sablefang

she/her | 18+

[sablefang]

sable ☼ she/her ☼ 30s requests: open find me by the great lakes. accounting → law (because numbers are boring) ask me about my cod headcanons. actually, ask me whatever you want. my inbox is open for requests, but i don’t take nsfw prompts! current series: trespassers will be shot | beta break | prince of hearts masterlist | about me | ask | ao3

[unseaworthy]

The Death and Rebirth of John MacTavish

Pairing: Call of Duty, TBI!Johnny x f!Reader | Rating: T

Tags/Content Warnings: Medical inaccuracies, depression, angst, slow-burn, hurt/comfort

Summary: A soldier suffering from a traumatic brain injury will need to relearn everything from locomotion to language to emotional regulation. Fortunately, there's a cute volunteer at his rehab facility who visits every week to read him poems and help him remember why the struggle is worth it.

Read on AO3 here, or navigate to the chapters below:

Prologue

Week One

Week Two

Week Three

Week Four

Week Five

Week Six

Week Seven

Week Eight

Week Nine

Week Ten

Week Eleven

Week Twelve

Week Thirteen

Week Fourteen

Week Fifteen

Week Sixteen

Week Seventeen

Week Eighteen

Week Nineteen

Week Twenty

Week Twenty-One

Week Twenty-Two

Week Twenty-Three

Week Twenty-Four

Week Twenty-Five

Week Twenty-Six

Dedicated to @youarehereyouaresafe, lover of all things Johnny and most beloved of friends.

Note: This is a little slower-paced and angstier than my other fics, plus some people might not like the heavy poetry. Totally understand if some of my usual readers pass on this one - it's not my best work, but I've had it planned since November and I had to get it out of my head. I have the first third of the story done, so you'll see a bunch of chapters go up at once and then probably won't hear from me for a while. Thank you so much for reading <3

[thememedaddy]

[warmfrequency]

after price kills shepherd, he has a finite window of time to grab his things and say goodbye to his wife.

cw: angst

You hear the front door swing open and hit the wall behind it and your first thought is he’s early.

You’re at the stove, wooden spoon in your hand with the skillet throwing up steam, onions gone soft and golden at the edges, music murmuring from the speaker on the windowsill.

The word ‘early’ is halfway up out of your throat, light, a little teasing, but it dies there when the sound coming from down the hall isn’t the sound of a man home for the night. There’s no pause to toe his boots off, no keys dropping in the bowl. Just the stairs taken too fast, two at a time, the whole house shivering under the weight of him going up.

Your hand finds the gas dial and turns the flame down. You open up your ears, straining to listen. Then you’re moving, following the sound of him up into the dark of the second landing.

The bedroom door’s open, and inside, John’s just a blur of motion against the moonlight behind him. The wardrobe’s flung wide open, the duffle is out — the one that lives at the back of the closet behind the winter coats, the one you were trained long ago not to touch nor ask about — and now it’s unzipped, open on the bed. His hands are working through the canvas with a fervor that turns your blood cold before he’s said a single word.

He hasn’t looked up, he’s too focused. And there’s something practiced and deeply troubling about the speed of which his hands are movings — it tells you more than his face even would.

“John?” you try, his back is to you now.

“Hey,” he says, a drawer slides open, he rifles through it, turns around, and whatever he took from the drawer disappears into his bag. “Listen to me a minute.”

“What’s happening? Wh- what’re you doing?”

You take a tentative step toward the bed.

“I have to go,” he says flat, pared down, slotted neatly into the rhythm of his packing. “Right now. Tonight.”

“Go where? You’ve only just got back. Is it a—,”

“It’s not work,” he cuts in roughly, then shakes his head, eyes squeezed shut.

His hands go still over the bag and he turns his head and finally, finally looks at you, blue eyes hooking under your ribs. He takes a steadying inhale through his parted lips, then out his flaring nostrils.

“It’s… it’s not a job, dove.”

You feel so behind him in this, like you’re still standing in the warm kitchen five minutes ago, still on the version of tonight where dinner’s almost ready. You can feel a tickle of dread crawling up the back of your neck.

You’ve never seen him like this.

He’s never like this — frantic.

“Then what is it, J—,”

“Shepherd’s dead,” he spills. He says it the way you’d pluck a splinter from a soft palm, all at once because slow is worse. “It was me, I did it. There’ll be people comin’ here to look for me, and I can’t be here when they come, and I can’t—” His throat bobs. “I can’t be anywhere near you. D’you understand me?”

