HELLOOO TONYYY i just wanted to say ive been following your works now for quite a while in ao3 and last year and i have to say youre one of my favorite make reader writers out there (ESP the bottom male reader tag) thank you for all your fics youve written so far and many more that will come, especially from kinktober 👀
now this will be my first time requesting so its alright if you can ignore this and i do apologize if youve got a bunch others thats still pending lol-
sooo ive struck this idea just now after a tiktok trend popped up where the same say the same line “you shaved your bush?” and that person voices different characters as they say the line
now i thought itd be hilarious if you had the RE men said this when the reader says they shaved it out of nowhere (during their job or wherever)/as they do the deed. assuming that the reader had a bush in the first place
i do have a suggestion tho for carlos in mind tho cuz its such a funny thought lmao: reader calling then during his job and immediately doubles his work to get to reader and once he does he shoves reader’s shorts/sweatpants whatever and underwear and just stares at the space there and cries and wails all dramatic because he says “it was the only thing left from reader that was attached to him being hairy” or whatever. its up to you tony 🙇
AND ANOTHER SUGGESTION: you can have this be part two to the donut stacking scenario cuz reader shenanigans 🤭
ANYWAYS THANK YOU TONY ONCE AGAIN FOR YOUR AMAZING FICS 🤩
Helloooo and thanks a lot for all kind words🥹🥹 I’ll add this to my list of requests and get to it as soon as I figure out all the other scenarios with our lovely survivors
ℌ𝔬𝔫𝔢𝔶𝔪𝔬𝔬𝔫 𝔴𝔦𝔱𝔥 𝔱𝔥𝔢 𝔪𝔬𝔩𝔡𝔶 𝔩𝔬𝔯𝔡
Ethan Winters x male reader
Summary: the night and morning after the new union between you and Lord Winters, you learn new things about your husband that further cement his complete devotion for you.
Tags: Male Reader. No Use of Y/N. Lord Ethan Winters AU. Canon Divergence. Dark Ethan Winters. Possessive Ethan Winters. Obsessive behavior. Protective Ethan Winters. Corruption. Infected Reader. Mold Infection. Touch-Starved Ethan Winters. Emotional Dependency. Unhealthy Attachment. Fluff. Forced marriage. Highly suggestive moments. Moldy dilf alert.
ℳ𝒶𝓈𝓉ℯ𝓇𝓁𝒾𝓈𝓉 - 𝒫𝓇ℯ𝓋𝒾ℴ𝓊𝓈 𝓅𝒶𝓇𝓉
Words count: 12000
To say you were exhausted was, honestly, the understatement of the entire evening, said with the kind of dry sarcasm your brain could only just barely muster while the rest of you was melting into the mattress. Between your thighs there was a warm trickle sliding down the crease of your ass and pooling on the sheet beneath you, physical remaining of your Lord husband that came from your gaping hole, sore in a very specific way, twitching now and then around emptiness and pushing out another sluggish dribble of him that painted the inside of your thigh sticky.
Somehow, though, none of that mattered, especially with the way Ethan had tucked you up against his bare chest and slung one heavy arm across your back, palm splayed wide to cover almost the whole span between your shoulder blades.
The faint blue veins that ran under it pulsed at a slow, sleepy pace now, calmed down from the frantic gaslamp throb they had reached while he was buried inside you.
Every question and worry you had been carrying around in your ribcage for the past weeks dissolved.
Your eyelids felt weighted with lead and Ethan was raining down kiss after kiss on the crown of your head that stayed a full second before he pulled his mouth back to place another one an inch to the left.
Murmuring into your scalp between kisses, low and slurred with the same exhaustion that was dragging you under, "you okay, sweetheart? Hurt anywhere?" His hand at your back drifted lower, splaying over the curve of your side, thumb making a soft dragging circle over your ribs. "Doing alright? Want me to get you water?"
You hummed a little noise back at him wordless that meant ‘I'm alright, don't move, don't you dare go anywhere,’ and shifted your head a fraction so that your cheek pressed more comfortably against the shelf of his pectoral.
His skin was faintly damp with sweat and it had a mineral undertone the mold always carried, heartbeat thudding heavy against your ear that did more to soothe you than any drug ever could.
Fingers of his had migrated up into your hair and spread wide, calloused pads dragging over your scalp in slow strokes that made your whole spine go liquid.
When his nails scraped lightly behind your ear a small involuntary sound came out of your throat and you felt his chest vibrate under your cheek with a satisfied little rumble.
If it had just been him and you, you would have been unconscious inside of ninety seconds.
But the toys on the floor kept snagging at the last ragged corner of your consciousness. Every time your eyes drifted half-open they were still there, arrayed on the herringbone floor near the foot of the bed
It felt like someone still played in here.
Your throat worked around a swallow very quietly, cringing at how frayed and hoarse your own voice came out, cracked in three separate places by how thoroughly he had wrung you out, you said, "Ethan… can I ask you somethin'?"
He hummed, sound vibrating up through the whole plate of his pectoral into your cheekbone and you felt him tilt his chin down against the top of your head.
You lifted your face off his chest with effort and when you finally propped your chin on his sternum to look up at him and his eyes were on yours already, barely glowing right now.
In this dim yellow lamplight they looked almost ordinary human blue, tired-husband blue and you could see the small creases at the outside corners where he had been smiling too much.
Wetting your lower lip it stung a little, split in one spot from where you had been biting it earlier.
"Is there… someone else living here?" you asked very carefully.
His face did not change. "No, sweetheart. It's just you and me." Voice calm and warm.
You hummed back at him an acknowledgement that didn't commit to belief or disbelief and you let your head sink back down onto his chest, gaze sideways toward the wall opposite the bed where mold was present.
Ropy black tendrils, thick as your wrist in places, thinning out to hair-fine filaments at their tips, ran down the wall in branching patterns from a knot near the ceiling.
Every couple of seconds a slow pulse of paler light moved down their bodies from the ceiling toward the floor in a soft peristaltic wave.
Were those the same ones that had slid up between your legs and inside you?
You watched the slow pulse of them for a long time while Ethan's fingers kept combing.
"You know… you can share anything with me if you want." A slow breath, feeling the way his lungs rose and fell under your cheek. "It's a good feeling sharing things. It gets lighter." Another breath and your fingers twitched idly against his ribs. "Besides. I'm your husband now, aren't I? That's kinda the… bare minimum I gotta do for you."
Something happened in his chest under your ear. A short low laugh that rippled up through the muscle right beneath your cheekbone and you felt the vibration of it in your own teeth.
Lifting your head off his chest again.
He was not looking at you, jaw tight with tension along the hinge and his lips were pressed too firmly together, upper lip pale where the pressure of the lower was pushing the blood out.
His eyes had left your face and moved, very deliberately, past your shoulder, all the way to the open doorway of the bedroom and whatever he was thinking, his throat worked around it once, a small soft bob of Adam's apple and did not swallow it down all the way.
You watched him for a long moment and there was grief in his face.
Curiosity, or maybe something older and stupider than curiosity, tugged your head to follow his eyes at the same dark doorway.
Right at the edge of your ears at the very threshold of what you could actually detect, there was a buzz that got louder the more you focused towards it.
You blinked hard and focused, exhaustion making every act of focus weight heavily and you had to physically screw your eyes half-shut and hold your breath to force your ears to work through the growing noise.
Under or through it, only for the barest instant you heard a baby crying very far away, somewhere down in the belly of the house.
Then the buzz surged and swelled up over your ears, drowning the sound out entirely, tension bleeding out of your neck and shoulders as the effort of your concentration collapsed.
