whats everyones first video game (criteria can be whatever you want but im going for the first game i remember playing as a kid) mine's harvest moon friends of mineral town
Zeke Jaeger x Reader // follow #CHLZeke for updates // n.s.fw mdni
POV: second person, AFAB reader, feminine pronouns
Chapter tags: sex on the beach (sorta), angst
Chapter length: 2.7k
“The world’s end. It will come.”
You frown, but he says nothing more. He presses his hands around and around sand mounds.
“This is a strange dream,” you say, half-opening your palm to let the fistful of sand slide to your other hand.
Zeke shrugs. “A dream to you. To me, it’s already happened. To me, this is a memory.”
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Sleep tosses you violently upon its banks.
The first dream that takes form consists of shadows layering upon shadows, with some form in the middle you can’t quite make out. You’re reaching forward and only parting fog between your fingers which turn to mist at the hint of contact. The disorientation feels like a nightmare. You wake for a moment, Zeke’s back to you in the darkness, before you turn over and you fall back into that river of sleep. A second dream teases you, filled with sugar and foam and peaks of sweet whipped cream. Then it, too, slips away into the waters before you can let it take shape. The current of half-darkness brings you further and the night is dreamless for a while.
But a third dream emerges from the rippling waters. From the mud you come to shore. You’re walking, your hands visible at your sides when you look down, your feet now treading on dry sand. You look up and a silver aurora shreds the sky above you.
You look ahead, and the sands continue.
The dunes roll into each other as the soles of your feet pad across the texture. The grains of sand are cool. Your pace treads quickly with ease, your calves not begging to sink into the ground like with each step along a beach. No, not like a beach. The sand feels more like blades of soft grass that press gently to the soles of your feet and kiss your heels in stride. You could run.
So, you do, giving into the wild urge. You run along this grassless ocean towards a tree in the distance. Silk skirts billow across your knees with each leap closer to this tree. Silver, with forked branches so brilliantly woven they almost seem to stretch into the comet-streaked sky like veins. The desire to run burns in your bones, and you run onwards towards this majesty.
As your sprint continues, you feel as though you are being watched with ghostly eyes.
You only see her when you’re nearly there. In fact, you run past the girl, and your head turns to her. She, too, walks towards the tree, with laden arms. She follows you with that heaviness of watching. Her eyes are glass, and you shiver when her gaze turns away without further attention to you. She continues her lonesome pad across the dreamscape.
You slow, then, below the silver tree. Not quite a tree, but you can’t think of anything else to describe it. Your lungs heave with the physical discipline of needing to catch your breath before you realize that you aren’t tired. You circle what must be the trunk of the tree, looking up to the aurora beyond.
This feels less like a dream and more like a premonition; a vision that has yet to happen.
“But I’ve seen nothing like this is in Marley,” you say aloud.
“No. There is nothing like this in Marley.”
You make your way around the tree, and there he is. It’s Zeke, or it looks like Zeke. But this is a dream, and this is a dream Zeke, and he is almost aged to your eyes, by time, exhaustion, or distortion of the dream itself. His hair is shaggy, creeping over his ears and out of any disciplined cut from the military. Ragged silver threads into the gold of his beard, from his scalp. He sits cross-legged in the sand.
“Come, sit,” he says, and you walk to him.
He does not greet you with either affection or coldness. You kneel to face him in the sand, and follow his focused gaze. Between his knees, he forms sand between his fingers, his eyes staring down. He isn’t wearing glasses.
“What is this?” you say. “What are you doing?”
“Waiting,” Zeke says.
You raise your eyebrows and run your fingers along the sand. You gather it, almost mirroring his motions.
“I’ve been waiting,” Zeke sighs. “For the end to finally come. It isn’t what I wanted, how I thought it would be, but the end is surely coming.”
“The end?”
“The world’s end. It will come.”
You frown, but he says nothing more. He presses his hands around and around sand mounds.
“This is a strange dream,” you say, half-opening your palm to let the fistful of sand slide to your other hand.
Zeke shrugs. “A dream to you. To me, it’s already happened. To me, this is a memory.”
He circles his hands and pats down the tower of sand to firm shape.
“You’re going to wake up and tell me about your dream where we built sandcastles together. I remember you telling me about it. So, to me, this dream has already happened. Now, this is a memory.”
You frown in confusion, but he only raises his eyebrows placidly. Oh, how irritating. He’s a smug know-it-all in your dreams, too.
“Have I been in your dreams before?” Zeke asks.
“I don’t know. I don’t remember. I don’t always remember dreams.”
“You haven’t told me about any of your dreams before this one. You’re not going to remember most of this one, too. Just that we were sitting in the sand. And something about it is going to make you disagreeable.”