You don’t.

His confession arrives in pieces and your hands rise to your temples as the words work their way into whatever corner of your mind is properly conscious.

He’s gone back to moving, the zip of the bag closing like something tearing in half. It’s the moving you can’t deal with right now because the moving means it’s already decided. It was decided before he came through the front door. You’re hearing the end of a conversation he’s been having with himself for god knows how long.

Sick turns over in your belly, hot and acidic as it ascends your esophagus, burning the back of your tongue before you swallow it back down.

“Stop.” Your hand closes firm around his forearm. “Stop, just— just look at me. Goddamnit, just— Stop moving!”

To his credit, he goes still for a moment, turning fully toward you now and lifts both hands to your face, cradling your jaw, and every scrap of that frantic velocity drains out of him. His forehead comes down to yours, warm, a little slicked. And suddenly you would give anything to have the frantic version of him back, because stillness means he’s made time for it. John doesn’t make room for things that don’t matter. He’s making room to say goodbye, and knowing that opens up beneath you like a trap-door.

His thumbs sweep the tears you didn’t even feel on your cheeks. “Look at me,” his hands stiffen and close tighter when they rest on your face, forcing your gaze onto his. “I need you to hear me.”

“No.” You’ve got two fistfuls of his shirt now, the cotton crushed in your hands, your head moving side to side against the cage of his palms. “No. No! You don’t get to do this, we’ll— we’ll fix it,” you try to sniffle but sob instead. “You’ll go to someone— Kate! There’ll be a way—,”

“There isn’t,” he murmurs, almost pleading.

“There’s always a way.”

“Not for this.” He says it so softly it takes the legs out from under you. His breath is warm against your mouth. “Not this one, dove. Not this time. I’m sorry.”

Part of you doesn’t quite believe the apology. It was tacked on at the end like an afterthought. You know John. Or, maybe you thought you did. The blood in your heart feels like it’s curdling, heavy, turning to tar as you continue to process exactly what’s happening here.

What he’s done.

You wrench your neck and free your face from the heat of his hands.

“How long?” you ask, voice breaking.

He doesn’t answer.

You strike his chest with the flat of both hands, again and again, then again. You can’t even shift him an inch and the both of you know it, it’s just somewhere for the fear to go as it bubbles. His chin tucks, watching with a curling devastation as you keep connecting with his body. In a flash, he’s got both of his hands on your wrists, yanking you forward against him. “How long, John?!”

You’re starting to learn how long.

He says nothing.

This isn’t a tour. It isn’t a season away with a date at the end of it. He’s running. There is no number because there is no horizon he can point to, no morning he can promise you he’ll be standing in this room again.

The realization comes out of you barely above a breath as you tip your head back to see him. “You’re not coming back.”

His eyes fall shut. He presses his mouth to your forehead hard and holds there, and when the words come they come muffled into your hair just above your ear, into the warmth of you he’s trying to memorize.

“I love you.” It’s not an answer to your question by any stretch of the imagination. He pulls back again to meet your eyes. “Whatever they say about me, whatever you hear — that’s the only truth, yeah?” His knuckles lift to your chin, the pad of his thumb pushing against the front of it, holding your gaze. “When they come, you tell them I was here, I threatened you, and I left in a hurry.”

Your lip wobbles as you look at him, your throat is so tight it hurts.

“Say it back to me.”

“Y- you were here, you left in a hurry.”

“I was here, I threatened you, I left in a hurry,” he repeats.

“You were here, y-you thre- threatened me, you left in a hurry.”

“Good.”

He kisses you and you can almost taste both halves of him in it at once: the half that’s yours, and the half that's already gone. You give it back to him like you can hold him in the room by your mouth alone. But you can’t. And you feel the precise instant he decides to stop, the breath he takes to force himself away.

“Lock the door behind me,” he says.

And the velocity is back. He swings the duffle bag up onto his shoulder, and he’s past you before you’ve turned, out the bedroom door, and you spin and rush after him with his name tearing out of you, your bare feet slapping against the hardwood.

“John! Please! John!”

But he’s already at the foot of the stairs, already crossing the hall, always faster than you, and you’re only halfway down when the front door swings open and the cold of the night pours in over the threshold to meet you. You reach the bottom step, lurch for the door.

