i write for any and all women that interests me and am happy to take requests! the amount of content depends heavily on whether or not i fall down a rabbit hole (again)!
this is a mostly safe for work blog, but there will still be suggestive content, possible thirsts, and potential smut, so i'd prefer 16+ blogs interacting and following! minor and ageless blogs are welcome, but please dni on any suggestive content!
men and fetishizers, i will smite you if you interact!! 🗣️
ai is not and never will be accepted here!
ABOUT (a brief get to know me <3)
call me kitty! :)
tumblr is a hobby, i am an academic weapon in college, and sometimes i get a little shy, so forgive me if i happen to disappear every once in a while!
i write mostly for fun, but sometimes, i get a little prose-y (i'm also a perfectionist and way too hard on myself, so things may take a while but i thrive on praise!)
selfships are accepted here! i love inserting myself in things, and you’re free to do the same! i just ask that everyone remains respectful!
this blog will likely contain suggestive content, but outright smut will be rare mostly because i'm too shy to actually write it. thirsts are accepted, though!
reader-inserts will primarily be fem!r or afab!gn!readers mostly because that is what i'm most comfortable with.
most of my reader-inserts/selfships will often be femme-coded/feminine-leaning (i cannot help but make at least one sanrio and pucca love reference in every fic, i'm sorry
i will be writing for female characters exclusively on this blog!
see more about me here, and my personal tags 【 kitty.core ☾⋆⁺☁︎｡】 and 【 xo.katenka 𝄞 】!
FANDOMS (aka who i'll write for)
hoyoverse (mostly genshin impact, zenless zone zero & honkai star rail)
resident evil
valorant
league of legends / arcane
path to nowhere
jujutsu kaisen
attack on titan
chainsaw man
wuthering waves
black lagoon
the last of us
devil may cry
the case study of vanitas
blue eye samurai
reverse: 1999
check out the full list of characters i will write for here!
jinx <3, katarina, akali and lux from league of legends / arcane
ERAS
chaer-cherry -> [250728-260223]
katka0 -> [250223-??]
ASKS
sunday station (askbox) will be open indefinitely! answered asks will be under sunday station central ☘︎ ˖꙳!
send in as many ideas you have, and i'll respond when i can!
please be kind, mental illness is real and i have it 💔 do you really want blood on ur hands? 😩 /j
i get very shy sometimes so forgive me if it takes a bit to respond!
this is not a dark content blog, and while i do enjoy it occasionally (usually via character studies, and not romanticized/glorified), my limit is quite low, and i have no tolerance for heavy kinks or anything with non-con!
NAVIGATION (see main tag #rina to the rescue ♡ ྀི!)
link to my masterlist navigation! (coming soon!)
all my works will be tagged as 【 ↻ ◁ II ▷ ↺ ・rina.writes `♡´】 and/or 【 ᴺᴼᵂ ᴾᴸᴬᵞᴵᴺᴳ : kitty.writes 🍡】!
drabbles, short length fics and ideas (rarely ever written though hjshds) will be tagged as 【 ❍ kitty’s.drabbles ✶ 】!
suggestive content will be tagged six ways to sunday ୨୧ (i think i’m extremely clever, pls laugh)
fluffy works will be tagged as sunday sweet ✿!
fic reblogs and recommendations will be tagged as rina's.recs જ⁀➴!
general reposts and art reblogs will be tagged as 【 ↻ ◁ II ▷ ↺ ・ kitty.reposts ⏾ 】 and 【 ↻ ◁ II ▷ ↺ ・ katcall <3 】!
content. guys she genuinely got me so good what the FUCK . . . ☪︎ tiniest bit suggestive bc i got carried away lowkey, don't look at me . . . ☪︎ not gonna read too much over this bc if i do i will never post it so if some parts don't make too much sense #sorrygang . . . ☪︎ fem!devil!reader with sort of established lore from part 1 but it doesn't really matter so take with this what you will . . . ☪︎ reader, denji & nayuta do live together tho . . . ☪︎ implied to take place during denji and asa's first date but i put just barely enough effort into #timeline . . . ☪︎ also implied makima/reader & reze/reader and don't even worry they are on the way, trust 🫡 . . . ☪︎ there's no point to this whatsoever honestly, i just really want to kiss fami.
wc. 3,493.
extra notes. idgaf abt formatting rn bc i want to post this so bad just vibe guys. gave a sneak peek to my dear wife @kingdomofalani but has since been edited, fuck it we ball #betareader #unofficially. enjoy this lowkey apology post bc ya girl has a big girl job now and ts is SERIOUS!
.
In hindsight, maybe watching Pretty Woman was a bad idea. Edward Lewis wins Vivian Ward's kiss by climbing a fire escape with a bouquet of roses in his mouth when your companion knocks you completely off your feet.
"I want to kiss you."
Fami sits beside you on your tattered, peeling couch, scarfing down her third apple she'd plucked from your fruit basket without asking when she tells you this. Droplets of apple juice linger on her lips while she chews; shiny, pink and dewy looking.
The credits roll on your TV, Roy Orbison blaring from your speakers, while your brain falls horrifically blank. Your head twists so fast, you barely hear the snap of a bone in your neck to face the Devil noncommittally munching on one of your apples, staring at you with that same impassiveness you've grown oddly fond of.
"...I'm sorry?" It takes several seconds for you to realize you've yet to grace her so eloquent demand with an equally as eloquent answer.
"I want to kiss you," she repeats easily, finally sparing you of her desolate stare, facing the TV, watching as the blooper reels and alternate takes of scenes play amongst the credits. She flickers to your VCR and the collection of VHS tapes encompassing it. "Like them."
Your heart betrays you, speeding up within your chest, pounding so furiously against your ribcage that it surely would have killed you had you been as humanoid within as you were without. It's laughable, really, how easily heat floods the tips of your ears, an intense burn that almost worries you, lest you spontaneously lose your sense of hearing. Distantly, beneath the silent pitch, you hear the obnoxious crunches of the apple between Fami's teeth, periodic in their rhythm that is almost periodic, until the wet chewing finally registers much too loudly, and you realize that you've once again left her hanging for seveal seconds.
You're frozen; suspended in time. Lost in the moment that this beautiful Devil tells you that she wants to kiss you, and when you subsequently lose nearly all cognitive function. You're utterly stuck on how the words ft in her mouth, and how her lips curve around the apple when she bites down, until the thought morphs into soft lips on yours and a tongue that tastes of apple in your mouth.
The heat kisses your cheeks now, your very cells buzzing underneath your skin, but your tongue feels impossibly heavy. Fami returns her gaze back to you, unabashed yet enticingly indecipherable, pink ringed pupils unraveling you.
Amidst your silence, she merely tilts her head— slowly, until her earring caresses the fabric on her shoulder, eyes fitting downward and back up again. If you didn't know any better, you'd almost think her to be undressing you with her stare.
"Have you ever even kissed anyone?" You sputter, breathy and unsure, after your brain reboots. You firmly remind yourself that this is not an ordinary girl expressing a desire to kiss you, but a Devil— Fami, who is entirely uncaring to even conceal her identity; all the more reason you shouldn't trust her, much less fall for her esoteric charm.
"No." She answers so simply, "But I want to try. With you."
Frustration burrows deep into the crease of your brows. How could she be so calm given what she's asking? You're not even sure you're friends, let alone close enough to kiss. "Well, I don't."
Fami doesn't falter, "You don't?"
"No," you cross your arms, pointedly ignoring the part of your mind that demands of you to face her again. When that doesn't feel like enough, when the mere thought of her being this close is too much, you decide to remove the tape from the VCR— anything to keep yourself busy.
"Not like that, at least."
You feel her eyes on your back as you crawl across the carpet to your TV stand and pluck out the tape. You toss it to the side and sift through your selection, pausing for a moment, then adjusting your position to sit on your heels when you become uncomfortably aware that you're basically giving her an unearned opportunity to stare at your ass.
Behind you, Fami quirks a brow, a slight movement of her face, at your behavior. You're a fidgeter, that she knows quite well with how much you touch her both unconsciously and consciously, but you've never been... nervous before.
"Like what?" She asks.
Rather than digging yourself further into the hole you've already did well to create for yourself, you opt to search for another movie, pretending to read over the titles of movies you've long memorized; two of Denji's favorites, three of yours, and three of Nayuta's, enough to hold the three of you over until the next time Denji manages to scrounge up enough change to purchase another. But it's not nearly enough to rid yourself of the churning in your stomach, the pounding in your chest, and the all-encompassing feeling of Fami's eyes on the back of your head.
It quickly becomes humiliating, however, how many times you've swiped your eyes over the same eight titles, your facade of nonchalance slipping with every sitting second of silence.
"Do you not want to kiss me?" She asks again, putting you out of your misery, yet you curl into yourself as you read over Guinea Pig: Mermaid in the Manhole for the fourth time.
"It's not that I—" you sputter, on the brink of malfunction, "I mean, I— I'm not saying I don't... want to."
"Then what is it?" Her head cocks to the side again, just barely inquisitive.
"It's... complicated."
Fami hums, an inscrutable tone that does little to betray her thoughts. "I want to kiss you, you want to kiss me. That means we should kiss, no?"
You scoff, "Not when you say it like that."
Only then does Fami's expression visibly change, a soft, nonplussed furrowing of her brows, "...I don't understand what you mean."
"Of course you don't."
It's a mumble under your breath that you normally know better than to have said out loud. Everyone else in your home, yourself included, has heightened hearing, you should know better. And you would have kept it to yourself, but the current of biting bitterness that rips through you nearly overwhelms you with its intensity.
You hear the couch shift underneath her as Fami leans forward, "Help me understand."
"No, Fami, let's just watch another movie."
"But I want to kiss you," she argues resolutely, infuriatingly earnest that it makes you want to scream.
"Yes, you've made that clear."
"And you want to kiss me."
Even more anger-inducing is that she doesn't even sound smug; persistent, yes, unfaltering, and stupefying correct in her assertions. "Your words, not mine."
"So we should kiss," she decides again, and you have to bite your lip as hard as you can to keep from physically screeching.
"Is that how you'd intend to ask?"
Again, Fami pauses at the surprising bite in your tone. "Edward Lewis didn't ask Vivian Ward when they kissed," she rebuts dispassionately.
"That's different," you argue, but it comes out more like a petulant whine, and you growl lowly, frustration bubbling.
"Different how?"
"Different, as in they already knew they were in love with each other, and she leaned in first. It was implied. And romantic."
There's another pause. The ruffling of fabric turns your head, and you find Fami having quickly made her way over to you. On her hands and knees, her skirt brushing loudly against your scratchy carpet, until she's next to you; her lanky legs knock against you as she twists to mimic your stance. Even with her lower half scrunched, she looms above you.
On the balls of her feet, she leans toward you, tilting her head the same way she had seen during the film, and attempts to kiss you.
You let her lips just brush yours before you pull away. Fami doesn't pout, but you catch the slightest purse of her lips, and the seemingly frustrated reluctance with which she opens her eyes to find you.
"I want to kiss you," she repeats lowly, dare you say almost huskily if not for her nearly completely vacant tone.
Your eyes flicker down, counting the beauty marks underneath her eyes, then even further down to the one just under her mouth. "Well, I'm not going to kiss you, so... if you want to do it..."
When you find her eyes again, there's something different in them. Her normally contracted pupils, voids of haunting emptiness, are now half a size bigger, almost encompassing the first ring around her eyes. There's faintest shine glimmering in them, enrapturing you completely.
She shuffles closer, lips fully brushing against yours, and sighs at the gentle touch. It's almost tender, the way she takes in every breath you release. Slowly, she moves to press her lips to yours, and you let hers touch yours for the tiniest moment— just faintly, you can taste her and the apples she devoured on her lips— before you pull away. Just slightly, so she can linger on the feeling, taste the temptation herself.
"I want you to ask," you whisper.
Her pink eyes are as intimidating as they are breathtaking at this distance, and it is only now that you can detect the slightest twitches of her face. At your words, and the feeling of your mouth so, so close— just a hair's breadth from touching hers, she wavers. Her tongue pokes out, dragging over the parts of her lips that you touched, as if savoring the faintest taste of you.
"Ask?"
You lean in almost greedily, deliberate in your teasing now— she leans in, you pull away. "Ask me if you can kiss me."
She takes several agonizing moments to linger in this closeness with you. Her eyes flutter back and forth from one of yours to the other, almost hypnotically. Then, they flicker down to your lips, an oddly human expression that makes her cross-eyed. It only reminds you once more that she is just as inhuman and inexperienced as you, yet unwittingly, your breath hitches.
