𓆝 𓆟 𓆞 blub blub blub

22 | "when you dive deep underwater, you can hear your own heartbeat. and your own heartbeat is the only thing you'll hear..." | main blog: @strwbrychffoncke

[froggiequarium]

𓇼 ⋆｡˚ 𓆝⋆｡˚ 𓇼 aquarium rooms ⸺> bakery to the right

sfw

lnds stalker!raf x sick!reader

lnds caleb memorizes barbie songs

lnds rafayel helps you dye your hair

lnds caleb praising you

rafayel makes you a nail set

non!mc reader seen by the li's best friends (series)

interacting w fae (ft. flins genshin impact)

stay a gentleman! (ft. varka genshin impact)

nsfw

lnds caleb puts a collar w a bell on you

thigh riding w lnds caleb

lnds caleb headlocking you

lnds caleb loves your curves

dividers by cafekitsune + anitalerina

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[vultursvolans]

something something being put in a situation where you have to sit on your f/os lap before you guys are even dating

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[luffysprincess]

Men who when they wake up in bed beside you they notice the sun rays hitting your still sleeping eyes so they hold a hand up to block the light until you naturally wake up

[mewnbuns]

hybrids who can smell other men on you and immediately their hackles are raised…… overcome with the animalistic need to override it with their own no matter the method……

[writingdose]

writers, instead of asking ai for help, you can always use your childhood trauma and repressed issues to help you with that fic

[azaablue]

the best fanfiction you've ever read was written by a woman in her 40s before she made dinner for her kids. it was written by a teenager after school when they should've been studying for a history test. and a barista came up with the idea while they cleaned the espresso machine and busser fact-checked it on their break and the post-doc edited between writing grant proposals and the nurse apologized for typos in the notes after a long shift and behind every drabble and one-shot and multi-chapter fic there is a person with a wonderful and interesting and chaotic life and it is such a privilege that we get to be apart of it because they decided to do this thing we all share, for fun.

[the-kirbe-anon-archive-deactiva]

I love dandelions!

*puts a dandelion in your hair*

Reblog to put a dandelion in prev's hair

[cryinggirlnamedhelen]

funnily enough, sae probably has the happiest life in blue lock. he’s completely unaware of rin’s beef against him, he finds everything funny and laughs internally all the time, he’s a millionaire, he plays for the best team in the world, he’s adored by fans, he’s a member of the ng11, and he really doesn’t gaf.

ignorance is bliss yall

[romopiod]

♥ 𝓕𝓐𝓔 𝓐𝓛𝓦𝓐𝓨𝓢 𝓕𝓘𝓛𝓛 𝓣𝓗𝓔𝓘𝓡 𝓓𝓔𝓑𝓣𝓢

𝓢𝓨𝓝𝓞𝓟𝓢𝓘𝓢:

You are walking home through a snowstorm when you find a dying flame trapped in an iron lantern, and against every warning your grandmother ever gave you about the Fae, you breathe it back to life. It vanishes. So, it seems, does the ordinary shape of your life.  Now the wind goes soft when you're cold. The wood never runs low. Someone is watching from the treeline, and it keeps showing up right when you need saving most. You're starting to think all he's ever wanted is you. And what you offer him in return is the one thing you have always had plenty of: yourself.

Featuring. Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins Word Count. 20k (please, I promise it's worth it) Trigger Warning(s). SMUT (18+) ♦ fucking in the woods ♦ slightly horror-adjacent? but extremely tame, dw Notes. I have tried to incorporate accurate Russian culture into this work, but keep in mind that I'm not Russian, so beware of any inaccuracies, esp in terminology! Feminine terms/pronouns used for reader throughout the work.

By the time you were ten, you had buried your mother in the ground so hard the priest cracked two shovels trying to dig her a grave deep enough for God to find her.

You remember thinking, even then, that this was the trouble with Nod-Krai. The dead were always closer to the surface than they ought to be. Frost kept them honest. It pushed coffins up through the soil come the spring thaw, the way a sin pushes its way up through a confession, and the men would go out with their hooks and their crosses and put the bodies back where they belonged, muttering prayers with the particular tiredness of men who did not quite believe them anymore.

You think of this now, several winters later, because you are walking through a storm that wants very badly to make you one of the dead it puts back.

The wind does not blow so much as it arrives, all at once, from every direction, as if the forest itself has exhaled. It finds the seam where your shawl meets your collar and works its fingers in. Snow has filled the road past your knees, and the birches on either side have become something else entirely in this light, white bones standing sentry, their black eyes watching you pass with the patient indifference your Babulya always warned you trees like that could feel. They remember who walks past them in the dark, she used to say, crossing herself, then crossing you, two fingers pressed hard to your collarbone like she could pin the blessing into your skin so it would not slip off. And they tell.

You are walking to her now. Babulya Marfa, who has not left her izba on the far side of the wood in nine years, who sends word twice a season to whoever is fool enough to make the crossing. Who is, as of three days ago, very possibly dying. Your uncle wrote it in a hand so unsteady you had to read the letter twice to be certain the words were asking for you and not something crueler. You left before the ink on your reply had dried. You did not think, until you were already an hour into the trees, to ask why a storm like this had chosen tonight, of all nights, to come down off the mountains and bury the only road that led to her door.

Your father would call this foolishness. He would say a woman with sense waits out the weather in town, drinks her tea, says her prayers to the Tsaritsa by the stove, where the only thing she has to fear is whether the samovar needs more coals. But your father is three days behind you, and you are not, despite what people say about you, entirely without sense. You are simply the kind of fool who has always believed that love is owed in person, paid in full, while there is still time to pay it.

So you walk. Your valenki are soaked through to felt that no longer remembers what dry feels like. The lantern you carried from town gave up its flame an hour ago, smothered by wind that seemed almost deliberate in the way it found the glass, and you have not had the courage to stop and relight it, certain that if you stood still even a moment, the cold would decide you had made its decision easier and simply keep you.

.

It is in this dark, this particular shade of black that swallows the difference between shut eyes and open ones, that you see it.

A flame. 

Blue, and so small you mistake it at first for the storm playing tricks on your sight.. It hangs low among the birches, perhaps thirty paces off the road, no taller than a candle's flame and twice as faint, guttering as though some unseen hand keeps pinching it nearly to death and then, at the last possible moment, relenting.

Your whole body goes still with the particular stillness of a hare that has just understood the shape in the grass is not grass.

Bolotnik fires, Babulya's voice says, clear as if she stood beside you, clearer than she has sounded in any letter these nine years. You were seven the first time she told you, the two of you wrapped under the same wool blanket while the stove ticked and settled, her hands smelling of tallow and dried dill as she traced the story into your palm like she was teaching you to read by touch alone. 

The wisps. The Fae's own lanterns, lit from a coal they stole out of the first fire that ever burned, before God made the sun to make fires honest. They do not burn for warmth, devushka. They burn for hunger. You see one in the marsh, in the wood, anywhere the dark pools like water, and you do not go to it. You let it call you sweetheart in your mother's voice if it likes. You let it weep. You keep walking, and you do not look back, because the moment you go to comfort it, it has already won.

You know this. You have known it since before you knew the shape of your own name in your own handwriting.

And still, fool you are, your feet have already turned off the road.

You tell yourself it is only that the flame is so weak, so clearly wretched in the way it strains and dims and strains again like something genuinely about to gutter out, that some animal part of you, the same part that once spent a whole spring nursing a crow with a broken wing back into the sky, simply cannot leave it to die. You tell yourself a great many things, in fact, in the time it takes you to cross those thirty paces, snow past your knees, breath turned to frost-lace at your lips, and every one of those things is a lie you are telling so that the truer, stupider reason, it looked so alone out there, the way you feel most nights, and you have never once in your life been able to leave a lonely thing alone, does not have to be looked at directly.

You should know better. Babulya spent half your childhood making certain that you did.

But you have never been able to walk past a thing that is suffering, not a crow, not a dog, not the old beggar woman outside the church whom the other girls crossed the street to avoid, and some buried, stubborn part of you has already decided, before your mind has caught up to agree, that whatever this flame is, it is hurting, and that this, more than any warning whispered over a childhood blanket, is the only fact that matters.

The snow grows strange beneath your feet as you near it, packed too smooth, untouched by wind in a perfect ring no wider than a grave, and the flame does not flicker the way fire flickers when it is fed by wind. It flickers the way breath does when it is being held back on purpose.

You stop within arm's reach and understand, all at once, two things.

The first is that there is no marsh-light hovering free in the air the way Babulya's stories always told it. It is caught, contained, burning low and blue and dying inside the soot-fogged glass of a small iron lantern, the kind a traveler might once have carried. Its handle hangs from nothing, from no hand, from no branch, suspended at the exact height a person would hold it if a person were standing there. It turns, very slightly, on its nothing-chain, as if it has only just noticed you, too.

The second is that you have already reached out your hand.

You have seen weirder things than a dying lantern with no one to hold it. You were twelve the night the Wild Hunt cornered you to a cliff, and whatever you carry from that night you have never spoken of to anyone, not even Babulya, who you suspect already knows because she never once asked. Set against that, a flame guttering in its little iron cage seems almost a kindness of a haunting, the sort a girl could reasonably survive.

Still, fear comes, and it settles less on the lantern itself than on the air pressing close around it, the way the cold here seems to bend slightly inward, the way the silence holds itself with a kind of attention. A shiver moves through you that has nothing to do with the wind. You know its name. You have felt it before, kneeling too close to the iconostasis with its rows of painted eyes, in the breath before a held secret decides whether it wants to stay held. It is the body's oldest language for something here is watching you back.

You ought to turn around now. Babulya told you this part too, the part that comes after the warning has already failed, where you are meant to drop your hand, walk back to the road, and let the wind keep whatever pity you were about to spend on a thing built to spend you in return.

But the flame dips low again, nearly to nothing, a wick about to surrender its last claim on burning, and something in your chest answers it before your senses can intervene. You think of the crow. You think, absurdly, that nothing this weak could possibly still be dangerous, the same lie every soft-hearted fool has told herself walking up to every wounded thing that ever bit her for the trouble.

You pull it from the air. It is lighter than it has any right to be, the iron cold enough to ache through your mitten, and you tuck it inside your coat against your ribs the way you'd carry a half-frozen kitten, your other hand coming up to shield the little glass door from the worst of the wind.

The clasp is iron too, plain and old, sized for fingers larger than your own, and it takes three tries with numb hands before it finally gives. The moment the door swings open, the flame leaps, rising thin and furious, bending away from your fingers like something startled out of sleep that wants nothing to do with being seen this close, this raw. You nearly snap the door shut again on instinct, certain you have woken something better left to die in peace.

But it does not strike you. It cannot, you understand a breath later. It has not the strength left to do anything but flinch, and the flinch costs it; it dips lower than before, and something in your own chest twists with a tenderness that makes no earthly sense, pointed as it is at a marsh-light, a Fae's stolen coal, a thing your own grandmother spent half your childhood teaching you to fear.

You cup your hands around it anyway. You bring your face close, the way you would to coax a coal back to life in a dying stove, and you breathe.

Not hard. Not the way you'd feed a fire that wanted feeding. Soft, the way you'd breathe warm air over fingers gone white, willing the blood back into them before it could be lost for good. The wind itself seems, for one strange suspended moment, to hold off from you, as though even it is waiting to see what you'll do.

The flame catches your breath the way a starving thing catches the smell of bread.

It does not simply grow. It answers. The blue of it deepens to something nearer violet at the root, then climbs to gold at the crown, and the little glass casing fills with light so sudden and so warm against your numbed face that you gasp and nearly drop the whole lantern into the snow. Heat rolls off it, real heat, more than a flame that size has any business giving off, and for one heartbeat you feel something unmistakably like relief, though whether it belongs to you or to the flame you could not say.

Then the air around the lantern draws tight, the way air draws tight before lightning finds its mark, and a crackle of something that is neither quite fire nor quite frost races up the iron in a bright thread, snapping hard against your fingertips. You cry out and let go.

The lantern does not fall.

It is simply gone. No smoke trails where it hung, no sound marks where it might have struck the snow, only the smell of scorched air left behind and the ghost-shape of the flame still printed on the inside of your eyes, the way a candle leaves its light behind even after you've shut them.

You stand there with your scorched hand cradled to your chest, the wind rushing back into the silence all at once as though it, too, had been holding its breath, and for a long moment your mind refuses to agree with what your eyes have just told it.

It is only when you finally look down, half expecting to find iron and broken glass scattered somewhere in the drifts, that you see them.

Two prints, pressed deep into the snow before you, where a moment ago there had been no prints, no one standing at all. Not a hare's tracks. Not a wolf's. Boot prints, large, larger than any foot you have ever stood across from, sunk into the snow with the full weight of someone who had been standing there, close enough to have reached out and touched you himself, for who knows how long before you ever noticed him at all.

The wind is already filling them in, patient, the way it fills in everything in Nod-Krai eventually. By the time you find the nerve to step back toward the road, there is almost nothing left to prove they were ever there.

Almost.

. . .

The izba is a smear of gold across a field gone the colour of spilled milk, and the sight of its one lit window does something to your knees that the whole night of walking had not managed. Smoke threads up from the chimney in a thin grey rope, bent sideways by the wind, and the gate hangs in its drift with a crust of ice fused so thick along the latch that you have to work your fingers under it to lift the bar at all, your scorched hand screaming where the cold metal finds the rawest part of it.

You do not let yourself think about why that part is raw. Not yet. There will be time for that later, in the dark, when no one is asking you to be brave in front of them.

Babulya does not wait for the knock. The door opens before your knuckles ever reach it, spilling stove-light and the smell of tallow candles and dried dill out into the storm, and there she is, smaller than you remembered, wrapped in three shawls against a cold that lives in her bones now more than it ever lived in the air, one hand braced on the frame as though the doorway itself might decide to abandon her if she let go.

"Devochka moya." Her voice cracks on the second word, half scold and half prayer. "What kind of fool walks Nod-Krai in a storm like this one?"

"The kind whose grandmother is dying," you say, and step into her arms, and you hear her sardonic chuckle at your humor, the particularly dark kind you have only been comfortable enough to use with your grandmother.

She is thinner than the letter let on. You feel it through the shawls, through your own numbed hands, the way her shoulder blades sit too close beneath the wool, like a bird's, like something built for leaving. She smells the same as ever, woodsmoke and beeswax and the particular bitterness of the herbs she keeps strung along the rafters, and for one long moment neither of you says anything at all, because some reunions are better held in silence than spoiled with words.

It is she who pulls back first. It is she who takes your face in both her hands the way she always has, thumbs pressed to your cheekbones, eyes narrowed in the candlelight like she is reading something written beneath your skin.

Then her gaze drops to your hand, and whatever she finds there stops her cold.

"Show me."

"It's nothing, Babulya."

"Show me, or I will know you for a liar before you've even taken off your coat."

You hold it out. In the stove-light the burn looks worse than it felt, an angry welt curled across two fingers and into your palm, the skin gone tight and shining where the crackle caught you. Babulya's mouth presses into a line you know from a hundred childhood scrapes, the line that means she is deciding how much of her fear to let you see.

"A frozen latch," you say, before she can ask. "On the gate, two farms back. I grabbed it without my mitten, stupid of me, and it stuck like a tongue to iron in January. I had to pull it free."

It is not, strictly, a lie. There was iron. There was cold enough to take skin. You have simply rearranged the order of things, set the lantern's clasp where a gate latch ought to be, and you tell yourself this is mercy and not cowardice, that a woman with a chest like a creaking floorboard does not need to hear about lights that should not exist hovering in Nod-Krai at midnight.

Babulya studies you the way she studies bread to know if it has risen properly, with the whole of her attention and none of her trust.

"Mm," she says, which from her has always meant I do not believe you and I am choosing, for now, to let it be.

She makes you sit by the stove anyway. She fetches the little clay pot of goose fat and honey from the shelf where it has lived since before you were born, the same salve she has smeared on every burn and chilblain and skinned knee of your whole life, and her hands, though they shake now in a way they did not used to, are still steady enough for this. She works in silence, mostly, her lips moving now and then in something too quiet to be speech and too rhythmic to be anything else, a prayer worn smooth from decades of use, the kind that does not need the saint's name spoken aloud anymore to still reach him.

"You were always like this," she says at last, winding clean cloth around your fingers with a practiced, gentle pressure. "Even as a small thing. Found a wounded sparrow once, hid it under your bed in a shoebox, fed it bread soaked in milk for a week before your mother found the smell." She ties off the bandage and holds your hand a moment longer than the task requires. "Soft hearts make for hard living, in a place like this one, devochka. The wood does not reward you for your kindness."

"Then it is fortunate," you say, "that I did not do this out of kindness. I did it out of carelessness."

She looks at you the way she has looked at you your entire life, the look that has always meant I see straight through to the lie and I love you regardless, and says nothing further on the matter. She only crosses herself once, quickly, before she rises to bank the stove for the night, the gesture so old and so automatic it might be aimed at God or at you, and you are not certain, even now, that there is much difference between the two as far as Babulya is concerned.

That night you lie awake on the bench by the stove long after her breathing in the next room has gone slow and even, listening to the wind worry at the shutters, your bandaged hand cradled against your chest. The pain has dulled to something distant, banked the way Babulya banked the coals, and you are nearly asleep, the line between waking and not gone thin and porous, when the warmth finds you.

It comes first as a hum beneath the bandage, faint, almost ticklish, the way a struck glass keeps singing long after the spoon has stopped touching it. Then heat blooms beneath the cloth, gentle and total, spreading up through your wrist and into your arm like sunlight remembered rather than felt, and for one disoriented moment you think you must be dreaming of summer, of the river before it freezes, of your mother's kitchen with bread in the oven.

You do not open your eyes. Some animal instinct keeps them shut, the same instinct that once told you not to look directly at the flame in the wood, and you lie there in the dark and let whatever this is finish what it has come to do, half terror and half something perilously close to gratitude, until sleep takes you before you can decide which one ought to win.

In the morning your hand does not hurt.

You notice it before you are even fully awake, the absence of pain so total it takes you a moment to understand what is missing, the way a sudden silence can wake a person faster than any sound. You unwind the bandage by the grey light coming through the shutters and find skin beneath it unmarked, no welt, no shine of new scar tissue, nothing at all to say that iron and lightning had ever touched you there.

Babulya finds you staring at your own palm like it belongs to someone else.

She takes your hand without asking, the way she always has, turning it toward the window, running her thumb once across the place where the burn should be. Her face does something complicated, disbelief and suspicion and something older than either, something that might once have had a saint's name attached to it before the church got hold of the old fears and dressed them up as sin.

"This was not nothing two days ago," she says.

"It must not have been as bad as it looked, Babulya. The cold makes everything look worse than it is."

"Mm," she says again, and this time the sound carries more weight than before, a whole unspoken sermon folded into one syllable, but she lets your hand go and does not press further, the way a woman learns not to press a wound that has decided to close on its own.

You spend the rest of the day telling yourself the same thing in a dozen different ways, peeling potatoes at her table, feeding the stove, listening to her cough in the next room with a sound like wind through a cracked window. You tell yourself the cold does strange things to the body, that burns from frozen metal heal faster than burns from fire, that you imagined the hum beneath the bandage the way exhausted travelers imagine all manner of things in the dark.

But some quieter, more honest part of you keeps circling back to the lantern.

You think of the way it had answered your breath like a starving thing answers bread, the violet at its root, the gold at its crown. You think, before you can stop yourself, that perhaps this is its doing somehow, some strange debt repaid across whatever distance separates you now, a kindness returned for a kindness given.

Silly, you tell yourself, almost fiercely, the way you might scold a child caught believing too easily in things that want to be believed. Why would a Fae's stolen flame trouble itself over the burned hand of a girl who'd only meant to save it? You are not even certain it was Fae at all, not truly, only that it matched every word of every warning Babulya ever gave you. And warnings, you have learned, are not always honest about what they are warning against.

It is only later, scrubbing the supper pot in water gone cold, that the other thought finds you, the one you had managed, until now, not to look at directly.

The footprints.

Someone had been standing in that ring of undisturbed snow. Someone large enough to leave a mark like that, close enough to have watched you take the lantern from the air, to have watched you breathe life back into a thing that should not have had breath left to take. A lantern does not simply float along a forest road for no reason at all. A lantern belongs to a hand, even one that does not show itself.

You wonder, scrubbing harder than the pot requires, whose hand that might once have been.

The dead, perhaps, lost and wandering as the dead in this country are said to do when the ground freezes too hard to properly hold them.

Or something else. Something that does not die in any way the priests would recognise, that only loses its light for a while and waits, patient as the wind filling in footprints, for someone soft-hearted enough to give it back.

. . .

The days that follow settle into a rhythm so ordinary it almost convinces you to forget the forest entirely. You boil oats and feed them to Babulya by the spoonful when her hands shake too badly to manage the bowl herself. You mend the hole in the second shutter where the wind has been getting through and complaining about it all winter. You sit by her bed in the evenings while she tells you, again, the story of how she met your grandfather at a spring fair, embellishing some new and entirely impossible detail each time she tells it. And you let her, because a story told a hundred times is still a gift the hundred-and-first time it is given. The cough in her chest does not improve, but it does not worsen either, and you decide to count that as something close enough to mercy.

It is on the fourth morning that you notice the woodpile under the eaves has shrunk to almost nothing, and you rise before the sky has so much as considered turning grey to do something about it.

The hour before dawn in Nod-Krai has always had a particular quality of dark to it, a dark that seems to have weight, that presses against the lantern glass and the backs of your eyes both, and you have walked it before with your heart in your throat and your axe held tighter than was strictly useful against a forest that does not, as a rule, care how tightly you hold anything. You bundle yourself into your tulup, wrap the strap of the hand-sled twice around your palm, and step out into a cold so total it feels less like weather and more like a held breath, the stars still hard and bright overhead, Orion's belt hanging just where Babulya taught you to find it as a child, a line of three lights she always called, with no apparent irony, God's own measuring rope.

The walk to the deadfall stand should take the better part of an hour in this dark, picking your way around drifts and roots buried under the snow with nothing but memory and starlight to guide you. Tonight it does not.

You notice it first as an absence rather than a presence, the way you notice a missing tooth with your tongue before you understand what is gone. The drifts that usually swallow you to the knee along this stretch of path have firmed beneath your feet into something almost like a road, packed and even, as though some patient hand swept it clear before you arrived. You tell yourself it is only the wind, that drifts shift and settle on their own logic, and you keep walking, and the feeling does not leave you even as the explanation does its best to.

Then there is the light. Not moonlight, which has none to spare behind tonight's thin cloud, and not starlight either, which has never in your life been bright enough to throw a shadow. This is something low and blue, hanging at the edges of your sight the way a held thought hangs just behind the eyes, never quite where you look but always present in the place you've just stopped looking. Each time you turn your head to find its source it slides away into the black between the birches, patient, unbothered, content to let you doubt it rather than be caught.

The sled grows lighter as you fill it. This, more than anything else, is the detail you cannot make peace with later, turning it over in your mind the way you'd turn over a coin to check it wasn't counterfeit. By the time you have stacked it with as much deadfall as you can reasonably drag, the weight across your shoulder where the rope bites should be considerable, should ache the way it has ached every winter of your life doing this same chore. Instead the sled seems to glide, its runners finding the smoothest line through the snow as though the ground itself has tilted very slightly in your favour, as though some unseen hand has taken up the back end of it and is bearing the worst of the weight without once asking to be thanked.

A raven watches you from a low branch the entire time you work, untroubled by your nearness in a way no wild bird ought to be, its head tilting with what you could swear, if you allowed yourself to swear to such things, looked very much like curiosity. When you straighten and meet its eye directly it does not startle into the dark the way it should. It simply watches you a moment longer, as if deciding something, and then lifts off without a sound, not so much as a single wingbeat disturbing the snow it leaves behind.

There are other small wrongnesses too, the kind you would not think twice about alone but that begin, stacked one atop the other, to take on the shape of something deliberate. Frost ferns bloom across a fallen log in a pattern too symmetrical to be weather's careless hand, fanned out like fingers pressed flat against the bark. 

The cold that should be biting at your scorched fingers, the ones that healed too fast and too clean to ever properly explain, seems instead to skirt around them, leaving every other part of you numb while that one hand stays strangely, impossibly warm. 

Once, you are certain you hear footsteps falling in time with your own, just beyond the treeline, matching your pace exactly, and when you stop dead to listen, they stop too, a half-beat too late to be only an echo of your own boots.

You do not run. You tell yourself this later as though it were a point of pride rather than the simple fact that your legs, full of wood and cold and four days of grief held carefully at bay, would not have carried you far even if you'd asked them to.

It is on the walk back, the sled heavier with cargo and somehow no harder to pull, that the ice on the little creek crossing gives way beneath you.

You have crossed it a hundred times in your life, this narrow vein of water that cuts the path near the old stone marker, frozen solid every winter you can remember, safe enough that Babulya never once warned you off it the way she warned you off the deeper water further south. You do not know, would not know, until much later from a neighbour's offhand mention of overflow ice swelling beneath the surface this year, that the crossing has turned treacherous, the visible ice no more than a skin stretched thin over a slow black current still moving underneath, waiting for exactly this kind of trust to be placed in it.

The crack beneath your boot sounds almost gentle, a small dry note like a knuckle popping, and then the world tilts and the cold reaches up through the broken ice to close around your shin before your mind has finished understanding what your body already knows.

You do not fall further than that. An arm comes around you from behind, solid and sudden, an entire wall of warmth pressed flush against your back where a moment before there had been only forest and falling, and you are hauled bodily off the cracking ice and onto solid ground with a strength that does not strain, that lifts you the way you might lift something you were never in any danger of dropping.

For a long moment you do not move at all, and could not if you tried. The cold has not finished delivering its verdict on your soaked boot, the creek still hissing behind you where the ice gave way, and your whole body seems to be arguing with itself over which sensation deserves your attention first, the water working its slow way through wool toward bare skin, or the warmth at your back, vast and improbable, radiating clean through your coat the way the stone bench beside Babulya's stove holds its heat on the rare nights the fire has been fed too generously. Your heart has not slowed since the ice cracked. If anything it climbs higher now, hammering against your ribs with a fear that has only just caught up to the danger that provoked it, several breaths too late to be of any use to you.

He has not let go. One arm remains banded firm across your middle, his hand spread wide against your stomach through the layers of your coat, and you understand, distantly, almost academically, that you ought to fear that more than you fear the water. You are not a fool. Babulya did not raise you to mistake a stranger's hand for safety only because it happens to be warm. And yet some unguarded, traitorous part of you leans back into that warmth before you can stop it, the way a half-frozen thing will press itself gratefully into the very palm that may, in the end, decide to do it harm.

You try, on instinct, to turn and see him properly, and find you cannot. Not because his hold has tightened, though it has, slightly, but because some older instinct, the one Babulya spent your whole childhood sharpening in you, insists that turning would be the worse mistake of the two. Still you catch fragments at the edge of your sight: a sleeve of something dark and heavier than wool, rimed white at the cuff the way iron rimes over in a hard freeze; a hand broader than your own and entirely bare despite air that numbed your own fingers through two layers of mitten; breath fogging out over your shoulder in a plume gone faintly, impossibly blue at its edges, like woodsmoke caught the instant before it remembers how to be flame.

Fear and something far less sensible move through you in the very same current, indistinguishable by the time either reaches your throat.

"Who's there?" It comes out smaller than you intend it to, edged with a tremor you cannot quite master, though you make yourself say it regardless, because Babulya also did not raise a girl who goes quiet simply for being afraid.

"Forgive me." His voice meets you low and unhurried, courteous in a way you were entirely unprepared for, the voice of a man who might once have bowed over a lady's hand at some fair now long since swallowed by frost, strange and out of place against the cold breathing out of the dark beyond the treeline. "I startled you. That was never my intention, only to keep you from going under." A pause, faintly rueful. "Though I confess you make it remarkably difficult to be merely a passing rescuer and nothing more."

Some inkling of bravery seeps into you, "Let me see you, then, if your intentions are so honest."

"Not yet." Said so gently it costs the refusal nothing of its firmness. "Forgive me the discourtesy of denying you twice in one night. You have done enough looking at things you oughtn't for one winter, brave as you are foolish."

The hand at your stomach shifts, just slightly, fingers spreading wider as though to better hold you upright, and you feel it then, through the wool, the unmistakable ridge of scarred skin across his palm, a burn healed over rough and old in a shape the too-observant part of your mind recognises at once, because it is the very shape your own hand wore for one single night before it healed too clean to be natural.

You do not have the chance to ask him about it. "Mind the ice on your way home," he says, close enough now that you feel the words against your hair before you hear them, something almost like a smile threaded through the courtesy of it. "I find I would rather not make a habit of fishing you out of it." 

Then the warmth at your back withdraws all at once, the cold rushing in to fill the space he leaves so completely that you sway on your feet from the shock of it alone, and when you finally turn, breath fogging hard in front of you, there is nothing left but a scatter of frost already creeping back across the broken ice and a low blue light receding fast between the birches, swallowed by the dark before you can take a single step after it.

You stand there a long while with your soaked boot going numb and your heart going the opposite of numb entirely. It is only the thought of Babulya waiting on you, of smoke needed for the stove and oats needed for the pot, that finally turns you back toward the road at all.

The rest of the day passes you by the way a current passes a stone too heavy to be carried along with it.

You are aware of moving through it, of sweeping the floor and feeding the chickens and changing your soaked boot for a dry one before Babulya can ask why your stocking is wet halfway up your shin. But none of it quite reaches the part of you that is still standing at the edge of a cracked creek with a stranger's hand spread warm against your stomach.

By evening you have not managed to put it down. You feel it still as you set the pot to simmer, the cabbage and the last of the autumn carrots going soft in water, gone the colour of weak tea, a phantom warmth pressed flat against your middle that no amount of cold air or honest work seems able to chase off. Twice you catch yourself with the ladle hovering forgotten over the pot, your mind thirty paces into Nod-Krai instead of in the kitchen where it belongs, and twice you have to scold yourself back into your own body before the soup scorches.

"You'll put a hole clean through that pot, staring at it so hard," Babulya says from her chair by the stove, not unkindly, her knitting needles clicking along at their own steady rhythm. "Or did the soup insult you somehow, that you mean to murder it twice?"

"I’m only tired, Babulya. I was up before the birds."

"Mm. The birds in this house keep later hours than they used to, then, because you've been somewhere else since you walked in that door, and it was not in the henhouse." She does not look up from her needles. "I am old, devochka, not blind."

You busy yourself with the bread instead of answering, and she lets you, for now, the same way she let the lie about the gate latch stand for now, and you understand, even as you're grateful for it, that her patience has never once in your life been the same thing as her forgetting.

The samovar takes longer than usual to come to a boil, or perhaps it only feels that way with your thoughts circling where they keep circling, back to the shape of a scar pressed into your stomach through two layers of wool, the precise, impossible warmth of a hand that should have been as cold as the air around it and was not. You wonder, not for the first time today, whether a thing like that leaves a mark a person cannot see. Whether you are walking around now carrying some invisible brand the way livestock carry the burn of their owner's iron, claimed by something that never once gave you its name, only the warmth of its hand and the courtesy of refusing to let you see its face.

You do not know if you should be afraid of that thought. You find, uncomfortably, that you are not nearly as afraid of it as you ought to be.

Outside the window, far off toward the mountains, light flickers once through the clouds, a soundless, violet-white flash that has no business existing in a sky this cold. Lightning in a Snezhnayan winter is rare enough that the old wives count it an omen, one way or another depending on which old wife you ask, and you stand very still at the window with the kettle forgotten in your hand and watch the dark for a second flash that does not come, and think, with a certainty that has no reasonable foundation at all, that it was watching you back.

Dinner is quiet in the comfortable way, the bread torn instead of cut, the soup eaten straight from the same pot it was cooked in because Babulya has never once seen the sense in dirtying a second dish for two people who already know each other's faces too well to bother with manners. She tells you, between spoonfuls, that the priest's wife caught her husband talking to the goat again, and that she is fairly certain it is the goat doing most of the talking these days, and you laugh harder than the joke perhaps deserves, grateful for anything loud enough to crowd out the violet flash still printed behind your eyes.

After, you kneel at her feet with the little jar of warmed juniper oil and unwrap the wool from her legs, and she hisses through her teeth at the first touch the way she always does, more out of habit now than real pain.

"Careful, devochka, I am not yet so far gone that you may simply knead me like dough."

"You complain every winter, and every winter you ask me to do it again the very next evening."

"A woman is allowed her contradictions. It is one of the few luxuries left to me." She watches you work for a while in silence, her swollen ankles giving slightly under your thumbs, and then, in the same mild tone she might use to remark on the weather, she says, "You have the look of a girl who has met something in the wood."

Your hands do not still, though it costs you something to keep them moving.

"I met a cracked creek and a wet boot, Babulya. Nothing more interesting than that."

"Mm." The sound carries the whole weight of a sermon again, the way it always does. "I have lived a long time in this house, devochka, longer than is strictly polite for a woman to admit to. I know the smell that clings to a person after the strange has had its hands on them. Ozone and woodsmoke and something underneath both that has no right name in any tongue I was ever taught." Her eyes, when you finally look up, are not angry. They are only tired, and old, and afraid in a way she is trying very hard not to let show. "You have carried that smell into my house twice now."

You say nothing, which is, between the two of you, its own kind of confession.

