just another frequency in the static collecting stars, scraps, and strange ideas
i write things that hum when you read them
call me ‘bits’ or ‘bitsy’ 𖤣.𖥧.𖡼.⚘
orbiting year twenty-four, answering to she/her frequencies
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note: some posts explore dark and heavy themes; read the tags and mind your footing
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PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
WORDS: 3,410
SUMMARY: A rare snowfall in the Citadel leads you into a quiet alley where a Rick finds you “off-route” and unexpectedly luminous.
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WARNINGS/TAGS: MINORS DO NOT INTERACT, Smut, Fluff, Blowjob, Rickbot vibes ish, quickie
A/N: Rushed little one-shot I tried to finish before work. Please excuse any typos or chaos, I just really wanted this out of my system before clocking in lol. It snowed where I live finally! Cue inspiration.
The brick bit through your layers, rough enough that you felt it anyway. You’d slumped against a building that towered over the block, tall enough to swallow snowfall whole; nothing drifted down into this narrow, sheltered strip. Only scattered patches clung to the concrete, each one melting from the center outward until the warmth of the ground hollowed them into soft, wet divots. What remained were thin, stubborn rims of ice: delicate halos where the snow had died slow. Winter’s breath caught mid-evaporation, memory refusing to thaw.
Snow was rare in the Citadel. If it fell, it was because a Rick approved it—manufactured, intentional, an ulterior motive covering something you weren’t meant to notice. Even so, the dense, chilled air settled easily in you, cooling the static in your chest and syncing cleanly with your own frostbitten state of mind.
You cupped a cigarette from the wind, letting the flame kiss paper before it settled into a steady burn. Smoke curled upward in slow, deliberate spirals. Gray against gray, blurring the edges of the Citadel’s architecture. The ember brightened at your fingertips, sharp and alive against the numbness creeping into your hands. Winter stole the warmth too quickly, as if even your bad habits couldn’t cling to you here.
Business had brought you to the Citadel: brief, straightforward, nothing beyond a scheduled meeting and a quick return home. But the place drew you in. Its impossible scale, its cold seamed edges, the faint hum of a thousand minds at work. You’d stepped away from your designated path just to glimpse more of it, a detour that turned into distance before you realized.
Enough distance, apparently, for someone to notice.
You didn’t hear him at first, only the faint scrape of a boot against scattered ice, deliberate enough to be intentional.
“Didn’t peg you for the lurking-in-alleyways type,” a voice drawled.
A Rick. Of course it was.
He drifted into your peripheral vision, hands tucked in his coat pockets, posture loose in that practiced way that still felt like he was reading every microexpression you made. His gaze swept the narrow strip of concrete, the rimmed circles of half-melted snow, then settled on you with a quiet, amused interest.
“I was looking for you,” he continued, tone steady and infuriatingly calm. “Didn’t expect you to be hiding under a skyscraper. Good way to dodge the cameras, though.”
There was something disarming about the precision of it, like this meeting had been pre-approved, slotted into a Citadel schedule you’d never see. Your breath fogged between you, and his eyes flicked to it with interest, like he hadn’t expected that detail to matter as much as it did.
“Mind if I join your little snow exile?” he asked, one brow lifted.
You couldn’t help the faint, crooked smile that surfaced. You lifted the cigarette again, the tip glowing faintly like a tiny star trapped in your hand. It came out thinner than you expected, a ghost of a sigh more than anything.
You drew in one last breath, then angled the cigarette toward him in a quiet offering, a curve of your wrist. He watched you for a beat, something unreadable passing through his expression, before he stepped in and plucked it neatly from your fingers. The ember flared once in his grasp, accepting the shift.
You watched the smoke rise from his hand instead of your own.
“You wouldn’t be out here unless someone gave you a reason,” you said softly. “What was mine?”
He took a drag, slow enough to make a point, the faint crackle of burning paper sharp in the quiet around you.
“You’re off-route,” he said. “Not that I’m complaining. Makes my job easier when you wander straight into me.”
You gestured at the icy patch beneath you with a small laugh, your breath fogging in a quick burst between you.
“Does this look like wandering?” you asked. “Citadel can move around me all it wants, but I stayed put.”
“You stayed put,” he repeated, like he was sampling the words. His gaze tracked the outline your body had warmed into the wall behind you, the only proof you’d been there awhile.
“That’s what drew attention. Movement is normal. Stillness isn’t.”
“You’re telling me every Rick who steps outside for a chain-smoke gets a personal wellness check from you? That seems… wildly inefficient.”
A beat. A drag. Smoke drifted off his lips like he was buying time.
He scoffed softly, a single exhale of smoke. The sound was low, warm against the cold. “I don’t check on Ricks,” he said.
He held the cigarette out to you again, pinched lightly between two fingers, the ember pulsing faintly like it recognized its original owner. Frosty air curled around his hand, thinning the smoke in slow ribbons.
“I’m supposed to bring you inside,” he said plainly. “Assignment, paperwork, all that.” His gaze lingered on you like the cold couldn’t touch him. “But when you walked out, you didn’t keep walking. You just… stopped.”
His eyes flicked to the ice at your feet, the faint imprint of your boots pressed into the melting edge. “That got my attention.”
He shrugged one shoulder, an almost-deflection that wasn’t quite convincing. The movement sent a soft tremor through the air between you, as if the space itself shifted to accommodate him. “So yeah. I’m stalling. You make it easy to forget the schedule.”
Your fingers grazed his as you reclaimed the cigarette, the warmth of his last drag still clinging to the filter.
“Paperwork,” you murmured, as if tasting the word. “Is that actually true, or is that the part you’re allowed to admit?”
You inhaled again, letting the ember flare in quiet challenge. He watched the cigarette touch your mouth, something flickering sharper in his eyes before he smoothed it away.
“Paperwork’s the part they’ll put on record,” he said. “They don’t have a word for… whatever this is.”
A knowing flare lit within you. "Ah," you realized his motives were just shy of professional.
"You're waiting for my compliance?" You smirked. "You've got it."
Your smile shifted something inside him, a tightening around his jaw, a flare low in his expression that had nothing to do with the cigarette.
“Is that right?” he asked, voice dropping a shade warmer. “Just like that?”
There was something honest in the way he looked at you. Like your surrender, even playful, was not the outcome he’d anticipated… but undeniably the one he preferred.
“That’s not usually how this works,” he said. “Most people argue first.”
The way he looked at you suggested he wouldn’t have minded the argument. But he liked this more.
"I'm not most people." You flicked ash to the snow. "How do you want me, then?"
“How do I want you?” he repeated softly to himself, as if actually considering it.
He let the question hang in the cold for a beat, the ember between you two glowing like it had an opinion on the matter. Then his mouth curved, slow and knowing, entirely too pleased.
His brows lifted; he gave an incredulous little laugh. “Oh, you’re dangerous,” he said. “Asking questions like that.”
With the smallest rotation of his wrist, reality cleaved open. No grand gesture, no flourish, just a precise twist of intention, and the air split into a clean, vertical seam of green-blue light. He jerked his chin toward the entrance, grin lingering. “Let’s go, sweetheart. Before you melt the snow.”
Stepping through sent a rush of static pulsing through your chest.
The room was warm. Warmer than the Citadel ever allowed itself to be.
Lit by suspended motes of golden light, tiny hovering spheres dimmed and brightened like fireflies made of circuitry. A soft, amber glow spilled from suspended glass panels overhead: floating sheets of light that drifted slowly like artificial auroras.
A single window stared into the void, revealing a wash of stars that shifted in slow waves. Not a real sky; something he coded himself, too precise to be natural.
A wide, low platform sat against the far wall—not quite a bed, not quite a couch—covered in layered fabrics: warm grays, muted greens, soft textures built for collapse rather than display: synthetic-star blankets.
Your shoulders dropped as the heat soaked in, every muscle loosening all at once.
Behind you, his silhouette cut clean against the last flicker of portal light before it collapsed entirely. A faint click echoed as the lock engaged, no harsher than a heartbeat. The air thickened, not heavy, just close. Intimate. Private in a way the Citadel rarely allowed anything to be.
“Wow,” you breathed. “This is… cozy.”
He huffed a laugh. “You say that like I dragged you into my actual bedroom.”
You arched a brow at him. “Didn’t you?”
He grinned. “Semantics.”
You looked at him over your shoulder with a smirk you didn’t bother hiding. Not a full turn, just enough for the golden light to skim your cheek, for your lashes to lift, for your eyes to meet his with a question you didn’t voice and an answer you already knew.
It stopped him cold. His eyes flicked down to your mouth, then back up, and something inside him unspooled like a pulled thread he’d been holding taut for too long.
He stepped forward once. Twice before his hand rose, hesitating near your cheek. When you didn’t pull away, the hesitation died.
He kissed you like he was afraid to startle you: gentle, lingering, warmer than the room itself. A breath. A pause. Then deeper, as though the first taste had undone him entirely. He kissed you like he’d been holding himself back since the moment he saw you in the snow-shadow.
He caught your jaw gently, turning you toward him, and pressed his mouth to your ear with heat that left no ambiguity. The motes brightened around you like stunned fireflies.
"…That answer your question?"
The moment his mouth left your pulse, your whole body lit up. Not visibly, but internally, like a fuse caught and kept burning: humming, sparking, glowing in a place you couldn’t hide even if you tried.
A warm, fizzy laugh slipped out of you before you could catch it. Embarrassingly honest, giddy, the kind of sound that would’ve mortified you if his eyes hadn’t softened immediately.
You felt weightless. Ridiculous. Warm and stupidly delighted that this was the direction your afternoon was headed.
And from the look he gave you, he knew exactly what he’d done, like he’d do it again just to watch you light up one more time.
He cupped the side of your neck with one warm hand and kissed you again. Deeper, surer, a low hum slipping from his chest the moment your lips met. The kind of kiss that said, I liked the way you melted. Do it again.
Your fingers curled into his coat without thinking. The kiss stole your balance—just a little—and he caught you with a quiet, satisfied sound in his throat.
“Oh, you’re adorable,” he fawned, not bothering to hide the grin tugging at his mouth.
Your laugh melted into a helpless smile, your chest still buzzing, your pulse still too quick.
“God,” you breathed, “I hate how good that felt.”
His eyes went molten. “Then you’re really going to hate what comes next.”
“You’re impossible,” you said.
He dipped his head, lips brushing your cheek in a slow, intentional sweep. “And you’re charming when you’re flustered.”
Something defiant sparked hot as your hands maneuvered his belt with ease. You lowered yourself smoothly, gathering the fabric in your hand and tugging it down with you. He drew in a slow, bracing breath, as if the simple sight of you settling lower rewired his pulse.
Grace sharpened into quiet insistence, as if even gravity knew better than to touch you without permission. A movement that questioned, Who's flustered now, huh?
His chest heaved with anticipation, cock twitching in the hum of the air before you kissed softly at the head, one hand on his thigh. His lab coat slipped along your cheekbone with the faintest drag. Too soft to flinch from. Too deliberate to ignore.
He groaned through a sigh, his head falling back as he fought the urge to close his eyes and fall into bliss or watch you with fevered intent. Instead, his fingers found your hair like he needed the anchor. His inhale shuddered warm against your crown, a soft loss of composure he didn’t intend you to hear.
You worked him slow in your mouth and let your tongue trace the curve him first, a slow swirl intended to map his weak points. They were easy to find, uncovered with each hitch of breath, each twitch of his fingers tightening through your hair.
He meant to ease you down gently. He really did. But the moment he felt the give, the heat, the closeness, the hum of the room tuning itself around your pulse, something warm and reckless sparked. His breath caught: rough, surprised, delighted, as he folded inward with a quiet laugh that vibrated against your skin.
“You—” he started, voice breaking into a grin, “—are going to be trouble, aren’t you?”
You laughed, glowing all over again as he guided you to slow to a stop before he fully lost composure. His fingers stayed tangled in your hair, the sound of his heaves caught somewhere between his mouth and where yours was.
“Only if you’re lucky,” you whispered against his shaft. And from the way his eyes darkened, warm and hungry, he considered himself very, very lucky.
“Impatient, are we?” he murmured above you, knuckles brushing your cheek.
“Up,” he said softly.
You couldn’t stop the stupid grin as you hooked a finger into a vacant buttonhole of his coat and gave a single, deliberate tug.
A laugh ghosted out of him.
“Come on,” he said, backing into the glow as he drew you along. “You’re not staying on the floor. Not when I have a room this warm.”
The back of your knees hit the platform and he didn’t hesitate. He guided you down with a gentle but utterly confident pressure, letting you fall into the warmth of the synth-blankets as he followed you, bracing himself above you.
He placed a hand beside your hip, leaning over you with a grin that could’ve started wars, like you’d knocked the air out of him.
“Yeah,” he whispered, eyes darkening, “right there.”
“…Hi,” you breathed, stupidly, glowing all over again.
He moved with precision to shed the layers of clothing that still clung to your frame like he was settling a bet. A soft, helpless sound escaped you. He swallowed it, kissed harder. His hands were on you before the thought fully formed: one sliding up your thigh, the other bracing beside your head as he deepened the kiss. The soft platform warmed beneath you, the lights dimming low like they knew what was coming.
His mouth opened against yours, warm and urgent, lips parting yours in a hungry sweep that sent heat spiraling down your spine. His hand slid behind your waist, pulling you closer until you had no choice but to melt into him.
He gave no warning, no notice, wasted no time when he plunged himself inside you. You hitched a startled cry. His grip on your waist tightened as he worked the breath out of you. A devastating precision that made your whole body hum through the initial breach of pain. The lights above flared, drifting into spirals that mirrored the pulse flickering through your core.
He paused when you inhaled sharply. Then he kept going.
“Oh,” you managed: heavy, flustered, a little breathless. Your chest buzzed with giddy electricity, and you knew your face was giving everything away, but you didn’t care.
Your fingers dragged up his chest, and he groaned—quiet, but real—before moving harder, like he needed the contact as much as you did. A controlled press of his body into yours. The platform adjusted underneath you, warming, softening, calibrating to the change.
You felt held. Centered. Lit from the inside impossibly fast.
“God,” you breathed, half-laughing. “You can’t just do that.” The smile tugging at your lips made it very clear you didn’t want him to stop.
“Oh, I absolutely can,” he said, nudging your knee with his own.
You could feel your pulse everywhere. Your throat, your ribs, the tips of your ears. The heat bloomed under your skin so quick it was almost embarrassing. Your hands scrambled for him out of instinct, fingers curling into the fabric near his ribs just to steady yourself.
When he felt you arch into him, a laugh, soft, warm, and delighted, escaped him. He rolled your hips effortlessly beneath him, half-guided, half-swept by the momentum and his heat.
“Tell me if you want me to stop,” he offered, but nothing about his hands suggested hesitation when he hooked your leg over his shoulder.
“That’s it,” he guided, his thumb pressing lightly into the curve of your knee. “There you go.”
A pleased sound left him. Low, almost involuntary. “Oh, you like that," he groaned between thrusts. His fingers flexed with surprising strength as he pulled you a fraction closer beneath him. "I felt you."
“Don’t stop,” you managed. You felt yourself light up under his touch, and you couldn’t pretend otherwise.
Your agreement hit him like a voltage spike. “Fuck,” he hissed into the air.
His hand slid up your leg again, slower this time, almost trembling.
“I—” He swallowed as he let out a shaky laugh, the kind that started cocky and ended somewhere raw.
“I wasn’t prepared for you,” he admitted, voice unraveling in tune with his composure.
"Neither was—" you tried, breath unsteady. Whatever language you knew abandoned you on the spot. Your back arched into his touch; your eyes fluttered shut.
A soft, humiliating little sound escaped you. The building pressure was imminent. Your voice broke into a gasp as the floating motes pulsed in sympathy.
“Try again,” he coaxed, voice wrecked and warm.
You couldn’t.
His grip only tightened, warm skin on warm skin. His palm flattening against your waist as he rolled his hips forward enough to make you cry again.
Your breath cut through him clean, sharp, undeniable. He choked on a breath, lips parting against your cheek.
“Fuck,” he whispered, raw. “That sound—don’t hide that from me.”
"I'm not," you argued through the ecstasy.
You tried again to speak, drawing in a shaky breath that died halfway. Your inhale tipped into a tiny, broken gasp. The noise you made wasn’t a word at all. Just a soft, startled, helpless sound.
It undid him. His breath stuttered out in a half-laugh, half-groan. A shudder ran through him, subtle but undeniable. His rhythm tightened, pulling you flush against him before he could think better of it.
You didn’t realize the lights were responding to you until you were already shaking.
"Please," you begged. Your thoughts dissolved like sugar in heat, melting into something bright and breathless and impossible to contain.
It was almost embarrassing how fast it happened—the way your breath stuttered, the way your hips tilted into the heat of him without permission, the way your voice failed, cut off mid-inhale into the silence of finishing.
Your body broke open in small, helpless increments. A gasp here, a tremor there, your fingers digging into his shoulders as if holding on would keep you from dissolving completely.
Your fingers tangled in his hair as your body arched into his, seeking the steadiness he offered even as something molten unraveled under your ribs. Your thoughts scattered like sparks, no coherence left, just heat, pressure, gravity, him.
He pulled back half an inch to look at you, just to see the glow ripple beneath your skin and the expression on his face nearly undid you all over again.
“You’re—” He swallowed. “God, you’re unreal.”
His hips anchored you to him even as your body tightened beneath him, pliant and open and helplessly responsive.
“Do that again,” he whispered, voice shaking through is own undoing. “Please.”
“I just… give me a minute.”
You turned your face away for a moment, eyes squeezed shut as you tried to pull oxygen into your lungs. The warmth of him, the weight, the voice, everything tangled inside you.
“Take your minute,” he murmured, voice low and shaken.
“Watching you fall apart might be the best part.”
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fine print
PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
Rick Prime/Reader (Original Female Character - No Use of Y/N)
✧
Allocated (Part 2/?)
Preliminary Assessment (Part 1)
link to ao3
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WORDS: 6,426
SUMMARY: Running on three hours of sleep and the ghost of Prime’s hands on your throat, you drag yourself in early to cover a shipment he “forgot” to warn you about. Prime rearranges your schedule without telling you, lets your coworkers notice what he did to your throat, then walks in early to audit intake—and you.
NOTE: THIS STORY IS DEAD DOVE. DO NOT EAT. It deals openly with manipulation, coercive dynamics, psychological pressure, panic responses, substance abuse, boundary violations, and unhealthy predatory power imbalances. Nothing here is gentle. Nothing resolves clean. If you’re looking for softness or safety, this is not that story.
This is spun directly from my own trauma and experiences, so if you’re sensitive to that, please skip it and take care of yourself ✿
A/N: Hi all! This chapter was meant to run longer, but the universe had other plans—my car decided to self-destruct, my therapist vanished under circumstances no one will clarify (quit? fired? classified?), I started a new job, and finals are approaching like a slow, inevitable collapse of the waveform.
I am working on the second (spicier) half that was supposed to follow this one! I simply wanted this segment out in the open rather than held hostage in my drafts.𖥔 ݁
Allocated (Part 2/?)
The drive home cut through streets that your nav terminal insisted were optimal.
Back-city corridors, run-down suburban blocks, streetlights long overdue for servicing. From here, the Outer Ring unfolded in a way you’d never seen. The skyline glowed violet against the night, clear and crisp, a counterfeit blank slate hiding a smear of polluted haze just beneath the dark. An outsider’s perspective, dazzling from a distance, the OR's inner workings seemed tucked neatly out of sight.
Prime's touch still lived in you, a charge humming beneath your skin, hot and overworked. His residual current left your system conducting far above baseline. Your nerves lit like stripped livewires. The wrong ones frayed, synaptic chains reconnected dormant ones, assembling an entirely new circuit into something irreversibly unsteady.
You understood the risk. You knew how wrong it was to court disaster, to indulge Rick Prime of all people. Letting yourself respond to him was a breach on more levels than you could count. HR violations? Meaningless. Rick Prime was HR. He was the entire system. The structure, the scaffolding, the whole machine. Every rule bent around him.
Plenty of people fell for co-workers, supervisors, higher-ups. No policy could keep want contained. Lines were drawn to be crossed in the Outer Ring like a rite of passage. Interpersonal entanglements were attached to the areacoords.
A system couldn’t cage emotion, couldn’t cauterize connection once it sparked. And really, who were you to pretend you didn’t want the attention? Who were you to let some sterile company policy keep you from the sick, sweet thrill of being singled out? You weren’t the type to step away from being chosen, not when his attention hit like a strike of fate.
It wasn't love; you weren't naive. You were smart enough to know that going in. You hadn't been searching for anything real, hadn't asked for tenderness, and neither had he. You wanted the charge. Something electric to hang your thoughts on, to override monotony out of your day. It was fun. Predictably unpredictable. And you didn’t have to initiate a single variable. He controlled the sequence. All you had to do was comply, and so far, your parameters aligned with his. Sure, he'd gotten rough. That was Prime. You knew that, expected it. You just hadn't realized that you liked it—maybe too much. Scarily so.
His stare had told you everything. Intentions carved clean. Neat, presentable. You'd forgotten how intoxicating certainty could be: his especially. Delivered cleanly, effortlessly, you found yourself wanting more of his reverent gravity, of being wanted with such precision. It should have stopped you: how quickly your mind had begun to chase that feeling, how easily you found yourself wanting the steadiness of his choices more than your own. The truth surfaced easily: you liked the way your thoughts went still when his intention pinned you in place.
Prime said he wanted to push you past any sane threshold, past anything a rational person would accept. You were neither rational nor sane; if you had been, he wouldn't have picked you. That alone sparked something darker. Curiouser.
Maybe this endeavor was just a fucked-up detour into self-analysis. A crash course in your limits. Your hard boundaries—if you even had any. A way to measure what you could handle, what would snap you in two. Prime would find your limits; you never doubted that. He'd been collecting your tendencies from the start, archiving each reaction, each encounter slotting into an evolving behavior model he kept refining in real time, building some adaptive framework out of your breath and body language. Something frighteningly accurate.
Being studied like that was provocative. His intentions were unmistakable. You just didn’t know the shape of the path he’d take to reach them. And that's what got you. Already tethered to him, curiosity fused into a new chemical compound. Turning back was a non-option. You'd hooked yourself on him, tangled around his edges until it felt instinctive.
This compulsion to analyze him to ruin, same as he'd promised you, grew fast, stubborn like a weed that refused to cease. You wanted to understand him, take him apart, observe him the same way he observed you. The desire rooted itself in the clefts between your neural pathways, twisting logic into something feral and unchecked. You'd never met anyone like him.
How were you ever going to match him, keep pace with someone like that? Keep him interested? After tonight you were sure you'd find your footing next time, had to. And God, you needed a next time. You'd never been delicate. And Prime sure as hell wasn't a man who kept flowers alive for aeshtetics.