She nears closer until her bottom lip brushes yours, exhaling into the shared air. And she whispers your name— reverently, your traitorous mind supplies, and asks against your lips, "Can I kiss you?"
Your lashes flutter, eyes rolling back involuntarily, as if the words alone give you inconceivable pleasure, and you barely muster enough agency to nod your head. The smallest motion for fear that you'd break the trance you both seem to entice each other into and widen the miniscule gap separating you. The very idea seems excruciating now.
She rewards you quickly, her lips descending upon yours with an urgency that is frighteningly reciprocated. The buzz beneath your skin brightens, a newer, more intense sensation at your point of contact. It burns pleasantly, like an intch finally being clawed it, and it's delicious.
You're the one who moves first; your fingers press delicately up her shoulders, against her neck, momentarily distracted by her earrings, before resuming their mission until they reach her face. Your grip tightens, squeezing her cheeks together to pull her closer.
An unexpected observation: she lets you do as you please. Rather, she sits almost morbidly corpse-like while your hands touch for every piece of her you can reach. Her hair, her earrings, her cheeks, her neck— your fingers leave their mark on her pale skin, but she doesn't make a single move. Discouraging it would be usually, and you would have taken this to indicate her visceral disinterest had it not been for the sheer vigor she responds with against your lips.
Gluttonously— desperately, even— your hands let up on their grip on her cheek and in her hair to caress down her arms to her hands situated in her lap. Her skirt is clenched tightly between her fingers, which only spurs you to continue. You practically rip the fabric from her fingers, and guide them to your waist, pressing them against you until they squeeze similarly at your own skirt. The fabric creases taut under her grip, but it's as if her fingers have burned them away with how clearly you feel her skin on yours.
Impossibly cold and rigid, like a dead body, until it's not. Like you've never seen in all your time of knowing her, Fami comes alive; what belies her endlessly stoic disposition is an invigorating passion. She clings to you, pulling you closer and closer, like she wants you to climb into her skin and become one with her.
Enticing is the way she lifts one of her hands, your skin cooling upon the loss of her grip, and clutches your cheek. The pads of her fingers press into your cheekbone; her thumb reaches under your chin and presses deliciously against your throat, and then she moves again.
Once more, you find yourself further impassioned when she curls the same hand around your nape, fingers tangling within the soft baby hairs there. You can't help the groan that leaves your throat, which she swallows greedily, tightening her hold until her hand all but palms the back of your head and she tugs.
She readily eats your sounds whole, tongue prodding into your mouth, licking everywhere she can reach. Your teeth, your tongue, your lips. It's messy, spit pooling on your tongue and she slurps it up ravenously. Insatiable, as though your saliva were ambrosia itself. When the hand still pawing at your thigh through your skirt reaches up to the curve of your spine and presses deliciously, you move without a single thought, right into her lap.
Kissing Fami is complete and utter bliss; it's unconventional, a little awkward, but bliss nonetheless. Making out with Fami is unlike anything you could've imagined. You dreamed about what it would be like to kiss Makima, then Himeno, and then Reze, but none ever came to fruition— they all died before you actually got the chance.
But Fami... is unlike any Devil or Hybrid or whatever else you've met. You used to think Makima was unfathomably powerful, the thought ironically gave you a sense of safety even when things went... bad. You have yet to uncover all of her secrets, but you are certain that if Fami really is a Devil, then she is a much more powerful one than even Makima.
You really, really like kissing Fami, you decide fairly quickly. And perhaps she enjoys kissing you too, what with how she dominates you, encompassing your lips and your tongue like she very well is attempting to actually eat you. She's not the vocal type; she sighs, gasps, into your mouth but doesn't make much more noise than that. Her passion lies in her body, in the way her mouth responds so vigorously to you, the way her fingers twitch and clutch until you feel the blood spreading rapidly when her grip finally relents.
You like kissing Fami so much that you don't even realize you're pushing her down and rhythmically pressing your lower half down against hers. Your hand itches when it presses against the carpet below her, but you couldn't possibly care less when Fami lifts the leg you've encompassed between your thighs and presses against you.
Another blissful sigh leaves you at the pressure, and your nails dig deeper into the carpet. You fall deeper and deeper into her spiral the longer her mouth dances against yours, and the easier she follows your gestures.
She moves as though she's normal— a normal girl making out with someone in your home. For a moment, you could believe that this was normal, that you were normal, that she was normal. The sighs shared between you make way for moans; your fingers curl into the carpet again only to find them tangling in her hair and mapping every point of her body you can reach.
She groans, low and husky, against your mouth when your hands grab onto her wrists and press them down against the carpet. Merely an anchor for yourself as your lower body slowly begins to move. The leg between your thighs shifts, flexing against the sensitive parts of your inner thighs, and you jolt, squeezing her limb and tightening your hold on her wrists.
"Is this okay?" She asks when you finally decide that breath is necessary and lift a fraction off of her, though even a second away from her leaves you in a frenzy, craving more, more, more.
"Mhm."
Her lips are distracting. She is distracting— and surely you distract her because as soon as you nod, she's on you again, craning her neck to get a taste of you.
.
You finally break free of the daze she has you under with a gasp. You're not entirely sure how much time has gone by, but your lips are swollen and you have to stop soon, or you will find a way to shag Fami right on this very carpet. Separating from her, your lower half sits idly on top of hers and you crane your head to find the clock on your wall. "What time is it?!"
Fami pants beneath you, her breaths in sync with the pounding of your heart in your chest. It's a sight to behold, one you simply do not have time for when you find that the clock reads a quarter past 1.
"Crap!" You scramble off of her with as much reluctance as urgency, "I have to go!"
Fami watches your legs tremble as you get your footing, mumbling under your breath about how Denji should've been home by now, which then spirals into worries of how he'd react if he had been on time to find you making out a girl on the living room floor. Slowly, she props herself up on her elbows, watching you with a return of her ever so dispassionate thousand-yard stare.
"Where are you going?" The last syllable doesn't even leave her lips before you're dragging her to her feet and pushing her towards the couch.
"I have to go pick up my little sister. She's not exactly the most patient person," you huff, sitting her down and scrambling over to grab your jacket.
You're halfway out the door when you finally turn and direct your full attention back to her, "Um... I would say you can stay, but.. I'm pretty sure you'll eat everything in my kitchen, and also Nayuta-chan doesn't really like visitors, but... um, I'll see what I can do. Make yourself at home, if you want."
With a shaky smile, you avert your eyes, heat bubbling to the tips of your ears once more and practically sprint for your front door. But then you pause again, deliberating. You turn, make your way back to her side and press the gentlest kiss on her cheek, and then her lips.
"I'm glad you asked to kiss me," you whisper, nipping at her bottom lip. She feels the sudden urge to grasp the nape of your neck and drag you back down under with her, but you pull away before she can. She pretends not to notice the smile you fail to hide, bottom lip burrowed under your teeth, and before she knows it, you're out the door, and Fami sits alone in your apartment.
A second later, you're prancing back inside, snatching her wrist and leading her out the door. "On second thought," you say as your fingers wrap around her wrist, "Nayuta-chan's definitely not as forgiving as I'm making her sound."
You linger outside the door, almost giddy at how she looms over you, "I'll see you at school?"
There's an endearing hope in your tone, a shine in your eyes that Fami finds absolutely adorable.
"Yes," she answers simply, then bends, tilting her head so that her earring brushes your cheek as she kisses you one last time. On the cheek, then on your mouth, as you had done just a minute ago. She nips at your bottom lip all the same, then stands up straight and watches you sputter, reaching up to soothe the sting of your bottom lip. It's exceedingly adorable how catty you get when you're flustered, especially when it's because of her; you huff petulantly, then stomp away, grumbling about how unfair it was that she managed to get the upper hand.
Again, her head dips to the side. Her lips still tingle with the taste of you, but she resists the urge to lick it all up before she gets the chance to taste it again. She savors it, in fact, while she waits until the squeaks of your shoes against linoleum stairs get softer and softer.
At the thought of you and you and her, a single quirk graces the side of her lip, and disappears from in front of your door, as if she was never there at all.
catherine augustus andohar nsfw headcanons because i desire her deeply (pun not intended)
- catherine is dominant whether she's the one giving or receiving; she'll take on the submissive role very occassionally if she thinks her partner can pull it off, but she'll still be a brat about it. and she will turn the tables if they're not careful
- likes having her hair pulled. during kissing or when she's going down on her partner, feeling them grip onto it turns her on even more and makes her speed up whatever she's doing
- she likes kissing a lot and can easily get worked up through it alone. catherine's lips are very well taken care of, soft and warm, and she easily dominates the kiss, coaxing her lover's mouth open with slow kisses and licks, her tongue sliding against theirs as the kiss turns deeper. she could go for hours just tasting and exploring her partner's mouth
- as for positions, i think she definitely enjoys riding, having a pretty, breathless woman straddling her strong thighs, catherine gripping her hips and thrusting up into her if her legs get too tired to go on... it provides her with a very satisfying view she can't get enough of
- she probably enjoys being the one on top, too, being able to set the pace and tease her partner as she gets off. her stamina is certainly above average, so even if she's the one doing most of the work, her partner might end up more exhausted than catherine herself </3
- she's generally pretty indulgent during sex, focusing on her lover's needs most of the time. their body is like another battlefield for catherine to claim, and she learns every weak spot, silently making plans on how to advance as she goes. her pace isn't usually too fast, she's more likely to fuck them deeply and thoroughly. she likes dragging out her partner's pleasure and seeing their body react to her; she's not downright cruel, but she gets her satisfaction seeing them squirming and needy for her, so she might tease them a bit before giving them what they want
- quite smug during sex and will talk through it most of the time. she'll have full on conversations with herself while her poor partner is too wrecked to get a full sentence out </3
- she has a high sex drive, so the moments when she's away in the whitesands with her troops are like torture. likely the first thing she does when she comes back home is drag her partner into the shower with her so they can make up for the lost time
- she likes toys with metal elements because she can manipulate them without using her hands, such as nipple clamps or vibrators; with her ability, she can do it from far away, too, making it possible to toy with her partner while she's away on business so they don't miss her too much
- catherine Definitely owns a strap that matches her uniform. actually, she probably has multiple to match her outfits, all custom made
- her prefered way of getting off is having her partner eat her out. she likes being treated like royalty, having them kiss their way up her legs and thighs before she pushes their head against her pussy. she gives them some freedom at first, but it's likely for catherine to just end up holding them in place and fucking their face if they go too slow
- she's vocal when she's the one receiving, she isn't ashamed of it at all. the more aroused she is, the more her breathy moans turn into deeper groans and gasps. also, she has an insane back arch when she cums. trust me
- massive car sex enjoyer, she likes the scandalous feeling of it — her car windows are heavily tinted, so no one can see inside, but the semi-public setting still gets her off.
- she's possessive as hell and likes showing off, so she enjoys leaving her mark on her partner, preferably in visible places. that might include some lovebites, but what she prefers are hickeys and lipstick marks (either on their skin or clothes, like the collar of their shirt)
- she thinks having sex in her uniform isn't very comfortable, but she absolutely will wear it if she sees her partner is into it. it gives her an insane ego boost if they happen to have a uniform kink. making girls' knees weak by using her deep, commanding general voice on them is one of her favourite past times
content. guys she genuinely got me so good what the FUCK . . . ☪︎ tiniest bit suggestive bc i got carried away lowkey, don't look at me . . . ☪︎ not gonna read too much over this bc if i do i will never post it so if some parts don't make too much sense #sorrygang . . . ☪︎ fem!devil!reader with sort of established lore from part 1 but it doesn't really matter so take with this what you will . . . ☪︎ reader, denji & nayuta do live together tho . . . ☪︎ implied to take place during denji and asa's first date but i put just barely enough effort into #timeline . . . ☪︎ also implied makima/reader & reze/reader and don't even worry they are on the way, trust 🫡 . . . ☪︎ there's no point to this whatsoever honestly, i just really want to kiss fami.
wc. 3,493.
extra notes. idgaf abt formatting rn bc i want to post this so bad just vibe guys. gave a sneak peek to my dear wife @kingdomofalani but has since been edited, fuck it we ball #betareader #unofficially. enjoy this lowkey apology post bc ya girl has a big girl job now and ts is SERIOUS!
.
In hindsight, maybe watching Pretty Woman was a bad idea. Edward Lewis wins Vivian Ward's kiss by climbing a fire escape with a bouquet of roses in his mouth when your companion knocks you completely off your feet.
"I want to kiss you."
Fami sits beside you on your tattered, peeling couch, scarfing down her third apple she'd plucked from your fruit basket without asking when she tells you this. Droplets of apple juice linger on her lips while she chews; shiny, pink and dewy looking.