She sighs, long and rattling, and reaches down to touch your face the way she has since before you could properly remember being touched at all. "Even as a babe you reached for the spider before the flower," she says, almost fond despite herself. "Strange things have always known a soft heart when they find one, dear. They collect hearts like that the way magpies collect anything that shines, not always out of cruelty. Sometimes only because shine is rare, and they are hungry for it in a way you and I will never properly understand."

"Is that a warning?"

"It is an observation. The warning is older and you have heard it from me a hundred times already and ignored it on the hundred-and-first." She lets her hand drop back into her lap. "So I will give you something more useful instead. If it comes to you again, and I think we both know it will, do not give it your name. Not your true one, not even in jest, not even to be polite. A name is a door, devochka, and you do not hand a stranger the key to your own house no matter how warm his hand felt on the threshold."

You think of the creek, of a voice low and unhurried against your hair, of how easily a name might have slipped free of you in that moment if he had only thought to ask for it.

"And if I lose my way," you say, half a question, "out there. In the dark."

"Turn your coat inside out and put it back on," Babulya says, as plainly as if she were telling you how much salt the soup wanted. "It will not save you from everything. But it confuses the kind of thing that leads by tricking the eye, and confusion, in my experience, has saved more fools than courage ever has."

You finish the oil in silence after that, and she lets you, watching the fire instead of you for once, and when you finally rise to bank the stove for the night her hand catches your wrist, briefly, only long enough to say, without words, that whatever else she is, she is not finished being afraid for you yet.

Sleep does not come easily. You lie on the bench with the blanket pulled to your chin and your thoughts will not stop circling the same low orbit, danger and warmth tangled so closely together you cannot any longer find the seam between them, the way you never could as a child either, always the first to climb toward the high branch instead of away from it, always the one who followed the strange sound into the trees instead of running from it. You have always been like this. Babulya is right to fear it in you. You are not entirely certain you would change it even if she asked.

You rise once, near midnight, drawn by nothing you could properly name, and go to the window.

The yard is empty. The snow lies smooth and undisturbed all the way to the treeline, lit faintly violet by clouds that have not yet decided whether to give up their lightning again, and you stand there with your palm pressed flat to the cold glass and your heart doing something unsteady in your chest, half hope and half dread, both feelings so similar in your body that you cannot say with any honesty which one you are hoping will win.

For one heartbeat, just at the treeline, a shape resolves out of the dark. Tall, still, edged faintly in the same violet-white as the lightning, the suggestion of a man standing exactly where the birches grow thickest, watching the house, watching, you understand with a certainty that settles into your bones like cold water, you.

You blink, and the shape is gone, swallowed back into the trees as completely as if it had never stood there at all.

You stay at the window a long while after, your breath fogging the glass in slow, even clouds, waiting for it to come back.

It does not. But you find, lying back down in the dark with your pulse still unsettled and your skin still remembering the precise shape of a hand it will not soon forget, that some part of you is already certain this is not the last you will see of him. . . .

You are not, at first, certain anything has changed at all. The morning after the lightning, you wake expecting the world to have settled back into its ordinary shape, the way a held breath settles once the danger that provoked it has passed, and for the length of breakfast it seems to have done exactly that. It is only later, hauling water from the well, that you notice the rope has come up without its usual stiff fight against the ice, sliding through your palms smooth as something freshly oiled though you know for a fact no one has touched it since autumn. You stand there a moment with the bucket dripping at your feet and tell yourself it is only a milder morning than most.

The bread proves you wrong by midday, rising fuller and faster than the same dough has any right to in a kitchen this cold, the crust coming out of the oven a deep, even gold instead of the patchy brown you have made your peace with every winter of your life. The hens, who by this point in the season usually offer you one egg between the four of them if you are fortunate, give you four whole eggs that morning and four again the next, and you carry them inside cradled against your chest like something stolen, glancing back over your shoulder at the coop as though it might explain itself if you looked at it hard enough.

You do not mention any of it to Babulya at first. You tell yourself this is only because none of it seems worth mentioning on its own, a softer rope, a better loaf, a generous hen, the small unremarkable mercies that any winter might occasionally offer a person without there needing to be a reason behind them at all. You know, even as you tell yourself this, that you do not entirely believe it.

By the third night you have stopped pretending not to notice.

The wind that has been needling its way through every gap in the shutters since the first snow falls strangely quiet around you on your way back from the woodpile, the bite gone out of it so completely that for a few startled paces you could swear something has wrapped itself bodily around you, warm and close as a held breath, before retreating back into ordinary cold the moment you cross the threshold. 

Your lantern, when you light it that same evening to check on the chickens one last time before bed, catches on the first strike of flint instead of the usual three or four, and burns brighter than the wick should allow, its flame threaded through at the very root with the faintest, most fleeting hint of blue, gone again before you can be entirely certain you saw it at all.

You stand in the yard with that lantern held up before your face for far longer than the chickens require, watching the flame for some sign of itself, your breath fogging white and even in the cold, and you do not know, even now, whether what you feel watching it is fear or something far less easy to name honestly.

Babulya notices before you find the courage to bring any of it to her.

"The wood from that last cord is lasting longer than it ought," she says one evening, not looking up from the sock she is darning, her needles moving with the same steady rhythm they have kept your whole life. "I split that cord myself, in better years, and I know its measure. We should have burned through half of it by now."

"Perhaps you split it more generously than you remember."

"Perhaps." She does not sound convinced, and does not pretend to be. "Or perhaps God has finally taken an interest in this house after forty years of looking elsewhere, which I confess would surprise me less than the alternative, which is that you have struck some manner of bargain with someone considerably less patient than He is, and considerably less inclined to wait for a proper prayer before deciding to help." She glances up at you then, sharp despite the candlelight softening every other line of her face. "Tell me, at least, that it was a charming devil, devochka, if you've gone and doomed the both of us. I should like to know I died for good company."

"I haven't doomed anyone, Babulya."

"Mm." The sound again, that whole unspoken sermon folded into one syllable, and she goes back to her darning without pressing further, though you can feel her attention on you for a long while after, the way you can feel the cold radiating off a window even with your back turned to it.

It is Babulya herself, in the end, who gives you the clearest proof that something has indeed turned in your favour, however little you understand the shape of it.

Her cough, which has rattled through this house every night since the letter that first called you home, begins, gradually and then all at once, to ease. The colour comes back into her face in a way you had stopped letting yourself hope for, a faint warmth returning to cheeks that have been the colour of tallow for weeks, and one morning you wake to find her already up and dressed and humming something tuneless over the porridge pot, her hands steadier on the spoon than they have been since before the snow came. You stand in the doorway and watch her for a long moment, your chest aching with a gratitude too large and too frightened to hold comfortably, because you cannot account for it, cannot point to any medicine or prayer or change in the weather that would explain a recovery this swift, and the not knowing sits in you alongside the relief like two animals forced to share the same small cage.

"Don't look so pleased with yourself," Babulya says, catching you staring, a wicked little glint surfacing in her eyes for the first time in longer than you can remember. "A woman my age improving this fast smells less of mercy than of mischief. Though I'll say this much, devochka. I'd rather die of mischief, in the end, than of that cough. At least mischief has the decency to be interesting."

You laugh, because the alternative is to weep, and she lets you, watching you with an expression that holds both her old wit and a  far more careful underneath it, the look of a woman who has lived long enough to know that gifts given without a clear giver are rarely given for free.

The hearth proves the strangest mercy of all. Some nights now you wake near dawn to find the stove still glowing warm and low though you banked it hours before with barely enough wood to last until midnight, the coals at its heart burning that same faint, impossible blue you have started to recognise the way you'd recognise a voice in a crowded room, low and constant and entirely too familiar for something you have only properly heard once in your life. You lie there in the dark on those mornings with your blanket warm around you and your heart going much too fast for sleep, and think, with a certainty that frightens you more than any cold ever has, that the very fire keeping you alive through this winter has decided, for reasons of its own, to keep you.

You should be more afraid of this than you are. You know this the way you know the catechism, by rote, without it changing anything about how your chest tightens each evening as the light fails and you find yourself listening for footsteps that do not come, watching the treeline from the window with an attention that has nothing to do with wolves.

It is the nights, more than anything, that betray you.

You tell yourself, the first few times, that it is only natural to think of him. He saved your life. He has, perhaps, gone on saving it in a hundred small ways you cannot prove and cannot quite bring yourself to refuse. It would be strange, you reason, not to think of a man like that, however briefly you knew him, however little of him you actually saw.

But the thinking does not stay brief, and it does not stay innocent for long.

You lie awake long after Babulya's breathing has gone slow and even in the next room, and you feel again, with a clarity that should by rights have faded by now, the exact warmth of his hand spread wide across your stomach through two layers of wool, the way it had not felt like a stranger's hand at all but like something that had always meant to rest there, patient, certain of its welcome. You feel it settle low in your belly each time you let yourself remember it, a warmth that does not stay politely where it started, that creeps, slow and unhurried as melt water finding the path of least resistance, further down than any decent thought has business travelling, and you lie very still in the dark and let it, because some traitorous part of you has stopped pretending it wants to stop.

You imagine his voice some nights, low and unhurried, frost caught somewhere in its register the way it had been at the creek, murmuring things you cannot quite construct into full sentences even in the privacy of your own skull, only the shape of his breath against your ear, warm where everything else in this house is cold, his chest a solid wall at your back the way it had been for that one suspended moment before he let you go. You wonder, in the dark, what those hands might feel like elsewhere, hands broad enough to span your whole stomach, scarred in a shape that matches your own, gentle in a way that does not feel remotely safe.

You try, more than once, to quiet the wanting with your own hands, alone beneath the blanket with your jaw set against the sound of your own breath. You chase the memory of him down through your own skin in the dark, palm pressed flat where his had been before letting it wander lower, into the ache that has pooled there for days now, slick and insistent and entirely unmoved by reason. For a moment, sometimes, it is almost enough. Your back arches off the bench, your breath catches high and helpless in your throat, your thighs tense around the hand that is trying so hard to be his and so plainly failing to be anyone but your own.

It is never enough. You come back to yourself each time a little emptier than before, your fingers slack and your chest still tight with a frustration that has very little to do with your body and everything to do with the fact that the only hand you actually want is one that does not belong to you, has perhaps never belonged to anyone, and chose, for reasons you cannot fathom, to belong for one single moment to you instead. You lie there afterward in the dark, spent and unsatisfied in the same breath, and feel, underneath the shame of it, something far more dangerous: the dawning, helpless certainty that no hand but his will do.

There is a darkness coiled inside the wanting that you do not examine too closely, not at first. You know what he is, or near enough. You know what Babulya's stories say about things that wear kindness the way a wolf wears sheep's wool, patient, generous, building a debt in small mercies until the debt comes due all at once. You know you ought to fear a creature that mends your grandmother's lungs and warms your hearth and never once asks what it wants in return, because nothing in this world, mortal or otherwise, gives so freely without eventually wanting something back.

And still you find, lying awake with your blood still unsettled and your own hand gone still and useless atop the blanket, that you do not only fear it.

Some small, dark, unguarded part of you wants to be wanted that badly. Wants to be worth the trouble of a wood that lasts longer, a cough that eases, a fire that burns blue through the coldest hours of the night. There is something in being chosen, even by something monstrous, even by something that may yet prove to want you only the way a magpie wants anything that shines, that you cannot make yourself entirely wish away.

You go to confession in your own head most nights, the old habit too deep to fully shed even now, and find you cannot make yourself properly sorry for any of it.

It builds like this for the better part of two weeks, favour and longing rising together in the same slow tide, until one night you simply cannot lie still in it any longer.

You do not plan it, not really, not in any way you could explain afterward to Babulya or to yourself. You wait until her breathing has gone deep and even, until the stove has burned down to its low blue coals and the house has settled into the particular silence that only comes once every living thing in it has finally stopped fighting sleep, and then you rise, and dress, and take down your cloak and your lantern from beside the door, and nothing else.

You do not know, stepping out into a cold gone strangely gentle around you, what exactly you mean to do if you find him. Demand to know why he has been so generous with a stranger's house. Ask him what the lantern was to him, what it cost him, what it meant that you were the one foolish enough to breathe life back into it. Or something else entirely, something you do not let yourself name even now, something carnal and reckless that lives lower in your body than any decent question ever has.

You walk without any clear destination, only the pull of something you cannot properly describe, the same instinct that once sent you reaching for a wounded sparrow before anyone could tell you it was foolish to. Your thoughts wander as your feet do, back to the creek, to the crack of ice and the arm that caught you before you'd finished falling, and a new and uncomfortable thought surfaces in you, unbidden, sharp enough to stop you mid-step in the snow.

What if the ice had never been an accident at all.

What if a creature patient enough to warm a hearth for weeks without once showing his face was also patient enough to know, long before you ever set foot on it, exactly which crossing had gone treacherous this year, and exactly when you would cross it.

A strange new heat moves through you at the thought, equal parts fury and something far darker and more thrilling than fury has any right to be tangled alongside it, a feeling you do not have a clean name for and would not say aloud even if you did. You do not know whether you want to scream at him for it or thank him, and the not knowing frightens you more than either answer would on its own.

It is full dark by the time you notice you are no longer alone.

The wind parts strangely around a stand of birch ahead of you, the falling snow bending visibly to either side of some shape you cannot quite see, the way mist parts for a body moving through it even when the body itself stays hidden. A pale light flickers at the very edge of your vision, the same low impossible blue as your lantern's flame, gone the instant you turn to look at it directly. Somewhere behind you, soft and unhurried, footsteps fall in a rhythm too deliberate to be the wind, matching your own pace exactly, the way they had once before, only this time you do not stop to test them. This time you keep walking, your heart loud in your own throat, something fierce and unwise blooming behind your ribs.

Fool I may be, you think, but who is being imprudent now, following a fool like me out into his own woods at midnight.

You catch yourself smiling at the thought, alone in the dark, and the smile frightens you more than the cold does.

It is only then, with the trees pressing close on either side and that light still flickering at the very edge of what you can see, that Babulya's voice surfaces in you, clear and sharp as it had been by the fire. Do not give it your name. Not your true one, not even in jest. You hold that one close, easy enough to keep, a door you have no intention of handing anyone the key to, however warm his hand had felt on its threshold.

Turn your cloak inside out, if you lose your way. It will not save you from everything. But confusion has saved more fools than courage ever has.

Your hands rise to the clasp at your throat almost on their own, the old obedience deep enough in you to move.

And then you stop.

You stand very still in the snow with your fingers resting against the cold metal of the clasp, your breath fogging slow in front of you, the light still flickering somewhere just out of reach, patient, waiting, and you think of warm hearths and healed lungs and a hand spread wide and certain against your stomach, and some small, dark, long-buried part of you, the same part that has always reached for the spider before the flower, decides, quite calmly, that it does not want to be found its way out of this at all.

You let your hands fall back to your sides, the cloak left exactly as it is.

If you are going to be led astray tonight, then astray is precisely where you mean to go.

You walk a while longer with that decision settled warm in your chest, the light still flickering somewhere ahead of you through the birches, patient as a held breath, and you let yourself believe, for a few more minutes, that the prickling at the back of your neck is only anticipation. It would be like him, you tell yourself, to make you work for it. To let you walk a little further into his woods before he finally let himself be found.

It takes you longer than it should to notice that the feeling crawling up your spine has stopped resembling anticipation at all.

The wind is the first thing to turn honest with you. It has been strangely gentle since you stepped outside, the bite gone soft around you the way it has been most nights this fortnight, and you do not register the moment it changes back, only the moment you realise it already has, cold enough now to needle straight through your cloak the way winter always has, the way it always should have, and something in your stomach goes very still and very cold in a manner that has nothing to do with the temperature.

It is, you tell yourself, only the ordinary cold reasserting itself. Even kindness must have its limits. Even a fire banked all winter eventually burns down to ash.

You do not entirely believe yourself, and the forest, in its own way, seems determined to prove you right not to.

The quiet comes next, and it is the wrong kind of quiet. The Chernyles at night is never truly silent, not even in the deepest cold, always some small business of owls or settling snow or wind worrying at branches to fill the dark with ordinary sound. Tonight that ordinary sound simply stops, all at once, the way a held breath stops, and you become aware of your own heartbeat with an intimacy that feels almost obscene in a silence this complete.

Then the smell reaches you. Not woodsmoke, not the clean mineral bite of frost you have grown almost fond of these past two weeks, but something underneath both of those, faint at first and then suddenly, sickeningly present, the smell of meat left too long past its honest use, of earth turned over somewhere it was never meant to be disturbed.

You stop walking.

The light ahead of you flickers once, low and frantic, and for the first time since you left your own door you understand, with a certainty that drops through you like a stone through black water, that it is trying to warn you rather than lead you.

The dark that comes pulses before it arrives, the way thunder sometimes announces itself in your chest before the sound of it ever reaches your ears, a pressure against your sternum that has no business being felt rather than heard. When it finally breaks across the treeline it does not come as light at all, but as its absence, a bruised, hungry black that swallows the snow's pale glow wherever it touches, and within that black, shapes.

You know the shapes from a hundred half-remembered stories before your mind even finishes assembling them into something whole, riders sat too straight in saddles built for bodies with proper weight to them, horses whose legs bend in places no living horse's legs were ever meant to bend, the whole procession dragging that swallowing dark along behind it like a hem too heavy to lift clear of the ground. The riders themselves are worse for being almost familiar, the shape of men and women both, faces collapsed in on themselves around hollows where eyes should be, mouths hung open on hinges too loose to be holding anything resembling breath. You understand, distantly, sickly, that these were people once. That something has worn them the way a hand wears a glove long after the glove has stopped fitting properly, and gone on wearing them regardless.

You were twelve the last time you stood this close to something wearing the dead. You have spent nine years building a wall around that night thick enough that you rarely have to look at it directly, and the wall comes down now in pieces too fast for you to stop it, the cold of a hollow tree trunk pressed against your back, the smell of rot passing close enough to taste, the particular, specific silence of a child too frightened even to weep. You remember thinking, at twelve, that you would surely die there. You remember surviving anyway, and never once feeling, since, that survival and luck were properly different things.

You do not have a hollow tree to press yourself into tonight. You have only open snow, and a lantern with no flame, and a cloak you deliberately, foolishly, left exactly as it was.

The Hunt sees you the way a storm sees a single standing tree, not with malice exactly, only with the simple, terrible inevitability of a thing that has never once had to ask permission to take what stands in its path. The lead rider turns its ruined face toward you, and whatever sound comes out of that hinge-loose mouth is not a word, has perhaps not been a word in longer than you have been alive, but you understand its meaning regardless, the way you understand a wolf's bared teeth, the way your whole body understands, all at once, that it is about to run out of road.

You do not get the chance to run. The lead rider's hand closes around your wrist before your single backward step has even finished, more claw now than hand, cold enough that it burns, and the wound it leaves does not wait politely for the rest of the world to catch up. Something rakes hard across your cheekbone in the same instant, parting skin, the pain arriving a full breath behind the shock of it, hot where everything else has gone numb, and you are being dragged forward into the reek of old earth before you've even managed to scream.

The world breaks open before the scream finishes leaving you.

There is no warning to it, none of the patient, gathering dread that announced itself before. One heartbeat the claw is closing tighter around your wrist, dragging you into the dark whole, and the next the night simply splits down its middle with a crack of violet light so total it scours every shadow from the clearing at once, the sound of it less heard than felt, a blow against your chest that drives the breath from your lungs before the cold ever could. The claw is gone from your wrist in the same instant, torn away by something too fast for your eyes to properly follow, and you go down hard into churned, blackened snow with your ears ringing and your cheek still bleeding and no clear memory of the half second between captivity and freedom.

He is already among them by the time your knees find the ground, as though he had never once been anywhere else, as though the Hunt itself had simply made the grave error of existing in the same dark he already occupied. There is no warming up to the violence in him, no measured beginning. Chains uncoil from somewhere beneath his coat and find their marks before you can track the movement that threw them, and where they strike, riders that should not still be moving simply stop, the bruised black light bleeding out of them into the snow like ink swallowed by water. The lantern at his hip flares violet with each turn he makes, throwing his shadow huge and shifting across the trampled ground, and within a handful of heartbeats far too few to properly count, the clearing belongs to no one but the two of you and the wreckage left behind.

He crosses to you before the last of it has finished settling, kneeling in the bloodied snow with a quickness that has nothing courtly left in it at all, and his hand finds your jaw before you can flinch away from it, tilting your face toward what little light remains.

"Hold still," he says, low, and you do, though whether from obedience or simple shock you could not honestly say.

His thumb finds the cut along your cheekbone and the pain there does not so much fade as forget itself entirely, warmth blooming beneath his touch and spreading outward in slow, deliberate waves, the same impossible heat you have spent two weeks chasing through your own hands in the dark and never once managing to properly recall. You feel the skin knit itself closed beneath his thumb, feel it with a clarity that makes your breath catch high in your throat, and he does not hurry the work, his palm cupping the whole curve of your jaw afterward as though reluctant to relinquish a thing he has only just finished claiming back from harm. His other hand finds your wrist next, the bruise already purpling there fading to nothing under the same slow, deliberate warmth, his thumb tracing once, lightly, over skin that remembers, beneath the new healing, exactly how his hand had felt the first time it held you.

"There," he says finally, and does not move away as quickly as the word suggests he might. His face is close enough now that you can feel the cold coming off him in waves even through the lingering warmth of his touch, close enough that you understand, with a lurch low in your stomach that has nothing to do with fear, that he is in no particular hurry to put any distance back between you. "The debt's settled, then. Though I doubt that will stop you coming to find me again regardless."

"You sound very certain of that."

"I am." Something almost fond moves behind the exhaustion in his eyes. "You have a particular look about you, little fool. The one that has never once in its life known how to leave a wounded thing well alone, even when the wounded thing in question is considerably more dangerous than it looks."

You hold his gaze, breath unsteady, and find some reckless scrap of courage still left in you despite everything the night has already spent. "Then tell me your name, and I'll know exactly how dangerous to be afraid of."

He laughs at that, properly, the sound of it melodic and surprised and entirely too warm for something that came out of a face built like winter, and the laugh does something complicated and unwise low in your chest.

"Bold," he says, "for someone who was warned, I expect, never to give away her own. Did your grandmother not also tell you what a name is worth, before you go demanding mine so plainly?" His thumb moves once more along your jaw, absent, proprietary. "Names are not handed over for the asking. Not by anything like me."

"Then how am I meant to find you again?"

"There is a stone marker by the creek that already owes you a debt of its own," he says, the amusement settling into something quieter, more deliberate. "Leave something there that was truly yours, given freely and not by accident, on a night the moon hides her face completely. Choose carefully what you part with. I am not always so generous with what I take in return as I have been tonight."

His gaze sharpens then, holding yours with an attention that feels almost like being read rather than looked at. "But you already know that, don't you? You knew it walking out here tonight with your cloak left exactly as it was." A pause, soft and certain. "You know precisely what you're doing."

He leans closer before you can answer him, close enough that his breath, when it comes, is warm against your skin in a way nothing about him should by rights be, his fingers ghosting once down the line of your throat with a touch too light to be anything but deliberate.

"Perhaps," he murmurs, "you will come to find out in time."

One final step closes the last of the distance between you, his breath heating the air at your temple, and then he is smoke before he is anything else, the whole solid weight of him unraveling into a low coil of violet-blue flame that gathers, impossibly, back into the small lantern at what had been his hip, and the lantern disappears with a single soft crackle, leaving nothing behind but scorched air and your own ragged breathing in the dark.

You kneel there a long while in the ruined snow, your skin still humming everywhere he touched it, heat pooling low in your belly with a persistence that has nothing left to do with fear at all. Some small, dark, unguarded part of you, the part you will not yet admit to even lying alone in the dark tonight, has already begun turning over what you might leave at that stone marker, what among your few poor possessions could possibly be valuable enough to be called truly yours.

You are, you understand with a thrill you cannot entirely call unwelcome, already looking forward to the choosing.

. . .

Whatever guides your feet back through Nod-Krai that night does so with a generosity that borders on tenderness, the drifts parting ahead of you the way a crowd might part for someone it had decided, for reasons of its own, to let pass unharmed. You reach the izba in half the time the walk out had cost you, your wound healed clean beneath cold-stiffened skin, and you let yourself entertain, somewhere between the gate and the door, a thought too dangerous to examine closely in daylight. Perhaps he is not the only one waiting on this. Perhaps, wherever he goes when he is not chains and violet flame and a voice low enough to live somewhere beneath your ribs, some part of him is also turning over what you might bring him, the way you cannot stop turning over what there is in your whole poor life worth giving.

It takes you the better part of two days to understand exactly how poor that life is.

You go through what little you own with the methodical, increasingly desperate attention of a woman searching for something she is no longer certain exists. Your mother's handkerchief, edged in thread gone soft and grey with age, feels too easily lost to trust to a roadside stone. The single coin you've kept since the spring fair, pressed flat and smooth from years in your pocket, has value only to a moneylender, and you doubt very much that a creature who heals wounds with a thought and unmakes the dead with a glance has any particular use for coins. A wooden comb, a chipped clay bead from a necklace long since scattered, a ribbon worn thin from braiding and rebraiding the same hair through a dozen winters, each in its turn seems too small, too cheap, too easily mistaken for an accident rather than an offering, and each in its turn you set back down with the same hollow, mounting frustration.

You are not, you are forced to admit somewhere in the long second afternoon of searching, a woman who has ever owned very much. You have only ever had people, and people, you suspect, are not the sort of thing a stone marker is built to hold.

Babulya notices long before you find the nerve to tell her anything at all.

"You smell of him again," she says on the second evening, not looking up from the stocking she is mending, her voice gone careful in a way that frightens you more than any sharpness might have. "Worse than before. Like something has gotten its hands properly on you this time, rather than only its kindness."

You set down the basket you've been pretending to sort and find you cannot, this time, manage another easy lie. "He saved my life, Babulya. The Hunt found me in the wood."

The needle stills entirely in her hands. When she finally looks up, the fear in her face is not the gentle, half-affectionate worry she has worn through every other strange thing this winter has brought you. It is older than that, and far less willing to be teased into something softer.

"The Hunt," she repeats, and crosses herself, quick and instinctive, the gesture of a woman who has spent a lifetime not quite believing and never once daring to stop hedging her bets regardless. "Bozhe moy. And you went looking for him anyway, after that. I can see it on you, devochka, you needn't lie to spare me the trouble of guessing."

You kneel at her feet then, the way you have a hundred times before for the oil and the wool, only this time it is your own hands that are unsteady. "I have to tell you something, and I think you already suspect most of it." You tell her about the lantern, finally, the whole of it, the blue flame guttering in the snow that first night, the warmth of it answering your breath, the crackle that took it from your hands and left only frost and footprints behind. You tell her about the burn that healed itself in a single night, about the wood that lasts and the hens that lay and the hearth that burns blue and unaided through the coldest hours, every small mercy you have spent weeks quietly refusing to question aloud.

She listens to all of it in a silence that does not soften, her hands folded too tightly in her lap, and when you finally finish she does not scold you, which somehow frightens you more than scolding would have.

"You did not save a lantern," she says at last, quiet. "Whatever you saved that night, devochka, it was never only a lantern. You understand that now. I think you understood it before you ever told me."

"I think I have, for some time."

"And still you went looking for him in the dark, with your cloak left exactly as it was." It is not quite a question. She studies you for a long moment, something complicated moving behind her tired eyes, equal parts grief and a reluctant, painful tenderness. "Do you remember what I told you, the spider and the flower, when you were small enough to still believe me about everything?"

"I remember." You hold her gaze, surprising yourself with how steady your own voice comes out. "You said strange things have always known a soft heart when they find one. That they collect hearts the way magpies collect anything that shines." You pause, something turning over in your chest that has been waiting, you realise now, a very long time to be said aloud. 

"But you never finished the thought, Babulya. A flower only ever gives sweetness back to the hand that reaches for it, and nothing more, no matter how long you hold it. A spider, if you let it close enough, might actually look at you while it decides what to do with you. I think some part of me has always wanted that more than I wanted to be safe. To be looked at. Properly. Even by something that might, in the end, choose to ruin me for it."

Babulya says nothing for a long moment, her hand coming to rest, light and trembling, against the side of your face. "Then God help you, devochka," she says finally, "because I do not think I can anymore. I can only hope whatever you've gone and let yourself love has at least the decency to be careful with you."

She does not forbid you from going back. You understand, watching her turn back to her mending with hands that have not quite stopped shaking, that this is its own kind of permission, the only kind she has left to give a girl who was never, by either of your own admissions, built to be talked out of a thing once her heart had already decided it.

You go on searching after that with no greater success, the third day bleeding into a fourth without anything in your possession rising to meet whatever standard he meant by truly yours, until you find yourself, on a still, solemn afternoon with the light already failing early the way it does this deep into winter, sitting before the small cracked mirror in your room with no particular purpose beyond simply being tired of looking everywhere except at yourself.

You have not looked properly in some time. The face that meets you in the silvered glass is not unfamiliar, only tired in a way you had not let yourself notice until this exact moment, the eyes a little hollowed by weeks of broken sleep, though something else lives in them too now, something restless and faintly bright that was not there before the night a lantern first answered your breath, a spark that survives, stubbornly, beneath all that weariness. Your chest rises and falls in the glass with each unsteady breath, the simple, ordinary motion of any living body keeping itself alive, and it is that motion, that small private rhythm of your own breathing, that finally drags the memory up whole and entire, the way it has been waiting, patient as frost, to be properly let in.

You tucked him there. Against your ribs, beneath your coat, pressed close to the very same body breathing in the mirror now, on the first night you ever saw him, when he was nothing more to you than a dying blue flame too pitiful to leave to the cold. You carried him against your own skin like something small and helpless, warmed him with nothing but the heat your own body had left to spare, and you understand now, sitting here with your own reflection watching you understand it, that he had been that close to you from the very beginning. Closer, perhaps, than he has been at any single moment since, closer than the creek, closer than tonight's ruined snow, his whole guttering self held against the place where your heart keeps its most honest rhythm, and you had not even known enough to be afraid of how intimate a thing that was.

Heat floods through you at the thought, slow and total, and you let it, alone in your room with the light failing and no one left to see your face but the mirror.

You wonder, for the first time, whether an ancient thing's patience is built the same way a mortal one's is, with a thread that frays a little more each time it is asked to hold, until eventually, inevitably, it simply does not. He has watched you for weeks now, mended your hearth and your grandmother's lungs and the small soft wounds the world keeps handing you, has come to your aid twice now with a violence that cost him nothing visible and a tenderness afterward that cost him, you suspect, considerably more. You think of his hand at the creek, of his thumb against your jaw healing skin that had only just finished tearing, of the particular unhurried way he had let his palm linger at your wrist long after the bruise beneath it had already gone. You do not think a creature moves that slowly, that deliberately, over a debt it considers fully settled.

You let yourself imagine it properly for the first time, sitting alone in the dying light, what it might mean if the patience fraying in him is not so different from the ache that has been fraying in you. What it might look like, the moment that thread finally gives. Whether he has lain awake, in whatever cold and ancient place things like him go to rest, turning over the memory of your breath against his dying flame the same restless way you turn over the memory of his hand against your stomach. Whether wanting, for something built of frost and old violet fire, feels anything at all like the slow, low-bellied ache that has kept you from sleeping properly more nights than you have admitted even to yourself, or whether it is something colder, hungrier, a wanting with teeth in it, patient only because patience has always been the surest way for a predator to make certain of its meal.

You think you would let him have you either way. The thought arrives calm and entire and frightens you with how little fight you have left in you to argue against it.

You imagine, because you cannot any longer stop yourself from imagining, what it might be to be wanted by something that old, that careful, that has spent weeks proving itself willing to set a wood untouched and a grandmother's lungs whole simply to keep a single mortal girl comfortable through her own ordinary winter. You imagine his hands again, broad and scarred and entirely too gentle for what you know they are capable of doing to anything that crosses him, moving the way they moved at your jaw, only slower, only further, learning every cold and ordinary inch of you the unhurried way a man learns a prayer he intends to keep saying for a very long time. You imagine his mouth finding the same places his thumb has already mapped, his breath the only warm thing left in a world gone entirely to frost around the two of you, and the ache low in your belly answers the thought so immediately, so thoroughly, that you have to press your own hand flat against your stomach simply to feel something solid beneath all that wanting.

Your hand does not stay at your stomach. It rises, slow and unthinking, to the soft underside of your breast, to the exact place a small iron lantern once rested against your own racing heart on a night you still cannot properly account for, and you hold it there a long moment, feeling your own pulse beat hard and unhidden beneath your palm, and understand, with a clarity that settles through you like the first true thaw of spring, exactly what it is you have been searching your whole poor life for these past two days without ever once finding.

It was never going to be a thing. Not a coin, not a ribbon, not anything you could set down on cold stone and walk away from with both hands still empty.

You have already decided, you realise, sitting there with your hand still pressed warm against your own chest and the last of the daylight finally giving out around you. You decided it, perhaps, the very moment you chose not to turn your cloak.

You know exactly what you mean to give him.

You dress, on the appointed night, the way a much younger version of yourself might have dressed for a spring fair she had no business attending, and you catch yourself at it halfway through lacing the bodice of the one good dress folded at the bottom of your chest, sky-blue thread worked into the collar by your mother's own hand, kept for Easter liturgy and your own nameday and almost nothing else in between.

What are you thinking, you ask yourself, hands stilling over the laces, he will not even see it under the cloak.

You finish lacing it anyway.

