xYzeez

21+ | Thoughts are being thunk into the point of which I have come to in life Don’t mind me just a fellow reader…

[amaranthinespirit]

hey! there's a person taking other COD blogs' work and uploading them without permission—mine included! their user is @whimsyunicornxd

be wary of this person, and please report it if you can!

[lunamaedotjpeg]

I love his big ass tits

[adejayy]

Rawrrr 🙂‍↕️😏

[elysianightsss]

SUNSHINE

Simon Riley × Reader | A One-Shot

20K words, Simon’s hair has grown out, reader wears glasses, Simon doesn’t know how to dance, smut, the fluffiest fluff, angst, size kink, Simon is huge, pee mentioned, Simon is filthy but we all knew that. Tell me if I missed any tags.

He was four years old when he stole your crayons.

Not all of them. Just the good ones. The red one. The yellow one. The bright, sunflower-gold one that you'd been saving to colour the sun in the corner of your drawing, the way all four-year-olds drew the sun — a circle in the corner, rays shooting out like a child's idea of joy.

You looked at him across the low art table in that bright little preschool room that smelled of poster paint and digestive biscuits.

He was stocky even then.

Chubby-cheeked and heavy-set. A thick, sturdy little boy who sat with his legs wide and his fat fists curled around your crayons like he'd earned them.

He wasn't even looking at you.

He was colouring something — a car, maybe, or a blob that might have been a dog — and the yellow crayon moved in big, purposeful strokes across his paper.

You did not cry.

You considered it.

Then you leaned across the table and took them back.

He looked up.

Brown eyes. Even at four, they were startling — dark and serious and far too watchful for a boy his age.

He stared at you.

You stared back.

Then he slid the gold crayon back across the table to you, said nothing, and went back to his drawing.

His name was Simon.

You would not learn that until the register was called the following morning. But you remembered his eyes before you remembered his name.

— ✦ —

He broke your glasses in Year Two.

Not on purpose — or so you believed, for most of your life, until you were old enough to accept that

Simon Riley did very few things without purpose.

He knocked into you in the corridor outside the dining hall, your plastic NHS frames hitting the linoleum floor, one arm snapping clean off at the hinge.

You stood there, the world going soft and blurry at the edges the way it always did without them, and you felt the particular, humiliating sting of being unable to see properly — the vulnerability of it, the indignity.

Simon picked up the frames. Looked at them. Looked at you.

He didn't say sorry straight away. He examined the break with the seriousness of a boy who was already, at seven, very careful about what he said and when he said it. Then, "I'll carry your bag till they're fixed."

"You broke my glasses," you told him like he didn’t know.

"I know." He nodded.

"That's not the same as fixing them."

"No," he agreed. "But it's what I've got."

He carried your bag for three days. And when your mum brought the repaired frames in on the fourth morning, he handed the bag back without ceremony, turned, and went to join his mates by the football cage. No further apology. No acknowledgement that anything had occurred between you at all.

That afternoon, you kicked over his sandcastle in the playground.

He watched you do it. Didn't say a word.

You felt better.

And somehow, after that, you were friends.

— ✦ —

He couldn't read very well. You figured this out in Year Three, during the round-robin reading in class — when the teacher went along the rows and each child read a sentence aloud.

You noticed the way Simon's jaw set and his hands went flat on the desk the closer it got to his turn. The way his eyes moved across the page, laboured and slow, tracking words like they were things to be wrestled rather than known.

He got through his sentence. Barely. His face was blank when he sat back, the particular blankness he'd already learned to wear — that carefully constructed nothing that meant everything was fine when everything was not fine at all.

You didn't say anything about it. Not then. You were eight years old, not stupid.

What you did was start reading with him at break time. You presented it as something you needed — you told him you were practising for a reading competition and needed an audience.

Simon was not fooled. He was never fooled, not really.

But he sat down with you on the bench by the library door and listened while you read, and then slowly, carefully, you handed the book to him and asked what he thought happened next, and he had to read ahead to find out.

It took most of the school year. But by the summer he was reading chapter books. He never thanked you. He did start saving you a seat on the library bench every break time, and that was the same thing.

— ✦ —

He played football and rugby.

You read on the grass bank above the field.

It became a kind of institution — the ritual of your shared proximity without shared activity. Simon on the pitch, broad and determined and already bigger than the other boys by Year Five, already moving with that particular physicality that seemed less like playing and more like declaration.

And you on the bank above, your book open, your reading glasses (a better pair now, tortoiseshell) perched on your nose, half-reading and half watching without ever quite admitting to the watching.

He always knew you were there. He didn't do anything about it. But sometimes, when he scored, he'd look up at the bank first before he looked anywhere else.

You told yourself you were only there because the grass was nice and the light was good.

You were not a good liar, even then.

— ✦ —

The boy's name was Daniel Holt and he pushed you over in the playground in Year Five because you'd refused to give him the answers to the maths homework.

You'd said no three times and the third time he pushed you and you went down hard on your palms and your knees, the concrete was unforgiving.

You were crying before you'd fully registered what had happened. Not dramatically — small, shocked, indignant tears, the kind that arrive before the pain does.

Simon was there before a teacher was. You didn't even see where he came from. One moment the playground was its ordinary mid-morning noise, and the next Daniel Holt had a split lip and Simon Riley was standing over him with blood on his knuckles and a look on his face that was completely, utterly calm.

The calm was the frightening part. Even at ten.

He got three days at home for it. He spent the first afternoon sitting on your front step, eating crisps, because he knew you'd be furious with him and wanted to face it head-on.

You were furious. You told him he was an idiot. He told you Daniel Holt had it coming. You told him violence wasn't the answer. He told you Daniel Holt wasn't going to touch you again.

He was right. Daniel Holt never came near you again.

You didn't thank him either. You went inside and made him a sandwich, and that was the same thing.

— ✦ —

Secondary school arrived like a change in weather — everything slightly larger, slightly louder, the corridors longer and noisier, the stakes somehow higher and more ambiguous all at once. You arrived with a bag so heavy your shoulder ached within the first hour: your textbooks, yes, but also the extracurricular books you carried everywhere, the extra notepad you used for non-school thoughts, the six different highlighters you colour-coded by subject.

Simon took the bag from you on the third day without asking.

"I can carry it," you told him.

"I know," he said.

He slung it over his shoulder like it weighed nothing, which for him it probably didn't. He'd grown over the summer — not just taller, though he was that, but broader, thicker through the shoulders in a way that made him look like a man playing a boy, trying the shape of it on. He wore it well, even at eleven. He wore everything like he'd already decided what he was and was simply waiting for the world to catch up.

He carried your bag when it was heavy, and it was frequently heavy. He did it without comment and without making you feel small for needing it. That was the thing about Simon — he never made you feel small. He made other people feel small, sometimes, when they deserved it. But not you. Never you.

— ✦ —

The bruises were never from rugby.

You knew by the second year of secondary.

You were not naive — you had read enough, observed enough, understood enough about the world to recognise the shape of what was happening in Simon Riley's house even though he never said a word about it.

The bruises were in the wrong places for rugby. They appeared in the wrong season. They were around his ribs and his arms and once, memorably, along his jaw, and he came to school the Monday after the jaw bruise with that face — that blank, carefully constructed nothing face — and you sat next to him at lunch and said nothing at all.

You said nothing because there was nothing you could do. You were twelve. You were a girl with a book bag and highlighter pens and absolutely no power over the man who was hurting your best friend, and knowing that — the impotence of it, the helpless, hollow ache of caring about someone you could not protect — was the first truly adult pain you ever felt.

What you could do was this: you could make sure he had somewhere to go.

Your mother, who was perceptive in the quiet way that some mothers are, never asked questions when Simon turned up at the back door on a Sunday evening or a Wednesday after school.

She just set another plate.

Your house became a refuge without anyone naming it as such. Simon did his homework at your kitchen table, ate your mother's cooking, watched telly with your family, and slept on your sofa sometimes when the option was presented naturally enough that it didn't feel like charity.

— ✦ —

You got your period for the first time on a Tuesday in November, in Year Nine. In the school toilets, third period, when you were thirteen years old and the day had been entirely ordinary right up until it wasn't.

The particular cocktail of shock and pain and embarrassment and the specific existential bewilderment of being a person whose body was doing something enormous without prior adequate notice left you sitting on the closed toilet lid crying in a way you hadn't cried in years.

You got out your Nokia. That familiar brick of a phone, the keypad worn smooth at the number five. You typed Simon's number and pressed call before you'd properly decided to.

He picked up on the second ring. "Yeah."

"Simon." Your voice came out wrong. Too thin.

A beat. When he spoke again his voice had changed — quieter, more careful. "Where are you?"

"Girls' toilets. Near the science block."

"Right," he said. "Stay there."

He appeared outside the girls' toilets seven minutes later — you could hear him through the door, his voice low and flat, telling a Year Eight girl to go use the other ones — and then he was there, right there on the other side of the door, talking to you through it in that steady, even way he had when he wanted to be calm on your behalf.

"You're alright," he said. “Do you need me to go to the office?"

"No," you managed. "I need — I don't know what I need."

"I'll get you something from the vending machine," he said, that Manchester accent of his low and unhurried. "And I'll text your mum."

When you came out of the toilets twenty minutes later, looking wrung-out and clutching what the school nurse had provided, Simon was leaning against the wall. He looked at you for a moment — took you in, the way he always did, that comprehensive, assessing look — and then he stepped forward and kissed your cheek. Quick. Certain. His mouth warm and deliberate against your cheekbone.

"You're alright," he said again. He said it like a fact. Like he was making it true by saying it.

You cried a bit more, for different reasons, and he pretended not to notice.

— ✦ —

He was captain of the rugby team by Year Ten. It suited him — the leadership, the sense of purpose, the structure of it.

You went to his matches sometimes, wrapped in a scarf on the touchline, and watched him move across the pitch with that same quality you'd noticed on the primary school field: less like playing, more like declaration.

He was ferocious and focused and occasionally frightening, and the other boys deferred to him not just because he was bigger than them but because he had the kind of authority that doesn't need to be announced.

Afterwards he'd find you on the touchline, still carrying that quality — coiled, alert — and it would take him a few minutes to come back to himself. To come back to you.

"Good game," you'd say.

"Yeah," he'd say.

And then slowly, the set of his shoulders would ease, and he'd become Simon again. Your Simon. The one who stole your crayons and carried your bag and ate your mother's shepherd's pie like it was sacred.

— ✦ —

He could make you laugh. This was not a small thing.

Simon Riley was not, by general consensus, a funny person. He was serious and quiet and his face in repose looked like a man carrying a private weather system. But he had a dry, deadpan wit that he deployed rarely and precisely, and it landed, every time, like a key in a lock made specifically for it.

He knew how to make you laugh because he'd spent years learning you. The specific frequency of your humour. The things that made you dissolve into giggles rather than just smile. He deployed his wit with the same precision he deployed everything else, and the result was that when Simon Riley made you laugh — really laugh, the helpless, breathless kind — it felt like being given something he didn't give to anyone else.

Which, you would eventually understand, was accurate.

— ✦ —

His name was Ryan Marsh and he was your first kiss, in the park on a Friday evening in Year Ten, and it was fine. It was nice, even. Ryan was sweet and nervous and smelled of his older brother's aftershave and the kiss lasted approximately forty seconds.

Ryan Marsh had a broken nose the following Monday.

Simon maintained, with total conviction, that Ryan had walked into a door. Ryan, to his credit, corroborated this story completely.

You did not push the matter, partly because you had no concrete evidence and partly because some part of you — the part that read on the grass bank and watched the pitch and noticed when Simon looked up at the bank before he looked anywhere else — felt something that was not entirely uncomplicated about it.

You and Ryan Marsh did not have a second kiss. You told yourself it was because the chemistry hadn't been right.

You were getting a bit better at lying to yourself, by fourteen. But only a bit.

— ✦ —

GCSEs arrived the way all important things arrived — with more weight than you'd expected and less warning than you'd have liked.

Year Ten and Eleven were the years you restructured Simon's entire approach to studying, methodically and patiently, the same way you'd helped him learn to read, finding the approach that worked for how his mind moved.

Simon was not unintelligent.

He was, in fact, formidably sharp in ways that didn't translate easily to an exam paper: quick to read people, quick to understand systems, possessed of a spatial and strategic intelligence that you recognised and admired even as you taught him how to write it down in ways that the mark scheme would accept.

He sat with you at your kitchen table night after night — your mother quietly replenishing the tea,— and you explained things in the language that made sense to his brain rather than the language of the textbook.

He sat with you at lunch during school hours and glared at anyone who called you a nerd. The glaring was extremely effective. Simon Riley's face, by fifteen, was a significant deterrent.

His GCSE results, when they arrived, were good. Better than anyone who knew his circumstances might have expected from a boy who'd had so much working against him.

He rang you on the house phone when he opened the results envelope. He didn't say much. His voice, when he spoke, was different — something in it unguarded, the Manchester in it softer somehow, without the armour it usually carried.

"Couldn't have done it without you," he said.

"You did it," you told him firmly. "I just held the torch."

"Still needed the torch."

You smiled so hard your face ached. "Go celebrate, Simon."

"Yeah," he said. And then, quieter, "Thanks, sunshine."

— ✦ —

He was an apprentice at the butcher's on Renshaw Street after school — learning the trade with the same focused, physical competence he brought to everything else, solid and unhurried, his big hands learning new kinds of precision. You had a job at the bookshop two streets over.

On his lunch breaks you would walk over with a sandwich and a packet of crisps, and you'd sit on the low wall around the side of the shop while he ate and you talked about nothing in particular and everything in general.

He had sawdust on his boots and you'd have ink on your fingers from pricing stickers, and you'd sit in the thin afternoon light talking about books and people and where things might go from here, and it was the most ordinary, irreplaceable thing in the world.

You didn't know, then, that you were storing it up. You didn't know you were in the middle of something finite.

You were seventeen and you thought you had time.

— ✦ —

It was the eleventh of September, 2001.

You were at work when it happened — the bookshop had a small television in the back room, and you watched the footage with your hand pressed over your mouth and the world rearranging itself into a new shape around you.

Simon came to you that evening. He didn't knock — he had a spare key, had done for years — and you heard him come in and go into the kitchen and fill the kettle, the sound of him so familiar and domestic and real that something in your chest loosened a fraction.

He brought you tea. He sat on the sofa beside you and you watched the news together in silence, and at some point your head found his shoulder without either of you deciding it had.

"I'm going to join up," he said. Not asking. Telling.

You lifted your head from his shoulder. Frowned at him. "Join up what?"

"The military."

The word landed in the room and stayed there. You looked at his face — that flat, certain expression he wore when he'd already decided something — and you felt the ground shift slightly under you.

"Simon. You're seventeen."

"You can join at sixteen with parental consent," he said. Straightforward, as though he'd already looked into it. Which of course he had. "Seventeen without."

"That's—" You stopped. Started again. "You've thought about this before today."

"Yeah."

Of course he had. You could see it now, the shape of it — this was not a reaction to the footage on the television, not a hot, impulsive thing. This was something Simon had been building toward without telling you. The structure of it. The purpose. The particular kind of belonging that came from being part of something larger than yourself. You'd always known he'd go toward something like this. You'd just hoped, without ever quite admitting to the hoping, that it might be further away.

"You're not going to try to talk me out of it." Not a question.

"Would it work?"

He held your gaze. "No."

"Then no," you said. Your voice was very steady. You were proud of it. "I'm not."

He was quiet for a long moment. The television continued its awful repetition. Then his arm came around your shoulders, heavy and warm, and he pulled you in closer against his side.

You stayed like that until the tea went cold.

— ✦ —

The train station was grey and noisy with other leavings, other arrivals, other people in the middle of things.

Simon stood in front of you on the platform with his kit bag and his big, careful hands and the face he'd spent seventeen years learning to keep blank, and it occurred to you, not for the first time and not for the last, that you loved him.

That you had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life. That you did not know how to say it and were not sure it would do either of you any good if you did.

So you didn't say it.

You went up on your toes and you hugged him — truly hugged him, arms around his neck, your face pressed against his jaw — and he held you back with both arms, the kit bag dropping to the platform, and he was so solid and warm and real that you memorised it.

"Don't be an idiot," you told him, muffled.

He made a sound that was almost a laugh. Almost. "Best I can do is try." The Manchester in his voice, low and warm and his.

"Simon."

"I know," he said quietly, against your temple. "I know, sunshine."

You stepped back. You held it together. He picked up his bag and he walked toward the platform and at the door of the train he turned, and looked at you standing there with your glasses and your coat and your hands pressed together in front of you, and for a second you saw something in his face that wasn't blank at all.

Then he was gone.

You cried on the way home. Proper, ugly crying, in the front seat of your mother's car, while she drove and said nothing and passed you a tissue.

You cried because you thought you might never see him again. Because the world had cracked open on a Tuesday in September and people were going toward the fracture and Simon Riley was one of them.

You cried because you never told him.

— ✦ —

He sent a birthday card every year.

They arrived with no return address and postmarks from places you'd never heard of, and sometimes they were late and sometimes they were so early you suspected he'd sent them weeks in advance in case he couldn't later.

They were always plain — Simon Riley was not a man who browsed the sentimental section — white or cream envelopes, the kind of card that was almost generic, and inside: his handwriting, which had improved vastly from the boy who'd struggled across the page in Year Three, and always the same thing. Your name at the top. Happy Birthday, sunshine. And then: S.

Just S.

Like he was still close enough that you'd know exactly who that meant. Like the initial was sufficient.

It was.

You sent his birthday gifts to a P.O. box he'd given you, wrapped carefully, the tag always: From your best friend. You didn't know if he received them all. You sent them anyway. It felt important to keep sending them — to maintain the thread, even when you couldn't see both ends of it.

— ✦ —

Thirty-four years old now.

You have no husband. You had come close, once — a man named Patrick who had been perfectly acceptable in every measurable way and who had wanted to marry you and had probably deserved someone who could give him more of herself than you could manage.

You had not been fair to Patrick. You knew that. You had been in love with someone else for most of your adult life, and even with the someone else absent and silent and possibly dead, there wasn't room for anyone else.

You have no children, though you wanted them. The timeline on that was becoming its own quiet ache, the kind you didn't prod too often.

You have a job that pays the bills and not much else — admin in an office building that smells of carpet cleaner and recycled air, the kind of work that requires enough of your brain to stop it from wandering but not enough to satisfy it.

You have an apartment that is functional and yours and that you have tried to make cozy, with books on every surface and plants that are mostly surviving and a kitchen you actually cook in.

It is not the house. It is not the house you told Simon about when you were sixteen and lying in his back garden on a summer evening, staring up at the sky.

No birthday card for five years now.

Five years of the particular, specific silence that was different from all the silences before, because the silences before had been interrupted. Annually, reliably, he had broken them.

Five years of nothing had the texture of conclusion. Of a chapter closing. And you had reached the point — slowly, painfully, with the kind of acceptance that doesn't feel like acceptance but feels like exhaustion — where you were fairly certain Simon Riley was dead.

Your heart ached for your best friend in the low, constant way of grief that has become so familiar it's almost structural.

You carried it the way you carried other things, quietly, with your spine straight.

Which is why you are sitting across from a man named — it didn't matter, it really didn't matter what his name was — on what your colleague Debbie had described as 'a perfectly nice date with a perfectly nice man' and trying to remember what it felt like to be interested in your own life.

The man sitting across from you was the complete opposite of Simon Riley.

He was trim and well-dressed and had the kind of face that was handsome in a way that required no effort to appreciate and inspired no particular feeling from you.

He had been talking for, by your reckoning, forty-seven minutes. In that time he had covered: his career (impressive, in his telling), his car (expensive, in his telling), his last holiday (exotic, in his telling), and his general philosophy on modern dating (nuanced, in his telling).

He had not asked about your job. He had not asked about your books or the one peeking out of your handbag; the one he'd glanced at and not commented on. He had not asked if your pasta was nice, which it was, actually, genuinely nice, and you'd have told him so if he'd asked. He had not asked you almost anything, come to think of it.

Simon Riley, who spoke perhaps a tenth as many words as this man, had always asked.

Simon Riley had always wanted to know. Not because it was polite. Because he actually, genuinely, in the particular way of people who care about very few things very deeply — wanted to know.

You excused yourself to use the bathroom and stood at the sink running cold water over your wrists and looking at your own reflection, and you thought: this is fine.

This is a perfectly nice evening with a perfectly nice man. This is what moving forward looks like. This is what being a person in the world, a person with a life and a future and reasonable expectations of company, looks like.

You dried your hands. You went back to the table. He had ordered himself another drink without asking if you wanted anything.

You finished your pasta and smiled at appropriate intervals and thought about Simon Riley and felt, as you so often felt, quietly furious at him for being gone.

— ✦ —

The birthday card arrived on a Thursday morning.

You almost missed it entirely — it was tucked between a pizza delivery leaflet and something from your energy supplier, the cream envelope almost camouflaged by the mundane. You shuffled through the post on autopilot and then stopped.

Your name, in handwriting you would have recognised anywhere, would have recognised in your sleep, had recognised in your bones for thirty years.

You sat down on the bottom stair. Your legs suddenly uneasy.

Your hands were not steady.

The envelope opened. The card was white. Plain. Almost generic.

Inside:

Happy Birthday, sunshine.

I'm sorry it's been so long.

I'll explain everything.

Come, if you want to.

If you can stand the sight of me.

Below that, an address. Three towns over. A postcode you didn't recognise.

And then, at the bottom, the way it had always been at the bottom: S.

You sat on the bottom stair for a very long time.

Then you got up, went to your room, and started thinking about what to wear.

— ✦ —

You plucked up the nerve to go on a Saturday.

The drive took forty minutes and you spent most of it trying to manage yourself — talking yourself through reasonable expectations (he is alive, that is enough, start there), warning yourself against things you could not control (the five years, the silence, the way your hands were doing that unsteady thing again), cataloguing everything practical (the address, the map).

The street was quiet. Semi-rural, the kind of neighbourhood that sits between things — between town and country, between the ordinary and the aspirational. The houses were spread out, set back from the road, each with its own front garden and its own character.

You parked. You looked at the address. You looked up.

And you stopped breathing.

It was a beautiful house.

Large, substantial and solid, the kind of house that had been built to last. White painted render, clean and bright in the afternoon light. A white picket fence surrounding the front garden, which was full of flowers. Roses climbing the gatepost. Lavender edging the path. Foxgloves and dahlias and great loose clusters of something purple you couldn't name from here. The kind of garden that had been planted with intention, tended with care, left to be a little wild in the best way.

A porch. And a porch swing, painted white, with a yellow cushion on it.

And flying from the corner of the roof, bright against the blue afternoon sky: the Union flag.

You sat very still in the driver's seat.

You were sixteen years old. It was a summer evening and you were lying in Simon's back garden on an old sleeping bag, looking up at the sky. He was beside you in the way he was always beside you — solid, quiet, taking up exactly the right amount of space. You'd been talking about the future the way teenagers do, in great floating hypotheticals that feel more like weather than plans.

"What kind of house?" he'd asked. He asked follow-up questions always, quietly, wanting the specifics. It was one of the things about him you loved.

And you'd described it. A big house, not ostentatious but real — space for books and for people and for a garden that did what it wanted within reason. A white fence, because you'd always liked them. A porch with somewhere to sit. A flag, because you were — despite everything — proud of where you were from.

Simon had been quiet for a long moment.

"Okay," he'd said. Just: okay.

You had thought he was humouring you.

You had not thought — you had not let yourself think — what it might mean, that he was going to do anything about it.

You got out of the car. Your legs were not entirely reliable. You held the gate and walked up the path — lavender brushing your hand where it grew close, the scent of it too perfect, almost staged — and you stopped at the foot of the porch steps.

The door opened.

He had to duck.

That was the first thing you noticed. The physical fact of him, the sheer size of him, his shoulders nearly touching the doorframe on both sides simultaneously, the automatic dip of his head as he stepped through onto the porch.

He straightened.

The afternoon light landed on him and you had to spend a moment recalibrating, because the last time you'd seen Simon Riley he had been seventeen years old with sawdust on his boots and a train ticket in his hand, and this man —

This man.

The white button-down shirt was simple, the sleeves rolled to the elbow, and from his left wrist to well past the roll of the sleeve his forearm was dark with ink — a sleeve of tattoos, intricate and considered. A whole geography of imagery that you couldn't read from here but would, you thought, take time to learn.

His right wrist carried a watch. His black slacks were fitted close enough that you could see the muscle of his thighs pulling the fabric with every shift of his weight, and his shoes — loafers, black with gold buckles, completely unexpected and somehow exactly right — were precise.

His hair. A dark sandy blonde, longer than military specification presumably allowed and slicked back from his face, which meant you could see all of it, his whole face; the angles that had sharpened from boy to man, the jaw, the set of his brow, and those eyes. Those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old and had never, not once, looked at you with anything less than complete attention.

He was raking those eyes over you now. Slowly. With the same quality he'd always had — that comprehensive, unhurried assessment that somehow never felt like being measured — and his hands were in his pockets and he was standing there like that, on the porch he'd built or bought or arranged specifically around a description you'd given him at sixteen.

He looked like something out of a magazine and like Simon all at once.

You were going to murder him.

"Hi, sunshine."

His voice. Lower than you remembered, rougher, carrying all the years he'd lived since you last heard it. That Manchester accent — still there, unmistakably, that warm northern flatness underneath everything, the vowels shaped by a city, by a street, by a particular kind of upbringing that no amount of training had entirely smoothed out.

That nickname, in that voice, in that low, deliberate way he'd always said it: like you were his.

Like it was a prayer.

