31F 📝 attempted writer 📝 #MDNI plz! #not even hot mess just mess #certified potty mouth #part sailor All over the Fandoms - current fixes COD, The Mandolorian & Baldur's Gate 3. Shoutouts to Merlin, Sherlock, Legend of Zelda, Avengers/MCU, Bleach, Star Wars, FE3H & more.
Hello! I'm Daisy! Welcome to my master list. It goes in order of shortest fics (Imagines & Drabbles) to my longest (My Continuing Series and Pending). Content warnings are in orange and any that are explicit are in red and labelled so, black is the general description of the fic and blue will be tropes.
Please read responsibly & mind the tags! Please MDNI!
I've done my best to label and warn for things but if you feel like I've missed anything let me know, I'm still learning!
Asks are Open & Welcome.
If you enjoyed reading and would like to send a tip they're much appreciated! 💛 My Ko-Fi Link 💛
Read here or on AO3! Note: Drabbles & Imagines are Tumblr Exclusive!
Because of AI scraping I've had to lock fics to registered users only - if you need/want an invite for an AO3 account DM or pop into my asks. 💛
Enjoy!
❤️Daisy
Drabbles / Imagines
General COD Men / Unspecified
HockeyAU - Team 141 - Reader/no pronouns x 141
Implied - GN Reader/no pronouns x ???
Implied 2 - GN Reader/no pronouns x ???
Open Up - GN Reader/No-pronouns
Foster Fail - GN Reader/No-pronouns for the Nameless COD Men challenge - Written to be Gaz but no name used
Simon 'Ghost' Riley
Just a Feeling - AFAB Pregnant!Reader
Within Something Stirs - GN/Femme Reader (use of babes by a friend)
Kyle 'Gaz' Garrick
Strange Gifts - GNReader/No-pronouns
Foster Fail - GN Reader/No-pronouns for the Nameless COD Men challenge - Written to be Gaz but no name used
John Price
Retired! Price - OCs no reader
Ficlets/OneShots
Taskforce 141
Team 141
2/4 fics complete
CW: Dark fics, non-con/dubcon theme. Tags on individual fics. Explicit 18+
Collection of fics for a taskforce 141 hockey AU with Goalie!Price, Enforcer!Simon, Winger!Soap, Center!Gaz.
Gender Neutral Reader x the 141
Not what was...
2/4 fics complete
CW: vary depending on fic, check individual tags
Explicit 18+
An Edwardian/Bridgerton-esque AU Oneshot Collection of fics for each man of the 141, can be read individually or as a series.
3/4 AFAB/Fem Reader 1/4 GN Reader
Yes Captain, Sir, ... Daddy?
Captain John Price
CW: Swearing, Panic Attack-ish Daddy Kink
You've messed up. Like immeasurably so. And now you have to tell Captain Price that, there's nothing you want less in the world.
Gender neutral reader x John Price No use of Y/NInspired by this post on Tumblr & originally reposted as a reblog.
Not what was sought
CW: Abuse, Alcohol abuse, mentions of suicide, depressive episodes / depressive adjacent, praise kink, explicit sex, pregnancy. EXPLICIT 18+
Not what was sought, but what was requisite.
Captain the Lord Johnathan Price, Viscount of Creden Hill is a consummate bachelor. He doesn't want to be on any dance cards. Hell, no one wants him on theirs. He's happy to sip his drink and drag Kyle and Johnny out of whatever mess they get into at these blasted things.
You, however, are in wont of a husband. Almost Definitely, desperately so.
It shall be an interesting season.
AFAB Reader (she/her pronouns) x John Price in an Edwardian/Bridgerton-esque AU, No Y/N, Slow burn, 17k+ words
Sergeant John 'Soap' MacTavish
The Out from Under You Collection
CW: AFAB Reader, explicit sex, public/semi-public sex, exhibitionism, sex toys, inappropriate use of hot tub jets, clothed sex, bad Scottish accents. Explicit 18+
For the Vacation Mode Challenge from @glitterypirateduck
Now do you really think you'd be able to look so bonnie and not have him chase you around the island? Silly thing you are. Better come to your senses quick, your arse looks fine as hell in that swimsuit but he's sure it'd look better under him.
Fem!(AFAB)Reader x John 'Soap' MacTavish vacay fic, no Y/N, smut with plot(ish)
Continuing Series
Beginning of the End
CW: Swearing, mentions of past abuse, implied SA, torture, canon typical violence, dub-con, corruption kink, dirty talk, praise kink, oral fixation, bondage, cock warming, daddy kink, exhibitionism, explicit sex, unprotected sex EXPLICIT 18+
You are wild honey, dark and sweet in their mouths. Poison, dripping down lacquered nails, seeping into their pores. The kick of liquor, intoxicating and breath-stealing. Death and shadows tangled in your fingers, hair, and past. Will the 141 cut themselves free of you and finally bury you for once? Or will they fall into your darkness?
ExShadow!Reader x The 141, Enemies to lovers, HoneyTrap!Reader, AFAB, (she/her pronouns), no Y/N
**Spoilers so beware!** Inspired by this post by @shmalk, it wormed it's way into my head and this hatched as a result.
Moonlit
CW: Canon typical violence, captivity/human trafficking, torture EXPLICIT 18+
In the darkness, something gathers; in the moonlight, something blooms. The 141 are sent to break up a human trafficking ring. The little rescue they bring back is full of surprises. Ripped from the world you know, you claw and drag your way through this new one to save the ones you know and love. Little do you know you'll be adding four more to the list of to-be-saved.
AFAB Reader x Poly!141, slow burn, no Y/N, (she/her) pronouns
Finished Series:
FFS Riley
CW: Swearing, Canon-typical Violence
The 141 have a rhythm, a beat. After working together for years they have worked out how to synchronize with each other, how to more than exist - to work as a team, a unit. Now there's two new members of their team, six new feet kicking their way to make their place in the 141. To say there's an adjustment period is understating it.
GenderNeutralReader Character in silly military domesticity with the 141. Loosely connected ficlets.
I am on my knees begging you to reblog this post and to stop reblogging the original ones I sent out yesterday. This is the complete account with all the most recent info; the other one is just sending people down senselessly panicked avenues that no longer lead anywhere.
IN SHORT
Cliff Weitzman, CEO of Speechify and (aspiring?) voice actor, used AI to scrape thousands of popular, finished works off AO3 to list them on his own for-profit website and in his attached app. He did this without getting any kind of permission from the authors of said work or informing AO3. Obviously.
When fandom at large was made aware of his theft and started pushing back, Weitzman issued a non-apology on the original social media posts—using
his dyslexia;
his intent to implement a tip-system for the plagiarized authors; and
a sudden willingness to take down the work of every author who saw my original social media posts and emailed him individually with a ‘valid’ claim,
as reasons we should allow him to continue monetizing fanwork for his own financial gain.
When we less-than-kindly refused, he took down his ‘apologies’ as well as his website (allegedly—it’s possible that our complaints to his web host, the deluge of emails he received or the unanticipated traffic brought it down, since there wasn’t any sort of official statement made about it), and when it came back up several hours later, all of the work formerly listed in the fan fiction category was no longer there.
THE TAKEAWAYS
1. Cliff Weitzman (aka Ofek Weitzman) is a scumbag with no qualms about taking fanwork without permission, feeding it to AI and monetizing it for his own financial gain;
2. Fandom can really get things done when it wants to, and
3. Our fanworks appear to be hidden, but they’re NOT DELETED from Weitzman’s servers, and independently published, original works are still listed without the authors' permission. We need to hold this man responsible for his theft, keep an eye on both his current and future endeavors, and take action immediately when he crosses the line again.
THE TIMELINE, THE DETAILS, THE SCREENSHOTS (behind the cut)
Sunday night, December 22nd 2024, I noticed an influx in visitors to my fic You & Me & Holiday Wine. When I searched the title online, hoping to find out where they came from, a new listing popped up (third one down, no less):
This listing is still up today, by the way, though now when you follow the link to word-stream, it just brings you to the main site. (Also, to be clear, this was not the cause for the influx of traffic to my fic; word-stream did not link back to the original work anywhere.)
I followed the link to word-stream, where to my horror Y&M&HW was listed in its entirety—though, beyond the first half of the first chapter, behind a paywall—along with a link promising to take me—through an app downloadable on the Apple Store—to an AI-narrated audiobook version. When I searched word-stream itself for my ao3 handle I found both of my multi-chapter fics were listed this way:
Because the tags on my fics (which included genres* and characters, but never the original IPs**) weren’t working, I put ‘Kara Danvers’ into the search bar and discovered that many more supercorp fics (Supergirl TV fandom, Kara Danvers/Lena Luthor pairing) were listed.
I went looking online for any mention of word-stream and AI plagiarism (the covers—as well as the ridiculously inflated number of reviews and ratings—made it immediately obvious that AI fuckery was involved), but found almost nothing: only one single Reddit post had been made, and it received (at that time) only a handful of upvotes and no advice.
I decided to make a tumblr post to bring the supercorp fandom up to speed about the theft. I draw as well as write for fandom and I’ve only ever had to deal with art theft—which has a clear set of steps to take depending on where said art was reposted—and I was at a loss regarding where to start in this situation.
After my post went up I remembered Project Copy Knight, which is worth commending for the work they’ve done to get fic stolen from AO3 taken down from monetized AI 'audiobook’ YouTube accounts. I reached out to @echoekhi, asking if they’d heard of this site and whether they could advise me on how to get our works taken down.
While waiting for a reply I looked into Copy Knight’s methods and decided to contact OTW’s legal department:
And then I went to bed.
By morning, tumblr friends @makicarn and @fazedlight as well as a very helpful tumblr anon had seen my post and done some very productive sleuthing:
@echoekhi had also gotten back to me, advising me, as expected, to contact the OTW. So I decided to sit tight until I got a response from them.
That response came only an hour or so later:
Which was 100% understandable, but still disappointing—I doubted a handful of individual takedown requests would accomplish much, and I wasn’t eager to share my given name and personal information with Cliff Weitzman himself, which is unavoidable if you want to file a DMCA.
I decided to take it to Reddit, hoping it would gain traction in the wider fanfic community, considering so many fandoms were affected. My Reddit posts (with the updates at the bottom as they were emerging) can be found here and here.
A helpful Reddit user posted a guide on how users could go about filing a DMCA against word-stream here (to wobbly-at-best results)
A different helpful Reddit user signed up to access insight into word-streams pricing. Comment is here.
Smells unbelievably scammy, right? In addition to those audacious prices—though in all fairness any amount of money would be audacious considering every work listed is accessible elsewhere for free—my dyscalculia is screaming silently at the sight of that completely unnecessary amount of intentionally obscured numbers.
Speaking of which! As soon as the post on r/AO3—and, as a result, my original tumblr post—began taking off properly, sometime around 1 pm, jumpscare! A notification that a tumblr account named @cliffweitzman had commented on my post, and I got a bit mad about the gist of his message :
Fortunately he caught plenty of flack in the comments from other users (truly you should check out the comment section, it is extremely gratifying and people are making tremendously good points), in response to which, of course, he first tried to both reiterate and renegotiate his point in a second, longer comment (which I didn’t screenshot in time so I’m sorry for the crappy notification email formatting):
which he then proceeded to also post to Reddit (this is another Reddit user’s screenshot, I didn’t see it at all, the notifications were moving too fast for me to follow by then)
... where he got a roughly equal amount of righteously furious replies. (Check downthread, they're still there, all the way at the bottom.)
After which Cliff went ahead & deleted his messages altogether.
It’s not entirely clear whether his account was suspended by Reddit soon after or whether he deleted it himself, but considering his tumblr account is still intact, I assume it’s the former. He made a handful of sock puppet accounts to play around with for a while, both on Reddit and Tumblr, only one of which I have a screenshot of, but since they all say roughly the same thing, you’re not missing much:
And then word-stream started throwing a DNS error.