You were too tired to push against it and your cheek dropped back down against his chest but Ethan moved, sliding out from under your weight with a careful roll of his hips, tucking a pillow under your head in the place his shoulder had been so that you did not go flat onto the mattress.
"I'll be back in a minute, sweetheart," he mumbled, voice threaded with something apologetic.
"mm-kay." You were exhausted, but not to the point that a piece of your brain did not track the sight of him rising off the mattress.
His back to you, broad and lean, muscle terracing down the length of his spine in long clean planes, dip of his lower back and the swell of his ass, high and firm as the muscles flexed when he stepped down off the bed.
When he bent, one knee dropping to plant on the floorboards while he fished around for his discarded boxers, the whole of him rounded down in a way that made your dry mouth go drier. The stitched-up scarring around his left wrist caught the lamplight, ugly ropey scar tissue with a faint black ooze at the seams.
He raked a hand through his sweat-damp hair to get it out of his eyes and glanced over his shoulder at you.
"Right back," he mouthed before he was through the doorway and gone.
The buzz in your ears was already beginning to slacken now that he was moving away from you, strange sedating pressure of his presence draining out of the air.
Curiosity was suddenly a much bigger animal in your chest than it had been a minute ago. As you pushed yourself up.
Oh, God.
That was a mistake because the instant you shifted your weight onto your palms and tried to sit upright, a hot spike of pain drove itself right up through your lower half from the base of your spine into your gut.
Your ass throbbed, hole clenching hard around nothing and the muscles in the small of your back had knotted up into hot little ropes while you had been lying there, now they burned and twanged in protest, breath hissing through your teeth with one small adjustment at a time until you were finally propped upright against the headboard with the coverlet pooled around your hips.
Freaky, intense activities with your Lord husband, who had a cock like something the mold itself had designed just to break you open in the exact right way.
Yeah, there was going to be a limp involved tomorrow.
From this new vantage point you could actually see the room properly for the first time.
The toys were pulsing very faint.
All of them were made of mold.
Why children's toys.
You couldn't come up with an answer that didn't hurt. Your tired brain kept starting sentences and refusing to finish them.
He said no one else lived here.
Your eyes slid sideways, drawn by nothing but the same low pull of curiosity that had gotten cats killed for a great many years.
The nightstand on his side of the bed with a drawer in it that was not quite closed.
Open by maybe half an inch, just enough of a gap that when you leaned slightly, wincing at the fresh bark of pain through your lower back, you could see down through the shadow of the crack into the shape of what lay inside.
There was a simple book, grey cloth cover with no title stamped on the spine that you could see, flat on the bottom of the drawer like it had been slid in there and shut away in a hurry.
You glanced at the open bedroom door and then at the drawer before closing your eyes and thinking about the book.
Shape of it in your mind, grey cloth and plain cover along with how it sat flat in the drawer.
Something bloomed cool along the floorboards.
A single tendril was rising up out of the wood beside the nightstand, Pearl-white and exactly the color of the new arm you had made for Mold, same faint mineral-fungal sheen to it that rose in a slow spiral, unspooling upward out of the herringbone with no sound at all, not even a rustle.
It bent at its tip the way a stem bends toward the sun and it turned its blind head toward the drawer, sliding up along the front of the nightstand to ease through the half-inch gap of the opening and disappeared inside.
Behind your eyes you saw it circling the book and wound around it in layers until you could no longer see the grey underneath at all, just a bright cocoon.
Very gently, the tendril lifted the book up out of the drawer and carried it onto your lap.
All these white tendrils began to dissolve into the floor right after, pale substance fraying into fine mist that sank in slow motes toward the floorboards and vanished before it reached them.
Within perhaps four seconds there was no evidence anything had happened at all.
Your hands were shaking slightly from the strange soft warm afterglow of having done that while you looked at the grey cover before placing one fingertip to the latest bookmark that had a small word marked on the outside side of it titled ‘him’.
Feb. 9th / Evening / The Rock
The date was close.
Your hand froze on the corner of the page while pulling the journal in your lap, spine cracking open easily as you began on that recent page.
Feb. 9th / Evening / The Rock
I decided to go today towards that rock to hopefully not find another one, or at the very least not dead. This should be the time of the month for these stupid rituals.
I told Miranda again to make them stop and she told me again she’ll have a look. Same conversation, third time. If I want the rituals stopped I have to find another solution perhaps.
I was late.
The two of them had already injured him badly, sloppy work to interrupt any possible attempt the poor kid might have done. He was still breathing when I got there and there was so much blood on that damn moss.
I killed the two men. I didn’t mean to, exactly, I guess the more I get taken by emotions the more it starts acting on it’s own.
God why can’t it just listen to me.
My hand was on the kid’s wound to stop the bleeding and the mold immediately went in him.
I felt the way the mold sealed the liver clean and closed the vessels. Somehow it settled in like it belonged to him and I felt no hostility like it did with the many others I tried.
It wanted the same thing I wanted.
I‘ve been trying to do this for a year and a half. Every other one turned.
Duke came up the path with the cart right after, thank God I asked him for a lift. I told him to bring me his linen and his brandy.
It felt nice holding him in my arms.
They deserved it.
Feb. 10th / Very Early / after meeting
I didn’t like the way she was looking at him but you don't say no to her.
At least I can keep him with me and not let the other… siblings of mine (God I still don’t like this way of referring to them) do things to him.
He fell asleep on my shoulder on the way home or rather, I made him do that.
I could feel him fighting it, he didn’t trust me yet and I get that, he’s smart. I put a little more of me into the string between us and I lowered the volume of him from the inside, so it worked. Head went down on my shoulder inside of a minute.
There was, below the notes of the day, a drawing done fast, hatching for the shadows. Your face, eyes closed and mouth just slightly parted.
There was a soft careful line under your lower lip where he had gone back over the pencil three or four times, trying to get the shape of the wet at the corner of your mouth exactly right.
Feb. 10th / Night at Home
I made him go to bed early, he was still tired from the cart, made sure of that.
We had a really nice long talk on the couch with some wine and, apparently, the villagers believe that I feed on peoples soul…
That at least got a good laugh out of me.
It was nice seeing him comfortable near me and, thankfully, didn’t seem to mind all those things of mold in my place.
I couldn’t help but think of how she would have loved him.
A thought of her in his arms and this stupid ‘gift’ I have replicated her crying somewhere inside the house.
It forced me to stop that noise for him and send some molded thing to search the tendril reproducing it.
I opened the string between us and I let a picture through.
Deep down I don’t know why I did that, I guess I was curious of how much I could do with this new bond I had.
After that I had some… problems of my own to attend in my room.
I want to be a good man about this. I’m going to try.
A drawing of you lying on the bed of the guest’s room laid right below his notes.
Your face was hot, feeling the pulse of it in the tips of your ears and low, unforgivably, in the front of your pants where your body had started to answer the words on the page before your head had caught up.
Feb. 11th / Morning / House
He came down for breakfast in the clothes I bought him.
I put more pictures in his head. Cheap, I know.
I couldn’t help it.
He sat at the table and he went very quiet. I watched him try to hide the fact that he was hard under the table.
Yeah, I didn’t regret this at all, really wished I could have him on the butcher block with his legs open around my hips as we kiss together.
I miss her a lot but his company is helping.
Mot— Miranda (by dint of always saying it to satisfy her I’m falling in this as well) wants us up at Alcina's tonight.
She wrote back that she’ll call off the rituals for good. Two years I’ve been asking and today she says yes.