Prime had only given you a taste, something just enough to ruin your balance semi-permanently. He'd done so little, technically speaking. Just enough to overload your system, short-circuit any coherent line of thought. Irritation pulsed through you; he'd pulled you back before you'd even left. Cut the sequence early, designed the interruption to leave you wanting. Shattering you with the smallest fraction of what he could do was calculated: a behavioral hook so unnecessary it was cruel. You were already forming dependency. Prime knew not fucking you wouldn't change your mind; it would prove his point in bold.
And that fuckass temporary setup he called a room. You couldn't stop thinking about it. What did his real home look like? Would he ever let you see it? The mattress alone pissed you off. Thin. Utilitarian. Impersonal. Rude. The walls were bare, nothing to anchor the eye except him. You'd bet his home was no warmer, just polished in a richer architectural arrogance.
Your door hadn't fully shut when your terminal lit up. A single message from Prime, timestamped as though he'd know exactly when you'd arrive home.
P: Shipment hits before opening. I want you there when it lands at six.
Y: That wasn't supposed to deliver until Thursday night?
P: Change of plans.
Y: When did the schedule change?
The thread stalled. His silence told you everything you needed to know.
Y: You knew this earlier, didn't you?
I'm not going to have a team for the first few hours. Everyone's scheduled at 8.
P: Yes.
The crew reports at eight.
You report when I tell you to.
A spark of fury lit incandescent within you. It was nearly 1 a.m. and now you'd have to be up at 4:30 to hide evidence on your neck and show up to deal with shipment meant for a full staff. What stung wasn't the upcoming lack of sleep, it was the fact he hadn't said a damn thing about it the entire time you were with him.
Y: And if I don't show up?
P: Not in your nature.
You didn't bother texting him back for fear of wasting the minimal time you had left to rest. You'd expected to be groggy at eight for an easy open. Now, you had a shipment to oversee at six and the wrong roster to handle it coming in at eight.
Shipment was supposed to arrive the following day, your team scheduled accordingly then in the evening. The girls that opened with you tomorrow weren't incompetent, no, they just weren't as refined, weren't as quick. It wasn't in their job description to handle freight: they were Glamour Aides, not Task Associates. No doubt the backroom would reduce into a mess.
You made a decision then to not subject your openers to deal with truck. It wouldn't be fair to them. You'd just prep as many boxes as time allowed, do what you could before you had to open, and the truck team would be able to get a head start Thursday night since you'd be cutting two hours off what they usually walked into. This would actually make things easier on them—not you.
You planned your morning automatically: wake earlier, hide whatever bruises he’d stamped across your throat like signatures. You swallowed warm and wrong around the ache, the pulse of pain misrouting a line and turning sweet.
With the plan solidified in your mind, you finally collapsed into bed, limbs heavy with the kind of exhaustion that tightened. Every muscle ached, your throat tight with leftover fury, your body still beating too fast from the hours previous. Fatigue washed over you in a dull, heavy tide, pulling your mind under even as it tried to cling to thoughts of him. Eventually, even that slipped away.
✧
Morning didn’t feel like morning at all—just a jagged continuation of the night before.
You moved through your routine on autopilot, skin tender where you’d covered the marks with color-corrector, eyes burning from too little sleep. If it weren't for the overwhelming fatigue you might've been able to process the severity of the bruises. But now, as your thoughts were locked on the ticking clock, you felt nothing but urgency.
The store felt colder than usual, humming under the weight of fluorescent lights that made your headache throb. By six, you were already knee-deep in the pallets, arranging boxes with hands that shook from exhaustion more than effort. Every sound, every slice of tape, every beep of the scanner. It all hit too loud, too sharp. Your jaw ached from clenching. Your patience was shot long before sunrise.
And underneath the anger, threaded through every irritated breath, was the other thing. The thing you didn’t want to name. The thing he’d put there. Only when the familiar flow of shipment kicked in, your mind was able to wander.
Your body kept remembering him in flashes. His grip, his voice, the certainty carved into every look. It infuriated you how present he felt even in his absence, how he lingered like static in your nerves. You’d come in early because he told you to. You were running on fumes because he’d decided you would. And the worst part wasn’t the exhaustion, it was the part of you that wasn’t surprised.
By eight, when your openers finally arrived, bright-eyed and coffees in hand, you’d already completed the bulk of the morning's workload. Already earned the kind of praise no one even had to say aloud. That was the point.
You worked yourself to the bone because being the best meant being untouchable, envied, adored.
You needed to be the quickest, the sharpest, the most reliable. People forgive the indispensable. They forgive their favorites even more so you carved yourself into both. Working perfectly wasn't just habit; it was a necessary strategy. Efficiency was currency. Precision was a shield. You curated performance the same way you curated your charm. If you were well-liked, you were granted margins of error no one else received.
You smiled like everything was fine, pretending you weren’t vibrating with fatigue, pretending your thoughts weren’t orbiting someone who wasn’t even there. Someone that wasn't everybody's boss. Pretending he hadn’t gotten exactly what he wanted.
Fuck.
Learning how to work at your usual caliber with him this present was going to be trickier than expected—especially with the ache settling into your body from how little he’d actually done. And if this was the aftermath of barely being touched, just the ghost of last night’s contact, what were you going to look like after he didn't hold back?
You were halfway through counting the safe when the doors cracked through the stillness. Only someone with a key could get in this early. Someone who shouldn't be here yet.
Too sharp. Too soon. The sound snapped through your overworked nerves; you jolted before you could think. You kept your head down, swallowed irritation at the miscount that forced you back to the start. Your openers, bright and unaware, shot quick looks over their shoulders and stiffened. The automatic—oh shit, corporate's here—stance every retail worker knew all too well settled over them like a uniform.
You knew it was him, had to be. The sound of his steps confirmed it before anything else did. Prime offered your girls clipped 'good mornings' and headed directly for the backroom without breaking stride. The moment he cleared the floor, your two openers swarmed you, whispering frantically about why he’d shown up before open.
“Why is he here?" one of them whispered over the counter. You gave her a half-truth about the truck arriving early—clean, simple, believable. Easy enough to keep the real reason buried.
“That tracks,” one of them muttered, nodding. In half a second, her focus darted upward and caught the faint discoloration beneath your concealer. “Actually—no, wait. Look at me.”
You blinked. A second too slow.
A duo of hushed squeals of excitement and question. “Oh my god. Why didn’t you tell us you had someone over!”
Their expressions shifted instantly. “Ohhh. So that’s why you’re exhausted.”
A grin. “Who was he?”
You inhaled sharply through your nose. Naturally. If there was one thing your girls never missed, it was anything to do with makeup. You were quietly proud of their detail-hawking minds even if it was the last thing you needed right now.
Fuck. "Okay, okay—yes. I hooked up with someone," you admitted with a warm smile. "But that's all you two are getting out of me. I'm literally dying."
“Okay, whatever, miss one-night,” one of them teased.
"You look like you slept three minutes," she added. "Oh, I brought you a RiftBoost today! It's in the fridge!"
Relief bloomed warm across your face, loosening your jaw, softening the tightness around your eyes. You prayed it was sugar-free; you’d drink it no matter what. And honestly? You’d half-expected her to bring one; she always took care of you like that.
"If we cover replen and you don’t have to touch a single tower, you owe us more details."
The girls were still buzzing around you, bargaining chores for gossip, when the air behind them shifted. A subtle drop in temperature, a pressure change, the kind that made your skin prickle before you even turned.
Prime stepped to the front like he’d always been part of the room. No announcement. No cleared throat. Just presence. Precise, calibrated, inescapable. Your coworkers straightened instinctively, their chatter dying mid-sentence and you reminded them to finish their opening duties. A polite shoo. Your girls peeled away like petals, chatter softening as they moved, muscle memory kicking in.
He stood at the end of the cashwrap, across from you, hands in his pockets, posture casual in the way predators are right before they pounce. The overhead fluorescents were unkind; they exposed what he already knew was beneath the makeup.
“You missed the deeper ones,” he said quietly, voice edged with something close to amusement.
“Should’ve used a cooler undertone,” he commented. “It hides violet better.”
Everything inside you besides a smirk locked. Prime’s gaze lifted from your neck to your eyes—sharp, assessing, a subtle flash of ownership before he masked it beneath professionalism.
“Follow me,” he said. Not a request. Not even pretending. He turned and walked, expecting you to fall into orbit behind him.
You didn't move, not yet. Your body remained exactly where it was, weighted by policy and something older than policy: habit, caution, responsibility etched into bone. You let your gaze flick up for half a second, just enough to acknowledge the command, just enough to refuse.
“You can go ahead,” you said, voice even. Cash drawer open, exposed, vulnerable. You’d been trained better than to leave currency uncounted and unprotected. No one walked away from an open safe.
Prime stopped mid-step. The air tightened as his attention whipped back toward you.
“Safe’s open,” you reminded him gently, almost sweetly.
The sound he made in response was quiet, sharp, and not meant for anyone else to hear. He exhaled through his nose, faint amusement undercutting his annoyance.
“Diligent,” he murmured. “Fine. Do it properly.”
Every time you pressed a bill flat against the counting slab, the sensor beneath it thrummed, reading weight, ink density, corner integrity. Numbers climbed along the glass display, soft teal digits reflecting in your eyes. You trusted this tech more than you trusted most people. It made sense. It didn’t lie. It didn’t flinch. When the last bill clicked flat against the table, you closed the safe with a decisive swing.
The tally matched the night prior, digit for digit. No discrepancies. Naturally. You’d handled last night’s close yourself.
Prime’s voice followed the sound, low and almost amused. “Now come here.”
Your legs moved before your mind caught up, the thrum of exhaustion and adrenaline tangling into something unsteady. The sales floor felt too bright, too shallow. Not until he reached the backroom door and let it swing shut behind you with a soft hydraulic hiss did he look at you. The corporate mask was still there—clean lines, controlled posture, the faintest impression of professionalism. But alone with him, the performance felt thinner, almost transparent.
His gaze dragged once over you, from your shoes to your throat, stopping on the bruise peeking through your concealer like it had been placed there for him to check. The room seemed to contract around the two of you, the hum of the HVAC sharpening into a thin, metallic whine behind your ears. Exhaustion clung to your bones; adrenaline pinched your spine.
“You didn’t hide my work well,” he said at last. “You’re usually more prepared than this."
Not a reprimand. A diagnosis. He took one step closer, just enough to invade your breath but not enough to touch. Your lungs misfired on the inhale, breath catching halfway like your body wasn’t sure it had permission to complete the motion. The bruise beneath your concealer pulsed in time with your heartbeat, a warm, traitorous echo of the night before.
One of the girls breezed into the back then, humming to herself, scanning backstock for a missing SKU like it was any ordinary morning and not a psychological interrogation with your pulse caught in its teeth. Her presence cracked the tension clean in half—not broken, but delayed, like a blade hovering instead of falling. You exhaled silently, thanking every star that her timing forced the conversation back into safe territory.
His shoulders settled, the raw edge sanding down into something deceptively polished. A version of Prime designed to pass corporate audits, not cause them. He was astonishingly fast at it.
His eyes tracked toward the shipment you’d been working through: your half-sorted crates, the scanned-but-not-yet-filed units, the manifest open on your tablet. Prime's eyes sharpened. Calculating. He was already auditing your workflow before he even took a step.
You felt suddenly, stupidly exposed. Your solo workflow was nothing like the tidy rhythm you showed the team. When you worked alone, you let the system sprawl—shipments half-open, scanners tucked at odd angles, notes scrawled on sticky tabs, your logic threaded through it all in a way only you understood.
It wasn’t wrong. It was just… yours. The setup was efficient in its own strange geometry, but only because you were the one moving through it.
“Tell me,” he continued, voice low but crisp, “why your metrics show irregularities this morning.”
Prime gave you enough rope to speak…now he was pulling it.
His eyes held you in place. Clinical, unreadable, cruel in their clarity. You forced your gaze to stay level, but he had that way of looking at you like you were data he was gathering in real time simply because he was doing exactly that.
There were none. You knew that. He knew that. This wasn’t about numbers.
Your pulse hammered under your jaw, right where his eyes lingered. You opened your mouth. Dry, unprepared, instinctively reaching for the language of work. The only safe territory you had left. You weren’t prepared for him. Not like this, not now.
You prayed the SKU your opener was searching for was buried in mass-cos: the only section in the backroom that stayed disorganized no matter how many resets you forced on it. You silently campaigned for a lip-liner.
“Something's off with your audit,” he continued the facade.
He was giving you the courtesy of structure. The thin skeleton of professionalism draped over something far less stable.
“I don’t know,” you started to fabricate, hating the yawn in your voice. "I'm in the middle of intake."
The words felt flimsy the moment they left your mouth.
“I processed as much as I could before I had to start opening. Maybe the system flagged something out of order. Or it's still syncing. I was rushing," you bit. You didn’t say it, but the rest was obvious: because of you.
Too many maybes. Too much reaching. Too much air. Prime’s expression didn’t shift, not even a fraction. He just watched you. Quietly, deliberately, letting you finish every unnecessary sentence. When the silence finally dropped, heavy and embarrassingly final, you realized you’d said too much and nothing at all.
His head tilted, so slight it might’ve been imagined. “That’s your explanation?” he asked softly. Just terrifyingly neutral. A professional tone used like a blade.
Your opener eventually located the product she needed and slipped out of the backroom without a second thought, ponytail swaying as she pushed through the door. Her departure pulled the noise with her, leaving the air flat and too still in her wake. Proximity was its own kind of force with him, pulling your thoughts into a narrow corridor where only his voice lived. The door might as well have locked itself.
“So,” he murmured without looking away, “a one-night thing?”
"You're hiding in aisles now? Walk just far enough to stay hidden but close enough to hear me talk?"
Your eyes met his with flare. “Don’t act like you didn’t plan that.”
Your accusation slid right off him. “Hm, you’re exhausted,” he said instead, voice gentle in a way that wasn’t comforting. “You know that?”
Obviously.
Prime cut around the back with a smooth pivot, stepping over the scattered boxes in clean, precise lines. His eyes didn’t leave you, but he avoided every crate as if he’d arranged them himself. The mess didn’t disrupt him; it revealed how fast he adapted.
"Who was he?" His eyes flicked to the bruises he had made."...Or she. You strike me as adaptable."
A humorless laugh scraped up your throat. “Seriously? What do you want me to say?"
“I want you to say the thing you’re working so hard not to say," a pause. “Who touched you last night?"
A worn-out breath eased past your lips, something bright and stubborn firing beneath the ache. You had no business trembling like this just because he was looking at you.
“You,” your gaze dropped. “Does that satisfy you?”
You stepped around him, forcing your limbs to cooperate, and tugged the mini-fridge open. The cold air rushed up your wrist, sharp against the heat crawling under your skin. Your hand closed around your co-worker's gift like it was a lifeline, something solid in a moment that wasn’t, and popped the tab.
His gaze flicked from the can to your mouth, deliberate. “Still on peach?”
His voice dipped lower. “Fitting. Seems you developed a preference overnight."
"Why are you here?" It burst out of you, sharper than a whisper, softer than a shout. Your voice spiked, a brittle edge to it. “I’m running on three hours of sleep. I didn't even buy this."
Prime clicked his tongue as his mouth curved—barely, but enough. A soft, knowing sound that wasn’t near a laugh but convincingly assumed the shape of one.
“Sharp when you’re tired,” he noted, eyes brightening. “I like that.”
“Glad I could make your data collection fun.” You tilted the can with poignant annoyance. The fizz hit a sore spot, forcing you to clear your throat through the caffeine.
His gaze dipped to the can you still held mid-tilt, then back to your face, slow as a scan. "I’m collecting accuracy," he stated. "And right now, you're very accurate." The implication coiled tight.
A sudden rattle at the backroom door snapped the moment like overstretched wire. One of your girls tugged it open only a sliver, eyes wide with the early-morning brightness of someone who had not been psychologically cornered before caffeine.
“Hey, um—sorry,” she chirped through the crack, oblivious. “Do you know where the new testers for Lunar Veil are? They’re not in line.”
You adored her in that soft, workplace-family way, but being asked the same question you heard like a mantra every week tugged at the edges of your patience.
"Did you check the new-cart?" And you knew the answer would be a variation of 'no' or 'oh, right!'
Your coworker made a beeline for the new-cart, fingers fumbling over the packaging, trying to move quickly but quietly, like noise might provoke the corporate apex predator standing behind you enjoying the show.
She avoided eye contact with Prime entirely, choosing the wall, the floor, the ceiling: anything but him, before slipping back out with a too-fast, “Thanks, sorry, thank you!”
The door shut. The sound landed like a lid sealing, cutting the room into two pressurized halves.
“Why are you here,” you repeated through your teeth.
“The supply routes are wrong,” he stated. “Shipments aren’t matching manifests. Intake logs are a mess everywhere except here.”
A fluorescent hum buzzed faintly overhead, vibrating through the metal shelving. His eyes lowered briefly to the RiftBoost can denting under your grip.
“You’re the only store running clean data,” he said. “I want to see why.”
You blinked, incredulous. A cold spark shot down your spine. “So what you said earlier was a lie?”
“No,” he shot. “You misinterpreted it.”
Prime’s gaze flicked to your mouth, then back to your eyes, sharp as a scanline.
Your voice smoothed into that dangerous calm you only used when you were about to crack. “Then what exactly is wrong with mymetrics, Prime?”
He continued, undisturbed. “The store performs perfectly. You perform under strain. Those aren’t the same thing.”
His tone held the quiet arrogance of someone who knew he’d cornered you with logic. The air thinned. The backroom felt too small.
You tried to look away, anything to avoid how close he’d gotten, but his hand found your elbow, light as a tether. Possessive, guiding your attention back to him. The warmth of his fingers bled through fabric like a low-voltage current.
“You’ll come with me tomorrow. Another site. Then the distribution node.”
Not offered. Assigned. You hated how easily he made things sound logical. Inevitable.
A pulse of heat fluttered beneath your ribs, the smallest nudge that transformed itself into something deeper, something you felt like a pulse under your skin.
The contact held for only a moment, but it rewired the air around you. The room reoriented to him.
Your pride wilted. Heat crawled up your neck, pooling at the base of your skull. “You’re really good at making work sound like a privilege,” you sighed, trying for dry, landing closer to exposed.
“You have tomorrow off,” he said. “You’ll use it.”
“Excuse me?” You wanted to throw the RiftBoost can at his head. The metal felt colder in your grip, biting at your palm. “Truck is tomorrow. I’m scheduled until midnight.”
“Not anymore. I already got you covered.” He’d moved pieces on a board you weren’t even supposed to be on.
“With who?”
“That’s not relevant,” he said, voice smooth as a sealed document. “The shift is covered.”
“Prime, that’s not a normal shift,” you said. “It’s six pallets and four hours of sorting on top of what I got through this morning. Replen's been hell. If I bail on a truck night, someone’s going to pay for it.”
Your pulse ticked in your throat, quick and uneven, nerves humming beneath your skin.
“There are four other managers, Prime. Four. And none of them handle ops. Who exactly did you put in that slot?”
“You’re assuming I put them in your position,” Prime murmured. “I didn’t.”
The air tightened as he stepped close enough that your pulse jumped, your ribs cinching around your next breath. You caught the faint scent of circuitry-clean ozone clinging to him. Outer Ring labs clashing with the dusty cardboard and floral testers of your stockroom.
“Someone volunteered,” he murmured.
Not believable. Not meant to be. “But if it helps your conscience, that’s the version you can accept.”
His gaze dipped to your mouth. The shift of it felt like a finger tracing your lower lip, an invisible pressure you couldn’t shake. “And you will accept it.”
You could already imagine the chaos. The frantic pings of the group chat. The panicked messages. The mental image made your stomach tighten, breath going shallow.
“It’s not fair to dump ops on someone who’s never touched a truck night.”
Your girls would be fine. They always were. They had your systems memorized down to muscle memory. Their flow matched yours like an extension of your own hands.
It was the manager you felt bad for, whoever he’d yanked sideways into a shift they weren’t built for. You pictured them standing in the backroom, drowning in shrink wrap and the mechanical whine of the pallet jack.
Prime blinked once, slow. A mechanical shutter. “If a manager can’t adapt to a single ops shift,” he said, “they shouldn’t be in leadership.”
“And if they struggle tomorrow, they’ll learn. Growth requires discomfort. You should know that better than anyone.”
“You really don’t give people room to breathe, do you?”
Prime regarded you with that maddening stillness. No irritation, no reaction. Just that clinical calm that made you feel dissected like he was peeling back layers with his eyes alone.
“Room to breathe?” he repeated smug. “No.”
Prime folded his hands behind his back. Corporate, smooth, lethal. The movement was too elegant for the cramped stockroom, like he didn’t belong among cardboard and clutter. Even the cheap fluorescent lights seemed to struggle to cling to him, casting sharp highlights along his jaw while everything else dulled.
“You’re coming with me tomorrow,” Prime said, tone dipped in warmth. “I need an intake model only you can give me.”
Prime reached without warning. His thumb slipped beneath yours where you still gripped the can, applying the faintest upward pressure. Gentle. Quiet. Unmistakably intimate.
He pried your tension loose with nothing but that single soft touch, leaving the can slackening in your hand, your breath catching at the shock of how tender it felt. Your pulse tripped over itself, traitorous.
You exhaled hard, half-afraid of dropping the can, “I didn’t say yes.”
“I know,” he murmured. He didn’t raise his voice, didn’t need to. The certainty in it pressed against you like a thumb to the sternum.
Prime’s gaze softened enough to unsettle. “You think I’d waste your time?” he asked quietly.
“You’ll walk into work next week knowing more than your entire chain of command,” he added. “Tell me that’s not something you want.”
“I can come with you tomorrow and still do truck,” you insisted. “It’s doable.”
Prime didn’t hesitate. Not even a heartbeat. “Absolutely not.” He said it like a fact of physics.
"Tomorrow night's already allocated.”
“Allocated to what?” you snapped.
His answer was a low, infuriating hum. “You,” he said. “Tomorrow night is mine.”
A pause. “I have plans for you and they don’t involve this store.”
Your stomach twisted in the worst-best way. You looked away, lips pressed tight, trying not to show the shift. Trying not to show that he’d hooked you.
You didn’t want to see the satisfaction you knew would be there, but you felt it anyway: that subtle hum in the air, the one that came whenever he knew he’d tilted you off your axis. It thrummed against your skin like a second heartbeat.
“I don’t invest in things that don’t return value.”
You shook your head without meaning to. “Prime—”
Prime’s hand found the curve between your wrist and palm: a soft, shocking cradle of warmth that stilled your breath. Your fingers twitched, instinctively leaning into it before you could stop yourself.
“You’re tired,” he said, voice softer than his mask allowed. “But you’re still the sharpest set of eyes I have.”
Your gaze snapped to his. Heat climbed your throat, unwanted. You hated the way his smile softened like he cherished that tell.
“It’ll get easier,” he whispered, and somehow it sounded like a vow.
You felt the words more than heard them. It was the sweetest lie you’d ever heard. Sweet enough to rot.
“What will?” you breathed.
