A Dumbass

Liv/Atari || Bad at everything || dw, im legal 21+

[red-atari]

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[lostrealityr]

Teeth of my lover

Aerion Targaryen x Wife Reader

In which Aerion’s wife is the opposite of him in all aspects, her gentle nature is less of something to break, but rather protect. Like a dragon guarding his plunder.

word count: 1,366

cw: 18+ mdni, talks of toxic relationships (not readers), consented biting, this is just pure fluff, sexual themes, characters are adults always - YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR THE CONTENT AND MEDIA THAT YOU CHOOSE TO CONSUME

Ashford tourney was supposed to be for mending long lasting alliances with the houses of the Reach. Instead, your father-by-law had lost two of his son’s on the journey, and the one that remained had managed to kill a horse during his first and now only joust. He had been banned from competing for fear the small-folk would try and pelt him to death with stones in the arena. You had been there all of three days, and you were all as sick of it as the people were of you.

Therefore when the evening jousts commenced at sunset, you had urged your husband to join you on a walk in the meadows. No one else will venture there you had said, they are preoccupied with the tournament.

And your words rang true, the meadow was deserted. Insects flew freely, birds sung loudly, an orange glow cast across the entire scene. It was picturesque. Utterly beautiful. That’s where you led amongst the flowers of the field, your head resting in your husband’s lap as his fingers fell idly through your hair.

“You are going to get filthy led down there.” He uttered, fingers tangling several strands together in a pattern which slightly resembled that of a plait. “You worry too much about things that do not matter my dragon.” You reached up a hand, pressing your two central fingers against his lips as he parted them, welcoming their taste against his tongue before biting down lightly. A pout fell across your face as you yanked your hand back, little red crescents bled across your fingers from the rawness of his touch. Biting was a known affection of your husband. He did it playfully, he did it endearingly, he did it in bed, he did it when he thought you needed a reminder of to whom you belong. You had grown used to it being a silent form of I love you, this makes you mine.

In retaliation to his brute touch you kissed his palm tenderly, pressing his fingers flat against your cheek as your lips caressed his callous hands. “You do not always have to be so gentle.” He murmured, his unused hand resuming its place at the crown of your head, massaging gently. “I do not seek to hurt you, husband.” It was true, did his immature actions like killing a horse in a friendly tourney make you want to suffocate him with your pillow? Yes. Would you ever do such a thing? No. Because you maintained impulse control, something your husband feverishly lacked. “People talk of our marriage you know.” It felt like a confession from his lips, he desired to be feared but he hated the whispers that carried pity in your direction, that he would dare lay a hand to his own wife, he would sooner cut it off himself than do such a thing to you. He was rough when he knew it brought you pleasure only, never would he strike you down for merely existing, why would he have taken you to wed if your thoughts and feelings deserved to be silenced at his hand? But he knew what people thought, he was publicly careless in his actions, he hurt others without thinking twice. They pitied you publicly, his own family even contributed.

The Mad Prince’s Poor Wife

Brightflames caged dove

The living ghost of Summerhall

They truly believed you to be so unseen. Sure you were quieter than most, but your husband was devoted to your every need. They did not see his affection, they had not earned it. You had never had to, but to hear the whispers on the wind of their blatant pity was painful. You were not ignored, far from it. But in Summerhall there was few that made good company, you often found yourself wandering the halls late at night when sleep would not find you, resulting in the living ghost becoming an unwanted nickname - because the servants truly believed you were wandering due to the fact your husband was bedding whores in your shared bedchamber, another misconception, he just snores very fucking loud.

“I know of what they say.” You looked up to meet his eyes lightly, his contrasted your own heavily “but again, it does not concern me for they do not know me.” He scoffed, untangling his fingers from your hair “Yes but maybe it should, they speak as if I hate you, I bed whores in our shared bed, I make you suffer when I do bed you.”

“Maybe they think that because you make me scream.” You giggled, you caught the amusement flash across his face in a subtly proud smirk before he shook his head “That is absolutely beside the point. Do not be so vulgar, it is not befitting of a Lady.” He was teasing, abundantly so, he lowered his face until he was inches from your own, upside down from your perspective. The tip of his nose brushed against the bridge of your own, however in his distraction you placed several kisses to his taught jaw. His eyes fell shut with a hum, you tangled your hands in his hair, pulling his face as close as you could get it to your own, kissing his forehead to his cheek tenderly, before releasing him and turning onto your stomach, resting your arms in his lap. You were propped up that way, giving him better access to the entirety of your face. He seized the opportunity to entwine his hands with your hair full, locking them at the base of your scalp so that you were forced to maintain eye contact with him. “Look at this dress. Have you any idea the coin I spent on it?” He tutted, the once flush pink skirts were saddled with marks of dusty mud - it would undoubtedly brush off but he enjoyed the game of making a fuss. “Probably more than was necessary.” You smiled, meeting his lips in a devastating kiss as he groaned into your mouth.

“It is growing late, we should return to bed.” He pulled away ever so slightly but you chased his lips with your own, “I do not wish to depart yet! No need to stay in that dreary place when this is the view.” He groaned against your lips before he was silenced by your tongue fighting its way back into his mouth. You settled yourself into his lap now, allowing you a better reach to his face as he chuckled quietly at your desperation for closeness.

“Do not laugh at me.” You whined, his hands settled to your hips in an attempt to settle your dispute. “You are desperate.” He titled his head, a lazy smile planted onto his face, such a vast separation from the brute man that held his own on a tourney field. “I am allowed to be desperate you are my husband.”

“Yes well, if you would come with me to bed I would be able to satisfy your desires.” He raised an eyebrow, a kiss pressed to the side of your face. “I desire your company and your affection and I want it here in this field.” You demanded, maybe it did sound a bit desperate in hindsight but you didn’t have the care for it. He only laughed louder as you pouted at him, “you sound childish. Lose the attitude my flame it does not best suit you.”

“Childish! How dare you!”

“Oh how dare I? Gods I do forget myself.” His lips joined to your neck in a flurry of hurried kisses that only forced your laughter to join with his. “There, is my wife now satisfied?”

A hazy smile joined your face, you adored your husband more than anything because to you this was who he was. It brought you pain more often than not to know how those around you viewed your relationship. They did not see his affection, they saw your withdrawal from public affection. You did not hold hands, you did not kiss or even touch where others could see. Because it was not for them to have. What you shared was gentle and sacred and entirely your own.

A/N: shorter and entirely out of character for aerion i know, but i couldn’t resist. sometimes i forget im literally writing fanfiction and i can write whatever i want however i want so yes this is not who aerion is as a character but i had a lot of fun so i hope you all enjoyed.

as always: likes, comments, reblogs + any interactions at all are always always appreciated - take care everyone!!

DISCLAIMER: All themes, plot, images used in general and characters from A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms + elsewhere belong to the rightful owners, I hold no rights to the original media - but my writing belongs to me.

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aerion targaryen taglist:

@the-many-fandom-person @gasstationwishes @mindless-rock @rock-lol

@16lcs @kiskisser @licornie @celestrys @scaredgrimes01 @diannnnsss @ophidialantern @b-bef @ariescvnt @irrelevantout28 @kekeke27 @scwheeler @etfrin @beelzebzb @lilyyexe @hanmed

[valarrswhitestreak]

your fics have me drooling btw

modern!aerion have sweet angelic!reader as his best friend (no one knows how this cruel asshole has the sweetest angelic girl as his closest friend though)

except.... he keeps perving on her all the time but she's too innocent to notice it

his hand is on her thigh, he kisses her, and gropes her all the time. she just thinks he's being friendly to her and that he likes her (not like that)

so it's summed break and he takes reader to his family vacation house (reader can be loaded too, just a lot more sheltered) and the entire family - baelor, maekar, daeron and valarr - seeing their satan spawn perving on this angelic girl who's kind and gentle to everyone

egg, daella and rhae would love her though and she'd love spending time with the girls (and egg)

No, because everyone would be so confused about how they became friends, but also what do they even talk about? It's one of the world's biggest mysteries. When the pair went to Dorne for a holiday a few years back, the paparazzi went crazy because there was Aerion... and angelic!reader? Maybe angelic!reader's family rarely made it into the news, but this certainly had more eyes her way.

But now, they're both in the summer home and Aerion cannot stop eyeing angelic!reader up like he wants to eat her. More than eat her, actually... devour her. And yet, she's none the wiser.

"Aerion's so kind!" she'd say to Maekar, making him gape. Aerion had applied her sunscreen for her, sliding his hands far too close to the strings of her tiny bikini bottoms, and had spent far too long sliding his hands over the planes of her back.

Daeron walks out to the garden one day to see the pair cuddled up on a sun lounger, their bodies intertwined in a way that friends wouldn't do – not to mention, Aerion's hand resting upon her ass, fondling the flesh to his heart's content.

Egg is confused too, but, selfishly, he doesn't want her to go away and so he will try to ignore his brother's weird behaviour. But then, after angelic!reader had offered to take the younger children in to town for a ice cream, he watches wide-eyed as Aerion drags angelic!reader into his arms and places a firm kiss on her lips. "Don't spoil them," Aerion mumbled. It was clear he was mad about having her push back their plans for the day.

Egg would be even more confused when they sit outside the ice cream parlour and angelic!reader asks, very poorly attempting to be nonchalant, whether Valarr has a girlfriend. He thought they were just lying to his family about being friends, but now he's worried because this might be worse. He doesn't think Aerion will be happy.

After all, Aerion hates Valarr.

[introspectres]

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[yanderenightmare]

Preying on the Hunter

♡ FMT: oneshot, 6k words, hybrid au, bunny reader, polar bear insert

♡ TW: dystopia, sex-trafficking, sexual slavery, vore-ish, forbidden love kinda, angst, size difference, predator x prey, subjugation, sexism allegory, master/slave dynamics

♡ FEM reader

Rabbits are born sluts. 

That much has always been clear. Damn useless creatures except for one thing—being used. They’re everywhere, in the several hundreds, easily hunted, easily trained by carrot and stick, and easily broken when put under it.

And you, you’re the same, a dime a dozen among the other dumb bunnies in the burrow. You’re not any different. 

And yet, from where he stands atop the mezzanine, lording over the pleasure den down below, his own empire, time and time again his eyes stray from admiring his rich guests and the cold cash they spend on his fluffle only to land on you.

His hunters had come back with you a month ago in a cage of a few dozen others. Dwarf rabbits—nothing special. Cute though, like any other bunny breed.

You didn't need any taming nor much training. You were the first of your batch to make it out onto the floor. In fact, he’s sure you made record timing if only they kept track of such things.

But you’re not broken. No, that would suggest there was something there for them to break. No, with you there wasn’t any pride or dignity for them to strip away. You were just slaphappy from the get go, showing no resistance, going with the regime like resisting wasn’t even an option. Of course, it wasn’t an option. But most animals, even docile ones such as rabbits, will put up some type of fight, however meaningless. You, however, remind him more of moon jelly—no matter the harsh waves, it’s still going to continue to do what it always does and drift along like nothing matters.

He’s never seen anyone be so casual about being treated like dirt. Looking at you, it doesn’t make any sense to him.

He’s well-aware of how plenty among his slaves try to fake it the best way they can, eager to avoid the bitter bite of unsatisfactory customers, while some have had their bodies trained for so long they enjoy it now—but in either case, he’s still able see the defeat and animosity behind their painted expression, if not anything at all. Others who’ll play along all sweet and nice such as you do ultimately prove themselves to be dumb little things who thought that if they could just bide their time with good behaviour, they would somehow make his handlers lower their guard enough to create an opportunity of escape, only to test their luck and fail miserably or come to the conclusion that such an opportunity would never exist, then be left with nothing but that same catatonic look of utter brokenness.

But there’s none of that in your eyes. You’re not trapped in the moment like the others, nor do you hoard any such silly agenda as trying to escape it.

For you, it seems somehow like you’re simply at ease with it. It’s almost as though it falls natural to you, but he’s not sure what to call it. You’re just… happy-go-lucky about it—like a doll come to life, programmed to do what a doll does—eyes round and blank like two polished marbles, only ever looking far off into the distance as though you can’t see the things around you. 

At the same time, he gets this annoying feeling as though you’re seeing something no one else can.

In all honesty, he’s got no idea what you are. And it bothers him like you would not believe.

Which is why he’s decided he needs to keep you closer. Friends and enemies and all that. Though, he doesn’t find it prudent to give you so much credit as to call you his enemy as that would imply you pose a threat. Still, he doesn’t enjoy things he doesn’t understand, and you, well, even though you’re nothing scary, he’s taken by this desperate need to put his finger on you for some reason. And to do that, he figures he’ll just put you under his thumb and be done with it in the best way he knows how.

He’s certain he’ll feel better about it all after he’s had you beneath him. Then, all these thoughts he’s been having will be proved as nothing more than a waste of time after he’s reduced you to what he knows is true for all bunnies. Prey at his mercy, and nothing more.

The girls that get handpicked for the mezzanine are usually all on their knees trying their best to earn their keep and not get sent back down to the den where customers get to do what they please with them any way they want. Being on the risen floor is like a blessing in that way—a chosen few, honored ones, saved from the fray below given an opportunity to please just one man instead of a dozen a day. 

Typically they’ll be rare breeds, red-listed, and now, even though you don’t stand out as anything special, mundane dwarf rabbit that you are, you’re going to be one of them. You should see it as a fucking godsend.

And yet, you don’t seem to grasp the value of it in the slightest. 

Two girls a little way from you are putting on a show for him, kissing and touching each other all for his viewing pleasure. Despite their performance, from where he sits on his comfy throne of pillows and throws, his eyes look past them onto you where you’ve placed yourself before the balustrade, peacefully staring passed it into the thin air, beyond the cesspit below, ahead at something unknown like always.

Only this time, he demands to have his answers.

“What’s got you looking so pleased?”

It seems you hadn’t noticed his approach, and yet you don’t spook by it either, that way your head slowly turns, looking up at him for the first time with those very big eyes, to where he looms above, stone-faced with his hands down his pockets.

Being a polar bear, he’s used to his size and presence invoking fear in everyone around him. It’s a natural response to the largest predator. He’s always viewed it as a sign of respect. A fact that everyone knows he’s not the one you should test your luck against.

You, however, don't regard him any differently than you would a fellow bunny. Giving him no signs of being in a rush to please him. You just stare, as though waiting for him to explain himself.

“You seem like you' got something you’re looking forward to.” His voice is brisk, demanding, “I want to know what it is.”

You blink then. Slow in your answer—way too slow to understand the dire situation you’ve landed yourself in, or maybe, simply unbothered. He really can’t tell, and it’s beyond frustrating at this point—trying his very hardest to read your mind and failing so miserably in the pursuit he has no other option but to wait oh-so-patiently for you to indulge him.

“We’re getting stew for supper today,” you say at last, looking back through the guardrail at his workers, flooding through the gate on the ground floor, carrying sacks of potatoes over their backs.

His nose scrunches at the prospect. You're really looking forward to that slop? Suppose you have to be that humble when you’re at the bottom of the food chain. Even so, he hasn’t heard any single one of his bunnies, of which he’s had hundreds, ever show any type of enthusiasm regarding the food.

“You like stew?” he asks. Patience tested, but curiosity unsated.

You shake your head then, a small smile of all things gracing your face, contradicting yourself, “Not really.”

His brows furrow. Is this a game or something? If so, it’s not amusing. His teeth grind. “Not really? Why are you so cheery then?”

You look up at him once more, blinking again, both like you’ve never really thought about it as well as though you think it’s obvious—so obvious that you find it odd to even be sparing it a thought.

“Well, you see… When there’s stew, they serve carrots on the side. And I really like carrots.”

You look back to the potato sacks just in time to catch sight of the crates of carrots now being brought in, and the smile on your face as you watch them is unlike anything he’s ever seen—warm, excited, blissful even. 

Affronted by it, he leaves you abruptly, thinking an expression like that has no right in a place like this. 

Content slaves are never a good thing. Content slaves forget that which they are—slaves. They start taking what little they have for granted. They become ungrateful, and demanding, and then the uproars happen. That’s it. That’s what he dislikes about you. That’s what’s been making him so uneasy. You don’t beg or scramble. You’re nonchalant, and that type of sangfroid is nothing short of insolent. What’s worse, it could inspire others.

He won’t have that. 

You think you have something to be happy about? Perhaps it’s time he reminded you—you have nothing.

He regards you keenly from the mezzanine, watching you enter the dining hall down below. The spring in your step is pitiful to behold and so is the dead still you come to when you're wandering eyes can’t find the tub of chopped carrots usually on display right next to the potatoes.

You keep the metal dinner bowl to your chest, this tiny rumple between your brows as your eyes become more searching the farther up the line you get. And then, when it’s finally your turn, you cock your little head over the display, voice softly inquiring to the workers on the other side, “Are all the carrots finished already?”

“No carrots today. Dietary restrictions. Boss-man’s orders,” is the strict reply that returns, given like a slap to the face.

“Oh…”

You blink then, as you do—that very empty type of blink like you’re resetting yourself the way he’s seen you do with other customers.

And then, just as always, you slip right back without a hiccup. “I guess I’ll just have some potatoes then.”

It’s disappointing. He’d thought for sure you’d give him a little more grief than that. But no. You even tack on a polite little “Thank you,” after being served, before hopping out of line like there was never anything more to be wanted.

You don’t make moves to sit with any of the others, he notices. Instead, you make your way alone up the stairs to where he is like you’ve already accepted the mezzanine as your new place.

He’s not sure why, but for some reason he hides himself so as not to spook you into going somewhere else. And from behind the coverage of a pillar, he continues his stalking, observing you as you sit yourself in the same spot as before, in front of the balustrade.

You proceed like earlier to look through the bars down at the burrow below. It’s empty and quiet now with everyone busy in the dining hall, and he realizes he’s never actually spared it a glance during supper before. It’s a strange sight. Like a battlefield after the battle.

You don’t eat in a mad hurry like the others. Actually, it takes five minutes before you even touch the potatoes, and when you do, it’s one piece at a time, calmly, taking your sweet time, like you’re trying to enjoy yourself. 

He finds himself wondering if you’d eat carrots the same way. And before he even knows it, he’s standing right behind you once more with the same question as earlier.

“What’ you looking at now?”

And just as before, you don’t spook by his presence. This time, you don't even bother turning to acknowledge him as though you might have known he was there all along.

“The burrow,” you answer. “How different it looks when it’s empty.” His thoughts exactly. “It’s sort of peaceful like this, don't you think?”

