when he pulls out this move and has the audacity to tell you to keep quiet like he’s not the one struggling to choke back a moan as you ride him, bucking your hips faster before slowing to a teasing drag that has his eyes rolling into the back of his head. then, the second he lets out even the faintest sound, you lean in, your lips ghosting against his ear as you whisper, “who needs to be quiet now, baby?”
Two people bound by timing, damage, and choices they were never ready to make. What begins as connection slowly turns into weight—love becoming both refuge and ruin. As they try to hold on, they discover that surviving together does not always mean healing together. Some things are not destroyed by falling apart, but by what remains afterward.
Noah x Original Female Character (Lilly)
TW: Mental health struggles | Self-destructive behavior | explicit smut | Angst | fluff
Minors do not Interact - this story is 18+
THIS IS A FANFICTION USING REAL PEOPLE IN A FICTIONAL SITUATION! I AM NOT IMPLYING THESE PEOPLE WOULD DO THE THINGS IN THE STORY OR ACT THE WAY THEY DO IN THE STORY IN REAL LIFE! IT IS FICTION!
Feels like a slow burner but isn't. I used a translator, bc I was too lazy to translate everything to english. Sry for that :s
Masterlist:
Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17 Part 18 Part 19
If anyone wants to be tagged, just comment :3
Other things:
Terms & Conditions [Corporate!Noah] part 1 | part 2 | Epilogue
Or it did, and my eyes simply refused to see it. The footsteps echoed on the cold tile with a cadence that wasn't entirely mine, as if someone were walking inside my body, using my feet as an instrument. The buzzing persisted in my temples, low and constant, mixed with the sound of breathing that came muffled, distant, as if it belonged to another being. The substance was still running through my veins.
I could feel it in my wrists, in the accelerated rhythm of my blood, in the way the walls breathed along with it. The fluorescent lights flickered on the ceiling with an almost deliberate slowness, and each interval of darkness brought with it a flash, my mother's voice, the smell of smoke, the sound of something breaking very far away.
My feet kept going.
The door to the office appeared at the end of the corridor, finally. The Grimshade symbol carved into the iron seemed to pulse, or perhaps it was my own eyes that were pulsing. I stopped before it for a few seconds, my hand suspended in the air before touching the wood. Steven had his back turned when the door opened.
The room smelled the same as always: extinguished cigar, old paper, the varnish on the desk that never dried quite right. A single lit lamp cast my father's shadow against the wall like a figure far larger than the man he actually was. He didn't turn around immediately. As if he knew and had decided not to rush.
I stood in the doorway.
"Steven…" I breathed the words and realized they were beginning to tangle in my throat.
The flashes returned in a sequence too fast to be contained. My mother's face overlaid the room. The smell of smoke swallowed the smell of cigar.
For an instant, the floor beneath his feet was no longer tile, it was burnt wood, and the sound I heard was not the silence of the office, but the crackling of something consumed by fire.
Then my father spoke:
"Noah…" Stumbling steps carried me into the room after I closed the door behind me. I felt so small in that place, I was no match for the elegance with which the well-pressed suit dressed his old body. I was dirty, foul-smelling, wearing clothes that more closely resembled rags, the remains of someone who had once been alive.
Not that my condition was so different.
Was he staring at me with that astonishment because he also thought my appearance was identical to that of the deceased? Could my father see my dull eyes and my skin without vigor? Dry lips and a torso so thin my bones could be counted?
If I could no longer hear my heart beating, could he hear it?
"I missed you, father…" I said quietly; I had difficulty moving my dry lips. "Why didn't you come see me?"
He cleared his throat and tried to conceal the look he was giving me, surveying my condition from head to toe.
"What are you doing…"
"Outside my cell?" I finished, taking another step forward. "Does it surprise you that I can move through the Grimshade premises like an ordinary human being? Even though you no longer see me as one?"
"Stop talking nonsense, boy." Steven tapped his fingers against the desk; that was common when he was pressured and couldn't respond. "You know exactly why you're here and why you cannot parade through the sanatorium as if you were one of our staff, Noah. You represent risk and instability; many things have already happened here due to negligence around your cell. I cannot put other people's lives at risk."
And his voice undid the vision like a knife cutting through smoke.
"Because you're speaking as if this wasn't imposed purely by you?"
"By me?" Steven pointed to himself. "I wasn't the one committed for killing my fiancée."
My father's words arrived with a delay, as if they needed to cross water before reaching his ears. I heard the timbre, recognized the cadence, that specific intonation of sarcasm. The voice that shaped every boundary I had internalized.