The goodbye you give Babulya is shorter than either of you pretends not to notice. She does not ask where you are going, though you suspect she has guessed well enough by now, and only takes your face in both her hands the way she has since before you could properly remember being touched at all, her thumb tracing once over your cheekbone as though memorising the shape of it against the possibility that this might be the last time she is given the chance to.

"Come home," she says, which is not quite the blessing it sounds like, and not quite a prayer either, though it carries the weight of both.

"I mean to."

"Mm." She crosses you, quick and certain, two fingers pressed to your collarbone the way she has done since you were small enough to need carrying. She does not say be careful. You think, perhaps, she has finally understood that careful was never going to be a road open to you.

The night holds no moon at all, the sky scoured down to bare, hard stars, and heat crawls over you the entire walk to the creek despite the cold, a current that will not lie still no matter how the frost outside tries to claim it, settling low in you the way water settles beneath ice and goes on moving long after the surface above it has stopped looking like anything alive.

You wait at the stone marker a long while once you arrive, your pulse keeping time the way the rosary beads by Babulya's icon keep time, fast and overworked, counted out one bead at a time against a silence that gives nothing back. You do not know what to call him, have never once been given anything to call him by, and so when you finally find your voice it comes out smaller and stranger than you intend.

"I've come," you say, to the dark, to the birches, to whoever or whatever might be listening. "As you asked."

For a moment nothing answers you at all, the night holding its breath the way it had before the Hunt found you, and your heart climbs into your throat with a fear that has, this time, almost nothing to do with danger.

Then he is simply there, the way a held breath becomes, all at once, the air you finally let go.

You have seen pieces of him before, his back in violence, his hand at your jaw, his eyes catching low firelight, but nothing has prepared you for the whole of him standing before you now beneath bare winter stars, and the sight of him knocks the breath clean out of your lungs the way the ice once had, sharper, colder, and far more dangerous to your continued survival. He is beautiful in the particular, merciless way a blizzard is beautiful, all sharp pale elegance and midnight-blue hair bleeding to ice at its tips, his mouth made for something caught exactly between a smile and a threat, his gold eyes holding yours with an attention so total you feel it land somewhere beneath your sternum.

He smiles, slow, and it does something unforgivable to your knees.

"What have you brought?"

The question is not unkind. It is, somehow, worse for being asked so gently, and you feel the heat climb your throat and settle high in your cheeks under the particular focus of his gaze, the same gaze that watched you mend yourself back together from a dying flame, now turned wholly and unbearably toward whatever answer you are about to give him.

He steps closer when you do not immediately speak, tilting his head, one dark brow lifting with the patient, knowing amusement of someone who has already guessed and is only waiting, with some private cruelty, to hear you say it aloud yourself.

"Myself," you say first, and then, quieter, your voice nearly lost beneath your own racing pulse, "my body."

He goes very still.

Whatever courteous mask he has worn for you until now slips, for one bare, unguarded instant, and beneath it you catch something far sharper, hunger and amusement tangled together so closely you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins, his mouth curving into something that is not quite a smile anymore, something closer to a sneer, cruel and delighted both at once.

"How generous." His voice has dropped, gone low and edged in a way that raises the hair along your arms. "Mortal flesh, freely offered, as though I have not had my fill of soft, foolish bodies a hundred times over before your grandmother's grandmother was so much as a thought in her own mother's womb." He circles you slowly, unhurried, the way a wolf circles something it has already decided is not, in fact, any real danger to itself. "You think yourself a gift, little dove. I wonder if you understand yet that you are closer to a sacrifice."

You should feel smaller for it. Some part of you does, heat rising shameful and furious in your chest at the easy, contemptuous certainty in his voice, and yet beneath the shame something else coils tighter still, something that does not want him to stop looking at you like that, like a thing worth picking apart slowly simply to see what it is made of.

He stops in front of you, too close now, close enough that the cold coming off him raises gooseflesh along every inch of skin the cloak fails to cover, and leans down until his face is level with your throat, breathing you in slow and deliberate, the way a man might breathe in bread fresh from the oven, helpless to it despite himself.

"Are you sure, little dove?" His mouth brushes the shell of your ear, and you feel the words more than hear them, frost and heat both at once. His hand finds your waist and draws you the last small distance forward, until there is no cold left between you at all. "I will unmake you."

You do not have the chance to answer him with words. His mouth finds yours instead, slow at first, almost reverent, as though he means to memorise the shape of your hesitation before he takes it from you entirely, and then it is not slow at all, not reverent, only deep and certain and utterly unhurried in its thoroughness, his hand sliding from your waist to cradle the back of your skull as though he means to keep you exactly where he has decided you belong.

You lose the night somewhere in the middle of it. You lose the cold, the stars, the stone marker digging into your hip where he has walked you back against it, lose every coherent thought beyond the slow, devastating drag of his mouth against yours, his other hand finding your jaw, your throat, the fevered pulse beating there, tracing it like something he intends to learn by heart. Your own hands fist in the heavy fabric of his coat, in the cold chains looped beneath it, anchoring yourself to him the only way you have left, and the kiss only deepens for it, lengthens, builds the way a held note builds before it finally breaks, until your knees have gone entirely unreliable beneath you and the only thing keeping you upright at all is the solid, immovable wall of him.

When he finally draws back, just far enough to let you breathe, you are dizzy in a way that has nothing to do with the cold air rushing back between you, your lips swollen, your pulse a wild, unsteady thing beneath his still-resting palm, and the satisfaction low in your belly has not eased so much as sharpened, gone taut and aching and entirely unwilling to be soothed by anything less than more of him.

He watches you come back to yourself with an expression that has finally, fully abandoned anything resembling courtesy, hunger sitting plain and unhidden in those hollow gold eyes now, and his thumb drags once, slow, along your bottom lip, as though tasting the effect of himself on you for his own private satisfaction.

"Well," he says, low, rough at the edges in a way his voice has never once been before tonight. "It seems I have only just begun unmaking you at all."

He has you pressed against the stone marker, but the rigidness of the rock is nothing compared to the absolute pleasure he delivers through you. In seconds, as though it took no thought at all, he hikes the skirt of your frock, and pulls down your underwear. He grins in absolute, dark glee at the shining slick of your core. You gasp as the cold winter air hits your skin. 

“How long have you been dreaming of this, dove?” He asks, slow and deep. He pulls your thighs apart, holding you by the waist as he pins you to the stone. “Those nights spent trying to satisfy yourself, imagining it was I?” 

His tone is mocking and you whine. He is so slow, so unhurried, he has not even touched you yet, and yet the breath of his mouth against your clit, his fingers pressing hard against the plush of your inner thigh has you squirming. You can’t help but move closer to him, like a desperate dying moth fluttering towards the blue lamp, knowing for certain a lick of its tongue would lead to your unfettered death right there. You want that death. You want his fingers in you. His mouth over you. Him. 

And then he inserts his finger into you. You cry out, sharp and furious, the same cry you had let out when the lantern had burned you, left your skin charred. It’s unfair, really, how long his fingers are. They curl just so perfectly against your gummy, wet walls. Your eyes fill with tears, damp little drops decorating your lashes. You swear you see stars dancing over you, little flames. He smiles, and it’s a mocking smile, one that is so egotistical, to be the only one that could undo you like this. 

He leans over you and presses hot, open mouthed kisses against your skin. His lips press against your cheek, your throat, your collarbone. It travels down and down, and soon enough he has your carefully tied bodice undone. The dress gathers at your waist. It leaves you bare underneath, your breasts perfect round mounds of soft flesh. Sweat gathers in the valley between them. And the Fae reaches up and gathers one of your breasts in his hot mouth. You moan out loud, the sound echoing across the forests, the sounds are so lewd you think, for one dizzying second, that it could ward off even the fiercest of creatures. His finger works magic inside of you, curling and pinching, it has you writhing beneath him. The carefully tied knot low in your belly unspooling with each curl of his finger. It’s all so much. His mouth on your chest, his finger bullying its way inside, hitting that sore, aching spot you’ve never been able to reach on your own. 

“P-Please! Ah… mhm, I—” You cry out. You feel, at your entrance, the skin of another long finger, it dancing over your entrance. You shiver in its ghostly hold. And then, for one shocking second, for one nauseous clarifying moment, you think to ask a question that out of all moments, this moment precisely, you ought to ask. You heave in his hold, before you stutter out desperately, “Y-You, haahn…. Your—name?” 

The Fae laughs, the vibrations travelling over your stomach, and then plunges a second of his fingers inside you. He relishes in the lewd moan you let out, the way your legs come up around him, bucking at his digits. And then, all too cruelly, before you can finally come undone, finally have the knot inside you untangled, he pulls out his fingers; they come away glistening and sticky, a thin strand of your arousal liquid connecting his digits to yourself. The sudden cold, the sudden absence of his flesh has you gasping. Tears spill from your face, and you look down dumbly, at his face twisted into a courteous yet mocking expression. 

“You never stop asking, do you, golubka?” He sneers at you. He watches as your hole clenches around nothing. And then almost taking pity on you at the sudden punishment, he breathes against your clit. His voice comes low, “Kyryll Chudomirovich Flins.” And then his tongue darts out, pressing itself flat and hot against your flesh. Your back arches. 

The name, Kyryll, Kyrll, Kyrll, floats around your mind. “Satisfied, are you?” He asks. You don’t get to respond to that as his tongue darks out like a spike into your entrance. Almost subconsciously, you give him your name, too. And it seems to be at that moment that he seems to truly gain a different glean in his eye. He hauls you by your waist, his large hands keeping you elevated against the giant stone, your legs thrown over his shoulder, as he fucks into you relentlessly. You swear you see stars as you feel your folds open and licked clean with his tongue, long and flexible. 

Kyryll presses his mouth between your thighs, and feels the way your body convulses before you even realise it. “Yes, ah…” He murmurs low, keeping the pace. “Come undone for me, dove.” Your body relinquishes in an instant, your body nearly lifts from the stone as your weeks-awaited release washes over you in waves. “Hnah…. Kyryll, ah!” You writhe. 

For one second, as your orgasm comes over you, it’s all euphoria. You pant, your breath laboured and heavy, and you dare to glance at the man, no, Fae, that kneels at your feet. His mouth is covered in your slick and you feel the heat rise to your cheeks when you see his tongue come out to lick at his lips, as though the minutes he spent between your thighs, feasting on your bud and its liquids have not yet quenched his thirst. His eyes, you take note, have turned into slits, snake-like as he pierces into you. He takes a hold of the fabric of your frock and discards it to the side. 

“You’re beautiful like this,” He murmurs. “Bare, your eyes wide, your body squirming, given to me like an offering.”

“Kyryll…” You whisper. His eyes get blown wide. Your mouth is heavy with his name, your tongue tasting the consonant of its writing. You realise, belatedly, that you hold some power over him. He had given you his name, his most sacred possession, and you could dangle it in front of him like you would dangle a wad of feathers in front of a cat. You try again, “Kyryll.” And this time, he pants. His grip on your thigh tightens, so tight in fact that you don’t doubt that red marks have been plastered all over your skin, like you have been branded to be his for eternity.

Kyryll moves before you can properly register it. It is as though the utterance of his name has him completely, absolutely, totally ensnared by you. He has your back pressed against the stone in an instant. His hands come up below your thighs and circles your plush legs around his waist. 

You don’t know if it is simply your imagination or not, but the woods around you blur at the edges of your vision, and it seems for one dizzying moment that you are not in the wild at all, and rather that you are in a synagogue of sorts with your back pressed against a large marble pillar. Certainly, this is the most sacrilegious thing you have done so far. But your surroundings do not matter. It does not matter where you are or what local sacrilege you are committing. All that matters is that Kyryll is looking at you with a stare so penetrating it could cut through you. His clothes have come undone, discarded who knows where, and you dare to glance downward. 

His cock is hard and erect. A long pink thing with precum leaking from its head. It has your mouth salivating. You realise that you need it, that all the magic his hands and mouth could do would pale in comparison to how full he could make you feel. He could press it in you to its hilt, have you see the world in a way you never could before. You can hear the snarl in Kyryll’s voice when he says, “Say it again, baby.” You realise, belatedly, thoughts clouded with lust, that his speech is far less controlled now, far less pompous, it rather takes on a base and vulgar tone. “Say my name.”

And you do. Or, rather, you moan it loud and harsh.

Kyryll whines, bites you hard enough on the throat you whine, hips bucking against him. You shiver when he lets his tip catch your clit a few times until you manage to tilt your pelvis enough for him to slide in. Just a bit, but enough for his breath to catch and a hurried curse in a language you do not recognise, to fall from his lips as your walls eagerly flutter around the intrusion.

“Oh, ah, I—,” you whine softly as he finally presses closer to you. Your hands scrabble for purchase on his back as his body surrounds you. chest brushing against yours and sending pleasure from the pressure against your breasts. You are reminded of his lantern heat, and you nuzzle into him. One hand grips your thigh and holds your legs open as he sinks to the base. He places kisses and marks along your collar. His teeth, sharper than most, graze against your skin. It leaves stinging marks on your supple flesh, marks that you are sure will leave deep purple bruises come daylight. “...Feels good!”

“Ha–Hah… I, dear… God,” Kyryll mutters, but at the utterance of the word ‘God’ his entire body convulses. His length stutters inside your walls breaking the pace he had set. You moan louder. It was almost as though any utterance of ‘God’ sent shocks of pain and repulsion through him. Kyryll snarls and sinks his teeth into your collarbone. You cry out, clawing into his back with marks that are sure to leave half-moon scars on his pale, smooth skin. You like that thought. You like having carved yourself into him, the same as he is doing to you now. 

And then he moans out your name, over and over and over again, a substitute for God. Each brutal thrust is punctuated with a cry of your name. Your vision turns white at the edges. You feel as his cock hits your cervix. Pleasure and pain entangle themselves together, your legs press tighter and tighter. You can feel and see and hear only him. His thrust speeding up, his breath against your ear, you take it all as the creature inside you comes undone. 

All it takes is one final moan, “Kyryll!” And he comes undone. 

Your orgasm floods you yet again, stronger and more potent this time, overtaking all your senses. And you swear that Kyryll loses it. He fucks you through it, hard and fast, and you feel it in the way he chases his own release, rutting into your soaked entrance like he had not had an offering this good before. You could bet, if you were braver, that he truly had not had someone like you at his whim before. Thick white ribbons of cum release and it coats your insides, dripping down your thighs onto the ground below. He stays there for a minute longer, ensuring all of his seed would nest deep inside you.

You pant, sweat gathering at your temples, but he does not seem to mind. Kyryll cups your jaw in hand and smiles, slow. 

.

.

.

.

When you finally surface back into your own body properly, you find the snow beneath you has melted in a wide, perfect circle, bare earth steaming faintly where frost has no business yielding at all. He has kept you warm the entire time, you understand, distantly, the same patient heat that has lived banked in your hearth all winter now spent freely on nothing but you, and the realisation settles through you with a tenderness that aches almost as much as anything else tonight has.

He does not move away from you after. This, more than anything else, is what undoes you completely, the way he stays close, unhurried, his mouth finding your shoulder and pressing there, soft, before moving on to the curve of your collarbone, to the inside of your wrist where your pulse still has not properly settled, to each of your knuckles in turn as though every part of you deserves its own separate, private reverence. You lie still beneath the slow, deliberate attention of it and feel something in your chest crack open even further than your body already has, because this, the gentleness of it, the patience, frightens you in a way his hunger never quite managed to.

You ache everywhere, a soreness that has settled deep and low and entirely pleasurable, the particular satisfied heaviness of muscles finally, properly spent, and you think, with a breathless half-laugh you cannot quite suppress, of every restless night you spent these past weeks chasing this same release with nothing but your own poor, insufficient hands. Nothing in all those long, frustrated hours came anywhere close. You are sated now in a way that reaches all the way to the bone, and some small, smug, satisfied part of you decides, lying there in the steaming snow, that the weeks of wanting were worth it simply for the contrast.

He helps you dress afterward with the same unhurried care, and it is this, more than the kissing, that you will remember longest. He laces your bodice the way you imagine a much gentler world might have taught him to, slow and careful, his fingers brushing your skin with each pull of the cord, pressing a kiss to the join of your shoulder once it is closed, to your collarbone above the sky-blue embroidery your mother once worked there. He kneels to tie your boots himself, an act so absurdly domestic for something built of chains and old violet fire that you have to look away from him for a moment simply to keep your composure, and even that small task he performs as though it were a rite rather than a chore, his thumb tracing once over your ankle before he lets the laces fall closed.

He settles your cloak back over your shoulders last of all, drawing the clasp closed at your throat himself, his knuckles grazing your jaw as he does, and presses one final kiss, soft and lingering, to your temple, as though sealing something shut that he has no intention of letting come undone again so easily.

"Kyryll," you say, quiet, savoring the shape of it now that the urgency that first dragged it out of him has burned down to embers. It sounds different in this voice than it had in the other, softer, almost shy of itself, and you watch something in him answer that softness in kind, his composure slipping for just a moment at hearing his own name spoken so gently after spending however many centuries hearing it, you suspect, mostly in fear or in screaming.

"Do not waste it," he says, though there is no real warning left in the words now, only a kind of fond, weary resignation, his thumb tracing slow over your knuckles. "I am told I am rather difficult to get rid of, once properly summoned."

You laugh, and the sound surprises you both, bright and unguarded in the cold dark.

He walks you to the edge of the treeline and no further, some old instinct in him apparently still unwilling to be seen too near Babulya's gate, and there he stops, drawing you in by the waist one last time, his forehead resting against yours, his breath warm against your mouth.

"This was never going to be a single night's bargain, golubka." His smile, when it comes, is dark and slow and entirely too pleased with itself, and yet underneath the danger of it lives something that looks, unmistakably, almost embarrassingly, like tenderness. "I have spent weeks now learning the shape of you, one small mercy at a time. I find I have no intention whatsoever of stopping simply because the debt's been paid twice over."

He brushes one last kiss against your mouth, lighter than all the others, almost careless, almost a promise.

"You will see me again," he says, already drawing back into the dark between the birches, his eyes holding yours until the very last possible moment. "Sooner, I expect, than either of us has the sense to properly prepare for."

And then he is gone, the way he always is, all at once and without sound, and you stand alone at the edge with your lips still warm and your whole body humming with a satisfaction that finally, finally, feels complete, and find that you are already, helplessly, counting the days until he keeps his word.

𝓟𝓛𝓔𝓐𝓢𝓔 𝓡𝓔𝓑𝓛𝓞𝓖 𝓘𝓕 𝓨𝓞𝓤 𝓔𝓝𝓙𝓞𝓨𝓔𝓓 𝓣𝓗𝓘𝓢, 𝓘𝓣 𝓗𝓔𝓛𝓟𝓢 𝓐 𝓛𝓞𝓣 ❤ gold animated divider by: @cafekitsune

[chuluoyi]

𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐓𝐓𝐋𝐄 𝐏𝐑𝐈𝐍𝐂𝐄

- xavier x reader

while the entire kingdom of philos rejoices over the soon-to-be-born heir to the throne, the king’s unwavering priority remains clear: his queen

genre/warnings: mildly suggestive, fluff, fluff, fluff, comfort, king!xavier and queen!reader, pregnancy, spoilers! from xavier's myth shooting stars and taking elements of xavier's card silvery polyphony

note: i'm not actually a xavier girlie... but ever since his myth and anecdote when shooting stars fall, he's been marinating in my head :')

“Your Majesty, here are the gifts meant for the Queen by the townsfolk.”

Xavier’s gaze swept over the various trinkets that filled the throne room—from fine fabrics and glistening pearls, to handwritten messages with heartfelt wishes for the future royal baby and your wellbeing. He raised an eyebrow, a flicker of curiosity crossing his face.

"All this? You’ve inspected every single one of them?" he questioned, gaze flicked to Jeremiah, his aide. His cerulean eyes narrowed slightly. "Nothing with malicious intent?"

Jeremiah shook his head with a smile. "No. They are purely tokens of love and respect for Her Majesty."

"I see..."

Xavier hummed softly, the stiffness in his posture easing as the assurance settled over him—no harm would come to you. In the fifth year of your reign as King and Queen of Philos, it had become clear that the people had come to adore their queen to such an extent.

As they should. The king found himself smiling despite his usual composure then. You were due their respect for all of your service and compassion. And now, with you carrying the future heir to the throne, it was even more deserved.

"Has the Queen been well? She hasn't been around much," Jeremiah asked, a knowing look crossed his face. "After all, you're counting down the days now..."

With the royal physician declaring you were at full-term, you could give birth any day now. Xavier would be lying if he said he wasn't antsy, but the least he could do in front of his subjects was showing an air of indifference.

But of course, Jeremiah knew him best after you.

"Why don't you pay her a visit? And oh, yeah, I think I've heard the maids saying Her Majesty is missing having the King serenading her!"

Your husband had been busy these past few days that he had little time to spend with you each day.

Of course, you missed him. There wasn’t much you could do while in confinement. And so when he entered your chambers on this windy winter day, you were more enthusiastic than you should have—

“Xavier!” You turned to him and smiled so brightly, your excitement making you rise to your feet and scamper towards him.

But he was faster, closing the distance in an instant and catching you before you could take more than a few steps. His hands steadied you, as the heavy weight in your womb proved to be a challenge.

“You’re supposed to be on bedrest,” he scolded, a frown tugging at his features. His hands rested firmly on your shoulders, holding you in place. “Don’t move around too much.”

“I’m fine, I’m fine!” You giggled as he led you to your bed, but before you could settle in, a sharp wave of pain rippled through your abdomen and spine. The smile faltered on your lips as you sucked in a quick breath, instinctively leaning into him for support.

“What's wrong?” Xavier’s voice tensed with concern, his arm tightening around you as his eyes widened in alarm. His free hand hovered protectively over yours, which was clutching your swollen belly. "Is it hurting? I’ll call for—"

“No, no!” You declined amidst your labored breaths, mustering up a smile despite the discomfort. “I’ve consulted the royal physician. It’s perfectly normal for me to experience this... I just have to bear it.”

“How is this normal?” Xavier's brow furrowed with worry and sternness. “If this keeps up, how will you preserve your strength for the real labor?”

He had always detested seeing you in distress. It was evident in all his actions, from the earliest moments of your relationship to this very day, and it made your heart warm.

When the pain subsided, you made him sit on your bed and brought both your hands to cup his face, trying to coax a smile from him.

"Don't worry too much, love." You grinned, eyes crinkling. "On the bright side, it just means that our little star is thiiis close to meeting us."

Xavier found your gaze and for a moment, he stayed silent. His clear blue eyes softened as they held yours. You had always been like this—diminishing your own discomfort in favor of reassuring him, and if you thought it would make him feel better, then you were sorely wrong because his instincts to protect you were deeply engraved in him, and it only fueled his concern further.

His hands settled over yours, pressing them to his face.

“From what I’ve seen, this baby really enjoys bullying you,” he muttered sullenly.

You pursed your lips. “A friendly reminder, you’re the one who got me with child.”

“I’ve always thought that sexual act is the pinnacle of showing the depths of my undying loyalty towards you.” His tone was mock-serious, the edge of a grin tugging at his lips. “The baby is a pleasant gift, what I enjoy more though—”

Before you could protest, his fingers skimmed over your figure, landing with unmistakable familiarity on your ample breasts—

“I like these the most.”

“Xavier!” You swatted his hand away with wide eyes, crossing both arms over your chest in an attempt to block him from further groping.

He chuckled openly at how defensive you were, a playful glint in his eyes. With a soft pat on your head, he stood up and extended his right hand towards you.

“What?” You stared at his hand, almost squeaking, wary that his hands might wander to your sensitive skin again. Xavier let out another chuckle, clearly amused by your reaction.

“I’ve heard through the grapevine that Her Majesty the Queen wants me to serenade her,” he said with a teasing smile. “And as your humble servant, who am I to refuse?”

. . .

You have always adored how Xavier plays the piano.

He claimed he didn't like the instrument that much, but the way his fingers moved over the keys so effortlessly, each note flowing with such precision—it was one of the many ways he captured your heart.

You sat next to him by the grand piano, your head gently bobbing along with the beautiful rhythm he drew from the keys.

“You used to play this a lot back then,” you commented as Xavier started playing the piece he composed himself, one you often referred as ‘his very own soundtrack.’

Celestial Serenade. Xavier even had a name for it. Solemn and playful, it was the beginning that always got your heart racing. But when he reached the bridge, a gnawing sadness would creep in, tugging at your heart.

And suddenly, in that moment, you had an epiphany.

From the days you had loved him as a student in the Academy, and then as a knight and your crown prince, those lonely years of waiting for him to come back the first time, until that decisive heartbreaking day when you let him go into the unknown once and for all—

—and those gruelling, painful years of waiting that followed afterwards… up until the day he finally came back to restore Philos, to retake his throne, and to make you his queen in the truest sense—

Tears pricked at your eyes at the flashback of everything the two of you had gone through, right after he finished the outro.

Xavier paused, his fingers still on the keys. He turned to you, but his eyes widened as he noticed the tears spilling from your eyes. “Why are you crying?”

“Nothing, I’m just—” Startled, you quickly wiped the tears from your face, but Xavier gently lifted your chin, his touch soft but insistent.

He was worried, his gaze searching yours as if he was struggling to find the right words, his eyes full of concern. “Tell me,” he urged quietly, the hint of a tremor in his voice. “What is it? What made you cry?”

How could you explain what you had just realized— the weight of all that had brought you to this moment? The journey, the sacrifices, the love that had never faltered even in the darkest of times?

And it all culminated into one single sentence, as you stared right into those beautiful eyes of his:

“I love you, Xavier.”

In that very second, Xavier could’ve sworn his heart was entirely in your grasp. His breath caught, and the world around him seemed to fade, leaving only you—your teary-eyed confession and the raw honesty in your gaze.

Through countless dawns and twilights, through many starry sea expeditions and a daring voyage to the past— everything he had done to protect you. All these long years of yearning to see you again had led to this precise moment, where happiness was finally within your reach.

To know his beloved returns his feelings in full… He was overwhelmed by love you gave him, it made his heart so, so full.

Xavier cupped your face with both hands, his thumbs gently wiping away the tears that streaked your cheeks. “Don't cry, you big crybaby. Save it for when we welcome our child later.”

You sniffled, frowning at him. “So, you don’t love me?”

A soft smile played on his lips as he pulled you into his arms, wrapping you in his warmth. He buried his face in the crook of your shoulder.

“Silly... I love you more than anything in this world.”

Three days later, you went into labor.

The palace descended into chaos, with attendants scurrying through the halls. But amidst all the commotion, Xavier was the one who struggled the most to maintain his composure.

Your cries from behind the doors felt like a blade slicing through his chest. He wanted nothing more than to rush in, to hold your hand, to do something—anything—but the midwives had firmly insisted that he stay out of the way.

Xavier’s mind raced with worry, his eyes fixed on the door as though sheer willpower could ease your pain. The only thing that mattered right in this moment was you and the child you were bringing into the world—and it was taking everything in him not to lose his wits.

Then, amidst his fervent prayers, hours later, a piercing cry broke through.

Xavier froze, his heart lurching. Relief and disbelief flooded him all at once as he realized—it was his baby's first cry.

But what about you?

He so desperately wanted to see you that Jeremiah had to physically restrain him. The women assured him you and the baby were being tended to.

When they finally allowed him inside, he rushed in so quickly he nearly stumbled.

There you were, seated on the bed, hair disheveled, exhaustion etched into every line of your face, yet to him, you were radiant—utterly so. His heart swelled as he watched you cradle the newborn, cooing with a tenderness that stole his breath.

“Now, say hi to Papa...”

Your voice was almost feather-like, yet it was in that moment the truth hit him with full force—his baby was really here. He stared at the tiny bundle in your arms, awestruck, before his gaze shifted to your pale face again.

And you smiled at him so brilliantly. So warmly.

“Xavier... say hello to our son.”

He felt like he was in a daze as he slowly kneeled and took the baby into his arms. The small, fragile weight felt both unfamiliar and extraordinary. This child— was a part of him, but most importantly, he was a part of you too.

The baby stirred, and when his eyes blinked open, Xavier’s breath hitched. Those tiny blue eyes, a mirror of his own, locked onto him.

“Ah, he—” Xavier faltered, his chest tightening as emotions overwhelmed him. Holding his son, seeing him so clearly now, felt like an arrow straight to his heart. Before this moment, he hadn’t thought much about how the baby might look. But now, he couldn’t help marveling at the sight. The little one had his hair and eyes, yet your delicate nose and soft, heart-shaped lips.

In that instant, all his doubts and fears melted away like snow under the sun, replaced by a feeling so intense, so overflowing, it brought a lump to his throat and tears in his eyes.

This was love—raw and undeniable. A love he never knew he could feel so deeply, now cradled in his arms.

And also in you.

As his gaze found yours again, Xavier made a vow—to every god and deity that might be listening, that no matter where his life led him, no matter how cruel fate might twist his path again, if it meant getting even a glimpse of this unparalleled happiness with you, then—

He would endure it all. Every storm, every trial. For you, for the love you shared, and now for the tiny life in his arms. And if you were ever separated again—

No matter how, no matter how many times, through all means, he will definitely find you, always.

[cherryscript]

₊˚⊹ᰔ TOYED WITH EACH OTHER ᝰ.ᐟ

❞ featuring ⠾ gege!caleb

i suggest reading prequel of this fic— SOULMATE? HOLEMATE! —for better understanding.

❞ summary ⠾ You and Caleb reunite at Gran’s house and BOOM—turns out those sketchy toys were secretly linking your dicks and pussies the whole time. Months of ghost-fucking each other? Mutual. Both virgins? Also mutual. Gran leaves for 3 days? → instant horny apocalypse. You two lose your V-cards in the most depraved, “gege/meimei” way possible :3

❞ wc ⠾ 7.7k

❞ content warnings ⠾ pseudocest, heavy og “gege / meimei” / big brother-little sister dynamic, explicit smut, heavy dubcon, usage of toys, toys connected to each other's dick and pussy (portal panties), virginity loss, oral (m! receiving), toy play, double penetration via toy + real cock, squirting, creampie, face-sitting, spanking, cum play, overstimulation, rough sex, voyeurism, theft of panties, reader's a brat, possessiveness, emotional intensity, overall just straight up filth with plot

❞ cherry’s note ⠾ thanks to @kingraspberry12-blog for commissioning this piece. I never thought I'd drag my ass down to actually write a part two but it is what it is. Here's the most awaited part two of soulmate?holemate!. I've lost count of how many times I've crashed out during this fic lol. My brain's so fried actually, need to sleep it off.

The summer drags like molasses this year, thick and sticky, every hour stretching longer than it has any right to. Maybe it’s the heat rolling in off the Bloomshore coast, maybe it’s Gran’s ancient air-conditioner wheezing like it’s on its last legs, or maybe—more likely—it’s because you’ve spent the last two days fucking a perfect silicone replica of your gege’s cock in the room right next to his, walls so thin you can hear the creak of his mattress when he shifts in his sleep.

You’re both on the living-room couch now, same faded floral pattern you used to fight over as kids, same throw blanket draped over your knees like nothing’s changed. Except everything has. The space between your thigh and his feels charged, electric, like the air itself is holding its breath. Neither of you looks directly at the other. Your eyes keep sliding to the TV screen—some mindless rerun neither of you is watching—then dart away before they can land on his profile, on the sharp line of his jaw, the way sweat beads at his temple and trails down the side of his neck.

Caleb breaks first.

He clears his throat, the sound rough, like it’s been stuck there for hours.

“Hey, pipsqueak…” His voice is lower than usual, careful. “How’s life out in Linkon? Big city, more people, all that noise?”

He chuckles, soft and awkward, rubbing the back of his neck the way he always does when he’s nervous. You used to tease him about it. Now it just makes your stomach twist.

“Don’t tell me you don’t miss your gege anymore…”

You glance up—too fast. His cheeks are flushed, a faint pink creeping up from his collar. He looks… shy. Almost boyish. It’s so unfair.

Your own face burns hotter. You look away quick, huffing a breath through your nose like it’ll cool you down.

“How can I not miss you…”

The words slip out quieter than you mean them to. You press your lips together hard, trapping everything else that wants to follow.

You miss him so much it hurts.

You miss you in ways you're not supposed to.

You miss you so bad you shove his dick—fake, warm, veiny, perfect—inside you every night and cry his name into the pillow while you hug that stupid apple plushie he won for you at the fair when you were fourteen. You clamp down around it until your thighs shake and your vision whites out, pretending it’s his arms pinning you, his chest against your back, his breath on your neck. You come so hard you sob, and then you feel guilty for hours, but you still do it again the next night. Because you're broken and you want him and you hate yourself for it.

But you don’t say any of that. You just stare at your knees and let the silence thicken.

Gran’s voice saves you both.

“Kids!”

You jump. Caleb straightens like he’s been caught doing something wrong.

She’s standing in the doorway, dressed in her going-out blouse, small rolling suitcase at her side.

“I’m headed downtown for three days. Something came up. Emergency stuff. You two will be fine, right? Like always.”

She’s said the same thing a hundred times over the years. Back then it meant popcorn fights and falling asleep to horror movies on the couch. Now the words land differently. Heavier.

The front door clicks shut behind her. The sound echoes.

Suddenly the house feels too quiet. Too big. Too empty except for him.

