Your brow furrowed at the shape of the question, though you understood, almost immediately, that it wasn't actually a request for permission at all. He already had that; had had it for longer than either of you had been willing to name out loud. What he was asking for was something closer to validation. Confirmation that the thing he'd spent months trying to strangle in himself wasn't, in fact, the monstrous thing he'd apparently convinced himself it was.
You understood that ache too, in your own bones — the particular loneliness of wanting something so completely and having spent months convinced that the wanting itself made you somehow irreparably broken.
You answered the only way that occurred to you in the moment. Your hands slid slowly upward, along the column of his throat, until they reached the white collar sitting there — the real, tangible barrier that had stood between the two of you since the very first morning you'd walked back into a church you'd sworn off for a decade. Your eyes lifted to meet his again, and held.
"May I?" you whispered.
He said nothing in reply. He didn't need to, everything you needed to know was already sitting plainly in his eyes, open and unguarded in a way you'd never once seen from him before, not even that Christmas Eve when he'd held you while you cried.
Your fingers found the collar's fastening and worked it loose, easing it free of his neck, the small motion undoing the top button of his black shirt along with it.
You held the collar for a moment in your open palm — a strange, small weight, considerably heavier than its actual size suggested — before setting it carefully aside on the pew's seat, treating it with something that felt, even now, like it deserved a measure of respect you weren't entirely sure you understood the source of.
You thought, distantly, of every time you'd watched that same collar catch the light at the altar, every Sunday it had sat between you like a small, precise fence neither of you had ever quite dared to name aloud. It looked, resting there now on the worn wood of the pew, almost ordinary. A strip of white plastic and nothing more. You wondered how something so small had managed to feel, for the better part of half a year, like the entire distance between you.
(Also Kat please please please tell me we’ll get to see him find out came-back-wrong!Companion doesn’t have a gag reflex in this context)
would you be mad if I said that I wrote a drabble as warm up exercise where it’s similar idea to this piece where you say it’s just a dream (you both know it isn’t really but it’s at least some flimsy excuse), and you suck his dick so hard that the edgeTM comes out and he deep throats you by pushing your head down and that’s how he finds out you have no gay reflex!!! :)))
came-back-wrong!succubus! companion with priest! brendan….. oh gosh. her perched at the end of the bed like an animal about to strike, and the first few nights he thinks it is just a dream but she gets closer and closer every night over the course of weeks, driving him crazy, until one night he feels a weight on his lap, no blanket between them and he opens his eyes and she’s sat naked on him, her eyes reflecting the moonlight like a cat
the first night you're at the foot of the bed, crouching low, your eyes catching the moonlight through the curtains and throwing it back in flat silver discs.
brendan wakes and spots you, his heart stopping, then starting again. you tilt your head in response and he thinks dream, rolling over and pulling the blanket to his chin, praying until his jaw hurts and sleep reclaims him.
the second night you're closer. halfway up the mattress, sitting cross-legged on top of the covers. your head tilted, watching the pulse in his throat with a focus that makes his skin prickle. he wakes and sees you, mumbling your name and you smile (too slow, the smile arriving in stages, the mouth first, then the cheeks, then the eyes, like a human expression rehearsed by something studying the manual) and he squeezes his eyes shut, praying, and when he opens them again you're gone.
the third night you're beside him. lying on your side, your face on his pillow. your eyes rest inches from his. brendan wakes and you're right there, your breath warm and sweet, your pupils wrong (too large, too reflective, swallowing the iris) and you whisper "you talk in your sleep, benny" and he lies frozen while his heartbeat fills the room.
the fourth night you touch him. your fingertip on his wrist first, tracing the vein, following it up his forearm. across his bicep. over his shoulder. down his chest. mapping him through his sleep shirt. there's no hurry in it, it's almost clinical, in fact. a game, a pause before you bite into him.
the fifth night begins with your mouth on his throat, your lips parting against his pulse. warm. so gentle, your tongue tasting the salt of his skin. a sound leaving him in his sleep (a sound he will deny, because it's a wanting sound, a starved sound of someone who's never been touched or loved before, a sound the pillow absorbs and keeps) and your mouth curves against his throat.
a week passes. then two. every night you're closer. every night the touch goes further, little by little. his collarbone. his stomach through the cotton. the ridge of his hip. the soft skin below his navel where the hair thins and his muscles tighten in his sleep. and every morning he wakes alone and hard and aching, telling himself, over and over, dream, dream, just a dream, the mind conjuring what the body wants, it's not real, she's in the other room, she's sleeping, it's not real.
except the sheets smell like you. except his skin holds the ghost of warmth where your fingers traced. except once, in the bathroom mirror, he finds a mark on his throat. a faint, pink discoloration. the exact size and shape of a mouth pressed to his pulse last night.
