.

Rolmuth’s hands reach down to his vest to pull another gun, aiming it at your foot and pulling the trigger causing you to let out an agonizing scream, pain racking your entire body.

The bullet shoots clean through, you knew that for sure. It was too close.

Your grip on his neck loosens so you can slap the gun out of his grip.

In three quick motions, Rolmuth’s back atop you with his hands grasping your hair again, dragging you towards the furnace until your face is close enough to feel the heat radiate onto your face.

You feel the thickness of gore engulf your foot and drip down your toes onto the floor.

Your grunting, muffled, and loud breaths make your head pound as the man squeezes your jaw and forces your neck towards the mouth of the forge.

“No…” you snarl with bared lips, kicking your legs regardless of the pain, throwing yourself towards him to keep yourself as far from the flames as you could.

Rolmuth laughs dryly accompanying his guttural breaths, his body stretching yet keeping a firm hold on your mandible as he takes hold of one of the branding rods.

“No!” Your eye widens and your hands reach up to push his face away from you.

“Fuck!” He growls, shaking his face to keep your hands off as he pulls the iron out of the furnace.

He wastes no time pressing it into your side regardless of the thin tank covering your skin, and the cloth does absolutely nothing in regards to the sudden gut wrenching sensation that makes it feel like your entire body was drenched in gasoline and set on fire with a blowtorch.

Your cry is deafening to the ears and the smell of burning charred flesh is quick to fill your nostrils. You feel and you hear your skin bubble up, sizzle, then pop, then stick to the metal and entangle itself around the start of the handle taking the appearance of something similar to chewed bubblegum.

Even trembling and shaking, you manage to find a way to position your hands so you can plant your thumbs into his eyes and use some of the only fingers you have left to press them into his eyes, causing the man to yell.

Still, your screams aren’t matchable as your fingernails gouge into his sockets and claw at his eyelids, shredding through flesh easily as blood began to dribble down his face and over his lips like tears. You still manage to scream louder in anger than the man can in pain.

Your fingers shove deeper into the grooves of his eye sockets, the organs are pushed so far back that blood sprays across your face and he finally releases the rod.

It clangs to the floor, and he starts sobbing in his native tongue, convulsing hands reaching up towards his red-painted face as you pull your gag out.

“Go to hell,” You seethe wobbly as you lift yourself and steer yourself behind him, taking Rolmuth by the nape of his neck and forcing himself inside the mouth, against the grills inside the furnace.

He shrieks and cries, moving erratically as his face is engulfed by the fire. Slowly, yet quickly, his skin is shredded by the blazes and the bottom rows of his teeth are exposed.

It takes him a while to stop making noise before you pull his head out and throw his twitching body onto the ground, then you finally allow yourself to lean against a boiler tank and take pressure off your injured foot.

You propel yourself off the tank by your palms and drag yourself regardless of your ankle to the edge of the furnace, turning yourself around to scrape the rope against the brick.

A gasp releases from your throat at the sudden relief around your wrists, the rope falling to the ground.

“Ghost?” You lift your head.

“‘M here.” He replies.

“I don’t know if I can get up.”

“I know you can,” Ghost urges. “Find…” he sputters up blistering coughs.

“…Fin’a knife, ‘n get me outta these binds, yea?” He huffs. “‘N I’ll do the rest.”

Your eye blinks as you grip the ankle of Rolmuth’s corpse, pulling him toward you to start flipping up his vest and pant pockets.

He didn’t have a knife on him.

Got to be fucking kidding me.

A door is swung open, a singular set of footsteps stepping into the room.

Your eye searches for a weapon—anything that can deal enough damage.

A metal fire poker is hanging off the wall to your right, so you swing your elbows back and lift yourself up by the palms of your hands.

As quick as you can, you hoist yourself up by using the support of a metal deaerator, your arm sliding against it as you limp and throw yourself towards the wall creating a subtle thud.

“What the fuck…?” A man’s voice murmurs.

You silently curse to yourself under your breath as you grab the fire poker off the nails that were being used to hold it up.

Using the heel of your injured foot, you shuffle against some shelving, looking between the gaps for the man inside the room.

He’s holding a Fennec, nothing you haven't dealt with before.

He’s twenty seconds to your left, carefully skimming along the floor with his eyes down the sights of his gun.

You pinch a metal screw off of one of the shelves and toss it into the corner closest to you to lead him your way.

“Fuck,” the younger male jumps slightly. He looked young and lanky, at least from his physique.

When you hear his boots start to rub against the floor, you lift your head slightly to watch him turn towards your direction.

Your fingers and nubs flex on the thin metal, it’s hard to gain a clear grip.

The man comes around the corner of the shelves, the sounds of his tactical gear shuffling alerting you when he gets closer until his helmet is in sight.

You immediately thrust the fire poker into the gap below his collarbone and into his scapula, dampening the fabric of his undershirt in that area as it rips.

Out of panic and shock, his finger grips the trigger and you have to jerk him away before any of his bullets are able to hit you.

“Please!” The boy pleads, gun dropping to hang around his neck as he grips the caps of your shoulders. You only glare at him before plunging the fire poker further into that same spot until it tears and mauls through his back, sticking out on the other end.

He’s gasping out, but it’s almost like no air is exhaling, mouth held agape as his grip on your shoulders releases.

You shout and cry out at every thrust until the hole carved into his skin is able to suck in the hooked tip.

The male’s head falls and you allow his body to slump down and forward, the metal rod holding his stilled body up.

You heave dryly and press a palm on the wall to support yourself, your foot is killing you—literally.

The blown out flesh and puckered skin walls made you want to barf. You could stick a finger through your foot and feel your pulsating muscles just hug around your finger.

You lean down and unclip the knife holster from the gun belt, unsheathing it then hobbling around the shelving towards Ghost who was still hanging from the pipes.

“Okay, okay…” you breathe sharply, struggling to lift yourself up onto the brick platform of the furnace, nearly stumbling off before you catch your footing.

“Keep still,” you say, arching your hand to start cutting at his bondings until he’s dropped onto the floor.

Ghost lets out a loud groan, his arms clutching his ribs. They’d broken one of his ribs, maybe multiple. You both were in bad shape.

It takes him a moment to get himself off the floor as you seat yourself and scoot off of the hearth.

He grabs both of the hand guns that had been dropped onto the floor, holding one out to you.

You unclip the magazine, then snap it back into the chamber at the sight of one missing bullet.

It was the same one that Rolmuth used to shoot your foot.

Ghost’s hand rests on your cheek, gently. “Y’did good, ‘lright?” He spoke with a lilt.

“Can y’walk?”

“A little.” You nod. “Fuckers took my shoes…”

He lets his hand fall to check his magazine, then he nods. “‘Don’t know if I can carry ya with m’ribs.”

“It’s okay, just don’t wait for me.” You reply.

His eyebrows furrow. “Bloody hell, Thaye, I ain’t leavin ya.”

“I know but—“

“No.”

Ghost’s half-lidded eyes glare at you, giving you all the warning to stop.

“Stay behind me.”

He starts walking towards the door, slowly peeking it before leaving with you behind him.

Walking hurt—even while you only applied pressure to the heel on your injured foot, the muscles contracted and the pain was torturous.

One man entered the hallway holding a box from another room, which Ghost took care of by shooting a single bullet between his eyes.

The box had opened and dropped glass equipment, alerting four others who had been lingering in the room he came from.

They yell and communicate in their native tongue, one sticking his head out of the door threshold to aim his rifle.

Ghost fires his pistol and the man swings his head back into the room, still opening fire into the hallway.

“Fuck!” You hiss, dodging the bullets and moving quickly behind a filing cabinet, lowering yourself down.

Ghost’s back presses against a door to your right, pulling himself out of cover to fire at the man.

Two bullets miss and the third causes his head to fling back and smear blood as his body arches and falls down to the floor.

You lift your head and aim your pistol, gasping when your throat is suddenly hooked back from behind you.

When the combatant turns you around and attempts to make a slash at your throat, you manage to extract yourself by gripping his wrist and snapping his elbow out of place, the sounds of bones snapping as he yells.

His knife drops from his hand and you scramble to pick it up from the floor.

You groan as his boot digs into your bandaged hand before you're able to pick it up, then his hand grips your neck to lift you up.

He wraps his arms around you and squeezes you, locking his wrists over each other at your back. You clench your teeth and jerk violently in his grasp.

Ghost is fighting four other men, locking them in the crook of his elbow and smashing their skulls between the doors.

The man holding you in position crushes you in his grasp even with his broken arm. He tries dragging you into another room.

“Let me the fuck go,” you gasp, causing the man to laugh.

“You will regret ever trying to leave your room,” he utters.

You breathe a moment, heart pounding through your chest as you swing your head into the side of his neck and sink your teeth into his skin with all the strength in your jaw.

Crimson liquid seeps into your mouth and down the front of your neck as you yank out the flesh of his throat. You spit out the skin and blood, wiping your mouth and tongue against the skin of your arm as the man’s grasp loosens

His shoulder blades and chest are glistening in red, gore spurting out of the torn spot in his throat as his body stumbles and he’s gargling on his own blood trying to speak.

“Fuck you…” You shutter weakly, eyes slowly skimming down to the knife lodged inside your waist.

Shit.

He must’ve stabbed you before lifting you up, your adrenaline pumping so fiercely you couldn’t feel it until now.

You stumble on your feet slightly, shaking hands lowering to wrap around the handle and pull it out of the slit.

The runnel of red paste turns into a thick stream down as it drenches your tank top.

You lift your head slowly and throw the knife overhead across the hallway, hitting a man who’s pointing a handgun at the back of Ghost’s head.

It’s blade spades into the back of his skull and makes his body wriggle down onto the floor.

“Ghost…!” You gasp and press your open palm over your soaking top and open laceration.

Ghost steps over both legs of a bloodied man before shooting him dead and advancing towards you.

“Shite…” He huffs, gently removing your hand and placing it back after gaining a clear inspection.

His hands grip the hem of his shirt and roughly tear at the fabric creating a long strip, then he moves your hand aside again to tightly secure it around your wound.

You hiss and groan, hand gripping his shoulder as he tugs and pulls at your body while tying the knot of the fabric.

“I’s ‘lright.” Ghost mollifies as he scoops his arm underneath your armpit.

It offers you some support as he guides you both out towards a staircase.

It wasn’t a warehouse—you and Ghost were just in a basement that was turned into a meth lab.

Boxes and boxes full of lab equipment scattered along the floors.

You’d never seen such a big basement, one with torture chambers and stonework rooms.

Hell, in the corner of the room with all the steel liquid tanks and chemical barrels.

A woman is in bright blue hazmat coveralls and a chemical mask standing on top of a metal stool.

Ghost raises his pistol and you lower it slightly with your palm, his eyes glaring at you with his head kept facing forward.

“You can’t miss, we don’t know what corrosives are in these tanks. Is it worth it?” You keep your voice low, personal between the two of you.

He doesn’t reply, instead he looks forward, then squeezes the trigger and picks the woman off by shooting her in the side of her neck.

You swallow thickly as her body spasms on the ground, the stool getting caught in her ankle as crimson fluid rises and bubbles inside of her mouth.

Ghost guides the two of you up the cobble stairs, one hand dragging up the wall and the other across your lieutenant’s wingspan.

Your eyes flash at the sudden two objects being thrown down the stairs, the sudden silence as they roll down step…after step…after step before Ghost is swinging you up into arms and yelling.

He’s breaching himself through the door, into open fire before the staircase you had come up from explodes into the emitting heat compressed air and blasts behind the two of you sending you both flying forward.

Smoke engulfs the room, giving both you and Ghost coverage to get behind cover.

You're pulled by the back of your shirt behind a deep freezer, bullets flying and hitting the metal.

“Fuckin’ pricks got us pinned!” His head lifts over to fire at three of the men who have ballistic shields covering those firing LMGs behind. “‘N I’ve got four left.”

You can’t see through the thick smoke—you can’t breathe while wheezing into the crook of your elbow. “Seven,” you inform him.

“Cover me,” Ghost grabs your arm for a moment, letting go and serving around the freezer.

You follow behind him with a raised pistol, shooting off at any glares you're able to see through the fumes.

Six…Five…

A man steps out from cover behind a wine cabinet, but before he can fire his rifle, you pop him in the eye.

Four…

Ghost quickly crouches down and shimmies the rifle out of the corpse’s grip, grabbing at a magazine and stuffing it into his vest he’d managed to keep.

You groan and push over a bookshelf behind Ghost once you’re both out of the smoke. He takes aim and opens fire at three men, blowing holes in their chests before he rams into the fourth with a loud yell and slams down the stock of his assault rifle into his face until his teeth and nose are finely pressed into the persian rug.

You finish off two more who try to walk through the threshold of the room, turning your head over your shoulder at the sound of approaching footsteps.

Two…

You jerk yourself away before you get slugged by a riot shield, ascending yourself and shoving your firearm past the barriers of his lips from behind. You pull the trigger and his head flings as the bullet rings out and creates a sizable hole in the back of his head.

One…

Before his body hits the tile, you take hold of his riot shield and deflect the hail of gunfire from the individual who came emerging from the threshold corner.

You walk forward until his clip is empty to drive the shield into his vest-covered chest, stunning him so you can push it aside and fire your last shot into the underside of his jaw.

Zero.

Bullets continue spraying throughout the entirety of the house while you make sure you don’t pass out from the amount of blood you’ve lost.

You grab the TAQ-V from off the floor and click a new magazine into it, shoving a spare into your back pocket before pushing into the same room as Ghost.

He’s piling bodies on the floor, wrestling for dominance over a knife.

You fastdraw another handgun you’d grabbed off of one of the bodies and shoot the man in his knee cap to allow Ghost to gain the upper hand and pierce the man’s temple with the weapon.

“Thanks,” he says gruffly.

You nod softly, inhaling sharply as you feel wet blood pool around your uninjured foot.

They took your shoes for no reason, like they had a use for them.

Maybe it allows you to move around more quietly, but it still disturbed you that they took the time to even peel off your socks.

“What intel did y’know that we didn’t?” His chest is against yours, head craning down to keep the conversation between the two of you.

“Lieutenant, we don’t…” You pause a moment, your head spinning.

Hunger, thirst, the cold, the blood loss. There was so much holding you hostage and you weren’t even able to comprehend how you were still standing—limping.

“Well, Seargant?” His voice is low, still holding the same husky British drawl.

“We don’t have the time for this, for now—“ Ghost shoves you aside before you can finish, raising the muzzle of his rifle to open fire on the men entering the room.

“Fuckin’ riot shields!” He pulls you behind a flipped over tattered blue couch that had already gone through its fair share of bullets.

A bullet flies and hits the side of the couch a hair’s breadth from your face.

“Goddammit,” he curses while replacing the magazine in his gun.

The men brandishing shields push further.

When one reaches close enough, you run in front of the shield and grab the sides before he crashes into you.

You turn him until his body is vulnerable to Ghost, your teeth ground into each other.

“Ghost!” You yell to catch his attention, head snapping in your direction to fire a single round into the back of his head.

You throw the body off of yourself and yank the riot shield to cover yourself, ducking your head as you recoil your fist and punch one of the men baring LMGs hard twice in the jaw.

You thrust the shield into the next, throwing it into his abdomen as he topples, finishing him off by shooting him down in the chest.

One turns with his M4 raised, but you turn your gun around and bash the stock into the base of his chest, then again into his cheek, swiping your leg across the floor and knocking him down then picking his head up and slamming it down on a thick shard of glass sticking upwards to finish him off.

Ghost drops the last body, finishing off a magazine into his vest and throwing the weapon aside. You toss him another one, which he catches with ease.

“We’ll force upstairs, look f’r our shit, ‘n leave.” He says as he picks up a frag grenade from off a vest.

“There should be Skimobiles somewhere around here, the ones they were using in the FFO,” you nod.

“A’right,” he groans while rolling his shoulders. “On my mark.”

He trudges past bodies until he’s at the threshold of the staircase, stepping up slowly with the grenade in one hand and his gun in his other.

You follow behind leisurely, eye down the scope of your rifle.

He pulls the clip and tosses it up, arm stretching behind to press his hand against your shoulder blade.

“Oh shit—grenade!” A man yells from upstairs before detonation.

“Go!” Ghost immediately backs up off the wall and skips over two steps into the corridor, prefiring as he loops around a wall.

There’s already bodies and limbs splayed across the room from the combatants who were hit by the frag.

Your back rubs against the wall as you lean to shoot down the hallway, whirring bullets firing past you.

After a few back and forths between staying flat against the wall and leaning to fire off your gun, bodies drop and you’re able to progress down the hall.

Ghost is somewhere on the opposite side of the house, you still hear heavy gunfire.

You pause at the sight of another man at the end of the hallway and you recognize him immediately.

The look in his eyes and the scruffiness of his face made your lips stretch in almost the most feral look.

Corbin, that was his name. Callsign ‘Pooch’.

Anger burns in the depths of your lungs and stomach as you grip the wall for support, lunging yourself forward to lift your feet over each body that was littered across the hallway floors.

Sweat ran down the sides of your face and splotched down around the neck of your shirt with the blood.

You watch his face twist into a wolfish grin as he slings his gun over his shoulder and walks towards you.

“Alright, sweetheart.” He purrs.

White noise fills your ears.

All you can see through the glossy shine of your eyes is the man who humiliated you in front of your superior.

All you can see through the blinding red rage is the man who beat Ghost and cracked his ribs, forcing you to watch him retract and twitch at every fleeting fist.

Even the hail of gunfire is silent in your ears as you drag your injured foot. Everything sounds underwater, everything feels dull.

His fist intersects and meets with your cheekbone causing your head to shift to the left and your body to stumble where you stand.

You grip his wrist and divert his second punch by lifting your arm and thrusting your knee roughly into his thigh to tamper his movements.

