Something pops. The world stretches apart into static. A bird croons overhead. You open your mouth wide as it wracks through you, but nothing comes out as your surroundings shatter like glass.
Instead, the casing of your teeth can only echo what he murmurs into the gap. A word you can barely hear through the haze as bliss tears you apart.
“Persephone.”
CONTENT: nipple play, pussy inspection, size kink(!!!!), slight humiliation, dom/sub undertones, p-in-v, anal play (if you squint), praise kink, slight degradation, spanking-ish (mostly just cheeky ass smacking)
preview
How do you come to terms with your own undoing? You always thought death would come quiet and sharp. Easy like a whip-crack. You wouldn’t have to wade the sticky deluge of awareness.
It would happen in a split second.
But you know it. Get it. This nauseating instinct burgeoning in your guts isn’t paranoia. It’s not the whisper of a footstep in a shadow. The dark alcove you pass in the city, feet moving a little faster to fall back under the yellow sanctum of a streetlight. Something bad can happen here.
This is the bad thing— the worst thing— this is justified fear. You feel it itching like nausea on the back of your tongue. Worming its way into your thunderous heart.
You thought you knew what it was like to be scared. But this twists in your chest and snakes to your stomach, coiling up and sitting heavy like a rock—
You are dying, and you are aware of it.
Something strange kicks in along the moribund stretch between here and there— the cognizance that cobwebs in little cracks across the foundation. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever felt before.
A sense of urgency. Late-onset hypervigilance (something you should have had on the road, with your hands on the wheel and your foot lingering in that safe-space between gas pedal and brake). You’ve never had to coach yourself into clambering off your deathbed before, but you’re distinctly aware that if you don’t start talking yourself out of it, you’ll fold yourself into the covers.
When he speaks, the sound is wedged into the twinging paradox of familiar and distant, all at once. Archaic— some sense of knowing buzzes along your bones. It sounds like homecoming to a place you’ve never been.
A place you don’t want to go.
The man leaning over your battered center console, your deformed gearshift— you, blinking up at him weakly—
Is an uncanny farrago.
Past the blurry vignette of your eyeline, the fuzzy streak that ruptures along the center, he looks almost human. Miming the perfect pastiche, down to the mussed coiffing of his hair, the ridging, pink line of his mouth. The flat, indifferent shapes of his face; the slope of his nose, the score of his lips. All entirely bereft of… emergency. Dread. Anything reasonable to the discovery of a sedan with its hood crumpled against an oak trunk. You, sandwiched between your tilted driver’s seat and the mangled steering wheel.
Instead, he stares down at you with the kind of undisturbed calm you’ve only found before a storm. The mirage of nirvana-like quiet along the cloudless sky, the tired, unmoving wind.
He’s the most handsomely apathetic man you’ve ever seen. Sculpted from marble and soft, borrowed flesh.
The kind that almost doesn’t belong. Too… simple. Just the mold of something familiar for you to grasp. The costume doesn’t bend itself enough to fit his shape, and so the imitation loses itself somewhere along the seams.
It’s the perfect example of beauty sewing herself into peril.
The biggest giveaway are his eyes. They’re bleary star-shapes through your gaze. Over-saturated colors. And they’re unlike anything sublunary you’ve ever seen before.
They make you feel like you’re drowning. Suffocating. A reminder that you’re too close to something much more than you.
Too close to the ghosting kiss of death.
They’re the greenest eyes you’ve ever seen. Preternaturally vibrant, almost glowing, framed in arsenic white. But it’s the charcoal black pools in them, like endless trenches, that make your lungs feel heavy. Their unfathomable depths. The way they refuse to echo the trepidation that lingers over your chest, bruising bones and stringing into the fibrils of your soft tissue.
You see a piece of yourself in them. Something waning.
It’s your own reflection. You’ve never seen yourself like that. Scared like a caged animal. Eclipsed behind the fear like the sun hiding in the shape of the moon.
“Time’s up,” is what he says. Low, and quiet, and pragmatic, gaze deadpan.