brendan stares at the mark, touches it, his fingers trembling.
dream. just a dream.
and then the following night comes and he knows it's different.
he surfaces from sleep in stages, awareness arriving in pieces. the room is silver with moonlight. the curtains are parted. the cross above his bed gleams.
weight. there's on his lap. warm and solid and real. not beside him. not at the foot of the bed. on him. straddling his hips. his blanket is gone, too. folded neatly at the foot of the bed (you folded it, you took the time to fold it, the precision of that detail more unsettling than the rest). and you're sitting on his lap in the moonlight and you're wearing nothing.
his eyes snap open.
you're silver and shadow. the moonlight paints the curves and hollows of your body in blue-white light. the dip of your collarbone. the slope of your shoulders. the curve of your breasts. your skin illuminated, bare, your hair framing your face and your eyes peering down at him curiously. and the eyes are the thing that pins him. your pupils enormous. reflective. catching the moon and throwing it back like a cat's. flat silver discs in the dark, watching him with predatory patience.
his breathing stops. his hands are at his sides, flat on the mattress. not touching you. not touching anything. every muscle in his body is too locked for that.
"you're dreaming, benny." your voice, low and warm, layered with that clicking undertone. your hands brush gently across his chest, palms flat, feeling his heartbeat slamming against his ribs. "it's just a dream. you can do anything you want in a dream."
"I'm not—this isn't—" his voice cracks, his eyes raking down your body and dragging back up and the looking is a sin and the wanting is a sin, he knows this.
you're naked on his lap and he's hard beneath you and the cross is above his head and he is a priest.
"you're so tense." your hips roll slowly, grinding down against the hard length of him through his sleep pants and his jaw clenches so hard the tendons in his neck jump out. your head tilts, your cat-eyes catching the light. "you're always so tense. always praying. always good." your palms glide up his chest, over his shoulders, your fingers finding his jaw, angling his face up toward yours. "don't you ever get tired of being so good?"
"please—"
the word rips out of him. and brendan doesn't know what he's asking for. for you to stop. for you to continue. for God to intervene. for God to look away.
"don't you want to warm me up, benny?" your forehead lowers to his, your breath on his parted mouth, so sweet and warm, still carrying that faint, metallic undertone that has no business existing in a human exhalation. your lips brush his, just barely. a ghost of contact. "everything is so cold. you're the only warm thing I have left, and I need you."
his hands leave the mattress.
they find your hips. both of them. settling against your bare skin, and the contact (his palms against your hip bones, his fingers curving around the swell of your waist, the heat of you bleeding into his cold hands) pulls a guttural, broken sound from his chest.
his hands are shaking, he realises, visibly so. his fingers tremble against your skin and the guilt and the want hit him in the same breath, occupying the same space, two chemicals that should neutralise each other instead combining into something volatile and new.
"I can't—" a croak of denial, his thumbs tracing the ridge of your hip bones, his body doing one thing and his mouth doing another. "I made vows to God. I—this is—you're not—"
"I'm right here." your hands cradle his face. your thumbs tracing his cheekbones, the cat-eyes soft now, tender. the moonlight catches the wet of your lower lip. "I'm right here, benny. I'm real. feel me." you press his hands harder against your hips, his fingers denting your skin. "I'm cold and you're warm. I need you. please."
the please breaks him. because he's heard you say please exactly once (on the church steps, barefoot, bleeding, "please, help me") and the vulnerability of it is a key turning in a lock he thought he'd welded shut for life.
his grip tightens on your hips, his fingers pressing into the flesh, pulling you down against him. the friction of you, bare and warm and wet against the thin cotton of his sleep pants, making his vision blur. a groan leaves him that vibrates into the mattress.
"this is a sin." his hands still pull you closer, his hips pressing up to meet yours, his eyes wet. "this is—god is watching, and I'm—"
"let him watch." your mouth finds his, your lips parting softly against his. your tongue traces his lower lip. "you've been his long enough, but you were mine first."
his hands shake on your hips but his mouth opens under yours. the kiss is clumsy, desperate, tasting of tears and his hands are pulling you against him and pushing you away in the same motion. the war in his body is visible in every trembling muscle. his hips pressing up, his arms tensing to push. his fingers gripping greedily even as his mouth tries to form the words of a prayer.
but the prayer doesn't come. for the first time since his ordination, the words don't come. his mouth is full of you and the latin dissolves into your name and his hands stop pushing and start pulling and the last wall falls away.
"just tonight," he breathes against your mouth, tears still on his face, but his hands firm on your hips now. not shaking. set firm in his conviction, his hips rolling up against you. "just tonight, and tomorrow I'll confess. I'll repent— "
"shh." your thumb wipes a tear from his cheek, your cunt grinding down on the straining hardness beneath you. you can feel him throbbing against you, the heat of you soaking through his sleep pants. "shh. no tomorrow. just this, just warm, just us, benny."
his head falls back against the pillow, his hands on your hips guiding the grind. his mouth open, his eyes fixed on the cross above the bed.
the moonlight catches the silver of it while you move against him, but brendan closes his eyes.
