⤷ Summary ˎˊ˗ Mornings with Roy are the softest thing you’ve ever known. The ruined hand on your stomach. The careful way he loves you. The life you built together after everything. But It only takes one night at the creek for it to break.
(I'm sorry if my tag bugs or bothers us I will remove if asked♡)
Mornings were the best of it. You'd wake most days to find him already up, already dressed, standing in the doorway just watching you sleep with an expression he thought he kept hidden and didn't. "You're staring," you'd tell him, not opening your eyes.
"I'm allowed," he'd say, and come sit on the edge of the bed, and put his ruined hand the one he still sometimes tried to keep out of sight from strangers flat against your stomach like he was checking you were warm. You'd cover it with your own. He never flinched from that anymore. It had taken the better part of a year to get him there.
"Go on back to sleep," he'd tell you, quiet, like he hadn't been the one to wake you in the first place just by looking too long. "Ain't light out proper yet."
"You're the one standing in my doorway."
"My doorway too, last I recollect." A corner of his mouth would go, not quite a smile, the kind he only ever spent on you. "Married you fair and square."
"Mm. Come here, then, if it's yours."
He never made you ask twice. He'd stretch out beside you on top of the quilt, boots and all, like he meant to only stay a minute, and a minute would turn into the better part of an hour, his thumb moving slow along your hip, tracing nothing in particular, just needing something to do with his hands that wasn't holding a rifle or mending fence. Sometimes he'd talk, low and unhurried, about nothing that mattered the mare favoring her left foreleg, a fence post that wanted fixing, weather coming in from the west that he could feel in that leg of his before he could see it in the sky. You'd learned early on that Roy didn't say I love you plain and easy the way some men did. He said it sideways. He said it in stay put, I got this and in you eat yet and in the particular care he took setting your coffee where your hand would find it without you having to look.
"You're quiet this morning," you told him once, tracing the line of a scar along his forearm, one of the dozen you'd long since stopped asking the story behind.
"Thinkin'."
"About?"
He was quiet a beat too long, the way he got when a thing mattered more than he wanted to let on. "About how I didn't figure on none of this. Any of it." A nod, small, taking in the room, the bed, you. "Didn't figure I'd get to keep somethin' this good."
"You're not keeping me, Roy. I'm choosing to stay."
"Well." His hand found yours again, folded it up small inside his. "Same thing, way I see it."
Midday belonged to the ranch, and to a different kind of closeness less soft, more worked-for. You'd find him out by the fence line most afternoons, sleeves shoved up, that ruined hand gripping a post steady while the other drove nails, and he'd hear you coming before you ever said a word always did, some old wartime habit that never left him.
"You didn't have to walk all the way out here," he'd say, not turning around, though you could hear the smile in it.
"Brought you water. Don't get used to it."
"Wouldn't dream of it." He'd take the ladle from you and drink like a man who'd forgotten his own thirst until you reminded him of it.
"Roy Goode. Do you not remember your manners?" You'd snatch the ladle back halfway to his mouth, scandalized on principle if nothing else. "I brought a cup. A whole cup. It's right there."
"Water's water." He'd reach for the ladle again, all innocence, like the cup sitting three feet away hadn't been the entire point of the errand.
"It is not just water, it is presentation, and you are a married man now, you cannot go around drinking out of ladles like some outlaw who's never sat at a table—"
"I am an outlaw who's never sat at a table."
"Not anymore you're not. Cup." You'd shove it into his chest until he took it, fighting a smile the whole while, and he'd let you win, mostly because losing to you was its own kind of pleasure he wasn't in any hurry to give up. He'd drink from the cup proper, watching you over the rim of it with that quiet, amused look he got when you fussed at him like he found the whole performance more charming than the water itself.
"Better?" he'd ask, all mock solemnity, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand in a way that undid the entire lesson.
"You're impossible."
"You married impossible." He'd catch your wrist before you could pull away, thumb running once over your knuckles, quick and rough and fond all at once. "Obliged, all the same."