You blinked, unsure what he meant until his gaze dipped, slow and knowing, to the space between your bodies. The inches that felt charged enough to spark.
Amused, almost pitying, Prime’s eyes lowered to your lips, then lifted with surgical control.
“This rhythm,” he said. “It won’t always hit you like this.”
The word wrapped around you like a hand closing. A lie. A truth. A trap. Maybe all three.
Prime’s eyes softened in a way that made your throat close. It felt like being seen and swallowed in the same breath.
You blinked hard. “Prime… I don’t know if—”
He cut in, softly. “You don’t have to know. You just have to come with me.”
“You think I like seeing you this strung out?” he murmured. “Fighting me? Fighting yourself?”
The space between you recalibrated around the place his skin had brushed yours. Every breath rerouted through him.
“I’ll make tomorrow easy,” he said, sweet as honey. “Just stay by me.”
The endearment slid under your ribs like a warm knife. You shouldn’t have wanted to. But want curled low in your stomach anyway, hot and unwelcome.
Your feet stayed rooted, pointed toward him, toes angled the slightest degree in his direction, as if your body had already made the decision you were too proud, too tired, too overwhelmed to voice. A small, traitorous stillness settled through your stance. Prime read that as consent. He wasn’t wrong.
His thumb brushed once more against your wrist before he pulled back.
“You handled the route change beautifully this morning,” he said, voice warm enough to bruise. “Better than I expected, honestly."
Prime's eyes narrowed, reading. He tilted his head, watching you like a machine making an unfamiliar sound “You haven’t eaten,” he said. “Your baseline’s too low for it.”
“That’s on me,” he murmured. “I kept you up too long last night.”
Heat shot straight up your bruised throat. “That’s not—Prime, that’s not why I haven’t eaten.”
"I just…I got home late and didn’t… I couldn’t—I didn’t feel—” The words wobbled, came out thin and unconvincing. Not because you were lying, but because standing this close to him made everything sound like an excuse.
Each fragment tripped over the next, thinning into nothing under his gaze. You heard yourself falter, the explanation unraveling faster than you could assemble it. Your throat locked. God, why couldn’t you just say it?
“I forget sometimes,” you finished weakly, the admission slipping out before you could polish it. “I do that. I lose track. And last night just...”
Your breath snagged, “It didn’t help.”
It wasn’t untrue. It wasn’t fully true either. The habits were yours. The exhaustion was his and somewhere between the two, you’d slipped right past the point of hunger without noticing.
Prime shut it down with nothing but a look. A slow blink. Lowered lashes. A soft, devastating tilt of his chin.
His eyes said the rest—quiet, merciless, certain: You know what kept you up. You know what kept you from eating. I’m not the one lying here.
Out of options. Out of any words that would please him. "I hate you," you fired blank. Flat, thin, depleted.
"Mm," he hummed. "Not yet." A shadow of satisfaction touched the corner of his mouth.
He accepted it like praise because he heard what you actually meant: I don’t know what to do with you. You’re too close. You’re too much.
His eyes dropped to your throat, to the fading purple beneath your skin. “You hate how this feels,” that look said. “You hate that I’m right.”
His gaze locked with yours, steady, unhurried. “And you hate how much that already matters to you.”
Prime checked the chrono; the minute flicked over: the thin digital numbers blinking their countdown to opening.
The moment should have ended there.
Instead, Prime’s attention drifted sideways, toward the new-cart beside you. Product tipped at angles, rubber-banded in bundles. A swarm of Lunar Veil testers still unplaced. The soft shimmer of fresh stock peeked through crinkled tissue.
Without asking, without hesitating, he reached in. He thumbed through the entire Lunar Veil line with clinical efficiency, like he was scanning data points instead of merchandise. Powders, tints, glosses. Each flicked aside until he found what he wanted.
A concealer. Light-weight. Neutral-cool. Impossibly exactly your shade.
You blinked, startled. “That’s sellable—” But he was already unscrewing the wand with no hesitation. Not even the courtesy of pretending to care about inventory loss. The applicator slid out with a soft click, loaded with product.
Prime dragged the tip across his own thumb first, testing consistency, tone, slip like he was calibrating a tool. Then he stepped in close. His free hand came to your throat, tilting your chin with the gentlest pressure. Not up, just open.
Prime touched the bruises he’d made last night with that small swipe of concealer on the pad of his thumb, smoothing pigment over tenderness in a slow, deliberate motion. Each one erasing evidence he put there.
He worked with the kind of focus he gave to weaponry and test rigs. Calm, calculating, annoyingly precise. His thumb blended the edge near your jaw, quickly feathering the formula into your skin. Nothing in his expression said apology. Mine to mark. Mine to cover. Mine to handle. A touch meant to settle you. Shape you. Like adjusting a detail on a doll he had every intention of returning to.
He leaned back a fraction, evaluating the result with a softness that was somehow worse than cruelty. Perfect. Satisfied.
Then he slid the wand back into the tube like nothing about this was insane, placed the used product back on the new-cart with corporate neatness, and stepped away just as the store chrono signaled unlock.
fine print
PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
Rick Prime/Reader (Original Female Character - No Use of Y/N)
✧
Preliminary Assessment - Part 1/?
link to ao3
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WORDS: 11,708
SUMMARY: You manage operations at a cosmetics shop on the Outer Ring, the kind of place where the lighting hums, inventory glitches without warning, and every mistake traces straight up the chain. Unfortunately, that chain ends with Rick Prime—the one overseeing your entire district, the one who appears whenever a sensor flickers or a shipment arrives two minutes off schedule.
One night, a few texts turn into something else.
A pin drop. An address you shouldn’t follow. A moment that spirals from curiosity into panic, then something far worse and far more addictive you’re not willing to stop.
WARNINGS/TAGS: MINORS DO NOT INTERACT Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, R**e/Non-con Elements, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Manipulative Relationship, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Domestic Violence, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Dom/sub Undertones, Female Reader-Insert, No Use of Y/N for Reader-Insert, Rough Oral Sex, Drunk Sex, Psychological Trauma, Power Dynamics, Power Imbalance, Physical Abuse, Sexual Abuse, Dark Romance, Forced Bonding, Sexual Overstimulation, Alternate Universe
NOTE: THIS STORY IS DEAD DOVE. DO NOT EAT.
It deals openly with manipulation, coercive dynamics, psychological pressure, panic responses, substance abuse, boundary violations, and unhealthy predatory power imbalances.
Nothing here is gentle. Nothing resolves clean. If you’re looking for softness or safety, this is not that story.
This is spun directly from my own trauma and experiences, so if you’re sensitive to that, please skip it and take care of yourself ✿
Preliminary Assessment
The first time you spent time with him outside of work had its own strange sincerity. Smaller, quieter, and increasingly more dangerous the more gentle it pretended to be.
Weighed down by nothing but a fitted sheet and a duvet twisted into a careless heap, buried under a scatter of clothes you’d never seen him wear: simple, civilian pieces, impossible to tell if they were clean or abandoned. Tossed aside like an afterthought.
A mattress on the floor. No frame.
You sat cross-legged on the edge, pretending your phone held more gravity than the man humming with calculation three feet away. Apps opened and closed under your thumb, your screen locking and unlocking in a jittery rhythm you couldn’t control. Your thoughts scrambled too fast for the text in front of you to make sense.
Why would Rick Prime, the Outer Ring authority, walking knife’s edge in a lab coat, live in a shitty apartment furnished like a half-abandoned frat crash pad? None of it fit the man you saw every day.
Laughing at the idea snuffed like a match. The more you looked, the clearer it became: this had to be intentional.
The details hit one by one. A kitchenette with nothing but a half bottle of something cheap and a row of nutrient bars still sealed. No tech consoles, no datapads. No trinkets. No mess that meant anything.
“You don’t live here,” you said, and it came out sounding like you were accusing the room rather than him.
Prime didn’t blink. “Correct.” He didn’t elaborate, didn’t soften the edges of the word, didn’t bother filling the silence with anything that might make this apartment make sense. He simply stood there watching you work through the reality of it.
He watched the realization unravel there on your face, watched you try to reconcile the man you knew with the place that absolutely wasn’t his.
“Confusing?” he asked eventually, his tone touched with a faint, dry amusement. “Good. Means you’re paying attention.”
He moved past you with slow precision, close enough that the air between you changed. You tracked him as he crossed to the dryer, opened it casually, and pulled out a heap of clothes he’d washed.
It took you a second to register what you were looking at. These weren’t the mismatched casual shirts thrown across the bed. These weren’t the soft, unfamiliar clothes that made no sense on him. These were his real clothes, the ones you saw him wear to work every day, pressed and severe, the monochrome pieces that matched the man who inspected your deck and ad-sets with razor-bright scrutiny.
He snapped one shirt out and began folding it with mechanical precision. The lines sharpened under his hands exactly the way they looked when he wore them. Something uneasy twisted through your chest.
“But... you do your laundry here?” you asked, unsure why the idea unsettled you as much as it did.
Prime didn’t look up. “That surprises you.”
“You just said you don’t live here.”
“I don’t,” he replied, still folding. “This place is useful. That’s different.”
Useful. Not home. Not personal. Function, not belonging. A den. A drop point. A place to disappear into without leaving anything of himself behind.
You stared at the growing stack of folded shirts. So familiar, so perfectly him. The truth sank in with a dull, heavy thud. This place wasn’t part of his life. It was part of his schedule. And somehow, you were slotted at the end of his day.
Prime finally lifted his head enough to catch your expression, and a smirk pulled at the corner of his mouth, smug and sharp. “You’re figuring it out,” he murmured. “Smart girl.”
Tangled between irritation and curiosity. Analyzing his space was the last thing you thought you'd be doing here tonight. It wasn't the premise, wasn't the unspoken promise you'd solidified with him only an hour before.
He set the finished shirt aside and watched you with a form of quiet satisfaction. Prime gave a small, unconcerned shrug. “A man in my position needs alternatives.”
“So this is just… what? A place you use?” you asked.
“For what I want,” he said simply. His gaze slid over you in a slow, deliberate sweep. “And who.”
"Are bed frames too expensive these days?" You pointed out the offense. He'd invited you here for more than laundry, surely. Unless you'd misread the situation entirely; you thought he'd spelled it out for you.
The complaint hung between you like a question you weren’t ready for. This didn’t match anything you’d imagined on the drive over. Prime, mattress on the floor, folding shirts like someone with a soul.
If you hadn’t known better, you might’ve thought you’d gotten the wrong apartment. He started a second load one shirt at a time, the soft thuds of fabric hitting metal just loud enough to mark time.
“Are bed frames too expensive?” he echoed, lips twitching. “Cute.”
He stepped toward you, slow, deliberate, closing the distance like he owned the air in between.
“You’re not confused because of the mattress,” he gestured. “You’re confused because this isn’t the space you imagined being alone with me in.”
His voice dipped lower. “And you’re trying very hard not to admit that.”
You weren’t sure what to make of it, not really.
Part of you was proud. Stupidly, dangerously proud to be one of the few he let this close. You’d offered just enough of yourself to interest him. Presented yourself exactly as he’d engineered you to, and for a moment you let that feel like success.
Even if this was just one of his temporary spaces, one of his nowhere-rooms. Some pathetic part of you still counted it as being chosen. It was a staging ground. A controlled environment. And you were the variable. You still wanted, needed, to believe the invitation meant something more than science.
✧
Earlier that evening, the message slid across your screen like a provocation, a trap you walked into willingly.
A line cast glittering with the kind of dangerous subtext you’d let spool too far already. A thread tugged from the depths, baited too deep to resurface.
You’d been the one sending bold little echoes throughout the day. Words tossed like coins into dark water, hoping he’d catch the shape of them. Of course he would. You knew he would.
You’d fed the line and then he tugged it tight.
All the flirtatious static of the past month finally converged into something sharp and his message had cut through all of it. Refusing was no longer an option.
'Prove it.'
Even after a full shift running the orbital beauty deck, stretched thin managing a starlit cosmetics hub on the Outer Ring. You’d floated between cargo bays and sales floors, sprinting between broken holo-palettes and impatient clients. Putting out managerial fires that sparked faster than you could snuff them.
Efficiency demanded you split yourself into four people; the station never cared you were only one and the Outer Ring’s ever-present rush rarely promised space to breathe.
You saw him almost every day, though not because he had any business with cosmetics. Rick Prime oversaw the entire Outer Ring Operations Division (OROD), from freight routing to the R&D tech embedded in every fluxshadow and quantum tag your store depended on. If a display flickered, if a scanner misread stock, if freight arrived two minutes off schedule, he appeared. Always under the pretense of inspections, system checks, “observational data.” Your deck wasn’t just retail. It was one of his testbeds. And you, unfortunately, were one of the metrics he measured most closely.
His position sat cleanly above yours—oversight, audit, merchandising—anything ops was yours to answer for. Planogram deviations, delayed inventory adjustments, any margin of error so small it barely existed; it all traced back to you. With him, it was never the system that failed. It was your hands. Your oversight. Your responsibility to correct. Fault irrelevant. Classic management, really.
He’d been in the store earlier, overseeing plano adjustments with that cold precision he carried everywhere. You passed him when you came in for your closing shift, familiar tension flickering between you. He left a few hours later, but not before reminding you he knew exactly how to get under your skin.
Not with anything blatant. He never needed that. It was the way he paused behind you while you set endcaps, hovered close enough that you felt the heat of him. The way his presence ghosted over the bottom shelf you were adjusting, knuckles brushing against the back of your head like it was an accident as you wrestled slatwall panels into place. The way he hummed a low, amused sound when you stiffened and pretended you didn’t notice.
The dynamic wasn’t new. He initiated pull months ago; you swayed. A pattern formed. A ritual, almost. Not spoken aloud, never defined, but undeniably real.
You'd offered some part of yourself in the quiet. Your attention, your stance, your pulse. Prime pocketed it, unhurried and certain, like it was already his. And in return, he gave you those deliberate inches of proximity, those soft-voiced corrections, those glances that felt like being pinned and studied.
A prelude to what he really wanted: the slow pull only ever had one direction to go.
He grew bolder in the way a man does when he’s already mapped out every reaction you’re capable of. Designed it that way. Each day he pressed a little further, testing how close he could get, how much he could say, how sharply he could pull on the invisible string he’d tied to you.
Prime catalogued you long before you knew you were under his study. Once he had the data he advanced with lethal precision. He pushed exactly where you’d yield and pressed exactly where you’d resist simply because he’d already decided resistance was just another way of telling him where to touch.
When he realized you couldn’t cut it—wouldn't cut it—when you startled but stayed, he stopped pretending restraint had anything to do with patience.
Prime told you what he envisioned, what he expected, what he planned to take from you like he was reciting data he’d already verified. Not a question. Not an invitation. A controlled reveal spoken in his language. The kind meant to make your pulse spike, your logic falter, your defenses rise just enough to give him something entertaining.
And it worked. God, it worked. Your body answered before your mind even formed a thought, leaning toward the pressure he created, toward the space he carved out for himself inside you. Because he didn’t just grow bolder, he made sure you were prepared to receive it.
You caught on to what he was doing, knew how the warmth he offered was designed to hook you deeper. And still, you let yourself crystallize in the sugar of it, addicted to the twisted thrill of thinking he picked you above everyone else. You didn’t want to let go of it. The craving sat too deep, too warm, threaded through places you couldn’t unwind.
It started with sarcastic comments, the kind he delivered like tests. Then came the pauses, small, disarming moments where his voice softened just enough to make you second-guess the entire dynamic. A push, a pull, a current he knew you’d indulge.
Before long, you were texting him after close. Answering his calls on your commute. His voice in your ear on the way home, like he’d always planned for it to end up there. You'd let his prose become part of your nightly routine.
And then, as these things always did with him, it escalated. His voice grew lower in the quiet hours, threaded with a confidence that made it impossible not to answer. He’d speak like he already knew where your night would end, like your orbit had tilted permanently toward his. And you let him pull, wanting him to. Let him tug at your evenings and thread himself into the parts of your life that should’ve stayed untouched. It started to hit like a habit. Fast, familiar, impossible to break.
That was the danger of it. He made intrusion feel like invitation.
'What are you doing right now?' (Tell me exactly where you are and how open you are to me.)
'You sound distracted.' (Focus on me.)
'Did you eat today?' (I’m checking for weaknesses. If I find any, I’ll use them.)
'You don’t have to pretend with me.' (Drop your guard. Make this easy.)
'I like your voice when you’re tired.' (You’re easier to manipulate when you’re worn down.)
He’d ask where you'd go when you’re upset, who you trusted, what you feared, what you wanted. Each question timed to when your guard was lowest, each answer coaxed out with that calm, patient attention that made you feel both seen and cornered.
Prime had started with nothing lines, half-thoughts, little hooks sent just rarely enough to make you wonder what he wasn’t saying. Each one landed like a tap against glass. Somewhere between the gaps, between the three-word texts and the long stretches of nothing, something in you snapped. Deciding you needed more than the breadcrumb attention he fed you that afternoon.
Halfway through your shift you cracked and started texting him.
‘You left too fast. Kinda rude, actually.’
A minute later, your phone buzzed.
‘I had things to do.’
‘Not with me, apparently.’
You hit send too fast. Too honest.
‘You’re being bold tonight.’
A beat.
‘Be careful with that.’
‘Why? Can’t handle it?’
‘I can handle you.’
Your pulse spiked.
‘Then maybe you shouldn’t have left.’
Silence. Thin. Electric.
‘You’re worked up.’
‘Maybe.’
‘I want to hear why.’
‘You know why.’
Typing bubble. Slow. Intentional.
‘Say it like you mean it.’
You bit down on your hesitation.
‘Fine. I wanted you here.’
A final buzz:
‘Prove it.’
You didn’t answer.
Not because you didn’t know what to say, but because every word felt too revealing, too hot against your tongue. Your thumb hovered over the screen for a full minute before you locked your phone and shoved it away.
The remaining hour that followed stretched out in tight, restless loops pacing the sales floor, straightening shelves you’d already fixed, trying not to check your phone every thirty seconds. You told yourself he wasn’t waiting. Told yourself you weren’t either as you aimed your attention on closing duties.
Your screen lit up as you were counting the registers. Just a pin drop on your map: an address and nothing else timed minutes before your departure. The kind of message that wasn’t a question, the kind that expected movement.
You closed the store on autopilot after that. Lights off, tills counted, doors locked. The whole place felt too quiet, too hollow, like the address on your screen had pulled all the oxygen out of the air. By the time you stepped into the parking lot, the night was thin. Cool air drifted over your skin.
You sat in your car with the engine off, keys dangling from your fingers, staring at the glow of your phone on the passenger seat. That little pin sat there like a dare, like pressure building behind your ribs. You told yourself you didn’t have to go. Told yourself you could ignore it, go home, pretend you hadn’t seen it. Dance the routine again tomorrow.
Your hand maneuvered underneath the passenger seat, dragging a half-drained bottle of peach tequila from the depths. You drank in small, stinging pulls, claiming it was for your nerves. You weren’t soothing yourself. You were preparing. Because he’d said 'Prove it,' and some treacherous part of you wanted to.
Your hand kept drifting toward the phone anyway. Not to text—to call. Like you always did. Like the ritual had already been carved into you. Same as every night, convincing yourself it was your idea.
'I’m stopping at AstroBite, should I bring you anything?' like the pretext could hide the truth.
His pause was smug enough to hear through static. A synth-chicken sandwich neither of you expected him to touch. A paper bag as an excuse. A keycard into trouble.
The drive over was a mess, your nerves were shot, your hands unsteadily buzzed on the wheel as you eyed the navigation terminal. The nerves, the burn of cheap tequila, it all collided with the immediate. You were headed over to Prime's place. All to prove that the flirting, the late nights, that you were worth the attention he’d weaponized so easily.
The closer you got, the more that sick little fear gnawed at you.
All the teasing, all the late-night breathing shared through the receiver. He’d open the door and see someone smaller, quieter, less bold than the voice he’d been indulging for months.
He’d see the truth of you: nervous, overwhelmed, human. You worried he’d recognize the gap between the fantasy you’d fed him might collapse the moment you stood in front of him. Greeted instead by a trembling, wide-eyed thing not worth her salt.
You’d braced yourself for the man the station saw, the one you saw. Outer Ring authority, all precision and power. And instead you’d walk into that dim little room with a mattress on the floor and a dryer rattling in the corner like a tired heartbeat.
As if he didn’t notice the stark contradiction between who he was out there and who he became in here. He wasn’t the immaculate, untouchable Director everyone feared. Not here. Not in that apartment born out of necessity, not preference. Even if it was only temporary.
A space that felt liminal, like he could vanish overnight. Maybe that mismatch was the real danger, the way he stripped himself down without ever taking anything off.
✧
Your nerves must’ve finally irritated him, because he crossed the line without warning—flat palm to your back, pushing you down into the mattress like he was settling a restless pet.
Your laugh cracked in your throat. He exhaled against your hair, warm and dismissive.
“Quit complaining," not a request. A correction. Amused and annoyed at the same time like your small talk had personally offended him.
Your head dipped, curtain of hair hiding your flush.
The washing unit churned repetitively in the background, mundane and strangely brutal. You shouldn’t have been surprised he cared more about laundry than calming you down. That was Prime: priorities, procedures, the world according to him.
He was a man who ordered his world by touchpoint, by maintenance, by control. You were just the guest in his space, uninvited until he chose to make you part of it. The trespasser on a bed that barely qualified as furniture until he decided you’d earned your place there. You wouldn’t belong here until he allowed it.
His breath peppered your skin then, right after pressing his palm between your shoulder blades. Prime hovered over your shoulder, brought his lips to the exposed curve of your neck. A test of reaction, gauging whether you could carry the momentum of whatever he intended for you long after tonight.
His hand stayed on your back while he watched you, really watched you.
How your shoulders rose under constraint, how your breath stuttered, how uncertainty twisted into something warmer. Accentuated by the fall of your hair, laden with the muddled cocktail of perfumes you’d been marinating in all shift. Exacerbated by the growing flush of realized contact. The ghosts of a dozen perfumes telling on you.
Prime shifted, just a subtle lean. The mattress dipped under his weight as he followed the angle he’d created, lowering himself with slow deliberation, his face drifting into your periphery.
His breath skimmed your cheek first: a silent warning before you could brace. His mouth brushed yours, soft and unbothered. Prime's kiss landed with the same energy he folded with. Unhurried, efficient, barely invested yet precise nonetheless. A chore. A box ticked.
It chipped at something fragile in you, but you didn’t pull away. Agreed to the consequences before understanding the terms. The peach tequila found a home behind your eyes, settling into something bolder. A fragile confidence blooming only because he was close enough to conduit. You weren't drunk, no. Just fluttery enough for your body to skip a few beats.
A false bravado guided your hand, threading up to the back of his head with careful, terrified intent. You weren’t sure if you were allowed to touch him like that, if the moment permitted it, if he permitted it. As though sliding your fingers through his hair crossed a line kissing didn’t.