The street is empty.

You look left, you look right. It’s as if you dreamt the whole thing. As if you made him up, boots to beard.

Behind you, the speaker’s still playing music from the kitchen. The onions have started to catch, the sweet smell tipping over into something bitter and charred.

[sablefang]

Loveddd seeing you mention Hereford in one of your fics, its my favourite thing with COD writers when they actually learn about the SAS 😛

🫶 I have a lot of fun looking at the Hereford area and just thinking about where the characters might live, eat, or drink. It’s a bit like my own hometown - on the smaller side, quite rural, not without its problems but I’m fond of it all the same. I think I’d like to visit someday!

[sleepyconfusedpotato]

"You broke a lot of rules, Price."

"No more rules."

---

CALL OF DUTY: MODERN WARFARE IV (2026)

[wolverinecore]

Captain Price in Call of Duty Modern Warfare 4 teaser

[captaincrusher]

Me filtering out kinks I don’t like on AO3. 

[grauline]

i’m a cockroach hiding under god’s fridge

[grauline]

and brother he’s got a shoe

[sablefang]

beta break update whennnn

I think about bb often, but there won't be an update anytime soon.

The short answer is I went from working 20 hours a week to 40-50, so I've gotten a lot busier. With the turn in weather, there are also a lot more things to be done at home. When I'm not working, I'm outside.

A little more below:

I also unfortunately read some things a few weeks back that really turned me off the fandom/community. What it boils down to is that several comments were made mocking/disparaging the kind of things I like to write about. While it's possible that the people involved weren't intending to be mean, it did kill any desire I had to write. Since then, I haven't touched my documents for beta break or trespassers will be shot - the motivation just isn't there.

I'll be back 💖 just need a break.

[warmfrequency]

simon riley x fem!reader — reader has small breasts and a tummy — as requested by this cutie anon

i’ve trained myself over the years not to write physical bodies for my ‘!readers’ so i hope i did alright. i’m happy to write a blurbie for any body feeling underrepresented.

cw: mdni, smut, oral, small breasts, bigger belly, (850ish wc)

You’re half-dressed, hunting for a clean shirt, when you catch him in the doorway, making you flinch.

Simon’s leaning with his shoulder against the frame, balaclava pushed up to his hairline, arms folded lazily across his chest.

“Christ, Si,” you huff, pressing a hand flat to your sternum. “Stop sneakin’ up on me like that.”

He doesn’t answer, his eyes are doing a slow, heavy-lidded drag down your body. Over your bare chest first, lingering on the quaint swell of your breasts. Then they travel lower, over the soft give of your belly where it curves and presses into the waistband of your underwear, and the way your thighs stick together as you stand there. You roll your eyes at him, giggling lightly as you turn back to the drawer.

“You’re bein’ a creep,” you smirk.

“Come ‘ere.”

You glance over your shoulder, “Why?”

He shifts in the doorway to stand straight, arms unfolding so he can direct you with his index and middle fingers, pointing down to the space of carpet just in front of him. “Come. Here.”

You sigh exaggeratedly and pad barefoot over to him. The second you’re in reach his hand catches your waist and pulls you flush against him. You hit him with a low ‘oof!’ escaping your throat. You can instantly feel him hard against your hip. You blink up at him.

“It’s, like, nine in the morning.”

He pulls back enough to have another gawk at you.

“Mhm,” he hums satisfactorily, and you’re not sure if he’s replying to your comment or simply pleased with whatever he’s got rattling around in his imagination at the moment.

A hand begins a slow migration up to your chest, cupping one of your breasts, holding there, pressing the rough of his palm against your flesh. His thumb strokes slow over your nipple until it tightens beneath it. “Fit perfectly in my palm,” he muses.

“Simon,” you sigh, amused.

His palm slides down then, over your ribs, splaying wide across the side of your belly, kneading, pressing his thumb into the pudge of you. He makes a low sound at the back of his throat. “Whose fault’s it m’hard at nine in the morning, then?”

“Your own,” you giggle.

“Yours,” he corrects plainly before he dips down and nudges your jaw up with his nose to kiss you, licking his tongue over yours while his hand continues to stroke the curve under his fingers. The other hand comes back to your chest like it just can’t stay away. “Walkin’ ’round in front of me like this. These pretty lil’ tits out. Belly all…” he squeezes once, gentle and possessive “…soft,” he finishes.