Deep down I really hope she thought of my proposal from the letter I sent her, the wedding idea was something I typed down at the very end of the various proposal just to show my… desperation perhaps?
Finding out that people were getting killed because of me wasn’t a nice feeling at all.
I hope he’ll say yes if things go as I pray.
This house had been so empty and hollow for more than an year.
You closed your thumb over the edge of the page and went way behind in pages to look for the beginning.
The next entry was dated eight months prior and the ink was darker, handwriting a lot less steady and shacking.
June 3rd / Night / Home
I dreamt of her again.
She was in the crib and reaching up for me and I reached down for her and my hand went all black in so many tentacles that passed through the wood to take hold of her fingers and she felt so real. I woke up with mold on the sheets in the shape of a small hand curled around my index finger.
I don't know what else to do.
Your eyes tracked down the page and the letters were beginning to soften at their edges. You blinked and rubbed the heel of your hand into your eye and when you looked again the word crib had lost the shape of its ‘C’ and become a smear that curled at one end.
You lifted your gaze to see the room was perfectly clear, every knot in the wood visible, the small brass key in the drawer's lock catching a point of light from the flame.
Looking back down and the page was fog, ghost-shapes of letters that would not resolve into words no matter how long you held them in your focus.
Rapidly you flipped the page to gather as much as possible going back to around 2 years.
April 17th / [illegible] / [illegible]
[illegible] Mia [illegible] the BSAA [illegible] again. The third [illegible] this year [illegible] black stuff every [illegible] hours [illegible] hands wouldn't stop [illegible]
[illegible] said the levels were [illegible] than after Louisiana [illegible] her they were [illegible]. She knew I was [illegible] but said nothing to me till this moment.
Rose [illegible]
Your throat closed.
Only the name was clear as every other word on the page had gone soft and unreachable.
In that moment you understood, with a slow cold clarity, that something was being done to prevent you from reading any further.
You turned the page rapidly.
May 10th / [illegible] / [illegible]
[illegible] hit her. I didn't [illegible] I would never [illegible] but the mold [illegible] and she flew [illegible] into the wall and she [illegible] up at me from the [illegible] and I saw [illegible] in her eyes [illegible].
I would never do what Eveline [illegible] to her
Rose was [illegible] the next room [illegible] crying and I couldn't [illegible] go to her because [illegible] afraid if I picked her up [illegible]
I sat on the [illegible] outside her door [illegible] hours with my hands shaking. [illegible] on my own THOUGHT [illegible]
That was the [illegible] I knew I had to [illegible]
Stop.
The word came to your head in his voice.
Please, honey, put it down.
November 8th / [illegible] / [illegible]
[illegible] fourteen this year. [illegible] I've killed [illegible] this year without even wanting to.
[illegible] Mia would not [illegible] room with me anymore. [illegible] would not hold Rose [illegible] I was in the house, she would [illegible] her closer and turn [illegible] shoulder toward me [illegible] her from me [illegible] her own husband [illegible]
I don't blame her. [illegible] wouldn't have held [illegible] near me either.
Baby. Please.
The voice in your head was not steady anymore.
I swear to God I was going to tell you, I've been trying for a week to figure out how to tell you, please put it down, please please put it down—
Even as your hand turned the page, the words on this one you could not read at all. The whole page was fog and only the drawing at the bottom was clear.
Done fast from memory many times over from the way the paper under it was thinned from the pressure of the pencil going over and over the same lines.
A baby asleep, one small fist curled against her cheek and very short soft hair.
Under the drawing, in a hand that had shook so badly the letters had almost torn the paper, one word.
Rosemary.
Your vision doubled, tongue felt very heavy and behind it your throat was warm, eyelids coming down with a pull that you tried to fight for perhaps two seconds and then stopped because you could not remember why you had been fighting them.
The diary lifted out of your lap carefully, followed by the soft sound of a page being smoothed flat.
A hand at the back of your neck, palm broad and dry settling under your hair where the small hot pulse was still jumping.
There you go, I've got you.
The hand slid under your arm and tipped you sideways, laying you along the length of the mattress as your cheek came to rest against the pillow.
He lifted your legs up and tucked a blanket over you before the mattress creaked just as it dipped. His chest came up against your side and his arm came over your ribs as the string between you thickened.
Consciousness came back slowly in warm surges one behind the other, each one soaking a little further into the cracked earth of your thoughts before the next arrived, a soft steady headache tapping at the inside of your temples as you dragged your eyelids open.
They stuck back down when pale slanting light that filters through drawn curtains hit them, but even that little was too much and you had to squeeze your eyes back down, count to ten before you could try again.
Second try worked better and your gaze focused on his bed, same bed you had been carried across the threshold into where your husband had fucked you stupid in.
It was still your first time seeing it in daylight, or the poor watered-down excuse for daylight the curtains were letting through.
Late afternoon, judging by the angle and the low tired gold at the edges.
You had slept through most of it.
Shoving the coverlet off, you sat up on the edge of the bed with your bare feet on the cold wood and your elbows planted heavy on top of your thighs.
Head sinking down into your palms, you pressed the heels of your hands into your eyes and rubbed hard, small red galaxies blooming in the dark behind your lids and when you pulled your palms away, the headache had shifted from a knock to a low even drone.
Memories were coming back in an order you did not choose between his mouth on yours, blue in his veins pulsing bright enough to light the underside of his fingers.
All those tendrils at your wrists and the way he had folded you in half and slid inside you inch by inch.
Underneath that, was the grey cloth cover of a book and all the stuff you read.
You sat on the edge of his bed with your feet cold on the wood and your fists in the mattress as you tried, hard, to decide whether you were going to be furious or terrified.
What your brain settled on instead was a kind of tired ache in the middle of your chest, small warm bruise that lived behind your sternum right where the string from him came in and it hurts to find out that someone you have started to love has been telling you the truth in every way except the one that matters.
You did not know how much of what you felt just now was yours and how much of it was his.
Pushing up off the bed your legs held. That was good, balance was there as you took two steps toward where the pile of your clothes had been thrown in last night but were now missing.
"Great," you muttered under your breath, voice that came out crackly at the low end from disuse.
Casting around the room by looking under the bed, at the dresser and pulling open the top drawer with the vague idea that maybe he had put your things there while you slept, but the drawer was full of neatly folded shirts of his, plain white t-shirts and a couple of plain grey henleys.
Standing there in the middle of the room with your arms crossed loose over your bare chest, one hand cupped low and dropped over your junk because standing naked in a room that was not, technically, warm was not the position you wanted to be in for another minute and you swore very quietly under your breath one more time for good measure.
Both the floor and air in the room was cold to the point where goosebumps prickled in a wave up your arms and down along your ribs.
Your room, or whatever the ex-room across the hall counted as now, would have your other clothes in it.
Crossing to the bedroom door with your hand still cupped low and your other arm tight across your chest, you eased it open and stuck your head out into the hall.
It was empty and you could hear, faint and far, water running somewhere downstairs, a faucet or a pipe.
You stepped out, floorboards of the hallway colder than his room's had been as every board sent a small hiss of chill up through the soles of your bare feet as you moved in, making it maybe six steps toward the corner where the hall bent toward your ex-room and then, right as you rounded the turn, Ethan came around it the other way.
Whole freezing body of yours colliding with his chest.
Not hard though, he had time to plant his feet a half-step before you got to him and his hands came up to catch both shoulders to steady you as your bare chest bumped once against the soft cotton of a blue hoodie over the harder shelf of him.
He looked good.