He groans, with grim chuckles following after. “I’m going to enjoy every last second of this,” he coos.

Your body shivers in disgust as you slide your fingers down to your waist, priming the knife stuffed beneath the hem of your shirt. “Go fuck yourself…” you hiss.

His eyes flicker down to your hand and his boot immediately connects with the middle of your torso, sending you across the floor with a loud thud.

Pooch steps between your legs and lifts your upper body by the neckline of your shirt, his knuckles slamming down to beat on your already swollen face.

Drool and blood pour from your mouth, a strangled gasp leaving you at every punch before he releases you harshly back down onto the floor.

Your eyes are rolling to the back of your head, the pressure and swelling in your face and head being all too much for you.

A boot is savagely kicked into the lower pit of your abdomen, making you gag on air.

“Get the fuck up.” Pooch spits.

You clutch your stomach and turn, slowly feeling for the knife, then quickly lifting the edge trimming of your tank top and grasping the handle, pulling it out and sweeping your leg around and behind his ankles to knock him off to the side.

He yells out swears as you level yourself over him, his legs kicking out to make your chest rest on the soles of his boots.

Both of your hands grasp the handle of the knife making it easier on your lack of fingers. His hands grip your forearms as you cry out and try forcing the knife down on him.

He kicks his legs up and backwards, upending you over him and sending the knife flying.

You hiss and give yourself no time to recover, flipping on your stomach and army crawling with your forearms to grab the knife.

He topples atop your body, planting a piercing slap across your face before reaching for the knife and propelling it downwards into you.

Before you’re able to block, the knife breaks through the skin in your stomach, your hand managing to grab his wrist before he’s able to gut you open.

You seethe and let out a sharp whine followed by a croaked cry, your other hand circling his wrist in an attempt to push him away.

Quickly, you roll your body off to the side and let go of him, causing the knife to pierce into the wood flooring as you grip a console table to succor yourself up.

Corbin abandons the knife and flings himself upwards, swinging his gun into his arms.

“I’m done playing games.”

You advance on him, grabbing the rifle and pushing it into his chest before he can aim it at you.

One of your hands grip the upper hand guard while the other grips the bolt and holds the muzzle up.

You yank his body over towards the window behind you, turning your body then grabbing the man by the back of his hair and smashing his head through the glass.

It shatters from contact and leaves cuts and shards in his skin, a loud yell clawing its way from his throat.

His finger grips the trigger and bullets roll out into the floor as you pull his head back.

You pull the rifle sling from off his shoulder, tossing it aside and disarming him from the X12 tucked into the back of his pants.

He growls at every tug of his scalp as you shoot him in the back of the leg and force him onto his knees.

A loud wail echoes the hallway from the man below you.

“Shut your fucking mouth,” you snap.

“You don’t get to scream.”

“You don’t get to cry and whine like a little bitch.”

There’s no remorse in your voice, no sense of mercy for the man being held on his knees and whimpering.

You smack the magazine onto the base of his nose, blood dripping it’s way down his nostrils as a struggling noise spills from his lips.

“You…fucking….” he chokes on his own words.

His entire body violently trembles at the tortured scream he releases as you squeeze the trigger again, shooting Pooch in his shoulder then proceeding to stick your thumb into the ravage wound harshly.

“Bitch! Fucking bitch!” He strains and pants like a dehydrated dog trying to jerk away from you.

You replace your finger with your foot, lowering his back against the floor as you press your toe into the bullet hole.

Another scream tears out of him as you blow another hole into the other side—his chest convulses.

Blood seeps from his mouth, you hold the grip of the handgun with both hands and sob out loud as you empty the entire magazine into his head until his face is unrecognizable to the amount of bullet holes.

You keep pulling the trigger, even as the gun starts to click announcing its out of ammunition.

The entire floor below you is covered in gore; flesh, messings of brains, blood, skin.

So much.

Your body snaps around as a hand abruptly drapes over your shoulder, your arm raising the gun ready to bash it into the skull of the next man to try and touch you.

“Thaye, Thaye—y’got him! Thaye, he’s dead!”

Someone calls your name trying to snap you of out haze.

Ghost—your eyes soften with glistening tears as he calmly disarms you after deflecting the hit with his forearm, tossing the handgun aside so he can push you into his chest by the back of your neck.

“‘S over, sweet girl.” Ghost says with intonation. “Can’t hurt ya anymore.”

Your eyes are wide with terror, hands bundling your lieutenant’s shirt as you exhale a shaky mewl.

It’s him who releases you first, handing you your custom rifle and radio.

His balaclava is back on his face, along with the skull mask.

“Y’r vest ‘n boots are in the room I came from,” Ghost jerks his head.

You nod softly and shamble towards the doorway in the direction he’d pointed out.

You pause.

A little boy walks out of the threshold—he’s holding a gun far bigger than his head.

Your eyes widen slightly. “Did these men take you from your family?”

You turn your head over your shoulder to call for Ghost, the sound of a bullet whirring filling your ears.

Ghost wastes no time pulling out his handgun and shooting the little boy in the head before running towards you.

Your right shoulder is screaming at you as time seems to slow down to a crawl. You hear Ghost yell behind you and the gunshot ringing as the little boy falls back and you do too, hitting the ground hard.

The masked man is on his knees in front of you within seconds, lifting your head into his lap.

“Thaye! Thaye, don’t y’fuckin’ die, not now…” He growls, applying pressure down onto your shoulder with both of his gloved hands.

Your lips slant in a tired manner, eyelids feeling heavy. His bloody hand kneads your cheek, smearing gore along your already dirtied skin.

“Fuck! Fuck!” he curses loudly. “Stay awake, love, please…”

God, he was hurting, it hurt to have your head against the burns on his stomach, but he wouldn’t let you die.

“Babygirl,” he says weakly.

All you can see is an uncleanable amount of red seep and cover your shirt.

Your lungs clutch together inside your chest, labored breaths escaping you with a strained noise.

“I know…I know—keep those gorgeous eyes on me, sweetheart.” He inhales a shaky breath, flipping up your blood-crusted hairs from sticking to your forehead.

You whisper an apology, catching his attention as you grip his waist. Ghost’s eyebrows furrow.

“Don’t. Don’t say sorry,” he says. “You did this, you saved our lives, love.”

“‘M just finishin’ the job, ‘lright?” His split and bloody lips find a place on your temple, planting a raw and long kiss to your throbbing skin.

“…’least I got to see your face before—“

Ghost holds you, squeezing your hand as a slight warning. “Don’t talk like that.”

It was a demand.

“That an—“ you spur into a coughing fit, blood spraying onto the man’s vest. “…Order, Lieutenant?”

“Spare y’r energy,” he huffs.

“Simon—“ you slur.

“Stop.” He snarls.

Your ragged breaths start to stray, causing panic to surge through the man above you.

“No,” he growls, squeezing your smaller hand in his a bit tighter than before. “Don’t, Thaye,” he says through clenched teeth.

Your body falls limp in his lap, the grasp loosening on his shirt making his heart pound through his chest, a painful pounding that felt similar to acid reflux.

“No!” Ghost yells, desperately palming at your tangled hair in panic. “Fuckin’ massacre,” he exhales shallowly.

One arm scoops beneath the back of your knees, the other across your shoulder blades with his hand holding your arm.

A loud strained groan claws it’s way from his gullet at the sudden pain inside his ribs as he lifts himself up and off the floor.

His muscles tighten inside his body, a burning sensation in his abdomen as he clutches you close to his chest, feeling your blood seep into his shirt.

☆════━━━┈┈┈┈━━━════☆

The gentle rhythmic beeping and steady flow of air through your nostrils was something that felt unreal and forced.

You slowly flutter your eyes open to light slipping in between the beige curtains. Your eyes are half-lidded and threatening to close against your will as your bandage wrapped hands rests atop the metal railing on either side of you.

It smells of strong floor cleaner and hand sanitizer, a scent that is slightly uneasy on you as you slowly slip back into consciousness.

Your muscles feel tight in your body; pain racking your shoulder and neck as you crane it to take a look around the room.

The walls are spinning and the ceiling above you is spiraling making you sick to your stomach.

On the bedside table to your left—closest to the window—there’s flowers. They’re too withered to try and recognize what kinds, shredding to flakes in your fingers when you caress them between your pinky and thumb.

Your hand drags up to pull nasal tubes out of your nostrils. It’s almost as if you’ve forgotten how to breathe air, throat tightening and lips so still from lack of moisture.

There’s a penetrating migraine in the back of your skull as you carefully swing your legs over the side of the bed, the thin baby pink and spotted hospital gown flowing down your sides leaving you slightly exposed in your thigh region.

Bare and bandaged feet slide along the smooth cold tile, sending chills up your body as you grip the IV stand with your trembling hand, the other holding onto the bed railing for support.

You groan and strain as you struggle to lift yourself up, propelling upwards with your palm and grip on the stand until your knees straighten and your standing up somewhat decently.

Where was Ghost? Is Ghost alive?

So many thoughts coursed through your head along with the punishing feeling of dehydration.

You guide yourself using the wheels on the IV stand towards a counter, your hands gripping the handle of the sink and pulling it upward.

A choked moan manages to break from you as you scoop the water in your hands and swill the rich liquid.

Water dribbles down your chin, which you wipe away before lifting your head to look into the medicine cabinet mirror.

Your hand rests on the wall in front of you as you heave.

They cut your hair shorter, not too short but enough so that it was comfortable. Your entire right side of your face being bandaged, stains of blood being a faint copper color.

Bandages wrapped around your neck and reached down your shoulder you’d been shot in.

Your hair had been taken care of neatly while you were in a coma, that was obvious.

Ghost. Where?

You grip the IV stand and hobble towards the door, turning the knob and gripping the threshold with your other hand as you step out.

A nurse pauses in her tracks, rushing to your side in an instant. “How are you up? Your injuries are critical,” she gasps, palm flattening against the small of your back.

“My lieutenant—…my lieutenant…” you say in an undertone.

“You need bed rest, you’ve only just woken up.” Her voice is gentle yet commanding.

“No,” you bark, shuffling out of her hold. “Please take me to him.”

The woman bites her lip before nodding hesitantly, hand against your back again to guide you towards his room.

It was only a few doors down from you—when the nurse opened the door, allowing you into the room.

You see the back of Ghost’s head facing in your direction, his hair tousled from the bandages wrapping around his head.

“Ghost,” you call.

His head turns from facing the window to facing you, you hear him murmur your name in reply.

“Y’minx,” he breathes. “Hell y’doin’ out ya bed?”

You carefully walk yourself towards him, the nurse holding her hands atop her chest nervously. The sound of the plastic wheels of the stand makes his breath hitch in his throat, the sound of reassurance that you were alive.

“You okay, big man?” Your voice is hoarse from lack of use, but he’s able to that you perfectly.

“D’ya ever worry ‘bout y’self, love?” Ghost asks with a tinge of humor.

Heavy casting was on his right leg, bandages and patches on practically every inch of his body—similar to you.

“Sometimes,” you smile softly and push strands of his hair out of his face, your heart slightly shatters in your chest at the sight of him flinching at your touch.

Ghost scoots himself over slightly, wincing at the sudden movement.

You seat yourself beside him on the large gatch bed and his hand pushes you down to lay beside him.

“Wait, Mr. Riley—“ the nurse takes a small step forward.

“I’ll ‘b fine,” he grunts.

Her eyes blink slightly as she takes a few steps back, her lips separating to speak though no words come out. She simply turns on her ankles and closes the door behind her.

Ghost secures an arm around your waist, pushing your back flush against his bandaged chest.

Your eyes trace his tattoos and the muscles of his arms, every scar and blemish.

“Where’s the force?” You ask quietly.

“Left recently,” he mumbles back tiredly, pressing his nose into your hair. “Y’smell like pomegranate—got y’self a damn spa crew while y’were out?”

You laugh dryly, breaking into a light fit of wheezes.

“Not too hard, Seargant.” Ghost’s finger tucks a loose strand of hair from your bangs behind your ear.

Your wet bandages on your hands rub against his knuckle as you hold onto his hand, he seems to pay no mind.

You turn your body slightly so you can get a better look at his face. “Odd seeing you without your eye black.” You quip.

His closed eyes open to look down at you. “Mm, might as well see m’down in me knickers then, eh?” He chuckles huskily.

“Very funny,” you roll your eyes lightheartedly.

You catch his small glances to your lips, his hand leaving your chest to run his thumb down your bottom lip until that same hand is cupping your cheek lovingly.

His eyes narrow, he’s sleepy, but you still catch yourself propping your body up with your elbow and closing the gap between the two of you.

Instantly, his head cranes and tilts to deepen the kiss, his fingers gently sliding down the side of your face to press his thumb into the underside of your jaw and drag his fingers along the nape of your neck.

Ghost breathes into your mouth, the taste of mint leaf and citrus enveloping your taste buds as his tongue laced over yours.

The kiss was passionate, you feel his eyebrows furrow showing his desperation as you both kissed softly at a gentle pace and motion.

Your eyes flutter open as you feel his warm lips leave yours with a quiet pop, both of you panting lightly with his forehead pressed against yours. Ghost’s eyes are unable to open for a few moments after you disconnect.

When they do open, your eyes bore into his brown orbs, the dark purple hue circling under his eyes showing his deprivation of sleep.

When he feels you buck gently back into his groin, he releases a small grunt, lips meeting yours again for a small chase kiss.

“Not like this,” he says quietly. “I’d take you on this bed right here, right now, but y’ve recently waken up ‘n we’re both still in r’covery.”

You hum in agreement, his hand finding it’s place on your chest once again with the knowledge of your lower abdomen injury.

“‘N to b’honest—‘can barely feel m’damned balls, feels like ‘ve got whiskey dick.” He grumbles, and you bite your lip to suppress a giggle.

“Simon!”

“Don’ you laugh at me, woman.” Ghost lowers his head into the crook of your neck, biting the skin gently

“My deepest condolences, Lieutenant,” you purr, catching his lips in another kiss when you jerk his head upward with your uninjured shoulder. He growls against your mouth in reaction.

There’s a long yet short line of silence as you turn towards his back again, your legs tangling with his as you hold your lips against his knuckles.

“Y’have no clue how strong you are.” He swallows the knot in his throat as he speaks. “God, Thaye, they…they told me there was a chance y’d never wake up.”

“Hey,” you hum. “Stop that, I’m here now.”

His eyes stare blankly at the wall ahead of you, maybe even the same wall you were staring at—if your eyes weren’t closed already.

“I just don’ know what I would’ve done if I made it outta there ‘n y’didn’t make it with me.” He says.

“Y’r the reason I made it out with you in the first place. If y’hadn’t pulled that barmy stunt—“ he pauses, and you feel the rise of his chest and the fall as he exhales deeply.

“Y’survived internal bleeding, trauma to the head ‘n eye, two broken ribs, second and third degree burns, asphyxiation, dismemberment, stab wounds and gunshot wounds..” Ghost squeezes his fist tighter against your chest.

“So did you, Si.” You coo softly.

“Christ…” he mutters.

His fingers interlock with yours best they can, regardless of the most of them being numbs on your knuckles, and it wasn't until your hand rested on his chest and rubbed over the raised scars, that he realized he hadn't been touched so gently in nearly eleven years. It wasn't a new feeling, but it was a feeling that he had craved desperately.

Never had fallen in love before, but he knew you had bad experiences with it—figuring out that your ex-fiancé had cheated on you while on deployment. Someone had to love you, and he was skeptical of it being him, but it was clear you loved him too and now he was scared you’d stop.

But hearing your gentle breathing as you slipped back into sleep hunched into his form led him somewhere he’d never been. You cleared his mind and cleared away his thoughts. For the first time, he doesn’t want to look away from what he has the ability to feel.

#simon ghost x reader #ghostheartfelt #ghostheartfelt writing #simon ghost riley #ghost #simon riley x reader #simon riley x you #simon riley #ghost cod #ghost mw2 #ghost mw2 hurt/comfort #ghost modern warfare #simon ghost x you #simon riley x y/n #simon riley imagine

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strawberrysnoopy · 1 month

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ACT ONE: The Photoshoot, Part Three of Four

prologue, part one, part two. warnings: tobacco, smoking, alcohol use, briefest mention of using alcohol as a coping mechanism, mentions of infidelity (as always), ada slander at times (sorry), texting for a while, leon's a bit of a perv,

author's note: btw I left the husband without a name so there's no overlap on you and your husband having the same name and you live in new york due to the modeling thing. I also try my hardest to keep the reader ambiguous because I realize that skinny, quirky, white girls aren't the only ones that read this series: if there's anything you'd like to recommend or change in the writing to be more reader-friendly, drop in my inbox and let me know! :) thank you guys so much for all the reblogs and 100 FOLLOWERS AHHH!! thank you thank you thank you!