That lasted for a good number of hours, which was unfortunately right around the time that a lot of authors first heard about the situation and started asking me individually how to find out whether their work was stolen too. I do not have that information and I am unclear on the perimeters Weitzman set for his AI scraper, so this is all conjecture: it LOOKS like the fics that were lifted had three things in common:
They were completed works;
They had over several thousand kudos on AO3; and
They were written by authors who had actively posted or updated work over the past year.
If anyone knows more about these perimeters or has info that counters my observation, please let me know!
I finally thought to check/alert evil Twitter during this time, and found out that the news was doing the rounds there already. I made a quick thread summarizing everything that had happened just in case. You can find it here.
I went to Bluesky too, where fandom was doing all the heavy lifting for me already, so I just reskeeted, as you do, and carried on.
Sometime in the very early evening, word-stream went back up—but the fan fiction category was nowhere to be seen. Tentative joy and celebration!***
That’s when several users—the ones who had signed up for accounts to gain intel and had accessed their own fics that way—reported that their work could still be accessed through their history. Relevant Reddit post here.
Sooo—
We’re obviously not done. The fanwork that was stolen by Weitzman may be inaccessible through his website right now, but they aren’t actually gone. And the fact that Weitzman wasn’t willing to get rid of them altogether means he still has plans for them.
This was my final edit on my Reddit post before turning off notifications, and it's pretty much where my head will be at for at least the foreseeable future:
Please feel free to add info in the comments, make your own posts, take whatever action you want to take to protect your work. I only beg you—seriously, I’m on my knees here—to not give up like I saw a handful of people express the urge to do. Keep sharing your creative work and remain vigilant and stay active to make sure we can continue to do so freely. Visit your favorite fics, and the ones you’ve kept in your ‘marked for later’ lists but never made time to read, and leave kudos, leave comments, support your fandom creatives, celebrate podficcers and support AO3. We created this place and it’s our responsibility to keep it alive and thriving for as long as we possibly can.
Also FUCK generative AI. It has NO place in fandom spaces.
THE 'SMALL' PRINT (some of it in all caps):
*Weitzman knew what he was doing and can NOT claim ignorance. One, it’s pretty basic kindergarten stuff that you don’t steal some other kid’s art project and present it as your own only to act surprised when they protest and then tell the victim that they should have told you sooner that they didn’t want their project stolen. And two, he was very careful never to list the IPs these fanworks were based on, so it’s clear he was at least familiar enough with the legalities to not get himself in hot water with corporate lawyers. Fucking over fans, though, he figured he could get away with that.
**A note about the AI that Weitzman used to steal our work: it’s even greasier than it looks at first glance. It’s not just the method he used to lift works off AO3 and then regurgitate onto his own website and app. Looking beyond the untold horrors of his AI-generated cover ‘art’, in many cases these covers attempt to depict something from the fics in question that can’t be gleaned from their summaries alone. In addition, my fics (and I assume the others, as well) were listed with generated genres; tags that did not appear anywhere in or on my fic on AO3 and were sometimes scarily accurate and sometimes way off the mark. I remember You & Me & Holiday Wine had ‘found family’ (100% correct, but not tagged by me as such) and I believe The Shape of Soup was listed as, among others, ‘enemies to friends to lovers’ and ‘love triangle’ (both wildly inaccurate). Even worse, not all the fic listed (as authors on Reddit pointed out) came with their original summaries at all. Often the entire summary was AI-generated. All of these things make it very clear that it was an all-encompassing scrape—not only were our fics stolen, they were also fed word-for-word into the AI Weitzman used and then analyzed to suit Weitzman’s needs. This means our work was literally fed to this AI to basically do with whatever its other users want, including (one assumes) text generation.
***Fan fiction appears to have been made (largely) inaccessible on word-stream at this time, but I’m hearing from several authors that their original, independently published work, which is listed at places like Kindle Unlimited, DOES still appear in word-stream’s search engine. This obviously hurts writers, especially independent ones, who depend on these works for income and, as a rule, don’t have a huge budget or a legal team with oceans of time to fight these battles for them. If you consider yourself an author in the broader sense, beyond merely existing online as a fandom author, beyond concerns that your own work is immediately at risk, DO NOT STOP MAKING NOISE ABOUT THIS.
Again, please, please PLEASE reblog this post instead of the one I sent originally. All the information is here, and it's driving me nuts to see the old ones are still passed around, sending people on wild goose chases.
from @glossysoap's open tag, because i love a pinterest board
go onto pinterest and select the first image the pops up when you search the following: breakfast, weather, drink, jewellery, quote, hobby, clothes, house, car
this feels accurate. no pressure tags: @secretsynthetic @dutiful-wildcraft @391780 @quarterlifekitty @eowynstwin
With his marriage on the rocks, Price ends up drinking himself into a stupor at the bar the night after his wife of fifteen years tells him she wants to separate. It's where he finds you—a man's walking midlife crisis. Much younger. Too pretty for your own good.
Just passing through, he can vaguely remember you telling him as you twirled a black straw around the drink he ordered for you. Whiskey sour but with cherries instead of lime.
He grimaced around the thought of it, but couldn't seem to peel his eyes away from the way you curl your tongue around the red cherry floating in your drink. Too goddamn pretty for your own good.
Too soft, too.
He feels it when he places his hand on your thigh—to steady you, he tells himself when you start to wobble on the stool—the soft meat of your body giving so easily under the weight of his thick, grizzled fingers.
You don't belong in a pub like this where the floor is always sticky, the wallpaper is probably still made of lead, and there's gum stuck to the underside of the table. Despite the smoking ban, the room is clogged with dense tendrils of smoke. No one lifts a brow when he pulls a cigar from his front pocket, and strikes a match to light it. Puffing away in the corner with a too pretty, too young thing leaning into him, asking can I give it a try?
It's wrong. He feels it in his bones. A siren wailing in his head. Leave, go home. Don't look back. And maybe that's what you are:
a siren
because he peels it from between his dry, chapped lips and feels his heart throbbing in his chest when you lean over him, his lap, eyes still locked on his in the near the perfect pastiche of an early 90s pornography video—amateur, grainy around the edges; soaked in that glossy, faded old film filter—and wrap your cherry red lips around the hilt, lashes fluttering as he swallows thickly and rasps out that's it, sweetheart, now suck—
Feels his age acutely in the ache of his thighs as his muscles tense, drawing tight together when your eyes close, pinching in disgust around the heady mouthful of maduro, but mm, love, ain't supposed to swallow it.
The gleam of unshed tears pooling against your lashline catch beautifully in the warm, lambent glow of the lights overhead that are undoubtedly older than you. Lachrymal. He feels it in his guts like a stone. A thick lump of smouldering coal he has to try and breathe around.
The eight—nine, maybe—whiskeys he had since he sat down and grunted his usual order at the barkeep catch up with him all at once the moment a single drop spills over, and those cherry red lips part, embarrassed, and the smoke in your voice, the raw, scorched wound of untested flesh doused in tobacco fill the hole in his belly when you say I've never done this before and, soft, shy, sweet: will you teach me?
It's awash in the jaundiced spill of winter lights. Blue hour bathed in orange. There's a mark on your thigh when he pulls his hand away, damp palm leaving a stain in the soft cotton of your pants. He's not sure why that renders all logic in his head null, but it stabs into him like a pickaxe through the temple. Sudden, violent, and jarring.
His hand cupping you through your pants, feeling the heat of your cunt on his still-wet palm. Growling in your ear when you tremble against his chest about how he has a lot he plans on teaching you, sweetheart, so be a good girl, and come home with him—
He doesn't make it that far.
Unbuttons his trousers the moment you climb into the back seat of his truck, legs spreading in anticipation for him to fill the split of your thighs, and curl a single finger in his direction, a silent comehither.
Marionette on strings, he follows. The obeyance rankles down his spine but he's too far gone to give it much more than a passing, agitated flick. Ignoring it in favour of wrestling his trousers down his hips, and pulling you on his lap.
It's every part the indecent, goatish drunk hookup he vaguely remembers from back when he was some approximation of your age. Pawing clumsily at your cunt in a selfish, perfunctory preparation. Unpractised despite having decades of experience throbbing insistently in his temple, muted under the cloying haze of too much alcohol and the manifestation of his fantasies come to life in his lap, perched so prettily above his aching cock.
Pants into the mess he makes of your neck about how much better he'll be later. Take you home, eat your pretty pussy out until you're nearly ripping his hair out from how good it feels, and then he'll fuck you on a bed. Proper, he grunts, snaking a hand down between your thighs to grip his cock, the other peeling away from the warm, tight heaven between your thighs, fingers slipping out slick and sticky, smearing it over his fat, weeping head.
"need you," he grunts, barely cognisant of much outside this concupiscent ache in his belly. This hunger he's never felt before. Just mutters, slurs, need you, need this pussy. Come on, love, let me in—
He pushes against your opening, flared head splitting your folds so obscenely that he's almost desperate with the need to commit the sight to memory. So fuckin' pretty—
You whine, mewling above him as his slick fingers squeeze your waist, pulling your down over him. Forcing his cock into you as you bable about it being too much, god, it's too much, too big—ego feeding, incendiary. Mesmeric. If it's meant to slow him down, or make him stop, it slips through the cracks. Eaten alive in the fog.
His hand pushes against your throat, fingers folding over the span of it. Gripping tight. Holding firm as he catches your gaze and plants his feet on the ground. The noise you make when he bucks into you from below, forcing the rest of his cock into the impossibly tight squeeze of your cunt is snuffed out when his hand spasms, closing into a choking grip.
Seated deep inside you—too deep, it's too much, please—he feels heavenised. Bathed in bliss. Nirvana. Can't quite wrap his head around how good you feel beyond staggered grunts that spill from his sweat-slicked lips, and a needy, urgent roll of his hips, unable to pull away from the euphoric clench of you swallowing him down.
It's an eye rolling pleasure. The kind that rips through his belly and drags him to the brink in an instant. All heat. A molten, velvet clench. Primal. All animal seeking a warm, safe latibule.
He thinks of the womb and it's primordial incalescence as he works himself into you, head blanketed in a dizzying, almost delirious spot of pleasure. Soporific. And that's what you are—an overwhelming sense of sempiternal warmth. Something every fibre of his being wants to crawl inside of.
And he does. Over and over again. Peels his hand from your throat to curl it over your nape instead, pushing your mouth against his in a scorching, bruising kiss. Laying claim, eating your moans from between your teeth, chasing the cherry sweetness that lingers. Making a mess of you with the sweat that drops down his temple and the spit that slicks your chin.
Inside you, too. Spilling in your cunt with a belly-deep groan. It rips through him like a head cold, a fever, and leaves him feeling warn and sore. Unable to keep up with the gutpunch of his pleasure as you cling to him tight and mewl in his ear for more.
(Something he plans on giving you for the rest of his life if you'll let him.)
Makes it to his house somehow. Fucks you in the foyer because the sight of your bare, cum-slick thighs shakily climbing up the stairs, knees pressing together to keep his release inside, is enough to rent him in two. And it does. Spilts him down the middle until all that's left is want.
Avarice. Greed. A hunger so deep, it rattles his bones when his belly growls.
Spends himself dry inside of you, unwilling to pull out even for second. Falling asleep with you slick and warm around his cock. Content for the first time in ages. Slipping into a sleep so deep, he wakes up at noon the day.
But you're gone when he does, leaving nothing behind except deep scratches down his back and the pair of panties he stuffed in your mouth last night to keep you from waking the neighbours.
