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yandere-daydreams · 6 months

Text

Title: Domesticated.

Commissioned by the very lovely, very inspired @elsecrytt.

Pairing: Yandere!Satan x Reader (Obey Me).

Word Count: 7.0k.

TW: Dub/Con & Non/Con, AFAB!Reader, Reader Is Straight Up A Bad Person In This One, Toxic Relationships, Semi-Public Sex, Bondage, Oral Sex, Overstimulation, Coercion, Prolonged Grooming, Mentions of Blood and Violence, Slight Stalking, and Obsessive Behavior. Dead Dove: Do Not Eat.

You were the first one to find Satan.

It wasn’t difficult. You’d been around long enough at that point to know that the birth of a demon was a strange, spontaneous thing; loud and wild, often accompanied by pillars of flame and always violent enough to leave the earth scarred in its wake. While his brothers fell from paradise like stars displaced from their heavens, you followed the cloud of smoke rising from the wasteland that made up the Devildom’s outskirts, tracked the scent of cedar and ivy and sulfur until you found him, seething in a crater of his own creation, freshly charred feathers still littered around him as he lashed out blindly, his aggression without a target but no less volatile for its aimlessness. He was bare save for the ash smeared across his pale skin, and you could make out a lashing tail behind him, a pair of curling horns sprouting from his waist-length hair, a pair of cat-like pawed feet he’d grow out of in a few weeks – all the same shade of black as the obsidian that surrounded him and tipped with a green you could only compare to the color of toxic waste, to the kind of emerald shine an insect might wear to let you know it was venomous. Every part of him practically glowed with rage. If you’d been aware of which throne he would take after he and his brothers found their footing in their new realm in that moment, you would’ve thought it was fitting.

In short, he was beautiful. Awe-inspiringly, breath-takingly beautiful.

And you were never the kind of person who could resist beautiful things.

Carefully, with dampened footsteps and a preference for the shadows, you edged closer to him, never letting Satan leave your peripheral. You were still a hundred or so feet away when he snapped toward you, pointed teeth already bared and curved talons poised to attack. You couldn’t be sure how lucid he was, but whatever happened to be running through that empty mind of his, it wasn’t enough to stop him from snarling at you, from hunching his back and digging his claws into the ground and charging, intent on tearing anything he saw apart before his anger could cool. Elation overwhelmed you. You felt the corners of your lips curl upward as he lunged, your heart practically beating through your chest as his lithe body streaked through the flame-tinged moonlight, as you took in the rabid creature that would be your end. There were sixty feet between you, then forty, and then—

And then, something dark and terrible descended from the clouded sky, tackling Satan and pinning him to the ground. Lucifer, you discovered, once the dust cleared and you could make out his face, his wings (lesser by two and painted the color of impurity, you noted with a not inconsiderable sense of satisfaction). You didn’t wait for him to notice you. Slipping back into the shadows of the wasteland, you stole one more glance toward Satan only to find his attention still fixed on you, unwavering despite his new guardian. Your eyes met his, and without hesitation, you spared him a smile. Of course, he didn’t return the gesture, but you didn’t mind.

You slipped into the night, already dreaming of the day you’d see him again.

By the second time you got so close to Satan, he’d already gained a reputation of his own.

You couldn’t say you weren’t proud. His anger cooled in the months after his conception, and he found a place among his brothers who, in turn, established themselves in the Devildom’s admittedly lax hierarchy of power and pleasure and all the many things that thrived when given reprieve from the harsh light of the sun. You kept your distance. As greedy as you were, you knew better than to get involved with people who knew better than to get involved with you.

Instead, you watched from the crowd as Satan grew into his rank, as the more untamed parts of his demonic nature fell away and he came to resemble something… cleaner, something less animalistic. You didn’t care for the change, but still, you kept track of him. What could you say? Even polished, he was still a gem worth keeping an eye on.

Your dutifulness was rewarded, too. Or, that was what you told yourself, at least, as you picked the lock on the door of the lecture hall where he’d thrown his latest fit, where it’d taken Mammon and Beelzebub’s joint strength to restrain him. You let your fingertips graze past overturned tables and side-stepped the shattered remains of shattered chalkboards and wooden chairs, taking in the proof of his untamed rage as you approached him. He’d been restrained, left to fester in his wrath until he was calm enough to deal with properly. Silver chains adorned with hundreds upon thousands of archaic runes kept him bound to a marble pillar near the center of the classroom, his arms trapped against his side and his more demonic features still on full display, much to your delight.

Despite having been on his own for a few hours, now, his rage had yet to die down. His fangs were still bared, his claws still biting into his own palms, his thorned tail still lashing back and forth behind his back like that of some starving wildcat, agitated that its quarry had been taken away. He only had a fraction of the wild radiance you’d been so captivated by during your first encounter, but still, you found yourself grinning. Even diluted, he was still beautiful.

This time, you didn’t have to mind your distance. You came to a stop less than a full arm’s length in front of him, ducking slightly when the point of his tail made a jab at your throat. “It’s alright, princess,” you started, keeping your voice low, your tone light. Like you were trying to soothe a wild animal – which, to be fair, wasn’t exactly not what you were doing. “I’m not here to hurt you. I just wanted to see that pretty face again.”

He really was so unlike he had been, the first time you’d met. There was a flicker of recognition in those burning eyes, a slight change to his posture. He pressed his back against the pillar, squaring his shoulders as his rabid snarl dulled into a thin scowl. His tail continued to thrash and writhe, but he didn’t try to go for your throat again. “I don’t need your help.”

“I wasn’t going to make an offer.” His eyes narrowed, and you held his piercing gaze for a second, then another, before allowing your attention to drift lower. Surprisingly, his uniform hadn’t been damaged during his rampage, only displaced; his shirt missing a few buttons where he’d torn at the collar, the jacket he always let hang open pushed so far back, it now threatened to fall from his shoulders altogether. What you were looking for lied lower, though – in the unnatural creases and unusual tautness of his pants. It was a common (albeit, no less embarrassing) side-effect of supernatural creatures giving into their true nature, especially for younger demons who never learned how to control their more primal instincts. He probably knew that, but you doubted he knew how to take care of it, just yet. Especially with his older brothers still learning how to handle their own sinful impulses. “I mean, I would be willing to give you a hand, if you need one,” you went on, nodding to his painfully hard cock. “But, if you’d rather seethe and growl in an empty classroom until one of your brothers comes back for you…”

You held up your hands, moving to turn on your heel and leave him alone with his anger, but Satan’s eyes widened, straining against his bondage as he lurched forward, practically drooling at the first hint of fresh blood. “You… you can do something about that?”

The muted excitement in his voice gave away his eagerness, his desperation. You let out a breath of a laugh, taking half a step closer, testing the boundaries before trying to catch such an active spark in your hands. When he didn’t immediately lunge at you, you brought a hand up, cupping his cheek and running your thumb over his jaw. “Of course,” you said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. As if he was the foolish one for being stupid enough to doubt you. “But only if you ask me to. I’m not going out of my way to help someone who’s going to tear my throat out as soon as I’m done.”

And, even then, you could’ve been persuaded to lay back and let him have his way with you if he begged prettily enough. Luckily, he was already distracted, already leaning into your touch and staring up at you with a new kind of reverence. He couldn’t have known he was doing it – his pride wouldn’t have allowed him to. As far as you could tell, this was all instinct. “Do it.”

You sighed, shaking your head. “You’ll have to do better than that, princess.”

He was quiet for a moment, then another. “Please,” he spat, finally, as if the word burnt his tongue. “Please, help me get rid of it.”

“No one’s going to want to do anything with you if you use that tone.” And yet, you stepped forward, resting one hand on his shoulder while the other dropped to the tent in his pants, to his cock. You ground your palm against his shaft through the thick material, and Satan grit his teeth. He didn’t know much, but he knew enough not to debase himself so willingly in front of you. “You’re lucky I’m such a bleeding heart. Otherwise, I would’ve left you here to suffer minutes ago.”

You watched him try to fight it, clenching his eyes shut as he braced himself, putting more effort into limiting his reactions now than he’d ever spared for his temper tantrums. With deft hands and saliva already pooling below your tongue, you shifted his pants down just far enough to free his cock – hard enough to press into his stomach. Like everything else about him, it was beautiful – pale but not ghastly, visibly veined but not overly defined, the head tinted a deep shade of pink you didn’t know you’d held such a fondness for, before you saw it on him. It was already leaking, too – pearls of precum dripping down his length and smearing against your skin as you wrapped your fist around the shaft and pumped lazily, playing indifferent to the way he bucked and writhed underneath you. “This,” you started, slowly, “is called a handjob. You can do it yourself, too, but it’s not as good. You’ll probably just end up making it worse.”

You swiped your thumb over his leaking tip, and he gasped, pressing himself flush against the marble pillar. You heard his restraints rattle and tightened your grip just enough to distract him, to give him something better to think about than getting away. “Pay attention, ‘cause you’re going to have to return the favor. That’s how this kind of thing works – I help you, then you help me.”

He nodded, sucking in a shaky breath. He wasn’t the brightest thing you’d ever come across, but he still might’ve proven himself to be a dutiful-enough student. “A h-handjob.”

“Good boy.” You teased the head of his cock by way of reward, then ground the heel of your palm into his base as a punishment for making you wait. When you were sure the lesson had sunk in, you took to jerking him off in earnest, taking on a pace just on the brink of satisfying and drinking in the little, stuttering moans that dripped past his lips in response. When his legs started to buckle, you worked a knee between his thighs and slotted your chest against his, staring up at him with as much adoration as someone like you could lend to something like him. You felt his cock twitch in your hand, heard his breathing turn raspy and shallow, and without warning, you pulled away, removing yourself from him completely.

He let out a desperate whine, the embodiment of pitiful. With an airy chuckle, you lowered yourself onto your knees, letting your hands fall to his waist. “This one’s a blowjob,” you muttered, just barely loud enough to be audible. He might’ve been a mediocre student, but you were an excellent teacher – always striving to fill curious minds with as much applicable knowledge as you could. “Some people call it oral sex, too. You’ll like it even more.”

His voice was so weak, so prone to cracking and breaking that in another world, it could’ve been cute. “…sex?”

“We’ll get to that later.” You pressed a fleeting kiss into his hip. “Just pay attention to me, for now.”

He really was lucky to have you. Anyone else might not have been able to handle how roughly he thrust into your mouth as soon as you’d taken the leaking head onto your tongue, might not have been willing to put up with his insatiable desire to bury himself in your throat – unaware or uncaring of your desire to breathe. You were patient, though, and strict, eager to swallow him down as deeply as you were able to before pulling back, pinning his hips down, and running the flat of your tongue up the sensitive underside of his cock. Whatever well of self-control he’d been using to bite back his pathetic little noises had clearly run dry. He moaned unabashedly, throwing his head forward and shuddering. His tail lashed out, his body determined to protect itself where his mind was unable to, but you didn’t pull away as it curled around your arm, didn’t waver as its curved thorns shredded your sleeve and sunk into your skin. Rather, you groaned around him, savoring the pure heat dripping down your arm, the way his agony seemed to drive itself under your flesh and make a home there. It was an overdue paradise, one that paled in comparison to what you could’ve had if Lucifer hadn’t interrupted you on that first night. You tried to treasure it all the same.

You fell into a steady rhythm quickly, no longer in the mood to tease him. You kept your eyes open as you bobbed your head, fixed to his flushed cheeks, his pained expression, the way he couldn’t seem to decide whether he wanted to shrink into himself or struggle against his restraints. “Stop, I—” He cut himself off with another moan, a quick jerk of his head to the side. As if there was anything he could do to hide from you, in a state like this. “There’s something wrong with—”

“You’re going to cum,” you corrected, pulling off of him just far enough to speak. With your lips still pressed against the head of his cock, you added, “That means you want me to keep going.”

If he had any mind to protest, he wasn’t able to put his complaints into words. Instead, all he managed to spit out was a fractured sob as you felt him throb against your tongue, as he came undone in your mouth. You milked him for all you had, pumping a fist over his shaft as he clumsily fucked your throat, his inexperience shining through once his inhibitions had been thoroughly pushed to the wayside. When you were sure you’d gotten everything out of him that you could, when your senses had been overwhelmed by the heady taste of him and the proof of your labor sat heavy in the pit of your stomach, you drew back, pushing yourself to your feet and taking in what you’d done to him. He was a mess, his face red and damp with sweat, emerald scales visible just underneath the collar of his shirt. With a slight smile, you fished something out of your pocket – a small, silver cage that you’d liberated from a succubus’ locker about an hour prior, when you heard Satan had lost his temper yet again. It fit the base of his cock as if it’d been made for him – pressing flush against his skin as it snapped into place with a satisfying click. When you were done, you pushed a kiss into the corner of his lips before stepping back.

“When that starts to get uncomfortable,” you started, grinning. “Come and find me.”

You didn’t give him a chance to protest before slipping away, leaving him panting and half-dressed for someone more tender-hearted to take care of.

He made it three weeks before seeking you out. An impressive lapse, considering he’d been hard again by the time you left that classroom.

This time, you made an effort to keep your distance. No more trailing behind him as he walked with his brothers or standing on the outskirts of the crowd as he picked a fight with yet another low-ranking demon – no, what he needed from you now was separation, the time it would take for him to think to look for you in his peripheral and then, later on, to convince himself the pleasure you could give him was worth the blow it’d deal to his ego. You’d started to lose hope by the time bridged the gap at one of Lord Diavolo’s frequent balls, thrown to celebrate Satan and his brothers ascending to the rank of Avatar. No one could seem to remember there ever being a rank by that name before their arrival, but legislation was for the Celestial Realm. Citizens of the Devildom were always more than happy to sample their prince’s generosity, regardless of the occasion.

You’d just finished slipping a stunning silver ring off of a witch’s finger and onto your own when he found you, red-faced and visibly out of breath, as if he’d just run from one side of the castle to the other. You grinned, moving to speak, but he clearly didn’t have an interest in whatever you might’ve said; taking hold of your arm and dragging you out of the main ballroom by way of greeting. You made no effort to resist. Struggling was for people who wanted to run, people who’d lost control and needed to be somewhere else. You, on the other hand, couldn’t imagine being anywhere but here.

You let haul you down a dimly lit hallway and through a simple wooden door – almost meager, by the prince’s standards. It was a storage closet, as far as you could tell, the shelves stocked with miscellaneous supplies and the light limited to what little could flood through the gaps between the doorframe after Satan slammed it behind him. You didn’t mind it, but you would’ve preferred something a little brighter. You would’ve preferred to have him on a podium, underneath a spotlight, where you could see every last inch of his perfect body. You would’ve preferred to have him on a stage, posed to your preference for the approval of an eager audience. You’d always been charitable, like that.

But, you couldn’t linger on how you would’ve liked him when you already had him right in front of you. As soon as he’d ensured you were alone, he was scrambling to find your hand in the darkness, to press your palm into the outline of his throbbing cock and whine – a sound it’d taken him minutes to make, the first time you were alone together. “I can’t take it off, and—and it hurts.” His speech was frantic, disjointed, prone to slipping and tripping over itself between coherent words. You couldn’t imagine how he’d spent the past few weeks. Even his brothers would’ve noticed something was wrong, if he was always this worked up. “The cage burns when I touch it, and it won’t stop leaking—”

“Ah, ah, that’s enough.” The saint that you were, you chose to put him out of his misery sooner rather than later. “Why don’t you show me the problem?”

At that, he froze up, his neediness momentarily overwhelmed by pure, unadulterated shame. His fangs caught on his bottom lip as he looked away from you and towards himself, his hands shaking ever-so-slightly as he brought them to the button of his adorably uncharacteristic dress pants. His brothers must’ve picked out his clothes – partially, at least. You didn’t know whether to be amused or endeared by the fact that he wasn’t quite ready to make decisions for himself, just yet.

Under your instruction, he stripped quickly, the pieces of his suit falling away until he was left exposed in front of you, dressed only in your last gift to him. Speaking of – his cage was… stranger than you’d remembered it bring, the silver bars pulsing with a dull violet glow. A lasting enchantment, you figured. You should’ve expected as much from something you’d snagged from a succubus, those freaks.

You ran a finger over the curved spine, taking a long moment to appreciate the craftsmanship before you turned your attention back to the source of Satan’s suffering: his cock, already hard and, like he’d said, already leaking. You probably should’ve been more selective when it came to how you restrained him. The flesh of his shaft strained painfully against the bars of his cage, the tip already drooling enough pre-cum to smear on your palm and pool on the floor in between his legs. The poor thing looked nearly suffocated – pale and ever so slightly discolored, sensitive enough to twitch and send a rough shudder up the length of Satan’s spine as you ran your thumb over what little of the underside remained exposed. He only had himself to blame, really. If he’d only swallowed his pride and come to you earlier, he wouldn’t need your help so badly now.

He wouldn’t need to prove that he deserved your help, after ignoring you for so many weeks.

“Poor baby,” you half-cooed, taking his face in your hands and pressing a lingering kiss into his forehead. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t be able to take something so difficult so soon. I’m sorry for making you suffer, like this.”

Immediately, you felt him stiffen. You could only hope it was a habit he’d never grow out of. You couldn’t imagine a version of Satan who was driven by anything other than the ongoing, everlasting need to prove himself and, when that failed, tear down everything that could claim he hadn’t. “I’m fine,” he said, as if he hadn’t been on the verge of tears only a second ago. “I could take this and more, if I needed to. It’s just— you said I would need to find you, eventually, and I wanted to get it over with before—”

“That’s enough.” You were sure he would’ve gone on for the next century if you let him, but you weren’t really interested in what he had to say. Not while he was so put-together, at least. “Do you want my help or not?”

He might’ve been a bad liar, but to his credit, he wasn’t delusional. Shakily, he nodded, keeping his lips pursed and his eyes pleading.

“Is that all you’re going to give me to work with?”

“…please.” He was more hesitant than he’d been the first time, but not quite so acidic, not quite so aggressive. He was begging, now, and you could never seem to turn away those in-need. “I’ll do anything.”

You sighed, the gesture airy and drawn-out. Eventually, when it seemed like his already-tenuous patience was starting to thin, you let your touch fall away from him altogether. “Why don’t you get on your knees?”

His expression fell – not so much disappointed as he was confused. “How will that—”

“I have other things to do tonight.” An expectant smile, a nod towards the floor. “I can’t help me if you don’t help me too, Satan.”

The weight of his given name seemed to do the trick. Slowly, his movements stilted and reluctant, he lowered himself onto his knees, his eyes quickly falling away from yours and find a home in his lap. You were glad you’d chosen to wear what you had – making quick work of the sashing binding your robes together and discarding your panties while Satan watched out of the corner of his eye, too embarrassed to stare but too curious not to look. You were tempted to take him by the hair, to find something to wrap around his neck and pull it tighter and tighter until he was exactly where you wanted him to be, but you couldn’t let yourself be so selfish. You couldn’t let yourself forget to take care of him – even if you could justify putting it off until he’d taken care of you.

With little warning, you brought up a foot and ground the toe of your heeled shoe into the shaft of his caged cock. He hissed, throwing his head forward and shrinking into himself, shrinking against you; his chest pressing into your thigh as he bucked mindlessly against your foot, the lewd act coming to him more naturally than you ever could’ve dreamed. Now, you raked your fingers through his hair, jerking him upward and guiding his mouth to your cunt. His eyes widened, a surprised grunt slipping out of some vulnerable pocket of his chest, but you held him in place. “Remember what I showed you last time?”

He hesitated, but not for very long. There was a slight lapse, a pause as he tried to bridge the gap between your anatomy and his, but after a moment of scraping your dull nails over his scalp, of grinning down at him with as much love and patience as you could muster, he let his eyes fall shut and opened his mouth, his tongue darting part his lips and lapping tentatively over your slit. His next swipe was a touch more confident, and the same went for the one after that, and the one after that. A slight groan bubbled up from the base of his throat, his hands coming to rest on your thighs – his curved talons biting shallowly into your skin. You embraced the spark of pain without complaint. As if you had the heart to interrupt such a valuable learning moment.

It was slow work – as sloppy as it was messy, his enthusiasm barely managing to overshadow his inexperience. You couldn’t tell how much of it was on purpose, if he meant to grind the bridge of his nose against your clit, if there was any rhyme or rhythm to how he drew his tongue over your entrance, but it was savage enough, animalistic enough to draw a shallow moan from your lips, to earn the flattened edge of your heel ground against his cock. It took ages for his tongue to slip into you, the tapered point curling and probing against the walls of your cunt. He was lucky to have been born such a rabid creature, to have been gifted such a pretty face. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be worth a minute of your time.

It was a good effort, but it wasn’t enough. With a sharp jerk to his hair, you pulled him away from you and threw him to the ground, his pointed talons leaving a row of raised skin in their wake. With a startled expression and a fog over his eyes, he blinked up at you, barely bothering to try and push himself up before you brought your heel down on his chest and pushed him flush against the floor. “Stay down.” You flashed him a smile, trying to pretend you meant for it to be comforting. “Don’t you trust me?”

He didn’t answer. You didn’t wait for him to, shedding your robes completely and straddling his waist. His prep work had been… minimalistic, to put it kindly, but you’d never been one to back down from a challenge. You met his eyes, holding his half-lidded gaze as you wrapped your hand around his cock and pulled his cage away as easily as if it’d never been there at all.

You took slow, agonizing seconds to line him up with your entrance, rolling your hips to spread his precum over your slit. He let out a slight whimper, then managed to find his voice. “What… what are doing?”

“I think I’ve already told you about this one,” you said, your smile now genuine. “We’re going to make love, princess.”

In your own defense, you gave him a chance to protest, to complain, to throw you off of him and rejoin his brothers in the prince’s ballroom. You waited a second, then another, and when he failed to do anything more than stare up at you with that pleading expression, you lowered yourself onto him, only stopping when you were sure he’d bottomed out.

You were able to bite back your voice, but Satan wasn’t so skilled when it came to hiding his reactions. His body went stiff underneath yours, his eyes falling shut as a sinful moan trickled past his lips. You heard his breath hitch, felt his cock twitch, and then he was coming undone inside of you, likely marking the first time he’d cum inside of anyone, because of anything but your mouth. You couldn’t help but laugh, drinking in his fractured whines as you started moving, rolling your hips and grinding against him, riding him properly – not that he’d know the difference. “S-stop,” he managed, though little pained noises and blissful gasps. “It— It hurts—”

Overstimulation, clearly. It was amazing, how sensitive a demon so ferocious could be. “You’ll like it once you calm down. Just try to tough it out for me, alright?” With one hand on his chest, you let the other slip between your legs and to your clit, sorely neglected by his earlier guesswork. “I’ve made you cum… how many times now? Twice? I think I get to take a little something for myself.”

If he was capable of responding, he didn’t seem to think it was worth the effort. Instead, he only collapsed underneath you, his talons scraping against the stone floor and his point fangs biting at his own lips while you used his cock as your own, personal toy; as something to be played with but otherwise left on the outskirts of your consideration. While he might’ve been willing to fuck anything you put in front of him, you held yourself to higher standards, seeking out whatever made heat pool in your core and that aching knot in the pit of your stomach draw itself that much tighter with a refined sense of determination. You’d known how pretty he was, but there was a different kind of beauty to the way he looked writhing below you, to the pitiful sounds he made every time you clenched around him or moved in a way that threatened to milk his cock – still hard, despite his whining, still needy – dry. It was clumsy, little more than reflex winning over dower rationality, but he tried to move his hips in time with yours, to seek out the heat of your cunt whenever you threatened to pull away and abandon him completely. Not that you were going to. As pathetic as his sensitivity was, you weren’t much better – the anticipation you’d built up in his absence more than enough to make up for his inexperience. Your climax rolled over you in thick, lethargic waves, dimming the edges of your vision and pulling a raspy, vaguely humored gasp from somewhere deep in your chest. It wasn’t much, but it was enough. You’d make him keep going until he gave you something better, next time.