No. Peaceful is not the word that came to mind. “I think you’d have to be mad to find peace in a place like this when in your position,” he states plainly, as if in an attempt to shake you out of whatever sordid outlook you were trying to impose on him.

“That might be,” you agree, a soft smile gracing your face. “But I think… you have to find beauty in the dark when you can, or else dark will be all there is.” The hairs on the back of his neck stand on end listening to you. “It’s like, sometimes good madness will save you from bad madness. You know?”

“No.” And that’s the problem. He doesn't know. He has no fucking clue. And he’s starting to realize it’s not because you’re withholding the answers.

“Why aren’t you upset?” he asks then. A fair question, he thinks. But you only look at him oddly, making him explain once again just like you did earlier. The gumption of you is unbelievable, he thinks as he supplies the requested context on your behest, “I took away the thing you were looking forward to. Typically, that would make someone upset.”

You look as though you still don’t quite understand, but then a light breaks across your face. “Oh, you mean the carrots?” You don’t seem any more upset by understanding he’d removed them on purpose. Instead, you just give your head a tiny shake. “It was only a small thing.”

“Don’t lie to me.” His fists ball at his sides.

“But I didn’t.” Your head tilts, gesturing down at your tray. “I should have told you I liked potatoes. Then you’d have taken those away instead.” You then snort with a giggle, but he doesn’t get why or how you would find it funny. 

And again, he’s left with the same question. “Then why aren’t you more upset?”

You think about it for a moment—a moment like another eternity to him. 

“Well, I… I am upset…” you admit—the smile on your face positively unnerving. Perhaps you really have gone crazy. But then that would mean you were crazy from the start, from before ever even coming here. “But… I can’t exactly let my life fall apart over carrots. That would just be silly. Wouldn't you say?”

He swallows thickly, trying to stifle the many foreign things he’s feeling inside, finding that he can’t exactly argue with your answer, even though it makes little sense. People get upset over smaller things all the time. 

Just look at him and how upset one bunny is making him.

He turns away and starts walking then, muttering under his breath, “Silly, indeed.”

He goes to his bedroom alone that night. Some of the chosen had tried cheering him up, but they all failed miserably. You were not one of them. No, you made zero effort trying to earn your keep.

He knows you’d come if he called for you. You’d have to, and you’ve never been one to refuse a direct order. Still, somehow, even though he’s the one with all the power, having to call on you makes him feel like you’re stripping him of it.

The next couple of days pass all the same, with you continuing to drive him nuts.

At this point, he doesn’t know what he’s doing or why. Lounging on his throne, his chin resting on his palm as he appraises you with jaded eyes. Having come up with a new strategy—if robbing you of your small delights doesn’t enact a response, maybe he’ll have better luck in spoiling you…

“Eat,” he says, but like always you don’t seem to take it like an order, standing there, in front of the big platter of carrots he’d had his workers bring up. 

It’s not the same kind they serve with the stew—flecked and spotted with mold, boiled to get rid of the bugs. No, these are quality. Crisp, bright, freshly plucked and washed just this morning.

And still, instead of throwing yourself at them, you have the nerve to act calm, asking, “Where’ the other girls?” while looking around like you’d feel ashamed starting without them.

“They’re for you,” he clarifies, sanctioning your approach.

Still, you stay put. Chewing your lip with your buck teeth. “Is that really okay?” 

He can’t believe it. Are you really feeling guilty—in a place like this that only ever takes and gives nothing back?

No one in their right mind would be asking about others when standing in your shoes. He knows for a fact that all the other girls you seem so concerned with would have been halfway finished gorging that platter without sparing you a single thought.

Suppose he’ll make it easier for you. “Eat it all, or I throw it out.” 

With that, a new smile takes your lips—one of which he’d not seen before or expected—small, bashful, coy, like you’re having a different conversation than the one you’re having. Bowing your head with a soft-spoken, “Thank you.”

You’re quiet as you eat. Slow with it like you’d been with the potatoes. Taking your time, enjoying yourself, savoring it, eating like he’s not right there observing you. It’s like you’re back in the wild. You, an oblivious little thing in a carrot field, and him, stalking you through the long grass.

“Aren’t you gonna ask?” he questions after a while.

“Ask about what?” you wonder, peering up at him from where you sit.

“Why I’m being nice.”

You seem to find that funny. “I don’t ask you why you’re cruel.” 

That’s fair, he thinks. Though he’s never really thought about it like that. 

And then you say, “I’m sure I’d have little luck understanding the mind of a man like you anyway.”

“A man like me?” he repeats, finding it interesting—wanting to arrest you on it. “And what kind of man do you think I am?”

It’s a dangerous question—you seem to understand that—taking your time to answer it just like you were with the carrots. “I suppose… a confusing one.”

You’re not wrong, though it’s a cleverly safe answer. He’s sure you’d have liked to have said something different if only it weren't for the likely threat it would pose to your life.

“Do you want me to ask?” you say then. And this time, he’s the one waiting for you to explain, looking at you with a halfway raised brow. “Why are you being nice to me?”

He scoffs. You’re proving to be a little more cheeky than what he was expecting. “I’m fattening you up to eat you.”

You laugh again. This time from your chest, bursting with it. He’s not sure a genuine laugh like it has ever rung out through the chamber. In fact, he’s not sure he’s ever even heard one like it whatsoever.

“Well, it’s a pretty good final meal.”

He dismisses you after you finish. 

Days pass without the two of you speaking. And he, stewing in it, is more confused than ever.

He used to lord over his palace like a king, fuck all day and watch his subjects with gold coins and power in his eyes. Now, he can’t remember the last time he spared even a single glance over the mezzanine without it being to look for you. He still hears the squeals and sighs of pleasure. But he can’t even picture the scene. No, his mind is otherwise busy.

Busy doesn’t even cut it. Plagued might. Yes, he’s plagued by you.

Plagued by you and he hasn’t even fucked you yet. It’s a joke. He’s never been one to edge himself. But now he hasn’t fucked in ages. And you’re to blame.

What’s the matter with him? All his life, he’s known what’s been what. People like to complicate things, make it sound like more, make it sound different from what it actually is. They romanticize and they fetishize, but at its core, it’s always been basic. Bunnies are weak and easily broken, and deserve to be treated accordingly. There’s nothing more to it than that.

He’s going to find you, and when he does he’s going to do to you what he should have done from the very start—break you like the weak and breakable thing you are.

“Know your place, slut,” a catty voice bites out. “You might have been popular down on the ground, but up here, I'm the fucking favorite.” 

From behind the pillar he witnesses the scene, forgetting his objective. Five chosen ones all stand in a ring around you, who’s pinned to the ground by three others, two holding your arms down and the last of them on top of you with a fist wrapped tightly around the root of your ear. She’s got something in her hand—a shiv, fashioned from some scrap-piece of metal with unknown origins—pointed with a poke up under your chin, looking just shy of drawing blood.

“If any of us see you trying to take my spot again, I’m gonna fucking gut you from cunt to belly button—understand?”

You don’t say anything—unable to with the make-shift blade threatening to slice your throat open. But your silence is an answer in and of itself, if it weren’t interrupted by him clearing his throat and stepping into view.

“Master–” all eight of them gasp, those standing shuffling away with a bow whilst the three others remain deadly still, waiting for his verdict with eyes wide.

“Get up. All of you,” he says, passing his judgement swiftly, not giving any one of them room to plead innocence or condone their crimes with silly reasonings, “There’s customers downstairs in need of attending. Go make yourselves useful.” 

A wave of displeased moaning followed, nearly amounting to a protest. Even so, their disgruntled pouting was premature. He wasn't finished. 

“And once you’re done, you can all stay down there.”

Pouting turned to pleading fast, all of them shaking their head with hands clasped together in prayer, “But, master, please—she had it coming, she never does anything, she—”

“One more word,” he stops the tangent, closing the gap with a slow saunter, standing multiple heads taller than all of them, even the one who thought herself so high and mighty just a moment ago. He makes sure to return her look of entreaty without mercy, saying, “And I’ll be the one gutting you.”

They all scurry shortly after that, tears in their throat as they hurry down the stairs.

You get up to join them—never one to make the wrong assumption, probably thinking he’s one to tar everyone with the same brush. And normally, he’d do just that, because in his eyes, there’s no telling people apart in any other way aside from separating product from customer, with himself being the only outsider. But then came you.

“Not you, Carrots,” he says, stopping you. “You stay right there.”

You remain still as he approaches. You don’t flinch, your eyes don’t flitter—it’s utterly uncanny, he’d believe it if you told him you were without senses, like a ghost.

“Why didn’t you fight back?”

It’s the question that’s been on his mind since you first showed up here—not a lick of resistance in you.

“I’m not fond of pain,” you answer. “So, I try my best to avoid it.”

His teeth grit, very nearly growling. “You have a bad habit of not answering the question being asked.”

You chew your lip, looking as though you’re not quite sure how to explain yourself. “Well… fighting it would only make it worse, wouldn’t you say? And besides… I don’t want to do to others what I don’t want being done to me.”

So, you believe in karma. That’s an interesting mental state—not one he’s ever understood too well. It’s always seemed like a comfort to those who don’t have the strength to take their own revenge, hoping that some higher power will do it for them. 

“Also, we bunnies have a saying,” you continue, now with that unseemly smile of yours. “If you’re at first getting fucked, you might as well try to enjoy it.”

Something violates him at that—a chill of all things. Thinking, that’s not karma. No, not at all. 

That’s resignation. An even odder mental state.

“Though… I don't think most of us take it to heart,” you add with a small laugh.

It makes no sense to him. In fact, it shocks him like you’ve just pulled out a knife and stabbed him with it. And yet, he thinks he might finally get you now. Any moment might be your last and you’ve accepted that as a fact of life. The same way he accepts and expects his stomach to growl, you accept and expect yourself to be the one to sate it. 

You’re the only one so far. The only one to successfully internalize that truth without breaking under the pressure.

“Will you bring the girls back?” you ask then, seemingly taking his silence as an invitation, and using it as an opportunity to think about others as if you can afford it.

He doesn’t know why it angers him the way it does. “Why the fuck would I do that?”

Like always, you don’t quiver under his growl like others would have. No, instead you keep insisting, “It’s cruel to send them back down after—”

“I thought you said you didn’t question cruelty.” he cuts you off.

And still, it’s like you don’t even care. “Well, I'm only asking because… it sort of feels like my fault, is all. I don’t want to be the reason they’re punished—”

“I’m not punishing them for you,” he interrupts, affronted by the mere suggestion. “I'm punishing them because they were cocky enough to think they could create a hierarchy not governed by me.”

He picks the shiv up from the floor, holding it up and inspecting it with a grimace like its very existence is an insult. 

“Tch—I should have killed them, and you’re asking me to save them.” He shakes his head, then finds your face again.

“You wanna know what bores me more than anything? When beggars start thinking they can be choosers.”

Gracing your jaw with the blade, he sneers. “Do you think you can be a chooser?”

And just like expected, you reset yourself with a blink, then utter a passive, “No.”

“And that’s why you’re up here, and they’re down there.” 

In all your time up here, he hasn’t once touched you, but within the next passing second he’s got your small body caged in his, trapped between himself and the balustrade where he always finds you, sitting, staring, thinking about things hidden from him.

“You’re the only one who gets it.” Knife cast aside, he uses his paw instead, dwarfing your chin and cheeks as he aims your head out to look across the den below. Fangs by the lop of your ear, blowing on the soft fur with his whispers, “You’re the only one who understands the laws of true wilderness. The rightful order of things. You know what you are and have accepted your place—made nature your common sense.”

Your feet dangle below, toes gracing the floor just barely, slipping in their stance where he has you hoisted against the guardrail, clutching onto it with your hands—knowing if he’d let go, you’d go toppling over it. And yet you don’t fight back. Knowing it’s all out of your hands, you remain just like putty in his.

“Look at them,” he continues, a disgust in his voice and in his narrowed eyes, spitting, “They all think they can be something different. Prey thinking they can hunt the hunter. Hunters thinking they can be loved by that which they hunt. It’s all false.”

He slips his hand from your chin to your neck, keeping a firm hold, though not squeezing, just enough to feel your pulse on his finger.

“You and me, we’re the only ones who see it for what it truly is,” he murmurs. “And why… I’ve decided I’m not gonna fuck you…”

His other paw, which up until this point had been holding the guardrail just shy of yours, now lifts and places itself over your heart, feeling it beat in his palm as he continues, “No, you deserve more respect than that… Which is why… I'm gonna give you the honor of being my first live kill.”

Betraying yourself, your heart does, nearly to his surprise, skip a beat upon him confessing his intention. But of course, despite your seemingly perfect composure, it would be utterly unnatural were it to remain steady.

“I’m gonna give you more carrots than you can eat,” he resumes, now forgoing your ear, nuzzling your cheek instead. “Then, when I've finally fattened you up enough, I'm gonna eat you whole—live and kicking.”

Swallowing thickly, he chuckles under his breath, setting you down on your own two feet again. Leaving your body cold as he begins walking away, with his final sentiments being, “And then we’ll both at last be done with this farce and become what nature intended.”

Weeks pass, and you remain alone on the mezzanine. He doesn't bring the old girls back, nor does he enroll any new girls either. It’s just you and him, in a silence so loud it’s gutting. And still, you’re fed a platter of carrots every day, and you never fail to finish every last one.

He doesn’t touch you again. No, instead, he maintains a distance. You catch his gaze linger though, just like it had since the beginning—on you while you eat, while you mind your business, even while you sleep, you’ll hear the low rumble of his breath, stalking you. It’s as he’d said, like hunter and prey.

Also now, on his throne, watching you where you sit, by the balustrade, looking outward at the burrow. No one wants to be there—not the girls, and not the men who come to see them either—they might think they do, but the truth remains. What they want can’t be found here. 

And yet, you suppose it comes close enough.

“You’ve been fattening me up for a while now…” you announce, cutting the silence. And then you turn your head back, flashing him your signature smile from over your shoulder. “Is this the part where you finally eat me?”

He doesn’t say anything. Just continues to stare at you like he’s waiting for you to make the decision for him.

“Do you want me to run?” you propose then—not sure if you’re trying to make it easier for him or perhaps harder. 

“Do you really think you’ll be able to stand still?” he mutters back. No mockery in his words. No humor in it at all.

You shuffle around to face him better, still smiling even though you know it probably doesn’t look too convincing anymore. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t matter either way. You’d be much quicker. I wouldn’t get far.”

His voice seems tight, suggesting, “I’m sure you could if you tried.”

You sigh then, “We both know that’s a lie.” 

And then you get up, chest getting tougher the tighter your throat snares, making it hard to breathe, and so you take a big one and release it just as sharply, scoffing, “Besides, I don't think my heart would be able to take it. I’d die from the ache before you could make the kill—and I wouldn't want to spoil the fun.” 

You place yourself about halfway toward him, before his throne. Submissiveness being your only weapon, you present yourself just so, linking your hands behind your back. “I think I’ll just stand right here and close my eyes if that’s okay.”

You hear him get up. You’ve always been so good at turning everything off, but right now you’re just not able—feeling the burn of salt swell up beneath your eyelids, pressing for release. You don’t want to let them, but they escape despite that, trickling down your cheeks.

You’re not afraid of dying. You’re not really afraid at all. That’s not it. It’s not fear. It’s something far less reasonable than that. Something audacious that couldn’t care less about the circumstances, even when it makes no sense. No sense at all. 

His finger brushes your cheek, catching the wetness and wiping it away. You don’t open your eyes, but you feel the air from his breathing reach you, getting warmer with his approach, soon on your lips.

“Don’t,” you object before it can happen. “You said so yourself…” Voice a soft croak, sniffling, “It isn’t natural for prey and hunter to mate.”

You hear him swallow thickly, abiding by your words as he mulls them over again the same way the two of you had done now for the last month since your first meeting.

“I know…” he says at last. Voice no louder than just for you to hear, very nearly desperate, “So let’s forget about it. We can pretend, can’t we?”

It’s tempting, but too fickle. “I’m afraid it’s not that simple.”

“So, what can I do? Tell me.” His paws brush your arms, carefully, without claws. “What do I have to do to make you mine?”

“Well… that’s a question you have to ask yourself, isn’t it?” Your eyes peel open, meeting his. “It all depends on one thing.”

You appraise each other like that. Him, waiting for your conditions, and you, feeling your heart rift for reasons beyond being prey before a predator, as you state the ultimatum, “Do you want me to be afraid of you? Or do you want me to be in love with you?”

You bite your lip and look down, as though planting your foot. Even though you know what you’re asking is an affront to nature, it remains true nonetheless, “You can’t have both.”

There’s a pause. Your heart beats out of your chest, fearing what to expect—a bite or something entirely different you don’t have the nerve to name.

“You’re right…” he says at last. “Hunters don’t mate with prey.”

The beating in your chest ceases—gets cut loose and drops. You knew it all along and yet that does nothing to ease the desolation it leaves behind. 

A hooked finger slips under your chin, lifting your head.

“It’s a good thing we’re both hunters.”

The bite finally comes then.

Hungry, yet toothless.

♡ BNHA – Bakugou, Enji ♡ JJK – Sukuna, Geto, Naoya, Toji

♡ Omegaverse & other Hybrid Tales ♡ FEM/GN X M INSERT masterlist

[memeuplift]

[silverflqmes]

some fluff to consider w dottore (zandik mode):

maybe its still early on in his fatui career where its his first formal ball. he's got you to help him master the proper waltz and dances, practicing around his lab with a record that occasionally skips while it plays. he does his best to observe you, too, seeing how your face reddens when he dips you or how you stumble over your feet when his hand squeezes your side mid motion. the reactions are archived in his head for later, when you retire to your room and he's still in his lab, biting his lip thinking about how many more reactions he could get from you if he pushed upon the unspoken line dividing you both from friends to something else...

໒⦂ 𝐌𝐀 𝐌𝐄𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐔𝐑𝐄 𝐄𝐍𝐍𝐄𝐌𝐈𝐄.

notes. hello anon — THIS IS SO USHHFFJJF i love this so much, the yearning here is so augh.. i hope you don’t mind me writing a drabble for this.. and yes the title was completely necessary.

genre. fluff + suggestive?

tw. use of ‘dear’

dottore x gn!reader.