Despite regretting not tying you to the bed and slipping the ring his wife left on the end table on your finger, it's cathartic.
Just—
Not meant to last. His fleeting siren. A secret he'll take to the grave because if it ever got out, it would ruin his reputation. His family. Everything he worked hard for.
And when his wife changes her mind two weeks later and comes back home, life returns to normal. He's once again the dutiful husband. Provider. A good, honest man even though he finds himself dreaming of you as he lays beside his wife, your scent still clinging to his pillow. Hungry. Unfed.
But this is the way it has to be. Must be.
Until his siren comes back to haunt him three weeks later when you turn up again, back in town and pregnant with his child.
i love ppl who talk in the tags bc it satisfies my deep desire to know ppl’s opinions on everything without needing to have a conversation with them and ask. even better when it’s a side tangent that barely has anything to do with the post, or a personal anecdote, or a joke. tag talker mutuals you’re my favorite. tag talkers rise up
price x f!reader | 4k words | series page | ao3
tags: unprotected piv sex, breeding kink if you squint, mentioned birth control, blood/gore, animal death
a/n: reader does some digging. a new face arrives in town. mdni banner by @/cafekitsune. 🔪
John lures you to his bed after talking disease and slaughter, herding you inside and between his sheets with only a few endearments.
As if you’d sleep alone after that.
The images do not fade, even with his hands on you, his teeth to your neck. Rabbits pressed to wires, frantic and desperate. John’s hands on your waist, heavy as an anchor, but you project elsewhere, picturing the final moments, imagining the smell.
Pinned beneath him, all you can think about is the way he said it so plainly, so business-like—he burned everything. Your stomach twists, jumping from the heat of his skin to flames licking at wood and fur. He kisses you again, grip tightening, and you wish you could sink into it, forget the visions circling in your thoughts like a baby’s mobile.
“Gotta get you out of your head,” John rasps. “You think too much.”
It isn’t an empty promise.
After leaving your nipples aching, he descends. The wet heat of his tongue chases the rabbits from your mind, and he burrows the muscle as far as it’ll go. By the time he pulls back, his face and beard slick, you’re in a daze, legs and stomach helplessly twitching.
A scorching heat drags over the crux of your thigh. Uncertainty washes over your face, and John shushes you before you make a sound. His hand slides under your thigh to your knee, guiding your leg around his waist. His cock slips over your wet cunt and knocks a gasp loose.
“You’re alright, you’re alright. Isn’t it time we seal this, darlin’? Make it official?” He grips himself, gliding it through his handiwork. Each pass teases and nudges at your hole. Sweat shines over his brow, expression intense, and when he smooths over the plush of your thigh, you realize he’s waiting for a response.
He’s been so patient with you, and you’ve lied so much.
And official—don’t you want that? First good thing in a long time. First good man. It’d be foolish not to.
You wet your lips, mouth dry. “Okay.”
His grin sharpens. “Should I grab a condom?”
“No, I–” He hasn’t noticed the scar on your arm, then.
The sound John makes, low and pleased, sends a shiver through you. “Perfect girl. Think mine are old, anyway.”
John languishes the head of his cock over your clit first, seemingly unable to get enough of how wet he’s made you. When his head dips in at last, he swears under his breath, blue eyes fixing to where he disappears. Your gasp breaks over a pathetic sound at the strain. It’s far from your first time, but you haven’t–it’s been–
“Shit, you feel incredible.” John moves slowly, gently, though his hands on your hips are tense, pressing and fidgeting against your skin. There’s a hum in the air, a tension. It’s clear he’s holding back, fighting the urge to let go, to take what he wants.
You’re inclined to let him. Your eyes roll back, colors melting into a haze behind your eyelids. Deeper than where your fingers can reach, thicker than what you’ve had, and warm. Molten and heavy. You feel every inch of him as he rocks himself in further, the throbbing heat of his cock a perfect counterpoint to your own pulsing need.
“C’mon, need to see you.”
Above you, John smiles, sweat beading along his temple. There’s tightness at the corners of his mouth. His praise runs together in your head.
It’s like—like rain hitting the desert after a thousand-year drought, pelting and seeping into the dirt and then some. A wasteland that doesn’t know what to do with it, can’t hold it, oversaturated, ground panicking and splitting apart. Flooding and drowning. Until–
Your mouth cracks open in a wordless cry as he bottoms out, the whole of him seated inside you. A welcomed stretch. It hasn’t felt like this in years.
“Lookatyou,” He laughs softly, expression smug, magnific. “Like a dream.” His hand splays over your belly, then draws a circle around your navel. “Gonna keep you happy, sweetheart. Full and happy.”
Your body cradles him naturally. He tells you so, arms holding you fast beneath him. Rutting into you, riding a line between too much and just right, his excitement leaking into you in more ways than one. The fur of his chest and belly scrubs over your front, and all you can do is hold on through his long, fervid thrusts.
It’s dizzying, to be wanted. Coveted. Blunt fingers expunging whatever residual stake your husband left on your hide.
It feels amazing.
“You’re not like others, are you? Special, rare breed—fuck, thassit—you want to be mine. For keeps.”
Keeps. Your head bounces in a nod.
He lifts, arms snaking out from under you, one hand finding an ankle, the other resting where you meet, thumb brushing your clit. Your fingers tangle in the sheets.
“You ready for my cum, love?” The question is filthy. Drenched in lust and delivered in a snarl. “I’m going to fill your cunt with it, just like you deserve. You do deserve it, yeah?”
The words fly out of you. “Yeah, yes, please, I do.”
“Good girl, so fuckin’ good for me.”
The bed creaks, the frame knocking against the wall. The snap of John’s hips makes your head spin. He’s whipped himself up into a frenzy, the speed and pressure of his thumb on your clit hurtling toward another orgasm.
The intense, telltale pressure tightens like a snare in your belly, sudden and sharp, a jolt that steals the air from your lungs in a cry. It snaps through you, fast and brutal, leaving you breathless and unsteady, as if the world has collapsed into the space between your legs.
When John follows suit, he drives himself to the hilt, flooding you in a torrent. Gives you what he says you deserve. Plants his own little flag between your legs. Stoops over you, bracketing your head, sweat pouring over his chest and biceps. He eats up the noises that trickle out of you, grinding his spend deep.
The aftermath reminds you of the storms from your childhood. Lightning cracking over the lake, air humming. Charged. It reverberates in your chest and grips your heart tight. You end up on your side, John curled around you, kissing your neck.
His whispers lull you to sleep. Full and happy.
~~
You’re running, the ground blurring beneath you, the forest around you impossibly vast. Trees rise like skyscrapers. The stumps, the fallen logs—massive, bigger than buses, bigger than planes. You don’t know what you’re running from, but your body moves, mind reduced to a single word: go. You veer left, crashing through the undergrowth, spot a hole in the earth, and instinctively dive. That’s when it hits you. You’re not yourself. Not even human. As the dark swallows you, you see your legs are not your own. Rabbit feet. Brown, bloodied. Behind you, jaws snap inches from your tail.
Then you’re falling through damp and dense air, thick with the smell of rust and earth and oil. Absolute darkness. Rumblings. Frantic voices shouting. Hands reach for you, miss, and pass in and out of the shadows. You can’t move, useless, yet your heart manages weak, thready pulses. At some point, the shouting stops, and the hands disappear. You realize you aren’t moving at all anymore.
You’re lying on a hard and cold surface. Something warm and sticky pools under your skull, spreading through the fur on your face. Blood. Trickling from your eyes, your nose, your mouth. It clings to you in a horrible, clotted mess. You try to turn your eyes in their sockets and manage only the barest shift. There’s a glimmer of light, faint and far away. You strain to focus, but when you glance the other way, the sight catches you mid-scream. The sound doesn’t make it out. Another rabbit lies beside you, limbs at awful angles, stock-still.
Sticky air washes over your body in a burst as something inhales deeply from beyond your field of vision.
A voice, near-unintelligible through the blood in your ears—Fuckin’ grand.
By some miracle, you do not wake screaming. The room is quiet, save for the slow rhythm of John snoring beside you. The vivid details of the dream are already dissolving, but the feeling lingers. A prickling crawling under your skin.
You soothe yourself, slowly cricketing your very human legs. You don’t want to wake John. It’s better to let him sleep. Eventually, your heartbeat steadies, though the strangeness doesn’t leave. You stay like that for a while, listening to him breathe. Between that and the ache between your thighs, you know you’re alive and safe.
~~
In the morning, you and John part ways. The cats, ever judgmental, hiss from beneath your car, staring and hissing when you veer too close. After washing off the scent of smoke and sweat, you tuck into bed, intending to only rest your eyes but sleep through lunch. You wake up disoriented and bleary-eyed, but it’s nothing a pot of coffee can’t fix.
You curse yourself for wasting half the day, settle onto the glider, and finally open the mysterious book.
Much of what you read is superstitious drivel. As far as you can tell, most of the stories are excised from the memories of old-timers. The hold-outs that stayed after the mines dried up and people pulled up stakes by the thousands. Folktales about cryptids and restless spirits, voices carried on the wind through the hills, dead men whistling work songs on the backroads after dark.
The kind of stories that remind you of home. Wrecked freighters drowned in the waves. Ghost ships adrift on the foggy water. The echoes of drowned sailors and longshoremen. The phrase Superior never gives up her dead, spoken with equal parts reverence and warning.
What holds your attention are the stories about the miners.
The brutal fights over pay, over unions, over the right to stay alive underground. People were kidnapped, murdered. Houses set alight, offices blown to pieces. Blood staining the silver pulled from the earth, the wealth it carried flowing into someone else’s hands. There’s little sympathy for the politicians and mine owners, even less for the scabs. Not that you expect it, nor do you harbor it—just a note you make thumbing through the transcription of some pages from a miner’s diary from the 1880s.
I can’t stop hearing George’s scream. Cut short like the earth itself swallowed him whole. One second, he was ahead of me in the west passage, carrying tools, muttering about the heat. The next, the ground opened beneath him. I shouted his name, but there was nothing but a pit. No sign of George, no sound from below.
The owner came down, took one look, and ordered the tunnel sealed. “Dangerous work,” he said, like losing George was just the cost of business. Replaceable like his tools. I’ve worked these mines for two years, and the rock here ain’t loose, the supports were solid. There’s no explaining it. The old-timers speak of the mines taking their due—blood for silver, they say. I used to scoff at them, but now I’m not so sure. Poor boy. Nothing left of him but an empty pit.
The passage frays your nerves like bad rope. You uncross your legs, grounding your feet to reassure yourself the floor is still there. This ‘George’ wasn’t the only miner lost. Far from it. Dozens of men from different companies who worked Grouse disappeared, sacrificed to the mountain, just as the miner said.
A yawn crawls out to let you know it’s time to turn in.
You close the book, stretching in the quiet. The lamplight flickers before you switch it off, casting the room into darkness. For a moment, you sit in the stillness, your vision adjusting to the night. Then, something catches your attention out the window—a glint of yellow low to the ground. At first, you think it’s maybe a coyote, but then they rise, shifting upright, standing tall. Your stomach knots as the eyes keep climbing, far beyond the height of any small animal. They hold steady, unblinking, and the wrongness renders you tharn. Your chest tightens, muscles locked in terror. You watch, pulse pounding in your ears, until the eyes blink once and vanish into the night.
A bear. A moose? Either way, it makes you check the locks and hurriedly slip into bed. Any tracks can wait until morning. You keep your pocket knife under a pillow, stretch your phone charger beneath the blankets, and fix your eyes on the thin curtains John put up a few weeks ago.
The next day, you mention it to John. He confirms your suspicions—most likely a black bear, he says. Baiting opens soon, luring big game closer t o town. Another reason to stay inside after dark.