That was the deeply unhelpful first thought your brain served up, golden canvas jacket open at the front and the collar of it was turned up a fraction on one side and not on the other, under the jacket the dark blue zip-up wool pullover was zipped only three-quarters of the way up and the plain grey t-shirt underneath was visible in a small triangle at the throat, stubble had grown in over the course of the day into a shade denser than last night.
His eyes went over you top to bottom quite rapidly but you saw the exact moment the fastness lost the argument, gaze snagging on the line of your throat first, then on the small pucker of one nipple that had gone hard from the cold, followed on the crease at your hip where your hand was hiding your dick, then on the light bruises his hands left last night.
His mouth had gone a shade slack, pupils in his blue eyes were slowly widening even as you watched.
Corners of his mouth lifting one at a time, boyishly appreciative that did nothing to hide the fact that his eyes had not stopped darkening yet.
"Well, hi." His voice came out an octave under where it usually sat, dragged there by whatever was going on behind his ribcage. It had a small husk on it, rasp along the underside of the word. "What a beautiful damn sight to walk into. Best I've seen in a long time."
Heat came into your face in a slow rush from the throat up. You mumbled something meant to be a ‘hi’ back at him and he leaned in, mouth pressing quickly against the side of your cheekbone, right at the top of the cheek where the stubble stung, breath warm over your ear.
"Ethan," you managed while clearing your throat. "Where are my clothes?"
"Oh," he said and stepped back a fraction so he could look at you properly again, grin still on him. "Yeah, about that. So…" He hooked one thumb into the front pocket of his jeans and drew his shoulders up in a small helpless shrug. "I threw 'em in the laundry."
He was trying not to laugh, lower lip pinned between his teeth. "In my defense, when I put 'em out there this morning, sweetheart, there was sun. And then, uh." He gestured vaguely toward the ceiling with his free hand. "Weather did what weather does. So now they're… damp and still hanging up. I'm waiting for them."
"Ethan."
"I know." He was actively laughing now, quietly, chest bouncing under the wool of the pullover. "I'm sorry."
"I'm currently freezing, you know that?"
He lifted both hands in surrender before you could smack him. "Okay, turn around."
You did not entirely trust him but turned around anyway, one arm across your chest, hand still hiding the front of you while behind came a soft rustle of him shrugging off the canvas jacket.
A beat later, the whole soft heavy weight of his jacket dropped over your shoulders from behind.
It was warm from him, still holding the heat of his body along the inside of the lining. It smelled like him too, cedar and a note of cold outdoor air.
His hands came around from behind and he zipped the jacket up over your chest in one steady practiced motion, all the way up to the notch of your throat as the jacket hit you at mid-thigh, hands settling a moment at your waist and he ducked his head down to your ear.
"There we go." His voice had a low satisfied quality to it that was not quite decent. "Yeah. That's… okay, honestly, I like it a lot better. You in my jacket and nothing else? I might have to keep hiding your clothes."
He kissed the shell of your ear and stepped back around you and took your hand in his so much bigger than yours, warmer too.
Thumb running a small stroke across the knob of your wrist and then he was tugging you down the hall gently toward the stairs, walking in front of you, glancing back over his shoulder every few steps as you went with him.
Along the wall on your left there was a thin rope of black mold following you down that pulsed as you passed, a slow soft peristaltic wave of paler light traveling along its inside before it went still again.
You noticed, as he was tugging you across the rug toward the couch, that the ache was gone and you hadn’t registered it at first because there had not been a single sensation.
Your lower back did not twinge with each step and, while settling that little revelation in the back of your mouth as you turned to him, he sat manspread down on the couch, one arm slung along the back cushions and the other resting on his thigh, knees fallen open wide enough to leave the whole space between them warm and available while he looked up at you standing over him with that same slow grin still on his mouth, waiting.
You did not really make a conscious decision about it, lowering yourself down onto the couch beside him closer than you had planned, hip pressing up along the outside of his thigh and your legs, without asking your permission, hooked across his with one of your calves slotting over the top of his thigh, other tucking under his knee so that your bare legs were braided through his denim-clad ones.
The pull went through you, warm gravitational pull that lived in the middle of your chest and lengthened when he was near you, wanted him closer and your face in the side of his throat,
Not all of that pull was yours, you knew the string he had written about was there and how he used them last night to make you sleep.
Whatever answer your body was giving him just now was not one hundred percent yours anymore but it felt very good being this close to him and his hand had come to rest, without you needing to ask, on the top of your bare knee where the jacket left off, palm warm and possessive.
"Feelin' okay, sweetheart?" His voice was quiet against your hair. "You hungry? I can heat you up something."
"Not hungry," you said. "I feel fine, actually. I thought I was gonna be limping all day, honestly, and I—" you shifted your hip experimentally and nothing barked "—nothing hurts."
"Yeah?" His voice had a lilt in it and you felt him smile against the top of your head.
You lifted your head off his shoulder enough to look at him.
His eyes were glowing, blue irises that had lit up bright at the very centers.
"There," he said mildly. "How about that?"
Pain hit you in exactly the low dull throbbing ache you should have had, from the base of your spine, down through both cheeks. Your mouth fell open and you hissed through your teeth as you bent forward involuntarily around your own middle, bare knee coming up off his thigh and for two long seconds you sat there gaping like a fish.
The glow bled out of his eyes just like the ache that bled out of you along with it.
"Aw," he said, low and teasing, "there we go, everything back to normal, huh. Just wanted to make sure my sweet husband was feeling like himself. Good to know you're feeling alright."
“you are such an asshole, oh my God." You were breathless still while speaking.
"Yeah." He was pleased with himself while leaning back into the couch cushions with a smirk on his mouth and his eyes back to ordinary blue, hand on your knee dragging a slow warm circle over the cap of it with his thumb. "I know. C'mere, sorry.“
He tugged you back down by the knee and you went as his arm came off the back of the couch and settled heavy across your shoulders, pulling you snug into his side and your head found the shelf of his shoulder.
Staying there and you letting your eyes half-close.
He had just demonstrated, casually, that he could put or take pain out of you at his own preference.
"Sweetheart," he said after a long while.
"Hm."
"I wanted to say sorry about last night." His thumb was drawing slow patterns on the top of your knee. "I might have gone a little… further than I should have right off the bat. That was your first time with me and I got a bit… you know." He laughed softly, small huff of air into your hair "I hope it wasn't too much."
He did not mention the diary, letting the whole conversation slide right on past that dark shape and you understood, with a soft cold clarity, that this was either his way of saying he did not want it brought back up ever, or his way of hoping you did not remember.
Wondering, briefly, whether he had tried at some point in the night, while you had been under, to lift the memory of the pages out of your head with his abilities.
If he had, it had not worked since you remembered every word he had let you read but apparently he did not know that since he was sitting here apologizing to you about the sex you two had.
Maybe this new thing inside you was not as bad as you had been braced for.
"It wasn't too much," you murmured against his throat, which was a lie in some directions and a truth in others. "I'm okay, Ethan. It was good, I liked all of it."
He made a small sound at the back of his throat close to a whimper and his arm tightened around your shoulders in a fierce quick squeeze.
Then his hands were under you, one at your waist with his thumb hooking under the edge of the jacket where it had ridden up while the other under the crook of your knee and he lifted you across himself in one smooth pull. You went with a small startled sound and the world swung as you settled on his lap, bare thighs bracketing his denim-clad ones, palms landing flat on the wool of his chest to catch yourself.
Big and broad hands settled on your thighs, palms curling around the fronts of your bare thighs just above the knee and sliding up in one proprietary drag, thumbs on the insides where the skin was softest and pulse-warm, stopping high enough that his fingers were tucked all the way up under the hem of the jacket.