The credits roll on your TV, Roy Orbison blaring from your speakers, while your brain falls horrifically blank. Your head twists so fast, you barely hear the snap of a bone in your neck to face the Devil noncommittally munching on one of your apples, staring at you with that same impassiveness you've grown oddly fond of.
"...I'm sorry?" It takes several seconds for you to realize you've yet to grace her so eloquent demand with an equally as eloquent answer.
"I want to kiss you," she repeats easily, finally sparing you of her desolate stare, facing the TV, watching as the blooper reels and alternate takes of scenes play amongst the credits. She flickers to your VCR and the collection of VHS tapes encompassing it. "Like them."
Your heart betrays you, speeding up within your chest, pounding so furiously against your ribcage that it surely would have killed you had you been as humanoid within as you were without. It's laughable, really, how easily heat floods the tips of your ears, an intense burn that almost worries you, lest you spontaneously lose your sense of hearing. Distantly, beneath the silent pitch, you hear the obnoxious crunches of the apple between Fami's teeth, periodic in their rhythm that is almost periodic, until the wet chewing finally registers much too loudly, and you realize that you've once again left her hanging for seveal seconds.
You're frozen; suspended in time. Lost in the moment that this beautiful Devil tells you that she wants to kiss you, and when you subsequently lose nearly all cognitive function. You're utterly stuck on how the words ft in her mouth, and how her lips curve around the apple when she bites down, until the thought morphs into soft lips on yours and a tongue that tastes of apple in your mouth.
The heat kisses your cheeks now, your very cells buzzing underneath your skin, but your tongue feels impossibly heavy. Fami returns her gaze back to you, unabashed yet enticingly indecipherable, pink ringed pupils unraveling you.
Amidst your silence, she merely tilts her head— slowly, until her earring caresses the fabric on her shoulder, eyes fitting downward and back up again. If you didn't know any better, you'd almost think her to be undressing you with her stare.
"Have you ever even kissed anyone?" You sputter, breathy and unsure, after your brain reboots. You firmly remind yourself that this is not an ordinary girl expressing a desire to kiss you, but a Devil— Fami, who is entirely uncaring to even conceal her identity; all the more reason you shouldn't trust her, much less fall for her esoteric charm.
"No." She answers so simply, "But I want to try. With you."
Frustration burrows deep into the crease of your brows. How could she be so calm given what she's asking? You're not even sure you're friends, let alone close enough to kiss. "Well, I don't."
Fami doesn't falter, "You don't?"
"No," you cross your arms, pointedly ignoring the part of your mind that demands of you to face her again. When that doesn't feel like enough, when the mere thought of her being this close is too much, you decide to remove the tape from the VCR— anything to keep yourself busy.
"Not like that, at least."
You feel her eyes on your back as you crawl across the carpet to your TV stand and pluck out the tape. You toss it to the side and sift through your selection, pausing for a moment, then adjusting your position to sit on your heels when you become uncomfortably aware that you're basically giving her an unearned opportunity to stare at your ass.
Behind you, Fami quirks a brow, a slight movement of her face, at your behavior. You're a fidgeter, that she knows quite well with how much you touch her both unconsciously and consciously, but you've never been... nervous before.
"Like what?" She asks.
Rather than digging yourself further into the hole you've already did well to create for yourself, you opt to search for another movie, pretending to read over the titles of movies you've long memorized; two of Denji's favorites, three of yours, and three of Nayuta's, enough to hold the three of you over until the next time Denji manages to scrounge up enough change to purchase another. But it's not nearly enough to rid yourself of the churning in your stomach, the pounding in your chest, and the all-encompassing feeling of Fami's eyes on the back of your head.
It quickly becomes humiliating, however, how many times you've swiped your eyes over the same eight titles, your facade of nonchalance slipping with every sitting second of silence.
"Do you not want to kiss me?" She asks again, putting you out of your misery, yet you curl into yourself as you read over Guinea Pig: Mermaid in the Manhole for the fourth time.
"It's not that I—" you sputter, on the brink of malfunction, "I mean, I— I'm not saying I don't... want to."
"Then what is it?" Her head cocks to the side again, just barely inquisitive.
"It's... complicated."
Fami hums, an inscrutable tone that does little to betray her thoughts. "I want to kiss you, you want to kiss me. That means we should kiss, no?"
You scoff, "Not when you say it like that."
Only then does Fami's expression visibly change, a soft, nonplussed furrowing of her brows, "...I don't understand what you mean."
"Of course you don't."
It's a mumble under your breath that you normally know better than to have said out loud. Everyone else in your home, yourself included, has heightened hearing, you should know better. And you would have kept it to yourself, but the current of biting bitterness that rips through you nearly overwhelms you with its intensity.
You hear the couch shift underneath her as Fami leans forward, "Help me understand."
"No, Fami, let's just watch another movie."
"But I want to kiss you," she argues resolutely, infuriatingly earnest that it makes you want to scream.
"Yes, you've made that clear."
"And you want to kiss me."
Even more anger-inducing is that she doesn't even sound smug; persistent, yes, unfaltering, and stupefying correct in her assertions. "Your words, not mine."
"So we should kiss," she decides again, and you have to bite your lip as hard as you can to keep from physically screeching.
"Is that how you'd intend to ask?"
Again, Fami pauses at the surprising bite in your tone. "Edward Lewis didn't ask Vivian Ward when they kissed," she rebuts dispassionately.
"That's different," you argue, but it comes out more like a petulant whine, and you growl lowly, frustration bubbling.
"Different how?"
"Different, as in they already knew they were in love with each other, and she leaned in first. It was implied. And romantic."
There's another pause. The ruffling of fabric turns your head, and you find Fami having quickly made her way over to you. On her hands and knees, her skirt brushing loudly against your scratchy carpet, until she's next to you; her lanky legs knock against you as she twists to mimic your stance. Even with her lower half scrunched, she looms above you.
On the balls of her feet, she leans toward you, tilting her head the same way she had seen during the film, and attempts to kiss you.
You let her lips just brush yours before you pull away. Fami doesn't pout, but you catch the slightest purse of her lips, and the seemingly frustrated reluctance with which she opens her eyes to find you.
"I want to kiss you," she repeats lowly, dare you say almost huskily if not for her nearly completely vacant tone.
Your eyes flicker down, counting the beauty marks underneath her eyes, then even further down to the one just under her mouth. "Well, I'm not going to kiss you, so... if you want to do it..."
When you find her eyes again, there's something different in them. Her normally contracted pupils, voids of haunting emptiness, are now half a size bigger, almost encompassing the first ring around her eyes. There's faintest shine glimmering in them, enrapturing you completely.
She shuffles closer, lips fully brushing against yours, and sighs at the gentle touch. It's almost tender, the way she takes in every breath you release. Slowly, she moves to press her lips to yours, and you let hers touch yours for the tiniest moment— just faintly, you can taste her and the apples she devoured on her lips— before you pull away. Just slightly, so she can linger on the feeling, taste the temptation herself.
"I want you to ask," you whisper.
Her pink eyes are as intimidating as they are breathtaking at this distance, and it is only now that you can detect the slightest twitches of her face. At your words, and the feeling of your mouth so, so close— just a hair's breadth from touching hers, she wavers. Her tongue pokes out, dragging over the parts of her lips that you touched, as if savoring the faintest taste of you.
"Ask?"
You lean in almost greedily, deliberate in your teasing now— she leans in, you pull away. "Ask me if you can kiss me."
She takes several agonizing moments to linger in this closeness with you. Her eyes flutter back and forth from one of yours to the other, almost hypnotically. Then, they flicker down to your lips, an oddly human expression that makes her cross-eyed. It only reminds you once more that she is just as inhuman and inexperienced as you, yet unwittingly, your breath hitches.
She nears closer until her bottom lip brushes yours, exhaling into the shared air. And she whispers your name— reverently, your traitorous mind supplies, and asks against your lips, "Can I kiss you?"
Your lashes flutter, eyes rolling back involuntarily, as if the words alone give you inconceivable pleasure, and you barely muster enough agency to nod your head. The smallest motion for fear that you'd break the trance you both seem to entice each other into and widen the miniscule gap separating you. The very idea seems excruciating now.
She rewards you quickly, her lips descending upon yours with an urgency that is frighteningly reciprocated. The buzz beneath your skin brightens, a newer, more intense sensation at your point of contact. It burns pleasantly, like an intch finally being clawed it, and it's delicious.
You're the one who moves first; your fingers press delicately up her shoulders, against her neck, momentarily distracted by her earrings, before resuming their mission until they reach her face. Your grip tightens, squeezing her cheeks together to pull her closer.
An unexpected observation: she lets you do as you please. Rather, she sits almost morbidly corpse-like while your hands touch for every piece of her you can reach. Her hair, her earrings, her cheeks, her neck— your fingers leave their mark on her pale skin, but she doesn't make a single move. Discouraging it would be usually, and you would have taken this to indicate her visceral disinterest had it not been for the sheer vigor she responds with against your lips.
Gluttonously— desperately, even— your hands let up on their grip on her cheek and in her hair to caress down her arms to her hands situated in her lap. Her skirt is clenched tightly between her fingers, which only spurs you to continue. You practically rip the fabric from her fingers, and guide them to your waist, pressing them against you until they squeeze similarly at your own skirt. The fabric creases taut under her grip, but it's as if her fingers have burned them away with how clearly you feel her skin on yours.
Impossibly cold and rigid, like a dead body, until it's not. Like you've never seen in all your time of knowing her, Fami comes alive; what belies her endlessly stoic disposition is an invigorating passion. She clings to you, pulling you closer and closer, like she wants you to climb into her skin and become one with her.
Enticing is the way she lifts one of her hands, your skin cooling upon the loss of her grip, and clutches your cheek. The pads of her fingers press into your cheekbone; her thumb reaches under your chin and presses deliciously against your throat, and then she moves again.
Once more, you find yourself further impassioned when she curls the same hand around your nape, fingers tangling within the soft baby hairs there. You can't help the groan that leaves your throat, which she swallows greedily, tightening her hold until her hand all but palms the back of your head and she tugs.
She readily eats your sounds whole, tongue prodding into your mouth, licking everywhere she can reach. Your teeth, your tongue, your lips. It's messy, spit pooling on your tongue and she slurps it up ravenously. Insatiable, as though your saliva were ambrosia itself. When the hand still pawing at your thigh through your skirt reaches up to the curve of your spine and presses deliciously, you move without a single thought, right into her lap.
Kissing Fami is complete and utter bliss; it's unconventional, a little awkward, but bliss nonetheless. Making out with Fami is unlike anything you could've imagined. You dreamed about what it would be like to kiss Makima, then Himeno, and then Reze, but none ever came to fruition— they all died before you actually got the chance.
But Fami... is unlike any Devil or Hybrid or whatever else you've met. You used to think Makima was unfathomably powerful, the thought ironically gave you a sense of safety even when things went... bad. You have yet to uncover all of her secrets, but you are certain that if Fami really is a Devil, then she is a much more powerful one than even Makima.
You really, really like kissing Fami, you decide fairly quickly. And perhaps she enjoys kissing you too, what with how she dominates you, encompassing your lips and your tongue like she very well is attempting to actually eat you. She's not the vocal type; she sighs, gasps, into your mouth but doesn't make much more noise than that. Her passion lies in her body, in the way her mouth responds so vigorously to you, the way her fingers twitch and clutch until you feel the blood spreading rapidly when her grip finally relents.
You like kissing Fami so much that you don't even realize you're pushing her down and rhythmically pressing your lower half down against hers. Your hand itches when it presses against the carpet below her, but you couldn't possibly care less when Fami lifts the leg you've encompassed between your thighs and presses against you.
Another blissful sigh leaves you at the pressure, and your nails dig deeper into the carpet. You fall deeper and deeper into her spiral the longer her mouth dances against yours, and the easier she follows your gestures.
She moves as though she's normal— a normal girl making out with someone in your home. For a moment, you could believe that this was normal, that you were normal, that she was normal. The sighs shared between you make way for moans; your fingers curl into the carpet again only to find them tangling in her hair and mapping every point of her body you can reach.
She groans, low and husky, against your mouth when your hands grab onto her wrists and press them down against the carpet. Merely an anchor for yourself as your lower body slowly begins to move. The leg between your thighs shifts, flexing against the sensitive parts of your inner thighs, and you jolt, squeezing her limb and tightening your hold on her wrists.
"Is this okay?" She asks when you finally decide that breath is necessary and lift a fraction off of her, though even a second away from her leaves you in a frenzy, craving more, more, more.
"Mhm."
Her lips are distracting. She is distracting— and surely you distract her because as soon as you nod, she's on you again, craning her neck to get a taste of you.
.