“S’just my body, Si,” you breathe, breaths becoming shallower.

“I know wot it is,” he smiles against your mouth. “Drives me fuckin’ mental. But y’knew that, di’n’t you?”

You did know that.

You also know what happens when you push into his hands instead of away, and you do it now, arching just slightly into his palm, and the noise he makes is honestly embarrassing for him.

He walks you backward to the bed in three steps and you go down on the edge of it. He’s on his knees on the floor before you can blink, big hands skirting up the outside of your thighs, fingers hooking into the cotton of your underwear and yanking them down and off. His hands come back up, slipping between your legs and parting them wide for the looking. His mouth’s already wet and your bottom lip tucks between your teeth.

“Eyes up here, Sergeant,” you giggle.

“No,” he grunts. His mouth finds the inside of your thigh, rolling your flesh between his lips, kissing and sucking higher and higher. “I’ll look where I want.”

A calloused hand comes up to span your stomach, one wide palm pressing into you, the other hand taking a hold of your hip while his mouth finds your center. You gasp, and fall back to your elbows.

His tongue is slow, working you open, and he keeps that hand on your tummy the whole time like he just can’t stop touching it, fingers spreading and gathering in the softness.

You moan and he hums against your clit, too pleased with himself. The vibration goes straight through you.

“Si— fuck—,”

The hand on your hip reaches up to your chest, palming one of your breasts again, his massive hand covering every bit of it. He fits you like he was measured for it. At least, that what he always says. You drop a hand into his hair and his eyes close.

He laps at your pussy like you both don’t have to get to work. He pulls back just long enough to drag his mouth low across your stomach, open-mouthed, sucking a mark just under your navel where nobody else will ever see it, and you feel him groan against your skin.

“Could spend the whole day on you,” he says, rough. “Jus’ like this.” His hand kneads your belly again. “You any idea what you fuckin’ do to me?”

You’re past words. You tug him by his hair and his mouth comes back to where you want it, and his hands stay where he wants it.

[unseaworthy]

The toxic!price girlies hate to see me coming… (jk)

Wholesome!Price who has always maintained he is interested in women, not girls.

Much to his dismay, something about his appearance continues to attract the younger sort. At bars, he grudgingly acknowledges flocks of college-aged girls shooting him looks and giggling, with some even bold enough to openly flirt. He’s started to use Johnny as buffer, quickly redirecting their attention towards the gregarious Scot to spare his admirers the awkward realization that their age is working against them.

There’s nothing wrong with the young birds, of course. They’re plenty cute, and they even have that fiery confidence he’s always been drawn to. But there’s something about a twiggy girl using gobs of makeup to look more fuckable that kills his libido.

He blames it on his own deflowering. In high school he’d messed around with some girls his age, but none wanted to go all the way. Being the cocky piece of shit he was, he figured he’d talk an older woman in his relieving him of his virginity so he could truly consider himself a man. He certainly wasn’t expecting the 30-something he met in a chatroom (it was a different time) to have the most insane thighs he’d seen in his life, or breasts with actual stretch marks. The weight of them in his hands felt like an epiphany. Something entirely apart from cupping a budding mound. The utter self-possession in the way she moved, like she knew exactly what she was, all that her plush body had to offer, altered his brain chemistry.

He’s been addicted ever since.

Unfortunately, the sort of women Price is drawn to rarely return his interest – either because they don’t believe it’s genuine or because they’ve got too much else going on in their life to be arsed with a man.

So when you’re hired as the new compliance officer who performs weekly inspections on base, he knows he’s done for. Cupid may as well have shot him in the heart with a fucking Uzi. You, with your wide hips and disappointed-mom attitude and hair that’s always messy in the most artless, charming way he could imagine. You wear practical sneakers and an ugly, navy polo that does absolutely nothing to the soft rolls around your midsection and an ample rack that he would happily suffocate in. When he finally gets you alone and starts putting the moves on you, your only response is irritated confusion and clear desire to get back to your task.

Price has his work cut out for him. But damned if that man doesn’t love a good pursuit.

[PS: I hope this doesn’t come off as body-shaming. Young, thin girls are gorgeous and 99% of the time Price would fuck the living daylights out of you!!!! But in this particular imagine, he’s exclusively horny for mom-bods.]