If it bothered him there was no obvious tell. Just hours ago you’d seen him polished and untouchable, ordering half the deck into submission without breaking stride. Now he was here, pressing the air out of you by simply existing within reach. Letting you tug his hair like it meant something pacifyingly domestic.
He kissed you slowly, deliberately, and you felt the curve of his mouth shift. Not tenderness, but ease. A private little smile he wore like a reward for pulling the right string and watching you melt on cue. A man congratulating himself for engineering your reaction exactly the way he intended. A man pleased with the proof of his own hypothesis.
He liked it—your sheepishness, the way you tried to make yourself small under his touch. He didn’t need fire from you, not tonight. Prime preferred the quiet before the burn and he knew he’d coax the flames when he was ready to see them.
He broke the kiss first, breath brushing your cheek as his brow pulled tight. His hands slid down your sides, gathering fabric with a rough, impatient fist. The moment snagged on cloth; his hands froze, irritation spiking sharp.
Lavender chiffon. Black ruffles. Tights.
The exact same outfit he’d seen you in hours ago on the deck. His eyes found yours. Steady and unimpressed, heavy with intent.
He scoffed sharp, almost incredulous. “I saw you in this earlier. Should’ve known it’d get in the way.” Prime leaned in just enough that his breath brushed your ear, his hands flattening deliberately against your hips: not to help, but to hold you in place.
“This is inefficient,” he hissed, as if the excess fabric was a logistical failure on your part, "Fix it."
You hesitated for half a breath, pulse ticking loud in your ears. Of course you moved. What else were you going to do when he told you to?
Fingers trembling just enough to betray you, you reached for the chiffon first, lifting the lavender veil to unhook it from the ruffled underlayer. Each adjustment felt too loud, too pointed, like you were confessing something with every motion. You kept your eyes down, afraid to meet his, terrified to stop.
Prime didn’t touch you. Didn’t help. His gaze dragged over every movement. Clinical, assessing, a little too satisfied as he watched you peel back the layered skirts for him like it was part of the protocol.
“Hm,” he murmured, a low sound of approval or critique—you couldn’t tell. “Should’ve done that before you showed up.”
You exhaled a fluttered breath, unsure whether to apologize or laugh.
When you reached the tights, sliding the fabric enough to smooth the clutter he’d complained about, Prime shifted his stance, barely, but enough that you felt the air change. Interest sharpening into intention.
“You’re nervous,” he observed, not mocking, not kind, just reading you like data he already expected.
"Yes," you admitted. Your fingers halted where they hovered over the seam of tights at your waist. The air cooled on your near-exposed thighs, acutely leaving you painfully aware of how little you had on and how much he controlled what happened next.
His jaw flexed once. “Don’t stop.” Not a compliment but not quite an order, more like he liked the way you reacted to him and didn’t want to interrupt the experiment.
He didn’t give you time to argue. You shakily maneuvered yourself free from the remaining layer, leaving just your underwear.
Prime's eyes met yours with mischief. “Good,” he murmured.
You half expected him to fuss about the rest of your attire but the black tank you wore gained no attention from him. You left it on, leaving you caught somewhere between relieved, thrown off, and a little bruised.
He joined you a moment later, lowering himself into the space beside you with deliberate weight, close enough that the air shifted. He closed the distance in a single, purposeful motion, catching your jaw between his fingers like he was centering a piece of machinery.
The kiss was different this time—not exploratory, not testing. More like he’d found the setting he wanted and pressed firmly into it. His gaze swept your face, reading every inch with that knife-edge precision he wore like a second skin. Prime tilted his head, a small, calculating motion.
You didn’t know whether to flinch or defend yourself. You didn’t get the chance.
A small flick of his fingers, a gesture more command than suggestion. “Move,” he said, chin tipping toward the wall behind you.
His gaze flicked to your throat, to the rapid rise of your breathing, then back to your eyes like he was watching something unfold exactly as he’d predicted. A second wave of nerves knifed through your chest. Sharp, hot, thrilling. His thumb swept a slow arc against your side, the smallest shift of skin against skin, enough to send a tremor of heat up your spine.
His hand lifted, fingers hovering a breath from your collarbone before settling gently. A touch so soft it felt like it cut deeper than anything abrupt could have. The pad of his thumb traced a deliberate path along the hollow just beneath your throat, as if testing the quality of your breath beneath it.
“You tense up every time I move,” he said softly, almost curious. “Relax. If I wanted you scared, you’d know.”
The mattress flexed under his shifting weight, and with him this close, you understood every stripped-down surface, every unfinished corner was designed to funnel your focus directly onto him. And it worked. Your pulse kicked. His eyes flicked to the movement beneath his thumb like he’d been waiting for it to spasm.
The pause between breaths was the only warning you got. Prime shifted forward, his gaze flicking briefly to your legs—a decision made in silence. Made by him alone.
You felt it before you understood it, the shift of the mattress, the quiet intention rolling off him the way the air reorganized around his movement.
Prime hooked his hands around your ankles and tugged. A simple motion, decisive enough to overturn your balance. Your back met the duvet. The black tank you wore rucked up along your spine, hair scattering into the sheets in a tousled spill of perfumed static and heat. He adjusted you until the angle suited whatever invisible architecture he was mapping.
Heat flooded your cheeks before you could school your expression. You felt off-center, too aware of your limbs, of your breathing, of the exact place he’d set you. You leveraged your weight on your forearms, angling desperately to see what he was aiming to do.
“Stay where I put you,” he said, voice dipping low. His hand found your hip with mechanical certainty, guiding you back into alignment as though correcting a miscalibrated axis. “Or I’ll start thinking you showed up tonight without a plan.”
His presence pressed in like gravitational pull, altering the room’s center of mass.
“Right there,” he said softly to himself, a thread of satisfaction weaving through the words. “Don’t move unless I say.”
You lay there, stunned, caught between anticipation and panic. Body slipping into that instinctive hush, the stillness of something small and aware of a predator’s shadow.
He caught the hitch in your breath immediately. “You get flustered fast,” he observed, almost clinical. “Noted.”
Prime’s eyes flicked down to your exposed navel. A tiny, surgical glance. Sharp at first, then molten, like your body was waking up under a heat lamp. Too quick to be admiration, too exact to be accidental.
He shifted as if he were about to move away, a subtle lift of his weight, a fractional pull of his torso. For a heartbeat you thought he was leaving the moment entirely. But instead of stepping back, he moved down the mattress. A deliberate glide of knees and forearms, his body angled lower, further from your face and closer to the center of you. Detached, analytical, like he was narrowing his field of study.
Your fingers curled into the duvet. Your breath shortened without your permission and you hated how obvious it felt. He looked like a man who’d only moved lower just to watch you react to him from above.
“You’re trying really hard not to move.” A light hum, almost amused. “Interesting choice.”
"You just told me not to." The words slipped out, equal parts defense and panic. You tried to channel the stress to your fists.
He tilted his head, that tiny, predatory tilt he did when he wanted to see something from a different angle. “I said stay. You’re not in trouble for reacting.”
His hand lifted from the mattress and found your knee—not squeezing, not restraining, just anchoring you with the weight of his palm. A subtle correction that sent a ridiculous surge up your spine.
“Much easier,” he murmured, as though you’d unknowingly cooperated with a larger plan.
He lowered his hand with deliberate care, letting his fingertips settle just above the thin elastic. His palm was warm, his fingers splayed slightly, each one claiming a small territory of fabric. The contact wasn’t forceful, but it carried weight. An unspoken reminder that he could shift you with a single motion if he wanted.
His eyes stayed on yours as his palm flattened against the soft curve of your stomach. A slow inhale, a subtle narrowing of his gaze. Like he’d found something unexpectedly beautiful there. His hand shifted again, higher this time underneath your tank, gliding up the center of your torso with reverent precision, like he was smoothing out the tremors himself.
He dipped lower, his breath skimming your skin in a warm, controlled sweep. The proximity alone made your muscles twitch, your stomach flutter tight. Somehow it felt less intimate than kissing. An unexpected relief, yes, but also a jolt of confusion, because what he was doing should’ve felt deeper, closer…and instead it landed with a strange, hollow distance you didn’t know how to name.
“Nervous?” he questioned, not looking up. He didn’t kiss you there yet. He didn’t have to. The almost-touch was worse, a teasing brush of heat that made your breath stumble. Prime lingered like he was amused by how tightly your body wound itself waiting for something he had no intention of giving.
Denial melted into a shaky inhale as his breath hit lower than you expected. “I’m not—” The words snagged in your throat, breaking apart before you could reshape them. You hated how honest it sounded. “I’m not nervous,” you tried again, quieter, as if volume could convince him.
Your hips twitched despite yourself; you cursed the instinct. Part of you wished he'd return to folding his shirts. His soft laugh said he saw everything.
“You sure?” he asked, dipping just low enough for his breath to roll over you again. “Because everything else is telling me a different story.”
Prime didn’t retreat. He didn’t touch you. He simply stayed suspended there, breath warm between your legs, letting the anticipation gnaw at you molecule by molecule. You could feel the moment stretching on purpose as his fingers spiraled prints into your skin. Elongated. Designed.
He watched every flutter, every twitch of muscle you tried and failed to smother. The duvet barely rustled under you, but he noticed even that. Your breath stuttered again, building quickly into frustration.
Another flicker of his touch overwhelmed you. The anticipation pulsed, gently overtook you, and your spine curved upward, lifting off the mattress like you needed to breathe different air.
He let the silence draw thin before speaking, “Mm. There it is.” Prime’s arm braced across your abdomen, blocking the rise. He flattened a palm over your sternum, catching the movement in its tracks.
"Uh-uh," he chided, a delighted reprimand that somehow felt heavier than a shout.
You froze under his hand, every muscle locking as if he’d iced your ribs with a single touch. The heat of his palm stood out in cruel contrast, burning while the rest of you stalled cold.
His thumb pressed lightly once, a silent command to settle. “Lay back,” he said quietly. “I want you where you were.”
“I—I’m sorry,” you breathed, unsure how to play any of this. The words slipped out thin and warm, like they’d been exhaled instead of spoken.
"Hm," he buzzed. His eyes sharpened with quiet satisfaction. “Relax,” he guided, almost soothing, almost cruel.
Your pulse jumped hard beneath his palm. He felt it, his fingers tightening just slightly, like he was acknowledging the kick of your heartbeat with private, silent amusement.
“I can’t—” the words broke as your stomach fluttered violently under another warm breath, “I... please, Prime." The words came out shaky, not nearly as coordinated as you meant. The demand you tried to formulate dissolved under the weight of your own rising frustration, raw and quickly dolloping.
His breath dipped lower again, closer, warm enough to make your skin contract in tiny, helpless shivers. You didn’t even realize until his eyes dipped and then the cold press of it registered all at once. The fabric was already wet. Sticking, betraying you in ways he didn’t have to say out loud.
“You think I didn’t plan for this?” His tone had that soft, clinical cadence like he was explaining a technical readout, not your own reactions. Maddeningly calm, "You'll adjust. I knew that going in."
Prime pinched just enough to lift the soaked weave from your skin—slow, deliberate, like he wanted to feel the weight of the dampness between his fingertips.
"I know you." His thumb stroked a small line, coaxing a tremor from you he definitely meant to cause. “Even here.” He watched your face, smugness softening into that sickly-sweet tone he used when he wanted someone pliant. Syrup over a blade, warm enough to lure, sharp enough to warn.
“Please," he echoed you. "You’re easier to read than half the tech I audit." Prime continued brushing your inner thigh like he was indulging innocence. Petting your nerves down until they followed his orders.
“No, that’s not—I just thought…” You stopped, eyes dropping away as your legs grew hot. “It's fast, that's all."
Prime's eyes narrowed. "You haven't seen fast. Fast is what happens when I stop giving you warnings."
Your knees bent slightly, legs drawing in a fraction without your permission, like your body was folding around the sensation rather than bracing against it. Prime teased harder, the pressure sharpening just enough to make your breath hitch, his touch no longer a suggestion but a deliberate provocation. Pinching and dragging the damp fabric with a firmer pull, the movement grazing your skin in a way that forced a trembling, involuntary sound to the back of your throat.
“Quit acting like you don't know me," he lured quietly, almost offended you’d questioned him. "We work together nearly every day. You hit my line like an addict."
His voice softened into velvet alert. “I’ve seen every version of you,” he mused. “Stressed. Tired. Irritated. Flustered. Trying so hard to pretend you’re composed.”
A quick flicker of amusement cut across his mouth, sharp and glinting. Sweet in the way poison is. Razor edges lacquered in honey. You tried to decipher how to move, or if you should say anything, but your body stayed locked under him, caught between instinct and caution. Your tongue hesitant as every option seemed wrong, risky, or exactly what he wanted.
Your breath stalled. His knee pressed into the mattress beside your hip, sinking it just slightly, enough that your body tilted toward him.
"You’re very good at what you do. Annoyingly so." The words were soft, “You perform better than anyone else on that deck. You think I wouldn’t notice you past that?” The sudden compliment slipped out with surgical accuracy, aimed to make you flinch or blush—or both. The angle of him blocked the light. Blocked everything.
You didn't dare interrupt him. You didn’t dare break eye contact, held there by something sharp and magnetic in his stare, like you'd shatter if you looked anywhere else.
“I’m your direct superior,” Prime gently reminded, voice dipping into something almost possessive. “I trained you, cherry-picked you."
He continued toying, fingers precise in their refusal, giving you nothing but the poignant edge of almost-sensation. The result was predictable: your hips shifted without permission, your breath broke into small, desperate sounds he clearly wanted to hear.
“And this—” he slid, watching your chest stutter under his touch, “this little jump in your breathing? Same as when I stand behind you at the palette bar.”
Prime teased you with such maddening precision that your thoughts dissolved into static, every rational thread burning away. Need eclipsing everything else. Every breath, every tremor, every sound narrowed. All that remained pulsing repetitively through your skull was 'please just touch me.'
“And now you’re lying here,” he cooed, “breathing the same way you do when you’re trying not to look at me in front of half your truck team.”
A low hum followed, almost amused as his finger traced the tremor running through your ribs. He shifted the lightest fraction on your collarbone. He watched the way your pupils stuttered, watched the twitch in your lower lip, watched you try to steady yourself underneath his hands. Collarbone and core.
"You think this is pretending?" You scoffed through a breathy inhale. "I'm here because I wanted to come," you admitted desperately, as if offering the truth might earn you something. Leniency, closeness, a little more of his touch.
“You’re here because I wanted you here," he corrected. “And you came...” he added, smirk haunting back into place, “knowing exactly who I am. Knowing exactly what I do to people. Knew exactly what that meant.”
You fought it. Bit down on it. But he made it impossible. You didn’t want to have to beg—God, you tried to hold the line—but his words softened something through you.
"Do something. Please," you cried. Hot, humiliating. Prime ignored your request.
“Tell me something,” he queried, voice so gentle it made the pressure worse. “When you were driving over here… when you were rehearsing every possible scenario in that little head of yours…”
His lips brushed the air above your cheek, deliberate and careful. You forgot to breathe.
“…did you ever once imagine,” Prime whispered, continued scratching over your center with care, “that I’d let you leave untouched?”
Your heart lurched painfully, audibly.
His smirk answered for you. “No. I didn’t think so.”
Prime closed the distance again. Slower this time, deeper, not rushed but inevitable, like he’d been waiting to confirm what he already knew. His breath warmed your mouth. It wasn't even deep. Just a claiming press of his mouth against yours, like he was verifying something he’d already built a theory around.
He took his hand away, guided it up to your jaw, fingers firm. The noise that broke out of you was tiny and desperate, a helpless protest at the loss of his touch.
Prime pulled back only an inch, barely enough space for air, and looked at you with a slow, blooming smirk that told you he’d found exactly what he was searching for. A soft, dismissive sound that almost passed for a laugh vibrated within his chest.
His fingers trailed just beneath your lower lip, collecting the faint, peachy scent lingering there. “You walk in here half-shaking, half-bracing, cheeks warm, pupils blown…and you think I wouldn’t taste that shot or two you took for courage?”
You opened your mouth—maybe to deny it, maybe to breathe—but he leaned in, voice dropping to a silk-edged whisper that brushed your lower lip.
Prime tilted your chin up with two fingers, guiding your line of sight to his like he was adjusting the angle on a scanner. “Don’t bother hiding it,” he smirked. He brought a knee to the crook of your legs, pressing in just enough to make your hips jolt toward him before you could stop yourself.
"Come on, you're fine. I didn’t say anything you can’t handle," he purred.
“God,” he added softly, mock-admiring. “You’re so much cuter when you try to, though.”
His thumb slipped from your jaw to your throat in a slow drag. Prime slotted his hand against the curve of your neck. “And I like watching you fail at it.”
Prime let the word 'cute' settle over you like dust. He watched the way your jaw clenched, the way your breath shook unevenly through your nose, the way your fingers curled in the duvet as if your body was trying to outrun the embarrassment he’d pinned you to.
Without breaking eye contact Prime withdrew, reached over to a small metal tray on the floor beside the mattress.
You shimmied back, retreating until your spine met the wall, until you could steady. You lifted a trembling hand to fix your hair, as if smoothing it might disguise what he’d done to you. Thighs pressed tight, a small relief of pressure. You brought your knees together, trying to hide the growing mess. It felt pointless: he’d already seen too much.
Prime presented a small glass vial. Clear. Cold. Something distilled and merciless sat inside, catching the dim light. He held it between two fingers, rolling it slowly, deliberately, like he was preserving data. Like this was another observation he already knew the result of.
“You want another?” he asked, tone lilting in that soft, almost affectionate mockery he saved only for you. “Since you clearly need it tonight.”
You glared through fire, "So you just had that there?" It was instinctive, sharp.
Prime’s smirk returned instantly. The soft one. “There it is,” he approved, amused. “A little backbone.”
He lifted the vial closer, letting it hover just inches from your lips, not touching, but enough that you could smell the clean, sterile bite of alcohol.
“Aw, don’t look at me like that,” he said, voice dropping warm and poisonous. “You’re the one who needed liquid courage just to knock on my door.”
You tightened your jaw, throat thick with indignation. “I don’t need—”
“Oh. You do,” he said calmly, cutting you off. “You proved that the moment you got dizzy in my hands.”
Your glare deepened, and Prime’s eyes glittered like you’d just confirmed another hypothesis.
“Go on,” he hummed, tilting the vial slightly. “Glare at me. That's cute too.”
His eyes never left yours as he brought the vial to his mouth, the glass touching his lower lip with a soft, final click. He tilted his head back slightly, throat exposed for a fraction of a second, and swallowed the shot in a smooth, unbroken pull.
“Wow,” you said, tone tight. “Seems like you've had a lot of practice.” Anger knotted with want in a way that made your chest tighten. It wasn’t fair how quickly your body missed the pressure of his hand. All need, no logic.
Prime inhaled a soft, amused sound that made your stomach flip. “Mm,” he hummed, tilting his head. “Smart girl."
He came back to you with unexpected care, a softness that didn’t match the sting he’d left behind. Prime's fingertips brushed your skin in slow, almost affectionate sweeps. Petting you back into place. Calming you like he hadn’t caused the reaction in the first place.
"We're even now... unless you drank more than you're letting on. If that's the case I don't mind catching up." He let his fingers run a lazy line down your sternum, stopping just shy of your ribs, a gesture halfway between affection and examination.
“No, you know what? Give me a shot,” you demanded. You refused to melt for him again—not without something more to hold onto. Not after the way he fed empty praise.
"You're not getting drunk tonight,” Prime laughed like it was obvious. “You think I’d waste your first time here?”
A small click of his tongue. “No. I want you remembering every second.”
His smile softened into something terrible. “And don’t worry,” Prime added. His voice dropped into a low, intimate mockery. “This is the last time you’ll ever be here this sober.”
Eyes glittered malicious and bright, like broken glass catching the light right before it cuts. “You won’t need tequila next time. I’ll handle that part.”
Your stomach plunged, that dizzy-mistake feeling of missing a step on a moving walkway, and for a heartbeat you nearly pushed him off you. "The fuck does that mean?"
Prime’s eyes flicked up, catching the crack in your voice like it was a gift. “Oh?” he murmured, amusement blooming. “That got your attention?"
You swallowed hard, heat climbed your throat. A need to prove you weren't such a skittish creature startled by its own heartbeat.
“I’m serious,” you snapped back.
Prime didn't answer you. Just continued watching your features falter.
“I’m not doing this again," You bluffed, voice too thin, too tight. He was confusing. This space was confusing. Nothing about him or this temporary hollow of a room was built for your logic.
Prime raised one brow, amused in the way only someone who already knew the answer could be. A whisper of alien liquor threaded through his breath, strange and sweet in a way that unsettled you.
“Sweetheart,” he stated, leaning in just enough to make your pulse slam. “You’ll be back the second I want you back.”
You stiffened. “You don’t get to decide—”
“Oh, but you’ll think you did,” he cut in, tone soft, deadly. "That’s the fun part.”
His eyes narrowed just a fraction, amused, certain, cruel in the way only accuracy can be. “But you already know that.”
He said it like he was reminding you of something you’d tried to bury. Like you’d already proven his point in ways you didn’t realize counted. Like every choice you’d made tonight—every tremor, every pause, every pathetic attempt at denial—was Exhibit A in a case he’d been building long before you walked in.
Prime let the silence sit between you for a beat. Long enough for the denial in your throat to curdle into something brittle. He eventually pushed off the mattress, rising in one smooth, controlled motion. You watched him cross to the edge of the room, the shift of his shoulders deliberate as he fished through the kitchenette. A punishment of distance before you understood how.
A moment later, he straightened with a heavy bottle in one hand, glass in the other. Prime didn’t even look back at you as his fingers curled around the bottle’s neck with casual authority, tilting it to pour himself another measured drink.
He lifted the glass between two fingers, admiring the way the amber caught the light, and finally, finally his eyes cut back to you.
Prime exhaled a quiet hum, like he’d been waiting for you to ask something. “You wanna know how?” he plucked. “Fine. I'll bite.”
“The first time I knew you'd come tonight,” he said, voice warm and low, “was when you walked past me today and couldn’t look me in the eye for more than half a second.”
Something in the air shifted, tightening corners like an invisible drawstring.
“You always make eye contact. Except,” he said softly, “...when you’re scared of disappointing me.”
Your breath hitched—small, pathetic. Nothing else to do but react. He'd made that very clear.
“The second,” he said, leaning forward just slightly closer, “was when I left the floor early and you didn’t ask why.” His smirk curled poisonous.
“You never let anything slip at work but you let that one go," he reflected. A faint crease formed between his brows, the closest he came to looking genuinely surprised. "Complained about it later though."
Your heart hammered hard enough to shake the mattress.
“And the third…”
Prime paused, savoring it as his eyes dragged over your expression like he was reading a line of code. “…was when you called me on your way home.”
Your arms tightened in a cross against your chest. He swirled his glass.