He was looking up at you, eyes gone soft at the outer corners, stubble on his jaw catching the low warm light from outside before he kissed the corner of your mouth first, then the pad of your cheek till he mapped every corner of your face.
Every kiss he pressed left behind a small burn where the stubble had dragged and your eyelids sank to half-mast.
His hands slid a fraction higher on your thighs, fingertips ghosting up under the jacket and along the tops of your legs to the curve of your ass.
Impossible not to feel the way he was hard already, now sitting up thick and unmistakable in the front of his jeans right in the crease of you where your ass met the tops of your thighs, bulge pressed up against you through the denim, heavy shape of him along the whole length and every small rocking motion he made with his hips dragged the seam of his jeans.
Warmth in your elevated too fast, hands on your thighs producing more sensation in your skin than his hands on your thighs ought to be producing. Every place his mouth touched your cheek was lighting up with an intensity that was not quite ordinary.
His hand at the back of your ass moved up along your spine under the jacket and settled in the hollow at the base of your neck, other hand sliding all the way up your thigh and cupping your hip through the canvas and he tipped his mouth up to yours, opening for you at the same instant your mouth came down to his.
Tongue coming in lush, curling against yours with an easy expertise and tasted like coffee along that green mineral undertone that lived in everything about him.
It was addictive.
You tried to keep up but lost immediately and gladly, hand at the back of your neck cradling you into a better angle as he tilted his head and his tongue slid deeper along yours while you rocked forward on his lap without meaning to, ridge of his cock dragging up along the seam of your ass under the jacket and both of you made a broken sound into each other's mouths at the same time.
He kept kissing you.
His fingers pressed into your hip through the canvas hard enough to bruise while the other hand slid up under the collar at the back of your neck and gripped a handful of your hair at the nape, holding you there so he could kiss you deeper.
All until your lungs were burning and small black spots were blooming at the edge of your vision before you finally, with a ragged gasp, had to break the seal.
You pulled back an inch, breath tearing in and out of him against your mouth in short hot gusts and yours was doing the same thing back.
His stubble had left a hot red scrape all around your lips that you could feel throbbing.
Ducking his face down and pressing an open-mouthed kiss to the pad of your cheek before dragging his lips down along your jaw with his teeth catching lightly on the underside of it, then along the tendon of your neck and into the soft warm dip of your collarbone where the zip of the jacket ended.
You dropped your forehead onto the top of his shirt and blonde hair while in a state between drowsing and thinking, cheek warm against the wool of his shoulder and the fire making its small pop-and-hiss noises across the room when his chest rumbled under you again.
"Sweetheart." The word came up through his sternum before out of his mouth. "You really, really not gonna eat anything? Truly? 'Cause I can just throw something together real quick, whatever you want."
"Ethan, I'm fine, I promise."
"When'd you eat last."
"…yesterday at breakfast."
"Yeah, see." He shifted a fraction under you, tilting his head down so he could look at your face where it was tucked against his throat,. stubble scraping the top of your ear. "Nope. That's not gonna fly. I'm makin' you something and you can't stop me, don't even try."
He said it firm and then bent his neck to press a chaste closed-mouth kiss right in the middle of your lips before he was sliding you off his lap with both broad hands under your ribs and setting you gently down onto the couch cushion beside him.
His jeans had a very obvious situation going on down the front of them that he did not bother trying to hide and one of his big hands came down to adjust himself matter-of-factly as he rose, thumb hooking briefly under his belt to shift the whole business into a less painful arrangement before he was jogging around the low table and off toward the kitchen.
You sat there in his jacket alone on the couch with your bare knees tucked under and it occurred to you that he was extremely adorable… when he was not standing over a corpse in the woods or controlling endless ropes of black mold.
Unfolding off the couch, bare feet finding the cold rug.
"I'm gonna grab clothes!" you called out toward the kitchen doorway.
"Sure!" His voice came back cheerful, distant, muffled by a pot lid banging down. "There's clean stuff in the second drawer, take whatever!"
Jogging up the stairs on the balls of your feet to spare them the cold of the wood, mold tendril running along the wall pulsing once again as you passed it.
In the bedroom (you had already stopped calling it his room) you crossed to the dresser and pulled the second drawer open, a pair of boxers, some joggers and one folded pair of grey sweats. Top drawer where you had looked earlier, one of his plain white shirts that you put on before zipping his jacket over it.
As you walked downstairs, the front door was in the corner of your eye and your hand was already on the knob.
The door swung on its hinges without a whisper and cold air came in over the threshold in a smooth wave to hit you full in the face as you stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind you with the softest click you could manage.
World outside white and grey but also quiet, snow had come down again while you were sleeping and it sat unbroken in a soft blanket along the porch boards, along the two shallow steps down into the yard and on the whole slope of the ground that ran away from the house toward the dead treeline.
Snow crunched under your boots while observing the houses all around, some with three walls now since both the fourth wall and the roof had gone, whole shell wrapped in thick ropes of mold. Thick ropes of it ran up the corners of the standing walls, and thicker ones bulged along the ground at the base, and where the wood had cracked open the mold had grown out through the cracks in slow black cauliflower-heads that pulsed faintly, in and out, in and out, in a slow synchronized breath.
There had been a house next to that one in a worse state with only the front doorframe still standing in a pile of collapsed timbers.
Only Ethan's house was whole while all those others were standing rather badly on their walls.
Behind, wet steps get detected by your ears.
Mold was standing four paces behind you in the snow since he had followed you out, his right arm was still the blade you had accidentally sharpened for him yesterday.
But the rest of him had changed since a lot more white was on him.
Last night he had been almost all black with just the blade white and clean, now you noticed that the white had spread in a thin milky wash across the top of his shoulders and down the front of his chest, white micelia that laid over the black underneath like frost. It even ran down his forelegs about halfway to the knee and stopped in a soft ragged line, blade arm white the whole length now and up into the shoulder joint.
The black was still most of him but white was gaining.
He tilted his head the other way with a soft chittering sound at the back of what would have been a throat.
"Hey, buddy," you said quietly, voice pitched low. "You following me?"
He tilted his head again.
"Well, you can tell your Lord I'm not going anywhere, alright?" You sighed, steam coming out of your mouth in a little cloud before dissolving.
Mold, as far as you could tell, could not reply but two things happened in your head at once. The first was that the pull in the middle of your chest tightened and the second was that his voice was in your head.
I know, honey.
Warm and very close.
I just want you safe, that's all. I just don't like the idea of you out there in the snow by yourself in bare feet. Lycans hardly ever come this far up but they do come, and I would really, really appreciate it if you'd come back to me.
You made a small face at Mold and Mold tilted his head.
You turned slow in place and started to answer him “yeah, alright, in a minute” and your eye caught something at the edge of the yard.
The treeline blurred.
Every trunk in that section had a soft fuzz around its edge and the shadows between the trunks was too even. Snow didn’t settle onto the branches and you blinked hard, the blur got a fraction sharper.
There was an open path, a break in the treeline where a road ran off into the woods.
He had hidden something right now from you using his abilities to smear a patch of forest into a wall and you could, if you concentrated, see through it.
A small cold thrill went up along the inside of both your arms.
You looked back over your shoulder at the house as you started walking and Mold trotted after you.
Aiming your thought at the string in your chest to talk with him.
"Hey, Ethan, sorry, quick question," you said out loud because you did not, actually, know if just thinking would do it. "What happened up here to the houses? They look like they got hit with a truck."