Tonight, though, you had better things to do than babysit. With a shallow inhale and a moment taken to compose yourself, you pulled away from him and pushed yourself to your feet. Satan let out a displeased growl, loud enough and deep enough to rattle off the walls of the storage closet, but you shut him up quickly, pressing the sole of your boot into his shaft and rocking with just enough force to leave him spilling ropes of thick, ivory cum on his stomach, the evidence of his depravity left splattered against the pale skin of his midriff and the dark leather of your shoes. He moved to grab your ankle, to keep you that much closer to him for that much longer, but you pulled back, straightening yourself and shrugging your robes back on while Satan watched you, his eyes glassy and his fangs bared. “Maybe, next time, you’ll be able to take the lead,” you wondered aloud, then laughed. “Wouldn’t count on it, though. I think you’re cuter when you don’t have to think for yourself.”

You could still feel his eyes burning into you as you slipped back into the castle.

He started asking you to meet him in the House of Lamentation, after that. You told him you didn’t have a problem with empty classrooms and storage closets, but he insisted. You weren’t surprised. Just as he was learning that he would have to be well-behaved for you, you were starting to realize that you’d have to be gentler than anticipated with him.

That’s what you were doing now – being gentle. The collar wrapped around his neck was loose and lightweight, the leash that connected his throat to your hand allowed to fall lax for the moment, at least until the next time he did something that you would need to. You’d even let him take charge, laying back while he buried his face between your thighs, a skill he was eager to hone after you admitted his natural talent left more than a little to be desired. He was making progress, too. He’d learned to bite back his pride while he lapped over your cunt and pushed aimless patterns into your clit, spurred on by every twitch and moan he could draw out of you. There was a pillow between his legs, something soft and pliable he could grind against while he took care of you, but the thin golden ring sitting at the base of his cock made sure he wouldn’t have his fun before you had yours. This one wasn’t enchanted (you’d been tempted, but magic could be fickle and you didn’t want to bring an arcane locksmith into your time with him), but it worked well enough, and he’d never really gotten the hang of taking care of himself. To be fair, that was something he didn’t have to learn. He had you to dote on him, and you weren’t going anywhere. Not for a few hours, at least.

His hand curled around your hips, spreading you open further as the tapered end of his tongue lavished your clit, his drool mixing with your slick and staining the inside of your thighs. You let your eyes fall shut, using your legs to pull him closer as you bucked into his mouth and used his tongue to nurse yourself through your climax, only letting him go when the first pangs of overstimulation began to set in. Even without your encouragement, he didn’t go far. You felt the mattress shift, sensed his body on top of yours, and then, his mouth was crashing into your own, his kiss all teeth and tongue and violent lust. Within seconds, you could taste your blood on his lips, make out the little, airy noises only partially muffled by your connection. You could—

Your fist was crashing into his cheek before you had time to think, to stop yourself. Your knuckles caught his jaw with enough force to pry him off of you and leave him on the floor, still sitting up but visibly folded into himself. You cursed under your breath, your eyes only flitting to the door once before you lowered yourself to the ground beside him. There was a half-hearted snarl, but it died in his throat as soon as you were close enough to cup his cheek. You let out a softened coo as you pulled him close, pressing a fleeting kiss into his forehead. “Ah, I know, I know.” Another kiss, this one to the bruise forming along his jaw. Your remorse, although left mostly unspoken, was genuine. Anyone would’ve mourned leaving a mark on such a beautiful face. “Are you hurt?”

“As if something like that would affect an Avatar.”

As sharp-tongued as he was defensive. You were thankful for his ego-serving tendencies in this moment more than most. With an airy laugh, you strung your arms over his shoulders and let him bury his face in the dip of your shoulder. “Just don’t surprise me like that again, alright?” And then, after he managed to nod, “I know you’re strong enough to take it, but it’d break my heart to see you get hurt. Because of something so trivial, especially.”

When he didn’t pull away, didn’t respond at all, you sighed. “Do you have anything to say to me?”

It was little more than a mumble, spoke just under his breath. “Thank you,” he paused, melted that much further into you, “for taking care of me.”

“Good boy.”

You left a few minutes later, dressed in one of his shirts and little else. For your own peace of mind, you decided not to think about how long it’d been since you’d seen him bury his teeth in anything aside from you.

Honestly, it’d been weeks since you’d seen his fangs at all.

You’d had this problem before. Ever the romantic, your idle mind tended to linger on what couldn’t be reclaimed, to drive you towards the pursuit of wild beauty despite knowing that truly untamed things couldn’t be found twice, let alone a few times a week, whenever the careful surveillance of his brothers lapsed and Satan could seek you out like some mangy, prowling predator, spurred on by the promise of relief. Really, you would’ve given up on him after that first encounter, after he failed to sink his claws into your neck, or—

A ragged grunt drew you out of your thoughts and back into the present moment, back to Satan where he hovered above you. You were in some shadowed tunnel of the catacombs underneath the House of Lamentation, tonight, and you’d been kind enough to let him take charge, to keep your thighs wrapped around his waist as he fucked into you like a trained mutt, rather than the wild animal you were looking for. The stone of the altar he’d laid you over was cool against your skin, his horns pleasantly calloused where your hands were wrapped around them, and yet, your mind still wandered, the feeling of his cock beating against the walls of your cunt numbed by your lack of interest. Satan was less unaffected, his eyes clenching shut as he buckled against you, burying his face in your chest as he pushed open-mouthed kisses into whatever he could reach. It was sickening, the thought that he might’ve wanted you to return such tender affection. It was sickening, the thought that he could be capable of being so banal.

His hips crashed into yours, and you felt his lips turn upward, his cock twitch inside of you. “I think—” A pitchy whine, a half-swallowed whimper. “I think I’m in love with you.”

God. You might’ve been starting to hate him.

You let your hands fall to his shoulders. “Down, boy.”

He shook his head, too lost in his own bliss to listen to you. You scowled, shoving lightly at his chest, attempting more to get his attention than to force him off of you. “Down. Unless you want me to assume you’ve forgotten how to be obedient.”

“I—I love you,” he repeated, and then again, “I love you.” One of your legs was forced over his shoulder, his chest pressed almost flush to yours – bending you in half in a way that would’ve been painful, if you’d been anyone else. You let out a throaty growl, marking the first time you’d stopped to his level, but Satan didn’t hesitate, didn’t relent, only bowing his head and letting his rhythm deteriorate into something less calculated, less taught. You would’ve been pleased, if you hadn’t been so angry with him. “We— We’re going to be together, and you’re going to be mine, and I’m going to be—”

You could see tears running down his cheeks, hear his voice shake from something entirely separate from pleasure or desperation. You cursed under your breath, dragging your nails down the length of his spine and clawing at his back with enough force to break the skin, but he didn’t seem to notice, didn’t seem to mind, to care, to notice.“I’ll be yours.” He sounded so pathetically determined, as he thought it would come true if he only spoke loudly enough, if he only fucked you desperately enough. He probably did. You’d never taught him any better, and you weren’t sure he had anyone else who would even know to try. “I’ll only be yours.”

You were struggling, now, thrashing underneath him, but he was still an Avatar, still ranks above any station you would ever be able to reach. He held you in a bone-crushing, heart-wrenching embrace; close enough for you to feel his heart beating through his chest, to pick up on the half-muffled sobs catching in his throat. He only pulled away to bring one of his hands up to your jaw, to hold you in place while he pressed his lips against yours in a kiss so soft and so gentle, you would’ve been tempted to call it loving had it not been so vile.

By the time he drew back, he was smiling, and you couldn’t seem to remember why you’d ever thought he could be anything but hideous.

“And you’ll never have to leave again.”

#yandere #yandere x reader #yandere x you #yandere imagines #yandere oneshot #yandere obey me #obey me #obey me imagines #yandere satan #satan x reader #satan x you #om satan x reader #om satan x you #yanderecore #yancore

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pandorxxx · 11 months

Text

Damsel (Chapter 1)

??? x Ash Na’vi fem reader (All aged up)

Warnings: light cursing, heat cycles, injuries (blood), fingering, self pleasure, voyeurism, heavy mentions of sex, intense orgasm.

🔞mdni🔞

Synopsis: a hunting trip gone terribly wrong. Ending in you on the wrong side of the forest, hurt, scared, and in heat. What happens when the son of Toruk Makto finds you?

Agony. Pain. Fear. Need you say more?

Your Aegean skin was cold and damp from your sweat. Yet you were hot, everywhere. Your womb ached and burned from your current state. Your heat was near.

Your weekly hunting trip was cut short because of it. You were on the wrong side of the forest in the middle of the night. Scared? No. Scared wasn’t even the word. You were frightened, paranoid even.

It was a written rule that the ash clan and Omatikayan people didn’t get along. Never have, never will. And there you were, weak, hurt, and vulnerable in their forest.

You laid against the hard bark of a tree. Writhing in your own pain. You were a delirious mess, panting, trying to fill your burning lungs with air. You occasionally would flutter in and out of consciousness in exhaustion. But would quickly gasp for air when you found yourself doing so.

Your plan was to stay still and quiet until sunrise, praying that you wouldn’t come across a native Navi, or any of their angry creatures.

Not to mention the crippling pain you were in. There was no way you could stand with out assistance. Your whole body was trembling, hot to the touch.

Your loincloth was soaked with your slick, smearing against your trembling thighs. But your delirium deemed it quite impossible to even attempt to satisfy yourself.

You knew you were hurt, and the pain was coming from your leg. However, your vision was blurred with the constant flow of tears.

Oh, how you wished to be home.

You contemplated with yourself:

If you were to stay out here, it was a very slim chance at your survival. But maybe if you just tried hard enough to stand, you could get out of the forest.

You choose the latter, using what strength you had in your arms to attempt at shimmying up the tree. It was a slow and steady stride, your back becoming scraped from the pressure on the bark.

You used your un-injured leg to push your body up. Whimpering and whining the entire way. And just when you thought you had it, your knees buckled under you, sending you tumbling back down the tree with a loud thud. “Fuck.” You strained, leaning your head back against the tree in frustration.

If no one knew of your presence, they sure did now. “Who’s there?” A deep voice uttered in the shadows. You audibly gasped, immediately palming your mouth in an attempt to keep yourself quiet.

His strong, muscular arm made an appearance before he did. He held his bow, ready to shoot if necessary. The darker shade of blue and his stripe pattern told you everything you needed to know.

Next was his broad back. Muscles flexing with every turn he made. His strong legs, legs of a true warrior. His steps were slow and quiet, scanning his area. His hair shaking dramatically with every turn of his head. He was…beautiful. But dangerous to you. So you kept quiet, stopped your breathing, hoping that he would soon walk away.

Unlucky for you, a wave of pain washed over your leg. Throbbing uncontrollably and unbearably. To the point that you had no other choice but to let out a soft whimper. His ears perked, and his entire body turned to you in an instance, drawing his bow back simultaneously.

“PLEASE. IM HURT.” You whimpered, trembling hands going up in surrender. His amber eyes widened at you, slowly turning the bow away from your small frame.

He scanned you from a distance, ruling out your potential to be a threat to him. His eyebrows were ruffled in confusion while your eyes were riddled with fear.

“I-I can’t move. Please, don’t hurt me.” You strained, shaking your head in fear as your eyes welled with more tears than before.

“I won’t hurt you.” He reassured, bending down to place his bow on the mossy ground. He looked into your eyes, his demeanor becoming softer. He threw his hands up in surrender to show you that he meant no harm to you.

“See? It’s fine.” He nodded, standing to his full height slowly, hands still up to keep you comfortable with his presence.

You eyed him frantically, still unsure about his intentions. Yet and still you nodded slowly, letting him know that you understood.

He smiled nervously, scanning your entire frame for a moment. He started at your wet, curly hair that flowed down your shoulders. Your damp, muted blue skin told him that you weren’t omatikayan. And so did your black, crystal embroidered cloths. Then his eye contact trailed down to your bloody leg, and his breathing hitched.

“Eywa, You’re bleeding, miss.” He spoke with concern, darting over to you. His quick strides made you scoot back against the tree in fear, and he noticed.

“Shit! I-I’m sorry. I don’t mean to scare you.” He shook his head, squatting down in-front of you. The night breeze provided you with a wiff of his musky scent, so addictive to you in this state. Your eyes fluttered between amber and chartreuse with each blink as you tried to snap out of it.

His eyes squinted slightly in confusion. “Are you ok?” He asked, scanning your entire body again.

“I’m…in heat.” You spoke with a shaky voice, jaw clenching in restraint as your eyes trailed his broad chest.

His eyes widened, realizing that you might actually be a threat to him in your state. There was so much going on that he didn’t even realize your strong pheromones that lingered until you confessed. As addictive as they became, he used all the possible restraint he could muster to tend to you. “Yes. I-I know now. You’re at the height of it.” He nodded, sending you a smile riddled with pity.

“Can I?” He asked, pointing at your injured leg. You sighed, closing your eyes in exhaustion before opening them again. You gave him a hesitant nod as consent. He reached for your leg slowly, gently grazing your skin before grabbing it gently.

You jumped at the contact. His touch was firm and satisfying. Like ice on a burn. He halted his movements, shooting his head up at you.

“Sorry. Did I hurt you?” He asked in concern. You shook your head slowly. Eyeing his chiseled frame. “Your hands are…strong.” You strained, admiring how his entire hand wrapped around your calf with no problem. He looked down as well, a light chuckle rumbling in his chest.

“Yeah, they are, aren’t they?” He nodded, shooting you a lighthearted smile. You blushed through the pain, nodding your head in response. He began to pull out an elastic bandage from his woven pouch, unrolling it to the size he needed.

“So, what’s your name? I-if you’re comfortable with sharing.” He asked, taking a seat in-front of you, placing your ankle on his thigh. You watched intently. “Y/n.” You whispered, watching him cut the bandage with his dagger.

“Y/n, Huh? That’s very pretty.” He smiled, laser focused on stretching the bandage. You watched his abs and arms flex with each pull of the bandage. Putting you in a trance.

“Hey, you alright?” He asked, watching your eyes flash between amber and chartreuse again. You shook your head, eyes becoming normal again. You sighed in frustration, snapping your attention to his concerned face.

“It’s close. Really close.” You nodded, watching him tie the bandage gently around your womb. He sighed as well, feeling so much pity for you in this moment.

“Im so sorry, y/n. Trust me, I know how much pain you’re in right now. Just stay calm, ok?” He sent you a soft glance. You nodded, still watching him bandage your leg up. Silence fell for a few seconds before you broke the ice.

“I-I never asked your name.” You stuttered, trailing your eyes back to his face. “Neteyam. My name is Neteyam. It’s nice to meet you. I wish it was under better circumstances of course.” He chuckled, still focused on your leg.

“Neteyam?” You whimpered, voice shaky and full of fear. His eyes shot up at you in concern. “What’s the matter?” He asked, hurrying to secure the bandage.

“I’m scared.” You whispered, teeth chattering together as tears fell from your puffy eyes. His gaze became soft, gently letting your leg down on the ground to wipe your tears.“I know, I know. Is this your first heat?” He asked, caressing your cheek with his thumb.

“Yes. I-I feel…hot.” You whined, nuzzling your head into his hand with a soft purr rumbling in your chest. Your tail began to tap the mossy ground beneath you, and that’s all he needed to know. He soon realized that his presence was speeding your heat up, making it more intense for you. An although you were tempting, he had no intentions on helping you through this.

“Where? Where is it hot. Show me.” He asked hesitantly. You grabbed his hand, trailing it down to your stomach. He sighed, watching intently.

You then proceeded to slide his hand down lower, until it reached your slimy loincloth, soaked with your slick. You slid his strong hand in between your legs, closing them around his arm. Your head flew back against the tree, letting out a soft moan at the friction.

His eyes widened, watching you slightly roll your hips to hump his hand, using it for any type of relief you could get. Even if it wasn’t much.

“Y/n. I-I know you’re not well right now. But I can take you to my grandmother, she can help you.” He reassured, his gaze still set on the sight in-front of him.

You shook your head in disagreement. Eyes falling shut as you whimpered loudly at his firm hand against your clothed cunt. “Your people will hurt me.” You moaned, holding onto his strong arm, using it as leverage to speed up the pace.

“Listen, I-I know our people don’t get along. But I promise…they won’t hurt you. My father is olo’eyktan, I can talk to him.” He explained, his voice straining in restraint at your scent. Your addictive scent.

“No. Just help me, now. I-It hurts.” You whimpered, hooking your fingers under your loincloth, shimmying it down to your ankles.

“I can’t help you. You could get pregnant, y/n. And my father would skin me.” He explained, his words going in one ear and out the other as you spread your legs wide. Your thighs connected together with numerous strings of slick as they pulled apart. Your juices flowed out of you like a slow leak, trickling to the mossy ground beneath you.

“Fuck.” Neteyam whispered, running his hand through his hair. His jaw clenched in restraint, eyeing your glistening cunt. “Just touch me then. Please, neteyam. I-I can’t take it anymore.” You cried, using the pad of your fingers to rub circles into your sensitive clit. Your moans became progressively louder as you rolled your hips against your hand.

You spread your folds opened with two fingers. Using the other hand to lightly tap on your clit, sending you into overdrive. Neteyam was stuck, his cock throbbing against the tight fabric that held it. He was completely tranced by your scent and your erotic behavior. All he could do was watch you.

Your eyes rolled back at the sensation, finally sliding all 3 of your fingers inside of yourself, coaxing the nastiest squelching sounds with each thrust of your hand. Your eyes came back from there trip behind your sockets as a glowing bright green, pupils replaced with slits. Your heat had taken over.

His eyes widened, mouth slightly agape as he watched you aggressively fuck your hand, looking for some sort of relief. And finally, it was coming. Your stomach visibly tensed, and your whimpers became so loud to the point where Neteyam had to cover your mouth as you pleasured yourself.

“Gonna cum?” He asked, staring at you in awe. You nodded lazily, tears flowing down your face as you whimpered into his hand.

“Ok, go ahead. But you have to keep it down.” He whispered. His deep voice being all the motivation you needed. Your eyes rolled back again, legs trembling uncontrollably.

And just like that, you had came undone. Squirting all over Neteyam’s lower abdomen, tapping your clit to make the orgasm more intense.

“Oh my fucking God.” He muttered breathily, muffling your screams with his hand. His eyes scanned his soaking wet stomach before trailing back up to your face. Eyebrows scrunched together as you came down form your intense high.

“Feeling…better?” He asked, already knowing what your answer would be. With his hand still over your mouth, you shook your head with a small whimper. He sighed, taking his hand from your mouth.

“I-I need you. I need this.” You whined, grabbing his bulge, massaging it in your dainty hands. He grunted, watching you slide your hand into his loincloth to feel him. He let out a series of low curses, squeezing his eyes shut. Although Neteyam was a man of great restraint, it was slipping away from him quickly.

And this was the moment that he realized, he had gotten himself into a very tricky situation.

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netherfeildren · 9 months

Text

The Cassandra Complex : Chapter I : Apollo

Series Masterlist

(Din Djarin x F!Reader)

Summary: Enter: A man who is not so much a man, but an effigy, a wound of steel and armor and Creed – secrecy and masked faces, above all else.

Enter: A girl who is not a girl, but a creature helmed in darkness and spit out unto the galaxy broken and unmoored.

Enter: The creation of myth.

Content Warnings: Dominant Din Djarin; Unprotected sex; Creampie;Size difference; Size kink; Rough sex; Overstimulation; Spanking; Brat taming; Touched-Starved Din Djarin

Rating: Explicit 18+

A/N: Hello, friends, and welcome to the new story!

A few notes: We are starting prior to season one’s canon, and I am doing what I want and making it so that Din already knows about the Force and the Jedi. I make free use of canon and the timeline in whatever way I see fit to suit my own horny purposes, sorry. If things aren’t canon or don’t make sense pls don’t tell me. I am naught but a fragile flower who wilts under harsh criticism.

Please note as well, that I do describe the FMC as having two different colored eyes although I do not specify what color they are.

Also, I will be updating the tags as we go along so as to avoid spoiling too much too early on.

Thank you and enjoy!

Word count: 8.1K

Read on AO3

PART I

CHAPTER I : APOLLO

Is it a god inside you, girl?

Anne Carson, Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

The first time you meet, he’s sitting in the corner of the shithole cantina on the shithole backwater planet you currently find yourself on: Nevarro. Sometimes you were wont to flight – in search of a nowhere place in the middle of a nowhere part of the galaxy to lose yourself. And the barren landscape of the volcanic planet, a broken star of red, the only interruption in the black field of ash, no wind, no life, no sound; it provides the perfect environment for getting lost when necessary.

And then one day, unexpectedly: him. He is a shining, metallic, mountain of a man.

Mandalorian.

Whenever you’d felt too suffocated, strangulated, in need of a moment, a breather, a reprieve from the reality of what you were… what you are becoming – this place is enough of nothing to be just the perfect something. When you’re not busy flitting from planet to planet, sector to sector, looking for something to fill the gnawing void within you. Before landing here, you’d been on Sorgan for a time. It’d been… nice… peaceful, or whatever approximation of peace you could partially recognize after an existence such as that which you were currently trying to run from. A temperate climate, kind people, but after a while, you’d happened upon a community one day, and they’d been so… so together, so familiar. Happy, they’d be so openly, unabashedly, uncomplicatedly happy. It was simple, and it had made a terrible lance of poisonous jealousy roil through you. Jealousy and anger and bitterness and a loneliness so painful that you’d had to flee, as far and as fast as you could from the reflection of all your envy and shame. And so you’d come here instead, to Nevarro. A more barren, emptier sort of place – better suited to your ilk.

“I’ve never met a Mandalorian before,” you croon up at him, smoothly sliding into the booth he’s currently occupying in the furthest dark corner of the cantina, only the gleaming silver crescent of the curve of his helmet visible from the other side of the room.

This is the first of many lies you will tell him.

No response. Only the dark, yawning pit of his visor faced slightly away from you.

The stark curve of his helmet gleams brightly. Beautiful. He looks strong, thickly built. His shoulders, so broad. The armor adorning his torso is beaten and worn, and yet, there’s something so… what’s the word? Lived, perhaps, about the facade of him. This is a creature who has lived – who has seen things, who has battled and survived and most assuredly killed.

Maybe a little like you, but good. For this you know with certainty about Mandalorians – a flash of a pained scream, beskar crumbling beneath the force of you, for not even what could be considered the most endurable alloy in the galaxy could withstand something of your nature, blood, so much blood, and the sound of such defeat as you do the unforgivable– they are good and honorable and worthy – great warriors. But perhaps, on the surface, with a face of shared, painful history, of survival, maybe there are some things between the two of you which could be called similar.

“I’ve always been curious, though… Always wanted to meet one.” You sidle closer to him. There’s something about him, the weapons, the breadth of his shoulders, the silence, which starts a chilled little shiver of fear that flashes and coalesces into something hotter and wetter deep in your belly, the closer you get to him. And the feeling of it – of apprehension, of standing in the presence of something other, something that could perhaps best, even you, it is exciting and arousing and different to everything else you’ve ever encountered.

Still no response.

“You’re hard to come by now. Not many of you left, right?” A curdle of shame and regret hidden beneath your wry tone, “A girl’s got to get extra lucky to find something as interesting as you nowadays… something as pretty too.”

He does react to this, finally, and a little shock of victory fizzes in your belly at the fact that he’s at last deigned to give you even a semblance of his attention, for you are desperately in want of it, as he turns his helmet the fraction of an inch in your direction at the sound of you calling him pretty. So, it seems even a Mandalorian is victim to vanity.

“Oh, so you can hear under there,” you quip, “I was beginning to worry…”

And then his voice, deep, and of potentially the lowest and smoothest baritone you’ve ever heard, comes through the modulator, “I can hear.” Clipped, and even maybe, a little cold.

“And he speaks too!” He flexes open the fingers of the gloved hand that lays on the table. You’re annoying him. “How exciting.” You cross one knee over the other, elbow propped up on the edge of the table and chin cupped in your palm, looking up at him. He’s tall, even sitting. Your joint presses into the hard muscle of his thigh, and you feel him scoot just the tiniest bit away from you. You have the uncontrollable urge to snap your teeth at him. You must surely be at least half his size, especially with all that beskar covering him. Don’t act so scared, big, bad Mandalorian. I’m just a little girl. You don’t know what I actually am.

Helmet now turned entirely in your direction to keep an eye on you, he says, “What are you?” Or… whoops, maybe he does know.

