The second Captain John Price receives credible intelligence regarding his missing lieutenant, accompanied by photographic evidence of said lieutenantâs current condition, he pinches the bridge of his nose and holds it there for a long moment.
Then he releases a sigh so deep and profoundly exhausted that the paperwork on his desk flutters.
There are moments in a manâs life when he reflects upon the choices that brought him to his present circumstances. Price has had more of those moments than most, usually while being shot at, occasionally while filling out expense reports, and once while watching Soap attempt to determine whether a grenade could be used to open a particularly stubborn jar of pickles.
This, however, may be the first time he has seriously regretted not accepting that desk job his uncle offered him straight out of school.
Corporate office. Nine to five. Sensible shoes. Perhaps a retirement party where the greatest threat to his life wouldâve been Sandra from Accounts becoming emotional after two glasses of prosecco.
Instead, he is staring at a photograph of Lieutenant Simon Riley tied to a chair in what appears to be a dungeon.
Bare concrete walls, chains hanging from hooks, one exposed bulb casting ominous shadows. There is even what appears to be a table containing several neatly arranged implements of torture, although Price suspects at least two of them are novelty kitchen utensils.
Simon sits in the middle of it all wearing his skull mask, trousers, and an expression that cannot be seen but can nevertheless be felt radiating through the photograph.
Price studies the ropes binding his lieutenantâs wrists.
He blinks.
He studies them again.
The rope is looped around Simonâs arms perhaps twice, secured with what looks suspiciously like a shoelace knot, and hanging loose enough that a moderately determined toddler could escape it.
âAre we certain this is current?â Price asks.
The intelligence officer standing opposite his desk shifts his weight. âTimestamp puts it at fourteen hundred yesterday, sir.â
âAnd weâre certain itâs Riley?â
âYes, sir.â
Price looks back at the photograph.
Simonâs boots are planted comfortably apart. His shoulders are relaxed. There are no visible injuries. Someone has placed a folded blanket beneath him so the metal chair wonât be uncomfortable.
There is also, Price notices with mounting despair, a bottle of water positioned beside his right foot with the water level already half gone.
âRight,â Price says.
The investigation continues and it should be difficult to determine how one of the worldâs most highly trained special operations soldiers was abducted from his own home. Simon Riley is six foot something of professionally cultivated paranoia. He checks exits without thinking, sleeps lightly, and once identified a surveillance team because the same pigeon appeared outside three different cafes.
You, by comparison, possess all the operational subtlety of a marching band falling down a staircase.
Price discovers you have been following Simon for six weeks.
Not discreetly, no. Youâve followed him to the store, the gym, the shooting range, and several coffee shops. Youâve taken photographs from behind newspapers held upside down, worn a black trench coat during a heatwave, an once crouched behind a decorative hedge that did not make you as invisible as you probably led yourself to believe you were.
Security footage shows Simon looking directly into the camera on several occasions while you scurry behind him between hiding places.
Price sees all of this and lowers his face into his hands.
The next report arrives shortly before lunch.
âA syringe was recovered from Lieutenant Rileyâs residence,â an officer tells him.
Price straightens slightly. Finally. Something resembling an actual crime.
âForensics?â
âLorazepam, sir.â
âWhat dosage?â
The officer consults the report. âZero point five milligrams.â
Price stares at him.
The officer clears his throat. âAtivan.â
âI know what lorazepam is.â
âYes, sir.â
Price looks at the report again, perhaps hoping an additional zero will materialize through force of will.
It doesnât.
âZero point five.â
âYes, sir.â
âThat dose wouldnât knock out a pensioner after Sunday lunch.â
âNo, sir.â
âRiley weighs nearly two forty.â
âYes, sir.â
They stand in silence and Priceâs eye begins to twitch.
The final piece of evidence is recovered from a traffic camera positioned across from Simonâs flat where Pricd can see you dragging Simon beneath the arms towards the back door.
Dragging is perhaps generous. You are straining, red faced and panting, moving him approximately three inches at a time while Simon allows his boots to scrape uselessly across the floor. His head lolls against his shoulder with theatrical unconsciousness.
In the process, his boot catches the base of a standing lamp, which begins to fall.
Simon, still allegedly unconscious, reaches out one hand, catches it, carefully rights it, and places it back beside the doorway.
âUnbelievable,â Price mutters.
You turn around at the sound and he drops his arm and resumes being unconscious before you see him.
You stare suspiciously and Simon remains perfectly still.
After several seconds, you shrug and return to your kidnapping.
Price pauses the footage, sits back, and runs both hands slowly down his face, dragging his palms over his beard until he resembles a man trying to physically remove himself from existence.
Behind him, one of the task force operators shifts impatiently. âCaptain?â
Price says nothing.
âDo you want us to assemble a team?â
âNo.â
There is a pause.
âNo, sir?â
âNo.â
âBut Lieutenant Riley has been taken hostage.â
âHas he?â
The operator looks at the frozen image on the screen. Simonâs enormous, supposedly unconscious body is halfway inside a compact hatchback while you attempt to fold one of his legs through the door.
âHeâs tied to a chair, sir.â
âHe could break those ropes by sneezing.â He says while he picks up Simonâs personnel file.
He opens it, turns to the appropriate page, and begins filling out a leave request.
The operator watches him. âSir?â
Price writes Simon Riley beneath the section marked PERSONNEL NAME.
âCaptain, what are you doing?â
âAdministrative work.â
âShouldnât we at least contact him?â
Price checks the box beside personal leave.
âHeâs been missing for two days.â
Price writes seven beneath REQUESTED NUMBER OF DAYS, considers it, crosses it out, and replaces it with fourteen.
âSir.â
Price signs the bottom of the form with a flourish made violent by fatigue.
The operator makes a questioning noise in the back of his throat.
Price places the completed document neatly on top of the photograph showing his lieutenant sitting comfortably in a dungeon with a blanket beneath his ass, a half finished bottle of water by his foot, and enough slack in his restraints to knit a second rope.
âNo deployment,â Price says. âNo rescue attempt. No one contacts him unless thereâs an actual emergency.â
âBut- â
âSimonâs exactly where he wants to be right now.â
Ghost doesn't like to be bossed around, everyone knows this.
Sure, he can duck his head and go along with superiors during missions, show the required amount of respect so he isn't shot. But off the field? Ghost has sent people to medical for telling him to move out of the way in a crowded hall.
Which is why everyone is shocked by how you treat him.
"Ghost, over here." You snap your fingers in his direction without looking up from your clipboard. A scowl firm on your face while ghost just...obeys. walks right over to dutifully peer over your shoulder "the hell is this, lieutenant? I shouldn't see discrepancies in inventory like this."
Ghost, to the rooms shock, simply nods peacefully. He seems almost shy when he offers "i can go recount, won't take me long."