John drops you home after closing. He tells you Simon’s supposed to drop by the store, and you hare off. More for you to read, anyway. You scavenge the cupboards, set out scraps for the cats, lock up, and head to bed early, determined to finish the book.
The land sales in the nineties weren’t the first resurrection of Grouse Bay, or even the second. There was another before that, in the seventies—bigger, wealthier, and lured men from across the country and the sea in search of work and good fortune. But the boom came with a sliver of the esteem it once carried and twice the disasters. More cave-ins, more accidents, in both the legitimate and the illegal mines. The same old fights between the unions and the owners. Everything seems to loop back on itself, like time doesn’t move forward but just circles around the tunnels, over and over.
The book abruptly ends by mentioning a collapse so massive it killed almost a hundred men, hollowing out the towns overnight. With it, silver prices fell, too, as if the mountain finally had its fill. But it feels strange. You go back over the paragraph, then skim the index, but there’s nothing else. No name for the mine, no mention of the company responsible. Just a brief note that the accident had been the final blow, and silver mining in the area was finished.
You notice, almost by accident, an irregularity near the seam of the pages. Clean cuts where the final chapter should be. Someone’s gone through the trouble of removing them neatly with surgical precision. The vandalism stumps you. The missing pages gnaw at your mind, their removal unsettling. As sleep pulls you under, you wonder who would do such a thing—and why.
Sleep passes in a blink. You wake, heart racing. Another bad dream to shake off.
Sunlight pokes through the trees. It’s half past five, and an old urge draws you out of bed and into clothes. You tell yourself it’s a silly, impulsive decision until the road levels out, and you pause to catch your breath. Below, Grouse Bay sleeps in. Perhaps you ought to go back and wait for John to wake up, but it’s your day off. Not his. You can’t depend on him forever. At some point, you’ll need to stand on your own two feet. Whatever better way to start than with a walk.
The journey to Ponderosa is quiet. Not a single car passes the entire time, not even when you pause to stretch and nibble on a cereal bar. You tried to compare it to the desert at first, the heat of the direct sun to the cold shade of trees, but it isn’t fair. The woods are a different beast entirely. Impenetrable and ancient. One of your father’s many lectures echoes: the natural world doesn’t care about you. Lakes, deserts, forests—they’ll take just as much as they’ll give. You don’t leave the road.
You arrive five minutes past seven.
The library doesn’t open until nine. You like Jeanne well enough, but she isn’t Robin. There’s nowhere else to go except the coffee shop, so you rest with a cup and a cinnamon roll as big as your face. You skim through the book again, wondering what Jeanne might say about it, if she’ll have suggestions or answers. Philip wanted you to read this. That much is clear, but he isn’t answering your texts.
When the bell above the door chimes, you glance up automatically, mid-bite. You stop chewing when you see him—a man with a holster on his narrow hips approaching the counter. His aviators stay on, even inside, giving him an air of confidence or arrogance. His expression is severe, all hard lines, until the barista asks for his order. Then he smiles suddenly, dazzlingly, and it softens him completely. Sloughing years off of his face and bringing his shoulders down from his ears. Handsome, but not in the same rugged way as John. You return to your book, needing to focus.
~~
Fortunately, Jeanne believes you when you tell her you didn’t do it. The look on her face still guts you.
Her brows knit. “This is terrible.”
“Right? It’s weird, why cut out only those pages?”
“Not a clue.”
“What I don’t get is the accident—it’s not exactly ancient history. The seventies weren’t that long ago. And if that many men died, wouldn’t there be a memorial or something?”
“There is, but it’s not... it’s not really for tourists.” Jeanne stands. “To be honest, I don’t think many people go out there anymore. It’s a half hour drive north, down some old logging roads. I don’t believe the county maintains them anymore.”
Jeanne leads you to where the microfilm reader sits in quiet obscurity. She carefully sets up the rolls, showing you how to focus the lens and scroll. Chuckling softly and playfully admonishing you about ‘young people and technology’. She leaves you to it, promising to check-in.
The machine hums as you turn the knob, the film scrolling past in a blur of headlines and advertisements for fishing gear and discount groceries. You pause occasionally, adjusting the focus, scanning for anything that looks remotely like what you’re searching for. Then you find it—Disaster at Devil’s Drop.
Ponderosa, Idaho – A devastating fire erupted at the Sawtooth Crest Mine early Tuesday afternoon, trapping 153 miners underground. By 1:00 PM, mine managers, unable to locate the source of the blaze, ordered a full evacuation as impenetrable smoke and deadly carbon monoxide swept through the tunnels.
While 60 miners escaped to safety, 93 tragically succumbed to carbon monoxide exposure in an area of the mine known as Devil’s Drop. Some bodies are reported unrecoverable. Remarkably, after a harrowing week entombed nearly 1,700 meters below the surface, three miners were rescued alive. The community mourns this profound loss, as investigations into the cause of the fire are already underway. The mine is closed until further notice.
The article is short for the tragedy’s scale, but you continue, and the air leaves your lungs in a rush. There’s a picture, simply captioned: Survivors wish to put the accident behind them. Grainy black and white, a relic of bad lighting and worse conditions. Three men, barely discernible through the smudges.
One of them is dark-haired, caught mid-motion, his features smearing into obscurity. Another looms impossibly tall, his head almost out of the frame, a bandana tied around his face like an outlaw. And then there’s the third.
You lean closer, squinting as if it will make the picture clearer. He’s younger than the others, with a mustache and a small and tired smile. It’s the smile that makes your stomach drop, the way it feels familiar.
For a moment, you forget the machine, the room, the reason you came here in the first place. All you can think is: I know him.
But that doesn’t make sense. It can’t.
Your fingers hover over the dial, frozen mid-turn, the machine suddenly deafening. You try to make sense of the thought forming in your head, absurd and undeniable. If it’s him—if it really is—then he should be decades older. Wrinkled, gray, softened by time in the way everyone eventually is.
But this man, the one in the photo, looks exactly the same. Young, weary, and smiling at a camera that can’t possibly have captured him at the same age as you remember.
Your heart pounds, a sudden spike of adrenaline you can’t explain. Your gaze darts back to the other faces in the photo, searching, but they’re just shapes, anonymous and blurred. You lean back from the screen, a cold weight settling in your stomach.
It’s impossible. But it’s him. Isn’t it?
The man from the diner. Alex.
~~~~
Mr. Keller’s silence is long enough for the coffee pot to finish, sizzling and beeping. Not once does his smile lapse, though. Kyle doesn’t move a muscle, either. He’s aware of the older woman at the end of the counter, watching him, but he doesn’t acknowledge her.
“I’m sorry, what was the question?”
What was it Shepherd had said? Local yokels. At the time, it had seemed an uncharitable thing to say, but maybe the ancient bastard had a point.
Kyle leans closer. “It was reported, that Mr. Graves gave you his card, then confronted a Mr. John Price and an unnamed woman. I asked if you had that name.”
The man looks at him, still smiling. “Can’t say I do.”
The man’s refusal isn’t surprising, but frustration sits low and insistent under his ribs. He’s not going to get anywhere with him anytime soon. At least he takes his card. Stupid, smiling prick.
“Say, you’re at The Partridge Inn, right?” Kyle narrowly keeps the surprise from his face, meeting Mr. Keller’s eye with a practiced and bored look. “The Prospector doesn’t do long-term rentals.”
Kyle doesn’t answer him. Fucking weird.
Moving from one business to the next, turns up nothing. Either Graves finally lost his mind and decided to go AWOL, or he was just that forgettable. Either way, the results are the same. Graves, however, is not the kind of man to drop an investigation, not with Shepherd’s approval on the line, and he’s certainly not someone easily forgotten. The loudmouth made sure of that. With nothing to show for the effort, Kyle drags himself back to the motel, another impossible task on his mind—finding a decent lunch.
Steps from the door, Kyle almost crushes it, boot hovering just above the grim thing. Heart thudding at the red smear on the battered welcome mat. At first, it looks like a headless mouse, another casualty of the feral cats that roam the town like they own it. But then the light catches something shiny. He crouches, his stomach lurching as he leans in.
It’s a rabbit’s foot. A silver cap hastily fixed to it, the fur matted with blackening blood. The scent of rot rises, thick and bitter, his lip curling in reflex at the sudden surge of disgust. Whoever made this, whatever the hell this is supposed to be, didn’t care about the mess.
Another feeling edges in as he stares at the morbid display—the sense of being watched. It’s been with him all day, on and off, as he roamed Ponderosa. Something about the locals. All warm handshakes and cold smiles. The streets are busy with tourists, crowded with the start of black bear and mountain lion season. But the residents, the people behind the counters and bussing tables, look at each other like they all know something he doesn’t, passing these quiet, knowing glances between them.
Kyle hooks the keychain on the end of his pen and stands. The cursed thing dangles, cap glinting.
He fucking hates small towns.
~~~~
John waves goodbye to a group of kids and their mum as she ushers them out of the shop, a sigh escaping him. He thinks, maybe in a few years, this will be his reality. Then his phone vibrates, interrupting the thought. It’s Kate.
K >> New suit poking around at Echo. I think he’ll be harder to shake.
The daydream burns away. He huffs. The smell of burnt matches lingers in the air.
> What makes you say that?
>> Gut feeling.
>> Confirmed he’s staying at the Partridge.
Dragging in a deep breath, he cracks his neck, side to side, and texts Soap.
> New suit at the Partridge, leave him a welcome gift, then fetch the doe.
> Soft mouth, lad.
combustible - highly flammable, easy to burn
cw: gn!reader, avoidant reader, angst (?), somewhat comfort (its comfort to ME), all lower case
a/n: a self-analysis. but if y'all catch strays that's not on me... also been a while since I've written so be gentle with me please
he's sixteen when the cat skitters from him the first time.
he's familiar with the pattern of an animal seeking shelter, some refuge from the cruel hands of the world. he's seen her test the limits and bounds of their steps, slinking around the garden as she tries to find safety.
he also knows she skitters the fastest and furthest away the second something unfamiliar breaches her space. first sign of discomfort and she's gone. it takes her days to return.
he wonders if she knows of the cruelty within the house. she must. ears as keen as hers have heard tommy's shuddering breath, he's sure of it.
and yet, the crashing inside never spooks her.
but somehow, his initial steps towards her always did.
simon still remembers the drop in his stomach, guilt cooling the pit of it, as he saw her galloping away. her hind legs coming between her front paws, moving so fast her front paws didnt even have a chance to come off the ground. he'd felt sick watching her scramble away from him. the nausea at her departing figure felt worse than the dread of returning inside.
so he'd sucked in a breath and stepped back behind the sliding door. whatever was waiting for him was better than disturbing her peace.
who was he to disturb the semblance of safety she'd worked so hard to find. slinking from alley to alley until she ended here. he at least had his own hands to ward off blows with. she didn't even have the dignity of that.
it took her days to come back. every day she was absent turned his stomach. shame weighed down his steps until he took the time to set up hidden food and water bowls to greet her. it was the least he could do for her. food and fresh water to greet her when she deemed it safe to return. a small token to let her know the space is hers, safely provided to her no matter what.
she'd still back away when she saw him at the door. half a bite of food falling from her mouth as she spotted him, slinking back instinctively.
but simon makes no move to open the door. he just watches her behind the safety of the glass.
they're locked together before she blinks quickly, assuring he's still standing behind the glass before returning to her food bowl.
it's a few more days of this before she turns to him, closing her eyes ever so slowly and then, turning her back to him.
simon can't help the smile that spreads across his face, warmth blooming in his chest as he feels genuine joy for the first time in a while.
gradually, she eases up. she even allows him to stand outside with her, at a distance. a few more weeks of this and she tentatively slinks between his legs as he freezes. doesn't even breathe to spook her away as she scents him, marking him as hers.