The voice that remained even when everything else was erased.
"But you should have been when you killed my mother and Cianan."
I spat the words with contempt dripping from my lips.
I didn't know exactly what I said; the words came from a place that wasn't exactly thought, it was impulse distilled into syllables. My body moved with a precision my mind couldn't follow, like two systems operating on different frequencies, one of them far older than the other.
My father took a step back. It was the first time in my life I had seen that happen.
"Where did you get that heap of imbecilities, Noah?" He shook his head, indignant. Steven picked up the phone and put it to his ear. "Your medication will be changed again; you're starting to hallucinate."
What followed lasted a short time. Or lasted an eternity. The time inside that room had folded in on itself, and I existed somewhere between the beginning and the end of a tension I had created myself since I walked through the door. With a single movement, I took the phone and put it back on the hook. I just wanted him to pay attention when I spoke to him, was that so difficult?
Why could he never listen? Why did the last word always have to be his?
"Why did you do this?" I said, choking on the words. "Why me? Why wasn't it enough to watch my mother and my sister die in front of me, you needed me to live with it in a part of my brain? Hidden away as if I were your goddamn safe?"
Silence. Heavier. More permanent.
"ANSWER ME!" I slammed along with the shout on his desk. Our gazes were locked; my father was now swallowing hard. "Why me, father? What did I do so wrong, when I could barely read, that made you decide it was a good idea to condemn my fate like this?"
I stood still, feeling my eyes burn. The same red as always stained my vision and made it blurry like a smear. The same texture I knew from another moment, another place, now like waves in place of consciousness.
"I had a brilliant future planned for you, an absolute certainty that you were born to be more than that house, that island. This entire world would have been too small for you, Noah." he explained, calm. He kept a tranquil, didactic tone of voice, like a teacher.
My brow furrowed, confused.
"But you would never have reached half of that if you had kept being that immaculate stone your mother intended you to be. I needed to prepare you for the world, I needed to make you strong, I needed you to grow up and learn how being a real man would save you from being a failure like your mother. She wasn't like us, Noah. She had no potential, she was weak, without resilience, without a firm pulse. She had barely learned how to conduct herself in high society, and that had been staining our name with some frequency." The way he said it was unsettling, and my eyes burned even more. "I kept you from having a future full of failures by putting an end to that in time to prepare you for what was still to come."
"That was the life you had planned for me? That was the brilliant future I deserved to have?"
I shouted with another slap on the desk, holding his gaze. My voice was trembling, I had lost control and was breathless when I needed to have more composure and confidence.
"Being locked in this place that barely has clean water to drink, in a dirty cell with no natural light, with a chain around my feet as if I were an animal. I don't know how old I am, I didn't finish my studies, I didn't marry the woman I love and I'll never have my body functioning normally again. All of this because you thought you knew what was best for me? What the hell is wrong with me?"
I demanded, anguished.
"FATHER, LOOK AT ME!" I screamed, letting the tears run down my face. "LOOK AT WHAT YOU DID TO ME!"
"Just so you can see how my effort was in vain, Noah," he lamented. "Even keeping you away from her, allowing your mind to repress the trauma so you could live a normal life and follow the future I envisioned, it had no effect whatsoever. Because I could have wrapped you in gold and the most solid and efficient upbringing, but nothing would have been able to fix the imperfect son who was born to be."
A nausea settled at the top of my throat.
"You ruined everything you had going for you when you let yourself be taken in by that whore."
"SHUT YOUR GODDAMN MOUTH!"
"WEAK!" He screamed.
Through my peripheral vision, I saw my father move his hand slowly across the desk; he was trying to reach the marble Venus statue at the edge of the table.
His body was leaning further forward in the chair; he was no longer in as defensive a position as he had been at the start of our conversation, and I needed to think fast, if my headache would allow, but I was certain he was going to strike me.
"But I really did deserve all of this, Noah." He nodded in agreement, wiping his lips with a wet tongue. "I had Travis at my disposal; he, from a young age, showed himself to be an excellent successor. Rune was focused, selfish, had concrete ideals and desires, and the lack of opportunities he had made him commit the most absurd maneuvers to get what he wanted. He always had everything you never had."
"But you couldn't value him enough because he was the maid's son."
"Because a bastard would be bad for my image, but I should never have wasted time trying to fix you like a damned old car in a workshop, building a less sick mind in that despicable body of yours instead of simply giving him the opportunity he always deserved."
I swallowed hard.