Some days you worked alongside him hauling feed, mending what needed mending, the two of you falling into a rhythm that didn't need much talking to keep time. He'd correct your grip on a hammer without a word, just his hand over yours a second, adjusting you'd hand him tools before he asked for them, already knowing which one. It was a different language than the one you spoke in bed, but it said the same thing underneath I know you. I've been paying attention.
"You're staring again," you told him once, catching him watching you coil a rope instead of doing his own work.
"Good view," he said, unbothered, and went back to it like he hadn't just made you flush clean to your ears in broad daylight.
At night it was different slower, heavier, the two of you moving around each other in the small rooms of La Belle like you'd been doing it your whole lives instead of just this one. He'd pull you into his lap by the fire some nights and just hold you there a long while before either of you said a word, his mouth against your hair, his hands finding all the places on you that told him, wordlessly, stay. You knew every scar on him by then, the map of a war and a bad man and a bullet he shouldn't have survived, and he knew you back just as well knew exactly where to put his mouth to make you forget your own name, knew the particular hush that came over the room when neither of you wanted to talk anymore.
"I keep waiting to wake up and find out this was a story I told myself," he admitted once, low, his lips against your shoulder in the dark. "That there ain't no ranch. No you."
"I'm not going anywhere," you told him.
The night it happened was an ordinary one. Wash needed doing, and the creek ran closer and quieter after dark than it did with the whole ranch stirring around it, so you took the basin and a lantern down past the tree line the way you had a hundred times before. Roy had offered to come; you'd waved him off, told him to stay by the fire and rest that leg that still ached him when the weather turned. He'd caught your hand before you left anyway, pulled you back for one more kiss, slow and certain, like he had all night to give it.
"Don't be long," he said against your mouth.
"I never am."
The creek was black glass under the lantern light, and the water was so cold it ached climbing up your wrists.
You didn’t hear anything at first no snapped branch, no boot in the mud.
Just a warmth, sudden and wrong, pressing flat against the back of your neck like a hand that had been there the whole time. Patient. Waiting for you to be alone long enough.
You went still. The lantern light trembled across the black surface of the creek. Your fingers stayed in the water even as the cold began to burn.
The warmth moved. Slow. Deliberate. Fingers long, cool at the tips spread against the side of your throat, not squeezing, just resting there the way Roy sometimes did when he came up behind you in the kitchen. Except Roy’s hands were always rough with callus and work. These were smoother. Older. They knew exactly where the pulse lived.
“Don’t scream,” a voice said against your ear.
It was Roy’s voice. Almost. The same low register, the same quiet that never needed to raise itself. But the edges were different thicker, older, carrying a faint Irish lilt that had no business being in these hills. The kind of sound that made the hair along your arms lift even before the words finished.
You turned your head just enough.
The face that looked back at you was the one you had kissed goodnight an hour ago. Same mouth. Same sharp line of jaw. Same dark eyes. But the eyes were wrong. Too still. Too bright in the lantern light, like something behind them had been awake for a very long time and was only now deciding to look at you properly.
He smiled, small and almost gentle, the exact same corner of the mouth smile Roy used when he was trying not to show how much he liked you fussing at him.
“There you are,” he said. “I’ve been waiting.”
Your body tried to step back. His hand on your throat simply followed, never tightening, just staying with you like it belonged there. The other hand came up and took the lantern from your fingers as carefully as if he were taking a cup from a child. He set it on the ground without looking away from you.
“You’re not—” The words stuck. Your mouth shaped Roy’s name and then refused to finish it.
“No,” he agreed, soft.
"But I could be, if that'd make this easier on you."
The face didn't change not right away. That was the cruelty of it, you understood later, the slow unraveling instead of a single clean shock. His thumb traced once along your jaw, the exact place Roy always touched when he tipped your face up for a kiss, and something in you recoiled from the familiarity of the gesture wearing a stranger underneath it.
"Who are you," you managed.
He tipped his head a fraction, considering the question like it amused him.
“The name’s Remmick” he said at last, soft as the water moving past your ankles. “Though that name won’t mean anything to you yet. Not the way his does.” His thumb stayed on your jaw, steady, not allowing you to look away.