You finally break free of the daze she has you under with a gasp. You're not entirely sure how much time has gone by, but your lips are swollen and you have to stop soon, or you will find a way to shag Fami right on this very carpet. Separating from her, your lower half sits idly on top of hers and you crane your head to find the clock on your wall. "What time is it?!"
Fami pants beneath you, her breaths in sync with the pounding of your heart in your chest. It's a sight to behold, one you simply do not have time for when you find that the clock reads a quarter past 1.
"Crap!" You scramble off of her with as much reluctance as urgency, "I have to go!"
Fami watches your legs tremble as you get your footing, mumbling under your breath about how Denji should've been home by now, which then spirals into worries of how he'd react if he had been on time to find you making out a girl on the living room floor. Slowly, she props herself up on her elbows, watching you with a return of her ever so dispassionate thousand-yard stare.
"Where are you going?" The last syllable doesn't even leave her lips before you're dragging her to her feet and pushing her towards the couch.
"I have to go pick up my little sister. She's not exactly the most patient person," you huff, sitting her down and scrambling over to grab your jacket.
You're halfway out the door when you finally turn and direct your full attention back to her, "Um... I would say you can stay, but.. I'm pretty sure you'll eat everything in my kitchen, and also Nayuta-chan doesn't really like visitors, but... um, I'll see what I can do. Make yourself at home, if you want."
With a shaky smile, you avert your eyes, heat bubbling to the tips of your ears once more and practically sprint for your front door. But then you pause again, deliberating. You turn, make your way back to her side and press the gentlest kiss on her cheek, and then her lips.
"I'm glad you asked to kiss me," you whisper, nipping at her bottom lip. She feels the sudden urge to grasp the nape of your neck and drag you back down under with her, but you pull away before she can. She pretends not to notice the smile you fail to hide, bottom lip burrowed under your teeth, and before she knows it, you're out the door, and Fami sits alone in your apartment.
A second later, you're prancing back inside, snatching her wrist and leading her out the door. "On second thought," you say as your fingers wrap around her wrist, "Nayuta-chan's definitely not as forgiving as I'm making her sound."
You linger outside the door, almost giddy at how she looms over you, "I'll see you at school?"
There's an endearing hope in your tone, a shine in your eyes that Fami finds absolutely adorable.
"Yes," she answers simply, then bends, tilting her head so that her earring brushes your cheek as she kisses you one last time. On the cheek, then on your mouth, as you had done just a minute ago. She nips at your bottom lip all the same, then stands up straight and watches you sputter, reaching up to soothe the sting of your bottom lip. It's exceedingly adorable how catty you get when you're flustered, especially when it's because of her; you huff petulantly, then stomp away, grumbling about how unfair it was that she managed to get the upper hand.
Again, her head dips to the side. Her lips still tingle with the taste of you, but she resists the urge to lick it all up before she gets the chance to taste it again. She savors it, in fact, while she waits until the squeaks of your shoes against linoleum stairs get softer and softer.
At the thought of you and you and her, a single quirk graces the side of her lip, and disappears from in front of your door, as if she was never there at all.
locked down a job, passed an exam, scored tickets to the devil wears prada 2, guaranteed shopping spree this weekend, AND saw a kuvira edit with my fav song of all time…… this fic is getting WRITTEN guys trust!!!!
part one
featuring ;; goddess!himeko x human!gender neutral!reader
content ;; greek myth au, just less heavy with religion, more yearning, this time its desire, kissing, himeko centric
note ;; another goddess!himeko ficlet. im sorry but i love her too much, she's so much fun to write... also ty to my omega reader once again @katka0
wc ;; 2.5k
requests + asks ;; open... i will just take extREMELY long
Himeko wanted to kiss you. She wanted to touch you.
Her curiosity, which had long since turned into an insatiable obsession, had now transformed itself into a gutting infatuation that even she could not wrap her godly head around.
How could a creature so inconsequential as a human envelop her mind entirely? That was the question she’d long since posed herself—even back when she hovered in the rocky mountains and watched you from the clouds above.
Except now, the question curled softer around her senses and buzzed beneath the skin of her feet.
Now, she found herself enamoured with you. The whole world, an elaborately painted masterpiece, became nothing but a backdrop to your existence, created solely for you to steal the show with your appearance.
So, when she questioned your grasp over all her attentions this time, no longer would she address her query through comparison of the never-ending tales of humans beguiling gods. That was common—basic—and you were anything but.
You were unique, a breath of air so fresh that it felt as if, unlike oxygen, this was what she truly needed to survive.
She often indulged this feeling with her nose buried into the crook of your neck, breathing you in until there was nothing else in this world to perceive—and she very much enjoyed the shivers you supplied her with on the side.
As such, answering her question of how you did it was approached holistically.
Holistic, yes. That was the word Himeko chose to describe her exploration of her affections to her closest sibling gods. Still, they’d easily note, with their eyebrows raised to the galaxies above, that the only system Himeko would ever examine was you alone.
And despite not knowing of Himeko’s internal questioning, you felt this too. Her experimentation was always so tactile.
Though ever fond, her eyes would dip into something analytical as she traced the tip of her forefinger along every carving of your face. While you would admit the touch was gentle as light itself, leaving the most enjoyable sense of warmth trailing its path, its intention weighed with curious purpose against your features, impossible to ignore.
Himeko always stopped at the seam of your lips.
They sat perfectly pillowed, pink, and plush, as if peonies had bloomed across the bottom half of your face. They waited almost tauntingly for her further examination, and there, the goddess became as pensive as a scholar.
What could she do with herself if not kiss them until they blossomed into red roses, slick with the dew of her morning’s kiss?
Following this question, every force in the universe seemed to lean their weight against the elegant curve of her back, oppressing her shadow to cast even harsher over you. With her hand settled in the earth next to your head, she wished to lower herself until her lips met yours in an exploration that her fingers could never accomplish.
But you were always so skittish, and that was enough for her to fight every influence that the universe itself had decided to thrust upon her. The last thing she wanted was to frighten you back into hiding.
So, she waited.
And on her many days of waiting, you resembled the sweetest of kittens.
Those furry creatures were so exceedingly curious—sometimes to their own detriment—to the world around them. Your resemblance lay plainly in that curiosity. Your world to explore was her, the one goddess that mattered, the one goddess you cared for.
When that image passed through Himeko’s mind, she spent her usual time with you curled into her embrace instead of comfortably sitting next to her. It was as much as you’d allow without squirming and running off from her, and she enjoyed it immensely.
Still, both you and the average kitten fled in the terrifying face of the unknown much more than to her liking.
She did not enjoy that part. Not one bit. In fact, your frequent retreat riddled her with a terrible affliction of want that burned her insides hotter than the breath of a star.
But even in her dislike, Himeko understood. She understood you better than the back of her hand. And, as the goddess of wisdom, she would never be foolish enough to push the boundaries you’d implicitly set.
She simply toed its edge until it gave.
That night, you were alone in a field of green grass that stretched further than you cared to appreciate. The journey depleted you of any and all energy in your body, that much Himeko could tell from the haggard rise and fall of your chest.
She revelled in the sight.
You’d consistently chosen this location for your meetings after she’d revealed it to be the heart of her earthly domain—somewhere she could be free of the worry of the spying eyes of her sibling gods.
That time, you had asked her how this vast plot of land came to be hers, and she explained in a long and grand story with her hand settled over your head, petting imaginary cat ears. She especially enjoyed your marvelling at the history, utterly in awe of the revelation of there having stood one of earth’s hugest temples on this land.
Ever since, you had so boldly turned this place into the two of your own’s spot. She easily permitted it and watched your trek into its centre with an almost untameable patience, waiting for you to call for her.
She wondered if you felt her watching you settle into where she had last sat next to you in that field. It always alternated, and Himeko found, in her endless examination of you, that you preferred the softer grass that bloomed beneath her.
She would make you a bed of cloud, if you asked. You never did, and somehow, she found that just the more loveable.
“Himeko,” you called, now lying on your back.
You shook the unshakeable with that call alone. Her spine racked with a shiver. You were adorable in a way she could not escape—not that she wanted to in the slightest.
In summoning Himeko, you symbolically addressed the moon. She preened at the thought of something so grand being marked as her image in your eyes. A passive utterance of her name would suffice well enough for her presence, yet you still afforded her such worship you did to no other god.
“I want to see you, Himeko. Are you there?”
Out of thin air, Himeko appeared.
“Of course I’m here. Always.”
The grass beneath the two of you grew thicker and the air more distinct. The earth and its atmosphere seemed to bend in reverence, prostrating in the presence of one of its rulers.
Even you, in your most primal reactions, grew goosebumps at her arrival. Every little hair reached upward, and Himeko couldn’t help but smooth her hands along your arms, letting them fall flat under her reassurance.
Your head was cradled in her lap, the finest pillow a mortal being could ask for. When she thought of it that way, she only could further wish to adorn you in the finest gifts a god could produce as she leaned over you.
Her hair spilled over her shoulders in rivulets of ruby, pouring into a curtain that isolated you further from the world around you. Her heart raced, and it pounded mightily through the grass beneath, the blades pulsing with every pump.
All she could see was you. The way your eyelashes fluttered at the tickle of her mane. The way your cheeks reddened to match its hue—even the way the apples of your cheeks rose in an automatic response to Himeko.
The goddess swore over all that she ruled that your smile shone so brilliantly that its rays broke through the strands of her fiery tresses and provided sunlight in the darkness of the night.
“Hi,” you breathed, no longer breathless from your expedition through the field, but from her alone. Oh, how perfect you were.
“Hello, little human.”
Himeko would’ve regretted pulling away if you hadn’t sat up to face her. You were a mirror of her posture, sitting with your legs folded beneath yourself and your knees pressed to hers. Your little eyes flitted over her openly.
“You’re so much smaller today.”
She smiled.
“An astute observation.”
The goddess, though remaining bigger than you, had shrunken down to size. She matched what you would only describe as a taller-than-average human, no longer dwarfing you entirely by her usual margins.
“What for?”
Your question prompted Himeko into a brief moment of thought, and her eyes pulled shut. Her mouth, however, doing quite the opposite, opened reflexively to provide a response—a habit of the goddess of wisdom, who always has an answer waiting in the wings.
Nothing sounded from her.
Nothing sounded from her, and Himeko realized that she had no reason at all. You had robbed her of all sense of rationale, and she had taken the form closest to a human that she could comfortably manage.
Himeko went still, and the world froze with her as she was forced to examine her predicament inductively. Why was she so small? At her uncertain meditation, the earth beneath her began to hum, almost recognizing the power you held over her.
You did not still one bit.
Instead, you took this opportunity to lean closer to the goddess, as if either of you were a pendulum that took turns in proximity. Himeko didn’t like that comparison, much preferring for either of you to crash against each other in the middle, but she couldn’t pay much attention to that for long in your approach.
Right then, in her own imagination, Himeko could practically see a tail sprouting from your sacrum, flicking curiously about. As usual, her kitty you were, and her questioning was abandoned in favour of giving you a good pet.
Her hands met your cheeks, thumbing over the soft skin below your eyes in a gentle, never-ending adoration. It was one of the most intimate touches you allowed. Himeko was addicted.
Her expression softened as if you were the most precious treasure in the world, and her bottom lip jutted out from its place. “I’ve no answer for you, dearest,” she all but cooed.
The wise goddess’ lack of response, which would have unnerved anyone else, did not bother you in the slightest. In fact, you occupied yourself more importantly with her touch, melting into it like wax and glueing yourself to her affection.
She held you there just to hold you. She held you there just to feel you. She held you there just to indulge you.
Himeko spotted galaxies in your eyes. They fluttered and shined, each star sparkling under her careful watch so addictively that she did not dare to betray her gaze on you for something else.
She watched and watched, never once growing bored. When your lids drooped lower in contentment, she peered through the cut of your lashes, and when your eyes dropped to her lips, her breath hitched.
The picture of temptation is how she’d describe you. Eros in its purest of forms replaced the usual golden lacquer flowing through her veins. They desperately reached, crooked and creaking, out for you.
She wished you could see yourself; maybe then you’d understand how fiercely you tore her in two. Himeko wanted you, and this time, she did not hesitate to let it be known.
“I wish to kiss you, little one.”
Her stomach hollowed into pure voracity when your pupils dilated in response. You shifted closer, and her fingertips softly curled into the sides of your head, just barely holding herself back.
“You do?” You questioned.
“I do,” she supplied.
A moment passed. And then another. Himeko, immortal and patient by nature, imagined it to be eons upon eons. The patch of grass around you grew in its coverage, no longer just a bed beneath you but a circle of lushness framing you before the heavens.