You opened your mouth. And you closed it. And you looked at him — this enormous, tattooed, stupidly handsome man who had stood on your mother's doorstep at twelve years old with bruises he didn't mention, who had kissed your cheek at thirteen and broken Ryan Marsh's nose at fourteen and waved goodbye from a train platform at seventeen and then sent you birthday cards from the edges of the world for a decade and then stopped for five years —

"Five years," you said. Your voice was very quiet.

Something moved in his face.

"I-,"

"I thought you were dead." You snapped cutting him off.

"I figured you would’ve."

"Simon."

"I know, sunshine." He said it the same way he'd always said things he couldn't argue with — not deflecting, not dismissing, just absorbing. The Manchester vowels in his voice like a hand on your shoulder. "I'll explain everything. I promise. All of it. Whatever you want to know."

You looked at him.

He looked at you.

The afternoon settled around the house, around the garden that was your garden in your own sixteen-year-old description, around the flag and the porch swing and the lavender and all of it, and the distance between you on the path and him on the porch steps was perhaps four feet and thirty years and five years of silence and a whole life of choosing not to say the one true thing.

"You built me the house?" you asked, whispering it. Like you were afraid to say it.

He was quiet for a moment. Then, "Bought it. Had the garden done the way you said."

"Simon." Your heart ached.

"You said lavender at the edges," he said. His voice was completely level. "You said a porch with somewhere to sit. You said you wanted to see the flag from the garden."

You pressed your hand to your mouth.

The rage was still there — it was not going anywhere quickly. The five years of it, the grief of it — but underneath it, something else. Something that had been there since you were four years old at a preschool art table, larger and quieter and more permanent than anything else you'd ever felt.

"You were sixteen," he said. As though this explained it. "You told me what you wanted. I just..." He stopped. Started again. "I wanted to be enough first. I wanted to have what you needed."

There was a long silence. A bee moved through the lavender. Somewhere a few streets away, a lawnmower hummed.

"Come inside," Simon said. "I'll make you tea. And I'll tell you everything."

You looked at him on the porch of the house he'd built you from a word, and you thought: you absolute idiot. You wonderful, impossible, infuriating man. You thought I'd stopped. You thought thirty years of this was something you could be enough for eventually, like it was a bar to clear, like there was a version of you I was waiting on instead of just —

Instead of just you. Always just you.

The lavender brushed your hand again. You walked up the steps and he looked down at you with those brown eyes that had never once left you.

"Hi, Simon," you said.

Something happened in his face. Something opened.

"Hi, sunshine," he said, his hand coming to the small of your back to guide you inside.

He made the tea.

You stood in the kitchen of a house that smelled of fresh paint and cedar and something faintly floral from the garden drifting through the open window over the sink, and you watched Simon Riley move around it like he'd always lived here — filling the kettle, finding the mugs without opening the wrong cupboard, knowing where the teabags were — and you thought: how long. How long has he been here, in this house he bought for you, learning where everything lives, waiting.

You sat at the kitchen table. It was a good table, heavy oak, the kind built to last and you ran your thumb along the grain of it and tried to arrange your feelings into some kind of order and failed.

Simon set the mug in front of you. Milk in last, the way you'd always taken it, which he knew because he'd made you approximately four thousand cups of tea over the course of your lives. He sat down across from you, his own mug between his big hands, and looked at you.

You looked back.

The kitchen light was warm and it caught the angles of his face. The jaw, the brow, the slight crook in his nose that was new, or newer, the result of something you didn't know about and weren't sure you wanted to.

He was watching you with that particular quality of attention he'd always had. Complete. Patient. Like you were the only thing in the room worth looking at.

"You're not wearing your glasses," he said.

You blinked. Of all the things. "No."

"Contacts?"

"For about ten years now, yes."

He was quiet for a moment, studying your face with that same unhurried attention, "I missed them."

"You missed my glasses?" You say with the deadpan tone you'd perfected over the years.

"Tortoiseshell ones," he said. "Used to push them up your nose when you were concentrating." He took a gulp of his tea, Adam's apple bobbing when he swallowed.

You stared at him. Eighteen years. Eighteen years of distance and war and God knows what else, and he missed your glasses. "Simon."

"Just saying."

"You are unbelievable." You scoff.

"The contacts suit you," he said, and the corner of his mouth moved — barely, almost nothing, but you'd spent your whole life reading that face and you caught it. "Everything suits you. But I liked the glasses."

"Stop it." You snap.

"Stop what?"

"Whatever that is," you said, and you pointed at his face, at the not-there-almost-smile, at the quality of his voice when he said everything suits you, at all of it. "You don't get to do that. You've been — Simon, you've been gone. You've been gone for eighteen years and for five of them, I thought you were dead." Your voice stayed steady, which surprised you. You'd expected it to crack on that. "So you don't get to walk out onto your porch looking like — like that — and tell me you missed my glasses and flirt at me like no time has passed."

He listened without interrupting. He always had — it was one of the things about him, the way he gave you the whole space of what you were saying before he entered it.

"You're right," he nodded.

"I know I'm right." Your spine straightened.

"I owe you an explanation."

"You owe me considerably more than that, Simon Riley, but yes. An explanation would be a start."

He wrapped both hands around his mug again and looked at you across the table and there was something in his face that was not the blank-nothing face, was not the armour he'd worn since he was twelve years old but something that was quieter and more exposed and a great deal more frightening because of it.

"Not here," he said.

You frowned. "What?"

"I don't want to do it like this. Sat in a kitchen." He glanced around the room briefly, as though orienting himself. "Come to dinner with me tomorrow night."

"What I—"

"The Grill on Merton Street."

You went very still.

The Grill on Merton Street. You hadn't been in years — not since you'd moved away from the area, not since things had shifted and the rituals of your old life had quietly been replaced by other things.

But you knew it. You knew every table in it. The way the light came through the front windows on a Sunday, the smell of it — roasted meat and old wood and the particular warmth of a place that had been feeding families for decades.

Your mother had loved it. Your father used to order the same thing every time and be pleased about it every time, and you and Simon had sat across from each other in the corner booth with the sticky laminated menus and kicked each other under the table and laughed.

"That's still open?" you managed.

"Had a look earlier this week," he said. "Still there. New owners but the same building. Same corner booth."

You looked at him. He looked at you. Outside, through the open window, a late bird was making itself known in the lavender.

"Fine," you said. "Dinner. Tomorrow. And you're going to tell me everything." you struck at him with a serious face.

"Everything," he agreed.

"I mean it, Simon. All of it."

"I know you do."

You drank your tea. It was exactly right. The temperature, the strength, the milk ratio and you hated him a little bit for that. For the fact that he still knew, that across seventeen years and God knows how many miles he still knew exactly how you took your tea, and he'd made it correctly on the first attempt without asking, and you were absolutely not going to cry about that.

You were not.

— ✦ —

You dressed carefully.

Not because you were trying to impress him.

You told yourself this firmly, standing in front of your wardrobe in the room you'd taken in the local B&B — you'd booked a night, not knowing how long this might take, not knowing what state you'd be in for the drive home afterwards — and you told yourself that you were simply dressing appropriately for a dinner at a decent restaurant.

That was all.

That was the entirety of it.

The dress was deep green. Fitted through the waist, falling to just below the knee, with a neckline that was elegant rather than dramatic.

You'd bought it for a work event two years ago and it had lived in your wardrobe since, waiting for an occasion that felt worth it. You put your hair up — not elaborately, just neatly, the kind of arrangement that looked effortless and had taken twenty minutes — and you wore the small gold earrings that had been your grandmother's. Low heels. The good handbag. A slick of red on your mouth that you almost wiped off twice before deciding to leave it.

You were not trying to impress him.

You were absolutely trying to impress him.

He was waiting outside The Grill when your taxi pulled up, standing on the pavement with his hands in his pockets. The air around him relaxed and easy. An anchored stillness, like a man who'd learned to wait and had made peace with it. He has the same dark slacks as yesterday, same loafers with the gold buckles, but the shirt tonight was black.

A deep, clean black that made his shoulders look approximately the width of a doorway, which was in fact an accurate assessment — and he'd left the top button undone. His hair was the same: pushed back, dark sandy blonde curling at the nape of his neck and catching the amber of the streetlights.

He saw you get out of the taxi.

He went very still. Completely, suddenly, entirely present in a way that landed on you like a hand against your sternum. Under your heartbeat.

You crossed the pavement toward him and his eyes moved over you — slowly, comprehensively, that same rake of attention he'd given you yesterday on the porch steps, only this time there was nothing restrained about what it did to your pulse.

He eyed you the same way he used to look at the extra cuts of slow roasted beef your mother added to his plate every time he joined you for a Sunday roast after church.

"Hi," you said.

"Hi, sunshine." His voice was low. The rough Manchester sending tingles down your spine.

He opened the door for you.

The Grill smelled exactly the same.

Roasted meat and warmed bread and old wood and something faintly of candle wax. It hit you the moment you stepped through the door and you had to stand still for just a second, just one second, to absorb the weight of it.

Your father's coat on the hook by the door. Your mother's reading glasses going into her bag as the menus arrived. Simon across from you, fourteen and fifteen and sixteen, his big hands wrapped around a Coke glass, his eyes on you under that careful brow.

The layout had shifted slightly — new owners, as Simon had said — but the bones of it were the same. The dark wood panelling. The low warm lighting. The tables set with proper linen and actual candles in glass holders. And in the back left corner was the booth.

Simon's hand was at the small of your back as the host led you through. A light touch, barely there, the kind of thing that could be merely courteous and was absolutely not merely courteous.

You said nothing about it.

You were almost at the booth when a voice said, "Well. I don't believe it."

You turned.

Margaret and Gerald Howarth.

Margaret had been your mother's friend since before you were born — a small, bright-eyed woman who had somehow barely aged in two decades. Her silver hair cut the same way it had always been, her husband a large, genial man beside her with a napkin already tucked into his collar. They'd been eating here since before you were born too, you suspected. Some people were simply woven into the furniture of a place.

"Margaret," you said, and you felt a genuine, warm rush of it. Of being seen by someone who had known you as a child, who had watched you grow up, who carried that particular knowledge of you that only people of a certain generation can hold. She was already rising halfway from her seat, her hand extended, and you took it and she covered it with her other one, the way she always had.

"We heard you were back in the area," she said — which was interesting, since you'd only arrived yesterday, but news apparently still moved at its old speed around here. Her bright eyes moved to Simon, and something in them softened with recognition and surprise in equal measure. "And Simon Riley. My goodness."

"Mrs Howarth." Simon's voice was respectful, quieter than usual, and you noticed — because you noticed everything about him — that he straightened fractionally. Not stiffly. Just the particular adjustment of a man in the presence of someone he'd known when he was young and unguarded.

"Look at the size of you," Gerald said, not unkindly, staring up at Simon with the frank appreciation of one large man for another. "What are they feeding you?"

"Gerald," Margaret scolded mildly.

"It's a compliment." He shrugged.

Simon almost smiled. "Good to see you, Mr Howarth."

Margaret was looking between the two of you with the expression of a woman who had been quietly observing people her entire life and drawing accurate conclusions from very little evidence. "Are you together?" she asked, with the particular directness that came with age and with having known you since you were in a pushchair.

"We're having dinner," you said carefully.

Margaret's expression said, quite clearly, that she had heard this and had also heard everything it was not saying. "Well," she said, patting your hand once more before releasing it, "it's lovely to see you both. You always did belong together, the pair of you. I said that to your mother once, do you know. I said those two—"

"It was lovely seeing you, Margaret," you said, with great warmth and only mild desperation.

She laughed, a bright, pleased sound and settled back into her seat.

As you turned to follow the host the rest of the way to the booth, you were almost certain you heard Gerald say, to his wife, "told you" in a tone of quiet marital satisfaction.

Simon was very carefully not reacting to any of this. You were very carefully not looking at him.

You saw two others you knew before you reached the booth.

Kim Ashworth, who had been in your form in Year Ten and who looked essentially the same as she had in school except that she had a baby on her hip and a husband trailing behind her with a changing bag.

She stopped mid-step when she saw you, did a small, delighted double take, said oh my God twice, and then looked at Simon in a way that was extremely uncomplicated in its appreciation before remembering the husband with the changing bag. There were promises exchanged to catch up properly, phone numbers that would probably not be used, genuine warmth on both sides.

And then at the bar, perched on a stool with a whisky, Dave Pearce — who had played alongside Simon on the secondary school rugby team and who greeted him with the particular vocabulary of men who knew each other at fifteen and have not changed as much as they think.

There was a brief, loud exchange that involved at least one shoulder-clap that could have knocked a smaller man sideways, and then Dave shook your hand too and told Simon he was punching. Which Simon received without expression and you tried your hardest not to laugh, biting your lip.

Finally the corner booth. You slid in. Simon folded himself into the seat across from you, the table scaled to ordinary human beings and therefore slightly absurd against the size of him, his knees bracketing it, his shoulders blocking the view of the room behind him entirely.

The menus came.

They were not laminated anymore — proper printed card, changed seasonally, the kind that meant the new owners had ambitions. But the roast was still on. The proper Sunday roast, the one your father used to order when you could afford to.

"Same corner," Simon said quietly.

"Same corner," you agreed.

He was looking at you across the table the way he used to look at you across this table, except that now his face was older and larger and had been to places that had clearly asked things of it. The look was different in its texture. Deeper, maybe. Older in the same way he was older. Like it had more weight behind it from all the years of being carried.

"You said everything," you reminded him. "All of it."

"I know."

"So." You gestured for him to start.

He set his menu down. Looked at you. And then he started talking.

He told it the way he told everything — without embellishment, without drama, in the flat, precise language of a man who had learned to communicate facts and trusted the facts to carry the weight without decoration.

He'd gone in at seventeen and he'd been good at it. Not surprising. He was built for the structure of it, for the clarity of having a purpose and a unit and a chain of things that made sense.

He'd moved up fast — faster than he let on in the cards he'd sent you, which had been careful, he explained, deliberately careful, because the more you knew the more you might worry. Which, you pointed out, had not been his decision to make. He didn't argue with that.

Task Force 141 came later. Years later, after deployments that he summarised in a sentence each and you understood enough from his face to know that each sentence was doing the work of much longer things.

He was a lieutenant now. He said it the way he said most things about himself, flatly, without vanity, presented as information. He had certain freedoms now that he hadn't had before, certain ability to make choices about where he went and when and what he did with the things the years had given him.

You both ordered your food.

"And the five years?" you asked, sipping your cocktail the waitress had brought over.

He was quiet for a moment, he stared at his San Miguel pint, the condensation sliding down the glass. Your food had arrived at some point during the waiting, while Simon collected his thoughts.

He picked up his fork and then set it down again.

"There was a man," Simon said.

Something about the way he said it made you put your fork down too.

"He ran drugs. Major operation, international — I won't go into all of it." He said this without flinching, looking at you steadily, not softening it. You'd always appreciated that about him — the way he treated your intelligence as a given. "After I escaped him, he decided to make it personal. He went after the people I—" He stopped. Chose the word carefully. "The people I was connected to."

The candle in the glass holder between you threw warm, unsteady light across his face.

"He killed them," Simon said. "My brother. Tommy's family." A pause that cost him something; you could see it cost him. "My Mother."

The restaurant continued around you — the murmur of other tables, the clink of cutlery, someone laughing softly near the bar — and you sat very still.

"Oh Simon," you whispered, you could feel the way your face formed the sympathy.

"I'm alright." He said it the way he'd always said it, the Manchester flat and absolute. The way that meant; don't make it bigger than I can hold right now. You knew that voice. You honoured it.

"He knew about you," Simon said and you froze. "That was the other thing. He'd done his research." His jaw shifted slightly. "As long as he was alive, you weren't safe. If I'd contacted you, properly contacted you, kept the thread going the way I wanted to, it would have given him a cleaner line. A more reliable way to reach me."

You understood the logic of it. You understood it clearly and immediately in the part of your brain that processed information. The other part — the part that had sat on the bottom stair with a birthday card after five years of silence, the part that had thought past tense — that part was going to take considerably longer.

"So you cut me off," you said. Not as an accusation. As a fact, laid down. You were starting to understand the shape of it.

"To keep you safe. Yes."

"Without telling me why." You sighed but you knew you were being unreasonable, but you hoped he would let you for a little longer.

"If I'd told you why, you'd have known there was a threat. And you'd have—" He stopped. The corner of his mouth moved, something that was not quite a smile and not quite not one. "You'd have done something about it. Gone looking. Made noise."

"I would not have—" You stopped, because you would have. You absolutely would have. You'd spent thirty years being completely unable to sit on the sidelines where Simon Riley was concerned, and the knowledge that someone was threatening him would have made you entirely unreasonable. "That's—" you huffed.

"Yeah," he said.

"You could have found a way—"

"There wasn't one. Not one that was safe." His voice was very level. "I went through every option, love. I promise you. Every one."

The word arrived quietly, without ceremony.

Love.

He'd never called you that — not in thirty years, not in all the time and all the familiarity of what you were to each other. He said it the way he said everything that mattered: without preamble, without dressing it up, laid down like the fact it was.

"And now?" you asked. Your voice was quite steady. Steadier than you felt.

"He's dead." No elaboration. None needed. The flat Manchester vowels carrying the weight of it cleanly, without mess. "And you're safe. And I—" He looked at you across the table, across the candle and the white linen. "I bought the house," he said. "I've spent a while making it what it is. Making if perfect. I saved up for years. The 141 pays well when you get to a certain level and I wasn't spending it on anything else."

"For years," you repeated, feeling a shiver rack up your spine and your toes go numb.

"Since I was about twenty." He said this without apparent embarrassment, as though it were the most natural thing in the world to spend fifteen years saving money to buy a woman a house from a description she'd given you at sixteen years old. "Took a while to find the right one that wasn’t too far from your parents. The lavender took three growing seasons to look like it did when you pulled up."

Three growing seasons.

He had planted the lavender three years ago. He had stood in a garden three towns from where you lived and planted lavender along a path because a sixteen-year-old girl had mentioned it lying on her back in his garden thirty years ago, and he had tended it for three years, and he had waited.

"Simon Riley," you said.

"It's got room for your books Sunshine, built the shelves myself." His lips quirked up at the corners at your flabbergasted expression.

"You are the most—" You stopped. Started again. "Do you have any idea what the past five years have felt like? Do you have any idea what I—" Your voice did the thing you'd been preventing it from doing, cracked at the edge of the sentence like a plate under too much weight. You stopped. Pressed your lips together. "I grieved you. I sat in my flat and I genuinely, actually grieved you and decided you were dead. I had — Simon, I had a plan for getting through it. I was managing it."

"I know."

"Don't say I know." you snapped sounding more like a bratty child than angry.

"I'm sorry." And this was different. This was not the automatic I know, the absorbing of your anger. This was something he said the way he said very few things — carefully, with full weight behind it. His eyes on yours across the table. "I'm sorry for the five years. I'm sorry I couldn't find another way. I'm sorry you were on your own with it." A pause. "I'm sorry it took me this long to have something worth coming back with."

"The house is not—" You stopped. "You didn't need to buy me a house, Simon. I didn't need—"

"I needed to," he said. Simply. "I needed to know I was coming back with something real. Something that wasn't just me turning up with nothing after all that time, asking you to — to accept—" He moved his hand across the table, and his fingers stopped just short of yours. Not touching. Close. "Asking you to take me as I was. I needed it to be enough. I needed there to be something I could give you that was—"

"Simon." Your voice was very quiet.

"I know it's not—"

"Simon." You turned your hand over on the table. Just that. The small, deliberate movement of turning your palm up.

He looked at it. Then he looked at you. Then, slowly, he put his hand in yours — his enormous, careful, tattooed hand. Not quite the one that had carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and pulled you up off the pavement after Daniel Holt and held you on the platform at the train station, but this one now and his fingers closed around yours and he held on.

"I only ever wanted you," you said softly.

"Sunshine-"

"You were always worth it," you cut him off. And then, because it was time — because it had been time for approximately thirty years and you were done waiting for the right moment when the right moment had repeatedly failed to arrive — "You were always enough. You were always the thing I was — Simon, you have always been the only one I wanted. Exactly as you are."

He was very still.

"I didn't tell you on the platform," you said. "I should have. I've thought about it every day since."

"So have I," he said.

The candle between you flickered in some movement of air from the kitchen, and in the warm unsteady light his face was open in a way you had waited thirty years to see. His hand was warm and sure around yours, and from the other side of the restaurant you were almost certain you heard Margaret Howarth say something to Gerald in a satisfied undertone.

"You planted the lavender," you grinned.

"Three years ago." He finally smiles back at you, it was crooked and uneven and you loved it.

"You are," you said carefully, "the most ridiculous man I have ever known." You shook your head still grinning.

"Missed you too, sunshine," he smirked.

Dinner ended the way the best dinners end — not with a definitive conclusion but with a gradual, reluctant unwinding, the kind where both people keep finding one more thing to say, one more thread to pull, because the alternative is standing up and the evening becoming past tense.

You ordered dessert.

Neither of you particularly wanted it but you both ordered it, and you both knew why, and neither of you said so. The chocolate brownie was very good. Simon ate his methodically, the way he ate everything, and at one point looked up and caught you watching him and said nothing.

The candle between you had burned down to a stub by the time the bill came.

He paid. You protested on principle. He gave you a look that had not changed at all since he was fourteen years old — flat, certain, faintly amused — and handed the card to the waiter without further discussion.

"That's not—" you started.

"Next time," he said.

Next time. You let it sit there between you, warm and presumptuous and everything you wanted.

Outside, the evening had cooled.

The last of the summer still holding in the air, the kind of September evening that felt like a concession, like the year wasn't ready to be done.

The street was quiet for a Saturday, just a few couples moving between the restaurants and a group of lads outside the pub further down having a smoke. The amber of the streetlights made everything look like something worth remembering.

Simon stood beside you on the pavement, close enough that his arm brushed yours when he turned to look down the street, and you were very aware of the warmth of him and the black shirt and the lavender you couldn't smell from here but could somehow still feel in your hands.

"Walk with me a bit," he said. Not a question, not quite. He'd always done that — phrased invitations as though the outcome were already agreed, as though he simply assumed you'd say yes because you almost always did.

"Alright."

He fell into step beside you, and for a little while you just walked — past the wine bar with its fairy lights, past the old library that had become a gin distillery at some point in the last decade, past the post office that had been there since before either of you were born. You talked about small things. Easy things. The kind of conversation that runs alongside the real one underneath.

Then he stopped.

You stopped too.

Simon looked down at you. His hands were in his pockets. That brown gaze of his moved over your face in the way it had been moving over your face all evening — like he was cataloguing it, like he was making up for lost time in the looking.

"Dance with me," he said.

You blinked. "What?"

He tilted his head, "Come dancing with me."

You stared at him.

Simon Riley, who had sat against the wall at every school disco you'd ever attended, arms folded, watching everyone else with the expression of a man conducting a private risk assessment.

Simon Riley, who you had never, in thirty years of knowing him, seen voluntarily approach a dance floor.

"You don't dance," you said.

"No," he agreed. "But you do."

The simplicity of it landed somewhere very central.

You do.

As though that were reason enough. As though your enjoyment of a thing were sufficient justification for him to walk into it without hesitation.

Which, you supposed, when it came to Simon, it always had been.

"Alright," you said, for the second time in ten minutes.

His hand found the small of your back again, that same light, deliberate touch from inside the restaurant and he guided you down the street.

Simon said you weren't far, when you heard it.

The particular sound of a Domino's box. The slight crinkle of a carrier bag. And then your mother's voice, carrying across the quiet street in the way it always had — warm and clear and entirely without volume control.

"Oh honey! We thought - oh!"

"Oh fuck," you cursed.

You said it very quietly. Not quietly enough. Simon chuckled under his breath.

Your parents were coming along the pavement from the direction of the only car park around here — your father in his weekend coat, your mother in the blue one she'd had for fifteen years. A Domino's pizza box balanced in her arms and a carrier bag hanging from your father's hand.

Movie night. Of course. They still did it every other Saturday, had done since you were small, and of course they would do it tonight of all the Saturday nights in the entire calendar.

Your mother's face when she saw you was pure, unguarded delight — the face she always made when she encountered you unexpectedly, as though each time were still a pleasant surprise. Then her gaze moved, naturally and automatically, to the man standing beside you with his hand at the small of your back.

The delight didn't disappear. It did something more complicated.

"Oh honey," she said again, but differently this time. Softer. Her voice going somewhere else entirely. "Simon?"

The Domino's box dipped. Your father caught it with the reflexes of a man who had been catching things your mother nearly dropped for forty years.

Simon had gone still beside you. Not that controlled, present stillness he had, the one that wasn't tension but something adjacent to it. He was looking at your mother with an expression you couldn't fully read from the side, but you could see the line of his jaw, and it was careful.

"Mrs—" he started.

"Don't you Mrs me," your mother said. Her voice was not angry. That was the thing — you'd prepared yourself, in the split second between seeing them and now, for anger, or for the brisk, self-protective coolness she used sometimes when she'd been frightened. But it wasn't that. It was something that had tears in it, which was considerably worse to witness.

She handed the pizza box to your father without looking at him — he took it with the silent competence of long practice — and she crossed the pavement in four short steps and she put her arms around Simon Riley.

He was so much larger than her. He had always been larger than her, even at fifteen when he'd eaten her shepherd's pie at the kitchen table and been careful to seem like it was casual and not like he was starving. Even when she gave him seconds and he looked like he would beg for thirds.

But now it was almost absurd, the smallness of her against the width of him, and he stood there for just a fraction of a second — that fraction where you could see him recalibrating, receiving something he hadn't prepared for — and then his arms came around her and he held on.