The lantern on the ground threw long, broken shadows across his face. In that light the resemblance was almost perfect almost. The longer you stared the more the differences surfaced the stillness in him that Roy never quite managed, the way his eyes held no fear of the dark, the faint, wrong sheen to his mouth like he’d already tasted something he shouldn’t have.
“I watched the two of you,” he went on, almost conversational. “For longer than you’d like to hear. Watched him put his ruined hand on your stomach in the morning like he was still surprised you hadn’t left. Watched you bring him water and scold him for the ladle. Watched him kiss you like a man who knows exactly how close he came to never having this.” His voice dropped even lower. “He’s careful with you. Soft in the places that matter. I can be that too, if you need it.”
Your throat worked against his palm. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?” The corner of his mouth lifted Roy’s almost-smile, stolen and worn without permission. “Don’t sound like him? Don’t touch you like him? Or don’t take you away from the only good thing he’s ever managed to keep?”
He leaned in until his forehead nearly rested against yours. Cold radiated off him in a slow, steady wave. When he spoke again the Irish in his voice thickened, no longer bothering to hide.
Then he turned his head and dragged the flat of his tongue up the side of your throat, slow and deliberate, right over the place where your pulse was hammering hardest. The touch was wet and cold and wrong, and your whole body locked. Fear spiked so sharp it almost hurt yet under it, traitorous and immediate, heat gathered low in your belly. You felt yourself get wet against your will, the shame of it rising almost as fast as the fear.
He made a low, pleased sound against your skin, like he’d tasted both. His mouth stayed there, lips parting so he could suck lightly at the same spot, teeth grazing just enough to make your breath catch. One hand slid from your waist down over the curve of your hip, fingers pressing in like he was mapping what Roy had already touched.
“I watched him put his mouth on you,” Remmick murmured against your throat, voice rough with something that wasn’t just hunger. “Watched him kiss you like he had the right. Like those careful hands of his were the only ones allowed to make you soft.” His hips pressed forward, letting you feel exactly how hard he was. “It made me want to take you apart in front of him. Show him how much louder you’d get for something that doesn’t have to be gentle.”
His free hand slid lower, palm firm against the front of your skirt, pressing between your legs just enough for him to feel the heat there. He exhaled a soft, almost angry laugh when he found you already wet.
“I’ve been alone a very long time,” he said, quiet enough that the creek almost swallowed it. “Longer than this country has had a name. I watched whole towns rise and burn and rise again. Watched men like him come home from wars with pieces missing and still somehow find a way to be gentle with someone. I never managed it. Not once. Not until I saw the way he looks at you.”
His thumb stroked once more along your jaw, deliberate, copying the exact pressure Roy used when he was trying to soothe you after a nightmare. The gesture was perfect. That was the worst part.
“You’re shaking,” he murmured, almost kindly. “He never makes you shake like this.”
You tried to pull back again. The hand at your throat simply followed, fingers spreading wider until the tips rested just beneath your ear. Still not squeezing. Just claiming the space.
“Please—”
“Hush.” The word landed soft, almost affectionate, the same way Roy said it when you were half-asleep and restless. “I’m not going to hurt you. Not the way you’re thinking.”
His other hand stayed pressed firm between your legs, the heel of his palm grinding slow against the heat he’d already found. The fabric of your skirt was thin enough that there was nowhere to hide. He felt every involuntary clench, every shameful pulse of wetness, and the low sound he made against your throat was pure satisfaction.
“There it is,” he breathed. “That’s what I wanted. Not the fear. The rest of it. The part of you that doesn’t care who the hands belong to as long as they’re touching you like this.”
You shook your head, small and frantic. His mouth followed the movement, lips brushing the hinge of your jaw.
The hand between your legs shifted. Fingers gathered the fabric and pushed it up, slow enough that you had time to feel every inch of skin being exposed to the night air. When his bare palm finally met the bare heat of you, your knees nearly gave.
He caught you easily. One arm banded around your waist, hauling you back against the hard line of his body. The other hand stayed exactly where it was, two fingers sliding through the slickness he’d already drawn out of you and pressing, not entering, just resting against the place that made your breath stutter.