[justseiya]

But Johnny is Johnny.🥺

[sablefang]

good news! my semester is over! bad news (but also kind of good news)! i started a new job this week. it’s been an adjustment, but I’m hoping to get back into writing soon 💖

[witherfide]

simon learning russian in secret to surprise nik ...

it's so out of nowhere, blurted out in the middle of a spotty conversation between nik fixing his helo and simon sharpening his knives. immediately regrets saying anything when nik gives him this odd look, one that he can't quite place as good or bad. makes simon antsy for the first time since he was a kid and he starts chatting about literally anything else to mull over the awkwardness. he is thoroughly silenced when nik ravages him like a man starved, over the moon that simon took the time to actually learn his language past the little things he’d taught him between missions.

[konigswaifu]

Simon Riley who believes with his entire being that he's undeserving of anything good. That he is destined to abide by the laws of the underworld.

Moves to -

Simon Riley who meets you and is too busy lapping at the honey between your legs to remember the suffocating weight of the dark, muttering his prayers against flesh, looking for salvation.

"Luv, you taste like mercy. Like th' first light after an eternity of darkness.."

Simon was not a religious man, but for you? He'd reconsider.

[konigswaifu]

𝐕𝐞𝐫𝐝𝐚𝐧𝐭 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐢𝐧𝐬

Chapter 1 of 'Feral Yield' Part of The 'Eyes of Lilith' collaboration Nikto x Afab!Reader || 3k CW: This chapter contains depictions of post-apocalyptic violence, captivity and enforced control systems, power imbalance and coercive authority structures, dehumanization, psychological tension, and mature thematic elements including implied sexual control and reproductive governance.

He doesn't look at you when they bring him in.

—

The Tether Guards wrench the chain viciously taut, metal links straining against the collar that bites into the raw flesh of his throat as blood beads where skin meets iron. The new specimen moves in perfect sync with their brutal pulls, each footfall landing with military precision across the jagged stone floor. And yet his eyes never waver, breathing never changes. His muscles coil and release with the lethal economy of a predator conserving energy. No hesitation. No drag. No wasted breath.

Not Wildes behavior, certainly. You note it immediately.

Males from the Wildes typically arrive like wounded animals - all bone beneath filthy skin, their eyes darting for escape routes, muscles twitching with the unpredictable energy of creatures who’ve simply forgotten civilization. Bodies straining against their chains until their wrists bleed. And their gazes… gods, their gazes, all hungry and desperate and accusing, fix on every female face in the room.

Looking. Always looking.

However, this one does not. His head remains slightly inclined, not lowered in submission but angled as if orienting toward something beyond the visible. Listening, perhaps. The thought is logged, then set aside. Irrelevant without confirmation. You note this as well.

The mud clinging to his boots flakes with each step and you notice there is dried blood caked onto him as well - dark, old, embedded into fabric that has been repaired more times than replaced. The condition of him suggests prolonged survival under stress; however, his posture suggests training, and your gaze lingers a fraction longer than necessary. The file given to you had indicated compliance. But what you observe instead is… refinement.

Even restrained, there is no visible tension in him; no tightening of muscle, no micro-adjustments against the chain. Not one single test to the limits of his confinement. He moves within them as if he has already measured their exact reach - and simply accepted it. Moves as if he'd been in such a predicament somewhere in his bloodied past.

Or perhaps he's chosen it?

You're unsure and make another note, then pause before you revise it.

'Not compliant. Controlled.'

The pencil stills in your hand, the note unfinished as your attention lingers where it shouldn't, and for a moment you simply watch him.

"Lift his head." The command leaves you evenly and one of the guards reacts immediately, strong hands wrenching the chain upward so the collar bites deeper into the already broken skin at his throat. It's meant to be abrupt, corrective, painful enough to remind him of his place.

And it is. But the reaction you've learned to expect never comes.

His head rises, and then steadies - held there not by the guard's grip but by something more deliberate. There's no flinch, no tightening at the corners of his eyes, no shift in breath; not even the instinctive recoil from the pain. His movement resolves too cleanly, too precisely, as though the violence of it has been accounted for, had been expected.. perhaps even experienced before.