Ghost, the guy who has genuinely pulled a knife over being told to make copies of something, just volunteered to recount the entire inventory.
That's just one example of the way you boss him around.
Soap won't shut up about the time you grabbed a still-bloody ghost fresh off the heli by the strap of his vest just to hiss "get your ass to medical, lieutenant. You look pathetic." Or the time gaz saw you chew ghost out for "standing in the fucking way. Either sit down or come help, Riley."
Ghost takes every rude comment and scold with a smile under that mask. Practically basking in your ire, almost blissful in gazs opinion.
Of course, no one dares to speculate on why. Most importantly no one mentions it to you.
They don't need to, either. You know damn well ghost gets off on you pushing him around. He likes to think he's subtle but even with compression shorts you know when he's sporting a stiffy. You don't mind, he looks hot when his brow pinches at dissapointing you.
Really, you want to know how much it takes before he begs for a chance to fuck you.
pornstar!ghost who cannot stop playing with you over your panties, hold you hostage in his lap while he gets his fill of you
he gets your cunt so often for work that it's a novel treat getting to toy with your lingerie. it's how he knows the cameras arent running, that when your lips part and your eyes roll it isn't scripted, isn't for anyone's benefit but his, because no one can see that pretty pussy.
but he can feel it.
can feel the way your clit swells when he pinches it, rubs his fingers over it, slaps it. can feel when you start to get wet, the way it begins to soak the fabric, silk and lace sticking to your cunt, slicking his fingers where they rub over you. you twitch and flinch away from him, pressing tighter into his hold in the process.
God, he loves it. loves the way you whine for him, beg for him, the way you turn with wet parted lips to try and catch his mouth with your panting desperate kisses.
it's the only time he talks too much, tells you too much, asks you for too much. asks you to tell him you're his when he knows you can't be.
No thoughts just post-TBI!soap who's hair is a grown out mess when you met him, right?
It's difficult to take care of his hair when his body doesn't want to listen to him most days. Limbs jerking at odd angles, cramping up, or running on a delay.
"I could cut it for you," you offer one night, brushing a strand of hair behind his ear. It's one of those days where soap wants to be anyone but the person he is. "I used to cut my friends hair all the time. Mohawk is easy."
"Y-you know it'll t-take forever, dove." Soap warns, refusing to get his hopes up "i can't s-sit still. Not like I used t-to."
"More time with eye candy? Oh nooooo...what will I do?" You roll your eyes, teasing.
Which is how soap ends up in the bathroom, shirt off because he knows he'll be hopping in the shower afterwards anyways. It feels weird having anyone so close, your hand in his hair "okay, johnny. I'm starting now, be good for me."
Turns out, soap has been missing this. Letting go while a lover cards through his hair. You easily adjust to the sudden jerks and twitches of his body, pulling the clippers away and resuming seamlessly with a "mh, so reactive, johnny."
It's been months since soap has felt in any way sexy. It's impossible for him to find pleasure in the body that hardly feels like his own.
But as you slowly shape out that familiar mohawk, it's like something snaps back into place. Your hands gently tugging soaps head into place has him blushing, half-hard from the absent touches alone.
"Oh? Really, johnny?" Then your hand really cards through his fresh mohawk, grips his roots tight and pulls him back to look at your pleased expression "enjoying it? Hm?"
The other hand slips down to palm at his jeans, and for the first time in months soap is arching his back with a moan. He clumsily humps your palms, eager.
"Go clean up and then we can play, okay?" You coo, offering his bulge one last stroke.
Soap sets a record for his fastest shower post-injury that night.
John price who has to dress up for a big formal event, right?
Of course the venues too hot, so the jacket comes off almost immediately, slung over his arm and framing that watch he loves. Leaving him in just a thin, white button-down.
Everytime he moves, those muscles flexing over cloth that hugs a bit too tight, you can see faint shadow along his shoulder, back, chest.
"I didn't know you had tattoos, sir." You mumble when he finally approaches after catching you staring for the fifth time that night.
"Got 'em back in basic," price hums, and you swear he reaches past you to grab a glass of champagne just to get you tight and close to his body. Chuckling at your obvious embarrassment with a "they're probably older than you, kid."
He turns back around, and you go right back to staring at the faint tattoos through the shirt, all along his broad shoulders andâ
Now imagine a soulmate au where your soulmates name is written on you, right?
You've known the name "john price" long before you knew how to write your own, child fingers tracing the letters on your arm, reverent.
You tried finding him, of course you did, but as it happens john price is far too common of a name. You give up on your dreams eventually. life demands you to actually live it instead of waiting for the signal to go.
As it happens, on one of your nights out you stumble upon him.
John price. You had noticed him in the bar earlier, drawn to him in a way you couldn't explain, and now it's him approaching you. He nods at your exposed arm, body between you and the rest of the crowd, almost possessive. "You are my soulmate, yes?"
Your name rolls off his tongue like honey, has your soul thumping at the thought of the one.
John price is big, strong, and dangerously handsome. He smells like whiskey and smoke and expensive cologne that tells you the gold around his neck is real. He keeps glancing at your mark with a smile, awestruck the same as you.
"Can i see my name? I want...I want to feel it." You tug at his leather jacket impatiently.
"Ah, bad idea. I was...hurt. left a scar right next to it, looks quite gruesome." He frowns, redirecting your hand to his lips for a kiss. You understand, soulmarks are personal, add in insecurity about scars and...you decide not to push.
Still, when his hand slides low on your back, eyes lidded in desire, you follow him home.
God are you thankful john is your soulmate, you're not sure how you could enjoy another man after the night he gave you. Entire body sore and pleased, face-down on his bed.
That's the exact image nikolai sends price, your soulmark clear in the frame. Followed by the message "warmed it up for you, john ;)"
Thinking about ghost's baby who always wants a bite of other peoples food.
Without fail, whenever anyone decides to eat around baby regardless of what the food actually is, tiny hands are waving in the air asking for some. Without fail, ghost has to gently try and redirect baby in a way that won't induce tears because
Because baby cries over clouds going away and random rocks...this always leads to fat tears and ghost glaring at the perpetrators.
He's about ready to bite you when you, in the middle of chatting with him in the porch, pull out your lunchbox. Sure, you always eat lunch with him on the porch, but baby's had a rough day and you know how baby gets.
Various fruits, some granola, a sandwich. Nothing special, but baby uncurls from his chest to blink curiously at the meal.
"...ahhh. ahb. Ahhh." Baby huffs, tiny fingers spread out and making grabby-hands, nearly toppling out of ghosts arms when he leans further.
"Aw, want a bite?" You ask baby, already pulling out a second container from you lunch, "here, have some. Yeah?"