You’re hyper-aware of every inch of Caleb next to you. The sleeveless shirt clings to his chest from the humidity, dark at the collar where sweat’s gathered. His shorts ride up just enough to show the thick muscle of his thighs. His arms—God, his arms—flex every time he shifts, biceps rounding, veins standing out against his skin. He’s broader than last summer, taller, filled out in all the ways that make your mouth dry and your core ache.

You stare out the window at the garden like it’s the most fascinating thing in the world. Anything to avoid looking at him.

He notices.

Caleb chuckles again, softer this time, and reaches out. One finger brushes your cheek—light, teasing, the same way he used to when you pouted as a kid.

“Aww, is my meimei sad? Mm… I’m here. We can spend some quality time together—”

The touch is barely there, but it burns straight down your spine. Your whole body jerks away like you’ve been shocked.

Caleb freezes, finger still hovering in the air. His eyes widen.

“Pipsqueak… are you okay?”

You can’t look at him. Your face is on fire, heart slamming so hard you’re sure he can hear it. Your nipples are already tight under your thin tank top, traitorously visible, and you cross your arms quickly to hide them.

“I’m—fine,” you mumble, staring at the floor. “Just… hot.”

He swallows. You hear it—the dry click of his throat. His gaze drops for half a second, catches the outline of your nipples, then snaps away like he’s been burned too.

“Right. Uh… yeah. Hot.” He exhales, rough. “Alright. I’ll be in the kitchen. Lemme know what you want for lunch.”

He stands. The couch dips and rises with his weight. You watch his back as he walks away—broad shoulders rolling under the shirt, the dip of his spine, the way his shorts hug the curve of his ass and the powerful flex of his thighs with every step.

The second he disappears around the corner you clench your thighs together so hard it hurts.

You’re already wet. Have been since he sat down. Since he said your nickname. Since he touched your cheek.

You need a shower. Cold. Now.

You bolt upstairs before you can think better of it, lock the bathroom door, strip in record time. The dildo is already in your hand—pulled from under your mattress like it’s been waiting for you.

The water’s barely warm when you brace one foot on the edge of the tub, line up the thick head, and sink down with a broken moan.

It stretches you open in that perfect, filthy way—veins dragging, curve kissing your front wall, heavy balls nudging your clit on the downstroke. You fuck yourself fast, desperate, water pounding your back, free hand braced on the tile.

“Gege—fuck—gege—”

You don’t even try to be quiet. The house is empty except for him, and part of you hopes—prays—he hears.

Downstairs, Caleb grips the kitchen counter so hard his knuckles turn white.

The second you disappeared upstairs he felt it: that familiar phantom squeeze around his cock, hot and wet and impossibly tight. Then the rhythm starts—fast, shallow, greedy.

He’s hard in seconds, leaking into his shorts, breath coming in short pants.

He glances toward the stairs.

He knows what you’re doing.

He knows because he’s been doing the same thing to your toy every night.

And now you’re both home.

Both alone.

Both breaking.

He doesn’t go upstairs. Not yet.

Instead he leans his back against the counter, the cool edge biting into his spine like it’s the only thing keeping him upright. His cock is painfully erect under the thin fabric of his shorts, the obscene bulge straining forward, tenting so hard the waistband digs into his lower abs. Every shallow breath makes it twitch, every phantom slam of your hips upstairs sends a fresh jolt through him. He moans—low, broken, helpless—each sound punched out of his lungs as your rhythm rocks him from the inside out. His knees buckle once, twice; he catches himself on the edge of the sink, knuckles white, hips grinding forward into nothing like he’s fucking the air.

He reaches down without thinking, palm cupping the thick ridge through the cotton. One rough stroke and his head falls back, throat working on a groan. The wet spot at the front of his shorts spreads fast—dark, sticky, obscene. He grinds harder into his own fist, hips rolling in slow, filthy circles, eyes fixed on the mess he’s making, precum soaking through until the fabric clings transparently to the flushed head.

Upstairs, you stand frozen under the cold spray for a long minute, water pounding your shoulders, doing absolutely nothing to dull the ache between your legs. Your pussy throbs in time with your heartbeat, still fluttering around the memory of double penetration, still greedy for more. The shower did jack shit. You shut off the water with a frustrated huff, towel yourself off in jerky movements, and stumble back to your room naked, skin pebbled, nipples tight from the chill and from want.

You don’t even close the door all the way.

You crawl onto the bed, legs splaying wide, knees bent and feet planted so you can watch yourself take it. The dildo is still warm from earlier, slick with your earlier mess. You line it up, tease the fat head through your folds once—then slam it home to the hilt in one brutal thrust. Your back arches off the mattress with a choked cry, pussy clamping down like a vice, walls rippling around every veiny inch.

Down the hall, Caleb sucks in a whimper so sharp it hurts. His eyes roll back; he has to brace both hands on the banister to keep from collapsing right there on the stairs. The phantom grip around his cock returns—tighter, hotter, wetter than before—and he knows exactly what you’re doing.

He climbs the last few steps on shaking legs, drawn like a magnet. Your door is cracked open. He shouldn’t look. He knows he shouldn’t.

He looks anyway.

And everything inside him fractures.

There you are—his sweet, innocent meimei—legs spread obscenely wide on the childhood bed you used to share during storms, tits heaving with every frantic roll of your hips, pussy stretched wide around a thick, veiny dildo that looks exactly like his cock. Down to the upward curve, the heavy balls slapping wetly against your ass with every thrust, the flushed brownish-pink head disappearing inside you over and over.

He can see the way your walls cling to it when you pull back, the slick strings connecting silicone to your swollen lips, the way your clit peeks out swollen and red every time you grind down.

“Mmhhh gege! Ahhh gege fuck—need you—mmpphhh!!”

Your voice cracks on his name, back bowing, tits bouncing wildly as you fuck yourself stupid, chasing that edge with desperate, sloppy thrusts. The sheets are soaked beneath you, wet patch spreading.

Caleb’s sure he would have moaned loud enough to wake the whole coast if he hadn’t bitten his lower lip bloody. It’s better than any porn he’s ever seen—hotter, filthier, because it’s you. His pipsqueak. His meimei. Ruining herself on a perfect copy of his dick.

The realization hits like a shockwave.

It was you.

All this time.

The ghost pussy milking him dry every night.

The way it clenched exactly when he needed it.

The way it knew his rhythm, his kinks, his breaking point.

And he’s been doing the same to you.

He shoves his shorts down in one rough yank; his cock springs free, angry red and leaking, veins standing out thick and pulsing. He wraps a fist around the base, strokes once—hard—and has to slap his free hand over his mouth to muffle the groan.

“Mmhh pipsqueak…” he whispers, voice wrecked, hips thrusting into his own grip like he’s fucking you through the doorway. “Such a needy little meimei… arghhh—it was you all along, huh?”

He can see every detail from here— the way your thighs tremble, the way your fingers dig into the sheets, the way you arch and sob his name like a prayer while you slam the toy deeper, chasing the stretch he’s been giving you in secret for months.

And he’s glad.

Fucking glad.

Because it’s mutual.

You out-freaked him first—ordered a replica of his dick and rode it until you cried his name—but he matched you, customized a perfect copy of your cunt and fucked it raw while whispering yours.

You’re both freaks.

Two depraved, lovesick freaks who’ve been secretly fucking each other stupid across hundreds of miles, and now you’re under the same roof with no Gran to stop you.

He strokes faster, matching your rhythm—every time you slam down, he fucks up into his fist. Precum drips over his knuckles, slicking the way. His balls draw up tight, aching.

You’re close. He can tell by the way your moans turn high and broken, the way your hips stutter, the way your pussy visibly flutters around the toy.

He’s right there with you.

One more thrust—yours, his—and you both shatter at the exact same second.

You come with a muffled scream into your pillow, body convulsing, squirting around the dildo in messy pulses that soak your thighs and the bed. The toy stays buried deep as you ride the aftershocks, whimpering his name over and over.

Caleb’s knees finally give out. He catches himself on the doorframe, biting his fist as he comes hard—thick ropes painting the floorboards, his hand, his stomach—while the phantom squeeze of your pussy milks him through every pulse.

He slumps there, panting, cock still twitching in his grip, eyes locked on you through the crack in the door.

You’re still trembling, legs limp, toy lodged inside you, chest rising and falling in shaky breaths.

He doesn’t move. Doesn’t speak.

But the door creaks just a fraction wider under his weight.

And your eyes—glazed, wrecked, still teary—slowly lift.

They meet his.

For one endless heartbeat, neither of you breathes.

Then your lips part on a soft, broken whisper that carries straight to him,

“…gege?”

And everything that’s been building for months finally snaps.

You freak out the second your eyes blink from eye contact.

The sheets fly up in a frantic scramble, bunching around your chest and thighs as you yank them to your chin. Your cheeks ignite—burning, scorching hot—while a high-pitched squeak tears out of you like a startled animal.

“What are you—!”

The door, already ajar, swings wider under Caleb’s unsteady weight. He loses his balance completely—arms windmilling for half a second—then crashes forward with a loud, graceless thud, face-planting straight into the floorboards.

You squeak even louder, the sound shrill enough to rattle the windows.

He groans, low and pained, and slowly lifts his head. Blood trickles from his nose in a thin, bright red stream, dripping onto the wood. He blinks once, twice, dazed, then pushes himself up on shaking arms. His shorts are still shoved halfway down his thighs from earlier, so his dick—half-hard, flushed dark, still glistening at the tip—bobs free with the motion, jumping against his stomach like it has a mind of its own.

Your breath snags in your throat, sharp and audible.

You stare. You can’t not staring.

When you’d scrolled through that sketchy website a month ago, trembling and horny and stupid, you’d picked every detail from memory—the exact length you’d felt pressed against your hip during too-long hugs, the slight upward curve you’d glimpsed once through damp sweatpants, the heavy hang of his balls, the thick veins that stood out when his forearms flexed carrying your luggage. You’d thought it was obsessive fantasy.

But seeing it now—in the flesh, real, twitching, leaking a bead of precum that rolls slowly down the shaft—you realize with dizzying clarity—they didn’t just make a replica.

They made an exact fucking match.

Everything clicks into place like a lock tumbling open.

The “ghost” sensations.

The double penetration every night.

The way your toy always seemed to know exactly when he was close, clamping down harder, milking tighter.

The way his phantom cock always mirrored your rhythm, pounding deeper when you slammed down hardest.

Caleb hauls himself to his feet, swaying slightly. He notices your wide-eyed stare locked on his cock and flushes darker than you’ve ever seen him—red creeping from his collar to his ears. With a rough, embarrassed jerk, he yanks his shorts back up, the waistband snapping against his hips, but it does nothing to hide the thick outline still straining forward.

“Pipsqueak…” His voice comes out hoarse, cracked, half-lidded eyes dark and glassy. A thin trail of blood slides from his nostril, curving over the bow of his upper lip. He doesn’t wipe it away.

You snap back to yourself with a jolt.

“Caleb—your nose is bleeding!”

You scramble forward on your knees, sheets slipping dangerously low as you reach for the box of tissues on your nightstand. One hand presses a wad against his nose while the other clutches the fabric to your chest—but not fast enough. The sheet drops just enough to bare your breasts again, nipples peaked and flushed from everything that’s happened.

Caleb’s gaze drops instantly.

He stares—openly, hungrily—for one long heartbeat before you yank the sheet back up with a mortified squeak. Only then does he drag his eyes back to yours, pupils blown wide.

“It’s not because I fell,” he rasps, voice thick. “It’s because of…”

His stare rakes down your body again—slow, deliberate—taking in the way the sheet clings to your sweat-damp skin, the dark patch between your thighs where you’re still dripping, the toy still half-buried inside you under the covers. You squeak again, smaller this time, thighs pressing together instinctively.

“Caleb!”

“Okay—okay, I want you to stop freaking out and listen to me—”

You look away fast, heart hammering so loud it drowns out everything else. You don’t know how to explain this. How to admit that you’ve been coming undone on a silicone clone of him for months. That you’ve whispered his name like a prayer while your pussy clenched around fake-him, imagining real-him pinning you down. That you’re terrified of what it means now that the secret’s out.

Who fucks a replica of their gege’s dick?

You do.

You really, really do.

Before you can spiral further, Caleb’s hands—big, warm, calloused from flight controls—cup your cheeks. Gentle. Steady. He tilts your face up until you have no choice but to meet his eyes.

They’re soft. Guilty. Desperate. Everything at once.

“We need to figure this out, okay?” he whispers, thumbs brushing your cheekbones. “Wait—I need to show you something.”

And just like that he’s gone—bolting out of your room, bare feet slapping the hallway floor, leaving the door swinging wide behind him.

You’re alone again.

The room smells like sex and shame and him.

Your thighs tremble. The dildo is still inside you—warm, thick, stretching you open—and every tiny shift makes it drag against your oversensitive walls. You clench once, involuntarily, and a fresh trickle of slick leaks out around it.

You can hear him in his room now—drawers opening, something thudding to the floor, a muffled curse.

Your mind races.

He’s going to show you something.

You already know what it is.

A possible pocket pussy.

The one he’s been fucking every night while you rode his replica. The one that’s been milking him dry from three hundred miles away.

And now it’s here in this house with both of you.

You swallow hard, heart in your throat.

The floorboards creak as he comes back down the hall.

You don’t move.

Don’t pull the toy out.

Don’t cover up any more than you already are.

You just wait—sheets clutched to your chest, thighs still spread, pussy still stuffed, pulse roaring in your ears—while the footsteps get closer.

When Caleb steps back through the doorway, holding the black satin box like it’s evidence in a crime scene, eyes locked on yours with something raw and unguarded…

You know.

There’s no going back now.

Not for either of you.

Caleb steps back into your room, the black satin box cradled in his big hands like it’s both a confession and a trophy. He doesn’t hesitate—doesn’t even try to play coy. He flips the lid open right in front of you.

Your eyes blow wide. Your mouth drops into a perfect, stunned little ‘o’.

Nestled inside, glossy and obscene, is the pocket pussy—soft silicone lips parted just enough to show the glistening pink interior. And draped over it, stretched across the entrance like a filthy bow, is one of your missing lace panties. The pale pink ones with the tiny bow at the front. The ones you swore the washing machine devoured months ago.

Caleb—shameless bastard now that the mask is off—hooks two fingers under the waistband and tugs the fabric aside. He drags the pad of his thumb slowly along the outer folds, parting them gently, stroking the slick entrance like he’s petting something precious.

The sensation hits you like lightning.

A surprised, broken moan rips out of your throat before you can stop it. Your pussy clenches hard around the dildo still buried inside you, walls fluttering wildly, fresh slick leaking out around the base.

Caleb flushes darker—cheeks, neck, ears—but his grin is pure sin. He chokes on his own spit when your inner muscles clamp down again, the toy translating every spasm straight to his cock.

“You get it now?” he rasps, voice wrecked.

Your brain kicks into overdrive, thoughts crashing faster than light.

You’d spent months drowning in guilt—convincing yourself you were the only freak here, the only one twisted enough to order a perfect replica of your gege’s dick and ride it until you sobbed his name into your pillow. You’d hated how much you wanted it, how wrong it felt, how right it felt every time you came clenching around fake-him.

But look at him.

Look at your freak of a gege standing there holding a replica of your cunt, wrapped in your stolen panties like some depraved keepsake. He didn’t just buy it—he customized it, scented it, fucked it raw while thinking of you, and then he kept your underwear like a trophy.

“CALEB YOU STOLE MY PANTIES?!!?” The scream explodes out of you, eyes huge, accusatory, betrayed.

He squeaks—actually squeaks—scratching the back of his head with his free hand, sheepish grin wobbling.

“Umm… well… I rescued them to wash but uh… hehehehehe—”

You lunge.

Your fists rain down on his chest, shoulders, arms—smacking him over and over, forgetting the sheet, forgetting the toy still stretching you open, forgetting everything except righteous fury.

“YOU JERK!!! I KEPT BUYING CUTE PANTIES AND YOU STOLE THEM?!??! HOW DARE YOU!!! I THOUGHT THE WASHER WAS EATING THEM!!”

“Ow—ouch—ouch—pipsqueak!”

He’s half-laughing, half-squeaking, trying to shield himself but not really fighting back. The sounds are ridiculous, boyish, so much like the old Caleb that it almost hurts.

Then his arms snap around your waist.

One hard yank and you’re flush against him—chest to chest, hips to hips, the thick ridge of his cock pressing right against your lower belly through his shorts. Your breath punches out of you in a startled gasp.

“I can buy you new ones, yeah?” he murmurs, voice dropping low, rough. “Anything you want. But right now… we need to talk about this, meimei.”

The name hits like a shockwave.

You stop breathing.

His eyes are locked on yours—dark, molten, stripped of every layer of pretense. You feel every inch of him: the heat radiating off his skin, the hard planes of his chest, the insistent throb of his cock trapped between you. And lower—the dildo still lodged deep inside you, making your walls flutter every time you shift.

“Take it out, pipsqueak.”

Your cheeks burn so hot you think they’ll combust. You shake your head frantically—no, no, no—too embarrassed to move, too mortified to pull the replica of him out of your dripping cunt while he watches.

Caleb frowns, impatient.

His hand slides down—big, warm fingers wrapping around the base of the dildo where it’s buried in you. He groans low in his throat at the feel of your walls gripping it—gripping him, then yanks.

The toy comes free with a wet, filthy pop.

You gasp sharply—sharp enough to hurt—your pussy clenching around sudden emptiness. Slick gushes out in a messy splash, coating your inner thighs, dripping onto the sheets, making everything even more obscene.

“Come on,” he chuckles, dark and teasing, holding the glistening dildo up between you like evidence. “I know you weren’t shy fucking this replica in Linkon, huh? No wonder the ghost was so needy…”

His eyes drag over the toy—taking in the way it’s coated in your arousal, veins shiny, base slick—and then rake back up your body, slow and hungry.

“I should’ve known it was my naughty little pipsqueak. After all… it’s only meimei who takes this much from her gege, hmm?”

His voice drops to gravel.

You gulp, panting softly, chest heaving. You pout up at him—bratty, defiant—and smack his chest again, weaker this time.

“But… you had a replica of mine too!”

Caleb laughs—low, rough, relieved.

“In that case… I’m guilty too.”

Then he moves.

One step forward and your back hits the mattress. You both go down in a tangle—sheets ripping away completely, your naked body splayed beneath him, still sweaty, still flushed, still smelling like sex and shame and him.

He braces on his forearms, caging you in, face inches from yours.

“Then we should share this sin together, right?”

His hips settle between your thighs. The hard length of him—real this time—nudges right against your soaked entrance, hot and thick and leaking through his shorts.

You whimper—small, broken, needy.

His mouth hovers over yours, breath mingling.

“Tell me to stop, meimei,” he whispers, voice trembling just enough to betray how close he is to breaking. “Tell me and I’ll walk out right now. We’ll pretend this never happened.”

Your hands slide up—fingers curling into his shoulders, nails digging in.

You don’t push him away.

You pull him closer.

“Don’t you dare,” you breathe against his lips.

And that’s it.

The last thread snaps.

Caleb’s mouth crashes down on yours—hungry, desperate, years of pent-up want pouring out in one bruising kiss. His tongue pushes past your lips, claiming, tasting, while his hips grind forward, dragging the fat head of his cock through your folds.

You arch up into him with a sob, legs wrapping around his waist, heels digging into his ass to pull him deeper.

He groans into your mouth—raw, wrecked.

“Fuck—pipsqueak—been waiting so long—”

Caleb pulls back just enough to drink you in—really drink you in.

You’re sprawled beneath him like a fever dream: lips swollen and glossy from his kisses, chest rising and falling in quick, shallow pants, eyes glassy and half-lidded with want. His gaze drags down slow—over the flushed peaks of your tits, the soft curve of your belly still trembling from aftershocks, then lower, to where your thighs are parted and your pussy is clenching desperately around nothing. Slick shines on your inner thighs, dripping down toward the sheets in lazy rivulets. The toy’s absence has left you empty and aching, walls fluttering visibly like they’re begging to be filled again.

His whole body burns—not just from the heat of the moment, but from the sheer, dizzying reality of it. His wildest, most shameful dream is right here: you, naked and wrecked and his, finally letting him see you like this. Touch you like this. He’s drowning in emotions—guilt, relief, raw hunger—but he forces himself to focus. He wants this to be good for you. Better than good. He wants to feed every filthy craving you’ve both been hiding, satisfy the hunger that’s been eating you alive for months.

“So pretty,” he stutters, voice cracking as two fingers glide down your slit. He parts your folds gently, watching the way your clit twitches under the lightest brush.

You yelp, thighs jerking inward on instinct. “Caleb!”

He shakes his head, firm but soft. His free hand comes down in a sharp spank to the plush meat of your thigh—hard enough to sting, soft enough to make the flesh jiggle.

“Oh no no no no,” he murmurs, eyes dark. “Don’t go hiding from me now. You’re beautiful, pipsqueak. I want to admire all of you.”

You bite your lower lip hard, cheeks flaming, but you don’t close your legs again. You watch—breath hitching—as his fingers continue their slow exploration: tracing your entrance, dipping just inside to feel how soaked you are, then sliding lower. He gropes one ass cheek shamelessly, kneading the soft flesh before landing another weak, appreciative spank. The jiggle makes him groan low in his throat.

“Aw damn…”

You huff, mortified and turned on in equal measure, and reach up to grab his ear—tugging hard.

He yelps instantly. “Ow ow ow—what’s wrong? Did I hurt you—”

You scoff, cutting him off, and slide both palms under his shirt. Your fingers find the hard planes of his pecs, cupping them shamelessly, thumbs brushing over his nipples.

“Take off your clothes too, dummy,” you mutter, voice bratty and breathless. “I don’t wanna be the only one naked.”

Caleb blinks once—then grins so wide it’s almost stupid, ear-to-ear and boyish despite the filthy situation.

“Fair enough.”

He yanks the sleeveless shirt over his head in one smooth motion, muscles flexing under sweaty skin as it hits the floor somewhere behind him. Next come the shorts—hooked thumbs in the waistband, frantic tug downward. The fabric slides off his thighs and his cock springs free, slapping lewdly against his lower abs with a wet smack.

You gasp—sharp, involuntary.

It’s exactly like the dildo. Down to the last detail: the thick veins, the slight upward curve, the flushed brownish-pink head already leaking, the heavy balls hanging low. Your pussy clenches hard around nothing at the sight, a fresh gush of slick trickling out.

“Like what you see, huh?” he smirks, voice hoarse and wrecked. He grips the base and smacks the fat head against your dripping folds—once, twice—coating himself in your mess.

You whine instantly, hips jerking up. “Ahhh fuck—Caleb—mmmpphhh!!”

But instead of pushing in, he pulls back. You frown, confused and needy—until you see him reach for the dildo again.

With a slow, sinful smile, he lines it up and slides it back inside your tight cunt.

“Hai—ahhhh—Caleb!?!”

You can only stare up at his face—pleasure twisting his features, mouth falling open in a perfect ‘o’—as he pushes the toy deeper. A low, rumbling groan escapes him.

“Fuck… exact feeling…”

He keeps going—slow, torturous—watching your face the whole time while he feeds inch after inch back into you. Your walls stretch around the familiar silicone, fluttering, sucking it in greedily until it’s buried to the hilt again: tip kissing your cervix, heavy balls pressed flush against your ass.

Only then does he stop.

But he’s not done.

He manhandles you with easy strength—big hands under your thighs, lifting you like you weigh nothing. You squeak as he repositions you properly on the bed: flat on your back, head near the pillows, legs spread wide. He climbs over you, straddling your chest, knees bracketing your shoulders.

His cock hovers right above your face—hard, twitching, leaking a fat pearl of precum from the slit.

Your brain empties completely. All you can do is stare: at him, at the dick that’s been haunting your nights for months, now real and inches from your lips.

“You’ll suck it, right baby?” he rasps, voice trembling with restraint. “Mmmh… suck gege’s dick while the replica stretches you open.”

He lowers himself slowly. The swollen head smacks against your lips—hot, sticky, salty.

You open immediately.

Your mouth wraps around the tip, tongue swirling, sucking gently at first. Caleb throws his head back with a guttural sound.

“Ohhh fuck—dual sensation—ahhh… shit!”

His fingers slide into your hair, gripping gently but firm. He starts fucking your mouth in shallow thrusts—careful not to choke you yet, but deep enough to make your eyes water.

“Fuck baby… take it deeper. I know you can—ahh… you’ve been swallowing that dick down your throat, haven’t you? Hah…”

You can barely think—pussy stuffed full and throbbing around the toy, mouth stretched around the real thing, taste of him flooding your senses. But you obey.

Your hands fly up—gripping the firm meat of his ass, nails digging in as you pull him forward. You relax your throat and swallow him to the base in one slow, greedy glide.

Your nose buries into the neatly trimmed, newly shaved patch of pubic hair. His scent—musk, clean sweat, him—overwhelms you. Your eyes roll back, lashes fluttering, fingers sinking deeper into the thick muscle of his thighs while tears of effort slip down your temples.

Caleb’s head snaps back, face contorting in raw pleasure—jaw slack, brows furrowed, a broken moan tearing from his chest.

“Fuck—pipsqueak—good girl—fuck—”

He holds himself there for a heartbeat—letting you feel every thick inch pulsing on your tongue—before he starts to move again.

Slow, deep thrusts into your mouth while the dildo stays buried in your cunt, every rock of his hips making the toy shift inside you just enough to drag against your walls.

You’re stuffed at both ends.

Full.

Claimed.

His.

And he’s not stopping until you both break again.

Caleb keeps fucking your mouth with slow, deliberate rolls of his hips—balls smacking wetly against your chin on every deep thrust, the filthy sound echoing in the quiet room. His moans are low and ragged, pleasure ripping through him in waves as your throat flutters around his length, tongue pressing flat against the underside, sucking greedily.

You snap your hips forward uselessly, clenching desperately around the dildo still buried deep in your cunt. The dual fullness—mouth stuffed with real him, pussy stretched by fake him—has you trembling, thighs shaking, slick dripping down your ass in steady rivulets.

That’s when he breaks.

Caleb’s whole body locks up, shaking violently. His fingers tighten in your hair—almost too hard—burying himself to the root until your nose presses flush against his pelvis. A guttural groan tears from his chest as he starts cumming.

Thick, hot spurts flood your mouth instantly—salty, bitter, overwhelming. Your eyes roll back so hard you see stars, throat working frantically to swallow it all, but there’s too much. It overflows the corners of your lips, dripping down your chin in messy strings.

He doesn’t stop.

He pulls out with a lewd, wet pop—cock still jerking—and shoots the last few ropes across your face: warm streaks painting your cheeks, your nose, your swollen lips. You gasp for air, tongue darting out instinctively to lick what you can reach, tasting him everywhere.

Caleb pants above you, chest heaving, staring down at the mess he made. You look wrecked—face covered in his cum, eyes glassy and dazed, lips parted and shiny. He knows he should feel ashamed. He should apologize, clean you up, stop this madness.

But fuck—you look so hot like this it’s rewriting his brain chemistry. Ruining him for anything else.

You flutter your lashes up at him, slow and deliberate, tongue tracing your lower lip to catch another drop. The sight snaps something inside him.

He groans, low and broken, and reaches for the dildo. One rough yank and he pulls it free from your overstimulated pussy.

You arch violently off the bed, hips jerking, a gush of slick squirting out around the sudden emptiness. “F-fuck—Caleb—!”

He stares, mesmerized. “Fuck… you’re so hot, meimei. I think I’m losing my mind.”

You’re panting, trying to catch your breath, body still twitching with aftershocks. Guilt crashes over him like cold water—he reaches for the tissue box on your nightstand with shaking hands and starts wiping your face clean, gentle despite everything.

His cheeks are crimson, burning with embarrassment and leftover heat. “Ah shit—sorry pipsqueak, didn’t mean to… fuck… I’m sorry, okay?”

You just stare up at him—brain fried, body humming—and reach out. Your fingers wrap around his still-hard cock, slick with spit and cum.

He hitches a sharp breath. “Ahhh—oh god—mmhh—”

You give him lazy, teasing strokes, smirking mischievously through the haze.

“I want it, Caleb,” you whisper, voice hoarse. “I want your dick.”

He groans, hips snapping forward into your touch. Hearing you talk like that—filthy, needy—makes him throb harder in your palm.

“Say it again, meimei,” he rasps, voice trembling. “Say it… properly.”

You bite your lower lip, thumb flicking over the sensitive head, circling the slit, smearing precum.

“I want your dick, gege,” you purr, slow and deliberate. “Please?”

You don’t stop. Somehow you sit up—legs shaky—free hand sliding up his arm, over the thick muscle of his shoulder, then flicking his hard nipple. You lick your lips again, eyes locked on his, and climb into his lap.

“Need you inside, gege,” you breathe against his throat. “Not the… toy. Need your dick to fuck this pussy—mmhh!”

Caleb snaps.

Since when did his sweet pipsqueak become this seductive little tease?

He hauls you up the bed in one swift motion—then slams you back down onto the mattress. Not too rough—just enough to make you squeak in surprise, tits bouncing with the impact.

“Fuck—look at that sultry expression,” he growls, voice dark. “You’re such a tease, meimei. Such a dirty girl begging her gege’s dick.”

His palm comes down in a sharp smack against your pussy—wet, obscene. You whine, arching hard, the sting turning into molten heat that makes you even wetter.

“You bought a dildo to fuck this needy little cunt, huh?” Another smack—harder. You sob, mindless, hips grinding back toward his hand. “Used a replica of your gege’s dick to train this pussy?”

You can only nod—whimpering, desperate—grinding shamelessly against his palm.

“Fuck—but who am I to judge?” he chuckles darkly. “I’m a freak too, ain’t I?”

He presses the fat head of his cock to your entrance—hot, leaking, real—and snaps his hips forward in one powerful thrust.

You both nearly scream.

The bed shakes beneath you as he bottoms out—thick, burning, stretching you in ways the toy never could. Your walls clamp down instantly, fluttering around every veiny inch.

Caleb grips the headboard above you, knuckles white, hovering over your body. His other hand slides between your legs—fingers finding your clit, pinching and flicking with his thumb while he watches your face twist in pleasure.

“Good thing is… I don’t have to train you for my dick anymore, hah,” he pants, hips rutting in sloppy, messy thrusts. “You’re nice and ready to take me full… fuck… I never thought—”

He throws his head back, eyes squeezing shut. Tears well at the corners—not from pain, but from too much everything: pleasure, relief, fear.

He’s terrified he’ll cry in front of you. Terrified you’ll disappear when this ends. Terrified he’ll lose you after finally having you.

So he fucks you deeper—hands roaming everywhere: groping your tits, spanking your ass, squeezing your thighs. Rough, unpracticed, desperate. He can’t help it. He’s never done this before—not like this, not with anyone.

Suddenly he stops—mid-thrust, sweat dripping down his chest in rivulets. He looks down at you, panic flashing in his eyes.

“Hey—hey hey hey, pipsqueak… hah… are you like—feeling actually good? Like… or…”

His whole face is on fire. He gulps, vulnerable in a way that makes your chest ache.

Your brain is too fried to process deeply. You just grin—mindless, blissed-out—and grind back against him with a small, innocent smile.

“Mmhh… best big brother ever…”

Caleb’s mouth falls open. He chokes on a laugh—or maybe a sob—then shakes his head and goes back to fucking you.

He’ll ask when you’re sober. Right now you’re too drunk on his cock to think straight.

He finds your clit again—rubbing tight circles—and feels the telltale shiver in your hips. You’re close. He can see the faint bulge in your lower belly every time he bottoms out, and it makes him shy and so fucking turned on at the same time.

The fact that he’s claiming you like this—fucking you so deep you’ll feel him for days—makes his head spin. He prays this isn’t a fever dream.

His own brain is melting from the pleasure, the sensation, the sight of you taking him so perfectly.

He reaches down—presses the heel of his palm against the bulge in your belly—and pushes.

Both your eyes roll back at the same instant.

Broken moans spill from your tongues as you cum together—hard.

You squirt violently—soaking his cock, his abs, the sheets in messy arcs—walls clamping down like a vice around him.

Caleb comes with a shattered whimper—hips stuttering, spilling inside you in thick, endless pulses until it leaks out around his base, dripping down his balls and onto the ruined bed.

He collapses next to you—breathing ragged, eyes half-focused and glassy.

After a long moment he reaches over—gentle now—brushing damp hair off your face. A soft, satisfied smile curves his lips.

“Thank you…” he whispers, voice hoarse and raw.

You turn your head—still panting, still trembling—and press a lazy kiss to his palm.

“Gege…”

He pulls you close—bodies sticky, tangled, hearts hammering in sync.

Caleb’s hand comes up slow—almost reverent—caressing the side of your face, thumb tracing the curve of your cheekbone like he’s memorizing the texture of your skin. His breath hitches when he feels the warmth, the realness of you still flushed and glowing against him. A low, stuttering rumble escapes his chest.

“Did you… like it, pipsqueak?”

You’re draped over him now—breasts cushioned against the hard plane of his chest, cheek pressed to the thick swell of his pec, listening to the thunder of his heartbeat slow. You grin lazily, voice cracked and hoarse from all the moaning, all the screaming his name.

“I fucking loved it, Caleb.”

His smirk falters—just for a second—something soft and vulnerable flickering in his eyes. His thumb circles lazy patterns over your hipbone, the touch grounding and possessive at once.