Your mother was crying. Small, quiet sounds, the kind she made when she was trying not to. Her face was pressed against his chest and her hands gripped the back of his black shirt and she said, muffled and with great feeling, "You absolute boy."

Simon said nothing. His eyes, over the top of your mother's head, found yours.

You had to look away. The street was very interesting. The lamppost in particular.

You bit into your lip.

Your father appeared at your shoulder.

He was a quiet man, always had been. The kind of steady, observant presence that took things in without making a production of the taking in. He stood beside you with the pizza box over one arm and the carrier bag in the other hand and watched his wife hold the boy who had eaten at their table for a decade, and he said, very quietly, to you,

"Well. He's not dead then."

"No Dad," you managed. "He's not dead."

"Good," your father said.

As though this settled it. As though the entirety of the past five years of your grief and his, because he had grieved Simon too in his quiet way, in the way of a man who doesn't say things aloud but feels them thoroughly. He looked at Simon over the top of your mother's head and gave him a single, deliberate nod. The kind that meant; we'll talk. The kind that meant; I have things to say to you. The kind that also, underneath both of those, meant; I'm so glad son.

Simon received the nod with equal gravity, which was exactly right.

Your mother finally pulled back. She held Simon by the arms — or tried to, her hands not quite making it around the circumference of them — and looked up at him with red eyes and the particular expression of a woman who has a great deal to say and is choosing, for now, not to say most of it.

"You'll come for dinner," she said. Not a question. The same tone she'd used on him at fifteen and apparently intended to continue using indefinitely. "Sunday. Proper dinner. Not a restaurant. Mine."

"Yes," Simon said. Immediately. Without hesitation.

"Good." She released his arms and reached up and patted his cheek once, firmly, the way you might with someone who had done something frustrating and beloved in equal measure.

Then she turned to you, and her expression did something complicated and warm and knowing, and she didn't say any of the things she was clearly thinking, which you appreciated deeply.

What she said instead was: "Don't stay out too late. You're thirty-five, not seventeen."

"Mum." You scolded.

"I'm just saying." She shrugged.

"We're going dancing," you told her, with the energy of someone redirecting a conversation through sheer momentum.

Your mother looked at Simon. Simon looked at your mother. Something passed between them that was private and thirty years old and not yours to have.

"Of course you are," she said.

Your father passed the Domino's box back to your mother, and said, "Right then. We'll leave you to it." He looked at Simon one more time. "Sunday," he confirmed.

"Sunday," Simon said.

Your parents moved off down the pavement.

Your mother looked back once — just once — and her face when she did was the face you'd seen her wear at your primary school nativity and at your GCSE results and on the morning you'd gone to university; the particular face of a woman watching her child be happy and feeling the full, complicated, loving weight of it.

Then she turned back to your father and said something you couldn't hear, and his hand found her shoulder as they walked, and they rounded the corner and were gone.

You stood on the pavement in the September evening and breathed.

Beside you, Simon was also very carefully just standing there.

"She cried on me," he said, after a moment.

"Yes."

"Didn't expect that."

You turned to look at him. He was looking at the corner your parents had turned, and his face had the quality it sometimes had when something had reached him — not visibly, not dramatically, just in that particular stillness that meant something had got through.

"She cried about you," you told him. "When you stopped writing. Three years ago — there were several times, actually, but three years ago was the worst. She held me in her kitchen and we both—" You stopped. Managed the next part carefully. "She loves you too, Simon. She always did. You were at our table every other night for years."

He was quiet for a moment. Something moved in his jaw. "I know," he said. And this time the I know was different from all the other times he'd said it tonight — heavier, and private.

"You agreed to Sunday dinner," you giggled.

"Of course I agreed to Sunday dinner," he said knowing full well he would have been stupid not to and gotten an earful from your mother.

Simon offered you his hand.

Not at the small of your back this time. His hand, palm up, in the space between you. Old-fashioned and deliberate.

You put yours in it.

"Come on then," he said. "Let's go dancing."

There was, as it turned out, only one place to go dancing in this town on a Saturday night if you meant actual dancing — the kind with a proper floor and music with a real structure to it.

It was not a club.

It was not a bar with a cleared space near the speaker.

It was the old church hall on Callow Street, which had been hosting the Saturday Evening Social Dance since before either of you were born, and which Simon seemed to know about with the specificity of a man who had done his research.

"A dance hall," you said, standing outside it. Through the tall, thin windows the warm light was visible, and the sound — strings, a proper band, something with a waltz rhythm that made the windows hum faintly. "You're taking me to a dance hall."

"Only place with a floor."

"Simon, this is a — there will be pensioners in there." you said quietly.

"There'll be a dance floor," he looked down at you. "And you said yes." he shrugged but looked smug.

He pushed the door open and held it, and because you had in fact said yes, and because the music through the door sounded genuinely lovely, and because you were still holding his hand from the pavement, you went in.

The church hall smelled of floor polish and tea. Fairy lights were strung along the rafters — someone's addition, not the original fixtures, and they made the whole space amber and soft.

Round tables lined the edges, most of them occupied by couples in their sixties and seventies and eighties, a few younger faces dotted among them, everyone dressed with the particular care of people who still believed an evening out was worth dressing for.

On the small stage at the far end, a four-piece band was working through something in three-four time with the ease of musicians who had played together for years.

And at the edge of the floor, clipboard in hand, wearing the same expression of organised authority she'd worn every PE lesson for fifteen years was Mrs Valerie Croft.

She was smaller than you remembered. Or perhaps you were simply larger.

She'd retired at some point — the hair was fully silver now rather than streaked — but the posture was identical: spine straight, chin up, the bearing of a woman who had spent decades telling teenagers to stand properly and had eventually simply become the embodiment of the instruction.

She looked up from her clipboard as you approached and her eyes moved from you to Simon, and to her credit, she didn't miss a step.

"Well," she tilted her chin up to meet his eyes, "Riley."

"Miss," Simon said. Which was technically incorrect given that she had a ring on her finger and had for as long as you'd known her, but you suspected it was because he'd called her Miss in secondary school the way you had. "Mrs Croft. Sorry. We were passing and— " He paused, which was unlike him. "Is there any chance we could crash it?"

Mrs Croft looked at him. She looked at you. She looked at your joined hands with the expression of a woman who had supervised enough teenagers to recognise a development when she saw one.

"Can you behave yourselves?" she asked.

"Yes," you said nodding.

Simon said nothing.

Mrs Croft made a sound that was not quite a laugh but was adjacent to one. "Floor's open," she said. "Don't knock anyone over." And she turned back to her clipboard.

The first dance was not elegant.

Simon was, as he had always been and had openly admitted, not a dancer.

He was a man built for other kinds of movement — purposeful, directed, the kind that had somewhere to go. Dancing required a different relationship with your body, a willingness to be present in it without agenda, and that was not naturally his.

But he was trying. And Simon Riley trying at something he wasn't good at with complete, unhesitating commitment was one of your favourite things in the world.

He held you correctly — one hand at your waist, the other holding yours at the right height — because he had clearly looked this up at some point, which you were choosing not to think about too hard. His footwork was careful. Deliberate. Slightly behind the beat in the way of someone counting silently.

"You're counting," you told him trying your hardest not to laugh.

"Shut up."

"Simon, I can see your lips moving." you snorted.

"I said shut up."

You were laughing now. Properly, helplessly, the kind that came up from somewhere real — and he looked down at you with that face, that flat, long-suffering, completely fond face, and something in his eyes that was warm in a way that had nothing to do with patience and everything to do with the fact that your laugh had always been, apparently, one of his favourite sounds.

"You're doing fine," you told him, once you'd recovered.

"I'm doing terribly," he answered. "Keep going."

By the second dance, he was better.

By the third, he had found something. Some adjustment in the way he held you, the way his hand settled more fully at your waist, drawing you closer so the movement between you became less about individual steps and more about one shared thing. He was a quick study. He always had been, once he'd decided something was worth doing.

You became aware, gradually, of the room watching.

Not intrusively. Not all at once. But in the soft, peripheral way of a room full of people who have been in love for decades and recognise the particular weather of it when it walks through the door.

An older couple near the stage — she in pale blue, he in a suit that had been good once and was still cared for — had stopped talking to watch you.

A woman at one of the corner tables had her chin in her hand.

Mrs Croft, by the door, was very deliberately looking at her clipboard and failing to look only at her clipboard.

You didn't mind. You were too busy watching Simon watch you.

The band changed tempo at half past nine.

The waltz gave way to something with a different shape entirely — something that moved from the hips rather than the feet, a rhythm that was slower in its pulse and considerably less innocent in its intention.

A rumba.

You looked up at Simon.

He looked down at you.

"I don't know this one," he said.

"I'll show you." you breathed.

You took his hand and placed it lower at your waist, right above the curve of your ass. Deliberately watching his face when you did it, watching the shift in his expression, the way something in his eyes went very still and very focused. "Hip to hip," you told him. "Slower than you think. Let the music pull you."

He followed your lead with an attention that was frankly overwhelming in its completeness.

Simon Riley giving you his full, undivided, physical focus was not a small thing. He was so large and so present and he moved with you rather than against you, adjusting with every shift of your weight, and somewhere in the second minute of the song the counting stopped and something else replaced it.

He drew you closer. His hand at your hip pulled you in until there was no space left between you, until you could feel the warmth of him through the green of your dress and you were very aware of every point of contact, of the music and of the room full of people who had gone very quiet.

Then he turned you.

It was not technically correct. It was not what the dance required. But he turned you in a single, smooth movement that his body had decided on and yours simply followed, because that was what it did with him.

And then he dipped you.

The room tilted. His arm was across your back, solid and immovable, and you were suspended in the amber light with the music around you and your hand at his shoulder.

He lowered you — slowly, with complete control, no hesitation in the hold and then his face was close, very close, and his nose grazed the line of your throat making your breath hitch.

A slow, deliberate graze. The warmth of his breath against your pulse point. You felt it in places that had nothing to do with dancing, between your legs throbbing.

His hand — the one at your hip — slid down, just slightly, just enough, finding the outside of your thigh where the fabric of your dress lay, and he hooked your leg, slowly, around his hip. His fingers at the back of your thigh. Holding you there. His nose still at your throat.

The music resolved. Somewhere behind you, someone started clapping.

He brought you upright. Smoothly, slowly, until you were standing again and his hand was still at the back of your thigh. Your leg still around his hip and your faces were very close. Your heart was conducting itself in a way that had absolutely nothing to do with exertion.

You were panting. Slightly. Just slightly.

He was not panting. He was looking down at you with the almost-smile, the one that had always been rarer than gold and twice as valuable — and his eyes were warm and very dark and entirely, completely satisfied with themselves.

"You looked that up as well," you managed.

"No," he said.

"Simon—"

"That one," he said, "I just wanted to do."

From the table by the stage, the woman in pale blue was applauding with great enthusiasm. Her husband had two fingers in his mouth and was whistling.

Mrs Croft had given up entirely on the clipboard.

The taxi back was not a long ride.

It felt longer than it was, and shorter than you wanted.

You sat beside him in the back seat with his thigh against yours and the city moving past the windows and neither of you speaking. The silence had a texture to it that was thick and warm and anticipatory in a way that made the air feel heavy in your lungs.

His hand was on your knee. Just resting there, heavy and warm, the way he did everything — with complete, unapologetic certainty.

You did not move it.

The house appeared at the end of the lane with its white fence and its dark windows and the lavender silver in the moonlight.

You were out of the taxi before it had fully stopped and you were aware how eager this appeared and you didn't care.

Simon paid the driver and caught up with you in three strides because his legs were considerably longer than yours and always had been.

He got to the door first. Key in hand.

The door opened.

And you did not wait for him to step through it.

You took him by the front of his shirt, that black shirt, warm from his body, the fabric bunching in your fists and you lips were suddenly on his.

You walked him backwards through the doorway and you felt the moment his back met the wall just inside and you were already kissing him before he'd fully registered the sequence of events.

Your mouth on his. Your hands in the front of his shirt. Thirty years of it finding its way out all at once, without ceremony, without preamble, without any of the careful management you had been applying to yourself since you were four years old at a preschool art table.

He kissed you back.

He kissed you back the way he did everything — thoroughly, completely, with his full attention and no apparent interest in doing anything else ever again.

His hands came to your face, big and careful, tilting your jaw, and for a moment you were simply inside the realness of him and the warmth of him and the fact that he was here and alive and kissing you in the hallway of the house he'd bought for you.

He pulled back.

"Easy, sunshine," he said against your lips. Low. A little breathless, which you would be privately triumphant about later. The corner of his mouth pulled up in that crooked smile.

You became aware, in the slightly dazed way of someone returning from somewhere, that your hands were still in his shirt and his hands were still on your face and you were standing approximately two inches apart in his hallway.

You also became aware, in the refocusing of your vision, of his mouth.

Of the scar on his upper lip.

You didn't know how you hadn't noticed it before — through dinner, through the dancing, through all of it.

Perhaps you had simply not been this close before. Or perhaps you had been looking at so many things that you hadn't been looking at everything.

It was small, a thin pale line bisecting the left side of his upper lip, old enough to have faded to silver, the kind of scar that had been there for years and had been lived with so thoroughly that the face had absorbed it.

You lifted your thumb and touched it, gently. "How'd you get this?"

He went very still, alert and present and reading you.

You kissed it. Softly. Just that.

Something moved in his throat.

His hands shifted from your face to your waist, warm and settled, and he began to move you gently — backwards, one steady step at a time — turning you both away from the wall and deeper into the hallway. His foot found the door behind him and pushed it closed with a quiet, final click.

"If I tell you about that one," he said, his voice low and even above your head as he guided you past the entrance and toward the stairs, "I'll have to tell you about the rest."

He looked down at you as he said it, that look, the one that said you were the most interesting thing he had ever encountered. The one that made you feel simultaneously seen and slightly undone — and his expression had in it something that was fond and amused and entirely, devastatingly warm.

You kicked your heels off at the bottom of the stairs. They went somewhere behind you. You didn't look.

Your bag went next, dropped against the banister.

"The rest?" you repeated. Your voice came out slightly smaller than you intended. Your eyes, entirely without your permission, moved down the front of him — the black shirt, the breadth of his shoulders, his torso, his thick thighs, all of him — and back up again. Slowly.

He watched you do it. He said nothing.

You swallowed. "Tell me then."

His hand at your waist steered you up the first step, and then the second, and the stairs curved slightly toward the landing above, and at the top of the stairs he pushed open the door to a bedroom.

The room was large and furnished.

A bed, properly large, the kind that accommodated a man his size without complaint. Low lamps on either side casting the same amber warmth as the hall below. Dark wood floors, a window looking out toward the garden, the curtain shifting slightly in a crack of night air.

He kissed you, just inside the door you kissed him back and his hands were at your hips.

Then he pulled back with a groan. Both of you breathing slightly harder than was strictly accounted for by climbing one flight of stairs.

"I want to, sunshine," he said. His voice was very low. Restrained. His hands still on your body, holding you there, his thumbs moving in a small slow motion against the fabric of your dress that was doing nothing to help you think clearly. "I do. But I need to hear it from you first. Your permission. Clear words. I don't want to misunderstand you."

You opened your mouth.

And then your eyes moved, over his shoulder, to the dresser.

A skull mask looked back at you.

You closed your mouth. You looked at it. The mask, white and stark and precise but somehow both alien and completely, recognisably his. The balaclava beside it, folded neatly. And tactical gloves — enormous, black, reinforced, approximately the size of your head.

"That yours?" you asked.

Simon turned his head, following your gaze. He looked at the dresser, then back at you. "Yeah."

"What is it?"

"What I wear on missions."

"Oh," you said.

And then your brain did something entirely beyond your authority. It constructed, with great speed and considerable detail, an image: Simon, broad and enormous, in black tactical gear. Gloved hands. That mask. Hovering over you.

You swallowed.

The image did not leave. It simply settled in, warm and vivid and decidedly unhelpful.

"Sunshine."

His hand came to your face — his big, warm, ungloved hand, his actual hand, the one you knew — his thumb sweeping gently under your eye, bringing you back into the room and the amber lamplight and the present moment.

"Hmm?" you managed meeting his gaze.

His eyes moved over your face with the same comprehensive attention he always gave you.

"Your permission, love," he said. Quiet. Certain.

"Oh." You blinked. "Yes. Yes, you have it. Always."

The almost-smile. "Not for everything I want to do to you." His thumb was still moving, very gently, under your eye. "I'll ask. Multiple times."

You stared at him. "Multiple—"

"Times," he confirmed. His voice was entirely level. His eyes were not.

You pushed his shoulder and your cheeks burned.

He caught your hand as you pushed it and laughed, a low, real, full sound, the kind that you had spent most of your life engineering because it was so rare and so completely, unreasonably good.

You laughed too, properly, the helpless kind, and his forehead came down to rest against yours and you were both laughing in the amber light of his bedroom with the skull mask on the dresser and the lavender outside the window and thirty years behind you and everything in front.

The laughing settled.

Not all at once — it unwound gradually, the way laughter does when it's the real kind, leaving something warm and loose in its place.

His forehead was still against yours. His hands had moved from your face to your waist, both of them now, holding you the way he'd held you on the dance floor — with that complete, unhurried certainty, like you were something he'd been waiting to hold properly for a very long time and intended to do it right.

The amber light of the lamps lay across everything. Through the gap in the curtain, you could see the edge of the garden — the pale shapes of flowers, the dark of the lawn.

"Tell me about the rest," you said quietly.

He pulled back just enough to look at you. "The scars?"

"You said if you told me about the one on your lip you'd have to tell me about the rest." You reached up and touched the scar again — that thin, silver line — with the pad of your thumb. "So tell me about the rest."

He looked at you for a long moment. Then he reached up and began, without ceremony, to unbutton his shirt.

You were very still.

He did it the way he did everything — without drama, without performance, button by button from the collar down, and when he shrugged it from his shoulders and set it aside you understood, in a way you hadn't before, what eighteen years of that life had written on him.

He was enormous.

You'd known that in the abstract — had known it from the doorframe and the dance floor and the way rooms seemed to reorganise themselves around him — but this was different.

This was the specific, undeniable reality of his shoulders, the breadth of his chest, the muscle of his arms that carried the tattoo sleeve on the left, the ink wrapping from wrist to shoulder in dark, intricate patterns that in this light you still couldn't fully read but wanted to.

And the scars.

There were more than you'd expected.

Each one a different shape and age and story, written into the topography of him in pale and silver lines. A long one along his left ribs. Something older, fainter, across the top of his right shoulder. A circular scar below his collarbone on the left side that your medical knowledge was sufficient to identify and that made your chest constrict briefly and completely before you put that particular knowledge away for now.

He was watching your face as you looked. Careful. Giving you the time of it.

You stepped forward. You placed your hand flat against his sternum — his heart under your palm, steady and real — and you felt him exhale.

"The lip," you said.

"Kandahar. 2004. Caught the stock of a rifle." He said it the same way he'd told you everything tonight — flat, factual, trusting the fact to carry the weight. "Bit through my lip. Wasn't pretty for a while."

You moved your hand from his sternum to his ribs. Found the long scar there, traced it gently with your fingertips.

"That one."

"Knife. 2009. I moved the wrong way and the other man moved the right way." The shadow of something in his face that was not quite humour and not quite not. "Lesson learned."

Your hand moved to his shoulder. The older, fainter scar.

"Before the military," he said, before you asked. His voice changed, just fractionally. Flatter. Doing more work to stay level. "Not a mission."

You understood. You didn't ask further. You pressed your lips to it instead — gently, just that, your mouth against the old pale mark — and you felt the breath go out of him in a way that was different from all the others. Slower. Deeper.

"Sunshine," he said. Very quietly.

"The one below your collarbone," you said.

A pause. "That one's not a story for tonight."

You tilted your head back to look up at him. "Is it a story for eventually?"

His eyes on yours. Something in them that was considering, assessing, "Yeah," he said. "Eventually."

"Alright," you said. You meant it. You had waited thirty years; you could wait for the story of one scar.

His hand moved to your face. That same gesture from the hallway — his thumb at your cheek, slow and deliberate and he tilted your chin up and kissed you. Not urgently this time. Slowly. Deeply.

His hands found the zip at the side of your dress — careful, unhurried — and he looked at you, a clear question in it, and you nodded, and his hands were very steady and very gentle. Your dress went the way of your heels and your bag, somewhere behind you, unmissed.

He looked at you the way he had looked at you on the porch yesterday, and outside The Grill tonight, and across the restaurant table, and on the dance floor — with that complete, comprehensive attention.

Only now there was nothing restrained about what was in it. It was simply there, open and certain, and it was thirty years of something finally being allowed to be exactly what it was.

"Hi," you said. Which was absurd. Which made him laugh again, low and real.

"Hi, sunshine," he said. His hands at your waist. His forehead dropping to yours.

“Si I need to-“ you breathed in deep, “I um,” he pulled his head away from yours, looking into your eyes with those brilliant brown ones of his.

“What is it Sunshine?” He asked, his finger under your chin tilting your head up.

“I’m, I’ve never-“ you sigh, “I’ve told you so many things, I can’t believe I can’t even say this to you.”

“Do we need to slow down?” He asked, his voice softening.

“No. It’s not that. I mean I’m not a virgin if that’s what you’re thinking I just, no guy has ever-“ you sigh again, your eyes dropping from his.

Simon is quiet. He waits, the way he always waits — giving you the whole space of it, not rushing you toward the end of the sentence.

“Made it good,” you finally say, to his chest. “For me. It’s always just, fine. Maybe sometimes I get close but then it’s over. Not that there’s been loads of guys, maybe three.”

A beat.

You make yourself look up at him.

Something changes in his face.

You see the flare of it.

Anger.

Not toward you — you feel that immediately, the anger isn't at you, it moves through him and settles somewhere else entirely. His jaw shifts. His eyes, for just a moment, go somewhere dark and quiet.

"Every one of them," he says. Low. More to himself than to you.

"Simon—"

"Had you," he says. "And didn't—" He stops. The jaw again. His eyes squeeze shut. "Didn't pay attention."

"It's not—"

"It is." His eyes open. He looks at you, his hands moving to your hips, both of them, settling there with a weight that feels like anchoring, like he needs the contact as much as you do. The darkness has settled now, controlled, underneath everything else.

"And I wasn't here." Something moves through his expression — not guilt exactly, but something adjacent to it, something private and old. "Should've been your first, sunshine. Should've been there to—"

He stops himself. His forehead drops to yours.

"I've waited years for this," he says quietly. "I'm not rushing it. And I'm going to pay attention."

“Pay attention?” You ask breathless.

“To every sigh,” he kissed your cheek, “whimper and moan.” His lips moved down to your jaw. “To the way your hips move, the way your back arches, the way you’ll writhe under me, how I’ve imaged it every time I’ve gotten off for the last two decades.” He whispered the last bit into your ear, teeth tugging on your earlobe.

You gasp, “Simon.” Your cheeks burn.

“Oh don’t tell me you never thought about it.” He grins pulling back to look down at you.

You look at the floor sheepishly cause of course you have. Of course you’ve cum the hardest you ever have in your life only when thinking about Simon fucking you.

"Oh you have." He smirked titling his head.

“Shut up.” You push his shoulder and he laughs.

His hands leave your hips and then you're moving, his arms around you, and the edge of the bed meets the back of your knees.

Then his massive paws are in your hair and his lips are on your neck as your back meets the sheets. His weight heavy and solid on you. You could tell he was holding himself up so he didn’t squish you.

He leaned back on his heels, kneeling between your legs. You sighed in satisfaction when his fingers ran over your bare skin. His blunt nails scratching softly where your pelvic bone sits.

"So beautiful Sunshine," He grabs your hips and squeezes, "Fill my hands with you finally." Simon groans. A noise you've been picturing in your head. This and everything else that happens this evening, you truly believe, will be one of those times when reality is better than anything you have imagined.

Simon's brown eyes have always been intense, but right now the way he's looking down at you it's like he is someone else entirely. His eyes almost black with how much they have darkened.

"Simon." You tangle your fingers with his.

"Can I?" He asks. His hand, the one not in yours, trailing down your thigh and stopping on your mound. You clench around nothing when he pushes down, just a little bit of pressure that you feel in your clit and makes your hips buck.

You don't miss the way his lips do the almost smile thing. You nod furiously but he shakes his head.

"Need your words love." He raises a brow.

"Yes, yes Simon touch me." You breathe out, your chest feeling tight when he nods, moving his hand down to cup your cunt over your underwear.

And maybe its because you haven't had sex in three years, maybe its because you are touch starved or maybe its simply because its Simon, but your back arches and your moan is down right pornographic with a simple touch over your underwear.

"So responsive." He mumbles, his thumb rubbing circles over your clit through the fabric. "Get your tits out for me Sunshine, wanna see em." he grunts feeling your underwear getting wet.

Shakily you reach behind your back and unclip your bra. "Been thinking about them for years. What they look like, how they'll bounce when I fuck you." He groans as you pull the straps down your arms and fling the bra on the floor.

His eyes are on your chest, he doesn't blink. Then as if his system has rebooted, he blows air out of his cheeks and whistles low. "Fuck lovie, so pretty. You're a dream." Simon leans forward and wraps his lips around your breast, his tongue swirling around the nipple as his thumb continues circling your clit.

You moan, fingers tugging at his hair.

He comes off your breast with a pop making you whine and push at his shoulder. He grins pressing his thumb firmer against you, while sliding his other hand over your leg, index finger tracing over the small scar on you leg from when you fell off your bike after Simon broke your training wheels.

There was something comforting about this. Simon wasn't someone you had to explain yourself to, he already knew every version of you, he was simply adding this one to his list. This version, open and honest and begging the man you'd known for thirty years to make you cum on his fingers.