Kat. Kat please I need to know. Kat, priest Brendan whimpering when he and came-back-wrong companion first make love, everything he learned in his vows pressing against his skull like the dull ache of a migraine, constant and angry and telling him this is WRONG. You made your vows. Does it all fall away at some point? Something snaps when she touches somewhere or does something. And the priest in him breaks because all at once he is reminded that she is his vows. She is his God. She is the higher power and the sun in the sky and the light on this Earth that he prayed over all his life and ignoring her, here, at his throat, loving on him, to ignore her would be sin itself. It would be damning. PLEASE Kat I NEED TO KNOW.
you breathe “I love you, brendan” against his mouth while kissing him and straddling him and he’s a goner.
he is ready to do unspeakable things and debase himself completely because it’s you. you’re the only being alive who could ever get him to do this. his vows were to you first (“you are the constant of my universe”) what drove him to priesthood was belief that he lost you and he would have happily kept those vows forever had you not come back. he was serious about them. but he rather damn himself for one more moment of this, another kiss and hug and another moment of hearing you gasp his name when he finally touches you.
i was mostly picturing him becoming a clergyman as a cover when he has to go into hiding. i like it most when reader is vulnerable 😭 so i'd write it as reader having no friends and no family members and being emotionally weak, you dedicate as much time as possible to the church and end up being involved with him even though he is trying his best to avoid you
I could see came back wrong companion sneaking away some nights to stalk bobby and just watch him because even though he moved on (allegedly) she still can’t quite stay away from him. Bonus points if he feels something as well but assumes it’s just in his head. Because if he sensed where she went in canon he’d sense her here
it happens once. three weeks after the kat discovery.
you wait until brendan’s breathing evens out, and then you slip from the rectory like smoke. barefoot. silent. your new body moving through the dark streets with that strange fluidity.
you find bobby’s house by scent. you couldn’t explain that if someone asked. you just follow the pull. the same pull that brought you to brendan’s church except this thread is older and hotter, attached to a wound that predates the backrooms altogether.
you crouch in the tree line across the street, still as stone, your eyes catching the porch light and reflecting it back. you watch the windows of a house that contains a man you loved and a woman who replaced you and a child who exists only because you disappeared.
inside the house, bobby wakes up.
he genuinely doesn’t know why. kat’s breathing is even and peaceful beside him. the baby monitor is quiet. nothing is outwardly wrong, but his skin is prickling. the hair on his arms keeps pricking up. that feeling again. the one he’s had for weeks now. like static electricity under his skin. like someone calling his name from very far away. like you. like the ghost of you pressed against the inside of his skull and ribs, insistent, here, I’m here, look.
he goes to the porch. stands in the dark in his boxers and bare feet. the street beyond is empty. the whole neighbourhood asleep because it’s the middle of the night. there’s nothing but restful dark in every direction he looks.
but the air feels different. charged. warm in a place where it shouldn’t be warm. and he swears (he’ll deny this, he’ll have to to deny it to stay sane) he can hear it. faint and melodic, carried on nothing but faint tickle of breeze.
bobby.
singsong. bright. the way you used to say it when you came through his front door with something exciting to tell him. the way you’d stretch the vowels. boh-beeee. musical and delighted, always warm, calling his name like it was your favourite word.
his hand grips the porch railing, his knuckles white, his eyes scanning the dark street. the tree line. the shadows between houses. nothing. nobody.
but the warmth lingers, and his eyes sting. he stands on his porch for twenty minutes breathing air that smells faintly, impossibly, like vanilla.
he forces himself to go back inside, lies down beside kat and stares at the ceiling for another fifteen minutes.
across the street, in the dark, your eyes catch the light one last time before you turn and disappear.
brendan is awake when you get back, sitting up in bed. he doesn’t ask where you went. he already knows, he can see it on your face.
“you can’t do that again,” he says softly.
you climb into bed, press your face into his throat, your clicking thin and aching.
“I know,” you whisper. “I know I can’t.”
you do it two more times before you stop. brendan pretends not to notice. bobby stands on his porch at 2am each time and feels the static, smelling the vanilla and tells himself he’s losing his mind.
except he’s not losing his mind, but you’re losing yours. a little more each time you watch him through a window and see him hold a child that isn’t yours in a house that should have been.
the third time is the last time. because the third time, the baby cries, and bobby picks her up, and holds her gently against his chest, pressing his mouth to her hair. and the sound you make from the tree line isn’t human, making a dog three houses down start barking insistently, and so you run.
you run with tears in your eyes and don’t go back again.