"But he keeps trying, doesn't he?" he asked.
My attention was still fixed on the silent movement of his hand across the desk.
"I can bet that the moment you were at the perfect point to finish executing his plan, suddenly Travis decided it was time for you to stop being a caged monster."
"He wants me to get better."
Steven let out a laugh so loud he nearly lost his balance.
"But who said it's possible to undo everything the two of us did to you over all these years, Noah?" He asked in a tone of challenge. "I started all of this and you're right, but Dr. Rune allowed you to keep being drugged, imprisoned, reevaluated in exploratory tests to make money from the research he keeps abroad. What use would you be to him dead if you hadn't yet done everything he wanted you to do, dirtying his hands in his place? As I said… he was always so much smarter than you."
My father's hand finally reached the statue. I saw the movement before I processed it, a reflex faster than any conscious thought. The marble cut through the air with a dull whistle, and I dodged by instinct, feeling the weight pass close to the side of my head. The world stopped for one entire second. Then came back with violence. It wasn't a decision, but a floodgate giving way after too much pressure during that conversation.
My body acted before any rational part of me could intervene, and the rational part was already so diluted by the substance in my veins that it barely existed as a concept. He tried to step back, but the desk was behind him.
I don't remember everything that happened between one moment and the next. Memory kept fragments: the sound of the chair toppling, the smell of cigar mixed with something warm, the reflection of the lamp on the marble that was now in my hands and the first blow that struck him full on with a force so absolute that it drew an immediate mouthful of blood.
The silence that followed was unlike any I had ever known. My father was on the floor, surrounded by a pool of blood so dark it resembled oil. His face was disfigured, with parts of what had once been his eyes, the cartilage of his nose and the cupid's bow of his lips enveloped in deformity. Only his dental arch with broken teeth and the spilled blood remained. All the fury that had been eating me alive had been unleashed against each blow to his face.
For my mother, for Cianan, for me. Every day he had forced me to separate myself from the image of being human and accept being seen and treated as a lab animal. Every twisted lesson he believed would make me a sadistic executioner with a putrid soul like his.
He had destroyed my life forever.
I stood still, breathing heavily, my arms aching from an effort I had barely registered. The lamp was still on, casting shadows in the same places as always, as if nothing had changed in the geometry of that room. I looked at my hands.
The red was the same as always. The texture, the metallic smell rising through the air with a familiarity I wished I didn't have. I dropped the marble. The sound of it hitting the floor echoed like a period at the end of a sentence.
The door opened without knocking.
I didn't even need to hear the footsteps to know who it was. I recognized their rhythm, cadenced, precise, without any hurry. Rune stood in the doorway for a moment.
His eyes swept the room with an expression that showed not a single drop of surprise. His glasses reflected the faint light of the lamp. Hands in the pockets of his coat. No expression on his face, no start, no reaction that wasn't completely calculated.
There was something else in him. Something that took me a few seconds to identify because I had never seen it before at the corners of his mouth, in his breathing slightly looser than usual.
Relief.
He walked in slowly, stepping around what was on the floor without looking away from it, only registering, the way a doctor registers an expected symptom. He sat in the chair on the other side of the desk with the naturalness of someone occupying a place that had always been theirs.
He stared at me.
"What a mess you made in here, didn't you?" He raised his eyebrows.
I was completely confused, with an intense headache; a sequence of voices and flashes seemed to flood my brain like a current of water.
Sitting on the floor, I hugged my knees and put my head between them, as if staring at the ground could help me regain control over my human actions.
"I figured it would take a little longer." he said, his voice low, almost casual.
"I didn't want to do this… I…" torment clouded my vision.
"I think you need to rest and clear your head; then, we can talk about how things will go from here on out. Can we agree on that?" Rune asked, resting one arm on the desk.
His tone of voice conveyed an almost tangible empathy. Welcoming.
"A-alright." I said, getting up from the floor.
I brushed invisible dust off my pants, wiped beneath my eyes a liquid that was about to dry. My brow furrowed immediately when I saw him pick up the phone and put it to his ear after dialing a few numbers, a smile on his face.
"Code 6875 - central," he said without taking his eyes off me. "Patient Noah Blackridge escaped from his ward in the Hidden and has just brutally murdered director Steven. I need containment and removal immediately."
My body went paralyzed, and he flashed a sadistic smile that revealed nearly every tooth in his jaw. I was unable to move, and I attributed that to what he was registering on his wristwatch.
"Thank you for your help up until now, Noah… I promise to take good care of you for the rest of your life at Grimshade."
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