“Me too.” He swallows. “I thought I was pushing things too fast… making it uncomfortable since I’ve never—”

Your eyes shoot open. You half-scream, half-gasp, bolting upright so fast your tits bounce against his chest.

“WAIT—you… YOU MEAN YOU WERE A VIRGIN?!?!”

Caleb’s whole face ignites—crimson flooding from his cheeks to the tips of his ears. He squeezes his eyes shut in pure mortification, but the corner of his mouth twitches upward in a faint, sheepish grin.

“Yeah yeah… first time got my dick wet. Kinda nervous.”

You beam—bright, wicked, delighted—and crash your mouth to his in a messy, giddy kiss. Then you’re scrambling off him, lunging for your phone on the nightstand.

“Wait—lemme take a picture of us losing our virginities together!”

Caleb’s mouth drops open. You were a virgin too. The realization hits him square in the chest—funny, warm, possessive—and a smug grin spreads across his face before he can stop it.

You flip the camera to selfie mode, crawling back into his lap, thighs bracketing his hips. His arms snake around your waist immediately—tight, claiming—pulling you flush against him while you stick your tongue out in a naughty little pose.

“Say cheese!”

He looks straight at the lens—smug as hell, eyes half-lidded and dark with leftover lust—while you giggle and snap the photo.

Caleb huffs softly after, nuzzling into your neck. “You better not show this to anyone.”

You wiggle your eyebrows mischievously. “Oh, I’m gonna show it to any guy who’ll bother me like—you should be scared of my big brother.”

He wheezes—chokes on his own spit—and bursts out laughing, arms squeezing you until you squeak in protest.

“Diabolical.”

His palm comes down in a light, playful spank on your ass—watching the flesh bounce with open delight.

“You’re a menace to society, you know that?”

“I get it from you.”

You bite your lower lip, rolling your hips back slow—grinding your slick folds along his still-hard cock. He groans low in his throat.

“Fair enough.”

He dives back in—kissing you deep, tongues tangling messy and hungry. You both moan into each other’s mouths, hands roaming, relearning every inch now that the barrier’s gone.

“Fuck… I’m gonna miss you when I go back to Skyhaven…”

You grin against his lips, crawling higher up his body until you’re straddling his chest. Your hand wraps around his cock—still slick, still leaking—and guide the head to your mouth.

“That’s what the toys are for, gege.”

You hum as you wrap your lips around him again—slow, teasing—tongue swirling over the sensitive slit. Caleb lets out a low, rumbling moan, hips twitching up into the wet heat of your mouth.

“Ahhh… I almost forgot…”

His fingers slide down—two thick digits pushing into your dripping pussy without warning. You moan around his cock, the vibration making him curse under his breath.

“Three days left… fuck, I can’t get enough of you, meimei…!”

Neither can you.

The next three days blur into one long, feverish haze.

You fuck like rabbits—hours bleeding into hours, positions changing, surfaces shifting—bed, floor, shower, kitchen counter when Gran’s still gone, even on the old couch in the living room where you used to watch cartoons together as kids.

He eats you out until your thighs shake and you’re crying his name.

You ride him slow and deep until he’s begging.

He pins you against the wall and fucks you standing until pictures rattle on their hooks.

You suck him off in the hallway while he tries—and fails to stay quiet.

Every time one of you starts to flag—exhausted, sore, spent—the other just reaches over, touches, whispers filthy encouragement, and the fire reignites.

Even after Gran comes back—bags in hand, cheerful questions about your “quiet week”—you keep sneaking.

Late-night tiptoes down the hall.

Muffled moans pressed into pillows so she doesn’t hear.

Quick, desperate fucks in the bathroom while the shower runs to cover the sounds.

His hand over your mouth while he grinds into you from behind, whispering “quiet, meimei, or Gran’ll hear how much her good girl likes her gege’s cock.”

When the vacation finally ends, you stand on the platform watching the train to Skyhaven pull away.

Caleb leans out the open window one last time—hair mussed, eyes soft and dark—and presses a final, lingering kiss to your lips.

“Be good,” he murmurs against your mouth.

You grin, wicked. “No promises.”

The train starts moving. He disappears down the track.

You stand there until it’s gone, thighs clenched tight—still feeling the fresh load he stuffed you full with this morning before dawn, warm and thick and leaking slowly down your inner thighs under your skirt.

You shift your weight—feel it drip a little more—and smile to yourself.

Three hundred miles apart again. But the toys are waiting. And now you both know exactly what the other needs. You turn toward your apartment in linkon, already counting the days until the next break.

© CHERRYSCRIPT 2026— don't copy translate feed my work to ai.

[cherryscript]

SOULMATE? HOLEMATE!

⚘. featuring Ꮺ gege!caleb

read sequel of this fic— TOYED WITH EACH OTHER

⚘. summary Ꮺ You ordered a custom dildo that perfectly matches your big-brother-figure Caleb’s dick. Caleb ordered a pocket pussy that perfectly matches your's. Neither of you knows the toys are synced to the real thing. Now every time one of you fucks your toy, the other feels it—like ghost sex on steroids. You’ve both spent months thinking you’re being haunted by the supernatural while secretly fucking each other senseless through the wall. The feedback loop goes haywire. No one is surviving this vacation with their sanity intact.

⚘. content warnings Ꮺ pseudocest, og cn gege/meimei trope, heavy dubcon, masturbations, unsolved sexual tension, zero communications, guilt, denial, forbidden desires, sexual frustration, mutual yearning, usage of sex toys, magical sex toys that secretly link to other person's body(portal panties), mutual fucking, semi-public/public, double penetration, extreme tightness + involuntary orgasms, excessive cumming/squirting, porn with little no plot . . .18 + ★ MINORS DNI !

⚘. wc Ꮺ 6k+

⚘. cherry’s note Ꮺ this is probably the weirdest scenario I've written so far... took me some real good TIME to finish...

“And that’s the last box,” you huff, letting the cardboard thud against the scuffed hardwood near the doorway. You straighten up straight, rolling your shoulders, wiping the sheen of sweat from your forehead with the back of your wrist. The tiny apartment looks like a warzone of luggage and flat-pack furniture Caleb swore you “absolutely needed”—his credit card, his orders, his quiet, stubborn way of still taking care of you even when he’s hundreds of miles away.

Linkon City air tastes different. Sharper. Lonelier.

You’ve been here three weeks and it still doesn’t feel like home. Maybe it never will without him barging through the door, scolding you for leaving dishes in the sink or for forgetting to eat again.

A sigh slips out as you kick off your sneakers. Shower first, chaos later.

Clothes hit the floor in a careless pile. The bathroom is barely big enough for one person, but the water pressure is perfect—hot, punishing, exactly what your sore muscles crave. Steam fills the cramped space, fogging the mirror, swallowing every reflection that isn’t you.

You tip your head back, letting the spray pound against your throat, your collarbones, sliding down between your breasts. The heat loosens something inside your chest.

Caleb’s face flashes behind your closed eyes uninvited. Always uninvited, yet always there.

Sharp jaw. Tired eyes that soften only for you. The way his pilot uniform hugs his shoulders now that he’s filling out, taller and broader every time he comes home on break. The way he still calls you “little pipsqueak” even though you’re not little anymore.

You shouldn’t.

You really, really shouldn’t.

But your hand is already moving, gliding over slick skin, tracing the curve of your waist, the dip of your navel, lower.

“You must’ve felt this heavy too, gege…” you whisper to the steam, voice trembling with guilt and something darker. “All alone in Skyhaven… in that big empty house with no one to—”

Your fingers slip between your thighs, parting swollen folds, finding yourself already soaked and it has nothing to do with the shower.

A broken little sound escapes as you circle your clit, slow, teasing, the same way you’ve imagined he would if he ever—God—if he ever let himself unravel like this.

“Mmh… gege, are you worried about me?” The words come out filthy, breathless, wrong in the best way. “Do you… think about me when you’re alone too?”

You press two fingers inside yourself, curling, pumping, thighs shaking. The heel of your palm grinds against your clit and your hips jerk forward like you’re fucking your own hand, like you’re chasing a ghost that wears his face.

You’ve never touched each other. Not once. Not beyond lingering hugs that lasted too long, not beyond his thumb brushing your cheek when you cried after graduation, not beyond falling asleep on his shoulder during long flights home and pretending both of you didn’t notice how neither moved away.

But you know.

You both know.

“C-Caleb—” His name cracks in your throat as you come undone, clenching hard around your fingers, knees nearly buckling. Water pounds over you like it’s trying to wash the sin off your skin, but it can’t reach the stain inside your chest.

You stay there until the water starts to cool, forehead pressed to the tile, panting, ashamed, and still aching for him.

Because even an entire city apart, even with new lives and new rules and the Hunter Academy waiting to swallow you whole tomorrow—Caleb is still the only home you want to go back to.

And you’re terrified he wants to come back to you too.

You step out of the bathroom wrapped in nothing but steam and guilt, skin still tingling, cheeks flaming hotter than the shower ever got. Droplets race down your neck, your spine, between your ass cheeks; every trickle feels like a reprimand. You don’t even bother with clothes. You just belly-flop onto the bed, wet hair fanning across the pillow, and immediately start flailing like a dying shrimp.

“Stupid, stupid, stupid!” you hiss, kicking the sheets, punching the mattress, rolling side to side until the towel finally gives up and falls open. You lie there spread-eagle, panting at the ceiling like it personally offended you.

You miss your stupid, overprotective, stupidly hot gege this much.

It’s pathetic. You’re pathetic.

You need to do something about it before you lose the last shred of your sanity.

With a groan you drag the laptop Caleb bought you—matte black, way too expensive, has a little fighter-jet sticker he slapped on the lid as a joke— onto your stomach and flip it open. Fingers hover over the keys for half a second before shame loses the fight.

You type: “best sex toys for beginners”.

The screen explodes with color and silicone and words like “thrusting” and “suction” and “10 vibration patterns”. Your eyes go wide.

“Oh WOW…”

You scroll, jaw literally on the floor, until you hit the prices and wheeze. Eight hundred dollars for a rabbit vibrator? Who has that kind of money? Certainly not a broke freshman hunter living off instant noodles and Caleb’s guilt-money transfers.

You slam the laptop shut, fling yourself backward again, and whine at the ceiling.

“Too broke for that… damn, I can’t even get a proper dildo shoved up into my pussy, life is unfair—”

Ding ding.

Your phone lights up on the nightstand. Unknown number. A link.

Normally you’d ignore it. Today you’re desperate and dumb, so you squint, see “70% OFF FLASH SALE!!” in screaming red letters, and click before your brain catches up.

The site that loads is… questionable. Neon pink, flickering banners, probably one virus away from stealing your soul. But front and center is a product that makes your heart stop.

“Feel Like Someone You Love”

100% customizable hyper-realistic silicone sleeve + internal texture mapping

“Upload a photo, choose vein pattern, pick warmth settings; experience the exact cock you’ve always dreamed of.”

Your mouth goes dry.

There’s a little heart icon that says “Most Wishlisted Item of the Year”.

You shouldn’t.

You really, really shouldn’t.

But your finger is already over the “Customize Now” button and your thighs are already squeezing together remembering how your own fingers felt pretending they were his.

Ten minutes later you’ve uploaded the clearest photo you have of Caleb—him leaning against the cockpit of his fighter, flight suit half-zipped, smirk sharp enough to cut glass. You pick the length you’ve definitely never measured in your head while hugging him goodbye, the exact girth your dirty imagination has circled back to for years, the upward curve you’ve caught a glimpse of once through his sweatpants and never recovered from.

Veins: raised, prominent, just like the ones on his forearms when he carries your luggage without breaking a sweat. Warmth setting: “always hot, like he just worked out”. Internal texture: “tight but yielding, the way you bet he’d feel if he ever snapped and pinned you down.

The total, with the sketchy discount, is suspiciously low. Delivery: 3–5 days, discreet packaging.

Your finger hovers over “Place Order”. Morals scream. Pussy throbs harder. You hit the button before you can talk yourself out of it.

Order confirmed. You drop the phone like it’s on fire, roll facedown into the pillow, and muffle a scream that’s half horror, half unbearable anticipation.

In three to five days, you’re going to fuck a perfect replica of the cock belonging to the one person you’re never, ever supposed to want.

And you already know you’re going to call it gege while you do.

Five days of checking the mailbox like a lunatic. Five days of that stupid website 404-ing every time you tried to track the order. Five days of punching training dummies with your entire soul while screaming internally about getting scammed out of your last paycheck for a ghost dick.

“FUCK, IT WAS A SCAM!” you snarl, slamming an uppercut into the dummy’s throat so hard the stuffing starts leaking, “WHAT WAS I THINKING!”. Your squadmates give you a wide berth, whispering. Whatever. Let them think you’re unhinged. You are unhinged.

Then your phone buzzes against your hip. Package delivered.

You don’t even wait for the instructor to dismiss you. You just bolt, boots pounding pavement the whole way back, lungs burning, sweat cooling on your neck in the evening air. The second the apartment door slams behind you, you spot the box.

Plain brown. No labels except your name in printed font. You drop to your knees like a woman possessed, nails clawing at tape, ripping cardboard like it owes you money. The lid flies off. And you stop breathing.

Nestled in black satin is the most obscene, perfect, terrifying cock you’ve ever seen.

It’s huge. Stupidly, ridiculously huge. Thick veins snake up the shaft, only these are flushed dark, pulsing faintly with the built-in warming tech. The head is that deep brownish-pink, flared and glistening from whatever hyper-realistic coating they used. Heavy balls hang low, weighted, shifting slightly when you nudge the box.

You don’t remember setting the length slider this high.

You don’t care. Your mouth actually waters.

“Oh wow…” It comes out strangled. You fall back onto your ass, legs splayed, staring at the thing like it might stand up and walk over to you itself. “Oh my god.”

Your pussy clenches so hard you feel it in your throat.

You haven’t even taken your sweaty training gear off and you’re already dripping down your thighs.

You pick it up with both hands—jesus, it’s warm, heavier than expected and the second your fingers close around the shaft it pulses again, like it knows who it belongs to.

Like it’s been waiting for you just as long as you’ve been waiting for him.

You press the thick head against your cheek without thinking, dragging it down to your lips, breathing in the clean, new-silicone scent mixed with whatever insane tech makes it smell faintly like his cologne.

“Fuck, gege…” you whisper against the tip, voice cracking.

The toy throbs in your grip like it heard you.

You have never sprinted to lock your bedroom door faster in your life.You don’t make it to the bed.

The second the lock clicks you’re already peeling off your sweat-soaked clothes, sports bra flung somewhere, shorts kicked aside, panties dragged down your thighs and left dangling off one ankle. The toy is still in your grip, hot against your palm, veins pulsing faintly with the internal heater like it has a heartbeat.

You drop to your knees on the rug, legs spreading wide without shame, back hitting the edge of the mattress. The thick head nudges your lips and you open instantly, greedy, tongue flattening against the underside as you take the first few inches into your mouth. It’s too big; your jaw aches immediately, drool already spilling down your chin, but you force yourself deeper, gagging softly, eyes watering.

You pull off with a wet pop and a broken moan.

“Need you inside me, gege… please—”

You flip onto all fours, ass in the air, face buried in the sheets that still smell like the detergent he used to buy for both of you back home. One hand reaches back, guiding the fat tip through your soaked folds, coating it, teasing your clit until your thighs shake.

Then you push.

The stretch is obscene. Your pussy flutters, resists, then gives all at once. A strangled cry rips out of you as the first half sinks in, thick veins dragging against your walls, that perfect upward curve kissing spots you’ve never reached with your fingers. You claw at the sheets, hips jerking back on instinct, taking more, more, until your ass meets the heavy silicone balls and you’re stuffed so full you can’t breathe.

“F-fuck—Caleb—”

You pull forward until only the head remains, then slam back. The impact makes you scream into the mattress. Again. Harder. Faster. Your tits bounce with every brutal thrust, nipples dragging against the rug, thighs slapping against silicone like they’re slapping against his hips.

You lose count of how many times you fuck yourself on it. You lose language. All that exists is the wet, filthy sound of your cunt swallowing him, the burn in your thighs, the way your clit throbs every time the base grinds against it.

You flip over, legs thrown wide, knees hooked over your elbows so you can watch. Watch the way your pussy lips stretched thin around his cock, watch it disappear inside you again and again, slick coating everything, dripping down your ass, pooling on the floor.

“Look what you do to me, gege,” you sob, voice wrecked. “Look how wet you make me—how empty I am without you—fuck, I’m such a slut for you—”

Your free hand flies to your clit, rubbing frantic circles, and the orgasm barrels into you like a freight train. You squirt, actually squirt, a gush that soaks the toy and your thighs and the rug beneath you. Your walls clamp down so hard the dildo almost slips out, but you shove it deeper, riding the aftershocks, grinding, crying his name like a prayer.

You don’t stop.

You can’t.

You pull it out only long enough to flip the toy around and shove the slick head against your ass, teasing, not quite brave enough yet, but the thought alone makes you come again, smaller this time, a full-body shudder that leaves you gasping.

When you finally collapse, the dildo is still buried to the hilt, your pussy fluttering around it in lazy pulses. You’re trembling, sweaty, ruined. Tears and drool and cum smeared across your face and chest.

You reach down blindly, fingers brushing the base, and give it one last slow thrust just to hear yourself whimper.

“…come home soon, gege,” you whisper to the empty room, voice hoarse. “I don’t think this is gonna be enough anymore.”

The toy stays inside you the rest of the night. You fall asleep clenching around it, dreaming of the real thing finally splitting you open.

—

—

Skyhaven, DAA parade grounds, 18:47 local.

Caleb is standing at parade rest, flight jacket crisp, medals gleaming, trying to look like the perfect poster boy for the Deepspace Aviation Academy while the brass drones on about honor and vigilance. The formation is dead silent except for the wind whipping the flags.

Then it starts.

A faint tingle at the base of his spine. He shifts his weight, ignores it. Probably just nerves.

Gideon elbows him from the left. “Dude, you good? You’re sweating bullets.”

Caleb forces a laugh, teeth clenched. “Yeah, just hot in this jacket.”

The tingle turns into heat. A slow, syrupy, pooling right behind his balls. His cock twitches once, then again, harder, like someone just wrapped a fist around it and squeezed.

He locks his knees to keep from swaying.

The sensation climbs. Something slick and impossibly tight slides down his shaft, inch by inch, swallowing him whole. His breath stutters. The wet spot blooming at the front of his dress pants is impossible to hide now; he angles his body behind the guy in front of him, praying nobody notices.

Another squeeze. A rhythmic drag. Something soft and spongy kissing the tip over and over and over.

His vision whites out for half a second. He breaks formation without permission, muttering a choked “bathroom” to Gideon’s startled face, and bolts.

He barely makes it to the nearest restroom, slamming the lock, back hitting the door as his trembling fingers rip his belt open. The second his cock springs free it’s flushed angry red, leaking like a faucet, veins bulging exactly the way you spent hours customizing.

He doesn’t even touch himself.

He doesn’t have to.

The feeling slams into him again: tight, wet heat clenching around him, riding him hard, fast, merciless. Invisible hips slam down, grind, pull up, slam down again. His balls draw up so tight it hurts.

“F-fuck—!” The moan tears out of him; he slaps a hand over his mouth, eyes rolling back, hips jerking into empty air like he’s fucking someone bent over the sink in front of him.

Every thrust feels real. Too real. He can feel slick walls fluttering, a cervix nudging the head on every brutal stroke, the phantom slap of skin on skin he’s never actually heard but somehow knows by heart.

His knees buckle. He grips the porcelain with white knuckles, forehead pressed to the cool mirror, panting like he’s running a marathon.

“Ah—shit—stop—please—” he doesn’t even know who he’s begging.

The pace only gets rougher.

He comes without warning, a broken cry muffled against his own arm, thick ropes painting the sink, the mirror, his dress shirt. His cock jerks and jerks like it’s being milked by a throat, a pussy, something greedy and possessive and familiar.

The orgasm doesn’t stop. It rolls straight into another, smaller but sharper, and his legs finally give out. He slides down the door until he’s sitting on the cold tile, cock still half-hard, twitching with aftershocks, cum dripping down his fist even though he never stroked himself once.

Chest heaving, he stares at the mess in dazed horror. “What the fuck was that…?”

Three hundred miles away, you’re still sprawled on your bedroom floor, impaled on the toy, whispering his name like a prayer while it throbs inside you.

Neither of you has any idea the link goes both ways. Yet.

Every night for the past ten days it’s the same ritual.

You stumble through the door still in your sweat-drenched hunter uniform, kick off your boots, and don’t even bother with the lights. The second the bedroom door shuts behind you, clothes hit the floor in a frantic trail. You’re already soaked before you even touch the toy, thighs slick, pussy throbbing like it’s been counting the hours until you get home to it.

You keep the dildo in the top drawer now, wrapped in one of Caleb’s old flight academy T-shirts like a dirty little secret. The moment your fingers close around the warm shaft it pulses, eager, like it missed you just as badly.

And three hundred miles away, Caleb starts sweating through whatever he’s doing.

Day 4

You ride it reverse on the desk chair, feet planted wide, rolling your hips slow and deep just to feel every vein drag inside you.

In Skyhaven, Caleb drops an entire tray of coffee in the cadet mess, doubles over the table with a choked gasp, thighs clamping together while his cock leaks helplessly into his boxers. Gideon has to drag him out by the elbow while Caleb stammers something about food poisoning.

Day 6

You’re on your knees in the shower, toy suction-cupped to the tile, slamming back onto it until your ass is red and the water runs cold.

Caleb’s in the middle of a night-flight simulator run. Mid-loop his whole body locks up; he yanks the stick too hard, fails the exercise, and spends ten minutes curled in the cockpit seat coming untouched while the instructor screams over the headset.

Day 8

You can’t wait anymore the second you get home. You don’t even make it to the bedroom. You drop onto the hallway floor, legs over your head, fucking yourself with both holes now—the replica so slick from your pussy it slides into your ass easy. You scream his name until your voice cracks.

Caleb’s in the barracks laundry room folding clothes. One second he’s fine, the next he’s on the floor, biting his own forearm to stay quiet while his cock jerks and feels violated by invisible forces. He comes so hard his vision blacks out. When he can move again he finds the crotch of his pants soaked front and back and has no explanation.

Day 10

You’re greedy. You strap the toy to a pillow, mount it like you’re riding him for real, hands braced on the headboard, hips snapping down so hard the bedframe slams the wall in rhythm.

“Gege—fuck—harder—please, I need—”

You sob it into the dark, tears streaking your cheeks, pussy gushing all over the silicone balls.

In Skyhaven, Caleb is supposed to be asleep. Instead he jerks awake in his bunk with a wounded sound, sheets twisted around his hips, cock so hard it hurts. The sensation hits like a punch: tight, wet heat swallowing him to the root, grinding, milking. Something inside him —his ass—clenches around nothing and everything at once. He shoves his face into his pillow and comes instantly, whole body convulsing, biting down so hard he tastes blood.

When it finally fades he’s shaking, drenched in sweat, heart hammering like he just ran ten miles.

He drags a trembling hand down his stomach and finds his cock still-hard cock slick with his own release and something else—slicker, warmer, smelling faintly smelling like you.

For the first time, real fear cuts through the haze. Because whatever is doing this to him isn’t random. And it’s getting stronger every night.

Caleb hasn’t slept properly in twelve days. Every night the “ghost” comes back. Every night it rides him harder, tighter, wetter, like it’s learning exactly how to unravel him.

He’s stopped trying to fight it. He just locks his door, shoves his face into his pillow, and lets the phantom cunt milk him dry while his cock leaks and his ass clenches around nothing and his brain short-circuits with the same voice that’s haunted him since puberty.

Your voice.

He’s started jerking off to the memory of it in the showers, biting his own fist so his bunkmates don’t hear him whimpering “pipsqueak” like a prayer.

He’s losing his fucking mind.

So when he’s alone in the dorm common room at 0300, half delirious, cock still half-hard from another unsolicited orgasm, he does the stupidest thing he’s ever done in his life.

He googles the symptoms.

Ends up on the same neon-pink, virus-looking website you found weeks ago.

The banner screams: FEEL LIKE SOMEONE YOU LOVE — NOW WITH REVERSE SYNC!

He doesn’t read the fine print. He’s too tired, too desperate, too turned on.

He uploads the clearest photo he has of you—last summer, you in that sundress, laughing at something he said, hair sticking to your sweaty neck.

He customizes everything with shaking hands,outer lips soft and plump, exactly the way he’s imagined a thousand times when you walked around the house in tiny sleep shorts. Inner walls textured like crushed velvet, tight at the entrance, then fluttering deeper. Clit hood pronounced, sensitive node swollen —because he’s spent years pretending he doesn’t notice how you squirm when he hugs you too long enough. Warmth setting: “always soaked, like she’s been thinking about you all day.” Scent module: the exact peach-and-vanilla body wash you’ve used since you were fifteen.

He pays triple for overnight shipping. The box arrives two days later while the entire barracks is out on a weekend training hike. Caleb locks himself in his room, heart hammering like a jet engine.

He tears the packaging open with his teeth. Inside, nestled in black satin, is the prettiest pocket pussy he’s ever seen.

Soft, dusky outer lips, flushed pink inside, already glistening with the self-lubricating gel. It’s warm to the touch, pulsing faintly like it’s breathing.

He exhales a broken “fuck… so pretty…” and runs two fingers down the seam, parting the lips gently. The toy quivers. A bead of lube rolls out like it’s already wet for him.

He doesn’t make it to the bed.

He drops into his desk chair, sweatpants shoved down to his hips, cock springing out thick and flushed and already dripping. He drags the head through the slick folds once, twice, coating himself, groaning at how realistic it feels.

Then he pushes in.

The sound that rips out of him is inhuman.

Tight, hot, velvet walls clamp down instantly, sucking him deeper like they’ve been waiting years. The inner texture ripples around his shaft exactly the way he’s fantasized your pussy would—fluttering, squeezing, dragging over every vein.

He bottoms out in one brutal thrust and his vision whites out.

“Fuck—pipsqueak—” he chokes, hips jerking helplessly. “Is this how you’re supposed to feel? So good—so fucking real—”

He starts slow, savoring it, pulling out until just the tip kisses the entrance, then sliding back in with a wet squelch that makes his balls draw up tight. The toy makes obscene sounds—soft, wet, exactly like a real cunt taking cock—and every noise goes straight to his spine.

He loses control fast.

Hands gripping the desk, he starts pounding into it like he hates it, like he loves it, hips snapping hard enough to rattle the chair. The pocket pussy sucks him back in on every stroke, walls fluttering wildly, clit hood bumping his pelvis on the downstroke.

“Take it—just like that—fuck, you’re so tight for me—”

He doesn’t notice the way the toy seems to clench harder when he says your nickname. Doesn’t notice the way it gushes fresh slick every time he groans “good girl” under his breath.

Three hundred miles away, you’re in the middle of a lecture at the Hunter Academy when your body suddenly locks up. A phantom cock—thick, burning hot, veiny—slides into you from nowhere. Your pen clatters to the desk. You slap both hands over your mouth to stifle a scream as invisible hips slam forward and bury something huge to the hilt inside you.

Your pussy spasms around empty air. Your clit throbs like someone’s grinding against it. Your chair creaks as your thighs snap together, trying to trap the sensation that isn’t there and is there all at once.

The “ghost” fucks you right there in the lecture hall, in front of thirty other cadets, relentless and deep and merciless.

You cum biting your own wrist so hard you leave teeth marks, tears streaming down your face, soaking through your panties and the seat beneath you while the professor drones on about wanderer migration patterns.

Back in Skyhaven, Caleb’s losing his mind in a different way.

He’s hunched over the desk now, one hand braced, the other brutally fucking the toy up and down his cock, chasing the edge.

“Gonna—fuck—gonna fill you up, pipsqueak—take every drop—”

He comes with a guttural shout, hips stuttering, cock pulsing so hard the toy overflows. Thick ropes of cum spill out around his shaft, dripping down the silicone lips, painting his fist, the desk, his thighs.

The pocket pussy keeps milking him through it, walls fluttering like it’s trying to drain him completely.

He slumps forward, forehead pressed to the cool wood, panting like he’s run a marathon.

The toy gives one last gentle squeeze… almost affectionate.

And somewhere far away, you’re curled in the academy bathroom stall, legs shaking, pussy still twitching with aftershocks, a flood of cum you didn’t make leaking out of you in thick, warm pulses.

You both whisper the same thing at the exact same second, voices hoarse and wrecked and terrified,“What the fuck is happening to me?”

—

—

The entire summer break is a slow-motion torture.

You arrive at Bloomshore first, two hours early because the Academy let out sooner than DAA. Grandma hugs you so hard your ribs creak, pinches your cheeks, stuffs you full of peach cobbler and gossip. The childhood house smells exactly the same: sun-warmed wood, sea-salt breeze, the faint lavender sachets she still keeps in every drawer. Your old bedroom is untouched, posters curling at the corners, the same twin bed you used to share with Caleb when thunderstorms scared you.

You dump your suitcase, unzip it, and there it is: the dildo, wrapped in one of his old flight-school hoodies like contraband. It’s been two days since you last used it and your body is already twitching, thighs pressing together every time you remember how it feels.

You shove it under the mattress and try to be normal. Then the front door opens downstairs and you hear his voice.

“Gran squeals, “Caleb, my handsome boy!”

You freeze halfway down the stairs.

He’s… bigger. Shoulders filling the doorway, hair longer and tousled from the wind, sunglasses hooked in the collar of a white T-shirt that clings to his chest. He’s grinning at Gran, but the same crooked smile that’s been haunting your wet dreams for months.

Then his eyes flick up and find you. “Hey, pipsqueak… and Gran.”

Your stomach flips so violently you almost trip on the last step. You launch yourself at him anyway, because that’s what you’ve always done. He catches you mid-jump like you weigh nothing, arms banding around your waist, laughing low in his chest as you collide.

“Yup, gege’s here. How’s my meimei doing in Linkon, hm?”

The second his palm settles on the back of your head, petting like when you were kids, every filthy memory slams into you at once—the toy stretching you open, the way you sobbed his name into your pillow, the phantom cum that leaked out of you for days afterward.

Your face ignites. You feel the heat of his body through his shirt, the flex of his biceps as he holds you, the faint cedar-and-jet-fuel scent that is just him. You jerk away like you’ve been electrocuted.

“Huh… me? …oh… uh… good! I’m doing… good!!!”

Your voice cracks on every syllable. You practically sprint past him, suitcase banging against your leg, and disappear into your room so fast you almost take out the coat rack.

Caleb stands there frozen, arms still half-raised, cheeks flushed crimson for reasons he refuses to examine.

Gran raises an eyebrow. “You two are acting mighty strange.”

He clears his throat, grabs his own duffel, and mutters something about needing a shower.

That night neither of you comes down for dinner.

You lie in your childhood bed, staring at the glow-in-the-dark stars you stuck on the ceiling together when you were ten, thighs clenched so tight they ache. You can hear him moving around in the room next door, the creak of his old mattress, the low thud of his bag hitting the floor.

You wonder if he brought it too. You wonder if he’s touching it right now. Across the wall, Caleb is wondering the exact same thing about you.

Both toys are hidden under respective mattresses, pulsing faintly like they know they’re finally under the same roof as their match.

The air-conditioner rattles. Crickets hum outside. The house is asleep.

Neither of you sleeps a wink. And somewhere in the dark, two identical warming circuits kick on at the exact same moment, waiting for someone to break first.

The first night back home, the dam breaks at 2:17 AM.

You’ve been tossing in your childhood bed for hours, sheets tangled around your ankles, thighs slick and aching from the constant low thrum of need that started the second you heard his laugh downstairs. The house is silent except for the distant crash of waves on Bloomshore’s cliffs and the faint creak of floorboards in the next room.

He’s right there.

Walls so thin you can hear him breathing if you press your ear to the plaster.

And under your mattress, the toy waits, warm and heavy and calling to you like a siren.

You give in with a muffled curse, fishing it out, fingers trembling as you drag it between your legs. No prep. No teasing. You’re already dripping, have been since that hug, so you just line up the fat head and sink down in one brutal slide.

The stretch is immediate and vicious, your pussy clenching around silicone veins like it’s starving. You bite your pillow to stifle the moan, hips rocking slow at first, savoring the drag, the way it kisses your cervix on every grind.

In the next room, Caleb jolts awake with a strangled gasp.

His cock—already half-hard from dreams of you—suddenly feels like it’s being strangled in velvet. Tighter than ever. Hotter. Wetter. The phantom walls clamp down so hard his vision spots, every ridge and flutter magnified tenfold, like whatever’s fucking him is twice as desperate tonight.

He scrambles for his duffel under the bed, yanking out the pocket pussy with shaking hands. No way he’s enduring this alone. He shoves his boxers down, spits into the toy’s slick entrance, and thrusts in without mercy.

The second he bottoms out, you scream into your sheets.

It’s like a second cock slams into you alongside the first—thicker, hotter, splitting you open from the inside. Your walls flutter wildly, stretched beyond reason, the dual sensations overlapping in a filthy symphony: the toy’s familiar curve grinding one spot while the phantom one drags against another, both pounding in perfect sync.

“F-fuck—gege—what—” you whimper, confused and wrecked, hips jerking up to meet nothing and everything. Your clit throbs like it’s being sucked, your ass clenches around air that feels full. You shove the dildo deeper, faster, chasing the burn, tears leaking down your cheeks as your body tries to process being double-fucked by ghosts.