A pause on his end as you felt him hesitate.
Yeah. His voice was quieter than a second ago, not warm now but tired, a small clean rasp of guilt along the underside of the word.
Yeah, that was me, sweetheart. When I got here I wasn't controlling any of this stuff in me real well yet. First few months I could barely leave the house without something coming out of me sideways and the neighbors… they weren't so lucky.
You had stepped past the corner of Ethan's yard now, out into the dead road toward the blur, snow crunched under your bare feet while Mold followed. On your right the collapsed neighbor's house yawned open.
"Were they—" you kept your voice soft and casual, "—were they threatening you, or something?"
A longer pause as you felt him sigh in your chest.
No, honey. They weren't doing anything.
You could hear, at the edge of the audio-half of your brain, the distant sound of a pot lid being set down carefully on a burner. He had stopped cooking. He was leaning on the kitchen counter now, both palms flat on the tile and head down, talking into the string.
I came in here in a real bad state, sweetheart. A lot of things happened to me before I got up here and by the time I made it into the village I was not okay and this stuff in me, takes what's in your head and it puts it out into the world.
He trailed off.
I never meant to. If I could I would take it back but I can't. That's why nobody lives up here anymore.
"I'm really sorry, Ethan" you said softly into the cold air and you meant it.
Thank you. Very quiet.
Sweetheart, could you come sit with me on the couch? I don't mean anything, I just— I mean, I'd love, obviously, but I just mean sit and talk. I could listen to you talk about literally anything. That's a pathetic thing to say out loud, ignore that last part. I just—
He was rambling shyly in his kitchen a hundred yards behind you leaning on his counter about wanting to sit on a couch with you and you had, in the last thirty seconds, walked yourself right up to the fuzz at the edge of the woods and had put your hand out as it had passed through empty air.
There was no wall of trees where your eye said there was one, but there was a road.
And I know I said this already but I really do love your company and spending time with you and I—
"You're not pathetic," you said out loud into the mouth of the road. "Yeah, of course I'll sit with you. That sounds nice, I want to."
You kept walking while Mold, ambling along at your heels, had passed through the same wall without breaking stride. You turned once and glanced back at him to see his head tilted the other way now.
Raising one finger up in front of your mouth and putting on the most pleading face you could put on.
"Buddy, please do not tell your Lord I'm out here, okay? Please, please. I'll—" you cast around for something to bribe him with and did not find anything and said, weakly, "I'll let you out more time, I promise."
Mold tilted his head the other way before he just… started walking again, blade-arm ticking a soft dry rhythm against the crust of the snow. He came up alongside you and fell in at your left, three paces off.
You could have kissed him if he had had a face without sharp fangs.
Branches hung low overhead as you moved further in, mold started showing up in the trees to either side of the wood, thin at first and by fifty paces in the trees on either side had gone from ordinary winter woods to something braided together with pulsing rope.
The tendrils grew thicker the further you went while Ethan, in your chest, kept talking.
If we're being honest I've been rehearsing what I want to say to you for a couple of days now and I just haven't been able to make the words work out loud, but with you in here, in my head… God, that sounds crazy to say. Look I know how this sounds and I know a lot of people would not want their husband inside their skull like this and if that's how you feel, sweetheart, you tell me and I'll pull it back.
"I don't mind." Which was true and untrue in ways he did not need to know all of yet. "I like hearing you."
Yeah?
Small hopeful lift.
"Yup."
Okay, alright. You had come around a slow curve in the road and the trees had thinned in front of you, mold along the trunks gone from ropes to thick pulsing sheets and beyond the last of the birches you saw a car at the base of a large fir.
The front end of it had folded itself in a soft crumpled U into the trunk, hood pushed halfway back into the passenger compartment while the windshield had been fully swallowed on the passenger side by a black mat of mold that had grown in through the crack.
It had the shape of a Dodge Challenger 1970, something you’ve seen through magazines back some years when you still lived in that place.
The driver's seat was gone under a black cauliflower head of mold the size of a curled dog and back door on the driver's side was missing entirely, hinges bent outward as mold ran up out of the wheel wells and along the sides of the body in ropes that pulsed once every few seconds.
Mold, beside you, stopped down on his haunches in the drift and tilted his head.
Ethan had stopped talking but you hadn’t realized that while observing the remainder of the car as you went around the front bumper, palm brushing the crumpled fender and coming away dusted powder-white with old paint.
You went along the passenger side where mold hung off the door handle in a soft dripping curtain to then turning the back corner and coming up to the missing back door on the driver's side and you leaned down to look in.
The back seat was in better shape than the front since mold had not made it back here yet, leather cracked and grey but it was, more or less, still leather.
You almost missed a small brown plush monkey with how hidden it was, palm-sized with circular dangling arms and legs, two little black-plastic eyes and a stitched-on smile.
Something in the middle of your chest went cold at the realization that this might belong to his daughter but soon black tendrils came up out of the snow all around you.
Four of them, thick as your wrist, dripping heavy with black wet substance that hit the snow around your feet.
What are you doing out here? His voice was cold and close, every warm inflection had drained out of it.
Sweetheart. I asked you a question. What are you doing out here and how did you get past the tree line?
"Ethan, please—"
The nearest tendril at your right hip stirred and wrapped itself gently around your right forearm from wrist to elbow.
Another one came around your right thigh in the same deliberate wrap and you felt one lift the hair at the back of your neck and settle across the tops of your shoulders.
The last of the four looped down and around your left ankle before every one of them tightened.
Sleepiness poured into you and your knees, without permission, softened.
Plush monkey in your hand suddenly had the same weight of a stone.
"Ethan, please don't, I'm sorry!" You heard him right in front of you because he had crossed the yard and the road in the amount of time it had taken the tendrils to close around you and then he was there, hair that had gotten a bit disheveled coming through the woods and his eyes were glowing, cold clean electric blue at both irises that lit the underside of his cheekbones a fraction.
"Honey." His voice came out of his mouth this time, not through the string. It was still cold. "How did you find this?"
"I…” your tongue was thickening at the root.
Something in his own face changed a fraction.
"You can't see them, can you." Quieter and in a different tone entirely, a small clean note of interest threading into it, the kind of interest a scientist might show a slide.
The blue in his eyes flickered while he came the rest of the way to you, big warm hand coming up and cradling the side of your face, palm along your cheek, thumb stroking your cheekbone.
It was so warm compared to the tendrils that it burned a little and so gentle as he cradled your face.
"Shh," he murmured and your eyes half-closed against your will. “I'm not gonna hurt you, sweetheart, I would never, I promise. It's just gonna feel like a nice long nap like last night and when you wake up I'll—"
His eyes moved past your face to the small brown shape hanging from your loosening fingers.
The blue in them went brighter, pupils fattening out inside the blue and the whole iris lit.
Immediately all the sleepiness in your body slowed to a stop and, in the next second, began to peel back off you.
He was not looking at you anymore but at that monkey, blue in his eyes so bright now while his mouth had come the rest of the way open and one small breath was going in and out through it very fast.
He shut his eyes hard and pulled a long slow breath in through his nose and held it for some seconds before letting it out and repeating the process.
The glow died back when he opened his eyes again.
They were not glowing anymore but only glassy.
You held the little monkey out to him and slowly, both hands cupped under it as he looked at it for a long moment.
"I didn't know this was in there," he said very quietly. "She must have been so sad in these two years, this was her best friend."
He turned the monkey over in his palm carefully and looked at the split seam with the red rubber band around it, touching the rubber band with his thumb and his mouth twitched once at the corner in a small helpless upward jerk.