Baby squeals in delight when you give him a slice of banana, round cheeks red and eyes squinted at his victory.
You...you packed food, just in case baby wanted some.
From there it's like a game. Making a big show of grabbing something "random" from your plate for baby to eat. Every single time baby loves it.
No once does baby cry when you eat around him, always armed with a smaller baby-safe version.
...yet the guys wonder why you're the only one with babysitting privileges.
You can't prove it, but someone has been in your apartment
Stalker/Serial Killer!Simon x Reader.
You can't breathe.
The rain is preventing it, filling the space between your mouth and the sky so that every breath you drag in is half air and half water, and your lungs are working at a deficit, pulling overtime.Â
You're running. You've been running. And it feels the way running feels in dreams, the legs churning, the ground stretching, the distance between you and anywhere safe expanding with every stride like the earth is being fed through on a belt beneath you, and no matter how hard you push it is not enough. It has never been enough.
The rain has soaked through everything. Your shirt is a second skin, plastered to the curve of your spine, dragging at your shoulders, heavy and sodden, pulling at the hem. Your joggers are worse. Waterlogged from the thighs down, clinging to the backs of your knees, catching with every stride so that each step is between momentum and drag.Â
You're still in your slippers- your fucking slippers- because you didn't have time for shoes, didn't have time for anything except the door and the stairs and the rain, and the soles are tearing apart against the wet ground. Every stone and root and divot rips through what's left of them. The cold stopped being pain a while ago. Now it's just absence. Your feet belong to someone else.
The field behind your apartment building is open and dark and the grass is slick and knee high in places, whipping against your shins as you crash through it, and somewhere behind you something is moving at a pace that doesn't match yours.
You're sprinting. The thing behind you is not. The thing behind you is covering the same ground at a walk, maybe a jog, the unhurried gait of something that understands the end of the pursuit better than you do: that your speed is borrowed from adrenaline and adrenaline has a half life and the distance between you is a loan you're taking out against a body that will come to collect.
The tree line. You can see it in the lightning, ragged dark mass, oak and ash and whatever else grows in the scrubby, unloved patch of urban woodland the city council hasn't developed yet. You've walked past it. You've never been inside it.
The dark between those trees is absolute and unknowable and you are running toward it anyway because the open field is killing you. Open means visible. Visible means found.
You hit the trees and the world changes.
The rain doesn't stop but it fractures, breaking against the canopy and reaching you in fat, cold drops that fall from leaves instead of sky, landing on the back of your neck.
The ground goes soft. Mud swallowing your foot to the ankle on the first step, the earth making a sound around your slipper that is wet and when you wrench free the shoe stays behind. You keep going. Barefoot on one side, the mud pressing between your toes.
You can't see. The canopy hides the lightning. What was blue white and blinding in the field becomes a dim, grey flicker in here, enough to show you shapes, trunk and branch, before the dark closes back over.
You navigate by collision. Bark under your palms as you bounce off trees you don't see until you're hitting them. Your shoulder clips an oak hard and something tears and you catch yourself on a low branch and the bark strips the skin from your palm in a hot, wet line, blood bubbling between fingers, and you keep moving.
Behind you, a branch breaks.
Something heavy stepping on something small, and the crack travels through the trees with a clarity that cuts through the rain and the thunder and lands in the base of your skull like a nail. You don't turn around. Turning around means slowing down.
A root catches your foot- the bare one, the one with no slipper- and you go down hands first, and the mud is cold and deep and your fingers sink into it to the second knuckle and the impact jars through your wrists and into your shoulders and your chin catches a root knuckle and the pain is bright, a flare of white behind your eyes, a copper bloom across your tongue where your teeth meet the inside of your cheek. You're on your hands and knees in the mud and the rain is hammering the canopy above you and the thunder rolls through the ground beneath your palms.
You push yourself up. Your hands slip. The mud gives and doesn't give back and your arms are shaking, not fear, not just fear, but the muscles beginning to fail, the glycogen stores emptying, the body starting to make panicked desperations your brain won't: how much farther, at what cost, for how long.
You get up. You run.
The woods thicken. The trees are closer together now and you're weaving between them with a gait that's barely controlled, pinballing off bark with your forearms raised to protect your face, and the branches catch you everywhere else, across the collarbone, the bicep, the soft skin at the inside of your wrist, leaving lines of heat that surface as welts, thin red marks that swell and sting in the rain.
Your bare foot finds something sharp. Glass, maybe, or a stone with an edge, and the pain blooms upward from the arch and you feel the skin open and the heat of blood mixing with the cold of mud and you don't stop. You can't stop.
The trees thin. You stumble out of the dense growth and into a gap in the canopy where a tree came down years ago. Rain returns full and direct, hammering the crown of your skull and running into your eyes. The ground is more leaf litter than mud. Your feet find traction for the first time in minutes.
You stop.
Not because you decide to. Because your body stops. The quadriceps seize, the calves lock, and you stand in the centre of the clearing bent double with your hands on your knees and your mouth open and the rain pouring down your face and into your gasping mouth, and the sound of your own breathing is the loudest thing in the world, ragged, wet, the desperate bellow pump of lungs operating past their margin.
You listen.
Rain on leaves. Thunder, further now, rolling east. Wind in the upper canopy, moving through the branches with a long, low hiss. The drip of water from a broken trunk to your left, rhythmic, metronomic, almost soothing.
No footsteps. No branches breaking. No displacement of air or weight behind you. The woods are empty. The dark between the trees is just dark. You turn, slowly, a full rotation, and every shadow is a shadow and every shape is a tree and the clearing is a clearing and you are alone in it.
The seconds pass. Ten. Twenty. The thunder moves further east and the lightning becomes occasional, distant, a flicker on the horizon rather than a detonation overhead. The rain eases from hammering to steady.
The breath comes out of you.
Not a sigh. Something deeper, something that originates in the locked down muscles of your lower back and travels upward through the ribs and the shoulders and the clenched, aching vice of your jaw. Your hands unclench and the tendons in your fingers straighten with the slow, creaking reluctance of something that's been locked too long, and your shoulders drop a quarter inch, and the shaking changes, less adrenaline, more cold, the tremor shifting from survival to exposure, and you straighten up and push the wet hair off your face and you breathe. In. Out. The rain is cold and clean and tastes like nothing and you stand in it and let it hit you.
You're out. You're alone. Whatever was behind you is gone, lost in the trees and the dark and the rain, and you're going to find the edge of the wood and a road and a light and-
The hand comes from behind you.
It covers your mouth and nose in a single motion, a seal, the palm wide enough to close over the entire lower half of your face with no gap, no sliver of clean air, and the cloth against your skin is wet and cold and sweet in a way that is immediately, viscerally wrong. The other arm locks around your waist, and your back meets his chest and the air leaves your lungs in a scream that doesn't make it past the cloth.