(Obsidian pits, unmerciful gemstones cut straight from the crust, gold-flecked like a reflection of the molten layer beneath.)
So unmoved. Indelicate. Like he’s got a horologe of your lifespan in his palm. You want to tell him to check his invisible wrist watch— that he’s wrong, it’s not.
Turn the hourglass, you think hysterically, almost feeling the granules you’re shedding as your time lapses. Crumbling around you. In on you, collapsing like a poorly-structured roof. Today, you’re built out of a flimsy house of cards.
You took three pages of notes on Hades in college.
Somewhere in your childhood home, the Greek Mythology notebook is wedged into a box in the attic from when you brought it home with you for winter break.
You watched animated renditions of the Grim Reaper dance across your TV in a hood, as a kid. Old cartoons off the floor with a bowl of cereal in your lap before school.
You learned about the devil in church.
Metaphysical kinship feels overdue, like a half-assed afterthought. But you stare up at the obscure wreathe of midnight black smoke wisping around the shape of his head, the nearly imperceptible, swirling coat of charcoal smoldering off his shoulders, and try to remember the words to prayers that were left to collect dust on your tongue years ago.
“You an’ I,” the seat crinkles when it shifts under his weight, the lopsided center console clicks under his forearm, “have somewhere to be.”
It’s not an open-ended invitation; come if you want, stay if you don’t. No. It’s an edict. You can’t chisel into the edges of dogma around it— the unspoken ones— but you know that this man is final. He is the law, the declaration, the order.
You’re not ready to die.
Too young, still wet behind the ears. You can’t wipe it off on the napkin your bucket list will be crumpled into— you’re still supposed to see Ayutthaya, and ride in a hot air balloon, and try that Thai place your friend recommended weeks ago; the one you’ve been putting off, because there was always more time. And that’s the thing, you think, it always feels like there’s more time. The bottle never runs out. You stare down into it and keep drinking like it’ll fill itself back up. The aspirations feel so nugatory now. The little army men maquettes your dad collected in the basement, speckling the peripheral ledges of this yawning, all-consuming demise. You sink into it. Flail. Sink deeper. Until— what?
The horrifying thought ripples the surface of the cesspool. These mountains stretch for miles. They arch, and roll, and recede; Gaia’s heavy-handed fingerpainting.
No one is here.
No one saw you.
And no one will know where to begin to look for you.
For what’s left.
And what is left of you? Inconclusive alphabet soup in the local newspaper? Headlines: missing; tragic accident; too young; thoughts and prayers. Eventually, a body to put into a box? A hole in the dirt, for tree roots to snake out like a cage and cradle your wilting, still heart?
You open your mouth. Close it. Mouth at the air, wordlessly, panting, like a guppy, with your tongue thick and numb and the words dangling precariously along the rim of your wobbling lower lip. You breathe them in shallowly, and they nearly die at the back of your throat.
How do you barter with Death? Look it in the eyes— the eclipse of your own, waning soul— and bargain?
It starts like this:
“I’m not ready.”
A time old tale. You intend for the words to be forceful— a kind of declaration. Rebellion is a trait that wouldn’t necessarily serve your case (but maybe he’d admire the dauntless passion). But they come out weak. Dizzy. Tired.
The console clicks again. Then, the sound of fabric brushing on leather. He’s closer. Leaning into you more. Over you. These are the only sounds besides your trembling pants, the rabitting pace of your heartbeat. A sharp contrast to his leisurely disposition. You feel it throbbing in your neck like a vice, like it’s swelling and taking up too much room the harder it thrums, too much space for your airway.
And you can’t look away from him. The supernovae whirling in the green beds of his eyes. Varicolored webs in motion, swirling like liquid, the way human eyes— so fixed, so temporary, so delicate— don’t. It’s the contrast of another world against your own— you stare into it like you’re watching two pools of another dimension unfold in his skull.
They’re not sorry for you. They sit on you. Magmatic. Unwavering.
“Tha’s too bad.”