Your throat bobbed in a swallow. Himeko caught the movement with how close she leaned, basking in the warmth of your breath that fanned across her face. She waited with her own baited breaths.
“…Okay.”
Your utterance barely left your lips before Himeko’s mouth met yours.
She offered you a quick kiss once—just once—before a quiet noise of relief left her. It vibrated between the two of you, and she particularly noted your shiver against her.
Oh, she was done for. This would be her undoing: the promising lock of your lips against one another—just as soft as she’d imagined, if not softer. Himeko was fundamentally changed, and she would never again be able to lace herself up quite the same after this.
With a warm breeze, Himeko’s shoulders slackened. She offered herself up to you on a platter, the same way a human would her, and the very environment reacted with her supplication.
Her right hand moved next, cupping the back of your neck before Himeko eagerly kissed you once more. This time, she savoured you. There was no other place she’d rather be; no other thing she’d rather do; no other being she’d rather hold.
Her lips moved in a slow dance against yours, just toeing the line of pressing her mouth deeper into you. This wasn’t a moment of hesitation, one where she waited impatiently for your lips to part, but one of contentment. She relished kissing you every step of the way.
She took her time in discovering this new version of you. One that melted hotly, pushing desperately closer to her until you climbed into her lap, deeming that just barely sufficient.
Surprisingly, you were the first to introduce your tongue into the equation.
Himeko accepted it greedily, the finest of offerings you could provide her. You tasted like the same honey you had supplied her with long ago at the foot of her statue, and she drank your sweetness in as if she were parched.
Both of you groaned at the sensation of your tongues meeting. They matched in the most perfect of harmonies, and Himeko decided that it was better than anything the Muses could produce. Above it, she could hear the wet smack of your lips against each other. She groaned again.
Her left hand found your waist, fingers pressing in with a desperate grasp as you wrapped your arms around her shoulders. Either of you held onto each other like you’d fall apart without it. Himeko surely would’ve, and she suspected the same for you based on how your thighs squeezed tightly around her.
When you parted, your eyes remained shut as you gulped down air, humanly seeking oxygen. Himeko’s right hand joined her left in holding you by the waist, and her lips remained hovered over yours, as if to breathe the life into your lungs herself.
Again, she watched the slick, reddened state of your lips. She memorized it, and in knowing she’d be able to memorize it many times to come, she kissed you again, just to steal your breath one last time.
You allowed her this. Allowed her to capture your lips in a final lock before you laughed against her, pulling her own lips into an unrestrained smile. In that moment, she wondered when next you would let her touch you further.
For now, this would suffice. And so, she kissed you long again, right until the moon went into hiding.
❝through drought and famine, natural disasters, my baby has been around for me❞
pairing — older!toph! x fem!waterbender!reader
synopsis — Toph wasn't religious but everyday she woke up grateful that some higher power decided to atone for her blindness by making her the best earth bender. And giving her the best girlfriend. Not that she'd say it out loud.
content — fem!reader, very slightly suggestive, mention of injury, ooc!toph, healer!reader, short fic, dialogue is kinda hard to follow, not proofread, use of petnames, no use of y/n, takes place ten years after Atla so Toph and reader are 22. Zuko is mentioned to have a fiancé, interpret that how you will
author's note — I have not watched the leaks and if I chose to I'll still watch it when it releases to support the animators
Toph wasn’t religious.
She didn’t pray, didn’t kneel, didn’t whisper thanks into the dark the way some people did when they thought someone was listening. No one is. She didn’t believe in fate or spirits carefully weaving people together like threads on a loom.
But sometimes, on mornings like this, she wondered. Because there was no way this was an accident.
The world was loud beneath her feet, a constant hum of life and motion. The city pulsed through the soles of her boots: merchants dragging carts, children sprinting across packed earth, someone arguing two streets over about cabbage prices. It all layered together into something familiar, something grounding.
And then there was her.
She moved softer than most, but Toph could always find her. She knew the rhythm of her steps like it was carved into her bones, light, careful, but never hesitant. She didn’t walk like someone afraid to take up space. She walked like someone who understood it.
Right now, she was pacing.
Back and forth. Back and forth.
Toph lay sprawled across the bed, one arm tucked behind her head, the other resting over her stomach, listening to the faint shift of water in the basin beside her.
“You’re wearing a groove into the floor, dollface,” she muttered.
Her steps paused.
“I’m thinking.”
“You’re worrying.”
A beat.
“…I’m thinking about worrying.”
Toph huffed, pushing herself upright. The mattress creaked under her weight, and she stretched, rolling her shoulders until something popped. “Alright sure.”
She didn’t respond right away. Toph felt her turn toward her, her presence settling, like a tide pulling back just enough to breathe.
“You should still be resting,” she said softly.
Toph snorted. “I am resting.”
“You got stabbed, Toph.”
“Scratched.”
“Toph.” Her girlfriend stared at her, unimpressed.
“Okay, fine, lightly stabbed,” she amended, completely unbothered. “I’ve had worse.”
“You were bleeding through your clothes.”
“And now I’m not. See? Problem solved.”
She crossed the room before Toph could say anything else, her steps quick and purposeful. The water shifted again, rising slightly with her movement, and Toph braced herself a second too late as her fingers pressed against her side.
She sucked in a sharp breath.
“That’s still tender,” she said, her voice dipping into that tone, the one that meant she was trying very hard to stay calm.
Toph grabbed her wrist, not pushing her away, just holding it there. “It’s fine.”
“It’s not fine.”
“It’s better, relax.”
She didn’t argue, but she didn’t pull her hand back either. Instead, she adjusted her grip, gentler now as cool water slipped between her fingers, seeping into the fabric of Toph’s shirt and into the wound beneath.
Toph hated this part.
Not the healing itself, but the stillness. The way she had to sit there and let someone take care of her, like she wasn’t capable of handling it herself.
But her hands were steady. Warm. Familiar.
And she stayed.
“You should’ve told me it was this bad,” she murmured. Toph shrugged, though the motion was careful. “Didn’t feel like getting lectured, angel.”
“I don’t lecture.”
“You absolutely lecture.”
“It’s called advise.”
“Same thing.”
She huffed, and Toph felt the faint brush of her breath against her collarbone. The water shifted again, cooler this time, pulling at the edges of pain until it dulled into something manageable.
Silence settled between them, easy. Toph tilted her head slightly, listening.
“Your heartbeat’s fast,” she said.
“I’m concentrating.”
“You’re worrying.”
She didn’t deny it.
Toph’s grip on her wrist loosened, fingers sliding down to lace with hers briefly before letting go. “I’m not dying, you know.”
“I know.”
“Then stop acting like it.”
“I’m not acting like anything,” she said, but her voice betrayed her, too tight.
Toph clicked her tongue. “You’re terrible at lying.”
“I just wish you’d be more careful.”
“I’m plenty careful.”
“You ran headfirst into a fight you didn’t need to be in.”
“I always need to be in the fight.”
“You do not.” She snapped.
That made her pause. Her hands stilled against Toph’s side.
“You don’t have to prove anything anymore, Toph,” she continued, quieter now.
Toph frowned. “I’m not—”
“You are.”
Toph opened her mouth, then shut it.
“…I had it handled,” she muttered.
“I know you did.”
“And it wasn’t even that bad.”
“I know.”
“And I would’ve been fine even if you weren’t there.”A pause. Then softer,“I know.”
Toph exhaled slowly, shoulders dropping just a little. “…Okay,” she muttered.
Her hands resumed their work, the water moving with quiet precision until the last of the wound closed.
“There.”
Toph pressed lightly against her side. No pain.
“…Okay,” she admitted. “That was kind of impressive.”
She scoffed. “Kind of?”
“Don’t let it get to your head, sweetcheeks.”
“Too late. Every accidental compliment from you, my head inflates to the size of Aang's."
Toph smirked.
Before she could step away, Toph caught her wrist again, firmer this time, and pulled her forward. She stumbled, a soft breath leaving her as she landed against her.
“Toph—”
Toph didn’t answer.
She just tilted her head slightly and found her mouth like it was second nature, but this time, she didn’t rush it.
Her lips pressed slow, deliberate, testing. A quiet pause. Then again, firmer.
Her hand slid from her wrist to her waist, fingers spreading like she needed to anchor her there, like she wasn’t planning on letting her go anytime soon. The waterbender’s breath caught, Toph felt it, warm against her lips, and then she kissed her back properly.
That was all it took.
Toph leaned in deeper, angling just slightly, her thumb pressing into her hip as she pulled her closer until there wasn’t space left between them. The kiss turned softer again, then slower, then something heavier.
She chased it.
Every time she tried to pull back, Toph followed, brushing their lips together again, once, twice, like she was unwilling to let it end on anything less than perfect. Her other hand came up, finding the side of her neck, fingers curling just slightly, grounding.
The water in the basin trembled faintly, reacting to her distraction.
Toph smirked against her mouth.
“Focus,” she murmured, low.
She huffed softly, but it dissolved into another breath when Toph kissed her again—this time dragging just enough, just slow enough to make her squirm.
Her hands tightened in Toph’s shirt, sliding from her shoulders down to her arms, fingertips tracing muscle like she was reassuring herself she was okay. Still here.
Toph softened at that.
Just a little.
She slowed, pressing one last lingering kiss before pulling back barely an inch, their foreheads brushing, her breath still close enough to steal.
“You worry too much,” Toph murmured.
“One of us has to.”
Her hands had settled on Toph’s shoulders at some point, fingers curling slightly into the fabric of her shirt, lightly tracing her biceps through.
“…You scared me,” she muttered.
Toph’s grip tightened just a little.
“…Yeah,” she said quietly. “I know.”
Another pause.
“I’m sorry.”
She stilled.
Toph leaned in, this time less teasing, more intentional, pressing a soft kiss to her cheek, then the corner of her mouth, then back to her lips again, gentler now. Familiar. Reassuring.
The waterbender laughed softly, trying to push her face away when Toph drifted closer, her lips brushing just beneath her jaw.
“Toph—”
“Relax,” she muttered, but there was no bite to it.
Her hands had found her waist again, thumbs tracing slow, absent circles against her sides as she lingered there for a second longer before pulling back.
“Just… try not to make a habit of it.”
“No promises.”
“Toph.”
“Kidding,” she muttered. “Mostly.”
She huffed, but she didn’t move away, remaining in her embraces as her girlfriend traced small circles in her waist.
“Zuko sent a messenger, by the way,” she said after a moment. “Oh yeah?” Toph leaned back slightly. “What does Sparky want?”
“He’s engaged.” Toph blinked. “…What?”
“That’s what I said.”
“To who?”
“He didn’t say. Just that he wants us there.” Toph snorted at that . “Unbelievable. Took him long enough.” The waterbender laughed softly. “You’re not surprised?”
“It’s Zuko. Guy needs someone to soften him up.”
“And that someone has to be a wife?”
“Worked for me didn’t it?”
“So you admit it.”
“Admit what?”
“That I soften you up.”
A long silence coated the room. “I never said that.” “Okay, Toph.” “Can we focus back on Zuko please? This wedding needs to happen immediately he’s going to be insufferable until it comes.”
She shifted slightly, still close, too close for it to be accidental. “Would you be insufferable?” she asked. Toph smirked. “Already am.” She rolled her eyes, but her thumb brushed absentmindedly along Toph’s jaw, lingering there.
“…We’d have to go,” she said. “To the wedding.” “Yeah, yeah. I’ll even wear something fancy. Try not to ruin his big day.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Toph tilted her head. “What did you mean then, dollface?”
There was a pause.
“…Would you ever want that?”
Toph stilled. Her fingers tightened slightly at her waist.
“…What, a big fancy wedding?” she deflected.
“No.”
A beat.
“…Just. That.”
Toph exhaled slowly. For once, she didn’t have something quick to say.
Did she want that?
Did she want—
Her hand slid up slightly, settling more securely at her back, pulling her closer again without thinking.
“…Yeah,” Toph muttered finally. “I think I would.”
Silence.
“…Good.”
Toph smirked faintly, leaning in just enough to brush her lips against hers again, slower this time. “Don’t get ahead of yourself, angel.”
“I’m not.”
“You are. You always do."
“Yeah, but you love it.”
Toph huffed at this, softly against her mouth. But she didn’t pull away.
And for a moment, just a moment, the world outside didn’t matter. Maybe she didn’t believe in higher powers.
But if something out there decided things like this—
…yeah.
It definitely got this one right.
love speaks! since this is my first wlw fic (on tumblr I have a lot on wattpad) this is about to be how a lot of y'all find out im gay lmao. if this sucks im sick so pitty me.