You ignore his question. “You know, I met a whore once – who claimed she’d fucked a Mandalorian. Is it true you just pull out the important bits and get on with it? Seems a bit cold, no? Even for a paid fuck?” He jolts a little at your vulgarity, and you flash him a wide grin, wriggle one delicate eyebrow provocatively. “No game?”

He turns his body to face you more fully now too, his thigh pressing into yours once again as he takes you on directly. Perhaps a warrior's instinct that can sense he is not in the presence of something to be trifled with. The helmet cocks slowly to the side. Silent, silent. Not one for many words this Mandalorian, although, it seems you’ve provoked him now.

“What are you?” he says again, voice measured.

“How do you mean?” You let your voice end on an upward lilt, and he shifts minutely, as if agitated at your uncooperativeness.

“You’re not– I don’t–” The helmet tilts the other way as if inspecting you, and you cut him off before he can finish.

“Oh, so many things.” You roll your hand on your wrist in a fluttering wave, tapping your fingers quickly against your thumb one by one, flexing a muscle you’ve not allowed yourself to use in a while and repressing it, all at once. You’re watching him so closely you see the small pivot of his neck to glance at your hand, and then back to your face. “Who can keep track anymore? So many strange creatures roaming the galaxy after the fall of everything. The Empire. We’re all just madly careening around as whatever the moment requires of us, aren’t we?” He’s quiet, still inspecting you, and you feel his gaze like a brand on the skin of your face. Like fire, like something that you remember from a nightmare, and that you think should be painful, but now only feels exciting. “So, what are you, Mandalorian? What does the present moment require of you?”

He goes silent again, and you watch the subtle downward tilt of his helmet as he inspects the length of you. You wish you could see if he was ogling the tight swell of your breasts beneath your dark clothes. You tilt your head side to side, smile big at him again, and you’re pretty sure you hear an agitated little huff of annoyance slip through the modulator.

And then: “I’m not interested.” He turns back to face away from you, both fists now firmly planted on the table’s surface, clenched into tight balls of clear annoyance. “Go away.”

Oh, he’s funny too. You throw your head back in a quick laugh, “Did I offer something?”

Silence.

“Dirty mind, Mandalorian.” You drag the vowels out to irk him just that extra bit more. “What? Just because I made one little mention of a whore means that, I too, must be peddling my wares?” And you knock your knee into his beskar clad thigh again. He scoots a smidge away from you, and you follow him, laughing again. Oh, you really should stop provoking him, but it’s just turning out to be too much fun. And you’d been watching him for weeks now, every time he came in here for a new bounty puck. You’d so wanted to talk to him, had snooped around to find out he’s in the Guild, and now you finally are. It was just too much for a girl who had too much time on her hands, and too many ugly thoughts she’d rather forget, roaming around in her mind, to look away from a moment of distraction such as this.

“Stop,” and it sounds like he’s gritting his teeth.

You snicker. “Stop what?” in a sing-songed lilt that you know must be grinding his gears. Poor, shiny Mandalorian.

“Whatever it is you’re doing – speaking to me like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like you want something from me.”

“What could I possibly want from you?” You bat your eyelashes at him. “Who’s the one peddling their wares now, Mandalorian, hmm?” He says nothing now, and you know you’re pushing him, you can see the vibration of his restrained agitation in the lines of his thick arms, but there is something needling and annoying and obnoxious inside of you that wants his attention, that wants to incite him. And so you make a mistake that perhaps, is not a mistake at all, but a call for something more, for a reaction from him because as you slowly start to lift a single finger up towards the curve of his helmet, you say, “Tell me, what do you have to offer?” At the same time, he pivots and snaps up to grasp the thin of your wrist in a bone crushing grip as you’re about to make contact with the smooth surface of the gleaming beskar helmet. And you know you were asking for it, that you should never have even insinuated that you were going to touch a Mandalorian’s helmet, and that this is only your own doing, but as his harsh strength makes contact with you, so unexpectedly, he’s so fast, that you’re caught almost entirely unaware, you react on pure instinct. A reflex so embedded into the deepest and most poisoned recesses of your mind, that despite the fact that you know this is the last sort of reaction you should exhibit, that above all else you needed to keep this part of yourself hidden and secreted away from the rest of the galaxy, you can’t help yourself when, at the moment that his crushing strength slams your hand back down onto the table, twisting painfully so that you’re crying out in shock and hurt, you weren’t going to do anything to him, you just wanted to touch a little, you can’t help it when you let go of the reins on your power, and you feel the Force snap out of you like a band of rubber, to crack out and wrap around his arm and rip his painful grip away from you. Another inviolable tendril shoves against his chest plate to push him back. His movements, too abrupt, too unexpectedly aggressive to give you a moment to temper your reaction, to give you a chance to remind yourself that this is not one of your painful, dark memories, that you’re free, you’re free, you’re free, and suppress your reaction to not reveal yourself.

The two of you pause for one long moment, him by force, and you in shock and fear and slight nausea as you pant breathlessly. It’s been a long time since you’ve lashed out like this, since you’ve used the Force in front of another person, and the sensation of being perceived, of being seen for what you truly are is disequilibrating and terrifying and sickeningly liberating all at the same time.

One thick arm of his is held up and pinned against the back of the booth the two of you are ensconced in, hidden from prying eyes, at least. His legs start to shift restlessly, seeking purchase or trying to kick out, and you pin him there too, lest he try and hurt you again.

“I do not like to be handled so,” you admonish him, clicking your tongue. You can feel the seething fury rolling off him. “I wasn’t going to do anything to you. I am not going to do anything to you.” He’s got a blaster strapped into a holster at his thigh, and you’re sure his vambrace is hiding several other nasty tricks up his sleeve. You eye them both. “If I let you go, are you going to try and hurt me again?”

“No,” he growls out.

“No,” you mock back, but release him anyway, letting an impenetrable wall settle between the two of you. He immediately goes for his blaster, and you block his reach which has him furiously growling and lurching towards you, only to be met by the invisible Force impeding his attack. He spits a frustrated volley of curses in a language you can’t understand, but that you’re fairly certain is Mando’a.

“Ah, ah, no blaster,” you tut, and he settles, going suddenly, shockingly still, watching you watch him. “You really are quite poorly mannered and surly.” There’s a part of you that is still slightly unbalanced, heart beating painfully against the cage of your ribs, but you’re trying to hide it behind a wry smile and light tone. Echoes of pain and hurt and cruel and unyielding hands molding you into a thing that was just as cruel and unyielding. You cannot tolerate being handled like that anymore, and you feel contrite that you’d provoked him into doing so. Sometimes it is still difficult for you to remember how it is you’re supposed to behave around other people.

And then something you weren’t expecting, for he says, “You’re a Force weilder. You’re a Jedi.”

You let out a barking laugh. “What do you know of the Force?”

“Are you?” He presses.

“Yes, but no, definitely not that, no.”

“Then what?”

“Nothing. Or… whatever the opposite of a Jedi is, I suppose.”

“The opposite?” He shakes his head, “I don’t–”

“Hmm…” you cut him off, turning to make sure the two of you still haven’t been noticed. “Not anymore. I don’t use it anymore.”

“Oh, no?”

“Well… you’ve gone and ruined that now, haven’t you?”

“You started–”

“All I was trying to do,” you interrupt, “Was make nice. I’d always wanted to meet a Mandalorian,” Lie, “Haven’t you ever heard of a little flirting? And I fear, now, you’ve painted them all in a very poor light,” Lie, “Look at how rude you’ve gone and been, when all I wanted was to be friends,” Another lie, “A shame…” you heave a big sigh, “You really are very beautiful.” Truth. That fist clenches again, and you cock your head to the side, getting one last good look at him. You feel suddenly sad, you don't want to go. You’ve enjoyed this brief moment you’ve gotten to talk to him. Even if you’d gone and pissed him off and ruined it all now.

“It was nice meeting you, shiny. Even if you were an abominable beast about it.” You give him a nod of your head, and a quick two fingered salute before you’re sliding out of the enshroudment of the booth and slipping out the back of the cantina, into the dark alleyway, leaving him behind.

The last glimpse you catch of him out of the corner of your eye before the door shuts behind you, is the sight of him scrambling out of the booth and starting towards the door to follow after you.

A glutton for punishment, then, so it seems.

You flit through the dark, dirty alleys, scampering from shadow to shadow. The city streets around you, gone quiet now as the sun over Nevarro sets quickly, and you can feel him hunting after you. He’s strong, and you can almost feel the heavy weight of his life force even at a distance, almost as if the goodness and honesty of his character is a presence of its own, sentient in a way. And he’s angry, and you can feel that too, charging after you, provoked, even if he does it on entirely silent and measured feet. You can sense that ravenous curiosity and frustration at being bested and evaded pressing up against you, chasing after you. As if there were some dark red thread connecting the two of you from spine to rib bone, leading him to you, pulling him along your trail. You tiptoe the lines of the shadows silently, making your way through the winding city streets, feeling him getting closer and closer, trying to confuse him, even as he gains on you anyway.

And then he’s there.

You feel a massive hand, strong and sure, clamp around the back of your neck, but his touch is measured this time – he’d heeded your warning. His other hand wraps around the bend of your elbow, twisting your arm back behind you, and then he’s kicking open the nearest door, what seems to be some sort of storage alcove, the space dark and humid and mildewed, and pushing you inside. He shoves you away from him once you pass together into the darkness, and you catch yourself on the edge of what feels like some sort of table or workbench.

You laugh breathlessly. Overwhelmed by the thrill of the chase, of the feel of his hands on you, the surrounding darkness, the sound of his own panting breath through the modulator of his helmet. You hope he’s just as overwhelmed, disequilibrated, as you are now.

“Oh, you again?” you laugh, turning to face him, bracing yourself back against the table. All you can see of him is the silver crescent of the curve of his helmet, the outline of his wide shoulders in the dim light of the moon seeping in through the cracks of space around the door. He is a steel giant.“Did you forget something? Need me to hand your ass to you again, Mandalorian?”

“You’re a fucking brat. Anyone ever tell you that before?”

You gasp mockingly, “Me? Never.”

“Why is it that everything you say sounds vaguely like a taunt? Like you’re trying to provoke me.”

And, oh, he sounds just so unbearably serious and put out by you, that you pout, forced to match his serious tone with one of your own. You force the smile to leave your voice, “Maybe because I am,” and your voice goes quieter, softer, because again, truth. There is something about him that incites provocation, you want him rattled, come undone. “Maybe I want to see what happens when a man made of metal loses control.”

“I can’t – I don’t–” His voice, even through the modulator, is its own flavor of foreplay. “I don’t know…” he says again, whispers it, his tone seeping through the helmet, entirely uncertain, or at war with himself.

He takes one menacing step forward, made even all the more intimidating by the vast difference in your heights, the sheer breadth of him, the darkness wrapping around him so that all he’s made into are slivers of gleaming silver flame here and there. You feel the whisper of one leather covered finger skim lightly over the outside of your right forearm, another soft touch to the left side of your waist, and you shiver all over.

“Not a virgin? Your Creed lets you fuck?”

“No.”

“No, what? Use your words.”

Silence. Stubborn, silent, tin can.

“Girlfriend?”

“No.”

“Whores?”

A grunt.

“Aha! Gotcha.” You start to toe your foot forward, bending your knee to make contact with him when you find his leg, tilting slightly away from the table so that you can slide your thigh between his legs. “Is that what you want me to be for you?”

“No.” Fucking monosyllabic–

“Then what do you want from me? Why did you follow me?”

“I don’t know…”

“Don’t lie.”

“I want to fuck you.” Your cunt goes soaked and tight at his words, because yes, yes yes, this is what you were leading him to. Finally, he’s caught on, and then he’s planting a strong, broad hand to the center of your chest and pushing you back into the table, and pressing the hard, unyielding length of himself against you. He’s hard and swollen beneath his pants, you can feel the thick heft of him against your belly as he presses into you, and you bring your palms up to slide against the unprotected sides of his strong waist, sending him into a full body shudder as you touch him, helmet falling forward on his neck as he hunches over you, hands planted on the table behind. You can hear his labored, panting breath huffing through the modulator as you run your hands along the planes of him. He’s huge, pure muscle beneath unrelenting beskar, and if you weren’t the creature that you are, you’d feel slightly frightened at the unbelievable strength he’s made up of. He is a thrumming effigy of restrained power beneath your hands, different to that which makes you up, and you feel the strength of him once again, humming through the Force. His light burns so bright, almost blindingly. He’s strong.

You slide one of your hands up his chest plate, tucking your fingers into the top-most edge to bring yourself up and closer to him as he curves over you, bending you back into an arch over the table’s edge. Your other hand reaches for his wrist braced against the table, wrapping around it, so thick your fingers don’t meet, to tuck your fingertips into the space where his sleeve meets his glove, and at the feel of your bare skin on his, just there, just there, he growls, deep and savage in his chest at the same time that you let out a breathy, warbled moan. His other hand shoots up to grasp at the small of your back and press you into him, his fingers digging painfully into your skin. He’s burning hot, sweltering, and he slides his palm lower, tilting your pelvis into his as you hitch one of your knees up the outside of his thigh to his hip, and then your cunt is rocking against the thick length of his cock, and another breathless, pained groan from the both of you as you make contact there, pushing and pulling against each other. You want to taste his skin, his tongue, you want to kiss him, to feel him licking into your mouth. You pull yourself in closer by the hand tucked into his chestplate to press your face into the warm space between his helmet’s edge and the folds of his cowl. He smells so good, like leather and sweat and metal. Something earthy and musky, something that proves to you that despite the beskar, there is only a man of flesh and blood and want beneath.

His palm slides to grip the lush of your ass, rolling you onto his length harder, pressing deeper as if he could fuck you through your clothes.

“Are you going to let me fuck you, little brat?” he pants, ending on a stuttered groan as you hook your calf around his waist and press your foot into the small of his back to grind particularly sharply onto him, pressing your clit into the edge of his utility belt, “Please, just– just–” you gasp, head falling back on your neck. And then he’s spinning you abruptly and pressing between your shoulder blades so that you're bent entirely over the table, cheek smushed against the hard surface. That wide palm slides down the slope of your spine, squeezes your asscheek harshly so that you’re moaning out in lust or pain, you can’t tell.

“Was that a yes? Who can’t use their words now?”

“I liked it better when you weren’t talking,” you grouch, but then his fingers have somehow snuck their way up beneath your tunic and under the edge of your trousers, and he’s ripping everything down to leave you bare and unprotected from the sudden onslaught of that huge expanse of leather clad palm cracking down painfully on the soft skin of your ass so that you’re scrambling to find the opposite end of the table to pull yourself away from him. A pathetic little screech claws its way out of you, and he wraps the length of your hair around his fist to pull your head back and up, turning you into his own little bow string, head resting back on the hard pauldron over his shoulder.

“Where do you think you’re going? I caught you, you’re mine now.”

“Fuck off–” You try, but he clamps his fingers around your jaw, squeezing the fine bones of your face to cut you off, his other hand in your hair gives a sharp tug that makes the tips of your breasts go hot and tight and your cunt clench around nothing. You can feel yourself dripping down the insides of your naked thighs.

“Open your mouth,” he orders, shoving the thick of his fingers inside to press down on your tongue. You try and moan around him, protest or something, but you can’t help but run your tongue around the digits, tasting the smokiness of blaster residue, the tang of whatever he must use to oil his gloves. “Finally, some silence. I like you better like this,” he taunts you with an imitation of your previous words. He bends his head forward, “Get them wet,” he murmurs, voice soft and sultry through the modulator, and the moan you give him now is all desperation as you let saliva pool heavy on your tongue to coat the leather.

When he pulls them from your mouth, tugging your head back further so that you can look up into the dark tee of his visor as he slides his spit slick gloves between your thighs to press against your throbbing clit, your whimpered little mewl has a chastising tut filtering through the helmet, “Slippery, little thing.” He starts to press slow circles to the aching bundle of nerves, sliding down on every other swirl to press gentle, teasing pressure to your clenching opening. “Did my chasing do all this? Do you like being hunted, brat?”

“Not–” you moan as he presses down hard on your clit, then back to the mouth of your cunt, giving you just the tip of his finger, “Not a brat,” you struggle to get out.

“No?” He starts to press two fingers inside at once, both of you groaning in tandem. “Maker – fucking tight–” He scissors his fingers inside of you, twisting his wrist to fuck you open, making room for himself inside of you. “Don’t know if I’ll even fit in here.”

“No,” you groan, low and drawn out, and then, yes, whispered breathlessly, one of your arms reaching back to hold onto the wrist of his hand still twisted in your hair, trying to find purchase on anything to anchor yourself with. Because the stretch of just his two fingers inside of you – you can hear the slick squelch of your wetness as he starts to fuck them in and out of you slowly – is so unexpectedly obscene. You had not expected to find yourself in this position with any man, especially not one like this – had not thought you were yet ready to be touched by another person. Not so soon after– “Please – m– more. I want–”

“You think you’re ready for my cock, little one? Have I stretched this tiny cunt out enough?”

“Yes– yes. Just do it.”

“Fuck–” You listen to the wet little pop as he pulls his fingers from you, and the clink and shuffle of his belt and armor as he pulls himself out of his clothes, and then he’s shifting behind you as you brace against the edge of the table. The burning hot blunt tip of his cock skimming against the round of your ass, and you feel him spread his feet wide, bend his knees, and then his cock is there at the slick mouth of your cunt, and he’s thrusting up and into you on the downward roll of your hips, and Maker, he’s deep like this. Suddenly, twin strangled groans of pain or relief ripping from your throats in tandem as he grinds deep, deeper, for a moment. You feel the heavy kick and throb of his cock inside of you, and he is too big, too thick – he forces you to take it anyway. Stretching you in a way you’ve never been before, your eyes smart, forcing your body to make room for his inside of you, it leaves your breath to stutter out in a weak little puff of shock.

And you moan, using the palms of your hands against the edge of the table to grind yourself back onto him while his hands clamp tightly around your hips, his fingers so long they almost meet at the center of your belly beneath your navel.

Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck. That’s so good.

You can’t tell which one of you is speaking. You can't even tell if you’re still breathing. And then he starts to move.

You knew he’d fuck hard, from the first moment you’d seen him, you knew.

He pulls his hips back, the slick wet, the grasping walls of your cunt trying to suck him back in, and then the scorching slide of him pressing back in, in, in, grinding again, those long fingers pressing down on your belly so that you feel him from the outside too.

“Harder,” you beg, because of course you want more. You are a creature made of greed and hunger. You always have been.

“Quit. You’ll take whatever the fuck you’re given,” but his hips slam back in, a savage growl punctuating the movement.

He gives it to you almost brutally, without pause or thought, fucking punched out breaths and whines from you.

“Shut up,” he spits on the end of one particularly deep, harsh thrust that’s followed by a high pitched mewl from you. “You want every piece of shit on Nevarro to find you split open on my cock like this?” Your head lolls back limply on his shoulder, the wet slap of his heavy balls against your clit overwhelming the sound of your thoughts. You can’t speak, your brain is currently being jostled within the confines of your skull by the force of his cock splitting you open. “No? Then be a good girl, and be quiet,” his voice, rough, even through the modulator is almost drowned out by the wet, obscene sound of him pounding into you.

He brings one of his hands back up to your jaw, turning your head slightly so that your nose is almost smushed up against the chrome of his visor. He wants to look at you. The hard beskar of his chest plate rubs harshly against your back on every push upwards of his hips, and you’re sure that’ll hurt later, but right now you just can’t seem to care. You can feel the humid, warm air of your panting breath, foggy against the gleam of his helmet, and you bring one of your hands up to the wrist holding your face, holding on for dear life, sanity, you’re not sure what. Your other hand twists back into the hanging fabric of his cloak so that you can pull yourself more tightly back into him as he slows his thrusts, making them longer and more drawn out. “Yeah– like that. Settle… good girl.” Your eyes flutter shut. Too much, too much. It should hurt. You wanted it to hurt. Not gentle, you don’t want it gentle.

“Harder,” you whine, plead.

“No. How I say.” He rolls his cock into you over and over, your slick sliding down your thighs, the backs abraded by the plates of beskar over his own legs. He’s so deep, so big it hurts so good. Even if you want it harder, it still hurts so good. The hand at your face slides down to rip open the fastening of your high necked tunic, reaching inside and under your breast band to pull out the heavy aching weight of your tit and pinch your nipple, rolling it between his strong leather clad fingers – more high, desperate mewls that have him groaning deep in his chest. You’re sure if your face wasn't so close to his you’d never be able to hear them through the helmet, low and rumbly and so delicious.

“Fucking beautiful,” he murmurs low, cupping your breast to plump it up, massaging it in his palm.

“What? You can see?”

“Yeah– fuck yes, I can see.”

“Not fair,” you whine. It’s so dark in the little room he’d pushed you into, you’re not even going to get to take a good look at his cock before this is all over.

“You don’t need to see. You just need to be good and take it.”

“Do you ever kiss?” you ask him suddenly. Irritated by the fact that you’ve not gotten to ogle him – or kiss him. If he even does that.

Another deep roll of his hips, a tight squeeze to the swinging globe of your breast, “No.”

“That’s a shame.”

And he responds immediately, voice subdued and even, underneath the helmet, despite the fact that you feel like he’s cleaving you in two. “Maybe next time,” he says. His palm slides down to your belly then, the other pressing down between your shoulder blades to fold you over the table, hands moving to wrap around your hips and lift you up and back onto his impaling cock so that the tips of your toes are left skimming the ground beneath, your fingers scramble and claw for purchase against the wood of the table. You can feel the wide tip of his cock punching against your womb on every thrust in and stars flash behind your eyes, mouth hanging open pathetically.

There is nothing gentle about the way he fucks you. Like he wants to split you in two, like he wants to make sure the shape of him is branded into the center of your body so that you’d never forget this. The sticky sweet coil of your orgasm starts up low in your belly, and you feel molded in his image for one second, pushed out of yourself to stand on the sidelines and look upon the sight of your much smaller form draped over the table and being fucked into so savagely by this silver blade of a man.

And then: they’re fucking bare, they’re fucking raw, and it has been so, so long since he has felt the touch of another person, someone else’s skin on his that was not bestowed upon him in violence or with the barrier of a sheath between. It is an almost overwhelming feeling, that of your hot, soaking wet cunt pulsing around him, you’re about to come for him, he can feel it. The fluttering of your inner muscles, delicate thing that you are, your thighs shaking as you struggle to push yourself back on to him to get it harder, deeper. He is, almost, made faint with the feeling. And those eyes… you’ve got the strangest multicolored eyes. One enshrouded entirely in darkness compared to its bright counterpart – as if one had forgotten to take that last step into the light. You’re fucking beautiful and–

You snap back into yourself. No, no, no, stay out of his head. Stay out of his head. Focus. You push yourself up again so that your back is against his chest, and he bands one tremendously strong arm around you, gripping your breast tightly. You feel him bend his knees framing your thighs to change and deepen the angle, and then he’s pounding right into that tender, devastating place inside of you, and your cunt twists and floods with your orgasm, electric shocks of pleasure numbing your fingers and toes. You can do nothing more than let him do with you what he will. Your toes aren’t even touching the floor.

He presses as deep as he can, grinds for a moment, and then he folds you over the table once again and presses down harshly on the small of your back with one heavy palm as he pulls his cock from you and finishes himself off. You listen to the wet thwack, thwack, thwack of him pulling on his cock, and then the searing hot spurt of his come is hitting your ass and the exposed seam of your fluttering cunt, a savage growl ripping through the modulator as he squeezes all of the air out of you with that unyielding hand. You’re like a pressed flower between the pages of a book – wilted and frayed, but still held in the image of that which you once were. At the last spurt from his cock he brings his hand to your ass, spreads you apart to rub his spend into the tight furl of your ass, and then further down into your throbbing, overly sensitive clit. All you can do is cry and whimper weakly, still trembling from your own orgasm. “T– too much, nooo,” you whine pathetically.

“Easy – easy, settle.”