Caleb’s teeth sink into his own bicep to keep from roaring loud enough to wake Grandma.

The toy is a vice. His cock feels like it’s being crushed in the best way—walls so tight they might snap him in half, rippling and milking with every brutal thrust. It’s wetter than before, slick gushing out around his shaft like the thing is coming alive, and every time he pulls back it sucks him in harder, deeper, the inner texture fluttering like a heartbeat.

“Pipsqueak—shit—too tight—gonna break me—” he growls through clenched teeth, one hand braced on the headboard, the other fucking the toy up and down his length so fast his arm burns. His balls slap against silicone with every snap, heavy and aching, the pressure building so intense he’s terrified he’ll black out.

You both lose track of time, separated by one flimsy wall, fucking your toys in frantic rhythm without knowing you’re fucking each other.

For you, it’s endless—the dildo splitting your pussy while the invisible cock mirrors every move, stretching you to your limits, making you gush so hard the sheets are soaked beneath your ass. You come once with a muffled sob, clenching around both, but it doesn’t stop—the sensations only amp up, phantom veins dragging inside you, a second head nudging spots that make your toes curl.

“More—gege, please—fill me up—” you beg the dark, fingers flying to your clit, rubbing frantic circles while you slam the toy home again and again.

Caleb hears something—a faint, wrecked whine through the wall—and it snaps his last thread.

He flips onto his back, legs spread wide, and fucks into the pocket pussy like a man possessed. The tightness is agonizing now, walls constricting so hard around his cock he swears it’s going to cut off circulation—hot, pulsing, fluttering like it’s alive and greedy and his. Every thrust sends sparks up his spine; his free hand claws at the sheets, hips bucking off the mattress.

“Take it—fuck, just like that—my good girl—” he rasps, voice hoarse, imagining your face, your body, the way you’d look split open on him for real.

The orgasm hits you both at the same instant.

You arch off the bed with a silent scream, pussy spasming around double fullness, squirting in thick arcs that drench your thighs and the toy. The phantom cum floods you—hot, thick, endless—leaking out around the dildo, pooling between your legs, making everything slicker, messier.

Caleb comes with a guttural “fuck—pipsqueak—” bitten off against his fist, cock jerking so hard the toy overflows instantly. Cum spills everywhere—his stomach, the sheets, the silicone lips stretched thin around him—but the walls keep milking, squeezing tighter than humanly possible, wringing every drop until his balls ache and his vision tunnels.

You both collapse in sweaty, trembling heaps, toys still buried deep, aftershocks rippling through you like shared electricity.

The wall between your rooms might as well not exist.

But neither of you moves. Neither knocks. Neither dares whisper the truth.

Instead, you pull the covers over your ruined body, the dildo still twitching faintly inside you, and pretend your heart isn’t pounding loud enough for him to hear.

Next door, Caleb does the exact same, cock softening in the vice-grip of the toy, a single thought looping in his wrecked mind,

Tomorrow night, he’s doing it again.

And so are you.

© CHERRYSCRIPT 2025 — don't copy, translate, feed my work to ai

[gojonigiru]

You’re not a knight of the Knights of Favonius, yet nearly everyone in Mondstadt knows your name. Not because of any official title, but because you’re the Grand Master’s closest friend.

The elderly still talk about the two of you like it was just yesterday. You and Varka were inseparable as children—always darting through the streets, wooden swords clashing loudly enough to earn the occasional scolding from passing adults.

You were the one who insisted on stories.

Sometimes you’d be a royal heir kidnapped by a terrible dragon lurking beyond the city walls. Other days you were a wandering scholar who had uncovered an ancient ruin and needed a brave knight to escort you through danger.

And Varka was always the knight.

Even back then he took the role too seriously. He’d puff his chest out, declare some dramatic oath about protecting you, and charge headfirst into imaginary monsters with reckless enthusiasm. Half the time he’d end up tripping over his own feet or crashing into a crate, but he’d still look at you afterward like he’d just saved the whole world.

The people of Mondstadt grew used to the sight of you together. If Varka was getting into trouble, you were likely involved. If you were wandering somewhere questionable—like the outskirts of Windrise or climbing places children definitely shouldn’t climb—Varka was right beside you.

As you grew older, things changed.

Varka joined the Knights of Favonius and quickly proved himself to be exactly the kind of man people trusted in battle—brave, loud, and honest to a fault. Someone who would throw himself between danger and the people he cared about without hesitation.

You didn’t follow him into knighthood, but that didn’t mean you disappeared from his life. If anything, you only became a constant presence around the headquarters—dropping by with food, listening to the knights complain about training, and occasionally helping with things that didn’t require a sword.

Some knights joke that you’re an unofficial member of the order. Others say you’re the only person capable of telling the Grand Master to “sit down and finish all his paperworks instead of giving all the work to Jean”.

And Varka listens to you because you’ve always been the one person who knew him before he became the Grand Master. Before the title, before the responsibilities, before people began looking at him like a legend instead of the boy who used to trip over wooden swords.

With you, he’s still just Varka.

Somewhere along the way, the lines of your friendship blurred for him. He’s not sure when it started.

Maybe it was the first time he returned from a long patrol and you were waiting at the gates for him. Maybe it was the way you always noticed when he was exhausted before anyone else did. Or maybe it was something much simpler: you’ve just always been there.

When people praise him, he looks for you in the crowd without thinking.

When he laughs, it’s usually because you said something first.

And when he imagines the future, you’re always standing somewhere nearby.

The problem is… he doesn’t know if you see him the same way. To you, he might still just be that friend who used to fight imaginary dragons.

Varka can face monsters without hesitation. But risking your friendship? That terrifies him more than any battlefield ever could.

The night before he leaves for his expedition, he asks you to come drink with him.

You’ve gone with him to Angel’s Share plenty of times before; usually with other knights. Sometimes the whole place turns into a loud celebration with stories, laughter, and half the order trying to outdrink each other. You normally just sit there listening, sipping something weak because your alcohol tolerance is terrible. But tonight feels different.

When you arrive, Varka doesn’t head for the counter where Charles or Diluc usually serve drinks. Instead, he leads you upstairs on a quiet table in the corner.

The conversation starts light—old stories, knights’ antics, gossip from the city. You talk about the same things you always do. It feels normal.

At some point between stories and half-finished drinks, your voice gets quieter, your responses become slower, and your head droops slightly before you catch yourself and blink awake again.

“You’re gonna fall asleep on me,” he teases, nudging your glass away from you.

“I’m not,” you mumble stubbornly, though your words slur slightly. He laughs.

You try to keep talking. Something about how you’ll miss him once he leaves with the expedition from Mondstadt. Something about how the city always feels a little quieter without him around.

But halfway through your sentence, your voice fades. Your head tips forward. And before either of you realize it, you’re asleep—arms folded on the table, cheek resting against them.

Varka blinks.

“…Hey.” He nudges your shoulder gently. No response.

He sighs, rubbing the back of his neck before leaning back in his chair. For a moment he just watches you, the same way he used to when you both collapsed after running around the streets as kids.

You look peaceful.

“You know,” he mutters after a while, “I figured if I was going to say it, tonight would be the only night.”

You don’t move.

Of course you don’t. You’re completely out.

Varka lets out a small laugh under his breath, shaking his head.

“Figures,” he says.

He rests his elbow on the table, looking at you like he’s trying to memorize the moment.

“I’ve been in love with you for years.”

The confession slips out easier than he expected.

Maybe because you can’t hear him. Maybe because if you could, he wouldn’t have the courage to say it at all.

“Pretty pathetic, huh?” he murmurs.

He studies your sleeping face for a moment, the familiar features he’s known almost his entire life. The same person who used to drag him into ridiculous adventures around the city.

“Grand Master of the Knights of Favonius,” he continues softly, “and the only person who can make him nervous is someone who can’t even stay awake through two drinks.”

Another quiet laugh escapes him.

Then he reaches across the table and carefully brushes a strand of hair away from your face.

“You’re lucky you fell asleep,” he says. “Because I’m only brave enough to admit this when you can’t hear me.”

For a long moment he just sits there with you, the lantern light flickering softly between you both.

Then he sighs, pushing himself to his feet.

“Come on,” he murmurs, gently lifting you up so you don’t have to stumble home alone. “You’ve got the whole city to look after while I’m gone.”

And you never remember the confession he left hanging in the quiet upstairs corner of the tavern.

© 2026 kominigiru.

[lokissweater]

your other half ⋆.ೃ࿔*:･

{megumi fushiguro x honored one f!reader}

— “ when i close my eyes, you're standing there in front of me. ” ♬.ᐟ

summary: ever since satoru took you and megumi in at the ages of five and eight, you've been attached to the hip and inseparable— more so on your part, as you stuck to him like glue and never left his side no matter how much he huffed and puffed and yet always pulled you back in, megumi playing a huge role in looking after you, gruffly tending to your scraped knees with fruit patterned bandaids, or scolding you about everything and anything under the sun, you being the next up and coming honored one as megumi is given the doomed task of training you himself by the higher ups, and having to physically restrain himself from ever thinking of you as anything but a nuisance... but he slips up, getting dangerously close to giving in to your obvious acts of affection, thinking he's no good for you and you're better off without. but when a sudden threat to you made by the zen'in clan puts the both of you under pressure, megumi juggles his feelings for you with what he should do... and what he wants to do.

warnings: MDNI. afab!reader, fluuuff, ANGST w/ comfort, mentions of blood and a bit of violence not tew bad tho, mentions of death, mentions of murder, mentions of alcohol and drinking, character development megumi AFFFF, childhood friends to lovers, its an au but it has jjk sprinkled in heh, battle scenes huzzah, SMUUUUTTTT, p in v sex, creampie, DOM AGRESSIVE MEGUMI BRO IM SWEATINGGGG, unprotected sex (wrap it y'all), dirty talk, reader is gojo's niece, cursing, LOWKEY brat tamer megumi just a lil, sexual themes, megumi is older than reader by three years, he's hot and mean but a sawwwftie for reader, all characters are aged up, mentions of reader having ‘pink cheeks’ is only to amplify and over-exaggerate feelings of embarrassment, shyness, and everything in between, and not to be taken literally! this is a work of fiction, and you can imagine many things for yourself :)

word count: 19.7k (I KNOWWW BUT PLEASE GIVE ME A CHANCE PLEEASEE!!--)

authors note: THE FIC IS FINALLY HEEREEE OMGGG i am SOO fucking nervous about this one and what you guys will think of it, but i poured my little heart into this one and WROOTTEEE. 45k words total and splitting it into three separate parts is something i NEVERRR WANNA DO AGAIN BAHAHA I NEED TO LEARN A LIMIT. but more than anything, i hope this story makes you guys so so happy and warm and that you end up liking it :,))) i love you with my EENTIREE being and ty again for all of your precious love!!! MWAHHH <33333

this story is split into three parts with this being the first one!! you can access here parts two and three, which will also be available at the end of this piece! :)

“you’re weak y/n.”

megumi’s never cut you slack. not even once.

“again.”

you huffed out a breath and stood, dusting off your skirt as you looked up at him with a quirk to the brow.

“you literally just taught me this technique and you expect me to pull it out of my ass right now?”

you didn’t know why he was so grumpy all of the time, or why he chose to treat you roughly— especially in the instances of lessons or training.

“you’re a gojo.” he spoke flatly. “are you not.”

but it didn’t mean you disliked him in the slightest… more as seeing him as your guiding key of sorts, and you relied on him in a lot more areas than him just being your mentor— but in everyday life. in social circumstances. in everything.

and you knew that that probably annoyed the shit out of him… but you couldn’t help it. 

megumi was written to be your shadow from the moment satoru took the both of you under his wing, and you looked for him everywhere you went.

“okay…” you pouted. “so are you.”

megumi snorted.

“m’not.” he mumbled, plopping down on a lonesome wooden chair that sat across from where you were standing, where it is every training session, a singular piece of furniture placed specifically for him to watch you fumble techniques, succeed at techniques, or if he was simply just tired and over what you were doing— your practices sometimes set in a dingy basement underneath castle grounds. 

“you know i’m not.”

“what? you are though—”

“does it look like we’re related?” megumi squinted his eyes at you. “the man’s hair is white.”

you pursed your lips and looked to the side, crossing your arms and huffing again.

“so.” you walked a little bit closer to him, defiance evident in your body language. “doesn’t mean you’re not a gojo—”

“you share his blood.” he slumped back against the chair. “i don’t.”

“yeah… but he raised us both, didn’t he?” you tilted your head, peering up at him. “made us both ice cream sundays for breakfast and french toast for dinner?”

his eyes flickered to yours with a blank and unreadable face, the two of you holding eye contact for a moment before he eventually looked away and crossed his arms, giving a singular shake of the head that read a hard ‘no.’

“he’s your uncle. not mine.”

megumi’s always kept you at a distance.

“so are you also saying you’re not my other half and i should scram? hehe?” you gave him a silly grin, one that made his line of sight slowly cross back to you.

you knew in your right mind that he was not a gojo like you were, that he was no where near being anything shared with you… and in moments were megumi denied every aspect of love and care that he received from both you and your uncle, in moments where he tried to keep you at an arms length, and you always stubbornly dodging his attempts to and agitatingly throwing your arms around him, somehow always finding ways to stay by his side like a piece of sticky taffy?

you were grateful to be tied to him still, for you knew that if it weren’t for satoru simply taking megumi in just before taking you in years later… 

you wouldn’t be tied to him at all.

and you couldn’t— wouldn’t imagine a world where megumi wasn’t yelling at you. weirdly so.

“again.”

“man!” you threw your head back and groaned, dropping your arms and letting them loosely swing at your sides. “i thought i was on break megs i thought we were having a conversation—”

“we’re taking this long because you keep blabbering.” he grumbled. “hurry up y/n.”

“can you say please—”

“now.”

“alright!” you spun around and began walking to the other side of the basement. “fuck man…”

“if you get it this time—” he called from across the echoey room, and you turned. “i’ll bring you something tomorrow. from home.”

“yeah like what.” you grumbled while lifting your arms, your fingers folding and hands quickly moving to try at a technique, all of your attempts still failing and ending up with you repeating them over and over. “how about you take me home instead of leaving me here—”

“nope.”

you were currently enrolled in jujutsu academy, a prestigious university that taught their students the academics and skills required to master all kinds of jujutsu sorcery, an institution that’s been around for god knows how long and ran by a bunch of old fart higher ups (as satoru would say) that dictated the future of the school and its students, and it was an absolute requirement that all students dorm on castle grounds for all four academic years. 

they dictated your future in particular because you were a gojo… for you showed exponential mastery in jujutsu sorcery that exceeded the level of skill the rest of your classmates took up until now to learn, when you had it down at the age of fifteen with little to no effort at all, the elders voting unanimously years ago during a hearing with them behind doors and megumi and satoru standing in the middle, that megumi would be the one to train you and bring your gifts up to proper fruition, for he was gifted in adaption and teaching.

because while jujutsu sorcery came naturally to you, megumi’s effort put him to almost the same level you were. 

your grandparents went to jujutsu academy, your parents went there, satoru went there, and megumi did as well before he graduated two years ago, now serving as an assistant professor as well as your private mentor.

“megggssss!” you whined, dropping your arms. “who’s even gonna find out i went home anyways? no one. no one cares.”

“gojo does.”

“just hide me.”

“it’s not even that bad.” megumi rolled his eyes. “i was away from home too.”

and you missed him everyday he was gone.

just like now, you looking forward to holidays and extended breaks so you could just be home again under the same roof as your uncle and megumi.

and you wondered if megumi missed you when you were gone too…

“okay…” you spoke sadly, lifting your arms again to restart the technique megumi taught you today. 

he sighed softly through his nose at your tone and stood, taking slow steps towards you while watching your form with a blank face, arms still crossed.

he stopped right as he got beside you. 

“push your elbows out more.” he tapped lightly underneath your elbow to get you to raise it. “hands closer together.”

you listened, adjusting your stance and trying again. 

“you’ll be home for a week next month.” he mumbled.

“shh megs. i’m focusing.”

the corners of megumi’s lips twitched upwards, his extended arm retracting back and crossing over his chest again with the other, taking large steps back as he watched you repeat the technique a total of six additional times before it finally came into fruition, a gust of whirling wind that damn near replicated a tornado with bright purple electric bolts twisting out from your hands, the cobblestone basement unrecognizable while you were both embedded in the effects of your sorcery.

your techniques were always way bigger and stronger than his… and he preferred it that way, so it would come in handy whenever you needed it.

though he hoped you never would.

you snapped your arms outward and the effects seized, quiet filling your surroundings the moment the wind and lights dispersed from your fingertips, your chest moving quickly.

“good.” megumi walked over to you, his footsteps crunching underneath loose gravel that no doubt crumbled due to the force of not just by todays technique, but previous ones as well. “you’re done.”

the technique megumi taught you today— one you learned and performed successfully in a day, was one that took him three months.

you dropped your hands with an exhale, exhausted from hours of doing the same exact damn thing.

“finally...” you mumbled, your tired gaze following megumi as he crossed you and sat back in the wooden chair, him leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees. 

he nudged his head to signal you over, and you listened, happily taking little skips in his direction and stopping once you got in front of him.

“i’ll bring you red bean rice cakes.” he spoke lowly. “i’ll make gojo make them for you.”

you gasped, your eyes twinkling as you thought of your favorite dessert in the entire fucking world, a specific kind that satoru rarely made because each time he did he’d almost burn the freaking house down, but nevertheless came out oh so yummy and delightful.

“yes! thank you!” you gushed with a big smile, and megumi stared. “watch him though megs last time he actually almost set the kitchen on fire even though he’s supposed to just flip the—”

you felt a little tug at the hem of your jean skirt and you stopped, head dropping down to see megumi fiddling with it.

“you’re wearing a skirt.”

“eh?” you spoke softly, stilling once you felt one of megumi’s fingertips poke at your knees, heat rising to your cheeks immediately.

“y—yeah i am—”

“i told you not to.”

the bashfulness dropped from your system and your eyes narrowed, leaning your weight on one hip and crossing your arms.

“but i love skirts megs you know that—”

“your knees y/n…” he mumbled, sighing through his nose as his index finger lightly ran over the skin on your left knee, his eyes trained on your mini scars that you got from all the times you’ve ate shit, or carelessly ran about without any means of protection or awareness. “you keep scraping your knees.”

your heart fluttered a bit, fondness creeping around your insides.

he always did this.

“they’re just little cuts...” you softly spoke, megumi’s eyes switching up to look at you, and you sending him a sweet closed-lipped smile in response. “it’s all good i haven’t fallen recently—”

he poked at a particularly fresh one and you winced, a squeak slipping past your lips as he rolled his eyes and leaned back against the chair, digging in his pockets.

“yeah and what’s that dingus...” he muttered, pulling out a bandaid and proceeding to roll up the sleeves of his white button up, tearing the packaging open after. “stop wearing skirts.”

“no.” you spoke firmly as you watched him peel the backing and carefully stick the bandaid over the new scrape on your knee, stuffing the wrapper back in his pocket once he was done. “take me home today and i’ll consider it.”

“you’re annoying me.”

“you’re annoying me—”

megumi stood, the chair scraping against the ground as he stepped to the side and began walking toward the exit, you staring flabbergasted before you quickly scoured for your bag and ran after him, swinging it over your shoulder.

“heyy!” you pouted. “where are you going?”

“m’walking you to your dorm.” he plainly stated as you both stepped out through the doors, going down the long dark corridor that led to the main grand hall of the school, both of your shoes clicking against the marble flooring. 

oh.

“already..?” you asked disappointingly, walking a few steps behind him. “are you coming tomorrow?”

“it’s my day off.”

“are you coming the day after tomorrow?”

“dunno.”

“wha—” you gawked. “are you not a professors assistant? what do you mean ‘dunno’—”

megumi looked at you from over his shoulder before turning his head forward again.

“when they need it. i’m here every couple of days y/n.”

“yeah well i always have a crap ton of homework to do every time you are here so i don’t even get to see you.” you grumbled, rounding the corner with him and stepping onto the main foyer of the castle, the ambience quiet and dim with only a few students still out and about studying or chatting. “how do you get away with working like— below minimum wage hours? you’re gonna get sacked you know…”

megumi snorted.

“and you’re gonna annoy me again if you’re wearing a skirt next time i’m here.”

“bite me.”

he quickly turned his head to the side and pursed his lips, stifling a laugh as you both walked up the grand rounding staircase that never seemed to fucking end, and one you never got used to either no matter how many times the two of you have trotted up and down these steps.

megumi’s well aware that you’re too stubborn for your own good to listen to him,  knowing that the next time he sees you, you will be wearing a skirt with another new cut on your knee that he’ll need to bring a bandaid for.

“you need to work on your clinginess.”

your jaw ran slack, stopping dead in your tracks on the staircase.

“hah?! what the hell do you even mean?!—”

but megumi didn’t even bother to turn around, you hurriedly hopping up the stairs again to catch up with him, finally arriving to your floor and going down the familiar pathway to your dormitory, several students recognizing their professor’s assistant and greeting megumi as they passed by.

“m’not clingy…” you muttered, looking off to the side as you rounded another corner. “go ahead and go back home. see if i care.”

he peered at you from the corner of his eye, slightly amused.

“i’m joking.” he spoke flatly. 

“you’re not funny.”

“neither are you.”

“hey!—”

he stopped in front of your dorm and you faltered, having not even noticed that you were already there, and kicking yourself for complaining and fighting with him the entire time rather than spending it having actual conversation with him, not knowing when the next time you’d see him would be.

there’s been instances where you don’t even see him for weeks at a time… 

and it was then that you realized that maybe you were just clingy…

“stop.”

you snapped your head up just as embarrassment bubbled up in your cheeks, an evident pinky vibrant shade that only intensified the moment he plopped a heavy hand on top of your head, you flinching a bit.

“you always do this when i leave...” he mumbled, bored half lidded eyes staring straight at you. 

“…do what?” you asked softly.

“get sad.”

“oh—” you felt your cheeks warm up again, you blinking up at him. “s—sorry.”

he huffed a little breath through his nose and looked off to the side. 

“i’ll come soon.” he dropped his hand. “just wait.”

“…right.”

megumi flicked your forehead and you flinched once more.

“ow!—”

“stop.”

“what?!” you rubbed the patch of stinging skin as you peaked an eye open. “what did i—”

“you’re doing it again—”

“bite me!”

he choked out a laugh and you stopped, him covering his mouth with the back of his hand and leaning forward a bit, shoulders shaking and the corners of his eyes crinkling, the vision taking you by surprise.

how pretty…

it was rare when he laughed, and each time you were lucky enough to catch it was like ingesting ample fuel that served to get you through the rest of your damn life.

you giggled softly alongside him, leaning up against the door of your room as your eyes literally glimmered up at him, megumi settling down himself and lowering his hand, meeting your gaze with that same expression of just— nothing, but somehow it being just enough for you. 

because even though those expressions and looks of nothing were grumpy and strict… they were familiar. 

they were kind. 

in his own special way.

you gently leaned your head against the door and gave him a thin lipped smile.

“leave before i cry.”

he rolled his eyes.

“you’re fine.”

you quirked a brow and raised your index finger, wagging it in his face in warning.

“don’t forget my red bean rice cakes okay? whenever the fuck i get them…”

he watched you— the way your shoulders drooped a little more than usual, the way the crease between your brows hadn’t gone away since the end of your training session, and the way you still made no attempts at reaching for the doorknob to go inside for the night, all made his eyes soften ever so slightly and feel a feeling he didn’t want to acknowledge.

“tomorrow.”

your head snapped up from being on the door.

“hm?”

“i’ll come tomorrow.” he spoke quietly, reaching up to absentmindedly move a few strands of hair over your shoulder before retracting his arm, clearing his throat and looking away. “with the rice cakes.”

you stared at him dumbly for a few seconds, doe eyes blinking and cogs turning until your face broke out into the biggest smile he had ever fucking seen, you jumping up and down and squealing and throwing your arms around his neck, him letting out a little ‘oof’ in response.

“yayyyy!” you cheered. “thanks megs! i’m so excited! just text me what time so i can make sure i finish my stupid homework beforehand and also tell gojo i said thank you in advance for the rice cakes—”

“get off.”

a smirk slowly crossed your lips, and megumi swallowed.

“no.”

he placed his hands on your waist, and barely so… just there on the surface like he was afraid of allowing himself to fully touch you for whatever reason, and yet— knowing exactly the reason at the same god damn time, another thing he refused to acknowledge and only triggered irritation towards himself.

“off y/n.”

“make me.”

“i won’t come tomorrow.”

your hands shot out and you pushed him back, your eyes wide and pleading as you knew that whatever megumi decided he was going to say or do, was bible.

“alright i’m off! i’m off...”

you sighed, dropped your arms and reached for the doorknob, rotating it and just stepping inside before turning back around, half of your body behind the door as you leaned your head against the edge of it, peering up at him.

“bye meggy megs.” you spoke gently. “don’t forget to eat a little before bed… i know you’ve been here for a while.”

and amidst megumi’s trial and tribulations about whatever the fuck was going on in his head, and amidst all of his agitating thoughts that were everything just— you… his eyes softened, and he sent you the teensiest little smile that quickly made your cheeks buzz and blush, him giving you a singular nod.

“oh!” you perked up. “and water my plants please i forgot to tell you.”

he had been. 

since you moved into the academy two years ago he’d been watering your plants.

“okay.”

you nodded. “…okay.”

and without another word megumi turned and left, walking down the quiet dark corridor with his hands in his pockets and shoulders tall, his footsteps echoing throughout and getting farther and farther away, you watching him until he eventually turned a corner and left your sight, the familiar feeling of loneliness and missing being anywhere outside of castle grounds creeping up on you like little relentless bugs.

megumi always kept you at a distance for reasons he didn’t want to acknowledge.

and as he grumpily trudged through campus with his head down and mind preoccupied with thoughts that he couldn’t fully register… his annoyance for you only grew.

because it was like a block in his brain— stubborn and angry all of the time, and clogged up with fleeting replayed memories of the way you did your hair everyday, or the way you smelled like strawberry poundcake that was exceptionally intensified during the summer time, all notions that only further solidified his reasons why megumi wanted to stay the fuck away from you.

he wanted to stay away for reasons he didn’t even want to think about, opting instead to snapping orders at you, ignoring you, or just straight up being mean, it always earning him a smack upside the head or a scolding from satoru since he was a kid, and leaving behind a pit of guilt in his chest that he mistook for aggravation.

“how was the little miss?”

megumi placed his shoes on the rack by the front door and nudged his slippers on upon arriving home, eyes bored as he tossed his keys in a fish bowl and began making his way to the kitchen, crossing satoru as he went.

“fine.” 

satoru happily bounded close behind. 

“great! and how was training today?”

“slow.”

“slow?” satoru quirked a brow. “why—”

“because she wouldn’t stop talking and complaining.” megumi mumbled, bending down and opening the cabinets underneath the sink, rummaging through until he pulled out a little green watering can— setting it under the faucet sink and turning the water on.

satoru crossed his arms. “okay… but i take it she got todays technique?”

he nodded.

“you didn’t yell at her?”

megumi’s face twitched but he nodded again, switching the faucet off and trying to ignore that familiar pit in his chest.

“did you tell her she did a good job?”

megumi looked over his shoulder, eyes narrowing at satoru.

“i don’t need to tell her that—”

“okay so you gave her a little hug and a kiss goodbye?—”

megumi whipped around fully, mortified by whatever the hell was coming out of satoru’s mouth as he took a kitchen towel from the counter and chucked it at his face, satoru snickering and dodging.

“what?!” satoru pouted. “i’m just asking… can’t a handsome poor old man ask?”

“no.”

“okay but did you..?—”

“no!”

he sighed heavily and slumped against the kitchen island. “oh gumi…”

“what.” he grumbled, grabbing the watering can and beginning to walk out of the kitchen.

“if you keep being mean to her and treating her the way you do, she’s gonna end up hating you.”

megumi slowed.

should he even care about that? why would he…

why did he.

“let her.” he spoke, voice monotone as he made his way down the hall and up the steps to your room.

satoru sighed again and followed after him.

“i don’t think you want that.” satoru called out. “she looks up to you megumi she loves you and you need to be nicer before she finds herself another megumi.”

he scoffed, stopping and turning slightly. “the fucks that supposed to mean—”

“you’re without a care in the world right now because that girl puts you on a pedestal and you barely have to lift a finger.” satoru scolded, icy blue eyes staring straight at him. “and if you keep pushing her, she’s gonna find someone else eventually who treats her better than you do.”

“i don’t care what she does.” megumi spat, satoru faltering. “and im done having this conversation.”

“meanie…” satoru muttered through pursed lips, looking off to the side. “fine! suffer and lose see how that feels.”

megumi turned his back to him and continued walking when a sudden grab to the ankle staggered him forward, the sound of a loud heavy thump on the ground making him snap his head around to see satoru laying flat down on the hardwood floor, eyes desperate with a quiver to his lips.

“please gumi! let the light in! you’re the only man i’m okay with my niece being with please just give her a little hug—”

“—you made me spill water—”

“— or tell her she did a good job or give her a present for a successful training sesh anything!-”

megumi shook him off his ankle and satoru whined, face dropping flat to the floor as he sniffled.

“it’s no use it’s no use—”

“can you make red bean rice cakes.” megumi mumbled. “the ones y/n likes.”

satoru stilled.

“why…” he muttered, face still down and voice muffled. “you hungry megs? there’s food in the fridge—”

“it’s not for me idiot it’s for y/n.”

satoru’s head shot up.

“you’re going to the university tomorrow?”

“yeah.”

“but it’s your day off?”

“i had to bribe y/n for her to get the technique down—”

“yiiippeeeee!” satoru flew up and stood, arms out and extended as he cheered and bounced up and down on his feet like a madman. “i absolutely can my little gremlin! i’ll get started on it now—”

gremlin?—

“— and when you see her tomorrow and give them to her you’re gonna give her a little smooch and confess—”

megumi choked on his own spit and coughed, fist hovering over his mouth and cheeks burning as he stood there wide eyed.

“gojo what the fuck are you on?”

“oop—” satoru froze, gaze slowly locking on his. “did i say that out loud—”

megumi threw a hand out, exasperated. “yes!”

“who did?”

“you!”

“no i didn’t… heh.”

“yes you fucking did—”

satoru waved him off. “nonsense! go to sleep it’s late megs i’ve got cooking to do—”

“—watch the stove—”

satoru knew deep down that megumi did care.

because although through the years he’s watched megumi yell at you, ignore you, boss you around and sometimes straight up belittle you… he loved you. and satoru hoped he wasn’t mistaken about that.

megumi scolded you constantly but patched up your knees with fruity bandaids whenever you fell, megumi insulted you for being a scaredy cat but held your hand through whatever it was that you were afraid of, megumi huffed and puffed over every request you had for him and yet he’d do it— even if it was asking for a piggy back ride when you were too tired, another cherry bomb pop ice cream when you’d already had three, or taking you to the lake by the train tracks just a block from the house to catch fireflies— all through rolling of eyes and mutterings of ‘you’re stupid.’

he always did it. 

and satoru was a testament to all of it— watching behind cracked doors or hallways or secretly following you both for your safety when you snuck out in the middle of the night to the lake… and yet met with the sight of the purest form of love each time.

megumi keeping you safe.

satoru never had to lift a finger because megumi beat him to it. all of the time.

you: goodnight megs!! :D i hope you ate!! also bring enough rice cakes tomorrow so we can share >:3

megumi stared at your text message before placing his phone on top of a drawer, him stood by the window sill where you kept all of your succulents and plants, watering each of them like he did every night before bed, the sound of trickling water from the can the only thing heard in the room besides satoru’s banging of pots and pans downstairs, him placing the watering can to the side once he was done and trudging over to your desk chair, plopping down on it.

megumi: ok.

your response was almost immediate.

you: DAYUM

you: dry as always meggy megs… <//3 

you: but i still love you HEHEHEH

he swallowed, gaze trained on your last sentence as his thumbs hovered over the screen of his phone, his brain unable to compute a response.

annoying.

his eyes lifted to the picture frames you had next to your desktop then, photos he’s looked at a million times already, and not a single one that was without him as they consisted of the two of you throughout the different stages of your lives— megumi with a blank or irritated expression in all of them, and you with the silliest fucking grin next to him— his mind having difficulty admitting that you were inexplicably pretty and doe eyed and lovely, something that was obvious… but yet blocking each and every thought that tried to slip past the slimy barriers of his brain, him rubbing at his temples as he hunched over on your desk.

you were exhausting to think about, and it was even more exhausting to know that megumi had slipped up during training… when he succumbed to feeling bad for you over him leaving and proceeding to brush your hair over your shoulder— to touch you, the feeling of its silkiness still remembered by his fingertips as he slowly flexed and retracted them where he sat.

he shouldn’t have. 

he should’ve told you to suck it up.

megumi: go to sleep.

you: omg i thought you were ignoring me

you: hi :PP

megumi: go to sleep y/n it’s late.

you: BOO YOU WHORE

you: tell me you love me and i will.

heat rose up megumi’s neck and he rolled his eyes.

megumi: you’re gross.

megumi: go to sleep.

you: brat.

you: okay fine i will. see you tomorrow gumi :) <3

you: goodnight!

megumi stood from your desk chair and snatched the watering can from your window sill, quickly making his way out of your room and slamming the door shut, feeling like he was suffocating in there over his own stupid head.

megumi: night.

even though it was a well known fact that you were extraordinarily gifted and a gojo— something that was a rarity in itself since satoru chose not to pass down his lineage, megumi was the only one who knew that you were actually the weakest fucking person he had ever had to train, and the last person who should ever be put in battle to protect anything.

and that’s what he feared the most.

you were a crybaby, whiny, and too emotionally involved to the point where any time megumi manifested a faux curse to train your combat abilities, you screamed and ran two minutes in without even performing any techniques of your own to try and fight it off, him having to be the one to drag you back or kill the curse himself just to get you to calm down and listen.

your techniques were powerful, yes, but you weren’t— mentally, emotionally, and even sometimes physically, you simply lacked adequate conviction and resilience to be someone worth putting in the front lines, to protect an entire flock of your community and be the saving grace you’d been trained since five years old to be.

but instead of being put on this path of sparkling reputation, your family name had doomed you from the moment you opened your eyes at birth, and again when your parents died by members of the zen’in clan, you cursed with the burden of expectation.

because while everyone else saw you as a golden prodigy— the higher ups, your classmates, satoru himself… megumi saw a girl.

a girl too silly for her own good.