This didn't feel like a hook up, not like other guys have, but it felt like two people who have been each other's home for years and they're finally admitting it.

"Kiss me Simon." You're not even sure if what you said made sense with how much you were panting. But he leaned down to graze his lips along yours. Teasing and soft, despite the fast past he'd started to set with his thumb.

"Stop teasing." You huffed.

"Its my favourite pastime." He grinned hooking his fingers in your underwear, pulling them down and moving with them to settle between your legs.

You gasp, when his tongue slides from your asshole to your clit. "Simon!" His dark eyes are locked on yours as he swirls the tip of his his tongue around your entrance. Your toes curl, your head falling back onto the soft bed sheets.

A few occasions, you could count on one hand, had a guy you were with eaten you out and it was good but fuck, it didn't feel like this.

You felt like you were burning all over with each swipe of his tongue, each dip inside your entrance, each pattern he begins to circle over your clit.

He was learning you.

Simon groans against you, his breath hot, it made you dizzy. You feel everything, its too much to quick and your hips start to buck against his mouth.

Simon clearly had no intention of slowing down or stopping as he slides his arms around your thighs and splays his hands over the tops of them locking you in place.

It feels like fire, like molten lava pooling low in your abdomen the harder his tongue presses against you.

You don’t even recognise the sounds coming out of you, it’s as if every movement pulls a new one from you. 

His thumb replaces his tongue and he rubs the bump in small circles until you can barely breathe. “Sound so pretty,” he murmurs just as your back arches and you moan loudly into the night air. 

He is still speaking but you can’t hear anything he is saying, it’s all blurring together the way your vision is blurring. His thumb slides from your clit down until it’s pushing its way inside you. Your hips jerk away but his other hand is quick to hold you in place.

“No running.” Simon growls.

You cry out when his tongue comes back to torture you, lapping at you like he’s never had a drink and you're fresh water. Soon enough the rhythm he’s built has your hips rolling forward seeking more of whatever he has to give you.

Your hand reaches for his arm and squeezes hard the exact moment your vision turns white and your body shakes, dissolving into pleasure. It's like lightning pulsing through you. He works your through your orgasm, wringing every last wave of pleasure from you before he moves to your lips, kissing you.

“Did so good Sunshine. I’ve got you.” His arms wrap around you, your nipples grazing against the hair on his chest, that alone has you whimpering. 

"Need more, want you inside me Simon. Please." You look into his eyes, your shyness gone with your orgasm.

"Okay Sunshine." Simon chuckles, the sound vibrating against you.

He pulls back and gets off the bed before he starts to unbuckle his belt. He pushes his black slacks down along with his underwear, his large, and he was so fucking big, cock already hard.

"Always wondered what you'd be like in bed," He tilts his head with a smirk, "If you'd like being in control. Or if you'd prefer me to lead," He knelt on the bed again, and oh my god Simon Riley, your best friend of thirty years and the love of your life was crawling up the bed towards you until his cock was flush with your entrance. "If you'd be needy and beg. Or if you'd bark orders at me." He slapped the head of his cock against your clit. "If you'd be loud or quiet."

"If you'd let me do whatever I wanted to you," his head titled back, eyes shut, "Fuck Sunshine, the things I've imagined doing to you," He looks down at you with the most intense gaze, pining you there on the bed, "Would you let me lovie? Do whatever I want to you?" He asks, pearly whites peaking out to sink into his bottom lip.

"Like what?" Your breath is so unsteady, so hitched and uneven you feel your cheeks heat even more than they have done at his words.

He grins, "Like what?" He chuckles pushing the head of his cock against your entrance, not in, but resting against it, "Wanna fuck you so hard you can't walk. Make love to you slow and so deep you'll feel me everywhere. Bend you over every surface in this house and make you cry on my cock-"

"Simon!" You gasp.

"Can I Sunshine?" He groans pushing in a little more and your eyes sting with tears at the stretch.

"Yes! Please yes!" He pushes in slowly. One of his hands coming next to you on the bed and the other gripping your hip. He keeps sliding in further, so slowly until its sheathed inside you.

Simon does not move. You can see the restraint within the way his teeth are gritted, his brows furrowed, sweat forming on his forehead. 

“Fuck you feel amazing wrapped around me, so tight.” He groans. 

You don’t have any words and even if you did, you doubt you would be able to say them. You have never felt so…full. So filled to the brim and unable to get a reprieve from it.

“M’gonna move, gotta move Sunshine,” Simon growls and the fullness disappears for a second before he’s pushing himself back in. 

“Fuck you feel so good Si.” You shudder and stars appear in your vision when he moves forward and takes your legs with him folding you in half.

Simon Riley has you in fucking mating press and didn't even break the slow rhythm he's building. He continues this push and pull movement until it begins to flow, each movement begins where the other ends. The pattern making you sob, “Don’t stop!”

You can't function and its only now that you understand the phrase 'being fucked dumb', rocking your hips, trying desperately to keep up with each thrust, back arched so beautifully.

Simon lets his hand slip and curve around your jaw without thinking about it, "Taking me so well Sunshine." The feral look in his eyes sends a shiver up your spine.

"Too big." You sobbed, your hands grabbing at his large biceps as he thrusts harder. He could feel every ridge and curve of your sopping cunt.

"You can take it." He encouraged you, biting at your neck leaving marks in his wake and looking so damn happy whilst doing it.

You continued to moan and whimper, tears of pleasure falling down your face while Simon's huge body hovered over you. Protecting you from the outside world, in here, it was just you and him.

"Si..oh!" you cried out feeling him hit that rough spot inside your weeping, swollen cunt.

"There it is." He didn't mean to grin like a obsessed man in such an intimate moment but he couldn't help himself. He never can with you. Each thrust hits the one place no man ever seems to be able to find but Simon seemingly found with ease. A spot that makes a tightening begin like a coil, being wound with every drive of his hips.

Your sinful noises morph into higher pitched breathy little screams.

"I know lovie, I know." He cooed, holding you closer. His sweat glazed skin meeting yours as his large veiny hand slips under your head, his other arm curling around your waist.

You move your hips and he groans vulgar into the air, his hand gripping your hair and pulling your head back, a little to the side before he attacks your neck all messy. Smearing his lips across your throat, you don’t even recognise the sound that leaves your mouth.

He pulls away, his dark eyes flit to your squelching pussy, the noise attracting his attention pupils dilating, honing in on the way your cunt sucks his cock back in. He couldn’t pull away even if he wanted to and fuck he doesn’t, he wants nothing more than to stay in your pretty pussy forever.

“Simonfuckyespleaserighttheredontstop!” All the words and moans blend together until your mumbling nonsense trying your hardest to keep conscious, it’s difficult with the way he’s fucking into you so deliciously it’s making you delirious in the best way.

His big body towering over yours, big hands gripping you almost bruisingly. His thick muscular hairy thighs press against your skin compellingly, the sight before you, it's irresistible. All you have to do is look down to see his massive cock sliding in and out of you, a ring of white collecting at the base.

It's too much seeing him like this, feeling the sweet pleasure burn through you and yet Simon moves one of his hands off your head and presses a thumb to your swollen, aching clit.

You're done for.

You sob, so fucking loud you swear everyone in the world can hear it, hot tears flow down your cheeks staining them.

"That's it." The words wash over you with your orgasm, it swirls around you, clings to you, and pushes you down down down the rabbit hole of pleasure. Oversensitivity sets in making you whine at his touch, but you can't stop yourself from wanting more.

Your hips buck into his touch eliciting a dirty chuckle from him.

As Simon picks up his thrusts, he comes to the conclusion that he loves you like this, wants to see it everyday. You're so drunk, so delirious and he loves it. Loves the far away look in your eyes right before they roll back into your skull.

He shoves his face into your neck groaning, "Gonna cum Sunshine, need to. Where?" his thrusts pick up again, as if that were even possible.

"Cum inside me Simon, fill me up." You cry out.

Simon must have been right there as he cums the second you finish your sentence. Hot thick robes of cum pushing deep inside you. He rubs your clit faster and another smaller orgasm zips through you leaving you whimpering.

He stays in you, holding you until he goes soft. He moves your legs so they don't cramp. "Did so well for me Sunshine. I love you so much." He looks into your eyes as more tears spill down your cheeks.

"I love you Simon." you bring your fingers into his hair, pulling him closer to kiss you. The contrast between the way he just destroyed your guts and is now kissing you so softly, is astounding.

He is careful when he picks you up and walks into the ensuite bathroom to the right, flicking the light on and placing you on the toilet. "Gotta pee sunshine, don't want you getting you a uti." He says and you're so tired you don't even have the energy to be embarrassed.

Your eyes as still closed as you pee. Your hand moves to find the toilet paper but a warm flannel is being pressed against you, Simon's other hand on your knee to keep them open. You whine and push his hand away, "Simon that's icky." You frown at him opening your eyes to see him looking at you with a frown of his own.

"Nothing about you is icky Sunshine. I'm clearing up my mess, now move your hand." You do as told and it occurs to you, through your tired haze, while Simon gently wipes you clean that he must be used to clearing up mess with the job he does.

"All done. Want a shower or straight to sleep?" He asks.

"Sleep." You yawn making him smile at you.

He carries you back to the bed, lifting the duvet and settling you both underneath it.

The particular quality of afterwards settles in the room.

The warmth of it, the specific silence, the way the world outside the window continues to exist and you become aware of it again in layers. The sound of the garden. The distant sound of a car somewhere. The sound of him breathing.

You were lying with your head on his chest. His arm around you, heavy and warm. His heartbeat under your ear, steady and unhurried, the same heart that had been beating beside you in one form or another for thirty years.

His hand moved. Slowly, idly, up and down your back.

You watched the lamplight glow on the beside table. You thought about the lavender. You thought about the train station in 2001, and the birthday cards, and the bottom stair with the cream envelope, and Margaret Howarth saying you always did belong together with the satisfied certainty of someone who had known it before either of you did.

"Simon," you said.

"Yeah."

"You planted lavender for three years."

"You mentioned that already."

"I'm still processing it."

A low sound in his chest that was the rumble of a laugh contained. "Take your time Sunshine."

You propped yourself up and looked at him. His face in the lamplight — older, marked, those brown eyes that had been watching you since you were four years old, now watching you from a pillow in the house he'd bought you.

His expression was open in the way it had been open on the porch and at the restaurant table and in the dance hall, the way it had been open perhaps three times in thirty years before tonight and was now, apparently, simply his face when he looked at you.

You loved him so much.

You had loved him in different quantities and different registers for most of your life and now you loved him in this one too, this new one, and it was the same love and completely different and you thought you would be discovering its dimensions for a considerable amount of time.

"You should have told me," you said. "Years ago. Before the train."

"Yeah," he said. No argument.

"I would have said it back then too."

Something moved in his face. "I know," he said. And then, quieter, "I wasn't ready then. Wasn't enough yet."

"Simon—"

"I know what you're going to say."

"You were always—"

"I know," he said. "I believe you. Now." His hand came up to your face, tucking a strand of hair back, his thumb at your cheekbone. "Took me a while to get there. But I'm here."

"You're here," you agreed smiling.

"And you're here." his hand tangled itself in your hair.

"I'm here." you giggled.

He looked at you for a long moment. Then, "Stay with me."

Not a question, not quite — more like a hope said aloud. The rarest thing from him. He had carried so much silently for so long, and this one small thing cost him something, and you could see it, and you loved him for it.

"It's my house," you said cheeky and bright.

He blinked. Then that laugh again — the real one, the rare one — and your heart did what it always did when you earned it, that particular, irreplaceable lurch.

"Yeah Sunshine," he said. "It is."

You lay back down against his chest. His arm came around you. His heartbeat under your ear.

Outside, the lavender moved. The Union flag was still on the roof. The porch swing sat in the dark with its yellow cushion, waiting for morning.

"Sunshine," he said. Into your hair.

"Hmm."

"I love you."

You pressed your lips to his chest, above his heart.

"I love you too," you said. "I've loved you since you were that chubby four-year-old who stole my crayons."

A long pause.

"Chubby," he repeated.

"Stocky," you amended, grinning into his chest. "You were very stocky."

"I was four."

"You were a very solid four year old."

His arm tightened around you — not painfully, just firmly, the way of a man making a point through the medium of holding — and you laughed again, helplessly, into the warmth of him.

He made that sound, that low rumbling laugh that lived in his chest, and the lamp burned warm and low and outside the lavender moved in the dark.

Simon Riley.

Who stole your crayons at four and broke your glasses at seven and learned to read because of you and carried your bag through every corridor of secondary school and punched a boy for pushing you over and kissed your cheek in a toilet corridor and sat beside you through every lunch and glared at anyone who called you a nerd and came round to your kitchen table for years and went to war at seventeen and sent you cards from the edges of the world and planted lavender for three years and bought you the house you described at sixteen and came home.

He came home to you.

Your best friend. Your home. Your Simon.

Taglist | @sdieflwr @pipsysstuff @laswells-cia-assistant @luneiiz @myblogystuff @kitty-kat-crevan @drugs-and-daddyissues @magicwriterinspo @twizkat @sea-4salt

[adejayy]

FLIPPING HECK, this is sO GOOD… This is SO GooD FLIPPppinG heckkk.

GREAT- No..- SENSATIONAL WORK @elysianightsss Furk, I LOVE ITTT 😩 Standing ovationnnn 🫶🏼👏🏽💐

And to think somebody has genuinely experienced this… and this is the closest I can get to the experience is just.. anyway

*insert the roller coaster of emotions as I read onwards depicted below*

[gooseifer07]

started as a pose study, but honestly? really digging how it's coming out

Stay up to date and follow me on insta / bsky / x !

[sweeterlilith]

Sometimes, when you’re restless and can’t sleep, he’d fuck you. But when he’s too tired or lazy, he’d sneak his hand down your panties and strum you to sleep.

Tonight isn’t any different.

He’s spooning you from behind, your head resting on his bicep instead of the pillow. He has one arm draped over your waist, your legs intertwined. You hear his soft snores behind you, his breath fanning over your hair.

But you couldn’t get yourself to fall asleep for some reason. It has been over an hour of restless tossing and turning until he pulled you close. So, you whisper his name in the dark.

“Hm?” He asks sleepily, voice deeper than usual.

“Can’t sleep”

“Yeah? Why’s that?”

“Don’t know… can’t seem to fall asleep”

He leans in from behind, kissing your neck softly, then your shoulder. He pulls you closer, his chest firm against your back. He uses his free hand to run it up your body, cupping your tits over the old shirt you wear to sleep. His hands are big, rough, and feel divine on your body. When you melt against him, he takes it as an invitation to go on.

His hand travels back down, along the waistline of your sleep shorts. You wiggle your ass back a bit, pressing against him deliciously. You hear a huff of a laugh from behind you, and he bites your neck.

“So that’s what you needed huh? Sleep aid?”

You can’t help but giggle and nod, “please?”

He takes your leg, throwing it over his own behind you, to open you up for him. He slips his hand down your shorts and the roughness of his skin makes your skin tingle. He presses his fingers over your panties, feeling the wet spot there. “Look at ya… so wet already…”

He rubs your clit in tight circles over your panties, making your arch back against him. He finally slips his hand under your panties, making you let out a whiny sigh of relief. He groans as he feels your wetness soak his fingers, his thumb working your clit as his middle and ring finger rub against your entrance.

He finally pushes in, filling you in a way that you never could do on your own. He pumps them in and out slowly at first, stretching you out. He scissors them open, making your mouth fall slack.

“Oh god… yes…”

He curls them against that spongy area, your body something he has memorized by now. Your nails dig into his forearm, your toes curling at the sensation that courses through your body. His thumb resumes the circles on your clit and you whine softly. “You like that? Be a good girl and come.”

He doubles his efforts, his other arm wrapping around your waist to keep you in place. Your body burns, skin crawling as you get closer to the edge. You start grinding down on his hand as he fingers you, kissing your shoulder and neck. He nibbles on your earlobe, leaning in to whisper “that’s right, baby… let go for me”

And you do, a filthy sound leaving your parted lips as you fall apart. He feels your wetness drip down his hand to his wrist. He only pulls his fingers out when you start to mewl and close your legs. He takes his fingers to his mouth, sucking them clean with a satisfied hum. Then he grabs you by the jaw from behind, tilting your head back enough for him to kiss you. You taste yourself on his tongue, your eyes fluttering shut.

He pulls away, letting your face go. “Goodnight, doll” he whispers, getting comfortable again, ready to go back to sleep. You can only mumble in reply, already drowsy. “Night”

[adejayy]

Um hellO!? bring me thereee, bring me thereee

[peachesofteal]

for all of us who can't bear to read anything but CoD fanfiction (due to the 141's fat tits) do you have any all-time favs?

Such an awful, sick affliction. I made one of these lists a while back but couldn't find it so you’re in luck because I have plenty of favorites and I’m happy to share them (in no particular order. I KNOW I'm forgetting at least ten fics I've read and loved but I have a goldfish brain today, forgive me):

And please, read the tags/warnings. Your consumption is your own responsibility.

Neon Medusa Too sweet not to share Ghost and Red Fox Alford plea The Willow Maid Exfiltration The Arrangement Civilian Asset See no evil Squeeze me I squeak MildLimerence Mine & Yours Saltwater Metanoia to you I can admit (that I'm too soft for all of it) white flag blood on my shirt, rose in my hand totally platonic Surviving you Dog all that's said in the lowlight birdsongs or advice and symphonies for your children Happiness songs that sound like sea foam down to the marrow roommate gaz Chink in the Armour Man-sized Hummingbird don't leave me locked in your heart Listening In Situationship-verse The Scottish Cabin in the Woods

Spoils of War Where Your Feet Pass Neighborly and/or not The Rear Window jigsaws pictures in frames, kisses on cheeks sirius c Spoils Cabin Fever / part one lotus flower the lies we tell Who Dares Win babytrap anthology The Hard Way Of Sea Foam and Iron bury me beneath the basswood tree Wicked Harvest Tiger balm baby blue Keeper/Kept Something Sweet Stay Away appetite

[adejayy]

So I can come back to it 📍

[rosaries-and-thorns]

Running with the Wolves

(Commission for the lovely @bellerva)

(Poly Werewolf 141 x Witch! Reader, Werewolf shifting, Sex dreams, Brief Smut, Female Reader, Fluff, Domesticity, Magic)

---

It’s Autumn when you first hear the whispers of the wolves.

“Strange beasts.” Whisper your neighbors at the market, bending low in hushed tones to whisper to you at your stall, where colored glass hangs from the beams above and waxed bottles lay piled on shelves. “They said they saw them by the old forest.”

You pay no mind to it, at least at first. In a town as small as yours, there’s always a tall tale of some kind- a whisper of a ghost or strange sound among the trees. They’re only fables, things meant to scare children into bed and keep them mindful of their parents. At worst they’re spoken of by the priests, a warning against those who don’t turn to the faith of their gods. Yet you- you know. You know that some stories are far more true than they seem.

It was years ago that you stumbled into the village, reeking of ash and smoke, hungry from days on end of running through the woods. In lands far past the village your own coven lay as nothing more than cinders and ruined homes, your sisters and mentors dead by crusaders’ blades. Only you had been able to escape, young and small as you were, able to run away undetected as your sisters burned. The memory of their screams remains forever engraved in your mind, echoed through the trees as leaves crunched under your bare feet and you left behind all that you were.

You became the lost girl from the woods, the strange child who didn’t speak of her past, and instead silently buried her magic in a coffin beneath layers of ember and ash. In time you’d become to your neighbors the girl with the healing hands, the one who offered ointments and herbs to cure the ails that plagued them. All the while you kept your magic dormant inside you, a tender flame awaiting a breath of life.

So you listen pleasantly to the murmurs of the beasts, assuring the villagefolk you call neighbors that it must have been some wandering creature that ventured down from the mountains in search of prey before the frost sets in. 

Yet then there’s the mention of livestock going missing. A sheep here, a hen there, of horses being spooked and wild eyed at dawn as if something frightened them. You try to brush it off as mere coincidence. Wild animals are hungry at this time of year, stuffing their bellies full before settling in for the long sleep. There haven’t been wolves in this village since before you were born- hunted to extinction for the safety of everyone inside the stone walls that surround it.

“You should stay inside the village, lass.” Says a regular customer of yours who visits you for a salve to keep her aging, aching joints at bay. “It’s safer inside the walls.”

You assure her that your small cottage down by the lake is perfectly safe. With its large, iron crossed door and the secret hexes you’ve engraved into the frame, it would take a truly massive monster to knock down your sanctuary and cause you to flee. It’s more than that, however. It’s the fact that you can’t possibly imagine yourself around so many people. It’s not safe to be in a place so crowded, in a place with so many eyes. If someone were to find out who you are...what you are....

Instead you hang herbs from the rafters in your cottage, you boil tinctures over the hearth as birchwood spills from the chimney, and you sometimes watch the edge of the woods wondering if perhaps the creatures there feel as lonely as you do.

Things change after the Harvest Moon.

“The size of a horse!” A man in the market outside the church gasps, pale as a sheet and his clothes askew. “Its withers stood above my head! Dark as the night and its face-!” The man shudders as his fellows try to comfort him, draping a cloak about his shoulders. “It looked like the reaper himself, shaped like a skull!” He paces back and forth, and it's only once he turns that you stifle a gasp at the blood splattered across his shirt and down his sleeves. It isn’t his, you realize grimly, and he lifts his head to shout at those gathered around him.

“It took Thomas! H-he tried to shoot it a-and-”

The crowd gasps, and you hover at the edge, something unknown and dreadful simmering low in your stomach. The man seems to have nearly collapsed from fright, eyes wild and darting as if the beast pursues him still. His mouth works in silent words, and it takes you a moment to realize what he’s saying.

Four of them, four of them, four of them.

Eventually the magistrate comes to escort the boy away and restore order to the frightened crowd. He tells you all that the wolves are not nearly as fearsome as the boy proclaimed, and that he and the village hunters will patrol beyond the gate to make sure the village is safe. Even so, it does little to tame the restlessness of your neighbors, who gather and whisper in the quietest of tones, murmuring the words they’re all thinking:

Werewolf.

As the sun lowers behind the trees, you hasten along the lonely forest path home and watch the long shadows grow dim in the waning light. A cold October wind sweeps under your cloak, lifts your hair to the breeze where your breath spills forth in a sigh of steam. In the growing darkness the forest seems quieter, more foreboding as the aspen and pine creak against the wind. An awareness prickles at the edges of your senses, a warning whisper that curls around you in the sudden silence.

You’re being watched.

Heart in your throat, you turn ever so slowly, hands shaking as you finally see it between the trees:

A shadow.

You don’t realize just how massive it is until it stands from where it’s crouched on the forest floor. With horror clawing its way up your throat you watch it rise, rise higher until its shoulders are halfway up the twisted trunks on either side of it. Its paws are easily the size of your head, its withers rise up to your eye level, as large as any bear you’ve seen and Gods-

The strength in your legs leaves you, and as the beast takes a single step forward they fail completely, sending you down into the leaves beneath your feet. A whimper threatens your throat as you urge your frozen limbs to move, to regain themselves and carry you down the path to the assumed safety of your cottage.

Beyond the thunder of your heart beat your mind screams higher than the whistle of the wind: RUN! RUN!

Yet as the beast creeps closer you can’t bring yourself to stand, fearing you’ll die of fright before the killing bite snaps your neck. Even the magic at your fingertips with your vague memory of spells and incantations feels like mist slipping through your hands. With each step the wolf, the monster, takes another step- deathly quiet even as it feels like the ground trembles beneath you. Unblinking, it stares at you, perfectly crouched, ready to strike. You can feel tears threatening at the corner of your eyes, your breath coming only in tight, watery little gasps.

“I-” You try, tongue liked lead as you try to speak, a mere whimper escaping instead: “Please-”

At last the beast comes to stand a mere few feet away from you- ebony black eyes at the level of your own with its head bowed. Its gaze seems fathomless, as if you’ll drown in the sheer darkness of it- never to return. Just like the hunter said, its massive snout and head is jet black except for a white patch that travels the length of its massive jaw. Horrifyingly, it almost looks like a skull.

Not like this. You whisper to the heavens, to your ancient deities, to the earth itself. Please, not like this.

Yet then the monster’s eyes break from yours, and it takes another step, massive nose lowering to the basket with your market gatherings of bread, cheese, and fruit. In a fit of utter mystery you watch as the creature’s tail lifts just marginally, almost like a dog, slowly sweeping back and forth as it snuffles through the goods.

Like the spell has been broken, the paralytic fear inside you evaporates like a puff of smoke. Magic attempts to wind itself through your veins and you raise your hand towards the beast, scooting backwards as a stuttered spell travels the length of your tongue.

Yet then your foot crunches a twig and the beast’s gaze snaps to your horrified features, once more locking its startling, glimmering black stare on your form. The spell freezes on your tongue, words stammering uselessly as your palm glimmers faintly with magic, flashing dimly as you try and fail to defend yourself.

For a heartbeat you think at last the wolf will finally leap, will abandon your meager offerings and seize you between its teeth in a swift death grip. Your bones will crunch between its fangs, your scream cut short as it echoes forth between the trees.

Instead, the creature keeps its gaze locked on you before lowering its mouth to gently, delicately, grip the handle of your basket. Before you can question it the beast leaps toward you, clearing your head in a single bound as you scream and clutch at yourself in terror. By the time you realize you’re still alive, by the time you turn to chase the sound of thundering steps behind you-

The wolf is gone.