“Said you were stopping for food,” he said, brow arching towards the untouched AstroBite bag on the counter, “but you don’t eat on nights you’re anxious."
“And the fourth,” he finished, “was the smell of peach tequila when you walked through my door.” He raised the glass in a mock toast. Nearly took a bow.
“A dead giveaway,” he stated. “You only drink when you can’t stand how badly you want something.”
Soft, devastating. “So tell me again,” he prodded, “how you aren't planning on coming here again.” Prime tipped his head back in one smooth motion, throat working, a pleasured hum slipping as he shot his liquor down.
The irritation simmered so hot under your skin it felt like a physical thing, prickling along your arms, tightening your throat. The words burst out before you could contain them. Sharp, bold, reckless. Fueled by how badly you wanted him and how furious you were that he knew it.
"If you don't fuck me."
He stalled for a beat, eyes flicking over your face as if he had to process that you’d really said something so ridiculous and now he had to correct it personally.
He nodded slow, tongue braced against his molars, jaw tightening around some silent conclusion. A choice. A pivot. Something dangerous and last-minute, the kind of shift that made your stomach drop before he even moved.
A tiny sign—subtle but undeniable—that he’d changed his mind about how he planned to handle you.
You felt the shift before you understood it.
He moved back over with dark precision, not stalking so much as arriving, his presence hitting you like a shadow falling exactly where it meant to. You felt pinned before he even touched you. And when he finally did, his hands were noticeably rougher, sliding up to your jaw and catching it in his grip, forcing your gaze up, forcing your breath still, forcing you into his control without a word.
Prime’s smile turned slow. Dark. Certain as he tightened his grip. He brought his fingers to the soft flesh of your neck and squeezed lightly on your pulse points. Your breathing shifted to adjust for the change in flow.
“You sure about that?” he tested. Deeper, pressing more firmly against your throat—anchoring you to the wall with a calm, steady pressure that made your pulse thrum into his palm. "If I don't fuck you bloody tonight, you're never coming back, huh?"
“I could make you flinch, make you scream, make you run—" Prime spat, "I could push you until you’re trembling, until ‘stop’ sounds like ‘more' and you’d still come back to finish what I started.”
He continued almost gentle in its precision as you silently fought your thinning breath. "And I fully intend to see the look on your face when I do."
You couldn't meet his eyes, vision hazing at the edges, blurring like heat off metal as your nerves tried to make sense of the way he carved. Alarm bells keened through you, a siren-song of instinct and fear, piercing enough to lace the air, sharp enough to make your lungs seize.
Some traitorous part of you folded toward him, leaned into the danger like it was warmth. The collision of fear and longing. The subtle flex of his forearm, the faint exhale through his nose, the unmistakable spark of pleasure. He was enjoying this. Pain just as much as the admission. The need.
Prime flexed his hand, "You've got time, don't you?" A taunt ghosted his mouth. Too sweet, too wrong.
How small. How chosen. How absolutely ruined you were by a voice spoken to sound like a promise and a threat at the same time. Your pulse thudded against his fingers, hurriedly figuring out if it needed to flee. He absorbed the rhythm like data.
“Mhm, just like that," he observed, tone quiet, coaxing, stating the obvious, “your breathing's uneven.”
“See how fast it is right now?" His fingers dug a few centimeters deeper, palm stiff, "I can fix that... if you'd like."
Air thinned brutally. A bright, frantic ache built under your sternum. You squirmed underneath his grip, bringing a hand to his wrist. Your fingers curled around the tendons flexing beneath your touch. Tried to make sense of his motives, his end game, how he layered honey and harassment until it muddied into heroin.
Prime’s lips curved, soft, victorious. “You don’t control anything,” he said. “Not at work. Not here.”
Your chest fluttered violently, a full-body giveaway, a kicked beehive. The breath left you in stuttering flashes, oxygen fading into a high. He saw it—felt it—and pressed his palm a little firmer, enough to restrain, enough to solidify the reaction.
“And the best part?” he leaned closer, his breath grazing the corner of your mouth. “You'll trust me through all of it.”
Prime finally lessened his grasp, leaving his hand to feel your body's rapid recalibration. Your breathing plumed into a fit of trembling inhales. His eyes softened. Tender.
"Your body tells me the truth every time," he whispered, squeezing once more—cruelly timed with your exhale so the next breath never came.
You shut your eyes hard, trying to steady the rising panic. You tried to pull in a normal breath, mouth silently open, begging. Instead of easing it, he let it thrum in the space. A current he’d engineered. His hand stayed exactly where it was but the rest of him shifted forward, barely a breath closer, enough that the heat of his body began to steep into yours.
You scraped your nails into his forearm, tiny crescents engraving themselves against his wrist like a desperate signature. A breathless act of self-defense, a tap-out, or need, you couldn’t tell. You weren’t sure how far he would let this go, how far he wanted it to go, but the uncertainty burned hotter than the lack of oxygen.
His eyes pinned you in place, narrowing just slightly as he took in the strain on your forehead, the plea in your open mouth, the way your knuckles whitened. Prime's grip on your throat remained purposeful. You felt that in the deliberate pressure of his hand. Too much. Like your struggle was something he could savor. Would. Was.
“Look at me.” He watched you without blinking, logging the flicker of fight he was drawing out of you for later use. He leaned forward another inch, just existing in a way that tripped your senses. The air felt warm and heavy and coded to him alone.
“You think this is bad?” he murmured, the vibration of it brushing your throat. “You don’t know half of what I can do.” Prime simply focused, and the atmosphere constricted around you.
Your chest felt too tight, like air had turned to something heavier, something he wouldn't let you reach. Each inhale an impossible task. You shook your head once, trying to pull in more air, failing. The stream was non-existent. Prime felt your tears and pressed his hand a little more firmly anyways, controlling the pace and timing of your panic with the weight of his palm.
For the first time he softened, but only in a way that made it worse. “Hey,” he murmured, voice low, syrup-sweet, coaxing. “Shh, you’re alright.” He hushed you softly. Almost tender, cruel.
Your chest lurched so hard it hurt.
Prime huffed, a half-sigh, half-growl. “You’re a mess.” But he didn’t let go.
“Stop trying to control it,” he whispered, the softness in his tone a trap. “You’re only making it worse for yourself."
You kept trying. You failed each time. Prime watched with quiet, beaming satisfaction.
His lips twitched, almost fondly as he witnessed your weakening, panicked stature. “Now you’re feeling it.”
Dark vignette blooming slow, a tunnel pulling inward. Your pulse climbed too fast, too loud, like it wanted out of your ribs. Out from under his grasp.
“You dramatic little thing,” he murmured. A soft scoff escaped him, half-mockery, half—God help you—fondness. “Look at you,” he teased. “Still shaking. Still going.”
He hovered another beat, letting your nerves paralyze openly beneath him before he finally released you, wasting no time to move his hand back low.
Something in you snapped—not true anger, something less than fear. The unbearable pressure of being watched so closely, touched so purposefully, horribly while you tried to keep yourself from shaking apart.
The first breath you dragged in came out wrong. So wrong. Too sharp, too cold. It scraped your throat raw and caught halfway, turning into a sputter before you could stop it. Tears prickled at the corners of your eyes as your lungs fought for rhythm. You tried to blink it down, tried to pull a clean breath through the constriction that remained in your throat, but your chest seized again.
"Why'd you—" It came out hoarse, cracked, more wounded than you meant it to—but anger felt safer than the humiliation clawing up your spine.
Prime’s brows lifted, amusement flickered like a flame. “Do what, exactly?”
Air found your lungs in thin, ragged ribbons. The coughs eventually softened into weak, residual spasms. Each one stole a little dignity with it.
“Finished?” he asked quietly, fingers toying cruel kindness over your hip bones. You pushed at him, not hard enough to mean it, just enough to pretend you still had control over the distance he closed. You pulled in a breath like you were ready to fight him, but Prime didn’t give you the space.
“Oh, don’t start pretending I crossed some line,” he said, voice low and precise. “You misjudged the moment. I adjusted it. That’s not cruelty, that’s maintenance. That's how this works.”
Your jaw clenched, heat clawing at your throat as you shied away. “Stop—!”
“I’m not going to stop.” His eyes darkened. An incredulous scoff. “Not after everything I’ve put into you. You think I’m responsible for your lungs forgetting how to function?”
Your head lulled to the wall. An attempt to quicken recovery. “You knew what you were doing.”
Prime’s mouth curled at one corner. Slow, knowing, infuriating. “Of course I did.”
Your breath stalled again, this time from sheer disbelief. You were fucked. Truly, dangerously fucked. There was no slipping out of this now.
“That wasn’t panic,” he said quietly. “That was anticipation your body wasn’t built to process.” Prime smiled, small and devastating. "You'll learn," he added.
“So don’t ask me why I did it,” he finished. “Ask yourself why you reacted exactly the way I expected.”
“I’m not—I don't—” The denial fractured as your stomach fluttered violently under another one of his steady, infuriating breaths. You swallowed hard, “I’m not trying to fight anything. I thought I made that very clear. You didn't have to choke me.”
Your breath accelerated in humiliating little bursts and coughs. He stayed there, letting you drown in the anticipation he’d built with two inches of space and a single, devastating truth.
"I didn't," he agreed nonchalantly. "You gave me a reason."
“You’re just—I don't understand” Your voice wavered, too soft, too raw. “You’re making it impossible to think. I can’t—we can't."
“Good,” he murmured, as if your unraveling was the entire point. “I don’t want you thinking.” Prime finally broke the barrier, the backs of his knuckles brushing along your inner thighs, turning to grab and knead. A rough, frustrated force teasing at elastic edges.
“You’re done talking.” He said it against your mouth a moment before he kissed you, firm and final, a quiet command sealed with a cold, furious intensity that felt like punishment and want tangled together.
Prime sunk down your frame, close enough that his next exhale heavied a line of heat, dragging another uncontrollable flinch from you. He threaded his fingers underneath the band by your inner thigh. Warmth flooded through you again, hips involuntarily bargaining for more as you cursed universes in your head.
Your thighs tensed; your ribs trembled. You hated how obvious it was. He wouldn't be coming up any time soon.
“Hey,” he soothed, the word barely touched your skin. “Breathe.”
His hand came up slowly, deliberately, letting the elastic guide his dangerous tracing. Prime's fingertips brushed the edge of your hip. A touch light enough to feel optional, which somehow made it heavier. His thumb traced a small arc you nearly gasped at.
“You’re doing fine,” he said quietly, revealing. “Better than you think.”
He let the gentleness hit you like a blow, soft enough to undo you. You were too exhausted to pretend you didn’t melt for it.
Prime tilted his head, gaze dragging slowly along your torso. “You’re trembling in three different muscle groups,” he stated. “Respiratory pattern’s inconsistent. You’re overwhelmed.”
The diagnosis landed like a hand back on your throat. Two fingertips dragged along your core. Testing. Measuring. His thumb pressed slowly into the soft flesh just above, deliberate pressure that electrified you at once. Your breath broke on contact.
You jerked beneath the touch, "Prime, please." A tired submission.
“You’re reacting to proximity alone,” he said. “You know how rare that is?” he praised quietly.
And then—just when you leaned into the warmth of his hand, just when your body reached for the contact, he lifted it away. He watched the shiver run through you. One last, satisfying tremor, then something in him clicked over. The amusement softened. The predatory edge sharpened. And the torture evaporated like it had never existed. Betrayal written in muscle and breath.
His posture changed first: a subtle settling of shoulders, a readjustment of weight, a breath that came slower, heavier. Purpose replacing play.
“Alright,” he decided, almost to himself. “That’s enough.”
Before you could decipher what he meant, Prime returned, this time with full intent, not experimental breath. His palm pressed firmly against your abdomen, steadying you, grounding you, claiming the tension he’d built and holding it still.
He brought his mouth to the ruined cloth, dragging his lower lip on the cotton. Hot breath sent yours hitching. Sharp, startled. Prime didn’t flinch at the reaction. His tongue carried more pressure than anything he’d touched you with all night.
He rose for a moment, fingers replacing the rhythm his tongue had set. Slow, confident, until he finally slid them underneath the fabric along your folds.
You swallowed, breath catching on his fingers as he dragged your underwear down your thighs, yanking your hips to his liking. Prime sunk a finger in, stopped just below the knuckle. Prodding, testing. It felt overwhelming, sharper than if he’d started the night this way.
The ecstasy hit almost instantly, embarrassingly. Body hurdling over mind. Of course it did; he’d engineered the pacing, layered each moment until your nerves had nowhere left to go.
Prime leaned into it, fixing you with a calm, almost clinical patience that made your pulse thrum harder.
“There you go,” he trained. “Match me.”
Your chest rose too fast, stuttered under his assault. He didn’t scold you, just added another finger, wrapped around you with a patience that felt rehearsed. He worked moderately, spreading just a little at a time. Millimeter by millimeter. Hooking, dragging, purring. Fingers spread over the soft tissue with a certainty impossible to ignore.
Prime worked you up the way he did everything: methodically, like a problem he already knew the solution to. He pressed in, nothing delicate left in him. Soon enough his hands were everywhere, dragging you closer before you even realized you were moving. He guided your hips, the small of your back closer into his face like he was rearranging you into exactly where he wanted you on his mouth.
Your knees nearly buckled. He didn’t stop. Didn’t soften. Didn’t give.
The warmth of his breath hit first, a soft exhale over the thinnest part of your skin. You felt him more than you heard him. The heat of him, the solidity, the deliberate pressure that left you breathless and off balance as he hummed deep vibration into you. Pushing you where he wanted you with rough, decisive alterations. He sucked at your pulse point with a quiet, claiming pull as if tasting the panic right from your bloodstream fed his ego. Peppered nips interspersed with careful nudges. The kind of pressure that said your body wasn’t going anywhere unless he allowed it.
It wasn’t gentle. It wasn’t careful. It was him. Heated, rough, unrelenting. Driving you higher than you meant to go, leaving you breathless under the sheer weight of him closing around you. His tongue dragged the moans hiding underneath your ribs out to open air. A mess of blue hair tousled and feathering against your thighs as he worked an agonizing pattern timed with your orbit.
You gasped. Your balance failed. Prime used it. His hands locked you in place, body pinned between the pressure of his mouth and the cage of his grip. You couldn’t twist away, couldn’t move at all.
You felt the moment it tipped from shocking to too much.Your palms shot down to his shoulders on instinct, pushing, trying to create even an inch of space. But he didn’t budge. Not even slightly. He just kept his mouth against your skin in that devastating, unhurried way. Controlled, deliberate, like he was proving a point you hadn’t realized you were losing. Prime steadied you as if you were the one causing trouble, not him.
Your breath stuttered; your hands stayed braced on his shoulders without meaning to. He lifted his head and met your blurred gaze, raised an eyebrow. Smug, knowing.
It hit you all at once: too much pressure, too much heat, too much of him in too small a space. Your brain couldn’t track the pace he set; every touch landed before you recovered from the last, stacking sensation until your whole body felt jittery and uncoordinated.
Your breath started breaking in short, uneven bursts, mind scrambling to catch up with what your nerves already couldn’t handle. It felt like your skin had been turned up too high. Every brush, every shift, every drag of him across you sparking off something raw and immediate. Override over override.
Your legs wouldn’t stay steady. Your hands could only grab for balance instead of escape. Falling through gaps he created faster than you could close them.
You couldn’t organize the feeling, couldn’t separate heat from pressure, fear from wanting, instinct from confusion. All of it tangled, coiling tight inside you until you couldn’t get grounded in any direction to release.
A sound slipped out of you you didn’t mean to make. Thin, breathless, overwhelmed, upset.
He felt the near-collapse the moment it almost hit you.
Of course he did.
Your body gave you away long before your voice did, trembling under the rush of too much, too fast, too close. Your pulse thudded against every place he touched, frantic and unsteady, your whole system overrun by sensation you hadn’t prepared for. Locked under his hands, his weight, his heat, the pressure he’d been building into you without pause had all hit your system at once, tripping every instinct you had.
A small, panicked sound tore out of your throat before you could stop it.
You pushed at him more out of sheer, overwhelmed desperation. Your fingers trembled against him, weak and useless, your body collapsing under sensations you couldn’t process fast enough.
Until finally—finally—he lifted his head and his expression settled into something cold and self-satisfied.
Prime went still like someone had flipped a switch. His grip eased just enough to keep you upright, but not enough to let you go. His eyes cut over your face with frightening precision, reading every tremor, every rapid breath, every place your body had lost its footing.
The absence hit harder than the contact.
Your whole body felt too hot and too cold at once, tight in some places, numb in others, like you’d been pulled out of yourself too fast. The shaking wouldn’t stop. Neither would the short, sharp breaths you couldn’t get control of.
You swallowed hard, throat tight. “I—” The incompleteness hit you wrong, raw. Something unsettling about the half-finished state of it like you’d been opened up and never stitched shut, left exposed in a way that made your nerves buzz in agony.
You hated that he saw it. Hated that he caused it. Hated that you still leaned into his steadiness because you had nowhere else to put the panic.
Prime reached out. Not to help you, not to steady you, but to brush one trembling strand of hair away from your face, the gentleness somehow worse as he cupped your cheek.
“Try pushing me again,” he said lowly. “See where that gets you.”
“The way you reacted here…” His voice dipped, soft and thoughtful.
“It tells me more than anything you’ve said tonight.” Prime tasted his lips, drew his wrist to his mouth and transferred your slick in a fluid, dominating motion.
You stared at him through wide eyes as he tossed your skirts over your lap. Frozen. The tights pooled in your lap. You watched him move around the room like nothing seismic had just shifted under your ribs.
He returned to his laundry, checked the remaining time on the washing unit, smoothed his hair back like it was nothing. Your thoughts returned slow, electric, charged like the atmosphere before rain.
He’d rattled you, undone you, and acted like it meant nothing.
This was real. And you had no idea what it would cost.
And the terrifying part?
A piece of you wanted him to do it again.
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PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
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SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
Carbonated Headcanons
The “Are You Okay?” Phases
The Celsius Cult Uprising & The Red Bull Rebellion
How Rick’s Take on Soda Nearly Collapsed the Citadel
fine print
PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
PLEASE credit/reblog if you use any of these (˶ᵔ ᵕ ᵔ˶)
⋆.° Rick & Morty ⋆.°
Portals
fine print
PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
the drink aisle absolutely no one requested to browse
you’re here anyways, might as well crack a cold one
The Fizz Compendium:
Carbonated Headcanons
The “Are You Okay?” Phases
The Celsius Cult Uprising & The Red Bull Rebellion
How Rick’s Take on Soda Nearly Collapsed the Citadel
⋆✴︎°｡back to navigation
How Rick’s Take on Soda Nearly Collapsed the Citadel
The Citadel, for all its corruption, was held together by three things:
Paperwork
Existential dread
And the economy of cheap, mass-produced beverages that kept millions of Ricks mildly caffeinated and functioning
Enter Rick C-137—who, during a routine inter-Citadel briefing, was asked why he never drank soda
“It’s kid sugar water. I’m above it.”
That sentence hit the Citadel like a cultural nuke
You have to understand: Citadel Ricks—especially the desk-job ones—depend on fizzy garbage to cope with their lives
It’s the only small joy they have besides complaining and dying
Suddenly, the most rogue, powerful, difficult-to-ignore Rick declares soda “beneath him.”
Which Citadel Ricks interpret as: “If you drink soda, you’re beneath him.” (They are.)
Within hours an identity crisis spread across entire sectors
Ricks poured out their sodas en masse
Mortys cried because they thought they were getting in trouble for liking Root Beer
The Citadel cafeteria’s fountain machines were overrun by panicked Ricks asking for ‘adult beverages only.’
The vending machine techs filed for hazard pay
The panic escalated so catastrophically that by noon, entire wings of the Citadel were reenacting a soda-based rebellion like they were colonists dumping crates into a harbor
Except instead of tea, it was flat Diet Cola and bottles of neon Code Red
And instead of a harbor, it was the Citadel wastewater disposal bay
Hundreds of identical Ricks stood shoulder-to-shoulder along the catwalks, holding their sodas aloft like sacred artifacts
Before dramatically yeeting them off the edge.
“No carbonation without representation!”
“Down with kid sugar water!”
“THE BRITISH ARE COMING!”
(They were not.)
Mortys watched from behind safety rails as mountainous cascades of fizzy liquid poured into the depths below, forming a swirling, glowing beverage lagoon that violated at least 17 environmental codes
A historian Rick would later call it:
“The Boston Tea Party if everyone involved had a superiority complex and a drinking problem.”
The whole event was dubbed “The Fizz Party Incident."
Some called it “The Carbonation Rebellion of Cycle 143.”
Cleanup took weeks
The emotional damage? Eternal.
A faction of “artisanal beverage Ricks” emerged overnight
Ricks who decided that soda was a “pedestrian stimulant for the intellectually stunted.”
They talked in circles about “mouthfeel” and “fermentation profiles” like they were defending dissertations at Culinary Hogwarts.
These Ricks immediately latched onto a kombucha trend they didn’t understand—just heard it was “gut-friendly” and “anti-capitalist” and assumed that meant superior.
In true Rick fashion, none of them followed instructions
They all tried to brew kombucha at industrial speed using alien yeast and questionable dimension-harvested sugars
Within 48 hours half the faction got botulism
The other half insisted the paralysis was “part of the detox ritual.”
Several were found collapsed on laboratory floors
“It’s artisan… artisan pain…”
Citadel medical staff had to issue a formal briefing
“Kombucha cannot be brewed in radioactive environments.”
“If your beverage is hissing, glowing, or speaking, it is NOT fermenting correctly.”
The incident became a Citadel meme known as “The Kombu-chaos.”
Rick C-137 later called them “a sad little renaissance fair of idiots."
This only made the faction double-down until they were hospitalized again
Traditionalist Ricks (who lived off Diet Cola because it reminded them of Earth Year 2004) protested
Someone threw a can of orange Fanta
It started a riot
The Citadel soda industry (a multi-dimensional megacorporation run by Mortys, obviously) crashed in under 48 hours
Mortys lost jobs.
Ricks blamed other Ricks.
A black market for “banned” beverages sprang up in the sewers
In a stunning display of political disconnect, one Citadel council member attempted to “restore unity”
He filmed a public statement where he dramatically cracked open a soda on camera, hoping it would symbolically “bring everyone together.”
This was worse than Kendall Jenner handing a can of Pepsi to a cop
Because the council member didn’t choose a neutral soda.
Or something widely loved
No—he chose cream soda.
The single most polarizing beverage in the multiverse.
Ricks everywhere gasped, Mortys recoiled.
One Rick threw up on the spot
The video backfired so violently that the Citadel saw a full 37% spike in intercultural hostility within the hour
Comment sections erupted
“THIS is the unity beverage???”
“Cream soda is for traitors.”
“He should resign.”
“I knew the Council was out of touch but this is historic.”
Someone edited the clip to show him handing the cream soda to a protesting Rick, who then screamed and combusted.