The words shudder and bruise through you like a sucker punch. Cut into you like the edge of a blade. The gravity they’re saturated in sinks between your ribs. It’s not I’m sorry.
You almost flinch. Despite how harsh the words are, how cruel, his tone is nothing but unembellished. Prosaic. Dull with unsentimental truth. That’s too bad; he says it like an observation, and nothing else.
And you shouldn’t expect different— can’t— from …whatever he is. An impassive numen: Death; The Reaper.
A deity doesn’t grieve temporal flesh.
You can’t expect him to. You wouldn’t feel sorry, either you think— you’d be desensitized. But it feels so much sharper from the other end.
It doesn’t matter what you should do. What you shouldn’t. It’s what you can’t.
You can’t accept it, give in. Not like this. It’s human instinct— to fight. The drive worms under your skin and mangles whatever is left, twisting it into something noxious. Full of bite.
You wear it on your teeth when you bear them to spit, “I won’t go.”
It’s full of anger. Vicious. Anger at him. The clumsy doe. The circumstances. Yourself. And it’s stubborn. This pluck against a… God, against whatever he is, surely won’t do you any favors.
But he doesn’t give you the satisfaction of the fight. Your tone, the shuddery breath you take as you sit up a little, square your shoulders, doesn’t chip the veneer on his clean, unemotional demeanor. The haze around the borders of your vision is a bleary smear that pans in, and you blink it away, lashes fluttering to bat it off. It has a tear trickling down your cheek.
When he stretches his hand up, it makes you falter. A reflexive tick, chin tipping. Flinching away. But the knuckle in his curled forefinger grazes your skin. Slow. Featherlight, like coaxing a frightened animal out of the corner it’s backed itself into. And the heat you find there makes you gasp. It’s hot against the crest of your cheekbone, so hot you think you’re feeling the fumes of that molten core, the crushed flinders of magma that swim along his irises. So hot you’re sure, now, that he’s pooling boiling ichor, veins running like lavascapes under the pastiche of a man he wears.
It knocks your resolve. Throws you off. It’s so… against your expectations. The notion of death.
Death is supposed to be cold. It’s supposed to kiss you with gloam, and unspool shadows across your heavy lashes, and chill you like the Vinson Massif snowcap with its tongue.
But he burns. Running so hot, it’s almost a human touch. Too much. Too close.
“Sh, sh, sh,” he coos, curled knuckle bumping the side of your jaw. Your chin.
You can’t move. Can’t break. Won’t give, lost in his tar-black pupils, like two mirrored, bottomless polynyas. The marbled, snaking tendrils of sunflower-yellow and green framing them.
For the first time, he looks at you with something besides nonchalant indifference. It’s still cold over the surface. A cosmetic veneer that makes him solid and inexpressive— but it fractures like a chisel sawing an ice hole. You can’t decipher what you find. It’s a misslip. A kind of parapraxis— the way his eyes rove you, dipping like scoping the valley in the mountains. A Freudian slip. They linger on your eyes, then— fall. To your mouth. Your neck. The soft lines of your chest. His fingers skid from your jawline to the hair that’s fallen over your shoulder. He twists a piece of your hair around his forefinger.
It has something peculiar pulling apart in your head. With the crash, the circumstances, the way you’re slowly slipping into this territory you don’t know, the finality of death with its boots on your doorstep, you’ve grown so numb.
But this hits you like a freight train, pulls you out.
Awe. There is something undeniable in what’s oozing from behind the dispassionate shell— this is the way a man looks when he wants.
With instinctive drive— basal need. It’s too close to human longing. The way a man looks at a bar. The slow rolling eyes, in sultry descent, from the other side of the couch. Knuckles on your thigh, bare skin, come closer unspoken.
His eyes are on the coil around his finger. Your lips again. When you swallow, there’s cotton in your throat. Nestled in it is the last ditch effort.
“What if— I give you… something.” It’s silly. The words shake and spill before you can throw them back and chase them with acceptance. You’re not asking. Not begging. Offering.