patience yields results and on sunny days she's curled up on his lap while he enjoys a hot cuppa.
this is why he blames himself when you run.
he'd breached the boundary too quickly, pushed too hard against the ease of the relationship you'd built. he hadn't meant to, but he'd seen he change in your gait. had noticed how you'd started to hide parts of yourself that he'd been privy to. the clothes didn't change, but your laughter did. dimmed down, clipped and short, just long enough to fool others but simon knew you better.
he sees you transform before his eyes, a version that had existed only before he knew you. hardened by the winds that had eroded your softness.
you'd erected walls for refuge. necessary to ward the winds intent on toppling you, though it had the unintended consequence of keeping kindness at bay. unable to feel it through the stone.
yet, simon had been granted access within the concrete barriers. privy to what was withheld from others.
and he'd pushed his luck.
he'd known some conversation were likely to push at you, irritate the way skin does when it rubs against itself, but you'd held strongly through it all. in the end, it wasn't a specific conversation that triggered your retreat, but the culmination of it all.
he'd watched how you'd clammed up. laughter dying on your lips as the realization dawned on you.
you were overexposed, overly comfortable, and unprotected.
your things were gone the next day.
his side table clear of anything of importance to you. small traces of of you through out his apartment, in the crevices, just enough to keep him off your scent. to prevent him from becoming alarmed.
he's a damn good soldier though. better at understanding when someone's got the urge to run with no intention of coming back. exceptional at finding people.
he gives you two days.
no messages or calls, all so you can breathe a little easier. work yourself out of state of mind you'd found yourself in. to no longer feel bare and exposed.
then, he shows up at your coffee shop. orders your drink, his drink, and waits.
the baristas know him by now, and they know you're his keeper. at least, that's what's been floating around amongst the regulars. so when you approach the counter seeking some liquid energy they simply gesture towards simon.
you're an expert at hiding yourself from others, so your face of neutrality never wavers. but simon isn't any other person, he knows better.
he sees the small, sharp inhale through your nose, the tightening grip around your phone, your other hand twitching against your leg. you're unhappy, but not angry.
he'll give you your space, he'll never deny you that, but he'll always be near. watching you from behind the glass while you get comfortable again. until you're able to have your back to him, to let your fingers graze the back of his.
until you find yourself curled into his side again.
he's willing to wait.
you eye him as you take a seat across from him, body uncharacteristically rigid.
"just a cup of coffee. take your time with it, i'm not in a rush love. i'll be here"
Commission time ! Please, send me a DM either here or on twitter if you're interested ! We will then discuss what you want me to draw, and depending on what it is, I will give you a price for what you're asking for !
For OCs, references are HIGHLY appreciated. Remember that if you don't have any art of them, picrews, moodboards, just like a collage of references or even stick drawings are better than nothing !
I reserve myself the right to refuse a commission if the content being asked makes me uncomfortable.
Opening 5 slots for now, but If I get enough interest, I will just open a waitlist !
Kyle "Gaz" Garrick/Fem Reader
Zombie apocalypse AU (all parts here)
Something is wrong.
Your nervous system has known it for weeks, ever since Gaz appeared out of nowhere to ruin your life. But now the constant hum of danger has escalated into a tangible vibration, as night falls on the camp, and you feel the invisible attention of every man shift to you.
Something is wrong, something is wrong, SOMETHING IS WRONG.
It doesn’t seem to matter that you absolutely - and loudly - denied Gaz’s claim. Nick hasn’t stopped glaring at you like you stole his ice cream cone. At you! Not Gaz, who’s the dirty rotten liar, but you, who did absolutely nothing wrong. In fact, you were the one who begged not to be left alone with Gaz, so what right do they have to be upset?
Not that Gaz got off scott free. Doran dragged him into the woods for a talking-to as soon as you returned, which you fear was more about sexual misconduct than about his ridiculous vendetta.
That’s the part that hurts the most, not that he betrayed you, but that you weren’t expecting it. He was being so reasonable that for one measly afternoon, you almost started to like him. What a fool you were. A hopeful, unsuspecting fool.
Sitting beside the campfire, you try to ignore the charge in the air, and methodically work your hairbrush through the last of the half-dried tangles. You smell and feel clean now, but at what cost?
“We’re not supposed to touch her.”
Again, Nick’s words weave through your thoughts, and you can’t quite put your finger on the reason they disturb you so much. You should be grateful that Doran set up some kind of protection. It’s undoubtedly why you’ve felt comfortable with them for as long as you have – the understanding that you’ll have safe passage, in more ways than one.
But there was no mistaking the resentment in Nick’s eyes, while you scrambled to throw your clothes back on beside the creek. “We’re not supposed to touch her.”
Why can’t Gaz just leave you alone? You were fending for yourself perfectly fine with only his casual disdain, but now it seems he won’t be satisfied until you’re left abandoned on the side of the road, like that horrible, mass suicide Rich found a month ago. Every day, Gaz does everything he can to alienate you from the group, and every day you get closer to your period.
You hope he doesn’t come back from that talk. An arrow in the chest could remove a really big problem in your life, and it’s not like the blood would matter all that much. You only have two and a half days left, so you’ll be on the move again whether you like it or not.
All you want to do is eat til you’re full, sleep til you’re rested, and trust someone enough to turn your back on them. But at this point, you’re fairly sure you’re never going to get any one of those luxuries ever again.
The first thing that really sets your nerves on edge isn’t what happens, it’s what doesn’t happen – Doran doesn’t announce anything at dinner. You know you’re going to the town tomorrow, he’s said as much, but there’s no delegation of tasks for the morning. There’s just that electricity in the air, the unusually quiet dinner, and Gaz sitting as far away from you as possible, glowering at the flames.
Despite his betrayal, you’re distinctly aware of his insinuation from earlier, that your rights were being discussed among the others. You’re obviously anxious about the outcome of that discussion, and especially nervous that Gaz’s stunt at the creek may have tipped things out of your favor.
Don’t worry, you tell yourself. There’s no point in driving yourself crazy, when you need to be smart, and present in the moment. You need a plan.
When Doran pulls you aside after dinner, you’ve got your innocent face on. You’re just a cute, helpful thing, and surely it’s more trouble than it’s worth to get rid of you.
“Tim will take your watch tonight,” Doran tells you bluntly.
Your face crumples in disbelief. “What? Why?”
He frowns. “You want watch?”
”Yes, of course. We all have to share the load.”
Doran eyes you speculatively. That’s something you’ve always liked about him, that he doesn’t weasel his way out of anything. He’ll look you in the eye and tell you the painful truth, which is essential for survival these days.
”You’ll need your sleep, for when you have to travel on your period. Take the night off.”
Reasonable, right? Logical, and unusually accommodating. But as you frown up at his face, you observe his eyes flick uncomfortably towards the trees for a moment, and a stone of dread sinks in your belly.
”Thank you, sir,” you tell him, innocent and unsuspecting.
A grunt is his only reply, turning back towards a group of the others near the edge of the woods.
Gaz is not in that group.
There are three reasons why you’ve survived this long, without any family or friends to protect you after the collapse of civilization. One, you’re uncommonly good at reading people. Two, you’re uncommonly good at mirroring, and figuring out how to fit yourself into whatever you need to be. And three, you always listen to your body’s intuition.
That night, you’ve barely rested your head on your lumpy, spruce needle pillow, when your skin pinches in a tight layer of goosebumps, and a warning radiates up your spine.
You subtly look around at first, trying to understand what it is your subconscious has picked up on, but nothing appears out of the ordinary. There’s just you, and your campmates, and Gaz. All stretched along the trampled grass as usual, but there’s something very wrong.
You’ve got nothing now, not even a knife for defense. If Gaz decides to off you in your sleep tonight, you’re confident he could take you out before you could so much as scream for help.
But you’ve also begun to suspect that Nick was the one who followed you into the woods last night. That his presence was the oppressive danger you felt, and subsequently ran from. What if he has something horrible in mind? What if Gaz’s claim to your body unintentionally painted an even worse target on your back?
You don’t dare go to sleep like this, you wouldn’t manage it even if you tried. Tim is on watch on the other side of the camp, and there are clouds covering the moon, so he doesn’t see you army crawl your way towards the woods. It takes quite some time to do it slowly and silently, but eventually you’re safe in the tree line. You brought your fleece jacket with you — you’ll need something warmer very soon, and maybe the town will yield a winter coat — but the night air is still uncomfortably cool against your cheeks.
What now? You can’t just stand here all night, losing sleep and making yourself vulnerable to the woods at your back. If someone found your bed empty, it’s a good bet they’d come looking over here anyway, so it’s not exactly a safe zone.
There’s an oak tree just a few meters farther into the woods, a big one. It’s not the easiest thing to climb, but after the months you’ve had to practice, you manage to haul yourself up into the branches without breaking any. You climb carefully, high enough up the trunk that you wouldn’t be spotted from the ground unless they had a flashlight. To your relief, you realize you now have a clear view of your camp roll below.
You can’t see much more than the blurry lump of it on the ground, but it gives you a measure of comfort, knowing that your paranoid delusions will be proven wrong over the course of the night. There’s certainly no prickle on your neck now, as you ease your body into the snug V of two solid branches. It’s not comfortable enough that you’d quickly fall asleep, but it’ll be relatively safe from a fall if you do.
The leaves rustle around you in the autumn breeze, and you rest your cheek against rough, crinkly bark. Like many other nights, you find yourself fantasizing about your past life — the bed you had, the food, the locked doors that kept you safe. You remember how it was to have friends, and never have to wonder if they were just leveraging you as a means of their own survival.
Sleep comes surprisingly fast, in the safety of the oak tree. When you realize you’re beginning to doze, you hook your arms around each branch, and let your legs hang loose to act as a counterweight to your upper body. And then you fade.
When you come back to awareness, you’re confused about how long you were asleep. The night is still the same shade of black, but the wind has stopped, and there’s an eerie silence blanketing the area. Your only solace is that the camp takes watch duty seriously, and if there were biters in the area, you’d know from the smell.
You’ve just begun to close your eyes again, when the task of checking on your camp roll comes back into focus, and you squint down at—
Shit, something’s moving. There’s some kind of grey blob slinking slowly towards your bed, apparently unable to tell that you’ve abandoned it already. Even this far away, you find yourself holding your breath in fear, doing your best to gather back your mental capabilities and figure out what this means.
The outline goes motionless when it reaches into your blanket and finds it cold and empty. It freezes there for a few seconds, and you smile grimly to yourself at the disbelief you imagine on the face of your would-be attacker. What? Silly forager girl is smarter than she looks? How inconvenient.
The shadow straightens up, leaning forward as if peering into the woods. No, you’re not coming back. You’re going to stay in this tree, and watch whoever-it-is go back to their own bedroll. You know, one of the ones you’ve marked in your head, aware of exactly the spot where each person sleeps at night. They’ve shown their hand tonight, and you’ll finally be a step ahead of this threat.
With the same wary slowness, the man slinks over to the other side of the clearing, and crawls back into Doran’s bed.
The next day, it takes an entire morning to travel all the way to the town.
Sitting in your tree that night with adrenaline pounding through you, you’d seriously considered abandoning the group right then. It was tempting to make your way in the opposite direction all on your own, without a moment to spare. But all of your supplies were still down at the camp, and you’d have to be a fool to leave with no water filtration, no means to make a fire, and no tampons.
So you’d crawled back into bed right before dawn, and when everyone else woke up, you pretended you’d been there the whole night. You were smiley, you were helpful, and you didn’t cast a single suspicious glance at the man who tried to sneak up on you in your sleep.
Let him wonder. Let him doubt. If you’re sure about one thing, it’s that you won’t be spending another night anywhere near these men.