“Roy’s careful,” he said against your ear. The Irish had fully taken the edges of the voice now, no longer bothering to hide. “Gentle. He asks with his hands before he takes. I don’t have to ask. I already know the answer.”
He pushed those two fingers inside you in one smooth, unhurried stroke.
Your whole body seized. A broken sound tore out of your throat before you could stop it half protest, half something uglier. He made a soft, approving noise and curled his fingers just so, finding the place Roy had learned months ago and using it without mercy.
“That’s it. Let me hear you. He doesn’t get to keep every sound you make.”
The cold of him was everywhere at your back, inside you, against your throat. But the hand working between your legs was devastatingly warm, almost human in its heat, and it moved with a patience that felt older than the hills around you. He pushed his fingers into you in long, deliberate strokes, the wet sound of it shockingly loud against the quiet of the creek.
You were shaking harder now. Tears had started without permission, sliding hot down your face. He licked one away when it reached your jaw, tasting it like it belonged to him.
“I’m going to take you with me now ,” he said, almost conversational, even as his fingers worked deeper. “Not far. Just far enough that he won’t find you before I’ve had my fill. And when he does come looking and he will, won’t he, stubborn bastard that he is I’ll let him see exactly how well I’ve learned the shape of you.”
His thumb found your clit and pressed, circling once, twice, until your hips jerked against your will.
The worst part wasn’t the fear. It was the way your body answered him anyway clenching around the fingers that weren’t Roy’s, soaking a hand that had never once touched you with care. You hated the wet sound of it. Hated the heat that kept building no matter how hard you tried to shut it down. Hated most of all that some traitorous part of you was still comparing the angle of the fingers, the pressure of the thumb, the low sound he made when you clenched. None of it was right. None of it was him. And still your body kept giving.
He kissed the side of your throat, right over the frantic beat of your pulse. The press of his mouth was almost tender.
The way his lips rested there like he had every right to soothe you. Like he was allowed to know the exact place Roy always kissed when he was trying to quiet your fear. Your body recognized the shape of the gesture and answered it before your mind could stop it shoulders loosening a fraction, breath hitching softer instead of sharper. The betrayal of it made your stomach turn. You hated how easy it was for him to find the same map Roy had spent a year learning. Hated that some stupid, animal part of you still leaned into the mouth against your throat as if kindness was kindness no matter whose face it wore. Tears came hotter. You wanted to claw the tenderness off your skin. You wanted Roy’s rough, real mouth there instead wanted the familiar scrape of his stubble, the particular way he always exhaled like holding you still cost him something. This wasn’t that. This was a perfect copy of care, and the fact that your pulse still jumped under it made you feel sick with yourself.
You hated him for knowing that rhythm.
You hated yourself more for the broken little sound that slipped out when he pressed his thumb harder against your clit.
“That’s not his,” you managed, voice raw. “You’re not—”
“I know.” He kissed the words off your skin. “I’m better at it than he is. Rougher than he is”
He pulled his fingers free without warning. The sudden emptiness made your hips jerk forward before you could stop them. Shame flooded hot and immediate. Remmick looked down at the shine on his hand, then back at your face, and something almost like wonder crossed the borrowed features.
“Christ,” he said softly. “Look at you.”
He brought the wet fingers to your mouth and pressed them against your lower lip, not forcing, just resting there.
“Open.”
You didn’t. He waited, patient as the dark, until the cold of his body and the heat still throbbing between your legs made the refusal feel smaller than it was. When your lips parted he slid the fingers in, slow, letting you taste yourself on someone who had no right to know what you tasted like.
“Good girl,” he said, and the words were so quiet they almost didn’t sound like mockery. “Now we’re going to walk. You’re going to keep quiet, and you’re going to come with me, and by the time the sun comes up he’s going to know exactly what it feels like to lose the only soft thing he ever got to keep.”
He withdrew his fingers, wiped them once on your skirt, and took your wrist. Not hard. Just certain. The lantern stayed where it was, throwing light across empty water and the place your feet had been.
You were taking too long.
Roy noticed it , the old habit of a man who'd spent years learning to read a room before he trusted it. The fire had burned down some. The clock on the mantel he'd fixed himself, still a little slow, said near on twenty minutes past when you should've been back with the wash basin, and twenty minutes was nothing, except it wasn't nothing, not with you.