"Ethan," you said.
He looked up and his eyes were red at the edges but the blue in them was ordinary human blue.
"Rose," you said, carefully. "Your daughter?"
He looked at you for a long moment and you watched the tired man behind his eyes resurface.
"Yeah," he exhaled a tired huff. "Yeah, honey. My daughter Rose. She's three now. She was one when I —" he swallowed "—when I left."
"Ethan, listen, you don't have to—"
"No." He shook his head and rubbed the back of his free hand across his cheek as it came away wet. "I owe you this after everything I…” he gestured vaguely at the tendrils' scorched puddles in the snow around your feet, "You've been so patient, c'mere and sit with me."
He turned and nodded his chin to an old fallen fir that had made itself a bench, one end tipped up onto a boulder and mold had grown along the underside of it in a thick soft padding.
He walked toward it, monkey cradled his chest while you went after him until he sat down on the mossed trunk and shifted over to leave the room, patting the mold beside him and you sat.
After a second Ethan lifted his arm and settled it around your shoulders to pull you into his side.
He looked at the monkey in his hand before he started to talk.
“My wife Mia, thought now ex-wife, went missing for three years and the last thing I knew at the time was that she was babysitting."
He rubbed his thumb over the little brown head.
"In reality she was transporting a little girl name was Eveline. She was a bioweapon grown in a lab and made of mold. The truth is Mia was a handler and something went wrong on the shipment, Eveline got out and Mia crash-landed with her in Louisiana…" he took a slow breath "She took a family of kind people—maybe excluding one of them— the Bakers. They had been forced to do awful things for three years and Mia was kept prisoner."
"Jesus," you whispered.
"Yeah." He shifted the monkey to his lap and his hand found yours, closing around it under the sleeve of the jacket and holding it.
"I went in there because I got a message from Mia under Eveline’s influence got her."
His mouth twisted.
"That house did every conceivable thing to me that night. I lost momentarily my left hand at one point, I got Mia out and killed Eveline. Some men came in at the end Chris Redfield was running the op and he pulled me and Mia out of that house alive… later through testing I found out I was infected."
“They helped you?"
"They tried." Small tired huff. "Chris is a good man, sweetheart. He said, ‘listen, you're gonna live with us for a while. We'll set you up in Romania near one of our bases, you'll do a bit of training and come in for tests.’ That was the deal, weekly tests and monitoring."
“After about a year of that Mia got pregnant." The corner of his mouth twitched again.
"That was the best year of my life," he said. "Rose was born on a Tuesday. She had this this soft little head, almost no hair with this little cap of soft fuzz. When they first put her on Mia's chest I leaned in over the two of them she opened her eyes and she looked at me and I… I have never in my life been looked at like that before or since."
He stopped and was quiet a long time.
"That was when it started."
"When what started?"
"The powers from the mold." Very quietly. "It had been in me for two years by then, all the tests came back saying it wasn't doing anything. I had killed so many people without even wanting to. Mia was scared of me. She'd get up and take Rose away or turn her shoulder toward me and Rose away, and I couldn't blame her."
He stopped and set his free hand flat on top of the monkey in his lap, breathing through his mouth for a second.
"The worst part was I would think things about my own daughter like— God, I hope she sleeps through the night tonight, I hope she doesn't cry, I need her to just sleep, and she would sleep for eleven hours… for so long that Mia would have to go in and check on her. I would look at Mia coming out of the nursery with Rose in her arms and I would see the look on her face."
He turned the monkey over in his lap.
"I could not trust myself in a house with my child, that's what it came down to. I loved her so much I could not describe it to you if you gave me the rest of my life to try. So I left."
He nodded down at the wrecked car.
"I got in that car that Mia bought for me for our second anniversary because I said one time that I liked them. It was in the middle of the night and I went away"
You did not say anything for a long moment, his arm around your shoulders had gone loose and you slid your free hand up onto his knee.
"I drove for hours," he said. "I don't know how many. I got over the mountains and into these hills and it was maybe three in the morning when I saw a shape in the road… I don't know if it was an animal or a person but I swerved and I came off the road through the trees… then I hit that fir."
He nodded at the trunk-wrapped-around-tree behind you.
"Of course I did not die, the front end of that car is a wad of tinfoil and I walked out of it. That’s how I got into the village and another Miranda said that this was a place for me."
You sat there for a long moment with your head on his shoulder and did not, at first, know how to answer him. There was no thing you could say that would take any of what he had just told you and make it lighter to carry.
You lifted your hand off his knee and slid it up along his forearm to the back of his hand, lacing your fingers between his and squeezing as warm as you could.
"Ethan." He did not look up but was still looking down at the monkey.
"Ethan, look at me. Please."
He looked at you and his eyes were the plain sad blue they had been at the end of the last sentence, red at the rim, a little wet.
"You are not the monster everybody in that village thinks you are. What you did was the best thing a man could do. You loved her too much to stay. That is exactly the thing the wholeliest father in the world does, do you understand? I don't know what it's like, I've never had a daughter or lost one. But I can tell you, Ethan, from the outside of it, what you did was for her. You left because you loved them so much you couldn't stand to be the thing that broke them.“
His face did something in the middle of the sentence.
First the corners of his mouth pulled up a fraction, then they pulled down and his chin dimpled hard as he pressed his lips together.
One clean fat tear detached itself from his left lash line and rolled straight down the line of the old dried track as a pained crooked smile came in his face.
"Sweetheart—" His voice cracked in the middle of the word and he laughed. "I… I don't know what to say now."
His hand squeezed yours so hard that for a second you thought he was going to bruise you but then he seemed to remember he was much stronger than a person and he loosened his grip before squeezing instead in a series of small careful pulses.
"You are the best thing I have found in this village. You know that, sweetheart?"
"Not even the coffee," you laughed breathlessly with how close you two had gotten.
"Not even that," he said and huffed, rubbing his cheek up on his shoulder to smear the wet off and looked at you.
"You wanna go home?"
"Yeah."
"Okay." He nodded once and squared his shoulders, standing up off the mossed trunk in one smooth motion and he did not let go of your hand.
He kept your hand the whole way while Mold ambled along behind you.
Then, halfway back up the path, curiosity you had felt in the clearing but had not yet had time to ask about came back up to the surface and you spoke.
"Hey."
"Mm?"
"How did you find me? Out there, I mean."
He looked at you and had a small crease going up between his brows.
"Sweetheart," he said, slowly. "You really don't know?"
"I mean… you were in my head, right, the whole time? I figured maybe—"
"No." He shook his head once. "No, honey, that wouldn't have told me where you were, that's a different thing."
He stopped walking and turned to face you on the path.
"You can't see them?" He said.
"See what?"
"Oh." A small breath went out of him. "Wait, hang on, look right here.”
He turned his hand palm-up in the air beside your shoulder and pursed his mouth a fraction, soon one thick black tendril slid up out of the snow between you and unrolled itself into the air about the height of your face to hang there.
"Look at it," he said softly. "Just look at it and let your eyes settle."
Looking at the black slick that occasionally pulsed, at first there was nothing else to see before you saw little bright motes.
All around your head and in front of your face mostly, a soft constant drift of them with some coming up and some down, tumbling slow through the air.
Each mote was pale gold and every one of them glowed faintly from within.
"Oh," you said small.
"Yeah," Ethan replied back softly.
He looked, actually, surprised while watching your cloud with an expression that was somewhere between fascinated and hunger.
"You've been putting those out since that night after I saved you. I've never seen a person do that before and I don't know what that is."