You plunge your hands into the sand. “You’re making me disagreeable right now,” you say without bite.
Zeke shakes his finger, as if admonishing a child. “Well, that’s why you’re going to wake up so sour,” he says squarely. “You’ll leave me no choice. I’m going to poke your ribs and make you laugh until you stop being so cross.”
“Don’t tickle me,” you say with familiarity, your shoulders immediately hunching into your spine as if to fend off an immediate attack.
“But I will. Because I did already.”
You exhale and glare at him, at an exasperated loss for words dangerously close to a giggle. He smiles that crooked grin, and that’s all you need to see him as your Zeke.
“Other things have already happened, too,” he says. “And things still to happen. I will continue to age here and wait for my brother, continue to sift the sand and wait for it to take shape.”
“Your brother?”
Zeke closes his eyes, and sighs, tired.
“You will see him, soon.”
You shake your head. “I didn’t know you had a brother.”
“Forgive me,” Zeke says, and his voice goes thin for a moment. He has to clear his throat. “It isn’t personal that you haven’t met. He doesn’t live here.”
He smiles then, and you understand the joke after a moment. It breaks through your confusion for a moment.
“Well, I assume he doesn’t live in Marley, either.”
“No,” Zeke says simply, and the droll touch fades with a sigh. He loses his smile. He turns his eyes down to the sand again. Then he looks up, and it aches, the way he looks at you. “I’ve missed you. I’ve really, really missed you.”
You laugh humorlessly and tilt your head, still perplexed. “Oh, yes? When is the last time you’ve seen me?”
Zeke opens his mouth, closes it, looks away. “I can’t tell you that. But it’s soon.”
The riddles are dizzying.
“Why can’t you tell me?” you insist. You tilt your head again. “You just said I won’t remember it.”
“I can’t do that to you, too.”
You grind your teeth. “You keep saying that. You won’t tell me anything. I- even today. You just won’t explain anything.”
“I can’t tell you,” Zeke says simply.
Can’t tell me what? You can only think of the only secret he’d told you he had. When he went to the Mid-East in the name of Paradis.
You reach for him, sudden, imploring. “You’re going to- leave me, soon?”
The words don’t sound real coming out of your mouth, because they do not make sense.
“But the war in the Mid-East is over,” you whisper. “Where could you go?”
Zeke’s hand turns. He’s hesitant at first, his fingers reaching to stroke against your skin as if you’ll skitter away like a deer at his touch. Your fingers knot in his. “There is always another battle.”
The movement of your bodies shifts the sand. It’s as fine as powdered bone.
“But then what is here?” you say. “What is my dream?”
Zeke leans to you. “Never mind it. If you must still believe this is a dream, then let me make it a sweet dream for us.”
He brings your joined hands to his mouth and kisses your knuckles. One by one, tender and lingering, like it’s the last he’ll taste of you. His lips are warm. Real. Firm. His beard brushes your skin.
It is the most tender you have ever seen him. Your chest aches with an unknown grief at his warmth.
“You feel real,” you whisper.
“I am. But not to you.”
His forehead presses to yours.
“I want to remember this,” you say. “I don’t want to forget any of you.”
“I will,” Zeke murmurs. “You won’t.”
Your throat hurts. You kiss him anyway.
It doesn’t start desperate. His lips part slowly, naturally. He’s done this before, and this is the kiss of your Zeke. But when he kisses again, and again, his reverence grows into something feverish. Your hands cup his face, the heels of your palms scraped by his beard. He sighs into you in gratitude for your touch.
Your knees crawl, and you’re over him. He lets you push him back into the sand, and you follow to straddle him as he lies beneath you.
His breath shudders through your name.
“I’m tired,” he whispers in a confession.
You trace your thumb along his lip, down to his chest, to silence and soothe him. His chest is bare; you cannot remember if he has always been bare here, or if his clothes have dissipated into the world of your dream. It doesn’t matter. Every bit of him is the truth beneath you. His chest is warm beneath your palms. His breath is hot where it ghosts on you.
“You can take my strength,” you say, and he nods with the gratitude of a parched man.
You lean down, and your mouths find each other again.
Zeke’s hands brace your hips, and skate upward. The silk skirts crossing your waist have melted away, his skin hot on your skin. He settles a moment between your breasts and rests his hand under your sternum. His thumb presses against the rock of your own heartbeat before continuing in restless motion to return to your waist, your hips. He moves his palms across your thighs, back up, across your back. He presses you lower down, as if pushing your breath into him. You follow the angle of his body, fingers threading through that hair with a length foreign to you. Your spine arches slightly to meet him.
He’s there, not inside you, but close.