You hike most of the day next to Rich, because he’s never seemed to care about you one way or the other. You don’t look at Gaz, and he doesn’t look at you.
It’s fate you’re relying on now. You’re desperately hoping that the town will have the survival supplies you need, maybe some lightweight food options, and a winter coat. If somehow the stars align on your scavenging, you can separate immediately from the others, hide somewhere in an empty building until they give up looking for you. You’ll make your own way at night fall, abandoning the only safety you’ve known in all these months, and hoping some other stroke of luck will befall you.
The others will probably thank their lucky stars to be rid of you.
You spend the journey scheming, and then mourning. It’ll be you against the world in just a few short hours, and you’re so close to your period. The timing couldn’t have been worse for Gaz to come out of nowhere to disrupt your life and your wellbeing. You’d probably be angrier about it, if you were a little less tired.
It’s strange, seeing the straight lines of rooftops again, when you get closer to the small town. Man made construction, now abandoned and haunted with the lives that will never be. You can practically see the cars cruising up and down the street, the mothers carrying in groceries.
Life, and purpose, and women.
Gaz goes on ahead, to take out the couple of biters wandering the outskirts. Two well-placed arrows in the head gives your group a clear path through the overgrown lawns, and you all leave your supplies near the treeline, for a faster escape if necessary.
The arrows have already been picked out of the motionless dead when you pass by, black rot oozing out of one of the eye sockets that was pierced. They’re both female, as biters often are.
“Look for any houses that are still locked,” Doran orders the group at large. ”Check basements and garages.”
Funny, you were under the impression that menstrual products were a priority.
Fuck, stop. You’ll have time to murder him in your mind later, when you have some comfortable miles of separation.
You head for the houses farther in, hoping that most scavengers would stick closer to the woods for an escape route. Still, nearly all of them have been broken into, or unlocked.
This was not a wealthy town, and the first home you walk into reminds you uncomfortably of your house growing up. Quickly scanning the disarray inside, you notice that something weird was done to the kitchen. Appliances were unplugged and moved around — a mixer here, a blender there — as if someone meant to take it with them, and then thought better of it. You open the oven on a whim, and shake your head at the electronics stowed in there, as if someone were afraid they’d be stolen in their absence. It’s difficult to see the value in a Nintendo Switch these days.
The house is colder than the air outside, so you hurry to the bathroom and check the water cistern on the toilet. You’re delighted to find it full, and you take your first comfortable piss in a long time, flushing it down with the months-old water.
Unfortunately, whoever lived here only used pads. You grab a half empty bottle of ibuprofen from the cabinet, foregoing the crusty tube of toothpaste, and try the bathroom connected to the main bedroom.
That investigation yields more pads and a fucking menstrual cup, so you cut your losses and head to the next house. And then the next. Half an hour later, and you’ve got a whopping seven tampons, a new bar of soap, and some Vaseline that looks nearly fresh out the package. You don’t dare carry anything containing water these days, as much as you may longingly eye the conditioners and lotions. Water has weight, and every gram counts when you’re backpacking for weeks.
The sudden noise of a door latching disturbs you. You distinctly remember locking everything behind yourself with each house you’ve entered, so whoever-it-is must have found another way in.
Silently closing the bathroom cabinet, you grab the pair of grooming scissors sitting on the counter, and fit them snug into your palm in a way that keeps them concealed, but available for stabbing.
Entering the hall, the floorboard creaks under your weight, and you freeze to listen. There are only small, scuffing sounds coming from the living area, but no other clues to your intruder’s identity. Biters can’t close doors, right?
Sticking to the extreme edge of the hall near the wall, you keep your feet in a straight line to walk on the sturdier parts of wood, and make your way slowly to the corner, peeking one eye around the drywall.
It’s Gaz. Of course it’s Gaz. He doesn’t appear to see you, even though he’s facing in your general direction. He’s found a cigarette somewhere, and he’s currently taking drag after drag of it, shoulders slumped with fatigue, and eyes half-lidded like he’s gone somewhere else mentally.
He has no idea the impact of his actions. He’s a stupid, stupid man, who does petty things because he has no other joy in life. Adjusting your grip on the scissors, you seriously consider for a moment, just attacking him. He doesn’t seem to know you’re here, and you might get a few good blows in before he could react.
But those are inside thoughts. Realistically you can’t afford to be covered in blood right now, even if you did manage to gravely injure him. There are tampons to look for, and not enough wiggle room in your schedule for murder.
But that doesn’t mean you have to walk away.
”Hello, Gaz.”
To your immense satisfaction, his entire body jolts in surprise, and his mostly-smoked cigarette drops to the carpet.
“Fucking hell,” he grumbles, snubbing it out with his boot and then frowning over at you. “This is not a good time.”
You adjust your backpack a little higher on your shoulder and peel away from the wall. “Oh, yeah. It must be so inconvenient to have women always coming on to you, when you’re just minding your own business.”
He blinks tiredly at you, shaking his head a little. “Don’t do this.”
You take another step forward, screwing your face up in mock confusion. “Don’t do what? Because according to you, I’ve already done it.”
Gaz merely reaches into his pocket and procures another cigarette, releasing a long, frustrated breath.
“Is that what you wish would happen?” you purr, stepping up to the edge of his personal space. “Is that what you think about, Gaz?”
Tucking the unlit cigarette back into his pocket, he finally turns his attention on you with a steely look. “No.”
“You know what I think?”
“Reckon you’re too busy being Doran’s little wife to do any of that.”
You ignore the insult to smile innocently at him, and take that last step into his body. Brazenly you place your palm right over the middle of his chest, atop the heart that’s pounding a rapid, frantic rhythm against your hand. Liar.
“Mmm.” You let your hip settle against his, curving your body seductively into his warmth. “I think you get so hard when you’re around me. I think you lie and cheat and ruin my life, because you can’t stand how bad you want me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself,” he mutters, his heart picking up even faster. The scent of that stupid deodorant somehow pokes through the smell of tobacco, and you screw up your nose at it.
“You smell like a girl.”
“Thank you,” he murmurs, slightly adjusting the angle of his body.
And then you feel his fingers finding your hand, and the scissors get skillfully removed from your possession, as his eyes stay locked on yours.
A thick, hot wash of rage floods through your chest, as you stare back at him and imagine smashing his nose into his brain. Your face is carefully neutral, but if he were to find your pulse right now, it would rival his.
Impulsively you bring your face even closer, nearly brushing your mouth to his ear as you tip your chin up and slowly, distinctly whisper, “I hate you.”
He’s so still. He doesn’t even seem to breathe at all, which gives you a ball of sick satisfaction in your chest, that you finally managed to offend him.
And then just when you’re about to pull away, he turns his head and presses his scruffy mouth to the corner of your lips.
The beat of the club music is thumping in your chest, vibrating through your bones as your boyfriend's chest heats your back. His stubble scratches your neck as he leans in, looping his arms around your waist, hips grinding his growing bulge into your ass as he nibbles your ear. The shots you'd done together give you lift, untethering you from shame, allowing you to take part in this whole exercise.
" 'member Bonnie, just lookin' t'night." slurs Johnny, hot breath fanning your ear, making you shiver despite the overwhelming heat.
"Dinnae need t' pick.... But take a look at 'im." he croons loud to be heard over the music as he reaches up to pull your chin so you're looking the way he wants. Despite the crowd at the bar, you can tell who he's talking about: the handsome, young, flashy guy with his shirt entirely unbuttoned showing off planes of muscle and a cheeky grin that you're sure Johnny's echoing behind you. And oh you can just about see it. The discussions with him roaring to the forefront of your mind.
How he'd handed the lit match of the idea off to you when you'd been twined together, slick and sweat-drenched. Dropping it as a casual question like it wasn't something that shoved your heart out of your chest and down through your ass.
"Ever thought 'bout a three-way?"
It's an instant and overwhelming dread. A reminder of swimming through request after request to be a 'unicorn' for couples on dating apps, of old boyfriends and girlfriends just assuming it was on the table because you were bi. He must see your face fall, because he's instantly scrambling, hands rubbing your arms and yanking you in under his chin. Muttering apologies and how you don't have to if you don't want to, was just an idea bonnie, and you'd thought it forgotten. A bad idea struck in the afterglow and burnt out quickly.
Until he brings it up again.
And again. But this time, it's after a long day and a few glasses of wine during lazy cuddles on the couch; facing away makes it easier, and the words come bubbling out. Eyes trained on the TV as you confess the attempts that soured you to it all. How you'd been used like some kind of toy to help another girl get off and as eye candy for her boyfriend, not even a weak orgasm for your trouble, all the other times where someone always ended up the third awkward wheel, how it sounds great on paper John but in reality it just doesn't work. And he's humming in agreement and apologies behind you, and again, you think it's burnt out.
Only for it to flare when you turn your back like some insidious hot spot. He starts making use of your toys in his war to win you over. Whispering in your ear about how a tongue would feel so much better when he's fucking into your tight cunt with his hand dragging your vibe over your clit, tugging on the plug in your ass as he grinds his cock through your folds, fanning the flames as he mutters about how hot it'd be to fuck you into someone else's cock.
You don't know if he Pavlov'd you into it or simply wore you down, fire licking the edges of your resistance until it was ash. His match dropped in you now a small flame, burning in desire. Enough that you'd thrown on your slinkiest club outfit to come out and 'window shop' with him. Because that's all you were doing. It didn't hurt to fantasize right? You hadn't lied, it always sounded great in theory. More cock, more pussy, more hands, tongues and teeth - what's not to love? And it makes you shiver in his hold despite the club's muggy air; you can almost feel how it'd be to be sandwiched between the mystery man and Johnny. How he'd run his hands up to your nipples, keeping your mouth busy with his as Johnny continues his bump and grind behind you. Your mouth is dry, and you don't know how, but John must be able to tell because he starts pressing you forward, pushing you toward the bar with a gentle shove and a wink.
"Jus' say hi, tha's all love. Dinnae need t' do more."
And maybe the shots were stronger than you thought. Maybe the fire he lit inside you was bigger than you knew but you do. It's almost an out-of-body experience feeling your feet move as you walk towards the stranger, his eyes half-lidded as he looks you over with a smirk that makes your stomach wobble.
You barely manage to mumble out your name and a hello before he purrs back, "Hello gorgeous."
And the desire in your belly evaporates. Pussy dryer than the Sahara in an instant, you backtrack frantically, muttering out excuses to his confused face as you turn tail and scurry to the safety of your baffled boyfriend.
"Th' hell did he say t' you bonnie?" he asks as he's looking you over like you're coming back from a fight rather than a bad attempt to pick up a stranger. He instantly goes into protective mode, "I'll fuck 'im up." and you're scrabbling to grab onto his arm to hold him back. Thankfully you manage to talk him out of it. Distracting him with kisses and raking your nails through his hair does the trick, leading to him dragging you out of the club and back home, you barely make it in the door. Dress up around your waist as he pounds you into the floor just inside the door of your flat you think it's forgotten. Gone just like your thoughts in the explosion of your orgasm, sprawling on the cool floor, the tile welcome against your overheated skin as John flops panting beside you.
Until he groans and you turn your head to see those curious blue eyes boring into you as he rolls to stare at you.
"What was all tha'? He insult your ma or somethin'? Ya looked like he pissed in your cornflakes." he drags you in as he says it, nuzzling into your neck.
"Just didn't like him." you deflect and you feel the puff of air as he snorts.
"Righ'. An' I'm the virgin Mary." he's digging his nose under your jaw like a dog and you know he's just as unlikely to drop this bone.
"His voice was awful," you mutter and it startles a bark of laughter out of him.
"What?" he laughs, pulling back to stare at you incredulously. Indignant you squirm in his hold and huff as he grins, defending your bruised feelings.