It feels as if it takes you hours to stand, and even then your legs shake and tremble like a sapling in a gale. It’s all you can do to stagger down the dark forest path to the door of your cottage, latching the heavy bar behind you to keep out any other beast that may find you here. You sink to the floor, shivering and wrapping your arms around yourself as the memory of the wolf races behind your eyes with his bottomless stare.

You shutter all the windows, latch every entrance and exit as your heart races up into your throat like a rabbit running from a fox. You turn on every light you can find and curl into your straw tick bed, tugging the blankets over your head and trying vainly to fall asleep.

and yet you wonder, even as midnight draws dark upon your cottage...

Why the wolf spared you.

Against everything, you wake to morning light streaming through the gaps in the shutters and falling golden upon your sprawled frame. Birdsong echoes as a chorus in the canopy, a gentle autumn wind rustling the branches outside. For a moment you forget about the events of the night prior, caught in a strange daydream where your fingers run through a dark, soft mane and someone whispers an echo of your name.

You’re frightened to leave the sanctuary of your cottage even in daylight, peeking beyond your curtains towards the small lake and stream that runs beside the path to town in case a shadow dances among the trees. Yet there’s nothing but a bevy of deer that gently lap at the water of your little lake.

You should report the incident to the village guards, you think as you dress yourself and eat. Perhaps by doing so you can aid the hunters in their pursuit of the beasts, keeping you and the rest of the village safe from further encounters.

Yet something sits ill at ease inside your stomach at the thought- a sense of wrongness at the idea of reporting your strange encounter. Perhaps it's because of the fact you’re seen as an odd sort of outsider to the rest of the village- one of the few that live beyond the walls and their safety. A part of you wonders if somehow the village-folk will view your encounter with suspicion. After all, why were you spared when one of the young hunters was not?

More than that- what reason do you have to share what has happened when you were left unharmed?

When at last you step out into the crisp autumn air, water pail in hand, you scream.

There’s a wolf flat to the ground, head resting on the grass and paws crossed as if he has deigned it a perfect place to take a gentle rest. It’s different from the one you saw the night prior- a scruffy sort of brown compared to the raven black of the wolf from before. He’s smaller too- still so much larger than the size of any wolf you’ve ever heard of, but not as massive as a draft horse. There’s an odd ruff of fur that travels the length of its spine, almost like a mane. At your scream the beast’s ears twitch, his great head lifting to observe you with startling blue eyes- only to lower once again. It makes no motion towards you, not moving at all even as you try and fumble for the door handle behind you.

“Stay back!” You gasp over the hammer of your heartbeat. “L-leave me alone!”

Yet rather than pounce, the creature’s ears tilt back and it whines- almost as if it understands you. Almost as if it’s a pup that’s been scolded for stealing a piece of meat from the table. It startles you, makes you blink in utter confusion as your mind desperately tries to process what exactly you are seeing.

“You-” You try, voice dry in your throat as the wolf's massive tongue rolls out and it pants, staring at you. “You’re...not going to eat me, are you?”

The beast snorts as if you’ve offended it, and then turns towards its shoulder before depositing something in front of it.

Your basket.

You stare at it for a long, long moment, thoughts churning uselessly before you look back to the wolf.

“You...can understand me, can’t you?”

At this the wolf yips, tail wagging and eyes glimmering.

“Then...” You try again hesitantly. “Can you...change? Back I mean, into a person?”

The wolf whines, low and whimpering, lowering its great head back down and its ears once again flattened to its head, brow drawn up in an almost human-like concern.

This makes no sense. You’ve always been taught werewolves can turn back at will into their human form outside of a full moon. It’s what makes them so dangerous- their ability to walk among humans and pass as one of them. So then why...?

Suddenly the wolf’s ears flick, and it looks off towards the narrow path that leads through the trees down into the village. All at once the fur on its back rises, lips drawing back in a snarl. You don’t see anything when you follow its gaze, staring through the trees until at last the distant sound of voices begins to float through the branches. You look at the wolf, but he’s already turned, glancing back at you over his shoulder. There’s a strange sort of loneliness to its stare, and he pauses for just a moment before three giant strides take it off into the trees. After a moment, you hear a single, bone-chilling howl rise from beyond the treetops.

One that is echoed by three others.

You huddle in the warmth of your cottage for the rest of the day, sheltered by brick walls and the flickering hearth. From the gaps in the shutters you watch as the sun rises high in the sky and the lake remains eerily still- absent of the usual creatures that wander its bank. All the while your heart flutters in the gap between your ribs and throat, a small bird caught in a cage as it desperately beats its wings with fear.

So you choose to pore over your grimoires, searching in ancient texts for anything that might provide an ounce of knowledge into these creatures. Your mind churns with what you know, and the absence of what you don’t. You don’t understand- nor could you. Despite the interactions you had with both wolves, it’s not as if either can speak. They should be able to transform back at will, the books say. Yet for whatever reason it seems as if they’re trapped within their beast-like forms, unable to walk on anything than four legs. It should scare you. It should frighten you half to death and it does- the idea that such monsters could easily snap your neck and swallow you whole. Yet neither beast had shown any inkling to do so, happy instead to observe what they could of you and then bound off into the woods.

The sun sets, and you hang herbs to dry among your rafters as the pot boils on the stove. Questions remain, haunting every breath, every footstep in the silence left behind by man and beast alike. You can’t help but wonder if...

You clasp a hand over your mouth to silence a scream at the scratching at your door, followed by a low, whimpering whine.

Every instinct beckons you further into the cottage- up into your loft where your quilt covers your head and you shiver against the growing darkness. Yet the thing at your door whines, scratching insistently and even barking so as to demand your rapt attention.

When you creak the door open you almost don’t see anything in the darkness, where the moon is veiled behind dark, inky clouds that roll across the sky. Even then you jump at the wet nose that peeks through the gap, snuffling and pressing up against your hand insistently.

You can hardly see him in the pitch darkness beyond your door- coat ebony dark just like his glinting eyes. Yet there’s a gentleness to them, a human-like emotion contained within that you can’t entirely discern.

“I-I don’t have any more bread.” You try, unsure of the beast’s wants. “I’m sorry.”

The wolf barks, demanding and insistent, and you try to take a step back inside your cottage to close the door- to no avail. “What do you want?” You try with increasing desperation, and the beast snorts, withdrawing entirely from your door just so it can jut one massive paw into the gap. It takes you a moment to notice, but when the wolf withdraws its paw you see it- the dark, crimson stain left against the floor.

“Are you hurt?” You ask instantly, drawing the door a little wider, and much to your shock the wolf leans against it, flinging the heavy wood open and stepping fully into your home.

He can barely fit through the door, having to lean his massive head down just to pass beyond the threshold. As he sniffs and circles you his tail sweeps herbs and cutlery off your kitchen table, scattering them and sending them crashing to the floor. Yet he pays no mind, shoving his massive snout under your hand with an insistent whine.

You’re kept upright only by his massive form circling you, each footfall creaking the floorboards so much you think perhaps they’ll snap in two. You try to look for where the beast is injured, but in his dark fur you can’t see any trace of blood, find any wet slickness with your hands.

“W-wait-” You try. “What are you-”

Before you can finish the thought the beast suddenly leaps away from you, out past the door into your garden, where he stands and looks back and forth between you and the forest. Waiting, watching, or perhaps...wanting.

You hesitate at the doorstep, dressed in nothing but your chemise and feeling the autumn wind blow across the threshold. It lifts the hem of your dress, flutters it in time with your anticipatory heartbeat as you stare at the wolf, and the wolf stares back.

Come. He seems to say. There’s little time to waste.

You shouldn’t.

Even so...

You gather with you what you can- fresh bandages, herbs to stop bleeding and help the pain, your cloak and boots and a lantern to light your way. You blow out the candles to your home and hover on the front step, wondering how on earth you’ll find what the wolf is leading you towards in the dark.

To your amazement the wolf lays flat on the ground, looking at you meaningfully.

You blink, unspoken questions seemingly answered.

The wolf is broad enough that it stretches your legs just to ride atop his shoulders, fingers dug into his thick, warm pelt as you lay flat atop him. With a bark, he races forwards, three great strides taking you off into the forest where branches whip against your face and shoulders. The wind whistles past your ears, and you dig your heels in harder to simply remain atop his rolling withers, face buried into his neck to keep it safe from the brambles and twisting tree limbs that seek to rip you from his back.

He runs without stopping, stamina seemingly endless as he carries you deeper, deeper into the woods, far past where you forage for herbs and mushrooms. Deeper still, to the ancient trees and knotted hills where the townsfolk whisper of strange stories and those that don’t return. The wind chills you to the bone, cloak flying as you too seem to sail through the air, the wolf’s paws hardly touching the ground as he races towards an unknown destination.

The moon reveals itself from behind its gossamer veil, bestowing gentle slants of moonlight through the trees as the wolf begins to slow, nose sniffing the ground before trotting forward into a thick grove of juniper as the leaves crunch under his massive feet. You rise from his back, lifting the branches out of the way as he approaches a crag in the distance, tangled with overgrown ivy where water seeps down from a nearby stream. He pauses at the edge of a clearing, barking once and listening.

A bark answers him in turn, and it sounds familiar just as the wolf from earlier in the morning darts from between the rocks and bounds up to you both, whining and sniffing at your bare legs and licking at your hands. You’re carried into a shallow dip between the boulders, where a jutting rock over your head shields you from the stars above. You can’t see, reaching instead for your lantern and lighting the wick inside.

You freeze when a growl emanates from within the cave, sending a primordial fear washing icy through your limbs. When you lift your lantern it reveals two massive forms huddled in the dark, one of them collapsed on its side and the other with his skull-white head set upon him, teeth drawn back to reveal the gleaming white of his dripping fangs.

The wolf from this morning, the strange ruff-like wolf with the playful blue eyes, shoves his nose up against his snarling friend in what you take as a gesture of reassurance. It seems to settle him, if only marginally, allowing you the space you need to slip from your wolf’s back and creep forward, raising your lantern as you go.

“Oh.” You breathe as you draw towards the fallen wolf. His russet fur is stained dark with blood in places, gashes strewn across his shoulder where a spear juts from muscle. “Oh you poor thing.”

He peers one glassy eye towards you, too weak to lift his head but offering a half-hearted low snarl.

Careful. Help, but be careful.

He makes a pained noise as you lay your hands on him, inspecting the wound. It’s cut deep, almost to the bone, and the notched tip of the spear makes it hard to yank free. It needs to come loose before you can do anything else, lest you agitate it further by tending the wounds around it. Yet the thought of yanking it loose only to have your neck snapped in half makes your shoulders shake and your skin break into goosebumps in the damp darkness of the cave.

“Trust me.” You whisper to the injured wolf- more of a prayer than a plea. He only looks at you, unblinking until at last he closes his eyes again in resignation. Behind you, the youngest of the wolves paces anxiously, whining and keening and stopping to bother his two friends in equal parts concern and reassurance.

Trust me. You plead again skyward, setting your hands on the broken grip of the spear and pulling.

The injured wolf snarls with such ferocity you nearly collapse backwards, but instead pour every ounce of fear and panic into your straining arms, grunting and panting until-

The spear comes loose and you tumble backwards, caught in your own cloak as blood splatters across your chemise and boots. When you look down, the iron tip is as large as your hand, made to kill things much larger than you.

The grunt of the injured wolf draws you back, and instantly you discard the weapon to race forward, pulling your clean rags and pressing it to the oozing wound even as blood drips over your fingers and rivulets down your arms.

“There.” You murmur towards the beast under you. “That’s the hard part done. Just rest now. Rest, and everything will be fine.”

Oddly, the beast lifts its head to you, for the first time focusing on you with a clear gaze. He holds your stare for a long moment, as if searching for something, before at last resting his head again and allowing you to resume your task.

It takes you most of the night to tend to the wounds, mixing an herb paste to stem the bleeding and quietly whispering incantations over the stitches you sew into his side. You don’t fear the wolves finding out about your magic. There’s no one they’d be able to tell anyone anyways, and you think it’s only fair they keep your secret as much as you’ve kept theirs too.

By the time you’ve finished you’re stained elbow deep in red, and you think your chemise is entirely ruined with the amount of blood that’s seeped into it. You’re exhausted, but satisfied with the blood you’ve managed to scrub away from the wolf’s pelt and the stitches that dance up his shoulder. When you at last sit back, he lifts his head and tucks it under your hand in a quiet but sincere gesture of thanks.

The other three wolves, who all have waited patiently while you worked, creep forward to check on their injured friend, licking at his stitches and nuzzling at his head. He seems grumpy at the display of fondness, chuffing quietly and grunting but otherwise tolerating their prodding and nuzzling.

You watch them at a short distance, gathering your supplies and huddling into your cloak. The frigid chill has long since seeped into your bones, and you shiver as you try to retain whatever warmth you have left. You long for your blankets at home, dreaming of laying next to the embers of the fire and sleeping until the sun rises high in the sky.

A nose nudges you, and you peer your eyes open in the dwindling lantern light to the dark-haired wolf nudging you in the direction of his injured friend. You acquiesce, gently hovering by his side until the dark-haired wolf settles on your other side, tucking his huge, warm form next to your cold, shivering one. His tawny brown friend is quick to join, circling several times before he lays across your numb feet and rests his head on your shivering thighs. The white-muzzled wolf tucks in behind him, arranging himself so he watches the mouth of the cave vigilantly, keeping watch as the forest turns soft hues of purple in the early dawn light.

Exhausted, now warm and blissfully comfortable, you twist into the massive forms of the wolves around you and allow sleep to find you between the soft snores of the beasts you once feared.

When you shut your eyes, dreams find you.

There’s voices you don’t recognize, touches of others warm against your skin. They surround you, tender and reverent despite their obscurity. A brush of your hair against your cheek, a warm breath across the nape of your neck, gathering you to them and bestowing tenderheartedness against the gentle fibers of your soul. They feel familiar somehow, but in the midst of your strange woolgather you can’t discern who they are.

“Hush, sweetheart, back to dreams.” They whisper, even as they kiss up along your jaw, down the swell of your breasts, fingers splayed against your stomach as a breathy sort of moan travels up your throat. It’s warm, like honey against your skin, sweet and cloying against your senses. A mouth presses fluttering, sucking kisses down the length of your collar bone, another sliding his fingers through silky folds and coaxing your arousal into a tender flame. Yet every time you try to stir, every time you try to chase sensation it only slips away again- like mist through your fingers even as those same voices whisper a distant echo of your name.

You wake within the confines of the cave alone.

Yet as the days come to pass, you discover you are far from the only one in the glade you call home.

You go to the market the day after, and allow your neighbors to fuss over you. The woods are dangerous, they warn you. You should stay behind the safety of the village walls. You ease their anxieties, offering them their usual tonics and herbs, and as the sun wanes once again you withdraw to your cottage- only to find a slain hare resting neatly upon your front step. A gesture of thanks, you think, one of many to come.

It stays as such. A turkey, a hare, a fish from your lake, sometimes even wildflowers that grow vibrant in the late autumn light. It’s rare that you see the wolves themselves- often catching their shadows darting into the trees and watching from a distance as you bend to collect the gifts. They’re wary at first, uncertain after you were shown their den deep in the woods. Perhaps they are afraid you will yet change your mind and go to the village guards. You know that even if you did you too would face the end of a spear for helping them, for offering your hands of healing.

Yet after several days of watching, soon the wolves creep closer. You can hear them at night, sniffing around your herb garden outside, snorting at the iron cross above your door to ward off evil, and even romping in the moonlight as strange dreams find you once more. In the darkness, the rustling of the ferns and swish of low hanging boughs brings an odd comfort, and lends itself to the dreamscape you lose yourself in when you close your eyes.

It’s always the same men, the same touches and muted whispers you can hardly hear. It’s always the same distant pleasure, touches that feel like they press through silk into the recesses of your thoughts. You chase them like one would a prism of light, reaching out your hands in desperate hopes you can hold it for just a moment before it disappears.

“Sweet girl.” They whisper in your dreams, as you contain a watery gasp at the fingers that press between your thighs. You can feel yourself leak down onto them just as another hand smoothes down the curve of your spine, pressing you into a delicious arch with an appreciative groan. “So good for us, so pretty-” Your mewls are caught on the digits caught between your teeth, pressing down against your tongue with a sinful, primal growl- like a beast lurking between the trees.

Touch me, touch me, hold me.

You reach out your hands, trying to hold the pleasure in the cup of your palms for just a moment-

and wake up with wetness between your thighs, and the sound of a mourning dove cooing in the rafters.

Names linger upon your lips, and you find when your mouth forms them they slip away with a sigh.

You give the wolves names as well.

To the wolf with the skull-pattern snout, you call him Ghost. He’s the quietest out of the four, but strong and steady, towering over the rest with a grand stature and strength coiled beneath his jet-black coat. He’s more distant than his counterparts at first, slow to warm to you and suspicious. Yet the more time you spend with him, the more he comes to you with a silent demand of ear scratches and your hands running over his dark mane.

His younger counterpart with the strange ruff you call Soap, as one afternoon you watch him splash in the lake nearby and come out sodden and dripping but his maw wide with something akin to laughter. Mischievous, he’s quick to pull his friends into a bout of wrestling or racing through the trees, emerging victorious and requesting your laughing praises as his reward. Out of them all, he’s by far the most demanding of your affections, whining if you are preoccupied by others and quick to shove his snout under your hands.

To the raven-haired wolf with the mahogany eyes twinkling with a slyness you can never put to words, who leans into your hands with a pleased, rumbling growl you call Gaz- meaning gentle in the old languages of your grimoires. When you speak to him, it feels like he understands more than any of the others, and sometimes you spend long hours in one-sided conversation as he blinks back at you with soulful, knowing eyes. More than that- Gaz is sly, quick to steal away a piece of prey from Soap or Ghost when they turn their backs, blinking innocently at them with a slight tilt of his head as if to say “What, me?”

Finally the older wolf, the one who lays still the most due to his healing wounds, who seems to have paid a heavy tribute to survive as long as he has, you call Price. He’s not as scarred as Ghost, but within him he seems to carry a sort of inner knowledge, a weight that bears heavy down upon his massive shoulders. You spend many afternoons tending to Price’s healing wounds, to which he rewards you by gently nuzzling against your hip until you succumb to a nap against his massive frame.

It’s Soap who accompanies you on long walks in the afternoon sunshine, darting between the trees to chase prey and often returning with something for your hearth. Gaz watches you dig for herbs in the soft soil of the forest, sometimes using his massive paws to expose roots that grow deep within the mossy earth. Ghost patrols the border of your glade at a distance, always vigilant for unwanted visitors and quick to alert the others if hunters are nearby. Yet he always returns at the end of the day, huffing with a begrudging sort of humor and allowing you to stroke the dense fur of his pelt. Price often lays near your front step, resting and healing from his injuries. When you nap in the warm sunshine, Price tucks himself around your form, curling protectively against your figure as you dream.

And dream you do, for as the days pass the dreams become clearer still. Sometimes you can catch glimpses of the men the voices belong to. A flash of lightning blue eyes, smooth dark skin, a jagged pink scar curving up a pale spine, a glimpse of a worried brow staring down at you despite the fondness in his eyes. You rest your head on his hairy, soft stomach, his hand carding through your hair as you move with the impact of every slapping thrust behind you.

“Taking him well, love.” He whispers, and you whimper at the unattainable need coiling low in your stomach, a desire that can’t be quelled here where you’re caught between wakefulness and sleep. You whisper as much to him, a plea to release you, to give you the words you need to find the end of your desire. Yet he only smiles, hushing you as the hands bracing on your hips dip lower between your thighs. You hiccup, writhing, needing, on the cusp-

and then you wake up.

You spend the day in town if only to avoid your newfound company after realizing you make noises in your sleep.

You spend fewer days in town thanks to the wolves who have made your cottage their home, but when you do you hear the constant murmur of hushed whispers. Tracks found in the outer pastures, a sheep slain and left to drown in its own blood, dark shadows and strange howling at night are among the stories you hear. They sit uneasily inside you, knowing the danger your newfound friends are in, but to raise your voice against it is to cast suspicion upon yourself- a danger which you can’t abide.

Ill at ease are you too with the whispers you hear behind your back. There’s fewer customers at your little stall now, and those who visit do so quickly and do not linger. Something has changed inside the village. There’s a paranoia now with every passing day the beasts are not caught and slaughtered. It infects the minds of the weak and afraid, and casts shadows of doubt upon their neighbors- including you.

“Step carefully.” The guard at the gate tells you as you walk out of the village, but when you turn to him, he refuses to meet your eyes.

The shadows in the woods seem longer that night.

That night, you dream of them once more.

Sometimes it’s just this- curled between them, up against phantom limbs and faces you can never clearly see. The veil of dreams hides the true memory of their appearances even as you cling tighter to them, relishing the warmth they offer. To you they whisper soft endearments, offer chaste kisses and embraces that fill the longing emptiness inside you.

“We’ll protect you.” They whisper, stroking your hair, tracing the curve of your bare spine. “We will keep you safe.”

You wish you could do the same for your wolves.

It’s not safe for them here, you think. It’s only a matter of time before someone sees your wolves and tracks them. Together the four of them could slaughter all of the hunters in the village without so much as a scratch, but if one of them were caught alone the way Price was, if the worst were to come to pass...

“You should leave.” You whisper to them one night. Their massive forms take up almost all the space in your cottage. It smells like animal, like musk and earth and warmth as they each come to rest near the hearth and you curl up between them. Gaz’s soft pelt sinks against your fingertips, and you stare into the flames listlessly, speaking words you know they can’t return.

“It’s not safe.” You go on. “You should go to the mountains, up the valley, further into the forbidden lands.” Yet even as you speak the words, you can feel your throat swell with emotion at the thought of them leaving you behind. It breaks before you can stop it, and you sob as you turn your face into Gaz’s shoulder, listening to the worried whines of the wolves around you.

“I don’t want to say goodbye.” You cry. “But you can’t stay. If...if somehow you get hurt...”

Soap shoves his massive snout under the crook of your arm, and even Ghost gently bends his head so you can tuck yourself against his jaw.

“I can’t be the reason you die.” It goes unspoken, but your meaning is clear. Yet none of the wolves make a motion to leave you, instead curling further around you like you’re something precious, something to be kept safe no matter what.

You didn’t realize how lonely you were until you met them.

Lonely are you still in the village- but now you feel more afraid than anything. There’s a word whispered behind your back now as you pass the others, a hatred in their eyes that pierces your fragile heart.

Witch.

It’s a term thrown as an insult, but these days it feels less like a passing bite and more like an accusation- one ending within a fiery blaze that will burn you down to ash. The terror of it all is that it’s true. You don’t attend Sunday mass because the inside of a church feels too warm, too crowded, and you can feel so many eyes upon you. You don’t recite the scriptures, you don’t join your hands in prayers with the others. You live so far away from the village, out of sight and beyond their scrutiny and it makes you a target.

It’s a rainy afternoon as you travel back to your cottage, and despite the drizzle you can hear the sound of someone behind you.

Following you.

A voice that is not yours whispers to you inside the recesses of your mind, echoing a warning, a command:

“Run.”

You’re not sure why but you do, breaking into a sprint as mud finds its way into your boots and the rain lashes against your skin. You run as fast as you can- towards the safety of your cottage, towards your friends, towards the wolves-

Your pursuer catches you- faster, stronger as he wrestles you to the ground. You scream, thrashing as the man above you brandishes a knife that you can see your horrified eyes on the reflection of the blade.

“Witch!” He hisses down at you, a single hand keeping you pinned by your throat so you choke for air. “It’s you who cursed our village! You’re the reason behind all this- I know it!”

Tears burn at your eyes, and you whimper a broken sort of sound- something like a plea, but more akin to a prey animal in their dying throes.

“Once you’re dead, everything will be set right- and those beasts will go back to wherever they came from.”

The knife descends, and you call out to them- the men from your dreams, the ones who whisper your name with tender touches and beloved kisses.

There’s a roar from the woods, and the man leans back just as a massive form leaps from the trees. He’s torn away from you with a cut off scream, and you cough and splutter, eyes burning as you try to regain your breath. Through your tears you see him- you see Price standing above your attacker, his lips pulled back to reveal his dripping fangs bared in a horrifying snarl. One paw immobilizes the man under him, who shouts and screams just as Price’s teeth lean down to his neck for a killing bite.

“No!” You cry, and Price’s ears flick to you, pausing before turning his steel blue stare towards your trembling form.

“Don’t.” You manage, rubbing at your throat. “He’s just scared. He didn’t-”

Beneath Price’s paw, the man whimpers, trying to shield his face.

“Don’t hurt him.” You beg again, wincing at the hard scrape of your throat. It’s enough to summon Price to you, circling you protectively and licking at your face. The man scrambled to his feet, crying out in terror as he races back towards the village.

You pray he will take this as a warning, but inside you know:

It’s time.

You turn to Price, throwing your arms around him with a shuddering sort of gasp, fingers curling into his thick pelt as he offers a low, comforting growl to you in turn.

“You need to leave.” You whisper urgently, turning your head to stare into his eyes. “All of you. I can buy you some time, but it won’t be long before they’ll be back.”

You watch as he bares his teeth in a snarl, and despite the languages lost between you, you understand even so.

“Let them come.”

You race with Price back to the cottage, where the other three members of the pack whine and pace around you, barking as if they’re communicating among themselves. All the while you watch the sun sink lower behind the naked branches and hear the ever present ticking of a clock inside your mind.

You’re running out of time.

You gather what you can: Grimoires, a bedroll, a few changes of clothes, your bag of tinctures and potions, things needed to keep you alive, things to help protect you if the worst comes. You have no plan beyond escaping, beyond vanishing into the woods before the villagers can track you down and find you. With every minute that passes you fear you’ll hear the sound of them coming through the woods, and with every minute you pray the wolves are already gone far beyond the trees, even if it makes your heart ache endlessly with their absence.