Your focus sharpens. Most react, even the trained ones, there is always something - an interruption in rhythm, a break in control. But this one offers nothing. For a brief, almost imperceptible moment, his gaze passes over the room without settling, unfixed and distant, as if taking measure of space rather than people. As if listening to someone that isn't there again. Then it stops. Right. on. you.

It doesn't feel like chance, not the way a drifting eye happens when a room offers nothing worth holding. His attention arrives with the precision of selection, as though something in you has already been accounted for in whatever internal map he is working from. He tilts his head a fraction, but the effect is unmistakable: the rest of the room is dismissed in his eyes and you are not being looked at so much as held in place by attention that does not intend to move again unless you move first. There is no desperation in it, no plea, no open defiance. It does not reach. It does not retreat. It assesses. The realization comes before the word does, quiet and unwelcome.

Recognition.

Your grip tightens slightly around the pencil. "Release the chain." And they do without hesitation. The guards let the metal slacken though their posture remains coiled, prepared for the expected misstep; the lashing out, the aggression of an unchecked male specimen. But it never comes. He doesn't even move. No lunge. No sway. No attempt to reclaim distance or test the space newly given to him. He simply remains where he is, shoulders set beneath restraint, his head still lifted - though not by force now, by choice - as if the command had been his to accept. Or refuse.

Then something in your pulse shifts, subtle enough to irritate more than alarm. You make another note.

'Displays no stress response.'

Pause. Then strike through it with a half-hearted sigh. He wasn't calm, you were certain of that much. Calm would indicate the lack of stress, but the word "controlled" sat wrong too, it implied something external, a leash, a handler, which wasn’t entirely wrong, but what you had observed was neither.

'Displays no stress response, Aware of observer'

Aware. The word sits wrong the moment you write it, felt too small for what you're observing, but you scratch a line beneath it anyway. He is not merely aware the way a catalogued male learns to be aware - reading the room for threat, for exit, for the precise angle of submission most likely to spare him pain, no. This is something older than that, more patient, more calculating. You are still turning the thought over when you look up from your notes and find that he has not stopped watching you since you stopped watching him.

The eye contact was an immediate spark that sent a shiver up your spine as if predator recognized prey. Your heart thumped against it's cage and you furrowed your brow in mock concentration to mask your shock. You were a professional, you'd had beasts of men storm into this space, snarling and tugging at the chains that bound them until skin broke, gnashing their teeth and pleading for things they thought they understood. But this male did no such thing and that alone unnerved you.

He is still. Not the stillness of submission, not the stillness of fear, no, the stillness of something that has learned to wait. The stillness of a predator.

Your gaze holds his a beat past professional and in that beat the pencil in your hand becomes something you are acutely aware of. A low, unnamable pressure settles beneath your ribs, quiet and unwelcome, the kind that arrives before you have a name for it. Your stomach closes around it like a fist finds a sword, a throat.

You swallow.

He is a specimen. An asset. A variable to be assessed and categorized. Nothing more… nothing more..

Your expression does not change, but your weight shifts, barely, a fraction of an inch, and his eyes sharpen. Not at the movement, but at the decision behind it, and he files it away behind that same impenetrable stillness, as patient as a collector. You bring your pulse back by habit, you return your eyes to the page and hum before you look at him the way you look at the others. Now forced and not because protocol calls for it. Still, the note you do not write sits heavier than the ones you do and you tuck it away in your mind.

'Observer experiences sympathy for peculiar male specimen.'

"Strip what's necessary." Your voice returns to you steadier than you deserve, however this time you do not glance at him. You watch him and catch the first thing he has given you: a single, almost imperceptible contraction at the outer corner of his eye, there and gone, swallowed back into that vast stillness before it can become anything you could name in a report. "Hold."

It's that slip, that glitch: the fraction of a second where control is less than absolute, before it is sealed and buried again beneath the next layer of steel. You mark it, and in the space that follows you let the room fill with silence - not as warning, not as mercy, but as an invitation for the specimen to recalibrate to your terms. The guards await your next gesture, tension in their knuckles, eyes darting between your measured calm and the threat of what’s tethered between them.

"Proceed."

The guards seize the order and strip away his clothing, each movement practiced to efficiency. Boots first, then the grim, blood-woven trousers that had been stitched and restitched by rough hands, the fabric more scar than cloth. Every article removed exposes planes of a body built for endurance, not display - though the effect is somehow more arresting for its lack of ornament. He is scarred. Not with the lazy, accidental etchings of the standard Wildes' prey, but with the deliberate brands of combat and punishment. The latticework of recountable injuries spread over his chest and along the ridges of his ribs: knife wounds and dull blunt trauma, a spread of pucker-scars suggestive of a shotgun spray, crude cauterizations and ancient bullet tracks.