The warmth of your fingers working against his cool and paled skin had him melting like a runny ice cream cone in your hands. His hand was on your hip, rubbing loving circles like he was trying to commit the warm feel of your flesh into his memory. This was the type of life he envisioned when he was younger: married to someone he loved deeply with every crevice of his being. He thought Ada was the person for him, but that was such a costly and emotionally unbalanced guess. "Thank you, honey." You nod in response, applying the rest of the stitching to his busted lip. His hands dare to move a little higher on your hips, squeezing your waist and getting some sick pleasure out of the way your breath stopped in embarrassment. The scene was perfect, just a good ol’ friend taking care of her busted up pal. Leon hated that he couldn’t find you earlier, sooner, before he could even lay eyes on Ada Wong. She had her charms, sure, but there was something about the soft lull of your presence, how gentle you were, how caring you could be with others that had his heart fluttering in his chest. He still can't believe out of all the places he could've met you, it was at a store while you were buying a bottle of wine for yourself and your husband. "Met" would have to be an overrated word in his dictionary. The truth was that Leon had first laid eyes upon you in a magazine. They had released their February shoot that show-cased entrepreneurial photographers on the rise, climbing their way to the top without a care in the world who they scratched on their way there. You happened to be the diamond in the rough, making everyone else's cliche photographs of "lust" or "revenge" or "innocence" themes seem drab. Your theme? Limerence. Beautiful, simmering, and chilling limerence. Your hair was pieced together lazily but curled neatly, wearing simple yet cryptic tops and little boy shorts that lovingly cradled your ass. The rookie photographer that snapped your photos had done a stellar job at making it seem like you were one of those once in a lifetime girls you met in college. He still had the magazine of course, stashed away in the depths of his closet: kept in pristine condition like a filthy little secret he loved to indulge in. "So..." He muses. He feels the little pause in your work, his eyes crinkling with amusement. "How long have you known? About your husband's infidelity?" You've always known. The first? A college girl in the first year of your "official" relationship Bubbly and vibrant and a fucking joy to be around. The kind of girl you see on ABC's 20/20 or some other type of true crime prime-time film. Your husband claimed it was a drunk hook-up. And the first time, you believed him. The second? A school teacher that looked, acted, and talked exactly like you. Maybe she was your long lost twin or some weird rip in the fabric of time and she happened to pop out. He claimed he was mad at you for the way you did laundry. You forgave him a second time, but you'd surely have a knife to his throat the third time.

"A while. It's just like some weird fact I live with, I guess. Like you have some chronic disease and it's something you deal with from time to time." He nodded, bringing your hand up to his mouth and pressing a soft kiss to your palm. He knows you don't deserve that. Nobody deserves that. Yet, he always wondered why you stayed. Your husband was an asshole, although that shouldn't be a term that leaves his lips due to the fact he's supposedly your husband's best bud, but for the sake of doing the holy honor of defending you: he was a cheating dick that didn't deserve to be maritally bound to a woman such as yourself. "Wouldn't you get a divorce? I don't mean to be like...rude or anything but I would've thought that you're the type of woman to leave his ass once he cheats." And you were. Headstrong, confident, and self-assured—he's never seen an insecure model before, or maybe that's some weird stereotype he's made in his head unconsciously. "It's a tough situation." And that's all you have to say about your marriage. He nodded, understanding your reluctance to speak on the subject. He can't say he's any different from you either considering his marriage to Ada, the very reason he can't be with you. Especially so intimately. It’s hard. The safety of it all. Having someone next to you at all times despite the shitty relationship. He knew.

Now the bathroom is silent. You’re still doctoring up his wounds while he sits up on the marble counter-top. He really wants to say something until you step in for him.

“I can’t believe you fucked my husband up like that.” You say, pulling your hands away from his face to find some more antibiotic cream. He hates that he feels his head moving forward to get your hands back on him. Pathetic. He feels pathetic, especially considering he beat the dog shit out of your husband when you graciously invited him into your home.

“I’m sorry—“ He begins, you stop him once more.

“No. Don’t apologize. I was thanking you.” He nods again, finding the motion of moving his head back and forth too repetitive. “So, thank you.”

He boldly takes your hand in his own, squeezing it and kissing the palm—feeling like he’s turning into a crazy man when your fingertips brush against his lower eyelids and cheeks.

“You’re welcome.” He releases your hand from his own, feeling guilty for not saying more to you. He feels as if you deserve more than silence, and to be honest, with everything you've gone through this week, you definitely do. "I know I said it already but I'm sorry for saying that I wanted to—" He pauses, not wanting to be so crude with his wording but throwing caution to the wind as he had already fucked everything up so far. "Said that I wanted to fuck you, that's not fair to you nor your husband."

"It's okay if you do." His heart pulses in his chest at those words. He had expected you to ignore it, maybe slap him if you were really pissed. But you agreed? What the fuck, it's like he's living in a fucking alternate universe. "It's not a crime to find someone else attractive. The only thing wrong is if you act on it." That was true, but it never took from how much he dreamed about you. The times he's jerked himself off while thinking of your gorgeous body on his mind had grown to a disgusting amount. Hell, it's gotten to a point where he doesn't even fight it anymore and Ada being in the house used to stop him, but not anymore. He'll just go up to the bathroom and rub one out with your magazine in hand. "Then I guess I'm attracted to you." Your cheeks flush red at the admission, flaring a brighter color when his hand grips your hip once more. And tighter, too. Jesus Christ, the way this whole situation had been playing out like a steamy porno. First, your husband was gone in the hospital. Second, Leon was brought into your home. Alone. Third, he admitted he wants to fuck you. No, he has to resist. You were right. It's not wrong to be attracted to someone other than your spouse but you had him wanting to act. Wanting to drag you down to the marital bed you share with your husband and fuck you senseless. "So, do you want to stay the night tonight? Considering your car is broken down and everything." You ask, your tone beautiful and raspy like it always is.

Oh, God. He's gonna fuck you.

tags:@heylesamis, @sweetserial, @iloveyousomuch1989, @galactict3a, @m1sery-busin3ss, @ssulfurr, @julia13123, @nic-stars, @stillhavingdaddyissues, @greywardensaywhat, @ressespearlz, @xqlenkdy, @g0rep1ty, @nomorekerkanymor,

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girlactionfigure · 2 months

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THURSDAY HERO: Princess Alice

Amazing story! Princess Alice was an unconventional royal who prioritized helping others over wealth and privilege. She devoted her life to good deeds and spiritual growth, and was notable among European royalty for taking Jews into her home during the Holocaust.

Princess Alice stood out for another reason: she was deaf from birth.

Born in 1885 at Windsor Castle, Alice was the great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria. She learned to lip read at a young age, and could speak several languages. Alice was widely regarded as the most beautiful princess in Europe.

At age 17, Alice fell in love with dashing Prince Andrew of Greece and they were married in 1903. Alice and Andrew had four daughters and a son. Their son Philip would later be married to Queen Elizabeth II. Alice communicated with her children mainly in sign language.

Political turmoil in Greece forced the royal family into exile. They settled in a sleepy suburb of Paris, where Alice threw herself into charitable work helping Greek refugees. Her husband left her for a life of gambling and debauchery in Monte Carlo.

Relying on the charity of wealthy relatives, Alice found strength in her Greek Orthodox faith. She became increasingly religious, and believed that she was receiving divine messages and had healing powers. She yearned to share her faith and mystical experiences with others, but instead was dismissed as mentally unhinged.

Alice had a nervous breakdown in 1930. She was committed against her will to a mental institution in Switzerland, with a dubious diagnosis of schizophrenia. Alice did not even get a chance to say goodbye to her children. Her youngest, 9 year old Philip, returned from a picnic to find his mother gone.

Alice tried desperately to leave the asylum, but was kept prisoner in Switzerland for 2 1/2 years. During that time, her beloved son Philip was sent to live with relatives, and her four daughters married German princes. Alice was not allowed to attend any of their weddings.

Finally, in 1932, Alice was released. She became a wanderer, traveling through Europe by herself, staying with relatives or at bed & breakfast inns. In 1935, Alice returned to Greece, where she lived alone in a modest two bedroom apartment and worked with the poor.

The Germans occupied Athens in April 1941. Alice devoted herself to relieving the tremendous suffering in her country. She worked for the Red Cross, organizing soup kitchens and creating shelters for orphaned children. Alice also started a nursing service to provide health care to the poorest Athenians.

In 1943, the Germans started deporting the Jews of Athens to concentration camps. Alice hid a Jewish widow, Rachel Cohen, and her children in her own apartment for over a year. Rachel’s late husband, Haimaki Cohen, was an advisor to King George I of Greece, and Alice considered it her solemn duty to save the remaining Cohen family.

Alice lived yards from Gestapo headquarters. When the Germans became suspicious of her and started asking questions, she used her deafness as an excuse not to answer them. Alice kept the Cohen family safe until Greece was liberated in 1944.

After the war, Alice founded her own religious order, the Christian Sisterhood of Martha and Mary, and became a nun. She built a convent and orphanage in a poverty-stricken part of Athens. Alice dressed in a nun’s habit consisting of a drab gray robe, white wimple, cord and rosary beads – but still enjoyed smoking and playing cards.

In 1967, after a Greek military coup, Alice finally returned to Great Britain. She lived at Buckingham Palace with her son Philip and daughter-in-law, Queen Elizabeth II.

Alice died in 1969. She owned no possessions, having given everything to the poor. Before she died, Alice expressed a desire to be buried at the Convent of Saint Mary Magdalene on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, but instead was laid to rest in the Royal Crypt in Windsor Castle.

In 1988, almost 20 years after she died, Alice’s dying wish was finally granted. Her remains were sent to Jerusalem, where she was buried on the Mount of Olives.

In 1994, Alice was honored by the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem (Yad Vashem) as Righteous Among The Nations. Her son Prince Philip said of his mother’s wartime heroism, “I suspect that it never occurred to her that her action was in any way special. She was a person with a deep religious faith, and she would have considered it to be a perfectly natural human reaction to fellow beings in distress.”

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#Thursday Hero

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vanalex · 2 months

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ewanmitchellcrumbs · 1 year

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Light the Way - Part One

Pairing: Modern!Aemond Targaryen x female character (third person) Warnings: Angst, date rape/roofies, slight BDSM Word count: ~4k Series masterlist

Chapter summary: Starting a new job is never easy, it's even worse when your boss is an arsehole. When he unexpectedly comes to the rescue though, the relationship dynamic changes drastically.

She graduated from university a year ago with a Bachelor’s degree in PR and Marketing, and still has no idea what she wants from life, although the last twelve months of working as a barista have proven to her that a career in hospitality and customer service is definitely not it. Having happened across an online advertisement of a vacancy for the position of a personal assistant at a private law firm, she applied on a whim, never expecting to hear back. It’s not like she was qualified anyway, so she had nothing to lose

Yet, here she is, almost four weeks later, standing in the foyer of Red Keep Legal, preparing to begin her first day. The office building is sleek and modern, minimalist in decor, yet the polish of everything suggests it is incomprehensibly expensive. A handsome, bearded, older man, dressed in a sharp suit collects her from reception. She learns his name is Otto Hightower and he is a partner at the firm. They are high end solicitors and only take on the most exclusive of clients. She turns his business card over in her hands, the thickness of the smooth, matte black cardstock is high quality, with ornate golden lettering and a blood red logo of a three headed dragon. She knows she has seen that logo before, but can’t place where exactly.

“You’ll be a personal assistant to my grandson, Aemond.” Otto tells her. “He’s working on a particularly tricky case at the moment, so you’ll be responsible for ensuring he has everything he needs. I imagine he won’t ask you to do much more than get him coffee.”

So there it was, the reason she’d gotten the job. She was hoping her coffee making days were behind her, but no such luck. She sighs inwardly, the bitter irony is almost comical.

“Anyway, if you have no further questions, I shall introduce you to Aemond.” Otto concludes.

She smiles and nods politely as he turns on his heel and leads her towards the elevator, stopping on the second to last floor. She follows him along a marble floored corridor, before he gently raps his knuckles against the rich mahogany of an office door. After a few moments the door swings open to reveal the most ethereal being she’d ever laid eyes upon. He is impossibly tall without being gangly or awkward; his long, lithe limbs flow like water as he props himself against the doorframe. His silky, silver locks are perfectly coiffed and she feels self conscious as the bright blue of his right eye scans all the way from her feet to the top of her head, analysing every inch. She notices the skin around his left eye is lightly scarred - the only indication that the realistic prosthetic that sits within the socket isn’t something he can actually see out of. The simple long sleeved top and black trousers she’s wearing suddenly feel drab in comparison to the well tailored navy blue suit he wears, and she fights the urge to hide herself.

“Aemond, this is your new personal assistant.” Otto informs him, gesturing towards her. “Your mother and I worked hard to find this one, so perhaps you could try being a little more cordial than last time.”

She doesn’t stop to think about what that could possibly mean, letting out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding in and rushing forward, smiling wide and extending a hand.

“Hi Aemond! It’s wonderful to meet you!”

His plush, full lips remain unmoving, as he stuffs his hands into his pockets, not returning the gesture and continuing to study her.

She drops her hand, feeling deflated and laughs nervously.

Clearly not picking up on the awkwardness, or simply not caring, Otto glances between the two of them, before giving a curt nod and striding back towards the elevator.

Aemond watches him go before returning his attention back to her.

“Wonderful to meet me, hm?” he finally says, quirking an eyebrow.

Before she can respond, he continues, “Look, I’ve told my grandfather I don’t need an assistant and I like my own space. I’m looking over some contracts at the moment, so I would prefer it if you could make yourself scarce.” He disappears from view, allowing his office door to close behind him.

She immediately feels miserable. Her shoulders slump as she stands in front of the closed door. The first day of a new job should feel exciting, especially when your boss is so breathtakingly handsome, but this guy is rude and has declared her useless within minutes of meeting her. For a moment she considers just walking out and not returning.

She spends the remainder of the day sitting at her desk that’s positioned to the outer left of Aemond’s door. No one goes in or out, and not once does she catch sight of him. As far as first days go this is undoubtedly the worst she has ever experienced. As tempting as it is to just bail and head home, she desperately needs the cash, so she watches the hours slowly tick by on the off chance her stand-offish boss may suddenly decide he needs something. By the time 6pm rolls around, and she stands to gather her things, her legs have cramped from sitting for so long and she curses herself for only stretching her legs on the few occasions she went to the bathroom.

Arriving home, she finds her flatmate isn’t back yet and breathes a sigh of relief, knowing she’d be bombarded with questions about her first day and not have a positive answer for any of them. She uses the opportunity to pace the flat, rifling through the contact sheet and paperwork she has been given. She sighs when she happens upon the number listed for Aemond - what was the point of having the number of someone who seemingly wanted nothing to do with her? She saves it to her phone anyway, tomorrow was a new day after all. Perhaps she’ll score a few brownie points if she texts and offers to grab him coffee on her way to the office. She still can’t figure out why he’d been so cold towards her. Flopping down on the couch with a glass of wine, she boots up her laptop, deciding to do some research on Aemond Targaryen, as she realises that beyond meeting him today and knowing he works for one of the most prestigious law firms in all of Westeros, she really knows nothing about the man she is supposed to be working for.

She wakes up early the next morning, armed with a plan. Her evening of wine-fuelled research had been fruitful. She’d discovered that Aemond was from a family of famous Valyrian legal, political and business figures. Her recognition of the logo on Otto’s card was because it was regularly splashed across all of the major tabloid and broadsheet newspapers. She’d read through a few old articles regarding family drama, disputes over assets, and the death of his father to get an idea of who he was, before deciding his cold demeanour is likely attributed to the combined stress of his job and seemingly endless rifts between his mother and half-sister. She decides that if she is to break down his walls then she will do so with kindness, but she also wants to look the part - if she is to fit in with such sophisticated people then she needs to start dressing like one. She slips into a pencil skirt so fitted it looks like it has been painted on, alongside a sheer white blouse and a killer pair of black stilettos. She completes the look with perfectly styled hair and a thick coat of blood red lipstick. She’d be lying if she said she wasn’t vying for more than Aemond’s professional attention, but she’d try anything at this point just to get him to acknowledge her presence. Giving herself a last once over look in the mirror, she fires off what she considers to be a breezy good morning text to Aemond, before heading to the coffee shop she used to work at. “Good morning Mr. Targaryen! Hope you’re well today. I’ll grab you a coffee on my way to the office. See you soon!”

Arriving exactly thirty minutes later, coffees in hand, she is disappointed to see that she’s been left on read. Nevermind. She has gone all out with the coffee order, asking for the special roast of beans with an extra shot and foamed milk. This was sure to win him over. She knocks timidly at his office door and after a long moment is about to knock again when it swings slowly open with a perfectly poised Aemond on the other side. God, he was breathtaking.

She realises she has gone too long without saying anything when he snaps out an impatient “Yes?” She jumps slightly, stepping forward into his office without an invitation. Aemond cautiously backs away, his brow furrowing with suspicion and confusion.

She thrusts one of the cups towards him, “Umm…I text you. Did you - uh - coffee?” Great, now I’ve lost the fucking power of speech.

Aemond gingerly accepts the cup from her, without saying thank you. “Are you always this articulate?” He says flatly, before taking a sip. His nose instantly wrinkles, “Ugh, does this have milk in it? I’m allergic to dairy."

Her eyes widen in horror, "Oh gods,, I’m so sorry! I should have thought to ask, I can always get you-"

"Forget it.” He cuts her off, “That will be all for the day, before you try to poison me any further. Close the door on your way out.”

Fantastic, another day sat at my desk, except this time I’m dressed like a cheap escort.

The confidence she’d felt when she stepped out of the door this morning had been crushed flat by Aemond in a matter of seconds. She sits with her hands clasped tightly in front of her on the desk, willing her unshed tears away. Did he want her to quit? She’d placed everything on this job and she didn’t want to give it up without a fight. Sje simply couldn’t understand why Aemond seemed to hate her so much.

After a few hours pass by, she notices it is lunch time - he has to take a break some time. She decides that now is when she’ll make her move. Standing purposefully, she sniffs back her tears and checks her make-up in her compact mirror, before strutting back towards Aemond’s door. She’ll give that arsehole a piece of her mind. It was about time he learned to respect her.

She bursts into Aemond’s office without knocking. “Just who in the hell do you think you are?!” she rants, not waiting for his reaction to her sudden intrusion.

He looks up from the documents he has been reading and stares at her, but his expression is unreadable.

He stays silent, so she continues her tirade. “I didn’t have a fucking clue who you were when I accepted this job, despite that I’ve treated you with nothing but respect and you can’t even extend me the same courtesy!” She paces as she yells at him, gesticulating wildly. There’s a part of her telling her to stop, that this behaviour will likely get her fired, but at this point it would have been like attempting to put toothpaste back in the tube. “I know you think you’re hot shit, but that doesn’t exempt you from behaving like a decent human being.” She stops and looks at him then, his face still a mask of neutrality as he gazes up at her from his seat at the desk. “Why aren’t you saying anything?!” She demands.