Something flickers. It’s different. His eyes flash. And then, a slow-seeping smile trickles across his lips. Something like it. Amused, then, you realize. He’s amused.
His forearm splays back over the center console. Your hair falls back into its place, over your shoulder. He cocks his head. Hums. He is the picture of languid ease and you cup your fright between your hands like a firefly and pretend.
“Trying to bargain?”
His eyes are a little easier, then, not so unblinking. Eyelids drooping half-mast. You wonder if you’ve thrown a wrench into the script— added a splash of color into the monotonous bleak spreadsheet of a routine he’s been cycling through for aeons. His fingers drum against the tilted center console (your eyes oscillate to them. Back. To them. Back. Onto the other hand, sliding down his thick thigh as he sits up).
“Isn’t that just…” thump, thump, thump. His fingertip on the broken plastic. Your heart in your ears. “…the sweetest thing.”
You swallow. Your throat clicks. His mouth is a malleable, broken moon. Quicksilver. Crescent sharpening, falling dull. Sharp again. He leans in a little closer. Up close like this, you can smell him. Taste him on the back of your throat. A cold cave, the wet, dark layers of the earth when you dig into the dirt too deep, a fallen cypress, leaves you can crumble between your fingers. White lillies. Bereavement flowers in careful, somber clusters around a casket.
“And what do you,” his eyes oscillate from your gaze to your slightly parted mouth, “have to give me?”
Your heart is rabbiting. Head dizzy. Every joint aches and creaks like a rusty hinge. The rattlesnake of it all slithers around your lungs.
“Sex,” you bluster. Your eyes are wide. Brows notched. It sounds a little shrill, a little incredulous. Far too callow for the offer you intend it to be.
Silly little human. And this is where he laughs. Tilts his head, nostrils flaring as he huffs through them. White lily-teeth in neat rows at your gall. But he doesn’t laugh— not outright, anyways. Your pulse throbs thick in your throat but you cling to it, because it means you’re still alive. His eyes are embers. Live coal in the pit of a campfire, and you feel the heat of it through your skin.
“That right?” he muses instead of outright chuffing, oiled in mirth.
You close your mouth. Open it. Close it again. All retorts die ugly at the back of your mouth— you fluster beside him because you’re finally feeling the heat, razing you, and the taunt slicking his tone is like kerosene to the flame.
Three ruckles crease across his forehead when he raises his brows. You count them; one, two, three. They look so out of place— crinkles in the perfect, porcelain-smooth amalgam that is an almost-human face carved from marble.
“In exchange for…?” he probes, chin ducked. Staring at you from over the bridge of his nose.
“My life.”
He hums again. Musing. Mocking. It’s the slow roll of the summer into autumn. The dying breath of an orbit collapsing to stutter anew.
“Awful brave,” he gibes, white teeth— white like cold skin, like snowfall under glowing apricity— flashing for a second from behind the lopsided curve of his smiling lips, “negotiating with a God.”
So he is. Your eyes inch in increments like you’re taking in every particle of this being, soaking up the dust-dark wisping off his shoulders. All around him. Dumb, little girl. He says it like he means it that way— stupid, plucky little human.
“Thinks it’s that easy, mm?” he says, “You… spread your pretty legs and what—? Turn back time?”
“That’s what the offer sounded like, yeah,” you tell him from between your gritted teeth, tone flat.
There is still a pulsating in your head, thrumming in your temple. But the sound of fabric brushing in the front seat of your cramped sedan, the way he huffs, is unmistakable.
“Cheeky, cheeky,” he drawls, but it’s all ease. Saturated in mirth— perhaps you’ve caught Death in good spirits. “Got a mouth on you.”
It’s his next words that have you faltering. Both because you’re, maybe, biting off more than you can chew, and because of the unanticipated heat that melts apart inside of you at the tone. The vulgarity.
“Maybe that’s what you need for a mouth like that,” he tells you, all low, eyes as white-hot as his touch, “do you some good. A nice, hard shag.”