It went viral
The council member later claimed he “didn’t realize cream soda discourse was so heated."
This just proved he was exactly the kind of Rick who would believe carbonation solves political unrest
Ricks everywhere eventually realized he wasn’t actually anti-soda
He was just anti-boring soda
Order was restored within hours
Soda stocks rebounded
Mortys got their jobs back
The artisanal beverage cult disbanded in shame
And Rick C-137?
He never apologized.
He never even acknowledged the chaos.
And when Morty asked if he knew what happened:
“Bubbles shouldn’t cause government instability. That’s a you problem.”
fine print
PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
the drink aisle absolutely no one requested to browse
you’re here anyways, might as well crack a cold one
The Fizz Compendium:
Carbonated Headcanons
The “Are You Okay?” Phases
The Celsius Cult Uprising & The Red Bull Rebellion
How Rick’s Take on Soda Nearly Collapsed the Citadel
⋆✴︎°｡back to navigation
The Celsius Cult Uprising & The Red Bull Rebellion
Summer drinks Celsius like it’s emotional regulation
One can per mood swing
Two if she’s studying
Three if Jerry breathes weird
Has a favorite flavor rotation but denies it because “I’m not like… obsessed.” (She is.)
Fully believes it’s “clean energy” because the can says so
Has not googled a single ingredient
Posts her Celsius cans on Snapchat for clout
Aesthetic angles. Soft lighting.
The whole “wellness girl on the brink” vibe
One time she accidentally posted an unopened can (because she forgot to crack it before the pic)
People immediately called her a poser
She thought about deleting her entire social presence for three days straight
Came back with a revenge post: a collage of eight half-empty cans arranged like a crime scene
Captioned: “STAY MAD.”
She now triple-checks every can before posting like it’s a bomb defusal sequence
Someone at school said “Red Bull is better than Celsius.”
Summer took this as a personal attack, a moral failing, and an act of war
Declared herself a loyal Celsius Soldier
“Clean energy only.”
She shakes like a stress toy every time she drinks it
Began posting more and more aesthetic Celsius pics on Snap like propaganda
In retaliation, a group of girls formed a Red Bull faction and started bringing the little Red Bull minis like contraband
Summer responded by stacking her Celsius cans at her desk like a shrine
Someone knocked it over once and she almost cried
One particularly dark week, Summer saw a girl crack open a Red Bull before class
“So it’s treason, then.”
The tension peaked during Spirit Week when both sides tried to secretly spike the punch
Celsius girls for “wellness energy.”
Red Bull girls for chaos.
The punch ended up tasting like pure electricity
Principal Vagina had heart palpitations
Summer once found an empty Red Bull can in her locker and treated it like a death threat
She posted a close-up of her Celsius can
Caption: “STAY IN YOUR LANE.”
Another day she tried drinking both to prove dominance
Spent lunch vibrating at 40 fps
Morty was legitimately concerned
Rick, watched from the sidelines
“This is how wars start, Summer. Petty resource wars. Love it. Keep going.”
Beth found out about the turf war weeks after it started because Summer came home visibly vibrating and Beth assumed it was “just hormones or whatever.”
When Summer explained it, Beth had to sit down
“Summer… that’s not a war. That’s a cry for help.”
She Immediately blamed the school, society, and Jerry.
Tried to talk Summer down with a heartfelt mother-daughter moment
Summer was so caffeinated she only heard every third word
Beth went on a frantic deep dive about the effects of “overconsumption of female-coded energy drinks,” as if gendered caffeine was a thing (It is.)
Bought a pack of La Croix to “help her transition off Celsius.”
Summer took this as an insult.
She still tells people she survived her daughter’s “Celsius Cult Era” like she’s a war veteran.
Morty barely knew the turf war was happening until someone shoved a Red Bull at him and said “Pick a side.”
“I—I don’t even drink energy drinks!”
Wrong answer. Now both sides thought he was a spy
One of Summer’s friends told him not to associate with Red Bull people
Five minutes later a Red Bull girl told him he smelled like Celsius
Morty just wanted to go to math class
He tried to mediate once
“Guys, it’s just caffeine."
Immediately got yelled at by both groups
He once opened the fridge and found it filled with Celsius cans labeled DO NOT TOUCH.
He touched one.
Summer caught him. He still has nightmares.
On the peak day of tension, Morty walked into the cafeteria
Two tables: Team Celsius and Team Red Bull. Both glaring.
“Oh god… they’re segregated.”
Morty suffered real psychological damage when Summer drank a Celsius and a Red Bull back-to-back just to intimidate someone
Rick, narrated from another room
“He’s learning valuable lessons about tribalism.”
Jerry didn’t understand the turf war at all
Thought it was about “school spirit” or “sportsmanship” or maybe “vitamins.”
Summer tried explaining it
He nodded along like he was following. He wasn’t.
“Back in my day, we fought over Surge vs. Mello Yello.”
Jerry wanted to be supportive
He brought home a 12-pack of off-brand ‘Energy Blast’ from the dollar store
Summer threw it at him
He accidentally aligned himself with the Red Bull faction because someone overheard him say “Celsius sounds like a thermometer brand.”
He got bullied for a week
Tried to “help” by giving a speech about compromise in the school drop-off lane
One of the Red Bull girls said he had soy milk energy
Jerry honestly believed the turf war was a metaphor for “modern youth anxiety.”
It wasn’t. It was just caffeine and vibes.
He tried drinking half a can of Red Bull to “bond with Summer.”
Had heartburn, a panic attack, and a self-esteem spiral so intense Beth had to call Rick
To this day, Jerry claims he “helped smooth tensions."
No one remembers him being involved.
Space Beth heard about the turf war and immediately went, “You’re fighting over earth beverages? Cute. Move aside.”
Showed up at Summer’s school with a six-pack of alien energy drinks that literally shimmered
One can hummed
Team Red Bull and Team Celsius briefly united in fear
Space Beth cracked one open, chugged half of it
"Now THIS is energy.”
The cafeteria lights flickered.
Someone screamed.
Without meaning to, she started a third faction
An elite, terrifying group of students who worshipped her neon alien cans like relics
Summer begged her to stop because she was ruining the delicate social ecosystem
“If your hierarchy collapses this easily, it deserves to fall.”
A rumor spread that the alien energy drink gave you “visions.”
Principal Vagina banned Space Beth from the premises after several students reported “existential awakenings in the hallway.”
Space Beth left Summer with a case of the alien cans “in case of emergencies.”
Summer hides them under her bed and treats them like nuclear launch codes.
The administration tried to ignore the war for as long as possible (naturally)
One day, during third period, three students simultaneously fainted from a combination of Celsius, Red Bull, and raw spite.
The nurse said she’d “seen less carnage at summer camp.”
A teacher found two freshmen trying to sell sips of Space Beth’s alien drink for $20 each
Another student tried mixing Celsius and Red Bull in a science classroom “for the culture,”
The beakers vibrated ominously
A guidance counselor got hit in the face with a flying Red Bull mini during a hallway argument
Principal Vagina finally snapped
A stash of 14 Celsius cans in a bathroom ceiling tile.
A Red Bull pyramid built in the stairwell.
A glowing alien energy drink can humming in a locker.
Within hours, the school board held an emergency meeting
Someone cried. Someone prayed.
Someone passed around a La Croix like a box of tissues.
By the end of the day, the announcement echoed through the halls:
“Effective immediately, all energy drinks are banned on school grounds.”
The students reacted like oxygen had been outlawed
Team Celsius mourned.
Team Red Bull rioted.
Space Beth’s cult simply said, “As foretold,” and walked away in silence
Summer looked at her empty locker shelf
“This is facism.”
Morty felt relief deep in his soul
Rick shrugged, pulled an alien soda from his coat.
“Doesn’t apply to off-world beverages. Loophole, bitches.”
And just like that, peace returned to the school
But everyone knew the war had merely gone underground
(Someone check on the CHUDS)
fine print
PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
the drink aisle absolutely no one requested to browse
you’re here anyways, might as well crack a cold one
The Fizz Compendium:
Carbonated Headcanons
The “Are You Okay?” Phases
The Celsius Cult Uprising & The Red Bull Rebellion
How Rick’s Take on Soda Nearly Collapsed the Citadel
⋆✴︎°｡back to navigation
The “Are You Okay?” Phases
Jerry:
Had a brief but catastrophic Monster Energy phase after seeing an ad that promised “unleash the beast.”
He genuinely believed it would change his life
Started drinking the green can like it was a personality trait
Told people he felt younger
He didn’t.
Spent an entire week saying things like, “I think my reflexes have improved.”
They had not. He walked into a screen door.
Developed a false sense of athleticism
Tried to do a pull-up, made it one inch off the ground, said it “didn’t count” because his form was “too advanced.”
Tried the blue Monster once and had a mini identity crisis because it made him feel “too cool.”
Got so hyped one morning he told Beth he was thinking about “trying skateboarding.”
She just stared at him in silent horror
Accidentally drank two back-to-back and spent the next four hours convinced he was having a religious experience
Morty found him sitting on the floor, whispering, “My heart feels like it’s downloading.”
Rick refused to help him
“Natural selection in action, Morty.”
The crash hit like a freight train
Jerry slept for 16 hours
Woke up swearing he’d “met God in a Monster-branded dream.”
Now avoids energy drinks entirely and claims he’s “too powerful” for them
Beth:
Had a six-month Red Bull phase early in her residency that absolutely torched her circadian rhythm, her dental health, and her ability to speak calmly to anyone
Lived in a constant state of delusional overconfidence
Thought she could mentally dominate time
Started as “I just need something to get through morning rounds."
It quickly became one can before work, one during lunch, one on the drive home
Jerry said she was glowing
She later realized he meant it literally—her skin looked radioactive
Rick called it her “meth but make it socially acceptable” era and encouraged it purely for entertainment value
Hasn’t touched Red Bull since
If she walks past one in the grocery store, she gets war flashbacks
Honorable Mention:
Beth didn’t mean to get into Olipop
It started because she felt guilty finishing a full bottle of wine on a Tuesday and told herself she needed “something healthier” in the house
She bought one can of Olipop Vintage Cola on a whim
Took one sip and said out loud, “Wow. It tastes… responsible."
Suddenly she was a probiotic soda evangelist
Beth opens Olipops the way other people open journals—quietly, tenderly, like she’s about to unpack emotional baggage
Drinks one while making dinner
Tells herself, “See? I’m a balanced adult."
Jerry tries to take a sip
“It’s a probiotic, Jerry. Your stomach can’t handle this.”
(It’s soda. But she’s not wrong.)
Runs out of Olipop once and spirals so hard she goes to a grocery store at 10 PM while wearing slippers and a coat over pajamas
Buys twelve.
Feels safe again.
Now Beth buys Olipop in bulk like she’s prepping for an apocalypse made entirely of gut bacteria
It makes her feel like she’s taking care of herself without actually fixing any part of her life
She 100% believes that Olipop is good for her mental health
Is it? No.
Does she feel better? Yes.
And that’s what matters to Beth.
Space Beth:
Space Beth didn’t intend to get attached to La Croix Coconut
It started right after she got with Beth
That strange, tender, terrifying window where she wasn’t sure who she was supposed to be now
Beth innocently stocked the fridge with drinks for Christmas, wanting everything to feel…normal. Domestic. Safe.
She opened the fridge one morning and grabbed the first can she saw
Took one sip, blinked twice.
Kinda hated it. Kinda loved it.
Drank the whole thing anyway.
Claims the flavor “reminds her of sunscreen and regret.”
Beth tries to explain that it’s just sparkling water with flavoring
“It’s pretend water, Beth. It’s lying.”
Immediately spiraled, convinced liking it meant she was going soft
The next day, she grabbed another
“Just to check if it still tastes like disappointment. For science.”
It did. She still finished it.
Suddenly she was drinking La Croix Coconut daily, as if the flavor would tell her who she was supposed to be in this new relationship
“This tastes… grounding? I’m not emotionally prepared to unpack that.”
Claims she hates the flavor, hates the aftertaste, hates the fake tropical vibe—
Yet it’s the only drink she reaches for when she’s overwhelmed by “feelings” she refuses to name
Drinks it in the kitchen while staring at the counter like she’s waiting for it to reveal her destiny
Tells herself, “I’m just hydrating. I’m not forming attachments.”
She’s absolutely forming attachments.
Once threw away all the other flavors in the variety pack but lined up the coconut ones neatly, like emotional safety cones
Jerry saw her drinking one and said “Oh, I didn’t know you liked—”
“I DON’T.”
Took another sip
Morty whispers, “She’s coping.”
Space Beth runs out during Christmas week and has a crisis so immediate she warp-speeds to the store and buys ONLY the coconut flavor
Comes home with four cases like she’s stockpiling for heartbreak
If anyone brings it up, she just mutters, “It’s not a phase. Or… maybe it is. I don’t know. Shut up.”
Summer:
See: The Celsius Cult Uprising & The Red Bull Rebellion
Morty:
Rick took him to the Taco Bell on Maple & 3rd after a traumatic dimension jump
Morty ordered a Baja Blast on a whim to see what the hype was about
It rewired his brain chemistry on the spot
“Oh my god… this tastes like hope.”
From then on, he insisted that ONLY the Maple & 3rd Taco Bell had the “right” machine settings
Every other Taco Bell was an insult to his palate and his emotional journey
He claims other locations “taste wrong” or “don’t have the magic ratio.”
Rick calls it “placebo-level delusion."
Morty hides Taco Bell receipts in his backpack like they’re love letters
Someone asked why that location tastes better
“It’s the heart, okay? This Taco Bell has heart.”
If anyone suggests all Taco Bells are the same, Morty becomes physically defensive
“NO. NO THEY’RE NOT. THIS ONE IS SPECIAL.”
Morty started timing his week around when he could get his next fix
He knows the employees’ shifts.
He knows when the syrup bag gets changed.
He knows when the soda machine gets cleaned.
Maple & 3rd was closed one day
A huge CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION banner hung across the entrance
Morty had a full spiritual crisis in the parking lot
Hands on knees. Real tears.
Staring at the darkened building like it was a fallen cathedral
Three people died.
“Please… please just let the machine be okay…”
Summer tried bringing him a bottled Baja Blast once
“This tastes like losing custody of your kids. Get it away from me.”
Jerry drank it instead. Agreed.
Rick suggested making “DIY Baja Blast” at home
“STOP. That’s sacrilegious.”
Morty gets feral when they run out of syrup
“Please, please check the back. I know you have more. I can FEEL it.”
He absolutely has a punch card
Which Taco Bell does not offer.
He made it himself.
During his worst week, Morty drank Baja Blast every single day
Rick had to intervene because Morty started vibrating at “dangerous teenage frequencies.”
He tells everyone he’s “cut back.”
Still sneaks out after school for his ritual Maple & 3rd fix
Morty fully believes this one Baja Blast fountain is a stabilizing force in his chaotic universe
And honestly? He's kinda on to something
Rick:
See: How Rick’s Take on Soda Nearly Collapsed the Citadel
fine print
PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
the drink aisle absolutely no one requested to browse
you’re here anyways, might as well crack a cold one
The Fizz Compendium:
Carbonated Headcanons
The “Are You Okay?” Phases
The Celsius Cult Uprising & The Red Bull Rebellion
How Rick’s Take on Soda Nearly Collapsed the Citadel
⋆✴︎°｡back to navigation
Carbonated Headcanons
Jerry:
Sprite, but secretly prefers 7UP like it’s some controversial stance
Fanta Orange on “special occasions” (when someone else bought it)
Thinks cream soda is “spicy.”
Says this with full sincerity
Loyal to generic brands and will absolutely die on that hill.
Only drinks ginger ale on planes
Calls it a “luxury experience.”
Once tried to impress Beth mid-flight by explaining the “elevated carbonation profile."
She pretended to be asleep but found it endearing
Terrified of:
Dr Pepper. Too complicated; makes him nervous
Anything with caffeine past 7 PM (he won’t sleep for three days)
Energy-drink sodas
Says they give him the shakes and intrusive thoughts
Anything that costs more than $1
“Why would I pay extra for bubbles?”
Kombucha. Self explanatory.
Beth:
Classic Coke fiend
In college she drank so much she got a cavity, panicked, switched to Coke Zero and eventually fell in love with the taste
Still indulges in cherry versions when she’s feeling nostalgic
Graduated to Ginger Ale later in life
The soda she drinks when she needs to feel okay for five minutes (and she’s out of wine)
Radiates “functional adult trying her best but also mildly dissociating in her kitchen” energy
Fundamentally Hates:
Diet Coke. Triggering college memories
Yes it tastes different than Coke Zero.
Bubblegum sodas. Too sweet, too artificial, too childhood trauma coded
Anything Space Beth drinks. Out of principle.
Space Beth:
Pepsi apologist. Says it with her whole chest
Lives for Wild Cherry Pepsi—drinks it like rocket fuel
OG Sprite Cranberry truther; hoards limited-edition cans like trophies
Mixes red wine and Coke without blinking
Beth watched her do it once and nearly lost her grip on reality
Closet Mountain Dew Voltage enjoyer, but will deny it until the day she dies
Avoids:
Anything Jerry drinks. She doesn’t even need to try it
Vanilla Coke. Too soft, too sweet, too terrestrial
Ginger Ale. Calls it “sad mom juice.”
Summer:
Will drink basically anything except root beer and tropical sodas
Diet Coke as her default; Cherry Diet Coke when she’s feeling dramatic or officially done with everyone’s bullshit
Radiates “I’m holding a Diet Coke like a fashion accessory” energy every time she walks into a room
Always reaches for something crisp, snappy, and universally recognized
She has a brand to maintain
Wont touch anything in a 2-liter bottle.
Claims it’s embarrassing to be seen pouring it
Secretly Drinks:
Pepsi Mango
Would destroy her social credibility.
She drinks it at 2AM and pretends it never happened
Baja Blast Zero
Says it’s “disgusting gamer juice,” but it hits different when she’s spiraling at night on slither.io
Morty:
Radiates classic Root Beer and Mountain Dew energy
The perfect blend of earnest kid-at-a-gas-station
“Rick dragged me into space again and I need caffeine immediately.”
A&W Root Beer is his comfort drink
He likes the foam, the sweetness, the reliability
It tastes like safety (which he desperately needs)
Mountain Dew (original or Code Red) when life gets overwhelming—which, let’s be real, is always
He drinks it like it’s emotional armor
Would 100% get way too excited about limited-edition Dew flavors
Begs Rick to take him to another dimension to try the ones that don’t exist in their universe
Has virtually zero soda loyalty but big feelings about which ones “taste like summer” and which ones “taste like regret.”
Is the only one in the family who actually enjoys those weird seasonal sodas nobody else buys
(Jerry wishes he was this cool)
Afraid of:
Grapefruit sodas (Squirt, Fresca)
One sip and he’s making the Morty Face™
Weird ranch/turkey-flavored novelty sodas
(Traumatized after Rick made him try one)
Rick:
Rarely ever drinks soda
Says he “doesn’t care about soda,” then philosophically dissects carbonation for twenty minutes like he’s defending a thesis
Has a distinctly old man flavor profile
Would rather sip something bitter, fermented, or questionably medicinal
Brewed his own soda once.
It hissed, glowed, ate through the countertop, and he hated it purely because it wasn’t liquor
Only drinks soda when he’s with Morty, and only if it tastes like a dare
Neon, corrosive, radioactive, banned, or discontinued for safety reasons
Or if it might dissolve enamel, he’s into it
Will Absolutey Avoid:
Diet anything. Says it tastes like “plastic guilt.”
Cream Soda. Calls it “vanilla-flavored failure.”
Anything with stevia. Claims it “tastes like a plant lying to you.”
fine print
PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
SUMMARY: You and Rick crash into an uncharted libido-enhancing planet.
⋆｡𖦹°⭒˚｡⋆ navigation portal
MINORS DO NOT INTERACT
WARNINGS/TAGS: Language, Smut, Ship Crash, Blood/Gore, Graphic Wounds, Sexual Tension, Aphrodisiacs/Implied Alien Drugs, Dubious Consent, Hurt/Comfort, Arguing, Fingering, Sexual Intercourse (P in V), First Time (with Rick), Rick Sanchez Full Emotional Spectrum, You Know Nothing Rick Sanchez, We Should've Stayed In That Cave Rick Sanchez
A/N: Kicking my feet I might turn this one into a series lemme know what y'all think!!
.𖥔 ݁ ˖ִ🛸༄˖°.
“God damn it,” Rick hissed into the steering wheel. The ship lurched like a drunk washing machine, the hull clattering. Gravity tilted—hard—and you slammed sideways into the passenger door. Metal met shoulder with a hollow thud, air leaving your lungs in a thin, startled gasp.
“What happened?” you snapped into focus, heart tripping against your throat. “Is it the bearings again?”
“Atmosphere,” Rick grumbled, wedged between the console and his ego. He reached for the sun visor terminal, lab coat pulling taut across his shoulders. The plastic edge clicked beneath his fingertips. Red light spilled over his knuckles: Terminal Offline.
“We’re gonna have to land,” he muttered, jaw set. His grip wrenched the steering column down and the ship pitched under his force. “Do me a favor and scan this planet. Quick.”
Your wrist terminal flickered to life in a wash of blue light. The hologram spilled between you: a terra map of an orb turning slow, continents like bruises under clouds. Mountain chains spidered outward, their cave systems glimmering with faint, unregistered heat signatures.
You swiped through the interface, thumb brushing a static pulse. “Breathable air,” you reported. “Zephyrax-934. Uncharted—at least by my logs.” A pause, “I haven’t been here… have you?”
The ship bucked dangerously close to the planet’s orbit, cutting through pockets of lilac haze with each bout of intergalactic turbulence. Thrusters sputtered as the hull shook itself apart, each inch of descent a staccato beat of metal fatigue and atmospheric friction. Rick leveraged harder on the pedal, syncing his rhythm to the planet’s magnetic pull, attempting to brake in tune with the planet’s currents.
Squinting through static, he side-eyed the hologram with narrowed eyes, “934, huh? Maybe. I don’t remember.”
“Yeah, uh, let me see if there’s anything we can—“ Your words fractured as the next shudder rippled like an electromagnetic current. The ship spun sideways. In the same blink the ship’s airbags deployed, exploding from their casings and slamming your right arm against the door’s interior panel. Your terminal cracked like a glow stick. Chemical heat soaked your forearm, saturating like wildfire.
As more of his computer systems started faltering, Rick’s AI ruptured through fragmented responses, its voice glitching in loops while sparks chewed through the console: Warning—impact sequence—containment—override—
You caught the blinding spark of an exposed motherboard, arcing, alive. Heat flamed up your arm, a warning, a promise. “Fuck!” you spat through disheveled hair.
Steering through pockets of resistance that felt less like air and more like water, his knuckles drained bloodless as he fought the wheel.
Rick cursed back from behind the haze, muffled by outdated deployment bags. “Shit, shit, SHIT.”