“Oh, are you done?” He replies sarcastically.

She throws her hands up in exasperation, eliciting a huge sigh at his complete lack of emotion.

Accepting her reaction as affirmation, he diverts his attention back to his paperwork and mutters “Well, if that’s all, you know where the door is.”

It takes all of her willpower not to grab the nearest object and launch it towards his head. She storms outside, slamming the door as she goes. Fuck this. Walking purposefully straight to the elevator, she lets it take her to the ground floor before hastily exiting the office building. There was absolutely no way she was spending another second in this godforsaken building.

Arriving home she throws her keys a little too aggressively onto the kitchen counter and heads straight towards the fridge, grabbing for the can of whipped cream. As she loudly squirts an unhealthy sized swirl of it into her mouth, her flatmate, Rhea, looks up from her laptop with an amused smile and asks “Rough morning?”

She hadn’t noticed her sitting at the dining table, too engrossed in her own foul mood to have any awareness of her surroundings. “Think I lost my job.” She slurs without bothering to swallow.

Rhea closes the lid of her laptop and rushes to pull her into a bear hug. Finally releasing her, she smiles kindly and wipes cream from her chin, before saying “First of all, you’re gross, and second, how has that happened? You’ve been there less than 48 hours!”

“It’s a long story.” She sighs, “The short version is that my boss is an arsehole, so I yelled at him and then left the office.”

“Oh.” Rhea winces, “That’s bad.”

“What the fuck am I going to do?!” She whines, rubbing her temples.

“Well, it might not solve your impending unemployment, but we could go out tonight?”

“Are you high right now, Rhea?! The only thing I’ll be doing tonight is looking at the classifieds!”

“Come on, you were miserable for so long in your last job and don’t seem to be faring much better in this one. You deserve a little fun!”

“I dunno…”

“I’m not taking no for an answer! I’m working from home today, so having a reason to leave the flat later will keep me sane. Plus you don’t even need to get changed - you are wearing that outfit!”

“Fine. I guess one drink couldn’t hurt.”

Rhea squeals with excitement, clapping her hands. “Amazing! Now be a doll and fuck off until 7pm, I have to concentrate.”

Rhea returns to her laptop while she retreats to her room, wondering if there will ever be a point this week where she isn’t being told to go away by someone.

The bar they end up at later that evening is loud and overcrowded. Despite that, she can feel herself relaxing. Perhaps it was the second white wine she was sipping or the steady beat of the music causing her to sway your hips involuntarily, but for the first time in two days she wasn't thinking about Aemond. She sighs contentedly, draining her glass and flashing Rhea a toothy grin as she pushes through the crowd with their next round of drinks.

“Having fun?” Rhea half shouts over the cacophony of noise.

Nodding, she grabs her hand, dragging her towards the dance floor. She chugs her drink as they both move to the rhythm of the song playing. She feels woozy and attributes it to drinking too much wine too fast.

“You want water?” She shouts to Rhea, making a drinking motion with her hand. Rhea nods gratefully and she staggers her way to the bar. She can feel her vision shifting in and out of focus and getting her legs to work the way she wants them to is proving difficult. Changing course, she heads outside, deciding a few lungfuls of fresh air will help set her straight.

As she slides down the brick exterior of the building she barely notices the dark figure that has followed her outside. “Easy.” A gruff male voice says, though in her mind it sounds far away, “Just relax.” Rough hands paw at her as her head flops around on a neck that feels boneless.

“Get the fuck off her.” She hears a familiar voice snarl demandingly. The man is gone in a flash and replaced instead by someone crouching in front of her, cupping her cheeks and coaxing her to look up into a concerned blue eye.

“Aemond?” She slurs.

“Keep looking at me.” Aemond says, cradling her head, “I’m fairly certain that that prick spiked your drink. I’m going to make sure you get home safely, but you need to stay awake, okay?”

Her eyes are glassy and Aemond blurs and duplicates in her vision as he keeps her face tilted up towards him. “Rhea.” She mumbles groggily.

As if summoned by the utterance of her name, her room mate pushes her way out of the bar, phone in hand, looking left and right. When she finally catches sight of her slumped on the ground with a man crouching over her, she shrieks and runs towards her. “What are you doing to her?!”

“Helping her.” Aemond replies flatly, without looking away from her. “Pretty sure she’s been spiked.”

“Jesus!” Rhea squeals, kneeling at her side, before finally looking over at Aemond. “Holy shit! You’re Aemond Targaryen! Your uncle is so hot!”

Aemond rolls his eye, hooking his arms around the body of the semi-conscious woman in front of him and slowly lifting her to her feet.

“Should we call the police?” Rhea asks, slowly realising the gravity of the situation.

Aemond turns to stare at her. “It will take an hour for them to get here.” He explains. “And when they do they’ll just file a report which they’ll never follow up on. Our time is better spent getting her home, so she’s at least safe. I’m assuming you know where she lives?”

Rhea nods. “We’re flatmates.”

Aemond momentarily supports her weight with a single arm as he fishes his phone out of his pocket, unlocks it and passes it to Rhea. “Order an Uber”.

“Thanks for helping her.” Rhea says, as the Uber finally pulls up to the curb. They waited in total silence and any excitement Rhea had felt at having met Aemond was rapidly dissipating into awkward discomfort. “I can look after her from here.” She moves to take her from the supporting hold he has on her.

“Because you’ve done such an incredible job of that so far.” He retorts icily. “I’m coming with you.”

He maneuveres her limp form into the back of the car as Rhea makes her way around to the other side to sit next to her. She is surprised to see Aemond fold his tall frame into the backseat beside her, fully expecting him to ride shotgun. The drive back is tense and uncomfortable. She sits unconscious, sandwiched between the two of them, her heading lolling against Aemond’s shoulder.

“So…” Rhea begins, attempting to break the silence, “You’re the arsehole boss then?”

It was intended as a joke, but Aemond’s humourless chuckle instantly makes her cheeks burn at having said something so rude. “Is it true you’re going to fire her?”

Aemond seems surprised at that. “No,” He says simply. “I won’t expect to see her in the office tomorrow, she’ll need a day to recover, but tell her to be there at 9am sharp on Thursday. And I take my coffee black.”

“Sure.” Rhea smiles meekly. By this point, the Uber has pulled up to its destination. “Would you like to uh…?” She asks, gesturing towards the block of flats.

“No, I think you’ll be fine from here.” He responds, “Goodnight.”

With that, Rhea is left to help her out of the car, which pulls away as soon as she's closed the door.

The next day she awakens with no memory of the evening before, feeling like she has the mother of all hangovers. She swears loudly as she looks at the time and realises it’s almost midday. If she wasn’t fired before, she certainly was now.

Hearing she is awake, Rhea sweeps into the room with a tall glass of water for her. She fills her in on the details of the previous evening and she listens in stunned silence. She spends the rest of the day in bed, struggling to process what has happened to her and the fact that a man she’d assumed hated her had come so valiantly to her rescue.

Thursday morning rolls around quickly and she dresses simply in black trousers and a sensible cardigan. She heads to grab Aemond his morning coffee; black coffee. No sooner had she deposited the cup into his hand had apologies begun tumbling from her lips, saying sorry for how she’d spoken to him, sorry for storming off, sorry for him having to look after her. He cuts her off, sliding a sheet of paper towards her.

“This,” He begins, “Is a list of things I need you to do for me today. Think you can handle it?”

She nods, stunned at finally being asked to help him out.

“Perfect. See you later.”

The day passes in a blur and she struggles. This is the first day she’s actually performing the job she has been hired to do and the busy, demanding nature of a prestigious law firm was worlds apart from the past two days of sitting at her desk and sulking. She gets lost trying to deliver documents to various people’s offices, forgets to seal contracts in confidential envelopes and accidentally hangs up on no less than five clients while trying to transfer their calls. It is a complete disaster.

She sits, highlighting every instance of the word “Harrenhal” in a document, feeling totally overwhelmed. How could anyone manage to be so bad at a relatively simple job?! The truth was, she kept finding herself distracted, thinking about what had happened to her two nights ago. What would have happened if Aemond hadn’t shown up? She caps the highlighter pen, resting her head in her hands and fails to suppress a sob.

Hearing his office door open, she turns to face Aemond as he exits, attempting to compose herself, but knows he has likely already seen her crying. “Sorry.” She whispers. “I’m just having a bad day. Ignore me.” She sniffles and wipes her eyes.

Silently Aemond beckons her into his office, maintaining eye contact as he does so.

She follows obediently, dread gnawing at her insides, certain he’s going to fire her.

“Kneel.” He quietly commands, once the door is closed behind them.

“What?!” Her eyes widen in shock.

“Trust me, you need this. Kneel.” He insists.

She does as she is told, kneeling before him, gazing up at his impossibly tall frame with curiosity.

He slowly reaches out a hand, fingers gently grazing her jawline, before running a thumb over her lips. He pushes gently, parting them and meeting the resistance of her teeth. “Open”.

This time she doesn’t question his request, silently accepting the alien intrusion of Aemond’s thumb into her mouth. Instinctively she feels herself sucking on the digit and gradually relaxes. The sensation sends a throb of arousal straight to her core. She’d never experienced anything like this before, but seeing him tower over her, offering his thumb for her to suck was strangely erotic.

“Better?” He asks.

She simply nods, doe-eyed and staring at him in awe.

“Good.” He smiles slightly, stooping down until his lips are ghosting the shell of her ear. It makes her shiver. “I much preferred Tuesday’s outfit, by the way. Maybe that can make a reappearance tomorrow?”

461 notes · View notes

thechaoticdruid · 4 months

Text

[This Bites] (3)

Pairing: Astarion x F! Chubby MC

Content/Warnings: Sexual humor, suggestive content, animal death, blood, slight angst, no Brian yay!, Winnie freaking out again, fluff,

Quick summary: Winnie gets Star out of the house after being cooped up since his arrival. Vampire hijinks ensue.

Chapter Two: Go Back

Chapter Three: Stay here.

Chapter Four: Lets fucking goooo!

Check out this silly recreation of the chapter in The Sims I did.

•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•

Hiding a secret pet from your parents was stressful enough, but hiding a whole grown ass man in your room would likely be a thousand times as nerve wracking. Especially with a step douche who had a habit of barging into the room. Luckily for Winnie, her stepfather was never a quiet man, always stomping along the floor in thick combat boots. And her current stowaway was very perceptive. That still didn't cover all her issues. Winnie had searched all over Nexus Mods for that damn cheat mod she downloaded but could not find it again. It was as if the creator deleted it just after Astarion got out. To make matters worse the vampire was likely starting to get hungry. He'd been gazing at her more and more longingly each day since his escape from the computer. She'd need a way for feeding her guest which didn't involve anyone getting sucked flat like a caprisun. Of course she thought about offering him her own blood, but the idea honestly made her uneasy. In fantasy it was very appealing, having an extremely attractive and alluring man suck on your neck, what's not to like? There was the whole sharp teeth tearing into your flesh aspect, but in fantasy there was no pain, no need to worry about death. Just sweet sweet blissful fantasy. But that was not the case now. In reality if Astarion were to sink his fangs into her neck he wouldn't need to drink all her blood to kill her. She'd probably bleed out from her jugular being punctured alone.

Winnie stared over at him as he peeked out the window. Night had fallen and he didn't need to worry about the sun. At least not for a while.

Winnie sighed, “I have no idea how I'm going to feed you if I'm honest.”

“Since you're so keen on protecting our dear friend Brian I suppose that leaves me with having to go out and hunt for my next meal, well unless you'd be generous enough to offer me your lovely neck.”

“I don't think that's a good idea, but I guess my arm might be okay…” Winnie lifted up her arm to look at it.

“You love to take the fun out of things don’t you? But alright, I'm not about to turn down a willing meal.” Astarion's pupils practically dilated at the sight of the veins on Winnie’s arm. His mouth watering at the thought of her warm blood coating his throat and he couldn't help but lick his lips.

“Hold on! I didn't mean right this second!” Winnie hid her arm behind her back, her cheeks turning red at the hungry look he was giving her.

“Such a tease.” Astarion huffed and crossed his arms.

“I had some things planned for tonight and I can't do them if my head is spinning from blood loss.” Winnie said before searching through her closet.

She pulled out a large duffle bag and began to unzip it. Inside were some hoodies and other clothing. Grey and black T-shirts, some jeans and a pair of sneakers. “Here, these were my brother's, they’ll probably fit you.” Winnie said before tossing the bag onto the bed.

Astarion made a disgusted sound.

“These are so tasteless and drab!”

“We’ll get you something more suitable to your tastes later. For now you need to be able to blend in.” Winnie explained. Astarion muttered something under his breath before he started removing his purple doublet and exposing his pale muscular chest. He was so perfect, so flawless. Winnie’s brain honestly turned off for a moment as the elf then proceeded to slide down his pants. Her eyes nearly entranced by a certain large shape in his drawers, her face turning bright red.

“My eyes are up here, darling.~��Astarion purred, voice husky and soft.

“A-Ah sorry! I should….” Winnie sputtered before scrambling off into the connecting bathroom. Astarion chuckled a bit, watching the flustered female dash out of the room. He couldn't help but find her rather adorable. Winnie stood in the bathroom for a few moments, heart pounding as she pressed her back against the door.

Oh God, why didn't I walk out sooner!?

“You can come out now, my dear.” Eventually Astarion's voice broke her from her thoughts. The human girl let out an exasperated sigh before opening the door and heading back in. The clothes were a little tight around his body, making his muscles quite visible through the light gray tee. Winnie quickly grabbed a black hoodie and handed it to him. “Here, put this on.” She said, watching him slide the jacket on. Winnie zipped it up for him before leaning up on her tiptoes and pulling the hood over his head.

“Hey! My hair!” He whined.

“I'll fix it for you later. Right now I don't want anyone gawking over your ears.”

“Why would anyone be doing that?”

“Ah, right. You see, in this world there are no elves, no magic, no vampires….Just humans really.” Winnie rubbed the back of her head.

“Really? Gods, how dull. Not that I mind being the only vampire around. That actually sounds rather delightful.” Astarion smirked a bit.

“Please don't get in any world domination ideas. Just because there aren't any vampires doesn't mean there aren't people who can tear you a new one.” Winnie sighed before peeking out the door into the hall. “Okay, they're asleep. Now come on.” Winnie said quietly.

“Where are we going?” Astarion whispered, slowly following Winnie as they tiptoed out of the house.

“We're heading out to town. It's probably a good idea for you to get acquainted with the area just in case something bad happens.” Winnie explained, “plus I feel bad about keeping you locked up in my room for days.” She then took out her cellphone and shook it, causing the flashlight to turn on.

“I thought you said, you didn't have magic here.”

“We don't. This my fanged friend is technology. It’s a machine mostly for talking to people far away, but also does a bunch of other stuff.” Winnie used her phone to navigate in the dark as they began walking down across her driveway. Winnie’s neighborhood was quiet, each of the houses were fairly spaced out with plenty of trees and brush littering the terrain. Parked in the yard near her family’s cars was a purple motorcycle.

“Oh, and this is my trusty steed! Or well it's basically my personal source of transportation. Think of it like a horse but made of metal. To make it even better this won't decide to turn around and bite you!” Winnie said with a smile.

“As wonderful as that sounds. I'm not quite sure about climbing onto some strange metal contraption.”

“Well…If you'd rather walk….” Winnie said in a sing-songy tone, putting her phone into her pocket.

“Nevermind! Let's go!”

Winnie climbed on the bike, her hands gripping the handles as she glanced over at Astarion. He looked the vehicle over curiously, nearly jumping up in the air when the girl turned on the engine.

“Come on!” Winnie said. Hesitantly he climbed on and immediately clung to Winnie, arms wrapped around her plush waist.

“Oh, this is rather intimate.~” Astarion took the opportunity to nuzzle his face into her neck, growing a bit more comfortable as he held onto her soft form. Winnie immediately turned bright red, a shiver going down her spine. She didn't really think this through did she?

Focus! Do not let the incredibly sexy vampire elf hugging your back cause you to have a crash!

We are not dying because of horniniess goddamnit!

Winnie mentally scolded herself as she drove off. Not that she disliked his attentions, mind you. She was just very easily flustered, never having been in any kind of romantic relationship, physical or otherwise. Astarion sighed into her neck, The smell of lavender and cherry blossoms mixed with the delectable scent of her blood was absolutely heavenly. It took all he had to resist the urge to sink his fangs into her neck and gorge himself on her blood.

Winnie kept her eyes on the road, the headlights of her motorcycle illuminated the street as they zoomed down it. There weren't too many cars on the road so Winnie could be thankful for that.

They rode away from the suburbs where Winnie’s home resided, eventually until coming towards a small shop just outside of the city. A large sign that read ‘CornerStore’ sat atop the building and illuminated the parking lot.

“This is where I work.” Winnie said as she turned into the parking lot. She parked up front in her usual spot before turning off the engine and hopping off.

“Well this seems like a cozy little shop.” Astarion said, getting off. “What exactly could you precure here?”

“Mostly snacks. Some hygiene products and other things. Just stuff you need around your home really.” Winnie said, leaning up on her toes to fix his hoodie before leading him inside.

Winnie looked around the shop, thinking about anything she could get which would be useful for her new guest to have in the future. She couldn't get too much however. She only had so much room in the little trunk she had on her motorcycle.

Bandages would be a good idea, shampoo…. Though he'd likely complain if it was some kind of cheap smelling stuff….

Astarion looked over Winnie as she scanned around the store. His tongue flicked over his fangs as he couldn't help but stare at her jugular. The gnawing pain in his stomach was crying out, demanding to be sated. He backed up as Winnie became engrossed in the products that decorated the shelves. Out of the corner of his eye he noticed a small creature outside the shop. Almost cat-like, but with a longer snout, a ringed tail and tiny black hands. The creature appeared to be picking around in the trash outside. Not his first choice, but it had to at least be better than a rat.