His cock is hard. Pressed against the base of your spine, unmistakable, the obscenity of it, that this is arousal, that the chase and the catching and the feel of your soaked body pinned against his is doing something to him. His breathing doesn't change. That's the worst part. The breathing stays steady, metered, controlled, even as the evidence of what this is doing to him presses against you with a bluntness that is almost conversational, almost casual, like a fact stated without shame: this is what you do to me. This is what catching you does to me.Â
His arm around your waist tightens, a fractional shift of pressure that brings your hips flush against his, and the adjustment is small and deliberate and possessive in a way that has nothing to do with strategy and everything to do with the specific, private, unhurried pleasure of a man pressing a caught thing closer because he can.
The cloth stays where it is. The chemical is sweet and heavy and it's in every breath now, saturating the fibres, filling your sinuses, coating the back of your throat with a taste like overripe fruit left in a closed room.
Your hands are on his forearm, both of them, gripping, pulling, nails digging into skin that doesn't give, and the strength in the arm is not reactive, not straining, just there. Your feet are sliding in the mud and you're pushing backward, trying to use his weight against him, but his weight doesn't move and your weight is leaving you, draining out through the soles of your feet.
Your knees soften, the tension that holds you upright dissolving. The chemical is fast. Faster than it should be, which means the concentration is high, which means the dosage was calculated, which means someone did the math on your body with an accuracy that implies knowledge of measurements you've never shared with anyone.Â
Your arms drop, fingers uncurling from his forearm one by one like petals off a dead flower, and your hands hang at your sides and your weight shifts backward into him and he takes it. He takes all of it. The arm around your waist becomes the only thing left in your body, the single point that keeps you vertical while everything else goes soft and dark and far away.
The rain is still falling but it sounds like it's happening to someone else, in a room you've already left. The thunder is just vibration. His chest behind you is just warmth. The cloth is just cloth and the chemical is just a taste now, fading, everything fading, the clearing going grey at the edges and then dark and then nothing, and the last sensory information your brain processes before the dark takes the rest is not the storm or the cold or the pain in your foot or the blood on your chin.
It's the smell of cigarette smoke. Old, stale, ground into the skin of the hand over your mouth- the same smoke that you swore you could smell inside your flat for weeks. And underneath it, faint, almost imagined: your own shampoo. On his skin. In the creases of fingers that have been inside your home, your bathroom, your bedroom, opening and closing around objects that belong to you with the slow, ritualistic patience of a man cataloguing a collection he hasn't finished building.
The dark doesn't fall. It rises. Up from the ground, up through your feet, up through the muscles and the bones and the blood, filling you from the bottom like a vessel being submerged, and the last thing you feel is his mouth against the crown of your head and then the vessel fills and the dark closes over the top and there is nothing left of you that is yours.
Simon Riley lifts you out of the mud.
The storm covers the sound.
No one sees him leave.
***
Several weeks agoâŠ
Finding your address takes Simon Riley eleven minutes. Â
You donât exactly do anything to hide your social media presence after all. Two photographs from your public account, backgrounds cross referenced. A corner shop's CCTV feed he shouldn't have access to and does and he has everything he needs. The flat number. The floor. Which windows are yours.
He parks the truck across the street one evening and doesn't move it for three nights. Doesn't need to. Does it anyway. Watches your lights. Learns the routine of your evenings- when you eat, when you shower, when the last light goes out. Flies it all away, memorized completely, until it's as indistinguishable from the air.Â
He waits until he sees you leave for your shift. Watches the way you pull the door, checks the handle twice, a thing you probably don't know you do. Watches until you round the corner and are gone.
Then he crosses the street.
The lock takes nine seconds.
(Wet ground. Gravel digging into a bleeding back. A sky the colour of poured concrete, no depth, no distance, just grey pressing down. The sound his own breathing made when the next one becomes a question of âifâ not âwhenâ.)Â
The flat smells like vanilla lotion and laundry still holding warmth from the dryer and coffee that brewed hours ago and hasn't fully left the air. He stands in the doorway for a moment longer than he needs to. Just breathing it. Then he closes the door behind him, cock twitching, heat pooling low, infatuated hunger.
He moves through the living room slowly. No urgency. Your place is small, everything in reach of the sofa, everything angled towards comfort for a person who comes home tired and wants to stop. An empty mug on the coffee table, lipstick on the rim. He picks it up. Holds it for a moment, turns it in his hands, brings the stained edge to his face and runs his tongue across the porcelain.
Sets it back in the ring of condensation it left.
(Pressure. Hands. Small, delicate. Pressing down. Warm against his skin.)
The bookshelf. He runs a finger along the spines without pulling anything until he finds the one with the broken spine, the cracked glue of a book read too many times in the same place. He opens to the bookmarked page. Reads filthy words about a man taking what he wanted. Hums when he imagines you touching yourself, fingers sinking into your cunt while you fantasize about strong hands pinning you down.Â
Every room feeds the obsession and heâs rock hard by the time he reaches your bedroom, the air thicker here, soaked in your scent. The bed is unmade on one side only, the pillow still holding the impression of your head, the duvet pushed back, the small evidence of a morning abandoned to the alarm. He stands beside it and looks at it for what is probably too long and then he steps inside.Â
(You hadn't spoken to him the way people speak to someone who might be dying. No performance of calm. No hollow reassurance. Just looked down at him like his death was just a minor inconvenience in your day.)
He finds the vibrator tucked inside your nightstand, still faintly sticky. A low, guttural groan rumbles in his chest. Naughty thing, fucking yourself after a long day. He turns it on for a second, the quiet buzz making his cock strain against his pants, before switching it off and returning it as if he was never there.
He opens the hamper, his own little treasure chest, and finds a worn pair of your panties- soft cotton, crotch still damp and stained with your slick, makes his mouth water. He brings them to his nose and huffs deeply, eyes rolling back.Â
(Stay with me. Maybe you said it. Maybe he built it later. Memory at the margins of consciousness is unreliable, the brain filling negative space with what it needs. But the hands he would know. Would know the specific weight and purpose of them anywhere.)
âFuckâŠ,â he mutters, voice rough and depraved, takes a step backwards, then another, another, until heâs sitting on your unmade bed. He lays down, presses his face into your pillow, grinds hips until heâs rutting against your bedsheets, imagining you beneath him.Â
Pulls out his thick drooling cock, veins pulsing on the underside, and fucks your pillow hard enough that the headboard taps onto your wall. Imagines your face right there, flushed and needy, lips pulled wide around the head of it, so pretty under him, taking every inch down your throat every night. Pre smears across the fabric and his breath comes heavier, more animalistic, huffing your panties again, again as he chases the high.Â
(You hadnât looked scared of him. He remembers that specifically. Whatever youâd seen when you found him- the mask, the gun, the scars- youâd moved past it in about a second and a half. Inconvenient details. Not your problem.)