You feel him fall to a crouch behind you, pulling you apart with both hands by the meat of your ass to look upon the sight of your blushed, fluttering hole. Messy, little cunt, you hear him whisper. He rubs his come into your trembling thighs, over your swollen clit again, inspecting every vulnerable inch and crevice of your sex, and then he’s pushing two of those thick fingers back inside of you, the passage made slick and fucked open by your mingled come. “Just one more, little one. Want to see it up close,” he murmurs. You try and wiggle away, tears of oversensitivity brimming beneath your lashes, I can’t, I can’t, you think you whisper, but he’s inescapable. He clamps one hand painfully over your asscheek, keeping you spread apart for his inspection, the other one buried deep inside of you so that his fingers are hooked against your g-spot where he presses over and over, quick and relentless, his fingers almost vibrating inside of you until your vision is going white hot and a buzzing sound rings in your ears, and you’re crying for what you think might sound like mercy or something equally despeerate. “Yes, fuck, yes. Just like that.” Your answering sob does not prompt him to abate, for he keeps his fingers pressed against that spot inside of you until you’re leaking an embarrassing amount of wetness down your thighs, until the rippling throbs of your orgasm have finally settled. You feel his head fall forward, the beskar of his helmet pressing against the space where your asscheek meets your thigh, and he holds there for a second against your burning hot skin, the scorching soothed by the cool metal.

You can’t stop shaking, you feel, suddenly, like you might cry. You were not prepared for something of this intensity, to be touched like this, and now that it’s happened you’re left reeling. You don’t even know his name. And now you’re sure he’ll go away to wherever it is that Mandalorian bounty hunters run off to, and you’ll never see him again, and you’ll have to live with the memory of this forever. And something like this… amidst all the other horror that lives within you, you’re sure that the intimacy, the fervor of this, will make it hurt all the more, even compared to all the rest.

He uncoils behind you, rising up to his towering height. You listen to the rustling of his clothes, and then he’s smoothing a large palm over the slope of your trembling back and reaching down to pull up your trousers, tucking your breast back beneath your tunic, righting your clothes for you without commentary. When you think you’ve finally caught your breath, or can at least pretend you’ve done so, enough to push yourself up from your position over the table. Your eyes feel pinched and hot, your heart beating so hard, almost painfully, within the confines of your ribcage that it feels as though your bones are rattling beneath your skin, knocking together in the imitation of a death rattle so that he’ll surely know that you feel two paces away from falling apart entirely.

“You’re… Are you okay? I didn’t hurt you?” Voice stilted.

“No more than I wanted you to.”

He’s silent for a moment, uncomfortable. You can feel the sensation of him pulling away, getting ready to make a run for it. “That’s not–” he cuts himself off. “Do you– do you spend much time on planet?” He’s awkward, uncomfortable now with this unnecessary notion of seemingly required small talk.

“No.” Lie. You like Nevarro, you spend more time here than anywhere else.

“What’s your name?” It shocks you that he asks, for you know he’d not give you his if you asked it of him in return, but for one infinitely painful, insanely uncharacteristic moment, you want to tell him. You want to give him your real name desperately, tell him who you are. But if you were to do that, then you might tell him what you are. And then he’d hate you, and the memory would be ruined, and you have so few good ones, that this one must be protected at all costs.

So instead you say that which you have no real desire to say, do what you have no real desire to do, and make sure that he thinks you’re not interested, that you have no desire to ever see him again. Maybe next time. Your heart gives a surprisingly painful pinch, your eyes growing hotter by the second. “This was just a fuck, don’t get all sentimental on me now.” Your voice is so cold, so uncaring. You hate the way you can make yourself sound sometimes. You sense him snap with tense shock, and he nods once, succinctly. “Very well. Thank you… for this. I suppose.”

You lean back against the table, trying your hardest to appear as unaffected as you can. You turn your face to the side, roll your cheek over the hill of your shoulder. “It was my pleasure.”

He turns to go, his cape snapping with the sharp abruptness of his movements, and he pulls open the door of the little storage room letting a flood of moonlight sweep in to shed light on the construction of this memory you’re assembling brick by brick to preserve in your mind for as long as you possibly can. Your eyes sweep over the length of him ravenously, trying to catalog every single detail of him, the incredible breadth of his shoulders, the silver gleam of his beskar helmet, the sweep of his cape, the arsenal of weapons strapped to his body, lethal. He turns back to look at you for one moment, the yawning darkness of his chrome visor, “Don’t get killed, Mandalorian. There are so few of you left now.” And truth, truth, truth, for it would be a shame beyond imagining for a creature such as this, something so strong and beautiful and other, to perish when so few like him remain. He pauses to take you in, as well. You wish you had the courage to ask him what he sees when he looks at a thing like you. The tears are right there, and you hate them and feel weak and disgusted, but also relieved, and you could fall to your knees, in this moment, to thank the Maker that you still possess the ability, the heart, to cry, to succumb to something as trife as tears. You hope he cannot see them. The helmet cocks to the side for one second, perhaps he too is cataloging you to his memory. He nods once, and then he’s turning and gone away into the night. The door snicks shut behind him, and you’re alone once again.

You pause for a moment, hoping that relief will come. He’s gone, you got what you wanted from him. You should be glad. But there is only the screaming thought of wait, there was still more, there was still more that I wanted from you.

You let yourself sink slowly to the ground, hand braced against the edge of the table he just fucked you over, lest your shaking legs give out and have you planting face first into the dirt. You fold your legs beneath you, tuck your wild hair gently behind your ears, your movements measured, trying to breathe deep and slow, in through your nose and out through your mouth. Don’t cry, there’s no reason to cry. But shouldn’t we be glad we can still cry? Isn’t it a sign that not all is lost? That there is still a part of us that feels enough to shed tears? This should be a good thing. And so you let the tears fall. You fold yourself over as small as you can, one hand pressed over your hot, leaking eyes, another over your mouth to keep your sounds contained, and you sob as quietly as you possibly can. It was so good and you’re crying and you’re alive and you’re free. You are free, and you should be glad of this. Cry, cry, but cry for your own victory, for your own freedom, for the chance to cry. This is what victory feels like. This is what it is to be alive.

And so, here is your truth: It is a difficult thing, to shed the facets of the dark side after you’ve lived with it for so long. To be a Sith is to forsake all connection, all peace. There is only passion to strength to power to victory to the Force, but it is always alone. Always against someone or something else. So, yes, it is difficult to shed the facets of the dark side that have made you the thing you’ve been for more than half your life, since the time you were stolen from your cradle, your parents slaughtered, and spirited away into the shadow of a cruel and unforgiving master. What is it to know exactly how your life will play out, to see everything, to be so aware of what you will be – and to still be lost? Part agony, part madness. The pieces of you that are secretive, that like to hide, to run, these are especially difficult to let go of, and you are so, so interminably sad, you live in it. It’s all you feel you are now, after the dark, after the fall of the Empire and the Sith, after escape, after freedom, after you’d so forcibly ripped its claws, that were so deeply sunk within you, out by sheer force of will, by sheer force of desperation, you worry that it’s taken a piece of you with it, your soul. That it had eaten a piece of you. That you don’t have one anymore.

You don’t even know his name. And even if you’re certain he would not have given it to you, for one moment, you feel an incredible lance of regret that you did not give him yours.

But then: a person without a soul could not cry.

And so this must only be proof of the fact that you must still possess yours, as shriveled or weak as it’s been made, you must still have one. You must. You must.

And you think: I am not unfamiliar with this half life – there is a wound inside of me – dark and putrid and festering. But perhaps my tears will heal me. Seal the wound closed.

You feel lonely – worse, you feel strange. Once, you were terrible – now you are only yourself. So you cry for the passion of the moment, for the way he made you feel, for the loss of a name, for the truth of freedom.

Chapter II

Netherfeildren's Masterlist

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alice-angel12x · 1 year

Text

Death is always around the corner

Riddle + Death!Reader

This Death is greatly inspired by the wolf death from Puss In Boots, and Jenny-Jinya kind death. (some headcanons for some of the characters) Riddle, Leona, Azul, Jamil, Vil, Idia, Malleus

Let's set the Scene: Masterlist

Something was off about this Mirror ceremony, Crowley could feel it. But decided to shack it off and continue with the ceremony.

"Ah, my lovely Lord, The noble and beautiful flower of evil, You are the most beautiful, number one in this world. Follow thy heart and take the hand of the one reflected in the mirror. Flames that turn even stars into ashes, Ice that imprisons even time, Great tree that swallows even the sky, Don’t be afraid of the power of darkness, Come now, show your power. Mine, theirs, and yours, There’s only a little time left for us. Do not let go of that hand, at all costs," Crowley chanted as a green flame appeared in the mirror.

As the night continued, all the new students were neatly sorted into dorms. There was just one coffin left, and just as he was about to insert the key to unlock the coffin. The coffin began to thrash and shack, as puffs of blue fire spewed out from the creaks in the coffin. The headmaster quickly stepped away from the coffin when the lid suddenly blasts off its hinges in a blaze of fire.

From the coffin, a grey cat creature with blue fire ears skitted across the ground. The crowd of students stared in confusion till something caught their attention. An eerie whistle could be heard from the smoking coffin. Out from the smoke steeped a mysterious figure. A figure dressed in the school's ceremonial robes stepped out into the chamber. They stood unnaturally still as the hood of their robe completely obscured their face as they continued to eerily whistle.

"U-Um, excuse me young...Um... You could have waited a few seconds longer till I opened the gate. Anyways please present yourself to the dark mirror," Crowley stuttered as he hurried the stranger.

The mirror awakened to look at the figure, and only stared in... fear?

"Ugh, I can smell... a disgusting amount of blot," The figure spat.

💗Riddle Roseheart💗

Riddle didn't really know what to think of this strange student. He never got a good look at them at the ceremony. The only thing they could tell was that they were a wolf beastman of sorts.

And his only other source of info was word of mouth around the school. And hearing that they were a part of the chandelier incident. Riddle already doesn't like them.

luckily he had the fortune to see this mysterious. Upon seeing this student, they looked strange, but he wasn't sure why. Maybe it was cause of how they just stared unblinkingly at him. With an ominous smile on their face.

When Riddle tried to scold the first-year group for all the trouble they have caused. Yet the student who went by Y/n, simply smiled, unfazed by his words.

This greatly annoyed him and he pulled out his magic pen, but in a blink of an eye, Y/n swiped it out of his grasp. He stood in shock as Y/n chuckled and took a sip of their drink.

Freaked out, Riddle decided to just leave. Yet for a week he felt watched, and whistling followed him no matter where he went. And Y/n's silhouette is always just on the edge of his sight.

One late night, Riddle had to drop off small books at the library, when the whistle filled his ears.

"Are you stalking me?" Riddle glared, as he turned to see Y/n resting against a pillar.

"Just observing. It's been a long while since I got a good look at the Roseheart family. And it's a shame to see how far they have fallen," They growled.

"How Dare You! Off with-'' before riddle could even finish his spell. Y/n swiped the pen from the boy's hand. And then quickly pinned him to the wall.

Riddles's heart started to beat insanely fast as he stared into Y/n's blood-red irises.

"Listen very closely, your life is crashing toward a terrible end if you don't change your tune," Y/n growled softly into Riddle's ear.

Riddle shut his eyes tight waiting for the next attack, but nothing came. As he slowly opened his eyes, he gasped when he found himself in his room.

When morning came, riddle ran to the library to apologize for losing the books. To only learn that Y/n had returned them for him.

Assuming it must have just been a dream, he didn't take Y/n's warning seriously. As blot continued to accumulate. Unaware of Y/n watching from a window across the courtyard, as they polish their sythe, with sad eyes.

They watched as Ace fail to properly apologize to Riddle's liking, and quickly banished the 1st years from the dorm. Which lead to this conflict.

As Y/n stood before Riddle and his overblot as he rampaged across the garden. Reading their weapons, preparing to claim Riddle's life before the blot does.

Suddenly, Aduece, Grim, Cater, and Trey stepped forward wanting to save Riddle. Y/n smiled softly as they dashed toward the blot creature to Find Riddle's soul.

_____________________________________________________

As Riddle slowly came to his dream of memories, he found himself sitting at a party table floating in the darkness. In front of him was a book with his name as the title, and the silhouette of his profile was on the cover.

"Not a good start to life huh," said a voice, causing Riddle to gasp and look up at the source. at the other end of the table was Y/n, dressed in black silk robes. "Strict mother molding you, all the while claiming it is for your own good."

"S-she didn't want me to be a failure like father. He was lazy and couldn't handle the work of a doctor," Riddle said.

"Did your mother tell you that?" Y/n asked as Riddle nodded. '' Then you might want to read this.''

Y/n slid a tray over to Riddle, on it was a book that read Mira Rosehearts, his Mothers name. Riddle looked back to Y/n for an explanation. "Everything your mother had said, done, thought, felt, and heard is documented in this. I recommend reading pages 9131 to 9134."

Riddle quickly read through said pages but slammed it down in anger and disbelief. It read how Riddle's father began to outshine Mira, and when people started to praise him more than her. She divorced and made sure she had full custody of Her son. She vowed to mold him and make him the perfect Roseheart, to outshine everyone else, no matter the cost.

"That is not my mother! You're trying to trick me! Who do you think you are?!" Riddle growled as he stood up from his chair.

"I Have a Beginning, But No End, and I End All Things That Begin. Who Am I?” Y/n asked simply.

"What is this rubbish, the answer is... The answer is," Riddle said slowly as his eyes widened in horror.

"I am Death, straight up," Y/n said as their eyes glowed, causing the boy to fall back into his seat.

"S-so I'm dead?" Riddle asked slowly.

"No, you escape me this time. You are very lucky that some people came to your rescue. Or else you would have died here today," Y/n said as they flipped riddle's book all the way to the back. On the inside of the back cover was a "wanted" Poster.

In bold words on top was Wanted, with Riddle's face printed in the middle. And Dead or Alive is printed at the bottom.

" I would have had you sign, right here,” Y/n said as they tapped over the word Dead. Causing Riddle to gulp nervesly.

"But You attend our school, have I truly escaped you?"Riddle asked nervously.

"Just because I am Death, doesn't mean I enjoy everything it entails. I do not enjoy having to separate families and loved ones. It's just a job that needs to be done," Y/n explained. " And I came here to collect an arrogant little boy, who thinks himself as law and order incarnate. But I can't seem to find him anymore.

Riddle watched as Y/n collected the books and turned to leave, as a door of light appeared.

"You were given a second chance Riddle. Live your life your way for yourself, not how your mother wants you to," Death Y/n said as they stepped through the door.

Riddle finally came too, much to everyone's relief. When everything was set and done. Riddle apologized to everyone and promised to improve on his behavior.

Yet as the days went by, Riddle noticed that Y/n for the most part vanished. He would see them around every once and a while, even Ace, Deuce, and Grim don't seem to hang out with them much.

Grim already spilled the beans on Y/n's identity, and of course, most kept their distance. For who would want death hanging around them.

One day at the reunbirthday party. As All of Riddle's new and old friends gather around his table. Enjoying tea and baked goods, the young dorm leader noticed a lone figure at a table.

Y/n sat alone at one table at the very back of the party, even the tables next to them were empty. As everyone wasn't really comfortable being near them.

Riddle watched sadly as Y/n sat with no snacks, tea, or even company to enjoy. So with a wave of his pen, Riddle levitated a fresh teapot with cups and a large tray of baked goods. As he proceeded to pull out a chair himself at Y/n's table.

Much to everyone's surprise and slight fear. Even Y/n was surprised by Riddle, but they smiled softly as the two began to chat and enjoy the unbirthday party.

But sadly their job here at NRC isn't over yet.

#disney twst #twst wonderland #disney twisted wonderland #twistedwonderland #twisted wonderland x reader #riddle rosehearts #riddle roseheart x reader #riddle x reader #twst riddle #Death!reader

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agent-cupcake · 9 months

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grimm

Pairing: Death (Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) x f!catgirl Reader

Synopsis: The series of unfortunate events and clichés that lead you to meeting a familiar nightmare in the middle of the woods beneath a full moon. It goes about as well as you'd expect.

Warnings: 18+, explicit smut w/ a nonhuman character (not a nonhuman cock though), noncon, death, violence

Tags: alternate universe, angst, size kink, object insertion, masochistic reader, praise (voice) kink, outdoor sex

Words: 18.5k

Notes: It's been a while, huh? Yes, today we are going to fuck the furry from a kids movie, I'm not sure if y'all are even surprised but. Anyway. On the one hand I'd say I feel shame but on the other they shouldn't have made him talk so sexy, which is not my fault. All the Spanish is from DeepL and context.reverso. Hopefully any mistakes aren't too bad and you don't find it too cringe, or you can manage to look past it for my sake.

Once upon a time there lived in an unassuming little corner of the world a man. A husband to a beautiful wife and a father of two lovely children. He was strange, perhaps, for the ears atop his head, and the vertical irises through which he looked, and the spry springiness of his limbs. Stranger too for his chosen lifestyle, a traveling merchant whose blood couldn’t get any lower. Ravi, sons and daughters of Bastet, relics of a bygone era. For all that he was strange, however, he was steadfast. Bolstered rather than weakened by the critical eye of other men, the unyielding cut of his silhouette and unshakable confidence made the man a lord in his own right. He had been here, and there, traveling wherever the wind called him, and always with certainty. If his chosen path was obstructed by a swath of trees, he would see the forest leveled before he so much as considered choosing a different route. A further measure of his determination, however, would prove that if he were told that those same obstructing trees were sacred, he would scorch the earth so thoroughly that not even ash dared remain beneath his boots when he trampled on the hallowed ground.

One day, the man looked down to admire how far he had come throughout the years, to smile upon the many grand achievements he had stacked up along the way. But then, looking a little closer, he couldn’t help but notice how long his shadow had become. While he had been distracted, the sun made its arc above him, and now it was falling towards the horizon, casting him in ever dimming light. Taking with it, he thought, Ra’s blessing. He began to tally up all of the things he had been ignoring. A stiff back, sore joints, fatigue after a day of travel, a headache after a night of frivolity. He noticed that while his son had grown tall and strong, he had been shrinking. The lovely apple cheeks of his beloved wife had begun to dull, wrinkles forming around her eyes. This realization filled the man with a feeling he had never experienced before—uncertainty. And then, fear.

Unable to face the dark, he vowed that he would not allow it, he would do whatever it took to escape such a terrible fate. Unbeknownst to him, this audacious belief invited the attention of a creature with a unique penchant for mischief and an appetite for fear. A wolf. He told the man that he could run, he could fight, he could rage, he could try to pull the sun back with all his might, but in his desperate frenzy to escape the night, he would only incur a great debt. An immeasurable bounty. One, perhaps, that would condemn not only him, but his family and the legacy he had created. A terrible fate.

“I do not fear you,” the man said.

The wolf laughed.

It was to be a chase, then. A hunt. The man ran, searching for something, anything, that would save him, traveling here and there with purpose, scouring the shadows, tracking down myth and rumor with a passion bordering mania. There had to be, he reasoned, a way to remain in Ra’s boundless glory. Circling ever nearer, the wolf harried his prey to the last.

Until, on the lush outskirts of a certain small village, a small ravi family set up their wagon for the night. The woods swarmed with the sound of bugs, the early summer heat simmering back down into the cold dampness of spring nights. Haunting and dreamlike, echoing in the dark, signaling finality, a song. And then, a figure in the dark. A familiar face, a frightening foe.

There, in the night, beneath the full moon, the hunt ended. Nowhere to go, nowhere to run, his obsession had taken him so completely that the only remaining recourse was a final fit of fury against the dying light. Perhaps, in those last moments, the man realized what a fool he had been. Too late. The wolf had grown bored of the game.

Horror of horrors, serendipity struck. A child who should have been tucked up tight in her bed, sheltered and safe from what lurked in the dark, grew bored of counting sheep. She hadn’t yet learned to fear the night, thinking her father to be playing a delightful trick. Creeping, quiet, curious, and ignorant to the cruelty of the dangerous unseen, she breached the forest’s uncanny shadows. Deeper, deeper, until she discovered the truth. Her father’s corpse hit the ground, his empty eyes never seeing her terror, his deaf ears never hearing her scream.

The gray wolf bid her to run, and she did. It was inevitable that they should meet again.

one chance.

Before that night, you never gave much thought to death, or luck, or malevolent forces, or tragedy. It was only when you were huffing, puffing, screaming for help, crying wolf, that true fear crept into your life. Once the door opened, it could not be closed. Although the monster was long gone, its shadow remained.

And they said: you were lucky to have escaped. They said: ravi law, loose as it was, could not be counted on for satisfactory justice. They said: the murder could not have been committed by any of the simple townsfolk. They said: it would be a blight upon the poor ordinary people for the case to drag on and on. And so the crime was tried thus—your brother, suffering a fit of drunken rage, donned a mummer’s wolf mask and murdered your father.

Not even a day passed before the so-called trial was held. The only building that could accommodate the gawkers and jury was the local barroom, a place that stank of old wood and fermentation. You didn't know the man acting as judge, you did not recognize any of the faces around you, only that they were indifferent, cold, and your brother's life rested in their callous hands. He sat near the front as the case was laid out for the gawkers, his face drawn and shadowed. Clapped in irons, his mouth covered to protect his jailors from his sharp ravi canines, ears as low as you’d ever seen them, looking not so much a man on trial than livestock on auction.

"You’re the daughter, are you not?” the judge called. It took you a moment to realize he meant you, his dull eyes signaling you out.

Someone spat at your feet.

“Filthy half breed."

"They’re incestuous, the father must have found them in the act."

“They’re both guilty.”

“Go ahead. Run. No one escapes me.”

The low whisper, practically a growl, made your ears twitch, your heartbeat racing as you scanned the faceless crowd with dry eyes, blinking fast to try and find the source of that terrible voice. But the faces were all human, drawn with cruelty and disgust, but human.

The judge banged on the table, catching your attention. “Young lady! You witnessed the crime, yes?”

You shook your head in rejection of the phantom voice and cleared your throat, breaking free of your mother’s grasp to stumble towards the judge. "Yessir," you said. "Yessir, I am… I-I did."

“Go on, then. We’ll hear your testimony.”

It was difficult to breathe, the air was stuffy and hot, your skin too tight. You could feel the people watching you, the weight of their eyes.

"You've got it all wrong, sir,” you said. “It-it wasn't him. He couldn't-"

"The facts only, if you please," the judge said, cutting you off. "Did you or did you not see the man who attacked you?”

Hot, heavy tears formed in your eyes, primed to travel the same salty tracks down your cheeks left by those before. Fear, pain, sadness, exhaustion, all of it compounded and ached within you. You didn’t want to remember. You didn’t want to think. But you had to.

"It was no man, sir," you said, your voice choked.

“Do you mean to tell me a woman killed your father?”

“No sir, it was an… an evil spirit.” Behind you, people muttered and whispered with disbelief. Shock. Doubt. Anger. The judge's jaw tightened, his eyes narrowing. “He had the head of a jackal, or a-a a wolf. ”

“A mask.”

“No, sir. It was not a man.” You heard your mother’s scolding voice from behind you, and your brother raised his head to look at you with shock, but you ignored it all.

"I should hope I don’t need to remind you of the severity of these proceedings,” the judge said, his eyes narrowed into slits.

"I know what I saw,” you replied, your hands balled into tight fists at your side.

"Your testimony is that an evil spirit with the head of a wolf murdered your father and attacked you?" The judge clarified, not so much as pretending to believe you. The question pulled a bit of laughter from the crowd. Your mother grabbed at your arm to pull you back, but you refused to let her. Instead, you set your stance and jaw.

"Yessir."

More laughter, as if there was anything humorous about this situation.

“I know,” the judge said loudly, silencing the crowd with a wave of his hand. “I know that you’ve been through a terrible thing, and I am sorry about that. That’s no excuse, however, and I mean this, it is no excuse for you to lie. You might think you’re defending your brother, but anything less than the absolute truth only strengthens the case against him. And, if I’m to be completely honest, I find this behavior deeply troubling. Perhaps it is acceptable among your kind to believe in stories of evil spirits and the like, but it is not appropriate here. We’re a good, God fearing people.”