At last you pause, bundled in your heaviest cloak and warmest pair of boots, tracing the runes and sigils you’ve carved into the beams of your beloved little home. There’s magic imbued still within them- a comforting sort of miasma that welcomes you warm into its embrace. It feels like where you belong- like home, like something that hadn’t felt quite so until it had been full with the forms of your beloved wolves.

A single, lone howl raises its voice towards the sky.

You know the voice of Price when you hear him, and soon to join him are the voices of Soap, Gaz, and the deep, lonely tenor of Ghost underneath. The volume of it shakes your home to its foundations, rattles the rafters and with it the bones inside your fragile frame. Beyond it you can hear it, just barely, the sound of approaching voices. Beyond the trees, the torchlight glows bright in the darkness.

“You need to leave.” You cry to Ghost outside as he stands at the edge of the trees, ruff bristled and his teeth gleaming in the orange moonlight. “You can’t stay- they’ll kill you!”

Yet Ghost does not answer, does not even flick his ears in your direction even as you tug desperately at him.

“Run!” You try at Gaz instead, but Gaz ignores you, ears pointed forward, alert and undeterred.

“WITCH!!”

It raises and snaps like a whip, crying out from the trees as a cluster of shadows walks through the trees, torches held aloft. The villagers stalk forward as one, filtering between the trembling trunks and twisted roots, further into the sanctuary of your glade. In their faces you see fury, betrayal, you see fear as they spot the wolves standing between you and them, expressions contorting into that of hatred.

“BURN THE WITCH!”

Your heart leaps into your throat, a scream threatening to burst from your lungs. There’s so many of them, guards, huntsmen, and villagers alike coalescing into a single mob intent on your own destruction.

And that of your friends.

They snarl in return, your wolves, barking and exposing their fangs for all to see. You can spot crossbows in the crowd, spears held aloft as the iron tips glint from the flames. You know they’ll embed themselves into the hides and pelts of your friends, and you will become awash in flame as the fallen forms of your wolves fall at your feet.

They’ll kill us all.

It’s that thought that pushes you forward, shoving you way past Soap and Gaz who stand protectively in front of you, snarling and bristled, seconds away from throwing themselves into the fray. You hear them yelp as you race forward, teeth snapping as they try to catch you by your cloak and drag you back to safety.

The villagers draw back, gasping and screaming as you plant yourself before them, arms spread wide to keep them from your pack just as an autumn wind curls itself about your form, lifting your cloak and parting the clouds so the moonlight streams down onto your shoulders.

“You are in MY woods.” You tell them, voice pitched low as the wind whistles and the treetops shiver above you. “You’ll take not one step further.”

There’s a hush over the crowd at that, at the promise of danger in the timbre of your voice, at the fire in your eyes. They look between each other, as if daring one another to be the first one to take a step forwards towards the witch who enchanted four monstrous beasts and brought devastation upon their homes.

Then, a voice from the crowd: “KILL THEM ALL!”

It startles one of the hunters at the front of the crowd, who lifts his crossbow and levies it straight for your throat.

And you, you remember the runes and sigils engraved into your home. You remember the magic you’ve woven into the soil you stand upon, into the very air that billows around you.

And, silently, you remember the first spell you ever learned.

“If I burn-” You murmur, hand outstretched as a low, simmering heat rapidly boils through your veins and threatens to ignite you from the inside out. “Then you burn too.”

All at once, the ground in between you and the mob erupts as a path of flame carves its way past your feet, cutting you off from the villagers in front of you. They scream, leaping away as flames lick at their boots, crying out in terror as the truth of your magic finally unveils itself with horrifying carnage.

“These wolves are under my protection!” You shout forth, hands extended as flames leap around you but offer no harm. “You will not harm them!”

Amidst the flames, amidst the gale that lifts the hem of your cape, amidst the glinting eyes and dripping fangs of your wolves behind you- you become the thing that they accuse you of. You become the thing from their nightmares, the one who brings devastation upon their land, who lays waste to the peace they’ve built atop the graves of your kind. You become the witch, who stands with the fire burning bright in her eyes, her hair wild in the wind and retribution clear in her furious gaze.

They scream, the villagers, falling over each other in their bid to escape from the encroaching fire. Weapons are discarded, shields left to singe within the blaze, and you watch as they flee away from you, away from your protected glade and the creatures who dwell within it.

When at last the remaining few grow distant into the trees, you feel the strength in your legs give way. Your knees hit the scorched earth, arms trembling with your weight as the draw of magic on your body saps away your vigor and leaves you panting and shivering.

It’s Ghost who comes to you first, offering a low, throaty grumble as he nudges you with his wet nose. You lean onto him, take his muzzle between your hands and stare into his golden eyes like you did once so long ago. It’s in his stare that you see the unspoken words he cannot say, but find you all the same.

You climb atop his broad shoulders, and give one last look to your cottage with its sigils and runes engraved into the beams, with the herbs planted in the garden and hung from the rafters. And you know that by leaving it, so too do you leave the person you pretended to be.

The four of you travel deep into the woods, with the knotted knells and twisted roots of ancient oaks. Further still do you travel up into the hills, where heather grows between the rocky slopes and you traverse paths made not by man, but by creature alone. Up into the mountains you pause to take in the rising sun that spills crimson across the snow-white peaks. It’s there that the four of you rest, and you curl into the forms of the wolves you’ve come to love- the wolves you plan to keep.

It’s there, surrounded on all sides by the scent of musk and fur, that you dream of them at last.

You see them, each of them with their own smiles and faces. You hear the sound of their laughter in distant twilight, and their voices soft with a tenderness you can scarcely comprehend. You move as one, as if you’ve memorized the maps of each other's bodies long ago. You know the sensation of every touch, every voice, every noise and breath against you. You know their desires even in the silence, drawing them into you like you’re the kindling to their flame. Lips kiss at your feet, your thighs, the flesh of your stomach and against your closed eyes.

They draw forth your pleasure with gasping kisses and the deep, pushing rolls of their hips. Even in dreams you feel them spread you open, take apart all your inner lacings so nothing is left but your own desire gushing forth. You feel the touch of their hands as they grasp a leg to lift it higher, as they grasp your waist to keep you flush against them. You feel their breath fan across your folds with a whisper of their reverence, and you know just how much you are wanted.

They speak to you in words you can’t yet hear, but you watch their lips form your name over and over, as if it’s a prayer they speak unto the glittering heavens.

In your sleep, you at last, at last, speak their own names for the first time.

The voices become clearer as wakefulness slowly rouses you, slipping between your thoughts like sounds beneath the surface of a lake.

“Should we wake her?”

“No, let her sleep.”

“Ye ken, I’ve always wanted to say this but- she’s so soft when she’s asleep.”

“Mind yourself, Soap. Don’t get any ideas.”

You eventually come to with a groggy sort of whine, extending your frigid limbs to stretch- only to find that the furs and manes that surrounded you the night prior are replaced instead by a tangle of very solid, very naked, very human limbs.

Any remaining semblance of sleep fades in an instant as you jolt wide awake, a gasp upon your lips and ready to defend yourself if need be. Instead, a gentle hand catches your wrist and keeps you where you lay. You freeze automatically if only because the touch itself feels so...familiar.

You blink, turning towards the owner of the hand, eyes wide and lips parted as you meet a familiar set of soft, soulful brown eyes.

“...Gaz?”

Oh. When he smiles, it feels like a sunrise.

“Kyle.” He tells you softly, and presses a chaste kiss to the back of your knuckles. “Or at least that’s what you said in your sleep, doll.”

You blink at him, a thousand questions on your tongue before you’re interrupted by a chin tucking over your shoulder.

“Aye, and he’s not the only one.” A brawny pair of arms wraps around your middle, dragging you back into a firm, warm mass of a body. “Said my name too, Bonnie.”

You know his voice even without looking at his lightening blue stare. “Soap.” You breathe. “How...?”

“Seems you broke our curse, love.” You look up to realize your head is resting on a warm, hairy thigh, connected above to a pair of heart-achingly gentle eyes and furrowed brow.

“Took you long enough.” Another body grumbles, tucking in behind Johnny and slinging a massive, tattooed arm over you both.

“Simon.” Price warns, but Simon only chuckles, warm and fond and oh how it fills an aching corner of your soul you never quite realized was empty.

“You- you’re all human.” You whisper in awe, sitting up on your elbows and turning to look at each face individually for the first time. “I thought-”

“We thought so too.” Gaz interrupts gently, stroking a hand down your shoulder. “We all pretty much resigned ourselves to stay wolves forever after we were cursed.”

Cursed?

Price can see the question in your eyes, breathing a heavy sigh before adjusting the both of you so you can face him better. His large, calloused hands wrap gently around your frame, scooping you up so you balance on his lap and stare into his steel blue eyes.

“We stumbled upon a coven, years ago.” Price tells you. “Hunted on their land without permission, and incurred their wrath as a result. Several of the witches put a hex upon us.”

“They said we’d remain as wolves until we found our mate, until she said our real names.” Soap pipes up, arms crossed under him and head propped up to look at you.

“Then I...” You whisper, looking from him to Price. “I broke it. I broke the curse.”

Price’s smile is soft, achingly tender, and you feel as if you could curl up inside it like a ray of sunshine, basking in its glow until the sun goes down. When you turn to look at the others, you see in their eyes too- the same expressions you saw in your dreams. Endlessly doting, reverent, and full of love.

“Then...” You whisper breathlessly as the true meaning of Soap’s words wash upon you with blessed, endlessly hopeful realization. “Then I’m-”

“Our mate.” Gaz offers, and leans so that his head rests upon your lap, staring up into your eyes with his own, soulful brown gaze.

Oh.

Words escape you. What is there to say? You’ve been so lost for so long, staring out the windows of your cottage and praying for a day like this to come- for someone to come and take you away to a place where you are endlessly cherished and adored for all you are. Now that day has come, and it’s come in the form of not one, but four beings you’ve come to cherish inside your own heart.

“That’s why you never left.” You realize aloud. “Why you stayed.”

“We’ll stay as long as you keep us, pet.” Ghost offers, solemn and sincere.

“We want to stay.” Soap adds quickly. “We- we talked about giving you our mark to prove it.”

“Only if you want it.” Gaz interjects.

“A mark?” You ask, trying to recall what your grimoires had to say about werewolves and whatever the men around you seem to be referencing, recalling with a sudden flash of realization. “Oh.”

“A mating bite.” Price clarifies to your wide-eyed gaze. “From all of us.”

Soap seems to recognize your confusion, because he scoots a little closer, if only to look up directly into your face.

“We’re a pack, bonnie. We’ve been bonded for a while but...it never felt complete until we found ye.”

Emotion floods through you, a deep wash of sensation so fierce it makes your chest tighten and a sob curl in your throat. The loneliness, the grief, the isolation and even the fragile hope- it all seems to coalesce into a single, unnamed emotion that has you reaching for them- for the men you’ve come to love.

Their arms settle around you, hushing and cooing as you cry openly into their bare forms. Loud, sobbing hiccups and cries break down the crumbling walls inside you, releasing a torrent of endless tenderness and an emotion you’ve come now to understand is love.

“I didn’t know where I belonged until I met you.” You weep, fat tears rolling down your face as Gaz tenderly smears them across your cheeks. “I-I’ve been alone for so long-”

“You never have to be alone again.” Price murmurs into your hair. “Not with us, love.”

It feels like magic, you think. It feels like the freedom of something trapped within you for so long, fragile and waiting to spread its wings. The years of being alone slowly lift from you with each sob, and with each shuddering sigh they dissipate into the frosty air, up into the clouds. The forms of the men around you warm you through, imbibe in you a fathomless sort of hope to which there is no end.

They hold you, they keep you, they whisper loving praises onto your skin and lips. In the light of dawn you descend into further unknown valleys, and build there the home you’ve always dreamt of. Under moonlight you race with them through the trees, you awake with them in your bed, you forget all your fears and sorrows and feel your magic woven into every breath, every smile, every laugh of joy.

And you know at last-

You’re home.

---

If you are interested in a commission, click here

[adejayy]

Yoooooooooooooooooooo, I love getting emotionally invested as I read into fics like THISSSS. *Genuinely starts barking* gonna be thinking about this for the next week onwards serious-lay

omgg this needs more recognitionnn, the absolute gut wrenching need and curiosity that piqued as I read on, my GAWSHHH

[beloveds-embrace]

(poly werewolves 141 x female human reader)

The forest had always been a cathedral to you.

Not in the way of stained glass and hymnals, but in the hush of pine needles cushioning each step, in the incense of sap and rain, in the way sunlight filtered through green boughs like blessings painted in gold. It was the only place where your body’s brokenness did not feel like a sentence. With your cane and your limp and the ache that gnawed the marrow of your leg on storm-heavy days, the world outside demanded swiftness, strength, perfection.

But here, in your tucked-away cottage on the edge of a wild expanse where no roads reached, you moved at your own pace. The mountains did not mind if you were slow, and the rivers did not scorn when you paused to breathe.

It had been three years since the army sent you home with medals and hollow apologies. The steel pin in your leg sang a different hymn than the one they spoke at the discharge ceremony. You had learned to live with it; You had learned to love quiet mornings steeped in tea and woodsmoke, evenings dappled with deer crossing through your garden as if you, too, belonged to the woods.

But peace is a delicate thing. It always shatters quietly, without warning.

The first sound was not one of peace; it was thunder dragged low across the undergrowth- crashing, breaking and desperate. You nearly dropped the kettle in your hands when you heard it, a ragged cacophony coming closer and closer. Your first thought was bear. Your second- wolves.

You barely had time to step outside before the shadows stumbled into your clearing.

Four of them. Enormous, their coats glistened dark with blood, not rain, their breaths sawing out in great wet gasps. Wolves, your mind supplied, but wrong somehow- shoulders broader, and you thought they might perhaps be wolf dogs… though you’d never seen so many in a pack like this.

And yet, not one of them snarled. Not one lunged.

They collapsed instead.

The first you noticed was a black-furred beast with scars tangled across his muzzle, and it crashed right against your porch steps. Another, the largest, was pale as bone itself, curled protectively near the others though he trembled like a candleflame on torn paws and legs. A mottled, dark-grey one with its back fur raised along its back like a long mohawk staggered in last and his eyes flashing toward you, unreadable, before he fell on his side. The fourth, leaner, russet-streaked, was bleeding badly from his flank; he whimpered once and then stilled, curling near the mottled dark-grey one.

Your breath should have fled with fear. And yet… something in their stillness unraveled the panic in your chest; they did not come with bared teeth. They came like creatures at the edge of breaking, and you’ve always had a soft heart towards animals- even ones who could genuinely tear you apart without a single chance for you to defend yourself.

They are injured, and they need help. And they looked wary of you- clearly only dropped here by sheer circumstance.

“God,” you whispered, cane rattling against the porch rail as you knelt as best you could. “You poor things.”

Your hands shook as you reached out, half-certain they’d tear into you, but the black one- his eyes fathomless, old as winter- only let out a low, warning rumble. Not threat, but something like acceptance, and something like surrender.

They let you touch them. They let you tend their wounds.

You dragged your old army medical kit out from the cupboard. The motions returned like instinct- press, clean, wrap. Gauze soaked through crimson faster than you could lay it down.

You whispered apologies each time they winced, though they bore the pain with an eerie calm. They were too intelligent for beasts, but you told yourself they must be strays, must be dogs twisted by some cruel hand of war or horrible owners clearly unequipped.

And still, your heart broke with every fever-hot breath against your palms.

Hours passed; the storm outside broke with rain, tapping against the roof as though the forest itself prayed for them. One by one, they sank into uneasy sleep on your floor, their hulking bodies curled together in a heap of fur and scar tissue.

You should have been afraid, truthfully- your cane leaned helplessly against the wall, your fragile body too slow to escape if they turned on you. And yet, you sat among them with your hand resting on one blood-matted ear, watching the rise and fall of their ribs, and felt nothing except gladness that they’d stopped here and not somewhere they would have been shot.

And when dawn crept pale through your windows, the black one was the first to stir, lifting his massive head to watch you. His eyes caught yours, unflinchingly sharp. You felt the weight of command in him, the way you once felt it in the battlefield: the quiet authority of someone who had endured too much, survived too long. He lowered his head again, a gesture not of defeat but of… trust, delicate as it might be.

Your throat tightened.

When the bleeding slowed and your trembling hands had done all they could with bandages and warm cloth, you stood in the middle of your little cottage and looked at them- four hulking shadows sprawled on your floor, breath hitching, blood drying into their coats. Wolves, or wolf-adjacent.

And yet… they were quiet, calm as tides, and watching you with eyes far too clever.

You had no words to give them; so you gave them what you could.

You hobbled to your pantry, leaning hard on your cane, gathering what little stores you could spare: the smoked venison you had meant to ration for the month, a loaf of bread baked just yesterday, a day-old chicken, and several clay bowls of water. You set it all down gently near the hearth, as if you were laying an offering at the altar of some ancient god.

“Here,” you murmured, voice almost breaking in the hush. “Eat. You’ll need the strength.”

Their eyes followed your every motion, gleaming in the firelight. There was no snarling and no snapping. Just… watching as though they understood.

For a heartbeat, the room seemed to hold itself still, as if waiting for you to do more. But exhaustion claimed you then, the ache in your leg cutting sharp, and you turned your back to reach for another roll of gauze. You thought only of finishing the work, of keeping them alive through the night.

When you turned again, the room was empty.

The bread, gone. The meat and chicken, gone. The bowl overturned, licked clean. The pawprints led across the wooden floor and out the open door, fading into the storm-slick earth.

You stood there alone, staring at the space where they had lain, where their breath had rattled heavy and mortal. And the strangest ache welled in your chest, something not relief and not fear, but in between.

The days that followed wore a strange shape.

You told yourself you had imagined it, that no wolves could have survived such wounds. That they had vanished back into the wild, perhaps to die beneath roots and soil. You wanted to believe it- needed to, even. Life had already carved you down to a small, quiet existence; the intrusion of those impossible beasts felt like a dream you could not keep.

But the forest began to change; it started small.

A rabbit, caught neatly in a snare you hadn’t set, left dangling near your garden. A pheasant feather placed cleanly upon your porch, too deliberate to be chance. Pawprints circling your cottage come morning, broad and heavy, pacing like guards at their post.

One afternoon, your cane slipped in the garden, your bad leg folding under you as the ground rushed up. A crackle tore through the brush, a crash of branches snapping, and before you struck the dirt a shape burst from the treeline. Mottled, Dark-grey fur and a snarl sharp enough to curdle marrow- directed not at you, but at the hulking shadow of a boar that had been creeping too near. The animal fled with a squeal, and the wolf lingered only a breath, gaze flicking toward you, before vanishing as though he had never been.

Another night, coyotes prowled too close. You sat frozen at your window, watching their dark shapes slink along the treeline and contemplating pulling out your gun. Then- low thunder; a growl so deep it seemed to shudder in the bones of the cottage. The coyotes yelped, scattering into the dark, and you pressed your hand to the glass, breath fogging it, certain you glimpsed a pale shape, moonlit and spectral, standing sentinel in the shadows.

And then there were the mornings.

Your path to the river always bore new prints- wolf prints, pacing and circling, shadowing your every step in mud. You never saw them, but the silence of the woods began to hum with a presence.

As though the forest itself had chosen you, and lent you its fiercest guardians.

You tried to deny it: tried to tell yourself you were imagining the weight of those eyes at your back, the sudden absence of predators near your clearing, the gifts of fresh-kill left like tithes upon your porch.

You told yourself it was only coincidence, only luck.

And yet, when you limped to the river one dusky evening, cane sinking into the soft loam, and felt the air shiver with the sound of an unseen growl as a bear wandered too close- only to watch the beast veer off suddenly, ears pinned, as though driven away by something far greater- you knew.

They had left your home, yes. But not you.

They haunted the tree line like shadows, like ghosts. You caught only glimpses- eyes blinking from between branches, the swish of a russet tail disappearing into the undergrowth, the heavy impression of a black pawprint pressed into the soil at your porch step.

And though you did not yet understand why, or what they truly were, you found yourself leaning into the protection of the unseen. For the first time since the war had sent you home broken and alone, you slept through the night without fear and without a hand clutching the gun under your pillow.

Because somewhere in the dark, the forest breathed- and you knew you were not alone.

p2

[adejayy]

Wooowwweee, this piece of literature *chefs kiss* Immediately had to speed read p2 it was so enticing 🤗

[howyoulovelikeweaponskill]

Something something for possessive simon…

f!reader, smut mdni, PIV, blood, mentions of violence, size kink.

You only notice it because your hand slips.

It had been curled at the back of his neck, fingers buried in his hair beneath the edge of his mask, holding on until your knuckles went bloodless because there is nothing else to do when Simon Riley is above you like this; one forearm braced beside your head, your knees spread and pulled back to your chest, his weight pressing you into the mattress with his hips grinding slow and mean like he has all the time in the world to ruin you.

You’re boneless under him - open-mouthed, shaking, letting him take you apart more and more with each of those deep, deliberate strokes that make your thoughts scatter into useless little pieces.

All is perfect until your hand slips, and you feel your thumb drag over something tacky.

You blink up at him through the haze, thinking maybe you’re imaging things - but then you see it. There, smeared dark along the thick column of his neck, just under his jaw.

Blood.

Your mouth moves before your brain catches up. “Simon—”

He stops, buried balls deep inside you. His eyes lift to yours from beneath the black smear of his paint. Brown eyes gone flat and dangerous.

“What?”

Your fingers swipe at his throat, and then pull back to show him your now candied fingertips. “You’re bleeding.”

For a second, he just stares at you.

Then his mouth shifts beneath the mask. “S’not mine.”

The room seems to go airless around you. For a moment, your brain does not know what to do with the words.

Not mine.

They land somewhere distant - muffled by euphoria and the heat of him still seated inside you. They should mean something immediately - they should send you upright, sober you, sharpen you. But you’re too gone beneath him, too pliant and overheated and pinned, your thighs trembling around his waist while he stays buried deep enough that every breath you take has to move around him.

So you just stare at him.

At the dark paint around his eyes, at the blood smear, at the shape of his shoulders above you. You stare long enough that the unusual details begin arranging themselves in whatever clear space you’ve got left in your mind.

His gloves, first.

They’re clean. Fresh black tactical gloves, one of them still gripping your hip as he stares down at you in pause. You can’t shake the feeling that they’re different - you know his kit. You know the worn seams, the scuffs, the little frays on the knuckles from use. These aren’t the pair he wore earlier.

Your gaze flicks lower.

His shirt, too.

Not the one from briefing. Not the one with the faded shoulder seam and the dust at the collar. This one is clean, dark, newly pulled on in a hurry. You catch a faint whiff of barracks detergent and bathroom soap with every move he makes.

He cleaned up.

The thought comes through the haze in pieces.

Simon cleaned himself up before he came here but somehow, he missed this. One dark smear beneath his jaw.

You swallow. Your voice comes out thin. “What happened?”

Simon watches your mouth form the words.

Your breathing sounds too loud now, while his somehow stays perfectly even - like he isn’t pressed into you to the hilt - like he isn’t the reason your thighs are shaking around his waist. Like he didn’t come to your room with another persons blood still drying in the place he forgot to wash. He lowers himself closer and the mattress dips beneath the weight of him.

His masked mouth brushes the corner of yours, not quite kissing you but just hovering there - dragging the rough fabric against your skin as he speaks.

“What happened was,” he pauses. “Graves opened his fuckin’ mouth.”

A cold thread winds through the heat in your stomach.

You go still beneath him, even though your cunt is still fluttering helplessly around the thick of him. The name alone does something ugly to the room. Sours the air. Pulls the world back in around the two of you.

“What—” you have to stop to breathe. Your nails dig into his shoulder. “What did he say?”

Simon’s hand slides slowly from your hip.

His palm moves over your waist, up your ribs, dragging goosebumps in its wake. He maps you like he already knows every reaction he is about to get - like he can feel the exact second your pulse jumps. His gloved fingers skim the base of your throat and settle there.

Thumb resting over your pulse. Counting it.

“He said he’d wondered what you sounded like when you begged.”

Your breath locks. You blink at him, stupidly.

For a second, you can’t reconcile the sentence with the room you’re in. With Simon above you. With Graves’s name in Simon’s mouth and blood under Simon’s jaw and your own pulse hammering against his thumb like it wants to betray you.

But Simon says it like he has had the words sitting behind his teeth for hours. Like he has been waiting to put them somewhere. Like he needs you to understand exactly what happened to the man who said them.

“He said,” Simon continues, each word dragged low through his teeth, “that a mouth like yours would be wasted on 141.”

Your nails bite into his shoulder.

“I-I—“ you whimper. “Si—“

His hips move before you can say anything else.

A slow, devastating thrust that punches the air out of you and leaves the rest of his name caught uselessly in your throat. He watches you take it. Watches your face twist. Watches the thought you were trying to form scatter completely.

“That Price needs to put you in your place,” he hisses through his teeth. “That he’d have had you on your knees by now.”

Your stomach twists.

You shake your head, but you don’t even know what you’re denying. Graves. Simon. The heat blooming under your skin. The fact that the words should disgust you cleanly, but Simon’s voice saying them like a death sentence makes something dark and shameful coil inside you.

He pulls out just to thrust in again.

Harder this time - hard enough to break the breath right out of you. Enough to make the headboard creak traitorously behind you. Enough to make your thighs tighten around his waist before you can stop them.

Simon feels it.