“you haven’t stepped on me once today.” you pointed out — softly, amused, yet audible enough for the man holding you to him. “that’s commendable, doctor.”

scoffing lightly, dottore gave your hip a small squeeze — whether in warning that he still could- step on you, that is.. or merely to remind you of his presence. one of the two, but you weren’t certain which, unless there was a secret third option that hadn’t quite crossed your mind as yet. “i would never do something so brash, unless requested explicitly and sweetly from you, my dear.” he finally said, carefully avoiding the lab equipment he had not bothered to move out of the way.

you always did say that obstacles were good for being able to avoid other pairs at formal events that called for dance, so they stuck around even now. a far cry from his first ball, which was.. well — it wasn’t horrible, but he wasn’t quite as loose as he was now with you. he moved more or less like lamb gaining its first footing, fortunately not stepping on you, however there was.. a constant self conscious feeling that he might.

a feeling that was all but unrecognizable now, slightly older and more familiarized with your teachings.

“i once recall a pair of pastel pumps i had worn, covered in light gray layers strikingly ressmbling the soles beneath your own.. perhaps my imagination?” you parroted back, twirling when the hand holding yours raised, puppeting you almost.

leading was the term, you’d corrected him several times in his earlier days in joining the fatui, but he insisted on calling it that. he just preferred the control the word had, perhaps. “a very wild imagination, indeed, but i suppose a figment of my inexperienced youth.” the harbinger finally said, returning his hand to your hip once you spun back into him.

perhaps a little too strongly, as your hand met his chest in place of his shoulder, eyes raising to his masked gaze for the briefest of blinks before you cleared your throat — awkwardly. “i didn’t think you had it in you to admit such a thing, doctor. has your arrogance subdued with age?”

“i prefer to call it being well-mannered and matured, my dear. two qualities that most of the male population lacks, and takes an awful deal of time to discover for themselves.” that included even him, to some degree — though he’d outgrown his immaturity.

the record — dated and worn, skipped the smallest of beats, but it did nothing to deter either of your movements. your hearts had known the steps, having reached sufficient proficiency in being able to fill in what was missing in your heads. a track in fontainian lyrically speaking, but with a beat that might possibly have sumerian origins.

for all that he despised the place he should have been able to call home once upon a time ago, he couldn’t deny the nostalgia that washed over him hearing the music that was only sparse. sumeru was a nation that focused little on the arts, after all, but in the smallest corners — found in impromptu performances and as entertainment in small bars or eating establishments, there was talent to be found.

although being welcome to such spaces was often a rarity for someone like him. so he typically listened from afar or watched from whichever window might have been left open to provide some circulation.

staring at him a second longer than you should have permitted yourself to, it was your turn to be the one stumbling, nearly stepping on his pristine boot. so much for that speech from before. “well-mannered, yes. whether you’re matured, hm..” you looked away, feeling your cheeks warm from having gazed at him for too long. “debatable.”

because such details and changes in your expression were impossible for a man like dottore to miss — always attentive of even the smallest things, he let out a low hum. “perhaps i should step on you just for that, but i’ve grown above such pettiness.” mostly, at least. “i must say, though, that last step was awfully unlike you, dearest.. whatever happened, hm?” dottore pressed, allowing the corners of his lips to curl as he gave your fabric-covered flesh the smallest of squeezes. a silent request on what your status was.

archons forbid you sprained an ankle or over-exhausted yourself.

“a miscalculation.” you responded as measured as your voice could possibly manage, shifting your hand upwards to rest on the curve of his shoulder as you squeezed him back — a silent reply of your own. “worry not, i can still continue. a misstep won’t be what cuts our session short.”

dottore chuckled at that, weaving the two of you between equipment he hadn’t touched in weeks. “i’d hope not, but it’s a good thing we are where we are. i could assess your condition rather easily, after all.” he mused out, splaying his fingers far enough to support your lower back before allowing your body to dip in his grasp.

a move that was not foreign — he’d done it before, and you were often prepared for the occasional rush of gravity.. but because of that little hiccup from before, you were unable to quite stop your arms from flying around his neck, even despite the mutual trust that he wouldn’t drop you.

he never did, not even back then — despite being on the scrawnier side upon joining the fatui.

swallowing the lump that had formed in your throat for the handful of seconds spent frozen in your places — like figures found on the snow globes often sold at the opera house the doctort often extended boxseat invitations to, you held his masked stare, music drowning out.

this.. didn’t happen very often. but whenever it did, it was.. difficult to pull yourself out of.

and dottore wasn’t saying anything. he was quiet, for once, patiently awaiting confirmation to continue your dance.

your heart skipped a beat in the way the record would.

“i-i’m fine.” you began when you finally remembered your voice, and that you may have allowed your eyes to roam his sharp features longer than one should. “another.. miscalculation.”

helping you upright, the scholar let out a soft hum, as though contemplating whether he should buy your obvious lie or play into it as he always did.

he opted for the latter. “perhaps we can leave it here for today. shall i examine you for good measure?” he then offered, using his now free hand to move some straying hairs back into place, as he knew well enough by now where each belonged.

“that won’t be necessary — i’m alright.” you tried dismissing, nearly shivering at the lightest brush of leather on your countenance. it was.. warm for a change. “i should.. probably get going, anyway. you have that event later tonight, and i’ve got- um..” well, you had nothing, truthfully. not this evening, at least.

“you’ve got?” dottore prompted, tilting his head with a smile of his own. “nothing, i presume?”

feeling your eyes widen, you turned your head almost immediately, huffing out a breath, “no need to sound so happy about making that discovery.” you chided, sliding your gaze back to his as you unwrapped one arm around his neck, adjusting one of the curls that framed his face.

it caught him just slightly off guard, though it didn’t quite meet his face. or at least, what had been visible to you. “a scholar should take enjoyment in a breakthrough, my dear, and i am no exception to that rule.” he chuckled once more, lowering his hand to your opposite hip. “in any case, since you have nothing scheduled for later into the evening, perhaps you might like to accompany me?” he offered softly, giving your side a small squeeze. “for old time’s sake.”

letting out a hum of your own, you let go of his hair to return your arm where it had previously accompanied the other around his neck, tilting your head to mirror his own. “is that right?” you questioned — rhetorically, of course. “all this time and you still haven’t taken a partner, doctor.” you teased, though there was.. this strange feeling of relief that bloomed in your chest.

dottore seemed to bring himself forward at that statement, confidently. “what need have i to do that when i have a perfectly good partner standing right in front of me right now, dear?”

and the hits just kept on coming — each more flustering than the last. sure, you had often teased one another, and the harbinger had certainly been a victim of that when you initially met.. but now?

being on the receiving end more often these days was.. certainly something else. especially when crossing into territory that began to blur the lines between the relatively platonic relationship you had both shared until now.

something that was happening more often these days, the longer you pondered on previous interactions.

food for thought, perhaps.

strumming your fingers against your arm, you let out a final noise of consideration before letting out a mixture between a chuckle and sigh. “i guess when you put it that way, how could i possibly refuse?” you returned, shfiting your weight to your other leg. “time and place, doctor?”

notes. saw my life flash before my eyes on this flight and almost shat myself but i managed to finish this so i hope it is somewhat enjoyable and not too rushed💔 maybe the ao3 author curse rlly is real

tysm for reading! consider leaving a tip if you enjoyed<3

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[romopiod]

♥ 𝓕𝓐𝓔 𝓐𝓛𝓦𝓐𝓨𝓢 𝓕𝓘𝓛𝓛 𝓣𝓗𝓔𝓘𝓡 𝓓𝓔𝓑𝓣𝓢

𝓢𝓨𝓝𝓞𝓟𝓢𝓘𝓢:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

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

A flame. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The lantern does not fall.

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

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

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

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

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

Almost.

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Show me."

"It's nothing, Babulya."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the morning your hand does not hurt.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The footprints.

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Is that a warning?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I haven't doomed anyone, Babulya."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then you stop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You stop walking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The world breaks open before the scream finishes leaving you.

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

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

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

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

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

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

"You sound very certain of that."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

. . .

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"I think I have, for some time."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You know exactly what you mean to give him.

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

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

You finish lacing it anyway.

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

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

"I mean to."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"What have you brought?"

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

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

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

He goes very still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

.

.

.

.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[titleknown]

Trump Moves to Deeply Censor the Entire Internet

The Trump administration is cynically exploiting calls for stricter AI regulation to pass broad censorship measures at the federal level.

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

So, if you live in the US and hate censorship and AI you know what to do, contact your congresspeople and tell them do not fucking dare let this through or so help us god...

[titleknown]

IMPORTANT UPDATE: The bastards just worked out a deal on the package, and they're going to try and ram it through the House in the next couple of weeks.

So, if you've been waiting to call, the time is NOW. Do it ASAP, be polite, be informed, but light up those phones like a Christmas tree!

[blahblahblah-yapyap]

Trophy wife

» sub!bottom!Zhongli x dom!top!amab!reader

» Genshin Impact

» 861 words

» reader doesn't know Zhongli's true identify, marriage out of convenience, wealthy!reader, pillow princess!Zhongli

There is something close to naiveness in the way Zhongli sees your relasionship, something mixed with the hope and the ilusion of love, something that he feels close and familiar, after all he was treated similar when he still holded the title of Rex Lapis, he used to be worshiped in a similar way you seem to do, in the way you look at him, in the way you shower him in compliments and love, sometimes he even wonder if it is that you know his secret but decided to keep it as that, perhaps it is true that you love him just as much as he does love you

Zhongli has always seen all the gifts you give him and the way you show him off so shamelessly as your way to love him, he is far from realicing that the main reason you have marry him it was because of his looks, because with that porcelain skin, with that elegant way to carry himself, with his precense alone it is enough to show off, that he truly is worth his value, the fact that you always dress him in the finest clothes and decorate him in jewelry it is to show off and not just an act of love

Everything his heart may desire is put in his hands by you, money is something neither you or him worry about, you are always showing him off, walking at his side with a hand on his waist, like a silent threat to everyone around that they are allowed to look but not to touch, you always bring him to meeting with important people because you want to show off what you have and what you can achive, because he is a candy to the eye and his knowledge over Liyue always manage to mesmerize anyone who looks at your direction, because he is your porcelain doll, he is yours to dress and show off, to use and impress, to walk at your side when you needed

And even if Zhongli is not fully aware that he has been leveled to a trophy wife, as something pretty to show off, deep down he knows he is being showed off and he loves it, it makes him stand as prideful as when he was Rex Lapis but also to stand silent at your side, to act as you expect and just look pretty while walking at your side, to await at your comand before saying anything, because he is a man of patience and always knows that if he behaives he will be rewarded

Because even if for you Zhongli is far from being more than a pretty face, of being a pretty doll for your to show of and enjoy, for him your love is the most adictive way to be worshiped. To be praised and loved is not new for him, he is Rex Lapis after all, but in all his centuries of life he has never feel so loved and worshiped like with the way your hands hold him close and the way your lips leave kisses all over his skin, like when your lips meet leaving him barely enough time to get ready before you find your way to proclaim him as yours again, before your toungue makes him shiver by savouring his existance, that victorious smirk that takes his breath away because of the pride you hold on the fact that, no matter how much people look at him there is no one else who gets to touch him, to devour him in the way you do

Because even if for you he wasn't more than a pretty face to show off, a trophy to bragg about with others, the way you praise him, the way you touch him makes him think that he may as well has born to reach this point, because as your pretty doll of husband you know how to treat him, how to lay him down and fuck him in a way that is the closest to true worship he had experience in all his life, in a way that nothing else can compare, not when he feels like he is truly becoming one with you, when you are reaching deep inside of him to the point that he lose all his mind and there nothing but the need of you left

Because even if he no longer is worshiped god, even if he has been reduced to a pretty face and an obedient trophy wife, someone who moves and speaks under your silent comand he will never regret it, because of the way you make him feel, they way you fill him completely and make his body tremble, the way you are willing to take the whole control and left him just having to worry about small things, to even let him just flow under your rythm until he has become a whimpering mess, weting the mattress with not only his saliva and tears, the way you worship him as your pretty doll it is what he loves now, what he is addicted to, he is right where he belongs now

[chrollogy]

𝓤𝐍𝐃𝐄𝐑 𝓞𝐁𝐒𝐄𝐑𝐕𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍𓂃 ࣪˖ ִֶ♱ ྀིྀ

pantalone x fem!reader x dottore

SYNOPSIS: Seeking to deepen his understanding of the human mind, The Doctor offers a ‘special’ experiment to his favourite subordinate—you—and his dear friend, Regrator. Amidst the heat of the study, the fine line between scientific curiosity and personal intrusion blurs as the Second Harbinger finds himself joining in on the fun.

CONTENT WARNING: DUBCON, fatui!reader, reader is dottore’s subordinate, reader is referred to as ‘miss’, petty bickering between the old men, slight scientific jargon, prob inaccurate science stuff (sorry), slight pervert pantalone, smut (mdni), nipple play (?), pantalone-centric in first half of smut, p*rn w/o plot, exhibitionism, dottore gets FOMO lowkey, implied use of aphrodisiac (m), p in v, protected sex but eventual unprotected sex, threesome, double penetration, anal sex (f receiving), fingering, multiple orgasms, overstimulation, not beta read.

WORD COUNT: 8.2k

NOTES: happy june :”3 !! i hope you enjoy this very self indulgent piece! i haven’t written a threesome in ages so apologies if its a bit clunky </3. div: babyg4rlhelps

The hallway leading to The Doctor’s laboratory was eerily quiet, his subordinates—like yourself—were currently on break at the cafeteria indulging in much needed fuel to power through yet another hectic day. The soles of your shoes echoed throughout the metallic floors, it served as a reminder at how deserted the corridor was; even though you’ve walked down this same path for years, the atmosphere never once failed to lick an icy shiver down your spine. It didn’t help how lifeless and dull these hallways were. As for the purpose of your early return in The Doctor’s laboratory, one of your colleagues had told you that the Harbinger required your presence urgently, and given your colleagues' words, it seemed to be a matter of importance.

Though, you wondered why The Doctor had specifically asked for you; as far as you were aware, your ranking as his subordinate wasn’t anything special—merely conducting experiments and quality control were your tasks, just like all the other subordinates under his authority. Ah, you didn’t mess up anything, did you? You always always followed protocols and it wasn’t like The Doctor had previously given you an earful for messing up an experiment. 

In fact, he had been nothing but full of praise towards you; there was one instance where the Harbinger gleefully praised your intellect. Although to others, he never held back on his dissatisfaction whenever a colleague of yours messed up certain experimental procedures. The Doctor always spoke to them of the importance of materials as they were not easily obtainable, and to always carefully read the protocols. Unfortunately, his rather strange bias towards you made you the butt of the jokes amongst your colleagues in cafeteria conversations, and you were more than certain they were currently laughing at you behind your back.

“Hah! She’s like a teacher’s pet but instead of a teacher it's Lord Dottore! Hahahahahaha!” One of your colleagues started right after you were told The Doctor needed you back at the laboratory.

Of course, it was all light hearted but you wished they were a bit more mature about the situation because sometimes you couldn’t help but feel . . . weird around Lord Dottore at times—especially at times where he’d lean over your shoulder to inspect your task for the day. Maybe he simply needed a closer look but the way his chest ghosted against your back had you biting the inside of your cheeks.

Stepping inside the laboratory, you were greeted with an empty space, devoid of the man you were looking for. The room was how everyone left it before heading to the cafeteria—powered equipment turned off, hazardous chemicals stored away, and several documents sprawled across counters. For a supposedly urgent matter, you expected him to be at least present in his own laboratory.

Confused, you called out, “. . Lord Dottore?”

Silence stretched for a few moments before you received a response, “I am in my office. It would be preferable if you joined me.”

At the sound of his familiar voice, you followed its origin where it led you to the slightly ajar door to his office. Your heart pounded against your chest, you’ve only been inside there once to drop off research notes because the person who usually did it was absent that day, The Doctor also wasn’t inside when you had entered previously so this was your first time in his office with him.

Something about that unnerved you. Sure, he was somewhat ‘nicer’ to you but there wasn’t denying the fact that he was an interesting individual but you were under the same organisation, so it wasn’t your place to question the Harbinger nor his motives.

As you walked inside, you quietly closed the door behind out of politeness before turning around to get on one knee and bow your head. During the brief movement, you caught a familiar tall figure standing just off to the side of The Doctor’s desk.

“Lord Dottore, Lord Regrator.” But what was he doing here?

There wasn’t much you knew about Lord Regrator other than he was the Ninth Harbinger who was in charge of economic policies in the nation.

“There’s no need for formalities. Sit. I called you here to discuss a special experiment.” Dottore gestured a gloved hand at the empty seat before his desk, the corners of his lips slightly curled.

A special experiment? At the mention of an experiment, your heart calmed a little—it was your expertise after all, so there was no point fretting over it but the strange tension in the room seemed to scream otherwise. It also didn’t explain why Regrator was present, it wasn’t like they were about to start discussing finance with you.

You nodded, standing up to quietly make your way to the empty seat, “Of course. May I ask what this experiment is about?”

As you sat down, Dottore spoke up once more, both elbows atop the wooden desk, leaning a little closer, “Recently, I have been expanding my research on the human brain and its connection to the body regarding its response to bodily sensations such as touch. I have appropriate non-invasive equipment in my personal laboratory, however, the procedure is rather . . invasive.”

Invasive? What could Dottore possibly mean by that?

“Naturally, such an experiment necessitates a suitable candidate and their willing consent.”

A participant—you assumed that was your supposed role, the reason why Dottore required your presence. Once more, your heart thrummed out of nervousness, you weren’t going to conduct an experiment, you were going to be experimented on. The mention of an invasive procedure already had your mind spinning in a million different scenarios; he wasn’t going to cut you open, was he . . ?

“Your intelligence precedes your colleagues which is why I have found you to be the suitable candidate. Of course, it all comes down to your decision but it would be a delight to have your involvement.”

You sucked in a small breath, “May I . . read over the research proposal, Lord Dottore?” He wordlessly nodded, opening a drawer on his desk before sliding a neat stack of papers over. 

Written in bold letters was the title: ‘Sensory cortex activation by stimulation’

The human mind remains an imperfectly understood mechanism. This study aims to document and analyze cerebral activity in response to external stimuli such as touch and pressure in order to better identify the relations between the human brain and body. The implications of this experimental research extend beyond mere academic curiosity, a more complex understanding of neurological behaviour under euphoric conditions may provide valuable insight into artificial human enhancement procedures. Experimentation of this nature requires a fully informed and consenting participant.

Methodology: The participant will be situated within a controlled laboratory environment under my supervision to maintain consistency of neurological readings throughout the duration of the experiment. Neurological activity will be monitored and recorded through the use of neural-imaging apparatus for high resolution cerebral observation. The participant will be gradually exposed to sexual stimuli in certain body areas as follows: nipple, clitoral and vaginal (penile penetration) leading up to orgasm which is the expected peak readings.