“This isn’t a story. I saw it,” you insisted, your throat swollen and the world blurring up with tears. “The beast might still be in the woods, if you just look-”

“Look for the big bad wolf?” the judge asked, a bushy gray eyebrow rising high, inviting further discontent and disbelieving laughter from the people behind you. He sighed, once again calling for order and shaking his head. “It pains me greatly, you must understand, I want to be fair considering your circumstances, but this really is unacceptable. If you won’t testify against him, your father’s killer-”

“I told you,” you insisted, a little louder.

“No, young lady. And I repeat—no. What you have done is insult me and the fine people of this town with your absurd heathen fiction,” he told you.

“That’s not-”

“Your kind think you are above civilized law, but understand that we are giving your father the justice he, as a son of God, deserves by right. Your father brought fear and tragedy into the hearts of these people, and your scoundrel brother committed an unthinkable crime. There are those who don’t believe your brother is deserving of a trial at all, considering the substantial evidence against him. Indeed, this is a kindness I am extending to you and your mother. So, for the last time, I will not tolerate your pagan fiction. Do you understand?”

“I do,” you said, although you could feel your confidence wavering, a shaky cold sweat beading up on the back of your neck, pooling acidically in your stomach. He wasn’t going to listen. He didn’t believe you. “But I haven’t lied, I know what I saw.”

That caused an uproar, the people’s voices overlapping, a relentless and meaningless wave of noise. Demanding you be silenced, removed, executed.

“That is enough,” the judge exclaimed, and you didn't know if he spoke to you or the people. “So far, I have disregarded accusations that you were complicit in your brother’s crime, but if you continue to behave in such a manner, I may have to reconsider. That is a charge of patricide, young lady. Do you not have enough decency to spare your mother the loss of another child?”

You looked at him, really looked at him, overcome with a dizzyingly caustic rush of pain and disbelief at the injustice. He didn’t care if your brother was or was not guilty, or who had actually killed your father. To him, the death of a ravi man was meaningless, let alone two. Let alone three. He saw your eyes and ears and that was it.

Trying to fight back the thick swell of fear and pain and anger, you breathed carefully in and out, staring straight up in an attempt to fight the tears.

“It wasn’t my brother,” you said, forcing the words from your mouth without inflection. "He would never, ever… he wouldn't."

“Did you,” the judge asked icily, bluntly, “or did you not see the face of the man who attacked you?”

Red eyes, a long snout, a canine mouth full of deadly sharp teeth. A spirit attempting some approximation of the god of death with twin sickles in hand, trying to twist the kind shepherd’s image into one of terror, a creature wearing the face of evil itself. But the truth cowered away from something far more potent, shamefully grotesque. Self preservation.

“No,” you said, realizing too late the damning significance of that answer, wanting to add more but not knowing what. When you looked your brother in the eye, you understood. And it didn’t matter what you said after that point. You were the girl who cried wolf.

two times questioned.

That night, a great storm blotted out the stars and made it impossible to see more than a few feet in front of yourself. You made off into the night with your meager possessions packed up in a sack and some vague idea of where to go in the back of your head, mostly memories of better times. Anywhere was better than the home for wayward girls you had been shuffled into, a place that was a charity in name only.

Ultimately, you didn’t make it far, not even out of the city. There was no place in the world left for you, and you were afraid of the dark, and it was so, so cold.

Falling to your knees at the side of the road, mud splattering you with the force of each raindrop, you cried. Sobbed, curling in on yourself, desperate to wish it all away, wailing louder than the winds could blow as if your misery would overcome nature itself. You tried not to cry much anymore, tried not to show your weakness, but now it all came flooding out. Agony deep enough to drown, heavy enough to crush.

Until you heard a song beneath the gale. Impossible that it should reach you above the riotous storm, impossible that you should know its melody. Panic slushed through your veins in an instant, and you stumbled upright, ready to run from a danger you had so desperately tried to convince yourself didn’t exist. Red eyes and silver sickles and-

When you whirled around to run, you were not caught by a wolf, but by the man you could only think of as the prison warden.

Caked with mud and soaked to the bone, he dragged you back to the home, and you let him, fearing what lurked in the darkness more than you feared the punishment your escape attempt would earn.

Although it wasn’t bright, the light blinded your glazed eyes. You slipped when he released you, but felt nothing when you fell, leaving a muddy smear upon the tiles. Your fingers, bleached of color, were numb to all sensation, slipping when you tried to support yourself. The cold burrowed into your very core. You shook. Violently, as if your soul itself trembled.

Fear had kept it all locked up tight in your chest. Fear of your shame for crying wolf. Fear that if you gave breath to the creature that haunted your dreams, he would be made real. You told yourself that your father was murdered by a man in a mask, but the wolfman haunted you, the face of oblivion, that song and that laugh.

Distantly, you became aware of a commotion, and then the headmistress appeared before you. A towel was forced into your clumsy hands by the same girl who helped you get to your ice-block feet, muttering something about drying off. You doubted a single towel would manage that feat, but you held fast onto the fabric with fingers you couldn’t feel.

“Where in God’s name,” the headmistress demanded, haughty even in her dressing gown and curlers, “do you think you were going?”

You hugged the towel to your chest, feeling the fluffy material grow heavy and limp from your embrace. Ruined by your touch. Shaking so hard your teeth clacked, the entire world jittered and hazed, your bones practically vibrating, tears and snot dripping down your face with the rainwater.

“I asked you a question,” she said, her tone a little more shrill. Anger smoldered in her voice, but your eyes found purchase only on the lacy hem of her nightcoat. Such fine lace would have been imported from the north, your father had sold more than his fair share of it. You owned several pretty dresses decorated with similar frills, once. A lifetime ago. A life that ended with one decisive slash of silver. “Where were you going? Running off with a boy?”

Wide open fields of rippling golden wheat, smooth red cliff sides overlooking deep drops into the abyss, frothy blue waves licking pale sandy shores. Places you knew, places you had only heard about. Ravi weren’t meant to stay in one place, yours was a people of wanderlust and breeze.

The lady stepped forward and slapped your cold, numb cheek. You stumbled, slipping back onto the floor. “You will answer when I ask you a question,” she said. “I will not repeat myself again.”

“I wanted to see my mother,” you finally told her, your voice barely comprehensible from the way you were shaking, more tears welling up. The pain was there, was always there, and it burned hotter than the biting blue on your fingers and toes.

“Oh, for the love of… you’re well on your way to joining her,” she said. “What in the world was I thinking, allowing you into my home…”

You stayed silent. There was no defense you could offer, no excuse you could provide. She sighed, annoyed.

“I’ll decide your punishment in the morning. Assuming you don’t catch cold and die.” She laughed once, a short sound. “I should be so lucky.”

Die. Your sluggish brain was slow to process that word, churning it round and round in a swirl of equally unpleasant thoughts. When you breathed, the air rattled in your chest. Your mother made the same sound at the very end, as if death had already planted its seed in her body, slowly infecting her from the inside out. Fear had never come for her, not like with your father or brother. There was only vacuous ecstasy, the madman’s bliss of fever. When you pictured what she looked like, it was her hollow eyes staring into nothingness, her bones poking out beneath waxy skin in unnatural angles and blood bubbling upon dry lips. “I am going to see them soon,” she told you, smiling. It was the first time since your brother’s execution that she didn’t look at you with blame smoldering beneath her pained eyes. “We’ll be together, and it will be beautiful.”

But it was not beautiful.

Death was a hideous, terrible thing. Despair and empty eyes and rotting flesh without poetry or resolution. Blood dripping from curved blades, lives harvested without mercy, red eyes flashing with glee. A neck snapping and a body gone limp at the end of a rope. Agony in a small room that smelled of human waste and sickness. Death was not beautiful.

three failures.

The other girls called you, among other things, murderer.

“She pushed her.”

“Her kind are all like that, thieves and murderers.”

“Freaks.”

The two of you were stuck cleaning windows, balanced precariously high up in the air. The platform got loose, teetering uncertainly two stories up. It could have just as easily been you rather than her, but it wasn’t. Of course you hadn’t pushed her, but who would believe the word of a ravi?

And who would believe you when you told them of the shadow which greeted her down below? A monster you couldn’t believe in. The bastardized form of a benevolent god. The real murderer.

They saw your fear as guilt. And that was that. Murderer. You hadn’t pushed her, that was a fact. But it was suspicious, wasn’t it? There was a pattern of death surrounding you. Punishment.

Every night, you begged forgiveness, begged for freedom from the creature that haunted you. Bastet did not answer. Ra did not answer. Your prayers became pleas, and your pleas weakened into whimpers. Eventually, you stopped asking.

It followed you. Death, less an intangible concept than a lurking threat circling ever nearer, followed. Your father, your brother, your mother, other girls in the home. But not you, no matter how close you came. Accidents happened. Punishment became more and more brutal. Part of it was because of what you were, a belief that a beast could handle rougher treatment. Part of it was your attitude. Punishment. Live, but live in misery. Survive, but survive endless torment. And they said that you were lucky. The beatings were never deadly, although they should have been. The accidents were never fatal, although they could have been. You shouldn’t have survived, but you did.

four minutes.

It was spring, then. The river beside the road gushed with newfound force, overeager after an especially snowy winter. Even the season of life and rebirth was ripe with violence and death. The scent of it seemed to cling permanently to your dirty clothes, cloying in the chill of night. You and three other girls from the charity house followed by the riverside on the way back to town, your faces dusty and feet heavy from a long day of work. There was, as it turned out, quite a bit of money in renting out orphans to satellite farm estates who could launder clothes, clean carpets, polish silver, and scrub cast iron. No money for you or the other girls, but money nonetheless.

The three chatted as they walked in front of you, a conversation you tuned out. Long had you grown accustomed to walking behind them, ignored and withdrawn. Trailing behind like a shadow, an afterthought. In so-called polite society, that’s all ravi were. They—they with their round irises and human ears, with their unmarked faces and smooth canines—didn’t want you at their side. You understood things like that now, things you had been so blissfully unaware of in your childhood.

You watched their worn-out shoes marching on in synchronized steps. Watched when they suddenly stopped, your eyes drawn up in confusion as they turned towards you with big smiles.

"Those flowers are awfully nice, you should see if you can cross the river to pick some for us."

"I’d go myself, but your kind are more agile than real people, right?"

"The rocks make a perfect bridge for you to cross."

Requests from them, although you weren’t sure they could be called anything other than orders, weren’t abnormal. The only thing lower than an orphaned girl was an orphaned ravi girl. That was the way of it. Rather than forming a bond of solidarity, they emphasized what little status they had left by pushing you around. Surely there were similar flowers on this side of the river, but that wasn’t the point.

Biting your lip, you looked at the rocks spanning the river’s violent course to the other side. It wasn’t much of a bridge. Attempting to cross was, at best, stupid. If you fell, you would be helplessly carried away by the water, thrashed about against the rocks. Dead, surely. But if you denied them, they would almost certainly do worse. Whisper words of your supposed misdeeds to the headmistress, spread lies that would earn you punishment. Malice gleamed in their empty, hollow eyes.

"All right," you said, feigning indifference as you sized up the river.

The girls smiled and tittered as you faced the river. The water roared. Nerves had your hands shaking, but you didn’t let them show.

With a big breath and a mental prayer to Bastet to steady your feet, you stepped onto the first rock. Beneath the worn sole of your boot, the rock was slippery. You set your jaw, going to take another step.

Something knocked against your back. While it was a light touch, the surprise jolted your balance.

Just like that, the rock slipped out from under you. An undignified squawk left your mouth, and your arms flailed around empty air desperately to regain your footing, but you couldn’t manage it.

The water hit as hard as the ground might, immediately dragging you under.

For a moment that seemed to consume forever entirely, animal panic. You inhaled a lungful of water, thrashing wildly. You tumbled sideways as the river dragged you along, hitting rocks on the way. You violently struggled against its unstoppable current in an attempt to get your head above the water.

Unable to breathe, unable to orient yourself, you were as good as dead.

Then you slammed against a rock. The agonizing impact gave you enough of a painful shock to find purchase against it, slicing your palms against the rough edges as you held fast against the water’s oppressive tow. Blindly, you managed to find which way was up and dragged yourself to it. And then you were vomiting river water, hacking it out of your lungs and desperately trying to suck in gasps of air.

Feeling as heavy and broken as a corpse, you managed to flop onto the bank, covering your entire front with mud, crawling through it to drag yourself out of the water completely. It was there that you came eye to eye with three familiar pairs of shoes.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to bump into you.”

“I guess cats can swim after all.”

“You’re lucky that rock was there, huh?”

You coughed up more water, coughed until you were hacking up blood, wheezing and shuddering with bone-deep violence. There would be a terrible bruise on your stomach. But you were alive because of it. Pain, and life. Lucky you.

five years.

Barely into your lanky teens and with nothing more than meager pocket change to live on, you made your final escape from the charity house and went west. The most recent beating was proof enough that if you stayed, you would die. The woman who stitched you up said you only narrowly avoided it this time. You knew a coffin was the sole eventuality waiting for you there. So you left. Despite the time spent there, you parted with no sentimentality for what you would be leaving behind, or excitement for what laid ahead.

In a way, you were following your father’s example. His legacy. In his final days, you heard him muttering about the sun going down. Your brother whispered that he’d grown paranoid of his own death, that it was why your family never stayed in any place for too long. He was driven by a mean, feral fear and even aggression towards death, the cornered-rat instinct to defend your life at any cost, to protect the pitiful remains of existence as an animal would. You thought you understood. So you pressed against your bruises and exhaled slowly, accepting the pain as proof that you were still alive.

Dust kicked up a big cloud behind the wagon, baking beneath the heat of the sun. Although the world was alive with birds and bugs and the sound of hoofs on the road and wheels crunching over ground, you couldn’t empathize. Crusty from a night of fitful sleep, your eyes cringed away from the garish sunlight, your head pounding angrily. Pain and anxiety from your first night on your own kept you awake and, when you did manage a few hours of sleep, you had bad dreams. A fiction where your family was restored and you were all together again. Whole, untainted by horror and death. You woke up hollow and sick and empty, unalive but breathing.

“Are those real?” the girl beside you asked, breaking you from your thoughts. She pointed at your ears, her eyes wide with curious innocence. You imagined that question had been building up for a while, ever since you hitched a ride on her father’s wagon to the nearest town, the two of you sitting in the back of the bed with your legs swinging over the passing road. She was very young, her round-cheeked smile missing a single tooth and bright colored ribbons in her hair. He was going to the next town over to sell goods from his farm.

"Quinta!" her father scolded sharply.

“It’s okay,” you said. It was better to be asked outright than to endure the side glances. “They’re real.” You tilted your head to show her. Quinta reached out to pet the fur, her chubby little hands cautious.

“What are you?” she asked, getting another stern look from her father over his shoulder. Not that you blamed her. He probably didn’t know either, ravi didn't often leave their small communities, and they were practically unheard of in this part of the world. Little wonder, some establishments wouldn’t so much as let you inside. It was a very positive mark on his character that he allowed you to ride on his wagon in the first place, most people wouldn’t.

“I’m ravi.”

She blinked. “Is that why you look like a cat?”

“I guess so.”

Quinta considered that for a moment, staring at you unabashedly. It wasn’t just your ears that were different, otherwise you could have covered them up and avoided the scrutiny. With round eyes and vertical pupils, markings seemingly painted over your cheeks, you stood out regardless of what you did or where you went. Ravi were strangers to everyone, uprooted and adrift, low as the dust trailing beneath your feet. That fact hadn’t changed after you ran away from the charity house, you merely traded the title or orphan for that of vagrant.

“My mom won’t let us keep cats, we only have a dog,” Quinta finally announced. “Do you like dogs?”

You shrugged.

“Are you afraid of them because of-” She put her hands over her head, mimicking your ears.

“We are natural enemies,” you said, although the comment didn’t come across as the joke you intended. Perhaps because it wasn’t a joke.

Quinta didn’t say anything, looking back at the passing road and her swinging feet. The warm air smelled like trees and dust and the stacks of straw piled up on the back of her father’s wagon. When the breeze blew, you got whiffs of the approaching town. Manure, cooking food, fire smoke, and that tangy, sweaty scent of so many people all crowded in one place.

“Where are you going?” she asked.

“Somewhere else.”

“Oh.”

You looked down, staring at the road. The sun beat down on your neck, sweat beading up on your hairline. You could hear the chorus of a small town’s buzzing crowds as the wagon pulled closer.

“We’ll come back tomorrow,” Quinta said. “Will you come to our house? I bet you’ll like my dog, he’s really, really nice. My mom is there, you can meet her.”

You smiled, feeling a sharp little pang at her sweet innocence. “Thank you, I’ll think about it.”

“Oh, please say you will.”

“Quinta, that’s enough,” her father chided. She frowned, but said nothing else.

The wagon pulled to a stop where the animals could be hitched. You hopped off and stretched, looking around the town. You weren’t really sure where you would go next. Far away. As far as possible.

“Thank you, sir,” you told the man, bowing politely.

He nodded gruffly, and you knew you shouldn’t linger. Still, you couldn’t help but glance back at the sound of his heavy grunt. When he passed the wagon bed, Quinta jumped up onto his back, her arms wrapped tight around his neck. He was quick to rebuke her, scowling as he put her on the ground. That clearly hurt her feelings, turning away with a trembling lower lip and furrowed brows. You felt, for a terrible moment, a great pain in your chest.

You wanted to tell her that he was just busy. Maybe he could be cold and stern, but that didn’t mean he didn’t love her. You wanted to tell her to love him while she could, that time was finite. Right then, you weren’t looking at a stranger and his daughter, but at a little girl with ears too big for her head and a man who waved at her from the driver’s seat with a sun-crinkled smile, a man who tweaked those fluffy ears with calloused fingers, and a man who kissed her forehead with paper-dry lips.

But then you blinked, sunblind and a little dizzy, and turned away from the scene.

You thought of your father, love for him tender sweet and swelling in your chest, overwhelming. But quickly, always so quick, his smiling, twinkly eyes were emptied as his body fell to the ground, deprived of dignity in those final moments. And the monster turned from him to face you with a wild expression, a growl in its throat. He said you would meet again. The big bad wolf was not real, he was a masked madman, a creature of fiction. All the same, your anxious, cold gaze scanned the crowd of many faces around you. Haunted. Hunted.

sixth sense.

Blisters covered your hands, and you couldn't stop coughing, your body seizing with fits of it. The tangy sour stench of smoke infected every pore of your body, saturated your lungs with its acrid excretions. Somehow, despite the horror of escaping a building as it burned down, you were alive. You had no idea what had woken you up, but it happened before anybody even noticed the fire. Others weren’t so lucky. The girl who slept every night two beds down from you, who was innocent, who had never done anything at all to you, was dead.

"It's not your fault that you couldn’t get to her in time. You were lucky enough to get out with your life," you were told, an attempt at consolation. A lie.

It was your fault. Your punishment. Your presence invited the flame to spark a blaze in the boarding house for working young women, and yet you had lived while someone else died. Above the sound of so many voices, of a chaos world attempting to fix such a tragedy, you could hear it. She screamed for as long as she was able, until her lungs were too coated in sooty black smoke to make a sound, until her flesh melted by the infernal heat. Other women boasted swaths of charred skin, blisters popping bright red and gruesome, bones broken from leaping out windows. Their lives would be ruined by this, by the sheer misfortune of being near you.

And as the flames licked the sky, you could have sworn you saw an inhuman face at the flickering orange edge where the light tapered into shadow, his eyes not so much reflecting the blaze as they were consuming the fire’s callous violence, soaking in the terror which mingled with the smoke.

Then you blinked watery eyes, and the shadow was just a shadow.

There was nothing for it, you left town as soon as you were well enough. Not soon enough, clearly.

It was your fault, your punishment, but terribly, shamefully, you kept thinking, over and over and over, at least it wasn’t you. You breathed in air that still stank of the memory of murderous smoke and felt grateful that you would recover from this incident.

That selfish drive was the crux of it all, the reason you could never allow yourself to move on. After so many years, most people would have found a way forward. They took their anguish in stride and did something with their life. But you didn’t. For you, there was no forgetting, and there was no moving on. You couldn’t be allowed happiness in a life others had been denied, a life that you hoarded so rabidly. Even cowards had to draw a line somewhere, didn’t they? No matter how miserable, you struggled to squeeze one more day out of the harsh world, to carve yourself another miserable hour, and then, crippled by pain and smoke and fear, felt a coward’s joy when facing tragedy because at least it wasn’t you.

Lucky, lucky, lucky you.

seven rainbow hues.

"Watch out!"

It happened so fast. That was the cliche, but the truth. Time did not wait for you to catch up in moments where survival came down to muscle memory. Panic and surprise cut up your perception in choppy little bits. One second you were walking down the road, you noticed a man beneath a falling beam and lunged, and then you were flat on your ass in the middle of a road, adrenaline spiking your heart rate and your entire body shaking with it. So little time had passed that the warning was still tangy in your mouth, the sound stifled by the echoing impact.

Someone was shouting. Screaming.

Sitting up, little rocks grinding into your skinned palms, you looked at the fallen beam not even a foot away. Had you erred even a few inches to the right, you would have been, at the very least, catastrophically injured. Just like the man you tried to push out of the way. He was screaming. His leg was crushed.

But you were fine. Alive.

People swarmed the man to free him from the beam while the world blurred extra bright, the colors of shock overloading your brain, dozens of different voices buzzing together. Someone asked if you were okay. You were. Of course you were. Alive. The carpenter jumped down from his ladder, finally getting the man out from under the beam. A gruesome mess had been made of his shin, bloody and broken. You only watched, a sort of cool numbness had taken the place of adrenaline.

The man's leg was a ruin of flesh and bone, and your only injuries were a bruised tailbone and skinned palms. You should not have survived that.

eight shots of moonshine.

“He reared up real tall, howling like a beast, and that’s when I stuck him,” the hunter said, his expression animated as he recounted the story. It was, by your count, his ninth drink, and the fifth version of his story about how he fought, and escaped, the terrifying half-man-half-wolf beast—el hombre lobo, in the local dialect. It made sense that some cruel spark of fate would invite the subject matter wherever you happened to be, especially now. That’s the way these things always happened, wasn’t it? The world had a way of kicking you when you were down.

You listened to him with half an ear, staring at your chapped, cracked knuckles. Working as a laundress was not kind to your skin. Unfortunately, being ravi and having a limited skill set meant that simple labor was just about all you could get. So you did odd jobs and, once you had enough money, you would be on your way to the next place, and then the next, and the next. Passing through like a ghost, and then gone. Temporary. Just like this bar, this drink, this man and his story. Transient.

“The sound he let out was deafening, and I mean that,” the hunter continued. “I’ve never heard anything like it, not in all my years.”

“That’s not true,” you said loudly, pulling the story to a screeching halt before its predictable conclusion. You hadn’t meant to speak, but you did. If nothing else than to just make him stop. Details changed, but the ending was mostly the same each time. The creature put up a fight, but the hunter was stronger and smarter. Maybe he’d mention the bear trap again, how he watched the wolfman trying to gnaw off its own leg. And it wasn’t like you cared what some random drunk had to say. You didn’t, really. It was the alcohol, and the memories the alcohol was meant to be suppressing, and some misplaced well of fury crammed deep into your gut, unable to be reached or drained or expressed in any meaningful way. Or maybe it was something else, something less palatable. You had a way of testing people’s tempers. Pain was proof of purchase, after all. And you had paid more than your fair share.

“What was that?” the hunter asked, glazed eyes surprisingly lucid when they landed on you, twinkling with an amused sort of incredulousness at being challenged. He had on a sweat stained red shirt and the ruddy complexion to match. Everyone around you was in similar states of drunken disrepair. So were you, for that matter—a shot of something hard and foul tasting past reasonable. Two shots away from having the energy to engage in this stupid argument, which was ridiculous considering you were the one to involve yourself in the first place.

“That didn’t happen,” you said. The few people who had been paying attention in the first place laughed at you, but the hunter seemed intrigued, if irritated, by your attitude.

“Are you calling me a liar?” he asked.

“Do you expect us to believe you fought the big bad wolf?” Those words were old and mean, that of a horrible old man without a shred of mercy in his heart.

Red-shirt’s eyes narrowed. A couple of the men laughed again, sending a few drunken jibes in your direction.