“Then he looked at me,” he says, voice dropping into something ruined and vicious, “and asked if I’d taught you to take orders.”

Your heart slams so hard you feel it in your throat, pulsing viscously under his palm. The room narrows to three things - Simon’s eyes, the blood on his neck, and the place where he is still holding you down.

There is blood on him.

Someone else’s blood.

Graves’s blood.

The realization comes slowly at first, then all at once.

You see it too clearly: Simon standing there silent while Graves ran his mouth. Simon listening. The moment the Ghost stops being a man in a room and becomes a consequence. You see the gloves he must have taken off. The blood on the old pair. The careful cleanup after. The way he must have washed his hands, changed, checked himself in the mirror, decided he was clean enough to come to you.

Clean enough. Except for the one place he missed.

Simon watches the realization move across your face.

“Oh God.” You force the words out. “What did you do?”

Your voice is barely a whisper.

His answer is immediate. “I hit him.”

The answer is too simple, too small for the blood under his jaw and the hell in his eyes and that is only because you know Simon.

You know the careful economy of him - the terrifying restraint. The discipline carved into his bones so deep it has become part of his breathing. Simon does not hit men because he is angry. He does not waste movement. He does not lose control unless something in him has already decided the consequence is worth it.

He ends things because he has weighed the cost and found it acceptable.

Your fingers curl tighter in his shirt. “How bad?”

For the first time, something almost like satisfaction passes through his eyes.

His hips roll in one slow, merciless stroke and your back arches before you can stop it. You spread your legs and take him deeper; helplessly, embarrassingly, betraying every sensible thought trying to form in your head.

“How—“ you try to ask again, but the question fractures halfway through another thrust.

Simon lowers his mouth to your ear. “Bad enough Price had to pull me off him.”

Your stomach flips in something stupid. Fear should come first.

It doesn’t.

It should be horror. Concern. Anger. Maybe all three. You should shove at his chest. Demand to know if he’s lost his fucking mind. Tell him he can’t do that, can’t put his hands on Graves over his disgusting mouth and a half-formed threat. Can’t turn command into a blood sport. Can’t risk his place, his rank, Price’s trust, your trust, just because another man said something deserving yet ultimately meaningless.

But what blooms under your ribs is not sensible enough to be outrage - it is hot. It is fucking shameful.

It is dark and possessive and awful in the exact shape of him.

Because he heard another man talk about you. Heard Graves put his hands on you in theory. Heard him degrade you, heard him imagine you on your knees, your mouth, your begging, and decided violence was the only answer he trusted.

Your body betrays you before your pride can stop it - a tight little clench around him.

Simon feels it. Of course he does.

He stills above you, and somehow that is worse than movement. He’s pressed to the hilt again, the pressure of him so intense now it leaves your breath caught uselessly behind your teeth. His eyes narrow in something that sees the betrayal before you can hide it.

Your face burns.

“No,” you whisper, before he even says anything.

His mouth shifts beneath the mask. “Oh.”

The sound is low. Cruel in its understanding.

Your pulse kicks under his thumb. “Simon—”

“There she is.”

Your breath stutters, caught somewhere between a moan and a denial, and you hate that he hears both. Hate that he can read you so easily. Hate that your body has already answered him before your pride can even get its feet under it.

Simon looks down at the place where your legs have tightened, then slowly back up to your face. It’s a deliberate act; he is taking inventory of every betrayal.

“You liked that.” He croons.

You shake your head, but it’s weak. Useless. Barely more than the brush of your hair against the pillow.

“N-no.”

His thumb presses against your throat, not hard, just enough to feel the wild little flutter of your pulse.

“Liar.”

Your mouth opens but nothing comes out. You can’t find a single defence, a single outrage. No clever thing you can throw between you and the truth and it is all because he is still inside you. Still wearing fresh gloves like he thought that would be enough to keep you from knowing. Still carrying that one missed smear of Graves’s blood under his jaw like a secret he failed to bury properly.

And now he has caught you reacting to it.

Caught the hitch in your breath. The clench of your cunt. The heat climbing up your neck. The way your whole body went soft and greedy around him the second you understood what he had done.

Simon’s eyes go darker. Hungry in a way that feels worse than anger.

“You should be pissed at me,” he murmurs.

His hips pull back an inch - just enough to make you feel the loss before he sinks back in, slow and devastating, until your hands shift to grab at his shoulders because there is no dignity left in you. No clean line of thought. No clever answer.

“You should be callin’ me reckless.”

Another thrust. Your eyes squeeze shut.

His hand leaves your throat and for half a second, you think he is letting you breathe. That is until both of his hands find your own wrists and pin them firmly above your head.

Your eyes snap open to meet his, expecting full satisfaction, but what you see is worse.

It’s all of him - the width of his shoulders blotting out the dim light, the black of his mask, the hard set of his jaw beneath it, the blood under his neck, those steady eyes watching you like he has already decided exactly how much of you he is going to take apart before he is finished.

“You should be asking what the fuck I was thinkin’,” he says, and you can almost hear the grin in it.

You swallow. “You can’t—”

He moves again, and the words break apart in your mouth.

Your back arches and your fingers curl helplessly against his grip. Your knees shift higher around his ribs, dragging him closer instead of pushing him away, because apparently your body has no interest in helping you survive this with any pride intact.

Simon’s eyes drop to your mouth, then back up to the glass in yours.

“I can’t what?” He murmurs.

You try.

You really do.

You drag the sentence up through the wreckage of yourself, but he is too deep, too thick, too much. The stretch of him keeps interrupting every thought before it can become language.

“You can’t just—” your breath catches on a thrust. “You can’t hit him because he—”

“Because he talked about fucking you?” Your whole body jolts. His eyes burn into yours. “If that’s what you mean, say it proper. Like you fuckin’ believe it.”

You can’t.

Your mouth parts, but all that comes out is a broken little sound when he grinds deeper, cockhead bullying your walls slow enough to make you feel every inch of him, cruel enough to leave you trembling closer to the edge. Any sensible thought is drowned out by the wave of bliss washing over you.

Simon makes a low sound. A rough breath leaves him.

“Too far gone to scold me now?”

You glare at him, or try to. It doesn’t land.

And it didn’t stand a chance, either. Not like this - not with your lips parted and your eyes glassy and cunt stretched pathetically around him. Not with your wrists trapped above your head and your hips still trying to meet him every time he gives you another devastating inch.

“I’m, mmff—serious,” you whisper.

“So am I.”

“Simon—”

“No.” His voice cuts low through the room. “You don’t get to say my name like that while you’re grippin’ me tighter for it.”

Your breath leaves you in a gasp.

He feels the way you clench again, and you see it hit him. See the slight flare of his nostrils beneath the mask. The way his eyes flutter for just a second. The way something brutal and possessive moves through him before he can smooth it down.

“Mhm. Yeah.” His voice drops into something rougher. “Fuckin’ problem, you are.”

Your face burns hotter.

You want to deny it - you want to shove at his chest and tell him he’s wrong. Tell him it’s just your body. Just the position. Just the fact that he has you pinned and overstimulated and too cockdrunk to think straight.

But it’s useless because Simon would know it’s a lie.

He moves again, slow and deep, and the denial dies somewhere behind your teeth.

“That’s it,” he murmurs. “Nothing clever now?”

“Mmff.” Your nails dig into your own palms where he holds your wrists down. “Shut up.”

His eyes flash. “Mhm.”

“I mean it.”

“No, you don’t.”

“I do.”

He gives you another measured thrust, and your voice breaks around a gasp. Simon watches it happen with only the most intent focus.

“Try that again.”

You hate him a little. You want him too much for it to matter.

“You’re—” you inhale sharply when he pulls out almost all the way and then back presses in hard enough to make the mattress shift beneath you. “You’re going to get yourself benched.”

“Probably.”

“Price is going to—”

“Already did.”

You blink up at him, breathless and stupid. “What?”

His thumb drags once along the inside of your wrist.

“Read me the riot act.”

Your nerves jump at that. “And you came here?”

“Yes.”

Something in your chest tightens. “Why?”

Simon looks at you for a long second and the room almost seems to shrink around his silence. Your head swims with all of it; the blood under his jaw, the fresh gloves, the heat of him still locked between your thighs.

When he finally speaks, his voice is quieter. “Because I had to see you.”

God. You think he’s lost his mind.

“Simon—“ your back arches and his mouth falls to your neck. “That’s not—this isn’t—“

He lowers himself closer to you, folding you deeper into the mattress.

“You think I lost it because he insulted you?” You don’t answer. His thumb strokes once over the pulse flying at your wrist. “No, sweet’eart.”

His hips move again, slow enough to be cruel, deep enough to make your eyes flutter.

“I lost it because he thought about touching what’s mine.”

The words hit you low and you make a sound you do not mean to make. Your cunt pulses at the word. Mine. A catastrophic vulnerability to a word you will never ever tire of hearing him say.

“That’s it,” he murmurs. “That’s what you like, yeah?”

You squirm under him, helpless. “Simon—”

“He said your name like he had a right to it.” His voice roughens. “Like he’d survive putting his hands on you.” The next thrust punches a feral moan out of you, and the pace turns to something almost vicious. “I had to let him know what mine felt like first.”

You moan, eyes shut. Helpless and needy as a whore.

He pauses again. One hand leaves your wrists and grips your jaw. “Look at me.”

You do.

“Another man touches you like this,” he whispers, a lethal rasp through his teeth, “and I’ll break every finger he owns.”

You shiver. His eyes flick down over your face, your mouth, the wrecked shape of you beneath him.

“And if he talks about you like that again?”

You barely manage the whisper. “What?”

Simon presses his forehead to yours. “I won’t stop at his face.”

For a long second, neither of you moves. Then he rolls his hips, and the whole world narrows back down to him - his body over yours, his hand at your jaw, Graves’s blood drying on his neck, and the awful, devastating tenderness in the way Simon kisses you like he is still trying not to become the worst version of himself.

One of your hands slip out from under his to touch the smear of blood again. Simon catches it and pins it back beside your head.

“Leave it.”

Your breath trembles. “Why?”

His eyes darken. “Because I want you to remember what happens when a man forgets who you belong to.”

And in the back of your mind, you think maybe you should argue. Maybe you should tell him you don’t belong to anyone or that this is crazy or that he’s going to get you both transferred - but then he does what he always does and starts fucking you deep and hard and mean - and your body reacts before your pride can save you.

Simon huffs a quiet, humorless breath. “That’s what I thought.”

Then he kisses you - filthy, possessive, furious, and fucks you like Graves is still in the room and Simon needs the whole world to understand it.

You’re Simon’s for as long as you’re both breathing.

[adejayy]

Hawt mammmmmaaa 😮‍💨

[lucyyx3x]

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What We Survived For ✦ Attack on Titan ✦

.ᐟ Post Rumbling! Reiner Braun x Reader.ᐟ

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[ NSFW warning .ᐟ 18+ ]

Post Rumbling! Reiner Braun x F! Reader (oneshot)

summary: It’s a few years after The Rumbling, and you and Reiner are married and live together alone in the woods. He decides one day to tell you what’s been on his mind….

wc: 3.3K

a/n: Still slowly going through writing all my requests and the Bridgerton AU so just a short one today, and I lowkey just wanted to write a cute fluff of Reiner after the war but also smut with Reiner wanting to get you pregnant (so I combined them both to write this)….anyway I hope u guys enjoy! :)

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The fire has burned down to embers again. You've been meaning to add a log for the better part of an hour. The intention is there, but so is the frost-pale light coming through the east-facing window, and the open book you stopped reading twenty minutes ago, and the tree line you keep looking at without quite meaning to. It was an old habit— the kind that gets into your bones during years of watching horizons for things that want to kill you, and doesn't fully leave just because the killing has stopped.

The world is quieter now. You're still learning what to do with that. The cabin sits on a patch of land that belonged to nobody when you found it, which means it belongs to you both now— yours by the particular logic of people who built something with their own hands and decided to stay. You'd spent the better part of a summer on it together, you and Reiner, arguing cheerfully about load-bearing walls and window placement while the rest of the world held its breath over reparations and the long, painful work of figuring out what came after.

You hear him before you see him. The crunch of boots on frost, and the particular weight of his foot fall— heavier on the left, a habit from an old injury he'd never quite shaken. Your heart lifts the way it always does, that small involuntary oh, and you think: ten years….Ten years of knowing this man and your heart still does that and it doesn't seem inclined to stop.

Reiner comes through the tree line with an armful of split logs and pine needles in his hair and his breath making soft clouds in the cold air, and you look at him the way you've been looking at him since you saw him again after those years apart— with something that is partly love and partly relief so profound it hasn't finished moving through you yet, and maybe never will.

You'd found each other again in the aftermath. In the dust and the ringing silence and the terrible, tender shock of still being alive. He'd looked at you across the rubble like a man who had prepared himself very thoroughly for a world without you in it and was having to rapidly revise every assumption—and then he'd crossed the distance between you without a word, and held on, and said your name into your hair like a question and an answer at the same time. I love you—finally said out loud. Years too late and yet exactly on time. You'd married him four months later, in a small ceremony because neither of you saw any reason to wait for the world to be more presentable.

He nudges the door open with his shoulder and the cold comes in with him— pine, winter and woodsmoke, and he still hasn't seen you watching.

He goes straight to the hearth. Sets the logs down with focused efficiency and crouches to coax the embers back, feeding the flame. You watch the firelight shift across his face— the short blond hair, the jaw you know by heart after tracing it so often. He glances back at you over his shoulder, and there it is—that expression. The one that undoes you every time.

"The fire died," he says.

"I know."

"You were right here."

"I was busy…."

"With what?"

You meet his eyes, pouting slightly. "Waiting for you to come back…"

Something moves across his face— that brief, helpless thing, before he turns back to the fire. You watch his shoulders rise and settle as the flame catches and the room begins to warm.

He stays crouched a moment longer, watching the fire establish itself, and you wonder what he's thinking. Whether he's here, or whether he's somewhere in the past—there are a lot of pasts to choose from, for Reiner Braun, and not all of them are kind to him. But then he pushes himself upright and shrugs off the coat and comes to you, pulling a chair around to your side of the table without any preamble, sitting close enough that your knees nearly touch.

He takes your hand between both of his. Just like that— immediate, like he's been meaning to since he left this morning. His hands are always warm, even in winter. Some artifact of what his body used to be capable of, some residual heat that stayed after everything else was surrendered. You have never once taken it for granted.

"You have pine needles in your hair," you tell him.

He reaches up and finds one, pulling it free with an expression of mild affront. 

"There was this branch that came out of nowhere."

"They tend to do that."

He sets the pine needle on the table with great dignity and you bite back a smile, and he watches you do it with those hazel eyes that have been watching you for a decade— from training yards at the Survey Corps to across the ruins of a world that kept trying to make sure you'd never sit at a quiet table together like this. His thumb traces slow arcs across your knuckles.

"I wasn't gone long," he says, softly, and it's not quite a question.

"An hour," you correct him.

"Was it—" He stops, before looking carefully at you, almost worried. "Are you alright?"

And there it is. The thing underneath the ordinary morning, the thing that lives in him now and probably always will. The fear that he'll come back and something will have changed. That the life he's built here—quietly, carefully, with his hands—will have turned out to be the kind of thing he only gets to have for a little while. You turn your hand over so your fingers can lace through his.

"I'm perfect," you assure him. "I just like it better when you're here."

The exhale he lets out is slow and even, but you feel the tension leave his shoulders. His grip on your hand tightens slightly. There it is— that undoing. The specific relief of being told, again, that he gets to stay.

He asks if you want to walk after breakfast, and you do. The frost crunches and the pines stand very still and Reiner's arm settles around your shoulders the way it always does when he's stopped thinking and just acted, and you lean into the solid warmth of him.

"Do you ever think about what it would have been like?" you ask. "If we'd said it sooner– that we loved each other?" He's quiet long enough that you know he's actually considering it.

"Yes," he says. "I used to think about it a lot." A pause. "But less now."

"What changed?"

The trees move slightly overhead, soft and dry.

"It brought me here," he says simply. "All of it, every wrong turn I took— it brought me to you."

You look up at him. At his pale lashes in the sunlight, the profile of a man who spent years convinced he didn't deserve to survive and has been quietly, incrementally, learning to be wrong about that.

"That might be the most optimistic thing you've ever said."

"Don't tell anyone."

You don't say anything, just press closer into his side, and his arm tightens around you as if to say— there you are, don't move—and you walk the rest of the path in the good silence you've built together, the kind that doesn't need filling.

By midday the frost is gone and the light has gone pale gold and you're back at the table with a cup of tea and his coffee—and you're trying to read a book quietly. Reiner is watching you again across the rim of his cup with that expression you've stopped pretending not to notice.

"You're staring," you say. 

"I'm looking at you."

"What's the difference?"

"Staring implies I shouldn't be."

You set your book down. He says it so simply, so completely without shame. Reiner Braun who spent the better part of a decade folding himself in half to take up less space, to want less, to need less— sitting here in the home he built with you looking at you like you're the best thing that ever happened to a life. You're so proud of him for that, but you don't say it. "Come here," you say instead.

He's on his feet before you've finished the sentence, rounding the table, and when you push your chair back he steps into the space like he was always meant to fill it. You stand and his hands find your waist and he pulls you in with that particular certainty— not desperate, not clumsy, just sure, like there is no version of this moment where he hesitates.

"Hi," you say softly, hands resting on his chest.

"Hi." His forehead comes down to rest against yours. That long exhale— the one that means he's setting something down. His arms tighten around you and you feel the full weight of his relief, that thing he carries for you, the gratitude that never quite resolves because it has nowhere to go except here, into this— into holding on.

"I keep thinking," he says quietly, against your hair, "about how many times it almost didn't happen."

"Reiner—"

"I know." His arms tighten. "I know–I'm not stuck in it. I just—" A pause. "I need you to know that I know how lucky I am. Every day. I know."

You pull back just enough to look at him. His eyes are very serious and steady, the way they get when he's saying something he's been sitting with for a while. There are faint lines at the corners now that weren't there when you met him, and a life written plainly on his face— and you love every year of it. Every hard-won line he had gotten. 

"You're my husband," you say. "You're allowed to just be here without earning it."

His throat moves. Something shifts in his expression, that specific undoing. "I'm working on realising that," he says.

"I know you are."

A quiet settles between you—the good kind, the kind your silences are almost always made of now as his hands move slowly up your back. His chin dips toward your shoulder and then, after a long moment, he speaks again, his voice lower than before. Careful in a different way.

"I've been thinking about something else, too."

You wait. You've learned to wait for him—to leave the space open and let him find his way to the thing he actually means. "A baby," he says. Just like that. Plainly, the way he says things when he's been holding them long enough that there's no more room for circling. His arms don't loosen—if anything, they pull you closer, like the admission has made him need the anchor. "I want— I keep thinking about it, and I can't stop, and I know it's—" His voice drops. "I need that. With you….I think I've needed it for a while."

You go very still, not out of shock— you've seen it, the way his eyes follow parents with their children in the market town, the softness that crosses his face and then disappears like he caught himself wanting something he hadn't cleared yet. You couldn't deny you had considered you and Reiner having children— the thought did cross your mind quite frequently. You pulled back far enough to look at his face properly— he looked terrified, but he also looked hopeful. He looks like a man holding something breakable with hands that spent too many years breaking things, hardly daring to believe they've been given this.

"Reiner." You bring your hand up to his jaw and feel him lean into it immediately, that helpless gravitating toward you he can never quite help. His eyes don’t meet yours, darting away to look at the ground. "Hey. Look at me." He does immediately, his eyes softening. "…..Yes," you say simply.

He blinks. "Yeah?"

"Yes." You smooth your thumb along his cheekbone, the same way he does to you. "Let's do this. Let's have a baby."

The breath that leaves him is shaky in a way you almost never hear from him, and then his forehead drops back to yours and he just stays there for a moment, eyes closed, undone in the quietest possible way. His hands spread wide and warm against your back like he wants to make sure all of you is real.

"Okay," he breathes. Then, softer: "Okay."

You tilt up and kiss him before he can say anything else— and it is deeper and slower and full of everything the word yes just opened up between you. Reiner's hand cradled the back of your head, his fingers tangling in your hair as he kissed you back with desperate, grateful tenderness, like a man drowning who'd just been thrown a lifeline. When you finally broke apart, his pupils were blown wide, the firelight swimming in their depths.

"Please..." he whispered, his voice cracking. "Let me show you how much I need this.…how much I need you." His fingers trembled as they fumbled with the buttons of your shirt, his usual practiced ease completely undone by the shaking of his hands. The fabric parted, and cool air washed over your exposed breasts, making your nipples pebble instantly. Reiner's gaze was raw and needy as he looked at you, his thumbs brushing over the hardened peaks.

"God, you're perfect," he breathed, lowering his head. His warm breath ghosted across your skin before his lips closed around one nipple. You gasped, your fingers digging into his shoulders as he suckled gently at first, then with increasing desperation. Whimpers vibrated against your breast as his other hand toyed with your other nipple, rolling and pinching until you were arching against him, gasping and begging for more. 

"Reiner," you moaned, your head falling back as pleasure washed through you in hot waves.

He switched sides, his tongue swirling patterns around your sensitive flesh while his free hand slid down your stomach. The tea and coffee cups rattled as his elbow knocked against them, dark liquid spilling across the wooden table, but Reiner didn't even notice or if he did he didn't care. His focus was entirely on you, on getting you naked and filling you full of him. His fingers dipped beneath your skirt, and you lifted your hips to help him tug it down along with your underwear.

The rough wood of the table pressed into your bare back as he laid you down onto it, but you barely registered the discomfort. All you could focus on was the heat building between your legs, the wetness gathering as his fingers found their way between your thighs.

"You're so wet for me," he groaned, his voice thick with awe and need. "So fucking ready for me."

His fingers explored your folds, spreading your wetness before one, then two slid inside you slowly. "Please," you begged, bucking against his hand as your inner muscles clamped around his fingers. He began pumping them in and out, his thumb circling your clit in time with his thrusts as he continued his assault on your breasts. 

"Need to be inside you," he whimpered against your breast. "Please... let me fuck you here, on this table... let me put my baby inside you..." His fingers curled inside you, pressing against that spot that made your vision blur. "Want to see you swollen with my child... want everyone to know you're carrying my baby..."

The minute you nodded at him Reiner shed his clothes with frantic movements, his body a familiar landscape of scars and muscle that made your mouth water. His cock sprang free, thick and already leaking precum, the head flushed an angry red as he pulled you to the edge of the table, positioning himself between your spread thighs.

"Please... Can I.." he begged, his voice breaking.

You nodded desperately, reaching between your bodies to guide him to your entrance. He slid in with a desperate groan, stretching you open inch by delicious inch. "Fuck...so perfect..." he panted against your neck.

He started thrusting immediately, hard and deep into you, setting a frantic pace that had the table creaking beneath you— your tea cup spilling over and smashing to the ground. Neither of you moved as Reiner continued. "Gonna fill you up... gonna make you mine forever..." he growled, his hips snapping against yours. The spilled drink on the floor seeped into your clothes and stained the table as you dug your nails into Reiner’s arms, hard enough to leave crescent shaped marks.

"Want to see you pregnant," he panted, his voice ragged with emotion. "Want everyone to know you're carrying my child..." His hands gripped your hips hard enough to bruise as he drove into you again and again, the table moving across the floor the harsher he thrusted. 

Your orgasm built rapidly, a tight coil in your belly wound by his desperate words and the relentless drag of his cock against your inner walls. "Reiner," you gasped. "I—I'm close."

His thumb found your clit, rubbing tight circles that had you seeing stars. "Cum for me... cum on my cock... please..." he begged, his thrusts becoming erratic. "Fuck, fuck, fuck...gonna get you pregnant ..." That command from him did it— your orgasm crashing over you, waves of pleasure so intense they left you shaking on the table. Your pussy spasmed around him, milking his cock as he continued to thrust into you from below.

"Take it...I’m gonna fill you up—fuck” he growled lowly as he buried himself deep with a final thrust, his cock pulsing as he spilled into you. You could feel the warmth flooding your pussy, painting your insides with his cum. He collapsed against you, his face buried in your neck as he shook with the force of his release, low whimpers escaping his lips.

For a long moment, you stayed joined like that, his softening cock still inside you as you both caught your breath. The fire crackled softly, casting a warm glow over your tangled limbs and the mess of spilled drinks across the table and floor.  "I love you," he whispered against your skin. "So much..."

You kissed his forehead, your fingers stroking through his sweat-damp hair. "I love you too."

As he pulled out, his cum immediately started leaking down your thighs. He watched with dark, intense eyes, his fingers coming up to trace through the mess before pushing it back inside you. "Don't want to waste any," he whimpered softly. "Need to make sure it takes..."

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[adejayy]

Yupp, thats what I’m talkin bouttT

[animentality]

[warmfrequency]

well fed

simon ‘ghost’ riley x mantis!hybrid!reader

summary: simon takes some precautions when he learns mantises have cannibalistic tendencies

cw: mdni, smut, piv, slight predator/prey if you squint, many liberties taken and likely inaccuracies about the female praying mantis (1.7k)

Simon first saw you at a handover briefing, half the base packed into a room that smelled like instant coffee and damp boots, and you were three seats down with your chin propped on one hand, listening. That was all. But he’s spent his entire adult life reading rooms for the thing that's wrong, and his eye snagged on you and would not come loose, and he couldn't for the life of him say why. Big eyes. Too big, maybe, though he didn't let himself ruminate on it. Arms a touch too long where they folded on the table, the line of them not adding up quite right against the rest of you. 