To ensure authenticity of collected data, the participant must remain aware and capable of providing continuous informed consent during all stages of experimentation and contraception will be used. Furthermore, a second participant (assigned to Pantalone) is set to carry out sexual stimuli mentioned above and is considered a controlled variable along with the primary participant. Collected findings will subsequently be analyzed for potential applications in the fields of cognitive enhancement and artificial synchronisation of human neural patterns.

In simpler terms, Dottore wanted to observe human neural activity during a euphoric state to better understand the connection between the brain and body? In all honesty, you were speechless. Not only was the former supervising the entire experiment but Lord Regrator was also a participant, at this point you were convinced this was some kind of humiliation ritual. There was no denying that The Doctor was extremely professional when it came to research, and you were more than certain it wasn’t going to be his first time seeing a naked human body—he had even written a formal proposal which further confirms that this experiment wasn’t some kind of perverted shenanigan.

“Do I, uh—Does the experiment require the primary participant to be . . fully naked?” You feigned a cough, flipping a page as you tried your best to avoid eye contact with Dottore. Though he wore a pointed mask, you were certain his eyes remained solely on you.

“It is not a necessity. Only stated areas in the proposal are required to be exposed for efficiency. I’d also like to mention that a generous compensation will be given once the experiment concludes.”

At the mention of compensation, your ears perked up. Even though the Fatui was an influential organization in Teyvat, the pay you received was fairly enough to get by but if you were being honest, you could use a bit more mora especially with this month’s bills rolling around. Without another word, you nodded, finally looking up at the Second Harbinger.

“Alright. I will participate in the experiment, Lord Dottore.”

Beneath the pointed mask, his rosy lips stretched into a wider smile, “Excellent. I require you to sign this contract then I shall conduct a pre-experiment interview to obtain better understanding of the participant.” Reaching over the desk, he flipped over to the last page of the proposal and slid a fountain pen over, silently tapping his gloved fingers against the wooden surface as he watched you sign. 

With your participation officially sealed with a signature, The Doctor carefully placed the document inside the drawer and fixed his attention on you, gloved hands loosely clasped around one another, “Are you sexually active?” His question settled into the thick silence awkwardly, it stuck out like a sore thumb—all too sudden and personal yet your commander had simply asked it as if he were asking about today’s weather.

You were aware this was part of the protocol but having Regrator present in the office seemed a bit much for you; what was he even here for? Surely, he wasn’t about to start asking you medical related questions, he didn’t even work in the field. Discomfort enveloped your warmed skin, a thousand kisses akin to small prickles—hot and itchy.

Shifting ever so slightly in your seat, you spoke, “N-No . . but I have had intercourse before.” Archons, if you were given the option between Her Majesty unleashing her unforgiving ice on you or to explain your sex life to The Doctor, without hesitation you’d pick the former. Dottore was still your boss, after all but thankfully, he was as professional as you expected, keenly listening to your reply while nodding—nothing more, nothing less. If he had any reaction to your answers, he didn’t let on.

“And when was the last time?”

God, when was the last time you had sex? You simply couldn’t remember. Being a Fatui wasn’t a walk down the park, days in The Doctor’s laboratory were long and tedious, by the time you return home late in the afternoon, you’d only have the strength to eat and wash up before welcoming the night. The routine was monotonous, yes but there wasn’t room to mope around  and complain.

“I cannot accurately say but most likely a month ago.” With your boyfriend then but The Doctor didn’t need to know about your past relationship.

The Second Harbinger’s questions continued for a couple more minutes, he asked about every single medical related question you could think of—medical history, current medications, prior injuries, and existing neurological conditions. Naturally, you tried your best to answer as accurately as advised by The Doctor and each response was recorded with meticulous precision.

“Good.” The word sounded less like praise and more like a conclusion. “If at any point you wish to withdraw from the study, you will retain your right to do so.”

Silence stretched inside the cold room.

You stared at Dottore. Through his pointed mask, he stared back. Neither of you spoke as his words lingered in the icy atmosphere like wisps of smoke, light and airy yet it held a bitter taste. A beat passed, then, very slowly, one corner of his mouth curved upward.

“I assume you’re wondering whether I genuinely mean that.”

So The Doctor was aware of your growing suspicion regarding his previous statement; you knew well enough how he worked, his experimental endeavours weren’t obtained through ethical and considerate experiments, and for him to state something like that was clearly out of character. Or maybe he actually housed an ounce of decency in him.

“Pardon my brazenness but yes, a little.”

The smile on his lips widened, “Reasonable.”

“Coerced participation produces unreliable results, especially neurological results.”

It wasn’t concern nor ethics but merely data quality, you didn’t know whether to applaud him for being such a dedicated scholar. Surprisingly, his reasoning was sound, emotions can and will affect neurological scans; factors such as stress can create physiological ‘noise’ which would increase variability in data.

At the lack of your reply, The Doctor merely dismissed your silence as acknowledgement and spoke up once more, “As you’re already aware, this study requires two participants. The reliability of the data is dependent upon minimising external variables and, unfamiliarity constitutes as such.”

“In other words, you’re making us socialize.” Lord Regrator finally spoke up, his dulcet voice curling around your body like a serpentine predator.

Well, it wasn’t entirely odd to familiarise oneself with a fellow study participant, especially if intimacy was on the table but the whole situation felt rather awkward. Under more casual circumstances, you’d feel at ease but being confined in your commander’s office with another Harbinger felt nothing but forced; you felt nothing less than a puppet being forced to interact with another toy at the hands of a naïve child.

“Call it whatever you prefer. Participants exhibit measurably different neurological responses when interacting with unfamiliar individuals.” A gloved finger tapped the wooden desk, “Trust levels, social comfort, perceived predictability—they all introduce inconsistencies. Unless, of course, you want me to find another willing participant. After all, you do have the right to withdraw from the study, Pantalone.”

Hidden beneath Dottore’s words was provocation but to Pantalone, the taunt was clear as day. From where he stood, he could see the way the former’s lips curled into a smug smile—a silent challenge between both of them. But Regrator didn’t bite, no, instead, he shifted his attention toward you.

“Well.” He smiled pleasantly, “It seems we’ve been assigned homework. If Dottore wishes us to become familiar with one another, I suppose introductions are in order.”

Satisfied that events were proceeding according to plan, the Second Harbinger immediately returned to his notes. Lord Regrator watched his companion for a brief moment, “He’s actually taking notes. How amusing.” A gentle laugh escaped his lips, he moved a tad closer to get a better view and the scent of tobacco faintly invaded your senses.

For the next hour, conversation between you and Regrator drifted from formal introductions to declassified Fatui affairs to Snezhnayan politics, and for the entirety of it, Dottore wordlessly sat in his seat, taking notes of everything. The conversation started off stiff as expected—Pantalone may be a participant but he was still a Harbinger, and with it came formality but as words flowed, you eased slightly. You learned about his role as a high ranking Fatuus and despite your lack of interest in his field, you simply nodded along.

Lord Regrator differed from Lord Dottore, and whether that observation was positive or not, you were uncertain. Different in a way that the former was clearly built for conversations, he gave flattery when needed, smiled at your words, and gave colourful responses; you assumed he obtained his mannerisms through his role but even with his authority, he was easier to converse with.

“Alright, that is all for today. I shall require both your presence next week once I have the appropriate equipment set up.”

With that, you excused yourself first and headed back to the cafeteria with a racing heart. On the way over, you questioned whether what you were getting yourself into was something you’d regret in the future but all your mind could think about was the coming week. The mere idea of Lord Regrator intimately touching you shouldn’t have invited heat between your legs but with every step taken closer to the cafeteria, the more it grew. It didn’t help how obscene visuals of you and him flashed in your mind every second or so.

The new week rolled around with slight anticipation; it was embarrassing, really, the slight excitement buried in the depths of your core pulsing with expectation. It was weird to anticipate such an erotic experiment but pure lust fogged your mind primarily due to the fact that you simply haven’t had sex in a month. Weeks of pent up stress and emotions? You were definitely overdue for release. Though, you did have to constantly remind yourself that it was a formal study within a controlled environment, and not some kind of one night stand with your commander’s colleague.

“I trust you’re both well rested?”

The three of you were back inside The Doctor’s office, it was late afternoon, the warm glow of the sun spilled through the frostbitten windows, painting the rather dull room in a mellow hue. The rest of your colleagues had already left the laboratory which meant you, along with the two Harbingers were the only ones present. It made you a little nervous—being alone in a room with two of Snezhnaya’s influential individuals.

Pantalone hummed and you replied with a small nod, already feeling your skin starting to prick.

Dottore led you both into another room connected to his office, it wasn’t as vast and you assumed this was strictly out of bounds to everyone but him. The room felt unnervingly sterile, its walls were constructed from smooth metal panels with narrow seams, and bright white lighting illuminated the space.

At the centre of the room stood the experiment’s primary apparatus—a reclining examination chair surrounded by an intricate arrangement of cables, a machine, and polished metallic arms suspended from the ceiling. The most striking feature of the room was the wall opposite the entrance—a single pane of reinforced observation glass stretched nearly from floor to ceiling; beyond the glass you assumed was the control room, housing machinery responsible for operating the experiment.

“For the entire duration of the experiment, I shall remain inside the control room to oversee the study and note down all results. Remove any unnecessary layers of clothing such as overcoats and gloves, and meet me by the apparatus.”

Left in your blouse and pants, you headed to the center of the room where Dottore stood with Pantalone just a step behind. The former tinkered around the apparatus, pressing a few buttons and flipping switches with a gloved finger, causing the machine to whirr to life; it hummed a low, almost quiet tune that somewhat settled your nerves.

“Lie down.”

The Doctor looked over his feathered shoulder, pointed mask gleaming beneath the harsh lighting before turning his attention to the suspended metallic arms for inspection. You did as you were told, positioning the entirety of your body along the examination chair, the leather was cool against the fabric of your clothes which left tiny goosebumps from the difference in temperature. Wordlessly, you watched as he positioned the metallic arms near your head, several inches away from contact; its tips were equipped with a semi-circle that encased your head. So, this was what The Doctor meant about non-invasive equipment.

“Once I operate the machine, you may feel a slight sensation but do not fret, it is simply the apparatus emitting pulses of energy to record neural activity. And as for you, I require complete obedience—every single word.”

“Hah, you act as if I’m some kind of disobedient mutt. I’m wounded.” Regrator pressed a hand over his chest, a mocking smile directed at his colleague.

The latter didn’t bother replying and instead walked off to the control room, the soles of his boots clicking with every calculated step. Pantalone softly shook his head, muttering a faint “Lovely as ever.” beneath his breath, full of sarcasm.

“Any command given will be spoken through this intercom.” 

Your attention quickly moved from Regrator to the mounted speakers on the corners of the room as Dottore’s amplified voice filled the space. Gaze darting over to the foot of the examination chair, just past the Ninth Harbinger’s torso, you watched your commander on the other side of the observation glass. Heat warmed your cheeks at the realisation that you directly faced the latter which meant he’d be able to see everything you exposed.

“Base readings first. In the meantime, Pantalone, I trust you have already taken the concoction I made prior?” 

With the metallic arms whirring to life, you could barely hear The Doctor’s words over the pulsing of the machine. Just as he mentioned, there was a slight foreign sensation in your head, it felt like pressure but also not at the same time, though, it wasn’t painful. You could only watch as the two conversed over the observation glass.

“Indeed.” Regrator nodded.

Two days ago, Dottore had given him a curated substance meant to increase one’s libido, thus concentrating blood flow to the genitalia. He had no qualms consuming it but it was foreign, indeed, he had never taken such a drug before and it took all his willpower not to take you right then and there. It didn’t help how his semi-hardened cock twitched inside his pants, involuntarily rubbing against the fabric of his underwear.

Dottore jotted down a few notes as the monitors displayed your real-time cerebral activity; so far, everything looked good, “Commencing the first phase of the experiment: nipple stimulation. Duration: 30 seconds. For the entire duration—without stopping—the nipples are to be stimulated via gently pinching or twisting.”

Thirty seconds didn’t seem too long, right? With that, you slightly lifted yourself off the examination chair, bringing your blouse over your chest before attempting to unclip your brassiere. Seeing your struggle, Pantalone brought himself closer, a faint whiff of tobacco following, “May I?”

Despite his chivalrous offer, his amethyst gaze kept darting at your clothed breasts and the smoothness of your skin—he knew it was impolite to do so but being under the influence of Dottore’s concoction had him acting a tad out of character. He cleared his throat as his cock twitched at the sight before him, swallowing down the low moan he almost let out. Could you really blame him? The garment was a black lace adorned with intricate patterns, not to mention the fabric being slightly see-through—a feature he found rather brazen. Pantalone could almost assume you wore this specific garment today for him to see. And maybe for your commander, as well.

“Thank you . .” You nodded and allowed Regrator to help.

“Pardon the intrusion.” He laced an arm through the narrow space between your back and the chair, lithe fingers expertly unclasping your brassiere with one hand.

Your heart may or may not have skipped a beat.

In one swift movement, the garment loosened around your torso, threatening to slip off. With slight hesitation and a burning face, you removed the fabric and shyly placed it on the chair right by your thigh. Almost immediately, icy air kissed your warmed skin which caused your nipples to harden, a small hiss almost slipping past your lips. While you were occupied with embarrassment, Pantalone’s gaze traced the curves of your chest, each mound sinfully beckoning his large hands—maybe even his mouth too. Obviously, it wasn’t his first seeing a naked woman but how his mind reeled with selfish fantasies was beyond childish.

In the control room, Dottore was unfazed—he had seen many nude bodies before and yours weren’t any different. It was nothing special, really but your cerebral activity on the other hand . . . That was more interesting.

“Whenever you’re ready.” He spoke into the intercom.

“I’ll be starting now, Miss.” Regrator sat on the narrow space of the chair, his clothed thigh brushing against your own; you tried not to think of the warmth which radiated from his body or how your name effortlessly rolled off his tongue like it was meant to be.

A silent nod was all you could muster—not even a split second eye contact to acknowledge his presence out of politeness but from the looks of it, Regrator didn’t mind at all as he proceeded to bring both hands up to your chest. If only you’d look his way you’d see a shy hue of crimson dusting his pale cheeks and ears but alas, your gaze fixated on the ceiling above.

A small yelp forced its way past your lips; Regrator used both index fingers to gently trace your areolas a couple of times, mere centimetres shy from your pebbled nipples, the tips of his fingers were cold—not icy but enough to send a strong shiver down your spine. You missed the way the corners of his lips subtly curled upwards in utter amusement—who would’ve thought Dottore’s lovely subordinate hid quite melodious tunes? There was no doubt his Harbinger colleague thought of the same thing.

As a matter of fact, despite being behind an observation glass, Dottore heard the sound you made all too clearly. The door to the control room was slightly ajar which caused any noise—minute or not—to spill through. It wasn’t foreign for his experimental subjects to create any noise but today differed, what was usually tunes of pain turned into hums of pleasure, and he couldn’t decide between the two which he preferred.

Maybe, just maybe by a tad bit—from how his core twisted with delight—it was probably the latter.

But Dottore had no room to ponder over that, not when your neurological activity displayed exquisite images on his monitor. As expected, a small cluster of highlights illuminated the somatosensory cortex which indicated its activation; he quickly jotted down notes, eyes trained on the screen before him, trying not to let your saccharine noises get to his head.

Another twitch of his now fully hardened cock had him letting out a low groan beneath his shaky breaths. The sight before him was simply exquisite; Pantalone may not have the best eyesight but he didn’t need a perfect vision to deduce the divine beauty—breasts splayed flat, torso arching ever so slightly, your head turned to the side, bottom lip tucked between your teeth, and brows furrowed in embarrassment.

Oh, what a shy little thing you were.

“Lord R-Regrator—!” He gently pinched your nipples which spread a sharp, quick shock across your chest. Another arch of your back pressed your skin closer to Regrator’s digits, he experimented with a slight twist, turning them between his index fingers and thumbs.

Archons, how embarrassing! You tried. You truly tried to hold back any unwanted sounds but the Lord Harbinger seemed to know what he was doing—how to please a woman—you couldn’t help but moan out his name from how amazing his hands felt against your feverish skin. Save for the low hum of machinery, the room was filled with complete silence and any noise made stuck out like crimson ink on a blank ivory canvas.

“Do let me know if my actions hurt you at some point.” Pantalone mindlessly murmured, mind completely fogged with lust, and senses drowned in your muffled moans.

You finally looked up at him through glassy eyes and wet lashes, it didn’t help how the bright lights above drew sparkles in your irises. He almost missed the wordless nod you responded with, too focused on the growing haze painted on your face. As Regrator continued his stimulation, shallow pants filled the space above your face and by this point, your face was as warm as it could get. Occasionally, your body shuddered beneath his expert touch, slowly and steadily driving you over the edge as each second passed.

Before another embarrassing moan could spill from your lips, The Doctor’s voice flooded the room via intercom, “First phase has concluded. Moving on to the second phase: clitoral stimulation. Duration: 30 seconds. As previously mentioned, stimulation has to be continuous for the entire duration.”

Even though embarrassment had slightly subsided, you hesitantly reached for the button of your pants, undoing them with trembling hands. Once more, the Ninth Harbinger offered assistance to which you thankfully accepted—there was no reason getting shy now, he had already played with your nipples earlier. Driving the soles of your shoes onto the cushioned examination chair, you lifted your hips and pulled your pants down along with your underwear with the Harbinger’s help—just enough to expose your cunt.

His eyes zeroed in on your glistening entrance. All for him? Oh, he was being spoiled, indeed. The sight of your cunt fanned the blazing flames of Pantalone’s ego—all this just from mere nipple play? How adorable. You must’ve been really touch starved.

“Before we commence the second phase, Pantalone, I trust you can find the clitoris, right? Perhaps you need my assistance?”

“I am not ignorant, Dottore.”

“I am simply making sure. No reason to get snappy.”

You wanted to laugh. Two Harbingers bickering should not have amused you but the pettiness behind your commander’s voice and the slight annoyance laced with Lord Regrator’s words was all too amusing. If you were to tell a fellow colleague about them two bickering whether one could find the clitoris or not, they would not believe a single word that’d come out of your mouth. Who knew they could talk about trivial matters, too, how interesting.