He told himself it was nothing three more times before he got up.
The night was cool coming off the ridge, stars thick overhead the way they only got out here, away from any town big enough to dim them. He walked the path down toward the creek without hurrying, still half convinced he'd find you crouched at the water's edge, cussing at a stuck button or laughing at your own clumsiness, and he'd tease you about it the way he did, and you'd walk back up to the house together with your shoulder bumping his.
He saw the lantern first. Sitting upright in the grass, still lit, throwing its small circle of gold across a stretch of bank that had nobody in it.
Roy stopped walking.
The basin was there too, tipped on its side a few feet off, water gone dark and still.
Two sets of prints where there should've been one. Yours, small, familiar as his own hand by now, dug in deep at the heel like you'd tried to plant yourself. And another set over them, longer stride, boot heel worn different than his own boots wore.
He knew his own tracks. This wasn't them.
"No," he said, quiet, to nobody. Just the word, flat and useless, like saying it might undo the shape of what he was looking at.
He was up and moving before he'd finished deciding to, leg protesting and ignored, following the second set of prints along the bank to where they veered off through the brush, careless now, not bothering to hide themselves like whoever left them wanted following, or didn't care to be followed, which was worse.
He yelled your name, rough and cracking in the middle, tearing out of him louder than he meant it. The dark didn't answer. Somewhere off in the trees an owl startled at the sound and went silent again, and that silence afterward was the worst part, total and undisturbed, like the whole ranch was holding its breath along with him.
He thought of that morning your hand over his ruined one, warm, unbothered, the way you never once flinched from it.
Thought, cold and sudden, of every man from his old life who might've finally caught up to him, and felt something in his chest go to iron.
He went back for his rifle and his horse without another wasted second, hands steady even though nothing else in him was.
The tracks led east, toward the old logging road, and Roy followed them at a controlled run, jaw set, that particular stillness coming over him that the men in La Belle had learned to read as something closer to a loaded gun than a grieving man. He wasn't going to lose you. Not to whoever this was. Not after a year spent learning, slow and careful, how to be the kind of man that deserved keeping something so good.
"I'm coming," he said, to the dark, to you, to whatever waited at the end of those tracks. His voice didn't shake this time. "You hear me. I'm coming."
Guess what- its the best day of the week. Multi-Fangdom Friday!
Remmick is familiar with the dynamics of sibling rivalry. Even ones that span centuries.
He's just hovering over them while they fight- extremely unhelpful as usual.
Soooo I never actually watched The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017) tv series but I was a HUGE fan of the books. I had an original print of the first book in the series and picked it back up before it got big on TV. I caught clips every now and then.
Damon was easily my favorite from the books. (With a special spot in my heart for Sage- book version) From what I did see in the series he would probably be my favorite again.
“Sinners” where it’s the same but it’s “What We Do in the Shadows”:
*Remmick first appears, he is introduced as Remmick, 1335 years old*
Remmick (talking head): One of the things that’s difficult about being a vampire is that even though you have a hive mind with the thralls, you still have to drill the steps. I mean, just because you read the instructions to build a car doesn’t mean you know how to actually use the tools to make one, amirite?
*cut to Remmick trying to teach the new vampires how to sing and dance Rocky Road to Dublin. Stack and Mary get it immediately while Cornbread, Bo Chow, and the rest are struggling with the moves*
Remmick (talking head): But everyone is trying, so that’s good. That’s what family is for anyways, you don’t just abandon them because they can’t do traditional Irish dances. And the moves are hard, believe me. For example, I once had a friend back in Ireland, his name was Mick. Mick got dusted around 1700 or 1800 or so, I don’t quite remember. When I tried to teach him the moves, I forgot that he had arthritis in both knees. For some reason, those issues continued on even as a vampire. So unfortunately, I doomed him to an eternal life of arthritis in both knees. Well, at least until he got dusted, which if I remember correctly, his killer wasn’t even trying to kill him. He was selling lamps and somehow the wooden nightstand got pierced into his heart.