The pressure builds fast. He grabs the bottle of lotion from your night stand, the one you slather on your soft skin every night- He wants his teeth in that skin. Wants to bite down to the bone and hold on- and unscrews the cap with shaking hands.Â
At the last second he pulls his cock off your pillows, presses the swollen head onto the bottle and cums, ropes spurting heavy. He milks every drop, stroking himself through the aftershocks, watches his cum mix with the bottle youâll use later, rub onto your skin without even knowing, carry him with you.Â
(The way you'd sighed through your nose. Not fear. Not shock. Just the exhale of a person whose evening had just become more complicated and who was already calculating the cost.)Â
He straightens up.
Tucks his dick away. Buttons his trousers. Stands in the centre of your bedroom for a moment, just looking- the pillow, the nightstand, the lotion bottle returned to its exact position- and something in his chest settles.
He checks the room once. Twice. Leaves nothing out of place. Tucks your panties in his pocket and leaves.
(Civilian hands. No calluses in the right places, no muscle memory of this. Tearing fabric without being asked to. Figuring it out as you went.)
He lets himself out. Pulls the door closed behind him until the latch clicks soft. Stands in the corridor for a moment, existing in spaces he was never invited into.
Lights a cigarette on the way down the stairs.
He doesn't smoke it inside.
He's not a fucking animal afterall.Â
***
The man outside the pub doesnât know Simon Riley exists.Â
Thatâs fine. Thatâs usually how it goes.Â
He's been watching him long enough to understand what kind of man he is. The type. Broad in the shoulders and soft in the middle, who moves through the world with the loose, unexamined confidence of someone who had never once been made to feel small. The kind who followed women to their cars and called it a compliment. Who'd saw you existing after a late shift and had decided that constituted an introduction.
Simon had watched him outside the chippy a week ago. Had watched you clock him from twenty feet out, the way your pace adjusted, fractional, barely perceptible (How loud. How fast. How much trouble.) Had watched the man's hand close around your wrist for just a moment, fingers wrapping with the casual presumption of someone who had done this before and found it went fine, before you'd pulled free and he called you a fat bitch in response.Â
(The torch in your teeth while both hands worked. The angle of your head. Completely absorbed. He'd been a problem to be solved and you were solving him and the indignity of it had been the most alive he'd felt in years.)Â
You hadn't reported it. Simon had waited three days to be sure, watching for the signs of someone who had- the variation in route, the hypervigilance, the particular flattened stillness of a person who has filed a thing and is waiting to see what happens to it. Nothing. You'd absorbed it and kept moving.Â
He understood that too, in a way he couldn't have put language to, couldnât have articulated.
He follows the man from the pub at closing. Last out, loud with his friends until he isn't, splitting off at the corner with the bac slapping ease of men who don't think about walking home alone at night because they never have to. He navigates with the rolling gait of someone three pints past sensible, loose in the joints, nodding to himself about something, unbothered.
The night is cold and damp, the pavement still wet from earlier rain, the street lamps doing that particular thing they do where they light the ground directly under them but not the spaces between.Â
The man doesn't look up. Doesn't look behind him.
(You'd told him to stay still in the tone of someone who expected to be listened to. He had- god he had- a soldier through and through.)Â
The man makes a sound, at the end. They usually do. Something small and bewildered, the realization a person makes when they understand all at once that the night has a different direction than they thought it would go. Simon holds on until the understanding passes.
Then he steps back.
(The quality of your silence. Not frightened silence. Not careful silence. Just⊠you had nothing to say, so you said nothing. He hadn't known what to do with that for weeks.)Â
The van is parked at the alley's far end. Simon had left it there this afternoon. He'd known, by then, how the evening would go.
The man is breathing when Simon puts him in the back. Zip ties at the wrists, tape across the mouth, a canvas hood that smells like other jobs in the city. Simon closes the doors without urgency.
He drives for forty minutes.
The lockup is on an industrial estate that stopped being used for anything legitimate around 2019, the kind of place that gets planning notices taped to the fence for months before anyone acts on them. Simon has used it several times before. It has a drain in the floor and the walls are thick enough.
(At some point youâd sat back on your heels and just waited. Watched the wound. Your breathing had been even throughout. His hadnât.)
The man is awake by the time Simon drags him out of the van. Awake and making sounds behind the tape. His eyes above the tape are blown wide. Simon looks at them for a moment.
Finds he has nothing in particular to say as he drags him inside and straps him down.
It's quiet work. It always is.
(Afterwards, you wiped your hands on the back of your jeans, methodical. Then youâd stood up and that had been that.)
Checks his hands. His jacket. Rolls his neck once, the vertebrae popping in a slow sequence from the base up. His breathing hasn't changed. It never does, the body learned a long time ago that this doesn't warrant elevation, settled it into the same category as any other task completed, any other problem resolved.
He looks at whatâs left of the man for a moment; eyes above the tape still blown, chest still instead of panicked, a body now and not a person.
And finds he has no particular feelings about it.
(Left without waiting to see if he'd be alright. He'd watched you go from the ground. Decided something then that he hadn't put words to until later.Â
Hadn't needed to.)
***
PresentâŠ
The first thing that comes back is smell.
Cold metal. Old damp. Something chemical underneath it, industrial cleaner, thick and lives in the back of the throat and doesn't leave when you swallow.
The second thing is the surface beneath you.
Not soft. Not a bed. Something hard and flat and slightly raised at the edges, the metal seams pressing into your shoulder blades and the backs of your thighs through your wet clothes, and the cold of it has been working its way into you long enough that you can't feel the distinction between the table and your own skin anymore. Just cold. Just hard. Just the weight of a body that hasn't been moved in a long time.
You open your eyes.
The ceiling is wrong.
High. Concrete. A single bulb on a wire, the light it throws pooling down onto you in a jaundiced circle and leaving everything past its edge in deep, pressurised dark. Something hangs from the rafters. You blink. Focus.
Chains. Heavy gauge, looped through iron rings bolted into the beam above you, hanging in loose coils, some ending in hooks, some ending in nothing. Just chain. They catch the light in segments. They don't move.
You sit up.
Too fast. The room tilts, the chemical still moving through your blood in slow pulls, your vision lagging behind your head by a half second, and you put both palms flat on the table and look at your hands and think: table. You're on a table.
You look down at it.
Metal. Stainless steel, or close enough. Dull with use and age. A drain at one end and channels running toward it, worn smooth, the edges of them a colour the rest of the surface isn't.
The walls.
You make yourself look at the walls.