Lord Regrator returned his rightful attention to you, his dull expression immediately shifted into the soft smile he always wore, “Ready, Miss?” Meek, you nodded. The Harbinger repositioned himself, right knee slotted between your parted legs to get a better view of your wet cunt.

He gathered the slick coating your cunt, spreading it on the pads of his fingers before pushing back your clitoral hood to reveal the swollen nub of flesh all in its needy glory. Embarrassingly enough, a simple ghostly touch on your clitoris had your entire body jerking against the leather of the chair, followed by a wanton moan of the Harbinger’s title. You quickly turned your head to the side and pressed the skin of your forearm against your lips—a futile attempt as the moment you obstructed your face, Lord Regrator’s digit began rubbing your clitoris in tight circles, as though a wordless protest against muffling the sounds you made.

His fingers were good—amazing, even, to the point where you wished thirty seconds went as quickly as a single second. In your head, clitoral stimulation of that duration was doable but you wholly underestimated yourself and the Lord Harbinger’s skills, on top of that, you were still trying to recover from earlier. You weren’t supposed to orgasm on this phase of the experiment otherwise it would ruin it entirely but it seemed like he had a goal: to drive you over the edge before the thirty seconds were up.

“L-Lord Regrator, I think—Mhm!”

“Hm? Were you saying something?”

The arm slung over your face immediately flew downwards to grasp his wrist, attempting to slow down his actions. Your free hand gripped on the side of the examination chair, nails digging crescents into the leather to ground and steer yourself from the impending orgasm. You arched your back and moaned aloud once more, earning a satisfied smile from the Lord Harbinger.

Dottore’s gaze ripped away from the monitors and landed at the centre of the room where you and Pantalone where, he carefully watched as your body pathetically writhed under the latter’s eager touch. He could barely see your lust-bitten face but judging from the moans you let out, his friend was doing exceptionally well at pleasing you—even the activity displayed on the monitors could back that fact; more regions of the brain were now highlighted indicating an increase in activity,

It was indeed fascinating to observe how one’s brain lit up from mere stimulation.

The tune of shallow, soft pants filled Regrator’s ears, it was amusing to watch you scramble and gather the threads of sanity in your palms, refusing to let pleasure take control of your body. Did he feel bad? A little but he was no saint. He switched from tight circles to figure eights, pressing onto your sensitive nub with a little more pressure. Your legs shook with bliss, fingers wrapped around his wrist tightening as you teetered to the brink of an orgasm.

“Ngh—ah! Lord Re—Haah!” 

“I suggest you use your words otherwise I cannot understand you.” Mockery laced his dulcet voice but with the hum of machinery mixed with your shameless moans, you didn’t pick up on it.

When did Pantalone last have fun like this? Sure, he was powerful enough to control the nation’s economic state with a mere snap of his fingers but being able to control the pleasure you felt? Beyond satisfying. Not only was he rewarded with your lust-fogged expressions but also how your body squirmed beneath his touch—desperate and pathetic.

Your core tightened, it stretched and stretched further waiting for the recoil called climax but before you could reach it, your commander’s cold voice filled the room once more, “Second phase has concluded. We’ll be moving on to the final phase after a short interval.”

With that, Regrator pulled away his hand which elicited an embarrassing whine of protest from you. In a daze, you stared up at the ceiling and silently thanked Lord Dottore for the short interval because you knew well enough you’d be a complete mess once the third phase began. Though, the Second Harbinger’s reasoning was most certainly experiment-related rather than pure concern for the subject.

The tight knot deep in your core disappointingly dissipated as each second passed without stimulation—it was beyond frustrating to say the least, especially after weeks without sex. Despite the cool air inside, a sheen of sweat lightly coated your entire body and you felt stuffy; suddenly, the fabric pulled halfway down your legs felt too restricting, the blouse pooled around your neck didn’t help either. At this point, you just wanted one thing, and judging by the crimson blush on Lord Regrator’s cheeks, he wanted it too—release.

Dottore simply wasn’t being nice with the interval, the main reason for it was to let your cerebral activity return to baseline, otherwise readings from the second phase would carry on to the third phase and mess with the experiment. But he did have a more selfish reason that didn’t need disclosing—the growing tent between his legs.

He only needed a few moments to recollect himself. His bodily response to the scene before him was normal—he was still a man, after all— but in a professional setting, it was undesirable. Dottore knew what he was getting into when he first wrote the proposal for this serendipitous experiment but he didn’t expect to be aroused by it. He leaned back in his seat, a subtle glance at the prominent bulge before letting out a soft sigh.

How truly inconvenient.

After a couple moments of recollecting himself—or simply trying to—Dottore spoke into the intercom to commence the final phase, “The third will be slightly different, there will be no set duration as the end goal of this phase is an orgasm but restrictions will be in order. That means strictly no touching aside from vaginal penetration, this would count as kissing, groping or holding one another. Doing so would interfere with results.”

Since Dottore observed the sensory cortex, other forms of stimulation besides penetration would also be recorded, lowering authenticity of the results.

“Contraception is located above the machinery.” He added.

Pantalone reached for the smooth surface of the machinery next to the examination chair where he grabbed a sealed packet. Lithe fingers curled around the waistband of his pants, you watched as he unbuttoned and pulled it down just enough to reveal his hardened, leaking cock. It slapped against his clothed abdomen, donning a crimson blush that mirrored the hues on his pale cheeks. The pearlescent glob of pre-cum coating his slit had you salivating a little, tongue subtly swiping over your bottom lip.

Wide eyed and lips slightly parted, you could only wordlessly stare at the foreign sight before you, he was decently thick and merely looking at it had you clenching around nothing—eager to have all of the Lord Harbinger inside you.

Pantalone let out a low hiss, expertly rolling the latex down his shaft, “Ready?” Amethyst eyes clouded with lust found your gaze. Lord Regrator’s expression was different from what he usually wore, the cunning, unreadable smile was gone, leaving room for a flustered one.

With a wordless nod from you, the Harbinger fully situated himself between your legs, both hands each circling around the back of your knees to push them to your bare chest, “Hold your legs open for me, will you, dear?” You did as you were told, hooking an arm on each knee, keeping your legs in place and eagerly waiting for his next move.

Knees digging on leather, Pantalone placed a hand on the wide headrest of the chair while the other curled around his base, slowly guiding his cock inside your sopping entrance. A mix of your moans lingered in the air as he bottomed out, the entirety of his shaft sat inside you—heavy and hard. The stretch was delicious, it almost felt purely sinful, you’ve never taken a cock that stretched you this good before and it was dangerous because you might just get addicted to it.

Pantalone leaned over you, free hand now joining the other on holding the headrest. The silvery chain of his glasses dangled mere centimetres from your face, teasing and ghosting over your feverish skin. He sat still for a moment to relish inside your tight, velvety walls, he felt like a boyish virgin all over again with how stimulated he was, and he hasn’t even started thrusting yet.

But Pantalone had a job to do: to bring you to an orgasm because that’s what he agreed to upon signing the contract of this study—to put your pleasure before his own.

A beat or two passed ‘til he slowly drew his hips back—with only the bulbous tip remaining inside—and languidly thrusted, your nails dug into your soft skin, leaving small crescent-shaped indents. You could really only hold on to your legs and take the steady yet forceful pace Lord Regrator had set which caused your body to jolt repeatedly with every smack of his hips against your own.

It was pure torture for Pantalone, you looked absolutely divine yet he wasn’t allowed to hold you—to grope and squeeze at your bouncing breasts, to rub at your clit, to suck on every part of your exposed skin and finally taste you for himself. Alas, he could only rake his gaze up and down your semi-naked form and fantasize how you’d react beneath his palms.

The examination chair groaned underneath the weight of Pantalone’s thrusts, high pitched squeaks interlaced with the string of moans and whimpers filling the entire space. Pantalone carefully shifted his weight to his upper body, anchoring his hands on the headrest to piston his hips into your own.

“O-Oh, god! Lord Regrator!”

“God? H-Haah! Ngh—‘M no god, my dear.”

Bitterness laced his trembling words, it's almost as though he took offense and now he expressed his disdain by merely picking up the pace, rendering you a babbling mess to shut you up. Skin slapping and the smell of sex dangerously danced in the air, one Dottore couldn’t simply ignore—especially the former.

The Second Harbinger messily jotted down notes, fingers tightening around the pen every now and then whenever you let out a loud moan. He didn’t stop his gaze from wandering to where you and Pantalone were, crimson gaze locked onto your jolting form while his friend eagerly pounded you like a starved man. How your legs vigorously bounced in the air was enough to let him know how roughly Pantalone went on you.

The problem between his legs worsened and Dottore may or may not have rubbed his hard on a few times beneath the desk. Just to get a small taste of friction his hardened cock desperately wanted. Childish? Perhaps but fuck he would be lying if he said he hadn’t thought of trading places with Pantalone—even for a mere second or two. He was more than curious what you’d feel like around him.

“Lord Regrator! I’m—aah! I’m close—ngh!” Legs burning from holding the position, you let go and opted to wrap them around the Harbinger’s waist, locking him in a rather intimate distance. Pantalone let out a breathless chuckle and changed his pace into deep, short thrusts, he grinded into you every few strokes or so, allowing you to see the stars.

A few more sharp thrusts and the knot inside your stomach snapped violently as pure bliss engulfed the entirety of your body. Pantalone, unable to move due to your legs tightening around him, sheathed his cock deep inside and grinded on you, his fat tip rubbing against your sweet, sweet spot. He watched your limp body convulsed beneath him as shocks of pleasure came crashing into you.

He followed suit, spilling his warm seed into the latex while relishing in the tightness of your walls, a loud grunt forced from his rosy lips.

The two of you stayed still for a moment, individuals merely reduced to a heaving mess as the fog of orgasm slowly dissipated from your bodies. As if on cue, Dottore spoke through the intercom,

“The final phase of the study has concluded. Your cooperation is appreciated.”

A breathless laugh from the Harbinger above you, “I sure hope you managed to collect ample findings, Dottore.”

The latter could only scoff, of course he was able to do so. As opposed to his hypothesis—where he had only hypothesized two regions would be active—a handful of regions were active during an orgasm. It gave him a better understanding of how to map the human brain.

At the latter’s silence, Pantalone spoke once more, “Though, I am rather curious,” He let out a small hiss while pulling out. “Why did you need a second participant? Surely you’re more than capable of executing this task yourself, no? Unless . .”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you simply can’t do it.” To please a woman, he wanted to add.

There was only one way to interpret the Ninth’s words and despite it being ‘friendly’ banter, annoyance bubbled in Dottore’s chest, “Obviously, I would need to record findings hence my lack of participation in the study. But if you ask me, I would have done a better job.”

“Really?”

Silence followed.

Solely due to their brief exchange—or was argument a better word?—you found yourself sandwiched between Lord Dottore and Lord Regrator; every article of your clothing long discarded on the cold tiles, and machinery turned off, long forgotten. With the former laying on the examination chair, you straddled him, trembling legs on either side of his waist while the other Harbinger pressed his clothed chest against your back.

“Lord Dottore . .” You bit your lip. 

In a haste, he had unzipped his pants and pulled out his leaking cock, rubbing the bare tip up and down your sensitive slit. Behind you, Pantalone’s hands mindlessly wandered all over your naked form—from the plush of your breasts to the fat of your ass, he left no skin untouched. But it wasn’t his hands alone, his lips trailed open-mouthed kisses down the side of your neck, leaving a few small bites in between.

Pantalone gently ushered you forward, one hand splayed across your back to bring you closer to Dottore ‘til your breasts squished against the latter’s chest. Both Harbingers lined their cocks to your entrances and slowly pushed inside. Slumped against the Second, you trembled violently as they stretched your holes out—one wrong move and you were sure to come undone.

With both cocks fully sheathed inside, all you could do at that point was pant like a mere mutt in heat, you haven’t had proper time to come down from your previous orgasm so any form of stimulation quite literally melted your brain and brought tears to your eyes.

Dottore cupped your jaw with a large, gloved hand and angled your face, he examined your fucked out expression momentarily before closing the distance. Messy and desperate, the Lord Harbinger’s kiss simply knocked oxygen from your lungs, he eagerly plunged his tongue past your lips and explored the inside of your mouth. 

The kiss and the sting of his pointed mask digging into your cheek was enough to briefly distract you from their experimental thrusts. Shameless, you wailed into your commander’s mouth, knuckles turning into a lovely shade of ivory as you gripped the collar of his coat.

The examination chair groaned beneath the weight of the Harbingers’ merciless thrusts and one could only hope it was sturdy enough to last an entire round. Creaks of the chair mixed with the sinful harmony of your moans filled all four corners of the room, thankfully this space was a bit more secluded in comparison to your commander’s laboratory which meant anyone else walking down the corridors wouldn’t be able to hear the lewd sounds as much.

Despite the eagerness behind their thrusts, it was certainly surprising to have their movements coordinate with one another—an unspoken rhythm with the sole purpose of bringing you and themselves to release.

Dottore pulled away to catch his breath, leaving a thin translucent string of saliva connecting his kiss-bitten lips to your own, hot breaths mingling together through rough pants. The corner of the Harbinger’s lips curled upwards upon seeing your drunken expression—who knew you looked utterly divine stuffed with two cocks? It made him twitch.

Pantalone’s gaze fixated on your lower half—how your ass bounced and jolted with every powerful thrust he gave. The mere sight of his wet cock appearing and disappearing between the globes of your ass had him heaving a little harder. Maybe it was also due to the tightness of your rear, or the fact that having another cock inside you intensified the pleasurable friction he felt.

A few more harsh thrusts, the coil inside you finally snapped once more, bringing you to a rather earth shattering orgasm. Your body violently trembled in pure bliss as you tried to moan their names to no avail. With the sensation being too much, you fisted Dottore’s clothed chest as if doing so would somewhat ease the pleasurable pain your entire body felt.

The Second soon followed suit, a couple of desperate thrusts into your sopping cunt—ones that had you wailing in overstimulation—before sheathing himself deep inside and releasing thick, warm ribbons of cum. A string of colourful curses in his mother tongue slipped past his kiss-bitten lips as he came inside. Dottore filled you all the way to the brim ‘til his seed slowly seeped out of your greedy hole and onto the leather cushion beneath.

Ah, he’d have to get it cleaned now. 

This left Pantalone who greedily hauled your limp body against his chest; one hand expertly rubbed your swollen clit while the other held your jaw to angle your face upwards so he could plunge his tongue inside your mouth. You choked on the messy kiss as the new angle invited him deeper inside. Dottore’s cock slipped out from the change in position but he didn’t mind, instead, he sat up and took it upon himself to plunge two long digits in your cunt.

His fingers were already long enough to reach far but the added thickness of his gloves had you arching your back. If it wasn’t for Lord Regrator’s firm hold, you would’ve already been slumped against the chair long ago. The former’s fingers moved in a ‘come hither’ motion which allowed him to brush against your sweet spot. Surely you could handle another one, right?

“Oh—hng! Close! Ah—haah!” Hands flew down to circle around Dottore’s wrist, you attempted to pathetically remove his fingers from your cunt which shortly proved futile as he remained unmoved.

You came once more, another blinding orgasm ripping through your orgasm but this time, you could barely even muster a whimper—only a soundless cry and fresh tears streaming down your face. Pantalone grunted and bit your shoulder as orgasm hit him, hot cum painting the walls of your rear; he grinded his hips against your ass to ride out his orgasm before releasing your skin from his bite.

Nothing but the sound of harsh breathing filled the walls and for a long moment, the three of you remained still to catch your breaths with reality slowly seeping in to replace what was once lust. You wanted to sleep right then and there, exhaustion weighed heavy on your body from how hard they both worked you—too tired to even think of the consequences.

None of this was supposed to happen—at least not the unexpected threesome but now that both Harbingers have had a taste of you, they might just come back for seconds.

[ravenna-reid]

IMBUED (pt.2)

Aerion Targaryen x fem!reader

Aerion is meant to be marrying your sister - not letting his attention drift to you...

⊹₊⟡⋆

You were trying on precious jewellery you had brought from home for the wedding.

Around your throat rested a jewelled collar so elaborate it seemed spun from frost. Strands of glittering diamonds cascaded from the top of your throat down across your collarbone and lower like frozen vines, filigreed yellow and white gold framing deep purple and navy blue stones.

Staring at your reflection in the mirror, it looked wrong. It felt wrong, the precious metal and stones pressing into your skin. The same necklace your mother often wore when she was alive.

You spread your hand across it as though you mean to tear it from your throat, feeling the cold beneath your fingers.

But you could never break such a thing.

Gently, you unclasped it and slipped it from your neck, securing it back into its case and tucking it beneath the vanity table, substituting the grand piece for a simple slim steel choker and drop amethyst and fang earrings.

There were only five more days until the alliance was sealed and your sister was a Targaryen. The physical distance that would come in between you two was a given you had tried to bury, but you hadn't truly taken it into consideration how you would both be separated on a personal level now.

She would no longer be a Sterling, and you will be the only daughter back home.

A harsh whiny from a horse outside dragged you from your thoughts.

You moved from the vanity table and stood behind the thick, draped curtains, peering out the window at the ordeal that was happening down below.

There Prince Aerion was on his stallion. It seemed he had just come back from who knew where, dressed as though he was anticipating war.

His armour was steely and dark, and when he removed his dragon-esque helm from his head, his frost white hair was slick with sweat and his expression was taught with adrenaline.

A knock on the door.

Derella partially opened it to see you looking back at her, then she swept into the room in a beautiful ivory and and violet gown.

"Good, you're awake." She began.

Your gaze cut to the Targaryen kingsguard now stationed at the door.

Derella didn't seem to mind. You gestured to her purple fabrics running along the floors. "They mimic his strange eyes."

Your sister smiled back at you, "Now, you can't go talking about eyes, can you?"

Your smile tightened. "I suppose not," your glance fell down, then your brows furrowed as you met her gaze. "Have you exchanged gifts yet?"

"Well, father has presented the dowery and other finery to the crown, and Aerion's father reciprocated with his own diplomatic gifts," Derella lounged across your bed, "Whilst Aerion was off somewhere, I was presented to the nobles and ladies of the court. The council members too. One lady gave me a gift," She beamed as she turned her head to show you the ruby hairnet bestowed upon her.

You arched a brow, "I wonder what she meant by it."

Derella hushed you softly, not wanting to know the realities and politics of gift giving within the court.

"You know Aerion and I aren't meant to be acting 'intimately' with one another yet?"

You gave her a long look. "As in?"

"We can only be in each other's presence when guards are present," she gestured to the one at the door.