In your effort to reach his damn portal gun, which was inconveniently out of sight, you slammed your free arm down on one of the airbags. Stupidly determined, you wrestled against the bloated air discovering the safety measure proved to be more hassle than help. Trapped like a mosquito in amber, movement was impossible. Why on EARTH did this idiot still have Takata airbags?
You couldn’t see him through the mess, but if your view was gone, his had to be worse. If Rick was as pinned as you were, then you were both going down with this heap of junk towards an unseen end.
A dying animal thrashing against the jowls of gravity, you prayed the emergency landing systems were still breathing code. If anything else, you’d settle for a merciful crash. Friction whistled a banshee’s cry. The chorus of system failure alerts and a screaming engine bled with your silent pleas. Relentless notes that sung, ‘this is it.’
The plunge was nothing near compassionate. Impact split the windshield in a web of light, glass spidering outward before it gave in like a black hole.
Shards and clots of alien grit ripped through the airbags, carving streaks of heat across your skin. Gravel scattered through the cabin. A horizontal hail shredding fabric, skin, anything that yielded.
Silence arrived still and sharp, threaded with the crackle of smoking circuitry. The lights on the dash blinked once, maybe twice, then dimmed to nothing.
The air felt alive, vibrating, as though the planet itself had exhaled into the ship.
Rick was a vague outline through the haze, slumped but moving. You caught the faint drag of his voice, cursing under his breath alongside the red glow of the ship’s failure. And with it, you nodded into a soundless dark.
—
His frame arched ice stiff over the pile of rubble that had slammed through the windshield and swathed the front seats.
“God dammit,” Rick rasped. The sound barely rose over the dying hum of the engine. “You just had to pass out now, huh? Great timing. Stellar.” He yanked at a loose strap, trying to free himself.
Cursing his ship to whatever hell was closest, he glanced toward you. Wilted, limp, blood winding along your arm where glass had kissed bone. His stomach twisted, violent and unwelcome.
Rick’s fingers hovered before they landed at your neck, “Don’t—” he murmured, pressing two digits to your throat, finding a pulse that stuttered under his touch. Weak, but there.
He exhaled, too shaky for his own comfort. “I’m not dragging your ass through customs,” Rick stated somewhere between resentful and relieved.
He gritted his teeth, scowling as he fingered the lining of his jacket. The motion was all impulse. Something to do with his hands while his brain refused to stop screaming. Searching for something: his flask, his nerve, maybe both. An ampoule.
Rick snapped the tiny glass vial between his teeth, spat the nub at his boots, and shoved it through the mess of hair blocking your features. His fingers snagged strands like a rough hand on velvet.
A sweep of ammonia snapped through the air, jumpstarting your current. Your head jerked back against the mangled headrest, breath catching on instinct.
Satisfied you weren’t dead, Rick shifted his attention towards the wreckage and unburying the center console. Aggravated, he sunk his nails into the cool, freshly unearthed dirt.
Each movement coalesced clouds of dust that hung chalky in the ship’s interior. Thick as it flirted with ammonia and unstable tech.
Clumps of dirt spilled out the cuffs of his oil streaked lab coat as he moved. He coughed a slurry of rough curses as flakes of glass bit his fingertips, caking crimson as blood coagulated with the dirt underneath them. When he finally reached the black-box, he pried it free from the wreckage like it owed him answers. A sound that was half relief, half fury.
Processing the damage, you blinked with haste as you de-shelled your forearm terminal. It came apart in two warped halves. Circuit-kissed skin welded to its interior. You sucked a sharp breath through your teeth. The damage was nothing short of apparent. Threads of melted tech begged to remain fused, seared to the flesh that remained intact. Patterns of charred lines and half-formed wire imprints ran along your wrist like veins that didn’t belong to you. The brand twitched, angry at its introduction to open air. A lattice of heat pulsed in rhythm with every shaky breath you dared take.
Muscles stiffly tenderized, pain lanced through your neck as you twisted a glare at Rick. Any answer that might explain why you were both bruised, bloodied, and trapped felt light years away.
There was no tell that he heard your silent plea. He stayed focused on his work.
You could see each tremor of his hands, each clench of his jaw, yet he still choreographed the board with wild precision, a master of control.
Petitioning eyes won you a once-over skim. ”What?” he snapped. Briefly, like the swish of a cat's tail, his focus barely grazed you. Incredulously infuriating.
Areas of the ship that had curled to the earth continued to splinter electricity. “We gotta get out of here,” you managed.
“Not until I sync this data,” Rick's breath mixed with the tang of burnt tech.
A scoff scraped your throat, “Sync to what? All our tech is destroyed!”
He halted his movements and slammed the lid, tripping his temper, “Our tech? None of this is even remotely yours.”
You flashed your raging forearm like it was obvious, “And look where that got us! We crashed. What part of that isn't clear?”
“Oh, I don’t know… maybe because this black-box is the only thing that’s keeping us from completely disappearing into the void?” He jerked back from the console, sparks snaking around his fingers. “And you think whining helps? Every second you’re sputtering, we lose another fragment!”
You jutted your chin towards the back viewport, where the terrain of Zephyrax-934 sprawled beyond. “We’re blind here! We need to figure out this planet before it figures us out!”
“What do you think I'm trying to do, here?" He didn’t even look up, fingers caressing the terminal like it was the only living thing besides himself that mattered, “And how exactly do you propose we move? The hull’s barely holding together, the atmosphere’s fucked, and you want a leisurely stroll?”
Coiled like chilled syrup clinging to a metal straw, you had no answer for him.
“Should’ve let you nap a bit longer. Would’ve spared me your commentary," he added.
You flinched at the snap in his voice, “Good to know you’d rather scrape my corpse than listen to reason.”
He jerked a cable from the box, sparks flaring. “We’re in this mess because you didn’t read the goddamn briefings before we crashed!”
“We barely had time to stabilize the entry!”
“You lost any bet we had when you spent invaluable time on footnotes while the ship was literally falling apart!” Rick feral, continued to maul your spirit's flesh like a starved dog, “Logs wouldn’t have kept us from crashing, but maybe—just maybe—they’d have given us a clue before we slammed into this mess!”
A hysterical cackle. “Footnotes? I read as much as you did on this place before your ship slit my wrist!”
Rick seethed, inhaling the remaining ammonia and smoke.
“You’re missing the bigger picture,” you pleaded, begging him to comprehend the potential dangers awaiting.
“The bigger picture? The bigger picture is survival, is this,” he pounded code, “You think I care about your panic?”
You kept your voice low and sharp. “If we don’t step out and actually look around, we’re not surviving at all.”
He finally turned, eyes flashing, jaw tight. “If you touch anything before I finish syncing, you're done," he threatened. “Move, you're dead to me," a half-empty bluff.
Though the dust from initial impact had settled, the air remained thick with unspoken friction. Dust drifted lazily across the beaten dash, but the tension refused to lift; you remained still, every muscle weeping, hoping the data Rick clung to could somehow wrest sense from this wreck.
You ghosted the pieces of terminal still stuck in your arm, gently picking away the foreign elements. Every millimeter of touch fought your nervous system as you meticulously pinched away the remains. Your wrist birthed streams each pull, and your fingers were quick to slick in your own blood, making the task near impossible.
Wafts of copper sliced through the air. Rick’s eyes flicked to your forearm, a grimace crossing his face as he allowed the gravity of your predicament to lure him down to a simmer, “Not that I’m checking, but… yeah, that’s bad.”
You huffed. Your forearm wept platelets, plasma. All your body’s defenses spilling out with eerie determination.
“Don’t move it,” he cautioned.
“So now you care,” you scoffed. “I’m fine, I’ll fix it.”
“You’re bleeding out,” Rick warned flatly. “Want to die here? Quit fucking with it.”
He was right. You vowed not to admit it and continued to peck regardless. The excavation was nearly finished. Sharp inhales and off-beat breaths.
Nowhere near subtle, he snuffed you out like a cigarette, “You sound like you’re getting fucked.”
“What?” you stared, stunned. Disbelief just short the pace of a hare.
“Pathetic,” he added, like diagnosing an illness.
“You think I sound pathetic?” Incomprehensible annoyance and disbelief knotted amongst the words.
Rick continued like he was discussing nothing short of science, “You do.”
Fury and shock pulled your expression taut. A psychotic grin.
His eyes flicked up, briefly unreadable. “You sound human. Same thing," Rick flattened. “Quit fucking with your arm,” he repeated.
An annoyed scientist interrupted. Rick yanked on a loose strap hanging over the dash, opting to slice a spot frayed from impact. He tossed it to your lap like an arrest warrant.
You begrudgingly surrendered to his orders, tightening the makeshift tourniquet with clenched teeth. “Where’s your portal gun?”
“Gone. Broken. Take your pick.” Rick stole a look of the expansive forest behind him. The light had dimmed to a blue-hour haze. He palmed the back of his neck and sighed, “I haven't been here but I know planets in the Vireon galaxy typically aren’t...that bad.”
Suspicion gripped you, “that bad?” ‘That bad' could mean a hundred different things in Rick's dictionary. Sentient vines that squeezed you to suffocation, locals with a penchant for sadistic abduction.
Your silence eventually lured an answer out of him when the black-box’s terminal faintly glowed green. “It’s an aphrodisiac planet,” he finished casually.
“Oh, this is rich.” The annoyance festering in you rolled to a boil, “Is that why you don’t want to go out there? Scared you're gonna fuck ferns till your balls get poison ivy?”
Rick exhaled through his nose and shoved the black-box away for good, satisfied with the knowledge his upload had completed. “I transferred our coordinates to the the sub-basement servers. Drones’ll pick up the rest,” Rick explained. Task marked off his mental list, his tone was already somewhere else. Clinical, methodical. He cut the last of his harness straps, a sharp snappunctuating his detachment.
“What makes this place oysters and saffron?” You pushed his knowledge.
“Atmosphere,” Rick bit out. His hands clamped down to your hips, unwarranted contact firing frayed nerves throughout your spine. Heat through blood and dust, and for a blink it felt less like help, more like possession. With one flick of the blade, he sliced through your blood-stuck harness. Movements brisk, brutal. His fingers pressed along your thighs to clear the straps with haste, the gesture mechanical yet too human. “Get out."
You tried the passenger door; it held firm, dented in place. Shoving proved futile, jarring your sore shoulder. The back hatch was your one salvation—the only portion of Rick’s ship that remained seemingly untouched by collision. Rick caught your eye and tilted his chin toward it, a silent order. The two of you maneuvered through the wreck, stepping out the hatch. Dimming sun soaked through lilac blue haze. The air outside felt heavier, like it had been waiting.
Thick and floral, like breathing through heated nectar each inhale. A film of metallic dust glinted against the half-dead sun. Dust motes drifted upwards instead of down as if gravity hadn’t quite yet decided what to cling to. Somewhere beyond the trees, a low thrumming pulse rose steady and alive, like the planet itself had a heartbeat. Rick’s boots crunched beside you, grounding the impossible.
“How long?” you spoke, tugging absently with the tourniquet that bit your forearm numb. The strap marked the divide just beneath your elbow.
Rick stood a careful distance away, eyes narrowed toward the wreck and the alien ridgeline beyond. He peered onwards taking in the surrounding terrain. You’d crashed along one of Zephyrax’s expansive mountain ranges. Slopes razored high and the faint shimmer of fog rolled between peaks.
“Not sure,” he admitted, something unreadable in his tone.
“Okay,” you acknowledged. “Your trunk—is that scanner still in there?”
“Should be.”
You followed him. Rick braced a boot against the trunk and pried until the latch gave. Inside, the scanner lay among shards of glass and coiled wire, its display flickered weakly next to the trashed portal gun. A fraction of closure.
He paid no mind to the loss. You watched as he calibrated the scanner with a few practiced taps. The scanner rippled, sending a wave of cerulean light over the soil. Data strings crawled across its surface: Atmosphere stable, Flora composition unknown.
“Still functional,” he said, almost to himself. Rick squinted at the readings, “Alright, plants first. If this place really is what I think it is, we’re walking through a hormone factory.”
The word hormone hung in the air, heavier than it should’ve been. Your arm throbbed, pulse syncing with the scanner’s faint hum.
He whispered an annoyance. “You’re useless if you bleed out,” he said, already reaching for what tools had survived the crash.
Rick’s medkit was mostly a graveyard. Half the contents caked with ash, the other half fused from heat. One item clung to life: a single vial of antiseptic, the glass miraculously intact. He held it up to the light, gave a terse nod.
“Lucky you,” he grumbled, uncorking it with his teeth. The liquid inside smelled faintly of iron and citrus. Sharp, searing, clean. His fingers snapped a command your way, ‘Come here.’ The sting hit before you could brace.
You hissed through clenched teeth, pulling back. A dab of antiseptic stained the dirt dark, interrupted by the jerk, “What about your hands?” Rick’s fingertips were twitching fire, raw from impact and subsequent actions that followed.
“Hold still,” he chided, and tugged your arm carelessly. A shot of fire. His voice had lost its bite, replaced with tired precision. The liquid met your wound with a hiss, pain blooming electric before dulling to warmth. Rick tore a strip from his lab coat, twisting the fabric into a makeshift bandage.
The contact was rough, but his thumb brushed once over the bandage’s edge, accidental, maybe. As his hands pressed against your arm, something beneath the surface began to shimmer. Microscopic spores in the atmosphere clung to the burn and began to crystallize, forming a temporary seal. Natural bio-tech. Unsettlingly, beautifully iridescent.
Rick froze just long enough to notice. “Well, congratulations. The planet just gave you a skin graft.”
As he knotted the final strip, the air around your arm glimmered faintly. Rick caught it in the corner of his eye, expression tightening. “Don’t move,” he warned, eyes narrowing on the faint glow. “This planet doesn’t do favors for free.”
As he spoke more spores gathered, fizzing with microscopic motion against his fingertips. They stitched over his wounds with slow, pulsing warmth, leaving faint, honey-colored scars that shimmered like wet resin.
A strange sweetness in the air. It didn’t feel like healing. It felt like being claimed.
Rick flexed his fingers, testing each joint like a mechanic checking a freshly rebuilt engine. “Well…that’s new. Hands work. Great. Yeah…we’re both in deep shit now.”
You thumbed your forearm. The pain had settled to a the ache of a dull bruise.
Rick continued testing his restored fingers, muttering something about, “We’ll pay for this later.”
You smirked through your own bruises. “Oh, I’m sure we will.”
He shot a sideways glance at you, lips twitching. “You’re enjoying that too much.”
And just like that, the crash, the pain, the weird planet—all of it faded into a thread of something sharper, warmer, closer, suspended between the two of you.
Whatever price the planet wanted would have to wait. “Plants,” you reminded him.
A brief pause, the slight tightening of his jaw, the way the glow of the setting sun highlighted the ridge of his brow. Nestling lavender-blue across his frame. “Yeah. Yeah, plants,” he agreed.
—
Rick hoisted the scanner, brushing aside the low-hanging silica canopy leaves. The trees offered cover, but the air hummed with something heavy, something sticky, that made your pulse tighten in your chest. Both of you moved with caution, aware that every inhaled breath carried a subtle insistence. Aphrodisiac, yes, only dangerous if you gave in.
“Scanner’s picking up something,” Rick murmured, tapping the interface. A faint glow vibrated over a cluster of luminescent root tubers. ‘Sensory enhancement warning,’ it read in stark red letters. You shot him a glare.
“We know,” you snapped, voice thick. “We don’t need the scanner to tell us this planet's spiked with libido.”
Rick grunted, brows furrowed, ignoring the heat creeping through his chest. “Yeah, well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.” His fingers lightly caressed a root; the scanner hissed a caution, but his thumb hovered over the edible tuber anyway.
You moved beside him, hands flexing against the rough bark of a nearby tree, heart thudding not entirely from fear. The hum in the air nudged awareness, sharpening every sense. You tried to focus on the task: Find something to eat. Stay functional. Survive.
But as your fingers unearthed a root and brushed against its faintly glowing surface, a heat spread along your forearms, a beat that traveled up your neck and settled low in your abdomen.
Rick’s eyes met yours, sharp, testing, tense. “You feel that?”
“Don’t,” you snapped, trying to shove the awareness down. The sweet, earthy alive, made it impossible to ignore. The world softened: the sweep of his sleeve against your arm, the low hum of the planet, the scent of sap and soil mixing with the air around you.
He groaned, exasperated and aware. “We need to eat something or we’re gonna pass out before the drones find us.”
You hesitated, fingers grazing the soft, glowing tuber. Eyes flicked up to his. Every sense screamed don’t, yet survival was survival. He nodded.
Finally, you dug in, chewing slowly, aware of the heat creeping further, the pulse under your skin synchronizing with his proximity. Rick followed suit, tasting the nectar ridden sap of a nearby bulb with a finger.
The scanner warned again. ‘Sensory amplification: high,’ but the warning felt both too urgent and absurd. You could feel the planet nudging, prodding, teasing, threading its effects into every breath, every trail of movement between you. Every step you took was measured, every inhale thick with pollen and pheromone-laden spores.
Somewhere under the haze, you both realized: it was impossible not to notice each other here.
Rick crouched a few paces away, the scanner resting against his thigh, smirk still lingering like he knew exactly what was happening. “Careful,” he said simply, as though the air wasn’t conspiring against you.
“We need to separate.” You stepped back, chest tight as you lengthened the distance. The heat radiating from his body impossibly palpable.
Zephyrax didn’t cooperate. The air itself pressed warmth against your skin, willing you back to the orbit of Rick’s aura.
He slyly smirked. “Having trouble?” he lazily teased, stating observations like this was just another day in a lab rather than crawling through a hormone-soaked alien forest.
You shot him a glare, adjusting your grip on the root tuber, “I’m fine.”
“Mm,” he murmured, tilting his head. “Sure you are.” There was amusement in his tone, but not ridicule. More a low, sly acknowledgment that he knew you weren’t entirely in control.
“Can you fuck off?" The words struck like flint.
The closer you got to edible roots or bulbs, the sharper the pull, subtle as a whisper, undeniable as your own heartbeat. Impossible to tell if they had adverse effects without help, Rick, of course, knew, and still kept the scanner just out of reach, gatekeeping survival like a game.
Smug as he leisurely strolled through the forest. His admiration for the planet was legitimate. Gaze devouring everything in his path as his head filled with theory, logging for future calculations.
It was all too much.
A reach for the scanner ended with Rick trapping your wrist between the device and his firm hand. “Whoa,” he said, mock-stern, smirk tugging at his lips. “Look at you," he hummed, “glowing, shaking.”
“Just tell me what’s edible,” you managed.
“All of it,” he replied too easily.
“You know what I mean.”
The heat of his hand, the pull of breath, the hum of the scanner. You squirmed, frustrated, aware of every spark in your fingertips, every inch of contact radiating through the thin fabric of your sleeve. “Shut up,” you spat, but your voice quivered, betraying more than you wanted.
“Not happening,” he murmured, thumb brushing lightly over your pulse. “Way too fun to watch.”
You twisted slightly, straining against his grip, eyes narrowing. “Why aren’t you feeling it?” Your voice was sharp, tinged with disbelief and heat, every syllable carrying the pull of the planet.
Rick didn’t release your wrist, only shifted his weight slightly, smirk still teasing. “Feeling what?” he asked, feigning innocence as his fingers held firm.
“The planet!” you hissed, tugging his grasp. “It’s messing with me, and you—” you glanced at his hands, then his chest, “you’re just… fine!”
He let out a low, amused hum. “Mm, yeah… I feel it,” he admitted finally, voice quiet, deliberate. “But I’ve been around a few planets that thought they could push people around. Doesn’t mean I let them.” He rubbed small, calculated circles across the surface of your skin, stirring more of your nerves. Nebulae in miniature.
You groaned, exasperated, “So you’re just… enjoying watching me squirm?”
Rick’s smirk widened. “Part of it? Sure. But mostly? I’m just curious how long you can fight it. And honestly,” He leaned just enough for the light from the scanner to catch the edges of his grin. “I like the view.”
You blinked, caught between indignation, awareness of the pull in your abdomen, and the subtle, dangerous thrill of being pinned there. Wrist in his grip, pulse hammering. “You love this, don’t you?” you shot, not sure if you were accusing him or the planet. Probably both.
He exhaled a low curse, the fight bleeding out of his smirk. “You make everything complicated,” he muttered, and before you could fire back, he leaned in. The kiss landed at your temple, rough-edged and fleeting, as if he regretted it the instant it happened but not enough to pull away.
You blinked, stunned, face flushed faster than you could smother it. “Was that—did you just—?”
The moment slipped past like static. Neither of you spoke. The forest exhaled around you, encouraging a venture deeper into the grove.
The air thickened, sweet with resin and static, every breeze deliberate. Controlled by the planet’s force.
His jaw locked; you could see the muscle twitch there. One hand stayed suspended in the air, hovering near you like it hadn’t gotten the memo to retreat. Then he shoved it through his hair instead, rough, forcing the motion casual.
His hands weren’t steady. Neither were yours.
“Rick,” you spoke softly, reaching to guide his gaze back to yours.
He fought within himself, stiff, opting to leave your palm lingering on air. “Focus,” he muttered, voice frayed at the edges. “It’s getting dark.”
A beat passed. “Caves,” Rick said, tone clipped and mechanical. “By the wreck. We can wait it out there.”
You nodded. Warm, dry, probably less persuasive than the forest. The caves by the ridge were likely the safest bet to wait out the night.
You followed Rick back the way you came.
As the two of you trekked out of the forest, the planet’s pressure lessened like a fading nicotine buzz.
By the time the two of you reached the wreck, the sun had folded behind Zephyrax’s peaks. The world dimmed to deep violet. A little ways beyond, the mountain curved inward, revealing a narrow recess of obsidian stone. Rick ducked first, scanner flickering across the interior, pathing amongst the rocks.
“This’ll do,” he observed. Inside the small alcove were trellises of vines thick with foliage, dimly glowing berries. The faint light illuminated a blanket of moss that sporadically carpeted the rocky floor. A stones throw deeper revealed puddles of liquid contained in rocky crevices: a collection of puddles.
The air grew thinner, colder. Aubergine moonlight weaving through the cave’s mouth like strands of silver thread. You looked almost luminescent under the cave’s strange glow. Translucent light followed like a halo, as though the planet itself adored you.
Rick’s gaze snagged on that glimmer, on the way the glow pooled in your hair, your lashes, the hollow of your collarbones. It made him still in a way he hated.
Rick shook his head, unfooled by the planet’s clear lure. It was too good to be true.
“We do need water,” you prioritized. “We should at least scan it.”
Rick crouched near one of the pools, the scanner hummed low as it analyzed the sample. The water shimmered faintly underneath the hologram. Too crystalline, too still. The reading pulsed across the display: ‘Bioreactive compounds detected.’
“Yeah,” he confirmed, leaning back on his heels. “Figures. Even the water here’s trying to flirt.”
“So it’s just roofied, basically,” you reasoned, squatting beside him at the puddle. Your reflection glowed like ionwine.