Winnie kept looking through some hygiene products, wondering what her fanged friend would need when suddenly she heard what sounded like an angry raccoon. She quickly whipped her head around, heart nearly stopping when she noticed Astarion was gone.

Quickly she rushed outside and glanced over to see a dead raccoon fall to the ground. Astarion stood over it, blood dripping down his chin.

“Are you fucking kidding me!?” Winnie whisper-shouted.

“I was hungry…” Astarion shrugged, looking at her with round innocent eyes, mouth still covered in blood. Winnie grimaced, kicking the dead raccoon off to the side and out of sight before grabbing hold of Astarion and dragging him off. She pulled him into the store before making a beeline for the bathroom. She dragged him inside and slammed the door.

The young woman pinched the bride of her nose, on the verge of tearing her hair out.

“Please…Just please….Can you not do any vampire shit out where people can see you!?” Winnie said.

“No one was even around to see me. Sweetie, you worry far too much.” Astarion said, making a sassy hand gesture. Winnie crossed her arms and huffed, her eyebrow twitching. She turned before grabbing some paper towels and wetting them.

“You have to understand.” Winnie said calmly, “if people find out you're a vampire they'll probably try to kill you or worse cut you open and try to find out what makes you tick. Just please be careful.” She wiped the blood off his face before crumbling up the towels and burying them in the bottom of the trashcan. Astarion crossed his arms and stepped closer to her.

“I am a master of stealth, my dear. And if you expect me to just wait about for my next meal while you flaunt around that delicious neck of yours, I might not be able to control myself for long.” He said, running a clawed finger over her jugular making her shiver. His voice was playful, a bit flirty even, but the warning was still very clear. If she kept him waiting for too long he might not even be able to think before taking a bite out of her.

“I promise I'll figure out a way to feed you, just give me time…Please.”

“Oh alright, but only because you're so sweet.” He tapped her nose playfully. “And that little snack should keep me sated for now, ahaha.”

Winnie washed her hands before leaving the bathroom to continue looking around for some supplies. Astarion followed after her, red eyes inspecting the isles with interest. Some of the objects looked familiar, but somehow still foreign.

A couple of times he'd ask Winnie what something was, and she'd do her best to explain, but sometimes it was difficult. Especially with some technological items that Winnie herself wasn't even completely educated on.

She picked up a few things she deemed would be useful for hosting her guest, bandages, hygienic stuff and a burner phone. Winnie was about to go pay for the items when she froze, eyes widening in fear. Shit. Becca was working tonight.

“Darling, are you alright?” The vampire’s voice was gentle. Astarion noticed Winnie’s fear and placed a hand on her shoulder before looking over to what had her tense. At the cash register was a tall skinny woman with long red hair, round red glasses and a face full of freckles. There was a black visor around her neck with a name tag attached along with several different round pins, most notable ones being a colorful pin with a pattern of pink and blue with a purple line in between and a second pin with what looked like a mind flayer on it. She wore a casual blue dress and didn't look the least but intimidating so Astarion was rather puzzled as to what had Winnie's heart pounding so wildly.

Becca was probably the closest thing Winnie had to a friend these days, considering practically all her peers from high school had ran off to start their own lives (the fucking plebs) and the two were able to bond a bit over a common interest in video games. See where this is going? Becca was a gamer. A rather devoted gamer who was always quick to snatch up any of the hot new triple A releases. Winnie turned back to look at Astarion before quietly whispering, “when we go up to the counter do not say a word, okay?”

“Why?” Astarion asked.

“I'll explain it later, just stay quiet please.” She said before the two walked up to the register. Becca glanced up from the magazine she was looking over and smiled. Astarion held the small of Winnie’s back and stayed close to her. He was still not sure why Winnie was so frightened of this very simple looking woman. Though looks could be deceiving. She could be some kind of shapeshifter in disguise!

“Winnie! I didn't think you'd be stopping by tonight.” Becca said in a cheerful tone.

“Hey Becca!” Winnie greeted in a tone as perky as she could muster. “I…Just needed to pick up a few things I was running low on.” She said handing over the items. Becca’s blue eyes looked over Winnie’s face as she scanned the supplies.

She noticed her nervousness, but didn't seem too concerned. Winnie was known to get anxious quite easily. But then she noticed the male standing next to her and hummed. Becca noticed the white curls peeking out from under the hoodie he wore and took a long look at his very pretty face. He seemed very familiar, but she couldn't for the life of herself figure out why.

“Winnie,” She spoke up in a playful tone, “is this your boyfriend? He is cute.” Becca teased with a wink. Astarion couldn't help but chuckle a bit.

“A-Ah! N-No! We're just friends!” Winnie said, getting very embarrassed. Astarion suddenly snapped his head towards her, a bit shocked at her words.

WHAT?!

Winnie ignored him the questioning looks he was giving her. She leaned over towards Becca. “I'm just helping him out. He's really really shy….” Winnie muttered to her. Astarion stood there arms crossed as he glared at Winnie slightly, eyebrow twitching.

“Oh, okay.” Becca responded, scanning and bagging up Winnie’s things. “That'll be 29.50.”

Winnie paid for the supplies before walking out, Astarion stomping after her. She put the bags into the trunk of her motorcycle before she finally acknowledged his glaring.

“What?” She asked.

“Just friends? After everything we've been through, you and I are just friends?!” Astarion almost hissed out, but his tone sounded far more hurt than angry.

“We literally just met a few days ago.” Winnie said, a bit confused. She backed up a bit, flinching at his tone.

“I wasn't lying when I said I fell in love with you over and over! I..I…Did something happen? Do you not like me anymore?” His voice sounded a bit hoarse. Winnie’s heart shattered as she noticed he looked like he was on the verge of tears.

“Astarion…” She said softly before approaching him. “I do like you. I like you a lot, but you don't really know me ... .The person in the game, the brave strong beautiful adventurer. That's not me.”

Astarion huffed, trying to blink away the glassiness of his eyes.

“I fell in love with the sweet person who saved me, nothing else matters!” He took her hands in his. “Please…I want to be with you…”

“Honey, you don't even know my birthday.” Winnie said with a sad smile. “And I….I'm really not sure. I know everything was probably quite real for you, but to me it was like I was just a spectator. Someone enjoying a good story. Hell I've never even kissed anyone in real life so the idea of jumping into a serious relationship out of nowhere is honestly terrifying…” Winnie said and looked off to the side. The silver haired male took a moment to regain his composure, wiping one of his eyes.

Winnie thought for a moment before looking back at him and gently squeezed his hands.

“Look, I don't have a lot of experience in this, but maybe we could start over? I could court you, maybe?”

“Oh….Y-Yes…Yes that would make me very…happy…” The vampire blinked away his tears before mustering up a smile. Winnie released his hands, before hesitantly moving in closer. She thought about going in for a hug before she noticed him lean closer, lips puckered.

Quickly she stopped his mouth with her index finger.

“I'm…Not ready for that just yet…” She said with a sad smile as he pulled back.

“Of course, apologies…I misunderstood.” He said feeling a bit embarrassed. Winnie quickly decided to just pull close for a hug before anything else happened. Astarion relaxed a bit, taking comfort in her embrace, and quickly wrapping his arms around her. It was difficult. His relationship had now practically been set back to stage one.

~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~

After Astarion had calmed down and the two of them left the Corner Store. Winnie decided to keep her word about beginning a courtship with her flamboyantly fanged friend. The night was still young and a date was the perfect excuse for Winnie to stop somewhere to look for something edible to sate her own hunger. Unfortunately there was little the pale elf could enjoy at such establishments, but Winnie did have one idea.

Astarion looked over Winnie’s shoulder, his eyes widened in awe at the bright lights of the city. It was rather beautiful, making the night much more pleasant and allowing him to see so much more color than he usually would at this time.

Winnie eventually stopped, bringing the motorcycle to a halt as they arrived at a large pleasant smelling building. The air was filled with the scent of meat and other savory dishes.

Winnie got off the bike before quickly adjusting the hood on Astarion's head, making sure his ears were not visible. Winnie then took her vampiric companion inside before ordering a table for the two. She sat across from him in a booth, looking down at her hands shyly.

“I know it might be hard to believe with my charms and devastatingly good looks, but I've actually never been on a date before, not a real one anyway.” Astarion chuckled a bit.

“What about before you were turned? Surely you'd have been on a date then?” Winnie frowned.

“Perhaps, but I can't exactly remember much from before. It might as well not have happened.” He sighed, looking off as a waitress walked towards the table. She was rather beautiful, long blonde hair, blue eyes, a waspy waist and thick curves in all the right places.

“What can I get you both?” She asked.

“Oh, something full bodied and red.” Astarion said and looked back at Winnie.

“Red wine and a pinjacolada please.” Winnie said as she glanced up at the waitress, eyes staring enviously at her nearly perfect bodice.

“Ah and some fried chicken fingers, and um….Can you get maybe get us an extremely rare steak?” Winnie asked feeling a bit clumsy and embarrassed about how her last line was worded.

“An extremely rare steak?” The waiter looked at Winnie like she had grown a second head.

“I don't know if we're allowed to-”

“Be a dear, and fetch me something as bloody as possible won't you beautiful?” Astarion turned towards the waitress, his tone dripping with charm, his ruby red eyes almost hypnotic as he gave her a flirtatious wink.

The waitress’s face turned bright red.

“Y-Yes! Yes of course!” She sputtered, a giddy grin spreading across her face. Winnie felt a twinge a jealousy shoot through her. She understood why he did that, but it didn't make it feel any better. The pudgy female took out her cellphone as Astarion began to ramble on about something. Something about how dull all of the people here seemed, and how abhorrent their attires were.

Winnie began looking on Tumblr, noticing a notification about TheRespectfulBard posting a new BG3 fanfiction. Though something else caught Winnie's eye as she skimmed through the Bard’s blog. Apparently the bard was also looking for a mod that had been recently removed from the Nexus Mod page. However the modification they were looking for happened to be a mod that added a few new overpowered attacks to the game. Winnie quickly looked through the comments and reblogs to find someone saying the mod was made by a user named ShadowMommy69.

Oh God…….It was made by a simp…..

“Winnie? Winnie? Are you even listening to me!?” Astarion spoke up, sounding a bit annoyed.

“Ah! Sorry…I got a bit distracted….” Winnie hearted TheRespectfulBard’s post before putting her phone in her pocket.

“Honestly darling if you can't pay attention I might have to find a way to punish you.~” He teased, his hand reaching over to hold hers from across the table.

“Oh shut up.” Winnie rolled her eyes with a grin, her cheeks burning up. Astarion was just eating up all of Winnie’s overly flustered reactions. They were honestly all too cute. He looked at her with soft round eyes, wanting nothing more to plant kisses all over her pudgy little face.

“I've got your order!” The waitress from before brought in their food and drinks. Her hips swayed as she strutted over and set them down on the table. Blue eyes roamed over Astarion’s face and body, though he didn't seem particularly interested. The smell of blood from the meat hit him like a truck, making his mouth water. Winnie immediately began to nibble on her chicken, but her eyes were glued on that woman.

“I hope you both enjoy…. Especially you.~” The blonde said, seductively running a finger over Astarion's chest, making him stiffen.

“Um lady he doesn't like to be touch-” Winnie tried to object, though her mouse like voice was completely ignored.

“I'm getting off at ten just so you know.” She winked at him before wandering off. Winnie glared at her strutting form.

“Creepy bitch…” She muttered under her breath. That skank was so not getting a tip. Astarion cleared his throat before dusting off the front of his jacket, acting as if the waitress had got him dirty.

“Well, now that that's over. I think I have something to attend to.” His looked down at the streak which was practically dripping with blood.

Winnie bit her lip. She wouldn't lie. This was a bit gross.

Winnie grabbed her drink, slowly sucking it down as she attempted to ignore the vampire in front of her, cutting up the steak and sucking the blood off. She couldn't imagine what was probably going through the head of any on lookers.

“Oh my God he is so fucking hot.” Winnie’s ears perked up at the waitress’s voice as she gossiped with her friends.

“Who's girl with him? Think they're together?”

“Fuck no! Have you seen her? Probably his sister or something.”

Winnie rolled her eyes and glanced back at her food. She didn't really feel very hungry anymore. She looked down at her stomach. The round, plumpness of it made her feel so disgusting. It wouldn't be long before Astarion realized he had more options. Better looking options.

“Are you alright my sweet?” Astarion's concerned voice brought her gaze back up.

“I'm fine I guess…A bit tired if I'm honest…” She said tapping her fingernails to the table.

“Well then, perhaps we should get you home so you can get your beauty rest hm? Not that you need it of course! You're already the most beautiful person here.” The elf said sweetly.

“Yeah, let's go.” Winnie nodded, the two left their table and Winnie payed for the food at the register. She side eyes the waitress from before who was still gossiping with her friends. Winnie turned ready to head out the doors before she was suddenly snatched up by Astarion.

“I just want you to know once we get home. I am going to make you scream my name.” He said, his husky voice purposely raised loud enough for everyone to hear. Winnie immediately buried her embarrassed face into his neck. Despite being ready to faint she also couldn't help but let out a series of giggles at his bluntness.

The waitress from before looked over with a shocked and frankly pissed expression. The vampire smirked slightly before tugging Winnie outside.

It was around eleven o'clock when they arrived back home. Winnie got off her bike with a yawn before looking over at Astarion who's hood had once again fallen off due to the motorcycle ride.

Since they were home though, she saw no point in fixing it again.

“I think that was an absolutely delightful first date, my love.” Astarion said as the two walked over towards the front door. “Don't you agree?”

“Shit.” Winnie stopped in her tracks.

“Oh come on! It wasn't that bad! Actually I don't think it was bad at all!” Astarion crossed his arms with a scoff.

“No! Shit!” She pointed at the front door which was cracked open about two feet.

“Oh, oh dear.” The vampire exclaimed before his companion rushed inside. He quickly followed after her as she zoomed into her bedroom.

“Maddie!? Maddie!” She called looking under the bed and in her closet before checking the bathoom. Astarion went into the bedroom and inhaled, trying to pinpoint the scent of the sweet little kitten’s blood. Was it nearby? However, his red orbs suddenly shot open at the echo of barking coming from outside.

“Maddie!” Winnie cried in fear.

~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~•~

Note from The ChaoticDruid: Been so hyped to get this chapter out! We have a lead on who caused Astarion to suddenly become sentient and it looks like a Shadowheart lover lol. A Shadowheart simp if you will! Also I know a lot of people would probably think Winnie's crazy for not wanting to jump right into a serious romance with Astarion, but I just feel like there are some things we'd love to fantasize about, but might not be too sure about in real life. Besides the girl is very romantically awkward. If anyone has any ideas on how to hide Astarion's ears better I'm open to suggestions, oh and PLEASE tell me what you think of the chapter! I love hearing all the comments about stuff, really makes my day.

Also fuck, Maddie's in danger! Somebody do something!

Taglist: @astarioffsimpmain , @iamsexytrash , @tiedyedghoulette , @hp-art-studio , @gaymistakeboi @the-disaster-in-waiting

103 notes · View notes

kimsohn · 8 months

Text

it takes 2 to mango

pairing . beomgyu x gn! reader (ft. yunjin of le sserafim) about . 12.2k words, fluff + angst warnings . cursing, a lot of food mentions, kissing, mentions of murder/dying (it's all jokes), y/n is in denial half the time (about beomgyu and mangoes), it took me like 2 months to write this so it may be all over the place i'm sorry in advance

synopsis . after your parents drop you off at your aunt's, leaving you with your whole life packed in bags, all you can do is wonder when you'll finally be able to get back to your old life. except, of course, when a brown-haired boy makes you wonder if staying here isn't so bad after all. note . literally after 2 years of delay and many plot changes it's finally here!! happy (late) birthday @urmelo, i told you i would write it and it's here (albeit two months late but wtv). also i literally wrote this whole thing based on this image but halfway through i realized he's sitting in a classroom so my whole broadcast idea was stupid 😞 and this is slightly inspired by all of us are dead and f4thailand! i stole the mango pun from google tagging . @invuwrld @tocupid @mmmsvnts @seung-scrittore

You have never loathed mangoes more than this moment.

It’s only been a couple of hours since your parents dropped you off at your aunt’s house, your whole life packed into suitcases and a Hello Kitty backpack you’ve owned since fifth grade, and you’re already sick of this situation. You don’t even understand your parents’ thought process, because who would even leave their whole life behind to start a mango supply business in Thailand, and you’re even angrier at your aunt for encouraging it. Now, you’re forced to leave behind the comfort of your old life and start anew in the four walls of your new house, miles away from your parents and old friends.

You even hate the stupid smile on your mom’s face when you agreed to their plan. At least you’ll be somewhat rich when your parents decide to come home, however long that might take (hopefully it’s within the next five minutes or so).

“Y/N, let me know if you want to paint your walls, okay? Your uncle loves interior design, so he’ll be happy to organize your room.”

In your old house, your walls were a bright, cheery yellow. Now they’re a boring beige, reminiscent of the hospital walls you’ve always hated. It’s okay though, because now yellow will remind you of mangoes, and you’re just about ready to hurl something at the mere thought of the fruit.

“It’s okay Auntie,” you respond, tracing your finger across the indents of the walls, “I kind of like the beige.”

Your cousin Yeonjun snickers from behind your aunt, and you fight the urge to roll your eyes. Yeonjun is definitely the type to hate beige because even his personality shines a bright red flag. Even now, he’s on his phone, probably flirting with (code word for annoying) some poor soul.

“Okay, honey. Yeonjun can help you finish unpacking, and then he can take you to school so you can find your classes. Tomorrow is your first day, after all, I don’t want you to get lost.”