Covered. Arranged, and that's the thing that takes a moment to process, that it isn't chaos, that there is a system here and someone maintains it. Metal implements on pegboard hooks. Shapes you have names for and shapes you don't. Coils of rope hung in neat loops. A length of heavy plastic sheeting folded into a rectangle with creased edges. Zip ties in three sizes on three separate hooks.
Your brain moves through it. Moves past it. Files it somewhere it isn't going to open right now.
You get off the table.
Your bare foot touches the concrete floor and the cold shoots upward through your ankle and you remember the wood and the root and the skin opening on the arch and you look down. Someone has wrapped it. Gauze, tight and clean. You stare at it for a moment longer than makes sense.
You wrap your arms around yourself. Your clothes are still damp, stiffening now as they dry wrong against your skin, and the cold is bone deep and total.
Somewhere behind you, a door opens.
You turn.
He's bigger than the room should allow for. That's the first coherent thought- not fear, or not only fear, but the lizard brain focusing on the right thing or the wrong thing or the only thing that matters in that half second delay. Tall. Broad. The balaclava still on, the eyes above it catching the yellow light. He's not moving fast. He's not moving with urgency at all. He steps inside and closes the door behind him and stands there for a moment, looking at you.
You say nothing.
He says nothing.
The chains hang in the space between you. The drain sits at the edge of your vision. The table presses cold against the backs of your thighs and you are standing in the middle of all of it in stiff damp clothes with a wrapped foot and a mouth that tastes like chemicals and copper and your heart in your chest is doing something loud and relentless that you are not going to think about right now.Â
He takes a step toward you.
You take one back and your hip catches the edge of the table and you stop, your hands coming up not quite in front of you, not a fighting stance, just the instinctive, trying to make yourself account for the space it needs.
He stops. Looks at your hands. Looks at your face. Something in the set of his shoulders changes, a small adjustment, a fraction of something releasing that you couldn't have explained if asked.Â
"Sat up on your own." His voice is low. Manchester flat, the vowels worn down, consonants that don't waste themselves. The voice of someone for whom speaking is a tool and not a pastime. "Good."Â
You stare at him.
"Where am I." Not a question. The grammar of a question with the punctuation of a statement, because some part of you has already decided that the answer is less important than the act of speaking, of making the room contain your voice as well as his.
He looks around the space briefly. Back at you.
"Somewhere no one's lookinâ fer you."
"That's not an answer." The chains catch a draft from somewhere and shift, a soft metallic sound, barely there. You don't look at them. You keep your eyes on him and your hands where they are and your back against the cold edge of the table and you breathe.
In. Out.
"No," he agrees. He says it without apology, without particular interest in your objection. Just a fact acknowledged and set aside.Â
The rain outside hammers the corrugated roof in waves, loud then quiet then loud again, and the single bulb swings a half inch in the draft and the shadows move and then settle.
He takes another step toward you.
You don't move this time.
"You wrapped my foot," you say.
He says nothing.
"Why."
He looks at you for a long moment. The pale eyes move over your face with the same unhurried attention he brought to the room, to the door, to everything. Like assessment is just how he exists in the world. Like everything he looks at is being filed.
"Didn't need it gettinâ infected."
"You chloroformed me in the woods."
"Mmm."
The flatness of it. Not defensive. Not guilty. Just the confirmation of a man who sees no contradiction between the two facts and isn't going to pretend otherwise.
Your hands are still between you. You lower them slowly. Not because you've decided anything. Just because holding them up is starting to feel like a performance for an audience that isn't here.
"What do you want," you say.
He takes another step. You stay where you are this time, hip against the table, and he stops close enough that the space between you is no longer large. Close enough that you can see the pale of his eyes properly now, the way they haven't moved off your face since he came through the door.
"You know what I want," he says.
Your heart does the loud thing again.
"I don't," you say. "I don't know you."
Something moves across his expression. Not quite a smile. The ghost of something that might have been one in different circumstances, on a different face.
"You've known fer months."
The rain. The chains. The single bulb throwing its yellow circle down onto both of you now, the shadows pressed back to the edges of the room.
You look at him.
He looks at you.
The table is cold against the backs of your thighs and the gauze on your foot is tight and professionally done and the room smells like metal and old damp and somewhere underneath all of it, faint and almost imagined, cigarette smoke.
You don't say anything.
Neither does he.
The silence stretches, thick and charged, until the air between you feels like it might snap. The single bulb sways overhead, dragging yellow light across the sharp cut of his jaw beneath the balaclava, across those pale eyes that havenât left your face once. Heat rolls off his massive frame in waves, bleeding into the cold of the room, into the cold of your soaked clothes, until your skin prickles with it.
Your heart slams against your ribs like it wants to crawl out and hand itself over. The metal table bites into the backs of your thighs, the gauze on your foot is tight pressure, but none of that matters when he finally moves.
One big hand curls around your wrist, rough calluses scraping over your racing pulse. His thumb strokes once, like heâs tasting the fear and the want underneath it and then he lifts you like you weigh nothing and slams your back down onto the table.Â
The impact jars through your spine, cold steel shocking against your skin as your soaked shirt rides up and your joggers bunch at your hips. Heâs on you in the next breath, caging you completely, the thick, heavy ridge of his cock grinding hard against your cunt through the wet fabric.
You gasp- half protest, half broken moan and his mouth crashes down on yours, claiming, devouring. The balaclava is shoved higher now, just enough for his lips and teeth and tongue to bite through your skin, blooming blood against your tongue. He tastes like stale tobacco and rain, and he kisses like heâs starving, tongue fucking into your mouth in time with the harsh, obscene roll of his hips.Â
His cock is massive even through his trousers- thick, burning hot, the fat head already leaking and smearing precum against the soaked seam of your joggers.
One massive hand shoves under your shirt, palm rough and scalding as it palms your breast, callused thumb dragging over your nipple until itâs aching and peaked. He pinches hard, twisting just enough to make you arch and whimper into his mouth, tears splashing down your cheeks and then heâs yanking your joggers down your thighs, wet fabric catching at your knees; he doesnât bother pulling them off all the way. Just rips them down far enough to bare your dripping cunt to the cold air.
âFuckinâ hell,â he breathes, pulling back just enough to look. Two thick fingers drag through your folds, spreading the slick mess, circling your swollen clit until your hips jerk helplessly. âSoakinâ already. Knew youâd be a greedy lil thing fer me.â
He frees his cock with his other hand, the thick, veined length springing out heavy and flushed dark, the head glistening with precum, a fat drop beading at the slit.Â
Itâs obscene how big he is, how it throbs in his fist as he strokes himself once, twice, smearing the wetness. Then heâs lining up, the blunt head nudging against your entrance, stretching you open before he even pushes in.