ꮼ world's best earthbender!toph is also the world's best lover
ᦸ girlfriend!toph has her own special ways to romance ⸝⸝ not proofread.
girlfriend!toph does not play when it comes to your relationship; even when she doesn't take anything seriously, nothing would make her let someone disrespect the love you share.
She can and has defended you whenever she's caught someone making obscene comments about the relationship.
girlfriend!toph isn't openly affectionate in the traditional sense—she can be at times, though rarely—opting to share loving words or grounding touches whenever in the presence of others.
The touch she goes for the most is tracing her fingertips over your features & taking a deep breath as she feels your heartbeat—the others have long learned to never bother her when touching you.
girlfriend!toph is an entirely different story in private; while she rarely seeks out affection, the moment she feels your touch, she melts—leaning into your touch, carefully reciprocating & relaxing.
There's only been one instance of your friends catching her being so vulnerable with you, and she's been extra careful to protect the sanctity of keeping private moments private
girlfriend!toph finds it peaceful when she lies in bed with you & you take turns whispering how your days went, taking turns with kissing each other's skin and scratching your backs.
It's always so soothing to feel her strong hands massaging your tense muscles while you're grumbling about a shitty day, and it's always so calming for her to be there for you.
girlfriend!toph has better muscles than most men, and she's well aware of it; it doesn't matter that she's short when it's easily made up for in her biceps—whether it's wrapping them around you at night, carrying you, or just letting you toy with them, she loves to show them off.
It's so gentle how she'll touch you, even with her arms anchored around your thighs or her bicep shoved to your lips to let you kiss her skin.
girlfriend!toph likes to take you outside and guide you to sit with her, carefully describing how the earth feels beneath her feet & how serene it is to just exist in the dirt sometimes—and how comfortable it feels to have you with her.
Something about holding hands with you, breathing, and sharing the peace she feels when one with the earth is so intimate she'll crave it sometimes.
girlfriend!toph lets you touch her hair. Brushing it, tying it up, braiding it, and toying with it. Every time you ask to mess with her hair, she'll grudgingly sit there and let you do whatever you want.
Even though she can't see what you've done, she'll touch over her hair and assure that it 'feels as pretty' as you said it looked.
girlfriend!toph will get very annoyed whenever one of her friends tries to guide her around, though whenever it's your hand clasping hers. Not tugging, not pulling, just holding on.
Though if anyone took her being okay with you doing it as they could, she'd go for their head.
girlfriend!toph is very protective of you. Even though she's well aware you can handle yourself, if she has the chance to defend your honor, she'll go all in, crass words, fists clenched, and threatening.
Not much gets her pissed, but insulting or being rude to you is the quickest way to get there.
girlfriend!toph hates it whenever her friends catch her being mushy. It's happened far too many times for her liking; a blush dusts her cheeks, & she'll groan whenever she hears the teasing starting from Sokka's lips.
Though that doesn't stop her from risking the occasional intimate moment, resting her head against your chest, kissing your hand, and using affectionate words that the entire gang has heard.
It never fails to surprise them how soft she is with you, though, no matter how many times they've witnessed it.
there’s genuinely nothing more satisfying than going back to a fic and #plotting only to discover that you already wrote smth for whatever you had in when you reached flow state that one time……
featuring ;; acheron x afab!reader
content ;; yearning, in-universe acheron, with my own additions because it's my story, reader has survived the shadow of ix, but is not at all an emanator, acheron forgets a lot, reader is a likkle sad about it, hurt & comfort, but it doesn't hurt that bad really because i suck at angst, eventual smut, so look forward to it, reader is afab but isn't otherwise referred to with gender specific terms
note ;; my first multi part fic... gulp i braved this plot i randomly came up with in class over the past month (slowest writer ever) so i hope you enjoy and that acheron isn't horribly ooc
wc ;; 7.5k
requests + asks ;; open! (im just so slow)
You had come to terms with your planet’s death in the past months you’d been left there to wither away. You swallowed it all down with the last of your tears, shoving at anything you could grasp to keep your head from sinking beneath the face of it all.
But coming to terms with your situation did not mean you breathed a little clearer or that you walked with your shoulders pulled back, chin up to the world to brave it with strength. It carved you hollow as your reality stared you directly in the eye, driving you mad as it poured in and washed you clean of all remaining hope left within you.
Your planet was dead, engulfed by the Nihility’s relentless shadow, and you alone remained, stalking through the planet, alive and persistent like a cockroach even an Aeon could not kill. A sole survivor among the corpses of your friends, your family, and the strangers too along with them.
When you gave the bodies a good look, desperately searching for a rise and fall of someone’s chest or a minute twitch of a finger, they blurred into each other, becoming a nauseatingly indiscernible smudge of blackness.
You frowned at the sight, looking away before bile could crawl up to your throat and meet the cracked ground beneath your feet.
The IX rendered everyone into obsolete pieces of flesh that you could barely comprehend. But you could feel it. The devastating screech of your instincts telling you that the foggy silhouettes before you were corpses.
The buzz of flies fluttering about certainly helped bring the notion to life. Or lack thereof.
Grief was relentless. An inescapable feeling that sickened you right down to your stomach before manifesting into something you could feel. Aging you past what your lifespan would allow, yet whenever you caught your reflection in the mirror, you looked all the same, albeit dirty.
Most times, though, you heard it.
On the lonely nights where you had no choice but to thrust yourself into the embrace of sleep that never welcomed you easily, emptiness rang through the air until you could no longer hold onto consciousness.
When you were not trying to get some shuteye, it pounded in your ears, determined to drive you further into madness as you tarried on through the debris. Searching for someone, anyone. Or, at least, something to each.
Everything was rotten.
The day of the disaster, about four hundred and twenty-eight days back, if you had counted correctly, you’d watched the lavender that sat preciously at your windowsill wilt before your eyes as the sun was swallowed by Nihility.
Everything about that day felt fresh, as if it were only yesterday that it had happened. But it wasn’t, and memories, whether before or during the disaster, were of no aid in unwinding the tightness of your shoulders.
There was only the present. And currently? You were hungry.
Just like the lavender, most of everything was decomposed down to inedible scraps that, at this point, you considered yourself lucky to scavenge.
Leaves were your only friend, you thought as you crouched before the fallen, dry little things. You ignored the way your knees creaked and groaned in protest at the movement, even if they sounded louder than anything else around you.
Picturing a sweet confection instead of the browned leaf, you pressed it past your lips, dry and cracked as they met your dirt-covered fingers. In addition to your weary skeleton, you paid no mind to the crunch of the leaves between your teeth.
Long before your now steely digestion, it took a month of your stomach turning over and rejecting what you could manage to scrounge up. Now, the ‘food’ you forced down settled hesitantly, like it was waiting for the other shoe to drop. What followed instead was a dirty swish of water that felt worse than anything else as it coated your throat with a permanent grime.
It barely helped, but it was something.
A breeze moved your attention to the decayed orchard around you.
You’d eaten all the rotted apples, figuring you’d die of sickness eventually. But you never did. Not one cough after spending over a year scarfing down whatever hadn’t decomposed into dry soil. Not even a single morning of illness after. You woke up only to excruciating hunger.
The bark of the tree scratched through your clothes as you leaned against the trunk. You didn’t mind it. Secretly, you hoped it infected you with something fatal.
All you wanted now was to die.
You’d placed your bets on starvation a few months back, ignoring every drop of dirty water and mouldy 'greens,' and allowed your stomach to constrict itself permanently. But you never died. You barely even got weaker, but you could feel it all, the hunger, the thirst, the longing.
Was this immortality, you wondered? Immortality without godhood, a curse in itself that every myth of hubris had warned of. You wished you’d faded with the rest of your people.
Shutting your eyes as the wind picked up again, you breathed in deep, hoping to catch a scent of something carried by the wind. Even if it was a figment of your mind’s imagination. Having a goal of search gave you something to work for. Without it, you’d only dig a deeper hole of insanity for yourself.
This one time, you’d actually caught something. Actually.
Ozone first, and then a faint bit of lotus that bloomed so freshly through your senses that it was unlike anything you’d smelled in the past year.
A voice followed.
“Are you alright down there?”
It rang so richly, you could swear it was a figment of your imagination. The sound licked up through you, leaving you in pieces on the ground you sat on before being followed by the crunch of a footstep.
With a snap, your eyes flew open, head swivelling without caution to the source of the voice.
There, you met the sight of two strong legs, scratched and marred from battle and thick with muscle. Your eyes didn’t hesitate to climb up the two masses of strength, even if your soul was struck still at the true sight of a person.
A woman stood before you, and she was beautiful.
Violet hair ribboned over her shoulders, rustled gently by the soft winds breathing over the barren lands of your planet. Her figure imposed effortlessly, looming a height you imagined you wouldn’t reach even if you were to press up on the tips of your toes, and her arms were wrung with muscle, the same as her lower half.
One eye of hers hid behind the swept-over curtain of her bangs, but the rest of her face was laid bare for you to carve into your mind so deep that if you had lost your ability to see, you could still pass your fingers over the indentation of the memory and clutch it to your heart.
Her appearance renovated you a warmth without a single touch, and she only stared back with a calm that you couldn’t fathom in the slightest.
Four hundred and twenty-eight gruelling days since the presence of another, and you were given this picture of a person. Your brain lagged behind your thundering heart, just barely able to keep to its pace.
“You’re not real,” you breathed, air stolen from your lungs. Its escape compelled you to lean closer, shifting to your knees before the violet woman as if she were a deity herself.
“I could almost say the same,” she murmured in response. The sound, albeit quiet, cut through the air between you, sizzling thereafter in a current of her electric presence.
You kept silent after that, swallowing through the dryness of your throat as her stare bored into you.
Her eye, purple and bracketed in rouge, narrowed just the slightest and pinned you still. You would have missed it had you not stared back at her so intensely, clinging on to any emotion that wasn’t your own after years of isolation.
In the inky void of her pupil, you caught your reflection: awed, intrigued, frightened, and daring to hope for something out of her that was nominally better than your current situation. Yet, in that same survey of your mirrored image, somehow, you appeared as a mystery to this woman, framed in the twilight of her iris.
So, you sat there with bated breath, skin tingling at the exhilarating notion of being discovered and regarded with curiosity for the first time in ages.
“You live through the shadow of Nihility?” She questioned lowly and carefully, just as quiet as before.
The soft breath that escaped her nose after was that of a quiet scoff, wisps of disbelief leaking from her and taking physical form.
Considering it yourself, you felt the same seeing an actual living, breathing person. Even if, likely, in her perspective, you were just barely that, falling more accurately under the category of surviving.
The skin of her knee was soft under the hand you extended out to her.
Warmth, real warmth, seeped through your fingertips and ebbed through every nerve in your body. Your breath steepened, and you held on tight, missing the softening of her expression as she bent and crouched before you.
Like this, you could smell her even clearer than before.
“You’ve survived, yet you’re… different to me.” Her hand reached out and her fingers wrapped tight around your bare wrist. “Excuse me.”
She could do anything, and you’d excuse it, you thought.
With her wrapped like a bracelet around your forearm, you were hit with the brief, dissipating nostalgia of community.
You remembered your friends dragging you out of your bedroom, eyes blindfolded with your free hand before it was yanked off as a larger group of your friends shrieked, "Surprise!" You remembered the cake you ate that day, and through that, you remembered all the cakes and desserts you’d ever enjoyed, all the meals you shared with your family, and all the nights you had snuck into your parents' bed as a child.
It reminded you what it meant to be alive, if only for a moment, before you returned to the present, eyes already fixed on the point of contact when something pulsed through where your skin met.
The closest word your mind could catalogue it to was power in its purest form, vibrating through your veins and reaching through your body like fingers carding through your nerves themselves.
You blinked at the unfamiliar sensation. It wasn’t uncomfortable, but it wasn’t comfortable either. It was just… there. Sitting close enough to consider adjacent to your soul. You shuddered at the feeling before it flickered away.
“What was that…?” You questioned, voice dipping into something timorous as you glanced back up at her face, chin tilted downwards just a bit. The woman bore a certain expression, as if she had performed the necessary preliminary of deciding just how she’d interact with you further.
She remained staring at where you were joined.
“The IX has left you with a powerful gift." She paused, pending until she had something finished and ready to say once more. “Whether you consider it to be one remains to be decided.”
She spoke again when you remained quiet.
“Plainly, you’ve been made resistant.”
This time, her words pulled your lips to a frown. Your mind was made to claw your hand from hers, but your heart kept you motionless, beating alone for the touch of another.
Still, your words came out in a scorned hiss.
“I decided long ago that this,” your free hand gestured carelessly to yourself. “Is nothing more than a curse.”
The woman only raised her brow, head tilting to the side as if to adjust her understanding to your own. The fire, briefly ignited within you, died to a simmer.