"Is he so crazy?" You asked.

She rolled her eyes. "Our private conversations are to be held in the gardens for the next few days," she continued on.

"And is that where you will be giving him your... gift." Your stare became a steady one at that.

When you had initially brought this up with her, Derella hadn't taken it so lightly.

"But I already have a gift for him."

"Then give him this one too."

She'd given you that funny look. "Derella," you had shaken your head, "I know you're skeptical about these things, but-"

"It's not that I don't hold the same beliefs, y/n, I am just not from the exact same lineage as-"

"Never the matter," you had waved her off. "Don't you think the man you will have to depend on for the rest of your life should be protected too?"

Come on. You'd heard what they said about those born into the House of the Dragons.

She seemed to understand now, or at least understand where you were coming from. Besides, just because she was to no longer be a Sterling didn't mean she was no longer your little sister. And you had an oath as the eldest to protect her.

Derella followed after you as you quietly moved back to the vanity table, eyeing the guard as you did so.

You pulled a small velvet pouch from your belongings, giving it a little shake before her eyes. She took it and pulled out the gift you had meticulously made for Aerion.

Inside was an elaborately made brooch, carefully decorated with the finest materials and carved with intricate etchings.

Derella looked to you as she turned it, watching the facets gleam against the early sun. The determined, though uncertain, expression on her face was the very same one she had worn when she told her father she would agree to the marriage.

˖⟡ ݁˖· ─

You were on the balcony again, arms lounging across its cool, coarse stone as you watched on.

You had spotted them in the distance a little while ago; Derella walking politely behind him with her hands folded neatly before her. Aerion leisurely walked down the slim path, leading and talking with one of his hands resting upon the hilt of the sword on his hip.

Aerion plucked a small lilac flower and turned to hold it up against the fabrics of her dress, the colours matching beautifully. Then he tossed it back into the garden.

You scoffed at his ways.

Your father appeared beside you, watching the two in the garden as well.

"I hope you are not planning anything my little blade."

"Of course not," you assured, your eyes never straying from Derella and Aerion. "I am merely observing."

"It's not proper," your father raised a brow, though an amused smile was present when you turned to face him. "Spying in such a way."

You both knew he didn't truly care. "Let me be nosey a little while longer, father."

He chuckled, placing a hand on your shoulder before turning to leave you be. Your eyes shifted back to the couple and their two guards in the gardens.

Derella finally stilled, her head lowering and lips shifting into a blossoming smile. Aerion stopped too and circled back, looking carefully at the velvet pouch she pulled from inside her flowing sleeves and held out to him. You wished you could hear what they were saying.

He accepted the pouch, pulling out the glittering brooch in one swift movement. Derella was still talking - explaining something to him as he inspected it.

Aerion looked up at her, an interestingly soft smile dusting his face.

And then his gaze easily found you. Less harsh but still sharp as it honed in on your figure high up on the balcony.

Despite the distance, it was heavy, and you gave him one last stare before turning to leave.

˖⟡ ݁˖· ─

Dinner was a little more ornate that night.

Black banners hung from the stone walls like great flags of pride and honour. The room was larger, the table longer. The food more decorative; from roasted venison and roasted goose and root vegetables, to herb-seasoned potatoes and thick sauces.

Your mouth watered at the sight of it all.

Many nobleman, ladies, and people of the court occupied the space, hands and bellies full with rich wines.

Derella seemed to be the star of the show - and this time, she didn't seem to mind. Though they would watch her fiercely, like a dragon watching its prey, she performed effortlessly - mannerisms elegant and smile charming.

You scanned the crowd. The bustling and rushing deadpanned servants with their trays. The Targaryens and your father conversing at the centre of the High Table. Your father must have already been a little inebriated; his cheeks ruddier than usual as he laughed. Harpists and lute players let their tune lace the heavily scented air.

Aerion was no where to be found. You found that to be quite interesting, for he did seem to love any kind of attention he lulled his way - whether it was good or bad.

So deep in thought, you hadn't even realised Derella was beside you until she grabbed your arm.

"Dear sister," she smiled a tight smile.

"Derella. You looked as though you were enjoying yourself over there."

"I was. You do know how I enjoy such events, especially now that they all seem to be warming up to me quite nicely." Her smile didn't reach her eyes, and she watched you as though you were meant to read her thoughts like literature.

A frown touched your brows. "So what is the matter? Did someone say something?"

"No, it's none of that." She quickly shook her head, "It isn't the courtly matters and finery." Her voice lowered, and it felt as though the entertainers were suddenly determined to make it harder for you to hear.

You leant in, "Ok Derella, so what's the matter?" Your lips thinned, then you asked. "Is it Aerion?"

Your sister's lack of response made your stomach churn. Her hold on your arm tightened. "Do not pick a fight, y/n." She warned, "He has not harmed me. I swear. It's just..."

And just like that, a perfectly fabricated alliance was dwindling before your eyes.

But what was an alliance compared to your sister's wellbeing?

You gently moved her to the side of the room - not so suspiciously that it would draw attention - pretending to examine fine tapestry that hung from the walls. You suddenly pictured your father's reaction to her wanting to no longer go through with the marriage.

"Derella, there are no easy arranged marriages. All brides feel just as you do leading up to their wedding."

"I know, I know," she began. "But Aerion has a fire in him that's alarming to me. Not that I think he would hurt me-"

"You're quite lucky," you reminded her. "Unfortunately, many are harmed by their own husbands."

Derella nodded in agreement. "Yes, but just because he has spared me doesn't mean he is kind." Her voice dropped down to a whisper, "Do you know what he does to those who disrespect him? Not even! All one has to do is look at him funny and he retaliates."

Your eyes narrowed in thought, then blinked. "Is it so bad to put people back in their place sometimes?"

Derella stared back at you, and then she was summoned by one of the older lady's of the court - the jewels on her neck ruby and her dress the same colour.

You didn't want to leave the conversation like this, but your sister merely looked back to you before letting herself be whisked away.

You caught your father's eye from across the room.

˖⟡ ݁˖· ─

You grabbed a small bit of fresh bread with finely sliced meat on top and left the Great Hall, searching for the courtyard for some for air.

A gentle, humid breeze raked through your hair, your heels crunching against the rocks in the courtyard. It was beautiful, of course, much like everything else in Red Keep.

The stars twinkled high tonight, and you wondered if there was someone somewhere far away reading and mapping them out.

The clinking of chains pricked your attention. There ahead of you lied a hunting hound on the ground, his round eyes blinking as he rested his head against his paws.

That was when you noticed the dishevelled man slouching against the wall the hunting hound was chained to. The man saw you too.

Wobbly forward and squinting his eyes to make you out, recognition finally melted across his rugged features. Recognition then also hit you.

It seemed you couldn't get away from the one that had made such a heinous toast on your first night here.

"You." He pointed his finger to you, head bowed and eyes glaring through his heavy-set brows. "You know what the Prince did to me for speaking about your sister?" He mocked, anger in his voice.

"You mean the next Targaryen Queen?" You arched a brow, "I believe he should have done more."

You were disappointed to see the man was still able to walk. Though you had to admit, he did look awful; dried blood in his brow, his right eye black and swollen and jaw bruised.

He staggered forward with vigorous momentum, and it made adrenaline race through your veins. Your body stiffened, readying itself. Then your eyes cut to the hound as its ears shot up from the man's movement. It appeared he was moving dangerously close to it.

"You've got a smart fucking mouth for a lady. Maybe you are just a bitch after all."

Something strange gleamed across your eyes. "Maybe." Your whisper was soft, and though your response and eyes took him aback, it would not deter a man drunk on wine, insecurity and rage.

You shifted to the side, hoping he would follow and consequently move closer to the dog he hadn't yet noticed. "So, what? Are you going to continue bitching about it?" You taunted evenly.

And you watched him seethe. "Fuck you."

You waited for him to come forward, and just as he stepped onto the dog chain, you added fuel to fire and threw the meat from your bread onto his shirt.

The hunting hound drove forward like a rabid animal, its calm demeanour quickly dissipating as its jaw locked around the man's leg. A wicked smile tugged at your lips as you watched him thrash and yell.

How awful you could be.

Oh well.

But that was when you saw another two men further back look over. They pushed themselves off a wall, stepping out of the shadows as they began to near you.

One of them called out. "Hey, why don't you come play with us?"

You knew when to fight, and you knew when to leave.

Turning on your heel, you decided to go the back way so that you could walk through the corridors instead of directly back into the Great Hall. Their calls didn't cease, and your head began to thud a little as you quickened your steps.

Could you somehow lure them into another trap?

You hadn't meant to gasp when you rounded the corner and slammed into yet another man. Only he was dressed in fine, bold clothes.

Only he had hair reminiscent of moonlight.

Initially, Aerion snarled, eyes darting down as his posture remained unmoved and unchanged. His arm shot out to grab at yours before he realised that it was you.

Instinctive made you throw up your own hands too, pressing them against his chest before you could will yourself not to.

You both watched each other until you pulled yourself back, shock written across your face as you stared up at him. "I didn't mean to," you rasped, eyes draping over him. "I didn't even hear you coming."

His eyes skated over your figure too. "You're fleeing. From what?" He asked the question almost as though he was annoyed.

"Nothing, I just took a wrong turn." You went to move past him, but Aerion shook his head and moved to block your path. "Bold of you to lie to a Prince, Sterling."

Your expression deadpanned, mock evident in your eyes, but before you could respond you looked over your shoulder.

He caught the shifting silhouettes behind you, and their faint, alcohol-laced taunts. You would be lying if you said your heart didn't race a little at the sound. After all, those men knew your face now.

Aerion quite easily picked up on the shift - the unease that rolled subtly off of you in waves. But he didn't ask, and you didn't explain, because you were already bowing your head at him.

"I need to go." Hastily, you slipped away with all the composure you could muster down the hall towards the doors.

You heard his heavy footsteps recede and slowed down your pace. A steady breath escaped you, and then heard the sound of impact. Yelling and loud grunts too.

You gingerly came to a stop and considered going back. Curiosity cooed in your ear as you stopped and listened to what sounded like a fight. How you itched to turn around, but you decided not to give in. Grabbing your skirts as your chatelaine shifted, you pulled them up as you began to ascend the stone steps.

Something heady laced Aerion's voice. "Don't go any further. I've been looking for you."

You rolled your eyes whilst your back was still towards him.

Why was everyone seeking you out today?

You turned to see the Dark Prince striding towards you, and he looked every bit Aerion the Monstrous with his bloody knuckles under the shadows and shifting candle light.

"You know those men?" He asked when he came to a stop before you.

"No," you exclaimed, coming off of the step. "Of course not."

His eyes gleamed as he looked back at you, and suddenly - for the first time since you ventured to these lands, you felt the full weight of his stare.

Your breathing had finally evened out, and you stood there staring back at him with a sort of confusion and intrigue melting together within you. "What did you do to them?"

Aerion tilted his head to the side. "Would you feel pity for them if I told you they were now broken little toys?"

Eyes steady, you shook your head. He was intrigued with your honesty - not many would admit such a thing.

"No." You said, and now you tilted your head at him. "Why have you been looking for me, Aerion?"

He shifted his weight onto one leg and slipped his hand into the inside of his vest, eyes pinned onto yours.

Aerion pulled something sparkling out and held it up where the candles shone brightly.

You exhaled through your nose. "My sister's gift for you?" Your heart had only a moments rest before it started beating again at the sight of it in his hold.

"I know strangeness when I see it. This reeks of it."

"It's a jewelled brooch," you replied, the ordeal of such a night chipping away at your patience. He arched a brow as if he could sense it to.

You tucked your hands behind your back. "It's merely gold, ruby and shadow glass."

"Shadow glass." He repeated. Aerion held it up closer to his eyes in inspection, then let his violet eyes snap back to you. "It has sigils all over it."

You moved in closer, "It's said to ground the mind." You explained, frustration tainting your quietened tone.

His eyes briefly grazed your lips - just a flicker - before he gave a venomous scoff. You lifted your chin as he shifted closer, black amber and a metallic scent wafting in the space between.

"Every time a Targaryen is born, the gods flip a coin. Don't think of me so lowly, I've heard it too," you felt his hiss against your skin. "Grounded mind," he mocked, "I know what this gift implies."

His whisper was too smooth for such a conversation. For such a man.

Faded cheers from the Great Hall sounded in the background, followed by the faint clinks of chalices and laughter.

You shook your head at him. "I am no sorceress, Targaryen. And this isn't some scheme. I can assure you, House Sterling wants this alliance as much as House Targaryen, and I will not be the one to jeopardise that."

He purposefully stretched out the silence like honey, waiting to see if you would break under his stare. You didn't, and he knew you wouldn't, but he still enjoyed trying.

Still, you worried he was going to carry this doubts and let them build up so much so that he would call the wedding off.

"Weirwood carved beads." You said finally, "That's what Derella wears beneath her sleeves." Aerion's eyes narrowed. "It's said to quieten attention from magic." That blunt edge in your voice softened.

It made him wonder. It made him want to simultaneously lean into your presence and viciously search for a betrayal that wasn't there.

"Does she now?" He asked. His tongue ran across his teeth as he weighed up the argument you presented.

"Alright, as proof," you held out your hand to him. "I shall wear it. Give it to me."

He shook his head and ignored your offer. "I hadn't realised I was marrying someone so mystical." Something in your chest was pulled taught like string.

"She isn't," you quickly cut in. "But does this... deter you, Prince Aerion?"

A fleeting smirk touched his face. Prince. Since when did you refer to him as such?

Aerion held the brooch up before your faces again. "So, it is a gift from you then?"

Had he somehow shifted closer? You pulled your eyes away from his and gave another scoff. Aerion smirked.

"Goodnight, Targaryen."

And with that, he watched as you disappeared beneath the shifting shadows, heart heavy with something unfamiliar.

It wasn't heavy with that comfortable anger or roguish schemes. Nor with his self-proclaimed significance or thirst for violence.

It was heavy with something he would not name, but instead dream about and think about more than he should.

⊹₊⟡⋆

@heyyyyy22555673 @antobooh @cottage-princessy @tremendouschangelingneophyte @el-anythingrlly @yourvoicesareperfect @vlliinv

[blueaxolote]

But I'm gonna be honest. We need a story where neglected reader is adopted by Talia and Ra’s al Ghul. Like, how funny would it be if, after Damian comes to the mansion, Talia shows up for a mother and son date, but her little gremlin totally stands her up.

She isn’t mad, just disappointed that her son is buying into Bruce’s dramatics. She respects that he can’t kill criminals, but he completely loses his mind because her family does. She should have known he was like all Americans... preaching respect until it doesn’t fit his standards.

She’s about to leave when she sees Bruce’s daughter—the civilian one, the one her beloved left outside his inner circle.

Her reserve is for two people, and two people will go.

"Child, come. We are going to have dinner."

"What?"

"And then we are going to the opera to see Madame Butterfly."

"I’m sold."

Reader had asked for tickets, but Bruce forgot.

Talia was ready to be tolerant, but she ends up setting another date and calling her beloved’s daughter almost every week.

She loves Damian, but she finds herself enjoying being a mom’s girl very much. Damian’s sister has a sensitivity her son lacks.

Some of Talia’s old clothes end up in her dresser. When summer comes, Talia invites her to Nepal; her beloved thinks she’s going to a summer camp, but Talia starts training their daughter. She can bear that she’s a civilian, but not that she’s defenseless.

Still, they take time to do a mini tour all around Asia, tasting local cuisine and shopping for clothes that actually fit her daughter.

Ra’s is curious but not really interested at first.

"So you are the detective’s runt."

"Unwanted, you mean."

"And that doesn’t bother you?" he asks, intrigued.

"I’ve decided my best vengeance is being unbothered by it."

He smiles briefly.

"What would the detective say if he knew you lingered with my daughter?"

"Sir, if you want a video reaction when he finds out, just pay me."

He sends her $10,000 when she ends up sending him high-resolution footage.

To everyone’s confusion—except Talia—Ra’s al Ghul acts like a normal grandpa when he’s around reader.

When Damian finds out, he accuses her of trying to steal his position as heir (he knows he’s already lost it, but he’s jealous). She looks at him like he’s dumb.

"Why would I be the heir when I’m the favorite grandchild?" she asks. "The heir thing is just some game gramps plays for fun. Why would he need one when he’s basically immortal with no plans of dying?"

That pretty much silences Damian for a long time.

No one understands their relationship. She’s welcome to join the League of Assassins, but it’s okay if she doesn’t, they still want her around.

And you know how messed up it is that Ra’s knows more about Bruce’s daughter than the detective himself? Ra’s al Ghul enjoys very much throwing it in his face.

[silverflqmes]

you should totally do one where dottore is using the trilune powers and the part where the rest burst in after columbina, he ends up recognizing reader as his old lover who went missing back in his akademiya days. not sure how i would want it to end but happy ending… knowing writers, you’ll be creative enough to know 🫵🏽

໒⦂ 𝐖𝐈𝐋𝐋𝐎𝐖.

notes. hello, tysm for the request! i apologize for the delays aaaa i was saving longer form content to do after i finished the semester since i was quite swamped.. that said, hope this was worth the wait! i also very much recommend willow by taylor swift — the lyrics very much fit this drabble aksjskdj

genre. hurt / comfort

tw. mentioned bullying

trilune god!dottore x gn fae!reader.

ocean tipped needles the size of blades halted in midair just before they could quite puncture or break skin, hovering dangerously close. if you breathed incorrectly, you were sure that crimson was sure to bloom beneath your clothing.

but the doctor was scrupulous. precise, even amidst the battlefield — where it called for combat prowess and not the clinical kind.

his expression was unreadable behind that crow-like mask, the one you’d only heard rumors about, and you couldn’t help but wish to see what those rubies were conveying underneath. was he angered? disappointed? satisfied? surprised that you were alive after all these years spent apart after his expulsion?

it was difficult for you to pinpoint. back at the akademiya, his face was on display for your eyes to observe at all times — watching the way his features pulled together so easily depending on the circumstances. he was.. incredibly expressive, from what you’d burned into your memory since his departure.

maybe that was why he hid it now, for no one to ever know what he was thinking — what he was expressing beneath the guise.