"Ethan, are they dangerous?” you swallowed.
"No." Immediate and firm. "They're not dangerous. You're making them and they're coming off of you."
"From how far?"
He gave you a small crooked apologetic smile.
"About as far as I need to."
You made a face at him and he laughed, first real one he had made since the wreck and it came out of him warm and a little shy.
"I gotta be honest with you. Since you started, uh… producing these spores… I mean, look at me, honey. I'm normally not like this."
He gestured, vaguely, at himself.
"Not like what?"
"Handsy." He shrugged embarrassed. "Not… all this. I have tried to keep my hands to myself and I have failed at it every single time you have gotten within reach of me. I breathe them and something in the mold in me… I don't know what it does exactly, but I kinda lose my mind.”
His pupils had gotten a fraction wide even in the evening light and you had a very acute sense, standing there on the packed snow of the woods-path in his jacket, that your face went hot and were suddenly and horribly aware of the fact that he was standing three inches from you.
The little cloud of gold around your face got brighter.
Like the mold with him, they altered based on your emotions.
He leaned in and the tip of his nose brushed the shell of your ear, cheek against yours for half a second before his mouth was in the crook of your neck, warm mouth against the top of the tendon at the side of your throat and his warm nose against the underside of your jaw.
"I have a… suggestion. Feel free to say no."
"Okay."
"Maybe a shower."
That made you laugh, startled sound that came out of you weak and warm.
"Maybe if we— if I got you under some hot water, it'd rinse off. That's an untested theory but I figured we could try… together."
"Is this your gentle way of saying I stink?"
He laughed straight into the crook of your neck and it vibrated up through your jaw, making you laugh breathlessly back and his hand came up around the back of your neck.
"What I am smelling right now is the best thing on the planet that’s making my dick very hard.”
Those words made your cock twitch inside your pants.
"…alright."
He pulled his mouth off your neck and his eyes came up to yours, pupils fat as he took your hand again and laced his fingers through yours.
You went when he tugged up the path and it took no time at all to get back home.
The good smell of whatever he had been cooking on the stove drifting warm out into the entryway and the way he steered you, without letting go of your hand, right past the kitchen and up the stairs, along the upstairs hall to the master bath at the end of it.
He shut the bath door behind you both with his heel, the rest was noise.
Much later you found out that the spores did not, in fact, come off in an hour of shower; nor did they not come off after Ethan got you clean from hours of you wedged up between the wall of the shower and his chest with his cock splitting you open and his forearm braced across the tile above your head because he simply could not stop.
Ethan had to carry you down the stairs right after wrapping you up in the cream towel and dried your hair with another one before putting his own jacket back around your shoulders.
No pain was involved to your muscles but he simply wanted to do everything for you for the rest of the night and, the second you would try to even move a muscle, his eyes would glow and the atrocious pain of the recent activities would stop any action you had in mind to do.
For the rest of that day, he didn’t look hurt at all.
✨✨cat (this one looks almost identical to mine🥹), rosy maple moth, mouse✨✨
no pressure tags: @cuntbitchandthebottlemen @quietchaosclub @scalpdisease @crowsberries (so sorry for any unwanted/repeat tags, pls ignore if that’s the case!!)
Halloo Tony! 💙👋
I must confess:
I get really embarrassed and flustered every time I send you those flirty anon messages 🫣
And I also feel bad every time I send one because I feel like I'm cluttering up your inbox with them.
(Maybe it's time we take it to the DMs or something lol ... 👀)
-💙👋
I don’t mind getting your asks 💙 anon, do as you wish and what makes you more comfortable. Imma still read any request or thing you send me while I’m laying on Ethan’s chest 🥰
Looking back at the list, there are 19 requests for the dark options against the 11 normal ones (I’m excluding day 31 from the count since it’s ‘writer’s choice’)
I’m glad to know you all like the dark themes I chose as well 🤭 there are still two days left for anyone interested that happens to like the prompts
Hi Anthony! I just wanted to say that I absolutely love your RE writing. I’ve especially been loving the Ethan Winters content you’ve been putting out. Everything is simply amazing.
Yes! That's absolutely finee, babe~
I'm so sorry for making you feel a bit burnt out, I got carried away with all the details 😅🙇♂️
Feel free to make any changes with my request, I'm just happy to be a part of the event and to be interacting with you!
I'm so glad you like it! 🥹🫶
I was a little nervous before sending it because I thought it didn't fit the theme at all
Aaaa thank you for accepting my request! 💙
‐💙👋
It’s all good don’t worry honey haha
I read some things and I went ‘👀👀 that’s a new one from him’ but I like it!! Very scorching hot 🔥 the day is red so I’ll perhaps add in maybe a more darkish tone to it, guess I’ll see when I’ll began doing it ;)
OMG I'm so sorry about the Day 9 request I just sent about Ethan. I prepared it yesterday and only just now checked that the day was taken. Again I'm sorry for that, could be changed to Day 7 then? or should I edit it a bit.
Lmao don’t worry at all and I appreciate you sending me this hahaha. I can definitely do day 7 while still keeping all the elements you sent to the previous ask, no problem at all for me and thanks also for the kind words at the end 🥹🧡
can we get RE9 Leon x m!husband. just some fluff like leon coming home stressed from work and his husband being there for him, making him dinner, watching a film with him etc.
Halloo again, Tony! 💙👋
I'm currently writing (a lengthy) prompt for Day 14 - Master and Sex Slave! And It'll be with James Cook!
Is it okay if I can claim that day and prompt before I send the request?
Thank you thank you thank youu again!
(P.S. I giggled when you wrote darlin' lol)
-💙👋
sure thing sugar, be sure to not forget in sending the plot, hella curious to see what you’re crafting
Edit: 💙 Anon!!!!! I’ve read it all omg, drooling worse then Remmick 🤭
One thing though, it is in fact very long, it gave me a bit of burn out reading all of it. Would it be alright for you if I perhaps removed just the jail timeskip? I wanna do all the steamy stuff you wrote in the end, just help a guy out that already has 30 other fics to have done for October? 🥹🧡
Gotcha!
I apologize if I'm annoying you with my question 🙇♂️
Thank you for the clarification!
I think... I'll make the Remmick fic request a separate one
I'll think of a dark prompt for one of Jack's characters! I've never really dabbled in conceptualizing one, but I wanna try at least once.
I just wanted to ask when you are planning on starting writing your kinktober fics? I am by no means trying to rush. The rate you release such incredibly well-written and long fics is already crazy.
I'm just wondering if you were gonna go straight to the fics after all the prompts are filled up or if you'll wait till October to start.
(Also, I saw you got my request, and I am ecstatic for when it releases. 😎)
Well the plan is to start in these days with peace since it’s still very far away.
I can’t wait till October otherwise I definitely won’t complete it
Does in day 23 - Size kink reader have to be the shorter one if it's with male character? In other words, is it needed to specify who's the taller/shorter in the request?
Nope, not at all. Simply the male readers being the bottom in the relationship.
Oh Anthony I'm so excited about this kinktober event of yours!!
Some of these prompts are so delicious, might just spark some inspo in me!
I can't wait to see what your genius brain has in store 🩷🤍
Ahhh thank you!! It took a while to find online all of them and, fun fact, right when I was about to post the prompt list I saw that I had like three duplicates hahaha
Just so you know, whatever you’ll write if you decide to do so, I’d absolutely devour it <3
𝒞𝓊𝓇𝓈ℯ𝒹 ℐ𝓃𝓈𝒾𝒹ℯ @lefteagleblizzard - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