With that, she closes the door behind you, leaving the two of you in your drab room with no personality. Instead of helping you unpack, Yeonjun sits on the chair in the corner, typing away with no care in his mind.

“I thought you were supposed to help?” you huff, though it’s not angrily.

Even though you and your cousin were friends, at first forcibly due to your family relations and later willingly because he’s actually quite interesting, you know that he won’t hesitate to note whatever he can to have leverage over you. Already, he’s taken a picture of your backpack, and if he helps you unpack, he’ll definitely find the shark plushie you brought for the sentiment. It’s not out of malice; it’s just the way your relationship is, however annoying it may be.

“Like you need my help,” he scoffs, crossing one leg over the other as a means to get comfortable, “just let me know when you’re done.”

You survey the mess of your belongings scattered across the bed. It’ll probably take hours, if not days, to sort out properly, and even you are itching to leave this stuffy room and get some fresh air. You’ve sorted out what you need for the next few days, so you might as well revisit this mess later.

“Actually, we can go now. I kind of need a break anyway.”

“Goody-two-shoes Y/N needs a break? Are you in your rebel era?” he jokes, but he opens the door and sticks a leg out, leaving it open for you to walk through.

You smack him on the shoulder as you walk to his car, sitting shotgun and itching to put your feet on the dash. You’re an average kid and you do average things, but you’re not in the mood to argue and correct your cousin.

“Just shut up and drive.”

You kind of wish you stayed at home because even mangoes wouldn’t survive in this environment.

Actually, there’s nothing wrong with your new school. It seems even more modern and spacious than your old one, and it has way more amenities than you could even imagine. You can see yourself fitting in here quite well, and since Yeonjun is popular, it’ll be easy to make friends.

The only problem is that the air conditioner isn’t working today, which means it’s extremely hot in the building. The hot sun outside paired with the lack of cool air means the whole building could resemble the Sahara Desert, and you wish you’d worn something more fitting for the weather, like the tank top Yeonjun has on right now (although, he seems to have other motives for wearing it). The sweat beads trickle down your forehead, and the only thing saving you right now is the popsicle your cousin was kind enough to buy for you. Unluckily, the gas station only had the mango flavor left.

“Yeonjun, are we done yet?” you ask, although it sounds more like a plea as you trudge along the hallways.

“Actually, no. We still have the science hallway, and the math hallway, and—”

A shrill noise fills the air, and you cover your ears shut and watch Yeonjun’s popsicle fall from his hands. Startled, the two of you find stability against the wall as the sound disappears and is replaced with crackling noises.

“Fuck, my popsicle!” Yeonjun exclaims, looking extremely disappointed as he grabs a tissue and cleans the mess up.

“Forget the popsicle, what was that? It’s a Sunday, who’s playing with the speakers?”

“It’s probably the media team preparing for the week’s announcements. Come, I’ll show you the broadcast studio.”

Yeonjun’s flip-flops squeak across the floor as you two walk, and in a matter of minutes, you reach a bright blue door next to the auditorium. Big block letters indicating which room it is are engraved on top, and Yeonjun knocks on the door repeatedly until it opens.

“I knew it was you,” a blue-haired boy answers, “you’re the only one annoying enough to knock that many times.”

“Hey! You should’ve answered faster.” Yeonjun protests as you giggle, glad you’re not the only one who finds your cousin annoying.

The boy pouts as he lets you two inside, and immediately you feel like you were cast into a recording studio. Shelves of CDs and books fill the sides, and behind the glass panel, a room full of microphones and levers peeks through. You feel like Radio Rebel in her bedroom, only intensified, and as you check out the large computer screens that line the walls, you find yourself imagining sitting in the center and being a part of whatever goes on behind the scenes here.

Your eyes cross over a brown-haired boy sitting at the table, headphones covering his plush hair and a teal highlighter in his hand. He’s looking down at a piece of paper, probably a script, and unknowingly you’re leaning forward to get a better look at his face before Yeonjun taps your shoulder and you straighten yourself.

“Y/N, this is Soobin,” Yeonjun gestures to the blue-haired boy, “and that over there is Beomgyu,” he continues, pointing to the boy at the desk.

Soobin smiles warmly, shaking your hand awkwardly as if this was a courthouse and not a classroom, but your eyes are more focused on Beomgyu. They’re focused on the way he taps the highlighter on his lips when he’s deep in thought, or when he adjusts his headphones when he’s satisfied with something. Yeonjun moves to interrupt him, probably to introduce you, but you hold him back so he can continue his work.

“Are you interested in joining?” Soobin asks, handing you a flyer, “we could always use more people.”

“I’m not that much of a speaker,” you respond, taking the handout anyway.

“You don’t need to be. We do more here than just talk, you know?”

As Soobin waves you goodbye, you take one last glance at the room, particularly Beomgyu, before you step out. You don’t know for sure whether you’ll join the club or not, but you have a feeling that you’ll be seeing him around pretty soon.

You might hate your alarm clock more than you hate mangoes, but at least it’s useful.

It’s the first day at your new school, but you’re not really jumping for joy. School is school wherever you go, and you don’t really feel the excitement or jitters someone would usually feel after transferring. You’re just about ready to pass through the rest of the year as smoothly as possible and hopefully not gain unwanted attention as the resident new kid. You’re already suffering enough by joining after a whole semester; you don’t need to bring any more trouble to yourself.

“Y/N, are you ready?” Yeonjun yells from outside the house, revving the accelerator so you can hear his annoyance.

“Coming!” you yell back, grabbing your bag and rushing out the door, holding a half-eaten piece of toast and a glass of orange juice.

Yeonjun likes to go to school a little early so he can talk to his friends, but this was a fact you didn’t know until five minutes ago. In an ideal situation, you wouldn’t have been rushing on your first day, but your cousin never makes things easy for you. At least he didn’t drive off without you.

Yeonjun attempts to lecture you about your lateness in the car, but you tell him to pay attention to the road and stuff the toast in your mouth. One thing you won’t let your cousin disturb you about is food, so you’re glad he calms down and lets you enjoy a peaceful ride to school.

You’re finishing your orange juice as he pulls into the student parking lot. He has a spot reserved for him, apparently, and the fact seems to be true as he parks in the space with “YEONJUN” decorated in bright red spray-paint letters. He puts on sunglasses as he exits the car, and you’re extremely glad he doesn’t have fans swooning over him in front of his car because you don’t know how much more you can take. Who does he think he is?

Thankfully, the air conditioner seems to be working this time around because as soon as you enter through the front doors, a blast of cool air hits you in the face. It’s only January, but the sun outside doesn’t seem to be taking a break this week, so you’re grateful for the human wonder that is A/C. Yesterday’s empty halls are now filled with students, and already Yeonjun is dragging you off to introduce you to some new people. You’re just glad he has pink hair because otherwise, you would’ve lost him.

By the time you reach your first class, your mind is riddled with names of people you’ll probably never talk to again. You’ve met at least three Jaehyuns, a Yunjin and a Yujin and another Han Yujin, two Jisungs, and many more students you definitely won’t remember. If you were on your own, it would’ve taken you a whole year to talk to this many people, but with a semi-superstar by your side, it only took ten minutes. You’re just glad your presence seems to be well-received.

Your first class is math, and already you find yourself falling asleep. A stack of books finds its way onto your desk, a textbook for everything you could need, and you can foresee yourself sleeping in to skip this terrible class. The only good sight about this class is Mr. Kim, who’s nice and tries to be entertaining, but there are only so many ways you can make numbers and formulas fun. At least the girl sitting in front of you, Yunjin from earlier, helps you pass the time by doodling her number on the margins of your notebook.

Bored and half asleep, you trudge your way to your second class, history. You’re grateful your cousin helped you find your way across the school yesterday, because your class is across the school in a corner you wouldn’t have even known existed. Unlucky for you, Mrs. Jung isn’t as nice or entertaining as Mr. Kim, but just before you can succumb to slumber, the intercom buzzes.

The morning announcements play, but instead of Soobin’s voice, you hear someone unfamiliar.

“Hey everyone, happy Monday! It’s the beginning of the week, which means we have a long road ahead, but I believe in each and every one of you to get through it. We’re only a couple of weeks from break, which is an exciting thought to look forward to…”

You realize halfway through that the voice is Beomgyu’s, and you don’t know what it is about his voice, but it seems to be perfect for starting off the announcements. He seems to be tasked with maybe a desperate attempt to cheer up the student body on a dreary Monday, but they seem to be doing the job because you feel much lighter than before the announcements. Others seem to feel the same way too, because the atmosphere in the once stale, cornered history classroom is now bright and jolly. You honestly wish you had listened to the full script he had prepared, but either because of your previous fascination or his soft, honeylike voice, you find it hard not to be lulled to dreamland.

After, he's followed by Soobin, who talks about the daily updates and the weather, and you wonder how he manages to sound so upbeat and cheery this early in the morning. He then passes the mic to a boy named Taehyun, who voices important announcements and leads the school pledge before the mic crackles off.

You can’t stop thinking about Beomgyu for the rest of the class period, so when he slides into the empty seat next to you halfway through the lesson, you think you must be imagining things. It’s like he’s glowing, as if a dreamy filter spans across his face. You stare at him until he stares back and raises an eyebrow, a quirk to show his feelings of confusion. He throws a rolled-up piece of paper at you, and when you catch it, you realize he’s very much real.

Bit by bit, you unfold the paper, and in scratchy handwriting, he’s written ‘Am I that interesting?’ in all caps. Your face feels like it’s on fire, and you tuck the paper in between the crease of your notebook, filled with doodles of Beomgyu’s name. You quickly shut it, hoping he didn’t see it, and avoid his gaze for the rest of the period.

Unluckily for you, fate doesn’t seem to be on your side because as soon as the bell rings, Beomgyu is reaching out to grab your elbow. You think you’re utterly and absolutely fucked, and you’re even more mortified when he links elbows with you and leads you out of the classroom.

“What’s your next class?” he prods, and you only answer after he asks a second time because you’re too embarrassed to register anything.

“English, with Mr. Yoon. Look, I’m sorry about before, I thought I was dreaming—”

“Dreaming? Are you in love with me or something?” he asks, and even though the question is accusatory, his smooth voice makes it sound like music to your ears.

“No!” you exclaim, a little too loudly that you have to apologize to the teachers standing in the hallway before continuing, “Look, I was falling asleep in Mrs. Jung’s class, okay? Since the seat next to me was empty beforehand, I thought you were a random daydream that I was making up to distract myself. I genuinely didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable with my staring or anything, I just didn’t know you were real until you threw that ball at me.”

“Oh, it’s okay,” he responds, his features softening at your explanation, “her class is pretty boring anyway. You’re new here, right? Yeonjun’s cousin? I’m Beomgyu.”

“I’m Y/N, nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too. You’re a little weird, you know that?” he remarks, laughing as he walks you to class.

You look down at your linked elbows and his goofy skipping. His observance is contradictory, but somehow, his weirdness is a little endearing to refute.

“Yeah, but you’re a little weird too. We cancel each other out, I guess.”

As soon as you step into the production room, you’re cast with the smell of mangoes. Seriously, those damned fruits seem to be following you, and you can never seem to escape them.

“Y/N! Hi! Welcome!” Soobin greets, ushering you into the room and grabbing you a seat, “We’re so happy to have you.”

It’s the next Thursday, a week after the dreaded daydream incident, and you’ve decided to show up to the broadcast meetings. You’ve been toying with the idea of joining ever since you walked into the room on Sunday, but it was Beomgyu’s insistence yesterday that really pushed you over the cliff of uncertainty.

“We have a lot of fun there. You don’t even have to speak on the morning announcements to be a part of it! We do much more than that, like run the newspaper and manage the yearbook. There’s a place for everyone, Y/N, you won’t regret joining.”

Even now, he waves warmly from the seat next to you. You’ve been talking frequently these days, partially because he’s in quite a few of your classes and partially because he’s part of a group chat Yeonjun added you to. He’s interesting to talk to and he always makes you laugh, and being around him makes you feel warm and fuzzy. Like your initial observance, he’s a little weird and goofy too, but it makes him all the more delightful.

You’re not crushing on him, of course. He’s a nice person to pass the time with during and after school. Besides, your friends at home are much better; he’s just a placeholder.

“Have some cake, Y/N!” Soobin insists, pushing a plate toward you, “It’s mango flavored!”

You smile hesitantly as you pick up the spoon and take a bite. It tastes good and you hate admitting it because mango is a good flavor; you just don’t like being reminded of the sentiment that comes along with it. You gaslight yourself into thinking it’s strawberry and finish the plate quickly, downing your water bottle straight after.

“Was it good?” Beomgyu asks, his voice a little hard to hear due to the conversations of next week’s script being tossed around behind him, “I got it from a bakery near my house. We actually have a snack at every club meeting, and this week was my turn to bring it.”

“Yeah, it was good. I’m just not really fond of mango,” you respond, already cringing at the words coming out of your mouth.

“You don’t like mango? Who doesn’t like mango?” Beomgyu voices, responding exactly how you expected him to.

“Me. I just don’t.”

Beomgyu drops the topic at your insistence and talks about the club instead, introducing you to some of the members. Taehyun, the boy from the announcements, is president, and Soobin is vice president. You learn that Beomgyu does a little bit of everything, and you try not to smile as he blushes when his friends list out his talents.

“Is Yeonjun not part of the club?” you ask after he’s introduced you to one of the many Jaehyuns part of the management team, “you guys seem to be good friends.”

“He was initially, but he has modeling lessons on Thursday so he can’t make it. He’s more like an honorary member, to be honest, but he helps us out a lot.”

You hum in agreement, meeting another Jaehyun (why are they all so attractive?) and rounding the corner to talk to Taehyun.

“I’ll leave you with Tae. He’ll help you figure out which team you’re best suited for.”

Taehyun pulls out a chair for you as Beomgyu walks away, and you can immediately see why he’s president. He’s a little reserved but he’s domineering, and he seems perfect for managing things behind and in front of the scenes.

“So, Y/N, did you have anything in mind when you were joining?”

“No, not really. I’m not very talkative though, and I don’t know how to handle a camera.”

“Yeah, Beomgyu also mentioned those things. I think you’ll be a good fit for the newspaper, based on first impression. Editors mostly work on the scripts and I think you’ll find it interesting. Come, I’ll introduce you to the head.”

He introduces you to Yunjin, the girl from your math class, and she helps you get the editing software and drive set up. Yunjin tells you that she’s the type of person who has a lot to say, and writing is a powerful outlet for her because it allows her to explore topics she’s passionate about. You don’t exactly know if you relate to her thought process, but it does make you feel a little excited.

“Is Beomgyu also part of the editing team?” you ask, mainly out of curiosity because you saw him revising the script on Sunday.

“Ah, kind of. He floats around between everything so I guess I could say that he is. Would you like to read some of his work?” she asks, pulling out a newspaper article from a stack in the corner, “Last issue, he wrote the front page spread dissing the school lunch menu. It might seem silly, but it was actually a huge hit, and honestly, the food has even gotten better since.”

You skim through the newspaper, and the interactive, colorful parts draw your gaze in. Elements like the pie chart, bolded words, and quotes make the article worth reading, and you can already tell from skimming the text that Beomgyu is a good writer. You flip through the rest, reading the story headlines and noting that some are serious, some are current, and some are merely just for entertainment. Even throughout the rest of the spreads, you can tell the writers put effort into making sure the newspaper is actually catered to the student population, and you can already imagine yourself publishing an issue of your own in the near future.

“Since you’re new, you can help Beomgyu out with his new piece. Let’s take things slow, okay?”

You nod, turning to face Beomgyu. You don’t know what’s going on in that fascinating mind of his, but you’re excited to find out.

It’s been a busy few weeks since you’ve moved here. Unfortunately, school doesn’t slow down time for you, so you’ve had to handle piles of schoolwork on top of adjusting to your new environment, at school, and at home. Your aunt, for one, is double the amount of hyper your parents were, and it’s taken you a while to get adjusted to her presence. At least you’ve had Yeonjun to help you out.

The one thing that you’ve actually looked forward to at school is the broadcast club. Taehyun was right about you fitting the editor role, and you’ve grown to fit in quite well with the other members. Mainly, however, you spend most of your time with Beomgyu, often looking over his shoulder and bouncing off ideas he has and grammatical errors he needs to fix. The issue is a little satirical, making it fun to read, and you’ve enjoyed helping him out because he actually values your input and your experiences.

It's the reason why he invited you to come to school on Sunday. He thought working in a quieter environment would help you two brainstorm better, and you agreed. You’ve been busy all week working on collecting student opinions for him, and today, he hopes you two can get a significant portion of the article complete.

Unlike the first Sunday you were here, the air conditioning is actually on now, but you still feel a little sweat prickling at the top of your forehead. You’re nervous because this is the first time you’ve actually been alone with Beomgyu, without anyone else nearby to mitigate your nerves. You’re scared about screwing up in front of him, or even worse, floating off into dreamland, but hopefully, you’ll be able to concentrate on your work and keep your thoughts at bay. If anything goes wrong, you can just blame it on his sweet voice.

You’re at least thankful Yeonjun hasn’t caught wind of how you two met, because he would never stop holding it over your head.

You knock three times on the blue door and Beomgyu pulls it open, wearing a bright grin on his face. He’s in a hoodie and sweats, a little bit more casual than his school attire, but somehow it just makes him more attractive. Combined with his dimples, he resembles a teddy bear, and you’re honestly surprised he hasn’t joined the modeling industry like your cousin. He’d make so much money as a loungewear model, you just know it.

“Hey, come in! I just got here, so I’ve been working on some scripts for the next week. You can get your stuff sorted while I finish.”

You nod, pulling the papers out of your bag and opening your laptop. Your mission for the week was to interview students regarding the article. You don’t know if he’ll like them, but hopefully, you’ve got some good anecdotes for Beomgyu to include in his writing.