"It was all nasal and pitchy and-" you sputter and he cuts you off laughing again, "Pitchy? Really bonnie?"
Pouting, you turn away from him, gaining your feet as he snorts and he's scrambling to stand behind you. Draping himself over your shoulders as you start the awkward shuffle to the bathroom, trying to avoid dripping on the floor.
"So you got a thing, for voices eh bonnie?" he's smirking at you. You can hear it, and it's confirmed when the bathroom mirror comes into view, his self-assured mug unrepentant and smug.
Feeling petty you shove him off your shoulders and grab his towel to wipe between your legs.
"So what?" your voice is sharp, but you're hurt; it's hard not to feel mocked the way he'd laughed like a loon, and you can almost see him shift gears. Blue eyes flashing as his grin turns slow and naughty, "Tha' mean you got some naughty audio?"
It feels so out of left field that your tipsy brain has no way to catch up, and it has your mouth flapping like a landed fish, and that has him crowing, "I knew it!"
Crowding into you with a wicked grin, he asks "Gonna share bonnie? Hmm?"
Stunned by the rapid shift, you're still floundering as he wheedles and bargains, "C'mon, please love. Show me yours and I'll show you mine?"
The way he grins and the glimmer in his eyes have always been your weakness. It's how he reeled you in in the first place, sealing the deal with his rumble and the accent. So you cave. And he's practically glued to your side, vibrating with excitement as he follows you to the bedroom and your earbuds. Pulling you into his lap and peering over your shoulder as you navigate with trembling fingers to your go-to audio. You hand him both headphones but he surprises you by tucking one into your ear and the other in his own. Winking as he hits play on your phone the voice in your ear starts up.
It's like you fall through his eyes, sky blue darkening in a storm threat until you're plunging into blue as dark as the deep sea. He's licking his lips, and the voice in your ear is murmuring about how soft your skin is when John's hand on your thigh makes you jump, and you both freeze, looking at each other.
"Christ, I need you." is groaned in your ear, and you don't know who snaps first, you or John. Your dress is ripped off over your head, and his shirt goes flying. Pants and underwear shoved frantically down his legs as his tongue and teeth chase you onto the the bed as you crawl back. Hands sliding over your skin and murmuring praise into your flesh as the audio continues to play, dropping groans and filth into both your ears. It's an explosive mix, Johnny's tongue on your clit and the voice in your ear moaning about how much of a fucking slut you are. It must be firing him up as much as it is you because he's moving with a ferocity you've only usually seen when he returns from brutally long deployments. Fingers digging into your thighs deep enough to bruise as you feel the bed bounce, his hips desperately fucking into it in a search for stimulation. Reaching down, you dig your fingers into the muscle of his shoulders desperately, and he must get the message because he comes surging up, teeth clacking against yours in a brutal kiss as he slams his drooling cock into you. There's no time to adjust but he slides right in despite how you clench at his intrusion. Both of you groan at how wet you are and the way he slides through your walls because of it. He barely pulls out, grabbing your leg to spin you and plaster his chest to your back, reaching new depths. Cock head bumping deeper as his thrusts grind your clit into the mattress. That alone would be enough to send you skyrocketing through to your orgasm, but he one-ups it, reaching around to put you in a headlock. Leaving you breathless and helpless to take how he frantically pounds into you and how he rumbles into your ear that doesn't have the earbud. It's surround sound of your kinks, John's voice in one ear, the audio in the other, throat squeezed by his bicep as his cock surges through you. You can't keep track of where it's all coming from, reduced to sensation and sound. Stuck just experiencing it all, pleasure an overwhelming crash through you.
"So pretty baby." is breathlessly groaned in your ear by someone as John's tip bullies your G spot. You can feel him throb in you with, "Look at your pretty little cunt taking my cock. So fucking hungry for it."
"Moaning like the little whore you are." has you whining and ready to beg, your orgasm right there and his pace doubles.
"Taking it so good baby." is crooned into your ear while there are groans in the other. And that's it. You're splintering into a million pieces, every nerve lit up and you feel Johnny lose his rhythm and his cock kick in you as your orgasm milks his own from him.
Both of you collapse to pant on the bed as you gather up the pieces of your grey matter. His hand is gentle as he removes your earbud, but his eyes and smile are wicked.
"Jesus bonnie, tha' was amazing." he says around his grin and you're loose in your limbs and mind, floaty and giddy, giggling at his words. He grins wider and pulls you in for a snuggle as you slowly come back down. Pressing soft kisses to your cheek as he rambles to you, and it slowly filters in. He has his own collection. And he wants to show you.
And with that, the threesome fire he nurtured so carefully is banked or redirected you're not sure but either way, he takes off after this new idea like a wildfire. Charging full in. Diligently sharing his own catalogue, working through yours with you and while your sex life had never been bad it's been ratcheted up to new heights that have your days passing in toe-curled bliss. Until you're woken up by one of those phone calls in the night, hugging your arms around you from the chill as you watch him pack. Trying to say your love aloud and with the kisses you see him off with.
The first few days are as brutal as always, the ache of missing him raw and fresh. But as it goes it becomes something you learn to live around, like every deployment before. It gets easier when he starts messaging. Signs of life and all. And just like the other deployments it starts sweet. Checking in with you about your day, and your week, asking about the local team's scores, passing on vague stories and so on. And just like the others it takes about a week for him to crack and ask for dirty pics. So soon your chat is interspersed with naughty photos and occasionally you or him sending audios you like back and forth. It seems a natural progression that after the deployment stretches on for a full month and a half he asks for "Just a little video bonnie." in a pleading voice message, blatantly using his own deep timbre against you.
It's further than you've gone before though, and it makes you balk, timid. Trying to skirt around it, deflecting, but he sees right through you even in text. Your phone pings with the alert and you see he's shared an audio file with you, some downloaded file that's a favorite of his no doubt. The voice message popping up soon after.
"Please? For me babe? Don't even need to see your pretty little pussy. Just your face. Wanna see you cum. It's been too long. Give it a listen. It's good. I promise." he's practically whining and you think of him, tucked away into some grungy bunker, halfway around the world and your stupid soft heart melts. Then caves.
So later that night you slide your headphones in and hit play, balancing your phone so it can film your face. Honestly, you half expected to hear Johnny in your ear, instead, it's a man's deep rumble you haven't heard before but it goes straight to your clit. Clearly, John's been taking notes about what you like because it's like some kinky wish list come true.
"Ain't you a pretty bird?" croons the gravelly voice and your thighs clench. You'd almost accuse Johnny of finding some kind of hypnotic audio with how you start automatically following the orders coming through your headphones.
"Bet those nipples o' yours are aching, you little slut. Practically beggin' t' be pinched." is followed by a mean-sounding laugh that almost makes you whimper.
"Ya going to be a good little slut and pinch 'em for me? Yeah? Work 'em over good till that sloppy cunt is dripping for me?" has your fingers moving without thought until it's exactly as he says and you're biting your lip automatically to stop from moaning as the voice continues rumbling in your ears. Deep tones denigrating and praising you as your fingers make their way to tease your entrance and slide over your throbbing clit. You don't know how much time has passed and it can't have been long but you're already teetering on the edge of euphoria, "Gonna rub that naughty little clit for me yeah? Only good girls get to come though."
It's automatic, falling from your blissed-out mind and tongue, "Please!"
"Hmmm." chuckles the voice, before saying softer than anything before, "You gonna come on your fingers you lil' tart? Come on then, le's hear it."
Your orgasm rips through you in a full-body shudder, leaving you moaning into the pillow. It's embarrassing, so much so that you can't even watch the video before sending it off to Johnny. Yeeting it into the digital gulf between you two and scurrying off to hide in the blissful ignorance of sleep.
When you wake up it's clearly been well received with a flurry of text messages waiting for you along with a five-minute long rambling voice message that you listen to twice. Once just hearing it for the first time. The second with your fingers stuffed in your cunt as you listen again to how his voice shakes as he rambles about how pretty you are when you cum and the slick sounds of his fist around his cock. Only the looming threat of you being late for work keeps you from going for a third listen. It breaks the proverbial dam and soon he's sending you more clips of the same VA as well as his own, and you send back videos of your own enjoyment. Not long after that you start getting his own videos back, the black glove choking his dick hypnotizing as it throbs and weeps milky cum, you faintly can hear the audio playing in the background as Johnny's own voice drips filth in your ears.
It makes for a particularly explosive homecoming. Really you don't know how you made it home from the airport you picked him up at without getting either a speeding ticket or an indecency charge. But you're not complaining as he plows you through the hall floor, then again over the couch, then slower in the shower and finally in the bed. You're aching and tingly, all your muscles feeling like jelly as he sleepily murmurs beside you, something about just doing delivery and you have to agree. There's no way your legs are up for standing and cooking so you order Indian and around your curry, he shares what stories he can before you both crash into the bed.
Slowly the sexcapades slow from the fervour of the freshly returned and it takes two weeks of him being home again before he even brings it up.
It's cute, he's clearly a little nervous, shifting awkwardly as he holds out the earbud, face pleading.
"It's fer couples. One for each o' us bonnie. It's that guy ye like."
It's not a hard sell honestly, and you're smiling at him as you put in the headphone, it'd be impossible not to with how his eyes light up and the wide grin that splits his face. His own earbud tucked in he starts to frantically kiss you, lips sealed to yours over and over around the interruptions caused by how you're both working the clothes off of each other.
"Slow down." rumbles the audio, and you feel him shudder under your hands, "Bird like tha' deserves t' be savoured."
Johnny slows, and your mind spins as he starts to just sloppily make out with you, fingers lightly teasing achingly slow circles around your nipples.
"Tha's a good boy, pretty bird ought t' show him how good yeah? Go on, grab his cock." croons the voice and your fingers are moving automatically to his dick as Johnny groans into your mouth.
"Tha's a good slut." purrs the audio, making you shudder as you squeeze his length, gliding your thumb over his tip that's slowly seeping pearly white.
John mutters into your neck, "Bloody Jesus, I ain't gonna last." and it makes you snort, just as the audio starts up again.
"Gotta lick those pretty nipples hmm? Give 'em a nibble f' me?" and you're gasping as Johnny licks, sucks, and bites as the deep voice continues.
"Look at that, lil' whore likes her tits bein' played with don't ya? Filthy girl. Bet you're bloody soaked down then, drooling for some fingers like the slut y' are." it makes you gasp and squeeze John's cock so he pops off your nipples with a groan, his head tilting back and hips thrusting up into your fist.
"Two needy little fuck toys here," chuckles the voice as John grabs blindly at your hips, "gonna have to work together now yeah? Want ya both stuffed full of some fingers until you're drooling like the slags y' are."
It has you looking wildly at John who just shoots you a grin that's manic, eyes wild before his middle finger plunges deep into you. Still, you hesitate but you can't for long, John's free hand snatching yours up and guiding it around. Pressing your finger into his ass as you stare shocked at him until he scissors his fingers inside you and you startle. Moving your hand, your finger, accidentally and he groans. It stirs something inside you and you slowly begin to match him thrust for thrust, slowly pumping your finger into his ass as he works another into your dripping pussy.
"Such good lil' slags." hums the voice and you clench around Johnny's fingers, "Don't forget, good sluts don't come without permission."
Johnny groans at that and meanly strums his thumb across your clit, setting your inner thighs to trembling as you fight to not come on his fingers. Whining "John!" earns you a small reprieve as he eases back to gently scissor his fingers inside instead and you decide to get revenge. Finding the small bulge inside his ass you begin to stroke it firmly, dropping your head to his chest and running your tongue around his nipple. A punched out, "Fuck!" comes from his lips as you bully his prostate and his hips start to move as the voice in both your ears chuckles.