His breath trembles where it hits your lips.
You raise your face with a moan, leaning up. You lift your hips, slip a hand to your tongue, before drawing it further south to guide him. You look down to Zeke and watch his searching gaze disappear below his heavy, sinking lid when the wetness from your mouth wraps around his cock. It’s a moment’s heavy pause before you guide him into you.
The moan is a shared sound into the starlit sky. You shudder to feel the way he opens you, loosens something like a stream being coaxed to widen into a river. You hold yourself over him and splay your palms on his chest. Zeke’s heartbeat is wild beneath your fingers.
“Ah,” you groan.
He’s so, so warm to the touch, and he gives that touch. He runs his fingers along your sides, locking his hands to your waist as your hips move and shift against the pull of gravity. Again, this hitched moment of pause crescendos slowly, slowly, to something more ravenous.
Zeke firms his grip, and begins to push you into him. You lean down.
“Kiss me,” he says in a rasp.
Your noses brush as you lean down, pushing into that heartbeat and keeping your hips dancing. He grabs his fingers down, a near-yell pushing at the back of your throat when that touch spreads you in a new ache. Zeke kisses your jaw, your cheek, your mouth again, finally. He touches you like he’s afraid he never will again.
And maybe he won’t.
“Please,” you breathe, and you don’t know what you beg for.
His mouth is fervent on yours. Your hands crawl, hunching over him. Your elbows are tucked, your bodies chest to chest. You twist your fingers in his hair and feel your cheeks wet with tears as you bring him close, closer.
He has the strength in his hips to thrust, now, and you are no longer controlling the rhythm but faltering into surrender as he drives it forward. He grunts from between clenched teeth, things that you forget as soon as he speaks them, and it makes your silent, hot tears run faster. The passion is primal, something terrifying and yet, quiet.
Zeke’s arms are locked around you.
You come, and your orgasm rolls deep like a wave. He follows you with a low, shuddering moan, with fingers clutching as he spills into you. He holds you so tightly it almost hurts. It hurts more when he finally lets go.
You lie against him after. The sand is cool beneath your knees, and even though your body is flushed, it does not stick to your skin. He wipes the tears from your eyelids with rough fingers, and then lowers his hand to draw circles on your spine, as if even without his mounds and towers, he must still keep his fingers active.
With your ear pressed on his chest, you can feel his heartbeat begin to slow. Your throat starts to feel tight, and you try to clear it with a humming sound.
“Are you alright?” he asks.
You don’t know what you mean to say. “I think so,” you say with another sniff. “I mean- yes. But this is somehow becoming a very sad dream.”
“Not a dream,” Zeke says, and he kisses the top of your head. “Don’t be sad.”
The sand sifts windlessly beneath you.
“I wanted to see you again,” he says. “I am glad it was like this.”
“You say this is a memory.”
Zeke blinks, a slow nod. “You will tell me very soon that you had this dream, what you remember of it.”
“Then, this is actually the present for you,” you say.
He looks at you with dull eyes. “To the extent that time has no meaning for me, yes. I have lived the past, the future.”
“So, do I see you again?” you say. “Will you see me again?”
Zeke averts his eyes for a moment, but when he speaks, he is sincere. “I don’t know. I don’t know all of where time will go.”
It sends a shiver down you. The sand is cold.
“What do you see?” Your voice is small.
“I hear it, in whispers,” Zeke whispers, and the sound in his voice is terrible. “He will speak to the Subjects of Ymir. You may find yourself back here, in another sort of dream. But I do not know what he will say.”
You find yourself shaking. A feeling has settled in your stomach, sickened with fear.
“But I have to tell you something, something I should have said, always. I l-“
“Wait, Zeke -”
“What?” he says.
His face is over yours.
“What? Are you awake?”
You jerk your chin up, and it’s morning. Zeke’s eyes are bleary, sleep pinching his eyelashes together, but he’s focused on you.
“You were shouting,” he says.
It’s a different man over you than the one who had been below. This Zeke’s hair is cropped shorter- wild from sleep, but a groomed shape below. He is bronze and morning sun. His muscles are lean and warm.
This is still your Zeke. This is your real Zeke. Right?
Was the other not also your real Zeke?
“I think had a dream about you,” you say, and as you try to describe it, you begin to feel it slipping frustratingly from your fingers like sand.
i'll defend fanfic for my whole life. like the joy it brings is genuinely transformative and indulgent in a way unique to the genre. it isn't meant for a market, it isn't meant to be sold or marketed. it is born out of such care and passion for a media that one must write and must share it, so other folks can enjoy it to. for no other reason than love and joy. do you know how special that is? especially in our current social and political climate.