“don’t run!” megumi yelled, his booming voice echoing across the grassy open field as he heard you scream and hiccup, scrambling to your feet just as the curse managed to fling you back.

“kill it! kill it! kill it!—”

“no! i’ve given you enough free passes—”

“—eeeekkk!—” 

you squealed and flew across the lawn again, megumi watching in utter disbelief as anytime you raised your arms to perform a technique, literal pathetic sparks would electrify through the air and fucking disappear just as soon as they came, megumi’s frustration only growing.

at this rate, if the higher ups ever decided to throw you in battle, you’d die.

and the thought only made him angrier.

“y/n!” he barked. “get up!”

“i’m trying!—”

“try harder!” he manipulated his hands and brought out another faux curse, this time in the form of his demon dogs. “get up!”

you shakily got to your feet and coughed, sweat dripping down your face as you raised your hands again to flimsily try to form a technique, your chest erratic and palms trembling.

“megumi please we’ve been at it for hours i fucking can’t!—”

“do it!”

you were completely worn out, panting and stomach aching from all of the running and dodging you’ve had to do, you having only successfully gotten rid of one curse out of the eight that he presented you with, shame gripping your throat as you moved your hands and fingers again and again, dodged every blast again and again, and ran for your life for the millionth time that night.

“stop running!” he yelled. “how many times have i told you never run!—”

“but i’m gonna die if i don’t!—”

“on your left!”

you screamed and threw yourself across the grass, tumbling down a few feet before quickly stabilizing yourself and popping your head up, seeing the curse coming at you at full speed without any means of mercy or pity.

you hated how much you had to train, feeling like the higher ups completely robbed you of your college life as you had to do this almost every night for hours at a time, the only good thing about it being that megumi was your mentor and the one you spent those exact suffering hours with, even if you embarrassed yourself in front of him each time because you just couldn’t do anything right.

and you were scared… so god damn scared and nervous that the day would come where you had to face whoever the fuck in battle, you yourself knowing that you were too much of a wuss and just plain bad at combat to fight off anyone, your mind reeling with the constant fear of death that at this point seemed like a given for you, a lump creeping up your throat everyday that you thought of your sealed fate and leaving this world faster than you could ever think of.

you were ashamed all of the time, especially in front of megumi… knowing he’d put so much time into you just for you to get thrown around like a rag doll by manifestations of nothing.

why couldn’t you do it? why couldn’t you simply be brave? like megumi?

you shot a hand out and tried a technique one final time, the curse closing in on you and lame little sparks of purple emitting from your palms just before the curse suddenly screeched out a roar and flew to the side, disappearing into a mist of black until the air finally settled into silence— your hair brushing through the breeze and the sound of crickets ringing faintly in the distance.

your eyes slowly moved to look in front of you, your gaze met with megumi standing over you with the most pissed off look you’d ever seen on his gorgeous face, his hands balled tightly into fists at his sides that flickered with turquoise blue sparks.

he had killed the curse for you. again.

“get up.”

you sniffled and stood, your knees trembling as you did so.

“m’sorry gumi—”

“why do you keep running.”

you peered up at him.

“…i’ll die if i—”

“then so be it.”

your eyes widened, lips slightly parted in shock.

huh?

“i’ve told you this already y/n.” his voice was clear and stern, a difference from his usual moody mumbling and huffing, and you didn’t like it at all. “even if you get hurt, even if you die, you never run.”

he snatched your wrist and began walking with you across the field, his grip tight.

“it’s pathetic and you’ll die for being a coward and not someone worth remembering.”

you felt a pang to your chest and you looked down, tears brimming your eyes.

“you’re weak and your family name does nothing for you—”

you knew that.

“—you’re too emotionally fucking involved you cry about everything and i don’t know what else to say to you—”

you knew that as well.

and ironically if anyone else ever told you what he was telling you in this moment, you’d laugh and blow a raspberry in their face, not giving a single shit and going about the rest of your day as if nothing ever happened, as if no one ever insulted you.

but it was megumi. and your body stung all over with zero means of relief.

you didn’t deserve relief.

the sound of your little hiccups and sniffles made megumi slow, his long legs gradually stopping as he looked at you from over his shoulder, his eyes met with the sight of you hunched over and silently crying, you quickly wiping your tears but the attempts proving futile as the waterworks kept going, your frame trembling.

his gaze automatically trailed down to your knees, and his eyes widened at the sight of them battered and bruised, more than usual and injuries he knew a simple banana designed bandaid wouldn’t be able to fix.

fuck.

megumi’s shoulders eased from their tense position, and his eyes softened, letting out a little sigh through his nose.

“i’m s—sorry—” you sobbed. “i wish i could fight and— and listen to you but i’m scared all of the time and i don’t know how to— hic! not be—”

“y/n—”

“but i promise you i’m trying and i hate that i keep disappointing you—”

“hey—”

“and i’m so sorry that i can n—never get it right-”

megumi gently tugged you in and you paused, your face colliding softly with his chest.

he wouldn’t allow himself to hug you, as painful as it was. and he wouldn’t allow himself to let you stand there crying when he was the reason for it either.

so he allowed himself the closest thing to it— your face in his chest and the side of his cheek just barely grazing the top of your head, the hold on your wrist gentler… secure as he let his senses be engulfed by the scent of you.

of strawberry pound cake.

“stop crying...” he mumbled. 

you hiccuped.

“s—orry—” you sniffled and wiped your eyes, burying your nose back into his chest after.

he almost never did this— ever. only on rare occasions, and you tried your best to hold onto the moment for as long as you possibly could, committing it to memory and trying to bask in what it felt like to be so close to him, all of it setting a reminder off in your head of how much you actually loved him, as if you already didn’t know.

you loved him so much that it was ridiculous.

the way the two of you stood there in the middle of the open field, unawarely taking in each others scent that had always been achingly familiar to the both of you— 

like summer grass. like playdates by the lake. like melting cherry bomb pop ice creams.

like childhood.

the low ricketing of cicadas and crickets in the distance filled the air around you, light winds that rustled through the grass by your feet, through the strands of your hair and megumi’s, and through your tear stained cheeks, all playing a part in surrounding the both of you with the feeling of each other, of how you grew up as one singular unit, regardless if one was more bubbly and forgiving than the other.

it was always you and him.

“you’re too emotionally involved y/n.” he murmured, and you nodded against him.

“i know.”

“and you’re weak.”

“i know.”

“and you keep running when i tell you not to.”

“yeah.”

“but—” his grip on your wrist tightened a little, megumi’s self control bursting at the seams as he swallowed. “you’re not disappointing anyone.”

“yeah i am.” you pouted, nose digging further into his button up, your voice muffled. “i’m disappointing you.”

“you’re not.” he muttered. “you’re just irritating.”

so completely and utterly irritating that he wanted to keep you locked away— distanced from the higher ups and anyone else who wanted to throw you in battle.

but he shouldn’t fucking care about that he shouldn’t let himself. it was your will and what you were supposed to do and yet— he always ended up caring every time he saw you… one way or another.

“as long as you’re not disappointed in me… i’m okay.” you murmured.

megumi’s heart twisted in his chest then, and he nuzzled his nose further into your hair, eyes closing and heart beating out of his fucking ribcage, allowing himself again to relish in who you were… even if it was just for now.

“y/n.”

you shifted in his hold.

“hm?”

“heal your knees please.”

you laughed softly and went to look up, chin propping up on his chest as he reluctantly detached his cheek from your head.

“heh… you do it.”

megumi’s eyes trailed down to you and slightly narrowed, you giggling at his reaction.

out of all types of techniques there were— defense, combat, stealth, manipulation, it was healing that megumi lacked the most, spending hours of his schooling life studying his ass off trying to get the basics down, spending day after day practicing different restoration rituals and recovery spells, purposely getting paper cuts or bruises to test out his abilities and yet failing every fucking attempt, you stepping in instead regardless of his huffing and puffing to heal his little wounds.

that was the reason why megumi was almost to your level of jujutsu sorcery, because he couldn’t freaking fix shit, and ironically in more ways than one.

“ow!”

megumi had flicked your forehead and you whined, your fingers coming up to rub the reddened irritated patch.

“heal it.”

“obviously i’m gonna heal it megs the ball is tomorrow.”

he quirked a brow.

“the ball?”

“mhm!” you cutely smiled, your own brows coming to a furrow after a few seconds. “what… it’s literally the same every year how do you not know—”

“no i know.” he mumbled. “i never went.”

your jaw dropped. “never? not even once?”

he shook his head and you scoffed.

“laaameee. you’re missing out meggy megs! i heard the junior year ball is the best hehe.”

“i’m good.”

you sent him a silly little mischievous grin then.

“…that’s why you’re coming with me tomorrow.”

his eyes snapped down in your direction, a bewildered expression on his face.

“don’t be stupid.”

“i will be stupid.” you cheesed. “pleeeaaaseee gumi ill be bored without you… and i need a date…”

he shook his head. “you’ll be bored regardless those events are a waste of time.”

you pouted and attempted to pull away, but megumi’s grip on your wrist tightened and you faltered, your eyes locking with his for a moment before you gave him a gradual sweet little smile. 

“you don’t wanna see me in a dress?”

he paused.

“why would i want to see that.”

“it’s dark blue! with little flower beady things on it.”

“so.”

“so?” you pouted, your gaze trailing down to the grass beneath your feet. “i wanted your opinion on it…”

megumi swallowed, silence emitting between the two of you until he hesitantly lifted a hand, his index finger timidly tapping underneath your chin to get you to look up, you complying with wide eyes and a pounding heart.

you realized that megumi lately had been more affectionate with you on multiple occasions, something you immediately noticed anytime he did something that he normally wouldn’t do, tonight being one of those examples where he was kinder with you, more lenient, and cutting you slack over things he absolutely fucking should not.

where before he would put you on a time out for not killing curses like he told you to, or give you the silent treatment if he found out you were skipping lectures to sleep in, now for the past couple of months he was ignoring every sin you’ve committed and instead letting them go, which only made it harder for you to keep your big mouth shut and contain the doomed feelings you had for him locked up— especially when he paired his mercy with little pats of the head, wrist holding, or slight mini caresses of affection that could easily be misinterpreted as two people who were together. in love.

you were convinced he’d bite your head off, chew a bit, and spit you out if you ever told him how you felt.

but maybe… maybe he wouldn’t.

selfishly… stupidly… you hoped megumi loved you just as much as you loved him.

“you shouldn’t care about my opinion.” he muttered. “wear the dress if you like it y/n.”

“but i do care.” you spoke softly. “if it’s your opinion… i want to know...”

he stared down at you with an expressionless face, you unable to read him in the fucking slightest.

“my opinion doesn’t matter.”

“but it does.” you pushed.

his eyes formed into slits.

“ask one of your friends—”

“but i wanna ask you!—”

“you’ll look pretty either way it doesn’t matter what you wea—”

you both stilled and megumi’s mouth snapped shut, pressing into a thin line and stare widening.

god fucking dammit.

“you think i’m pretty..?” you tilted your head cutely, a sugary smile slowly spreading across your lips as you waited for his response.

he bit down hard on his tongue, loosening his jaw once the taste of metallic filled his taste buds.

“not what i meant.”

you quirked a brow.

“gumi you said ‘you’ll look pretty either way it doesn’t ma’—”

megumi mushed a quick hand over your mouth to shut you up, a vibrant pink shade so painfully obvious on his cheeks that you couldn’t help but giggle underneath his palm, him looking away in agitation and his scruffy spiky bangs covering his eyes a little.

so cuuteee!

“forget about it.”

“nuh uh.” you muffled.

“do it.”

you licked his palm and he ripped his hand away in disgust, eyebrows pinched as he wiped your spit on his sweater.

“you said i was pretty.” 

megumi’s eyes flickered to yours before they awkwardly moved away.

“okay.”

you lit up.

“so yeah? you think i’m pretty?”

he looked down and raised his arm to scratch the back of his neck, his mouth physically unable to move and his brain failing to compute how to deal with what he just said, him struggling so much that it felt like his heart was borderline strangling him, frustration filling his every vein as his mind scrambled around trying to figure out how to get you to be quiet.

but there was literally no way. he knew you and your big mouth would never let it go.

“guuumiiii.”

“hm?” he lazily dropped his hand, gaze switching to yours before zooming away again.

you laughed.

“what megs…” you pushed gently. “it’s okay for you to think that if you want to you know...”

was it though?

megumi didn’t think so. 

megumi didn’t think he deserved to think about you like that at all.

but inevitably, agonizingly, and admittedly… you were so fucking pretty to him that it made it hard for him to think about anything else, and any moment that he wasn’t with you… he was thinking of you, and he didn’t know how to stop that no matter how hard he tried.

because god he tried. since childhood he’s tried. he could close his fucking eyes and you’d still be there.

but any idiot numskull could see that you were beautiful.

and megumi definitely could.

“megs…?”

he didn’t need to see you in a dress to know. he didn’t need anything but you standing in front of him in the way that you were now, with your stupid scraped bloody knees and your doe eyes and the way you always looked at him like he created the very air you breathed… like he was everything.

and it made him angry. angry and weak.

he didn’t deserve to be anything to you. 

“so am i pretty or wh—”

“gorgeous.”

you faltered, pupils dilating as you felt your heart physically fucking stop, him looking at you with a blank face and acting like he didn’t just drop something like that on you.

you’d never heard that word come out of his mouth, and nonetheless directed at you, you parting your lips in attempts at trying to respond but your throat feeling too tight to even try and get anything out.

“but you don’t need me to tell you that.” he spoke. “everyone knows.”

everyone…?

your cheeks grew hot, and you quickly dropped your gaze and looked away.

at this rate, if he didn’t quit it, you knew you’d probably end up blubbering that you loved him, and you didn’t know if that was a good idea or the worst possible freaking—

“you shouldn’t have issues with getting a date.” he mumbled. “so don’t waste it asking me.”

you pursed your lips.

“m’not wasting anything.” you replied. “i was asking you for a reason.”

he blinked.

“go with me.”

his fists bawled at his sides and he swallowed, his grip tightening by the second as he looked down at you, afraid that he’d gone too far and maybe— maybe encouraged you—

but his mouth moved quicker than his brain could come up with a way to stop himself.

“why.”

he knew why.

he fucking knew man.

“because i’m in love with you megs.”

and for some reason… he needed to hear you say it. selfishly. just once.

because what he also knew, was that he had to break your heart to spare you from a life of isolation and just— nothing, which was the only thing he could provide for you when you deserved absolute happiness and serenity and bliss…

all things he could kill himself wishing over, spend the rest of his life bargaining with every divine entity just to become someone worth standing by your side… and yet it still wouldn’t be enough.

he wasn’t good for you, he couldn’t damn you and give you a life of desolation he— he couldn’t do that to you.

he loved you too much to do that to you.

“you’ll get over it.”

you stilled, flabbergasted.

what the fuck?

“huh—”

“it’ll go away just give it time—”

“megumi what?” you scoffed, eyebrows furrowing. “what the hell are you saying—”

“i’m saying get over it y/n.” he bit back, and you flinched at his snappy tone. 

“i’m taking you back to your dorm let’s go.”

you physically felt your heart break over his words, anger brewing up in your chest so god damn fast that you didn’t have time to let your mind think rationally over the situation.

“no.”

he rolled his eyes and reached to take your wrist, you instantly snatching it away and taking a step back.

“i said no.”

“y/n—”

“i tell you i love you and you tell me to get over it?” you spoke in aching disbelief. “the fucks wrong with you?”

“we’re leaving—”

“i love you and you know that.”

he wavered, heart beating against his ribcage as he damned himself over the look on your face.

“stop saying that.” he responded coldly with narrowed eyes, and it only made you angrier.

“i love you.”

“what did i just say—”

“i love you—”

“stop.”

you took a step closer.

“i love you—”

“enough!”

megumi’s arms flung out and grabbed you by shoulders, yanking you closer with a tight grip as he shook you with every word that he spoke, stare wild and what looked to you like anger… was desperation from him.

“are you stupid?!” he yelled. “how could you let yourself feel that way about me?!”

you stared at him with blown out eyes as he continued to shake you.

“how could you waste your fucking time y/n?!”

“m—megs—”

“—hah?!”

he pulled you in even closer that the tip of his nose brushed against yours, his hot breath fanning across your face.

“get a god damn grip.” he seethed. “i’m only here to teach you how to not be a nuisance on the frontlines so forget about me y/n.”

he shook his head.

“i’m not your partner, i’m not your friend, i’m a fucking tool the higher ups assigned to you so you could be lucky enough to not die on the field. so forget about me!”

silence filled the air then, his heavy labored breathing loud as his chest rose and fell erratically, his heart throbbing just as much as yours was as you both looked at each other, tears slowly welling up in your eyes that read nothing but betrayal and grief that was tied directly to him.

you always knew that if it wasn’t for satoru taking the both of you in, you had no place in megumi’s life.

and yet you always thought— that after all this time… through every moment he grumpily protected you and looked after you, dried your tears and guided you, made you snacks when you were kids anytime you were hungry, walked you and picked you up from school, tied your shoes and stuck bandaids on your cuts, stayed awake with you when you were too scared to go to sleep at night alone—

that you had earned a place in his life.

but you were wrong. 

so fucking wrong.

“how could you say that..?” you choked out, voice small and wavering. “why are you hurting me?”

he blinked, shoulders slowly relaxing as he loosened his grip on your shoulders, coming down from whatever the fuck he was on that made him lash out without meaning to.

“we’ve— we’ve done everything together since we were kids—“ fat tears continued to drip down your cheeks. “and you’re telling me none of it meant anything to you? that i— hic— i’m not even a friend to you?”

your biggest fear had always been that megumi was only around because he was forced to be.

and now that you knew that it was exactly that, your soul bubbled up with the most intense type of unfamiliar agony and heartbreak you had ever felt in your life— heavy and suffocating and a feeling you never thought would be because of him.

“why couldn’t you just say you didn’t love me back?!” you yelled suddenly, your heartache quickly manifesting into bitter. “why do you always have to be such a fucking dick!”

megumi felt a pang in his chest and he swallowed the lump in his throat, already regretting so much what he had done just because he couldn’t survive his internal strife, wrongfully taking it out on you instead and rejecting you in the worst way humanly possible, when he was supposed to let you down easy, not hurt you, not lie to you.

this wasn’t supposed to happen. 

at least— not like this jesus not like this—

you ripped yourself away from him and he snapped out of it, him blinking down at you.

“i’m sorry i misinterpreted what we were.” you mumbled, quickly wiping away your tears and wanting to just get fucking rid of them. “you don’t have to worry about me anymore.”

what?

“i’ll speak to the higher ups myself and arrange your dismissal so you don’t have to train me.” you met his eyes then and his shoulders dropped in utter guilt over the look on your face. “we can be done from here. i’ll leave you alone.”

he shook his head.

“wait—” he reached out for you and you dodged him. “stop that hold on—”

“don’t touch me.”

you walked past him, your shoulder harshly bumping against his bicep as he staggered back a bit, his mind reeling over what was going on and unable to keep up with the way it was unraveling so quickly.

this isn’t what he wanted at all he— god his intentions were never to lose you entirely.

but what in the fuck did he expect saying those kind of things to you though? that you’d stick around still kissing his ass? how could he possibly and fucking stupidly think some shit like that?

he thought that this was for the best, that this is what was good for you, and yet he pathetically couldn’t stomach the reality of it once he got what he wanted.

“m’going back to my dorm. bye—”

he quickly reached and caught your arm with his hands, pulling you back a bit.

“no.” he breathed out. “no wait—”

you looked at him from over your shoulder and glared through your tears.

“i said don’t touch me megumi get off—”

“jesus listen to me y/n!—”

“what so you can keep telling me how much of a burden i am to you?!” you sniffled. “no thanks i should’ve caught the message years ago every time you called me annoying or stupid—”

“stop—”

“—let go!” you sobbed, more tears flooding in.

“please megumi...” you hiccuped. “let go of me…”

he stared at you then, the devastated and defeated expression on your face that shouldn’t ever be there in the first place, the way your body trembled and the tears on your wet cheeks, the new awful way you were looking at him now, the fucking blood on your knees—

made megumi gently, slowly, loosen his grip until your soft arm slipped from his fingertips and returned to your side.

he’d done what he was supposed to do, but in a way that was at the cost of you.

and he realized that even if you chose to hate him for the rest of your life, he’d force himself to learn to live with it if it meant you were happier somewhere else… with someone else.

living a life with all of the things he wished he could provide for you.

so he chose not to fix it.

“…let me at least walk you to your dorm.” he spoke up, voice hoarse from all the yelling. “there’s been word of the zen’in clan lurking around… whether its true or not i need to walk you back.”

you rolled your eyes and turned away from him, trudging your way across the field and through the freezing air to get back to your dorm on your own.

“fuck off megumi.”

gojo was livid when he found out what happened.

and for a man who never let a crack of anger, or anything else that didn’t resemble bubbling sparkling and annoying joy show through his exterior, something megumi didn’t even know gojo was capable of… was a sight that was odd and daunting.

because gojo resembled him— an expression of nothing, eyes shadowed and blank as the both of them stood in the middle of the kitchen, him having just admitted to gojo of what he had done to you and only met with absolute silence from him, a million words unspoken as gojo simply stepped around him and out of the kitchen entirely, gaze casted down with an aura that seeped utter disappointment.

no yelling. no reprimanding. no scolding.

and somehow that was worse.

you had kept your word and left him alone as well.

where once megumi would be bombarded with texts from you about the most random silliest things, or calls from you begging him to come to castle grounds to hang out with you, or goodnight messages with obnoxious amounts of hearts and smiley faces… were all gone since that night— his phone log empty and the date from your last text to him only getting farther and farther away as the weeks passed, his life so quiet that it tripped him up.

sixteen years of babbling, cherry pop ice creams, cry baby tears, and cheesy smiles over the simplest things, to suddenly nothing… was awful.

it was the first time megumi was experiencing life without your noise, and even though his methods in doing so were utterly unfair to you, he felt they were necessary.

to keep you at a distance that was way beyond an arms length, a distance that allowed you to flourish without the burden of who he was, and a distance that stopped you from going back to him.

“oh no wait!— do this one instead.”

you turned from your vanity mirror and looked behind you, your closest friend sat on your bed and digging through her literal suit case sized makeup bag, eyes lighting up once she found what she was looking for and extending her arm out towards you.

“this one! it’s like a brown glossy color i think it’ll look better.”

you reached and took the little lip gloss from her hand, sending her a grateful smile before turning back around towards the mirror, unscrewing the product and leaning forward.

“what was wrong with the other one?” you asked, being conscious of the way you were moving your mouth to prevent from accidentally smudging the color. “i thought it was cute.”

“it was too pink.” she replied, hopping off of your bed to join you at your vanity, sitting next to you on the bench and watching you blend the gloss. “this one looks better with your dress.”

you had almost ditched the ball tonight entirely, given that for the last couple of weeks you had lost your will do to practically anything, but the relentless harassment from your close friend and the countless times she showed up at your dorm banging on the door and screaming through the other side about how you were giving up on an experience of a lifetime… quickly convinced you otherwise for your god damn sanity.

you sat back to examine the shade and hummed, nodding as you capped the product and handed it back to her.

“you’re right my love! thank you!—”

“has he texted you?”

your face immediately dropped and she laughed.

“i’m sorry! i’m sorry—” she swung an arm around your shoulders and pulled you in a little hug. “i’ve been meaning to ask but i didn’t want you to disown me…”

you huffed out a laugh and shook your head. “it’s okay babe… but no he hasn’t. and i don’t want him to.”

your close friend pursed her lips and pulled back a bit, her arm unraveling from you and lifting a hand to smooth out your styled hair.

“he um… he finally showed up to my defense lecture the other day.”

your quirked a brow and looked at her.

you’d noticed throughout the last couple of weeks that megumi had stopped showing up to the classes he was supposed to assist for, your curiosity getting the best of you more times than you’d like to admit as you physically went to the classes he often lectured to scope it out, only to be met with either nothing, or the professor themselves informing you that he hadn’t been in for the day and were unaware of when he would be back.

“he’s gonna get fired.” you muttered, turning back towards the mirror and snatching the little beady orchards clips you had for your hair from the desk, their color matching your dress. “…but how was he.”

she laughed and shrugged.

“looked the same to me! pale, skinny, mean.”

a small smile spread across your face, your arms coming down as you shifted your gaze to her once more.

“sounds like he’s okay.”

and you were glad to know that, regardless if he had hurt you or not… for a part of you would always care about megumi no matter the distance or circumstance.

“i threw a paper airplane at him during class.” she snickered, and your jaw dropped as she held a hand over her mouth to try and stop her giggling.

“really?!” you asked incredulously, laughing. “oh my god don’t do that babe you’ll get in trouble…”

she snorted. “i could care less what that man does he was awful to you. i wanted him to send me up.”

you playfully rolled your eyes and stood, walking over to your closet to look for your heels. 

“did he do anything about it?” you called from inside, rummaging through your ransacked hazardous fucking wardrobe and remembering how megumi scolded you to clean it just before your fall out with him, your heart aching a little at the thought.

you missed him yelling at you… ironically enough.

“he just grabbed it from the floor and threw it in the trash…” she grumbled. “which is a shame because i wrote him a cute little message inside the plane.”

you gasped and jumped out of the closet with your heels in hand.

“girl— what did you write?”

she crossed her arms and physically turned away.

“…nothing.”

“hey!” you giggled, slipping on your heels and bending down to strap them in place. “don’t be mean to him please…”

she gawked and stood, reaching for her purse on your bed and swinging the sling over her shoulder. “but he was mean to you! i had every right.”

you gave her a look and she rolled her eyes.

“i didn’t even say anything that bad i just called him an asshat and that he should work on his big mouth—”

“hey!—”

the ball was held at the grand hall on castle grounds, the venue completely transformed with aquatic configurations and various spells of manipulation that altered the environment, the techniques used so advanced that it entirely immersed the students into feeling like they were in a literal aquarium, tiny little fishies and eels and jellyfish that swam about throughout the walls and ceiling, the hall lit up in various shades of sea blue that illuminated the floor and the formal attire of the students— an atmosphere that was charmingly ocean-like and moody, with the live band only further adding to the feel of the event.

you noticed too that there was an ample amount of security around, more than usual as rumors just kept spreading about the zen’in clan and their plans to pay a little visit to the university, everyone confused as to why the clan wanted any business with jujutsu academy to begin with, but you had a feeling… you knew deep down… that they actually wanted business with you.

“be happy y/n!”

your head turned to your close friend, her looking at you with soft eyes and a reassuring smile as you both stepped into the hall.

“at least for tonight! don’t think about him.”

“i’m not!” you waved her off. “i’m okay!”

“you’re lying you little brat.” she scolded, pointing a manicured finger at you. “it’s obvious when you’re sad and you have been.”

your shoulders relaxed a little as you stared at her, swallowing down the forming lump in your throat as you diverted your gaze ahead, unsure how to respond without the fear of accidentally triggering a blubbering wave of waterworks, something that had been a norm for you since that night.

you tried to block it out at first for the purpose of not letting your grades slip… but your attempts pathetically proved futile when you ended up thinking about the things he said to you during lectures or while you studied— his words and the angry expression he had continuously flashing through your mind like a broken record, only fucking torture for you and adding to the resentment you felt towards him simultaneously.

he had looked so done with you… and you hated that he did because it should’ve been you who was done with him.

and you liked to think that you were.

except you continued to wish you never pushed his buttons, or never admitted that you loved him or even— met him that night and just rescheduled the training session altogether… you willing to settle for absolutely anything if it meant you got to keep him, no matter if you had to live the rest of your life biting back your fat tongue to prevent yourself from telling him how much you loved him, or how much the thought of a life without him was worse than the actual thought of demise.

but you knew that wasn’t fair, because regardless of how much you stupidly loved him, he was a dick for disregarding the years you spent together and speaking of it like it was something fleeting, when those exact years were everything and more to you.

“do you want something to drink?!” your close friend yelled over the music, breaking you from your spiraling. “i’ll get it for you!”

you quickly nodded and linked your arm with hers. 

“it’s okay i’ll just go with you!”

“kayy!—”

you both walked across the hall to get to the punch table, weaving your way through several sweaty groups and crowds before eventually reaching your destination, both of you grabbing cups and carefully pouring the beverages of your choice with a ladle.

your friend brought the punch to her lips and took a gulping drink, her faltering a bit before a slow sneaky delighted smile spread across her lips, tossing her head back then and downing the rest of it.

you giggled. “what? you like it?”

she swallowed and wiggled her eyebrows at you.

“it’s spiked.”

your eyes flew open and you quickly took a big ol gulp yourself, your pupils twinkling at the familiar taste of tequila that you hadn’t had in months since your last break back home, the university lamely depriving its students of alcohol during special events as they deemed it ‘unclassy’ and ‘unprofessional,’ though the entire student body knowing that the reason they actually did ban it was because administration got butthurt over a former drunk student vandalizing the school’s emblem, it usually cemented pretty and golden in front of the main castle gates on the ground… only for it the morning after that years ball to have a big fat red dick across the body.

today, the ghost of a fat red dick still remained on the emblem— blurry and faint— but still there.

that student was satoru.

“how did they even smuggle it in?” you asked incredulously as you continued to take sips of your drink, funnily feeling gratitude for the person who managed to do it that unknowingly contributed in the mending of your broken heart, even if it was only temporary.

your close friend shrugged, already pouring herself another cup full.

“probably a repression spell or binding charm.”

you quirked a brow.

“binding?”

“mhm!” she put the ladle down and brought the cup to her lips, drinking a bit before continuing. “like they maybe binded the alcohol with a sugar cube… that’s at least what i planned to do!”

she stuffed a hand into her chest and your eyes followed, her funnily rummaging in there for a bit and you trying not to laugh as she eventually pulled her hand back out and extended it, fingers opening to reveal two little pretty sugar cubes sitting on her palm.

your mouth hung and you both uncontrollably giggled then as you snatched one from her hand to get a closer look, your eyes glazing over the crystallized sugar and amazed at how good your close friend was at binding charms, though it something that shouldn’t have been a surprise to you since sneaky spells like that were her forte.

soon enough word got around that the punch table was spiked beyond repair, and dozens of students huddled around the massive fountain bowl throughout the night to either scope out the credibility of the rumor, or just straight up go for seconds, you being one of them as you had lost count of how many refills you got and instead focused on secretly tossing more sugar cubes in the punch for your friend, her using duplication spells to make copies of as many cubes as she possibly could, gassing up her energy until her creations went from solid squares to literal puddles of sugar water.

and by the time the ball reached its halfway mark, more than half of the student body was fucking drunk with the way everyone was rowdy and loopy and louder than previous years, you and your friend still standing near the punch table acting like silly little body guards— admiring your creation as the beverage went from its usual blood red color to a neon glittering pink, stupidly hoping and praying that faculty wouldn’t notice and you’d both end up successful and unscathed.

“y/n!”

you turned around and watched your friend literally stumble up to you, her hands flying to rest on your shoulders to stabilize herself.

“you know itsuki? from my defense class?”

you tilted your head in thought, your mind a little too buzzed to try and locate what the face of a man looked like that wasn’t one with deep blue eyes and spiky black hair.

“nope!” you cheesed, and she laughed.

“he’s the cutie patootie one! the one that brought us that batch of cookies that one time after finals?”

your face lit up in remembrance.

“oh!” you quickly nodded. “oh yeah him! what about him?”

she grinned. “he just told me that he thinks i’m cuuteee! we’ve been hanging out for a while and i think i’m gonna try and get a little kissy kiss—”

your close friend stopped then, face and body completely stilling as her gaze shifted to something behind you, her eyes widening slightly.

your brows furrowed and you made an attempt at turning around to see what she was looking at behind you, but her grip on your shoulders only tightened, her line of sight shooting back to you.

“what?” you pushed, panic rising in your chest when she didn’t answer. “what?! is it faculty?! are we in trouble?! oh my god did they see what we did to the punch—”

she finally spun you around and pointed up ahead.

it was megumi.

standing there directly across from you at the other side of the grand hall, hands at his sides and staring straight at you with the same alarmed expression you had, your heart making a big plummet down to the pit of your stomach as you stood there, the silhouettes and frames of students fleetingly passing by blocking your view of him from time to time.

it had been three entire weeks since you last saw him, and although the time frame was silly and meer… it was the longest you had ever been apart from him completely.

why was he here?

did he not tell you that the annual ball’s were a waste of time and boring? 

did he not tell you to forget him?

you felt your hands grow clammy as you slowly craned your neck around to look at your close friend, her meeting your eyes with worry written all over her face as she leaned in.