"No coming now."
Reminded of this 'rule' Johnny sets to strumming your clit again and it becomes some twisted game of chicken as you drag each other towards orgasm. The deep rumble dropping praise and insults in equal measure, rough timbre giving orders to you both until you swear you can't handle anymore.
"Think your dick deserves to get wet now yeah?"
His sentence is barely complete before John's ripped himself off your finger and his own fingers out of you to replace them with his cock. It's a delicious shock as his girth stretches you wide before he's setting a brutal pace. Desperately clinging to his shoulders you barely make out the chiding tone.
"Ah, ah, fuck 'er right. Slow. Deep. Gotta make that messy cunt drool all over your cock."
John's hips stutter but slow, and instead settle for an achingly deep slow push in and out. It has you begging in short order, so close to euphoria, needing just that little edge more to reach sheer bliss. Pleases fall from your lips in a litany that John grits his teeth through as the voice coos condescendingly.
"Poor bird. Do y' need to come?"
Both you and Johnny nod at that as he's panting into your neck and you can feel his shoulders shake with the exertion of holding back.
"Christ can just imagine me there. Fuckin' y' ass open, stuffin' you full of cock. You'd love tha' wouldn't ya? Fucked from both sides like the fuck toy y' are?"
Tears are streaming down your face and you think Johnny's biting your neck but it's hard to focus on that when you hear the rough chuckle, "G'on then, cum like a good slut f' me."
It's explosive, near-instantaneous at his words, you shatter to pieces, body clenching and releasing in rolling wave after wave of ecstasy. John swearing and hips stuttering as he fucks his own climax deeper into you through the last spasms of his cock.
It takes a long time for you to string your thoughts back together, but luckily John seems to have it somewhat together. Gently pulling the earbud from you with a sweet kiss before staggering off to the bathroom as you hear him muttering under his breath. Returning with a damp and warm towel you trade soft kisses as you clean yourselves up. With a throw John sends the towel off to the laundry hamper in the corner and drags you in for a snuggle, your eyes closing in the warmth of his chest you gather enough presence of mind to murmur to him, "Should set an alarm."
He groans at that, "I left my phone on the dresser, do we need t'?"
Cracking an eye open you blearily judge the distance to the dresser across the bedroom. Deciding it's not worth losing the snuggles you respond with a 'nah' and a kiss to his chest.
It comes back to bite you in the morning. Thankfully your body is used enough to your routine that it wakes you close enough to your regular alarm that you don't end up late for work, but the mad scramble you have to do to get there sets the tone for the rest of the day. Leaving you off kilter and tense until you're finally unlocking the door to your flat.
Only to freeze at the sight of the behemoth peering at you over the back of your couch through some kind of ghoulish skull balaclava. Your heart drops into your shoes, fear surging forward until Johnny pops up and spins you into a hug, "Ah bonnie! Dinnae le' Ghost scare ye, he's not as bad as he looks."
Dragging you forward as he beams, "Come on an' say hi, he's my lieutenant ye ken."
Pushing at your shoulders until you're sitting next to Ghost you try to shove the fear away and timidly turn to face him.
Offering your name and hand in hello earns you a handshake from a vaguely familiar black glove and a thundering heart when you meet his brown eyes. It kicks fully out of your control as the adrenaline surges when you hear "Ain't you a good dove?" in a way too familiar tone.
18+ Gaz/fem reader — past bullying, PIV, friends to lovers
Gaz who used to be such a jerk to you.
You’d almost think he liked you at times, but then a backhanded compliment or a laugh at your expense would sober you right out of that delusion. It was always a stark reminder of the invisible wall between you — his effortless charm, and your nervous quiet.
You accepted it.
Socially, your breeds were just different. He was a dangerous thing you’d better not touch, better not even look at too long, in case it opened you up to his attention.
And if you were a more healed version of yourself, you might have cut ties — found new friends, deleted the group chat, and maybe even switched your classes around to avoid him. But you were seventeen and didn’t think you deserved any of those protections, so you stuck it out.
And then he joined the military, and you moved on with your life. Many years, two and a half boyfriends, and two cats later, you never expect to run into him again. But you do, on some random, gloomy day. That’s definitely him, headed obliviously in your direction while he talks to someone on the phone.
You’ve just finished assuring yourself that there’s no way he'll remember you, when his eyes land on your face and light up in recognition.
Shit.
This is going to hurt.
Instantly your mind erases all the personal growth you’ve accomplished, and puts you right back into the anxious shell you were all those years ago, as if his face were some trigger for memory loss. If only he hadn’t noticed you, and you could turn around and pretend you never saw him. But no, he’s already walking over, stowing his phone in his pocket.
“Kyle,” you respond with a fake smile when he says your name. “You look…” Your eyes rake over his faded, well-worn jacket, so at odds with the flashy clothes he used to wear. “…different.”
It’s true, everything about him seems changed, from the understated surety of his posture, to the random scar on his face now. Even his eyes feel different, when they’re connecting with yours. It’s like his personal aura of disregard has evaporated, and something entirely different has taken its place.
“Speak for yourself,” he says, in a softer, deeper voice than you remember. “I like the new hair.”
You cringe internally, waiting for that mocking smile to make an appearance. But no, he just gazes speculatively across the pavement at you, as if the compliment had no hidden meaning at all.
“Thanks,” you mumble. “It’s… uh… are you visiting?”
“Stationed,” he clarifies, reluctantly dragging his eyes away to scan the damp street. “Just got my things unpacked.”
“Oh, that’s cool.” You’ve just started to slink away as subtly as you can, first one sidestep and then another.
“D’you live here?” he asks point-blank, with a little quirk to his brow.
C’mon, lie. Say you’re on holiday or something.
“…Yeah.” Why does he have to act so different? It’s throwing off your learned defenses. “A couple streets over.”
The spark of interest you glimpse in his eyes is quickly smothered by something unreadable.
“S’ppose I’ll be seeing you, then,” he offers, lingering his eyes once more on your hair, which you previously believed was behaving today.
“Alright, see y—“
It’s Kyle who escapes down the stretch of pavement. Kyle who makes a hasty, awkward retreat before you’ve even finished speaking.
“What the fuck?” you mutter to yourself, continuing down the street.
Sure, you’re confused, but that encounter was oddly… centering.
Maybe, after all this time, you somehow grew up. You’re not even that afraid of his attention any more, as if it just doesn’t even matter that much. Even if he were exactly the same as he was before, he would never again become a main character in your life or in your thoughts. How unexpectedly liberating.
You go home that night, thinking about the person you used to be. The energy you’d waste on proving yourself to people who were never your friends. The awkward moments you’d agonize over in your head, punishing yourself a hundred times for the smallest misstep. How strange that Kyle was the one to prove how much you’ve changed.
You start running into him on a fairly regular basis. At your favorite lunch spot, at the chemist's, and most commonly, on your way home from work, heading to your respective flats in the opposite direction of each other.
Every time, you're struck by how grounded you feel when he looks at you. Your heel suddenly doesn't ache, your skin doesn't feel tight and uncomfortable. He keeps a respectful distance, but his voice is always steady, and his clothes are always functional and boring. You suppose that's what the military does to some people, or maybe it's just time itself that changed him.
It takes a month for him to ask for your number. Another week to text you, and instead of asking you out for drinks, he seems interested in your cats. He can't have any of his own, he says, with the job. He seems to like the photos you send, and the little updates about your day.
It's you who invites him over the first time, for a bottle of wine and a pirated film. He sits on the other side of your couch for most of it, with his hands clasped over his belly like he's been paid not to touch anything while he’s there. He even keeps his jacket on, so when the film is done and it's time to either talk or kiss, he just stands right up and says his goodbyes.
He's almost awkward as an adult, which throws you completely off guard. It takes your cats claiming him to get him to relax a little at your place, but eventually he'll be spread out on your couch on a random Thursday night, with one cat loafing on his lap and the other one waiting on the arm rest for her turn, twitching her tail impatiently.
Your coworker asks if you two are dating, which is so utterly absurd, you don't even know what to say. You and Kyle are friends, and that alone should be enough of a crinkle in the universe. He's just new to the city, and you get along now, so it makes sense to hang out sometimes.
Nevermind that you've been cuddling closer lately, so the spare cat won't be so left out. Nevermind that you're now familiar with the feeling of his warm arm pressed against your shoulder, the backs of his knuckles tucked into the side of your thigh. Nevermind that in your bed after he's gone, you often hallucinate scenes of other things happening between you, things that would surely never exist in a sane world.
If he wanted you, he would make a move, so you're friends.
You're a bad friend, the next time he comes over.
You're wearing one of those satin bras that shows the impression of your nipples through your shirt, and you have your hair done, and you've got on a pair of little shorts, instead of your usual leggings.
Nothing a rock-solid friendship can't handle, of course. Nothing Gaz can't handle, even if he's extra quiet that night. You expect to feel his eyes on your body, but instead you feel the opposite, the inward shift in his concentration.
That rock-solid military control is suddenly a tangible barrier between you, uncomfortable and tight. The outside of your knees touch when he joins you on the sofa, shooting a spark through your lower belly—
Christ, you need to stop it. You're probably just seeking his approval to fill a teenage wound that's not his responsibility to repair. You shouldn't need him to validate you, you're your own person now, and also, fuck him for making you feel like shit in high school. You don't want him, anyway. It would be toxic as hell to pursue someone who's capable of hurting you like that, so stop it.
Overwhelmed, you put your feet up on the couch and rub at your face, trying to simultaneously get a handle on your feelings and shield you from view. This is all so stupid and unnecessary, and you're terrified that you actually like him in a very un-friendlike manner, which will only serve to embarrass you further.
For some reason, Kyle jolts straight up out of his seat, sending the cat leaping away with an affronted growl.
“Have you got any beer?” he asks, already on his way to the fridge.
“Um… I think so. Help yourself.”
Curiously, you watch his back while he putters around in your tiny kitchen. Why the hell is he taking so long?
“Kyle, are you okay?”
He takes a long drink with his back to you, and then finally turns around, bracing his arms on your counter and almost glowering at you.
“What?” you probe, curling your feet under you, and feeling self conscious with your bare legs.
Shit, he has a girlfriend, doesn’t he. Or he’s married. Or this is all an elaborate prank to shred your self esteem.
Kyle’s mouth opens and closes silently, and then he stalls with another drink of beer. You know, to torture you.
“Look, if y—“
“I love y—“
You both snap your mouths shut at the same time, staring wide eyed at each other over the countertop.
“I know I’ve been a right prick,” he says in a rush, “and you’ve got every right to bloody hate me—“
“I don’t hate you.”
Again, and both stop and blink at each other, breathing fast. You can feel your heart pounding against the front wall of your chest.
“I don’t know what to do,” he admits. “I thought I’d gotten over you, and then I meet you again, and it’s like…”
Some kind of weird euphoria is starting to bubble up inside you, making the edges of your consciousness turn into blurry pink irrelevance. Kyle— Kyle likes you.
“Are you married?” you croak, and he just laughs, shaking his head.
“No.”
“Do you have a girlfriend?”
“No.”
You chew on your mouth, heart still fluttering. “Mind grabbing me one of those beers?”
You have sex that night, in your bed, with the cats making annoyed noises intermittently on the other side. He accidentally cums in your hand, with his palm wrapped around the swell of your pretty satin bra. He seems rather embarrassed by it, but you tell him it’s fine, of course, and just expect that you’ll have to wait another day to get yours.
You couldn’t be more wrong, because he makes you cum on his fingers twice before he gets hard again.
You walk into work the next day, feeling the most alive you’ve ever felt on a solid two hours of sleep. Your phone chimes, and you look down at first text from your new boyfriend:
Come to mine tonight? I’ve got something planned.
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