“Is that what you’re supposed to be?” One of his friends called, gesturing at your ears, which twitched under his attention.

“No, no. She’s one of those cat people. The eastern savages,” the man sitting next to you responded, roughly tweaking your ear. He’d made a few friendly comments in your direction throughout the night. And then a few less friendly ones as the liquor loosened his tongue. You winced and ducked away, scowling at him. He grinned. “Have you got any wares to sell us, gata? Or maybe you’re here to put on a show.”

Another laugh, a playful wolf whistle.

“Ah, I understand. I was mistaken,” red-shirt allowed, a mean grin spreading across his face. “It was no wolfman after all. You ought to tell your pa to keep away from these parts. Next time I see him, he won’t get off so easy.”

That drew a bigger laugh from the few people bothering to pay attention. A part of you hated him a little bit, hated him with a riotous, evil sort of passion. His ignorance, his audacity. You hated yourself more for not holding your tongue.

“No, it was her ma,” another man chimed in. “Must have been in heat if she was so focused on you.” You felt a red hot flush rise to your cheeks at that, some uncomfortable mixture of embarrassment and anger.

Needing to calm the impulse of rage, and kicking yourself for having spoken at all, you took a deep breath.

“Aw, pobre gata, don’t be upset,” the man next to you said. Poor cat? He drew out the condescending pet name with a sugary sweetness, going for your ears again. You scooted back to avoid him, nearly falling from the alcohol-induced sway of the world. The men laughed again. “Where’re you going?” he asked. “They’re just teasing.”

You licked your dry lips. You needed to leave, it wasn’t the sort of place you should have been hanging out in the first place. Part of you worried that he might try something. He looked hungry. Worse, part of you wondered if he would, wanted to stick around and find out what kind of situation you’d dug yourself into. Curiosity didn’t come from desire or lust, but from something darker, the impulse of deserved violence. Alcohol made it worse, made you think that maybe you could want it, that you might enjoy being roughed up and used in a vulgar game of intimacy.

“Let me buy you another drink,” he offered. “I promise not to tease you.”

You pursed your lips, and knew you would hate yourself later, and decided that it didn’t matter all that much anyway. “Okay.”

Hours later, you were sweaty, sour with alcohol but no longer drunk enough to tolerate the discomfort, and ultimately dissatisfied with the interaction as you stumbled through the quiet town back to the room you had been renting. The unpleasant scent of sex was all you could smell, it clung to your rumpled dress and messy hair. Evidence of your mistake. Despite being so forward, he hadn’t been what you hoped. Whenever you pulled back, he thought to coax you further with sweet words rather than rough hands. You’d have been better off trying to antagonize the man in the red shirt to get what you really wanted, not a quick upright with a man who wanted to slobber on your neck and call you beautiful.

Disgust, shame—a sickening feeling of wrong had you ducking into an alley, vomiting up a stomach full of bile and alcohol like a homeless wretch, shaking hard enough that your teeth clattered. Snot, stomach acid, and tears smeared against the side of the building when you pressed your fevered cheek against it, the material rough on your skin. But it was cool, and solid, and you were breathing. Alive.

Miserable. Beautiful. That was your mother’s word. An ugly, ugly word. Your shoulders heaved with half-hearted sobs, your skin crawling and stomach twisting. You were alive because the only thing you feared more than the hideous pain of living was beautiful death, and that was the ugliest feeling you could possibly imagine.

Eventually, you collected yourself, wiping your mouth and eyes, and completed your walk of shame, your thoughts lingering on el hombre lobo and the furious hollow in your chest, and the sort of hatred which begged violence and cried for pity.

nine lives.

Afternoon faded into sunset as you walked, and you weren’t too concerned. If anything, you felt the same relaxing sense of relief you always felt when you left one place for another.

No, you didn’t worry at all until twilight gave way to the rise of the moon. That’s when you stopped, frowning up at the sky. Either you were lost or you had severely misjudged the distance. Unfortunately, there was nothing to be done other than continue on and hope that you reached civilization soon. You pulled your cloak a little closer to fight off the chill, adjusting your bag uncomfortably. Summer was coming, but the air retained the cold damp newness of deep spring.

And so you trundled along, reminding yourself over and over that it was okay. While possible, it wasn’t likely that anything would happen to you.

Your anxiety wasn’t helped by the full moon. A morbid coincidence, and a mixed blessing. It was full that night. Illuminating your father’s twisted expression of fear, haloing the impossible beast looming above you, lighting your way when you ran, dying your blood into the color of ink. As always, it was a bit of mischief the universe was having at your expense. It shone the same steady pale silver, bleaching the world in imitation sunshine just like it always had, always did.

A gentle breeze shook the tree canopy, the leaves shivering. Above them, the perfect velvet blue veil of sky was mostly undisturbed by clouds. The stars twinkled and winked, dulled slightly by the radiance of the moon. Bugs wailed and frogs sang their nighttime dirge, an unsettlingly miserable sound. No matter how uncomfortable the sun could be, blinding and revealing, the night was worse. It was the place where nightmares lived, after all. And the woods, the place where the big bad wolf hid.

Right. These were the woods where the hunter claimed to have seen the wolfman those few weeks ago. A chill slithered down your spine at that realization. While it was most certainly a lie, in the dark, it troubled you. It frightened you. There were many things in the deep, dark woods to be afraid of. Hiding, lurking.

Huffing with annoyance at your paranoia, you vigorously shook your head and focused on the path instead. Everything was fine, you just had to keep going.

Seemingly out of nowhere, the wind began to blow a lot harder, catching the hem of your cloak and loose strands of hair, crawling beneath your clothes to make you shiver. At the same time, a shadow slowly closed in around you, a stray cloud covering up the moon. The sudden lack of light made the shadows darken significantly. Goosebumps crawled across your entire body in response to the windy chill, hairs standing on end and visceral discomfort lurching in your gut like a hook behind your belly button. Surrounded on all sides by darkness, stranded in the woods, you were completely and utterly vulnerable.

Then it all—bugs, the frogs, and the wind—everything died. Not slowly, tapering off naturally, but all at once, as if a great dampener was suddenly pressed into the air. And that was strange, that was eerie, that was cause for fear, but the first whistled note shot straight into your core.

Trees were hungry things. They, with their thick wood and big bodies, had an appetite for sound. Echoes, however, were mischievous. They would rather play tricks than be eaten. Back and forth, from everywhere and nowhere, a tune you knew all too well danced amidst the silent forest. The notes jumped from one to the next in a song that should have been cheerful but wasn’t. You didn’t move. You felt like you couldn’t. Standing there, ears perked and twitching in search of any noise aside from the whistling, heart racing, cold sweat gathering on the nape of your neck, you suddenly knew, with an alarming degree of certainty, that you weren’t alone.

Slowly, eyes watering from the sudden burst and disappearance of the wind, you looked up.

The whistler, seeming not to notice you, was no more than a dozen feet ahead, a darker shadow amidst the void, a little off the edge of the clearing. Jarring surprise shot like lightning down your spine at the sight, at how close you were to somebody you hadn’t noticed, so powerful that you stumbled backward on pure instinct. But your foot landed on a mossy rock and the squishy material slid out from under your boot. You tried to find your balance, but you wound up overcorrecting, sending you forward instead. With a yelp and a loud thump, you tumbled onto the ground, landing hard on your elbows and knees.

The song ended.

“¿Tan deseosa estás de ser engullida?” the man asked, amused. You looked up, terrified, but without any moonlight to help you see, the most you could make out was the vague shape of a hooded figure leaning against a tree.

Fear made your hands shaky, your body unwieldy and awkward. Scrambling, unsure if you should have been embarrassed or scared, you got up to your feet. At least you weren’t hurt.

“I-I don’t… no entiendo,” you said, wondering, hoping, fearing, unsure. At least it was just a man. That shouldn’t have been the consolation it was. It shouldn’t have been any consolation at all.

“I asked if you needed any help,” he clarified in an accented voice, amused in a way that made you think he was making fun of you. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”

“I, um… I was just surprised, bu-but it’s okay,” you said, trying very hard to calm down. “I’m fine.”

“Are you sure? I would hate for you to wind up like the last girl who got lost in the woods,” he said. You squinted into the dark, but you couldn’t see any details beyond a shadow. Covered moon or not, the dark was borderline unnatural. “She was gobbled up whole, her granny too. You’ve even got the red hood.”

It took you a second to register that he was messing with you. Entertaining any sort of interaction was foolish, but you couldn’t help your nervous laugh, pulling your cloak closer. “Oh, yeah.”

The stranger laughed in turn, forcefully friendly in a very uncomfortably stilted way. The sound sent a fresh shiver down your spine. “They don’t get very many people coming all the way out here to visit,” the man said. “Are you here to see family, gatita?”

Your ears twitched nervously. “Um… Excuse me?”

“Is that offensive? I can never remember what you beast types call yourselves. Ra… something.”

“Ravi,” you said.

“That’s right. I’ve never been much of a cat person myself, but I can see the appeal. The big eyes, the fuzzy ears… Very cute.” He paused. “Hey, can you purr too?”

You drew back, your awkward moment of uncertainty giving way to dread at the underlying danger of a question like that. While many people scorned you blindly, there were those with a particular taste for half-breeds.

“I need to get going, it’s late,” you said slowly. You didn’t want to turn your back on him, and you had no idea how close you were to town, but anything was better than here.

“Wait, before you go, I heard a story recently,” he said, unconcerned with your response. “It’s about your kind. Stop me if you’ve heard it before.”

“I don’t-”

“Once upon a time,” he said, speaking as if you hadn’t, “a gato got it in his head that one life wasn’t enough for him. Even though he had everything he could ask for—a wife, two children, a successful career, he was proud. He didn’t see why he should have to abide by the same rules as everyone else. Of course, he was warned that it was a bad idea, but it became a… preoccupation of his. He traveled just about everywhere, certain that he could do what no one else had.”

The man paused, giving you a moment to register his words, to feel the slow drip of horror pooling in your stomach.

“It didn’t work out for him, in the end. It never does.”

“Who are you?” you asked, although you had a feeling. A very strange, awful feeling. “How do you-”

“Do you know how it ends?” he asked, pushing away from the tree and standing up, stepping out of the shadows, only a few feet in front of you. Your eyes were better adjusted now, taking in as much light as possible. His hood fell back, letting you see the man in full.

Only, he wasn’t a man.

For a second, the ears on the top of his head made you think he was ravi too. But they were too small. Pointed. Distinctly canine.

Then the rest of it registered.

He wasn’t a wolf standing on hind legs, or a person with wolf features, but some inhuman, impossible mix of the two. His long, toothy snout was distinct to a dolichocephalic skull. A beast. That’s what you would assume given all that thick gray fur, round eyes, and the pointy ears directly on top of the head. But somehow, despite all of that, something about his face registered as perfectly, sickeningly, uncannily human.

And you knew him. You saw him in your nightmares, in the shadows, in the darkest places of your mind. No matter what resolve you had before that moment, all you wanted was to run. You needed to run. But fear, pure and distilled, paralyzed you.

“No? That’s fine, it’s just a story, after all,” he said, the words far too well articulated considering the wolf’s muzzle they were coming from, the shiny sharp teeth through which they were spoken.

You opened your mouth to respond, and instead you whimpered as you exhaled.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “You remember me, don’t you? I remember you. Although, you were a lot smaller back then. Who would’ve thought that you’d turn out to be such a looker?" He laughed at that, a stilted chuckle. When you didn’t respond, his demeanor dropped, darkened. “Your fear was intoxicating.”

Leaning forward, he closed his eyes and sniffed at the air like a dog. You couldn’t do anything, your limbs refusing to move even though every cell in your body screamed at you to run. When he leaned back and exhaled, his lips pulled back in what was very distinctly a smile, an expression that should have been impossible for a wolf to make.

“I’ve waited a long time to see you like this again, I worried that it would be disappointing,” he told you, red eyes opening. They were mad. His smile was mad. Dread overwhelmed your system. “But you smell even better than I remember.”

He took a step forward. With a few unnerving exceptions, his body was human enough. Tall, broad shouldered, slightly hunched, wearing clothes like a person. His hands were almost like paws with pads and claws, but were articulated like your own—short one finger. He was no monster. He was a nightmare come to life.

“What’s the matter?” he asked. “Surprised to see me?”

“No,” you whispered, shaking your head. “No, you’re not… not real.”

You could see the excitement in his eyes as he licked his lips with a long tongue, another entirely animalistic motion. The perfect meld of human and wolf traits was fascinating. Sickening. Something that should not exist.

You did nothing other than stare at him with wide eyes as he leaned in. And you did nothing as he raised his hand, dragging the claw in a butterfly kiss over your cheek. “You think?” he asked, the growl in his voice almost like a purr.

That woke you out of your trance and you stumbled back, covering the skin which tingled from the very real touch.

He laughed and straightened out, but didn’t follow you. “It’s not safe to be out here so late. You never know what you’ll find lurking in the woods.”

You swallowed hard, your breathing picking up, the old well of fury cracking open just a little. There should have been more, but the fear was too intense, cold in your veins. “What are you?” you asked, barely audible. Frightened of the answer, but desperate to know.

“Your father called me Anubis. That’s one of your gods, right?”

“You are not a god,” you said, an objection because you couldn’t allow this nightmare, any degree of holy pedigree that you had feared for so long. There was doubt in your voice though, doubt you couldn’t stifle.

“It depends on how you look at it,” he allowed. “But it’s true that I have no interest in being worshiped, and I certainly don’t want your faith. I prefer fear.”

You swallowed hard, shaking your head in a hazy attempt to fight back the swelling tide of fear, to deny him that. “I'm not… not afraid of you, wolf."

That didn’t so much as make him blink. "You fear me more than you fear anything else."

"No! You killed my… my—I hate you."

“Sure you do."

“And because of you, my brother was…” You couldn’t finish the statement, your entire body nearly vibrating from the way you were shaking. “And then mm-my mother...”

“Execution and, what was it, some kind of sickness?” The wolf clicked his tongue. “It’s a harsh world.”

“You took them from me,” you said softly. “You took everything.”

“Do you want revenge, gatita? You wouldn’t be the first.”

The mocking tone of his voice was as bad as a slap across the face. Even if you wanted revenge, what fight could you possibly put up against an impossible creature like him? You flexed your hands and clasped them together, your breathing picking up with the confusion of old fury and sadness and fear.

“I want to know why,” you finally said.

The wolf sighed, rolling his eyes in an exaggerated—and far too human—way as he continued to circle you. “Everybody thinks there’s a reason. There isn’t. Who lives, who dies, it’s all the same to me in the end. But there are those who… tempt fate. Although, I prefer to call it tempting death."

"You're saying that my father wanted to die? You're crazy,” you argued, your shoulders tensing in some form of defense.

"He was especially tempting. His pride, his ego, his fear… I gave him several chances, and he chose to insult me over and over again.” He paused for a moment before continuing, “I may have gotten carried away. You can’t blame me for wanting some fun now and again."

Despite the relative warmth of the night, the air chilled whenever you inhaled, your skin raising with goosebumps. Something in your head clicked, the understanding you had been trying very hard not to acknowledge.

"What are you?" you asked again, but you were thinking that you knew. Of course you knew, it was something you’d known for a long time.

"You know who I am."

"Death," you whispered.

“And you know all about tempting death, don't you? To be honest, I’m starting to lose my patience, gatita,” he practically whispered the pet name, leaning down behind you so the word brushed intimately against your ear, his breath disturbing the fine hairs and making them twitch.

You yelped and jumped away, twisting around. All you could think about was how close all those teeth had been to your ears. Your neck. Death watched as you stumbled even further backwards, hitting a tree and falling against it.

“Watching you survive things that would kill anybody else over and over, it’s unbearable. You throw yourself into danger like you’re trying to tease me.” Genuine irritation glowed in his eyes. Frustration. You shouldn’t have been able to see an emotion like that on such an inhuman face.

You needed to run. Whether or not that was a good idea no longer mattered. Surely he wouldn’t follow you out of the woods, surely sanity would take his place once you were back among civilization, out of the moonlight’s pure lunacy. Your insides squeezed sickeningly. Your heart raced.

“Is it a cat thing? You inherited the ears, the eyes, and, what, the nine lives? I guess that skipped a generation,” Death mused, his demeanor shifting completely right back into amusement. “Or maybe it’s just dumb luck. What do you think, gatita—are you feeling lucky tonight?”

Run. You needed to run.

Death stepped forward.

You had to run.

Rather than get any closer to him to follow the trail, you rolled off of the tree to the side so you could escape into the trees, letting your pack drop to the ground to avail yourself of the extra weight. With your back to the wolf, you sprinted, not caring where it took you, only that it was as far away from him as possible.

Behind you, you heard him calling out to you. You heard him laughing. You gasped and choked for breath, your feet pounding against the forest floor, your streaming eyes blind to anything other than what was directly in front of you. Running, catching the sharp fingers of trees across your arms and face, stray logs and squishy moss and wet grass threatening to trip you with every step. All around, you could hear his laughter, echoing around amidst the trees and in your head.

And for what? Your escape had been doomed from the start, nothing more than the animalistic instinct of prey.

It really only made sense when you realized that Death stood directly in your path, a hulking shadow with red eyes. Your body jolted on instinct and you skittered into a hard stop, momentum pushing you forward while your feet tried to backtrack.

“¿Dónde vas, gatita? Haven’t you heard that it’s dangerous to stray from the path?”

Thoughtlessly, you twisted around, but you were too slow. Or he was too fast. Grabbing a fistful of fabric from the back of your cloak, Death dragged you backwards. And then you were looking into a pair of bright red eyes, choking as your cloak’s tie tightened around your windpipe.

He growled as a wolf would, and you felt base terror in your very core. No matter how humanly he expressed emotion, his face was very decidedly that of a wolf, of a predator that you were naturally wired to fear. A rising surge of bile burned in your throat from running and all you could hear was your heartbeat, thundering ever faster. You choked out a yelp, lashing out however you could in a bid to get free. He easily avoided every attack you threw out, seemingly bored by the attempts, casually holding you at arms length.

“What I really can’t stand,” he told you, his voice low and calm, “is how you waste it. Fighting so hard to stay alive, and for what? Nothing will be lost when I end it.”

“Shut up!” you cried, choking the words out through gritted teeth. You would live. Survive just like you always did. He considered that, licking his lips before irritation once more gave way to excitement.

“Then again,” Death said, letting you down enough to stand on your toes, allowing you to take a breath. Oxygen hit you in a hard rush, you might have fallen over if he weren’t steadying you. “I’m in no rush.”

“Let me go,” you demanded, your breathing ragged, your ears buzzing and ignorant of his words.

Death smiled, his wolfish muzzle pulled back in an expression so human it bordered on obscene. His face was right to yours, you could practically count each of his deadly sharp teeth, see into the soulless depths of those evil eyes.

“Your fear is positively mouthwatering. The poor little kitten is really terrified of el lobo feroz. That fear is the only thing that’s ever given your life purpose. If you think about it, I’m the only reason you keep going. It’s almost flattering.” He licked his lips again, considering you intently. “You don’t mind having some fun before I kill you, right?”

“No!” you screamed the word, but all it did was make his eyes flash with hunger.

“I’m going to eat. You. Up.”

Every muscle in your body went taut, seizing with a different sort of horror. That confounded curiosity to know what he intended, the disturbing impulse to tempt violence, was only heightened by the adrenaline in your system. You had no word for the dark feeling, for the disturbing impulse. Only disgust, swirling dark twisting up hot and low in your gut. With shaking hands, you finally managed to undo the tie around your neck, dropping out of your cloak and onto the ground. And then, before you could even stand up, you were running.

This time, Death didn’t react. No laughter or jeering taunts followed your escape. Dampened beneath the rush of blood in your ears and your feet pounding on the forest floor, the woods were full of the normal sounds. Bugs and frogs and birds and the breeze.

All the same, you knew that el lobo feroz wasn’t far behind. You knew that, and you knew you wouldn’t escape from him. Not this time. But you couldn’t just stop. So you made your frantic flight through the trees, sprinting as fast as you could to escape a creature which existed in opposition to all that was sane or safe. Death himself.

From behind you, in front of you, on both slides, all around, the lilting whistled tune finally began. Panic, bright red and raw, caused you to trip. There was a jolt when your foot caught on something, sending a little shockwave all up your body, then a lurch as gravity forced you down and momentum dragged you forward. For a moment, true weightlessness. And then you were skidding and somersaulting along the ground, skinning your hands and knees all over again before you collapsed, your chin painfully knocking against the ground when you completed your tumble. No pain registered, just numb confusion. You were breathing so hard your lungs burned, your tongue paper dry and sour. Despite the deafening sound of your heart beating and the wheezing rattle of air in your lungs, you could hear his song.

Everything, everything hurt, but you forced yourself up, to shamble into the bushes, curling into a ball to wait.

The song ended.

Seconds—less than that, really—passed before anything happened. Then you heard him. He allowed you to hear him, your pursuer wasn’t concerned that you would manage to escape. He didn’t need to bother running after you, or disguise the noise of his approach. You squeezed your eyes shut until you heard heavy feet crunching through the grass and twigs right in front of you, peeking them open to watch a figure emerge from the darkness.

Death stopped to sniff the air like the predatory beast he appeared to be. You pressed both hands over your mouth and nose, your entire body shaking with the tension of staying stiffly still. For a moment, you hoped he would move on. You didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.

“This has been fun,” he said conversationally, “but you’re not exactly the most challenging hunt. So, make this easier for yourself and come out, or make it more fun for me and stay put. Your choice, gatita.”

Your sore, overworked body twitched, wanting to obey and spare yourself. But if he knew where you were, he wouldn’t be looking around randomly like he was, right? Unless this was another game and he was trying to trick you, to see how you’d respond to that threat. But he could be bluffing. You didn’t know, and that uncertainty kept you in place.

Death chuckled ominously, leaving your line of sight. Somehow, that was worse than anything else, the nothingness of blind anticipation.

For a fleeting moment, you hoped he had moved on after all.

“Did you really think you could hide from me?” Death asked. Behind you, above you. A short little scream ripped from your throat as he grabbed you by the hair, wrenching you upright so fast that your body went limp with dizziness, head spinning with terror and a fresh rush of energy. He kept you up by exchanging a fistful of hair for the front of your dress. “Me temo que no tiene suerte.”

Getting your bearings, you yelped, thrashing out of his grip. Death let you go too easily, causing you to stumble. You went down hard. This time, it did hurt. Your hands and knees were skinned raw. But still, you crawled. It wasn’t a choice, it was instinct.

“I’m going to enjoy this,” Death said, crouching down behind you. He laughed. “I’ve got a feeling that you will too.”

“No—no.”

“You can’t lie to me. I can smell it. Fear mixed with desire… It's delicious. I can’t wait to have a taste.”

All you could do was grunt when he grabbed you by the waist, easily lifting you up and manhandling you onto your back. You fell with a heavy sound, dizzy all over again.

“I’d say I was surprised, but… Well, I’m not,” Death said, straddling you. His legs were completely wrong. They bent like a man’s at the knee, but bent again with the backwards angle of a wolf’s legs, ending in a set of thick paws. His face was worse. He spoke with such vivid animation. It shouldn’t have been possible for a wolf’s face to emote like that, it shouldn’t have been possible that Death himself could look so gleeful, so excited. When you attempted to drag yourself away, he settled more of his weight on top of you. “This is how you like it, right? Rough. It makes you feel alive.”

Even in your terrified panic, you knew what he was talking about. How long had he been watching you? How intently? Had you ever managed to escape from him, or were you just running around like a headless chicken, never knowing you were doomed? Furiously rejecting that, you bucked upward, bowing your back to throw him off. When that didn’t work, you grasped fistfuls of fabric from the front of his shirt to get leverage.

Death growed low and grabbed your face, slamming your head against the ground, claws digging into the soft skin of your cheeks. He followed while you were still reeling, leaning down to talk directly into your ear.

“Do you feel alive now, gatita?”

You whimpered, squeezing your eyes shut so you couldn’t see his frightening face. El lobo feroz. His nose was cold and leathery when it brushed your face as he pulled back, air ghosting across your cheek and making you whimper. Death laughed, sitting up.