But then his face - half of it is less face than memory, the corner of his mouth torn and split upward as if by a cruel and practiced hand, and a web or burn scars pucker his skin. A surgeon, maybe, had tried to knit the split, the sutures crude but semi-effective, and one eye, bloodshot with a web of capillaries, sits under a split brow. Even so, the gaze is intact. His nose has been broken twice, once recent, once long healed; his hair, shorn with a blade, grows in uneven and close to the skull, black and thick.

You note all of this and continue observing as a shiver draws your eyes lower, and you are left surprised by the lack of shame or modesty in him. You see his thick, softened cock, heavy against his thigh, completely at rest yet somehow more imposing for its stillness, and the sac below it, full and taut, as if all the world’s violence and hunger had bled down into these organs and made them dense with purpose. For a moment, the dissonance is so acute - between the mutilations above and the unmarked perfection below - that even the guards hesitate, covering their confusion with scornful glances, but failing to conceal how their eyes track the specimen’s anatomy with an envy that is anything but professional.

You let your gaze linger, cataloguing without affect. He is beautiful, anatomically flawless in terms of breedability. You consider his options briefly before shooting a glare at the two guards. "Knock it off, you two." They straighten right away. "Yes Miss."

You return your gaze once more and crouch down to get a closer look, being thorough was your job, and something you took seriously. So when you reach him, his cock twitches - a startlingly animate gesture among the utter stillness of the rest of his body - and you feel, to your professional disgust, a flush crawl up your neck with a hot, prickling urgency. 'Ignore it', you told yourself. Your hand flicks the pencil across the page, annotating with sterile clarity the curvature, color, and presentation of the specimen's genitals, noting the involuntary response as evidence of intact function and baseline endocrine levels. Your own baseline, however, is spiking unacceptably. You clear your throat as if it could dislodge the heat from your chest or the unbidden image of how he might look in other, unwitnessed states: aroused not by humiliation, but by intent.

You continue and write your observations;

'testicular descent confirmed, no evident torsion, pubic hair pattern within standard deviation';

And it is only by will that you keep your hands from betraying anything like a tremor as you reach out with the end of your pencil, nudging his thigh for response. The thigh in question flexes, just a fraction, and you hear the minute creak of one of the chains - he could break it, you realize, if only he cared to.

The knowledge is as clarifying as it is chilling.

Yet here he stands, fully exposed, the only restraint now the collar and the guards' readiness. He breathes, and the curve of his lungs reminds you how well he fills the space. You realize now that the catalogued males are often hulking, but this one is different - still hulking in his own way, yes, but he is the shape of a tool too valuable to be thrown away, repaired again and again despite the damage, because nothing else will suffice. He is not just a body. He is a weapon, passed hand to hand, stained by every engagement.

You can only picture his file: the places he'd fought, the divisions he was claimed by, the verdicts rendered and rescinded. There's something uniquely exiled about him, as though each new scar is a verdict, each reparative suture an apology for the one that came before it. You find yourself wondering whose hand made each mark - enemy or ally, lover or torturer - and why he has not died in someone’s arms, or someone’s quarry.

Then your eyes narrow as the possibilities for his registry: Fighter meant guard, meant entertainer, meant frontlines and hunting and countless displays of testosterone for the Enclave. Breeder meant just that. Kept locked away with his cock milked for precious genetic materials to continue the human race. Pet was more complicated depending on the Owner and which faction she hailed from; determining whether he’d be graced with leather, metal or satin.

But you saw more than that. The thought arrives before you can stop it. Not specimen. Not male. Acquisition.

Your pencil stills against the page as one of the guards speak, "Verdict?", impatience creeping into his voice as he shifts his grip on the slackened chain. "Iron Daughters'll petition if he clears combat."

The irritation that rises in you is immediate enough to surprise you. "He hasn't cleared anything yet," you answer, much sharper than you'd intended. The guard only shrugs, his eyes flicking dismissively over him. "Looks sturdy enough. Breed stock if nothing else."

And something unpleasant twists beneath your ribs.

'If nothing else.'