“you okay?!” she asked in your ear, trying to combat the booming noise of the band’s music. “why the fuck is he here?!”

“i— i don’t know!—” you stammered, your head shaking and you physically afraid to look in his direction again. “maybe he got put on chaperone duty?”

“then why is he coming over here—”

“NO!—”

your head snapped ahead to see megumi pushing through the crowd to get to you, awkwardly sliding his way through nooks and crannies and plainly returning greetings to surprised students who recognized him and said hello, you spinning around to face your close friend with wild afraid eyes.

“i have to go i have to go i hav—”

“what?!” she pouted. “why?! maybe he’s coming over to apologize—”

“or he’s coming over to chew me out about the punch!—”

“oh fuck!—” she quickly snatched the cup from your hand and set it down on the table behind her. “you’re right you’re right go!—”

you took a step out before your close friend grabbed your shoulders and wrung you back in again.

“wait! will you be back? are you coming back? are you leaving—”

you frantically nodded. “yes! yes i will let me just lose him really quick i love you—”

“i love you too okay go! go babe go—”

she ushered you on ahead and you sped off through the crowd, megumi’s brows furrowing as he watched you zoom in a different direction, him stopping and blinking confusedly before he backtracked and went the way he thought he saw you go.

fuck fuck fuck fuck—

you didn’t know why he was here. 

but it took literally every ounce of your god damn soul not to give in and walk toward him, especially seeing how he was actually dressed up in a little black tux when he’s never worn something like that before, the closest thing being the white button ups and lazily tied ties he wore to work on campus or your training sessions.

you pushed and slipped through crowds of people in a hurry, spluttering out sorry’s and apologetic looks as you tried to look for any type of leeway, a hiding corner or— or fucking something to get you out of sight and away from the grand hall, your heart beating out of your chest as you suddenly stumbled on the hem of your dress, you just barely balling up the bottom of it and hiking it up before you felt a pair of arms snake around your waist and pull you, your back colliding against something hard.

you didn’t need to turn around to know exactly who it was, you immediately attempting to break free by wiggling and pulling at his arms, you lamely struggling as the grip he had around your waist was solid.

“y/n—”

“let go.” you spat, squirming some more.

“stop moving.” megumi mumbled.

“no.”

“just listen for a second—”

somehow you managed to break free from his hold and you ran, you just getting out of the main entrance of the grand hall and down a nearby solo corridor before you were snatched back again, a surprised squeal slipping past your lips as you felt an arm loop underneath your knees and the other under your back, megumi scooping you up and your arms flying to wrap around his neck for stability.

“the fuck are you doing?!” you kicked and squirmed and he only kept walking, face blank. 

“i need to talk to you.”

“well i don’t want you to talk to me—”

“too bad.”

you gawked. “i’m giving you what you want so piss off—”

“i changed my mind.”

you faltered, eyes blinking at him before your pride quickly simmered up again and you turned your head the other way in defiance.

“bite me.”

megumi sharply turned his head, stifling his laughter as you watched the way his shoulders slightly shook, your own relaxing and your face softening up over the familiar melody.

your stubbornness could only take you so far…

you sighed softly through your nose and accepted defeat, your head gently dropping against his shoulder as he eventually composed himself and continued to walk.

“where are we going…” you mumbled.

“just up ahead.” he replied. “by the courtyard.”

you meekly nodded, your nostrils catching a whiff of his familiar comforting scent that was mixed with a little bit of woody cologne, butterflies fluttering in your chest then as you subconsciously, slowly, placed your nose into the crook of his neck, nuzzling it in a tiny bit as you closed your eyes.

megumi’s grip on you tightened.

“which cologne are you wearing..?” you asked softly.

he looked down at you for a moment before returning his gaze up ahead.

“dunno. i got it from gojo’s dresser.”

you giggled and nodded.

“s’nice.” your arms loosened around his neck as megumi stepped through the entrance of the courtyard. “you smell good…”

and so did you.

like strawberry poundcake.

megumi bent his knees and carefully set you down on the cobblestone paving upon arriving, the night air soothingly warm as the gentle trickling droplets of the courtyards central fountain filled your ears, the two of you standing there in front of each other with rigid postures and avoidant eyes.

you absentmindedly played with the little rich blue flower beads on your dress before megumi spoke up.

“m’sorry for what i said to you.”

your eyes flickered up to meet his expecting ones, trailing back down after a bit and shrugging.

“it’s okay.”

“but it’s not.”

his voice was weirdly firm, and you pursed your lips to try and keep your crybaby tears down.

megumi quickly realized that he couldn’t keep you at a distance that was beyond an arms length.

but that didn’t cancel out the fact that he was shamefully still selfish as fuck. 

because although he couldn’t tolerate you absent from his life in the slightest— him completely agitated and annoyed at literally nothing everyday since the day he yelled at you, skipping out on work and getting an earful from the academy’s administration about it, feeling fucking weird without you talking his ear off, or having you next to him to look after…

missing you…

he still stood by his rotten oath that tormented him every moment he spent with you.

“i didn’t mean anything i told you.” he mumbled, his eyes locked on your dress. “and i’m sorry i hurt you y/n. really.”

his gaze timidly crept up to yours before dropping back down to the cobblestone beneath his feet.

and you noticed then that he looked so— small, the walls you had poorly built around yourself effortlessly crumbling the longer you looked at him.

“you are a friend… and i don’t want you away.”

a sneaky tear slipped down your cheek, you quickly wiping it away with the back of your hand.

“but—”

your gaze moved up, seeing that his were already fixated on you— soft and struggling to continue and tell you whatever it was that he needed to tell you, him fidgeting a bit and playing with the cuffs of his blazer.

but you already had a feeling of what he was going to say.

“i uh—”

megumi swallowed, his throat dry as he physically couldn’t get the words out, him hesitant and afraid and conflicted over what he wanted to say, and what he was supposed to say.

but he had to… he had to man.

“i can’t return your feelings.”

you bit the inside of your cheek.

…of course he couldn’t.

“m’sorry… i just—” he reached up and ran a hand through his spiky hair, looking off to the side. “i can’t…”

you already knew that, since you were a kid you knew that… but a part of you remained hopeful for the infeasible for reasons you yourself couldn’t understand, knowing that you’d end up gutted and borderline ruined in the end.

megumi was unique like that. one of a kind. 

and someone like him, someone as sweet and genuine as him despite his delivery and attitude, those attributes being the very thing you treasured about him, the very thing that was so silly to you and made you laugh all of the time, was a rarity in itself.

megumi was a rarity in itself— a man that wasn’t made for you no matter how much you wanted him to be, and one that you’ve belonged to in a way that he hasn’t to you.

your little hiccup made megumi snap his head up, and his gaze softened, watching you dig the heels of your palms into your eyes with your head down, his battered heart throbbing in utter guilt and self hatred over making you cry again.

that’s all he ever seemed to fucking do.

he took a tiny step forward and gently wrapped his fingers around both of your wrists, carefully peeling your hands away from your face and looking down at you with subtle sad apologetic eyes, you sniffling and trembling as you trailed your gaze up to meet his.

“i’m really sorry sweetheart…” he mumbled, and your bottom lip stupidly wobbled even more over what he for the first time called you, you wishing on every star that it was under different circumstances than the one you were doomed and set to be in now.

through red glassy eyes and tear stained cheeks you gave him a sweet sad smile, you slowly shaking your head side to side and sniffling.

“don’t be sorry gumi.” you quietly replied. “it’s not your fault at all… you can’t help what you don’t feel.”

he set one of your hands on his chest and reached, his thumb wiping under your eye with furrowed brows and slightly down turned lips, his brain scattered and fucking everywhere, unable to decide what to think or do for you that would make you feel a little bit better, for he was dumb and incapable of shit like that to begin with.

“you’re still my other half…” you grinned weakly through your tears, subconsciously tilting your head and leaning your cheek into his palm. “even if it means something different to me than it does to you.”

megumi felt a sting through his chest and he nodded, stiffly as he continued to try and wipe away your tears with the same thumb, his other hand slightly tightening over your wrist.

“stop crying dingus...” he murmured, and you giggled softly through your hiccups.

he felt he wasn’t worth your tears at all.

“do you at least still think i’m prettyyy?” you cheesed lightheartedly, silly and bubbly as you pulled your head up and away from his palm— his hand shiny and wet from your tears as he stared at it.

“i do.”

and you lit up then, expecting him to fully deny it and delighted to hear the contrary, despite the fact that he couldn’t return your feelings— you were satisfied to know that he at least saw you in some form of a different light besides someone he just grew up with.

“kay… we should—”

he suddenly reached out and bunched your cheeks together, bringing your face in and squinting his eyes, sniffing.

“…have you been drinking?”

you stilled, wide eyed as you looked at him.

“no…?”

“you reek of alcohol y/n.”

“…no.”

“who gave you it?”

“um— the punch was spiked… and then i spiked it some more—”

megumi rolled his eyes and released your face.

“you’re an idiot y/n administration is already looking for who did it because the students are being dumb—”

your eyes twinkled as he scolded you, you having missed it immensely as your ears swallowed every jab and reprimand.

“—you turn into a knuckle head too when you drink how much of it did you have?”

“dunno! heehee—”

“oh my god—”

“found you.”

the both of you froze, wide eyed and staring at each other as you heard footsteps inching closer from behind you.

“you’re satoru gojo’s little legacy… right?”

megumi’s face hardened and he slowly lifted his gaze.

“get behind me y/n.”

“what? why—”

“do it now.”

you immediately shut up and listened, scurrying behind megumi’s tall lanky frame and peeking through the gaps of his arms to reveal a man, weird and scruffy looking as he stared at you like a piece of fucking meat. 

“ahh… pretty little thing too… they didn’t tell me that.”

your pupils blew out and you cowered a bit behind megumi, gripping the fabric of his blazer as you dug your forehead in his back in fear.

who the fuck is they?

“how did you get on castle grounds.” megumi pressed firmly, and the man snorted.

“you think a silly tiny sealing charm is enough to combat cursed technique?”

something dawned on him then and his gaze switched from megumi to you, a slow gradual and creepy smile spreading across his face.

“she has that… right..? cursed technique? multiple?”

megumi reached and moved you further behind him, him taking a step to the side and blocking you from the weird man’s line of sight entirely.

“the fuck is it your business?” megumi spat. “it has nothing to do with you—”

“ahh! but it has everything to do with me young man!” he grinned, giddy as he slapped his hands together and rubbed. “and by the way you’re pouting… it is her! ahh… i can’t believe it’s me who found her they’ll be oh so very pleased—”

“shut up.” megumi barked. “leave or i’ll kill you myself.”

you gasped quietly. “m—megs hold on—”

but the man only laughed, sickly and uncontrollable as he took another step forward, you and megumi simultaneously taking a step back.

“you’re dying tonight my boy if you don’t hand her over.” he tumbled out hastily, his dazed loopy demeanor quickly swinging to agitation and urgency. “and quick. they’re waiting. they’re waiting they’ve been waiting—”

“who’s they?” you spoke up, peeking your head out and megumi whipping his back to shoot you a glare.

the man’s eyes lit up upon seeing you again.

“the zen’in clan my dear.” he replied. “where you’re meant to be.”

your blood ran cold, the color completely draining from your face as you stared at him, the rumors and warnings and everything else that you’d heard for the past weeks coming to fruition in this very moment, it staring right back at you and giving you an eerie feeling that scared you shitless, you unknowing of why the zen’in clan wanted you so badly or what they wanted to do with you, the thought only making you uneasy.

and megumi’s suspicions were confirmed with the man’s confession, him having an inkling about it from the way he was desperate to keep his eyes on you, afraid to lose sight and impatient throughout the entire interaction, megumi irritated over some random jackass from that idiotic clan coming over to try and take you away… yet the undeniable feeling of fear still annoyingly evident in his bones, for he knew the zen’in clan was ruthless and merciless when it came to fulfilling their lineage with irrefutable power.

and you were the missing key.

“give her and i’ll spare you.” the man spat, hand extended and expectant.

megumi rolled his eyes. “so what is this then? a fucking ambush?”

“call it what you will.” he replied. “but i’m not leaving without her.”

without another thought the man lunged and reached behind to snatch you, megumi quickly wrapping an arm around your waist and taking a giant leap back, blasting defensive rays of blue towards the ambusher that knocked him off his feet and made him eat shit on the grass.

“don’t run.” megumi warned through batted breaths, and you quickly nodded.

“i know i know—”

“stick to me don’t go off anywhere—”

“i know—”

“don’t try to use your techniques either you’re not ready—”

“megumi!”

he quickly looked behind him and spun back around to grab you by the waist again, him hurling both of your bodies off to the side and avoiding the turbulent blow of the ambusher’s cursed technique, it instead hitting the stone wall behind you and creating a crumbling massive hole, the two of you slamming down on the grass and tumbling over a few feet together until you came to a sudden halt.

“give me her!” the ambusher roared from across the courtyard, his voice echoing. “you idiot boy you’re ruining everything!—”

you felt fucking useless and pathetic.

if you had just tried harder, paid attention more during megumi’s lessons and took it seriously, or actually built yourself up to be someone that could handle a situation like this, megumi wouldn’t have to be the one scrambling around and using part of his defense techniques to protect the both of you— keeping you glued to his side and carrying you everywhere so you could move with him as one and avoid getting hit, being a total fucking nuisance and not being helpful at all in the slightest when you should’ve been.

but the ambusher continued to manifest his techniques and recklessly hurl them at you both, destroying everything in his wake until the courtyard was in complete shambles— scalding flames over areas of grass or parts of destroyed walls, chunks of cobblestone and gravel scattered everywhere, and both men continuing to fight until the courtyard was nearly unrecognizable, you for the first time witnessing the full extent of megumi’s strength and inexplicably amazed at his critical thinking and expertise… yet it unfortunately still falling a few steps behind the advancement of a technique like the zen’in clan’s.

and amidst your aimless bickering with megumi in trying to come up with a plan behind a piece of broken wall, the ambusher suddenly pushed a massive purple flame that caused the both of you to tear apart unexpectedly, the two of you tumbling on opposite sides of the court yard as he quickly ushered forward.

“i need you alive—” he brought his hands together and formed various symbols directed at you, before you felt your body completely cemented to the ground and immobile, fear settling within you as you squirmed and struggled to break free from the gravitational pull of whatever it was that he put on you, megumi’s head snapping up and whipping around looking for you in a panic, scrambling to his feet once you were spotted and making a run for it to you.

“megs no!” you panicked. “go the other way!—”

“and i need you dead—”

you heard it before you saw it.

the familiar eerie buzz of a specific spell that was only taught through textbooks and scriptures, one that straight up resembled russian roulette with its low chances of success, yet nevertheless it still equally terrifying if whoever wielded the spell actually managed to get it to work.

it was death induce.

an old timey spell that’s outdated and outright useless with its supposed mechanisms, the incantation’s purpose represented in the name— to induce death, a spell that instantaneously stops all of your physiological bodily functions upon impact… but with a catch.

the spell only had a ten percent chance of success, with the other person casting the spell dying themselves upon failure, which is the sole reason why no one for the past several decades bothered to use it, and why the total required reading and studying you had to do for it added up to literally thirty fucking minutes, death induce being one of the most pathetic and time consuming spells of all time… and yet often completely overlooked.

because sure, ten percent was funnily low…

but it wasn’t zero. success of it meant death.

and as you looked across the courtyard, the infamously known yellow neon light that you’d seen a carbon copy of in your textbooks, the weird buzzing sound that signified it wasn’t any particular cursed technique or charm, the suffocating heat that radiated and burned your skin even when you were literally way over fifteen feet away, all signified to you that the ambusher was desperate enough to decide and play death induce’s game.

and yet so were you.

for the thought of megumi on the chancing verge of death petrified and nauseated you, the decision to partake in the ambusher’s idiotic ludicrousy one that was ridiculously easy when it came to megumi, regardless if it had to do with putting your life on the line and risking peril, you preferring it to be you knocking on death’s door rather than him.

but funnily, megumi preferred it to be him rather than you with the way he continued to agitate the ambusher, and bark at him anything he could think of that would direct his attention towards him and not you, rapidly pushing manifestations of his technique one after the other without a break just so the ambusher wouldn’t turn his head and see you vulnerable and struggling on the floor.

he needed to get rid of him. he needed to kill him.

because if what he was seeing in front of him in this very moment was true, if this stupid fucking moron was actually using death induce on him— dead or alive the ambusher would kidnap you and take you away, for megumi knew his level of training and technique wasn’t nearly enough for fighting anyone in the zen’in clan, and he wouldn’t be able to hold him off for much longer.

his body was in pain, throbbing and stinging all over with forming bruises on the surface of his skin, sweat dripping from his forehead and him freaking exhausted, his chest heaving as he prepared a defense charm to try and turn those chances of death induce to zero, facing the ambusher and waiting for the impact of scorching heat and blistering skin—

except it never came.

the sudden buzzing blast hurled a whirling wind of hot air that launched him away and across the courtyard, him slamming on the floor and rolling across the grass until his front knocked into a stoney wall and he stopped, a groan slipping past his lips as he rolled onto his back and squeezed his eyes shut, his bones aching and sore as he tried to push down the pain and get up.

megumi was utterly annoyed over death induce and how much of a piece of shit spell it was, but he was thankful that he at least surpassed its chances.

he cursed under his breath and slowly propped himself up on an elbow, one eye peeking open and scanning the destroyed courtyard in search for you, it hard to see through the smoke of the flames and dirt until—

he spotted you. 

on the floor and unmoving.

his face fell and he scrambled to his feet, booking it across the gravel and through the smoke until he got to you, getting on his knees and reaching out to turn you over by the shoulder, a chill shooting down his spine when you remained limp and unresponsive.

what the fuck happened? was the force that impactful that it knocked you away too? 

but— but that didn’t make any sense you were literally far away across the courtyard how the hell did you get over to him so fast—

megumi’s hands shot out and he placed his palms on your bare upper arms, finding that your skin was abnormally warm… and yet you were abnormally sickly looking.

why? why the fuck was your skin warm—

he continued to hurriedly feel across your skin, his palms flying from your arms to your shoulders, your neck and forehead until they settled over your cheeks, his breath quickening as he realized that maybe the reason why he had survived death induce… was because it didn’t hit him at all.

it hit you. 

and you fell under the ten percent.

“y/n.” he firmly called, him going a bit lightheaded when you didn’t answer.

“sweetheart—”

he readjusted his hold on your cheeks and gently shook your head, leaning over you with wide horror filled eyes and parted lips.

“h—hey—” he removed a hand from your face and placed the pads of his fingertips on the side of your neck just beneath your jaw, feeling for a pulse and changing his positioning over and over because he wasn’t fucking getting one.

he carefully set your head down and felt the other side of your neck.

nothing.

“god—”

he moved down and snatched your wrist, hurriedly feeling it around with his fingertips and borderline squeezing the life out of your skin.

nothing.

a low groan from somewhere else caught his attention and megumi snapped his head around, looking over his shoulder and eyes squinting— spotting the ambusher slowly awakening and rolling on a pile of gravel not too far from where he was.

he immediately put your wrist down and stood up, trudging over to the man and kicking him over onto his back once he got there, the ambusher letting out a wail of pain before megumi fisted his shirt and jerked him up.

“what fucking spell was that?! was it death induce?!”

the ambusher only continued to groan, his head lulling around.

“hey!” he barked. “who was it that you hit?! me or her?!”

with his eyes rolling back, the ambusher parted his cracked lips— voice hoarse and barely audible as he spoke, him seemingly dancing with the chances of life and death.

“her…”

megumi saw red then, throwing him back down and reeling his fist back to sucker punch him straight in the jaw, delivering hit after hit without mercy until his own knuckles were achingly torn up and bleeding, his heart pounding through his chest and feeling heat coming out of his ears as he knocked the ambusher out cold.

he didn’t want to believe that this son of a bitch killed you. he didn’t want to believe that you sacrificed yourself for him.

he didn’t want to believe that you were dead.

megumi let go of the man and stood again, running back over to you with his breath caught in his throat, panic ransacking through his nervous system as he reached you and got back down on his knees again, trembling hands gripping your shoulders and shaking you frantically.

“hey—” he wheezed out. “what are you doing huh? why’d you do that huh?”

there was still no response from you and he paled, hands going back to your cheeks and giving them a squeeze, blinking back the tears that threatened to spill as he tried to wake you up.

“please i’m sorry—” he begged. “i’m sorry baby i’m so sorry—”

he sniffed and quickly wiped his nose with the back of his hand, babbling and spewing out pent up feelings and thoughts that he never allowed himself to contemplate or acknowledge.

“i’m sorry i’ve been— i’ve been too mean i’ve always been too mean to you—”

megumi had always been harsh with you.

was this the price he was paying for that? was this the price he was paying for letting himself be blinded by his hardships and the inability to be emotionally and mentally stable, that he let himself just— inflict that and beat down someone as sweet as you?

“i didn’t mean any of it i didn’t mean any of it—”

why had he been so cruel to you? what did he think he was going to get out of it? what was the point when he loved you so much?

and why did you save someone as cruel as him? or forgave him without fail each and every time he yelled at you, insulted you, ignored you, made you cry?

why did you love him?

megumi’s mind went into a spiral as he shakily scooped you in his arms and lifted you up, your body limp and cold now as he ran out of the courtyard and through the halls, looking for some sort of open classroom or space that would allow him to try and bring you back, him ignoring every piercing agonizing feeling that racked through his body as he moved.

he was in a state of absolute denial— refusing to accept you were dead as he jiggled various door knobs or looked through classroom windows, hoisting you up further in his arms as he relentlessly looked, breathing ragged and cheeks flushed and his mind randomly flashing memories of the two of you when you were children, eating ice cream for dinner and collecting lady bugs by the lake.

would he ever get to do that with you again?

megumi turned a doorknob and it clicked open, his eyes widening as he kicked the door open and closed, speedily walking through the classroom and concurring it must’ve been some random botany class with the amount of potted plants and herbs splayed about, him making his way to the largest table in the room and sliding everything off of it— glass bottles and granulated cylinders shattering on the floor as he carefully laid you down, yanking his blazer open and shaking it off before tossing it to the side.

there was no such thing as bringing someone back from the dead, but megumi was delusional and lost as his eyes scoured through the classroom in search for any type of healing textbook, his gaze landing on a tiny bookshelf a few feet away and scrambling to it, pulling every single book out and hurriedly flipping through the pages in hopes of something that could point him in the right direction to fixing you, throwing and hurling any that didn’t help and cursing when he couldn’t find anything.

he ditched the bookshelf and made his way back over to you, megumi realizing then that he had to rely on his own personal knowledge and healing techniques to try and bring you back… when healing was the worst fucking skill he had, failing the class during his time at the academy and having to retake it nearly twice until he finally passed.

you were the one that excelled in it. you excelled in everything.

you were a gift.

with trembling fingers, megumi formed different symbols before placing his hands flat on your chest, a lime green light illuminating through your skin as he stood there hopeful for— for anything, but his shoulders dropping once the light flickered and went out entirely, like it always did when he tried healing techniques.

“please please—”

he tried once more.

and then he tried again and again and again— forming symbols and placing his hands over different parts of your body, him getting progressively more desperate and angry and fucked off that it wasn’t working, the way you increasingly just got colder and stiff— lifeless as you laid there limp, head lulled to the side with your lips cracked and the bags under your eyes sunken, the absence of your bubbly soul profoundly horrific to him as his bottom lip trembled and additional tears blurred his vision.

his healing techniques kept flickering away just as soon as he manifested them, and he kept trying until they were mere sparks of green and blue, him digging his fingers exasperatedly in his hair before reaching out, placing his hands on your waist and gripping at the fabric of your dress— the very same one you wanted him to see, and the very same one he didn’t have the balls to tell you that you looked absolutely gorgeous in the minute he saw you at the dance.

“baby i’m sorry man for— for everything i did everything wrong i shouldn’t have yelled at you i shouldn’t have—”

you had always been the prettiest girl he had ever seen.

“i love you! i— i do! i love you i love you—”

and it had been a privilege to grow up with you.

“come back to me please i’ll do whatever you want—”

tiny blue sparks buzzed from his palms as he continued to babble and hyperventilate, his hands grabbing and squeezing the meat of your skin through your dress, trying to get some type of feel of you that could fulfill his delusions that you were still alive, his mind continuing to torment him by playing different memories of his childhood with you.

“you’re just tired right? you just need to— you just need to lay down for a little bit baby—”

you couldn’t do this. you couldn’t shower him with love and the way you laughed, shape who he was as a human being, be the center of his world, follow him through every phase of his life and then just fucking leave.

megumi had envisioned it all with you.

you by his side, holding you, kissing you, getting the honor to call you his, you being his wife, you being the mother of his children— everything under the sun megumi had envisioned it all with you in foolish shame and resentment when it was anything but.

he was swimming in a suffocating pool of guilt that seemed to grab him by the ankles and pull him further down the longer he looked at you, dead and gone, him muttering nonsense and begging no one in particular for a second chance with you, not wanting you to be the lesson that teaches him to be a little kinder, but wanting you to be the one he comes home to and openly loves because he can.

he was stupid to think that he couldn’t. 

but it was too late, and through his mania of trying to awaken you, he thought about what gojo would do once he found out you were dead, he thought about the guilt he would carry for the rest of his life, and he thought about how he would be able to go on now that he’d heard you tell him once that you loved him.

through his blabbering and sorrow, the blue sparks under his palms increased in size and intensity, him unaware that he was manifesting part of his technique as thundering wind whirled around him, his wide wild eyes locked on you and remembering everything of you, placing his hands back over your chest and begging until—

an electrifying shock sputtered out of his palms and through your chest, the currents visibly twisting around your limbs as your upper body violently jerked up by the voltage, you laying there still for a couple of seconds before your eyelids flew open and you gasped for air, quickly sitting up and breathing erratically.

“oh my—” you placed a hand over your chest and swallowed, trying to catch your breath as your gaze switched to megumi. “what the fuck? wait i think i literally died—”

holy shit.

“i was in like— i can’t even explain i forgot oh my god it was so dark and then it wasn’t—”

…how?

“—and then now i’m here and i feel really funny like my skin tingles what did you—”

megumi let out a choked sob and you stiffened, him taking a staggering step forward and placing his hands at the edge of the table on either sides of you, his head hanging low and part of his spiky hair covering his eyes.

you blinked.

“…m—megs?”

you heard him sniffle and your heart dropped, his shoulders shaking and little hiccups slipping past his lips as he gripped the table, a mass of tears running down his cheeks as he stayed hunched over in front of you, choking and struggling to let it out as he cried.

you’d never seen him cry.

“gumi no hold on…” you put your hands on his shoulders and gave him a reassuring squeeze. “what happened? did you get hurt? what happened to that one guy—”

megumi lifted his head then and smashed his lips against yours, shutting you up completely and you freezing with blown out pupils.

what— what—

he was kissing you. like actually he was kissing you.

slowly, gently, he disconnected from your lips and leaned back a bit, him looking at you dead in the face with blood shot eyes and no expression.

your cheeks burned.

“what— wait i thought— what—”

“i lied.”

your brows furrowed.

“h—huh?”

“i lied. i love you.”

your eyes blew out of their sockets and you stilled, a hand flying over your mouth as you stared at him, your next words muffled.

“like— like as a friend or—”

“i’m in love with you.”

the same hand flew and slapped across your forehead instead in disbelief.

“yeah okay but like as a friend or—”

megumi lifted his hands and cupped your blushing cheeks, bringing you in and locking his lips with yours again— kissing you so deeply and borderline desperate with each mouthful, him swallowing you up as he took a couple steps forward through the kiss and settled himself in between your legs, your hands finding his wrists and gripping for stability as you tried to keep up with him.

oh my fucking god—

he pulled back with a tiny smack! and looked at you, both of you breathless with heaving chests.

“as in i want you for the rest of my life.”

you were at a loss for words, unsure where this was coming from after he had just told you that he couldn’t return your feelings, him looking at you all serious and breathless.

“but—“ you began softly. “but i thought you said—”

“forget what i said…“ he spoke under his breath, and he leaned in again with half lidded ditzy eyes to kiss you, completely enamored and intoxicated off of the way you tasted and the way your soft lips felt against his, his many dreams of getting to kiss you proving to no avail of what the actual thing felt like, and he didn’t understand how he went this long without it or how he could ever possibly prohibit himself from a privilege like that.

he was so fucking stupid.

he deepened the kiss and your hands shot out behind you, palms flat on the table to keep your balance as he pressed the front of his body flush against yours, kissing you so fast and raunchy that butterflies flew erratically in your tummy, this side of megumi completely new and foreign to you and one you thought you’d never get to experience.

and now megumi was a different kind of lost… one he preferred as he pulled away from the suction he had on your lips and dragged his mouth across your cheek, down to your jaw and down to your neck before he sucked and nibbled at the nape of it, his hand cradling the opposite side of it and the other kneading at your waist, drinking you up and giving you no space to breathe as you felt like little birdies were flying over your head, your heart thumping as one of your hands slid up his chest and fisted the white fabric on his shoulders, you licking your lips.

“m—megs—”

“shut up.” he mumbled against your skin, continuing his perverted literal attack on your neck as he slowly pulled the hem of your dress up and slipped a sneaky little hand under, settling on your bare waist and your face going fucking red over the feeling of his hand over the side of your panties.

megumi was a goner now that he knew what it was like to touch you in the way that he’d always wanted.

both of his hands slowly slid down and settled over your soft thighs, squeezing and kneading at them as he sucked on your neck, his lips eventually trailing further down to the plush of your tits and licking them up, your mouth hanging open and eyelids fluttering shut over how good it felt. 

you let out a little mewl of pleasure that snapped megumi from his trance, him quickly pulling his face out of your gorgeous tits and hands away from underneath your dress, his cheeks pink and mind replaying your tiny moan that went straight to his dick, a breathless huff slipping past his lips as he wiped his wet mouth with the back of his hand— the entirety of it coated from shamefully slobbering all over you.

“shit— m’sorry sweetheart i should’ve asked first—”

you pouted and tilted your head, disappointed doe eyes looking up at him. “why’d you stop guumiii?”

megumi’s cheeks turned a more vibrant shade of pink as he stared at your pretty face.

“because i was feeling you up without permission.” he mumbled, arm dropping back to his side and placing his hands on either sides of you at the table again. “i’m sorry.”

you grinned and shook your head.

“it’s okay megs! i—”

“no but…” he sighed softly through his nose and tiredly lulled his head to the side, the close proximity between you two intimate as he fondly looked over your features.

“i’m sorry for everything baby.”

you faltered, heat rising up your neck as your brain started short circuiting over baby.

you had no idea of what you had done that made megumi do a complete one eighty on you, the way he was acting so odd yet so endearing that you couldn’t help but melt at his sincerity… at his softness, your eyes searching his for a moment before you gave him a slow sweet smile.

“what’s everything gumi?” you asked gently, your arms lifting and wrapping around his neck, resting there lazily.

he leaned forward and rested his forehead against yours, eyes closing.

“for being mean to you.” he spoke lowly. “for yelling at you and treating you like shit all of the time.”

you softly shook your head against his forehead.

“you’re so silly.” you whispered. “you’ve never treated me badly megumi… besides that one night hehe.”

he sighed deeply through his nose and lifted his head.

“i’m a moron.”

you pulled your bottom lip between your teeth and smiled, letting out a giddy little giggle that made him smile.

“s’okay… don’t be so harsh.” you spoke softly. “you’re kind gumi. you’ve looked after me all my life haven’t you? fed me rice cakes when you weren’t supposed to?”

you leaned forward and placed a soft cutesy peck on the tip of his cold nose.

“no one told you to do that… you have a genuine heart that’s big and full of everything good that you think you’re not.”

god how he loved you.

and for the first time in his life his mind was quiet… serene, now that he’d let himself accept the fact that maybe he could have something as good as you, even if he didn’t truly deserve it.

because he didn’t, he’s awful and selfish for keeping you.

but he didn’t give a single flying fuck anymore, choosing instead to work for the rest of his life to be someone that had the right to have you.

megumi leaned and gave you a quick kiss.

“i really love you...” he mumbled, and you perked up and beamed.

“i really love you too!” you happily readjusted the hold you had around his neck and tugged him in closer, his hands coming up to snake around your waist in response and pull you against him tightly, his nerves officially simmering down once he felt the warmth of your skin and the beating of your heart against his chest again, him actively blocking out the memory of you in the complete opposite state.

megumi still wasn’t sure how he managed to bring you from the dead, but that night he refused to split from you and take you back to your dorm, opting instead to taking you home and you bouncing off the walls over his decision, the both of you moving quickly in your dorm as he helped you pack and gather your things for the weekend (and him giving you a look once he saw your still messy closet…), him looking over his shoulders every five seconds as you speed walked through the castle halls and to his car, interlaced fingers tight and cemented as he guided you, megumi literally traumatized from the events of earlier as he didn’t let you out of his sight— a hand on your shoulder, a hand on your waist, and a hand holding some part of your dress as you both moved.

neither of you were aware of the whereabouts of the ambusher, if he was dead or alive, or if there would be more… 

but megumi didn’t want to take his chances and just go home.

PART TWO | PART THREE

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