“The ears really are cute,” he told you, releasing your cheeks to take hold of your ear instead. The rough pads caught on the delicate skin, brushing the fur up in a way that made you shudder. He saw that, you could tell by the way his red eyes flashed, the way he licked his lips again. “Who knows, maybe you’ll change my mind about cats.”

“Stop it,” you said, covering your face in an attempt to find peace from this absurdity. He hadn’t broken skin with his claws, but your chin and palms were busted up, your cheeks latticed with shallow scrapes from the trees.

“I told you. You can’t hide from me,” Death said, his voice dragging with a growl. The threat was emphasized by the sudden cold edge dragging lightly against your neck.

Stiffening, you lowered your hands, looking up at him with wet eyes—looking at the humanoid wolf claiming to be death, who had killed your father and ruined your life, who had haunted you every day since, whose mere shadow terrified you to your core, and once you came to grips with the unbelievability of what you saw, you had to contend with the knowledge that you were powerless to such a nightmare. Utterly, completely powerless.

Death groaned. Or hummed. Or growled. It was a happy sound, excited. “Está buena, gatita,” he told you, saying it like praise. “I don’t normally go for this sort of thing.” Casually, he nudged your chin upward before dragging the sickle down so the point caught beneath the neckline of your dress. “I shouldn’t. It’ll have to be our secret, hm?”

Willful ignorance had done nothing for you thus far, but you still clung to it. He couldn’t be talking about what you thought he was. He couldn’t be that human.

In a sharp movement, he pulled the sickle downward. Fabric ripped loudly in the quiet night. Yelping, you tried to pull the scraps back together, to cover yourself because that indignity was too far, wasn’t it? Nudity could mean nothing more than a prelude to violence to something like him, but it was different to you.

Death growled in annoyance, pressing the weapon’s tip into the soft give of your stomach.

“Hands off,” he told you. You didn’t move, and he pressed down. Not too much, just enough to break the skin, to draw blood.

“Stop,” you said, clinging even more desperately to the front of your ruined bodice, “that hurts.”

“I’ll keep going. To. The. Hilt.” Death drew out each word, pressing down with each word to make his point, the sickle’s edge disappearing into your skin. He meant it. Obey or suffer.

Looking straight above at the uncaring night sky, you released your bodice. He chuckled as he pulled the weapon away. It might have been that sound, or the crushing disgust of being exposed. There was very little thought behind the way you lashed out, capitalizing on his moment of distraction as he readjusted himself.

Your pathetic attempt at escaping the inevitable lacked any art or intelligence, only the final burst of energy that came from knowing you’d have no more chances after this. Death avoided your thrashing limbs, letting you wriggle your way upward, twisting around to try and crawl away. And then he drove the sickle into the ground right beside your hand, the blade only narrowly missing your fingers as he drove it into the dirt. You yelped, flinching away. Death used the moment to flip you around again, slamming the air out of your lungs.

"Delicious," he growled, curling over you to get at the exposed skin of your torso. Fabric that hadn’t been properly cut was torn away by his hands. Hands, paws. Human finger articulation and the thick pads of a dog’s feet, each tipped with dangerously long claws. They caught your skin, the rough pads like sandpaper on your sensitive flesh. Just as quickly as the fabric was out of the way, his nose replaced it, his hulking form hunching over your body. Each rapid inhale tickled your skin, pairing disturbingly with the cold of his nose. Unlike his hands, his tongue was soft, lapping up the blood he’d drawn on your stomach before he moved up. The uncanny mixture of sensations made you squirm.

“Stop, stop now,” you said, jerking in uncoordinated little bursts beneath him more on instinct than rational thought. Fur filled the spaces between your fingers as you tried to push him off. He didn't react to you tugging on it, all it did was remind you of how bestial he was. The whole situation was terrifying, yes. But, more viscerally, it was gross. Deeply uncomfortable to feel his long, smooth tongue, to endure the threat of teeth as he moved up, to choke back disgust and terror as he passed over your nipples. “Stop,” you whined the word despite yourself, your eyes screwed shut in an attempt to separate from reality. Death chuckled, moving up across your flushed chest, to your neck, leaving you flushing bright red and slick with his saliva.

“Impatient?” he asked, the words brushing over your fluttering pulse. “I’m not surprised. That’s fine.”

The waistband of your dress didn’t part as easily as the top. He worked from the other end instead, making a slit to tear the fabric up and expose your stockings and panties. Claws made short work of the thin, well worn cotton, carving shallow lines into your skin to strip you entirely.

“Nn-no, what are you doing? Stop, st-” your words cut off with a heavy ‘umph’ when he pushed you back down. Death didn’t so much as look at you as he admired his handiwork, let alone respond to your plea.

“Just like I thought,” he said. “You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”

“No,” you said, desperately shaking your head. All you could see was his sharp, sharp teeth, those deadly claws. And your body was electrified, covered with drool and chills and thrumming hot with blood. There was no way out of this, you couldn't even comprehend the pain he could cause. Out of options, you pushed down the remains of your skirt, attempting to close your legs.

Claws dug into your thighs as Death forced them back open with a little growl, sparing you no indignity. The moon deprived you of the cover of darkness and it shouldn’t have been so embarrassing because he wasn’t a man, but it was. Just like he had with your torso, Death explored the exposed skin. The puffing brushes of air as he sniffed and licked along your thighs was humiliating and obscene on its own, nevermind when he nipped at the sensitive flesh to make you whimper, forcing you to contemplate the damage those teeth could do where you were most vulnerable.

The thought of such agony had you try a final time to close your legs, only to have them spread even wider, giving you the perfect view of el lobo feroz with his muzzle pressed against your pussy, his long pink tongue lolling out to drag across your slit. It wasn’t the pain you anticipated, but it was just too strange, too surprising, too disturbing. Having the snout of a beast between your legs, regardless of the creature's perceived humanity, was enough to make you feel sick, twisted and filthy.

“No, no, don’t,” you demanded shrilly, kicking in an attempt to displace him. Death growled, claws puncturing into your skin as he pushed your hips back down, peering up at you. His eyes didn’t reflect or catch the moonlight. They glowed. Empty. Evil.

“Ten cuidado, gatita,” he warned. “Haven’t you ever been warned about getting in the way of a wolf and his meal?”

“Please,” you said, unable to comprehend that this could happen. That this would happen. “Please don’t… don’t. You can’t do this.”

“What are you going to do to stop me?”

That was awful, too awful for words. Fight and risk more pain, or let it happen and… And what? What rational response could you possibly have to this other than disgust and despair? Maybe you should have been glad he wasn’t about to rip you to bloody shreds and feast on the remains, glad that you would be spared pain and immediate death, but that consolation felt terribly cheap when confronted with the equally unimaginable.

“You can’t,” you said, your voice too high, terrified into a whine. “You’re not even… I mean it’s not like you can… like you’ll… you can…”

Death hummed in annoyance, you could feel the vibration of the sound. “Te voy a comer. Y luego te voy a coger,” he told you, the words easy like he was explaining something very simple which, considering you couldn’t understand them, only made it that much worse. “¿Está bien, gatita?”

“No,” you said. “No, I don’t…” Understand. Believe. Consent.

Death laughed, arranging your legs into a more comfortable press towards your chest to make room for his hulking form. There was nothing you could do to make him stop.

The pads of his fingers were painfully rough against your pussy’s outer lips, catching on the sensitive flesh as he parted them. His tongue, however, was softer than anything you’d ever felt, lapping at your entrance, up to your clit. You squirmed uncontrollably, locked in some limbo of disgust, discomfort, and embarrassment.

You thought that if you just closed your eyes, if you just blocked it out, you could pretend that this wasn’t happening, but Death hummed out an animalistic growl, and his tongue was far too long and dexterous to be human, and his fur bristled against your thighs, and there was no way out. Already, your body was waking up to the stimulation. Responding. There was something wrong with you. You knew that, you’d known that for a long time, taking pleasure in beatings, wanting sex to be rougher and rougher, needing to be brutalized like it was an itch to be scratched. This was a new low, the grotesque indulgence of those most perverse.

Like you.

“Please stop,” you whined, another plea to add to the string of ignored requests. Death made a sound you could feel more than hear. For reasons other than fear, you shuddered at the noise.

With your clit acceptably swollen, your body twitching with every movement, his tongue slicked downward. Your hips jumped, legs closing and opening with surprise, but Death wasn’t deterred.

“No-oh,” you sounded so weak, your rejection coming out pathetic and breathy.

Death made another growl-like sound, pushing you down flat with mean claws that poked fresh holes into your skin. You hadn’t been trying to escape, you just couldn’t stop from squirming as he tested the flinching muscles of your entrance. This was new, and different, and terrible, and foul. His tongue was soft and long and far too dexterous, pushing into you with a few hungry strokes. No human man could do that. It wasn’t physically possible.

You whimpered, your head falling back in some vain attempt to block it all out. Escape wasn’t so easy. While his tongue lacked the pressure and weight of something solid, he attacked your g-spot with precision. Eating you out. Eating you. Given that long snout, it had to have been awkward, but that didn’t seem to deter him. And every time his head moved, his nose ground against your clit. He was probably watching you, watching you twitch and gasp and writhe helplessly, but you kept your eyes squeezed shut. The sight of a wolf’s head between your legs like this would kill you, surely it would.

Unbidden, you remembered telling the child Quinta that dogs were your natural enemy, and your penchant for seeking the companionship of those who promised animosity, and the wicked sort of sense it made that you would find yourself here, and you could only laugh at it all but the hysterical sound came out like a sob, and then a low groan, and then a sharp whine when Death pressed the rough pad of one of his fingers against your clit instead, dragging small little circles against it while his tongue continued to torment you.

“No, no, no, no-”

Whatever you were denying, it was pointless. Noise for the sake of it, words getting all tangled up with your choked moans and sobs and hiccups. The little addition of pain from the too rough texture on your clit was enough to give you what you really wanted, what you always ached for.

Pleasure lurched in your core, your hips bucking wildly. Death growled again and it was mean. Aggressive. You seized up, mouth open wide as if for a scream, your feet planted so you could tilt your hips up for more. More pleasure, more pain. Disgust, shame, fear, all of it became white hot and foul, agonizingly sexy in the few moments where the high of orgasm negated the living nightmare between your legs.

And then you were coming down, hips jerking into the tongue of a wolf monster, the creature that had killed your father, Death himself, and you actually sobbed, shying away from his touch as little sparks of overstimulation promised something worse. Unable to escape in any material way, you covered your face. Tears, dirt, and blood smeared together on the feverish, sweaty skin, nearly suffocating as you panted.

Death let you be and sat up, laughing. Laughing at you.

“That was faster than I expected.”

Peeking out from between your fingers, you saw the way his muzzle was glistening before his tongue swiped it away, saw the way he was smiling as he mocked you. “Ah. Unh-no, I-”

Death leaned over you. You flinched away, but he only grabbed the sickle he’d driven into the ground beside you. Casually, he flicked the blade out. The cool metal winked in the moonlight. Although you were still trembling with the aftershocks of orgasm, you weren’t too far gone to feel a fresh wave of fear. Immediately, you curled in on yourself, covering as much of your vulnerability as possible.

“You cower in fear, but I can taste your desire,” Death said, licking his lips. “It’s not half bad.”

“Please just… just stop.”

“I’m doing you a favor. You’re too tight.”

Death didn’t elaborate on that, positioning the weapon’s hilt between your legs, pushing the flared base between your folds before you could figure out what was happening. Everything was wet with a mixture of saliva and your own arousal, slick enough for the weapon to press against your entrance. You figured it out then, but he pinned you in place with a hand on your stomach, claws pressing against the flinching skin. There was nothing you could really do to avoid it, and you didn’t dare close your legs around the blade itself.

“This might hurt.”

“Stop, please stop, you can’t—”

Death didn’t say anything, watching your expression as he pushed the weapon’s grip into you. To see such a sharp blade between your legs in any capacity was dizzying, and that was without the intensely physical pressure of its grip rubbing against your inner walls.

“I told you, didn’t I?” he asked. “To. The. Hilt.” With every word, he drove the weapon deeper, your body jerking with each movement.

“Stop, just stop, please, take it…take it out.”

“I’d do it myself, but,” Death said, holding up his off-hand, “I’m not so sure you’d like that.” His claws practically gleamed in the moonlight, and you knew exactly how rough the pads were. The idea of those inside of you was enough to make your insides wither, although all that really amounted to was your cunt tightening around the weapon. You grunted at the feeling, shook your head fast, panicked.

“No! No,” you told him as coherently as you could. Your tongue was dry as bone, you choked on the grit.

“Thought so,” he replied, pulling the sickle back only to slam it back in.

The textured grip felt disturbingly good in some mad, broken way. His tongue had been so smooth and soft, but this was solid and firm, forcing itself into you. He used it like a tool, not bothering to simulate sex, twisting it this way and that, forcing your pussy open. Making room. You couldn’t help but writhe with each movement, your cunt tightening around the grip, hips tilting up as you were consumed by a confusing twist of disgust and need. Violence and pain were things you knew and understood. Familiarity had you dripping around the weapon, you could hear how wet you were, and his harsh motions only emphasized the vulgar sound.

“Not bad,” Death said, amused by the sight. You shut your eyes. “This weapon killed your father. It’s only fair that you should die by it too—una pequeña muerte.”

“Don’t,” you said, body going painfully tense with disgust, with hate, with fear. Death pulled the sickle out, pushing it back in with an ugly squelch, dragging a pained yelp from your mouth, and then a distinctly less pained one when he twisted it slightly. “No, no, I…”

Little death. You belatedly realized the implication of that. You’d already come once, it wasn’t nearly as difficult to build you up again. Especially not when he was being more deliberate with each thrust, when the sandpaper-rough texture of his finger nudged at your clit again.

Nothing in particular set you off, maybe it was just the acceptance of sensation, the acknowledgement that it would buy you a few moments of madness from this unthinkable situation. Gasping, flushing, writhing like a creature possessed, you seized up, pleasure flushing through your system with a white-hot sort of frenzy. You didn’t think it could be compared to death, not really. You felt distinctly alive for a few seconds of shivering, wet heat.

Until it ended, abruptly dropping you back in the middle of an unfathomable predicament.

Death hummed as he stopped, letting you wilt back onto the ground, trembling and hot. “I prefer a fight, but-” Without much ceremony and a disgustingly wet shlick, Death pulled the weapon out of your pussy. “You put on quite the show, gatita. This is going to be good.”

“What are you doing?” you asked, drawing your legs in, wincing at the feeling. Some part of you still rejected what was happening, what he was capable of doing. Of course that got a little harder to believe when he pushed his pants down. Was it flattering that a monster would be turned on by torturing you? You wanted to think that it couldn’t be, that you weren’t that depraved, but the part of your deepest self that stirred in reaction to the sight frightened you. It seemed that the human shape and build of his body carried over to his primary sex characteristics. It was sick that the revelation should be relieving, but at least you would be spared the particular grotesque indignity of inhuman genitalia. Maybe if you shut your eyes, if you blocked it all out, you could pretend that it was just a man raping you.

Because that was so much better.

You weren’t even aware that you were trying to crawl away until he clicked his tongue, grabbing your waist to pull you back into place. The pads on his fingers were so rough, claws threatening to rip the sensitive flesh. He licked his lips with wolfish excitement. Fur brushed your bare skin. There was no way out of this, to escape el lobo feroz. Not mentally, not physically.

You pressed your thighs together as tightly as you could, ignoring how slick they were.

“It’s too late for that,” he said, easily prying them apart. Fur brushed against your skin, but you were more concerned with the sight of his cock as it bobbed up before settling against your abdomen.

Heavy. That was your first thought, right before the comparison between your body and his cock really settled in your feverish brain. The head alone was thick enough that you couldn’t fathom it getting past your entrance, let alone that you’d be able to take the rest.

“No, no, no, you-you can’t do this,” you said, staring at his dick with a crawling sense of fear that had nothing to do with his inhumanity—in all regards—and everything to do with the size. “It won’t fit.”

“You can accommodate new life,” he said, a hand going under his cock to press against your abdomen, right above your womb. “Let alone Death. You’ll be fine.” He said it like a joke, like it was amusing. He was sick. You were sick. This was…

When he moved, the slap of his dick on your abdomen was audible, punctuating a joke that wasn’t funny to begin with. Death clearly wasn’t concerned as he rearranged you, pushing your legs up and apart until your thighs screamed, his body bearing down against you for leverage. The unyielding press of his cock between your legs made you panic, but he had you utterly pinned. You couldn’t do anything other than feel it slide across the sensitive flesh, settling right against your entrance. You couldn’t do anything to stop this. Death grunted as he readjusted you, claws digging fresh lines into your flesh, and began to rock his hips forward. When you yelped, bucking up against him, the sharp points broke skin. It would be easy for him to rip you up with nothing more than those claws.

“Quédate quieto,” he growled. You didn’t need to understand to be still.

So close like this, you realized that you could smell him. Not the stench of a dog, of wet fur or a poorly maintained pelt. Not the scent of a man either, familiar and human. Death smelled like a cool summer night, and torrential rain, and a river’s violent rapids, and acrid smoke, and the dry dust of an old road. Although it wasn’t entirely unpleasant in the way you might have expected of a wolf man, it made your stomach churn, doing nothing to help you relax as he continued to press the thick head of his cock against your pussy.

For a moment, you thought that it really was impossible, that you would be spared. That single second of relief was all it took for the head to pop past the initial barrier of muscle. Your mouth dropped open at the feeling. Surprise, maybe. Your legs were spread wide enough to mitigate some of the dragging pain as he forced himself a little deeper, just past the ridge. Death made a sound low in his chest, but all you could manage was stiff, cold shock. Surprise at how surreal it all was. But reality marched on all the same, with or without your comprehension. You weren’t sure what you expected it to feel like, but you would have been wrong anyway. Stretching, aching, too much, too much, too-

Grunting, he rolled his hips, pulling back just enough before thrusting deeper. Little by little, letting you adjust and relax ever so slightly before pulling back to go further. You whined each time, back arching, your pussy tightening around him. It was probably a protective measure, trying to keep him out, but it hurt, pulling a rumbly growl out of his throat, his hips pushing forward despite the painful resistance.

“No more,” you got out, the words tight, pained.

Muttering something under his breath, Death leaned back to let drool drip from his long tongue. It landed heavily where the two of you were joined, splatting with an unattractive slap onto the place where you were joined, onto your swollen clit. He laughed at your girlish yelp of surprise.

You let your head fall back, your hands covering your face. They smelled like dirt and blood. At least the extra lubrication helped, and you knew your body was responding to this. Whether to protect itself or out of some truly disturbing reciprocation, your pussy was soaking his cock, making way for him as he rolled his hips back and forth.

Deeper, further. You were going to split apart.

“Stop, please,” you finally broke enough to beg, pressing against his stomach, ignoring the sickening feeling of fur beneath your hand. You were almost surprised when Death stopped, huffing hard. Worse, you were grateful.

“Too much, gatita? And you were doing so well.”

A pathetic little whine tore from your throat when you looked down at the remaining few inches of cock between your straining pussy lips and his grotesque inhuman body, despairing at the sight. “I can’t,” you whimpered. “No more.”

Death growled in frustration, claws digging painfully into your skin as he shifted back and forth a few times, trying to ease himself deeper. You could see the shadow of distension shifting across your abdomen as he did, proof of how deep inside of you he already was. But no matter how he rolled his hips, or twisted you around, there was no more room.

“Stop,” you said, the word getting caught in your swollen throat, your body desperately straining to get away for fear that he’d just force it in.

Death stilled, exhaling hard to steady himself. It sounded like a growl. Your pussy unintentionally clenched hard around him at the noise. It hurt, the muscles unable to adjust to his size. The reaction had his breath catching, and that became a throaty laugh.

“Fine,” he said, finally dragging his hips back. It was what you wanted, but it still hurt, the stretch worsened by the way your pussy squeezed and pulsed around his length. Death stopped when only the head remained inside of you. “You just need to be broken in. That’s fine.”

You looked, stricken, from the dizzying sight of his cock—now, at least partially, glistening with your own arousal—to the sickening expression of manic glee he wore. How could a canine face express such viscerally human emotions?

And then, in the back of your empty, dizzy head—why was this happening?

“No more,” you begged, squeezing your eyes shut, your pussy trying to push him out despite the discomfort of it. Claws ripped into your skin when his grip had to tighten to keep you in place, his hips chasing yours as you tried so desperately to escape. It hurt all over again. Maybe not as bad, but now you knew what to anticipate.

“It's better like this.” He stopped when he was as deep as he could go and you were grateful that he didn’t push it further, grateful that he was taking it slow. The stretching, pinching ache wasn’t any better, but it wasn’t worse either. “What is this… Two? Three inches?” You looked down, realizing that he was referring to how much of his cock couldn’t fit inside of you. It had to be more than that, although you were stuck on the sight of your pussy stretched around him. “By the end of the night, there won’t be anything keeping us apart. That’ll be… poetic, don’t you think?”

It wasn’t fair that his voice should be that of a man, should be low and dripping with a villain’s dangerous charisma. All you could do was groan weakly, your breathing shallow. Despite what he said, there was nothing poetic to the sound of it. Slick, filthy, disgustingly wet. Every thrust punched a sharp noise out of you, although most of them were nothing more than heavy breaths. Death wasn’t very quiet either, making noises that fluctuated seamlessly between that of a man and that of a beast.

“Hurts,” you whimpered in protest, willing him to slow down. He didn’t.

“Good.”

The single word, the cruelty of it and the accompanying set of a harsher pace, hurt in more ways than the physical. You couldn’t help but wail in despair, writhing with pain you couldn’t escape, unable to get away as he fucked you. Deeper and deeper, forcing you to stretch out to accommodate him.

“You like the pain, right?” Death asked mockingly, his voice low enough to nearly get missed beneath the filthy squelch of each thrust. And all you could do was whimper. Did you like the pain? No, but there was a perverse satisfaction of justified destruction. You had no idea how he knew that.

“I don’t,” you said, needing to reject him. To reject all of this because otherwise you were afraid it would end like before, that you would give in. That you’d enjoy this. But it was too late. You couldn’t help your hips from twitching of their own volition, and a particularly sharp thrust pulled a surprised gasp from your open mouth.

“Buena gatita,” he said in a low voice, half growl. The sound, the language, the speaker, none of it mattered because your body knew praise, and the kind that came with cruelty was what you craved in the sickest part of your brain. “Muy buena.” Your cunt fluttered weakly around him, your hips rolling upward to meet his next thrust. It hurt, and it felt good.

As soon as you admitted that to yourself in any way, you were lost. A few more thrusts and you had to bite your lip to keep from moaning. There wasn’t a single place within you that wasn’t full of him, not in your head or your pussy or your chest. Consumed entirely by Death.

Gods help you, you could hear the fresh wave of wet arousal your body provided with that awful thought, so eager to submit to his dominion. As if sensing that, he stilled, his cock buried deep into you. Your eyes opened unintentionally, confused by the sudden break.

“Well, well, would you look at that,” Death said as a way of explanation, self satisfied. You followed his eyes, looking at where the two of you were joined. There was nothing between, his pelvis flush between your legs, the fur matting with how wet everything was. You opened your mouth to say something, but nothing came out. His hips shifted and you could see the bump of distension, more pronounced now. “Like I said—poetic. All you’ve done for years is tease me and now-” He laughed. “Now you’re mine.”

Death pulled back slowly, letting you see how much of his cock he’d forced your body to accept. It looked about as impossible as it felt, you couldn’t really comprehend it on any level other than the most base—sickening satisfaction. Ensuring you were still watching, his hips snapped forward. Once, twice, three times, making sure each thrust was solid and steady, filling you up entirely, the thick head of his cock brutalizing your cunt in a way no human man ever could. The battering against your cervix hurt in a profound, electric way, a way nobody had ever managed to hurt you.

And you took it. Your mouth open dumbly, your head tipping back into the dirt, your body rolling with each movement.