As though he were interchangeable. As though another like him might wander in with the next caravan of half-starved Wildes, bloodied and begging. Your gaze returns to him despite yourself, and again you find him watching you with that same impossible steadiness, as if the space between observation and understanding has narrowed in ways you had not authorized.

And then the room feels smaller suddenly. Closer. You step toward him before entirely deciding to, near enough now to see the inconsistencies hidden by distance: the old scar tissue disappearing beneath the metal collar, the faint discoloration at the edges of poorly healed wounds, the subtle hitch in breath he suppresses when one of the guards shifts the chain too carelessly.

There. Pain. Not absent, never absent, but contained.

The realization lands somewhere softer than it should. You bend slightly to better inspect the ruined line of his jaw, your gaze tracing the damage there with professional intent, though something quieter lingers beneath it now, something dangerously adjacent to curiosity. The split at the corner of his mouth had healed unevenly, pulled taut in a way that suggested deliberate cruelty rather than accident. Up close, the violence of him feels different. Less monstrous. More survived.

"You've endured quite a lot," you murmur before thinking better of it, the words escaping quieter than protocol allows and the room stills. One of the guards glances at the other, but it is him you notice, not your guards, because something shifts. Not visibly enough for anyone else to catch. No grand reaction, no softening of his features or yours, yet his attention sharpens with startling precision, settling over you with something newly focused, as though until now he had merely tolerated your presence and suddenly, inexplicably, chosen to acknowledge it.

The sensation unsettles you far more than aggression would have; and somewhere beneath the clinical rhythm of observation and assessment, beneath protocol and training and all the rules meant to keep professional distance intact, a thought slips quietly into place and refuses to leave:

The Iron Daughters would waste him.

You are not entirely certain when the thought becomes something uglier.

Something selfish.

He should remain here. With you.

The thought arrives fully formed this time, uninvited and unsoftened by professional distance. It does not feel like assessment anymore. It feels like conclusion. The Iron Daughters would waste him, the Enclave would decorate him until nothing useful remained, and the Verdant Mothers - your own system, your own structure - would at least understand what it meant to preserve value when it was found. You tell yourself it's logic. Allocation. Efficiency. Yet the word that lingers beneath it is not any of those things.

It's possession.

He is a prime specimen, one too rare to be misplaced, too intact to be handed off to incompetence. Your pencil resumes movement, but slower now, less certain, as if even documentation has begun to lag behind intent. You are no longer recording what he is, you are deciding where he belongs.

"He's a prime specimen."

Your voice is steadier than whatever sits beneath it, and you hold the space after it just long enough for it to become final rather than considered.

"Too prime for the Daughters."

One of the guards makes a small sound of agreement that only sharpens your irritation further. You turn the page with deliberate control.

"The Enclave would stockade him. Turn him into a show."

You pause only long enough for the thought to form properly in your mind before it reaches your mouth.

"Sure, they'd admire his cock, milk it and waste the seed. Then they'd treat him like the Hunchback of Notre Dame." The words settle in the room with a strange finality and you exhale through your nose, the tension in your grip tightening around the pencil at the image they conjure - not just of excess, but of misuse. Wasted potential irritates you more than brutality ever has.

"Best placement is with the Mothers. Here, in the Vale." Silence follows. Not resistance, not agreement - but something more uncertain, as though the room itself recalibrates around your decision. The guards exchange a glance, and then still once more.

"Return him to holding. Ensure he's washed, fed. I’ll reexamine tomorrow."

There is brief hesitation but authority closes it quickly. The chains that bind him shift and he is pulled back toward the door. And then, just before he leaves your line of sight, his gaze catches yours again. It's quick, not entirely deliberate, but it lands with precision anyway as though recognition has already been recorded and stored somewhere neither of you can access. And once more it unsettles you more than it should, because it doesn't feel like the end of an inspection.

It feels like the beginning of acknowledgment.

The door closes and the sound lingers, and before you sterilize, before you finalize notes, you are already writing the request. The words forming cleanly, decisively, almost detached from you entirely. 'High Mother authorization. Retention petition. Containment reassignment to Verdant custody.' The language is correct, the structure is correct, but somewhere between the lines, something less correct is taking shape - quiet, certain, and entirely unconcerned with whether it is permitted or not.

You would have him. And now the only remaining question is how long it will take the system to agree with you.