Your eyes widen, panicked. âWait-!â
He drives in, bottoming out in a single stroke that punches the air from your lungs in a high pitched whine. The stretch is vicious, burning, your walls forced wide around the thick girth of him until you feel every vein, every ridge dragging against your insides. A broken cry tears from your throat as he bottoms out, tears spilling, balls heavy and tight against your ass, the head of his cock kissing so deep you swear you feel it in your throat.
âChrist, thaâs it,â he groans, hips grinding deep, holding himself there so you can feel every inch of him pulsing inside you. âTakinâ every fuckinâ inch. Been dreaming about this tight cunt swallowinâ me whole.â
He starts to move slow at first, dragging out until just the fat head is stretching your entrance, then slamming back in so hard the table creaks beneath you.Â
Every thrust is wet and filthy, slap of skin on skin echoing off concrete walls, your arousal coating his cock and dripping down to soak the metal beneath you. His hips snap harder, faster, the thick head battering that spot inside you that makes white hot sparks explode behind your eyes.
Your hands fist in his jacket, nails digging in as he pounds into you. One of his hands pins your wrists above your head, the other grips your thigh, yanking it higher so he can drive even deeper. His mouth finds your throat, teeth sinking in.
Your orgasm crashes over you, walls clamping down around his cock so hard he snarls. Your back arches off the table, cunt gushing around him, soaking his balls and the metal beneath you as wave after wave rips through you.Â
Youâre crying out, shaking, tears leaking from the corners of your eyes, and he fucks you through it, chasing his own release.
âFuck- good girl, squeezing me so fuckinâ perfect- â His rhythm stutters, turns sloppy and desperate. He buries himself one last time, grinding deep as his cock pulses and throbs inside you. Thick, hot ropes of cum flood your cunt, spilling deep, so much it leaks out around his shaft and drips messily down your thighs onto the table.
He stays buried inside you, heavy and twitching, one hand sliding up to cup your tear streaked cheek almost tenderly. His thumb brushes the wetness away as his breathing slowly evens out.
The chains overhead sway softly in the draft, clinking like theyâre keeping count.
***
Several weeks agoâŠ
You canât prove it, but someone has been in your apartment.Â
You stand in the doorway of your own flat for a long moment. Coat still on. Keys in your hand.
Then you step inside and close the door behind you, and you don't change anything about your face.Â
You notice the mug first.
Not displaced⊠that would be too obvious, and whoever came through your door is not obvious. It's the ring. The condensation ring on the coffee table is wrong, slightly, the way a thing is wrong when it's been lifted and replaced by someone who understood the importance of replacing it but didn't account for the fact that you always set it down on the same quarter inch of worn lacquer, the same groove. You've been setting it there for two years. The ring is two millimetres off.
Your shampoo. The bottle on the shower shelf that you could swear was turned slightly. And underneath all of it, you stop in the middle of your bathroom and just stand there, breathing in something like cigarette smoke. Old. Ground into skin.
You are not scared. That's the thing you keep examining, turning over, looking at from different angles. You have every reason to be scared and the feeling that surfaces instead is something more likeâŠÂ recognition. The specific recognition of something that has been true for a while finally making itself legible. Someone has been watching you and the part of you that should be running is instead sitting very still and watching back.
You think about what kind of person does this as a matter of course.
You think about this more than you should.
(And then you stop thinking about it altogether when your landlord- the one with the master key and the habit of using it âaccidentallyâ when youâre showering or laying on the couch with your vibrator between your legs- goes missing on a Wednesday and turns up dead in a Birmingham car park on a Friday, and the police use words like opportunistic and random and you use no words at all, just stand at your kitchen window with your mug and watch the street below and breathe. And then the man from HR who cornered you in the stairwell stops showing up to work, and a week later someone finds him in a canal in Leeds with his wallet still in his pocket. And you stop thinking about it when the pervert who harasses women on the way to work and who rubbed himself against your ass for seven stops isnât on the bus one morning and doesnât get on it the morning after that either. You think âhuhâ and stop looking for the stories in the local paper after that)
You put this information somewhere quiet inside yourself and you close the door on it.
Then you make decisions.
The next morning you put on lipstick before your coffee. Not the lipstick you wear to work, the dark one you only put on when you're going somewhere worth the effort, a rich, specific red that leaves a clean mark on porcelain. You drink slowly. You set the mug down in its groove. You leave it on the table when you go. (Smeared now when you come back)
You buy a new book. Cracked the spine yourself, deliberately, over the place you wanted him to open to. Bookmarked the right page. (And the book mark is not exactly where you measured it when you put it in the pages, tucked down three millimeters more.)
The panties took more consideration. You stood in front of your drawer for a long moment, the particular cold logic of the thing settling through you. Then you put on the soft cotton ones, the worn pair, and you wore them for a full day, and you touched yourself in them until the gusset was soaked, and you left them near the top of the hamper. (Gone when you change out of your work clothes and go to throw them in the dirty laundry)
Rewards, you were beginning to think of them as, for the ledger that someone was keeping on your behalf, without your asking, without your knowledge of the specific terms, but not, you were becoming increasingly certain, without your participation.
You hadn't asked for any of it.
You hadn't not asked for any of it either.
This is the part you sit with. The part you turn over in the small hours when the flat is quiet and the street below has gone still and the cigarette smell has faded but not entirely left.
You are not innocent. You are not sure you want to be. You put on the lipstick and you left the mug and you walked close to the city drunk long enough that the message was legible, and three days later he ceased to be a problem.
The ledger exists. You are on it. The question you haven't answered- the question you keep not answering, keep setting aside- is whether you are the subject of it or the cause.
The night you saved his life is the night the ledger tips.
You don't think of it that way at the time. At the time it is simply a matter of logistics: a man bleeding out in the alley behind the Tesco Metro, the specific dark of blood, a wound that is going to kill him in four minutes if someone doesn't intervene, and you are there with your hands and your knowledge and the particular absence of panic that your colleagues have always found slightly unsettling in you.
You don't think about the balaclava. You don't think about the gun- empty, or he'd have used it- that you'd stepped over to get to him. You think about the wound and the pressure and the count.
Stay with me.
He lives. That's the metric.
Afterwards when the sirens got close and radio chatter from the paramedics were nearby, you stood up and wiped your hands on the back of your jeans and the calculation is already running somewhere below the level of words: he owes you something now. Not gratitude⊠you don't want gratitude, gratitude is soft and symmetric and what exists between you is neither. What exists is something that runs deeper than the ledger of your landlord and the others, something that reorganises the terms entirely and youâll take advantage of it for as long as heâll allow you and youâll reward him for it for as long as he does.
He watched you go.
You knew he was watching.
You didn't look back.
(And you do not let yourself think about what happens when crumbs stop being enough. When the man who has been living on the edges of your life decides the edges are no longer satisfying and wants th full thing, everything you can give to a man like him.)