“Then it is as you’ve determined.”
The woman settled the fact easily, your words falling right as rain without further question, and you softened entirely.
She watched the fall of your shoulders before turning to look off in the distance. Her eyes flitted back and forth so minutely and particularly that you wondered if she was seeing everything regardless of if it were miles away.
“It is only you who survives?” She questioned, still looking far off. You figured that she could indeed see that far a distance.
“…Yes.”
She hummed gravely, and her hand slid up to grip your forearm in a grip that was both firm and gentle, just beneath your elbow. You shifted in place a moment at the touch, only feeling more present when her eyes shifted back to yours. Your breath hitched at the violet.
“I too have lost my planet and people,” she sighed, hand tightening in the slightest over your arm. Once again, she looked down at where her hand was around you, staring down pensively at the feeling before continuing. “First to war, then the IX.”
You didn’t say anything for a moment after, instead finding yourself looking into a mirror—albeit one shifted a bit to its side. You knew at least half of her troubles well enough, war being one you couldn’t imagine for the life of you.
“Then,” you started, perplexing yourself for something to say in response to her revelation. “Are you like me? Resistant and such.”
“No.” The woman’s lips pursed, shaking her head as she let go of your arm. Her touch remained a ghost against your skin. “Very different, I think.”
She responded like it was something fuzzy to conceptualize but a heavy burden to bear regardless. You only held further distaste for IX for being an additional stressor to your perceived saviour—and all she did was being there. With you. It was all you needed.
Blubbering, you attempted to ease whatever unintended emotion you may have strung up within her before it tightened into a knot impossible to release.
“That’s okay...!” Your hands waved in front of you in a quick motion.
The words tumbled through your lips and scattered within the space between you awkwardly. You hadn’t a clue as to why you had said them or what exactly was ‘okay,’ but it brought a small smile to her face regardless, easily placated.
Her head tilted again.
“In a way it’s okay, I suppose,” she hummed, calm as the breeze between you. “Yours.”
Another quietness settled between you, pregnant with something unidentifiable. Whatever it was, you weren’t eager to press in and unearth its meaning. Silence had plagued you like a terrible sickness these past years, and there was no way you were going to let your first opportunity to fill it slip through your fingers.
So, you introduced yourself, the only thing you could give in return to her presence.
“You’re on the planet Inendi,” you told her. “Or what it once was, at least.”
You shifted in position, sitting cross-legged before the crouched purple woman.
She stared at you carefully as you moved, eyes roving over your face as if cataloguing its curve along with the sonic ring of your name deep into her mind. It seemed almost meticulous, in a sense, and the internal question of why she would put in such an amount of care to remember it came and went before she carried her attention over to the rest of Inendi.
“I am called Acheron,” she supplied.
She left out the name of her planet in favour of sighing something wistful. You didn’t push, though you wanted to.
“I travel the galaxies in search of planets like this here Inendi of yours. I hunt any existing harbinger of IX.”
You supposed it made for an explanation to the sinew that emanated from the entirety of her existence. Even by way of her shoulders moving as she breathed, you could decipher from Acheron’s posture alone that she was some sort of warrior. Now, you understood she was indeed a warrior—one against Nihility.
Her words settled like dust before being shaken off as you pressed forward, looking at Acheron with rounded eyes coloured with panicked dismay.
“Will you be leaving then?” You questioned with barely concealed fragility. It didn’t miss her as her gaze returned quickly to yours.
“Yes…” She began, her hand reaching out to brush her fingertips along the space just above your knee. It flattened there, fingers splaying, and tingles blossomed beneath her palm. “But I will not leave you alone here, friend.”
Friend.
She pulled her touch back into herself, and you nearly moved along with the motion.
“If you wish, I imagine joining me would serve better than continuing here. Of course, the decision is entirely yours—”
“I’ll come,” you cut Acheron off with a quickness that had her lips sealing shut and a perplexed flutter of her eyes.
You repeated your words again after a moment, calmer on your second go-around. You were gifted another one of Acheron's softened smiles.
She shifted and stood, holding a hand out toward you, and you wrapped your own around hers easily. In that brief moment of your hands pressing against one another, you wished you could never let go before being hauled up in an accidental display of power so natural to Acheron that you tumbled right against her form.
She didn’t so much as stumble, only pausing to register the amount of strength she’d next have to reserve when handling you.
“Then come,” she nodded. You followed right on after her.
—
You were certain that joining Acheron in her exploits was to be a brief blip in your post-Inendi existence: a journey that ended with a teary-eyed goodbye after which you’d settle in some planet that suited you just second to which your original home did.
But that was planets ago—tens of planets ago—and there you were with that violet woman. Where there was no home any longer, Acheron became familiar.
Now, sleep collected you with little objection into its cold embrace.
You wondered on those dreamless nights if she was your new home. If Inendi had fractured off a branch of herself and planted a seed within Acheron. One that you could not bear to abandon for a single planet across the galaxies, no matter the enemy you’d face or the danger you’d brave travelling as her sole companion.
Then, you’d wake up from your empty slumber with the question still ringing in your mind, just as she was ready to go. She who never slept but waited only for you.
Whatever it was that kept you with her, it did not matter enough for you to bring into question, as Acheron seemed entirely unburdened in permitting you to keep at her side.
So, in your time with Acheron, you learned the woman.
You watched her as she spoke, as she marched, even when she did nothing at all. Every minor shift in her countenance or posture was catalogued within until your brain was a dictionary of all that was her.
Your untiring pursuit of understanding her was rewarding in ways that nothing else could match since your leaving of Inendi. It lit you up like fireworks bursting within before simmering on the face of your skin, pulling your cheeks up into a personal smile that she would notice but never comment on.
Your most significant finding was in her speech: Acheron never wasted her breath on superfluous chatter. Every word that slipped through her lips was important, relevant, and never to be missed.
This fact trained you, in a way, to forever catch her voice over the babble of others, no matter how quietly she may have uttered a comment. And as the sound of her timbre would worm its way into your ears, you’d find yourself hanging onto her words, deciphering every possible meaning until the grip of your mind couldn’t hold any longer and you’d fall into what you imagined to be the felicitous abyss that was truly understanding Acheron.
You wouldn’t mind falling into her so entirely, you thought. You imagined she’d catch you the same way she would whenever you’d leap from a ledge into her arms or when she’d pull you up another, right into her hold to steady your jostled form to balance.
As most things belonging to you were, the pane of this notion was shattered to pieces by the Memokeeper you’d met on your arrival to Penacony, the so-called “Planet of Festivities.”
You’d most shamefully felt green at her revelation of really peering into Acheron’s mind, despite how she shivered in sharing its harrowing description. It forced you to consider whether you knew her at all.
Still, Acheron’s silence regarding your continued presence left you with two conjectures that you endlessly poured yourself into. Was your leaving an insignificant affair to Acheron or one that was out of the question?
Shaking your head free of the matter that was of no place to currently be pending, you turned your head to peruse Acheron’s profile, who stood to your left, facing ahead as her hair whipped in the wind behind her.
This was your spot: to her right, where her blade did not rest. And, sometimes, you selfishly fancied yourself with the idea of her placing her hand over your shoulder the same way she rested her left over the hilt of her katana.
It was on rare occasion when you received this touch.
Acheron’s thumb would press against your collarbone as the rest of her fingers lay over your shoulder.
It was a firm grip, reassuring and strong, that swirled your stomach into a dizzying mix of its contents. It raised goosebumps to your skin in an equal amount of excitement as it did trepidation.
Anyone else would call it superstition, but as you had determined through your travels with Acheron, her hand against your shoulder forebode another go-around of a true battle between her and an enemy.
Yet, greedily, and most wrongly, you still craved the feeling of her hand against you, one way or another.
Her touch was cool as it was warm, and it drew you closer to her than you often were for a moment’s breath before she’d unsheathe her blade and deliver death to whatever stood before her.
After which, she’d forget. A cycle that left both you and Acheron entirely lost for purpose as she wandered continuously through the galaxies, just barely grasping hold of her memories before her hand met your shoulder once more.
It hollowed you just as IX did your planet whenever this came to pass, as selfish as it felt to claim such a thing. But how could you not feel such a way when, after battle, your closest companion stared at you as if you were merely a stranger?
She was no less accepting of you, at least. That, sometimes, hurt the most.
Eventually, though, as you did with all cycles, you grew used to it. It was as inevitable as the sunrise and sunset, and you could only stomach it and push through for Acheron’s sake.
The first time, however, was the worst.
You remembered it just as vividly as the Dreamscape’s sky expanded into a brilliant golden shine, giant stacks of poker chips sinking through its gloss, capable of crushing any unfortunate soul who found themselves beneath them.
You remembered it just as grimly as Acheron’s hand did, in fact, meet your shoulder, maneuvering you close to her form before stepping ahead of you and the rest of the Astral Express’ crew.
The memory of her hand on your shoulder would likely last longer than her memory of this moment as she reached for her blade.
Then, all of her, and the surrounding area, faded into the same black, white, and red that had swallowed Inendi and Acheron’s planet all those years ago.
And again, you saw the first planet you visited: Harirau.
—
If Acheron had arrived to Inendi on a ship, you would have heard it.
The planet’s silence was so thick that, from it, you could pick out the scrape of dead branches scratching against each other regardless of their distance. Even the empty rustle of dead leaves further than your eyes could reach could capture your attention, fooling you into another trek in search of life on your desolate planet.
Missing a spacecraft was an impossibility, but somehow, you had missed Acheron’s.
You were occupied by this understanding as you joined hands with the woman the first time, up on your feet with a renewed hope that shone ironically through your gaunt form.
She must’ve landed far, but in knowing you’d be off this planet soon enough, it was a marathon you were willing to brave by her side.
Looking over her shoulder, your mouth pressed to its side in question.
“How far is your ship?”
When you glanced back to her expression, you were met with her looking down at you far too softly for someone she had only just met. Her stare was understandably pitiful in nature, but it pierced through you with a desperation of companionship that matched your own.
The weight of her attention filled you to the brim with a satisfaction only available to the loneliest of individuals. So, you peered back at her, hoping to return even a sliver of the feeling she elicited in you.
Her expression didn’t budge.
“What is it?” You questioned again, cautiously, this time.
Acheron kept silent before her face turned pensive, her curved eyebrow barely furrowing before she stepped entirely into your space.
Her warmth bled through your ratty clothing as her arm took its liberty of slipping around your waist, hand splayed flat to the small of your back. You straightened to attention at the touch, glancing away briefly if only to reassure yourself that this was real once again.
This type of proximity was foreign. It died along with your planet, and its absence was illustrated in the taut, upright pull of your shoulders. It took a long breath and a half before you could settle in her hold. Acheron waited patiently for just that.
“I tend to travel more… unconventionally,” Acheron explained slowly, letting her words hang in the little bit of space between you before she continued. You could feel the slow rise and fall of her chest against yours.
“Moving through space will require power the same as THEIRS. As such, you will feel its similarity.” Her lips pursed. “Stay close; it won’t take long.”
Her explanation—if it could be deemed as such—was frustratingly vague, and you were just about done with all the uncertainty these past years had shoved all the way down your throat. Uncertainty of survival, uncertainty of a meal, uncertainty of whether you’d wake up the next day. It frustrated you to your core, and with a soft huff through your nose, you instead took to examining Acheron for anything else you’d be lucky enough to pick up on.
All she seemed to offer was hesitance with a promise of brevity in amends for her incautious closeness to you, as if that were a problem at all. What you needed was clarity, and the lack of it tugged your lips into a downward curve.
Acheron, for all her bravery to visit a planet as dead as Inendi, almost pulled back at your seeming displeasure.
Your hands stopped her before she could.
She took pause as they snaked up to hold onto her arms, bracing themselves on the firmness of her biceps. The action did well in reassuring her—you felt as much in the tightening of her hold around your waist.
“Acheron,” you began. “I don’t understand what you mean. Do you have to call your ship—?”
You were cut off by reality tearing itself in two, bending around you with a force of power that was so mighty and distinct that it could only be recognized as THEIRS. Its familiarity brought about a dread that curdled and crushed whatever spirit remained within.
All in one moment, as you were being shot through space, you were under the cast of IX’s shadow once again.
To keep your soul from exiting your body, your arms automatically wound themselves around Acheron’s neck, clinging to her broad form as you hooked your chin over her shoulder.
You couldn’t tell if you were screaming; you could barely register anything at all. Your skin pulled so far with the force of movement, you wondered if it might’ve torn right off, leaving you a mass of muscle before you’d even reached your destination.
Your stomach flipped so violently that you pursed your lips to keep from vomiting.