Or, apparently not.

“Beomgyu.”

“Hmm?” he asks, looking up from his paper.

“I accidentally grabbed Yeonjun’s bag. I left the data at home, I’m so, so sorry. I can’t believe how stupid I am; how could I even forget something this important?”

“Hey, Y/N,”

“I just knew something was going to go wrong today, and I was so scared I was going to fuck things up and I did, and—”

“Y/N!”

You stop in your tracks, eyes wide and close to tears. You’re usually not this sensitive at all, but this means a lot to you, working with Beomgyu means a lot to you, and you don’t want to lose all of this over your stupidity and inattentiveness. However, Beomgyu looks far from angry, and he has his hands on your shoulders, rubbing them to calm you down.

“It’s okay. You’re all good. We have so much more time until the deadline, so don’t beat yourself up, okay? We can just hang out and have fun. Look, I even brought you some mochi from the corner store!”

He shows you the packet, and the bright yellow color is enough to have you burst into tears.

“Did I do something wrong?” he asks, looking at the packet, “it’s mango flavored. Oh! You don’t like mango. I’m so sorry, it slipped my mind. Forgive me?”

You sniffle, bringing him into a hug. The mochi wrapper crinkles between you as you put your head on his shoulder, clutching onto him as a means to calm you down. Beomgyu stills for a moment, probably out of shock before patting your back, albeit awkwardly yet reassuring.

“Sorry,” you mumble, “I didn’t mean to have a breakdown like that. I just didn’t want you to hate me. And I’ll eat the mango mochi, don’t worry.”

“I could never hate you, Y/N.”

“You’ve only known me for a couple of weeks; how could you say that?”

“Because even in the short time I’ve known you, I can tell how much of an amazing person you are. You’re bright and talented, and I love spending time with you, so stop apologizing, okay? It was just an accident.”

“Okay, I will,” you whisper, stepping back, “So, what now?”

“We could finish the mochi, for starters.”

You nod as you open the wrapper and take a bite. It’s tasty, so much so that you hate it, and you’re honestly five seconds away from letting go of your stupid grudge just to enjoy some fresh mango. However, your parents have plagued you enough with the fruit on their phone calls, which seems to hold your desires back well enough.

You stand to your feet as Beomgyu beckons you to follow him, wanting to show you something. He lets you in through the small door leading to the glass panel room, and you’re immediately illuminated by the huge screens around you. So much technology surrounds you, from microphones to switches to headphones, but you’re more intrigued by the feedback noise that emits once Beomgyu twists a knob, similar to the one you heard when you first got here.

“Does it usually make that noise when you turn it on?” you ask, walking around the room.

“Yeah, it’s a little bit annoying. That’s why we have to keep it turned on before school starts.”

“I figured. I heard it when I came here with Yeonjun before my first day.”

Beomgyu turns to you with an expression of mild surprise.

“I think Soobin and I were here that day. You should’ve visited us.”

“We did. We talked to Soobin, but you were working on something so we didn’t want to disturb you.”

“Is that why you thought I was in your daydream the day after?”

You feel like you’re on fire, and you look away from him. You didn’t expect Beomgyu to be this perceptive, but it was probably your fault for walking straight into this.

“Umm. Yeah, kind of. It’s embarrassing,” you say, covering your face with your palms.

“It’s not,” he responds, tapping your shoulder, “it’s actually kind of cute. Now that you’re in this room with me again, will I be in another one of your daydreams? I loved feeling like a celebrity.”

You mentally shrivel in humiliation, cringing when he lets out a laugh. If Yeonjun is a tease, then Beomgyu is most definitely a menace.

You are extremely close to falling asleep.

Currently, you’re sunbathing on one of Yunjin’s many beach chairs. They’re colorful and the sun shines ever so gently on your face, so the setting is perfect for you to take a nap. Too bad you’re at a pool party and not in your backyard, and Yunjin just might murder you if you drift off to dreamland after all the hard work you’d put into setting things up.

It’s spring break, which means one whole week of warm sun rays and well-needed rest. The newest issue of the magazine was published yesterday, and particularly this time around, it seemed to be quite popular amongst the student population. The group decided to throw a party to celebrate all the hard work that’s gone into publishing, and what other location would it be at than Yunjin’s gigantic mansion?

You’re particularly proud of Beomgyu’s hard work because his spread was absolutely stunning, but he merely brushed it off and thanked you for helping him when you thanked him earlier. He can be calm and graceful like that at times, like a soft breeze. Now, however, you turn to your side to see him sipping a mocktail on the chair next to you, donned in sunglasses and shark-decorated swim shorts, the farthest thing from serene.

“What flavor is that?” you ask, your voice tinged with sleep, “Actually, never mind. It’s probably mango.”

He laughs, and it’s so, so pretty. If you had to pick one sound to hear for the rest of your life, you’d take your chances on that.

“It is, but it’s kind of watery. I’m gonna save it for later though,” he starts, turning to face the pool and pointing at Taehyun.

“What about him?” you ask, craning your head to see him lounging in the pool with a duck floatie.

“If I cannonball into the pool, just how drenched do you think he’ll be?”

Your cries are practically unheard as you watch Beomgyu jump into the pool, absolutely obliterating not only Taehyun but also poor, unsuspecting Soobin next to him. Ten minutes later, after receiving a well-deserved scolding from Taehyun and issuing apologies, Beomgyu slogs his way back to the chair on your left with a shit-eating grin on his face.

“That was definitely worth it.”

“It definitely was not,” you counter, sitting up and leaning against the back, “you’re literally such a nuisance. If I had known you were this terrible, I would not have become friends with you.”

“I mean, you technically didn’t choose. You can’t really help who you daydream about, right?”

You’re glaring daggers into him, but he’s cruel enough to still find the situation funny. You can’t believe he’s trying to hold back laughter even in this situation, but you probably shouldn’t have expected any better. Seriously, how did he go from the sweet-talker broadcast boy to the literal devil?

“Watch your words, or I will slice you up as I did to all the mangoes in Fruit Ninja last week.”

“Woah, chill,” he starts, putting his sunglasses back on and taking a sip of his watery mocktail, “why do you even hate mangoes? You talk about them as if they were your exes.”

“My parents left me here to start a mango business in Thailand,” you say, picking at the skin next to your thumbnail and wincing when it hurts.

Beomgyu spits out his drink in alarm, but you kind of saw it coming. You’ve noticed that he tends to exaggerate things a lot, but you guess it’s just part of his personality.

“Wow, that genuinely sucks. I’m really sorry; I shouldn’t have prodded.”

“It’s okay. I don’t tell people because it’s only temporary. I might not even be here next year.”

Two months ago, you would’ve been happy at the thought. Now, however, even mentioning it brings a pang of sadness to your chest. You’ve known your time here was momentary all along, so why do you feel guilty?

“Are you happy?” he says, his voice a lot quieter now, “I mean, would you want to stay here or go back?”

You want to tell him what you think is logical, and logically, your old home was much better than here. You practically grew up there, and the place suits you so well that you’re meant to be there. However, the words that rush out of your heart speak differently.

“I honestly don’t know. I like it here, but I like it there too. I’ll just enjoy my time here before I leave. I still have a while anyway.”

Beomgyu flips to the other side, away from your gaze before he speaks. If you weren’t listening carefully, you might’ve not been able to hear his words.

“I don’t want you to leave. I like it when you’re here.”

He sounds so soft and clingy that it almost makes you cry. Instantly, you know that no one has ever cared enough to share the same sentiment back at your old house.

Home. You should’ve called it home, but it doesn’t feel right anymore. You used to think that home was a physical feeling, a place where you were raised and nurtured. Home before was the walls of the building you spend the most time in, but now, it feels a little different.

No, home isn’t your old house. It isn’t your new house either, even if the beige has grown quite well to your liking. Home is sitting here on this beach chair, surrounded by your closest friends, and the feelings of warmth that surround you all. Home is an emotion, something you’ve never felt in the past years of your life until you moved here. Home is being surrounded by people who want you, just because you’re you and not because it would be convenient.

“I like being here too,” you whisper back, and although he has his back turned to you, you can still feel his smile.

“Then just tell your parents you want to stay here.”

You can’t tell him that your mindset has made you feel that this is all temporary. Ever since you moved here, you’ve felt like a ticking bomb, waiting for a single phone call to determine your fate. Once, you would’ve been able to answer that it’s where you belong. Now, you seem to question if it’s merely just an obligation.

“It’s not that simple, Beomgyu.”

He sighs, and as he turns back around to face you, you drape an arm over your eyes. You don’t want to feel the intensity of his glare, but even without your vision, you feel his eyes shooting daggers into your abdomen. If only life were as easy as being able to sense Beomgyu’s responses, for you would’ve been sipping margaritas on some island with your talents.

“Isn’t it? Or maybe, just maybe, you’re overcomplicating it.”

You sigh, unwilling to answer, and the conversation falls to a standstill. You hate thinking, especially about this, but eventually, Beomgyu’s words are going to catch up to you. Whatever the implications of this conversation are, you’re sure you won’t enjoy them.

Not one bit.

You’re walking home with Beomgyu a couple of days after break has ended, an unfamiliar scene for you. Usually, Yeonjun drives you home in his shiny car, but he had to stay back for some tutoring today and you were left ride-less. Thankfully, Beomgyu swooped in to save the day, saying he’d keep you company since he knew the route. You’d accepted quite freely, definitely because you didn’t want to rely on Google Maps and not because you liked spending time with him.

Spring is in full season, which means the walk home is filled with greenery and a lush breeze. You feel like something out of a Studio Ghibli movie, but as you turn to look at Beomgyu, you realize he’s more aptly fitted for the scenario.

His hair is fluttering slightly through the wind, and his side profile is so perfect that only an animation artist could’ve crafted it. Beautiful is the only word to describe him, and each glance you take becomes increasingly hard to look away from.

You like him. It’s not a realization that’s come from this moment, but rather a million moments beforehand. Whenever you try to pinpoint an exact moment, your mind runs blank, as if you were pre-programmed to have him in your heart since the beginning of your existence. You’d just been so immersed in convincing yourself that you didn’t that you never really accepted you did.

“Y/N,” you hear from his lips, “are you going to the spring dance?”

The spring dance is next week, and it’s all everyone has been talking about lately, especially Yunjin. Honestly, if the Jung Jaehyun asked you out (yes, you can finally differentiate between the multiple Jaehyuns), you wouldn’t shut up about it either, but you don’t have any interest in it otherwise. The only updates you hear are when you don’t tone out Yunjin in math (there’s only so much you can hear about his features), and you’re growing quite sick of the talk.

Mainly though, you’re just annoyed you have to go without a date. A certain someone always pops up in your mind when you think about the event, but you’re too shy to ask and he seems to be preoccupied with other things. Even if it’s going just as friends, you’d take the chance, but it doesn’t seem in your cards for the near future.

“Yeonjun is forcing me to. I’d much rather spend my Friday nights with a show, but it is what it is.”

“Oh, come on!” he protests, shaking his head, “it’s always super fun. You won’t regret coming.”

“I guess, but I don’t really know who to go with. Yeonjun has a date, and I don’t want to be a third wheel.”

Beomgyu fishes something out of his pockets and holds it out to you. Upon closer inspection, you realize it’s a rectangular mango drink, and you raise an eyebrow.

“I know, I know, but it’s still driving me crazy that you hate mango. I want to be the person that changes your opinion on it, okay? Whenever you think of mango, don’t think of your parents, think of me!”

You roll your eyes as you grab the drink and punch the straw in. You don’t want to admit it, but the gesture is sweet, and already your negative thinking is rewriting itself to include positive memories with Beomgyu.

“Whatever,” you say, attempting to take a sip out of the straw only to find it stuck, “is there something wrong with your straw? Mine isn’t working.”

“No, there isn’t,” he replies, confusion settling across his face, “is it blocked? There might be something inside.”

Sure enough, you peek through the hole to see something white stuck in the straw, and you try your hardest to pull it out with your fingers. The texture is a little rough and thin, almost paper-like, but sadly you fail to get it out.

“Can you actually not get it out?” he asks, looking worried.

“Yeah, but it’s not that big of a deal. I’ll just get another straw after I get home.”

“This cannot be happening right now.” he mutters, grabbing it from you and trying his hardest to squeeze out the object, “Of course I fucked this up.”

“Beomgyu, it’s okay. Relax. It’s not that big of a deal,” you respond, trying to calm him down after seeing him get this worked up, “it’s just a drink.”

“But it’s not! Ugh,” he says, frustrated as he pulls out his phone, “you were supposed to be able to pull out the paper.”

“What are you talking about?”

He passes over his phone to you, and there’s a picture of a small piece of paper on it. When you zoom in to get a better look at the writing on it, you gasp.

“It takes two to mango, so will you be my partner?” you read out loud, looking at Beomgyu.

He smiles awkwardly, shrugging his shoulders.

“You’re asking me to be your date for the dance? Oh my god, yes!”

You hug him tightly, pressing your head into the crook of his shoulder. You don’t know if his intentions behind this are friendly or romantic, but the mere thought of being together, even just for a night, has you reeling. You feel so, so giddy as if you’re already on the dance floor and swaying in his arms.

You feel him sigh in relief, hugging you back.

“I’m so sorry I fucked up everything. It was supposed to be super cute—”

“Don’t worry about it. Even if you just asked me the question, I would’ve been happy. It was so creative though; how’d you come up with it?”

“I, um. I searched it up,” he replies, and you hear the bashfulness in his voice, “I just wanted it to be meaningful enough to us. I know that it’s unoriginal, sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry. Even just you researching to find something this creative is meaningful to me.” you answer honestly, “I’m saving that straw forever, I swear.”

He laughs, and you feel his chest vibrate against you. It’s a comforting feeling, one you’ll hopefully experience at the dance next week.

“I’m so excited. I can’t wait,” he whispers, pulling you in a little tighter.

“Yeah,” you whisper back, holding onto him, “Me too.”

The dance is a little lame, but being here with Beomgyu makes it worthwhile.

Seriously, if you’d come alone, you probably would’ve ended up sitting in the corner and munching on the brownies (they’re actually tasty, you can’t even deny it). However, Beomgyu has made it his personal mission for you to have fun, which is why he pulls you onto the dance floor to vibe with the beat of the song.

“This is so high school,” you mutter, feigning annoyance, “what song even is this?”

“I think it’s ‘Good Boy Gone Bad’ by TXT.”

“I’ve never heard of them.”

“Who cares? Stop being a downer and let loose a little.”

Contrary to your dislike, you do end up dancing. The song has a peppy beat and the two of you lose yourself in it, but even as you forget all of what occupies your brain, Beomgyu still remains in your head.

You’ll never forget the sparkling expression on his face when he saw your outfit as he picked you up from your house or the way he turned up your favorite song as you sped along to the venue. You would pay a million dollars just to relive that moment again, laughing at each other’s singing and enjoying each other’s company, but you realize that you don’t need to experience past moments with Beomgyu when he constantly makes better memories with you. With Beomgyu, you like living in the present, and he makes you forget about special days in the past you had coined as ‘the best day ever’ because nothing could compare to the feeling of being by his side like this.

The song ends, leaving you all woozy and excited, but the feelings quickly shift away when a much slower beat starts playing. You don’t even have to ask for the song name, because Beomgyu is already whispering it into your ear.

“’Fairy of Shampoo’ by the same artist. They’re pretty good, right?”

You move to nod, but the action is long forgotten as Beomgyu wraps his arms around your waist. He’s staring you in the eyes, a silent request for permission, and your response is wrapping your arms around his neck in a similar manner. You sway, and Beomgyu follows your lead, but this time around, the only thing you’re losing yourself in is his eyes.

The soft, angelic singing and chatter around you are muffled as if everyone in the room has disappeared except you and Beomgyu. You’re in a trance, with the perfect feeling of his arms around you as if they were always meant to be there. It’s so easy to will yourself away from everything to focus his gaze that you should be concerned, but one look at his eyes can confirm he’s in the same boat.

Maybe friends can ask each other out to dances. Maybe friends can slow-dance together. However, you find it hard to believe friends can look each other like this in the eyes and pretend they don’t feel anything.

Before you know it, the air grows hazy, and the only thing that makes your vision clearer is leaning in closer to Beomgyu. Or maybe that’s what’s making you crazy in the first place, but you don’t care because you’re trapped in the magnetic pull he emits that drives you closer, and closer, and closer. You’re close enough to notice the small moles on his cheek and the faint cologne he wears that smells like jasmine. You can’t even tell if you’re moving anymore because the only action you’re focused on is the fluttering of his eyelashes and the pursing of his lips.

It takes your brain a while to register what he says next because his voice is husky enough to be covered by the music, but the mere fact that his voice dropped three octaves has your mind spinning.

“Do you want this as badly as I do?”

Your throat is so parched you can’t even speak, but you don’t need words to imply what you want. You nod, the tiniest nod that if he wasn’t so focused, he wouldn’t have seen it, but his eyes are solely on you and that’s enough confirmation for him. The last thing you see is him leaning dangerously close before your eyes flutter shut, but the moment is ruined as your phone rings from your pocket and startles you both.

You fumble with the device as he clears his throat, leaning back, and with wide eyes, you see that it’s your mother calling. You’re cursing her mentally for calling at the worst possible time, but one look at Beomgyu has him motioning you off the dance floor.

“Take it; it’s probably important. I’ll be right here.”

You smile tightly before rushing off the dance floor, finding a place near the entrance that’s much quieter than the center. From this position, you have a straight view of Beomgyu in the middle, but you’re blocked by a sea of people surrounding him. It reminds you just how many obstacles you have between each other, and you mentally berate yourself for being so careless and almost kissing him before answering the phone.

“Hello? Mom?”

“Oh honey, hi! Your Auntie told me you were at some school dance, are you having fun?”