The storm comes on a Thursday. You've been watching the weather for two days, the way the pressure dropped, the way the air went close and electric and tasted faintly of iron- meteorological preconditions for a power cut in this part of the city, the grid unreliable, the substation two streets over that goes out whenever the rainfall hits a certain rate.
You go to bed with your phone charged.
The lights go out at half past eleven.
The thunder is already overhead, close enough that the flash and the crack arrive almost together, and you sit up in the dark and breathe and wait for the backup on the hall light to kick in the way it usually does and it doesn't kick in this time, and the flat is completely dark, and then lightning fills the window for a single white second-Â
-and there is a shape in your bedroom that is not furniture.
The thought arrives lie lightning does: total, white, gone before you can hold it. Whether your name was always on the ledger too. Whether you were ever the one keeping it.Â
Your body moves off the bed, through the door, navigating your flat entirely by memory because the dark is total and the thunder swallows the sound of your feet and somewhere behind you something large and patient shifts its weight and doesn't rush, and that is the worst of it, the not rushing, because it means he already knows how this ends-
You hit the stairs. You hit the rain. Your slippers begin to fray.
You canât breathe.
artwork for this piece by the lovely @auberghyn Iâm crying it looks so pretty. The woman is actually me! I sent the artist pictures of myself and everything. It should not be used to indicate Readerâs race though! Go view her post for the uncensored version. :]
Painfully shy reader getting absolutely obliterated drunk at the pub, losing all sense of timidity, and telling Gaz and Soap "I bet the reason Ghost actually hides his face is 'cause he knows everybody'd wanna sit on it".
Ghost overhearing, leaning over your shoulder, and letting you know "I'm just keeping your seat clean until you're ready to sit on it, love".
Obviously Simon fucks the embarrassment out of you the next day, but only after making sure you get your reserved seat nice and wet.
half convinced that besides the general jason glazing the only reason anyone even bothers to entertain this idea is because people canât square the asian woman as being a bigger physical threat than the hulking white guy and so they have to underestimate her. its no different from a chud who plays a bit of tennis in the summer and convinces himself he could probably go toe to toe against naomi osaka
People narrow their eyes the first time ghost talks about his "sweet girl"
Ghost is...well. a loner. He's socially awkward at best and aggressive at worst. Ghost kills people without flinching, looms in every corner He's in. No way he has a 'sweet girl' at home.
And yet, that's exactly what he tells the team our night at the bar. Mouth half-stuffed with greasy chips, he grunts "my sweet girl could do this better. Lovely cook."
After he broke the news about her, it was all he'd talk about.
Ghost, the guy who turns people into a fine red mists then laughs about it is the same guy that smiles "my sweet girl wants to see the movies tonight, you know how it is, cap." Or proudly shows off the lunch he's brought from home with a "i made it myself. My sweet lovie is teaching me 'ow to cook."
Always on and on about his sweet girl, about his lovie, the best thing in his life. Like a lovesick puppy.
"Oh!! Hi, simon! Glad to see you back in one piece!" You smile at your neighbor when he enters the elevator. Almost instinctively you hand over your heaviest grocery bags.
Simon, your neighbor, smiles around the scars and presses the button for you. You've been living next to him for a few months now, and embarrassingly you keep finding excuses to spend time with him. Though, you doubt he would ever reciprocate your little crush.
goodie two-shoes newly adopted jason todd is one of the funniest fucking things to come out of the batfamily fandom, actually. yâall remember that episode of the office us where dwight gets fired and the day afterwards micheal is all sad like âwhy havenât the cleaning ladies arranged the toys in my office and watered my plants?â and everybody tells him âno dwight used to do that.â ? in the funniest way possible i want this to be bruce and jason.
jason todd who was such a sweet eager-to-please kid. he literally adored bruce for taking him in and letting him be robin, so he was doing literally anything he could think of to make his adoption worthwhile to bruce. being the model student at school, keeping his room immaculately clean, training as much as he could--the enthusiasm was genuinely baffling to bruce, who up until that point had only ever dealt with dick motherfucking grayson as a child under his care. at first he thought something was wrong with jason, or that he was covering something up. alfred had to pull him aside after a few months just like 'no he's genuinely this much of a people pleaser, master bruce. this isn't an act'. they had no idea what to do with this kid.
bruce doesn't even know most of the stuff jason does, he just assumes these little things Happen to Happen, and doesn't consider that it isn't alfred or that it might not be a coincidence. he counts himself lucky that jason is a well behaved kid and doesn't look too far into the details of how far that behaviour goes. so through the years after jason's death, bruce is genuinely just... fucking baffled.
"alfred, why did you stop making those little smoothie pots and leaving them in the fridge for my breakfasts? i really liked them, but you never have them anymore."
"...what smoothie pots?"
"the ones you always left in the door of the fridge for me, with the post-it notes telling me to have a good morning."
"i have never made you a smoothie pot, master bruce. i fear this was another of jason's little habits."
"...shit."
"indeed."
"so you don't know how to make these smoothie pots?"
like- i want jason to have literally been doing the most random fucking stuff you can think of. he was organising bruce's sock drawer, watering the plants in the downstairs bathroom, stapling together all the WE files in bruce's office so that bruce wouldn't misplace any of them. he was going above and beyond to make bruce's life as easy as possible in any way he could think of for YEARS, and he did it all so quietly that bruce never noticed until jason wasn't around anymore and all of a sudden his life was real fuckin' inconvenient and he had no idea why.
i just think it would be funny if red hood does a big identity reveal in front of all the bats and bruce just instantly bursts into tears in jason's arms weeping about how 'alfred let the fern die and they had to buy a new mop bucket because nobody knew where jason had stored it last' and jason is just. very confused holding a sobbing batman because he genuinely forgot that he used to do any of that stuff. meanwhile dick's in the background next to tim and he's just like 'so were you the one that organised the west attic? 'cause tim thinks it was the spirit of thomas wayne and we've been arguing about it for six months.'
bonus points if the league of assassins comes into it because at some point talia comes to visit damian and her and bruce get to chatting about jason, and bruce gets all teary and fond as he waxes poetic about how amazing and helpful jason was as a kid living around the manor, all the stuff he used to do, and then he turns to talia to ask what he was like living with her and she looks at him with the eyes of a long-dead veteran to tell him 'within his first two months he'd blown up two watchtowers, taught damian to call us all slurs in six different languages, and shaved a strip of my father's hair off while he was asleep. over his time with us he has personally contributed to the creation of ninety-three new rules around the compound, and the day before he left for gotham i personally watched him set fire to one of our helicopters.' and then there's just a really awkward period of silence because bruce has no idea what to say to that because HIS time with jason was fuckin great.
Fucking my way through this shit @satanslittlefucker - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
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