He did not look away like he should’ve. A normal man sees a pretty stranger and has the decency to glance off; Simon’s known for quite some time he was not a normal man – and he fixed on you through the whole briefing… and out into the corridor… and across the next nine days, with the forbearing, unblinking attention of a lion in tall grass. He learned your shift pattern before he learned your name. He could have told you, by the end of that first week, the exact rhythm of your walk from sound alone. He knew which mug was yours, and what the base note of your perfume was: myrrh.

He didn’t find any of this strange – Simon's baseline is strange. The wanting came in effortless and stupid, the way it does for everyone else in the world — he simply routed it through the only instincts he's got, which are a predator's.

It was Soap who ruined him.

Soap caught him at it in the mess — Simon parked against the far wall with a coffee going cold in his fist, focused on watching you eat. Soap followed the line of his stare, found you at the end of it, and grinned like the cheshire cat. "Oh, her," he said, delighted. "Aye, she's one of the hybrids. Mantis." He said it the way you'd mention someone supported the wrong football team. Then, because Soap cannot leave fuck-all alone, he leaned in and cheerfully added, "You'll want to be careful there, big man. Mantis females, ehh— they eat the fella after. During, sometimes. Bite the head clean off and finish the job. Read it somewhere once." He clapped Simon on the shoulder. "Best of luck."

And then he left. Wandered off to find some grub, whistling.

Simon stood very still against the wall, then. Felt the information go into him like a splinter you can't find to pull.

Bite the head clean off?

He looked back at you across the room — you'd tilted your head to listen to the person beside you, smooth and too far round, big dark eyes catching the strip-lights — and the want did not go anywhere, that was the horror of it, the want stayed exactly where it was and the new knowledge simply moved in alongside it and started rearranging some things.

He wanted you.

And being Simon, he did not do the sensible thing and walk away. He did the research.

The thing about dating Simon, you would learn, is that you have never in your life been so well fed.

You understood it maybe six weeks in, when you opened his fridge expecting the usual bachelor wasteland and found it stocked like he was provisioning for a siege. Yogurt. Three kinds of cheese. A bowl of cut fruit under cling film. A tin labeled ‘FROG LEGS’.

It was risk management dressed up as romance, which in fairness is mostly what romance is… Isn’t it?

He'd taken Soap's splinter and built a guideline out of it. He knows — he has read, in studies he will deny owning — that the trouble starts when you're hungry. Or stressed. Or both, which is the cocktail that turns a nice evening into something a coroner writes up.

He has constructed an entire relationship on the single principle of never ever letting you get to that point.

You'll be reaching for him on the sofa, hand sliding up under his shirt, mouth at the hot pulse in his throat, and he'll go rigid and say, in that flat  rumble of his, "When d’you last eat?"

"Simon," you sigh,

"Tha’ s’not an answer, love."

"I'm not hungry–,"

"I saw you skipped lunch."

He watches a lot. He watches you eat with open, naked satisfaction, and the first time you caught him at it you'd put your fork down and said ‘did you want some?’ and he'd said ‘no, you have it,’ and meant it with his whole strange heart.

The man can produce a plate of food out of thin air, and there's no point arguing, because he'll simply outlast you, planted there immovable as a boulder until you've eaten enough that his shoulders come down from around his ears.

He's never once said the word out loud. Cannibalism. He skirts it like a tripwire. Early on you'd tilted your head at him a degree too sharp while he was shaving — honestly just affection — and caught his eye in the mirror, and he'd nicked his own jaw and not flinched at the blood at all, only at you. Razor frozen halfway up his neck. The muscle in his cheek jumped and his pupils shrank to pinpricks and you'd thought: Oh. He's frightened. Big, terrible Ghost, who garrotes men in their sleep, scared witless by the tilt of your head. 

You felt bad for almost a full minute.

You have, in fairness, never confirmed or denied a thing. When he goes still and careful you let him. It's the most romantic thing anyone's ever done for you, this grim devout terror, and you're not about to spoil it with reassurance.

Soap, for the record, has really no idea what he started. He'll see the two of you in the canteen, Simon angling the better-fed plate toward you and think, good lad, taking my advice.

Simon had you down — the eyes that hold on him no matter where he moves, that dark point in each one that stays, tracking, while the rest of your face goes soft and human; the too-far head-turn; the way your hands fold up against your chest when you go truly still, wrists tucked, prayer-shaped.

He did not account for the wings.

You hadn't told him because you genuinely forget they're there — folded flat along your spine, a faint seam under the skin, a sheen across your shoulder blades he'd assumed was an old scar. You can't really fly. You never thought to mention them. Plus, it seemed like he knew plenty.

But now he's got you under him with your shirt long gone and his mouth working at the junction of your neck and collar, and there's none of the careful bracing tonight — he fed you an hour ago, he made sure, he watched you finish — and now there's just his weight and his hands and the husky sounds he makes against your skin. One big palm splays flat on your stomach and slides lower, fingers finding you already slick, stroking slow over your clit until your hips chase it on their own. "So soft, love," he murmurs, like he's not shaking. He gets two fingers inside you, curls them, and your whole spine bows off the mattress.

That's when they snap open.

In the dark it's monstrous; a sudden unfolding of something unknown and far too wide for the room, fanning from your back in a wash of color he can't quite name in the half-light. A deep iridescent purple shot through with flares of red, eyespots blooming towards the tips. One instant flat girl, the next a thing twice your size.

Simon goes to stone, shuts down, every system offline. This is it, he thinks — this is the bit where she takes the head. His fingers still inside you. He holds his breath, bracing.

You make a small strangled noise and pull them back down.

They fold away almost as fast as they came, gone into brackets around your spine, and you throw an arm over your face and refuse to look at him. Your ears are hot. He can feel it where his jaw rests on your cheek.

"Sorry," you whisper. "That just— happens sometimes. It– it doesn't mean anything bad, I swear… just… you… just feels good, is all.”

The single most dangerous woman he's ever shared a bed with has flashed her startle display because he got two fingers knuckle deep inside of her, and now she's mortified, hiding her face like a kid. Four months of Soap's splinter works its way loose, pushing out of his muscle, and falls out somewhere in the dark, and Simon — who has never in his life felt safe and certainly never expected to find it here, of all the deranged places — starts to come softly apart with relief. He pulls himself back to look at you.

"Le’me see you," he says, and peels your arm off your face, and when you do his eyes are doing something you've never seen on him: wet at the edges, wide open, not afraid of you at all. 

Worse than not afraid. Pleased with himself.

He leans back down and kisses you hard, pushing his fingers deeper and says it against your mouth because he’s got nothing left to lose: "Do it again. Want to watch."

So you do. 

And Simon fucks you slow and then not slow at all, and every time he tips you over they snap wide behind you and fill the room with color, and by the third time he's stopped flinching and started hunting it, smug, learning the exact angle that does it. When he finally comes it's with his forehead pressed to yours and your wings open around the both of you like something out of a church window, and he's saying something into your jaw, rough and ruined, that takes you a second to parse as all mine, there she is, there's my good girl.

Afterward you bite him. Just a little on the shoulder, just to be a menace, licking the taste of iron from your canine. 

He doesn't even twitch. "Knew it," he says into your hair, wrecked and grinning where you can't see. "Tellin’ Soap he was right."

“Who’s Soap?”

[adejayy]

yummyyy

[ballard96]

[shotmrmiller]

The first thing you notice is the smell.

The cold tang of metal; old pipes running overhead, faintly sweating in the dark, leaving the air tasting like a coin pressed on the tongue. Water drips from them in slow, uneven ticks. The concrete walls give off a sour, mineral scent that clings to your clothes, your skin, the inside of your nose.

You can feel its chill even at a distance.

The corridor beneath base isn't on any blueprint. You're almost certain of that. The blackout hit twenty minutes ago, throwing half the compound into emergency lighting, and you'd taken the wrong turn looking for a backup auxiliary generator just in case that failed in medical, too.

Down here, it's nothing but a maze of concrete veins and rusted pipes.

And then you see a light. Dim. Jaundiced. It flickers from behind a door left slightly ajar.

You think: maintenance worker. You think: maybe someone else got lost, too.

You absolutely do not think: Ghost.

Until you pull the door open.

The room is small. Windowless. Hidden. A tiny bunker nested inside another bunker, like a pearl in an oyster. Shelves line the walls from floor to ceiling, sagging under the weight of things that don't really belong there. Weapons. Tac gear. And then... other things. Stranger. Human.

A wristwatch with a spider-web crack on the glass. A cigarette box with a corner crushed inward. Dog tags with the chain snapped. A deck of cards stiff with old blood, tucked inside wax paper so they won't rot. And there are photographs too, warped by water damage, every face blurred or gouged out entirely.

And there, sitting on an old crate in the center of it, is Simon Riley.

Unmasked.

You've barely seen his face, and it already feels like you've seen too much.

The sickly light above drags across him in pieces— sharp cheekbones, sunken, exhausted eyes, a nose crooked from breaks that no one tended. He looks so much older than he sounds. His broad shoulders are hunched forward, forearms on his thighs, gloved fingers flicking open the lid of an old lighter.

Click. Click. Click.

The sound ricochets strangely around the cramped room.

Ghost doesn't move for the mask beside him, doesn't curse, doesn't even look surprised. He just lifts his eyes toward you slowly, and the weight of that gaze pins you in the doorway harder than any weapon could.

"You lost?"

The question comes out calm enough to make your stomach drop straight to the floor. You glance down at your boots because looking directly at him feels like reading someone else's obituary over their shoulder.

A dozen things suddenly crowd your throat, and all of them true. I was looking for a generator for the med wing. I didn't know anyone was down here. I didn't know anyone could come down here. But your tongue sticks uselessly to the roof of your mouth, like language itself has abandoned you in the scarred face of this man.

"I didn't— I, uh, yeah." Pathetic.

(Ghost doesn't seem like the type who wants anything more than the bare‑bones answer anyway.)

"Mm."

Click.

You should leave. Every instinct hammered into you by years around dangerous men tells you that much. You should swear silence, pretending you never saw the shape of his lips in this light. But your attention catches on a simple silver band. It's scratched to hell, and there are initials carved inside.

T.R.

Your mouth moves before your better sense can catch it. "Whose was that?"

Ghost's thumb stills. "A dead man." Flat. Immediate. Final.

(You can't tell whether he means the ring or the lighter or every object in this room at once. Maybe he can't either.)

You swallow hard, mouth dry. "Sorry."

Click. The lighter snaps open, but the flame doesn't come.

"Should be." There's something wrong with the way he says it. It doesn't sound like grief, exactly. Grief is softer than this.

You don't know what compels you to step inside fully. Maybe it's morbid curiosity. Maybe explicit stupidity. Maybe it's because if you leave now, you'll never see this version of Simon Riley again.

The door shuts behind you with a muted clang, sealing the air in, sealing you in. The room immediately shrinks around it. It isn't large to begin with, barely bigger than a storage unit, but with Ghost inside it becomes suffocating.

"Did he serve?"

Ghost's thumb drags slowly over the ridged wheel of the lighter. Once. Twice.

"No."

Your eyes flick unwillingly around the room again. The objects make more sense now in the worst possible way. They're relics. Remains. Every item preserved like an insect trapped in amber.

Ghost notices where your attention goes because men like him miss nothing. "You ask everyone this many questions?" he murmurs.

"No."

One corner of his mouth twitches. "Smartest thing you've said since opening that door."

Heat crawls up the back of your neck. Embarrassment. Shame. Both tangled together so tightly you can't separate them anymore. You take half a step backward. "I should go."

"Probably."

But he doesn't tell you to leave, and if Ghost didn't want to be found, you would've never made it this far.

You glance at the walls again. "Do you keep all these to remember them? Why?"

Why keep pain? Why keep so much of it? Why hoard grief like a magpie with its sharpest baubles?

Click. Click. Click.

It's silent. Then: "Someone should."

You crouch carefully beside the shelves. Up close, the objects feel even worse somehow. They're gruesome in their normality.

A bent keyring with a faded supermarket rewards tag still attached. A cheap pen chewed along the cap. A cracked pair of sunglasses wrapped in cloth to keep the lenses from scratching further. Tiny pieces of lives, stripped of context, reduced to artifacts by time and violence.

Your eyes catch on a wristwatch stopped permanently at 2:17.

You imagine someone lending out that pen and asking for it back. Someone tugging on those sunglasses under summer heat. Someone flicking ash from cigarettes with living hands.

Now all that's left of them fits on a shelf.

A shiver crawls beneath your skin.

Ghost watches you from the crate without moving. Without the mask, there's nowhere for your eyes to hide from the damage time has done to him. His skin is weathered, roughened, uneven in tone; patches of old bruising that never quite faded and tiny, pitted marks from shrapnel or gravel or god knows what else. He has a scar that runs along the corner of his mouth, tugging it into a half‑sneer even when he's expressionless.

He is not handsome. And you don't think he's meant to be.

"Most people disappear twice," he says after a while. His voice is low enough that the pipes overhead nearly swallow it. "First time's when their heart stops."

Click.

"The second's when nobody says their name anymore."

The lighter snaps shut.

You look at the silver ring again. "Were you close?"

Ghost's gaze rises.

It washes over you again— that awful sensation of standing too close to something built to kill. Predators tend to go still before they decide whether you're a threat or a meal.

The room seems to contract around the weight of his attention. Then his eyes drift away again; a mercy.

"He talked too bloody much," Ghost mutters.

You blink. It's so unexpectedly human an answer that it nearly knocks the breath from you. A faint scrape sounds as he leans back slightly against the wall behind the crate.

" 'ated tea." His thumb drags once more across the lighter wheel. "Burned every meal he touched. Thought he could sing."

Another click of the lighter.

"Couldn't." A laugh nearly escapes you before you catch it. It still curls warm in your chest anyway, small and startled and terribly out of place down here among the ghosts.

Your gaze catches briefly on the bare skin of his face again before darting away almost painfully fast. You know, distantly, that you should be afraid of being caught staring. But there's another feeling underneath it too. Something terrible and magnetic.

Ghost's hand closes suddenly around the lighter, swallowing it entirely inside his fist. "Seen enough?"

You nod too quickly. "I won't tell anyone."

"I know." Your skin goes cold before your mind even parses the meaning. The weight of his stare nearly locks your knees. Then his eyes flick once toward the doorway behind you.

"Generator room's two corridors east," he says. "Take the left staircase. Panel sticks sometimes. Kick it before you flip the switch."

Your mouth parts slightly. He knew why you were down here. Maybe he'd known from the second you opened the door.

"Right," you manage softly. "Thanks."

You stand slowly, pins and needles stabbing through your legs, and reach for the door. The concrete floor feels uneven beneath your feet. Damp cold curls around your ankles.

Your hand finds the handle... and then you stop. You don't know why. You don't know what you're waiting for. Permission? Forgiveness? A warning?

Ghost doesn't give you any of those. He just says, "Close the door behind you."

---

After that night, Ghost, who used to vanish the second a room got too full, who could slip between shadows like he was made of them, starts turning up everywhere. And for a man his size, it's wrong how no one else notices. Men twice as jumpy as you walk straight past him like he's not even there.

You do, though.

You're hunched over late‑night paperwork in medical, and the letters start to blur together until your eyes burn. You look up to blink the sting away and he's there.

(In the harsh light, he looks less like a man and more like the idea of one. Or maybe you're just tired.)

You take the stairwell because the elevator's been temperamental all week. Halfway down, thinking only of coffee and sleep, you round the landing and nearly collide with him. You mutter something, an apology, maybe. He says nothing.

You're outside, late, the air cold enough to sting your lungs. You step out to breathe, to be alone for thirty seconds. You're alone for three.

A shape detaches from the dark behind the storage crates.

You mention during lunch— not even to him, you don't think he'd been anywhere nearby— that the mess stopped stocking honey packets again. Mostly, you complain because the tea tastes like boiled dishwater without it.

That evening, there are six honey packets lined up neatly beside your med bag.

Your field knife vanishes from your kit a few days later. You spend an entire shift irritated and muttering under your breath about theft until it reappears tucked back where it belongs, cleaner and so sharp it glides through gauze as if it were water.

At first, you convince yourself it's just Ghost's version of care. It's stilted. Awkward. A little unsettling, maybe, but harmless enough.

But then the others start helping.

You mention offhand that your bunk heater's been malfunctioning for weeks. The next day, Gaz appears in your doorway carrying an entirely new unit under one arm. "Simon said yours sounded dodgy," he says casually, crouching to install it before you can even answer.

You stare. "Ghost told you?"

Gaz glances up briefly, screwdriver between his teeth. "Mm." Like that explains literally anything. And maybe to them, it does.

A week later, you find a thermos sitting on your desk. It's not new, nor standard issue. It's an old, battered steel thing with a dent in the side and a bit of black tape wrapped around the lid to keep it from rattling. It's warm when you touch it.

You unscrew the top. Inside it is tea. It's not good tea. Not even close. It's strong enough to strip paint and smells faintly like someone boiled it in a canteen over a camp stove.

But there's honey in it. Your throat goes tight.

You carry the thermos with you to the rec room, still not sure what to do with it. Soap spots it instantly. "Och, ye found it then?" he says, eyebrows lifting.

You stop dead. "You know whose it is?"

He looks baffled by the question. "Aye?"

"And... you knew someone went into my office?" Your voice pitches higher than you mean it to. There's personal information in there. Medical files. Notes. pieces of people's lives sealed under law and ethics. HIPAA would have you by the hair.

Soap snorts into his coffee. "Someone?" he repeats. "Bonnie, that's Simon."

You stare at him, Soap stares back, and that's the end of the conversation, apparently.

Then, it's Price. One evening during a lull between briefings, you're standing in the doorway of his office with a mug of tea you don't remember making. The steam curls weakly in the dim light, and Price glances at it, at you, before returning to the report in front of him. "Simon tell you to drink more water too?"

You blink. "What?"

He flips another page, pen tapping at the margin. "Been on me for weeks about it." There's a faint twitch at the corner of his mouth, not quite a smile, but close enough to count. Like this is funny to him.

"Sir," you say carefully, "are you aware Ghost has been—"

You trail off because suddenly you don't know what word fits. Watching sounds paranoid. Following sounds worse. Collecting feels somehow closest, which is an insane thought to have about another human being.

Price supplies it for you without looking up. "Hoverin'."

"…Yes."

"Hm."

Somewhere down the corridor Soap bursts into loud laughter before being shushed by Gaz. Price takes a slow sip from his mug before adding, almost absently, "Has Simon ever made you feel unsafe?"

The answer should be yes. Every metric of common sense says yes.

Objectively speaking, Simon Riley is terrifying. He moves like something built for violence first and humanity second. He appears soundlessly in doorways. Watches you with unnerving intensity. Notices things.

The things he does are strange. Undeniably strange. But for all the watching, Simon Riley is almost painfully careful with you. He doesn't corner you, doesn't demand your attention. Half the time he leaves before you can even thank him for whatever odd little act of care he's committed this week.

Your silence answers for you.

Price looks at you and nods once, satisfied. "There y'are then."

He returns to his report. Matter settled, then.

----

The mission in Moldova goes to shit fast. Too fast. The intel is compromised, the extraction blown, and gunfire erupts before anyone can reposition behind cover.

You aren't supposed to be at the front line to begin with. You're support: field medical, stabilization, trauma response. You're the medic they bring when intelligence suggests possible civilian casualties or prolonged extraction windows. Your job is to keep people alive long enough to make it home, not trade fire in the middle of kill zones.

And the safehouse was supposed to be clear.

You remember shouting, smoke, your ears ringing. Simon's voice in your comms suddenly turning sharp— Medic, move. Now— and then pain. A bullet tears through your shoulder and the world folds sideways. You hit the ground hard enough to black out for a second or two at a time. Shapes blur around you. Someone is screaming. Maybe you.

One second you're alone on the ground. The next Ghost's on his knees in front of you, his gloves slick red as he presses them against your wound. Pain detonates white-hot behind your eyes.

"Stay awake."

You've heard him interrogate men in a softer voice.

Gunfire erupts again somewhere behind him. Ghost doesn't even look back. His body shields yours automatically, broad enough to blot out everything— light, movement, danger— while bullets punch splinters from the wall nearby.

Until all you can see is the skull on his mask and the rise and fall of his chest.

----

Recovery takes weeks. Simon becomes unbearable during them. He sleeps outside medical twice before Price threatens disciplinary action. You wake one night to find him standing motionless in the doorway at 04:13, just watching your chest rise and fall.

He doesn't even pretend he wasn't caught. Just leaves.

---

You return to the hidden room alone six weeks later. The light is still a sickly yellow. Lines reduced to residue still line the shelves. But something's changed.

There's space now, a section cleared carefully among the clutter. And sitting there is a little polaroid you'd forgotten existed entirely.

Soap had taken it weeks ago in the mess after somebody smuggled in terrible instant film cartridges that developed blotchy and grainy. Youd forgotten the picture existed almost immediately afterward. In it, you're laughing, head turned halfway away from the lens, grin wide enough to make your eyes crinkle, shoulders blurred slightly from movement because you must've been laughing hard enough not to stay still.

Your stomach bottoms out. It feels like you're looking at a grave that's waiting for a body. The door opens behind you with a low groan. Heavy boots scrape once. The silence that follows is thick enough to chew on.

You swallow hard. "Why do you have this?" Your fingers hover near the photo but don't touch it. Beneath the white border, written in messy black marker, is a date. The date you were shot.

Did he think—? You turn to look at him. Ghost stands in the doorway, shoulders filling the frame, the skull of his mask gleaming pale.

"Did you put this up because you thought I was dying?"

For the first time since you met him, Ghost looks faintly offended, like you've questioned his competence. "No," he says immediately. "It was only a flesh wound."

Simon shifts his weight from one foot to the other, massive arms folding across his chest. "You were alert during extraction," he continues, matter-of-fact. "Bleeding slowed after pressure was applied. Entry and exit wound. Missed anything important by a fair margin."

Then, dry enough to almost sound irritated: "Not everyone falls apart after getting shot."

You stare at him. At the utter sincerity of it. At the absurdity of hearing only a flesh wound, as if bullet holes were only inconvenient weather. "Then why put it here?"

Simon's eyes settle on the Polaroid. "I put it because you looked happy."

It's sweet. Awkward. Deeply concerning. But sweet.

--

And then, Prague. Prague is wet and fast and mean. It's the kind of violence that happens in cramped stairwells where gunfire deafens instantly and men die choking around blood that steams in winter air.

Ghost kills three people in under thirty seconds. A throat crushed wetly by one gloved hand. A knife disappearing under a jawline. A gunshot so close the spray hits the concrete hot.

You spend extraction with blood soaking through your gloves while stabilizing a wound in the extraction van. Diesel fumes. Rain hammering the roof. Soap swearing through a morphine haze. By the time, you get back to the safehouse, your head feels packed with cotton.

The med bay lights buzz softly overhead in soft white strips while rain rattles against the windows outside. Soap's already been discharged with stitches and complaints. Gaz disappeared an hour ago. Price is somewhere, buried in paperwork and classified reports.

Ghost is the last patient left. He sits on the edge of the examination table in silence while you cut through the ruined compression sleeve on his arm.

Blood slicks your fingers dark and tacky. "Hold still," you mutter.

"I am."

You peel fabric carefully away from the gouge carved along his bicep. It's not deep. Ugly, though. Angry. Your fingers brush the straps at his shoulders.

"Need the vest off." Ghost doesn't move. You glance up.

The black paint around the eyes of his mask makes his stare look excavated. Watching you with that unnerving, absolute focus he always has. (Soap would call it a sniper's focus.)

Finally, he gives a single, heavy nod. You start emptying it out first, because the vest is heavier than it looks.

Knife. Radio. Extra mags. Another knife. Another.

Everything comes out piece by piece beneath your hands, heavy with rainwater and gunpowder and the metallic stink of blood. And then something small slips free from an inner pocket and lands soundlessly on the floor.

Black fabric. Tiny. Folded.

Your stomach drops before your brain catches up. You know those. You know them because they're yours.

For a second, neither of you move. The room becomes hideously quiet. Your pulse pounds thickly at your throat. Ghost looks down at the underwear. Then slowly up at you.

There's no embarrassment in his eyes. No panic. Not even surprise.

"Simon." Your voice barely works.

His eyes cut briefly toward the door like he's checking whether anyone else saw. Then back to you. You wait for a joke. An excuse. Anything.

Instead, Ghost reaches down calmly, picks them up off the floor with two fingers, folds it once between his huge hands, and slides it back into the inner pocket of his vest.

"Your hands are cold. Stitch me up, and we'll get out of here, get you something dry to wear."

(And no. You can't wear those.)

[mimi-iscrazy]

Those fics where yn is with a mmc who is misogynistic is so nasty. Women die from these type of men daily, have their lived ruined cause of such mentality and you turn it into some fetish for your smut fanfics? Imagine all the women who died fighting for our rights only for yall to romanticising misogynistic men and enable their behaviours.

[adejayy]

Fic - Recommendation <3

First off ☝🏼😮‍💨 WoOW..

Secondly, how does this not have more traction/ likes, this piece of literature *chefs kiss* (no pun intended…)

Consistent, concise, so.. vivid. Perfect balance of tension/ horror, the flow of everything and the details (omg, clawing at the bars of my enclosuree!!) It felt like an actual lived experience, gollEee. I can go AwNnn but this was an amazing read in my humble and personal opinion 😩

GRAVEYARD SHIFT (TW! Dark ff, read them tags!)

[adejayy]

Fic - Recommendation <3

First account/ Fiction I went searching for with HASTE, having re-activated after a long break off socials!!

Ongoing fic, I just love the plot is all. Support the author! Amazing work she’s done :)

BLEEDING BLUE

(First proper post kinda nervy, lmk if I need any other tags)