In the brief moments you were able to hold your eyes open, no colour safe for red made its appearance in your travels, painting the inky abyss around you until you could no longer bear its vibrance.
You screwed your eyes shut instead and held on tighter to Acheron, who remained your only semblance of an anchor as you jetted through more galaxies than you could count.
Then, there was sand.
It nestled and poked between your toes as your weight sunk into it. You would’ve fallen into it entirely if not for Acheron bracing you upright against her. Your legs were jelly, knees just short of buckling, and you could vaguely hear your companion questioning your welfare over the shrill screeches of birds—songs tropical in nature.
A gasp tore through your throat so violently that you winced at its sharpness, eyes flying open as your hands found Acheron’s chest only to shove yourself away from it.
She let go without argument, holding them out in a still-open invitation that you did not accept. Instead, you stumbled off into a thicket of palm trees, and Acheron followed close behind as you emptied what little content your stomach held at one’s base.
Acheron ducked into a crouch behind you, hand finding your back as you retched. It sank heavy and warm against your shirt. You could only focus on it for a minute before another wave of nausea hit, and you gave to the sand what acids remained within you.
“It’s difficult. I know,” she reassured, hand moving to smooth circles against you. “Are you alright?”
She called your name once as your chest heaved with effort, but you didn’t respond—couldn’t. Your mind wrangled with itself, rearranging its position within your skull after being brought to an entirely new planet in just seconds.
Wherever you were, it was hot and humid. The sun burned in a relentless disk that you narrowly avoided in the shade, the climate seemingly disposed to hasten your sickness. Fortunately for you, there was nothing left to give other than an empty gag and a copious amount of saliva.
You held your tongue until your breath evened out into something respectable enough to award Acheron a response. Then, you turned to face her, swiping the back of your hand across your wet mouth.
“Yeah,” you panted, blinking harshly as your vision settled back, by slow degrees, from three into one.
When Acheron returned clearly into picture, it took only a moment to realize that she was faring just the same as you—safe for the vomit. She stared blankly before her chin dipped in a slow nod that looked anything but certain. It was a peculiar sight to be met with when just moments ago she seemed unshakeable.
Her eyes were foggy as she herself grappled with the shift in environment. Goosebumps erupted up your spine as her hand dragged up to your nape, catching her own balance with it as she rested her touch there.
Even if you could not afford the luxury of the emotion, the sight had you cast a worried glance over her as you reached your hand back to hook onto her arm. You were certain your breath reeked of sick as your lips cracked open to question if she was faring any better than you were, but you didn’t get so much as a word out before your mind seared white-hot with pain.
Choking out a groan, your hand squeezed with all its might into Acheron. The muscle beneath your fingers didn’t give a millimetre as you leaned into her. She didn’t so much as wince, only leaning close to catch you in case you collapsed entirely.
“Fuck! Fuck—my head,” you gritted, keeling over yet again as tears slipped freely from your eyes right into the sandy mess of your vomit.
“You’re not okay,” Acheron said decidedly and reached to grab hold of both of your shoulders in what was an unhelpful attempt at grounding you through the pain.
When you looked into her eyes, vision bleary with tears, you could only imagine how pathetic you looked in that moment, hair strewn about with dried spit coating the outside of your lips. You acquainted your attention with the ground instead, bottom lip quivering at the thought.
“Hold on,” Acheron muttered, hands finding your armpits before pulling you up to your feet with her. Her arms hooked beneath your knees, picking you up into an effortless carry as she ducked her head, urging you to wrap your arms around her neck the same way you had earlier.
“I’m finding us some food,” she explained shortly, moving along to where you assumed she saw a village. You looked in the same direction but could only see so far ahead before tears blurred your vision once more. You could’ve sworn you heard a low coo.
“And a place to stay as well. You need rest.”
In Acheron’s mission of finding a place to settle, the people of—as you learned this planet was called—Harirau lent you a small, woven hut. It was strung along the mighty frames that crawled over the beach and hung huts of varying sizes. Each of them connected to one another through similarly woven bridges adjacent to the shores on which the Harirauns boasted their excellent fishing.
You learned, among the concerned flock of inhabitants that trailed behind Acheron and you, the name of an elderly woman: Arihia. She guided and moved nimbly for her age, which you attributed to the ardent swimming culture this village bore, and commanded a respect that easily waved off the curious crowd of other villagers surrounding you.
In the hut, she had familiarized either of you with the hammocks and mats for sleeping, recommending the latter for your brittle form. You heeded her advice with little argument, and she unravelled a mat for Acheron to set you down upon.
Arihia’s gaze washed over you in a warm, homey concern that only someone of old age could provide. It stirred in you an urge to curl up into her attention’s embrace, but it shone too similarly to your own mother’s care. You settled instead on the mat with a solemn frown that you hid deftly, turning your head to look out of the nearest partition in the hut.
You people-watched and drew an easy conclusion about the planet in your hiding. The Harirauns were a people of benevolent spirit: generous and welcoming. With the beautiful nature that surrounded them, you wondered if their irreproachable demeanours were a byproduct of their tropical environment.
The sky was free of grey, as blue as the clear waters below, and there was a permanent taste of salt in the air.
Curiously, you threw your gaze along the pathways that hung further past the shores and watched the people swim, unable to tear your attention from the graceful arch of their dives into the warm waters below.
Both the children and adults seemed proficient in this ability, and they swam just as mobile as they walked on land. Their hair, either curly or braided, was typically long in nature, and it fascinated you as it followed them like capes underwater.
Returning your attention to the confines of your temporary alcove, you basked in the comfortable coolness the shade and nearby water afforded you, letting relaxation take you for the first time in years.
The mat was more comfortable than it seemed, and, over the gentle crash of waves and the squawk of seagull-equivalent Hariraun birds, you learned from Arihia that the hut you occupied was often granted to passing travelers free of charge, along with the mealtimes that were held with the larger community.
She bid the two of you goodbye soon after, parting with a light wave of her wrinkled fingers and a swish of her skirt, feet bare and padding away.
Promptly, Acheron turned to set up a hammock of her own. It drew between two posts that filled you with a minor sense of envy in its position, which revealed the open scenery of the planet’s waters, which were bigger than what your opening afforded you.
When she finished, she crouched to your side like a careful attendant.
“I’m going to collect some food for us,” she said, her voice just as lulling as the ocean’s sighs.
When her hand had suddenly found your arm, you realized that your eyes had been shut for too long to be a blink.
“Arihia offered us an early portion. For the time being, try to stay awake. I’ll return quickly.”
Acheron waited patiently for a nod or a hum of agreement, unmoving until you’d confirmed. Instead, you held her attention a moment longer, glancing back outside to catch a man casting a wide net over the water.
When you opened your mouth, Acheron leaned just the slightest bit closer.
“What’ll it be?” You questioned. “Fish?”
You turned your gaze back to Acheron, whose lips ghosted into a smirk at your dry comment.
“Likely,” she nodded, standing up to her full height. She towered over you when you lay down like this and bid you goodbye with a quiet nod before stepping out of the hut.
Your brief moment of solitude was spent fighting sleep and eagerly awaiting actual, real food, appetite becoming more of an afterthought with each passing second.
Digging your heels into the mat below you, you shifted whenever your eyes felt too heavy. Suddenly, footsteps rung out, heels pressing against the floor.
“You’re back,” you said weakly, eyes falling to the wooden bowls and utensils in either of Acheron’s hands as she returned to the hut.
“Yes.”
She agreed shortly with a nod, stepping closer to you before settling down with her legs folded beneath her. It was a comical position, you thought, to see someone so strong tending to you like this. She set the bowls down and helped lift you upright with carefully situated hands.
“They refused payment and offered more than needed. It took some time.”
You only shrugged at her explanation with a small shake of your head.
“Seemed quick enough.”
The bowls held what looked to be a fish soup. Sitting in its red and hearty broth swam a multitude of vegetables that were unfamiliar versions of the vegetables you once ate in Inendi. Its strangeness to you didn’t help your lack of inclination to eat.
Picking up the smaller portion, Acheron handed you a bowl after tucking the spoon into it. Heat bloomed through the container and into your hands, feeling frustratingly heavy for its little content, and you greeted the broth with a slow blink.
It smelled good. Aeons, had it really been a while since you’d eaten real food? But, in the face of the real thing, it felt like too much even when you knew it was nothing more than that of a child-sized meal.
It took you summoning all remaining determination from within to wrap your fingers around the spoon. In that moment, sleep sounded much more appetizing than this, but with Acheron’s stare and the stark emptiness of your stomach, you reluctantly dipped the utensil in for some liquid and an accompanying chunk of fish.
The spoon was heavy and, embarrassingly, shook on its journey to your lips. You steeled yourself into stillness when it came close enough, insisting on cooling it down with a blow despite it being at an adequate temperature to accept into your mouth as is.
Acheron only watched, her own bowl remaining set aside. Not forgotten, just waiting.
“You must eat,” she said, voice final, with your name acting as the final punctuation of her sentence. You anticipated her words before she said them, and you flicked your gaze from your spoon to her, shooting back a, suddenly, sharp reply.
“I know.”
The bite you took was small, somehow leaving behind broth in the spoon’s catch. It was less of a mouthful that you could manage, but your energy was drained to a seed, and you felt more husk than human as you moved.
As you swallowed, Acheron sat silently by your side. Concern slid over the curve of her shoulders that curled in her attention to you before her hand reached out again to find yours over the bowl.
“Let me help,” she offered, scooting just a bit closer when you cast a glance to her. “Please,” she added, urging before you could even speak up.
“I’m fine.” You shut your eyes, indignant as your empty stomach spoke for you. Then, you scooped up another mouthful.
Most astoundingly, for yourself, you were able to manage a few more bites. It was admittedly delicious and something you’d appreciate thoroughly any other day, but each bite was more agonizing than the previous, spoon dragging heavier with every lift to your lips.
There was about half left by the time you finally took pause.
Acheron, who ate her own bowl silently, was just about finished, and her offer, remaining readily on the table, was becoming more tempting by the minute. The thought of accepting it, however, brought a tingle of embarrassment that swept up your back and across your face.
You glanced at her between chewing on a vegetable.
Your stare was fortunately heavy enough to capture Acheron’s attention without a single word. She set down her bowl, not seeming particularly moved by its contents, as you slowly turned the handle of your spoon to her silently. Her eyes flicked down to the utensil before returning to your face, an eyebrow arching upwards in question.
You sighed through your nose at her patiently waiting for your verbal agreement. Of course.
With an awkward clearance of your throat, you spoke.
“I—,” you began quietly, words practically sacrilege to the independence you’d exemplified in your time on the barren Inendi. You swallowed down a lump in your throat that returned right after. “—could use some help.”
The words slithered from behind and through the jail of your teeth. You didn’t—couldn’t—tack on a please to the end of your sentence for the life of you, but Acheron paid it no mind. She nodded, brushing her hair over her shoulder before taking your bowl from your hands, fingers sliding along yours.
Acheron accepted your request with a simple and short “alright.” You shouldn’t have expected anything more with her typical curtness, and it was something you appreciated in minor as she scooped up a spoonful whose quantity matched your previous bites.
When she raised the spoon up, she brought it to herself first, purposelessly blowing on it to buy you some time as you willed yourself to slacken your jaw from its grit.
On your first bite, the spoon clicked awkwardly against your teeth. She dragged it upwards along your lips to keep anything from spilling and examined your averted gaze as you chewed and swallowed before slowly bringing up another mouthful.
Each scoop, blow, and bite continued until the spoon scraped and scratched at the bottom of the bowl. By then, the two of you were coordinated enough for you to accept the spoon without its usual clatter against your teeth, and your insides twisted in conflict at the thought.
The notion of being fed was no less humiliating by the end of the endeavour, but you’d accustomed yourself to it the best you could allow yourself to. Acheron, on the other hand, remained unbothered. Each of her movements remained casual as she offered you the rest of her bowl, to which you refused, slinking down until your back returned to the mat.
She only nodded, grabbing your bowl and moving away to finish her own. The space she awarded you didn’t seem like enough. The hut became nothing but a closet, and you ducked into your blankets and turned onto your side as you looked outside the hut.
The sun was barely coming down to rest, and children continued to run about, their giggles and squeals ringing along the shores even at their distance. It offered a pleasurable buzz of noise that Inendi did not provide, and your body slackened quickly, ignoring the remaining bits of daylight and insisting on sending you off to sleep.
Your stomach, despite all the fuss, was pleasantly full. Silently, you thanked Acheron for her efforts as she stepped out to return the plates to your gracious hosts, but when your eyes finally fell shut, your cheeks remained warm with embarrassment, and the violet woman plagued your dreams the entire night.