“..what is the meaning of this?” dottore cut through the silence — slowly, carefully, yet each word had come out more frigid than the last. an obvious distance between you both, and yet a yearning melancholy.

the traveler helped columbina back to her feet after a particularly harsh blow, the rest of their comrades following suit to their side just a few steps behind you. if the doctor had to guess, this farce looked more or less like a pathetic attempt at shielding themselves using his former partner as a wall of some kind.

it filled him with ire, and yet as he set his divine gaze upon your face — all that seemed to dull and dissipate into something quiet and almost in disbelief. you were still alive after all these years — even after he’d gone back to sumeru and found through his intelligence that you were no longer there.. you’d managed to live as long as he had.

doing what, he wasn’t sure — and part of him had desperately wanted to know how, given the lengths he had gone to exceed the expiration of most humans.. but that seemed to die on his tongue as he approached you with meticulous steps.

you always held firm when it came to him, never once intimidated by his presence. his village scorned him for his existence, either choosing to run away or at him with pitchforks and torches for his way of thinking, meanwhile his fellow alumni kept a safe distance, whispering among themselves when they thought he could not hear.

but you? archons, either you were a fool, naive, too kind for your own good, or all the above.

he admired your persistence, attempting to drill your way into his heart with the second lunch you always brought him ( because his was somehow always sullied one way or another- typically by students who simply wanted to make his day unbearable ) or through the bandages you’d conveniently kept on you to tend to some cuts and bruises that came not from experiments but from some daring hands or blades. whatever the reason, if anything ever went bad ( not that he really cared, it was mostly just an inconvenience ), you were always there to pick up the pieces even when he didn’t ask.

eventually he’d realized that nothing could push you away. even his unethical practices and hereditary mind were not enough to deter you, which only made him wonder how much longer you’d be able to stand him before fleeing or casting him out, too.

and when the day of his expulsion came, it was him that was forced to take his leave. because he knew you’d fight it, he left without a say. the akademiya was already holding him back enough from reaching his full potential, and although you made being there more bearable.. he did not belong there.

you deserved better, as well.

but did you?

“zandik..” you spoke his name quietly, like an ancient spell that very little could chant, as though lost in the winds of time. he’d long since forgone that name, associating it with someone weaker — more pathetic than his current self. a scholar with academic constraints.

zandik would never have created a god or become one himself. he paled in comparison to the person he now was, and yet, when you uttered that name so gently.. in the way that you called it so warmly back at the akademiya, or whispered it so tenderly during lectures — he found himself berating it less.

despite the audience, it mattered little to him that they knew his given name. as of this moment, you were here — in the flesh. and although you were intervening with his experiment, carefully crafted to take from the world what had never been granted to him.. he found trouble being put off by this occurrence.

if anything, he was more intrigued by this variable. he’d never considered the possibility of you intervening with his plans, and for that he had to pay respects to whoever managed to find or create this potential projection of you. no one had known about your importance to him, or even your existence — he made sure to never bring you up to his colleagues, and willed his mind to forget.

you had your own life, something that should not be thrown away or contaminated by your previous association to his existence. and if that meant never seeing you again, pushing down those memories of his- the only fond ones he would have of his youth.. then he was willing to make that sacrifice.

even now, when he might have had you back.

“you shouldn’t be here, if you even are here.” dottore said in lieu of greeting, waving away the needles just slightly away from potentially damaging your body — fresh out of the sweet memories he’d long since buried. just in different clothing — with the green akademiya robes long gone, and features that were slightly more matured. “for all the time you’d spent around me, you should know better than to interrupt my experiments.”

“and you should know that i always remained even as you sighed and rolled your eyes. the vacant seat was never there without reason.” you returned, challenging his integrity in the way that you would centuries ago. he was glad to find that you still had that spark in you — the one that dared to question his intelligence even though it was clear that he was the top student.

you never shied away, and he admired that you tried — that you even bothered to test yourself against him.

a soft chuckle left his lips. “the vacant seat was a default, my dear. have you forgotten that desks were coupled?”

“how could i?” you returned with an airiness, braving the trek towards him. “it meant i always had a seat guaranteed beside you.”

as your footsteps slowed just a few inches away from his much larger stature — far different than the feeble man you came to know at the akademiya — you allowed your hands to find the long locks that had spilled over his shoulder, humming thoughtfully to yourself. “you grew your hair out.”

“that’s what you notice?” he scoffed, though there was little bite behind his words, and he made no effort to stop your curious hands.

it made you smile a little, looking up at him with a longer hum this time as your brows knitted together. deeply concentrated, or at least- that was what you aimed to convey. “i think you got taller as well — late growth spurt?”

that earned you a click of the tongue, and despite the mask, you knew he was rolling those rubies underneath that crow-like mask.

some things never changed.

“very funny, dear. your observations never cease to leave me questioning how your scholarly career had persisted for as long as it had.” he parroted back, yet his hand reached to cup your cheek — cradling it as though it were an ancient artifact dug up from an era once lost to time.

which, in a way, it was.

and instead of pushing it away or recoiling, you leaned into it, placing your two hands over the back of his as your eyes fluttered shut. “my degree would say otherwise, i could show it to you sometime.” you offered sweetly, unbothered by the mild insult — but you knew to read between the lines, having dealt with his speech patterns time and time again. “though, that might be difficult with the way things seem to be playing out here.”

as though struck by reality, dottore found that behind you — there was still the traveler and their ragtag team along with his treacherous colleagues.

colleagues that eyed him skeptically, yet equally as fiercely. likely planning to turn him over to her majesty for his experiment.

pursing his lips together after looking between the group and yourself, dottore snapped his fingers with his free hand, space warping. the moon marrows might have been stolen back, but he still had the ability to wield the artificial one- albeit less stable now.

the familiar lab of the false moon institute greeted the two of you as he let his shoulders fall, exhaustion creeping up on him. leave it to the descender to sully his plans, but no matter. experiments could go either way, he knew that well. and while results are the end goal, he quite valued the process — certainly whenever outliers presented themselves like this.

“i meant what i said before.” the harbinger finally spoke again, running his thumb over the curve of your cheek. “you should not be here. it’s.. not possible.” he followed up quietly, still not quite believing that you had been there- in the flesh.

but you were.

moving closer, you reached up to peel off the mask that hid one of your favorite features of his, smiling at the softened, glistened hue of scarlet that greeted you. “you’d be correct on that,” you answered breezily, placing down the accessory on a desk scattered with his notes. “except for long living species. fae tend to live longer — or age slower, i suppose.”

that made his eyes widen. a fae? you’d never once mentioned that — or had you said it and he tuned it out with how engrossed he usually got with his studies?

either way, it made his breath hitch just enough for you to notice. “i never really got to tell you, did i?” you continued with a small laugh, though it lacked the mirth he remembered. “i was hoping to, but the day that i finally felt okay enough to tell you- you were suddenly gone. expelled.” you finished a little lower, though your words never wavered in clarity and confidence. “i just never said it because i didn’t want you to think less or more of me — i liked what we had, you made me feel.. normal.”

now that made him huff out a laugh of his own, seafoam locks bouncing with the shake of his head. “i could say the same, given my own reputation and how you still spoke or hung around me as though i were anyone else.” if you were worried about being abnormal, then what would that make him? alien?

saying that only seemed to make your smile stretch, however. “maybe that’s why i felt drawn to you. we shared something in common, although differing, but it brought us together.. and that still seems to hold now,” you continued, reaching up to hold his own cheek. “right, zandik?”

pink collected on his pale cheeks as his eyes fell to your hand and then back to your face before flitting elsewhere. without the mask, he felt.. naked, for lack of better wording — vulnerable.

and yet he couldn’t find a better person to share that with. consider yourself lucky, or unlucky. “a rather bold hypothesis with little grounds and a clear bias.” he remarked, returning his gaze to you. “but perhaps.. a welcome one.”

without constraint, he pulled your body into his- smaller against him because of the power he had partially inherited, but that didn’t stop you from squeezing back. centuries had gone by building up to the moment you would one day find him again.

and you weren’t going to be picky about a height difference of all things.

“you don’t know how many nights i’ve spent dreaming of this day, zandik.”

pressing his lips to the crown of your head, he basked in your familiar fragrance, reminiscent of the nation he could never called home. “as i have missed you deeply, my dear.”

notes. this is how the archon quest ended? right? like uh, y’know he didn’t kick the bucket and just tp-ed back to the lab with us, right? right..?

tysm for reading! consider leaving a tip if you enjoyed<3

↳ return to main masterlist . request rules . send an ask

[jade-zzz]

MISERY AND COMPANY

SAGAU! YANDERE DOTTORE X READER

SYNOPSIS : Transported into a video game, then to be cast out as an imposter and left for dead, you survive what should have been final. As Zhongli’s devotion twists into obsession and Dottore claims you as his own, divinity proves to be nothing but another vulnerability.

WARNINGS : SAGAU Cult AU, Imposter God AU, Creator Reader, Gender Neutral, Implied/Depicted Violence, Major Character Injury, Yandere Behaviour, Emotional Manipulation, Non-Consensual Touch, Dehumanisation, Imprisonment / Confinement, Psychological Horror, Obsessive and Possessive Behaviour, Cult Mentality, Unhealthy Behaviour.

Zhongli had waited six thousand years for the Creator.

Somewhat to his own embarrassment, his first impression upon their arrival was how unlike anything he had imagined they were. The scriptures had described them in meticulous detail, yet words were finite, limited in their ability to capture a being such as this. No passage could have prepared him for the reality of them standing before him.

And then there was the truth of it— undeniable. They were cruel.

That, however, was not a problem. Zhongli had waited six thousand years. In that time, he learned how to shape himself, his views, his convictions, even the core of his being, into something that might better suit the Creator’s tastes. Devotion, after all, was an act of constant refinement. At times, he allowed himself to daydream. He imagined presenting them with his life’s work and waiting, measured and silent, for their judgment. Would they approve of Liyue as it stood? Of the way he had ruled, the choices he had made, the sacrifices demanded across millennia? Would they find fault in him? He decided it would not matter. If they were displeased, if there was anything they wished changed, he would see it done. Land could be torn asunder. The heavens themselves, which tethered the world to the sky, could be challenged and overthrown. Should the flaw prove to be himself, then he would correct that as well. Thus, when an imposter was discovered, and the Creator’s displeasure became unmistakably clear, Zhongli did not hesitate. As a faithful servant ought, he took it upon himself to remove the problem.

His first impression of you, however, brings his carefully laid plans to a halt. A week after the announcement of your existence, he finally finds you. The moment his eyes settle on you, he freezes, utterly still, as though the world itself has paused around him. His heart sinks, an unfamiliar weight settling low in his chest as he watches you seated by the riverbank, the quiet radiance of your existence rippling outward through the water. For a fleeting moment, the instinct to kneel nearly overtakes him. He suppresses it at once. That impulse is misplaced. Reverence belongs to the Creator alone. What unsettles him now is nothing more than the sight of your reflection trembling in the current, a trick of light and water that stirs something it has no right to.

That must be it.

Surely, it is only your mirrored image, one that reflects the creator, that confounds his loyalties—nothing more.

His second impression of you is this: you are frustratingly difficult to kill.

At first, he makes easy work of you. There is nothing dramatic about it, just red blood spilled, the abrupt drain of colour from your skin, a heartbeat that falters and fades far too quickly. If he wished, he could have ensured it was final. He could have ordered your body burned, or cast from one of Liyue’s many cliffs, erased so thoroughly that even rumour would struggle to remember you. But it was late. He was expected to return before sunrise, and the inconvenience of further effort outweighed its necessity. The matter seemed settled enough as it was. He would attend to your body in the morning, once the light had fully left your eyes and there could be no lingering doubt. It was not as though you could cause any further trouble in his absence.

One can imagine, then, his surprise when he returned the following morning, no less than twelve hours later, to find you gone. Not merely absent, but erased, without a single trace left behind. Were he anyone else, he might have called it a miracle. The blood had vanished as though it had been dissolved into the earth itself, or carried away by the river that thundered against the rocks where he had left you. Nothing to suggest a body had ever lain there at all. The likelihood of scavengers having found you was far lower than he would have preferred to believe. And that, more than the emptiness of the riverbank, unsettled him.

His instincts prove correct soon enough, as word of you reaches him from Inazuma. He ought to feel relieved. The matter is no longer his to resolve; it has passed into the hands of another nation. He is free to return to the Creator’s side, where he belongs, unburdened by unfinished duty. This should be a blessing. And yet— A single, treacherous thought coils in his mind. Why is it them, and not him? Zhongli knows he should not indulge such feelings. Jealousy has no place in devotion. If there is anger stirring within him, it should be directed at you, for slipping beyond his grasp, for unsettling the Creator with your continued existence. That is the proper interpretation. That is what he tells himself.

Still, the nights stretch long and restless. He lies awake, thoughts circling where they should not, imagining what it might be like to find you again—to stand before you once more, and lay his eyes upon your visage with nothing left between them but truth.

His third impression, he decides, is one of hate.

You occupy his thoughts with an unforgiving persistence. Despite how little he truly remembers of you, you consume every waking moment, and the moments that should have been given to sleep. Nights find him kneeling before the small shrine he has built for the Creator, hands steady, posture reverent, as if ritual alone might absolve him. He knows himself to be a righteous man. That certainty changes nothing. He can feel you. He can see you as you were—sunlight caught in your hair, warmth spilling across the river’s surface, the glow of your presence almost caressing his form as you gazed down at your own reflection. The memory is unbidden, vivid, intolerable.

This is not his fault. He refuses to believe it is.

It is you, the deviant, who sparked this flame. And so he prays. No, he begs, for your fire not to sear him to flesh and mind, even as it continues to burn him all the same. He prays for his creator to deliver him from this sin, he stays kneeling at the shrine for the better half of the nights coming, as he can almost feel the fire burning him.

Meanwhile, you lie half-dead in the white snow, the aftermath of Inazuma’s failed witch hunt etched into every trembling breath you take. The cold has numbed you to pain, leaving only a dull, drifting awareness as shadows loom overhead.

A man stands above you, his face hidden behind a mask, his gaze unreadable as it settles upon your broken form. Without haste, he bends and gathers you into his arms, disturbingly gentle in contrast to the violence that brought you here.

After all, you are in need of a doctor. And his services, he decides, are open.

Dottore’s first impression of you, however, is a simple one: you had been outcast.

News of an imposter was hardly remarkable. Such rumours surfaced whenever devotion curdled into excess, when those zealous in their loyalty to you, or rather, to the deceiver wearing your name—rushed headlong into outrage. To be hunted like an animal and yet survive it was no small feat. Even he could acknowledge that it required a formidable mind. He is not surprised when the truth reveals itself so plainly: the true god lies broken in the snow, while the false one sits comfortably upon a throne. That your people failed to recognize the difference speaks less to your deception than to their lack of rigor. Disappointing, really.

He could almost sympathize with you, almost. With the sheer amount of time and energy you had poured into this world, with everything you had endured simply to survive within a place you had once cared for, just to make it this far. He finds himself wondering whether you had ever considered giving up. Surely the repetition, the endless cycle of pursuit and survival, must have worn you down eventually. But you did not surrender, instead, you fled. In his opinion, that was the wiser choice.

He makes easy work of you. There is nothing poetic about it, blood spilled, colour draining from your face, a heartbeat faltering and fading. A flaw, yes, but a correctable one. Were it anyone else on his table, survival would have been impossible.

And yet.

Despite his certainty, despite the precision of his work, he finds himself surprised when the following morning arrives, no less than ten hours later, to find you alive. Very much alive, in fact. There is a heartbeat, faint, erratic, but it exists all the same. Your pulse is nearly imperceptible, so weak it takes two fingers pressed firmly into the side of your throat to coax it into being. The touch of ice-cold skin against your warmth draws a response from you at last. You stir, barely. A twitch of your fingertips, a subtle flutter beneath your eyelids, minimal reaction, but functional nonetheless. His gaze travels with quiet precision, bruises bloom along your arms in mottled shades of violet and yellow, mapping violence in the abstract. Near your collarbone, a scar curves like a bolt of lightning, jagged and unmistakable. He pauses there, curious. He wonders, not for the first time, how you found the strength to reach Snezhnaya at all, let alone endure its winter for so long in such a state. His musings did not matter in the end. They do not change the fact that the world that had once adored you had treated you most cruelly—and he could fix that.

His second impression settles in with unexpected clarity.

You are endearing. Like a frightened little rabbit, bloodied and shaking, still running despite the certainty of pursuit. Prey that refuses to lie down and die, even as the predators, unsated, relentless, follow the trail you leave behind. It is almost cute, he thinks, in a pitifully misguided way. A futile, stubborn instinct for survival clinging on long after it should have been extinguished. If he were a lesser man, unburdened by reason, he might have called it a miracle. He almost does. For what else could your continued existence be? You live as though the heavens themselves have intervened, not in the way of the blessed, but in the way a wounded rabbit lives when surrounded by starving wolves. Only instead of a forest, you awaken in a laboratory.

And that is where you remain.

Not that you ever truly had a choice.

Despite his adamant insistence that you were not what they accused you of, leaving would have placed you at the mercy of others—and, in truth, there was no mercy to be found there at all. After everything that had followed your arrival in this world, falling into a game only to be branded an imposter, hunted, and treated as though you were not human, the last person you ever expected to save you was Dottore. Even days after your near death, you still could not make sense of him. What he deemed worthy of his time and what he dismissed as frivolous waste seemed governed by a logic entirely his own. You supposed you should be grateful that you had fallen into the former category. Otherwise, your body might have been the next one laid out upon his vivisection table.

Lately, all your mornings begin the same way. You wake two hundred or so feet below ground,(at least that’s what he told you), buried beneath satin sheets in an otherwise empty bed. Blearily, you force yourself upright and stumble onto the floor, grimacing as the cold bites into your bare feet—the thin rug doing little to soften the shock. Snezhnaya’s temperatures rarely rise above freezing, and while the doctor appears wholly unbothered by the cold, you are not so resilient. The chill serves as an unwelcome reminder of your fragility, of your mortality, made painfully clear since your arrival here. Your gaze drifts to the bandages wrapped firmly around your arms, and your mouth tightens. On the bedside table waits a cup of tea, milky and rich, its familiar blend offering a small, fragile comfort to your mornings. You learned, not long ago, that it is not brought by the doctor himself, but by another version of him—after waking one morning to find a face with no eyes, only metal, staring down at you.

After you finish the tea, you spend the next stretch of the morning resting in bed, strict orders, ones you do not dare to disobey. You read, when you can be bothered, which isn’t often, but when you can you can choose one of the many books he has left for you to stave off boredom. It startles you, at first, to realize you understand the words on the page without ever having learned the language. There is little else to occupy your time. You could, in theory, join him while he works, linger at the edge of his presence. But the laboratory repels you. The cloying scent of rot and preservatives turns your stomach the moment you cross the threshold, and the dark, congealed puddles on the floor burn themselves into your vision long after you look away.