“I am,” you whisper back, just now realizing how much you miss your parents sending you off to these dances, “but I miss you a lot.”

“Actually, I called you about that!”

“What do you mean?”

“Our business here is doing so well that another company wants to buy us and give us a huge amount of shares. This means we can move back home and still make a profit!”

Your mom goes on about the logistics, but all you hear is white noise ringing through your ears. You knew this moment would creep up on you, but you just didn’t expect it so suddenly, especially after sharing such an intimate moment with Beomgyu. God, Beomgyu. How can you even begin to tell him?

“Mom, I have to go.”

“Of course, you must be busy! I’ll call you later, okay?”

Your fingers shake as you cut the call, tears brimming at the corner of your eyes. The room feels hazy once again, but this time, it feels suffocating. Your cheeks feel hot and you have no idea what to do, and all you can feel is Beomgyu’s gaze staring at you from across the room, boring into your eyes. All you can think is that he knows, and he hates you, and he’s going to feel so betrayed—

“Y/N? Are you okay?” you hear, and Yeonjun steps in front of you, blocking the connection between you and your crush.

“I- I need to go home. Please.”

You’re glad Yeonjun knows when to not be a nuisance, because all he does is nod wordlessly and clasp your palm, leading you to the car. You’re thankful that your cousin is actually a nice person deep down because he’s ditching his date and dropping his many it-boy moments just to take you home and let you cry on his shoulder. You try so, so hard not to look back because you know you’ll break down, but you can’t help what your heart wants. As you turn and make eye contact with Beomgyu, you see his confused and betrayed expression as he pushes past the people on the dance floor, but the crowd is too large, and he’s stuck between the masses. It’s bitter how these people once reminded you of obstacles, and now they’re exactly that, but you’re thankful because you’re sure you won’t be able to stop the tears if he talks to you right now.

As Yeonjun whisks you away in the dreary night, all you can hope is that Beomgyu remembers only the good moments between you, and not the worst. Maybe one day, just one, you hope he’ll forgive you, even though you know that you’ll never forgive yourself.

You have no heart to even attempt the history homework sitting on your desk.

It’s only been a week, but you feel like you went through five years of trauma from it alone. If it weren’t for Yeonjun, you would’ve locked yourself in your room the whole week and finished a bucket of ice cream. Instead, you showed up to class every day, draped in an oversized hoodie and making no means of eye contact with anyone. Any time you encountered Beomgyu, you tried your hardest to avoid it, even going as far as bargaining with your teacher to switch seats in history.

The only person you even talked to this week was your cousin. He was the only person you could confide in, probably because he was the only one who truly understood your current predicament. It’s silly, depending so much on the person who could use this as blackmail at any moment, but you have to say you’re a little grateful for him dragging you to school in the morning instead of leaving you to allow in the four walls of your bedroom.

However, even the motivation from Yeonjun can’t stop your bleeding heart. You feel like you’re going through hell and back, and with exams coming up your mind just isn’t in the right place. How long are you going to keep your homework sheets sitting on your table void of pencil markings? Even the mere act of reading the instructions has you tired, and all you can do is rest your head against the table and try not to let your thoughts drift off.

Even this homework reminds you of him. It reminds you of how you would goof off during your lectures, texting each other through the crevices of your desk, or how you would sit for long hours in the library and attempt to study, kicking each other’s feet beneath the table. Even now, you can hear him knocking on the door, asking you to open up and talk.

“Y/N, it’s Beomgyu!”

Okay, maybe that part isn’t your imagination.

Why is he even here? What business would he even want with you after you’ve wronged him so much? Your mind has no idea, but the only thing you’re listening to is your heart as you pull open the door and take in his presence.

He looks beautiful, like always. His existence is something that you want to cuddle into a ball and put in your pocket, yours to keep and cherish forever because he is simply the word soft personified. Today, however, he sports dark circles under his eyes and a paler shade of skin. What has made your teddy bear so sad? Is it your doing?

“Hi,” you whisper, and your hands itch to reach out and wrap him in a tight hug.

“Yeonjun told me what happened. I wanted to give you some space, but it’s torture without you.”

Now you’re confused. Why is he showing up at your door and giving you comfort? Isn’t he the one who has been wronged this whole time?

“You mean, you’re not mad at me?”

“Why would I be? It’s not your fault you need to move back. Sure, I’m sad about it, but this isn’t something you can control, right?”

Now, nothing stops you or your conscience as you wrap your arms around him, furrowing into his familiar scent as tears escape your eyes. You’ve done a lot of hugging recently, but this time, it feels like an eternity has gone by. You never want to let go of him or this moment, and you can even feel your mind memorizing every aspect of this moment.

You guess Beomgyu makes you feel that way. Mind and heart combined, with no conflict.

“You always know what to say,” you point out, sniffling.

“I’d hope so; I have to do it every Monday.”

You laugh, although it’s choked and dry from your crying, but as your head moves, you hear a crinkle from his back pocket.

“What’s that?”

“Oh, um,” he starts, grabbing the object out of his pocket, “they’re mango popsicles. I was going to try and bargain with you if this didn’t work out.”

“Hmm, well, I’m not really convinced yet,” you joke, motioning him to follow you and sit on your bed as he rolls his eyes.

Silence ensues for the next couple of seconds as you both open the wrappers and enjoy the delicacy. The flavor doesn’t even bother you anymore, because now when you think of mango, you think of Beomgyu. You think of his sweetness, his humor, and his bright sunshine personality that matches the color of the delightful fruit.

“Oh, Y/N, you have some juice dripping down your chin,” Beomgyu notices, pointing to the area.

“Where, here?” you ask, patting the left side and feeling its dryness, “or a little higher?”

“No, I- here,” he says, leaning closer with his thumb and brushing off the liquid.

You want to thank him, but as you look up into his eyes, you realize how imperceptibly close you two are. Suddenly, you’re thrust back to a week ago when you were in his arms, leaning into each other until you could feel his breath upon yours, but this time, there’s nothing stopping you. No phone, no crowd, and most importantly, no insecurities come between you two now, and your mind is clear as you lean in and latch your lips upon his.

If you were unsure of what mango meant to you before, you’re definitely sure it will remind you of Beomgyu now, because all you can taste is the mango on his lips. It’s like your mind has gone into overdrive as you move closer, and you can vaguely register him using his free hand to palm the back of your head and tilt it up. The atmosphere doesn’t feel hazy anymore; instead, it feels shy and awkward, as if you were two lovers learning the world together. Like everything with Beomgyu, it feels right, just so right, and you never want to leave because you are his wholeheartedly, and he is yours.

Until you register what’s happening, of course.

You pull away quickly, chest heaving as you try to catch your breath. Beomgyu’s lips are puffy, and you’re sure yours must mimic a similar appearance, but that’s the least of your worries.

“Beomgyu, I—”

“I love you,” he breathes out, and his voice is light and airy as if he can’t hold in the words anymore, “I love you so much that it kills me you’re leaving. I don’t know how to fix this pain, but what I can say is that I’ll try my hardest to be by your side. Every day I’ve spent with you has been the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, and being without you this past week has made me realize how much light will disappear from my life if you leave. I’ll take you in any way you’ll let me, even if it’s through late-night calls or sparse texts. Please be mine, please.”

He's begging you now, holding your hands within his and clutching tightly, but even the words you want to say are trapped in your throat. You can’t do it to him. You can’t force him to love you thousands of miles away and look forward to you when he has a whole future ahead of him. You may be burdened by the ghosts of your past, but he isn’t, and you can’t deprive him of the one thing that makes himself him: his sunshine.

“I’m so sorry Beomgyu. I can’t put you in that position.”

Even the tears that once hesitated to fall now escape freely as he nods, cradling your cheek. After all that’s happened, he’s still so understanding, and even though he has a tight smile on his face, he keeps on a brave front for you.

“I knew you would say that. It’s okay, we can just enjoy the last of our days together.”

“Don’t hold yourself back for me, alright?” you whisper, wiping the stray tears that you don’t want him to see.

He notices the tear stains on your cheeks anyway, wiping the wetness with the pads of his thumbs. You notice he doesn’t respond, but at this point, he doesn’t need to. Even though you’ve warned him against it, you know without a doubt that he’ll always be waiting for you, even with all your uncertainty.

The last bell of the year rings, but as your classmates bustle around you with joy and laughter, you don’t know what to feel.

Moving is a funny concept. You leave behind everything you know just to start anew, but unlike most people, you’ve finally gotten the chance to go back to the past. Your old friends, your old family, your old life. Months ago, you would’ve jumped for this opportunity, as many others would in your situation, but now you’re experiencing a bittersweet emotion. You can’t even deny it: this place has had a tremendous impact on you through the experiences it put you through, the people it made you meet, and the emotions it caused you to feel. Even just thinking about going away leaves a pang in your heart, but you suppose life is about these occurrences, whether they’re sad or happy, and you’ll just have to persevere through it like you always do.

You’re walking out to the parking lot when Beomgyu joins you. You’ve still been talking even after the dreaded incident weeks ago, especially since you studied together for exams, but your relationship since you rejected him hasn’t been the same. It’s like you’re tiptoeing around with each other, waiting for one another to break, but you’ve already broken before so you don’t know why it feels so fragile. Maybe it’s the tension in the air around your departure or the lack of definition within your relationship, but either way, it feels suffocating.

At least you’re grateful he hasn’t shut you out yet.

“So, how was your last day of school?” you hear, but this time you focus your eyes on the ground instead.

It feels too weird to look at him. It’s like you don’t have permission to admire his beauty anymore, so you rarely ever make eye contact with him. Instead, you focus on the gum he’s chewing, the one you know is mango-flavored but always so bitter. Maybe it was a sign you two were never meant to be.

“It was good. You know, tiring as always, but I’m glad it’s over.”

“Yeah, I get it. Are you going back home soon?”

Honestly, your parents haven’t been super transparent with you, but from their calls, you assume that you still have well into the summer before you move out. They sound busy wrapping up things, and they haven’t given you an exact date, but they have promised you they’ll be here soon. Like all things in your life, even your parting is uncertain, and that’s what you tell him.

“So, what I hear is that I can still terrorize you over the summer.”

You laugh, but it’s forced and uneasy. The tension is so thick you could cut it with a knife, but honestly, you’ve gotten a little too used to it by now.

“I guess you could, Gyu.”

He stops you in your tracks by stepping in front of you.

“Look, I know we’re a little awkward right now, but I feel like I have to say this, or I’ll never get the chance. I’m so honored to have been your friend, and I’m going to miss you a lot. Like, a lot a lot. I’m sorry for putting you in so many awkward situations, but I hope you can remember the good parts when you think of me.”

You sigh, patting his head. If you were on good terms with him, you would’ve gifted him a hug, but you hope the small gesture can do your feelings enough justice.

“I’m gonna miss you too. A lot a lot,” you mimic, watching him smile, “so text me often, okay? I’m sorry for making things awkward too.”

He shakes his head, willing to argue in your favor, but before he can even start a car horn sounds from the parking lot. You crane your head to see a familiar vehicle, one that’s accompanied you throughout your lifetime, except this time, it’s adorned with a painted mango on the side.

“Mom? Dad?”

Your parents step out of the car, and your legs are moving you towards them before you can even register it. Video calls don’t do their beautiful faces any justice, and it feels so surreal as you stop in front of them, waiting for them to just be a figment of your imagination.

“Hey, sweetie,” your dad says, and that’s all it takes before you’re leaning into his touch, burrowing yourself into him as you would often do when you were a little kid.

You forgot how much pain you felt when they left you here. All this time, you’ve suppressed it, and only at night when you were in your room, half-asleep and overthinking, did you let your tears come to bay. You wanted to be strong for them because everything they did was for you, but it was hard not to lose sight of their eventual return and get lost in the lifeless emotions associated with their disappearance every waking day that passed. It took every ounce of strength in you to pick yourself up every day and pretend like you were fine, but although there were many factors that helped you mitigate those feelings, none of them could truly ever make the ache ebb away.

“Why are you here? I thought it would be a while,” you ask after you’ve calmed down and properly reunited with them, “are we moving back soon?”

“Actually, about that… we’ve changed our minds a little bit.”

Your mom holds your face in her palms, pinching at the skin on your cheek ever so slightly.

“Your aunt told us how happy you are here, and how you’ve grown so much from moving here. I know that losing your parents so suddenly must’ve had a huge impact on you, but if this place helped you with those struggles even just a little bit, then it must be worth staying here. We thought that you might like it if we stayed here permanently. What do you think?”

You can’t believe it. It’s as if the world has deafened and all you can hear is the ringing echoing through your ears because what they’re saying sounds too good to be true. Moving here? Permanently? Is life playing some sort of cruel joke on you?

“You aren’t joking, right?” you whisper, and all your parents can do is laugh as they shake their heads.

They say that your life flashes before your eyes as you die, but right now, all that flashes through your eyes are the memories you’ve made in your seemingly short time here. You remember sitting shotgun in Yeonjun’s car as he annoyed you on the way to school, texting Yunjin during math while you two try not to fall asleep, and teaming up with Taehyun while wreaking havoc on poor Soobin.

However, most importantly, you remember Beomgyu. From the curve of his lips to the rings on his fingers, from the walks home you’ve shared to your first and last kiss in your very bedroom, he’s always been with you wholeheartedly. You haven’t been able to stop thinking about him since that very first day when the boy with dark curls caught your watercolor eyes, and for the foreseeable future, you don’t think you’ll be able to stop.

When you turn to look back at him, he’s there. He’s always there, waiting for you no matter how far you go. Even if he is just a speckle in the distance, just the size of an atom, you are his nucleus and he revolves around you, chasing you until he breaks down into a black hole of nothing. Even now, as you stare at him from the parking lot, one look at you tells him everything he needs to know. He’s here, here before your eyes in a matter of seconds, and as your parents ask him who he is, you know that only the most perfect boy would respond with such a beautiful answer as he directly addresses you.

“I’m whoever you want me to be.”

You shake your head, unable to hide the smile that flits across your face. After a long, long time of shying away from Beomgyu, you’re finally ready to embrace the feelings he brings you, whether tears or smile lines.

“This is Beomgyu, my lover.”

Your bedroom is still bare with your whole life packed into boxes once again, but at least this time around, your walls are painted yellow again. However, instead of a sunny yellow, they’re more of a mango color, your mom going even as far as to say it’s the exact same hue as the mangoes they grew in Thailand, fresh and ripe. Honestly, you’re just glad you’re not sitting within the depressing beige color again, because why did you even convince yourself it made you happy?

What’s not fresh is the old carpet you and your boyfriend are sitting on, but sometimes you can appreciate the old things too. In fact, it’s somewhat comfortable as you lie in his arms, sprawled across the carpet with no looming future dangling over your head. It’s just you, your other half, and nothing more, enjoying your well-deserved summer break weeks after school has ended.

“I’m not ready for school,” you complain, liking the feeling of being illuminated by the bright sun peeking through your blinds, “I like sitting around doing nothing. Imagine how hectic it would’ve been if I actually moved back.”

Your statement is only half-true though, because there are many things awaiting you once school starts that you’re actually very excited for. For starters, you get to have your own article published in the newspaper, and you have a slight inkling as to what it’s going to be about. Also, you have many wonderful friends who will make your life a lot easier, so even though school is school, at least you’ll have amazing people by your side. Really, you’re just complaining for no reason.

“I’m just glad we won’t have to throw you a farewell party. I don’t think Taehyun or Soobin would’ve let me near Yunjin’s pool again.”

You smack his chest lightly, and he laughs, curling in closer to lay your head against his chest. You really should be unpacking your things, at least, that’s what you told your parents you’d be doing, but you can’t pass up the chance to cuddle with Beomgyu every time you get it. You both have been pining for each other for far too long anyway, so why waste any more time?

“Y/N!” you hear from outside the door, “I brought you food!”

You get up to let your mom in, but Beomgyu is already five steps ahead of you. Your mom gives him a warm smile because seemingly, your parents seem more smitten with him than you are. You can’t really blame them though; who doesn’t like Choi Beomgyu?

“Thank you for the mango, auntie!” he responds, and of course, the endearment has her reeling.

“I thought you two would be hungry after working hard,” she says, leaning over to peek through the gap between him and the door, “but it seems you two have done nothing at all. Oh well, you can eat it anyway. You have all the time in the world.”

You two really do, because as you make yourselves cozy on the carpet once more, bowls of mango in hand, it feels like time has taken a pause after all the misery it has put you through. You eat the slices wholeheartedly as you think, with Beomgyu brushing off the juice that escapes your mouth occasionally when the piece is too big. You’re glad that time is moving slowly because you want to savor every moment you have with him. He deserves it, and so do you.

“We should really start setting things up,” Beomgyu starts, “How long are you going to sleep with just four yellow walls and no decoration? That would be so depressing.”

“Hey, at least it’s less depressing than beige walls,” you grumble, “but even just being here makes me content enough to fall asleep. I have nothing to worry about this time around, especially when you’re just five minutes or a phone call away.”

Mere seconds pass before he’s leaning in to place a kiss on your lips, and of course, everything about him tastes extremely mango. Your malice for the fruit is far gone now, far, far gone because not only are your parents back, but also because Beomgyu is the only thing you think about when reminded of the flavor. However, your rollercoaster feelings for the fruit are the last thing on your mind as you lean in closer, placing the mango bowl beside you.

“You still hate mango, baby?” he whispers between kisses, and it takes everything in you to pull him back, reminding him that you two are supposed to be unpacking and not making out.

“Answer the question,” he whines, a cute little pout on his face that makes you five seconds away from forgetting your very own warning and kissing him breathless again.

“No, I don’t,” you finally answer, grabbing his hand and interlacing it with yours, “I love it now.”

He grins, and you decide to succumb to your desires, forgetting all sense of rationality when it comes to him as you press a kiss to his lips again.

“I love mango just as much as I love you.”

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