“Non-lethal,” he replied, eyes flicking to you before back to the screen. “But don’t drink too much.”
“Same to you.”
Rick slipped a hand in his breast pocket, conjuring his kryptonite. He thumbed the cap of his flask, tipped its remaining contents down his throat. “I’m covered.”
You dipped a finger into the pool. Ripples danced outwards, a honeycomb pattern. “We’re drinking this whether you like it or not,” you warned.
He snorted, “Yeah? You planning to waterboard me with it?”
“Rick,” you sighed. “We're not dying of dehydration. Plus," you nudged his shoulder, “first wave wasn't so bad.”
“Uh-huh,” he rolled his eyes and dipped the empty flask into the pool. The liquid generously sloshed itself into its metal confines. Rick tipped the flask to his lips and sipped, rested elbows on his knees for a beat longer, and passed the flask your way.
The metal was cool against your palms. And the water took easily. A strange warmth licked through your chest. Drinking starlight.
His gaze traced the line of your throat. Rick’s eyes lingered, amused and sharp, "Hmm. Yep. Definitely doing something.”
Something indeed. “How deep you think this cave goes?” The mossy area looked to descend further than you initially expected. The vines along the obsidian raveled to dark, impenetrable depths.
The cave hummed around the exchange, air gently thinning into something cooler, cleaner. Rick leaned back against the wall, squinting at shadows that no longer looked so threatening. “Looks deep enough to hide a few mistakes,” he mused.
A quiet descended. A shared breath caught in the shift of temperature. The chill kissed your skin, and for the first time, his warmth nearby felt less like arrogance and more like relief.
The temperature dropped another degree, breath visible. Rick glanced your way. Exhaling realization through his nose. “You’re shaking.”
“I’m fine.”
“Yeah, and I’m sober.”
A shiver trailed up your arms. Rick noticed; of course he did. He sighed, peeling off his lab coat with the exaggerated suffering of a man doing something charitable against his will.
“Don’t read into this,” he muttered, tossing it over your shoulders.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” you replied, though your smirk betrayed you.
He rolled his eyes, but the corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re terrible at lying.”
“So are you.”
Rick shifted beside you, a quiet rustle of fabric. “Move over,” he said, low, reluctant. “Before one of us freezes or starts hallucinating.”
You obeyed, the space between you closing until the planet’s eerie bruised glow spilled across both your faces. The coat rustled softly as he adjusted it. Rick’s shoulder pressed against yours, solid and electric. His warmth seeped through layers of exhaustion and restraint.
“Better?” he asked.
“Yeah,” you whispered, the words misting across the coat’s overlap like incense. You leaned in despite yourself, and he didn’t move away.
“See?” he muttered. “Efficient use of body heat. Totally scientific.” The faint scent of his flask lingered. Metallic sweetness, sharp and smoky, and something else ozone-laced.
“Uh-huh,” you said. “Real selfless of you.”
“It’s science, not seduction."
“Seduction is science," you countered.
“Can’t argue with that,” he mused. The rumble of his voice shivered faintly through the small space between you.
You turned, barely. The world felt softened at the edges, and he was the only thing that stayed sharp. The low light turned him half-real. The cave’s light painted his skin in shifting blues and violets. Jaw sharp beneath faint stubble, lips slack with thought. His focus lingered forward, gripping the flask like it was a tether.
“I think this planet wants us to fuck,” you breathed.
“It does,” he factually agreed, voice sandpaper soft. His eyes remained fixed ahead, “Question is, do you want to? Or is that just your neurochemistry talking?”
“I want to—us to,” your confidence faded. For a fleeting second, you wondered if the pull in your chest was just the planet or him.
Rick’s eyes traced you like a formula he didn’t want to solve too fast. “You think it’s just the planet?” he asked, quieter now. “All this?”
For once, the question didn’t sound like a challenge. It sounded like a confession.
You swallowed. “You’re asking like you don’t already know the answer.”
Rick’s mouth twitched between a smirk and something softer. “Maybe I wanna hear you say it.”
“Why?” you challenged, voice breaking at the edges.
“Because,” he said, leaning closer, breath ghosting your cheek, “if you do, I can stop pretending I don’t.” The tangy salt of his skin, the faintest hint of the flask’s burn still clung to his breath.
The silence stretched, thick and humming. You could feel the planet pressing against your ribs, begging confession.
You didn’t look at him when you spoke. “Yes.”
The word fell heavy. Too human, too simple.
Rick’s breath caught between restraint and ruin. “You certain?”
“Pretty sure.”
Rick leaned closer, voice low. “Then the planet’s got nothin’ on you.”
The distance between you collapsed without warning. His knuckles grazed your collarbone, unintentional almost. His pulse jumped beneath his skin. Rick wasn’t touching you so much as orbiting you, drawn too close to resist, too aware to commit. Yet.
Your breaths tangled and hitched. You could feel him watching the line of your throat, the way it fluttered when you swallowed. The planet’s hum echoed in both of you.
He exhaled, low and unsteady.
He reached first—rough palm to your jaw, and moved to cup the back of your head, pulling you in until the world narrowed. He leaned in slowly, deliberate, giving you every chance to pull away. You didn’t.
The first kiss was quiet, reverent, before it deepened, heat spilling between your teeth like starlight melting into dark water.
Every nerve came alive at once. The second kiss wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t rushed either; it was searching, the kind that came after too long pretending not to care.
You tasted him: smoke, flask-burn, the faint metallic ghost of ozone.
Your hands found his chest, his pulse thrumming hard against your palms. The air thickened, laced with the scent of moss and static. His teeth caught your lip, just enough to drag a sound from you that wasn’t entirely yours.
You moved without thinking, closing the distance until your knees bracketed his. The movement sent pebbles skittering across the cave floor; his hand shot out to steady you, splayed at your hip. Rick shoved the tangled lab coat aside.
The rough sound in his throat wasn’t quite a laugh as his back retreated into the moss-laden stone, adjusting to your shifting position.
Rick didn’t move, didn’t have to. The gravity between you was it’s own equation.
Both hands found your hips, thumbs notched against the curve, anchoring you on his thigh as though the ground itself might give way. Your heat was palpable against his leg. Agonizingly electric. Aware.
You grabbed fistfuls of his shirt, pulling him closer. Rick groaned through hot breath as you settled into a straddle. Somewhere in the distance, the flora pulsed with light, each glow stuttering in rhythm. The cave’s temperature shifted with rising intensity. Wet against the skin: Zephyrax’s applause swelling, adoration or warning, it was hard to tell.
You took a moment to lean back and sweep the hair out of your eyes, and with it the sheen of sweat developing along your hairline. The faint tremor of effort.
Imperfect symmetry, hard to look away, Rick took in the sight of you. His gaze tracked you, something volatile sparking behind it. Adoration or anticipation, he couldn’t tell. Just knew you’d bypassed every firewall he’d thought would keep you theoretical.
You met his eyes with flushed cheeks. “You’re staring,” a small laugh.
“Calculating,” he corrected. His fingers flexed once, twice, grounding you where fabric met skin as if he needed the contact to prove you were real.
He countered the pause with pressure, stiffening his thigh against your core. He didn’t move much, just enough to tip your axis in his favor. Your center of gravity was no longer yours alone.
Rick curled his thumbs beneath your waistband, brushing the thin fabric beneath it. He felt the drag of fibers, the microscopic grip where the threads met flesh. He noted the texture like data, tried to file it away, but the sensory feedback lingered.
A single nod, as if the air itself might break if you spoke. Unspoken permission, quiet allowance was enough for him.
He moved over you quick, coaxing fabric down your hips to heap at your boots. Rick’s fingers lingered at your laces, feeling the friction of worn fibers. The motion was thoughtless, practiced but slower this time. Leather creaked as Rick hooked his thumbs behind the heels, adversely tugging you closer as he worked to free your feet.
The strange relief of it, muscles easing where they’d been braced too long. Even the smallest shift felt amplified here, the planet listening through every fiber.
Air slid through the weave of your sock, cool against the air. Rick’s fingers closed around your ankle. His fingers found the ridge of bone, the hollow just above it. He worked small circles into the tension, slow enough it looked like thought. Small rotations, assessing. Absently cataloguing the ache from travel.
One by one he freed your legs, moving quick, and with them his undershirt. He tugged the hem loose, movements economical, no flourish. For a heartbeat he kneeled there, shoulders easing a quiet breath that folded the air flat again. A sculpture half-finished, mortal and divine.
Rick unhooked the buckle of his belt with a sharp flick. Unspooling tension. His hands hovered at the zipper for a heartbeat too long, knuckles pale with thought. He let his pants fall neatly, a sense of ownership over the space around him, as if he was marking the boundary he was quickly crossing. Like he’d done it a thousand times before, because he had—just not with you.
It was then you caught the strain visualized between his legs. Fabric taut.
Pinpricks of anticipation pounded your temples in small, insistent blurs. Rick ran his hands underneath your shirt. The cloth muffled everything but the smooth caress of skin. Palms glided until they met curved wire, slotted in the crook of his thumb and pointer finger.
The tremor, the sudden stillness of it all, felt electric as the temperature.
Your shirt made a quiet flutter as it fell, the kind of sound that barely reached the air but somehow broke the stillness. Rick faltered forward, finding your lips, bracing his weight atop your chest. Your mouth opened under his, clinging to his atmosphere. Softness carried pressure, a quiet insistence that clawed at your ribs, tightened in your gut. His hands found your arms, your waist, grounding, guiding as his mouth moved to the curve of your neck.
Rick slid his fingers underneath the band of cloth that clung at your hips, coiling them one measure tighter in his grasp, as he pressed his length against your center, eliciting a moan.
He slid a palm over you, narrowed eyes catching each flutter in your expression. His digits teased, flexing lightly in a torturous, repetitive motion.
The cloth yielded under his touch, alive with residual warmth. It shouldn’t have mattered, but it did. Each ridge, each thread. Tiny topographies of distraction. He flexed his hand, pretending it was curiosity, not the pulse it triggered. Rougher under his touch than he expected, heat trapped in a dampening weave.
The experiment became worship: pressure calibrated, movement deliberate, breath gone quiet. Everything but taking them off.
Just fabric. That’s all it was. Polymer blend, 40/60 maybe. But the heat under his hand said otherwise. His mind kept converting warmth into meaning, and meaning into something harder to shake.
Frustrated huffs, gentle as moth wings. Hips tilted upwards involuntarily, you brought your thighs closer together, a plea for more.
Rick splayed a hand across your knee, redirecting it to cushioned moss. A yielding resistance.
He clicked his tongue, “We do this my way.” Not a careless step, but an exploration of pressure, how far he could sic’ control.
Simple friction, he told himself, basic chemistry. The body always betrayed itself in contact.
“Please,” you pleaded. A futile attempt to maneuver hips in your favor blocked. Bending your free leg upwards earned contact with his bicep, flexed just enough to nudge you back down. You were utterly at his mercy. Every touch spiraled into growing need.
A cocky smirk. “Breathe,” Rick coaxed just the opposite. He thumbed your clit through the cloth, the tip of his nail fleetingly agonizing against the bundle of nerves. Prickling irritation.
Frustration transferred to your grip. You cupped the back of his head, an attempt to urge him closer. Rick barely budged. He moved only with the quiet gravity of someone who dictated the rules of motion.
Ragged breathing, your moans clearly pitched into wavelengths of strained desperation.
“Please," you begged once more.
Rick finally obliged, sliding his fingers under the damp fabric, slicking them against your folds. He moved slowly, repeating the torturous cycle he’d assigned before.
You whispered exploitatives, bringing your hands above your head in surrender, wrists overlapping. Rick towered over you, enjoying the view. You tried your best to keep steady, a mess of self-constrained writhing.
The air moved like a living thing, slow, tidal, breathing with you. Every inhale drew the cave’s cool dampness into your lungs; every exhale sent faint ripples through the vapor that clung to the stone.
With a precise push, Rick sunk a finger deeper, then two. His eyes scanned your features, devouring every reaction. He curled his fingers deliberately, testing how far you stretched to the edge of sensation.
“Look at you," Rick cooed. His influence was clear on your face. Tightened brows above rapid fluttery blinks. An arching back, Rick kept even pressure within you. Purposeful and timed with the gentle spasm of your hips begging for more. Knot after knot unwinded like threads pulled gently from a tangle.
His hand found his briefs. Rick dragged them down, freeing his strained length. He palmed himself with dry friction, thumbing the tip to smooth his slick.
Too sweet, too metallic. The air pressed against your skin like water. Fingers gripped at nothing, breath shallow, your senses threatened to fold in. “Rick," you negotiated for more.
He removed his fingers with care, leaving you trembling in anticipation as he drew himself closer, taking your soaked underwear with him.
Violet and blue. The light neither steady nor random, pulsed in rhythm with your breath, or maybe the planet’s. It was impossible to tell where your heartbeat ended and the atmosphere began. Each flicker of color shimmered along your skin, heatless but present, like being touched by sound.
Rick slicked himself against your folds before aligning his head with your entrance. He slowly pushed forward, groaning at the sensation. As if the planet itself had leaned in, the pressure wasn’t violent, just unrelenting. A slow, invisible hand guiding him down, forward, deeper.
He groaned under the weight, low and involuntary, the sound swallowed instantly by the cave’s walls. The glow around him dragged resistance through his lungs; every exhale met the atmosphere’s answering push.
His body adjusted before his mind did. Muscles flexed, grinding against you. The hum in the air deepened, vibrating through his ribs.
It hurt. Not unfamiliar, and you’d been tucked away long enough for it to. Straining just short of tearing, a deep ache that sharpened before softening webbed at your entrance. You quieted through the pain.
“Christ, you’re—“ his words caught on the draw, replaced instead with your open-mouthed pants. “Fuck," he decided on. His growing pleasure leaving him wordless.
“Just keep moving,” you huffed, “It’s been a while.” The pain spread into a steady burn that almost felt good. It was pain, yes, but refined. Pain made precise.
Rick sunk himself in fully, pausing briefly at the hilt to let you breathe. “Relax,” he reassured. “Good problem to have.” Cocky.
It took a handful of agonizing thrusts for your body to shape to him, giving way to his rhythm. His breathing synced with each hit, a steady tempo of exertion. Each press, each roll, seemed to pull your body into itself, releasing tension like water slipping through cracks, leaving you both heavier and lighter at once. Pained hisses turned pleasurable shudders. A gradient of ecstasy unfurled, softening every earlier ache.
A grin cut through his expression. “Okay?” A craftsman checking his work.
You didn’t answer. You didn’t have to. The silence stretched, full of breaths you both understood all too well. His body stopped resisting.
Rick reached over. His fingers dug into the fabric of his lab coat, scrunched it into lumpy wedge. He shoved it underneath your tailbone, filling the hollow beneath the small of your back. He tore clumps of moss with it. Uneven, too soft in spots, too firm in others, but it held just enough against the ache in your gut. Not comfort exactly, but leverage.
Rick rocked forward, testing the shift, and let his head tilt back. It wasn’t luxurious but the fresh angle was a calculated pleasure proven by a chorus of deepening moans. He nudged at your sweet spot with meticulous pacing. A viscous drag clinging to skin.
“Please just," you didn’t bother spelling it out for him. Couldn’t at the peak he was quickly pushing you towards.
Rick was already smirking like he decoded a language you never meant to speak aloud. “Yeah?” he groaned between thrusts, half amused, half resigned. “Got it.”
He kept the pace until your insides crystallized, the last phase before shattering a rain of a thousand. Your body hummed through it, faint at first, then louder, until it texturized. It rippled behind your temples, silvery and wet, like currents tangled in nerve endings. Every blink distorted. Hue bleeding, sound stretched thin, the body slow to remember itself in the static haze.
Rick followed, the last trace of curiosity shuttered behind him. A little forceful, a lack of control. Through ragged breaths, ribbons prettied your insides.
The moment was over, fading but concluded, and he moved like someone unwilling to linger.
A quiet collapse, the two of you independently recovered. A faint vibration lingered underneath your skin, steady and clean, the kind of immobilizing calm that felt earned. Stillness born of too much feeling. No guilt, no rush. Just that strange, private hum that came from surviving something, finishing something, and realizing you made it intact.
A sound cracked the silence. The faint metallic chirr of calibration, a pulse of blue light against the dark. You blinked. Rick was no longer beside you. He stood a few feet away, hunched over one of the drones, hands moving with brisk, unthinking precision. The shift in him was jarring. The air that had been sacred a second ago now hummed with ordinary sound. Tools, motion, disinterest.
“When—” Your voice came out raw, small. “When did they get here?”
He didn’t look up, eyes squinting at the readout. “Couple minutes ago,” he said, like that meant nothing, like the moment you’d just lived had been yours alone.
The hum in your chest faltered, replaced by something sharper than awareness. Distance. The quiet shock of being left behind mid-breath though you weren’t entirely sure what you were expecting from him.
You blinked hard, breath catching on to the turn of relief. The drones — finally.
Their faint hum filled the air, reassuring in their predictability. Still, your pulse stuttered.
“Did they—” you hesitated, glancing toward the obsidian seam of the cave’s entrance, “Did they see anything?”
He grunted, somewhere between dismissive and thoughtful, “If they did, it’s on the feed.” He kept his eyes on the screen, tone clipped, “Which I’ll delete. Obviously.”
Rick crouched lower, the glow of the drones’ interface washed blue across his face. His fingers moved in short, practiced bursts. Tap, flick, recalibrate, reroute. A low click echoed off the cavern walls, then a sharp beep, higher-pitched, almost triumphant.
“Finally,” he muttered. One last sequence of keystrokes and the drone’s shell hissed open, releasing a faint puff of sterilized air.
Inside: a neatly folded set of clothes, still sealed in vacuum plastic, and a fresh portal gun: gleaming, intact, portal fluid swirling faintly like it had been waiting. He didn’t notice your expression. Your relief tangled with the shock of seeing something so familiar emerge from this strange place.
Rick grinned, the kind that looked half-earned and half-spiteful. His thumb brushed the trigger casing. “Fresh clothes, working tech,” he said under his breath. “Not a bad haul.”
Your words snapped through the cave, sharper than you meant them to. “How the fuck did your AI know to send that, Rick?”
“The black-box. Doesn’t think. Doesn’t guess. It remembers.”
You blink, caught halfway between relief and dread. “Remembers what?”
Rick’s gaze flicked past you, toward the dark stretch of the cavern, “Everything it’s seen me do,” he said. “Every calibration, every variable, every failure. It’s built to predict my next move before I make it — because I programmed it to. That’s its job.”
He stood, portal gun in hand, the glow of its coil painting his knuckles green. “So if it sent this…” He gestured at the clothes, at the tech gleaming like a heartbeat in the drone’s open shell. “It means it thought I’d need it—which clearly, we did,” he said.
It sat under your skin, that sour pulse of embarrassment. Hot and spreading quick. You glanced toward the cave mouth where the last traces of smoke still cling to the air.
“You don’t turn your ship into abstract art on a cliffside and not need emergency delivery," he finished.
You knew he was right about the black box, about its importance, but admitting it would feel like swallowing glass. So you stayed quiet and bare. Bra and socks and embarrassment.
Then, without looking at you, he’d reached over and tossed something your way. A folded packet, the clean clothes from the crate.
“Here,” he said, like it was nothing. “Figured you’d want first pick.”
You’d caught it clumsily, pulse skipping. It was so casual it almost stung. No mention of the moment previous, no smugness, no victory lap.
He’d straightened, cracking his shoulder, still facing away. “Don’t worry about it,” he added, tone even, almost bored.
It had been the kind of line that left space for you to breathe again. A truce spoken in his language. You nodded, though he hadn’t seen it, and let the silence settle warm again, the embarrassment ebbing into something quieter. Gratitude threaded with ache.
Rick adjusted the last setting on the portal gun and fired. The air tore open with a hiss: a vertical wound of green light spilling across the cave wall. The glow painted everything in acid hues.
He stood there for a moment, watching it stabilize. Then, almost pointedly, he said, “Pathetic.”
The word snapped you out of your head. “What?”
He didn’t look at you right away, just holstered the gun and brushed the dust from his palms. “You,” he said finally, voice flat, eyes still on the portal. “You sounded pathetic.”
You blinked. The words hit differently. Not cruel, but threaded with memory. You could still feel it: glass embedded in your forearm, blood mixing with dust, his voice above you, sharp and detached. 'You sound like you’re getting fucked. Pathetic.’
You remembered your forearm, still patched with a makeshift bandage. Beneath it a nearly healed scar, shiny circuitry slivers of memory.
He caught your expression then, the confusion, the flush of remembrance. His mouth twitched something between a smirk and a wince. “Don’t look at me like that,” he muttered. “Just…don’t make it a habit.”
“Well, let’s never crash here again,” you countered. “Once was enough to prove our compatibility issues.”
“Compatibility issues, huh?” He stepped closer towards the portal, tone dipping. “If that’s what you want to call chemistry, sure.”
Acid light caught the edge of his lab coat, and for a second you saw it again: that flicker of honesty he always buried under sarcasm. Then he was gone, swallowed by the green.
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PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
hi! I'm happy you're here ˖ ᡣ𐭩 ⊹ ࣪ ౨ৎ˚₊
new blog, old writer.
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࣪ ˖ 𖦹°⋆Rick and Morty࣪ ˖ 𖦹°⋆
♡︎ EXPLICIT CONTENT/SMUT
𓆤 DEAD DOVE/MATURE THEMES
࣪ ˖ Series°⋆
♡︎𓆤 Company Policy
You manage operations at cosmetics shop on the Outer Ring. That chain ends with Rick Prime—the one overseeing your entire district.
One night, a few texts turn into something else.
A pin drop. An address you shouldn’t follow. A moment that spirals from curiosity into panic, then something far worse and far more addictive you’re not willing to stop.
✧
Preliminary Assessment (Part 1)
Allocated (Part 2)
˖ One-Shots/Standalones°⋆
♡︎Snow in the Citadel
A rare snowfall in the Citadel leads you into a quiet alley where a Rick finds you “off-route” and unexpectedly luminous.
♡︎The Planet Breathes with Us
You and Rick crash into an uncharted libido-enhanching planet
Baseball's for Losers
Rick and Summer verbally harassing Jerry. That's it; that's the fic
fine print
PLEASE DO NOT COPY, REPOST (REBLOGGING IS FINE & ENCOURAGED), TRANSLATE, SCREENSHOT, OR USE MY FANFICTION OR DIGITAL ARTWORK IN VIDEOS, AUDIOS, AI TRAINING, OR DERIVATIVE MEDIA.
ALL WRITTEN AND VISUAL WORK HERE EXISTS UNDER COPYRIGHT PROTECTION. ANY WORD-FOR-WORD PLAGIARISM OR UNAUTHORIZED USE, IN ANY LANGUAGE OR FORMAT, WILL RESULT IN LEGAL ACTION.
SHARED THEMES AND INSPIRATION ARE PART OF THE COLLECTIVE HUM — DIRECT DUPLICATION IS NOT.