You choose the bed instead.

Sleep, however, refuses to come. Ever since the hunt, you have been trapped in a hollow state of wakefulness, an endless limbo of insomnia. No matter how long you lie upon the soft mattress, your body twisting restlessly beneath the sheets, rest remains just out of reach. You yearn for sleep with an aching intensity, but it never answers you. It isn’t as though it bothers you all that much. Most days, simply getting up and moving feels like an insurmountable task. It’s not that you don’t know you should, you do, but there’s a persistent fog in your mind that dulls every intention, makes effort feel distant and unimportant. And so, you remain in bed.

You no longer feel like yourself—if that’s even the right way to put it. The truth is, you don’t feel anything at all. It is almost like screaming without ever hearing a sound leave your mouth.

Occasionally, Dottore comes himself to check on your condition, carving out time despite the countless experiments demanding his attention. The doctor increases your medication. Beyond the usual painkillers, he takes it upon himself to administer various vitamins, an occasional sedative to coax you into sleep, and other substances you eventually stop asking about. He replaces your bandages with practiced efficiency, and sometimes, unasked, he helps you wash. Unallowing to let you wallow in your own filth. You never want him to. The first time, even through your hoarse, broken voice, you refuse as firmly as you can. It makes no difference. You find yourself wondering whether he ever feels embarrassed. After all this time in such close proximity, you imagine that if you were to ask him outright, he would launch into one of his long, indulgent lectures, how a true scholar stands above such trivialities, how emotions like embarrassment are inefficiencies best discarded, how he is untouched by sentiment altogether.

You do not believe him. There must be something, buried somewhere beneath the layers of intellect and calculation. He is simply very good at hiding it. Otherwise, you cannot fathom why he would have saved you that day at all.

In that regard, your first impression of him is nothing like what you expected. When you played Genshin, you knew Dottore only through fragments and reputation, the conflict with Diluc, the countless lives taken, the long list of atrocities catalogued neatly in the lore. It was easy enough to acknowledge those horrors from a distance, from the safety of a world that could be exited at will. Living inside it, however, is different.

Here, he is not the caricature of a villain you anticipated. There are moments, rare, fleeting, where something almost like kindness surfaces, if you squint and catch him in the right light. It unsettles you more than outright cruelty ever could. You tell yourself he must be gaining something from this—that it is only a matter of time before your guard slips and you find yourself laid out upon his vivisection table. The reasoning is sound enough in your mind. And yet, as time passes and nothing changes, no hidden cruelty revealed, no sudden turn toward violence, the excuses you cling to begin to crumble.

There is always a brief moment of silence when Dottore enters the room, as though he is observing you before deciding to approach, before the routine resumes.

“Can you hear me?” he asks, every time. As if you are both still caught in those first days, when he had found you broken in the snow and you lay unresponsive after the surgery. You manage a half-hearted reply, thin and automatic, and that seems to satisfy him.

He guides you toward the en-suite bathroom, the bath already drawn. You do not remember hearing anyone come in to prepare it, but memory has become unreliable these days. You are not entirely present anymore. You undress with reluctant, mechanical movements. Despite everything, your weakness, your dependence, there remains a stubbornly human part of you that understands embarrassment. By the time you lower yourself into the tub, without clothing and dignity, the water closes around you as if an embrace.

He is oddly gentle with you. He forgoes a sponge, choosing instead to use his hands, lathered with a soap that lacks the sharp sting of chemicals—likely chosen to avoid irritating your sensitive scars and still-healing wounds. His touch moves methodically, ensuring no stretch of skin is left unattended. He never asks for permission. He simply lifts your arm above your head to wash beneath it, efficient and precise. He is not rough. And perhaps, in some distant, numbed part of you, there is a strange relief in not having to do anything yourself. Eventually, you close your eyes.

The silence settles between you, as it always does. The doctor moves his hands along your sides, deliberate and precise. Your eyes remain closed, but you imagine what you would see: the unblinking figure of him, the mask rendering his gaze impassive yet unnervingly attentive, studying you as though committing every detail to memory. Every muscle that tenses, every subtle shift of your body, nothing escapes him. Perhaps it amuses him, the knowledge that he can elicit a reaction from a god with nothing but his own touch, bending you, contorting you, shaping your response to suit him. He has always been fascinated by such things: the way bodies betray themselves, the predictable mathematics of stimuli and reaction.

Perhaps, had this been when you first arrived, you would have been tense—unable to meet his eyes, barely able to resist flinching at his touch. Now, if you were to react the same way, you can almost hear his voice, dry and precise, the same as when you first came to him: “And here I thought we had moved past your naïve embarrassment.” You imagine the faint lift of his tone, the implied amusement. But now, your mind is occupied with everything and nothing all at once, an oxymoron that makes even the simplest thought slippery. It is frustratingly difficult to name your emotions when they exist as one undifferentiated mass. Back then, you might have felt shame, disgust, fear, anger, sometimes all at once. Yet even those labels never quite fit. Now, at this moment, you do not have the capacity, or perhaps the desire, to look any deeper into yourself.

Once he deems you clean, he steps back, leaving you bare, exposed in the cold air. Every inch of you falls under his scrutiny. You cannot see his eyes behind the mask, but you feel them, red, unblinking, meticulous, tracking each tremor, each involuntary twitch you make standing there. The weight of his attention presses down on you, making the room smaller, the air heavier. For a moment, you almost want to sink back into the bathwater.

You shift uneasily from foot to foot, your muscles tight, your skin crawling as if aware of his invisible hands still cataloguing you. Perhaps he will circle you, but he does not. He waits instead. Then comes the faint, deliberate click of his tongue, the sound of approval.

“Your condition is improving. Good.”

It is different from before, when he would prod and test your wounds and scars, studying the way skin and flesh healed under his scrutiny. But Dottore is never predictable; he is too clever to fall into that pattern twice. Dottore’s satisfaction is quiet but still evident. You feel it in the faint curve of his lips and the subtle shift of his posture. Although, around you he always appears to be rather pleased with himself.

After his careful observation, he gestures for you to step forward. Without a word, he takes the towel and begins to dry you himself. Every movement is deliberate, measured, his hands moving over your skin with the precision of a sculptor shaping clay. There is a strange reverence in the way he touches you, a quiet devotion that borders on worship. He attends to every limb with the same meticulous care, and gradually, you go limp in his hands, your body surrendering to his methodical attention. When there is nothing to soften your grief, it ends up softening you to the one before you. When he kneels to dry your legs, your hands find their way to his shoulders almost instinctively. He does not flinch, does not shift, does not react, yet the stillness of his acceptance presses in on you, and you are aware of every careful motion.

It is during moments like this that Dottore considers himself truly fortunate. Perhaps, for once in his life, he even entertains the notion that fate is real. That he was cast out from his birthplace, only for the creator of this world to fall victim to that same cruelty—how neatly the pattern aligns. How alike you are. He wonders if you are, in some sense, his creation: a being exiled from your natural environment, stumbling through the world like a new-born, instinctively imprinting upon him as the first figure you encountered upon waking. The thought is… pleasing. Perhaps that is a lie.

Perhaps it had always been the other way around. Perhaps he was the one born into a world that rejected him, and it was you who held him, unknowingly, unknowably, in your arms. Perhaps it was he who imprinted upon you.

It is only after he has finished drying you, back in your room, your bed layered with silks, soft throws, and warm blankets, your nightclothes returned to you, that he allows himself a look that can only be called fondness. One hand traces small circles over the skin of your collarbone peeking through fabric, while the other tugs the blankets snugly around you. His eyes drift over your form one last time before it is hidden, as though committing the sight to memory, savouring every detail as if it were the most fascinating thing he has ever encountered.

But it is not fascination in the way mortals might understand. Divinity, he reminds himself, is reserved for him alone, as he is starkly reminded as his gaze lingers on you, lying there in the bed before him. Still, it takes all his willpower not to break into a grin.

You are, he realizes, utterly perfect for him.

It is almost exhilarating, knowing your life is entirely in his hands, your divinity, your very existence, your very self. His fingers tighten around the blankets. Really, he thinks, he deserves this. After everything he has endured, after all he has accomplished, having his own divinity delivered almost effortlessly to his doorstep is more satisfying than he could have imagined.

You do not realize your eyes have closed, drifting into a dreamless sleep. Dottore remains hovering over you, unbothered by your sudden surrender to unconsciousness. His hand, long released from the blankets, rests in your hair, fingers tracing through it as if memorizing its texture. He murmurs to himself, low vibrations threading through the quiet room, and though you cannot make out the words, the sound is oddly comforting as you sink deeper into slumber. For a fleeting instant, you imagine waking tomorrow in your own bed, finally home.

But you know the truth. With the memory of his hands resting on your collarbone, threading through your hair, you will awaken not in safety, but in the laboratory. And there, as always, is where you will remain.

A/N: I’ve always loved the Imposter Cult SAGAU because the concept is genuinely horrifying. You’re thrown into something you know is a game, hunted to within an inch of your life, and then, after being killed or watching the truth come out and the imposter be executed right in front of you, you’re expected to just forgive everyone? Of course I love it. Who wouldn’t have a complete mental breakdown after that? In this version, after the Reader is killed, Teyvat simply respawns them in a different area and hopes for the best. At that point, prayers and wishes are the only things holding the Reader’s sanity together.

[luminarylorecat]

Who's the Father??

Warnings: A lot of talk about childbirth, labor, and possibly inaccurate medical terms. Mentions of storing and freezing the placenta. Segments using swear words and being involved with the delivery (except 8, he's a minor). Segment 35 (Omega), being a little possessive and self-centered as always. No smut, but mentioned and implied nsfw.

Sitting in the labor room, you held the red scarlet-eyed baby in your arms, stroking the infant's tuft of blue hair every now and then. Segment 8, or "Little Doctor" as you like to call him, leaned over the side to look at the newborn, an innocent sort of curiosity brimming in his very own pair of red eyes.

Your baby was born healthy, looking just like a mix of both you and Zandik. He'd helped deliver it himself, muttering about how he trusted no one but him to take the task upon himself.

Well, technically, it was just Segment 25 who helped with the main task; the others volunteered themselves with other stuff, such as weighing the baby, stitching your tears up, cleaning the blood, storing your placenta and umbilical cord for research purposes, etc.

All the segments insisted on helping out, even Little Doctor, who unfortunately had to sit outside for most of the labor but was eventually allowed in to see the baby and check on you. Everyone's main goal was to ensure the mother and newborn were both safe and healthy.

Now that everything was successfully executed, you and the newborn were both taking a small, well-earned nap. All the adult segments turned to look at one another with suspicion.

Who the fuck was the baby's real father?

They all had slept with you, came inside of you, so the possibility that one of them was the father was 20%.

Except they were all Zandiks.

They all had the same DNA, the same blood. They might as well all be identical twins, if identical twins were all the segment of a man who died a century ago.

"Well? What were we all even expecting? That the baby would be born, and we could take a DNA test to verify the paternity? We all share the same blood dipshits. Ever thought of that?" Segment 18 spat out, looking at the other older segments after they'd all stepped out.

Segment 25 merely took off his mask and gloves, opting to let the other Segments deal with the guy instead.

"We were hoping to keep the peace until the baby was born to keep our Lady's pregnancy smooth. You know she gets troubled when we all get into unnecessary fights." Segment 65 explained, stepping closer to your door to make sure it was locked in case their argument woke you up. "A miscarriage would've been tragic. Besides, we all had our own goals to accomplish during this period. I doubt Omega is going to let you have a share of the placenta."

Omega, or Segment 35, who snuck off to the side to keep your placenta in a freezer, shot them all a dirty look. "How rude! Preserving the placenta has it's benefits-"

"We never said it didn't. But must you be so greedy as to keep it for yourself?" Segment 45 cuts off.

"-because I am the most research-oriented out of all of us, one who shall produce the most fulfilling results. In case of a genetic disease or a tumor, it will prove to be very useful." He preened

"You talk as if you're the real father." scoffs Segment 18.

"Well, of course I am. Who else but I could produce such brilliant progeny."

The comment riled up Segment 18, who walked up to Omega's face, his sharp teeth bare, "So sure of yourself, aren't you, old man? You sure your sperm can even swim that far? Your cock get that hard? Well, getting erect would be no problem for such a beauty; however, I bet her fallopian tubes shriveled the moment you got in you son of a-"

"Alright, alright. There's no need to stir up a ruckus right here," said Segment 25, wiping his hands dry on a towel, clearly the most tired of them all.

Unlike the other Segments, he had to be on-call and close to you that day, and hence had stayed by you till the moment you had pushed the baby out. "She's still inside, sleeping, taking a well-earned nap before one of us has to wake her from her blissful slumber in two hours to take her vitals again. Not to mention, we will need to attend to my newborn as well. For now, we could all take a moment, Segment 8 will alert us should anything happen-"

"What do you mean, 'my newborn'?" Segment 45 butts in, "You didn't even try to debate whether the child is yours or not."

"Well, of course, because it is mine. Only fools fight over what's not theirs-"

"Get a load of this asshole-"

"Can we all take this somewhere else, the baby might wake up-"

"Dottore!" a voice booms from down the hall, along with the sound of multiple footsteps.

All Segments turned around to see The Regrator, Pantalone, along with a few Fatui agents carrying many boxes and bags with them.

"I believe congratulations are in order? How is the missus and the baby?" asked Pantalone.

"Who let this guy know about her labor? I thought we were to keep this information from the other Harbingers," sneered Segment 25.

"And you certainly did, I assure you. No one other than me knows about this little joy of yours. I only happened to find out about this because the 8-year-old segment seemed quite anxious about not being let into the operating room. Seeing as you did not hesitate to let him watch the dissection of the original Zandik, my only conclusion about not allowing him in the operating room was that your wife was giving birth. That, and the fact I hadn't seen her for quite some time. Seemed easy to deduce." The Regrator stated, shrugging and rustling his fur coat.

"And what if it was a surgery like, say, an appendectomy? What use are the gifts then?" Segment 18 pointed out.

"Then I believe that you must get started on producing a progeny, no? Anyway, I've brought a few tokens of goodwill. I hope you'll accept them from a friend."

"Leave them out here. She's sleeping, and we'd rather not disturb her or the baby." Segment 65 said, pointing towards a table for the gifts to be kept. "We'll let her know of them as soon as she's able to concern herself with things other than herself and the baby. I hope you understand she's not in the condition to receive guests at the moment."

"That's alright." The Regrator signed his agents to keep the presents on the table and take their leave.

"Speaking of not disturbing the baby, though, what were all of you arguing about? Well, it's not rare to see each of you in disagreement with the other. Rather, it happens pretty often to be rare. But an opportunity that brings all of you together to have such a conflict......."

"We were discussing who the real father of the baby is," said Segment 18.

Pantalone nodded in understanding.

"I'd hardly call that a discussion. But does it truly matter? All of you are the same person, and hence, similar at your core. I'm sure the child would benefit from having multiple parental figures. I wouldn't call it a major issue."

"It is." Said all the Zandiks there in unison.

"Dear Feofan, it seems you still don't understand us all, even when you are a dear friend of ours. We all may be derived of the same Zandik, but as Dottore, we're all different," Omega explained, "Our values, our approach to research, our research, and our view of this world, they all differ due to the number of memories we carry. Determining the true father is determining whose legacy will be carried on. It isn't as simple as 'raising a child'."

".......so it has to do with your ego," Pantalone cheeked.

"How rude, I have genuine affection towards my wife and my child," said Omega.

"There he goes again," Segment 45 groaned, rolling his eyes.

"Oh my god, it's MY baby you twat," argued Segment 18.

"Well, you're certainly not raising my child with that mouth of yours," said Segment 65 calmly.

"Gents, gents," Pantalone raised his hands, trying to mitigate and calm down all the Dottores before it would escalate, lest they end up dissecting another one of them again.

"I have a solution. How about you solve this the way you know best? You're all intelligent and highly educated individuals; surely you can come to a conclusion amongst yourselves."

All the Zandiks looked at each other, as if they had never considered that idea.

"Determining the father of the baby through research. We can't do a DNA test, but....." mused Segment 45.

"Surely, only DNA can't be the only factor to determine the paternity," suggested Segment 18.

"If we can't find a way to find a match with blood, tissue, or DNA, we could always narrow down the possibility of one of us being the father by calculating the fertility factor of our sperm, the time between conception and delivery, and the general condition of the mother and the baby during pregnancy," Segment 35 muttered.

Pantalone sighed, seemingly relieved that he had managed to prevent another Zandik from being dissected today.

"I must, however, object to executing this plan right now," said Segment 25, "her postpartum period is to last for at the very least 2 months, and we have a newborn to care for as well."

"Naturally," all Segments agreed and nodded.

"Then," smirked Omega, "we shall have a time limit of 2 months to conduct our research. Whosoever manages to bring concrete proof along with the timeline and convinces everyone that the baby is theirs shall get to claim the progeny and raise them. Do we all agree?"

"Yes," said all the Segments.

"Then shall I volunteer as a referee? You know, as a neutral party, to keep things nice and fair?" asked Pantalone.

"Of course, friend. You're more than welcome to invite yourself to my research discussions. You are, after all, the one funding all of our experiments," said Omega gleefully.

Pantalone watched with interest as all of the Segments dismissed themselves, some going to rest after what he assumed was a long day of being in the delivery room, others sprinting to their assigned labs to get a head start on their research, while the rest stayed to be available for you.

'Ah,' Pantalone thought to himself, stepping outside and pulling out a cigarette, 'this whole ordeal shall be quite entertaining.'

Part 2??? (˵ ¬ᴗ¬˵)

a/n: hello hello everynyan |˶˙ᵕ˙ )ﾉﾞ I wrote this at 3 am in a fever dream lol. Fun fact: kids of identical twins are genetic half-siblings. SO if you have an identical twin and have a baby, the baby is also half of your twin lol. It gave me the idea about what if multiple people shared the same DNA and boom that's how I wrote this fic in 2 hours when I have like 12 other drafts that have been collecting dust ehe (ᵕ—ᗜ—) I might make a few edits here and there so pls excuse any grammatical errors lol I don't know english well ≽^•⩊•^≼ anyway enjoy ٩(ˊᗜˋ*)و ♡

@luminarylorecat Do not repost, translate, adapt, feed into AI, or claim this work. Reblogs and links are appreciated; copying and reuploading are not.

[tiarpopdind-hl]

Painted this guy 🙄🙄🙄