Even suffering such intimate, awful pain, you couldn’t deny your feeling of pleasure. Sublime friction, pressure in every place you needed it. And, to a dreadful degree, Death seemed to be aware of your reactions. Aware enough, at least, to take note when you couldn’t help but moan aloud, to exploit the angle that had you seeing stars. He grabbed you off the ground, forcing you to throw your arms around his neck. Like that, you were even more at his mercy. Full enough to split, you could understand the indulgence of size, of craving excess. Beautiful. Your boiling brain pulled that word out from its scattered nothingness, and it was beautiful. Repulsive, disturbing, grotesque, and beautiful.

“That’s right,” Death practically purred into your ear. “Look at how well you take it, you’d think you were made for this.”

“Oh, gods, oh—please, I can’t, I…” You weren’t even sure what you were begging for, it was too late from the second he praised you, sending you spiraling, coming hard, your pussy squeezing his cock so hard it hurt, your fingers pulling hard at the fur on his neck. Death laughed breathlessly, not slowing down for even a second. You didn’t care. If it hurt, it felt good, an endless feedback loop of madness.

Holding so close to him, you were more aware than ever of how terrifyingly powerful his body was. He could easily destroy you if he wanted.

This was Death at his gentlest.

Dizzy, reeling, hardly able to scrape together any coherent thought beyond that, all you felt at the realization was the vague veil of fear. Letting yourself get fucked by the big bad wolf. Coming on his cock, moaning like a whore for a being that shouldn’t exist in the middle of the woods beneath a full moon.

His hips stuttered then, a groan catching on a growl in his chest.

“Delicious,” he said. “Your fear, I could just…” Death didn’t finish that thought, or maybe you couldn’t hear it as his thrusts became well and truly punishing. Seeking his end like a man would. That was what you expected, in a distant way, but you didn’t expect that a mystical—mythical?—creature would ejaculate, only that you’d had enough encounters with men to know you shouldn’t let it happen. Not inside. Never inside, that was way too dangerous.

“Nn-no-”

He didn’t listen. You couldn’t escape, and you stopped caring after a moment because the heavy, carnal weight of him coming inside of you was enough to make you squeal, your pussy squeezing his cock, your body straining in an arch against his. You didn’t know if you were coming again or if it was just a continuation of the onslaught of stimulation that your brain couldn’t make rational sense of, but there was a sort of lunatic’s bliss in the feeling, in the agonizingly hellish ecstasy of pleasure. Of complete and utter excess. You could feel the rumbling vibrations of his growl, it entwined with the human groans. The two shouldn’t have suited one another, but your broken mind accepted both gleefully, losing yourself in the sound.

After a few jerky, halting movements, Death released you.

He was slow to pull out, which was probably a mercy. Even softening, his cock was painfully big, you couldn’t hold back your pained whimper when he pulled out. The absence was immediate, cold, and hollow. You wilted when he let you fall limp onto the ground, defeated. Deflated. Breathing as if you’d run a marathon, it was all you could do to keep it together, the gravity of all that happened setting in.

Something landed on your naked, sweaty body. Scared, you opened your eyes. But it was fabric. A second passed before you realized it was your red cloak. The one you left behind to escape from him before. It felt like a lifetime ago. You gratefully used it to cover your nudity, glad for the moment to catch your breath with some dignity.

“Ah, that was good,” Death said, satisfied, rolling his neck and shoulders. He’d already fixed his pants and retrieved his weapons. “The fun’s over now. For you, at least.”

“I don’t know… how to get back to the trail…” you said, wincing as you sat up and looked around. His cum dripped out of your gaping, sore pussy, sticky on your thighs. Vaguely, you wondered what sort of monsters would come from such a coupling, but you disregarded that thought just as quickly. If he was done, you needed to get away. Then again, you weren’t even sure if you could walk.

“I wouldn’t worry about it.”

Death’s less than friendly tone rolled over you like ice water. Slowly looking over at him, you exhaled a big, shuddery lungful of cool night air. He stood high above you, his looming figure blotting out the moon. Right then, he looked no different than he had all those years ago. Brilliant red eyes, gray fur, silver sickles. The big bad wolf in all his glory.

“What?”

Those bright red eyes held a different sort of intensity than before. Swirling, passionate madness without any of the ravenous hunger. “You know, I’ve been watching you ever since that night. Every time you narrowly escape death, and every time you get other people killed. But you know that, you’ve seen me. That’s why you run, thinking you can escape the inevitable. For whatever reason—luck, fate, the blessing of those gods you claim to believe in—your life has been spared over and over. And yet, you do nothing with it.”

There was malice in those words, a visceral sort of disgust that reflected what you so often felt for yourself. You considered trying to stand up, trying to run again. Fear thundered in your chest, urged you to escape as you always did. But, honestly, you didn’t think your legs could support your weight. No. You couldn’t run. You never had really managed to escape him anyway.

“So, I thought, why does it matter if you die now or later—your life has no meaning. If I finish it now, you won’t be able to keep teasing me, and we’ll both have some peace.”

“I don’t want to die,” you said, your voice hushed to hide the tears.

Death looked down at you, and you wondered if it was disgust or pity you saw on his inhuman face. But then you realized, it was neither. His jewel bright eyes gleamed with glee, passion of a type you couldn’t understand, that belonged to something beyond the realm of what you could possibly comprehend. A living nightmare.

“Your fear,” Death said, inhaling deeply as he took a step forward, his sickles in hand, “has the most intoxicating smell. I might even miss it.”

#death puss in boots #death x reader #death the wolf #not sfw #my writing #tw.noncon

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ladybirdswritings · 5 months

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Silken Webs & Pirouettes - Miguel O’Hara x Reader

TW - PTSD, mentions of abuse.

Summary - You realize that maybe working with a man as intimidating as Miguel O’Hara just isn’t for you… Ballerina!Reader & CEO!Miguel. Alternate Universe with most of the characters included as seen in "Across the Spiderverse." Many cameos ahead. Miguel is a successful business owner but personality is canon. This is a steamy reader insert, Miguel x You! Enjoy and pls leave me lots of love and comments as it keeps me motivated <333

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six

You feel out of place. Stuffy, anxious, like a walking corpse with heavy eyes and an empty stomach. You’ve convinced yourself that once you waltz up those stairs, everyone is going to turn to you. Point and laugh as Mr. O’Hara rips you to tiny, pretty pieces with those awfully sharp teeth of his.

You took the stairs today because the glass elevator seems too dreadful. Each floor rising just getting you closer and closer to your demise, out in the open for the world to see.

You only have one flight left before you know it, though. The bittersweet stamina your body remembers from the times you used to twirl upon a silvered stage. You frown, maybe definitely purposely going slower up the final steps.

Your morning has been hectic. Your curls were in a battle with your hands and the straightener, reflecting the heat away like they were made of ice. Your hair is frizzy, and your ribbon has a tear in it. The sole of your boot is mere threads away from ripping apart and you’re terribly hungry. You had no time to eat, though.

The air constricts you as you reach the tip of the castle where the fanged creature with dark, unforgiving eyes dwells. Your body is overtaken with soft trembles yet you do your best to keep composed. Through the glass door and onto the shiny tiles.

The ambush doesn’t come… you ease.

Your eyes scan through the cold air that greets you. To your complete surprise, your Christmas tree still stands, covered in its pink bows and golden lights. You doubt you’ll ever be as confused as you are right now again at any other moment in your life.

Your eyes wander to the front desk where Cindy is seated, she smiles and nods and you swiftly make your way to her. Mary Jane wears glasses far too big for her petite face, clicking and clacking on her ivory keyboard.

“Hey!” She greets, handing you your bag of ribbons immediately.

It hasn’t been lit up to ash, it shocks you.

“Hey… is um…” thankfully she understands and you don’t have to say much more.

Christ, you’re treating him like he’s a monster tucked underneath your bed.

“Nope, he’s been out all morning… super weird between you and I, he’s never late!”

You believe her, but that doesn’t matter… all the tension in your body floats away like a cloud returning itself to the sky. The breath you’ve been holding since you conquered each step leaves you, and you finally feel as though you can breathe again.

“Uh oh, what’d you do?” Mary Jane inquires as she takes a sip of her peppermint tea.

You can only manage to shake your head, mumbling your gratitude softly and dragging the bag to the tree. The ladder still stands tall, taunting you with rusty screws.

“Hi pretty.” You whisper to the giant thing, hand burying itself in the tote to pluck out yet another pink ribbon. Knowing he’s gone, you work with ease. Gentle on the ladder, the ballerina in your heart still dances even though you cannot. Your balance is impeccable as you blanket the back of the tree now. It doesn’t take long.

Without him here, the office is alive. It’s happy. The women chat as they would while getting manicures at a salon. They giggle and swoon over Mr. O’Hara which is to be nothing more than expected. It makes you giggle. He must feel so high and mighty being surrounded by people bowing at the beck of his hand. Yet when his thumb doesn’t suffocate them, they blossom like roses.

They’re lovely, fun to listen to while you tinker with the tree. This is nice.

This is nice and the laughter and joy and “Santa, Baby” purring on the radio lasts all but an hour before dead silence and gasps soon flood your ears.

You chill, freezing up with your hand in the bag of bows. Your body is kneeling before the tree, the gold shining like starlight on your pretty features. Someone lowers the music quickly, and the man who simultaneously suffocates all the fun with just his presence alone walks through his elevator door.

You hear it ring, you hear the heavy clicks of his shoes and the adjust of his tie. Everyone is dead silent, now. Tense. Back to the normal that is known here.

You? You’re frozen, your head still bowed. You’re afraid of him, maybe. It is rare for you, you’re afraid of no one. Not anymore. Not after… well, it’s a promise you made to yourself.

Closer…

Closer..

Closer his boots near, until?

They stop.

They stop right beside you and god, it is right then in that moment that you’d rather run out and lay in the snow as you’re certain it would keep you warmer than you are in this moment, beneath him.

“You, come with me.” Is all he offers before marching forward on his path.

You gulp, maybe you misheard? A cautious glance at Cindy’s wide, sympathetic eyes and you know all you need to. This cruel, cruel man. He let you blanket his stupid, limp tree in ribbons, he let you get comfortable like a mouse under a warm lamp— not knowing there’s a serpent hiding away… ready to strike. Ready to tell you he’s letting you go.

Cindy raises her brows, as if rushing you to do something. To unfreeze. You dig your nails into your palm, hard enough to snap you back and you’re soon up on your feet. Each step you take, you look at nothing but your worn shoes.

The oak door is held open by him. They’re all staring, eyes like daggers stuck in your back.

“Time to actually do your work, ladies.” He commands, they comply immediately. Does he have a spy? Perhaps a meter that starts ringing when there’s too much fun…

The oak door slams, trapping you— the little mouse into his warm den. The sound startles you, making your eyes fall shut.

Keep it together…

He walks past you swiftly, scent of rich firewood and coffee intoxicating your body so much so that if you weren’t so horrified right now, your mouth would water.

“Sit.” He commands as he takes his place upon his leather throne.

You let out a shaky breath, making your way forward with all the force you have left within you. Maybe you should just blurt out an apology and book it straight for the highest hills you can find…

The zombie you are, dressed in clothes you used to wear for rehearsal as it’s all you have. Ivory tights and pom pom boots, a pink skirt and wrapped shirt. You rehearse the moves of walking and sitting like a dance you’ve danced before. The leather is cold when it engulfs you, unpleasant.

You clasp your hands in your lap, picking at the remnants of the French manicure Rio gave you last week. Waiting for it, expecting, remembering. Your head is hung in shame, in submission.

“You look nervous.” He observes.

You stay silent, reluctant to admit how true that really is.

You feel him, you feel him like fire on your skin. His eyes demanding your attention, but you can’t. You won’t. It isn’t good enough for him. He leans forward,

“You’re new here, but if you cared to ask my girls what my first rule is? You’d know that you look at me when I talk to you, do you understand?” He commands, and like a ballerina does, you mend and comply. Heated as your face as becomes, rapid as your heart flutters, and nervous as your being is… your eyes follow the order and shoot up to face his own.

They are dark, scorching into you like hellfire, an incomparable inferno. You want to shrink, but you won’t. You can’t give him the satisfaction.

“Rule two. Answer me.” He commands.

“Yes…” you whisper.

He’s satisfied, at least you hope. It certainly seems that way. He leans back in his leather chair and keeps his eyes locked on you. It is then you’re certain he’s a sadist. It’s obvious, obvious by the way you press your knees together and pick at your polish that you’re uncomfortable. He doesn’t care.

The silence is dreadful, heavy and suffocating. You try your best to hold it, stare into his eyes and ignore the fire burning your skin from the bone but god— it’s too much.

“I didn’t know!” You blurt out, half hoping he is deaf yet also half hoping he understands what you mean.

His eyes narrow and you’re certain you’ve made a fool of yourself again. You let your gaze fall and the subtle sound you hear under his breath makes you snap them right back up.

“I know. Keep it that way.” He forces through clenched, sharp teeth.

If he wasn’t so horrifying, so cruel, you’d feel sorry for him. His words, the subject, it’s painful for him to utter— to think of. You can tell.

The silence blankets the room again, and your eyes beg him to let you glance anywhere but at him. You’re desperate though, the bigger part of you. Desperate to suffer here, instead of home. Maybe he knows just how desperate you are, maybe he’s using it. Maybe he’s delaying the inevitable, maybe there’s nothing you can do to avoid it.

It seems like forever, but he eventually speaks.

“I want you to do something for me.”

Pack your shit and leave…

You finish his words within the confines of your mind, prepared for them. They never come, no… what follows only shocks you.

“I want a tree. A small one for my office. Red and blue ribbons, and soccer ornaments.”

What?

This man, this enigma of a man seems to be the most capable creature alive and able to make your head spin like a record. You shake your head, confused…

“What?” It’s a soft whisper, weak.

“Rule three, I don’t repeat myself. You heard me.”

You did. You did and you still don’t slightly believe it. You’re dreaming, that must be it. You fell on the stairs on the way up and you’ve been tucked away in a coma.

No. It can’t be true. Sure, if anyone on this earth would be intimidating enough to make you truly feel their gaze in a coma, it would be him… but it’s far too real, too intense to simply exist within your imagination.

“I— can do that, sir.”

He only nods, once. Voice louder now, commanding the room, commanding you.

“I want it done by tonight, on my desk before you leave.”

You nod, mind still jogging to keep up with this conversation, to understand it. Your brows are furrowed, eyes searching for an invisible answer around the room. They land back on him and it’s as if he was waiting for them to do just that. A raise of his brow and he gives you an expression you can’t quite understand.

“You’re dismissed.”

Oh.

He talks to you like you’re just a dull-brained creature, incapable of understanding a word he says, an idiot. You stand on your feet and then swiftly turn your back on him, which is somehow more frightening than looking him in the eyes.

That must be it, you suppose. You’re grateful. Baffled but, grateful. You won’t test your luck, you won’t question it. Perhaps Cindy was onto something with her analysis of him. He’s just not— soft.

No, he’s in control and commanding and intimidating and far far easier to deal with than the cavalry at home. Okay… okay, you can manage this.

Even so? You can’t walk quicker to the door, it seems— hurrying out like the inferno from his eyes is just behind you. It is. The oak creaks softly behind you, and you huff as you make it out to the other side, surviving to tell the story of how you evaded the beast. Mary Jane and Cindy’s eyes are wide and waiting.

You only offer a thumbs up and nod, then get straight to work.

You’re happy for the excuse to waltz the city during this lovely time of year. Especially when you’re not paying for the things you buy. The streets are lined with snowfall surrounding cobble pavement, brick roads and sparkling trees that reach the sky. There are smiling St. Nick’s on every street corner and employees dressed as elves in every small shop. It smells of coffee and chocolate chips.

You’re not at all dressed for December. Your check hasn’t come in just yet, you’ll buy warm clothes when it does. Jack Frost is a bite on your shoulder, cheeks and nose pink and chilled from the snow. You’re trembling.

That doesn’t matter though because you’re also dancing, right now. Dancing like you did as a ballerina; that equates to simply following orders. It isn’t until the warmth of the small gift shop nearby embraces you that you ease. Warmth crawls up your spine and burns Jack off of it. You can think, now. You can stop following orders, stop dancing.

Your trembling fingertips are numb, grazing over the snow globes, ribbons and ornaments. Hmm…

Soccer…

Perhaps he’s a fan…

Blue and red ribbon…

Your teeth chatter as you grab a wicker basket and collect each color. You find lights to compliment them and a dark, lonely little tree by the windowsill. Fitting. Ornaments, then. Soccer balls and goals, flags and tennis shoes. It becomes more apparent as you fill your basket that this is not for him.

Cautiously, you grab your cracked phone and find your watch history. The thumbnail, the picture from last night. Where the grinning ghost sits on his shoulders, she’s adorned in a socccer jersey. No, the tree is not for him at all…

It’s for her.

Sadness swells at the base of your throat but you force it down with a gulp. Gentle thing you are, always so empathetic with the world around you. Even the cruelest parts.

Yet, his words from earlier only echo in your mind.

Keep it that way.

Maybe you’re stupid or maybe you’ve just never been good at following orders when there’s not a wire hanger involved… but you just can’t.

Your eyes glaze over the wooden ornaments stand and land upon a dark oak frame with a vacant place for a picture. You know just what you’ll do…

Time passes quickly and you are back at the office soon. The tree is small, but you handle it with care and adoration. You tie the ribbons by hand and place them snugly upon the blossomed branches. The lights are a mixture of red, gold and blue. The star is gold too and it compliments the rest nicely. The ornaments are small, hanging like icicles from the tips of each branch. Overall? It’s perfect. Missing one, final touch though.

Everyone has left, the office lights dim. It’s just you and the grinch who’s steadily growing a heart. Maybe not three sizes bigger just yet, but you’ll take even a quarter. It’s big enough for him to keep you at least… for now.

You hurry over to the front desk where you print the picture, ink staining the colors vivid and bright.

Her smile was so pretty…

You cut the excess paper and grab the photo frame ornament, adorning it with the heart warming picture of him and his little girl. After you clean your mess, you place the final touch upon his tiny tree and revel in your masterpiece. Perfection, all you ever strive for.

But now? Back into the devil’s den.

You would be lying if you said your heart isn’t pounding as you approach the oak door, but as soon as you make it there— you steady yourself.

You remember who you are, what you have survived.

One cold man who you won’t know in a few months can’t take that. Your fire.

The tree is stable in your hands, but it needs both of them to balance upright. With your foot, you knock.

No answer.

You knock again…

And, no answer.

With a huff, you risk the possibility of angering the beast more than he usually is and use your bum to push the large thing open. You’re very much annoyed to find him alert and well, glasses resting on his face as he types away at a document on his laptop. The square thing looks like a toy compared to his hands.

Christ.

He doesn’t regard you, he doesn’t need to. He already gave his orders. You’re careful to maintain balance as you gently bring the tree to his desk and place it to the corner of him. A switch of a button and it glows. You catch him then, glancing just once at it before continuing his work. The lights reflect in his glasses.

You tidy up a few spots and ribbons that shifted from transfer and then step back to admire. You’re satisfied. You don’t bother saying goodbye, he’s immersed enough as is and you’d rather refrain from unnecessary interaction with the heatmiser.

You smooth your skirt as you make your way out, ribbons bouncing on your locks. The door shuts behind you, you’re safe again.

The tiles squeak as your boots kiss them, gathering your bag and phone— you get ready to leave. Near the stairs and then— oh, right. You forgot to unplug the tree.

You know well how much of a disaster it would be if you set the floor on fire. With a huff, you make your way back and check the moisture with two fingers. All is well. You bend over and unplug the golden shimmer to make the top floor even darker, hearing the oak door shut swiftly as you do. It makes you jump.

Just when you almost missed him.

His steps are heavy… heavier than usual. Quicker too.

He must be tired, anxious for his bed. He’s filthy rich. He probably has the biggest bed with dozens of pillows and the softest of sheets. You wish your bed was like that…

You turn.

Maybe one day you’ll have a bed just as— oh!

Two hands case you up against the wall beside your ribbon tree, and all you see in front of you is that look.

That. Look.

It’s back.

Monstrous, horrifying, furious with you.

The darkness, the redness in his eyes is clearer now. The veins in his neck and the tension in his shoulders and jaw.

He raises his hand, you flinch by habit. Grasped tightly in it is the picture, except now— the glass has been shattered and it’s cutting into his palms. Your eyes widen, hands reaching out to help him. He pulls his palm back before you can, moving his head so that his eyes are staring directly into yours.

That look.

You chill.

“¿Qué carajo es esto!? Huh!? Tell me!” He growls, voice guttural, loud, horrifying— and it is then that you realize now more than ever that you truly are the mouse. And he? He’s the serpent.

With a grunt, he throws the glass ornament with his smiling, pretty girl across the room. It shatters even more once the wall finds it. He cases you in again, and you know now just how trapped you truly are. Just you and him on this lonely floor. He’s angry. You’re shaking.

You’ve seen this anger before. In her… in Katerina.

A gulp, maybe you’re a fish because your mouth bobs open far too many times to explain and yet you can’t. speak. The words catch themselves on the tip of your tongue. Your eyes can’t take it, they fall shut as you slow your breathing. There’s panic on the horizon. Memories so familiar to this flood back like an ocean of poison in your mind.

His index and thumb move to grip your chin, so angry and yet his grip is only firm, not painful. He tugs your face enough so that your eyes shoot open again.

“Did I tell you to do this?” His voice, perhaps it’s scarier now. It’s dark, low, composed like a cap on shaken pop.

“You knew better, girl! You knew better!” Her voice now… Katerina’s. Echoing in your head.

You’re suffocating, the air around you is too thin. You can’t breathe, you can’t look at those eyes.

No, no no. You’re panicking. His features blur as tears pool in your sight. He tugs your chin again, they fall onto his fingertips.

“You already forgot my rules, huh? You stupid, stupid girl…” he spits.

“You ungrateful, stupid girl.” She screams against your skull.

“I told you to keep it that way, didn’t I? Díos mio! What’s the matter with you?” He’s exasperated. He’s asking, eyes commanding an answer from you. You don’t know.

What is the matter with you?

Like the mythology of Rogue, it’s like everything you touch withers by your hand.

After everything Katerina gave you… after he took a chance letting you work here.

Your throat constricts as you gaze into the serpent’s eyes. Your heart is a hummingbird’s then, fighting so hard to fill that clouded brain with oxygen. You’re dizzy. You’re remembering.

You can’t. You need to move you need—

You can’t stop yourself, hand shooting up to dig your nails into the skin of his wrist. His eyes shoot toward the spot and he hisses, pulling it back. You take the chance to escape.

Under his arm and you stumble forward, hugging your midsection with a gasp, desperate for a lick of oxygen to bless your burning lungs.

A sob takes over you, but a close of your eyes and a quick inhale of the firewood and coffee that intoxicates you and you remember just where you are. You’re in his office. You’re not with her. You’re here. You’re here and you don’t want to be, anymore.

No, no not with him. Not after this. All of it, all of him. It’s too much, it’s too far. You don’t deserve this. You don’t deserve home either but at least there you can save up and flee…

You’re so panicked, all your mind can do is run over the many ways you’re going to call home through the flashing images of her. Images of Katerina bloom like ivy in your mind as you plan out your next steps. You feel glued in place yet so desperate to leave.

You glance at the broken glass and jagged smile of the ghost girl, jumping when the warmth of his palm greets your shoulder.

“Mirame, look at me.” He commands, but softly. Rather, softer than usual.

You feel pathetic yet still, your hand shoots up to push his own away from behind you.

You’ve had enough.

You buried the devil in your past. Your life is far too valuable to dance with another one.

You’d rather be cased up at home forever, working a job around family that think of you as nothing more than scum than be around him for a day longer.

You know, now…

“I quit.” You force out through another sob, not daring to turn and face him. You’re hunched over, shaky and weak. On the verge of suffocating completely. You wipe at your eyes and don’t hear another sound from him before you snatch your bag and phone and practically run to the stairwell.

Two steps at a time, maybe three before December’s chill kisses you in icy greeting. You don’t need to whistle for a cab to brake. In you go, familiar as you’ve done this twice now because of him.

Only this time? You’ll never come back again…

🏷️ ‘s @reirain @needybitez @migueloharastruelove @laysmt @maomaimao @daisy-artfield | chap 6 song 🎧:

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